Ben Palmer's Brain

Comedian Ben Palmer set up a fake tip line for reporting immigrants in the United States suspected of not having legal status. He recorded the conversations, and things... got uncomfortable and, in some cases, disturbing. But for a lot of viewers, these calls were surprisingly funny. How does Ben Palmer withstand the awkwardness and maintain his deadpan delivery as he trolls unsuspecting Americans trying to get their neighbors deported? And how did he go from being your average stand-up comic, doing sets after his day job, to creating viral social commentary full-time? Show notes: He made a fake ICE deportation tip line. Then a kindergarten teacher called. (Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/02/20/fake-ice-tip-line-viral/) God, Country, Family (YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wclaq1iZxiU) Ben Palmer's YouTube Channel (YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@palmertrolls) This episode was written and produced by Grace Tatter. It was co-hosted by Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson, and edited by Meg Cramer. Mix and sound design by Paul Vaitkus.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Support for WBUR comes from the Quiet Tension Podcast. When Joe Missoula got the Celtics job, Steve Paliuka sat up until 1:00 in the morning, typing him 25 things about leadership. Dr. Sharon Turbin asks what came first on the list. Listen closely wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:19Speaker 01

  Whenever fall comes back around, it always feels like a fresh start. This year, I've been layering in some styles from the new Lululemon fall drop, because the weather is shifting and I find I have to be ready for the entire day and not just one part of it. Lululemon's fall line has some really versatile transitional pieces, so I can just wake up, throw on a matching set, add a jacket or a fleece, and head out, knowing that I'll feel comfortable enough to go wherever the day takes me. Check out the new fall arrivals in store and online now at lululemon.com.

• 0:48Amory Sivertson?

  Ugh, I hate Mondays.

• 0:50Speaker 03

  King's Hawaiian cinnamon swirl bite?

• 0:52Amory Sivertson?

  Taylor Hansen? Sure, I'll try one. Mmm.

• 0:58Speaker 04

  Hey, let's get back to work, please.

• 0:59Amory Sivertson?

  But Taylor Hansen's making my day way better with these new soft and swirly King's Hawaiian cinnamon bites.

• 1:04Speaker 04

  Taylor Hansen? Nice. Try one. Mmm.

• 1:11Speaker 04

  King's Hawaiian cinnamon bites. There's nothing like it.

• 1:19Ben Brock Johnson?

  WBUR Podcasts, Boston.

• 1:29Ben Brock Johnson?

  Recently, we had the luck of talking to another Ben, Ben Palmer. Ben Palmer has a tip line for reporting people in the United States without legal status.

• 1:41Speaker 06

  It was a young Spanish woman who couldn't speak English. It's just sad for them to even be here. Three customers in front of us also did not speak English. All I was trying to do was find out how to deal with these people.

• 1:52Ben Brock Johnson?

  The Trump administration has made immigration enforcement a priority. And at first blush, Ben Palmer is just doing his part to help other people do their part. He got this tip from a woman who was suspicious of her neighbors.

• 2:09Speaker 06

  It's gotten out of control. I mean, it's like they side-eye you every time you walk outside to pick your trash out. They're... You said they're side... Dying you? Yeah, like, you know, giving you dirty looks whenever you walk by with your garbage or whatever, like, just trying to make you feel uncomfortable. I don't know how many of them are actually illegal, but I would say probably about half of them because they never leave home. They're always, always here.

• 2:33Speaker 07

  They're homebodies.

• 2:35Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:38Ben Brock Johnson?

  Ben took the neighbor's report, said he'd look into it, and then he called her back.

• 2:43Speaker 07

  Okay, yeah, so we were able to look into those individuals that you had reported. And yeah, we were able to find you some help on that.

• 2:51Speaker 06

  Oh, really? Okay.

• 2:54Speaker 07

  Yeah, so this is from a clinical psychologist. Says that your brain often misinterprets dirty looks due to negativity bias and personalization.

• 3:04Speaker 06

  Okay, you're not talking about psychological help because I know what side-eyeing is and I'm not imagining things.

• 3:12Amory Sivertson?

  If you're not familiar with Ben Palmer, you might have felt discomfort listening to that call. And then maybe it dawned on you.

