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

0:05 Welcome back to Behind the Bastards. This is part two of our episodes on the rise of the nuisance streamer. Welcome back, Jason Pargin. Thank you so much for coming back on the show. You've got a new book in the John Dice at the End series out. So let's plug that up at the top and then we'll get back into it.

0:22 Yes, book five in the John Dice at the End series is called There Are No Giant Crabs in This Novel. A Novel of Giant Crabs. If you're unfamiliar with the series, I feel like the title conveys the tone pretty well. They are extremely profane in graphic, should be available in almost any format. Although at the time we're recording this, there's word that there are book shortages. Paper shortages. Paper shortages.

0:48 And because America is just so feverish about reading, we just can't get enough. We're buying up all the books.

0:56 Yeah.

0:57 So it's a crisis that you see this every day on the news. Americans reading too much.

1:02 That's the main problem with this country is literacy.

1:05 But I suggested this topic because if I was going to come on here and promote something along with my lighthearted horror action novels, I didn't want it to be covering a genocide. But part one of this episode, kind of a bummer. Going to be frank.

1:20 It's a real bummer. It's got to get worse. So I want to peel back a little bit and talk about some other things that are kind of at the foundation of this broad kind of amorphous industry of nuisance and rage baiting that we've been sort of grappling with this week. You've probably heard the term attention economy. I think people generally have heard the phrase. It was coined by a psychologist and economist named Herbert Simon in 1971.

1:57 Decades before the internet was a thing regular people knew or cared about, Simon, undoubtedly looking at the mass media of his day, wrote about how the discrepancy between the amount of information available to modern consumers and the biological limitations of our ability to process that information. was going to lead to some conflicts, right? He proposed it would lead to a wealth of information but a poverty of attention, right?

2:20 And that that would make the ability to draw and command attention incredibly valuable. That's what an attention economy is. It's the only economy pretty much that I've ever worked in, right? Like at least in my career as a creative, you know? If you're a writer, if you're a musician, if you make TV or movies, you are in some way– or if you're a streamer, you are in some way participating in the attention economy, right? All of our ability to make money relies on you listening to this podcast, you reading Jason's books, you watching the movie Digger, which you did not. But like it is all attention. That's like the most monetizable thing in the world. In an article for Forbes, Kurt Steinhurst turned me on to a conference

3:01 presentation by a guy named Michael Goldhaber. Goldhaber is a former theoretical physicist turned internet Cassandra. And in the 1990s, he put together a paper called The Attention Economy and the Net. And in it, he described online spaces as the places where, quote, we will increasingly live our lives.

3:18 What counts most is what is most scarce now, namely attention. The attention economy brings with it its own kind of wealth, its own class divisions, stars versus fans, and its own forms of property, all of which make it incompatible with the industrial money market-based economy it bids fair to replace.

3:34 Success will come to those who best accommodate to this new reality. He's saying this in the 90s. It's definitely like one of the most prescient things anyone ever said about the internet. That like that is the new haves and have nots is attention based.

3:48 And people my age have been hearing some version of this going back to the TV era. People forget that like that opening credit sequence of The Simpsons. Yeah. The joke is that they're all leaving their daily life and they're all rushing, rushing, rushing to get somewhere. And then the punchline is they're rushing to get in front of the TV. Yeah. They're rushing it. Back in 1987, that can't be how old that show was.

4:11 88, something like that. Yeah.

4:13 Everybody knew what that joke was because all of the sitcoms from the 70s, 80s were all referencing this box rots your brain because of this fundamental idea that they're now competing for your eyeballs on this stupid box and The stuff that is meaningful, information and news, now is having to compete with entertainment. So now the news has to be more entertaining. And now you can't discern the difference between information that's important, which is like from an evolutionary point of view, is this actually a threat, something I need to know about or whatever, versus something that is merely entertainment. weird or novel, something that catches your eye because it's, so now everything becomes just a string

4:57 of distractions rather than the things you actually need to know about.

5:01 And it also, you get this situation where whose opinion on the climate matters more? A climate scientist who is incredibly well-educated and has done a tremendous amount of work and knows a great deal about his field, but has no ability to like communicate that to a mass audience. Or some guy who just has an opinion but is really good at getting a couple hundred thousand people to like watch him on Twitch, right? Or like listen to him on a podcast. It's the dude with the podcast is more influential in like climate policy. That's how the world works today. Or health policy. Look at RFK Jr., right?

5:35 Like this is Goldhaber described attention in the future of the internet as a kind of enduring wealth, perhaps the most enduring kind of wealth in the brave new world the internet would create. I don't really think there's an argument about whether or not he was correct anymore. One of the best pieces of evidence for this would be the fact that the current wealthiest man on the planet, Elon Musk, is the wealthiest man on the planet in large part because of his ability to draw and dominate our attention. This is not just like, because I don't like Elon Musk, me having an opinion. Look at the actual money that Tesla or SpaceX or X has actually made.

6:08 And in most cases, his companies do not make a profit. His wealth is a product of stock valuation, and the valuations of his stocks are tied directly to his ability to convince people his ventures will be worth tremendous amounts of money in the future. Don't just take my word for it. Graham Cole of Neomom Labs recently published an analysis of what they call the Musk effect, tracking the value of his companies over the last 15 years. They noted that after Tesla's IPO, quote, growth was slow, but Tesla did have a unique selling point. It made electric cars sexy, and it had a frontman who got them into the headlines. Tesla wouldn't spend a penny on traditional advertising until 2023, when it was already a half a

6:46 trillion dollar company. This is not just me not liking Elon Musk. He is rich because of his ability to command attention. That is the main skill that he has, really.

6:56 And this is the thing that when people try to explain what Donald Trump did for a living before he was a reality show star, and it's like, well, he's a real estate developer. It's like, yeah, but what is that? What is that?

7:09 He's kind of a business guy.

7:11 But honestly, it's like, well, why does he put his name on everything? Why does he wear a Halloween costume? Why does he have crazy hair? He's making himself very distinct and memorable. Why does he brand everything with his name? Because that was his business, was the attention. Everybody knew who he was. Everybody in New York knew who he was.

7:30 In the 80s, he was on TV all the time. He showed up in Home Alone. Being a big name is how he got projects done. Yep. And having a golf course or a casino or whatever that had the word Trump on it, that branding was everything. So that's why some of us, including, I will confess right now, somebody who had an important platform in 2015, 2016, I did not think Trump was actually seriously running for president.

7:55 I thought it was a stunt. I thought it was an Elon Musk, like, yeah, I'm getting my face out there to boost my stock price to get money coming into whatever. I thought he was going to launch like a Fox News alternative.

8:05 Yeah.

8:06 And that his run for president was a pure publicity, viral publicity stunt, like when Kanye ran.

8:12 No, and I think to give credit where it's due, I think the first person that cracked who really, and one of the first people I saw on the internet who really saw where things were going was Adam Todd Brown. He wrote a column that was like, I think Trump's going to win, and I think he's going to win doing this. And he was very right.

8:26 Let me say it now on here, Netflix, wherever this is broadcast. Adam knew I did not.

8:32 Absolutely.

8:33 He was ahead of me. I probably told him he was crazy at the time or thought he was crazy. He was right.

8:39 I wasn't. He was completely right. Unfortunately, that article is also lost media.

8:44 Oh, yeah.

8:45 We can't prove it. In fact, now that I think about it, I was actually right.

8:48 Yeah, no, that was Jason.

8:50 Because it can't be proven. I was right about everything. You just can't. It's all been deleted.

8:56 Yeah, yeah. All of all of my correct takes have been deleted. Only the bad ones are left. So it's debatable whether Musk's increasing addiction to rage baiting has helped his businesses past a certain point. He did not. I don't think his Tesla wealth came from rage baiting.

9:12 Right.

9:12 But he does a lot of that now, especially in some of that's he has been affected by the same social media engine that has also like helped him.

9:20 Right.

9:21 And in fact, some of Tesla's largest dives in stock value have come as a direct result of recent public statements. But Donald Trump also owes a great deal of his presidency to rage baiting, right? We might if we're if we're calling these people nuisance streamers, we might rightly call Trump the first nuisance president, right? That like, that's kind of how he got to the White House is by creating a series of scandals that kept his name in the news and in like, electrified his followers in part because they they wanted to be able to do the same kinds of stuff and say the same kinds of stuff and also kept all the people who didn't like him talking about him so much that there was no room for anyone else in the media.

