Sixteenth Minute (of Fame) - mailbag: your 'i was the main character' stories

Episode Date: May 20, 2025

Before we go on (brief! I promise!) hiatus and move to a seasonal format, Jamie takes a look at your submitted stories about being the main character -- from viral pets to grieving online to reckoning with your relationship to a changing internet, we explore the spectrum of what it means to be too online. Bonus: one of Jamie's favorite memes of all time calls in! Thank you for making the first year of Sixteenth Minute so special, see you soon <3 Buy Raw Dog here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250847751/rawdog/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an IHeart podcast. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA. Right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. On the new podcast, America's Crime Lab, every case has a story to tell. And the DNA holds the truth. He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha.

This technology is already solving so many cases. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I just normally do straight stand-up, but this is a bit different. What do you get when a true crime producer walks into a comedy club? Answer, a new podcast called Wisecrack, where a comedian finds himself at the center of a chilling true crime story. Does anyone know what show they've come to see?

It's a story. It's about the scariest night of my life. This is Wisecrack, available now. Listen to Wisecrack on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What would you do if one bad decision forced you to choose between a maximum security prison or the most brutal boot camp designed to be hell on earth? Unfortunately for Mark Lombardo, this was the choice he faced. He said, you are a number, a New York State number, and we own you.

Listen to shock incarceration on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast. podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. If you're looking for another heavy podcast about trauma, this ain't it. This is for the ones who had to survive and still show up as brilliant, loud, soft, and whole. The unwanted sorority is where black women, fims, and gender expansive survivors of sexual violence rewrite the rules on healing, support, and what happens after. And I'm your host and co-president of this organization, Dr. Leah Tretta. Listen to The Unwanted Sorority, new episodes every Thursday on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Cool Zone Media I'm not so bad when you turn up the lights going up. I can be perfect all in a time. To make me a start, let's take it too far. Then give me one moment. 16 minutes of fame 60 minute of fame 16 minutes of fame

16 minute of faith One more minute of fame I'm not so bad when you take your mind Hello, and welcome back to 16th minute, the podcast where we talk to the internet's characters of the day, see how their moment affected them and what that says about us and the internet. I'm your host, Jamie Loftus, and today we are closing a chapter of 16th minute.

And I'm turning the mic over to you, my listeners, to share your experiences being the main character, and reflect a little bit about your experiences online. And normally at the top of an episode, I would go on as I do, but I'm actually on the road right now promoting the paperback version of my book, Raw Dog. Ian, let's get a horn in there.

But I've actually been meeting a lot of 16th minute listeners. It's been really cool. I just, I don't know, I work in a series of small rooms, and it's easy to forget that people actually are hearing, this. But as I'm writing this right now, I am sitting in a hotel bed with my mom drinking a large iced from dunks in Boston with a mild hangover because my friend Tori and I decided to be annoying at our favorite margarita bar from college until 2 a.m. last night. So I feel great. I'm home and I'm happy. And so it just feels like the perfect moment to reflect on what has been

a very chaotic and wonderful year with this show. So, in case you missed it, 16th minute, the show is here to stay, but after our first year, we are going to be taking a short hiatus and are going to return in the summer with a more seasonal format, closer to the limited series work I did before this week-to-week format, where I'm going to do deep dives and more thorough reporting on the corners of the internet that I feel are under-archived or under-explored. So things to look out for, the internet and death, the actual science behind ASMR, a genre I've been consuming for a decade and know very little about. Think about how the internet connects to justice, connects to court cases, connects to incarceration. We're going to have a time on the 16th minute feed. But this last year, talking to the characters of the day from week to week, has been so fascinating. I felt so challenged and hopefully have grown a lot as a result. And the most important thing to me is to thank the subjects of this show who have so generously given me and you their trust in sharing their stories.

It was really, really cool and an honor to, you know, have and end shape those stories. Thank you so much. This show has challenged my relationship and continued addiction to the internet. And, you know, more than anything, it's been fun to learn about people whose image and whose legacy we kind of take for granted, right? Plus, I'm a yapper and it's terminal, so this show worked great for me. And so much of 16th Minute has been made between here where I am right now in Massachusetts and at home where I live in Los Angeles. And making a show like this, as I was saying, mostly on my couch or in hotel rooms or in hospital back. Because yes, the entire 30 to 50 feral hogs episode was recorded in a hospital bathroom with our incredible crew of three.

My producer, Sophie and Ian and weekly voice work from Grant, making the show feels very small and personal. And so getting ready for this episode and actually hearing your voice memos has been really cool and kind of weird. You guys are freaks. I've been walking around with your voice in my ears for the last week and a half and hearing the ways, that like this show and the internet on the whole fits into your life has been really awesome. Not to get all parisocial, but you guys did. And I promise, promise, promise to never sell you a meme coin. So let me be parisocial for a second. It's really cool to be a small part of your life. And I hope you'll stick around for what's next. Okay. I want to get to your stories because

they are amazing and there was so fucking many of them. What I can promise is that of the hundred or so submissions I received for this episode. I did listen to every single one of them. And if yours doesn't air, you are so valid, et cetera. But I had to make cuts of stories that were too similar or there were sometimes sensitive elements that I didn't have time to handle with the proper sensitivity and care of the story deserved. So if you submitted, thank you so much for trusting me with your story if you didn't hear back from me personally. And I think over the course of these stories, we've really covered the full breadth of the human on the internet experience because you've sent some of the funniest stuff I've heard about the internet and and also some of the

saddest. So before we get into your voice memos, I wanted to just share the log line for a few stories that didn't make the cut. Ian, let's get some circus music going here. A story about being shamed online for defending oneself from being attacked. by a goose. Starting a podcast about Drake before Drake was confirmed scary and becoming famous in Canada. Being niche famous as a famous call in person for the podcast, my brother, my brother, and me. Getting cyber bullied on a Harry Potter forum in the 90s and a message just titled The Ballad of Funky Kong. The list goes on. And let's be clear. So let me be clear. I Jamie Loftus have had a little experience being the niche main character.

myself. This has in fact happened to me twice in the last 10 years. The first time was in 2015 when I did a Pick Me performance art project that led to headlines like this. Comedian slash American Patriots selling Shrek nudes to benefit Planned Parenthood, which I have nothing else to say. That's exactly what it sounded like. I painted myself like Shrek and I sold them. And one time I was at a party, and my own nude was in the bathroom. Moving on, I also went viral shortly in 2017 when I did, wait for it, yet another pick-me performance art piece that led to headlines like this. We talk to the woman who is butt-jugging infinite jest.

