Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - Inside the most toxic live-streaming platform + NATO influencers

Episode Date: July 11, 2024

Kick, a is home to some of the most reprehensible behavior on the internet. Creators have live-streamed themselves accosting people on the street, sexually harassing minors, even getting into hit-and-run car accidents. Taylor Lorenz talks to J. Aubrey, who documents some of the Internet’s worst people, about Kick’s race to the bottom.Plus, Taylor breaks down her recent reporting on influencers in politics. NATO and the State Department invited content creators to this year’s summit in Washington, DC. And in Utah, the first full-time content creator is running for Senate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week, NATO is bringing dozens of influencers to meet with some of the most powerful figures in D.C. The first full-time content creator is running for U.S. Senate and trying to get election rules changed. At our main topic, Jay Aubrey breaks down the terrible behavior enabled by live streaming Twitch competitor, Kik. I'm Taylor Lorenz, and that's all coming up next on Power User. Hey, Zach, how was your Fourth of July? Hello, it was great. I spent it in Portugal, so not in America. How was yours? I did nothing. I went over to a friend's barbecue and then the Sunday of 4th of July weekend

I spent the day at the new Christian Content Creator House in L.A. What are they up to at the Christian Content Creator House? Making videos for the Lord. I spoke to a bunch of them. I'm writing a story about it, I think eventually. Okay. But yeah, basically it's a bunch of, you know, extremely Christian content creators that want to get together and collab for Jesus. Amazing. I hope they're TikToking in tongues. Yeah. Other stuff I've been working on, this week, NATO brought dozens of influencers to Washington, D.C.,

to meet with some of the most powerful officials there. The State Department and Department of Defense also brought a bunch of content creators. They're all in town this week for the big NATO summit and 75th anniversary of NATO. This year, NATO is hosting its summit right here in Washington, D.C., home with the U.S. Congress, and the White House. And what are they doing? Well, they're meeting with a lot of high-profile people. They were at the White House.

A bunch of them interviewed Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, and they're meeting with other sort of high-profile NATO officials to hopefully help NATO reach younger audiences. I talked to a bunch of international relations experts, and they were saying, basically, America's become increasingly isolationists. Young people don't really care about NATO or our foreign policy or think that, rightfully, we've had kind of disastrous foreign policy

over the past few decades. So this is sort of an effort for NATO to rehab its image. Cool. And you wrote another story as well. You've been busy this week. Yeah, I wrote about Caroline Gleck, who is a Utah Senate candidate. She's actually running as a Democrat for Mitt Romney's seat in Utah. She is the first full-time content creator to run for U.S. federal office. So she's trying to get a bunch of campaign finance rules changed. Basically, the way that a lot of these FEC rules are structured is not really conducive to the career of an influencer. For instance, taking a salary from the campaign, it's like mostly calculated off people that have full-time income or own their own business or have like a steady paycheck. So

it's also kind of unclear whether or not she can do sponsored content in the blackout period up to the campaign. There's this 90-day period where you're not supposed to have appear in any commercial advertisements if you're a federal candidate for office. So she's hoping that the FEC will issue this advisory opinion in the next week or so clarifying these rules and hopefully making it so influencers can more easily run for federal office. Also, her latest bill will be brought to you by me undies. Yeah, exactly, right. So how do you feel about this? You're probably pro creators, right? I'm assuming. I think that this is a major job, and I don't think that people who have this sort of untraditional work should be shut out of public office. I think actually

would be pretty beneficial to have people that understand these platforms in Congress. I mean, even just to have one senator that knows how to turn on a computer would be huge. too, I think, for the country. Also, just to advise on tech legislation, we keep seeing these horrible congressional hearings where senators are asking, you know, like, do you condemn Finsta and sort of like how, you know, falling for dumb TikTok challenges? So I think having someone with basic digital literacy could be really helpful and maybe craft some labor protections for this half a trillion dollar industry that's completely unregulated. I think it'll be interesting to see how the FVC kind of navigates all of this. It's such a, it's sort of, it's sort of,

of such a new realm. And I think there's just a lot to be clarified. Yeah. I don't know if you saw this, Zach, but the YouTuber Logan Paul is suing other YouTuber and investigative journalist Coffee KZilla for defamation. Coffee Zilla has done, I would say, some of the best coverage of crypto scams out there, and whether you're looking at the traditional media or just on YouTube. This man has done just incredible investigative work. And specifically around some of Logan Paul's crypto endeavors, like this thing called Crypto Zoo, that would supposedly feature virtual eggs that hatch into virtual characters that could breed with other virtual characters and somehow be worth crypto.

