The Life of Fredrick Brennan feat. Jay Brandstetter (E361)
Frederick Brennan, a self-taught programmer and type designer tied to 8chan (8kun), Gamergate, and QAnon, died in January 2026 after years of chronic pain from osteogenesis imperfecta, opioid dependence, and liver damage from excessive ibuprofen. His childhood trauma—including foster care abuse by Barb with Olestra exposure—shaped his online radicalization before he later abandoned extremist forums like Wizard Chan, shut down 8chan’s hosting, and embraced neurodiversity (autism) and niche passions like fonts and solitaire. A media figure despite discomfort, Brennan’s legal ambitions and rare interviews revealed a complex evolution from doxxed troll to reluctant reformer, leaving behind a paradoxical legacy of manipulation and redemption amid internet subcultures. [Automatically generated summary]
Welcome to the QAA podcast, episode 361, The Life of Frederick Brennan.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rocketansky, Julian Field, and Travis View.
Frederick Brennan, the self-taught programmer and type designer, best known for founding and later denouncing the anonymous image board 8chan, died on January 10th, 2026.
He was 31 years old.
We had Frederick on the show several times starting in 2019, and he always had valuable insights into the technical aspects of image boards, the owner operators of 8chan, Jim, and Ron Watkins, and the history of the internet.
8Chan, which has since rebranded as a coon, was the most extreme experiment in unmoderated online speech in history and central to both Gamergate and QAnon, as well as a place where white supremacist shooters posted their manifestos before going on rampages.
As a consequence, Frederick's life and work is unavoidably tied to online extremism.
But his denouncing of 8chan as horrible consequences, as long as actively working to deplatform the site, which led to Jim Watkins attempting to kill him with Lawfare, led to some of our more interesting questions and conversations around radicalization and redemption.
We all have personal stories to share about Frederick, but to talk more intimately about his life and work, we are joined by Jay Branstetter.
He is an internet historian, host of the I'm From the Internet podcast, personal assistant to Frederick, and Frederick's partner in the last months of his life.
Jay, you have our condolences, and thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today.
I'm glad I could finally talk about this.
I know it happened back in January, but for personal reasons, his family didn't want to release it until his birthday on the 21st.
So in a weird way, it feels kind of nice to finally have it out there and very heartening to see how many people he touched positively who are missing him.
Yeah, yeah.
I guess like for those who don't know, who were you to Fred in his last years?
Well, when I first came up here, we were originally friends over the internet, and then I came up here to be his caretaker, and then he had a health scare and it made us sort of have a heart-to-heart.
And then we sort of realized we had feelings for each other.
And so for the last six months of his life, we were partners.
Like he lived with his family.
I was living with them.
Like, I even lived with them before that.
It was a very interesting experience going from like, you know, all things considered, things could have turned out a lot worse inviting a stranger from the internet to come take care of you.
I'm glad that he got me.
Yeah, seriously.
Somebody to fall for instead of like, you know, a crazed murderer per se.
Yeah.
Well, as we'll find out, he was on drugs at this time.
So I think that explains why his decision-making skills weren't probably as good as they usually would be.
Yeah, I mean, I think, I mean, I really wanted to really talk because I think that, you know, we're talking about internet history.
He is a really important figure, as much as like, you know, some other, I guess, like prominent like forum founders.
And I think that I'm sure you talked a lot about, you know, his life and his struggles.
And something I, you know, I think has always been interesting to me is something about there's a, something that's part of the public narrative about Frederick is his difficult childhood.
He suffered, you know, chronic medical trauma and ableism, family upheaval driven largely by his father, and then years of foster care where he experienced like exploitation, medical neglect.
He lived with osteogenesis imperfecta, which is also known as brittle bone disease, which led him to frequently breaking his bones and constantly being in pain.
So what did he tell you about his childhood and growing up with these disabilities?
It was really neat to learn a lot.
Never really like, really known that much about what it's like to grow up with something like that.
And like, there were some good memories he told me about, like, when he was a kid, something that him and his mom and his sibling would do is they would put like they had like carpeting on the ground, so it was very soft.
And she would get on the floor with them, and all of them would just kind of scoot around because none of them could walk, but they could still kind of move around together.
They would, that was like how they would play together.
Because when you have fertile bones, one of the things about that's really distressing is like you don't really understand your own limitations.
And also, as a kid, you don't have full motor control yet.
So it's very just, you know, it's very upsetting to just be like, even outside of the fact that you're spending a lot of time unable to go out and interact with other kids because you're in a cast.
It's like, even when you're out, it seems very upsetting to go through.
I can definitely understand why that would be, I don't know how I would have handled that.
Yeah, I mean, when I, you know, talked to Fred about this, I think what was, you know, distressing about it was the fact that he had a kind of constant unhealed broken bones.
It was just, you know, some of them healed, some of them just didn't.
And sneezing, for example, could become a real problem.
Yeah, like that was sincerely like it was half a joke, but sincerely a problem was like he was like, I was always afraid I would make him laugh too hard.
Like that was seriously something we had to worry about.
But like, yeah, in general, in terms of his fragile, it's like, yeah, just on a daily basis, sometimes like an old fracture, like, especially now that he was getting older, like, you know, when the weather changes, he would feel it kind of everywhere instead of just in a knee or something.
Or his, as time went on, this sort of, yeah, it's the way he explained it to me is when you have OI, it's kind of like your bones are 10 years older than the rest of you on top of being brittle.
So they, you know, because they age quicker.
So it was very much one of those things where even it was kind of worsening in some ways, even if he had better understanding of it.
Yeah, when he was in LA, I mean, something that definitely marked me was just like the level of care that he required to just, I mean, and that's if you don't leave your house, but if you leave your house, obviously, like we went with him to a Bernie rally and we had to get like a van where, you know, like the chair straps in at the back, it's hard to get him in, it's hard to get him out.
Then you hope the place that you go to has like access for people.
So it's just like constantly having this level of effort that is kind of like superhuman, you know, like none of us really understand that unless maybe, I don't know, we had a period of being extremely sick or something.
Julian is leaving out like the funniest part of the story.
Well, I funny, I guess in retrospect.
What is it?
Where we had to carry Fred in his chair down the front steps of Julian's apartment because Julian was on the second floor.
And then that second floor is up like on the third floor.
There's a whole second part of steps.
And Fred was being so funny about it because he was like, you guys don't understand.
Like, please let me know if you can really do this.
Because if you drop me, I will die.
Like, if you drop me, I'm dead.
Like, hey.
Well, I guess that's funny if because we didn't drop him, it would be less funny.
That's the end of the story.
But he was basically like, are you guys sure that you can carry me?
Because this isn't any just carry a wheelchair guy like down the stairs.
This is like, if anything goes wrong, like that's it.
Yeah.
I mean, that's, that's, that's, that's also something to take into account is to leave to go somewhere to do things, you have to essentially put your life in someone else's hands.
Yes.
I mean, that it's a lot of these processes, I think, just mentally and physically, are just, you know, it's like, it's very hard to understand if you haven't experienced it because it's a totally different life, like in almost every way.
Yeah, like a very invisible one is like sidewalks, like little cracks of the sidewalks to us are something that like his wheels can't get over.
So there'd be times we'd be walking down the street and then halfway between there'd be a big crack.
He'd be like, well, we got to turn around.
And they turn around and go on the side of the road to go around it.
Just even little things like that.
You don't really like that was even like a game idea he'd been tossing around, like a physics-based thing where one person's in a wheelchair and the other one's trying to, you know, cover stuff up for them.
Because it was something that we talked about a lot as we were on walks because it came up so often.
That's nice.
It's like the opposite of the goose game where you're just like pissing everybody off.
It's like you're just being extremely helpful.
Something else that I think you discussed is that he was also diagnosed with autism as an adult.
So like, how did he discover this?
And I guess, how I guess did it help him, I guess, like kind of recontextualize some of his other struggles in childhood.
Yeah, from what I understand it, it's something that he figured out online because when he was spending his time on these online places, he was meeting a lot of other neurodiverse people.
And it's something I bonded with him over because I didn't figure out I was autistic until I was 34.
So that's, that was one of the reasons why I was kind of happy to just pack up and move to another place.
I was like, yeah, this stuff isn't working out for me.
Let me try something else.
But yeah, from what I understand, it was something he figured out.
And so he never really got like the professional.
Even back then, it was a lot better than it was when I was growing up.
But I'm 38, by the way.
I'm six years older than him.
So not much of a difference, but relatively.
But anyway, still a young man.
Yeah.
And so he never really had the formal training.
And a lot of it is kind of like in terms of recontextualizing, I think that definitely kind of, especially with his turn, being like, oh, yeah, this is part of why I don't get along with people.
This is part of why I don't want the same things that other people want.
