Endless Thread - MEMES, Part 7: Dead Giveaway

Episode Date: November 4, 2021

In 2013, four white musicians turned a local TV news clip featuring a Black man named Charles Ramsey into a song and uploaded it to YouTube. The auto-tuned meme, titled "Dead Giveaway," gained tens of millions of views virtually overnight. But the musicians, known as The Gregory Brothers, had not asked for Ramsey's permission, leaving him to wonder: Is this flattery or mockery — or bigotry?

Support for endless thread comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Mayrotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like,

Why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? and, of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, folks. Heads up, this episode briefly mentions sexual assault. So take care when listening. Here's the show.

Produced by the I-Lab at WBUR, Boston. Can you take me back to six months before this happened? Who are you? What are you doing in life? Set the circumstance. Set the tone. I got you, baby. I got you.

I got you. This is what I am. Six months before I became that dude. That dude is Charles. I worked for Hodges Restaurant in downtown Cleveland. I was a dishwasher. A few months ago, I met Charles in Cleveland. I wanted to know how he went from dishwasher to that dude. This is what happened.

A friend of mine from across the street, his nephew was in the Army in Afghanistan. He came back with a spent 60-year-old. bullet shell. Gave it to me. Charles put the shell in his pocket and forgot about it, until a few hours later, when he was at work, getting changed. And I'm taking off my shirt and you hear this, hit the floor. And he says, well, look at that.

Looks like somebody's going to have a meeting with me in about five minutes in my office, Charles. He got suspended. At this point in his life, suspension wasn't really a big deal. Charles says he was a lifelong troublemaker. As he puts it, he wasn't decent. Why do you think you aren't decent? Because I used to sell crack cocaine, breaking people's houses, beat up people that were the opposite color of me.

But he became that dude, a decent dude, on May 6, 2013. If he hadn't been suspended, he would have been on his way to work. Instead, he woke up late. He didn't bother to fix his hair or put on a clean t-shirt and went to McDonald's for late breakfast. Then he went home. And I'm sitting in the living room and I just bought a package. And the package is still hard.

What I mean by that is I sell rocks. What I bought was a huge piece of cocaine. So what I have to do is make that into small pieces of cocaine. Now, while I was doing that, right, here comes the boom, banging, banging, banging, banging, banging, banging, banging, banging, banging. Now, keep in mind, I got drugs. and I'm living on the street that is not considered Beverly Hills, which means, you know, damn well, it ain't Ed McMahon bringing you no big check because you're one from Reader's Digest.

It's the police. So I was thinking, so I run upstairs, put the way to cocaine, run back downstairs, peek out the window. And I'm looking at two people. Two neighbors from down the street, they were standing outside the house next to Charles's house. It was a two-story with dingy siding. Behind the front door was a third person, a woman in a white tank top. She looked young, 20s maybe.

Her face panic-stricken. And she started banging the door again. The bang, bang, bang, bang was pissing me off. So I go over there. What the fuck is wrong with you? Get me out of here. How you get in there? Ariel put me in here.

Cleveland 911 police ambulance to fire. Yeah, hey, bro. I'm at 2207. A little fool, right? When Charles and one of those neighbors broke down the door, A woman came out with a six-year-old girl. Fire ambulance. I'm a nice.

Amanda Berry had been missing for 10 years. Amanda was abducted when she was 16 by Charles' next-door neighbor. Who's the guy who went out? His name is Ariel Castro. That next-door neighbor, Ariel Castro, had also taken two other women, whom he kept in chains and physically and sexually abused for years. Until the day Amanda met Charles. Charles says that moment breaking down the door

was when an indecent man became a national hero. A real event catapulted my black ass into orbit. But that wasn't the moment that permanently altered Charles' life. Hey, Charles, let me talk to you. talking with Charles Ramsey, he's a neighbor. That would come next. What was the reaction on the girl's faces? I can't imagine to see the sunlight to be around people.