9:59 And this is something other Republicans said during the primaries. I think it was Marco Rubio saying that the same day he unveiled his economic plan, not that I think his economic plan would have been good, but the same day he unveiled it, Trump made a joke about how he had a big dick. I don't know if he said it in a speech or in a debate. And Rubio's like, 100% of the coverage went to him saying that, and no one even asked about this thing that I'm unveiling that would affect every citizen in the country if I want. Like the substance of what you're trying to get out there, there's just no oxygen in the room.

10:31 Completely meaningless.

10:32 Because every day Trump could go on Twitter, and he was on Twitter all hours of the night, or he'd go on some platform and he could go to, he always spoke to the press, never turned down an interview.

10:42 Yeah.

10:43 And just always gave them some clickbait that would make them money, because again, that's traffic for them too, for these platforms. And you just couldn't get a word in. Yeah, he trolled his way right to the White House. I realize we're 11 years late on that conversation.

10:58 Into this process, yeah. But I mean, it's all relevant to this concept of like the the attention economy.

11:05 Right.

11:05 Which is why nuisance streamers have a job, too. And like that part of why live streaming in general is so profitable is because of how much attention it commands. People spend hours listening, usually while they're doing something else, but hours and hours every day watching their streamers.

11:22 Right.

11:22 Right.

11:24 As I've stated, I don't think Noosa's streamers would have become a thing, at least not in the way they are, without the Trump presidency. And it probably won't surprise you to hear that ICE slash DeNino endorsed and voted for Donald Trump and justified his decision by claiming he found the president funny, right? That was why he thought he was worth voting for. A lot of people in 2016 voted for Trump because they thought he was funny. And again, if you can't grapple with that, you're not going to understand why everything that's happened has happened. It doesn't have to be good. It's just accurate. Um... And likewise, a lot of De Niro's viewers seem to have fallen in love with him because he represented a break from liberal, woke,

11:59 dominated media. From that New Yorker article by Adrian Chen, one viewer who claimed to be a 35-year-old retired army sergeant with two kids and two ex-wives wrote on the subreddit, thank God for Paul, because all cable TV, not some, but all channels for the most part, are the same left-wing, pro-gay, anti-American, anti-white garbage. And one of the other things that article notes is that a popular activity in the ICE Poseidon community was to find different phrases like KFC and watermelon they could use as replacements for the N-word to get around YouTube's ban on the N-word. That's always a major part of all of these nuisance guys is being racist specifically towards Black people. It's just a very enduring through

12:42 line in all of these types of content, really. It's not the only kind of racism.

12:48 There is always an element of 4chan that was this, wherein I have no idea what percentage of these people would be racist in real life. If they had an actual opportunity to discriminate versus this is the one thing that makes mom and dad mad when I say it. It's the one thing that they... Because if you've got a platform that allows profanity, they definitely don't allow slurs.

13:13 So slurs are what we're using because you're a 12-year-old boy and you want to feel like you're... So trying to The difference between the ones that meant it versus the ones that were 12 was always difficult, because that was the only thing about 4chan, is you would have people with their little Hitler avatar, and some of them were actual very well-versed in white supremacy, and some of them were 11 years old, and you could never tell who was who.

13:39 No, and past a certain point, it does stop mattering, right?

13:43 Well, when you're building a fan base, because what you do is you create a pipeline, right? Where this stuff, you start out by saying, ironically, and we're just trolling. You're in a space with other people who take it seriously. And so now they're posting just every day, it's a new, here's black crime video. Look at this black person attacking this elderly white woman or whatever. Whatever they do. And it's just every day. Every day. They've just got this stuff.

14:07 And so now you're saying it unironically.

14:11 And I think the other part of that, while that is happening, another thing that's happening is you are watching... streamers and other media people that you admire or like make money by saying that stuff, by repeating those phrases, by drawing up controversy, by using slurs and repeating like racist arguments about like crime and whatnot, right? That is, I think, also a key part of it is that you also see not only are people not being punished for that behavior, they're being rewarded for that behavior. And I want to talk, there's some psychology experiments that are kind of relevant to this phenomenon. In 1961, a Canadian-American psychologist named Albert Bandera embarked on an experiment, and his

14:50 goal was to explore the ways in which young human beings learn how and when it's acceptable to be aggressive, right? At the time, there were a few leading theories, and everyone was very worried because television was becoming the dominant method of entertainment, certainly by the 60s, and no one knew is like watching violence on TV or in movies going to make kids violent, right? This is not You know, by the time we hit the 90s, there's a lot more panic about it that's less justified. But in the 60s, like, you have to ask that question, right? You don't know.

15:19 This is a new thing. We have been parking kids in front of TVs. You should want to know what it does to them, right? So Bandura works up a simple experiment. He split 70-something little kids between three groups. One experimental group was modeled aggressive behavior in the form of an adult would be in the room and they would beat the shit out of this inflatable Bobo doll.

15:37 Another group of kids watched an adult model behavior that did not involve aggression towards the doll, and the control group were just kids that were observed playing without any adult coming in, right? I'm drastically simplifying the study, but Bandura found that children who watched an aggressive adult model but aggressive behavior were, per Simply Psychology, significantly more likely to imitate aggressive behavior both physically and verbally. Now, most write-ups you'll find are entirely focused on what this tells us about children, but I don't think we should just limit it to that. Per a relevant write-up on NeuroLaunch.com, a child's brain treats the absence of response as information,

16:13 not neutrality. When a behavior produces no negative outcome, the brain files it under safe to repeat, strengthening the neural pathways tied to that action just as surely as if it had been rewarded outright. And I really don't think you should just focus on how that affects kids, because I think we, people in general, interpret behavior that produces no negative outcome as safe to repeat. Now, that doesn't mean they're necessarily going to do it. I might see, I can see right now, it is actually safe, certainly as a white person in certain chunks of the media, to say racist things, right? I don't want to do that, but I know people are not being punished for it.

16:49 They are, in fact, getting rich for it, right? And Other people are making those calculations and do not have any compunction against engaging in that sort of behavior, right? Because they see that not only do you not get punished for it, you can get really rich. If you just like curse out a little eight-year-old boy by saying the N-word a bunch, you can get $ 800, 000. It happened to a lady, right? That influences people's behavior, just like I think seeing Trump get away with being Trump influences people's behavior.

17:16 And I guess just very quickly, I never want to portray it like there's something magical about the internet or magical about smartphones that scrambles our brain. As you said, it's just basic human nature. You learn how to live by observing other people. You don't come out of the womb knowing what words are okay to use. We're social animals.

17:36 You observe. So if you're in a household where there's domestic violence, what you learn is it's okay to respond with violence if somebody irritates you. Because you observe it. Unless you see your dad get hauled away to jail, it's like, okay, this is how humans hash out disagreements. Is it if she raises her voice and you can slap her and that's how... You just learn it. And to say, well, you should have known better. It's like, not really. If that's what you observed every day, that's all you know. So if your role models are people you're observing on a screen... I'm sorry, I don't care who you are. If the examples are, if it's made very clear what you're watching is a cartoon, yeah, you can understand art. You actually cannot stick a bunch of

18:24 dynamite in a cat's mouth and then the cat just turns black and then he's fine in the next scene. You get that's a cartoon. If you're watching something that's supposed to be real life and you see the way this person talks and their attitudes that they express, I cannot emphasize enough how young the viewership is for a lot of these guys we're talking about it is yeah kids in many cases and they're just observing yeah here's what you can get away with in.

18:49 Society yeah yeah and that's you know i've been thinking are you familiar with the comic series crossed jason no they're making it into a movie it's like a kind of a zombie story but instead of it being a zombie plague it's this disease that causes this like cross-shaped rash on people's faces garth ennis Yes, it's by the guy who did The Boys.

19:08 I do know what it is.

19:09 It just makes people lose all inhibitions and give in to their most violent, sexual, and like sadistic impulses, right? I don't particularly, they are way too, they're too graphic for even me. I don't know how they're going to make this shit into a movie. But I have been thinking about the way the plague works in those comics as I've been reading this, because there's an extent to which this does seem to work like a contagion. You see people get away with like that lady who made 800 grand saying the N-word, And you see other people start glomming on and start engaging in equally like violent and aggressive or at least like cruel public behavior because they're chasing that money and that notoriety. It's not just that,

19:46 you know, it's Donald Trump. People are, I'm sure, now copying. Chud the Builder as he's raised hundreds of thousands of dollars, right? But I do, I keep thinking about that as a contagion now. I almost can't stop. And I don't mean that in like a literal biological sense, but I do think it's actually kind of a useful way to look at how Mao socially maladaptive, well, it's not even maladaptive, unfortunately, but how socially negative behaviors get reinforced and become adaptive, right?

