The effects of true crime brain rot

In the past decade, true crime has gone from a niche and somewhat disparaged genre to one of entertainment’s most prolific. What is it about true crime that’s made it become such a huge part of popular culture? Through the lens of the mysterious disappearance (and reappearance) of Hannah Kobayashi, journalist Jennifer Swann joins us to talk about how missing persons’ cases take on lives on their own online. Our guest Jennifer Swann is a journalist and producer. She has a newsletter, Self Storage, https://jennswann.substack.com/ and produces the investigative true crime podcast My Friend Daisy, which you can find anywhere you listen to podcasts. Listen to the extended conversation on Panic World's Patreon — and enjoy ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, and access to the Garbage Day Discord — for just five bucks a month at: https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. Sponsors Want to sponsor Panic World? Ad sales & marketing support by Multitude, hit them up here: ⁠http://multitude.productions⁠. Credits - Host: Ryan Broderick - Producer: Grant Irving - Engineer: Rebecca Seidel - Researcher: Adam Bumas - Business Manager: Josh Fjelstad 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:26Ryan Broderick?

  I mean, there's something very American, like at the heart of just like obsessing over stories of crime and murder and malfeasance. Like, we love that stuff. That's part of our national identity, I think, in a way.

• 0:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I think like we saw so much of it like in the 80s and 90s, you know, and I think like when I was growing up, there was always something on the news, you know, of like missing, missing women, someone that disappears in like Aruba, the Natalie Holloway story.

• 0:52Ryan Broderick?

  So many women went missing in the 80s. Like, they were just disappearing. They're disappearing every week, it feels like.

• 0:57Speaker 02

  I don't know where they're going. Yeah, they're totally disappearing.

• 1:19Ryan Broderick?

  So I'm Ryan Broderick. Joining me as always is our producer Grant Irving. You'll hear his angelic voice pop in from time to time. This is Panic! Roll, a show about how the internet warps our minds, our culture, and eventually, reality. Honestly, when I think of true crime culture, and I should admit at the top here that like I am actually not really a true crime purveyor. I'm much more of the unsolved mysteries, like why are all the cows being mutilated and are aliens and the Mothman real kind of person? That's my thing. And when I do sort of see true crime culture, I get a little grossed out, I think. Because also, like, as a journalist, I always sort of feel very conflicted about turning that kind of thing into entertainment. But in the TikTok age, it's not just like big production studios that are doing this. It's everybody. It's like this decentralized,

• 2:00Ryan Broderick?

  like from the floor up kind of thing that's happening now. And joining me today to talk about this whole kind of new online true crime culture is Jennifer Swan, writer, host of My Friend Daisy. And, you know, you know, from reading and listening to your stuff, it does, I was, I was excited to have you on because it feels like you're similarly conflicted about this. Can you, can you sort of walk us through broad strokes, like the, the queasiness that you have around this subject?

• 2:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. I mean, even just the name true crime, there's this connotation that comes with it of like, you know, people being salivating over these gory details of someone's story. And there is something inherent about it where we're finding entertainment. Sure, there's like a profit margin over someone's tragedy ultimately. And I think, you know, these stories are fascinating. I think they're certainly worth telling, especially in a way that might shed light on our culture, our society, on people's lives who we might otherwise, might not otherwise get to hear about. And so like, I do think there's value in it, but I think there's something inherently that can be a little bit cringey when you think about the stories that get told and whose stories

• 3:12Speaker 02

  we're telling, whose stories we're omitting, and why we're telling those stories. And, you know, even stories I've worked on where I'm like, I would not have written this, or I would have not done this story had this horrible tragedy not befallen this person. And there is something really inherently, I think, upsetting about that, you know?

• 3:30Ryan Broderick?

  You talked about sort of like the stories you've worked on. And that's actually where I wanted to start. You know, you had this piece in The Cut where you talk about the kind of true crime brain rot and the way that like our, you know, I think our national fascination with crime and with stories of murder and particularly like crime against women has mixed together with like the social media panopticon. One of the defining archetypes of the current era we're living in is like the internet detective, which 10 years ago, 15 years ago, were sort of this like weird cultural laughing stock, this thing we kind of ignore. And now they aren't. So I guess like, how did you become interested in the internet detective as a concept?

• 4:11Speaker 02

  I think that a big part of this internet detective sort of motif in the last 10 years is like, I think a lot of it has to do with what these missing or murdered women have their own social media presence. And then it becomes like this big feast of clues to try to figure out like, who is this person? And like, where were they last seen? What are they into? And how do we find them? And I think for me, like, I remember hearing about the Elisa Lam story. I don't know if you guys followed this. She was like a Canadian college student who I think was on vacation in LA back in like 2013. She was staying at the Cecil Hotel, which is like a former SRO in Skid Row, but has, you know, cheap rooms to stay the night.

• 4:56Speaker 02

  It's also famously where like the Night Stalker murdered women. So it has this like very storied nefarious history to it. And her body ended up in a water tank on the top of the roof.

• 5:08Ryan Broderick?

  Yes, I watched a whole Netflix documentary about this.

• 5:11Speaker 02

  Yes, and there's all these documentaries that have come out in the last 10 years of just trying to unravel the story because it was so baffling of like, how did she get in there? And then there was surveillance footage of her like in an elevator seemingly talking to someone who wasn't there. And so I think like that was the first time reading about this story and being in LA when it happened. And then eventually writing about it and reading the court reports and talking about people who were reading her Tumblr and trying to figure out who she was. That was sort of the first time that it came into my consciousness of like, okay, there's this crime that happened potentially, right? Like there's this woman who was found in a water tank and then there's these people who are trying to crack the case. And so that was the first time it sort of came to my attention of like, oh, they're reading her Tumblr and she's like quoting Chuck Palahniuk.

• 5:56Speaker 02

  And she's talking about her depression and like, what do we think this means? Do we think this means that she, you know, had a mental breakdown? There were all these clues that people were really assembling and that was the first time where it was like, oh, okay. People are putting this together based on stuff that she herself has put on the internet.

• 6:14Ryan Broderick?

  I remember this documentary because it sticks out to me because it was one of the first I'd seen that was taking the citizen journalist, the sort of internet detective seriously. Cause I feel like up until the mid 2010s, they were always like depicted as like insane freaks that like, we're just doing this for no reason. Like especially in movies or something, right?

• 6:35Speaker 02

  There was always like a middle aged dude wearing a fedora.

• 6:37Ryan Broderick?

  Exactly, exactly. So the two questions I feel like that leads to though is like, one, like, do you feel like there is? A gendered element to the kinds of internet detectives that sort of circle, and I'm going to keep using that term for lack of a better one during this episode, but like the type of internet detectives that like sort of like circle a story like Hannah Kobayashi, or like, are they typically women, would you say? And then two, like, do you feel like they get more intensely conspiratorial as time goes on? Because that's been my experience.

