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

Ryan, you're looking a little dark. I am seeing that, and I'm trying to figure out all my lights are on. You're an extra bisexual lighting. I know. It's fine. Okay, Kat, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. We're going to 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? Just from the word gross alone, I could already like guess who you were talking about. Sure, we're at the class. Who do you think I'm talking about? I assume you're talking about one of Twitch's most popular and prolific streamers ever, Asmongold. Is that how you pronounce? Asmongold. I've always been saying asmongold. 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. 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 or culture and eventually reality. Joining us today from Spitfire Newsletter, also on Courier Now, welcome Courier Network friend, Kat Tambarge. How are you doing? 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. There's hail. All my viewers will notice I have a sunburn on my nose. 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 Zach 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 going to get to why he's really gross. But his reach and his influence are absolutely terrifying because he's really just like a bad dude. And his existence is a bad thing. It's a bad sign. And you know, we talk all the time about the 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? So it was after the Depth Heard 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 Depth Heard 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? Hold on. Representation matters. And so I do think there is something very powerful about Twitch, the average Twitch user seeing themselves on screen. Yes. And that leads us actually to our first clip, which we're going to show you now, unfortunately. Our researcher Adam dug this up. This is Zach Hoyt's first ever YouTube video when he was still going as Zach Raar as in Raarar means I love you and dinosaur. This is 2008. And this is about a rat that was found in his parents kitchen. Oh, frick it. I can smell this house. Oh, there's the rat. Okay. So that is a rat in an extremely disgusting kitchen and they're going to 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 think this is this isn't 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 there was like some kind of frisbee that they would put like blunt guts into. Yeah, and they'd be watching like really horrible horror movies or wrestling or 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. And why we aren't freaking out about it enough. It is it breaks my brain. Have you found yourself in situations with guys like this? 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. 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. Not the type that this speaks to me and a lot of them lived in houses like this and a lot and those were like the guys you would also like buy weed from in high school. Like, I can tell you I have been couch locked from bad stepped on mid on a couch next to a guy like Aiden Ross or Aspen Gold. And be like, I can never let this happen to me. Right. This is a night. Yeah. Yeah. The framing of this as aspirational in particular is really disturbing. So and like with with Aspen Gold, 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. And so we see this video of the 18 year old Aspen Gold 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 going to do a little comparison of sort of how he got here. This is as an old talking about Grock when it was being used to like undress women and children without their permission on X. 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. 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, how did that happen? 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 a masked 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 deputy her trial. 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 going to get there. That is absolutely when he starts to explode. 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 is hanging out. Jeffrey Epstein is hanging out like most of the male kind of culture of the 21st century is being written in real time by wild players. I used to go to like a land 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 wash their hands. Yeah. So Hoyt starts uploading gameplay videos of World of Warcraft. He starts to get his early fan base from Wow. I actually knew a Wow sicko in high school that would do war driving. Are you familiar with this? 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. Yeah. So yeah, he starts he starts filming videos, gameplay videos, timeout, 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 OK. So this is a video that is oh my god, it looks like the fucking player which it's insane. This is a video that is titled Asmongold's layer. It is 1.1 million views. It's from 2010. And here we go. 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 going to clean it today, but I don't want. I don't want to lose the memory. Ah, God, it's like a Harmony Corrine movie. It's a nightmare. Watching old Asmongold videos is like the eerie feeling of watching a Marvel Hornets video where I'm like, my whole body is on edge. Like what's going to happen next? 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? 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. Yeah. Why would there be an overlap? I just think it's like this was like where nerds went online is why 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 wasn't really tapped it. And then I remember like the whole like parody of it with Major League gaming. I feel like. Yeah. So like I was kind of aware that these spaces existed, but like I wasn't playing any video games because I had a job and I had 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 started 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 streaming Wow all day, every day. If you think this is depressing, you're right. But Asmongold would disagree. 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, experience the outside world. But all that goes away once he's back in his safe little nest in his room playing video games. So he you know, it's all totally fine. And he becomes the single most popular Wow streamer on Twitch, which at that time was like one of the larger. Are you familiar with how Twitch kind of functions? Yeah. 