Close All Tabs - Bee Movie, "We Are Charlie Kirk," and the Enduring Bait-and-Switch Meme

Episode Date: April 1, 2026

According to all known laws of aviation, there is no way a bee should be able to fly. Its wings are too small to get its fat little body off the ground. The bee, of course, flies anyway because bees don't care what humans think is impossible. In 2007, Bee Movie hit theaters with a strange plot and was considered a box office flop. Nearly two decades later, it’s somehow more relevant than ever, not because of the movie itself, but because of what happened next. The script became a meme, then a prank, then, eventually, a tool for protest. In this episode, host Morgan Sung traces the evolution of bait-and-switch memes, from early internet shock images to the rise of the “Never Gonna Give You Up” rickroll, all the way to TikTok-era pranks that burn out as quickly as they go viral. Along the way, she talks to Bee Movie co-writer Spike Feresten about how the film became an unlikely internet icon, and to digital rhetoric expert Bret Strauch about what makes a meme actually stick. Guests: Spike Feresten, screenwriter and comedian Bret Strauch, assistant professor of digital media, University of Colorado Boulder Further Reading/Listening: Behind the scenes content on the making of this episode! MEMES, Part 3: Gotta make you understand — Endless Thread A Complete History of Bee Movie’s Many, Many Memes — Paris Martineau, Intelligencer Why Did Bee Movie Become A Meme? — Joshua Kristian McCoy, GameRant The Josh Hutcherson ‘Whistle’ edit meme, explained — Ana Diaz, Polygon ‘His courage our own’: This Charlie Kirk tribute song is blowing up on Spotify. Was it made by a human—or AI? — Braden Bjella, The Mary Sue  Read the Transcript here Email us at [e-mail] Follow us on Instagram⁠ and ⁠TikTok⁠ Credits: Close All Tabs is hosted by Morgan Sung. Our team includes producer Maya Cueva, editor Chris Hambrick and senior editor Chris Egusa who also composed our theme song and credits music. Additional music from APM. Audio engineering by Brendan Willard. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is our Director of Podcasts. Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our Editor in Chief. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Its wings are too small to get its fat little body off the ground. The bee, of course, flies anyway because bees don't care what humans think. possible. Those are the iconic opening lines of the 2007 film, B-Movie. And the voice you heard reading those lines... My name is Spike First, and is that really it? Is that what we wrote? Spike is a comedian and screenwriter who's worked on Seinfeld, written for David Letterman, hosted his own show, and co-wrote the one and only B-movie. You know, the one starring Jerry Seinfeld as a talking bee. I'm going out. Out? Out. Out where? Outside the hive. What if the bees discovered the humans were taking their honey?

That was one big idea that kind of unlocked a little bit of the plot. But the kind of larger idea was what would happen if a bee didn't want to just go into the honey business? Isn't there? Is there something more? Hyginks ensue. Bee movie is a surprisingly deep story about exploitation, uncompensated labor, the vital environmental role that bees play as pollinators. and what it takes to break out of society's mold.

That is, if society is a honeybee hive in Manhattan. Oh, and the bee kind of falls in love with a human woman. It's a whole thing. Spike said that Steven Spielberg asked Jerry Seinfeld if he wanted to do an animated movie. And Jerry Seinfeld said, What about a movie about bees? And we'll call it B movie. And he went sold.

It's the shortest pitch in, like, film history. And then Jerry called us up the next day and said, I just sold a movie to Spielberg, Dreamerbook's animation, about bees. And we were like, what is it about? And he goes, that's what we have to figure out. The very first thing we did was start reading about bees, and we came across this fact. And we were, oh, this is kind of a remarkable that these guys can't fly in rain and that their bodies aren't right.

And it's hard for them to fly. And everything became kind of fodder for, you know, the world of B-movie. This was Jerry's big comeback after Seinfeld, which had wrapped up about five years before development on B-movie started. And the movie did well at the box office, but among film critics, it was a flop. Kids loved it, but it didn't compare to the Shrek franchise or Ratatouille, which dominated early 2000s animation. The plot was weird. The jokes skewed more adult. And the whole romantic vibe between a human woman and a honeybee, maybe a bit too out there for the general public. Jerry even joked about it a couple years ago. Here he is on the Tonight

