Panic World - How Bronies won the internet

Episode Date: October 21, 2026

In 2010, Hasbro launched a new generation of My Little Pony toys, and debuted a nice little television show to accompany it. It was called My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, and over a million people tuned into its premiere. Although perhaps not the kind of people Hasbro big wigs expected. No, instead, the “Brony” was born — guys who might have seemed kind of innocent in the beginning (although even that is debatable), but Bronies grew into an unstoppable force of fully grown men looking “respectfully” at a bunch of cute, big-eyed, flamboyantly colored, personified horses that were designed for kids. PJ Vogt joins us once again, despite knowing what he signed up for, to learn more about this subculture built around elaborate lore, conventions, tasteful art, “clopping,” tulpas, a certain interesting project involving a jar — and how Bronies have impacted broader internet culture. Our guest PJ Vogt hosts the podcast Search Engine. Check it out on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Want even more Panic World content? Like ad-free episodes, bonuses & exclusives, and access to our members-only Discord? Sign up for a membership for just $6.66 a month at https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. Credits - Host: Ryan Broderick - Producer: Grant Irving - Production Coordinator: Josh Fjelstad - Researcher: Adam Bumas Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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It seemed like something silly that maybe even represented something positive. And meanwhile, something toxic was brewing that looking back, we can see infected culture as a whole. That's today's episode. Bronies, what's the deal? So, do you have any idea what we're talking about today? No, I've walked into this room as I walk into so many rooms completely clueless. Okay, well, let me share my screen, and I want you to kind of just talk me through your first reactions, emotion, to what you're looking at. I always forget that this is what happens when I come here.

I don't like this at all. To describe it for our audio listeners, what you're looking at right now. It's like, it looks like the rear end of a stuffed animal that sort of seems like it's hard to say, but it could be a mile. little pony. It has it's light blue. It's different shades of light blue. It's got a harp, like it almost looks like a harp tattoo and brought on your end. And the thing that I'm regretfully have to add is that like the the hole for the butt is is is big enough that a human could put their body part in it and it seems designed for a human to put their body part in it. It's interesting. You think it's the butt. That's interesting. Is that not the butt? Well, it's a

Oh, God. It could be, you know, it's a hand puppet, essentially. I hope. I don't think this has been modified. I think this is, like, fairly innocent. Oh. I'll learn more about it soon. But this is Lyra Heartstrings.

She is My Little Pony. And yes, the My Little Pony characters all have a different emblem on their back leg. Sorry, this wasn't made for sex. It's just that because of the context of panic world, I put that on it. because of the context of the picture, the picture's a little bit suggestively angled. But I thought this was made for sex. Well, if this is not, then I disagree for it. I don't think this was made for sex.

I don't. I think this is a hand puppet. I'm going to choose to believe that, but it is ominously photographed. The opening looks small for a hand. Yeah, you know what? I actually Googled this. There is no, they don't make a hand puppet of flower hard strings. Okay.

Yeah, I feel like I feel like good about my read on this. All right, let's continue. Okay. So the reason I showed you that horrible image. is because today we're talking about My Little Pony and we're talking about bronies. A topic that in the course of two years of doing the show, we've actually not touched. Really? No.

We saved it for you. We're going to get into that. But first, let me just do the proper setup here. My name is Ryan Broderick. With me, as always, is my producer Grant Irving. Grant, what would your pony be? What would your pony sona be? That's a worst question than being asked what my fur sona is.

What would your pony sona be? So out of depth here. Okay. It probably have like a headphone emoji on the butt. I don't. That's cool. What's a good answer, Ryan?

Yeah, you could be like a, you could be Grant the Klopcaster. That's actually pretty cute. Yeah. Well, clopping also means jerking off in the brony community. But yes. I know. I made this outline. Okay.

So this is Panic World. Show about how the internet warps our minds or culture and eventually reality is brought to you by garbage media and with us is. is our favorite guest to terrorize. PJ Vote. Welcome to the show. PJ, what would your pony sona be?

Can't use clockcaster. What about like kind of like HR, HR professional? Like an HR rep? Yeah, like an HR rep pony. Is that a thing? A horse relations? Yeah, horse relations.

That also sounds like a sex thing. Yeah. I feel like all roads lead to the same place here. Have you gone down this rabbit hole before? Do you know much about the brony world? I really don't. I know that back one million years ago when I was working at Reply All we did a thing about this, but I, my brain, which sometimes deletes necessary information, has definitely deleted this

unnecessary information. So I don't know. I know that, I mean, I know who my little ponies are. And I know that there are people on the internet who have more complicated feelings about my little ponies than their creators probably intended. But that's about where my file stops these days. I went to a New York City Brony meetup in 2012

It is to this day The worst smelling room I have ever been in That says a lot Can you give us your top three Worst smelling rooms I used to play Magic the Gathering I have been to like super smash tournaments And this was worse

Yeah it smelled really bad That was sort of my major takeaway Like uh and none of the creepy stuff was happening They were they were just like adults Who liked My Little Pony a lot Was there a gender ratio that you recall Fairly 50 50-50, actually.

Interesting. And do they dress up the way like furries would? Or are they just, do they just, they're just people? They can. At the event that I was at, it was a lot of just like accessories, wearing like a rainbow dash wings or something or like a pinky pie tutu. Those are both ponies from My Little Pony. The reason we wanted to talk about it is because I think in a lot of ways,

the brony community blew open the door for basically, the way all of culture works now, which is like you're kind of an embarrassing fanatic of it, and companies now know that these mainly adults will be that way and sort of want to foster that. Like I would argue that Swifties and Bronies are functionally the same concept. I want to say like I do already agree with one of these observations, which is that it's become more socially permissible to be a fan. The way once only teenagers were allowed to be fans, like millennials brought fandom into their middle age. And corporations, which maybe would have kind of ignored, because super fans can be off-putting to just like normal enthusiasts of a thing.

But corporations have started to cater to these like adult fans of things. Is that the theory? Yeah. In fact, like we touched on this in your, I think it was your last episode, which was Gadget Hack Ranch, the Russian cult around a cartoon mouse, which is like a lot of the fans. which is like a lot of the fans of Gadget, you know, spent the 80s and the 90s complaining that as adults, they could not get access to basically children's media. And they wanted to be catered to. And so the, you know, in fact, literally just this week, I saw like a report that for the first time ever, toy sales are now predominantly selling to adults, not children. That's good.

