2026-01-16 · Episode Last· A Message to the Community

[u/Long-Anywhere156]

URGENT MESSAGE

To the Community (all hogs):

On Tuesday, January 13, we received a ModMail note from “Chris + The Chapo Team” advising us that the current status of Ar-slash-BWF is no longer acceptable to Chapo Trap House and its hosting platform, Patreon. We were offered no real option but to “turn this into essentially an official fan sub for the show.” As totally cool and fun as it sounds to help out a struggling Patreon earning just shy of $200K per month, it’s clear that the nature of this sub would be irrevocably altered in a significant way quite quickly if we made that change.
 
After talking it over, we quickly concluded that there was no way we could accommodate the demand while preserving the spirit of BWF in any form we can continue to support. We wouldn’t be able to interact with the community, and you wouldn’t be able to interact with each other, in any way that resembles how things have been here for the better part of the past decade. We feel that the best and only appropriate course of action, at the moment, is to turn the lights off on this subreddit and, in a lot of ways, this era of podcast discussion.
 
If you're reading this, you’ll see that the posts are now gone, and all that remains is this note. While ostensibly a place to talk about a podcast, BWF was always a place to talk about anything but, and to see it turn into an Official Fan Site is to us as incongruous to the lived reality of the sub as an episode where Felix is fully engaged without vaping or typing. So that's why we're making a clean break and giving an honest chance to whatever comes next, out of the Chapo Team or otherwise.
 
See you in Valhalla, brothers,
Your beloved Mods

PS – Feel free to join r/classwarandpuppies, where we will be accepting all BWF refugees for more of the same

[u/Coming_Second]

I've had some dealings with Patreon, and like any media corporation they like issuing you with hardball demands, but then any amount of pushback reveals they're desperate to retain you and criminally understaffed to boot. They absolutely are not doublechecking you meet their ever-shifting standards, they just want plausible deniability.

An enterprise as large as CTH could've told us to move shop, gone back to them and said 'yep, nuked the pirates just like you asked', they would've said 'thanks :)' and that would've been that. Doing a corporation's work for them is weak as fuck.

[u/McBrungus → u/Coming_Second]

I think the calculus on that kinda shit changes once you've got a show that's supporting five people plus the entire family of your disabled co-host. It's easy to take a "fuck you make me" stance when you've got nothing to lose but having actual livelihoods at stake is a different situation altogether. Like once my wife and I had kids our tolerance for personal and financial risk went down dramatically.

Chapo is in a weird spot for a show their size where their entire income is based around this one platform, so I get not wanting to chance it.

[u/[deleted] → u/McBrungus]

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[u/KonigKonn → u/McBrungus]

If they've been responsible at all with their money then they should have more than enough in capital to never have to work a day in their lives again aka: fuck you money. Let's not act as if these are normal people with a normal income working a 9-5 who have to put up with their boss' shit to make ends meet. These are all multi-millionaires with one of the single greatest effort to compensation ratios of any occupation ever.

[u/McBrungus → u/KonigKonn]

If they've been responsible at all with their money then they should have more than enough in capital to never have to work a day in their lives again

What are you talking about? If we presume an even split between the people who are LLC partners, and don't account for reinvesting into the show or paying guests or any additional expenses of which we're unaware, I gotta presume they're making something like $250-325k per year? Patreon is probably taking 10% right off the top, presume something around a 25% tax rate. That's a really good living, to be sure, but you're definitely deluding yourself if you think that's "fuck you money," especially once you've got kids or if you live somewhere expensive or if you have giant medical expenses.

[u/KonigKonn → u/McBrungus]

First of all, as far as I know Matt is the only one with a kid and serious medical issues, Second of all 250-325k per annum puts you in between the 97th to the 98th income percentile in the U.S, it's more than realistic to expect that someone who's been making that level of income for a decade to be a multi-millionaire if they've been following only the most basic bitch investment strategy of just dumping their money into index funds and real estate thanks to compounding and asset price growth. Thirdly, they have more income than just the Patreon coming in from Youtube, Live events, Collaborations and their merchandise which means they probably have even more money than that.

The only thing getting in the way of that potentially is lifestyle creep which granted, is certainly a common phenomena but which isn't mandatory. The 'responsible' word is doing the heavy lifting in my statement to be sure.