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

Episode Date: May 9, 2023

Today we're joined by Dr. Nicholas Kardaras, psychologist and one of the country’s foremost addiction and mental health experts, to discuss mass shootings, incel culture, and video game violence. We start off with an update on the Texas shooting that took place last weekend and the strange details about the shooter's online history that have come out (which are still being investigated). We discuss how incel culture began as a well-intentioned lonely hearts support group and morphed into an online breeding ground for angry people. We go through some of the ideologies espoused by mass shooters and talk about how search algorithms create a sense of egocentric narcissism, causing people to believe they're the center of their digital world. We argue that while it's worth talking about guns, mass shootings are rooted more in societal and psychological issues that need to be addressed. Then, we ask why these shootings are almost always perpetrated by men and address whether violent video games have anything to do with this male aggression, as some have argued. We end with some encouragement: How to feed your kids digital vegetables rather than digital candy. You can get Dr. Kardaras' books here: Digital Madness: How Social Media Is Driving Our Mental Health Crisis--and How to Restore Our Sanity Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction Is Hijacking Our Kids - and How to Break the Trance --- Timecodes: (00:58) Updates on Texas mall shooting (10:23) Interview with Dr. Kardaras begins / ideology of shooters (14:23) School shootings (16:32) Incels & narcissism (27:35) Mentality of serial killers and mass shooters (32:30) Why it's usually men (38:50) Violent video games (50:18) Drug use (54:57) Mental health assessments & Jordan Neely (56:55) Texas shooter profile (01:01:11) Treatment for this kind of person (01:03:45) Treatment for screen/gaming addiction --- Today's Sponsors: EdenPURE — when you buy one Thunderstorm you get one FREE, this week only! Go to EdenPureDeals.com, use promo code 'ALLIE'! Birch Gold — protect your future with gold. Text 'ALLIE' to 989898 for a free, zero obligation info kit on diversifying and protecting your savings with gold. Carly Jean Los Angeles — use promo code 'ALLIEBASICS' to save 25% off your first order at CarlyJeanLosAngeles.com! PublicSq. — download the PublicSq app from the App Store or Google Play, create a free account, and begin your search for freedom-loving businesses! --- Links: WFAA ABC: "How did the Allen mall shooting happen? Who were the victims? Who was the shooter? Everything we know" https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/local/allen-texas-outlet-mall-shooting-victims-shooter-suspect-updates-everything-we-know-about-the-allen-shooting/287-2f9a1328-b59f-4960-a96a-5a143953fd99 Omega Recovery: "The connection between drug use, video games, deadly weapons and school shootings." https://omegarecovery.org/the-connection-between-drug-use-video-games-deadly-weapons-and-school-shootings/ --- Relevant Episodes: Ep 801 | Don’t Fall for Weaponized Empathy https://apple.co/3psSEuc --- Buy Allie's book, You're Not Enough (& That's Okay): Escaping the Toxic Culture of Self-Love: https://alliebethstuckey.com/book Relatable merchandise – use promo code 'MOM10' for a discount: https://shop.blazemedia.com/collections/allie-stuckey

Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort.

We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. What's inside the mind of a mass shooter? What kind of psychological factors are at play and do things like marijuana, video games, and social media play a role? Our guest today, brilliant psychologist Dr. Nicholas Carderis says, yes, these things are factors. So he's going to pull back the curtain to reveal what goes on behind the scenes before these mass shootings, what we can do to try to prevent these shootings from happening again from a psychological and societal perspective.

And tomorrow he'll actually be back to discuss the damaging effects of social media overall. You will not want to miss that conversation or this one, which is brought to by our friends at Good Ranchers. Go to Good Ranchers.com. Use code alley at checkout. That's good ranchers.com. code Allie. Okay, before we get into that fascinating conversation with Dr. Cardaris, I do want to give you a little bit of an update on the shooting that happened over the weekend.

You can listen to yesterdays. We gave a summary of what we know so far, but there's a little bit of a development, both in who the victims are and in who the shooter is, and particularly the profile of the shooter is very relevant to the conversation that we're about to have with this psychologist. So first, though, I want to honor the victims. We've got 20-year-old Christian LeCour. He was an on-duty security guard at the outlet mall where the shooting occurred. So he was taken out perhaps strategically.

And then I'm not really probably going to be able to pronounce this name, but 27-year-old Ashwaria Tataconda. It was an engineer who moved to the U.S. five years ago. Her family is still living in India. I can't imagine how they are feeling getting this news. I'm sure that she came to America for a better life, thinking that. she would be safer here. Then there's Elio, Elio Kumana Rivas, born in Dallas, and that's really all we know. Two elementary school sisters from the Wiley Independent School District have been identified as victims, Daniela Madoza, a fourth grader, Sophia Mendoza, a second grader,

and their mother is in the hospital in critical condition. Again, can you just imagine being in the hospital and waking up to the news of your babies being gone. And then someone else who is in the hospital is this six-year-old, six-year-old named William Song. And as I said yesterday, this family, they, their kids attend the school that actually was like the rival Christian high school to my school going up and so growing up. So I don't know them personally at all, but I know some people in the area who do know them, it's a, you know, it's a very, you know, it's a very small world, especially the Christian community. And apparently they were just this amazing sweet family. And so William Song is in the hospital. He is the only surviving member of this mass

murder, Cho Q Song and King Xing-young. That's the two children. So I'm not actually sure what the last name is of William. I think their last names are actually young. And then their three-year-old child was also killed. And so the six-year-old is the only one surviving. There's a GoFundMe set up for the family. It had a goal of $50,000 just to try to help pay for the medical bills, the funeral cost, things like that. It's actually almost raised a million dollars as of last night, which is pretty incredible. And you know what? They need it. Like I'm just, and I'm just praying for this boy, and I ask for you too as well. Like pray that this boy finds love and support. I'm sure that he has other family members. They're a Korean family member or a Korean family. So I don't know if their family is still in Korea, if they've been

in America for a long time. But I just hope and pray that he has close family members that take him in, that make him feel like a son, and that he finds purpose and belonging and that he knows who he is in Christ. And this was a Christian family. And I think the Lord for that. I'm sure that somehow God will use this devastating circumstance, this awful tragedy to bring glory to himself and to win hearts and souls. And I pray that one of those hearts is the heart of William. I pray that he would run after Jesus all the days of his life. And I'm just, oh, holding back tears. I'm so sad for him. I'm so sad for him. He doesn't get his mom when he is recovering. He doesn't get comforted by his parents. He doesn't get to play with his brother anymore. Oh, so just pray for him.

