Gen Z Influencer Gives MACHETES & BOOZE To Homeless, Social Media PSYCHOSIS Is Here
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A series of viral videos captured the attention of the press.
A man was giving out machetes, fireball cigarettes to the homeless.
We have now seen videos popping up of homeless people angrily swinging machetes walking down the street.
And why did this man do it?
Because he is desperate for you to know who he is.
He doesn't care about doing something good.
He cares about eyeballs because in the influence economy, capturing attention is all that matters.
And this man has gotten millions of views by doing this.
Now, it does appear that TikTok has begun to remove many of these videos.
And on YouTube and Instagram, there's not really much viewership at all.
But these TikTok videos, they hit the millions.
And when questioned, he said, so what?
You got to do it to get the views.
There is a sliding scale from mass shooter to, I don't know, influencer vlogger.
And that is, there are people online that genuinely have something they're passionate about, something they want to say.
I don't put them in the scale.
That is, if you're a chess player and you make chess videos because you like talking about chess.
Me, I like talking about news.
Some things I talk about don't get as many views as something else.
And there's certainly ways to improve your viewership.
But then there are people who are desperate for attention.
And so they will make shock content to various degrees.
Some people who engage in the utmost violence do it because they are desperate for recognition.
Will anyone ever remember who they were?
Then you have people like this that fall somewhere in between, creating very serious social problems because he knows it's shocking.
Got to get attention.
This phenomenon has been going on for about 10 plus years, since the dawn of social media, to be completely honest.
People used to do these prank videos where they dress up like killer clowns and jump out and lunge at people.
And they'd make a lot of money from it.
There were people who would go into black neighborhoods and throw racial slurs around and secretly film it.
There are viral videos where people go to casinos, throw fake money on the ground, and then get into fights with people.
I don't mean like physical fights, because it's shock content.
What we are looking at is a very similar component.
It is the other side of the coin to what we see with the rise of the woke cult.
And that is what you experience online and your worldview is a component of who you already are.
So you will become more, you'll become more extreme in whatever it is you're already doing.
What we end up seeing is liberals who hold this neoliberal, neoconservative worldview, and we say liberal now in the modern political context, believe the craziest things.
They think that Donald Trump called Nazis fine people.
He never did.
They believe these things because videos emerged that played to their expectations, that made these media companies money, and then drove these people to a world of insanity and has created a political conflict.
But what happens if you're a young person growing up in this world and you don't actually have a moral worldview because you're a very young person or you have a limited moral worldview?
Well, you fall into radicalization, various cult sex or otherwise, or you become like this and go hand out machetes because the only thing that matters is that people see your face.
And this is where we currently are.
Now, there's a bunch of other trends that we've seen emerge that have resulted in young people getting hurt.
We have seen the trend of quitting your job go viral because people get views from quitting their jobs.
It is making us insane.
But my friends, there is a light at the end of the tunnel.
Another big trend that's happening now is Gen Z is just logging off.
They're getting offline.
And there's more and more reports talking about it, which is very interesting.
And people are starting to recognize these views, they are all fake.
I actually tend to believe that most of the top personalities have fake views.
And Twitch is getting called out very heavily for it because people are paying for bots.
They're paying tens of thousands of dollars so they can just claim to the press they're the biggest streamer.
If you're rich, why not?
You only need a little bit of action on your stream.
You buy the rest, and there you go.
So let me just say it like this.
As we get to this story and break down exactly what's going on, and I'll show you these videos.
I would like to throw one thing your way, my friends.
There are many funny memes about Timcast and Tim Pool money that my friends have made, people you may know.
Seamus Coglin made a promo for his show, Freedom Tunes, where he says, we don't have Tim Pool money.
Jeremy Hambley made a similar joke about how he was raising money to go to MFest saying, we don't have Tim Pool money.
I'm not doing that to humble brag.
I'm doing it to make a point.
Timcast IRO averages between YouTube and Rumble around 40,000 concurrent viewers.
All legitimate, all real people.
I just make videos, got millions of subs.
There are other popular streamers who have comparable live viewership or better, but for some reason, don't have nearly as much money.
Why?
Well, these accounts are spending the money they make to make it look like they're big.
Whereas for us, we are just actually as big as we are.
And we sell ads and we make money and we use it to launch skate events and to build studios.
Interesting, isn't it?