That's a healthy society. How are we supposed to feel about that? Okay, so I have a fight. I have a fight with my girlfriend about this that has been going for like a year. And it's largely like based around like where did children focus spaces go? And she believes that like the Apple store basically killed the McDonald's playroom. And there's some evidence to back that up that like private equity after the great recession turned all of the like child focused fast food restaurants into Apple stores to chase a different clientele. My theory is that not necessarily that that didn't happen, but that it has.

continued and sort of gotten worse over time because there are just less children. It's a side effect of just like lower fertility rates overall, like just people not having kids. Or, but it's not, and I want to be careful, it's not lower fertility rates overall. It's lower fertility rates for demographics that corporations would care about. Okay, so it's like the affluent people that corporations are going to target, fewer of them are having kids. And because they're not having kids, they also have more money to spend and because they're more attached to their sort of signifiers of childhood.

It's like they become the demographic where X amount of decades ago, their kids would have been a demographic. That's a theory I've had for a while. Yeah. And I wish I had more data, but there isn't a lot of data to explain where did the McDonald's playroom go. But I think around 2010, as the Brony fandom is coming to focus, the media landscape is changing.

The recession has, like, greatly changed the economy. And, you know, Marvel is basically firing up. You know, you have Iron Man in 2008, the Dark Night as well. So all of a sudden there is this sense of like, wait a minute, adults will go see baby stuff. And so we don't need like a sexy Harrison Ford crime thriller. We can like put a guy in a cape and blow stuff up. And then the adults will also buy the action figure. It's hard to talk about without sounding like such a pretentious jerk.

But as somebody who will go see a Marvel movie, like the, I feel like there was a taboo against continuing. continuing to enjoy the things you enjoyed as a kid and the taboo kind of sucked. But then we knocked down the taboo and like, I've been watching movies from the 90s lately. And it's like watching movies from the 70s. It's like adults talk about things and like they don't shoot any lasers. It's awesome. I have also been watching like basically any movie I can find made before 2008. Yeah, yeah.

Or maybe go even further back to like the Michael Bay Transformers is probably like another. When did that come out? Hold on. Let's see. 2007 so yeah basically like all of these companies pre great recession are making adult movies for adults and then the recession hits and it's like let's all go look at baby stuff and buy baby stuff and be babies forever this also feels like Ron Paul was like a part of the soup here how do you why was Ron Paul's a button for this was Ron Paul in Michael Bay's Transformers the time frame of it

of like let's turn everything into a super fandom or like maybe the the fandom the fandom for Ron Paul was such an indicator that this was coming. Well, actually, let me set this up because that's not totally crazy. Also, I am imagining what would happen if you had like a giant Bitcoin transformer that transformed into a robot version of Ron Paul, which would be pretty cool. Let's cut that and actually let's make it merch. Yeah. Let's IP that.

If you want to buy action figures. So, yeah, actually let's set this up. So 2010 is a really interesting year. You have a bunch of industries kind of realizing that like adults, will engage in fandom behavior, you know, and they're not growing out of it. 2010 is when 4chan sort of becomes the epicenter of the My Little Pony Friendship is Magic reboot. So My Little Pony is like He Man or Transformers, you know, it's a toy line that became a multimedia franchise, right? and it starts in 1981 and there are a bunch of different TV shows.

In 2010, My Little Pony Friendship is Magic launches. And that is when the, that's what the bronies latch onto. Okay. It's the reboot. Friendship is magic. Our researcher Adam gave us like a gigantic ticking clock of like all the things leading to, like it almost reads like a history of World War II. but if I can condense it very quickly, basically from like February 2010 until like the end of the year,

there's all this different stuff happening in the animation world and Fortune is sort of acting as the home base for it. So that's where you get the fandoms springing up for adventure time. Adult Swim launches their flash game robot unicorn attack. The entire website is redecorated as the game robot unicorn attack. Wait, Forge Hand was? Yeah, because they used to do like events and like do takeovers and like kind of and mess with the website CSS and stuff. But this wasn't like American corporations like doing a sponsor.

This is happening on the fandom side. You also get like Minecraft becoming very big out of nowhere. So it's like like the world as we know it is sort of. of being born in 2010. In October 2010, the hub channel starts broadcasting in the U.S. It's a new channel that's co-owned by Hasbro. And it's basically just like a way to like dump a bunch of ad dollars into different Hasbro stuff.

And part of this, the hubs, yeah, it's co-owned by Discovery and Hasbro. Okay. It's 24-hour cartoon channel. They launched My Little Pony Friendship as Magic. We could only find a few examples of chatter from its immediate launch date, which would probably prove that it wasn't a huge hit with older fans. Right, right. Because if they were there waiting to be activated, this signal should have been good enough.

Yes. We found what looks to be the first ever 4chan thread about the reboot Friendship is Magic. Okay, I'm looking at your screen. So this is a section of 4chan called CO or comics and cartoons. So do you want me to read it? I want you to read the first three comments here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.

So somebody says, first episode is up, and they've got a screen grab of these innocent and adorable little ponies. Somebody says, La Bump, just like I'm bumping this thread. And then the third comment, which really only is within eight minutes of the first one. somebody says, this is not sexy. What were they thinking? Yeah. There's some further chatter down where someone says, are you saying you found the original sexy?

So the big thing here also for context is that these characters have been redesigned. So this is not the original animation style. They have bigger eyes. I would argue kind of a flirtier appearance. Yeah. Almost like they're asking for it. I wouldn't go that far. It feels like more, it feels like kind of anime-ish.

Manga-ish? Yeah. I would say so, yeah. And it's a lot of people talking about My Little Pony as a kid, you know, watching it. So these would be like young adults in the 2010, you know, in 2010. Can I just say like I, so I never really went on 4-10. I was like, I was told it was a website for the bad kids and I stayed off of it. And my understanding, one is that many of the like internet culture people I know and love were at minimum reading the board and understood earlier than I did.

how much of culture is being influenced by it. But also, I understand people are talking about wanting to like fuck the ponies here, but I'm surprised the degree to which it's also people just being like, I like my little ponies. Like I didn't know it was also a normal fandom board. I thought it was much more just like trolls being trolls. It becomes that later. But there's also sections.

