The cult using Minecraft to recruit

Often, like in the case of the Momo Challenge, when parents freak out about a thing online, it’s probably not really a thing. But, today we are talking about one panic that is real — “764,” the comm-network that is gamifying committing crimes and abuse. Joining us is Marcus Parks of The Last Podcast on the Left, to dive into this conspiracy that’s more than a theory. Our guest Marcus Parks is a host of The Last Podcast on the Left, which is currently doing a miniseries on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Check it out on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts! We have a related bonus episode of our Patreon this week, where our producer Grant Irving sat down with expert on extremist ideologies and groups, Dr. Marc-André Argentino. Learn more about the history of cults and networks like 764 by joining our Patreon for just five bucks a month at: https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. 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.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up require compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 0:26Ryan Broderick?

  Hey, just a heads up. This is one of our more gnarly episodes. And we're going to be talking about some pretty intense themes. If that's something that you don't feel like you're into today, you know, you can always skip and come back. But we're gonna... Today's episode is a little more intense than usual. Not including anything that, you know, has been revealed to actually have happened because of CIA involvement over the last 60 to 70 years. What is one conspiracy that, you know, has felt super unbelievable that you later discovered was like actually quite real?

• 0:59Speaker 02

  I mean, you mean outside of, say, like MKUltra?

• 1:03Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because that's easy. That's the easy stuff. That's easy.

• 1:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. But yeah, of course, that's the easy stuff. I would say the, you know, introducing of crack cocaine into inner cities was also... Well, I guess it all... The problem is that the CIA is involved in all of it.

• 1:18Ryan Broderick?

  I've set you up for failure. Yeah.

• 1:20Speaker 02

  You get... That's the problem is it's always... If it's real, it's the CIA.

• 1:41Speaker 02

  As far as conspiracy theories go, I think the biggest one was finding out that it was probably JFK's Secret Service agent who accidentally shot him in the back of the head.

• 1:51Ryan Broderick?

  I have not heard that before.

• 1:52Speaker 02

  Oh, I believe it 1,000%.

• 1:54Ryan Broderick?

  Interesting.

• 1:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, that it was in, that JFK's assassination was just the world's worst workplace accident.

• 2:01Ryan Broderick?

  So I have a recent one that I think, I think I believe, which is that Elon Musk's black eye was not from his son X, but actually from Stephen Miller, because he's trying to do like a weird IVF braiding thing with Stephen Miller's wife.

• 2:15Speaker 02

  Alright, I'll buy it.

• 2:15Ryan Broderick?

  Because Stephen Miller is left-handed. I don't know if X is left-handed, so, and that didn't look like the punch of a child either. I mean, although Stephen Miller has little hands, so maybe. Anyways, uh, the reason I bring this up is because sometimes two things can be true, right? You know, we can have lots of insane moral panics and then we can discover years later that they, they were real. And then sometimes we also will never find out what happened. Like, we still don't know why all those clowns showed up in 2016.

• 2:42Speaker 02

  No idea. That was one of my favorite mysteries, though. We debated about that endlessly.

• 2:47Ryan Broderick?

  It's very confusing, and these things come around all the time. But generally speaking, my rule is that if there is a conspiracy, a group of people with some kind of plot or scheme that's organized, you know, instead of just like random people on the internet being annoying, then it's probably not true, because if it was true, like, this is why I'm not really a 9/11 truther. Because like, it, like, someone's gonna tattle. Someone's gonna leak. I, I tend to believe that stupidity is actually the true conspiracy of almost everything.

• 3:14Speaker 02

  That's one of the guiding principles of, uh, last podcast is never confuse incompetence for malice.

• 3:20Ryan Broderick?

  Exactly. This is why you're the perfect guest for today. Um, an, an example from, from our show we've covered before is the Momo challenge, which was like some sort of like evil internet demon that was terrorizing children and making people commit suicide, but it actually turned out to just be like a bunch of like really like misreported police reports around the world that didn't go anywhere, right?

• 3:37Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:38Ryan Broderick?

  With all those fake or half-true stories, I think both you and I kind of assume when parents are freaking out, the story is likely bullshit. But the more the internet has evolved, the lines have become blurrier. For instance, our last episode on Slender Man explored this exact idea. A fake thing creates a real thing, creates a kind of half-fake, half-real moral panic. And now, in our even more flattened world, we have a true conspiracy that really does sound fake, but is actually a real threat. With me? Still with me?

• 4:10Ryan Broderick?

  My name is Ryan Broderick and joining me is our producer Grant Irving, who has put here in my script that today especially, I am not supposed to make jokes that I've locked him in some kind of cage. Because we're going to be talking about torture. And I guess I'm not allowed to torture my producer because we're woke. This is Panic World, a show about how the internet warps our minds, our culture, and eventually reality. And today, we're talking about 764, the COM network, a coalition that is gamifying, committing crimes and abuse. And joining me, an expert of dark shit, an expert on the blurred lines of real and fiction, Marcus Parks from Last Pod on the Left. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 4:52Speaker 02

  I'm doing great. Thank you so much for having me. I'm a big fan of the show.

• 4:55Ryan Broderick?

  Have you heard anything about 764 before?

• 4:58Speaker 02

  I have not heard anything about this.

• 5:00Ryan Broderick?

  Okay.

• 5:03Speaker 02

  This is entirely new to me. It's like, because for me, I usually go back into the past, you know, to, you know, find out, to discover the conspiracies that we've already been through. Like, modern stuff is usually beyond me because I have such a difficult time actually understanding all of the ins and outs of it. What happened?

• 5:21Ryan Broderick?

  Well, that's, that's actually perfect because this does have tendrils that go into the past. We're going to be sort of referencing a lot of, I think, things that will be familiar to listeners of both of our shows. But let me give you kind of an example of the discourse around 764, okay? So this is from a local news report, ABC 7 in San Francisco.

• 5:41Speaker 03

  This mother and daughter don't want you to see their faces, to know their names or where they live. They are just breaking free from the terror that is 764. She explains how predators are scanning online games like Minecraft and Roblox for young girls.

• 5:56Ryan Broderick?

  Did you notice any sort of like hallmarks of a mass panic? You know, a sort of like, you know, like, parents are talking to the local news? Like, it feels very typical, right?

• 6:05Speaker 02

  It does. One of my favorite periods of history to study and one of the things that I find the most fascinating, like, one of the most fascinating chapters in American history is the Satanic Panic. And this does have shades of...

• 6:19Speaker 02

  You know, you have to shield your children from these horrible things. There's this unknown thing that you don't know anything about.

• 6:27Ryan Broderick?

  Right. My big thing is also always like local news affiliates. So whenever I hear about like a local news station that finds like a parent that's like warning other parents, I'm like, mm, okay. Sure. Yeah. So immediate reaction to something like this is probably that it's not real or that's overstated. But that is not the case. I wish that was the case. That is not the case. We are now in an era where real terror feels like somebody parroting fake terror.

• 6:53Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 6:53Ryan Broderick?

  Broadly what we're talking about and what this piece is talking about is COM or C O M. And it refers to an organized group that hang out on places like Discord and Telegram. And they really got their start around 2021. And they are effectively nihilists that have turned nihilism into like a, like an A R G. Like a, like a, like a, like a game you can play online. Um, and they level up by doing taboo behavior or committing really horrible acts online or in real life. Grant spoke to the public safety expert for the Canadian government, uh, Marc Andre Argentino. And we'll be quoting from his blog, From the Depths, quite a bit on today's episode. And here's how Andre describes it.

• 7:35Speaker 04

  Basically, I separate the COM network into the pillars of criminality. So cyber criminality is one. The last part of the COM network is offline COM or what they call I R L. This is everything from graffitis, like we saw in Winnipeg, all the way to things like planning a terrorist act, like we saw recently with the arrest in Edmonton, all the way up to things like bioterrorism, as we had with Commander Butcher in New York.

• 7:59Ryan Broderick?