show. And I apologize for what seems to be a certain uncomfortable, subtle, sexual aspect of the B-movie with really was not intentional. But after it came out, I realized this is really not appropriate for children. The world moved on. But today, almost 20 years later, B-movie is a cult classic. Because the B-movie script itself has become one of the quintessential internet pranks. Annoyed with someone, dump the B-movie script in their comments. Protesting against the government's anti-trans bathroom complaint forms, spam the tip line with the B-movie script. Here's Spike again. We couldn't quite understand. Are they making fun of us, which is fine, or are they really celebrating us? Or is it, are they just taking our weird thing and doing weird things

with it? There is simple. ideas like weaponized absurdity, you know, so when some horrible right winger is, you know, got some sort of hotline to expose the trans community or, you know, something, and people just load in the B-movie script. To us, like, that's fantastic. Like, we're not even going to engage you in conversation. We're just going to drop an absurdity bomb in there and just stop it. The B-movie script remains a top-tier internet prank.

It's up there with Rick Rowling. This is a genre known as Baden Switch memes. The internet has changed drastically since the days of pranking people with never going to give you up. And memes have changed too. Imagine trying to explain today's trends to someone in 2007. But what hasn't changed about internet culture is the love of a good prank. The art of the Bade and Switch meme endures. It's April Fool's Day, so today we're diving into the evolution of these memes.

and what makes a meme prank actually stick around? Ready? This is Close All Tabs. I'm Morgan Sung, tech journalist, and your chronically online friend here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let's get into it. Before we talk about what makes a good bait-and-switch meme,

let's get into where they even came from. For today's internet history lesson, we're going back in time. Before TikTok, before Vine, may she rest in peace, and before YouTube, to an era when the internet was simpler and darker. Let's open a new tab. The Internet Forum, Wild West. Dr. Brett Strau teaches at the University of Colorado in Boulder, where he studies digital genres and digital writing, also known as the rhetoric of memes. He's going to break down what a bait-and-switch meme is at its core.

baited and switch memes are fairly simple like when you look at it from a genre perspective usually you have some sort of setup that is directing your expectation towards one thing and then it flips and subverts that expectation once we either scroll down or click on something or jump to a new video something to that effect what were the proto bait and switch memes like before the Rickroll where were they taking place how do they work in the analog era before we get to our digital internet era, we have culture jammers. And all they're doing is taking traditional sort of company advertisements and subverting them. So you would see something like Joe Camel from the Camel cigarettes,

but they would subvert the messaging, sort of pointing out some ideological problem or ethical problem. And so instead of Joe Camel, they did an image using the camel likeness, but as Joe Chemo sort of pointing out the health effects of cigarettes. The first internet forums had been around since the 70s and 80s. This culture of posting and messaging didn't become widespread until the 90s. The early forums and chat rooms didn't have anything close to the moderation and rules that we have on social media today. That's when we started to see the first bait-in-switch memes. I've seen people talk about the early internet forums of like the late 90s, early 2000s, as almost like this unmoderated last frontier.

We had an episode on political online history where we referred to that time period as the Bronze Age of the Internet. Can you describe what this era of forums was like and what that meant for mean culture? I feel this early era. So we get like 4chan, but there's also other sites like Something Awful.com, rotten.com. Please don't go to those sites. Where a lot of this sort of proto-internet meme behavior is happening. And one of the things that we see in this early era is that it's largely like gate kept in a way. We have a much smaller, more niche audience for these memes.

And it's usually driven through more like obviously masculine sensibilities and sort of this gross out culture. And there's a little bit of a prank culture thing going on as well. We see a lot of shock sites. This is like earlier internet like 2002 where. People would send links to what essentially were just pornographic images as a form of hazing. And a lot of people found this funny, but some people were also found it disturbing as well. One of these shock images, which we will not name here, involves a human orifice that is enlarged, so to speak. And usually we get sent like this file and people would click on it and then they would see this sort of grotesque.

image. Now, some people might laugh at that, but I think the people that found it funny were the people sending it, not necessarily the people receiving it in all cases. But also, we see how, like, this fits this sort of frat-boy gross-out sort of community building, so to speak. I wouldn't necessarily it's a community I'd want to be in, but it definitely has this sort of social function in those groups. So how did we go from that horrific image macro that Brett tactfully described, to the family-friendly, wholesome Rickroll. Let's open a new tab. Pranks in the age of YouTube.

Picture this. It's 2007. You're dressed in your most obscure bandy and skinniest skinnyest skinny jeans, brand-new Blackberry tucked in your back pocket. You're on the family desktop, just made your first Facebook account. You're scrolling through your feed, poking your friends, and you come across a post that says, Grand Theft Auto 4 trailer just dropped, watched here. You love GTA.

