Sixteenth Minute (of Fame) - a fish fell from the sky

Episode Date: August 13, 2024

This summer, a fish named Alice fell from the sky and directly into the lawn of junior doctor Ben Beska. And so, of course, he tweeted about it... only to lose his newly beloved fish just a week later. What followed was what it looks like to go viral in 2024. Jamie speaks with Ben Beska over the course of two months to track the journey; plus, we talk to Stanford psychiatrist Dr. Elia Aboujaoude to learn what going viral has the potential to do to your mind. Follow Ben's fish adventures here: https://x.com/Beska Buy Dr. Aboujaoude's new book, A Leader's Destiny, here: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/elias-aboujaoude/a-leaders-destiny/9781541703018/?lens=publicaffairs See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an IHeart podcast. Welcome to Pretty Private with Ebeney, the podcast where silence is broken and stories are set free. I'm Ebeney, and every Tuesday I'll be sharing all new anonymous stories that would challenge your perceptions and give you new insight on the people around you. Every Tuesday, make sure you listen to Pretty Private from the Black Effect Podcast Network. Tune in on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA. Right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime.

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Tate McCray. The Offspring. Tim McRaw. Tickets are on sale now. AXS.com. Get your tickets today. AXS.com. CoalZ Media I wish I could tell you that frantically looking up incidents of fish falling from the sky

cracks the top ten of the most demented internet wormholes I've ever gone down, but you know that's not true. Still, I am thrilled to report to you that there's not one, not two, but at least six stories about fish falling from the sky that I can talk about off the top of my damn head. Australia, 2010, in a small town in Australia Northern Territory called Lajamanu, a counselor announced to the community

that there was a huge storm coming, but did not announce that that storm would consist of both rain and live fish. Oops! The fish were pretty small, about the width of two fingers, but when fish are falling from the sky and they're landing on the ground still alive, there really is no sense in being a size queen about,

it, right? And residents in this area claimed that this had happened two other times in the last 50 years. And there's actually natural precedent for this with the reasoning that tornadoes can pull water and fish from hundreds of miles away from their point of origin. It's like the recent Glenn Powell documentary Twisters. Next example, Texarkana, Texas 2021. On New Year's Eve Eve, East Texas residents reported seeing fish falling from the sky. Dead ones this time, I fear, scattered across pavement, and the city itself announced that, quote-unquote, animal rain, which is a thing, that quote-unquote animal rain happens

when, quote, small water animals like frogs, crabs, and small fish are swept up in water spouts or drafts that occur on the surface of the earth. They are then rained down at the same time as the rain. While it's uncommon, it happens. as evidenced in several places in Texarkana today, unquote. Texas, bless my Texan listeners. You already have to deal with the brunt of the feral hog population. And now this?

Not even the dignity of live fish. And I could keep going. The list of raining fish locations goes on and on, and there's been an uptick of reports in the last 15 years. And this could be for a number of reasons. It could be a rise in interest in reporting such things. It could be increased access to personal technology to share such incidents. It could very likely be a creepy side effect of global warming or a combination of all three.

But whatever the cause, there have been reported cases of either living or dead fish raining from the sky reported in Sri Lanka, India, Ethiopia, Pennsylvania, Tempico, California, the Philippines, and Honduras since 2012. And today, on 16th minute, what if I was like, today we're talking about Bean Dad? No, today we are talking to and with a very recent air of internet characters of the day. One human, one fish, either coy or gold, depending on who you ask, was found on a sunny spring afternoon in Manchester, England. A cardiology resident named Ben Beska looked outside his bedroom window and saw a wriggling orange shape on his lawn. He went downstairs, and as a man in his early 30s, he brought his phone with him on autopilot, prepared to update his friend group text in the event that anything interesting happened. Listener, something interesting happened.

What waited for Ben Besska on the lawn was a large goldfish, in pretty rough shape, you could say, due to the whole not being underwater thing, but also from the impact of what seemed to be a pretty significant fall. Ben pokes the fish gently, and it moves. She's alive. She's having the worst day of her life, and he's a doctor. He's going to try and save her. Ben scoops the fish into his hand and runs her into his kitchen, looking around to find tools to improvise a fish tank with. He's never had fish before. He's got cats, and that's more or less the opposite. Thinking quickly, he grabs an empty freezer drawer and fills it with water, plopping the injured fish inside. She's not doing great. She's shedding scales, but to Ben's surprise, she starts to swim again. Confident that he can now take a breath, he hits the group chat. It's Alice, he fumbles into a text, not realizing the second word of his sentence has been autocorrected.

He meant to write, it's alive. But Ben's friends confirm his gut instinct. For the first time in recorded history, autocorrect did something right. The fish's name would be Alice, and a guy who to that point had been a cardiologist, meme posting Swifty on Twitter, couldn't wait to tell his followers all about it. He tweets on June 1st, 2024. But the real show here is the picture attached.

It's Alice, the giant, I'm just going to say goldfish. It sounds better. Fish Twitter can come for me. In the photo, Alice, the goldfish, is plopped helplessly on a lush green lawn. Ben captions the photo. So today I found a goldfish just on the grass in my back garden. It was alive, I think, and I have absolutely no idea where it came from. There's no ponds anywhere near, so I took it inside.

