Heart Starts Pounding: Horrors, Hauntings, and Mysteries - 138. Tortured Live on Stream: The Death of Jean Pormanove

Episode Date: September 18, 2025

At 4:47 AM on August 18th, 2025, after 280 hours of torture streamed live to thousands of viewers, Jean Pormanove died in his sleep while on camera. The official cause of death was cardiac arrest. But what really killed him was a system perfectly designed to monetize human suffering, to turn degradation into content, to transform a vulnerable man's destruction into entertainment. The streaming continues. The algorithm watches. And somewhere, another Jean Pormanove is typing his first message to his mother: "I feel like I'm being held hostage." The question isn't whether this will happen again. It's happening right now, the only question is whether we'll keep watching. TW: Torture, Death Subscribe on⁠ Patreon⁠ to become a member of our Rogue Detecting Society and enjoy ad-free listening, monthly bonus content, merch discounts and more. Members of our High Council on Patreon also have access to our weekly after-show, Footnotes, where I share my case file with our producer, Matt. You can also enjoy many of these same perks, including ad-free listening and bonus content when you subscribe on Apple Podcasts . Follow on⁠ Tik Tok⁠ and⁠ Instagram⁠ for a daily dose of horror. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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And somewhere in the world, someone is watching a live stream that's been running for nearly 300 hours straight. On this viewer's screen, four people are sleeping in what looks like a cramped, messy bedroom. The camera angle is fixed, it's not moving, and it's showing all four bodies sprawled across beds and in makeshift sleeping arrangements. But something is wrong with one of the men on stream. The man who's closest to the camera, middle-aged, disheveled brown hair matted with what looks like paint or oil. his face is swollen and bruised he hasn't moved in a while not the restless tossing of exhausted sleep not the shallow breathing visible in the other men he's completely still the viewer watches for another minute and then two and then

five but this man does not move at all so the viewer types in the chat is JP okay no response from any of the moderators in the chat so the viewer decides to donate some money just five euros because donations trigger an alert sound that might wake the others. The electronic chime plays through the room speakers and one of the younger men stirs. He's got blonde hair catching in the harsh overhead light that's been left on. He sits up grogly and he sees the donation message on his phone. Jean's not moving. The donation message reads, the blonde man later identified as Owen Sinaz and Donati, though viewers know him as Naruto, stumbles over to the still man in the bed. Jean, he starts shaking him. Nothing. So he

He grabs a water bottle from the floor and he throws it at the man's face, but the bottle just bounces off of him and rolls away, and Jean does not flinch. Naruto then slabs him across the face hard and the sound echoes through the whole live stream. But the man, Jean Pormanov, does not move. He's in a really weird position, Naruto says to the camera, and then, abruptly, the viewer watches as the feed cuts to black. The stream that this viewer had been watching had been going on for nearly 12 days straight and would go on to be described as a non-stop horror show of psychological and physical abuse,

and it just ended with the death of one of the streamers involved. Welcome to Heart Starts Pounding, a podcast of horrors, hauntings, and mysteries. I'm your host, Kaylin Moore. And today, we're going to dive into a horror, a recent story that just happened outside of Nice, France. that actually some of you had sent me. It's the story of a man that was doing more and more extreme gimmicks on a live stream for followers and donations, but it's also going to be the story of the platform that enabled it.

The more I read about this, the more I got pulled down the rabbit hole of extreme live streams, and it's a real problem that the internet is having today. So I want to get into all of that with you today. But before we do, I wanted to give a shout out to our listener, Athaniel. I hope I said that right. They commented on Spotify and said, quote, I absolutely love this podcast. I'm so excited for spooky season and Halloween. I also wanted to ask if you can do an episode on Polish mythology.

I'm having trouble finding any. Thank you, Athaniel, adding Polish mythology to my research list. Poland is actually ranked number 19 in total listeners by country. So thank you to everyone in Poland listening. The rogue detecting society is really all over the world, which I think is very cool. So if you're listening in India or the Philippines or Puerto Rico, Kenya, Argentina, almost anywhere, just know you're not alone. And Athaniel, I'm also actually really excited to tell you about spooky season, which I can finally talk a little bit about now. The theme is going to be monsters.