Pray for him. This is an awful tragedy. We know a little bit more about the shooter now. So it was assumed by the media very quickly over the weekend that this person, who I've told you, I'm not going to say his name, but he that he had neo-Nazi sympathies, that he was a white supremacist. And we pointed out how strange it was that the media was running with this narrative so quickly without having any firm substantiation of those things. Yeah. And it wasn't just that they were calling him a white supremacist. They were saying that this is a right-wing belief, that he was a right-wing extremist who was

also this white supremacist neo-Nazi. Everyone thought it was very strange because he's very obviously Hispanic. It's a very obviously Hispanic name. As we pointed out yesterday, he was removed from the army in 2008 for mental health reasons. And he has been a security guard since then. And so that's really all we knew. But now more investigations have uncovered that what appears to be his social media profile on a Russian social media website called Odnachklazkniki. I don't know how to pronounce it. Had lots of postings of Nazi symbols. There were allegedly some pictures that he posted with Nazi tattoos.

But some people are also pointing out that it's very strange that he had this Russian social media profile, that he didn't have any followers. that the profile seems to have been made very recently. Ian Miles Schong, he's been someone who has been posting about this on Twitter, and he just says that the circumstances surrounding this are very strange. They're very unusual. If you look at some of the pictures that are apparently on this Russian social media profile of this Hispanic, Texan, neo-Nazi, a lot of the pictures are not pictures that he actually took.

They are like Mexicans dressed in Nazi guard that were taken from a, white supremacist Reddit, subreddit, that were then placed on his page. And so that doesn't necessarily debunk it.

People are just saying that this is odd. It's also odd that this person apparently named Tim Poole and lives of TikTok is inspiration.

I mean, Tim Poole is not some like diehard conservative. You could consider him certainly center right, but that's a strange

and random inspiration for white supremacy. Certainly, lives of TikTok isn't. I mean, she's Jewish herself. White supremacists do not like Jewish people. And then he also praised apparently the Nashville shooter a couple weeks ago, who we know was a woman or a girl identifying as the opposite sex. And so there are just a lot of questions about the validity of the social media page, how quickly the media are jumping on it. And again, it's not like we have to defend someone against accusations of white supremacy if it's true. However, tying it to the right wing or tying it to do conservatives, tying it to Tim freaking pool.

I mean, there's obviously a narrative that they're trying to spend. There's something that they're trying to push that the left-wing media thinks is going to be expedient and helpful for them. And so I do think it's worth it. And regardless of the narrative that's trying to be pushed, I think it's worth it for people to ask, like, is this really true? People are still debating like the gang tattoo. You'll hear me talk about this a little bit with Dr.

Cardaris. Some people, again, are pointing out that on his hand, he has this strange tattoo. Some people are saying, no, that's just the city of Dallas, a symbol. As I said, I grew up in Dallas. I didn't even know there was a symbol of Dallas that, like, people knew, much less when tattoo on their body. Other people are saying, sure, it's the city of Dallas. It's the city of Dallas symbol, but it is also a gang tattoo. I don't know. I don't know. And some people are saying that it looks like, like tango blast and Aryan Circle. Aryan Circle is white supremacist neo-Nazi. Tango Blast would have been some kind of Hispanic gang and that apparently this person looks

like he would have been associated with those two gangs. So there's a, I mean, there's still a lot of speculation that's going on out there. What we know is that this is a young troubled man. That's what we know. And that fits the profile of a lot of these mass shooters, whether you're talking about gang violence, whether you're talking about these school shootings or church shootings. It is almost always that, not in Nashville, but it is almost always these young, disturbed, troubled, violent men. So I wanted to know, like, why is that? What is going on in the minds of these

young men that they want to commit these horrific acts of violence that they know will also probably end in their death as well? Men of all different kinds of backgrounds, all different kinds of ethnicities are perpetrating these kinds of crimes. What is going on? So we're going to get into it. We're going to get into all of the controversy and he's going to say some things that we're told we're not allowed to say. We're not allowed to say that these things have connection, things like video games and things like that. But he believes that they absolutely do. So Dr. Cardaris, the psychologist today is going to break it all down for us. And without further ado, here he is.

Dr. Cardaris, thank you so much for joining us. What I want to talk to you about today is a very disturbing subject, but that you've spent a lot of time on analyzing, talking about. And that is the mind of kind of the typical, I guess, male mass shooter, depending on how you define mass shooting, I guess, the kind that we typically see walking into a school, walking into a crowded area like we did over the weekend in Texas. taking a gun and just shooting a bunch of people seemingly for no reason.

And you've probably seen that the shooter over the weekend, they've analyzed some of his social media posts. Apparently, if the posts are real, there's some verification happening. He identified perhaps as a neo-Nazi. He even identified as an in-cell, an involuntary celibate, seemed to glorify violence a lot when it came to other mass shootings, particularly the Nashville mass. shooting. So tell me, just based on kind of the profile of what we know about this mass shooter and other mass shooters, what is going on here behind the scenes?

Yeah, so I think it's kind of a pretty complex phenomenon, but when you look at it at its core, it's a phenomenon of young people who feel a sense of emptiness and a sense of isolation. And look, this is not new, right? There's always been young people who have felt that way. the new ingredient has been these echo chambers of digital echo chambers that exacerbate a sense of separation and isolation, but can also not just fuel people's ideological beliefs. They become, the best way that I could put this is, you know, once upon the time, a lot of these groups were, used to be support groups for lonely people, and now they've become breeding grounds for angry people.