Again, I don't feel the need to explain this further. It's a pretty direct headline. And I have, you know, some love for this younger version of myself now. I mean, folks, she really wanted to be picked. And eventually, someone did. Because true fact, Grant, who I'm going to marry, is a fan of Infinite Just. There you go. And he had encountered the butt-chugging Infinite Just story when it first happened.

And he didn't realize that it was me who had butt-chugged the book until he started Googling me when he had his little crush. And to me, this is why the internet is so addictive. Yes, it's awful. Yes, it's this increasingly hostile place that is stealing our data, our time, it's weaponizing our own identities against us, while making it nearly impossible to function without it. But sometimes your future husband first heard of you because you were butt-chugging infinite chest,

and you feel seen by the world for a second, and it's hard to find an IRL equivalent of that. I can't explain it. You're going to hear a lot of that, but you get it because I've heard your voice memos, and you're going to hear a lot of that today, of people's moment in the sun or unwittingly becoming internet niche famous. And after listening to these stories, I've separated them into a few little categories. Isn't that nice? Arguments about celebrities.

Victim of bad clickbait. Internet grief. Pets, a classic. And of course, the life-consuming niche internet forum and other stories sprinkled throughout that I think you'll enjoy. But first, we are kicking off our I Was the Main Character Spectacular with the subject of a famous meme who has been on my list of subjects to cover and turned out to be a listener of the show.

What a get. Here's Cliff. Hi, Jamie. My name is Cliff. And while I was never an internet main character, I had the dubious honor of being one of its first memes. This was back in like the late 90s where the movie Forrest Gump had just

come out. I probably still had a O.L. And in Forrest Gump, he sat on a bench for most of the movie telling his story. And we had a bench that had the phrase been laid off on it. And a friend and I thought it would be funny to take a picture

of me sitting and just blocking the word off and ha ha half a second of a chuckle, you know. And it only really worked because I was this nerdy, autistic kid, and you couldn't tell if I knew what was happening or was completely oblivious. But in a way, that did take off a little bit on the early days of the Internet. Of course, someone made a meme out of it.

And, you know, where it said, Ben Laid, they added, this kid clearly hasn't. And, yeah, it made the rounds. I thought it was funny at the time. I was recognized for it one time a year or two later. during college at a party and people asked if I had been laid yet and when I answered that I had these cheers went up

and everyone gave me drinks I was odd looking back on it now but I don't know what I would have thought if that happened now because I would not have been able to handle the sort of experiences a lot of the people that you've interviewed have had and

yeah so I wonder what it would be like now, or maybe it would have never taken off because it's not something that you can really do anything with because the joke's kind of self-contained. But I still see it pop up in the wild once every five, ten years or so just to remind me that the internet does not forget. So anyway, thanks for all you do. I appreciate it. And I look forward to hearing other people's experiences. Thank you so much for calling in, Cliff. I cannot tell you how delighted I was. Thank you for listening. All right, we're going to keep moving.

One of the most interesting middle ground ways to become the character of the day is to say something publicly, but not intend for it to break containment. This happens all the time, as we now have algorithms that are boosted on locking in on trends in a way that no one could have anticipated. That is, the wrong side of the internet finds you. On this show, this has happened to Willie McNabb of 30 to 50 Farrell Hogs fame. It happened to coffee wife. It happened to Dr. Allie Luke's the Smell Doctor.

And it could happen to you. Here's listener and friend and amazing poet, Maya Williams. Hi, Jamie. So picture this April 2022. I decide to make a TikTok. I don't always make TikToks, but when I do, apparently this could happen. There's one clip I have of Kiki Palmer being hilarious from a Variety's lie detector series, genuinely not knowing who Dick Cheney is. And then I have a clip of Tyler Perry on the Variety Lie Detector series, mimicking Kiki Palmer, saying, oh, I'm sorry to this man.

I don't know who this man is, even though he does know J.J. Abrams and has worked with him before. and then there's a clip of me saying further proof that he's not funny unless he's mimicking black women, no surprise. To my surprise, up to 44,000 views is upon the video. I receive comments from people of many racial backgrounds saying things like, oh my gosh, I agree with this. And like, yeah, Tyler Perry could do better in entertainment. And then there are some comments that are entirely from black folks who say things like, oh, you're just being a hater, or, hey, shut up, or, hey, Kiki Palmer has worked with Tyler Perry before. Maybe it's okay that he mimics her. And then I end up turning off the comments when someone comments, sis, where are your eyebrows activating

like that childhood insecurity that I've received before? And it made me laugh, but at the same time made my heart sing. So I'm like, okay, I'm done with these comments. let's turn them off. But I wanted to share this with you because I'm very curious about what happens when people of marginalized genders are trending because of entertainment media and reacting to it, especially people of marginalized genders who are black people. So Maya brings up a great point at the end of her message because as we've talked about on this show many times, the internet is informed by and often intentionally amplifies. real-life discrimination, particularly in the video-driven era that we're in right now. We've looked at stories like this, in particular, recently, with Tessica Brown of Gorilla Glue fame, in which she was faced with rampant misogynoir, even from within her own community.

Teizonday of Chocolate Rain fame also spoke to this in detail in our recent series with him. And this makes me think of a conversation I had recently when I was... Listen to me. This makes me think of a conversation I had. I sound like a pastor. But this makes me think of a conversation I had recently when I was talking about main characters at UCLA. Bragg. Thank you. And yes, I did make sure I was working with professors that were pro-Palestine. I spoke at the Center for Critical Internet Theory. And after the talk, a professor who I will not reveal the name of because I cannot wait to speak with her on this show was talking about how pivotal she felt the switch from the text-based to video-based internet was, and how she wished that her students had gotten a chance to experience true internet anonymity, which, as we all know, could go in a number of directions, but isn't really available now. And we're going to cover stories from that era in a bit, but I hadn't really ever thought of it this way, and there is so much truth to that. Because to continue our celebrity comment spectacular, how someone looks is always

commented upon, whether it's the celebrity themselves or the user. Here's Hayden and Jessica Chastain. Hi, Jamie. I have one incident where I was sort of anonymously a main character back in late August of 2017. I was checking Twitter during the workday, as one does when it's slow, and saw that the actress Jessica Chastain had tweeted something. I found a little little bit inane about the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville that had happened a little bit prior to that. Something about like disposing nonviolence when faced with a bunch of violent Nazis that want to eradicate your existence. She was one of my favorite actresses and I was already

a little bit sensitive to the topic because I graduated from BVA and it was a really special place to me and up to that point had been the location of like some of the happiest memories of my life so far, which really had turned sour when, you know, all of these places that you recognize in the news was papered over with Nazis and white supremacists and stuff. So I just still, to this day, sort of have like a knee-jerk reaction to people being stupid about it. And I, without really thinking too hard about it, I fired off a tweet to her, like, not even thinking that she would see it because she had, I think at that point, like half a million followers and who even can handle your notifications at that level, you know. But,

