Fryders and Alligator Alcatraz tours: When trolls get inventive

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Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay. Sorry, I can't hear you. Shut up. Yes, you can. What? I'm not buying it, Johnson. You're trolling me. This is some inventive trolling, isn't it? It's inventive. I feel like working on this episode has made me question everything. Wow. What's today's question everything? Hit me. I guess I'll start with a simple question, a humble question. Peanut butter and jelly.

Wow, you're in the right headspace, I gotta say. Wrong answer, but right headspace, which is, I was going to ask you about something you've eaten. Okay. Have you ever eaten a frider? Frider? Yes. Don't know what a frider is. It's a fried spider. A what? No. A fried spider. Nope. No, I will not. My story this week. No. It's a tribute to you. Find someone else. Find someone else to co-host this episode with you.

Immediately find someone else. No. Today on Endless Thread from WBUR, we're talking trolling. Inventive trolling. We are trying to answer a central question. Are spiders a thing in New Zealand? Can you read some of this AI overview summary for me for Do They Eat Spiders in New Zealand? Okay. The AI overview, which really is an interesting disruption to the way that we exist now. Yeah. And that includes the media. Well, not a mainstream dish.

They're already hedging. Some people in New Zealand do eat spiders, particularly deep fried spiders known as friders. This practice is not widely known or practiced, okay, but it does exist within a certain cultural context. And what's the link that they, the article that they cite over to the right side of the image that I sent you? Medium, which is the other thing that made me a little skeptical. It says, three facts about New Zealand I didn't know until I moved here. Unique Kiwi cuisine.

is famous for wine and hobbits, but dot, dot, dot. And it's a medium post by someone named Alana Irving. Yes. The rest of that is, New Zealand is famous for wine and hobbits, but not so much its cuisine. Unless they've been here, most people probably can't name any unique kiwi dishes. But when I arrived, one really stood out. Friders.

in parentheses, fried spiders. When I told friends back home about friders, they thought I was joking. I'm not. Just take it from dozens of kiwis. And she hyperlinks to something in her just take it from dozens of kiwis sentence, but we'll get there. Because I'm going to have you read the next little chunk of Alana Irving's Medium post for us. All right. When I asked the guy behind the counter at my local Spidey and Chups, no.

Absolutely not. Keep going. Spidey and Chup's shop? Come on. In a touristy area, if you'd heard any anti-arachnid sentiments, he rightly pointed out that it's hard to argue with such a delectable snack. This is parody. People, he quotes, people from other cultures really are heavily biased against eating insects and the like. Then they have a white bait fritter. That's a fish, yep. A white bait fritter with a bit of...

ton of web mixed in and they suddenly changed their tune. Yep. No. Then Alana includes a recipe for the perfect frider. No. So I'm going to send you that recipe and I would love for you to read some of the ingredients and the steps for us, if you please. This makes me mad because I love deep fried things. And I just, this is a bridge too far. It's a web too far. Six tunnel web spiders, 500 grams. Ugh. Ugh.

Oil for deep frying, two eggs, two tablespoons water, two tablespoons corn flour. I assume it's tablespoons or maybe it's teaspoons. One cup flour, baking powder, vinegar, milk, chopped thyme, mint, sage, flour. Milk fangs until all the deadly... No. No. Milk fangs until all the deadly toxin is out of the spiders before preparing? No. I would have heard of this if it was real.

I reject this. You reject this. Okay. So she also writes in this post, quote, I find incredulity about friders to be culturally myopic. Spider is eaten in many parts of the world, such as inland China, the Central Asian Plateau, and on several Pacific islands, including New Zealand. Quote-unquote normal food is relative. After all, there are many people in India horrified at the idea of eating.

cows. Here's the thing. Sure. I'm, like, cultural blind spots fully accept. I'm saying in the age of the internet, I would have heard about this. I definitely would have heard about it. And people in India might be like very, you know, I mean, that's a huge population. They might be.

as she suggests, skeptical of the idea of eating cows, but it's not like they've never heard of people eating cows. You know what I mean? Yeah. Okay. That's a good point. I'm calling this fake. Calling this fake. This is all fake.

