We have been working with Patrick which is here for about a year on reversing games and fuzzing games, online games particularly and before I start we have a bunch of questions for you guys. The first one would be how many of you ever play online games? Please raise your hand. All right. Some people don't. Okay. Don't expect that. How many of you ever thought of cheating? Come on. Don't be shy. Don't be shy. All right. How many of you really succeeded in doing that? All right. Well, so all of you probably ever one who tried to cheat at one game like Diablo 3 or League of Legends which will be the focus of the talk today, we realized quickly that it is very, very hard and when we started to do the presentation for this talk we had two options. The first option was well, how about doing a talk where we show you a bunch of attacks or a bunch of how we crash games and the second one was more into telling you how we did it. And we decided to take the later route because I've been doing a lot of fuzzing and a lot of reversing on games for the last three years.  How do I do reversing games? And most of the skill set that you need to do that are not your standard reverse technique idea or skill set. So what we hope to you to get from this talk is ideas on how next time you want to test a game not for cheating of course but for intellectual satisfaction you have the right skill set, right? By the way, if you start cheating at Diablo 3 I would be super angry because I'm still playing it so please hold for a little while before you start doing that. Thank you. It's a very, very tough place and over the last year we met incredible people and before starting we want to acknowledge them because they did some of the work and we want to take credit for it. So we want to thank particularly Drew, Moises which did a lot of work on Diablo 3 and Incline 9 which did a lot of work on League of Legends and we are building on what they did and we helped them along the way and they helped us so it's really like they should be there together with us or at least here in spirit I guess. So why fuzzing online game is so hard? Well, interior is super simple. You have a server and you have a game and nothing special in it except a few things. First, well, you don't have the server. When you try to fuzz, let's say Apache or an FTP server you usually have the binary as a very least so you can actually instrument it, look how it works and you can relaunch it and stuff. When you are fuzzing games, you don't. You simply don't have the server. The server is something out of your reach, you don't know how it works, you don't know how it's run, on which platform it is run, it's completely obscure to you. And by the way, do not fuzz games server. Fuzzing game server is illegal and I have to put this disclaimer somewhere. Do not try to fuzz Diablo 3 server and never tell you to do that. Do not do that. You can maybe fuzz the client that may be legal. I'm not a lawyer but I'm pretty sure fuzzing server is illegal. The second thing is when you look at the protocol, over the time it became more and more complicated, I'm going to tell you more about the one about Diablo 3 and the one on League of Legends but most of them, maybe except FormVir, how very, very complex and encrypted and you don't really know what's inside so it's really hard to just fire up a sniper and just look at packet, won't give you much these days. You have to really work harder on that. And finally, well, games try to do the basic and to prevent you from debugging code so they have anti debugging techniques, they also have active security checks. The most well known would be the warden. I'm going to give you a few words on this in a few slides which is Blizzard active security checker and they're a very, very, very complex piece of code. You're looking at huge binary with a ton of DLR so if you just say, well, I'm going to just reverse it, let's pop up ADA or any type of analysis and you're going to fail because it's just too big. And then when you look at that, you are like this. That's actually my usual face which is like, oh, that hurts, it's really hard and you make no progress. When Patrick joined me like six months ago, he spent probably like two months doing zero progress. It's like very frustrating and we don't want you guys to feel the same so we try to give you a point of how to not be stuck. It's possible and most people are like this in the forum. I don't know what to do. How am I starting? What is the thing I should need to know? Well, friends, there is hope. It is possible to first game, it is possible to have results. You just have to be very creative and we really have to think out of the box and use some sort of technique that you might not feel like are linked to reverse but actually are really useful. And yes, I'm going to give you statistics and yes, we're going to do some mathematical analysis of packets because at some point, as you will see, there is no the way and it actually would be faster than just reverse the same. So what we really want you to take out from this talk is the new techniques or the techniques revamped to first games that we come across over the last year and then you can take them home and try to play with them and hopefully you will help a bunch of open source projects that are around games and a lot of good come out of that. So here is our master plan for today. We have the game, we have the server, so what we try to do usually is we try to be in between. We want to have our tool to actually intercept the traffic and be able to see the packets and there is here is our first twist is we also want our tool to correlate that with memory offsets. One of the things which is very powerful is when you combine network traffic with memory analysis because you know what packet affect which state and then you can write things like if I see this packet, what are the packet I see when this value comes up or which value comes down and so forth. So it's actually a very useful technique to combine both of them. So today we're going to show you four things. One is how do you intercept traffic, which is the first step. Then how you have to bypass encryption. So every game you use encryption so you have to do that before doing any works. Then how do you reverse the traffic? When you have decrypted your packets, how do you actually come up with a understanding of what it is?  So intercepting traffic. There is mainly three ways for intercepting traffic. The first one is you take your game and you do something which is well known, which is GI injections. I'm speaking of Windows games. For Linux fans it's more like a LD preload where you try to overwrite a specific set of functions. The other one is you work at the OS level and where you have to write the driver or you use a VM, you put your game into the VM depending on how graphic intensive is your game, you might or might not be able to do that and then you write the driver which is going to intercept the packet before they leave the box and before they eat the router or the last way is to actually have the network or the IPI advisor and just use this interception after the packets leave the box. Okay. So hooking WinSocks. So most of the games in Windows use WinSocks which is a Windows socket API which is a standard way to send and receive packets. I have yet to see a game which doesn't use it. And basically there is a couple of functions that you want to basically overwrite. The first one is connect which allows you to manipulate where the game connects. The second one is receive for receiving packets and the third one is obviously sending packets. These are the three functions that you want to hook and there is two ways mainly to do that. The first one is to use Microsoft D2 libraries which is a way for you to write a DLR which says I want to intercept this, this, this and this and then it's going to inject a DLR into the game and you would have like a bypass to these functions. The other one if you don't want to use D2 and there is a lot of discussion for communities on what is the best way to do you can actually not use Microsoft D2 and use IAT hooking which is basically you write the table of the pointer directly by yourself and then they go into your function and then you return to the real functions. That's where things become harder when you do a game. If you do that on a browser like IE it works perfectly. If you do that on Diablo 3 you have to face a warden. So what is a warden? So a warden is the code name for Blizzard anti-chilling engine. It is meant basically to do three things. The first thing which we know most about is it really does certain offset in the memory. So it looks at different offset in the game and try to see if these offset have been modified in any ways. It also can the list of process you have run on your computer for known bots or known executable like debuggers, packet interceptor, sniper and so forth and report it to Blizzard and last thing it actually seems to be able to run blob of code. So basically sometimes it's fetch a blob of code and just run it and return the result to Blizzard. What it means for us is that if you use hooking you will get code. You will. There is like no, you might not be code right away because you might inject or hook a little bit differently that the receive or send function and you can be upper this function but sometimes it will figure this out and you get code because the wardens can for every time ways of injecting the allows. So the other options that we sort of work, we use for the last six months is write a driver. Two years ago we were starting to do use an LSP which was the old way to do it by Microsoft. There was actually a talk at DEF CON 15 on that. It's fun to tell you how old is like five or six years old. There is a new one we came out which is actually easier so if you want to look at doing that the easiest way to do is to use the Windows filter platform which make basically you can tell I want to intercept TCP connection or I want to intercept the stream on top of it and make it easier for you because it's going to re-sync TCP counter for you and so forth. So it's pretty good. The thing you have to be careful when you write the driver is actually the driver what you do is basically you stop the packets to go to the server and you re-enject them. The problem when you do that with the driver is your own packet are going to go back to your own driver so you have to tag them. It seems easy to explain. When you implement it it's sort of tricky and you might find weird bugs like having the same packet send twice to the server and so forth so you have to be careful. On a side note you can't really redirect IPs so I saw that a bunch of times in the forums people say well but what you can do is simply tell Diablo 3 to go and connect to your own IPs. There is like a common line option for that. The truth is it's used to work in beta. In release you can't do