• 7:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I think that's right. Yeah, because I think, you know, obviously, the cases that really, I think, break through and get tons of media coverage, it tends to be attractive women. Like, let's just say, I think that's obvious. There's this whole, like, term that was coined of white, missing white woman syndrome. And I think a lot of the detectives, you know, so and so, these online detectives, I think they tend to be women, too, because women see themselves in these women who are supposedly missing or in danger. And so I think it's, speaking as a woman, I think there is a sense that like, oh, the authorities aren't taking our stories seriously, or like, they're going to say that we deserved this because we, like, dressed a certain way or said a certain thing.

• 7:52Speaker 02

  I think it does draw in women who are, like, mistrustful of the system, or maybe have had bad experiences with the court system, and they're like, oh, they're not going to take this seriously. So like, we, it's up to us to find this woman.

• 8:05Ryan Broderick?

  The systemic breakdown piece, I think, is really important. We touched on this in a recent episode about like the chaos of what we've been calling the post Me Too era, like the, like, everything that's happened after the Johnny Depp trial. So much of it, both bad and good, is sort of, stems from a still systemic inability to deal with the violence and harassment against women. The more chaotic, like, internet content you see about, like, Me Too stuff, or missing women, or true crime, you have to take that into account, that like, the American legal system just still doesn't really work for women, like, at all.

• 8:42Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, I think there's always a sense that, like, women are not going to be believed, or that, like, their cases are not going to be taken seriously. And so they're just being like, we gotta, we gotta figure this out for ourselves, because, like, no one's going to save us, kind of a thing.

• 8:53Ryan Broderick?

  So let's talk about Hannah Kobayashi. Hold on, I'll do my best true crime impression. Yeah, hey, guys. Another violent tragedy to talk about in a really weirdly positive way for you. But to set this up, so on November 8th, 2024, Hannah Kobayashi was supposed to take a flight from LA to New York. She never gets on the plane. Can you sort of set us up about like the family at the center of this? Because I feel like that's sort of like the best place to start here.

• 9:20Speaker 02

  Her sister is a woman named Sydney Kobayashi. Sydney, I think, is about a year and a half older than Hannah. She did a bunch of local interviews and was able to kind of paint a portrait of Hannah as someone who wouldn't do this kind of thing, wouldn't just disappear and not tell anyone. A key, key family figure is also this woman named Lorie Pidgen.

• 9:40Ryan Broderick?

  Great side character name in a, in a mystery. That's just, that's some Agatha Christie shit right there. That's great.

• 9:45Speaker 02

  Yes, yes. Also, she's a van life influencer. So she is, she has this very robust social media. She's just the-

• 9:53Ryan Broderick?

  Listeners, you can't hear it, but I just cracked my knuckles. I just, I was just like, let's go, let's dig in.

• 9:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. And she was this great narrator for this story of like, we need to find my niece. She's in danger. She did a lot of front-facing camera videos where she is crying to her phone and giving out information to her followers. And so she really became the person who was like this megaphone for the family, for better or worse. But I think, you know, when you watch the news, like Lorie is really the person who like, she drove down to LA, she was on the streets looking for Hannah. She held a rally, like she really got tons of eyes on this story. And then Lorie also worked closely with Hannah's father, Ryan Kobayashi, who flew in from Honolulu to Los Angeles to look for her.

• 10:39Ryan Broderick?

  But what about Hannah's internet footprint? Because I feel like that is so crucial in these kinds of stories is like, you alluded to it at the top, like is, was there, was there enough there for people to, to dig through?

• 10:49Speaker 02

  Yes, there was enough and then some. And I think like, her Instagram is just fascinating. Like, for one thing, she is a photographer. She takes these really beautiful photos, whether it's of like the landscape and the islands and the jungle in Hawaii, or it's like she'll do self-portraits. Her photos are beautiful. Her captions are really sort of cryptic. Like she'll write these kind of like Buddhist sayings, you know, that are kind of like philosophizing about losing all attachment in life and becoming enlightened. And, you know, I think her captions were a big piece of why people initially thought like that she was on some kind of spiritual quest because she had written about, you know, going off the grid. And even the LAPD talked about looking through her social media and

• 11:34Speaker 02

  trying to come up with theories of the case based on that, which was kind of interesting to see this like reversal where even the authorities were looking to Instagram to be like, oh, how do we put this piece together? But her Instagram was super alluring. Like she is obviously, she's like a gorgeous girl. She has these like, you know, she travels a lot. She goes to music festivals. I think it just drew people in, you know, she seemed like someone who I might know or who I might meet at a concert or something. Like we have similar music interests. And so I think there was something about her, like very parasocially where people are like, oh, this girl seems cool. And she's also seems interesting. Like what is she into?

• 12:13Ryan Broderick?

  In a world of content, even the police get flattened down into essentially the same as everybody else. Like we're all, we interviewed Caroline Callaway very early on in this show and she talked about sort of the unreality of her Instagram captions. It like kind of broke her own brain to see people believe them.

• 12:30Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 12:31Ryan Broderick?

  When you're saying like, oh, the cops are like digging through her Instagram captions. It's like, oh, like everyone is part of the kayfabe of the internet now. But before we go any further, I want to nail down some basic details of the story just to so that our listeners can follow here. So on November 9th, she's seen in LA at a bookstore in a fancy part of town. November 10th, she goes to an event at a Nike store and she posts about it. Everything seems like it's fine. She's in LA doing stuff. Then I guess on the 11th, the weird messages start.

• 13:02Speaker 02

  I will just add that there was something a little off kilter about all this too, because at this point, she missed a flight. She had layover at LAX. She was traveling to New York from Honolulu, or I'm sorry, from Maui. And at this point, she missed a layover. And like, the weird thing is, she was just kind of exploring LA. So when she was going to these places, it sort of seemed like everything was fine, but it was also weird in that like, why wasn't she still trying to get on a flight? So it was strange when like, she would pop up in the background of like, a YouTube video that someone filmed at this shopping center. And they're like, why is she at this pop-up event? You know? So there's always, from the very beginning, there were questions about like, why is she just hanging out? You know?

• 13:38Ryan Broderick?

  Is she in the, like, she in a video?

• 13:42Speaker 02

  She's literally in the background. Someone took a video of this like LeBron James pop-up event at The Grove. And she's literally like, walking by in the video. And people realized it after it was publicized that she had been missing. So that was another piece of the like, whoa, she just ended up in this video on YouTube somehow.

• 14:00Ryan Broderick?

  That's like a genuinely insanely creepy thing. But it's, this story gets creepier because the next day, on the 11th, she sends a message that reads, "D packers wiped my identity, stole all my funds, and have me on a mindfuck since Friday." And then the next day, her family reports her missing and they fly to LA. So this is where I think things are, might get kind of confusing. So I want to nail down a couple of things. So first, can you tell us about Hannah's aunt at this moment? Like, this is where she gets involved, right? Like, this is where she takes the van down?