You've been waiting for this. So you click it and... You just got Rick rolled. That's exactly what happened to countless people that year. A teenager posted a link on 4chan, claiming that it was a link to the highly anticipated trailer. When unsuspecting digital bystanders clicked it, they were surprised with the video of Rick Astley's 1987 banger,

never going to give you up. And so, the Rickroll was born. The change from sort of this gross out humor meme into something that's more family-friendly, I think comes along with the fact that internet platforms and social media platforms became much more accessible beyond sort of that initial niche computer nerd culture that we see. And so as part of ways in which the community functions, they want to share, like if you receive it, It might be annoying, but I think at some point we find it funny where something that's more gross out, that's not going to have as much wide appeal. And Rick Rowling really took off.

The hacktivist collective Anonymous protested against the Church of Scientology by blasting never going to give you up on boom boxes outside of their headquarters. Radiohead announced their new album and posted the download link, only to Rickroll everyone. For April Fool's Day in 2008, YouTube made all of the links. on the site's homepage lead to never going to give you up, Rick Rowling the world. And then for the annual Macy's Thanksgiving parade that year, Rick Astley himself appeared on a float and performed what was, at the time, possibly the most widely televised Rickroll in the world. Rick Rowling was a cultural phenomenon. It was also the last time everyone was on the same internet, before we were siloed by algorithms. We're still at a moment in our media landscape where we're still

sharing media. We have TV shows we're all watching. We have broadcast television. And even though people can create and share their own content, we don't see as many content creators. And so a lot of the shared cultural texts we have helps build toward this moment where, hey, we can share this mean because people know the reference. We're not all listening to our own Spotify playlists, right?

we're not all consuming the shows that we want on Netflix. We have the shared culture, which helps sort of propagate the fact that we have a meme that's sort of ubiquitous, at least in the Western Hemisphere. What was so appealing about the Rickroll? Like, why did that work so well? Coming out of the 90s, there was a little bit of this 80s nostalgia, which we see building up in which now we see huge 80s nostalgia. There's this sort of absurdity of the 80s era and its music that sort of plays into the absurdity of this internet prank, essentially. And no other bait and switch meme from that early YouTube era took off the same way. There was the Trollol Lull guy.

It's a clip of a Russian singer performing in the 70s. There was also, you've been gnomed. I'm gnotic gnaub. I'm gnautting. I'm a gnome. Which was this video of an animated gnome, laughing at the viewer, while text flashes across the screen. It says, predictably, And you've been known.

Both of these memes functioned like a Rickroll. You click a link expecting one thing and instead, you get another. But there was a historical framework for Rickrolling. It was a huge 80s bop coming back around. The other memes lacked that, so they didn't have the same cultural impact as Rickrolling. By the early 2010s, a new challenger had arisen. This underlying media, as Brett put it, was ripe with mean material. Let's talk about B-movie. After this break.

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Great brands, great prices. That's why you rack. We're back. So what makes a good bait-and-switch meme? What makes that prank work so well? Obviously, we're opening a new tab. B-movie and meme dadaism. memes were getting weirder, more absurd, and few memes define the 2010s like B-movie.

How should I start it? You like jazz? No, that's not good. There she comes. Speak, you fool. The bee seemed to have a thing for the girl. Yeah. You know, and we don't really want to pursue that as an idea in children's entertainment.

That was Jerry Seinfeld on The Tonight Show, acknowledging the taboo interspecies romantic undertones in B-movie. Spike Farrison, the screenwriter, who co-wrote the movie, got a kick out of writing the pairing. Here's a funny anecdote from the room. So we were writing this in New York. You know, I was doing a show in L.A., but I would fly, you know, to New York every couple of weeks. And we'd sit in this big room, Jerry's office, and work on this. And to us, these characters were just two characters.

It was just Barry and Vanessa. And then everyone was for a while, I would go, hey, that Barry's a bee. He's this big. So when you say, they shake hands. or they walk. You can't, we can't keep treating them like two characters who are friends, like Jerry and Elaine, which is kind of how we treated them. We were writing them like Jerry and Elaine, forgetting about the size disparity and the species disparity.