And in one tweet, a legend was born. Ben the Doctor and Alice, the goldfish that fell from the sky. Your 16th minute starts now. I'm not so bad when you turn up the lights going on. I'll get me perfect. All right. Make me a start Let's take it too far

Then give me one moment Let me see you at a minute Let me see a minute of fame Sixteen minute of fame Sixteen minute of face One more minute of me Welcome back to Welcome back to 16th minute

The show where we take a look at the main characters of the internet and see what they show us about ourselves And occasionally, the show where I covertly share more about my personal life than is responsible. I've been working on this episode for almost two months now, and it's going to be our first in-real-time story of virality. A bit of a case study of a flash-in-the-pan viral moment and how this attention can affect a main character in nearly real time. And quick aside, for everyone who sent along requests about the Haktua girl, you're not getting that episode yet. It's way too soon. But the Haktua

sensation is kind of an outlier on today's internet. For most people that get sucked into the algorithm these days. This kind of longevity is pretty fleeting. The get-so-famous you spark a week's long culture war route of fame was not Ben Baska's destiny, in part because the story is really different, but also because Ben is a working professional. He's in his 30s, and this chance encounter with Alice and the subsequent online fame has to fit into his life, not the other way around. And in these far more common cases, if something is even a little off, maybe the person is too busy with their normal life to really commit to the new lifestyle that the algorithm is foisting upon them. Maybe their interest in other things dilutes and confuses

a potential audience and they move on. Maybe the person who goes viral is burdened by the question, do I even want to be this guy? And that's why Ben and Alice the Goldfish is such an interesting story to me. This story has the makings of a fable. So today, we're going to talk to Ben about the profound weirdness that takes hold in someone's life when the internet decides that you are this guy now actually. And then we're going to talk to a psychologist who's been studying how virality affects the brain and psyche for decades to give us a better idea of what Ben was really going through. So come with me, if you will, to June 24, maybe you remember it. An American presidential debate asks the question, who is more dead? Furiosa is bombing at the box

office and everyone's afraid to say that it was because it was a little mid. And in Newcastle, England, a young doctor looked out his window to see that a fish named Alice had fallen from the sky. So where do we leave off with this story? Ben finds Alice and discovers her name via a typo in a friend group chat, but doesn't post about it to his Twitter account right away. He's a doctor babe. He's got a life to save. So once Alice is safely in a freezer drawer and Ben's cats are locked in a separate room, he books it to the nearest pet store and grabs a small tank to tied Alice over until he figures out what to do next. And while she was in rough shape when he found her, Alice seems to be rallying a little bit. Within two hours, Ben has all but brought our orange fin girl back from the

dead. And it's at this point that he starts tweeting. So let's hear the tweet that started it all one more time, captioned with a picture of a helpless Alice in the grass. So today I found a goldfish just on the grass in my back garden. It was alive, I think, and I have absolutely no idea where it came from. There's no ponds anywhere near. So I took it inside.

Now this is the tweet of a man who knows how a viral thread begins. And unlike many attempted viral threads, Ben's story has the narrative juice to trickle into today's Twitter algorithm. And while I could not explain to you what the end game of Twitter's current iteration is, I do know that its algorithmically driven platform

was absolutely the reason Alice the Goldfish came into my life. I first saw Ben's tweets the day after the saga began. So Ben's thread continues, accompanied by carefully documented pictures and videos. He tweets, It was alive, although not very happy in an old freezer draw, much happier in an actual and hastily bought tank.

Anyway, I have a fish now. Thumbs up emoji. For me, this last tweet is the money shot. Two posts after being found fallen from the sky on his lawn, there's a video of Alice the Goldfish swimming along happily in a small aquarium. It's a cartoon. And before you ask, how did a fish fall from the sky? Look, I can't guarantee an answer.

I'm all out of answers. How Alice got there is between Alice and God. But of course, this is the first question that a lot of Twitter users have. and we immediately have this classic split in opinion. We have the likely explanation of how Alice fell from the sky, which Ben Besska, most media outlets, and a couple naturalists on Twitter have subscribed to, and there are the unhinged conspiracy theories.

Here is the likely reason, quoted here from BBC News. Dr. Besska suspected a bird had picked up the fish from a nearby pond and dropped it while carrying it away. However, he said, there are no ponds close by, and he thought it must, therefore, have traveled a, quote, reasonable distance, end quote. Baska continued in the same piece. It's been quite funny. Some of the comments are really quite funny, and about a thousand people said they thought a bird dropped it. Look, I'm not too proud to admit that I first read this story and was like, what?

And then I read that Ben Besska lived near a body of water and a bird almost certainly caught and then dropped. Alice and I was like, oh, yeah, that makes sense. For me, this explanation made the whole story less mysterious and more of a Pixar movie I would watch. But remember, this is Twitter we're talking about, a place where, for every post, there's an equal and opposite conspiracy post. And honestly, a place where it's not completely unreasonable to doubt that a narrator is just doing something for attention.

Patterns of lying for clout are super common on social media and have some of my favorite memes of all time. I'm talking Ruth Konda forever. I'm talking cinnamon toast, shrimp. The list goes on. And with that in mind, here are the conspiracy theories about Ben and Alice. People who, for what I can tell, assume that Ben bought a goldfish, threw it on his lawn, and took a picture of it in hopes that the Twitter algorithm would swallow it whole. The tweet says, So this is fake, and I'm contributing. Sorry, but this is just really misguided to me. Ben Bessca, until this point, has been a terminally online, but pretty keeping in his own lane kind of poster.

He would tweet frequently, but it was mainly memes and observations about the medical world, about Taylor Swift, and about boy genius. Communities he was already a part of. And from what I can tell, most of his interactions prior to Alice's arrival from either a bird, heaven, or Besska's own evil plan, or people he'd already spoken with before. So do I think this guy's a con artist? No, I don't. I think he's a very online guy in his 30s. But surprisingly, while there is this paranoia that Ben faked the Alice story at first, those theories die out pretty quickly as the story gained mainstream media

and the likely cause of the bird dropping Alice seem to make sense to more people than not. No, the true controversy of this story has to do with, wait for it, the aquarium community. For fuck's sake, here's what they had to say. You can remove the big bushy plant for more space. That guy will need at least a 20-gallon tank. That's the pond variety, so it's not going to be happy in a small space. A tank needs time to cycle properly in order to process fish waste. You can buy bacteria to help speed up the process,

but in the meantime, make sure you do very frequent water changes with properly treated water in order to keep it alive. You guys, I'm going to hold my tongue here. I cannot get canceled by the aquarium community. today. No, part of what's interesting to me about this story is the raw speed that it moves with. In part, because Ben Beska is interacting with people about Alice on Twitter in basically real time and push in the algorithm within hours, and Ben Beska finds himself fending off criticisms from aquarium aficionados on the same day that he finds Alice, June 1st. He hastily continues this

original, increasingly viral thread. At present, it has over 200,000 likes. He continues this original thread with defenses of this small fish tank he bought in haste, saying, Repeat after me, a hastily bought, temporary tank is better for a goldfish than laying dead in the grass. Folks, you hate to see it, but the aquarium community clearly got to Ben. And he tweets later in the day as he continues to observe Alice the goldfish. And I can hear the aquarium community grumbling, she's a coy fish, but she's a goldfish to me. Ben continues. You happen to find a mostly dead goldfish on your lawn and tweet about saving its life, and your replies are filled with people saying, you should have planned this better.