• 3:22Speaker 07

  I like pretending to be things that I'm not and inserting myself in situations where I don't necessarily belong for fun and entertainment.

• 3:33Amory Sivertson?

  This tip line is a bit. This Ben is a comedian.

• 3:38Ben Brock Johnson?

  How dare you? Okay, yes, he is a real comedian. It is true. How did Ben, a kind of quiet, millennial, brown-haired dude from Nashville, get to be a comedian? Practice, practicing jokes, but also life experience that has informed his jokes.

• 3:55Amory Sivertson?

  Ben is a United States Air Force veteran. He also drove for Uber. He worked at a car emissions testing company. And his comedy often leans into the banality and the brutality of customer service.

• 4:09Ben Brock Johnson?

  Because that stuff was on his resume before he became a comedian who takes aim at this kind of thing. Do you just like doing different jobs, whether you do them really or fakely?

• 4:20Speaker 07

  No, I didn't like any of those jobs.

• 4:22Ben Brock Johnson?

  Okay.

• 4:23Speaker 07

  I just had to do them. The one job I've always wanted to do is comedy.

• 4:29Amory Sivertson?

  Another side hustle Ben had while trying to make it? Appearing on Court TV.

• 4:38Speaker 07

  It just started with another stand-up comedian friend of mine.

• 4:42Ben Brock Johnson?

  Ben's friend proposes that they submit lawsuits to Court TV shows. You can just go to the TV show's websites and fill out a form with your case. You don't even always have to file with a real court first.

• 4:56Amory Sivertson?

  Ben's friend tells him that if they're chosen, they'll get flown out to LA and then they can split the winnings 50/50.

• 5:03Speaker 07

  And I'm like, all right, let's do it.

• 5:07Amory Sivertson?

  So Ben and his friends come up with a fake dispute. A comedian who walked offstage because he was getting heckled and was now in breach of contract for not completing his set.

• 5:18Speaker 07

  And we already had some show flyers, so it wasn't really hard to, you know, come up with that or, you know, lie about that.

• 5:26Amory Sivertson?

  Promoter Ben Palmer is suing a performer for breach of contract. Defended to Rulio. They got picked and flown out to a Hollywood studio for the taping, where Ben told the judge that his friend, the comedian, was heckled because he wasn't very funny. So you say he was laughing at his own jokes before he told.

• 5:45Speaker 07

  Laughing at his own jokes? That's not good. I did it once.

• 5:49Speaker 04

  Joining him in court is his witness and fellow comedian, Ben Palmer.

• 5:54Speaker 07

  I did it twice.

• 5:56Speaker 04

  Michael Albanese is suing Benjamin Phil Palmer for $4,000 for a refund of.

• 6:02Speaker 07

  I did it as many times as I could before eventually they go, hey, you've been on these shows before. We can't have you on.

• 6:08Amory Sivertson?

  But it all worked out for Ben. He doesn't need those Court TV payouts anymore.

• 6:13Ben Brock Johnson?

  How did Ben Palmer go from goofing around on Court TV to creating, as one commenter put it, "one of the most creative, nonviolent, and effective acts of resistance they'd ever seen"? I'm Mother Ben Brock Johnson.

• 6:27Amory Sivertson?

  I'm Amory Sivertson.

• 6:29Ben Brock Johnson?

  And you're listening to Endless Threat.

• 6:30Amory Sivertson?

  Coming to you from WBUR, Boston's NPR. Today's episode, Ben Palmer's Brain.

• 6:42Ben Brock Johnson?

  Ben first tried his hand at stand-up back in 2008 when he was living in Ohio.

• 6:48Speaker 07

  Yeah, I just had a bunch of weird ideas that I prepared for a long time and went up and did it. And it didn't go as great as I thought it was gonna go.

• 6:57Ben Brock Johnson?

  You don't say.

• 7:00Speaker 07

  It probably was a bomb, but in my head, I heard maybe one or two laughs and they probably were awkward laughs. But I, that was enough for me to keep trying.

• 7:09Amory Sivertson?

  Was it political in any way? What was the?

• 7:12Speaker 07

  No, not at all. It was very weird, absurd.

• 7:15Amory Sivertson?

