Why the internet's grossest influencer is more powerful than you think

Today we're joined again by journalist Kat Tenbarge to talk about one of the grossest guys on the internet. He’s also one of the most popular Twitch streamers there is. His name is Zack Hoyt, better known as Asmongold. His first video was in 2008, featuring him trying to catch a rat in his parents’ house. He then became obsessed with World of Warcraft and started streaming his gameplay. The rest is history. He has a “rat clock.” Roaches frequently join his streams of popular video games. Then, of course, he got radicalized by the Johnny Depp vs. Amber Heard trial and started getting political. How did we let this happen? And is he part of the manosphere or kind of his own thing? Ryan, Kat, and Grant try to determine what exactly is appealing about this kind of guy. Our guest Kat Tenbarge runs Spitfire News. Subscribe to Spitfire News at ⁠https://spitfirenews.com/⁠, and follow her on Instagram, Bluesky, TikTok @kattenbarge. She also makes videos for our friends at COURIER, which you can find at ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@COURIERHQ⁠. Patreon Want even more Panic World content? Like ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, and access to our exclusive Discord? Sign up for a membership at:⁠ https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld⁠. Sponsors This episode is sponsored by Surfshark. If you want to make your online life feel just a little less exposed, go to ⁠https://surfshark.com/panic⁠ and use code PANIC at checkout to get 4 extra months of Surfshark VPN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:25Speaker 01

  Ryan, you're looking a little dark.

• 0:28Ryan Broderick?

  I am seeing that, and I'm trying to figure out, all my lights are on.

• 0:34Speaker 01

  You're in extra bisexual lighting.

• 0:37Ryan Broderick?

  I know.

• 0:40Speaker 01

  It's fine.

• 0:58Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, Kat, welcome to the show.

• 0:59Speaker 03

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:01Ryan Broderick?

  We're gonna be talking today about a guy who I don't ever want to talk about ever. I hate this guy. He's gross. Do you know who I'm talking about?

• 1:10Speaker 03

  Just from the word gross alone, I could already like guess who you were talking about.

• 1:15Ryan Broderick?

  Share with the class. Who do you think I'm talking about?

• 1:17Speaker 03

  I assume you're talking about one of Twitch's most popular and prolific streamers ever, Asmongold.

• 1:26Ryan Broderick?

  Is that how you pronounce his name?

• 1:27Speaker 03

  I think so.

• 1:28Ryan Broderick?

  I've always been saying Asmongold.

• 1:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, Adam left me three notes to not let you say Asmongold the entire recording, which is why I put it at the top of the outline, phonetically spelled out.

• 1:38Ryan Broderick?

  It's Asmongold. Okay, that's weirder. Anyways, my name is Ryan Broderick. With me as always is Grant Irving, a man who has great personal hygiene, actually. And this is Panic World, a show about how the internet warps our minds, our culture, and eventually, reality. Joining us today from Spitfire Newsletter, also on Courier now, welcome Courier Network friend, Kat Tambarch. How are you doing?

• 2:05Speaker 03

  You know, it's always such an interesting question, but I think today is going pretty well. At least it's like not, well, actually, it might be back to 40 degrees. It was really nice weather the past few days, so that was really uplifting, but I think it's back to bad weather.

• 2:19Speaker 01

  There's hail.

• 2:19Ryan Broderick?

  Eagle-eyed viewers will notice I have a sunburn on my nose.

• 2:25Ryan Broderick?

  Which, yeah, that's my mistake for going outside. I should never do it. I think that's what YouTubers must do, right? Is like, oh, I guess they wear sunscreen also. I didn't do that. But someone who doesn't wear sunscreen, definitely, is Zack Hoyt, better known as Asmongold. Oh, that's a hard sentence to say. Better known as Asmongold. He is one of the world's biggest streamers, and he is who we are talking about today. He is someone that I have tried very hard never to mention and/or think about, because he's really gross. And we're gonna get to why he's really gross. But his reach and his influence are absolutely terrifying, because he's really, just like a, he's like a bad dude. And his existence is, is a bad thing. It's a bad sign. And you know, we talk all the time about the

• 3:10Ryan Broderick?

  manosphere, but there's this other kind of infection ruining the men of the internet. And it isn't talked about enough. And I actually think Asmongold is the perfect way to get into talking about this other sort of nefarious force warping the minds of young men. Kat, when did you first notice this guy?

• 3:30Speaker 03

  So, it was after the Dep Herd trial was when I learned who he was. And he wasn't even super on my radar, because I was mainly paying attention to YouTubers who were covering the Dep Herd trial. But the first time I remember learning about him was learning about his hoarder house, and how like, dirty it was. And then, in the same sentence, I was told he was like, the most popular Twitch streamer. And I was like, how is that possible?

• 3:58Ryan Broderick?

  Hold on. Representation matters. And so, I do think there is something very powerful about Twitch, the average Twitch user seeing themselves on screen.

• 4:10Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 4:10Ryan Broderick?

  And that leads us actually to our first clip, which we're gonna show you now, unfortunately. Our researcher Adam dug this up. This is Zack Hoyt's first ever YouTube video, when he was still going as Zach Rar, as in rar rar means I love you and dinosaur. This is 2008, and this is about a rat that was found in his parents' kitchen.

• 4:38Ryan Broderick?

  I can smell this house.

• 4:39Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 4:41Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, there's the rat. Okay, so that is a rat in an extremely disgusting kitchen. And they're gonna try to catch the rat. That's, there's four minutes of this. Okay, I need to say something. I need to say something because I, I think this is, this has in a lot of ways become like the main insight of my adult life, actually, in a lot of ways. And this is really sad to say. When I was a teenager and in, early years in college, I would find myself often with guys that look like that hitting themselves in the face with like hammers and blocks of wood in houses that looked like that. Usually, uh, there was like some kind of frisbee that they would put like blunt guts into. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 5:22Ryan Broderick?

  Watching like really horrible horror movies or wrestling or, and I, I went to one house where it was like a pot that they had boiled hot dogs in, but they got too high and forgot about the hot dogs. So they just had hot dog, they had literal hot dog water that was just like in their kitchen. And I spent all of my time and energy of my life to make sure I am never around these people ever again. And I am mystified that like people are so desperate to hang out with these kinds of people that they are doing it remotely via the internet now. I want to try to figure out how the hell we let this happen.

• 6:04Ryan Broderick?

  And why we aren't freaking out about it enough. It is, uh, it breaks my brain. Are you, uh, have you found yourself in situations with guys like this?

• 6:11Speaker 03

  Yes. What this reminds me of so palpably are the like losers that my best friend in high school would date. And I would like go over to her boyfriend's house and he would have like Rick and Morty on the TV, like the Hot Topic, Spencer's, um, oh God, what are they called? Tapestries like stuck to the wall with pushpens and they would just be smoking like the worst weed created to man. That, the archetype that this speaks to me. And a lot of them lived in houses like this and a lot, and those were like the guys who you would also like buy weed from in high school.

• 6:44Ryan Broderick?

  Like, I can tell you, I have been couch locked from bad stepped on mids. On a couch next to a guy like Aiden Ross or Asmongold and be like, I can never let this happen to me ever again. This is a nightmare.

• 6:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 7:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, the framing of this as aspirational in particular is really disturbing. So, and like with Asmongold, it's like, he's not impoverished. These guys are actually making a ton of money. They're just choosing to live like this, which is what's so staggering to me.

• 7:17Ryan Broderick?

