Panic World - Was the Tide Pod Challenge ever real? (With PJ Vogt)

Episode Date: October 30, 2024

Tide Pods were the king of the forbidden candies. The items that looked delicious despite being disgusting, or poisonous, if you actually bit into one. For a few months in 2018, it seemed like the biggest threat to American teenagers was the temptation to participate in the "Tide Pod Challenge," i.e., bite into the Gushers-like laundry pod on camera before calling poison control. Local news was all over the story, police were making videos warning teens of the dangers, an NFL star made a PSA. But, was this actually a real problem? Were teens across the country really this gullible? Was anyone actually being hurt or dying because they ate a Tide Pod? Our guest PJ Vogt is the host of Search Engine. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts, and you can follow him otherwise @PJVogt. 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

Hey there, guys. Ryan here. Before we get into today's episode, got a few announcements for you. Over on our Patreon, we have a spooky Halloween-themed bonus episode. It's an interview between our producer Grant and Callie Hernandez, the lead of the sequel to the Blair Witch Project. She gave us some great additional Blair Witch lore and talked all about living up to the viral legacy of the original one. We'll also be dropping a recording of the Garbage Day Live show at the Bell House, which happened earlier this month, behind a paywall on our Patreon. You can also find a video on there of me cooking Nykel chicken, add free episodes, and much, much more.

All right, let's get into this week's episode. I have a little question for you to tee up this week's episode. So I'm going to send you this link. Can you tell the audience, which of these is your favorite forbidden snack? Oh, okay. So on these forbidden snacks, there's a Himalayan Salt Lamp. Have you ever wanted to lick a Himalayan Salt Lamp? Have you ever wanted to lick a Himalayan salt lamp?

Yes, absolutely. I mean, I'm only a human. Okay, and then there's Dungeons and Dragons, D&D die. Yeah, D&D dies, yeah. And then there's like, the bath bombs look like giant gobstoppers. They do look delicious. What is the thing that looks like a gusher, a blue gusher? That's a tidepot.

Okay, I see where we are. I'm situated. I'm situated. I'm situated. Yeah, I would say. You see how this connects to the show? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm back. All right.

So I would say, in order of deliciousness, the tidepods look really good. I would say the bath bombs look most delicious. After that, the tide pod, after that, a lick of the Himalayan salt lamp, because obviously you want to make sweet and salty. And then I don't find the D&D cubes appetizing, but I get they're like, they're multi-colored in a way that looks a little bit like a jolly rancher. Yeah. And then obviously you got like your, you know, your erasers and, uh,

And then lava, just straight up lava. I've never been doing to you. I'm also buying time because Grant's outline does this thing where it breaks my computer. It's completely working my computer yet again. Every day, every minute the internet produces content that makes zero sense to most people. And for some reason, I've decided to make it my life's work to make some of that stuff make sense to some people. And one of the topics still this day that I get asked about the most is what's the deal with tide pods? America has two mainstay pastimes, consumption and panics.

And on the rare glorious occasion, those. two things overlap. What was the Tidepod challenge? Was it really worthy of our freak out? And what should we learn from it? I'm Ryan Broderick and welcome to Panic World, a show about the various witch hunts, moral panics, and viral freakouts bubbling up out of the weirdest, most confusing corners of the internet. And joining me today is a guy who I think has a bright future in podcasting. His name is PJ Vote. Hello, PJ. Welcome to the show. Hi, Ryan. Thanks for having me. So the reason I'm asking you about forbidden candy is because this is the origins of the Tide Pod Challenge.

But I would love to hear when you first became aware of the Tide Pod Challenge. So I used to work for a podcast called Reply All. And we sometimes we would do like, we did a mix of kind of normal-ish podcast journalism. And then we had a segment called Yes, Yes, No, where our boss would bring in confusing tweets and ask for them to be explained to us, to him by us. And I remember that he had a tweet that was like, the premise was that was, it was. the four horsemen of the apocalypse. And one of the things was Tidepods.

There was like three other just like internet memes of that moment that all, I think, pointed perhaps at like a deadening of human sensitivity towards foolishness. And so that's where I remember talking about them. I was probably aware of them a little bit before then, but that was like, that's when I remember thinking the hardest about Tidepods in my life.

I see, okay. Well, a little background here. You might not know this. Tide pods, they started, okay, so they were invented by Procter and Gamble. They started development in 2004, and 75 people worked on the project to come up with the tide pod. 74? 75? 75 people.

Yes. And there was 450 sketches that went into designing the packaging. And, like, how do we think that labor was allocated? Like, because it's basically just like you put Tide in a thing that melts safely. Is it all just branding and marketing people? Well, here's what we know. So there was a fortune deep dive about this. And the Fortune article reads, okay, as the final shape emerged, the development team was thrilled

with the results. Tide pods were fun to hold, squishy yet firm. Their colors, Tide's signature blue and orange, in swirl shape chambers atop a white backdrop. She stood out far more than the same. single colored packets on the market at that point. And here's a quote from Tom Fisher, a former P&G executive for fabric and home care sales, the division that made typos. Okay.

So he says, we knew we had a breakthrough product on our hands. And just so I understand it, like the breakthrough is basically like, you don't like doing laundry. We've made it exciting by giving you some new crap to buy. Like, that's the breakthrough, right? Like, they don't like clean better or different, do they? No, they just, I mean. I think the major thing is like you throw them in the machine and they're like measured out for you.

Oh, right. So you're not going to do. Actually, what I often do, which is put too much detergent and then my clothes smell like, nobody in my life is honest with me. Do you, are you an over detergenter? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I often am. I often like pour past the little line. And like, I think you actually could get away with pouring under the line. But I'm not like, I'm not, I'm the kind of person who would buy tied pods exactly once, but not twice. But maybe they only needed a nation of me's. I use Tidepods to this day, actually.