• 14:33Speaker 02

  Right. So these text messages start circulating. It seems like they circulate, like Hannah sends these messages to her friends. She was also supposed to go visit her other aunt in New York. And so at some point, Aunt Lorie, who lives in the Pacific Northwest, she also runs an Instagram account for, you know, traveling throughout the Pacific Northwest. She and her husband drive their RV down to LA. And they start, you know, this is all within like, that week that she goes missing. And they start passing the flyers, putting her face on it, connecting with people that Hannah knows, and really like, sounding the alarm.

• 15:07Ryan Broderick?

  Okay. And next up, can you talk a little bit about? Shari Finn, because she hasn't appeared yet in this story. And this is sort of when her and her organization get involved, is that right?

• 15:17Speaker 02

  That's right. Yeah, it all kind of happens like during this first week that Hannah goes missing. There's this woman named Shari Finn. She runs a nonprofit organization for missing and exploited individuals. A lot of them are children, some of them are adults. And so Shari starts putting out all these flyers that say like, missing, at risk, contact us if you've seen Hannah. And Shari runs this organization called the Rad Movement. And so her organization is really aimed at like finding people, but it also has a focus on people who have been trafficked. So Shari's vision from the

• 15:54Ryan Broderick?

  Red flag went up for me.

• 15:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, so her vision from the very beginning is thinking like, this could be a trafficking case and like, we need to save her from trafficking. So that is very much where her mindset is at. And also the founder of this organization, Shari, she says that her daughter was trafficked from high school. So again, this is something that is very deeply like embedded in her brain and personal to her.

• 16:17Ryan Broderick?

  If you can hear that right now, it's all the Panic World listeners going,

• 16:23Ryan Broderick?

  okay, and last but not least here, just to set up our main characters, talk us through Jess Chu and how she gets involved.

• 16:30Speaker 02

  So Jess is a TikToker. She's based in Honolulu, basically like in the general area where Hannah grew up. Jess never met Hannah, she doesn't know Hannah, but she hears about this story and she hears about it on the local news and she immediately thinks like, whoa, here's a woman, she also is from, you know, lives in Hawaii, she's about my age, she's traveling, I travel a lot. And Jess immediately starts becoming very alarmed and she thinks, you know, if there is someone snatching women at airports, I want to know what's going on. I want to know what to avoid, how to protect myself, kind of a thing. And so Jess happens to work at a radio station, she moonlights as an on-air host. And so she starts giving these broadcasts. She mentions it, you know, just in between her music segments, like, hey, there's this missing woman.

• 17:15Speaker 02

  If anyone has information, she kind of does this little PSA. And after that, she becomes just completely obsessed with this case to the point that she starts going on TikTok and sometimes multiple times a day, she'll be doing these updates about Hannah. And it's interesting because when you look at her account, like prior to this, it's like her TikToks are like her on vacation or doing dance trends or talking about, you know, food or restaurants. And all of a sudden, once the Hannah case starts, it just becomes completely all Hannah, all missing person stuff, all the time. She can't break away from it.

• 17:49Ryan Broderick?

  I really can't come up with a more perfect storm than like a van life influencer aunt, a woman who runs like a trafficking quote unquote organization and a TikToker with a parasocial relationship to a missing woman. It's so perfect. And the thing you described with Jess and her TikTok feed, sort of like going from all kinds of different content and then hard pivot is such a thing. And not even just stories like true crime, but like the amount of times that we've come across influencers who are doing all a bunch of different stuff and then like they do one thing, the algorithm likes it and like that's their deal.

• 18:29Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 18:30Ryan Broderick?

  And I think it's such an important like a force because like now there's no incentive for her to not like double, triple, quadruple down on this story.

• 18:39Speaker 02

  Yes. Yeah.

• 18:41Speaker 03

  Do you think she was incentivized by a natural obsession or that she was like, did she seem to like the attention and like think she could spin this off into a true crime podcast?

• 18:55Speaker 02

  I think that it started from a place of natural curiosity, obsession, concern. And I think that like what you're talking about, Ryan, probably happened where like she saw that the algorithm was rewarding those videos. But at the same time, I think that it is one of those stories where like as she got deeper into it, you know, it started as like, oh, I'm just spreading information about the case. I'm trying to find her. And there were so many missing pieces, you know, things that we haven't even talked about yet that like did not line up in the story.

• 19:21Ryan Broderick?

  We're gonna get there.

• 19:22Speaker 02

  Yeah. Timeline issues, all of these questions that kind of came up where people suddenly realized that the narrators in the story, like For example, Hannah's family were not, you know, they were giving information that was inconsistent or that didn't add up to people. And so I think as those things happened, I think Jess did genuinely get like really, I think you see her turn and kind of become angry to be like, well, what is like, we need to actually understand what's happening. Because at this point, she spent all this time talking about it. And yeah, maybe it's also been good for her TikTok. But I think you kind of see her processing and upset over like, we're working on this case and we need to know what's going on.

• 19:59Ryan Broderick?

  I actually don't think it's that cynical to follow signals from TikTok. I think it's natural. Like if you care about something and you're telling people about it and then you're being rewarded for it, like you're just gonna keep doing it. Like journalists, that happens to them. Like they get obsessed with the story. They're rewarded for it and they keep going. You know, exactly. But right now, okay, we've set our story up. Everything's in motion and things are gonna get more confusing and darker and but also a little tease for the next section. Hannah isn't actually missing technically, right? Like so we're gonna, we're gonna get to all that after the ad break. But first, a word from our sponsor, Bear Mace.

• 20:42Speaker 02

  Is that a real sponsor?

• 20:44Ryan Broderick?

  No, no, no. We try to make a joke tied to the theme of the episode. Grant had it in there, Crime Con, but I wanted to double check if Crime Con was real. I assume it is.

• 20:54Speaker 02

  I think Crime Con is real. Yeah.

• 20:56Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, that sounds totally fucked up.

• 20:59Speaker 02

  There's also Crime Cruise now.

• 21:01Ryan Broderick?

  Crime Cruise is the most fucked up thing I've ever heard of. Oh, my God.

• 21:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:05Ryan Broderick?

  Jesus Christ. Okay.

• 21:10Speaker 00

  Hey, Spotify listeners. When you travel with American Airlines, you'll enjoy comfort and convenience at every altitude. Before takeoff, unwind in the Admirals Club Lounge with curated self-serve offerings of hearty bites and refreshments. In flight, stay connected with high-speed Wi-Fi. Sponsored by AT&T. Your journey is designed to feel easy from the moment you check in to the moment you arrive. No matter where you're going, American gets you there. Book now at aa.com.

• 21:36Speaker 04

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• 22:03Ryan Broderick?

  Where we left off, Hannah's family and the internet are doing everything they can to raise attention to find Hannah despite having no real clue what is actually happening with Hannah. Hannah's aunt, she's speculating wildly on national TV, which is awesome. I hope a family member of mine speculates wildly on national TV if I go slightly missing. This is what her aunt said on CNN. "Our mind is now going to abduction, and I hate to say the word, but trafficked. If someone has Hannah, I want you to know that she is the kindest, most beautiful soul in the entire world. Please don't hurt her." And so November continues on. The internet becomes more and more rabid. So can you tell me how the sort of like combined forces of this story break apart?

