Link to Discord: https://discord.gg/UzUgHpuDVG

In this eye-opening episode, Malcolm dives deep into the potential dangers lurking within Discord servers, particularly for young and impressionable minds. He explains how the platform's unique features, such as private channels, illusion of consensus, and mod privileges, can easily facilitate grooming, gender dysphoria cults, and echo chambers that distort reality. Malcolm and Simone also discuss the importance of parental oversight in online communities, the power of status-seeking behaviors, and the need for caution when navigating these virtual spaces. Join them as they explore the dark side of Discord and offer insights on how to protect yourself and your loved ones.

Simone Collins: [00:00:00] Well, what I'm curious about is your theory as to why Discord servers specifically are so good at this. I'm assuming it's the fact that they're much more limited in what you see.

So then ultimately the criteria that people are competing on becomes very very focused. Is that you agree

Malcolm Collins: then? So it's three things that lead to discord servers being uniquely good at this.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. Today is an interesting topic because I had never really engaged with discord as a platform that much before. As old people, I'd gotten into it a little, I didn't really see the point. It didn't seem like a way that I could build up any sort of large audience or advance my career. So I just saw no point to it because I, you know, I'm sort of past the point in my life.

Okay,

Simone Collins: exactly. So why do you play video games? This is, this is my thing with video games. Is this going to make me money? Is this going to advance my career? Then why am I trying to figure out this task when I have so many other tasks? Now you understand [00:01:00] the

Malcolm Collins: low stress task where I know, you know, the input needed to succeed in social situations just aren't that way.

If I'm engaging in a community like discord, you know, it hasn't been optimized to give me the right amount of reward for my effort. So. But anyway, this is why I hadn't been engaging with the community. Well, recently I started to, because we created a discord for this channel based on some fan created a discord for this fan created discord, and then I've been promoting it and it's doing Incredibly well, like three days after launching at any point day or night, there's always like a conversation going on.

So we've got about 50 active members and yeah, I've been very surprised.

Simone Collins: Cool people too, from what I've glanced at.

Malcolm Collins: So that's, Which has led me to actually engage with discord as a platform finally, which is saying a

Simone Collins: lot because you don't find most people worth engaging.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So I, I finally reached a point where.

In, in sort of working with the platform and using the [00:02:00] platform and setting everything up where I feel like I understand one, why people use it into how it works as a platform, but in doing that, I also begin to realize how extremely dangerous discord is as a platform. Much more dangerous for young minds than something like tick tock, for example, which I think would really surprise people who are not obsessed with the way sort of social interactions work and human emotions work and everything like that.

Right? Like that's my obsession to anyone who's read our books on like governance and everything like that. When I'm building up how governance work, I start by looking at how do humans interact, how do humans judge status, what sort of motivates our base human. Actions because through understanding humanity, I can understand better why different mechanisms for organizing us will lead to different, you know, large scale macro outcomes.

Well, with discord, I was looking at it and what really got me [00:03:00] down this particular rabbit hole is I also really like, tea videos if you're familiar. So when you watch them too this means like drama videos. Okay. That kind of tea. Yes. Drama about, yeah, you know, YouTube creators and other sorts of like celebs celebs.

I really wish people would do one on us, but no one

Simone Collins: really has yet. Because there's nothing at, what are they going to talk about?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I, I, Oh, they could come up with that. I've often thought the scene where, you know, You know, my kid fell in the water and I was like pretty lackadaisical and getting em out coming.

Yeah. But that's not

Simone Collins: filmed or anything. Like if that was something that No,

Malcolm Collins: but I, social media viral on, I mentioned it on our channel. Mm-Hmm. And you know it, other TV videos, they're like, oh, the person, like when they saw their dog had been hit by a car, they shot it instead of taking it to the vet.

And it's like, yeah, of course you would do that to a severely injured animal. Like, no. Well,

Simone Collins: that's just the difference between. Progressive commentators and conservatives, which that itself, that incident online where I think a Christian influencer shot their dog after they [00:04:00] found it hurt in the streets was such a classic indication, right?

If like one is actually just trying to be kind to a suffering person. Being that, that one loves and the other is trying to, it's, it's credentialism and trying to follow the correct, I

Malcolm Collins: wouldn't even say that to the conservative, it is the dog's best interest that they care about to the progressive. The dog is a tool to modify their own self image and emotions.