Oh, really? You throw them in the bag with the laundry, and then I just throw the whole thing in the machine, and I'm done. It's great. So you're mocking the work of these 75 people, but, like, they've probably made thousands of dollars off of you in the last few years.

I think you're really overesteroing amount of laundry that I do. Hundreds, tens? Definitely 20 times, for sure. Okay, so I'm going to show you. This is an early commercial for tiepods. Can you describe for our audience what you're seeing here? Yeah, let me boot it up. Let me boot it up.

Let me click a link. Yeah, boot up that link. All right, I'm booting up the link. Okay, there's whimsical commercial library music playing. A woman walks into an all-white laundry room, throws a tripod in the laundry machine. And now, like, triumphant music is playing. The room turns blue.

A lady jumps out. of the washing machine for some reason. It's a bunch of like cool, creative punk rock-esque people in colorful clothes, jumping out of sort of almost psychedelic watching machines. And then it also says Shazam for more in case you're like loving the song, I guess. So this was 12 years ago when Shazam was like trying to like pivot into like a real social network, I think. So like you could like Shazam ads.

You're like, I need more advertisement. I want more ad. So I think it's fair to say that this commercial has like LMFAO party rockers anthem aesthetic to it. Yes, that is a well described. It does. It's like kind of like a lot of bright colors in a way that's kind of clashy, but it's supposed to be kind of fun and exciting.

So would you say that this looks delicious? Is this activating the pica in you? I would say it doesn't look delicious enough that it makes me want to eat something that I'm not supposed to eat, but if the exact same color scheme and color saturation were applied to candy, I would eat it. Do you know what I mean? Like, it kind of looks like you're in, it's a very like starburst, uh, fruit roll up palette of texture and color. And those are candies that I find irresistible. Yeah, I feel the same way. There is sort of like an ice cream, uh, like the way ice cream looks in cartoons. Yes. Is kind of how tiepods look to me. Uh, very studio Ghibli. Uh,

Very studio-gibly. And what's really funny is when we started doing research for this episode, we discovered that Procter & Gamble knew almost immediately that this was going to be a problem. Really? Yeah. So, according to this fantastic fortune deep dive, it reads, immediately after the launch, the company enlisted the Cincinnati Drug and Poison Information Center to collect data on exposures.

Richard Dart, head of the Rocky Mountain Poison and Drug Center at Denver Health, describes this as highly unusual. With prescription drugs, if the FDA has concerns, they will require monitoring right from the minute it enters the market, he says. But for consumer products, especially, I don't think I've ever heard of one that did this. So they knew they were doing something incredibly risky by making something you're not supposed to eat that looks like something you would want to eat. Exactly. And so right from the beginning, you know, this thing bursts out of the party rockers anthem world. It's hitting shelves and there's a problem because it looks too delicious. But before we sort of start to go through the ticking clock here of Taipod Mania, I was hoping, you know, as a fellow traveler of internet lore, if you could kind of describe for our audience the difference between how the internet operated, let's say, between 2015 and 2018 to the way it operates now.

How would you to describe the vibe back then? Oh, man. I mean, 2015 and 2018 falls across Trump. So it's sort of a blurred chapter. but I would say those were, God, I sound like such an elder millennial. Those were maybe the last time. I mean, here's what I'll say. You've made this point, which I find very insightful,

which is that part of the reason people participate in misinformation is because it can be really fun. It can be fun to spread a rumor without caring if it's true or not. And I would say when I think back to that chapter of Internet, a lot of misinformation was often being spread that did not feel like it was changing important things. Like it felt like silly rumors

like sort of proliferated on a still functioning social media internet but it wasn't like oh sorry one sec someone's talking loudly outside the studio. One sec. Like it felt like you could document the

the current hold on. Hold on podcast professional. Let's take it from the top. Yeah. Okay. It felt like okay so I would say in that chapter of internet it felt like sorry this is still happening he's just sneaking out to eat tidepods that's all that's happening he's just gobbling those bad boys up in the laundry room okay i think i won okay i would say that in that chapter of the internet silliness and misinformation abounded but it didn't feel as consequential and it didn't feel like it still felt like you could enjoy

watching something dumb happen without worrying about what it was doing to the country. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, and I would say like between 2015 and 2018, there was this moment where we were sort of transitioning. We were obviously at this point post-Justine Sacco, you know, just in case anyone listening doesn't remember her. She was the woman who tweeted a really bad age joke

and then got on a plane and her entire life unraveled as the entire world watched. You kids can look it up. It was a big deal. So we know that the internet can, like, reach insane levels of scale and impact, but we don't. totally we can't like totally predict what will matter so we're like still in this this like pre-trump world i think that's what it is like i remember when i would try to describe the internet then

what i would often say is that it takes already existing human impulses desires reflexes and puts them through a fun house and and like puts them in front of a fun house mirror but it felt like the people who were badly affected or interestingly affected by that fun house mirror were still on the margins. You know, there weren't that many Justine Sacco's. There was like a Justine Sacco. There's like one person. You get one a year. One a year. Yeah. We sacrifice one person every year of the internet and then we all go about our business. And it feels like what happened after that was both not it's not that there was like a million Justine Saccoes, but there was this a bigger feeling that like more people were becoming internet poisoned. It wasn't just people who were online a lot. but Thanksgiving was getting weirder. Like Trump's election, obviously was a big moment,

but also like, you know, it's not just what Trump does the country. It's like you have like Eric Garland time for some game theory. Like everyone was going to get a lot crazier instead of like this feeling that I had in that moment, which is like, oh, it's making some people crazy, but most of us are having fun. Right. So let's go over the challenges that set the stage for tie pods. No one remembers now because our brains are destroyed, but this goes back. way before TikTok.