Like I could see why a lot of his early hang-ups about virginity and stuff, partially that was speaking from experience.
Also as an asexual, this is something I've experienced.
Like, I know I'm supposed to be feeling a certain way.
I don't.
What is wrong with me that's making me like this?
And why can't I fix it?
Like, that is a very unhealthy headspace to be in.
And it's very self-reinforcing.
I really wish I didn't relate to that.
Like, there's just so many aspects of my life where I'm like stumped, stumped daily.
Love to be 42 and still talking about that.
But it's a lifetime process, you know, and it's not like, oh, great, I got a diagnosis or now I have a name for this.
Like, it doesn't make it any easier.
It doesn't make you any better at getting along with people.
It doesn't make you make choices in like a different way.
Just the knowledge, you know?
Like, unfortunately, I wish, I wish there was some sort of like way to kind of intellectually override some of these impulses once we realize them.
You know, just like how difficult they're making our life and how if we had different behavior, like it would just be so much easier.
And then it's like, well, struggling to change it and ongoing process.
So, yeah.
I mean, I do.
It's like just with him, it's just a stack, you know.
I mean, my lord, this is a highly modified game.
I'll put it that way.
He has like 11 mods like loaded into the whole pattern.
No, he's got like 15 gigs of mods and it's downloading from like a P2P server.
Like, yeah, it's going to take, it's going to take the whole night.
You're going to have to leave the system on overnight.
Yeah, he's one of those challenge runs that the streamers do for the real sitcos.
It's like, you think you see what this game normally looks like?
Let me show you what you could really do in this game.
Yeah, he's doing Diablo 2 hardcore runs.
Well, so far we're doing great.
We're comparing Fred to a game.
We're remembering when we almost killed him by trying to get him to get him.
I think Fred would laugh at this.
I do.
I do miss him.
Something that I said online is just he was he made the world more interesting, you know?
And I certainly like had my ups and downs with Fred.
Like he was a temperamental person.
Like, you know, you'd be getting along and then suddenly, suddenly you're not getting along.
And it's like, what's happening?
What did I like, you know, and you try to kind of deal with it.
But I think that like knowing Fred over a longer period of time, you just, you're aware, I suppose, that that is like an aspect of how he is.
And it's obviously not like what he would pick if he could.
Nobody wants like big mood shifts and stuff like that or, you know, like to create a kind of hyper-defensive protection, I suppose, is the way I would put it.
And it's like, if you can't understand why someone like Fred did that, then like, what, what even are you like, you have to have some level of, I don't know, just like emotional compassion for someone, even when he's, you know, being a dick because later he won't again.
Later, you can have a good conversation with him again, you know?
It's just, it was just kind of like an aspect of knowing him and getting to know him and like letting him in your life.
And so I don't know.
It's, I do miss him.
Like it's this is a weird, it's a weird experience to have a podcast where we're talking about him in third person and just like, you know, him being gone.
So me too.
Yeah.
And especially for someone where like he was a figure on the internet like years before I ever met him.
Like I didn't meet him really until 2022, like after he, you know, the documentary and everything.
Like I remember, I first saw him, I think like in 2013, 2014 when Gamergate was unfolding and people were talking about the site where all those people were meeting.
And I remember seeing him and it stood out to me because like normally when I see the people who are on these sites, I don't get what they're so mad about.
This guy, I kind of understand why he's angry at the world.
Like I get him.
I'm not saying it's good, but I get where he's coming from, especially for someone who was so young at the time.
Like he was 19 when he made HN famously.
Like, you know, he was literally like a teenager when he first started out.
Crazy.
Yeah.
Another thing that was an aspect of Fred's life that I know was very difficult and that I certainly related to was his relationship to pain management, you know?
I mean, to be this in this much physical pain, the, you know, opioids are like kind of like our only real solution because we just don't have that many good pain management drugs that can handle this level of distress.
And so, you know, that's, that's definitely something that I would talk a lot about with Fred and have my own experiences with addiction.
So that was something that I really related to him about.
But I think that I guess like not many people are perhaps aware that like his basically entire life that I knew him at least was struggling with intense drug addiction on top of everything else, which if you're talking mood swings, you're talking, I mean, that shit is built in as well.
So yeah, I just wanted to talk to you a little bit about that, Jay.
I mean, it feels a bit weird bringing it up, but you were mentioning that Fred has had experiences in rehabilitation since or did.
Yeah, because especially when he grew up before we knew what we know now about things like OxyContin and stuff.
So yeah, it's something he was taking his whole life.
And then from what I understand, when he was in the Philippines, he was getting good regular health care because like there was a doctor he went to regularly.
Their doctors operate out of hospitals.
So like he didn't have to travel to get care.
It was all in the same building.
And then when he came back here, it was quarantined first off.
So he couldn't really get access to doctors easily.
And also like, you know, he didn't really have an income.
He was kind of isolated and everything.
So he wound up self doing his, he wound up ordering like off the dark web, getting fentanyl patches.
So he was, he was basically self-medicated.
And from there, he was kind of just spiraling, taking more and more of them.
Like, you know, and I didn't know about that when I first came up here, but that was how he was kind of working through it.
And especially like, I feel like, especially after the dust had settled, the sort of like the emotional sort of toll of like being like, you know, you went through all this stuff.
You did all these things.
Now it's just kind of you're by yourself and there's nothing you can really do because the world's kind of frozen right now.
And yeah, why not just take this big pile of drugs you have?
Again, I'm not excusing or apologizing it, but like, especially for someone like him who was already in chronic pain, like what else, you know, I get why he wound up like that, even if it sucks.
And I wish I could have been there to help him with it back then.
Yeah, of course.
I mean, the bottom line is to have any kind of, I think, like judgment other than like, of course, we're all responsible for our own actions.
Like, you know, that's, that's different.
But drug addiction doesn't have to do with choice.
It's not about being weak-willed.
Like, it's, you know, so I think for me, like, I definitely see it from that perspective, having had my experiences in rehabilitation and periods of sobriety and periods of non-sobriety.
It's like the first thing you have to understand is that it's not a choice.
Otherwise, like that person is detestable.
Why?
Why would they hurt people around them and hurt themselves over and over by choice?
That would obviously make them a bad person, you know?
But of course, that's just not, it's not our medical understanding of it anymore.
But I'm always fucking blown away by how little information people have about this, including doctors.
I've ended up in, you know, hospital settings and stuff, like highly distressful situations.
And just doctors like, absolutely, it's like, have you read anything about this?
Journey Through Addiction00:15:28
Like, this is crazy.
You know, it's, it feels like we're in the fucking 1950s.
Like, I think people think that just because people now openly talk about addiction and they talk about rehabilitation, like this stuff is a little bit more like in our zeitgeist that people's minds have changed about it.
I would argue no.
It is, it is medieval out there, the understanding of addiction.
Yeah.
And even just, that's the thing about Fred too, is going to a doctor.
Like regular people, like people with able-bodied people already have trouble getting our doctors understand us like him.
Like they have to use like a children's blood pressure cuff on his leg or it will break his arm when they try and take his blood pressure.
Like right from get one, he was like, no, you have to do this special or I'm going to get hurt.
Yeah.
So that was what, yeah.
And also like in terms of rehab, that's the thing that's tough too.
Like going to rehab is already hard enough.
Like he had to pick up methadone.
And when you start off, you got to go there every day to get it.
He can't drive.
You know, there's not like a bus he can get to this clinic.
If I wasn't there, he wouldn't have been able to do it.
But because I was there, you know, every day I got to drive him up there.
We had a nice little drive back and forth.
I have to bundle him up, like get him strapped down in the van, do the whole thing.
So, all the extra stuff to do that.
But, you know, again, he really wanted this.
I never had to force him to it or drag him out of bed.
He was always up and at it.
And also, while he's doing this, he can't take opiate.
So, he's just like has all this pain and just taking like over-the-counter stuff like ibuprofen and acetaminophen.
Although eventually, that did catch up with him a little, as I can talk about too.
Yeah, I imagine the like either liver or stomach are going to pay for both of those.
If I'm familiar with like the downsides, oh, yeah, especially if he wasn't really aware, like, yeah, basically, last year around July, we had to take him to the hospital because he wasn't communicating how much pain he was in.
He was just popping more and more ibuprofen, and it messed up his liver enzyme.
And he was like hallucinating.
And we still don't have an official cause of death yet.
We have, they have the auto, we have his ashes and everything, but the autopsy has like a we ordered a toxicology report, and they said it could take up to six months, I think, something like that.
But I wouldn't be surprised if some sort of organ failure damage was related to that, just because that happened before that.
And then his health, he never really fully bounced back after that.
But that was that was that was why we sort of had that conversation because he had a near-death experience, and we were just talking.
