Part One: How Nuisance Streamers and Rage-Baiting Ate the Internet

00:00:05
Speaker 1: Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the very worst people in all of history. And we have a very special episode for you this week. I've been burning the midnight oil because we have as a guest this week, my old boss and current New York Times bestselling author, several times over, Jason Pargin. Jason, welcome back to the show. Thank you.
00:00:27
Speaker 2: I get so nervous doing this show because of the subject matter. It seems like it's so easy to fall into saying something that can be taken out of context. Like, well, now that is one thing I admit I do like about Bill Cosby. And then one of my enemies is going to pull that out. And then I'm sitting here trying to launch a book and they're going to put that all over TikTok and Reels because it's out of context. Like in this episode, if I say the phrase... I'm not saying I'm going to say it, but if I say the phrase, I'm kind of glad that guy got shot, don't pull that. It's illegal for you to pull that out without including the context. I will take you to court.
00:01:11
Speaker 1: There is one guy who you'll be glad gets shot in this episode. Or at least I'm glad. Look, I'm willing to admit it. He shot himself.
00:01:21
Speaker 3: Jason, do you want to give us a plug for your latest book that's coming out up top?
00:01:25
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's plug your book.
00:01:27
Speaker 2: Sure. It is book five in the John Dies at the End series that some of you will be familiar with. And the title is, There Are No Giant Crabs in This Novel, A Novel of Giant Crabs. And it should be available probably when you listen to this.
00:01:46
Speaker 1: Yeah, at least in ebook form.
00:01:48
Speaker 2: Yeah. We're hoping. If you're not familiar in the book industry, there's issues with paper shortages. I guess there's some disruptions to things in the world, to supplies of all things from all countries.
00:02:00
Speaker 1: I've heard about that.
00:02:01
Speaker 2: And I don't want to act like I'm the worst victim because I think part of it has to do with fuel prices and diesel prices, which I think is due to wars that have killed many, many people. Don't want to act like... Don't take this out of context that I think I am the greatest victim of the wars happening all over the world. I realize I am one small part of all of this. But anyways, in theory, the book should be available by the time you listen to this in probably almost any format. And if you listen to this many years from now, may not be available again. Who can say?
00:02:33
Speaker 1: We can say we're all potentially making lost media every time we create anything. Well, yeah, you said that.
00:02:40
Speaker 2: I was your old boss at crack. There's no evidence of that.
00:02:42
Speaker 1: Yeah, not anymore.
00:02:44
Speaker 2: All that stuff has been deleted from the site. There's no evidence either of us ever worked there.
00:02:48
Speaker 1: Years of work just gone.
00:02:50
Speaker 2: Which is crazy because I successfully predicted every single thing that has happened since then. And now there's no way to prove it.
00:02:58
Speaker 1: That's right. That's right. Like right down to a couple of weeks ago when the Brewers won that latest game. You know, you got it all.
00:03:07
Speaker 2: Did a whole column about that.
00:03:08
Speaker 1: People thought it was weird. You were writing a lot of articles about Milwaukee sports, but.
00:03:14
Speaker 2: Now who's the fool?
00:03:15
Speaker 1: Now who's the fool?
00:03:16
Speaker 2: Still me.
00:03:17
Speaker 1: There is evidence.
00:03:18
Speaker 3: It's just, you know, protected by HIPAA because it's in your therapist's log.
00:03:23
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:03:32
Speaker 1: Jason, you came to me with the kind of pitch you wanted to hear about this week, right? You wanted to hear specifically about like some of these guys, they generally get called nuisance streamers, right? Or rage baiters.
00:03:44
Speaker 2: Well, I heard about it on the news because it happened here where I live. Yes. In the great state of Tennessee. And they were talking like I should know what this is because they're like, well, you know, this guy did his thing where he streamed himself going into a restaurant and then shouting racial slurs at the staff and then shot himself.
00:04:05
Speaker 3: I don't know.
00:04:05
Speaker 2: You're going to get into the story probably. And then they're like, well, you know, he's a nuisance streamer. I was like, he's a.
00:04:11
Speaker 1: A what?
00:04:12
Speaker 2: Is this another cyberpunk thing that has come true? Is that what's happened?
00:04:17
Speaker 1: That's actually where my script starts, Jason, because in 1992, Neil Stevenson published the novel Snow Crash, which in the years since has been credited with inventing or at least predicting MMORPGs, social media, cryptocurrency, almost every mainstay of our modern digital life, right? It really is a pretty remarkable book. It's impossible to overemphasize how influential Snow Crash was, in part because most, if not all, of the people who coded or otherwise created all those things did so in part because they read Snow Crash's kids, right? So there's a lot in that book that might stick with the reader. But the main thing that stuck in my mind after reading it was the concept of a gargoyle. These were side characters Stevenson included to illustrate the dangers of digital addiction. Quote, instead of using laptops, they were computers on their bodies broken up into separate modules that hang at the waist on the back on the headset. They serve as human surveillance devices recording everything that happens around them. Nothing looks stupider. These get ups are the modern day equivalent of the slide rule scabbard or the calculator pouch on the belt. marking the user as belonging to a class that is at once above and far below human society. And we're talking about those guys today.
00:05:26
Speaker 2: But see this right away. This is fascinating to me because you have one of the subjects, I know we covered it back at Crack, not to keep mentioning Crack, which again has none of our work still on it, but the concept of technology making a new kind of crime possible. Yeah. Because you think about like when the telephone was invented and then five minutes later, The prank caller pervert is like, wait a second, I can use this to call women.
00:05:52
Speaker 1: Yeah, I can make people uncomfortable.
00:05:53
Speaker 2: And then pleasure myself over the phone. I've been waiting my whole life for this. Finally, they invented the thing that's going to let me exercise my specific. And like here, the ability to stream from the street to where walking down the street, you can get upload speeds that can keep you live streaming while you're doing God knows what. That's brand new. Yeah. And it's like there's a type of person who had been waiting their whole life Like, here's a new kind of mischief I can do that technology, thank.
00:06:21
Speaker 1: God, has enabled me to do.
00:06:24
Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, this is what I like about AI, because there's actually no way that can be misused.
00:06:28
Speaker 1: No, no. Thankfully, we finally invented a technology that has no downsides. But yeah, it is interesting. I remember when I first went to my first CES around 2010 or 11, which is the big consumer electronics show in LA every year. They had people who were streaming live video from the show, but it was a whole backpack. Their rigs were like 30 or 40 pounds. This is just in 2010 or something, right? It's not all that long ago. And yeah, now you can do it on your phone and it's led to a bunch of different kinds of content. There are just a lot of people who just live stream their lives and aren't trying to like fuck with other people. But there's also an increasingly popular kind of content for live streamers that just focuses around pissing people off, right? Like what you're doing is going out in public to make people react angrily to what you're doing or to make them look like fools or to make them scared or uncomfortable, right?
00:07:23
Speaker 2: Well, here's where I think it's really important to clarify, because a lot of them call themselves prank streamers, where they talk like they're doing what they do on Jackass, or what Tom Green did. But it's like, okay, it's not a prank to just run up to somebody and start screaming racial slurs in their face. You've got to have some element of a setup that would be fun for somebody.
