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

Robert explains how live streamers went from pranks, to acts of insane violence and public cruelty, and eventually turned them into a lucrative industry. 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. This is part two of our episodes on the rise of the nuisance streamer. Welcome back, Jason Pargian. Thank you so much for coming back on the show. You've got a new book in the John Dies at the End series out. So let's, let's plug that up at the top and then we'll get back into it.

• 0:22Speaker 01

  Yes, book five in the John Dies at the End series is called, There Are No Giant Crabs in This Novel, A Novel of Giant Crabs. If you're unfamiliar with the series, I feel like the title conveys the tone pretty well. They are extremely profane and graphic, should be available in almost any format, although I, at the time we're recording this, there's word that there are book shortages because, you know, paper shortages and because America's just so feverish about reading, we just can't get enough. We're buying up all the books. So it's a crisis that you see this every day on the news. Americans reading too much.

• 1:01Robert Evans?

  Mm hmm. That's the main problem with this country is literacy.

• 1:05Speaker 01

  But I suggested this topic because if I was going to come on here and promote something along with my lighthearted horror action novels, I didn't want it to be covering a genocide. But part one of this episode, kind of a bummer, gonna be frank.

• 1:20Robert Evans?

  It's a real bummer. It's gotta get worse.

• 1:27Speaker 02

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• 2:37Robert Evans?

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• 3:38Speaker 05

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• 4:25Speaker 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.

• 4:40Speaker 06

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

• 4:45Speaker 04

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• 5:07Robert Evans?

  So I want to peel back a little bit and talk about some other things that are kind of at the foundation of this, this broad kind of amorphous industry of nuisance and rage baiting that we've been sort of grappling with in this week. You've probably heard the term attention economy. I think people are generally have heard the phrase. It was coined by a psychologist and economist named Herbert Simon in 1971. Decades before the internet was a thing regular people knew or cared about, Simon, undoubtedly looking at the mass media of his day, wrote about how the discrepancy between the amount of information available to modern consumers and the biological limitations of our ability to like process that information

• 5:49Robert Evans?

  was going to lead to some conflicts, right? He proposed it would lead to a wealth of information, but a poverty of attention, right? And that that would make the ability to draw and command attention incredibly valuable. That's what an attention economy is. It's the only economy pretty much that I've ever worked at, right? Like at least in my career as a creative, you know? If you were a writer, if you're a musician, if you make TV or movies, you are in some way, or if you're a streamer, you are in some way participating in the attention economy, right? All of our ability to make money relies on you listening to this podcast, you reading Jason's books, you watching the movie Digger, which you did not. But like it is all attention. That's like the most monetizable thing in

• 6:33Robert Evans?

  the world. In an article for Forbes, Kurt Steinhurst turned me on to a conference presentation by a guy named Michael Goldhaber. Goldhaber is a former theoretical physicist turned internet Cassandra, and in the 1990s, he put together a paper called The Attention Economy and the Net. And in it, he described online spaces as the places where, quote, "we will increasingly live our lives." What counts most is what is most scarce now, namely attention. The attention economy brings with it its own kind of wealth, its own class divisions, stars versus fans, and its own forms of property, all of which make it incompatible with the industrial money market-based economy it bids fair to replace. Success will come to those who best accommodate to this new reality. He's saying this in the 90s. It's definitely

• 7:16Robert Evans?

  like one of the most prescient things anyone ever said about the internet, that like that is the new haves and haves nots is attention-based.

• 7:24Speaker 01

  And people my age have been hearing some version of this going back to the TV era. People forget that, like that opening credit sequence of The Simpsons, the joke is that they're all leaving their daily life and they're all rushing, rushing, rushing to get somewhere. And then the punchline is they're rushing to get in front of the TV.

• 7:42Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 7:43Speaker 01

  They're rushing, like back in 1987, that can't be hell.

• 7:47Robert Evans?

  88, something like that. Yeah.

• 7:49Speaker 01

  Like that, everybody knew what that joke was because all of the sitcoms from the 70s, 80s were all like referencing this, this box rots your brain because of this fundamental idea that they're now competing for your eyeballs on this stupid box. And the stuff that is meaningful information and news now is having to compete with entertainment. So now the news has to be more entertaining. And now you can't discern the difference between information that's important, which is like from an evolutionary point of view, is this actually a threat, something I need to know about or whatever?

• 8:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 8:26Speaker 01

  Versus something that is merely weird or novel, something that catches your eye because it's, it's, so now everything becomes just a string of distractions rather than the things you actually need to know about.

• 8:37Robert Evans?

  And it also, you get this situation where whose opinion on the climate matters more? A climate scientist who is incredibly well-educated and has done a tremendous amount of work and knows a great deal about his, his, his field, but has no ability to like communicate that to a mass audience? Or some guy who just has an opinion, but is really good at getting a couple hundred thousand people to like watch him on Twitch, right? Or like listen to him on a podcast? It's the dude with the podcast is more influential in like climate policy. That's how the world works today. Or health policy. Look at RFK Jr., right? Like this is, Goldhaber described attention in the future of the internet as a kind of enduring wealth, perhaps the most enduring kind of wealth in the brave new

• 9:21Robert Evans?

  world the internet would create. I don't really think there's an argument about whether or not he was correct anymore. One of the best pieces of evidence for this would be the fact that the current wealthiest man on the planet, Elon Musk, is the wealthiest man on the planet in large part because of his ability to draw and dominate our attention. This is not just like, because I don't like Elon Musk, me having an opinion. Look at the actual money that Tesla or SpaceX or X has actually made. And in most cases, his companies do not make a profit. His wealth is a product of stock valuation and the valuations of his stocks are tied directly to his ability to convince people his ventures will be worth tremendous amounts of money in the future. Don't just take my word for it. Graham Cole of Neo Mom Labs recently published an analysis of what they call the Musk effect, tracking

• 10:04Robert Evans?

  the value of his companies over the last 15 years. They noted that after Tesla's IPO, quote, "Growth was slow, but Tesla did have a unique selling point. It made electric cars sexy and it had a frontman who got them into the headlines. Tesla wouldn't spend a penny on traditional advertising until 2023, when it was already a half a trillion dollar company." Like this is not just me not liking Elon Musk. He is rich because of his ability to command attention, right? Like that is the main skill that he has, really.

• 10:33Speaker 01

  And this is the thing that when people try to explain what Donald Trump did for a living before he was a reality show star, and it's like, well, he's a real estate developer. It's like, yeah, but what is that? What is that? It's like

• 10:45Robert Evans?

  Kind of a business guy.

• 10:47Speaker 01

  Well, but honestly, it's like, well, why does he put his name on everything? Why does he wear a Halloween costume? Why does he have like, like crazy hair? Like, he's making himself very distinct and memorable. Why does he have it? Why does he brand everything with his name? Because that was his business was the attention. Everybody knew who he was. Everybody in New York knew who he was on the 80s. He was on TV all the time. He showed up in Home Alone. Being a big name is how he got projects done.

• 11:13Robert Evans?

  Yep.

• 11:13Speaker 01

  And having a golf course or a casino or whatever that had the word Trump on it. That branding was everything. So that's why some of us, including, I will confess right now, somebody who had an important platform in 2015, 2016. I did not think Trump was actually seriously running for president. I thought it was a stunt. I thought it was an Elon Musk, like, yeah, I'm getting my face out there to boost my stock price to get money coming into whatever. I thought he was going to launch like a Fox News alternative.

• 11:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 11:42Speaker 01

  And that his run for president was a pure publicity, viral publicity stunt. Like when Kanye ran.

• 11:48Robert Evans?

  No, and I think to be, to give credit where it's due, I think the first person that cracked who really, and one of the first people that saw on the internet, who really saw where things were going was Adam Todd Brown. He wrote a column that was like, I think Trump's gonna win and I think he's gonna win doing this. He was very right.

• 12:01Speaker 01

  Let me, let me say it now on here, Netflix, wherever this is broadcast. Adam knew, I did not.

• 12:08Robert Evans?

  Absolutely.

• 12:09Speaker 01

  He was, he was ahead of me. I probably told him he was crazy at the time or thought he was crazy. He was right, I wasn't.

• 12:16Robert Evans?

  He was completely right. Unfortunately, that article is also lost media.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, we can't prove it. In fact, now that I think about it, I was actually right.

• 12:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah, no, that was, yeah, that was Jason's.

• 12:27Speaker 01

  Can't be proven.

• 12:29Speaker 01

  I was right about everything. You just can't, it's all been deleted.

• 12:32Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. All of, all of my correct takes have been deleted. Only the bad ones are left.

• 12:39Robert Evans?

  So it's debatable whether Musk's increasing addiction to rage baiting has helped his businesses past a certain point. He did not, I don't think his Tesla wealth came from rage baiting, right? But he does a lot of that now, especially in some of that's, he has been affected by the same social media engine that has also like helped him, right? And in fact, some of Tesla's largest dives in stock value have come as a direct result of recent public statements. But Donald Trump also owes a great deal of his presidency to rage baiting, right? We might, if we're, if we're calling these people nuisance streamers, we might rightly call Trump the first nuisance president, right? That like, that's kind of how he got to the White House is by creating a series of scandals

• 13:19Robert Evans?

  that kept his name in the news and in like electrified his followers in part because they, they wanted to be able to do the same kinds of stuff and say the same kinds of stuff. And also kept all the people who didn't like him talking about him so much that like, there was no room for anyone else in the media, you know?