And it was, you know, that's one, I guess, one positive to come out of this, even if it was like a horrible experience to go through.
Yeah, wow, yeah, that's it's so difficult.
That's that's the thing is like you think you're kind of dealing and wrestling with like your biggest issues, and then some fucking new weird issue creeps up.
Like, oh, I took too much ibuprofen, and that actually has this result.
You know, yeah, and it made it made me see God and lightning bolts coming out of people.
It was, yeah, I didn't know that your liver could cause you to hallucinate like that.
That was very scary to witness on the outside.
I'm sure, you know, so he couldn't, he couldn't communicate to the doctors.
He was out of his sort of out of his mind.
It's like, yeah, his hips got a little hurt because like he couldn't tell them how to carry him and such.
He was just out of his mind with the, you know, his liver stuff.
So it was really, I'm glad I could be there for him at least.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, you know, I think one of the more interesting things about, you know, Frederick Brennan's like, I guess, intellectual journey related to his relationship to like image boards and free speech.
Like, you know, famously, he is one of the very first image board he kind of owned was Wizard Chan, the incel image board, which he purchased, but then relinquished control of after he lost his virginity.
He's very wrong, Travis.
It was just discussing Gandalf and other wizards.
But yeah, I mean, like, like, I'm curious if you ever talked about his early days and his early interest in sort of image board culture.
We did talk about internet and image board stuff in general.
Like, my thing was, I never really probed him about this stuff.
I was curious, but also I understood that was something he was very, you know, it was a bad experience for him.
So my thing was if he brought it up, I would, I would be happy to follow it, but I never really poked him.
But he did talk some about it then.
Like, I do think it is kind of ironic that that's kind of what kicked this whole thing off was him being on Wizard Chan and he wound up with her in a relationship with an asexual.
I mean, just like, if you're like, you know, even when you win, you're still kind of, you know, it's like it didn't matter in the end after all, you know?
I think it's very sweet in a way.
Well, that's that's so often life is the things that we think are the most important end up just like we end up ditching that so quick when something actually important comes in front of us.
I totally get that.
Yeah, there's also that whole path, which is like Fred clearly started up in circles that had just profound like misogyny and homophobia just built in.
And his journey was to find out that his sexuality was actually like larger than perhaps he understood at the time, being a teenager.
And I certainly relate to that too, you know?
So yeah, that's that's another like whole very frustrating and difficult journey that he had to go on because man, the contrast, you know, is wild.
It really is.
Yeah.
And also another thing too is like, it was like he was secretive about it at the time, but he's a furry as well.
So I could see that affecting you as well because that was very much one of the groups that like, especially like 2000s image board culture, just like that was a very common target of ridicule.
Like I think furries weren't even allowed to post on 4chan for a long time.
So that could see also sort of encouraging him to lock up and be sort of reclusive.
Yeah, when he came out, certainly I think we all saw when he came out as the raccoon.
That he was posting about.
He was loving it.
Yeah, the artwork.
I remember that from that period was amazing.
He commissioned so much.
He commissioned so much horny, furry artwork.
It really was awesome.
When I first started working for him, I was working remotely.
And one of the first things he had me do was set up an FTP and download all his furry art commissions and organize them by artists.
Oh my God, that's incredible.
Yeah, the adventures that that little raccoon, I mean, do you ever wonder?
Because a lot of the time the raccoon was pictured with like a larger, reliable furry animal that took care of him.
And then Jay, you kind of ended up pretty well.
Did he ever say, hey, man, could you wear a costume?
I did wear a Panda onesie on Halloween one year.
He couldn't wear one.
He couldn't wear one.
So I got him a little Pikachu hat because the problem with costumes is his arms have to be unrestrained so he could still steal his chair.
No, that is pretty funny.
I mean, that is honestly one of the reasons why I messaged him was I had this gimmick account that was very modestly successful in 2002.
I had like 23,000 followers and it was about something awful because that's sort of my specialty is like forums history.
I'm actually not someone who used really used image boards very much aside from like a brief time in 2008 when I crossed over because there was the Project Chanology thing going on.
I lived in Florida, so I got to go to the one at Clearwater at the protest.
Like I got the furs that's outside their headquarters.
It was pretty cool.
I'm glad I got to do that.
But yeah, I have my Twitter account and because I'd never had any kind of internet success like this before, I'm checking all the new people following it and just watching them come by.
And also I noticed when I'm like, oh, that one has a cute fursona.
And I click on it.
I'm like, oh, that's funny.
This fursona is this guy.
This furry is using the same name as the guy who owns 8-chan.
And then I realized I was like more followers than me.
I'm like, oh shit, this is Frederick Brennan.
Because I didn't know he was a furry until that point.
And then I had, and then immediately I'm like, wait, he's not just a furry, he's a furry, and he's also like the same type of furry that I am.
I have to say hi to this guy.
Like, yeah, we had so, like, in spite of our physical differences and other things, like, we are very similar people in a lot of ways.
So we immediately kind of bonded and hit it off.
And it was, it was great.
Yeah.
I'm really, really, really, again, another great reason to be open, not to hide your light under a bushel because that's how people learn about you.
Like, if he had still been hiding the fact that he was a furry, I may never have thought to say hi to him.
Like, what am I going to talk about with this, with this guy?
Yeah.
Well, what I loved about that, like, part of Frederick's life is just how much joy it exuded.
Like, he was doing commissions.
He was like really enjoying himself doing this.
And like you said, doing it very publicly.
There was something quite beautiful and liberating, I have to say, about that shift.
Yeah.
And speaking from experience, as someone who also went through a similar thing, like I hid the fact that I was a furry until my early 30s.
And one of the things I think really helps is kind of like, especially if you're someone like him or me, where you can be a little mischievous.
You have a little bit of like a troll spirit to you.
It's sort of like going from being ashamed of it to realizing, no, it's good that it pisses these people off because they deserve to be pissed off about it.
They're jerks, you know, let me have fun.
And then you're no longer, it doesn't feel bad when people are mean to you about it.
And it's because you just sort of recontextualize it.
Yeah, I know.
We need, we need furry rights on the internet, man.
I'm sick of this shit.
But you, you explained really well what I observed as like an outsider, which was that like, and what Julian mentioned previously, is that you could see that Fred was having like so much fun with it and so much fun that it was like pissing off like people who, you know, who would have been his old sort of like cohorts, you know, from the chans who are basically like, what the fuck?
Like, what the fuck?
You know, we so need more examples of people like changing and evolving publicly and normalizing that like how your life looks at like 19 like has nothing to do with like how happy you could be at 41 or 42, what, you know, whatever.
And so like, I always like thought that that was so, I was so like, I just thought it was so fun that it was like, I don't know, he, I, I just saw that as something so much more brave, like braver than like I could have ever done or been open about on the internet.
And yeah, just like, I think that's why we're here having this conversation is like what Julian said at the very beginning is that like Fred was really interesting.
The world feels less interesting because he's he's gone.
Yeah, and I'm really glad that you brought that up because, like, yeah, like that's one of the reasons I think that Fred is worth celebrating too.
Because, like, you know, we were like the first generation of people to kind of have the internet.
And it's like when you make pancakes, at least when I make them, you always kind of burn the first one because you're figuring out like how hot the griddle is or like how the thing.
It's like our generation was the burnt pancake.
We didn't know what the fuck was going to happen.
Now we have an idea of what happens.
We've seen some of the patterns that play out.
And so that's one of the reasons why first, it's like getting someone to even admit they're wrong is really hard on the internet.
And he not only admitted he was wrong, he basically like completely destroyed the life he had built up to that point to try and set it right.
And I was like, this is that, and then stuck to it.
It wasn't just like him, like, especially now that there's this whole pipeline for people to sort of cynically become right-wing grievance guys.
He wasn't doing any of that shit.
He was like, no, I'm actually like, he took it.
He actually fought.
And I think showing these real examples, what it looks like when someone really meaningfully changes shows people that are in the position it used to be that you can get out.
There is a way out of this.
And we're seeing more and more what that looks like as more and more people get out and also become confident enough to talk about their experiences.
Yeah.
And like, I think, I think 100%.
He had to make that early decision to make that change and to oppose essentially everything that he had previously embraced.
He had to make that knowing that there are people that they will never forgive you.
There are people to this day, you know, that it's like if you talk about Fred in any positive way online, they're going to come at you.
And so he had to do that knowing that those people are like that.
You know, and that, you know, I'd say that adds to the act, I think.
It adds to like how difficult that act can be.
Because that's the thing with being wrong and then admitting it is people for various reasons like don't give a fuck.
They will never forgive you and they hate you and they won't change their mind about that.
So it's human psychology is really, really fun.
Yeah, that is one of the tough parts about it too.
