Panic World - NyQuil Chicken (with Katie Notopoulos)

Episode Date: September 11, 2024

Welcome to Panic World. For our premiere, we're going back a few years to explore the panic that grew around "Sleepytime Chicken" aka NyQuil Chicken. Along with friend of the pod Katie Notopoulos, Ryan will explore the origins of the recipe on 4chan back in 2017 and chart its start as a joke to ultimately causing everyone from CNN to the FDA to issue warnings against it. But were the nation's youth really cooking — and eating — this cough syrup-soaked fowl? And what does the spread of the trend from 4chan to the mainstream tell us about our relationship with the internet and social media these days? You can follow Katie Notopoulos's work at Business Insider, or @katienotopoulos. And give us a follow wherever you listen to podcasts to help Panic World go viral. Want even more Panic World content? Like ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, and access to the Garbage Day Discord? Sign up for a membership at https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. Want to sponsor Panic World? Ad sales & marketing support by Multitude ⁠http://multitude.productions⁠. Credits - Host: Ryan Broderick - Producer: Grant Irving - Researcher: Adam Bumas - Business Manager: Josh Fjelstad Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Can you walk us through the basic steps here for making sleepy time chicken? Sure. So would you like me to do it according to the recipe posted on 4chan? I'll take you through step by step. Don't share your own recipe that you use. I'm not my own personal. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm Ryan Roderick.

And every day, every minute the Internet produces content that doesn't make any sense to anybody. And for some reason, I've decided to make it my life's work to make some of that stuff make some sense to some people. And one of the topics that is near and dear to my heart is a little episode of internet history called NyQuil Chicken, whereas the real ones know it, Sleepy Time Chicken. And that's what we're going to be talking about today on the first episode of Panic World, a show about the various witch hunts, moral panics, and viral freakouts that bubble up out of the darkest, most confusing corners of the web. NyQuilchicken was a 4chan post that became a TikTok challenge, that became a cultural flashpoint in Washington, unearthing deep national fears about the power of communist China and its ability to brainwash the youth of the country. It's one of my favorite examples of internet brain rot, and to talk about it today is a dear friend of mine, an incredible reporter for Business Insider, an expert on ingesting way too much cough medicine. Katie Nettopoulos. Thank you for coming on the show today, Katie.

How are you? Wow. Ryan, first of all, I thought you were introducing me. I thought you were teen this episode and who would know more about brain rot than Katie. Oh, that's a good one too. I should have done that, yeah. But I wanted to say, first of all, thank you for having me on. And this feels so right.

Feels right, doesn't it? It feels so good. Katie, for people who are familiar with you and your uvra, Tell the folks a little bit about your writing and your sort of area of expertise. Well, I am a senior correspondent at Business Insider. I cover topics on technology and culture and a lot of internet culture kind of stuff. You know, I love a good internet hoax. You also did some of the most important reporting for me this year, which is you did find out that chicken eggs have worse shells.

than they used to, which I thought I was crazy, but you got to the bottom of that. I am so glad you brought that up because I was extremely proud of myself, too, and I honestly felt like I had been gaslit by the egg industry. The truth is that if you have recently felt like every time you break an egg to like mix it in a bowl or put it in a pan, that like, oh, why do I keep getting shell bits everywhere? Like, I used to be good at cracking eggs, but now I'm not. It's because the shells have actually changed. But I think they're getting better.

It has to do with bird flu. Yeah, thank you for doing the important work. We're also here today to get to the bottom of chicken-related chaos, and this story has reached the highest levels of power. So let's take a listen. NyQuil Chicken is apparently a thing on TikTok. And if you weren't already completely disgusted by the videos that we just showed, the FDA is telling you, do not do this, right?

The FDA is out with this new warning against exactly what you think it is. Chicken cooked in NyQuil. So this will eventually all culminate in a conspiracy that reaches the highest levels of Congress. But it starts where all good conspiracy theories start, 4chan. For the totally unfamiliar here, Katie, how would you best describe 4chan and the culture that that permeates out of 4chan? Well, Fortune is a message board that's been around for since, what, 2004 started maybe 2002? early 2000s, yeah. And I think most people, when they hear for, I think most people have heard of 4chan in the sense of like, it's a message board that's full of these sort of trolls and Nazis and hateful content and a lot of sort of bad things have come out of it, things that have, you know, led into some of the very vile, bad stuff that's happened in the last handful of years.

but I do think that it is relevant for our conversation particularly to note that like that is very true that fortune is a place full of Nazis and very bad people but it is also not a single board and there are like other boards on it it is it's kind of like Reddit where there's lots of different subreddits the most popular ones are the ones for awful stuff but there are some like like surprisingly quaint ones, right? Like there's ones that are just like talking about like comics or food or, you know, other topics. The comic one is pretty bad actually. But, uh, yes. Yeah. I mean, to be fair, they're all big, they all live in the same house.

They're just different rooms. Are you talking about the one from My Little Pony? That's the one that you think is probably the better one. Well, it was my little pony stuff was all big. Was that completely? completely banned from 4chan? No, no, they have a pony board. I'm looking right at it.

Oh, they just have a point on it. But I'm looking at it. The important thing to know is there is stuff on 4chan that's not just vile, racist stuff. Now, like, I'm not, this is not saying that it's a good place to hang out for a nice time. So there's a cooking board, which we'll be talking about, which is a board for sharing recipes, in theory. There's also a photography board. They've had an active LGBT board for a very long time. It's one of the older queer spaces on the internet at this point.

And yeah, there's a lot of bad stuff, but it's not all for, you know, eventual school shooters to consume. There's some other nice things in there. And the cooking board, which is called CK, is like 4chan in terms of how they operate, but it's focused largely on food. And without this 4chan cooking community, the world would never have the gift of NyQuil chicken. And I wanted to kind of go through some examples to give people a taste. taste, if you will, of how 4chan users talk about food. So here's a recipe I want to send you, a recipe, quote, unquote, a thread. And I want you to sort of describe generally what you see here.

What have I just sent you? It's a thread titled, Store Was Out of Broccoli. Okay, so I'm assuming that store is out of broccoli. It looks like it's a bunch of photographs. It's very long. and it starts with a picture of a store and it's sort of corn and celery and a big blank space in between.

