Discord & Roblox: The pipeline to school shootings (w/ David Riedman)

Speaker 1: Hey everybody, welcome back to Fighting Matters. I am Steve Quan from BJJ Mental Models. Back again with Jesse Walker from Rough Hands BJJ in Louisville, Kentucky. Jesse, how's it going? Speaker 2: I'm sitting here in Louisville fiddling while Rome burns. How are you, Steve? Speaker 1: Sitting here in Vancouver fiddling while Rome burns, I suppose. Um, interesting times for sure and I actually probably this is going to touch on what we talked about today, but maybe first we should just get right into it and introduce our guest. We've got David Reedman on the line. How's it going, David? Speaker 3: You know, as you all said, it's going as well as it can, uh, as we enter another major conflict and a significant threat environment, uh, across the United States and the whole world. Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, man, we could talk for days about that. I'm not even sure how we're going to find time to talk about everything we want to talk about today with you here. We might have to split this up, but maybe first let's set the table. David, do you want to give everyone a quick introduction about your background both inside and outside of the martial arts? Speaker 3: Sounds good. Yeah, I'll start with the martial arts. Uh, I've been training Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu for about 17 years. I'm an instructor at Orlando Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, not surprisingly in Orlando, Florida. Uh, beautiful facility. If anybody is coming down for Pans, uh, please feel free to shoot me a DM. We'd be happy to have you on the mats there. Uh, outside of the gym, uh, my background is in, uh, risk management, homeland security, intelligence, terrorism, counterterrorism. I have a pretty diverse background, everything from working in a windowless room with a combination lock, um, through a lot of interesting work, uh, across kind of risk and specialty insurance. Um, and I also started a, a very robust database a couple years ago with the intent to identify the who, what, where, when and why of school shootings and really all gun violence on school property. And over the last, uh, eight years now, that's developed into, uh, probably the most robust and data rich resource, uh, for understanding gun violence at schools. Speaker 1: Well, that is a an incredibly diverse background and again, there's so much that we could discuss here with you today. Given current events, I don't even know where to start with this, David, so I am thinking maybe I will just let you say what you think is important to take this conversation in whatever direction you think would be most beneficial for people in the martial arts space. Some thoughts on my side, of course, most people know I live in British Columbia, Canada, and we just suffered, um, probably I I believe it to be one of the worst mass shootings in Canadian history. Certainly, um, the worst in British Columbia where I live. I'm referring to the Tumbler Ridge shooting, which was just absolutely shocking. This is not something that we are used to or accustomed to here in Canada. The last time I can think of us having a shooting this horrific up here was maybe 40 years ago. Um, and and this is really gutted the community, as most people can imagine, as always happens whenever things like this occur. So I was thinking when we booked this that maybe what we could talk about is school violence. But like you said, you know, as of this recording, and I I feel like I have to date this, we're recording this on Monday, March 2nd at 11:15 AM Pacific time. I've got to say that because the news is changing so rapidly that if this thing goes live 48 hours from now, half of what we say could no longer be up to date. As of this recording, of course, the United States is now at war with Iran. Iran has retaliated by attacking, I mean, it's actually hard to even know the scope of their counterattacks at this point. We're very much in that early stage fog of war. But all of this, David, touches on your experience in a variety of different ways. So, rather than me carving out the topic here, I will turn this around to you. With the perspective that you have and this platform here, what do you think martial artists need to know about this world that we're entering into? Speaker 3: The shooting at Tumbler Ridge, um, that's actually a a really important case to touch on. Um, so I have, uh, a substack, the Reedman Report, where I write about risk, AI, security, and education. Um, and I wrote a couple articles right after Tumbler Ridge. I've written articles about just about every school shooting and mass shooting, um, that's happened in the last six or seven years. And unfortunately, Tumbler Ridge follows this pattern that has occurred in over the last two years in the US, where the term radicalization, um, in kind of its modern sense, is really connected to terrorism. And we think about a group like Al-Qaeda or a group like ISIS putting out online materials trying to to radicalize people into joining their cause. Um, but what's taken place in kind of the last two years in the US is that there's a really nihilistic, um, community of of people online. And this is the deregulated social media where you can post whatever you want, you can post any videos you want, you can't get, um, trust and safety teams won't block your accounts anymore. So there's a group called True Crime Community or TCC, and they just openly use the hashtag, um, TCC. And it's a lot of preteens and teenagers and young adolescents that are sharing gore videos, uh, very graphic videos, ISIS beheadings, suicide bombers, people committing suicide on camera. Uh, and through the the TCC kind of group affiliation, um, people will then start to, uh, kind of fantasize about being school shooters or mass shooters. So they create fan art, they create stories, they, um, change their usernames to take on the names of prior school shooters. Uh, and they get really deep into these communities where they feel