Panic World - The age of the lolcow

Episode Date: December 10, 2025

Today, we’re examining the idea that the Republican Party and its co-option of extremist online culture like 4chan and Kiwi Farms — and all of their posters and lurkers alike — has turned into one of their key political weapons. June Sternbach and Josh Boerman of Ill Conceived join us to look back at one of the earliest and darkest examples of this, through the story of Chris Chan and the invention of “lolcows” (don’t worry, if you don’t know any of these names, we’ll catch you up… unfortunately). Our guests are June Sternbach and Josh Boerman, who together host the new podcast covering natalism, Ill Conceived. Check it out at https://illconceivedpodcast.com/ or wherever you listen. Follow June at https://bsky.app/profile/junlper.beer or follow her other podcast Kill the Computer: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/338-kill-the-computer-102075853/  Follow Josh at https://bsky.app/profile/bosh.worstpossible.world and his other podcast The Worst of All Possible Worlds: https://www.worstpossible.world/  EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal ➼ https://nordvpn.com/panicworld Try it risk-free now with a 30-day money-back guarantee! Want even more Panic World content? Like ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, and access to the Garbage Day Discord? Sign up for a membership at: https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. And if you want to see this conversation on video, ⁠Panic World is now posting episodes to YouTube! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Josh, nice to meet you. Howdy. Thank you for doing this again. Yeah, thanks for going on. Super excited. Thanks for coming on for what is sure to be our darkest, most complicated episode. Yes. Oh, yeah.

Other than this brief respite with the last election just a couple of days ago, that's just been sort of the mood for the last whole year. So it's like fine, you know? It's just like it's not any much darker than most of like the last year, to me at least. Yeah. I grant like about halfway through the. pre-production for this episode was like, can you just tell me why we're doing this? And I was like, I was like, yeah, unfortunately for humanity, this is the most relevant thing

that has ever happened and sort of is the secret skeleton key for culture. But we'll get there. First, I'm going to offer you both two questions, a red and blue pill matrix style. So you can either answer what your favorite Pokemon is or you can answer what your favorite Sonic the Hedgehog character is. Oh, shit. Okay. Oh, shit.

And if you'd prefer to answer it as, like, what do you think is the sexiest Pokemon or the sexiest Sonic the Hedgehog character, if that's easier? I can sound off on this one right away. Okay, yeah, you perked up really fast. So the hottest female Sonic character, Vanilla, the Rabbit. She's attractive and is approximately the size of an average human mother. That's true. She is, she absolutely is the size of an average human mother.

tell me that you I know exactly what you're talking about. I unfortunately know exactly what you're talking about. I also looked up Josh the Hedgehog. A new image for Josh the Hedgehog posted five days ago. Oh, sick.

Flame like shirt, it looks, flame pants. It looks sick as hell. So like if you're into that sort of thing, like, you know, you could, you got some options for some cool sonic sonas. In the past, when I looked up Josh the Hedgehog, I found one that's like a deviant heart hedgehog.

It was a brown hedgehog. It was a brown hedgehog. that had strong libertarian opinions about politics. Cool. Like if you went to the devian art page, there's a lot of Josh the Hedgehog pointing to like... Oh, wait, I should, hold on, pause. I should explain to our audience.

If you're not super... If you're not super online, first, first, what we were quoting was a famous ranking of the hottest Sonic the Hedgehog characters on YouTube. And also, there is a thing that people know about, weirdly enough,

thanks to me actually. I wrote the original BuzzFeed post about this like a decade ago. Which is that there is so much Sonic the Hedgehog fan art on the internet, you can type your name, The Hedgehog into Google and get your Sonic The Hedgehog Fersona.

So, yeah. Answer the question, June. So if we're in this vein, I'll, you know, I'll go with Pokemon. I have to say my favorite Pokemon is Vaporion. No. Because Viporian is the most compatible

Pokemon for humans with the human breeding. They're in the field egg fruit. This is all we need, actually. Which is mostly comprised of mammals. Vaporion are an average of three feet, three inches tall, and 63.9 pounds. This means they're large enough to be able to handle human dicks and with their impressive base stats for HP and access to acid armor. Acid armor, yeah.

Rough with one. Sorry, I had to do it. This episode has started so much sicker than it was dissipating. So I had to do it. So let me just get this right off the bat here. This is Panic World to show about how the internet warps their minds or culture and eventually reality. I'm Ryan Broderick.

With me as always is Grant Irving, who I have to remember does not know a lot of the things that we just sort of take for granted. So we have not one, but two guests today with her second appearance on the show. June Sternbach, welcome back. Thank you for having me back. Congratulations. Yay. And with June is her new podcast partner on the wonderful show,

Ill Conceived, Josh Borman. Hey, welcome. Nice to meet you. Yeah. It's a great show. It's a great show. You guys should be proud of it. And I'm happy you're both on here.

I'm especially happy you're both on here to talk about what I alluded to you at the top before we got sidetracked by. fuckable Pokemon. We are talking about possibly the thornyest thing on the internet, the thornyest story that I can really think of. We are talking about Christine Chan, also known as Chris Chan, and the concept of lull cows. So I want to start really simple because I'm going to assume that our listeners, well, okay, there are listeners that heard the top of this episode and are locked the fuck in.

Yeah. And there's probably a lot of listeners who have no idea what we're talking. talking about. So let's start with the simplest thing here. How would you guys define a lol cow? L-O-L-L-Cow. I would say a l-l-cow is somebody who posts online a lot in a way that is particularly cringe or particularly unself-aware and also is not neurotypical in some way, shape, or form. And so the combination of the extremely cringe posting with the lack of self-awareness basically means that they leave themselves open to criticism. And then the lull cow piece of it just is that a lot of people who enjoy doing targeted bullying

and harassment will identify that subject and, yeah, subject them to online harassment, basically. I don't disagree. And I think this is going to be something that we debate throughout this episode. You sort of put it on the lull cow as the defining, like it's their inability. to stop posting. And I think that that is actually... I'm going to sound like such a goddamn maniac to this entire episode. I think that's a very traditionalist understanding of the lulcow.

Okay, okay. So you're a reformist when it comes to law cows, law law enforcement? I think it is worth making the distinction because I think you are correct that the original idea was that, which was let's go find neurodivergent people, mentally unwell people on the internet, and let's bully them and stalk them and obsess over them. That is probably the most concise.

story of Christine Chan, Chris Chan. I think the reformist thought is this idea of let's go find this person and obsess and stock and follow them doesn't necessarily need the like active participation as much as it used to. That's what I would say. To that point to build off of that, like there are examples specifically even with Christine Chan where people would like try to integrate themselves into her personal. life. It would go beyond posting. People would try to get close with her to make her trust them,

reveal certain details. A lot of these people are actively seeking out different avenues to harass beyond just like the screen, I suppose. Yeah. I think that's right. I think that is definitely right. And the thesis of today's episode, the reason we're talking about it right now is as I was sort of discussing this topic with Grant, who, Grant, like, how aware of Chris Chan were you on a scale? of one to ten before we started this. Eight. Like, okay. But I, when I was revisiting and spiraling because of our revisiting,

probably the saddest thing, one of the saddest things we've covered, I was really stuck on like, why, us, what do we have to say about it? And in sort of getting into the weeds, I kind of lost track of that because I didn't want us to do it. But I, but then when we talked about it, I was like, yeah, you're right. This is like, this is the right reason to revisit it. Yeah. And I think I can share this, but our researcher, Adam Bumas, who is, such a champ, said that he had to consult with his rabbi after he was done researching for this episode

as like needing like sort of emotional support. It's in the outline. Okay, good. Okay. We'll get there then. That's brutal. The thesis of today is that the Republican Party in its co-option and weaponization of extremist online spaces, absorbing the cultures of 4chan of Reddit, of Kiwi farms,

have effectively turned the discovery of, of Lowell cows, of these people that you could follow and stalk and demonize and obsess over into a, I would argue their core political weapon. And this might sound a little strange and I want to throw this at you and see what you guys think. But I was struck by how similar the investigation and dogpiling and then criminal proceedings of Tyler Robinson and his trans partner was to what I would easily have found on a Kiwi Farms thread a decade ago.