Therefore, they care not for the suffering of the dog. Anything that extends the dog's utility to them is warranted. Which and anything that makes them look good in terms of how they're interacting with it is warranted. What I'm saying is that we've said enough stuff that they could find stuff like that on us, okay?

But one of the most common types of tea videos comes from people's servers and specifically their discord servers and these servers end up either being used as grooming platforms or becoming hotbeds of like [00:05:00] CP and like other sorts of bad information that really they should be doing a better job, like moderating or policing or something like that and this is obviously, like, a What I'm thinking when I'm putting up the server, like how do I keep this from being used as a platform for one of those types of things?

And what immediately came to me was discord is almost set up from the ground level to encourage, grooming behavior virtue spirals, and the formation of organic cults. And this is something we talk a lot about on the show, is how you can get like these organic cults forming. And this is what we, a, there was little things that like happened within our server in its first few days.

Like this is day three of operation, right? So I'm not an old server. And Some individuals started putting the number of kids they had after their name. So it's say their names and then a number and then kids. And then it became so common that people removed the word kids and it was just a [00:06:00] name and then a number, and then it became people shaming people for not.

putting that in which shows sort of in real time how something like religious traditions can evolve, which is how social norms

Simone Collins: are created. Released.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. It's like, it's like you, you, you left something under a rock and then you look in like some civilization has formed, you know, that classic trope.

And you're like, Oh, I did not intend any of this. I was just pointing out that there was a server here and now it has social norms and Because I had made the admins. And it just give you an example of another social norm that formed a different color than the other individuals because I thought they should be rewarded if they're doing additional work.

But then this caused the perception that they were higher status than other individuals. Well, if they do

Simone Collins: more work, aren't they higher status?

Malcolm Collins: I mean, that's the way I see it, right? But I hadn't chosen them based on anything. thing that I was really thinking through. I was just like, some people recommended them who had helped us with other things or who set up the server.

[00:07:00] Most of them are just because the guy who set up the server said, these are good guys. And so I was like, sure. And then another person, two other people have reached out to me saying they really liked one of the admins. I think. Different admins as well that they were doing a good job, like in communications.

I've had with other fans that I have regular email communication with. And so I saw that and was like, okay, things must be going well. Right. But anyway, so there was some anxiety around like status being inferred by the different colors. And next time I check the server, Moderators are all the same color as everyone else.

And then so one of the moderators I had given authority to had made that change And they were also talking about like how do you which is I think goes with the spirit of the channel You know the level of like equality and free speech that we try to motivate within the channel But then there were other things that were really interesting.

There was an instance of Oh, yeah, trying to decide how I make moderators and somebody proposed, obviously trying to look out for our best interest, that I should make moderators people who donate to the Collins Foundation. And I was like, well, only three people have ever donated to the Collins Foundation, to my knowledge. The person who did it to spite their super woke [00:08:00] D& D group the founder of Skype, and then ourselves.

And I don't know if there are a couple of other people.

Simone Collins: Yeah. A couple of other people have

Malcolm Collins: donated. Okay. Okay. Well, so we've had a couple other people, but I think that those are like the big ones in terms of like, and they don't use our platforms. They don't care. Like they, they don't care about any status within the discord service.

But in addition to that, I don't want to create a pressure that would motivate people who aren't donating because they want the money to like go to good stuff, but are donating for some sort of social status. I don't want to create that, especially among people who have less wealth than I have. Like that seems actively immoral to me and it's something that

Simone Collins: also seems exploitative.

I don't know. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: So I was like, yeah, I'm not going to do that. But if it gives you the idea of how people are thinking about norms, how they're thinking about rules, like the no racism rule, for example, that's a, how do you deal with facts that leftists would call racist, right? How do you like, and so, you know, there was some debate on how exactly that's going to work, you [00:09:00] know, and we, we decided that it's, you know, no motivated reasoning based on race, but you can, you know, if something's backed by evidence, you can investigate the evidence which is interesting.

Yeah. Yeah.

Simone Collins: So like, I can understand why someone suggested, you know, donations being, A sign of basically demonstrated dedication to the projects that this whole effort represents. So I also think that that's really admirable. It's nice. We just don't want. We don't want to impose on anyone. So everything is

Malcolm Collins: logical.