  So Ben was doing straight up stand-up, just him and a mic. And then he started experimenting with new places to try out his absurd style of comedy.

• 7:26Ben Brock Johnson?

  Like on Facebook?

• 7:27Speaker 07

  None of the corporations or the companies were on there. And it was just like a fun thing to do with your friends. And then the corporations went on there and it was like, oh, great.

• 7:37Ben Brock Johnson?

  Back around 2015, corporations like Uber were making Facebook pages, but they weren't responding to comments left by customers.

• 7:46Speaker 07

  Their page was just filled with complaints and issues people were having and nobody was responding to them. So I was like, wow, I'm gonna respond then. And so that's where it started.

• 8:00Amory Sivertson?

  At first, Ben would just use his personal Facebook account to respond to these consumer complaints. He'd sign his posts, Ben Palmer, freelance customer service representative.

• 8:11Ben Brock Johnson?

  Ben started to make videos narrating his Facebook exploits.

• 8:15Speaker 07

  Or on Walmart's Facebook page, Gina is talking about how she went to the store in Arizona and saw several employees wearing BLM masks. She used to love shopping at Walmart, but then they started supporting BLM. She will no longer shop there.

• 8:31Amory Sivertson?

  Ben replied to Gina, posing as a Walmart employee.

• 8:36Speaker 07

  Well, we are disappointed to see you go. We understand how you may feel strongly about bio-latex manufacturing. We hope you change your mind and shop at Walmart again.

• 8:51Ben Brock Johnson?

  As a customer service agent on Facebook, Ben's tone always comes off as matter of fact, dutiful. He's just getting the job done. He's walking a line where we, his audience, can see he's kidding, but the person he's trolling often can't.

• 9:08Amory Sivertson?

  At first, he was just playing this character behind a keyboard. But then he started to up the ante, doing this bit on video where he has to keep a straight face to sell his deadpan delivery, like in a Zoom interview for a job with a multi-level marketing company. What stood out to you on the company overview?

• 9:30Speaker 03

  Well, I did see that on Glassdoor, you guys had half a star. And, you know, that's something that I always look at when I'm looking at prospective companies. I do have a zero star standard and you guys had, you had half. So you definitely met my standards there, as far as that goes.

• 9:54Amory Sivertson?

  I can tell you my experience as a viewer, which is like, I am wanting the person to believe you for as long as possible.

• 10:02Ben Brock Johnson?

  Why do you want that?

• 10:05Amory Sivertson?

  Because I'm, like, I'm trying to delay the, the moment of realization that something is up. Like, I don't, I don't want the jig to be up too soon because I'm so uncomfortable when it is.

• 10:20Speaker 07

  I usually try to go as long as I can. But there gets a point where I start to get tired of the person.

• 10:28Ben Brock Johnson?

  Do you have a record?

• 10:31Speaker 07

  Yeah, I went three months with a politician who thought I was somebody I wasn't.

• 10:37Amory Sivertson?

  This was Ted Yoho, a former Republican congressman from Florida.

• 10:41Speaker 07

  He's the congressman who called AOC an F and B.

• 10:45Amory Sivertson?

  That's Ben politely avoiding what Yoho really called Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2020, "a fucking bitch." At the time, Yoho told Congress that AOC had misheard him.

• 10:58Ben Brock Johnson?

  A couple of years later, Yoho stumbled onto a website Ben's friend had made.

• 11:03Speaker 07

  Parler Social was the name of it.

• 11:05Amory Sivertson?

  Parler is the social network that was launched as a free speech alternative to Facebook and Twitter in 2018 and is mostly associated with conservative or right-wing users.

• 11:17Ben Brock Johnson?

  Parler Social was a parody of that site.

• 11:21Speaker 07

  And even on the website, it said, "This is a joke." But he left his phone number, and so I called him. And yeah, we became like friends almost.

• 11:32Ben Brock Johnson?

  Ben told Yoho that his name was Eric and that he worked for Parler Social, and he offered to help Yoho start a podcast.

• 11:40Amory Sivertson?

  Ben contacted the lawyer for Sacha Baron Cohen, the comedian who plays Borat. That lawyer provided Ben with a release form that Baron Cohen gets people to sign when he's interviewing them in character.

