Our favorite middle school conspiracies

We’re joined by No Such Thing for a crossover episode to (try to) get to the bottom of some of the most infamous conspiracies we (aka millennials) heard in middle school. We’re talking about the false rumors that Ciara was intersex, Marilyn Manson removed his own rib, and the whole panic around “jenkem” — and explore how these wild rumors even spread without the aid of social media. You can find No Such Thing at https://www.nosuchthing.show/ or anywhere you listen to podcasts. This episode is sponsored by Uncommon Goods. To get 15% off your next gift, go to https://www.uncommongoods.com/panicworld ! Want even more Panic World content? Like ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, and access to the Garbage Day Discord? Sign up for a membership at: https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. And if you want to see this conversation on video, ⁠Panic World is now posting episodes to YouTube! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Ryan Broderick?

  So you might notice, video viewers, that things look a little different today. My name is Shane Gillis. Welcome to the Flagrant Podcast. Finally transitioning into a Manosphere podcast. This is great. My name is Ryan Broderick. This is Panic World, a show about how the internet works our minds, our culture, and eventually, reality. And joining me today are the guys from the No Such Thing Podcast. Welcome to the show, everybody. Hey.

• 0:21Speaker 01

  Hey. Thanks for having us.

• 0:23Ryan Broderick?

  Are you excited to talk about our topic today?

• 0:26Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 0:26Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, our topic is, of course, middle school conspiracy theories.

• 0:47Ryan Broderick?

  So the way it's gonna work is you guys are gonna take it first, and then we're gonna take it in the back half. There's a better way to phrase that, but I can't.

• 0:56Speaker 01

  You got a cock chair in your mind, and that's kinda...

• 0:59Ryan Broderick?

  I just, I got... Anyways, yeah, okay.

• 1:01Speaker 01

  So, let's do this. Alright, fellas. We are gathered here today to try and get to the bottom of something that we've been trying to get to the bottom of for a very long time now. Noah, where did you go to middle school? Connecticut. In Connecticut. Devin, where did you go to middle school?

• 1:18Speaker 02

  New Jersey.

• 1:19Speaker 01

  Okay, I went to middle school in Ohio. How about you, Ryan?

• 1:23Ryan Broderick?

  Massachusetts.

• 1:23Speaker 01

  Massachusetts, okay. We all went to... Grant?

• 1:26Speaker 03

  Oh, oh, I'm gonna be acknowledged.

• 1:28Ryan Broderick?

  You can speak now, Grant.

• 1:32Speaker 03

  Pennsylvania? Is that an okay answer?

• 1:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. Okay, and despite the fact that we all went to different high... middle schools or high schools in different states, I'm willing to bet that we've all heard the same celebrity rumor. And, you know, we all went to these schools in the early 2000s, and so... What was the biggest celebrity rumor at your school, Devin?

• 1:56Speaker 02

  Well, I'm cheating a little bit, because this is what the episode is about, but...

• 2:01Speaker 01

  It's not a, you know.

• 2:03Speaker 02

  True question.

• 2:03Speaker 01

  We know the answer, we're talking to the listener.

• 2:06Speaker 02

  It was that Ciara, um, the, the R and B singer.

• 2:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:11Speaker 02

  Was born, at the time, we were saying she was born a hermaphrodite. Which today, we would say intersex.

• 2:17Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:18Speaker 02

  And she apparently was on Oprah, uh, where she revealed this to the world.

• 2:22Speaker 01

  Does that sound familiar to you guys?

• 2:24Ryan Broderick?

  I've heard different versions of different celebrities with that thing.

• 2:28Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 2:28Ryan Broderick?

  Cause there was also one for Lady Gaga.

• 2:30Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:30Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, a couple of years later.

• 2:31Ryan Broderick?

  We would've been like in high school or college, yeah.

• 2:33Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:33Ryan Broderick?

  So, but it's come around a bunch, yeah.

• 2:35Speaker 02

  Well, Anderson Cooper did ask her about it, like, for sixty minutes. Cause he was asking her, basically, why didn't you just, like, come out and say this was fake? She was like, why does it matter if I have a dick?

• 2:45Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, she was like, why, why do you give a shit?

• 2:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:47Ryan Broderick?

  I thought it was cool.

• 2:48Speaker 01

  That's a good answer, I think.

• 2:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:50Speaker 01

  Um, but yeah, basically, in middle school, the biggest celebrity rumor was that Ciara was either, what we were calling back then, a hermaphrodite, or just a man pretending to be a woman.

• 3:00Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:00Speaker 01

  And I've been personally fascinated by the fact that, no matter where you went to middle school in the United States, you heard of this rumor, or participated in the spreading of it. Um, and the reason why I'm fascinated is because it was so early in social media, kind of, trajectory, or before social media.

• 3:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:20Speaker 01

  I think, maybe I was on Zanga at the time, but we weren't really talking about, uh, you know, celebrity rumors. And I, and I really wanted to know where this rumor came from, and how it was able to spread across the country, despite the fact that we weren't really online in the sense that we were today.

• 3:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:38Speaker 01

  But, before we try to figure out where this rumor came from, it's important to, kind of, contextualize what was happening when the rumor started.

• 3:48Speaker 02

  Cool.

• 3:49Speaker 01

  So, I'll just give you a very brief recap of Ciara's career in music. She grew up in College Park, Atlanta, which, if you listen to, like, any amount of hip hop, will be a familiar neighborhood to you, because in the early 2000s, they were screaming the name of that neighborhood out in the actual songs. This is the same neighborhood as Ludacris, uh, same neighborhood as 2 Chainz, Young Joc. I don't know what happened to him, but he was great. Uh, and, and Jermaine Dupri.

• 4:18Ryan Broderick?

  Oh sure.

• 4:19Speaker 01

  Jermaine Dupri, yes. Alright, but when Ciara was in high school, she created a girls group called Hearsay, with two friends, and it ended up becoming popular enough that she got a writing deal out of this girls group, and from that writing deal she met Jazzy Faye. He's not infamous. He's just famous, yeah.

• 4:42Speaker 01

  Jazzy Faye is important because he kinda created a bouncier sound in Atlanta at the time, and so Ciara's like singing talent combined with this kind of innovative sound that felt new and fresh is really what I think propelled the two of them into stardom. Together, they wrote a few demos, and one of the demos would become "One Two Step",

• 5:07Ryan Broderick?

  Oh sure.

• 5:08Speaker 01

  Probably Ciara's most famous song.

• 5:10Ryan Broderick?

  I think so.

• 5:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 5:11Speaker 01

  Which features Missy Elliott, who becomes a frequent collaborator of what Ciara, and also had her own, she also had rumors about her sexual life swirling at the time.

• 5:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 5:26Speaker 01

  "One Two Step" is on an album called "Goodies",

• 5:28Ryan Broderick?

  Okay.

• 5:29Speaker 01

  "Goodies" debuted at number three on the Billboard charts, and it stayed on the Billboard Top 100 for over a year, just to give you a sense of how popular Ciara became.

• 5:40Ryan Broderick?

  I mean, this was the soundtrack of every bar and bar mitzvah I went to. In the late 90s, early 2000s.

• 5:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:46Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 5:47Speaker 01

  It's really kind of music we shouldn't have been listening to at that age, I think. There's some stuff going on in those in those verses that's like, oh, is this for the kids or what?

• 5:56Speaker 03

  People are becoming men and women. This is the passing into adulthood.

• 6:01Speaker 04

  You need to understand.

• 6:03Speaker 01

  So, the album "Goodies", there's a song on the album also called "Goodies", also a very famous Ciara song. And the core of the song, it's about everyone who's surrounding Ciara being kind of criminally horny for Ciara.

• 6:22Ryan Broderick?