Today, we're investigating Logan Paul's Crypto Zoo, a blockchain game that made millions, but never worked. Some of you guys think you know the story, but it goes so much deeper. I've uncovered sociopaths, billionaires, fake orphans. So CoffeeZilla made several videos, basically alleging that this project was a scam. Logan Paul promised to refund everyone's money, and the two of them have been going back and forth on all of this. And now Logan Paul has filed a defamation claim against Coffeezilla?

Yeah, exactly. You're always talking about the important of journalism and institutions that back journalism, a thing that comes up all the time when you're doing investigative journalism, are lawsuits, right? You, of all people, you get sued all the time. But you, Taylor Lawrence, aren't the one getting sued. Now it's the Washington Post who has your back because they have a whole legal team. Well, they're suing me, but the Washington Post or the New York Times or other places that I've worked will defend you and cover your legal issues.

I don't know what CoffeeZilla's situation is. It's probably way different because he's not part of this like a larger journalistic institution. So this is all to say why we need journalistic institutions because if everyone is just doing it solo, they're just going to get sued out of the. business, right? You can sue someone for anything. So it's how powerful people silence less powerful people usually through suing them. Yeah, 100%. I mean, literally deal with that on a regular basis as a journalist. And like you said, these lawsuits can be totally baseless. But I think it's up to this person not to defend himself. Also, I just think the work that Coffee Zilla has done has just been incredible. Like every mainstream crypto journalist knows who.

he is and knows that he's one of the best investigative journalists on YouTube. So I think it's worrying that we're seeing a lawsuit against him already. I agree. More Twitch streamer news this week is that Sketch, who's a content creator who became really famous for playing Madden, was the subject of, I would call a smearer or hate campaign. It came out that he had an only fan's account a few years ago. And images of him having sex with men were leaked. This set off the worst homophobic attacks that I've seen on the internet in a while. It was disgusting what people were doing and saying about him. I was really heartened to see big content creators come to his defense. Sketch even said that Faye's Banks really helped him and it's part of the reason he's still alive.

I saw Hassan come out in support of him. I just think this guy does not deserve any hate. I'm 100% team sketch on this situation. It's just horrible to see this level of homophobia. as a fan of hip-hop I am so used to this kind of stuff anytime it's revealed that a rapper is gay you see a lot of the same kind of stuff I actually didn't know this Twitch streamer but yeah

especially he's playing a football game Madden so I just imagine the fans of his who are watching him play a football game are I mean obviously there's so much homophobia still ingrained in the sports world and the e-sports world but also just Twitch generally

like Twitch culture I think it's really disappointing So I was really happy to see, like I said, those big creators coming out and supporting him. And also it just breaks my heart that he felt so bad or like this is something that he needs to be ashamed of. I would hope that we could live in a world where it's not a gotcha to say that you have an only fan's or you're gay. Right. You know, those are two completely fine things that people can engage in, especially content creators. Yeah, it just broke my heart.

And I think it's important to just remember how much homophobia is ingrained in the live streaming community. Yeah, I hope he's okay. Another article about social media that was getting tons of traction this week was this big New York Times piece that came out by Natasha Singer about a group of kids bullying their teachers through basically making fake accounts of them on TikTok and pretending that they were pedophiles, smearing them, all of this stuff. These were all middle school students in a pretty affluent Philadelphia suburb. And this all blew up in their face. They got in trouble. They had to take down these 20 or so accounts where they were impersonating the teachers. And hundreds of students interacted with this content before the perpetrator. were suspended. Teachers in the New York Times article were talking about how demoralizing and hard this is and how they shouldn't have to deal with this stuff on top of the classrooms. I had kind of mixed feelings about this piece. First of all, I think Natasha Singer is one of the best journalist working today. So it was an expertly reported piece. What I wished that she included a little bit more of is just the broader content. Like, this is not a TikTok problem.