There's no broccoli. The next photo is someone taking green gatorade and pouring it into a pot on their stove, like sort of a sauce pan. And now they are simmering or boiling the gatorade. And this is all sort of different posts

within the same thread. And then there's occasionally interjections from different, from the common not just the original poster. Someone's saying, I like where this is going. The person takes a handful of chopped cauliflower. Someone says, oh, fuck, don't do it. Tosses the cauliflower in.

Perfect. Someone says, you know, they put the lid on. They're simmering it. And they end up with a sort of fluorescent green tinged cauliflower. And then they're eating it with the rest of their food. Right. That is the magic of the four. 4chan cooking community, I think best distilled.

There's another really good one that I'll summarize very briefly where a guy shared, you know, I think recently a couple years ago that he had found a way to buy guerrilla food from a zoo supply company and was telling other users on 4chan that since he started eating gorilla food, monkey chow, as he called it, he started to become very muscular like a monkey. And he shared like a before and after photo himself. So, you know. Not knowing that much about what gorillas eat, I sort of would assume that zoos or whatnot would sort of feed them, you know, whole foods rather than like, you know, chow.

But, you know, maybe there is some sort of like special vitamin pellets that they would get. I thought the same thing. I was surprised that monkeys were eating pellets. But it is the brand that this user shared on Fortune is called Missouri. and it's an exotic animal nutrient, and they have what they call primate biscuits, which I guess is some kind of monkey chow. Oh, my God.

So if you want the 4chan monkey diet, that's where you got to go. It's pretty cheap, actually. I mean, it's not bad. And I have to imagine that we need the same things monkeys need generally. So you could probably get away with eating a lot of it. I wonder if it's like, I wonder if it's like a lot of fire. I have to think so.

Like, do you think you would really like the last ass? You know, I... I'm going to try it. I would like to know. The one last 4chan recipe I want to highlight here because I think it's beautiful and its simplicity. And it's an image that goes around a lot. So I think there's a decent chance that people listening to this have seen this. Can you describe the image that I just sent you?

Okay. It is just, I can't even think of a title for this. And it is a picture of a hot dog on a plate in a bun. And instead of mustard or ketchup, it is slathered in a hot pink liquid. And then there's a bottle of Pepto-Bisble right next to it. So someone has dumped Pepto over a hot dog. And I think what's important about this image is that it's taken, you know, in such a way where it's very blurry. Like a lot of the images of food you see on 4chan kind of look like like crime scenes from like the layer of a serial killer.

And I think that's that's sort of the general aesthetic you kind of have to keep in mind. No one's making like gourmet meals on here. Like this isn't Pinterest. It's not that kind of food. It's more like on Reddit there's that like male living spaces subreddit. And it's like always the saddest thing. And it's like some guy in like a really bare studio. apartment being like, how can I spruce up the place? And it's like, you know, it's got like a

mattress on the floor. It's like that kind of thing. So it's like sort of like simple meals for single guys. Like it's that kind of cooking a little bit. That is actually a perfect segue into what we need to talk about next, which is arguably the most prolific 4chan cooking user of all time, dino attendees. There's someone who really set the bar for how you get attention from strangers on the internet by cooking absolutely disgusting food. Okay. So. I don't think I know. You don't? Oh, I'm very excited. I am very, very excited to tell you about dino tennies. So for listeners who don't understand sort of like the mechanics of 4chan, they've never been on it, all users are anonymous. Some parts of 4chan will show like a country flag next to your username, which would correspond to like the IP address of where you're logging in. Every once in a while, there is a user that has gifted the ability to actually have a username on the site. And dino tennies is one of these rare users. uh dino tendees i think was eventually banned and then unband he's he comes back and forth a lot his major thing is making really disgusting meals uh with his pet possum is this ringing a bell at all for you

no okay good here's here's here's here's a real good one this is a dino tendies recipe and it's titled Dino Tendee's back with another master class, and he said that he's going to make deep dish pizza. And so just sort of give us a general kind of description of the images in this thread. What it kind of looks and feels like. Okay. So first of all, the stove setup is like, you can sort of tell it's a very outdated, cheap stove. if it's like sort of like white with the plastic knobs on the back. And it's next to, it's sort of got a plain wall.

It looks like at one point, the wall next door it looks like a cabinet must have been ripped out. And there's just a microwave on a green milk upturned green milk carton. It's like a trap house. It looks like a trap house. Yeah. And so there is a bag of cheese with in a Ziploth, a dozen eggs, and a pan. is on this electric stove. Just set up.

It's sort of a shot that sets up the ingredients. And it says, tonight we make deep dish pizza. And to skip ahead, essentially what happens is he chops up a bunch of spam, a bunch of eggs, some cheese, cooks all of it on a trash bag

and whisks it with like a coat hanger. And then he covers it in pepperonies and more eggs and more spam. and then eats it in a totally empty, bombed out room next to a framed picture of the Wendy's mascot, like just the Wendy's girl, Wendy, her face. And this is kind of the general aesthetic of all of his posts. Yeah. And I'm scrolling and I'm looking.

I mean, every step of this is disgusting. Like every element of the food looks. disgusting. I interviewed Dino Tendies a few years ago back in 2021. Yeah, I caught his attention because he had done a new thread that claimed that he was making food in the toilet of a psych ward. And so I tweeted about it. You know, Dino Tendies is back with a new update.

And he reached out to me. And I asked him this question. I said, what percentage of what we see in Dino Tendee's post is real? And he replied, people ask me a lot if I really do live in this house with a bunch of possums. And yes, I do. All of the food or other items is found in dumpsters. I really don't do this anymore, though, because it's extremely time-consuming. And a lot of places I would go to started locking their trash up.

Most of the threads are videos. Oh, yeah, he makes videos too. Most of the threads are videos. I just have a general idea of what I'm going to do and just kind of roll with whatever happens. there are a few tricks here and there in videos, like when I made an egg sandwich on a barbell plate, there was no way the sun was going to get that hot to cook it, so I put it in my oven and waited for it to hit 425 degrees.

Then he threw it on his lawn and ate it. I also asked him if the possums have names. Their names are tequito, mochi, and pierogi. Those are cute names. Yeah. Oh, and then I asked him to describe what he was doing. Why is he doing this? And he said, the whole project to me is an ongoing shitpost.