I knew something was wrong when a little pretty white girl ran into a black man's arms. Something is wrong here. Dead giveaway. Charles, thank you very much. This interview with ABC affiliate News 5 Cleveland uploaded to YouTube instantly went viral. Something about Charles was captivating, real. A little funny maybe. And Charles soaked up his 15 minutes of fame.

He talked to Anderson Cooper and Snoop Dog and the White House. Not Obama. Damn. And that's where this story could have ended. But a few days after the event, Charles clicked on a video that was different. I would hear my voice behind some music. And I'd say, what the hell is that? It was a song, molded from his words, auto-tuned.

And this one video had already gained millions. millions of views, more than any other clip of Charles. I knew something was wrong when a little pretty white girl ran to a black man's arms. Dead giveaway. My neighbor got big testicles because we see this dude every day. We eat ribs with this dude, but we didn't have a clue that that girl was in that house. She said, please help me get out. Dead giveaway.

Dead giveaway became his catchphrase, one he'd frequently used. in the spotlight. But at times, the spotlight was hard to handle. Charles would later say attention rained down on him like a shower of anvils. He felt a total loss of control. That feeling was the result of not just the rescue, not just the viral news clips, but of the explosive auto-tuned anthem that was watched, streamed, downloaded, sung, tens of millions of times.

Charles, the hero. Charles the pop star. Charles the unintentional celebrity. I'm Amory Seabriton. I'm Ben Brock Johnson, and you're listening to Endless Thread. Coming to you from WBUR, Boston's NPR station. Dead giveaway was one of hundreds of autotuned music videos to come out in the 2010s. It was a full-fledged phenomenon, becoming a TV trope.

The auto-tune remix is way better. Go to Related Video. Uh-huh. And in one case, Good. Professor. And in one case, the theme song for the hit Netflix series

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. Today, this fad has kind of faded. But these videos left behind more than a legacy of laughs or groans, and that has something to do with why memes become memes in the first place and why they end up going mainstream. Most of the time, the source, in this case Charles Ramsey,

loses control of the meme. I mean, yeah, there are videos and images of him, but he has no power over how they were created or who changes them. That loss of power can lead to very tricky ethical territory. Members of our meme chorus, the experts we asked about memes more generally, they talked about this. These are systems that, like, don't necessarily value the people who started this thing in the first place. The meme has to be changed to become a meme.

That addition of just your own personal sparkle. And then you just use it over and over in different contexts. They might not actually even understand the subtext of what's going on. To understand the outcome of this shift in context, and to fully understand Charles's story and where it goes, we have to rewind not to just the time before Charles became that dude. But all the way back to the birth of the band that is most associated with these memes, the group that set dead giveaway to music, the grandmasters of YouTube AutoTune. Hi, I'm Evan Gregory, one of the Gregory brothers.

Hi, this is Andrew Gregory. Hey, this is Michael Gregory from YouTube.com slash Shmo Yowho, accent on the yo. and sorry that we all sound similar because we're brothers. Hopefully you know who is who. That URL Michael Gavis is the Gregory Brothers' epically popular YouTube channel, Shmo Yoho. Today, the channel has nearly three and a half million subscribers and more than a billion views.

Considering the average video lasts about three minutes, that adds up to 52 million hours of watching. It's not surprising that the Gregory brothers are considered meme-making masks. But it is a title that Evan disputes. I don't think we ever set out to say we are making memes. But what we do with creating songs out of things is a participation in meme culture. It's like we love something so much that we want to touch it and make something new out of it. The brothers grew up in Radford, Virginia, in the foothills of Appalachia.

Loved comedy, loved music, didn't really put them together. until after college when... This all started, believe it or not, with Joe Biden in a way, because the first time that we had like a prototype for AutoTune the news was the vice presidential debate of 2008. Hey, can I call you Joe?