So you've always had the lost teenager that's trying to find a sense of meaning or purpose or identity in the digital age that's been amplified. And now they're finding community with online chat rooms like in 4chan or different types of ideological groups. Because when you look at these school shooters, they do tend to fall into two types of categories. One is the ideologically inspired shooter. The one like the potential, the shooter that were, not the potential, but the shooter that we're talking about from the other day that. seemed to be Nazi white supremacist ideologically based and and we've seen a lot of those like and by the way this is no longer localized to the United States you know the the largest mass shootings have been now internationally you know we had Brazik was the shooter in Norway in 2012

who killed 77 people at that youth camp because again he was also a nationalist who felt that You know, there was, he was trying to basically, he had a manifesto, right? So, so you have like the Christchurch shooter also, who was an anti-Muslim, ideologically driven person who also had a manifesto, the Christchurch shooting, where he killed over 51 people in the mosque and also left a manifesto. So typically the ideologically driven shooters will have a manifesto, will be driven by really an extreme belief system that's been fueled and amplified on social media and the world that we live in. The others are more the lonely outlier, the one who feels

just alone and angry and wants their 15 minutes of infamy. That's the more mentally unstable. That would be more like the Newtown, Connecticut, Adam Lanza type. That would be more like the school shooters that are looking for some sense of meaning in their lives and their copycats who are seeing that if I commit a school shooting, I'm going to get some notoriety. I'm going to have some sense of value to my life because my life feels empty and worthless. So not so much ideologically driven, but emptiness driven and trying to get a sense of also immortality. The interesting thing is if you look at school shootings, these were really unheard of before Columbine. You know, before Columbine, which was, you know, Cleveland and Harris with the two young men, you know, the Trenchcoat

mafia who did that in 1999. You really, the only other real big school shooting was in 1966, the UT Tower, University of Texas tower shooting, which was a marine that had some traumatic brain injury that essentially had an insane day and shot and killed 14 people in 1966. But from 1966 until Columbine, school shootings weren't even a phenomenon. 1999 when Columbine happened was the first internet era school shooting and then you created the template, the prototype for other young men to now say, I can now have some notoriety in my life. I can now also be someone.

What do you think shifted from 1966 to 1999? I have my own theories, but from a psychologist's perspective, like what do you think changed in the minds of young men and the minds of people that, Now we've had several of these in the past 20 plus years. Well, yeah, I mean, so, I mean, I think the digital age has been kerosene to a fire. And, you know, we've had this phenomenon. We've become a society of emptiness, this, you know, the great book that was Bowling Alone in the early 1970s. He's talked about how we as a society have shifted where we don't have the supports and the sense of tethering that give people a sense of identity.

Yeah. So people are looking for identity. People feel lost and empty. So our faith-based institutions have fallen by the wayside. People are not as connected to those as they used to be. Even things like youth clubs and, you know, Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, YMCA's, social organos, rotary clubs, things that people used to belong to. People had more of a sense of belonging. And now people feel more fragmented and isolated.

And so that creates this emptiness that people. often talk about and write about, if I can, the Encel movement is particularly interesting in how it evolved. The original in cell, well, let me take that back. He wasn't the original insult, but he was the first high-profile insol was Elliot Rogers, was the one that most people know. He was the young man that was this, he went to UC Santa Barbara and with a knife, a car, and the gun committed, killed over six people and over 14 were injured. And it really targeted a sorority. He targeted what he felt were the women that rejected him, which he called the Stacey's,

and then the men that they gave their affections to, the Chads. So the Chad and the Stacey's were his target. I didn't know this. Yeah. So, and by the way, his father had been a pretty prominent Hollywood director. His father was one of the directors on The Hunger Games. And so this was a kid of privilege. And when he did his manifesto, so he did a video manifesto the night before the murders,

and he's sitting in his BMW, and it's almost like a stereotype. He's snarling like a Hollywood villain, and he's talking about how he's been wronged and how the world is terrible. And he's going to destroy the world he's talking about in this manifesto. And he says things, I mean, I want to give you the exact quote because I don't want to misquote, but he said things like it was going to be his day of retribution against a wretched and depraved society, and he said, I am the good guy. I am the victim here. And like all narcissists, he felt a sense of being wronged. He didn't see any role in his sense of why he had never even

kissed a girl at that point. The interesting part is he commits this murder, these murders, rather, but then a strange phenomenon happens. He becomes deified within a certain community of lost, angry, female rejected young men. And he became known as the Supreme gentleman. That video, if you go on YouTube and Google it, you could find it, the Supreme Gentleman. So now thousands of young men consider themselves insults, and at least 10 have copied his misogynistic violent attacks against women. The most prominent one was the Toronto truck murders in 2018. There was a young man who took a rider truck and plowed through the crowd and killed 10 people, killed 10 people, injured over 18. And on his,

his social media was paying tribute to Elliot Rogers, called himself a private in-cell rebellion, paid tribute to Elliot Rogers as their supreme gentleman leader, and they were now ideologically aligned with this sort of misogynistic angry message. The interesting part of this, more interesting part of this whole phenomenon, was the in-cell movement originally was started by a woman, a Canadian college student back in 1996. Her name was Alana, and she started her website called Alana's Involuntary Salibate Club. And it was supposed to be a lonely heart support group. And she started this as a well-intentioned support system for people who were struggling

with relationships. It was open to men and women. And it morphed. Like so many things online morphed. Once the angry young men parachuted into that group, it became something quite different. She had to quit the group. She regretted what she had created because she had no idea. that this Alana's, you know, kind of warmly funny involuntary celibate support group is going to morph

into the contagion that turned Elliott Rogers into a mass murderer and created thousands of followers. And that's kind of what we're seeing with the school shooting things. Cleveland and Harris, according to the Homeland Security investigators and the FBI, became a template for other copycats in social contagion fashion. Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality.

We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. So how is this in Sal being an involuntary celibate, kind of being angry at both the men and the women that they feel have kind of marginalized them, rejected them, not brought them into the fold of dating or sex or whatever? how is that connected to someone going out and shooting a seemingly random group of people? Like I'd understand the connection a little bit more if they were all happening at sorority houses.

But I mean, these people seem kind of indiscriminate in a lot of cases, except for those, you know, religious targeting. But, you know, the strip mall over the weekend, Columbine seems kind of, you know, you're killing a bunch of different kinds of people. So how are those two things connected? Well, Columbine, they were planning that for a year, by the way. going to be a bomb attack originally and then they had a resort to guns for the mass attack. So you have to understand that most of these folks are not only empty, but they're narcissists, right? So a narcissist feels very victimized and sort of blames the world for whatever feeling of malcontent that they have. And when you have to look at what the digital age, I mean, we're breeding

narcissistic thinking. I've tried to make this, I've tried to kind of illustrate this to people. think about if you're a young kid or a pre-adolescent adolescent and you're growing up in the digital age, right? And we've talked about this, Allie, you're of a certain age, I'm of a certain age. Because of the way predictive algorithms work, if you're 12 years old and you start searching for something, the algorithms will start sending you more and more of that content. Now, forgetting the echo chamber amplification effect, it also creates a sense of, I'm the center of my digital universe. It creates a sense of egocentric narcissism because it's almost a form of magical thinking. A lot of these younger kids whose digital world is created in their image now because the predictive algorithms curate a digital world for them that is really tailored to them. So now you begin to think, wow, I am the center of the universe.

