Endless Thread - Kisscams, ratcams, Barbra Streisand

Episode Date: August 1, 2025

On this week's Endless Thread, host Ben Brock Johnson and producer Grace Tatter bring us two stories about the power of livestreams – one from the Coldplay concert box seats, and another from a notorious rat corridor in Brooklyn, NYC. Show notes: What's the deal with "Astronomer" CEO and CPO affair? (Reddit) A Crown Heights Building's Rat Infestation Gets a Livestream (Hell Gate) Rat cam (YouTube/Adam Schleser) I am a rat (a real live rotten-tailed rat)  (YouTube/Adam Schleser)

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and you want to be careful with how you share that information and protected. That's how you get in touch. WBUR Secure Tips at Proton.m.m. Or call us or text, signal 646-456-9095. Producer Grace Tatter, how do-billy do on this day? I'm great, host Ben Brock Johnson. You ready to stir up some endless thread from WBUR in Boston? Always. Are you familiar with the Streisand effect?

The strice end effect. I, think so. So that's like Barbara Streisand wanted a story buried, but then in trying to bury it, she got more people to talk about it. So it had like the opposite effect. Is that it? That's pretty much it. This was from back in 2003, Barbara Strassand engaged in legal action against the California Coastal Records Project to get photos of her Malibu home removed from a website. Of course, the result of this is that the photos have been viewed millions and millions of times and have been much more public than they ever would have been if she had just like let it ride. Poor Barbara.

So I don't think I've ever seen the Streisand effect physically manifest. You know what I'm going to talk to you about. So let's not pretend. you know what I'm going to talk to you about, right? Yes. I mean, I, like, laughed a lot about this video. So when you mentioned it in passing, I had an immediate feel of laughter and recognition.

How did you first come across the now-famous video, Grace? And what in your estimation did it show at the time when you first saw it? I actually came across this video originally and the WBR Slack because it is kind of a local news story. Yes, it is. Shout out Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts. Coldplay was playing at Gillette Stadium, and they were doing the Kiss Cam, which I have to imagine has existed since time immemorial at live events. And the Kiss Cam goes to this one couple, like this middle-aged couple who are like vibing to Chris Martin.

And then they just like drop. The guy drops. Oh, and she turns. So we all know what the Kiss Cam is, obviously, like you said, Grace, it's very common. But just to describe it, this is essentially a live stream of the audience during a large stadium event. With Kiss Cam, the idea is you put the camera on two people who are canoodling or who are seeming to be a couple and tens of thousands of people peer pressure them to kiss each other in public, which we could talk about that. But effectively, that's what it is. They do it at sporting events.

They do it at concerts that are cheesy like Coldplay concerts. And Coldplay does it specifically at concerts. as part of what is called the Jumbotron song. Cole play's own version of the Kiss Cam, where Chris Martin sings about the people the camera has pointed at as they appear on the Jumbotron, which he did with this couple. And this video shows, what is, I guess,

it's like a box. They got box seats. Yeah, they're fancy. Yeah, they're fancy. So this couple in the box seats. There's a third person next to them face beat red because this woman, who's next to them, who clearly knows them, is, like, the most uncomfortable a person could possibly be.

You just feel her, like, discomfort radiating off of your phone screen. And one of them is the CEO of a company called Astronomer. And the other one is the CPO, which is... The chief people officer. The chief people officer. I don't think it's something that used to exist. A relatively new type of job. Essentially the head of HR, right, I think is what we would say at this company.

Do you know offhand anything about the company astronomer, Grace? I actually don't. So all I know, yeah, I knew that they worked together. But what astronomer. I'm guessing it has to do with stars. That would be my guess. You know, that's a good guess. It's a good guess.

Let's try this on for size, Grace. Astronomer empowers data teams to bring mission-critical software analytics and AI to life. AI wrote that. Some words valid. But okay. Investors in this company, which, by the way, as I understand it, has a $1 billion valuation. Wow.

Bain Capital. J.P. Morgan and Chase. Salesforce Ventures. Sierra Ventures. These are big companies, big investing companies. So this is like a, you know, this company is a pretty big deal in the tech world. So he's a high profile dude. Yeah, Andy Byron, chief executive officer and Kristen Cabot, chief people officer.

