I'm Manny and this is Devin, and this is no such thing.

The show where we settle our dawn arguments and yours by actually doing the research.

On today's episode, how did we all hear that Sierra rumor?

I No, there's no no such thing, no such thing, no such thank touch thank no touch thank.

All Right, So today's episode is actually a collaboration with our friends over at Panic World, so we would be joined by Ryan and his producer Grant.

It is about middle school conspiracy theories and rumors.

Uh, we're gonna be talking about a time long long ago, So there's gonna be some language that is not up to date that we're gonna be referencing.

For example, throughout this episode, we're gonna use the term hermathodite, which we're using at the time to refer to intersects people, which, if you do not know, are people who have sexual anatomy or reproductive organs or chromosome patterns that do not align with what we assume to be typical definitions for male or female.

We're also going to be talking about this idea of people pretending to be a gender that they are not.

Obviously, this is very outdated language, and we know that Trench people are not pretending to be something that they're not.

I would like to say that that's outdated, but as we discuss in this episode, this is.

Current day phenomenon.

So let's get into it, all.

Right, fellas, we are gathered here today to try and get to the bottom of something that we've been trying to get to the bottom of for a very long time.

Now, just some quick text for the listeners.

No, where did you go to middle school?

Connecticut?

In Connecticut and New Jersey?

Okay?

I went to middle school in Ohio?

How about you, Ryan, Massachusetts?

And despite the fact that we all went to different middle schools or high schools in different states, I'm willing to bet that we've all heard the same celebrity rumor.

And then, you know, we all went to these schools in the early two thousands and so what was the biggest celebrity rumor at your school?

Devin, I'm cheating a little bit because it's what the episode is about, but it's not.

It's not a you know, we're talking to the listeners.

It was that Sierra, the R and B singer was born.

At the time we were saying she was born hermapthadite.

Today we would say.

In yes, and she apparently was on Oprah where she revealed this to the world.

Does that sound familiar to you, guys.

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

Oh okay, because there was also one for Lady Gaga.

Yes, oh yeah, yeah.

We would have been high school or college.

Yeah, but it's come around a bunch.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Basically in middle school, the biggest celebrity rumor was that Sierra was what we were calling back then a hermaphrodite, or that she was trans And I've been personally fascinated by the fact that no matter where you went to middle school in the United States, you heard of this rumor or participated in the spreading of it.

And the reason why I'm fascinated is because it was so early in social media kind of trajectory, or before social media.

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

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

So Sierra grew.

Up in College Park, Atlanta.

If you've ever listened to hip hop in the early two thousands, you'll recognize that neighborhood because it was yelled out in virtually every hip hop song.

And it's getting best to me of course.

And in high school she created a girls singing group called Hearsay with two of her friends.

Uh they got so popular that she got a writing deal with Jazzy Fay.

Together Jazzy Fans here wrote a few demos.

One of those demos is what would Become One two Step, which is the hit single from her debut album, Goodies in two thousand and four, So Much, which featured Missy Elliott, a frequent collaborator of Sierra.

I know you heard about a lot of greatam c but they ain't got nothing, no men because.

Of Thattua and someone who also had rumors swirling about her sexuality at the time.

Goodies.

The album debuted at number three on Billboard's Top two hundred, and it was around this time that she also became a sex symbol.

She released this single Goodies on the album Goodies, and I just want to play you guys some of the lyrics I bet you want the Goodies that you thought about it got you all hot and bothered mad because I talk around it.

If you're looking for the goodies, keep on looking because they stay in the jars.

Obviously, the song meaning is that, you know, everyone around her, people in the music industry, are incredibly thirsty for Sierra, and she's telling them that, you know, even though I'm young, like I know what I'm doing, it's not happening.

Get over it.

It's like common knowledge, I guess in American society, where like people will sometimes make up things about people who have rejected their advances, and I just I do wonder if that had a role to play in this rumor getting started.

So we did an episode kind of about the like the entertainment world rumor mill and like how it's evolved now, like the Justin Baldoni stuff.

And I have to assume that, like the new version where they're waging war with like troll accounts and stuff, is just a digital version of what was already happening.

So like hearing this, which is the first time I've sort of heard this all put together, it wouldn't surprise me if she's writing what is effective, like a shady track about like predatory man in the industry, and all of a sudden a rumor appears it she is intersector hermaphrodite that feels totally linked to me.

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

Yeah, so and we looked at you know, went to classic Google trends, typed in Sierra Man to see when these rumors started.

So there's basically nothing until December of two thousand and four, and then it starts to go up a little bit.

