Fruit of the Loom: Horn of Lies

The brand Fruit of the Loom is almost ubiquitous in the world of underwear and casual wear. You have likely seen its logo, if not on your own body, on store racks or at least in ads. Now, in your mind's eye, picture it. What do you see? For years, countless people have been taking to the internet to share their memory of the Fruit of the Loom logo. A lot of them have the same memory – a basket, rather, a cornucopia of fruit. But they're all wrong. At least, Fruit of the Loom claims that is has never had a cornucopia in its logo and there is little concrete evidence to suggest that the brand is lying. So what could be behind this collective misremembering? This week on Endless Thread, Ben and Amory embark on a quest for answers: Is the Fruit of the Loom cornucopia simply an example of the Mandela Effect (a pervasive mass-misremembering of a fact or event), or has someone pulled the woolen underwear over our eyes? Show notes: Has the 'Fruit of the Loom' Logo Ever Contained a Cornucopia? https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fruit-of-the-loom-cornucopia/ (Snopes) Black T-Shirt logo https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/14rokfk/i_told_you_all_that_fruit_of_the_loom_had_a/ (Reddit) Alan's Reddit post https://www.reddit.com/r/MandelaEffect/comments/1b8inoh/i_found_fruit_of_the_loom_products_with_the/ This episode was produced by Frannie Monahan and co-hosted by Amory Sivertson and Ben Brock Johnson. It was edited by Dave Shaw. Mix and sound design by Paul Vaitkus.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questram School of Business. A recent episode looks at what the rise of the gig economy means for workers, businesses, and the future of work. Stick around until the end of this podcast to preview the episode.

• 0:19Speaker 01

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• 0:49Speaker 03

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• 1:05Amory Sivertson?

  WBUR Podcasts, Boston.

• 1:12Ben Brock Johnson?

  Hey, can I ask you a question?

• 1:13Amory Sivertson?

  Okay.

• 1:14Ben Brock Johnson?

  So we're from Public Radio. We're exploring a mystery about Fruit of the Loom. Do you know what that is?

• 1:20Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 1:22Ben Brock Johnson?

  Uh, can you tell me what it is?

• 1:24Speaker 06

  It's a underwear brand.

• 1:26Ben Brock Johnson?

  Do you remember the logo of this brand?

• 1:28Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's a basket of fruit.

• 1:31Amory Sivertson?

  A basket.

• 1:31Ben Brock Johnson?

  A basket of fruit. Okay.

• 1:33Speaker 06

  Maybe a cornucopia of fruit.

• 1:35Ben Brock Johnson?

  Or a cornucopia of fruit.

• 1:37Speaker 06

  Yeah. How'd I do?

• 1:38Amory Sivertson?

  Beautiful.

• 1:39Ben Brock Johnson?

  You passed the test.

• 1:40Amory Sivertson?

  You passed the test.

• 1:41Ben Brock Johnson?

  What's your name?

• 1:41Amory Sivertson?

  May we ask your name?

• 1:42Speaker 06

  Randall.

• 1:42Ben Brock Johnson?

  Randall?

• 1:43Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 1:43Ben Brock Johnson?

  Randall?

• 1:44Speaker 06

  Randall Moore.

• 1:48Amory Sivertson?

  A couple of summers ago, we took a little field trip on foot, just a few blocks up the street from the WBUR office in Boston.

• 1:56Ben Brock Johnson?

  Which is where we met Randall, clearly, but this was just the beginning of our adventure. We had a theory to prove, or maybe debunk?

• 2:06Amory Sivertson?

  What if I told you that the Fruit of the Loom logo never had a cornucopia in it?

• 2:12Speaker 06

  Then I probably made something up in my mind that wasn't there.

• 2:19Amory Sivertson?

  Now, we're going to guess that you've either listened to our show for long enough or you're online enough to know that what Randall is hinting at here is the Mandela Effect, a potent and pervasive misremembering of something. Like, for example, that Nelson Mandela died in prison in the 80s. He didn't.

• 2:38Ben Brock Johnson?

  But these misrememberings are collective, meaning Randall isn't alone. So far from it. Countless people, for years now, have taken Reddit, YouTube, TikTok, and beyond to, like Randall, share their memory of the logo for the underwear, casual wear, whatever wear, brand, Fruit of the Loom.

• 3:00Amory Sivertson?

  But unlike Randall, a lot of them aren't ready to accept the fruit, the whole fruit, and nothing but the fruit. At least, the whole fruit according to Fruit of the Loom itself.

• 3:13Ben Brock Johnson?

  That's right. Fruit of the Loom says there is no cornucopia. There has never been a cornucopia, ever. No matter what the internet thinks. So you're telling me the Fruit of the Loom logo never had a cornucopia?

• 3:27Speaker 03

  They've straight up been lying to us, saying that it never existed. No, I remember this vividly. Fruit of the Loom's just like, "No, it was never there. It was just a fruit."

• 3:35Ben Brock Johnson?

  Why do tell is the most iconic part of this logo, a cornucopia that has been burned into my brain?

• 3:42Speaker 03

  Y'all remember this too, right? Like, I'm not just bugging?

• 3:49Amory Sivertson?

  You are not just bugging. Not as far as we're concerned. We are cornucopia truthers. But peep the logo on the Fruit of the Loom website today, and what do you see, Ben?

• 4:00Ben Brock Johnson?

  So we got three different kinds of grape-ish looking items, and some what looks like lettuce and a big ol' apple stuck in the middle. And underneath it, a large lettering that says "Fruit of the Loom."

• 4:20Amory Sivertson?

  But no cornucopia. But as is sometimes the case, in order to really tackle an online discrepancy, we have to go offline. To flip through the tags of actual old t-shirts to see the cornucopia of our mind's eye with our actual eyes.