that their life, their real world life and wherever they are has no purpose. But in this community, they all of a sudden have a purpose, they have belonging. When they post a picture that they drew of the Columbine shooters, all of a sudden it gets a ton of likes, it gets a ton of shares within their community and now they have value. And from that, it kind of escalates and escalates to the point where they might interact with somebody as they're planning and then committing violence. A big part of it is live streaming, getting into a Discord chat right before the shooting to get pumped up. So they'll be kind of one of the, one of the cornermen essentially for somebody who's about to commit a shooting. And then they'll take on the role of then being the next shooter themselves. And I think that some of the early signs, uh, from Tumbler Ridge are very much that same pattern we've seen in the recent US school shootings, where there was nobody in that community who you could sit in the basement with and plot a school shooting. But on the internet, you can find thousands of other people, um, many of them are adults and some of them may be, you know, actors in kind of adversary nation states and so on. Uh, but really encouraging and pushing, um, even preteens, uh, they're they're kids as young as nine or 10 years old, um, involved in in True Crime Community. Uh, so that's that's something different and I it in martial arts, in Jiu-Jitsu, a lot of us are kind of weird outcasts, but we find community and purpose and belonging from being part of our, being part of our gym. Um, and I think that that's the same process that people are feeling, um, when they end up in these online communities. Speaker 1: You know, I became an adult in the 2000s and so I grew up, entered my adult years at a time when, um, you know, extremist terrorist attacks were all over the news. And the fear at that time was some sort of foreign adversary coming over and setting up sleeper cells and launching these horrific attacks. Um, and that that's a threat that I think intuitively people can at least understand and get their head around. Whereas with this wave of nihilistic violent extremism, especially amongst young people, I find it very hard to get my head around it and and how this could even happen. How how how someone could even be motivated to go down this this rabbit hole. I think, for example, of the Charlie Kirk shooting and um the the very little information that has come out now about the the alleged shooter and their motivations and it just it the the closest I can think of is it reminds me of the Joker from Batman, just a completely nihilistic, chaotic, sadistic worldview that doesn't seem to really even be based on any specific goals they're trying to achieve other than destroying things and creating misery. And that's so weird to me. I mean, again, growing up in, you know, with comic book characters and cartoon heroes, I always looked at the Joker and thought, this is this is a silly and unrealistic villain, right? No one in the real world is going to act this way. But the scary thing about this new wave of young nihilistic violence is that it seems so unbelievably senseless. It seems like it's a game to them in many ways. And it's very hard for people for myself, who are maybe a generation or two removed from that, to really get my head around that motivation. What is what is leading to this? Like, what causes someone to get radicalized in this way where it's not even tied to some sort of political movement, it's just general nihilism that they absorb off of the internet. Just such a such a a chaotic, sadistic belief in the world that even without some sort of guiding vision for what they're doing, just the the desire to destroy is that strong. It's so hard to to understand. Speaker 3: Before touching on that, I think there are a couple terms to unpack that that you threw out there. So the first is extremism. And extremism is really just having an incompatible belief with society. And on kind of a a social level, that could be say somebody who's an extreme misogynist and they will not take direction or talk to a woman. That would be incompatible in a workplace because if there's a woman there, you can't have a person that that won't talk to a woman. The same with kind of extreme racism. If you're a true white nationalist and you won't be on the same bus or the same room with a minority person, then your extremism, your in your belief is incompatible with society. So that's extremism. Um, there's actually a psychological diagnosis connected to that, which is an extreme overvalued belief. And that's when that extremism becomes the center of your life and you no longer can kind of regulate normal life. Um, and something that that lots and lots of people, uh, suffer from is eating disorders. And so an eating disorder is a personal extreme overvalued belief where something that you believe that's not true about yourself, um, dominates your your thinking about every every situation. So that extremism can apply to to lots of different things as long as it's incompatible with the with the norms of mainstream society. Terrorism is can be extremism or not, depending on who your your in group is, kind of looking at social identity theory. So with with terrorism, you can have ideological terrorism, where you have a subgroup in a society that feels oppressed to the point where the only thing that they can do is acts of violence for the purpose of changing the political structure, uh, within that country. And if you think about Algeria in the 1950s, um, when they were a French colony, the terrorists in Algeria were blowing up bombs in marketplaces with the intent to end the French occupation and have, uh, freedom in Algeria. So you're a terrorist until you defeat the French and then you're the Algerians. Uh, so ideological terrorism is just terrorism for the purpose of political change. That's much different from what we've also seen as kind of lone wolf terrorism, where somebody has a they've never met somebody in that terrorist