And I was fascinated that the, essentially, the FBI was live updating their own internal Kiwi Farms thread. And it kind of blew my mind to see the one to one so close together. No, that was insane. That's sort of been the hallmark of this administration so far. And with how terminally online, almost every single person in that administration is, like, that's not the only time the FBI was like live tweeting their key pieces of evidence to a bunch of people who it's like, why am I seeing this?

Why am I seeing three bullets? Like other, the other than to incite harassment, right? Harassment. Propaganda. Like, try to lead people a different way. But no, like first cut like week or so. I don't remember how long it was, but like the Tyler Robinson Chase before they knew who it was, there was close to a dozen of different people, particularly trans people

as like accomplices or people who might have done it. There were people that were put under fire because of this. And not to be like, oh, and me too, but like there was a group of harassment on Twitter that blew up because people who intentionally try to harass me on this very far right Kiwi Farms Adjacent sphere on Twitter said that my like me, my dead name was either involved or knew about it. So if you go on Google Trends, which I'm not suggesting you do because it's not worth it. But like if I go on Google Trends and search my dead name, full dead name, first and last name, you will see a spike of searches for my full dead name on Google Trends the day after or so the Charlie Kirk assassination happened because of this like harassment tactic that is approved from the top down to just like the soldiers of the party at this point. And once again, for anyone listening, we're going to do our best to explain every piece of context and lore here. you'll understand what Kiwi Farms is what we're talking about but first we have to

start our story at possibly the most important thing that's happened politically in America in the 21st century which was that people started uploading fan art of Sonic to Hedgehog to the internet and really too fast. That's right. And

it does actually loop it does no it works it just it works it is true boot chases and hug Sonic all the time and we It's a powerful hammer. Why, it's Amy Rose, of course. It's Amy Rose, of course. So it's not only that people are, and, you know, we talked about this.

What episode did we go, like, down a hole about, like, oh, with gadget, with gadget hack wrench. These people are not furries. There is an overlap between Sonic the Hedgehog custom art people and furries, but they are not, I would say, furries. They're adjacent, much like the gadget hackworth cult in Russia. But to give you an. example of what people in the 2000s were doing with Sonic fan art. Grant has a couple here.

So first, this is a funny example of what, you know, what people would put on the internet for their custom Sonic to Hedgehog art. And I think we should all rate it out of 10, what you guys think here. So is this what you wanted? Can you just do a quick scroll through some of this weird fan art, please? This is great. Got some inflation. My friend Katie Natopoulos, a reporter for Business Insider, has made the argument to me that I think is correct that the reason there's so much weird Sonic fan art is because children like Sonic the Hedgehog and he becomes sort of

like a way you express your weird like preteen sexuality. Okay, okay. I buy it. I think that makes sense to me. Okay, you can, you can jump off of this grant. I will say I was happy to see the one of them being lions from the Lion King.

Well, that one's also, that's pretty good. That's pretty good. That's an inflated Sonic right there. That's a good inflated Sonic right there. Yeah. I feel like Sonic inflation is like the most iconic of this genre of like weird Sonic art. Yeah, there's something about making Sonic big and round that I really enjoy. It's like Goku. Also, for the record, Sonic becomes Jabba the Hut.

It's kind of crazy. We have almost at the 20 minute recording mark and we have not actually talked about Christian at all. Can I tell you guys about kitchen cells? I love that place. Yeah, I'm obsessed with kitchen cells. I'm obsessed. We should just change this episode to just be us reading post. from kitchen cells to each other day.

That'll be another day. Back on track. In 2004, Christine Chan begins a hand-drawing web comic called Sonichu. And Sonichu is a mashup of Sonic and Pikachu. Did you guys like encounter this like in the wild? I guess like you guys are a little bit younger than I am. But like did you remember this being a thing? I'm not sure I am younger than you.

I think we might be around the same. I'm 25 years old. Oh. No, I'm kidding. I'm 36 years old. I'm also 36 years old. We're cooking. Yeah. Yeah. Sonic, go, what is it again? Go Sonichu. Go and fight to the extreme. I will. Thank you, Father. Right? That's the first, the first comic? Yes. Yes, you are correct. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I remember. I, the only, like, context I had of any of this when I was, like, growing up, I'm a little bit younger. I just turned 30 a couple of days ago. Congratulations. Thank you.

Yeah, but like I knew about like all of this in so far as like people talking about like Sana Chu as like a lal cow concept. I didn't like I wasn't on the ground floor. I just like knew that there was this like whole lore. I will say I'm a big fan of outsider art generally. So there is something about these early Sona Choo comics that I find actually really charming. So for me, the enjoyment of it was never like look at this fucking weirdo who's making these. weird things. It was just like, I don't know.

I find it, again, charming in the way that I find all art, outsider art charming, because now I have the thing up. And yes, it is, the cover of it is CWC saying, go Sonichu, go out and zap to the extreme. CWC being Chris Chan, right? So we're about to, there's going to be a lot of confusing names for, and I'll get to that in just a second. But yes, yeah, CWC, Christine Chan, Chris Chan, yeah. So I was not nearly as nice about this as you were because I was 14 years old and I was a 4chan something awful and web comic reader.

Oh, no. And this hit me dead to rights right in the center of like my meanest impulses. And that's how I sort of discovered it. My claim to fame, people don't know about this, but I was banned from the control, alt delete webcomic message board around the same time they tried to co-c crowd fund their, their like horrible animated series. and Tim Buckley got mad at me and I was like a 12, 13 year old boy. Oh, but that's a feather in your cap right there. Getting Tim Buckley mad is great.

I would think so, yeah. But this was sort of like in the exact vector of the internet that I was hanging out in. And this comic was going not really viral, but it had become sort of a cultural touchstone in these spaces. So just to make things simple here, Chris Chan now goes by Christine Chan and Chris.

She tends to use them interchangeably. And her transition will be important in this story. But at the time, she's just like a web comic artist making a poorly drawn comic on the internet. And it starts to catch the attention of sort of the darker corners of the internet. And her drawing, her avatar of herself is this famous sort of picture of her and a striped shirt. Grant, you want to pull up one of the panels here just so we can kind of get a sense of what the vibe is here.

