Panic World - The wild world wide web of witches

Episode Date: October 8, 2025

Witches, curses, magic, and the internet overlap much more than you’d think — and not just because of the Etsy witch that cursed Charlie Kirk. The very online Peter Berkman and Luke Silas of the band Anamanaguchi join us to talk about the history of internet witches and witchcraft, and the spooky connections between the supernatural and digital worlds. Our guests are members of Anamanaguchi, who you can catch on tour until October 17. Check out their latest album Anyway here and find their tour dates here!  Want even more Panic World content? Like ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, and access to our Discord? TODAY is the last day to get your first month for just $0.50 by signing up for our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. Enter “PANICYEAR” at checkout. Panic World is also up for two listener’s choice Signal Awards — please vote for us in the ⁠Conversation Starter and ⁠Weird⁠ categories by October 9! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So I want to open up with a really simple question for you guys. Has anyone ever put a curse on you? Not yet. Probably, honestly. When I was in eighth grade, yes. I dated a young woman very briefly and I broke up with her over AOL Instant Messenger. See, we had it coming. Okay.

And I did have it coming. We still joke about it to this day. We're friends. And she did, in fact, put some. kind of hex on me. Interesting. I don't remember the exact details of what it was supposed to do. Probably just, you know, ruin my life or my love life or something like that.

Do you feel like it worked? Hard to, again, I don't know what it was supposed to do. But it seemed like, did you feel generally hexed? For a long time. Does that? Maybe. I don't know enough about hexes and curses to tell you either way, but we're hopefully going to find out more.

after today's episode. The reason I ask is because witches, curses, magic, and the internet are weirdly intertwined. They overlap way more than you'd think, and we're going to be talking about how magic got hooked up to the internet today. My name is Ryan Broderick, joining me as always, or until I can get a witch to curse him forever and shut him up, is my producer Grant Irving.

You'll hear him from time to time. This is Panic World to show about how the internet warps our minds, our culture, and eventually reality. And today, I'm super excited to have two fabulous guests on to talk about internet, which is joining me from the band, Anna Managuchi, Peter Berkman, and Luke Silas. Welcome. Thank you so much.

You're coming on. Thank you. It's a beautiful day. You guys, I think it's safe to say, are pretty online. You're known as a very online band. Does that sound right to you? The phrase terminally online comes up often. Yeah.

Not for me. Okay. No, yeah. Not for you. It's very common for me to be talking to people and realize, oh, they're not in the bubble that I'm in. It happens pretty frequently. How would you describe your internet bubble?

Connected to video games, connected to artists, and by extension, like everything that those gamers and artists are connected to. So the memes run deep, the actual, like, lore runs pretty deep. I don't know. I've definitely been, like, laughed at and or iced out at work lunch tables for explaining things like inflation to people. Like Sonic Inflation, like Sonic the Head... That was actually... Exactly. See, that's why you're here, though.

You got expelled from that table into this one. Yes, absolutely. Welcome, yeah. You're in a safe space. We can talk about the seminal flash video game, Sonic Inflation Adventure, as much as you'd like. Seminole. Today, though, I would say, seminal, I would say, yeah. A game that started at all.

Yeah. What we are here to talk about today is a topic that we picked specifically for you guys, We thought this would work pretty well. We're talking about the history of internet witches and internet witchcraft. And it is, unfortunately, one that has come into the news thanks to a group of internet witches that may or may not have put a curse on Charlie Kirk via an Etsy sale. But that is like the most recent thing here. Do you have a take on sort of like, I mean, I guess the first question is, have you seen sort of

witchcraft online before? Have you encountered other than being hexed on In sub messenger back in the day? Like, have you seen sort of magic communities, which communities, spooky communities? Well, you know, I thank God I was not hexed over AIM when I was eight. But I, or did you say eighth grade? Eighth grade? Oh, yeah, that makes more sense. I was going to say, like, that whole story, I was like an eight-year-old hexed you and it worked.

Like, that's, I mean, that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah, dude, I've got like kind of a bit to say about this. My experience to like the world of, like, witchcrafts online. And one of the most visible moments of that was definitely Lil B cursing Kevin Durant's and blessing other things. And I had to explain to my family at Thanksgiving. It's like, this is working, guys. Like, Lil B is kind of like a warlock situation happening right now.

And my uncles were all into sports. I didn't really know much about it. They were like, whoa. And then, like, literally a month later, he was on ESPN wearing a sundress. and explaining to everybody what's about to happen in basketball. So shout out Lil B. Shout out Lil B. But no,

the other day I actually had this intrusive thought about, maybe you know Doug Rushkoff. Have you ever heard of that guy? I've worked with him before, yeah. He's a friend of mine as well. And I was thinking about internet algorithms. We're on tour and like I said something like, you know, that I've never said before.

I don't know. It could have been something like, I'm just going to make up a random phrase here. Like, oh, did you get the new, like, box of milk or something? And then, like, suddenly boxed milk, Instagram ad, whatever. Right. And I was like, oh, like, the algorithm thing, the generation of it all is like a kind of witchcraft. Right.

Like, when we're kids, you stare in the mirror, it's like, oh, if you say Bloody Mary three times, it's like, that's sort of a pre-digital, like, game in the Algo to get, to get Bloody Mary into your subconscious, you know? So, yeah, I think, like, magic. uh, witchcraft, etc. is like actually built in to the internet on purpose. That's a great transition to what I want to show you guys first. So Grant, could you pull up, uh, my favorite, this is my personal favorite screenshot of

maybe anything on the internet ever. This is a very, very early message board post from, I believe, 1994. Uh, and you're going to see it right here on your screen. So it's titled Kate Bush, a witch as in Wiccan. And it's from a very, yeah, so Night 94, and I'll read it for you. This is an interesting thread running in alt.pagan about how likely it was that Kate was Wiccan. And one of my favorite sort of follow-ups in this thread. So this is a bunch of witches, like arguing about whether or not Kate Bush identifies as Wiccan.

And one of them gets so frustrated. They're like, we have debated this on and off for eight years. And this is like on Usenet. Do you remember using that, like the very, very early message board thread kind of thing? Yeah. And so this is, I think, a really good snapshot of one of the earliest communities online. And in fact, in 2021, Vice wrote about this community called Podsnet, started in 1984. And Vice wrote, a successful login returned a screen of text and a list of messages grouped into categories.

