Speaker 1: Welcome to tex Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios
Speaker 1: How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
Speaker 1: iHeart Radio and I love all things tech, and today
Speaker 1: we're going to cover an interesting topic. There was a
Speaker 1: suggestion from Shaye Lee. And you might remember Shay in
Speaker 1: her alter ego as al Amona, who sabotaged my episode
Speaker 1: about how matches work, and now she's back. Hi, Shay Hi,
Speaker 1: I heard Alimona ran off with the quister. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: the union made in. They're just gonna burn it all
Speaker 1: to the ground, burn it all down. So to give
Speaker 1: some background on what this episode is all about, Shaye
Speaker 1: reached out to me and asked if I had ever
Speaker 1: done an episode about a specific piece of internet folklore
Speaker 1: called aratus, and we're going to get to that. We
Speaker 1: communicate in stories and your traditional folklore. These are the
Speaker 1: tales that are passed around. Typically they're not even written
Speaker 1: down there, their oral traditions. It's told around the campfire.
Speaker 1: And now the campfires turned into creepy pasta, yes, which
Speaker 1: we will talk about. So you know that that also
Speaker 1: developed into things that we call urban legends. Urban leges
Speaker 1: is just another type of folklore. But it was a
Speaker 1: subset of folklore that kind of grew into as we
Speaker 1: started to see the industrial revolution. We saw people move
Speaker 1: to the cities. You know, it became less of an
Speaker 1: agrarian world, and a lot lots of the uh, A
Speaker 1: lot of regions in the around the world became more
Speaker 1: urban and less agrarian, and a different set of folklore
Speaker 1: tales started to arise. A lot of them are like
Speaker 1: tales of warning. Yeah, you say, like don't trust strangers tales. Yes,
Speaker 1: a lot of morality tales too, Yeah, a lot of
Speaker 1: them are like, see what happens if you do this
Speaker 1: thing that breaks our social morays? You will suffer like
Speaker 1: these people did. Yeah, see what happens when you take
Speaker 1: candy and or apples from strange women in the woods, right, right,
Speaker 1: Except now it's like when you're going trick or treating,
Speaker 1: if you don't check all the candy, you're going to
Speaker 1: end up with razor blades and poison. Right. Yeah, I've
Speaker 1: never found a razor blade in any of my candy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: no one in my twenty seven years of trick or treating,
Speaker 1: no one ever did until people started worrying about it,
Speaker 1: and then people would yeah or like or like it
Speaker 1: would be Oh I discovered this, and it turned out
Speaker 1: that they had planted their own discovery that kind of thing,
Speaker 1: kind of like the the murders. Yes. Yes, So one
Speaker 1: of the things I wanted to to kind of allude
Speaker 1: to to kind of set the stage for the stuff
Speaker 1: we're gonna talk about today, which is the more internet
Speaker 1: based stuff. I'm just going to give an example of
Speaker 1: one of my favorite urban legends of all time. It's
Speaker 1: a It's one that's been told a billion different times.
Speaker 1: It's been written in lots of different anthologies. Shay, you'll
Speaker 1: appreciate this. When I was in uh elementary school and
Speaker 1: middle school, the books I checked out the most in
Speaker 1: my school library, we're all about urban legends, ghosts, and
Speaker 1: other types of paranormal, supernatural kind of stuff. We have
Speaker 1: that in common because I did the exact same thing.
Speaker 1: I stopped believing in it. So that's where our path divulge, No,
Speaker 1: so diverted, I should say. So. The story I want
Speaker 1: to tell is the Vanishing Hitchhecker story. Classic story. So
Speaker 1: the basic version of the story goes, a guy's driving
Speaker 1: down a road, a dark country road at night. The
Speaker 1: rain is coming down really hard, it's hard to see,
Speaker 1: and as he's driving down the road, he sees a
Speaker 1: young woman walking along the side the road, and so,
Speaker 1: not wanting her to get totally frozen out in the
Speaker 1: pouring rain, he pulls over and offers her a ride,
Speaker 1: and she gets in the back seat of his car,
Speaker 1: and out of a sense of a concern for her,
Speaker 1: he gives her his jacket to wrap around herself, and
Speaker 1: then she gives him an address, and so he starts
Speaker 1: to drive, and otherwise she doesn't really communicate with him.
Speaker 1: He gets to the address. When he gets there, he
Speaker 1: looks in the back seat and the girl's gone, and
Speaker 1: he never heard the car door open or anything. He
Speaker 1: doesn't know what happened, and his jacket is gone as well.
Speaker 1: There's just a like a the seats wet from where
Speaker 1: she had been because of the pouring rain, but otherwise
Speaker 1: there's no indication. So he goes to the house where
Speaker 1: he had the address and knocks on the door to
Speaker 1: find out what the heck is going on. Woman answers
Speaker 1: the door. Typically it's a woman in this in this legend,
Speaker 1: he explains what has happened. The woman goes pale and says,
Speaker 1: no one by that description lives here. But there was
Speaker 1: a young woman whose family lived here before us, but
Speaker 1: she died years ago and she's buried at such and
Speaker 1: such cemetery. So he goes to the cemetery, and when
Speaker 1: he comes up on the grave of the young woman,
Speaker 1: there's his jacket resting on her gravestone vanishing. Hi. Oh,
Speaker 1: and it's considerate to leave his jacket behind. Yeah, Otherwise
Speaker 1: she's up with teen angel and looking at rings and
Speaker 1: jackets that are just an accumulation of wealth that they've
Speaker 1: had over the years. I remember that movie vaguely. Well,
Speaker 1: I was talking about the song, but there's a whole
Speaker 1: genre of music that's dedicated to teenagers dying. So that's
Speaker 1: an example of an urban legend. It's one that's been told. Like,
Speaker 1: there's lots of variations. Well, the Internet has its own
Speaker 1: versions of this, and we're also going to talk about
Speaker 1: in this episode how the Internet reinforces the communication of
Speaker 1: these stories and reinforces people's belief in it, largely through
Speaker 1: the behavior of those who are sharing the stories and
Speaker 1: also the way the platform themselves work. So you mentioned
Speaker 1: creepy pasta. Let's explain what creepy pasta is, and I
Speaker 1: guess first we have to explain what copy pasta is,
Speaker 1: because creepy pasta is a subset of copy pasta. Before
Speaker 1: I learned it from you, I actually didn't know that
Speaker 1: creepy pasta was a subset of copy pasta. I just
Speaker 1: thought it was its own thing, just the name of
Speaker 1: a forum, because no one ever talks about copy pasta anymore.