So like, you know, the LGBT board on 4chan is extremely aggressive, but it's like full of, discussion, you know, the fit board, the sort of weightlifting board, there's a lot of discussion. It's people just talking. You're trying to troll each other and mess with each other, but it's not like, you know, there's a lot of boring stuff on there. The two kind of last comments from this thread that I would like to sort of point out, which I think are interesting, there's one person that says, I think this is blacked out, but I think

it says, fuck you, I think I'm having a crush on a cowgirl pony. The little nerd heroin isn't too bad, too. I hope there's going to be. They mean heroin. They spelled it heroin, like the drug. but they mean heroin like a female character. Yeah, yeah. I hope there's going to be some reverse furry art of this

so I can delude myself without remorse. That would mean like you turn the pony into a human girl. So by reverse furry, they just, you could delete reverse and furry. Like a reverse furry image is just an image. Well, no, yes, yes. Because it seems like in a world

where every image is a furry. PJ, you're not getting the nuances. Yeah, when you live in this world, everything is already furry art. And then this one I think is the most interesting because, you know, and it's sandwiched around a whole bunch of people being like, you want to fuck this pony. But there's this other guy that writes, Jesus Christ, it's like cocaine. I'm a 24-year-old man. I should hate this.

But I watched it. I watched it all. I love the animation. I love the voices. I hate the story. I can't fucking stop. Damn it. And I think that's a really useful insight into kind of the proto-brony culture where it's, but it's a lot of older men.

who are sort of becoming like very hypnotized by this show and don't totally understand why. For them, it's a, I mean, it's like a classic guilty pleasure where their understanding of who they are in the world is that they should never enjoy this thing, but they're enjoying this thing. And it feels annoying to them or worrisome or uncool, but like there's some part that is deeper than reason that's just enjoying it. Yeah, I would say so. Have you ever like really fallen for some baby shit? and like not known why? You know, I actually have this experience with like the current crop of mainstream Spider-Man movies where as a person who like makes stories for a living,

the most reason one has a full hour that is narratively indefensible where they're setting up a sequel. Like they're not different young people. Like the fact that I, that my smart brain sees what's wrong with them is like not some great credit to me. But they totally emotionally move me in a way that is really strange. I didn't get to go to my usual movie theater for both Project Hail Mary and Spider-Man Brand New Day. So I ended up going to this one like in Burham Hill that's like more of a family kind of. We saw it at the same place. I know exactly where you.

Cobble Hill, right? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I saw both of these movies that are kind of all ages, general audiences, movies just so happen to see them at this theater. Yeah. I was so taken aback by like being thrown into child world. Yeah. Like, yeah.

It's like, oh, I'm supposed to be watching my like, baby stuff for adults in adult world, but now I'm watching it in child world, and I'm realizing that, like, I'm a, at this point, decades-long fan of a baby show about Spider-Man. And, like, it was an interesting, it was an interesting experience. I liked it. I mean, it's, I think there's actually something kind of deep there or, like, relevant there, which is you talk in your work, I talked to something in mind so much about how the internet changes and supercharges and and like strange makes fandom stranger but one of the things the internet does that didn't occur to me or I wasn't reminded until you said that is like you're not always in an actual physical room with

the other people enjoying the thing and so you're not being reminded that like your enjoyment of it is sort of abnormal you know what I think it was because this actually kind of happened to me around the same time which is like culture music movies TV shows were something that I experienced community with friends or with my family or whatever there's suddenly enough people on the internet in the back half of the 2000s that I'm starting to develop hobbies and interests totally on my own yeah and I'm able to socialize with people online without ever having to explain myself to people around me and it feels like there's a breaking point with my little pony where it's a bunch of people who are just like wait I like this and I don't know how to just explain like

like why I like this. And then there's like the crushing weight of reality when you finally like go to a brony meetup and you see everyone else who feels the same way. Because that 24 year old in the thread before the internet, he might have been channel surfing and seen the show and liked it. But okay, there's no one in his friend group he can talk to. With the internet, he realizes there's a bunch of other adults. But then he goes and meets the adults and he has to decide these other adults, do I want to

be in a group with them or not? Yeah. That's my theory. And we're going to go further into how, you know, 4chan sort of shapes this initial fandom. Right after a word from our sponsors, Hasbro, I think they would love this episode. Hello, hi. Have you ever wanted to experience Ryan Broderick and the Garbage Day experience in person? Well, you can do that. In New York City or in Washington, D.C.

We'll be at Babies All right October 27th in Brooklyn. Ryan will be in Washington, D.C., doing a Garbage Day live on November 18th at PubKee. If you would like to see Ryan's fleshy, fleshy meat suit and shake his caporeal hand, you can do that. You, in Washington, D.C., or New York City can see and maybe touch Ryan appropriately in person. in flesh. Have I sold this well? I think so. Okay.

Let's do outside of 4chan first, then we'll go back to 4chan. So by the time we hit like December 2010, Miss Magazine or MS Magazine, yeah, Miss Magazine, they have a takedown article about My Little Pony titled My Little Homophobic Racist Smart Shaming Pony. What year is that? 2010, which feels like really overkill for this. It feels, yeah. Early for that take.

They're mad at My Little Pony because it teaches girls that magical white ponies are suited for leadership and black ponies are suited to be servants. It teaches them that they shouldn't learn anything and that they should just rely on their friends. There's a bunch of weird shit in this, in this article. There's a bunch of like political stuff that they're mad about. Like the idea that My Little Pony has like a monarchy system and so they're mad about that. They think Curtis Yarven has gotten into the writer's room. Yeah, exactly.

This is like one of those things where like it's not even woke one. It's like, it's like, point one. It's prehistoric. It's like, I mean, it's an article that if you were like, oh, it's like 2019. I mean, yeah, it seems like 2019. It doesn't actually seem like 2010. No, it's still president. Yeah, this is like, this.

I can't even make heads of tales of this. Yeah, the creator Lauren Fost, uh, she actually responded point by point. I won't belabor this. but like she was saying you know that the purpose was not that girl should not be studious but rather they should live a balanced life and there's endless ways to be a girl but i i put this here in the outline because i think it shows that this was a show being taken very seriously by some adults and there was something seeping in and that the show was like interactive and like talking back and forth in a way that was very of the time and like i think really sets us up for where all of this is going. But inside of 4chan, it is becoming very popular. The CO board I showed you before, the comics and cartoons board. They're talking about every episode as it comes out.

