The wild world wide web of witches

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration blog, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up require compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 0:26Ryan Broderick?

  So I want to open up with like a really simple question for you guys. Has anyone ever put a curse on you?

• 0:33Speaker 02

  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.

• 0:58Ryan Broderick?

  Interesting.

• 0:59Speaker 02

  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. But I-

• 1:07Ryan Broderick?

  Do you feel like it worked?

• 1:11Speaker 02

  Hard to- again, I don't know what it was supposed to do. But it's-

• 1:15Ryan Broderick?

  Did you feel generally hexed?

• 1:17Speaker 02

  For a long time, does that? Maybe.

• 1:36Ryan Broderick?

  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, a 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 witches. Joining me from the band, Anna Managuchi, Peter Berkman, and Luke Silas. Welcome. Thank you, guys, so much for coming on.

• 2:21Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 2:22Speaker 03

  Thank you. It's a beautiful day.

• 2:23Ryan Broderick?

  Um, you guys, I think it's safe to say are pretty online. You're known as a very online band. Does that, does that sound right to you?

• 2:29Speaker 03

  The phrase terminally online comes up often. Yeah. Not, not for me.

• 2:33Ryan Broderick?

  Okay.

• 2:34Speaker 02

  No, yeah.

• 2:34Ryan Broderick?

  Not for you.

• 2:35Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:42Ryan Broderick?

  How would you describe your internet bubble?

• 2:45Speaker 02

  Uh, connected to video games, connected to artists, and by extension, like everything that those gamers and artists are connected to. So the, the memes run deep, the actual like lore runs pretty deep. I, I don't know. I, I've definitely been like laughed at and or iced out at work lunch tables for explaining things like inflation to people. Uh.

• 3:09Ryan Broderick?

  Like Sonic inflation, like Sonic the Hedgehog?

• 3:10Speaker 02

  That was actually exactly the.

• 3:15Speaker 03

  See, that's why you're here, though. You got, you got expelled from that table into this one.

• 3:18Speaker 02

  Yes, absolutely.

• 3:19Ryan Broderick?

  Welcome. Yeah. You're in safe space. Uh, we could talk about the seminal flash video game Sonic Inflation Adventure as much as you'd like.

• 3:27Speaker 02

  Seminal.

• 3:28Ryan Broderick?

  Today, though, I would say seminal, I would say, yeah.

• 3:33Speaker 02

  Game that started it all.

• 3:35Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. Well, what, what we are here to talk about today is a topic that we picked specifically for you guys. We thought, we thought this would work pretty well. We're talking about the history of internet witches and internet witchcraft. Uh, 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. Um, but that is like the most recent thing here. Uh, 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, have you encountered, other than being hexed on, on Instant Messenger back in the day? Like, have you seen sort of magic communities, witch communities, spooky communities?

• 4:15Speaker 03

  Well, you know, I, I thank God I was not hexed over AIM, uh, when I was eight, but, uh, I, or did you say eighth grade?

• 4:23Speaker 02

  Eighth.

• 4:23Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, that makes more sense. I was gonna say like, I, that whole story, I was like an eight year old hexed you and it worked. Like, that's, I mean, that makes sense.

• 4:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, dude, I've, I've got like, kind of a bit to say about this. My, my exposure to like the world of like witchcraft online. One of the most like visible moments of that was definitely Lil B.

• 4:43Speaker 03

  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 them, but they were like, whoa. And then, like, literally a month later, dude was on ESPN wearing a sundress, explaining to everybody what's about to happen in basketball. So shout out Lil B.

• 5:15Ryan Broderick?

  Shout out Lil B.

• 5:15Speaker 03

  But, no, the other day, I actually had this intrusive thought about, maybe you know Doug Rushkoff? Have you ever heard of that guy?

• 5:23Ryan Broderick?

  I've worked with him before, yeah.

• 5:24Speaker 03

  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 gonna make up a random phrase here, like, oh, did you get the new, like, box of milk or something? And then, like, suddenly, box of milk, Instagram ad, whatever.

• 5:45Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 5:45Speaker 03

  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, witchcraft, et cetera, is like, actually built in to the internet on purpose.

• 6:11Ryan Broderick?

  That's a great transition to what I want to show you guys first. So, Grant, could you pull up 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. And you're gonna see it right here on your screen. So it's titled, "Kate Bush: A Witch As In Wiccan." And it's from a, it's from a very, yeah, so 1994. 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. is like arguing about whether or not Kate Bush identifies as Wiccan.

• 6:57Ryan Broderick?

  And one of them gets so frustrated, they're like, we have debated this on and off for eight years. And this, this is like on Usenet, do you remember Usenet, like the very, very early message board thread kind of thing? Yeah. And so thi- 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 texts, 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.

• 7:42Ryan Broderick?