Speaker 1: But the it's it's a sort of a portmanteau of
Speaker 1: copy paste, right, and it's the fact that a lot
Speaker 1: of people to share stories. What they would do is
Speaker 1: they would find something on the Internet that was interesting,
Speaker 1: maybe in a message board or whatever, copy it and
Speaker 1: then paste into some other message board or whatever, and
Speaker 1: that's yeah. Usually there was no attribution, like I often
Speaker 1: expelled for that if I tried that. Well, they weren't
Speaker 1: necessarily they weren't necessarily trying to pass it off as
Speaker 1: their own work, but rather like I saw this crazy
Speaker 1: story or this funny joke or whatever it might be.
Speaker 1: But sometimes when you're doing that copy and basing, well
Speaker 1: one you might lose the attribution, so you don't know
Speaker 1: who originated the thing and to sometimes you lose the context,
Speaker 1: like is this a joke? Is it a piece of fiction?
Speaker 1: Is it supposed to be an account of something that
Speaker 1: actually happened. Creepy pasta is a subset where it's specifically
Speaker 1: about spooky, creepy paranormal typically kind of stuff, but not
Speaker 1: necessarily paranormal, but often paranormal, or like the unnamed serial
Speaker 1: killers of Yeah, like the hook that's hanging on the
Speaker 1: card door, that kind of just the killer. Do you
Speaker 1: know who Jeff Jeff the Killer. I do not know
Speaker 1: who Jeff the Killer is. Jeff the Killer is weird
Speaker 1: because it's in his name. Yeah, you would think, well,
Speaker 1: Jeff the Killer is a Baker obviously, listen, sorry, listen,
Speaker 1: my dad was Jeff the Killer Jeff Baker. And um,
Speaker 1: kind of a boogeyman type story, very like how he
Speaker 1: comes into your room if you don't share this, or
Speaker 1: if you share it a number of times or YadA yadya,
Speaker 1: and um that for me, the story isn't what's important.
Speaker 1: I'm sure you've seen pictures of him when you're just
Speaker 1: scrolling through Facebook. Have you seen like the picture it's
Speaker 1: like a big white creepy face that it's been so
Speaker 1: edited that there's like no nose and just a big
Speaker 1: creepy smile and huge eyes, and it usually has like
Speaker 1: a caption that says, go to sleep under it, or
Speaker 1: I probably have. Yeah, I've seen a lot on the internet.
Speaker 1: I don't remember most of it. But um, so, Jeff
Speaker 1: the Killer. There's many incarnations of Jeff the Killer. There's
Speaker 1: you know, the creepy guy that comes into your bedroom
Speaker 1: and kills you and all that. Oh yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: he's so inconvenient and inconsiderate, but um they're because of
Speaker 1: creepy Pasta and just all the threads abut Jeff the Killer.
Speaker 1: There were Jeff the Killer fan girls that would draw
Speaker 1: a little like a little romantic, you know, heart images
Speaker 1: of him as as Yeah, as if that's like they're
Speaker 1: they're brad Pitt that this is this is messed up.
Speaker 1: So we wanted to talk a little bit about a
Speaker 1: couple of examples of creepypasta. This is just the beginning
Speaker 1: of this episode. Two each each section we're going to
Speaker 1: talk about a different kind of subset of Internet folklore.
Speaker 1: But creepy Pasta is one that is pretty easy to reference,
Speaker 1: and uh, one example of it although it didn't necessarily
Speaker 1: start as creepy pasta itself, because creepy pasta tends to
Speaker 1: be in the form of some sort of story. Um.
Speaker 1: A lot of early types of creepypasta fell into one
Speaker 1: of two categories. It was a story about something that
Speaker 1: supposedly happened to someone, and it could it could be
Speaker 1: presented as fiction. You didn't have to present it as
Speaker 1: if it were real, but it's it's given in that
Speaker 1: sort of tale, or it was you know, lost episodes
Speaker 1: of certain types of shows or movies or things that
Speaker 1: that uh no longer are shown, but they do exist
Speaker 1: and there's something creepy about what happened, Like it's that
Speaker 1: one really dark episode of Gilligan's Island. There are versions
Speaker 1: of of it. Now that that particular style of creepy
Speaker 1: pasta fell out of favor fairly quickly, Like it was
Speaker 1: kind of like a creepy version of fan fiction. But
Speaker 1: one of the most prominent examples is slender Man, which
Speaker 1: didn't start off, as I said, as creepy pasta. It
Speaker 1: started off as kind of an exercise. Uh. There was
Speaker 1: the Something Awful forums forum board on the Internet, so
Speaker 1: people would get together and have conversations about different topics,
Speaker 1: and this was particularly in a thread that was titled
Speaker 1: create Paranormal Images. So it's just people trying to use
Speaker 1: photoshop to create images that were unsettling or had some
Speaker 1: sort of alien or paranormal aspect to them, Like the
Speaker 1: idea like make something that if you were to look
Speaker 1: at people would go like, ooh, that's what is that?
Speaker 1: That's creepy. Yeah. So this guy named Eric Knudson created
Speaker 1: a a picture of an elongated, like an unnaturally tall,
Speaker 1: unnaturally thin figure with an odd like obscured face, and
Speaker 1: it became known as the slender Man. He also included
Speaker 1: a little bit of flavor text to kind of give
Speaker 1: some very shifty background on this character and attaching him
Speaker 1: to the fictional fire. And then the Internet took that
Speaker 1: boy Haldy. Yeah. So there were all these different people
Speaker 1: who contributed to flushing out the mythology behind slender Man.
Speaker 1: So the legend of Slenderman grew online, right, and it's
Speaker 1: on all these different communities and people within that thread
Speaker 1: had already predicted that some of the images that were
Speaker 1: being made were likely going to end up on websites
Speaker 1: about the paranormal, but they would be submitted as if
Speaker 1: they were genuine examples of evidence, as opposed to somebody
Speaker 1: specifically crafted this and in fact that did happen, including
Speaker 1: with slender Man. And so that's where we started seeing
Speaker 1: more discussions about it, including people who are sure that
Speaker 1: they had heard of this character before and in fact,
Speaker 1: that was one of the points you wanted to make, right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I worked with a girl a couple of years ago,
Speaker 1: about five years ago. She swore up and down that
Speaker 1: she and a bunch of internet friends contributed to, uh,
Speaker 1: the creation of slenderman um. Not I don't. She didn't
Speaker 1: mention anything about the photoshop. But the way, if I
Speaker 1: can remember it correctly, the way she presented it to
Speaker 1: me was that she and a couple of friends were
Speaker 1: just chatting over the Internet and somebody on the thread
Speaker 1: or the forum said, hey, let's make a legend and
Speaker 1: or let's make a let's let's make an urban legend.