  Who wouldn't be?

• 6:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. And maybe at the time, emphasis on the criminal part of criminal horny, but she's, I think the song came out with-

• 6:30Ryan Broderick?

  I don't approve that.

• 6:32Ryan Broderick?

  Wait, wait, wait, hold on to this more. I wanna make, I wanna say along with being respectfully horny of Sierra.

• 6:40Speaker 01

  Well, I only say that because I think the song came out when she was 18, but when did, you know, who's to say when she wrote it, or the experiences she's talking about in the song, when did they take place? I don't know.

• 6:51Speaker 02

  Hopefully she was of age.

• 6:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, anyway, either way, we were younger than 18.

• 6:55Ryan Broderick?

  What year is this again?

• 6:56Speaker 01

  Uh, 2004.

• 6:57Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, so I would have been like 13.

• 6:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think we're in the clear, guys.

• 7:01Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, yeah, I would be the one being played on by being made horny of Sierra.

• 7:05Speaker 04

  I'm sorry that happened to you.

• 7:06Ryan Broderick?

  Thank you.

• 7:07Speaker 01

  And it's after this song comes out about how, you know, I, I have these goodies and you're not allowed to have them and I'm not giving them up no matter what you do. It's around this context, I think, that this rumor starts. And I don't know, I just think the context there is interesting that all these people in the industry, she's singing about, I think, people in the industry who are trying to hook up with her, uh, and I don't know, all of a sudden this rumor comes out.

• 7:35Ryan Broderick?

  So, we did an episode kind of about like the entertainment world rumor mill and like how it's evolved now, like the Justin Baldoni stuff. And I have to assume that like the new version where they're waging war with like troll accounts and stuff is just a digital version of what was already happening. So like, hearing this, which is the first time I've, I've sort of heard this all put together, it wouldn't surprise me if she's writing what is effectively like a shady track about like predatory men in the industry and all of a sudden a rumor appears that she is intersex or hermaphrodite. That, that feels totally linked to me.

• 8:09Speaker 01

  And as of right now, I have no evidence for this, but I think it's interesting when, like exactly what time this rumor started coming out.

• 8:18Speaker 02

  So, and we looked at, you know, went to a classic Google Trends, typed in Sierra Man to see when these rumors started. So, there's basically nothing until December of 2004, and then it starts to go up a little bit. January starts to go up a little bit more, and then by February of 2005, uh, it's when it hits its peak.

• 8:42Ryan Broderick?

  Was there any kind of award buzz around goodies?

• 8:48Speaker 01

  She definitely was nominated for a bunch of the kind of classic awards, Grammys. I'm not sure if she won any. I should look that up.

• 8:55Ryan Broderick?

  I'm, computer.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  Jamie?

• 8:57Ryan Broderick?

  Uh, Jamie? Uh, cuz I'm wondering if like the peak is because of award season buzz. Or like I'm wondering, cuz when we've done sort of similar research, like there, there usually is like something uh, that you can kind of point to be like, eh, maybe that's what caused it. Like, that would be what my thought would be.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, could be.

• 9:16Speaker 02

  So she was at a party in February of 2005, a Vibe magazine party. And this is the quote that everyone sort of keeps going back to. New York Daily News asked her about it. As far as I can tell, this is the first time.

• 9:27Ryan Broderick?

  They asked her about it?

• 9:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:28Ryan Broderick?

  That's fucked.

• 9:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, a lot of people asked her directly about this.

• 9:31Speaker 01

  We used to have to be shady in person, not in Reddit, yeah.

• 9:35Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah. This is face to face, though.

• 9:37Speaker 01

  And I guess we should mention that part of, a big part of the rumor we heard was that she had actually addressed the rumors on the Oprah show. There's a bit, there's a Mandela effect thing happening where all of us thought she had already addressed the rumors on Oprah, which never happened.

• 9:52Speaker 02

  Exactly. So Vibe asked her basically what happened. And Ciara's like, you know what's funny? The rumors that I used to be a man. And she said, the funny thing about it is that people are saying I said this on Oprah. I've never been on Oprah. It's gonna take me a while to get on Oprah, right? Like, I just started my career. Oprah's like a milestone. I'm not there yet. So I looked into this, you know, you can't just take Ciara's word for this. Has she ever been on Oprah?

• 10:18Speaker 02

  By this point, she had not, but she was on Regis and Kelly. Along with Yao Ming.

• 10:25Speaker 01

  Oh, nice.

• 10:25Speaker 02

  Uh, and John Goodman. Good episode.

• 10:27Speaker 01

  Wow, that's a good panel, yeah. I wanna see that. I gotta go watch that.

• 10:30Speaker 02

  Which did air, right? You got the TV guys back in the day. Did air before Oprah's voting party special. So I'm like, maybe people were seeing the ads for, you know, how they would be like, alright, you know? Yeah, exactly.

• 10:45Speaker 01

  I'm imagining Regis filming, introducing.

• 10:47Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, no goodies. Now my favorite song, goodies!

• 10:51Speaker 01

  At 8 a.m.

• 10:52Ryan Broderick?

  So I, I actually just Googled this cuz I was curious if people were confusing it with another Oprah episode. And she did do an intersex episode in 2007.

• 11:01Speaker 02

  Well, she did actually in 2004.

• 11:03Ryan Broderick?

  Oh.

• 11:05Speaker 02

  Do a segment in August about trans children.

• 11:09Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, okay.

• 11:10Speaker 01

  Whoa.

• 11:11Speaker 02

  None of the kids' names were Sierra.

• 11:14Ryan Broderick?

  Okay.

• 11:14Speaker 02

  I did go through and to be like, alright, maybe is there some confusion here? But yeah, she did do it again in 2007. I don't know that in 2004, they were calling them trans, they were saying like gender identity issues.

• 11:27Speaker 03

  I'm sure that episode has aged great.

• 11:28Ryan Broderick?

  I'm sure it's fine.

• 11:29Speaker 03

  I'm sure we would all think that.

• 11:31Ryan Broderick?

  It's totally fine and there's no reason to think about it anymore.

• 11:34Speaker 02

  She did a great job.

• 11:35Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 11:36Speaker 03

  Just like when she interviewed Nazis.

• 11:38Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 11:41Speaker 02

  I feel like Oprah is the classic, like if there's a rumor, you say that you heard it on Oprah. Growing up, there was another rumor that Tommy Hilfiger was on Oprah and he told Oprah, "I don't like black people wearing my clothes."

• 11:54Ryan Broderick?

  I remember this, I remember this rumor.

• 11:56Speaker 02

  My mom, like I said, I was talking to my mom about this episode and she was like, "Oh yeah, I remember." I literally stopped buying Tommy Hilfiger for like a year or two.

• 12:04Ryan Broderick?

  There was a boycott.

• 12:05Speaker 02

  Because yeah, because we all heard that he was like, "I don't like black people wearing my clothes."

• 12:09Speaker 01

  And it just never happened?

• 12:10Speaker 02

  No.

• 12:11Ryan Broderick?

  What?

• 12:12Speaker 04

  He was never on the show at all.

• 12:13Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, I'm so fascinated with this because like clearly there is some sort of way that these things are spreading. Cause I definitely vividly remember up until just a second ago, I thought that that happened.

• 12:24Speaker 02

  No.

• 12:25Ryan Broderick?

  So like how? Cause it wouldn't have been the internet.

• 12:28Speaker 02

  No.

• 12:29Ryan Broderick?

  I'm so fascinated with how that would have spread.

• 12:31Speaker 02

  How were we? Cause it wasn't like we saw something online and we were like, "Hey, I saw on a Reddit thread, you know, Tommy Hilfiger saying he doesn't like black people wearing his clothes."