You see, the reality is the internet's largely fake and everyone's desperate to claim they have merit, even when they don't.
Fake it till you make it to an extreme degree.
So let's start here with who this influencer is and why he's giving out machetes.
And then we'll look at more.
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But let's get to the news.
And we'll start by actually showing you what this guy was doing.
If the only thing he did was lay out cigarettes and fireball, I would be laughing.
And then he kicked it over and said, I'm not giving people booze and cigarettes.
That'd be really funny.
Nah, he actually goes and does it.
This is messed up, dude.
Seriously, sick stuff.
This dude should be banned from every platform.
Look, it's one thing if there's political speech that you don't like, you're allowed to express your opinions.
It's another thing when you are giving out booze, cigarettes, and weapons to people for clout.
I think we should absolutely ban this stuff.
This is not free speech.
This is this is, look at this.
Nah, I mean, I think it's fair to say these people are all over 18.
But clearly, these are not people he should.
It's wild, dude.
This dude is sick in the head.
The New York Post reports, a wannabe social media influencer went viral this week when he handed out 18-inch machetes and booze to homeless people.
Keith Castillo, who goes by POV Wolfie, posted the video on Thanksgiving on TikTok, and he garnered more than 14 million views.
I got to be honest, I was on Instagram and it recommended this video to me.
Here, you want one of these?
Hell yeah, man.
Looks like TikTok has deleted it.
A caption reads, keeping the homeless in the streets, apparently mocking the plight of those without a place to call their own.
The stainless steel Gordon brand machetes were still wrapped in packaging.
Castillo told the post he purchased them in bulk from online retailer Harbor Freight for less than five bucks each.
In another video posted on November 2nd, Castillo hands out four unwrapped machetes alongside handles of vodka, handles, to people on an unidentified big easy backroad.
In a November 20th post, the influencer distributed seven machetes that he termed a big-ass swords, in which he claimed it's an effort to keep the homeless folks safe.
Keeping them safe, no, making them dangerous, yes.
The 29-year-old told the post he was on a nationwide tour, which began in October, and is currently in Little Rock, where he once again is handing out alcohol and machetes.
I have like 30 machetes in my car right now.
Dude, they're cheap.
I travel around, bulk record in one day, and then for my safety, go to another city, do the same thing there for like two weeks and kind of travel around.
So far, he's armed homeless folks in Austin, New Orleans, and Little Rock, but he has his sites on larger skylines.
He said, I have plans to go to Vegas, Skid Row.
I should be in New York in January.
The Corpus Christi Texas Native said people said he spoke to the police about handing out machetes and was assured he wasn't doing anything illegal.
Castillo also doesn't think he's doing anything immoral and believes homeless will not use the blades to hurt him or anyone or else or anyone else.
These are for like tool purposes.
They have zero intent for what people are claiming they want to do.
There's already videos popping up where someone filmed a homeless guy walking on the street, swinging a machete and just pointing and screaming at people.
This dude is insane and should be banned.
He expressed no second thoughts on handing out alcohol to potential substance abusers.
He says, honestly, I really don't care, bro.
It's good for the clicks and the views, you know.
Got to do what we have to do so we eat.
Sounds like a cocktail for disaster.
Alcohol and machetes.
Could we get any dumber?
It's a retired NYPD sergeant and John Jay College of Criminal Justice Professor, Joseph Gia Cologne.
Indeed, my friends.
Well, you take a look at where he was, and he had 3.9 million views in the Google Cache.
It's gone now.
It's been deleted.
I'm pretty sure if you click on it, it just outright says it is unavailable.
Now, here's the thing.
Why was he doing it?
3.9 million views.
Take a look at his page now with those videos taken down.
20,000, 8,000.
It's got 63,000 for sure.
100,000 here.
But it doesn't really get that much.
These aren't particularly notable videos of him apparently just playing Fortnite.
So he decided to go cause problems.
I'm going to be honest with you.
I believe TikTok followers are largely fake.
My opinion, I don't have any, my reason to believe it, is that you don't know who this guy is and that he had to go do this to get attention.
And so I often wonder why it is.
There's a, here's his YouTube.
There's a prominent podcaster who gets real big guests and he's got millions of followers.
And for some reason, no one ever comments, no one ever likes, but the views are there.
Because I'm going to tell you, my friends, it's all botting.
Now, check this out.
