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

Episode Date: April 8, 2026

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

Ryan, you're looking a little dark. I am seeing that, and I'm trying to figure out all my lights are on. You're in extra bisexual lighting. I know. It's fine. Okay. Kat, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me.

We're going to be talking today about a guy who I don't ever want to talk about ever. I hate this guy. He's gross. Do you know who I'm talking about? Just from the word gross, a lot of. I could already like guess who you were talking about. Sure with the class. Who do you think I'm talking about?

I assume you're talking about one of Twitch's most popular and prolific streamers ever, Asmond gold. Is that how you pronounce the name? Asmen gold. I've always been saying as mungold. Yeah, Adam left me three notes to not let you say as mungold the entire recording, which is why I put it at the top of the outline, phonetically spelled out. It's Asmengold. Okay. That's weird.

Anyways, my name is Ryan Broderick. With me, as always, is Grant Irving, a man who has great personal hygiene, actually. And this is Panic World, a show about how the internet warps our minds are culture and eventually reality. Joining us today from Spitfire Newsletter. Also on Courier Now, welcome Courier Network friend. Kat, Tambarge, how are you doing? You know, it's always such an interesting question, but I think today is going pretty well. At least it's like not, well, actually it might be back to 40 degrees.

It was really nice weather the past few days. So that was really uplifting. But I think it's back to bad weather. There's hail. Eagle eye viewers will notice I have a sunburn on my nose from yesterday. Which, yeah, that's my mistake for going outside. I should never do it. I think that's what YouTubers must do, right?

It's like, well, I guess they wear sunscreen also. I didn't do that. But someone who doesn't wear sunscreen, definitely, is Zach Hoyt, better known as Asmongold. Oh, that's a hard sentence to say. Better known as Asmengold. He is one of the world's biggest streamers and he is who we are talking about today. He is someone that I have tried very hard never to mention and or think about because he's really gross. And we're going to get to why he's really gross. But his reach and his influence are absolutely terrifying because he's really just like a he's like a bad dude. And his existence is a bad thing. It's a bad sign. And you know, we talk all

the time about the manosphere, but there's this other kind of infection ruining the men of the internet. And it isn't talked about enough. And I actually think Aspen Gold is the perfect way to get into talking about this other sort of nefarious force warping the minds of young men. Kat, when did you first notice this guy? So it was after the Depp Hurd trial was when I learned who he was. And he wasn't even super on my radar because I was mainly paying attention to YouTubers who were covering the Depp Heard trial. But the first time I remember learning about him was learning about his hoarder house and how like dirty it was. And then in the same sentence, I was told he was like the most popular Twitch streamer. And I was like, how is that possible? Hold on. Representation matters.

And so I do think there is something very powerful about Twitch. the average Twitch users seeing themselves on school. Yes. And that leads us actually to our first clip, which we're going to show you now, unfortunately. Our researcher Adam dug this up. This is Zach Hoyt's first ever YouTube video when he was still going as Zach Rarr, as in RaRR means I Love You and Dinosaur. This is 2008, and this is about a rat that was found in his parents' kitchen.

I can smell this house. Oh, there's the rat. Okay, so that has a rat in an extremely disgusting kitchen, and they're going to try to catch the rat. There's four minutes of this. Okay, I need to say something. I need to say something because I think this is, this is in a lot of ways become like the main insight of my adult life, actually,

in a lot of ways. And this is really sad to say. When I was a teenager and in early years in college, I would find myself often with guys that, look like that hitting themselves in the face with like hammers and blocks of wood in houses that looked like that usually uh there was like some kind of frisbee that they would put like blunt guts into yeah yeah yeah yeah watching like really horrible horror movies or wrestling or i went to one house where it was like a pot that they had boiled hot dogs in but they got too high and

forgot about the hot dogs so they just had hot dog they had literal hot dog water that was just like in their kitchen. And I spent all of my time and energy of my life to make sure I am never around these people ever again. And I am mystified that like people are so desperate to hang out with these kinds of people that they are doing it remotely via the internet now. I want to try to figure out how the hell we let this happen. And why we aren't freaking out about it enough. It is, it breaks my brain. Are you, have you found yourself in situations with guys like this? Yes. What this reminds me of so palpably are the like losers that my best friend in high school would date. And I would like go over to her boyfriend's house and he would have like

Rick and Morty on the TV like the hot topic Spencer's. Oh God, what are they called? Tapestries like stuck to the wall with push pens. And they would just be smoking like the worst weed created to man. Not the archetype that this speaks to me. And a lot of them lived in houses like this. And those were like the guys you would also like buy weed from in high school. Like I can tell you, I have been couch locked from bad stepped on mids on a couch next to a guy like Aiden Ross or Asman Gold and be like, I can never let this happen to me ever again. This is a nightmare. Yeah.