When I first started the threads on CK, some people thought I was doing this is some sort of weird art project for college. And I found that absolutely hilarious. I was mostly just messing around with cooking. And he also said that he is a classically trained chef. Really? Well, so you kind of know. A little bit, I feel like there's an aesthetic element here that like presumably, it's from this interview.

It sounds a little hard to tell how real or ironic or fake this guy is being exactly where on that spectrum somewhere on there. Exactly. These guys are perfected being gross and ridiculous, but it's not like that far off

from how someone who uses 4chan regularly might actually live. And this is the primordial ooze that Nykel Chicken comes from. It's a place where you'll see something that's dumb, but it's dumb in a way that might actually exist. And normally, People are going to find that disgusting and upsetting.

But we're going to get to all that right after the break. We're on 4chan. The year is 2017. We're on the cooking board. It's on April Fool's Day, funny enough. Okay. So that's red flag. Red flag.

So on April Fool's Day, 2017, which feels so much more recent than it should. Like I thought, I thought NyQuil Chicken was like old, but it wasn't. and it was posted on April Fool's Day, 2017, and it was not called Michael Chicken. It had a different name. It was called Sleepy Time Chicken. Yeah, I always think of it as Sleepy Time Chicken. Can you walk us through the basic steps here for making Sleepy Time Chicken?

Sure. Okay, wait, Katie, before you start, let's set the scene here, all right? Let's do a little bit of sound design. Let's make this thing pop, okay? Take us in. So it starts off. a photograph of a package of Tyson chicken strips, chicken breasts. And you guys want to see my Sleepy Time chicken,

and everyone's pretty excited. So, you know, first he says, first two ingredients, it's the chicken, and then he has a bottle of green NyQuil, which, like, I don't know if you guys are big NyQuil heads, but, like, honestly, the green one. Green one's bad. The red one is superior.

Yeah. So he... starts cooking it. What he seems to do is he dumps the bottle of NyQuil into a deep sauce pan with the chicken strips in it. They're sort of their breasts, but they're like the thin breasts. And then he seems to be simmering it. He puts a lid on it for a little while. At one point he adds in a little bit of, it looks like some sort of whiskey.

and so maybe that cuts a little bit of the maybe it's the flavor thing. I think it's to make it a little sleepier. Yeah, make it a little sleepier. So basically he's poaching chicken breasts in NyQuil and whiskey. And then he... And he then post finally a pitcher still alive, plated up. And it's a picture of the three chicken breasts on a plate. There's a little bit of

sort of like green liquid on the sides. And he has a new bottle of NyQuil unopened with the red caps. So now it's the cherry flavor. The good kind. And actually, you know what? I take it back. He has two. He says presentation is key. He's got

two bottles of NyQuil. Excuse me. Oh my God. I think obviously needs a nightquil. It looks like he does a little more with it. So he wraps it in a tortilla with sour cream, a little shredded cheese. He pour some of the red NyQuil over it. So you got kind of like a burrito kind of thing, like a burrito with sauce. He tries that. And now he is going, he puts it into a Queesan Heart, like a food processor. And he's got the red NyQuil and some of the green. And he's got the red NyQuil and some of the green.

And he's pouring a little bit of extra bourbon into it. And he sort of makes, he chops it up, makes himself a slurry. And then that goes into, let's see. That's the grossest part. Yeah, I actually think like I draw the line there. I think it's not funny when he does that. But that's sleepy time chicken. That's that's it.

That is the main thing is it. It's a tortilla with sprinkle cheese and sour cream and two kinds of NyQuil and whiskey. And that's posted on April 1st, 2017. It makes the rounds. This is 2017. So 4chan isn't sort of its own island anymore. We're in the Trump era where like 4chan runs the news. So it makes its way over to Reddit.

It goes to Reddit's R4chan, which is sort of the big hub for aggregating 4chan content. It doesn't make it all the way to R all. It doesn't make it to the top. It isn't like a huge thing. But it's fairly popular. In fact, it's popular enough that 19 days after it's posted to Reddit and 4chan, it ends up on what was then Twitter. And I just sent it to you. If you could read this tweet out loud, that would be very helpful here.

All right. This says, if she makes you NyQuil Chicken, dot, dot, dot, do not let her go. I mean. And it's from a username. Tristan. Tristan. And this would be the first instance of the phrase NyQuil chicken. So that's where that happens.

That's where you lose Sleepy Time chicken, which I think is a superior name for this. Yeah. And you get NyQuil chicken. So what's really interesting is that that's kind of it for a while. Yeah. Like it just sort of disappears into the. the anals of history of the of internet. Yeah.

I mean, I very distinctly remember you and I enjoying this. It wasn't like breaking through an enormy world, but it was like, whoa, check out this gross thing. I saw on the internet. You know,

we saw it, you know. We debated making it, I think. I, it is sort of coming back to me that we had talked about it. And I think, so in 2017,

I was living in London. Mm-hmm. And it's possible, that I didn't make it because I couldn't figure out if I could get NyQuil. Yeah, they have like different kind of cough medicine stuff there, right? They do.

Yeah. I think I couldn't get NyQuil and I couldn't get like sprinkle cheese. Like the kind of, I wanted to make it like the exactly way he made it. They don't tell bad, shredded cheese. They do, but I don't think it's the same. You know, British people like don't really have a great handle on Tex-Mex. It's like it's a whole thing. Okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so NyQuil chicken kind of disappears. It sort of fades into the background noise of the internet until 2020. And in 2020, which I don't think is an accident. I don't think it's an accident that in 2020, Nykelchicken comes back because that's when everyone is sort of home doing nothing. It's, yeah, it's deep 2020 and a TikTok username Ig Rob Flow, I.G. Rob Floo makes

NyQuil chicken. So now it has made the jump and is now a TikTok thing. And it's made differently. There's no whiskey. It's not made as a taco. He also at one point pours the chicken fluid back into the bottle, which is really gross. Yeah. And it looks like he's doing it in a pretty shallow pan. Honestly, I just feel like it's a pure cooking technique that this pan seems so shallow. I would be worried about the liquid pouring out, but it's not quite a poaching. It's more like cooking, like marinating in the sauce almost, acid cooks, you know?

The cooking technique's a little different. Another thing I didn't notice until literally watching it just now is that he's not using tongs. He's using a hair straightener. Wait, wait, I didn't notice that. I've watched this video over and over again, and I have never noticed that he's using. an unplugged in or possibly plugged in hair straightener to pick up the chicken. What I'm noticing is this is not brand name NyQuil. It's called whatever it is.