Like I think for me personally, from my experience, I think it is a part of sort of really maturing and coming to terms of the fact that you did something bad is that you have to accept like not everyone's going to forgive you.
That's something you have to live with.
That's a consequence of what you did, even if it would be good or better for them if they did do that.
And he was, he, I think he, for somebody who could be pretty inflammatory, I think he said he handled that with as much grace with a lot more grace than I might expect.
So like the only time I really complain about people online being mean to him is he's like, oh God, the Queen of Canada is bothering me again or whatever.
Like QAnon people would always be like pinging him or like whenever something was in the news.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
It just reminds me of like also how much more visible Fred's life was online by the time he hit like maybe 13, 14.
I remember, I mean, man, if I had to fucking explain what that, what I was doing on GeoCities with a page literally called the Hansen hate page, in which I like basically homophobically attacked like the band Hansen for no reason, for no reason, just clearly working out my own sexual insecurities at a young age.
It's like, no one knows about that.
When I was a child, I wanted to kill Barney.
Now that I'm an adult, I want to kill Hansen.
No one has a screen cap of that to fucking tell me I'm never going to be forgiven, you know?
But I hope, I hope I'm a different person.
Oh, God.
It was so awful.
God.
Oh, man.
I remember I even recorded.
I was like very creative already.
It was early podcasting, baby.
I recorded a wave where it was like, oh, I'm Michael Jackson.
I'm in the street.
Like, oh, the car's coming.
Bam.
It hit Michael Jackson.
And then like all this stuff that I was like, this is so fun.
I was such a little piece of shit.
You know, like, what the fuck was I thinking?
And in retrospect, I'm like, oh, all of these layers, these mods were already there.
And I didn't have any fucking tools to deal with them at all.
So instead, it became, you know, all these different fucking coping mechanisms and stuff.
But I'm just glad no one has a fucking screen cap of that that they can shove in my face every time I pretend to have any kind of like empathy or virtue or do anything decent in this world.
So, you know, Fred didn't have that.
Fred was on the Sonic forums like, you know, getting raided.
I was going to ask if you knew about the chow garden being his origins, because that is such a fun.
Yeah, if Sega had just moderated their web spaces, none of this would have happened.
Totally.
You can all trace this back to Sonic.
Yeah.
No, I mean, it's, it's so, yeah, he got raided and then he got interested in the chance.
I mean, this is, I had long conversations with, I consider probably my best interview ever, the first interview I did with Fred, where it was the middle of the night for me.
And I was very low energy, but we really like went through all the different like parts of his life.
So I still look back at that as something really cool.
But yeah, I did, of course, in the process, find out about the Sonic board getting raided by these Chan morons and then him being like, well, wait, what's this?
It's like, you're 13.
Like, I don't make any good.
I made no good decisions back then, you know?
And then, yeah, and then kind of having it become his whole identity.
Like, how do you see that process, I guess?
This is a question that I'm stealing from Travis here.
He said, when did the internet shift from interest to identity for him?
I'm guessing from what I would say, like at first, when he was a really little kid, he had this odd experience where because he was someone who was very well, well written, he was very good at language, he could sort of pass as someone who was older, but also the stuff he would talk about kind of give him away.
Like he would write like very passionate, like essay-length defenses of some malware installer because he liked the cursors it gave him, like things like that.
Like this very unsupervised child on the internet, not really knowing what he's doing, but knows that he likes it.
And I could, and also I think a part of it too is like sort of realizing that he could express himself on there and sort of having this sort of identity.
But like he talked about in the documentary, like that thing where he said that the like when he saw like the dark side of the internet, it reflected how he felt about himself.
Like, oh, this is how everyone really feels.
They just won't say it instead of this.
And from there, I feel like that kind of, I think when he got doxxed, that was the point where it really turned a corner.
Because at that point, it was like he couldn't separate the two.
So he was just like, well, I guess I'll just lean into it and just have this be my life now.
But before that, there was always, I guess, kind of the release valve of, well, no one really knows who I am.
I could just stop one day.
Yeah, absolutely.
I certainly had experiences like that early on on the internet.
Like for me, it was a kind of, in retrospect, like a kind of smarter, but not much less cruel version of like the kind of lol cow phenomenon on the Kiwi farms.
But it was it was called Portal of Evil.
Oh my gosh.
Of course, Old Man Murray before that.
So I was, I was like fucking chatting with these people at a way too young an age.
I was too, I was too stupid, but I had that feeling, that niggling feeling of like, maybe these guys are right and their awful, extremely cynical version of like life and who you are and how you can judge others.
Maybe they're right.
Because it felt like you said, it's like if you have something like, I don't know, depression or all these things, like suddenly you see the world reflect just how awful you're already feeling.
I'm so happy that I somehow stayed away from the internet from like 1996 through, I don't know, 2007, 2008.
I mean, I really, I was an AIM, I had AIM, Instant Messenger, or whatever.
But that was it.
I never got, I never went onto 4chan.
I never saw any of the boards.
Well, you didn't do an IRC kid.
That's the first thing.
MIRC Memories00:02:04
You didn't do MIRC.
So I was on MIRC immediately when that shit was.
What is that even?
Internet relay chat.
Essentially, it's just a chat client that was made for free by this, I think, Indian guy.
And it just became very, very easy to access things that were harder that you had to kind of almost no programming to make like commands.
So this was like a kind of graphic user interface that allowed you access to these internet relay chat rooms.
And it was dramatic.
You know, you could fucking, people would take over.
There would be mod wars.
They would like, you know, there's a lot going on.
I was too, I was too worried.
My dad had too much computer voodoo around the home, the home system.
Like, you know, if we had a Mac World magazine and there was a demo, he'd be like, well, well, hold on.
What are you down with?
Well, immediately I'll tell you, I don't think MIRC was ever released for Mac, right?
Am I wrong?
I'm not really familiar with Mac stuff.
I don't think MIRC was ever released for Mac.
That's why.
Oh, and we were a Mac family through and through.
I remember.
He probably had an IRC relay version.
Did you ever have ICQ, Jake?
That's another big one.
No, no, no.
We had AOL.
This motherfucker's never typed in his friend's IP address into WinNuke.
He never typed it into WinNuke.
And he's never giving them the blue screen of death.
No.
Bro, bro, get out of here, bro.
We're fucking...
No, I really didn't use the computer.
I had...
I was AIM.
I did AIM.
I remember distinctly my brother and I would make fun.
Here's the thing: I was just on the borderline of like the popular group.
Far fringes.
So I was so trying to deny my like theater, you know, my theater passions and like try out for every sports to eat, you know, as you know, some sort of like a play to be popular.
And so the internet was like, that was like, oh, me and my brother used to make fun of each other for being on the internet too much.
We would call each other internet rats.
Like if we saw somebody sitting at the family computer with the AOL ding going on a little too long, we'd be like, oh, you're an internet rat.
Like, that's the era that I was from, where we're like, chatting on the internet was like, I don't know.
I was like a computer rat as soon as I could be.
As soon as I found MIRC, I was like, the internet's way more important than all these morons I'm going to school.
Internet Rats Feeding Elestra00:02:57
I'm sure if I had been exposed, I would have loved it.
Stupid classmates.
Unless they want to play Ultima Online with me, in which case, like, yeah, we can, we can talk, you know.
I couldn't even have games.
My God, Mike, the Mac we had could barely run myth off the demo CD.
Okay, Jake, you don't have to tell people that you like were tied to the radiator and that they fed you scraps.
Over Thanksgiving, my mom asked me, she was saying, like, she was like, do you think that you were deprived as a child?
Like, I thought you had everything you had everything you really asked for.
And I was like, oh, I was like, oh, what did I say?
Moms are so awesome, dude.
What a great, you can't escape that.
That's the beam.
That's the tractor beam.
Your ship is like being swallowed by the mothership as she says that.
Because how can you work your way out of that?
There's no fucking way.
That's awesome.
Here, I guess while we're talking about mothers, let me tell you about one of Fred's foster moms he had, who was really funny.
He told me a lot of complainted a lot about her over the years.
Her name was Barb.
And one of his foster moms, she was one of those people.
She was like very religious.
She owned a catering business and she just had like a flock of like foster children that she would have work do catering work for her.
Like the older ones would actually like work at, and like since he couldn't walk and he was in the wheelchair, he would have to do stuff like make dumplings or whatever, like things he could do sitting down.
Way.
That is like the, yeah, like cartoon, yeah, like Dickensian child abuse here.
Like, I think you're looking for the word entrepreneurship.
That's true.
They're disrupting the child labor market.
I should be thinking ahead here.
But yeah, and so like one of her hang-ups was that she was obsessed with Olestra.
And this was like in the 2000s, well after we knew Elestra was bad and what it did to you.