January starts to go up a little bit more, and then by February of two thousand and five, it's when it hits its peak.

Was there any kind of award buzz around goodies?

She definitely was nominated for a bunch of the kind of classic awards.

I'm not sure if she won any.

I should look up computer because I'm wondering if like the peak is because of award season buzz or like I'm wondering, because when we've done sort of similar research, like there usually is like something that you can kind of point to be like maybe that's what caused it.

That would be what my thought would be.

Yeah, it could be.

So we looked into this, and in two thousand and five, Sharah was not up for any major awards, and the next year, so two thousand and six, she was nominated for and did end up winning one Grammy Award.

So she was at a party in February of two thousand and five, a Vibe magazine party, and this is the quote that everyone sort of keeps going back to New York Daily News.

Ask her about it, as far as I can tell, this the first time.

YE ask her about it.

Yeah, that's it.

Yeah.

A lot of people ask her directly about this.

This is not like behind the scenes rumored.

This is like, Sierra, are you a man?

This is face to face though.

And I guess we should mention that part of a big part of the rumor we heard was that she had actually addressed the rumors on the Oprah Show.

There's a bit there's a Mandela effect thing happening where all the thoughts she had already addressed the rumors on Oprah, which never happened exactly.

So Vibe ask her basically, what happens and Sierra's like, you know, it's funny the rumors that I used to be a man.

And she said, the funny thing about it is that people are saying I said this on Oprah.

I've never been on Oprah.

It's gonna take me a while to get on opraen right, Like I just started my career.

Oprah's like a milestone.

I'm not there yet.

So I looked into this.

You know, you can't just take Sierra's word for this.

Has she ever been on Oprah by this point, she had not, but she was on Regis and Kelly.

It'll make a television debut.

Want to show with Sierra with goodies?

Sierra, you got the TV guys back in the day, the air before Oprah's Voting Party special.

So I'm like, maybe people were seeing the ads for you know how they would be like, all right, you.

Know, I actually just googled this because I was curious if people were confusing it with another Oprah episode.

And she did do an interesting episode in two thousand and seven.

Well she did actually in two thousand four.

You was segment in August about trans children.

Yeah, okay, none of the kids' names were Sierra.

I did go through and to be like, all right, maybe is there some confusion here, But yeah, she did do it again in two thousand and seven.

I don't know that that.

In two thousand and four they were calling them trans.

They were saying like gender identity, yeah.

Issues.

I'm sure that episode has aged great.

I'm sure, yeah, everyone, and there's no reason to think about it anymore.

She did a great job.

So I feel like Oprah is the classic.

Like if there's a rumor, you say that you heard it on Oprah.

Growing up, there was another rumor that Tommy Hill figure was on Oprah and he told Oprah, I don't like black people wearing my clothes.

I remember that.

I remember this my mom, Like.

I said, I was talking to my mom about this episode and she was like, oh, yeah, I remember.

I literally stopped buying Tommy Hill Figure for like a year or two.

There was a boycott.

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

And it just never happened.

No, why did he was on the show at all.

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

No, So like how because it wouldn't have been the Internet, Like, I'm so fascinated.

How were we because it wasn't like we saw something online, like hey, I saw on a Reddit thread, you know, Tommy Hill figure saying he doesn't like black.

And there's no there's no reports of him ever saying that and in any kind of context.

No, it would be crazy if he said it on right, Yeah, yeah, pretty amazing to Oprah, Yeah that would take anyway.

The nineties were wild.

But I don't know if that Yeah, how how would that have happened?

So Snop's actually debunked this in February of two thousand and five.

Sierra the Sierra Rumor their best as to why people think this is happening.

It is because there's a random irishwoman named Sierra who had a blog about her transition, and they're saying, if you google Sierra at this time, this is one of the first things that pops up.

So people are saying maybe that's the case.

Right.

So that's February.

But in March, still circulating, we got the Herald News in New Jersey paper.

There's an eighteen year old Charles.

They're asking him, Charles' what's the craziest news story you heard recently?

And he says that Sierra is a man.

They printed this.

That's a good column.

It's one it was like get to know your neighbors segments and that's Charles's.

Fun you know, news story night.

I actually tried to track down Charles.

We found him and I reached out sent him the photo and he did not respond.

So we get our first sort of inkling here of maybe where this is coming from.

So in March of two thousand and five, there's this chain letter that's going around.

Remember chain letters, Yeah, of course they're very important on email.

Yeah, on email.

And it's a fake article from all Hip Hop.