  It's a loosely connected group of evil. So to say that they all believe one thing wouldn't be fair. But here's a statement from the quote unquote leader of 764, uh, which is the most important group in this larger network.

• 8:15Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 8:16Ryan Broderick?

  "The goal of 764 is the purification of all living things through endless attacks. Evil has no limits." Upper case, by the way. We won't stop until our goal is completed and all life forms are eliminated. Only 764 will remain. For us to achieve such ambition, the cult must share a single-minded passion for death and conquest. For him, there exists only one pleasure, one reward, one satisfaction, a successful hunt. He must be prepared to destroy himself and to destroy with his own hands everything that stands of our goal. This is so boring shit. This shit is so fucking boring. God damn.

• 8:52Speaker 02

  Well, it's just so generic. Like, there's nothing about this that is original. They sound like Cobra Command.

• 9:01Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, it's like that thing where if you leave men alone online long enough, they all start talking like Sephiroth from Final Fantasy VII.

• 9:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, it sounds exactly like that. Yeah. If they're nihilists, it's not gonna fucking mean anything. I guess that is sort of the point. But I don't know how you build something around that.

• 9:18Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I don't want to go down like the Big Lebowski route of like, what is a nihilist? Like, how do you actually actively be one? But you know, this can be exceptionally dumb and cartoon villain-esque and still be harmful. I mean, it happens all the time now. I'm gonna read you a bit more from Argentino's blog here. So he wrote, "Within 764's private inner circle, the defendants hammered home the principle that violence, sexual, psychological, and physical, is both entertainment and ideological labor. And they rank them based on how transgressive they are." I'm sure most people did a similar thing in college. You know, it's like, we all go through that phase. But this is one quote of a 764 message that Argentino had access to.

• 10:00Ryan Broderick?

  So the quote reads, "We're not anti-extortion. It does in a way promote harm and teaches cringey e-girls lessons." So like, obviously, it should be no surprise to anyone listening that this is also very gendered.

• 10:14Speaker 02

  Well, yeah. Yeah, of course it is.

• 10:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's just, that's how it goes on the internet when it comes to shit like this. It does sound like it has like occult mentality to it. When you have other people telling each other, "That's fucking awesome," over and over again, and you do it in a vacuum enough, and you get the right group of people, or the wrong group of people, as it were, really dark shit can happen. And most of it is bullshit. I mean, most of the moral panics, the moral, you know, because that is, that same exact argument has been made by satanic panic people in the past of, you know, like, this is why you can't have metal concerts. This is why, you know, like, I always remember this old man talking about an Ozzy concert, and he's like, "It was like watching Nuremberg."

• 10:59Speaker 02

  I don't think you can put an Ozzy concert on par with Nuremberg. But when it comes to the internet, and when it comes to where we're at today with internet culture, like, the, I mean, we're in the middle of rewriting the rules of what, you know, of what the world is right now, what humanity is, how it works. Like, that's part of why I love this show, is that's what I'm, and your newsletters, like, that's what I'm fascinated in. But I do believe that when the history books look back on this time period, it's going to be fucking insane, because I do think the two most important things are going to be 4chan and the WWE.

• 11:38Ryan Broderick?

  Which are effectively the same thing, I think, at a certain point. I also, yeah, I always like laugh about like the danger around like metal shows, where it's like, what people imagine is like some sort of like dark evil energy, and what is actually happening is like that photo of that guy pissing into his own mouth in the middle of the mosh pit. You know, like, that's, that's what's actually happening. I also, I, you know, I'm a, I'm a big advocate for net neutrality, but I do think we need to carve out for like what I would call masculinity lifeguards. So like, if you have like 10 or more men in one space online, there has to be someone in there that's like, "You guys like can't go like full extremists." Like, you gotta, you gotta like calm down and like, watch an episode of Sex in the City or something, like chill out for a second. But back to a story that has absolutely no chill whatsoever, let's really get a sense

• 12:23Ryan Broderick?

  of how horrible this all is. Last year Attorney General Matt Olson for the National Security Division did like a press conference about this group, and...

• 12:34Ryan Broderick?

  He had a, he had a line that, that was, "It's not premised on the idea of child pornography." Which, you know, answers a lot of questions, Mike. "It's not premised on the idea of child pornography." Sure, should answer, yeah. But I should note, there is absolutely like a, a non-consensual, like sexual abuse material aspect here, especially one involving minors, obviously.

• 12:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, if it's, if they're looking for the biggest transgressions, then that's, that's always, I guess, taking a page out of Marquis de Sade here.

• 13:00Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, the, the, the statement from Olson continues and it says, "It's premised on the idea of collapsing society, and they do it through animal cruelty, and they do it through swatting and extortion." So this sounds like satanic panic shit. It sounds fake. And when a government official is saying, you know, "This group of people online want to destroy the world, they're gonna, and they're gonna do horrible stuff," I think it is pretty reflexive to just roll your eyes at that kind of thing.

• 13:27Speaker 02

  Sure, yeah. And the institutions have had a, um, history of over-correcting, uh, when it comes to this sort of thing. Of course, I mean, there were people back in the eighties who were, quote unquote, "Killing in the name of Satan." You know, you did have Richard Ramirez, who was genuinely scary, genuinely terrified. You had a man who would go out and, you know, carve out the eyes of old ladies and leave them on the dresser because he knew it would freak people out, and he shows up in court with a pentagram on his hand. Uh, but the thing is about the satanic killers is that,

• 14:07Speaker 02

  you know, throughout all of my research, there was about three, maybe four. But when you kind of flipside that, the number of serial killers who murdered in the name of God, or in the name of Jesus, that number skyrockets. It's dozens upon dozens upon Gary Ridgeway, you know, like the, the Green River Killer. Some of this stuff does come partly from projection, and it does come partly from, "We know that the world is fucked up, we know that the world is chaotic," and especially like now, once this does hit a moral panic, if it does hit a moral panic, the very same people that are causing all of the chaos in this world right now are the very same people that are gonna be calling for stricter laws, that are gonna be calling for people to be arrested, that are gonna

• 14:50Speaker 02

  be calling for investigations. Uh, those people, I think, are just gonna make things far worse, um, just because they...

• 15:01Speaker 02

  It's just how they do it.

• 15:02Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 15:02Speaker 02

  How it's always gone. It's just, and that's just the pattern over and over.

• 15:05Ryan Broderick?

  It, we, we, we came across this a bunch in our early episodes where you, you know, you'd have something like the blue whale challenge in Russia, which was like a suicide game, or you'd have something like the Tide Pod challenge, or the Nyquil challenge, right? And there would be this hysteria element to it. And then there would be like an ironic component to it where people are engaging with it because they're seeing it and the institutions are warning about it. And then like, it becomes like a purple monkey dishwasher thing where people can't tell what's real and what's not anymore. And that is like, obviously, an important dimension to anything like this, which is that like, especially now in the age of the internet, like, public messaging is sort of broken, like possibly forever.

• 15:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:45Ryan Broderick?

  And as a result, this has been covered well and responsibly, and it's still under the radar. Wired writes about sort of the, the beginnings of, of the warnings about this, right? And they, they write, "It sounds like a cheap true crime conspiracy. An international network of predators, steeped in Satanism, lure children from seemingly harmless online platforms like Discord, Minecraft, and Roblox, and extort them to sexually exploit and grievously harm themselves. Some victims are even pushed to suicide, except it's true." And it gets even more, uh, silly, but also worse at the same time because the groups-

• 16:21Speaker 02

  It always does.

• 16:22Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 16:22Speaker 02

  It sounds somewhat like QAnon, you know, like that same sort of idea where-

• 16:26Ryan Broderick?

  Not dissimilar, yeah.

• 16:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's no central, like, it didn't necessarily come from any one person, or it just sort of builds upon itself, taking, you know, from various, you know, it sounds like taking from various pop culture references, just like QAnon took from, you know, every conspiracy theory from the last, you know,

• 16:44Ryan Broderick?

  Exactly.