So Ben does get some hate, but that is vastly outdone by the effusive love and praise at this pretty charming story. Most users are incredibly charmed and stoked about this, and it seems like Alice the Goldfish is poised to become a modern, classic internet animal. She's got the potential of a grumpy cat, of a Marnie the dog, of a neon cat. The list goes on. Because there is a sort of playbook to make these kinds of things happen once the public is excited about an animal that's either extremely adorable or has a really compelling story. And almost right away, that seems where this story is headed. The story goes viral around the UK in the first three days of June. as live doctor finds goldfish in garden.

Junior doctor goes viral after rescuing live fish from garden lawn in Newcastle. I found a goldfish seconds from death in my garden. Now I'm keeping it as my pet. And here's the singular point where Ben and Alice Besska and the Hawk to a girl converge. They're both very amenable to speak with the press. And they appear to respond to reporters very quickly. Ben gives interviews to a number of different places. And while most are just rehashing the story of discovering Alice, anyone hoping to find out how Alice was doing now could follow Ben on Twitter, where updates were coming fast and furious.

In the next couple days, he provided updates on not just Alice, but on his aquarium journey. Early on, he tweets back and forth with an aquarium company that offers him free advice, and even better, a free aquarium. Next, critical to the viral internet pet phenomenon, a separate account. pops up for Alice the Goldfish. Her handle is at Alice Beska. She quote tweets a picture Ben posted of Alice the Goldfish in that small tank with this little zinger. Emergency housing not so bad, I guess,

but fuck me, this studio flat is kind of small. Then she replies to Ben. Got anything bigger, love? Immediately, Ben starts interacting with the Alice Beska account, so at the time, I made assumptions. And even I ended up messing this up. I assumed that this was Ben talking to an account pretending to be Alice that he had created himself. But it turns out that just a day later, this account had been created by a fan of Alice.

So free of charge, this fan was already performing the next step in creating an iconic internet animal, creating a specific editorial voice, which sounds super corny, but think of an internet animal you like. In most cases, there is a specific kind of caption that you'll read for a familiar animal, and Alice Beska's voice was lovingly antagonistic toward Ben's incompetence as a new fish owner, making in-jokes that people who had been following the whole saga could appreciate. Then another step on the journey to engage fans in making Alice a legitimate internet pet. Ben launches a GoFundMe to help fund the aquarium equipment he needs. Here's what he posts.

Now apparently I need a bigger tank, and chemicals, and other random things that apparently a fish needs. At least that's what everyone on Twitter is saying. I would appreciate your help in helping me find a nicer home. My amazing story has also been covered in the news. Read more in the evening standard, the Guardian, or the Mirror. Things chug along like this for a couple days, with Ben Beska's account providing updates on Alice as fan art and puff pieces continue to roll in. Paintings, memes, a haiku for Alice. The goldfish who lived, Twitter was incredulous, when Alice met Ben.

The Alice Beska account is posting regularly, and by June 5th, just four days after this all began, Ben tweets. Hey, Alice Beska, do you want a boyfriend or a sister slash brother? Enter Barney, a blackfish who arrives on June 6th. The Alice account quotes a picture of Barney and captions it, Goth B.F. By this time, there's also merch. On June 5th, the Alice account, not Ben himself, launches a tentative merch store consisting of multiple Alice designs. And at this point, it feels clear that Ben Besska wants to make this a thing. I first got in touch with Ben on June 4th. I was on top of it, and we planned to speak on June 6th. But then he went quiet, and not just in our chat,

but on social media altogether. And I assume that was because he's still a junior doctor and said that he was going to be attending a conference pretty soon. And that was true, but that's not why he went quiet. What happened was Alice died. And okay, maybe this is corny, but I saw this song reference by many Alice fans when the news originally broke,

so we are going to get the karaoke track from Candle in the Wind bumping in Alice's memory. Full drama. Beautiful. It's a classic for a reason. Ben broke his silence on Twitter on June 8th. Unfortunately, I have some very sad news to share. Alice has passed from her injuries and is now eternally swimming in the big fish tank in the sky.

RIP. Alice is now the fish that lived for a bit. And the cynical among us thought, Well, this really fucks up the Pixar story. And I've thought about this a ridiculous amount because it is really sad, but I also think it's kind of beautiful, right? Because if Ben hadn't found her, Alice would have died a week earlier. And through the combination of a strange twist of feet and a loose-jawed predatory bird, Ben Besska was able to give Alice the goldfish another week of life that was spent in comfort with adoration and good,

and a new friend Barney, and, unbeknownst to Alice, worldwide notoriety. I think it's really sweet, and I'm weak. It did make me cry. But this is a show about social media, not our capacity to empathize with dead fish. So my curiosity was, how did Ben, the Alice Beska account, and the press handle this tragic development? After the death announcement from Ben, Alice Asturie gets another small bump in mainstream media. Man who adopted fish he found in his garden shares sad update. And then Ben is left to figure out basically, does he try to keep this thing going in the wake of a pet he's slowly fallen in love with dying, or does he just go back to who he was a week ago?

First, he amplifies the public mourning of Alice, the memorial drawings of her being welcomed into the great. coy pond in the sky, a drawing of Steve Irwin's angel telling Alice, you did great girl. Her photo edited onto the cover of Elton John's Candle in the Wind. The Alice Beska account posts, Do not fear death so much, but rather the inadequate life. It all feels fitting. And then the Alice Beska account keeps tweeting. June 12th, Alice quote tweets Ben posting fan art of her, saying,

oh gee look at me slaying posthumously june 14th three days until the t-shirt ship i'm so excited for everyone to get their shirts june 21st when ben posts a picture of the new massive gifted fish tank that alice didn't live long enough to enjoy wow he's moved on quick because by this time ben beska has chosen the direction he's going in he's doubling down on fish at the time of alice's death the free fish tank was already in the mail and he'd already gotten her a goth BF in the form of Barney. So after taking some time to mourn Alice at a UK Taylor Swift Eros tour that he'd had tickets to for months, he seems to decide to keep going. By mid-June, Ben had to wonder, Carrie Bradshaw voice, what does he do after Alice? On June 18th, less than two weeks after Alice's premature death, I asked him just that.