Here, users would respond to text, download what they could, and hang up. Here, a BBS called MagicNet flourished. But one problem in particular, spurred. its users to found their own splinter network. Christian fundamentalists had infiltrated the group to spy on members. People were losing jobs, child custody, etc. Farrell McGowan told motherboard. So like not only is this like exactly how things work now, but it was, it's like an early,

early example of magic users, you know, Wiccans using the internet. Did you ever encounter like any of these really early kind of witchy subcultures, like in your time on old internet. I'd say the closest I ever came to, like, directly interacting with that world, it was probably in, like, seventh or eighth grade myself, where we're the same age. I frequented AOL message boards. And so I was in the punk message board. And, but I was also, as a Curen Bowhouse fan and AFI fan, I was in the goth message

boards. Yeah. Yeah. You know, there was a lot of stuff there that led me into, like, websites that looked like what you showed me. but like more of the geocities tripod variety um role play communities stuff like that you know i figure if i'm not participating i probably shouldn't be peering you know what i that's right so that's right i feel very similarly that like if i'm in there as a point of interest in some capacity then that

puts me into like sort of weird voyeuristic capacity and and like the for me it was similarly not not through like goth music but through like tabletop role playing games and like things like that so like when i was looking at things about dungeons and dragons that would lead me to people who played let's say vampire the masquerade and that had all of these connected uh subcultures to that as well yeah and think about how rudo would be if like you were playing d and d and someone was just like like chilling out just watching yeah exactly unwelcome but yeah so i that's the vibe i got where like i knew that people were doing that stuff and i was sort of like, I'm going to go on Habo Hotel and use my brother's credit card to buy Fernie.

Right. And I never wanted to mess with these people because, like, they were, they were taking it very seriously. I also grew up near Salem, Massachusetts. So, like, this was not, like, totally strange for me as a kid. But even in these early communities that we were researching for this episode, there was, like, a buying and selling of curses and hexes, this idea that you could, like, commission a spell from a high priestess.

We found, like, a section from Australian Witchcraft magazine. that were like connecting different like magic users, you know, on early social platforms. Here's an example of what this looked like. So this is a website, whitenmagic.com. A.U. In all its old web one glory. It reads here issue number 47 of dogs, cats, and which is an interview with someone named Lynn Andrews, I suppose it's some kind of witch or how to make those spells work.

how to use herbs in your spells. One is called To Coven or Not To Coven, which I think rules. That's great. And apparently they're doing a special feature on the city versus country debate, whatever that meant in the 90s. I love that as a point of debate for a win. Yeah, I love that. And then here you go.

You can buy a book of spells for $9.50. And it has things like love magic, good luck, charms. And this was sort of what I think this world felt like in the 90s. But moving through the timeline here, things get a little different. And we start to see the splintering of this subculture into other subcultures. Have either of you heard of other kin or Therians? Yeah, totally. Do you want to do you want?

We picked the right topic for you guys. All right. So real briefly, you know, no pressure, but can you describe what these ideas are to our audience? may not know. Otherkin and then Therian. Otherkin, I'm, I think if I'm thinking of the right thing, is just it is, oh, I mean, I'm familiar with kinning as a concept. Is there something special about other kin? That's where it comes from. It's like the first version of it. So I'll read the description from Know Your Mem, the very, very useful website for us. Otherkin is a term used to refer to people who believe that their physical bodies do not reflect their perceived actual non-human

spiritual forms. This perceived entity may range from mythical species like dragons, elves, and fairies to wild animals and domesticated pets. And a point of order here, they are not furries. Right. There is some overlap. They've been selected by some spiritual thing. Exactly.

It's the spiritual component. And Therians are basically just like energy vampires. Like they're people who, that I think was the first. Yeah. Honestly, if you've ever seen what? what we do in the shadows. Craig Robertson is like a great example. Yeah,

one of my favorite TV characters of all time. And I feel like Starians were the first example of one of these comedies that I came across as a kid, like just having no understanding of what I was looking at. But like some like message board about like energy vampires. But the question is with a lot of this stuff is like how serious was it? Like were people, as you said, just role playing and having fun or did they really believe this stuff?

Okay, so we found a hundred page book collecting, a list of all the major sort of like history of this community. And they, it reads, when we other can or theory and say things like, I'm an elf, we say it in earnest. And we've put a lot of thought into how he came to that statement over many years of our lives.

This identification is not make believe or role playing. It is who we are in real life. And I should say that the title of the book was written in Hobbit font, which feels appropriate to me. And despite this being very silly, we are in the peak gatekeeping era. We also have a live journal post here from 2013, which I think adds to this. It reads, in an interview last week with author Anna Silver, she explains that her young adult urban fantasy novel, Otherborn, was partially inspired by what she'd read about real people who call themselves Otherkin.

In the interview, Silver said, apparently Silver's fantasy novel uses the word otherborn instead. That's fine, because it's about a different supernatural concept than Otherkin anyways. Were you guys in any sort of like really weird niche internet communities in 2000s? Yeah, I was actually in the chip tune community, which is how I wanted to appear doing music. A lot of overlap with the other kin community, I imagine, in the tip chip tune community. Maybe I actually, today probably, back then, not so much. But, yeah, like now that the chiptune world is very much like on Tumblr and stuff. And back then it was very like only technical, only.

I found this new mapper for this cartridge or, you know, back. Maybe my LCDJ hookup. Yeah, exactly. I think the one that I was most part, I was definitely an active live journal user for music. So like I was in a couple of mixtape trading communities, which definitely brought a lot of interesting personalities. I feel like without being able to recall anyone specific, I know that there were people who were notably like, oh, they had, you know, in like the early 2000s, like their persona in their profile picture, things like that. 100%. So I was made a way.

aware of some of this stuff fairly early on. Looking back at this stuff, it's obviously like very silly, but to me, it feels very much like young people experimenting with like what anonymity online can allow, right? Like these are people who are or even what it just simply does to them. Right. Like what would you be if you could be anyone or anything on the internet? You know, which I think is kind of empowering and as and we're going to get kind of deeper into like how silly this stuff can get.