• 12:39Speaker 01

  There's no reports of him ever saying that in any kind of context?

• 12:43Speaker 02

  No.

• 12:43Speaker 04

  It would be crazy if he said it on Oprah.

• 12:45Speaker 01

  That, right, yeah.

• 12:46Speaker 04

  Pretty amazing.

• 12:47Speaker 01

  To Oprah.

• 12:49Speaker 02

  Take off my clothes.

• 12:50Ryan Broderick?

  The 90s were wild, but I don't know if that, yeah, how would that have happened?

• 12:55Speaker 03

  I remember really solemnly, like I thought I was the wokest kid in the world going up to my friend in middle school and being like, "I'm really sorry about Tommy Hilfiger." I'm just like, "I know, I know you love that shirt." Yeah, and he's like, "I feel really seen right now."

• 13:09Speaker 02

  Can't believe I can't wear this anymore.

• 13:13Speaker 02

  So, Snopes actually debunked this in February of 2005. Ciara, the Ciara rumor. Their best guess as to why people think this is happening is because there's a random Irish woman named Ciara who had a blog about her transition.

• 13:29Ryan Broderick?

  Oh.

• 13:30Speaker 02

  And they're saying if you Google Ciara at this time, this is one of the first things that pops up. So, people are saying maybe that's the case, right? So, that's February, but in March, it's still circulating. We got the Herald News, a New Jersey paper.

• 13:48Ryan Broderick?

  Okay.

• 13:48Speaker 02

  There's an 18-year-old Charles. They're asking him, "Charles, what's the craziest news story you heard recently?" And he says that Ciara is a man. They printed this.

• 13:59Ryan Broderick?

  That's a good column.

• 14:00Speaker 02

  It's one of those like get-to-know-your-neighbors segments. And that's Charles's fun, you know, news story. So, we get our first sort of inkling here of maybe where this is coming from. So, in March of 2005, there's this chain letter that's going around. Remember chain letters?

• 14:20Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, of course, they're very important. On email.

• 14:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, on email.

• 14:24Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 14:25Speaker 02

  And it's a fake article from All Hip Hop. And the gist of the article is that Ciara goes on, not Oprah, but 106 in Park.

• 14:35Ryan Broderick?

  Okay.

• 14:36Speaker 02

  And she says, "I am gay." And then, I'll read what it just says, because it's just crazy. "Ciara's coming out as a lesbian would have been difficult on its own, but also having to admit that she is really a he on national television was cause for celebration amongst the gay and lesbian community. No major pop star singer has ever come out as a transvestite to viewers explicitly after already releasing an album."

• 15:05Ryan Broderick?

  So, I'm gonna ignore like all of the terms that they're using there, because it's a mess. But it is fascinating to me that that is written as like an inspirational thing. It's basically what I...

• 15:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:18Ryan Broderick?

  Someone made this up or misunderstood this.

• 15:22Ryan Broderick?

  I'm imagining that this was probably shared like within like a black gay email community. Yeah. That would be my guess. Yeah. I got a treasure trove that somebody sent me of like old chain letters that I've been like looking at over the last few months. And it's really fascinating. They are very similar to what you would see on Facebook now. Like they are written specifically for a group, like either a listserv or like people who know each other. So it's interesting to me that like that rumor is being shared positively within some sort of in-group. That's cause for celebration. Yeah, like it's not like they're not being mean about, I mean, they're completely confused on what's happening in every possible way. But it is interesting that it's like inspirational as a framing.

• 16:03Ryan Broderick?

  So then that's, you know, beginning of March, sort of mid-March, Ciara goes on one in Sixon Park. And this is the first time we have her. Yeah, for real this time.

• 16:13Speaker 03

  In 2005, right?

• 16:16Ryan Broderick?

  That, this is sad to admit, if you missed a TV program airing. Yeah. You couldn't just go back and look at it. Grant, we have an entire episode about this. That is the entirety of our gadget episode.

• 16:31Speaker 03

  What was?

• 16:32Ryan Broderick?

  The one you wrote the outline. That's the point that you put in there. We have an entire episode about how the fact that you couldn't re-watch Rescue Rangers made everyone insane.

• 16:41Speaker 03

  The only way that I can process the horrible nihilistic show we create is that I write the episode and then I completely.

• 16:48Ryan Broderick?

  Erase it from the beginning. We have an entire episode about this.

• 16:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, we do a whole clear the air session.

• 16:53Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 16:53Speaker 05

  So if there are any rumors, anything that's going on with Ciara, which there are on the internet and all that other mess, clear the air right now. Let the people know what's going on.

• 17:01Speaker 06

  Oh, my goodness. There's so many crazy, funny things. And you know, I gotta say, none of them bother me, but I just do it just to do it because whatever. Um, there's one thing about me being a man or something like that before I was, something when I was born, I got a change. Really? A mafadite or something like that. And they said that I went on Oprah and did it. And I'm like, okay, come on now. You know, if I was on Oprah, like, I mean, it takes a while before that happens for somebody going Oprah, you know what I mean? Like, that's really big, so.

• 17:27Ryan Broderick?

  I just had a visceral memory of learning about this as a teenager. I, I just like, something about that just like triggered a moment where I'm like in my living room, watching her music video. There's no PC way to say this, like trying to see if I could tell.

• 17:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 17:43Ryan Broderick?

  Like trying to clock her essentially, and I completely had forgotten that. Wow, that's wild.

• 17:49Speaker 01

  I remember being like 12 or 13 or whatever, watching one. I watched one of Six and Park religiously back then.

• 17:55Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 17:56Speaker 01

  And being like, damn, all my friends lied to me. I do think it's funny, the music they were playing underneath this segment, like, like court case music, we're not gonna figure this out once and for all.

• 18:08Speaker 02

  Put her on a stand. That wasn't the end of it, of course. July 2005, Entertainment Weekly is doing a write-up, and they kind of start the article talking about, hey, the singer, the story goes, was born, intersexual, and stay with us here, recently out of herself as a lesbian hermaphrodite on Oprah. And it's, you know, basically her giving the line of like, no, that's not true. Then, a year later, so November of 2006, in a Slam magazine article about Kingdom Come, the not great Jay-Z album.

• 18:43Speaker 01

  Oh, sure.

• 18:44Speaker 02

  Here's a review. And out of nowhere, the writer goes, and trust me, writing that last sentence hurt me just as much as when I heard that Ciara was allegedly a hermaphrodite. Thank God she isn't. This is, you know, November 2006, and then December 2006, AP is doing a profile of her and they're still talking about it.

• 19:05Ryan Broderick?

  Associated Press.

• 19:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. The Associated Press in December of 2006.

• 19:10Speaker 01

  What'd they say?

• 19:11Speaker 02

  Yeah. Uh, she just wants to have fun, she said, and that includes ignoring wild rumors that began circulating when she first made a name for herself. People were saying that she was dating Missy Elliott, who rapped on Ciara's number one hit.

• 19:24Ryan Broderick?

  That I remember. I remember rumors that like Missy Elliott was grooming Ciara. I remember that.

• 19:29Speaker 02

  Which was weird because they were saying, okay, Ciara's a man, Missy Elliott is a lesbian, but Missy Elliott is dating Ciara.

• 19:38Speaker 04

  Right.

• 19:38Speaker 02

  So things aren't adding up.

• 19:39Ryan Broderick?

  Well, everyone's very confused.

• 19:41Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 19:42Speaker 01

  Isn't it the case that Missy Elliott, I think we all had our, like, we could kind of see it, but she didn't really come out until pretty recently.

• 19:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, similar to, well, I feel like it's her and Queen Latifah.

• 19:56Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 19:56Speaker 02

  Were similarly, like, people who knew them knew.