that. Basically the server send a packet a challenge packet to Diablo 3 with the IP of the server and if it actually doesn't match the release it has into a DLR which is downloaded every time you launch a game it's going to refuse to connect. So you actually have to the Diablo 3 has to believe that you connect to the right IP otherwise you can't actually launch a game. And some people will say well but I can hook this function. Well if you hook this function the world is going to catch you so you can't do that. You have to either remove the IP to a different box or you have to do the driver interceptions. So to summarize this part you can do the injection and it works fine on games which don't have like active checks like League of Legends. That's probably the current way of doing it for League of Legends. When you deal with games which are really really secure like Diablo 3 you have to do something more fancy. We use driver for a very good reason is as I said in my master plan I want to be able to read the game state. I want to be able to collect packets with what is happening in the memory and the only way for me to do that is to be on the same computer. I might be able to do it with a second box but I have to do socket and so forth and there will be some latency which might not be which might seem trickier. So our current approach what we recommend to do is actually use the driver and use the WPF way of doing it just like we did it. Encryptions. Let's start with the easy one. League of Legends. So League of Legends use bluffish. I have no idea why they choose bluffish which is slow but somehow someone they must have read that bluffish is great so they implemented bluffish. So League of Legends have two binary one which is the launcher where you find your game and then you click play and it launch the game. The interesting part of that is actually when you click on launch the key with a bluffish key appear in the command line. So they have some sort of encryption. Not a big deal. Let's go back to something way more complicated under Diablo 3. So you have the game and you have the batonnet server which is the first server you connect to. The first thing you're going to do is what is called SRP6 challenge which is basically a way for you to prove that you have the right login and password without transmitting it in clear. It's a six step protocol. I'm not going into details. If you look Google SRP6 you're going to find it.  That's why it's pretty good. It's actually very, very the right way to do that. And when you have done that what you obtain is a secret key which is shared between the batonnet server and the game and change out every instance of the game of course. And then you use that to start TLS. So you do TLS PS key which is pressure at key so basically they start to do TLS instead of using certificate to exchange the keys actually use the keys they have used in SRP6. And when this is done and you say okay I can do all of this. You have the RSA challenge.  And then after that you actually connect to a second server which is what we call the game server where the actual game occur. You know when you click play actually you are moving to another server. And no please do not put the key into the command line. Not this time. So why a RSA challenge? So TLS PS key is basically using SSL with a pressure key which is the one you exchange it during the SRP6 challenge. And it should be perfectly fine for us because well I know my password so I can recreate the SRP6 challenge on my interception mechanism. And so there is no way for Blizzard to know that it's an end-to-end connection so they use a RSA challenge so the client expect a message which is signed with the private key of Blizzard and if this is not showed by, if it's not valid then the game will refuse to launch again. It's actually located into the password DRL. So basically what happened is we don't know the key. We don't know the Blizzard private key and the game expect you to have this challenge signed by the private key of Blizzard otherwise it will refuse to launch. So it's a way for them to do authentications. And it's actually perfectly meant to be prevent for exactly what we want to do which is manage the middle attacks. So there is two ways to bypass the challenge. One is you're going to factor an RSA key which is as far as I can tell impossible or you're going to patch the game. But if you patch the game, you know what happened? The warden is going to go after you. Remember the warden we should look at the offset, they actually look at the offset of the key so if you try to change the key or change the task they're going to catch you. So that's probably what the happy face you make. And you're like okay that's become complicated so you start to thinking well maybe I can do put into debug mode swap on during the challenge and be very quick and remove the swap or might intercept the warden and I might actually trick the warden into not scanning the right offset. And then you look more and more and then you realize something really deep. Traffic to the game server is not encrypted. So when you realize that you're like yes I can't so you can't what's it mean is we can monitor the game by itself but we can't do for action auction a house protocol is encrypted. So if you want to basically try to first the auction and again it's illegal you might not be able to do that because these packets are encrypted so they protect your login, the character selection and the auction house. If you just want to be in the game like bashing monster and doing quest this is not encrypted so that's the part we focus with. So at that point we give up on managing everything and we just like let the game do all the authentication for itself and we pick up the connection after all this is done and we just give up on basically the auction so forth. All right. Reversing protocol. Here's what a Diablo 3 game packets look like. So they use TCP and on top of TCP they use RPC which is remote procedure calls so they send a lot of calls to the server say do this, do that, for instance I'm facing this, I'm going there and the server going to say play this animation or I'm going to kill this monster so basically you say I'm going to attack there and the server is going to send you back how much DPS you did because all the computation are done on the server side to prevent cheating again and then on top of that they use what we call Protobuf. Protobuf is a way to create nested protocol which is developed by Google, there is an open source implementation of that. The community has created a C sharp version of it so you have it for Python, C++, Java and C sharp currently available open source and if you want to know what a Diablo 3 packets look like this is a packet which is half reversed so you have this is an attack packet so when you attack packets this is what we have been able to isolate so you have something which is like an aim target message where you have three fields we believe it's actually five or six fields we don't know exactly how to split it yet and then you have the location where you want to eat which is like three coordinates which are at the bottom of the screen.  On the other side League of Legends use something completely different they use UDP and on top of that they use INET which is a reliable connection on top of UDP. On top of that they have Bloffish and on top of that they have a new protocol which is a League of Legends protocol which is their own custom protocol which is the thing you care deeply about. So INET is just a way to multiplex. Basically the League of Legends packet format is something like this you have an OP code which tells you what the action is followed by an ID which is an integer, so little bits, little Indian and then followed by some content and then they are multiplexing across multiple channels and each channel have a set of flags so you usually have like four or five channels and one or two flags for this. Usually three is for sending information and one is for receiving information or something like that. And then you're like, at that point you feel pretty good. You're like, well okay now I'm, I know the protocol, I'm able to manipulate it, I'm happy, I did all the hard work right? It seems fair and from now it should be done here. Well, let's take some check. We recorded a game which lasted 21 minutes and in 21 minutes we get 60,000 packets. That's a lot of data as a process. And on average you get about 48 packets second so if you try to do that with a sniper, well you won't see anything. If you try to process that with a sniper, well it's going to take you a lot of time and we have isolated 78 different OP codes so there's also a lot of different packets. So if you want to grab that, you have some birth to up to 80% or 90 packets a second at some point and then it's very, very, very oscillating and it's not easy to do that with that. And then, well, yeah there is too much stuff to process. You can't just look at it and just figure out what it is because it's actually too much data. Well there is no searching as too much data. You know, having a lot of data is good because if we have a lot of data we can start to do something like statistical analysis and don't be afraid it's pretty easy to actually figure out a lot of things by themselves and then use that. So what I propose to do from there is first we're going to bucket which is basically split the traffic by OP code because we know that each OP code is sort of separated and then try to do some what I call differential analysis. I'm going to show you how it works. Then we're going to try to mutate this to do the fuzzing and then we can inject the code and just look at the data and see how it's going to work. So bucketing is very simple. All you do is you look at the OP code and you say well, if it's OP code A I'm going to put it into the bucket A and if it's B I'm going to put it into the bucket B and that's all there is to it. So it's not hard and it's going to be like four lines of Python or something. And then you have your bucket and then you can work on each of them in installations. When you have each bucket what you do is you take each packet and what you're going to do is you're going to do the first packet followed by the second packet and you're going to look at how many of them are differences in the same offset. So you're going to compare offset by offset which is column by column and you compare all of them. And for instance you can see that for the first offset the value is from two to nine. We have the range because the lowest one is zero two and the highest one is zero nine. And the second one hasn't moved so it's basically some sort of static field. Either an identifier or a split, a separator or something like that. And the third one is also separated. When you have that you have to do a second step where what you do is you do a differential analysis between traces. So you have