But I find it a little inspiring to like look back at these old. websites of people who are like, I'm a witch on the internet. I'm a sell spells on this message board. I identify as a dragon. And it's like, cool, man. Like, sure. Well, you have to imagine that. Even before the internet, they were probably doing that through like zines or classifieds with the newspaper, stuff like that. 100%. Yeah. Now it's on Etsy, which makes perfect sense, you know. It makes perfect sense. And before we move to our first break, I wanted to kind of get your guys sense of like how you understand I guess like the evolution of the internet right so like you know in the 90s early 2000s we have web 1 people are just sort of like posting and like

it just sits there web 2 the internet comes alive right like we get platforms like you said tumbler facebook my space to a degree when you guys were starting to use the internet would you say that you were like jumping on as the internet was coming alive and moving to web 2 or did you had Did you spend time on like just straight up archaic mess? We did. We both did. The change from like homecrafted sort of URLs and servers that are hosted by particular people, websites that are for like dog breeding facilities in Iowa.com, you know? Like with our own angel fire.com slash CA4 slash my big onion.

Sign my guest book type beat. Webring stuff. all very extension of like the zine culture, which is all very used netty. This just looks different. All of a sudden that changed, and I noticed it changed with the introduction of things like the RSS feed. I remember Dig being the first thing that's like,

what if we wrapped all of this up? And we made browsing the internet a sort of like passive experience where we find the stuff and we give it to you. But it's really you giving it to yourself because you're voting for it, right? And that gives way to things like Reddit, which also runs on RSS. What does RSS stand for? Does anyone know?

Was it real syndication service? Something like that. Yeah. Hold on. If I get this wrong, I'm going to get busted. Where, uh, no, that, no, Google AI search. I'm not trying to find the right-wing Hindu nationalist party. Uh, are you sure?

Are you sure? Is, uh, really simple syndication is what's it. I'm not talking about the international Indian right-wing Hindu Vata volunteer paramilitary to organization. So there's nothing more like being online now that is like, are you sure you didn't once a faster shit? It doesn't even have the same letters, but like might we interest you in this? Yeah.

Well, no, we're going to be talking about exactly what that shift does to the spookier corners of the internet right after a break. But first, a word from our sponsors, which is on Etsy. Let's say, let's just say which is on Etsy. I don't want to get control with the Secret Service going any further there. All right. So web 2.0 comes online. As you said, now the internet is more passive and weirdly enough more identity focused, right?

The same shift that Vimeo and YouTube and all these platforms were making was happening everywhere. So it was becoming like, I am me online. I'm not really, I'm not supposed to be anonymous. I could be still, but they don't want you to be. And the person that I am is now like very marketable. It's like very targeted. And that's happening really quickly. And you start to see this change.

with spookier stuff, weirder stuff as well, which I think is really fascinating. So then the next kind of like little subculture in our story are called Tulpas. Do you guys know what a Tulpa is? I'm not familiar with that one, no. Yeah, okay.

So a Tulpa is, it's a concept from Tibetan Buddhism. And it's basically like you can focus on a being through meditation and conjure it and create it. And this becomes very popular with a, subculture called bronies oh yeah yeah yeah so bronies are adult usually men who are who were fans of the my little pony tv show and we have a really good post that i think sums up the whole moment here with bronies and tulpas if uh if grant can pull that up here so on the subject of the early my little pony fan base this is a tumbler post My favorite thing was when Bronis literally started researching and performing practices of Tibetan Buddhism such as lucid dreaming and the concept of tulpas and discussing in depth on forums solely to try and insert themselves into My Little Pony through their dreams and make their favorite ponies come to life in thought form. Does anyone else remember this?

And then someone wrote, what about the post about the guy who claimed he conjured My Little Pony Tulpas to be his lovers, but instead they bullied and tyrannized him. Then someone said that was the best one. And then someone said the best part was someone suggesting him to create a Jackie Chan Tulpa to defend him. And then someone said, no, that was the guy who made a pinky pie without a face that screamed at him every waking hour. So this is, I think, a pretty good summary of what this whole thing was like. Did you guys ever encounter bronies online around like 2011, 2012? This is like very turn of the 2010s quoted to me. Lots of good music came out of that community.

I encountered the music. I didn't actually discover Telpas through the Brodians, but I've never seen a post like that, but it all makes perfect metaphysical sense to me. I do love the idea that Telpa is straight up rejected. Like that feels very real for me, the idea of like, this is a misappropriation of this power. Stop. This is a crime against what does exist. Like reading that makes perfect sense.

Wait, say more about the music. actually totally miss this. Brony step. There's, I mean, Bronies have conventions, right? Conventions need music. Right. People who are online

are listening to all kinds of dope electronic music. Maybe even they're just speeding up music that already exists, Nightcore, you know? And they fill convention halls, and it's, boom, boom, whatever. You know, Five Night of Freddy's, right?

The Living Tombstone came out of the Brony world. The same way that there are people who started themed projects about video games that happened very much with My Little Pony also. There was huge crossover into, there's, there's that notable video of a Fiesta

that happened at a Brony convention in 2013. That is, it was put out as, as, you know, most people are familiar with the, like, cringe aspect of it, but it was a full, like, rave with DJs and people performing original music,

with a lot of, like, really prolific artists, a lot of, singers, even. A lot of whom are still connected to electronic music today and have,

like, moved out of, groaning world into like greater expansions of their own interests. That's actually a really good point because I feel like a lot of that stuff, particularly Nightcore, is a really important precursor to, you know, what we'd call Hyperpop now. Like you can't really get one without going through the the sped-up screamo covers of McElmore's Thrift Shop era of Nightcore. Yeah, Nightcore, I think actually Daniel Harald posted the other day, old Facebook post

from like 2011 or something, which he said, like, I think the quote is, Nightcore has penetrated my heart. I mean, there's still some Nightcore songs that, like, I think are just so much better than the original. I still listen to it. Oh, yeah. For our audience, Nightcore is when you speed up, essentially you speed up a song, and then you put on YouTube with like a hot anime girl as the, as the album art.

That's sort of the simplest version. If listeners don't know, don't stop. If you didn't know before that definition, we don't want you to listen or watch. We're a big tent. We will give you, if you're a Patreon subscriber, we're going to let everybody in. If you don't have to know Nykore, it's okay. It's like the TikTok slowed and reverb, but backwards and earlier. Exactly.

Like the lo-fi, like chill remixes of pop songs now. You know what? It was Obama era. People were full of this millennial optimism at the time. And now that we've lost that, like, why wouldn't it be slowed and reverbed instead? People have lost that hope so the music reflects that and what people choose to make it home. Think about it. We should bring back nightcore.

