Endless Thread - Snacktime: Why You Should Care About Other People

Episode Date: September 16, 2021

Ben tells Amory about a controversial idea for a reality TV show. Amory tells Ben about the thing Dr. Anthony Fauci did NOT say... but everyone thinks he did. 

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Hello? All right, fine. I'll go talk to someone else. See ya. How are you? I'm good. I'm good. End of summer.

You know how people are like, summer's over and I'm like, nope, not until next week. Not me. I was in the pond yesterday. It was cold. It was cold in the pond yesterday, but I was in it. Good for you. So this is the true end of summer snack. And this is when we, just in case anyone is tuning in for the very first time, this is when we share shorter stories from the internet for each other in preparation for the larger meal-sized episodes that are coming up very soon we announced when we're coming back, October 1st. Almost terrifyingly soon.

Save the date. But in the meantime, we have little snacks for each other, little snack stories. Snickety snackies. Snickety snacks. Do you want to go first? I definitely do. And I have a question for you, Amory. Okay.

What kind of reality television show would you go on? Like, if you were going to be featured on a reality TV show, what would it be? Like, what would your skill set be? What am I really good at? I know dates. I can remember dates really well. Uh-huh. Like birthdays and significant dates.

You could stick me in a pack of elephants, and I'd have to, like, befriend the elephants. I feel like I can do well in that environment. I don't even think you're going to get a meeting based on these so far. No, I'm probably not. Any of those, like, So build a fortress for yourself and kill and forge for all your own food. I'd be dead in minutes.

Why? Where are you going with this? Are you aware of the recent Twitter conversation about a recent announcement that CBS is going to host a competition series called the activist? Actor Priyanka Chopra, musical artist, Usher, and Dancing with the Stars star, Julianne Huff, are all going to host. And it's six activists competing to bring attention to causes that are focused on health, education, and the environment. The competing activist's success is measured via online engagement, social metrics, and hosts input. Oh, God. The hosts will guide the activists through their journey with plenty of surprises from high-profile public figures. What's your reaction to this?

There are a lot stupider reality shows out there, you know, where you basically just like, let's put all these people on an island and see if they make out. So this doesn't rub me the complete wrong way. Well, that puts you in the minority. At least according to Twitter, which, you know, in which certain people can be very loud. But, you know, this got a lot of hate on Twitter, the idea of this show. What? What's the... Naomi Klein tweeted, I'm confused.

Is this an advanced Marxist critique to expose how competition for money and attention pits activists against each other and undermines deep change or just the end of the world? Someone else named Sankul Sonawane. We're all laughing at the activist show starring Pryanka Chopra, but that's what activism has been reduced to. So I don't know if you know about Priyanka, but Priyanka has been controversial in the past. She's sort of cheered on Indian armed forces when they've launched air strikes on India's neighbor, Pakistan,

and at the time our sentiment sort of aligned her with Hindu nationalists in India. This has all been very controversial. Julianne apparently wore blackface back in 2013. Usher has been sued for giving people STDs and then not disclosing that he had an STD when he gave them the STD. I mean, it's just, it's messy. It's messy. The reaction is messy. The network is producing this in partnership with global citizen.

The CEO of that company's organization is Australian-born Hugh Evans. His LinkedIn bio says, among other things, quote, At 14, Australian-born Evans spent the night in a Manila slum. The harsh realities of his host's lives motivated Evans to challenge the status quo of extreme poverty. It's just tricky territory to weigh into, especially on a reality show, right? Yeah, I think that there is a larger conversation to be had about how do we change the world. It's not simple. And certainly once you throw celebrities into the mix and a reality show into the mix, it's going to get more complicated. Sometimes if something makes people mad, it can actually

inspire further action. And maybe this will be that that people will want to do something themselves as a result of seeing whatever goes down, whatever beautiful things or dumpster fires are lit as a result of this show. Okay, guys, that entire conversation was taped earlier in the week. And as of Thursday, CBS announced they're caving to the press. They are no longer making the show because there's been so much backlash, but it will air in some other form, like a documentary, something like that, TBD on the date. Here's the thing, though, it just touches on this point that in the capitalist world we live in, once something becomes fashionable, it gets commodified. Someone's always like, I can make money off that. There's a long history of this. It is how we roll in America.