  "People were losing jobs, child custody, etc.," Farrell McGowan told Motherboard." So like, not only is this like exactly how things work now, um, but it was, it was, it's like an early, early example of magic users, you know, Wiccans using the internet. Um, did, did you ever encounter like any of these really early kind of witchy, uh, subcultures, like in your, in your time on, on old internet?

• 8:06Speaker 03

  You know, I'd say the closest I ever came to like directly interacting with that world was probably in like seventh or eighth grade myself, where we're the same age. I frequented AOL message boards. Um, and so I was in the punk message board and, but I was also, as a Cure and Bauhaus fan, an AFI fan. I was in the Goth message boards.

• 8:26Ryan Broderick?

  Sick, yeah.

• 8:27Speaker 03

  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, roleplay communities, stuff like that. You know, I figure if I'm not participating, I, I probably shouldn't be peering.

• 8:45Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 8:46Speaker 02

  I, 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, there were that would lead me to people who played, let's say Vampire the Masquerade, and that had all of these connected subcultures to that as well.

• 9:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, and think about how rude it would be if like you were playing D and D and someone was just like like chilling out.

• 9:22Ryan Broderick?

  Just watching.

• 9:23Speaker 03

  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 gonna go on Habbo Hotel and use my brother's credit card to buy Furny.

• 9:37Ryan Broderick?

  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 are 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 a here's an example of what this looked like. So this is this is a website, white magic.com.au in all its old Web one glory.

• 10:18Ryan Broderick?

  It's reads here, issue number 47 of Dogs, Cats and Witches, 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 in the 90s.

• 10:45Speaker 02

  I love that as a as a point of debate for a win.

• 10:49Ryan Broderick?

  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 Otherkin or Therians?

• 11:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, totally.

• 11:18Ryan Broderick?

  Do you do you want?

• 11:21Ryan Broderick?

  We picked the right topic for you guys. So, real briefly, you know, no, no pressure, but can you describe what these ideas are to our audience who may not know? Othercan and then Theryan.

• 11:32Speaker 02

  Uh, Othercan, I'm, I think if I'm thinking of the right thing, it's just, it is, oh, I mean, I'm familiar with kinning as a concept. Is there something special about Othercan?

• 11:42Ryan Broderick?

  That's where it comes from. Uh, it's the, it's like the first version of it. So I'll, I'll, I'll read the description from Know Your Meme. The, the very, very useful website for us. Uh, Othercan 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. They, there is some overlap.

• 12:12Speaker 02

  They've been selected by some spiritual thing.

• 12:14Ryan Broderick?

  Exactly. It's the spiritual component. And Theryans are, uh, basically just like energy vampires. Like, like they're people who, and that I think was the first. Yeah, I, I, um, honestly, if you've ever seen What We Do in the Shadows, Craig Robinson is a great example. Yeah, one of my favorite TV characters of all time. And I feel like Theryans were the first example of one of these communities 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?

• 12:54Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, so we found, uh, a hundred-page book collecting a list of, uh, all the major sort of like history of this community. Uh, and they, it reads, "When we Othercan or Theryan say things like, 'I'm an elf,' we say it in earnest, and we've put a lot of thought into how we 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, uh, I should say that the title of the book was written in Hobbit font. Uh, 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,

• 13:39Ryan Broderick?

  "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?

• 13:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was in, I was actually in the chiptune community, which is how I wound up here doing music.

• 14:01Ryan Broderick?

  Lot of overlap with the otherkin community, I imagine, in the chiptune community.

• 14:06Speaker 03

  Maybe, I actually, you, today, probably. Uh, 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, you know, like, "I found this new mapper for this cartridge," or, you know. Back then, maybe another.

• 14:25Ryan Broderick?

  My LCDJ hookup, yeah, exactly.

• 14:28Speaker 02

  I think the, the one that I was most part, I was definitely an active live journal user, uh, for music. So like I was in a couple of mixtape trading communities, which definitely brought a lot of interesting personalities. Uh, I, 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."

• 14:55Ryan Broderick?

  A hundred percent.

• 14:56Speaker 02

  So, so I was made aware of, of some of this stuff fairly early on.

• 15:01Ryan Broderick?

  Looking back at this stuff, it's obviously like very silly, but to me, it, it feels very much like young people experimenting with like what anonymity online can allow, right? Like, th- these are people who are...

• 15:12Speaker 03

  Or even what it just simply does to them.

• 15:14Ryan Broderick?

  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 is, and we're gonna get kind of deeper into like how silly this stuff can get, but I, 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 cell spells on this message board, I identify as a dragon." And it's like, "Cool, man, like, sure."

• 15:36Speaker 03

  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.

• 15:43Ryan Broderick?

  Hundred percent.

• 15:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, and now, now it's on Etsy, which makes perfect sense, you know?

• 15:49Ryan Broderick?

  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, Tumblr, Facebook, MySpace 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, did you spend time on like just straight up archaic?