• 11:53Ben Brock Johnson?

  In these recordings, Yoho told Ben that he had a name for the podcast that he wanted to make: God, Country, Family.

• 12:01Speaker 03

  You know, pretty much God, Country, Family, everything I ran on.

• 12:05Speaker 07

  Sorry, you cut out?

• 12:06Speaker 03

  If I cut out.

• 12:07Speaker 07

  Yeah, "God, Damn It, Family" or something like that.

• 12:11Speaker 03

  God, Country, Family.

• 12:13Speaker 07

  Oh, okay.

• 12:14Amory Sivertson?

  Ben chatted with Yoho often. At one point, they talked about a gun safety program that Yoho had proposed.

• 12:21Speaker 03

  When I was in Congress, a gun safety program to go into the school, of course, none of the schools, you know, really wanted to do that.

• 12:27Speaker 07

  Maybe if there were more shooting ranges inside the schools, you know, that way all that aggression, you know, you skip right past the lunchroom, you know, right to the shooting range, maybe some target practice in. Even if the targets were, you know, six-year-old boys and girls as the targets, you know, that saves a life then, hey.

• 12:46Speaker 03

  Well, and have the parents come out with you.

• 12:50Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yoho trusted Ben. He even told Ben that he had, in fact, called AOC an effing B.

• 12:57Speaker 03

  A reporter heard me say something. He said, "What was that about?" I said, "No."

• 13:01Speaker 06

  Comment. You guys are in the media business and you know, when somebody says no comment, it's kind of off the record, you know, you don't, you don't go after that.

• 13:10Speaker 07

  Right.

• 13:10Speaker 06

  And he said, did you call her an F and B? And I said, no comment. Um, but truth is, as I walked away by myself, I said, what a F and B.

• 13:28Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yoho didn't catch on to any funny business until Ben agreed to help him record a God family country interview with former Republican presidential candidate and representative from Minnesota, Michelle Bachmann, in person at Liberty University in Virginia.

• 13:46Amory Sivertson?

  Ben brought some gifts to the taping, including child shaped target cutouts.

• 13:52Speaker 07

  And that's when he realized, okay, yeah, this isn't, this isn't right. But he had to really put it in his face.

• 13:58Ben Brock Johnson?

  How did he react?

• 14:00Speaker 07

  Angerly.

• 14:06Amory Sivertson?

  Did you, um, did you ever see the documentary Free Solo?

• 14:10Speaker 07

  Yeah, I did.

• 14:11Ben Brock Johnson?

  If you haven't seen it, Free Solo is a documentary about rock climber Alex Honnold, who climbs huge mountains without ropes. In the documentary, we find out his amygdala, the part of the brain that processes emotion, including fear, isn't as reactive as most people's.

• 14:29Amory Sivertson?

  I have a very low threshold for, um, other people being embarrassed, whatever the scenario is. And I wonder, like, are you feeling the same thing on the other side, but you're just keeping it going because you're so committed to the bit? Or, or are you, are you like Free Solo guy and you just have a much higher threshold for making people uncomfortable?

• 14:54Speaker 07

  Maybe I need to get my amygdala checked out. Never thought about that.

• 15:01Speaker 07

  I'm not trying to embarrass people and a lot of times I feel for the people and I have empathy for them and I'm not trying to, I don't want to be, it's hard for me to be mean to people, even if I disagree with them or they're saying something ridiculous. But yeah, like, you know, the only time my amygdala goes off is when I'm wondering if they know who I am and that's, that's where I get a little, sometimes, like every time I talk to him on the phone, I go, is this the call where he's gonna go, hey, I found out who you really are, you know, and then I'm like, ah, damn it. Cause that happened to me at the court shows once, actually, like, I, I got all the way to the finish line, I got picked up at the airport in a car and they drove me to the studio and we're gonna film the next day and right before that happened, they, they picked

• 15:43Speaker 07

  me up, I get out of the car and then the producer goes, she goes, Ben, you're a comedian and you live in Atlanta and I was like, yeah. Cause at the time I told her, I told her my name was Phil, I used my middle name so I could still submit my driver's license when they buy you a flight and I wasn't lying.