And the gist of the article is that Sierra goes on not Oprah but one O six in Park and.

She says I am gay.

And then.

I'll read what it just says, because it's just crazy.

Sierra's coming out as a lesbian would have been difficult on its own but also having to admit that she is really a he on national television was caused for celebration amongst the gay and lesbian community.

No major pop star singer has ever come out as a transvestite to viewers, especifically after already releasing an album.

So I'm gonna ignore like all of the terms that they're using there because it's a mess.

But it is fascinating to me that that is written as like an inspirational thing is basically what I like.

That's someone made this up or misunderstood this.

I'm imagining that this was probably shared like within like a black gay email community.

That would be my guess.

Yeah, I got a treasure trove that somebody sent me off, like old chain letters that I've been like looking at over the last few months, and it's really fascinating that like they are very similar to what you would see on Facebook now that they are written specifically for a group like either a list serve or like people who know each other.

So it's interesting to me that like that rumor is being shared positively within some sort of in groups.

That's cost for celebration.

Yeah, Like it's not like they're not being mean a bad.

I mean, they're completely confused on what's happening in every possible way.

But it is interesting that it's like inspirational as a framing.

So then that's you know, beginning of March, sort of mid March, Tierra goes I want in six in Park and this is the first time we for real, yeah, for real, it's time.

So if there are any.

Rumors anything that's going on with's the era, which there are on the internet and all of the message clear.

Air right now.

Let the people know what's going on.

Any crazy anything, And you know, I gotta say, none of them bother me, but I just do it just to do it, because whatever, there's one thing about me being a man or something like that before I was something when I was born, I got a change, really amaphrodite or something like that.

And they said that I went on Oprah and did it.

And I'm like, okay, come on, now, you know if I was on Oprah, like I mean, it takes a while before that happens with somebody going to Oprah, you know what I mean, Like that's really big, so we know that didn't happen.

If you can find it, though, I'll give you one hundred grand and find you around the water.

And do everything for it, if taking and play it for me.

Yeah, and then there's something else about me being a lesbian or something like that.

I mean, it's so sad, and I'm sitting right here in the dressing It's like, it's so funny to me.

And want I feel about in life is that the bigger and better things get for you, the more people try to bring you down.

And that's just the way I sens the true.

So I mean, that's not true.

I'm gonna say.

It's not true.

I watched One of six and park religiously back then, yeah, and being like, damn all my friends lied to me.

Yea.

I remember watching it just being like, what the hell was that all about?

So this follows her for a little, you know that that wasn't the end of it.

Of course.

July two thousand and five, Entertainment Weekly is doing a write up and they kind of start the article talking about, Hey, the singer, the story goes was born intersexual and stay with us here recently out of herself as a lesbian, her mathedite on Oprah, and it's you know, basically her giving the line of like, no that's not true.

Then a year later, so November of two thousand and six, in a Slam magazine article about Kingdom come the not Great jay Z album.

Oh there's a review and out of no where the writer goes, and trust me, writing that last sentence hurt me just as much as when I heard that Sierra was allegedly her math that I thank god she isn't.

This is you know, November two thousand and six.

It was actually hard tracking this this writer down.

I finally did no response as well response.

I think people just don't want to talk about it.

You know, we give him the opportunity to comment on what you said November and it's review.

And then December two thousand and six, AP is doing a profile of her and they're still talking about it.

Associated Press, Yeah, that's.

The Associated Press.

In December of two thousand and six.

They say she just wants to have fun, she said, and that includes ignoring wild rumors that began circulating when she first made a name for herself.

People were saying that she was dating Missy Elliott, who rapped on Sierra's number one.

Hitber That I remember rumors that like Missy Elliot was grooming Sierra.

Yes, I remember that.

By two thousand and six, like interest for this was pretty down and it didn't really pick up until twenty fifteen, which was when rumors started going around that Sierra and Future were expecting a kid, which makes sense why people would be like.

Yes, sure.

There was a moment I think in two thousand and six or seven where she released a song called like a Boy, so it.

Sounds I.

Could switch up the.

Boat not a thing, and I think I remember being I thought, I remember thinking, oh, she's kind of poking fun at but it's really about like privilege, I think.

I think.

So this comes up in one of these articles where you know, they're making all these innuendos about how people think she's a man, and that was it.

That was it.

That's kind of a trajectory of is Sierra really a man?

And this has come up with Lady Gaga.

Megan Fox, Megan Fox.

It's like any sort of like sex symbol, yes, pop star, this like comes up.