We're going to be talking about some people and some stories that you may think you know, but we're going to do them in a very heart starts pounding way. I'm super excited about that. And we're also going to be doing a special re-release of our horror audio drama The Timekeeper. every Friday on the heartspounding feed. And finally, we are going to officially be kicking off the Rogue Detecting Society monthly book club. This is something that one of our Patreon High Council members, Samantha, so very big thank you to Samantha.

That is a big undertaking, and I love when the community does stuff like that. Last week, we announced the book that we chose for this month. And we'll have a special chat in the Patreon group chat. We're also going to be putting a special book club discussion bonus episode every month that's going to be free for everyone. and more details to come on all of that. And finally, before we dive in, next week, I'm going to have a very special guest on the feed.

It's going to be my friend Annie Elise, who a lot of you probably know from her show, tend to life and serialously. We're going to be discussing some very scary stories that will lead us straight into spooky season. So make sure you join me next week to hear about that. So, all right, let's go back to France and to the story that I was just telling you.

It's when your heart starts pounding. When police arrived at the house outside of Nice, France later that morning, they found Raphael Graven, known to hundreds of thousands online as Jean Pormanov dead, lying in the same position that he had been seen in on the live stream. He also was suspiciously alone. The others who had been in that cramped bedroom, who had been streaming alongside him for nearly two weeks straight, were no. nowhere to be found. Now, Jean's official cause of death would later be listed as cardiac arrest complicated by a pre-existing heart condition and thyroid issues. But what really killed him wasn't just a failing heart. It was more than 11 straight days of systematic torture that was broadcast live to thousands of paying viewers, a descent into hell that people actually donated

money to watch. Now, to understand how this 46-year-old military veteran ended up dying, on camera for entertainment. I kind of want to go back and talk a little bit more about where this all started. And like a lot of stories about people who die for content, it did actually start pretty innocently. Now Raphael Graven was born on January 26, 1979, in Woppy France, a small commune in the northeast of the country. He had served in the French military, though the details of his service were a little unclear. It was hard to find more information on that. And by his 40s, he was living with his mother, but he was also really struggling with mental health issues that his family would later describe as leaving him vulnerable and easily influenced. In March of 2020,

right as COVID was shutting down the world, he did what millions of other people were doing. He started making content online. He had these early TikTok videos that were pretty standard for the platform. He did a lot of gameplay footage from Grand Theft Auto 5 and FIFA. He did some comedy sketches, a lot of dancing. He really had this energy that people responded to and he had a willingness to be silly and self-deprecating and it really made him relatable. So by 2021, he started making content for Twitch because that's where the real money at the time was. And he found his niche pretty quickly. He started being known for his over-the-top rage reactions during gaming streams. When he'd lose at FIFA, he would scream and throw things. And when some of the

someone beat him in Grand Theft Auto, he would have these really explosive meltdowns that viewers just kind of couldn't look away from. It was a performance for the most part because he realized that the more extreme his emotions were and the more extreme those outbursts were, the more people wanted to watch him. And that really started working. By 2023, he had almost 670,000 followers on Twitch and his videos had been viewed over 35 million times. But here's a thing about the Twitch platform. It only gives the streamers who stream on Twitch 50% of the subscription revenue that they earn. And in 2023, there was this new platform coming about that was making waves by offering something really unprecedented at the time, a 95% revenue share. And that platform was called KICC. Now, KIC launched in 2022, and it was founded by a 27-year-old Australian billionaire named Edward Craven.