There wasn't an app feeding them to us. Each time one popped up, it felt exciting and not immediately exhausting. Yes. Yeah, this is like we're not that far out of like ice bucket challenge internet. Oh, we're going to get to that. Okay, okay. But first, but first, I want to go back a little further in time. This is the earliest example we could find of the cinnamon challenge.

And I would love for you to give us a play by play. of what's going on in this clip from 2006. Okay. I've never seen this, by the way. Okay, so it says pipe, which I think is this person's name. They have long hair. I'm not. Yeah, it's titled Pipe Addempts the Cinnamon Challenge,

which is a perfect name for the way that this person looks. Yeah, they have like, sort of like, sort of metal head long hair. But it's like... Backyard wrestling vibes. Backyard wrestling is much. better described. Okay. So they're... What are they doing? They just coughed. Swallow it. Swallow it.

Okay. They ate something out of a spoon. Oh. Do you not... Do you not know what the cinnamon challenges? No. This is... No. Oh, okay. So the cinnamon challenge is where you take a spoonful of cinnamon and you try to eat it. That's what this is. It's so, it's so like calling it... I mean, I guess this is true a lot of a lot of these things, but like, calling them a challenge somehow makes them seem more intellectual or something. I mean, or like more like like questy or like it's like stick a fork in an outlet challenge.

Like eating a spoon of little of cinnamon is a very bad idea that will make you ill right away. I'm assuming. Yeah, I watched a guy do it at a party once and he got really sick and he kind of ruined the party for everybody because he threw up all over the kitchen. Yeah, that's what I was assuming happened. Okay, so pipe is attempting the cinnamon challenge. It's some backyard wrestler looking person in their backyard near a porch. They have a spoon laden with cinnamon, and they're about to eat it. And then he kind of laughs and spits it out.

Oh, he hasn't swallowed it yet. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. He looks like he's going to throw up when this goes down. He's just being encouraged to swallow it by the filming person. Oh, this person is making some horrible faces. They look like they're transforming from a person into something else.

Yeah, but Pipe does it. Pipe gets the cinnamon down, which I think is pretty much. Oh, yeah, Pipe does it. And he's not going to, he's not going to spew. So that's so 174,000 people watched Pipe eat cinnamon. And that was the cinnamon challenge. Yeah, and the comments are people being like still checking in 17 years later, which is what you want to see. Oh.

This sort of thing, like I said, had been going on forever on the internet. You had planking, a variation of planking called owling. What was owl? You know of that one? No. You kind of like sit like an owl. Okay. But it's difficult the way planking is difficult.

Yeah. You know, you kind of like planking, you would like lay down flat on stuff. Oh yeah. It's weird. I feel like everything people were doing at this moment felt a little bit like trends that would have happened in like 1910 or something like in a small town. Like they're all like, it's like these goofy kids are trying to pack into a telephone booth. But it was just happening on the internet. Yes.

So I think a lot of it had to do with like the spread of digital cameras, right? So it's like people experimenting with what they could capture in a with a camera and then put it online. So planking is like perfect for that. Yeah. There's another one called like Hadookening where you'd like pretend to be like a street fighter character. And then when people put like visual effects on it or you just do the Hadoca and hand gesture. You do the Hadookin in midair. I was actually brought on Japanese TV once to do an interview about Hadoquening as like a hot new

meme. Very strange time. Yes. But there's a whole bunch of these. And we found a bunch of really funny ones. We found three different challenges involving bananas. Do you know any of these? I know none of these. I know none of the banana challenges.

Okay. So there's one from 1998 called the Banana Blowout, which involves like cutting the legs off like panty hose and then you like pull it over your head and then you try to like push a banana through the panty hose into your mouth. It's not even why. Is everybody ready? All right. Everybody hold your banana.

Don't crack you. Go! You know, that one's pretty cool. Then there's also the banana Sprite challenge where you like eat two bananas and then you try to drink a liter of Sprite without throwing up. Okay. Sure. And then the last one obviously is like you try to obviously, I'm saying obviously you like

you like put the banana peel on the green. ground and then you try to slip on it like a cartoon. Oh, that's great. That one I approve of. Yeah. It's funny, it's just like, whatever. I'm going to sound so convergingly if I keep doing this. But I feel like now the things people are doing because of TikTok are like breaking or deforming their jaws.

Like I just, this does feel like a more. Are you talking about like. Looks maxing. Like in cells, jaw maxing. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like I, I just, I'm sure dark things were happening then too. I'm sure I documented some of those dark things.

But like, it does feel like a simpler time. Well, it's, thank you, thank you for teeing us up here, because we're actually going to talk about exactly when that changed. Okay. Which was in 2014. So have you ever heard of the neck nomination challenge? No. No. Your ability to zip through just pure internet filth is so inspiring to me, the amount of things you found in the dumpster.

I need, I need something to do with all of these things that I know. And I don't know what else I can do with them. So what was this? Okay, so in 2014, but by 2014, Facebook had really supercharged its news feed. Mobile traffic had like full on replaced desktop traffic. And so everyone had a smartphone with a Facebook feed inside of it and they're sharing content. And they're sharing content with each other. And users quickly figure out that you can, you can essentially tag someone in a post and then everyone sees it and you can kind of publicly talk to each other on Facebook, which is kind of bizarre to think that that at one point was new.

but it was. Right. And so a bunch of like Australian and British lads figure out that you can use this feature to challenge each other to do dumb stuff. And so this was called the neck nomination challenge. And what you would do is you would neck or finish a bottle of alcohol. And then you would challenge someone else to do it. And it basically caused like a cascade of deaths across the UK.

From alcohol poisoning? Yeah, because they were neck nominating each other to drink more and more alcohol. That was kind of, but what's crazy about the neck nomination challenge is a couple months later, it inspires the ice bucket challenge. Oh, so it's like the same social behavior that just causing like young people to drink themselves to death then gets turned into a slightly, I mean, not slightly, like a much safer and more socially valuable. So the neck, the neck, it was it called the neck? It was it called the neck? What was it called? So N-E-K nomination, neck-nomination. Okay, so the neck nomination inspires the Ice Bucket Challenge?