• 22:48Ryan Broderick?

  Like what actually starts the schism here?

• 22:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there are a number of things that happened. And one of them is that Hannah's dad dies by suicide. That ignites more interest in the case. But I think also there is this question of like, how do we handle this? And I think the response from the family, you know, the rad movement was speaking on behalf of them and putting out statements on behalf of Hannah's mother and her sister. And I think the way that these statements came off to the public was strange because it was sort of like, this is a tragedy. We're very sad about this, but we have to move on and we have to keep looking for Hannah. And so I think like that kind of divided people of like, whoa, like they're still looking for her and her dad has died and it seems like maybe they should put the brakes on the search party.

• 23:31Speaker 02

  And so there was a lot of like conflicting energy around that. And also by that point, the case had really reached this like media frenzy where it was on every TV news network. It was definitely Story where like my mom had been following the story and it's it's interesting because like the stories that I follow don't necessarily you know she they're not on her radar but this was one where it was just like you know people of every age group and demographic were watching this on TV news and on Tik Tok and it was really permeating there was this schism that happened around the time that Hannah's dad died where it was clear that the family was feuding Hannah's mom would and her sister would put out statements through the rad movement and then Hannah's Aunt Larrie would put out statements and they would be sort of like

• 24:14Speaker 02

  sub tweeting each other there was the sort of passive aggressive thing that would happen where at some point you know Hannah's sister was kind of like Larrie doesn't speak for us the aunt doesn't speak for us and so that was another thing that kind of made people feel like whoa something weird is going on here we don't know who to trust we don't know who to listen to we're getting you know conflicting pieces of the story and then the other element that came out was there was news that broke actually through one of the private investigators involved in this story who also kind of inserted himself into the story he wasn't actually hired to work on this case

• 24:47Ryan Broderick?

  Awesome even better another another civil like another internet detective involved great

• 24:53Speaker 02

  Yeah and he's a professional he's a licensed detective but it's interesting he was also feuding with the internet detectives he was feuding with the family and so you have this scenario where like the family is publicly feuding with each other and then all the detectives on all sides were also like pointing fingers like the Spider-Man meme where they were all kind of accusing each other of lying

• 25:13Ryan Broderick?

  You know I like to think of myself as a bit of an internet expert and I'm going to guess that the people on the internet had a very normal reaction to all of this I bet that this everyone was like this seems totally fine

• 25:26Speaker 02

  Yeah yeah yeah no one said anything about it Reddit just went dark

• 25:30Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah I bet Reddit didn't care about any of this right like especially her dad killing himself I bet nobody thought anything insane about that at all

• 25:40Speaker 02

  There were so many conspiracy theories about this and I think at this point too like no one actually knew where Hannah was or what had happened to her and so you know there were obviously theories about like her dad knew something or there was some there was definitely this like conspiratorial narrative about some Unknown predator or someone who was orchestrating this. And so I think like that was immediately fodder for conspiracy. And then the other thing that came out through this other private investigator was that Hannah had allegedly been involved in some kind of sham marriage. And so that was this point where all of a sudden these online detectives also began to turn on her and think like, oh, well, she engaged in fraudulent activity. Is she scamming us? Like, why do we care? Like, there was also this anger over like, we're spending all of our resources and we're

• 26:25Speaker 02

  doing all this work for her and maybe she's scamming us, you know? So like everyone, it just created this total panic, especially on Reddit where everyone was accusing each other of spreading misinformation or like, well, how do you know this and what's your source?

• 26:38Ryan Broderick?

  I guess it's probably time to talk about Alan now, huh?

• 26:41Speaker 02

  Oh, boy, Alan.

• 26:44Ryan Broderick?

  So this is from your article. Are you comfortable with me reading your own article back to you? I know it's a very strange feeling. "Who the fuck is Alan?" Chu said on Thanksgiving Day in one of her near daily TikTok updates. She tracked down the new character's social media accounts and quickly formed a picture. He was a surfer who, like Hannah, had been, was fond of nature, travel and electronic music. So who's Alan? Talk us through Alan here.

• 27:10Speaker 02

  Oh, man. It's so funny because like I wrote so many drafts of the story because it was such a confusing story to like, try to convey to people who weren't already following it. And like, it was like a very late stage point where my editor was like, wait, Alan's real? Like, he's, he actually exists? And I was like, yes, Alan is real. Alan is a person who, he's an Argentinian man. He moved to Maui at some point a few years ago. He has since left the country, actually, as a result of this whole sort of fiasco that he got caught in. But he allegedly, no one actually knows what happened, but he allegedly had some sort of arrangement with Hannah where he was going to get a green card, they were going to get married. It's unclear whether that actually happened, but you know, it does appear that they staged some sort of ceremony with photos.

• 27:52Speaker 02

  And so that was like a huge theory driving this was like, oh, did he cheat her out of money? Did she cheat him out of money and that's why she went on the run? That became a huge leading theory. In this case.

• 28:04Ryan Broderick?

  Yes, as you write in your piece, in Reddit and TikTok, theories blossomed that Hannah had planned to take the photos that they found of her and Alan for the purpose of faking a loving relationship, for example, or that she'd been paid to marry the Argentine man because she was having money troubles, as suggested by the Pinterest boards, she titled "Money Making Jobs and Money Saving Strategies." Now, I want to pause here for a second because I think this is so crucial. The daily lives of all of us online make total sense to us. And they are probably fairly random, actually. Like, you know, what I'm putting on my Tumblr, or my Blue Sky account, or what I'm looking

• 28:46Ryan Broderick?

  at on YouTube, they make sense to me, but like, they don't really say anything, other than like, what I was, you know, doing. And so many of these stories all hinge on essentially everyone in the world pretending like that's not true. It's like that Nick Mullin joke where it's like, we're the CIA and, uh, we're, okay, we're all ready to secretly do 9/11, but we just forgot one thing: the clues. We gotta go do the clues now. And it's like, everyone assumes that this woman hid clues about her life all over the internet and then went missing. Every, yeah, it's literally just Easter eggs. It's so brain breaking to me that this keeps happening.

• 29:27Ryan Broderick?

  I think it's a part, a huge part of the internet kind of turning against the family now, right? Like, this is part of what is happening. Like, the clues, quote unquote, that they're finding don't make sense with the reality of what's unfolding in front of them.

• 29:38Speaker 02

  Totally. They don't make sense. And then the other thing is, like, the family was sometimes saying different things in news articles. I think, like, Hannah's mom came out at one point and was confronted with this supposed evidence of, like, a marriage certificate or documents related to immigration. And her line was like, "Oh yeah, I just found this, and, you know, this is the first time I'm seeing this, and I reported to the police." And no one actually knows how this went down, but of course, everyone hears this and they think, like, "The mom is hiding something, or this doesn't make sense, or she must have known about this at some point." And so, there is this feeling online that, like, the family knows something, they're withholding information. That upsets everyone and then it makes everyone so much more determined to be like, we're gonna actually figure out what happened. Like, what is she posting about?