So it is not good. but it's like, it's just like something that somebody's making on the internet. It's fan art, right? It looks childish, but the content is adult. And that's what makes the whole thing, I think, fascinating for people and a bit unnerving. Boyfriend free girl, a very important turn of phrase here that every CWC head will remember. That got pulled into like songs and all this other stuff because that was a big piece of it, as I recall too, was like the quest for a girlfriend was huge. Right.

And what I think is really interesting. about Christine Chan at this time is that she is pretty up front about sort of like breaking down her online and offline self in a way that feels very modern now in a way. Yeah, that was not really done like that before. It was like all, it was pretty much all pseudo-anonymous or just anonymous where that's, that's not really the case as much anymore. Yeah, that's interesting actually. I even remember like a huge controversy when people,

finally discovered what the guys from Penny Arcade look like in real life and they didn't look like their cartoon versions because like they were like weird ugly men so then went and became Gamer Gator so like I don't really care about calling them that but it was like a whole problem right and so yeah the internet was just not a place that you put yourself on and it definitely wasn't a place I think you put like earnest creations on to as I recall too a big piece of this comic was pulling in people from real life and making them characters in the comic yeah yeah the uh the That's another unnerving feature of the whole thing. People who Christine had crushes on or had interpersonal issues with would pop up in her comics. For instance, a community college director who Christine didn't get along with was a character. And Christine would use her real name and then have Sonichu attack her. It's understandable, you know, why people who were interacting with Christine in real life would be upset about this. This is, you know, I think a lot of. violation today where everyone's online. This was especially a violation back then. But it's what

happens after these are uploaded online that we're going to be focusing on today. And also another important dimension to the story is that Christine was diagnosed with autism as a child. And that plays a massive role in pretty much everything that happens from this point forward. As this comic starts to get passed around something awful, 4chan, and sort of even more fringe spaces, I don't really get the impression that she initially understood that people were making fun of her. Didn't really understand the, I think there's a lot of context collapsed. Does that sound fair to say? Yeah.

I would say a piece of it too with something awful specifically is that this is a lot of... Something awful the website. Yeah. Somethingoffal.com. It's about something awful. All of these things are so complicated to say with human language at this point. Yeah. Is that members of the SA forums, aka Goons, I would say disproportionately young, disproportionately male, and disproportionately neurodivergent as well.

I would say so. So you've got a lot of people who are genuinely on the spectrum and they are clowning on these other, as they would say, autists, largely because it gives them the ability to differentiate themselves and be less cringe than the thing they are making fun of. Yes, I am I'm not a spokesperson for the autistic community and I'm not a spokesperson for the trans community. June is. Yeah, the CEO for the first of transgender. Zorn Mondon, I'm the transgender CEO last week. Yeah, that's right. So, but I will say that like, as someone who frequented these spaces, both do have a very bucket of crabs effect.

and I think you are right in sort of diagnosing it as like higher functioning people who are neurodivergent, bullying people who, someone who isn't. You can see that broadly in a lot of these more nihilistic communities too. I mean, the greatest example of that, the largest one,

is like in-cell, online in-cell communities where people will start posting about how maybe something of their life improved. Maybe they are like working out and they're feeling confident about their like physique for the first time. And all like people in these communities will all of a sudden be like, no, you have to stop. Like you can't do that. Don't become a normie.

Don't do this. Don't do that. Try to pull people back down into this never-ending doom spiral, essentially. And we're going to talk about what that never-ending doom spiral looked like for Christine after the break. But first, a word from our sponsors, Pokemon Z-A legends. Ooh. Nintendo, please don't sue me. People want to take away.

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I was observing your drink. It's the working class, uh, seltzer. I've also heard it has a lot of forever chemicals in it, which I like it. Oh, hell yeah. If polar were a Pokemon, which Pokemon would have been? Well, that's Leifian. That's definitely, maybe a, the forever chemicals is like a grimer for sure. For sure.

Yeah, that's good. So we're going to skip ahead of 2007. And I'm going to just say this right off the bat for any people listening. who've been following this forever. We just, we're not going to go into every single microdrama. There are people who have been chronicling this for two decades. This is linked to larger ideas, so we're just trying to get through as much as we can. So something awful in 4chan, Discover the comic.

It's been publishing for a few years. And unfortunately for Christine, there, June, you alluded to this, there's tons of personal information in the comic. And this is what, basically, starts the breakdown between online and offline for Christine. And it leads us to a website that no longer exists. And I'm a little sad. It doesn't exist because even though it was a racist hellhole, it was a genuinely useful tool for me,

Encyclopedia Dramatica. Oh, yeah. Do you guys remember this? I do. Of course. I didn't even realize that's gone. Holy shit. There are like, you can find versions of it, but there's no, like,

I honestly wish it was still being updated. And I understand that it morphed into. is sort of a bullying tool. But for someone who studies that world, it was so useful to just, like, pull up, like, whatever stupid thing they were talking about. As regards, like, older internet drama, it was an invaluable resource.

Yeah, especially, like, with specific individuals, which is why it was taken down eventually, because it was just doxing people. No, just also chronicling, like, the most crazy online drama and, like, situations that maybe 15 people know about is also just, like, genuinely kind of fun when it doesn't turn evil.

There is something really nice about it, yeah We should start an Encyclopedia Dramatica Just for people who are still on Substack, I think actually Yeah Check this out Encyclopedia Drapanica Hmm

You know, I'm just saying Write that one down Ooh, that is something interesting We should I don't want to think about Madaglaces This much Okay, so Christine discovers that she has become sort of a target when she's emailed by a 4chan user who sends her a bunch of screenshots and erotic fan art. Right.

And this is the start, I think, of what Josh had mentioned, which is the inability to stop the loop. And this is, I would argue, the start of the loop. she tries to edit her Incyclopedia Dramatica article about her and about Sonichu, her Sonic Pikachu Bad Farm mashup. Yeah. Never edit your own chronology like that. Never, never. Yeah.

And one of the early hangups here, too, is this idea that, like, Sonichu is my original intellectual property. Therefore, nobody else has the right to make derivative work of it. This, of course, leads to people making more Sonichu fan art. It just goes on and on and on. Yeah. And this is the era. where like I think we are all still mapping out behaviors that are just sort of assumed to be permanent like the strizan effect is coined around this time the a lot of the the the rules of the

internet rule 34 like these things are all being canonized at this exact moment which is really unfortunate for christine especially and it establishes a cycle that we is still going on the trolling keeps escalating as the reactions from Christine continue to escalate. It creates a cycle that is extremely hard to get out of other than just basically just getting off the internet. And I wanted to sort of ask you guys, are you familiar with the Com Network or like the 7-6-4 terror cells? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. On my other podcast, Kill the Computer, we did a whole like two-part series. And I find that they operate almost identically to how people would, interact with Christine during this period, which is you find someone and you harass them

hoping that they will fight back and then you just sort of like, you weaponize that loop. When Grant sort of like first brought the Com Network story to us for an episode we did over the summer, my first instinct was just like, oh, like, this is just like Kiwi Farms decentralized. This is this is the exact behavior, but now anyone can do it with a group chat, which is, like, I think very scary to me. The other thing I want to mention about this idea, too, is it's horrible harassment, usually by other minors in both cases, that you have, like, minors are being groomed by other minors to do horrible things, but we're like very rarely talking about a fucking adult.