It's like a precursor. It's people figuring out this, as you described, social behavior. And then when summer rolls around, like, Facebook users have figured out that they can publicly communicate through content. And now there's like video uploads on the news feed as well. So you can communicate through video content. which is now the entirety of TikTok, but 10 years ago, this was brand new behavior that it never existed before.

That is fascinating. That's fascinating. And it's the rare example on the internet of something being imitated and becoming more socially wholesome instead of more socially damaging. Well, you're wrong. Because immediately,

immediately a bunch of other challenges appear, such as the fire challenge, where you rub alcohol on your body, and light yourself on fire. Okay, okay, okay. The laws of nature are reasserting themselves. Wait, were people really lighting themselves on fire? What do you?

Was it like a little bit? Of course people were, of course people were lighting themselves on fire. Right, of course. Okay, okay, and then what else? Okay, so they're doing all kinds, you know, this is when you get like space monkeying. It's when, you know what space monkey? I don't know anything.

I feel like a narque. I've never, what was space monkeying? Well, space munking was an older one that I heard when I was in middle school, but I, like, made a resurgence in Facebook era, which is where you would, like, choke yourself to get high. Oh, yeah, people I knew did that. People I knew did everything to get high. It wasn't a challenge.

It was just a problem. Right. And so during this era, though, you're seeing, like, you're seeing the idea of, like, a chain letter combining with social media and creating this new idea. And it's based on a lot of older behavior. Planking is, like, probably the best example. Yeah. But now it's evolving really quickly.

Okay, so we've covered all the challenges that set the stage for Tidepods, but after the break, we're going to get into how eating laundry detergent took over the world. Now we're slowly getting into how the Tidepot challenge existed. So I opened the show by asking you, you know, what kind of forbidden food you would like to eat. And the reason we did that is because in 2017, a Tumblr username Cybercrimer made a post that's been deleted now. called forbidden snacks. And it was the Super Balls, the salt lamp, and the Tidepods. Yeah. And it goes viral on Tumblr.

And people start adding more forbidden foods. So you get like aquarium gravel and scented candles. And they're not really saying these are foods I want to eat. What they're saying is what they're commenting on is that in a, not to get too high bro here, but like in a consumer society, a lot of things that one way to make someone want to purchase something is to make it look delicious, even if it's not something you would eat. They're just pointing out all the things you're not supposed to eat that look like. like they'd be good. I think that's part of it.

And I also think that like most people had a moment as a child where they saw something that wasn't edible that looked like it would be good if you ate it. Yeah, I think there's this one specific toy whistle that was like blue and white. And it looked like it was made out of like, you know, like the candies you would read about in the Willy Wonka book. And I remember like even though I knew it was plastic, I remember writing down because I was just like on the very off chance that this is candy. It's going to be the best thing I ever eat.

And it was plastic. Did you do it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I took a big, I took a big chomp, but it wasn't edible. So I'm hoping you, I can tag you in once again here to kind of build the connective tissue because I do think people younger than us and probably also older than us actually don't understand how Tumblr interacted with the rest of the internet in like 2016, 2017. but how would you sort of define its relationship to the wider world of internet culture 10 years ago? My memory, and I think you were deeper and tumbler than me,

but my memory is that it was kind of like, I'm trying not to use the word insane as a pejorative, but like it was a stranger. That's fine. We're not doing PC stuff on this show. You can go full Joe Rogan if you want. Well, I do have some supplements to sell you. No, it was like it was a it was a place where there was both more in jokes and more densely layered funny in jokes, but also where people had gotten deeper into stranger ideas faster than the rest of the internet.

And so it was a very strange place to visit because you never knew if you were walking in on a conversation where two people were pretending to be kind of crazy or actually being really crazy or if they were just like not crazy, but. had arrived at a new idea faster than, say, like, Twitter or whatever. And oftentimes when, like, I spent more time on Twitter, but I would, when Twitter and Tumblr interacted, it was like two countries that were not totally equipped to understand each other interacting. Like, the jokes did not entirely translate. And some of the funnier or weirder moments of miscommunication happened at that intersection. Does that seem fair?

I think that's exactly right. where because of Tumblr's reblog feature that essentially allowed you to like chain a bunch of posts together, the communication was just very different than what you would see on Twitter or Facebook. And so like a lot of times like in the 2010s, you know, you'd have something happening over here on Tumblr and then you'd have something happening over here on Facebook and on YouTube and Twitter. And they're all sort of informing each other, but not literally. and it's like it's a it's a it's a it's a phenomenon that we don't really see much anymore actually I think the sort of like internet wide culture shift around something at the same time yeah tumbler was also the first place that taught me like I don't know how if you could learn how to mostly read tumbler correctly your internet literacy was going to be pretty good like it was just like it was a very

it was like it was just a difficult text you know what I mean like if you could survive there, you'd be all right. Yeah. If you could survive the Onsler, if you could survive the Onsler, you could survive the Onsler. The Onsler is like the little boy with the top hat from that Lorax movie. Oh yeah. And they wrote like tons of gay fanfic about it for like years. The internet that raised us, Ryan. So as I was saying like where you have these different areas, right? That are all lighting up. This is happening around. tidepods. So you have forbidden snacks on Tumblr. You have YouTubers beginning to make videos where they're trying to eat tidepods. College Humor makes a video about how delicious they look.