• 30:20Speaker 02

  Another big thing that came out on her Instagram, and this was, I think, like, a day or two before she left for this flight, was she posted this photo of like a Hawaiian lei, and the caption was something like, "Hell hath no fury, like a woman scorned," kind of a thing. And so people saw that. They said, "The lei looks like the photo she's wearing in these supposed marriage photos." And so like, everyone was constructing this narrative based on what is really a photo of, you know, a flower necklace on a windowsill. You know, like, it could be anything, but I think-

• 30:51Ryan Broderick?

  They give you them at the airport in Hawaii.

• 30:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:54Ryan Broderick?

  Like, you just get, you just get them. Like, it's-

• 30:57Speaker 02

  Yes. But in this case, it was like, oh, this is the secret to the case. Like, we, she's a woman, she's in danger because of this evil man, and there was this whole sort of narrative about what she had made-

• 31:08Ryan Broderick?

  And the evil man hit a clue on Instagram so you could catch him. That's what he did. He's like, he's like, "I'll let people know secretly." Um, one of my favorite, like, side plots of this absolutely insane story is when Shari Finn gets, like, half-cancelled for maybe being secretly conservative. It's so fucking stupid even to describe it. Basically, like, um, her, the rad movement has a logo that's like a riff on the Gadsden flag. And so they started spinning up this conspiracy theory that it was like this secret conservative movement. And then they, they found like a quote about how she carries like a gun in her purse. It's like, "Yeah, I bet the anti-trafficking woman has a gun in her purse. That sounds right to me, actually."

• 31:51Speaker 02

  Yes. And the anti-trafficking woman who lives near the US border is also afraid that immigrants are committing crimes and trafficking people. So that all checks out.

• 32:00Ryan Broderick?

  Very, very many years ago, I did a story about, do you ever like encounter like Hunter Moore on the MySpace, in the MySpace era?

• 32:08Speaker 02

  I don't think so.

• 32:10Ryan Broderick?

  He was known as the revenge porn king.

• 32:12Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 32:12Ryan Broderick?

  And he basically had a website that was like crowdsourcing revenge porn, and he went to jail.

• 32:16Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 32:17Ryan Broderick?

  And then I, I, I like profile, not profile, but like was doing a big story on these kids that were trying to like keep his like legacy going by like still working for him while he was in prison. And I interviewed this, this woman who was a lawyer, and she was trying to basically change revenge porn laws in California to help her daughter who'd been a victim of revenge porn like during the Hunter Moore era. And her politics were out of control. Like, I still follow her on Twitter. Her politics are indecipherably confusing and does it honestly doesn't matter because what she's doing is very specific and it's like, okay, that she has totally incomprehensible politics as far as I'm concerned. But those are the kinds of people that like you meet in situations like this.

• 33:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, especially when there is this like personal sort of motivation, like they're working for Shari because she says this happened to her daughter, which is something that I wasn't exactly confirmed, but it is like her origin story of the organization. I think it's like you see everything through the lens of like someone is trying to traffic us, you know? And people online, I think like they were discovering these sort of like conservative iconography and they were, they were posting about it as if it was like a revelation, right? And then I talked to her and she's like, yeah, of course I'm conservative, like duh, you know, like her office, her, her husband had like a mouse pad that says like pedo hunter, you know, like they're really into that kind of stuff that you might hear about in QAnon of like everyone is a pedophile, you know?

• 33:39Ryan Broderick?

  Yes, it's just how the world works. Those are the kinds of people that you meet when stuff happens. Uh, I don't want to like pull the rug out from under our listeners, but um, I guess it's time to talk about how you found out that Hannah wasn't being trafficked and that she wasn't missing.

• 33:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:00Speaker 02

  It's so.

• 34:01Ryan Broderick?

  Sorry to laugh, but like, it's just, it's, it's like unbelievable to me. Like the whole thing is just, it's wild. So, yeah.

• 34:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's crazy. And I was like, it seems like so much happens in the story. And then when I thought about it, I was like, oh my God, all this happens in like two or three weeks where it just goes completely viral and everyone loses their mind over it. So like.

• 34:19Ryan Broderick?

  Well, just for the timeline. So December 2nd, the LAPD announces that they're closing the investigation. So this story basically goes from what, like November?

• 34:28Speaker 02

  8th, 9th.

• 34:29Ryan Broderick?

  November 8th to December 2nd.

• 34:30Speaker 02

  So like not even a full month, but it's like this total pandemonium. And at some point, yeah, LAPD has this press conference. They're like, we think she's involved, we think she's missing voluntarily. And the family, of course, refutes that.

• 34:42Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, so I assume that the internet is like totally fine with this?

• 34:48Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 34:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, again, very normal. No one has any reaction. They're just like, yes, queen, go enjoy Mexico. We're here for you.

• 34:56Ryan Broderick?

  We're all done now.

• 34:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, there's this like feeling of betrayal among people who followed her case because they were just sort of like, you know, I think that true crime as a genre has kind of like predisposed us to imagine the worst, you know, or to imagine some like harrowing thing has happened to somebody. And I think like people were relieved to find that that was seemingly not the case, but they were also like, we need to actually know what happened, like what, what the hell was going on? And there was no explanation. And so people were just kind of losing their minds over that, you know? And that's another point where they sort of turned on Hannah, like, how could she do this to us?

• 35:30Ryan Broderick?

  And in your article, you know, at this point, you write, in a News Nation TV interview, oh, News Nation, yeah, fantastic, good stuff. The older sister, Sydney, argued that they hadn't seen the footage of Kobayashi crossing into Mexico and didn't believe that she would have done so voluntarily. They say that they've seen her alone and that doesn't discount the fact that someone could be watching her from afar, knowing how big this case has gotten and maybe controlling her or telling her what to do, Sydney told Hawaii News Now, which seems like a mess. And then also to make it even messier, the aunt says she's quote unquote splitsies? Is that, is that right? With the family?

• 36:10Speaker 02

  Yes, the fam.

• 36:11Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, it's all a mess. The family's fighting. The cops have said there's nothing to investigate. Can you explain how Jess Chu, our lead internet detective, kind of cracked this?