  And so we see this video of the 18-year-old Asmongold trying to catch a rat in his house. And if we flash forward to this year, we now have this video, which I will share my screen on to show you. So we're gonna do a little comparison of sort of how he got here. This is Asmongold talking about Grok when it was being used to like, undress women and children without their permission on X.

• 7:44Speaker 04

  Like, I'm old enough to remember back in the day, whenever, if you wanted to post something on the internet, you were always told, never post shit and pictures of yourself on the internet, because weirdos can get them and do stuff with them. It's not that it's even a good thing to have happen, but at the same time, I mean, if you don't want this shit to happen, don't post stuff on the internet.

• 8:05Ryan Broderick?

  And this has like, millions and millions and millions of views, and he has millions and millions and millions of followers, and he is arguably one of the larger pundits in American politics right now. Um, Kat, how did that happen?

• 8:22Speaker 03

  Well, well, like a lot of deplorable creatures who have undue influence over our political system today, they just like, did viral bait content until they had amassed a giant audience and enough eyeballs on them at any given time to be this influential. And like, the way that he did it was largely through commenting on the Deb V. Heard trial.

• 8:47Ryan Broderick?

  His rise went completely under the radar for a very long time because it's the kind of shit we thought we could, I mean, I thought I could just ignore. And we're gonna get there. That is absolutely when he starts to explode. He, he, he moves off of the rat video, though, in 2008 to his first kind of home base. It's World of Warcraft, which is also where like Steve Bannon's hanging out, Jeffrey Epstein's hanging out. Like, most of the male kind of culture of the 21st century is being written in real time by WoW players. I used to go to like a LAN center and play Warcraft with people and quickly was like, "I can't be around you freaks anymore." Also kept getting sick because none of them like washed their hands. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 9:31Ryan Broderick?

  So Hoyt starts uploading gameplay videos of World of Warcraft. He starts to get his early fanbase from WoW. I actually knew a WoW sicko in high school that would do war driving. Are you familiar with this? Uh-uh. He would drive around and look for unsecure Wi-Fi networks and then try to play WoW on them from his car. Wait, that's wild. Why not, you know?

• 9:56Ryan Broderick?

  So yeah, he starts, he starts filming videos, gameplay videos, talking about Warcraft. And then he starts answering fan requests to like do different things. And one of them is him showing his room. And this is, okay, so this is a video that is, oh my god, it looks like the fucking Blair Witch. It's insane.

• 10:19Ryan Broderick?

  This is a video that is titled "Asmongold's Layer." It has 1.1 million views. It's from 2010. And here we go.

• 10:30Speaker 05

  Hello, everyone. I've heard a lot of people saying that I exaggerate things, I, you know, make things more than what they are. And that's true. But not in terms of my room. A lot of people think that it's actually not as bad as it is. And I'm probably gonna clean it today, but I don't want, I don't want to lose the memory.

• 10:52Ryan Broderick?

  Ah, god. It's like a Harmony Koran movie. It's a nightmare.

• 10:59Speaker 03

  Watching old Asmongold videos is like the eerie feeling of watching a Marble Hornets video where I'm like, my whole body is on edge. Like, what's gonna happen next?

• 11:09Ryan Broderick?

  It's haunted. It's absolutely haunted content and it becomes very popular. And by 2013, he starts a YouTube channel, Asmongold1341, which is for his WoW content. And it gets enough attention that they make a subreddit for him, which I didn't realize his fandom was this old. Did you? I mean, like, were you aware of all this?

• 11:28Speaker 03

  No, it doesn't surprise me because I'm like, I feel like people, like, the people I knew in high school who were obsessed with World of Warcraft were also obsessed with Reddit. So I'm like, this makes a lot of sense to me that he would have a very early fan subreddit community.

• 11:43Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 11:43Speaker 01

  Why would there be an overlap?

• 11:46Speaker 03

  I just think it's like, this was like where nerds went online, is why.

• 11:51Ryan Broderick?

  I, I was like, it's funny, like, he doesn't start streaming on Twitch for like a few more years, but I do kind of remember this culture that I didn't totally understand, actually. And it's very possible that I maybe even came across Asmongold subreddit and like, didn't understand it. Because I do remember in the early 2010s, there being this sense that certain players of certain video games were kind of becoming celebrities in their own way. And I couldn't totally understand how. Like, I, I wasn't really tapped in. And then I remember like the whole, like, parody of it with Major League Gaming. Yeah. So like, I, I was kind of aware that these spaces existed, but like, I wasn't playing any video games

• 12:32Ryan Broderick?

  because I had a job and I was dating a woman and I had a life and stuff. So I kind of tapped out. And then Twitch appears. And Twitch, I think, is the moment where everything starts to sort of connect. In November 2016, Trump gets elected, Asmongold starts streaming WoW on Twitch, and he streams the game four days a week, sometimes more. And he does that basically for like, three years straight. He is, he's streaming WoW all day, every day. If you think this is depressing, you're right, but Asmongold would disagree.

• 13:10Ryan Broderick?

  There's one video where he talks about how he might feel sad when he looks around and doesn't have a girlfriend or, you know, experienced the outside world. But all that goes away once he's back in his safe little nest in his room playing video games. So, you know, it's all totally fine. And he becomes the single most popular wild streamer on Twitch, which at that time was like one of the larger, are you familiar with how Twitch kind of functions?

• 13:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:36Ryan Broderick?

  Okay. For people who aren't just, there are categories for certain games and then certain games are more popular than other games. Like, for instance, right now, if you want to be really popular on Twitch, you get really good at Fortnite. The Fortnite tag is going to promote you, et cetera, et cetera. And his audience is like very attracted to how they can make fun of him and relate to him.

• 13:56Speaker 03

  He strikes me as like a male version of a lol cow. Like basically, yeah, because I'm like this, to me, I've seen this, this exact type of environment that forms around this exact type of person who like documents their life on YouTube, who has really like messy impoverished like living conditions, who has like 76 so like styrofoam soda containers around them at any given time. And a lot of times you have these like communities of observers, even when the, the person they're observing has like relatively no following or like little engagement. Because people just love to like scrutinize and watch these people. And I think there's a little bit of like a shot, a schadenfreude, or how do you say that word?

• 14:39Ryan Broderick?

  Schadenfreude.

• 14:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, okay. There's like a little bit of schadenfreude element to it where it's like, my life, my room isn't as messy as his, like my life is not as, as visually depraved as his is. But with men who become these types of figures, like when women become lol cows, a lol cow is literally like a woman. So they just get harassed. But when men get this type of attention online, they can build careers off of it. It's like they're, they're still the target of the joke, but they can gain like credibility from that.

• 15:11Ryan Broderick?

  I think that's a fantastic point. And in fact, like our research backs this up pretty, pretty solidly. And I remember like at the time, I started to become aware of him probably after Trump became president and I would see his stuff in livestream fails, which is the subreddit for like sharing Twitch streamer cringe. And I remember like every time he would pop up, I would think like, well, that's the end of him. And it wouldn't happen because the what you're describing is real like there is something about a guy who can just sustain being a massive punching bag for people. And so, yeah, with Asmongold, this is exactly what happens in 2016. He ends up on livestream fails because multiple roaches are crawling around his chair and computer.

• 15:55Ryan Broderick?

  He gets asked about it and he says, he complains that they've been laying eggs in his food.

• 16:02Ryan Broderick?