• 4:38Ben Brock Johnson?

  And where better to do that? We told Randall, Goodwill.

• 4:42Speaker 06

  Okay, well, good luck with that.

• 4:43Ben Brock Johnson?

  Unless you have a Fruit of the Loom undershirt on right now, and which we'll happily take it from you.

• 4:50Speaker 06

  No, no, you gotta go up the street. Sorry.

• 4:53Ben Brock Johnson?

  Thank you, Randall.

• 4:54Amory Sivertson?

  Thanks, Randall.

• 4:55Ben Brock Johnson?

  Appreciate your time.

• 4:55Amory Sivertson?

  Very good sport. Appreciate it.

• 4:56Ben Brock Johnson?

  You have a good day. So up the street we went, to the horn of plenty that is some massive thrift store.

• 5:04Amory Sivertson?

  To do our part for a nearly decade-long online saga that continues to bear new and different fruit. From the Mandela Effect to a conspiracy theory.

• 5:15Ben Brock Johnson?

  To a counterfeit operation?

• 5:19Ben Brock Johnson?

  I'm Ben Brock Johnson.

• 5:21Amory Sivertson?

  I'm Amory Sivertson, and you're listening to Endless Thread.

• 5:24Ben Brock Johnson?

  Coming to you from WBUR, Boston's NPR cornucopia.

• 5:28Amory Sivertson?

  Today's episode, Fruit of the Loom: The Horn of Lies.

• 5:41Ben Brock Johnson?

  I bet we could figure that out.

• 5:42Speaker 03

  Okay. Thanks.

• 5:44Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 5:45Speaker 03

  So we've just entered the Goodwill up the street from our office, and we need the t-shirts.

• 5:50Ben Brock Johnson?

  We need the t-shirts, yeah, yeah.

• 5:52Speaker 03

  We need the, like, old sports t-shirts. There are t-shirts here, but...

• 5:57Ben Brock Johnson?

  Okay, we can look in here.

• 6:00Amory Sivertson?

  Okay, before we get too deep into the racks, we need to explain ourselves a little more. Because, Ben, normally when a group of people online say one thing, and the company at the center of the claim authoritatively says another, that's the end of it. Case closed.

• 6:16Ben Brock Johnson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 6:17Amory Sivertson?

  But as this literal deep dive demonstrates, we were among the people who just weren't buying it. I wasn't buying it. And there are reasons for that. So let's trace the history of the mystery a little bit.

• 6:29Ben Brock Johnson?

  Okay, yep, I'm with you.

• 6:33Amory Sivertson?

  Okay. The first mention of a cornucopia memory that I found online was a Reddit post from nine years ago in the Mandela Effect subreddit.

• 6:43Ben Brock Johnson?

  Okay.

• 6:43Amory Sivertson?

  So was this the first ever post about it? Probably not. Hard to say. But even in this nine-year-old cornucopia post, someone comments, "I remember there being one too, but according to the company, there's never been a cornucopia." And then they drop a link to a particular page on the Fruit of the Loom website, which isn't broken but doesn't go where it used to. But the mystery gained a lot of momentum in the last few years, which I credit to some snarkiness from Fruit of the Loom itself. So in January of 2022, the company posted on X, quote, "Did it hurt when you realized our logo never had a cornucopia?"

• 7:25Ben Brock Johnson?

  Hmm.

• 7:26Amory Sivertson?

  That's kind of spicy. And then in 2023, the company posted a screenshot of a USA Today crossword puzzle. The clue for one of the things, 14 across, was "Fruit of the [blank] company that, in fact, does not have a cornucopia in its logo."

• 7:46Ben Brock Johnson?

  Okay.

• 7:46Amory Sivertson?

  And their caption for this post was, "The Mandela Effect is real. The cornucopia in our logo is not."

• 7:52Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yep.

• 7:53Amory Sivertson?

  But, you know, I'm a believe-it-when-I-see-it kind of person. And if I was going to believe that the logo that I had in my head for Fruit of the Loom was not, and never was, the logo for Fruit of the Loom, I was gonna have to dig through some old t-shirts first.

• 8:09Ben Brock Johnson?

  All right, let's get back to the racks.

• 8:12Amory Sivertson?

  Okay, how do we, um...

• 8:14Ben Brock Johnson?

  I'll look on this side.

• 8:15Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah, you look that. Okay. It's like, how can we do this so that we're not just doubling each other's work?

• 8:26Amory Sivertson?

  I found my first Fruit of the Loom shirt.

• 8:28Ben Brock Johnson?

  What? No.

• 8:29Amory Sivertson?

  It's just fruit.

• 8:30Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh my god. It's just fruit. Okay.

• 8:35Amory Sivertson?

  But it was still exciting.

• 8:37Ben Brock Johnson?

  Look at this, look at this one.

• 8:40Ben Brock Johnson?

  This, this person wrote their name, Ruda Kudjmore in the shirt.

• 8:45Amory Sivertson?

  I think it's a Ruda.

• 8:46Ben Brock Johnson?

  You found a Fruit of the Loom and no cornucopia.

• 8:49Amory Sivertson?

  Just fruit. It's not old enough, though. Which was it, which shirt was that?

• 8:54Ben Brock Johnson?

  We gotta go old school.

• 8:57Amory Sivertson?

  This shirt is clearly not old enough.

• 9:02Amory Sivertson?

  Ah, another Fruit of the Loom, just fruit.

• 9:04Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh, man, see?

• 9:05Amory Sivertson?

  Just fruit.

• 9:06Ben Brock Johnson?

  It's like the dude shirt zone.

• 9:09Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah, this was definitely the right place to go, but look. It's like I should be expecting something else. It's just fruit.