• 16:02Ben Brock Johnson?

  You can't, you can't see this Ben, but Emery had a physical reaction to what you just described. She was like trying to crawl into a hole in the studio.

• 16:10Speaker 07

  The amygdala's firing off. Uh, and so I felt that way, I was like, oh no, she's about to just like tell me I have to go all the way back home, I just flew across the country for this and then all she said was, you better be funny.

• 16:29Speaker 04

  Today, Judge Alex wonders how one litigant made it this far. You know how procreation works, right? You know that there's like a million sperm that go swimming towards that one egg competing to see which one can fertilize that egg?

• 16:42Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 16:43Speaker 04

  I am amazed that yours won.

• 16:50Ben Brock Johnson?

  More investigating Ben's brain after a break.

• 17:02Speaker 00

  Support for WBUR comes from the Quiet Tension Podcast. There's a part of high performance that drives you, shapes you, and pulls at you, too. Rarely spoken, almost never examined, that's the quiet tension. Coming up, psychologist and executive coach Dr. Sharon Turbin with Steve Paliuka on what separates the leaders people follow from the ones they don't. Stay with us for a preview. Listen closely wherever you get your podcasts.

• 17:31Speaker 01

  Whenever fall comes back around, it always feels like a fresh start. This year, I've been layering in some styles from the new Lululemon fall drop because the weather is shifting and I find I have to be ready for the entire day and not just one part of it. Lululemon's fall line has some really versatile transitional pieces, so I can just wake up, throw on a matching set, add a jacket or a fleece, and head out, knowing that I'll feel comfortable enough to go wherever the day takes me. Check out the new fall arrivals in store and online now at lululemon.com.

• 18:01Amory Sivertson?

  Now at Kroger, your points add up to more ways to save every trip. Use them your way to take dollars off groceries at checkout or save at the pump. You can even save up to $35 on your next fill-up. Same points, more choices. And with low prices on fresh, quality food, plus digital and personalized offers tailored to how you shop, your dollar goes further. Redeem your points online or in the app. Kroger, fresh for everyone. Restrictions apply. See site or store for details. Ben Palmer has had several comedy videos that have gotten millions of views across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. But when he created a fake immigration tip line back in February

• 18:44Amory Sivertson?

  and started posting videos like the one you heard at the beginning of this episode...

• 18:48Speaker 06

  I don't know how many of them are actually illegal.

• 18:50Amory Sivertson?

  He got a whole new level of attention.

• 18:54Ben Brock Johnson?

  His most viewed video from this series features a teacher. She wanted to report the parents of a kindergarten student at her school.

• 19:05Speaker 07

  And it looks like they have a child who was born in New York, which makes them an American citizen.

• 19:10Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 19:11Speaker 07

  So we're looking to deport the parents and leave the child.

• 19:16Speaker 06

  Right. Like I said, I don't know if they're here illegally. I just... I think it's odd, you know, very odd.

• 19:22Ben Brock Johnson?

  She thinks they're not in the country legally because, she says, they are Hispanic, and there aren't a lot of Hispanic people in her community.

• 19:31Speaker 07

  Yeah, because you normally see those people where?

• 19:35Speaker 06

  Like in the city.

• 19:36Speaker 07

  Got it. Okay, Hispanics out of place now in country, not where they belong in city.

• 19:45Amory Sivertson?

  This video has racked up more than 1 million views on YouTube since Ben posted it in early February, and more than 22 million views on TikTok.

• 19:55Ben Brock Johnson?

  Many of the top commenters are alarmed that a teacher would profile a student and then facilitate separating that student from their family. They use words like devastated, disgusting.

• 20:08Amory Sivertson?

  Since starting his second term, President Trump has promised to target more than 10 million migrants unauthorized to live in the United States. The number of people jailed in immigration detention centers is at an all-time high, including some US citizens and more than 11,000 parents of kids who are US citizens.

• 20:29Ben Brock Johnson?

  Ben opposes the administration's immigration enforcement tactics, and yet he's able to engage with callers like that teacher in his signature deadpan, low-firing, amygdala tone.

• 20:41Speaker 07

  Teachers at school wants kindergarten child's parents deported.

