Hank: Good morning John.
I--you don't want to admit this necessarily
but we are both, at least in part, Floridians.
And I wanna be clear, Florida has a lot going
for it.
It is home to two of my very favorite foods:
the key lime pie and the Cuban sandwich.
It also has manatees and Cape Canaveral and
Disney World and really great thunderstorms.
It is the third largest state by population
in the nation and has a huge amount of cultural
diversity and diversity of wildlife and habitat
and beaches and parties and the Miami Heat,
who I hear do quite well.
But Florida is also weirdly kinda the laughing
stock of the nation.
It's uh...yeah.
Back when i was first on the internet, I'd
spend a lot of time on fark.com because I
was a teenage boy.
And they have a bunch of categories on fark.com
they categorize their outrageous headlines
into like scary or fail or face palm.
One of those categories is simply, Florida.
Because it seems, and is also objectively
true, that there are just way more weird news
stories that come out of Florida than any
other state.
"Florida man tries to convince woman to buy,
cook, and eat iguanas taped to his bike."
"Florida man arrested for directing traffic
while urinating."
"Florida man refuses to get out of hotel pool;
demands police tickle him."
The Florida Man headline has become a cliche.
There is a Twitter account devoted to the
adventures of Florida Man.
And it's a good read.
There seems to be something really odd about
Florida Man or maybe about Florida.
I've actually read a bunch of different theories
on this.
Is it the party culture of Miami?
Or is it the huge income gap between the wealthiest
and the poorest Floridan?
Or is that Florida is such a weird amalgamation
of a bunch of different cultures that are
all interacting with each other?
Because no one is really from Florida?
And all these theories are wrong.
There is actually a very simple and uninteresting
reason why Florida Man is a thing.
It's a law called the Government in the Sunshine
Act.
And it is part of Florida's almost unparalleled
history of open government.
If you work in the government in the state
of Florida, every email you send is a matter
of public record.
Anyone can read it.
The public has to be notified anytime two
members of the government meet together to
talk about something.
And most important to this video, every piece
of police paperwork is available to journalists
the moment they ask for it.
It is actually a fairly admirable policy,
though it is questionable in regards to the
rights of the person who has been arrested,
but not convicted of a crime.
That you're just reporting on the thing that
arrest report says before any of that has
gone through any kind of due process.
Which is one of the reasons why other states
have different rules.
But you combine that weird law with the fact
that Florida is the third most populous state,
and with the fact that journalism is in kind
of an economically difficult place right now,
and you're going to see a lot of sensationalist
headlines about Florida Man.
Like if a journalist catches wind that a man
in a Thor costume punches through a deli display
case and starts eating handful of knishes.
All he has to do is call the police department
and they have to send him over ultra-detailed
arrest reports with statements from witnesses
and the police.
In other places, writing a dumb story like
that would probably be more trouble than it
was worth.
Because they would have to jump through all
the hoops that are necessary to get the arrest
report.
But in Florida, thanks to a sometimes even
troublingly open government, there are no
hoops.
I have an additional theory pet theory that
we didn't have a stereotype to stick on Florida
like we did for Californians and New Yorkers
and Texans.
So we had to come up with something and because
our brains are super good at pattern-recognition,
we noticed this thing where a lot of weird
headlines were coming out of Florida and there
it was.
It stuck.
Florida: weird news capital of America and
possibly the world.
John, I'll see you on Tuesday.
I just wanted to say thank you to Francesca
Leigh who told me about this weird fluke of
history that's the reason why we think Florida
is so weird.
You can check out her YouTube channel over
there.
I had to pre-record this one cause uh there's
too much going on in Minneapolis with NerdCon.
So if anything happened in the last few days
and I'm not talking about it, that's why.
Thanks for watching.
