Twitch's Weird History

December 31, 1999. A group of live streamers had been partying all night in the basement of a New York City building. What they didn't know was that the FBI was about to raid their underground bunker. They had been told that there was this doomsday cult and that there was gonna be like, you know, some mass suicide or something. Today, streamers come face to face with law enforcement all too often. But when the FBI arrived at 353 Broadway, they quickly realized that this was no prank phone call. Interrogation rooms, public showers, free drugs, and even a gun rang. Stocked with automatic weapons.

You know, they go downstairs, they find all these bunks set up in the church thing. It's looking very millennium cultish.

In this dingy basement, livestreaming had reached peak insanity. Complete lawlessness had led to chaos. But miraculously, these dark beginnings would ultimately be overcome and morph into the professional livestreaming community we see today. Just a few decades later. Amazon would buy Twitch for a billion dollars. Streamers would start signing multimillion dollar contracts, and hundreds of millions of viewers would watch live streams. Had to know if there was a link between the Twitch we know today and the basement cult that came face to face with the FBI all those years earlier. So I called up Justin Khan, one of the founders of Twitch. So, Justin, did you know about the millennium livestreaming cult?

And we say, goodbye 80s, hello 90s. Well, let's start the insanity.

Okay, so it's the 1990s. Friends is on TV. People had just started getting cell phones, and this is your current cell phone. And the Internet was in its infancy, but one startup was way ahead of everyone else. Just look at this. The site had streaming video, live chat, and it even covered gaming content. Sounds familiar, right? This startup was called sudo.com, and it basically had all the same features as Twitch.

Sudo, right now, as we sit here, is the first Internet television network.

That's Josh Harris, the founder of Sudo. Josh had a vision of what the Internet could be. But to get there, he needed money.

Hello, I'm Josh Harris, president of Jupiter Communications.

Before Sudo, Josh realized that companies needed statistics about the Internet to build their businesses. So he built a research team and started selling reports to financial analysts.

I made up my first report. It sold four or 500 copies at 300.

And amazingly, his forecasts always seem to come true. If you were on Wall street in the 1990s and you wanted to know about the Internet, Josh was your guy.

Josh had a vision at a very young age, and he was telling me there was this whole new thing that was coming where we're going to be able to communicate with each other over this network.

With cash pouring in from his reports, Josh began coming up with new ideas. He saw that more and more people were getting Internet access every day. But more importantly, he understood their desires and how to exploit them. And so he started building chat rooms, most of them adult themed. Obviously, this was the 90s, way before Slack and Discord. Online chat was a novelty, but these racy chats wound up accounting for 20% of all billable chat hours in the United States. It wasn't long before Josh had sold these chat rooms and walked away a multimillionaire. But that was nothing. Next, Josh took his research company public. The IPO landed him $80 million. And all of a sudden, he was the hottest thing in the New York City tech scene.

You could just watch your wealth grow. You don't believe it. It's irrational to you.

All that money led to Josh living an absolutely wild lifestyle. He was constantly throwing parties in New York City that drew in all sorts of people.

I open the door and it's like a rave going on. And supermodels like wearing close to no clothes, sitting on the laps of nerds playing Doom.

That's Jason Calacanis, a famous angel investor who wrote checks to the founders of Uber and Robinhood. We'll come back to him later in this story. Josh's party lifestyle would ultimately be his downfall. But while the dot com boom was raging, he had plenty of ideas for new businesses. By 1994, Josh wanted to take chat rooms to the next level. TV was still king, but with pseudo.com viewers could not just watch, but interact with what's on their screen. People born after the 90s, you can't really understand how insane this was. Back in those days, text messaging wasn't even widespread. At this point, it's hard to imagine a time when people weren't looking down at their phones all the time. But this was the 90s. The Internet was extremely early.

Little Wing, who is a new viewer. Pappy is a new viewer. We got some new people out there.

Oh, boy. Words getting around. It was genius because nobody has done it yet.

And that was the future.

That's where it was gonna go. It was gonna be interactive television. The early adopters loved livestreaming. Jason Calacanis was one of them, and he even hosted a show about tech.

Welcome to the Silicon Alley Reporter Net TV show. Let me get myself on the screen here perfectly so you can See me with your real video player, G3.

But Sudo wasn't exactly professional on the inside. Walls were covered in graffiti and I mean, look at this footage. These weren't your typical office socials.

I suspect there have been people on illegal drugs, hallucinogenic drugs that have been on this elevator and it's seemingly endless ride.

Even though TV was still king, live streaming had an edge. Targeted advertising.

What's the competitive edge? I'm much more efficient television. My advertisers can be delivered a very specific audience. And guess what? My audience can be counted because they're computers.

Josh recognized that live streaming was all about spectacle and pushing boundaries. He even invented a character, this guy, Lovey the Clown. We still see this over over the top style in streamers today. Plenty of live streamers play a character in order to attract attention. And Josh understood this. But he was slowly losing his grip on reality. Dad would say, you're out of your mind. What's wrong with you? He just wanted to go like and slap him over the head every time he said a brought out Lovey. Josh's bizarre behavior got worse and would ultimately lead him to leave. Pseudo.com, but it was his next project where he finally took it too far.

Partially an event, partially a party and.

Partially a social experiment.

