On this podcast, we explore fantastical thinking, moral panics, urban legends, conspiracy theories, hoaxes, and crazes, examine the forces that shape our culture, and tell the stories that create the realities we share, and sometimes the realities we don't.

Hi, I'm Chelsea Weber Smith, and welcome to Jackass. I mean American hysteria.

And MTV insists this is not a copycat incident.

Big Brother Magadine tells you how to commit suicide, drug use, and also explicit descriptions of sex.

Steve burned his face so bad he ended up looking like Freddy Krueger.

Daredevil hustler named Evil Knievel, who's one of the more grotesque spectacles in our history.

Hi, I'm Johnny Knoxville. Welcome to Jackass.

Three, two, one, five.

At the turn of the millennium, rowdy preteens and teenagers like me started doing things like pushing each other in shopping carts through the dim parking lots of chain grocery stores,

slamming into curves until we soared into sculpted hedges, our parents' handheld cameras

capturing a creative stream of aggressively irritating stunts, pranks, and pathetic attempts at kickflips.

The tapes now, mercifully, melting away in some never-ending

landfill. While skateboarding with abandon, I racked up a fractured wrist that left me

poolless for the summer, my cast wrapped in a bread bag when I needed to take a

shower. Then I got a somewhat serious hand injury after trying and failing to jump off a yellow

cement pole and land on my skateboard.

The truth was, I always had a general propensity for flinging myself into oblivion, jumping off

untested cliffs and bridges into dark water while onlookers put their hands to their faces.

Now let me set the general tenor at the time our title show appeared in 2000,

the year of our gnarly lord.

An indignant pop-punk band named Blink 182 was suddenly topping the charts, soon to be followed

by others like Sum 41 and Good Charlotte, a surprising challenge to the sugary boy bands of

...