Yeah, and that's kind of why it came out the way it came out. The romance is just one of many absurd plot lines in the movie. Like, we've got bees going to human court to sue human. for the exploitation of their labor. But the movie was way too ahead of its time. Critics hated it. It was marketed as a kid's movie, and instead, it was this story about freeing the bees

and seizing the means of production, of honey, and also towing the line of beastiality. But that's why it was such good meme material. Here's Brett Strau again. People, when they originally went to see the bee movie, were expecting a kid's, or Bugs Life or Ants movie, and they got something much more serious. And so in a way, like the B movie is a bait and switch by itself.

The trailers are selling it as sort of like a kid's movie, but really there's a lot more adult-oriented content that people were not expecting. And so the fact that it sort of functioned as a bait and switch by itself made sense that people started using it as just a way to troll people. Tumblr latched onto the movie starting in 2011, fawning over the film's poetic opening lines. According to all known laws of aviation, there is no way that a bee should be able to fly. Its wings are too small to get its fat little body off the ground.

The bee, of course, flies anyway, because bees don't care what humans think is impossible. Tumblr users were totally sincere about it, calling the lines inspirational. By 2013, the meme exploded. People were starting to realize how absurd the movie really was. Screenshots from the film became reaction memes. Edits of Seinfeld, but with characters from B-movie, went super viral. And then there's the fan fiction, which is still going today. I told Spike about it. So there is a real moment on Tumblr with people kind of sincerely appreciating the dialogue in B-movie and the narration. then people kind of ironically started posting the memes, which I'm sure you've seen. It broke containment, moved to Twitter, and then it reached the peak of virality, which is sexy fan fiction.

Oh, it did. Oh, I'm sorry. I don't know about that. This is good. Well, I'm just going to read you a few tags from archive of our own, from B-movie fanfix that were written this, like this year. So tags include Vanessa X. X. Berry, typical. Megamind, X. Barry Benson,

top-berry, bottom megamind, interspecies relationships, hive worship, and improper use of honey drizzler. What do you make of the B-movie smut? Smut. That's a funny word to use from the 50s,

smut. It kind of plays into what I would love to do. I mean, like, hypothetically, and this will never happen. But I want to do six sequels to be movie. All is a series on Netflix or wherever, 40 minutes a piece, B two, be three, be four, be five, be six, be seven.

A lot of time has gone by and we're going to do our six sequels now. And it's all, what you just described is one of the areas I really want to dive into, which is that relationship, not the smut, but the fun you could have with a B, dating a woman. I think there's a lot of comedy there and I think the world has changed and I and I think you could write that in a way that's not smut, but it also kind of celebrates what the world has done with this. And, you know, I don't think we would go as far as South Park, but kind of do our version of maybe a South Parkian take on B-movie. Because I, I love their relationship. I love that friendship. And I wonder what those conversations would be like should they explore the idea

of dating. Yeah. I mean, look, if you ever need a writer's room, there's a bunch of people on archive of our own who have already written. I think that's cool. No, that's great. I mean, like any of this stuff, you know, you put it out into the world and the world can do with it what it wants. That's what's nice about it. In 2013, a Facebook user posted the entire script on someone else's Facebook wall. That was the start of the Bade and Switch B-movie script. For the next few years, you might unwittingly open a link to a comment or post only for your phone to freeze and crash because it's trying to load the entire B-movie script. It was like a more devious Rickroll. It wreaked havoc across the internet. Group chats were bombarded with the 9,000-word wall of text. Any email

with an urgent subject line could just contain the B-movie script. It even moved offline. One college student pranked his classmates by spending 12 hours writing out the entire script on a chalkboard. The coolest kids in 2016 were t-shirts printed with the entire script. The meme did eventually slow down, though. Phones got better and became capable of loading the whole script. Like Rick Rowling, surprising your friends with 131 pages of dialogue, got old. But then the script was weaponized again as a form of protest. In 2021, Texas passed the Heartbeat Act, which effectively banned abortion after six weeks.

The law allowed anyone to sue abortion providers and individuals who sought abortions after the six-week limit. The organization Texas Right to Life set up an anonymous tip site to report anyone who violated the Heartbeat Act. To protest, TikTok users stand the site with Shrek porn, lurid fan fiction, and the one and only B-movie script. protesters did it again when Missouri opened an online form to report clinics that provide gender-affirming care. And then, again, when Indiana's Attorney General launched a form to report schools that teach gender ideology. And then, again, when the Trump administration partnered with the far-right group to report schools that had DEI efforts. Any time the government or an organization working with it opened some kind of citizen surveillance tool, it's a target for B-WRILLI, movie script dumps. Spike and other B-movie writers are big fans of this practice.