• 16:25Speaker 03

  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 their own- Angelfire.com slash CA4 slash mybigonion. Sign my guestbook type beat, web ring stuff, all very like extension of like the zine culture, which is all very Usenet-y, it just looks different. All of a sudden that changed, and I noticed it change 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?

• 17:07Speaker 03

  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?

• 17:24Ryan Broderick?

  Was it Real Syndication Services or something?

• 17:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:28Ryan Broderick?

  Hold on. If I get this wrong, I'm gonna get busted. No, that, no Google AI search. I'm not trying to find the right wing Hindu nationalist party, which is also called RSS.

• 17:43Ryan Broderick?

  Really simple syndication is what is what's it I'm not talking about the international Indian right wing Hindu Vata volunteer paramilitary organization. So.

• 17:54Speaker 04

  There's nothing more like being online now that is like, are you sure you didn't want some fascist shit? It doesn't even have the same letters, but like, might we interest you in this?

• 18:04Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. Well, no, we're, uh, 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 in trouble with the Secret Service going any further there.

• 18:22Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration blog, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses setup required compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 18:49Speaker 05

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• 19:19Ryan Broderick?

  All right. So web 2.0 like comes online. As you said, now the internet is more passive and weirdly enough, more identity focused, right? Instead, the same shift that Vimeo and YouTube and all these platforms are 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, the person that I am is now like very marketable. It's like very, it's 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, uh, then the next, uh, kind of like little subculture in our story are called tulpa's. Do you guys know what a tulpa is?

• 20:01Speaker 02

  I'm not familiar with that one, no.

• 20:03Ryan Broderick?

  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.

• 20:22Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 20:27Ryan Broderick?

  Okay. Yeah.

• 20:30Speaker 02

  I'm with you.

• 20:30Ryan Broderick?

  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, if Grant can pull that up here. So on the subject of the early My Little Pony fanbase, this is a Tumblr post. "My favorite thing was when bronies literally started researching and performing practices of Tibetan Buddhism such as lucid dreaming and the concept of tulpas and discussing it 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?"

• 21:16Ryan Broderick?

  Then someone said, "That was the best one." And then someone said, "The best part was someone suggesting him to create a Jackie Tan, a Jackie Chan tulpa to defend him." And then someone said, "No, that was the guy who made a pinkie pie without a face and 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? Like this, this is like very turn of the 2010s coded to me.

• 21:46Speaker 02

  Lots, lots of good music came out of that community.

• 21:48Speaker 03

  I, I encountered the music. I didn't actually... Discover tulpo's through the Bronies, but I've never seen a post like that, but it all makes perfect metaphysical sense to me.

• 21:58Speaker 02

  I do love the idea that that tulpa is straight up rejected. Like, that feels very real to 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.

• 22:15Ryan Broderick?

  Wait, say more about the music, because I actually totally missed this.

• 22:17Speaker 03

  Brony step, there's, I mean, Bronies have conventions, right? Conventions need music.

• 22:23Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 22:23Speaker 03

  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, boom, boom, whatever. You know, Five Night at Freddy's, right? The Living Tombstone came out of the Brony world.

• 22:40Speaker 02

  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 that notable video of a Fiesta Equestria that happened at a Brony convention in 2013, that is, it was put out 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

• 23:10Speaker 03

  Singers, even.

• 23:11Speaker 02

  A lot of whom are still connected to electronic music today and have like, moved out of Brony world into like, greater expansions of their own interests.

• 23:22Ryan Broderick?

  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 call hyperpop now. Like, you can't really get one without going through the sped up screamo covers of Macklemore's Thrift Shop era of Nightcore.

• 23:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, Nightcore, I think actually Daniel Harrell 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."

• 23:52Ryan Broderick?

  I mean, there's still some Nightcore songs that like I think are just so much better than the original. I still listen to them. 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.

• 24:07Speaker 04

  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.

• 24:12Ryan Broderick?

  No, no, hey, we're a big fan.

• 24:13Speaker 04

  We will give you, if you're a Patreon subscriber, we're gonna give you.

• 24:16Ryan Broderick?

  We'll let everybody in. If you don't have to know Nightcore, it's okay.

• 24:19Speaker 03

  It's like the TikTok slowed and reverb, but backwards and earlier.

• 24:23Ryan Broderick?

  Exactly. Like the lo-fi, like chill remixes of pop songs now.

• 24:27Speaker 02

  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 reverb instead? People have lost that hope. So the music reflects that and what people choose to make at home.

• 24:42Ryan Broderick?

  We should bring back Nightcore. Liberalism needs Nightcore. Yeah, we need, we need Nightcore.

• 24:47Speaker 04

  Make America a mindless self-indulgence.

• 24:52Ryan Broderick?

  That's a great point. So in terms of like where this, the tulpa 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 tulpas. Things snowballed in 2012 when adult fans of My Little Pony Friendship is 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's control." And they basically said that like, most people who did this, learned about it from 4chan, 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?