• 36:19Speaker 02

  Yes. So from the beginning of her obsession, as Jess got deeper into the case, she reached out to Hannah's sister, Sydney. She also reached out to Hannah's Aunt Laurie. And she was kind of like having phone conversations with them, texting, trying to gather information, trying to, you know, give updates to her own followers at the same time. And she was also following the tweets of this private investigator named Steve Fisher, who was very involved in the case. He was not officially hired to work on it, but he, like everyone else, who kind of got sucked into the mystery of it and obsessed with it. And so at one point, he said something about like, I know where Hannah is, like, I know her location. I have contacts in Mexico. They've told They've seen her, but she doesn't want to be found. If the family wants to find out, that's

• 37:03Speaker 02

  fine. They can contact me. Not verbatim, but he sort of said something to that extent. And so Jess saw this and she immediately was like, oh my God, I have to be the person to tell Hannah's family that this man knows where she is. So Jess then contacted Larrie, Hannah's aunt, and is like DMing her, being like, dude, this guy knows where she is. You have to go find her. And so Jess is kind of like a cheerleader behind the scenes, like egging people on. She gets ahold of Larrie. Larrie makes this video saying like, some guy says he knows where he is. And Jess basically connects them. And she's like, how are you not in touch with this guy? Like, and in some ways Jess is also testing Larrie because Jess is a little skeptical too. She's like, if Larrie genuinely doesn't know where Hannah is, you know, if she's, if

• 37:45Speaker 02

  she's real about all this and she's not in on it, because there was this theory that like she was somehow in on it presumably to get

• 37:53Ryan Broderick?

  Everyone's a suspect. Yeah, absolutely.

• 37:54Speaker 02

  Everyone's a suspect. Everyone is doing this to get clout. That's always the accusation. Like if you're legit and you're actually concerned about your niece, here's where she is, contact this guy. Yeah. So this all sort of reaches this big culmination. I think it's like that first weekend of December. And I was following the aunt's Aunt Larrie's TikTok. And honestly, the content that Larrie was putting out, I have to say, just as like a spectator, was like pretty riveting, even though it was very like simplistic. It would literally just be a video of her like, you know, she did this video of the open road, presumably driving down to Mexico. There's like, her dog is resting on the dashboard. And the caption just says something like, Mexico, here I come. We're gonna get Hannah. And it was like, it felt very cinematic. Cause like as a

• 38:36Speaker 02

  someone viewing that, you're like rooting for her. Like, oh my God, yes, she's gonna get her. Cause like, we don't know what's going on at this point.

• 38:42Ryan Broderick?

  Of course, this is exactly how things work in real life. What did the hero auntie find, I guess?

• 38:48Speaker 02

  And then she just went dark. There was nothing. There was no updates. People were thinking the worst, but they were also like, tell us what the hell is going on.

• 38:56Ryan Broderick?

  Right. So to this day, it's all clouded and mystery. But as we put a pin in the story, what do we know? And what as an expert do you think actually happened?

• 39:06Speaker 02

  Finally, Hannah, through Lorie, who has sort of become like her de facto spokesperson, puts out this statement, I think, to like People Magazine, saying, you know, Hannah crossed the border yesterday. She's, she's fine. We're recovering. We've been through a really traumatic situation. And it sort of uses this language that talks about trauma and, you know, says this is very difficult, but doesn't actually reveal what happened, what went on. That was, it was like the most anticlimactic thing where everyone was kind of like, what? Like, what did we just follow?

• 39:38Ryan Broderick?

  Maybe she was getting cheap dental surgery.

• 39:42Speaker 02

  But, you know, supposedly she was on a spiritual journey. She reemerged, I think, in January. She all of a sudden came out with a new Instagram page that, of course, the sleuths immediately found, totally different username. And it was just a photo of her sitting on a boulder in Joshua Tree. And she had this caption about, you know, how everyone's judging her and they don't know her story. And again,

• 40:04Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, here, let me, yeah, let me read it, actually. When the whole world is looking to you for answers, what would you say? That's iconic. What, what, what an incredible way to, to open that. How would you feel if your entire existence was put on display for the world to judge you without knowing your truth? To say you are at fault for your father taking his own life? Are we so quick to put a magnifying glass at the life of another that we forget our humanity? Which is very shady. Really appreciate that. But also, I think, quite astute. I think it's a, it's a, it's a fantastic way of summing up basically everything that happened.

• 40:39Speaker 02

  Yes, yes. And it's like, she's sort of positioning herself at like, yes, I'm at the center of the story, but also I don't know you guys anything. I don't need to explain myself. Like, I didn't ask for this kind of a thing, you know? And of course, people acted very normal about that caption, too, you know, about like, well, where's your humanity? You know, why did you do this to us?

• 40:57Ryan Broderick?

  So what happened to our girl Jess? How's she handling all this?

• 41:01Speaker 02

  You know, Jess is upset about the whole thing. And so she feels completely let down. She feels like Hannah owes her an explanation, which she has still not gotten. And she feels like, you know, I invested my time. I deserve to know what happened. It feels kind of like a punch in the face. I believe she's also now recapping other missing persons cases. She's doing now a mix of like restaurant reviews and local sort of Hawaii travel stuff. You know, she did get criticism of like, why don't you actually look into cases where people are actually missing? So I think she's done that, but none of it has quite hit that level of like the Hannah TikToks, you know?

• 41:37Ryan Broderick?

  First, doing a mix of like local restaurant reviews and like missing women cases is an incredible snapshot of the way the internet works in 2025. But yes, and I want to talk more about sort of the way the Panopticon sort of forces people to perform for it. Because this is not, you know, this is not an isolated incident. Like this is sort of just the way things work now. And we're going to talk about all of that after a word from our sponsors, True Crime Cruise. It's a cruise ship where you can talk about all of your favorite murder victims, I guess. We'll be right back.

• 42:17Speaker 02

  Try not to get thrown overboard.

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• 42:48Speaker 04

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• 43:15Ryan Broderick?

  The thing you sort of mentioned about like, why did you do this to us? Like, the internet users who feel victimized, I think is so crucial. Because no one in these situations wants to admit their own agency in a way. Like, especially the influencers, especially the random internet users. They all have this sense that they were compelled to do this. Which, you know, I don't know if I buy, but it's an interesting, like, reaction that you see every time.

• 43:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that sense of agency kind of oscillates too. Because like, there are definitely detectives, quote unquote, on this case who are like, who do feel this real calling and this sense of agency where like, it's up to me, if I don't do this, no one else will. And so like, you do see people really owning that and feeling responsible. And it's almost like they're projecting that same sense of responsibility on this person that they've invested time into, even though that person has not asked for all of these things to transpire. You know, so it's like, it's like, there's this expectation that it's reciprocal when it's really one-sided.

• 44:18Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, no, I... We were, we were trying to look back at like, you know, four examples of, you know, how true crime has evolved. Are you familiar with the Maura, Maura Murray case?

• 44:32Speaker 02

  No, tell me about it.

• 44:34Ryan Broderick?

  So, uh, it was a woman who was going on a trip to Vermont. She crashes her car in New Hampshire, she's never seen again. This is in February 2004. Facebook launches at Harvard, basically around the exact same time. There's like a bunch of like, local chatter about it. And there's a bunch of suspicious stuff, like she packed up her entire room. There were reports she had a big fight with her boyfriend. Um, and then people start speculating about her essentially forever. You know, there's theories that she committed to, there's theories that she killed herself, theories that she wandered into the woods, uh, a theory that, uh, like, a killer picked her up? Like, the killer? I don't know.

• 45:11Speaker 02

  No.

• 45:12Ryan Broderick?

  Or that she like, started, yeah, or that she just like, fled and started a new identity. But Boston Magazine in 2014 looked back at it and they wrote, "In February 2005, members of the DIY detective message..." Web sleuths.com. Man, old internet branding was so good.