• 13:36Speaker 01

  And this is something other Republicans said during the primaries. I think it was Marco Rubio saying that the same day he unveiled his economic plan, not that I think his economic plan would have been good, but the same day he unveiled it, Trump made a joke about how he had a big dick.

• 13:49Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 13:49Speaker 01

  I don't know if he started in a speech or in a debate and Rubio's like, 100% of the coverage went to him saying that. And no, no one even asked about this thing that I'm unveiling that would affect every citizen in the country if I want, like the substance of what you're trying to get out there, there's just no oxygen in the room. Because every day Trump could go on Twitter and he was on Twitter all hours of the night.

• 14:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 14:13Speaker 01

  Or he could go on some platform and he could go to, he's always spoke to the press, never turned down an interview and just always gave them some clickbait that, that would make them money. Because again, that's traffic for them too, for these platforms. And you just couldn't get a word in. Yeah, he trolled his way right to the White House. I realize we're, you know, 11 years late on that conversation.

• 14:35Robert Evans?

  Into this process, yeah. But it is, I mean, it's all relevant to this concept of like the, the attention economy, right? Which is why nuisance streamers have a job too. And like that part of why live streaming in general is so profitable is because of how much attention it commands. People spend hours listening, usually while they're doing something else, but hours and hours every day watching their streamers, right? And as I've stated, I don't think news's streamers would have become a thing, at least not in the way they are, without the Trump presidency. And it probably won't surprise you to hear that ICE slash DeNino endorsed and voted for Donald Trump and justified his decision by claiming he found the president funny, right? That was why he thought he was worth voting for.

• 15:17Robert Evans?

  A lot of people in 2016 voted for Trump because they thought he was funny. And again, if you can't grapple with that, you're not going to understand why all, everything that's happened has happened. It doesn't have to be good, it's just accurate.

• 15:30Robert Evans?

  And likewise, a lot of DeNino's viewers seem to have fallen in love with him because he represented a break from liberal, woke dominated media. From that New Yorker article by Adrian Chen, one viewer who claimed to be a 35-year-old retired army sergeant with two kids and two ex-wives wrote on the subreddit, "Thank God for Paul, because all cable TV, not some, but all channels for the most part are the same left-wing, pro-gay, anti-American, anti-white garbage." And, you know, one of the other things that article notes is that a popular activity in the ICE Poseidon community was to find different phrases like KFC and watermelon they could use as like replacements for the N-word to get around YouTube's ban on the N-word. That's also, that's always a major part of, of all of these kind of like nuisance guys is being racist specifically towards black people.

• 16:16Robert Evans?

  It's just like a very enduring through line in all of these types of content, really. It's not the only kind of racism.

• 16:24Speaker 01

  Well, there is always an element of 4chan that was this, where I have no idea what percentage of these people were, would be racist in real life. If like, if they had an actual opportunity to discriminate versus this is the one thing that makes mom and dad mad when I say it. It's the one thing that, that they, you know, because if you've got a platform that allows profanity, they definitely don't allow slurs. So slurs are what we're using because you're 12, you're a 12-year-old boy and you want to feel like you're, so trying to, the difference between the ones that meant it versus the ones that were 12 is always, always difficult. Cause that was the only thing about 4chan is you would have people with little, with their little Hitler avatar.

• 17:06Speaker 01

  And some of them were actual very well-versed in white supremacy and some of them were 11 years old and you could never tell who was who.

• 17:15Robert Evans?

  No, and past a certain point, it does stop mattering, right?

• 17:19Speaker 01

  Like, well, when you're building a fan base, because what you do is you create a pipeline where the stuff you started out by saying ironically, and we're just trolling, you're in a space with other, with other people who mean to take it seriously. And so now they're posting just every day, it's a new, here's black crime video. Look at this black person attacking this, I'll delete white woman or whatever, whatever they do. And it's just every day, every day, they've just got the stuff. And so now you've, now you're saying that unironically.

• 17:47Robert Evans?

  And I think the other part of that, while that is happening, another thing that's happening is you are watching streamers and other media people that you admire or like make money by saying that stuff, by repeating those phrases, by drawing up controversy, by using slurs and repeating like racist arguments about like crime and whatnot, right? That is, I think, also a key part of it is that you also see, not only are people not being punished for that behavior, they're being rewarded for that behavior. And I want to talk, there's, there's some psychology experiments that are kind of relevant to this phenomenon. In 1961, a Canadian-American psychologist named Albert Bandera embarked on an experiment and his goal was to explore the ways in which young human beings learn how and when it's

• 18:31Robert Evans?

  acceptable to be aggressive, right? At the time, there were a few leading theories and everyone was very worried because television was becoming the dominant method of entertainment, certainly by the 60s. And no one knew is like watching violence on TV or in movies going to make kids violent, right? This is not, you know, by the time we hit the 90s, there's a lot more panic about it that's less justified. But in the 60s, like you have to ask that question, right? You don't know, this is a new thing. We have been parking kids in front of TVs. You should want to know what it does to them, right? So Bandura works up a simple experiment. He splits 70-something little kids between three groups. One experimental group was modeled aggressive behavior in the form of an adult would be in the room and they would beat the shit out of this inflatable Bobo doll.

• 19:14Robert Evans?

  Another group of kids watched an adult model behavior that did not involve aggression towards the doll and the control group were just kids that were observed playing without any adult coming in, right? I'm drastically simplifying the study, but Bandura found that children who watched an aggressive adult model, aggressive behavior were, per simply psychology, significantly more likely to imitate aggressive behavior, both physically and verbally. Now, most write-ups you'll find are entirely focused on what this tells us about children, but I don't think we should just limit it to that. Per relevant write-up on neurolaunch.com, "A child's brain treats the absence of response as information, not neutrality. When a behavior produces no negative outcome, the brain files it under 'safe to repeat', strengthening the neural pathways tied to that action just as surely as if it had been

• 19:59Robert Evans?

  rewarded outright." And I really don't think you should just focus on how that affects kids, because I think we, people in general, interpret behavior that produces no negative outcome as safe to repeat. Now, that doesn't mean they're necessarily going to do it. I might see, I can see right now, it is actually safe, as certainly as a white person in certain chunks of the media, to say racist things, right? I don't want to do that, but I know people are not being punished for it. They are in fact, getting rich for it, right? And other people are making those calculations and do not have any compunction against engaging in that sort of behavior, right? Because they see that not only do you not get punished for it, you can get really rich. If you just like curse out a little eight-year-old boy by saying the N-word a bunch, you can get $800,000.

• 20:44Robert Evans?

  It happened to a lady, right? That influences people's behavior, just like I think seeing Trump get away with being Trump influences people's behavior. And

• 20:53Speaker 01

  I guess just very quickly, I don't, I never want to portray it like there's something magical about the internet or magical about smartphones that scrambles their brain.

• 21:02Robert Evans?

  No.

• 21:02Speaker 01

  As you said, it's just basic human nature. You learn how to live by observing other people. You don't come out of the womb knowing what words are okay to use. We're social animals. You observe, so if you're in a household where there's domestic violence, what you learn is it's okay to respond with violence if somebody irritates you. And you, because you observe it, like, yeah, that's

• 21:24Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 21:24Speaker 01

  Unless you see your dad get hauled away to jail, it's like, okay, this is, this is how humans hash out disagreements. Is it if she, you know, she raises her voice and you can slap her and that's how, like, you just learn it. And to say, well, you should have known better. It's like, not really. If that's what you observed every day, that's all you know. So if your if your role models are people you're observing on a screen, I'm sorry, I don't care who you are. If if the examples are, if it's made very clear what you're watching as a cartoon, yeah, you can understand. You actually cannot stick a bunch of dynamite in a cat's mouth and then the cat just turns black and then he's fine. The next scene, you get that's a cartoon. If you're watching something that's supposed to be real

• 22:08Speaker 01

  life, and you see the way this person talks and their attitudes that they express, I cannot emphasize enough how young the viewership is for a lot of these guys we're talking about. It is kids in many cases, and they're just observing, yeah, here's what you can get away with in society.

• 22:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. And that's, you know, I've been thinking, are you familiar with the comic series Crossed, Jason?

• 22:31Speaker 01

  No.

• 22:32Robert Evans?

  They're making it into a movie. It's like a kind of a zombie story, but instead of it being a zombie plague, it's this disease that causes this like cross-sape rash on people's faces.

• 22:41Speaker 01

  Is it a Garth Ennis?

• 22:42Robert Evans?

  Yes, it's by the guy who did The Boys.

• 22:44Speaker 01

  I didn't know what it is.

• 22:45Robert Evans?

  It just makes people lose all inhibitions and give in to their most violent, sexual, and like sadistic impulses, right? I don't particularly, they are way too, they're too graphic for even me. I don't know how they're gonna make this shit into a movie. But I have been thinking about the way the plague works in those comics as I've been reading this, because there's an extent to which this does seem to work like a contagion. You see people get away with like that lady who made 800 grand saying the N-word, and you see other people start glomming on and start engaging in equally like violent and aggressive, or at least like cruel, public behavior, because they're chasing that money and that notoriety. It's not just that, like, you know, it's Donald Trump, it's people are, I'm sure now copying Chud the Builder, as he's raised hundreds of thousands of dollars, right? But I do,

• 23:30Robert Evans?