  God, this is so gross, man. Then, then about a year later, viewers notice that there's dried blood on his wall next to his bed. This is like grossing me out so bad.

• 16:16Ryan Broderick?

  He explains that it's from, he explains it's from his teeth because they bleed overnight. Then he wipes it on the wall.

• 16:28Speaker 01

  Who amongst us?

• 16:30Ryan Broderick?

  This is so, this is so gross, man. I'm like, and then about a year after that, a few months after that, he realizes that it's been 1,234 days or six years and nine months of cumulative time playing WoW. Like that's, that's how long he's been at it. And as he is sort of becoming, as you said, this like, this like positive lol cow, this like relatable lol cow.

• 16:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:59Ryan Broderick?

  He's learning that he can be extremely offensive. He realizes that he can go viral in a different way. So he gets a 24 hour ban in August 2017 from Twitch for insulting the victims of Hurricane Katrina, calling them animals and saying that the hurricane should have done a better job. Also, why are you talking about Hurricane Katrina in 2017? Like, what an insanely deep pull.

• 17:23Speaker 03

  It's like the only natural disaster he remembers.

• 17:26Ryan Broderick?

  I mean, this is a guy who is clearly like frozen in 2007. That is absolutely true.

• 17:31Speaker 01

  I double checked. I was like, did he mean Hurricane Sandy? Did he mean something later?

• 17:36Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, like there was a hurricane like a couple of years before. In 2018, he goes viral again because he announces that he is dating another Twitch streamer named Pink Sparkles. Have you ever heard of her?

• 17:48Speaker 03

  Yes, I have heard of her.

• 17:51Ryan Broderick?

  Your voice definitely told a story there. Let's get into this because it's a whole other part of the dynamic, I think. Asmongold can go viral for being a lol cow, for being gross, being offensive. All of that gets him attention, but it also makes him useful to other creators and women creators, which intentionally or not leads to like its own kind of rage bait.

• 18:13Speaker 03

  There are so many women like this who are oftentimes like younger and more conventionally attractive than these guys and seemingly would have a lot of other opportunities, but yet wind up in relationships with men like Asmongold and Keemstar and like Boogie, like these just these male lol cow figures. They attract these women, maybe because they like present vulnerability. I don't know what it is.

• 18:37Ryan Broderick?

  Comparing Asmongold to Boogie is a is smart. Keemstar as well, if you listening don't know who these people are, that's totally fine. Um, just live your life.

• 18:48Speaker 03

  You're better off for it.

• 18:48Ryan Broderick?

  Just live your, live your damn life. Um, so yeah, at the time that they started dating, Pink Sparkles is getting a lot of hate because the users of Twitch have called decided she's a quote unquote cam whore. Um, and someone asks like why she's considered a cam whore. And, um, people are mad that she's like adjusting her shirt on stream. One user writes, she adjusted her top so you could see her nipple. People want less chicks who stream in almost no clothing, standing in front of the cam all day, selling their nudes through Snapchat slash Patreon while squatting for donations. What does Twitch do? Tell them to stop dressing like whores.

• 19:30Ryan Broderick?

  These cam girls get banned every week for showing tits and then a bunch of other gross stuff that he lists out. Um, and then they're back streaming and a day after they're banned. And this is really interesting to me because I also think that like Twitch through monetization sort of created not only the concept of a simp, but this weird kind of like. This new kind of psychology around hating women online where it's like they don't just hate women, they hate how my horniness contributes to them positively monetarily.

• 20:01Speaker 03

  Yes, it's really interesting like seeing how misogyny has evolved on Twitch because it's like there's misogyny on every social media platform, but Twitch has this very unique culture of it, or I guess it's not unique, it's just so specific to the platform where it's like because it's dominated by video game culture, there's this belief held by many users that like no woman can be there for any real reason. Like any woman who's successful on Twitch could only be successful because she's like trapping simps with her body. That's the only way a woman could perform. And I think you see that like in the video game culture more broadly, but even Twitch as a company like kind of feeds

• 20:43Speaker 03

  into this through content restrictions around like, okay, you can wear a shirt that if it has to be cut off at a certain point, like the company almost lends to this weird logic that you don't see on every social media platform.

• 20:57Ryan Broderick?

  This connects to something that I've been thinking about since the, an episode we did with Siri Doll about how like the new men's rights movement is like extremely gay and how they hate women. And I was thinking about this idea that this really ties to, which is, I think Twitch basically connected the dots for this like very psychosexual thing among especially young men that is like very dark, which is that like they hate women streamers in particular, women creators, because they are jealous of the attention those women are getting from men.

• 21:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:39Ryan Broderick?

  Like these guys want that attention from men. And, and it also sort of ties to these conversations we were having in a previous episode about transvestigating with Kitty Kims and, uh, what's, what's? Jeff.

• 21:53Ryan Broderick?

  We're leaving that in just like that. What's this? What's the, I was gonna say, what's the guy who looks like a dog's name? Um, like?

• 21:59Speaker 01

  Love you, buddy.

• 22:02Ryan Broderick?

  Kitty, Kim, and Jeff, about how like, there is this jealousy, there is this sort of like, desire to police others' bodies because you can't police your own kind of thing. And I do think like simping, the concept of simping and hating female streamers is a lot of, like specifically, young men looking at women online and being like, I want men to care about me that way.

• 22:23Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 22:24Ryan Broderick?

  And then you also get the sort of self-loathing of like, that one would have at a casino, where it's like, I am dumping tons of money into watching this woman online, and I'm sick, I'm, you know, sick with myself. And so it's like, it's these two really weird psychologies that Twitch has just like, connected and turned into a great business for them, so.

• 22:42Speaker 01

  They see themselves as an Asmongold figure. It's both creates the jealousy of like, they're like, I relate to this guy, maybe I can get a woman like this, makes her popular, makes money. And then there's a resentment that they are not him, even though he's the most gross, even though they have blood on their walls, too.

• 23:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:03Speaker 01

  You know, it's that like weird, the, I want to be you, and I relate to you in that same squalor.

• 23:12Speaker 03

  Yes. I also think that like, for women who watch these men, and I think their audiences are overwhelmingly men, but there are women who like, watch this type of content, who engage with this type of content, and then come to appear in this content, either through like, being a significant other, or just like, being on Twitch. And it's like, you almost get this sense that some of these women feel bad for these guys. Like, they see the side of them, like, they're like, oh, your life is so sad. But at the same time, like, they have so much power over them, and they like, use it in such a like, harmful way. Going back to the clip we watched of Asmongold being like, if you're a woman and you put your picture on the internet, like, you're gonna get sexually abused, and that's your fault.

• 23:54Speaker 03

  And yet, for whatever reason, like, there's an audience for that, even among like, some women.

• 24:00Ryan Broderick?

  I'm gonna sit in the, just like, extreme psychic anguish of imagining a woman watching an Asmongold stream for a second, and we're gonna throw to our sponsors, and raid, get rid of the cockroaches in your gamer nest.

• 24:17Speaker 06

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• 25:44Speaker 06

  It also comes with a risk-free 30-day money-back guarantee, and the link and code are in the show description. Now, back to the story, because unfortunately, the internet is only getting weirder. I feel seen. Do you watch live streamers at all? Like, and, and, and, and don't cheat. Do you watch them live?

• 26:03Speaker 03

  I, this is, oh, God, people are gonna be so mad. I only watch one person live.

• 26:09Ryan Broderick?

  Who is that?