one traces which might have this shape where the first offset is variable, the second one is fixed, the third one is fixed and then you for instance look for the second player trace and you compare those two. And what you can see from there is that of course the first offset have variations, the second one is fixed but actually the third one is also variable because it's probably the idea of the user or idea of the player so you can actually get more data. If you want all of this I put all the differential analysis on the League of Legends protocol into the Github. If you look for League of Legends in net line you're going to find them and I have all of them in public. And when you have that you can say well now I can first everything. So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to take every range and for each range I'm going to just you know just mutate all of those. Well, the problem is it looks like this. It's what we call the curse of dimensionality. If you try to have one bucket which change it's perfectly fine. If you have seven range which actually change, even if you try to do four mutation by range and combine all of those you're going to end up with millions and millions of packets. To give you an idea, when we started to generate all the fuzzing vectors for the League of Legends client and we only used three value which is minimum, maximum and median value. We ended up with 1.5 million packets. And the problem is League of Legends is very brittle, the client. So most of the time we actually crash the client. So and the problem is then you have to click on reload the game, reset the game and then click and then start. And even if you automate that with let's say auto it then you have to do it in super slow. So, well, you have to take it to the next level. It's not good enough. Even if you are to that point where you know what is fixed, what is not fixed and you're able to try to do all the fuzzing, you're not good enough. You need something better. So you can start with something very simple. You can look at frequency analysis. This is the plot. What you can see here is by opcode. And it's a logarithmic scale so the biggest bore are actually way higher than they look up here on the diagram. Some opcode are very, very frequent. There are mainly pings and update on location and stuff like that which are not really what you are interested in. On the other hand, there is a handful of code which are very, very, very rare. And these are the ones you actually care about. Why? Because the small stuff is usually the good stuff. For instance, when you do a level up, well, level up is not that often. You're not going to level up every second. So you might have like four or five of those into the trace. Same thing for buying items. You do not buy like 20 items or a million items. You buy maybe 10, 20 items so it's very, very low. And something for attacking. You do not attack that often. So there is very, very few packets. So if you discard all the stuff which is very, very frequently updated, then you end up with a small chunk of opcode which are more manageable to do. That been said, remember, it's an online game. So when you send a comment, you also want to know what the answer is linked to it. So the problem is with League of Legends that I said, there is multiple packets as they sort of multiplex each other. So it's actually hard to know which one is related to one another. So you need to actually do correlations between opcodes. For instance, when you have an attack trigger, you want to know what is the response from the server for that. Or when you assign a new skill, what you really want to know is, well, what is the server entering to me and how I can play with that. So to do that, you do something which is fairly standard, which is called ngram analysis. It's very, a big word for, and I'm going to show you a big word. It's actually a big word for something which is that simple. What you do is you take the, you only take the opcode and then you take the first packet and then the second packet and then you say, well, I see these two opcodes one after the other one time. And then you move and you say, well, I see these two opcodes one after the other one time and the fourth. And at the end, if you repeat across all the trace, you're going to get some of them which are more frequent than the other. And it's going to get actually rid of the noise. So if you actually trigger something multiple times, it's likely that at some point, the answer and the response which are related are going to appear close together more often than the other. I'm simplifying a little bit because you need to be a little bit more fuzzy, but that's the essence of this. And there is one gotcha with that. If you try to do that, do not try to keep high frequency packets into it because you have some packets which are like 10 times a second, so they're going to mess up your analysis, so you need to actually get rid of all the high frequency packets before inserting it into it. So let me give you a concrete example. So far we've been doing a lot of hand waving. Here's a League of Legend set skill packet. So every time you gain a level, you have the ability to select a skill and say I want to increase this skill or this skill or this skill. What you actually do is we pull out the trace for you. And in blue there is the opcode 3E, and then you have 1B, 1C, 1A, 1B which is the second column which is basically the player ID. How we know that, we know that because if you look at one trace it's fixed. If you look at multiple trace with multiple players, it's actually become viable so we know it's actually linked to the player. And then at the end you have 0, 0, 2, 0, 3, 0, et cetera. It's actually called from 0, 0 to 0, 5. And then we took a deeper look at that by basically clicking on one of the slots and then looking at what packet we got by playing the game and looking at the output at the same time. And it's actually the slot position. So what the packet says is I want to put the player ID X, I want to put one more point to this slot. And then you need the answer, right? And so we did this frequency analysis and then gram and we get the answer and the answer is 18. And so 18 is the same thing. You have the player ID.  Right? So basically it tells you well for slot position 1, which is 0, 0, you get a skill between 0, 1 and 0, 6, which is the maximum you can get for a given skill.  Yes? No, maybe? Yes. It seems to be there is a bug where you're like, well, if the server send me how much power I can get for a given slot, what will happen if I rewrite 0, 1 to let's say 0, 6? So I get like, I said I'm going to assign one point and then I stop the packet from the server and I say, well, no, in reality you don't get one more point, you get like six more points. It sort of work in a sense that your client is going to believe that you actually have six. So your client is going to believe what the server say and it's going to say yes, you have a spell level six. But when you try to use it, it won't work because actually the server keep tab of how much DPS you do. So actually even you can pretend to have the skill, but it's actually not going to do anything because they do the computation on the server. I don't know when they fixed it, but it's fixed. All right. Another way to do it, we found very useful is binding a specific set of keystroke to our keyboard before we're doing an action. So we actually say we usually use control X. And so we press control X just before we want to, the action we're interested in and then our software actually add to the trace or a click event into the trace. And after that what we do is we usually look at the end few packet after that. So it's actually helping basically and transmitting the game and looking at the trace at the same time, putting the click at that point is actually help us to isolate the packet we want to look at. If you don't want to do all the different analysis and stuff, the easiest way is just to record a specific one and say well I want you to know what are the packets from this particular point in time and then you can actually look at only these packets. Again, what we want to come across is don't try to reverse the entire protocol because most of the protocol port are sort of independent. Just try to focus on the one you are really interested in, like attacking or setting an item or removing an item and then just look at those packets and if you look at enough of those packets you're going to find a recurrence and then with this you can actually figure out how the protocol works. And then for the next part I'm going to let Patrick tell you a little bit more how we monitor the results. Okay, so what about monitoring the results? Remember the bigger picture is to build a fuzzer so we kind of need some way to automate the monitoring of the results so that we can build some scripts for example that is going to check whether or not we succeeded. So how do I do that? As my packet affected the game state. To do that we need to read the state of the game. We have a couple of ways to do that. The first one is to read the game memory. So we are going to inject a packet and then we need to find the memory offsets of the potential value that is going to be affected. And this value will give us an idea of how we succeeded in changing the state of the game. For example if we take the health of the player of the number of gold pieces we can say that I have 10 gold and now I'm going to buy an item and I have 11 gold. So did my injection work? Now how can I find the offset in the memory? The idea is to start with the complete armor for example and take a whole snapshot of the memory. Then you remove one piece of armor and you do the same thing. You filter all the values that didn't change and you keep the good stuff. And then you do it again.  And again and again. And at the end it's likely that you will find the relevant value in a couple of iterations. What if the offset is encrypted or if you're skating? Usually not all the structure is encrypted. It's only the interesting values. So you need to find a field in the structure for example the player structure that is not encrypted. The idea is for instance in Diablo 3. The gold value is not encrypted in the player structure. So it's actually a float. So you can find this value and then climb up or down in the structure to find the health value. And then you get the offset in the structure and you can get the actual memory address. Another option would be to do more set and unset on the value until you get only one value. But this can take a lot of time and a lot of iterations. If it's obfuscated the thing that you can do is just look for a value that changes or do not changes and try to extract what is important for you. And then find out how it's obfuscated. Okay so that's it for the game analysis J.O. Thank you for coming. And you can follow us on Twitter or gplus.