When you go on the website, you don't have to scroll far to find these folks. And that's a no-no, right? Like, so they're clearly coworkers. And she's probably in charge of people. What are you talking about, Grace? Totally fine. And she's probably somewhat in charge of the. policy that says coworkers are not supposed to be hold in each other's arms at Coldplay concerts? Well, look, different companies have different ways of thinking and talking about this.

I think, you know, some companies say you have to disclose romantic relationships in the office. I think most companies would say there should be no romantic relationships inside of departments where somebody's, there's like a power differential, right? Like there's a manager or a superior who has a relationship with somebody working underneath them because that can lead to problems, of course. But the other thing is, you know, these two people are married to other people. That is why that man dropped down so quickly. And you can tell. This is more than an HR policy.

What jumps out to me about this is that it kind of created this very immediately. massively, hugely viral moment. And people very quickly, of course, went down the rabbit hole as the internet is want to do, like, jumped onto these people's LinkedIn profiles, found out everything about them. I would imagine that their personal lives are just in this moment completely exploded, right? I know. I will say actually one of the first things I thought about when I saw it is I laughed and then I when I realized that they were married, which again, I intuited from the sheer panic,

particularly for the CEO, but I thought of their partners and how humiliating that would be. I mean, to have this transgression be like the joke of the internet for a day. Yeah, and I think another thing that's interesting is like I literally just Googled, what is the company astronomer? here are the news articles that came up in the top results. Are you ready? Yeah. New York Post.

Okay. TMZ, NDTV, Wister Telegram. Shout out Worcester Telegram. Again, local news. The Economic Times and the New York Post. There's a couple of New York posts. They've gotten more than one article on it. Yeah, on the top results page for me.

New York Post is they're going deep. on this. They're throwing everything they got at it. So first of all, everybody, like, went and found out what astronomer was, right? I don't know, like, from a perspective of, like, does this company, is this good or is it bad? Right? They say, no, press is bad press. I think this is kind of bad press. Yeah, it doesn't instill a lot of trust in the CEO's decision-making skills because it is a little foolish. I took the merry-go-round on this one on Reddit, like, saw the

top post on, I think it was like pop culture chat or interesting as F or whatever it was. Then I went to this post that was basically a finance post. And somebody was making this point that when you're a company,

I believe this is a startup, but a company like this with all these big investment firms, somebody made the point in a Reddit comment, Look, if the CEO of a company is willing to lie about his relationship to his partner, what else is he willing to lie about? And you don't want to invest in a company where it appears the top brass is comfortable,

this comfortable, lying about things that are very important. in people's personal lives, at least. I, of course, also do think that affairs are morally questionable. Or maybe not, of course. Esther Perel has some complicating thoughts on this, but I do personally find affairs morally questionable. I also am like, they're not our business. And one thing that this all made me think of is it reminded me a lot of this episode I did

on Find My Friends, because there's this idea of you don't have to worry about, being constantly surveilled if you have nothing to hide. But like, it's human to have stuff to hide. Yes, true. Not all secrets are bad. This is a secret that hurts people, but not all secrets are. And then also, like, part of being human is also, like, sometimes you are going to have bad secrets, too. So now we just live in this society where, like, kiss cams have always existed, but social media hasn't. So now just, like, when you go out into the world, you might become part of other people. people's content in a way that you wouldn't used to be or that wouldn't have used to happen. And it makes it like we're all on the Truman show.

Like we're all like. Yes. And that's weird. So like, yes, it shows bad judgment for this guy to have an affair with a subordinate. But also part of me is like, ah, but we shouldn't even all know this. Or like, should we start living our lives knowing that like the mass of social media might turn against us? Like, is that what we want to be, like, guiding our decisions?

I don't know. It's weird. So, again, I think, Grace, this is just a reminder that, you know, the stric-and effect, it comes for us all. The more you try to hide something, the more it might be obvious. Like, if they hadn't ducked, if he hadn't ducked and she hadn't turned away. No one would have put it on TikTok. Exactly.

So there you go. I don't know. Just word to the wise. Play it cool. Stay frosty. Yeah. Or you could do, my mom always tells us, well, if you can't be good, be careful. Oh, and then her other one is, it's a small world, so you better be good.