Until you milk a spider's fangs in front of me, deep fry it and drop it into my mouth, I reject it. Okay, so we're going to break this down together. If we go back to the original Google search that led us to the Medium post, you'll see in the little preview version of the Medium post that there's a picture of a Fryder. Golden brown and crispy looking. Right, and very spider-shaped. This picture comes from an Epicurious recipe. This recipe calls for two frozen adult Texas brown.

tarantulas or two Chilean rose tarantulas. Neither of those places are New Zealand. Correct. So at the very least, our medium poster, Alana Irving, chose us. It's a sus frider photo for her piece. Yeah. Especially given that she allegedly quotes a guy from her local Spidey and Chup shop. Why can't you just take a picture there? We have a suspicious photo appropriated.

as being Friders. And then we have the hyperlink higher up when the writer, Alana Irving, says that all of her friends think she's joking about Friders, but she's not. Just take it from dozens of Kiwis. The hyperlink on that sentence goes to a Reddit post from eight years ago in the New Zealand subreddit. No, these guys are trolling. The title is, was this post a joke?

And it links to the post in question and says, I was reading through this post as a Brit and I am so confused. This has to be a joke, right? I find it hard to believe that so many people would have joined in on a troll, yet I can't find anything about it on Google. So I'm going to link you to that post then, and I want you to start by reading the title for us. Are there a lot of spiders in New Zealand compared to the U.S.? That's the title of the post. Yes. So can you read?

Just some of the top comments on this post for us. There are quite a few, but during the summer months when they're breeding, you're allowed to catch the adults if they're more than 12 centimeters or five inches wide. In my experience, it's best to warn tourists before they eat a dish. with them in it because some people can be fussy when it comes to what they're used to eating. To be honest, it's mainly older people who have them. Younger people would rather have McDonald's or something.

Okay. No. What's the very next one? It is a recipe for deep red spiders. It's not just a recipe. It's the same recipe. It's the exact recipe that Alana first included in her Medium post. 500 grams of tunnel web spiders, corn flour, the whole thing. I think we're in copy pasta zone here, you know, as in you copy a post from the Internet and you paste it somewhere else on the Internet. And for some reason, we call these copy pastas. This feels like a copy pasta, right?

You're picking up what's going down here. One of the sort of confusing things about Reddit can be that like... In a lot of instances, you can actually trust the comment section. Which is one of the reasons why I love Reddit is because you can basically like, you can kind of get a sense from the sort of like overall group's responses of whether something is real. The collective wisdom that happens is... real, but also Redditors love a joke. They love a comment thread joke.

And if you basically like tickle them with your original post by saying, is this a troll? You're really like flipping a coin because most of the people who are going to respond to that, you're basically forcing them to choose. between actually giving you real information and being like, oh, let's keep it going, baby. You know what I mean? Yeah. I've just sent you another comment that I'd like you to read from a Redditor whose username is proceed to party.

As an American who had no knowledge that eating spiders is a normal thing there, this is horrifying. Having said that, I'll try anything once, and when I finally make it to your beautiful country, I'm putting this on my list. Edit. Reading the rest of this thread has me so effing confused right now. Is this real or not? Please, dot. Someone, dot. Okay. I've sent you one more thing that I would just love.

for you to read. The response that Proceed to Party got. Okay, what I see is mention it to your hotel receptionist. They always know the best places to get friders. And then Proceed to Party says noted. Thanks, bud. Okay, here's another sort of like cultural blind spot.

comment. I know it's hard to get perspective from cultures outside your own, but people do things differently all around the world. Yes, of course. Spider is eaten in many other parts of the world, such as inland China and the Central Asian Plateau, not to mention on several Pacific islands. Yes, this includes New Zealand.

Indians are as horrified by the eating of calves as Westerners are by the eating of dogs. These things are all relative. What jumped out at me about that is this mention of inland China, the Central Asian Plateau. The idea of people in India being horrified at the idea of eating cows, that exact language. This is when I'm like, oh, we are definitely.

in copy pasta territory. Because Alana Irving mentions this exactly in her Medium post because she did indeed copy it from Reddit. And she also copied the Reddit comment that included that quote. from her local Spidey and Chups shop about how people change their tune about eating spiders once they try a fritter with some tunnel web mixed in, direct copy-paste. So at this point, I'm like, okay, I think we've officially...

We've got a troll here. And indeed, the other two facts about New Zealand from her Medium post that Alana didn't know until she moved there, supposedly, are one, that it's illegal to have a garden in New Zealand. Were you familiar with this idea? No. This was another hoax that New Zealanders helped perpetuate online in recent years. And two, it's important to be aware of giant birds, specifically the moa.