Hi everyone, Joe for Jaspy's casewrakes.com crazy finish in the money at football game Seattle beating the Eagles on a On a game-winning drive a true lock Anyway, 2021 series sets football any given Sunday any given Monday 2021 series to blaster box number six A few different dice rolls happening here. First of all, we're gonna give away 10 spots within the blaster break Then we'll do the break itself second dice roll third and final dice roll We're gonna re-randomize everybody's names top 14. We'll get teams in that jumbo bowman draft jumbo break Big thank you to this group for making it happen So half of this group are gonna get extra spots. So good luck top 10 after 7 5 and 2 7 times 1 2 3 4 5 6 and 7th and final time after 7 we got Jordan Ryan Roy Steven Adam Adam Steven Adam Roy Tristan. So extra spots going your way. This will help Help you maybe try to get some of the nicer teams now, let's do the blaster box break all 30 teams are in no combos Second dice roll is gonna be one and a five six times each one two three four five and six One and a five six times for the teams one two three All right, so here's the first half of the list right here. No trade windows Filler breaks and here's the second half right over there. There's the final printout right here hot off the presses pop this open if you find any Surprises in here a relic right there Jazz Chisholm rookie card and it's sweet Lou Brock It's gonna be your commemorative relic here. It's gonna go to Adam and st. Louis What's going on G. Lo watch that game? true locks happy Ryan Hayes rookie card is true lock from Seattle, and we've got a Cole Calhoun to 2021 got a silver Josh Fleming All right, that's that oh he's from KC. Where did he go to Missouri? I feel like that's starting to flash back to me now. All right, let's flash back to this list Let's gather everybody's name third and final dice roll. We're gonna match you up with the team top 14 we'll get a team after 11 five and a six 11 times good luck one two three four five six seven eight nine Ten and 11th and final time Roy very close, but no cigar, but I still see your name over here. You got some teams, but 15 through 30 sad times top 14 though happy times Adam Roy Roy Adam Ryan Anthony Adam Steven Jordan Adam Steven Tristan Adam and Roy up top There's the top 14 After 11 and here's who you get matched up with Roy with Oakland Adam with the Reds Tristan with the Guardians SKS with the Royals Adam with the fish Jordan with the White Sox SKS with the Braves Adam with my Dodgers and Anthony with the Cardinals last spot Mojo Ryan with the Angels Adam with the Brewers Roy with the Rockies and Astros and Adam with the Toronto Blue Jays We'll see you in the next video for jumbo pick your team number eight Jaskies case rakes.com


Thank you very much, Francescus. I feel like being moderated by the speaker. But let me maybe add a few words about religion and politics in China today to be a very comprehensive presentation made by Francescus. First of all, I think the Communist Party has always had a complicated relationship with religious organizations and religions as a whole. Since the regime on the paper, the ethics regime, and that's a big difference with the regime which preceded the Communist Party, Republic of China, or Imperial China, where religious organizations were much better accepted by the government. And it's also the case, if you look at other Chinese societies in Hong Kong or Taiwan, the cohabitation or coexistence between the state, the government, and religious organizations is much easier in mainland China. Now, there's been a relaxation of religious control in China since the beginning of the reform 40 years ago. And as Francescus was saying, there's been a revival of religious activities. But I think a very important distinction which needs to be made has been already alluded to by Francescus is the distinction the Communist Party makes between freedom of faith, which is well accepted, and freedom of religious organizations. So religious organizations need to be accepted and monitored and also supervised by the Communist Party. For a long time, it was the Sara, which is a funny acronym, the State Administration for Religious Affairs, which has been in charge of the five accepted religions, China. And now the whole administration has been transferred under the Communist Party Central Committee of the United Front Work Department. But the way the parties state, if I may use the term, and ministers' religions and religious organization has remained the same. And the five accepted religions are Taoism, Buddhism, Christianity, or Protestant churches, Islam, and Catholicism. So it means that on the paper, at least, Judaism, orthodoxy are not recognized or not administered the same way as these five religions, although there is a department within the administration in charge of other religions, including in the same basket all these smaller religions in China. Now, in this cynicization of religious activities, there is one thing which is very important to me, which was also mentioned briefly by Francescus, is the distinction made by the current leadership sitting between the religions which are presented as Chinese, or mainly Chinese, as Taoism, but also Buddhism, which entered China in the first century of BC, and what the authorities deem as Western religions, including Islam, Christianity, and Catholicism. And the way those various religious groups or organizations are managed is very different. One of the concern of the authority regarding Buddhism is the commercialization of Buddhism, the fact that a lot of Buddhist temples, abbots, are involved in business activities, which make them very rich, but also which is a perversion of religious activities. And that's one of the danger which has been identified by the sitting people even more than these predecessors. But for non-Chinese religions, I think the danger which has been perceived by the authorities is the danger of penetration of other countries. If you take the example of Christianity, the major danger identified by the authorities in the infants of American or Western, very active evangelical churches, in particular the ones based in the US. Now, it's not a danger which is isolated from politics because one of the expressions of the Yisiva Society, which is a manifestation of the Yisiva Society's kind of opening up and diversification, has been the large appeal of Christianity among a number of, I mean, elite members. And that's a very intriguing kind of association for the authorities because you've seen, for instance, more and more dissidents or human rights lawyers in China who become Christian in the middle of their endeavor to protect human rights or to sort of put pressure on the authorities to open the political system. So that adds up on the danger which is perceived by the authorities in particular today. There's been a number of, Francis has mentioned, a number of examples of stricter control since the pink to cover in 2012 of religious activities. One of the best known examples, as far as Christians are concerned, has been the destruction of crosses of a number of provinces, particularly in the young province, where according to some data, something like 15, 12 to 17,000 crosses have been destroyed in one single province, which for some five years at least was ruled by someone very close to sitting being someone called Siap Arlong. So it's very much sort of also a link to political developments emerging in China since sitting being to cover. Now, as far as Islam is concerned, of course, Francis has mentioned the recent developments in Xinjiang. One thing I would like to add regarding Xinjiang, the fact that the Uyghur movement in favor of independence or in favor of autonomy, political autonomy, by tradition was not religious. It was a secular movement, the Kemalist movement of Turkish Kemalist influence by Turkish modernizers. It became religious rather recently, actually. And last maybe 20 years. 20 years ago, Xinjiang was not very religious. The Islam practiced by most Xinjiang Uyghur people, Kazakh and others, is more kind of Sufi, moderate Islam. But there's been elements of radical Islam coming up, which has been also linked to the fight for more autonomy or even independence of Xinjiang in the last 20 years. So that has been a recent development as far as the political situation in Xinjiang is concerned, which doesn't justify but explain the reaction of the authorities. Now, the policy which has been privileged by the Chinese authorities the last few months or years is something we can discuss if we have a bit of time in the Q&A, so in my view, very counterproductive because it may create more, actually more radical militants than solving the issue. Now, you mentioned, and that's one of the motivations for the Chinese society, this is more people in the Chinese society in China to embrace religion, lack of trust in society. Now, one of the answers of the authority to that lack of trust which is, I think, admitted by a lot of politicians or a lot of government people in China has been the establishment of the trial basis or what has been called in China the social credit system. And the social credit systems aim is precisely to restore trust among citizens or between the government and citizens. Whether it's gonna work is another story because it's very much a top-down kind of endeavor and project and I have some doubts because clearly in what people try to create in embracing religious activities and creating community of faith at the grassroots is precisely community of trusts which have been sort of put in danger with the sort of both communist regime but also the 40 years of reform opening but also a strategy which has focused very much of improving material life but not spiritual life. At least spiritual life has been a big issue. Now, we have to put things into perspective in the sense that, and we may disagree from just as an eye to the magnitude of religious activity that how important religion is for Chinese today. I would add one thing I mean to start with is the fact that contrary to the West or even including Muslim countries, in China you can embrace, you can sort of be getting involved in various religions at the same time. You can be Christian, Buddhist at the same time which is for us Westerners pretty hard to understand. So the approach to religions may be very different from us. The second thing is in many urbanized middle class people, religions doesn't matter that much. It's not something which is structuring their life. Yes, people go to the temple, sometimes practice religions or have some kind of faith but how important religion is for them in their daily life is something which we have to put into perspective. The other thing we have to, I mean Francis has mentioned a few figures. There are discussions about, I mean Islam is clearly the Uighur 20 million, the Huai 20 million or so. So it will remain a minority religion in China which needs to be protected and guaranteed us but at the same time it's not going to be a big issue. Now the big issue for the Chinese leadership today is whether Christianity is going to be emerged so much that it's going to become more important than any other religion. Now there are debates about the number of Christian people in China. Clearly the Catholic is still a minority, it's 1% of the population at most but Protestants and evangelical churches are developing very quickly. So experts kind of are divided about how many Christians you have in China. Some people claim that they are more Christian than Communist Party members or around 100 million Christians in China. I think a more reasonable figure would be 70 million but still it's a large figure for China because it goes, I mean the base was something at the end of the Cultural Revolution and around 20 million at most so it has increased very quickly and the fact that among the elites you've got more and more Christians in China and among the counter elites, so the elites, political elites, who want to put pressure on the system to open a political system are also very often Christians. So Christianity is perceived for these reasons even more of a danger by the Chinese government. So the question is what kind of gravitation in the coming years the government will accept with a lot of churches which are not really underground but which are tolerated at the local level but they're not really associated with what we call the major Protestant organization which is the Three-Self Christian Association which is under the supervision of the government. So you've got what we call a lot of house churches in China. When they remain small, they're tolerated. When they get too big, they're dismantled and so. But again, as Francisus was mentioning at the end of his presentation, the situation is not black and white, it's kind of gray because you've got a lot of theorems among the authorities. For a reason which I have to do with the fact that religion is perceived by the authorities as useful to some degree. So to put the use of Marx's expression which is well-known religion, the opium of the people, it's an opium which if it's used in a moderate way is perceived as a stabilizing force for the Chinese society, including by the authorities. Now, religious organizations also are a useful role in charity, in social programs. And again, if you look at the past, I mean, figure of the Kuomintang where the Kuomintang was in power in China, you see the same kind of views of religious organization to supplement the government's social policy which sometimes are not strong enough to fulfill all the needs of the poor, the disadvantage of the Chinese society. So again, I think there is some acceptance of religious organization, but the party wants to be in control of any kind of organization. Finally, and that's the bottom line, I think of the authorities, this danger of what the Communist Party equals foreign infiltration. And foreign infiltration, not only for changing the soul of the Chinese people but also changing their political mind and sort of precipitating a peaceful evolution of the regime towards another kind of political system. And that's why Christianity will remain perceived by the authorities with a lot of suspicion in the coming up. And much more the Protestants have to say that the Catholic Church as such. So now the context itself, and I've been too long maybe on religious, but it's a context in which the Communist Party is trying to strengthen its ideological discourse and propaganda. But here you've got an irony in the sense that Chinese society has never been more globalized. The youth is very much plugged in and connected to the outside world. And at the same time, it looks like the Communist Party today and the sitting thing is trying to isolate or we isolate China from the rest of the world. And here there is a big irony in the situation and think of tension for the future of China's relations with the outside world. And that's something we may come back to in the future.