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

And so we see this video of the 18 year old Asman Gold trying to catch a rat in his house. And if we flash forward to this year, we now have this video, which I will share my screen on to show you. So we're going to do a little comparison of sort of how he got here. This is Asmond Gold talking about Grock when it was being used to undress women and children without their permission on X. Like, I'm old enough to remember back in the day, whenever if you wanted to post something on the internet, you were always told, never post shit and pictures of yourself on the internet because weirdos can get them and do stuff with them. It's not that it's even a good thing to have happened, but at the same time, I mean, if you don't want this shit to happen, don't post stuff on the internet. has like millions and millions and millions and millions of views and he has millions and millions of followers and he is arguably one of the the larger pundits in american politics right now um

cat how did that happen well well like a lot of deplorable creatures who have undue influence over our political system today they just like did viral bake content until they had amassed a giant audience and enough eyeballs on them at any given time to be this influential. And like the way that he did it was largely through commenting on the Dept v. Heard trial. His rise went completely under the radar for a very long time because it's the kind of shit we thought we could, I mean, I thought I could just ignore. And we're going to get there. That is absolutely when he starts to explode. He moves off of the rat video, though, in 2008 to his first kind of home.

base. It's World Warcraft, which is also where like Steve Bannon's hanging out, Jeffrey Epstein's hanging out. Like most of the male kind of culture of the 21st century is being written in real time by wild players. I used to go to like a land center and play Warcraft with people and quickly was like, I can't be around you freaks anymore. Also, I kept getting sick because none of them like wash their hands. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Hoyt starts uploading gameplay videos of World Warcraft. He starts to get his early fan base from Wow. I actually knew a Wow sicko in high school that would do war driving. Are you familiar with this? He would drive around and look for unsecure Wi-Fi networks and then try to play wow on them from his car.

Wait, that's wild. Why not? You know? So yeah, he starts filming videos, gameplay videos, tie-mail Warcraft. And then he starts answering fan requests to like do different things. And one of them is him showing his room. And this is, okay, so this is a video that is, oh my God, it looks like the fucking Blair, which, it's insane. This is a video that is titled Asmond Gold's layer. It is 1.1 million views.

It's from 2010. And here we go. Hello, everyone. I heard a lot of people saying that I exaggerate things. I, you know, make things more than what they are. And that's true. But not in terms of my room. One of people think that it's actually not as bad it is.

And I'm probably going to clean it today, but I don't want, I don't want to lose the memory. Ah, God. It's like a Harmony Korean movie. It's a nightmare. Watching old Aspen Gold, videos is like the eerie feeling of watching a Marble Hornets video where I'm like, my whole body is on edge. Like what's going to happen next? It's haunted.

It's absolutely haunted content. And it becomes very popular. And by 2013, he starts a YouTube channel Asmon Gold 1341, which is for his wow content. And it gets enough attention that they make a subreddit for him, which I didn't realize his fandom was this old. Did you, I mean, like, were you aware of all this? No. it doesn't surprise me because I'm like I feel like people like the people I knew in high school who were obsessed with World of Warcraft were also obsessed with Reddit so I'm like this makes a lot of sense to me that he would have a very early fan subreddit community yeah why would there be an overlap I just think it's like this was like where nerds yes went online is why I I was like it's funny like he doesn't start streaming on Twitch for like a few more years but I do kind of remember this culture that I I didn't totally understand, actually.

And it's very possible that I maybe even came across Asman Gold Subreddit and, like, didn't understand it. Because I do remember in the early 2010s, there being this sense that certain players of certain video games were kind of becoming celebrities in their own way. And I couldn't totally understand how. Like, I wasn't really tapped it. And then I remember, like, the whole, like, parody of it with Major League Gaming. Yeah.

Yeah. So, like, I was kind of aware. that these spaces existed, but like I wasn't playing any video games because I had a job and I was dating a woman and I had a life and stuff. So I kind of tapped out. And then Twitch appears. And Twitch, I think, is the moment where everything starts to sort of connect. In November 2016, Trump gets elected, Asma and Gold starts streaming while on Twitch. And he streams the game four days a week, sometimes more.

And he does that basically for like three years. He is streaming wow all day, every day. If you think this is depressing, you're right. But Asman Gold would disagree. There's one video where he talks about how he might feel sad when he looks around and doesn't have a girlfriend or, you know, experience the outside world. But all of that goes away once he's back in his safe little nest in his room playing video games. So, you know, it's all totally fine. And he becomes the single most popular wow streamer on Twitch, which at that time was like one of the larger, are you familiar with how Twitch kind of functions?

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

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

and Freud or how do you say that word? Shotenfroid. Yeah. Okay. There's like a little bit of shot and Freud element to it where it's like my life, my room isn't as messy as his. Like my life is not as visually depraved as his is. But with men who become these types of figures, like when women become low cows. A low cow is literally like a woman. So they just get harassed. But when men get this type of attention online, they can build careers off of it. It's like they're still the target of the joke, but they can gain like credibility from that. I think that's a fantastic point. And in fact, like our research backs this up pretty, pretty solidly. And I remember like at the time, I started to become aware of him probably after Trump became president. And I would see his stuff in live

stream fails, which is the subreddit for like sharing Twitch stream or cringe. And I remember like every time he would pop up, I would think like, well, that's the end of him. And it wouldn't happen because what you're describing is real. Like there is something about a guy who can just sustain being a massive punching bag for people. And so yeah, with Asmon Gold, this is exactly what happens. In 2016, he ends up on live stream fails because multiple roaches are crawling around his chair and computer. He gets asked about it and he says, he complains that they've been laying eggs in his food.