• 20:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:01Speaker 02

  But they publicly didn't talk about it.

• 20:02Speaker 01

  I don't think they were ever, yeah.

• 20:03Speaker 03

  Man, it'd be so much cooler to be dating Missy Elliott than Russell Wilson.

• 20:08Speaker 02

  True.

• 20:10Speaker 01

  He just got benched.

• 20:11Speaker 02

  Or Future, which is, so basically by 2006, like, search interest for this was pretty down, and it didn't really pick up until 2015.

• 20:21Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 20:22Speaker 02

  Which was when rumors started going around that Ciara and Future were expecting a kid.

• 20:26Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 20:27Speaker 02

  Which makes sense why people would be, like, searching it again.

• 20:29Speaker 03

  Wait a second, sure.

• 20:31Speaker 01

  There was a moment, I think in 2006 or '07, where she released a song called "Like a Boy."

• 20:37Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 20:38Speaker 01

  So I remember thinking, oh, she's kind of poking fun at, but it's really about, like, privilege, I think.

• 20:44Speaker 03

  I think so, yeah.

• 20:45Speaker 02

  This comes up in one of these articles where, you know, they're making all these innuendos about how people think she's a man.

• 20:52Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 20:54Speaker 02

  It's pretty crazy.

• 20:54Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 20:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, and that was it, that was it. That's kind of the trajectory of, is Ciara really a man? And like Ryan said before, like, this has come up with Lady Gaga.

• 21:04Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 21:05Speaker 02

  Megan Fox.

• 21:06Ryan Broderick?

  Megan Fox, yeah.

• 21:07Speaker 02

  It's like any sort of, like, sex symbol.

• 21:08Speaker 01

  To Megan Fox, wow.

• 21:10Speaker 02

  Pop star, this, like, comes up.

• 21:12Ryan Broderick?

  There seems to be some sort of connection between, like, a sex symbol who starts to figure out how to translate that into power and influence.

• 21:20Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 21:21Ryan Broderick?

  Like Lady Gaga in particular, like, the, the claims that she was intersex or, or trans appeared like right as she is starting to kind of do whatever she wants. And that's why like I tend to think there's some sort of like industry rumor mill that that comes out to like knock them down a peg when they start to like break off. And that would sort of make sense here too. They're like, she's blowing up and now she's like writing songs about how like, you know, she's gonna do her own thing or whatever and she's having a successful album. And then those rumors appear. Like that, that doesn't seem like an accident to me.

• 21:55Speaker 02

  And it makes sense that they go to the, you know, the intersex or trans thing, right? Because it's that always like, oh, you were really into this person and now like something that like, you know, something is happening that you didn't know was happening. You've been fooled. You've been tricked. So like goes at this like insecurity that people have about like, oh no, I thought it was straight, but now I'm into this person who you're telling me is not.

• 22:16Speaker 01

  She's not into me. She must be trans.

• 22:18Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 22:19Ryan Broderick?

  I mean, it's also just super hard to prove. In fact, like, we should mention, like, literally right now, Candace Owens is being sued by the president and his wife of France. And the first lady of France has actually proving that she is not trans. Um, medically. So like, that's how pervasive these sort of things come up, I think.

• 22:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:41Speaker 03

  I, I do remember now, uh, the bullying that would ensue if you were like a middle schooler who said like, you thought Ciara was hot.

• 22:48Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 22:48Speaker 03

  And then there's a rumor. Like, it was like so tied into the homophobia of like being a middle school boy.

• 22:55Ryan Broderick?

  For the record, trans or not, Ciara is hot. It doesn't matter.

• 23:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:01Ryan Broderick?

  She is very, very hot. Even today.

• 23:04Speaker 01

  That fucking, uh, have you guys seen that stupid Andrew Tate clip where he's like talking about how he'd rather have sex with?

• 23:10Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 23:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. Like Megan Fox as a man versus like, wait.

• 23:14Speaker 03

  It was, I hate that.

• 23:16Ryan Broderick?

  It's like accidentally woke.

• 23:17Speaker 02

  You watch Andrew Tate.

• 23:20Speaker 02

  Explain it for us.

• 23:20Speaker 03

  I remember Andrew Tate videos. I don't remember our show.

• 23:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 23:25Speaker 03

  It was like, would you rather sleep with a trans woman that's a 10? Or a biological woman that's a 1?

• 23:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:34Speaker 03

  And then it was, uh, this is so dumb. It is.

• 23:39Speaker 03

  Seared on my memory and then he's like, you're talking about some like Hulk Hogan looking woman. Or some Megan Fox looking.

• 23:48Speaker 01

  He's actually like ridiculing his followers for choosing the one that's a biological or you know born as. Really insane.

• 23:56Ryan Broderick?

  Very normal stuff.

• 23:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:57Ryan Broderick?

  Lots of normal stuff.

• 23:58Speaker 01

  Top G.

• 23:59Speaker 03

  That is, that is the most, uh, you are only talking to middle schoolers.

• 24:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:05Speaker 03

  Like, like the, that is, it, it, I think I remember that specifically because it was insightful into understanding that like, that is the bullying tactics you use at 13 and by 15, you're like, that's pretty stupid. Very stupid question. I will say that, um, not to bring this down, but we do a lot of opining in modern society about the state of journalism. But then you review old journalism and the AP asking questions like this and you're like, seems like we weren't very good at it.

• 24:35Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, journalism has always been bad and I, during the pandemic, I was actually curious. I was like, who was the first American journalist? And the best I could tell, it was a guy who used to write a newsletter libeling famous people in Europe. And he was kicked out of Europe and he went to the UK where he continued to libel famous people. So they kicked him out of there and he went to Boston and then he continued to just libel famous people. And he was considered to have like the first journalistic institution in America and I think that's beautiful. That's like a really beautiful tradition that we.

• 25:06Speaker 01

  We should get back to that.

• 25:07Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, like, we haven't stopped. And like in the mid 2000s also, there was this really weird, like, I want to call it like a post nine 11 horniness. They're just like, which is nasty. It was, if you, uh, a friend of mine's been like antagonizing me with Bloodhound Gang live footage that he keeps texting me. And it's the nastiest shit I've ever seen in my life. There was just like this.

• 25:28Speaker 01

  What's Bloodhound Gang?

• 25:29Ryan Broderick?

  Uh, like, uh, the, the rap group, uh, you and me, baby, ain't nothing but mammals, so let's do it.

• 25:35Speaker 01

  Oh, yes. Okay. I know that one.

• 25:37Ryan Broderick?

  And like, he sends me live videos of them performing and it's disgusting.

• 25:39Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 25:40Ryan Broderick?

  There was just like this ugly horniness, uh, that happened for some reason. I don't know what it was.

• 25:45Speaker 03

  Americans, America's hero, Jimmy Kimmel with the man show sort of shit.

• 25:49Ryan Broderick?

  The man show is insane to watch.

• 25:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:51Speaker 03

  And now women jumping on trampolines.

• 25:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:55Speaker 02

  It's like the toss the commercial sort of stuff.

• 25:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 25:59Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, that decade was nasty.

• 26:01Speaker 02

  All right, we're gonna take a little break and then we're gonna hear about Ryan's favorite middle school conspiracy.

• 26:11Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, you guys remember like the first time you ever heard about like drugs? Like DARE programs?

• 26:17Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Still have my DARE shirt from, uh...

• 26:20Speaker 01

  I do too at my parents' house.

• 26:21Speaker 02

  Yeah. Oh, nice.

• 26:22Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, I also remember sort of like watching like a DARE presentation being like, should you just be telling us like how drugs work and like where to get them? But it's around this time, I think, that I first heard of what I've considered like the funniest, stupidest, middle school rumor. I think it's endlessly funny. Have you guys ever heard of Jenkum?