20:17 It is adaptive in our society to say a racial slur at the right time if you're the kind of person who can monetize that. That's not good, but if you make $ 800, 000 doing it, that's an adaptive behavior, right? That's a benefit to your fitness in our society. That's the message that's been transferred, right? Whether or not you like it. And that is just tremendously dark. Sorry.

20:40 Sheesh.

20:41 Let's go to ads. And we're back.

20:51 Yeah.

20:53 I was trying to control my face during that. I was like, okay. Okay.

20:59 No, but we don't have to prove the idea that a social contagion is real. I mean, when I went to journalism school, we learned that you don't cover suicides because there's a known phenomenon where like one famous youth suicide causes, you see a spike in suicides because it's like you give someone permission to do it. Mass shootings tend to come in bunches because it's like one happens and somebody else who had been considering it or planning that they see it, they see the coverage they got.

21:28 See how it got their message out there. See how all the little slogans they painted on their assault rifle made them famous. It's like, well, I can top that score. It's just the way people are. It's when people talk about social contagions, they're not making up something. It's as reliable a factor in human behavior. Riots work this way.

21:51 Take your pick. Yeah.

21:53 Yeah. So there is a growing body of scientific research to kind of support the social contagion theory of why this sort of like rage-baiting behavior is more common than ever. University of Chicago and UCLA researchers recently published a paper on what they call the inferential psychology of morality and punishment.

22:13 Through experimentation, they concluded that punishment in a society provides a psychological cue– Seeing someone punished for behavior does not necessarily make people conclude that it's morally wrong, but they often conclude that it's undesirable because it has negative externalities. Now, that doesn't tell us much about how to deal with modern-day murderers or robbers because those behaviors are currently illegal and at least theoretically punished. But I think it has a lot to do with why so many influencers today won't bat an eye at, say, running a crypto pump-and-dump that literally robs their fans of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

22:43 They see other people do it and avoid punishment. Why wouldn't they follow suit? And this brings me back to Ice Poseidon. This is a little bit of a detour, but I think it's relevant. In late 2021, Ice partnered with a group of mysterious backers to launch CXCoin, a cryptocurrency meant to allow streamers and content creators a safe and easy method of receiving support through cryptocurrencies. Now, at this point, a whole bunch of e-celebs had already done rug pull, pump and dumps just like this, which is why Ice insisted to his fans he was creating a long-term platform and that he absolutely wouldn't pull his money out of the project as it was locked in. Now, obviously, he does a pump and dump and he robs everybody. Coffeezilla,

23:23 who I guess you'd call him a journalist, he does a really good job of reporting on like scams and crimes in the crypto world. He's a very reputable source on this stuff. Did a report on Ice Poseidon's cryptocurrency and claims that he pulled his money out of it after just a few weeks, cashing out $ 500, 000 and leaving a liquidity pool of just $ 40, 000 left in the cryptocurrency.

23:43 per an article on Inven Global by Aaron Alford. In Coffeezilla's interviews with Ice Poseidon, Ice admitted to draining the money while laughing. He showed no remorse for his decision to scam his fans, despite all but admitting to carrying out the scam. Part of the responsibility is on them as well for putting too much emotion into it, Ice claimed, in defense of himself scamming his investors. Coffeezilla repeatedly attempted to get Ice Poseidon to return the money when he confronted him in his call. If you want the answer, yeah, I could give the money back. It is within my power, but I'm going to look out for myself and not do that, Ice replied. In his video on all this, Coffeezilla's conclusion is hard to argue with. When you don't

24:18 have law enforcement consequences for what is essentially theft and fraud, you end up with people like Ice Poseidon realizing they can do the same without consequence, right?

24:26 Like, of course.

24:29 Why wouldn't he?

24:29 It's the same reason you can right now go into a gas station and get pills that claim to keep you awake all day or they increase sexual performance.

24:37 It's like five-hour energy.

24:38 And it's not caffeine because they've tested it. It's like, oh, this is straight up kratom or whatever. This is a banned substance.

24:46 To be clear, it's not kratom. It's a synthetic derivative of kratom called 7-OH. But yeah, they're selling it like five-hour energy and people are getting dope sick. It's fucked up.

24:56 Yeah, it's worse, I believe, than creative. But there's nobody watching the store. So there's money to be made. That's just incentives. If you put it out there and nobody rips it off shelves, nobody comes and kicks down your door then. what is legal is what doesn't get enforced. Like that's just, that's the way it is.

25:14 No. And it's, you know, they, cause they've, they've, they've scheduled now the DEA is scheduled seven Oh H. So it's no longer legal to sell, but there's a whole wide variety of other that even have nothing to do with like opioid derivatives, all sorts of weird chemicals that are being put into like energy drinks and pills and sold over the counter that you often have no fucking idea what you're getting. Cause there's absolutely no regulation of this industry whatsoever. Um, It's probably a bad idea. Yeah, I want to start talking now about a guy we haven't discussed yet in these episodes. His name is Vitaly Zdorvetsky.

25:49 He goes by the name Vitaly ZDTV on YouTube. And he's like an early streamer e-celeb. He's a prank streamer e-celeb. He's one of like the biggest prank streamer guys. Like many early streamer celebrities, he was born in the 1990s, 92 to be exact, and as the name might suggest, he was born in Russia, although his family moved to the U.S. in 2004 so he could try to become an actor. Vitale soon realized that the internet was where he wanted to be. Aaron George gave an able summary of his career for an article on NeoFuture. Vitaly initially pursued professional skateboarding before turning his attention to video content.

26:24 Launching his YouTube channel, VitalyZDTV, he tapped into the burgeoning genre of prank videos, quickly distinguishing himself with elaborate and often confrontational setups. One of his earliest major successes, and a sign of the controversy that would follow him, was the Miami zombie attack prank in 2012. Inspired by a real cannibalistic attack that had shocked the city, Vitaly, dressed as a zombie, chased unsuspecting people, primarily in poorer neighborhoods.

26:48 And when Aaron says poor, people will note that he's usually chasing black people, right? Like after a guy just like bit someone's face off, right?

26:58 And this was a guy who, the first time I saw clips of his, he goes back a ways, right? Like, this is not 2021 era.

27:06 No, no, no. This is like the 2010s. Yeah, I think from like the 2010s teens. Yeah.

27:11 The first viral pranks of his, he had at least actually done pranks. Yeah, some of them were pranks. There was like a chainsaw attack, and he had like somebody who's like an amputee, and it made it look like he chopped their legs off or whatever.

27:23 Yeah.

27:23 Like, it may be cruel and tasteless or whatever, but he actually staged a thing.

27:28 There is like a joke there, right?

27:30 Yeah, there was a joke to it. Yeah. Yeah.

27:32 Although, again, you can see the danger, too. Like, just among other things, in a country with as many guns as we have, I would not pretend to be attacking people with a chainsaw in public. Right. Yeah. Don't do that.

27:42 If people who are not from the United States and don't, if you visit here, I cannot emphasize enough how likely it is the person you pass in the street has a gun.

27:51 I rarely go to the grocery store without 30 rounds of 9mm on me.

27:55 There are lots of things that you might think you could get away with wherever you're from. In the United States, there's somebody in the vicinity who might shoot you dead. And also, they may be itching for the opportunity to do it. I'm just saying that as a warning. Yeah.

28:08 Don't do this kind of stuff. To be quite honest, if you see someone cutting off a limb of another person with a chainsaw, you should probably shoot them.

28:16 If you can. Yeah, that is a good guy with a gun situation probably. But anyway.

28:21 Or a good guy tragically intervening in a badly thought out prank.

28:25 Although honestly, also probably fine. Okay, no, don't take that out of context. I'm not saying shoot a YouTube prankster.

28:34 No, we're just saying... There's instances in which it could be understandable why you might.

28:40 And there's at least one case where the jury actually let the guy off when he shot the prankster. It's like, no.