• 45:27Speaker 02

  I love.

• 45:29Ryan Broderick?

  Love it. Web sleuths.com. Jumped into the fray anonymous posters with names like grassy Noel 2. Fuck yeah. Once again, conservatives love this stuff like they really do.

• 45:41Ryan Broderick?

  And cyber law sick.

• 45:42Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 45:43Ryan Broderick?

  Attempted to piece together a timeline, wondering why Maura would have partied on Saturday night, or what made her so upset at work in 2007 pages on Facebook and MySpace were created in the hopes of gathering tips, which is crazy because that's like three years later. And in the Franconia City Forum on the small town message board topics.com, more than 42,000 comments have been posted on a thread in just the last four years. And for 20 years, there have just been conspiracy theories circulating. That to me proves that this isn't inherently an internet thing. But the what your story I think illustrates so perfectly is that like, when everyone is sort of being driven by internet traffic,

• 46:27Ryan Broderick?

  the behaviors I think move faster and they get stranger.

• 46:31Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I think it's all happening in this climate where like, this idea of authority gets flattened where everyone is an authority, you know, it's like, we don't trust what the cops say, we don't trust what the news reports and like, here, I'm going to tell you what happened on my Tik Tok. And so I think everyone is listening to these and it becomes this like game of telephone where it just like amplifies everything.

• 46:50Ryan Broderick?

  Exactly. Even crazier, there was a development in Maura's case last month. A man named Stefan Baldwin was sentenced to 15 years in prison for a scam, where he took money from animal shelters and killed the animals.

• 47:02Speaker 02

  Oh, my God.

• 47:03Ryan Broderick?

  And apparently he dated Maura when they were in school together before she went to Amherst, which is where she went missing from. And his DNA was in her car and it's being treated like a new development in the case. Yeah.

• 47:13Speaker 02

  Crazy.

• 47:15Ryan Broderick?

  I think people on the internet forget that like crimes take a while to solve. Like the wheels of justice turn very slowly. I feel like the Trump era is sort of like maybe help hopefully reminding people of this that like, it just takes a while. If you've like sort of zoom all the way forward to, I think, probably the biggest. Most like sort of defining missing persons case of our current internet age, Gabby Petito. Like that to me, I remember following it as a journalist at the time. And I think the major difference, and I've been trying to like, figure out how to say this all episode. I think the major difference is that social media and particularly social video has convinced people that everything they need to solve the case can be found within those

• 48:00Ryan Broderick?

  images and videos. Yeah, that's the difference. Is like, if you see a video of Gabby Petito, you're like, okay, if I watch this video a thousand times, I will find all of the clues, because this is all I have. But like, the context collapse of the internet has convinced me that this is all I need.

• 48:17Speaker 02

  Yes. Yes. I mean, and the, you know, the same way that people were looking at Gabby Petito's YouTube videos and trying to figure out like, what campsite she was at. I mean, the same thing was happening with this Hannah Kobayashi case where like, people were, I mean, Jess, for example, was zooming in on, you know, photos of itineraries that Hannah had written and like, comparing her handwriting to another document and just, yeah, convinced that like, if you look hard enough, the truth will reveal itself.

• 48:42Speaker 03

  How do we balance that, yes, it is, it is crazy to think that because everyone is so, all of crimes can be solved by looking at somebody's online profile, with, because we live in a surveillance state, and also, we do document enough of our lives, that like, actually, a lot of crimes can be solved by like, a large amount of people online, seemingly sometimes better than the police. You kind of have to hold both at the same time, right?

• 49:16Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 49:19Ryan Broderick?

  You do. I agree.

• 49:21Speaker 03

  I guess I find it, it makes me kind of spin out, because it's like, it's so frustrating, because I want to be, I'm like, this feels bad that it's content. And also, you're like, oh, look, they like, uh, they found the boyfriend. That's incredible.

• 49:33Ryan Broderick?

  So, I think, you know, I want to hear Jen's take on this, but my immediate take is that,

• 49:40Ryan Broderick?

  The times that it works, we hear about because we're like, oh, it worked. It's confirmation bias in a lot of ways.

• 49:48Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 49:49Ryan Broderick?

  And the reason you're hearing about like, you know, oh, the internet solved this crime is because there's, I'm gonna say trillions of crimes a day that the internet can't solve.

• 50:01Speaker 02

  I think that's right. And I think like also as someone who, quick shameless plug, but like I am doing a podcast now about a group of teenage girls who did help solve a crime via TikTok. And I think like one of the amazing things about that story is how remarkable and how unique and how rare that is. I think that like, it is true that like in the same way that Hannah randomly showed up in this vlogger's YouTube video of this event at the Grove, like sometimes people do catch suspects or they catch evidence just by total happenstance because they happen to be filming everything and uploading everything online. And like that can be evidence. And I think there are cases that show that. And then, you know, conversely, the danger is that you can spin your wheels being like

• 50:43Speaker 02

  everything is a clue when it's not. So I think like, yeah, definitely both things can be true of like, it can lead to evidence, but like sometimes it's totally random.

• 50:55Ryan Broderick?

  We know when it works because it's like a big deal.

• 50:58Speaker 03

  Totally.

• 50:58Ryan Broderick?

  If a woman had gone missing, I mean, we have a couple of examples here, but like, which we can sort of bounce off of, like, we have a story here from 2017 about Linda O'Keefe, an 11-year-old girl who was found dead in Newport Beach, California in the 70s. Because of DNA advancements, the cops were able to get a new sample and, you know, they needed the public's help to find a match. And tech advancements and crowdsourcing can certainly help, but no one back in the 70s would have thought her diaries and photos of her had the clues that could solve the case.

• 51:35Speaker 02

  Right.

• 51:36Ryan Broderick?

  And so it's such a, it's such a new idea that, and it's, and it's almost exclusively young women. The idea is that young women are documenting their lives so extensively online that we can put all of their social media data together in a timeline and figure out exactly what happened, which is just like not how anybody lives their lives, I don't think, other than maybe streamers.

• 51:56Speaker 02

  Well, and there also is this sense that like you should have access to everyone at any given moment, especially in this case where people weren't sure whether, you know, I think they assumed that she was alive, which thankfully she is, but like, I think there was this element where like, people were commenting and DMing her and like, you know, even just once she was located in Mexico, people were sending her like, money on Venmo, you know, and so I think like, people really felt like, we should have access to this person who has become, in a way, this public figure, like, we should be able to give her our own advice, or like, tell her how we feel about this all, and people want to be able to like, communicate, and in that way, I mean, people were communicating with her Aunt Laurie, she put her cellphone number on TikTok, and so people were just calling in and being like, here's my theory, and so people, I think, took it a step further

• 52:40Speaker 02

  of like, wanting this closeness to that person of like, not just close reading their Instagram, but also being like, oh, I need to DM you, and like, if you're reading this, like, do X, Y, and Z, or whatever, you know?