And this was reflected. Aaliot Rogers had this one quote where he said, he analogized himself to God. or he said he was, yeah, he's the closest thing. I'm the closest thing to a living God. So a lot of these folks feel wrong. They're self-centered narcissists. The digital world amplifies that effect. And the extremism, we get it.

The extremism will create certain targets, but you're asking about the more of the random mass shootings. Well, so now they feel that the society is, it needs to be disrupted, because the society has wronged them. So it's not so much indiscriminate as it's trying to disrupt the fabric of a society that they feel has wronged them or victimized them. So it doesn't matter if it's the five-year-old at a shopping mall or, you know, a random person in a school that they've never met. They're lashing out.

They're lashing out because, and again, for a narcissist, other people aren't, they don't really have the empathy of a sense of like, I'm hurting other people. These people are human, living, flesh and blood that I'm causing harm to. They don't have that same sense of empathy that you and I have, where if you see somebody that, you know, and I've worked with, I've worked, you know, I've done murder trials and I've done things with, you know, narcissistic young people, you and I might see somebody get hit by a bus and go over to help and oh my God, do you need some assistance? They don't. They just see it and they find entertainment in violence sometimes. They're desensitized to it. They don't have, you know, we might look at it neurologically as there's a thing called mirror neurons and mirror. neurons, or where to allow us to feel empathy with other human beings.

There's some research that seems to show that if you grow up gaming and a lot of digital media, your mirror neurons, your empathy neurons never fully developed. So complex reasons, but they don't feel. Yeah, I'm sorry, go ahead. Oh, I was, no, I was just saying I definitely want to talk about the video game phenomenon. But one question I do have just about this narcissism piece, because I agree. It just seems like there's no sense whatsoever in, ooh, what kind of consequence will this reap? You know, what effect will this have? And one of the effects that they seem to

not really care about is the effect that it'll even have on themselves. Like most of us, when we think about narcissism and just like the colloquial sense, you think of someone who loves themselves, who has a, will do anything to protect themselves. But these people, they're committing these shootings. I'm guessing knowing that they are going to be killed, right? And sometimes they even take their own life. And so, I mean, they don't, I guess they don't even feel any sense of that they even have any kind of dignity or that they're even worthy of compassion, right? But yes and no.

I think what's more important for them is just to live forever. And then to me, they'll live forever. So the narcissist wants to be remembered. So that's why some of them are live streaming it, right? So many of these shootings are live streamed because this is performative. You need an audience because this wouldn't happen. These events wouldn't happen in the media vacuum. If there was a sense that they committed these acts and nobody would know if the tree fell in the forest,

no one was there to hear it. If a mass murderer shot up a community and there was no one there to see it, I don't think they would do it. The whole intention is to create this, because this is what they're mimicking, right? We know from social learning theory, we learned by models. They saw that Cleveland and Harris, Columbine, those two were talking about them today 24 years later. So that's the goal. maybe bodily I might be killed, but I lonely, low, you know, because paradoxically narcissists have a very, you know, it's egomaniacs with an inferiority complex is a phrase that we

use to use. So they have kind of a low self-worth, yet they feel this exaggerated sense of importance. And so how can they, how can they be put on the Mount Rushmore of shooters? And oftentimes, as you'll read in some of their manifestos, they're trying to outscore the other mass shooters. They're trying to get more. kills because the more kills is the more will be the more infamous. Do you think they also take pleasure in the sadness and the division and the chaos, the arguments, the debates and all of that that erupt after they do something like this? Yeah, I think, you know, they used to say that about serial, you know,

because the psychological profile of a serial killer versus a mass murderer, we used to be very different. And they used to say that the serial killer was taking the serial killer profile used to be, a white male and in our society the white male is the privilege you know you're supposed to be the high achieving you know we have the most opportunity because there's the less less obstacles in our success and it's the white underachieving male who doesn't achieve in the society where they're supposed to be achieving the quote unquote loser and now I want to disrupt the fabric of this society and so I'm going to do these these I'm going to show my sense of power

and my sense of that I am someone by doing these sort of methodically premeditated shootings as opposed to sort of the mass, because the mass shootings, before these more recent generation of school shootings, used to be the kind of more the going postal, the rage-filled episode where somebody would go after they got fired and they would go shoot up somebody because they were rage-filled. The serial killer used to be the person that was methodically disrupting the society.

Interestingly, because obviously this has always leads. to the gun debate, and to me, I think it's a no-brainer that this is more of a societal and psychiatric issue rather than the gun debate because, and I want to slide over to this issue, we see this phenomenon happening in the country like China. So China has undergone a huge seismic shift in their societal norms. They've gone from an agrarian, essentially surf, farm-based society into a hyper post-industrial technological society where the average male in China used to have their small plot of land. It was poverty, but you had something to call your own. You had your little plot that you would live on and farm and tend to. And now all of a sudden, you've been

shifted into these megacities where you're working in megafactories. And there's a confusion. There's an anger. There's a sense of feeling lost. There's a sense of feeling lost. a shift to the psyche of that whole society. And so what we're seeing, that's manifesting into, they're having these epidemic episodes of mass stabbings in schools. So there's been 25, 30 episodes of young Chinese men who are entered elementary schools with machetes and knives and just start slashing.

And all you see is a rage at a society that has now marginalized them, to humanize them, not valued them. And this is them just lashing out. they're not going for infamy or because they don't get the notoriety that they do in our culture when there's a school shooting. Every news station has them. In that society, it's just rage. So it's happening across cultures in a variety of ways. I think when we think of the typical mass school shooter, we typically think of a young white frustrated male. When someone thinks about the in-cell, we're thinking about the young white frustrated male. But of course, it depends on how

you define mass shooting. I think it's typically defined as. as four or more victims. But when you're looking at so-called gun violence across the board, I mean, it's really all different cultures, all different races. Obviously, gang violence is a big problem in the inner cities. We saw just the other day a horrible story out of Alabama where a few teens who happen to be black, they walked into a party, and they killed a bunch of people, you know, sprayed them with bullets.