• 9:16Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh, God, I'm getting so excited just finding the, the brands. Okay, spoiler alert, we found a lot more Fruit of the Loom shirts, some older, some newer, but we found zero cornucopious. What we did find among the racks, though, was a college kid named Will O'Brien, who we put the same open-ended, neutral questions to about the logo.

• 9:45Speaker 06

  I'd say there was a cornucopia.

• 9:47Amory Sivertson?

  In the logo?

• 9:48Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 9:49Amory Sivertson?

  You think there is one?

• 9:50Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 9:51Amory Sivertson?

  What makes you think that?

• 9:54Speaker 06

  From my childhood, when I was younger, I swear to God, there was one.

• 9:58Amory Sivertson?

  Right, but what if, what if I told you that Fruit of the Loom says, no cornucopia never was, just fruit?

• 10:04Speaker 06

  I've seen that. I don't believe it.

• 10:06Amory Sivertson?

  So we told Will about the cornucopia-less shirts we'd found.

• 10:10Speaker 06

  That's weird.

• 10:12Amory Sivertson?

  Right?

• 10:13Ben Brock Johnson?

  Do you believe in alternate timelines?

• 10:16Speaker 06

  I believe that there's different universes where there's the same thing, just different tweaks.

• 10:22Ben Brock Johnson?

  You're a multiverse, you, you're down with the multiverse?

• 10:25Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think that's true. I could see that.

• 10:27Ben Brock Johnson?

  Could Fruit of the Loom cornucopia be like a multiverse thing, you, do you think?

• 10:32Speaker 06

  No, because we're in our timeline. Ask this kid. Fades, get over here.

• 10:37Ben Brock Johnson?

  Fades is Will's buddy, Brendan Videl, and Brendan had a different take.

• 10:43Speaker 06

  I know there's like a, maybe a Mandela effect thing going on with the cornucopia, though. I've heard about that.

• 10:48Amory Sivertson?

  Just heard of it.

• 10:49Ben Brock Johnson?

  But you're, you're no, you're no cornucopia, your team no cornucopia.

• 10:53Speaker 06

  I am, just, I think it's because I know it, though, you know?

• 10:56Amory Sivertson?

  You know about the Mandela effect thing, so now...

• 10:59Speaker 06

  Like originally, I did think it was there, you know?

• 11:02Ben Brock Johnson?

  You're not no cap, you're no cope.

• 11:04Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 11:05Ben Brock Johnson?

  Cornucopia.

• 11:05Speaker 06

  No, absolutely. Yeah, exactly.

• 11:09Amory Sivertson?

  We got the pro-copes and the no-copes.

• 11:11Ben Brock Johnson?

  And you're pro-cope.

• 11:12Speaker 06

  I'm pro-cope.

• 11:14Ben Brock Johnson?

  All right, we got a pro-cope and a no-cope. I feel like we, this is, well, that's all we needed.

• 11:21Amory Sivertson?

  So Ben, part of the reason why you have pro-copes in a seemingly no-cope world is because for just about every post you see online about how the cornucopia is make-believe, there's another with an image of the logo that we all seem to remember with a cornucopia.

• 11:39Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yes.

• 11:40Amory Sivertson?

  And there are pictures of T-shirts with this cornucopia logo all over the internet, including a post on X from 2024 with a picture of a faded black T-shirt. You know the one I'm talking about? Yeah, where the cornucopia logo isn't just printed on a tag that could have been, like swapped out for the original tag, it's printed on the shirt itself. The, the like tagless tag approach.

• 12:05Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, yeah, I remember those, I remember those, yeah.

• 12:07Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah, and still Fruit of the Loom says, nope, no cope. In fact, they used to have a page on their website devoted to their quote-unquote "fruit story", in which they showed the Fruit of the Loom logos throughout the years, dating all the way back to 1893.

• 12:25Ben Brock Johnson?

  What's your fruit story? What's your, you know what I mean? We should all have a fruit story, you know?

• 12:32Amory Sivertson?

  You're so right. I love it. I eat it every day. I'm gonna send you these logos. I want you to bring these to life for us a little bit.

• 12:39Ben Brock Johnson?

  When you go back to 1893,

• 12:44Ben Brock Johnson?

  of Fruit of the Loom.

• 12:45Amory Sivertson?

  Yep.

• 12:46Ben Brock Johnson?

  This is much more of a, it's a still life kind of vibe. It's bringing like a Thanksgiving vibe to me.

• 12:54Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah.

• 12:54Ben Brock Johnson?

  Um, in a way, and then 1927, it moves into a ovular situation. There's an oval there. Um, with the, pretty much the same setup, but then in 1962, it jumps to more of the logo that we all recognize. It's like less of a still life and more of a animated look.

• 13:22Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah.

• 13:23Ben Brock Johnson?

  1978 is very similar, and then current Fruit of the Loom basically loses the oval, brings the fruit forward. It's a very fruit-forward logo.

• 13:36Amory Sivertson?

  It's fruit-forward, yeah. What do you notice about the leaves in like the 60s and 70s as compared to now?

• 13:44Ben Brock Johnson?

  Interesting. They are brown, they're brownie, browning. So which, you know, sort of like, it, it almost like suggests the rattan woven basket vibes.

• 13:58Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah.

• 13:59Ben Brock Johnson?

  But that's not enough to have made me think it was a cornucopia. I'm just not buying that.

• 14:05Amory Sivertson?

  I don't think so either, but this is a theory that people have floated online, like, oh, once you see the brown leaves, maybe we all just assumed that that was like a basket, our brain played tricks on us.

• 14:17Ben Brock Johnson?

  That's assuming some pretty big leaps and bounds, I would say. You don't just plop a cornucopia in your memory. Cornucopia is a pretty, that's a rare item.