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

Yes, like Lady gog in particular, like the claims that she was intersex or trans appeared like right as she is starting to kind of do whatever she wants.

And that's why, like I tend to think there's some sort of like industry rumor mill yeah, that that comes out to like knock them down a peg when they start to like break off, And that would sort of make sense here too, Like she's blowing up and now she's like writing songs about how like you know, she's gonna do her own thing or whatever, and she's having a successful album and then those rumors appear like that.

That doesn't seem like an accident.

To me, And it makes sense that they go to the you know, the intersex or trans thing, right, because it's always like, oh, you were really into this person and now like something thing that like you know, something's happening that you didn't know what's happening.

You've been fooled, you've been tricked.

So like goes at this like insecurity that people have about like oh, no, I thought it was straight, but now I'm into this person who you're telling me is.

She must be trained exactly.

I mean, it's also just super hard to prove in fact, like yeah, we should mention like literally right now, Candice Owens is being sued by the president and his wife of France.

Brigitte Macrone, wife of the French president Manuel Macrone, now says she's going to present scientific and photo evidence in court to prove her sex.

This is part of the couple's court case here in the US, as they're suing the woman on the right side of your screen, conservative commentator Candice Owens for saying on her platforms Macrone was born male.

So like that's how pervasive these sort of things come up.

I think.

Yeah, it was shocking to me going through this that so much of this was in like printed like actually.

I was surprised by that.

I thought it would be more just like blogs and of course there's people you know, it's a common blogs and stuff, but a lot of it was like actually printed in like you know, Chicago Tribune and like AP like real newspapers.

Well, I think the assumption was that like no one would ever see it outside of Chicago.

It's like it's not you know, we're very new into a world where we can see what people in Chicago are reading.

Yeah, like that's kind of a crazy idea.

Yeah, we could see what people in other countries are writing, like that's never been the case.

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

So we had some pretty incredible responses to our shower episode.

Some of you said the episode changed your lives.

Carolyn wrote in saying, Hi, guys, I'm a white girl.

We didn't actually wash her lights in the shower.

Your dermatologist guest embarrassed the hell out of me, So now I take an extra ten seconds wash my legs.

Great job, Carolyn, But some of you weren't convinced, like this listener who called in.

I typically only shower once or twice a week, to be honest, and in the office two days a week.

So Monday night I'll take a shower so that I'm clean for Tuesday.

Wednesday, I'm fine.

Thursday, I go back into the office, bill home, take another shower, and nobody has seen to complain to me.

Maybe I'll shower on Friday before the weekend, but like, I don't really care.

Nobody's ever pulled me aside, and like, hey, you.

Stick, I don't know, man.

Then then I think he has doing it too much, know what the dermatologist said, but I think you're going a little too much.

Okay.

Uh.

You guys remember like the first time you ever heard about like drugs, like, oh yeah, my parents house.

Yeah, okay.

I also remember sort of like watching like a Dare presentation, being like should you just be telling us like how drugs were where to get them?

But it's around this time I think that I first heard of what I've considered like the funniest, stupidest middle school rumor.

I think it's endlessly funny.

Have you guys ever heard of jenkam?

I don't think so.

No.

Vaguely, the word sounds familiar.

Ab yeah, not the jeans, No, okay, that's jinko.

So jenkam.

I'm going to describe it to you and I hopefully you don't throw up.

But there was a rumor in the late nineties, I want to say, mid to late nineties, early two thousands that you could get high by pooping and peeing in a bottle and then huffing it.

And it became a massive moral panic for local news stations across the country, and it was called jenkam.

And I remember like one I remember hearing about it, the idea of like two kids were found getting high on jenkom by the river or whatever, or like by the quarry, and like it was this thing that like, and I've talked to other people over the years who remember the Jenkom panic of the late nineties, And so we're gonna be talking about the Jenkom panic of the late nineties.

And my producer, Grant, who's over there in his little cuckchair, he's going to show you a news clip all about jencom.

Here is a shocking heads up for parents about teen drug use.

One Florida Sheriff's Department warns there's a new way for your kids to get high and as Fox series Jack Miller reports, they're using raw sewage.

The Washington Post, the Drugs Report, and Inside Edition are all talking about jenkom.

It could be uh toxic in harmony.

The bulletin describes jencom as gas produced by raw sewage that's allowed to ferment.

Pictures show young people who appear to be breathing in jencom.

When we mentioned this new concoction to people on the street here in Jacksonville, not only had they never heard of it before, but they said they didn't want to get anywhere near it.

It sounds horrible.