And so we don't see that as much in the news. It's kind of strange how one kind of story is elevated and the other one is it. But the commonality does seem to be in almost every case, except for the Nashville shooter, is that it's a male and it's a young male. So tell us about that. Like why is that, whether it's in China, whether it's here, whether it's in Texas, whether it's in New York City. It's almost always men.

And I think most people kind of have the common sense to know why. But again, from a psychological perspective, why is it usually men and not women? Well, again, it goes back to kind of what I was saying, where the male is supposed to, supposed to be the, there's expectations on the male role. And again, if somebody feels, it's the quote unquote loser profile, right? I'm not, I'm not feeling empowered as a man should in the society. And you're going to sort of act out. But what's happening again also, you're entering these various hate groups that are now, as I said before, they're breeding grounds for that resentment. So 30 years ago, if you just felt marginalized and empty, you know,

you might just be depressed and you might not have a very wonderful life, but now if you start going on to 4chan, you're finding community. So a lot of these angry groups are finding community. So the internet can be wonderful for people to find community who have disabilities and have different issues. Wonderful. They're finding community where otherwise it would not have been a sense of community. But now really potentially dangerous groups are finding community in ways that can really amplify and amplify and amplify. So, again, there were always sort of young men going through these transitional adolescent developmental phases, but they didn't have these sort of communities that are now breeding grounds, as I said before. So, you know, and with females, you know, there's issues that way too.

And, you know, the Nashville shooter, as you mentioned, but even the Yuvaldi shooter was ostensibly also trans. There's now, you know, folks who are feeling angry at the society because they're feeling marginalizedness. You know, and what's interesting, you know, it's been mentioned in the media quite a bit that, you know, we know, we knew within the first day that the shooter in Texas the other day was a nationalist or white supremac, even though it was Hispanic. But right away, his ideological profile was newsworthy. And we still don't have the manifesto from the Nashville shooter. Again, people are speculating that it's because of it's going to not help certain political causes to, because you know, what I had read, the couple of people that had seen that they said that it was so horrific and it was such a manifesto of destruction that it would not serve certain political narratives. So, you know, I think any group now that feels angry, marginalized can potentially have representative school shooters or mass shooters to lash out. And it seems to me that, I mean, obviously we know that in general, young men are, men are more aggressive physically than women.

They have more testosterone than women do. They were made to have that aggression. That's why men are typically, they have different jobs than women do. Even whether it's just like hands-on blue-collar jobs or whether you're talking about being in the military, being a police officer, it's much more likely for a man to take those roles than women. And I do wonder if we don't have healthy channels to kind of to channel that healthy masculinity, that healthy testosterone that is going to be inevitably pulsing through the veins of those teenage boys. And I'm not casting them as victims. But I do wonder some of the consequences of constantly just trying to say, no, masculinity is bad. No, any form of aggression is bad. No, it's all toxic. so let's just suppress it.

That just doesn't seem to be working very well for men. Yeah, that's a great insight. So, you know, the toxic masculinity narrative, right, how we've demonized what was traditionally male. And, you know, again, we were having conversation about the differences between biological sexes or gender. And, you know, now that's all also being sort of, the rug is being pulled out from the whole society with male,

what's male, what's female. And the interesting part with all of that is exactly what you're saying. is when you make being male toxic, and this starts at the elementary school level, right? There's been books written about this where boys are expected to comport themselves like little girls in the classroom, and when they don't, that's when we have the whole ADHD diagnosis

and Medicaid, let's medicate. Because there's been, again, educators that focus on this look that most elementary school teachers are female, and girls tend to be more collectivist, boys tend to be, as you said, more aggressive and more rambunctious. So if they're not sitting in the reading circle like the girls are, they must be hyperactive. And we need to medicate them into a dossal-like submission.

And as they kind of get older, though, like as you said, the expectation is that you can't be male. But what we've seen in even people's digital preferences, we know that the gaming industry is predominantly male because that taps into aggression and all the first-person shooter games and all the violence amplifying games. and females tend to gravitate towards social media, which taps into their sense of connectivity and collectivism. And so we know that there's predilections between the genders that the digital, the big tech identifies really clearly and plays towards, but then that also exacerbates it too.

So now you have the violent gaming industry, which has taken these young empty men, giving them not only sort of a digital cause, because when they're gaming, they're leveling up and they're doing they have a sense of since it's purpose but it's not real purpose right because if you've reached level 155 in the fantasy world but what is that really but it's also desensitizing them to violence and there's been a boatload of violence research and aggression research with violent gaming and how

that impacts and desensitizes young men additionally well let's talk about that because whenever someone brings anything up actually just my sister and they'll text me the other day do you think that these violent video games are helping cause this? And of course, I mean, I do. I just from a nut, and that's not based on any research or any expertise that I have. It's just kind of, it seems common sense to me that if you are constantly glorifying violence, you're attaching your identity or attaching your accolades to violence, even if it's virtual violence. Of course, it's not always going to lead to real life violence. But in certain individuals, it seems like it would. So tell us about. the connection there. Is there a real connection that everyone seems to want to deny? Yeah, so there's real substantial research. The main folks that did media violence and its effect on young people were, it's Dr. Craig Anderson and the folks at Iowa State. They've been studying media violence for over 30 years now. And they're calling it not a correlational link,

but a causal link. You watch violent content. You will become more aggressive. Now, more Aggressive doesn't necessarily mean you're going to be a school shooter, but it means you might be more likely to punch your sister or, you know, kick the dog or you're going to be, you're raising your, your aggression threshold. The research on that is clear. The research is also clear that how realistic the violence is on screen also has an amplification of the violent effect. So remember back in the day, you know, they used to say things like Bugs Bunny, you know, were violent Warner Brothers cartoons would, you know, make people more violent. Or when I was growing up, they had cop shows like Starsky and Hutch, and they would say that, you know, that's going to make teenagers more violent. There was a bit of a moral panic about that. The difference was when you watched an old TV show in the 70s or 80s, it wasn't, the level of realism wasn't there.