• 26:43Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 26:44Speaker 01

  I don't think so.

• 26:44Speaker 02

  No, vaguely. The word sounds familiar, but I'm not placing it.

• 26:48Speaker 01

  Not the jeans.

• 26:49Ryan Broderick?

  No, that's Jinko.

• 26:51Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, okay, sorry.

• 26:52Ryan Broderick?

  So Jenkum, I'm gonna describe it to you and hopefully you don't throw up. But there was a rumor in the late 90s, I wanna say mid to late 90s or the 2000s, that you could get high by pooping and peeing in a bottle.

• 27:04Speaker 01

  What?

• 27:05Ryan Broderick?

  And then huffing it. And it became a massive moral panic for local news stations across the country. And it was called Jenkum. And I remember like one, I remember hearing about it, the idea of like, two kids were found getting high on Jenkum by the river or whatever. And so we're gonna be talking about the Jenkum panic of the late 90s and my producer Grant, who's over there in his little cuck chair, is gonna show you a news clip all about Jenkum.

• 27:30Speaker 01

  What are you guys laughing about? Ryan says that every episode. I'm immune now.

• 27:34Speaker 07

  One Florida sheriff's department warns there's a new way for your kids to get high. And as Fox News Jack Miller reports, they're using raw sewage.

• 27:42Speaker 05

  The bulletin describes Jenkum as gas produced by raw sewage that's allowed to ferment. When we mentioned this new concoction to people on the street here in Jacksonville, not only had they never heard of it before, but they said they didn't want to get anywhere near it. It sounds horrible. Yeah, I couldn't imagine doing something like that. Honestly? They need to find something better to do.

• 28:03Ryan Broderick?

  To do with her life. Sounds pretty sick to me. Not anything you would ever consider? Never. Pause it. That guy looks like the exact kind of guy that was.

• 28:14Ryan Broderick?

  He's like, I don't want to touch it. It means it's not real.

• 28:18Ryan Broderick?

  Cause that guy is like. He sells Jankum. That guy looks like a bath salts guy. And he's like, I don't want to touch Jankum.

• 28:24Speaker 03

  There's a glint in his eye that makes you think he's like. Yeah, yeah, I would never do that.

• 28:30Ryan Broderick?

  So what are your, what are your thoughts? What are your first reaction?

• 28:33Speaker 01

  Isn't Jankum essentially how the Ninja Turtles are created? In the sewage?

• 28:39Speaker 01

  The fumes from human waste? That's disgusting. I don't think I've ever heard of this.

• 28:44Ryan Broderick?

  No. So you two haven't.

• 28:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, I've never hearing about it.

• 28:46Ryan Broderick?

  What's the context you heard it in?

• 28:48Speaker 04

  I don't think it permeated to the news where I was. I, I think I just heard it from some other kid. It must've been something like that.

• 28:54Speaker 01

  What I'm curious about is, was it a thing happening? Is, are we talking about a trend here or like? It's a rumor of something that actually wasn't happening.

• 29:03Ryan Broderick?

  Well, we're gonna get into that, but I, I would first sort of classify along with like all the other like get high on your own.

• 29:09Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 29:09Ryan Broderick?

  Stories like smoking banana peels or uh.

• 29:14Speaker 04

  They have a highlighter.

• 29:15Ryan Broderick?

  Highlighter, yeah, exactly. So, so let's, let's, let's run through it here. So I've got it right here. So. 1995, according to Snopes, uh, it's the first, uh, the first documentation of Jankum comes from an international news wire service in Lukasaka, Zambia. And it reads, human extra, extra excrement is scooped up from the edges of the sewer ponds in old cans and containers, which are covered with a polyurethane bag. And left to stew or ferment for a week. The contents are then inhaled and the result is a lung full of biogases and a powerful hit. Jankum huffers bury their entire face in the ghastly mass, gassing it all in.

• 29:52Speaker 01

  Oh my god.

• 29:54Ryan Broderick?

  And so we had talked earlier in the first half about how like. One of the most interesting things about like the late 90s and the 2000s is the move to being able to see all of the news for the first time. Like, the news went from like a thing you saw on your TV, local affiliates, or local newspaper, and then maybe you have a national newspaper. But, online, all of a sudden, these articles are being uploaded. You saw the old screenshot of the Washington Post there.

• 30:17Speaker 03

  Is that really what it used to look like?

• 30:19Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, dude. Yeah, these things looked ugly as hell. And you were also seeing the rise of websites like The Drudge Report, which launches like in the mid to late 90s, who are now aggregating this stuff. Because it's like, no one kind of thought about it. It was an afterthought. So, do you guys know about arrowid.org? Okay, I love arrowid.org. It is a webs- it's essentially the Wikipedia of drugs. And it has a whole section called "Trip Reports" where people like take drugs and then write out like insane stories.

• 30:44Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 30:45Ryan Broderick?

  It's a lot of people robo-tripping in the bathrooms of Taco Bells across the country. And so, they, uh, they like look into it, and they say, "It's not gonna get you high." They say, "We have no knowledge about the accuracy of these reports, but it's certainly possible the kids in Zambia thought it would be funny to make up a story for adult aid workers that they were inhaling sewer gas to get high." Which I think is like very possible. Uh, by the late 90s, the story has stuck around long enough to make it to the New York Times and the BBC. So the BBC writes, "Jenkem is cheap, potent, and very popular among the thousands of street children in Lutzaka." "When they cannot afford glue or are too scared to steal petrol, these youngsters turn to jenkem as a way of getting high. It lasts about an hour," says one user.

• 31:28Ryan Broderick?

  "16-year-old Luke, who prefers jenkem to other substances with glue, I just hear voices in my head, but with jenkem, I see visions. I see my mother who is dead and I forget about the problems in my life." And, so...

• 31:41Speaker 03

  This was, this was the picture that the BBC thought was chill to put on this article.

• 31:48Ryan Broderick?

  So, I think there's a couple things. One, I do believe that Arrowid users are absolute freaks enough to have tested it. Like, they, they will test anything. I also think it's possible that there were nine or 10 translation issues happening here.

• 32:04Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 32:04Ryan Broderick?

  I also think that the BBC, especially in the late 90s, was looking for poverty porn. And there's like an entire genre of this. I think that there's also, like, a- A thread that takes this all the way to crocodile. Do you remember that?

• 32:20Speaker 01

  No.

• 32:20Ryan Broderick?

  So crocodile was a drug that was purportedly being used by Russians in the late 2000s, where they would mix gasoline and heroin and their skin would fall off. Oh my god. And so we've talked about this on the episode that Grant doesn't remember about gadget, which is that like, not only in the late 90s and 2000s were people suddenly being able to see the news for the first time, they were creating blogs to write poorly about the rest of the world. Oh yeah. So you had like, Iloveafrica.com or whatever, and it's some white guy who has no idea what he's talking about, and he's like blogging about his time as an aid worker there. Or Iloverussia.com and it's weird crazy Russian stories. So that's sort of the environment that this is taking place in.

• 33:04Ryan Broderick?

  Do you guys remember anything even similar to this in your early days on the internet? Like weird news stories that would sort of fly by or weird blogs like writing about this kind of thing?

• 33:14Speaker 01

  Well, I remember like the Marilyn Manson rumor that he like removed his

• 33:21Ryan Broderick?

  Sure.

• 33:21Speaker 01

  his rib cage so that he could go down on himself.

• 33:25Ryan Broderick?

  That was the big one in my mental. Yeah.