But it was the Martin Luther King Jr. quote about the danger of the white moderate. And I like closed Twitter and then went back to doing whatever spreadsheet nonsense I was doing that day. And then I checked back a little bit later and saw that she had replied and was like a step and a half away from calling me a reverse racist. And like we had a little bit of a back and forth before she stopped replying. So I thought that was sort of the end of it. but the issue just continued to snowball some as the day went on even after she stopped engaging with me directly and like with doing with other people because I think at some point the Mary Sue wrote about it

and then by the evening like one of my Twitter friends had sent me an article like the Huffington Post had written about it and at that about around that point I started getting a wave of abuse from sort of alt-right hyper-conservative egg profile stuff and I had linked it originally to the Hoff Post article that was because it was way more mainstream than anything the Mary Sue would put out. Yeah so that sort of was it for a while until a few years later I discovered that the reason I got so much of the right hyper right wing abuse was because Breitbart had done an article about it. Now that's just

sort of a fun fact that Breitbart put a hit out on me and couldn't even do it right because it was just my Star Wars Day and Twitter account. Every year in my calendar, there's a little alert for like Chastain Beef Day in late August. And I think I speak for all of us when I say, happy early Jessica Chastain Beef Day to us all. And finally, Kelly called in about the harrowing experience of becoming the top comment on a half-thought-out body-shaming meme about Adele. Hello, my name is Kelly. I'm a book designer living in Brooklyn, and I became a very minor main character on Instagram for one day when I got into a fight with a meme account. It was May of 2020, which was famously a good and healthy time for all of us.

The singer Adele had just lost weight, and the account Meme Queen, made a post that I still have a screenshot of in my phone, because again, good healthy time. The post features two photos of Adele looking thinner than ever before, with text above them that reads, Adele's glow up is what 2020 needs right now. The actual caption says, quote, her ex is post. punching the air right now. Because I was glued to my phone on May 7th of 2020 for some reason, I was one of the first commenters. I commented, quote, Adele has always been hot as fuck. Stop referring to weight loss as glowing up, please. Unfortunately, for me, she saw my comment early on and replied

to it, saying, quote, no one said about weight loss. Please don't put words in my mouth, unquote. In the screenshot I have on my phone from 16 hours after the incident, my initial comment had 15,300 37 likes and hundreds of replies. As it does, this all happened very fast, and for several hours, I was glued to my phone, against the better advice of my friends, replying back to people and arguing about the very definition of the term glow-up. And there were a lot of people agreeing with me and other comments calling out meme queen for her fat phobia. But mine was the one that everyone saw as soon as I opened the comments, and by everyone, I also mean trolls. But the thing that is the most memorable to me about this experience is the carrot photo.

Several days before the incident, I had posted a photo to my grid of my hand holding a bunch of very beautiful carrots, stems and leaves included. The caption said, I'm just going to say it, these carrots are hot. This was conveniently the most recent post on my grid, which meant that it was the one that two or three of the more aggressive trolls from Meme Queen's page decided to comment on. And so I give you the most exquisitely stupid comment a stranger has ever left on my Instagram. So the person who finds carrots hot is the one who doesn't believe in fat shaming. What? Anyway, I have no way of getting back to the post since it's a meme account that has posted approximately 600 million times since, but the commenting and fighting continued on for days

after the post, and I have no clue how the number shook out in the end, and people forgot about it quickly, and I unfollowed meme queen because she posted too much weird fatphobic normie content and not enough memes, which, by the way, can someone please explain to me how a photo of a singer looking thin with a caption about her glow-up is a meme? As you've elucidated on this show and others, the conversation around women's bodies in media has not gotten any better.

I appreciate all the work you've done to push us towards a better place, though, and I figured I'd share this story if you want to use it, as it's only slightly more relevant than the other one time that I became a very minor man character, which was because my girlfriend's parents saw Richard Dreyfus go on a homophobic rant at a Jaws event, and I tweeted about it

and got quoted by multiple names. news sources. I love the internet. Thank you so much, Kelly. And when we come back, more of your stories. What would you do if one bad decision forced you to choose between a maximum security prison or the most brutal boot camp designed to be hell on earth? Unfortunately for Mark Lombardo, this was the choice he faced. He said, you are a number, a New York state number, and we own you. Shock incarceration, also known as boot camps, are short-term, highly regimented correctional programs that mimic military basic training. These programs aimed to provide a shock

of prison life, emphasizing strict discipline, physical training, hard labor, and rehabilitation programs. Mark had one chance to complete this program and had no idea of the hell awaiting him the next six months. The first night was so overwhelming. And, And you don't know who's next to you yet. And we didn't know what to expect in the morning. Nobody tells you anything. Listen to shock incarceration on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it.

They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA. Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in evidence so tiny you might just miss it. He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer screen.

I was just like, ah, gotcha. On America's Crime Lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors. And you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Othrum. the Houston Lab that takes on the most hopeless cases to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We all know, right? Genius is evenly distributed. Opportunity is not. It's Black Business Month and Black Tech Green Money is tapping in. I'm Will Lucas spotlighting Black founders, investors and innovators, building the future one idea at a time.

Let's talk legacy, tech, and generational wealth. I don't think any person of any gender, race, ethnicity should alter who they are, especially on an intellectual level or a talent level, to make someone else feel comfortable just because they are the majority in this situation, and they need employment. So for me, I'm always going to be honest in saying that we need to be unapologetically ourselves. If that makes me a vocal CEO, and people consider that rocking the boat, so be it. To hear this and more on the power of Black Innovation,

the ownership, listen to Black Tech Green Money from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Adventure should never come with a pause button. Remember the movie pass era? Where you could watch all the movies you wanted for just $9? It made

zero cents and I could not stop thinking about it. I'm Bridget Todd, host of the tech podcast, there are no girls on the internet. On this new season, I'm talking to the innovators who are left out of the tech headlines. Like the visionary behind a movie pass, Black founder, Stacey C. Spikes, who was pushed out of movie pass the company that he founded. His story is wild,

and it's currently the subject of a juicy new HBO documentary. We dive into how culture connects us. When you go to France, or you go to England, or you go to Hong Kong, those kids are wearing Jordans, they're wearing Kobe's shirt, they're watching Black Panther. And the challenges of being a Black founder. Close your eyes and tell me what a tech founder looks like. They're not going to describe someone who looks like me and they're not going to describe someone who looks like you. I created There Are No Girls on the Internet because the future belongs to all of us. So listen to There Are No Girls on the Internet on the IHurt Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. to be alive. Let's keep moving. My college crush and my algebra teacher came to my book reading last