• 16:45Speaker 02

  200 years.

• 16:46Ryan Broderick?

  It's Q, it's like QAnon in the sense of blended lore, but I feel like it's more broken down into like different high school cliques. Grant spoke with Argentino about how they organize themselves and thus sort of radicalize within each other.

• 17:00Speaker 04

  In the case of one individual who was convinced by a group to go out and commit a murder. That individual was subsequently turned into law enforcement by the people who had convinced them to do this as a part of the recruitment process. It's like, no, like, alright, he did it, cool. Let's fed him, and then let's move on to the next. So there's no plan for like, future building and growth. It is really about the destruction and chaos in the immediate.

• 17:26Speaker 05

  No, it's high school. It's, it's, it's like, it's, it's high school for destruction. It's like, it's actually very easy to think about if you just think about it's like, who's cool in the click in this moment?

• 17:35Speaker 04

  You have the cool kids table. That's like, you know, that's 764. Everyone wants to reach that epitome. Every other table's gonna have their brands. You're gonna be entities of table, right? I had to play on the team to be part of the jock table. I had to play Magic card to go with the geeks. In the calm network, you need to commit a criminal act that represents the pillars of criminality to sit at that table. So if you are at a table that is into offline content, well, you need to slash tires, do a graffiti, commit arson, whatever, right? If you're into an extortion community, you got to get someone to self-harm, share explicit images, you know, manipulate them to do something. That is how you get in.

• 18:14Speaker 04

  So it is like, like, high school in that sense where you have to participate to gain access. So as soon as you're in these spaces, you have already crossed the threshold into criminal behavior.

• 18:28Ryan Broderick?

  As you mentioned, 764 is the most notorious group in this network. People strive to join it. They, they want into that one. And I think, once you understand the high school aspect of all of this, it starts to really make sense. And, and it's easier to, to understand that this is real and, and get how it functions. And Argentino has documented how it all actually works.

• 18:49Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 18:50Ryan Broderick?

  Argentino writes, "The veteran was bragging about a car he set on fire and recorded in order to gain access to the Inferno cell, which I suppose is a cell for arson specifically." He was informed by the cell owners that firebombing should be posted in the IRL cell, not the... I love that like, even in the most extreme situations, it all comes down to mod drama. It's always mod. It's like, this is the wrong subreddit. You didn't, you, you didn't follow the subreddit's rules.

• 19:22Speaker 02

  That's incredible.

• 19:24Ryan Broderick?

  And then he was told that it should be sent to the KNR server, which is dedicated to offline criminal activities, and like X for higher, like murder for higher, firebomb for higher services.

• 19:34Speaker 02

  But what's interesting about that to me is that, for me, you know, like when it comes to conspiracies and when it comes to stuff like this, it's always the most human answer. It usually turns out to be the right one. And something like that, mod drama, like human shit, it gives it a little more credence. You know, it really does. Like when you, when you see people interacting the way that humans actually interact, that's why the satanic panic was always such obvious bullshit. Because the people, like, you know, the old books like Michelle Remembers, where, or, you know, where people, or the McMartin preschool trial, you know, these kids would come out and, you know,

• 20:15Speaker 02

  tell these, you know, wild, fabulous stories about how I got flushed down the toilet into another basement and, you know, I went on an airplane and they had me back by, you know, the time my parents were there to pick me up from the daycare at 4:00 PM. Like, none of that, nobody in those stories actually acts like a person. Or, you know, the stand-up comedian Mike Warnke, who told everyone that, you know, he was a satanic priest and then became a mulleted comedian, who went back and forth between talking about his time as a satanic priest, sacrificing people and telling, you know, Gallagher stand-up bits about, you know, when does yogurt go bad and shit like that. If it's human, then that makes me believe in it a little bit more. And this sounds very human.

• 20:56Ryan Broderick?

  Yes. So, everything you know now about 764 and the com network, who do you think is like the target demo for people in this? Like, what kinds of people do you think are in this?

• 21:06Speaker 02

  I would say, uh, white guys in their late teens, early twenties.

• 21:11Ryan Broderick?

  So it seems to skew even younger. And to give you a sense of how this all started, we have an example of kind of like the original case that tipped off law enforcement into the existence of this. So this is from Wired again, and it says,

• 21:25Ryan Broderick?

  God, these guys are so lame. Username Gore Butcher. Uh, allegedly is Angel Louise Almeida, a high school dropout from Ocala, Florida, with a violent past and a long rap sheet. In the fall of 2021, the feds allege Almeida posted images on Instagram of himself posing with a handgun and a photo of himself in front of a Nazi flag and a computer screen reading "I'm addicted to hardcore child pornography," while wearing a shirt emblazoned with kitty fiddler. And, uh, do you want to guess like what the ATF found when they raided his apartment? Do you have a?

• 22:02Speaker 02

  I would get, uh, guns?

• 22:05Ryan Broderick?

  Lot of guns.

• 22:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:07Ryan Broderick?

  A skull mask, balaclava.

• 22:09Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 22:10Ryan Broderick?

  Super cool. Uh, and four electronic devices. Investigators say his devices held hundreds of thousands of digital files, including reams of, uh, child sexual abuse material and communications with the other members of 764. Uh, and this is like the first time the FBI gets a sense of what's going on here, and they do classify it as a child abuse network.

• 22:32Speaker 02

  So, so the, take me through this one, like, okay. Why was this guy so open? If he was so incredibly, you know, like guilty of so many things, like, why was he so also so incredibly open about it?

• 22:49Ryan Broderick?

  Uh, good question. So in some ways, this group is sophisticated in how they operate, but as individuals, they're young and, you know, unwell and online. Uh, you know, he was in his early twenties, he was harming people, but I, I think you can see those posts as a cry for help, you know? Or at least, uh, a level of mental illness where, you know, he can't think through what he's posting. And that brings us to the mastermind that started 764. Let's start to, let's start with you just taking a look at a picture. Jesus Christ.

• 23:22Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, this is, this is the founder of 764 that you're looking at right now. It's like a human moon pie. He looks like, he looks like if Paddington Bear was a boy.

• 23:35Speaker 02

  He's got that mop, a red hair, top of his head, quite chubby. He actually is far more clean cut than I imagined. Like, that's incredible.

• 23:45Ryan Broderick?

  So this is Brad-

• 23:46Speaker 02

  And he looks, and he looks, how old is this guy? Like, he looks seven, he looks like 15, 16 years old.

• 23:52Ryan Broderick?

  So, so yeah, here's, here's what you gotta know about this, this Renaissance painting of an angel. The idyllic image of, this comes from the Washington Post. The idyllic image of Bradley Cadenhead.

• 24:06Ryan Broderick?

  Fucking Cadenhead. Cadenhead's close-lit family began to unravel when he was 10. His mother moved out that year in 2016. "When, quote-unquote, 'my mom moved out, it affected me,' Cadenhead told probation officers. 'Cadenhead began cutting himself,' he said. And then, everything I'm about to say is gonna be very predictable, I think. He claims that he started looking at porn very early. He was bullied. He started, like, reading about mass shootings and thinking about committing mass shootings. He was hospitalized, that didn't seem to help. And then he stopped going to school around 9th grade." So, the Washington Post article reads, "He became fascinated with videos of torture images he was exposed to while playing the online video game Minecraft. He said he looked at the images for shock value."

• 24:51Ryan Broderick?

  Quote-unquote, "The kid never left the house," after dropping out, Stephenville Police Captain Jeremy Lanier said. "His room and his bathroom were his entire existence." I mean, that's, I mean, that, nothing weird with that, like, I, I live like that. The same month, he dropped out of school, and then Cadenhead started his first 764 chatroom. And if you're wondering why we've been calling it 764, that is his area code, yeah.

• 25:15Ryan Broderick?

