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

How did nuisance streaming and rage-baiting rise to dominate the internet? Robert traces the unsettling devolution and its consequences for guest Jason Pargin. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Robert Evans?

  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, 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.

• 0:27Speaker 01

  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, then I'm trying, I'm sitting here trying to launch a book and they're going to put that all over Tik Tok and reels because it's not, it's out of context. Like in this episode, if I say the phrase, I'm not saying I'm gonna say it. But if I say the phrase, I'm kind of glad that guy got shot. Don't, don't pull that. It's illegal for you to pull that out without including the context. I will take you to court.

• 1:11Robert Evans?

  There is one guy who you'll be glad gets shot in this episode. So, or at least I'm glad. Look, I'm willing to admit it. He shot himself accidentally.

• 1:22Speaker 02

  Jason, do you want to give us a plug for your latest book that's coming out up top?

• 1:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah, let's plug your book.

• 1:27Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:46Robert Evans?

  Yeah, at least in ebook form.

• 1:49Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:00Robert Evans?

  I've heard about that.

• 2:01Speaker 01

  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, again, don't take this out of context. I think I am the greatest victim of the wars happening all over the world. I realize I am one, one small part of all of this. But anyways, in theory, the book should be available by the time you listen to this and probably almost any format. And if you listen to this many years from now, may not be available again. Who can say?

• 2:33Robert Evans?

  Who can say? We're all potentially making lost media every time we create anything.

• 2:39Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, you said that I was your old boss at crack. There's no evidence of that.

• 2:42Robert Evans?

  Yeah, not anymore.

• 2:44Speaker 01

  All that stuff has been deleted from the site. There's no evidence either of us ever worked there.

• 2:48Robert Evans?

  Years of work just gone.

• 2:50Speaker 01

  Which is crazy, because I successfully predicted every single thing that has happened since then. And now there's no way to prove it.

• 2:58Robert Evans?

  That's right. That's right. Like, right down to a couple of weeks ago, when the Brewers won, won that latest game, you know, you got it all.

• 3:07Speaker 01

  Did a whole column about that.

• 3:08Robert Evans?

  People thought it was weird. You were writing a lot of articles about Milwaukee sports, but.

• 3:14Speaker 01

  Now who's the fool?

• 3:15Robert Evans?

  Now who's the fool?

• 3:16Speaker 01

  Still me.

• 3:17Speaker 02

  There is evidence. It's just, you know, protected by HIPAA because it's in your therapist's log.

• 3:27Speaker 03

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 3:31Robert Evans?

  Picture this, you're listening to the Sniffy's Cruising Confessions podcast, and suddenly, wait, what did they just say? Well, the questions raised in those show stopping moments will be answered in the all new bonus series, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, Bedside Manor. Hosts Gabe and Chris will dive deep on a specific topic covered in that week's Tuesday episode, from sexual health and HIV prevention to finding the right doctor. Listen to this special bonus series, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, Bedside Manor, now on the iHeart Radio app or wherever you get podcasts. Sponsored by Healthy Sexual from Gilead Sciences.

• 4:03Speaker 04

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 help make it happen fast. Rated A plus by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval. I'm Melissa Jelton, host of the What Happened to Her podcast. We're kicking off the season with the Sandra Birchmore story, a case the police wrote off as a suicide in a snowstorm. Her family never bought it, and the man they suspected wore a badge.

• 4:47Speaker 05

  You never know who that devil is because he's wearing a disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform.

• 4:52Speaker 04

  And you can get access to all episodes 100% ad free with an iHeart True Crime Plus subscription exclusively on Apple Podcasts, available only to iHeart True Crime Plus subscribers. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts, search for iHeart True Crime Plus and subscribe today.

• 5:13Speaker 06

  If anyone wanted to commit a murder, up here would be the greatest place in the world to hide the body. But no one will find it.

• 5:21Speaker 05

  He acted friendly. He talked friendly. He sounded friendly. They all knew that I did the scary boogie stuff. And I said, maybe she'll find

• 5:31Speaker 07

  out where this girl is. I saw him violent. Backhanded her a pow.

• 5:39Speaker 05

  Listen to The Devil's Quarry, Season Two, in the Bone Valley feed on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 5:53Speaker 06

  Malcolm Gladwell here. My new book, The American Way of Killing, investigates America's gun violence crisis. Why is the richest country in the world plagued by such lethal violence? Through a series of stories, interviews, and archival tape, I confront one of today's most urgent moral dilemmas and examine why the US has never quite understood its own problem, and why you can't fix what you refuse to see clearly. Get The American Way of Killing at pushkin.fm/audio-books.

• 6:32Robert Evans?

  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, these guys, they generally get called nuisance streamers, right? Or rage baiters?

• 6:45Speaker 01

  I heard about it on the news because it happened here where I live, in the great state of Tennessee. And, 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. I don't know. 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.

• 7:11Robert Evans?

  A what?

• 7:12Speaker 01

  Is this another cyberpunk thing that has come true? Is that what's happened?

• 7:17Robert Evans?

  That's actually where my script starts, Jason, because in 1992, Neal Stephenson published the novel Snow Crash, which in the years since has been credited with inventing, or at least predicting MMORPG, social media, cryptocurrency, almost every mainstay of our modern digital life, right? It really is a pretty remarkable book. Like, 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 as 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, Stephenson included, to illustrate the dangers

• 8:00Robert Evans?

  of digital addiction. Quote, "Instead of using laptops, they wear 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 getups 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.

