Discord is More Dangerous than TikTok
Episode Stats
Summary
In this episode, we talk about the dangers of social media platforms like Discord, TikTok and TikTok, and how they can be used to recruit, influence, and manipulate young minds. We also talk about how to deal with people who are not mentally stable, and why it s important to be mentally stable.
Transcript
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a lot of Discord servers are based around specific individuals who are high status for some reason
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or another. Suppose you had a young guy, a horny guy, like a lot of rising YouTube creators.
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You put them into an environment where most people have some level of admiration for them.
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Then you give them total control through admin privileges on Discord of what messages are seen
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from the group. As soon as you've done that, you've created an environment where somebody who is not
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mentally stable is heavily psychologically motivated with no real negatives at all to them
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for removing everyone who disagrees with them or everyone who disagrees with an idea that they are
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pushing forward. Go back to the comment I made about it's a cult using the trans movement for
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cover. Well, suppose you had a cult about affirming like some form of gender identity, right?
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On April 4th, 2023, Postcard reveals he's in contact with four minors age 9 to 13. I've so far sent it
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to four minors between the ages of 9 and 13. I hope it encourages them to transition. When the
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Onca Zone animation became a meme, they got excited over its virality among kids. Man and Drain and
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Orion also fantasized about getting kids on hormones. Would you like to know more?
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Hello, Simone. Today is an interesting topic because I had never really engaged with Discord
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as a platform that much before. As old people, I'd gotten into it a little. I didn't really see
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the point. It didn't seem like a way that I could build up any sort of large audience or advance my
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career. So I just saw no point to it because I'm sort of past the point of my life.
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Okay, exactly. So why do you play video games? This is my thing with video games. Is this going to
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make me money? Is this going to advance my career? Then why am I trying to figure out
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this task when I have so many other tasks? Now you understand how I feel.
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I guess it's a low stress task where I know the input needed to succeed and social situations just
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aren't that way. If I'm engaging in a community like Discord, it hasn't been optimized to give me
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the right amount of reward for my effort. But anyway, this is why I hadn't been engaging with
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the community. Well, recently I started to, because we created a Discord for this channel based on some
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fans. A fan created a Discord for this channel. A fan created a Discord and then I've been promoting
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it and it's doing incredibly well. Like three days after launching at any point, day or night,
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there's always like a conversation going on. So we've got about 50 active members.
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And yeah, I've been very surprised. Well, people too, from what I've glanced at.
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Yeah, which has led me to actually engage with Discord as a platform, finally.
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Which is saying a lot because you don't find most people worth engaging.
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Yeah. So I finally reached a point in sort of working with the platform and using the platform
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and setting everything up where I feel like I understand, one, why people use it, and two,
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how it works as a platform. But in doing that, I also began to realize how extremely dangerous
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Discord is as a platform. Much more dangerous for young minds than something like TikTok,
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for example. Which I think would really surprise people who are not obsessed with the way sort of
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social interactions work and human emotions work and everything like that, right? Like that's my
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obsession to anyone who's read our books on like governance and everything like that. When I'm
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building up how governance work, I start by looking at how do humans interact? How do humans judge
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status? What sort of motivates our base human actions? Because through understanding humanity,
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I can understand better why different mechanisms for organizing us will lead to different large-scale
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macro outcomes. Well, with Discord, I was looking at it. And what really got me down
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this particular rabbit hole is I also really like tea videos, if you're familiar. So when you watch
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them too, this means like drama videos. Okay. That kind of tea. Yes. Drama about YouTube creators and
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other sorts of like celeb celebs. I really wish people would do one on us, but no one really has yet.
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Because there's nothing. What are they going to talk about? Yeah. Oh, they could come up. I've often
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thought the scene where, you know, my kid fell in the water and I was like pretty lackadaisical in
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getting them out. Yeah, but that's not filmed or anything. Like if that was something that was
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viral. No, but I've mentioned it on our channel. And you know, it's other tea videos. They're like,
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oh, the person, like when they saw their dog had been hit by a car, they shot it instead of taking it
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to the vet. And it's like, yeah, of course you would do that to a severely injured animal. Like,
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I know. Well, that's just the difference between progressive commentators and conservatives,
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that itself, that incident online where I think a Christian influencer shot their dog after they
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found it hurt in the streets was such a classic indication, right? If like one is actually just
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trying to be kind to a suffering being that one loves and the other is trying to, it's credentialism
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and trying to follow the correct pathways. I wouldn't even say that. To the conservative,
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it is the dog's best interest that they care about. Yeah. To the progressive, the dog is a tool
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to modify their own self image and emotions. Therefore they care not for the suffering of
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the dog. Anything that extends the dog's utility to them is warranted, which, and anything that
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makes them look good in terms of how they're interacting with it is warranted. What I'm saying
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is that we've said enough stuff that they could find stuff like that on us. Okay. But one of the
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most common types of tea videos comes from people's servers and specifically their discord servers and
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these servers end up either being used as grooming platforms or becoming hotbeds of like CP and like
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other sorts of bad information that really they should be doing a better job like moderating or policing
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or something like that. And this is obviously like what I'm thinking when I'm putting up the server,
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like how do I keep this from being used as a platform for one of those types of things?
