Eden DaSilva meets brainrot slam poet supreme Sam on his home turf on Vancouver Island to discuss his miraculous rise, crashout-aided fall from grace, and his recent return and embrace of sweet, sweet gambling money.
Scrolling through Instagram Reels one evening, a familiar face pops up in my feed. It’s Sam, the guy that works at the liquor store down the street from my apartment.
“Guys, whoever sold me that fake phenibut, count your fucking days, I know that shit was fake. You guys are pissing me the fuck off, I hate this city bruh.”
I’d recognize the blue walls of the Logan’s Liquor Store break room anywhere. I had worked there years ago, until one day the manager inexplicably stopped including my name on the weekly schedule. I often stopped by still, after closing shifts at my new job washing dishes at a restaurant. Sam had started working there within the last month or two, and after noticing him writing tags in a notebook behind the counter, we began chatting briefly on the evenings I’d stop in.
This Reel caught my attention because just hours earlier during Sam’s weekend shift with Jeff, a longtime employee with whom I had spent a summer working nights together while blasting Playboi Carti’s recently released Whole Lotta Red, Jeff and I had discussed the recent restrictions on the online sale of phenibut, a nootropic supplement sitting in a grey-area of legality. Sam was unfamiliar with the substance and its mild recreational effects; we explained what the GABA analogue does, and how Nootropics Depot and Lift Mode’s indefinite pause of sales would make it harder to obtain.
Most of his Reels were filmed in the back room of the liquor store, and he only had a thousand or so followers at the time. I made a mental note to mention my discovery of this burner account, @gavinweiland, next time I saw him at Logan’s.
This never happened. On one of my next visits, another clerk informed me that Sam had been fired — allegedly for stealing a bottle of alcohol and a bag of chips.
“I never stole anything,” Sam interrupts after I mention this. Now, nearly two years since we first met, we’re sitting in his downtown Victoria apartment discussing his meteoric ascent to Instagram Reel virality, his summer spent as a “demi-influencer,” and his self-admitted falloff, marked by a series of online crashouts that led to an eventual hiatus from posting altogether.
“Not even the chips?” I ask.
I know he stole the chips — he proudly admitted to it in The Life and Times of Gavin Weiland, a surreal mini-documentary chronicling his month of nonstop partying in LA financed by a mysterious crypto-millionaire.
“Okay, I stole the chips,” he concedes. “Okay, okay, I digress. Logan’s was a torture chamber. It was a wage cage. You couldn’t change the temperature of the room. You couldn’t change the music. You couldn’t lean, you couldn’t sit down. You couldn’t go on your phone. It was very strict for a liquor store. You had to stand there like a robot. I knew my time was coming to an end there, because I had already taken on a new job at this screenprinting place and I was like, alright I’m out of here. I gave my two weeks, and in the last week I was just grabbing the chips and eating them. Honestly, fuck them.”
Sam grew up a two-hour ferry ride away in Vancouver, moving across the water to Vancouver Island in search of change after the end of a long-term relationship he summarizes as “food, sex, and going on our phones.”
He takes a sip of his beer. “It was my high school sweetheart. We had a beautiful relationship. A long, blossoming relationship, but it got to the point where it became hyper-repetitive. We split, and I came to Victoria in January of 2024. Then I started working at Logan’s, since it was pretty close to home. I walked in with a résumé, and that fat ass fucking retarded manager was there. That was the beginning of it all.”
After Sam got fired from Logan’s, it would be another month until I saw him, spontaneously on the street, just a few addresses over from the liquor store he was now banned from. He sipped on a tall can and explained that he was about to fly to California on a private jet. Some random guy had offered him a VIP pass for the first weekend of Coachella. This is because, in the last few weeks, Sam blew up. His bizarre punchline poetry amassed him nearly 100,000 Instagram followers, making him somewhat of a local celebrity.
“I have like ten fucking dollars to my name right now,” he told me matter-of-factly, while checking his phone. “I’m about to have the best weekend of my life.”
Rather than return home on Monday, his weekend morphs into a month-long bender documented by intermittent Instagram Stories. Instead of his usual minute-long videos packed with surreal quips and Will Mahony-esque monologues regarding his relatably average life at a dead-end job, his feed became an unpredictable mix of blacked-out chaos at nightclubs and grid pics with Quadeca, Faye Webster, Na-Kel Smith, Babytron, Cole Bennet, Kerwin Frost, and Joeyy.
A few months later, in June 2024, the former All Gas No Brakes founders Nick Mosher and Evan Gilbert-Katz posted The Life and Times of Gavin Weiland on their new channel Documentary Forever. The first half chronicles Sam’s post-Coachella month in California, spent between a $10,000/night AirBNB, courtside Lakers games, strip clubs, and the vape store. The documentary features interviews with his accomplices — similarly terminally-online dudes introduced by their Instagram handles who offer little to no explanation of what it is that they actually do. The mysterious financier of the trip is referred to only as “Bean.”