Yeah, hello, my name is Achim Dovermann. I'm the Deputy Director General for research of the International Rice Research Institute, or IRI. And the gentleman beside me here is Lee Weil. He's the head of our experimental station. And what we want to do with you in the next few months is actually learn how to grow a crop of rice. Not just any crop of rice, we want to do it in the best possible manner we can think of. Now we are scientists, so we do a lot of research. We believe that we know a lot about rice and how to grow it in different parts of the world. And we have lots of recommendations for farmers and extension workers. We often call them best management practices. You can find them on the internet, on our rice knowledge bank, in extension materials, in books, in scientific papers. But what we really, really want to do is try to practice what we preach. Because often we as scientists may come up with things that, you know, don't really work in practice, or sometimes you wonder why aren't people using them. So that's why Lee and I have decided, well, why don't we do it ourselves? As much as we can do ourselves, because some of the things we may not be really qualified to do, but we'll try. We will be qualified. Now Lee, what qualifies you to grow this crop of rice? Yes, well, I'm something of a fraud myself. I am a rice farmer in Australia, but due to dry conditions and an absence from Australia for the last three years, I harvested my rice crop, last rice crop, six years ago. So I'm a little rusty as well. And you have not really done this in a setting like this one here in the humid tropics with small fields and wet environment. Exactly right. I'm out of my comfort zone and I suspect you're out of your comfort zone, so that's a good place to be. Right. Well, I've done research on this for 20 years, but really, you know, have I ever really done all these things together in a larger field? Probably not. I have other people or had other people do it for me, but, you know, that's probably not the right thing to do. So come and join us. Come back with us pretty much every week in the coming months and learn with us what we do. We'll also not be shy at all to show you what we might screw up. I'm sure we're going to mess up a few things, you know. But that's it. We want to learn and we want to make sure that the things that we recommend to farmers coming out of our research actually work. So we'll see where we are four months from now in terms of what crop we have grown, what its yield has been. We are setting a high yield target. We're not embarrassed to say that. What's the target? Well, normally we would say, with best management practices, you would like to shoot for a yield of about 80% of the yield potential. And the yield potential here is? Well, in a good dry season, it's between 9 and 10 tons nowadays. So our goal should be probably, let's say, a 7 ton crop. That sounds a good goal. Whether we'll achieve it, we don't know, but we'll be knowing more in four months from now. Thank you.


Hello, Psych2Go viewers. Our guest for today's live stream is Brian Cham, one of our amazing writers here at Psych2Go. Brian is a software engineer based in London and he's also passionate about writing and spreading autism awareness. Brian has created several topics on the topic of autism for Psych2Go, which are linked in the description. Welcome, Brian. Thank you so much for joining me today. Hi, Michelle. It's great to be here. It's great to be here. So can you tell me a little bit about yourself and your background? Thanks for the introduction. I think you've covered most of my background there. When it comes to Psych2Go, I was actually a fan for a few years and it helped me a lot in my life. In the year 2021, there was an open ad for a new writer and I actually referred a friend of mine who was a psychologist and he was also subscribed to the channel. However, he wasn't interested in participating. So I applied myself and I sent a sample script and at Psych2Go, they were impressed and they knew that I had autism. So I officially joined in August 2021 as the first autistic writer to help write autism-related scripts, although I've related about some other psychology topics as well. So I've been at working for Psych2Go as a writer for almost two years now. That's amazing. So you're like a pioneer. Other people are gonna feel like inspired to apply to Psych2Go and write about autism. That's amazing. So when were you diagnosed with autism, Brian? I was diagnosed with autism at the age of 16. So at the time I was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome after being referred by my school. And even before then, there were some signs from a young age, but others just thought I had an eccentric or a pedantic personality. And it was only a high school that others really started to notice that I had really rigid routines and habits and the teachers actually suspected me of having OCD at the time. So they referred me to a specialist and actually diagnosed me with Asperger syndrome. And for those not familiar with the term, Asperger syndrome was an older diagnosis for individuals who had some autistic behavioral traits but didn't have significant verbal deficits, which is where you would get diagnosed with full autism spectrum disorder. And in the past 10 years, there's actually been a change to the official diagnosis and the DSM and the ICD, which is the official classification guides used in the field of psychiatry. Asperger syndrome is no longer an official diagnosis, but it's being merged into the general autism spectrum. And my case is a little different from most other autistic people because it's usual for them to be diagnosed at a much younger age, when parents and teachers notice significant differences in behavior, especially things like language difficulties. Oh, thank you for clarifying that, because I did hear about that, that it's been changed and that, can you like clarify that again? So Asperger's isn't like on the, it's like different now. It's like, it's all under autism spectrum disorder. That's right, yes. Autism spectrum disorder is the big umbrella term and that's pretty much the only one that's official now. Okay, thank you for clarifying that, because there's probably people who don't know that and still think that, yeah, it's like different.  Sure. I think being diagnosed on the autism spectrum or big guys with Asperger's syndrome, I really impacted my worldview a lot at the time. So although that happened relatively late in my teens, it did give me a lot of clarity about why I was different from others and that made things a lot smoother knowing that. So the diagnosis led me and my family to pursue some books and some resources to help me with like communication and coping strategies and me personally, it really helped me to be less critical of myself when I wasn't able to do things that others were able to do, especially like missing out socially. And so that way, I wasn't holding myself to impossible expectations or impossible comparisons with others. Which is what would happen before a lot, since I could see I was struggling socially a lot compared to other people at school. But as for you, Michelle, what has it been like for you to have a loved one with autism and how have you supported them? Well, you know, it is difficult because we live in a society that isn't, as accepting as it should be and it's always hurtful even if you're not the one who's directly impacted by it, seeing your loved one be discriminated against because the truth is, I feel like the people in the neurodivergent community, they get discriminated against. I really feel like they do get discriminated against and I notice my loved one get discriminated against and it hurts me. It's awful to witness that and that's why it's my mission to destigmatize mental illness and to destigmatize autism, anything like that because it's just wrong, to see people get discriminated against. It's the mission of all of us like to go. Yeah, that's the mission and it's an amazing mission that's noble and I think we're doing an amazing job. What do you think? We just passed 11 million subscribers so clearly we're doing something right. Yeah, obviously, right? 10 years and counting, right? And then, so, honestly, how did you feel that you received the support you needed growing up from loved ones, teachers at school? Because you did mention your family. You mentioned that your family did research on it so do you feel like they rallied around you and give you the support you needed? When it came to my family, yes, I think they did the best they could with what they had. We were referred to a lot of resources that we could pursue on our own. In my case, when we saw the specialist, he said my case wasn't severe enough to actually go to any specific programs or anything like that. That was reserved for a very limited number of people. When it came to the school, I feel that the teachers didn't really have much of a knowledge about that. So there wasn't really much of a help there and then going to university, they were actually kind of clueless about it, to be honest. Really out at the university, there wasn't like student organizations and more like support services. There wasn't an official support service for that, but they seemed kind of dismissive. Dismissive? I'm sorry that you dealt with that experience. Often that can happen because there isn't always like people who are trained, which they should be, right? Like the necessary training isn't always there for like professionals who are supposed to help students, right? Yeah, it's unfortunate. I mean, I went in there with not very high expectations anyway, but after that I thought, okay, I just got to deal with this on my own. It was disappointing, but I mean, I went the first 16 years of my life not having that support and I knew some strategies. That's amazing. So like you learn how to like cope with it and you learn to like be your own advocate in a way? To some degree, yes, yes. I mean, there are limits to what I can do by myself, but I think part of having the diagnosis also fills you with a bit of confidence that you can actually succeed in this well, even if it is difficult because you've done it already so far. And so do you feel like you ever struggled at all due to autism? Like, did you ever experience bullying? Yeah, there's definitely a lot of struggles that came with autism. So growing up, my main issues were to do with communication and socializing. So a common experience for autistic people is taking comments too literally and that can lead to misunderstandings when it comes from an authority figure. So one example I remember quite strongly is when I was in school, when I was around 13 years old, we were in drama class and we had these performances all planned and the teacher asked