• 20:47Speaker 06

  You make it sound terrible. You make it sound like it's terrible, but...

• 20:50Speaker 07

  Oh, well, I'm just writing down what you're telling me.

• 20:52Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 21:03Speaker 07

  Once you kind of put it back on them, what's going to happen if what they called for happens, they get uncomfortable. But it's like, but that's what's going to happen. There's another lady who's like, I want to call about this employee that works at Publix. And she helped me find the water, but she didn't speak English, so I want to report her.

• 21:20Ben Brock Johnson?

  And so despite her ability to help you find the water, you feel like she should be put in a van and driven?

• 21:29Speaker 07

  Across the bar.

• 21:30Speaker 06

  No, it's not. No, that's, that's not at all what I'm saying. What I'm saying is it's worth an interest. It's worth, it's worth a piece.

• 21:37Speaker 07

  It becomes uncomfortable for them once it, they have to sit with it themselves as opposed to putting it out on somebody else, like, you know, an official like me.

• 21:48Amory Sivertson?

  Have you had any breakthroughs with any of the callers in real time or more so just people watching these?

• 21:55Speaker 07

  Yeah, I had someone go, you know what? The more questions I asked him, I shouldn't have even called you. He goes, you have a nice day. I'm like, yeah, you too. See you later.

• 22:12Amory Sivertson?

  I wonder what, if you have sort of ethical guardrails that you follow, whether it's something like the immigration tip line or any of your bits, are there, are there lines for yourself that you won't cross to get a laugh?

• 22:32Speaker 07

  Yeah, I've never shared anybody's personal information. Even when I was doing the trolling on Facebook, I'd always crop out their profile picture and their name, or mostly last name. I'm dealing with the ideas that these people, or the beliefs that these people have, not the people themselves. I don't want them getting death threats. I don't want them getting bombarded and doxxed. I don't think that's helpful. It's just damaging. Now I'm causing trauma to people because I put them on blast. Millions of people saw the video. Now they get hate mail every day. I don't want that.

• 23:07Amory Sivertson?

  The way that the tip line has been covered, or it seems like a lot of the reaction to it originally was that this was this act of resistance, maybe even more so than it is a joke or a bit. What do you think of that?

• 23:24Speaker 07

  Yeah, I think, I like that. It's nice to be a part of that, especially when it really matters. When you're talking about people that are just using the hotline maliciously.

• 23:36Speaker 07

  It's good that I'm getting in the way of that and trying to handle their problem without it getting to the real people.

• 23:48Amory Sivertson?

  The real people being the real ICE and the real DHS.

• 23:52Ben Brock Johnson?

  The Department of Homeland Security put out a statement saying they were aware of a fraudulent YouTube page falsely representing ICE and condemned it. Some conservatives have said you could go to prison. What do you think about that?

• 24:06Speaker 07

  Well, it's a YouTube channel, not a YouTube page, but I appreciate that they're watching me and I hope, I hope they had their ad block turned off when they watched the videos. So you could say that technically the Department of Homeland Security chipped in on all this. But yeah, I also noticed that their statement didn't necessarily say that what I was doing was illegal. So that also kind of helped. They said they just don't condone it.

• 24:38Amory Sivertson?

  Since we spoke with him, Ben has continued to release videos from this hotline and they continue to rack up hundreds of thousands, if not millions of views.

• 24:47Ben Brock Johnson?

  He's planning another stand-up tour. He is doing comedy full-time. Now his only other jobs are pretend.

• 24:56Amory Sivertson?

  I wonder if, how you have thought about your role as a comedian, seeing that you started, you know, well over a decade ago at this point and how maybe your, how you view your role as a comedian differently in this America that we're living in right now as opposed to 2008 when you were getting into stand-up.

• 25:23Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's definitely evolved for me, you know? In the beginning, I'm just making jokes, talking about my dating life or, you know, little observations, awkward stuff, just trying to make people laugh.

• 25:37Speaker 07

  Yeah, and at some point I started to be able to use comedy a little differently. I think it's effective in shining a light on things and, you know.

• 25:50Speaker 07

  Making people see that there's things going on behind the scenes that maybe we should have a little bit more attention on. People love laughing and it's very, it's a lot more spreadable. I don't know if spreadable is a word, but I just-

• 26:03Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah, of course.