It was bang, bang, pow, pow, bugs, you know, the roadrunner falls off the cliff. It's not, it's so cartoon-like that there's no confusing that. There's no reality blurring line there. Now we have hyper immersive, hyper realism, huge plasma or LCD screens where young children who are still developing their sense of reality testing, what's real and what's not, are losing themselves in these larger interactive violent episodes. And now you've got real gunshot fire. You've got real blood splattering. The one of the studies they did at Iowa State, they looked at the aggression effect when there was the actual blood versus no blood modifications on the game and the how much the sound effects were realistic. And so the more realistic, you know, this is probably common sense, right?

The more blood on screen and the more realistic the sound effects were, the more the more the aggression was elevated. So we know that from social learning theory, we learn from role models. And those role models can be digital and they can be real. So we could learn how to smoke from our friends. And we could also learn how to be violent through interactive digital media games. That's a no-brainer that it makes young people more aggressive and violent. And some people are more likely to go past that trigger point. There was a great book also.

He was a West Point professor. He was a major in the Army, Grossman. Major Grossman wrote a book, Stop teaching our kids to kill. And it was a whole book against the gaming industry, the video game industry. And this is a military man who was basically saying that it was desensitizing young people.

A lot of these young gamers were going into the military, by the way. They wanted to extend the video game experience. I had two specifically private clients myself years ago who were playing Call of Duty. And I remember the one young man, he was 17, he came into my office on the Monday. He had a 48-hour jag of playing call the duty, and he came into my office on the Monday morning. He said, I did it. I signed up.

I signed up for the Marines, and now it'll be real. And I was like, you know, you're not going to be able to shut this. It's not a game now. You can't turn this off, right? But it was sort of greasing the tracks for them to either do the real thing in a military setting or in, you know, let's face it. things like Grand Theft Auto aren't military. These are like a random acts of violence where you're beating prostitutes with a baseball bat.

And they're eight-year-olds playing this game where you hear the baseball bat, hitting a woman over the head and the blood is splattering. And adults are saying, oh, they're just playing a video game. But for some of these kids, this is an immersive real world. So we think that's not going to impact them? Of course. I mean, it's like the connection between, you know, people watching hardcore pornography and sexual violence. Yeah, that's not real either.

But, I mean, it is training your brain to think about people differently. It's training your brain to think about people like objects. And so I don't know, it just makes sense to me that there would be a connection. The World Health Organization said that they've now added gaming disorder to their list of mental disorders or mental health concerns. What is gaming disorder? Yeah, we've been trying to fight that battle for like four or five. years now. The APA still hasn't gotten there. You get the American Psychological Association. So gaming disorder essentially now classifies it's under the umbrella of what are called

process addictions and process addictions are behavioral addictions like sex and gambling can be behavioral compulsions that can be addictions. And so gaming disorder is basically someone who's addicted to gaming in the way that it, the biggest symptom is it adversely impacts your daily functioning. So is it. adversely impacting your schooling, your social life, your physical health. Are you is your real life becoming smaller and smaller and smaller in the devotion of your new compulsion, obsession, addiction, call it, call it what you can't, what you will. You know, I'm careful about the word addiction because I know people, for some people,

that's a third rail word, because when I have people that I treat, they don't like to hear that they're addicts. So, you know, I might say obsession or compulsion sometimes just to kind of soften the language. for the person who's struggling with the understanding that they have a problem. But the reality is there is so many people now that are having a problem. You know, what was interesting was in the Far East. They had identified gaming as a problem way before we did. Over 10 years ago in China, they considered gaming their number one health crisis for young people.

They had identified over 20 million gamers that had had a problem. And South Korea had opened up 400 rehabs just devoted to technology. addiction or gaming addiction. So they were way ahead of the curve in terms of identifying the problem and treating it than we were. We're a little slow to the dance to realize that this has become an addiction for many young people and problematic for many young people. There was a study that showed a couple things. One study that found that using gaming is a coping mechanism for stress. That's something that a lot of young boys do. It actually resulted at even higher levels of stress and aggression. And then sometimes they were coping.

because of the stress of social alienation, kind of like what we were talking about earlier. Some of these people that we've seen become these school shooters, their video games, who are kind of like their pacifier or their security blanket or even their sense of community because I know that you have the ability in some of these games to, you know, talk to other people and form community, I guess, that way. But rather than it actually calming them down as, you know, comfort measures are supposed to do, would actually just exacerbate that their stress and I guess cause them to channel stress in very aggressive and violent ways.

Yeah, I mean, we could look at it like, well, essentially any kind of hyper arousing digital content like that is a stimulant. It raises its dopaminergic. It raises dopamine levels. So it's like the, you know, kind of paradoxically, it's like how the way we give a stimulant to somebody, a kid who has ADHD, will give riddlein to the ADHD kid, even though, wait a second, we're giving a stimulant to a kid who, who's already hyperactive, that seems a little counterintuitive.

But while, so while it's a stimulant, it's also acts a little bit as a hypnotic. So the kid who's hyperactive is now sort of gets hypnotized by his screen experience, but it is arousing them. So adrenally, they're going through this arousal response. Dopaminergically, they're going through this arousal response. And then when you take away the screen, that person is now raised their thermostat on adrenaline and dopamine. And they've been, it's made it work.

course, you know, it's similar to like something like a person who's depressed who starts drinking alcohol. I'm depressed and I'll start self-medicating by drinking. The drinking temporarily makes me feel better, but we know that drinking is a sedative. It's going to make you more depressed eventually. But the more I drink, the more depressed I get, the more depressed I get, the more I drink because I escape in that. And so that's what a lot of the gamers that I've worked with, they'll say that they're depressed, but the more they game, the more depressed they get. And then the more depressed to get the more of the escaping gaming. So it's a vicious cycle that perpetuates itself. That depression also, I could say, is true with anxiety and things like, you know, more

aggression because it's a temporary digital pacifier, but it's actually making the problem worse. And so when you get off that pacifier, you're going to not be better in the same way that somebody takes a sedative. If you take Xanax to calm yourself, it'll temporarily work. But, Once you're off the Xanax, you're going to get a bad rebound effect and get even more anxiety when you're not taking the Xanax. Same thing with the screen time. Yeah. And what's the connection you see between these acts of violence that we're talking about and drug use? Is there typically some kind of correlation or causal relationship there? Well, I mean, it goes back to anybody who, you know, we talk about the metaphor that I really love is same root system, different branch systems.