• 33:27Speaker 01

  But in terms of like these kind of like kind of fleeting, maybe drug related, not a whole ton. I guess like with Jankum, even though I'm sure it's made up to some degree, it does feel believable, I guess, because of the because of the cost effectiveness, I suppose. Like it is free, I suppose. You just need a bottle. Yeah. And if it's getting you, if it's supposedly getting you a better high, then

• 33:52Ryan Broderick?

  You can see visions. You can see your dead mom in a vision. This one, but glue, you only hear stuff.

• 33:58Speaker 03

  You can just totally imagine the most pretentious, annoying American aid worker being like, please tell me your story. Some 19-year-old fucker who is like, it's like, I'm gonna write a book about you totally. And they're like, yeah. And like the mom's in the other room.

• 34:17Speaker 02

  What were you doing out there?

• 34:19Ryan Broderick?

  So, I looked into this for the first time a couple of years ago, 2015. I was on a podcast I used to run with my friend Katie called Internet Explorer. We looked into it and we basically found that it was completely fake. And largely a way to troll local police and local media. And Grant is gonna show you an image that looks gross.

• 34:46Speaker 02

  Oh my god.

• 34:48Ryan Broderick?

  It looks like a little boy sticking a straw into a bottle full of poop and pee.

• 34:54Speaker 02

  Which, aren't you supposed to huff it? Why is he, why is there a straw?

• 34:58Speaker 03

  But if you didn't know that, and you just saw this image, you'd be like, was there a glass bottle of you? Who?

• 35:02Ryan Broderick?

  Yes. Now, okay, so this is a young man who went by Pickwick on the message board totesy.com. And he posted these photos of what appeared to be him huffing balloons full of poop and pee and bottles. It was straws and stuff. And he wrote, "Okay, today I set it up and put the bottle in the hot sun. My friend took pictures of all the steps. First I shit in the bottle, then I pissed in it. I took a balloon and I stretched it over the top to catch all the gases. Now wait a few days and hope the balloon fills up." Then he posted again, "Well, today I finally did it. I probably became the first person in America to huff his own shit gas."

• 35:43Ryan Broderick?

  He then continues, "After breathing in, I immediately felt that I was passing out. I did not even have time to spit before I became unconscious. When I woke up, my spittle had oozed out of my mouth, down my chin. I asked my friend how long I was out for. He said about a minute and that he had repeatedly tried to wake me up, but I would not wake up. After I was fully into the dreamlike state, visual hallucinations began to start. I had fleeting visions of people who seemed completely random, like my second grade teacher. At the peak of my trip, I saw things like pillars in my lung that disappeared into shapes." And, like, obviously, he's making this up to see if he can get people to huff their own shit. Yeah. Like, I think that is the way to think about this.

• 36:23Ryan Broderick?

  What do you think happens next in this story? After, now we have message board users trying to convince each other to do this. What do you think happens next?

• 36:30Speaker 01

  Oh, man. I imagine like a sizable amount of people try it and don't get high and realize they've been had.

• 36:38Speaker 04

  Someone has to get sick from actually trying it.

• 36:40Ryan Broderick?

  So we don't have a ton of data on that, but what we do have is how it spreads to 4chan next. And the idea is to send letters to your principal to get your principal to hire a dare officer to then tell the kids at your school about Jenkum.

• 37:00Speaker 01

  Oh, my god.

• 37:01Speaker 04

  That's great.

• 37:01Ryan Broderick?

  And so we have a massive wall of text here. I'm gonna read some of it here. So you're supposed to email this to your school principal, okay? So you're supposed to, it says, "Step one, email this to your principal. Step two, question mark, question mark, question mark. Step three, profit." And what you're supposed to write is, "I am writing anonymously because I do not want my child to get in any trouble, but I need to alert you to something your students are doing that is potentially very dangerous. Yesterday afternoon, I came home early to find my son and his friends getting high on something called Jenkum, which they had met, which they say they heard about at school. This Jenkum is the most disgusting thing I've ever heard of." And then I'm not gonna describe how they describe how to do it. And can you guess what happens once people start doing this?

• 37:41Speaker 02

  Oh, the schools definitely took the bait.

• 37:43Ryan Broderick?

  Computer? Yes. This is from the Collier County Sheriff's Office Criminal Intelligence Bureau. And it is a drug bulletin about a new drug called Jenkum.

• 37:54Speaker 01

  Oh, and they've got the image of the kid and it's got, that's right.

• 37:58Speaker 04

  Good for him.

• 37:59Ryan Broderick?

  And this is actually very similar to a couple bulletins we found passing around Mexico. Do you remember the Momo challenge?

• 38:06Speaker 01

  Momo challenge?

• 38:06Ryan Broderick?

  It was like a disgusting statue that if you looked at it, it would like curse you on the internet. So it became like a huge mass panic that like children were committing suicide after seeing this statue of this like evil chicken woman. And Mexican police were creating bulletins like that and passing them around as well. So like this is, this is how far back this idea goes. And then, of course, uh, the Washington Post, they write about it, they fall for it, they take down the Post.

• 38:30Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 38:31Ryan Broderick?

  Fox News falls for it. And they write, "We wouldn't classify it as a drug so much because it's feces and urine."

• 38:40Ryan Broderick?

  Says Garrison County, a spokesman for the Drug Enforcement Administration in Washington. You've pretty much.

• 38:48Ryan Broderick?

  You're pretty much at the bottom of the barrel.

• 38:54Speaker 02

  Which, fair.

• 38:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:56Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. And eventually, Pickwick, the guy who does the pictures of him huffing the bottle, he admits that it's all fake and that what you've been looking at, don't worry, is a mixture of Nutella, water, flour, and beer. And he wrote, "I never inhaled any poop gas and got high off it. I have deleted the pictures. Hopefully no weirdo saved them on his computer."

• 39:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:16Ryan Broderick?

  We did.

• 39:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:17Ryan Broderick?

  "I just don't want people to ever recognize me as the kid who have poop gas." Well, sorry bud.

• 39:24Speaker 01

  So is this him feeling like some level of guilt that all of these places picked it up? I thought that was kind of the goal.

• 39:29Ryan Broderick?

  I think, I think it's a couple of things. One, I think we are at a really pivotal moment in the late 90s, 2000s, where the internet is just getting big and no one really understands how big it's getting. And you have early message boards that are beginning to network with larger message boards. 4chan comes around in like 2003, 2004. So, all of that stuff is starting. The media is probably doing a thing, and I'm trying to like think back to my time in that period, like in J-School when I'm learning about it. And I believe what it was, was like, you had a newsroom, they'd write their stories, and then they would just upload them online and forget about it. So they're all of a sudden getting viral traffic for the first time. And they're like, the first big viral New York Times piece, I forget what it was,

• 40:11Ryan Broderick?

  I looked it up years ago, I think it happens like 2009, where like they're like, whoa, this is like a big thing of traffic. So, all of these stories are being passed around, no one's really paying attention, and these worlds are colliding. And I think, if I had to imagine, this Pickwick kid was like, uh-oh. You know, if his picture is showing up in like a bulletin for like local law enforcement, who's like a whole other thing here? Like, local law enforcement have been using the internet in weird ways for 20, 30 years that no one really, still to this day, pays attention to. I think all these horses are just combining in ways where like people just weren't prepared for how viral it could go.

• 40:46Speaker 04

  I think that the kid had a moment of being like, if I have to...

• 40:50Ryan Broderick?

  Be like meeting for like the college interviews.

• 40:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:52Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, they're like, so how do you explain this moment? Clicked in?

• 40:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:57Ryan Broderick?

  And I honestly think that like, he was just ahead of his time because if he's like, yeah, I went viral. Well, I am, you are lucky to have me as part of your like media studies.

• 41:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a way he could have spun it.

• 41:08Ryan Broderick?

  I mean, he'd be a YouTube star today.