They're also pirating the show and uploading it to YouTube. They're obsessed with making fan art. They find out that the creator and showrunner, Lauren Faust, is a deviant art user herself, which is a bit, you know, we don't talk about deviant art a ton on this show, but it is we should do like a whole episode about it um very important website um but she's answering questions about the show that she's getting from devian art users and there's i should explain in 2010 devian art reddit 4chan and tumbler are all kind of orbiting the same unit like they're all in the same constellation i would say okay do we know if she knew that her fandom was living some of her

the fans of her work were four chan but you kind of have to remember that like four chan It wasn't the, like, bad word it is now. So it was a website that some, like, strange, mostly male nerds hanging out on, but it wasn't like, it wasn't the enemy of the internet, of like the internet of good thinking people. Not in the same way. Yeah. So, like, and also, like, it was really hard to sort of tell the difference between what was coming from fortune, what was coming from deviant art. But this is where we have to talk about background ponies. Okay.

So background pony is a term that bronies use for the cartoon ponies that appear as extras on the show. Right. What they would call on a film set if they saw extras, they would call them non-furry extras. Non-furry backgrounds. Non-pony background actors, yeah. Got it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, because, you know, there's a bunch of technological things that have happened that have created, like, a very unique situation here where they are ripping the show straight to the internet.

so they're able to watch it over and over and over again. They're making fan art. They're obsessing about every single frame. And they're also naming background ponies. So like if a random pony is drawn in the background of a scene, there's an entire fandom that springs up around it. Interesting. And the show and Lauren Faust was like very quick to sort of feed into that.

So this is how we end up with a probably the most famous background pony Derpy hooves Derpy hooves Yes I'm just going to say this now If there are any like Hardcore Barney's listening to this And I'm

Seriously messing something up Feel free to yell at me But if you're gonna be like pedantic About any of this Like I'm just You can email grant Don't email me about it We'll respond if you

Pay $6.66 for our Patreon Yeah if you pay us Right that's the rule If you pay us You can yell at us I like rage baiting your way into higher subscriptions by being like right-ish. I think it's a really, I like this business model and I might steal it.

We have a rule at the Garbagey Newsletter that you can't leave a comment unless you're paying subscriber because like that's labor. I got to read that, you know? I get a push alert. So much more satisfying. There's somebody who's giving us like $100 to call us Liptards like pretty much every episode. And like, I love that guy. Yeah, he's cool.

That is a little bit close to sex work. Yeah. Look, the creator economy and sex work are basically the same thing. So when you asked, like, was Lauren Faust on 4chan? Yeah. This is like a good bit of evidence that yes. Because the name Derpy Hooves comes from a CEO thread. It's a background pony with derpy eyes.

So they're just like, okay, that's Derpy Hoves. But it's like kind of hard to pull apart. Like, you know, at what point did the My Little Pony team see the fan art? Was it because of deviant art? Was it because of 4chan? Was it because of Tumblr? It's kind of hard to tell. But Derby Hooves basically starts to show up more and more

and like kind of graduates from Background Pony. So it feels like the show is aware that the internet likes this thing that was supposed to be incidental to the show. And you can just feel that conversation between the thing on the TV and the thing that's commenting on the thing on the TV. Which is at this point still very novel. Yeah. I've heard similar stories about sort of the Simpsons writers discovering

that their fans had VHS tapes of episodes, and that they started to make jokes on the show that you could only spot if you were illegally taping it and watching it on a VHS. That's cool. Yeah. By January 2011, the Pony Fandem is so big that it needs to sort of create its own web portal.

It sort of took over 4chan as a virus. There's two ways to look at this. One is that, like, it's legit, and there's just a ton of bronies on 4chan in 2011. It could also be that, like, a lot of the meaner, more acerobic 4chan users thought it would be funny to act like adult My Little Pony fans. Yeah. Either way, it's kind of functionally the same. So that's how we end up with the launch of Equestria Daily. Equestria Daily.

So this is, you know, I think still to this day, probably the biggest web portal for My Little Pony stuff. There's a whole bunch of drama written about in this February 2011 thread, or this February 2011 post, basically complaining that Moot, the founder of 4chan, and the janitors of 4chan, were deleting pony content. Okay. Yeah. And then Moot, who Grant was nice enough to point this out in our outline, and I should share this. All of this is happening one year before Moot meets Jeffrey Epstein,

just for anyone who is keeping track of the timeline there. moot is at South by Southwest back when that was a thing that would be like normal to happen and he says in a quote ponies are really popular on 4chan right now for whatever reason

Adam found this this is interesting I hadn't really considered it this way but basically this whole thing of like banning ponies then unbanging ponies disciplining the mods that tried to ban the ponies all this is considered one of the only times that Fortune

has actually lost a fight. Really? Like even 4chan users kind of see it that way. That 4chan lost a fight with the pony people because they fought back and got unband? Yeah. Interesting. Like Q&I couldn't do that. Right, right, right.

Q&O got kicked off and stayed kicked off. One of the very few groups of people to ever be kicked off of 4chan and successfully petitioned their way back are the bronies. What does that say about the bronies? There's an interesting thing to be said about the. the psychology of a brony and the psychology of a 4chan user. The sort of like

you live in a fantasy world. You know, 4chan is itself a message board that largely started about anime and anime pornography in particular. So it's like I could see this as like a

real manifestation of the 4chan type. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's like kicking them off as like a, you could imagine it happening. Like you can imagine a punk web site that like hates ska music or whatever but i could never imagine that me neither uh but it's like

it's they're in the spirit of the way the reason the thing was created right uh what forchan launches in 2003 or 2004 so it's like it's sort of like seven years of four chan culture was going to build to something like this no matter what in a way at the same time at that the ponies are taking over four chan they're also taking over the mainstream by april 2011 friend of our show uh emily st james is recapping it for the AV club. And the first mainstream write-up of Bronies as a concept that Adam, our researcher, could find, was in Wired in June of 2011. And it's about a out-of-work computer programmer named Luke Allen who self-medicates, quote-unquote, by watching animated ponies have magical adventures.