Yeah. Have you ever met a middle schooler? They are mean as shit. They are so mean. This is not a story about social media. This is a story about middle schoolers being mean. If I had access to these tools in middle school, I probably would have done something similar, right? Because that's just where you are at that age. But I mean, the problem is they do have access to these highly powerful tools that we just, we didn't used to, right? But there was always like, you know, rumors about teachers that middle schoolers would be spreading. It's just now we have social media and smartphones and you can just kind of supercharge it in a way that you even evidence that this did spread. I think actually because it was on TikTok, it seems like it was found out

sooner because it's sort of like public and enough people had interacted with it. I mean, I'm thinking of yikyak. Do you remember yikyak, the anonymous? A few years back. Teachers, I mean, there was so much vicious slander on there about teachers. When I was in college, we had a Facebook page for one of our professors that somebody ran that was this like a group page people contributed to making fun of him, posting things about him that were, I mean, in retrospect, pretty defamatory. It was mostly like wholesome making, fun of him, but I think young people, especially middle school age, they have no concept of consequences or, you know, how stuff like this affects people's lives. So I just think, I think the

technology is going to change. I mean, we could see AI deep fakes of teachers soon enough, you know, so I think rather than focusing on TikTok, TikTok, you know, is the problem. And not to say that that's what Natasha did, but that's kind of like how a lot of people were taking it, I think we need to fix the problem. And I also don't agree with people that were just like, oh, this is, it's just let kids be kids. It's like, okay, let kids be kids, but this is totally unacceptable behavior. Completely. Yeah, to me, it's kids being mean and then the technology that allows them to be mean, and you put those two things together, and it's explosive. But yeah, I don't think it's specifically TikTok. You could easily use 10 other things to be shitty. Yeah, and that's what I worry. And I just also worry

that the way that the article is being taken, especially by people like Jonathan Haidt, my nemesis, is like this is the reason to ban technology, ban smartphones. Like, okay, ban smartphones in school, sure. You know, I mean, there's reasons why people don't want to do that. And I think actually it's worth a discussion of sort of the benefits versus the cost. But either way, kids are probably doing this at home at night, right? Or like on their iPad or out of school. Like banning tech use in school or at home, it doesn't always even stop this type of stuff.

And I think that we need to also recognize how technology is evolving. Anyway, I hope these kids grow up and think about what they've done. That sounds very boomer, but... Yeah, I need a thousand-word essay on my desk by tomorrow. Make them make a TikTok, an apology TikTok. Another thing I think it's important to note is that kids take cues from the adults around them. And I think, especially since the pandemic started, just in the past few years, we've just seen this erosion of empathy.

And I know a lot of people like to blame it on social media. But I feel like we live in this hyper-individualistic, hyper-capitalist society that sort of prioritizes, you know, pulling yourself off by bootstraps and never relying on anyone, never caring about anyone. And I just think if we lived in a more interconnected, empathetic world, and if the adults who are raising these kids showed more empathy, taught their kids empathy, we wouldn't end up in situations like this. After the break, we'll talk about the bad behavior happening on kick and what it means for the rest of the internet. The people in charge of platforms like Twitter, Rumble, and Truth Social all say that they're champions of the same ideal.

I think it's very important for an inclusive arena for free speech. When it comes to fighting for free expression, Rumble is the tip of the spear. We're not woke. People that are betting on America, betting on free speech, are going to invest with us. One of the newest platforms positioning itself as a bastion of free speech is the live streaming app Kik. It was founded in 2022, and its lax content moderation has attracted a slew of creators booted off its primary competitor, Twitch. Since then, KikStreamer. have streamed themselves accosting people on the street, sexually harassing minors, and even

fleeing the scene of a car accident. One of Kicks' own founders, the streamer Trainwrex TV, summed it up like this. If we create a platform that allows people to be more free and everyone takes that freedom and does heinous, disgusting in the name of clout, that's why we are where we are today. My guest is a content creator who documents these horrible people, Jonathan Aubrey, known as Jay Aubrey on YouTube has more than 1.2 million subscribers. He recently published a two-and-a-half-hour long documentary called The Endless Depravity of Kick, the Worst Streamers of All Time. Hi, Jonathan. Welcome to Power User. Hi, thank you so much for having me. All right. So I want to dive deep into one of the worst streaming

