So, what are we about to do right now?
I'm going to look at how Bean Dad wound up being Twitter's worst story of the year, even
though the year just started.
And how he got exposed so hard he wound up deleting his entire Twitter to try to cover
everything up.
I find like most stories about, "I don't like this person, so I'm going to find their old
Tweets," are pretty dumb because they all go the same way.
But I'm inclined to say Bean Dad might be Twitter's worst person of 2021 so far.
Before I do that, shout out Mandy Mateer for this comment, "Alternate title: Watch D'Angelo
Wallace lose the will to live in real time," because it just so eloquently summed up, not
just that specific video, but also this is who I am at this point.
Enough of the fun stuff.
So who is Bean Dad?
We're actually talking about John Roderick.
All you need to know, he was the lead singer in a band, and he also runs a podcast with
this other dude named Ken Jennings who's going to make a surprise appearance.
Another thing about him is that he's a verified Twitter user, but surprise of all surprises,
his Twitter account is now gone permanently.
The dude nuked it.
It all started a long time ago.
Just kidding.
So yesterday my daughter, who is nine years old, was hungry and I was doing a jigsaw puzzle.
So I said over my shoulder, "Make some baked beans."
She said, "How?"
like all kids do when they want you to do it.
So I said, "Open the can and put it in a pot."
She brought me the can and said, "Open it how?"
I'm not quite sure that kid's saying, "How do you do this?" is an indicator that they
want you to do it for them.
So anyways, she was like, "How do I open the can, Dad?"
And he says, "With a can opener, I said, incredulous.
She brought me the can opener and we both started it.
I realized I'd never taught her to use it.
What kind of apocalypse father doesn't teach his kid how to use a manual can opener?
So I said, how do you think this works?
She struggled for a while, and with a big dramatic sigh, she said, "Will you please
just open the can?"
A teaching moment just dropped in my lap."
Instead of showing her how to use the can opener, he says, "I went back to my jigsaw
puzzle.
She was next to me, grunting and groaning, trying to get the thing.
Eventually she collapsed in a frustrated heap.
I said, "Explain the parts."
Basically, she's like, "I don't know how to use this, which is literally why I asked."
And he said, "The tool is made to be pleasing, but it doesn't have any superfluous qualities,
everything that moves does so for a reason."
Do you think you're impressing a nine year old because you know the definition of the
word superfluous?
So here's where we're back into me not getting it.
Because if you just acknowledge that your nine-year-old has successfully pointed out
to you that she has made an attempt to understand how this works, then why the heck are you
not just telling her the last part?
All this bean talk is making me feel a certain way.
I know this is parenting theater in some ways and like all parents throughout history, I'm
trying to correct my own mistakes in the way I educate my child.
She sees through this.
Fun fact, she's nine.
She doesn't.
All she knows is that she was hungry and you made her wait for six hours.
After posting this thread, it blew up.
I have collected some of my favorite tweets about it.
This genepark1, he quotes the can opener monologue and turns it into an Evangelion meme, which,
while funny, really does make me feel bad for the girl.
This person tweeted out, "The Bean Dad thread brought up a lot of emotions and realizations
lol."
And here you can see it says, "Trust issues, anger management issues, [daddy issues intensify]...
Wait.
It's all Daddy issues?
Always has been."
This story hits all of these on the head.
Especially things like feeling shame when asking for help/never asking for help.
This person said, "You know, I was reading this thinking about my own father who was
very much like this.
As a child, he would always force me to figure out things that I didn't know and it was a
teaching lesson.
I stopped asking him for help and never asked anyone."
I don't know, Bean Dad.
I could take his word for it.
That he thought he was being 100% helpful.
But this is how people internalize it.
It's like impact versus intent.
Some people thought it was a teaching moment.
"I am thinking the daughter might think of this moment when she's choosing a nursing
home for him."
Why did Mary snap though?
She snapped.
What do you think he did right after that?
Did he say, "Oh wow.
I understand where you're coming from.
I may have worded this poorly."
No, of course he didn't.
"Somehow my story about teaching my daughter how to work out how to use a can opener and
overcome her frustration got over onto a version of Twitter where I'm being accused of child
abuse.
It's astonishing.
My kid is fine, everybody."
Then he says, "Maybe not surprisingly, none of the people who hate my can opener story
follow me on Twitter."
Of course we don't follow you.
You went viral across the entire internet for bragging that you did not feed your daughter.
Then his last tweet, I guess, was, "The best part about being ratioed by these parenting
concern trolls is that they keep harping on how depriving my kid of baked beans for six
hours is child abuse.
Six hours is the length of time between meals."
Now we have gone into a bit of a gotcha moment, because if you go back to the original thread,
he starts this thread off by saying, "Yesterday, my daughter was hungry."