  I keep thinking about that, it as a contagion now. I almost can't stop. And I don't mean that in like a literal biological sense, but I do think it's actually kind of a useful way to look at how mal, socially maladaptive, well, it's not even maladaptive, unfortunately, but how socially negative behaviors get reinforced and become adaptive, right? It is adaptive in our society to say a racial slur at the right time, if you're the kind of person who can monetize that. That's not good, but if you make $800,000 doing it, that's an adaptive behavior, right? That's a benefit to your fitness in our society. That's the message that's been transferred, right? Whether or not you like it, and that is just tremendously dark.

• 24:15Robert Evans?

  Sorry.

• 24:16Speaker 07

  Sheesh.

• 24:18Robert Evans?

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• 28:37Speaker 06

  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.

• 28:49Speaker 04

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

• 29:00Robert Evans?

  And we're back. Yeah.

• 29:03Speaker 07

  I was trying to control my face during that. I was like, okay.

• 29:09Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 29:10Speaker 01

  No, but we don't, we don't have to prove the idea that a social contagion is real. I mean, I, when I went to journalism school, we learned that you don't cover suicides, because there's a known phenomenon where like one famous youth suicide causes, you see a spike in suicides, because it's like you give someone permission to do it. It's, mass shootings tend to come in bunches, because it's like one happens and somebody else who had been considering it or planning that they see it, they see the coverage they got, see how it got their message out there. So see it how, you know, all the little slogans they painted on their assault rifle made them famous. It's like, well, I can top that score. It's, it's just the way, it's the way people are. You, it's when people talk

• 29:53Speaker 01

  about social contagions, they're not making up something. It's, it's as reliable a factor in human behavior. Riots work this way. Take your, you know, take your pick.

• 30:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So there is a growing body of scientific research to kind of support the the social contagion theory of why this sort of like rage-baiting behavior is more common than ever. University of Chicago and UCLA researchers recently published a paper on what they call the inferential psychology of morality and punishment. Through experimentation, they concluded that punishment in a society provides a psychological cue. Seeing someone punished for behavior does not necessarily make people conclude that it's morally wrong, but they often conclude that it's undesirable, because it has negative externalities. Now, that doesn't tell us about how to, much about how to deal with like modern day murderers or robbers, because those behaviors are currently illegal and at least theoretically punished. But I think it has a lot to do with why so many influencers today won't

• 30:48Robert Evans?

  bat an eye at, say, running a crypto pump and dump that literally robs their fans of hundreds of thousands of dollars. They see other people do it and avoid punishment. Why wouldn't they follow suit? And this brings me back to Ice Poseidon. This is a little bit of a detour, but I think it's relevant. In late 2021, Ice partnered with a group of mysterious backers to launch CX Coin, a cryptocurrency meant to allow streamers and content creators a safe and easy method of receiving support through cryptocurrencies. Now, at this point, a whole bunch of e-celebs had already done rug pull pump and dumps just like this, which is why Ice insisted to his fans he was creating a long-term platform, and that he absolutely wouldn't pull his money out of the project, as it was locked

• 31:28Robert Evans?

  in. Now, obviously, he does a pump and dump, and he robs everybody. Coffeezilla, who, I guess you'd call him a journalist, he does a really good job of reporting on like scams and crimes in the crypto world. He's a very reputable source on this stuff, did a report on Ice Poseidon's cryptocurrency, and claims that he pulled his money out of it after just a few weeks, cashing out $500,000 and leaving a liquidity pool of just 40,000 left in the cryptocurrency. Per an article on Invin Global by Aaron Alfred, in Coffeezilla's interviews with Ice Poseidon, Ice admitted to draining the money while laughing. He showed no remorse for his decision to scam his fans, despite all but admitting to carrying out the scam. Part of the responsibility is on them as well, for putting too much emotion into it,

• 32:10Robert Evans?

  Ice claimed, in defense of himself scamming his investors. Coffeezilla repeatedly attempted to get Ice Poseidon to return the money when he confronted him in his call. If you want the answer, yeah, I could give the money back. It is within my power, but I'm going to look out for myself and not do that, Ice replied. In his video on all this, Coffeezilla's conclusion is hard to argue with. When you don't have law enforcement consequences for what is essentially theft and fraud, you end up with people like Ice Poseidon realizing they can do the same without consequence, right?

• 32:38Robert Evans?

  Of course. Why wouldn't he?

• 32:40Speaker 01

  Same reason you can right now go into a gas station and get pills that claim to keep you awake all day or they increase.

• 32:47Robert Evans?

  It's like five hour energy.

• 32:48Speaker 01

  And it's not caffeine because they've tested it. It's like, oh,

• 32:52Robert Evans?

  This is a powerful opiate.

• 32:53Speaker 01

  This is straight up kratom or whatever. This is a banned substance.

• 32:56Robert Evans?

  It's to be clear, it's not kratom. It's a derivative. It's a synthetic derivative of kratom called 70H. But like, yeah, they're selling it like five hour energy and people are getting dope sick. It's fucked up.

• 33:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's worse than kratom, I believe, than kratom. But there's nobody watching the store. So there's money to be made. That's just incentives. If you put it out there and nobody rips it off shelves, nobody comes and kicks down your door, then what is legal is what doesn't get enforced. Like, that's just, that's the way it is.

• 33:24Robert Evans?

  No, and it's, you know, because they've, they've, they've scheduled now, the DEA scheduled 70H. So it's no longer legal to sell. But there's a whole wide variety of other that even have nothing to do with like opioid derivatives, all sorts of weird chemicals that are being put into like, energy drinks and pills and sold over the counter, that you often have no fucking idea what you're getting because there's absolutely no regulation of this industry whatsoever. It's probably a bad idea. Yeah, I want to start talking now about a guy we haven't discussed yet in these episodes. His name is Vitaly Zdorvetsky. He goes by the name Vitaly ZDTV on YouTube. And he's like a, an early streamer e-celeb.

• 34:06Robert Evans?

  He's a prank streamer e-celeb. He's one of like, the biggest prank streamer guys. Like many early streamer celebrities, he was born in the 1990s, 92 to be exact. And as the name might suggest, he was born in Russia, although his family moved to the US in 2004 so he could try to become an actor. Vitaly soon realized that the internet was where he wanted to be. Aaron George gave an able summary of his career for an article on Neo Future. Vitaly initially pursued professional skateboarding before turning his attention to video content. Launching his YouTube channel, Vitaly ZDTV, he tapped into the burgeoning genre of prank videos, quickly distinguishing himself with elaborate and often confrontational setups. One of his earliest major successes, and a sign of the controversy that would

• 34:46Robert Evans?

  follow him, was the Miami zombie attack prank in 2012. Inspired by a real cannibalistic attack that had shocked the city, Vitaly, dressed as a zombie, chased unsuspecting people, primarily in poorer neighborhoods. And when they, when Aaron says poorer, people will note that he's usually chasing black people, right? Like, after a guy just like bit someone's face off, right?

• 35:09Speaker 01

  And this was a guy who, the first time I saw, I saw clips of his, then this, he goes back a ways, right? Like, this is not 2021 era. This is.

• 35:17Robert Evans?

  No, no, no. This is like the 2010s. Like, yeah, I think from like, the 2010s teens. Yeah.

• 35:21Speaker 01

  The first viral pranks of his, he had at least actually done pranks. The one I remember seeing, there was like a chainsaw attack and he had like, somebody who's like an amputee and it made it look like he chopped their legs off or whatever. Like, it may be cruel and tasteless or whatever, but he had actually staged a thing.

• 35:38Robert Evans?

  There is like a joke there, right?

• 35:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, there was a joke to it. Yeah.

• 35:42Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Although, again, you can see the danger too. Like, just among other things, in a country with as many guns as we have, I would not pretend to be attacking people with a chainsaw in public. Don't do that.

• 35:52Speaker 01

  If people who are not from the United States and don't, if you visit here, I cannot emphasize enough how likely it is the person you pass in the street has a gun.

• 36:01Robert Evans?

  I rarely go to the grocery store without 30 rounds of 9mm on me.

• 36:05Speaker 01

  There are lots of things that you might think you could get away with, wherever you're from. In the United States, there's somebody in the vicinity who might shoot you dead. And also, they may be itching for the opportunity to do it. I'm just saying that as a warning.

• 36:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Don't do this kind of. So to be quite honest, if you see someone cutting off a limb of another person with a chainsaw, you should probably shoot them if you can.

• 36:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, that is a good guy with a gun situation, probably. But anyway.

• 36:31Robert Evans?

  Um, or a good guy tragically intervening in a badly thought out prank.

• 36:35Speaker 01

  Although honestly, also probably fine. Okay, no, don't, don't take that, don't take that out of context. I'm not saying shoot a YouTube prankster.

• 36:44Robert Evans?

  No. We're just saying, it's, there's instances in which it could be understandable why you might.

• 36:50Speaker 01

  And there's at least one case where the, the jury actually let the guy off when he shot the pranksters. Like, no, that.

• 36:56Robert Evans?

  If you do that to someone, you might get shot. Yeah.

• 36:59Speaker 01

  We're not saying, we approve, but.

• 37:01Robert Evans?

  No.

• 37:02Speaker 01

  You know.

• 37:03Robert Evans?