platforms of all time today. Tell, for people who aren't familiar, what is Kick? Oh my God. That's such a loaded question. It's basically, it's an alternative to Twitch. It's kind of, how I would describe it best, that was launched end of 2022 by Twitch streamer by the name of Trainor X TV. And Ed Craven was the other, one of the other co-founders. You know, also happens to be the founder of Steak, which is an online crypto casino that is basically the financial backing that Kik receives. That's the reason why Kik is able to be what it is. And the whole reason it even became a thing in the first place was because Twitch decided to ban unregulated crypto gambling on their sites. And so Train decided, well, I'm being paid so well

by these companies. I don't want to lose that. So I'm just going to go ahead and make my own platform where I can continue doing that. And that's basically how kick started. And they also have definitely leaned into the, you know, we're the free speech platform. You know, no cancel culture over here. You can do and say whatever you want. And that's where a lot of the problems come from. I think. So we'll get into all of those problems. I mean, I feel like one other way Twitch has been able to cleave off talent is with its revenue splits. Yes. It has a much friendlier revenue split than Twitch.

I think Twitch takes 40%. Is that right? I think so. Yeah. And Kicks takes something like 5% of the revenue earned per stream. Yeah. It's like 9.5% goes to the creator, which is like in any other circumstance. I mean, that is great.

And even in the circumstance of Kik, I mean, that is life-changing money for like a small streamer. I don't entirely blame every streamer that goes over there. Like, if you really want to make it in the industry, that can really help you go full time. And so it's just very alluring. But then at the same time, you're having to exist on this platform with all these other people. They give it such a bad name. It's been called a playground for degenerates. I saw that.

I saw that article. Just broadly, what makes the content on kick so significantly worse than what's on Twitch? I think it's really just that it's so, it's basically impossible to do IRL streaming in the way that Ice Poseidon used to do, like on Twitch. You can't do that on Twitch anymore. IRL streams are basically real life streams, quote unquote real life. You're streaming out in the real world rather than behind your desktop computer. Explain who Ice Poseidon is for people who don't know. So he was like the guy who pioneered IRS streaming years and years and years ago. And he is currently banned from Twitch. And so he streams on Kik. And Kik is, where you can make the most money. If you have a big enough audience, you can get a very good deal over there. So that's truly the, it's sort of the natural place for a lot of these people to go because they know that they can get away with so much more over there. Eddie congratulated suspendous on his wedding. Let's get into suspendous in a minute because we have to explain who these people are.

But to me, kick feels, are you familiar with the platform, D-Live? Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Kick feels like kind of a spiritual successor to D-Live. I wrote about D-Live a bunch around January. It's how a bunch of live streamers that day were monetizing their live streams as they were storming the capital. And it seems to track these people that, yeah, have either been de-platformed from

Twitch, want to be crazy, and ultimately just want to make money really quickly by sort of being as extreme as possible. Yes. Yeah, exactly. Okay, let's run through some of the kick main characters. I feel like the most famous kick streamer is Aidan Ross. He's one of the biggest

creators on the platform with 1.2 million followers. Tell me a little bit about this man. So Aiden Ross began as a Twitch streamer. He was like one of the biggest streamers on Twitch and had some of the biggest streams of all time over there in 2022 when he hosted Andrew Tate. I'm sure you remember that. It was huge. She's like over 100,000 people watching at one time. A lot of people think that you are a misogynistic person. I don't think you are, Mr. Tate. But when I said I was going to do the stream with you, I got backlash for it, but I didn't really give a fuck. I highlight the differences between men and women.

Does that make me a misogynist? I don't think so. It got to a point where he was just getting banned so frequently that he decided that he had had enough. And so he, he's like one of the reasons that Kick sort of has such a reputation of like, well, we'll just kind of allow anything because the second he goes over there, he streams the Super Bowl to, you know, thousands and thousands of people, which is illegal. And then he also showed porn to most, to his audience, which are mostly children, you know. So that kind of right off the bat gave Kik.

a pretty bad reputation. Wait, the game's on? We can watch it. Pull up porn. Yeah, yeah. Should we just once? Y'all want to see porn? We can go to Megal.