• 14:27Amory Sivertson?

  Right, so the company has been having some fun with all of this on TikTok. They have an active TikTok account, and they've been posting videos like this one. Read the caption.

• 14:41Ben Brock Johnson?

  When you learn about the Mandela effect and finally realize why everybody keeps talking to you about cornucopious.

• 14:48Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah, press play on that bad boy.

• 14:49Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh, boy.

• 14:56Ben Brock Johnson?

  I can't. This is just a ridiculous eyes and mouth.

• 15:00Amory Sivertson?

  Some very unsettling human eyes and mouth inside of the logo. And they have, they have a lot of videos like this, but, but stick with that one. Look at the first comment on this video.

• 15:12Ben Brock Johnson?

  There was a cornucopia, though, right?

• 15:15Amory Sivertson?

  And Fruit of the Loom says?

• 15:16Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh, this is from Fruit of the Loom. Oh, I didn't even pick that up. We plead the fifth. Oh, my God. See, now they're just like, now they're trolling everyone, which is kind of what they were doing from the beginning. They were like, oh, my God, we can totally lean into this, right? Like, I feel like, yeah.

• 15:34Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah.

• 15:35Ben Brock Johnson?

  You can't trust the corporation. They're not gonna, unless we get an official answer from them, they're not, anything they post on social media is sus, as far as I'm concerned.

• 15:45Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah, and they'll heart comments where people talk about seeing a cornucopia on their old, like shirts in the family, or they'll respond to claims of seeing the cornucopia with like the little eyes emoji, or write, we can't confirm or deny.

• 15:58Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yep.

• 15:59Amory Sivertson?

  Which is especially confusing because their website absolutely denies that there was ever a cornucopia. But yes, I wanted to hear it from an actual Fruit of the Loom employee. Their comms team has never gotten back to me. So I went on LinkedIn and started looking for former Fruit of the Loom employees, which is hard to do because they have thousands of employees now, they've had thousands and thousands in the past. But I did find some, emailed several, only heard back from one, a guy named Nelson Feliciano, who told me the company, quote, "never had a cornucopia in its logo, just like it never had a banana among the fruit. People see what they want to see. Just because the masses think something is true doesn't make it true."

• 16:39Amory Sivertson?

  So I posted to my social media circles to see if anyone that I knew had a connection to Fruit of the Loom, and someone wrote me back saying like, no, but have you ever seen their old commercials with the crazy fruit guys? Have you seen these commercials, Ben, from like the 70s?

• 17:13Ben Brock Johnson?

  I think so.

• 17:14Amory Sivertson?

  Okay, well, this, this was kind of a revelation to me, because I'm like, oh, of course, the commercials. Like, they can take a cornucopia out of their logo online if we want to go sort of conspiratorial. They've removed it, but it would be a lot harder to take it out of old commercials.

• 17:30Ben Brock Johnson?

  That's true.

• 17:31Amory Sivertson?

  Here's one that you just need to see because these are so silly. This is from 1987.

• 17:49Ben Brock Johnson?

  Okay, how do I describe it? It's like, it's about little boys being real hard on their underpants.

• 17:57Amory Sivertson?

  I don't care about the little boys, I care about the fruits.

• 18:01Ben Brock Johnson?

  I just find it weird that they're like, your boys are tough on their underwear? And then it like zooms into a kid's butt on a bicycle, whatever. And then there's like these guys dressed up as giant fruits, and there's like a green grapes guy, there's an apple guy, there's a kind of weird looking leafy guy, which is, that's not a fruit, but he's there.

• 18:23Amory Sivertson?

  No, but he's the leaves in the logo. Have you gotten to the logo yet?

• 18:30Ben Brock Johnson?

  There's no cornucopia in this commercial.

• 18:32Amory Sivertson?

  No cope. I watched a lot of Fruit of the Loom commercials, including ones from the 90s, that I would have been more likely to remember, but had no memory of. This is definitely an era.

• 18:45Ben Brock Johnson?

  Okay.

• 18:58Amory Sivertson?

  But no cope in any of these commercials. And maybe no hope for the pro-copers among us.

• 19:04Ben Brock Johnson?

  Hmm.

• 19:05Amory Sivertson?

  But there was one more curious thing that surfaced online during this internet fruit fight.

• 19:10Ben Brock Johnson?

  Okay.

• 19:11Amory Sivertson?

  And that is an application to the United States Patent and Trademark Office submitted by Fruit of the Loom in 1973. And what's included in the mark information on this application? Design search code 05.09.14, which is, quote, "baskets of fruit, containers of fruit, cornucopia, horn of plenty."

• 19:38Ben Brock Johnson?

  Hmm. Horn of plenty. Interesting.

• 19:44Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah. Some people thought that this was a smoking gun. Like, you were trying to file for a cornucopia in your design, but Fruit of the Loom says, A, the actual image they were trying to register did not include a cornucopia, which is true. You can see the image on the application. And B, that design search code mentioning baskets and a cornucopia is really just meant to help the Patent and Trademark Office search for applications and logos with similar features. So it speaks to like the mental association we make between fruit and cornucopias, but not to Fruit of the Loom ever actually having one in its logo.

• 20:29Amory Sivertson?

  So all of this information now lives in the FAQ section of Fruit of the Loom's website. They've taken it out of the Fruit Story page. It's now the FAQ page.

• 20:40Ben Brock Johnson?

  Much less intriguing than Fruit Story.

• 20:43Amory Sivertson?

  I know. And that page links to a Snopes article that I absolutely need to shout out because they searched newspaper archives from the 1910s all the way up through the 2020s thus far in search of a Fruit of the Loom logo with a cornucopia in it. No cope. They found no cope.

• 21:03Ben Brock Johnson?