  He started posting gore, self-harm, animal abuse, child sexual abuse material. He kept getting reported to Discord and having to make new accounts. And he wrote, on May 10th, under the screen name Felix0744 in a server called Feds, he wrote, "I'm device banned from almost every email service. I've been through 400 Felix accounts, 100 fake accounts for Discord, banned on Roblox twice. I've already been reported to the FBI 15 times and they haven't done shit." Although weirdly, he like- bleeped out shit. I don't know. It doesn't matter.

• 25:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:52Ryan Broderick?

  Um, and then lastly here, when the police showed up with a search warrant on the afternoon of August 25th, 2021, Lanyar said, Kaden Head emerged in the apartment, his hair disheveled, inside his room, which Lanyar said reeked of body odor. Man, if the cops are arresting you and they're like roasting you about your body odor being so bad, it made the room stink. Like, I don't know. I don't, you gotta give up, dude. Like, you gotta give it up.

• 26:16Speaker 02

  Yeah. No, no, it's over, man. It's absolutely. So he started, so it all comes from this guy or this kid, this kid. I mean, so how old is he when he was arrested?

• 26:27Ryan Broderick?

  Grant, do we have an age for when he was arrested?

• 26:31Speaker 02

  I mean, still, was he still a minor?

• 26:33Speaker 05

  He should have been going into 10th grade. Yeah.

• 26:35Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. So, uh, yeah. So in, in March 2023, he pleaded guilty to possessing child pornography. And he was 19 years old, but he was sentenced to 80 years in prison.

• 26:46Speaker 05

  And so, so when they arrested him years ago, he was still a minor. So like, he started this at around 15.

• 26:52Ryan Broderick?

  Right. So to get the timeline there. Yeah.

• 26:54Speaker 02

  That's incredible.

• 26:55Ryan Broderick?

  Two last straight things here before we move into the break. So, uh, cause I do think this is important for kind of understanding the like irony quotient at play here. So Kaden Head told, uh, probation officers that he had no actual interest in child pornography. Like it was, which, I mean,

• 27:12Speaker 02

  Was it academic?

• 27:14Ryan Broderick?

  I, I, he said that he used it to recruit predators to his group and to control and intimidate people. Now, I'm, I'm like willing to take that with a grain of salt and say like, I don't know, man, you had a lot of child pornography on your laptop or somebody like didn't care about child pornography. But I will say, we did an episode a couple of months ago about like red rooms and like Hitman for hire sites and stuff. And, and if you spend time on like what's called the dark web, child sexual abuse material can be used as a currency or as leverage. It is, it is a thing that people in the more nefarious corners of the internet use, you know?

• 27:47Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 27:47Ryan Broderick?

  And last thing that really thematically gets at the heart of the issue. Uh, Bobby Stidham, the Arith County's Director of Community Supervision and Corrections, told the judge that Kaden Head's online persona Was no less dangerous than a predator on the street. I don't know if he knows where the internet ends and real life begins.

• 28:07Ryan Broderick?

  And after the break, we're going to be talking about sort of how what Keaton had built started to spread. And, and like why these groups are now almost impossible to knock down. And we're going to talk about that right after a word from our sponsors, whoever they are. They're probably really pissed to be on this episode and I apologize.

• 28:26Speaker 02

  Hey man, last podcast, we've been doing it for years.

• 28:34Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration block. Or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 29:01Speaker 02

  What is Roblox?

• 29:03Ryan Broderick?

  Roblox is like Minecraft if Minecraft was a casino.

• 29:06Speaker 02

  Okay. All right.

• 29:09Ryan Broderick?

  It's to put it, to put it more clearly, it's basically, it's, it's almost identical to Minecraft in terms of its mechanics. It's like a sandbox game you play like Minecraft, but you can build games inside of it more easily than Minecraft. Okay. And so it, there's a, there are a lot of problems with it, like in terms of what it's allowing, like what it's allowing children to do on there. And there's all kinds of safety issues with it. And there is an app store that exists inside of Minecraft that kids can develop games for.

• 29:36Speaker 02

  Right.

• 29:37Ryan Broderick?

  So it's, it's a lot more monetized, basically.

• 29:39Speaker 02

  So, okay, one of the things I would like to know, maybe this can, can help me understand like how, you know, these connections are made. Like when I played, you know, when I played Minecraft, like it's, I never go online. I despise online gaming. I can't handle like.

• 29:54Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, so you're, you're not grooming children on Minecraft. Okay, no, I just wanted to make sure, I just wanted to make sure, yeah.

• 30:01Speaker 02

  Cool, no, no, I appreciate it. Everybody's, not everyone who listens knows who I am, so I'm glad.

• 30:06Ryan Broderick?

  Just wanted to be really clear, like.

• 30:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, you don't want everyone to know. Uh, yeah, I, I can't stand like online gaming or interacting with, with other people in that way. Like for me, like gaming is a very like solitary experience. So when it comes to like Minecraft or Roblox, like how do people connect? And, and, and how, and how do these conversations start? Like, how, how do you get from, hey, how are you to, you know, do you want to kill a cat?

• 30:32Ryan Broderick?

  I think you just leave with the cat thing. Um, no, so I can, I can, I can tell you this. So I had, I had some experience, uh, reporting on a Minecraft influencer years ago, and it took me two or three years to finally get like the proof that he was grooming kids on Minecraft and connecting with them. And so I learned a lot about the process through like talking to his victims and sort of doing the reporting there. And the way it works is like you play Minecraft by yourself, or you play it with other people you might know in real life. Or maybe you go into a Discord that you find on like the Minecraft subreddit and you meet people there. But one of the easiest ways to sort of find people is to stream yourself doing it.

• 31:16Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 31:16Ryan Broderick?

  So like thi- this isn't even just true for Predators, this is also just true for like the vast universe of like Minecraft celebrities, like the Dream SMP. They will stream themselves playing, put it on Twitch or put it on, you know, YouTube or whatever. Then they might advertise a Discord in the chat of that platform, move people there. So what you're doing is you're just moving people to more and more private spaces.

• 31:39Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 31:40Ryan Broderick?

  And that's not even true of just Minecraft. That's kind of how almost all online radicalization eventually goes. Like you're broadcasting as a way to capture people and then you want to just take them to a more quiet place to be like, have you heard about the 14 words? You know, like that's, that's the, that seems to be most people's vector for this stuff.

• 31:59Speaker 02

  Okay, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, it's how it's always worked.

• 32:02Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, yeah, it's, I mean, it's the same in real life to a degree as well, right? Like.

• 32:06Speaker 02

  Eventually, you're on the compound.

• 32:08Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, a lot of Nazi punk bands used to do that. They'd like put, you know, they'd try to sneak into a festival and then they'd try to take, you know, convince you to do whatever. So you are an expert in all things dark and occult. What would you say makes this different from like random 4chan bullshit that you've come across?

• 32:28Speaker 02

  Well, most of that stuff, you know, it's all talk, you know, but, but the problem is, is that, you know, all talk ceased to mean anything many years ago. Because, you know, what you said earlier about the judge, you know, saying that he doesn't know where real life ends and the internet begins or vice versa, that judge doesn't understand that those two things, they are the same thing.

• 32:55Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 32:55Speaker 02

  In 2025, like there is, you know, a 4chan, you know, we started with the 4chan post and we ended at January 6. Like I said earlier, like the rules have changed. Like you don't know what is real. You don't know when those things are going to start jumping into, into, I guess, like actual violent territory when it comes to actually like committing violence, like one person against another.

• 33:20Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And what the internet has, I think, changed, maybe. I actually am not sure. Maybe you do know this better than I do. I think the role of like irony or abstraction has changed, maybe. Like the internet is such an easier place to create like a context free environment. You can create like a game structure and, and sort of, I think it's sometimes easier to not think about the real life implications of what you're saying or what you're doing or what you're engaging with. But then I also think like, maybe you can achieve that in real life just as easily like pre-internet too.