The truth is, the type of people with the time to be good Discord admins is probably going to be inversely correlated with how much money they make. Yeah. Because, you know, if you're making a ton of money, you know, you often Are considered more competent in the eyes of society by your resume and everything like that and therefore have more demands on your time.

Which you know, if we're looking for competent people whose society hasn't realized they're competent yet, they're going to be less wealthy. So they're the very last people I would want to ask for money, you know. Which is [00:10:00] interesting, but I want to get into how discord is almost set up to create grooming.

Because and organically forming calls. So one, I love the, the naming of discord that it's literally named after discord. Yeah, you know, yeah. The heiress, the goddess of discord and strife, right? Like, what a better name for it.

 I bet she'd be good at causing all kinds of destruction and chaos. I know. Isn't it cool? Yeah.

Hi, Alice. Oh, poo! You tricked me, you bonehead! What are you up to, girl? Oh, just cooking up trouble, you know, having fun. And there's nothing you can do about it! I

Malcolm Collins: But you've got to think about how the platform works. And this was one, the reason why I'm doing all the talking now, is because Simone didn't pre talk this episode with me, because she said she wanted to be surprised by everything I was saying, because she didn't know where I was going with this.

But the idea being is that a lot of discord servers are based around a specific [00:11:00] individuals who are high status for some reason or another, either seen as running some project or they are seen as like a YouTube celebrity or something like that. Like that's where a lot of these T videos are coming from.

Yeah. All the

Simone Collins: servers that I know of. typically are built around either a cluster of people or a person and typically their podcast or a YouTube channel for

Malcolm Collins: sure. Yeah. So just think about it like this, Simone, suppose you had a young guy, a horny guy, let's say a guy in his teens, like a lot of, you know, rising YouTube creators.

And I have, I've mentioned in the past that when guys are in that page, a place in puberty, they often do things that are immoral in the pursuit of sex. Although, you know, you see women doing the same thing with like, Hypnotist Sappho is an example of a furry. What's the word? PDF file. And she targets, you know, young people through Discord.

She might be trans, in which case, you know, what does that mean anymore these days? So, within the Discord server, by that what I mean is a lot of people who I [00:12:00] think historically would not have been called trans are called trans now and still have the hormonal profile of a male. And, and so, you know, that would still explain the behavior, but anyway, so you take an individual like that, you put them into an environment where people are talking and most people have some level of admiration for them, then you give them total control through admin privileges on discord of, Who gets booted from the group, what messages are seen from the group.

So you can do sort of temporary punishments where I could like, for example, like shadow ban someone or mute someone they would say, or make it so that like everyone else is muted to them. Like weird things like that. As soon as you've done that, you've created an environment where somebody who is not mentally stable, it's a heavily.

psychologically motivated with no real negatives at all to them for removing everyone who disagrees with them. Or everyone who disagrees with an idea that they are pushing forward. [00:13:00] This sounds

Simone Collins: so stressful.

Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, go back to the comment I made about like, trans individuals today. And we've done the episode on like, is a cult using the trans movement for cover?

Well, suppose you had a cult about affirming like some form of gender identity, right?

it's genuinely really good grooming advice. On April 4th, 2023, Postcard reveals he's in contact with four minors. Age 9 to 13. I've so far sent it to four minors between the ages of 9 and 13. I hope it encourages them to transition. When the Anka Zone animation became a meme, they got excited over its virality among kids. Mana Drain and Orion also fantasized about getting kids on hormones orion was the manager , coercing him every step of the way. This is apparent by how he talked about him to others. Has he started hormones yet? Yes, but not effectively. I guess that's what you'd expect just telling a r to buy hormones. They bought estrogen, but no anti androgen. It would have been more fun if he started hormone blockers at like 12.

Haha, isn't that true for everyone? Don't worry, I'll make him into a good girl

I know people may have thought that I was being maybe controversial or reaching. When I [00:14:00] said that a cult is using the trans movement for cover. But it's only natural. If you make some group a protected class in society that no one is allowed to criticize. Without being called transphobic the. Individuals with malintent, we'll start using that group for cover. And the most transphobic thing you can do is to not call out those individuals. Yes. There is really a group of people out there who uses the trans identity and the cover it provides them. In order to groom kids. And attempt to get them on hormones for their own sexual satisfaction. To be against fighting against this community is the most genuinely transphobic position I could imagine a person taking. Because to say that in calling out individuals like this. We are calling out all trans people. You are implying that all trans people are actually like this. And that if we prevented the protection, trans rights gives some [00:15:00] individuals from covering this community that we would be removing all of the meaningful protection.