• 8:26Speaker 01

  But see, that's 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.

• 8:42Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 8:42Speaker 01

  Because you think about like, when the telephone was invented, and then five minutes later, the prank caller pervert was like, wait a second, I can use this to call women.

• 8:52Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I can make people uncomfortable.

• 8:54Speaker 01

  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. And it's like, there's a type of person who had been waited their whole life. Like, here's a new kind of mischief I can do that technology, thank God.

• 9:22Robert Evans?

  Has enabled me to do. Yeah.

• 9:25Speaker 01

  I mean, this is what I like about AI, because there's actually no way that can be misused.

• 9:29Robert Evans?

  No, no. Thankfully, we finally invented a technology that has no downsides.

• 9:35Robert Evans?

  But yeah, it is, 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 like streaming live video from the show, but it was, it was a whole backpack, like their rigs were like 30 or 40 penn. This is just in like 2010 or something, right? It's not all that long ago. And yeah, now you can do it on your phone and it's red. 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

• 10:18Robert Evans?

  what you're doing, or to make them look like fools, or to make them scared or uncomfortable, right?

• 10:23Speaker 01

  Well, I, here's where I think it's really important to clarify, because a lot of them call themselves prank streamers. Well, 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 like a setup that would be fun for somebody.

• 10:46Robert Evans?

  Yeah, like it, and that's, that's actually what's most upsetting to me. Cause I think, and we'll get into this, this is fun for people, but not in a way that I think is, 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, as we'll discuss. But this, this kind of content, these guys, they, as we've said, they go by nuisance streamers, some people call them, and the, 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

• 11:30Robert Evans?

  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 24, 24 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's, says that like, he's shouting racial slurs at my family, right? He's shouting the N word at them over and over again. Uh, 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, 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

• 12:15Robert Evans?

  somewhat viral because Etherly was very obviously being an asshole in this situation. And he was fired from his contracting job. So he's, 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? Um, and the, 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

• 12:57Robert Evans?

  people, which he branded chimp outs, right? That's like the, the, like the thing his, he would like that his, 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 livestreamed 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

• 13:39Robert Evans?

  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? So charming fella, right? This is an interesting, uh, uh, career pivot for a former contractor, but he makes pretty good money doing it. Chud is mostly streaming on Kick, 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

• 14:21Robert Evans?

  stuff. It's like Gab or something like that, you know? Um, since his streams were long and largely boring, he monetized them primarily through a complex content ecosystem that, uh, Will Sommer kind of describes this very well in an article for The Bulwark. Etherly's rise has been fueled by clipping accounts on social media, which take the hours of streaming he produces and repackage his most incendiary moments into shorter videos, right? So he films these long videos and his fans, I think maybe people he, he pays clip out like the most offensive segments and put them up as 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.

• 15:06Speaker 01

  Okay. I have eight or nine thousand questions about this.

• 15:11Robert Evans?

  Sure. Yeah.

• 15:15Speaker 01

  We don't know how much money he makes off this, right? We don't know how big his audience is.

• 15:19Robert Evans?

  We have some evidence. He raised $65,000 before the event we're about to talk about the shooting. He raised like 65 grand in a crowdfunding campaign. And he also launched a meme coin, uh, dollar sign Chud, which, uh, I imagine made him some amount of money. I, it's, I don't know how to tell there, but he made, he was raising a good amount of money.

• 15:38Speaker 02

  I hate every word you just said.

• 15:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's not great. But he's making, not insignificant money.

• 15:45Speaker 01

  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. I kind of thought this is a quirky, kind of a weird subject. It's like, you know, not like people are dying here. But so far, this is the saddest thing I've ever heard in my entire life.

• 16:04Robert Evans?

  Really depressing. Yeah, it's super depressing.

• 16:07Speaker 01

  So much of this could only, like, I assume he had an NFT at some point, probably, maybe he didn't get on that.

• 16:12Robert Evans?

  He made it a little late for that, honestly, but.

• 16:14Speaker 01

  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, cause I don't know, like if he was on the show, uh, in fact, let's bring him on now.

• 16:34Robert Evans?

  Yeah, let's, let's, let's get Chud in from the waiting room.

• 16:37Speaker 01

  But if he was on the show, would he describe, would he describe this as like, well, it's a free speech thing? I'm, I'm, it's, I want to prove that speeches, because I feel like there's no, uh, place or time where saying certain things in somebody's face would not get you struck by that person. And I'm not saying I approve of that. I, 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, or hit you or do something. And if you call the police, they often will

• 17:17Speaker 01

  not sympathize with you for instigating that. Like they recognize, no, that's, I'm sorry, like that's, that's an expected outcome of what occurred here today.

• 17:28Robert Evans?

  Clearly being a giant asshole. Yeah.

• 17:31Speaker 01

  This is not a free speech issue. This is like living among other human beings. And he knows this, like, like him getting hit, that's the goal of the stream, right? Like that's, that's where he wants this to go.

• 17:43Robert Evans?

  It's unfortunately even darker than that, right? Cause he, he does, you were right. Like when he's, he showed up on Infowars and he's, he's showed up on like Gavin Mcginnis, the Proud Boys founders 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, I'm sure. Um, but the, the fact that there's violence, right? And the fact that he might provoke violence by doing this is part of the point, right? 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, right? Which then draws more people to his content and more attention to his work. And attention is money. It doesn't matter if

• 18:28Robert Evans?

  it's good or bad. It's just money, right? Um, and he's, 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.