he made his fortune running stake.com. Maybe you've heard of it. It's one of the world's largest crypto casinos. And he had this really simple idea for a platform. He wanted to make a competitor to Twitch that allowed people to make more money, but also allowed them to have more freedom of speech. He felt like at the time Twitch had too many rules,

took too much money from creators, and banned too much content for being extreme. But kick was going to be different. Kik would let creators be free, where Twitch was banning gambling on the site, Kik had a way around that. Twitch was also really cracking down on hate speech and shocking content, but they were not going to crack down on that on Kik. And so, Jean Pormanov, who was already starting to make more extreme content, just at least in the outburst he was having, made the jump over to Kik. But at first, his Kik content wasn't really that much different from his Twitch streams. He did a lot of gaming. He did some raging. He did a lot of dancing as well. But Kix's algorithm and more importantly, Kix audience, really rewarded a different kind of content. They really liked seeing people be pushed to their limits. Twitch's audience mostly wanted to watch people play games, but not kicks. The algorithm seemed to really push content of people enduring genuine discomfort, real humiliation and actual pain. And that's when these two

creators. Owen, Senazendadi, and Safine Hamadi, who were known as Naruto and Safine on the site, joins the platform. They really had no problem making shocking and violent content. And they had figured out really what P.T. Barnum knew centuries ago, that it is more profitable to be the exhibitor than the exhibited. Both of these guys were in their mid-20s at the time. Owen was just 26, Safene was 23, and they created what French investigative outlet media part would later call, quote, a business of online abuse. But unlike P.T. Barnum, who at least maintained this pretense of shromanship, Naruto and Safine didn't pretend that what they were doing had any integrity. They were doing pure exploitation streamed live. And they had this formula. They would find

vulnerable people, often individuals with mental disabilities or psychological issues, and they would create content around humiliating them. They had shows with names like numbers and illiterates where they would mock people who couldn't read or really do basic math, and they would shout slurs at these people, they'd call them stupid, and donations would just roll in the more that they did it. The audience really rewarded them for treating people who seem to have intellectual disabilities horribly. And they found that the more extreme they treated these people, the more money they made. And you can make money basically two ways on kick through showing ads on your content and through donations that your fans give. Now, Naruto and Safine weren't really

making content that was ad friendly. I mean, no one's going to throw a hello fresh ad in the middle of what they were doing. So they really relied on fan donations. And viewers would donate when they approved of what the two were doing, but they would also donate to make suggestions on what torture they wanted seen inflicted on their subjects. Like, think strangulation and electrical shocks. And the more extreme, typically the better and typically the more money that was made. Donations would really flood in when the two would say shoot their targets with paintball guns at close range, causing them to cry. And donations could amount to as much as 13,000 pounds in a month, and that's around $17.5,000 in U.S. currency. Now, Jean Pormonov became their latest scheme sometime in early 2025.

And the nature of their relationship is pretty murky. Was John a willing participant in all of this online abuse, or was he a victim? And the answer seems to really change depending on who you ask. See, in December of 2024, Media Part had published an act. expose on Naruto and Safine's whole operation they were running on kick. The article detailed the systematic abuse of vulnerable people, including this disabled man who was known as Kudu, who would appear regularly in their streams.

Kudu was seen getting beaten by the two men regularly on camera. He also endured electrical shocks and other forms of torture. And eventually, the niece police prosecutor caught wind of what was happening and opened an investigation. to it. And on January 8th, 2025, both Naruto and Safine were detained by police and their equipment was all seized. But here's the thing. Investigators actually interviewed Jean Pormanov as part of this investigation. They knew that he had just started working with these two men in the same capacity that Kudu was, you know, essentially as their punching bag. And this really concerned the police,

so they wanted to talk to him and make sure that he was actually okay. And he said something that would come back to haunt everyone involved. He told police that he was participating willingly, that all of this violence and humiliation and abuse, it was all scripted. It was all for show. It was all for money. And so even though the cops were skeptical of the whole situation, they didn't really have much evidence of coercion and they released Naruto and Safin the same day. And seven months later, Jean Pormanov would be found dead. So what happened? This episode is brought to you by MintMobil. Maybe you have the same issue that I have truly every single month.