Speaker 1: And they probably already had their you know, base material
Speaker 1: with the pictures and the other flavor text and stuff.
Speaker 1: But she swears up and down that she contributed to
Speaker 1: the creation of slenderman um. Red Letter Media believes that
Speaker 1: they contributed to the creation of Slenderman. There's a video
Speaker 1: called very appropriately did red Letter Media in Vince Slenderman
Speaker 1: Um three guesses about what that video is, and it
Speaker 1: was mostly done tongue in cheet. Yeah, but they their
Speaker 1: criteria is that they made a short film that had
Speaker 1: a character that was bald and war suit. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: and he was ominous, so that makes him Slenderman. But
Speaker 1: by that, by that criteria than like the Gentleman and
Speaker 1: from Buffy are Slenderman from the episode Hush and the
Speaker 1: silence from Yeah, he's Slenderman, and you know, ominous bald
Speaker 1: guys your Slenderman? Dude, are you? Are you Slenderman? I'm
Speaker 1: only I'm only ominous when I'm walking to work. When
Speaker 1: I'm walking away from work, I'm whistling and I'm jaunty. Yeah. No,
Speaker 1: that's a good point. And like when we were sort
Speaker 1: of brainstorming this episode, one thing she said that really
Speaker 1: stuck with me is like everybody made slender Man, Like
Speaker 1: every Yeah, it was like one of those stories where
Speaker 1: you're just like the Internet's baby. We all made him.
Speaker 1: But but his actual creation date is something that we
Speaker 1: can trace back to that photoshop thread, which we even
Speaker 1: know when that was originally posted, which was June eight,
Speaker 1: two thousand nine. It is so rare when you can
Speaker 1: actually trace a legend back to its point of origin. Now, granted,
Speaker 1: it grew much larger than that thread, and in fact
Speaker 1: it even factors into a real world crime. And um,
Speaker 1: this is what I'm sure anyone who's followed the story
Speaker 1: of Slenderman knows about. There were a group of young
Speaker 1: girls in Wisconsin and two They were all friends, and
Speaker 1: two of the friends lured the third one out to
Speaker 1: a remote location and then stabbed her. Uh. She fortunately
Speaker 1: was survived the the attack and made a full recovery. Uh.
Speaker 1: And the two attackers were committed to mental health institutions
Speaker 1: for at least you know a while you said that
Speaker 1: one of them is is currently coming up for parole soon.
Speaker 1: I I didn't actually read the article on it. While
Speaker 1: I was scrolling through the social media interwebs one day,
Speaker 1: I saw an article. I didn't read the article, but
Speaker 1: I saw the headline said, Um, one of them was
Speaker 1: up for parole, and apparently the family of the victim
Speaker 1: is not very happy about that. Understandably, so understandable. It
Speaker 1: is certainly one of those stories where you feel awful
Speaker 1: for everybody. You feel terrible for people who have lost
Speaker 1: enough connection with reality to not be able to tell
Speaker 1: the difference between a fantasy and what is actually real.
Speaker 1: But then when you're a kid, that's that's a tough
Speaker 1: distinction to make. Honestly, these days, as an adult, it
Speaker 1: could be a pretty tough distinction to make. There's a
Speaker 1: lot of misinformation out there, and the whole thing with
Speaker 1: internet folklore is that the problem with it is that
Speaker 1: so much of it seems real. It's presented as it's
Speaker 1: completely sincere and real. Yeah, I mean, I would like
Speaker 1: to think that I don't believe in a tall child
Speaker 1: snatching bald guy, but I mean at late at night,
Speaker 1: you see something like this and your imagination starts to
Speaker 1: fill in gaps and then you know, you start to
Speaker 1: you start to believe things that are not necessarily true
Speaker 1: might be true. Yeah, we wanted to chat a little
Speaker 1: bit about also a couple of other examples of creepy
Speaker 1: pasta really quickly. And this next one was one that
Speaker 1: surprised me because you also mentioned candle Cove, which I
Speaker 1: had not heard of before you mentioned it. I hadn't
Speaker 1: heard of anything about candle Cove until maybe a year
Speaker 1: and a half ago. Um, I was just I was
Speaker 1: at my mom's house one day visiting and she and
Speaker 1: my stepdad were really into the show and it was
Speaker 1: candle and it's the show I think it was on
Speaker 1: SI Fi. There was there. It's their Channel zero series. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's what tripped me up. But yeah, it was a
Speaker 1: show called Candle Cove and they were really into it,
Speaker 1: and she was explaining to me, you know, the the premise,
Speaker 1: the pres sounded familiar, so I don't know if I had,
Speaker 1: you know, encountered the encounter the original, but I looked
Speaker 1: it up because honestly, the reason I was looking it
Speaker 1: up is that I recognized one of the actors from
Speaker 1: Parks and rec and I wanted to figure out what
Speaker 1: his name was. And as I was looking it up,
Speaker 1: all the information about how Candle Cove started off as
Speaker 1: I don't think it was on Creepy Pasta, but it was.
Speaker 1: It was definitely a Creepy Pasta style story. Yes it was.
Speaker 1: It was written by a guy named Chris Straub. And
Speaker 1: what's funny is I've talked to Chris Straub personally years ago.
Speaker 1: So Chris Straub is also a web comic list and
Speaker 1: I wrote for how Stuff Works dot com. I wrote
Speaker 1: the article how web Comics Work, and he was one
Speaker 1: of my sources, and I did a full interview with him,
Speaker 1: chatted with him for about probably an hour while I
Speaker 1: was researching this work. And uh, it's so interesting because
Speaker 1: again I had no idea until we started researching this
Speaker 1: episode that he had contributed this piece of internet lore.