00:07:46
Speaker 1: Yeah. And that's... That's actually what's most upsetting to me, because I think we'll get into this. This is fun for people, but not in a way that I think is a positive development for society. The fact that people are having fun with what these folks are doing is a pretty dark turn for the old human race, although not an unprecedented one, as we'll discuss. But this kind of content, these guys, as we've said, they go by nuisance streamers, some people call them. And the type of content they're doing, it also tends to be called rage baiting, right? And rage baiting isn't just, you know, people streaming. It's a thing, as we'll talk about, people have done online forever. But probably the most relevant example of the nuisance streamer archetype in the United States right now is Dalton Levi Etherly. This is the guy you asked me about at the start of the episode. He's better known as Chud the Builder. And Etherly's origin story is unfortunately about what you'd expect. He was in a car accident around 2024 or 2025, like late 2024, early 2025. And the other car was driven by a black woman. I think she had her family with her. And they wound up like having an altercation afterwards. And she takes a picture of him during it where he's holding his cross out the window. And she says that, like, he's shouting racial slurs at my family, right? He's shouting the N-word at them over and over again. Chud would later claim that he hit them with a blessing because they were throwing drinks at his car. I don't think there's any real evidence of– I mean, there's not– this wasn't, like, fully documented. He's not streaming, so it's a– I don't know exactly what happened. But the interaction, the picture of him went somewhat viral because Etherly was very obviously being an asshole in this situation. And he was fired from his contracting job. So he gets in this public altercation with a black person. He starts shouting racial slurs and he loses his job. And within a few months of this, he decides to adopt the name Chud the Builder online and start live streaming, right? And the specific thing he's doing per one arrest affidavit was filmed content, including racially charged content on social media with the expressed goal of provoking rage. He would do things like accost strangers by walking up to them and like saying relevant racial slurs on camera. And his goal was to provoke reactions primarily from black people, which he branded chimp outs.
00:09:58
Speaker 2: Right.
00:09:58
Speaker 1: That's like the the. thing that his content was usually like filed under in social media. It's what his fans came to expect. And he did a lot of other infuriating stuff. On May 11th, 2026, Chud dined at a restaurant in the Nashville area. He racked up an almost $ 400 bill. He loudly and disruptively live-streamed at his table until staff told him to stop. And at this point, he, per an affidavit, grew disruptive and started making racial statements, yelling and screaming. He began to insist he would not pay if you are kicking me out, and then he left the restaurant. Because that's like a $ 400 theft, the restaurant called the police, and the police find Chud on the street and arrest him. Days before this happened, he had posted a video of himself macing a black man and screaming the N-word at him in response to that guy knocking a hat off his head, which I think was in response to Chud saying racial slurs in public in order to make money, right? Charming fella, right? This is an interesting career pivot for a former contractor, but he makes pretty good money doing it. Chet is mostly streaming on Kik, which is a website we'll discuss in more detail later, but in short, it exists because Twitch, which is like the first of these live streaming services, started kicking streamers off their service when they did stuff like this, right? And so kick is the free speech alternative, right? Like this happens with other social media stuff. It's like Gab or something like that, you know? Since his streams were long and largely boring, he monetized them primarily through a complex content ecosystem that Will Sommer kind of describes this very well in an article for The Bulwark. He films these long videos and his fans, I think maybe people he pays, clip out like the most offensive segments and put them up on short videos with like his cash app or his Venmo or whatever in there so people can send him money because he made someone uncomfortable by shouting racial slurs in public. That's his business, right? That's how Chud makes his money.
00:12:06
Speaker 2: Okay. I have eight or 9,000 questions about this.
00:12:10
Speaker 1: Sure.
00:12:11
Speaker 2: Yeah. Um, We don't know how much money he makes off this, right? We don't know how big his audience is.
00:12:19
Speaker 1: We have some evidence. He raised $ 65, 000 before the event we're about to talk about, the shooting. He raised like $ 65, 000 in a crowdfunding campaign. And he also launched a meme coin, dollar sign Chud, which I imagine made him some amount of money. I don't know how to tell there, but he was raising a good amount of money.
00:12:38
Speaker 3: I hate every word you just said.
00:12:40
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's not great. But he's making not insignificant money.
00:12:45
Speaker 2: I'm trying not to make your episode sad. I know people don't, they're not tuning into podcasts because they want to be sad for the rest of the day. Sure. I kind of thought this is a quirky, kind of a weird subject. It's not like people are dying here. But so far, this is the saddest thing I've ever heard in my entire life.
00:13:03
Speaker 1: It's really depressing. Yeah, it's super depressing.
00:13:07
Speaker 2: So much of this could only, like, I assume he had an NFT at some point, probably. Maybe he didn't get it.
00:13:11
Speaker 1: I think he may have been a little late for that, honestly, but.
00:13:14
Speaker 2: There's like this vein in the economy that you can worm yourself into, but only if you've done something extremely terrible. And it's like this rebound effect of, because I don't know, like if he was on the show, in fact, let's bring him on now.
00:13:34
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's get Chet in from the waiting room.
00:13:35
Speaker 2: Yeah. But if he was on the show, would he describe this as like, well, it's a free speech thing. Yes. I want to prove that speech is... Because I feel like there's no place or time where saying certain things in somebody's face would not get you struck by that person. I'm not saying I approve of that. I don't get into many fistfights in my life, but it is a very normal part of human interaction. Somebody's out and about and you start screaming slurs or whatever, that at some point they're going to shove you or hit you or do something. And if you call the police, they often will not sympathize with you for instigating that. Like they recognize, no, that's, I'm sorry, like that's an expected outcome of what occurred here today.
00:14:28
Speaker 1: Clearly being a giant asshole.
00:14:30
Speaker 2: Yeah. This is not a free speech issue. This is like living among other human beings. And he knows this. Like him getting hit, that's the goal of the stream, right?
00:14:40
Speaker 1: Yes, yes.
00:14:40
Speaker 2: That's where he wants this to go.
00:14:42
Speaker 1: It's unfortunately even darker than that, right? Because he does. You were right. Like when he showed up on InfoWars and he showed up on like Gavin McGinnis, the Proud Boys founder's podcast or show or whatever. And he said like it's a free speech. I'm trying to reclaim the N-word for white people, which like– Reclaim? You know why it was developed originally, right? Like he does, I'm sure. But the fact that there's violence and the fact that he might provoke violence by doing this is part of the point. Will Sommer in his article describes it as like a boomerang effect. Etherly will say deliberately and do deliberately infuriating things to provoke a response, ideally from famous people online, which then draws more people to his content and more attention to his work. And attention is money. It doesn't matter if it's good or bad. It's just money.
00:15:30
Speaker 2: Right.
00:15:31
Speaker 1: And he's been making pretty good money. And he's made it very clear for at least several months prior to what happens that his ultimate goal was to shoot and kill someone over this. In December of 2025, he posted to Twitter, series finale is dead chimp on the pavement and you monkeys rioting when I walk free. So that's not coded, really.
00:15:52
Speaker 2: Okay. Okay. I know that somebody– I know there's places online where people discuss these episodes. Somebody's going to say that we're part of the problem because we are now giving this guy publicity by talking about him. But this is the paradox that people like him exploit because you have a choice of either not talking about it and then it just stands on its own or talking about it. It's like, well, some– there's at least one chud in the audience who's going to say like, oh, I actually think that sounds hilarious. I'm going to go listen to it. But in theory, this thing in society where you kind of have to acknowledge and denounce bad behavior, but also you're shining a light on it, and then the way the attention economy works, you're also letting them profit from it. In theory, somebody could ride that All the way to the White House. Yeah. Just saying a series of outrageous things every single day and then just dominating news coverage and then until suddenly you're president. And that's my cyberpunk hypothetical. God knows it.
00:16:57
Speaker 1: It would never happen, obviously, in the real world.
00:17:01
Speaker 2: But yeah, that's the whole point, is he knows that there's no good way to– oppose this because if you want to say like well just don't feed the trolls it's like well that he's fine with that too because he's eventually going to find somebody.