And she would buy tubs of Elestra when she cooked at home.
She would put it in all their food and she'd make them eat it.
Wait, wait, what is it?
What is it?
It's in the 90s, it was like this additive that was supposed to make like fat, it made food not be as calorie dense, but the side effect is it makes the undigested oil just sort of leak out of your colon.
So people realized it wasn't worth it.
Oh, yeah.
This is, there was a certain kind of potato chip.
I remember they would have to put up like a, they would have to put a warning on it that said it causes anal leakage.
I remember this.
It was a big joke when we were kids.
They have been feeding you poison in this country for so long.
Like, I'm so glad I kind of grew outside the United States and like probably wasn't poisoned by some like new invention like Elestra.
But you guys, it's like awesome, man.
It's like every 10 years, like everything that everybody was eating is like recalled.
And like we say, like, yep, we can't not fit for consumption.
They found the color out of space and they used it to color yogurt for children.
It is a very processed era of food.
So she was fucking feeding them Elestra?
Like, why?
Why?
Just because I'm assuming she had an eating disorder.
It sounds like she had some sort of weird fixation on it.
I was like, whatever things she would do is because they were like this funny, like really religious family.
She and her bio kids would pretend to be raptured.
They would just like leave their clothes in the floor and then hide.
And the idea is like the foster kids would see that and get scared because they thought they were raptured.
They'd jump out of the closet.
Like, ha, that's going to happen if you don't convert.
Like, again, like, the foster system is horrible.
I hope this person is in fucking jail.
Like, I'm sorry.
That is.
Bio Kids' Pretended Rapture00:03:52
Listening to just that story in my head, I was like, man, I'm surprised Fred wasn't more fucked up.
Exactly.
God, yeah.
Holy shit.
We'll see what one of her bio kids, he checked on, he checked them on Facebook recently, and they're like a skull mask guy now.
So their bio kids wound up exactly like that we would expect parents like that to create.
Wow, man.
Do you know, Jay, offhand, like how many foster homes Fred was in, like over the course of his like childhood?
He was only in the foster care system for a couple of years.
It's just he bounced between a bunch of them because like he wasn't an easy kid to that rebellious streak.
Like that's kind of how he honed it was having these abusive parents he didn't like or these unsafe family environments to be that's the thing too is like sometimes one of the foster kids would be violent and you know it was like a not a safe environment to be in.
I'd probably guess like half a dozen based on the different families he talked about over the years.
Yeah.
I mean Wizard makes I mean I always saw like he had to develop essentially the personality of like the kind of like evil vizier, right?
Like it's like if you're getting abused so much like and you can't really do anything physical, you just the only thing you have is the ear of the king.
And I'm sure I'm sure he came up with all kinds of ways of trying to at least get taken care of, you know?
I guess sort of like the flip side of that is he was very good at talk like like sometimes like I'm autistic.
Sometimes I would get overwhelmed or something.
He was very good at talking me down because like that's how he has to interact with everything.
Whereas like in the past, I'm a big guy.
If I like get loud or something, people get scared or they flinch.
Him he's like, okay, Jay.
Just immediately just like just I was like, okay, I'm being ridiculous.
Okay, Jay.
Oh, man.
You know, I don't know if a lot of people know this, but Fred, I mean, people who knew him, I think, do, but Fred was like, you know, a whiz with fonts.
And this was something that I found out much later that this was kind of his like passion was fonts.
And believe it or not, I actually hit him up when my then fiancé and I were trying to make our save the date invitations.
We had like, there was this font that she had seen that was, she was like, I really like this, but like we couldn't find it.
We couldn't figure it out.
And I was like, well, I was like, there is one person who I think like could probably help us.
And I hit up Fred on Twitter and he was like, oh, he was like, yeah, that's like this version of something like Courier.
He was like, don't use that.
If you want something that's like closer to that, but like a way better font, he suggested this like totally different one that we ended up using.
And so like he helped, he helped us figure out the font for our save the date invitations that went out to my entire family, who I'm sure would still to this day have no idea that, you know, quote unquote Hot Wheels contributed.
Oh, God.
Yeah.
Well, what you don't know is secretly he built in like a crazy cipher to the font.
And we're all going to be reading his manifesto soon after scanning that.
Oh, God.
No.
Yeah.
He was always like that.
It never showed off.
Like we'd be on a walk in a store.
So he'd be like, hey, check out that sign over there.
See it?
That's the igloo cooler font.
And I'd be like, you're right.
He could just font stuff like that.
I love that.
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
I love a weird, obsessed person about something very specific that not too many other people care about as a Ghostbusters fan myself.
Yeah, I mean, you talk about like, you're right.
It's like, it's very difficult that his like, you know, so much of his life is public and like part of the public record because like lots of people have stupid ideas where they're 19 while high on mushrooms that they think is are profound.
Yeah, but usually they're forgotten.
But in Fred's case, this experience led him to creating 8-Chan, which he envisioned basically as some sort of hybrid between 4chan and Reddit.
And, you know, it's interesting is that he had this ambition for it to be, you know, to unseat Christopher Poole as like in 4chan as like, you know, the number one image board.
And it basically struggled for a while until Gamergate and 4chan sort of started banning Gamergate discussions.
And all of a sudden, his mostly inactive image board became very, very popular.
8chan's Unexpected Rise00:15:02
And I think this is, I don't know, it's just, I think, it's interesting part of his record because this is something that, you know, 8chan is something that he struggled to get going.
And then it was only because of this horrible harassment campaign that this started, started gaining traction.
Did he ever talk about that experience?
About uh Gamergate and 8 Chan, um, I don't think he didn't really talk about that much specifically.
I think because he was probably ashamed of that time of his life, I imagine, like, you know, when you've spent all this time being very immersed in something that you've come to renounce, like in terms of he would talk about like how like some of the stuff, like from what the person was like, people were just like really mean to him all the time.
Like, there's like the idea, like, a lot of stuff that he did.
Like, you talk about him sort of acting like the scheming vizier.
Like, when he ran 8chan, he did sort of like act in a certain way to sort of, you know, doing that sort of like talking like Sephiroth or he's just, you know, because he wants to act like he's like an intimidating aloof figure because he's scared by all these like psychos who keep threatening to kill him every time he tries to change something.
Yeah, you had to have like a pretty thick skin, I think.
Uh, you know, if you're quite constant contact with these people, you develop a very thick skin.
Yeah, then, uh, yeah, so he uh, so the explosion of Gamergate caused him to um has to have some difficulty keeping 8chan online, which led to his relationship with Jim Watkins, who offered to buy it and uh hire Fred in order to keep him online.
Did he talk about his experiences with a Watkins in the Philippines?
Oh, yeah, that was we had sort of a thing, neither of us drank, but we had a thing where whenever uh Jim died, we were gonna get a thing, we were gonna celebrate because, like, yeah, it was sort of like a shared thing where like when his health took a turn.
But of the actual time there, he told me a little bit about his time there.
Like, um, like a fun story I can open with was like just sort of sort of like the buffoonery at play was once Jim was like, he wanted to try some kratom, so he went to like a local Filipino worker who worked for him and gave him a couple thousand pesos, like, go buy me some kratom.
And when he came back, he had multiple garbage bags full of kratom leaf because Jim did not know that that that's how you buy kratom in the Philippines, it's just the raw product.
He's like, What the fuck am I supposed to do with all this?
Just like a room full of drugs, yeah, yeah, Jim.
Uh, it's true, like I have to say, and this is gonna come across as maybe a little uh a little mean, but uh, when I heard of Fred's passing after you know, um, the original kind of shock and feelings, uh, I had this thought that was just like that motherfucker outlived him, like, he didn't deserve to, like, Jim, Jim should be gone, like, and I know that's very childish, but yeah, fuck him.
Oh, God, yeah, and then there is like one story he told me about there that was like a darker one.
He don't think he told it publicly, but it was like, I think, like, for him, sort of like probably a big moment for him where he was like, once they were at some sort of like nightclub or something, and uh, because he learned he taught himself Tagalog, he liked the language there, he liked the culture of the Philippines, like it really broke his heart, he could never go back because he was a fugitive.
And because he knew Tagalog, he could talk to like the people who lived there, he could talk to like the workers and such.
And when they're at this club, he's talking to one of the women and she tells him, I like I'm a human trafficking victim.
Can you help me?
And he's just like, basically, he's like, what can I do?
Like, I'm basically kind of realizing, like, I want to help this person, but I can't because all these people also control the circumstances of my life.
So it's kind of like, you know, I don't, I'm not saying that the Watkins is on this person, just they were at a place.
And him sort of realized, oh, this is the crowd and like the place that I'm at.
I don't want to be here.
Like, it's like a very harrowing thing that stuck with him.
Yeah.