• 18:54Speaker 01

  Okay. Um, I, yeah, 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, we're 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, I'm going to go, uh, listen to it. But in theory, this, this thing in society where you kind of have to. Acknowledge and denounce bad behavior, but also you're shining a light on it.

• 19:38Speaker 01

  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.

• 19:46Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 19:46Speaker 01

  Just saying a series of outrageous things every single day and then just dominating news coverage and then until suddenly you're president and like that's my, you know, my cyberpunk hypothetical, God knows it.

• 19:58Robert Evans?

  It would never happen, obviously, in the real world.

• 20:01Speaker 01

  But yeah, that's, that's the whole point is he knows that there's no, 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's, he's fine with that too, because he's eventually going to find somebody.

• 20:16Robert Evans?

  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, in some version of this. We've had, we have some streamers in Portland who will show up and 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.

• 20:47Speaker 01

  And I've heard of something called First Amendment auditors.

• 20:50Robert Evans?

  Auditors, yeah.

• 20:51Speaker 01

  It's like packs of, is that those people or are you talking about different people?

• 20:54Robert Evans?

  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, there are some people where I think there is more of a justification, right? 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, right? 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 in being that kind of guy now is a really diff, 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.

• 21:39Robert Evans?

  Like usually you would have had to like 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, 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'mma hit you and he hit me. He started wailing on me and even after I had to defend myself by shooting him, right? So that's what happens. Uh, he's, Fox is a black man. He's like yelling racial slurs.

• 22:24Robert Evans?

  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. Um, and he also shoots himself due to the fact that he's just generally not super competent with a gun. And yeah, uh, 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. Uh, 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, Chud, uh, for this episode.

• 23:07Robert Evans?

  He's not worth that much, much attention. What's a much worth discuss, 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, right? Cause 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?

• 23:52Robert Evans?

  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, 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 Schusler 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," right? 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, right?

• 24:36Robert Evans?

  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.

• 25:07Speaker 01

  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.

• 25:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 25:30Speaker 01

  That just you, 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 the 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 between you.

• 25:58Robert Evans?

  You just want to kill them.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  So the fact that the idea of rage baiting comes from road rage, not that different of a phenomenon.

• 26:06Robert Evans?

  No, makes complete sense. The, the most, 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? I would shoot that. Every time I've been in traffic, I would drop a nuke, right? Like on me, you know?

• 26:25Speaker 01

  I literally didn't know that presidents were not allowed to drive, but yeah, it makes, it makes.

• 26:28Robert Evans?

  No, they are not. Yeah. 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 your 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 crack, one of the first and most futile pieces of advice we would give new writers is like, don't necessarily read the comments, right? 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, right? Like that's just the thing that happens with a comment section. And, you know, I, I, we didn't know it at the time, but I think our struggle with and

• 27:11Robert Evans?

  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

• 27:51Robert Evans?

  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 were in an earlier age would say, well, that's a musician, right? That's a writer. Cause 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. Um, it's kind of, you know, 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

• 28:36Robert Evans?

  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?

• 28:49Speaker 01

  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, it, 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 the money.

• 29:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 29:14Speaker 01

  And then they, to have their name read on the streams, like, oh, whoever sent me a hundred and $50, thanks for the donation. And they're sending money to millionaires. And it's people like sending a significant chunk of their meager paycheck from Chipotle to a guy worth a hundred million dollars. And that's how it works because.

• 29:31Robert Evans?

  Baffling to me. Yeah.

• 29:33Speaker 01

  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 know, 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.

• 29:52Robert Evans?

  Yeah. It, it's, 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 taking shit on, talking shit on the youngs, 41% of a Morning Consult survey of 2,204 adults listed influencer as a dream career, right? Like this is. Pretty much the most commonly desired like life path for people right now.

• 30:38Robert Evans?

  The data is pretty consistent.

• 30:41Speaker 01

  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.

• 30:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 30:52Speaker 01

  But at least in my case, if they Googled me, it would come up like, well, he's an author.

• 30:57Robert Evans?

  And then he writes books. Yeah.

• 30:58Speaker 01

  He's on, he went on social media as part of his being an author. And then I, 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, 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 he tell people?

• 31:21Robert Evans?

  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.

• 31:47Speaker 04

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 help make it happen fast. Rated A plus by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five star trust pilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 32:16Speaker 02

  I'm Melissa Jelton and in my new podcast, What Happened to Her? I'm bringing you new stories and conversations every week. Stories about women whose deaths were too quickly ruled a suicide.

• 32:28Speaker 06

  She was starting to get worried and get scared for her safety.

• 32:35Speaker 02

  Stories of survival.

• 32:37Speaker 06

  The only difference between me and her frankly was a little bit of luck because by all rights I should be dead.

• 32:43Speaker 02

  Cases that everyone else called closed.

• 32:46Speaker 03

  They can't convict her, right? Like she has so much evidence.

• 32:50Speaker 02

  These stories all start in the same place with a woman failed by a system that didn't believe her, that didn't protect her, that didn't see her.

• 32:59Speaker 04

  No child should ever experience that. And we were babies.