00:17:15
Speaker 1: Yeah there's a world full of people and you're running around shouting in their faces someone's going to react right there's a lot of people who make livings in some version of this we've had we have some streamers in Portland who will show up in protest and just have like literally put their cameras on people's bodies like to provoke somebody to hit them so that they can then crowdfund that like I got attacked you know for like well You were like, it's not that good that you got attacked, but you were trying to get attacked, right? Like that was the purpose of you being here.
00:17:47
Speaker 2: And I've heard of something called First Amendment auditors.
00:17:50
Speaker 1: Auditors, yeah.
00:17:50
Speaker 2: It's like packs of, is that those people or are you talking about different people?
00:17:53
Speaker 1: I would say First Amendment auditors, there's a spectrum because some of them are doing stuff like showing up and protesting in places that you're supposed to be allowed to like have a sign or something. And if they get arrested, they're suing the police department. There are some people where I think there is more of a justification.
00:18:09
Speaker 2: Right.
00:18:10
Speaker 1: But this is I mean, Chud is well past that line. He is talking specifically like my goal is to provoke someone to attack me because I always have a gun on me and I will shoot them.
00:18:20
Speaker 2: Right. Right.
00:18:20
Speaker 1: Like that is a real the fact that he's stated that outright is a very different, I think, wrinkle on this and that there's money and being that kind of guy now is a really different like that is new. That that was not the case. Even a couple of years ago, I wouldn't have imagined that working as a business like. usually you would have had to hide a little bit what you were doing, but Chud's very open about it. And on the afternoon of May 13th, 2026, two days after he was arrested in Nashville for ditching out on that bill, Etherly was in Montgomery County Court over a failure to pay $ 3, 000 owed to a credit card company. Outside of the courthouse, he started streaming and doing his usual thing, saying racial slurs and stuff, at which point a man named Joshua Fox confronted him, and Chud alleges this happened. He said, you start saying all that chimp out shit to me and I'm gonna hit you. And he hit me. He started wailing on me. And even after I had to defend myself by shooting him.
00:19:16
Speaker 2: Right.
00:19:17
Speaker 1: So that's what happens. He's the Fox is a black man.
00:19:21
Speaker 2: He's like.
00:19:23
Speaker 1: Yelling racial slurs. Fox walks up to him and strikes him. And he pulls his gun and starts blasting. He shoots Fox, a disabled veteran and father of three, three times. Thankfully, Fox survives. Several of his shots miss and ricochet off walls. This is a crowded area. He could have hit numerous bystanders. And he also shoots himself due to the fact that he's just generally not super competent with a gun. And yeah, so that is the one shooting I don't feel bad about here. He's currently being charged with a bunch of crimes, including attempted murder. And we'll talk a little bit more about him in part two. But I want to, because, you know, as you said, I don't want to focus on this specific Chud for this episode. He's not worth that much attention. What's much more worth discussing is how did we get to the point Where this guy decided confronting random black people with racial slurs and waiting for an excuse to murder them on video was a good career move. And how did we get to the point where he has, as a spoiler, raised hundreds of thousands of dollars as a result of this?
00:20:26
Speaker 3: Right?
00:20:27
Speaker 1: Because that's where we are right now. And that's what I wanted to kind of unravel. One term you'll hear used repeatedly in conjunction with Chud and the other nuisance streamers we'll talk about this week is rage bait. Rage baiting content is one of the pillars of modern social media because all algorithmic social media prioritizes making you angry in order to keep you engaged, right? It is a part of the business model. Anger is a thing that keeps you on the site, right? Like the more you engage, the more people, the more they can put content that pisses you off that you want to argue with, the longer you stay on the site. Like it's everyone's business model one way or the other. Some sites like Elon Musk's X reward people with direct cash payments if they generate rage effectively enough. The phrase rage bait, which the Oxford University Press voted its word of the year in 2025, actually has its origins on the pre-social Internet. New York Times journalist Jennifer Schuessler traced it back to 2002, quote, in a post on a Usenet discussion group to describe a particular kind of driver reaction to being flashed by another driver seeking to pass.
00:21:27
Speaker 2: Right.
00:21:28
Speaker 1: It's it's when someone tries to pass you and like the driver gets pissed off and tries to block them for some completely illogical reason.
00:21:35
Speaker 2: Right.
00:21:35
Speaker 1: Like you're just trying to piss off the other driver, basically. I doubt that's relevant to the terms modern popularity. This strikes me as the kind of word that was reinvented from first principles to describe modern online behavior. But the fact that it came into existence decades earlier to describe an offline behavior is relevant. It is important we acknowledge that the impulses which make rage baiting content popular and make guys like Chud able to make a shitload of money don't originate online. They've always been with us, right? This has always been a piece of the human experience.
00:22:07
Speaker 2: Also, you want to hear a really weird theory? So you can take two people walking down the sidewalk side by side, and they are very friendly with each other. If one bumps into the other, it's like, oh, excuse me. You take those two people and put them into two separate cars in traffic, and now they will casually try to murder each other because there is something about being in a car behind a windshield that just That other person is not a human being. They are an obstacle. They are your enemy. You have no charity toward them. You have no grace. There's something weird about a windshield and a screen on your phone and how you view other human beings that is different than if you were encountering them face-to-face standing in line at the grocery store. You would be much more forgiving, but the moment you have that gap.
00:22:57
Speaker 1: Between you– You just want to kill them.
00:22:58
Speaker 2: Yeah. So the fact that the idea of rage baiting comes from road rage, not that different of a phenomenon.
00:23:06
Speaker 1: No, it makes complete sense. The most logical thing around the presidency is that we do not allow presidents to drive. Because if any president had the chance to get behind the wheel, the nukes would already have been fired, right?
00:23:18
Speaker 2: I would shoot.
00:23:19
Speaker 1: Every time I've been in traffic, I would drop a nuke, right? Like, on me, you know?
00:23:24
Speaker 2: I literally didn't know that presidents were not allowed to drive, but yeah, it makes perfect sense.
00:23:28
Speaker 1: No, they are not.
00:23:29
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:23:30
Speaker 1: So it's also equally worth acknowledging, in addition to the fact that these impulses go back further than social media, that making a nuisance by pissing people off has a long and storied history online well before the dominance of social media. Jason, you and I both came up writing for the internet. And from my earliest days, I remember comment sections being hives of scum and villainy. Back at Cracked, one of the first and most futile pieces of advice we would give new writers is like, don't necessarily read the comments.
00:23:57
Speaker 3: Right.
00:23:58
Speaker 1: There's going to be there's going to be fans in there, but there's going to be people who are there trying to troll you, too.
00:24:03
Speaker 2: Right.
00:24:03
Speaker 1: Like that's just the thing that happens with the comment section. And, you know, I we didn't know it at the time, but I think our struggle with and about commenters and this is a bigger thing than, you know, the old place we work. This is just like people know this about Internet comments. There's always people who are there just to try to piss other people off. And I think that that's kind of a prelude to this cottage industry, right? You can see some of the impulses that wound up feeding into this there as well. Nuisance streamers and other rage baiters are part of the influencer industrial complex. And it's hard to get accurate estimates of the size of the influencer economy, as it's often called. But in October of 2024, Goldman Sachs estimated it as a $ 250 billion a year industry. Now, that Because sometimes you hear that and you think like, oh, so that's all like people trying to sell stuff on TikTok. It's not quite that. I think that this is also referred to as the creator economy. So a lot of people get lumped in as influencers who are in an earlier age would say, well, that's a musician, right? That's a writer. Because to some extent, anyone who wants to be a creative person has to have that degree of like social media, like you have to engage with people, right? You have to be able to build a fan base. it's kind of necessary. But a big chunk of that is people who are making their money with their primary marketable asset not being a thing that they do, but being just their relationship with their fan base, right? That's kind of the purest example of the influencer economy, someone who is famous because they're an influencer as opposed to, well, this is a musician who I want to listen to, or this is a writer that I want to listen to or an actor, right? Like this person is just an influencer, you know? I don't really know what chunk of that $ 250 billion a year are people like that, but it certainly seems to be growing, right?