  Snopes found no cope?

• 21:05Amory Sivertson?

  Snopes, no cope for Snopes.

• 21:07Ben Brock Johnson?

  No cope for Snopes.

• 21:09Amory Sivertson?

  And this piece also identifies the source of two common cornucopia logos that circulate online, one of which first surfaced on Imger in 2017, but was popularized by a BuzzFeed quiz in 2019.

• 21:24Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh, God, it always goes back to BuzzFeed ruining it.

• 21:28Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah, well, this, this is how this one spread because it was a quiz devoted entirely to misremembered logos.

• 21:34Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh, my goodness.

• 21:35Amory Sivertson?

  But the other cornucopia logo that circulates a lot was created by Fruit of the Loom itself in 2022.

• 21:44Ben Brock Johnson?

  Okay.

• 21:44Amory Sivertson?

  On April Fool's Day.

• 21:46Ben Brock Johnson?

  Okay.

• 21:47Amory Sivertson?

  So remember the faded black t-shirt that we were talking about with the cornucopia logo?

• 21:54Ben Brock Johnson?

  Of course, of course.

• 21:54Amory Sivertson?

  That logo in that t-shirt was the April Fool's Day Fruit of the Loom logo, which means someone either did a great job photoshopping that shirt, or there could be something else going on here. A theory we heard when we ran into someone we knew on the way back from our hopeless, copeless field trip to Goodwill. You're not wearing a Fruit of the Loom shirt by any chance right now, are you?

• 22:21Speaker 06

  This is polo. No, this is polo, and these are Hanes.

• 22:23Amory Sivertson?

  Oh, yeah, okay. All right, very stylish. If you could conjure up-

• 22:27Ben Brock Johnson?

  Thank you for showing us your underpants.

• 22:28Amory Sivertson?

  Yes, thank you.

• 22:29Speaker 06

  I mean, you guys were inquiring. I figured, why not, you know?

• 22:32Amory Sivertson?

  I appreciate that thorough answer.

• 22:35Ben Brock Johnson?

  This is sound designer Marquis Neal, a name you might recognize from our credits as of late, and he is a proud member of the pro-cope community, despite being a Hanes man now.

• 22:46Speaker 06

  I definitely remember seeing a basket of fruit on my underwears. I'm not crazy.

• 22:51Amory Sivertson?

  I'm not either.

• 22:52Speaker 06

  I'm sticking to that. I'm sticking to, I'm not crazy, they are.

• 22:55Amory Sivertson?

  But once he pulled out his phone and looked it up.

• 22:58Speaker 06

  There's really no basket. This is crazy. I'm about to Google.

• 23:03Ben Brock Johnson?

  On Marquis's phone, it was all cope, baby.

• 23:06Speaker 06

  Doug, this is, yo, yo. All right, is there two different internets? Because this is crazy. What is this?

• 23:12Amory Sivertson?

  A collective misremembering is what the Mandela Effect is.

• 23:15Speaker 06

  Time out, time out, time out.

• 23:17Amory Sivertson?

  It's like we're all crazy together.

• 23:19Speaker 06

  I got a conspiracy.

• 23:20Ben Brock Johnson?

  All right, let's hear it.

• 23:20Speaker 06

  What if this one is the bootleg brand and we've been buying the bootleg brand and not the real brand the entire time?

• 23:27Ben Brock Johnson?

  I like this theory too very much. This is an interesting idea, and it connects to something that I found on Reddit more recently. And I talked to the person who posted that thing on Reddit. So there's some hope for cope. And we're going to talk about that in a minute.

• 24:03Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questram School of Business. What gets lost when work stops looking like a nine to five job?

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• 24:29Speaker 00

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• 25:44Ben Brock Johnson?

  So, Amory.

• 25:45Amory Sivertson?

  So, Ben.

• 25:46Ben Brock Johnson?

  We keep cope alive by keeping hope alive. About cope. But you and I are increasingly, even as journalists, amongst a vocal, I don't know if it's a majority or a minority, of people who cannot find real evidence of the cope.

• 26:09Amory Sivertson?

  No.

• 26:10Ben Brock Johnson?

  However, I found what I believe to be one of the closest things I've seen to hard, physical evidence of the cornucopia on Reddit. So this was a simple image post, and it had very small amount of text attached to it that was like, huh, this is interesting. Looks like this one has a cornucopia, something to that effect. And it was a photo of a hand holding a pair of socks. And the label wrapped around the socks had the cornucopia. It said Fruit of the Loom, and it had the cornucopia. Now, look, there's a million of these things floating around the internet, right?

• 26:55Ben Brock Johnson?

  But the original poster claimed to have seen the socks in real life. It was their hand holding the socks.

• 27:04Amory Sivertson?

  Okay.

• 27:05Ben Brock Johnson?

  In the country of Colombia. What time is it there?

• 27:10Speaker 03

  Right now is 9:14 PM.

• 27:14Ben Brock Johnson?

  I found the original poster also in the country of Colombia. No, I didn't go to Colombia. I wish I had gone to Colombia. But anyway, I found him. He goes by Alan. When I first got him on the line, I was on video, Alan was not. We connected over Discord. Alan said, "Oh, you're like a stereotypical white dude with a beard who has a podcast."

• 27:41Amory Sivertson?

  Get him, Alan.

• 27:43Ben Brock Johnson?

  I immediately knew I was in for a ride. And then he was like, "Are you famous?" I'm, um, I'm, uh, podcast, uh, public radio famous. Does that count?

• 27:58Speaker 03

  I don't know. You kind of sound like one of those guys that makes video essays or something.

• 28:05Ben Brock Johnson?

  Alan took a minute to warm up, even though he was funny from jump. But he also seemed like almost genuinely excited.