Coming up in a minute, I have a story for you that's about credit where credit is due. Oh, finally I get recognition. 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. 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.

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Okay, Ben, I have a mystery wrapped in an enigma for you. Okay. I like that. Sounds delicious. Great. Off to a good start. Okay, I'm going to read you a quote. And I want to see if You can tell me who said it without Googling. Okay? Okay. The quote is, I don't know how to explain to you that you should care about other people.

It seems familiar for some reason. Okay, I have a hint. People have printed this quote on face masks. I don't know how to explain to you that you should care about other people. Is it our president, Joseph Biden? No, but you're kind of you're on the right track. So this quote was everywhere in the early months of the pandemic. It was on t-shirts.

It was on lapel pins. It was on artsy little cross-stitches that you could buy on Etsy. But it was especially on social media where people were turning it into all sorts of, like, flowery Instagram and Facebook posts, all attributed to Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the next. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, of course. Fauci, baby. Well, the problem is, there is no record of Dr. Fauci saying this. In fact, he likely didn't say it at all. But I, Ben, know who did.

Oh, snap. My name is Lauren Morrell. I am an author. I write primarily young adult fiction. I live in Knoxville, Tennessee. And... And Lauren is the first documented person to have said... said this statement that's now been misattributed to Dr. Fauci. It was in the form of a tweet

that she made on January 12, 2017, about a week before Donald Trump was inaugurated. And one of the first things Trump said he was going to do as president was try to repeal the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. And so I was very opposed. I was also pregnant with my second child. So I was in the process of dealing with the health care system and bills and insurance and all of that. kind of stuff. So I just sat down and fired off this tweet and then walked away from my computer. And the next thing I knew, it was getting thousands and thousands of retweets. Lauren says that at the time, she didn't feel like she was saying anything particularly revolutionary. She was mostly just exhausted and fed up with the ACA debate.

And I was just like, I don't, I'm done. I can't explain this to you. Like, if you are missing this chip, then your computer doesn't work. So as Lauren said, this resonated with a lot of people. And as an author, this is some priceless publicity for her. And as Lauren later acknowledged, more people have likely read this tweet than have read her six YA novels combined. So it should have been really good for her career, except... Fast forward, five months.

June of 2017 to the publication of an op-ed on Huff Post by a contributor named Kayla Chadwick. The piece was called, I don't know how to explain to you that you should care about other people. Oh. So people were sending this piece to Lauren. And at first she thinks, oh, wow, someone wrote about my tweet. Great. But then she read the actual op-ed. And I was like, oh, I'm not here at all.

And people just kept sharing that Huffington Post piece. And I did. I tweeted the Huffington Post, and I wasn't trying to be a jerk about it. I was like, hey, you know, that was actually my tweet. You know, I think I linked to it or something. And I made attempts. They didn't go anywhere. I thought, oh, well, thus goes the Internet.

This will be gone soon and we'll all forget about it. So I just sort of ducked my head and moved on from it. Wow. Did they reply? No, Huffington Post didn't reply. She tweeted at the contributor, the person who wrote the op-ed. That person didn't reply. Oh, man, come on.

So fast forward three more years. And all of a sudden, you get the, you know, the merchandise and the Instagram posts, all attributing this to Dr. Fauci. So how did this happen? I have absolutely no idea. It just seems to have appeared one day. I remember seeing it because the actress Martha Plimpton put it on her Instagram, and then everybody shared it on Instagram, and then it was just everywhere.