You have Redditors talking about it. This is here, this is a, this is a recent Reddit post, actually, on Dropout. Are you familiar with Dropout? Dropout is like the, it's sort of the college humor follow up, but it's a paid for service, right? Right. And, Take a look. Tell us what brought the people to Reddit. Oh, my God. That's so funny. Yeah, someone is saying, someone's trying to find the recipe for the fake Tidepods they were eating in a comedy sketch from Zach on Discord. The Tidepods were made out of icing and plastic wrap. So it would have been dangerous to actually chew and swallow it. It was okay for me to chew them up and make it look gross. No, do not try at home. It's so funny because it's also just like one of the tensions of the internet that I feel like just runs electrically.

through the Tidepod thing, which is that people like to make stupid jokes. And then there's always this question of like, how gullible is the rest of the audience for this thing? You know what I mean? Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Now, if, you know, do you remember any specific memes from this sort of era of the Tidepod

challenge? Is there anything that really sticks? Almost not. Almost not. Refresh me. So people were realizing their content with Tidepods would do really well. So to get a little taste of what was popular, I'm going to send you something. I want you to go into extreme detail and explain what you're seeing here.

Yeah, sure. Okay. Oh. Oh. That is disgusting. So it's from a user named Ice Queen. And it just says, Tide pods are the best thing to ever go on pizza, salivating smiley face emoji. And then the first picture is an uncooked.

pizza with it's just like a cheese pizza and a pan with one two three three five six nine nine ten twelve tied pods on top like pepperoni they're green blue and white and the next picture is they cooked it and it looks like so disgusting it looks like if an ai on acid tried to make like a vincent van go painting like it's all like blue and white and smeary in with the cheese it's like really like I know they're joking, but it is nasty. Also, because it turns out when Tidepods cook, the colors go from, like, whimsical to, like, really bad-assid-trip colors. Now, are you ready to see more photos from this image set? Yes, please.

Should I just scroll down? No, no. I just said you where these images came from. Okay. This is another tweet from someone called This Asshole. Hey, at the Real Asswolf. Want some forbidden fruit pizza. That hint, it ain't pineapple.

Oh my God, it's a furry. It's like a full furry. This is versus like a giant wolf with blue ears. They're putting the time pot pizza in the oven 400 degrees. And then they're offering it to the camera. Oh, my God, what a culture we made. That's insane. So this is like, I feel like this actually doesn't happen as much anymore, which is that

Like in the 2010s, if a thing went viral enough, the furries would show up. And it was weird enough. The furries would show up. Yeah. And that's exactly what happened with Tidepods, where you're starting to see. Oh, my God. These furies show up and get involved. And so this furry, by the way, made a full YouTube video.

Okay. Okay. It is six and a half minutes long. I just sent you the link. Oh, no. And it is two furries in fur suits making what they called the forbidden fruit pizza. and it is a video of them cooking tied pots on a pizza. It's weird.

Like, I'm as a person who, like, subscribes to a deep commitment to tolerance and non-judgment, sometimes in a way that makes me slightly insane. I have no problem with furries. They should try to be happy and express themselves however they want. There's something about a furry offering me a tide pod pizza to camera that makes me feel like I'm, I'm watching something from the perspective of a person who is being held captive. Like, it feels really bad. It feels like you're in like the, like, like, this is your version of like the saw dungeon.

Yes. Hello, PJ. We're going to play a game. It really feels bad. I think because it's the combination of the fact that like furries are both like sexual and, you know, Disney-ish, which never, which is always a little like whatever. But then they're like, it's this sort of like, hey kids, eat the poison pizza. Like, it really, really feels quite bad to watch. I don't like this at all.

In this video of particular, there's something, like, uncanny about the fact that they're in these, like, extremely ornate fur suits. Yes. But they're in, like, a normal house. Yes. Like a human lives in this house. And so it looks like an alien race has invaded your home and is making you eat detergent. That's what it looks like.

I also want you to know that at the end of the video, they say that they're going to compare recipes where they're not just going to use Tidepods. They're going to use the cascade for it and see how that cooks down. Oh, no. That's horrible. Yeah. So obviously we're all having fun with this. It's 2017.

You know, the internet is still an exciting, weird place. but people start to freak out because everyone around the internet is talking about eating tidepods and that could be a problem if you do that. Yes. And we're going to figure out how real this whole thing was

but we're going to do that after the break. You know, as we've been talking about this, it is a little blurry as to who started it. And we know that it kind of launched off around 2015. It really hit its stride around 2017 and different platforms are all kind of making the same joke which is one that Procter and Gamble knew was going to be a problem almost from the beginning. Yes.

So what we found is that Know Your Meme credits this guy with the original Tidepod challenge, which is debatable, but he seems to be one of the first people to actually make it into a challenge beyond just, I'm going to eat this thing because it's funny. Okay, so I'm watching this guy. Who is he? Aaron Swan. Yes.

Okay, I'm watching. Hey, guys, it's the Aaron Swan 669. Back again with another video. This time I'm doing the Tide Pod Challenge. Okay, so the one thing he advances, he says, I'm doing the Tide Pod Challenge. And he says, just kidding. But, like, it's the idea that we'll take this, like, challenge mechanic that we've used for all these other kinds of, like, socially risky behaviors. And now we're playing into Tide Potts.

And he's joking, but literally just the word challenge may be showing up for the first time here. That's the innovation here is that he's figured out. And what I do think is funny is that like in and I think like a lot of good internet content follows this rule, which is that he's just sort of assuming we know what he's talking about. Yes. Like he's just like, I'm doing the top pod challenge. You're like, what the hell you, what is this? Yes.

And then things get really out of control. And we're going to make you do a play by play again for us because this is the moment. where the story hits the news. Oh, my God. Which is always good. So this is a CBS story titled, teens are eating laundry detergent for the TidePod Challenge from January 2018. I have one browser that, like, doesn't have any ad block on it.

Here we go. Okay. Well, first they're showing me an ad for a continuous glucose monitor with one of the Jonas brothers. Oh. I think it's Nick that has diabetes. Oh, I've got it now. I've got it now. Yeah, a dangerous dare.