• 28:12Speaker 03

  It was my first time being interviewed for anything.

• 28:15Ben Brock Johnson?

  So I did ask Alan for his full name. He declined.

• 28:18Speaker 03

  I don't like to use my real name because, well, you know, my parents teach me not to tell everything to strangers on the internet.

• 28:26Ben Brock Johnson?

  They're smart. But I was also a little skeptical of Alan because, you know, here's this 20-year-old guy. He is extremely online, as far as I can tell. And when you're extremely online, you are, I would say, more likely to engage in snark and sarcasm and shitposting, et cetera, especially if you are on Reddit.

• 28:47Speaker 03

  I play video games, talk to friends through Discord. Learn a lot on social media like Twitter or Reddit.

• 28:54Ben Brock Johnson?

  Okay.

• 28:55Speaker 03

  And watch a lot of YouTube.

• 28:56Ben Brock Johnson?

  I asked him when he first learned about this particular, uh, cornucopia thing in the Fruit of the Loom logo.

• 29:06Speaker 03

  Kind of a tricky question. I mean, it's, it's like, when was the first time you ever learned about apple pie? I mean, it's just like one of these things in the popular collective that you just kind of know. Maybe when I was- Ten, twenty, maybe, those early years when you're in the internet and you maybe come across some kind of like top ten Mandela FX or some like short video explaining that.

• 29:33Ben Brock Johnson?

  Okay, maybe that's a big range, but you know, I asked Alan to tell me the story of finding these socks in the real world.

• 29:42Speaker 03

  Hmm, let me recall my thoughts.

• 29:47Speaker 03

  Okay, um.

• 29:49Ben Brock Johnson?

  I'm taking you at your word, by the way. So this, if you're, if you're like, uh, shitposting me right now, I'm just letting you know I'm taking you at your word, so.

• 29:58Speaker 03

  Oh, no, absolutely. I'm, I'm, I'm telling you exactly how I remember. Well, my memory is not that good, but I'm being one hundred percent sincere in this.

• 30:08Ben Brock Johnson?

  Okay.

• 30:09Speaker 03

  I found the socks while I was doing some like errands with my mom in, in this chain supermarket.

• 30:17Ben Brock Johnson?

  Okay.

• 30:17Speaker 03

  Uh, this, it's called Exito.

• 30:20Ben Brock Johnson?

  Exito, okay.

• 30:22Speaker 03

  This is a Colombian supermarket chain. It's like kind of generic.

• 30:26Ben Brock Johnson?

  Okay, having never been there, Emery, but looking at photos online, Exito is like Walmart combined with Family Dollar, maybe? It, it's got a lot of different kinds of things going on.

• 30:37Speaker 03

  And there was this bin of, of like bargain clothes and there was like a metal basket full of this, uh, socks. And I noticed the logo that was the Fruit of the Loom thing.

• 30:49Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yep.

• 30:50Speaker 03

  And when I watched it, I, I said something like, huh, wasn't this like a Mandela thing? And then I, because I remember like the famous Mandela FX things, there's the bursting bears, there's like the monopoly guy. And then there's the Fruit of the Loom thing, where they say that people think that they saw the, the Fruit of the Loom with the cornucopia or something.

• 31:12Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yep.

• 31:14Speaker 03

  And then I, I look at the socks and I see the, clearly the packaging with the, was the fruits of the loom. That, that it was a cow Fruit of the Loom and it had the cornucopia and I was confused. So I picked up my phone, I went on the internet and I, I looked at the, the, the Fruit of the Loom Mandela effect. And there it was. Supposedly the Fruit of the Loom logo never had the cornucopia, but yet there it was. I had it in my, in my hand.

• 31:44Ben Brock Johnson?

  What do you think, Emery? Do you believe him?

• 31:48Amory Sivertson?

  Sure.

• 31:49Ben Brock Johnson?

  I was in a similar headspace and I think like Alan, he was sort of shocked that this had seemingly not happened to anyone else ever.

• 31:59Speaker 03

  In the internet, when I went to look it up, there was never some kind of like the definitive like physical proof that the cornucopia was there. It was always just like the edit of the, of the logo. I've even looked around to see if it was like a pirate thing or like a knockoff version. But apparently it was the Fruit of the Loom thing. It said made in USA, I think.

• 32:24Ben Brock Johnson?

  My next question, Emery, of course, was, did he buy the socks?

• 32:31Ben Brock Johnson?

  This post was several years ago that he put up. It was in twenty twenty four, I guess, at this point.

• 32:37Amory Sivertson?

  Okay, yeah, that's when this was really popping.

• 32:40Ben Brock Johnson?

  And Alan is now twenty one.

• 32:43Speaker 03

  In that time, I, I didn't have money on my own and I showed it to my mom and I told her that the whole thing about the Mandela effect. But it ended up more like a curious oddity than something we needed to buy.

• 33:00Ben Brock Johnson?

  So mom held the purse strings, literally, um, and so he did not buy the socks. Uh, but I was still stuck on this idea, as were some reditors who commented on Alan's post, that this could be a fake image. What about the people who's, who's like, say it's BS?

• 33:19Speaker 03

  If I remember correctly, I posted that photo before AI-generated imagery was become popular. I mean, back in that time, the best AI generator images or videos was Will Smith eating the spaghetti in that grotesque way.

• 33:35Ben Brock Johnson?

  Emery, do you remember the disturbing Will Smith eating spaghetti videos?

• 33:39Amory Sivertson?

  I missed those ones, but I'm not sad to have missed them, it sounds like.

• 33:44Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, do yourself a favor, don't look those up.

• 33:48Amory Sivertson?

  I shan't. Um, AI images weren't maybe as much of a thing back then, but like Photoshop was.