Ooh, wow. And I would say it's a small, insurveiled world, so you better be good or at least play it cool. Grace, a little postscript to this story, by the way. Those LinkedIn profiles did stay on the astronomer website for much longer than one might have thought. in the age of the internet. But the CEO, Byron, and the CPO, Cabot, both have now resigned. Aw.

But you know that the internet plus the stricent effect equals forever. So those memes, Grace, they're still going. Have you seen them? Oh, yeah. This is going to be one of the iconic moments of 2025, years for now when Billy Joel does another, we didn't start the fire. The Chris Cam is going to be in it.

Okay, so Grace, I have brought you a kind of old school live streaming at the game Kiss Cam story, right? Mm-hmm. But you have a live streaming story for me, and let's get to that right after this break. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories, stories about policing or politics, country music. Hockey. Sex.

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Whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org.org slash creative studio. Okay, so your story was a local story in Boston. My story starts with a guy where I live now in Brooklyn. His name is Adam Schleser,

and he lives in, this part of Brooklyn that is a notorious rat corridor. Like, it frequently has the most, the highest number of rat complaints in New York City, which is really saying something. Okay. Okay. All right. Fair. And his building, Adam's building, has it real bad. This whole apartment complex. It's actually six buildings. It's the old Brooklyn Jewish hospital complex. And it is just infested with rats. And so he cannot sleep at night because of all the gnawing and scurrying that and like rats screaming that he hears through his walls and in his ceiling. These rats in heavy metal bands or what's going on? So Adam does.

He's, yeah, being driven to insanity by these rat sounds. And he does what many of us do in the face of an unsolvable problem. He posts to Reddit. And he describes this kind of hell that he. and his neighbors have been dealing with for months. And in that post, he includes a link to what he hopes might be a solution to his problem. Oh, God. The rats are running through the rafters.

What you are seeing is a clip from the live stream that Adam is now broadcasting from his ceiling 24-7. Oh, boy. Rat cam. Yeah. So maybe you're wondering, like, what gave Adam this idea. like why he decided that this was what needed to happen to solve his rat problem. I mean, I get it in a way. It's like, yeah, this is the, this is 2025.

Let's get, let's turn these rats into influencers, baby. And you got to have receipts. So I met up with Adam because this live stream really caught my imagination as someone who is very rodent, paranoid. We met in a less rat infested. location on his apartment. We met at his co-working space in his neighborhood. And he told me that he began to dream of a live stream after he had taken all of the steps that you're supposed to do at these things. He'd contacted his landlord, then the city. The city had sent an inspector,

but the inspector didn't see anything because the rats are in the ceilings and the walls. They're not running around his apartment. Thank God, I guess. But because he- Inspector like sticks his head into the apartment. He's like, no, it looks good to me. See you Well, exactly. He said, I don't care if there's an elephant in your walls. If you can't see it, you can't cite it. What? That's a quote? That is a paraphrase from Adam. Though let me tell you, Adam is the most organized person I've ever talked to. He has receipts on receipts. So he's a fairly reliable narrator. Oh, my God. So, yeah, this makes him feel insane, right? Because he knew the rats were up there. He knew it. So he, like, feels gaslit and just crazy.

I had fantasized about putting a camera in ceiling. It was wrong with me. Like, this is what I'm dreaming about is putting a camera in my ceiling. And how am I going to do that? I even envisioned cutting out a piece of dry wall to put in plexiglass so I could, like, have, like, a window up there. To be like, see, there's rats up there? I'm not crazy.

Do you think you would feel similarly to him in this situation? Have you ever, like, known that there's a really real problem? But, like, you can't convince the people who could fix it that this problem exist. Yeah, well, I hate to say it, but I'm more of the inspector in my family. If I can't see it, I can't cite it. I think my wife, Sarah and I, when we lived in New York, she was certain, certain that we had bedbugs for a long time. and we finally had somebody come. And the guy, I think he was just trying to, like, cut her a break.

Because he was like, he was like, it is true. I believe that you may have one bed bug. So your loved ones are the ones who would want to, like, install a bed bug cam. Yeah. If I can't see it, I can't try to fix it. But I also get the thing of, like, I'm not crazy. Let me show you that I'm not crazy. I must prove to you that I'm not crazy.