Oh, and the kids do actually seem to be really. really doing it. They're not chewing and swallowing, but they are biting, making a gross face and spitting out. It is a three-minute news package from CBS, and I would estimate, like, a good 40% of it are just clips from YouTube of teenagers eating tibods, interspersed with a couple like talking heads being like, don't eat tibods. God, this, it is, uh, as soon as you see someone actually eat a tidepot, it becomes much less appetiting, I will say. I mean, I wanted try the pizza and then I saw the kids eating it and now I don't want to try the furry's pizza. One of the funnier things about when an internet trend hits like a morning show in America is that all the affiliates start to pick up the story.

And so I'm going to send you another link here. This is from 23 ABC News K-E-R-O. And it's a Baker's Field Facebook mom warning others about the dangers of TidePont. HOD challenges. If they eat them, I'll kill him. Gina Colon is a Bakersfield mom and creator of the Facebook pages, Bakersfield moms, and moms helping moms. Now Colon is warning other parents in Bakersfield.

It is out there that they're doing this challenge, and this is what it looks like, and to be aware, and, you know, it can potentially kill your child if they're not careful. Now the trend has gotten so big that Tide has released this video. I'm grunk. They're hiring football. players to tell kids not to eat tired pots. Yes.

So the best part of this, the best part of this is that there is a video put out with Rob Grancowski begging children not to eat detergent. And that video comes out on January 12th. And the same day that they put that video up, a Facebook user, does the challenge and it gets three million views. Wow.

So, and it's funny because it's not as if, it's not as if people genuinely think that it's candy. It's like the more you warn people not to do it. I'm not saying like tons of people are going to do it, but like you're creating, you're creating the attention market for someone to do it. You're like telling teenagers not to do something because it's dangerous or else lots of people will pay attention to them is not. like a strategy that perfectly understands a teenager's mind.

And at the top of the show, you kind of talked about this idea of like misinformation being fun. And in a lot of the cases that we found when we were researching for this episode, were fake. Like the super viral Facebook video that got three million views in January 2018 was most likely fake. Right. Because people are interested in this thing. And now there's a whole like content,

economy incentivizing people to make content about this. And it's not just people faking it. This is also like the peak time for digital media garbage. So you've got outlets like NME that's writing a story called the Tidepod Challenge, proof that humanity is doomed. And you have the new statesman writing a story about how, you know, it's the, it's proof that the world is ending. Right. And then of course, you get the police involved. Oh, no. Dilly Dilly, everybody, and welcome to the debut episode of What to Eat, What Not to Eat. I'm your host Adam. And I'm Jeff.

Jeff, why don't you get this ball rolling? Give the people at home something that they can safely eat. Well, Adam? How about this carrot? All right, Jeff. Give the people at home something that they shouldn't eat. How about Super Nintendo Gaming System? You're telling me I shouldn't eat that?

What is this? This is the Sanich Police Department, which is a police department in Canada. But even these cops, I just have to say they're like, everyone's doing the same thing. Like, like, everyone is participating in the same thing, which is like the tone of this is so manic and crazy. I mean, not to, I don't know these cops and I wasn't there

and I don't want to make guesses about other people's motivations, but as a student of internet content, what it sure looks like is like, this is going to be fun to post because we're jumping onto an ongoing conversation. We're jumping in in a very playful over-the-top way. Like, everyone's participating

in the same thing. Like, everyone is getting basically content out of the same stupid idea. Well, Adam, today, we're here to talk about tidepods. Tie-pods. Tell me more, Jeff. Well, Adam, people are putting these in their mouths. But, Jeff, don't those go in the washing machine? They're supposed to go on the washing machine, but people are

putting that in their mouths, putting it on social media and using the hashtag Tidepod challenge. Tidepot challenge. That's ridiculous. Remember kids, retweets aren't worth your life. BJ, could you read for the audience the hashtag that the Sanich Police Department

put at the end of their post about not eating tidepods? Hashtag no pod in your bod. That is not what happens when you are genuinely when you're a Canadian police officer genuinely worried about the fate of Canada's

tide pod munching children. That's what happens when you're like, this is kind of funny, let's do our thing. Do you know what I mean? Yes, I know exactly what you mean. And I have this problem a lot when we talk about these kinds of stories because, yes,

there probably should be a way to tell children not to eat tidepods. Although you could also argue that like maybe making a tide pod look like a gusher was a bad idea to begin with. Yes. But it's like one. the train starts moving on these kinds of things, there is no way to engage without furthering it along. Yeah, if you, it's a giant rolling ball of stupidity. And whatever you slap on that ball, whether it's a warning or a condemnation or another joke, the ball gets bigger and picks up momentum.

Yes. It's almost like the way you would have killed the Tidepod challenge is you would have found the cringiest, most like corporate associated brand in America. And you would have had to them make a bunch of jokes about it and it would feel to people the way Lockheed Martin doing pride parade stuff feels a little bit. Like the way to actually have killed the joke would have been, I think, and I wouldn't have really advised this because what if a bunch of kids ate tidalads, but to have like accelerated it to the point in the cycle where it was considered cringe faster. Yeah.

I mean, I used to call it the Harambe cycle, which is the cycle in which a brand engages with a meme and then kills it, which I think is actually good for the ecosystem of memes. Yes. And I call it the Harambe cycle because Harambe was such a dark meme that no brand could monetize it. So it just sort of curdled and still exists. Right. It should have, it should have been killed. Because in a normal room, what happens is somebody makes a joke and everybody laughs and somebody else riffs on the joke. And that happens until someone riffs on the joke and nobody laughs. Then you know to move on. On the internet, it's like this infinite chamber of people riffing on the joke. You know it's over. It's funny. It's like it is a nice way to

think about it, which is that the corporation jumping in lets us start a new cycle. It tells everybody it's over and like forces the internet to stop riffing, which you kind of need. You do need it. And that did happen in this case. So you do have like a bunch of people trying to jump on this and monetize it. There's like a pizza shop in Brooklyn that makes like a donut that looks like a tie pod. Was this the pizza shop on Bedford and Williamsburg? I believe it was. They're good at this. And then, like, Vice went and, like, ate the TidePod pizza, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. And then you also, you get whiskey pods, which are, like, Tide Pods full of whiskey that you can eat.

