'Jeopardy!' Star Ken Jennings Defends Podcast Co-Host John Roderick for 'Bean Dad' Tweets

Ken Jennings is defending his podcast co-host John Roderick, who is now perhaps better known on [...]

By Allison Schonter

Ken Jennings is defending his podcast co-host John Roderick, who is now perhaps better known on Twitter as the "Bean Dad," after he faced social media backlash for his 23-tweet-long story over the weekend about his hungry daughter's hours-long attempt to open a can of beans. As phrases like "she's 9" and "Bean Dad" began trending on the social media platform, some accusing Roderick of child abuse, the Jeopardy! champion stood by his Omnibus podcast co-host's side, defending him as a "loving and attentive dad."

Addressing the situation Sunday, Jennings, in the first of two tweets, joked that he was "extremely jealous and annoyed that my podcast co-host is going to be a dictionary entry and I never will." He later returned to Twitter to add that Roderick is "a loving and attentive dad" who tends to tell "heightened-for-effect stories about his own irascibility on like ten podcasts a week." He dubbed Twitter and the backlash "so dumb."

Jennings, who recently apologized for his own "insensitive" tweets, soon faced his own backlash for his response to the controversy. Several people replied to his response with screenshots of past tweets defending the use of racist and homophobic slurs, as well as anti-Semitic tweets, including one in which he wrote about being "a student of Hitler." Jennings replied by writing, "if we're word-searching through old tweets now, it's pretty easy to find what he actually thinks about anti-Semitism. On our show he's always the pro-Israel one!" He added in another tweet that "there's no axis where any anti-Semitic screenshot represents any actual opinion I've ever heard from him."

The Bean Dad saga began over the weekend when Roderick took to Twitter to tell the tale of his 9-year-old-daughter's six-hour endeavor in learning how to use a manual can opener. Roderick, who explained that he was working on a puzzle when his daughter said she was hungry, said he saw the moment as a teachable one, and told her they would not eat until she figured out how to open the can. During the six-hour-long feat, he said that his daughter was reduced to tears.

The story immediately led to backlash, though Roderick had defended himself, writing that "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." He even changed his Twitter bio to "Bean Dad since 2021." He later deleted the tweet thread, however, and his account has since been deactivated. According to Entertainment Weekly, in response to the backlash, the My Brother, My Brother and Me podcast announced it would no longer use music performed by Roderick as its theme song, as his "response to today's situation is emblematic of a pattern of behavior that is antithetical to the energy we try to bring to the things we do."

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