Halen versus Biden. I made this video like this just joke musical from the debate. I thought it would be funny if the debate was a musical. But it was just like me singing is kind of corny. your response Pakistan that's where they live

that's where they are and then the next week because that video got 20,000 views or something insane for my small channel I was like I should do a follow-up but it'll be boring

if every week I just come back and I'm like, hello, I'm debating or something like that and so I was like I got to make them sing and I had been in the studio so much

auto-tuning people because this was 2008 and it was ubiquitous. Prime auto tune. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. Both if you turn it up to like a glee level and if you turn it up to a T-Pain level. So I realized that the technology is just so powerful

that if I was doing this in the studio, I could do it to somebody speaking. And I ended up really lucking out because Joe Biden ended up being, and still is, I'd say the Beyonce of accidental singing. I got hairy legs. They called their vocalists, they turned blonde, Din the sun.

They called their vocalists unintentional singers. And at the beginning, these unintentional singers were people known to the public, media figures, politicians. As their success evolved from one hit to many, they quit their day jobs and started looking for fodder, mining where else?

There's a page on YouTube called The Charts. It doesn't exist anymore. where now there's trending. So I woke up one morning and I type in like YouTube.com slash charts and the entire page of the YouTube charts. 50 top videos was the Antoine Dodson interview. Well, obviously we have a rapist in Lincoln Park.

He's climbing in your windows. He's snatching your people up trying to rape them so y'all need to hide your kids, hide your wife, and had your husband because they're raping anybody out here. The attacker got loose and went out the upstairs. may remember the name Antoine Dodson, or maybe you know him as the hide your kids, hide your wife guy, because in 2010, this interview was practically inescapable. The story goes like this. Antoine Dodson was living with his sister in the Lincoln Park

housing projects of Huntsville, Alabama. One night, a man allegedly came into his sister Kelly's room, tried to rape her, and then was scared off by Antoine. According to Antoine, when they reported the attack, the police were ambivalent. So Antoine, who had done some community organizing before, reached out to local news station W-A-F-F. In the interview, Antoine is wearing a dark tank top and a red kerchief. He speaks directly into the camera. So much of the incident in interview would later be echoed by Charles Ramsey's experience, including... What did you hear in that Antoine Dodson video that made you think, we got to do something with this?

Yeah, when that video came out, I mean, like everybody was. was sending it to us. I watched it. And it was just this captivating moment where, you know, something awful happened, but he and Kelly kind of reclaimed this power. They went on TV. They had this mix of like righteous anger, like calling for justice. And also just like, just roasting the hell out of this guy in this kind of hilarious, but not inappropriately a hilarious sort of way. I don't know. I've never seen something like it. And his, Antoine's voice was, you know, I could hear the melody the way it went like a 5-4-3 if you're a music theory nerd. And yeah, I just like pretty much overnight just put it over a beat.

He's clamming in your windows. He's nasty your people are trying to rape him so y'all need to have your kids, had your wife, had your kids, had your wife, had your wife. Bed intruder's song, as it was called, was posted to YouTube three days after the interview with a caption that referred to Antoine as a, quote, young hero. If the interview was spreading like wildfire, the song was nuclear. In two weeks, it had been watched nearly nine men. million times. By two months, almost 30 million times. Adjust that for inflation from over 10 years ago,

I think the number is bonkersillion for today. And I should say, at least a few of those views were mine, because the song was a total earworm. Bet Intruder would even go on to be YouTube's most watched video of 2010. The song hit Billboard's Hot 100 list. Antoine and the Gregory Brothers performed it at the BET Award. Yeah, our career and life changed. Even outside of, like, financially what benefit that particular video would have, it just expanded our following so much that the next year, as we're releasing more videos, those would all get watched a lot.