me, Brian, would you like to go first? And I interpreted that as a literal question and I just said, no, thanks. And then after that, the teacher got really angry and she said, I wasn't asking and I got so confused by her reaction because I was thinking, what do you mean you weren't asking? That's a question, that's how questions work. I mean, why get angry that I answered what you asked me? It was very baffling to me. I thought it was just very straightforward. What she was trying to ask me so I gave her a straightforward answer. Nowadays, I have a bit more insight into that sort of thing which is what those resources is helping to understand. So now I know that the teacher was asking me a rhetorical question and she probably thought that I was just trying to be funny which explains her reaction. Well, in reality, she should have tried explaining it to you instead of like scolding you right away. Well, this was before my diagnosis. Afterwards, I think there were a bit more support about that before that was just, yeah. I just feel like- Lots of misunderstandings like that. Absolutely, she still should have just explained it though like for any student because you know, putting a student on the spot, right? And just scolding them like, no, right? So I guess she could have, but I get what you're saying. So you received the support you needed like after you were diagnosed. Yeah, afterwards they were a bit more open to giving me the benefit of the doubt and explaining things like that. Okay, that's awesome to hear. And what are the main misconceptions that you've noticed people have about autism? Yeah, so the misconceptions is actually the focus of that I wrote about the biggest myths about autism. I think it's the one that's linked in the video description below here. And in my opinion, the biggest misconception is lumping all autistic people into one monolith. So on one hand, you have a very negative opinion that autism is primarily a disability and the focus is only on what we can't do, the struggles we face. And there are certainly a lot of struggles and a lot of autistic people who need help with a lot of life skills. But if you pay too much attention to the charity ads, for instance, you get the false impression that we're all like that and that we can't achieve anything in life. And that can lead to comments where people might say to me, oh, I'm surprised you have autism. You have a job, but you have friends, things like that. And it's a bit condescending because they think an autistic person is someone who can't even tie the shoelaces. That's obviously not the case. But on the other hand, there's also a tendency to lump autistic people into that Rayman category where we all have these superhuman mental abilities and we can figure out these very advanced things on the spot. And again, there is some truth in that because there are plenty of examples of very highly accomplished scientists and inventors and artists who are on the spectrum. So it's good that people are aware of these positive examples and those positive abilities. The problem is if you assume that we all have these amazing talents and you put us all in the pedestal, that can set some unrealistic expectations and that can actually deny us understanding and health that we need. So the main misconception is actually lumping us all into one stereotype, whether it's overly negative or overly positive because every autistic person is different. That's why they're called autism spectrum. And everyone has a mix of strengths they can offer and some weaknesses where they will need some help and understanding and guidance. That's amazing that you said that because I do think that's the main misconception with a lot, not just autism, but with other, just with anything when it comes to mental health, like, okay, well, people who have this disorder are like this or people who have autism have this or if someone, and there's always like, people just want to stereotype others. And in reality, it's like, no, we're all individuals and we all come with different personalities, strengths, weaknesses, like you said. So I think that's amazing that you brought that up. And what should people know about the beauty of neurodiversity? Well, for anyone who's not familiar with that term, neurodiversity is the idea that everyone's brains are wired differently. And when it comes to conditions like autism spectrum or ADHD, things like that, these are just variations to be understood, to be accommodated and to be accepted and not necessarily disabilities to be treated or cured, which was the older way, more traditional way of thinking about it. So I think the beauty of neurodiversity is how it offers a more hopeful perspective about the autism spectrum. So although we do have our struggles and shortcomings, the neurodiversity paradigm suggests that we should think there's not like symptoms to fix, but more just like friction between individual and the environment that's not adapted to them.  The difference is that the environment is adapted for their mental profile. So there's just no, there's less friction for them. So through this lens, if we accept autism as a natural variation, there's just more appreciation of our intrinsic worth, which can have a huge effect on our self-esteem when not being labeled as wrong or defective in some way. And it helps us to retain some of our autistic behaviors and ways of thinking, but to find ways of, find healthy ways to adapt or cope in this setting that's geared for neurotypical people, rather than trying to eliminate the behaviors at their core, which is something that creates a lot of stress and trauma. And ironically, those sorts of treatments can actually create more issues than the original autistic traits themselves. But by accepting or adapting them, we can truly celebrate the differences that make us special. I was about to ask that question from personal experiences that you've had. How do you feel that our differences make us special? Sure. Okay, it comes to the autism spectrum. Going back to that monolith thing, there's no one-size-fits-all list of traits that's gonna make everyone special, but there are some common ones that are common to people with autism. So one of them is attention to detail, as autistic people are often quite good at noticing a particular things that neurotypicals can gloss over. We're also good at spotting patterns and memorizing facts, and especially when it comes to our special interests, which are the things that each autistic person sort of has a deep passion about. And there's some evidence that autistic people are actually overrepresented in scientific fields because of this particular kind of mental skill set. Again, some of them, not all of them. And on a personal level, as in terms of personal traits, autistic people are often quite straightforward and they're quite reliable, especially with a speech that can be good and bad, but generally it's very helpful to have someone who doesn't sort of beat around the bush and just says things straight. But when it comes to me in particular, I seem to have a specialty for memorizing things and organizing or planning things. So that can be, that's actually quite a valuable asset in my job as a software engineer because I'm essentially arranging things like within a computer system or even like within teams. And it's just helpful in my general life because I naturally try to make everything quite orderly and organized. That's one area where my autism, actually I think there's a good difference. And you're very articulate. And so how do you feel that Psych2Go is helping to dismantle harmful stereotypes about autism and how can we continue to spread awareness effectively? I think Psych2Go is a great platform for dismantling harmful stereotypes about everything that psychology related, as you mentioned, like every sort of mental health or psychology really a topic. So we've just passed 11 million subscribers and our format is very engaging. It's very enticing. There's a lot of cute animations. And when it comes to autism in particular, I was brought into the team to give an authentic viewpoint about that topic. And we've already released that two-part episode about autism myths. And that's already been quite effective because our viewers are passionate about all sort of subjects that deal with mental health and psychology, even if it's one that I haven't really heard of before. And it's gotten a good response from all sorts of viewers. So it's gotten a good response from viewers who weren't familiar with autism because it explains things clearly for those with no prior understanding. But it's also got a good response from autistic views, especially autistic viewers because they recognize a lot of myths in their lives from the people around them and they're glad to have a resource that they can share with others. They don't have to keep explaining the same things over and over to everyone around them. And when it comes to spreading this awareness in the future, that's a matter of our viewers sharing our content to a wider network. Because at the end of the day, the people who most need Psych2Go's videos are the ones who aren't actually subscribed to us to begin with because they're not getting the information and affirmation that they need. Absolutely. But what I love about Psych2Go is that they're always dedicated to like evolving and learning. Like even if we don't always create the perfect video, like we're always trying to learn and we're always trying to do better to help others. And we take accountability for, you know, when we need to improve, right? And when we need to spread more awareness, but we're always, there's like a mission at Psych2Go to always do better. Absolutely. I mean, we're always reading the feedback of our fans. We're always looking at the reception that everything gets. We're trying to make a good impact. And if we need to adapt to improve ourselves, then we always do that. Yeah, and I love that. And so now we're going to move to the audience segment where we answer viewer questions. I'm super excited for this. So the first question was asked by Maria. She asked, Hello Brian, I'm being severely bullied in school due to my autism. I don't know how to deal with it. And I feel like no one accepts me. Do you have any advice on how to deal with this? That's a really difficult one because when it comes to bullying in general, I mean, the standard advice is like, tell the school, make sure that teachers know so they can do something about it. But a lot of the times, the whole problem behind being bullied is that you've already done that. You've already tried that. And if that doesn't work, I mean, I can tell you from my personal experience, being on the autism spectrum, definitely makes you more of a target for bullies. And I think one of the main