• 52:52Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, and I think to sort of circle back to the question, yeah, I posed at the top of the episode, like, you know, how is true crime brain rot destroying the world? Like, I think by turning these stories into entertainment, to turning them into a serialized podcast, or documentaries on Netflix that are sort of just algorithmically generated, like, we are creating a culture where the woman at the center of the case, even if she's still alive, like, has no real agency in how big this story gets, and the people who are consuming it feel like they are owed more and more, because it's entertainment, it's something that they're connecting with, it's like, it's emotionally satisfying, and, you know, I think that is really bad.

• 53:37Ryan Broderick?

  I just think that that's really fucked up.

• 53:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, and like, I think there is this cynicism, even among true crime fans, where I think that like, they are smart about how these mechanisms work in the genres and in the industries, where like, you know, there's all this chatter on Reddit about like, when is the Netflix documentary coming out, and like, who are we gonna cast in the movie version of this, and so I think like, people have this expectation that like, oh, this is gonna be IP for X, Y, and Z, and it's unclear whether Hannah actually wants anything to do with it, you know, like, that is the question that all of these production companies are racing to see if they can get Hannah, and meanwhile, Hannah is seemingly just living a quiet life somewhere seemingly in the Pacific Northwest with her, and no one actually knows what's going on with her, but she has given no indication that she wants this kind of like, Hollywood treatment, you know?

• 54:25Ryan Broderick?

  Also, what would the movie be? It's four days and a bunch of Reddit posts. This is the thing that like drives me totally nuts about this stuff is that like, and you can always tell it when you're talking to somebody who's like consumed too many posts about something. And they're about to like tell you like, oh my God, like the craziest thing happened online. And you can watch the light kind of go from their eyes is like, almost like they're describing a dream to you. Because they realize that what they're describing is just like, they read a lot of posts. And like those things like not, they're like, oh my God, then this subreddit said this, but that wasn't. It's like, yeah, you're just talking about posts. Like, what are you talking? Like, this isn't anything. Like, um, and I, I think it's a real testament to like how easily you can be swept up in this stuff. And feel like you're part of this thing that like, there is no center to.

• 55:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:08Ryan Broderick?

  Not you. You actually did the work to like figure out what's going on. But I'm talking about like the people on Reddit.

• 55:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, and I, it's weird because I feel like I have this like parasocial relationship with all of them too, where like, once I started digging into this, it was like, oh, I get it. Like, I get the appeal. I can't judge anyone. Like, this is, I thought it was fascinating. Like, I probably had this glazed look over my face as I was, you know, digesting every single thread. Because like, there is this sense of mystery to it. Um, you want it to resolve in some way. And I think at the end of the day, the fact that like, maybe she was just someone who needed a break. Or like, didn't want to respond to her family's text messages. Like, there is this interesting question at the end of it too, of like, at what point can a woman, like a grown adult woman, just decide to kind of walk away from her life? Or like, do we need to be beholden to our phones at any given moment, you know?

• 55:57Speaker 02

  And like, there is this question of if this had happened 20 years ago, like, probably none of this would have happened. Because she wouldn't have been on Instagram. She wouldn't have been on iMessage, you know, she wouldn't have been geolocated. Um, on Find My Phone. And so like, I don't know, in some ways, I do think it is this fantasy too of like, whoa, like she really escaped off the grid and like, no one knew where she was. Like, there is something sort of amazing. And like, I, I don't know, I think there's something envious about that. Like, that's so cool that you just didn't like, it's horrible. Like, she put her family and friends through hell. But I think there's something enviable about the fact that she was actually able to go off-grid. Again, I don't know. It sounds like she really did go through something traumatic. I don't know what was going on. But it did feel like she embodied this fantasy of losing touch with modern technology.

• 56:43Ryan Broderick?

  I do love that this story effectively boils down to a woman like did something for herself. And it was so catastrophic to society that it sent several people into like deep psychological tailspins. The police were called and it became a national news story for like an entire month. I think that's really beautiful. A woman, a woman went on a vacation to Mexico and didn't tell anybody and the entire country shut down for like a month.

• 57:08Speaker 02

  Yes, it was like her self-care journey became total pandemonium, trafficking fears, like America's worst nightmare.

• 57:17Ryan Broderick?

  That's the real crime, if you ask me, is a woman going on vacation by herself and not telling anyone.

• 57:21Speaker 02

  If a woman does not respond to her mom's text message within two days, like should they call the police? I don't know.

• 57:29Ryan Broderick?

  Her aunt and her mom will never speak to each other again after going on a national manhunt for her.

• 57:35Speaker 02

  It's sad, like they're all really sad and really comical. Like there are, yeah, it's a really, I don't know, it's really crazy.

• 57:42Ryan Broderick?

  Every person's life is messy. Everyone's family is definitely messy. And the internet like is very seductive in how it lies to us about that not being true for everyone else. Like we assume that the person who's now been put in the viral pedestal has a perfect life and will have not, won't have the inconsistencies that we have. And every single time, like we discover that that's not true. Like every single time we find out that somebody's flawed and they've got some weird aunt that lives in a van and they like their lives are a mess. Like it's just, that's just everybody.

• 58:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, I did see, side note, I did see that Larrie was selling her RV and I'm very curious about what's happening. See, I'm like deep in it too, because I was like, oh, she's

• 58:23Ryan Broderick?

  Panic World listeners, our Patreon is $5 a month. If you can hit our next goal, our stretch goal, we will buy the, we will buy the van, we will buy the van and drive around the country.

• 58:33Speaker 02

  That would be incredible. You could do tour stops, you could, you could podcast from the van itself.

• 58:38Ryan Broderick?

  We could podcast from the van. I think, I think that's exactly the way to do it. I want to thank you for coming on the show. This was as delightful as a conversation about a missing woman could be. So just really, where can people follow you online?

• 58:53Speaker 02

  You know, I've started a Substack that I, like everyone else, that I have yet to actually write on, but someday this will be aspirational, genswan.substack.com. And listen to my podcast, which is also about online detectives called My Friend Daisy.

• 59:09Ryan Broderick?

  So if you want to hear a bit of an extended cut of this episode, you can join our Patreon at patreon.com/panicworld. And for just five bucks, you get more episode. You also get ad free episodes and a whole bunch of other stuff. Patreon.com/panicworld. Panic World is a Garbage Day production. Subscribe to the newsletter at garbage day dot email. Panic World is written and produced by Grant Irving. It's hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Our amazing researcher is Adam Bumis. It's engineered by Rebecca Seidel. Our deranged logo was created by Gabby Cash. Please give us $5 at patreon.com/panicworld. Please give us products to sell by contacting multitude@multitude-production/ad.

• 59:53Ryan Broderick?

  For any other way you would like to give us money or work with us or promote us or become financially entangled with us, you can reach out to our fixer, our wonderful bag man, Josh Fielstad, and you can reach him at [email protected]. And one piece of advice from me to you. Chill out. Touch grass while you still can.

• 1:00:18Speaker 05

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