The trans rights activism is meant to achieve. Don't blow up our spot, bro. All t slurs are like that. You can trust me around your kid. It'd be transphobic not to. Me with daycare tots. To Orion, and many of his associates, their identity was little more than a political shield.

It clearly worked, given he publicly fantasized about assaulting women in bathrooms. Me when transphobic little girls ask me what I'm doing in the women's restroom when I'm obviously a woman. the two fantasized about assaulting J. K. Rowling's grandchildren. Not letting teaslers get with your kids is transphobic. Someone should Harry Potter woman's grandkids. Orion then goes on to call them turf meats.

And don't give me that, oh, this is just like edge cases or fringe people in the community type of thing. Alack Vade minute who was put in out, magazines out 100. A hundred third, the top 100, most influential LGBT people that year said these days, the narrative [00:16:00] is that transgender people will come into bathrooms and abuse, little girls. The supposedly quote unquote, purity of the victims has remained stagnant. There are no princesses, little girls are also kinky.

Your kids aren't as straight and narrow as you think.

The community really does need a very serious cleanup and grooming is a theory as a problem. We might do another video just dedicated to this topic, but if you're like, well, I understand that some people are doing some bad things, but think of the damage this can do to the wider LGBT community. And it's like, bro, like, think about these messages. You're reading. What about the kids who are being convinced who are not actually trans to get on hormones at extremely young ages and having their entire lives ruined just so that they can be some creepy grownups sex toy. Like, do you have. Zero sympathy for these individuals.

They can never come back from that and worse.

Now, every time they hear about trans issues, they are just [00:17:00] reminded how their bodies were ruined for the gratification of some sicko. How often does this happen? How many more of these people do we need to catch it before we say, okay, some individuals are using this ideology for nefarious means. And we need to call it out that this can happen.

The weirdos can use stuff like trans identity to go into restrooms and attempt to assault little girls. And do something about this. Although we are getting off topic here. So I'll see if I can find another way to talk about this issue.

Malcolm Collins: So, so to make this more PC, like, suppose it's like a cloud gender community. Okay. Everyone who disconfirms cloud gender identity gets booted from the server. Everyone who in any way even questions themselves or isn't sure or used to identify as this but goes back is removed from the community.

But there isn't a perception among people in the community that these people are being silenced or removed. It's not really super loud and obvious that this is happening. And a [00:18:00] lot of people may not care. They might say, Oh, well, we've created norms where disconfirming. Something is a form of violence to people, right?

Like, and the, and the left often does this, right? But you could also see people getting a big head. Like, as I said, a popular male creator, a bunch of people are fawning over him in the server, and then maybe he creates a separate thread for the girls who like him, right? Well, now you've got a thread, which is private, and everyone in it is a girl who likes him.

That creates within women, and you often see within women, of course they're going to end up finding him more arousing. You've created an environment where every other woman in the environment sees this individual as high status and arousing in some way, so you're going to get sort of um, a, a reinforcing loop of, oh, this is like, if you talk about like, hypergamy or whatever, like, obviously women like dating men who are higher status than men, men like that as well, but like, women like it a bit more than men like it.

So, And this is in terms of long term partnerships whereas men they're often okay with at least having sexual partners who are lower status than them, but [00:19:00] long term partners, you know, they look for. So in, in this environment, you get these loops, like you have at concerts where like women cheer and then it just goes, Oh my God, all the other women are cheering.

This person must be so hot. And then they end up like passing out because it creates a feedback loop that can't turn itself off. We have records of this happening to women going all the way back to lits Main

Simone Collins: Lititz Lit Mania. What was it? Was it Hans Litt? I can't pronounce names. LIZT. The

Malcolm Collins: composer.

Yeah. Yeah. And then we had it for the Frankie Sinatra. We had it like Frankie Sinatra whatever. Sinatra whatever. So we see this going way back into history. This isn't like a modern thing. So anyway, my assumption here is that as soon as you've created this and you've got some horned dog guy, you, and, and especially if it's the guy who has any sort of biological predilection for younger presenting phenotypic traits in females.