It's like a store brand NyQuil. It's called nighttime. I wonder if this is actually, oh my God, you're right. That's a hair straining. It's a mini hair straightener. It's CVSpring. And it looks like it's plugged in. He's using a tiny possibly plugged in hair straightener.

and it's CVS brand cofferdic. So by the way, if you want to buy any of the products mentioned in today's episode, whether it's Monkey Chow or CVS brand Coff Medicine, listen to the Yen for the promo code. So what is really interesting here, though, is that the, there was only really like this video. Like, this was not a trend, really. And we're going to talk more about, like, sort of how it was misunderstood as a trend. But before we do that, like, Katie, can you kind of talk. about kind of like the history of viral challenges because I feel like they've always existed,

obviously, you know, ice bucket challenge, planking, all that stuff. But with TikTok, they were sort of given a new cultural cachet, a new, a sort of new value. So like, how did TikTok change our concept of a viral trend or viral challenge? So partly the nature and the mechanics of TikTok encourage this kind of behavior in the most simple way with the dance challenges, right? Like, somebody would do a funny dance and that would encourage everyone else to do the dance to, which for some reason, I never understood why it was a dance challenge. It was like, just do the dance. It's not a many challenge.

I mean, there's no, what happens if you don't do it? The sort of biggest early breakout moment of TikTok was Old Town Road, little Naz-X, right? And that was its own sort of, that was a TikTok dance challenge. It was, you know, change into a, they would start off in their normal. clothes and then change into like, you know, a cowboy hat or whatever. Right. And there were sort of other types of challenges, but I feel like calling the dance trends challenges just sort of fed into this whole world of this.

And TikTok even like in their original version of their sort of trending page, they had it built in with like challenges that you can do and you could click into these different, you know, everyone's doing this one thing like, hey, make, you know, do this thing with your sibling or, you know, whatever. So they were, you know, internally encouraging this kind of everybody do the same trend, make a video about yourself doing this thing with your own little unique twist on it. I think ultimately, like, that really is what drove in my mind the, a lot of the popularity of TikTok. Because one of the hardest things about creating content is like coming up with a new idea.

Like that was kind of what's hard about bond. It's like, you're just going to come up with a new idea out of nowhere to like make a funny video. That's really hard. But it's a lot easier to come up with an idea if it's a riff on a thing that already exists. Like, you know, hey, everyone's doing the thing where you like clap your hands three times. But I'm going to do the silliest version because I have like a crazy outfit on or something like that. I also think it's it's important to point out that when TikTok sort of surfaces these trends or challenges, it creates a discovery. pathway. So, like, if you want to build an account really quickly on TikTok, you can use

trending audio and it'll link your video to every other video that uses the audio. If you use a hashtag for hashtag Jencom challenge, you know, it will link you to all the other videos. So not only is it easy to, you know, to participate, but it's a really, really quick way to get new followers. And this has sort of led to a kind of a row of. evolving door, I think, of moral panics about TikTok challenges. Are you familiar with the Benadryl challenge? No. Basically, in 2023, there was a whole wave of local news stories about kids who were

eating an entire box of Benadryl and then filming themselves on TikTok. I mean, but this goes all the way back to like space monkey stuff, Jenkim, like this sort of local news station urban legend teen challenge thing. I feel like is not a new thing because of TikTok. TikTok has just made it really easy to, I mean, to write stories about these things and kind of tie into the viral cycle in a way. Yeah. And I do think that like calling it a challenge implies that kids are like dared to do it. Like they feel like they have to do it.

Right. Like I simply have to. I've been, I've been asked to do the kind of in the way that I think the best know version of these was the ice bucket challenge where it's like, I challenge you, Ryan, you have to do it next. And so I think that there would that sort of a little bit became ingrained of like if we call it the Benadryl challenge, then it's as if I'm saying, I just took a box of Benadryl, Ryan, I challenge you and that you would have to do it. Whereas like that's not exactly really what's going on here. It's like it's just a trend of people doing things. Right. Like in the 2000s, I, I at least knew several people who tried to smoke banana peels because they had heard on a message board that it would get you stoned. And it just makes you sick. Are any of those people in the room with us now, Ryan? No, no. But I did watch, I did watch a guy in college eat an entire box of Benadryl.

He did not die, but he was not good. Oh, God. Like, he was, yeah, he was nuts for a while. So don't do that. But I think what is really fascinating is that these trends, it almost doesn't matter if they're, like, do you struggle with sort of how many people does it take for something to count as a trend? Because I have struggled with this in reporting for years, which is, and I'll get really mad when like, you know, an outlet will be like the new trend.

And then I'll be like, it's not a trend. I don't know why we're talking about this, but now you've made it into a trend. You've sort of created this self-fulfilling prophecy. Right. Well, you know, I mean, you know the rule, right? Right. Like if you wanted to be a trend, the rule is just you have to find three people doing it. And then you can write about it and call it a trend.

See, I try to find two people Right about it before everybody else And then assume a third one Okay, I like that But no, I do I know what you mean That like is this, you know, just a handful of people Is it maybe one video that went super viral Or is there actually like something of substance behind here?

Like is it, you know And I don't know Does it matter? Right? Like the butterboard thing I feel like was a great example of that What's the butterboard? maybe two years ago was like kind of along the lines of like girl dinner it was like all the hot girls are eating butterboards for dinner like instead of having a cheese board or maybe they weren't eating it for dinner we're like instead of having a cheese board for your party have a butter board and it was basically like spread a bunch of butter over like a wood cutting board and then put a bunch of like crackers and different pieces of bread and other things that you might dip in butter and like I guess that sounds like kind of good if you just like eating a lot of bread.

and butter. And maybe they would put like, you know, salt or honey in the butter to make it a little different. But I do. And it sort of became, it was one of these things that was like written up in a lot of like lifestyle media kind of, you know, that kind of, because it was a food trend. And it was a very like aesthetic, charming new food trend, right? Like you can imagine, I don't know, is that like a cool new thing to do at your cocktail

party? Have a butterboard. But I do feel like, I feel like, now I should like fact check this, but I feel like it came out later that it was like a vi like it was a sciop seated by like the dairy board or something or like the original like influencer who had like showed off her butterboard was being paid by like the dairy council or whatever but i'm so i'm not 100% sure on that i feel like i'm maybe repeating a rumor but that that it turns out it was like this astro turfed thing hey this is grant the producer of panic world sorry for the interruption but we

fact check this. Katie's right. This was paid for by big dairy. All right, back to the episode. Because I'm not going to a lot of people were like, that's disgusting. Why would anyone want to just eat a ton of butter? That's weird. Like, I don't want to dip vegetables in butter. That's when I start to wish that the theory that there is like one guy in China who's like making all the content for Americans to do on TikTok was real. Because it'd be like, yeah, I got them all to just eat butter. Like these people are absolute freaks. Like they're just, We put like a hot girl in a video to be like, all me and my girlies do is eat butter together. And now everyone in the country is eating butter.