night. Boston is the most perfect place in the world and that's just a fact. Let's get back into your stories. Up next, Aspen called in about some of the most blood-boilingly dishonest clickbait I have ever heard. When I was 18 years old in 2018, I was the media spokesperson for Lush Cosmetics first trans rights campaign in North America. My key quote was on display. in the front window of every North American lush store, so I got some interest from media companies to have some interviews, which mostly were simple and nice, but Refinery 29 put out a pretty wild clickbait article on me

in their beauty diaries, titled, I'm a trans college student, and I spend $1,782 a year on beauty products, which was wildly inaccurate, since I mostly used free samples that I brought home, and also included an $800 top surgery consultation that I'd attended as one of those beauty products. Social media comments, naturally it went crazy. Thankfully, my full name wasn't ever shared in my interviews, but I was pretty vocal about my involvement in the campaign on social media.

So I still got messages from people going, is this you? Is it true? or how can you justify spending this way and all sorts of vitriolic hateful comments? And I even got questioned by lush employees at other stores if they realized who I was. I felt pretty embarrassed and definitely misrepresented, which was a hard place to be in as a transgender teenager representing an entire identity group for an international company. Refinery 29 did eventually change the name of the article on search.

engines, so now it comes up as transgender man's skin care routine is all lush products because they're rightfully ashamed of their clickbait lies. It was a niche main character moment, but it really has haunted me ever since.

Surgery consultation is a beauty product? Again, haunting. It'll never leave me. Thank you so much for calling in, Aspen. I wish I could say I were more surprise that a clickbait site would sink so low as to bully a trans teenager and misrepresent

getting needed care. You deserve better. Aspen forever. Let's go to the Refinery 29 headquarters right now. But as other stories sent in demonstrated, not all IRL to internet encounters are completely doomed. I mean, most of them are, but here or two that worked out rather nicely. Hi Jamie and 16th minute folks. My name's Tom Lum. We ran into each other on an episode of NeverPosts. So in 2021, I was working in software development. It was fine, but I just was starting to lose my mind a little bit. And so I saw a job application to work as a writer for SciShow, which is a science YouTube channel that I adore. It was made by Hank and John Green, who also made stuff like Crash Course, vlog, and I've been a huge fan of all of their stuff since I was a teen and so I thought

you know what I should apply to this job mostly on a whim this was pre-COVID vaccine so I was just spending all of my days at home alone and really starting to lose my mind and I was just like

I need to change something and this seems cool I'll just give it a shot and part of the application was they wanted examples of you doing science communication they need a video I've been meaning to learn

how this app works And I had also been meaning to make something about this story I had learned in college that I love to tell, which is that we once gave bees jet lag for science. And then I posted it to my zero followers at like midnight and then went to sleep. And then I woke up to 5,000 followers, which was the most I had had on any social media ever. and then the video started to really blow up to the point where my notifications on TikTok were functionally useless. The magazine Popular Science

also did a podcast episode about that TikTok in which they mispronounced my last name because they saw my username, which is Tom Lumperson, and assumed my name was Tom Lumperson. I was very lucky that this all happened when I was in my late 20s and I had already seen many stories,

of virality gone wrong or going nowhere, right? You know, I obviously didn't like quit my job and throw everything into TikTok, but I started making more of those science videos. Funny enough, Hank, Hank Green commented on that original video, and then as I kept doing it, we became mutuals and then friends. So that was always truly wild,

which gives me emotional vertigo, if I think about too hard. I also told Hank, I told Hank, you know, a few years later, I was like, did you know about that? And he was like, did we hire you? And I was like, no, but that's fine. It all worked down the end. Hi, my name is BJ Colangelo, and I am telling the story of the time I was the Twitter

main character of the day. And fortunately, it wasn't for doing or saying something terrible. It was Halloween, 2017, and I went to the airport way too early, as I am known to do, and sat down at the bar, had a drink, and met two women who, were meeting for the first time at the airport because they had suspected that their husbands were having an affair with each other. And they were flying to where their supposed business trip was taking place so that they could finally confront them. It was one of the most fascinating conversations I've ever eavesdropped. And as we were known to do in the late 2010s

on Twitter, I documented the entire conversation. I posted about it, turned my phone off, got on my flight, thought nothing of it, landed, turned my phone on to call a ride share, and my phone practically exploded in my hand because it had gone beyond viral. It ended up on BBC 3, George Tchaise, social media shared it, all of those weird aggregate sites that just compile popular tweets for the day, did whole stories about it. Cleveland Magazine interviewed me about it because it was, was such a huge thing that had happened at the Cleveland Airport with me, somebody who was at the time a journalist working in Cleveland. And it was very surreal. But because I had done my best to keep their identities as secret as possible, people were very upset that I wasn't

now turning into a private investigator and changing my flights to go track these people down to give them closure. Nope, it's just a weird thing that happened. I have no idea whatever became of these couples. I have no idea what became of their marriages. But it continued to be viral for days later. Netflix shared it because it has a little similar plot elements with Grace and Frankie. So that put it on even more eyes.

And as somebody who also works as an entertainment journalist, that does mean that every so often I'll be talking to somebody, I'll say my name, they'll see what I look like because I have kind of a distinct look of green hair and I've looked the same way for about like a decade now. And they'll ask me, hey, are you the lady who tweeted about the women at the airport? And I have to say yes. Yes, that was me. Even today, all these years later, I still get people randomly who will find me on other social media platforms to ask me if I ever got closure or if I know whatever happened or what became of them. And the answer is no. I don't. I do not know whatever happened to the shot lady and the gum lady or they're probably

gay husbands. Thank you to Tom and BJ. And BJ's story in particular really stuck with me because the quote unquote overheard viral Twitter thread was such a moment in like the late 2010s. And BJ, to be clear, did the right thing here and properly his. the identity of the folks that she was overhearing, but it is one of my dream subjects to talk more about how as social media progresses, we have this habit of knee-jerk surveilling each other without being careful as BJ was. Like social media, to some extent, is designed to, of course, make us feel bad, but also to have us surveil ourselves and each other. It's something I have to catch myself doing all the time. But self-in-pure surveillance,

Isn't what the internet was built on? The internet was built on, of course, little videos of pets. Here are two of your pet stories. Hi, my name is Joel Edmiston. I'm a listener to your show. My cat went viral, basically. My cat went into the bathtub. He went in the bath with water in it and walked around.