  So in 2012, the same year he did that zombie attack video, he was also arrested for a racist prank. Per Huffington Post, quote, "According to the arrest report, police arrested Vitaly after watching his speeding ticket pranks video posted on March 5. In the video, police say Vitaly approached three black males, accused one of being involved in a robbery in the area, and told all three they were getting a ticket for wearing their pants too low. Officers note that at one point, Vitaly touched his earpiece and said, 'You guys coming now?' as if calling for backup. He also told the three men that he would believe their innocence if they walked around a pole and said, 'I didn't do it.' One of the men circled the pole five times as Vitaly watched. So again, you see a lot of the things we've been building. He's really focused on like, going after black people and like, trying to embarrass and scare them. And also, like, that's just impersonating

• 37:48Robert Evans?

  an officer. This is the kind of thing that should have legally gotten him in trouble. It doesn't. Not really.

• 37:54Speaker 01

  You'll notice that the element of the prank kind of went away to where now he's just harassing black people. And this is the evolution of, of a lot of these where it's like, well, I'm just going to cut out the middle man. And.

• 38:06Robert Evans?

  I wonder how much of that is him recognizing that's a safer thing that like, well, because people are fucking scared of the police, if you pretend to be one, they're not going to shoot you, right? And they'll probably do whatever shit you say because they think you're a cop. He, this is, again, the kind of thing, based on the way the law is written, he should have gotten serious consequences for. I don't think this arrest ever turns into anything. It's hard to tell. I'm not sure, like, but, but none of this ever seems to result in him being like, put behind bars or suffering serious consequences. The arrests are never a serious, like, barrier to him continuing to put out content and make money. Now, Vitaly is using YouTube initially, but I do think it's noteworthy that his first

• 38:49Robert Evans?

  massive prank success came in 2012, the year after Twitch launched. That's not positive, but it's evidence that they're both kind of propelled by similar trends, right? Later that year, Vitaly was arrested for the first time in Boca Raton after he approached a man outside of a store with a briefcase he insinuated had a bomb in it. Now, that write-up does also note that early on, Vitaly tried a mix of positive and negative content. He did a homeless man makeover video in 2013, where he actually like befriended this homeless guy and like, helped him out and it led to a job offer for the guy. Like, it's a nice piece of content. But clearly, the, the negative pranks, like the mean ones, are what make the most money and get the most views. He did a gold digger prank in 2013 that became

• 39:31Robert Evans?

  a, a very popular sensation. Yeah, he dressed his leather face for a prank in 2014. He jumped on the car of the Croatian prime minister as he left prison in 2015. And this all, like, makes it like, it makes him really famous, right? He winds up getting a movie deal with Lionsgate to make the movie Natural Born Pranksters in 2015. So he's now being rewarded, like, with a movie deal for doing mostly like, really mean, cruel things, right? And I think we can rightly view YouTube prank content as an interstitial, like, content evolution between the beginning of the social media era and like, the birth of in-person live streaming. And Natural Born Pranksters might well represent the high watermark for

• 40:14Robert Evans?

  this kind of content. The movie was a failure. It netted about $300,000 on a million dollar budget. Katie Walsh, writing for the LA Times, gave a review that might as well be a review of the whole nuisance streaming concept. "In borrowing the model of Jackass and Punk, this film lacks the essential DNA of what made those shows appealing. These pranksters aren't nearly so generous, and their sadistic stunts display a mean-spirited streak, resulting in a racist, sexist, and homophobic harassment." Right? I can remember, like, the olds got pissed off about Jackass when I was a kid.

• 40:46Speaker 07

  Sure.

• 40:46Robert Evans?

  But it was never like, cruel or mean, right? The boys are doing stuff that like, messes them up sometime, but the joke is not on like, random innocent people. It's on them being jackasses.

• 40:57Speaker 07

  No, no. Like, Steve-O's covering himself in shit, not making a unwilling, uh, somebody who's desperate for money on house person do it for, because they desperately need money.

• 41:08Robert Evans?

  Johnny Knoxville would never, right? Steve-O would never. Wee Man would never if they weren't that kind of guys.

• 41:16Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 41:16Speaker 01

  And there's, I mean, there's Eric Andre style stuff where you captured the reaction of people in public, but it's because you've staged a surreal scene. Like, and Eric Andre had this thing where he, like, went and tore the. Door off of a cop car made it look like he had superhuman strength.

• 41:32Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 41:33Speaker 01

  To capture people viewing something surreal and magical happening in happening in front of them.

• 41:38Robert Evans?

  And that's, yeah, fun and creative. And he did, you know, I was there at the RNC in 2016 when he crashed in Alex Jones rally. And you could look at that as kind of in the nuisance streaming thing. But the target he's picking is also someone who is a public figure, putting themselves out in public. And like putting themselves in a position where it's, it's very different from going up to a homeless person on the street or like some random person who doesn't know what's happening. Right? Like it's, it's just a different kind of thing. It's a lot crueler and a meaner kind of thing. But the fact that Vitali and his friends get a movie deal for harassing strangers and endangering themselves sends another message, right? This shit pays and is rewarded by society.

• 42:19Robert Evans?

  Unfortunately for Vitali, YouTube decided not longer after his movie came out that prank content was getting a little risky. All it would take is one prankster getting gunned down and suddenly Google would be fielding questions their PR team did not want to answer. So Vitali's videos start getting removed and demonetized, but he keeps pranking. Right? And his pranks begin to turn over time to things that put him in more personal and legal jeopardy. In 2016, he climbed up atop the Hollywood sign for a video stunt. He's arrested. Later that same year, he's arrested for streaking during game four of the NBA finals. And the next year, 2017, he gets arrested for running onto the field of the world series. Then in January of 2020, he's arrested and jailed in Egypt for climbing the pyramids of Giza to make a three minute Instagram video.

• 43:03Robert Evans?

  Uh, I think this was probably inspired by the fact that Egypt had made doing that a crime the year before, but the penalty was at most a month in jail and a fine of like no more than $6,300. Well worth it, given the economics of social media. A few months later, in April of 2020, he was arrested in Miami and charged with felony aggravated battery after he leapt out of the bushes and assaulted a random woman he had never met before while she was jogging. He punches her repeatedly in the face. I've seen pictures of this woman. She is brutally injured. This is an incredibly cruel and violent attack. There's not a joke here.

• 43:36Speaker 01

  Did he filmed himself doing that or is that just an attack?

• 43:39Robert Evans?

  I don't know. It's, this is really weird to me. My suspicion is that someone was filming and they probably didn't put it on because the content went wrong. He kind of comes out with his like arms wide and like trying to like grab her. I don't know what his goal was here. His victim claims he just jumped out at her and started beating the absolute hell out of her. Right? He only stops because your screams draw bystanders. I don't know what he was trying to do here.

• 44:06Speaker 01

  Right? There's, what was the date for that incident?

• 44:09Robert Evans?

  That's in 20, April of 2020.

• 44:12Speaker 01

  Okay. I think anything having to do with streaming, there is a very, very important event that happened in early 2020. Where if you look at total traffic to Twitch, I think it went up like 500%. You look at any stream or you look at the timeline of when they got popular, all these people at home who had nothing else to do. And again, these streamers are not their entertainment.

• 44:36Robert Evans?

  Right at that sweet spot.

• 44:38Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 44:38Speaker 01

  Those streamers are their friends. The streamers are their social interaction. That chat is their social interaction. And so the competition between these guys, because you have to keep upping the spectacle. Your stunt has to be dumber than the last one you did. It has to be more dangerous that, because this is now about spectacle now. It's about seeing something you've never seen before, about the potential to see something live on camera that you've never seen before. Uh, and so suddenly there's all these new eyeballs and the amount of money coming in. I think you look at early 2020, the great derangement of streaming, I believe, started right there. Along with, there were actually other things in society that happened too as well, but streaming is one area.

• 45:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah. But that was mainly streaming. Yeah. I, yeah, I, that really makes sense. Cause this seems, and I don't fully know what he was going for. Right? Like, it's not clear that he was making video content, but given the rest of his history, I assume this was supposed to be a prank that went wrong or like, I don't know what else he would have been doing unless he was just literally trying to beat up a random woman for no reason and didn't want it filmed. But that seems less likely than that. This was like content that went badly, just given his history. Right? I don't fully know. He gets charged with a felony. I'm unaware of what happened to this, with this case. There have been no public updates since he bonded out. He doesn't seem to have done any time. He keeps right on streaming.

• 46:03Robert Evans?

  And the fact that he consistently avoided serious consequences while growing his YouTube following to more than 10 million people clearly inspires others to follow in his footsteps. Right? I don't know if there was a first nuisance streamer as much as guys like Vitali and our friend Ice Poseidon started triangulating their new content to converge closer and closer to that ideal. And you're right, a lot of it is happening in like the, the spring and summer of 2020 is when that, that, that, and after that point is when a lot of that like shift starts to happen towards outright nuisance streaming. And these are all guys who had done pieces of that before, but things get a lot more aggressive and a lot meaner after that. For his part, Ice Poseidon took his fan base to YouTube after Twitch banned him.

• 46:48Robert Evans?

  And this would prove a significant moment for a couple of reasons. He kept streaming in real life and as he did, it became clear that he got the majority of his attention from being a huge asshole in public. In 2018, he visited Europe and of course streamed everything, including himself getting kicked out of multiple hotels. On October 17th, 2018, he posted this. I made the most read newspaper in Switzerland. I have no idea what it says, but probably something along the lines of being an international criminal genius after I fled the country because it's illegal to stream there lol. The, the article title is YouTube star nerfed Zurich hotels. And I don't speak German, but basic Googling reveals this headline translates roughly to YouTube star annoys Zurich hotels. Like that is the headline. There must not have been a lot going on in Zurich back then.