28:46 If you do that to someone, you might get shot.

28:48 We're not saying we approve, but, you know.

28:53 So in 2012, the same year he did that zombie attack video, he was also arrested for a racist prank. Per Huffington Post, quote, According to the arrest report, police arrested Vitale after watching his speeding ticket pranks video posted on March 5th. In the video, police say Vitale approached three black males, accused one of being involved in a robbery in the area, and told all three they were getting a ticket for wearing their pants too low. Officers note that at one point, Vitale touched his earpiece and said, you guys coming now? As if calling for backup. He also told the three men that he would believe their innocence if they walked around a pole and said, I didn't do it. One of them encircled the pole five

29:26 times as Vitale watched. So again, you see a lot of the things we've been building. He's really focused on going after Black people and trying to embarrass and scare them. And also, that's just impersonating an officer. This is the kind of thing that's have legally gotten him in trouble. It doesn't. Not really.

29:43 You'll notice that the element of the prank kind of went away to where now he's just harassing Black people. And this is the evolution of a lot of these, where it's like, well, I'm just going to cut out the middleman.

29:56 I wonder how much of that is him recognizing that's a safer... thing that like, well, because people are fucking scared of the police, if you pretend to be one, they're not going to shoot you, right? And they'll probably do whatever shit you say, because they think you're a cop. This is, again, the kind of thing, based on the way the law is written, he should have gotten serious consequences for. I don't think this arrest ever turns into anything.

30:19 It's hard to tell. I'm not sure. But none of this ever seems to result in him being put behind bars or suffering serious consequences. The arrest's are never a serious barrier to him continuing to put out content and make money. Now, Vitaly is using YouTube initially, but I do think it's noteworthy that his first massive prank success came in 2012, the year after Twitch launched. That's not causative, but it's evidence that they're both kind of propelled by similar trends, right? Later that year, Vitaly was arrested for the first time in Boca Raton after he approached a man outside of a store with a briefcase he insinuated had a bomb in it. Now, that write-up does also note that early on, Vitaly tried a mix of positive

30:58 and negative content. He did a homeless man makeover video in 2013, where he actually befriended this homeless guy and helped him out, and it led to a job offer for the guy. It's a nice piece of content, but clearly the negative pranks, like the mean ones, are what make the most money and get the most views. He did a gold digger prank in 2013 that became a a very popular sensation. He dressed as Leatherface for a prank in 2014. He jumped on the car of the Croatian prime minister as he left prison in 2015. And this all makes him really famous, right? He winds up getting a movie deal with Lionsgate to make the movie Natural Born Pranksters in 2015. So he's now being rewarded with a movie deal for doing mostly really mean, cruel things, right?

31:49 And I think we can rightly view YouTube prank content as an interstitial content evolution between the beginning of the social media era and the birth of in-person live streaming. And natural-born pranksters might well represent the high watermark for this kind of content. The movie was a failure. It netted about $ 300, 000 on a million-dollar budget. Katie Walsh, writing for the LA Times, gave a review that might as well be a review of the whole nuisance streaming concept.

32:16 In borrowing the model of jackass and punk, this film lacks the essential DNA of what made those shows appealing. These pranksters aren't nearly so generous, and their sadistic stunts display a mean-spirited streak, resulting in a racist, sexist, and homophobic harassment.

32:29 Right?

32:30 I can remember, like, the olds got pissed off about jackass when I was a kid.

32:35 Sure.

32:36 But it was never, like, cruel or mean, right? The boys are doing stuff that, like, messes them up sometimes, but the joke is not on, like, random innocent people. It's on them. being jackasses.

32:46 No, no. Like, Steve-O's covering himself in shit, not making an unwilling, somebody who's desperate for money on House person do it for, because they desperately need money.

32:58 Johnny Knoxville would never. Yeah. Steve-O would never. Wee Man would never. They weren't that kind of guys.

33:05 Yeah.

33:06 And there's, I mean, there's Eric Andre style stuff where you captured the reaction of people in public, but it's because you've staged a surreal scene before. Eric Andre had this thing where he went and tore the door off of a cop car and made it look like he had superhuman strength to capture people viewing something surreal and magical happening in front of them.

33:28 And that's, yeah, fun and creative. And he did. I was there at the RNC in 2016 when he crashed an Alex Jones rally. And you could look at that as kind of in the news streaming thing. But the target he's picking is also someone who is a public figure putting themselves out in public and like putting themselves in a position where it's very different from going up to a homeless person on the street or like some random person who doesn't know what's happening. Right. Like, it's just a different kind of thing. It's a lot crueler and a meaner kind of thing. But the fact that Vitaly and his friends get a movie deal for harassing strangers and endangering themselves sends another message, right? This shit

34:06 pays and is rewarded by society. Unfortunately for Vitaly, YouTube decided not longer after his movie came out that prank content was getting a little risky. All it would take is one prankster getting gunned down and suddenly Google would be fielding questions their PR team did not want to answer. So Vitaly's videos start getting removed and demonetized. But he keeps pranking, right? And his pranks begin to turn over time to things that put him in more personal and legal jeopardy. In 2016, he climbed up atop the Hollywood sign for a video stunt. He's arrested. Later that same year, he's arrested for streaking during Game 4 of the NBA Finals.

34:41 And the next year, 2017, he gets arrested for running onto the field of the World Series. Then in January of 2020, he's arrested and jailed in Egypt for climbing the pyramids of Giza to make a three-minute Instagram video. I think this was probably inspired by the fact that Egypt had made doing that a crime the year before, but the penalty was at most a month in jail and a fine of like no more than $ 6, 300, well worth it giving the economics of social media. A few months later, in April of 2020, he was arrested in Miami and charged with felony aggravated battery after he leapt out of the bushes and assaulted a random woman he had never met before while she was jogging. He punches her repeatedly in the face. I've seen pictures of this woman.

35:20 She is brutally injured. This is an incredibly cruel and violent attack. There's not a joke here.

35:26 Did he film himself doing that or is that just an attack?

35:29 I don't know. This is really weird to me. My suspicion is that someone was filming and they probably didn't put it on because the content went wrong. He kind of comes out with his arms wide and trying to grab her. I don't know what his goal was here. His victim claims he just jumped out at her and started beating the absolute hell out of her. He only stops because her screams draw bystanders. I don't know what he was trying to do here.

35:56 What was the date for that incident?

35:59 That's in April of 2020.

36:00 Okay. I think anything having to do with streaming, there is a very, very important event that happened in early 2020. Oh, yeah. Where if you look at total traffic to Twitch, I think it went up like 500%. Yeah. You look at any streamer, you look at the timeline of when they got popular, all these people at home who had nothing else to do. And again, these streamers... And.

36:25 April's right at that sweet spot.

36:27 Those streamers are their friends. The streamers are their social interaction. That chat is their social interaction. And so the competition between these guys, because you have to keep upping the spectacle. Your stunt has to be dumber than the last one you did. It has to be more dangerous. Because this is now about spectacle now. It's about seeing something you've never seen before. It's about the potential to see something live on camera that you've never seen before. And so suddenly there's all these new eyeballs and the amount of money coming in. I think you look at early 2020, the great derangement of streaming, I believe, started right there.

37:05 There were actually other things in society that happened to as well.

37:08 But streaming is one area.

37:10 Yeah.

37:11 But that was mainly streaming. Yeah. That really makes sense. because this seems, and I don't fully know what he was going for, right? Like it's not clear that he was making video content, but given the rest of his history, I assume this was supposed to be a prank that went wrong or like, I don't know what else he would have been doing unless he was just literally trying to beat up a random woman for no reason and didn't want it filmed. But that seems less likely than that.

37:35 This was like content that went badly, just given his history, right? I don't fully know. He gets charged with a felony. I'm unaware of what happened with this case. There have been no public updates since he bonded out. He doesn't seem to have done any time. He keeps right on streaming. And the fact that he consistently avoided serious consequences while growing his YouTube following to more than 10 million people clearly inspires others to follow in his footsteps, right? I don't know if there was a first nuisance streamer as much as guys like Vitaly and our friend Ice Poseidon started triangulating their new content to converge closer and closer to that ideal. And you're right. A lot of it is happening in like the spring and summer of 2020

38:17 is when that– and after that point is when a lot of that like shift starts to happen towards– outright nuisance streaming. And these are all guys who had done pieces of that before, but things get a lot more aggressive and a lot meaner after that. For his part, Ice Poseidon took his fan base to YouTube after Twitch banned him, and this would prove a significant moment for a couple of reasons. He kept streaming in real life, and as he did, it became clear that he got the majority of his attention from being a huge asshole in public. In 2018, he visited Europe and, of course, streamed everything, including himself getting kicked out of multiple hotels.