The rest of the story is him describing that she did not eat for an additional six hours.
This was a child who was already far enough past a meal that she was hungry again.
So this dude is weird.
He's either lying and he just made up the story for Twitter clout to make everyone mad,
which did happen, or this really happened.
But either way, we still have a person who is defending not feeding a hungry child for
six hours.
Now there's this immensely popular podcast: My Brother, My Brother and Me.
They had been using his songs.
"We appreciate John letting us use one of his songs as the theme.
But his response to this situation is emblematic of a pattern of behavior that is antithetical
to the energy we try to bring to the things we do.
So it's time for us to move on."
So just off of the Bean Dad stuff alone and how poor, they basically were like, "Nope,
we don't want to associate with that."
But Twitter people did what Twitter people always do.
They started digging through his old tweets.
What they found was a little different than your average, "Oh, he said weird stuff a few
years ago," which is where Ken Jennings joins the fray.
He apparently holds the longest winning streak record on Jeopardy.
Ken Jennings posts a podcast with Bean Dad.
The plot is getting thicker.
"If this reassures anyone, I personally know John aka Bean Dad to be a loving and attentive
Dad who, B, tells heightened for effect stories about his own irascibility on 10 podcasts
a week."
What about his weird anti-Semitic stuff?
So I did some extensive digging.
This isn't borderline anti-Semitic.
This is white supremacist rhetoric from 2013.
"The fourth has been perverted by activists, Jew judges and mud pupil apologists.
The founders intended USA as a white homeland."
I typically do not ever think a tweet from 2013 is enough to implicate somebody as being
a bad person in 2020, but if it's white supremacist anti-Semitic rhetoric, I will absolutely bring
that up.
Are you kidding me?
This is absolutely homophobic and ableist.
I guess this person said, "Matt's soccer team was called The Stormtroopers, but the mothers
of the other teams made us changed it because of the Nazis."
And he said, "Jews ruin everybody's fun."
And the problem was, it just goes on and on and on.
This is so creepy.
He made an apology, even though his Twitter is deleted.
Okay.
John Roderick says, "Hi.
I deactivated my Twitter yesterday in a panic.
I had to reflect on what I'd done and the hurt I'd caused and my mind was clouded by
the consequences of my own actions.
That's really what happened here.
My story about my daughter and the can of beans was poorly told.
I didn't share how much laughing we were doing, how we had a bowl of pistachios between us
all day or that we'd both had a full breakfast together a few hours before."
A few hours before.
So he confirms that it was six hours plus a few hours before and all they had was a
bowl of pistachios that he magically just added to the story now that people were mad.
"I frame the story with me as the a-hole Dad, because that's my comedic persona."
He ironically took pride in not feeding a crying hungry child for six to nine hours.
So, so far we have still got no confirmation that she wasn't crying.
"I was a locus for a tremendous outpouring of anger and grief."
Not the victim card.
"As for the many racist, anti-Semitic, hurtful and slur filled tweets, all of those tweets
were intended to be ironic, sarcastic."
He just said, "If I ever said anything offensive, seriously, no I didn't."
He said, "I thought then, that being an ally meant taking the slurs of the oppressors and
flipping them to mock racism, sexism, homophobia, bigotry."
Who's going to tell him who the oppressors are in that case?
I'm not going to tell him.
"I am humiliated by my incredibly insensitive use of the language of sexual assault in casual
banter," when he easily tweets rape jokes but he won't even use the word rape to describe
apologizing for his rape jokes.
"Because I was a hipster intellectual from a diverse community, it was okay for me to
joke and deploy slurs in that context."
Oh, okay.
So he was one of those people.
They literally think that not wanting me to actually die is a pass for saying the N word.
They're really like, "Hey, just because I'm not super racist, it's okay for me to be a
little racist."
You can decide whether or not you thought the tweets I read were sarcastic.
There's no way you would tweet about those things so many times under the guise of sarcasm.
What do I think of Bean Dad?
I don't think he had to leave Twitter, but that was his choice.
He was not run off the internet.
This was not cancel culture.
This is a decision he made to try to escape the consequences of his own actions.
People saying, "Oh, Hey, you were describing abusive behavior."
That's not an overreaction chief.
I think the lesson here is clear.
If you're going to get canceled over food on the internet, at least pick something that
tastes good.
Baked beans were never going to be worth it.
Anyway, I'll be here all week folks at 2:00 PM central time.
If it's Monday, Wednesday, Friday, I'm uploading a new video here.
If it's Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, that means I'm going live over on Twitch.
So basically what I'm saying is I'll see you tomorrow, unless of course it's Sunday, in
which case, just watch this video again.
Okay.
Bye.