• 33:02Speaker 05

  She did all of these brave things and came out and spoke about it and he got a year. You never know who that devil is because he's wearing a disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform.

• 33:14Speaker 02

  Listen to What Happened to Her on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 33:22Speaker 01

  You broke me. You do not deserve happiness.

• 33:25Speaker 02

  I'm Andrea Gunning. On this season of Betrayal, we meet Carl Bryant. Carl thought he was living a normal, drama-free life until the messages started.

• 33:36Speaker 01

  You will have hell to pay.

• 33:38Speaker 02

  For nine months, someone infiltrated every aspect of Carl's life, threatening to ruin him.

• 33:46Speaker 05

  Cyber stalking, swatting, extortion, impersonation.

• 33:50Speaker 02

  And then the text threats escalated.

• 33:54Speaker 01

  Someone's not going to make it out of this alive.

• 33:57Speaker 05

  Yes, department! It's playing out in real life, not just on the phone.

• 34:03Speaker 02

  Every piece of evidence pointed to one man, but every piece of evidence was a lie.

• 34:10Speaker 01

  He was not going to stop unless we stopped him.

• 34:14Speaker 02

  Listen to Betrayal, season six, on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 34:22Speaker 01

  This is Daryl Bell.

• 34:23Speaker 06

  And I'm Kadim Hardison.

• 34:24Speaker 01

  And together, we're the voices behind the newest podcast on the Black Effect Podcast Network, A Different Worldview with Daryl and Kadim. Each Thursday, we're rewatching an episode of the show that changed our lives and so many others, A Different World.

• 34:39Speaker 06

  We're sharing never before heard stories from behind the scenes and sitting down with other stars from the show to hear their unique perspectives.

• 34:46Speaker 01

  We're also discussing the arts world and pop culture headlines with plenty of laughs along the way.

• 34:52Speaker 06

  We did a movie called School Days and me being a trained actor. You got, you get the first shot, so I took the trained actor. Go ahead. And you being the dude that said, hey Spike on the street, you saw him and they're coming out of the bathroom or something and said, hey Spike. Coming out in the bathroom. I might have made that up. So don't miss the start of something great.

• 35:12Speaker 01

  Listen to A Different Worldview with Daryl and Kadim every Thursday from the Black Effect Podcast Network, on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 35:24Speaker 03

  They shared the same name, the same home, the same DNA, the same blood. But behind closed doors, blood isn't always thicker than water and family loyalty can turn deadly. From shocking betrayals to carefully planned murders, The Black Effect's new original podcast series, Bloodline Crimes, hosted by me, Morgan Wood, explores the darkest and bizarre cases where family became the most dangerous threat of all. Because sometimes the person you should fear most is not a stranger, but rather someone sitting at the dinner table with you. Real cases, real families, real killers.

• 36:08Speaker 03

  This is Bloodline Crimes. Listen to The Black Effect's Bloodline Crimes every Thursday, starting October 8th, from the Black Effect Podcast Network, on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 36:29Robert Evans?

  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. But these episodes aren't about that separate but related issue. We might find this like, and I do want to note, because 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.

• 37:10Robert Evans?

  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 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.

• 37:36Speaker 01

  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, that job sucks. He, he seems to hate it. So if you're, if the, you grow up and the, the people you interact with are on a screen and there are other influencers, yeah, it, it looks like something you could do. Where if I was a kid, you know, I, I would see, you know, 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.

• 38:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 38:11Speaker 01

  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. 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 way, 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? Like all of the body image stuff where the thing that they're doing is just being themselves.

• 38:52Speaker 01

  So if I can't do that, then it's not, it's not because my guitar playing was bad. It's because I am not good enough.

• 38:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 39:00Speaker 01

  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, my whole deal. Where if people don't buy my book, it's like, well, who cares? That's just a thing I wrote.

• 39:17Robert Evans?

  And I think, you know, on 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, of nuisance streaming.

• 39:48Robert Evans?

  So I still have some more 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 could say like Ben Shapiro and 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 like 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 there's, you can see like, there's some deeply buried things that people respond to.

• 40:32Robert Evans?

  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.

• 40:53Speaker 01

  Okay, but also there's a mechanism here where by far the best promotion for one of these streamers, the best way to break away, 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?

• 41:09Robert Evans?

  Yeah, we'll be talking about that.

• 41:11Speaker 01

  Thing in Japan. Okay.

• 41:12Robert Evans?

  The thing in Japan. Yeah.

• 41:14Speaker 01

  But, but the, that's the first time, the first time I heard of the streamer Dr. Disrespect was because he had been banned from Twitch for some sort of conduct.

• 41:22Robert Evans?

  That's what gets you attention.

• 41:23Speaker 01

  The first time I've heard the name, it's PewDiePie. It was, he shouted racial slur in a stream. First time I heard of this guy and then you look it up, it's like, oh yeah, he's the most famous person in the world. He has 300 million followers and makes, it's like, oh, so.

• 41:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm not saying they intentionally necessarily did did it as publicity, but it always helps them.

• 41:46Robert Evans?

  It always helps.

• 41:47Speaker 01

  Even if they get banned for a while, it 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's going to come to the conclusion. Well, let's just make that happen.

• 42:00Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. And that, I mean, that that is where we're, you know, heading to, right? And I think the, 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, the stuff like Chud the Builder starts with a woman named Jennifer Ringley. And Jennifer's 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?