group, they've never been to a training center, they don't have they haven't been issued their flag. Um, but they commit an act, uh, with the intent of advancing a group's agenda. And they don't really know whether that's going to work or not, they don't really know whether they'll be known or not, but they're doing something for the purposes of another group. And that's also separate if this wasn't confusing enough, um, from single issue terrorism. And that's folks like, um, the environmentalists that, uh, are blowing up a pipeline or sabotaging the industrial equipment at a logging, uh, operation. They they don't care about the politics of it, they're probably not trying to hurt anybody in most cases, but they are trying to commit some sort of violence or destruction for the purpose of reversing a a issue that they care about. Um, abortion bombings fall into that too. Um, most of those abortion clinic bombings were not a specific person, they weren't trying to overturn Roe v. Wade, they were a an attack against what an institution that represented something that they were against. And I'll just pause there before getting into the purposeless violence because I think those kind of four or five things on their own could be pretty complicated to to disaggregate. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. And the the thing that really, again, I guess getting back to traditional notions of extremism and terrorism versus some of the changes we're seeing now. I mean, we've talked before on this podcast about extremist groups in the martial arts, specifically groups like Active Clubs, right? Who bring supremacist and hateful beliefs in and they wrap that around martial arts and they use martial arts as a pipeline to recruit. And at at least in those situations, I can understand how someone could get radicalized like that. You know, you you're in a vulnerable time in your life, you meet a charismatic leader. Tale as old as time. You get basically indoctrinated into a cult and the deeper you go into the rabbit hole, the harder it is to escape. But what's interesting about a lot of this online stuff now is it's very memetic. There isn't always a cult leader who is bringing you in and, you know, threatening you with exile if you try to leave or indoctrinating you personally. It could be that these are just influencers that you're getting influenced by online. There might not even be influencers. It could just be memes that get circulated and through the circulation of those memes, stuff gets normalized that probably shouldn't be normalized. And I find the decentralized nature of that kind of radicalization to be very interesting because normally when you think of a a radicalized group, you can kind of trace that back to some head honcho that you can at least point a finger at. But in this case, so much of it seems to just be content that grows organically and how do you how do you control or tamp down on on something like that? It seems so just unregulated and wild. Speaker 3: Yeah, it was actually your episode about the Active Clubs, um, when I first, uh, sent a message to to Mike McAfee, the old bastard, uh, and sent him an article that I'd just written about, uh, the purposeless violence and, you know, how how to frame that. So the the Active Clubs most certainly fall into kind of your ideological terrorism. They're people that have a clear social agenda. You're getting, um, recognition and prestige and value from being a member of that group and the purpose of it is for some sort of political and social change, where they those kind of white nationalist neo-Nazi groups, they want to go out and fight and train and be ready for their war because they believe that the next society that they'll usher in is going to be, you know, your your white male centric, um, white nationalist society. So that that's the same as a jihadist. Um, that's exactly the same kind of ideology. What's different in things like the Tumbler Ridge school shooting, the other recent school shootings, is that they are, you know, either nihilistic, where somebody says, you know, this the world has no purpose, I have no purpose. I'm going to commit this violent public suicide, uh, because of that. Or, um, some of them just have no reason and it doesn't make any sense. And this feels new and it feels different, um, but, you know, I did my my PhD coursework in sociology and, uh, Emile Durkheim and his definition of the term anime, uh, from his study of suicide in the late 1800s in France, uh, really explains a lot of this because it this was kind of one of the first empirical studies of suicide or the first empirical study of suicide. And he found that the reason people were killing themselves in this kind of post-industrial revolution period is that there was, um, social disintegration that people didn't think that as you were making this change from an agrarian to an urban society, um, this big disparity between the uneducated and the educated, this big disparity between the factory worker and the factory owner, that people thought that they just had no upward mobility or purpose or opportunity for a better life, um, so they killed themselves. And now that's just changed because school shootings and mass shootings are these violent public suicides where now instead of just killing yourself in your in your apartment, now people kill themselves on a live stream after, uh, taking other people with them. Speaker 2: David, if I could, yeah, if I could ask a a question really quick. So, and and I'll give a real life example that we we came across recently, uh, last weekend on a trip, is that there seems to be a a narrative about a lot of these shootings that are emerging now, um, from the right. Um, we were we were up in, uh, Wisconsin last weekend. I was teaching in a camp. I got done teaching, was meeting the girls down at the, uh, hot tub and there was a older couple there, uh, talking to, uh, my my spouse Shelby about school shootings and gun violence and, uh, over and over again, they kept referencing, uh, you know, it it's trans people and it's people on Ritalin and antidepressants that are that are, you know, taking place and, you know, taking part in this kind of violence. Uh, and I was hoping you could speak to that either statistically, uh, you know, anecdotally. Uh, certainly I've been around long enough to know that that pattern isn't necessarily something that has been repeating for the last few decades. There's I think maybe a couple more instances of it in the last few years. Um, but I I think it's important for us to talk about that because that narrative is starting to emerge. So there may be some people listening, whether they are, you know, kind of captured by kind of right ideology, some people may be hearing that and thinking, well, why aren't these guys talking about trans people and and antidepressants and how how that's affecting the the gun violence culture in America? Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, it's it's a good point and that's something that goes, um, viral especially on on right-wing social media. Um, so back to the 1960s, I've I've recorded data, you know, really detailed structured, 100 plus variable, uh, per incident data on almost 3,400 school, uh, shootings on school property. Of those, about 300 of them were deliberately planned attacks, where somebody had, um, a hit list, a manifesto, a plan, multiple weapons, extra ammunition, all of the things that would go into the a a mass fatality shooting. Um, aside from that, the majority of shootings both at schools and in public places are almost all escalations of disputes. And somebody happens to be carrying a gun. They had no intent of shooting somebody that day, but once a dispute starts, uh, they open fire. That's the by far the most common reason for both a shooting at a school and a shooting at a public space. And as people, you know, ourselves and every listener, when we have spent thousands of hours of our lives on the mat, the idea that somebody has an argument in the line at the supermarket and then they're going to pull out a gun and maybe shoot you and even if you're not arguing, they might shoot you as a bystander by accident. Um, it's it's really terrifying. So I think that's a a whole separate issue, but the main reason for the for gun violence in the United States is escalations of disputes where somebody happens to have a weapon and it turns into a shooting. Um, now getting into those planned attacks, so there are about 300 of them. There are three out of those 300 that involved somebody who identified as a different gender. And none of those three had received any formal gender affirming care. And in the probably the highest profile case, which is the Nashville school shooter, I have an episode on my podcast where a forensic psychologist and I went line by line through the manifesto. And there's it's more clear from reading the manifesto that there was either a dissociative or a personality disorder where the shooter had kind of two different people writing, two different handwriting styles, two different, um, self-images, two different descriptions of sexuality and gender and desire. That that case was by the FBI and, uh, Nashville Police not deemed to be somebody who was transgender, even though that is the highest profile, quote unquote, transgender shooting. Um, that was instead another failure of, uh, gun policy in our country where somebody with very severe documented mental illness, uh, was still able to buy multiple guns and join gun clubs to practice shooting them and no intervention had ever took place. I think that there's a a bigger a bigger problem that may be brewing now, um, and Tumbler Ridge may be part of that, the school shooting, um, at Annunciation School in Minnesota, um, earlier this year where it was, uh, a transgender person who committed that shooting. When we're talking about extremism and nihilism, if you are transgender, if you don't have community, and then society and the government says that you don't have a right to exist, that you can't have a driver's license, that your perception of your gender is not valid, that who maybe you've been recognized as for for many, you know, years or decades is no longer a person. What does that do to your your psyche? If you're told you don't have a right to exist, if you're told you don't exist, then why should you believe in anyone else's existence? So I think that that's a much more dangerous thing is if you back people into a corner, then what other choice do they have other than committing violence? Speaker 1: I'm I'm really glad that you guys brought that up because again, when this Tumbler Ridge situation happened, um, this was a situation where the shooter did identify as transgender and I remember when that happened, the first thing I thought was, there are a lot of dirt bags who are going to be all over this and they are going to use this as an opportunity to grind their axes about trans people. And it's frustrating because like you said, David, the data does simply does not bear out that transgender people are, you know, responsible for school shootings in any meaningful way. But I've seen enough of these bad faith online arguments to know how it goes, right? They'll find one example and they'll cherry pick that and they'll lean in on that hard and they won't represent the data accurately. And I think you bring up a good point, which is if there are common threads amongst a lot of these people who inflict these terrible acts of violence, it's not so much gender ideology, it is more nihilism and, uh, just a a sense of where they fit into the world. And anytime you have a disenfranchised group, I I mean, look, the the more disenfranchised the group is and the more desperate they get, the more likely terrible things are to happen. And I think that's really where the focus needs to be. Especially this day and age where there is so much talk about how isolated we've become and how a lot of the traditional glue that we built community around isn't there anymore. Um, I mean, I haven't been into an office personally in years at this point, right? And