factors is that autistic people often don't have much of a support network or a social network because it's difficult to make these social connections. And I think, and we're just going through my life experience, I think that once I did actually get the tools and guidance to form more social connections, to have this network of friends around me, then that helped a lot with bullying because then I have people around me who can vouch for me, who can stick up for me, and if you just spend more time around people who do appreciate you, then you're not spending time with the people who won't appreciate you at all. So that would be from my experience. I would get around it. And that's amazing. So what you mean is like creating a strong support system, essentially. Yes, that's right. Perfect. And then Adrian asked, do you think that autism worsens social anxiety in daily life? Definitely. So autistic people, I mean, one of the key factors behind autistic people is difficulty with like socializing and communication. And in my experience, that's also had a very strong relationship with social anxiety because if I don't know how this, I mean, if you remember back to the example with that drama teacher, I mean, if I don't know how people are going to react when I say very straightforward things, then that can create a lot of anxiety because I don't know if they're gonna receive that positively or negatively. And there've been a lot of times when I tried to reach out, tried to socialize only to get like a very strong negative reaction and I had no idea why. So I do feel like there is a connection between autistic traits and social anxiety, although not everyone who has autism will respond in that sort of way with anxiety. But I do think it's related and if you can get treatment, I mean, if this is something that's affecting you and you can get treatment for social anxiety itself, then that does help. Absolutely. And then Tristan asked, do you agree that the impact of autism is greater when living in poverty? How does one navigate autism when they don't have the financial resources to get mental health treatment? So this is something that that affects a lot of people because on one hand you've got people, autism who might live in poverty and they might not be able to access these resources. But there's also a lot of people in similar situations where perhaps they're in a school or they're just in a society that has very low awareness or they just don't have these things available. So we just broaden that a little. There's definitely a big impact of being autistic but not being in a situation or circumstances where you can easily reach out and get any sort of mental health treatment either for dealing with autism itself or dealing with any sort of anxiety or any sort of side effects of that. So in that case, if that's something that is bothering you, there are online forums. I believe there's one called wrongplanet.net or something like that. And that's like an internet forum for people with autism and you can share your experiences and you can listen to lots of tips and advice and that's definitely something that helps if you aren't able to reach out to professional help. And then Jaina asked, I have ADHD. So I understand some aspects of being... So I'll just read this last part. So I understand certain aspects of people who are autistic. I'm good at calming my brother down but it's hard to be patient. How should I help him? Sorry for butchering your question, Jaina. Yeah, so there it is, Brian. When it comes to being patient, that can be difficult. I mean, if you just ask my family members about what it was like being with me growing up, yeah, they definitely exercised a lot of patience. I think part of that is just giving that person enough space to express themselves that there is something that's really bothering them because a lot of things that will bother autistic people and cause meltdowns or breakdowns or what have you are things that you might not understand or expect at face value. So having the ability to understand and sympathise with whatever's going on in their life and what's affecting them is easier said than done but once you have that understanding, then that can help you to manage some of these sort of outbursts. And then someone asks, is loneliness common among autistic people? Yes, it's probably one of the most common issues that autistic people face. And for this, I would go back to my advice about internet forums for people who are also autistic because if you're having trouble with people in real life, then people on autism forums will always be there. They'll always understand. And in my experience, it really helps actually with written communication on the internet because you don't have to constantly think about all these other things, like eye contact, facial expression, tone of voice. It's much more straightforward if you're just on a forum. And building on that, do you feel like the discrimination against autistic, that autistic people face kind of contributes to that alienation that maybe makes them feel lonely? Like they're alienated in a way sometimes? Yeah, it's definitely. So even, I mean, in my case, even before I was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome at the age of 16, a lot of people did pick up on the fact that I was behaving very differently, very oddly, and that's something that led to a lot of alienation, even if they didn't have any specific label like autism to actually put on me. So I do think that is a big factor, both, yeah, both the autism and also the awareness and the discrimination from other parties. Absolutely, and then Jack asked, Brian, how do you accommodate someone in the workplace with autism? I think this is a great question because it's about dismantling stigma.  Well, when it comes to accommodating autism, it's hard to give any one-size-fits-all answer because everyone with autism will have their own special sort of requirements or requests. So the important thing is, I mean, if you are in the sort of like, you know, HR position is to sort of reach out to them and ask them how you can accommodate them in particular. But if you mean someone like a co-worker where you're not really in a position to like change the environment, I guess there are some common things that you can, that you can do. And one thing that has probably helped me in my work life is just to be quite straightforward with your communication. So try not to use, you know, rhetorical questions, sarcasm, if you want to ask them something or request something, don't beat around the bush, just go straight for it. They probably won't be offended. But in my case, I really appreciate when people just say what they want from me. Perfect. And then Alexander asked, and this is kind of a loaded question. There's like several questions within the question, but I'll start with the first one. Brian, do you think that ABA therapy is a form of torture? Well, for anyone in the audience who isn't familiar, ABA therapy, I believe it stands for applied behavioral analysis. And this is a form of treat. It's a sort of older form of treatment for autistic children that revolves around something I sort of hinted at before, which is like eliminating or suppressing like autistic behaviors. And it's something that has been quite controversial because of its methods, they can be quite harsh. And also just because of the very premise of it, it's been sort of likened to dog training, but for humans. And there have been a lot of cases where, you know, autistic children go through this training, they come out acting more neurotypical, which can help them in social situations, but at the same time, they also end up with a lot of mental health issues and trauma. So it's definitely something that has raised a lot of controversy and some have labeled it like a form of torture. And then he asks, what do you, or here she asks, what do you think about autistic people being treated with electric shocks in the US? I'm assuming this is related to the previous question. Yeah, like with ABA therapy, yeah. Yeah, with ABA, some of the methods used, it can be quite harsh. Sometimes they are like electric. Would you say it's unethical? Oh yeah, definitely. It's something that's quite horrifying. I mean, I personally never went through this myself. So I've only heard like second hand things, but even that is quite troubling to me, the idea of trying to fix something that is a sort of like your hardwired, it's both unethical and it's practically impossible. And then he's also, Alexander's also asking, what do you think about the organization Autism Speaks? And I know that they've been at the center of a lot of controversy. So. Yes, so for anyone not familiar in the audience, Autism Speaks is an organization or sort of autism charity that funds, that has a lot of strong relationships with ABA therapy and they fund a lot of research and treatment based around the idea that autism is something to be cured or fixed. So that is something that has been very controversial and has a very negative reputation on autistic people, especially because of those methods that we've been talking about, ABA and like electric shocks and things like that. And then Adrian asks, Brian, what should I do when I feel self-conscious about being autistic in daily social situations and not correctly picking up on social cues? In that case, it usually helps to have at least one person in the interaction who knows about you being autistic and they can actually help to smoothen things out. So if you're not picking up on something, like in my case, I might have a friend who might sort of hint at me like, oh, I think this person is getting a bit bored of the conversation. Maybe they'd want to change the subject or something like that. So when it comes to those sorts of interactions, having at least one person who can actually guide you interpret things for you is very, very helpful. I love this question by Edison. What are some positive things you've seen or experienced in the autism community and how has it impacted you? Well, I think within the autism community, some of the most positive things just sharing a lot of affirmation about autistic traits and how they can be beneficial and not necessarily stigmatized. So I think growing up, especially when you're not diagnosed with autism, there's a lot of stigma or discrimination around people engaging in autistic behaviors and just knowing that there are lots of people out there who can say, no, actually, this is something you can embrace. It's not something to be ashamed of. It's not necessarily something to suppress. That's definitely something that has been quite positive. And as for affecting me personally, I think you're hearing those sorts of positive messages and knowing ways to sort of adapt them, those sorts of autism behaviors if they are causing any issues in my life. So it's not necessarily a matter of me just like suppressing it all the time. And then Lauren asks, what do you think of Sia's movie regarding autism titled music? Did you see that? I haven't seen it. I've heard a lot about it. Yeah, me too. I know why people are upset about it, but I haven't seen it personally because I don't want to. I know that when I was reading about it and reading comments from different people, if they were saying that the movie felt offensive to people in the autism community, that was like the controversy. That's what I read as well. Like it was a very, it was almost like a caricature of autistic people. It wasn't anything authentic like we ever psyched to go. And like what you had said about like autistic people don't exist as a monolith. And I feel like that movie was sort of like perpetuating those stereotypes. Yeah, yes, from what I've heard, it definitely perpetuated a lot of these impressions that people in the general population have but aren't necessarily accurate to all people with autism. If, well, this is just from what I've heard, I definitely have nothing in common with the autistic character in the film. And then Jenny asked, has your cultural background affected the way your family, loved ones, community has approached you when it comes to your like autism? Has there been like a difference because of culture? I think that's what she's trying to get at.  