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N-U-T-R-A-F-O-L dot com promo code H-S-P-Pod. That's Nutraful.com promo code H-S-P pod. To understand what really happened next, we need to rewind just a little bit and talk a little bit more about who Jean really was, not just who the character he played online was, but the person that his family knew. Now, for a long time, Jean lived with his mother. in a very small apartment. At 46, he never really established independence. His family would later describe him as someone who struggled with his mental health issues,

who was very easily influenced, someone who desperately wanted friends and acceptance and community. The military veteran who once served his country had become kind of isolated, spending most of his time online where his rage reactions and willingness to debase himself had finally brought him the attention that he craved. his health was failing too.

He had this heart condition that he was being treated for and he had thyroid problems that required medication. He wasn't really in that great of shape and probably shouldn't have been putting his body through any kind of extreme stress. But it seems like Naruto and Safine approached him with an offer that he just couldn't refuse. In clips that would surface after Jean's death, you can hear Naruto making these promises to him. Like, you won't be alone anymore if you keep streaming with us. And he also said things like, we're your real family.

He promised John that you'll have a wife in children in real life, just keep going. The pair offered him a stipend of 6,000 pounds every month. And they kept telling him things like, that's more money than you would ever make on your own. And John really believed them. It seemed like he felt like if he didn't work with them, he would be lonely and living with his mom forever. I mean, the two even told him that this was the only chance he would ever have at having a wife and children as if he kept streaming with them. And so, the live streams began. And, you know, let me tell you, I've watched a couple of these streams, and they are very hard to watch.

Most of the streams take place in one room with white walls and a big sign in the back that just says kick. There's a few plastic chairs in the room, but not much else. And in most of the videos that I've seen, it's just Jean Pormonov, Saffin, and Naruto in this room at any given time. Sometimes there's other men in there, and in nearly all of the clips, Jean looks like he's being absolutely tortured. In one clip, two men see how long they can choke him for, just completely out of the blue. They surprise attack him with this. John starts screaming, but over his screams, you can hear the sounds of donations coming in.

into the stream. Other times they would chain him up until he could complete various tasks that they had set out for him. He's also shot with paintball guns at close range. Sometimes he's tackled to the floor. And all of this is happening while donations are flooding in and around 15,000 people were regularly tuning in. I've also seen streams where his head was dunked underwater and they attempted to drown him. Sometimes he screams when these things are happening. Sometimes he starts crying, but he never leaves the situation. He always stays in the room while the abuse continues. And it really makes you wonder why. Well, in one clip that has since surfaced, Jean does threaten to leave. He tells them that he's done. But Naruto gives him this threat saying that he's going to take

away the housing situation that he had arranged for him and it's going to leave him living on the street. He says that Jean will have no home, no money, and no chance at the life he was working towards if he chooses to leave the stream and stop working with Safina Naruto. And so, in that moment, Jean decides that he's just going to stay. But things after that point just continued to get worse. Leading up to the final live stream that they all did together, John was living in hell and not doing very well physically. And one really chilling recording from just days before his death, Naruto forces Jean to make a statement on camera.

And of course, this clip later was deleted, probably at the behest of someone's lawyer, but all the viewers remembered what happened in it. He tells Jean to say, quote, let him say on camera right now, that if he dies tomorrow in the middle of a live show, it's due to his terrible state of health and not to us. Naruto demands that he says this.

And Jean initially refuses. You can really hear the exhaustion and his voice at this point of the stream, just the defeat that he's feeling. He just wants to go home. But Naruto insists, we're in the middle of a live show. If you get angry and start screaming and go into cardiac arrest, people are going to take it out on us when it's due to your 46 years of miserable life. Eventually, completely broken down, Jean just says these words to camera,

that if he dies, it's not their fault. It's his own body giving out, and it has nothing to do with the torture. It was a very horrible and scary omen of what was to come. Because the final stream began on August 5th of this year, 2025. It was supposed to be a marathon. They were going to stream continuously until they hit certain donation goals. Jean, Naruto, Safine, and Kudu, the disabled man who had been part of the streams for months. They were all going to live together in a house outside of Nice and broadcast everything 24-7.