Yeah, they would function as like a blackmail situation where they would set, like, basically have some of these members that they targeted, like, these children in a lot of cases. send compromising photos like CSAM and then be basically continue to harass me and be like if you don't want me to share these you have to do this this and this in some in some cases that's led to like actual real like murders in and not even just the United States this is like a fairly global phenomena insane and I'm glad you brought up the blackmail aspect because this is exactly where the Chris Chan story goes around this time she's going viral I don't really want to run through like all the horrible things

things that people are doing to her and how she's responding because it's just really messy. But around this time, one of the trolls pretends to be romantically interested in her. And this is in 2009. They start interacting back and forth. Christine is uploading things to YouTube, talking about how she's in love. She writes a special issue of Sonichu where music videos. Music videos. They get married in the comic.

All the Sonatoo characters are guests, which is classic. You know, good enough for Marvel. Good enough for Sonichu. I would argue there is a music video which we everybody comes in with everything for a huge party man you have them all you have all of the er text in there that's incredible right here it's right fucking here if people don't know what you're talking about you can Google gamer Anthony game master I'm sorry game master Anthony you're a historian I didn't realize you're a historian oh yeah oh my god this is I'm so in my lane right now I have no idea

So this troll going by Ivy then asks Christine to upload a tour of her house. This is actually, I think, one of the most classic internet things ever. And in this story, it's very dark. But I do think this is something that just continues to this day, which is that someone who is very online accidentally exposes how they live. And like, it's a particularly common thing with like crypto people, like cryptocurrency people. It makes me think of that infamous selfie of J.K. Rolling where it's like,

Is that mold? Exactly. You have to be very careful with what's in the background. You have to be very careful. Like, just like before we started recording, it's November now. But I had to switch my October calendar to November. That would have been embarrassing. I didn't want to be embarrassed.

I didn't want to reveal too much about myself. Yeah. I think that's really smart. I'm glad to get it because I would have been so distracted. Horrible. I always sort of talk about it is like the Reddit meetup effect where it's like the minute you take a photo of your meetup. Like if everyone looks insane. like you just like the whole community implodes so this is what

goon meets goon meets the best goon meets where goon meats were like a really like gooner meet up gooner something awful goon meetups were like perfect for this thing because like everyone looked nuts and this is what happens with christine so there are structural problems to her house she just it doesn't look great her parents find out that she put her address online Oh. Her dad confronts her directly about it, and we know about all of this because Christine uploaded the

video of her dad confronting her about it to YouTube. And this is, I think, another thing you see to this day, which is like someone finds themselves in the middle of the internet spotlight, and they just start like oversharing and over uploading and thinking that that might quell the abuse, and it doesn't because like you expose things about you that are embarrassing or human, things that, like, I think are just pretty normal. We all live weird lives, especially if we're really online. There's a reason we're very online. I don't know what you're talking about.

I'm normal. Yeah, you're normal. But no, that's true. You have to like really. A lobooboo. But yeah, you really like, especially I feel like most people these days, especially because of these tales like Christians, where a lot of people know that you have to harden yourself.

If you want to be at least any sense of vulnerable or like share any aspect of you, you really have to like harden yourself. and be strategic about it. Like you just, you have to be so careful. Depending on the spaces you occupy, for sure. It definitely varies from community to community. I mean, she was, she's like the prime example, Chris Chan.

But like I feel like most people in those days didn't really think that like posting a photo of their house would lead to like crazy consequences. Like why would you think in like it's a new technology sort of like to you especially. It's rather fresh. Why would you think that humans would just like be mean like that? But that's just sort of like. especially when they're offering to help, which they were, right? And it was in bad faith, obviously. It was a trap.

Yeah. And then I think the sort of autism dimension there is important, too. So it's like not only are, not only is Christine navigating completely new territory technologically and socially, but she's also missing, you know, the understanding of just current socialization. She eventually discovers that Ivy is honeypotting her and messing with her. and the character of Ivy is killed off in the Son-and-chew comic. Ivy is trapped in an elevator, and then there's like an earthquake that makes, like, her neck get tangled in the cable of the elevator,

and, like, it kills her. I should say this is the other thing that I think makes all of this output weirdly compelling in a way, is that it all looks like stuff that was drawn by a child. Yes. But it can also be very violent and very sexual, because Chris Chan at the time was an adult, you know. I think that that was something, the sort of psychology of it was something that people found weirdly compelling. Yeah, and I'm glad you brought up the age dynamic here because it's even more confusing than something like the Com network.

Because Chris Chan at this point is probably, I think she's a young adult at this point. And the people who are beginning to mess with her are. children being convinced by other older teenagers or young adults to do this. And contrapoints, actually, the YouTuber has a really good take on this, where she describes it as users grooming a child to deceive an autistic person into performing sex acts for their entertainment. And she's referring to an incident where 13-year-olds were catfishing Christine and then convincing her to have phone sex and then recording it and posting on the internet.

And like, I imagine if you just like concisely summarized what I just said and you just gave it to like any law enforcement professional, their head would just spin off the top of their neck like like a rocket. I have no idea what, what am I supposed to do with this? Yeah. It's like the Wild West because not only is it that, but it's also online across the entire globe in some cases. Yeah. You know, it's funny. I was at like a talk last night with like a journalist and internet creators and and what? one of the speakers was saying that, you know, growing up in the 2000s, being really online also

kind of meant you assume the internet was a fad. And it was something I had totally memory hold. Up until like Trump was elected more or less assumed the internet was not going to be around or mattered. Like, like you thought there would be something that would surpass it? I just assumed like we'd all go back to TV. Like I just, I kind of figured every social network would implode like MySpace. And like the internet would kind of exist, but like it would never. never it would never create the crossover that happened during COVID would never happen it would just forever be a niche it would just be like there's the internet people and there's everyone else and like and never the two worlds should meet and that is totally imploded you're right probably like

probably like probably starting around like 2017 yeah shout out jamy cohen it blew my mind and i think when i'm looking at this now encyclopedia dramatica articles on people like chris chan are growing and sort of calcifying because 2007, 2008, people are like going, well, the internet's going to end, so this doesn't really matter. But then by the time you get to the 2010s, these pages are massive and just full of people's personal information because the internet became so important you couldn't leave it. Right. Well, and by 2009, you have an entire spinoff. An entire wiki is created just to document the drama around Chris. We're about to, so okay, let's do this. So Chris Chan's page becomes so long that it spins off into WCWK forums.

And Quicky is a nightmare. It still exists. It is, I would say it's the hub of Chris Chan doxing and the sort of toxic anti-fandom. Is that right? Still, would you say, Josh? Yeah, I mean, for Chris Chan specifically, yes. And then, of course, Kiwi farms, Kiwi and that is just, a corruption of quick.

Right. And that's, yeah, it's where it starts. And that behavior, so I don't, I don't, you know,

it's funny, I was one of the journalists in the 2010s that like, we kind of all agreed, like, if you did not have to mention Kiwi Farms,

you should just never mentioned Kiwi Farms. One, because the personal safety risk was just not worth it. By the way, if you want to stock and harass me,

my email is grant at Garbageday. Dot email. And my phone number is. I didn't try to give my address out or my neighborhood out last episode. Oh my God. It's really good.