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And what immediately came to me was discord is almost set up from the ground level to encourage grooming
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behavior, virtue spirals, and the formation of organic cults. And this is something we talk a lot about on the show
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is how you can get like these organic cults forming. And this is what we, there was little things that
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like happened within our server in its first few days. Like this is day three of operation, right? So
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I'm not an old server. And some individuals started putting the number of kids they had after their
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names. So I'd say their names and then a number and then kids. And then it became so common that people
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removed the word kids and it was just a name and then a number. And then it became people shaming people
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for not putting that in, which shows sort of in real time, how something like religious traditions
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can evolve, which is how social norms are created, released. Yeah. It's like, it's like you, you,
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you left something under a rock and then you look in like some civilization has formed, you know,
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that classic trope. And you're like, Oh, I did not intend any of this. I was just pointing out that
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there was a server here and now it has social norms and fights over because I had made the admins
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edit. Just give you an example of another social norm that formed a different color than the other
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individuals. Cause I thought they should be rewarded if they're doing additional work, but then this
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caused the perception that they were higher status than other individuals. Well, if they do more work,
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aren't they higher status? I mean, that's the way I see it. Right. But I hadn't chosen them based on
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anything that I was really thinking through. I was just like some people recommended them who had helped us
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with other things or who set up the server. Most of them were just because the guy who set up the
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server said, these are good guys. And so I was like, sure. And then another person, two other
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people have reached out to me saying they really liked one of the admins. I think it was different
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admins as well, but they were doing a good job. Like in communications I've had with other fans that
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I have regular email communication with. And so I saw that and was like, okay, things must be going
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well. Right. But anyway, so there was some anxiety around like status being inferred by the different
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colors. And next time I check the server moderators are all the same color as everyone
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else. And then, so one of the moderators who I had given authority to had made that change.
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And they were also talking about like, how do you, which is, I think goes with the spirit of
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the channel, you know, the level of like equality and free speech that we try to motivate within the
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channel. But then there were other things that were really interesting. There was an instance of,
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oh yeah, trying to decide how I make moderators. And somebody proposed, obviously trying to look out
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for our best interest, that I should make moderators, people who donate to the Collins
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Foundation. And I was like, well, only three people have ever donated to the Collins
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Foundation to my knowledge. The person who did it, despite their super woke D&D group, the founder
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of Skype and then ourselves. And I don't know if we have a couple of other people. Yeah. A couple
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of other people have donated. Okay. Okay. So we've had a couple other people, but I think that those
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are like the big ones in terms of like, and they don't use our platforms. They don't care. Like
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they don't care about any status within the discord service. But in addition to that, I don't want
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to create a pressure that would motivate people who aren't donating because they want the money
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to like go to good stuff, but are donating for some sort of social status. I don't want to create
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that, especially among people who have less wealth than I have. Like that seems actively immoral to
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me. And it's something that we- Well, it also seems exploitative. I don't know. Yeah.
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So I was like, yeah, I'm not going to do that. But if it gives you the idea of how people are
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thinking about norms, how they're thinking about rules, like the no racism rule, for example,
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that's a, how do you deal with facts that leftists would call racist, right? How do you like,
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and so, you know, there was some debate on how exactly that's going to work, you know, and we
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decided that it's, you know, no motivated reasoning based on race, but you can, you know, if something's
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backed by evidence, you can investigate the evidence, which is interesting. Yeah. Yeah.
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So like, I can understand why someone suggested, you know, donations being a sign of basically
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demonstrated dedication to the projects that this whole effort represents. So I also think that
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that's really admirable. It's nice. We just don't want, we don't want to impose on anyone.
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Oh, also, the truth is, is the type of people with the time to be good discord admins,
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is probably going to be inversely correlated with how much money they make. Yeah. Because,
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you know, if you're making a ton of money, you know, you often are considered more competent in
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the eyes of society by your resume and everything like that, and therefore have more demands on your
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time, which, you know, if we're looking for competent people whose society hasn't realized
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they're competent yet, they're going to be less wealthy. So they're the very last people I would
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want to ask for money, you know, which is interesting. But I want to get into how discord is almost set up
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to create grooming, because, and organically forming coals. So one, I love the, the naming
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of discord that is literally named after discordia, you know, the heiress, the goddess of discord and
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strife, right? Like what a better name for it. I bet she'd be good at causing all kinds of
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destruction and chaos. I know, isn't it cool? Hi, heiress. Oh, poo. You tricked me, you bonehead.