But I think the philosophical quandary about whether or not these trends are real, whether they matter. I actually think in a weird way, NyQuil Chicken is like a really good example of how to solve that, what that means, what the answer is there. Because as we're about to see, the answer is it doesn't matter if these challenges are real because they impact real. life regardless. And we're going to talk about that right after the break. The first NyQuil Chicken, Sleepy Time Chicken, appears in 2017. It disappears. Comes back a couple years later during the pandemic, 2020. A guy on TikTok uses what we learned as a hair straightener to make it on camera, put it on TikTok. It bounces around for a while. It disappears. Then in 2022, a user named, it's so good. This username is so good.

Can you tell us the username for this for this TikTok? Because I want to give you the privilege of reading it out loud. System of a Clown 69. It's killer. It's so good. It's really good. So once again, System of Clown 69 gets the bottle of NyQuil. This time it is literally NyQuil.

And they cook up some chicken breasts. You get the idea. Although an important detail that was pointed out by a researcher, Adam Bumis, who did this, the research for this episode, he's a beast. And he made a very important observation. The 22 Sleepy Time Chicken, NyQuil Chicken video, was set to Mitzky, which is good for the artist Mitzki. Are you familiar? Yeah, yeah. Very good for the algorithm.

Good, yeah, that makes sense. So presumably this is the same thing. It was just sort of either simmering or poaching the chicken breast in the... Yeah, yeah. They just, same idea. And it gets picked up everywhere. This is the moment that the inside joke that we would have shared on Slack five years prior becomes a national news story. It's written up by Mike.com, which I didn't even know was still operating in 2022.

It is from there that doctors get involved. So Mike.com talks to a doctor, Aaron Hartman, who told them, when you cook cough medicine, like NyQuil, you boil off the water and alcohol in it, leaving the chicken saturated with a super concentrated amount of drugs in the meat. If you ate one of those cutlets completely cooked, it would be as if you were consuming a quarter to a half a bottle of NyQuil. So it actually sounds like this is a better way to get treatment if you have severe symptoms. Katie, D, do you think NyQuil? treats cold symptoms? Do you think it... Well, no, you know, it's actually funny because I used to be a NyQuil believer,

but I would say when what? Maybe a year or two ago, there was a sort of announced a study that came out that said, okay, we doctors finally admit it. There's literally nothing in the ingredient. It's whatever the non-suda haphedareta is. It's like the final clean. Gephenazine or something. Yeah.

Yeah. whatever the one that's not that you don't have to ask for behind the counter at the pharmacy, that they're like, yeah, literally we are all our tests say that it does nothing for you, which like I kind of feel like everyone like knew, but there was maybe enough of a placebo effect going on. But I feel like now that I know that, it, you know, there's no point. I mean, maybe it'll, you should treat your symptoms separately. So bend adril is probably better if you have a runny nose at night and maybe treat like cough symptoms with a different, with a pure, you know, cough treatment.

What I would say also is try the chicken. See if it works. Try the chicken. I mean, it can't. For the record, please do not do that. Please do not. Actually. Do not.

Do not eat the chicken. Do not eat the chicken. So back in our timeline of Michael Chicken traveling around the world, it was at this point also that Jimmy Fallon gets involved. He mentions it in a monologue, which I didn't know about. because I haven't had a TV that can play television in many, many years. But yeah, I'm a millennial. I watch cable at my parents' house.

And now, like, I think is now in the story is sort of the best example of how a thing, literally the same thing, five years prior, didn't really matter to anyone outside of freaks like us. In 2022, post-pandemic, it is everything. It's everywhere. And I think part of that is to do with the fact that it was on TikTok. And part of that is also to do with the fact that after COVID lockdown, there's a whole lot of people who are using the internet as sort of their primary,

their primary portal to the world, I think. Does that kind of clock with you with your observations as well? I mean, I think there's so many, so many things going on, right? Like the TikTok was exactly at a place where like totally broke people's meter to tell, whether something was like satire or real, or was this challenge, you know, like all the heady brew for a moral panic about like, is this kids watching it? Is this adults watching it? Are people actually doing it? Like, no one can tell. Do you also think that there was sort of a shift in how the average person sort of viewed TikTok between, let's say, 2020 and 2022? Like, do you feel like

that was the moment where TikTok sort of crossed over as the biggest app in the world? Like, do you think there was like an extra sensitivity to it by this point? Yeah. And definitely like huge mainstream number, right? Like, I feel like in 2020, it was still like, I'm an adult, but I actually like TikTok. Like it was still sort of the teen dancing app. It was like the Dimmilio sisters, right?

Like that's what people thought of it as. And by 2022, people were like, no, this is actually just incredibly popular app that adults go on for all sorts of. types of content that they enjoy consuming. I remember seeing my first TikTok dance, like, done in the wild. It was 2020, and I was in, like, a really rural part of Brazil, like, by the beach. And I was on a road trip. And I was, like, eating lunch.

And I look over. And this girl had put her phone on her family's car and was, like, doing weird hand movements. And I was like, what is that? And then I was like, oh, my God, that's a TikTok dance. And I was, like, in the middle of nowhere. And that, that for me, I was like, like, like, oh, this is big. And then by 2022, my feeling was like, TikTok is the only app that matters and everything is just like downstream of it culturally. So I feel like people's radars were much

more attuned to this stuff. Okay. So the second NyQuil chicken video, of which I have only ever been able to find two. So there's only ever been, as far as I can tell, two people who have done this. Nine months after that is when the FDA publishes, their NyQuil chicken warning, which is really funny. Oh, my God. The FDA, I mean, it took the, how long do it take them to figure out that NyQuil doesn't work? And yet they're right on it with the chicken. So their blog post is titled, A Recipe for Disaster, Social Media Challenges involving medicines.