Mm-Hmm. , or males, for that matter, if that's what he's into, you now have, if what he's seeking is sex, you now have the [00:20:00] perfect environment that one motivates him going down the path of attempting to groom people and the perfect environment for grooming someone. It would actually be almost kind of impossible for someone not to end up being groomed.

Then you have the second problem. What if the guy doesn't want sex? What if he wants power? Like, what if he wants a common thing for young people? And we mentioned this in the book, there's a, a thing about this in in Japan, they have a name for it, which is I, I can't remember the anime about it though, but I'll, I'll edit it.

It's called like Evil Eye something or like, thinking. But anyway what it means

All right. Claude says the term you were looking for is Chimbu. Which literally translates to quote middle school, second year syndrome in quote, it refers to a common phase in adolescents, usually around the eighth grade or so. Hence the name where teens may exhibit delusions of grandeur, believing they have special powers, a secret identity, or otherwise exceptionally unique or important. Some comments and BuJo delusions include one believing they have a hidden supernatural power, like controlling the elements or reading minds [00:21:00] to claiming to be reincarnated from another world or to have a secret, dark past. Three using made up overly complicated names for everyday objects or actions

for effecting a distinctive fashion style often involving Gothic occult or fantasy elements.

Malcolm Collins: Is there's a trend in young people of a certain age to like, believe they have magical powers and like, that they, you know what I'm talking about, right? Like I'm actually an energy vampire or I'm actually, you know, if I do this ritual in the right way, the wind blows like this or like,

Simone Collins: Oh yeah, like modern,

Malcolm Collins: modern Wiccans.

Yeah. Yeah, modern Wiccans would be a great example of this, but they're not all Wiccans, you know, some of them do that with a Christian lens, some of them do it with some sort of other esoteric or mystical lens around it, but it's a very common thing for people to believe because these power fantasies just really appeal to people during these ages where they're attempting to find their identity if they have a community that will affirm them.

Well, if you've created an environment like this, and I'm sure this happens much more in, like, female dominated discords, you know, why [00:22:00] not? Once you've gotten a group around you that you can just remove anyone from who, who defends and you've created like private channels around this, why not try to get them all to worship you or something, right?

Like, if that's what gets you off, if that's what your desire is and It would happen organically, right? Somebody might have a few ideas. I actually think, to an extent, this could be what we're seeing with you know, Rubey Arden, one of Alt Hist, if people have seen his CIA video which goes in a very mystical direction.

And he talks about thinking that he is getting like that he has supernatural perception of the world. And that this is also supported by evidence and historical tradition that some people just have this supernatural perspective of reality. And this might be a true thing. Like I don't want to s**t on his, but, but let's assume that it's not, let's assume that every now and then people just get this inclination that they have a supernatural perception of reality around a certain age range, which, you know, he falls like 22.

And Then he is in a community where he drops this [00:23:00] as an idea. And of course people are going to feel uncomfortable. I mean, he's the big guy. He's got half a million subscribers on an unconfirming that. And some of them might be like, actually, I have this too. Right? And then it begins to create a snowball effect where.

He feels encouraged to, and, and I'm not saying that this has happened to him yet, but I'm just saying you can see how somebody who starts in this position in a completely like goodwill position to be increasingly encouraged by the way server dynamics work on discord to make more and more extreme claims about supernatural abilities or something like that.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, it seems like. This kind of community set up is a likely to create an echo chamber effect for any group or any behavior where it's very easy once you establish what it, what makes you higher status, then that thing is [00:24:00] going to get out of control because then people are going to chase after that thing and need to augment it or emphasize it in order to maintain.

higher relative status, right? There's no way around it. Whether it's the number of kids you report you have next to your username or how supernatural your abilities may be,

Malcolm Collins: I guess. Yeah. Well, I mean, keep in mind that a lot of people don't sort for status in the external world. I think a lot of people think that most humans are driven by the affirmation of other individuals.

When the reality is, is that a huge class of sort of, I'd say the unthinking masses are more driven by their perception of how other people see them. And they are totally okay with cheesing that perception when it benefits them emotionally. So have you ever been, and I'd ask the followers, you know what I'm talking about, someone like.

