Mega-fame in the streaming world comes with workplace hazards: a nitpicking audience, the fear of being swatted, the isolation of living in a streamers-only bubble. Endlessly being “on” can also take a serious toll on the psyche. Fanum recalls feeling mentally destroyed after a 48-hour streaming stretch. “I remember getting off and I was like, Whoa, what day is it?” He likes doing outdoor streams because they offer a reprieve. “When you do it too much—specifically desktop—being in the same room every single day, it can cook you.”

He’s grown passionate about mental health and has done stream sessions known as Grown-Man Hours, where he puts on some lo-fi beats and gets raw. He’ll divulge his own worries, interact with fans, give advice to people when he feels he can or suggest they get professional help when he feels he can’t. “I know what it’s like to feel like the world is closing in on you,” he tells me. At one point in his life, he “had super bad anxiety, damn near close to a disorder,” and panic attacks.

Now, he says, people sometimes approach him thinking he’s a motivational speaker. He tells me he’s had fans come up to him teary-eyed, saying his content has saved their lives. “That’s a bless, that’s a W, bro,” he says, glowing. He pauses to make sure he’s been understood. “You know what’s a W and an L?” I nod. “That’s a W.”


Fanum thinks AMP is on the vanguard of coolness in the streaming world, which used to be associated with socially awkward dorks. Before the live-influencer boom, “people would clown your typical streamer.” Now streamers are widely beloved—clouted, to use their term. “We made it cool to play games, we made it cool to be you, to be on stream and have fun,” he says. He talks about upgrading the fashion in the creator space: “Your typical merch…they just slap their YouTube or Twitch name. No, I want to make it cool, like, Yo, where you got that from?” He says he plans on dropping a line of high-end streetwear. “You troopin’ through life,” he explains. “Clothes make you feel a certain type of way, almost like armor in a game.”

Currently, Fanum has nine employees, he says, and 30 other associates who help in less concrete ways, like running his Grand Theft Auto server. They discuss stream ideas at weekly meetings online, and otherwise seem to operate like an anarchic start-up. (At one point, Vinny, who is lying on the couch as Fanum and I speak, starts snoring in the background.) “Usually, I’ll come up with an idea, I let Meagan know,” Fanum explains, and she helps make it a reality. In the past, they’ve gotten animals from farms, like a goat named Curry. Recently, Meagan sourced five live turkeys from Craigslist. He tells me he did not eat the turkeys, though his chat was under that impression.

The employee-boss relationship seems to be friends-first, and work-life separation is an irrelevant concept. “It’s a lifestyle,” Vinny says. “We think of everything. Not everything, but, in the back of our minds: What could be content?” He tells me that Fanum has helped him out personally before, but when I ask for an example, the only thing Vinny can think of is tied into producing more content: When his laptop broke, Fanum went to the Apple store to get him a fresh one, “just so I could keep working and not slow down the pace.”

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