• 34:01Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, cults can do it, political leaders can do it. You know, it's, you know, I think the internet makes dehumanization a lot easier. You know, it's one of the first times in history where it feels like, you know, we can do it to ourselves, you know, where we can convince ourselves to dehumanize another human being, to dehumanize other people, uh, just for our own purposes, without somebody telling us to do it, without someone leading us into it. Uh, I think the internet gives us a lot of opportunities to do so. Uh, and I think once people start figuring out, oh, this makes me feel better about myself, then the feedback loop begins. Uh, and it's, and it's also directly related to the dopamine rush of the internet and

• 34:43Speaker 02

  the diminishing returns, uh, which, you know, that also relates back to so many, like you see with, you know, serial killers, you know, you see it, uh, you know, with these people, you know, they may have a year between their first kill and their second. And then it starts to be where they have to kill every, you know, some guys are killing two, three times a week.

• 35:05Ryan Broderick?

  I'm like that with ordering Taco Bell. Yeah. It's just the timeline speeds up.

• 35:08Speaker 02

  The timeline speeds up. You get that, you get the diminishing return on doing that terrible thing.

• 35:14Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. The cheesy gordita crunch doesn't hit as hard the second or third time. Yeah, no, that's exactly right.

• 35:19Speaker 02

  It really doesn't, man. And then you gotta get that, you know, like, well, I'll just add a bean and cheese. You know, I'll just get extra red sauce.

• 35:24Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, exactly. But it doesn't do it.

• 35:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, it just, it just doesn't do it.

• 35:28Ryan Broderick?

  So, Argentino in his blog about 764 kind of touches on this as well. "The heinous and traumatic acts are done simply for the lulls, for administrative privileges in a chat or server," once again, mod drama, classic. "For a special title or tag next to their username to be put on a roster from one of the com groups, or for access and entry into the most private enclosed networks of these communities. These rewards sought by these miners are ephemeral as titles can be removed or lost by an admin who thinks their content is lacking, or if they become victim or get quote unquote cucked." And what I think is really fascinating here-

• 36:05Speaker 02

  How did I know cucked was gonna come up at some point in this?

• 36:07Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I mean, the, once we let Grant out of the cuck chair to ask a couple of questions later, he can talk all about that. Uh, no, so what I think is really fascinating here, though, is when I started covering, I guess what you would call like digital extremism, or online extremism, or online radicalization, like 10, 15 years ago- The assumption was that eventually we would solve it. And then we would come up with new problems. You know, because the world keeps turning. But this group is such a fascinating example of like the post 4chan world where the, the, the lines between like an incel and a violent troll and a white supremacist, which were very distinct when they first appeared. They were different boards on 4chan.

• 36:48Ryan Broderick?

  You know, the guys on Pole and the guys on R9K or R9K or whatever, they were different people.

• 36:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:54Ryan Broderick?

  But for the next generation coming up, the Roblox, Minecraft generation, the Gen Z, Gen Alpha even, those things have all flattened down into just like a soup of online misery. It's such a, it's such a natural extension of where we were headed 10, 15 years ago that it like depresses me that it just like is this obvious in hindsight that we were headed here.

• 37:13Speaker 02

  It's really difficult to see where culture is going nowadays. We've never seen anything like this. Like we, we've never seen like the, another podcast, um, besides last, but I also do a music history podcast.

• 37:27Ryan Broderick?

  This guy's got two podcasts. Oh yeah, baby.

• 37:30Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, man. But it's, it's a music history podcast. It's called, uh, No Dogs in Space, you know, where, where we look at, you know, like the, the, the history of a band. And we, you know, also look at like the cultural context of that band, you know, the things that were happening around them at the time that informed their music. In 1973, they talk about 1968 like we talk about 1945. You know, like they talk about it like it happened a million years ago. And they talk about culture as this ever evolving thing. And I can't remember the last time we as a culture talked about moving towards something and talked about the evolution of anything.

• 38:12Speaker 02

  2025 feels exactly the same as 2015 culturally, at least to me. I, it's all become a blur. I don't know if that's, I, I sometimes wonder if it's just because of, you know, I'm 42 years old.

• 38:23Ryan Broderick?

  It can't be that we're both older. I think it's, it's not that. I do agree with you though. I do agree with you.

• 38:30Speaker 02

  You know, when you combine like this sort of insane like internet culture that we have that. The way the world has totally flattened out, like when all of these things come together, you do wonder like how, and I know that's the that's the central question that you have. How do we fix this? Like, how do we get out of this?

• 38:50Ryan Broderick?

  We need a new video game is what we need. Um, no, I

• 38:55Speaker 02

  We already fucking blew through Elden Ring and now they bring it back and now I gotta play with other fucking people to play Elden Ring now? Play a From Software game? No.

• 39:03Ryan Broderick?

  We just need more video games. The the business model that both Minecraft, but to a larger extent, Roblox, but definitely social platforms like Facebook or Instagram or whatever, all thrive on is one of digitally replacing something in real life. And it's it's interaction, it's social interaction. And we talked earlier in the episode about the dehumanization that is inherent there. And I don't want to sound like, you know, an old crank that's like, the internet makes you a bad person. And we have plenty of episodes on for Panic World about how like, actually, the internet also allows you to be kind of anything you want to be. And that's especially important if like, real life is tough for you. Yada, yada, yada. Everyone knows the deal. But we need to actually humanize and understand the consequences of this new sort of gamified terrorism, gamified, you know, horror online.

• 39:48Ryan Broderick?

  It's important to keep in mind that we are largely talking about teens victimizing other teenagers or people in their early twenties preying on people who are only a couple of years younger than them. And so this is from a CBC documentary.

• 39:59Speaker 06

  My name is Trinity. I was 14 when I was groomed by members of 764 and I was exploited for three years. It just became so painful. I didn't feel real. I didn't feel like a human being.

• 40:14Ryan Broderick?

  She goes on to say, I met these people on accident. One of my friends was showing me these gore videos on Discord, invited me to one of them, and then I ended up talking in these servers. Now, I should say,

• 40:25Ryan Broderick?

  anyone listening, if someone's showing you gore videos, don't join a Discord for that. Just don't do that. Anyone that wants to sit in a Discord and talk about gore content is weird. That's a weird thing to do. Uh, I grew up, I grew up, look, I grew up in the age of rotten.com. And I never once thought, I want to join a chat room to talk about what I just saw on rotten.com. That did not, that never occurred to me. Obviously, which is not to say that we should blame the victims, you know, whose morbid curiosity helped them go deeper and deeper into these worlds.

• 40:54Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 40:54Ryan Broderick?

  She says she was love bombed, convinced to provide blackmail material, and they kept giving her escalating tasks like cutting usernames into herself. Um, which is interesting because like we, on the Blue Whale episode we did, like that was a fake thing. So where do you think the adults were in all of this?

• 41:11Speaker 02

  The adults as in like moderators, parents, like that sort of thing?

• 41:16Ryan Broderick?

  Any little, literally anyone, uh, who could have done anything here to stop this from happening.

• 41:22Speaker 02

  I mean, this just, everything about this just screams loneliness.

• 41:27Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 41:28Speaker 02

  Like, everything about this screams abandonment. Like, everything. Like, this does not seem like, you know, nobody, nobody's watching any of these kids.

• 41:37Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, but that's not always the case. More disturbingly, Trinity's mom was trying to help.

• 41:42Speaker 07

  She would say, "I need my phone back. They love me. If I'm not on the internet, they're gonna tell everybody. They're gonna show everybody. You have to give it back to me." What would happen when you took away the phone or turned off the wifi? She would break through drywall to get to me. She would get violent. She would start screaming and drooling and throwing herself on the floor, banging her head on the walls, scratching herself, pulling her hair out.

• 42:06Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, it's a nightmare for both of them. Trinity's mom said she slept with the door locked and with all the animals in with her, like all the pets. The police were not very helpful.

• 42:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:16Ryan Broderick?

  Uh, obviously, um, like, yeah, duh. Um, and this did reach a breaking point. By July 2021, they pushed Trinity to try and kill herself on stream.

• 42:28Speaker 06

  I livestreamed for everybody in a Discord of me taking a bloodbath and...