• 25:37Speaker 03

  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. 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 we're playing of like, very realistic manga Mario's that like 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-

• 26:22Speaker 03

  You could've-

• 26:23Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, you could've stopped 4chan and all of social media.

• 26:26Speaker 03

  A lot of funny little Forrest Gump things happening here that- Well, it was New York in the mid 2000s, but yeah, I really, I actually am very curious how stopping works in both the reasons.

• 26:40Speaker 03

  I was like, "What am I, do I uh, 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 at the end of 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?

• 27:04Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I've read it. Yeah, it's good. And I'm, I have a similar conflicting feeling about it. Cause like, 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.

• 27:36Speaker 03

  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 where like, the memes can be created, the people can remix and use their creativity and like, realize that they aren't passive recipients of 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

• 28:19Speaker 03

  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, uh, maybe naive, maybe best wishing for humanity type thing that like if we were given these tools that were quite powerful, that, um, we'd somehow be able to use them for good and be able to mitigate the, uh, evil of them. Didn't work out.

• 28:43Ryan Broderick?

  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, 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.

• 28:59Speaker 03

  And they won't scream at you even though they don't have mouths. I didn't give it a mouth.

• 29:03Ryan Broderick?

  They don't have a face. I have, I have no mouth and I am Pinkie Pie and I must scream. Yeah, no, exactly. Like this sort of crushing reality of like what people would do with these technologies, then also I think what capitalism does once it like gets a hold. And that to me is sort of the story of 2010.

• 29:19Speaker 03

  Capitalism for real. Fuck that shit.

• 29:21Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. Yeah. Hell yeah, baby. Um, 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.

• 29:34Speaker 03

  I'm gonna sell my topo to Palantir.

• 29:36Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. You guys should collab with Palantir.

• 29:40Speaker 03

  It's gonna do a lot for this nation. I agree.

• 29:42Ryan Broderick?

  I mean, if you think about it, surveillance is a topo. Um, one that watches all of us. But so, uh, my 20th.

• 29:50Speaker 04

  Peter Thiel's actually just a topo.

• 29:52Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, we've all made him up. We've conjured the Antichrist.

• 29:54Speaker 04

  And his lawsuits are then fixed.

• 29:56Ryan Broderick?

  Exactly. Um, so in 2015, we started to see the rise of meme magic, meme magic.

• 30:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, Warlock selected Donald Trump, by the way.

• 30:04Ryan Broderick?

  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 me. One message board post 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. Meme magic isn't real, but critically, it's also not 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.

• 30:45Ryan Broderick?

  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.

• 30:57Speaker 03

  Have you ever seen the anime Mob Psycho 100?

• 30:59Ryan Broderick?

  Hell yeah, brother.

• 31:01Speaker 03

  There we go, now we're talking. That's the anime that describes like, how we deal with this problem. Reagan, Arataka.

• 31:08Ryan Broderick?

  Say more.

• 31:09Speaker 03

  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. Yeah.

• 31:24Ryan Broderick?

  Well, I'm glad you brought it back to the money thing, because by the time that the social media landscape is like...

• 31:29Speaker 03

  Etsy wishes don't work for free?

• 31:30Ryan Broderick?

  Exactly, they don't work for free. And by the time the internet landscape is sort of like, becoming more corporatized, becoming more controlled, 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?

• 31:50Speaker 03

  Now you hit me with something I don't know. I don't know what Bone Gazi is.

• 31:54Speaker 02

  I'm excited by name alone. Hit me with Bone Gazi, please.

• 31:58Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, I have some slides that Grant is gonna pull up for you. I've condensed this story, because it's a little complicated. But Bone Gazi started on Tumblr, and it is a portmanteau of Benghazi and bone.

• 32:15Speaker 03

  Right, cuz I thought so.

• 32:17Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, it was covered in the national news by the Washington Post, among many other news agencies at the time. Bone Ghazi 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 Darling if the bones that she was talking about collecting were ethically sourced.

• 32:54Speaker 03

  Oh, oh.

• 32:55Ryan Broderick?

  Okay.

• 32:56Speaker 03

  I don't recall this, but I now understand the pun.

• 32:59Ryan Broderick?

  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 lol." And then Ender Darling was arrested in Louisiana. Turns out that Ender Darling was sourcing her bones from cemeteries around New Orleans,

• 33:42Ryan Broderick?

  and not legally sourcing them, like she was digging up grubs.

• 33:46Speaker 03

  This is why you gotta be friends with the people who make the laws, like Prescott Bush, who stole Geronimo's skull for the Yale Boys.

• 33:52Ryan Broderick?

  Exactly. I'm always saying that. And it became sort of like a huge, huge thing on Tumblr, and it's actually spawned like several bone-related controversies. There was an incident called Tumbler, which is a portmanteau of the word toe.

• 34:11Speaker 03

  Oh, no.

• 34:12Ryan Broderick?

  And Tumblr. If you're, 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 CummyEyelids, who was known for making a necklace out 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.