00:25:49
Speaker 2: And so many of them just came from the world of, in terms of influencers, of just like reacting to video games or reacting to, because people will ask, well, what does Asmongold do? And it's like, well, he was a World of Warcraft streamer and then pivoted to just watching videos and reacting to them. But when you go on these streams, these Twitch streams or wherever, it's people just sending them money. Yeah, yeah. And then to have their name read on the streams, like, oh, whoever sent me $ 150, thanks for the donation. And they're sending money to millionaires. And it's people sending a significant chunk of their meager paycheck from Chipotle to a guy worth $ 100 million today.
00:26:28
Speaker 1: And that's how it works because- That's baffling to me, yeah.
00:26:33
Speaker 2: I know that part of it is I'm too old to understand this because it's kind of new. But when I was a kid, you bought an album from a rock star, you got an album. The idea of just mailing an envelope full of money to Nirvana and saying, hey, split this up among the band would have been crazy to me.
00:26:52
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's really strange, but it is like this is the dominant form of like influential media, certainly for the very young, right? There's a reason this particular kind of relationship is so valuable. From 2019 to 2023, the number of Gen Z and millennial respondents to a morning consult poll who described themselves as trusting social media influencers grew from 51 to 61%. 57% of young people listed their dream career as influencer. And lest I be seen as talking shit on the youngs, 41% of a morning consult survey of 2,204 adults listed influencer as a dream career, right? This is pretty much the most commonly desired life path for people right now. The data is pretty consistent.
00:27:40
Speaker 2: Okay, but here's the thing. I, in my current life right now, sometimes struggle to explain to people what I do for a living. And in fact, sometimes I lie. But at least in my case, if they Googled me, it would come up like, well, he's an author. He writes books, yeah. He went on social media as part of his being an author. And then hopefully they would not notice that actually the entire audience is now TikTok and Reels and hardly any of those people read my books, whatever. But at least it's legible what I'm doing. If you're somebody like Chud the Builder and people ask what you do for a living, what does.
00:28:17
Speaker 1: He tell people? Professional racist. I think influencer, there's not a lot of, you know, we need to go to ads, but I think kind of to put a bow on that, I don't think it's a stigmatized profession, really. Like certain, I think what Chud's doing is, but I don't think influencing is anymore, right? Like it's deeply desired. And we'll all sit with that while we listen to some ads, because this is totally different from the thing that we're talking about. And we're back. So I was talking about how influencer is pretty much the most desired career among young people. It is worth noting that basically everyone who tries will fail miserably at that ambition, right? Roughly half of the people who actually make money as an influencer make less than 10 grand a year. Um, but these episodes aren't about that separate, but related issue. We might find this like, and I do want to note, cause I also think sometimes it gets written as like, oh, all the kids want to do is like sit on a live stream and have people send them money. When I was a kid, I think a similar number of people would have given their chief ambition as becoming some form of celebrity and music or musician or actor or whatever. So I think when we talk about like how everyone wants to be an influencer, it's not so much that like they were, they find that kind of thing possible. intellectually appealing. It's that like, it's really hard out there right now. College degrees don't get you what they used to get you. And influencers make a shitload of money and don't have to do much work. That's the, that's at least what people think, right? I think that's why it's a desirable career is it's like, well, this is a way better life than I'm going to get doing any kind of straight job.
00:29:59
Speaker 2: I mean, that's just a very human thing. You grow up as a kid and you see what the adults around you are doing and you determine, oh, that looks cool or that looks lame. Or your dad is a plumber. It's like, well, that job sucks. He seems to hate it. So if you grow up and the people you interact with are on a screen and there are other influencers, yeah, it looks like... Something you could do, where if I was a kid, I would see a rock band and think, oh, that would be cool to do that. But the first time I tried to play an instrument, realized, oh, no, I cannot, in fact, do that. Yeah. But that's why it's so unhealthy, too, because especially, to make it clear, anything I talk about, it's worse for young girls and women. Yeah. Because for them, when they're looking at an influencer on Instagram, it's not necessarily personality. It is looking a certain way, being a certain weight, living a certain lifestyle. And it's like, well, can you achieve that? Can you achieve that level of, can you have her skin? Can you have her hair? Can you be that level of being thin where they already were thin and now they're taking Ozempic? Yeah. All of the body image stuff where the thing that they're doing is just being themselves. So if I can't do that, then it's not because my guitar playing was bad. It's because I am not good enough. Yeah. Because an influencer is just putting their own being and their own personality and their own lifestyle out there. So it's like, well, if I'm not successful doing that, that's a condemnation of my whole deal. Where if people don't buy my book, it's like, well, who cares? That's just a thing I wrote.
00:31:39
Speaker 1: And I think, you know, the corollary to that too, Jason, is if you succeed at this, I think one of the thoughts it sort of reinforces in your head is like, well, if I'm making money at this, then I'm like, I'm a good person. Like I'm doing good as a person, right? Whatever I'm doing is the right thing if it's working. You know, all that matters is the attention. So whatever is getting me attention and money is like ethical, right? Like that is kind of the corollary to that, unfortunately. And that is sort of what leads us to the logic of nuisance streaming. Um, so I, I still have some more, uh, groundwork to lay, right? Because just, just talking about like rage baiting as a form of content doesn't necessarily lead us to chud the builder walking around with a concealed gun, screaming racial slurs, right? You can say like Ben Shapiro in the daily wire with their liberal tears mugs, that's rage baiting, right? But it's a very different kind of rage baiting, right? And I'd be lying if I said 0% of this show's success came from telling stories that piss people off, right? That's part of what people come here for, is they know they're going to hear something horrible that makes them angry and frustrated, but hopefully informs them about the world more too, right? I don't think it's, again, not the same thing. But you can see there's some deeply buried things that people respond to. Fear and anger are two of the big ones. That's why social media profits from making you angry and afraid, right? Is that it's, we're hardwired to care about stuff that makes us feel that way. It's the same reason that like people are hardwired to be interested in stories about serial killers and shit, right? Is it feels relevant to us if it scares us.
00:33:15
Speaker 2: Okay, but also there's a mechanism here where by far the best promotion for one of these streamers, the best way to break free of the platform into the mainstream is with some kind of scandal. Do you want to guess the first time I ever heard of Logan Paul?
00:33:31
Speaker 1: Yeah, we'll be talking about that.
00:33:33
Speaker 2: The thing in Japan, okay.
00:33:35
Speaker 1: The thing in Japan, yeah.
00:33:37
Speaker 2: But that's the first time I heard of the streamer Dr. Disrespect was because he had been banned from Twitch for some sort.
00:33:43
Speaker 1: Of, Yeah, that's what gets you attention.
00:34:07
Speaker 2: It always helps them.
00:34:08
Speaker 1: It always helps them.
00:34:09
Speaker 2: Even if they get banned for a while, because it's on the front page of the New York Times. So many people, it was the first time. So it only makes sense that eventually somebody is going to come to the conclusion, well, let's just make that happen. Yeah, yeah.