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, etc, etc. And his audience is like very attracted to how they can make fun of him and relate to him. He strikes me as like a male version of a locale. 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 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 shot in for it. Or how do you say that word shot and Freud? Yeah. Okay. There's like a little bit of shot and for an 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 low cows, a low 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. 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 live stream fails, which is the subreddit for like sharing Twitch stream or 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 as one goal, this is exactly what happens in 2016. He ends up on live stream fails because multiple roaches are crawling around his chair and computer. He gets asked about it and he says he complains that they've been laying eggs in his food. God, this is so gross, man. Then then in about a year later, viewers notice that there's dried blood on his wall next to his bed. This is like gross. He had so bad. He explains that it's from he explains it's from his teeth because they bleed overnight and he wipes it on the wall. Who amongst us? 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 a one thousand two hundred and thirty four 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 low cow, this like relatable low cow. Yeah. He's learning that he can be extremely offensive. He realized that he can go viral in a different way. So he gets a 24 hour ban in August, twenty seventeen 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 twenty seventeen? Like what? What an insanely deep pull. And like the only natural disaster he remembers. I mean, this is a guy who is clearly like frozen in 2007. That is absolutely true. Yeah. I double checked. I was like, did he mean Hurricane Sandy? Did he mean something later? Yeah, like there was a hurricane like a couple years before in twenty eighteen. He goes viral again because he announces that he is dating another Twitch streamer named Pink Sparkles. Have you ever heard of her? Yes, I have heard of her. Your voice definitely pulled 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 low cow, for being gross, being offensive. All that gets him attention, but it also makes him useful to other creators and women creators, which intentionally are not leads to like its own kind of rage bait. 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 low cow figures, they attract these women maybe because they like present vulnerability. I don't know what it is. Comparing Asmongold to Boogie is smart. Keemstar as well. If you listening don't know who these people are, that's totally fine. Just live your life. You're better off for it. Just live your live your damn life. So yeah, at the time that they start dating, Pink Sparkles is getting a lot of hate because the users of Twitch have decided she's a quote unquote cam whore. And someone asks like why she's considered a cam whore. And 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, staying 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. These cam girls get banned every week for showing tits and then a bunch of other gross stuff that he lists out. And then they're back streaming in a day after the band. 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. 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 can 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 into this through content restrictions around like, OK, 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. 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. Yeah, like these guys want that attention from men. And it also sort of ties to these conversations we were having in a previous episode about transvestigating with kitty Kim's and what's what's Jeff. We're leaving that interest like that. What's the I was gonna say, what's the guy who looks like a dog's name? Like. Love you buddy. Kitty Kim's 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. Yes. And 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 sick with myself. And so it's like it's these two really weird psychologists that Twitch has just like connected and turned into a great business for them. So they see themselves as an as an gold figure. It's both creates the jealousy of like. I relate to this guy. Maybe I can get get a woman like this makes her popular and 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. Yeah. You know it's that like weird. I want to be you and I relate to you in that same squalor. 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 this side of them like they're like oh your life is so sad. But at the same time 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 Asman Gold being like if you're a woman and you put your picture on the Internet like you're going to get sexually abused and that's your fault. And yet for whatever reason like there's an audience for that even among like some women. I'm going to sit in the just like extreme psychic anguish of imagining a woman watching an Asmonds old stream for a second and we're going to throw to our sponsors and raid. Get rid of the cockroaches in your gamer nest. Maybe this is real millennial of me. I think privacy is actually an essential right that we all deserve. And might I recommend surf shark algorithms decide what we consume platforms decide what gets amplified. And somewhere in the background there are countless companies trackers and random third parties quietly collecting data on what we click where we are and what we're doing online. And honestly that's part of what makes something like surf shark VPN feel less like and nice to have and more like basic Internet hygiene. Because whether you're digging through the weird corners of the web traveling or just connecting to public Wi-Fi at an airport or coffee shop surf shark encrypts your Internet activity. So what you're doing stays private which if you spend as much time online as most of us do that's pretty essential. One thing I especially like is that it also helps you get around geo restrictions which means if content is blocked where you are you can still access it which is useful. Whether you're traveling or just trying to watch something the Internet has arbitrarily decided you shouldn't have it works across all devices with one subscription. So your phone, laptop, tablet, every screen that currently controls your life can all be protected at once. So if you want to make your online life feel just a little less exposed go to surf shark dot com slash panic or use code panic at checkout to get four extra months of surf shark VPN. Again that's surf shark dot com slash panic you know like the show. It also comes with a risk free 30 day money back guarantee and the link and code are in the show description. 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 don't cheat. Do you watch them live? I this is oh God people are gonna be so mad. I only watch one person live. Who is that? My fiance watches more live stuff than I do and so she'll watch us on piker when there's a major political event happening and so I will come watch him with her. So I'll watch his son live and that's basically the only one who I actually watch live for other people I usually just watch clips after the fact. 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 I 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 all stream at home. Oh that's so interesting. 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 actually watch it and like I am one of those people were like if I watch a Hassan stream I'm like get a real real real real room. 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. 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 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 in 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 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 genuinely have to stop. It's too much. Yeah, I'm the same way. But there are many people who do not feel that way because Aspen Gold 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 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. So for those who are not familiar with the world of Clippers, that is why you know who Clivicular is. That is why you know who Husan 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, 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 Aspen Gold. And it puts him in a perfect spot for society collapsing in 2020. And we at that point all become Aspen Golds. And it turns him into something of a cultural institution. He starts his own content creator production company called O.T.K. Or One True King in October 2020. And he signs up streamers Mizkif and S.Fan. Are you do you know who these people are? I know who Mizkif is. I know who Mizkif is either. I don't know why I know who Mizkif is. 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. There are basically like for my what I can understand, there's like a hundred to two hundred streamers with Capuchin names that are constantly suing each other. And yeah, and like and like claiming like defamation lawsuits against each other. And I don't like, yeah, in fact, I just Googled Mizkif. And apparently he is suing another streamer named Emeru, which was I think the one the woman who was assaulted at TwitchCon last year. 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. Oh, actually, I did remember a stream that I watched live. I enjoy the I love the I show speed tour video. I love them. I think they're delightful. And I think 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? Yes, I've seen that. 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 mug 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. So anyways, this is the moment where Aspen Gold starts to kind of like figure out how to create how to change the industry of streaming. And he's leaning into what was called like the eternal sleepover style of streaming, which was like Kaisenat 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 couched like two smoking regs with in 2008. But now they're billionaires and like owned by Saudi petrol. Saudi petrol states. Yeah. So he doesn't take any of the money that he's making to make his home life better. That's what's so crazy. Easy thing here. 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 Aspen Gold is he chooses to live in fills. Yes, 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. Yeah, like I can't even really watch like that show Horders because I find. Yeah. 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. Yeah, I am not going to diagnose Aspen Gold with. I mean, he has to have like all kinds of different psychiatric disorders, but like I'm 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. Yeah, that's really dark. I also know like 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 Aspen Gold of killing his mom? We 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. She was dealing with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. In a statement he put out in 2021, he said that she was seven years old. She was overweight. She smoked and she basically lived not well. 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 OK 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 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, 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 Rahr, 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. Oh, he should have these conversations with a therapist. Yeah, I mean, based on what he's about to sort of spew out under 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 think in many ways. You know, there's lots has been written and lots been said about sort of the American psyche being one born of of isolation and loneliness, particularly the American suburbs or sort of this breeding ground for people who distrust their neighbors. You know, there's toilets on episodes going all the way back, you know, to the invention of the suburb talking about this. And I have no problem imagining that like that, the the new version of the 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 either. Don't talk to anyone or I talk on the Internet. Right. And that's unfortunately for the rest of us. What Asmongold decides to do when he comes back. And we have broken this up into sort of 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 Asmongold's house. This is also the period I'm not going to pull this link up. And I'm just going to 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. Yes. I've been waiting for this moment. 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 ever happened, honestly. 