Everyone can guess which neighborhood in Brooklyn you live. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. You're a podcaster that does CrossFit. Where do you think you live? I do BJJ now. Okay. That's great, man.

Thanks for keeping up on my social life. That's great, man. Okay. So, so yeah, quick. Actually, June, how would you sort of describe Kiwi Farms? Because I think we do have to describe it. I mean, it is essentially like the hub of, of online harassment, of like keeping track of perceived enemies.

And in a lot of cases, something I've realized is it's not always necessarily, like, ideologically consistent. You can't just be like, oh, it's essentially far right, but it's more like nihilistic than anything else because, like, as I have just curiously dug around, it's like, oh, they have, like, people that I hate on here keeping of people. And like, I'm not like going to dig into that stuff because I think that's, I think trying to dig into people's personal lives like that, trying to like mine their personal information, different aspects of their life like that is sort of a reprehensible thing.

I think it's like an anti-social behavior to do stuff like to actually use that and weaponize that against people. But that's what I've noticed. It's not necessarily like a far right. It is very far right aligned in a lot of cases, but it's more than that. It's like a nihilistic archive of perceived like enemies or like weirdos in quotes because in a lot of cases, it's not like always weirdos. It's just people. It's just, it's just an archive of people who are online and like visible in some cases. Yes. And it and it is where we get the term loll cow,

l-o-l cow, and it comes from the idea that you can farm or milk them for the lulls. Yeah. And as we said, Quicky forums is still up and it has everything about Christine, you can imagine, from her family tree to her official legal dead name to some of her medical documents that's crazy they there there there's been quests to find like even earlier art that she created as a child they they're sort of treating her as a Truman show yeah and it is doxing in the most exhaustive extensive way you could imagine and I wanted to read this from a researcher Adam which I hinted at at the top here he writes This is why I had to go to my rabbi about researching this episode. It's the most exhaustive source a researcher could possibly ask for,

but it's also deeply immoral to use as a source because you're implicitly legitimizing it when you do. When I was looking at it, I kept thinking this could be about me. This could be about any one of my friends, my family. Chris Chan is far from blameless in its creation, but would anyone's life look good in such exhaustive detail with much less documentation or recommendation for the people who spent years harassing them,

which is definitely the way I feel about delving into this world. It's like to document it is to add to the documentation of it in a way. It is journalistically a strange world to be in. The sad reality is, though, that it has sort of cracked the mainstream. It's not like everyone's grandma is not going to know about it, but like for those who are sort of terminally online, It's correct to that. Christine, after this intense early period, tries to go offline between 2009, 2011.

She tries to stop posting for a while. And they pull her back, right? Like they pretend to be friends with her. They call her incessantly. And they mess with her. She responds. It's like all of these people, the reason that they drag Chris Chen back in is they need their show. They can't handle not having their show to watch.

and play with and there's an interactive thing to it as well you get to participate in the construction of the narrative right it's why I voted for Trump you just nailed it yeah it's a get some more popcorn yeah the show is just about to start well I I do think there's something like very damning about this and what it says about sort of internet irony which is like if you're devoting let's say two decades of your life to obsessively follow someone you think is embarrassing or you kind of hate or you enjoy tormenting because you get some sort of like ironic entertainment out of it. I've read these spaces. It's not people being sincere about their hatred. It's extremely ironically detached. Yeah.

And June, you use the word nihilistic, which is this word that we kept running up against when we were talking about 764 and the comm network. And it's a word that I was using. And our listeners actually kind of like push back. And I was trying to like figure out how to describe this exact feeling. It's more like cynical nihilism. Because nihilism in itself isn't like, oh, the world is over, therefore we must destroy everything.

It's more of like a cynical lens of nihilism, more specifically, more, because I've gotten reprimanded for that too. And I'm like, actually you're right. It's not just nihilism. Because I would describe myself traditionally as like the way I like observe the world is like a nihilistic way of looking at the world. It's just, a lot of these people are very cynical about it. I would argue that it is just a parisocial relationship at the end of the day.

Without the constant, I don't know, performance of whatever the hell the thing is, the people observing the show can't get enough, you know? It's sort of how like everything is content now. People's demise is content now. People observing people you don't know is content. I mean, that's sort of what the internet has become in like the last two decades, essentially. I also think it's very dangerous to spend a lot of time ironically appreciating something or ironically interfacing with something because it becomes very hard to remember which way is up. And so I think for a lot of these people, there is like a sunken cost fallacy there where they have spent a decade effectively stalking this vulnerable person.

and maybe the beginning was like, this is really funny. And like, I ironically love this and like, oh, it's so funny. And after a while, like, you just have no idea what you're doing anymore. A lot of the guys that I knew who were radicalized into extreme politics in the late 2000s all started because they kind of thought this or that was funny. And this is, I think, why Quicky Forums becomes this massive hub by the 2010s. of extremism. In 2014, it becomes a massive part of GamerGate. It causes a bunch of suicides.

It is a huge, huge place for child sexual abuse material, doxing. And then in 2015, it's renamed Kiwi Farms. And it continues to follow Christine. And it basically wants to also destroy the world. Like one of the biggest mods on Kiwi Farms is an anti-Semitic white genocide conspiracist who like eventually even says that the harassment against Christine is too much. These people are so far beyond even your garden variety, 4chan, blood and soil nationalist that they're like, those guys are freaks. I haven't really followed what those people have been up to, the extreme, you know, Chris Chan followers. What kind of shit are they even getting up to these days?

Well, we should probably talk about one of the most recent updates in the Christine story. And I believe was one of the earliest conversations Grant and I had where I pitched, Grant, did I pitch you the court case as a podcast? I pitched you and you said, you guys cannot pay for our safety. Oh, that's what it was. Yeah. And I said, and I said, yeah. Yeah, you were like, we should do a show about this. You can't pay to keep me safe enough to do this.

Okay. For now, the last really dark turn is that. that trolls got Christine to admit that she was having sex with her own mother in 2021. They had uploaded a call that Christine had where a troll goads and encourages Christine to talk about having an incestuous relationship with her mother. And then this leads to Christine's arrest. Oh, yes. I remember this now. I remember that. The Kiwi Farms trolls call the cops.

She and her mother are arrested. the arrest is live streamed by a YouTuber who happens to be cosplaying as Christine as it's happening. What the fuck? That's crazy. It's mind-boggingly insane. I can't even...

It's like the three stoogging just gets stuck in a door. Like, that's my brain at the moment. Like, what else? Don't you have something better to do with your life? Genuinely, I can't fathom getting to that point. No. I actually, when I wrote about this, at the time, I got an email from a reader who I ended up commissioning.

He was in Germany and he wrote a story for me about the Chris Chan of Germany who's called Dracken Lord. Okay. Who is a Braverian metalhead who basically has had the exact same life as Chris Chan. But the town is like tried to kick him out several times because he has this, he lives in this very small Bravarian town that like people just show up at to like harass him. And he has like meltdowns on YouTube like every once in a while. This is a universal experience in a way, which I think is fascinating.