Liberalism needs nightcore. Yeah. We need nightcore. Make America mindless self-indulgence. Yeah. That's a great point. So in terms of like where this the Topal stuff comes from, Vice once again like dug into this,

they talked to a user named Macy J. Who manifested a Tulpa. And Vice wrote a few anonymous members started to experiment with creating Tulpa things snowballed in 2012 when adult fans of My Little Pony friendship It was magic caught on. They created a new forum on Reddit and crafted Tulpas based on their favorite characters from the show. So they're fanboys with imaginary friends, right?

Not really. Tulpas are believed to be conscious beings with their own preferences and not completely under their host control. And they basically said that, like, most people who did this learned about it from Fortune, which is a website that comes up a lot for us on this show. I have conflicting feelings about it. Were you guys ever like 4chan lurkers or posters even? Less than you would think considering the connections that we do have to 4chan.

I've known Chris Poole for, I met him New Year's Eve 2006 in New York City. Wow. I've known him for a very long time. He's a good friend. But yeah, the first time I ever saw 4chan was at this New Year's Eve party, the Nintendo Wii had just come out a few months before, or maybe a month before. And there were all these images on the Wii slideshow that were playing of like very realistic manga Marios that could never have been in a manga ever.

And I asked my friend, what is this? It's like, oh, this is a website, 4chan. That's Chris. It's his website. And we talked. And I met a bunch of people from like mods and stuff from that world. And you could have stopped 4chan and all of social media. There's a lot of funny little forest gump things happening here.

Well, it was New York in the mid-2000s. But yeah, I really, I actually am very curious how stopping works in both of these instances. I was like, what do I? Do I put something into a drink or something? But no. Yeah, Chris, he appears in our music video for Meow. He takes off the cat mask. Oh, yeah.

The music video. Chris is a very gentle soul. I think he wanted to make an anime website. And what happened on it surprised everybody, I think. Have you ever read it came from something awful? Yeah, I've read it. Yeah, it's good. And I have a similar conflicting feeling about it.

As a teenager, like, I spent a lot of time on it and I enjoyed my time there. Like, it was funny and I understood that, like, I think with a lot of internet subcultures, they serve a purpose that we're kind of forgetting, especially now in the midst of this massive culture war, which is like, if you have a free speech environment like the internet, you kind of have to have a pressure release valve. You kind of have to have a place for people to go just like goof off and be insane. And like, it makes the rest of the internet like kind of safer, in my opinion. The Chris that I knew, he left 4chan and he decided. to make another website called Canvas.

That was meant to be like, what if we took all the fun, creative aspects of 4chan? We're like, the memes can be created. The people can remix and use their creativity and, like, realize that they aren't passive recipients to culture,

but rather active, like, makers of it at all times. And so the way that Canvas worked was you would, like, upload an image, and then people would remix image, and that would create a thread. It was like an image board without the, like, threat of,

doxing and pornography or whatever. But turns out the moderation staff, literally the people who were building the website had to be the 24-7 moderation staff for this website. And it crumbled. You can read about Canvas. It was like a dream that just could not exist. It was done with this maybe naive, maybe best wishing for humanity type thing that like if we were given these tools that were quite powerful, that we'd somehow be able

to use them for good and be able to mitigate the, evil of them. Didn't work out. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, what you're hitting on, though, is sort of like the story that we're telling today, which is like the clash between like naive optimism and utopianism, the people who thought the internet could be this thing where you could be anyone and identify as anything

and conjure my little pony characters from your mind and talk about it online. For hands, and they won't scream at you even though they don't have mouths. I didn't give it a mouth. They don't have a face. I have no mouth and I am pinky pie and I'm a scream. Yeah, no, exactly. like this sort of crushing reality of like what people would do with these technologies but also I think what capitalism does once it like gets a whole and I that to me

is sort of the story that capitalism for real fuck that shit yeah yeah hell yeah baby and like all things with capitalism and the internet around 2015 everything starts in this world that we're talking about today starts to get a little dumber and that's I'm gonna sell my top of Palantier yeah You guys should collab with Palantir. It's going to do a lot for this nation. I agree. I mean, if you think about it, surveillance is a toll-up.

One that watches all of us. But so by 20- Peter Teal's actually just a Topo. Yeah, we've all made him up. We've conjured the antichrist. And his lawsuits are then fixing to. So in 2015, we started to see the rise of meme magic. Meem magic.

Yeah, Warlock's elected Donald Trump, by the way. Yes, yes. This is exactly what we're talking about. So it is a far-right version of the secret. So you sort of like conjure reality with memes. One message board posts we found here, it reads in November, 2016, a group of internet trolls became convinced that they had caused the election of Donald Trump through meme magic. Mean magic isn't real. But critically, it's also not real.

It's the half-ironic superstition, never fully disregarded that online trolling can affect real-world events, which obviously it gets its start on 4chan. This is sort of the rise of the true radicalization of 4chan. And I think that idea of like, it's not real, but it's not not real, is like a very interesting component of the internet. It is effectively not real, but it is the realest thing now. You can kind of use the internet with enough scale and enough influence to, like, alter reality, or at least a lot of people on the far right think so. Have you ever seen the anime Mob Psycho 100?

Hell yeah, brother. There we go. Now we're talking. That's the anime that describes, like, how we deal with this problem. Reagan, Arataka. Say more. He's the non-magician, the bullshit artist, who's able to be like, what are you really getting at here?

What's your real problem? Yeah. And by the way, I'm the best exorcist in the world. So hire me. Give me your money. Well, I'm glad you brought it back to the money thing because by the time that the social media landscape doesn't work for free. Exactly.

They don't work for free. And by the time the internet landscape is sort of like becoming more. corporatized, becoming more control, becoming more dominated by the far right. We also see sort of like how these old kind of witchy communities start to get influenced by it, affected by it, and that takes us to one of my favorite events in internet history, Bone Gazi. Now you hit me with something I don't know. I don't know what Bon Gazi is. I'm excited by name alone. Hit me with Bon Gazi, please. Okay. I have some slides that Grant is going to pull up for you. I've condensed this story because it's a little complicated. But,

But Bone Gazi started on Tumblr, and it is a portmanteau of Benghazi and Bone. Right, because I thought so. Yeah. It was covered in the national news by the Washington Post, among many other news agencies at the time. Bone Gazi was an incident that started on Tumblr. and it involves a user that went by Ender Darling. Ender Darling had a secret Facebook group for queer witches that they were in, and they were posting about their, oh, here we go.

They were posting about their bone collection, okay? And the members of the queer witch Facebook group asked Ender, and her darling if the bones that she was talking about collecting were ethically sourced. Oh, oh. Okay. I don't recall this, but I now understand the pun. Yeah. So it turns out they weren't ethically sourced and a screenshot of the Facebook conversation ended up on Tumblr. One important takeaway here, one sort of conversation in the Facebook group.