• 42:33Speaker 01

  Jenny Cam.

• 42:34Robert Evans?

  Jenny Cam. Yeah. Okay. So you you caught this back during the, back at the time.

• 42:38Speaker 01

  When it was happening live. I was there when she would go live. Yeah.

• 42:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. And it was, this was like a major, you know, moment. She 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, like 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

• 43:26Robert Evans?

  her laundry or brushing her teeth, this slideshow of the mundane was utterly compelling. Four million people, than a greater, 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. You know, 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. Krotowski 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

• 44:05Robert Evans?

  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 much she would today. If today you were capable of drawing four million live viewers a day, you would be worth tens of millions of dollars. Right? Those are massive numbers today.

• 44:25Speaker 01

  Uh, let's put it this way. One of the ways that she got paid is she, the fans would mail her cash in envelopes.

• 44:30Robert Evans?

  Good Lord. Yeah. So it was really, really.

• 44:33Speaker 01

  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. Like, yeah, because it would crash if she changed clothes in front of the camera. It would, it would freeze up and die because too many people would would jump on because there are 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. She.

• 44:58Robert Evans?

  No, no. She kind of proves the concept and proves 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

• 45:40Robert Evans?

  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? Um, we'll talk a little bit more about that. That's, that's, that's certainly 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.

• 46:03Speaker 01

  I mean, I very quickly, I will say that when, 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.

• 46:18Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 46:19Speaker 01

  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 caricatures. 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, it's like, okay, this is like, like, let's wait for the real primaries to start, because right now, the 4chaners 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, he's the troll meme candidate and nothing else. And then suddenly, he's president.

• 47:01Robert Evans?

  Suddenly, he's the president twice. Yeah. And it's, it's weird to me because like, as a kid, I was like a class clown. I got in trouble for being like, saying things in school that were like 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, 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 like, 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

• 47:45Robert Evans?

  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, too. 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 timeframe.

• 48:29Speaker 01

  Okay, I'm sorry. Um, who was sending the, who was sending the money for what? Was she saying she needed to raise it for her legal?

• 48:39Robert Evans?

  Legal defense.

• 48:40Speaker 01

  Because it was like a disorderly conduct charge. What's the, there's not going to be a.

• 48:43Robert Evans?

  I think the attitude was the wokes are coming for me. They've destroyed my ability to like make a living, you know? Yeah. It, it, 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 she got, but that's, 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

• 49:25Robert Evans?

  makes me think this is one thing that made him recognize there's money in doing this sort of shit.

• 49:31Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, because she, 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.

• 49:44Robert Evans?

  Certainly some people have too much money.

• 49:45Speaker 01

  Because I'm seeing what you're spending it on.

• 49:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 49:48Speaker 01

  That could, 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.

• 49:56Robert Evans?

  Like, I would, I would, yeah, like, that money would be better spent on literally anything, like lead based gasoline. I'd rather have it go to.

• 50:05Speaker 01

  Drugs.

• 50:06Robert Evans?

  Drugs, of course.

• 50:07Speaker 01

  At least crack will get you high.

• 50:09Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. At least crack has value. Yeah.

• 50:13Speaker 01

  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.

• 50:19Robert Evans?

  Now, Jason, I've always been pro crack. I'm anti cocaine.

• 50:22Speaker 01

  Buying crack because it's great. Don't pull that out of context. That's against the law. I will take you to court.

• 50:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I won't. 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 Shin. Twitch offered a number of ways to monetize a live stream 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 descriptions and tips. This is what you're talking about, right? It's very baffling to the olds, because like, this isn't how

• 51:12Robert Evans?

  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 livestreamer 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 DiNino. He was 23 in 2018. And then 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,

• 51:56Robert Evans?

  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 DiNino 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? 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

• 52:39Robert Evans?

  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 talked, covered them on crack 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 of the article is a little vague.

• 53:03Speaker 01

  Oh, so you're saying it didn't cure him?

• 53:05Robert Evans?

  It's, it's

• 53:05Speaker 01

  Of his maladaptive behaviors?

• 53:08Robert Evans?

  No. He was apparent, 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, DiNino got into RuneScape, an MMORPG that's, 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 lifespan. And he soon got super addictive, right? Chin's article claims that he played it all hours, waking up at 5:00 AM to play before school and gaming

• 53:52Robert Evans?

  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 DiNino found that in the game, he could do things for attention without real life consequences. Quote, "In 2013, DiNino 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. DiNino 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."

• 54:37Robert Evans?

  So again, you see a similarity between like the, this kid's trajectory and Chud's where, you know, they're, they're, they're not fitting in in regular society, work doesn't work out for them and they realize they start getting rewarded for the, 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 slur king 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 DiNino's social life, he started monetizing his time gaming and he did not even consider separating his real and personal life from his performances.

• 55:21Robert Evans?

  He would talk to his biggest fans on the phone and even game with them in real time. His fanbase 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 fanbase 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 fanbases like this, right?

• 55:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:50Robert Evans?

  Who can, can respond kind of aggressively.

• 55:53Speaker 01

  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.

• 56:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 56:03Speaker 01

  Like the whole, it's like, it's like Destiny reacts to Asmongold reacts to Hassan 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, it's a form of cross-promotion and some of it is very clearly like world, like wrestling style beef.

• 56:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah, kayfabe, basically.

• 56:27Speaker 01

  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.