It's not just this guy.
We've got this video from Eat on X.
This is, he says, Rakai runs off after giving flowers to a woman without paying for them.
Watch this video.
And let's take a look at Gen Z social media psychosis.
So for those who are just listening, he walks up to a bunch of flowers that are for sale.
I say this dude should be perma-banned from every platform.
You commit a crime on camera, you get banned, gone.
I'm assuming he's on Twitch, but don't worry.
Twitch is fake anyway.
Don't ask me.
I got the proof.
We'll get there.
This is just more video.
This is the same videos we already showed from the other guy, but we have this.
The five most deadly TikTok challenges, including one that's killed over 100 people.
There are fake videos emerging where people wash meat with dish soap.
It's not real.
There are, man, there's so much fake stuff that's crazy.
You ever see these videos?
They're these fake cooking videos where women will go to their, they have like an island counter in their kitchen and they'll dump out a bunch of spaghetti sauce, sprinkle cheese just straight on the counter, and then they'll take a block of Velveeta and ripping it in chunks, and then they'll take a bunch of nachos and put it on there, and then they'll mash it together into a paste, and you're like, this is disgusting.
And they're acting like this is a great recipe.
And then they mix it up and then they bake it and then they put it on a pizza crust.
And you know what unit is?
You've been watching the whole time.
They pretend that it's a real recipe, but it's not.
They'll take eggs and crack them and they'll mix the egg, the shells into it and break it up and say, the shells are a great source of calcium.
You want to get it in there.
And you know, it doesn't even affect the flavor.
And you're sitting there watching this, being like, what is wrong with these people?
But the reality is, what's wrong with you?
You watch it.
So the algorithm shares it more.
I mean, look at this.
They're dumping dish soap and mouthwash onto their meat.
There's a viral video of a woman taking ground beef, pouring dish soap all over it and washing it, cleaning it off, and then cooking it.
They're not real.
They'll film that, throw it away, take regular ground beef, cook that, and then eat it and make you think they did.
Because it gets views.
The Tide Pod Challenge, remember this?
It actually resulted, or first we have the blackout challenge.
100 people have died where they would, I'm not going to explain what they do, mind you, strangle themselves so that they could pass out.
100 people have died as a result.
A 12-year-old boy died in the UK.
Crazy.
The Tide Pod challenge resulted in 35,000 emergency room visits.
Now, the truth is, nobody was actually eating Tide Pods.
They would put it in their mouth as a joke.
But guess what?
For many of these people, your saliva would break the plastic, whatever coating was, dissolves in water.
And so there was one well-known story where a dude put it in his mouth and it broke open, burning his tongue, and he went, and he aspirated and he sucked a bunch into his lungs.
And he started coughing and wheezing, struggling to breathe.
They call an ambulance.
He has scar tissue in his lungs, reducing his capacity to take in oxygen, destroying his life because they thought it was a joke.
Do not do this stuff.
The milk crate challenge was actually kind of interesting.
It wasn't telling anybody to burn yourself.
The issue is climbing across milk crates, they're not stable.
And the challenge was to walk across it.
The problem is, people without physical abilities fell from a great height.
Not great, but five or six feet.
Some people permanently paralyzed themselves.
Some people broke their spines and fortunately weren't paralyzed.
But they're going to have that for the rest of their lives.
I don't think the milk crate challenge falls in the same category as many of these things.
Because if you're a professional athlete, you're not really batting an eye at something like this.
But if people decide to do feats of athleticism they can't do, I mean, that's not the same thing as eating a Tide Pod.
The fire challenge is one of the worst.
People are putting alcohol on their skin and setting it on fire.
Do not do this.
People have gotten seriously hurt.
One kid burned his entire back and will now have to wear special liners and lubricants on his back forever.
Don't do it.
The Benadryl challenge.
Kids are overdosing on Benadryl, having seizures and giving themselves brain damage.
Crazier still is the quitting challenge, where Gen Zers who don't value work because they don't make enough money, they're never going to own a house, and there's no light at the end of the tunnel.
I don't really blame them, have found that quitting can make you go viral.
Indeed.
Literally quitting.
Quit.
Quit your job.
Who cares?
You can't buy a house.
You can't have a family.
You can't afford healthcare.
So what are you working for anyway?
Go on Snap, go on EBT.
What's happening is these young people have figured out that if they quit their jobs, they can get millions of views.