• 47:34Speaker 07

  Yeah, check, check it out for, for the, for the Netflix folks and Jason.

• 47:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah. I think nerfed pretty, the most direct translation would be like a noise.

• 47:43Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 47:44Speaker 01

  But you're gonna see this trend of going international with these stunts. And I got the sense, and you're probably going to get into it, but I get the sense that for the authorities over there, it's easier to just tell you, leave the country as opposed to trying to go through a trial and ultimately when the charge is just going to be some sort of disorderly conduct thing. So there, again, it's like very little downside. It's like, okay, so they're gonna make me leave. And now I've got all this footage and made how much money off those streams? So.

• 48:14Robert Evans?

  You know, even in the States though, we've talked about a bunch of arrests in the States, none of which seem to stop people or lead to any real consequences. They don't do time. They don't lose enough money that it's not worth it for them. Right?

• 48:27Speaker 01

  Like, I can see it, but if you, for example, somebody dresses up as a cop and annoys or intimidates some random poor people on the sidewalk. It's like, okay, it's a disorderly conduct. It's, again, did not, did not pull a gun, didn't threaten, didn't take money from them, didn't, didn't restrain them, which would have been like a kidnapping charge, didn't put them in handcuffs, just annoyed them. And so ultimately it's like, yeah, it's gonna, who wants to deal with all that?

• 48:58Robert Evans?

  It is weird that impersonating an officer is a serious crime, but it's very rarely punished when people do it. Like that is surprising to me.

• 49:07Speaker 01

  I, I think because if you didn't use it to try to get into someone's home, to try to restrain someone, to try to get someone to go with you somewhere, you know what I'm saying? Like if it was in the course of committing another crime, if you just went out in public in a police uniform, it could be a stripper, it could be all sorts of things you're doing that are, again, it may technically be illegal, but are they going to actually pursue that? In general, I think most of these guys have a pretty good instinct for, it's the same as the bullies you had in high school. They have a sense of what they can get away with. They have a sense of what, of what they, the, the authorities are actually going to punish versus they'll just tell you, get out of here, don't do it again. Or, or you get a fine. Again, that's a fraction of what you made off that one stream.

• 49:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And I, I do think you are right that like a big part of why a lot of this nuisance stuff starts occurring overseas is that people do start encountering enough consequences for it. Like Ice Poseidon spends 2016 and 2017, like in Hollywood accosting passersby and just trying to like piss people off for content. That's a big part of his, his shtick. And then in 2019, his LA home is raided by the FBI in response to spoof phone calls that made bomb threats and seemed to have come from his place. This was not actually that. This was the result of like a toxic fan spoofing his number. Because Danino, like they, he doesn't get prosecuted for this. I don't think he actually did anything here. He makes at the time, a show of promising to reform his once toxic community.

• 50:34Robert Evans?

  But then in the early 2020s, he starts doing like, I mean, he does debut as a boxer in this weird influencer contest. As I said, he gets into like crypto scamming. But in 2023, he decides to head east to Southeast Asia. By this time, Ice Poseidon had moved his content to Kick, which as I noted last episode, was Twitch with less moderation. Kick was founded in 2022 after crypto billionaires Ed Craven and Bijan Tahrani were kicked off Twitch during a crackdown on gambling advertisements. Craven and Tahrani had formed Stake, which Wikipedia tells me is the largest online casino in the world. Per an article in Huck Magazine, they decided to start it as a challenger platform in 2022, prioritizing freedom of expression, which some viewed as with a thinly veiled disclaimer.

• 51:20Robert Evans?

  Right? Basically, this is where you can go to say slurs, right? Like, we're fine with that here. Ice Poseidon started streaming himself gambling, presumably because Kick paid him to, because we know they made deals like that. They would like pay people in sometimes multimillion dollar deals to like gamble on stream, right? But this must not have been enough, or at least he may have seen his numbers slip, because he also keeps making nuisance content and traveling overseas to do it. In June of 2023, he took his entourage to Bangkok, Thailand. We're doing a live Kick broadcast. He performed an explicit lap dance for his girlfriend in a hotel restaurant. The hotel, and this is like a really nice hotel in Thailand, right? Like a world-class one. And the hotel manager confronts them and tells them that what they're doing was disrespectful to Thai culture.

• 52:03Robert Evans?

  Because they don't stop, she calls the cops on them, and Danino and his friends are arrested. At one point, they were looking at up to five years in prison. But a few days later, he makes an apology video, and then a couple of weeks after that, he's freed. I think the apology video was probably something his lawyer made him, advised him to do. Danino credited a nice judge for choosing to release them once they had their day in court. He tweeted, "Fuck the haters wanting injustice. I hope you're mad. I'll keep killing it on Kick." Within days, he and his crew were in Queensland, Australia, where they invited a sex worker into their hotel room and offered to pay her $500 for having sex with another streamer. The whole thing was, of course, livestreamed secretly. They were in another room commenting on it while like this is going on. I think the woman had been paid to be filmed, but I don't think she understood that she

• 52:48Robert Evans?

  was being livestreamed to the internet, per an NBC News article. After several minutes of the encounter, the woman then said she received a message from a friend who warned her the meeting was a setup, that the two other men, Danino and Pepper, who's one of his buddies, who the man said were sleeping in another room, were actually watching the stream. The woman became visibly uncomfortable and tried to leave, but the man blocked her, telling her she had already been paid. She protested, calling the situation creepy, and tried again to leave. "Why is it creepy?" the man asked, before insisting it was just the two of them in the apartment, even though Danino and Pepper were in the next room. Eventually, the woman left the apartment while the man followed her. After she left, police appeared to be waiting for Danino and Pepper outside. Viewers reacted with shock in the live chat as the stream captured the pair's subsequent arrest.

• 53:30Robert Evans?

  They were initially charged with sexual assault, but the charges were dropped and they were released. So again, something obviously not acceptable and just zero consequences, right?

• 53:40Speaker 01

  One thing, you're gonna see a pattern that come up very, came up very briefly, where if they do face some sort of consequences, they'll often issue some sort of a public apology.

• 53:50Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 53:50Speaker 01

  And then they may reference mental illness or something, say that, well, you know, he was suffering from some episode or whatever. That seems to be a playbook for getting, as long as you get out of the country and back to the United States, or to what are the next country you're gonna terrorize? They've got a process down for how to, to do that. Because usually, the country's just happy to see them gone.

• 54:14Robert Evans?

  Yeah. I think they go for claiming mental illness because Ambien is no longer as widely prescribed. That was the old way to justify doing something fucked up. Ah, the Ambien walrus got me.

• 54:26Robert Evans?

  Speaking of the Ambien walrus, maybe Ambien's advertising on our podcast. Probably not, because I don't think people get prescribed it anymore, but I don't know. Ambien.

• 55:11Robert Evans?

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• 56:10Robert Evans?

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• 57:26Speaker 05

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• 57:33Speaker 04

  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.

• 57:45Speaker 05

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

• 57:51Speaker 04

  Stories of survival.

• 57:53Speaker 05

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

• 58:00Speaker 04

  Cases that everyone else called closed.

• 58:03Speaker 05

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

• 58:07Speaker 04

  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.

• 58:25Speaker 06

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

• 58:31Speaker 04

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

• 58:42Robert Evans?

  We're back. Sophie's telling me that we are not being paid by Ambien. We are not. So that's, I mean, reach out to us, Ambien people. Maybe, maybe we could get you back in Roseanne's hands. So, at the same time Danino was engaging in this stuff, nuisance streaming has fully taken off as an internet phenomenon. And a weird number of these streamers decide to pick Japan or South Korea in particular as the location for their abusive videos. The reason you'll most often see cited by people who like live in Japan and South Korea for why this is happening is because these countries have a culture of politeness and avoiding direct conflict. They also have very low rates of personal weapon ownership, and that makes them very safe places to troll, right?

• 59:24Speaker 01

  That is the real reason. In neither of those countries are you gonna get, are you gonna get shot? It's so funny watching a, like a Korean drama on Netflix or something, and there'll be a plot point where the detective opens the desk drawer of the guy's like, there's a gun. He had a gun in that drawer. My God, what was he up to? Where in the United States, the cop would just like move the gun aside to try to find, like, what's, it has to be something here. His gun's in the way, but, yeah, under the, move the pile of guns to see if there's evidence. But yeah, I can, I really want to hit that point. The fact that, one, the whole concept of going to a high-trust society and intentionally

• 1:00:05Speaker 01

  breaking it, because you know that they don't want to confront you, but also just knowing that you're in a place where, you know, I, not, not to- Signal boost the right wing talking point of, you know, yeah, come try that in a Texas small town, but seriously, don't try that in a Texas small town. They will shoot you. And you, they, they won't go to jail for doing it.

• 1:00:27Robert Evans?