When you're in a conversation with maybe like an old person and they're telling you a story and they're trying to be like a mentor to you and it is very obvious to anyone who was actually interested in your perception of them that they would [00:25:00] know that they're just like you don't think very highly of them and you are amusing them so that they feel like a mentor because you know it's important that they feel like a mentor to their continued patronage of you.

Well, or or, you know, it's like a parent, right? And they're giving you some long narrative that is more about telling a narrative to themselves than it is about actually altering the way that you see them. It's more about telling themselves how you see them than it is about altering your own perception of them.

And people can do this very frequently. And I think within, you know, communities that go into a mystical direction you can really easily get spirals around this where an individual wants the people around them to believe that they have power and they want to believe that they believe the people around them are powerful.

Believe they have power more than they actually want the people around them to believe they have power. If you understand what I'm saying. And this can create spirals that go really far, [00:26:00] really fast. To the point where now the person is, and one of the reasons why this is so dangerous is because now the person is drawing information about reality from unreal things, from internal intuitions, which end up being confirmed by a community and end up creating these sorts of.

cults. And I think that this is where one of the places where you get these gender cults, the, the, the, the extreme, like, right leaning and left leaning gender cults. You know, when you get something like a trans community where everything is about gender expression, I mean, what is looks maxing, if not an obsession with gender expression, which is often more right leaning.

They begin to define their, or, or like these workout communities or like these you know, I think that some iterations of like the red pill community went a bunch of different directions. Some of them were sane, and then some of them I think are more just like gender dysphoria cults. But they're, they are trying to affirm that they are their birth gender.

And people can be like, why so frequently do. On both the left and the right, do you [00:27:00] get these gender dysphoria cults within these sorts of feedback environments? And there's a few reasons. One is that gender is the thing that people are most frequently uncomfortable about when they're going through puberty, which is the age at which people mostly choose a new religion.

So between 15 and 21 is when most people leave their birth religion or culture. So, it's a primary thing of interest when you're most likely to get recruits. The other thing is that it's very easy to get into what I'd call like gender spirals where like you just have to, you know, fit this identity that you've created for yourself as like the correct way to be who you are.

And if you can't do that, you just might as well die. But Simona, you wanted me to not prep you on any of this. What do you think?

Simone Collins: Well, what I'm curious about is your theory as to why Discord servers specifically are so good at this. I'm assuming it's the fact that they're much more limited in what you see.

So then ultimately the criteria that people are competing on becomes very very focused. Is that you agree

Malcolm Collins: then? So it's three things that lead to discord servers being uniquely good at [00:28:00] this.

Simone Collins: Well, what I'm curious about is your theory as to why Discord servers specifically are so good at this. I'm assuming it's the fact that they're much more limited in what you see.

So then ultimately the criteria that people are competing on becomes very very focused. Is that you agree

Malcolm Collins: then? So it's three things that lead to discord servers being uniquely good at this. One thing is, is it's very easy for a person who is high status outside of Discord and otherwise being normal outside of Discord to be completely weird within a Discord server without that much risk of it leaking.

I mean, obviously it does leak, but, but they can feel like it, but like, you know, I'm talking to like two, three people here in this private channel, like, I can see everyone who's in the channel. I might have a longer relationship with them. So, it's a lot harder. It's a lot easier to go sort of crazy or to go sort of like subtle abusive without being a fear of it coming back to haunt you or being called out on it.

Also

Simone Collins: the level of online dating then in, in the [00:29:00] way that with the advent of swipe based dating, things also fell off the rails and. We actually saw

Malcolm Collins: quite different from that. Oh, really? Yeah. So consider it. Well, this is where the second thing is discord is really important. The, the illusion of consensus because it allows a mod was in a server to always create the illusion that there is consensus with anything that they are saying more of their status vis a vis the world.

Right. And so with swipe based dating and stuff like that, everybody still knows that they need to judge whether this person is worthy of their time, the person who they're interacting with. That is somewhat taken out of individual's hands within discord servers to an extent. And so I think that that's what makes it quite different from those

Simone Collins: environments.

It's this added tyranny from various mods that makes it extra.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, and keep in mind, I don't think a Discord server like ours is really at that much [00:30:00] risk. Because one, we would, like, our goals are not aligned with this. We're an older married couple that's like, not out there looking to groom people.