Sure. Okay. So these, unfortunately, weren't widely available, which, you know, I would have loved to eat a big gusher full of whiskey. But as everyone's having fun and also freaking out, you also have Procter and Gamble going, having, like, the full-on-last half of Oppenheimer, realized that they have, like, unleashed this. evil across the world. We do have a tweet from them, which is very funny. And it reads, our product is absolutely not to be consumed.

Please, if you have, drink a glass of water or milk and contact poison. Contact the poison control center. And did anyone ever actually like, like, I know that people bit into them and spat it out. Did anyone get actually ill from eating tide detergent from a pod? I'm so glad you asked that because that's next on my outline for the today's episode. So that's great. Who was affected? Let's let's dig into this.

So from what we can see, laundry pods did lead to thousands of calls to various poison control centers. But here's what's interesting. The majority of those calls happened before the Tide Pod challenge. So wait, before, but was it people eating Tide Pods? So in like the beginning of the 2010s, you're seeing like several thousand calls to poison control centers about exposure to laundry detergent across the board. Okay. And by 2013, that figure is now up around 20,000.

And basically every year since then, there has been several thousand people a year that have to go to the hospital or a poison control center because of exposure to laundry detergent. The majority of the cases that we found involve. either people under the age, or either involved children under the age of six. Which is what you would expect. It's just like kids just our little self-destruction machines.

Yeah. They want to eat that forbidden snack, which, you know, makes sense to me. You also, very darkly, a lot of these cases involve people with dementia or Alzheimer's. Be confused. And I'm going to, I mean, I am not a consumer health expert, but I'm going to guess, like, that is not unique to laundry detergent. Like, there are probably a lot of. lot of things around the house that are dangerous for people with dementia or some sort of mental

impairment. They consume it. They got to go to the hospital. But if the numbers are relatively steady, those people, the fear was not about those groups. The fear was about teenagers and like perhaps like a few adults. Like it's not as if. Which is always the fear. Right.

It's always. Yeah. It's always. It's always. The most impressionable attention seeking executive function lacking citizens we have in our democracy. Right. And so what we what we found is that by 2019, nine people, seven adults and two children died due to exposure to laundry detergent in the U.S. Wow.

Which is a lot, but it's not a lot. And we also, from what we could see, you know, didn't have much connection to anything that was happening on the internet. It was just that there was this thing in your house that was kind of confusing. And people who were either too young or too old to understand what was going on consumed it by accident. So this was a genuine moral panic. It was a lot of fear and warning and conversation devoted to something that was not a threat. So what we found is, according to UPenn, there were about 130 teens exposed at the height of the Tidepod hysteria in January 2018. about 25 to 50 cases, maybe on purpose, but it was not really, it was not a national crisis of any kind.

To kind of sum it all up, basically there were like maybe several, there's a little over 100 teenagers who did this, but the majority of people who go to a poison control center or a hospital due to exposure to laundry detergent are either children or old people with dementia or all centers. Right. That's sort of the broad take here. And to put it in perspective, like, I'm going to mess up these numbers lately, but 40,000 Americans died in cars last year. 70,000 died from opioid overdoses. Like, this is a statistically questionable use of national thought and resources. Looking back on this, you know, 10 years later, almost 10 years later, most of the videos about the Tidepot Challenge have been taken down.

A huge chunk of the videos that were viral or almost certainly. fake. It was probably about a hundred teens across America that bit into a tide pod and got sick enough to go to the hospital. The majority of people who do get sick from laundry detergent are not doing it because of a viral challenge. PJ, what would, I want to talk about the legacy of the type ofad pot challenge. What I want to start with is we tend to focus on what teens are doing and amp the volume up to 11. And when it starts to get crazy, there's really no way to turn back. And I, I, why do you think we, we keep doing? that. Like, why do you think that this very old style of freaking out about children has just been

uploaded onto the internet and now we just do it all the time? To defend the moral panickers for a moment. To take, to take like the unusual part of this, teenagers' decision-making skills, if you spend time as an adult around teenagers, can be really troubling. And what's confusing about teenagers is that they are a mix of oftentimes behaving like a functional adult and 20% of the time or 40% of time depending on the kid behaving like a person who's suddenly become drunk. Like it's really, really confusing knowing which bad ideas a teenager says they are describing with irony, even in real life, and which they are describing with full sincerity.

So I do want to give like the local news moms and dads a little bit of understanding or grace. But I think the real thing is that the internet is putting adults in the room where the kids are joking with each other. And that's the problem. Like, the problem is there's no ability online to really, like, it's hard to tell when someone's deploying irony. It's hard to tell when someone's deploying irony if the audience watching that irony is going to receive it ironically. It's just like all these people are in conversations that never should be in conversations.

Parents should not know that their kids are making tied pod jokes. Local news should not know about Tumblr or probably even YouTube. It's all these people who do not have the context to understand each other getting pushed together. more freaked out the grownups get, obviously the funnier it is. And the more jokes the kids make, the more scared the grownups get. And what the grownups are correct about is that at some point, if the joke is made often enough, loudly enough, yes, on the margins, some kids somewhere is going to jump into a tidepot. Like, they are right about that. It's just the best thing they could do is stop talking about it. Right. And America does not have, even before the internet, like America

doesn't really have an off switch for discourse. I've lived in a couple different countries over my life, and a lot of other countries do, like, particularly in Europe, in the UK, like, their discourse cycles don't really spin out of control the way ours do, and it's, there's something very uniquely American, I think, about becoming hysterical. There is a real national hysteria that we like to engage in. I grew up next to Salem, Massachusetts, which is a living landmark to American hysteria. Yeah.