• 34:41Speaker 03

  Damn. I just keep on thinking about very powerful people who steal bones all the time. Think about like, uh, yeah, how the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, when they first put that up, they just had a real live skeleton in it. And then it took like about,

• 34:54Ryan Broderick?

  Really?

• 34:54Speaker 03

  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.

• 35:02Speaker 04

  Who was able to recognize that the skeleton was real?

• 35:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:06Speaker 04

  Like, I could not identify a break.

• 35:08Speaker 03

  Maybe a doctor who went on vacation.

• 35:12Speaker 03

  Counting the ribs. Sure. That's that tibia. I don't even know, whatever.

• 35:16Ryan Broderick?

  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 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 II with memes. And all of that will collide around 2018, 2019 with the launch of TikTok in the US. And we're going to talk about that right after the break.

• 35:48Speaker 03

  This podcast rules. Sorry. This podcast rules.

• 35:53Ryan Broderick?

  We're going to talk about that next, but right after a word from our sponsors, more witches on Etsy.

• 36:02Speaker 00

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• 36:59Ryan Broderick?

  Do you guys use TikTok at all? Are you on TikTok?

• 37:00Speaker 03

  A monicum. No, not really.

• 37:02Ryan Broderick?

  Okay.

• 37:03Speaker 03

  I've frankly avoided it to the best of my ability. But but best of your ability is very bad because it turns out we have an extremely popular song on TikTok, the Miku song. Speaking of tulpa's.

• 37:17Ryan Broderick?

  Sure. Can you can you connect the dots for our audience there, actually? Because I think Hatsune Miku is kind of an interesting sort of figure we haven't actually touched on.

• 37:25Speaker 03

  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 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, A, I, U, A, O, K, K, whatever, they're collected as a single library. So you can make this actress, who is a real person from Japan, 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

• 38:07Speaker 03

  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 song. And the concept of it was sort of making it like an Eminem, My Name Is type thing, where it's like 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 Sub41 Fat Lip, you know, it would it would play as the theme song to the Miku TV show. So that was our thought. And then in 2019, after

• 38:52Speaker 03

  we had toured with Miku and Luke had made a dance for Miku, Luke's dance, which was filmed at a 2016 concert, exploded on TikTok, like exploded.

• 39:01Ryan Broderick?

  Cool.

• 39:01Speaker 03

  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.

• 39:15Speaker 02

  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 Miku dance on like, 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.

• 39:35Ryan Broderick?

  That's so awesome.

• 39:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:37Ryan Broderick?

  Uh, so when I, speaking of Miku, I've, I've always wanted to have an excuse to tell this story. Uh, when I was working as a reporter in Tokyo, uh, I was there for like a couple of months and I got an opportunity to try out like a new Miku VR project that Krypton was, 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 in 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 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, like I, I didn't mean to grab her butt in VR.

• 40:22Ryan Broderick?

  But at the same time, I was like, trying to see like what, what happened, I guess, like 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 like took the headset off of me. And like the translator was like, sorry, we're just not ready to, to, to, to debut this yet. And at the time I was like, oh man, I, I screwed up. And then later I was like, they programmed Miku's butt to react. Cause like someone had to make that happen. And I never heard anything else about the VR thing again.

• 40:50Speaker 03

  That's different than my first VR experience with Miku, which was a fan made version of, uh, I think it was a giant Miku who stomped on you. I had, I have a Oculus DK one. I jumped back in the Kickstarter back in the day. Which is another fun acquisition that happened over the decade that we're talking about.

• 41:11Ryan Broderick?

  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 US is like, all of the old stuff becomes new, right? Like, 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?

• 41:47Speaker 03

  No.

• 41:49Ryan Broderick?

  John's Bones was like a young guy in New York who was selling bones on TikTok. And people...

• 41:56Speaker 03

  Wow, let's go.

• 41:57Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. People got really mad. He was charging $2,000 for his 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 still 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's skull and the bones of the Dalit people who have no say in what happened to the remains after death." And then John Bone, John's Bones, John, from John's Bones, responds to everyone with a

• 42:37Ryan Broderick?

  picture of his like Taiwanese passport, saying that like, it's okay that he can sell indigenous remains.

• 42:45Speaker 03

  Oh, okay. You know, I think if you're gonna ethically source your bones, you have to kill the person yourself, right? Like, that's your claim, right?

• 42:53Ryan Broderick?

  I would agree.

• 42:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 42:54Speaker 02

  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.

• 42:59Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. Like the guy on Vice who got his leg amputated, then cooked it and ate it as tacos with his friends?

• 43:05Speaker 03

  Yes, like that guy. That's actually, that's a great example.

• 43:09Speaker 02

  We're adamant defenders of that.

• 43:11Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, Grant has tried to remove references to that story out of multiple episodes, and now he can't, so.

• 43:17Speaker 02

  On John's Bones, just one thing, my friend was his teacher.

• 43:21Ryan Broderick?