We really, I think already as shown by our actions, are not interested in, like, Money, particularly or at least money from our community, right? We're not interested in, like, like, there's just a lot of the motivations in this extremist, anti mystic stance we take on everything, which we've done in order to protect our kids prevents a lot of the sort of self self care.

power fantasy spirals which can become really easy if you allow for mystical thinking. And finally, we, I don't really act as an active mod within the server, and the people who are active mods are sort of active around, actually, it's a great Test, I'm going to say, so, you know, like within the discord server, we're, we're actually, you know, halting the track series for a while because it's a lot of extra work.

And Simone is, you know, about to give birth. So we just didn't want to do it for now. And. In halting that, like the videos don't do as [00:31:00] well as our other videos, but and they take a lot more time, but they're much more popular among the type of people who use our discord server. So it could be the type of environment where if we have set these social norms around belief systems with something like that, we can see, do they actually protect against weird sorts of spirals?

I mean, one of the things that we've already seen within our discord server Which I don't know if it's a positive thing or not, because we've talked about, you know, making it high status for people to have more kids is going to encourage higher fertility. I don't know. A lot of

Simone Collins: people who are active on the server have zeros next to them.

And I think most people in the prenatalist movement, the model, modern technophilic one, they Are younger and they don't have kids yet. I

Malcolm Collins: IAnd, I understand. So the question at hand is, should we say that this should not be a social norm with within the community? Should we say that you shouldn't put the number of kids you have?

Or is it good that we are constantly, in terms of every social interaction, reminding people This is the goal, this is the goal, this is the goal. I mean,

Simone Collins: I, I do [00:32:00] think what I like about it as something that's present and what I'd love about seeing more about this in modern society is that it does give someone.

A reminder that having kids has some kind of status bump to it and that it is an asset to you and it is a cool thing if you have kids because. in many circles now, if you have kids, it's just assumed that you are now less fun, less cool, more poor, more stressed, more sleep deprived, all these bad things.

It is a drop to your status. So yeah, I would say anything that indicates no matter how many people have zeros by their names, that having a higher number could increase their status is fantastic.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. Well, here's an interesting thing that was going around the discord server today. And I was wondering if you had thoughts on this, they were asking.

What happens if the discord, because apparently discords can get banned for like bad political thought, like, QAnon boards got banned and like anyone who has friends was members of QAnon boards got their boards banned.

Simone Collins: But aren't they private? I mean, [00:33:00] there's no

Malcolm Collins: like. No, no. They say that once you get over 500 members and we're already to 203 days.

Simone Collins: So that means an outsider will join it, flag it, and then it gets.

Malcolm Collins: No, not an outsider. The mobs at discord often monitor the service. And they say definitely once you get over a thousand, which is what we're really aiming for. Okay. So join, we're going to have the link in below. But yeah, it is actually a really cool group.

Like I like interacting with it and I did not expect to. So that's

Simone Collins: cool. The air question is what happens when it gets banned?

Malcolm Collins: Well, so I would tell them this, you know, if they're signed up for our sub stack, they get an email every time we do an episode. So that's really easy to track. But. I don't know, like, if, if we get banned on a few platforms, we'll find a way to tell you where to find us on one of the remaining platforms.

We're on so many platforms.

Simone Collins: Yeah, but they're referring to a place to chat and hang out because you can't Right, well we would

Malcolm Collins: create a new community and some other, I don't know, more right wing app or something like that. I mean, I'm sure you could have something like Discord that is totally Crypto based or something like that, you know, like blockchain based.

And that is [00:34:00] difficult to meddle with, but I don't want to deal with that right now. I've looked at some of those communities and they're actually pretty hard to use. So I just haven't dealt with it. But they, they exist if we have to go that route, but I think that we do a pretty good job of not crossing the line.

So, unless things get like really crazy, I mean, we are primarily on a Google hosted platform, so I can see the fear here, right? But yeah, so I'm wondering if you had any final thoughts on this theory.

Simone Collins: It makes a lot of sense. It makes me want to keep our children off Discord, so.

Malcolm Collins: I would definitely say, I would, Discord will be strongly disallowed for our kids.