00:34:23
Speaker 1: And that, I mean, that is where we're, you know, heading to, right? And I think an important piece of connecting tissue in terms of like how we get from rage baiting, you know, comment sections on the internet and, you know, the daily wire to The stuff like Chud the Builder starts with a woman named Jennifer Ringley. And Jennifer is not a bad person, right? Not in any way, shape, or form. But she is one of the most influential people in the history of the internet that you've probably never heard of. Because when Jennifer was 19 in 1996 and a college student, she became the first live streamer. She invented live streaming effectively, right?
00:34:56
Speaker 2: Jenny Cam.
00:34:57
Speaker 1: Jenny Cam, yeah. Okay, so you caught this back at the time.
00:35:00
Speaker 2: When it was happening live. I was there when she would go live, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
00:35:05
Speaker 1: And this was like a major moment. She had a webcam in her dingy dorm room and started broadcasting her life all day, every day. You'll see if you're on the Netflix, we've got a couple of clips from the show. But it looks a lot like modern life, other than the resolutions worse. It looks a lot like modern live stream content, right? She's like doing her makeup. She's doing her homework. She's got the camera on her while she's sleeping. As Jason noted, she called what she was doing Jenny Cam, and it was very successful. Even by modern terms, she was pulling incredible numbers. Per that BBC article, websites took whole minutes to upload. And yet, although Jennifer's stream of pics were usually of an empty room, she was at class or in the loo, or of Jennifer looking at the computer, or sitting on the bed studying, or in a fit of action doing her laundry or brushing her teeth, this slideshow of the mundane was utterly compelling. Four million people, then a far greater proportion of internet users than it is today, would watch her quarter-minute updates of quotidian life. And mostly it was pretty positive. She got an interview with David Letterman. She got New York Times coverage. There was a turn when she had what that article describes as an intimate night with her boyfriend that was streamed. Um, Kratosky describes this as turning her fan reactions, quote, from curiosity to condemnation, which I do think is worth keeping in mind in terms of the things that will piss off your audience. This is going to be a through line with some of these streamers. Your fans don't necessarily want to see you have a happy relationship. Um, She shuts the experiment down in 2003, and despite her wild success, I don't think she got rich. I don't know how much. She would today. If today you were capable of drawing 4 million live viewers a day, you would be worth tens of millions of dollars, right? Those are massive numbers today.
00:36:48
Speaker 2: Let's put it this way. One of the ways that she got paid is the fans would mail her cash in envelopes.
00:36:53
Speaker 1: Good Lord.
00:36:54
Speaker 2: Yeah, so it was really, really— You understand that the systems, the infrastructure now to send tips, none of that existed. She was running this off of a server in her apartment. Yeah. Because it would crash if she changed clothes in front of the camera. It would freeze up and die because too many people would jump on because there were people waiting for that to happen. Yeah. Yeah, and then I'm sure you're going to get to, she is not on anywhere on the internet at all. No, no.
00:37:21
Speaker 1: No, she kind of proves the concept, improves the hunger for this kind of content. But obviously, 96 to 2003, the technology is nowhere near where it would need to be to make this an industry. As you say, there's not any kind of like infrastructure around like making this monetized. So a lot of things about technology, we're going to need to change for live streaming to become a dominant kind of content and aspects of our culture needed to change too. I'm going to call my shot now and argue pretty directly. I don't think nuisance streaming at least is something that would have existed before the rise of Donald Trump, just as I don't think the Trump presidency would have existed without social media, right? That's a big part of why he got elected. And as I'll talk about, I think there's a degree to which seeing the president succeed doing the things that he does provided permission for other people to behave in a certain way, right? Because he is the president, you know? We'll talk a little bit more about that. That's me kind of going out on a limb a little bit. It's certainly unprovable, but I do feel pretty strongly about that.
00:38:26
Speaker 2: I mean, very quickly, I will say that when we were at Cracked, the first sign of that movement before Trump came along was around the time of Gamergate, and that was being driven by 4chan. And 4chan is entirely a rage bait. Yes. Space where people would post, you know, Hitler did nothing wrong memes. And it was a mix of people who actually believe that and people who were literally 12. Yeah. Like it was literal children sometimes posting and they would have the racist, the Jewish caricature. That's the first time I ever saw that was on 4chan. So when Trump first came along, he was like the 4chan meme candidate to me. Like I thought, oh, it's like, okay, this is like, let's wait for the real Trump. primaries to start because right now the four channers are boosting this Trump thing because they think it's funny that he's the troll candidate. So it very much, at least early on, registered as he's the troll meme candidate and nothing else. And then suddenly he's president.
00:39:23
Speaker 1: Suddenly he's the president twice.
00:39:25
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:39:25
Speaker 1: And it's weird to me because as a kid, I was a class clown. I got in trouble for saying things in school that were deliberately meant to provoke a reaction sometimes. I was that kind of kid, right? And my mom... Really did not encourage that sort of behavior. And one of the things she would say to me when I would get in a pocket is like, hey, if you keep doing that when you get older, someone will like beat the shit out of you or shoot you, right? Like you can't say certain things to people out in the world or they'll fuck you up, right? And I... I've come to believe actually that that's a good thing, like that people should feel that way. Not that you should go out in fear of your fellow man, but you should know that like, well, if I just walk up to someone and say a racial slur, there's a good chance I'm going to get the shit kicked out of me, right? Like, I think that fear is positive in a lot of ways. And one of the things that's broken down in the last quarter century is today, if you're a huge asshole in public, you might get fucked up, but you might get really rich.
00:40:22
Speaker 2: Too, right?
00:40:23
Speaker 1: And a great example of this and something that I think probably inspired Chud the Builder is back in August of 2025, a white lady from Minnesota was captured on film calling an eight-year-old boy with autism the N-word repeatedly. She was charged with three counts of disorderly conduct. She took to a crowdfunding site and billing herself as the victim of silly misinformation raised more than $ 800, 000 in a matter of days. A fundraiser for the family of the child raised $ 340, 000 in the same time frame.
00:40:51
Speaker 2: Okay, I'm sorry. Who was sending the money? Was she saying she needed to raise it for her legal bills? Because it was like a disorderly conduct charge. There's not going to be a.
00:41:05
Speaker 1: I think the attitude was the wokes are coming for me. They've destroyed my ability to make a living.
00:41:11
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah.
00:41:14
Speaker 1: It's what you brought up earlier, Jason. As soon as like a scandal goes viral, it's the best advertising you can get. She becomes instantly famous. And I think she just had the sense to be like, well, if I throw up a fundraiser right now, I will draw in all of the people who think it's fine to behave this way. And apparently there's a lot of those, right? Or at least there's people with a lot of money who feel that way. I don't know how many individual donations.
00:41:36
Speaker 2: She got, but.
00:41:39
Speaker 1: I suspect this really had an influence on Chud. I don't know, he hasn't spoken about it, but the timing of this and the timing of when he started doing his content makes me think this is one thing that made him recognize there's money in doing this sort of shit.
00:41:53
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, because it's not a hypothetical. She demonstrated that, because it's so weird, because sometimes in this economy, it seems like nobody has money, but other times it's like, I think some of you have too much money.
00:42:06
Speaker 1: Certainly some people have too much money.
00:42:07
Speaker 2: Because I'm seeing what you're spending it on. Yeah. That money would have been better off going anywhere. I would rather you gamble with that money. Because at least you could have maybe won.
00:42:18
Speaker 1: Yeah, that money would be better spent on literally anything. Like lead-based gasoline. I'd rather have it go to.