Our interview, when we come back. Your entire identity has been fabricated. Your beloved brother goes missing without a trace. You discover the depths of your mother's illness, the way it has echoed and reverberated throughout your life, impacting your very legacy. Hi, I'm Danny Shapiro. And these are just a few of the profound and powerful stories

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Welcome back to 16th minute. I'm getting dangerously close to becoming a train guy. And today, we're talking about junior doctor Ben Besska and Alice, the goldfish who fell from the sky. And as much as I would like to interview Alice myself, I am at present unable to communicate with fish, and also she's dead. Given these barriers to entry, I instead decided to reach out to the fish poster himself, Ben Beska. So I actually interviewed Ben twice this episode, once on June 18th, while this story was still developing, and then over a month later in late July. You don't need me to tell you that a month can be galaxies apart when it comes to viral stories. Before we first talked over Zoom, just a few days after Alice the Fish passed away,

Besska was both very receptive to talk to me and the press in general, but was kind of hard to pin down. Because it's not like becoming the goldfish guy meant that he quit his extremely demanding job working as a cardiology resident at an English hospital. But I kept bugging him because I'm really good at that, and when we found time to catch up, he was in good humor and, understandably, a little overwhelmed from the events of the week. Here is our chat from June.

Who are you, Zandeska? So I'm from England, so I'm from Newcastle. So I've been a doctor, oh, I don't know, a long time now, I can't remember. But I've been a doctor for a while. I studied in Newcastle, went to medical school in Newcastle, stayed in Newcastle. My number one hobby is now keeping fish, but prior to last week. That was not my main hobby. I mainly used Twitter, actually.

I mean, as you say, you look through it. There was a very minimal fish content on it. Yeah, there's a huge pivot moment. There was a pivot. There was a big pivot. Mainly used it for medicine stuff, basically. Mediter stuff sprinkled with bits of, you know, Taylor Swift and Phoebe Bridges and artists like that, which I like. But it was a big, big pivot recently to fish.

And I think now there's like 20,000 extra people following me all who care about fish. so I've had to change my you know what I talk about significantly anything that isn't fish related effectively I get lots of abuse for it not being fish related really already I mean I assume it's tongue-in-cheek abuse yeah I mean who knows but I sent a tweet about I know some boring medicine stuff and people reply saying oh yes but what's this got to do with the fish I want to talk about that in a bit of like how when you become notorious for one thing that all of a sudden that is like the yardstick that yeah it's like your entire personality now well before we get there i want to be taken through this biblical event

of finding alice it was june first so i was when was i think i was upstairs initially um in my house and i heard magpies you know squawking and i's like what the hell is going on and i saw this gold thing on the lawn so went downstairs went outside and there was a fish on the floor in the grass. I didn't really understand what was happening. No kidding. And she wasn't moving. She was just kind of like still on the floor.

And I was like, oh, right. Dead fish, fine. Don't ask too many questions. So I took a picture of the fish being, because I knew no one would believe me when I said there was a fish on the floor. And I sent the photo to my friend and I said, there's a fish in the garden.

And it was like, what are you talking about? But then the fish moved. It's gills moved. But she was breathing. They breathe? She was suffocating, really, wasn't she? I guess so. Yeah, I guess she was.

And I was like, oh, God. Like, what do I do in this situation? So I ran inside and I just put the sink on, filled up the sink. And picked her up by a tail, ran inside. And it started doing the classic fish thing, the fish fluffy. And I was like bloody out. And it was gross because it was like slimy. And it was a fish.

It was alive, you know. Yeah. So I just threw her in the sink. And, I mean, she was kind of still and not really moving. I mean, it was a fish I fell on the lawn. I need some kind of container to put her in. I found a freezer drawer

which was the number of, you know, I don't know, it was the only container I could think to put something so large in, filled up with water, put the fish in. And it wasn't really moving still. I kind of tapped the box and then it started swimming around and amongst the water was, you know, loads of scales that I think had probably fallen off of whatever trauma led her to you know, my back garden.

But no, that's the story of how I found the fish and the first two minutes of the second life. You've got Alice in the freezer drawer. He's slowly coming to. What is the distance? Do you clarify because numerous people actually thought this. She wasn't actually in the freezer. The freezer drawer was outside of the freezer. I think that was clear in your video.

I think it was very clear, but people on Twitter, you know, you know, how. the internet is. What is the amount of time between finding Alice, getting her into a receptacle, and sharing it online? Probably half an hour. So I put the fish in the drawer. I left the house to go to the nearest shop to buy a fish tank or something better than a drawer, you know, because I know the fish need, you know, chemicals or something. I know a lot more now about that, but I knew that basically that fish needs some kind of chemicals. I literally went to the closest shop, bought a tank, bought some chemicals, came home, put it in that tank. I think at that point, I tweeted about it. I mean, within the first half an hour or so, you know, my normal friends

that you tweet, you know, like the normal medical Twitter people, then it sort of snowballs and snowballs and it goes mad, maybe within half an hour, an hour. So you can't track how large it gets because, you know, every second there's 20 notifications and you can't keep track of anything. Had you ever been through anything like it? No, I thought I'd achieve something like this with a Nobel Prize or some kind of genuine achievement, but no, no, it's a fish. So the story blows up. Something I noticed early on, there was a lot of, or not a lot, but at least some doubt cast onto the story. What was the nature of that and like, how did you handle it? Yeah, so I think the first doubt, there was people suggesting that I went out, bought,

a fish, a large goldfish. I don't know if you can buy them when they're big. Put it on the lawn, like battered it around a bit, ripped a few of its, you know, took some of her scales off and then posted it on the internet, which makes no sense at all. It is completely illogical. I mean, I believe they probably think the earth is flat as well. My internet brain says like there's just enough evidence, not in this story, but that people will do wild shit for a story that gets absurd levels of engagement. The thing about the internet is that anyone that has grown up on the internet knows you have to approach anything with a level of skepticism

because nothing is true on the internet, is it? But this story, I think, is so obscene that it's almost not scriptable. It's just so bonkers. Why would I make that up? Why would anyone make that up? But then everyone else actually pivoted. I mean, everyone's an expert on the internet, as you know. I was then told that the tank was too small.