Yeah, I couldn't imagine doing something like that.

That guy looks like the exact kind of guy that would do Jacob, and the fact that he's like, I don't want to touch it means it's not real.

That's that's that's how you know, because that guy is like that guy looks like a bath salts guy, and he's like, I don't want to touch Jencob.

Honestly, they need to find something better to do with her life, seriously, because.

That's just insane.

I can't imagine anybody doing something like that.

Sounds pretty sick to me.

Huh, okay, not anything you would ever consider.

Never what are your thoughts?

Here?

Are your first reacted?

Isn't Jencob essentially how the ninja turtles are created in this like the fumes from human from waste, that's disgusting.

I don't think I've ever heard of this, so.

You two, haven't you ever hearing?

But what's the context you heard it in?

I mean, I don't think I heard.

I don't think it permeated to the news where I was.

I think I just heard it from some other kids.

It must have been something like that.

What I'm curious about is it was it a thing happening?

Is are we talking about a trend here or like this it's a rumor of something that actually wasn't happening.

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

They have a highlighter, highlighter.

Yeah, exactly, So so let's let's let's run through it here.

Nineteen ninety five.

According to Snopes, it's the first.

The first documentation of Jenkim comes from an international newswire service in Luksaka, Zambia, and it reads, human excrement is scooped up from the edges of the sewer ponds in old cans of containers, which are covered with a polyurethane bag and left a steward froment for a week.

The contents are then inhaled, and the result is a lung full of biogases and a powerful hit.

Jencom Hoffers bury their entire face in the ghastly mask, gasping it all in Oh my God.

And so we had talked earlier in the first half about how like one of the most interesting things about like the the late nineties and the two thousands is the move to being able to see all of the news for the first time.

Like the news went from like a thing you saw on your TV, local affiliates or local newspaper, and then maybe you have a national newspaper, but online, all of a sudden, these articles are being uploaded.

You saw the old screenshot of the Washington Post.

There is that really what it used to look like?

Ye?

Yeah, these things looked ugly as hell.

And you were also seeing the rise of websites like the Drug Report, which launches like in the mid to late nineties.

Who are now aggregating this stuff because it's like no one kind of thought about it was an afterthought.

Do you guys know about aeroid dot org?

M okay, I love aeroid dot org.

It is a website.

It's essentially the Wikipedia of drugs, and it has a whole section called trip reports where people like take drugs and then write out like insane stories of it's a lot of people robot tripping in the bathrooms of taco bells across the country, and so they they like look into it and they say it's not gonna get you high, and they say, we have no knowledge about the accuracy of these reports, but it's certainly possible.

The kids in Zambia thought it would be funny to make up a story for adult aid workers that they were inhaling the s who were gas to get high, which I think is like very possible.

By the late nineties, the story is stuck around long enough to make it to the New York Times and the BBC, so the BBC rights jenkim is cheap, potent and very popular among the thousands of street children in Lutsaka.

When they cannot afford glue or are too scared to steal petrol, these youngsters turn to Jenkam as a way of getting high.

It lasts about an hour, says one user, sixteen year old Luke Mombande, who prefers Jenkam to other substances.

With glue, I just hear voices in my head.

But with jenkin I see visions, I see my mother who is dead, and I forget about the problems in my life.

So I think there's a couple of things.

One, I do believe that erowood users are absolute freaks enough to have tested it like they will test anything.

I also think it's possible that there were nine or ten translation issues happening here.

I also think that the BBC, especially in the late nineties, was looking for poverty porn, and there's like an entire genre of this.

I think that there's also like a thread that takes this all the way to Crocodile.

Do you remember that?

So crocodile was a drug that was purportedly being used by Russians in the late two thousands, where they would mix gasoline and heroin and their skin would fall off.

Oh my god.

Not only in the late nineties and two thousands, where people suddenly being able to see the news for the first time, they were creating blogs to write poorly about the rest of the world.

So you had like I Love Africa dot com or whatever, and it's some white guy who has no idea was talking about and he's like blogging about his time as an aid worker there, or I Love Russia dot com and it's weird, crazy Russian story.

So that's sort of the environment that this is taking place in.

I guess, like, do you guys remember anything even similar to this in your in your early days on the Internet, like like weird news stories that would sort of fly by, or weird blogs like writing about this kind of thing.

Well, I remember like the Marilyn Manson rumor that he like removed his his rib cage so that he could.

Go down on himself.

That was the big one in my middle.

Yeah.