  No way!

• 43:22Speaker 02

  And said he sucked.

• 43:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, the guy who tried to sell bones for $2,000, wasn't a cool guy?

• 43:30Speaker 04

  He would make, he made a bunch of like art bone furniture.

• 43:33Ryan Broderick?

  That's fucked. That's fucked. I'm sorry. I mean.

• 43:36Speaker 04

  And they had to critique it. Okay.

• 43:38Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. I guess, though, if it was ethically sourced bones, bone furniture would go really hard.

• 43:42Speaker 02

  If only we had enough leg bones to go around.

• 43:46Ryan Broderick?

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

• 44:15Speaker 02

  Not, not by name, no.

• 44:17Ryan Broderick?

  Shifting, uh, was very popular with Tumblr users who wanted to, uh, basically meditate so hard that they would go to a dimension where Harry Potter was real.

• 44:25Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 44:27Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 44:28Speaker 02

  Swag.

• 44:31Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 44:31Speaker 04

  You're, you're definitely our most internet verse.

• 44:35Ryan Broderick?

  This is definitely, yeah.

• 44:36Speaker 04

  Other, other people make, react to the things we say, and you guys just do nods of understanding in a way that no one else has ever done.

• 44:44Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 44:45Speaker 02

  I've heard about both these things, about like the, the rise of like self diagnosing and identifying with, with certain, you know, personality, like complexes on TikTok and the sort of like proliferation of, of that. And also what you're talking about, the shifting thing. And it, I mean, it's just a, 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

• 45:29Speaker 02

  an identity in a way that's like holistic. And this is, this is who you are in a, in a much more, uh,

• 45:37Speaker 02

  Complete sense, like it doesn't really work that way.

• 45:43Ryan Broderick?

  I think you're right, like 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, 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.

• 46:03Speaker 03

  Ana Maniguchi has a weird account because like there are four of us that run the same account. Yeah, it's, it's exactly.

• 46:09Ryan Broderick?

  You're a head system. Exactly. Yeah.

• 46:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, we're head system, straight up.

• 46:13Ryan Broderick?

  I feel like the, 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.

• 46:29Speaker 03

  The new marketplace, like it's where stuff gets sold.

• 46:32Ryan Broderick?

  Exactly.

• 46:32Speaker 03

  Etsy is even a little bit outdated.

• 46:34Ryan Broderick?

  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, 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.

• 46:57Speaker 02

  What did the moon do? Come on.

• 46:59Ryan Broderick?

  I.

• 46:59Speaker 03

  That's a great question.

• 47:00Ryan Broderick?

  I can't get a good answer for why there's a, like a really like vocal contingent of people who hate the moon, but there is a big community of people who hate the moon online.

• 47:12Speaker 03

  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 a side ultimately.

• 47:19Speaker 02

  It could just be that.

• 47:21Ryan Broderick?

  I think it probably is. And these baby witches hated the moon so much that they hexed 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.

• 47:38Ryan Broderick?

  They are quote "the same four who tried to hex the fae", which would be like fairy folk. So like clearly these are the amateur witches that are messing with what they don't understand. And um, the uh, the, 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 Moonin 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.

• 48:17Speaker 03

  This is kind of what Bloodborne is about, right? A little bit.

• 48:20Ryan Broderick?

  I mean, I think so. Yeah, I think so. And baby witches on WitchTok have continued to try to hex and curse things over the years. Uh, when Trump got COVID, a bunch of witches hexed him, uh, according to The Atlantic.

• 48:36Speaker 03

  Have people considered Trump is a magic user himself?

• 48:41Ryan Broderick?

  It's possible.

• 48:44Speaker 03

  Possi- possible?

• 48:45Ryan Broderick?

  I think it-

• 48:45Speaker 03

  Say more.

• 48:46Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, well, yeah.

• 48:47Speaker 03

  Also crook away.

• 48:47Ryan Broderick?

  Dig, dig into this. Could we agree to likely? I think, I, what, uh, make your point here, because I think you're on to something, actually.

• 48:55Speaker 03

  Well, isn't the use of symbolic power, um, a really big part of this?

• 48:59Ryan Broderick?

  Mean magic, yeah.

• 49:00Speaker 03

  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.

• 49:19Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I think you're right.

• 49:20Speaker 03

  To effective purposes.

• 49:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, not, not to mention like-

• 49:24Speaker 03

  He knows how to fucking say things, period, that make people do things.

• 49:28Ryan Broderick?

  He's a level and entity, for sure.

• 49:29Speaker 02

  I mean, is there a, a good warlock case, given that he is like beholden to patrons above him that grant him further power?

• 49:37Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, interesting. Whoa, okay.

• 49:40Speaker 02

  Are we getting somewhere?

• 49:41Ryan Broderick?

  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, the, 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 editors note on it now, which I

• 50:10Speaker 03

  The post was taken down. I thought, I thought, I thought it was left up with the

• 50:13Ryan Broderick?