Over the next several years, the Gregory's put out dozens of songs like this, dead giveaway, and many, many, more I love cats I love every kind of cat I was banging seven gram rocks That's how I roll with I grew hard

I grew hard The Gregory brothers told us That many of these videos featured unintentional singers intentionally positioned as heroes People like Antoine Dodson and Charles Ramsey But not everyone sees it that way Not by a long shot

More on that In a minute If I don't sit down If I don't go all the way If I don't win 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. Of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers. And hopefully make you see the world anew.

Radio Lab, adventures on the edge of what we think we know. wherever you get your podcast. There is something powerful about the sound of the human voice. Beautifully produced audio has the unique power to connect and inspire. Tell your organization's story with a custom podcast from CitySpace Productions, the creative studio from WBUR's business partnerships team. Become a thought leader. Recruit new talent.

Reach new audiences. Whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org slash creative. studio. In the early days, the Gregory Brothers videos exclusively featured politicians and celebrities. And if you stripped away the auto-tune bells and whistles, they were doing something as old as human civilization, lampooning the powerful, who are generally understood as fair game in the U.S. But Antoine and Charles were in a different category.

They may have chosen to do the interviews, but they did not choose to be in music videos, understandable that they were confused when they first saw them. I seen that somebody had put a song to it. And I was like, what is this? Why are they trying to play my family? Like, I hated that shit because I thought somebody was making fun of my family. This is Antoine on BET in 2018,

explaining that he didn't come around to the song until the Gregory brothers got in touch. They came to me and said, hey, what do you think if we make a whole song and sell it on iTunes? I'm like, hmm, let me think about it. Selling equals coins. Yeah, we're going to sell it because we're trying to get out the hood.

You know what I'm saying? Antoine didn't want to be interviewed for our story. After weeks of DMs, emails, phone calls, and handwritten letters, he told us he's only interested in paid interviews. Which we totally understand. But for us, as journalists and in public radio, that's a no-go. What we can say is that this reaction Antoine described about the bed intruder song, Charles Ramsey had a similar one to Dead Giveaway, because as with Antoine, Charles didn't find out about the song until days after it had been posted when the Gregory brothers first attempted to contact him.

The first time you heard the song, what did you think? Did you like the song? I didn't know it was going to be a song. Keep in mind, he had explained to me what you were going to do. But they didn't reach out to you until after they had already made the song. Precisely, my love. So what's to think about other than you bastards are. up to something's conniving. Well, did it make you mad that they had made a song? No, no, no, no, no, because if there was an opportunity for someone to capitalize off whatever, I don't have any problem with that.

They found some way to capitalize off me, and I wasn't smart enough to do it myself. But some people would say that that is exploitative, that they're taking advantage of your, and this is why I wanted to talk to you. That's the American way, darling. That's how we survive on this planet. It's not, you're not taking his identity, right? You're not saying he's not a hero. What we are doing is this is one hell of an event.

So if there's any avenue that we can monetize some kind of way, then we're going to do it. And that is any and everybody on this planet, babe. The Gregory Brothers struck the same financial deal with Charles and the other unintentional singers that they had with Antoine. They split the profits 50-50 on iTunes and later on Spotify. Experts told us that this profit model, devised by the Gregory Brothers, was precedent-setting for the Wild West Internet of the 2010s. Wired Magazine called it a, quote, noble practice. But there's one exception, YouTube. For nearly all of their videos, YouTube ad revenue goes to the Gregory Brothers alone.

The Gregory Brothers wouldn't share figures with us, but they said that the money they earn from YouTube on these songs is not really that much compared to other platforms. Again, Charles Ramsey. Yeah, have you kept track of how much money this is brought in? No. Do you have a guess? 8 grand. Huh. What a goddamner, 40 million views.

Where's the fucking money? How many goddamn views you need to get rich? The Gregory Brothers said Charles has made a little more than 8 grand from the song. They also pointed out that unlike with Bet Intruder and the other songs, they don't run ads on the video for dead giveaway, meaning that even if Charles got a share of the YouTube ad revenue, the views wouldn't matter. When Antoine first saw that intruder, he thought he'd been made into a joke. He wasn't the only one to see it that way.