What happened over those 10 days was later described as, quote, absolute horror. The violence started immediately, but it escalated gradually. At first, it was just sleep deprivation. Viewers could donate to have motorcycle engines revved in the bedroom or leaf blowers turned on next to the sleeping streamers. And slowly but surely, Jean and Kudu became extremely sleep deprived. And then, after that, came the physical abuse. Slapping, punching, strangling. Naruto had a paintball gun that he would shoot at Jean point blank.

They poured paint all over him, oil. They forced him to drink all these various concoctions that made him throw up. By day five, Jean's face was swollen really beyond recognition. His body was also covered in bruises. He moved very slowly, like every step was hurting him. But still, if you were watching the stream, you could hear the sound of the donations just rolling in. The stream was pulling in some serious money, about 36,000 euros over the 10-day period, the most money they had ever made. Thousands of people were watching at any given time.

They were all commenting and cheering and requesting to see specific tortures that they wanted to pay for. there was really no one that felt like what was going on was wrong. On day seven of the stream, Naruto snatched Jean's cell phone from out of his hands because he wanted to read his texts aloud so the chat could laugh at them. And one of these texts that he reads was actually to Jean's mother.

It read, quote, Hi, mom, how are you? Stuck to death with this game. It's going too far. I feel like I'm being held hostage with their horrible concept. I'm fed up. I want to get out. The other guy won't let me.

He's holding me hostage. Now, this was proof of what a lot of people and French prosecutors assumed that Jean may not have been a willing participant in everything that was going on. Even though the door was technically unlocked, Naruto and Safine had created this situation where Jean felt like he couldn't exit. And in a final plea for help with no one else to go to, He texted his 70-year-old mother, and Naruto, on stream, just mocked him for this text. And the chat laughed, and then donations just continued to roll in. By day nine, Jean could hardly stand. In one clip, he's shouting and he's panicking that he needs to take his heart medication.

While Naruto hits him repeatedly, this makes the chat go wild, and the donation alerts don't stop. On the night of August 17th going into the 18th, Naruto dressed up as Batman and delivered what people described as brutal strikes to Jean's face. John went to sleep after that happened, or he passed out. It's kind of hard to tell which, and he never woke up. When police arrived, Naruto and Safine had fled the scene. They left Jean's body behind and completely disappeared. But within hours after the news,

broke, they were posting on social media. Naruto called Jean his brother and partner, and he asked for respect for his memory. The audacity of the posts was honestly breathtaking, and French authorities moved pretty quickly because these two had already been on their radar. A criminal investigation was opened for, quote, violence against vulnerable persons and failure to assist a person in danger. The niece prosecutor said they were investigating whether the, violence and humiliation, Jean suffered, had aggravated his pre-existing conditions and led to his

death. But perhaps more significantly, France announced that they were going to sue the platform kick itself. They argued that they had been negligent. They had profited from torture. And they had created an environment where this kind of content wasn't just allowed, but was actively promoted. See, leading up to Jean's death, KIC had been using images of Jean being hurt on live stream as promotional material. Kik's French social media accounts had been using these images from those torture streams to sell merchandise. It was going to be hard for the platform to say that they were unaware of what was going on. And the potential penalties were pretty severe.

Kik executives could face up to 10 years in prison and million euro fines. And the platform's response was pretty corporate in the situation. They released this statement that said they were, quote, shocked and saddened by Jean's death. They ended up banning Naruto and Safine from the platform after the fact, of course, and they promised that they were going to review their policies. But it seems like Kick really wasn't upset that the abuse had taken place. They were mostly upset that they had gotten caught, because this was not the only shocking incident

to occur on one of the platform's live streams. The new BMO ViPorter MasterCard is your ticket to more. More perks, more points, more flights, more of all the things you want in a travel rewards card, and then some. Get your ticket to more with the new BMO ViPorter MasterCard and get up to $2,400 in value

in your first 13 months. Terms and conditions apply. Visit bemo.com slash V-I. Porter to learn more. Last year, and maybe you remember this headline, this really disturbing video was going around the internet from a kick live stream. And in it, a 26-year-old woman named Natalie Reynolds coaxes a homeless woman in Austin, Texas,