So I should say that the Ballad of Lauren Morrill, as I'm calling it, was written up in Oprah Daily last summer by a writer named Ashley Spencer, who did a bang-up job and who spent a good amount of time trying to get to the bottom of this, how Lauren's tweet came to be misattributed to Anthony Fauci. Love Ashley Spencer. Love it. Nice. And the closest thing that Ashley Spencer could find was a quote from Dr. Fauci's 2020 graduation speech to the College of the Holy Cross, his alma mater, in which he said this. And now is the time, if ever there was one, for us to care selflessly about one another.

So like the spirit is there, but it's not close enough to the, you know, Yeah, that's very different. Very different. Yeah. So it's like, how did this happen? Is this plagiarism? Is this accidental plagiarism where Kayla Chadwick from HuffPost thinks she made up the quote when really she just absorbed it from Twitter? Is it convergent evolution where everyone had this thought independently and no one deliberately or even accidentally stole from each other? And we're just seeing different versions of the same quote from different brains. I don't know. What do you think happened here, Ben? I mean, it's just one of these things where, like, you inadvertently create a slogan that hit a nerve for a bunch of people, and it reverberated because of that all over the place.

And then it doesn't necessarily go away, even if it's sort of the virality dies down. If it's still relevant years later, for whatever reason, maybe you happen to be in a global pandemic and there happens to be a ridiculous debate about whether or not people should, wear masks to protect each other, maybe it just comes back because people have been using it the whole time low-key, even after it sort of like went off Twitter. Yeah. Yeah. And I don't think that we will know the answer to this mystery until we hear from the final person involved in this, which is Dr. Fauci. And Ashley Spencer, the Oprah Daily writer, reached out to him and his team was like, um, he's a little busy dealing with

something else that went viral. So we're not going to hear back. But because I'm a firm believer in giving credit where credits do, that joke was courtesy of my husband. So nice job. Nice job, Mike. Well done. Right. But where does this leave Lauren Morrill, the YA author and presumed OG author of the I don't know how to explain to you quote via Twitter? I'm much less likely now to sort of brainstorm out loud on the internet, which I think a lot of artists used to do just for funsies on social media, because now you think, well, gosh, that could get away, you know, that could be a really cool idea for me to explore, but if somebody's faster at it than me, then it's gone.

So, Ben, there's one more twist to this story, something I haven't told you about Lauren, and that is, I sort of know her. She's married to a former colleague of mine here at WBUR, Adam Ragusea, who is a radio journalist, turned full-time YouTube chef with more than one and a half million subscribers. Here's everything I wish I had known when I first started trying to cook steak. And Adam was able to take this huge career leap because a couple of his cooking videos went viral. Meanwhile, Lauren has this viral tweet that she thought was a big. going to boost her writing career and help her sell more books. And it just did not turn out the same way. And that stings for her a little bit. A lot of people will say, well, you could have made money off

of selling, you know, the T-shirts or whatever. And I don't care about that. It's not about that for me. For me, the primary thing was always, you know, this is the work that I dedicate my time and my life to, and I just want my words to be read, and this was a chance for them to be read, and they weren't. So what in your mind, Ben, is the moral of the ballot of Lauren Moral? Don't be a woman on the internet. Oh, too real. What's something that she can do something about or that any of us could do something about?

I don't know that you can do anything, and I don't know that you should do anything. Like, I don't know if anything. anyone should benefit from, like, saying one thing that made a lot of sense to a lot of people if it's, like, one sentence long. I just don't know what's, I don't know what the precedent is for that. Yeah, I mean, these are definitely new times where a tweet can, a tweet is not just a tweet. Like, a tweet is how we communicate. And if you say something, if you happen to capture what a lot of people are feeling, I hope that you would get to benefit from that. Because again, she's not trying to, like, make the money off the t-shirts,

but I would love for her words to at least be her words again. In the meantime, I think Lauren would probably just love it if people read her novels, which will link to some of her work on our website, wbUR.org slash endless thread. They're probably full of pithy phrases, pithy one-line phrases. We can expect. So that's it. That's our end of summer snack. And we'll be back so soon. October 1st, new episode.

Woohoo!