  I think it's since been taken down.

• 50:16Speaker 04

  Our wonderful researcher Adam gave me a link that that's that was from archives. So I think it's been taken down.

• 50:23Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, it's definitely been edited. Yeah, they were trying to do damage control. I think it's a little silly.

• 50:28Speaker 03

  Well, this is right after the Seattle Mariners, the Etsy witches hooked up the Seattle Mariners.

• 50:32Ryan Broderick?

  Exactly. Yeah.

• 50:33Speaker 03

  And what we found out that the Seattle Mariners were already hooked up by Nintendo.

• 50:37Ryan Broderick?

  Wait, what? What do you mean?

• 50:38Speaker 03

  Did you know that? So, well, Nintendo of America is in Seattle and Nintendo of Japan really loves baseball.

• 50:46Ryan Broderick?

  Makes sense.

• 50:47Speaker 03

  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, a Nintendo logo.

• 51:09Ryan Broderick?

  Sick.

• 51:09Speaker 03

  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. So, 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.

• 51:27Ryan Broderick?

  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 witchcraft 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. I, to ruin his day with the collective feminist power of the Etsy coven would make my life's greatest joy, which I think is totally reasonable, actually.

• 52:08Speaker 03

  It's a much more reasonable ill to wish on somebody, but the, I think the danger of these forces is you, what you want and the outcome. It's that space in between where all the weirdness occurs, you know? And I'm not saying, honestly, I'm legitimately not saying that witches 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.

• 52:45Ryan Broderick?

  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 the magic we work with is effective. When you work in alignment with the collective energy, it can manifest in unthinkable ways.

• 53:26Speaker 03

  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 all so beholden to larger forces? But yeah, I mean, play stupid games, win stupid prizes. What can I say?

• 53:56Ryan Broderick?

  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 is like when we all come together and we use the technology to sort of change the way we think about ourselves, 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 unthinkable nature of collective energy.

• 54:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, and it's funny how, you know, people say, oh, none of these words are in the Bible. 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.

• 55:17Speaker 02

  But to your point, that means that we could also show this podcast to my father, and that he would be able to draw conclusions from it that are in line with his own broader experience. That like, it just kinda, it's based in principle and practice that is far larger than any of this.

• 55:32Ryan Broderick?

  You talked about kind of 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 do a Naruto run at Area 51.

• 55:47Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 55:48Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, yeah. And I think it was like, right off the bat, I think if I'm getting it correctly, it was either right off the bat, either before or maybe after the gentle minions meme, where like, all the Gen Z kids were like, dressing up in suits to go see the new Minions movie. I don't know which, 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, 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.

• 56:32Ryan Broderick?

  Like, it's like, not consciously understand.

• 56:36Speaker 02

  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 one's 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.

• 57:02Speaker 03

  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.

• 57:15Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 57:16Speaker 03

  If, I think there's a book called like 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, in 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 and again, right? And, 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, uh, 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

• 57:57Speaker 03

  in the sixties, seventies, the eighties, a little bit in the nineties, 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, um, the computers did that on a level that was beyond their understanding. So if you tried to explain Kinning to Steve Jobs, it would take him a minute, you know?

• 58:27Speaker 02

  I think he'd get it though.

• 58:28Speaker 03

  He'd get it, he totally, it would take him a minute, I said.

• 58:32Speaker 04

  If there's ever been an energy vampire.

• 58:34Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, like real theory and Steve Jobs like, no, the uh, and I think like 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 La Boo Boo.

• 58:49Speaker 03

  Broadcast yourself Dubai.

• 58:51Ryan Broderick?

  Dubai Chocolate, Ma Chalate, like you can do it.

• 58:54Speaker 03

  We're on tour right now. We are stopping at coffee shops and seeing Dubai Chocolate everywhere, everywhere.

• 59:01Ryan Broderick?

  Have you tried it?

• 59:02Speaker 03

  Not yet.

• 59:03Ryan Broderick?

  I haven't tried it.

• 59:03Speaker 02

  Did I? Is it sick?

• 59:05Ryan Broderick?

  I've heard it's good. I have one in my fridge and I still haven't eaten it yet, actually.

• 59:08Speaker 02

  I'm still on no sugar, but should I, should I break edge?

• 59:11Ryan Broderick?

  You should break edge for my, you should break edge for Dubai Chocolate.

• 59:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, I've actually, I've enjoyed the like, the fitness aspect of tour where, yeah, I'm like trying to avoid stuff that I would definitely eat if I were home.

• 59:22Speaker 04

  Yeah. I will say, I thought we were doing a fun spooky show and then it actually got scary for me. So.

• 59:29Speaker 03

  Yeah. So when we talk spooky, it gets spooky.

• 59:33Speaker 04

  From moving through this and just, and uh, my role here is to be like the less online person to, to, to be the vessel of, 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.

• 59:55Speaker 03

  Yes, it does. It creates a generation gap where none would exist otherwise.