I sent you a picture. Yeah, yeah. So this was... No. What's the captain? Describe the picture for me. A rare MOA attack caught on camera. And then it's what looks like a slowest camper. Um, like running away along, along a river bed, uh, next to what looks like a, like a big bird kind of creature with giant floppy feet and a hair suit.

Yes, it looks like a person in a bird suit. It looks like a person in a bird suit, 100%. So, yes, the moa was a giant bird, ostrich-like, but bigger, that it was native to New Zealand, but it went extinct. thousands of years ago. Of course, of course. So this is when I tell you how my journey down the rabbit hole on Fridays began. It started with this post.

All of New Zealand teams up to troll an unsuspecting American who wanted to know about the local spider population. Another unsuspecting American is caught in their convincing web of deceit. And that other unsuspecting American is the commenter we mentioned earlier, Proceed to Party, who also has the top comment on this best of post, because that's where I found this. Can you read that top comment?

That's not fair. They're really convincing, Kiwi bastards. They're funny f***ers, though. I'll give them that. Thank goodness one of them took pity on me and messaged me to let me know that my hotel receptionist would probably think I'm out of my mind if I asked where to get fried spiders. Edit, I've never gotten gold before. Thanks, friend.

So the funny thing is, even though I went into this knowing that this was all allegedly a hoax, I too found some of the Kiwi Redditors in the original post really convincing. And I was afraid to write off. friders as not a thing because our cultural traditions and cuisines are so different from country to country and region to region. Yeah. And it wasn't until I read the rest of Alana's Medium posts that I finally felt for sure comfortable going like, OK, no, not a thing.

I mean, here's like the amazing thing about the Internet is it sort of like widens your aperture in this like incredible way. But it also is guaranteed to slowly degrade truth. Yeah, which is which can have like hilarious consequences and very not hilarious consequences. But I love to I love to go down the rabbit hole on a hilarious consequence.

Yeah. And the hoax continues. I found a post on threads from just last year of someone saying like, can someone from New Zealand tell me what a frider is? Is it is it rude to refuse them? And people are still trolling and only a few. And souls in there said, like, no, no, mate. They're pulling your leg. No, mate. And I should say, well, friders, that term, that does not appear to be a thing. Fried spiders is. Okay. You find them.

I think most commonly in Cambodia and some other Southeast Asian countries. So people do eat fried spiders. Note to self, no need to travel to Cambodia for culinary exploration. I mean, go for some other reason. There you go. Yes, yes, yes. But Friders, Spidey and Chups, not a thing. Even though I emailed Alana Irving as I was looking into this. And I believe that she continues to troll me because she emailed me back. She did?

She did. She emailed me back. She said, thanks for reaching out. I'm glad to hear of your interest in New Zealand, but I have to say I'm disappointed that you assume it's all a joke. Oh, my God. Okay, just to be clear, though, I do love Cambodian food that does not include spiders. I have eaten bugs at various restaurants. Emery, you might take exception to that. But in a world where large format protein is very destructive to the world, I don't mind. And I personally support eating bugs.

Just not spiders. Even if they're deep fried, I will try a handful of chups, though. Oh, yeah. Sign me up for chups. Yeah, we could get a basket. We could share a basket of chups. Never met a potato I didn't like. All right. When we come back, another story about inventive trolling. As a raider scavenging a derelict world, you settle into an underground settlement. But now you must return to the surface, where arc machines roam.

If you're brave enough, who knows what you might find? Arc Raiders, a multiplayer extraction adventure video game. Buy now for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S, and PC. Rated T for Teen. So good, so good, so good Score holiday gifts everyone wants for way less at your Nordstrom Rack store. Save on Ugg, Nike, Rag & Bone, Vince, Frame, Kurt Geiger London, and more. Because there's always something new. I'm giving all the gifts this year with that extra 5% off.

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Follow and listen wherever you get your podcasts. Amory. Ben. Do you know what Alligator Alcatraz is? It's a detention center. that Trump has built in the Florida Everglades. He opened it this past summer, and its purpose is to detain people that the Trump administration thinks are here illegally. Yeah, about 5,000 detainees caught up in ISIS immigration sweeps. So, do you know the significance of the number 4547? Nope.

