 Good morning John. You don't want to admit this necessarily, but we are both, at least in part, Floridians. And I want to be clear, Florida has a lot going for it. It's home to two of my very favorite foods, the Keelab Pie and the Cuban Sandwich. It also has manatees and Cape Canaveral and Disney World and really great thunderstorms. It's the third largest state by population in the nation and it 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 kind of the laughing stock of the nation. It's, 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 that they categorize their outrageous headlines into like scary or fail or face palm. 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 women to buy, cook and eat iguanas taped to his bite. 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's 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 men 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 Floridian? Or is it 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 of these theories are wrong. There is actually a very simple and uninteresting reason why Florida man is the thing. It's a law called the Government in the Sunshine Act and it's part of Florida's almost unparalleled history of open government. If you work in the government of 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's actually a fairly admirable policy, though it is questionable with 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 the 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 gonna 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 handfuls of canishes 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. And other places writing a dumb story like that would probably be more trouble than it was worth because they'd 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 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 because our brains are super good at pattern recognition. We noticed this thing where there were lots of weird headlines 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 Lee who told me about this weird fluke of history that's the reason why we think Florida is so weird. You can check her YouTube channel out over there. I had to pre-record this one because it'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.