I don't know how many of you know about this video, but here you go.
Let's play this classic.
Classic video.
It's 4.30 a.m. and I'm at work.
And I'm not going to play the yay song because I don't get them flagging me or whatever stupid thing they're going to do.
So we'll just mute it.
And it's her dancing at her job.
Where she says, I work for an awesome company that produces news videos.
And then she basically goes on to say that she's quitting and this is the video she's making for it.
And this video's got 19 million views.
So Gen Z didn't discover this, but they're embracing it.
So what's happening now is some of these young people have jobs that are actually fine, but they're like, if I quit and just say bad things, I can make way more money.
The truth is, my friends, it's all fake.
Take a look at this from Yeet.
Stable Ronaldo reveals that he has an upcoming meeting with Twitch about their view botting problem.
I'm having a meeting because I'm over it.
I sent them a whole thing.
I said, I want a meeting Thursday doing a meeting with a lot of people.
Let me tell you why.
If you're actually popular, if you actually work really hard, but you never get ranked, you never get attention, but you do have that popularity, the point, these people are going to, what these people are going to see is they're going to say, listen, if the view botters, if the fake views weren't there, I'd be number one.
I would be explaining why I'm successful, why people like watching my content.
Instead, people assume the viewbots are the real content.
And they're not.
So high-profile people who don't view bot are getting pissed off because they're ending up like ranked number 10.
And the person who's number one has zero comments.
Why does Twitch allow this?
Viewbotter.com, the best Twitch viewer bot that uses AI for authenticity.
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What's this?
Viewbots.com, next generation ViewBot Tech.
And then we have another video.
Julia Kin says viewbot pricing can go up to $50,000 per month.
If someone asked me, like Tim, how do you know the cost of viewbotting?
And I'd be like, I went to a couple viewbotting websites to see how much it cost.
Like, that's it.
I Google searched this.
I found these companies.
It's extremely expensive to do.
But imagine you're someone with like 20,000 concurrent viewers.
And so at that level, and if you're doing consistent work, you could be making millions of dollars.
So you decide that if you're making, well, I mean, it's pretty crazy.
50,000 per month.
But let's say you're somebody who's making, I don't know, 150K per month.
And you're thinking, I can put myself at number one.
So you do it.
Here's what I think.
I think this lady just looked it up.
There's nothing wrong with looking it up.
And you're curious about what people are doing, how they're doing it?
Sure.
Me personally, I spend all my money on skateboarding.
And while we do rank really well on Timcast IRL, we actually were doing fairly well.
I don't know where we're at right now.
During the election, we were number two just behind Steven Crowder.
Pretty crazy, right?
The second biggest live stream in the country.
I think we're around like seven or eight now.
We're not in a political season.
It is what it is.
But, you know, that's the way it goes.
You know what I find really fascinating?
The truth is everyone's botting and all of it's fake.
You want to know how I know?
Or at least why I think that's the case.
When we sell ads, for some reason, our advertisers always come to us and they say, your conversion rates are amazing.
And I say, well, the truth is, I think I do pretty good, a good job of selling products.
I used to do nonprofit fundraising.
And so, like the ad I did for Beam earlier, for which I really am a fan, hey, it was a pretty good ad.
I think so.
I showed you my sleep score.
That's legit.
That's actually my sleep eight mattress sleep score, 94.
So if you're like a lot of these channels where you just do a straight up ad read and you say, make sure you go to whatever.com, check it out.
Anyway, back to the news.
People aren't really moved by that.
They might know about it.
But I think the truth is, aside from the fact that maybe I do better sales pitches, maybe I don't.
We have real viewers.
Y'all are real viewers.
This video might get 80,000 views, I think, on a good day.
This channel used to get away more, but we changed the format and it is what it is.
I don't need to buy views or do whatever.
I have no problem saying four years ago, this channel was getting 500,000 views per video, once per day, and now those same videos are doing sometimes 200, but usually around 50 to 100.
Because the people who, the schedule changed, I stopped making the videos and so people stopped coming for it.
It happens.
I have no reason to buy fake viewers for this channel.
We just do the content we do.
And because of that, the conversion rates are normal.
But what if you're buying ad reads from somebody who's botting?
Unfortunately, then you're not going to convert anything because the viewers aren't actually watching.
That's the terrifying reality.
