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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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