I can prank phone calls on right now. I don't give a fuck. Bro, this is amazing, bro. Yeah, he's also had a bunch of weird sexual conversations with minors. Yeah, yeah. He's done that too. Yeah. I feel like he's in the Andrew Tate extended universe of people where, like, he's this, like,

Andrew Tate acolyte and, like, defender and kind of glombed on to Andrew Tate's popularity, really early? Yes, yes. Yeah, he pretty much, he saw the clout that Andrew Tait was getting and the clout that he was getting Aiden Ross, you know, by proxy. And he was just like, yeah, I could dip into this, you know, and that's, he has no incentive to not, you know, because that's what gets him the most attention. So there's another character on there called Neon. He's a pretty popular streamer as well. I think he's 19, maybe 20 now. Famously kind of got into this car accident and fled the scene. Tell us a little bit about him and how he became so popular.

So Neon is another one. Almost all of these people started off on other platforms. That's another interesting thing. No one's really grown organically on kick. But Neon started off on YouTube when he was super young, making these like, you know, Fortnite videos, prank videos when he was like 11 or 12. And he pretended to fake his own death by saying he had, you know, brain tumor. That was a wild moment.

Cloudfeen, I love the numbers. So I was doing dumb shit. I don't understand. Man, I faking my number. death, bro. So I had a fake cousin. I had a fake brother and then I told him to tell everyone that I died. I think from that early age, he saw how much attention he could get from being this provocative character. And then at the beginning of 2023, he came back and decided that he was going to be a very, you know, an Aidan Ross, Andrew Tate, Sneako type character who also idolizes Andrew Tate.

And that's what he's tried to do. And again, the best place to do that with little to know overhead would be kick. And so he just kind of ended up on kick. I feel like he is a cautionary tale for parents of like what happens when you let your child just become brain-rotted by the internet at too young of an age. Yeah. There should have been some kind of like regulation. It's almost like Mr. Beast like too. Like I mean, Mr. Beast in the earliest days was like really just trying anything. Like he was very birthed out of that same like YouTube prank culture. And of course he went into like making children's entertainment and game show stuff.

but, like, I feel like neon kind of went into opposite direction where he almost got more extreme. Yeah, yeah, he has. And I honestly just think it's because he, he doesn't care if the attention he gets is, like, positive or negative. He doesn't really care about having, like, a legacy or, like, uplifting people's lives or, like, just making content that people care about, like Mr. Beast does. He just wants to be talked about. He wants to be relevant. And so if he can get that, he can get it easier when it's, like, negative, when he can just do whatever stupid thing he thinks of. And then it's like, okay, now I have the attention that I've been craving, you know. And I don't think that any of these streamers can be successfully, like, canceled necessarily either because I think they're, they thrive on controversy and their audiences, like, love that they lean into that. I've heard Hassan Piker refer to this as like a layer of like grime protection because it's like if you are so grimy, then it's like people, yeah, nobody's really going to bat an eye. But if your, if your reputation is squeaky clean, then it's a much bigger deal. And it's going to be harder or, you know, maybe. be impossible for you to recover from it. I feel like so much, I mean, when you look at this landscape of terrible kick content, first of all, so many of these awful streamers are young men and they're

hyper, hyper misogynistic young men. And they're essentially going around just harassing women or harassing people, whether it's on live streams, like monkey, whether it's in person. I mean, you had a lot of great clips of this in your video, but like these people just running up to random people on the street, harassing service workers. Here you can see suspendous with slightly homeless another streamer harassing the locals in other countries. This is kind of what they're known to do, but this clip in particular garnered a high level of infamy when after they get rejected by a random girl

they just walked up to on the street, they go on to ask if she's for sale. How can this platform ever be considered legitimate when the core sort of content genres on there are so reprehensible? I don't think that it will be considered legitimate, you know? I mean, for a while. I mean, it's, I've kind of thought that like,

kick is kind of putting themselves in a really bad place for themselves because it's like they want to continue and grow. And in order to do that, they are going to have to crack down on these liabilities. But then at the same time, once they start doing that, the original core audience that they had originally pandered to is going to start seeing them less and less as like the free speech alternative that they came to them for. I've already seen people say on Twitter like, oh, Kik's not the real free speech place. You've got to go to Rumble for that. Kicks gone woke. Yeah, yeah, literally. Yeah, just for banning people that have, you know, committed crimes. It's crazy.