Did you have a gut reaction when you first heard the song? It was a, wow, this is fucking catchy. Uh-huh. And it was, wow, this is also problematic. This is Kenyatta cheese. I'm, what the heck do I do? He co-founded Know Your Meme. He's also a member of our meme course.

The thing that was problematic wasn't necessarily the song itself. It was the response that it was generating in the rest of us. Like everybody's got reactions where they were all of a sudden discounting the fact that this was a person talking about like rape and assault. Right? In a freaking news piece. turning it into and treating it as if it's entertainment. Look at this guy. Someone made a beat out of this.

That was problem number one, and it applied to a handful of the videos the Gregory Brothers auto-tuned. The song Not Today, for instance, featured Michelle DeBine, whose apartment complex caught fire. Another songified Caleb McGilvery, who smashed a hatchet into the head of an alleged attacker. I don't necessarily fault the Gregory Brothers. It's a systemic issue. It's not necessarily just a personal choice issue. Problem two. But there's something there that all of a sudden it feels kind of minstrel show.

Kenyatta remembers being told by his parents. As a kid who's African and Chinese American, he should avoid talking to the white-dominated TV news because of the way it exploited people of color and their trauma for greater viewership. You saw the same cultural issues around the Black American experience, around black language, around issues around race and class, manifests themselves in this video. The Gregory brothers are white.

Antoine and Charles are black. So are a small handful of other people in strange or dire circumstances who later found out they'd become unintentional performers. There is a historical piece of connecting back to using Black-Evel American experience, especially unfiltered black American experience, where like when we don't code switch, when we're not thinking about beyond the audience that we think we're speaking to and how somebody else might take that thing we're doing and we contextualize it. Some argue that these videos take advantage of that dualism, twisting a black person's lived experience into white media with a different meaning. Another expert we spoke with used a specific phrase.

Blackness gone wrong through the white gaze. Alexandra Aglora is a scholar of media and race at Arizona State University. For example, the Bed and Treater song, it's following a common formula of how race is portrayed on the internet. You have Anton Dodson with a kerchief on his head, a tank top standing outside what looks like a project, again, feeding into the white imagination of what poor black life is like. This critique, Alex says, is not a bit of. of Antoine. It's of the people making the video and of how others consume it. For example, the Gregories are in the Bed Intruder video posing as newscasters. So you know it's coming from

their lens. They're clapping. They're wearing their suits. And their white bodies are put in there in juxtaposition of Antoine's black body in the tank top. So that's one way where the Gregory brothers are involved in this, whether or not that was... intentional on their behalf. That's the way that it's read, and that's the way to it's read to a white audience. Emery and I, we are a white audience. Which is part of the reason why we were interested in doing this episode.

Were we laughing at it, with it, or some combination? And what does that mean for our own impact on this stuff? It's worth asking, it's worth trying to understand, and it's worth owning up to. Here's Evan Gregory. Ben, a minute ago, you asked, how do we think about people laughing at that video? And I think you're right to bring it up because when you look at the original interview, why are people sharing it?

And you could see what the discussion was in the comments. People are laughing at it. So when we went to touch it, a big part of what the song is doing is a little transformation into an anthem and an outcome of which was everyone, wants to sing along with the song and be on Antoine's side, enjoying it and enjoying the energy and laughing along with him, as opposed to laughing at him for some unknown visceral reason. What's your reaction to people who feel like that's exploitative?

Right. Yeah, no, I think it's just important to sit down and listen because I think the danger is that somebody just kind of floats in and watches it and giggles, like, for the wrong reason and floats away. And it's important for us, again, to allow those things to serve as billboards for them rather than something that is just offering some sort of, like, weird tourism or something like that. We spoke with the Gregory brothers for hours. They answered all of our questions. They were calm and cordial.