I take a video, put some audio on it and put it on TikTok. I am a comedian. I have tried a tick. I had tried TikTok at that point. it didn't work out, and I deleted some stuff. And, you know, just like on YouTube and Instagram, trying to make things hit. But this cat video, I went to sleep, woke up, it was gigantic.

And I've kept making videos. That was in 2021. So I've kept making videos about the cat with water stuff because he does like water. And he was a kitten at the time. He's older now. I, you know, record my narrations over top of the videos. I'm, like, pleased with the account.

It does make me feel good because it's kept up the followers and stuff. It's on Instagram as well now in a way that I feel like it is sort of my content and not just cat content and having the camera pointed in the right place when the cat comes on. I will say there's a lot of positive feedback on the page, also a lot of negative feedback that makes me upset in a way that I wish it didn't. like obviously the negative negativity is going to be there but i just wish i didn't care so much i think it's called concern trolling when people act concerned for the cat over the smallest details and pretend they're experts or when they're just calling me any names or you know blah blah blah

and it never ceases to amaze me this is a cat after all this is a cat page after all and and i and i can admit that i especially when things are really viral, I kind of read every comment. And I wish that I didn't, wish that I didn't feel compelled to read every comment. Because here's what I do. I delete every negative comment that I see. I block the person. It's probably good practice. But the fact that I have to read every comment for it, I kind of like scroll past, you know, thoughtlessly over the positive ones. But when I see any negativity, it's like delete. Hi, I go by Sally St. Rose. And I am calling in to talk about my tiny viral moment of my fat sphinx named Joby. I rescue and adopt

hairless cats and one of my first ones was named Joby. He was amazing. He was a butterball of wrinkles and I have always loved taking pictures of my cats and posting them online. I would post them on Instagram, Facebook, Tumblr. One time I woke up and overnight one of the pictures had gone viral. People had made memes of it, passed it around. So, so many people did that. And then the next thing, a video went viral of him and one of my other cats in the bathtub. I had made shower caps for them, tiny little cat shower caps. I hadn't seen anyone do that yet, and I thought that was adorable. And so I did that. And I was one of the first people to post hairless cats and Shower Cats online, and people went wild for it. I had media companies reaching out to me

to not only use it, but they wanted to manage it. And I still have a media company that manages his videos. They get licensed out to Comedy Central. He was on Key and Peel. It was awesome. I loved the love that Joby got from people. I was like, okay, everyone feels like me. They love Jobie just as much as I do. And it was great for a while. Then I started getting the hate comments, the hate DMs, people searching out to find my personal accounts and emails so they can write me messages to let me know he's going to die. They want to kill him. He's so ugly. Really bizarre things. But I just, you know, I was like, hey, it's the internet. Not going to pay them any mind. And when he was 11, he passed away from his heart condition. He had HCM, which is pretty common

in hairless breed, unfortunately. But he passed away. And it was really sad. I was hit by grief really, really hard. And I would talk about it a little bit online. And then I started noticing mass and mass amounts of people unfollowing me when he passed away. I thought it was so bizarre. And I was like, why are people unfollowing just because he's no longer alive? And it was so weird. I couldn't understand. I was like, do you not love him anymore? Because he's no longer alive. And I did a lot of introspection about what does this mean and why are people doing this? And I had to come to a realization, it's, oh, it's the internet. He was a moment of time for people. And then that was it. And I was putting my feelings onto them of how I viewed Jobi of my world.

You know, we'll love him forever. I'll have to carry this grief for him forever. And that's not how other people viewed him. And so it really puts into perspective other really famous internet cats that have passed away, why they still post them continuously. You have to keep up that facade of, yes, most people know, that the cat is gone, but you have to keep posting their pictures as if they're not. And that has to be really hard. Thank you to Joel and Sally for their stories. We talked a little bit

about internet pets in our Moodang episode, but it's something that I would really like to continue talking about, because as Sally is alluding to, pets famously don't live as long as us. And so there is this inevitable, I've monetized my pet, and now I'm grieving them. And I just think it's a very interesting thing to get into more. But while we're talking about foundational pillars of the internet, why don't we jump back into the good old text-based and flash animation forums we were talking about a little earlier? A lot of people are still nostalgic for this internet while it had many problems.

It's an era of the internet we've explored in episodes like Badger Badger Mushroom, an overly attached girlfriend, or even as late historically as, as The Dress. The days where we could still sort of talk our shit in anonymity, and things went awry in a completely different way than they do now. Here are your forum stories. I'm a 90s kid. Born in the mid-80s, I spent my earliest years playing in streets and creeks

and abandoned store parking lots, doing dumb shit that would likely make it onto primetime news today. Minor vandalism, simple arson, plenty of petty theft, just kids being a fucking menace. Until it was about 10 or so. At that point, my half-formed frontal cortex became increasingly aware of the allure of the Internet. But during my preteen years, I spent untold hours trying to ignore the 6 o'clock news in the background as I scoured the latest links page on this BB or that Usenet. It was pure information, niche interest, someone's hobby, and others vault or shrine to this event or that celebrity. But if actual information or useful services weren't of interest, the chat rooms were.

Something awful, for instance. And for all the negatives associated with that particular phase of the internet, many people my age look back to this as its peak. The bar for entry did not exist. Have you computer? Have you internet? Yes. Please enjoy this unfiltered onslaught of the absolute worst takes in the history of man. Pages upon pages of topic and reply on things so momentous as the then current theft of the U.S. election by one George War Crimes Bush. By the mid-2000s, advertisements had fully invaded these and all other spaces.

Websites cost money to host, and many of these platforms, forums and chat rooms and info boards, provided no product beyond conversation. The conversations were free and couldn't pay the bills, so we started seeing ads everywhere. Jump ahead literally any period of time. We're constantly looking for the humanity in the ocean of corporatization that has superseded this thing we thought was the future. But the promise of infinite information and connection at the press of a book, button has become that only for data brokers and corporate sales managers is part of the reason

we seek out these main characters of the day, that we can find something enjoyable that doesn't come with its own custom checkout page is the smallest reprieve for those of us who saw the internet as a great and public good before capitalism realized it could monetize literally anything. Characters of the day, while increasingly fed to us algorithmically, represent the remaining possibility of a platform. Actual personalities and original thought that managed to get past the near complete commoditization of every medium and deliver something unique and human

in a world increasingly devoid of both those qualities. Hi, Jamie, my name is Alex. I love your show. Thank you so much for all the hard work making it. In 2005, I was a freshman in college, and I posted a really crude flash animation about bathroom etiquette. It was called a men's room monologue.