Not my definition of medication, but I will allow it. This is a real, like, oh, this is going to be a problem later, isn't it? Luke Allen tells wired that the show is a perfect storm of 80s nostalgia and cultural irony. I think that's another important piece here is that like the show is extremely earnest but also very in on its own kind of joke. It's a funny show. I've seen it. I've seen parts of it. It's funny. And then Laura Faust, the creator, ends up saying that she's very proud that adult men like the show. Basically there's like a thing where like the brony audience is complaining about the quality of merch and they want a better quality merch, which is sort of, you can hear the cash register in the

background of that, you know, they're realizing that this is a real thing. And then by the fall of 2011, you get the first ever BronyCon and 300 people attend. And I really just cannot imagine what that room was like. I think a heavy smell. But it's, it's like, it's a story so far about what the internet of the 2010s was, which was that the people who made things were in much closer communication with the people who consume the things they made. But all the reasons you might not want to do that, like you could do it for the first time. And people were excited to do it. And both sides were excited to be in communication with each other.

But like later, I think as like things go wrong in different directions, you have a lot of people make stuff just build the wall because they're, they're afraid of what can happen. But here's the moment of like total optimism about what that can mean. Yeah. And I think I think there's a bit of naivity. with a lot of this. Yeah. I read a lot of Lauren Faus' comments at the time as like, oh,

this is weird and wacky and kind of cool. That's fun. And not really totally getting that like it is actually probably weird and bad that like, uh, well, there's a census that there's a brony census that's conducted in January 2012. Oh my God. It's the Brony Heard census.

It's an 89 page report that's conducted by a brony among, and there's 9,000 response. And here's the sort of demographic breakdown of the brony community as of 2012. Okay. So 85.70% of the audience were male, or at least the responders were male. And the bulk, 89% of them were between the ages of 15 and 29, and 96.74% were not married or had ever been married. Okay. Yeah.

So young. Yeah. Yeah. 79% of the bronies said that they were public about their love of My Little Pony. And then there were, there was like a census unlike who the favorite character was. And it seems like a lot of the teenage fans were like flutter shy, not Rainbow Dash, which I think I find surprising. But as you got older, the older fans were like Twilight Sparkle. What does that evolution mean?

Well, let's, let's, okay, so first, let's do Rainbow Dash. I'll pull up Rainbow Dash for you so you can see. So Rainbow Dash, I think is sort of like the main pony, really, in a lot of ways. Like, when I think of my pony. I've seen this, but I've seen this one. I think of Rainbow Dash, you know. Rainbow Dash looks like an intentional protagonist. It's like a cool pony with kind of a rainbow mohawk.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Then we got Flutter Shy. And this was the young people's favorites? Flutter Shy was the favorite pony for younger bruneration. Flutter's eye looks a little more like a princess would be rescued by a hero in a traditional Like like kind of has like Princess Peach vibes I think that's right yeah I think you're getting it and then Take her to a scasho And take her to scosho take her to skajou take it up pick it up and then obviously the most popular is twilight sparkle

Who's kind of got like like a got like a got e-girl vibe yeah she's like the girl that spider man dates who's not Mary Jane Gwen Gwen Stacy Don't you think? A little bit? Kind of a Gwen Stacey thing? In which iteration of Gwen Stacy you're talking about? I'm a Spider-Man casual

so I really, I'm not sure. Gwen Stacy is a blonde hair. This one, no, the one that was in the animated Spider-Man. Oh, you're talking about Spider-Gwen from the alternate reality? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. With the cool, like, undercut?

Yeah, that's defensible, right? Yeah, I see what you mean there. Yeah, okay. But she's like, she's cool. She's like edgy. She just, she transferred to school in the 10th grade and she's like... Twilight Sparkle. Kind of got vibes.

I think that's right. 58 of the responders to this had PhDs and 247 had graduate degrees. Oh, interesting. Nine out of 10 responders were under 30. But if I'm looking at this right, of the 9,000 responders, that means that the majority, like the

large majority were actually either like bachelors or less. which is interesting to me because I always kind of wonder like if you want a neat is no not in education employment or training not in education

so just a person with what type of job like what does that leave? Nothing like you're just nothing person it's a term for that or like the the Hikikamori kind of subculture in Japan of people who like don't go outside

like I kind of wonder like the world of people working yeah I kind of wonder if like a lot of bronies were just like complete like crashouts in a way you're picturing like needs or maybe on the other hand like buster blue characters where like they're affluent and educated but they're kind of like looping in education that that's what i would guess but uh right after another word from our sponsors hasbro again somehow um we are going to talk about how this is getting pretty dark and actually has been dark the whole time see heroes and others see egos. Bloomberg sees the era of billionaire athletes. While others follow

the noise, we follow the money. Learn more at Bloomberg.com. Do you think this is just like a nice story about like some like weird adult men who like cartoon ponies and they are enjoying like the feminist, you know, undertones of a cartoon show for girls? I think the fact that there are overlapping circles of permissible enjoyment, here are some of them less permissible. Like, I'm ironically pretending to watch a kid show. I'm just an innocent person who likes a kid show. And I'm eroticizing characters that both represent children and are made for children. I would guess that tent three has either been growing or up to stuff.

I have a video for you. Okay. Here we go. All right, so I'm pretty sure you're aware of Princess Celestia being portrayed as a tyrant and near natural, and God forbid, a molester. And Pinky Pie and Flour Shy on occasion. No. I'm going to let you know from where I stand, the darker side of the fandom is not part of what I will talk about. It's not part of what the show is about.

If you choose to do that, that's your choice. It's not why we're here, not why I'm here anyway. This weird guy is trying to ask them about like random internet bullshit about a pony. So he's almost asking about like pony gossip, but it's lore that 4chan or people like 4chaners have invented. They're like, have you heard all the bad stuff we imagine that the ponies do? This guy's also old enough to grow facial hair and looking at the other people in line and like other people in the crowd we can see. think the rest of them can. And like, that to me is notable. He's asking her, like, have you seen the way people are drawing the pony that you voice? That sentence that he says is so interesting

because he says, you're aware they're portrayed. Right. But he doesn't have a subject before portrayed. Like, a casual listener such as myself would imagine portrayed on television by the writers, but he means portrayed by weirdos on the internet, which he's not saying he is, but the fact that he's bringing this into this space with like kids in line behind him, suggest that he has a weird. Yeah, like it's such an unfathomably weird. I'm like so happy we have a document of this existing that like, because this is clearly how people were sort of dealing with this stuff at the time,

which is the pony that you voice on the internet, they're calling her a molester. What do you say to this? And it's like, How do you respond to these allegations I invented? God forbid. She's doing this thing in fiction, in subgenre fanfic. Right.

It's such a weird. Yeah. It's insane. The other thing I noticed in that video is the actor on stage, the woman who does like Princess Celestria? Was it Celestria? She responds, this is not her first time doing this. She doesn't look shocked like who's this guy.