I, I think it's incredibly dangerous, except for our server. They can join our server, nothing else. Well, no, I mean, I, I can just see how easy it would be if you are following one of your heroes for them to heavily begin to twist, because the thing about Discord is, is, is, is, it's not like Reddit or Twitter where you're like acting in a larger ecosystem you can go in every time you go to that [00:35:00] server and it feels like a friend group.

And yet it's actually being heavily moderated. Everything that you're seeing within that community. And so you can feel as if you're getting true friend information when it is actually an incredibly twisted interpretation of reality.

Simone Collins: So it's like mainstream news outlets. I mean, welcome to the club. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: But I think people know to be like when you're a young kid, right. You don't get a lot of your perspective of the world from mainstream news outlets. You get it from your peer groups. Yeah. And it, it unlocked for me a big understanding of why individuals who I think pretty obviously are not trans are transitioning now.

I mean, why part of the red pill movement has become this intense gender dysphoria movement for, was like look smacking and, and work out everything and like gender displays and, and like, Oh, this is how to be the man of the perfect man. Right. Like it's a, it's a big issue for them is because That's an incredibly appealing way to brainwash a young person.

And now you've given them the tool to do it. [00:36:00]

Simone Collins: Gosh, well, that's scary, but it's cool that the discord server is picking up and I had no idea that discord could be so fascinating, but I think it's another important thing just to walk away with is that I think it's underrated. How many people navigate the internet through private chat channels?

Not necessarily just discord, WhatsApp groups, other things like that. Remember when we met the woman who runs an NGO that teaches people internet literacy and how to like start businesses and do basic project management. The key thing that she found was that. People in refugee camps, people from less economically advantaged areas didn't use the internet the way that we do.

They don't use internet browsers and Google things and ask questions and reference Wikipedia and articles and whatnot to understand reality. They navigate the internet and reality through [00:37:00] Instagram, through WhatsApp, through Facebook, and through other text based groups, probably like Discord, but whatever their local version of it might be.

So I think it's important to keep in mind that these dynamics that you're seeing with Discord aren't just showing up among super nerdy communities that use Discord servers. This may just be how many, many groups, especially low tech groups, are just understanding reality in the world in

Malcolm Collins: general. Well, and I think this brings me to a final point is just as discord can be used to draw people into cultural groups that they do not intend to be drawn into.

I think that they can also have this secondary counter effect of protecting kids in a way. So if you're controlling the discord groups, your kids are like, if you are a Catholic family and your kids are in discord groups for young Catholic kids where their faith is part of the social status of the way the discord server is run.

And you have some level of adult supervision within these communities, it could be incredibly powerful at preventing them from deconverting. Same with like our [00:38:00] wider community. I mean, we've created a set of structured cultural norms, which is why I feel so safe with my kids in our discord server, because I know that it's going to reinforce the cultural values that we try to Preach on this channel.

And through that, it creates one, this sense of community for them but also a values aligned community that they can return to. So I think that there's a high utility for something like this for child rearing. It's worth us continuing to grow it where we can and not get it banned because it will have utility to our children in terms of not getting sucked out into the world.

Simone Collins: Yeah. That makes sense. And well, I'm glad you brought me up to speed on this because sadly I do not have time to really check it out myself, but I'm glad you're there.

Malcolm Collins: All right. Love you to decimum. Love you too, Malcolm.

If you want to check out our discord servers, you got the link and I put it in the comments.

Simone Collins: had anything to do with it. [00:39:00] Don't you dare demonize cheese. Ever. I mean, when has cheese ever made someone sick at least come on? Well, our, our ancestors have been eating off cheese for,

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, she's referencing, I have food poisoning right now and we're trying to determine the culprit. I suspect it was old sausages.

It was old sausages. I could have been cheese 'cause I eat a lot of cheese. And I was thinking today actually was milk. 'cause I was like, well, can I trust the milk? And I was like, milk is a great food because you always know when it's off. Yeah, but you

Simone Collins: have a god tongue with milk. Well, I can't, right?

I'll drink expired sour milk forever because you somehow are so prissy with your milk, but I'll happily chug it. It just has a patina, you know, it has a bite at that point, you know, it's partially fermented. What's so wrong?

Malcolm Collins: Well, we'll get started on the episode and I'll move this bit to the end. Okay.

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