I think in the past few years, we've seen this alternative, like, almost mirror image social ecosystem on the right, where you have, like, the mainstream social platforms, which are increasingly cracking down on content, and then you have these, quote, unquote, free speech platforms. And they sort of like to pretend that they're ultimately free speech, but then you see a lot of them backtrack, right? I mean, even Rumble, like, they have community guidelines. And I feel like they all desperately want to be. seen as more mainstream, but as you mentioned, they're in this catch-22 with the audience that they've cultivated. Exactly. I think it's really just a, it's like you think that you can, you know,

you see problems with like YouTube and Twitch maybe like over-moderating in some areas. And so they're like, well, I'm just going to create something new. And then once they do that and they, and it's like the Wild West, then you have people like suspend us and Derek Graz and all these horrible people that come over and it's like, hang on a second, you know, like it's like, it's basically a slow process of realizing why YouTube and Twitch as flawed as they may be, were the way that they were. You know what I mean? So it's, it's just, I don't know. It reminds me of when Elon took over Twitter and there was that famous tweet that was like, he's just going to like backtrack his way into realizing that like he has to implement

all of the same things that his predecessors had. It was actually run by business people, not a bunch of like woke whatever. Yes. That's exactly what it is. But you know what these platforms do offer is revenue streams? And they are, they actually offer a lot better terms for content creators, which I think is interesting. So I think the mainstream social platforms, like, they hate sharing revenue with their kind of, like they do not want the creators to monetize. They want to keep all their ad revenue for themselves. And on the right, there seems to these platforms that have better terms. Obviously, that's how they lure talent away. But I do think it kind of, I mean, I wish that it pressured the mainstream platforms to give better terms. I don't think it necessarily has.

No, and I think the reason for that is like, kick is so bad that it's like, if they were actually like kind of a legitimate platform, maybe that would incentivize Twitch to actually start paying people better, you know? Yeah. When people hear about KIC, right, they might just be like, okay, well, this is just an internet cesspool. You know, it has no impact. Why should anyone care about it? Why do you think it's important to pay attention to this platform and cover it? I do think that kick is kind of on a downtrend. And I think even the creators have admitted that themselves. But, you know, they're hard to ignore it when they're assigning people like XQC for $100 million reportedly. That's more than like some of the top athletes make. But I mean, there's so many

competitors, right, that like come up, especially that have tried to come up against Twitch. What is it, Mixer? Mixer, yeah. Like, Mixer, this other platform at one point played millions of dollars to Ninja, another big Twitch streamer and then went out of business. And then Ninja, I think, went back to Twitch. But I do, I think that even though, even when they fail, I mean, truth social is another good example of like one of these like alternative social platforms that's largely a failure, I would say, I think they still shift online culture in kind of a dangerous way. And you see a lot of this kick content propagated on other platforms, right? Like Twitter. Yeah. Well, their entire accounts on Twitter where it's like kick clips, you know, and like every day they'll post like five

clips of some random streamers that you've never heard of that maybe have like 17 live viewers at a time on kick, you know, that will then get thousands and hundreds of thousands in some cases of views. So, yeah, I mean, it just kind of has this ripple effect where, although not many people may see it on kick, so many people see it on Twitter, because Elon really doesn't, he doesn't crack down in anything like that. Well, I think the extreme clips that they post, that they repost, it's like, it's made for sort of like short form outrage content, whether you're like one of these like little boys that's

a fan of these people and you're like, yeah, you know, screw that lady at the restaurant. Yeah, own that Walmart employee. Yeah. Or you're just like outraged by it, in which case it gets comments and engagement and ultimately fame. It gets talked about by other YouTubers, you know? But it's like, what's the alternative, like, not talking about it? Like, it's so hard because it's like, it's so hard to ignore because every day, I mean, you're seeing something else about some idiot kick streamer doing something insane. I don't know if you saw this.