This is a stock answer. Obviously. obviously this is not happening for the first time. You know, you know, sort of like the accepted wisdom now that, like, everything is WWE.

Mm-hmm. And that, like, there is both the narrative and the meta-narrative. So it's not just, yeah. You know, for Marvel, it's not just the story

within the Marvel movies. It's also, you know, what Kevin Fagy is doing in the background and whether or not they're going to give more screen time to your favorite character, blah, blah, blah,

blah, blah. This is almost like watching that world come into focus and no one knows it. Yeah, They're dealing with something for, if not the first time, one of the first times. I can imagine that being so completely bewildering. But they can't be like, you don't get the microphone because they also want that audience.

Yes. Like they want to sell them toys. So they can't be like, no, sir. You cannot be in line with these children to ask your Q&A question. That guy would get tackled by an air marshal. Like he's so is clearly the guy who's going to do this. But yeah, it's like they want these people's money. They don't mind their internet fandom.

but they don't want them in a room with the original intended audience for this who are children. I mean, that's like, I would say almost like the core attention of the 21st century, which is like we want your deranged fandom, and we want to sell products to you via that fandom, and we have no desire to deal with the psychological and emotional wreckage that comes from that level of worship. I don't know who to hold culpable in that scenario. I agree. I don't think it's like, how dare you, my little pony creators, but it's like nobody, everyone was kind of summoning this thing with this spell and not thinking through the second and third order implications. I sometimes think about, it's like such a corny, like, boomer reference, but a lot of times when I'm looking at stuff like this on the internet, I'll think about like Dylan going electric and how prior to the internet, there's more stories about a massively popular person who deliberately says, I have an audience, I want to carve a section of my audience

out. I want to tell these people, through the choices I make or the things I say, like, don't really consume this. You see some of it. Sometimes people decide, like, they don't politically agree with parts of their audience or whatever. But, like, more often you see people amused that an unlikely sort of fandom has shown up, surprise the demands that fandom has on the thing, and then kind of, like, unsure what to do. Like this kind of interaction, it's specific, but some version of it, I feel like was happening a lot around that time. B.J., what you're describing is something I think about constantly, because in the 2010s, it was,

I need to be really careful. I might attract, like, a goon-brained army of, like, neo-Nazis who love my cartoon pony show. We haven't gotten to the Nazi thing yet, but there's a Nazi thing coming, obviously. Of course. But I feel like nowadays there's a bunch of different avenues. where if you aren't sort of managing your fan base or the community that forms around you, they start to sort of take control.

And you have to sort of be very careful with who you attract and how you manage them. Yeah. The through line that I see with all of these things, whether you are attracting like weird men or you're attracting like mega woke scolds or whatever, the major thing is like if you are desperate and you allow them in, it is extremely hard to get them out. Yeah, there was this really popular cliche in the late 2010s, I think,

where it said people would talk about platforms and they would say, you can't let a Nazi on your platform because once Nazis enter a bar, it's a Nazi bar. And, like, I actually, I think that idea was kind of a bad tool. Like, whatever. You like the Nazis in the bar. Makes the mosh pit better?

Well, it was like, who's a Nazi? And, like, sometimes the platform's actually, like if there's some racist on sub-sac, it doesn't mean there can't be some other person on sub-sac. Like, it was more true in some places than other places. And it imagined a world where we all knew what a Nazi was. But like the Nazis don't identify as Nazis. Everybody calls everybody else a Nazi.

It was just, it wasn't, it made the world feel simpler than it was, even though I think in real life, a Nazi bar does become a Nazi bar. But the other thing that that idea missed is that there's lots of other groups that aren't Nazis that once they get in the bar, it's their bar. Like, if you're like, if you're like, if you're like, you're like, if you're like we have a fun pony show and some guys like to like uh watch it erotically it's their bar like like no one's kids are going to that bar yeah that can't just be cornered off and i and i i look at my little pony you know grant said like i don't know who to blame it don't know who's culpable here

and copable if you will and um my my read on it is that it's almost entirely naivety and then maybe greed by the end. It's like we genuinely do not understand what we have done here. We have a showrunner who's for the time period pretty online and they think they're just having fun online and they're like this happened with like the author John Green when he was like bullied off of Tumblr in the mid-2010s when they started editing his posts to be about how much you love sucking cock. I don't know if you know what I'm talking about. I don't but every none of that is hard to imagine. John Green fans and then John Green anti-fans basically got real weird and he left the platform and Tumblr had to change the way reblogs worked because you could edit the post you reblogged, which was a terrible idea.

So they kept editing his reblogs. If you have a really close relationship with the internet and you're sort of feeding into it parisocially, you have to be prepared for how that could get really weird. And I think 15 years ago, people just weren't super clear on how that was going to work. I was too old for Archie, but like people talk, I would consume pop culture, like, made by people older than me. We're, like, there'd be two characters talking about whether they were more attracted to, like, Betty or Veronica. Like, the idea that things for kids, kids who, like, might be sort of entering puberty would have something a little, a little attractive or a little flirty. I think that's actually a runner, you know?

Like, I think that idea is old. I don't think the people in the My Little Pony Writers' Room were like, we better make sure that our ponies dress real conservatively or people are going to get weird. Like, it's the thing that changed with the internet. Veronica is obviously best girl, obviously. If you said that on 4chan. Like if Archie had come out during the 4chan era,

that conversation would just go to a much different place. I said that I used to play Badger the Gathering. When I was at like a tween, I would go to Magic the Gathering nights on Fridays, Friday night magic. And I would play with kids my age and also adult men. And I remember there was like this older guy, you know, I was 11 or 12, so I can't tell if he was 17 or 37 because everyone just looked older than me. Yeah. He had like a card case and on the card case was a picture of the Powerpuff Girls. And I like joke.

I was playing with him and I was trash talking him and I was like, why do you have like a PowerPuff Girl sticker on your card case? And he's like, I, and I'll never forget this. He said, I like their big eyes because it means they can see it coming. Oh. And I was like probably 11, maybe 12 at most. That culture in the 2000s was being uploaded to the internet. Yeah. Your town hobby shop guys were becoming an internet problem.