To your point, the like ironically enjoying something, that is, it's such a slippery slope for, in some cases, the way that you can like detach yourself. I had this realization, I think, close to the end of 2024. I had to have been shortly after Donald Trump won the election. And I made the realization, like, I don't think anything I did was like as bad necessarily as like what a lot of these people are doing. But like a lot of my early days on like Twitter, for example, was like a lot of irony pill. poisoned jokes and like, oh, wow, isn't this funny, this fake thing that could be real? That's like, that's like kind of crazy. It's like a little crazy.

I had this like realization that like sincerity at this current point is sort of dead online. And that's a problem. Sincerity needs to like have a comeback. We need to be sincere with each other and honest and like embrace that a little bit more for like the health of not just yourself and like the individual, but I think of just all of the broader society. This hope punk is going to see Hamilton this weekend. See, but I love that, right?

It's like immediately it's the reflex of like, I'm going to make an ironic joke about it. And I think that is something that everybody who grew up on the internet has in common, right? Is the moment that you get a little bit too sincere, you have to dial it back. And I actually like that. I think that's fun. I do too. And I like doing that.

And good taste. It's good. I don't know. I find people who are too earnest to be very irritating. And that might just be because of the amount of time I've spent online. But I find the whole question of ironic detachment so interesting. interesting. Why do we all have that reflexive need to prove that we're not cringe? Well, my theory is that the way culture has evolved, particularly online, and the way that

is interacted with politics and corporations of the last 20 years, has made it very hard to earnestly enjoy anything without it being co-opted. So, like, when I'm making the joke that, like, I'm going to Hamilton, like, it's because, like, Hamilton was absorbed. absorbed into like a neoliberal machine. Right. And so I remember the beginnings of internet irony. I remember the spaces like something awful in Fortune when they were closer aligned to something like anonymous or something like Occupy Wall Street. And I remember that those jokes and that kind of humor being a way to signal that you are

creating culture that could not be co-opted by the torture machine. True. But we're now living in a world where the White House is posting an AI video of Donald Trump taking a shit on everybody. Right. Halo garbage, like halo propaganda garbage. It's crazy. You can't fight that with irony as effectively anymore

because, like, you know, J.D. Vance is dressing up as his own, like, weird, ugly meme. Yeah, to prove how not mad he is. Right. You know, and that's not going to work, right? That's never going to work. It's going to be so obvious how sweaty you are when you're trying to prove that you're not mad about the meme. But, yeah, for every piece of, like, irony that you throw out there,

they're going to throw even worse, cringier irony right back at you, I think. And that's the thing, though, is the further they go, the further it becomes like policy, public policy at the White House from the people running the show themselves. It just becomes embarrassing at a certain point. Like, it started off this administration

where I would see some of the stuff, and I'm just like, oh, I'm like, oh, I'm like, oh, this frustrates me. Oh, whoa, whoa. But now I see, like, some of the, like, crazy, like, fucking garbage they post every day. Like, for example, the Halo AI bullshit. And I'm just, I just roll my fucking eyes. I'm like, I'm just tired.

Like, this is so embarrassing. I'm just over it. Just like, come on, guys. Just to sort of close the loop on the Christine Chan story most recently, because I do think what you're saying is, I want to jump further into this in the next section. But basically, Christine is arrested. The, did she abuse her mother or not question still hasn't been answered totally.

There's no way to definitively say what happened. It's not unfair to say Christine had a shaky grip on reality. For instance, Christine was once convinced for a time that the world and her comics was actually an alternate reality. So when it comes to Christine and her mother, who knows what did or didn't happen? But just because Christine says something happened doesn't make it true. Regardless, she ends up spending time in prison waiting to go to a trial. Even worse, she was transferred to a men's jail. In 2023, she was released and a judge dismissed the case, but she's still being trained.

old. Like we said at the top, this is an incredibly dark story. Christine Chan is just like the most premier example of this sort of like internet collapsing it on your life. And you know when I was in high school, I had a close friend of mine who used the internet and was very, very secure in his identity on there and like was insured at every step of the way that none of it could like be linked back to any part of him. And at the time I was very naive and I was like that's like I get it but like very odd I was like that's a very odd thing to do like that's a little goofy to be like this secure about yourself online it's just the internet what could go wrong and like oh a lot a lot sadly can go wrong with a lot of this shit yeah

and we're going to talk about what an internet where anyone could become the next christine chan looks like and feels like it means for our democracy right after a word from our sponsors Sonic Generations Shadow You can play as Shadow in the new Sonic Generations game Available on all platforms I like his gun

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He's super cool Sonic 3 is genuinely a great movie And I recommend watching it It's good I can ever watch this uh grant yeah uh one thing that this story illustrated that i think i were seeing in the gop now that seems like maybe a glimmer of hope is that this community would turn on each other quickly and like and the and like it was very clear that the people that you were aligning with

didn't give a shit about you at all and i think um the the post charlie kirk grievance tour has really shown this that like there's no real ally there is no real friend like your death will be used as an opportunity for the next person and i and i wonder of like this full insincerity that it has to eventually like not attract people because it's a miserable crash out when you have no real friends and you must know that no one actually cares about you They're only trying to use you. I could be wrong, but I... No, I think you're right.

I think you're on to something. I mean, when you talk about like infiltrating and then breaking up networks, the best way to do it, obviously, is to get in and start peeling people off from each other. And then once you have an in, you have the ability to, like, blow the whole thing up from inside. And I have to imagine that if you can find a decent in with these people, it would be very easy to do. because they have nothing really going for them other than spite. And because they collect intel and, you know, swatting and stuff like that, all of that is basically like trophies for their wall. If you present them the opportunity to take another one down and like use you to do that,

they're going to see that is like a win, right? Like that's going to be yet more lulls for the fucking trophy rack or whatever. The game aspect, I think, is dead on. They are attracted to the reaction they can get from people, and they're also attracted to being rewarded internally for it. If you look through any of the White House affiliated X accounts right now, any of the big departments, you know, DHS, any of those, they're all taking memes from right-wing users

and repackaging them on the main account as a way to, like, reward them. And then with, The thread a couple weeks ago where DHS just live tweeted all the deportations they did based around social media activity they found. If you go into the post interactions on X of those posts, it's all the right wing users taking credit for being the one that sent it to them. Right. Which is so Kiwi Farms coded. It's like, oh, I did this. This only has utility as long as the people who are running the show, the people who are in power, are able and willing to.

to reward this behavior? Yes. But that can change extremely fucking quickly. The more you reward this kind of behavior, the more it erodes your power everywhere else. And I think we're seeing this happen in real time. And especially I feel like post-Charlie Kirk, a cent, like that's, I feel like where things really felt

like there was that seismic shift. Absolutely. It's funny you bring this up, actually. I was working on like this retrospective thing about MySpace and I was like digging through old academic journals about it. And I was reading a lot about the shifts between like Facebook and MySpace and, you know, why people went to Facebook.

And, you know, the arguments that I've come across is that MySpace just became so unpleasant to be on, so aesthetically gross and difficult to use and full of so much drama and predators and scams. That it started making me kind of come to this idea that like the current entirety of social media is going through a MySpace phase and that like people will just leave. And I think one of the stranger, like, impacts of a right-wing government using the internet this way, turning it into one giant Kiwi Farms thread, turning it into one giant fortune thread, is that people will just stop. I totally agree with you. I see this all the time.