And the important poll quote is here. A recent social media video challenge encourages people to cook chicken and NyQuil or other similar over-the-counter cough and cold medication, presumably to eat. Ah, yes, FDA. These people are definitely eating this stuff. System of a clown 69 is about to sit down with a knife and fork and really cut in here. And then the next paragraph is, the challenge sounds silly on and on appetizing. And it is. But it could also be very unsafe.

Boiling a medication can make it much more concentrated and change its properties in other ways. Even if you don't eat the chicken, inhaling the medications vapors while cooking could cause high levels of the drugs to enter your body. It could also hurt your lungs. Put simply, someone could take a dangerously high amount of the coffin cold medication without even realizing it. I mean, you can imagine for a second, right? Like, you work at the FDA in some kind. how this comes across your purview, right? Like you, maybe you watch it on TikTok.

Maybe your friend sends it to you. Maybe your child has seen, you have like a teenage daughter who's like, mom, check this out. This is hilarious. You have no evidence that people are doing this, but you're also thinking, you know what? Can't hurt to put out the warning, right? Can't hurt to tell people not to. That's key here.

The assumption that it can't hurt to put out the warning. The problem is, as it's, it's, it's a problem is, as it's, it's, you know, it's, it's anyone who's been to journalism school in the last 30 years will tell you, the minute a government agency of any kind responds to anything, it becomes newsworthy. And that's exactly what happened here. The FDA statement encourages NyQuil to put out their own statement saying that they don't endorse inappropriate use of their cough medicine, which then turns into posts from CNN, the Hill, Reuters, the New York Times, with CNN's being particularly funny. They wrote, while most of us would recoil in horror from such dangerous suggestions,

adolescents and young adults continue to be susceptible to social media dares like these, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. This is the problem. Everyone is saying, well, the FDA has mentioned it, so this must be a thing that's happening. So we're all going to write about it like it's happening, which then makes everyone think that it's happening, even though. Let me ask you a question. Is it possible that the FDA had information that there were instances of this happening,

but those instances, because they were minors, were not publicized in other ways. For example, maybe they got alerts from different hospitals that, you know, 10 children around the country have been sent to the hospital after doing this, but there would be no other sort of reporting of those incidents. necessarily. Like, is it possible this was real and that the FDA knows that and we don't? I'm glad you asked that because we prepared for you to ask that and throw this entire interview off track with your trollish questioning. According to what we have been able to find, there was zero reported hospitalizations due to NyQuil Chicken. Now, it could be that these

weren't public. It could be the FDA knows something we don't. My point of view, you, my sort of understanding of this is exactly kind of what you first described, which is that someone at the FDA saw this and they're like, we should probably deal with it. And I sort of assume that that was largely driven by an increased sensitivity to TikTok challenges simply because that's kind of what half of their blog post is about. It's it's not a recipe for danger. Sleepy Time Chicken is dangerous. Don't make it. It's a recipe for danger. Social media challenge involving medicines. And it's talking specifically about social media challenges, which makes me think that's kind of what they were waiting for. They were waiting for like a concrete example to go after other things like the Benadryl challenge and all the rest. That makes sense. One thing that is funny among these three different examples of the people who've done it, starting with the four-chain guy and then the two. We've never seen someone actually eat it.

We have never. They make it. But you have no evidence. You don't all, in all those three, you never see the person's face. You never see a bite mark out of the thing, really. Maybe in the first one, there's like pieces of it missing, but I suspect no one ever has eaten. In the very first Sleepy Time Chicken Thread, there's a photo of the poster's mouth with a fork in it. But it's not, it's not, you can't prove that he ate it.

He like, he clearly like made. it looked like he ate it. But our former colleague, Kelsey Weekman, over at BuzzFeed, investigated the, the effect that all of this had on the interest of NyQuil Chicken on TikTok and found that before the FDA warning, there were five searches. Searches. After the FDA warning, there were 7,000 searches. That was me.

Yeah, it was you looking at it over and over and over and over. Yeah. Where were those videos? And like I said, we have never found any proof that anyone actually did this. We've never found any proof that anyone even tried to eat it. But because of the way this sort of happened specifically on TikTok at this specific moment, it became a really big deal. And this is a really funny story. But it's also very indicative of a larger issue, one that's going to be going on this entire year, now that TikTok has a nine-month ticking clock,

to either divest or be banned in the U.S. because in 2023, Representative Buddy Carter, a congressman from Georgia, was part of a panel that hauled in the CEO of TikTok and asked him specifically about NyQuil Chicken. I don't speak for everyone, but there are those on this committee,

including myself, who believe that the Chinese Communist Party is engaged in psychological warfare through TikTok, to deliberately influence U.S. children. You know, you see behind me, if you look behind me, Mr. Creel, you see some of the challenges that we've seen on TikTok. You know about them. You know about the milk crate.

You know about the blackout challenge. You know about the NyQuil chicken challenge, the Benadryl Challenge, the Dragon's Breath Liquid Nitrogen Trend. Oh, my God. And for people who can't see this, video, buddy Carter, who at one point does pronounce the Chinese sister app for TikTok, Duyan, which is pretty good. But he's also, he's talking in front of a giant board of like, it looks like a teen vaping,

another team teaching people how to choke themselves to get high, like space monkeying, and a big picture of boiled chicken in NyQuil. Oh my Am I And I just I I think this is a really silly funny story

But in many ways It is kind of like a perfect way to measure our changing relationship to the internet since 2017 This thing that nobody cared about That only real weirdos Even knew existed Is now being talked about

In Congress Five years six years, seven years later. And it's kind of, I don't know, what do you make of that? You know, going back to the original instance of it where it's, you know, it's, we saw it because it was on 4chan and then it was on Reddit.