• 33:56Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, yeah, this jumped out to me too. And, and you know, I should say, Emery, I didn't mention this before, but Alan is currently studying at university in Columbia for audio visual arts, which kind of made my ears perk up, right? He's good with computers, he's studying visual arts. This guy probably knows his way around, uh, messing with images on computers. You promised on your life that you didn't, uh, Photoshop these Fruit of the Loom logos onto the socks.

• 34:28Speaker 03

  Unless I have a really big like brain hemorrhage and I'm misremembering or some like person made now like a hoax about this and they gave me amnesiacs, I could one hundred percent certain to you on my life that, uh, that was how I found it.

• 34:48Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yes, so that, that wasn't a no.

• 34:53Amory Sivertson?

  That was like everything but a no. That was quite the tap dance of an answer.

• 34:58Ben Brock Johnson?

  Right. But anyway, he and I talked about a plan to do some legwork for us.

• 35:03Speaker 03

  Promise you this, tomorrow I have to go to the university and in my way back, I can go to the very same supermarket, and I mean the very same one where I took the picture, to maybe see if they still have those socks two years later.

• 35:20Ben Brock Johnson?

  If you are able to talk to somebody and get more information, that would be incredible. That would be huge.

• 35:26Speaker 03

  Of course, this could, this could be an adventure in and of itself.

• 35:32Ben Brock Johnson?

  See, Alan's with us, man, you know? I'm starting to like Alan. So he promised we could talk the very next night. Uh, and we did. I'm very excited to ask you about your adventures today. How did it go?

• 35:47Speaker 03

  Just postering my resume with some journalistic on-the-field investigations.

• 35:59Amory Sivertson?

  This guy, he knows what's up, yes.

• 36:03Ben Brock Johnson?

  He does know what's up. Um, Emery, you might ask, uh, were these investigations fruitful?

• 36:11Amory Sivertson?

  Were they then? Is this a horn of answers?

• 36:16Ben Brock Johnson?

  Was there an answer nestled perfectly inside a cornucopia of information? Because, you know, as the learn Spanish on tape commercials used to say on the radio, Emery, it's as easy as spelling S O C K S. That's what I want. That's what we want, right?

• 36:36Amory Sivertson?

  Yes. I'm familiar with that reference, see?

• 36:41Speaker 03

  It's unfortunate to say, uh, I do not bear very good news. The investigation seems to have hit a little bit of a wall, which seems. I went to the very same supermarket in which I took the photo. I talked to a very lovely lady, which was the manager of the store, which she unfortunately told me that given the amount of time, it was basically impossible to determine the nature of the corporation that was on the socks. And besides the legal aspect, that I will need to go to the internet page

• 37:24Speaker 03

  and directly ask for permission into the inquiry of the information.

• 37:30Ben Brock Johnson?

  Basically, you know, he got like, you're gonna have to talk to corporate.

• 37:39Ben Brock Johnson?

  And I did email, uh, an email that I found for Exito. I have had no response.

• 37:44Amory Sivertson?

  Huh.

• 37:45Ben Brock Johnson?

  It seems unlikely that we're gonna get an answer from Exito. So it feels like we're kind of stuck here, which had me and Alan both feeling some regret. Because, you know, he had also gone back to his Reddit post, because he hadn't looked at it when I first, you know, got in touch with them.

• 38:03Speaker 03

  I do have to apologize since I reviewed my posting on Reddit and I found out that I did took a photo. I didn't document properly.

• 38:12Ben Brock Johnson?

  All of the back stuff on the food and the corporation logo, which could point to where it was being made or other information about it.

• 38:25Amory Sivertson?

  So like if there was going to be company information on the back of the label around the socks, he doesn't have that.

• 38:32Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 38:37Ben Brock Johnson?

  So Amory, I do have one more detail to share here.

• 38:41Amory Sivertson?

  Ooh, okay.

• 38:42Ben Brock Johnson?

  It is something that Alan found on Spanish language websites, Colombian websites, I believe, and I was able to find it as well. He posted his original post with the socks in 2024.

• 38:57Amory Sivertson?

  Okay.

• 38:58Ben Brock Johnson?

  Fruit of the Loom as a brand didn't have a presence in the country of Colombia, like was not selling its products there at all until 2025.

• 39:11Amory Sivertson?

  Whoa, okay.

• 39:15Ben Brock Johnson?

  So it can't be legit Fruit of the Loom.

• 39:21Amory Sivertson?

  No, I mean, at this point, we kind of knew it wasn't.

• 39:25Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah. And so let's recap a little bit here, right? What is the best theory of what actually happened here? Either my friend Alan, who doesn't want his full name divulged, who I've only met over Discord and, you know, audio calls.

• 39:42Amory Sivertson?

  So best friends.

• 39:44Ben Brock Johnson?

  Best buds. I really do like Alan, though, I have to say.

• 39:48Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah.

• 39:49Ben Brock Johnson?

  Either Alan is making this up.

• 39:51Amory Sivertson?

  No.

• 39:52Ben Brock Johnson?

  As somebody who's studying visual arts and, you know, is fairly online. Or there was a cornucopia logo in some fashion on these socks. Right? And the photo is real and now we just don't know how that happened. So let's, let's like work our way through the second one. How in your mind did this happen?

• 40:22Amory Sivertson?

  So do you remember when we ran into Marquis on our way back from Goodwill? And he looks up just the Fruit of the Loom logo because he doesn't believe us that there's no cornucopia in it. At this point, when you look it up online, the logo for Fruit of the Loom, the cornucopia comes up.

• 40:42Ben Brock Johnson?

  It's competing with the actual logo.

• 40:44Amory Sivertson?