And they were also early adopters. So not only were they coming online, like everyone else was coming online, they were coming on faster. And they were much more savvy about technology. Yeah. Having a pornographic picture of a My Little Pony character is like not something that would surprise you if you were coming on. were in like a town comic book store. It's not just that they're invading the bar. They started the bar. They started the online fandom communities because they were first to those spaces. This is why I like having you on this show because you just did the transition to the next

section for me perfectly, which is yes, there was a Nazi problem inside the brony community on top of all the weird porn stuff. There was a blog called My Nationalist Pony. This was later, but it got a lot of pickup, you know, in the sort of first Trump era. I'm surprised the Nazis were okay with bronies in their midst? It's the other way around. I always want to be like really careful about how I describe this, which is like in

the 2000s you had Stormfront, which is this massive hardcore neo-Nazi message board. I remember. And they would raid other websites and they'd just fill it up with hate speech. And they were like what you'd imagine like Nazis to look like. They were classic, like whenever

everybody talks about internet Nazi as if it's a much more agreed upon category, They actually were that. They were like racial slur using, like in your face, like swastika, everything. They were a person at the top of the genre that says like internet Nazi. They were them. Yes. And in the 2000s, across different message boards and online communities,

Stormfront was both a joke and like something that people would make fun of. And they were losing younger users who were learning. a new way of recruiting people, which was through irony, through pop culture. And so it wasn't like the Nazis don't want to do with bronies. It was like, I am a Nazi on this message board. And whatever you like, I'm going to find a way to convince you that it's tied to Nazism and that you are already a Nazi. You're already a racist, already a white nationalist. And what you love has just been a part of our thing forever. So if you like, well, okay, so. I knew a guy in high school who was really into punk music, and he, like, was recommended

Nazi oi punk music on his blog, on the blog that he got music from. And the guy was like, if you like no effects, you'll love this. No, I would have that where, like, there would be music I'd like if somebody would play me something that would sound, I mean, it's sort of like Christian rock, no events of Christian rock where like I just find. It's the exact same, it's the exact same radicalization strategy. Where you're like, oh, this is a less good version of this thing I like, but they're talking about like Christ or Hitler.

But yeah, it was like a way to siddle up. Yes. And so Caitlin Tiffany, who is a fantastic writer, she published a piece in 2020 titled, My Little Pony Fans Are Ready to Admit They Have a Nazi Problem, which might be the most 2020 headline I have ever read. And it's a great piece. It's all about basically for years, Bronies were like, we are not Nazis, we are not porn addicts, we are normal people.

And then finally, the community was like, yeah, we have a problem here. And it had been a problem the whole time. And I think a lot of it was because the primordial soup that the brony community comes out of is 4chan. They're interacting with all this stuff. They're kind of hoovering it all up. It's a part of their identity. It doesn't mean that every brony is an Nazi or every brony is a weird pervert. But it's like very hard to separate that out.

Yeah, the detail from the article that stays with me is that someone was from someone in the community arguing that was a fan. of my little pony and like said that they support black lives matter or whatever and uh but that the fan pony of like a pony with a swastika was cute and that you can like that pony without it being a problem uh i think this really just kind of gets at how like my fantasy is more sacred than um anything going on in reality and like don't that fantasy and like fandom is more sacred than like the outside world. We probably have to talk about the weird stuff now. The weird stuff now?

Yeah. Oh, okay. Do you guys give me the worst ones? Yeah. There's like no question. Good. Okay, so. Oh, God, whatever this is.

I don't even like looking at this, honestly. No, I don't want to. All right, look, I'm just going to describe it to you. Because I want to look at it and I want to show it to you. Do you know about the cum jar? No. Okay, so I'm looking at... Hold on.

That was in Audible because PJ has recoiled. He said no. He doesn't. I said no. I was moving away from my screen, which is getting me away from my microphone. Okay, I'm going to just read this to you, and I'll spare you. I also, like, I'm terrified that Riverside will ban us. I'm going to show this.

God, it's so fucking gross. Okay, so it's 2014. So we're, you know, about four years into this now, just for. for our timeline. And it's a user on the newly minted MLP 4chan board. So My Little Pony, 4chan board. Mm-hmm. He writes, I assume it's, yeah, I mean, actually, for reasons.

It's not even, we don't have to do that. For reasons that we come clear in just a second, it's a he. Yeah. Hello, my dearest MLP. I come before you today to reveal a horrible accident to the brony cum jar project. the place where I was hiding my cum jar was actually on top of a kind of radiator that was connected to our furnace

and of course since it's getting colder we light it up so basically the Ramo Dash figure has been boiled and cum it's brown now and for comparison I have also got another glass of cum that's about a week old I will probably still bury it someday

now there's a couple of things here that I think are extremely important for understanding this, all right? Actually, first, uh-huh. What are you? What do you think about this? I don't like it. I would say, first of all, I don't like it. Do you have questions? Yeah, I have an observation and a question. My observation is just like, this kid definitely, like, existed at a lot of high schools, but he wasn't able to find his brethren online and form a group where they push each other forward.

Yep. And I think in many ways the internet was a mistake. Secondly, why is he burying it in the yard? So there's a lot of greats. I'm really happy you ask that question. Why do you bury a seed? Oh. One, to the best of my knowledge, this is the first reference to this.

So this is like a thing that this guy has just been doing. The feeling I have, which is I've walked into the middle of a disgusting story. that has context, and I'm confused because this guy's starting in the middle of something that he shouldn't have started at the beginning. This was actually the beginning. This is the beginning. That's my favorite part about this, is that he was just already doing this. Oh. And from the context clues, it seems like what he was doing was putting Rainbow Dash figurines in a jar, and it's a big jar, dude. It's bigger than you could possibly imagine. And he's filled it up pretty far.

and he wants to completely submers the Rainbow Dash figurine kind of like a Piss Christ kind of deal Yeah, no, I get it And then I guess the idea was that once Rainbow Dash was completely submerged He was going to bury it Again, don't know why But then he boiled up by accident It's funny he'd say Piss Christ

Because I'm like, oh, this is what like a deep social conservative feels When they like witness modern art Like, I feel disgusted. I feel angry. Yeah. I wanted to stop. I would support a politician or a policy that would make it stop, even if it might have, like, bad effects elsewhere.

Like, I feel like Rudy Giuliani looking at Piss Christ. Yeah. I'll do one more look at this, and then I actually have to stop because I will gag. And, like, Piss Christ also. You guys should, this episode should be sponsored by, like, dude wipes for your eyeballs or something. Piss Christ is also a useful comparison because of the color. But, um, oh. So there's some comments here that I can read through.