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What are you up to, girl? Oh, just cooking up trouble, you know, having fun. And there's
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nothing you can do about it. But you've got to think about how the platform works. And this was
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one, the reason why I'm doing all the talking now is because Simone didn't pre-talk this episode with
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me, because she said she wanted to be surprised by everything I was saying, because she didn't know
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where I was going with this. But the idea being is that a lot of discord servers are based around
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specific individuals who are high status for some reason or another. Either they're seen as running
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some project or they are seen as like a YouTube celebrity or something like that. Like that's
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where a lot of these tea videos are coming from. Yeah. All the servers that I know of typically are
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built around either a cluster of people or a person. And typically they're sub stack or a podcast or a
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YouTube channel for sure. Yeah. So just think about it like this, Simone. Suppose you had a young guy,
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a horny guy, let's say a guy in his teens, like a lot of, you know, rising YouTube creators.
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And I have, I've mentioned in the past that when guys are in that page,
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a place in puberty, they often do things that are immoral in the pursuit of sex. Although,
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you know, you see women doing the same thing with like a hypnotist Sappho is an example of a furry,
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what's the word? PDF file. And she targets, you know, young people through discord. She might be trans,
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in which case, you know, what does that mean anymore these days? So within the discord server,
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by that, what I mean is a lot of people who I think historically would not have been called trans
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are called trans now and still have the hormonal profile of a male. And, and so, you know, that
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would still explain the behavior, but anyway, so you take an individual like that, you put them into
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an environment where people are talking and most people have some level of admiration for them.
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Then you give them total control through admin privileges on discord of who gets booted from
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the group, what messages are seen from the group. So you can do sort of temporary punishments
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where I could like, for example, like shadow ban someone or mute someone, they would say,
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or make it so that like everyone else is muted to them, like weird things like that.
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As soon as you've done that, you've created an environment where somebody who is not mentally
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stable, it's a heavily psychologically motivated with no real negatives at all to them for removing
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everyone who disagrees with them or everyone who disagrees with an idea that they are pushing
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forward. This sounds so stressful. Well, I mean, go back to the comment I made about like trans
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individuals today. And we've done the episode on like, it's a cult using the trans movement for
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cover. Well, suppose you had a cult about affirming like some form of gender identity, right?
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It's genuinely really good grooming advice. On April 4th, 2023, Postcard reveals he's in contact
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with four minors, age 9 to 13. I've so far sent it to four minors between the ages of 9 and 13.
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I hope it encourages them to transition. When the Anka Zone animation became a meme,
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they got excited over its virality among kids. Man and Drain and Orion also fantasized about getting
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kids on hormones. Orion was the manager, coercing him every step of the way. This is apparent by how
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he talked about him to others. Has he started hormones yet? Yes, but not effectively. I guess
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that's what you'd expect just telling a retard to buy hormones. They bought estrogen, but no
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anti-androgen. It would have been more fun if he started hormone blockers at like 12.
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Haha, isn't that true for everyone? Don't worry, I'll make him into a good girl.
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I know people may have thought that I was being maybe controversial or reaching when I said that a
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cult is using the trans movement for cover. But it's only natural if you make some group a
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protected class in society that no one is allowed to criticize without being called transphobic,
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that individuals with malintent will start using that group for cover. And the most transphobic
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thing you can do is to not call out those individuals. Yes, there is really a group of
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people out there who uses the trans identity and the cover it provides them in order to groom kids
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and attempt to get them on hormones for their own sexual satisfaction. To be against fighting
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against this community is the most genuinely transphobic position I could imagine a person
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taking. Because to say that in calling out individuals like this, we are calling out all
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trans people, you are implying that all trans people are actually like this. And that if we prevented
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the protection trans rights gives some individuals from covering this community, that we would be
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removing all of the meaningful protection the trans rights activism is meant to achieve.
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Don't blow up our spot, bro. All teaslers are like that. If you can trust me around your kid,
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it'd be transphobic not to. Me with daycare tots. To Orion and many of his associates, their identity was
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little more than a political shield. It clearly worked given he publicly fantasized about assaulting
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women in bathrooms. Me when transphobic little girls asked me what I'm doing in the women's
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restroom when I'm obviously a woman. The two fantasized about assaulting J.K. Rowling's
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grandchildren. Not letting teaslers get with your kids is transphobic. Someone should Harry Potter
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woman's grandkids. Orion then goes on to call them turf meat. And don't give me that, oh, this is just
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like edge cases or fringe people in the community type of thing. Alok Vade Menon, who was put in
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Out Magazine's Out 100, 100, so the top 100 most influential LGBT people that year, said,
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these days the narrative is that transgender people will come into bathrooms and abuse little
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girls. The supposed quote-unquote purity of the victims has remained stagnant. There are no
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princesses. Little girls are also kinky. Your kids aren't as straight and narrow as you think.