Someone wrote, I'm absolutely interested in buying the bones, but you need to be careful with the state and federal laws. And then Ender Darling wrote, oh, I know. I looked up and it's all good. I wouldn't even be offering if there's a chance that someone would get into trouble, parentheses, me, L.O.L. And then Ender Darling was arrested in Louisiana. Turns out that Ender Darling was sourcing her bones from cemeteries around New Orleans and not legally sourcing them. Like she was digging up grives. This is why you got to be friends with the people who make the laws like Prescott Bush who stole Geronimo's skull for the elbow. Exactly.

I'm always saying that. And it became sort of like a. a huge, huge thing on Tumblr and it has actually spawned like several bone-related controversies. There was an incident called Tombler, which is a portmanteau of the word toe. Oh, no. And Tumblr. And basically a witch on Tumblr had her toe amputated and then sent it to a friend to make it into a necklace. And that was a big to do.

It was the Tumblr user Cummy eyelids who was known for making a necklace out of her amputed. added of an amputated toe, she received in the mail. She regularly receives human body parts in the mail, bought a human skeleton for $30 at a flea market. The skeleton was from a university, very likely grave robbed, and she got in a lot of trouble with the Tumblr community for doing that. Damn.

I just keep on thinking about very powerful people who steal bones all the time. Think about, like, how the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, when they first put that up, they just had a real-life skeleton in it, and then it took like about... Really?

Yeah, yeah, you can look it up. It took, like, a little bit for people to be like, where'd that come from? And they're like, all right, all right. We'll do a fake one. Yeah. Who was able to recognize that the skeleton was real? Yeah.

Like, I wouldn't be able to clock. Maybe a doctor who went on vacation. Counting the ribs. Sure. That's that tibia. I don't even know. Whatever. The reason we're sort of talking about the Tumblr era and also the meme magic era

happening kind of simultaneously is I think that they are very much great examples of how the internet is bifurcating in the 2010. So you have like liberal. circles and you have far right circles and they're having very different conversations. You know, one side is saying your bones have to be ethically sourced. The other side is saying that we can literally conjure Hitler 2 with memes. And all of that will collide around 2018, 2019 with the launch of TikTok in the U.S. And we're going to talk about that right after the break.

This podcast rules. We're going to talk about that next. But right after a word from our sponsors, more witches on. On Etsy. Do you guys use TikTok at all? Are you on TikTok? A modicum. No, not really.

Okay. I've frankly avoided it to the best of my ability. But the best of your ability is very bad because it turns out we have an extremely popular song on TikTok, the Miku song. Speaking of Tulpas. Sure. Can you connect the dots for our audience there, actually? Because I think Hatsunei Niku is kind of an interesting sort of figure we haven't actually

touched on. So Miku is a character, which is not a word anyone should take lightly, a character who is tied to a piece of technology called Vocaloid, which was made by Yamaha. It's the same sort of principle of speech synthesis software behind the AI voices that you hear through 11 labs and stuff like that, except in this case, the phoneme, the bank of phonemes, the A-I-U-A-O, Kaki Kui, whatever,

they're collected as a single library so you can make this actress, who is a real person from Japan. I forget her name, sadly, for the V4. English Bank. You can type whatever you want, and Miku will say whatever you want in the pitch that you're assigning it with a gender slider, a clearness slider, a breathiness slider, and the rest of it. So you can do articulations and basically craft a digital singer based off of the words that you would like a singer to say without ever having to record Britney Spears or whatever. She's got a bluish, greenish hair. She is like the ideal, like, young girl singer look.

She's got, like, cool hair, cool ponytail hair and cool outfit. So we have the most popular English language, Miku's song. And the concept of it was sort of making it like an M&M, my name is type thing. We're introducing this extremely difficult concept by like, hi, my name's Miku, and this is what I'm all about, you know, kind of thing. Like S. 41 Fat Lip, you know, it would play as the theme song to the Miku TV show. So that was our thought. And then in 2019, after we had toured with Miku and Luke had made a dance for Miku,

Luke's dance, which was filmed at our 2016 concert, exploded on TikTok, like exploded. Cool. And it was like view all, not like millions of views, but like millions of individual videos that have been made from this thing. And that's what happens when something explodes there. And now it's in Fortnite and you can take Luke's dance and buy it. It's crazy. I was talking to someone at the Austin show about like, a friend of mine who plays Fortnite

and how frustrating it is to get like headshotted and then get the Muku dance on. I know that person. Can we not do this? This fucking sucks. Like my dance is used for BM and that is so cool to me. I'm so awesome.

So when I speaking of Miku, I've always wanted to have an excuse to tell this story. When I was working as a reporter in Tokyo, I was there for like a couple months and I got an opportunity to try out a new Miku VR project that Krypton was working on. And so they put the headset on me and they give me the handles.

And basically what it is is like you can watch a movie while sitting on a log like with Miku and VR. That's the idea. And she like kind of reacts to your hands and stuff. And so they're watching me watch, use it. And so I'm like, I'm trying out the physics. Like it's like, you know, what you do with a video game. And without thinking, I guess.

I didn't mean to grab her butt in VR. But at the same time, I was trying to see what would happen, I guess, to different physics effects. And she reacted. They shut down the demo. And they were like, we're not ready to talk about this yet, actually. And they took the headset off of me. And like, the translator was like, sorry, we're just not ready to debut this yet. And at the time, I was like, oh, man, I screwed up.

And then later I was like, they programmed Meku's butt to react. Because, like, someone had to make that happen. and I never heard anything else about the VR thing again. That's different than my first VR experience with Meku, which was a fan-made version of, I think it was a giant Miku who stomped on you. I have an Oculus DK1. I got back in the Kickstarter back in the day,

which is another fun acquisition that happened over the decade that we're talking about. So speaking of sort of like large companies taking over the internet, TikTok is the newest, biggest company, to sort of dominate the internet landscape. And one of the interesting things that I've been following since like TikTok blew up, you know, around the pandemic era, I guess you would say in the U.S. is like all of the old stuff becomes new, right? Like it's a, it's a, it's eternal September forever there because they're like super young kids don't have any context for what's happened before.

And so a lot of like old scandals, old memes recirculate. And one of them is bone drama. There's a guy named John's Bones. Are you familiar with John's Bones? John's bones was like a young guy in New York who was selling bones on TikTok. And people... Wow, let's go. Yeah.