to jump into a lake promising her $20. The woman eventually does it, So she is very hesitant to, and Natalie has to really work at convincing her. She tells her it's for a scavenger hunt, and don't worry about it, I'm going to pay you $20 to do this. But when the woman jumps in, she starts drowning and screaming immediately. And Natalie freaks out and just flees the scene, and all of this was included in the live stream. Viewers of this stream then watched as she panicked with her friends while ambulances arrived and pulled the woman from the lake. saving her life but if they didn't come in time that woman would have just died and all of this

was just for one girl's live stream even while it was researching this episode i saw that there was recently another issue in austin texas during a scavenger hunt that was being live streamed this streamer on kick who went by zena the witch was walking around austin with a paintball gun until she found an innocent bystander to shoot at close range she was so dedicated to the stream that she actually live streamed herself being arrested. Her kick channel was shut down and she is currently awaiting charges for the assault. Recently, there was another incident where a Russian kick streamer was arrested for stabbing a commenter who showed up to his house after they got into a fight during a live stream. It seems like this streamer had said his address while he was streaming

and he actually told the commenter who he was fighting with to show up. And that man did and then got stabbed while the live stream was still going, even though you can't see it on screen. Now, there's also just really an ungodly amount of trolls on the site as well. People do things that might not necessarily be illegal, but are shocking and upsetting and are strictly for views and donations. Like there was this one streamer, Suspendus, who went to a Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Memorial site in Japan and started very loudly blasting the American National Anthem until people just got so uncomfortable they left. The point is, obscene, violent, shocking, and offensive content

is highly rewarded on the platform. But it's also been rewarded on other platforms. Kik is not the only place where this happens. So there's a platform called Pump Fun where people can create meme coins on the Solana blockchain. You've definitely heard of meme coins before. They're crypto coins that are usually based on memes, like Dogecoin, for instance. The most famous coin that was launched on the Pump Fun platform is probably the Haktua Girls, if you heard about that scandal that happened last year. She had the coin that plummeted 90% in value after just a few hours and lost a ton of her followers a bunch of money. It's relatively cheap and easy to launch your own meme coin on the site, but if you want it to do well, you have to drum up a lot of excitement

and get people to buy the coin. And in a bid to allow coin creators to bring attention to their launches, Pump Fun, I feel so dumb saying that word out loud. briefly added a live stream functionality. In November of 2024, right around when Jean was starting his collaboration with Naruto, the pump fund streams had devolved into what I can only describe as total and complete chaos. One streamer actually held a gun to their pet's head. The pet was okay, it was fine. But he threatened to shoot unless his token hit a million dollars.

Another person fired a weapon out of their window every time the price increased. there were reports, and I want to emphasize that these are reports they were not confirmed, of someone hitting their child on stream until their token hit $15,000. The most documented case of kind of debauchery on stream involved this developer who went by the name Michael. On May 22nd, 2024, he had the really wild idea to douse himself in isopropal alcohol and had fireworks shot at him on stream. He did, can you believe it?

suffer third degree burns over 30% of his body, but his token spiked 4,500% to a market cap of $1.82 million. He ended up making $3,000 from community donations for his hospital bills, and the token creators and early buyers made hundreds of thousands of dollars. But it was another situation where doing shocking things on stream was completely financially rewarded. And I feel like places that you might not even expect to do shocking things. on stream allow shocking things to happen. I don't know if I ever mentioned this or talked about it on this show, but early on when I was starting heart starts pounding, it was I'd only done really a few episodes of the show, but I got reached out to by this company that wanted me to fly to Dallas for

this movie promotion they were doing. And the point of this promotion was they were going to lock me in a room for 12 hours for an entire night and they were going to live stream it on TikTok. The people who were watching on TikTok were going to be able to vote on things that would happen to me in the room. And they were not very transparent about what those things were going to be. I had to ask them what some of those things would be. And they said like a hand would reach out from under the bed and would grab me and something would open from the door and like someone would pop out, whatever. I was going to be in this bedroom where things were happening. And it was to promote this movie that was coming out. But the whole thing felt very sketchy.