• 26:10Speaker 03

  My fiance watches more live stuff than I do. And so she'll watch Hasan Piker when there's like a major political event happening. And so I will come watch him with her. So I'll watch Hasan live and that's basically the only one who I actually watch live. For other people, I usually just watch clips after the fact.

• 26:28Ryan Broderick?

  I am a clip person. I find the act of watching a live stream like extremely sweaty. And yeah, like I just, there's something about it that I find kind of obnoxious. I do, like I'll watch like news conferences live. I'll watch like breaking news live, but watching like a person in a chair, like watch something else, it just like sort of like breaks my brain in a weird way. I also, I was talking to a video editor about this recently, who was trying to tell me that like I should stop filming anything in my office. Because subconsciously, we all start to feel like weird PTSD symptoms from COVID lockdown when we watch people stream at home.

• 27:10Speaker 03

  Oh, that's so interesting.

• 27:12Ryan Broderick?

  And then I sort of like took that and I started thinking about it more. And I was like, so I wonder if it actually is like goes two ways where it's like, there are people who have like, who continue to gravitate towards that because it's like that safety that of that, of that, of those years versus the people who are like, this is so itchy that like, I can't actually watch it. And like, I am one of those people where like, if I watch a Hasan stream, I'm like, get a real room.

• 27:36Ryan Broderick?

  Go outside. Like I can watch, I can watch clavicular walk around like a weird action figure and you know, fight people in nightclubs, but watching someone sit in their desk just like, makes me feel like I'm on a Zoom call.

• 27:47Speaker 03

  Yes, I think that's so real. And it's also like, when you're watching a live stream, especially with someone who has a big audience, it is so overstimulating.

• 27:55Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 27:56Speaker 03

  Because not only are they like usually talking really fast, like bouncing from topic to topic, but then you have like the live comments that are just pouring in at a rate faster you can actually read. And a lot of streamers have little animations on the screen and like the corner. And it'll be like, oh my God, someone just donated, someone just subscribed, someone just bought 100 subscriptions. So it reminds me of like the casino screen.

• 28:19Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 28:19Speaker 03

  Uh, when you're like betting, like they're just trying to capture your attention in so many different ways, but I can only watch that for like 15 minutes before I, I genuinely have to stop. It's too much.

• 28:29Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I'm the same way. Um, but there are many people who do not feel that way because Asmongold becomes one of the biggest streamers on Twitch by 2019. He's captured the eyes of boys everywhere who only want to zone out and watch someone else play video games. And he's about to take this to a whole new level. He is riding like a new wave of interest around World of Warcraft Classic, which is released by Blizzard that year. And he hires the, a team who really changes everything for him. But also I would argue like this idea has quietly changed the entire media landscape, possibly forever, which is he hires Clippers.

• 29:11Ryan Broderick?

  So for those who are not familiar with the world of Clippers, that is why you know who Clavicular is, that is why you know who Hasan Piker is, that is why you know who all of these streamers are. What they have discovered is that instead of making a podcast and making short form videos and making mid-length videos and then, uh, you know, going live, what they can do is they can just go live and then have the Clippers cut down those streams into manageable chunks of content that can fit every widget hole across the internet. And this is what happens with Asmongold. And it puts him in a perfect spot for society collapsing in 2020. And we, at that point, all become Asmongolds. And it turns him into something

• 29:53Ryan Broderick?

  of a cultural institution. He starts his own content creator production company called OTK or One True King in October 2020. And he signs up, uh, streamers Mizkif and S-Fand. Are you, do you know who these people are?

• 30:09Speaker 03

  I know who Mizkif is.

• 30:10Ryan Broderick?

  I know who Mizkif is either. I don't know why I know who Mizkif is.

• 30:13Speaker 03

  I see his name. It's one of those names that you just cannot escape. It's always like, it's like Clavicular style. Like it's like Mizkif like gooned on so and so. And it's like, I don't know what that means, but you just see it over and over and over and over again.

• 30:26Ryan Broderick?

  There are basically like, from my, what I can understand, there's like a hundred to 200 streamers with capuche names that are constantly suing each other.

• 30:37Ryan Broderick?

  And yeah, and like, and like claiming like defamation lawsuits against each other. And I don't like, yeah, in fact, I just Googled Miskif. And apparently he is suing another streamer named Emmeru, which was, I think, the one, the woman who was assaulted at TwitchCon last year.

• 30:53Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 30:53Ryan Broderick?

  So they had like this whole world of like people in gaming chairs, just yelling at each other online. The he, the H3, H3 universe of kind of people. I, I can't even imagine the psychology of someone who would watch this.

• 31:09Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, actually, wait, I did remember a stream that I watched live. I enjoy the, I, I, I love the iShow Speed Tour video.

• 31:16Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 31:17Ryan Broderick?

  I love them. I think they're delightful and I think. But that's, that's a person outside the house. It is a person outside the house. And I think the ongoing bit, do you know about White Speed?

• 31:24Speaker 03

  Yes, I've seen that.

• 31:25Ryan Broderick?

  I think it's like one of the funniest things I've ever, basically there's a white guy that will just appear wherever Speed is and like mog him on camera and disappear. And he like, has followed him to like rural Africa in the middle of China. It's, it's, it's so, it's, it's incredible.

• 31:40Ryan Broderick?

  So anyways, this is the moment where Asmongold starts to kind of like figure out how to, how to change the industry of, of streaming. Um, and he's leaning into what was called like the eternal sleepover style of streaming, which was like Kai Sanat and that whole crew where they like, they get a big McMansion that's totally unfurnished and they just sort of live in it on camera for days at a time. And they're also, I think, pulling things from esports, which is also kind of like a, another culture full of guys that I would be couch locked to smoking regs with in 2008. But now they're billionaires, um, and like owned by Saudi Petrol, Saudi Petrol States. Yeah. So, um, he doesn't take any of the money that he's making to make his home life better.

• 32:26Speaker 03

  That's what's so crazy.

• 32:28Ryan Broderick?

  Crazy thing here.

• 32:29Speaker 03

  He could renovate, he could tear down the entire house and build a mansion from the ground up, but he doesn't, he won't even clean his room. And that is what like really gets me about Asmongold is he chooses to live in filth.

• 32:42Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 32:42Speaker 03

  He likes it. It's comforting to him. And yet surprisingly. That doesn't make anyone like stop. Well, it makes us stop and say like, what's wrong with him. But for his audience, I'm like, don't, doesn't that make you wonder about like, can I trust him? Should I like value anything that he has to say? Like, he refuses to clean his room. That feels like base level, like human behavior to be an adult.

• 33:08Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, like I, I can't even really watch like that show Hoarders, because I, I find, I find that like displays of what I would, you know, say is like mental illness to be like extremely uncomfortable and exploitative to watch.

• 33:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:21Ryan Broderick?

  I am not going to diagnose Asma Gold with, I mean, he has to have like all kinds of different psychiatric disorders. But like, I am not going to diagnose on, on this episode, what I think they are. But I will say that his mother ends up dying in 2021. He takes a hiatus for like the first time ever from streaming. But then can, comes back and he's just been streaming in the same room of her house. And has just been there the whole time.

• 33:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's really dark. I also know like, um, Casey Tron, I think, was the person who was sort of like, well, why didn't he with all of his like money and privilege and power, like make his mom's living scenario a little bit better before she died? And like he and his fans got really mad at that. Like they're like, how dare you accuse Asma Gold of killing his mom? Which I don't even think that people necessarily did. It's just like, people ask questions about why he chooses to live this way. And he finds those questions really offensive.