I posted that on Newgrounds.com, and it got millions of views, thousands, tens of thousands of comments, and I really felt like a main character, like a celebrity for actually a couple of months. The comments were rolling in. It really spread around the internet onto all these other weird 2005 websites

like eBombs World and albino black sheep. People I met in real life would find out I made the cartoon and get really excited. It was a super cool experience, and people were so positive about it, which is weird looking back because the cartoon is so badly drawn, the audio is terrible, the writing is just so, I don't know, we'd call it cringe now, like what an 18-year-old boy would write in 2005. I'm grateful for it. It's a little hard to watch now, and I'm grateful, I think, to have posted it back then.

I think people wouldn't be as nice about this cartoon now. But the fact that they were nice kind of helped push me towards my career as a professional animator. I used to play a lot of World of Warcraft in the mid-2000s, and I was a regular shit poster on my server's forum for about a year or two.

Around this time, it was kind of an open secret that George Fisher from the band Cannibal Corpse played on our server, and people were always coming by and asking what his character name was. And at some point, someone started saying my character name as a joke. Things started to get out of hand at that point.

I had no idea who George Fisher was and I don't even think I heard a cannibal corpse song at that point ever. So I was really confused when people started messaging me and calling me George. I was getting in-game mail from people giving me their actual phone numbers and women offering me sexual favors with like really explicit messages. I never responded to anything because it was so awkward. Like I would see my name pop up in the comment sections of George Fisher videos when people are asking what server he plays on.

At some point, the real George Fisher heard about people going to me thinking I was him, and he got kind of pissed because he thought I was doing it on purpose, like I was trying to impersonate him. And my friend made it pretty clear that George really didn't like me when the topic came up. And eventually he transferred to another server, and I started getting less and less messages, thankfully, but I never got any closure. So I guess if you're listening, George, or if you're someone who knows George and can at the word to him. I'm sorry. This is all a big misunderstanding and I didn't want anything to do anything

in this. Thank you so much, my boys. And when we come back, a few more stories for the road. He said, you are a number, a New York State number, and we own you. Shock incarceration, also known as boot camps, are short-term, highly regimented correctional programs that mimic military basic training. These programs aim to provide a shock of prison life, emphasizing strict discipline, physical training, hard labor, and rehabilitation programs. Mark had one chance to complete this program and had no idea of the hell-awaiting. him the next six months. The first night was so overwhelming, and you don't know who's next to you. And we didn't know what to expect in the morning. Nobody tells you anything. Listen to shock incarceration on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A foot washed up a shoe with

some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases. But everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA. Right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA. Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in evidence so tiny you might just miss it.

He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, got you. On America's Crime Lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors. And you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Othrum, the Houston Lab that takes on the most hopeless cases to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We all know, right? Genius is evenly distributed. Opportunity is not. It's Black Business Month and Black Tech Green Money is tapping in.

I'm Will Lucas spotlighting Black founders, investors. and innovators building the future one idea at a time. Let's talk legacy, tech, and generational wealth. I don't think any person of any gender, race, ethnicity should alter who they are, especially on an intellectual level or a talent level

to make someone else feel comfortable just because they are the majority in this situation and they need employment. So for me, I'm always going to be honest in saying that we need to be unapologetically ourselves. If that makes me a vocal CEO and people consider that rocking the boat, So be it.

To hear this and more on the power of black innovation and ownership, listen to Black Tech Green Money from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When your car is making a strange noise, no matter what it is, you can't just pretend it's not happening. That's an interesting sound. It's like your mental health. If you're struggling and feeling overwhelmed, it's important to do something about it.

It can be as simple as talking to someone, or just taking a deep, calming breath to ground yourself. Because once you start to address the problem, you can go so much further. The Huntsman Mental Health Institute and the Ad Council have resources available for you at loveyourmind today.org. Welcome back to 16th Minute, the show you write and record in bed with your mom. And here are a few last stories I like to share. So when it came to stories about niche internet community trauma, there was quite a bit to sort through. I think most people who have been too logged in have had experiences like this, where one's time and identity are wrapped up in a community where they feel uniquely seen,

the kind of community that can consume you without really having a possibility of leaking into your in-person life in a meaningful way, an actual second life. Because after all, a niche interest is niche for a reason. You had to make a forum in order to find your people. And the emotional attachments that are formed and the validation received on forums like this can really affect and shape you, regardless of how big or small that community is. Here's Ayumi on being a moderator. Hi, Jamie. It's Ayumi Shinozaki. While this is a very small scale version of that, I did want to

submit my story just in case it counts for something. Also, just because even at a smaller scale, it helped me really put a lot of things in perspective as to how I wanted to spend my time on the internet moving forward. Basically, in the early 2010s, I was part of a confession blog for a fandom, unsurprisingly, magical girls. So it was magical girl confessions.com. pretty much right away it started to catch on. I was very excited about the blog as well

because, of course, it seemed like a cool place to gather for love of magical girls. So one of the things that would happen a lot is misgendering. At the time, I was not going by she-her pronouns. I am now, but at the time I was not, I was going by they-them or the demigirl pronouns I had created for myself, which are G-Gem-Jir.

There was a lot of racist things, in particular because I am half Japanese. people would try to talk about how I wasn't Japanese enough, for example, and things like that. And also, on the reverse side, accept me as Japanese and then be very racist about it. Like, a lot of these people, I would say most these people, never knew me personally, never took the time to get to know who I was. They just had this idea of me, and it was very frustrating, very exhausting. By this point, I had to talk to my own therapist about Tumblr.

and constantly my therapist would say, okay, but why do you need to be here? Why do you need to be working on this blog? What is clearly hurting you so much. And my partner at the time also would express very similar feelings. And I had it in my head that if I did things the right way, then maybe people could actually see me for who I was and see that like I was separate from these confessions. People were so focused on the idea of me that they didn't take the time to get to know me as a person and it was very frustrating.

What year is it? Yes. 2015, at the near the end of 2015, my grandmother in Japan was diagnosed with cancer and we didn't know what the situation would be, especially whether or not she might survive despite the fact that I had not been able to go back to Japan for a decade or so with some emergency money

and I even took out alone myself. I went with my mother and my brother back to Osaka to see my family for a week. And it was a really great experience. And it was through that experience that I realized I really wanted to come back to Japan. So once I knew I was going to leave in February, it became a thing of, okay, I'm going to leave America. But I'm also going to leave Tumblr. I just realized, like, there was no way for me to ever get through to these people because they had their ideas. of me. And I knew, and I know now that no matter what I do on the internet, people will always

come to your posts with their idea of what you represent to them. And I think accepting that has been so important to my mental health and to my life as a person who has been very online all my life. And I'm so, so, like, so much more at peace with my internet usage, knowing that, knowing that like I can basically just decompartmentalize any weird comments that people will send my way if I know, oh, they just don't know who I am. They, they are projecting. Thank you so much, Aumi. She is also a guest on the Bechtelcast coming up. So jump over to that feed if you run out of episodes here. Next up, a true pioneer. Casey, who was a Disney adult before Disney adults were Disney adults. Hi, Jamie. My name is Casey. And my

My niche internet claim to fame is that I was an early Disney content creator. I started posting Disney content on Instagram back in 2012. And in March 2014, I decided to start a Disney small shop. And there weren't a lot of us back then. There was just a couple. So my business grew very quickly. And so did my Instagram following where I posted from the theme parks. I posted my products.