00:42:28
Speaker 2: Drugs.
00:42:29
Speaker 1: Drugs, of course.
00:42:30
Speaker 2: At least crack will get you high. Yeah. Yeah.
00:42:33
Speaker 1: At least crack has value.
00:42:34
Speaker 2: Yeah. See, there's an example of something you could pull out of context and make the book look bad or make the publisher look bad.
00:42:42
Speaker 1: Now, Jason, I've always been pro-crack. I'm anti-cocaine. You would be.
00:42:44
Speaker 2: Better off buying crack because it's great. Don't pull that out of context. That's against the law. I will take you to court. Yeah.
00:42:53
Speaker 3: I won't.
00:42:53
Speaker 1: I meant what I said. So professional live streaming didn't come into existence until 2011 when Twitch was launched as a video streaming platform. This proved to be a wise business move as millions of young adolescents had been raised on a mix of video games and YouTube content based around playing those video games. Twitch provided a much more direct variant of this experience and the young people ate it up. per an article in The New Yorker by Adrian Chin. Twitch offered a number of ways to monetize a livestream and attracted a huge audience of young gamers who, to their parents' confusion, wanted not only to watch people play video games for hours, but also wanted to give money to their favorite streamers in the form of subscriptions and tips. This is what you're talking about, right? It's very baffling to the olds because, like, this isn't how media ever worked for us, right? You, like, you pay for a product or your attention and, like, the ad revenue they get from it is the product. This is a real, like, sea change. That 2018 article by Chin was a profile of a guy who was probably the first or at least the first successful in-person live streamer and one of the first nuisance streamers. And he goes by the name Ice Poseidon. This is the guy who took Twitch from being a place where people streamed themselves gaming to a place where people just streamed themselves out in the world being, right? His real name is Paul DeNino. He was 23 in 2018, and in that interview with Chin, he described his childhood as a never-ending struggle against authority. He grew up in a wealthy, gated community in Martin County, Florida. Today, it's the seventh richest county in Florida with an average income of $ 123, 000 a year. His mother was a mental health administrator at a clinical facility, and his father was a plasma technician. His mother told Chin that Danino was shy as a child, and to gain attention, he acted out. At one point, he asked the teacher in class if she was good at giving blowjobs, and obviously, he got in trouble for this kind of thing, right?
00:44:42
Speaker 2: Um.
00:44:43
Speaker 1: So we see again, he's like, you've got a class clown kid here who's bad at boundaries and knowing what's appropriate. And it makes him isolated and drives him to the internet more because he doesn't feel like anyone gets him in the world, right? Because he's being punished for his behavior. As a result of how he acted, he was kicked out of or had to leave school several times. At one point, his parents sent him to what the article described as a forestry camp for troubled boys. I don't know where this was. I'm guessing it's one of those troubled teen facilities I've covered on this show. We covered it on Cracked a number of times. If so, he was abused as a kid, right? These are profoundly abusive places. I don't know exactly what facility. It may have been a different kind of thing, though. The description in the article is a little vague.
00:45:25
Speaker 2: Oh, so you're saying it didn't cure him of his maladaptive behaviors? No. No.
00:45:32
Speaker 1: He says he was prescribed Zoloft and ADHD meds and then sleeping pills to deal with the side effects and that he quit all of these drugs when he turned 16. Although he always brings this up online as a way to urge his followers not to take their psychiatric medications. So I don't maybe take that with a grain of salt. Please take your psych meds, folks. Anyway, while he was struggling to find his place as an adolescent, Danino got into RuneScape, an MMORPG that's kind of, you know, I think it predated WoW, if I'm remembering properly. It's one of the older ones, but it's one of the ones that's had a really long, like, lifespan. And he soon got super addictive, right? Chin's article claims that he played it all hours, waking up at 5 a.m. to play before school and gaming late into the night. He started avoiding going outside at all, and he started making friends online. He met his first roommate on Skype. and developed a following of other players who enjoyed his online antics. Chin writes how Danino found that in the game, he could do things for attention without real-life consequences. Quote, In 2013, Danino came up with a prank called Closing Doors, in which he would repeatedly click on a door so it couldn't be opened, trapping another player in the room. Danino uploaded videos of the prank to YouTube, and they racked up views. He decided to start broadcasting live on Twitch. The first night, 10 people watched him. The next, 20. Soon he was making $ 700 a month in viewer donations. At the end of the summer, he was laid off from the restaurant where he worked and decided to make live streaming a career. So again, you see a similarity between this kid's trajectory and Chud's where they're not fitting in in regular society, work doesn't work out for them, and they realize they start getting rewarded for their behavior online and decide to turn that into an income stream. Now what What Ice Poseidon is doing is much less objectionable. He's not going in and like making himself a racial slurking or whatever. He's doing like pranks in a video game and stuff, right? At first, he was just another Twitch streamer and he gained a loyal following of fans. He nicknamed the Purple Army because RuneScape was Danino's social life. He started monetizing his time gaming and he did not even consider separating his real and personal life from his performances. He would talk to his biggest fans on the phone and even game with them in real time. His fan base grew madly loyal and Chin claims it became known for harassing other streamers and was described by other players as a toxic hive, right? So this fan base he develops, maybe in part because he's doing some kind of aggressive pranks, becomes themselves. Like they get really into like brigading people, I think is the old term we would use for it, right? We're all familiar with fan bases like this, right? Who can respond kind of aggressively, right?
00:48:16
Speaker 2: But also, if you go into the world of streaming, it feels like 90% of their content is streamers just having beef with other streamers. It's like Destiny reacts to Asmongold, reacts to Hasan, reacts– I'm just naming streamers now– reacts to iShowSpeed, who is reacting to– that's all the ones I know. But it's only– it's like that's the whole thing. It's a form of cross-promotion and some of it is very clearly like world– like wrestling style beef. Yeah.
00:48:48
Speaker 1: Kayfabe basically.
00:48:50
Speaker 2: Like the first time you've heard of this other streamer is when I yelled at him and so now– Like, it's true that you're all now in each other's chat screaming slurs at each other or whatever.
00:49:00
Speaker 3: And that's the perfect reference, Jason, because now we're seeing so many of those guys go into that world where they're doing YouTuber boxing.
00:49:08
Speaker 1: Wrestling and boxing.
00:49:09
Speaker 3: Wrestling and boxing. And, you know, we're going to get to the Paul brothers as well using Logan Paul was a WWE superstar today. And it's like but they're using the same exact skills they learned from this. there.
00:49:26
Speaker 1: It's also, it's interesting. All I know about Asmongold is that he's like a filthy goblin whose room is always disgusting, right? Because I just see shit like that clipped all over social media. I was watching a movie just literally last night called They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, which is from the 60s. It stars Jane Fonda. And it's kind of about It's weirdly enough, it predicted a lot of like the way social media works. But it's about this like dancing contest that is incredibly abusive. It goes on for like a thousand hours and it's destroying the bodies of the contestants. And at one point, the emcee explains like the appeal is like, no, no, they're not rooting for you. they like seeing you be like fucked up and miserable and like engage in like dealing with like horrible, stressful problems. Cause it's funny to them.
00:50:15
Speaker 2: Right.
00:50:16
Speaker 1: And it distracts them from their own lives. And this movie from the sixties really gets today better than almost any other media I've seen.