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The community really does need a very serious cleanup, and grooming is a serious problem. We might do
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another video just dedicated to this topic, but if you're like, well, I understand that some people
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are doing some bad things, but think of the damage this could do to the wider LGBT community, and it's
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like, bro, like, think about these messages you're reading. What about the kids who are being convinced
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who are not actually trans to get on hormones at extremely young ages and having their entire lives
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ruined just so that they can be some creepy grown-up sex toy? Like, do you have zero sympathy for these
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individuals? They could never come back from that, and worse, now every time they hear about trans
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issues, they are just reminded how their bodies were ruined for the gratification of some sicko.
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How often does this happen? How many more of these people do we need to catch before we say,
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okay, some individuals are using this ideology for nefarious means, and we need to call out that
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this can happen, that weirdos can use stuff like trans identity to go into restrooms and attempt to
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assault little girls, and do something about this? Although we are getting off topic here, so I'll see if I
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can find another way to talk about this issue. So to make this more PC, like, suppose it's like a
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cloud gender community, and everyone who disconfirms cloud gender identity gets booted from the
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server. Everyone who in any way even questions themselves or isn't sure or used to identify as
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this but goes back is removed from the community. But there isn't a perception among people in the
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community that these people are being silenced or removed. It's not really super loud and obvious
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that this is happening, and a lot of people may not care. They might say, oh, well, we've created norms
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where disconfirming something is a form of violence to people, right? Like, and the left often does
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this, right? But you could also see people getting a big head, like, as I said, a popular male creator,
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a bunch of people are fawning over him in the server, and then maybe he creates a separate thread
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for the girls who like him, right? Well, now you've got a thread, which is private, and everyone in it
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is a girl who likes him. That creates within women, and you often see within women, of course,
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they're going to end up finding him more arousing. You've created an environment where every other
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woman in the environment sees this individual as high status and arousing in some way. So you're
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going to get sort of a reinforcing loop of, oh, this is like, if you talk about, like, hypergamy or
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whatever, like, obviously women like dating men who are higher status than men like that as well. But
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like, women like it a bit more than men like it. So, and this is in terms of long-term partnerships,
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whereas men, they're often okay with at least having sexual partners who are lower status than
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them, but long-term partners, you know, they look for it. So in this environment, you get these loops,
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like you have at concerts where, like, women cheer, and then it just goes, oh my god, all the other
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women are cheering, this person must be so hot, and then they end up, like, passing out because it
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creates a feedback loop that can't turn itself off. We have records of this happening to women going all the
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way back to... Litzemania. Was it Hans Litz? I can't pronounce names. L-I-Z-T, the composer.
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Yeah, yeah. And then we had it for the Frankie Sinatra. We had it, like...
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Whatever, Sinatra, whatever. So we see this going way back into history. This isn't, like, a modern thing.
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So anyway, my assumption here is that as soon as you've created this and you've got some horned
00:20:38.860
dog guy, and especially if it's a guy who has any sort of biological predilection for younger
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presenting phenotypic traits in females or males, for that matter, if that's what he's into, you now
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have, if what he's seeking is sex, you now have the perfect environment that one motivates him going
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down the path of attempting to groom people and the perfect environment for grooming someone. It would
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actually be almost kind of impossible for someone not to end up being groomed. Then you have the
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second problem. What if the guy doesn't want sex? What if he wants power? Like, what if he wants
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a common thing for young people? And we mentioned this in the book. There's a thing about this in
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Japan. They have a name for it, which is... I can't remember. There's an anime about it,
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but I'll edit it. It's called, like, Evil Eye something or, like, thinking. But anyway, what it means...
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The term you are looking for is chimbuyo, which literally translates to, quote,
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middle school second year syndrome, end quote. It refers to a common phase in adolescence,
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usually around the eighth grade or so, hence the name, where teens may exhibit delusions of grandeur,
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believing they have special powers, a secret identity, or otherwise exceptionally unique or
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important. Some common chimbuyo delusions include, one, believing they have a hidden supernatural power,
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like controlling the elements or reading minds. Two, claiming to be reincarnated
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from another world or to have a secret dark past. Three, using made-up, overly complicated
00:22:02.220
names for everyday objects or actions. Four, affecting a distinctive fashion style,
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often involving gothic, occult, or fantasy elements.