But in terms of like these kind of like kind of fleeting drug related not not not a whole ton, I guess, like with Jencom, even though I'm sure it's made up to some degree, it does feel believable.

I guess because of the because of the cost effectiveness.

I suppose like it is free.

I suppose you just made a model.

Yeah, and if it's getting you, if it's supposedly getting you a better high, then you.

Can see visions.

You can see your dead mom in a vision with this one.

But glue, you only hear stuff.

I looked into this for the first time a couple of years ago, twenty fifteen.

I was on a podcast I used to run with my friend Katie called Internet Explorer.

We looked into it and we basically found that it was completely fake and largely a way to troll local police and local media.

And Grant is going to show you an image that looks gross.

Oh my god, it looks like a little boy sticking a straw into a bottle full of poop and pea.

Which aren't you supposed to huf it?

Why is he?

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

Yes?

Now?

Okay, So this is a young man who went by Pickwick on the message board totsy dot com and he posted these photos of what appeared to be him huffing balloons full of poop and pea and bottles it with straws and stuff, And he wrote, Okay, today I set it up and put the bottle in the hot sun.

My friend took pictures of all the steps.

First I shpit in the battle, then I pissed in it.

I took a balloon and I stretched it over the top to catch all the gases.

Now wait a few days and hope the balloon fills up.

Then he posts again, well, today I finally did it.

I probably became the first person in America to huff his own shit gas.

He then continues, after breathing in, I immediately felt that I was passing out.

I did not even have time to spit before I became unconscious.

When I woke up, my spittle had oozed out of my mouth down my chin.

I asked my friend how long I was out for.

He said about a minute, and that he had repeatedly tried to wake me up, but I would not wake up.

After I was fully into the dream like state, visual hallucinations began to start.

I had fleeting visions people who seemed completely random, like my second grade teacher.

At the peak of my trip, I saw things like pillars and my lung that disappeared into shapes, and like, obviously he's making this up to see if can get people to huff their own shit.

Yeah, Like, I think that is the way to think about this.

What do you think happens next in this story?

After now we have message board users trying to convince each other.

To do this.

What do you think happens next?

Oh?

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

Someone has to get sick from actually trying it.

So we don't have a ton of data on that, but what we do have is how it spreads to four chan next, and the idea is to send letters to your principle to get your principal to hire a DARE officer to then tell the kids at your school about Genish God.

And so we have a massive wall of text here.

I'm going to read some of it here.

So you're supposed to email this to your school principle.

Okay, so you're supposed to it, says Step one, email us to your principal.

Step two, question mark, question mark, question mark, Step three profit.

And what you're supposed to write is I am writing anonymous because I do not want my child to get in any trouble.

But I need to alert you to something your students are doing that it is potentially very dangerous.

Yesterday afternoon, I came home early to find my son and his friends getting high on something called jenkam, which they had which they say they heard about at school.

This jenkam is the most disgusting thing I've ever heard of.

And then I'm not going to describe how they describe how.

To do it.

And can you guess what happens once people started doing.

This, Oh, the school, it's definitely took debate computer.

Yes, this is from the Collier County Sheriff's Office Criminal Intelligence Bureau, and it is a drug bulletin about a new drug called jenkam.

Oh they've got the image of the kid, and that's right, good for him.

And this is actually very similar to a couple of bulletins we found passing around Mexico.

Do you remember the Momo challenge.

Momo challenge.

It was like a disgusting statue that if you looked at it, it would like curse you on the internet.

So it became like a huge mass panic that like children were committing suicide after seeing this statue of this evil chicken woman, and Mexican police were creating bulletins like that and passing them around as well.

So like this is this is how far back this idea goes.

And then of course the Washington Post they write about it, they fall for it, they take down the post.

Oh, Fox News falls for it, and they write, we wouldn't classify it as a drug so much because it's faces and urine, says Garrison County as spokesman for the Drug Edforce and Administration in Washington.

You pretty much you pretty much hit the at the bottom of the.

Barrel if you experiment which fair.

Yeah, and eventually Pickwick, the guy who does the pictures of him huffing the bottle, he admits that it's all fake and that what you've been looking at, don't worry is a mixture of nutella, water flour, and beer, and he wrote, I never inhaled any poop gas and got high off it.

I have deleted the pictures, hopefully no weirdos save them on his computer.

Yeah we did.

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

Well, sorry, Bud, So.

This is him feelings like some level of guilt that all of these places picked it up.

I thought that was kind of the goal.

I think it's a couple of things.

One, I think we are at a really pivotal moment in the late ninety two thousands where the Internet is just getting big and no one really understands how big it's getting, and you have early message boards that are beginning to network with larger message boards.