So someone said, wait, so does this mean the project is over? And then the original user wrote, I will probably not be able to add come to it anymore. So I'll probably just bury it when I get the chance. How is that low on your priority list? If you've been, yeah, what else are you doing? Yeah, like. This is just one of your prizes? This is a side project?

I mean, you're not busy. It's clearly a side project. Then someone said, oh, I guess we had a good run. And then the original user replied again, this little fault shall not stop me from drowning Rainbow Dash. I shall proceed with the project when the time is right. It makes me want there to be a draft. I do you feel like the connection to J.D. Vance to this is like a year to be.

This is short walk. And then, you know, there's obviously a whole bunch of gross fan art that I won't subjected to and sort of homemade fleshlight contraptions that I won't go through. You've got to fill in the blanks there. There was a period. There is a slice of this fandom time where it was like being commended as like, oh, look at these guys who are not afraid of like going against masculine trends and are like, have we entered a new. kind of man who is able to like be sensitive and it was kind of rewarded in a mass media way. Think we made a mistake there. To me, like what it circles is like my one of my pet theories about our culture in 202026.

It's just like we don't know what a man is supposed to be. Like anyone who starts to talk about it is up to something really bad. But we don't have a positive articulation of like, do we all agree what like a normal, like, non-toxic, like, good version of a dude is. Even, like, in fiction, I'm like, I don't know. Like, over, over 5-9. Over 5-9. B.J., I think you're right, though.

We don't know what a man is. Like, in pop culture, and we basically haven't for 20 years, and everyone's gone completely insane because of it. During Obama, there is this sort of like, look, shining examples of men, like, and this is all good. And it was, like, this very positive spin. And it was like, oh, like, that some of those adult men are weird is not representative. Don't, like, don't look over there.

Yeah, and also like the guys, the guys who seemed very virtuous, like, the guys who were like super virtuous, like, we realized like, that was a problem. Like, I don't know. There was a, yeah, there was a moment where we were like, let's expand what a masculine man can be. And then you find out some of those guys have jars and, like, it gets a compliment. You never know what guys got a jar at home. No, you just got to dig up all their back. Yeah. But the last thing when you talk about is the brony tulpa.

Oh, wow. mirror with a tulpa? Give it to me again, but yeah, we again, this is a thing like 15 years ago. I knew what it was for 20 minutes. It's like, I think it's a Tibetan meditation technique where you try to manifest basically like an imaginary friend kind of thing. I'm, yeah, but there's people, there's like non-Tibetan just random Americans who have kind of like thought themselves into an imaginary friend that to them is not imaginary and it's unclear whether they have a vivid fantasy life or a self-induced sort of psychosis or a religion that if enough people end up doing it will all like get a day off work from yeah and so uh this user tried to create a tulpa of pinky

pie and they write uh actually can you can you see the green texts uh creating pinky pie it's like creating pinky pie tulpa do it before going to bed every night ignore warnings about doing exactly that because it can take ideas from your dreams Obviously. 60 hours then I've started hearing and seeing her. Her face is deformed as fucking frightening and I can't change it. She keeps yelling for no fucking reason. Mostly when someone else is talking to me,

can't hear shit when she does my feeling when. Yeah. It's weird. This person both seems to have like made themselves possibly schizophrenic and they can't even have a healthy relationship with a woman who's a top top. They created. Like they're like, ah, she won't stop talking to me. This is like a big trope. on 4chan and it's a good one that persists even to this day they they really love the idea of like

making themselves insane forever uh-huh they love this on top of just being a funny thing this is just another great example i think of how closely tied these two worlds were i also don't think it's an accident that these worlds are getting worse in tandem as they get deeper into the decade. You know, 2014 is the Brony cum jar. It's also GamerGate. You know, like there's, there's something that has gone wrong here and we are seeing the impact of it the further we get into the decade. I don't think it's been fixed. Oh, I think we're fine now. I think we're absolutely fine. So ultimately, I think that's where we end this. How are you feeling emotionally, PJ?

I think if we had stopped before the jar, I would have felt like, oh, people are interesting. And the Internet opens up new possibilities for socialization and culture. And it's not always perfect, but isn't it interesting? And I think the way I feel now is like it'll take me a really long time to forget this. And I really look forward to the day when I forget this. It's a, you know, I think this is very much a thematic sequel to the gadget hack wrench episode. It's another story about what happens when adult men who are fans of children's animation are catered to in any way. And I think that's really the lesson across both of these is that, like, we have to stop.

As a person who's very live and let live, people should like what they want to like. I wouldn't like go around bullying bronies. But there's a difference between your fandom has people. that you didn't expect and you're catering to them. And I think people who make cartoons for children should not cater to their adult fans. My sort of gut reaction is that it's largely a symptom of always on culture. To bring it all the way back, you mentioned Dylan going electric, which, by the way, for younger listeners, he's talking about a man named Bob Dylan. Robert Zimmerman.

Who used an electric guitar for the first time and everyone freaked out because he was in a... It was crazy at the time. Yeah, it was crazy. He had one of those unplugged guitars before then. It's kind of like when Kanye West did auto tune. Yeah, yeah. That works surprisingly well. But yeah.

Yeah. So that did not require Bob Dylan to constantly be talking to electric guitar fans or his own fans all the time. Yeah. And I think that without distance from what you're making or what you're doing, when you break down those walls, the parasyciality allows things to get really strange. Once you know they're there, they're in your head. Like, it's very hard to be a voice actor knowing that people are like eroticizing you and be like, eh, I'm just going to push them away. They, you know, the actual normal kids who watch my show, they don't really post on the internet. They're, like, not allowed to. They're on Roblox. But I'm going to ignore this, like,

hive of horny, like, jar, jar barriers because I don't want to think of them as my fandom. I'm not sure that even totally works. Yeah. Yikes, guys. That was a great episode. I feel really good about it. PJ, um, where, did you have anything you want to plug? Anything big? coming up on the pod on your neck of the woods we just put out an episode I really love we got a email from a listener who said that either his father was making a Bollywood film or he was being scammed and he wanted to know whether his retired former pharmacist father who was sending hundreds of thousands of dollars to India was actually making a movie or not and so we investigated was he got a listen well thank you so much if you want to follow you on the internet where can

they do that just subscribe to search engine Spotify Apple Podcasts I try not to post on social media if you see me posting I betrayed myself means you're filling up the jar oh