I mean, I used to be expected to spend eight hours a day, every weekday in an office. Um, my life has changed a lot since then and if you told me back in 2015 that in just a few years, I would be able to work completely remote, I would think that was the most utopian thing ever. But it is a different lived experience. Once you're there and you realize like the basis of the majority of your social interaction is now gone and you have to replace that somehow, it's not easy even for an adult. I can only imagine how difficult it must be for young people who grow up in a a very different world from what I, you know, we were used to. Uh, and not only are a lot of those social systems that used to be in place evaporating, but they now also have this other factor of algorithmic content being served to them that really, I mean, Jesse, you and I were talking about this just before we went on the air. A lot of these systems really exist to drum up and amplify the worst possible signals of humanity, especially on social media. I can only imagine what it must be like to grow up today versus when I grew up and how difficult that must be. Um, am I on the right path here, David? Because it really feels to me like there will be people who always use these these outlier acts to to to grind some sort of axe or push some agenda. Like, you know, if they're if they're anti-trans, they're going to try to find that one outlier case and use that to make their anti-trans argument. But it really feels like this has more to do with the fabric of society and how we're raising people and and what we're exposing young people to than it does gender identity or any anything like that. What are what are your thoughts on this? And what does the data say? Speaker 3: Yeah, that was one of the reasons that I went back to 1960, um, and then, you know, hopefully I'd like to go back to kind of 1948 and include all of the post, uh, World War II incidents to have kind of a full modern history of school shootings. But the problem is newspaper records, uh, especially in the south or segregated areas, um, are are just really inconsistent through the through the 50s. But the the point of that is that you could pull the details of a school shooting from 1966 or 1974 or 1979. And the details of them are pretty much the same as any of the other ones today. Um, before social media, before R-rated movies, there were school shootings. Uh, Columbine was not the first. Uh, from what I've studied, Columbine was the 12th shooting where somebody wore a black trench coat. Um, so that had been an iconic image, um, back to the 1980s. So what has changed now is the value of kind of participation in, uh, an online group that really romanticizes, um, violence because I think to your point about people are alone, people are isolated. If you used to be able to find one other kid at your school who maybe would make some Columbine basement tapes with you, um, but that would be a gamble because if if they weren't into it, they'd report you and and you're going to be in trouble. Now you can just get onto the internet. And what's changed so much in the last three years is the degradation of trust and safety. Elon buying Twitter and making that an absolute hellscape for extremist and violent content. And then the whole family of kind of broader social media, uh, getting rid of those trust and safety features. If if you went back in time five years before, uh, the X purchase by Elon, if you tried to post kind of some violent content, you might get a couple likes, you might get a couple followers, but your account would get blocked. Now you can post that stuff for months and months, amass more and more followers, and then you can slowly peel followers off into separate, um, completely encrypted communities. So that's kind of the the trajectory of this is a random kid might be on Roblox, might be on Instagram, might be on, um, you know, any of the social media platforms. They the algorithm feeds them some sort of content that they interact with. They interact with it more so they get more of it. Then they start associating with the people that are posting the content. Once there's some association, then somebody sends you an invite, says, come to our private Discord. Once you're in the private Discord, you have distributed encrypted servers, it's going to be extraordinarily difficult for anybody to ever discover what you're talking about. Groups from there will peel off into a subgroup. Um, there was one, uh, that a student in Perry, Iowa was a member of two years ago. Um, it was called the School Shooting Massacres Discussion. There were 12 12 kids in it. And he got deep into that group, posted up, you know, up until the minute before he committed his school shooting and he walked out of the bathroom with a shotgun and killed the principal and a 12-year-old and wounded nine others and then killed himself a minute later. Um, that's this progression that wasn't possible before we deregulated social media. Because you couldn't if you couldn't get to the point of having a bunch of followers and likes, you'd never get to the point of being invited to the Discord. And if you're not invited to the Discord, you don't make it into the even more extreme Discord. And if you're not in that even more extreme Discord for a year, then you probably don't decide that committing a violent public suicide at your school is the best thing to do. Speaker 1: Talk a little bit about this this strategy of peeling people off because this is one of the really fascinating things about society today, the the fragmentation of our attention span and our interests because you have so many options. I mean, Jesse can relate to this, you know, when we were growing up, Jesse, I bet you that on any given day, you know, you and I could go to school or whatever and talk about the episode of The Simpsons that was on TV last night and everyone would know exactly what we were talking about. Like there there were few enough content options out there that there was such a thing as water cooler talk. You could, you