And when I think about the Tidepod Challenge and I think about the Salem Witch Trials to me, I think they're the same mechanics, which is like these teens are doing something and it's going to make everybody crazy for a while. And why do you think America is like a country without a discourse off switch? I think that we, I think we're sort of addicted to the, I think it does go back to the First Amendment and this idea that like, Americans believe that everything can be solved with discourse. Yeah. And that if you have an idea that is loud enough and popular enough, it can change your life and you can change reality. And that is something very American. And I think when American companies created their first social networks, that kind of physics was encoded into these platforms like Facebook, like YouTube, where, you know, they launch in the early 2010s saying we're going to democratize voices.

Yeah. And like, hilariously, like, one of the first things people do with them is challenge each other to eat weird stuff. There is a, uh, an unpredictability that, you know, I think is exciting and can be very dangerous and very strange. And we don't have the best resources for dealing with it. Like, still to this day. Um, now that we have a new challenge every week, thanks to TikTok. Yeah. I don't think our immune system.

for contextualizing jokes or understanding how to evaluate something has gotten much better. Like I see more people literally familiar with the phrase moral panic. Like you see more people say it more of the time. But our ability as a mass media using democracy to know what to pay attention to and in what amount, I'm not sure has gotten much more sophisticated. I think Thai pods could happen again. I hope so I feel bad for those teens

that ate the tie pot and got sick but it was pretty funny for you it's worth it for the content I agree and speaking of that I want to show you one last video talking about worth it for the content walk us through walk us through this last video here

okay all right I'm loading it up really though Duma puts Tidepod hold on I can't see the full title really though Duma puts Tidepot in mouth I'm assuming is the end of that title it's a okay let me say hold on let me stretch this window out into his oh no really though Duma puts Tide Pots into his bong all right it's a world star yeah brother oh my God it's a world yeah it's got the

World Star Watermark so you know it's good. Oh my God. There's a damn me some tie pod. This guy is using a fork to put a tripod into, he's smoking a tie pod out of a bond. Really, though, Duma, I didn't expect more from you. Wow. Yo, I want to hang out with Pipe and Duma and just like eat cinnamon and smoke tiepods, you know? That is terrible and also what I love about this stupid country.

We'll do anything for attention. Yeah, there's, because like there's a kid in every town in America that if you like give him five bucks, he'll eat a tide pod. Yes. And like, there's nothing wrong with that actually. I think that's fine. There's a lot wrong with that. Just agree to take him to the hospital, you know, when he's done. But, you know, if he wants to eat the tie pot, eat the tide pot.

God, I love the idea of practice. gamble just sitting there being like really though dumb a no so okay the last thing the last thing here what I think is most fascinating to me with the legacy of the type buy challenge is how it is essentially what runs tic-tok now this idea of like iterative viral behavior and the idea that like one of the biggest conversations in congress right now is like the dangers of a chinese run app like pumping random challenges into teens in America yeah do you do you think there is a danger here, like a large-scale danger here, for viral challenges and the Chinese government.

I will tell you, honestly, I find the TikTok debate deeply confusing where, like, I've seen people make the analogy that, you know, we wouldn't give a broadcast license to, like, Russia during the height of the Cold War and China controlling a social media network that both broadcast to Americans and also spies on them in the way that every social media network spies on everybody is something that we should think long and hard about. But I've also seen the argument that basically all the anxiety and skepticism that American legislators should be applying to every internet company, they're specifically only applying to TikTok and that seems silly at best, xenophobic, possibly at worst.

There are two arguments that I still find myself bouncing. But the idea that the way China will further weaken American hegemony is through a series of stupid challenges that they'll push to our youth. I do not buy if for no other reason, then like we need no help disfaring ourselves. We will do that. Like two Americans locked in a room will challenge each other to eat cinnamon given a long enough time scale. Right. Like if you dig into like the dark corners of TikTok, you're going to find like the drink bleach challenge and the light yourself on fire challenge. and the smoke a tide pod in your bong challenge and like china doesn't need to do that like we invented we will do it America we invented America's

funniest one videos like that's all that ever was like we we love doing stupid shit for attention and then getting upset about it and then continuing to do it if you had to eat a tie pot like what color type oh one of the orange ones they look delicious yeah the orange purple yeah I would do the the orange white it kind of looks like like, like, Sherbert. Orange and cream, Sherbert. It does look pretty good. Yeah. Yeah.

PJ, I want to thank you for coming on the show. I want to thank you for describing in vivid detail some of the worst videos we could find to shove in your face today. If people want to follow you on the internet, where can they do that? I have a podcast called Search Engine, where we're a bunch of human beings who run a search engine. We answer questions from people on the internet. And people should go check out the show. And if they have questions, send them to me and I'll try to answer them. Thank you very much for doing this.

Thank you for having me. It was really fun to be here. You know, you should do more podcasts. You're pretty good. I'm trying. I appreciate it. Thanks, Ryan. Panic World is a Garbage Day production.

You can subscribe to the newsletter at Garbageday.commail. Panic World is written and produced by Grant Irving, hosted by me, Ryan Broderick, and our amazing researcher is Adam Bumis, video editing by Kat Rasek. And our incredibly derange logo was drawn by Gabby. cash. If you want to give us $5 a month, you can do that at patreon.com slash panic world. And in return, we'll give you more content to consume. If you want to buy an ad on the show or sponsor it in any way, you can contact the fine folks at multitude at multitude. Productions slash ads. And if you want to get involved in the other way, you know, any other crazy scheme you want to rope us into, you can

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