Oh, we love it. Absolutely love it. It gets passed around, you know, that it's doing something good for the world, it always makes you feel good. And that we don't have to be any part of it, that someone's taking it and just disrupting, like I said, dropping an absurdity bomb on some bad cause. That just makes you feel good. Do it as much as you want. If I can, can help you. I will help in whatever way, but you're doing a fine job by yourself. It's funny because back in 2017 for the 10-year anniversary of B-movie, New York Mag for this extensive history of the meme and like trace the rise and fall of it. And back then it was like, okay, it was like there was a good year of like no B-movie memes. And they questioned whether

the meme was dead. That was almost 10 years ago. And the B-movie script keeps coming back. The meme has like evolved so much. But like the core of it is still. like the script, the dialogue. Why do you think it survives? I think it's the writing. I think it's the weirdness. You know, it's funny. That movie was out of sync with culture in 2006, and I think it still is out of sync with kind of cultural norms in a way. Be human, you know. Yeah, I know, but it's still kind of hard to wrap your head around that. You know what I mean? I mean, I don't think anybody really thinks about dating a bee. So I don't think it has been. And we like bees. To us, the bees are, you know, when you think about the planet, keeping the planet healthy, the bees are

one of our canaries in the coal mine, if you will, like how the bees doing. I don't know if you do this, but when you see a bee kind of dying on the sidewalk, don't you get nervous? We help it, yeah. Well, is this global warming? What is doing this? So we have this special reverence for this insect that stings us occasionally. But still we like them a lot because they make this very sweet, gooey substance that we enjoy putting in our teas. But again, it's not for me or us to say. It's, you know, you'd have to ask the people who love this movie what they love about it. We're just the people who put it out.

The B-movie script is the gift that keeps on giving. But other Bade and Switch memes have also blown up. And unlike the trusty Rickroll or the Evergreen B-movie, this new generation of internet pranks blow up fast, and burn out quickly. They don't last. Let's get into that and one last tab. The Short Form Vertical Video Revolution. Before the B-movie script was weaponized for protest the way that it is today, it had kind of peaked by 2016. And a slew of bait and switch memes cycled in and out of relevance. The primary force behind this rapid-fire meme lifespan? TikTok. In 2020, we had Get Stickbugged. a Minecraft compilation? Surprise, it cuts to a clip of a dancing stick bug. But that fizzled out

by the end of the year. In 2022, TikTok users lured viewers in with videos about juicy celebrity gossip. And then, you got Chris. It's a clip of Chris Jenner, shimmying in the sequin shirt and bowtie, set to a sped-up version of Lady Marmalade from Mulan Rouge. The cut said that getting Chris is the natural evolution of Rick Rowling. And then in 2012, In 2020, we had the Josh Hutcherson whistle edits. Here's one of my favorite ones. It's a video from inside a plane. The caption says,

Guys, the view is incredible. The video pans to the close window, and a hand reaches out to open the shade. And then, The view through the window is just a close-up of Josh Hutcherson's face from a 2014 fan edit, set to a cover of Flo Rida's whistle. Polygon said that this trend was TikTok's Rickroll.

And then, at the end of last year, another Rickroll successor blew up. That is an AI-generated ballad about Charlie Kirk, which was first posted to YouTube and streaming platforms days after his death. It's total AI slop, but unfortunately, very catchy. Like the B-movie script, it went viral at first out of sincerity. People listened to it as a tribute to Charlie Kirk. And then, it became a meme. We're talking remixes, Mongolian throat singing covers, and of course, pranks, like connecting to public Bluetooth speakers

and blasting cowbell dance remixes of We Are Charlie Kirk. Here's Brett's take. All of them, it's clear that there's some sort of musical component people can latch on to, and all the music itself is sort of absurd or ridiculous in a way, whether it's been altered and sped up like the We Are Christ or just sort of that funky beat that you've been sticked bug has, especially like with the We Are Charlie Kirk, there's more levels of absurdity being that it was AI written. So this pathos is literally being manufactured. It's not something that's like necessarily human generated, like emotion being generated. And so it just makes it rife for this type of inversion or.

subversion. Yeah. We just speed ran so many trends and none of them really lasted more than six months. I mean, maybe the Charlie Kirk one will last longer because of the current state of the world. But generally, why is the turnover rate for memes so high now? I think there's a few reasons for this. The first is just the media context and media environment. We're not sharing the same stuff that we did as a culture. It's much more small niche cultures where the these things are spreading. Another element to this that I believe is important is that it's easier to create these than it was 15, 20 years ago. And so now more are being created.