I would post pretty much every day to stay relevant and to get people to find me. So at its peak, I probably had around 57,000 followers, which isn't a ton, but for 2015, 2016, 2017, this is pretty big in the Disney realm. I would get recognized at the theme parks. I would get asked for photos. And I made a lot of friends this way. As, you know, internet people do, we kind of find each other, find our group. But it also made me more susceptible to toxic friendships, people that were, you know, clout chasing. They were looking for the kind of bump that they would get if I was to tag them in a photo or be on story with them, things like that.

You know, I found it really hard to enjoy the theme parks as time went on because I always felt like I needed to be on in case, you know, I saw a follower or a customer. One time a follower's dad posted a selfie in front of my hotel room door. His daughter found my room, and he decided to, grown man, decided to take a photo in front of my room and tag me in it and say, neighbors at Disney. So that was probably the scariest thing that happened, and I had to go to the front desk and change rooms because I didn't feel very safe there because then they started DMing me, and it was just very strange. you know as time went on the more stylized like lifestyler lifestyle influencer became more popular and I was you know getting older and people stopped bothering me as much or you know maybe they recognized me but didn't you know I wasn't relevant anymore so people didn't bother me at the theme parks anymore but I do think that even just this little small claim to fame can

really affect you. And there are times that I kind of miss, you know, being known. And I can miss the free swag. But, you know, I don't think it's great for your mental health to have so many people watching your content and commenting their opinions. And the dizzy influencers now, they have Reddit snark pages. And reading that would be the worst. So I'm probably glad that I was one of the early ones. Thank you so much, Casey. And I want to be clear, this is a theme park adult safe space in case you couldn't glean it from my whole vibe. I firmly believe theme park adults either had perfect childhoods or very fucked up childhoods and everyone else just doesn't understand. And finally, we have a story about a niche internet community

that became a central part of Bailey's childhood. Hi, Jamie. My name is Bailey. I am an avid 16th minute listener and although I've never had a proper main character moments on the internet, I do want to share a little bit about a now-defunct website that I frequented in my teenage years called debate.org. Forring break of 2016, I was going to a very conservative middle and high school, which I was at for six years. And I was increasingly frustrated. I was one of the only kids there who wasn't Mormon. For whatever reason, I decided to join Debate.org in a moment of boredom, but also as an expression of, I guess, wanting to express intellectual rigor.

You know, it was 2016. It was post-Donald Trump announcing his candidacy for president. Now, the structure of debate.org is interesting because, of course, the main event, are the debates, and you could vote on other people's debates, but there were also polls, public forums of different topics. It was a common joke that I was one of three women who used the site, and although that wasn't factually true, it certainly felt like that. I ended up meeting two people in real life that I met on debate.org. I watched Rocky Horror Picture Show for the first time with him. And weirdly enough, my dad, I completely lied to him and said that I knew him from

school. He was a couple years older than me. The other person I met was my ex. Older than me, I should not have been in a relationship with them. And it took up a lot of my life or what felt like a lot of my life at the time. I was involved with this person from age. 13 to 16 in different capacities as friends, as sexual partners, as friends again, before COVID happened. And I slowly disentangled myself. Why I'm talking about debate.org right now is because I have a lot of complicated feelings in that it is no longer an accessible website. I think I discovered that about a year or two ago when I was trying to go and view my old profile as sort of a self-flagellation exercise and then found I could no longer access the website. And I've tried multiple times since then, including right before recording this to see and you cannot access the website.

That comes with a mix of relief and grief. I think often about a remark that you made in an episode of 16th minute that we, the listeners, were listening to a future piece of lost media. And that is what debate.org has kind of turned into. The grief comes in because I no longer have a portion of my life that is documented. Oh, that's my cat. She is mourning it as well. Because of the ages that I was active on that website, it shows a weird transition where I was crystallizing my opinions that I still hold on certain things.

It's where I discovered David Lynch. It's where I discovered a lot of different music that I now love. It's where I formalized some political opinions that I still have to this. this day. Debate.org was a fever dream. I guess I'm happy I was a part of it while I was around. I certainly will not be passing on stories of it to my children and grandchildren if they survive on a burning planet. Thank you so much to Bailey. There's so much to think about with that story, but the first thing that jumps to my mind is we should probably all hunt your ex. Right? Thank you so much for setting in your story.

Okay, I saved the sticky stuff for last, as I am wont to do. As many of you might know, about half of the first year of 16th minute was produced while my dad was actively sick in Massachusetts, and I was caretaking for him along with my mom and brother in our extended family, and the other half of this show has been produced after he passed away. something that I don't care how parasocial it is, listener messages, and being able to talk about it a little bit on this show shortly after really was a tremendously healing and cool thing.

It was the first time I felt like in control of what was happening in a long time. But suffice it to say, I've been weirdly in the trenches for this year of studying internet history. And the fact is that the internet's relationship with grief and grieving is, I think, one of its strength. I'm very lucky to have a great in-person support system, but sometimes you wake up in a cold sweat at 3 in the morning and you're alone and you just need to read a Reddit post

about how someone has felt the same way you have and that it sucks. And then it doesn't really get better, it just gets different. And for people who aren't as well, lucky as me to have a reliable in-person support system, the internet can be transformative in processing one's grief, or, as the case may be, processing one's recovery from addiction. There are still good corners of the internet. And so I really appreciated these stories about the internet and processing grief. Here's Jake. Hey, Jamie. My name's Jake.

Personally, I am 26 years old, and I started, I guess, interacting with the internet in a real consistent way, I would say. Starting when I was like seven or eight, honestly. I do have a very specific memory that feels just like significant somehow in a way I can't really put words to. I in fifth grade had a friend pass away and it was honestly a pretty traumatic accident. He drowned and I have a very distinct memory of learning the news

and immediately going on the internet to help me understand and I remember getting on Google with like the old Google like still serif font back when it was a functional surgent into I typed in you know like what happens after

you die and like is heaven real and like a bunch of like honestly pretty like deep philosophical questions just asking Google I mean I'm a grown adult now I've done by fair share of therapy and processing outside of that experience

but it always looking back has struck me as maybe novel to this era that I immediately went on the internet to cope with grief at such a young age. Anyway, maybe I'm just, maybe I'm inflating my own importance here a little bit. Anyway, love the show. I want to hug baby Jake so much. And to close us out, here is Ben. Hey, how's it going?