Speaker 1: So the original work is presented as a series of posts,
Speaker 1: again on a message board, so it seemingly a lot
Speaker 1: of contributors. Yes, but but it's it's the work of
Speaker 1: fiction of one person, but presented in the way as
Speaker 1: if it's a thread, a conversational thread between multiple people
Speaker 1: who all remember this children's show that no one else
Speaker 1: seems to realize existed. And it starts off pretty innocently, like, Hey,
Speaker 1: does anyone else here happen to remember this show? I
Speaker 1: remember watching it as a kid, but I don't. I
Speaker 1: can't find anything about it, and so I'm wondering, like
Speaker 1: I just imagine it, and other people say, oh no,
Speaker 1: I remember that show too, and again this is all
Speaker 1: part of the fiction. Yeah. I think like the big
Speaker 1: twist is not only as the show super creepy, as
Speaker 1: people remember more and more about it, it starts to
Speaker 1: appear more and more sinister. But one of the details
Speaker 1: released is that, uh, the person who star the thread
Speaker 1: chatted with his mother about what had happened, and his
Speaker 1: mother said, oh, you would always say that you went
Speaker 1: to want to watch a show called candle Cove, but
Speaker 1: you just changed the channel to static and sat there
Speaker 1: and stared at it for thirty minutes. Yeah. So again,
Speaker 1: very very kind of creepy premise. But that has taken
Speaker 1: a life of its own, where not only is it
Speaker 1: a television series on sci fi where they take elements
Speaker 1: of that and they wrap other narrative around it, um,
Speaker 1: but on top of that, like I even debate on
Speaker 1: using on including this because I thought, well, clearly this
Speaker 1: is the work of fiction. People know it's work of fiction. No,
Speaker 1: there are YouTube interviews are in YouTube videos I should
Speaker 1: say titled is was Candle Cove a real TV show?
Speaker 1: And I thought, well, if you have to make a
Speaker 1: video about it, then there are people wondering about it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because there's there's videos of like original Candle Cove episodes
Speaker 1: which I'm pretty sure are just lifted from the show
Speaker 1: or base or there might be some like fan made
Speaker 1: things because there were fan fictions written about candle Cove. Yeah,
Speaker 1: now a lot of these actually would get a lot
Speaker 1: of fan fiction added to it. And Uh, the other
Speaker 1: thing that this reminds me of is something called the
Speaker 1: Mandola effect. Um. Actually that's technically the Mandela effect, but
Speaker 1: I've heard it pronounced the wrong way. But it's named
Speaker 1: after Nelson Mandela. So have you heard of this effect.
Speaker 1: I've heard of the effect. I don't actually know why.
Speaker 1: It's called the Mandela effect. So Nelson Mandela was imprisoned
Speaker 1: for many, many years, and the Mandela effect refers to
Speaker 1: this belief that people had that they had heard newscasters
Speaker 1: in the nineteen eighties announced that Nelson Mandela had passed
Speaker 1: away while in prison, but that never happened. But people
Speaker 1: swear they remember seeing those newscasts, but it never happened.
Speaker 1: There are other examples of this. Uh. The two that
Speaker 1: people tend to site pretty frequently are the Bernstein Bears,
Speaker 1: where it's it's spelled stain at the end. That's the
Speaker 1: correct spelling, but everyone thinks it's steen s T E
Speaker 1: I n instead of s T A I n um,
Speaker 1: and they swear like no I have a book and
Speaker 1: it's spelled the other way. It's the barn steam Bears,
Speaker 1: the barn Stain Bears, and the other one is Uh.
Speaker 1: Everyone's convinced that the comedian Sindbad was in a movie
Speaker 1: in which he played a genie named Shazam. Apparently he
Speaker 1: was in like a weird promo where he was a genie,
Speaker 1: but it wasn't there. There was no movie because there
Speaker 1: was no Yeah, but those are all like Internet legends
Speaker 1: that ended up sort of get growing, and this man
Speaker 1: Mandela effect or Mandela effect had this added benefit of
Speaker 1: people hearing something and then convincing themselves that they too
Speaker 1: had experienced it, which is kind of interesting. Now we
Speaker 1: actually have tons more we could talk about, like their
Speaker 1: other LM monts, not just creepy pasta. There's stuff like
Speaker 1: inspirational stories that are referred to as glurge, where I've
Speaker 1: never heard refer to it as that it's you had
Speaker 1: to be on snopes dot com back in the day
Speaker 1: on those message boards, but glurge refers to stories that
Speaker 1: are meant to tap into those sort of sappy emotions
Speaker 1: that we have. Uh. They also tend to be kind
Speaker 1: of dark under the surface, but it's it's the inspirational
Speaker 1: story counterpart to creepy pasta, except it's often passed as
Speaker 1: it really happened, and it turns out it's never anything verifiable.
Speaker 1: But rather than go on all arounte about that, we're
Speaker 1: gonna take a quick break and when we come back,
Speaker 1: we're gonna talk about some conspiracy theories. Now, we started
Speaker 1: off this episode talking about works of fiction that aren't
Speaker 1: necessarily intended to be taken seriously, but sometimes take a
Speaker 1: life of their own outside of their point of origin,
Speaker 1: and then they are taken seriously. There are other times
Speaker 1: where there's just a joke or a hoax that people
Speaker 1: end up taking as a sincere message. And the first
Speaker 1: one I wanted to mention is is one of the
Speaker 1: earliest examples of an Internet hoax. It actually dates to December,
Speaker 1: when very few people even knew what the Internet was,
Speaker 1: and it all involves the company Microsoft supposedly acquiring the
Speaker 1: Catholic Church. Huh, you're a Catholic, so so do you
Speaker 1: own shares in Microsoft? Is that how it works? I
Speaker 1: mean I have a Mac, so I don't. I don't
Speaker 1: know that's true. It's right in front of it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I if if my mom's secretly owned shares and Microsoft,
Speaker 1: then you know she's got some splain in too, do Yeah.
Speaker 1: So had you heard of this before? I actually never
Speaker 1: have maybe, And I went to Catholic school for so
Speaker 1: many years in my life, I'm surprised I never heard
Speaker 1: this four. How old were you in ninety four? I
Speaker 1: was two, okay, maybe that's why you didn't hear about it, okay,
Speaker 1: whereas I was older than that. So this was a joke,
Speaker 1: and it was clearly a joke. It was a press release,
Speaker 1: supposed press release, but it was, you know, a joke
Speaker 1: in the form of a press release supposedly from the
Speaker 1: Associated Press, which is you know, it's a legitimate organization. Uh.
Speaker 1: It even had a byline by Hank Vorhez was supposedly
Speaker 1: the name of the person who who wrote up this
Speaker 1: press release in your relation to Jason, not Vorhees. Uh so,
Speaker 1: uh yeah. And I even wrote, just imagine what Clippy
Speaker 1: would be like. So you're trying to transubstantiate, would you
Speaker 1: like some help? Um? So? Yeah. The the hoax, the
Speaker 1: press release hoax even included a host in quote from
Speaker 1: Bill Gates, who was referring to religion as a growth market.
Speaker 1: Obviously that was part of the joke. And I said
Speaker 1: that Microsoft would get exclusive electronic publication rights to the Bible,
Speaker 1: so they would be able to only one version of it,
Speaker 1: not the King James, and that would be the yeah,
Speaker 1: be it would be whatever is the most Catholic version. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the longer version, the Catholic version of anything. Is the
Speaker 1: longer version ever been to a Catholic wedding. Yes, I
Speaker 1: had still going on. I know I had to sneak out.