00:50:22
Speaker 2: I am not going to take this off on a tangent here, but some of us, when we talked about like canceled culture, We were not saying, actually, I think Bill Cosby should have been allowed to still have a show after the things he did. It wasn't that. It's that when you have somebody who rightfully did something bad, you got people criticizing, calling her out correctly. But then you have this other circle of people who clearly don't care. Yeah. But they are the sadists who see an opportunity because they want this person to commit suicide on camera or whatever. And they will just go at them and just start calling their house or whatever. It's like, whoa, you don't care about justice. You're a freak who has found an opportunity because for you, that would be entertainment. The downfall of.
00:51:15
Speaker 1: And you can tell very well the difference between when you have someone like, you know, who's very powerful in the industry who gets quote unquote canceled, they're gonna be back with a Netflix special in a year or two. The majority of the people who get attacked by mobs like that and actually suffer constant or just like random folks online who like said something maybe that was like kind of shitty once. And then they get this mob that harasses them, sometimes for years. Like, people endure years of online harassment because of shit like this. And it is part of the same, like, content cycle, I think. Like, it is part of the same, this broader media blob of people desperately needing more conflict in their lives. And I do think that's a part of, like, what this nuisance streamer complex is feeding, right?
00:51:57
Speaker 2: I mean.
00:51:58
Speaker 1: This desire for conflict.
00:52:00
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:52:00
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, I just got a news alert that, you know, directly relates to it that's from MS Now. It says the FBI plans to offer the UFC an exclusive one-year contract to train its special agents in hand-to-hand combat.
00:52:16
Speaker 2: Great.
00:52:17
Speaker 3: Great.
00:52:18
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:52:19
Speaker 3: Everything is interconnected in the most horrifying way.
00:52:22
Speaker 2: Well, no, but like the director of FBI, Kash Patel, has said, like streamer merch. He has like custom Nikes and like he has a logo.
00:52:32
Speaker 3: He, in a way, is a nuisance streamer in my opinion.
00:52:37
Speaker 1: That's, I mean, that's a lot of what like Pete Hegseth is doing too, right? Like the deliberate use of slurs in order to provoke content condemning it, which then like, you know, it's, it's, It's all part of the same blob.
00:52:50
Speaker 2: Execution he wants to live stream that just came up earlier today. That's not something that he thinks is good strategy. It's something that he thinks will make people get angry and that it will be good because we owned the libs by shooting this guy in a wheelchair because he's a paraplegic, I think, live on a stream and think it's going to make the liberals scream. It's like, yeah, but is that? Is that the guiding principle of your whole philosophy? Because that doesn't prove that you're right. No. You can do a lot of things to make people mad. That doesn't mean you're correct. Yeah. Anyway.
00:53:25
Speaker 1: You know who is correct, Jason, about everything? It's our sponsors. They're always right. Listen to them, won't you? And we're back.
00:53:40
Speaker 2: So.
00:53:40
Speaker 1: That was a tangent. We've been going on a couple of them. But let's get back to the story of Ice Poseidon, Paul Danino. Things change for him. He's streaming. He's building a following. He's doing weird little in-game pranks. And shit changes in the summer of 2016 when Pokemon Go is released. Danino starts strapping a webcam onto himself and walking around and live streaming from the world as he's playing this game. And per Chin's article, This was when he pioneered one of his viewers' favorite forms of content, ineptly hitting on women on the street. The streams were a sensation. He said that he regularly pulled in 20,000 viewers. His fame began to bleed into the real world. And so he starts making serious money. By the time in 2018 Chin's talking to him, he's making like 60 grand a month doing this sort of stuff. And this is how he transitions. He still does some like sit down in his house streams, but he starts exclusively pretty much going out into the world and interacting with people, right? And Danino's leap into fame hinged entirely on taking that step from out from behind the keyboard into the real world where he could provoke real people in various ways.
00:54:49
Speaker 2: Right.
00:54:49
Speaker 1: And he wasn't just he's not purely doing nuisance streaming. Sometimes he's having pleasant interactions with people. But again, the thing that makes him first go viral for this is like badly hitting on women in public in a way that's probably embarrassing and awkward, I would imagine.
00:55:03
Speaker 2: Right. And also they didn't they didn't agree to be part of your show. No. That's the thing. Because occasionally you'll see somebody post something like that, and the comments will be like, oh, this is fake. She's in on it. It's like, no, I want her to be in on it.
00:55:16
Speaker 1: Yeah, I would prefer that.
00:55:18
Speaker 2: Yes, I want that to be a plant. I don't want to think that you interrupted somebody going about their day just so you could get donations from a bunch of creeps. Anyway.
00:55:27
Speaker 1: Yeah. Now, Paul's success came in spite of the fact that his content caused problems both for Twitch and for him. In December of 2016, he was banned for 45 days from Twitch after he gave out a girl's phone number on stream, and his followers started calling and harassing her. During his interview with Chin, Danino talked about this and said that he felt bad about having done that, but because their interview occurred while Danino was streaming, his viewers were able to comment too, and one of them just said, I remember how he didn't give a fuck about leaking the girl's number. Ha ha ha, Ice is such a good fucking liar.
00:55:59
Speaker 2: Also, pretty sure that's the first time I ever heard of Ice Poseidon was when that incident, because again, that band is trended on Twitter and everywhere else. Yep.
00:56:08
Speaker 1: And then you hear the name.
00:56:09
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:56:10
Speaker 1: However he felt, De Niro moved to Los Angeles after this, into an apartment complex that had already become famous as a streamer living space. I think one of the Pauls had lived there previously. He had to leave after six months because his fans kept calling the apartment office asking if he was there and then calling in bomb threats. He started to get swatted with incredible regularity, and this continued for several years. Chin writes, there was a time when he was swatted every day for a month. Things reached a crisis point when someone called in a bomb threat on a plane he had just boarded in Phoenix on his way to a video game convention, and several of the airport's runways had to be closed. And again, that's why I said when I'm like, part of the appeal is just like watching other people deal with fucked up shit that makes them unhappy, right? Like that is part of the content here.
00:56:54
Speaker 2: Okay, but I'm going to say, even at a very low level of fame, you're going to have a certain percentage of people who very quickly get bored of the thing you do. And they think, well, you know what would be fun? To see this person get shot by the police or something. To see this person have a breakdown. To see their life ruined. Because I've gotten tired of the act, so I want to see what they're like in distress. I want to see what they're like when they think their life is in danger. And again, these are People who are extremely unwell in many cases. Oh, yeah. But if you've got a large enough audience and those people feel like they have access to your personal life because you've been broadcasting your life.
00:57:34
Speaker 1: Every minute of it.
00:57:35
Speaker 2: Yeah. I'm not saying he deserved it. I'm just saying that I'm telling you firsthand. And again, if you're a woman, it's so much worse. The creeps you get, the DMs you get, you don't have to be very famous at all to have the weirdo who tries to get the cops to show up at your house or whatever. Yeah.
00:57:52
Speaker 1: And, you know, this is he's not just again, he's not a nuisance streamer at this point, although part of the appeal is other people causing nuisances for him. So this is, you know, we can see how this behavior maybe eventually leads to Chud the Builder, but it's still a pretty far cry from what Chud is doing. But you can see the seeds of the industry to come in ISIS successes and failures. The drama of watching him deal with SWAT attempts and other provocations was part of the appeal. And as you probably noticed, a number of his most famous moments came from his interactions with women, specifically negative interactions with women. Hitting on a lady without success or giving out another woman's phone number online. In time, he seems to have fallen in actual love or at least like with a woman named Caroline and they started dating. His fans decided she was a gold digger. They nicknamed her the leech per the New Yorker. Viewers thought that she was taking him away from the stream and using him to boost her own career. They bombarded the subreddit with hateful posts about Carolyn and Danino, approached the couple in real life to harass them, and staged a boycott that cut Danino's viewership and revenue by a third, demanding that he break up with her. Danino resisted for months. Carolyn made him happy, but eventually he relented. It just got too much, dude, he told me. It was just easier to break up with her than to deal with it. He showed me a chart of his earnings, which had doubled the week after he and Carolyn broke up. We'll talk more about Danino, Ice Poseidon in part two. two, but I want to break down what we're seeing at this stage. Ice's fans had trained him to respond to their demands about his personal life and shown him that by doing so he made money, potentially life-changing money. We're talking tens of thousands of dollars a month. Think about what you do for that kind of money. And think about what other people have done for a lot less, right? And you'll start to understand how we get to chud the builder. And I think that's where I want to end us for today, Jason. How are you feeling?