• 42:36Speaker 06

  Scorching hot water.

• 42:38Speaker 07

  When she was in the bathtub, I was pounding on the door for her to come out.

• 42:41Ryan Broderick?

  After this, they got her to a hospital. Thank God. She met with the National Canadian Police, like a special unit that specializes in this. They took her devices, but they couldn't figure out who she was talking to. They did later arrest her worst abuser. When they were arrested, they asked him why he did this. And according to the arresting officer, he said, I like the blood. And he got seven years in prison. The, after the arrest, she met with the FBI and helped them.

• 43:09Speaker 06

  This whole situation is giving me power back. I felt like I lost a piece of myself to this.

• 43:17Ryan Broderick?

  It's a good end to this. And people listening, if they want to hear more about this, you should watch the CBC documentary. It's very good. She's moved into her apartment. She's moving on with her life. She's, you know, growing up similarly normally now. But it's easy to see that a young person in Trini's position could take her life or be traumatized indefinitely.

• 43:33Speaker 02

  Like when you really start fucking with someone's emotions and you really, and especially when, when they're younger, this just seems like pure, you know, emotional, you know, this is just completely, this is just scrambling up somebody's emotions, you know, and, and that can really fuck up a person.

• 43:52Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I think the, I think part of it, like one of the dimensions at play here is that this is happening across platforms that are created specifically for you to use them more, even if they're negative. It's a dimension that like I don't see spoken a lot about when we talk about kind of like abuse cycles online where it's like you might, like you might be engaging with really bad content.

• 44:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:16Ryan Broderick?

  But the platform you're doing it on is programmed literally to make sure that you keep logging in every day to engage with that bad content.

• 44:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:23Ryan Broderick?

  And like feeling like that matters. And I can see, you know, we're talking about people who. You were talking about people who are 14, 15, 16 years old, which means they've never even known a world without that stuff. Like, it's never even existed. So I could see how that could really scramble your incentives, or like your point of view, or your perspective, which brings us to the other side of the coin, the abuser. This is from a Washington Post story. Samuel Hervey, a 25-year-old in the throes of a severe mental health crisis, a Minnesota native, stepped into the frame of the live video stream. He sat down, cross-legged, and emptied a plastic bottle filled with gasoline onto his head and his

• 45:08Ryan Broderick?

  clothing, then lit a flame. Among those watching the November 21 livestream was a 15-year-old girl in an Eastern European city who had spent much of the previous week in close contact with Hervey, urging him to take his own life on camera. "I was getting my big break," she recalled, thinking during Hervey's suicide. "It was a competition of who could do the worst thing, so obviously I felt very cool." When the Post spoke to that young woman, she was now 18, she's only referred in the story by her screen name, which was F M L K. And she said, "I feel very bad for what I did even now. It's something that happened when I was in a bad space. I feel like this thing is gonna haunt me for the

• 45:51Ryan Broderick?

  rest of my life," you know, as it should. So let me give you a bit more background. It really paints the picture of how these groups work. F M L K's victim, Hervey, was in a mental health crisis and went online. That same day, Hervey created a chatroom, referred to as a server on Discord, dedicated to his suicide. He named it An Hero Tempest. Do you know the term An Hero?

• 46:11Speaker 02

  Of course. No, I was on 4chan way back in the day. I'm well familiar with Mitchell.

• 46:16Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. So, um, most of the users told him not to do it, but F M L K reached out to convince him to actually do it. And it was a way to gain clout in 764.

• 46:30Speaker 02

  I think it is really like a big part of this is feeling like it matters.

• 46:35Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 46:35Speaker 02

  A lot of these people are looking for purpose. They're looking for something. To do, they're looking for some way to feel like they're a part of it. Like it's getting attention, it's getting notoriety, it's getting status. Even if it is just a fucking badge, you know, even if it is just, you know, something that's next to your username, even if it is just being a mod, you know, status is status, you know, the humans still crave the same things today that we craved, you know, 5,000 years ago. We, our brains really haven't changed that much. Uh, we just are now in this situation where, you know, our brains haven't caught up to where we are.

• 47:15Speaker 02

  Like I, I always love the, the mea culpa from an internet utopianist. Um, that, you know, it was from an article, you know, maybe four or five years ago. Or this guy had spent the nineties telling everyone that the internet was going to change the world, that it was going to bring us together, that it was going to make everything so much better. And he came out and said, I'm sorry, I was wrong.

• 47:39Ryan Broderick?

  Good.

• 47:39Speaker 02

  I was, he said, I was so fucking wrong. I can't believe how wrong I was.

• 47:45Ryan Broderick?

  You really shit the bed on that one.

• 47:48Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, uh, this is where their prediction ends up. During hours of interviews at a coffee shop and in a restaurant, she was at times nervous, but spoke matter of factly, this is from the Washington Post story. As she described her entry into the dark online community. It began in 2019, she said, when at age 13, she was scouring social media for gory pictures and videos. She joined chat rooms and on Discord and Telegram for a group that called itself cult with a V. Uh, a 764 predecessor whose members posted graphic images of self harm and child pornography. At the time, she said she was trying to belong, she had no friends at her school and felt like an outcast. I thought they were edgy. I wanted them to like me. And she's really like the worst case, you know, humanly possible of a thing that happens to all of us.

• 48:32Ryan Broderick?

  She realized that wasn't the, you know, the clique or the group that she wanted to be a part of. She started the 10th grade at a new school that fall. She made new friends and she came to see the online groups in a different light. I realized those people are scum, she told the post. I realized that if I keep doing that, my life was not going to be good. And what this is so illustrative of is the breakdown between like.

• 48:56Ryan Broderick?

  Seeking out like goth or edgy or dark fictional material and the internet sort of being a repository of the real thing. And it's like when I was a mentally ill teenager, I sought out really dark themes and spooky stuff and heavy music. And it was all fictionalized and I would come across gore content and be like, no thanks. It wasn't super easy to access. But now, after so many years of building up like this massive, massive collection of content across all these platforms, you can just go find that stuff. And I do think the lines are blurred for a lot of people entering that world as young people now.

• 49:34Speaker 02

  Man, we are in the wild fucking west right now and trying to figure out like what this stuff is really, is really doing to us. It sometimes feels like we're in the time period of like lead gasoline. Do you know the lead gasoline theory?

• 49:50Ryan Broderick?

  I do, I believe it. It's one I believe, actually. That lead gasoline basically led to like, what, Gen X like being like conservative essentially? Is that the only thing?

• 50:01Speaker 02

  Well, no, well, it is partly that, but it is, it's more with the boomers and it's more with violence. And just throughout the years, you could see in countries, and you saw this like not just America, but you could see it in country after country, where like the rise of the use of leaded gasoline, like the more leaded gasoline was used, you saw a line a few years later of crime like skyrocketing. So like, you know, the serial, like they ask like, why aren't there as many serial killers around today as there were like in the seventies and eighties? Because in the seventies and eighties, it's one of the theories, the reason why they were so violent, the seventies, eighties and nineties, is because of the exposure to leaded gasoline.

• 50:46Speaker 02

  And you see it in countries across the world, once they ban leaded gasoline, you see their crime rates start to dip a few years later. And I think social media is gonna be the leaded gasoline of the 21st century.

• 51:02Ryan Broderick?

  But I think you and I are fine.

• 51:04Speaker 02

  No, I'm fucking

• 51:05Ryan Broderick?

  I think we're fine.

• 51:06Speaker 02

  Oh dude, no, no, no.

• 51:07Ryan Broderick?

  I think we're the only two people that it hasn't impacted. I think we're fine.

• 51:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, man, I'm perfect. I'm fucking

• 51:13Ryan Broderick?

  Not Grant though. Grant's a real sicko. And we're gonna talk about some other sickos, the 764 group and what they've been up to, right after a break from some very upset advertisers.

• 51:28Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18+.

• 51:55Ryan Broderick?