know, go to work and talk about the show that was on TV last night because most people probably watched it. What is challenging today is because of the sheer proliferation of content out there, because it's been democratized, because anyone can publish anything on YouTube and other platforms and we algorithmically get served what we're interested in. On one hand, that's amazing technology, right? And it sounds very utopian, but it also means that we can all get into these really tiny sub niches that are completely separated from the zeitgeist and what everyone else is talking about. I mean, I bet the stuff that I watch on YouTube, probably you guys have never heard, right? Because I I've been funneled into such a a unique niche of interest that probably not many other people in the whole world care about the exact stuff I do. And this has been an interesting side effect of all of this algorithmic fragmentation. You talked, David, about how the game that a lot of these people play is they try to splinter off and peel people off of these groups. They try to get them into private chatter, into private areas where the signal then gets reinforced. Talk a little bit about the strategy there because my understanding is that is very deliberate by a lot of the people who are putting these groups together. Speaker 3: Yeah, and I I think it's kind of similar to what you talked about with the Active Clubs in Jiu-Jitsu that, you know, if you have a Jiu-Jitsu Academy, when somebody brand new comes in, you're not going to, you know, disclose a lot to them. Uh, but over the course of, um, a couple weeks or months, maybe if you make an off-handed comment and then the person kind of responds affirmatively to it, then you know you can push a little farther and a little farther. And then maybe you flash somebody the tattoo you have that's, you know, a a fringe Nazi symbol and if they give you kind of a wink, now you know you're in the group and then from there, now you can invite them to, hey, come over to my house on Saturday, some other friends are going to be there and it's going to be our little neo-Nazi party. Um, you can't just ask every person coming through the door if they're if they're a neo-Nazi or not. Um, it takes it takes a little bit of of uh coaxing to get them there. And that's the same thing that happens in the social media communities. Uh, where on the on the open web, on the mainstream social media platforms, once somebody's posting some volume, um, of active shooter memes, of drawings they've done of school shooters, of a picture of the shrine they have to school shooters in their bedroom, that'll get them the the credibility that other folks will say, okay, we're going to go ahead and invite this person, um, to our Discord. The really scary place where this is happening, um, and I have an episode with, uh, a psychologist who's a deradicalization coach, um, is Roblox. And Roblox is a very popular game with kids between six and 12. Uh, but looking at their user data, half of the users are between six and 12. And half of the users are much older than six and 12. So you have this place where adults are interacting with elementary school children and their parents are not really monitoring it. Uh, and that's a place where if there's somebody you meet and interact with in Roblox, they would invite you to a private map. And they have private maps for the Columbine shooting, for the Uvalde shooting, for the Aurora, um, movie theater shooting, for all of these different, uh, shooting scenarios. And if you play and are interested and excited and you're a young kid, then they'll say, okay, well, you're really cool. We really like you. Why don't you come to our private Discord? And once you're on Discord with the younger kids, um, then there will be a lot of grooming that takes place. Where now you feel this prestige because you're an elementary school kid, but these cool adults, um, are buying you all these power-ups in the game or taking you to these private maps, are talking to you or giving you this secret you can't tell to your parents. Then they'll ask you to, you know, make some graphic child pornography for them. And once, you know, a child has done that, or they'll say, you know, video yourself cutting yourself, um, or make, you know, some suicidal or some racist statements. Once they have that video, then they can blackmail forever and they'll blackmail that into, uh, more and more exploitation and it can even cross over into real world exploitation, where you're going to commit violence, um, or else we're going to release this. You're going to meet this person, uh, for for sexual exploitation or else we're going to release this. Or even you're going to kill yourself on camera, um, or we're going to do these things that are going to ruin your life. Um, and that's that's a really that's a really scary environment that's happening on an app that most parents just let their kids play to to keep them quiet when they're around the house. Speaker 1: Um, Roblox really scares me as a as a parent. Um, you know, there's a lot of tools and products out there that are dangerous for children, but for many of them, especially the social media platforms, at the bare minimum, you know, the social media platforms are not exactly tailored to be a children's application. I think most parents understand that, you know, social media can be a dangerous place and although some parents do put their kids on there, I certainly wouldn't suggest it, but at least I think parents have some degree of informed understanding of what these platforms are. Roblox, on the other hand, advertises itself as a an app for children. Everything about that app screams, this is for young children. It very much reminds me, again, aging myself here of like the old Joe Camel ads, where very clearly an adult product is being sold towards children and the fact that this thing is dressed up almost like a Lego game, I think draws kids in. And as you mentioned, most parents probably don't understand, um, the sheer amount of communication tools that really