  Absolutely. So much so that, that Keith was like, wait a minute, I see both. So what are we doing here? And so I think someone who wanted to sell something as Fruit of the Loom, I think they saw, oh, this is a way to sell Fruit of the Loom that will be recognizable to people, but is not actually the Fruit of the Loom logo.

• 41:08Ben Brock Johnson?

  Okay, I think Alan agrees with you. I mean, I'm a very rational guy, so I just thought that maybe the people of the packaging company, or maybe they repackaged it here, or they have some kind of middle manager, where they just went lazy and picked up the first Fruit of the Loom corporate logo on the internet. But I honestly don't see any kind of another explanation. So I was trying to imagine the correct analogy for this, Amory. Have you ever seen the original Ghostbusters movie?

• 41:43Amory Sivertson?

  You know, I haven't. It's on the list.

• 41:46Ben Brock Johnson?

  I know. Oh, I know. This is the conversation we always have. It's a straight classic.

• 41:51Amory Sivertson?

  I know.

• 41:52Ben Brock Johnson?

  There's this part in the end of the movie where the Ghostbusters are in a tete-a-tet, if you will, with Gozer, the Gozerian. Are you a god? Who you obviously don't know. This is an ancient godlike cosmic entity that is facing off against the Ghostbusters. No. Then.

• 42:19Ben Brock Johnson?

  Gozer asks the Ghostbusters to choose the way in which all of humanity will meet its demise. No, it can't be. What is it? It can't be. What did you do, Ray? Oh, shit. And all they have to do is imagine the form in which their doom will arrive. And it will.

• 42:41Speaker 06

  It's the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.

• 42:47Ben Brock Johnson?

  So the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man comes to destroy all of humanity and the Ghostbusters have to deal with that.

• 42:54Ben Brock Johnson?

  But like, to me, that's like this example of like, this is manifesting, right? We're collectively summoning the cornucopia. We are thinking about it. We're talking about it on the internet. And that brings it into the real world via somebody like copying and pasting the fake logo onto some socks that make it into like an exoto bargain bin in Colombia. You know what I mean? We're manifesting.

• 43:19Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah. Yeah. And the question from here is like, I think it was a fast company article, but at the end of it, they basically suggested like, maybe Fruit of the Loom should just change their logo at this point to, to the cornucopia.

• 43:36Amory Sivertson?

  But I don't think that's going to happen because at this point, they have to sort of stick to their guns around, no, if you see the cornucopia, that's not us.

• 43:44Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah. And it's, you know, it's sort of, you know, it feels like somewhat of a letdown to not maybe solve the original mystery or, or to feel as though it's like unsolved, even though the company has denied it. But not having a truly definitive answer on these socks and where they came from got Alan and I feeling a little more philosophical.

• 44:09Ben Brock Johnson?

  And in this part of the conversation, we got to something that for me at least, Amory, felt kind of satisfying. That's the paradox of semantics on the popular culture. You grab something that you maybe is fake or you invent something, but then the collective intelligence just repeats that same pattern so many times that it, and stop just becoming part of a culture and by an extent, real. So Amory, I am getting comfortable now in this non-definitive space and appreciating that at the same time, you know, before we hung up, Alan had something else to say.

• 44:53Ben Brock Johnson?

  It was about someone who is also from Colombia, an author and a journalist, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I do would like to leave you with some parting words. Absolutely. I do believe this interaction is very interesting because of all the places on earth for you to find this almost magical situation of not knowing if it's real or not. To be in the, in, in my country, Colombia, a place where it's famous for his, its magical realism.

• 45:34Ben Brock Johnson?

  The, the literary current of blending the unknown with the mundane. I think it's the perfect example of it. I love that.

• 45:54Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah, that's pretty good.

• 45:56Ben Brock Johnson?

  It's pretty good, right?

• 45:58Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah. That leaves me with a little like, well, we, we can't explain everything. So sometimes we just have to get, get comfortable in the things we can't explain.

• 46:22Amory Sivertson?

  Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was produced by Frannie Monahan. It was co-hosted and reported by me, Amory Sivertson.

• 46:30Ben Brock Johnson?

  And me, Ben Brock Johnson. It was edited by Dave Shaw. Mix and sound design by our Fruit of the Loom-tastic production manager, Paul Vikes.

• 46:41Amory Sivertson?

  The rest of our team is Grace Tatter, Dean Russell, Emily Jankowski, and our senior managing producer, Suma Tijoshi.

• 46:47Ben Brock Johnson?

  Big ups to Marquis, by the way, who we bumped into on the street. That was fun.

• 46:51Amory Sivertson?

  Woo, woo, Marquis Neil.

• 46:53Ben Brock Johnson?

  Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between online communities and international counterfeiting operations that fuel conspiracy theories.

• 47:03Amory Sivertson?

  If you have an untold history, an unsolved mystery, or some other wild story from the internet, you know what to do. Email us, [email protected].

• 47:30Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questram School of Business. Follow Is Business Broken? wherever you get your podcasts and listen on for a preview of a recent episode featuring Brandeis University Professor David Weil on a question at the heart of the gig economy. When an app controls how you work, is it really just a platform or is it your employer? It is very true that the platforms allow, let's say, drivers to find riders much more easily in a way that would be impossible absent the Uber or Lyft technology. Yes, the technology is connecting people, but the technology is also doing all the

• 48:14Speaker 00

  kinds of things that we usually associate with management. Setting the rate of pay, setting the pace of work, deciding on who gets the job and who doesn't, monitoring the performance of that party. There's a lot that these technologies do that are all about what we would call management.

• 48:38Speaker 00

  Find the full episode by searching for Is Business Broken? wherever you get your podcasts and learn more about the Marotra Institute for Business, Markets, and Society at ibms.bu.edu.

• 48:57Speaker 03

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• 49:23Speaker 01

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