So in my culture, I mean, I'm from Aotearoa, New Zealand, but originally my family comes from Hong Kong. And I don't think autism, I don't think they even knew anything about autism before I got my diagnosis. So having some of that, having it coming from a society where like no one knows anything about those mental health conditions, knowing nothing about autism that definitely made things a lot more difficult when it came to understanding my situation. And when I got diagnosed, they really had to sit down with my parents and go through some really basic things like, no, it's not something that you catch, it's just something he was born with. It wasn't anything to do with, it wasn't your fault as a parent, for example. And coming from that background, it made things a little bit harder for my family at first, but they came to learn about it. That's amazing. Having their support made the difference, right? Sorry, did you hear me? Sorry. Oh, I was waiting for you. I thought you were going to. Yeah, so what was it? Oh, I was just saying, having the support of your family made all the difference, right? Oh, yes, I gave a little nod. Yeah, okay. Sorry about that.  Brian, what has been your special interests in your life? My special interest is Vixillology, which is the study of flags. And I'm actually... The flag in the back. There's actually a few, and I think I'm blocking it there, you can see. I love that. It's right there. I'm actually part of a few Vexillological organizations as well. If there's anyone from Utah, you'll know that your state flag actually got redesigned last year. And I was actually one of the advisors who was actually advising the government on some of the specifications of that flag. That's amazing. Oh my, why didn't you bring this up before? Yeah, well, I mean, on the topic of special interests, I mean, this is one of those things that they mean positive messages from the forums. Like, you don't have to treat this like it's some weird obsession. It's not. You can turn this into something productive. So that's definitely something that I... Productive, healthy, interesting. Exactly, yes. That's so awesome. And how long have you been into that? I was into that generally since I was around 13. But as for actually pursuing this, like actually connecting with other people and things like that, it was only in the past few years that I've actually reached out and actually pursued it, written things about it, got in contact with those sort of redesign campaigns, that sort of thing. And that concludes our audience segment, but I still have a few questions for you, Brian. So I wanted to know what topics should Psych2Go cover in the future regarding autism and which ones would you like to write about? Well, when it comes to autism, there is a lot of... I don't know if you call them subtypes, but there are lots of terms that the audience might not be familiar with, that sort of correspond to these subtypes of autism. So I've mentioned Asperger syndrome, which is my one. But there are other sort of diagnoses, some in the past, some in the present, like there's one called PDD NOS. So I think something that we could cover is to sort of untangle what all these different autistic-related terms are, what they mean and how they relate to each other, because for the people in the general population, there's a lot to keep up with. I mean, autism by itself is sort of a mystery for a lot of people, but then having all these other ones, there's autism, hearing about autism spectrum, Aspergers, I mean, there's just a lot of terms for them to come to grips with and try and figure out. And then just in general, just so that I know, because I'm also a writer on the channel and just in general, what topics would you like to see Psych to go cover? Anything and everything. I think in the past, I've been trying to push for some more audience interaction stuff, so more like Q&A or advice column sessions, because a lot of what we put out is kind of general, like here's some general information about anxiety, general information about relationships, but having something, I guess, that's personal. I mean, kind of doing this here, aren't we? We're answering the audience questions. I think having a lot of interactive things like that really helps us to connect with that audience and build a community. Our audience sometimes says we have too many videos about sex. Is that true? I haven't been keeping count. Well, just on that, I do have an interview with a sex expert next week, so we got another one coming, so that's why I bring it up, because we're doing more. I'm interviewing someone. It's our very first interview with a sex expert on the channel, so I'm excited for that, just previewing that. But thank you so much, Brian, for being here with us. It's amazing. You're so articulate. You're so interesting. And you're so knowledgeable. And so we really appreciate you being here. And I love your videos, by the way. Thanks. It was great to be here. Awesome. Well, thank you to our amazing, intelligent viewers at Psych2Go. We'll see you in the next one. Bye-bye.


Hugh Jackson may not be here anymore But we are I'm Greg Susterman alongside Jim Sonnis and this is the fan duel hurry up. What's going on Jim? Yeah, I mean I was interested to see what would go down with Hugh Jackson getting fired But then they announced that Greg Williams was the interim guy and as a big-time Baker Mayfield fan I don't know if that's actually an improvement honestly Freddy kitchens man. It's all about Freddy Yeah, I definitely knew who this guy was before today I had definitely heard his name at some point in my life. I am sure Maybe definitely not. I have no idea who this guy is according to his Wikipedia He resurrected the career of Carson Palmer as the quarterbacks coach in Arizona and had nothing to do with Bruce Arians Okay, yeah, yeah Bruce Arians yet not known for being an offensive genius or anything So I'm sure it was all about kitchens. Absolutely sure Baker Mayfield not in the stock up column today But you know who is you know who is DJ more wide receiver for the Carolina Panthers the rookie from the University of Maryland Crushed it on Sunday. Why is the arrow pointing up on DJ more? Obviously, it's the Big Ten background. You know, you gotta have that if not for that I don't know if we'd be talking about this guy, but DJ more really stepped in well with Tori Smith out on Sunday You kind of expected that DJ more would get more snaps But he played 71% of their snaps on Sunday Which was only two fewer snaps and what Devin Funches was that because Carolina does rotate their wide receivers So seeing more near the top of the heap super encouraging and he looked good He had six targets to those targets were deep targets and he also had two rushing attempts Which to me says Carolina knows how good of a talent he is and they want the football in his hands, which to me is super encouraging So I think that the one thing you can say about DJ more is that he's never gonna be a super high volume guy because they've got Christian McCaffrey They've got camter on the ball. They've got Greg Olson. They've also got Devin Funches So he's not going to be a 10 11 12 target guy Especially because they do tend to run the football quite a bit still But he is superbly talented as he showed at Maryland and there's a reason he was a first-round pick And if you can get him the football Five or so times per game. He can do quite a bit with that now We do have to see what will happen with Tori Smith's health because if Smith comes back Maybe he jumps back into his old role They put Smith back or they put more back in the bottle But I think with what more showed both yesterday and for the entire season so far is that they need this guy in The field and Carolina is a team that can contend this year So they need their best players out there So I'm inclined to believe that that more is here to stay I liked what I saw from him both on Sunday and honestly the whole year So I'm excited to see what he does and I think this is a good time to buy DJ Moore for sure Schedule's quite nice for the Panthers going forward Is there any chance that we saw it on Sunday DJ Moore have more targets and receptions and yards and Devin Funches Is there a changing of the guard there or is this a one-week wonder? I think that their roles are different enough to still be you know Where they could both maintain the viability the one area where I do think it does or Devin Funches is DJ Moore despite not being this huge guy Can get down the field and previously Devin Funches has kind of been the lone ranger from a downfield target perspective But as I said in that game DJ Moore had two deep targets and Devin Funches had just one out of four total from Cam Newton on the day So I think it's a threat to Devin Funches there It's not to the point where I'm saying you need to sell Devin Funches now Because he has looked really good ever since Greg Olsen got back as well But I think yeah, it does hurt Funches down the field a bit where he is not you know Cam doesn't have to force it to Devin Funches that may make Cam Newton more efficient But I think that you're along the right path there where it does hurt Devin Funches a little bit All right, so roles are a little bit different So we should be okay when it comes to picking up DJ Moore and again the Maryland pedigree all good