• 56:37Speaker 02

  And that, 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, they're doing YouTuber boxing, wrestling and boxing and, you know, we're going to get to them later.

• 56:50Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah, that's part of the story, too.

• 56:51Speaker 02

  The Paul brothers as well, using, Logan Paul is a WWE superstar today. And it's like, but they're using the same exact skills they learned from this, there.

• 57:04Robert Evans?

  It's also, it's interesting, part of the, like, all I know about Asmongold is that he's like a filthy goblin whose room is always like disgusting, right? Like, because I just see shit like that clipped all over social media.

• 57:16Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 57:16Robert Evans?

  Like, and 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 MC 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 because it's funny to them, right? And it distracts them from their own lives. And this movie from the 60s really gets today better than almost any other media I've seen.

• 58:01Speaker 01

  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, we're 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.

• 58:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 58:32Speaker 01

  But they are the sadists who see an opportunity because they want this person to like 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

• 58:53Robert Evans?

  And, 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, 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?

• 59:35Speaker 02

  I mean.

• 59:36Robert Evans?

  Is this, this desire for conflict.

• 59:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, I'm just gonna, I just got a news alert that, you know, directly relates to it, that's from MS, 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."

• 59:54Robert Evans?

  Great.

• 59:54Speaker 02

  Great.

• 59:55Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 59:55Speaker 02

  That's where every, everything is interconnected in the most horrifying way.

• 1:00:01Speaker 01

  Well, no, but like the director of FBI, Cash Patel, has merch, like streamer merch.

• 1:00:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:06Speaker 01

  He has like custom Nikes and, and like, he has a logo.

• 1:00:10Speaker 02

  He, in a way, is a nuisance streamer, in my opinion.

• 1:00:14Robert Evans?

  That's, that's, I mean, that's a lot of what like Pete Hegseth is doing too, right?

• 1:00:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:19Robert Evans?

  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, right?

• 1:00:28Speaker 01

  Execution. He wants to livestream.

• 1:00:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:29Speaker 01

  That just came up earlier today. Like, like, that's, that's not something that he thinks is good strategy. It's something that he thinks will make people get angry and, 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. And it's like, yeah, but is that, is that the guiding principle of your whole philosophy? Is he just make, because that doesn't prove that you're right.

• 1:00:57Robert Evans?

  No.

• 1:00:57Speaker 01

  You can do a lot of things to make people mad. That doesn't, doesn't mean you're correct.

• 1:01:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:02Speaker 01

  Anyway.

• 1:01:03Robert Evans?

  But you know who is correct, Jason? About everything is our sponsors. They're always right. Listen to them, won't you?

• 1:01:12Speaker 04

  Cash Flow Crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds up to $200,000 right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval. I'm Melissa Jelton, and in my new podcast, What Happened to Her, I'm bringing you new stories and conversations every week. Stories about women whose deaths were too quickly ruled a suicide.

• 1:01:54Speaker 02

  She was starting to get worried and get scared for her safety. Stories of survival. The only difference between me and her, frankly, was a little bit of luck.

• 1:02:07Speaker 04

  Because by all rights, I should be dead. Cases that everyone else called closed. They can't convict her, right? Like, she has so much evidence. These stories all start in the same place, with a woman failed by a system that didn't believe her, that didn't protect her, that didn't see her. No child should ever experience that. And we were babies. She did all of these brave things and came out and spoke about it, and he got a year.

• 1:02:34Speaker 05

  You never know who that devil is because he's wearing disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform.

• 1:02:40Speaker 04

  Listen to What Happened to Her on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You broke me. You do not deserve happiness. I'm Andrea Gunning. On this season of Betrayal, we meet Carl Bryant. Carl thought he was living a normal, drama-free life, until the messages started. You will have hell to pay. For nine months, someone infiltrated every aspect of Carl's life, threatening to ruin him. Cyber stalking, swatting, extortion, impersonation. And then the text threats escalated. Someone's not gonna make it out of this alive. Yes, department!

• 1:03:24Speaker 04

  It's playing out in real life, not just on the phone. Every piece of evidence pointed to one man. But every piece of evidence was a lie. He was not going to stop unless we stopped him.

• 1:03:40Speaker 04

  Listen to Betrayal, Season Six, on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:03:47Speaker 03

  They shared the same name, the same home, the same DNA, the same blood. But behind closed doors, blood isn't always thicker than water, and family loyalty can turn deadly. From shocking betrayals to carefully planned murders, The Black Effect's new original podcast series, Bloodline Crimes, hosted by me, Morgan Wood, explores the darkest and bizarre cases where family became the most dangerous threat of all. Because sometimes the person you should fear most is not a stranger, but rather someone sitting at the dinner table with you. Real

• 1:04:26Speaker 03

  cases, real families, real killers. This is Bloodline Crimes. Listen to The Black Effect's Bloodline Crimes every Thursday, starting October 8, from the Black Effect Podcast Network, on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:04:47Speaker 01

  This is Daryl Bell.

• 1:04:49Speaker 03

  And I'm Kadim Harson.

• 1:04:50Speaker 01

  And together, we're the voices behind the newest podcast on the Black Effect Podcast Network, A Different Worldview with Daryl and Kadim. Each Thursday, we're rewatching an episode of the show that changed our lives, and so many others. A Different World.

• 1:05:05Speaker 06

  We're sharing never-before-heard stories from behind the scenes, and sitting down with other stars from the show to hear their unique perspectives.