Speaker 1: That was seven years ago. But yeah, this, like I said,
Speaker 1: it was pretty clear it was a joke. And yet
Speaker 1: there are people who either they got mad because they
Speaker 1: thought that Microsoft had been perpetuating this joke and they
Speaker 1: said this is in poor taste and Microsoft got flooded
Speaker 1: with complaints, or there were a few people who thought
Speaker 1: it was a genuine press release and they were horrified
Speaker 1: about it, and they were reaching out the Microsoft express
Speaker 1: their horror and concern. It got so bad that Microsoft
Speaker 1: actually formally denounced the joke on December six, released its
Speaker 1: own press release to say, no, we had nothing to
Speaker 1: do with this announcement. We definitely did not buy the
Speaker 1: Catholic Church. We know, we don't know who it was
Speaker 1: that created this, We have no connection to it. We
Speaker 1: are sorry that you're upset, which was weird that they
Speaker 1: were apologizing for something that they literally had no control over.
Speaker 1: I mean, this wouldn't be the only time that Microsoft
Speaker 1: would get connected to Internet legends and hoaxes. There's there
Speaker 1: were also ones that said if you forward this email,
Speaker 1: then Bill Gates is going to give you like dollars,
Speaker 1: which was never true. Oh those chain letters, I remember
Speaker 1: those email chain letters quite well. Yeah, thankfully those have
Speaker 1: kind of died down. But you sometimes will see the
Speaker 1: equivalent on Facebook where it will be like usually Facebook,
Speaker 1: it's share this, but don't share it copy and pasted.
Speaker 1: And by the way, cut that message. Don't share this
Speaker 1: copy and pasted. That's pretty much a dead giveaway that
Speaker 1: what what you're being asked to do is to perpetuate
Speaker 1: a hoax, because the justification usually get is we don't
Speaker 1: want the people who are most vulnerable to be targeted,
Speaker 1: so therefore, copy and paste it or Facebook's algorithms will
Speaker 1: not promote this if you share it. That's not true.
Speaker 1: The reason they don't want you to share it is
Speaker 1: because if you share it rather than copy and pasted Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can trace it back to the point of origin.
Speaker 1: So sounds but the Microsoft Catholic Church stuff sounds a
Speaker 1: little Jonathan swift E. Yeah, it was a it was
Speaker 1: a pretty odd thing to see become, you know, a
Speaker 1: hoax level. Again, I don't think it was intended as
Speaker 1: a hoax. Like to me, this sounds like an onion
Speaker 1: article and someone mistaken believing that a satirical article is
Speaker 1: a real thing, like a modest proposal type of stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And when you when you see people taking something that
Speaker 1: was meant as satire, sincerely, that's not scary. It is scary,
Speaker 1: although sometimes it's you could also argue some people are
Speaker 1: just really bad at satire, and sometimes things that people
Speaker 1: claim our satire just are lies. S satirical, it's just
Speaker 1: a lie. And uh, you know, perpetuating a lie and
Speaker 1: then telling people, oh no it's satire. That's not to
Speaker 1: get out of jail free card. My joke didn't land.
Speaker 1: Oh don't worry, it was just satire. Yeah, no, it wasn't.
Speaker 1: It was a bad joke, right right, or or there's no,
Speaker 1: there was no joke structure there. You were just telling falsehoods.
Speaker 1: Then you got mad when you got called out on it.
Speaker 1: So that is a very early example. And then the
Speaker 1: next one is sort of the genesis for this whole episode,
Speaker 1: the eratus story E R R A t A S.
Speaker 1: Although sometimes it's just with one R R A T
Speaker 1: A S. I'm glad that you've established that we were
Speaker 1: saying erratas not not not erotic, or I was saying
Speaker 1: like aratus. Well, it's a rata. Errata is already plural,
Speaker 1: so it's already it's already got a problem with it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because it's it's pluralized, uh in an Anglican way. But
Speaker 1: arrata would already be the plural and it means like errors. Right.
Speaker 1: You typically would say, like you would publish a rata
Speaker 1: to say these are things that we're included in the
Speaker 1: previous published work which there are wrong. Yeah, might be
Speaker 1: a typo, might be that there was a misplaced decimal
Speaker 1: and a figure or something. So the misspelling of erratas
Speaker 1: is in itself of errata to be in a ratum, right,
Speaker 1: it wouldn't be. It's errataception. Okay, So this is a
Speaker 1: weird one. It's a very odd story. It's actually kind
Speaker 1: of hard to explain because it gets wrapped up in
Speaker 1: about two or three different kind of weird things. Uh. Supposedly,
Speaker 1: aratus itself refers to some kind of computer algorithm. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's used by HR or used by companies to remove
Speaker 1: material they don't want on the Internet. Like think of
Speaker 1: it as it's supposedly an algorithm that can seek and
Speaker 1: destroy content and remove it from the Internet automatically. Typically
Speaker 1: described as a way of removing stuff that's infringing on copyright,
Speaker 1: so like a takedown. So let's say that you, I
Speaker 1: don't know, you upload the entire film Berry Gordy's the
Speaker 1: Last Dragon to YouTube, and you just haven't hosted on
Speaker 1: your own account because it's the greatest movie ever made,
Speaker 1: and I will brook no discussion upon the matter, and
Speaker 1: then this ratus computer algorithm would could be could be
Speaker 1: sent to take that down. There's no need for that.
Speaker 1: YouTube has a very effective, some would say over effective
Speaker 1: means of taking down stuff that gets copyright strikes on it,
Speaker 1: either demonetizing it or taking it down entirely, there's no
Speaker 1: need for an algorithm. But the other component to this
Speaker 1: is that supposedly the algorithm could find and remove references
Speaker 1: to itself. Yeah, like if you what it's when I
Speaker 1: was researching, it seemed like it was saying that if you,
Speaker 1: if anybody even typed in erratas into like a search engine,
Speaker 1: it could somehow not really damage your computer, but it
Speaker 1: could like track you just by looking it up or
Speaker 1: something like like Like a lot of stories went were
Speaker 1: about how someone was supposedly working for a company and
Speaker 1: came across some mention of eratus box labeled yeah, or
Speaker 1: like a division that had the name Eratus, and then
Speaker 1: they would do an internal search on their uh intra net,
Speaker 1: right the company's intranet, not the Internet necessarily, and that
Speaker 1: this would suddenly raise an alarm among the big wigs
Speaker 1: and that person would be dismissed, fired from their job,
Speaker 1: or they would be discouraged in no uncertain terms to
Speaker 1: leave all that alone. And so it was just this
Speaker 1: idea that it was a forbidden search term to the
Speaker 1: point where people were perpetuating stories that you shouldn't even
Speaker 1: search for it online because it could come back to
Speaker 1: haunt you. Don't even think think. Meanwhile, seemingly not connected
Speaker 1: to this at all, there was a YouTube account created
Speaker 1: called Chronos for Life that appeared to be mostly dedicated
Speaker 1: to a very odd video talking about the Jurassic Park film.