Yeah, of course.
That's horrifying because you realize the lack of power and that like everybody around you, you know, the Jims and the Ron's and all of these people are so just profoundly evil that like, of course, they end up around human trafficked people.
Like they were constantly, you know, kind of running small to medium-sized scams that involved essentially human trafficking.
And, you know, Jim is an extremely racist man who, you know, treats like Filipinos as like inferior to like, let's say, a Japanese person.
And so, yeah, it's like, it's just, you just start to, I guess he, at that point, he probably realized, oh, I'm surrounded by evil that perhaps my heart doesn't want to embrace and I can do nothing about it because these people could kill me in two seconds and blame it on anything.
Like, it's like, oh, he fell over.
Like, yeah, now he's dead.
It's like, you know, I mean, him getting out of the Philippines is one of the craziest things.
And a reason I'll always be thankful to Cullen Hoback for doing that in the process of making his film because I think that was, I mean, he absolutely saved his life.
Oh, 100%.
Yeah.
I sent him a message after the announcement to thank him and also tell him that he left one of his tripods here.
I found it when I was cleaning the house.
Really, I'm really curious if you talked about his turn, obviously, is his turn away from like being dependent upon the Watkins and escaping that horrible situation, but also realizing that is sort of like his earlier sort of philosophy about like unrestrained free speech online is unworkable and it leads to horrible things.
I mean, what was what do you think the turning point was for him in that kind of thinking?
I think I think that obviously the having to flee jail, like the prison system is pretty radicalizing for a lot of people.
And I think going through that experience and even indirectly, realizing like how quickly that your entire life could be turned like that or taken away from you, I think that kind of made him realize like he identified as a communist when I knew him.
Like he was, he had, he had gone very far in the opposite direction from his old beliefs.
He was still very, he was still very principled.
He still had strong, like he was still very much into free software.
He was still very much into open source software.
He really liked the idea of information and knowledge being free to people.
But also he was like, yeah, we can't let anything go anywhere.
There has to be some kind of moderation.
And I guess that was one of the things we first sort of bonded over was talking about those sort of feelings of guilt about like, you know, like misspent youth, things we did in the past, like the concepts of restorative justice.
Like those were some of the first things we talked about and thought about them a lot.
Comrade Brennan, we salute you.
Yeah.
I mean, yeah, one of the things that I remember that happened, it was in 2019 in the wake of the Christ Church massacre in New Zealand.
And that particular mass murderer put his manifesto on 8chan and then put like links to the Facebook live stream on 8chan, knowing other 8-channers would like, would like see it and like save that video and stuff.
Well, I just remember like him being like pretty disturbed about that particularly, where like, you know, realizing that he's like, it's like this thing that he created was now a, you know, really a tool for like the worst people in the world to do horrible atrocities.
Oh, absolutely.
And also he was like, we should at least take the site down for a day or two just out of respect for the victims.
And, you know, they were like, no, we're not taking the site down.
What are you talking about?
And that was another sort of like, yeah, I think in terms of him realizing that his whole kind of life and world there, that was like, he cited that a lot as like the one that sort of turned around.
I guess I was thinking more in a general sense, like his political views when I was talking earlier.
But yeah, in terms of like, that was like the specific moment he always cites is like, okay, this, this needs to change.
This is not working.
And yeah, one of the things that always really convinced me that he was, he was very sincere in this hatred of 8chan.
It's like beyond the fact that, you know, the owners were now literally threatening his life with lawfare and he was having to escape that horrible situation was that he did a lot of work after Cloudfair stopped providing services for 8chan, which caused the site to go down.
Well, 8chan tried to find hosting and sort of DDOS protection elsewhere.
And Frederick very actively tried to find where he was getting those services and then letting them know what they were doing and getting the site knocked down again.
He spent a lot of time and energy just being a real, real, he was using his online trolling instincts for good and trying to figure out what he needed to do.
He just contacted all these hosting companies in order to figure out what he needed to do to get the site knocked out over and over and over again, much to the frustration of Jim and Ron Watkins.
Oh, yeah.
That was so cool.
Well, they can always fucking, they can have their giant pile of evil garbage.
They can have their little fucking sad empire.
I really hope the worst for those fucking scum.
Well, I do know that they aren't doing very well as of recently.
Like last year, they tried to do a cryptocurrency because like I think Ron was talking about how he didn't have any money or anything.
He was going to have to get a job if they didn't turn things around.
And so they did a cryptocurrency.
People kept trying to give Fred free crypto to try and get him to adorn.
He's like, no, go away.
Fuck off.
And also like his health isn't doing super good either.
He had to sell a bunch of his businesses.
So at least his empire is a lot smaller than it used to be, even if it couldn't be taken down completely.
I'm really curious about what, I mean, guess what was Fred up to in 2025, like the last year of his life?
I mean, what was his main interest?
Was he really into this font making?
It was, yeah, when I was, I'd say like up until he was doing the rehab, he wasn't doing very much.
After he started the method, though, and that's when like the first year, a year or so, a lot of it was just him sort of like re getting used to living a daily life, like getting out of his chair or go on walks.
In terms of his hobbies, he was really into his fonts.
He hadn't been doing very much programming lately because by trade, he was a software engineer, but he had been out of practice for a while.
And now because of AI, he felt like it wasn't really something he could get back into.
Like he tried to get back into fonts at one point and like his, like his contact that he had talked to about it was just talking about AI stuff.
So it was kind of, he was kind of going through a similar thing that a lot of people are going through where his specialized skills weren't as, he couldn't really find a use for them like he used to.
But so it was one of those things where he was kind of trying to find what his next thing might be.
He was getting into different stuff.
Like, you know, he was, he was watching a lot of YouTube, like educational YouTube, not like conspiracy YouTube.
Although occasionally we would watch something funny and laugh about it.
Like we've done a couple bonus episodes about weird YouTube people we saw.
Or like he got a little bit into gaming, which was kind of interesting.
I helped him get into that.
And he was like getting into the programming side of it, like decompiling and recompiling old games, especially as someone who's fluent in Japanese.
I think he could have done a lot of use for like translations and stuff.
That was a thing he was like, also, he was sort of a media person a little bit too.
He would like to go out sometimes and find if there was a DVD at the thrift store that wasn't on archive.org, he'd buy it and rip it and put it on there.
He liked to just do little things like that.
He had a lot of little projects to work on and he would abandon them a lot and move on to a next one.
But, you know, it's always finding a new thing to work on, some new project.
And, you know, he, there was a lot of ways his life could have gone from here.
Also, another thing he was talking about was he was thinking about studying for the bar exam because like he liked the idea of being able to like help people or represent them if they needed.
Oh, yeah.
I bet he would be an incredible lawyer.
Oh my God.
Yeah.
That would be a powerful version of Fred, I think.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I think, yeah, this is, yeah, because he's his, his sort of like his manipulative, I want him manipulative, but like, you know, his like, his ability to like argue.
I think we'd be harnessed.
I mean, let's be honest.
It's not even like, I'm not even saying it as an insult.
Like, Fred had a lot.
He was of, he could control stuff and twist things and was able to, he was good at manipulation.
Like, I think he'd be a great lawyer.
All right.
You know, I say that with full respect, you know, I mean, it's like, it makes sense, like, why he developed that, that, that defense.
So, yeah, I think he'd be great at defending people.
Yeah.
I mean, the other thing is what's really interesting in Fred is that he really became sort of an unlikely media star in recent years.
You know, it was like besides, besides appearing on our own show, he was, he was once on the front page of the New York Times talking about how much he wanted to take down 8chan.
And like he was in documentaries.
He was in news reports.
He was on podcasts like this one and yours.
There was a deep, deep description of him in the book Black Pill by El Reeves.
She did a lot of work with him.
Cullen Hoback, of course, like a lot of work with him.
A lot of people got very interested in Fred's life.
And like you said, yeah, he was a very visible person and his whole history was like pretty, you could just watch or listen to a few different things, read a book or two and know an immense amount about this man.
Yeah.
And as someone who knew him personally, that was kind of interesting too.
Cause one of the things I realized is like he doesn't like being on camera.
He's not like somebody who enjoys being like in the spotlight like that.
It was something he did because he felt like he had to.
And like there was, he did enjoy some of it, obviously.
But like by the time I came up here, he was the point where he was, he wasn't really doing interviews anymore because he felt like he kind of said everything he needed to say and he wasn't really enjoying it.
But he did go to one more when I was here.
I got to tag along with him to it.
So that was kind of neat.
It was, I think, when PBS Frontline was interviewing him for something about Telegram.
It was neat to get to see what it looks like when like a national news team like that.
It's like, you know, it takes me like a fucking hour to set up my microphone.
I'm watching this team of pros just like setting up whole cameras and microphones and speak.