  No, there's a reason why they're doing it in these places, right? And there are other reasons, right? Another possible reason why Japan has become a fixture dates back to 2017, as you mentioned in episode one, when a YouTuber Logan Paul, then 22, filmed and published a YouTube video in the Okigahara Forest in Japan, better known as the Suicide Forest, because a large but deliberately unknown number of Japanese people choose to end their lives there. The government actually doesn't publish statistics on how many do because they don't want to, the social contagion thing, right? They don't want to encourage it. And you probably, I think most people are aware of this, right? Logan and his crew come across a dead man hanging in the forest. They film it, they publish it for their millions of YouTube followers, and it blows up. And there, Paul is forced

• 1:01:07Robert Evans?

  to apologize repeatedly. One of the telling things about this is that a lot of his apology tour is him arguing with his own fans who are often being like, I thought it was awesome. He's like, no, no, it wasn't, guys. It was bad. It was bad. Like, please, stop saying this was good. Sophie Holloway, writing for Huck, suggests this also helped to make Japan a destination for streamers. Because again, for a lot of these people, they're not thinking, oh, Logan had to apologize and it pissed people off. They're thinking, he got a lot of attention. Right?

• 1:01:36Speaker 01

  Like, because legally, what were the consequences of, of that?

• 1:01:40Robert Evans?

  Nothing.

• 1:01:40Speaker 01

  Nothing. Yeah. He just got a lot, like, he did apologize, but he got, again, that's how I heard of him. For the very first time, that controversy, and I bet for millions and millions of people, that was the very first time they heard the name Logan Paul. I bet my, you know, my grandma, my dad, anybody.

• 1:01:55Speaker 07

  I would like to forget the name Logan Paul.

• 1:01:58Robert Evans?

  Yep. Yep. That's how I heard about him.

• 1:02:00Speaker 01

  But again, it's, it's, you know, if you look at the stuff he got to do since then, that was the best thing that happened to his career. No question.

• 1:02:08Robert Evans?

  Absolutely. Massively beneficial to him. Now, the nuisance streamers don't really start showing up in Japan in numbers until after 2020, particularly after like the pandemic lockdowns start to fade. In March of 2023, a video of a prankster licking a soy sauce bottle on the conveyor of a kaitzen sushi restaurant, which is like one of those Japanese sushi restaurants where like the stuff comes by in a conveyor, goes viral. An article in the BBC summarized what happened next. In the video, he can be seen squashing sushi dinners at a kura sushi restaurant branch. Since then, dozens of such videos have proliferated, sparking public concern. Now, a lot of these copycats are Japanese, but a ton of foreigners are increasingly traveling over to Japan and in the coming months, sniffing out potential

• 1:02:50Robert Evans?

  content. And they start doing this, too. In Japan, the viral trend becomes known as sushi terrorism, and it's forced permanent changes to the way that these restaurants operated. It's just kind of one example of how the social contagion thing worked. And as more foreigners start traveling to Japan to piss off people, the locals develop a term nuisance foreigners that soon came to encompass any foreigner who pissed off the locals. And this is actually where the phrase nuisance streamer comes from, right? I think it's deliberately descended from what Japanese people are calling these like nuisance foreigners coming around to like piss people off, right? And this brings me to another one of the assholes you specifically asked about when you suggested this topic, Jason, Johnny Somali, right? We are talking about Johnny's adventures in Japan and South Korea now. His real name

• 1:03:33Robert Evans?

  is Ramzi Khalid Ismail. He was probably born on September 26, 2000, although I've seen 1999 claimed as well. I don't really know. Ismail has given different and conflicting claims about his background on streams. He has at different points claimed to have been a former Somali pirate or former child soldier. There's no evidence of this. He's also claimed to have grown up in Scottsdale, Arizona, and graduated from ASU, which I think is probably a lot likelier than the former pirate thing. Johnny Somali is the name that he adopted for Twitch, where he started streaming nuisance content during a 2023 trip to Japan. An article for the UK Standard describes his content this way. During a trip to Japan last summer, a masked Ismail and another man entered the construction site of a hotel in Osaka and

• 1:04:16Robert Evans?

  filmed themselves shouting Fukushima, referencing a 2011 nuclear power plant disaster at workers. Ismail was arrested, released, and then arrested again a month later for disrupting a restaurant with loud noises on his phone. Although the charges of trespassing on the construction site were dropped, the court found him guilty of obstructing a business and fined him 200,000 yen, around 1,000 euros, before kicking him out of the country. This wasn't his only scandal during his Japan visit. His streams in the country often depicted him taunting locals in public by repeating phrases like Hiroshima and Nagasaki at them, and loudly threatening to bomb the country, resulting in him being physically assaulted on the street again. So part of what you see is how crude this is. He doesn't speak the language. So all he can shout is like the name of several disasters to try to offend

• 1:05:00Robert Evans?

  people, because it'll make him angry.

• 1:05:02Speaker 01

  But also, he's not, again, he's not being a little scamp thumbing his nose at authority. He's not mocking celebrities or billionaires, or even, you know, like the snooty rich people at a hotel. These are people working at a construction site.

• 1:05:17Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:18Speaker 01

  These are regular people. You know, it's a running theme, I think, is going to be going after just restaurant workers, like the people at the very bottom rung of employment, you know, having to tolerate enough crap in the course of a shift. And you're going to go there, start throwing food on the floor, whatever, where the joke becomes how inappropriate the target is.

• 1:05:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And it's, you know, one of the other things he did, he visited Tokyo Disney in June and recorded visitors without consent while using a speaker to play music that repeatedly referenced the atomic bombings of Japan. Like, he's bringing up the thing that will piss people off the most because he wants to get hit. He wants that kind of a reaction. That's good content. His behavior ultimately saw him kicked out of the country and attacked online by PewDiePie, who moved to Japan and accused him of ruining Japan for other foreigners. So we've come full circle.

• 1:06:10Speaker 01

  Because PewDiePie at this point is like a grandfather.

• 1:06:13Robert Evans?

  He's an old man. He's ancient.

• 1:06:15Speaker 01

  Down with, yeah, he's settled down with the family and he doesn't scream or anything anymore. So he's become something of an uncle type, I think, amongst that, that crowd.

• 1:06:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he does still does some sort of content, but like, he's definitely not this kind of streamer, right? Like, that was not his business. Like, what he did, like, it's not my kind of content, but like, playing a video game while being entertaining is like a, an artistic skill to some degree, right? As opposed to shouting Hiroshima at a bunch of people, right?

• 1:06:44Robert Evans?

  After all of this, Johnny Somali went to Israel, where he was banned from Jerusalem for 50 days for pinning photos of Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein to the Western Wall. At some point in all of this, he was banned from Twitch and made the move to Kick, who gave him a permanent ban while he was in Israel because he kept making on-air death threats. He was arrested later in his trip for accosting, like physically accosting a female police officer and telling her he planned to slap her ass, saying, I'll grab it too. Donald Trump told me to grab it by the pussy. I'll grab that too.

• 1:07:15Speaker 01

  So he wants to get arrested, then. He's trying, he wants to, this is intentionally trying to get, he's trying to get arrested because again, knows that he's just going to get turned loose 72 hours later or whatever, after, yeah.

• 1:07:27Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And that does happen. That happens to Vitali. He actually got deported from, I think, the Philippines, it might have been Indonesia, to Russia, because he was doing some bullshit like this. And it worked out great for him, right? Because he was able to talk about how horrible the jail conditions were and how he got his phone smuggled in. And so the story was about like, problems in the jail system as opposed to like, well, this guy was deserved to have something done to him, right?

• 1:07:48Speaker 01

  Also, Johnny Smiley got banned from Kick, the place you go.

• 1:07:52Robert Evans?

  It's not easy.

• 1:07:54Speaker 01

  It's like getting kicked out of Australia. Like, that's, that's where we put the criminals. What are you talking about? It's like getting kicked out of prison.

• 1:08:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:02Speaker 01

  I thought that was the whole point of Kick is like, this is the free speech platform. How loathsome do you have to be? That's like Kick being scared of legal action. Like, no, this is a liability even for us, and we're degenerates.

• 1:08:14Robert Evans?

  You have to really be crossing a line. And he's about to cross another line. In October of 2024, he traveled to South Korea, announcing online beforehand his intention to find a member of the K-pop band BTS and punch them in the face. Since actual pop stars don't tend to walk around, just like where random streamers can hit them, he moved on to other targets and livestreamed himself twerking on and kissing a statue meant to honor Korean comfort women. These were women and often girls abducted by Japanese forces during World War II and used as sex slaves. The issue of comfort women in Korea and elsewhere in territories conquered by the Empire of Japan is still very much alive. The Japanese government does not do a good job of acknowledging that this happened. This is a massive cause

• 1:08:56Robert Evans?

  of conflict between Japan and its neighbors up to the present day. And this is taken very seriously in South Korea. This is a horror, this is like a 9/11 level, like traumatic cultural crime, right?

• 1:09:08Speaker 01

  Japan gets off too easy in the cultural reputation, just as, just as Britain gets off too easy in how we remember certain empires. Yeah. Like, I get it. I get it. They, they, you know, they suffered their own disasters there in the end, but they get off too easy, is all I'm saying.

• 1:09:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah, they were pretty out of pocket.

• 1:09:28Speaker 01

  There was, yeah.

• 1:09:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And it's, yeah. Before everything blew up for him, Johnny made it clear that he knew this history. He knew why what he was doing was offensive because he visited a unification church facility in Seoul and he posed with a picture of Shinzo Abe, who as Prime Minister of Japan refused to acknowledge the reality of what had been done to these comfort women, right? There's a reason why, number one, Abe was also associated with that church, which is why he was assassinated. So there's a number of reasons why he's doing this. But the fact that he, like, he can't have not known the implications of all of this, of bringing Abe into it, of defacing effectively this statue that represented a horrific crime.