• 59:59Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 59:59Speaker 04

  Yeah. Just, just looking at it through 14 year olds like to think that they can cast spells and, and identify as elves and, 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. It 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

• 1:00:28Speaker 03

  You would like me to react to that?

• 1:00:31Speaker 04

  If you guys have a reaction.

• 1:00:33Speaker 03

  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's 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.

• 1:01:15Speaker 03

  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,

• 1:01:28Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:01:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:01:43Speaker 03

  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 tulpa 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.

• 1:02:12Speaker 03

  And yeah, that's like the scary new thing that where all the money is. That's like the surveillance, the security, the storage, 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.

• 1:02:33Ryan Broderick?

  It's so interesting that you make that connection. I was speaking at like a, 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, 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?

• 1:03:06Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:03:06Ryan Broderick?

  Because if you can do that, you can control a population. You can, 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.

• 1:03:15Speaker 03

  Fake news fucks with people's minds, but it doesn't move their souls in a way that you can predict.

• 1:03:23Ryan Broderick?

  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.

• 1:03:31Speaker 03

  Thank you. This is great.

• 1:03:34Ryan Broderick?

  I usually ask like, where could people follow you online? But like, where could people follow you online? But also, how can people come out and see you guys? What's, what's next on tour? Where are you headed?

• 1:03:43Speaker 03

  When is this episode coming out?

• 1:03:45Ryan Broderick?

  I think we should like, maybe do it like prime spooky season, like early October.

• 1:03:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, we're gonna, it's gonna be our Halloween trip.

• 1:03:52Speaker 03

  Okay, cool. Your Halloween trip. 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, and you know how to find that. But check out our album Anyway. And I recommend getting it on Nina Protocol, which is a non Spotify situation where you can download the album.

• 1:04:24Speaker 03

  And yeah, it's, 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 Luke.

• 1:04:41Speaker 02

  Hi.

• 1:04:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:04:42Ryan Broderick?

  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.

• 1:04:51Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:04:52Ryan Broderick?

  And I literally screamed. I, I went to the Nighthawk in Brooklyn to see like a 35mm whatever screening of Batman and Robin. Yeah. And then I woke up and I saw it on YouTube and I was like, fuck, god damn.

• 1:05:03Speaker 03

  That's hilarious. And our video is a highly Batman and Robin centric situation.

• 1:05:08Ryan Broderick?

  It's so, your, your video kind of blew my mind because you actually identify like the aesthetics of Batman together. Like, it's all almost seamless aesthetically. Like, it kind of blew my mind. I, I still think, I, I watch the video all the time. It's so good.

• 1:05:24Speaker 03

  Well, thank you. We, we owe a lot of, of that to the director Jared Robb, who, by the way, there's another movie that's going to come out next year, which if, is going to blow your mind. It's called Nirvana, the Band, the Show, the M-.

• 1:05:37Ryan Broderick?

  I'm a huge Nirvana, the Band, uh, fan. I cannot wait for this movie.

• 1:05:40Speaker 03

  So Jared of Nirvana, the Band, the Show fame, uh, shot the Magnet video with us.

• 1:05:44Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, no way.

• 1:05:46Speaker 02

  The Darcy video that came out the month or so prior.

• 1:05:49Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, alright.

• 1:05:51Speaker 03

  Explains a lot.

• 1:05:52Ryan Broderick?

  That explains a ton, yeah. Um, I'm, yeah, huge fan. Uh, yeah, wow, that's wild. Um, yeah. Uh, uh, thank you guys for coming on. This was fantastic. Seriously.

• 1:06:04Speaker 03

  Dude, yeah, you guys are amazing. Um, and actually, I, I would recommend watching, anybody watch the Mad, Mad Magnet music video. It's, it's pretty good.

• 1:06:12Ryan Broderick?

  It's so good.

• 1:06:15Ryan Broderick?

  Panic World is a production of Courier. It is written and produced by Grant Irving and hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Josh Fialsted is our production coordinator and our amazing researcher is Adam Bumis. From Courier is Shane Verkest, who edits our video episodes along with our producer, Devin Maroney, and national managing director and executive producer, Kevin Dreyfus. RC DeMezzo is their VP of Brand and Social. Charlotte Robinson is their Deputy Director of Brand and Social. Mary Anne Couga is their Director of Marketing. YouTube and Podcast Growth Marketer, Samantha Hollis. 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 [email protected].

• 1:06:59Ryan Broderick?

  Be sure to check out the Panic World YouTube channel, which you can find at youtube.com/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.

• 1:07:20Speaker 06

  When everyone's finally together, what makes mornings even brighter? Keeping things deliciously simple. Whether you're pouring up a glass of morning refreshment or topping off festive drinks for a family brunch, Simply Orange brings that 100% fresh squeezed taste to every moment. Deliciously bright and delightfully easy, Simply Orange is made for all your seasonal gatherings. Simply Orange, say yes to simple.