• 41:10Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 41:10Speaker 04

  Oh, for sure.

• 41:11Speaker 01

  It's interesting too, how the sheriff's department handled this. I mean, I, on one hand, I wonder what is their responsibility? But on the other hand, it's like they didn't seem to do any kind of an investigation to see whether it was real or not before they put out this.

• 41:25Speaker 04

  They're trying to get ahead of it.

• 41:26Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 41:26Speaker 02

  I feel like that's all the sort of like kid panic stuff is they just react first and then try to, I guess they, I don't know, I don't even know if they ever tried to like figure out if it's real.

• 41:36Speaker 04

  Well, like Ryan, have you looked into like, did you ever cover the Tide Pods thing?

• 41:40Ryan Broderick?

  We did.

• 41:41Speaker 04

  That seems like the more modern corollary and I'm curious how that.

• 41:44Ryan Broderick?

  What we found was that the majority of Tide Pods being smoked or huffed or eaten or whatever were either from trolls. Or darker, like there was a string of old people with dementia thinking they were candy.

• 42:01Speaker 01

  Oh, God.

• 42:01Ryan Broderick?

  And it was one of those things where it like bubbled up out of consumer reports and sort of took on a life of its own. And no one really knew how to deal with it. A similar trajectory would be NyQuil chicken, like the idea that TikTok users were boiling chicken in NyQuil, which I did do eventually, by the way. Um, it smells horrible. Don't do it. But.

• 42:22Speaker 01

  You can find that on our Patreon.

• 42:23Ryan Broderick?

  You can find that on our Patreon. It's like the institutions don't know how to address the rumor.

• 42:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:29Ryan Broderick?

  Without amplifying it.

• 42:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 42:31Ryan Broderick?

  And so like one, uh, cause the, cause you know, with journalists, like if local law enforcement have a press conference and like teenagers are huffing their own shit. The journalist is like, well, police today, so the teenagers are huffing their own shit.

• 42:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:41Ryan Broderick?

  And nowhere in that, in that interaction is anyone going, well, are they huffing their own shit?

• 42:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:47Ryan Broderick?

  And like, that is kind of the story of almost all of American media.

• 42:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:50Ryan Broderick?

  Like we're at, you know, kind of more serious twist on this, like this is playing out right now with like ICE raids and stuff.

• 42:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:57Ryan Broderick?

  Like local law enforcement will say something or, or a law enforcement agency or a government agency will say something and journalists will just write down that they said it.

• 43:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:04Ryan Broderick?

  And by the time that that travels, there might be another journalist in the background going, well, is this real? Is this right? And people have already moved on and like it can happen for silly stuff and it can happen for serious stuff.

• 43:15Speaker 01

  I was listening to your guys' uh, uh, bonus episode about weapons and Eddington and you're talking a little bit about this kind of phenomenon where in weapons, the police department doesn't know how to investigate um, Julia's character.

• 43:30Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, the teacher.

• 43:31Speaker 01

  Without riling up the whole town because that's what they want the police department to do. And so, yeah, like you were saying, there's kind of no way to do it without just spreading the thing even further.

• 43:40Speaker 03

  Well, in this case, it would be to go, I received an anonymous letter.

• 43:45Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 43:45Speaker 03

  Of a, uh, I remember being a teenager and thinking poop and pee is funny.

• 43:49Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 43:50Speaker 03

  Maybe this is bullshit.

• 43:51Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 43:51Speaker 03

  Would be a vital first now.

• 43:54Ryan Broderick?

  But it's also kind of like a new, it's a uniquely American problem. Like I, there, there are obviously like all kinds of mass panics and moral panics in different countries, but the, the, the, you, the sort of unique way our free press interacts with our fairly open law enforcement investigations. Like in a lot of countries, like I, I was reporting in the UK for a while and like there's a rule where like the minute charges get dropped down, you cannot report on it or you'll go to jail until like the trial starts. And they have very strict rules because you, you would be considered like tampering with a jury or something, or the judging or whatever. And here, we kind of have this like legal media circus that just exists.

• 44:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:32Ryan Broderick?

  And it can happen for really silly stuff and really serious stuff. And, and it's existed for decades, if not, you know, a century now. And so, yeah, it makes it very hard, as you said, for any institution to like investigate something without it creating a larger media circus.

• 44:49Speaker 02

  Yeah. I thought about this with the ICE rate stuff where they're making now these like crazy social media, like videos that are like,

• 44:56Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 44:56Speaker 02

  It's like a movie.

• 44:57Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, yeah.

• 44:57Speaker 02

  And they're showing people's faces. And I'm like, okay, we don't know what these people have done at all.

• 45:02Ryan Broderick?

  No.

• 45:02Speaker 02

  And now you're in some like hype reel for, for ICE.

• 45:05Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 45:05Speaker 02

  And it's like, you just took me out of my home. It's like, what if there are no charges on this person? It's like, it's already too far gone. Yeah. You're already.

• 45:12Ryan Broderick?

  Well, I, I think that's the evolution of a story like Jenkin, which is like. Like now, the institutions have direct access to information channels. So like before, it would be your sheriff comes out and he's like, "Children are huffing poop and pee." And then the journalist writes it down and it goes in the newspaper and people read it. But as we looked into moral panics in the 2010s, Tide Pods for instance, you'll just start to see local, fentanyl is a great example of this, where the law enforcement just have a Facebook page.

• 45:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:43Ryan Broderick?

  And they just post in the Facebook page, like, "People are dying from like touching fentanyl."

• 45:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:47Ryan Broderick?

  And there's no journalist involved there. And the final evolution of that would be the DHS doing like sizzle reels for ICE raids.

• 45:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:53Ryan Broderick?

  Where they don't need any media coverage. They can just transmit it directly. And that is a really weird world to live in. Because it wasn't that this one was good. I mean, the old world produced Jenkin, but the new world,

• 46:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:06Ryan Broderick?

  God knows what's happening.

• 46:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:07Ryan Broderick?

  You know? But after the break, we're going to be talking about something that's already popped up today, which is Marilyn Manson trying to suck his own dick.

• 46:16Speaker 01

  I can't win.

• 46:16Ryan Broderick?

  Which was the big rumor, probably the biggest rumor of my middle school. But we're going to talk about that right after a word from our sponsors, who are probably furious. Our sponsors, an empty Poland Spring bottle. Fill it with whatever you like.

• 46:36Ryan Broderick?

  So, you guys had been wondering about the Marilyn Manson rumor. And we did a little digging into where this came from. And according to Hysteria Mag, the rumor began on the 27th of November, 1994, which is actually kind of wild that like it has an exact date.

• 46:53Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 46:53Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. Marilyn Manson was arrested after a show for violating the adult entertainment code. And police arrested him after being under the impression that Manson had performed oral sex on a man while performing on stage, but as it turns out, he wasn't. Rather, it was jackoff Jill vocalist Jessica, who was apparently wearing a prosthetic penis at the gig, with Manson simulating oral sex on the appendage. He was held for 16 hours and then released without charge. I think the double confusion of that spread and turned into him sucking himself off. And then it was, "How would he suck himself off?" And it was, "He got two ribs of it."

• 47:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. So people were trying to rationalize what they heard.

• 47:31Speaker 02

  What they saw.

• 47:32Ryan Broderick?

  Exactly. But you guys had asked us if there was anything similar. And so we have a TikTok of a much more modern rumor, one that I want to be on the record saying I believe, wholeheartedly.

• 47:47Speaker 06

  My new favorite stupid conspiracy theory is that Liz Truss, the new Prime Minister of the UK, is secretly a collared submissive. Basically, Truss wears the same necklace in a lot of, if not most of, her public appearances. And that design, the ring attached to a chain, is very similar to the design of a lot of day collars.