So with COVID, everyone went online. Yeah. And I don't know how tuned into specifically trans online trans communities you guys were, especially at that time. But there was, like, a big baby boom of trans people coming out. and starting to transition. There was a huge, huge increase of visibly coming out trans people. And as the internet, especially closer to this, like, insane Trump here that we're living in, but even running up to it with how transphobic everyone has just been becoming,

there has been a very intentional push, at least in my communities, to get the fuck offline and start doing stuff in person. I have, like, community events, like, where I live, where it's just like we are, like, gathering like 50 people and just doing something. Like, and then all the amount of people that are like, I just deleted all my social media. Like,

this is what I do know. I don't, I don't fucking know what, it's, I have no clue what the fuck Twitter is anymore. I don't know what X is. I don't know what's happening on there. There is a detachment away from social media.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think to pull sort of the targeted harassment stuff back in, why would you want to stay online? Yeah. When all of the posts that you have can and will be used against you, right? There's no fucking reason to,

stick around on like Twitter or what have you. All it's going to get is you targeted and dunked on in the worst possible faith by the worst people alive. And there's this incentive with algorithmic social media to continue. If you get a good dunk in on someone, you're incentivized to continue doing it, especially as like social capital starts to accumulate at posts. You get like 100,000 likes. It feels great, especially if you get like a really good dunk in on someone.

I think to sort of like take. this on home. The lesson of Christine Chan, the reason why I think it is it is important to dig into this story and try to responsibly talk about it is that anyone now can be Christian. If you do not understand the dynamics here, do not understand the forces at play, do not understand like what the internet will do and how it read. It's media literacy in a way. And I think the fact that we now have this extremely aggressive right-wing government that is very comfortable acting like a Kiwi Farms user, acting like a 4chan user, and going after people, particularly trans people, but also people who are neurodivergent, immigrants, people of color, any vulnerable community, they have no issue. It is worth learning sort of where the Chris Chan train starts and how to get off of it before you're stuck in this cycle. Yeah, I mean, with AI, large language models, not only are you going to get all of that text,

if you get a lie that's big enough and well-spread enough, the large language model is going to keep spitting it back out over and over again, because it has no way of determining what's true or not. It just knows what is probable. And that's one of the things that I think is scariest about just the way that harassment can work, particularly in the LLM world. Not only are you going to have places like fucking quickie, you're going to have large language models spitting that information back out, even though it's generally speaking, either completely fabricated or seriously misleading. Did you see the jaw maxing in-cell GPT? No.

Someone made a custom GPT. So there are like plug-ins sort of things now you can use custom chat GPT builds. And one is called jaw maxing or no, one is called look maxing. And basically it will just convince you to get plastic surgery and cut your face open. And it's an automated in-cell. And so a lot of that, you're very right, like a lot of the oldest internet behavior is being encoded into LLMs and will just sort of operate in perpetuity. June, what you're saying? And to that point and Josh's point before with, I'm sure you guys saw this on Twitter a couple of months ago now, Will Stancel was being, he was a target of a lot of these people on Twitter because Twitter is just sort of Kiwi farms at this point.

So there's a lot of... Will Stanssel is a low cow 4x, yes. And the way that they weaponized Grock to say, I'm not going to say it on the show, but just like absolutely reprehensible in saying things about him. And it ingratiates that into the AI chatbot itself is just crazy. It's a weaponized feature for these people at this point. I am very happy you brought up, Will, actually. I love when people bring him up. He's great.

I love him. I have obviously. Well, you can't be sincere. You can't have a sincere moment. A lack of unbelievable that I cannot appreciate Will Stansel in an unguarded, honest way on this show. I have issues with Mr. Stancel. I think he is extremely illiterate when it comes to internet culture and doesn't like to admit that. I think he has a very, I got an internet connection in 2017 vibe to him that I find extremely irksome.

That said, he is an ally against the authoritarian regime. so enemy of enemy is my friend it's fine whatever yeah he has though i think turned himself into a chris chan figure 4x for twitter and i i want to sit down with him and like show him this and be like you don't have to this does not you don't have to live like this way they're making like disgusting a i generated cartoons about him they're like hacking grok to say stuff about him they're finding like any photo they can of him and posting it everywhere. I think he's stuck in a loop that's very similar to what the one we talked about is. Absolutely.

Next week on Panic World. Plattner and Will Stensel on the same episode. I do, I do want to talk to Graham Platner. Yes. I'm curious what that whole world is like right now. But no, Will Stancel, sure. Like if you want to come on the show and talk about it, like, can talk about it. But like, I feel bad because like there are these figures that.

I think there are some figures on Blue Sky that would qualify as a Chris Chan figure. Like, we haven't mentioned this term on the entire episode here, but the main character effect is becoming a Chris Chan. That's what that is. It's on TikTok, too, actually. I mean, I know we had briefly mentioned TikTok, but I don't know if you guys are familiar with World of T-shirts, Joshua Block. Oh, yeah. He's like the best example of TikTok. Very similar situation.

So sad. Really fucking sad. But can you quickly sort of just summarize? Yeah, I mean, deeply autistic, young. man who originally started posting videos of himself dancing and singing on the streets of New York and it was very, very charming. But comes from a similarly... Oh, oh God, this is so dark.

Unstable home situation and then has now developed serious alcoholism and has been a hardcore alcoholic for a few years and is now being taken advantage of by the worst people in the world to make additional content, basically. Basically, he's on the spectrum, and they convinced him to just keep drinking alcohol on stream, right? And he basically, that he live streamed himself into alcoholism. And it's like an incentive in a lot of cases. People will pay money for him to keep doing it. And like the person that like sort of weaponizes that behavior encourages him to get him.

He's had a few different handlers at this point who all basically just ferry him around. And it's just like documenting a World Star type behavior. in real time. It's really something else. I don't talk about this very often just because I like to keep my personal and internet life separate. Why would you want to do that? If you want Ryan to dress.

No, I volunteer at a summer camp for special needs kids. I've been doing it for like 20, 25 years now. And when social media was invented, like I was already working there, right? So I was there for that transition. And now kids will show up with smartphones.

And my rule for many, many years has been like no photos at camp because I assume like a good 60 to 70% of those classic like person doing a weird thing meme images is someone with special needs. Someone who is neurodivergent being caught unaware. Yeah. Having their photo taken off a photo bucket account or a flicker or a Facebook and just there's an entire genre of reaction image on 4chan that's just guys with Down syndrome. Like Shane Gillis brought all that shit back a couple years ago. And now like everyone's using the R word again. And it's like there's something so cruel and dark to me about the outsourcing and the mainstreaming of this very weird world we've spent this episode talking about. And just see it in every corner of the internet now.

I think it is genuinely the most profound failure of this current internet age is like letting this shit come back. I would argue, though, that it's not at all surprising, given the national climate, right? I mean, when you have a national climate that sees sort of survival of the fittest as being simultaneous and synonymous with being neurotypical, being traditionally able-bodied shit like that, yeah, no, anything short of that is going to be seen as both a failure and deeply cringe. And it's not even just the culture. It's, in a lot of cases, coming from the top leadership of the government. of the United States. Which we talk about a lot on ill-conceived, right? The fact that the natalist project that we see that is making these big moves,

so much of what they want to do is fundamentally eugenicist because they see these things as aberrations and unacceptable. I'm going to try my best here to put a final line that isn't extremely, extremely depressing, which is that I think this episode is sort of convinced me that, yes, sincerity is important, even if it makes my skin crawl. And I've been told I have resting sarcasm voice, but I'm from Boston. We all have it. It's the thing.