People got really mad. He was charging $2,000 for a skull. He said it was purely for like educational reasons. People also got mad at him about like whether or not the bones were like of people of color. Someone wrote on Twitter when it was back to sell Twitter. Content warning, selling of indigenous remains. John's bones on TikTok has been called out by anthros. I think that means anthropologists for selling, among other items, a Sammy skull and the bones of the Dalit people who have no saying what happened to the remains after death.

And then John Bone, John's bones, John from John's bones, responds to everyone with a picture of his, his, like, Taiwanese passport saying that, like, it's okay that he can sell indigenous remains. Oh, okay. You know, I think if you're going to ethically source your bones, you have to kill the person yourself, right? Like, that's my claim. Right? Yeah, like if we're following it all the way to the source, you know, it's kind of like growing your own food that you then get to sell on a farmer's market. Yeah. Like the guy on vice who got his leg amputated, then cooked it and ate it as tacos with his friends.

Yeah, like that guy. That's actually, that's a great example. We're adamant defenders. Yeah, Grant has tried to remove references to that story out of multiple episodes. and now he can't. On John's bones, just one thing. My friend was his teacher. No way.

And said he sucked. Yeah. The guy who tried to sell bones for $2,000 wasn't a cool guy? He would make, he made a bunch of like art bone furniture. Oh, that's fucked. That's fucked. I'm sorry. I mean.

And they had to critique it. Okay. Yeah. I guess though if it was ethically sourced bones, bone furniture would go really hard. If only we had enough leg bones. to go around. Exactly. You've got to just grow your own bones to sell.

But a lot of old stuff gets kicked up when TikTok comes online. So we start to see the rise of Tulpas, but through like a different name. We started to see the concept of like head systems, kind of like other kin. Are you familiar with like the dissociative identity disorder people? Yeah. So it's a lot of just like, oh, and then most importantly of all the rise of something called shifting, which was very popular with Harry Potter fans. Do you know about shifting?

Not by name, no. Shifting was very popular with Tumblr users who wanted to basically meditate so hard that they would go to a dimension where Harry Potter was real. Yeah. Swag. You're definitely our most internet versus.

This is definitely, yeah. Other people react to the things we say and you guys just do nods of understanding. in a way that no one else has ever done. Yeah. I've heard about both these things, about like the rise of like self-diagnosing and identifying with certain, you know, personality, like complexes on TikTok

and the sort of like proliferation of that. And also what you're talking about, the shifting thing. And I mean, it's just to me a clear extension of exactly what we were talking about earlier where it's like the need to not only like identify, but the anonymity around it. But what gets complicated is because, like, that anonymity factor doesn't really mean what it used to. Like, it's the same way as, like,

the idea of this current iteration of the internet being built around in identity in a way that's, like, holistic. And this is who you are in a much more complete sense. Like, it doesn't really, work that way. I think you're right. It's almost like kids experimenting with like, let's call it like, you know, head systems, you know, the idea that you have multiple personalities that are operating one TikTok

account is such a, it's such a funny idea because it's, it's sort of just like playing with the idea of having multiple users on one account, multiple identities online. It's like a, it's kind of earnest. Onomoneguchi has a weird account because like there are four of us that run the same account. Yeah. So it's exactly. You're a head system.

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, we're head system. Straight up. I feel like the biggest influence, though, that TikTok has had on the spooky corners of the internet is the popularization of witch talk. So, like, all of the witches are now kind of on TikTok and they're using it, you know, the way they used to the way they use it.

It's the new marketplace. Like, it's where stuff gets sold. Exactly. Etsy is even a little bit outdated. I would say so because, like, we're in a full-on attention economy now. So, like, you kind of have to get attention to sell anything, including witchcraft. And I think the first big indication like witches had moved on to TikTok was when the, according to the cut, they wrote, baby witches tried to hex the moon in July 2020. What did the moon do?

Come on. That's a great question. I can't get a good answer for why there's a really like vocal contingent of people who hate the moon. But there is a big community of people who hate the moon. online. Well, I feel like there are cults of the sun, there are cults of the moon, right? Like we're talking about people who pick aside, ultimately. It could just be that. I think it probably is. And these baby witches hated the moon so much that they hex the moon, not understanding that the moon is very powerful astrologically. The cut wrote, according to one Reddit

user, one witch from Witch Talk knows who the four amateur witches who attempted the lunar hex are. They're the same, they are quote, the same four who tried to heck the fay, which would be like fairy folks. So clearly these are the amateur witches that are messing with what they don't understand. And the article continues, some elder witches say you wouldn't hex the moon because hexing the moon is impossible. It's too formidable an entity for anyone to take on. It's not a thing TikTok user Raven Moonen Zero said in a video addressing the moon hexing rumors. But what a witch can do, according to this camp, is strongly demonstrate their disrespect of the deities who control the moon.

Basically, if these beginner witches did in fact try to hex the moon, then they would have committed an offense against witchcraft and against nature, and they should expect the gods to smite them. This is kind of what Bloodborn is about, right? I mean, I think so. Yeah, I think so. And baby witches on witch talk have continued to try to hex and curse things over the years when Trump got COVID. A bunch of witches hexed him, according to the Atlantic. Have people considered Trump is a magic use? himself.

It's possible. Possible? I think it's... Say more. Yeah. I think you look away. Dig into this. Could we agree to likely...

I think... Make your point here, because I think you're on to something, actually. Well, isn't the use of symbolic power a really big part of this? Me magic. Yeah. Yeah. So I think when a guy like Peter Thiel introduces Donald Trump at the 2016 Republican National Convention as a master builder,

I think he's saying something that's like, oh, this guy knows how to use power. Yeah, I think you're right. To effective purposes. Yeah, not to mention like, he knows how to fucking say things, period, that make people do things. He's a malevolent entity for sure. I mean, is there a good warlock case given that he is like beholden two patrons above him that grant him further power? Oh, interesting. Whoa. Okay.

Are we getting somewhere? I think we are absolutely cooking right now. This is totally right. And it would make sense that like witches are constantly fighting with the far right in magical realms. I mean, in June of this year, a bunch of Etsy witches, you know, started selling curses. And one of those curses was to Charlie, against Charlie Kirk. The staff of Jezebel, they, they bought the curse. The post has been taken down.

and there's like an editor's note on it now, which I, the person was taken down. I thought, I thought it was left up with the editors. I think it's since been taken down. Our wonderful researcher Adam gave me a link that that was from archives. So I think it's been taken down. Yeah. It's definitely been edited. Yeah, they were trying to do damage control.