unscrupulous people, including predators, have to reach your child on on Roblox. It's a it is a scary thing and I'm glad you brought that up. Um, Jesse, you look like you had something to add there. Speaker 2: So, I I was curious about whether it happens across, uh, all fandoms and all domains or whether there is something particularly, uh, enticing about getting fragmented into all of these kind of unsavory elements. Is there something, uh, you know, I I'll say it tongue in cheek, but like, is there a way I can use this strategy to get more students at my Jiu-Jitsu school, right? Um, or does it always have to be like school shootings or let's go be a Nazi together or let's go do this bad. Is there something about the badness of it that makes it more attractive? Or are there also secret Discord communities about ponies or, you know, and and I don't know the answer. Um, but is is there an attractiveness there to the to the bad stuff? Speaker 3: No, that's that's a great point, uh, that you make there, which is 99.9% of the the social media uses are completely valid. Um, like kids are on Discord because it's a great multimodal platform for, uh, video game communication or just having a different way with your friends that you can, uh, share and swap, you know, images. It's it's it's like a another Slack. I mean, it's it's just a good communication platform. Social media, the majority of stuff on social media is not related to violence. Um, this kind of reminds me of of a discussion from, uh, one of the episodes of BJJ Mental Models, uh, with a woman who's a physician talking about, um, harm from supplements. And that, you know, if you have a vaccine, the adverse effects from a vaccine are documented because you have rigorous government safety and reporting standards. So you can look at a vaccine and say, yes, exactly out of every million doses, there's going to be, you know, 1.1 people that have this adverse outcome. But if there's some, um, Himalayan, you know, root nut that you take, uh, as a supplement and, you know, one in a thousand people who take it go blind, you don't know that because there's no data collection. Um, and when there's no data collection, no information available, people just assume that it's not happening. So the reason that we know about this radicalization through, uh, the social media into the private chat, um, pathway is because if people are doing that to talk about Pokémon or toy horses or a certain, you know, comic book collection or anything in the entire world, that pathway doesn't get documented because there's no harm that comes out of it. There's no shooting at the end of it for us to retrace those pieces. So I think that there are countless numbers of of groups and super niche groups and super niche topics, um, that people spend enormous amounts of of time online, uh, interacting with people doing the same things. Um, but when they when they are harmless, there's no outcome to measure. And when there's no outcome to measure, we just don't really think about it. Speaker 1: I remember, I guess I'm keep dating myself on this episode. Back in my day, you know, I mean, they're always telling us how old we are anyway, so we might as well just lean in. You know, they always say all of the commentators are always like, who are all these old guys? Um, you know, Discord is really nothing new. Um, when I was growing up, you know, we had IRC, right? Which is effectively the same thing. I remember when I first used Discord, I was like, this is giving me flashback vibes. We've done this before. Yeah, it's really just IRC. So it's not like it's specifically new technology, this idea that people online can create a private server and they can go off and chat. But I I think it's more around how these tools are getting used or maybe just the sheer volume of people that are now on these platforms. It used to be that the internet, uh, really was kind of this small cowboy culture, you know, the the internet wants to be free, information wants to be free, it needs to be completely unregulated. And a lot of people still very much hold those beliefs. But I'm finding myself having to challenge those now because I I take a look at how many bad actors are doing terrible things on the internet under the guise of anonymity. And I wonder where is the line? I mean, I take a look at some of the some of the regulation that we see coming up, especially in the states, you know, things like ID laws to use the internet. And part of me really gets the ick from that, right? I don't like the idea of people surveilling customers and screening them and keeping copies of their ID, especially for very sensitive things, which often these are tied to. But on the other hand, I do feel like something has to be done. We we clearly cannot allow these incredibly wealthy tech companies to just do whatever they want. I think we're really seeing at this point what happens when we allow them to be totally unregulated. I mean, you talked about X. We've got folks like Elon Musk, the world's richest man, just openly promoting Nazi agendas and white supremacist beliefs and with just shamelessly allowing and and encouraging the spread of disinformation on his platform. Things that 15 years ago would have been considered just a gross level of corporate misconduct and and irresponsibility. But these tech companies and especially the people behind them now are so powerful. They have so much money and just structurally, they're so entrenched in their companies. These they're not going to get voted out by the, you know, the board of directors or by shareholders. They basically have an iron lock on this and they can do whatever they want. It really does feel like something has to be done to rein this in. But on the other hand, I am sympathetic to the fact that digital surveillance has really significant considerations, right? We have to deal with it it's one thing if, you know, the liquor store asks you to show your ID. It's another thing if a company is screening you and that's going into a database that could get hacked and exposed