• 1:05:12Speaker 01

  We're also discussing the arts world and pop culture headlines with plenty of laughs along the way.

• 1:05:18Speaker 06

  We did a movie called School Days, and me being- A trained actor. You got, you get the first shot, so I took the trained actor. Go ahead. And you being the dude that said, "Hey, Spike, on the street, you saw him coming out of the bathroom or something," and said, "Hey, Spike, pull me in." Coming out of the bathroom. I might have made that up.

• 1:05:36Speaker 07

  So don't miss the start of something great.

• 1:05:38Speaker 01

  Listen to A Different Worldview with Daryl and Kadim every Thursday from the Black Effect Podcast Network, on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:05:54Robert Evans?

  And we're back. So, that was a tangent. We've been going on a couple of them. But I, let's get back to the story of Ice Poseidon, Paul DeNino. Things changed for him. You know, he's streaming, he's building a following, he's doing like weird little in-game pranks, and shit changes in the summer of 2016, when Pokemon Go is released. Oh, yeah. DeNino, DeNino starts strapping a webcam onto himself, carrying his, and like, walking around and live-streaming from the world as he's playing this game, right? 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."

• 1:06:36Robert Evans?

  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, 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 DeNino'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, right? 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, right?

• 1:07:19Speaker 01

  And also, they didn't, they didn't agree to be part of your show.

• 1:07:22Robert Evans?

  No.

• 1:07:23Speaker 01

  That's, that's the thing. Because occasionally, you'll see somebody post something like that, and the comments will be, like, "Oh, this is fake." You know, she's in on it. It's like, no, I want her to be in on it. I-

• 1:07:32Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I would prefer that.

• 1:07:33Speaker 01

  Yes, I want that to be a plant. I don't want to think that you interrupted somebody going about their day-

• 1:07:39Robert Evans?

  Because that's shitty.

• 1:07:39Speaker 01

  -just so you can get donations from a bunch of creeps, and, anyway.

• 1:07:43Robert Evans?

  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, DeNino talked about this and said that he felt bad about having done that. But because their interview occurred while DeNino 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."

• 1:08:15Speaker 01

  Also, pretty sure that's the first time I ever heard of Ice Poseidon, was that, when that incident, because again, that ban trended on Twitter and everywhere else.

• 1:08:23Robert Evans?

  Yep. And then you hear the name, yeah. However he felt, DeNino 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. Yeah. He had to leave after six months because his fans kept calling the apartment office, asking he was, 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,

• 1:09:08Robert Evans?

  that is part of the content here, and-

• 1:09:10Speaker 01

  Okay, but I'm gonna say, as, even at a very low level of fame, you're gonna have a certain percentage of people who very quickly get bored of the thing you do-

• 1:09:20Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:09:20Speaker 01

  And they think, well, you know what would be fun? To see this person get shot by the police, or, or something. To see this person have a breakdown, to see their life-

• 1:09:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:29Speaker 01

  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. So, you know, and again, these are people who are extremely unwell, in many cases.

• 1:09:41Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:09:42Speaker 01

  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-

• 1:09:49Robert Evans?

  Every minute of it. Yeah.

• 1:09:52Speaker 01

  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 got the DMs, you got, 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.

• 1:10:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And it, 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 Ice's successes and failures. The drama of watching him deal with SWAT attempts and other provocations was part of the appeal. And as you've 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

• 1:10:50Robert Evans?

  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 Caroline and DeNino, approached the couple in real life to harass them, and staged a boycott that cut DeNino's viewership and revenue by a third, demanding that he break up with her. DeNino resisted for months. Caroline 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 Caroline broke up. We'll talk more about DeNino, Ice Poseidon, in part 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

• 1:11:31Robert Evans?

  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?

• 1:11:56Speaker 01

  I think that there's people who would say that all of the backstory and the stuff from their youth about being the class clown, maybe having new, 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 will 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 and to be, it's different versus where you get to forever stay behind a keyboard and stay behind a monitor and

• 1:12:36Speaker 01

  a webcam. 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, the 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 the human's 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, you're not seeing your fans face to face. It's all, it's all anonymous and you're, and your money, you don't have like a job where you have a salary. You're making money hour by hour, day by

• 1:13:20Speaker 01

  day, and you can see, 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 a, an engine of madness.

• 1:13:38Robert Evans?

  Yeah. It, I, I shudder to think about like what my life would have been like if I'd been born like 10 years later, right? Because I just based on the fact that I've, I've succeeded at this, I probably, I probably would have tried to get involved in some, 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, like 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

• 1:14:22Robert Evans?

  a pure representation of my id and how I respond to piles of money.

• 1:14:26Speaker 01

  And you had editors, you had professionals working with it. You had people you had to go through. And again, we, 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, like those people are so important to your life, where if you just had direct access to an audience as a teenager, uh, I don't, cause I, I mean, I was, you know, I was out of college before I got my first internet connection. Well, you know, 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?

• 1:15:01Robert Evans?

  I was reading that blog when I was 12, Jason.

• 1:15:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so now I'm, you've got somebody like me who I joined TikTok, you know, four years ago, it was August 2022, because I, it's like my book sales were going down. It's like, oh, I'm getting old and my audiences are all dying off of old age. So I'm going to go on TikTok to try to connect with the youths, 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 have, I'm coming up on 3 million followers across TikTok reels,

• 1:15:47Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:15:58Robert Evans?