• 34:19Ryan Broderick?

  She was dealing with, uh, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. In a statement he put out in 2021, he said that she was 70 years old, she was overweight, she smoked. And she basically lived not well.

• 34:33Ryan Broderick?

  If I became a billionaire from streaming all day, I would buy my mom a new house, but you know, whatever. He has to be presenting to his audience that it's okay to live in filth. And only care about video games. Otherwise he loses all his power. But it's a catch 22, because obviously it's affecting him as well. He did open up a bit about sort of like. Like his life after, after his mom died. And I think this is kind of useful insight into who he is as a person. He said, I can't really say when, however, I, uh, he, uh, so he's asked, like, would he come back? And he said, I can't really say when, however, I would like to come on my alt stream, Zach Rar,

• 35:14Ryan Broderick?

  and just kind of give my fucking opinion about things. Talk about stuff I'm reading online that I have to give my two cents for. It's either I talk to the camera, oh gosh, or I sit, or I sit in front of a mirror and I almost have the conversation with myself.

• 35:32Speaker 03

  Ooh, he should have these conversations with a therapist.

• 35:35Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I mean, based on what he's about to sort of spew out onto the internet in the next years in our story here, I would have much rather he just sat and talked to the mirror. And I, but I, I think in many ways,

• 35:49Ryan Broderick?

  you know, there, there's lots that's been written and lots been said about sort of the American psyche being one born of, of isolation and loneliness, particularly the American suburbs are sort of this breeding ground for people who distrust their neighbors. You know, there's Twilight Zone episodes going all the way back, you know, to the invention of the suburb, talking about this. And I, I have no problem imagining that like that, the, the new version of this sort of suburban isolation, the sort of desolation of these old factory towns that people are stuck in are full of people who are like, well, I, I either don't talk to anyone or I talk on the internet.

• 36:25Speaker 03

  Right.

• 36:25Ryan Broderick?

  And that's unfortunately for the rest of us, what Asmongold decides to do, uh, when he comes back. And we, um, have broken this up into sort of, uh, categories here of what he's up to during this period. So let's first talk about his hygiene. And I'm going to try to get through this without gagging. He cleans his room in mid 2022. It gets dirty again and he tries to clean it again and then he basically gives up. And then one user makes a horror video game about, uh, Asmongold's house.

• 36:58Ryan Broderick?

  This is also the period, I'm not gonna pull this link up and I'm just gonna try to explain it as best I can and just get the hell out of here. This is when we get to the rat clock.

• 37:07Speaker 03

  Yes. I've been waiting for this moment.

• 37:12Ryan Broderick?

  Do you want to describe the rat clock? Because I don't know if I can actually get through it. I think it's one of the grossest things that's like ever happened, honestly.

• 37:20Speaker 03

  So, correct me if I'm wrong, but basically Asmongold tells his viewers that the way that he wakes up in the morning is he doesn't set an alarm.

• 37:31Ryan Broderick?

  Yep.

• 37:31Speaker 03

  He, there is a dead rat in his room and it is rotting.

• 37:36Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 37:36Speaker 03

  And when the sun rises and the sunlight hits the dead rotting rat carcass through the window, it, the fumes begin to intensify. And so he actually wakes up because the room smells so bad. And so he, that's his alarm clock. It's the dead rotting rat.

• 37:53Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. Yeah. That's, um, exactly. Hold on. Sorry. But there's one part of the tape you need to hear.

• 38:02Speaker 04

  As soon as, you know, it got hot enough, it would wake me up and then I would know, oh shit, it's time to stream. Have you guys ever done that before?

• 38:08Ryan Broderick?

  No. No one has ever done this. You are the only one. Um, he, uh, at this period of time, he starts buying thrift store clothes instead of doing laundry. Uh, there's rat, you know, there's roaches all over his desk. He ends up getting the nickname Roach King. He starts dating another young woman streamer named Case.

• 38:38Ryan Broderick?

  They do a stream where they sit down at a restaurant to get out of the house and sort of do an IRL stream. Yeah. And, um, it's really weird. Um, here's how one viewer describes it. I'm watching him eat at some fast food restaurant. She doesn't even look at him. She just stares at the camera. It's so unnerving, one viewer said. Seems like very clear that probably she was dating him to maybe get kind of a boost in viewers, I think we can say. She leaves because she's disgusted by his house. He gets accused of grooming her and her possibly being underage comes into play there.

• 39:14Ryan Broderick?

  He is extremely wealthy by this point and just now being pulled into random kind of drama episodes that don't really matter. And he is still claiming that he's like apolitical at this point, which I think is interesting. He's veering more and more into like edgelord territory, outwardly edgelord territory. He's calling people the R word. He's saying that he's triggering people. And then in 2022, we get to the Depp v. Heard trial. So you have been on this show before to talk about this, but for people who haven't gone back in the archive, and you absolutely should, listen to that episode. But tell us a little bit about sort of Asmongold's role in that trial.

• 39:57Ryan Broderick?

  Cause I, I think he actually kind of came away weirdly unscathed from it in a certain, and like bigger than he ever had been before in a weird way.

• 40:06Speaker 03

  Yes. Yeah. Cause so at the time of the Depp v. Heard trial, which was May 2022, there was already a big online movement that was justice for Johnny Depp. It was a bunch of Johnny Depp fans and people who hated Amber Heard, and they had already created this narrative and were pushing it on YouTube, you know, across platforms through viral videos, basically saying that Amber Heard had accused Johnny Depp of abuse, but she was actually the one abusing him. And so when Johnny Depp sued Amber Heard for defamation, the narrative that quickly took hold online was that that was his form of getting justice for him being abused.

• 40:48Speaker 03

  And so lots of different content creators, including people who had never covered anything remotely like this before, all started covering this at the same time from the position of that narrative and getting millions of views from it. Um, I remember in May 2022, like a couple of weeks into the trial, I did this story for NBC News about this 15 year old boy who had been uploading like guitar covers to YouTube and getting like 30 views. And then he uploaded a compilation of clips of Johnny Depp like winning, like smiling, laughing, making jokes, and that got like three million views. Yes. And like when you get that many views, it unlocks a whole new door of possibilities

• 41:30Speaker 03

  for you as a creator, because now you can become monetized. Now you can, you know, profit from these things. And so Asmongold, as most influencers did at that time, hopped onto the anti Amber Heard train. And I, to familiar, like to refresh myself with the type of content that he was doing, I watched this video on his YouTube channel today. It has over three and a half million views, and it's like a compilation of him reacting to the trial. And some creators actually livestreamed the trial and in its entirety and reacted to it for like eight hours a day. A lot of creators were reacting to reactions.

• 42:10Speaker 03

  So like Asmongold was reacting to these like TikTok videos in part. That was like someone else, probably like a 17 year old, made these like epic fail compilations of like Amber Heard and like moments where Johnny Depp appeared like funny or comedic. And Asmongold like would sit there and react to those. And he would say like things that are very interesting to me, such as at one point, he was like, she's just not good enough at lying. Like he was basically like, he gave the whole game away. He was like, I support Johnny Depp because he's funny, he's entertaining, and because he's really good at like selling this narrative. And he, like many other content creators, were like, Amber Heard's team sucks,

• 42:54Speaker 03

  because even if they're right, they're not like selling it to the audience, which is not what a court case is supposed to be about. It's not supposed to be about like how many people on Twitch are laughing, or like how many people like, it's not about like a popular vote. But in this case, it really was.

