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There's a youtuber who's been showing up a lot in my feed lately. "The Healthy Gamer" aka "Dr Alok Kanojia" aka "Dr K." His actual channel is here: https://youtube.com/@HealthyGamerGG but the single clearest expression of his views is probably his interview here with another influencer, Diary of a CEO.
The reason I bring him up here is that he reminds me a lot of when Scott A used to talk about social issues. First of all, he's a psychiatrist. So at least some of the time, he has the weight of authority on his side (based on my training at Harvard medical school, there's lots of research saying... blah blah blah). But he's not afraid to go way outside the mainstream, speculating about hot-button cultural issues, particularly incels and modern dating. He's also got a hefty dose of "woo"- he spent time at some sort of Hindu monk training program in India, and his main recommendation for most people is "Yoga and meditation."
He uses a lot of clickbait thumbnails, with some wording that seems ripped straight from 4chan /r9k/. "Why therapy sucks for men," "Getting a girlfriend is NOT an achievable goal, "untake the blackpill," "why chasing red flags lead to love," and many others. Most of them are very long, so I've only skimmed through them. That's another similarity he has with Scott A- he has immense patience and goes on at great length over what most other people just hit in tweets and short videos. I hate the fact that he's using video as a medium, but I do understand that's what the young people are into these days. It also lets him sooth us with his calming voice and demeanor, instead of just focusing on the words...
Overall he comes across as both very wise and very kind. His overall perspective seems very "blue-pilled," but he seems to genuinely understand the slang that red-pillers and incels are using, which most liberal blue-pillers seem to get slightly wrong. He admits that a lot of the incels/red-pillers/black-pillers have genuine problems. He even admits that, for some of them, it's quite logical that they would want to commit suicide, given how crappy their lives are and how few solutions are available. He strikes a good balance between "here's how you can help yourself" and "this isn't really your fault, it's the fault of society." He's one of the very few men I've seen who's able to cry and camera and make me more sympathetic towards him. I can't help but like him, even when I disagree with him.
That said...
He's not content to just be a Youtube influencer. He's also selling a "coaching guide" on his website: https://www.healthygamer.gg/ for $100. Or a series of "coaching lessons" with a personal "coach" (NOT a licensed therapist), for $50/session (20 session minimum). Not with him, personally, but with some other person that he's supposedly trained. There's also a more expensive program for wanna-be Youtube creators.
I don't know how to feel about that. On the one hand... that's what psychiatrists and therapists do, right? They have to make a living, so they charge for their services. It's understandable that you can't fix all your problems from just watching Youtube videos, and maybe this sort of coaching works better than regular therapy (which I do have a pretty low opinion of). And there's a lot of alienated young men right now who really don't have anyone in their life they can reach out to for help right now.
On the other hand... this is exactly what scammers like Andrew Tate and the old PUAs do. Set himself up as this great, winning guy (he's not afraid to show off his lovely family and nice house), and offer an expensive service to teach vulnerable young men how to follow in his footsteps. Since the service is kind of vague, he can charge whatever he wants and there's no way to prove he scammed us. And he's definitely working the algorithm as hard as he can, with clickbait thumbnails and lots of Youtube shorts, plus going on interviews with other famous channels.
I can't tell whether this guy is the nicest, kindest guy who just wants to make a living from his very valuable service, or the shadiest scammer who's taking advantage of miserable people while pretending to be a saint. It's one or the other, no in-between. Thoughts?
....no? It's definitely in between. He is a nice guy who genuinely believes in the value of his service, and has seen it genuinely help people, and has rationally concluded that valuable services are worth large amounts of money, and good advertising and optics help you sell more of them.
This is no different than a top class chef charging $100 for meals at a high class restaurant instead of working at a soup kitchen. You would not describe such a person as "the nicest kindest chef", it's not a charity, but neither is it merely a scam.
High value product for high cost = fair
High value product for low cost = kind
Low value product for high cost = scam
Low value product for low cost = fair
Whether it genuinely is a high value product, I have no idea. But I believe that he genuinely believes in it, and wouldn't offer it if he didn't believe it was valuable, in a way unlike Andrew Tate or other scammers.
People have a way of convincing themselves of things that are convenient for themselves. Which means that a standard of "if they themselves believe it, it doesn't count as a scam" is unworkable. If they don't have some well-founded reason to believe it, they're indistinguishable from scammers even if on some level they've convinced themselves that their scam is really a good deal. You can't read their mind, after all.
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I think the difference is, with the top chef, it's very obvious to everyone that his lessons are valuable. You can taste his food, directly sense how good it is, and he's teaching you himself. This is both vague ("what is "motivation?" what is "happiness?") and indirect (he's not teaching you himself, he's recruiting other people to teach you). This is more like if a famous modern artist recruited other artists to teach you how to become a famous modern artist, where the value of each work ranges wildly depending on totally subjective opinions and reputation.
Also, why do you think Andrew Tate doesn't "sincerely believe" that his service is valuable?
I would consider a "scammer" to be someone who deliberately tricks people into overpaying for a service above what value they would actually acquire from it. In a normal rational capitalist transaction, both the seller and consumer gain utility by transfering a good which the consumer values more highly than the seller does, for some price in between the two subjective valuations of that good. A non-scam seller genuinely helps their consumers while enriching themselves because the consumers value the good more highly than the price paid. A scam is when the seller deceives the consumer into over-valuing the good to the point that they pay a price higher than the actual value they receive once the good is obtained. Importantly, this involves actual deception: someone who unknowingly sells something to customers is like someone who unknowingly tells you false facts that they believe: they're wrong, but they're not a "liar".