And they pointed out that we were asking them about a small handful of more than 500. songs they have uploaded. Most of their songs feature politicians or white people on the news or are collaborations with other YouTubers. And after the interview, they sent us this written statement. Quote, we regret not challenging the premise of one of the central ideas of your interview, people laughing at Antoine. The overwhelming reaction to Antoine, the original interview, and our video was that of respect and admiration. He was slash is a hero. We do not believe most people were laughing at Antoine or the situation he was in. We certainly were not.

Do you think that people were laughing at Antoine, we're laughing at Charles Ramsey, and we're laughing maybe even more at them because of these songs? Absolutely. Know your meme co-founder, Kenyatta Cheese, says he believes that the Gregory brothers were not mocking Antoine and Charles. And he believes that many of the people watching the videos were not either. And then you had other corners of the internet where this was used to reinforce existing stereotypes around the Black experience. I mean, I know that people probably, in it for the wrong reason, they're trying to make fun of it. But you know what I'm saying?

It's sad that people have so much negative to say about the situation because this is a serious matter. But people are going to talk. We can't stop them for time. So as far as you're concerned, race is not an issue in what's going on here? Not at all. Not to me and my family. All right. This is Antoine speaking with NPR in 2010. And even though Kenyatta and Alex do see race as an issue, they acknowledge that it's nuanced.

Because while the Gregories didn't reach out before they uploaded the song, and they didn't ask Antoine if he was okay with the song before they posted it, they did eventually ask his permission to leave the song up on YouTube and to make it a little. available on iTunes. And Antoine said yes. Again, Alex Aglora. He chose to be portrayed in this way, which is a sacrifice of his own identity. But at the same time, there was recognition about the event to be had. There was money to be made. And I think that he made enough money from the Bet and Truder song to actually move his family out of the place where they were living where the attempted rape happened. Antoine did interviews, sold T-shirts, set up a helpline for survivors of sexual assault.

And while we don't know exactly how much money Antoine made, he did, as Alex said, make enough to leave the Lincoln Park projects for good. Credit, compensation, maybe at a cost. Depends on how you see it. Even though Antoine Dodson didn't want to be interviewed for this story, he did send us a follow-up email. It contained one sentence. The Gregory Bros. and I are friends. 11 years later, and still cool. Throughout this series, we've talked to subjects of memes who have made millions

and embraced fame and others who have gone into hiding. Charles is somewhere in the middle. In the months after he found Amanda Berry, he pulled in money from media appearances and wrote a book, titled, What Else, Dead Giveaway? People even sent him money.

Every letter I opened up that came to the house had money in it. Just from people, from organizations? No. Who was sending you money? Anybody that had a pulse. It was enough money to quit his job at the time, but that only lasted a few months.

It was only 30 grand. BMW was $8,000. I got to pay fucking rent and no more money. Within months, Charles was broke and living in his car. Until he reconnected with an old coworker and moved in with him, he got another job and stopped selling drugs. Then, two years ago, he reunited with Amanda Barry. the woman he had found banging on the door in 2013.

And perhaps not surprisingly, Dead Giveaway. Have you heard that? I have. Dead giveaway. What did you think about that? Let me tell you about that. Listen, that video got, I think, what was it?

32 million views. The people that know me already know this message. The people that don't know, this is the message. No matter what you go on and happen with you in life, remain humble. And this experience you'd say made your message. you'd say made you humble? Very much so. Because when you become famous, it just comes to you and it won't stop coming to you.

You do some soul searching with yourself. And you ask yourself, okay, well, you got that shot you're looking for. Is this really what you want? And you say, well, no. So once you put those in perspective, you say, well, what do we got here? You got life. And you were fortunate to be part of that situation. Keep in mind, since you're not dead yet, you may be part of another situation.