So at the core, if someone's got some underlying issues, whether it's depression, trauma, anxiety, they're going to try to find some way to self-soothe to decrease that sense of discomfort. And so you might find one person's expression of self-medicating might be drug and alcohol. The other persons might be compulsive sex or gambling or digital experiences. And so typically they are comorbid. It's rare that I have a gamer that's not either smoking a little bit too much pot or doing something else that are also kind of manifestations of their own emptiness or discomfort. And typically, you know, I've been an addiction psychologist for 25 years. We also, it's called the whack-a-mole theory of addiction, right? You're treating somebody who identifies only it's a, it's, the lens is focused on the substance.

It's substance-focused. The person says, my problem is, alcohol, so they stopped drinking alcohol, then, you know, two weeks later, now they're taking too any pills or they're smoking too much pop because you put out one fire or you hit one whackamole, and the other whackamol pops up because the problem is internal. And you could put out the symptom, but the symptom isn't the real issue. It's just how you're trying to self-regulate yourself or lessen your discomfort. And it's true with digital media as well. Right. And obviously, we don't know all of the things that this patent most recent shooter in

Texas was into, as we said, we know some of his profile. But one thing that we do apparently know that's being reported is that he was removed from the Army back in 2008 for mental health concerns. But then he was still able to go on and to, you know, become a security officer. He had extensive firearm training. Do you see that it's a problem with a lot of these men that are dealing with these underlying mental health issues that they're not given the health that they need or that just no one even addressed their underlying anxiety or depression, they just kind of ignored it? Well, I think, you know, the final line that we talk about, there's a concept called compulsory treatment. When can you force someone to get treatment? You know, oftentimes everyone sort of

rings their hands like where they should have known and somebody should have gotten. But, you know, we're dealing with legal adults and forcing someone. into treatment, there's, it's justifiably, there's a pretty high bar. We don't want, quote, unquote, the state mandating, because, you know, that slippery slope becomes very political, too. Now, what's considered a psychiatric disorder, I don't want potentially a psychiatrist committing someone to treatment because they're not fitting some paradigms or norms. So there's a pretty high bar and forcing people into treatment.

In New York, where I live, they had something called Kendra's Law. And Kendra's law was 25 years ago. There was an unmedicated schizophrenic client who was on the subway system and he pushed a woman, Kendra Webbdale, in front of a train, killed her. And Kendra's law said that if you have a psychiatric history and a history of a demonstrated act of acting violently when you're not medicated, you don't get the right to not take your meds. If you don't show up and take your meds, you will be arrested. You'll be put in, forcibly put into either a jail.

setting or a psychiatric secure facility. So Kendra's law tried to look at some of these issues, how you can force, you know, in Florida, they have the Baker Act where you can, you know, for 72 hours, sign somebody in to force them to get treatment. So I worked in school settings for a long time and there were a lot of high school kids that would write, you know, pretty weird things in their English essay that the English teachers would, you know, their hair would be on fire and they would say, oh my God, this, this young man should be sent away to treatment or locked up or and 99 times out of 100 it was kind of fantasy or storytelling we don't have an exact predictive crystal ball with mental health to know which one out of those hundred is the potential

is the person's going to act violently because a lot of young people today are writing a lot of weird things and if we've started forcing all of them into kind of residential treatment settings we wouldn't have enough hospitals or rehabs to do that so so that's that's that's a So it's kind of a bit of a gray area, but it is, it is tough. I wish that they're, I mean, obviously we both care very much about civil liberties. I agree with you that it is a slippery slope that for revenge, someone could say that their ex-husband has, you know, some mental health issues, get them locked up, get their guns taken away or something like that.

But then you look at these situations, there's almost always been some kind of underlying mental health issue that was never addressed. I even think about that guy, Jordan Neely, that just died. in the subway and he had 42, 44 prior arrest, serious mental health issues, had been violent in his past, had been threatening people. And I just think, okay, I don't know that prison was the best option for that person, but something was, like something should have protected innocent people from his harassment. Something should have protected him, too, because, yeah, so I just reflects, well, it reflects three broken aspects of the system. It reflects a broken mental health

system, a broken criminal justice system. And there was a third one in there somewhere that I've now kind of alluded to me. But yeah, he fell through the cracks and that shouldn't happen. And I agree with you. I mean, I think there should be one thing that I've been involved with. There's been a movement to try to have mandatory mental health screenings for elementary and middle school kids, right? You want to be able to, well, and the narrative is get them the support that they need, right? But then the pushback is that is you're trying to red flag school shooters or kids that might just be a little bit off and you're trying to kind of, you know, stigmatize them. But if we were able to do pre-screenings and, you know, have like a mental health day in schools

where every kid did some level of psychological screenings, we can get a sense of like who might need some more help and who might be a little bit further along that might need some more supervision and some more structured, you know, be on the radar, at least, if something happens. What was interesting about the Texas shooter that's allegedly been a Nazi, because I did see the pictures of him where he had swastikas on his chest. Yeah, but some of those pictures, so it's ongoing. And, you know, this always happens after a few days, we'll know more. But apparently the profile of this person that was from Facebook reportedly was created very

recently, some of the pictures people, internet sleuths are amazing, have found that people, that were on his Facebook page weren't actually taken by him, but were actually taken from a neo-Nazi Reddit page and put on his page. So the question is, did he create this page? And is he posting these things? Or is someone else afterwards for attention? Whatever? Creating this page. I don't know yet. I'm sure that we'll find more information even today. Is it a question whether the tattoos are alleged to be Photoshoped? No, I not necessarily photoshopped, but there were a lot of different pictures on there that, you know, were Nazi symbols and things like that, that they're not sure whether he posted or not. People are pointing out that the tattoos look strange.

They look fairly new. People are debating still whether or not some of the tattoos were gang symbols or the city of Dallas. There's a lot of debates, and I'm not going to pretend to be the arbiter of those. But I don't even remember what the point was of that. But yes, there's some debate about his associations, his affiliations, I guess. If he was a Nazi, if those swastikas were indeed real. What's interesting is I have worked with people of that profile too because, look, let's face it, he was Hispanic, right?

And being a Hispanic white supremac with the Nazis were not fond of people of color of any variety. And so I've worked with clients. So this is a particular profile of client also, the self-loathing client, right, where I remember one time I worked with a white supremacist young person who was Polish. And, you know, it amazed me how little of history some of these kids knew. And I remember having to have the conversation saying, you've got a Nazi swastika and you're just similar with the Hispanic friend. Are you aware of what Adolf Hitler did to the Polish people? Are you aware of?