• 1:10:10Robert Evans?

  He posted, RIP Shinzo Abe, I defeated the Koreans for you. So it's pretty clear he knows what he's doing.

• 1:10:17Speaker 07

  This guy sucks.

• 1:10:19Robert Evans?

  He definitely does.

• 1:10:20Speaker 01

  He did like a brief Wikipedia search to see what would be good trolling material. This is like bare surface level. It's like, okay, what offends this country? And that's, that's it. He got a couple of points and that's.

• 1:10:33Robert Evans?

  Yep. Yep. My guess would be he read an article about Abe after the assassination that brought up the comfort women. He was like, oh, great. That's, that's a way I can really piss people off. Yeah. Per an article in the Economic Times, Somali deliberately sought to provoke South Koreans, including Kyung Hee University students and bystanders by displaying a drawing of the Japanese Rising Sun flag, a symbol widely considered offensive in the country due to its ties to Japan's wartime aggression. Additionally, Somali played explicit content loudly while riding the subway, drawing considerable attention. The music was often North Korean marching tunes. So again, he's just really, he's pushing all of the obvious buttons, right?

• 1:11:09Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:11:10Robert Evans?

  When people would get angry, he would shout at them to speak English. Johnny was assaulted repeatedly and initially the police acted to protect him from his assailants. In one video, after he got like attacked while kissing that comfort woman statue, he shouts from the back of a police car, Americans have way more freedom here. These inwards protecting us. We're in the back of a police car. Come and get us. Come get us. Somali was initially taken into custody by the police for his own safety. After he was attacked for kissing that statue, he was later charged with a bunch of crimes for which he might have been imprisoned for up to 10 years. But those charges relied heavily on him possessing drugs and ultimately he only got a six month sentence. Although as his conviction comes with a fine, he may find himself stuck in South Korea for a while until he can pay it. I don't know what his finances are like. He's not able to stream

• 1:11:54Robert Evans?

  right now and hasn't been for a while. He is currently incarcerated, right?

• 1:11:59Speaker 01

  Is this the first one we've come across that's actually had charges stick? That's interesting. I wonder if it wasn't.

• 1:12:04Robert Evans?

  This is the first one I've seen.

• 1:12:05Speaker 01

  They finally got fed up with the trend and wanted to make an example. Cause how else are you gonna?

• 1:12:11Robert Evans?

  I read a lot of, in South Korean papers, I read a lot of discussion along that line of like, we have to really go after, we have to punish this kid because we can't have people continuing to do this. Right? Like this is really unacceptable. Now, that said, I've seen a lot of speculation that Johnny's punishment might discourage other nuisance streamers and I don't know that it will. While he did face real consequences, including the destruction of his business, the brouhaha around his arrest and conviction created content for countless other streamers and YouTubers. In April of 2025, directly inspired by Johnny's example, Ice Poseidon, Paul De Nino, visited South Korea the very month that Johnny went on trial for his own actions. Per the Korea Herald, American YouTuber Ice

• 1:12:54Robert Evans?

  Poseidon came under fire that same month for a live stream in Busan where he and his companion shouted in public, kicked trash and mocked Korean food, saying kimchi is disgusting. When riding in a taxi, he also spoke Korean in an exaggerated mocking tone, seeming to ridicule the elderly driver. In another article that I read in Google translated form by Korean reporter Kim Hyun Jung, notes that Ice Poseidon made direct reference to comfort women, shouting on stream that Japan gave good genes to Koreans through comfort women. And it's clear to me from all this, that the only long-term impact so far that Johnny's example has had was to warn other streamers away from directly touching the statues. But it also convinced them, well, going to Korea and doing this kind of stuff is really good business, right? It gets attention. Johnny's famous right

• 1:13:39Robert Evans?

  now for it. I want to get some of that attention. I'm just not going to go quite as far. Right? Which is upsetting. And De Nino was not arrested or punished for his behavior in any way. All across the world, nuisance streamers continue to piss people off in public, often driven by headlines. For example, in France, there's an ongoing issue with what some people call injection panic, right? This is a rash of crimes where bystanders are injected with random shit at nightclubs. And that, these real crimes is a real problem that they have in France right now, inspired a French influencer, Amin Mojito27, to make a series of TikTok and Instagram videos in which he approached pedestrians with a fake syringe and chased them on camera. Right? Like, the fuck, man?

• 1:14:25Robert Evans?

  He was sentenced to six months in prison for his actions. And if there's ever, if there is though, ever a time in which modest carceral punishment could have stopped this shit, I think we're past it now. Even though some people are getting punished, there's just too much fucking money in it. Right? I opened this episode with the case of Chud the Builder, who committed his crimes a few months after Mojito was convicted in October of 2025. And whatever happens to Chud, I doubt it's going to dissuade the next nuisance streamer or videographer, or whatever you want to call them, for one reason, the money. Per an article on News Channel 5 Nashville by Levi Ismail, more than $300,000 has poured in through donations for Dalton Etherly since his May 13th arrest. So he's still, I mean,

• 1:15:07Robert Evans?

  he's, he might go to prison, right? But he's also making hundreds of thousands of dollars. That's why he was able to bail out, even though he was put in like $1.2 million bail or something like that. It's because his fans raised so much money.

• 1:15:21Robert Evans?

  And yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know what else to say here.

• 1:15:27Speaker 01

  But that's the end of it? I thought you were gonna circle back around to some kind of a solution that would make me, that would make me feel better. Cause it kind of seems like.

• 1:15:34Speaker 07

  Not that kind of show, Jason. Not that kind of show.

• 1:15:37Robert Evans?

  I have a solution in mind, Jason, but it's not, not what I can say on air.

• 1:15:43Speaker 01

  Well, no, but I, like, I don't want us to constantly be, of course, these two episodes sounding like we're saying, well, you know what would have fixed this whole problem? Prison. More police and more prison.

• 1:15:55Robert Evans?

  Clearly hasn't.

• 1:15:55Speaker 01

  Longer prison sentences. Like, that's, that's not the, the vibe of this show. Like, you know, incarceration solves everything. It teaches people a lesson. But you have a system that's created incentives. It's the same with, you're seeing a lot of things with new technology, like same thing with the gambling, where suddenly, like the gambling ads are everywhere. You watch a football game, every ad break is now just a gambling app ad. And then the gambling is in your pocket. And it's like, well, yeah, that's where the money's gonna go unless that's just, you know, there's money to be made. People like to gamble or they can't stop gambling. So that's where you're, the technology and the

• 1:16:36Speaker 01

  incentives have combined to drive people in a certain direction. And here you've got a generation of kids who find movies boring. And when they, you think about spectacle, they're not thinking, like when I was like, you know, I saw Jurassic Park the first time and saw a special effect that looked like a real dinosaur. It's like, yeah, that's spectacle. That's what Hollywood spectacle. That same kid would watch Jurassic Park and would have fallen asleep. Cause like, it's a CGI dinosaur. I've seen that a billion times. But spectacle is, you're watching something live and this guy's on the street and he could die. The one, I referenced a situation, I think in the last episode, that I think there was a streamer called Tanner Cook, one that got shot at a shopping mall.

• 1:17:22Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I should have brought that into these, these scripts. But yeah, it was that same kind of thing.

• 1:17:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. He was confronting, just shouting slurs at a guy who, again, is just a, like a delivery driver or something, Uber driver, or he's like Uber Eats. It just kept telling him, back off, back off, back off. And then finally pulled a gun and shot him. Cause the guy apparently is like, oh, this is great content. How upset this guy's getting. This is great spectacle. Look at the emotion. Look how angry he is. And then he gets shot and then the jury, they let him off of shooting them. The jury was like, well, the crime is discharging a gun in a shopping mall because again, the ricochet could have hurt, could have hit someone who didn't deserve to be shot.

• 1:17:59Robert Evans?

  Right. But this guy clearly did.

• 1:18:02Speaker 01

  You know, again, we're not, we're not saying we want you to be shooting people that are filming YouTube pranks, but that's a, that's an outcome that you should anticipate.

• 1:18:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And to be clear, quite frankly, if like, one of these guys gets shot and killed, it won't stop anybody. Right? Because again, what would stop them? If you want to know like, what would stop this? And I don't have a way to make this happen. What will stop this is if there's not money in it.

• 1:18:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:26Robert Evans?

  That'll stop this.

• 1:18:26Speaker 01

  And the platforms, that's part of it. And I think people are probably asking, well, who, like, are they getting paid through Twitch? Are they getting paid through Kick? Are they getting paid through, what are the other degenerate, like Rumble?

• 1:18:39Robert Evans?

  Oh, there, I forget. There's, there's, there's one that's even a rung down from Kick, right? That's like the even more socially unacceptable one. I'm forgetting its name right now.

• 1:18:47Speaker 01

  Rumble, I think.

• 1:18:47Robert Evans?

  Rumble, rumble. Yes.

• 1:18:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. But so, so there's layers to this because for one thing, there's always another platform. Cause there's always another platform to take the people who've been banned from the last platform for doing porn, gambling, violence, whatever, racism. There's always some other, you know, there's some company run out of Estonia or whatever, saying, yeah, we'll take you. And, but the other thing is, there's so many mechanisms because the fans are sending money directly. So for example, if you do a GoFundMe, a lot of times they will shut down a fundraiser if you're a dirtbag. But there's always.