  Please tell me how to stop.

• 1:15:59Speaker 01

  Because I grew up wanting to be Stephen King. I didn't grow up wanting to be, you know, pick your, 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, yeah, how do you, how do I do that? It's like, I don't, 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, to get people to buy my books. And now they just, they only watch the videos. Now I get recognized every time I leave the house and none of them have read my books. They, they all love the videos. They don't, if I tell them that, well, now were you around in the crack days? Like, in the what?

• 1:16:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah, the what magazine?

• 1:16:46Speaker 01

  It doesn't, 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'm now, I, I find myself trying to talk to these young people who are trying to ask me like, well, how, like, yeah, this is my job. I want to be an influencer like you. It's like, no, you don't. I, I can, I'm, I'm an elderly man. I've lived my life. I, I'm adjusted enough to know that, 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, they said that thoughtlessly, but I, I had decades to adjust to that.

• 1:17:20Robert Evans?

  Sure.

• 1:17:20Speaker 01

  I can't imagine if I was 16, getting the comments I get now, it would have been, it would have fried my brain.

• 1:17:26Speaker 02

  I mean, it's very similar to like, like, say, like a Justin Bieber getting famous at such an early age, that, 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, and, and an influencer, it's very different. It's very different.

• 1:17:46Robert Evans?

  People saying you're good at this actual, like, long-recognized and valued talent, as opposed to like, I, like, you made me laugh because you made someone unhappy in the real world, by like, saying something to them.

• 1:17:59Speaker 01

  Or I just admire the way you, 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.

• 1:18:19Robert Evans?

  It's, and forever. Yeah. It seems like hell, honestly. I don't understand how the streamers do it, right? Like, that's probably enough for this episode. Check out Jason's books, all of Jason's books. The John Dies at the End series is great. And Jason, you, you've got a more direct plug, I'm sure, at the end of this.

• 1:18:38Speaker 01

  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. They're not, it's not like Game of Thrones.

• 1:19:01Robert Evans?

  Jason knows what he's doing.

• 1:19:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. You just, you can just grab one. Yeah. It's fine.

• 1:19:06Robert Evans?

  One of my favorite and longest, I've been reading John Dies at the End stuff since you started, since it was like a serial that you would put out a story every Halloween.

• 1:19:14Speaker 01

  It was, 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, then became a film. It became, it was a, that's the first thing that like made me, the level of fame that I have. It was, it was that. And back, 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.

• 1:19:43Speaker 02

  Wild.

• 1:19:45Speaker 01

  I'm so old.

• 1:19:46Robert Evans?

  Yeah. R I P. 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 D'Onino to Chud the Builder walking around with a handgun. Uh, that, that, that and more in part two.

• 1:20:09Speaker 02

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Full video episodes of Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit Remind Me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips and our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, youtube.com/behindthebastards. We love about 40% of you, statistically speaking.

• 1:20:44Speaker 04

  I'm Melissa Jelton, host of the What Happened to Her podcast. We're kicking off the season with the Sandra Birchmore story, a case the police wrote off as a suicide in a snowstorm. Her family never bought it, and the man they suspected wore a badge.

• 1:20:58Speaker 05

  You never know who that devil is because he's wearing a disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform.

• 1:21:04Speaker 04

  And you can get access to all episodes 100% ad-free with an iHeart True Crime Plus subscription exclusively on Apple Podcasts, available only to iHeart True Crime Plus subscribers. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts, search for iHeart True Crime Plus and subscribe today.

• 1:21:25Speaker 06

  If anyone wanted to commit a murder, up here would be the greatest place in the world to hide the body. But soon they'll find it. He acted friendly. He talked friendly. He sounded friendly. They all knew that I did the scary boogie stuff. And they said, maybe she'll find out where this girl is.

• 1:21:45Speaker 07

  I saw him violent. Backhanded her. Pow!

• 1:21:51Speaker 01

  Listen to The Devil's Quarry, Season Two, in the Bone Valley feed on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:22:05Speaker 01

  Malcolm Gladwell here. My new book, The American Way of Killing, investigates America's gun violence crisis. Why is the richest country in the world plagued by such lethal violence? Through a series of stories, interviews, and archival tape, I confront one of today's most urgent moral dilemmas and examine why the US has never quite understood its own problem and why you can't fix what you refuse to see clearly. Get The American Way of Killing at pushkin.fm/audio-books.

• 1:22:39Speaker 03

  Is there an epidemic against literature, more specifically, Black literature? I'm Jacquez Peace Thomas, and on this season of the Black Lit Podcast, we're outside asking why. They don't want a whole bunch of little elevators, Malcolm X's and Martin Luther King's running around. And when you look at a lot of different cultures, they're like, you need to know where you came from. And considering this is Black Reading Month, the only real question is, what are you reading next? Listen to Black Lit from the Black Effect Podcast Network on our iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:23:11Speaker 02

  In 1986, a man named Scott Macklem was killed in broad daylight. Police quickly found their suspect. Prosecutors convicted him. But now, almost 40 years later, I'm reexamining this case. I really didn't believe any of it was real. And I was like, well, they're, they're going to figure out this is not me. They're, they're going to do their police job. Has the wrong man been in prison this whole time? Listen to Examine: The Backfire Effect on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:23:49Speaker 03

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.