So to a lot of MAGA supporters, this refers to President Trump. Because he was the 45th president and then he was the 47th president. Exactly. Yes. This has kind of become a rallying cry number for the president. Interestingly, it also refers to HR, I think it's HR bill.

4547 Strengthening Protections for Social Security Beneficiaries Act of 2018, which was signed by Trump. I think there's some debate about whether this bill helped or hurt our ability to collect and protect Social Security, but... I digress. Do you know what Terry's Tours is? Terry's Tours. No, I have a guess. All right. What is it? It's a guy named Terry with a boat who takes people on tours through the Everglades. I mean, you're not completely wrong, but let me send you a TikTok.

okay for you to watch uh and you can either describe it during or after it's terry from terry's tours of lake lanier and we brought our fantastic endeavor down to the everglades for the first official alligator alcatraz swamp tours okay so Terry is a woman, a blonde, white, middle-aged woman wearing a Hawaiian shirt who is advertising alligator Alcatraz. specifically boat tours of alligator Alcatraz. She said something about, like, you can name an alligator. Yeah, you can adopt alligators.

$4,547. She said a bunch of really offensive stuff. She said that they'll give kids on the tour a bubble gun so that they can... blow bubbles at people being detained there and say, get out of my country. They have a version of like hungry, hungry hippos, except it's alligators. as she says, brown people. What do you think? I think it's bad, Ben. I think it's pretty upsetting. Well...

I'd like to tell you about comedian Lissandra Vasquez. Excellent. Who created this video. Thank God. Okay, I was hoping so, because at the end, the laugh being slowed down, the like... That makes me feel so much better. Lissandra, a comedian, very big on TikTok, 900,000 followers, just about regularly skewers politicians. The Terry's Tours, spelled T-O-U-R-Z, of course, promotion.

leads to a website. And if people try to book a tour of Alligator Alcatraz or adopt an alligator, rename the alligator, it instead funnels visitors towards organizations that offer... legal and financial assistance to migrants. These organizations include the National Day of Labor Organizing Network and also Border Kindness. This was all reported. in the publication Latin Times. We had a little overlap in our two stories. Did you see the fried alligator bites? Yes.

In her video. Yes. Deep pride. We got that deep pride crossover, baby. Dipping sauce. Yep. So, you know, what does this remind you of? Does this remind you of anything? Hmm. The first thing that comes to mind for me was when the KKK tried to sponsor a chunk of highway so that it would say like this.

portion of the highway is sponsored by the KKK. And so the highway administrator, wherever, I forget where this took place, renamed it the Rosa Parks Highway. Said it was like, this segment of the Rosa Parks Highway is sponsored by the KKK. It's like maintained and kept beautiful. by the KKK. The Ku Klux Klan. Wow. Okay. But what are you thinking of? Well, that's a really good example. This, you know, and it is part of this kind of like history of similarly politically motivated...

trolling. Were you talking about Gen Z buying up the tickets to the Trump rally? Yes. Okay. Back in 2022, there was this Trump rally where a bunch of TikTokers reserved tickets or spaces or like... showed interest to the tune of maybe a million people. And then they never showed up to the rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Only 6,000 people showed up. A lot of people felt like it was a big embarrassment to the Trump campaign. Another example is this trolling of the Kellogg Company.

that was created by this TikToker. And the sort of troll was Sean. This TikToker designed these bots to troll. troll the website created by Kellogg and flood it with fake job applications after Kellogg, the company, sort of employed anti-union practices or practices deemed unfriendly to labor unions as some of its...

employees were trying to get organized for collective bargaining. We interviewed that guy. I don't know if you remember Gen Z for Change, that episode of Endless Thread. I highly recommend you go back and check out that episode about Gen Z for Change.

But back to Terry's tours. Lissandra Vasquez posted an update a few days ago, at least a few days ago on the day that we are taping this. And I will send you that. Okay. So she posts this update where she mentions that people were saying you should be collecting email addresses for the people who want.

to buy a tour. And so she updated the page so that it is much easier to collect their email addresses. She kind of updated the Google search so that it looks even more official when you search Terry's tours on Google. She's showing some data about the number of visits she's had to the site. And she tells people who are in on the joke not to put their contact information in, that this is just a kind of.

socially entrap the people who might actually be genuinely interested in something like Terry's tours. What do you think? What do you think about all this? It's actually making me think of our SRA episode, the Socialist Rifle Association, and the people from the Massachusetts chapter that we spoke to who were kind of saying, like, well, you know...