I'll be honest, while I've watched a reasonable amount of Dr K. I'm not very familiar with Andrew Tate directly. Everything I know about him is third-hand, so I wouldn't place bets on my belief that he's an actual scammer, it's mostly based on vibes. His advice is largely selfish and unconcerned with helping other people as long as you maximize your own well-being at the expense of others, which is entirely self-consistent with maximizing his own well-being at the expense of others. It would be not at all hypocritical for him to scam his audience. I think. Again, I've mostly heard about him third-hand, so I could be wrong here. I'm much more confident that Dr K is not knowingly scamming others, at least in the form of deliberately deceiving or overcharging them, based on his general personality and genuineness. I believe that he believes that his customers will benefit from his services at a value higher than the cost. I don't know if that's true or not, but even if false I wouldn't consider it a "scam", in the same way that I don't believe $100 restaurants are worth the price to non-millionaires, but still aren't scams as long as they're up front about the prices.
Andrew Tate's brother has outright said their business was a scam and that they were fleecing fools. So I've got pretty high odds on Tate being a scammer. https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/brothers-make-millions-using-webcam-26508739
I don't know a ton about Dr. K, but sounds like he's somewhere between "overcharging for a somewhat useful service because he can" and "selling a great service at a reasonable market price". It really depends on how good his coaches are. I don't think they need licenses or government regulated training to be helpful, and $1000 for life-changing help that changes someone from a NEET to a functioning member of society is absolutely worth it. But whether his coaches can actually help much is an open question I think. But people can just watch his videos and decide for themselves whether that sort of therapy is right of them- he isn't advocating for anything immoral or lying to people like Tate does, so if someone wants to pay $1000 for several hours of 1 on 1 help, that's their choice.
I don't see what the coaches are even doing, besides repeating the same advice that he's giving for free in his videos. As I understand it, with traditional therapy, the main benefit is supposed to be from talking about your problems to someone who will listen. The "talking cure" as Freud called it. But you're also opening up about your deepest secrets to someone, which is why it helps to have therapists somewhat regulated so they don't take advantage of people or convince them of crazy shit like Freud did.
As far as I can tell, he gives great explanations of how modern society and technology are bad for people in ways that are not their personal fault. But his main advice is just to get the internet and do some meditation. At least a therapist can meet you in person, seeing a coach over the internet seems to contradict that.
Having an internet coach who you can talk to and get personalized advice from isn't a useless service. Just having an intelligent person to be a sounding board can be worth money. Plus it can serve as someone to be accountable to- you need to tell the coach how much progress you make each week, so you make sure you make some progress instead of putting it off.
What consequences would regulated therapists face that these coaches wouldn't for abuse of people's secrets?
Doesn't the therapist lose their license if they're caught doing something wildly unprofessional? That's supposed to keep them in check a bit. But yeah, I do agree that it's helpful to have a real person to talk to regularly, just wish it didn't have to be some stranger on the internet.
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This sounds like "death of the author" stuff. Does the intent of the author matter, or is it just the words on the page? Not a clear issue, but I think most scholars side with the latter. EG, it doesn't matter whether someone intends to be a scammer, what matters is if they can actually give a useful service that justifies their prices.
I would be interested to know if there's anyone that's like "yeah, I paid for coaching from one of Dr. K's coaches and it was totally worth it. Turned my life around, in some ways that are easy to measure and verify."
What matters depends on what you're trying to extrapolate it for. If you're evaluating whether you or someone you know should purchase the product, then the value of the product matters, and intent only matters in-so-far as it correlates with the value of the product If person A is an intentional scammer then the vast majority of products they offer will have low value and high cost, so you can use that as a prior and probably dismiss all their offerings without any additional investigation.
If you're extrapolating it to the value of their other offerings then intent matters a little. An intentional scammer is going to offer bunches of scams and fail to cultivate real value. Someone who values themselves highly in a genuine way is going to attempt to offer good value even if they tend to overprice some of it, so the correlation between offerings will be weaker.
If you're extrapolating that to the value of their character, then intent matters a lot. If person A offers a bad product unintentionally, then you can't conclude they're a bad person, while if they do it intentionally then they are.
So if two people, A and B, have free videos offering advice, and then paid videos and services offering more detailed advice and individual attention for a cost, and person A is a known scammer and person B is not, you should probably avoid even the free videos from person A, because they're optimizing for advertising the scam and getting money rather than being genuinely useful, while person B is likely to offer more genuine advice in their free videos, because they believe the value of their product can speak for itself.
Ultimately, the value of the free and paid content is what actually matters, but the intent correlates strongly across content
That's true. Unfortunately it's very hard to judge intent when the person is a is gifted salesman and charismatic speaker. Sometimes I think they even convince themselves. Take L Ron Hubbard for example. As far as I can tell it started off as a simple grift ("You don't get rich writing science fiction. If you want to get rich, you start a religion."). But then went deeper and deeper into it, and spent his entire life surrounded by fawning sycophants, and he started to actually believe that he was some sort of messiah. Plenty of people still swear by his teachings to, and would happily hand over all their money to the Church of Scientology all over again.
Basically I think the entire self-help/therapy/mysticism industry is full of both types, people who are actively scamming and people who are sincerely trying to help people. And I don't think I can always tell the difference.
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