• 26:04Ben Brock Johnson?

  We'll take it, yeah.

• 26:05Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 26:06Ben Brock Johnson?

  There's a lot of things that are spreadable.

• 26:07Speaker 07

  Yeah. I think of my comedy like peanut butter and-

• 26:12Amory Sivertson?

  And some people are allergic to it and most people are not.

• 26:16Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 26:20Amory Sivertson?

  Thank you for using your, your superhuman amygdala for, um, for comedy goals.

• 26:27Speaker 07

  I'm really happy about my amygdala.

• 26:30Amory Sivertson?

  I hope you've never felt better about your amygdala than this day.

• 26:34Ben Brock Johnson?

  In this moment.

• 26:35Speaker 07

  Yes, definitely. Top 10 amygdala day for me.

• 26:46Amory Sivertson?

  Before we go, we should say we did reach out to the politician Ben Palmer trolled for months. The guy who called AOC an expletive, former Representative Ted Yoho, to hear his thoughts on how his relationship with Palmer played out. We didn't hear back from Yoho in time for this episode, but if he wants to talk, he can reach us troll free.

• 27:17Amory Sivertson?

  Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was written and produced by Grace Tatter and co-hosted by me, Amory Sivertson.

• 27:26Ben Brock Johnson?

  And me, Ben Brock Johnson. It was edited by Meg Cramer, mixed and sound design by our production manager, Paul Vikes, who also pitched this episode. Props to Paul.

• 27:36Amory Sivertson?

  The rest of our team is Dean Russell, Chios Nambirdado, Kalyani Saxena, Emily Jankowski, and our managing producer, Suma Tajoshi.

• 27:43Ben Brock Johnson?

  Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between a real customer service agent and Ben Palmer.

• 27:49Amory Sivertson?

  If you have an untold history, an unsolved mystery, or some other wild story from the internet that you want us to tell, hit us up. [email protected].

• 28:16Speaker 00

  Support for WBUR comes from the Quiet Tension Podcast with Dr. Sharon Churbin, psychologist, executive coach, and a close listener to what lives beneath high performance. Here she is with Steve Paliuka, who built Bain Capital and helped bring a championship back to Boston, on the thing the best leaders do that most don't.

• 28:37Speaker 06

  The best leaders kind of give credit and take blame. When something goes wrong, they're the first ones to take responsibility for it. And they see the good in the other people on the team. They don't immediately try to deflect whatever problem there was, what went wrong. You miss the sales target on the salesperson, they reflect on themselves and what they could do better. Same thing, you know, what Joe Mazzulla does in basketball. If you see his press conferences and the Celtics don't play well, the first thing he says is, you know, "I need to coach better. I made a mistake here. I made a mistake there." Not many coaches do that. But that's why the players love Joe, and that's why, another reason, he's a great coach. So there are things like that that you learn. There are

• 29:18Speaker 06

  many, many more things like that I learned from people like Red Auerbach and my classmates from business school and sports and all the rest.

• 29:27Speaker 00

  And really, what an array of leaders, because leadership is both the same and different, depending on the environment that you're in.

• 29:37Speaker 00

  Listen for more of the Quiet Tension wherever you get your podcasts.

• 29:43Amory Sivertson?

  When fall comes back around, there's a sense of a reset. And new pieces from Lululemon's fall drop are an inspiration to push your goals and elevate your routines. As your calendar fills, easy-to-layer styles meet the demands of your day. And as you challenge yourself to try even more, versatile sets transition with you. The Lululemon Fall lineup brings new levels of comfort and confidence, whether you're starting something fresh or starting something over. Check out the latest arrivals in store and on lululemon.com now.

• 30:13Amory Sivertson?

  When you shop Kroger delivery, you can expect the savings you love and fresh groceries delivered right to your door. From delicious produce to everyday essentials, enjoy the convenience of delivery and the trusted selection you've come to know from Kroger. Because bringing you fresh, quality groceries is what we do best. Right now, enjoy free delivery on orders of $50 or more with your digital coupon. Restrictions apply. See site for details. Kroger. Fresh for everyone.