I think it's a little silly. Well, this is right after the Seattle Mariners, the Etsy which is hooked up the Seattle Mariners. Exactly. Yeah. But we found out that the Seattle Mariners were already hooked up by Nintendo. Wait, what do you mean? Did you know that? So, well, Nintendo of America is in Seattle,

and Nintendo of Japan really loves baseball. Makes sense. Mm-hmm. Who remembers Ken Griffey Jr. baseball in the Super Nintendo? He's the only real player in the game. Seattle, of all places, closest to Japan, huge Japanese population in Seattle.

So Nintendo had on all the players' jerseys, their shirts, when they, on their batting arm, whatever arm is facing the pitcher, for Nintendo logo. It's so raw. We visited the offices last month, and that was like a, I mean,

that's a little bit of symbolic power right there. But either way, Nintendo was hooking up the Seattle Mariners in the same way. I believe that the Etsy witches were. And then, sorry, now you were continuing on more current.

No, no, no, no. But this is a really good connection. I mean, it goes all the way back to Little B. I mean, like, the idea of, like, of Internet Witchcrafts and sports, they're very tied together. And just as a point of clarification, this was what the curse against Charlie Kirk was, just so everyone knows. Jezebel wrote, I want to make it clear.

I'm not calling on dark forces to cause him harm. I just want him to wake up every morning with an inexplicable zit. I want his podcast microphone to malfunction every time he hits record. I want his blue blazers to suddenly be all one size too small. I want his socks to always be sliding down his foot. I want his thumb to grow too big to tweet. To ruin his day with the collective feminist power of the Etsy Cubbin would make my life's greatest joy. which I think is totally reasonable, actually.

It's a much more reasonable ill to wish on somebody. But I think the danger of these forces is what you want and the outcome. It's that space in between where all the weirdness occurs. And I'm not saying, honestly, I'm legitimately not saying that which is are responsible for anything that happened to Charlie Kirk. Even if that day his podcast thumb was a little messed up or whatever, his Twitter thumb. But yeah, what I'm saying is like, I think anybody who uses these powers understands that you're not in full control of what you get. Producer Grant and I are smiling quite a bit right now because what you said is exactly what the witch who cursed him said. Priestess Lillen told the UK tabloid Metro, I would like to say first off that a person's life and death always has weight and we do not celebrate the loss of life.

With that said, throughout the witchcraft community, many of us believe that spells, magic, and curses are very real and can bring about profound change in this world. While we cannot claim literal responsibility for Mr. Kirk's death, we do affirm that magic, that the magic we work with is effective. When you work in alignment with the collective energy, it can manifest in unthinkable ways. Yeah, real shit. The idea of that kind of manifestation with the collective energy that is a direct response to what a lot of people might say is the energy put out into the world by Charlie Kirk and the forces to which he was beholden. Whoa, he was beholden to forces too? No kidding.

That is so weird. Who would have thought that these people are also beholden the larger forces? But yeah, I mean, play stupid games win stupid prizes. What can I say? I also can't think of like a better metaphor for the internet than like the unthinkable, what is it? The collective energy that can manifest in unthinkable ways. And I think that is why these communities have been so online from such like an early start. It's like when we all come together and we use the technology to sort of change the way we think about ourselves or identities or the way we communicate or what we identify as or whatever it is for better or for worse, that can have unexpected outcomes.

And when I think of like the history of the last 30 years, like that is all it is. It's just like the un the unthinkable nature of collective energy. Yeah. And it's funny how, you know, if people say, oh, none of these words are in the Bible or whatever. Like the idea, like the conversation that we've had so far, if you bring this to like the 80s, you might find some weird shortwave radio station of like some people who understand what's going on. But like the fact that this is a conversation that like you could show to, I don't know, a 12 year old and they would kind of understand what we're talking about from start to finish. That it's proof that we live in a different world. And it's proof that we understand as a result of technology metaphysical things in a totally different way than we did from our parents or even especially our grandparents. But to your point, that means that we could also show this podcast to my father and that he would be a,

able to draw conclusions from it that are in line with his own broader experience. That, like, it just kind of, it's based in principle and practice that is far larger than any of this. You talked about kind of like the, like the different world we live in now. And we did an episode about this a few months ago, but the moment that I remember thinking, like, oh, the world's different now was when all of the Gen Z kids decided to Naruto run at Area 51. Yeah. Yeah.

And I think it was like right off the bat. I think if I'm getting it correctly, it was either right. Right off the bat, either before or maybe after the gentle minions meme where all the Gen Z kids were like dressing up in suits to go see the new minions movie. I don't know which one, but like that period, I remember just thinking like, oh, so if you've always grown up in a world where you can harness collective energy via the internet, like you have a totally different understanding of what's possible. You can effectively manifest Area 51 to be real and like make it a joke or like you can get all your friends to do something stupid with you. And if you have like TikTok as the motivator, if you have social media as the motivator, that you have. You can kind of move mountains. That is a profoundly different world to live in, one that I still think most people don't really understand, even though they might understand.

Like, it's like not consciously understand. I think people understand that the, how do I put this? The desire to shape the world around us is always there. And the idea that any of this exists as a means to not just like really solidify ones. idea of who they are, but also to exert control in the world in a meaningful, impactful way is a very real one that isn't directly considered as such. The way that I would say what Luke just said is like this thought, which I mean, I guess Luke said that this has existed forever, but I think it really took on a special form with

the invention of television and the invention of satellites. Sure. I think there's a book called Global Mind Change or something that sort of took this like Joseph Campbell idea of like if we, you know, cast spells in the form of like stories, in the form of global narratives and the form of characters and pictures and stuff like that, you know, yeah, you could sell Superman to a culture and do it again and again again, right? And what would that do to the people in there? They would begin to identify.

They'd start dancing like Michael Jackson. They'd start, you know, maybe we could create a world in an image that we'd like to see it. Yeah, there was like a lot of money attached with finding ways to do this, particularly in the 60s, 70s, the 80s, a little bit in the 90s. But that really gave way to experiments in technology, right? Where those very same people in San Francisco were like, while they were trying to devise ways to like make TV work, they accidentally took a bunch of drugs and made computers instead. And the computers did that on a level that was beyond their understanding. So if you tried to explain canning to Steve Jobs, it would take him a minute, you know. I think he'd get it, though.