• 43:12Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 43:12Speaker 03

  Because ultimately, as we all know, the jury completely fell for the exact same shtick and voted, and Johnny Depp won that case. And at the same time, you had people like Asmongold, who were weighing in on the sidelines, who also had these transformative moments in their careers, because his views and following just like skyrocketed, as did many of the creators who made content about this. And on Twitch, like, I don't know if there were any real Twitch streamers who were defending Amber Heard. Like, everyone on Twitch was commenting on this and like shitting all over Amber Heard.

• 43:47Ryan Broderick?

  I mean, no. I think.

• 43:52Ryan Broderick?

  Twitch is not a, how do I say this without being needlessly cruel perhaps?

• 44:00Ryan Broderick?

  Twitch, Twitch has created a lot of people with massive audiences that are not particularly well-educated, or articulate, or smart, or interesting, or talented, who also have no incentive to become those things.

• 44:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 44:21Ryan Broderick?

  And so, when they all kind of figured out in 2022, that they could attach themselves to a court trial the way they used to attach themselves to a popular video game, because that's how Twitch works, right? I sort of talked about this in the last section, but like Twitch doesn't really have a way to promote content. There's no algorithm for Twitch streams, but what it does have are silos. So like, if you want to get people's attention, you could start playing a video game the day it comes out, or even before it comes out, if it's well-hyped. And then when people go to check out that video game, they'll find you, and that's how you grow your audience. So similarly, if there is a stream that everyone can attach themselves to, and especially one that solves the problem of Twitch live streams from home in particular,

• 45:05Ryan Broderick?

  which is that you have to have, as you said, have to have something happening on the screen. You can't just, like, it's actually extremely taxing to just sit there for five hours with nothing happening on the screen, and you have to stream for five hours, because the average stream time for most channels is like 30 seconds.

• 45:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:22Ryan Broderick?

  So you're like, you're trying to get like thousands of people to watch you for more than 30 seconds. So there has to be stuff happening. And yes, you end up, after the Depp v. Heard trial, with this like massive roster of cultural pundits that have never, literally, in Asmongold's case, gone outside.

• 45:40Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 45:41Ryan Broderick?

  Like, "do not talk to other human beings," in Asmongold's own words, "would be talking to a mirror if he wasn't streaming." These people do not exist in the world, and yet, because of quirks of different algorithmic clipping systems and Twitch are now like the new CNN for like an entire generation of people.

• 46:03Speaker 03

  Right. And another like thing to note about the Depp v. Heard trial is at the time, and I think even for a lot of people today, people were viewing it as this very apolitical thing. Like, the majority opinion by far was that Johnny Depp was in the right and Amber Heard was in the wrong. And that wasn't like a conservative take. That was like, everybody's take. That was like, the bipartisan majority to the extreme. And so you had, um, like Hasan Piker was, was commenting on the Depp Heard trial against Amber Heard, even though he's like, the leftist political streamer. And you had all of these like, big liberal commentary and drama channels, all taking this like, party line, Amber Heard

• 46:45Speaker 03

  is a real abuser. And so for Asmongold, it's like, he wouldn't even necessarily have to identify as a conservative at this stage. This was just the majority opinion. But of course, now, multiple years down the line, we can see how this was a radicalizing moment that pushed a lot of people into an alt-right pipeline. Because of course, at the heart of this narrative, was the idea that the Me Too movement was inherently flawed, that women lie about being abused, and that victims are the real abusers. So it's the inverse logic of Me Too. And once people believe that, you can get them to believe anything.

• 47:25Ryan Broderick?

  And just to sort of like, table set here, Twitch users are extremely young. The majority are under 25. They, and then a huge chunk of that are under 21. I mean, we are talking about like, bored college kids, people working in remote jobs, like, for their first job, or people who are completely just out of work. I mean, the joke that Hasan Piker has is like, he calls his streams adult daycare. Um, and like, you know, like, and so, it's, it's a very fervent ground for building a very passionate audience. And we're gonna talk about after the break, what happens when a stinky dumbass realizes that he can

• 48:08Ryan Broderick?

  talk about current events to that passionate fanbase, and becomes, uh, from, from lolcow to Gen Z Jake Tapper, the Asmongold story. More after the break. But first, a word from our sponsors, uh, mousetraps.

• 48:28Ryan Broderick?

  Mountain Dew Code Red. Mountain Dew Code Red, shot, son, Mountain Dew Code Red Shadow the Hedgehog Special Edition. On the bottle, Shadow the Hedgehog is riding a motorcycle and he's got a gun.

• 48:43Ryan Broderick?

  Which is a real edition of Mountain Dew Code Red that I definitely drank in high school when they released the Shadow the Hedgehog solo game where he did have a motorcycle and a gun.

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• 49:19Speaker 07

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• 49:46Ryan Broderick?

  Mazmangold is now hopped up on current events and has a big old fanbase that are very interested in hearing his completely uninformed opinion about random things that happen on his screen. And this is a unfortunately perfect situation to be in, in October 2024. This is one year after the October 7th attack in Israel, and he says in a random stream that Palestinians are inferior and deserve to be experiencing a genocide. He's banned for two weeks for hate speech. He apologizes in a video that gets 8 million views, titled "Streaming Has Destroyed Me." He steps back from his OTK venture and says he's gonna do

• 50:31Ryan Broderick?

  better and stream less. He, I just wish he just said, "Stream no more. Just don't stream anymore."

• 50:38Speaker 03

  Just retire.

• 50:41Ryan Broderick?

  But he also says that Palestinians are terrible people. Who have a call to genocide baked into their laws. He says they're not the same as us. They came from an inferior culture. And that he's just a bunch of other just random racist bullshit. And this doesn't go well for him. He then apologizes even more. Saying, "I've slowly been devolving into the most mean spirited, rude, nasty, callous, psychopathic version of myself. One thing this has taught me is that it's made me realize that I need to get myself in check. I need to get my mind under control. I need to just get my life. I need to fix my fucking life." Yeah, brother, uh, you do.

• 51:25Ryan Broderick?

  He then says, "Streaming is my entire life. Doing this is my entire existence. And I think that the process of that has been extremely unhealthy for me. And I think what it's done is that it's allowed me to become such a one dimensional person that I'm not even a person anymore." It's like, oh my god. It's

• 51:45Ryan Broderick?

  It's like I'm Dark Souls. I'm going hollow or something, which I guess is a reference to the game Dark Souls. You know, he almost, he almost landed it. Like he almost, almost landed it and then he had to go full gamer at the end. Yeah, and then, uh, he finishes that by saying,

• 52:04Ryan Broderick?

  "Don't worry, I'll react to a D E I equals die gaming video first day back to stream."

• 52:13Ryan Broderick?

  I, I want to get your thoughts on this first because I have some thoughts as well. So what are your sort of initial reactions to this, uh, just this unraveling of a human being that I just read through?

• 52:24Speaker 03

  It's literally, it's like the, like the famous, like, "They admit it" meme. Because it's like, he literally is explaining it all right here. He's a profoundly broken person. He has like so many mental issues. And because of that, he feels this rage and bigotry toward other people. And like, of course, you can draw a straight line between him saying that like Hurricane Katrina victims who were overwhelmed. Black people deserve to die. And then him being like, the Palestinians are like innately evil people. Like, these are not the rantings and ravings of a serious person. They're the rantings and ravings of like a self admitted, like, very fucked up in the head person.