  So, just a quick run through of some other acts of terror that have been committed by 764 and com groups. So, in March of 2022, a member attacked an 82-year-old man. Two weeks later, he killed an elderly woman. In 2024, a Swedish user with the name slain764 stabbed eight people and recorded it. And December 2024, a 15-year-old opened fire at the Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, killing a student and a teacher before killing himself. There's, you know, all kinds of stories about extorting and then kidnapping minors, foiled terrorist plots, tons and tons and tons of child sexual abuse material, swattings. And then one last one here from Wired.

• 52:38Ryan Broderick?

  "The nonprofit National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received hundreds of reports of minors extorted into hurting themselves in 2023. There was a sharp rise over the previous years, where they only ever saw a handful of these cases, in these online groups. Some of the most egregious online incitement reports that we're seeing in terms of what these children are being coerced to do." Just to sort of give you a last little picture of where we are at the moment. This is from Argentina again. The US Department of Justice accused Prasan Nepal, Trippi, as he was known, a 20-year-old from High Point, North Carolina, and Leonidas Veragianis, or someone who goes by War. I would go with the cooler name, which is

• 53:22Ryan Broderick?

  your name in that case, by the way. His name is Leonidas. Okay, anyways, who is a US citizen in Thessaloniki, Greece.

• 53:29Speaker 02

  Kids don't always make the best decisions when it comes to like online. When I was 14, I like to go, I like to go by Doomhammer online.

• 53:35Ryan Broderick?

  I mean, that's sick. I went by Ryman, which is not good.

• 53:40Speaker 02

  Well, I went between Doomhammer and Alien Pirate, so.

• 53:42Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, those are both very good. Wow. Yeah, so these two were accused of being leaders of and playing key roles in running 764 from late 2020 until March 2025. A complaint filed in Washington DC in April 2025 charges both men with operating a child exploitation enterprise. Each faces one count of child exploitation under a charge that carries a potential life sentence. And here's some last bad news for you from Wired in 2025. "In the face of international law enforcement presser, dozens of prosecutions and worldwide disrepute, the network of young sadists, misanthropes, child predators, and extortionists

• 54:22Ryan Broderick?

  known as COM or 764 has not shrunk away into obscurity. Rather, its members have progressed from online extortion and crimes related to child sexual abuse material to real-world violence." So we're talking about knifings, killings, firebombings, drive-by shootings, school shootings, and murder-for-hire plots across Europe, North America. They've all been connected to a splinter group called No Lives Matter. This is not the same thing as what was connected to the IVF bombing.

• 54:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 54:50Ryan Broderick?

  But it's not not, because these things are all, I think, based around a very... Modern sense of nihilism, it is all kind of ballooning out and flattening and spreading in a million directions, the way this stuff always does.

• 55:05Speaker 02

  So how is this story not massive? Is it just that it's too hard to explain? Cause that is sometimes what we've run into is like when we've come across like a story that's, you know, just in from history that you get like, well, everybody should know about this. How does everyone not know about this? Sometimes it just does come down to it's, it's difficult to get people to pay attention.

• 55:29Ryan Broderick?

  So yeah, I think there's a couple of things at play. One, it took a lot of time for incels to be taken seriously as a terror, as a terror group. It really took like Elliot Rogers doing something quite big for that to like, they were around, obviously. I also think that this group, you know, there's not that many of them. So they, they can have a big impact while still being relatively tiny. Andre told us that in 764, there's roughly a dozen named members and three times that many recruits and about 17,000 unique accounts.

• 56:00Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 56:01Ryan Broderick?

  So this is, this is a very cynical take here, but I think that this group is not going for scale in the way that we're used to internet-inspired terrorism. It's honestly very anti-millennial in that way. Like they're not going for a massive bombing or a huge spree shooting.

• 56:20Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 56:21Ryan Broderick?

  I would guess there's probably a fear. I mean, I even feel it now, like doing this episode about telling people about this. Cause I felt that way about Kiwi Farms. Like I, I was like, I don't actually think normal people need to know about this until like, you know, you can't anymore and you have to tell them. But like, I don't know. I, I, it also just sounds fake.

• 56:40Speaker 02

  It does. It sounds like a bunch of Joker henchmen without the Joker, where they're just sort of agents of chaos. And sometimes, I mean, and that is terrifying. It's terrifying to think about, it's terrifying to talk about.

• 56:52Speaker 05

  Can I, can I throw out two, just, just one thing to add to this?

• 56:56Ryan Broderick?

  You can come out of your cage now.

• 56:57Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 56:59Speaker 05

  This just seemed like a specific episode where it felt very inappropriate to make cage jokes, but fine.

• 57:03Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 57:05Ryan Broderick?

  I'm part of 764 now. I'm in. I want to get the flair on my Telegram username.

• 57:10Speaker 05

  One, I think that there's a problem where it sounds silly and we're so quick to be like, that is a moral panic, that is bait.

• 57:18Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 57:18Speaker 05

  That there's an immediate dismissal because everything is a flat circle. So all these kids are just playing off of things and yes, ending things that are, that were fake and making them real. And two, I think that it doesn't have a political ideology.

• 57:32Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 57:33Speaker 05

  If this was, obviously there's lots of swastikas and there's people who identify as neo Nazis within 764, but they are not doing this in the name of Hitler.

• 57:43Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 57:43Speaker 05

  And if it was in the name of Hitler and it fell, if this fell within left, right politics, it could be then be packaged in a way we understand. And now we exist in a new age of terrorism where it doesn't work that way.

• 57:55Ryan Broderick?

  This is very important and it's, and it's becoming more important because acceleration is violence is increasing. We are not ready as a society, as a country, law enforcement is not ready. And, and when I talk to people who are extremism researchers, where I talk to like consultants who deal with the FBI, I have friends who do that work. They're like the number one thing that we are screaming at the FBI, screaming at law enforcement agencies to understand is that nihilistic accelerationist violence is going to be the domestic terror of the future. It is right wing. It is far right. It is connected to all of the other things.

• 58:37Ryan Broderick?

  But the branding is so different and so new that like, we are not, like the media cannot figure it out. Like they have no idea how to deal with it.

• 58:45Speaker 02

  You know what it feels like in the eighties, you know, anytime they showed a punk?

• 58:49Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 58:50Speaker 02

  As a criminal and he was always laughing in that really high register while like, you know, he's, yeah, like.

• 58:56Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 58:57Speaker 02

  Exactly. Like beating up an old lady or blowing up a gas station, like Robocop 2.

• 59:00Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 59:01Speaker 02

  You know, like.

• 59:01Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 59:02Speaker 02

  It feels like that's what's happening now, like that, that, cause that was never real. That, that, that didn't exist back then. That was a, a. A conservative fever dream and maybe there is something about, you know, wanting to stay a little bit detached. You know, where you say like, we don't want to say that it's a moral panic, you know, you know, we don't want to be, you know, lumped in with any of that. We don't want to come out and say like, hey, maybe we should be thinking about these kids like that. Even saying it feels a little goofy.

• 59:32Ryan Broderick?

  It does feel goofy. You mentioned the Joker earlier, but it's very similar to the Jokers. The gang from Batman Beyond that took the Joker's mantle and turned it into a biker gang. Uh, they killed Terry McGinnis's parents in the first episode and he becomes Batman because of it. Um, no, but a decentralized domestic terrorism, global terrorism. I mean, we've had versions of this forever, like ISIS is the kind of the blueprint, but ISIS was ideological. Yeah. And we are not really prepared to think about the lack of ideology as an ideology. Even though it obviously it has to be.

• 1:00:10Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, we've, I mean, what the fuck do you call the mass shootings that we've had, you know, over the last 20 years? Like, was there any ideology behind, you know, Sung, did Sung Cho have an ideology? No, he had Richard McBeef. There was no ideology, even going as far back as Columbine. There was no ideology, you know, Adam Lanza that had no ideology. A lot of them, there's fucking nothing behind it.