• 48:14Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, so just to sort of combine everything we've talked about today. I do think, so we live in a time of like peak rumors, peak conspiracies, there's so many, it's hard to like pay attention. But I do think the Liz Truss one is very similar to the Marilyn Manson one, similar even to the Jenkin one, and the Ciara one, which is that they all, the really pernicious ones, all seem to kind of touch on the idea of revealing someone being part of a subculture. Something that we, a part of society that we don't pay attention to, whether it's drug users, or it's S and M people, or it's trans people, or gay people, it's people who are considered like outside of the mainstream.

• 48:57Ryan Broderick?

  And like the really successful rumors seem to work when you claim that someone well-known is actually part of that. And I think the kind of fear of the other required there. That said, I do believe that Liz Truss is wearing an S and M chain, and I do believe that she wore it in her last meeting with the Queen right before the Queen died. I will believe that till I die.

• 49:17Speaker 03

  She had a high-powered job, you know, you gotta find some way to relieve stress.

• 49:21Speaker 04

  I think it's true of most politicians.

• 49:22Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I don't think there's anything wrong with that. But yeah, I do think that like really successful rumors, particularly about public figures, all involve the like, this person is secretly a communist, or they're secretly gay, or secretly a lesbian, you know, secretly trans, secretly an S and M freak. Like, there's always that, because there's something like tantalizing, and it's hard to prove, and it's hard to prove, and it's hard to disprove on the other person. They can't, they can say no, and you just don't believe them.

• 49:49Speaker 01

  It's funny you should mention, we actually spoke to an expert, or Noah spoke to an expert about rumors and why we attach to rumors, especially celebrity rumors, what we get out of them. And I mean, that makes a ton of sense, but...

• 50:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, that aligned a lot. Her name's Charlotte DeBacher. She's in Belgium. And she was saying, yeah, a lot of the, basically the point of a lot of rumors or why we gravitate is like, there's like reputational stuff. So this is like a way to take people down a peg, basically. And a lot of it's like survival. So it's like, you learn like, okay, do this, like, don't do this drug. It's gonna kill you, or do this thing. And this is kind of how you can survive. And then you build a community just based on talking about these other people.

• 50:31Ryan Broderick?

  Interesting.

• 50:32Speaker 04

  But yeah, a lot of it is kind of this othering sort of thing where it's like reputational, you're figuring it out. And then there's just like the parasocial element, which has only gotten more increased with time, where it's like, we become so attached to these people and it's all, we're talking about, you know, Britney Spears or Ciara or whoever, and it's obviously one-sided. And then it's, then of course, just the way they spread, it's like, Ciara even answering, dignifying these questions, with like a, well, no, of course, not only just feeds the fire. And that, that I think has even gotten worse in more recent times, you know?

• 51:02Ryan Broderick?

  It's interesting to me how like, if you look at it on a timeline, like the 90s are really bad for this stuff. And the 2000s, still pretty bad, but like, it's changing. And then it does kind of feel like between, like 2010 and like, August 2014, the start of Gamergate, there's a kind of a moment where it actually feels like things are getting better. Like, information is kind of flowing at a speed where we can like, say, that's fake, that's not fake. Like, media organizations are interested in debunking stuff. Debunking doesn't feel tied to a culture war thing yet.

• 51:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 51:38Ryan Broderick?

  And then it flips, and it gets progressively worse. And then after COVID, it feels like we are basically back in the 90s again. And I think a lot of it has to do with like, ephemerality. Like TikTok feels as ephemeral as 90s TV to me, where you will see a TikTok and it'll pass you by and you won't think about it. And then you'll just like be repeating some insane... Anything you heard?

• 52:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:00Ryan Broderick?

  And you won't be able to find it.

• 52:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, you're not referencing it directly, so it's like you're changing little things.

• 52:05Ryan Broderick?

  It's, yeah, like I even find myself, because I use X still, Twitter, because it's like you can see all the bad people on there, and so it's great for my job. But I have found myself like accidentally absorbing through osmosis, random stuff I'm seeing, and then like saying it out loud to someone, they're being like, what are you talking about?

• 52:21Speaker 03

  I was about to say the, the being able to buy a checkmark, I think also was a major contributor.

• 52:27Ryan Broderick?

  Hundred two.

• 52:28Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 52:28Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 52:29Speaker 03

  A bunch of random information being legitimized.

• 52:31Ryan Broderick?

  Ian Rappaport's, you know, always, yeah.

• 52:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:34Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. It's, there's definitely something about like not being able to like catch stuff passing you by like, because like a rumor is effectively like someone just told you this thing, and then it's in your head, and you repeat it without really thinking. And like the internet has sort of become that now. Like it is just this rumor factory, which I do think to tie it back to the thing at the top, like is being weaponized by, you know, people in the entertainment industry who know that they can make Reddit accounts, and they can make Instagram accounts, and, you know, flood the zone that way.

• 53:04Speaker 03

  I guess in conclusion, everything's awesome.

• 53:06Ryan Broderick?

  Um, everything's fine.

• 53:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, it seems like we're on a good track.

• 53:09Ryan Broderick?

  Well, okay, let's, let's, let's, so, Ciara was not a man, although even if she was born man, still beautiful. Jenkham.

• 53:19Speaker 03

  She can do better than Russell Wilson.

• 53:21Ryan Broderick?

  She can do better than Russell Wilson. Jenkham, not real, don't do it. Marilyn Manson is a freak and a bad person, but did not have his ribs removed to suck his own dick.

• 53:31Speaker 04

  That's okay if he, that's, you know.

• 53:32Ryan Broderick?

  And that's, that's actually the least bad thing he could do.

• 53:36Speaker 03

  Honestly, that would make him less of a, that might solve the problem further.

• 53:40Ryan Broderick?

  He should just be abusing himself. Yeah, exactly. And then lastly, jury's still out on Liz Truss being an S and M person. I want to believe, and I always say on Panic World, you should find like a really harmless conspiracy theory that you believe in, and just like have fun with that.

• 53:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:53Ryan Broderick?

  You know, just a little break.

• 53:54Speaker 04

  Kind of a low stakes one.

• 53:55Ryan Broderick?

  A low stakes one. You want to believe in aliens, believe in aliens, but don't give anyone any money.

• 54:00Speaker 03

  Honestly, I think kind of question everything. If you want to try Jenkham, send us an email, let us know.

• 54:05Ryan Broderick?

  If you email me about Jenkham, I will call the police.

• 54:10Ryan Broderick?

  I will, I will dock you, and I will call the police.

• 54:14Ryan Broderick?

  Thank you guys for having me on the show.

• 54:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks for joining us.

• 54:18Ryan Broderick?

  If, uh, this is going on both feeds, so if you want to follow me, you can find me as Ryan Hates This on Blue Sky, or Broderick on X, or Ryan Hates This on Instagram. Panic World is Panic World everywhere. You'll find it. Just search, type in the little AI. Say Panic World. It'll pop up. Uh, if people want to find you guys, where can they find you guys?

• 54:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're, uh, nosuchthing.show on, I think, every social media app and

• 54:43Speaker 04

  and on the podcast apps.

• 54:45Speaker 01

  And on everywhere you listen to podcasts.

• 54:47Speaker 04

  Nosuchthing. Maybe type Manny Noah Duvan as one word. That might help.

• 54:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:53Ryan 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. R.C. DeMezzo is their VP of Brand and Social. Charlotte Robinson is their Deputy Director of Brand and Social. Mary Ann Kuga 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]. Be sure to

• 55:38Ryan Broderick?

  check out the Panic World YouTube channel, which you can find at youtube.com slash at Panic World Pod. 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.