Speaker 1: It was like a fan video of Jurassic Park. And
Speaker 1: have you watched these videos? I didn't watch the video.
Speaker 1: I watched clips of the like snippets of the videos themselves.
Speaker 1: So a lot of the videos have like white text
Speaker 1: on top of there's there's no that's illegible. Yeah, there's no,
Speaker 1: there's no like voice over. It's like the narrator is
Speaker 1: communicating via text, but it's white text over light background.
Speaker 1: So it makes it. And sometimes it's only up for
Speaker 1: a short number of frames, and it's and the video
Speaker 1: itself along with the text is so poor quality no
Speaker 1: matter how you watch it that it's hard to read,
Speaker 1: no matter what. Right, So you get you get the
Speaker 1: sense that the person who made this uh is either
Speaker 1: doing some very interesting but strange performance art, or maybe
Speaker 1: they're not. They're not. Well, that's another possibility, because it
Speaker 1: comes across very disjointed, illogical, difficult to follow, things that
Speaker 1: would typically be unsettling. Yeah, it was kind of conspiratorial,
Speaker 1: but you didn't really know what the conspiracy was, right,
Speaker 1: And then there would be a video that was in
Speaker 1: that same vein, but not about Jurassic Park rather about
Speaker 1: how uh this eratus thing was a dark conspiracy and
Speaker 1: I think that it was even Uh the person was
Speaker 1: worried about their mother being under surveillance. Yeah, because the
Speaker 1: mom was the one originally uploading all the Jurassic Park
Speaker 1: videos because or something. And then yeah, that that her
Speaker 1: her own mental acuity was deteriorating as a result of this,
Speaker 1: and yeah, I guess, very very strange. And then uh,
Speaker 1: people found that if they turned on captions for these videos,
Speaker 1: because you couldn't really make anything out in the videos,
Speaker 1: but you turn on captions, you would get these captions
Speaker 1: that would not appear otherwise. That left clues, and if
Speaker 1: you followed the clues, you would eventually find your self
Speaker 1: looking at the band camp page for a band called
Speaker 1: KFC Murder Chicks. Are we going to get sued? No,
Speaker 1: but that's what the band was called. I'm yeah, are
Speaker 1: they going to get sued? But probably not at this point.
Speaker 1: It sounds to be like that band has been defunct
Speaker 1: for a long time. So what this eventually appeared to
Speaker 1: be was a case of a person working on a
Speaker 1: music project which largely was based around taking snippets of
Speaker 1: audio from videos and putting it together into really weird
Speaker 1: uh composition. Yeah. The purpose of the band was to
Speaker 1: create a type of music called Internet sounds. Yeah deep Internet, Yeah,
Speaker 1: the deep Internet Sounds, and it was supposed to be
Speaker 1: some sort of weird, distorted background noise. It made me
Speaker 1: think of like a perhaps less focused approach to to
Speaker 1: forrmants as a Negative Land does, and that's a band
Speaker 1: that does a lot of compositions by taking pieces audio
Speaker 1: snippets from different sources and putting them together into very
Speaker 1: interesting uh audio like interesting albums. Actually, in fact, I
Speaker 1: had UH, one of the founding members of Negative Land
Speaker 1: on for a couple of episodes and we talked about
Speaker 1: that work so similar to that, and in fact that
Speaker 1: the person who had UH created these would later say, yeah,
Speaker 1: this was just sort of my attempt to kind of
Speaker 1: make something um, but I didn't really have a fully
Speaker 1: fleshed out plan on how that was going to work.
Speaker 1: But on the Internet people were following it and filling
Speaker 1: in the gaps and making it more than what it
Speaker 1: was and treating it like, oh, there really is this
Speaker 1: conspiracy out there. And one of the crazy things about
Speaker 1: conspiracy theory is that if you come out and tell
Speaker 1: someone no, that was all manufactured, it's not actually a
Speaker 1: conspiracy that ends up being parcy. Yeah, it's a cover up, right, Like,
Speaker 1: so there's no way to disprove a conspiracy to someone
Speaker 1: who's desperately going to follow that conspiracy theory. They they
Speaker 1: they are invested in believing in it, and so any
Speaker 1: counter evidence you give was manufactured to discredit the conspiracy,
Speaker 1: but it doesn't disprove it. That kind of thing. So
Speaker 1: this is another one of those cases where again I
Speaker 1: I had never even heard of this until you asked
Speaker 1: me about it. I honestly, at the beginning of this week,
Speaker 1: I was just very sick and going through just the interwebs,
Speaker 1: and I came across the video about eratas conspiracy, and
Speaker 1: I was like, that sounds like something he has talked
Speaker 1: about at some point. I don't know. There are so
Speaker 1: many episodes that I'm not sure. I mean, it may
Speaker 1: turn out that there that I have covered this very
Speaker 1: same story. Yeah, and I wouldn't remember this was all
Speaker 1: a conspiracy in and of itself. Well, I think it's
Speaker 1: fascinating and we have a little bit more to talk
Speaker 1: about as far as misinformation goes, where Like in this case,
Speaker 1: I would say that the eradas thing kind of falls
Speaker 1: into the land of the alternate reality game genre. So
Speaker 1: alternate reality games are where you mix reality and the
Speaker 1: fictional world within a game, and um, there are a
Speaker 1: lot of examples. They typically are marketing tools. So for example, AI,
Speaker 1: the movie AI, the Spielberg Kubrick film AI had an
Speaker 1: alternate reality game associated with it that a lot of
Speaker 1: people referred to as The Beast, and it was a
Speaker 1: story that played out mostly online, but included some stuff
Speaker 1: where people could interact not just online, but they could
Speaker 1: get faxes and phone calls and stuff. So it was
Speaker 1: like the fictional world of the game would reach across
Speaker 1: the barrier between reality and fiction and interact with you
Speaker 1: in ways in the real world that typically games don't.
Speaker 1: So it became kind of a role playing game almost, um.