and now everyone in their dog knows exactly what websites you've visited and has a copy of your personal info, right? It is a different level of concern. What do you think is the and maybe this is just an impossible to answer question, but what do you think is the optimal solution for fixing this problem and, uh, putting safeguards in place while at the same time balancing people's privacy rights? Speaker 3: Well, the messages that you talk about, uh, on social media, the interesting thing is they're not new. It's just that things that sat at the fringe and were harder to access and you certainly would not access them by accident, um, as you can with algorithmic media. Um, they're they're all the same. So in the in the 1970s and 1980s, as kind of the American neo-Nazi movement started to rise and we started to have, you know, the the anti-government movement across the Midwest and south and some of the western states. Uh, James Mason, who's kind of credited as as the the father of the, uh, the modern American neo-Nazi movement, had an anthology of his essays, uh, which was his self-printed book called Siege. And he would go to gun shows and at gun shows, he'd have a regular stand and if you talk to people or people knew him or recognized him, then that would be the opportunity where then you could buy his book, where it's not sitting out on the display, maybe it's out in his van in the parking lot, maybe it's, you know, wrapped in something else, uh, under the stage, but once you get the gun show folks to come in, there's going to be a fraction of those folks that are interested in, um, you know, your far far right fringe and your white nationalist agenda. So there was a way to get the material out to people. It just was difficult to get it to a large group. Um, and what's interesting is then you fast forward to, um, the the attack in Charlottesville, um, one of the trending hashtags on Twitter, and this is, you know, original Twitter, which was fortunately a lot of stuff was shut down pretty quickly, was pound read Siege. So there are PDF copies of Siege floating around and then it was, um, as white nationalist energy was growing online, returning to read this book that got sold at gun shows in the 70s and 80s was now something that was digitally accessible to anyone. And Siege in a lot of ways is thought of kind of like the far far right, uh, extremist right anti-government right, um, like it's it's their, uh, foundational text for for kind of understanding, um, America. And I think that we we also forget about how much how much political strife there was in the country through the 70s and 80s into the 90s. I mean, we had Ruby Ridge where you had the standoff between the government and, uh, a white nationalist survivalist group. Um, Ruby Ridge becomes the impetus for Waco. Um, Waco then you have, you know, the the siege there that's, uh, televised, lit on fire, you know, uh, dozens of of children, uh, die there and that creates this really deep anti-government movement in the country that leads Timothy McVeigh to loading up a Ryder truck full of explosives. And Timothy McVeigh had not really been a fringe guy. I mean, he was an army special forces, uh, soldier. He had served in Desert Storm. Um, so you have somebody who is who is the good guy as as the, uh, right would describe, you know, the the American soldier, who loads up a truck full of ammonium nitrate, uh, enriched with, uh, fuel oil, takes it to the Murrah Government Building, blows up the government building. The most severely damaged part of that is a daycare center. I mean, a horrible, horrible act in 1996. Then three years later, you have the Columbine bombing. And Columbine was not supposed to be a shooting. It was supposed to be a bombing on the, uh, four-year anniversary of Oklahoma City. It was going to be a bigger bombing that killed more kids than Oklahoma City did. Um, but fortunately, some teenagers didn't know how to make a bomb as well as a former army special forces soldier. Uh, so the bombs didn't go off, it turned into a school shooting and then it became the iconic, uh, school shooting that now I've documented 50 or 60 other shootings where they directly pulled from Columbine, uh, in their plots today. So that that's a long way of saying that everything that feels new is really old. Every thing that goes viral now was something that went viral before. It's just much more accessible and people can accidentally wander into it. Speaker 1: Well, thank you for sharing that, David. Um, you've got an amazing Substack. If people want to check that out or follow your work, how can they do that? Speaker 3: It's the Reedman Report. It's uh, my last name, report on Substack. Uh, you can also search the K through 12 school shooting database and that will come up as the top search on Google. That also has links to subscribe. And everything on that website is free. If you're an academic researcher and you want a copy of the data set, I share it freely with anybody who's interested. Uh, and the Substack is also, uh, free to subscribe and I just put the bottom of the articles under the paywall because we're all playing the algorithmic game and if you don't paywall your content, then, uh, Substack, uh, doesn't upvote it. So we're all just trying to figure out how to get our message out, uh, in this world that that amplifies a lot of the worst messages. Speaker 1: Well, thank you for what you do, David. I I really appreciate it. I'll do my best to put links to that stuff in the show notes. My stuff's at BJJmentalmodels.com. Jesse, your stuff is at roughhandsbjj.com. Anything else that anyone wants to bring up before we close this off? Speaker 2: This has been great, David. We really appreciate your time. Speaker 3: Yeah, and if anybody listening is in town for Pans, uh, please shoot me a DM. Uh, and happy to, uh, have you at Orlando Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. Speaker 1: Amazing. Well, thank you everyone. Really appreciate it. Thank you, David, and to the listeners as well. Great chat and we will talk to everyone soon.