He'd get it. He totally, it would take him a minute, I said. If there's ever been an energy vampire. Yeah, like real therian, Steve Jobs. Like, no, the, and I think to your point, like, what technology has done is given the power that the TV used to have, the radio used to have to anyone. So, like, you can manifest Lubbubu. Broadcast yourself. Dubai, Job, Lobo.

Dubai chocolate, macho latte. You can do it. We're on tour right now. We are stopping at coffee shops and seeing Dubai chocolate everywhere. Everywhere. Have you tried it? Not yet. I haven't tried it.

Is it sick? I've heard it's good. I have one in my fridge and I still haven't eaten it yet, actually. I'm still on no sugar, but should I break edge? You should break edge for Mo. You should break edge for Dubai chocolate. Yeah, I've actually, I've enjoyed the fitness aspect of tour where, yeah, I'm like trying to avoid stuff that I would definitely eat if I were hoping.

Yeah. I will say, I thought we were doing a fun spooky show, and then it actually got scary for me. Yeah. So when we talk spooky, it gets spooky. From moving through this and just, and my role here is to be like the less online person to be the vessel of that. What I see is that people and young people have always been the same, but the technology

really altering through this timeline makes the world change. Yes, it does. It creates a generation gap where none would exist otherwise. Yeah. Yeah, just looking at it through 14-year-olds like to think that they can cast spells and identify as elves. But like once anonymity is gone, once it's like not in like, once like it's not bifurcated and it's, it's everywhere, like the ramifications are like unthinkable.

Also, like the paradox is also just remembering. like, yeah, people have literally always had the same kind of goofy people thoughts and like interests. That's- You would like me to react to that. If you guys have a reaction. Yeah, yeah, I do. I do have a reaction.

Yeah. So, yeah, when it comes to like changing times and changing behaviors, I'm a student of Marshall McLuhan who said that the medium is the message. What you say matters, of course, but the way that it said, matters much more than you might imagine. Saying something on the telephone at all, talking over Zoom at all, is a pattern of behavior that changes the way that we're talking.

It sets a tone for, we have all these microphones. This conversation would have played out in a very different way in person. And it would have played out much differently in front of an audience that's not going to be on YouTube. Like the way that we're speaking is, whether we know it or not, subconsciously patterned.

around those factors, but customs, you know? And so, yeah, I'd say like, the generation gap between the radio people and the television people is small compared to, and that was a big one, because you had the hippies, it's a small gap compared to the television to the digital people. Yeah. And the main difference there is that if television amplified our imagination to the point of extreme. Digital does the exact opposite. It amplifies our memory to the point of extreme. So suddenly, not only can you conjure every image that you can dream of and tulp it up

in your dreams, now actually the thing that's happening invisibly while all this is occurring is it's all being stored, recalled, perfectly indexed, perfectly retrievable. And yeah, that's like the scary new thing that where all the money is. That's like the surveillance, the security, the storage, the, that's where the money goes and where the development occurs. And so, but it's also where the psychological action is for young people. And the real sad paradox is that the adults don't understand that. It's so interesting that you make that connection. I was speaking at like a arts and technology and journalism festival in Georgia, the country earlier this year.

And one of the speakers was talking about sort of the, the urge, particularly from Russia, to control people's memories via, like, digital media. And, like, and the understanding of the countries surrounding Russia that sort of are waiting to find out if they're going to be the next Ukraine, they're seeing, like, the Russian troll farms there invest heavily in modifying nostalgia. Like, how do you remember your own history? Yep. Because if you can do that, you can control a population. You can impact the population much faster than just sort of blasting them with fake news or whatever. Although, you know, misinformation is sort of a form.

Fake news fucks with people's minds, but it doesn't move their souls in a way that you can predict. I want to thank you guys for coming on this show. This was like honestly one of the most delightful conversations I've had in a long time. This was so fun. Thank you. Yeah. I usually ask like where can people follow you online, but like where can people follow you online? But also how can people come out and see you guys?

What's next on tour? Where are you headed? When is this episode coming out? I think we should like maybe do it like prime spooky season like early October. Yeah, yeah, we're going to, it's going to be our Halloween trail. Okay, cool. Your Halloween trail. Okay, sweet.

Well, if you are watching this in early October, we are still on tour until October 17th. And then after that, we will no longer be on tour, but we'll probably be on tour next year. We're working on, well, first of all, we have an album called Anyway. And I think that's actually the best place to check us out online. You can follow us on social media if you want, but you know how to find that. But check out our album anyway. And I recommend getting it on Nina Prona Call, which is a non-Spotify situation where you can download the album. And yeah, it's cool.

I think you'll like it. We lived in a house together. We were tired of being online and making art solely online. So we decided to live together in a house and write music that was simple enough to play with each other in the room. And that was the whole purpose behind it. Hi, Lou. Talk about me magic. I went to a screening of Batman and Robin

and then the next morning woke up and your Batman music video had dropped. And I literally screamed. I went to the Nighthawk in Brooklyn to see like a 35 millimeter or whatever screening of Batman and Robin. Yeah. And then I woke up and I saw it on YouTube and I was like, fuck, goddamn.

And our video is a highly Batman and Robin centric situation. Your video kind of blew my mind because you actually identify the aesthetics of Batman together. Like, it's all almost seamless aesthetically. Like, it kind of blew my mind. I still think, I watch the video all the time.

It's so good. Well, thank you. We owe a lot of that to the director, Jared Robb, who, by the way, there's another movie that's going to come out next year, which is going to blow your mind. It's called Nirvana the Band, the show. I'm a huge Nirvana

the Band fan. I cannot wait for this movie. So, Jared, of Nirvana, the Band. And the show of fame shot the magnet video with us. Oh, no way. The Darcy video that came out the month or so prior. Okay. All right.

Explain for it. That explains a ton. Yeah. I'm, yeah, huge fan. Yeah, wow, that's wild. Yeah. Thank you guys for coming on. This was fantastic.

Seriously. Dude, yeah, you guys are amazing. And actually, I would recommend watching anybody watch the magnet music video. It's pretty good. It's so good. Panic Whirl is a production of Courier. It is written and produced by Grant Irving and hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Josh Fielstead is our production coordinator, and our amazing researcher is Adam Bumas.

From Currier is Shane Verkest, who edits our video episodes, along with our producer, Devin Moroni, and National Managing Director and Executive Producer Kevin Dreyfus. R.C. de Mezzo 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. You can email her 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.