My name's Ben, and in the early 2010s-ish, I was a main character, minor main character, on Reddit for a couple of days. I was a senior in college. I was probably three or four weeks from graduation, and my grandfather, who had also graduated from that school, was losing his battle with cancer and was in the process of being moved to in-home hospice care. I had been home to visit him a couple of weeks earlier and say goodbye, and even, even though, Then he was determined, even if they cart me up there in an ambulance, I'm going to that graduation. But it was clear he was not making his way across the house to the bathroom, let alone the track up to central Minnesota from rural Iowa. So while I was there, my folks were going through photos, prepping for memorials, things like that. And they found some photos of grandpa on campus.

And, you know, I thought it would be a nice thing to replicate those photos and as a way to have us together as part of this process of graduating in this time of transition. And even though he couldn't be there physically. So when I got back up to campus, my girlfriend and I went and found those spots out on campus, you know, kind of look at the hillside and the trees and subtract 60 years. and imagine if that building wasn't there. I kind of dressed like him. He was wearing a checked flannel shirt and some khakis, so I found a checked flannel shirt and some khakis. Took the photos, kind of posed like him,

and sent them, emailed them back home to mom and dad. So this was, like I said, early 2010, so kind of early days of, kind of right before the turn to the modern social media age, and kind of promptly just threw them up on, without thinking, on R-slash-picks. And they pretty quickly shut up, to being the top post on the sub. And then quickly after that, turned into the top 10, 15 posts of

Reddit. And obviously, that comes with like a deluge of comments. It's less imposing then than it is now. Obviously, it's not coming to my phone. I didn't have a phone that was capable of that. It was all browser-based. But I think I was happy for the distraction, right? It was, you know, I'm going through this major turning of a page in my life, this chapter change, graduating college, right of passage, becoming an adult, but also having, you know, this, my grandpa's going to die in the middle of all of this weight hanging over my head. So to have this kind of like proactive thing I can do talking about grandpa with people on the internet, I think felt productive in a way that like taking tests and writing papers

didn't to distract me from it all. So it was kind of a good distraction. And most of it was positive, right? There's obviously edge cases. You had your militant atheists who wanted you to know that, you know, it was a travesty that these Catholics are still allowed to run schools and brainwash the minds of our youths. I studied theology in school and nothing turns you against the church like studying church history. Plenty of folks who really needed me to know that in the title where I put my grandfather and I, 60 years apart, yada, yada, yada, the correct grammar is my grandfather and me. So I obviously needed my bachelor's degree to be stripped from me.

But all of it was pretty positive, you know, all in good fun. Like I said, I dressed like my grandpa in the photos. And so McElmore's thrift shop had just come out. There's the line, I wear your granddad's clothes. I look incredible. So lots of folks posting that. On the flip side, there were also folks posting that they needed me to know that my grandfather was far more attractive than I ever would be. And, you know, that's fair.

That went on for about, for a couple of days. And then the people who write about what's going on on the internet started reaching out. There were only a few of them. The only one that I actually talked with was the only one that I could verify, kind of was a real person. And they were a blogger at the Huffington Post Plus 50 section. I think at that point I was kind of like, starting to make the realization that like, oh, I should probably be a little bit more private with this public airing of grief. But by the time that we kind of sussed that we weren't both trying to

scam each other, grandpa died. And so where they were looking for probably a little bit more perfunctory, like, I'm so excited to graduate. I love my grandpa so much. They got a theology major process in grief philosophizing about family and what we leave behind and the impacts on lives that we have. To their credit, they posted what was essentially, you know, a little bit of an essay mixed with an obituary. And it still exists out there to this day. And it's something that I'm glad is there for me to revisit, you know, until the day some executive turns it into a piece of lost media. I don't think at 22 I would have had the wherewithal to write down how I was feeling and to share my thought processes

more than just like talking with my roommates and my sisters. So to have this thing that I can revisit, see this snapshot of who I was at this moment in time as, you know, kind of my entire world is shifting in addition to losing my grandpa is a nice thing to have. It's a nice artifact to have of who I was. Thank you so much to Jake and to Ben. And on that note, we close out this chapter of 16th minute. What do we do with the internet? This massive thing that billionaires will not truly let belong to us. Are the good parts, the communal parts, even the healing parts, worth all the damage that it is done to us and to the planet and will continue to. We're going to keep talking about it. But until next time, this is Jamie Loftus,

and you are listening to a future piece of Lost Media. Talk soon. 16th Minute is a production of Cool Zone Media and I Hard Radio. It is written, hosted, and produced by me, Jamie Laughness. Our executive producers are Sophie Lichten and Robert Evans. The Amazing Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor. Our theme song is by Sad 13. Voice acting is from Grant Crater. And pet shoutouts to our dog producer Anderson, my cats flea and Casper, and my pet rock bird who will outlive us all. Bye. I just normally do straight stand-up, but this is a bit different. What do you get when a true crime producer walks into a comedy club? Answer, a new podcast called Wisecrack, where a comedian finds himself at the center of a chilling true crime story.

Does anyone know what show they've come to see? It's a story. It's about the scariest night of my life. This is Wisecrack. Available now. Listen to Wisecrack on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you're looking for another heavy podcast about trauma, this ain't it. This is for the ones who had to survive and still show up as brilliant, loud, soft, and whole. The Unwanted Sorority is where black women, fims, and gender expansive survivors of sexual violence, rewrite the rules on healing, support, and what happens after. And I'm your host and co-president of this organization, Dr. Leah Trette. Listen to the Unwanted Sorority, new episodes every Thursday on the IHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA. Right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. On the new podcast, America's Crime Lab, every case has a story to tell. And the DNA holds the truth. He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer screen.

I was just like, ah, gotcha. This technology is already solving so many cases. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio, app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's Black Business Month, and Money and Wealth Podcast with John Hope Bryant is tapping in. I'm breaking down how to build wealth, create opportunities, and move from surviving to thriving. It's time to talk about ownership, equity, and everything in between. Black and brown communities have historically been last in life.

Let me just say this, AI is moving faster than civil rights legislation ever did. Listen to Money and Wealth from the Black Effect Podcast Network on IHeart Radio. Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. This is an IHeart podcast.