And subconsciously, I think they are aware of it. There's a sense of self-loathing. It's like when you encounter sometimes, well, you know, there's, there's whatever your, whatever your ethnic group is, if you have a self-loathing towards that group. And then a lot of people, and this is not that uncommon where you don't like where you come from. You aspire to be of another cultural or ethnic identity. And so, you know, in psychology we call it a reaction formation. So you then begin to now objectify and demonize the other. So you're going to become now the ethnic group that you aspire towards.

It's a bit of cultural appropriation, I guess you would say. But it's because at your core, you have this really low self-esteem, and it's now applied to your whole ethnic group. And you hate what your ethnic group represents. You're going to become the polar opposite of that. And if this was a Hispanic man who was somewhat self-loathing and became a Nazi, that might explain some of that because that's happened. Yeah.

But I don't know if that's true specifically in this case, but some of the pieces seem to be adding up. So if you are treating a young man who fits these kinds of profiles that we've talked about, whatever it is, they're violent, whether they're neo-Nazi or not. Maybe you see in this person a profile of a would-be mass shooter. Like, how do you treat a young man like that? What does that entail? Yeah, it's really kind of you have to kind of strip away all the external, you know, you have to kind of, it's almost like layer by layer of the onion. You have to peel back each layer to get to a person's sort of intrinsic sense of self and identity and almost build that back up in a way that becomes healthier. So now, well, first and foremost, you have to build a therapeutic alliance.

You have to build some sense of connection with that person to be able to meaningfully engage in this journey of beginning to understand how the person got to where they, they got and to then start chipping away and chipping away and peeling back some of the layers and to then create, hopefully, reshape that person's sense of self and self-worth and their paradigm of the world in a healthier way. And oftentimes that comes, you know, it's interesting. We have in my treatment program in Austin, we had a young man recently who came from a very extreme right-wing views and, you know, the people in his group and his treatment group were pretty diverse. And sometimes it's just interacting with people of different shapes and flavors that expands your paradigm and makes it makes for a sort of healthier, a healthier perspective,

more open to understanding and being empathic towards other folks. Because again, a lot of times people that go down ideological rabbit holes or pathways, they're in these echo chambers. And so sometimes it's just a question of expanding their lens to be more open. And then again, really beginning to say, what are your core values? Who are you at your core? And let's really do a rebuild essentially on how you see yourself and how you see the world because that's going to serve you better from a mental health standpoint. Because right now you've created a narrative.

you're living in the narrative that it's toxic for you, toxic potentially for others, and how can we help you get to a better place where you've created a better identity for yourself that's more adaptive and healthier. Yeah. You know, something that you said earlier that I kind of want to hear you expound on,

but I'll connect it to this question, is you mentioned that you found that gaming or studies have found that gaming can actually prevent the parts of the brain that allow for empathy, to kind of, to be stunted. That part of the brain doesn't really develop. I guess it's kind of like burning nerve endings.

You just can't feel it anymore. So in a situation like this, if you've got someone who is addicted to gaming, do you take those things away? Like, are you in partnership with the parents to say, okay, we're detoxing from gaming, from phones, from, you know, this online world that he sucked into. Is that part of it? Absolutely.

I mean, even for our class, that don't have a quote unquote gaming or tech issue of my treatment program for two months, you know, you're off of all of that because it's outside influences. You want to focus on the person, right? You want to focus on whatever their issues are. And so all those other things are at the very least, they're a distraction, but at most they're shaping and impacting in ways that are very toxic. But we frame it as we don't want the distractions of phones and social media and gaming, and certainly for persons addicted to gaming, you know, they shouldn't go back to gaming. I mean, we do a whole, you know, we treat gaming addiction.

So there's, we then help them do what's called a digital reentry plan where now what's a healthy use of technology that you can use moving forward, researching something or or zooming with grandma's, a healthy use of technology. So we begin to identify digital vegetables versus digital candy. digital candy or just those empty calories of candy crush world of warcraft gaming that that just is just bubble gum for the brain as opposed to technology in service of research schoolwork keeping in touch with family members those kinds of things and identifying the differences so we're saying not to never use technology again but what's what what are the flavors of technology

that have been unhealthy for you and how do we help you stay off of those. Yeah. Okay. Because I know that we need to go to respect your time. Can you just give a message to parents, parents of boys, particularly teenage boys, like what's your advice to them? This is kind of like a scary time for them. They want to make sure that they are channeling that masculinity and natural aggression in ways that are healthy, but they just don't know what to do. So what are just some basic tips that you would give parents of boys? And again, as the parent of 16-year-old, identical twin boys myself, I'm in the fight also. So again, it's having healthy supports.

And by healthy supports, I mean, get your kids busy and healthy activities. Because in the void and the vacuum of boredom, there's a lot of other things that your kids can very quickly get seduced by. And I've seen, you know, straight-A students who are athletes, get sucked into toxic rabbit holes quickly. I mean, this could happen where your child changes in a matter of weeks to months. So it's get them involved in healthy activities, social organizations, sports, music, whatever that may be. And be aware of what they're digital, what they're watching online because it's like knowing who their friends are. You have to know who they're online with because before you know, a few forays into 4chan can lead to a lot of indoctrination.

that you may not be even aware that might be happening. So I'm all in favor for knowing what your kid's digital world is because that's the world that they're living in oftentimes. And it is a scary time. But as much as we can, I think we also have to be the parents, not be afraid to talk about what values are and what it means to be a young man. Character development doesn't get talked about a lot of mental health.

I do talk about it a lot. what is definition of character, ethics, values, have those conversations with your kids and don't leave that void there to be filled in by ideological groups or university professors sometimes who may confuse your child into all sorts of other up-is-down confusion. And here we're talking about the gender issue as well. If your child, you know, help them understand who they are in ways that are affirming, genuinely affirming, not in the Orwellian phrase of gender affirming health care, which is such a toxic Orwellian concept.

But anyway. Right. Dr. Cardenas, tomorrow we're going to play the other part of the interview where we talk specifically about social media, that addiction. We talk about your books and things like that. So for all of that, people will have to tune in tomorrow. But I so appreciate you taking the time to come on and talk about this tough subject. and thanks for the work that you do.

I really appreciate it. And likewise, thank you for the work that you were doing, Allie. Much appreciated it as well. Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles,

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