• 1:19:23Robert Evans?

  There's GiveSendGo. Yeah. Which is where that lady raised 800 grand.

• 1:19:27Speaker 01

  The racist lady shouting at the, at the child. I still, I think you have listeners who think you had to have made that up because why would people donate to shouting at an eight year old?

• 1:19:35Robert Evans?

  $800,000 for shouting slurs at a child with autism. Yeah.

• 1:19:39Speaker 01

  But that wasn't GoFundMe. That was, or Kickstarter.

• 1:19:42Robert Evans?

  GiveSendGo.

• 1:19:43Speaker 01

  Okay. Yeah. But even if that one got shut down, there's always a

• 1:19:47Robert Evans?

  Exactly.

• 1:19:48Speaker 01

  crowd funny platform, or there's a crypto platform.

• 1:19:52Speaker 07

  Crypters are gonna find a way.

• 1:19:54Speaker 01

  The technology means that you don't have to convince Coca-Cola to run a 30 second ad against this content. You can get the money directly from the fans. There's always another platform. There's always another fundraising mechanism. You could just do it through crypto. Like, you kind of can't stop the flow of money. That's what I was saying at the very, very start of last episode, is that the technology made a new type of bad behavior possible. And it's very, and society has not adjusted to it yet.

• 1:20:25Robert Evans?

  Nope. No, and I do want to be clear. I don't think this is a situation in which like creating new laws is gonna, for one thing, all of these people we've talked about have repeatedly broken the law and not gotten in trouble, including for like beating a woman badly. Like, I don't know. I assume he got some sort of like community service or some shit, but he didn't stop streaming. Vitali like kept doing his thing. And like, if you were to make, if someone were to make like a law against like nuisance, causing a nuisance for content, it's just gonna get used against like protesters and shit. None of these people are gonna get punished by it. Right? Like, I don't, I don't think that that's, this is a problem that has to be solved to some extent socially by making this both unacceptable and thus unprofitable. And I know, I have no idea how to make that happen.

• 1:21:11Speaker 01

  Like, it's similar to like this, one of my most unpopular political opinions is that I think passing new laws to make like hate speech a felony, I know who they're gonna target. And it's not the people you think they're gonna target. Like, I know how that's gonna get used. I'm sorry. They're gonna decide that like calling somebody a Zionist is a slur. And so they're gonna apply it toward, it's not the people you think it's gonna apply to.

• 1:21:32Speaker 07

  Sure.

• 1:21:33Speaker 01

  And it's like, I'm sorry, I know, I don't wanna give the government that ability. I don't trust, I don't trust, depending on what administration's in charge, I don't trust that it's gonna.

• 1:21:44Robert Evans?

  No, to the, to the extent that I think there's any sort of like carceral or legal thing that would help. It's like, well, I guess if somebody personates a police officer, you should probably punish them? If somebody beats a woman half to death on the street, you should probably punish them? As opposed to letting them continue to make money online?

• 1:22:02Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:22:02Speaker 01

  A lot of things come down to enforcing rules that we kind of already have. It's just that, again, certain people are always gonna be very good finding the gaps to slip through. It's just that, you know, your society ideally has a way to handle sociopaths or amoral people who have just decided this is the only way they can make money. And gonna be frank, all the examples you used here, if they weren't doing this, it's not like they would be brain surgeons. I'm thinking this is probably the maximum amount of money they could make. I don't, not, not thinking they have other talents they're hiding from the world. But yeah, it's, so this show just doesn't end with like, like a hopeful note at all, does it?

• 1:22:48Robert Evans?

  I don't really have anything hopeful to say about this, Jason.

• 1:22:51Speaker 07

  My hopeful note is that you have a book coming out. That's my hopeful note.

• 1:22:56Robert Evans?

  You do have a book coming out. Yeah.

• 1:22:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. And these books-

• 1:22:59Robert Evans?

  Maybe if we all get back to books.

• 1:23:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. And these books are fun. They're not about, by design, this is what I do to escape the real world. They're, I've got a neon crab behind me, holding, holding a little knife. I know that only the, the video watchers can see it, but.

• 1:23:19Robert Evans?

  It is a great little crab. You sent me a nice plastic crab that I have on my table, actually.

• 1:23:23Speaker 01

  Oh, there we go.

• 1:23:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Well, Jason, this has been a fun, depressing conversation about, I don't know, what kind of feels a little like a death spiral culturally. I don't, I don't see this getting better before it gets worse. We'll see.

• 1:23:37Speaker 01

  Trends come and go. There's, I'm sure you go back to the 1960s, you'll find, you know, where have the serial killers gone? They became mass shooters. Like, stuff comes and goes. There's a brief period in the 60s when all these teenage girls decided that hitchhiking was the best way to travel. And a whole bunch of men were like, hey, that would be an easy way to kill 300 women. And then, but what's the last famous serial killer you've heard of? It's, it's a thing that, you know, you adjust, people start to keep an eye out a little bit better. They become a little bit more vigilant.

• 1:24:12Robert Evans?

  And this will get boring at some point, right? Like, everything does.

• 1:24:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, cuz the spectacle goes away. Cuz it's, it's the, yeah, it's the 100th time you've seen somebody run up and try to yell racial slurs at a bunch of construction workers. It's like, okay, whatever, dude.

• 1:24:26Robert Evans?

  I guess that, that is where I do feel some of the future danger comes, is that as this does at some point start having diminishing returns, some of these guys will try way more extreme things, right? In order to like move the needle. And I don't think it'll, it, obviously that never works in the long run, but you're gonna see, you're gonna see some more Chud the Builder like stories before this is over, right? That is definitely true, I think.

• 1:24:49Speaker 01

  I gotta say, I, I think it was on reels, I saw somebody had made like a very, cuz you can still kind of tell AI right now, not for much longer. But they made a bad AI video of like, it was in the gym, and there's a woman with like a big butt, and the guy ran up and like slapped her on the butt, and she like turned around and yelled at him. But it was all AI. And I remember thinking, yeah, no, no real woman was slapped there.

• 1:25:13Robert Evans?

  There you go.

• 1:25:13Speaker 01

  It's all, it's all just a bunch of pixels. Yeah, yeah, it's depraved. It's, yes, there's people watching it, and it's making them worse people cuz they're like getting off on the idea.

• 1:25:22Speaker 07

  You were just relieved it didn't happen to an actual woman.

• 1:25:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was.

• 1:25:27Speaker 07

  You know, I get it.

• 1:25:28Robert Evans?

  I, I do wonder, maybe stuff like that will reduce somewhat the amount of both the profitability of doing this for real and the number of people doing it. Maybe we'll just transition to very off putting AI videos of pranks. I guess that's optimistic.

• 1:25:43Speaker 01

  That's the best I can offer you. I'm so sorry. I realized that in a perfect world, that would not exist, but.

• 1:25:49Robert Evans?

  We don't have a good episode ending here. Yeah. All right, everybody. Buy Jason's book.

• 1:25:57Speaker 07

  Buy Jason's book.

• 1:25:57Speaker 01

  Also.

• 1:25:58Robert Evans?

  There are no Jason Crabs in this book.

• 1:26:00Speaker 01

  I'm Jason K. Pargen on TikTok reels, YouTube, all of them. Every platform that has video, I'm on there.

• 1:26:08Robert Evans?

  Find Jason's videos, read Jason's books, and I don't know, don't become a nuisance streamer.

• 1:26:16Speaker 07

  Be nice to other people. Touch grass. Wear sunscreen.

• 1:26:20Speaker 01

  It is the saddest job I've ever heard of, I think, in my entire life. This is the worst possible job, I think.

• 1:26:26Robert Evans?

  Oh, I like.

• 1:26:26Speaker 01

  I think, I can't think of another, of going and shouting slurs at people for, for donations. I can't fathom.

• 1:26:33Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah, this job, yes.

• 1:26:34Speaker 01

  No, I wasn't talking about a podcaster being the worst possible job.

• 1:26:37Robert Evans?

  That seems weird, Jason. No, yes, absolutely. I agree. Sorry.

• 1:26:40Speaker 01

  This is a noble profession, what you're doing.

• 1:26:43Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes. It's the only real job. I often say this to surgeons.

• 1:26:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. You're proud to tell your, your grandparents that you do this.

• 1:26:50Robert Evans?

  That's right.

• 1:26:51Speaker 07

  Yes, my brother, the oncologist.

• 1:26:54Robert Evans?

  Yeah, see, that's a fake job.

• 1:26:56Speaker 07

  I'm not joking. The motherfucker wants to cure cancer. It's so good. It's crazy. Podcast.

• 1:27:06Robert Evans?

  All right, we're done.

• 1:27:11Speaker 07

  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 in our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, youtube.com/behindthebastards. We love about 40% of you, statistically speaking.

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• 1:29:30Speaker 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.

• 1:29:45Speaker 06

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

• 1:29:51Speaker 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.

• 1:30:09Speaker 01

  How do you know that Claude won't become manipulative?

• 1:30:14Speaker 03

  This is a constant worry. And you can actually catch the model thinking, I think X is actually true, but I'm gonna tell the user Y.

• 1:30:22Speaker 01

  I'm Walter Isaacson. On my new podcast, The Builders, I'm going inside the minds of the people shaping our future. Listen to The Builders starting October 13 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:30:39Speaker 02

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.