The Poop Song Conspiracy

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
Warning, this episode contains juvenile poop jokes and over-the-top fart noises. Listener discretion is advised.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:09)
You're listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz, the stories behind the world's most recognizable and interesting sounds.

**Dallas Taylor** (0:20)
I'm Dallas Taylor.
Think about the most embarrassing moment in your adult life. Now imagine finding a bunch of songs online with your name in the title and the lyrics all reference the embarrassing thing that happened to you.
If it were me, I would question my sanity. But for one New Yorker, that's exactly what happened, and it led him and his sister down a rabbit hole that involved AI music, lots of poop jokes, and arguably the world's most prolific songwriter. This story comes from one of my very favorite podcasts. It's called Hyperfixed, and it's hosted by Alex Goldman. Here's Alex.

**Alex Goldman** (1:02)
So a few months ago, Hyperfixed producer Amore Yates sat down with a listener who is no stranger to bad Internet.

**Amore Yates** (1:08)
Oh, here she is again.

**Manon** (1:10)
Hi. Hi.

**Amore Yates** (1:12)
Okay.

**Manon** (1:12)
I'm back. Is it better now?
I can see you and I can hear you. Okay. That's great progress.

**Alex Goldman** (1:20)
This is Manon. She's half French, half American, and she's a journalist currently based in Liberia in West Africa.
Manon finds a lot of meaning in her work, but she's always far away from family, and that's what she always expected.

**Manon** (1:34)
We knew that we were probably not going to be in the same country as our parents, because we knew that our careers were probably not going to end up in the same place as our parents were. Yeah.

**Amore Yates** (1:43)
When did you realize that was a foreseeable outcome?

**Manon** (1:48)
Probably in middle school.

**Amore Yates** (1:50)
That is so young.

**Alex Goldman** (1:52)
Growing up, Manon and her little brother, Ethan, moved around the world like the wild thorn berries, except their parents weren't documentary filmmakers and they didn't adopt a feral child named Donnie. Instead, their dads are biogeochemists, and his research took him around the world to study climate change, forestry, and soil. So by the time that Manon was 18, she lived in Kenya, Indonesia, the US, and Brazil.
Moving so frequently like that, Manon and Ethan built an unbreakable bond.

**Manon** (2:21)
You're going to a lot of places where you don't know other people, and so in those initial days before you start making friends, it feels a little safer to have your sibling there at school with you. We can understand each other and each other's experience because we share so much of it in ways that other people can't.

**Alex Goldman** (2:40)
Like the time, a 14-year-old Ethan rocked a very specific haircut.

**Manon** (2:44)
We were living in Indonesia at the time. He had the droopy side hair thing that Justin Bieber had, and packs of young girls, maybe high school age girls, would want to take photos with him, and my whole family would tease him about it. It was happening all the time that people were like, oh, Justin Bieber, Justin Bieber, and he didn't like it. Ethan was more into metal music at that age.

**Alex Goldman** (3:07)
These days, Ethan is living in New York City with his girlfriend Rachel, and Manon and Ethan at this point are pretty used to the distance. They basically created their own language. Every day, sometimes every other day, sometimes once a week, Manon and Ethan will send each other animal memes or the occasional poop and fart joke because that's the humor they grew up with.

**Manon** (3:28)
I mean, in the family in general, we always have like if someone's mentioning that they're going to the bathroom, the joke is usually like, don't fall in or mention my name, you'll get a good seat.

**Alex Goldman** (3:42)
See, why can't I have a family like this?
I'm so jealous. Anyway, bathroom jokes, dad jokes, general teasing, this is all part of their long-distance sibling love language. That kind of humor trickles into their daily lives even when they aren't together. In fact, the reason Manal reached out to us in the first place is because of Ethan. It all started with a prank that he pulled on a colleague.

**Ethan** (4:11)
A couple of months ago, the Spotify on our iPad at the bar went out and we couldn't get in contact immediately with the owner of the bar to get his login to re-login to Spotify.

**Alex Goldman** (4:24)
That's Ethan.
Before his sister reached out to us, he'd never heard of Hyperfixed. He's just not much of a podcast person. Instead, he's more interested in making craft cocktails at the whiskey bar he works at on the Upper East Side. And occasionally acting as the bar's DJ.