00:59:41
Speaker 2: I think that there's people who would say that all of the bank story and the stuff from their youth about being the class clown, maybe coming from a broken home, the thing you see over and over in these stories, that maybe some mental health issues, early medication. I think a lot of people say, well, every entertainer Every stand-up comic has that. But the difference is, a stand-up comic at some point had to go out to a club and interact with other comics and interact with the people on the club. They had to learn to be a person and to be a professional. It's different versus where you get to forever stay behind a keyboard and stay behind a monitor and a web camera. It's in terms of your development as a human being and trying to develop some sort of a, it is very different to where you've developed an act. You go out on stage, then we step off the stage.
01:00:33
Speaker 3: Yeah.
01:00:33
Speaker 2: Act is over and you're back to your own real life. It is in terms of if you were trying to build a machine that ruins a human brain and a human development, I can't think of a better one than this method of you're 19 years old. You suddenly are making millions of dollars a year. You're not seeing your fans face to face. It's all anonymous. And your money, you don't have like a job where you have a salary. You're making money hour by hour, day by day. And you can watch the line go up. When I did this, the line went up. And the feedback loop of how quickly you get captured by that audience, where everything about how you dress, how you act, how you talk is going to get dictated by watching what makes that line go up. It is an engine of madness.
01:01:23
Speaker 1: Yeah. I shudder to think about what my life would have been like if I had been born 10 years later, right? Because just based on the fact that I've succeeded at this, I probably would have tried to get involved in some similar chunk of the creator economy, because there wouldn't have been websites to write for, right? That doesn't exist anymore in the way that it did when I was coming up as a baby writer. And you're right. I I can't even imagine how different, not just like my writing would be, but I would be as a person if I hadn't spent 20 years working with a bunch of other people and having my work shaped by them and my personality shaped by them and my interactions with them, as opposed to the body of my work being a pure representation of my id and how I respond to piles of money.
01:02:11
Speaker 2: And you had editors, you had professionals working with it, you had people you had to go through. And again, we like to talk about gatekeepers, things like that. But in this case, especially if you're a young person, it's your first work. Those people are so important to your life, where if you just had direct access to an audience as a teenager, I don't... Because, I mean, I was... I was out of college before I got my first internet connection. My first blog was after I had a college degree. That's how old I am. Do people realize that's how old I am?
01:02:46
Speaker 1: I was reading that blog when I was 12, Jason.
01:02:49
Speaker 2: Yeah. And so now you've got somebody like me who I joined TikTok four years ago. It was August 2022 because my book sales were going down. It's like, oh, I'm getting old and my audience is all dying off of old age. So I'm going to go on TikTok to try to connect with the youth because I've heard there's people that review books on there. And if you're on there, then I was like, well, I can tell these people, hey, I got a new book out. You've probably seen me. Now you've seen my face because, hey, I wrote anonymously the first 10 years of my career. I didn't want people to know my name, what I looked like, where I lived, anything. So now fast forward four years, I'm coming up on 3 million followers across TikTok, Reels, Instagram, YouTube. And I get messages every day saying, well, how do you do it? How do you become an influencer? How do you become a TikTok influencer? It's like, no, you tell me how I cannot have to do this.
01:03:42
Speaker 1: Please tell me how to stop.
01:03:44
Speaker 2: Because I grew up wanting to be Stephen King. I didn't grow up wanting to be, you know, pick your TikTok influencer. It's sad that I can't name one, even though because I do this for a living. Yeah. You understand? Like, I didn't aspire to that because it didn't exist. And so now I'm an elderly man on this platform of children, and I have children asking, well, how do I do that? It's like, I don't know. I've been on the internet every single day since 1996, and this is all I know. And I went on here to try to get people to buy my books, and now they only watch the videos. Now I get recognized every time I leave the house, and none of them have read my books yet. They all love the videos. If I tell them that, now, were you around in the crack days? In the what?
01:04:29
Speaker 1: Yeah, the what magazine?
01:04:31
Speaker 2: You're not on here at all. Did you just lie? What are you talking about? There's no evidence of that. So anyway, I find myself trying to talk to these young people who are trying to ask me, well, yeah, this is my job. I want to be an influencer like you. It's like, no, you don't. I'm an elderly man. I've lived my life. I'm adjusted enough to know that these comments, that when people say the things they're saying, that that's just the way they interact with content sometimes. They don't even mean it a lot of times. It's like they said that thoughtlessly, but I had decades to adjust to that. Sure. I can't imagine if I was 16 getting the comments I get now, it would have been, it would have fried my brain.
01:05:11
Speaker 3: I mean, it's very similar to like, like, say, like a Justin Bieber getting famous at such an early age, that changes a person. But it's like, at least his thing, it's like he got famous because he has a very good singing voice. And an influencer, it's very different. It's very different.
01:05:31
Speaker 1: People saying you're good at this actual like long recognized and valued talent as opposed to like, you made me laugh because you made someone unhappy in the real world by like saying something to them.
01:05:45
Speaker 2: Or I just admire the way you dress. I admire the way you live your life. It's like, well, but that's nuts because Justin Bieber worked very hard to learn how to sing and dance and do all that stuff. But that was an act. When he walked away from the stage, it was over. The idea of just What you have for breakfast is part of the show.
01:06:04
Speaker 1: And forever.
01:06:06
Speaker 2: Yeah.
01:06:07
Speaker 1: It seems like hell, honestly. I don't understand how the streamers do it, right? That's probably enough for this episode. Check out Jason's books, all of Jason's books. The John Dyes at the End series is great. And Jason, you've got a more direct plug, I'm sure, at the end of this.
01:06:24
Speaker 2: Yeah, the new one, book five in that series is There Are No Giant Crabs in This Novel, A Novel of Giant Crabs. These books are like detective novels in that you can read, you can grab any random one. Each book is its own complete case or whatever. So if you find one at a garage sale or at the library, if they've only got book three, it's fine. It's not like Game of Thrones.
01:06:46
Speaker 1: Jason knows what he's doing.
01:06:48
Speaker 2: Yeah, you can just grab one.
01:06:50
Speaker 1: It's fine. One of my favorite and longest, I've been reading John Dice at the End stuff since you started, since it was like a serial that you would put out a story every Halloween. Yeah.
01:06:59
Speaker 2: It was backrooms before backrooms. It was a piece of internet lore. It was a viral blog post that got passed around in the late 90s and early 2000s and then became a film. That's the first thing that made me the level of fame that I have. It was that. And back then, when a piece of text that was 150,000 words long could go viral, like lots of people reading it, they would just read it all day. Yeah.
01:07:29
Speaker 1: Wild i'm so old yeah rip reading well read jason's books and uh yeah come back in part two and we will uh we will continue with our story about how we got from you know paul danino to chud the builder walking around with a handgun uh that that that and more in part two.
01:07:54
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