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Is there a trend in young people of a certain age to, like, believe they have magical powers?
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You know what I'm talking about, right? Like, I'm actually an energy vampire, or I'm actually,
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you know, if I do this ritual in the right way, the wind blows like this, or like...
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Yeah, modern Wiccans would be a great example of this, but they're not all Wiccans. You know,
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some of them do that with a Christian lens, some of them do it with some sort of other
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esoteric or mystical lens around it, but it's a very common thing for people to believe,
00:22:42.760
because these power fantasies just really appeal to people during these ages where they're attempting to find
00:22:46.520
their identity if they have a community that will affirm them. Well, if you've created an
00:22:50.440
environment like this, and I'm sure this happens much more in, like, female-dominated discords,
00:22:54.080
you know, why not, once you've gotten a group around you that you can just remove anyone from
00:23:00.580
who dissents, and you've created, like, private channels around this, why not try to get them all
00:23:05.560
to worship you or something, right? Like, if that's what gets you off, if that's what your desire is,
00:23:11.560
and it would happen organically, right? Somebody might have a few ideas,
00:23:16.880
I actually think to an extent this could be what we're seeing with, you know,
00:23:20.180
Rubiard and what I've all hissed if people have seen his CIA video, which goes in a very mystical
00:23:24.460
direction, and he talks about thinking that he is getting, like, that he has supernatural perception
00:23:30.880
of the world, and that this is also supported by evidence and historical tradition that some people
00:23:35.580
just have this supernatural perspective of reality. And this might be a true thing, like,
00:23:39.040
I don't want to shit on him, but let's assume that it's not. Let's assume that every now and then
00:23:43.380
people just get this inclination that they have a supernatural perception of reality around a
00:23:47.860
certain age range, which, you know, he falls squarely within, he's like 22. And then he is
00:23:53.560
in a community where he drops this as an idea, and of course, people are going to feel uncomfortable.
00:23:58.440
I mean, he's the big guy. He's got half a million subscribers, unconfirming that. And some of them
00:24:03.640
might be like, actually, I have this too, right? And then it begins to create a snowball effect
00:24:10.040
where he feels encouraged to, and I'm not saying that this has happened to him yet, but I'm just
00:24:16.880
saying you can see how somebody who starts in this position, in a completely, like, goodwill position,
00:24:21.620
to be increasingly encouraged by the way server dynamics work on Discord, to make more and more
00:24:28.840
extreme claims about supernatural abilities or something like that.
00:24:34.320
Yeah, well, it seems like this kind of community setup is likely to create an echo chamber effect
00:24:43.420
for any group or any behavior where it's very easy. Once you establish what makes you higher status,
00:24:53.760
then that thing is going to get out of control because then people are going to chase after that
00:24:58.500
thing and need to augment it or emphasize it in order to maintain higher relative status, right?
00:25:04.300
There's no way around it. Whether it's the number of kids you report you have next to your username
00:25:08.880
or how supernatural your abilities may be, I guess.
00:25:15.060
Yeah, well, I mean, keep in mind that a lot of people don't sort for status in the external world.
00:25:21.940
I think a lot of people think that most humans are driven by the affirmation of other individuals
00:25:26.880
when the reality is that a huge class of sort of, I'd say, the unthinking masses are more driven
00:25:32.960
by their perception of how other people see them, and they are totally okay with cheesing that
00:25:38.320
perception when it benefits them emotionally. So have you ever been, and I ask the followers,
00:25:43.320
you know what I'm talking about, someone like when you're in a conversation with maybe like an old
00:25:46.020
person and they're telling you a story and they're trying to be like a mentor to you. And it is very
00:25:50.380
obvious to anyone who was actually interested in your perception of them that they would know
00:25:55.280
that they're just like, you don't think very highly of them and you are amusing them so that
00:26:00.100
they feel like a mentor because you know, it's important that they feel like a mentor to their
00:26:03.200
continued patronage of you. Well, or, or, you know, it's like a parent, right? And they're giving
00:26:09.000
you some long narrative that is more about telling a narrative to themselves than it is about actually
00:26:14.380
altering the way that you see them. It's more about telling themselves how you see them than it is about
00:26:21.260
altering your own perception of them. And people can do this very frequently. And I think within
00:26:25.900
communities that go into a mystical direction, you can really easily get spirals around this,
00:26:33.200
where an individual wants the people around them to believe that they have power and they want to
00:26:42.000
believe that they believe the people around them believe they have power more than they actually
00:26:46.400
want the people around them to believe they have power. If you understand what I'm saying.