So stay humble. That's it. Remain humble. And that's my story. This idea that one person's thing is taken and changed into another person's thing. This is the basic definition of meme, a piece of culture evolving as it's passed from one hand to the next. For better or for worse. Do you think memes are potentially problematic?

in part because they fundamentally detach from their creators? Oh, yes. Memes are sort of the ultimate form. It is the final boss form of like exploitation and appropriation. It is the place where you can take somebody's lived experience. You can take a quote from somebody and re contextualize it in ways that no longer serve and possibly hurt the original creator, but of course serve your audience. And here's the thing.

That's always going to happen. It's kind of like, yeah, this is the problem with all ideas that spread, is that the context does collapse over time. As a meme moves through the internet, it finds new, broader audiences, but it may lose its original context, its original meaning. And that can be a problem, especially when the person at the center of a meme never agreed to being the person at the center of a meme. to having the context of their life and identity stripped away and remade.

The Gregory brothers say that today they would do things differently. We had this mindset like many other people on YouTube, that everything is media to be consumed, regardless of the source. And so that's what changed over the years is realizing, okay, we're no longer just going to be out there touching anything that draws our attention. and we're going to reach out first and try to get that right. Even though issues around appropriation, agency, systemic racism, trauma, and power, even though those issues have always been there,

the broader conversations about them have shifted since the Gregory brothers started more than a decade ago. Something that was, to me, funny in 2010. Or to me, funny in 2013. Those things are a lot less funny now. I'm going to guess that if, you know, the Grigger brothers have probably seen a ton of press over the years and a ton of like think pieces about their role in the work that they've created, that they're going to approach this as mindfully as possible. And hopefully whether it's like the interview they did with you all or or anything else, like they're going to try to expand their ideas of what might be possible. For the folks like that, like that is their part. But these are, we are all folks that sit within systems.

If there was a critical meme theory, that wouldn't say that, like, y'all are the problem, it would be y'all benefit from this thing that's a problem. And it's up to all of us to fix that thing. Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. Do you want early tickets to events, swag, bonus content, pictures of Amory's oatmeal, or my breakfast sandwich? Join our email list. You can find it at WBUR.org slash endless thread.

Also, we want to know what you. you think is the most underrated meme. Call us, yes, pick up the phone, 857, 244-0338. Or better yet, you can record a voice memo on your phone and email it to endless thread at wbUR.org. And we just might feature your voice memo and your suggestion on the show. For example. Hey there, this is DeBanjo Boy.

I don't know if it's an underrated meme, but it's just perfection. and could be right for debate as to, you know, the social and political implications of this meme. But I'm here to nominate Uncle Denzel. It was the hardest I've laughed in a long, long time, and I'm not even a meme expert by any means. But boy, oh boy, people got creative with that one. Big thanks to our meme chorus, by the way. Sarah Laola teaches about digital culture and design a coastal Carolina University.

Joan Donovan is research director at the Harvard Kennedy School's Shorenstein Center. Gianluca Stringini studies online security disinformation and hate speech at Boston University. Amanda Brennan has the extremely cool title of Internet Librarian. Kenyatta Cheese co-founded the site Know Your Meme, where Don Caldwell is editor-in-chief. Please go find their work and benefit from their meme genius. This episode was produced by Dean Russell. Our series and our show is made by producers Nora Sacks, Dean Russell, and Quincy Walters. We're co-hosted by us, Amory Severson.

And Ben Brock Johnson, this episode was edited by Maureen McMurray. Mix and sound design by Matt Reed. Original music in this episode also by Matt Reed. Special thanks to an additional production work from Josh Crane, Frank Hernandez, Kristen Torres, Sophie Codner, and Rachel Carlson. Endless thread is a show about the blurred lines between digital communities and a Zoom room you can smell. How can you smell it, Ben? What does it smell like?

I don't know. You've got to be there. You just have to be there, IRL. You've got an untold history, an unsolved mystery, or a wild story from the internet that you want us to tell. Hit us up. Email endless thread at wbUR.org. Stay cool forever.