But I think you guys are right. The way you combat this culture is by embracing people, by being sincere, by getting offline, knowing when to quit. And I hope, you know, the people who listened to this today and didn't know anything that we're talking about, understand that Vaporon is the most fuckable Pokemon. I almost made it through. I almost did it. I think you should say a nice thing to me.

I think that you should practice, you should practice sincerity by saying one nice thing to me on microphone. So if you guys know, there's been an ongoing bit for about a year now that whenever I introduce Grant, I always say I'm going to unmute his microphone and allow him to speak or I'll let him out of his cuck cage or, you know, whatever.

I unzip the like full body leather inflatable suit that I have him in at all times, you know, something like that. inflatable yeah yeah it's a I find this erotically intriguing

go on it's one of those black suits where you put the hose in and you blow them up big and around okay okay

that's where that's where that's where grants a podcast his mic is inside the suit patreon.com slash panic world

that's the only way you get to see the real version of the show that's right I let I let Grant out of his gimp box

and he like crawls out and he gets some real of benefits on the paywall Grant you are a wonderful producer

You are very, very good at making this show and you are not scared to go down paths like this one that I am very scared and or jaded and won't go down. So thank you. Every week. It is nice. And I do love that you're respecting the court-ordered restraining order I put against you. We only communicate on Zoom. I see a future where schools are going to start having you. You know how you'd have to like diagram sentences?

There's going to be like irony and it's sincerity. diagramming. So it's like this part was sincere and then there was the ironic detachment. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. There's looking at Christian Chan's art all week, put something in that I'm going to sincerely say it kind of devastated me and I want everyone to take a look at this. Does this seem similar in style to Christine's art? Yeah, I mean, so. So that's Daniel Johnston? So that's Daniel Johnston.

And what what struck me this week, this is what, and I'm not saying that Christine Chan would have ever been Daniel Johnson. I'm not saying that. But it didn't make me think that like, if Daniel Johnson was born into an internet age, like one of the most beautiful things I can think of is that somebody who was as deeply troubled as Daniel Johnson was,

was able to be reach people and, communicate with people in a way that people who are that severely ill where they get to. And it was like the right community was able to make this connection and appreciate him and like treat him with respect. Like, you know, there's the documentary shows like, uh, Sonic youth like taking him around New York like very like respectfully. Yes. It's pronounced Sonnet Chu.

But, I have to say, though, that's like genuinely devastating to see that. Yeah. That's like, I'm genuinely. like touched and like very saddened by that. That's what hit me was that if Daniel Johnson was on TikTok, it just like that fucking sucks. And I want to get to a world where like the culture that allowed for a Daniel Johnston to be embraced, like that can exist in subcultures.

And so like there's no reason it can't exist again. And I think there is still some of it. You know, at the end of the day, one of the reasons that I like sometimes TikTok, Instagram Reels, things like that, is that you do get people who are doing something genuinely different. And I think it's always really cool to see. Even if I do laugh at it a little bit, which sometimes I do. But it's, you know, I've tried to put away the piece of myself that immediately goes to

just mocking it relentlessly. And instead, I've tried to get to a place where I'm like, why does this inspire this kind of reaction in me? It's because there's something pure about it. It's because this is somebody putting themselves out there in a way that maybe I, fear to do myself and that's honestly admirable yeah and i think what you said earlier josh is right that it's cyclical and if you want that cycle to shift you know we might not be out of a trump administration anytime soon or ever but you can create that in a small way wherever you spend time

like you can you can you can do that i think jana daniel johnson is a great example of someone who like was discovered by the right kinds of musicians and the right kinds of people and was able to sort of have that life, right? You don't have to be an amazing artist or an amazing person, even, in the case of Christine Chan, like, to have people do that. Joshua Block didn't have to be absorbed by these horrible people. Like, yeah, it just doesn't have to happen. So I think that's a good, sincere place to stop today. I would say so. This is the most emotional. It's a real rollercoaster. podcasting ever, just ever. Yeah, it's a complicated subject

and ultimately, like, Christine Chan is a human being and, like, none of this needed to happen. If people want to follow you guys on the internet, where can they do that? June, why don't you go first? If people want to endlessly document your life on the internet, when they do that. So I'm primarily just on Blue Sky these days.

It's a juniper. Dot beer on there, and then I also do two podcasts. one of which being with Josh here, that's ill-conceived a podcast about natalism. And then I have another podcast called Kill the Computer that I do with my co-host, Caleb. Josh, where can people follow you?

You can find my website, joshborman.com, which has links to all my shit. I'm mostly on blue sky at bosh. At worst possible. Dot world. As June said, I co-host Ill-Conceived. And my other podcast is called The Worst of All Possible Worlds,

where every week we talk about a different piece of media. We do sort of long-form deep dives into that stuff, everything from movies to video games to TV to Christian children's radio drama. So if any of that is relevant to your interests, go check it out. We just did an episode about Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. That was a lot of fun. Oh, yeah. And, you know, everything from that up to, like, classic plays.

We did Into the Woods, you know. We really try to be all over the place and eclectic with it. It's funny. I was actually going to bring up sort of like the Real Housewives. for Christian or if like there's an entire universe of people who seemingly hate all the real housewives and want them to die. Yes. But we'll go to their conventions and watch every episode of their shows.

Very, very similar dynamic, I think. And then they just sort of wait for these women to like self implode online TV. So, you know. It's a long running human trait, I feel like, to just be interested in people's demise. I assume there's someone listening to this show because they want me to completely go off the deep end. And I just want to say, some of them even give us $5. just tell us that we're libtards and I love you. That is true. We do have a bunch

of Patreon supporters who just pay us five bucks a month to call us lib tards underneath every episode. It is awesome. Kind of rips, actually. Thank you guys so much. This is wonderful. Yeah, thank you. Thanks for having us. Yeah, thanks for having us. Panic Whirl is a production of Courier.

It is written and produced by Grant Irving and hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Josh Fielsted is our production coordinator and our amazing researcher is Adam Bumis, from Currier, is Shane Verkest, who edits our video episodes, along with our producer, Kevin Maroney, and National Managing Director and Executive Producer Kevin Dreyfus. R.C. DeMezzo is their VP of Brand and Social.

Charlotte Robinson is their Deputy Director of Brand and Social. Marianne Couga is their Director of Marketing, YouTube, and Podcast Growth Marketer, Samantha Hollos. And Tracy Kaplan is the Senior Vice President of Sales and Distribution. If you want to sponsor the show or give us products to sell, she's the one to talk to. can email here at Tracy at courier newsroom.com. Be sure to check up the Panicworld YouTube channel, which you can find at YouTube.com slash at PanicworldPod. And please give us some nice ratings on podcast apps and leave a funny review. Lastly, here's my advice for you. Chill out and touch grass

while you still can.