And when I was starting heart starts pounding, you know, it was really just me. They reached out to me directly. I didn't have anyone in my corner who was reading over contracts and making sure things were above board. Also, they were offering money and it was at a time in my life where I really could have used the money. The point is, even platforms you wouldn't expect to be making and distributing shocking content do. And there's always going to be people who are going to take advantage of that and try to get vulnerable people. people, people at the beginning of their career, people who can't advocate for themselves to join in and really be the punching bag. Also, I'll add, I said no to that opportunity. I was not

going to let these strangers beat me up in a room on a live stream. But here's the thing that really connects all of this. So the founder of KIC, that child billionaire Edward Craven, made his billions from cryptocurrency and online gambling. His entire business model is basically built on exploitation and addiction. Kick was actually designed to funnel viewers to his online casino, stake.com. The 95% revenue share that attracted streamers like Jean Pormanov, yeah, it's just a lost leader that's subsidized by gambling profits. So it's no wonder he did not care if people were being tortured on his platform.

As long as it made him money, it was fine. Craven has been explicit about all of this in interviews. He says that controversial content. is good for the platform. He said, quote, the more shock factor involved in their content, the more viewers they get. He even said in one interview that the algorithm isn't broken, it's working exactly as it's designed to. Now, we often talk on the show about what is scarier to us, the idea that the monster in our house is supernatural or human. Is it scarier to think you're being haunted by a ghost or stalked by a person? Now, sometimes the human explanation is

legitimately worse because humans choose to cause harm. But maybe that's not the only question in this story. Maybe the question is, what's scarier? The human or the algorithm? Because Naruto and Safin, as cruel as they were, were still human. They could theoretically be reasoned with, arrested, held accountable, as I hope they are. But even when they're gone, the algorithm is going to remain. and it's just going to leave empty space for someone else to fill exactly what they were doing. And as I was researching this episode, I couldn't help but think about a lot of those old-timey 1800s freak shows that they used to do, like the ones put on by P.T. Barnum. He was really famous for touring people's misfortunes around America and charging audiences to see it.

I just talked about this recently in our bonus episode from last month, the Dark Roadside Attractions episode. but he at one point toured two conjoined twins that were abducted from Vietnam around the country and he actually forbade them from getting the surgery that would separate them because he was making too much money off touring them around the country and having people pay to see them. Just really horrible, horrible stuff. But all of this feels like a modern version of that, human suffering for profit. Naruto and Safene are similar to P.T. Barnum in that way. It's just that the internet has made it so you don't.

don't actually have to leave your house to run your own side show. Jean Pormanov died at 4.47 a.m. on August 18th, 2025, after 280 hours of torture was streamed. The official cause of death was cardiac arrest, but what really killed him was a system perfectly designed to monetize human suffering, to turn degradation into content, and to transform a vulnerable man's destruction into entertainment for an audience of thousands. The French government is currently suing kick.

Naruto and Safine are under criminal investigation. There are calls for regulation, for platform accountability, for change. As I record this right now, someone somewhere is starting another marathon stream. Someone is dousing themselves in something flammable. And someone is accepting another degrading challenge for donations. So the question isn't really whether this will happen again. It's happening right now, even as you're going to be. listening to this. The only question is whether people will keep watching. That is all I have for you

this week. Thank you for joining me in this very dark story, but hopefully some good will come out of this someday, and streams like this will just be completely shut down. You can join me here next week as I have my guest, Annie Elisa on. We're going to be talking about some very true, very scary stories to lead us into spooky season, so you're not going to want to miss that. And until next time, stay curious. Ooh, whoo. Heart starts pounding is written and produced by me, Kayla Moore. Heart starts pounding is also produced by Matt Brown.

Our associate producer is Juno Hopps. Sound design and mix by Peachtree Sound. Special thanks to Travis Dunlap, Grayson Jernigan, the team at WME and Ben Jaffe. Have a heart pounding story or a case request. Check out heartsardspounding.com.