Speaker 1: And I think that that's one version that can end
Speaker 1: up being misconstrued as being reality as opposed to now
Speaker 1: this is a marketing thing, or it's it's meant to
Speaker 1: be a game. When we come back, we're gonna talk
Speaker 1: about examples of misinformation that we're created specifically to perpetuate
Speaker 1: an agenda, not to create some sort of fiction or
Speaker 1: a game. We'll do that after we come back from
Speaker 1: this quick break. All right, we're getting into the home stretch,
Speaker 1: and this is some of the darkest stuff we have
Speaker 1: to talk about. So there are communities out on the
Speaker 1: Internet that so discord and they may do it for
Speaker 1: multiple reasons. They might just want to you know, it
Speaker 1: might be like what Christopher Nolan would say, some people
Speaker 1: just want to watch the world burn. Um. In some cases,
Speaker 1: it's to push a particular agenda that they really believe in,
Speaker 1: or to discredit an agenda that they do not like.
Speaker 1: And um, and all's fair in these communities, and in fact,
Speaker 1: you have multiple people with different motivators, all working towards
Speaker 1: the same goal. Some people may earnestly want to bring
Speaker 1: down something. Some people may just think it's funny to
Speaker 1: see commotion come out of their work, you know. Some
Speaker 1: people just want to get a rise out of people. Um.
Speaker 1: But the communities that we typically see this in the
Speaker 1: most are places like four chan and eight chan, where
Speaker 1: we get groups of people who find each other, they
Speaker 1: have some sort of commonality between them, and they know
Speaker 1: how to gamify systems. They know how people think, and
Speaker 1: they know how systems work, and using those two things together,
Speaker 1: they can perpetuate misinformation and lies and push forward their
Speaker 1: own agenda. And we've seen that several times over the
Speaker 1: last few years. In particular, so one entity or one
Speaker 1: group would be q and on. Really that's originally an
Speaker 1: entity UH, a person who was posting with the handle
Speaker 1: q um so q and on being anonymous that has
Speaker 1: posted numerous things that were very conspiracy oriented directed at
Speaker 1: particular groups or people, for example Hillary Clinton UM and
Speaker 1: it ends up being something a narrative that ends up
Speaker 1: being picked up by other people and then presented as
Speaker 1: truth that then gets reinforced again and again to the
Speaker 1: point where you start seeing some of those things that
Speaker 1: have never shown to have any actual truth to them
Speaker 1: being presented by UH by media outlets as truth, usually
Speaker 1: right wing media outlets. You don't tend to see that
Speaker 1: beyond that group, but it has become a real issue.
Speaker 1: And one example of that has been known as pizza Gate.
Speaker 1: And pizza Gate is a pretty a truly terrible story
Speaker 1: UH and it's it's one that alleges that there was
Speaker 1: this particular pizza parlor where secretly there was a pedophilia
Speaker 1: ring running through this this pizza parlor, Like that was
Speaker 1: like the nexus for this pedophilia ring, uh, and that
Speaker 1: this establishment also had a connection to the Clintons, And
Speaker 1: there were a lot of different people posting on a
Speaker 1: lot of different platforms that we're trying to substantiate these
Speaker 1: claims that again under investigation, there was no evidence to
Speaker 1: support any of it, but that wasn't what was important.
Speaker 1: What was important was that ground swell of people making
Speaker 1: these allegations and then immediately responding to any criticism by saying,
Speaker 1: you're trying to cover this up and that is unacceptable.
Speaker 1: Their children and they're they're welfare that's at stake and
Speaker 1: how dare you? And I mean, that's a very powerful
Speaker 1: emotional lever to pull. So it was really effective, at
Speaker 1: least in certain circles. Yes. And also it's one of
Speaker 1: those arguments where you are confirming so one's bias that's
Speaker 1: directed towards a certain group. Right. So that's one of
Speaker 1: the reasons why we really wanted to talk about this topic.
Speaker 1: Two is the idea that why do these things get
Speaker 1: spread so fast and why do they get adopted so quickly?
Speaker 1: And it's a couple of different things. Uh. One of
Speaker 1: the big things is just the way human behavior tends
Speaker 1: to work. So say, if you come up to me
Speaker 1: and you tell me something that that seems to confirm
Speaker 1: a bias I already have, I am more inclined to
Speaker 1: believe you right, because you seem to be telling me
Speaker 1: something that that reinforces a belief I already possess. So
Speaker 1: if I believe I have a sweet, sweet style despite
Speaker 1: all evidence to the contrary, and you come up and
Speaker 1: you say, Wow, you're really got that outfits really well
Speaker 1: put together, you really are looking great today, I can
Speaker 1: sit there and think like, oh, yeah, I knew I
Speaker 1: have a sweet, sweet style, and sheha is just reinforce
Speaker 1: that belief. So while any objective viewer might look at
Speaker 1: me and think this guy doesn't even know how to
Speaker 1: match his socks, I'm walking down the straight thinking I
Speaker 1: got sweet sweet style. Yes, But in that case that
Speaker 1: was that's harmless, right. But if I have, let's say
Speaker 1: a different belief. Let's say that I believe that um
Speaker 1: an organization like the Red Cross. Let's say I have
Speaker 1: a belief that the Red Cross is actually doing something
Speaker 1: really nefarious. And then you were to come to me
Speaker 1: and say, I just heard that over in South Carolina
Speaker 1: the Red Cross has quarantined this entire community, and they
Speaker 1: won't tell anyone why. And it's like it doesn't even
Speaker 1: have to make any sense, right, It doesn't have to
Speaker 1: have It doesn't have to make any sense you have
Speaker 1: to have you don't have to have any corroborating evidence.
Speaker 1: If it plays into a belief I already have, I
Speaker 1: am more inclined to believe you, So that's part of it.
Speaker 1: If it plays on a fear I have, I'm more
Speaker 1: inclined to believe you because if I'm already afraid of
Speaker 1: something and you tell me there's that that fear is
Speaker 1: is rational or is you know, legitimate because of some
Speaker 1: other reason, I'm more inclined to believe you. On top
Speaker 1: of that, we have these Internet communities and uh, in
Speaker 1: some cases you might have something like a sub credit
Speaker 1: where you have these people who share some sort of
Speaker 1: common interest or common trait. They will reinforce their beliefs.
Speaker 1: It becomes an echo chamber. But you also have platforms
Speaker 1: like Facebook and Facebook. The way it works is that
Speaker 1: when a post gets a lot of engagement, when people
Speaker 1: are leaving comments, when people are sharing it, when people
Speaker 1: are liking it. You know, when people are applying to
Speaker 1: one another. Facebook sees that activity, and Facebook makes money
Speaker 1: when people are spending time on Facebook. So if they
Speaker 1: see if they being an algorithm, actually it's not even
Speaker 1: a person. If the Facebook algorithm identifies certain posts as
Speaker 1: being really productive from an engagement standpoint, those posts are
Speaker 1: valuable because it means when people see this, they spend
Speaker 1: more time on the platform. When they spend more time
Speaker 1: on the platform, we make more money. So let's promote
Speaker 1: the posts that are getting this kind of crazy engagement.