• 1:00:32Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:33Speaker 02

  So we've been living in it. Like, that's the, that's the funny thing about it is that we've been living in this reality for a very long time now. Uh, it just seems like now they're starting to organize.

• 1:00:43Ryan Broderick?

  We've, or and we've open sourced it. We've created like, we've, we've made it scalable.

• 1:00:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:48Speaker 05

  You, you can kind of feel a collective disappointment in media whenever there's a mass casualty event. And then it doesn't fall into an ideological thing that is politically advantageous.

• 1:01:00Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:01:01Speaker 05

  It's like, we're waiting for the manifesto and then if it does, if the manifesto is weird, it just becomes less interesting to talk about. As, and as, like a CNN punditry level, which is like.

• 1:01:14Speaker 02

  A problem.

• 1:01:15Ryan Broderick?

  No, but I can tell you why, which is like, eh, like in the 2010s, when, when these things were like post Sandy Hook, like that period after Sandy Hook. There was first a desire to find out who these people were and find their social media history and publish it. That was like, that was like wave one of like the digital media mass shooting playbook.

• 1:01:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, let's watch every YouTube video that Elliot Rogers ever made and, you know, analyze it.

• 1:01:42Ryan Broderick?

  And then there was wave two, which was find out why they did it, which is not easy to do. But quickly, a lot of newsrooms, ones I worked in, ones my friends worked in, editors in those newsrooms figured out that if you could say, well, Facebook was connected in some way, like the Christchurch shooter, he livestreamed on Facebook.

• 1:02:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:03Ryan Broderick?

  Well, that doesn't become one story. That becomes a series of stories of like, we've asked Facebook for comment. How did Facebook allow this to happen? It's good for business, but it also, I, I don't want to be super cynical about it, but it does tie into a larger fascination with these things and, and a desire for answers. And so in the case of 764, to bring it back around, if the answer is these kids don't believe in anything because they were born at the end of the world as far as they're concerned, and they're just tormenting each other until they all die, like that's not satisfying for anybody. That's really, thanks for listening, guys. Have a great day. Like, yeah, it's just not, it's not satisfying.

• 1:02:46Speaker 02

  When you start asking why, you know, you say as far as they're concerned, it is the end of the world and I, you know, find myself, you know, caught in that hole quite a bit as well. Yeah, it's, if you have to start asking the questions of like, well, why do they think it's the end of the world? That introduces a lot of questions that a lot of the media sponsors don't like to answer.

• 1:03:07Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. How are you feeling? You seem, did we bum you out? Did we bum you out? You all right?

• 1:03:11Speaker 02

  Oh, absolutely not. No, no, no. This is, uh, this is, uh, this is my job.

• 1:03:16Ryan Broderick?

  Okay.

• 1:03:17Speaker 02

  This has been my job for a really long time.

• 1:03:21Ryan Broderick?

  Just making sure we have similar brain damage. No, good. We failed. We failed, Ryan. We didn't break him. It's our first guest in so long. Actually, no, I will say you are the first guest we've had in a long time that hasn't ended our episode just gray and like absolutely stricken with anxiety. So yeah, this is good. This feels good.

• 1:03:37Speaker 02

  Oh, no, I actually confirms quite a bit that I've been thinking anyway, like, and it kind of puts into perspective, like, you know, actually, it helps me to understand the mass shooter epidemic of the last 20 years quite a bit better. And, you know, I like, when I understand something, it makes me feel better. And I, that's part of why, that's part of why we did sort of the whole thing of last podcast is like, I wanted to understand this stuff, you know, even if the answer is disturbing, at least it's not, you know, just in a black hole of nothingness.

• 1:04:07Ryan Broderick?

  Well, I actually, that is where I wanted to end this, because I do think with all this stuff, the answer is almost always 100%. Like, I would say like 99% of the time, the answer is like, you have to sort of engage with this stuff earnestly and thoughtfully and not, like, these kids are obviously reacting to stuff around them. It's telling them that, like, life does not matter, right?

• 1:04:29Speaker 02

  Obviously.

• 1:04:30Ryan Broderick?

  And the simplest answer here, the most effective answer, which is also unfortunately the cringiest and the most embarrassing, is you just have to say, no, it does. Like, a lot of what we've talked about this, this episode is just a reflection of like, kind of how, I don't know, I feel like we screwed up by like, letting this meme of like, it's the end of the world, become so pervasive that like, 16 and 17 year olds are acting like it is and treating it like that way. And I, and I just think that like, you know, if you, if anyone's listening to this feeling like, really distraught, instead of joining some sort of nihilist Discord page, just, I don't know, like, get yourself like a little treat, you know? Watch a, watch a TV show or something, have a little treat or something.

• 1:05:14Ryan Broderick?

  But like, remind yourself that, yeah, like, life is worth living, yeah, I mean, because that is what this is. This is people who just got sucked into this mindset that it's very hard to pull out of.

• 1:05:23Speaker 02

  We are, at this moment, at this inflection point, and I don't know which way we're gonna go, I don't know which way we're gonna turn, but, you know, things will get better eventually.

• 1:05:35Ryan Broderick?

  That's right.

• 1:05:35Speaker 02

  You know, whether, whether it be 10 years from now, 5 years from now, it might even be 100 years from now.

• 1:05:40Ryan Broderick?

  Even if I've gotta go on Minecraft and figure out how that works to, to help, I'll do it, if I have to do it.

• 1:05:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:47Ryan Broderick?

  I don't want to.

• 1:05:47Speaker 02

  But there's always, there's always.

• 1:05:48Speaker 05

  Mod seems like a good place to start. More mods seems probably like a.

• 1:05:52Ryan Broderick?

  More mods.

• 1:05:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, more mods. More mods. I, I don't know if, I mean, that's the thing, it is eventually gonna be where everyone's job is just gonna be to make sure that everyone else isn't being awful.

• 1:06:03Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 1:06:03Speaker 02

  And we're just a.

• 1:06:04Ryan Broderick?

  Internet lifeguards. As I said, we gotta get masculinity lifeguards. Um, I, this is a silly question I ask you, I ask this all our guests, but it's silly for you. Uh, if people wanna follow you on the internet, where can they do that?

• 1:06:14Speaker 02

  No, you can, uh, if you enjoy, you know, history, if you enjoy dark shit, if you enjoy, you know, like, where true crime, like, tru- true crime used to be our bread and butter, but these days we're, you know, moving a little bit more towards like history stuff. We're in the middle of, on last podcast on the left, a whole series on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Uh, and it's, my god, the parallels between today and 1860.

• 1:06:41Ryan Broderick?

  John Wilkes Booth's Discord channel was out of control. Yeah, I've heard that.

• 1:06:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, man, uh, it, it's, just the parallels of the way people talk about stuff and, you know, the, the divides in our country today, like, it's, it's another one of those things that just shows you, you know, it's, we're, we're just, you know, history's just rhyming constantly. Uh, so if you like that, you know, we're, we're, and I also do another podcast called No Dogs in Space, uh, where we go through, uh, music history and, you know, we did a whole season on punk, we've done a, we did a season on the Beastie Boys, we went through, you know, the history of hip-hop and how it, you know, conflated with, uh, you know, the history of punk, uh, Velvet Underground, all kinds of great shit over there. Uh, if you wanna check it out, go check out the podcast.

• 1:07:21Ryan Broderick?

  Uh, thank you so much for doing this, this was a blast, this was.

• 1:07:24Speaker 02

  Hey, thank you so much for having me.

• 1:07:25Ryan Broderick?

  Great, thank you.

• 1:07:27Ryan Broderick?

  Hey, if you want to hear the full interview granted with Andre, you can find that on our Patreon, patreon.com/panicworld. Panic World is a production of Courier. It is written and produced by Grant Irving and hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Josh Fialsted 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 Couga 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.

• 1:08:11Ryan Broderick?

  You can email her at [email protected]. Lastly, here's my advice for you: chill out and touch grass while you still can.

• 1:08:22Speaker 08

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• 1:08:27Speaker 09

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