38:54 On October 17th, 2018, he posted this. I made the most read newspaper in Switzerland. I have no idea what it says, but probably something along the lines of being an international criminal genius after I fled the country because it's illegal to stream there, lol. The article title is YouTube star nerfed Zurcher hotels. And I don't speak German, but basic Googling reveals this headline translates roughly to YouTube star annoys Zurich hotels. Like that is the headline. There must not have been a lot going on in Zurich back then.

39:23 Yeah, check it out for the Netflix folks and Jason.

39:27 Yeah, I think Nerfed. the most direct translation would be like a noise.

39:33 But you're going to see this trend of going international with these stunts. And I got the sense, and you're probably going to get into it, but I get the sense that for the authorities over there, it's easier to just tell you, leave the country, as opposed to Trying to go through a trial and ultimately when the charge is just going to be some sort of disorderly conduct thing.

39:54 So there, again, it's a very little downside. It's like, okay, so they're going to make me leave. And now I've got all this footage and made how much money off those streams.

40:03 So, you know, even in the States that we've talked about a bunch of arrests in the States, none of which seem to stop people or lead to any real consequences. They don't do time. They don't lose enough money that it's not worth it for them.

40:15 Right.

40:18 For example, if somebody dresses up as a cop and annoys or intimidates some random poor people on the sidewalk, it's like, okay, it's disorderly conduct. Again, did not pull a gun, didn't threaten them, didn't take money from them, didn't restrain them, which would have been like a kidnapping charge, didn't put them in handcuffs, just annoyed them. And so ultimately, it's like yeah, it's gonna, who wants to deal with all that?

40:48 It is weird that impersonating an officer is a serious crime, but it's very rarely punished when people do it. Like, that is surprising to me.

40:57 I think because if you didn't use it to try to get into someone's home, to try to restrain someone, to try to get someone to go with you somewhere, you know what I'm saying? Like, if it was in the course of committing another crime, if you just went out in public in a police uniform, you could be a stripper, it could be all sorts of things you're doing that Again, it may technically be illegal, but are they going to actually pursue that? In general, I think most of these guys have a pretty good instinct for, it's the same as the bullies you had in high school.

41:26 They have a sense of what they can get away with. They have a sense of what the authorities are actually going to punish versus they'll just tell you, get out of here, don't do it again. Or you get a fine. Again, that's a fraction of what you made off that one stream.

41:41 Yeah, and I do think you are right that a big part of why a lot of this nuisance stuff starts occurring overseas is that people do start encountering enough consequences for it. Ice Poseidon spends 2016 and 2017 in Hollywood accosting passersby and just trying to piss people off for content. That's a big part of his shtick. And then in 2019, his LA home is raided by the FBI in response to spoof phone calls that made bomb threats and seem to have come from his place. This was not actually that. This was the result of like a toxic fan spoofing his number because Danino, like he doesn't get prosecuted for this. I don't think he actually did anything here. He makes at the time a show of promising to reform his once toxic community. But then

42:24 in the early 2020s, he starts doing like, I mean, he does debut as a boxer in this weird influencer contest. As I said, he gets into like crypto scamming. But in 2023, he decides to head east to Southeast Asia. By this time, Ice Poseidon had moved his content to Kik, which, as I noted last episode, was Twitch with less moderation.

42:44 Kik was founded in 2022 after crypto billionaires Ed Craven and Bijan Tarani were kicked off Twitch during a crackdown on gambling advertisements. Craven and Tarani had formed Stake, which Wikipedia tells me is the largest online casino in the world. Per an article in Huck magazine, They decided to start it as a challenger platform in 2022, prioritizing freedom of expression, which some viewed as with a thinly veiled disclaimer. Basically, this is where you can go to say slurs. We're fine with that here. Ice Poseidon started streaming himself gambling, presumably because Kik paid him to, because we know they made deals like that. They would pay people in sometimes multi-million dollar deals to gamble on stream, right? But this

43:25 must not have been enough, or at least he may have seen his numbers slip, because he also keeps making nuisance content and traveling overseas to do it. In June of 2023, he took his entourage to Bangkok, Thailand, where doing a live kick broadcast, he performed an explicit lap dance for his girlfriend in a hotel restaurant. And this is like a really nice hotel in Thailand, right? Like a world-class one. And the hotel manager confronts them and tells them that what they're doing was disrespectful to Thai culture.

43:52 Because they don't stop, she calls the cops on them, and Danino and his friends are arrested. At one point, they were looking at up to five years in prison, but a few days later, he makes an apology video, and then a couple of weeks after that, he's freed. I think the apology video was probably something his lawyer advised him to do. Danino credited a nice judge for choosing to release them once they had their day in court.

44:13 He tweeted,' Fuck the haters wanting injustice. I hope you're mad. I'll keep killing it on kick.' Within days, he and his crew were in Queensland, Australia, where they invited a sex worker into their hotel room and offered to pay her $ 500 for having sex with another streamer. The whole thing was, of course, live-streamed, secretly. They were in another room commenting on it while, like, this is going on.

44:34 I think the woman had been paid to be filmed, but I don't think she understood that she was being live-streamed to the internet, per an NBC News article. After several minutes of the encounter, the woman then said she received a message from a friend who warned her the meeting was a set-up. that the two other men, Danino and Pepper, who's one of his buddies, who the man said were sleeping in another room, were actually watching the stream.

44:53 The woman became visibly uncomfortable and tried to leave, but the man blocked her, telling her she had already been paid. She protested, calling the situation creepy, and tried again to leave. Why is it creepy? the man asked, before insisting it was just the two of them in the apartment, even though Danino and Pepper were in the next room. Eventually, the woman left the apartment while the man followed her.

45:12 After she left, police appeared to be waiting for Danino and Pepper outside. Viewers reacted with shock in the live chat as the stream captured the pair's subsequent arrest. They were initially charged with sexual assault, but the charges were dropped and they were released. So again, something obviously not acceptable and just zero consequences, right?

45:30 One thing you're going to see a pattern that came up very briefly, where if they do face some sort of consequences, they'll often issue some sort of a public apology. Yeah. And then they may reference mental illness or something, say that, well, he was suffering from some episode or whatever. That seems to be a playbook for getting– as long as you get out of the country and back to the United States or to whatever the next country you're going to terrorize, they've got a process down for how to do that.

46:00 Because usually the country is just happy to see them gone.

46:03 Yeah. I think they go for claiming mental illness because Ambien is no longer as widely prescribed. That was the old way to justify doing something fucked up. Oh, the Ambien walrus got me.

46:13 Yeah.

46:16 Speaking of the Ambien walrus, maybe Ambien's advertising on our podcast. Probably not, because I don't think people get prescribed it anymore, but I don't know. Ambien.

46:26 Wow.

46:34 We're back. Sophie's telling me that we are not being paid by Ambien.

46:37 We are not.

46:38 So that's, I mean, reach out to us, Ambien people. Maybe we could get you back in Roseanne's hands. So at the same time Danino is engaging in this stuff, nuisance streaming has fully taken off as an internet phenomenon, and a weird number of these streamers decide to pick Japan or South Korea in particular as the location for their abusive videos. The reason you'll most often see cited by people who live in Japan and South Korea for why this is happening is because these countries have a culture of politeness and avoiding direct conflict. They also have very low rates of personal weapon ownership, and that makes them very safe places to troll.

47:16 That is the real reason. In neither of those countries are you going to get shot. It's so funny watching a Korean drama on Netflix or something, and there will be a plot point where the detective opens the desk drawer of the guy. It's like, there's a gun. He had a gun in that drawer. My God, what was he up to? Where in the United States, the cop would just move the gun aside to try to find what's...

47:40 It has to be something here. His gun's in the way. But move the pile of guns to see if there's evidence. But yeah, I really want to hit that point. The fact that, one, the whole concept of going to a high-trust society and intentionally breaking it because you know that they don't want to confront you, but also just knowing that you're in a place where– not to signal boost the right-wing talking point of, yeah, come try that in a Texas small town, but seriously– Don't try that in a Texas small town. They will shoot you. And they won't go to jail for doing it.