And like, I think in those places, it was very clear that this was like an ironic joke. It came from a place of like mayhem idiots who do, idiot stuff for their to impress other idiots and no one's really doing it and by the time it gets to TikTok you sort of lost that context of like of course they're joking because like on TikTok it's not clear that of course they're joking you know it's not you're not like oh well everyone on TikTok is you know not to be trusted or whatever um because there's plenty of good stuff on TikTok right

So I feel like there is that shift and that leap of platform, I think does make a big difference in like how it became the context of like, this is clearly a joke that no one's actually doing and they're just kind of like messing around. And then it was put on the place where it's like, my goodness, this could become the next old town road challenge. Right. By all accounts, the FDA amplified this and made this into a bigger topic than it probably would have been. is there a correct way for a government institution like the FBI to weigh in on this stuff without turning it into like a media circus? Well, you know, it's a good thing that I'm not in charge of any government agency, Ryan, because I don't fucking know. All right, we got it. All right.

Cool. Moving on. I mean, I don't know. Like, you know, if they said nothing but thought there was a real concern out there, like what do they do? Go talk to the NyQuil company and say, you know, don't sell this to teenagers who look hungry, you know?

If a guy comes in with a neck beard, don't give it to him. I don't know. I, you know, like, I guess someone has to make these decisions. I don't know what the better version is. Like, not amplifying it, I suppose. I don't know if there's any evidence

that this made people try it either. You know, like, it certainly amplified the punchline, but did it amplify anyone actually doing it? I don't know. Based on what we can tell, no. It literally just became content for people to talk about. I cannot shake.

And I don't know at one point in my life. I've got to just make this chicken one day. I've got to try it. Like, I've wanted this for so many years now. The problem is, the problem is. Mm-hmm. It looks good. Like, it glows.

Here's the thing is I actually, I have a thought. I bet it actually tastes kind of good. Hey, it's Grant again, producer of Panic World. Sorry for the interruption. We just want to say the official position of the podcast is NyQuil chicken would not be tasty. We do not endorse anything Katie is about to say. and you absolutely should not sue us.

In fact, if you take anything away from this interruption, it's that you shouldn't sue us. All right, back to Katie saying things we do not agree with. What do you think it tastes like? I think that, like, if you do it in, like, the cherry, like, think about it, like poaching chicken and a sort of, like, sweet, you know, a sweet liquid, like, that's probably good, right?

You know? a sort of sweet marinate. It's got a little bit of like cherry flavor. And then maybe it's got like a little bit of that like bitter zing. You know? You think it has like a, you think it has a zing? Do you think you think NyQuil chicken has a zing?

I think it definitely would probably have a really chemically taste, like in the same way that Nyklo does, right? Like, but it would be like, you know, I think it would be good to be perfectly honest. I think it would taste kind of. I'm trying to think of. have you ever have you ever had like a habanero salsa like a chicken with like habanero mango kind of like a sweet salsa yeah yeah yeah that's kind of like what i'm thinking about i think it's possible that like and i think it would probably pair well with like a hot sauce like i think like yeah like i absolutely agree like let me let me pitch to you like chicken with a bitter cherry glaze uh served with, you know, maybe like a

like something crunchy, like a side. So, I don't know, like a cruciferous kind of, you know, maybe some like a bok choy, maybe like kale. I don't know. A bachoy. I think a bachoy and like, or like a southwest

salad with like the tortilla crisps. You know, like you're not just eating like a straight chip. With like maybe some like, I don't love orange in salad, you know, but I do think like a NyQuil chicken salad with like some mandarin oranges and some like tortilla crisps. Or you do it as like a marinade and then you're like rotissurine like a whole chicken, right? Like think about like, hold on. Hold on.

Are you ready for this one, right? That's a lot of NyQuil. That is a lot of NyQuil. Sleepy time. Thanks. Yeah. Yeah, I'm ready. Thanks.

You based a great way to make your entire family pass out. Well, here's the thing. I mean, the FDA has said that if you boil it, you cook off a bunch of the drugs into the air. So that's why you put it in the oven. Which I think is FDA speak for getting you high. No, but I think the fumes would come out of the oven. I think the solution is you don't do it on the stove top. You do it inside the stove.

You roast it. You do it like a long, slow roast. Instead of potting it on the stove top, you do it in the stove. Yeah. I'm just sitting in a crack of window. I don't. I feel like at this point, we have to be clear. Here's what I think.

No one should do this. No one should eat the sleepy time chicken. So, okay, just to take this thing on home. Do you think we can course correct the sort of like outrage impulse we have about TikTok content? Like, do you think that there's a way to turn back the clock on this without like obviously just banning the whole app? Can we stop people from thinking that things that are like, like kind of obvious hoaxes on the internet are hoaxes. Like, yes and no, right?

Like, the hoaxers are always one step ahead. So it's like people will get a little bit more attuned to, I think, to think through the idea of like, here's an obviously fake challenge that no one's actually really doing. So maybe this isn't like a real thing. Like, don't forget out about it. It's like a panic. But I do have this other theory that I've sort of been noodling on based on a lot of stuff that I've seen, which is that like trolling is over.

Bate is the new thing. And like bait is getting really good and really sophisticated and really hard to tell. And I feel like this sort of straddles that line a little bit of like trolling. Like this is, this kind of feels like bait. Can you define that a bit more for our listeners? Because I'm nodding my head in like real. ago, Alarm's agreement. But can you, can you, can you just sort of like parse that a bit more?

I would describe bait as like a satire or we, let's formally call it maybe a troll post. But I feel like it's like it's different. It's like a different thing. Someone's not being genuine. They're doing something like rage bait is like posting something purposefully inflammatory just for the, that you don't mean just to get people riled up. And I see a lot of that. more and more on TikTok.

It has been a big thing on Twitter for a long time and it's gotten even worse, especially as the incentive structure there. Like basically the way that blue checks get paid for how many comments you get highly incentivizes bait. There's one guy who is pretty probably probably he's like a real guy who works in tech, Nikita Beer. He does he does this. much. And he's very open about it, too. Like, he's described how, like, a great way to, like, get bait is to say something, like, kind of reasonable, but, like, add in one tiny wrong thing. Like, I remember he was, like, posting something about, like, you know, the greatest thing about the city of Boston is, you know, how you can take those riverboat cruises that go under the bridges or something like that would, like, you know, it's like just a little bit off or something that, and every, so everyone, like, jumps into correct or whatever. And like that's like a great like bait example.

I feel like I see more and more on Instagram now. A lot of like satire stuff that like they never break character really. Oh like the the cocky goes boing boying guy? No. Have you seen that guy? No. Oh really? So there's like this guy.