Twitch cracked down a couple months ago and 24% of their viewership dropped off.
Strange.
Now, as bad as crazy as everything is, my friends, there is a light at the end of the tunnel.
And I think we have this here.
They grew up online.
Now some teens are choosing to log off.
Take a look at this from First Post.
Why nobody is posting on social media anymore.
Vantage with Palki Sharma.
I actually have other theories about this.
I think there's a high probability the population is much lower around the world than people realize.
There's a viral video where this guy says China's population may actually be 500 million, not 1.4 billion.
Malls seem empty, streets are empty.
I agree.
But here's the thing.
When I talk about empty city streets, people say, Tim, it's because they're at home and they're online.
Then why aren't they posting on social media anymore?
Now, what I can say is Occam's razor.
The likely scenario is young people are leaving social media, and we've heard this trend for a while because it's become painfully inauthentic.
They know it's not real.
Check this out.
unidentified
For our next story, let's talk about the internet.
It has never felt louder and busier.
Ads, reels, AI slop, viral videos, it's like a constant digital screaming match.
And that seems to have put off the people who make the internet because they are going quiet.
Let me show you a study.
It says that social media activity is dropping across the world.
This study was conducted in 50 countries.
It involved more than 250,000 people.
That's a pretty decent sample size.
And here's what it found.
Social media usage is down by 10%.
People are leaving.
And it's mostly young people, the people who grew up with their phones.
They're turning away.
Turns out this trend also has a name.
It's called Posting Zero.
It's a fancy name for a simple reality.
Basically, people have stopped posting their lives on social media.
That is posting zero.
And here's why it's happening.
The study has given three reasons.
First, the polished nature of social media.
When these platforms first came, they weren't so curated.
There were breakfast photos, pet photos, gym selfies, random life updates that no one really asked for.
Every scroll shows you a skincare ad, a reel that you've already seen 11 times, a guy explaining how to make your first million by the age of 24, and an AI model who is definitely not real.
The reason it's not true is that social media has always been the highlight reel.
It's never been real.
It's always been curated, but not in the same way.
So I respect that.
I remember when Friendster first started getting popular.
We used U-Journal back in the day.
Everybody had a GeoCities.
We had our own little GeoCities websites.
And, you know, your GIF of the incredible Hulk or the banana guy doing the peanut butter jelly dance.
And Friendster is when things started to get more social.
People were posting photos and images.
MySpace eventually took over.
Then Facebook came around.
But I remember seeing the images from people.
You know, they're driving in a car and they're taking that selfie shot.
They're at the club and the party and it looks like it's so much fun.
And I'd see these from my friends.
And then we'd go out on a Friday night and we'd be hanging out at a diner and they'd be like, let's get a great photo together.
And then I'd see that photo later and be like, it was not nearly as fun as that photo makes it look.
It was always the highlight reel.
But here's what's true.
It's all inauthentic.
Videos you see on Instagram, they're advertisements.
You'll see a commercial or you'll see a video where a guy's like doing a Man in the Street interview and then abruptly in the middle of it, he'll be like, what kind of skincare product do you use?
And it turns out a skincare company hired the guy to make it look like an authentic Man in the Street viral video and then inject an ad in the middle of it.
It's getting boring.
If you're not competing, what are you doing?
So this guy is handing out machetes.
He's not posting zero.
He's saying, please look at me.
I'm desperate.
Everybody else is saying, bro, I'm not interested in playing that game.
And so they're leaving.
I do think it's fair to point out that the young generation is much smaller.
So it could be a false positive.
The reason why we're seeing less posting from the younger generation is because there's less young people.
But as long as they're accounting for demographic size and it's posts per capita or however you want to do it, then yeah, it's probably happening.
Now, these people are still scrolling social media.
They're just not posting.
The question will be: are you going to be real and authentic and will you make it through?
I don't know.
I don't know about you.
Some people will.
Many people will not.
The one thing I can say is that while some people are stopping the posting, many others are going insane.
And it's sad.
They believe crazy things.
There's channels that make it look, they're botting so they look popular so they can say crazy things and build cultures and communities.
I hope we break through it and find some authenticity.
But I suppose we won't know for sure for 20 years.
Because this psycho generation of young social media obsessed people, it's their whole worldview and you can't shake it from them.
But I suppose this is just one more instance and we'll see where the trend takes us.