• 53:06Speaker 03

  The problem is, like, people take him seriously and treat him as if he's some sort of, like, credible authority? Or even just like, I guess if you were watching Asmongold for fun and like you, you acknowledged all of that about him, it would just be more sadistic on your end. But you can tell based on like how his fandom responds to him, that a lot of them still view him as like somewhat credible or serious or authoritative, despite him admitting it all to their faces.

• 53:38Ryan Broderick?

  It's, I totally agree with you. And it, and it shows like such a fascinating glimpse into his politics in a way as well where, you know, like, okay, if you imagine,

• 53:52Ryan Broderick?

  politics is an ocean and wokeness, pure, perfect wokeness is that the, is above the water. The closer you, and you're underwater. And the closer you swim up, you can see, like, wokeness. But then the further you go down, you like start to lose sense of like what is up and what is down.

• 54:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:14Ryan Broderick?

  And so for him, he like, kind of understands that like he went too far by being like, Palestinians should be exterminated. He's saying this stuff and he clearly gets that like, okay, I have, it's like he saw the fish swim up or something. He's like, okay, so that's the direction I've got to go in. But he still can't see the, the air. He still can't see the sky. So he's like, he's like, oh, yeah, like I'm a really broken person. I'm completely lost. But like, when I come back, like, I'm definitely going to talk about how DEI sucks.

• 54:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:45Ryan Broderick?

  And for him, he probably doesn't even think of that as politics, the same way he wouldn't think about his opinions on Amber Heard being political or his opinions on black residents of New Orleans being political. Because he's so uninformed and, and so uneducated in these things and, and so misanthropic and paranoid and lonely that like, there's no way that that information could ever enter his head. Even though he has a massive audience of who I have to imagine are similar, similar minded people.

• 55:14Speaker 03

  Yes, it is really dystopian because it's like he does, as you said, like he doesn't really even go outside. He doesn't like really have a plane of reality to compare to the things that happen in his life. And like the things he says online and the impacts that they have. So I doubt that he really views any of what he talks about as real. I think it's all just like characters to him that he can like, and if he says the right thing, like number go up. And if he says the wrong thing, like banned from Twitch, need to say different things so that I can get back on Twitch.

• 55:49Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I think that's right. He's definitely incentivized to say dumber and dumber things because, and this is where I start to like, get kind of like blackpilled myself and start to freak out a little bit where it's like, there was this assumption, the comedian Chris Fleming has a special on HBO right now. And there's this whole bit about how like older millennials were raised for a world that doesn't exist anymore. And, and I've been thinking a lot about it because

• 56:15Ryan Broderick?

  there was this assumption like all of my life that like entertainment, like even the worst, lowest common denominator entertainment had to sort of be professionally made and aspirational. And the aspiration was to be rich and famous and, and well groomed and successful. And like, that's what we were all aspiring to be, even the worst, lowest, you know, Hollywood slop of the 2000s was like that. And the idea that you sort of had to perform to a higher standard. And then you get this wave of creators in the 2010s and 2020s that like,

• 56:55Ryan Broderick?

  are just that mirror that he talks about that they are just a reflection of sort of our worst, lowest impulses. And people like it and I, and I start to spin out when I think about AI because it's like, there, there are a lot of people that are like, AI is never going to work because like people don't want slop. And it's like, there's a scarier answer here, which is that like people's tastes are actually not good on mass. And like the majority of the world would actually be quite happy. Watching Asmongold and flicking through like Veggie Family Gets Cooked Alive AI videos, if you've seen those going around, or like the fat cat from China that rides a motorbike. Like, I've been watching a lot of AI slop recently. Um, speaking of bad taste, but like,

• 57:40Ryan Broderick?

  the scarier thing is like, no, once you've opened Pandora's box, there is no incentive to go up. Actually, if you show people the ugliest, dumbest stuff, they're gonna like that more because

• 57:55Ryan Broderick?

  we are not high-minded as a species. Like, I, this is where I started to talk like Sephiroth from Final Fantasy VII. You know, like, it's scary stuff. And Asmongold scares me. His popularity genuinely scares me because I think it's proof of that.

• 58:09Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, I feel like this is the lesson that the internet teaches us over and over and over again, which is like, there's a certain generation of people who remember life before the internet, who look at figures like Asmongold, and I think watch them through the lens of like, at least my life isn't this bad. And so, watching this guy with like his dead rat alarm clock,

• 58:30Speaker 03

  there's no one else, there's no one else who like, I feel like has a dead rat alarm clock. So, everyone on the planet can be like, oh my gosh, at least I don't wake up every day to the smell of rotting rodent flesh. But, for young people watching Asmongold, and like, you see this with AI slop too, because a lot of the consumers of this stuff, like, anecdotally, if you watch like what kids are watching on the subway, or like I had a friend like watch a child, like watching AI slop for five hours at like a vacation resort. So, there are kids growing up on this type of content who don't even know that there's like better stuff out there. Like, they're watching Asmongold because they like it, because now it's familiar and common to them. So, yeah, I mean, I think that-

• 59:15Speaker 03

  I do fear for the implications of what it means that like this type of thing is so popular because no matter what your reasons are for watching it, that still says something bad.

• 59:26Ryan Broderick?

  Right. And I want to check myself. Like, our audience has made fun of Grant and I for talking about things like folk punk before on this show. But like in high school and college, like I listened to a band called Johnny Hobo and the Freight Trains, I think they're called. And this guy, Pat the Bunny, who like lived in garbage and like did heroin and smoked meth and wrote songs that sounded like they were recorded on a tin can. And Johnny Hobo, you know, Pat the Bunny could be Asmongold. Asmongold could not be Pat the Bunny. Like, the disgust, the sort of raw culture, the sort of reactionary culture even that I was interested in as a teenager, that ugly, grimy, angry stuff was performative. Like, and it

• 1:00:11Ryan Broderick?

  was performative for a point. It was trying to say something. It wasn't just like, I live in, I live in a freight train and I eat garbage and I have a tattooed dog and I play banjo. It was like, these things are bad and I don't want to live like this anymore and all my friends are passing away. There was, there was something to be said there. And Asmongold has nothing to say.

• 1:00:37Speaker 03

  Right. It's like the difference between like a John Waters film and then like actually thinking you should live like the characters in that film.

• 1:00:44Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, like, he's a millionaire. Yeah, right. He's also a millionaire in making mainstream entertainment. Like, like, Divine could absolutely have a rat clock. Asmongold could not eat actual human shit in a John Waters film. Like, that is the difference. He is an individual who has nothing to say or nothing to offer, uh, sort of popular culture. And he is unfortunately now at the center of it. And he continues to sort of Mr. Magoo his way around blindly. Um, God, I just wish I'd just go back in time and watch Talk Two and Eat Lunchly.

• 1:01:18Speaker 03

  Those were the good old days.

• 1:01:19Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, the past is a different country, you know? The world you grew up in does not exist anymore. He loves Elon Musk until they get into a feud in January 2025 over Elon Musk's like fake Diablo play videos. That's right around the time that Elon Musk Nazi salutes, starts running the Doge experiment, and Osmongold starts to get more political, talking about politics more often. He starts live reacting to Trump's State of the Union and different press conferences. He has no concept of what any of these things are because he lives in the attic of a house and never leaves it. Finish my sort of rundown here with this.

• 1:02:01Ryan Broderick?