He called it quiet. We live in public. And Josh sunk millions into this project.

Down here we're building a capsule hotel to find out what the Internet is going to look like when it takes over. Cost about $250,000 to build the pod structure with an additional $150,000 to build the internal cable network. 150,000 DOL to feed everyone. $300,000 for miscellaneous artists and events.

This place was insane. They had drugs, booze, interrogation rooms.

Any techniques that we can use to intimidate them, you know, to break them, in essence. Did you try to commit suicide?

Yes.

Show me the speed with which the knife would have held through your flesh. It was a very frightening experience. In fact, it was torture.

And even an indoor gun range stocked full of ammunition. Yeah, where's the gun range? Sounds good.

I want to do the gun.

You want to shoot guns?

I do.

This was his hedonistic bunker. And the rules were simple.

Don't bring your money with you. Everything is free except the video that we capture of you that we own.

But the project wasn't just about having fun. Josh ran the bunker like an authoritarian cult.

The image I have in my mind is like in a concentration camp. You know those pictures where they're all spotted. They're all facing forward.

Attendees had to answer deeply personal questions and give their Social Security numbers. Everything was filmed. Everything. They even had cameras in the bathrooms and public showers. By the way, there is so much I can't show on YouTube, but I highly recommend that you check out the documentary, which I'll link below. It's a fascinating watch and a great source of footage for this video. In Josh's mind, no one would have privacy in the future. So why here?

Andy Warhol was actually wrong. His view is, of course, that people want 15 minutes of fame in their lifetime. Our view is that people want 15 minutes of fame every day.

Josh, in some ways, was right. We allow Facebook and Google to track everything we do, and we openly share our lives on social media. But even 20 years later, the impact of the Internet has been far more moderate than Josh predicted. Yes, there are some people who are who stream their lives for hours on end, but that's certainly not the norm.

We're one of the safer places to be in New York City.

The debauchery couldn't go on forever. And so, on the turn of the millennium, the cops raided the bunker. FBI. Open up.

Get out now.

I don't want to see you leave. Don't be an asshole.

I'm not.

Get out.

Get out.

Run. People are not supposed to stay in the hotel anymore. Something crazy happens when you point a camera at someone. The desire for fame and attention is so strong that social norms seem to fly out the window. But this erratic behavior wasn't contained to just Josh's crazy experiment. Most of those incidents have been repeated on Twitch. At some point in time, even Dr. Disrespect tried to livestream in a bathroom. Although he was banned immediately for this, Josh's obsession with live streaming didn't stop there. He went on to wire up his entire house like a We Live in Public Version 2.0.

We rigged a camera inside the refrigerator, camera in the cat box, infrared cameras in the bedroom, 72 highly sensitive microphones.

Josh and his girlfriend laid their entire lives bare. But the openness took its toll on Josh's mental health and have been living.

With, you know, continuous surveillance of cameras. That combination is not designed for mental stability and health. That's right. I'm sick. I'm mentally sick right now.

It ultimately led him to becoming violent and psychotic.

Stop it.

Leave me alone.

Don't let go of me. Don't hurt me.

Josh would leave New York and moved to an apple farm. Nearly broke and no longer revered as a tech genius, but this story sounds familiar to me. This is Justin Kahn, who would go on to become the founder of Twitch. Justin also rigged up his house for 24. 7 live streaming here with Justin from.

Justin TV, which is a website that.

Broadcasts your life live 24.

7 from your point of view.

Everything from, you know, going on dates to walking around the street to having business, meaning everything is on camera.

Live streaming video with chat rooms.

The resemblance between Pseudo and Twitch is uncanny. Even while researching this video, I saw he followed the director of the We Live in Public documentary. And so I had to know, how much inspiration did Justin take from Josh's experiments when he streamed his life? And is Twitch inspired by the original Pseudo site? Hey, Justin, thanks for taking the call. I'm really excited to talk to you.

Yo, it's great to talk to you finally. After watching on his YouTube videos.

I've had this. I've had this thought in my mind since I watched this documentary, We Live in Public. When you first started out thinking about doing Justin TV streaming your life, had you heard about what happened with We Live in Public and Josh Harris?

Yeah, so I guess I found out about it later after we had already come up with the idea. People told me, but the documentary hadn't come out yet. So, yeah, the documentary came out a couple years after the Justin TV experiment of me streaming my life to the Internet in 24. So, you know, I heard this, like, oh, yeah, this guy tried this and he was doing it in a warehouse in Brooklyn or something, right? Like he was in New York. But outside of that, I didn't really know really what happened to him. I guess I'm. I've always been someone who hasn't done very, you know, that much research anyways.

So if you had known that this guy livestreamed his whole life and had this kind of breakup and had like a pretty rough go of it, do you think that would have intimidated you, or do you think he would have been like, you know what? I can do it better?

I mean, at the time, you know, being 22 years old or whatever, I probably would have been like, fuck it, nice. Mine will be way better.

I love that. Yeah. So there you have it. The Twitch team only found out about Josh Harris after they had already started building, but it wouldn't have stopped them anyway. Don't let previous failures stop you from building the future. If you're not already subscribed to Justin, head on over there now. And if you want to know what Justin's co founder Kyle went on to do after launching Twitch. Just watch this video next. Thanks for watching.