The video ends with Bean chartering a private jet back to Victoria, joining Sam as he reluctantly returns to his real life in Victoria and takes the documentary crew on a tour of the city, which includes a shift at his new gig: screenprinting minor league sports gear.
Three weeks after the release of the documentary, Sam relinquished the @gavinweiland Instagram handle, reverting back to his longtime screen name @strappnasti. His posting became more sporadic, and often clearly intoxicated. Eventually, he stopped posting on the account altogether. Occasional updates from his personal account mostly consisted of either throwback photos or story posts about underground rap and Counter-Strike.
This winter, I bumped into Sam for the first time in nearly a year, as he wandered downtown on a day off from his current job working front of house at a restaurant. A few days later, I convinced him to invite me over to drink some beers and catch up in a retrospective interview of sorts.
Throughout our conversation, I wonder if I’m talking to Sam, the guy from the liquor store, or Strappnasti, the curated character of a brainrot baron. He insists there’s no distinction between the two, although his immediate greeting of “Are we already mic’d up?” suggests he’s somewhat aware that any slip-up could pierce the veil of his irony-laden internet persona.
The entire Strappnasti project started with Sam dreaming of being a rapper; he rushed out 45-50 songs on SoundCloud that got no traction, and eventually decided to reuse the lyrics in the form of Instagram Reels. “Why let all these bars get wasted on a song that’s gonna get 200 plays when I can break it up into Reels and at least get more exposure?” he reasons. “That’s exactly what I did. A lot of my early Reels were from songs I had made.”
He tried to bruteforce virality by milking his archive of rap bars, recording and posting up to 5 Reels a day. “I’m a Notes app head. People think it’s off the dome, but it’s always been Notes app. It’s always been pre-written and calculated, to an extent,” he says.
It was what he claims was his 57th Reel — a brief video with the opener “blowing up on Reels and I think they know that, she yelling in my ear cause I stole her Prozac” — that finally hijacked the algorithm and blew up. Sam quickly employed the SoundCloud rapper method, archiving every Reel he had posted previous to that one to make his feed look spotless. “I moved forward with that being the threshold [for not archiving]— it has to hit 50k views.” Sam deployed other canny strategies to reel in viewers, like aggressively location-tagging every post with Victoria, BC. In part, Sam credits his move to Victoria with his Instagram Reels career.
“When you’re stuck on an island and you have nothing else to do, and nothing to lose, what are you gonna turn to? I moved here after a pretty devastating breakup. I had no friends and no one to talk to, so I started making videos.”
In the quiet and mostly boring city of Victoria, it isn’t hard to capture the attention of locals with videos walking down familiar streets. It was through this local notoriety that Sam connected with Bean, who was also living on Vancouver Island at the time. He explains that Bean created Howl, an online gambling casino which somehow involves both crypto and Counter-Strike skins. After linking up at one of Victoria’s downtown nightclubs, they became friends.
“A fan reached out and said, ‘I’ll give you a free pass to Coachella if you come with me.’ I ran it by Bean. I’m like, yo I’m bout to go to Coachella, this guy’s tryna pay for all my shit. He’s like ‘you know what bro, lets go together.’ He organized the private jets and crazy rentals and we lived it up. He spent fuckin… I’m not gonna talk about that. But he spent a ridiculous amount of money on the trip. It was all on Bean’s dime, and that’s obviously very clear in the documentary.”
It’s clear that Sam regrets nothing about how the doc portrayed his hedonistic lifestyle of debtmaxxing and his personality revolving around post-ironic Reels lingo. If anything, he wishes they included footage from the two mic’d up dates that he went on with girls from Instagram.
“[Evan and Nick] hit me up and I didn’t realize who it was at first, but I looked at their channel and saw that they had made that ‘artists in a mansion’ video. I saw what they were doing and I was like, this is gonna be bad, but I cannot let this escape me — I need this moment in time captured. It’s very reverse-vain. I do consider that my magnum opus. I’m not trying to say that in retrospect, but I knew that the video was gonna be a hit piece… not a hit piece but a real piece. That’s a double entendre, I guess. We were fucked up and being idiots, living it up. My family members have seen the video, my coworkers have seen the video, my parents… everybody.”
When I ask how he told his mom about the documentary, he answers without hesitation.
“Direct link.”
“She was definitely distraught,” he continues. “I mean, my mom’s been distraught a lot of times. Even with me talking about my ketamine use, she’s like, ‘Do you need help?’ I’m like, mom, I’m just talking about ketamine on IG, it’s not that deep.”