So the fish that was dead, well, I don't know, semi-dead, was put into a tank of water, and apparently that tank was not good enough. And I was actually told by someone that the fish would have been better on the lawn. Oh, my God. It shows how very normal people are on the internet, doesn't it? People were saying, you know, you needed a 30, 40, 50-gallon tank. And I was like, why would I have that much water stored in a receptacle of my house? Just in case a fish appeared.

If I was prepared, that is very good evidence I would have put the fish on the lawn. That's true. Yes, that would be like, oh, he just happened to have a different thing. What was your relationship to the internet, you know, before this incident? Well, I kind of grew up on the internet, you know, typical millennial, chronically online, and I understand the nuances of, you know, the internet. What is the next step? At what point are you like, we got to start Alice an account? Like, where do you go from there? So I actually didn't start that account.

Really? Really. It's one of the people. people on their Twitter, that isn't me, started it as a joke, obviously. It's a joke. It's truly brilliant. It's a very good idea. I think it's even more funny that I didn't set the account up. The tweets coming from that account have been actually very funny if you read. They are very good. It's only the other person who's run the account. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. She has her own social media team. That's wild. Yeah, because it felt like growing up online as well, you know, you see famous internet animals and how there's like a voice curated for them. Yeah. No, no.

So it's not me, not me. So in the meantime, as she is becoming a main character, unbeknownst to her, what are the next steps with Alice? You've got her in the smaller tank. People are giving you shit. What happens next? So I put all the chemicals in and remove the chemicals you're not meant to have. I don't want to talk too much about that because then this becomes like a fish care podcast,

which I think is a different thing. Yeah, not my beat. All good. Set up a tank and make sure a tank was okay. And then I had to go to a conference for a few days. I was a very anxious time leaving this new. newly found half dead fish in a tank. You had a camera, right?

Brilliant. To keep an eye on it. Well, it was like a camera from, like just a normal, you know, like a security camera thing. I moved, keep an eye on it. The level of anxiety that leads to that. But we, no, I mean, it's, I'd be interested to hear. It's just sods law, isn't it?

I'm not sure, I'm not sure that's the term you know. I don't know. I mean, I don't know how to define sods law. It is a weird circumstance that I found this fish. lived but then I had to leave the house and I didn't like that I'd rather you know care for the fish in a weird way yeah make sure she doesn't die she didn't at that time so you did get to see her again yes yeah yeah yeah came home and she was fine so while you're at this conference um did people know that you're the guy or is it like you're being normal ben at this conference and secretly

you know checking your fish camera I mean I was being normal ben but everyone knew and it was very embarrassing. Really? Because at this point, it hit like the national media and the international media, actually. And people had seen it and people have said, oh, I saw this in the Guardian. It's almost surreal, the situation. It's difficult to explain how you get to the point of people you've not met reading about you in an actual newspaper about a fish you found on the floor.

It's a weird story. It's a very weird story. So there's a series of things that happen. It seems like Alice moves into a bigger tank. She gets a boyfriend. There's a merch store. There's a GoFundMe. Take me through this series of days.

It's so much happened. So the first thing that happened was a GoFundMe. And that was because I had maybe 1,000 people tell me the tank was too small. And I was like, I'll buy a new tank, but I'll put her in because that's what the internet tells me to do. But then looking at fish tanks, they're so expensive. And I was like, well, I can't justify spending. know, two, 300 quid. So I made this go fund me. It was mainly aimed at the people who were giving me shit saying you should get a bigger tank if you care about animals. I was like, well,

thank you very much. Okay, you do it. But that actually got a lot of traction. I got a lot of money donated to that. But then a company called Fluville, well-known fish company, but I didn't, I don't know this. I didn't know this at the time. Messaged me and said, oh, we can give you a tank for Alice. And I was like, oh, that's nice. That's good. So I didn't need the money on the go fund me after all. So I refunded all that back. And you know you're on the internet and you ask for advice about stuff and people give you loads of shit. Whereas this, I email, there was this bloke at this company that I was emailing and, um, you know, stupid questions about fish. I didn't know the answer to, but which were patently stupid. I would email and ask him and

answer me and, you know, give me actual advice rather than telling me I'm an idiot from not having a tank set up. The merch, I actually bought one of those t-shirts. I think it's shipping soon. That was set, that wasn't set up by me. That was set up by Alice, the fish. I can, Alice. Mainly is a tongue-in-cheek thing because people get asking for it. But then people, including me, bought stuff from it. You had to buy merch from your own fish. That's cruel.

Well, I think that's shipped soon, so I've got a T-shirt with a picture of half-dead fish on. And then Barney came into the mix. How did Barney come into the mix? I imagine, I know nothing about fish, but I imagine it's lonely to be a fish in a tank on your own without a mate. I went to shop and bought a new fish to go along with Alice. I picked Barney. I'm not sure why I picked the name Barney, but I think he kind of suited him.

And I realized I'm accidentally naming these fish, tropical typhoons in terms of like the 80s. Oh my God. Yeah, that's true. The next fish need to start with the sea. I think all of a sudden, done, you had Alice for about a week, right? About a week, yeah, give a take, yeah.

Tell me about her. Tell me about like this weird experience. it's kind of the odd thing about it is that it's given me a really like a new hobby out of nowhere and i've got a weird connection to this stupid fish now barney i mean because of the relationship that i then found on the lawn right but you'd think that fish didn't have personalities but you kind of notice things about them it's me projecting my own you know my own care about these fish you know onto the fish um so i'm going to keep barney obviously i'm not going to kill him And in Alice's memory in this bigger tank and then get, you know, get him some mates to keep him company.