The right is going to take up arms, and so we should also know how to use these weapons. And it kind of feels like in a similar territory of, like, the Internet is going to be used. For, you know, we don't even necessarily need to call it like good or evil. It's going to be used for certain outcomes. Right. And if you are not also using it. to try to reach people in this day and age, like you could quickly get outmatched. Mm-hmm. Out-trolled. Yeah, yeah. Out-trolled. And so...

Yeah, it feels like we're only going to be seeing a lot more of this. I think we're seeing a really interesting exercise, which is basically separating Trump supporters from their money. What's interesting about that to me is that a lot of people would also say that Trump is actually taking advantage of his supporters, whether it's Trump coin or. you know, all kinds of different sort of MAGA-related merch, they would argue that Trump's supporters are being taken advantage of financially.

as well as, you know, intellectually and emotionally or whatever you might say. So what's interesting about this is this is kind of like an effort to, I guess, play the same game in a way, maybe. from Lissandra. I have not spoken with Lissandra, but like, you know, I feel like...

And she's playing with this idea of like, all right, if you're going to be stupid enough to vote for Trump, then like, I'm going to see if I can separate you from some of your money as well, because you're also doing that again. I am not calling Trump supporters stupid. I'm just saying that seems to be the sort of part of the motivation here. But I think it's kind of interesting. But I guess I wonder, like...

You know, it's a it's it is certainly an inventive troll, as we as we established as the theme. But I right now, I guess this is kind of where. where I am kind of emotionally. It's like, I want real change in the world. And if her goal is to maybe change hearts and minds, like...

That only works if you can see the ridiculousness, if you can actually process the ridiculousness of some of the things that she is trying to make seem ridiculous. Yes. Right. So we'll being redirected to these other things that. feel totally contrary to what people who might genuinely be interested in a territory or believe is directing them towards those resources actually going to going to change hearts and minds. Yeah. Like.

I don't know. That doesn't mean that I, like, disapprove of it by any means, that approach, no matter what you're making a video about. It's just, I do wonder if we are... Are we are we creating more division? Maybe it just allows people who are feeling crazy right now looking at all the things that are happening. Maybe it allows those people to feel less crazy and maybe that's enough.

But I take your point that it's sort of like inventive trolling, you know, lesser than sign than, you know, than like real. discourse and discussion and kind of like open-hearted, direct conversation about the things that are... dividing us um yeah so yeah and it comes it comes at a time when we are

Whatever you are fighting for, people are genuinely curious about, like, what is going to work? What is actually effective? And this came up in the Jeffrey Noe episode, too, is that he's talking, you know, Jeffrey Noe is talking about. marching in the streets with hundreds of thousands of people and

You know, I don't even remember if it was in the episode or if it was like more in our discussions while we were making the episode of like, God, does that work anymore? Like hundreds of thousands of people marching in streets. Does that actually do anything anymore? So we're all. just kind of like what works what what can we try next and um or maybe it's less about the strategy and more about just like we have these tools and hopefully we can keep laughing in the process but

I don't know, man. It's tricky. Tricky, tricky.

So we first talked about Alligator Alcatraz and Vasquez's inventive trolling months ago. And it seems important to note that ICE raids have only continued and intensified since then. And Alligator Alcatraz is caught up in several court battles and lawsuits, everything from the private contractors being paid to build out and run the place.

to issues of access to lawyers for detainees and attorney-client legal rights. No official tally from Vasquez on how much she's raised by redirecting people to support immigration protections with their dollars. But you don't have to visit her TikTok to find those links. They're in our show notes. Endless Threat is a production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was co-hosted by myself, Ben Brock Johnson, and Anne-Marie Sievertson. It was produced by Frannie Monaghan.

Our editor is Meg Kramer, mix and sound design by production manager Paul Vykus. The rest of our team is Grace Tatter, Dean Russell, managing producer Summit Tajoshi, and Emily Jankowski. Also, by the way, last week we erroneously said that Despicable Me is a Disney film. Despicable Us. It is, in fact, produced by Illumination and was animated by a French animation studio, McGuff. Nous sommes désolés pour les rues.

or something. If you have an untold history, an unsolved mystery, or some other wild story from the internet that you want us to tell, get in touch. Endless thread at WBUR.org. Merci.