God, this is so gross, man. Then about a year later, viewers notice that there's dried blood on his wall next to his bed. This is like grossing me out so bad. He explains that it's from his, he explains it's from his teeth because they bleed overnight and he wipes it on the wall. Who amongst us? This is so gross, man. I'm like, and then about a year after that, a few months after that, he realizes that it's

been 1,234 days or six years and nine months of cumulative time playing, wow, like that's how long he's been at it. And as he is sort of becoming, as you said, this like, this like positive low cow, this like relatable low cow. Yeah. He's learning that he can be extremely offensive. He realizes that he can go viral in a different way. So he gets a 24-hour ban in August, 2017 from Twitch for insulting the victims of Hurricane Katrina, calling them animals and saying that the hurricanes should have done a better job.

Also, why are you talking about Hurricane Katrina in 2017? Like, what an insanely deep pull. It's like the only natural disaster he remembers. I mean, this is a guy who is clearly like frozen in 2007. That is absolutely true. I double checked. I was like, did he mean Hurricane Sandy? Did he mean something later?

Yeah, like there was a hurricane like a couple years before. In 2018, he goes viral again because he announces that he is dating another Twitch streamer named Pink Sparkles. Have you ever heard of her? Yes, I have heard of her. Your voice definitely told a story there. Let's get into this because it's a whole other part of the dynamic, I think. Asmond Gold can go viral for being a lull cow, for being gross, being offensive.

All of that gets some attention, but it also makes him useful to other creators and women creators, which intentionally are not leads to its own kind of rage bait. There are so many women like this who are oftentimes younger and more conventionally attractive than these guys and seemingly would have a lot of other opportunities, but yet wind up in relationships with men like Asman Gold and Keem Star and like Boogie, like these just these male locale figures, they attract these women. Maybe because they like present vulnerability, I don't know what it is. Comparing Asmond Gold to Boogie is smart.

Keemstar as well, if you listening don't know who these people are, that's totally fine. Just live your life. off for it. Just live your, live your damn life. So, yeah, at the time that they start dating Pink Sparkles is getting a lot of hate because the users of Twitch have decided she's a quote unquote cam whore. And someone asks like why she's considered a cam whore. And people are mad that she's like adjusting her shirt on stream.

One user writes, she adjusted her top so you could see her nipple. People want less chicks who stream in almost no clothing, standing in front of the cam all day, selling their nudes through Snapchat slash Patreon while squatting for donations. What does Twitch do tell them to stop dressing like horrors? These cam girls get banned every week for showing tits and then a bunch of other gross stuff that he lists out. And then they're back streaming a day after their band. And this is really interesting to me because I also think that like Twitch through monetization sort of created not only the concept of a simp, But this weird kind of like, this new kind of psychology around hating women online where it's like they don't just hate women. They hate how my horniness contributes to them positively monetarily.

Yes. It's really interesting like seeing how misogyny has evolved on Twitch because it's like there's misogyny on every social media platform. But Twitch has this very unique culture of it. Or I guess it's not unique. It's just so specific to the platform where it's like, because. it's dominated by video game culture, there's this belief held by many users that like no woman can be there for any real reason. Like any woman who's successful on Twitch could only be successful because she's like trapping

simps with her body. That's the only way a woman could perform. And I think you see that like in the video game culture more broadly. But even Twitch as a company like kind of feeds into this through content restrictions around like, okay, you can wear a shirt that if it has to be cut off at a certain point, like the company almost lends to this weird logic that you don't see on every social media platform. This connects to something that I've been thinking about since an episode we did with Siri doll about how like the new men's rights movement is like extremely gay and how they hate women.

And I was thinking about this idea that this really ties to, which is I think Twitch basically connected the dots for this very psychosexual thing among especially young men that is very dark which is that like they hate women streamers in particular

women creators because they are jealous of the attention those women are getting from men. Yeah. Like these guys want that attention from men. And it also sort of ties to these conversations we are having in a previous episode about transvestigating with Kitty Kim's and, uh, what's, what's, Jeff?

We're leaving that interest like that. What's the, what's the, I was going to say, what's the guy who looks like a dog's name? Um, like, love you, buddy. Uh, Kitty Kim's and Jeff about how like there is this jealousy. There is this sort of like desire to police others' bodies because you can't police your own kind of thing. And I do think like simping, the concept of simping and hating female streamers is a lot of like specifically young men looking at women online and being like, I want men to care about me that way. Yes. And then you also get the sort of self-loathing of like that one would have at a casino where it's like I am dumping tons of money into watching this woman online and I'm sick.

I'm sick with myself. And so it's like it's these two really weird psychologies that Twitch has just like connected and turned into a great business. them so they see themselves as an asming gold figure it's both creates the jealousy of like they're like i relate to this guy maybe i can get get a woman like this makes her popular makes money and then there's a resentment that they are not him even though he's the most gross even though they have blood on their walls too yeah you know it's that like weird the i want to be you and i relate to you in that same squalor. Yes. I also think that like for women who watch these men,

and I think their audiences are overwhelmingly men, but there are women who like watch this type of content, who engage with this type of content, and then come to appear in this content, either through like being a significant other or just like being on Twitch. And it's like, you almost get this sense that some of these women feel bad for these guys. Like they see the side of them, like they're like, oh, your life is so sad. But at the same time,

time, like, they have so much power over them and they, like, use it in such a, like, harmful way. Going back to the clip we watched of Asman Gold being like, if you're a woman and you put your picture on the internet, like, you're going to get sexually abused and that's your fault. And yet, for whatever reason, like, there's an audience for that, even among like some women. I'm going to sit in the, uh, just like extreme psychic anguish of imagining a woman watching an Asmond Gold stream for a second. and we're going to throw to our sponsors, and raid.