00:26:49.160
Yeah. And that this can create spirals that go really far, really fast to the point where now the
00:26:57.880
person is, and one of the reasons why this is so dangerous is because now the person is drawing
00:27:01.740
information about reality from unreal things, from internal intuitions, which end up being confirmed
00:27:08.720
by a community and end up creating these sorts of cults. And I think that this is where, one of the
00:27:14.960
places where you get these gender cults, the extreme, like right-leaning and left-leaning gender cults.
00:27:20.700
You know, when you get something like a trans community where everything is about gender expression,
00:27:24.700
I mean, what is looks maxing, if not an obsession with gender expression, which is often more
00:27:29.680
right-leaning. They begin to define their, or like these workout communities, or like these,
00:27:36.540
you know, I think that some iterations of like, the red pill community went in a bunch of different
00:27:40.460
directions. Some of them were sane. And then some of them, I think, are more just like
00:27:44.840
gender dysphoria cults. But they are trying to affirm that they are their birth gender.
00:27:50.320
And people can be like, why so frequently do, on both the left and the right, do you get these
00:27:55.680
gender dysphoria cults within these sorts of feedback environments? And there's a few reasons.
00:28:01.120
One is that gender is the thing that people are most frequently uncomfortable about when they're
00:28:04.580
going through puberty, which is the age at which people mostly choose any religion. So between 15 and
00:28:09.140
21 is when most people leave their birth religion or culture. So it's a primary thing of interest when
00:28:14.640
you're most likely to get recruits. The other thing is that it's very easy to get into what I'd call like
00:28:19.640
gender spirals, where, like, you just have to fit this identity that you've created for yourself as
00:28:25.640
like the correct way to be who you are. And if you can't do that, you just might as well die.
00:28:30.660
But Simone, you wanted me to not prep you on any of this. What do you think?
00:28:35.320
Well, what I'm curious about is your theory as to why Discord servers specifically are so good at
00:28:40.700
this. I'm assuming it's the fact that they're much more limited in what you see.
00:28:44.220
So then the criteria that people are competing on becomes very, very focused. Is that you agree
00:28:51.120
then? So it's three things that lead to Discord servers being uniquely good at this.
00:28:55.260
Well, what I'm curious about is your theory as to why Discord servers specifically are so good at
00:29:00.760
this. I'm assuming it's the fact that they're much more limited in what you see. So then the criteria
00:29:06.300
that people are competing on becomes very, very focused. Is that you agree then?
00:29:11.420
So it's three things that lead to Discord servers being uniquely good at this.
00:29:15.360
One thing is, is it's very easy for a person who is high status outside of Discord and otherwise
00:29:21.800
being normal outside of Discord to be completely weird within a Discord server without that much
00:29:27.920
risk of it leaking. I mean, obviously it does leak, but they can feel like it. But like,
00:29:32.720
you know, I'm talking to like two, three people here in this private channel. Like, I can see
00:29:37.520
everyone who's in the channel. I might have a longer relationship with them. So it's a lot
00:29:41.920
hard. It's a lot easier to go sort of crazy or to go sort of like subtle abusive without being a fear
00:29:49.220
of it coming back to haunt you or being called out on it. Also, this reminds me a lot of online dating
00:29:54.180
then in the way that with the advent of swipe-based dating, things also fell off the rails. And
00:30:00.640
we actually saw. I think it's quite different from that. Oh, really?
00:30:04.460
Yeah. So consider, well, this is where the second thing with Discord is really important.
00:30:08.240
The illusion of consensus, because it allows a mod within a server to always create the illusion
00:30:16.340
that there is consensus with anything that they are saying or of their status vis-a-vis the world.
00:30:22.880
And so with swipe-based dating and stuff like that, everybody still knows that they need to judge
00:30:29.240
whether this person is worthy of their time, the person who they're interacting with. That is somewhat
00:30:33.920
taken out of individuals' hands within Discord servers to an extent. And so I think that that's
00:30:39.920
what makes it quite different from those environments.
00:30:42.820
It's this added tyranny from various mods that makes it extra crazy.
00:30:50.120
Yeah. And keep in mind, I don't think a Discord server like ours is really at that much risk
00:30:54.660
because one, our goals are not aligned with this. We're an older married couple that's
00:31:01.540
not out there looking to groom people. We really, I think already as shown by our actions,
00:31:06.900
are not interested in money particularly, or at least money from our community, right?
00:31:12.200
We're not interested in, there's just a lot of the motivations and this extremist anti-mystic
00:31:17.260
stance we take on everything, which we've done in order to protect our kids, prevents a lot of
00:31:21.820
these sort of self-power fantasy spirals, which can become really easy if you allow for mystical
00:31:27.480
thinking. And finally, we, I don't really act as an active mod within the server and the people who
00:31:33.560
are active mods are sort of active around, actually it's a great test, I'm going to say.