There was a kick streamer that lit a bunch of fireworks next to a sleeping homeless person. And that guy, I just checked, he still has his kick, you know? It's like, because it didn't get enough attention. Not enough people talked about it. There's like one tweet about it, one or two tweets that don't have the most attention. He's just going to keep doing stupid stuff, you know, because it's like maybe that didn't get enough cloud. So he's going to make something else that gets more cloud, you know.

And that's all it is. It's just a race to the bottom over there. Yeah. Yeah. And who are the people that are watching this content? Like, what is the demographics? I don't really. I mean, I would have to imagine because I haven't like, like, look.

That's the other thing. Kik is very like gatekeeping about their demographic, about their like, you know, data and stuff and who all you how many people use the site um i don't really know but i would have to imagine it couldn't be anybody older than like 15 you know 16 probably late teens like you touched on like um younger men who are just kind of like lacking in any type of direction like they don't really have any purpose they feel like um and so they just kind of turn to this kind of content and um they yeah i think it's funny i don't know yeah i think it's like 11 and 12 year old boys yeah yeah maybe 13 i guess if they're old enough to be pretty young

It's got to be pretty young. Because they're watching 19 and 20 year old. Like so many of the kick streamers themselves are children almost. Exactly. Yeah, that's a good point. So it's like children farming outrage content for other children. That's a pretty bleak sentence right there. Yeah, yeah, that's true.

I guess I wonder kind of like where it does go from here. Can it become more mainstream? What happens if kick shuts down? What happens to all these people? What other platforms do you think that they'll, you think it's just going to be a. big win for Rumble. No, I think there's probably going to be, I mean, who knows? Because it feels like every few years, there's a new one that pops up. So it's like there could be maybe like by

2027, 2028, there could be a brand new like platform that we don't even know about yet that is basically the new kick, you know, like I just feel like that's going to keep happening. I think live streaming in general is becoming more and more pervasive, like as a content format. Yeah, yeah. What will be Kicks' ultimate legacy? I think you kind of touched on it earlier where you said that it kind of, it speaks to a whole new like shift online where it's like this kind of content is becoming more accessible and more normalized across all different platforms because even even though they might not be on YouTube, people will talk about it on YouTube. It will get re-uploaded to YouTube. It will get a ton of attention across YouTube. Twitch, people that react to it over there. TikTok where clips are posted there.

Twitter, where that's another place where it can get millions of hits. So it might happen on KIC. Not a whole lot of people might see it on KIC as it's happening live, but millions and millions of people will see it everywhere else. And that does kind of create a shift in the culture and it kind of

desensitizes people to the insane things that they can see. And it also, it does normalize it where it's Like, if Aiden Ross does something crazy, you're not as shocked by it anymore because he's been doing it forever and ever and ever. I don't know. Yeah, it does. It does kind of usher in this new wave of internet culture that I haven't really seen since 2016. It's really shifting back in that direction. I wasn't expecting it. You know, and the way that it's happened has been very interesting to watch and also depressing. But, yeah. Ultimately, it's very dark. But I think it is really back to like prank culture, 20th. which is also kind of what like the earliest internet thrived on there was tons of beheading videos and gore and crazy stuff and you would sort of see extreme stuff but yeah i feel like we have reverted

and it's it's pretty bad i think the internet is such a mix of content these days that there's no one isolated platform like it's easy to be like oh well that's just happening over there and it's like but that's not how the internet works everything bleeds into each other and yes these people are all part of the broader influencer ecosystem. These people are also at Hollywood parties with like mainstream content creators. And as long as you can wield attention, there are going to be athletes, music artists, anybody, market brands that want to reach that audience. Absolutely. Absolutely. If the numbers are there, then yeah, everything else is going to fall into place for them. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, thank you so much for joining me today and breaking all of

this down. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. It's been great. That's the show. You can watch full on my YouTube channel, Taylor Lorenz. Power User is produced by Travis Larchick and Jelani Carter. Our video editor is Brandon Kiefer. Our executive producers are Zach Mack and Ashok Kerwa. Power User is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. If you like the show, give us a rating and review on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen. We'll be back next week for another episode of Power User.

See you then.