I must prove to you that I'm not crazy. Although, like, cutting a hole in the ceiling where the rats are, man. That's, you're playing with fire. You're playing with fur there, my friend. Well, he did not end up cutting. There's no plexiglass in Adam's ceiling, at least as of now. But he did get a camera that an exterminator recommended, because apparently exterminators sometimes really do monitor pest this way.

And he could have just done that, right? Like, he could have just had a little bit of a little bit of a, of footage or just shared it to his landlord. But once he hooked it up to his iPad, he started this live stream on YouTube so everyone could see it. And he made that Reddit post I mentioned earlier on his neighborhood sub, where it kind of popped off because who doesn't love an animal cam? So his post on Reddit caught the attention of some local journalists.

I saw it because of a story by Anna Oaks and Hellgate that goes into a lot of detail about this apartment complexes problem. It's very good journalism. This is Hellgate, the online publication focused on New York City in the area. Exactly, yeah. But it also got picked up by your friends at the New York Post. And that's when it really started doing numbers. So Adam, like I said, he'd done all of the steps that you're supposed to do, all of the old school steps. But posting it online, making that Reddit post, making the live stream, but then making the Reddit post that like drew people's attention to the live stream, that had way more of an effect than the months and months that he tried to

play by the book. Literally, while I was talking to him, his super was calling about moving him up to an apartment on a higher floor, potentially so they can start tearing out his ceiling where the rats live. So, like, he finally kind of got traction after he drew millions of eyeballs to this. Listen, people say you don't need journalism, but it works. Yeah, yeah, citizen journalism, but then, yeah, combined with these, you know, real institutions like The Post and Hellgate. So Adam might be open to leaving the apartment temporarily, maybe, but he is not moving and he is not taking down the live stream until this problem is really and truly fixed. Because his thinking is that, like, if he leaves, then his landlord and, like, the live stream goes away and the problem is no longer being documented, the landlord. the landlord will just, like, have someone else move in, someone who's, like, thrilled to get a stabilized unit,

and, like, then the problem will just be theirs. And, like, this actually does need to get fixed. 100%. 100% agree, as they say on the New York City subway. 100% agree. So Adams' rat cam reminded me of an episode Dean did a few years ago about animal cams. Do you remember that episode? I do. The Endless Thread senior producer, Dean Russell, in the whatever, I forget, the name of the eagle, but there was an eagle cam. Yeah. I believe it was Jackie the eagle. Jackie the eagle. Yeah. The episode was about how these live streams really get humans to care about the other creatures that we share this planet with, like Jackie the eagle, like rats who live in our ceilings. Yes. Do you feel

the rat cuteness now that you've looked at the rat cam? I mean, I do have some empathy for the rats. And I admit, Adam helped me get some empathy for these rats because Like, yeah, he is watching them all the time. But he said that even before, even before he started watching their every move, he had empathy with them. And that's why he wrote this song. Hmm. I am a rat.

Not a rat bastard, but a real life, rotten-tailed rat. That's beautiful. Yeah, it's a lot of empathy, right? Yeah. So hopefully this animal cam gets... Adam and his neighbors, a rat-free, safe and sanitary living environment as they deserve and are entitled to. But, you know, also, maybe Adam can make us all feel a little more for our furry neighbors.

A little more for our furry neighbors. Love it, Grace. Thank you for bringing this rat-tastic story. And then next time someone tells you there's a critter in your walls, may you believe them. own bed. I've got nowhere else to go. You've paved over my hill. I see that you have lost your way. Never forget nature's unyielding will. Endless thread is a production of WBUR in Boston.

This episode was co-hosted by myself, Ben Brock Johnson. And me, Grace Satter. It was produced by Franny Monaghan. Our editor is Meg Kramer, Mix and Sound Design by production manager Paul Vycus. The rest of our team is Amory Siebertsin, Dean Russell, managing producer Samadhajoshi, and Emily Jankowski. If you have an untold history, an unsolved mystery, or live stream footage of your bosses having an affair that you want to share with us. Or like a critter cam. Yeah, or a critter cam. I'll take a critter cam.

It doesn't need to be infidelity. Sure, but I'll also take the tea. You can get in touch with us at endless thread at wbUR.org. A dirty rat bastard, run-tailed rat. I scurried faster than you can thou, 3-1-1-D-O-H. Yes, I'm spreading disease, and it'll probably kill both you and me.