00:31:40.460
So, you know, like within the Discord server, we're, we're actually, you know, halting the
00:31:45.260
track series for a while because it's a lot of extra work and Simone is about to give birth. So
00:31:49.800
we just didn't want to do it for now. And in halting that, like the videos don't do as well
00:31:55.320
as our other videos, but, and they take a lot more time, but they're much more popular among the type
00:32:00.120
of people who use our Discord server. So it could be the type of environment where if we have set these
00:32:05.460
social norms around belief systems with something like that, we can see, do they actually protect
00:32:11.200
against weird sorts of spirals? I mean, one of the things that we've already seen was in our Discord
00:32:17.360
server, which I don't know if it's a positive thing or not, because we've talked about, you know,
00:32:22.380
making it high status for people to have more kids is going to encourage higher fertility.
00:32:26.440
I don't know. A lot of people who are active on the server have zeros next to them. And I think most
00:32:31.660
people in the pernatalist movement, the modern technophilic one, are younger and they don't
00:32:36.820
have kids yet. I understand. So the question at hand is, should we say that this should not be a
00:32:42.460
social norm within the community? Should we say that you shouldn't put the number of kids you have?
00:32:46.100
Or is it good that we are constantly, in terms of every social interaction, reminding people,
00:32:51.300
this is the goal, this is the goal, this is the goal? I mean, I do think what I like about it
00:32:56.460
as something that's present. And what I love about seeing more about this in modern society is that
00:33:02.620
it does give someone a reminder that having kids has some kind of status bump to it and that it is
00:33:10.360
an asset to you. And it is a cool thing if you have kids, because in many circles now, if you have
00:33:17.020
kids, it's just assumed that you are now less fun, less cool, more poor, more stressed, more sleep
00:33:23.660
deprived, all these bad things. It is a drop to your status. So yeah, I would say anything that
00:33:29.260
indicates, no matter how many people have zeros by their names, that having a higher number could
00:33:35.040
increase their status is fantastic. Yeah. Yeah. Well, here's an interesting thing that was going
00:33:41.140
around the Discord server today. And I was wondering if you had thoughts on this. They were asking
00:33:43.980
what happens if the Discord, because apparently Discords can get banned for like bad political thought,
00:33:49.380
like QAnon boards got banned and like anyone who has friends was members of QAnon boards got their
00:33:53.240
boards banned. But aren't they private? I mean, there's no like... No, no. They say that once
00:33:57.720
you get over 500 members, and we're already to 200 in three days. So that means an outsider will join
00:34:02.340
it, flag it, and then it gets to you. No, not an outsider. The mobs at Discord often monitor the
00:34:06.920
servers. Oh, wow. And they say definitely once you get over a thousand, which is what we're really aiming
00:34:10.580
for. So join. We're going to have the link below. But yeah, it is actually a really cool group. Like I like
00:34:16.780
interacting with it, and I did not expect to. So that's cool. But your question is what happens when it gets
00:34:21.540
banned? Well, so I would tell them this, you know, if they're signed up for our sub stack,
00:34:25.880
they get an email every time we do an episode. So that's really easy to track. But I don't know.
00:34:31.480
Like, if we get banned on a few platforms, we'll find a way to tell you where to find us on one of
00:34:36.160
the remaining platforms. We're on so many platforms. Yeah, but they're referring to a place to chat and
00:34:40.200
hang out because you can't... Right. Well, we would create a new community and some other, I don't know,
00:34:45.640
more right wing app or something like that. I mean, I'm sure you could have something like
00:34:49.840
discord that is totally crypto based or something like that, you know, like blockchain based,
00:34:54.540
and that is difficult to meddle with. But I don't want to deal with that right now. I've looked at
00:34:58.300
some of those communities, and they're actually pretty hard to use. So I just haven't dealt with
00:35:02.740
it. But they exist if we have to go that route. But I think that we do a pretty good job of not
00:35:09.260
crossing the line. So unless things get like really crazy, I mean, we are primarily on a Google
00:35:13.920
hosted platform. So I can see the fear here, right? But yeah, so I'm wondering if you had any final
00:35:19.340
thoughts on this theory. It makes a lot of sense. It makes me want to keep our children off discord.
00:35:26.280
So I would definitely say I would discord will be strongly disallowed for our kids. I think it's
00:35:31.700
incredibly dangerous, except for our server. They can join our server, nothing else. Well, no, I mean,
00:35:38.140
I can just see how easy it would be if you are following one of your heroes for them to heavily
00:35:45.140
begin to twist. Because the thing about discord is, is it's not like Reddit or Twitter, where you're
00:35:50.460
like acting in a larger ecosystem, you can go in every time you go to that server, and it feels like
00:35:56.080
a friend group. And yet it's actually being heavily moderated, everything that you're seeing was in
00:36:00.820
that community. And so you can feel as if you're getting true friend information, when it is actually
00:36:08.780
Oh, so it's like mainstream news outlets. I mean, welcome to the club.