Four Chan comes around in like two thousand and three thousand and four, So like all of that stuff is starting, the media is probably doing a thing, and I'm trying to like think back to my time in that period like in Jay school, and I'm learning about it, and I believe what it was was like you had a newsroom.

They'd write their stories and then they would just upload them online and forget about it.

So they're all of a sudden getting viral traffic for the first time, and they're like the first big viral New York Times piece.

I forget what it was.

I looked it up years ago.

I think happens in like two thousand and nine, when like they're like, whoa, this is like a big thing of traffic.

So all of these stories are being passed around, no one's really paying attention, and these worlds are colliding.

And I think, if I had to imagine this, pickquick kid was like, uh oh, you know, if you have pictures showing up in like a bulletin for like local law enforcement, who's like a whole other thing here, Like local law enforcement have been using the Internet in weird ways for twenty thirty years that no one really still to this day pays attention to.

I think all these horses are just combining in ways where like people just weren't prepared for how viral it could go.

It's interesting too, how the Sheriff's department handled this.

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

They're trying to get ahead of it.

Yeah, I feel like that's all the sort of like kid panics, like they just react first and then try it.

I don't know.

I don't even know if they ever try to, like you, if it's real.

Well, like, Ryan, have you looked into like did you ever cover the tie pods thing?

Teenagers appearing to eat laundry detergent pods and posting the pictures on social media.

Photos showed the pods being used.

It's pizza toppings or a bowl of them mixed with bleach for breakfast.

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

What we found was that the majority of tiepods being smoked or huffed or eaten or whatever were either from trolls or darker like there was a string of old people with dementia thinking they were candy and it was one of those things where it like bubbled up out of consumer reports and sort of took on a life of its own and no one really knew how to deal with it.

A similar trajectory would be Nike will Chicken, Like the idea of that TikTok users are boy and Chicken and Nike, Well, which I did do eventually, by the way, it smells horrible, don't do it, but you can find that on our pages.

But like it's another one where it's like the institutions don't know how to address the rumor without amplifying it.

Yeah.

Yeah, And so like one because you know, with journalists, like if local law enforcement have a press conference and like teenagers are huffing their own shit, the journalists is like, well, police today, So the teenagers are huffing their own shit, And nowhere in that in that interaction is anyone going, well, are they huffing their own shit?

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

Like we're at in a kind of more serious twist on this, Like this is playing out right now with like ice raids and stuff, like local law enforcement will say something, or or a law enforcement agency or a government agency will say something, and journalists will just write down that they set it, and by the time that that travels there might be another journalists in the background going well is this real?

Is this right?

And people have already moved on, and like it can happen for silly stuff and it can happen for serious stuff.

I thought about this with the ice rates stuff.

But are making now these like crazy social media like videos that are like, yeah, it's like a movie and you're showing people's faces and I'm like, Okay, we don't know what these people have done at all.

And now you're in some like hype reel for for ice right, and it's like you just took me out of my home.

It's like what if there are no charges on this person.

It's like it's already too far gone.

Yeah, you're already well.

I think that's the evolution of a story like Jenkin, which is like like, now the institutions have direct access to information channels.

As we looked into more panics into the twenty tens, tide pods, for instance, you'll just start to see local fentanyl is a great example of this, where the law enforcement just have a Facebook page.

Yeah, and he just posted the Facebook page like people are dying from like touching fentanyl and there's no journalists involved there.

And the final evolution of that would be the the DHS doing like sizzle reels for ice raids where they don't need any media coverage.

They can just transmit it directly.

And that is a really weird world to live, because it wasn't that this one was good.

I mean, the old world pretty is jenkin, but the new world, God knows what's happening.

Yeah, you know, after the break, we're going to be talking about something that's already popped up today, which is Marilyn Manson trying to suck his own dick, which was the big rumor, probably the biggest rumor of my middle school.

But we're going to talk about that right afterward from our sponsors, who are probably furious.

Okay, So you guys had been wondering about the Marilyn Manson rumor, and we did a little digging into where this came from, and according to Hysteria mag the rumor began on the twenty seventh of November nineteen ninety four, which is actually kind of wild that like it has like an exact date.

Yeah, Marilyn Manson was arrested after a show for violating the Adult Entertainment Code, and police arrested him after being under the impression that Manson had performed oral sex on a man while performing on stage, but as it turns out.

He wasn't.

Rather it was Jack Off Jill vocalist Jessica, who was apparently wearing a prosthetic penis at the gig, with Manson stimulating oral sex on the appendage.