It's a start of a beautiful hobby. Can you say a beautiful hobby? When Alice passed away, did you just, did you find her one morning? What happened? Yeah, so I found her. She was just in the tank in the morning, like in the typical fishy way, like floating in the tank. It actually upset me, to be fair, because I was like, why? You only know this fish for a week. and I think it's the concept that it was nearly dead or maybe dead and I saved her and then she died up just died despite that it's a bit like oh you know like you tried and failed and it's a bit sad but you didn't fail though I don't know I mean that's like part of what I was a random person online that was very moved by this because it was just like you you gave

this creature a lovely last week of their life that's so it's really kind and I suppose it's nicer to, again, I don't know this, but I suppose it's nicer to die in a tank than it is on the lawn. I think within minutes when you posted that she'd passed away. And there is a huge outpouring. What was, what was that like? Well, it was nice, actually. It seems like, I mean, there's a lot of funny responses because the best way to deal with sadness is to take the piss, which is good. I enjoy that very much. But the part of the story is like resonated a bit and it's made people happy, you know, it's a wholesome story, isn't it? It's a bit of a sad end, I suppose, but it's still a wholesome story. It is. Yeah, the fan art was, there's so much of it, first of all,

and it was very sweet. And then you went to a Taylor Swift concert. And I went to a Taylor Swift concert, the traditional way to send off a fish. Yeah. On the internet side, I want to go back to what you were talking about at the beginning, where now it's like, how big did your online audience grow in the space of this very chaotic week with Alice? think maybe like 10, 15,000. I mean, I only had, I think, like 5,000 to start with. But yeah, so I've gained 15,000 people that care only about fish now. Where do you go from here? I'm opening a branded set of pet shops. No, I'm not. No, I don't know. I mean, I'm going to, I mean, Barney's obviously still here. I imagine people still want to hear some updates about that fish,

that silly fish. His new friends called C-D-E-F-G, etc. when they finally get there. But still, every tweet I make that isn't about fish, gets a lot of fish replies. So, you know, it's a bit like you've got to give the audience what they want. More fish content to come? Yes, more fish content to come, yeah. The path of least resistance, isn't it, just to continue on that?

And it's easier than fighting it. Thank you so much to Ben. We'll be hearing more from him soon. And when we come back, I consult an expert to ask the follow-up question and most of you were too cowardly to. What does becoming the fish guy do to your brain? My name is Ed. Everyone say hello, Ed.

I'm from a very rural background myself. My dad is a farmer and my mom is a cousin. So, like, it's not like... What do you get when a true crime producer walks into a comedy club? I know it sounds like the start of a bad joke, but that really was my reality nine years ago. I just normally do straight stand-up, but this is a bit different. On stage stood a comedian with a story that no one expected to hear.

On 22nd of July 2015, a 23-year-old man had killed his family. And then he came to my house. So what do you get when a true crime producer walks into a comedy club? A new podcast called Wisecrack, where stand-up comedy and murder takes center stage. Available now. Listen to Wisecrack on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it.

They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA. Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in evidence so tiny you might just miss it. He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer screen.

I was just like, ah, got you. On America's Crime Lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors. And you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Othrum. the Houston Lab that takes on the most hopeless cases to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What would you do if one bad decision forced you to choose between a maximum security prison or the most brutal boot camp designed to be hell on earth? Unfortunately for Mark Lombardo, this was the choice he faced. He said, you are a number a New York State number, and we own you.

Shock incarceration, also known as boot camps, are short-term, highly regimented correctional programs that mimic military basic training. These programs aim to provide a shock of prison life, emphasizing strict discipline, physical training, hard labor, and rehabilitation programs. Mark had one chance to complete this program and had no idea of the hell awaiting him the next six months.

The first night was so overwhelming, and you don't know who's next to you. And we didn't know what to expect in the morning. Nobody tells you anything. Listen to shock incarceration on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to 16th Minute. When I was in fifth grade, my class inexplicably did a production of Hamlet, and I got to play Hamlet, but only acts one through three. So I got to do Hamlet up until I killed Polonius, and then Katia Andrad just did the rest of it. We were both really good. And today, we are talking

about a fish that fell from the sky and derailed the life of a junior doctor. So after I spoke with Ben Baska, I kept an eye on his posts, and sure enough, his fish empire has continued to grow. Less than two months after Alice, the man has over 15 fish, a whole ass ecosystem, and the tank has a golden decal on the side that reads, The Alice Memorial Tank, and is flanked by fan art from her brief, beautiful week with Ben. Ben's story felt like a great opportunity to ask something that I've been wondering about since this show began. What does going viral do to you psychologically? There's no definitive answer, but psychologists have to you.

have been studying this for decades at this point, and I consulted one of internet psychology's go-to guys. Dr. Elias Abujade, clinical professor, researcher, and writer at Stanford, where he is the chief of the anxiety disorders section and director of the OCD Clinic and the Impulse Controlled Disorders Clinic. Instead of asking him, as a lifelong OCD sufferer, how to personally improve my life, I asked him about the fish guy. Aboujade is also the online. author of the new book, A Leader's Destiny, as well as the 2012 book, Virtually You, The Dangerous Powers of the E-Personality. Talking about these isolated examples like Ben Besska and Alice the Goldfish is what Dr.