48:18 No. There's a reason why they're doing it in these places, right? And there are other reasons, right? Another possible reason why Japan has become a fixture dates back to 2017, as you mentioned in episode one, when YouTuber Logan Paul, then 22, filmed and published a YouTube video in the Okigahara Forest in Japan, better known as the Suicide Forest, because a large but deliberately unknown number of Japanese people choose to end their lives there. The government actually doesn't publish statistics on how many do because they don't want to, the social contagion thing, right? They don't want to encourage it.

48:49 And you probably, I think most people are aware of this, right? Logan and his crew come across a dead man hanging in the forest. They film it. They publish it for their millions of YouTube followers. And it blows up. And Paul is forced to apologize repeatedly. One of the telling things about this is that a lot of his apology tour is him arguing with his own fans who are often being like, I thought it was awesome. He's like, no, no, it wasn't. Guys, it was bad. It was bad. Like, please stop saying this was good. Um, Sophia Holloway writing for Huck suggests this also helped to make Japan a destination.

49:20 for streamers. Because again, for a lot of these people, they're not thinking, oh, Logan had to apologize and it pissed people off. They're thinking he got a lot of attention, right?

49:27 Because legally, what were the consequences of that? Nothing. Nothing, yeah. He just got a lot, like he did apologize, but he got, again, that's how I heard of him for the very first time. Is that controversial? I bet for millions and millions of people, that was the very first time they heard the name Logan Paul. I bet my grandma, my dad, anybody.

49:47 I would like to forget the name Logan Paul.

49:50 Yep. Yep.

49:51 That's how I heard about him.

49:52 Again, if you look at the stuff he got to do since then, that was the best thing that happened to his career.

49:59 Absolutely.

49:59 No question. Objectively.

50:01 Massively beneficial to him. Now, the nuisance streamers don't really start showing up in Japan in numbers until after 2020, particularly after the pandemic lockdowns start to fade. In March of 2023– A video of a prankster licking a soy sauce bottle on the conveyor of a kaitzen sushi restaurant, which is like one of those Japanese sushi restaurants where the stuff comes by in a conveyor, goes viral. An article in the BBC summarized what happened next. In the video, he can be seen squashing sushi dinners at a Kura Sushi restaurant branch. Since then, dozens of such videos have proliferated, sparking public concern. Now, a lot of these copycats are Japanese, but a ton of foreigners are increasingly traveling over to

50:39 Japan and in the coming months sniffing out potential content. And they start doing this too. In Japan, the viral trend becomes known as sushi terrorism, and it's forced permanent changes to the way that these restaurants operated. It's just kind of one example of how the social contagion thing worked.

50:54 And as more foreigners start traveling to Japan to piss off people, the locals develop a term, nuisance foreigners, that soon came to encompass any foreigner who pissed off the locals. And this is actually where the phrase nuisance streamer comes from, right? I think it's deliberately descended from what Japanese people are calling these like nuisance foreigners, Coming around to, like, piss people off, right? And this brings me to another one of the assholes you specifically asked about when you suggested this topic, Jason. Johnny Somali, right? We are talking about Johnny's adventures in Japan and South Korea now. His real name is Ramzi Khalid Ismail. He was probably born on September 26, 2000. Although I've seen 1999 claimed as well,

51:32 I don't really know. Ismail has given different and conflicting claims about his background on streams. He has at different points claimed to have been a former Somali pirate or former child soldier. There's no evidence of this. He's also claimed to have grown up in Scottsdale, Arizona and graduated from ASU, which I think is probably a lot likelier than the former pirate thing. Johnny Somali is the name that he adopted for Twitch, where he started streaming nuisance content during a 2023 trip to Japan. An article for the UK Standard describes his content this way. During a trip to Japan last summer, a masked Ismail and another man entered the construction site of a hotel in Osaka and filmed themselves shouting Fukushima, referencing a 2011 nuclear power

52:12 plant disaster, at workers. Ismail was arrested, released, and then arrested again a month later for disrupting a restaurant with loud noises on his phone. Although the charges of trespassing on the construction site were dropped, the court found him guilty of obstructing a business and fined him 200,000 yen, around 1,000 euros, before kicking him out of the country.

52:30 This wasn't his only scandal during his Japan visit. His streams in the country often depicted him taunting locals in public by repeating phrases like Hiroshima and Nagasaki at them and loudly threatening to bomb the country, resulting in him being physically assaulted on the street again. So part of what you see is how crude this is. He doesn't speak the language. So all he can shout is like the name of several disasters to try to offend people because it'll make him angry.

52:54 But also he's not, again... He's not being a little scamp thumbing his nose at authority. He's not mocking celebrities or billionaires or even, you know, like the snooty rich people at a hotel. These are people working at a construction site.

53:09 Yeah.

53:09 These are regular people. You know, it's a running theme, I think, is going to be going after just restaurant workers, like the people at the very bottom rung of employment, you know, having to tolerate enough crap in the course of a shift. And you're going to go there, start throwing food on the floor, whatever, where The joke becomes how inappropriate the target is.

53:30 Yeah. And it's one of the other things he did. He visited Tokyo Disney in June and recorded Visitors Without Consent while using a speaker to play music that repeatedly referenced the atomic bombings of Japan. He's bringing up the thing that will piss people off the most because he wants to get hit. He wants that kind of a reaction.

53:49 That's good content. His behavior ultimately saw him kicked out of the country and attacked online by PewDiePie, who moved to Japan and accused him of ruining Japan for other foreigners. So we've come full circle.

54:02 Because PewDiePie at this point is like a grandfather.

54:05 He's an old man. He's ancient.

54:07 Yeah, he's settled down with the family and he doesn't scream or anything anymore. So he's become something of an. an uncle type, I think amongst that, that crowd. Yeah.

54:16 He does still do some sort of content, but like, he's definitely not this kind of streamer.

54:19 Right.

54:20 Like that was not his business. Um, like what he did, like, it's not my kind of content, but like playing a video game while being entertaining is like a, an artistic skill to some degree. Right. As opposed to shouting Hiroshima at a bunch of people. Right. Like, After all of this, Johnny Somali went to Israel, where he was banned from Jerusalem for 50 days for pinning photos of Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein to the Western Wall. At some point in all of this, he was banned from Twitch and made the move to Kik, who gave him a permanent ban while he was in Israel because he kept making on-air death threats. He was arrested later in his trip for physically accosting a female police officer and telling her

54:59 he planned to slap her ass, saying, I'll grab it too. Donald Trump told me to grab it by the pussy. I'll grab that too.

55:07 So he wants to get arrested then. Yeah. He wants to. This is intentionally trying to get. Absolutely. He's trying to get arrested because, again, he knows that he's just going to get turned loose 72 hours later or whatever after.

55:18 Yeah.

55:18 Yeah.

55:19 And that does happen. That happens to Vitaly. He actually got deported from, I think, the Philippines. It might have been Indonesia to Russia because he was doing some bullshit like this. And it worked out great for him, right? Because he was able to talk about how horrible the jail conditions were and how he got his phone smuggled in.

55:33 And so the story was about like problems in the jail system as opposed to like, well, this guy was deserved to have something done to him, right?

55:40 Also, Johnny Smiley got banned from Kick, the place that you go– It's like getting kicked out of Australia. That's where we put the criminals. What are you talking about? It's like getting kicked out of prison. I thought that was the whole point of Kik, is this is the free speech platform. How loathsome do you have to be?

55:59 That's like Kik being scared of legal action. Like, no, this is a liability even for us, and we're degenerates.

56:06 You have to really be crossing a line. And he's about to cross another line. In October of 2024, he traveled to South Korea. Announcing online beforehand his intention to find a member of the K-pop band BTS and punch them in the face. Since actual pop stars don't tend to walk around just like where random streamers can hit them, he moved on to other targets and livestreamed himself twerking on and kissing a statue meant to honor Korean comfort women.

56:31 These were women and often girls abducted by Japanese forces during World War II and used as sex slaves. The issue of comfort women in Korea and elsewhere in territories conquered by the Empire of Japan is still very much alive. The Japanese government does not do a good job of acknowledging that this happened. This is a massive cause of conflict between Japan and its neighbors up to the present day.