He's been doing this character Dan Henschel. He's like a really weird outsider comedian. He's just been posting, like, insane content for months, maybe years. Here, check this out. I think the thing that has bothered me the most about my ex-wife and my her child dying is that everybody just acts like it's a horrible tragedy. And I know that that's going to be a little shocking. But let me ask you this. Sorry.

I was trying to resist doing something very bad. What if I killed that person? I'm not going to. But what if I did? Would we all cry? Mm-hmm. Yeah, he's just, he's a mess. I'll give you an example of like a bait account that like I recently talked to these people.

And they were very nice. It was a relatively young couple and they have two small kids. And the woman is this attractive woman. She looks like an influencer. And they made this one where she and her husband are going, they're like, we've decided that we really love being shoeless and grounding our feet because it makes us feel so at one with nature, which like is a real thing that like, you know, sort of woo-woo people do. And so they're playing off that.

And but they're just walking around like the streets of Cleveland and going like into a mall without shoes on. Oh, I've seen these people. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then they do one where they, like, get kicked out of the Sephora because they're not wearing shoes. And, you know, the people in the comments are going nuts. And they, and then they did, like, this one that was so good. They're like, because we're so committed to going barefoot all the time, but stores won't let us in, we've decided what we're going to do is we're going to cut the soles off all our shoes.

And we're really committed to this. And they showed them, like, cutting the souls off their, like, sneakers or whatever. and then they go around with their like soulless sneakers walking around. They're kidding. They're doing a satire, but all the comments don't realize this. And like it's just, it's bait and it's incredibly successful.

And I feel like I've been seeing so much more stuff like that. I recently sent you a Instagram post that I like had to, I'm like a little embarrassed about this because I had to like catch myself. Because after I saw it and I was like, oh my God, this is the funniest thing. I got to send it to Ryan. And then after I saw it, I like watch like two more videos from the same guy. And I was like, oh, crap.

I got, I got, I got, I got had. This guy is doing bait. He's doing a bit. Wait, wait. And I don't think I've, hold on. Wait, I can react in real time here because I never check my Instagram. So hold on. Well, I've been sending you a lot of good stuff, Ryan.

So, yeah, it's a recording of a prison. No, that wasn't it. That wasn't it. I send you. It's like a sort of young guy with brown hair. Wow, you do send me a lot of Instagram. I can't believe you haven't been watching my videos. I'm really hurt.

I sent you so many. Let's see. You've sent me like a guy with like a big pig or chicken or something. And you've said, okay, this is a guy. His name is Mr. Busson-Madix. And it says trolled. Let me see here. Okay.

Here's ways I've epically trod different types of teachers. And yeah, trog is pronounced trog. Deal with it. All right, kids, no more talking for the rest of lunch. Can I get a lawyer? Oh, yeah. So I sent it to you being like, oh, my God, look at this guy. It's like so funny, not realizing that it was a bit.

And then I, like, realized it was. And I tried to, like, save myself. And I was like, oh, yeah. I mean, I just think his bit is really funny. What he's doing, Ryan? Like, oh. Like, I didn't want to admit that I got had. You didn't think this was a bit?

Okay. But you know it's a bit and you look at it. You're like, yeah, obvious bit. Like, obvious bait. Like, but I got had. I think this gets to the heart of the issue here, though, which is that when you look at a video, a short form video on an app like Instagram or TikTok, there's not a lot of room for context.

You're just sort of seeing these images and these. and hearing these sounds and you just sort of react. And I think you're right that like it's not enough room to really troll someone, but it's absolutely enough space to bait someone into a reaction. That's the difference between a massive 4chan thread where you're, you're following along for pages and pages and you're watching people react. And they're kind of playing along and it's obvious that everyone's playing along versus a 90-second TikTok video of someone like doing something gross with a piece of food.

And you're just like freak out because that's what it wants you to do. And I think you're totally right that that is a massive shift in how we use the internet that happened in the last, you know, five to seven years. I feel like trolling is almost like part of it is you have to do a lower effort than the person you're trolling. Like if someone like you're, you have to be doing less. And in the bait, these people are doing these really elaborate videos where they're doing a lot. Yeah. Like a good troll will be every time Scott Bayo tweeted, people would respond to him like, you wear a diaper.

And he would get really mad or whatever. That's like, you know, it's like a really like, it's like a real thing or whatever. And like that's like a low effort troll. Like it just drives him mad because every time he tweets, people are replying to him that he wears a diaper or whatever. This is like someone's created a whole character universe. Are you doing that to Scott?

Are you doing that to Scott Bayo? No, he blocked me years ago. Of course not. I want to ask you one last question for today's episode, Katie, and I want to thank you for coming on. But my last question is, why did Scott Bayo block you? For saying he wore a diaper. What I just said?

Katie, if people don't want to follow you on the internet, and I don't know why they would, but if they would like to follow you on the internet, Where can they do that? They can follow me on X, formerly noticed Twitter, at Cadyinotopoulos, same name on threads, blue sky. On Mastodon, you can find me at the user handle at Poop Poop Poop P. Which I regret, and I guess you can't really change once you've kind of claimed your handle. Yeah.

And you can follow my writing on. business insider.com. Thank you very much for coming on. And, you know, if the fans want it, and we can get this fan movement going, hashtag Katie Sleepy Time Chicken Challenge, we can have you come back on and try it. And we'll get some real good firsthand reporting.

But thank you again for this. This was great. Thank you so much for having me. Panic World is a Garbage Day production. It's written and produced by Grant Irving, hosted by myself with research from the always fantastic Adam Bumis. We have a Patreon which you can find at patreon.com slash panicworld. If you like to buy an ad on the show or give us money in any way, you can contact Josh Fielstad, our business manager, at Panicworld pod at gmail.com. And I'd like to end this episode with an important reminder. Log off and touch grass while you still can. Hey, this is Grant. The producer of Panic World just have to come in one more time. You know, we confirmed that big down.

was responsible for the butterboard challenge. But I want to make clear, we're not saying that that's a bad thing. If Big Dairy wants us to get behind butterboards or basically anything else, we are happy to do so. Alternatively, if the milk substitute your almond milk, your almond slash coconut milk, your oat milks, want us to come out and just hate the dairy industry, we are happy to do that as well. Just email Josh at Panicworldpod at gmail.com And we are for sale for any milk-like substance. That's Panicworldpod at gmail.com for any milk or milk-related products.

You got it.