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. Yeah, he has. There is a dead rat in his room and it is rotting. And when the sun rises and the sunlight hits the dead rotting rat carcass through the window, 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. Yeah. Yeah. That's exactly. Hold on. Sorry. But there's one part of the tape you need to hear. As soon as 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? No, no one has ever done this. You are the only one. He at this period of time, he starts buying thrift store clothes instead of doing laundry. There's rat. There's roaches all over his desk. He ends up getting the nickname Roach King. He starts dating another young woman streamer named Case. They do a stream where they sit down at a restaurant to get out of the house and so do an IRL stream. Yeah. And it's really weird. 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. 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 Edgler territory, out outwardly edgler territory. He's calling people the R word. He's saying that he's triggering people. And then in twenty twenty two, we get to the depth. The herd trial. So you have been on this show before to talk about this, but for people who haven't gone back in the archive, you actually should listen to that episode. But tell us a little bit about sort of Asmongold's role in that trial, because I think he actually kind of came away weirdly unscathed from it in a certain like bigger than he ever had been before in a weird way. Yes. Yeah. Because so at the time of the Depe Hurd trial, which was May twenty twenty two, 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. 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. I remember in May twenty twenty two, 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 for you as a creator, because now you can become monetized. Now you can, you know, profit from these things. And so as many gold as most influencers did at that time, hopped onto the anti Amber Heard train. And I too, 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 live streamed the trial and in its entirety and reacted to it for like eight hours a day. A lot of creators were reacting to reactions. So like as many gold was reacting to these like tick talk 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 as many gold 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 got it like selling this narrative. And he like many other content creators were like, Amber Heard's team sucks because even if they're right, they're not like selling it to the audience, which is not what it's court cases 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. Yeah. Because as we all know, the jury completely fell for the exact same stick 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. I mean, no, I think. Twitch is not a. How do I say this about being needlessly cruel, perhaps? 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. Right. 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, 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. Yeah. 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 debt v. herd trial with this like massive roster of cultural pundits that have never literally in as mongols case gone outside. Yes. Like do not talk to other human beings in as mongols 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. Right. And another like thing to note about the debt v. herd 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 Herd 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 like Hassan Piker was was commenting on the debt herd trial against Amber Herd, 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 Herd 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. 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. And like, you know, like, and so. It's it's a very fervent ground for building a very passionate audience. And we're going to talk about after the break what happens when a stinky dumbass realizes that he can talk about current events to that passionate fan base. And becomes from from low cow to Gen Z. Jake Tapper, the is mungle story more after the break. But first, the word from our sponsors. Mouse traps. Mountain Dew Code Red Mountain Dew Code Red Shots on 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. 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. Let's go. Don't miss the UK's number one movie. The Super Mario Brothers can take care of the kingdom. It's a super powered adventure. This April. Pack our things. The galaxy gets even bigger. He knows that's my bike, right? The Super Mario Galaxy movie in cinemas now. As one goal is now hopped up on current events and has a big old fan base 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 eight million views titled streaming has destroyed me. He steps back from his O.T.K. venture and says he's going to do better and stream less. He just wish he just said stream no more. Just don't. He won't anymore. Just retire. 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 is 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, you do. 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. 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 he finishes that by saying. Don't worry. I'll react to a D. E. I equals die gaming video first day back to stream. 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? Just this unraveling of a human being that I just read through. 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 overwhelmingly 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. 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, though a lot of them still view him as like somewhat credible or serious or authoritative, despite him admitting it all to their faces. It's it I totally agree with you. And and it and it shows like such a fascinating glimpse into his politics in a way as well, where, you know, like, OK, if you imagine politics as an ocean and wokeness, pure, perfect wokeness, is that the is above the water, the closer you and your 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. Yeah. 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, OK, I have. It's like you saw the fish swim up or something. Is it OK? 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 D. I. Sucks. Yeah. 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 Herd being political or his opinions on black residents of New Orleans being political, because he's so uninformed and so uneducated in these things and 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. 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 ban from Twitch, need to say different things so that I can get back on Twitch. 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. 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 are all aspiring to be. Even the worst, lowest, you know, Hollywood's 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. 