56:51 And this is taken very seriously in South Korea. This is a horror. This is like a 9-11 level, like traumatic cultural crime, right?

56:59 Japan gets off too easy in the cultural reputation, just as Britain gets off too easy in how we remember certain empires. Yeah. Like, I get it. I get it. They suffered their own disasters there in the end, but they get off too easy, is all I'm saying.

57:17 They were pretty out of pocket.

57:20 There was– yeah. Yeah.

57:22 And it's– yeah. Before everything blew up for him, Johnny made it clear that he knew this history. He knew why what he was doing was offensive because he visited a unification church facility in Seoul, and he posed with a picture of Shinzo Abe. who as prime minister of Japan refused to acknowledge the reality of what had been done to these comfort women, right? There's a reason why, number one, Abe was also associated with that church, which is why he was assassinated. So there's a number of reasons why he's doing this. But the fact that he, like, he can't have not known the implications of all of this, of bringing Abe into it, of defacing effectively this statue that represented a horrific crime. He posted, RIP Shinzo Abe,

58:04 I defeated the Koreans for you. So, It's pretty clear he knows what he's doing.

58:09 This guy sucks.

58:10 He definitely does.

58:12 He did like a brief Wikipedia search to see what would be good trolling material. This is like bare surface level. It's like, okay, what offends this country? And that's it. He got a couple of points and that's.

58:25 Yep. Yep. My guess would be he read an article about Abe after the assassination that brought up the comfort women. He was like, oh, great. That's a way I can really piss people off.

58:33 Yeah.

58:35 Per an article in The Economic Times, Somali deliberately sought to provoke South Koreans, including Kyunghee University students and bystanders, by displaying a drawing of the Japanese Rising Sun flag, a symbol widely considered offensive in the country due to its ties to Japan's wartime aggression. Additionally, Somali played explicit content loudly while riding the subway, drawing considerable attention. The music was often North Korean marching tunes. So again, he's just really, he's pushing all of the obvious buttons, right?

59:01 Yeah.

59:10 Video, after he got like attacked while kissing that comfort woman statue, he shouts from the back of a police car, Americans have way more freedom here. These N-words protecting us. We're in the back of a police car. Come and get us. Come get us. Somali was initially taken into custody by the police for his own safety. After he was attacked for kissing that statue, he was later charged with a bunch of crimes, for which he might have been imprisoned for up to 10 years. But those charges relied heavily on him possessing drugs, and ultimately he only got a six-month sentence. Although as his conviction comes with a fine, he may find himself stuck in South Korea for a while until he can pay it. I don't

59:43 know what his finances are like. He's not able to stream right now and hasn't been for a while. He is currently incarcerated, right?

59:50 Is this the first one we've come across that's actually had charges stick? That's interesting. I wonder if it was when they finally got fed up with the trend and wanted to make an example, because how else are you going to.

1:00:03 I read a lot of, in South Korean papers, I read a lot of discussion along that line of like, we have to really go after, we have to punish this kid because we can't have people continuing to do this, right? Like, this is really unacceptable.

1:00:16 Yeah.

1:00:17 Now, that said, I've seen a lot of speculation that Johnny's punishment might discourage other nuisance streamers, and I don't know that it will. While he did face real consequences, including the destruction of his business, the brouhaha around his arrest and conviction created content for countless other streamers and YouTubers.

1:00:33 In April of 2025, directly inspired by Johnny's example, Ice Poseidon, Paul Danino, visited South Korea, the very month that Johnny went on trial for his own actions. Per the Korea Herald, American YouTuber Ice Poseidon came under fire that same month for a live stream in Busan where he and his companion shouted in public, kicked trash, and mocked Korean food, saying kimchi is disgusting. When riding in a taxi, he also spoke Korean in an exaggerated mocking tone, seeming to ridicule the elderly driver. In another article that I read in Google Translated form by Korean reporter Kim Hyun-jung, notes that Ice Poseidon made direct reference to comfort women, shouting on stream that Japan gave good genes to Koreans through

1:01:13 comfort women. And it's clear to me from all this that the only long-term impact so far that Johnny's example has had was to warn other streamers away from directly touching the statues. But it also convinced them, well, going to Korea and doing this kind of stuff is really good business, right? It gets attention. Johnny's famous right now for it. I want to get some of that attention.

1:01:32 I'm just not going to go quite as far, right? Which is upsetting. And Danino was not arrested or punished for his behavior in any way. All across the world, nuisance dreamers continue to piss people off in public, often driven by headlines. For example, in France, there's an ongoing issue with what some people call injection panic, right? This is a rash of crimes where bystanders are injected with random shit at nightclubs. And these real crimes, this is a real problem that they have in France right now, inspired a French influencer, Amine Mojito, 27. To make a series of TikTok and Instagram videos in which he approached pedestrians with a fake syringe and chased them on camera.

1:02:12 Right?

1:02:12 Like, the fuck, man? He was sentenced to six months in prison for his actions. And if there's ever, if there is, though, ever a time in which modest carceral punishment could have stopped this shit, I think we're past it now. Even though some people are getting punished, there's just too much fucking money in it.

1:02:30 Right? Right?

1:02:31 I open this episode with the case of Chud the Builder, who committed his crimes a few months after Mojito was convicted in October of 2025. And whatever happens to Chud, I doubt it's going to dissuade the next nuisance streamer or videographer or whatever you want to call them for one reason, the money. Per an article on News Channel 5 Nashville by Levi Ismail, more than $ 300, 000 has poured in through donations for Dalton Etherly since his May 13th arrest. So.

1:02:58 I mean, he might go to prison, right? But he's also making hundreds of thousands of dollars. That's why he was able to bail out, even though he was put in like $ 1. 2 million bail or something like that. It's because his fans raised so much money. And yeah, I don't know.

1:03:15 I don't know.

1:03:17 I don't know what else to say here.

1:03:18 But that's the end of it? I thought you were going to circle back around to some kind of a solution that would make me feel better. Not the kind of show Jason.

1:03:27 Not that kind of show.

1:03:29 I have a solution in mind, Jason, but it's not one I can say on air.

1:03:35 Well, no, but I don't want us to constantly be, of course, these two episodes sounding like we're saying, well, you know what would have fixed this whole problem? Prison. More police and more prison. No, it clearly hasn't. Longer prison sentences. That's not the vibe of this show. Incarceration solves everything. It teaches people a lesson. But you have a system that's created incentives. It's the same with, you're seeing a lot of things with new technology, like the same thing with the gambling, where suddenly, like the gambling ads are everywhere. You watch a football game, every ad break is now just a gambling app ad. And then the gambling is in your pocket. And it's like, well, yeah, that's where the money's going to go unless that's just,

1:04:19 you know, there's money to be made. People like to gamble or they can't stop gambling. So, That's where the technology and the incentives have combined to drive people in a certain direction. And here you've got a generation of kids who find movies boring. And when you think about spectacle, they're not thinking like when I was a, you know, I saw Jurassic Park the first time and saw a special effect that looked like a real dinosaur. It's like, yeah, that's spectacle. That's what Hollywood spectacle. That same kid would watch Jurassic Park and would fall asleep because like it's a CGI movie. dinosaur i've seen that a billion times but spectacle is you're watching something live and this guy's on the street and he could die the one i

1:05:06 referenced a situation i think in the last episode that i think there's a streamer called tanner cook one that got shot at a shopping mall.

1:05:13 Yeah yeah yeah i should have brought that into these these scripts but yeah it was that same kind of thing.

1:05:18 Yeah, he was confronting, just shouting slurs at a guy who, again, just like a delivery driver or something, an Uber driver, or he's like Uber Eats, and just kept telling him back off, back off, back off, and then finally pulled a gun and shot him, because the guy apparently was like, oh, this is great content, how upset this guy's getting, this is great spectacle, look at the emotion, look how angry he is, and then he gets shot, and then the jury, they let him off of shooting him, the jury was like, well, the crime is discharging a gun in a shopping mall, because again, the ricochet Could have hit someone who didn't deserve to be shot. Right. But this guy clearly did.

1:05:54 You know, again, we're not saying we want you to be shooting people that are filming YouTube pranks, but that's an outcome that you should anticipate. Yeah.

1:06:04 And to be clear, quite frankly, if one of these guys gets shot and killed, it won't stop anybody, right? Because what would stop them, if you want to know what would stop this, and I don't have a way to make this happen, what will stop this is if there's not money in it.