I'm just, wow, I see why they're professionals.
It's neat to see in motion.
Yeah, because normally if he was a bit more able, like they'd probably put him in a van.
Like that's what happened to me.
It was like, you know, 5 a.m. It's a CNN van.
And then, you know, you just hope it's not a sprinter bringing you to like Guantanamo.
But it's like, yeah, you just get in there and they interview you.
Like, it's not the whole studio is built into the van and like the driver's in the front, like communicating with you over a little earpiece.
It's crazy.
I do have a fun story about that interview, actually, now I think about it, where it was in a vineyard.
They wanted to have a nice backdrop.
So it was like a conference room there or something.
And because it was like a hotel type place, the chair they had was like a very low to the ground, like recliner type chair.
And so I had to like help pick him up out of his chair and set him into it.
And then after the interview, it was too low for him to climb back into his chair.
So I had to lift him up out of it to put him in there.
And he was wearing his long shirt at the time.
I'm trying to pick him up and it's a little heavy.
I'm flipping around and actually kind of flip him in.
Like I basically mooned the entire staff of PBS Furline by accident.
And I can't do anything about it because both my hands are busy moving him.
So I'm like, okay, okay.
He's trying to get him in his chair.
Like when I first came up here, I weighed like 325 pounds.
I got in really good shape taking care of Fred.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
He's yeah, he would definitely be a quite a workout to be the caretaker of.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, because like, you know, it's like people think that they know Frederick Brennan.
Well, he's about because, you know, his life story has been published in so many articles is, you know, you could read his Wikipedia page, which I'm very proud to say his Wikipedia page has a whole subsection called Opposition to QAnon.
But is there anything that you think that, you know, it's interesting about Fred that maybe the world doesn't know about?
It's just on the Wikipedia note, if you go to the Wikipedia page for Osteogenesis Imperfected, those are his X-rays on it.
He was a big Wikipedia nerd.
So he scanned him and is like, okay, you guys have the rights for this.
We need a picture for it.
But yeah, the one thing that surprised me about him was like basically, he wasn't really a big media person, and the media that he liked was not at all what you would expect based on him being like the guy who founded A-chan.
Like his favorite movie was The Devil Wears Prada.
Wow.
One of the first things I did when I came here was we watched it together.
Oh my God.
You guys, you guys should have been reading the tea leaves earlier.
Yeah.
And also like the, or like music is like his favorite type of music.
He really calypso because it's a historical genre so we could learn about it.
Like when we were going to the, he'd also, you know, you listened to it on the way to the clinic and tell me the stories about the musicians or what it meant.
And I was like, oh, wow, America was not good to that country.
Trinidad.
No.
Yeah.
Nor to many.
I mean, honestly, I'm trying to struggling to figure out who America is good for at this point.
Yeah.
America, a large inconvenience in the international sphere.
Boy, yeah.
I mean, yeah, it seemed like he did have really kind of like diverse interests, you know.
Yeah, I think that's one of the reasons I got along with him really well because he knew a lot of academic stuff, whereas I'm more of like a pop culture and culture person.
So we compliment each other really well.
Like he didn't know hardly anything about movies or TV.
Like once, you know, we live in New Jersey, Spirit Halloween was founded near here.
So once I took him to the flagship store, and since he didn't know any of this stuff, it was very fun.
Like he saw like a Beetlejuice.
He's like, oh, a prisoner because he's wearing the stripes.
Just like, it's fun seeing somebody who's that out of touch with pop culture in a very cute way.
Fred Brennan's Cards00:09:51
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
A prisoner.
That prisoner is wearing weird makeup and has weird hair.
Yeah, that's amazing.
I mean, that's the thing is, like, I guess, like you said, you know, he started a lot of projects and stuff.
He's someone that I relate to immensely over hyperfixation.
Just not being able to, it's like to do things halfway.
You're either completely carried away down some fucking specific rabbit hole and eclipsing the rest of the world.
And then you come back out of it like, what the hell was that?
So yeah, I mean, you know, that makes sense.
It's like then you, you have holes in like other parts because you've just spent, you know, so much about such specialized things.
I mean, that's really defined Fred was an immense amount of highly specialized information was in that head.
Yeah, like once he got really into playing cards and he ordered like 12 different types of playing cards, he's had the whole decks.
Like, oh, here's the French tarot playing cards.
Here's this type.
Here's the German playing cards.
He was like learning all the different types of all the different variations of solitaire that exists.
Like he would just get really into subjects like that in a fun way.
One thing that's really interesting about, you know, your relationship with Fred is the fact that you are kind of specialized in something awful, which is basically just before Fred's generation, right?
If I'm not wrong, Fred was not on Something Awful, or was he?
Oh, no, not at all.
He was, he was never on there.
That was a little before his time.
And also, yeah, like Moot was a poster on Something Awful.
And like a lot of the early ones, like Kurt Taner and She were also active Something Awful posters at the time.
There was a lot of crossover with that.
And it was kind of like, I know there's a joke that sort of got circulated seriously where it's like about how low text banning hentai caused January 6th.
I wouldn't cause that directly a line of ascension through it.
But yeah, something awful was a lot of the early 4chan user base was people who were from there.
And also they were recruited to tie it back to IRC, the Strawberry Fields IRC channel for their anime sub forum is where a lot of early people were recruited for 4chan too.
So yeah, it is very tied up in the early DNA of that.
And so did you guys find like you were trading information about those different periods that essentially are linked through so many, so many weird mechanisms?
That is pretty fun.
It was kind of neat letting him know like what people he knew of were from there or got their start there before he knew about them.
Or inversely, like in general, I've noticed like it is kind of fun, like being like being a something awful person when all your friends are like Tumblr people or image board people.
It's kind of like being an Australian living in America where like all your frames of references are just different enough that everyone's like, oh, this is new.
I'm not familiar with this.
And it's, it's sort of like a fun angle.
So I guess in terms of interaction, just we would sort of tell stories to each other about different website people.
So it was like, I guess it took in a way it was kind of easy to like how even though the form was different, the actual experiences could be surprisingly similar.
Just like instead of being known by usernames, it's just like, oh, that guy who would always do this thing.
Yeah, it's, I mean, again, like we've tracked it, but the amiseration of people like really plays a lot into every stage of the mutations.
But yeah, you have a podcast that deals with something awful.
You want to tell us like what the name of the podcast is, where people could find it and tell us like what, what, what do you get up to there?
Sure, yeah.
I co-host a podcast called I'm From the Internet.
My co-host is a comedian and game designer named Winslow Dumain.
If you saw the Chicago rat hole in the news a couple years ago, he's the guy whose picture blew that whole thing up.
So he's internet history too in his own way.
Yeah, I remember that.
I remember the rat hole.
It's fantastic.
Yeah.
For the first couple of years, it was focused on the something awful forums.
And last year we sort of switched.
Now we're doing more general internet history.
But what it is, is we usually, it's narrative internet history.
We focus on like a person or an event or a website or something.
And I tell the story of it to Winslow.
It's the classic I'm the subject matter expert.
It's his first time and he's he's reacting and doing flavor.
And also Fred has appeared in a couple of bonus episodes.
I've made them free.
So if you want to hear him and me interacting, it's on there.
But yeah, it's pretty, we cover all sorts of different topics.
We've even done a couple of sports episodes.
I don't know anything about sports.
Like we have when Hockey Night in Canada was choosing a new theme song and someone submitted a troll entry and it won the poll and like the Canadian people were freaking out about this sound with like gunshots and explosions in it opening hockey every week.
Just fun little things like that.
Or our drug episodes are all timers.
The one where I announced I was starting to work for Fred was DeJuice, which was a Soviet benzo that causes memory loss and stays active in your system for days.
So people would take the drug, forgot they took the drug, take more of the drug, and then a week later come to and find out that like they'd crashed their car and lost their job.
Like multiple lives were ruined over the course of that episode.
Oh my God.
Yeah, it's I'm from the internet, right?
People could just search for it on any podcast platform.
Yeah, I'm from the internet or IFTI for sure.
Like when I say internet history, people think it's like I'm talking like the version seven of Discord.
No, no, this is very narrative, but also it's not, it's not like lol cow.
It's not drama or snark.
Like we try and have a point and we're pretty humanistic.
Like there have been multiple times I did episodes about someone and they come, they email me like, thank you for being nice to me.
Like I did one on this guy who did like Hollywood replica vehicles.
He had a replica of the of the Jeep from Jurassic Park and a video game company borrowed it for a trade event to promote a game they were working on with Jurassic Park.
And when they returned it, it was all scratched up and he caused, and he wound up escalating it into a public feud.
And the content at the time was, oh, this guy was just trying to get them to give him free money, basically.
But as someone who worked in logistics, I dug it.