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 start to spin out when I think about AI because it's like there there are a lot of people that 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. A I 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 I slot recently. Speaking of bad taste, like 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 going to like that more because. We are not high minded as a species like I am. This is where I started to talk like Sephiroth from Final Fantasy. So, you know, like it's scary stuff. And I as one gold scares me his popularity genuinely scares me because I think it's proof of that. 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 Asman Gold 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. That makes 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 as many gold and like you see this with A.I. 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 A.I. Slop for five hours at like a vacation resort. So there 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 Asman Gold because they like it because now it's familiar and common to them. So yeah, I mean, I think that 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. 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 listen to a band called Johnny Hobo and the freight trains and 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 Tidcan. And Johnny Hobo, you know, Pat the bunny could be Asman Gold. Asma Gold could not be Pat the bunny. Like the 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 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 Asma Gold has nothing to say. 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. Like he's a millionaire. Yeah, right. He's also a millionaire and making mainstream entertainment. Like like divine could absolutely have a rat clock. Asma Gold 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 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. God, I just wish I just go back in time and watch talk to and eat lunch. Those were the good old days. Yeah, the past is a different country, you know, the world you grew up in does not 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 Osmond Gold 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. Finished my sort of rundown here with this. This is from the Atlantic, which ends up doing a profile on his rise. They write the feeling one gets of is not of watching him, but of watching with him. I sometimes felt a paying him nostalgia for 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 is in a dispute among philosophical visions for a better world or even a contest. Among constituencies for resources, 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 on screen 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 scream. And now he has moved to rumble, which is a even worse streaming platform. Yeah. Did Charlie Warr is all right that for the Atlantic? Probably not. It was pretty good. So. Whoever wrote it was. No, it wasn't. It was the guy who's Spencer Cornhubber. It was good. I love you, Charlie. No, so I just think I think. As one gold is a really bad guy and he makes me really depressed. Yes, it is depressing. It's depressing. It's like 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 to 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. Like if Asman Gold does crazy stuff on stream like harms himself or others, that's what people want to see. Like the the viewing of Asman Gold 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. 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 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 Asman Gold 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 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. Yeah, I stare at Asman Gold'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 young men that watch his streams will come to a similar revelation. I hope because 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 from from the rug. Like 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 it's not interesting. It's not sustainable. It doesn't sustain your soul. It 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 watching old sitcom. Long order. Every episode is on some stream platform. Go watch that or something like anything is better. Yeah, 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. 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 I see it as a different subset than, you know, like the larger man of fear. It's a good different thing, I think. I do think it's different subcultures of men. And it's like the debt fee heard 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 debt heard trial. Yeah, like they have they have similar values. But like Asmongold is much closer to, you know, like those Japanese soldiers like didn't know World War Two was over. Yes, he's like that for Gamergate. It's literally like nerd culture versus jock culture is the way that I think of it, because 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. It really depresses me that people watch this stuff. Like it it honestly makes me really upset. All right. Well, unlike normal episodes where we depress the guest, I have depressed myself. I am in a very dark spot mentally and I'm going to go I'm going to go recover. Kat, I want to thank you for coming on the show. This was delightful. Thank you for having me. If people want to follow you on the internet, where can they do that? You can follow me at www.spitfirenews.com. That is my newsletter. I write about this stuff a lot. 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. The minute people on Blue Sky hear about Asmongold, they will actually kill themselves and delete the website. Like like. And they're kind of right. 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 they'd be like, it's it's done. It's over. Yeah. Panic World is a production of Courier. It is written and produced by Grant Irving and hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Josh Fielstead is our production coordinator and our amazing researcher is Adam Bumas 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. D'Amezzo is their VP of brand and social. Charlotte Robinson is their deputy director of brand and social. Marianne Cuga 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 tracy at couriernewsroom.com. Lastly, here's my advice for you. Chill out and touch grass while you still can.