And so they're essentially eating themselves out of existence, right? So as soon as a new mean comes out, at least in the early mid 2000s, it stuck around because it took a little bit more technological know-how. You didn't have the production software and access to it that you do now. I noticed that almost all bait and switch meme trends are on TikTok now, maybe reels. But no one is pulling off a Rickroll with YouTube anymore. I saw a video of someone Rickrolling their friend by sending a TikTok link, which makes me wonder, did YouTube ads ruin the Rickroll? Kind of spoils a surprise. I mean, YouTube ads ruin everything. For humor to work, timing is critical, right? And so those ads really disrupt

like the genre of humor that's happening. Would the original Rickroll work with modern content consumption habits? When we consume content, it's a lot of times happening passively to us, algorithmically served, instead of us actively seeking it out or actually clicking links. I don't think so. We need that interaction, I think, for the Rickroll to be successful. And it feels like at least it was another person presenting this to us. and now it's sort of the algorithm is serving it up to a plate on us,

and we're not finding these things. And so I think what makes a lot of media content special, whether it's memes, movies, songs, is it's stuff that we find, not that someone else or something else finds for us. And so innately, there's going to be less meaning for a lot of that. The mean turnover rate is so high that no internet prank really sticks around long enough

to rival or recreate the magic of the, the Rickroll. The very format of the Rickroll is limiting, especially in today's digital landscape. Even Rickrolling itself is difficult to pull off today because internet habits have changed. But what has endured as a prank is the B-movie script. I have this take, and it's that the B-movie script is the ultimate bait-and-switch because it's purely text. There's no image macro, there's no video-laden with ads, or that you have to wait to load to ruin the prank. The joke itself is so malleable. It can be dumped in comment sections and government tip lines or turned into an image macro and then deep fried or just like read by that TikTok AI voice and 2X speed, which makes it

funnier. Do you have any thoughts on this? Like the flexibility of this meme? Well, that's why I think we see certain memes that at least are being iterated and changed upon more and some that don't seem to change as much. And so with it being all text, it's really easy to adapt all text. to different formats. I think my favorite of the B-Movie script ones is where they do The Crawl from Star Wars and we get the intro to the B-Movie. And so the easier that it is to manipulate that initial form of media,

so text is super easy, makes it much easier to put it into different places, different platforms, and distribute it. B-Movie came out nearly 20 years ago. Script-dumping started in 2013. Last year, 12 years after that Facebook user posted the entire script on someone else's wall, the Doge-led government-H-R email was pelted with B-Movie scripts. At the request of Elon Musk, all federal employees were asked to email the Office of Personnel Management with five tasks they accomplished that week.

On X, Musk posted, failure to respond will be taken as a resignation. The email leaked online, and Internet users responded. responded on behalf of federal employees with pages and pages of B-movie dialogue. Spike was thrilled. It's pretty exciting that anybody's even talking about it. Really, I mean, you have to look at it. We look at it that way, I think, that people are still talking about this movie from what, 2006 that we made, you know, in that way and that it has the second and third lives.

You know, we get excited that people are still watching that movie and enjoying it. Like, it's flattering. It's the only way to really put it. that this movie hasn't been forgotten, it hasn't disappeared into a canyon of content and gone forever, that it comes up over and over again in generally a good way. And, you know, if people are making fun of it, that's fine too. That's what we do.

We make fun of things. You can make fun of us. Go ahead. You heard Spike. Go forth and prank. Let's close all these tabs. Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. This episode was produced by our senior editor, Chris Agusa,

who also composed our theme song and credits music. It was edited by Chris Hambrick. Our team includes producer Maya Kueva. Additional music by APM. Brendan Willard is our audio engineer. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Cheon is our director of podcasts, and Ethan Tovin Lindsay is our editor-in-chief.

Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California Local. keyboard sounds were recorded on my purple and pink dust silver K-84 wired mechanical keyboard with Gatoron red switches. Do you like these deep dives? Are you closing your tabs? Then don't forget to rate and review us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to the show. Maybe drop a comment too. And if you really like close all tabs and want to support public media, go to donate.kkwed.org slash podcasts. Thanks for listening. Support for KQED podcasts comes from Star One Credit Union.

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