Like, no, they signed the bill of lading.
The company was at Fly here.
I'm like getting to break through how that works and walk through it.
Like, it's fun to actually get to do a little journalism sometimes as well.
I don't try and, I'm not like one of those just reading Wikipedia people.
I do, I do a lot of digging and try and give my own spin on things.
But that drug episode you're mentioning, it's not one of you guys that took that drug, right?
You're talking about, oh, no.
I don't, our Patreon doesn't make nearly enough for that, unfortunately.
But yeah, it was like, I was reading other people's experiences and sort of also when you have that zoomed out look, like the drug subform on something awful.
You can go to like the opiates thread, check the front page.
Everyone there is permabanks.
They died.
It is a one of the most haunting places on the internet.
It's done more to keep me away from doing drugs than any actual anti-drug work has done.
Yeah.
And do you ever like cover like Arrowwid?
Like just straight up?
I mean, that's that's an internet subculture that's like, I almost feel like, is there, is there a good podcast on the whole history of Arrowid?
Like, it's fascinating.
I don't know.
I'm definitely gonna have to do an episode on it at some point.
Like now for the new ones, I have did like I did do some sort of episodes.
Like I did one on Emotion Eric.
It's fun to do nice ones too, like fun websites.
I did one on horse ebooks.
A recent one was on the oatmeal.
That was fun to sort of break down that guy's whole methodology.
And like before AI, you know, making this type of crap was a bespoke human process, but it was still very cynical.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, I really recommend it.
People should go check out I'm from the internet.
It's really so nice of you to make the time and it's just been a real pleasure talking to you.
No, thank you so much for inviting me on.
I'm really glad I can talk a little about Fred.
Like, yeah, he was a very complicated person.
And I'm really lucky I got to know him at the time of his life when he turned it around.
And I'm sorry he didn't get more of a chance to share it with the world, but I still think it's really meaningful and important that he did turn things around and found it.
Also, like part of the reason why he wasn't posting as much as the last few years, he was living a lot more of his life off the internet.
He was having more fun.
We were going on walks.
He was putting together Legos.
It was like even someone like him was sort of making this sort of realizing, yeah, there's maybe this isn't how I want to spend my entire life.
And I think that's a good thing too.
He helped me as well.
We helped each other.
Yeah, I don't think any one of us is in the danger of forgetting Frederick Brennan.
So rest in peace, brother.
Yeah.
And thank you again.
Yeah, no, a really awkward moment to say.
Do you have anything else to plug?
But yeah.
No, just my pod.
Just I'm from the internet.
It's been running for a couple of years and I'm not really working on anything else right now.
I'm always open to collab, though, if anyone has anything going on.
Do you have like a Twitter or anything like that?
Oh, yeah.
I'm on Blue Sky.
The podcast also has a link tree.
And we do have a Patreon IFTI pod.
It's only a dollar a month.
We have over 50 episodes on there.
And I made the ones with Fred on them free.
So if you don't want to plug, you can go there and listen to him.
The Preacher Wars one is fun.
He talks about some of the weird creatures his family was into, who now he still follows on YouTube to make fun of.
So it's a neat little look behind the window there, too.
Hell yeah, people.
Definitely go and do that.
And if you're interested in our Patreon, that's patreon.com/slash QAA.
We have five bucks a month, a whole second episode for every main, and access to our entire very long catalog at this point.
I think all the Fred Brennan episodes are free.
So if you want to search for his name on our podcast, you can go and listen to some of these conversations we're referring to.
I even got him to kind of act as like the voice of God when we were at QCon.
So he would just break in like in the middle of our live coverage and give some information.
So that was really cool and fun too.
And we have a mini series network as well, CurseMedia.net, if you're interested in, you know, these kind of serialized, deeper dives that we've been doing over there.
So yeah, we have a website too, QAAPodcast.com.
Listener, until next week, may Fred Brennan bless you and keep...
We have auto-keyed content based on your preferences.
Is it true that you are somehow related to former CIA director John Bryden?
You can get the fifth on this one.
That's how you relate.
I wish I was.
I wish I was.
Because I would just call him Daddy or something.
Okay, no, nothing of that either.
Okay.
Okay.
He would have helped my ass, I'm sure.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like Brennan is one of the most common surnames in the United States.
People don't know this.
People have brainworms.
They're idiots.
They don't know this, but Fred Brennan is actually the result of Brennan's Super Soldier program gone terribly wrong.
He was supposed to be a Superman, and he could originally early fly and shit like that.
But then I just ended up as a fat cripple.
What happened?
And you know what?
I'm going to sue the U.S. government.
And the Deep State turned their back on you.
And they're very much familiar with the people.
Don't need to microfund me.
Mr. Brennan, if you're out there, if you're listening, the CIA should donate 100%.
They should donate the money that you've earned from the cocaine that you've pumped out into the streets this week, just this week alone.
Please pump it back into Frederick's GoFundMe.
The least you can do is get the guy an apartment.
We're asking cops to spend 10 less arrests this week and spend 10 bucks on Fred Brennan's.
So stop arresting people and also pay him money.
Back to Basics00:02:19
Thank you.
Thank you.
That's right.
Well, anytime.
We love telling the police what to do on the show.
Absolutely.
Man.
So, yeah.
So now you're here.
And I suppose, I mean, even if maybe it wasn't your choice, it seems like you're going to be building a life in the United States.
Yeah, it seems like that's what I'm going to do.
I'm going to establish residency in California.
I'm going to go back to, you know, I was working on a project called Font Forge before.
Yeah.
It's just a font editor, you know.
I have friends there who are helping me too.
Cool.
You know, it's like all my co-workers are internet people and all everybody I know is from the internet.
So it's kind of tough.
But yeah, I mean, everybody has, you know, really come together.
So in a weird way, it is like you've sort of been ejected from the, you know, from the Matrix of this whole online world where everything, that's how you knew how to get places.
That's where people owed you favors.
You owe them.
When I came back here, I just felt like I was 16 again.
Yeah.
Like celebrating, getting a bank account and getting a place to live on your own.
Like, I literally feel like a teenager.
Yeah, which is really hard.
I mean, you know, I always, anytime I have to go like, you know, stay with my parents or something, you know, you turn from like a 30-year-old to 30-something year-old.
Yeah, you're back to being like 12 years old again.
It's a humbling, it's a humbling experience.
And so it's.
Yeah, but luckily, you know, parents are awesome.
My mom just, she just puts up with my shit, you know?
Yeah.
You know, she puts up with me.
And so you used to live on the East Coast, and famously, there's a story where cops, you went into like, I guess, be a witness, and then the cops left you out in the cold for like, I don't know how long, and you almost died basically from that.
Yeah, I almost lost some toes.
What made you think that the West Coast was a better?
Honestly, the reason I'm in Los Angeles is that the friend who brought me here, this was just where the flight was landing.
And then he would move on to where he had to go.
But, you know, it was like I did not, you know, I really relied on the awesome guy who brought me here.
Yeah.
And they made the choices.
Like, if they had lived in Austin, Texas, that's where I'd be.
If they lived in Hawaii, that's where I'd be.
That's right.
If they had lived in Little St. James, that's where you'd be.
I have no idea where that is.
Free Bloom and Onions Deal00:02:03
But yes, exactly.
Oh, that pedophiles island.
I got it.
Okay.
Sweet Lord.
Well, fellas, I mean, yeah, I don't really know where to really go with this.
I mean, you guys were so awesome to me helping me out on such short notice.
And it's like, you didn't ask for anything and you didn't like, so I really appreciate that.
Like, this podcast, the people that make it, they are real bros.
And it's not just for content for them.
You know, they really, really helped me out on really short notice.
Like, Julian Field, like, dropped everything on a Saturday and came to talk to me just to see what was going on.
You know, because like at that point, it wasn't public yet.
None of the documents had come out.
Like, the arrest warrant had him posted.
Ronald Watkins didn't leak it to Neon Revolt yet.
Yeah, I don't never really come across a situation like this, so I don't know that I'm even qualified to understand it or comment yet.
But it seems like we're kind of in the eye of the storm.
I'm just glad that Jim Watkin is not Bloomberg levels of rich.
There's nothing in the United States.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, maybe we can get if we piss off Bloomberg enough.
Yeah, maybe on his radar.
He likes to do Dickensian things like, you know, like crush people with special needs for no particular reason.
He does seem like he enjoys it.
Can I have a million dollars, please?
Yeah, exactly.
Straight to the GoFundMe.
We promise you to go fund me.
So many memes at some point.
He'll make a whole.
You want a meme?
Fuck that.
He'll make you an image board.
Mr. Bloomberg.
Have you ever heard of 12chan?
Now, Mr. Bloomberg, this is a website that's going to work for you.