Abujade does best in my opinion, and he gave me some insight into what Ben was going through and what you can do if the algorithm tries to kill you like an English bird of prey would to a large goldfish. Here's our talk. Elias Abuchetti. I'm a clinical professor. at Stanford University. I also run the program in Internet Health and Society at Cedars and I Medical Center. I study the intersection of technology and psychology and have done so for almost many years now, hard to believe, and have addressed my work both to the general audience of internet users, but also scientists, researchers. So interested in your work, especially because

because, I mean, a very eventful 20 years for life online in your study and observation. What does receiving a ton of unexpected attention online do to you? Well, online attention has, in a way, become a proxy for self-worth. We value ourselves to the extent that we get, likes, retweets, and all men. of online attention. It is a very valuable currency in that sense. And going viral represents sort of the extreme version of this, you know, something that everyone online is supposed to aspire to

because it represents popularity, it represents clout, and it represents self-esteem. I mean, at this point, I feel like it's fairly common knowledge. the internet is addictive, but in your estimation, has it evolved in the ways it's become addictive? What are the changes you've noticed in the way that were sort of kept tethered to social media and to the internet? Yeah, that's really interesting. I mean, I think a lot of the obvious problems that most people recognize today were

already there, you know, a couple of decades ago. And what we've seen is just this kind of intensification and gradual worsening. One personality trait I've worked on and talked about is narcissism. And you can see how if you have any sort of vulnerability to that or any kind of kernel of that in your personality structure, the internet can intensify it, you know, by giving you a stage, by giving you, quote-unquote, followers, by increasing your sense of how popular and effective you are. It's hard for anyone to be totally immune to that.

But if you already have those tendencies, then they can become quite magnified. that's what we see, I think, repeatedly and online. That's just one of the many personality traits that the Internet and Internet-related technologies act on, and they've all, as the Internet has evolved, they've all been kind of further intensified and magnified. Again, it feels like there's a common consensus that I agree with that this is clearly bad for me.

But I can also directly point to so many positive things in my life, whether it was community building or relationships or whatever it was that wouldn't have been possible without the internet. Because you've observed this and studied this for so long, for people that do have a healthier relationship to the internet, what is the balance? You know, you always get sort of the classic go touch grass, but in so many ways, you know, jobs or communication, it's now, there's not many alternatives. How have you seen people successfully manage relationships with this technology? Well, it is a very freaky balance, I think. And it's gotten almost impossible to pull off because, as you pointed out, you know, you can't be a professional today and not have a

strong online presence. You can't be, you know, a quote unquote, normal teenager and not have a social media presence. So these things have become very ingrained. And I think sort of how culture has evolved is by the time we recognize the dangers, we had already become addicted and the culture has moved so deep into embracing these technologies that we can't turn the clock back. So it's not about kind of going back to 1997 or whatever. It's more about trying to maintain some grounding in real life, whatever that means anymore. And I think there's some encouraging signals in that direction.

I teach undergrads at Stanford and Berkeley, And there seems to be sort of a newfound respect and a new kind of coolness attached to going off of the online grid, at least temporarily. Yeah. We see people souring on online dating, for example, making the courageous decision not to look for a partner or romantic interest on dating apps. So there are attempts, I think overall they're healthy ones. But again, our goal should not be, you know, the lead the last 20 years of our lives. Right. Going back to the subject of this interview, he's this really nice guy named Ben who found a live goldfish that had like fallen out of a bird's beak.

It fell into his lawn and he rescued it while it was still alive. And this was, he tweeted about it. He was, you know, an active Twitter user. It was interesting as we were talking, just listening to him, be like, this is really exciting, but it's also really weird. And it comes with kind of this very specific pressure to feel like, you know, this is you now. And I know you written a book called Virtually You, the Internet and the Fracturing of the Self. Could you tell me a little bit about that as we are constructing our Internet selves?

This feels like a very kind of like extreme. specific example, but I could feel sort of the nucleus of listening to someone kind of shifting the way they've constructed themselves online because of this random thing that happened to them and went viral. And in my book, Virtually, you, I talked about how we have an e-personality that can be quite distinct from how we function, you know, normal life. So we tend to be more aggressive on We tend to be more impulsive. We tend to show more narcissism, less patience, et cetera. And that version of ourselves can feel more sort of attractive, more liberated to us.

And we end up buying into it sometimes excessively and sometimes at the expense of who we really are and what our real personality structure is about. Now, in this example you shared, it does seem like, you know, a nice individual who had some sort of strange thing happened to him practically overnight his life became about that. And I see parallels with what I've written about,

but what I like about how you describe him that he recognized that it's weird. He recognized that it doesn't quite make sense. And sometimes online we stop, like we lose that ability to distinguish between what's, like, weird and what's real, what's fake and what's grounded. You also say that he recognizes the pressure of kind of embracing this persona

and keeping it going. And I also appreciate that about the story because most of us, or many of us, don't see it as pressure. We end up somehow, again, liking it more than we should without acknowledging the pressure to the person that's not really who we are. It felt like he was saying,

and I would feel the same way in the same position, like you've been given this, strange gift of all of these eyes and all in the gift of virality yes the gift in the curse i mean i think of all of these other people who are turned into these internet main characters and how some people you know no i reject this i don't want anything to do with this and others you can see the wheels turning a little bit of like how like is it possible to make this moment a part of who i am does it even make sense. I think, I mean, I think there is a way to have fun with it, embrace it temporarily without allowing it to get to your head too much. I mean, the thing about virality is that it

doesn't last, right? Like, we get tired of people who go viral and stories that go viral pretty quickly. I mean, online, we're constantly on the couch. You know, the next big thing or the next story. I think acknowledging this aspect of virality is important if you don't want to end up being, you know, the victim of it, right? Because if you embrace it and assume that you can keep it up, then you're going against all the lessons that internet history has taught us. But if you can, you know, play with it, have fun with it, but, you know, remember all along that it's not going to be super lasting, then I think that's a healthy or more realistic approach. If I came to you and said, hey, I just completely randomly became an internet main character,

I don't really want this attention. I'm overwhelmed by it. How would you advise me? I guess one thing I would tell you is to reassure you that internet, memes have a finite lifespan that as heavy and overwhelming as this feels as everlasting as it feels, it has

a beginning and middle and an end and it will be shorter living than you probably assume it is. I would caution you against responding impulsively to whatever

situation is because that's another thing that people under pressure will do online and they end up often regretting their reaction. Think through how you react. Don't do anything that might sort of compound the problem. Lastly, I've done a lot of work on privacy, online privacy. Yes. You know, one of the biggest sort of victims of online culture, the fact that we now live in a privacy. and privacy and healthy psychology go hand in hand. So I would urge you, despite this sort of viral state that you're in, I would urge you to be protective of your privacy to the extent that you can,

despite the internet attention. And then the flip side of that. The flip side of that question is I approach you and I say, I want to go viral, I want to become famous online, I think I can handle it, and I don't think it'll affect me. How would you advise me? What I would do in this case is put my therapist a hat on and ask what it is about your current life, your offline life, even your online life, even your online life that feels so empty and hollow that you would be desperately seeking online fame. I would recommend that you not look for online fame for the sake of online fame,

but do what you want to do and go for the goals you always wanted to go for. And if internet fame happens, it will be for the right reasons and not for the sake of it. I love that answer. Yeah. So it's like sometimes it happens, but hopefully, God, I mean, for the few that it happens on their terms. I think just the idea of like wanting internet fame at all costs. And I mean, that's the trap that a lot of culture falls into right. Like I want to be in it for whatever, whatever it takes.