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because unfortunately, the internet is only getting weirder. I feel seen. Do you watch live streamers at all? Like, and, and don't cheat. Do you watch them live? I this is oh god people are going to be so mad I only watch one person live who is that my fiance watches more live stuff than I do and so she'll watch has on piker when there's like a major political event happening and so I will come watch him with her so I'll watch hasan live and that's basically the only one who I actually watch live for other people I usually just watch clips after the fact I I am a clip person And I find the act of watching a live stream, like extremely sweaty. And, yeah, like, I just, there's something about it that I find kind of obnoxious.

I do, like, I'll watch, like, news conferences live. I'll watch, like, breaking news live. But watching, like, a person in a chair, like, watch something else. It just, like, sort of, like, breaks my brain in a weird way. I also, I was talking to a video editor about this recently who was trying to tell me that, like, I should stop filming anything in my. office because subconsciously we all start to feel like weird PTSD symptoms from COVID lockdown when we watch people stream at home. Oh, that's so interesting.

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

fight people in nightclubs. But watching someone sit in their desk just like makes me feel like I'm on a Zoom call. Yes. I think that's so real. And it's also like when you're watching a live stream, especially with someone who has a big audience, it is so overstimulating. Yeah. Because not only are they like usually talking really fast, like,

bouncing from topic to topic. But then you have like the live comments that are just pouring in at a rate faster you can actually read. And a lot of streamers have little animations on the screen in like the corner. And it'll be like, oh, my God, someone just donated. Someone just subscribed. Someone just bought 100 subscriptions. So it reminds me of like the casino screen.

Yes. When you're like betting. Like they're just trying to capture your attention in so many different ways. But I can only watch that for like 15 minutes before I genuinely have to stop. It's too much. Yeah, I'm the same way. But there are many people who do not feel that way because Asman Gold becomes one of the biggest streamers on Twitch. By 2019, he's captured the eyes of boys everywhere who only want to zone out and watch someone else play video games.

And he's about to take this to a whole new level. He is riding like a new wave of interest around World of Warcraft Classic, which is released by Blizzard that year. And he hires a team who really changes everything for him. also, I would argue, like, this idea has quietly changed the entire media landscape possibly forever, which is he hires clippers. So for those who are not familiar with the world of clippers, that is why you know who clavicular is. That is why you know who Hussein Piker is.

That is why you know who all of these streamers are. What they have discovered is that instead of making a podcast and making short form videos and making mid-length videos and then, you know, going live. What they can do is they can just go live and then have the clippers cut down those streams into manageable chunks of content that can fit every widget hole across the internet. And this is what happens with Asmon Gold. And it puts him in a perfect spot for society collapsing in 2020. And we at that point all become Asmon Golds. And it turns him into something of a cultural institution.

He starts his own content creator production company called OTP or One. One True King in October 2020. And he signs up streamers Mizkiff and S-Fand. Do you know who these people are? I know who Mizkiff is either. I don't know why I know who Ms. Kiff is. I see his name. It's one of those names that you just cannot escape.

It's always like, it's like clavicular style. Like it's like Ms. Kiff like gooned on so-and-so. And it's like, I don't know what that means. But you just see it over and over and over and over again. There are basically like from my, when I can understand, there's like 100 to 200 streamers with Kappacha names that are constantly suing each other

and like and like claiming like defamation lawsuits against each other and I don't like yeah in fact I just Googled Miskiff and apparently he is suing another streamer name Emmeroo which was I think the one the woman who was assaulted at Twitchcon last year. So yeah like this whole world of like people in gaming chairs just yelling at each other

online the he the h3 h3 universe of kind of people i i can't even imagine the psychology of someone who would watch this um oh actually wait i did remember a stream that i watch live i enjoy the i love the i show speed tour video oh yeah i love them i think they're delightful and i think but that's that's a person outside the house it is a person outside the house and i think the ongoing bit do you know about white speed yes i've seen that i think it's like one of the funniest things I've ever seen. Basically, there's a white guy that will just appear wherever speed is and like mug him on camera and disappear. And he like has followed him to like rural Africa and the middle of China. It's it's so, it's incredible. So anyways, this is the moment where Asman

Gold starts to kind of like figure out how to create, how to change the industry of streaming. And he's leaning into what was called like the eternal sleepover style of streaming, which was like Kai Sinat and that whole crew where they like, they like, they're. get a big McMansion that's totally unfurnished and they just sort of live in it on camera for days at a time and they're also I think pulling things from e-sports which is also kind of like a another culture full of guys that I would be couched lock two smoking regs with in 2008 but now they're billionaires and like owned by Saudi petrol. Saddie petrol states yeah so um he doesn't take any of the money that he's making to make his home life better that's

What's so crazy. That's the crazy thing here. He could renovate. He could tear down the entire house and build a mansion from the ground up, but he doesn't, he won't even clean his room. And that is what like really gets me about Asmond Gold is he chooses to live in Philth. Yes. He likes it.

It's comforting to him. And yet surprisingly, that doesn't make anyone like stop. Well, it makes us stop and say like what's wrong with him. But for his audience, I'm like, don't, doesn't that make you wonder about like, can I trust him should i like value anything that he has to say like he refuses to clean his room that feels like base level like human behavior to be an adult yeah like i i can't even really watch like that show hoarders because i find i find that like displays of what i would you know say is like mental illness to be like extremely uncomfortable and exploitative to watch yeah i am not going to diagnose asma

gold with, I mean, he has to have like all kinds of different psychiatric disorders, but like, I'm not going to diagnose on, uh, on this episode what I think they are. But I will say that his mother ends up dying in 2021. He takes a hiatus for like the first time ever from streaming, but then comes back and he's just been streaming in the same room of her house and has just been there the whole time. Yeah, that's really dark. I also know like, um, Casey Tron, I think, was the person who was sort of like, well, why didn't he, with all of his like money and privilege and power, like, make his mom's living scenario a little bit better before she died. And like he and his fans got really mad at that.

Like they're like, how dare you accuse Asman Gold of killing his mom? Which I don't even think that people necessarily did. It's just like people ask questions about why he chooses to live this way. And he finds those questions really offensive. She was dealing with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in a. statement he put out in 2021. He said that she was 70 years old. She was overweight. She smoked. And she basically lived not well. If I became a billionaire from streaming all day, I would buy my mom a new house. But, you know, whatever. He has to be presenting to his audience that it's okay to live in filth and only care about video games. Otherwise, he loses all his power. But it's a catch 22 because obviously it's affecting him as well. he did open up a bit about sort of like his life after after his mom died and I think this is kind of useful insight into who he is as a person he said I can't really say when however I uh so he's asked like would he come back and he said I can't really say when however I would like to come on my alt stream Zach Rar and just kind of give my fucking opinion about things talk about stuff I'm reading online that I have to give my two cents for it's either I talk to the camera.

Oh gosh. Or I sit or I sit in front of a mirror and I almost have the conversation with myself. Ooh. He should have these conversations with a therapist.

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

And I, but I think in many ways, you know, there's lots that's been written and lots been said about sort of the American psyche being one born of isolation and loneliness, particularly the American suburbs are sort of this breeding ground for people who distrust their neighbors. You know, there's Twilight Zone episodes

going all the way back, you know, to the invention of the suburb talking about this. And I have no problem imagining that like that the new version of this sort of suburban isolation, the sort of desolation of these old factory towns that people are stuck in are full of people who are like, well, I either don't talk to any. or I talk on the internet. Right. And that's, unfortunately, for the rest of us, what Asman Gold decides to do when he comes back.

And we have broken this up into sort of categories here of what he's up to during this period. So let's first talk about his hygiene. And I'm going to try to get through this without gagging. He cleans his room in mid-2020. It gets dirty again. And he tries to clean it again. And then he basically gives up.

And then one user makes a horror video. game about Asman Gold's house. This is also the period. I'm not going to pull this link up and I'm just going to try to explain it as best I can and just get the hell out of here. This is when we get to the rat clock. Yes. I've been waiting for this moment.

Do you want to describe the rat clock? Because I don't know if I can actually get through it. I think it's one of the grossest things that ever happened, honestly. So correct me. I'm wrong, but basically, Asmond Gold tells his viewers that the way that he wakes up in the morning is he doesn't set an alarm. Yep. He, there is a dead rat in his room and it is rotting.

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

But there's one part of the tape you need to hear. As soon as it, you know, it got hot enough, it would wake me up. And then I would know, oh, shit, it's time to stream. Have you guys ever done that before? No. No one has ever done this. You're the only one. He, at this period of time, he starts buying thrift store clothes instead of doing laundry. Uh, there's rat, there's roaches all over his desk.

He ends up getting the nickname Roach King. He starts dating another young woman streamer named Case. Um, they do a stream where they sit down at a restaurant to get out of the house and so do an IRL stream. Yeah. And, um, it's really weird. Here's how one viewer describes it. Um, watching them eat at some fast food restaurant. She doesn't even look at him.

She just stares at the camera. It's so unnerving, one viewer said. Seems like very clear that probably she was dating him to maybe get kind of a boost in viewers, I think we can say. She leaves because she's disgusted by his house. He gets accused of grooming her and her possibly being underage comes into play there. He is extremely wealthy by this point and just now being pulled into random kind of drama episodes that don't really matter. and he is still claiming that he's like apolitical at this point, which I think is interesting. He's veering more and more into like edge lord territory, outwardly edd lord territory.

He's calling people the R word. He's saying that he's triggering people. And then in 2022, we get to the Depp v. Heard trial. So you have been on this show before to talk about this, but for people who haven't gone back in the archive and you absolutely should listen to that episode. But tell us a little bit about sort of Asman Gold's role in that trial. Because I think he actually kind of came away weirdly unscathed from it in a certain, like bigger than he ever had been before in a weird way. Yes. Yeah. Because so at the time of the Depp v. Heard trial, which was May 22,

there was already a big online movement that was justice for Johnny Depp. It was a, bunch of Johnny Depp fans and people who hated Amber Heard and they had already created this narrative and were pushing it on YouTube, you know, across platforms through viral videos, basically saying that Amber Heard had accused Johnny Depp of abuse, but she was actually the one abusing him. And so when Johnny Depp sued Amber Heard for defamation, the narrative that quickly took hold online was that that was his form of getting justice for him being abused. And so lots of different content creators, including people who had never covered anything remotely like this before, all started covering this at the same time from the position of that narrative and getting

millions of views from it. I remember in May 2022, like a couple weeks into the trial, I did this story for NBC News about this 15-year-old boy who had been uploading like guitar covers to YouTube and getting like 30 views. And then he uploaded a compilation of clips of Johnny Depp like, winning, like smiling, laughing, making jokes. And that got like three million views. And the same. Yes. And like when you get that many views, it unlocks a whole new door possibilities for you as a creator because now you can become monetized. Now you can, you know, profit from these things. And so Asman Gold, as most influencers did at that time, hopped onto the anti-amber herd train. And I, to familiar, like to refresh myself with the type of content

that he was doing. I watched this video on his YouTube channel today. It has over three and a half million views and it's like a compilation of him reacting to the trial. And some creators actually live streamed the trial and in its entirety and reacted to it for like eight hours a day. A lot of creators were reacting to reactions. So like Asman Gold was reacting to these like TikTok videos in part that was like someone else, probably like a 17 year old. made these like epic fail compilations of like Amber Heard and like moments where Johnny Depp appeared like funny or comedic. And Asman Gold like would sit there and react to those. And he would say like things that are very interesting to me, such as at one point he was like,

she's just not good enough at lying. Like he was basically like he gave the whole game away. He was like, I support Johnny Depp because he's funny. He's entertaining. And because he's really good at like selling this. narrative and he like many other content creators were like Amber Hurd's team sucks because even if they're right they're not like selling it to the audience which is not what a court case is supposed to be about it's not supposed to be about like how many people on Twitch are laughing or like how many

people like it's not about like a popular vote but in this case it really was yeah because ultimately as we all know the jury completely fell for the exact same stick and voted and and Johnny Depp won that case. And at the same time, you had people like Asman Gold, who were weighing in on the sidelines, who also had these transformative moments in their careers because his views and following just like skyrocketed, as did many of the creators who made content about this. And on Twitch, like, I don't know if there were any real Twitch streamers who were defending Amber Heard. Like, everyone on Twitch was commenting on this and like shitting all over Amber Heard. I mean, no. I think Twitch is not a...

How do I say this without being needlessly cruel, perhaps? Twitch has created a lot of people with massive audiences that are not particularly well-educated or articulate or smart or interesting or talented, who also have no incentive to become those things. Right. And so when they all kind of figured out in 2022 that they could attach themselves to a court trial the way they used to attach themselves to a popular video game, because that's how Twitch works, right?

I sort of talked about this in the last section, but Twitch doesn't really have a way to promote content. There's no algorithm for Twitch streams, but what it does have are silos. So like if you want to get people's attention, you could start playing a video game the day it comes out or even before it comes out if it's well hyped and then when people go to check out that video game they'll find you and that's how you grow your audience so similarly if there is a stream that everyone can attach themselves to and especially

one that solves the problem of of twitch live streams from home in particular which is that you have to have as you said have to have something happening on the screen you can't just like it's it's actually extremely taxing to just sit there for five hours with nothing happening on the screen. And you have to stream for five hours because the average stream time for most channels is like 30 seconds. Yeah. So you're like you're trying to get like thousands of people to watch you for more than 30 seconds. So there has to be stuff happening.

And yes, you end up after the Debt v. Heard trial with this like massive roster of cultural pundits that have never literally in as Mongols case gone outside. Yes. Yes. Like do not talk to other human beings. in as Mungle's own words, would be talking to a mirror if he wasn't streaming. These people do not exist in the world. And yet because of quirks of different algorithmic clipping systems and Twitch are now like the new CNN for like an entire generation of people.

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

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

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

passionate fan base and becomes from from low cow to gen z jake tapper the is mungled story more after the break but first a word from our sponsors uh mouse traps mountain do code red mountain do code red shot son mountain do code red shadow the hedgehog special edition on the bottle shadow the hedgehog is riding a motorcycle and he's got a gun. Which is a real edition of Mountain Duke Hood Red that I definitely drank in high school when they released the Shot of the Hedgehog solo game where he did have a motorcycle and a gun.

As Mom Gold is now hopped up on current events and has a big old fan base that are very interested in hearing his completely uninformed opinion about random things that happen on his screen. And this is a unfortunately perfect situation to be in in October 2024. This is one year after the October 7th attack in Israel, and he says in a random stream that Palestinians are inferior and deserve to be experiencing a genocide. He's banned for two

weeks for hate speech. He apologizes in a video that gets 8 million views titled, streaming has destroyed me. He steps back from his OTK venture and says he's going to do better in stream less. He just wish he just said stream no more. Just don't stream anymore. Just retire. But he also says that Palestinians are terrible people who have a call to genocide baked into their laws.

He says they're not the same as us. They came from an inferior culture. And that he's just a bunch of other just random racist bullshit. And this doesn't go well for him. He then apologizes even more, saying, I've slowly been devolving into the most mean-spirited, rude, nasty, callous, psychopathic version of myself. One thing this has taught me is that it's made me realize that I need to get myself in check. I need to get my mind under control. I need to just get my life.

I need to fix my fucking life. Yeah, brother, you do. He then says, streaming is my entire life, doing this is my entire existence. And I think that the process of that has been extremely unhealthy for me. And I think what it's done is that it's allowed me to become such a one-dimensional person that I'm not even a person anymore. It's like, oh, my God. It's like I'm Dark Souls.

I'm going hollow or something, which I guess is a reference to the view game. Dark Souls. You know, he almost landed it. Like he almost landed it. And then he had to go full gamer at the end. yeah and then he finishes that by saying don't worry I'll react to a DEI equals die gaming video first day back to stream I want to get your thoughts on this first because I have some thoughts as well so what are your sort of initial reactions to this just this unraveling of a human being that I just read through

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

They're the rantings and ravings of like a self-admitted like very fucked up in the head person. The problem is like people take him seriously and treat him as if he's some sort of like credible authority or even just like, I guess if you were watching Asmingold for fun and like you you acknowledged all of that about him, it would just be more sadistic on your end. But you can tell based on like how his fandom responds to him, that a lot of them still view him as like somewhat credible or serious or authoritative despite him admitting it all to their faces. It's it I totally agree with you.

And it and it shows like such a fascinating glimpse into his politics in a way as well where, you know, like, okay, if you imagine, uh, politics is an ocean and wokenness, pure perfect wokeness is above the water. The closer you, and you're underwater, and the closer you swim up, you can see like, wokeness. But then the further you go down, you like start to lose sense of like what is up and what is down. Yeah. And so for him, he like kind of understands that like he went too far by being like,

Palestinians should be exterminated. He's saying this stuff and he clearly gets that like, okay, I have, it's like he saw the fish swim up or something. He's like, okay, so that's the direction I've got to go in. But he still can't see the air. He still can't see the sky. So he's like, he's like, oh, yeah, like, I'm a really broken person. I'm completely lost.

But like when I come back, like, I'm definitely going to talk about how DEI sucks. Yeah. And for him, he probably doesn't even think of that as politics, the same way he wouldn't think about his opinions on Amber Hurst. heard being political or his opinions on black residents of New Orleans being political because he's so uninformed and so uneducated in these things and so misanthropic and paranoid and lonely that like there's no way that that information could ever enter his head even though he has a massive audience of who I have to imagine are similar similar minded people.

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

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

And I've been thinking a lot about it because there was this assumption like all of my life that like entertainment like even the worst lowest common denominator entertainment had to sort of be professionally made and aspirational. And the aspiration was to be rich and famous and and well-groomed and successful. And like that's what we were all aspiring to be. Even the worst lowest, you know, Hollywood slop of the 2000s was like that. And the idea that you sort of had to perform to a higher standard.

And then you get this wave of creative. in the 2010s and 2020s that like are just that mirror that he talks about that they are just a reflection of sort of our worst lowest impulses and people like it and I start to spin out when I think about AI because it's like there there are a lot of people that are like AI is never going to work because like people don't want slop and it's like there's a scarier answer here which is that like people's tastes are actually not good on mass and like the majority of the world would actually be quite happy watching asmen gold and flicking through like veggie family gets cooked alive AI videos if you've seen those going around or like the fat cat from china that rides a motorbike like I've been watching a lot of AI sloppy recently um speaking of bad taste but like the scarier thing is like no once you've opened pandora's box there is no incentive to go up actually if you show people the ugliest dumbest stuff, they're going to like that more because we are not high-minded as a species.

This is where I started to talk like Sephiroth from Final Fantasy, seven. You know, like, it's scary stuff. And Asmon Gold scares me. His popularity genuinely scares me because I think it's proof of that. Yeah. I mean, I feel like this is the lesson that the internet teaches us over and over and over again, which is like there's a certain generation of people who remember life before the internet who look at figures like Asmin Gold.

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

So yeah, I mean, I think that I do fear for the implications of what it means that like this type of of thing is so popular because no matter what your reasons are for watching it, that still says something bad. Right. And I don't want to check myself like our audience has made fun at Grant and I for talking about things like folk punk before on this show. But like in high school and college, like I listened to a band called Johnny Hobo and the freight trains, I think they're called. And this guy Pat the Bunny who like lived in garbage and like did heroin and smoked meth and wrote songs that sounded like they were recorded on a tid can.

And Johnny Hobo, you know, Pat the Bunny could be Asmongold. Asmogold could not be Pat the Bunny. Like the disgust, the sort of raw culture, the sort of reactionary culture even that I was interested in as a teenager, that ugly, grimy, angry, angry stuff was performative. Like, and it was performative for a point. It was trying to say something. It wasn't just like, I. I live in a freight train and I eat garbage and I have a tattooed dog and I play banjo.

It was like, these things are bad and I don't want to live like this anymore and all my friends are passing away. There was there was something to be said there. And Aspen Gold has nothing to say. Right. It's like the difference between like a John Waters film and then like actually thinking you should live like the characters in that film. Yeah. Like he's a millionaire. Yeah.

Right. He's also a millionaire and making me instrumental. Like, divine could absolutely have a rat clock. Asmund Gold could not eat actual human shit in a John Waters film. Like, that is the difference. He is an individual who has nothing to say or nothing to offer sort of popular culture, and he is unfortunately now at the center of it. And he continues to sort of Mr. Magoo his way around blindly.

God, I just wish I'd just go back in time and watch Talk to and eat lunchly. Those were the good old days. Yeah, the past is a different country, you know. The world you grew up and does not exist anymore. He loves Elon Musk until they get into a feud in January 2025 over Elon Musk's like fake Diablo play videos. That's right around the time that Elon Musk Nazi salutes starts running the Doge experiment. And Osmond Gold starts to get more. political, talking about politics more often.

He starts live reacting to Trump's state of the union and different press conferences. He has no concept of what any of these things are because he lives in the attic of a house and never leaves it. Finish my sort of rundown here with this. This is from the Atlantic, which ends up doing a profile on his rise. They write, the feeling one gets is not of watching him, but of watching with him. I sometimes felt a pangom nostalgia for middle school hangouts with friends, a specific form of communication arise. from a group of guys staring at the same screen, you murmur nonsense back and forth in knowingly Neanderthal manner. I place pretty much no values in principles or morality, he said in one stream.

I think that these are top-down ideas that are given to you by the elites. Ironically enough, the diss suggests its own ideology. Politics is in a dispute among philosophical visions for a better world or even a contest. Among constituencies for resources, it's a quest for certain humans who matter. to defeat people-shaped obstacles that don't. His hypnotized single-minded mentality from my own gaming experiences. After a certain amount of playtime,

what's on-screen stops looking like a coherent world and starts looking like inputs and outputs, challenges and rewards. And when you look up, reality feels like the scream. And now he has moved to Rumble, which is a even worse streaming platform. Yeah.

Did Charlie Warnsell write that for the alien? Probably not. It was pretty good. So whoever wrote it was, uh, no, it wasn't. It was a guy who's a Spencer cornhopper. It was good. I love you, Charlie. Um, no. So, uh, I just think, I think as when gold is a really bad guy and he makes me really depressed. Yes. It is depressing. It's depressing. It's like I feel like it's depressing not just because of the broader societal implications, but there's lots of influencer figures like this where it's like there is something actually genuinely wrong with them.

Like they are broken people for various reasons. Like I feel this way about clavicular too where it's like you have these people who are just so like profoundly in need of like care and support. And they're also incredibly rich and like have so much proximity to like power and privilege. But none of that is geared toward like making them better people or making their lives better. Like everything around them is just encouraging them to get worse and worse and worse because people want them to hit rock bottom. Like if Asman Gold does crazy stuff on stream like harms himself or others, that's what people want to see. Like the viewing of Asman Gold is kind of sadistic in itself.

And he, his ideology is obviously like murderous and like violent and wrong. So there's like no good that comes out of it. It's just so bleak. I also think just in a broader way to sort of combine metaphors here, you know, the Atlantic piece concludes with this idea that like you stare at a screen for too long and it doesn't really look like anything. But that's also true for a mirror. And that image that I keep coming back to of Asmond Gold staring at himself in the mirror and talking to himself, like if you stare at yourself in the mirror long enough, like you

no longer look like anything, you don't look like yourself. And I have to imagine that we will eventually reach a point where people are no longer interested in seeing a direct reflection of their own lives. Like, the media that we're using and consuming hasn't really been around long enough in this way for us to know. But my expectation is that, like, this can only last for so long. Yeah. I stare at Asman Gold's streams and I think that is a room that I have worked so hard to

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

It's not sustainable. It doesn't sustain your soul. It doesn't sustain your mind. It's nothing. And I just, I really hope that like the people who like his stuff eventually just like, I don't know, turn on the fucking TV.

Just like watching old sitcom. Law and order. Every episode is on some streaming platform. Go watch that or something. Like anything is better. Yeah. I look at all this. And my only conclusion is that like the pandemic just did way more harm to our brains than

I thought it did. I mean, there's just this. this type of guy influencer that has no sense of the outside world being real. It's it's a, I see it as a different subsect than, you know, like the larger manosphere. It's like a different thing, I think. I do think it's different subcultures of men. And it's like the depth be heard trial was a rare moment where a bunch of different, very

diverse subcultures like touched and intersected because that was when you saw like liberal gossip or like liberal celebrity podcasters like girls and gays were saying the same thing as like literally Andrew Tate and there are rare moments where that happens but it's not because I don't think it's because they're the same type of people it's just that like there are occasional times when you can get everyone to agree on something that's wrong and like that was the Deppard trial yeah like they have they have similar values but like Asmongold is much closer to you know like those jabs Japanese soldiers like didn't know World War II was over. Yeah.

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

It really depresses me to people watch this stuff. Like it, it honestly like makes me really upset. All right. Well, unlike normal episodes where we depressed the guest, I have depressed myself, actually. I am in a very dark spot mentally, and I'm going to go recover. Kat, I want to thank you for coming on the show. This was delightful. Thank you for having me. If people want to follow you on the internet, where can they do that? You can follow me at www.spitfirenews.com. That is my newsletter. I write about this stuff a lot.

I've also been making videos for Currier. So if you subscribe to Currier on YouTube, you'll see me there. And otherwise, I'm mainly on Blue Sky where no one's ever heard of Asmond Gold, ever. The minute people on Blue Sky hear about Asmengold, they will actually kill themselves and delete the website. And they're kind of right. Like if the median age 45-year-old blue sky user discovered Asman Gold, they would actually jump out of window. Like there's no, they'd be like, it's done, it's over. Yeah.

Panic Whirl is a production of Courier. It is written and produced by Grant Irving and hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Josh Fielstead is our production coordinator and our amazing researcher is Adam Bumis. From Courier is Shane Verkes, who edits our video episodes along with our producer, Kevin Maroni and National Managing Director and Executive producer Kevin Dreyfus. R.C. DeMezzo is their VP of Brand and Social, Charlotte Robinson, is their deputy director of brand and social. Marianne Couga is their director of marketing,

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