Hi, everybody, welcome back to the Be There in Five podcast. I'm Kate Kennedy, your host.

This week, well, we'll see how far this goes. I was kind of going to snorkel a few different things. And one of these was this, not rumor, but like, I've seen a few different memes or videos this past week talking about how the dare program from the 80s, huge by the 90s, rebranded to the real program, I think, sometime in the late 2000s,

that it was an MLM or like a pyramid scheme.

And I looked into this and I was like, yeah, like, let's kind of skim through it.

It's interesting to think about this program in general

because it's now widely known to be statistically rather ineffective.

And it was a very big part of, I don't know,

I think it's a big part of like millennial lore in the same way like abstinence-only education

being mandated in public schools was.

Like we just, we had a very like purity-focused upbringing in many ways that really

leverage like Bush Reagan era scare tactics and not giving us like practical solutions or tools

for like the real world world just hoping if they got

into our brains young enough and scared us about enough things that we'd cooperate and what's

interesting is I thought I've always kind of joked that dare like completely worked on me like

I know it didn't work by and large, but I found it so personally scary and the stereotypes about the type of people who do drugs or offer you drugs or what they look like.

You know, like the cartoon all stars of it all, the guy in a trench coat offering you a doobie, the junkie in the alley that used to be the

hottest guy in school but had one joint and his life went immediately spiraling into an

addiction crisis because their whole thing was like weed as a gateway drug. But yeah, it's just,

it's interesting to look back on.

And on Instagram, I was like, yeah, if anybody has any anecdotes, like, feel free to text the hotline.

Just, you know, wanting some supporting tales from listeners thinking this would be like a tight segment.

I felt like shook by how many people wrote in.

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