In a photo posted in May of 2024, Sam poses alongside Vancouver-based Instagram Reeler aldo2swag. The caption reads: “thanks for one hundred and thirty thousand followers.”
Today, his account sits at 94k. As far as I can tell, he doesn’t seem to care. “I’ve obviously fallen off. I took a long hiatus, and before that I did a lot to burn my following.” He alludes to a number of drug-fueled crashouts, and recounts one in particular during which he claims to have drank 24 Twisted Teas and consumed LSD before posting 40 Reels in the middle of the night. “I considered 100k the benchmark, and then I just didnt give a fuck. I’d already seen what I wanted to see.”
You don’t think you could have taken it further? Or you just didn’t want to?
He finishes another beer and sets the can down, pausing for a moment.
“Thats an interesting one. I could have definitely taken it further, I’d like to think.”
At his best, Sam says, he felt gratified by the way his online work positively influenced people in the real world. “I think back to this one situation where this guy was like, ‘Yo my dads dying from a heart failure and I’m in the hospital with him, and I’m watching your videos and I feel a lot better.’ I remember reading that like, damn.”
During his nearly year-long hiatus, I began noticing a similar style of Reels appearing in my feed, also filmed in Victoria and Vancouver. @ch3dderb0b, the account I saw most frequently, mainly posted Reels riding his bike weirdly, hitting disposable vapes, or animatedly smoking weed on Victoria streets; he’s something like a shortform brainrot Charlie Chaplin, his humor deriving from body language. In Vancouver, @bluntsmoker808, @brollxd and @thevancouvertimekeeper receive sometimes millions of views on brief videos where they take bong tokes on Granville Street, ride Lime scooters with their pants down, or hump Gastown’s “iconic” (pretty lame) steam clock.
In an attempt to answer the question Sam asks himself in the documentary (“what the fuck am I influencing?”), I suggest that he may have paved the way for this new genre of Reels. He’s not so sure.
“I think I definitely showed a lot of people how easy it was,” Sam muses. “But in terms of content, I dunno. Their content is very funny and it’s very rash, I’d say it’s more contact humor. It’s honestly like, Peewee Herman level. The shit that I went out to make was damn near slam poetry. How are you gonna compare like, a hyper-thought out slam poetry video to a guy biking weird? But in the same breath, I think that shit’s so funny. It’s not even slapstick, it’s like, drystick. It’s just like these dry quick videos. I think it’s beautiful.”
One other thing that Sam and ch3dderb0b have in common: gambling ads. By the end of the summer, ch3dderb0b dropped the perma-silent act in order to promote Rainbet, an online crypto casino and sportsbook targeting a young audience with lucrative influencer deals.
In recent times, promo for the growing number of online gambling companies has become unavoidable, infesting every facet of shortform content from niche local influencers to Drake’s Instagram. Undisclosed gambling ads—where creators pull up a gambling app loaded with demo money and miraculously hit a jackpot first try—are everywhere.
Just days before our interview, Sam’s @strappnasti hiatus came to an end. His account bio is now marked by a Strappnasti affiliate link for Kalshi, and he’s mentioned the online prediction market in pretty much all his new videos. He confirmed that he signed a deal with them, and the monthly income he gets covers his rent a few times over.
“These are high-profile gambling sites that are dealing with billions, in the Bs, so their influencer budgets are crazy,” he says when I mention his recent endorsement of Kalshi. “It would bring anyone out of the woodworks.”
“Nobody wants to sell their soul,” he continues, “but when you’re offered money that’s gonna pay your rent, it’s very hard to turn down these gambling sites. Instagram in Canada has no money in it. What else are you gonna do but take a deal? You don’t have other options. I tried it myself. I blew up and got a big following, and I didn’t see any money off it. I kept working jobs. It’s really hard being a creator, especially in Canada, to touch any money.”
Despite the Kalshi money, Sam still works full time at his restaurant job. In terms of these contracts, his seems to be on the lower end. “I think shortform content is a prison within itself,” he reflects. “These guys signed to Roobet and Rainbet can post an Instagram story and as long as it gets a certain amount, they’re paid by the view. It’s like, view percent or something.” In a new digital goldrush of “organic content” deals, it seems like a no-brainer to push any moral quandaries to the side and promote gambling when it pays leagues more than any shitty job you’ve ever had. Everyone else is doing it now, anyway.
As our interview winds to an end, I ask why he thinks he started making Reels in the first place, before the pipeline of demi-influencer to gambling brand partnerships became a clear-cut method of making money on the internet.
“I just wanted to be a rapper. It’s not a good answer, but I really want to be a famous rapper, dude… that’s it.”
kalshi link in bio
i’m sad i bought a gun 🙁