He was held for sixteen hours and then released without charge.

And that I think the double confusion of that spread and turned into him sucking himself off, and then it was how would he suck himself off?

And it was he got too ribsy, So people were trying to rationalize what they were they saw.

Exactly, I do think so we live in a time of like peak rumors peak conspiracies.

There's so many it's hard to pay attention.

The really pernicious ones.

All seemed to kind of touch on the idea of revealing someone being part of a subculture, something that we part of society that we don't pay attention to.

Whether it's drug users, or it's trans people, are gay people's it's people who are considered like outside of the mainstream and like the really successful rumors seem to work when you claim that someone well known is actually part of that.

And and and I think there's a kind of fear of the other required there.

There's something like tantalizing, and it's hard to prove.

It's hard to disprove on the other person.

They can't they can say no, and you just don't believe them.

It's funny should mention we actually spoke to an expert about rumors and why we attached to rumors, especially celebrity rumors, what we get out of them.

Yeah, So I spoke to Charlotte Debaker.

She's a researcher out of Belgium, and her research focuses on gossip and rumors and kind of the historical and evolutionary purpose they have served for humans.

Gossip became this system to vicariously learn from the experiences of other people, but it also became like a reputation mechanism to control free writers, people that were gonna take away benefits from you.

And a lot of it's like survival.

So it's like you learn, like, don't do this drug, it's gonna kill you.

And you not only warn others like other animals will shout out these alarm calls when there's a dangerous animal or predator coming up.

We humans start gossiping about be careful.

You have to be careful about that person.

And at the same time, because gossip has like multiple effects, it's also slendering the reputation of that person, So you're not only warning others about the potential danger, but at the same time you're also giving a punishment to the person that you're targeting by ruining their reputation.

Then you build a community just based on talking about these other people, and then there's just like the parasocial element, which has only gotten more increased with time, where it's like we become so attached to these people and it's all we're talking about, you know, Britney Spears or Sierra or whoever, and it's obviously one sided.

Our stone age minds are not designed by evolution to perceive these celebrities as no members of our real social network.

So you see them, you start to feel emotional about them.

Some you like very much, some you dislike very much, and then the mechanisms for why you gossip about real life people start to transmit to gossiping about these celebrities as well.

You want to slender Taylor Swift versus Blake Lively, choose a camp and then you start to slender the one person and then praise the other one or vice versa.

Then, of course, just the way they spread, it's like Sierra even answering dignifying these questions with like, well, no, of course, not only just feeds the fire, and that I think has even gotten worse in more recent times.

You know, it's interesting to me, how like if you look at it on a timeline, like the the nineties are really bad for this stuff, and the two thousands still pretty bad, but like it's changing.

And then it does kind of feel like between like twenty ten and like August twenty fourteen, the start of gamer Gate, there's a kind of a moment where it actually feels like things are getting better, Like information is kind of flowing at a speed where we can like say that's fake, that's not fake, Like media organizations are interested in debunking stuff.

Debunking doesn't feel tied to a culture war thing yet, Yeah, and then it flips and it gets progressively worse, and then after COVID it feels like we are basically back in the nineties again, and I think a lot of it has to do with like ephemorality, Like TikTok feels as ephemeral as nineties TV to me, where you will see a TikTok and you'll pass you by and you won't think about it, and then you'll just like be repeating some insane thing you heard and you won't be able to find it.

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

It's Yeah, I even find myself because I use I use x still Twitter because it's like you can see all the bad people on there, and so it's great for my job.

But I have found myself like accidentally absorbing through osmosis random stuff I'm seeing and then like saying it out loud to someone there and being like, what are you talking about.

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

Thank you to our friends Grant Irving and Ryan Broderick for working with us on this one.

It was a weird one.

If you want some more weird times about the Internet, check out their podcast Panic World.

So if you want to follow me, you can find me as Ryan hays This on Blue Sky or Broadwick on x or Ryan Hayses on Instagram.

Panic World is Panic World everywhere you'll find it.

Just search type into Little Ai.

It's a Panic World up great, so much fun.

Yeah, it's awesome.

See it all together.

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Our executive producers are Kate Osbourne and mangest Hatti Kudur.

The show was created by Manny Fidel Nor Friedman and me Devin Joseph.

The theme end credit song is by Manny mixing my Steve Bone.

Audition of music for this episode by Zeno Atarelli.

Our guest this week was Charlotte the Baker visit no such thing, not show to subscribe to our newsletter.

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