  This is from The Atlantic, which ends up doing a profile on his rise. They write, "The feeling one gets is not of watching him, but of watching with him. I sometimes felt a pang of nostalgia from middle school hangouts with friends. A specific form of communication arises from a group of guys staring at the same screen. You murmur nonsense back and forth in knowingly Neanderthal manner. I place pretty much no values in principles or morality," he said in one stream. "I think that these are top-down ideas that are given to you by the elites. Ironically enough, the diss suggests its own ideology. Politics isn't a dispute among philosophical visions for a better world or even a contest among constituencies for resources.

• 1:02:44Ryan Broderick?

  It's a quest for certain humans who matter to defeat people-shaped obstacles that don't. His hypnotized, single-minded mentality from my own gaming experiences. After a certain amount of playtime, what's onscreen stops looking like a coherent world and starts looking like inputs and outputs, challenges and rewards. And when you look up, reality feels like the screen." And now he has moved to Rumble, which is a even worse streaming platform.

• 1:03:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:03:14Speaker 03

  Did Charlie Warzal write that for The Atlantic?

• 1:03:16Ryan Broderick?

  Probably not. It was pretty good. So whoever wrote it was, uh, no, no, it wasn't. It was the guy, Spencer Kornhoffer.

• 1:03:26Speaker 03

  It was good.

• 1:03:27Ryan Broderick?

  I love you, Charlie. Um, no, so, uh, I just think, I think Asmongold is a really bad guy and he makes me really depressed.

• 1:03:38Speaker 03

  Yes, it is depressing. It's depressing. It's like, I, I feel like it's depressing not just because of the broader societal implications, but there's lots of influencer figures like this where it's like, there is something actually genuinely wrong with them. Like they are broken people for various reasons. Like I feel this way about Clavicular too, where it's like, you have these people who are just so like profoundly in need of like care and support. And they're also incredibly rich and like have so much proximity to like power and privilege, but none of that is geared toward like making them better people or making their lives better. Like everything around them is just encouraging them to get worse and worse and worse because people want them to hit rock bottom.

• 1:04:22Speaker 03

  Like if Asmongold does crazy stuff on stream, like harms himself or others, that's what people want to see. Like the, the viewing of Asmongold is kind of sadistic in itself. And he, his ideology is obviously like murderous and like violent and wrong. So there's like no good that comes out of it. It's just so bleak.

• 1:04:43Ryan Broderick?

  I also think just in a broader way to sort of combine metaphors here, you know, the Atlantic piece concludes with this idea that like you, you stare at a screen for too long and it doesn't really look like anything. But that's also true for a mirror and that image that I keep coming back to of Asmongold staring at himself in the mirror and talking to himself. Like if you stare at yourself in the mirror long enough, like you no longer look like anything. You don't look like yourself. And I, and I, I have to imagine that we will eventually reach a point where people are no longer interested in seeing a direct reflection of their own lives. Like the media that we're using and consuming hasn't really been around long enough in this way for us to know. But my, my expectation is that like, this can only last for so long.

• 1:05:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:05:28Ryan Broderick?

  I stare at Asmongold's streams and I think that is a room that I have worked so hard to never be in ever again. And I have to imagine that eventually the young men, majority of young men that watch his streams will come to a similar revelation, I hope. Cause like, that, that Atlantic writer has nostalgia for those like, video game sleepovers. I do not. I actually, those sucked, man. I had to sleep on the floor. It was cold. Like, like. I got pink eye. My friend got pink eye, same deal, uh, from, from the rug. Like, I, I get the nostalgia aspect of like wanting to feel like you're at a, like a sleepover with a bunch of guys, but like, that shit sucks. And like, it's not interesting to watch. And it's, and, and, and it's not interesting, it's not sustainable.

• 1:06:13Ryan Broderick?

  It, it, it doesn't sustain your soul, doesn't sustain your mind, it's nothing. And I just, I really hope that like, the people who like his stuff eventually just like, I don't know, turn on the fucking TV, just like, watch an old sitcom. Law and Order, every episode is on some stream platform, go watch that or something, like, anything is better.

• 1:06:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:30Ryan Broderick?

  I look at all this and my only conclusion is that like, the pandemic just did way more harm to our brains than I thought it did. Uh, I mean, there's just this, this type of guy influencer that has no sense of the outside world being real. It's, it's a, I, I see it as a, as a different subsect than, you know, like the larger manosphere. It's like a different thing, I think.

• 1:06:55Speaker 03

  I do think it's different subcultures of men and it's like, the Depheard trial was a rare moment where a bunch of different, very diverse subcultures, like, touched and intersected, because that was when you saw like, liberal gossip, or like, liberal celebrity podcasters, like, girls and gays, were saying the same thing as like, literally Andrew Tate. And there are rare moments where that happens, but it's not because, I don't think it's because they're the same type of people, it's just that like, there are occasional times when you can get everyone to agree on something that's wrong. And like, that was the Depheard trial.

• 1:07:31Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, like, they have, they have similar values, but like, Asmongold is much closer to, you know, like those Japanese soldiers that like, didn't know World War II was over?

• 1:07:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:07:44Ryan Broderick?

  He's like that for Gamergate.

• 1:07:45Speaker 03

  It's literally like nerd culture versus jock culture. Is the way that I think of it. Cause it's like, you can't both aspire to look and live like Asmongold and look and live like Andrew Tate at the same time. In that sense, they're polar opposites. Like Asmongold obviously lives in filth, looks like shit.

• 1:08:05Ryan Broderick?

  It really depresses me that people watch this stuff. Like it, it honestly like makes me really upset. All right. Well, unlike normal episodes where we depress the guest, I have depressed myself.

• 1:08:17Ryan Broderick?

  I, I am in a very dark spot mentally and I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go recover. Kat, I want to thank you for coming on the show. This was delightful.

• 1:08:25Speaker 03

  Thank you for having me.

• 1:08:26Ryan Broderick?

  If people want to follow you on the internet, where can they do that?

• 1:08:30Speaker 03

  Uh, you can follow me at www spitfirenews.com. That is my newsletter. I write about this stuff a lot. Um, I've also been making videos for Courier. So if you subscribe to Courier on YouTube, you'll see me there. And otherwise I'm mainly on Blue Sky where no one's ever heard of Asmongold, ever.

• 1:08:48Ryan Broderick?

  The minute people on Blue Sky hear about Asmongold, they will actually kill themselves and delete the website. Like, like.

• 1:08:54Speaker 03

  And they're kind of right.

• 1:08:56Ryan Broderick?

  Like, like if, if the, if the median age 45 year old Blue Sky user discovered Asmongold, they would actually jump out a window. Like there's no, maybe like it's, it's done, it's over. Um, yeah.

• 1:09:10Ryan Broderick?

  Panic World is a production of Courier. It is written and produced by Grant Irving and hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Josh Fielstedt is our production coordinator and our amazing researcher is Adam Bumis. From Courier is Shane Verkest, who edits our video episodes, along with our producer, Devin Maroney, and National Managing Director and Executive Producer, Kevin Dreyfus. R.C. DeMezzo is their VP of Brand and Social. Charlotte Robinson is their Deputy Director of Brand and Social. Mary Ann Kuga is their Director of Marketing and Tracy Kaplan is the Senior Vice President of Sales and Distribution. If you want to sponsor the show or give us products to sell, she's the one to talk to. You can email her at [email protected].

• 1:09:51Ryan Broderick?

  Lastly, here's my advice for you. Chill out and touch grass while you still can.

• 1:10:00Speaker 08

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