1:06:17 Yeah.

1:06:17 That'll stop this.

1:06:18 And the platforms, that's part of it. And I think people are probably asking, well, who– are they getting paid through Twitch? Are they getting paid through Kik? Are they getting paid through– what are the other degenerate– like Rumble?

1:06:30 Oh, I forget. There's one that's even a rung down from Kik, right? That's like the even more socially unacceptable one. I'm forgetting its name right now.

1:06:38 It's Rumble, I think. Rumble. Rumble.

1:06:40 Yes. Yeah.

1:06:41 But so– There's layers to this because for one thing, there's always another platform. Because there's always another platform to take the people who have been banned from the last platform for doing porn, gambling, violence, whatever, racism. There's always some other, you know, there's some company run out of Estonia or whatever saying, yeah, we'll take you. But the other thing is there's so many mechanisms because the fans are sending money directly. So, for example, if you do a GoFundMe, a lot of times they will shut down a fundraiser if you're a dirtbag investor. But there's always.

1:07:15 Another- There's give, send, go.

1:07:16 Yeah.

1:07:16 Which is where that lady raised 800 grand.

1:07:19 The racist lady shouting at the child. I still, I think you have listeners who think you had to have made that up because why would people donate to shouting at an eight-year-old?

1:07:28 $ 800, 000 for shouting slurs at a child with autism. Yeah.

1:07:30 But that wasn't GoFundMe. That was, or Kickstarter.

1:07:33 Give, send, go.

1:07:35 Okay.

1:07:35 Yeah.

1:07:36 But even if that one got shut down, there's always a crowdfunding platform or there's a crypto platform.

1:07:43 Cryptors are going to find a way.

1:07:45 The technology means that you don't have to convince Coca-Cola to run a 30-second ad against this content. You can get the money directly from the fans. There's always another platform. There's always another fundraising mechanism. You could just do it through crypto. You kind of can't stop the flow of money.

1:08:05 That's what I was saying at the very, very start of last episode, is that the technology made a new type of bad behavior possible. And it's very... And society has not adjusted to it yet.

1:08:16 Nope. No, and I do want to be clear. I don't think this is a situation in which, like, creating new laws is going to... For one thing, all of these people we've talked about have repeatedly broken the law and not gotten in trouble, including for, like, beating a woman badly. Like, I don't know. I assume he got some sort of, like, community service or some shit, but he didn't stop streaming. Vitaly, like, kept doing his thing.

1:08:38 And....

1:08:39 Like, like, if you were to make if someone were to make like a law against like nuisance causing a nuisance for content, it's just going to get used against like protesters and shit. None of these people are going to get punished by it, right? Like, I don't, I don't think that that's, this is a problem that has to be solved to some extent socially by making this both unacceptable and thus unprofitable. And I have no idea how to make that happen.

1:09:03 It's similar to– one of my most unpopular political opinions is that I think passing new laws to make hate speech a felony– I know who they're going to target, and it's not the people you think they're going to target. I know how that's going to get used. I'm sorry. They're going to decide that calling somebody a Zionist is a slur, and so they're going to apply it toward– it's not the people you think it's going to apply to. Sure.

1:09:24 It's like, I'm sorry. I don't want to give the government that ability. I don't trust– depending on what administration is in charge, I don't trust that it's going to– No.

1:09:35 No. To the extent that I think there's any sort of carceral or legal thing that would help, it's like, well, I guess if somebody impersonates a police officer, you should probably punish them. If somebody beats a woman half to death on the street, you should probably punish them as opposed to letting them continue to make money online.

1:09:54 A lot of things come down to... enforcing rules that we kind of already have. It's just that, again, certain people are always going to be very good at finding the gaps to slip through. It's just that your society ideally has a way to handle sociopaths or amoral people who have just decided this is the only way they can make money. And going to be frank, all the examples you used here, if they weren't doing this, it's not like they would be brain surgeons. I'm thinking this is probably the maximum amount of money they could make.

1:10:28 Not thinking they have other talents they're hiding from the world. But yeah, it's... So this show just doesn't end with like a hopeful note at all, does it?

1:10:40 I don't really have anything hopeful to say about this, Jason.

1:10:43 My hopeful note is that you have a book coming out.

1:10:47 That's my hopeful note. You do have a book coming out.

1:10:50 Yeah.

1:10:51 Maybe if we all get back to books.

1:10:53 And these books are fun. They're not about, by design, this is what I do to escape the real world. I've got a neon crab behind me holding a little knife. I know that only the video watchers can see it.

1:11:10 It is a great little crab. You sent me a nice plastic crab that I have on my table, actually.

1:11:16 Yeah.

1:11:17 Well, Jason, this has been a fun, depressing conversation about I don't know. It kind of feels a little like a death spiral culturally. I don't see this getting better before it gets worse. We'll see.

1:11:29 Trends come and go. I'm sure you go back to the 1960s, you'll find, you know, where have the serial killers gone? They became mass shooters. Stuff comes and goes. There's a brief period in the 60s when all these teenage girls decided that hitchhiking was the best way to travel. And a whole bunch of men were like, hey, that would be an easy way to kill 300 women. and then, but what's the last famous serial killer you've heard of?

1:11:54 It's a thing that, you know, you adjust, people start to keep an eye out a little bit better, they become a little bit more vigilant.

1:12:03 And this will get boring at some point, right? Like, everything does.

1:12:07 Yeah, because the spectacle goes away, because it's the hundredth time you've seen somebody run up and try to yell racial slurs at a bunch of construction workers. It's like, okay, whatever, dude.

1:12:18 I guess that is where I do feel some of the future danger comes is that as this does at some point start having diminishing returns, some of these guys will try way more extreme things in order to move the needle. Obviously, that never works in the long run, but you're going to see some more Chud the Builder-like stories before this is over. That is definitely true, I think.

1:12:41 I got to say, I think it was on Reels, I saw somebody had made a very because you can still kind of tell ai right now not for much longer but they made a bad ai video of like it was in a gym and there's a woman with like a big butt and the guy ran up like slapped her on the butt and she like turned around and yelled at him but it was all ai and i remember thinking yeah no no real woman was slapped there there you go it's all it's all just a bunch of pixels yeah yeah it's depraved it's yes there's people watching it and it's making them worse people because they're getting off on the idea.

1:13:13 You were just relieved it didn't happen to an actual woman.

1:13:17 Yeah, I was. I get it. I do wonder, maybe stuff like that will reduce somewhat the amount of both the profitability of doing this for real and the number of people doing it. Maybe we'll just transition to very off-putting AI videos of pranks. I guess that's optimistic.

1:13:34 That's the best I can offer you. I'm so sorry. I realized that in a perfect world that would not.

1:13:39 Exist, but We don't have a good episode ending here.

1:13:45 Yeah.

1:13:46 All right, everybody. Buy Jason's book.

1:13:48 Buy Jason's book. Also.

1:13:50 There are no Jason Krabs in this book.

1:13:52 I'm Jason K. Pargin on TikTok, Reels, YouTube. All of them. Every platform that has video, I'm on there.

1:14:00 Find Jason's videos. Read Jason's books. And I don't know.

1:14:06 Don't.

1:14:06 Become a nuisance streamer.

1:14:08 Be nice to other people. Touch grass. Wear sunscreen.

1:14:11 It is the saddest job I've ever heard of, I think, in my entire life. This is the worst possible job, I think.

1:14:18 I like it.

1:14:18 I can't think of another, of going and shouting slurs at people for donations. I can't fathom.

1:14:25 Oh, yeah, this job, yes.

1:14:26 No, I wasn't talking about a podcaster being the worst possible job.

1:14:29 That seems weird, Jason. No, yes, absolutely.

1:14:31 I agree. Sorry. This is a noble profession, what you're doing.

1:14:34 Yes, yes.

1:14:35 It's the only real job. I often say this to surgeons.

1:14:38 You're proud to tell your grandparents that you do this.

1:14:42 That's right.

1:14:43 Yes, my brother, the oncologist.

1:14:45 I'm not joking. See, that's a fake job. I'm not joking. The motherfucker wants to cure cancer. It's so good.

1:14:53 It's crazy. Podcast.

1:14:58 All right. We're done.

1:15:02 Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Full video episodes of Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit Remind Me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips and our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash at Behind the Bastards. We love about 40% of you, statistically speaking.