Speaker 1: And so that's why you see posts that are not
Speaker 1: necessarily sincere or earnest, or accurate or truthful get promoted
Speaker 1: on sites like Facebook. In fact, that's one of the
Speaker 1: big reasons why the United States government has called Facebook
Speaker 1: to task on multiple occasions for perpetuating, you know, quote
Speaker 1: unquote fake news, which I term I hate because it's
Speaker 1: often used to discredit actual news while not being applied
Speaker 1: to what is truly fake news. But that's neither here
Speaker 1: nor there. So it's a tricky situation because as a
Speaker 1: as a human being, it's asking what what I'm asking
Speaker 1: you to do is to engage your critical thinking skills
Speaker 1: even when you're encountering something that seems to be confirming
Speaker 1: your beliefs, like you have to. You have to apply
Speaker 1: critical thinking even in those cases, especially in those cases,
Speaker 1: because that's when your most vulnerable to accepting a lie
Speaker 1: as the truth, When it is telling you something that
Speaker 1: you want to hear, or it's reaffirming something you were
Speaker 1: afraid of. That's when you have to apply those critical
Speaker 1: thinking skills the most. Because the people who are perpetuating
Speaker 1: this stuff, they already they're aware, at least on a
Speaker 1: certain level of human psychology and how these things work
Speaker 1: and how messages can be delivered in a way that
Speaker 1: will get the broadest acceptance. So you have to keep
Speaker 1: that in mind, like they're gamifying the system, and the
Speaker 1: system happens to be the way people think and the
Speaker 1: way these communities operate. To quote my favorite musical ever
Speaker 1: created um ref Madness the Musical. Okay, I just think
Speaker 1: it was gonna be repo the Genetic Opera, But go ahead,
Speaker 1: I mean, I guess we could find a connection there
Speaker 1: as well. But refermat the very last line and refor
Speaker 1: Madness the Musical is when danger's near, exploit their fear.
Speaker 1: The end will justify the means. Yeah, so this is
Speaker 1: not this is not a new idea. I mean, propaganda
Speaker 1: is largely based on this same principle. In fact, you know,
Speaker 1: you could say that a lot of the people who
Speaker 1: are creating this misinformation, they're just following in the same
Speaker 1: footsteps as ad executives and uh and and political operatives
Speaker 1: have for for decades or longer. Um fax has always
Speaker 1: been part of advertisement pretty much. Oh absolutely, no, I
Speaker 1: mean you look back at like someone. The series mad
Speaker 1: Men was based off of actual advertising executives who really
Speaker 1: did find incredibly creative ways to convince people to buy
Speaker 1: stuff that they didn't want or need. And the same
Speaker 1: thing is true now about much more critical stuff like
Speaker 1: who are leaders are or what policies we should adopt,
Speaker 1: or what groups we should you know, pay attention to.
Speaker 1: So it's a it's a you know, while we started
Speaker 1: off kind of talking about folklore, the important thing is
Speaker 1: that we need to be able to separate fiction from truth.
Speaker 1: We can still enjoy fiction. I think stuff like creepy
Speaker 1: pasta has a definitely has a place. It just has
Speaker 1: a place as accepting it as hey, let's get around
Speaker 1: the fire and tell ghost stories. Not come here. You
Speaker 1: need to hear this because it might save your life. Yeah, right,
Speaker 1: that's the difference. We have to be able to differentiate
Speaker 1: those two things. If we don't, we're more likely than
Speaker 1: not to act on incorrect information. So, Jeff, the killer
Speaker 1: is not really in your bedroom. I sure hope not.
Speaker 1: I don't have to clean. I would feel so awkward.
Speaker 1: I'd be like, I'm so sorry for the mess. You've
Speaker 1: been hanging around me too much, apologizing to just kill
Speaker 1: me now because I feel so embarrassed. They'd be like, listen,
Speaker 1: you've maybe he would help you clean it before. I'd say,
Speaker 1: you made your bed, but you clearly haven't. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I mean he's just gonna dirty it up anyway. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's true. Just stabby step stab, which ironically was the
Speaker 1: name of the operation that the two girls who carried
Speaker 1: out the slip. Yeah, they called it stabby step stab.
Speaker 1: That is that's actually nothing. Yeah. I thought I was
Speaker 1: just pulling that out of thin air, but then I remember, nope,
Speaker 1: that's what they called that. So that was a callback,
Speaker 1: not on purpose. That was just my brain sabotaging me.
Speaker 1: Not not creative. I mean, I know that's the lack
Speaker 1: of creativity is not the worst part of the story,
Speaker 1: but problematic part of it. Well, Shaye, thank you for
Speaker 1: your suggestion, Thank you for letting me come on the
Speaker 1: show and annoy you. You didn't didn't annoy me at all.
Speaker 1: It was very helpful, and I am glad to have
Speaker 1: someone to talk with so that it you know, we
Speaker 1: can have that sort of conversation and you can. You know,
Speaker 1: you introduced me to stuff I had not heard about,
Speaker 1: and I find a lot of it fascinating. You introduced
Speaker 1: me to something I didn't know about that was written
Speaker 1: by a guy I do know, which was weird. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that was odd. Now I watched the show like in
Speaker 1: its entirety. Now, yeah, now, he wrote the original Creepypasta.
Speaker 1: I don't think he was connected to the show, except
Speaker 1: maybe he probably got a credit. Yeah, I probably got
Speaker 1: like a writer's credit or maybe even like a producer's credit.
Speaker 1: I I honestly don't know. And honestly, it's not like
Speaker 1: we're friends or anything. I literally interviewed him for an article.
Speaker 1: So what he's saying is that he wants to be
Speaker 1: your friends. I mean, that's true. It's true. It's true,
Speaker 1: but it's not not relevant. Okay, So if you guys
Speaker 1: have suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, or maybe
Speaker 1: there's someone you want me to have on as a guest,
Speaker 1: or maybe you think, why don't you have that shape
Speaker 1: person on again? You need to let me know. You
Speaker 1: can reach out to me on Facebook or Twitter. The
Speaker 1: handle for both of those is text stuff H s
Speaker 1: W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text
Speaker 1: Stuff is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i
Speaker 1: heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
Speaker 1: your favorite shows.