00:36:12.900
Yeah, but I think people know to be like, when you're a young kid, right, you don't get a lot
00:36:18.040
of your perspective of the world from mainstream news outlets, you get it from your peer groups.
00:36:21.340
Yeah. And it unlocked for me a big understanding of why individuals who I think pretty obviously are
00:36:28.000
not trans are transitioning now. And why part of the red pill movement has become this intense
00:36:33.680
gender dysphoria movement for what was like look smacking and work out everything and like gender
00:36:39.420
displays and like, oh, this is how to be the man of the perfect man, right? Like it's a big issue for
00:36:44.740
them. It's because that's an incredibly appealing way to brainwash a young person. And now you've given
00:36:54.820
Yeah, gosh. Well, that's scary. But it's cool that the discord servers picking up and I had no idea that
00:37:02.860
discord could be so fascinating. But I think it's another important thing just to walk away with is
00:37:08.420
that I think it's underrated how many people navigate the internet through private chat channels, not
00:37:16.320
necessarily just discord, WhatsApp groups, other things like that. Remember when we met the woman who runs an
00:37:24.240
NGO that teaches people internet literacy, yeah, and how to like start businesses and do basic project
00:37:30.420
management. And the key thing that she found was that people in refugee camps, people from less
00:37:38.220
economically advantaged areas didn't use the internet the way that we do. They don't use internet browsers
00:37:44.060
and Google things and ask questions and reference Wikipedia and articles and whatnot to understand
00:37:51.560
reality. They navigate the internet and reality through Instagram, through WhatsApp, through Facebook,
00:37:56.860
and through other text based groups, probably like discord, but whatever their local version of it
00:38:02.280
might be. So I think it's important to keep in mind that these dynamics that you're seeing with discord
00:38:06.880
aren't just showing up among super nerdy communities that use discord servers. This may just be how many,
00:38:14.840
many groups, especially low tech groups, are just understanding reality in the world in general.
00:38:20.600
Well, and I think this brings me to a final point is just as discord can be used to draw people into
00:38:25.800
cultural groups that they do not intend to be drawn into. I think that they can also have this
00:38:30.320
secondary counter effect of protecting kids in a way. So if you're controlling the discord groups,
00:38:37.080
your kids are like, if you are a Catholic family, and your kids are in discord groups for young Catholic
00:38:41.940
kids, where their faith is part of the social status of the way the discord server is run, and you have
00:38:47.440
some level of adult supervision within these communities, it could be incredibly powerful at preventing
00:38:52.440
them from deconverting. Same with like our wider community. I mean, we've created a set of structured
00:38:57.440
cultural norms, which is why I feel so safe with my kids in our discord server, because I know that it's
00:39:03.020
going to reinforce the cultural values that we try to preach on this channel. And through that, it creates
00:39:09.660
one, this sense of community for them, but also a values aligned community that they can return to.
00:39:15.060
So I think that there's a high utility for something like this for child rearing.
00:39:19.740
Yeah, that's why it's worth us continuing to grow it where we can and not get it banned,
00:39:25.160
because it will have utility to our children in terms of not getting sucked out into the world.
00:39:31.240
Yeah, that makes sense. And well, I'm glad you brought me up to speed on this, because
00:39:35.840
sadly, I do not have time to really check it out myself, but I'm glad you're there.
00:39:44.600
If you want to check out our discord servers here at the link and I put it in the comments.
00:39:53.160
Had anything to do with it. Don't you dare demonize cheese. Ever. I mean, when is cheese
00:39:59.880
ever made someone sick? At least. Come on. Our ancestors have been eating off cheese for
00:40:08.000
a very long time. Yeah. She's referencing, I have food poisoning right now and we're trying
00:40:13.060
to determine the culprit. I suspect it was old sausages. It was old sausages. It could have been
00:40:18.740
cheese because I eat a lot of cheese. And I was thinking today actually was milk because I was
00:40:24.040
like, well, can I trust the milk? And I was like, milk is a great food because you always know when
00:40:28.160
it's off. Yeah, but you have a God tongue with milk. Well, I can't, right? I'll drink expired sour milk
00:40:33.960
forever because you somehow are so prissy with your milk, but I'll happily chug it. It just has
00:40:40.040
a patina, you know, it has a bite at that point, you know, it's partially fermented. What's so wrong?
00:40:46.620
Well, anyway, we'll, we'll get started on the episode and I'll move this bit to the end. Okay.