And that's just not. healthy. And then my last question is, I don't know if this is a hard question or not, so I apologize in advance. Is there anything about the state of today's internet, how we're consuming, to feel positive about? I think there's a newfound awareness that we may have embraced some technologies who may have embraced some platforms blindly without sort of thinking through our behavior. There's, I think, broad recognition around that. And I think that's the necessary first step toward being able to correct things, you know, like awareness, education are absolutely essential. And I think there's a lot more of that today compared to even

a couple of years ago. That's the silver lining I see. Whether it's sufficient is a different story altogether, but at least it's a necessary we have a healthier dose of that now compared to the recent past. Thank you so much to Dr. Abujade

and you can find his new book, A Leader's Destiny, Why Psychology, Personality, and Character Make All the Difference at the link in the description. A little over a month after Ben Besket and I first talked, I checked in again to see how he was doing and tell him a little bit about my chat with Dr. Aboujaday. Here are his updates. Hi, Ben, how are you?

Good, thank you. How are you? So we haven't spoken since about this time last month. Tell me what has changed in your fish life. So I now have three fish. names please names so Barney is the original companion to Alice he's still around he did have some kind of weird fungal infection for a while which I think is new but he's better and I think actually it's salt that cured him apparently salt is like a cure all for goldfish we've got Daphne looks a little bit like Alice but is a bit stockier and then we've got Edgar who is a bit like a bruiser kind of bloke who is a bit like a bruiser kind of bloc who is got like a little mustache. I imagine him like a American prohibition kind of guy with a mini gun. Okay. I like that there is also, yeah, the applied personalities. That is critical, a critical component of pet ownership. It's very important. And then obviously we've got

Charlie's Angels, which I think I had last time. I can't remember. Loads of mini fish. There's 13 of them. There's loads of mini little fish. Wow. Okay. This is wonderful news. is this like a lifelong thing have you because that was my question going in i was like is he going to commit to being the fish guy i think i think it is probably yes given that everything has gone well with the you know no fish has died i mean barney tried his best but you know no fish has died so it may be that i'm not terrible at keeping fish and and i'm sure i said this last time But every time that I post anything on Twitter that isn't directly fish related, I almost get abuse for not posting about the fish.

How dare you have other hobbies or other things to talk about. People have said things like, oh, yes, we followed you for the fish. And now we're learning about, you know, the intricacies of the UK medical system. That's fascinating. I have a theory that, yeah, people that casually follow anyone online get really upset if they learn more than like three things about you. You just cannot be too multifaceted or people kind of freak out. It seems like you're posting whatever the fuck you want anyways.

Do you feel pressure to fish post a certain amount? No, not really. I mean, I like posting about the fish because they are quite funny. And the amount of, you know, stupid shit, any animal does, let alone a load of fish. You know, sharing that on Twitter is actually quite, it's quite entertaining. It's also, it's a good way to sort of like document as well, you know, things that have changed over the past month or so. You know, we'll keep doing this.

I'll check in with you in a year and see how life has changed. Any fish goals, anything that you like want to do that you haven't done? Are you going to expand? Are you going to maintain? What's the plan? So apparently someone warned me about this before. It's called multi-tank syndrome. And essentially you start with one fish or one tank and it's never, never enough.

It's sort of like an addiction. And you keep buying more tanks. until your house is more tanks than house. I want a marine tank or salt water tank. Oh, wow. Oh, that's a good. That's serious, right? It's serious.

Well, I'm so glad that Alice has brought this new facet of your life. It's going to be, I'm quite excited to see what my electric bill is going to do. I imagine it's going to go up significantly. Such is the life of a fish father. Quite. Well, thank you for catching up with. me, Ben. No problem.

Thanks so much to Ben Besska for being game to this unhinged case study, and you can follow his ongoing fish adventure on Twitter at BESCA. And with that, Alice, our dearly departed goldfish and Ben Bessca, your 16th minute ends now. And for our moment of fun this week, since this is a pet episode, here is my perfect eldest boy flea singing you a beautiful song. My boy soprano. See you next week. 16th Minute is a production of Cool Zone Media and IHeart Radio. It is written, hosted, and produced by me, Jamie Loftus.

Our executive producers are Sophie Lichten and Robert Evans. The Amazing Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor. Our theme song is by Sad 13. And pet shoutouts to our dog producer Anderson, My Cats Flea, and Casper, and my pet rock bird who will outlive us all. Bye. Welcome to Pretty Private with Ebeney, the podcast where silence is broken and stories are set free.

I'm Ebeney, and every Tuesday I'll be sharing all new anonymous stories that would challenge your perceptions and give you new insight on the people around you. Every Tuesday, make sure you listen to Pretty Private from the Black Effect Podcast Network. Tune in on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Your entire identity has been fabricated. Your beloved brother goes missing without a trace. You discover the depths of your mother's illness. I'm Danny Shapiro, and these are just a few of the powerful stories I'll be mining on our upcoming 12th season of family secrets.

We continue to be moved and inspired by our guests and their courageously told stories. Listen to Family Secrets Season 12 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I just normally do straight stand-up, but this is a bit different. What do you get when a true crime producer walks into a comedy club? Answer, a new podcast called Wisecrack, where a comedian finds himself at the center of a chilling true crime story. Does anyone know what show they've come to see? It's a story. It's about the scariest night of my life.

This is Wisecrack. available now. Listen to Wisecrack on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast.