Manifesting an online rom-com existence

Of all the internet communities in all the world, you walked into ours. Hosts Ben and Amory pay homage to the magic of chance encounters with producer Grace Tatter. Together, they explore the ways in which the internet fuels random yet delightful meetings between strangers online, from a website https://youraislopbores.me/ where you can impersonate ChatGPT to Craigslist's beloved Missed Connections page. Show notes: YourAISlopBores. Me https://youraislopbores.me/ What Craigslist’s missed connections are still good for https://www.thebolditalic.com/what-craigslists-missed-connections-are-still-good-for/ (The Bold Italic) Credits: This episode was produced by Kalyani Saxena. Mix and sound design by Marquis Neal. It was edited by Meg Cramer and Dave Shaw, and hosted by Ben Brock Johnson, Amory Sivertson, and Grace Tatter.

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.

• 0:19Amory Sivertson?

  Support for Endless Thread comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at mathworks.com.

• 0:34Speaker 02

  Ugh, I hate Mondays.

• 0:36Speaker 03

  King's Hawaiian cinnamon swirl bite?

• 0:37Speaker 02

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

• 0:43Speaker 04

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

• 0:45Speaker 02

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

• 0:49Speaker 04

  Taylor Hansen? Nice.

• 0:51Speaker 03

  Try one.

• 0:52Speaker 04

  Mmm.

• 0:56Speaker 05

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

• 1:05Speaker 05

  WBUR Podcasts, Boston.

• 1:15Speaker 06

  Hello, hosts Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson.

• 1:19Ben Brock Johnson?

  Mmm, greetings, producer Grace Tatter.

• 1:22Amory Sivertson?

  Hello.

• 1:23Speaker 06

  We've all planned to be here today, but we're going to be talking about chance encounters, things that don't involve scheduled calendar invites.

• 1:33Amory Sivertson?

  Couldn't plan them if you wanted to.

• 1:34Speaker 06

  Exactly.

• 1:36Ben Brock Johnson?

  Are we talking about the good kind or the bad kind, Grace? The good stuff or the bad stuff?

• 1:41Speaker 06

  That will be in your hands, Ben.

• 1:43Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh, boy. Are you gonna chance encounter me?

• 1:46Amory Sivertson?

  We think we've shown up for an Endless Thread taping, but Grace is about to flip the script.

• 1:52Ben Brock Johnson?

  Nice, okay.

• 1:53Speaker 06

  So, yeah, I would say, online at least, life has not been feeling very serendipitous lately because everything is curated by the invisible hand of an algorithm. And then there's also just so much AI online now, whether it's like content from actual bots or people using AI.

• 2:12Ben Brock Johnson?

  I'm having a lot of chance encounters with slop. That's basically, and it doesn't feel so chance, you're right.

• 2:18Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah, it can feel like kind of a bummer.

• 2:22Speaker 06

  So I have a little internet antidote to all of that. My friend Emily recently told me about a site where anyone can answer questions pretending to be ChatGPT.

• 2:36Amory Sivertson?

  What?

• 2:38Speaker 06

  The URL, if you want to go to it, is youraislopbores.me.

• 2:45Amory Sivertson?

  Oh, I'm over 13 and agree to follow the code of conduct. I'm not reading the code of conduct.

• 2:50Ben Brock Johnson?

  Wait, wait, wait, you're, I feel like you're diving in. I haven't hit any, I don't know which of these three options I should pick yet. Should, do I?

• 2:57Amory Sivertson?

  What? Then you got something different than I did.

• 3:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, what did you get?

• 3:02Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh, I, I have your AI slope bores.

• 3:06Speaker 06

  What website was that?

• 3:09Ben Brock Johnson?

  All right, now, now I'm in the right place. It's got a little skull emoji. I'm clicking the things. I'm agreeing to the terms of service without reading them. All right, I'm in.

• 3:20Speaker 06

  Okay, cool. And our rules popping up for you in Comic Sans?

• 3:26Amory Sivertson?

  I see Comic Sans. I can't say I see rules.

• 3:29Speaker 06

  Um, okay, I think the rules might have popped up really quickly. So they say, in a world looming with the threat of AI stealing your job, save humanity by stealing AI's job. And how it works is that you earn credits by LARPing, live action role playing as AI, which means someone puts in a prompt, either for a text response or a drawing, and you either type or draw your response in character as AI. And that gets you credits, which you can then spend asking other fake AIs questions or asking them to draw something. Does that make sense?

• 4:09Amory Sivertson?

  I think so. So LARP to earn credits, go to human mode to spend credits if you want to ask AI something yourself.

• 4:16Speaker 06

  Yeah, that was a much more elegant way to explain it. Yes, exactly.

• 4:21Amory Sivertson?

  Okay, I'm gonna hit start LARPing.

• 4:23Speaker 06

  Yes, yeah, I was going to say you all should, should start, start LARPing.

• 4:27Ben Brock Johnson?

  You should LARPing? I'm gonna start LARPing.

• 4:30Amory Sivertson?

  I'm gonna start LARPing. It's playing music.

• 4:35Speaker 06

  So the music plays when you're waiting for a response. Because like right now, we can see at the bottom, only 664 people are online. 338 humans versus 325 AI in your AI right now. So it was waiting to match you with a, a human prompt.

• 4:54Amory Sivertson?

  Okay.

• 4:55Speaker 06

  That's why you're hearing the loud music.

• 4:57Ben Brock Johnson?

  Okay. I got a new one. It says, could the big Yahoo save us from what we D? I think they meant did. Um, I'm gonna say the big Yahoo is busy right now.

• 5:13Amory Sivertson?

  You've created a monster, Grace. This is all, this is all Ben is gonna say.

• 5:18Ben Brock Johnson?

  I'm in, I'm in.

• 5:19Speaker 06

  Ben is now fully AI.

• 5:21Ben Brock Johnson?

  Random, random, random people talking to me? That's my friggin' dream. It's my dream.

• 5:27Speaker 06

  Fun. What, like, what makes it so fun?

• 5:30Amory Sivertson?

  And random people thinking that you're an expert.

• 5:34Ben Brock Johnson?

  Smooches. I'm gonna say the big Yahoo is busy right now. Come back later. Smooches.

• 5:43Ben Brock Johnson?

  This is the best. What do you mean? How? I mean, it's the best.

• 5:47Ben Brock Johnson?

  It's great. I'm in. I'll see you guys later.

• 5:51Speaker 06

  Okay. Well, now I feel like you should take a turn being a human.

• 5:55Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh God, so boring. Okay, fine.

• 5:57Speaker 06

  Ask AI something. A fellow AI.

• 6:02Ben Brock Johnson?

  Okay. Someone responded and said below the, uh, knee as to where are your feet at?

• 6:07Speaker 06

  That was what you wanted to ask?

• 6:09Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah. And I said, where's your head at? And someone responded, in the gutters.

• 6:15Speaker 06

  Aww.

• 6:16Ben Brock Johnson?

  And then I said, Amory, this you?

• 6:18Amory Sivertson?

  See what you get back. They'll be like, who the hell is that?

• 6:21Speaker 06

  Or it will be another Amory. That would really be.

• 6:24Amory Sivertson?

  That would be a chance encounter for you. What are the chances of that?

• 6:28Ben Brock Johnson?

  Someone responded, you thought you were talking to Amory? And then they go to all caps, but no, it was I. Dio.

• 6:40Amory Sivertson?

  Ooh, I got a prompt.

• 6:42Speaker 06

  Yay.

• 6:42Amory Sivertson?

  Alien stage Luca Yao love story.

• 6:47Speaker 06

  What?

• 6:49Amory Sivertson?

  Hmm. I'm gonna just draw a little alien.

• 6:53Amory Sivertson?

  I'm just drawing two aliens with little hearts all around them.

• 6:57Speaker 06

  Let's see if I can screenshot my... That will be the episode art.

• 7:05Speaker 06

  Okay, Emery, Ben loves LARPing as AI. How did you feel when you finally got the chance?

• 7:11Amory Sivertson?

  I mean, it's just silly. It's silly. And it's, I was thinking, you know, while I was patiently waiting for my prompt, I was thinking like, what is the bigger takeaway of this? And if the bigger takeaway is just to get people to be, like, my problem with AI, and these are obviously broad strokes, is people using AI to do creative work. You know, like, I get that the robots are good at doing some things. I just, just this morning, I could, anything that I have a subscription to, like, you know, for example, Julep, my rabbit, her hay, that's a subscription service. And I love that AI texts me now and is like, "Hey, you ready for that next barrel of hay?" Or, "Do you want me to delay it by a week?"

• 7:55Amory Sivertson?

  And I can just be like, "Delay by a week?" And it's like, "Great, I got you." Perfect use of AI. But like, anything creative, no, get that the hell away from me. Like, don't replace human thinking and creativity in that way. And so what I love about this is like, I didn't know what that thing was, but it got me to draw a silly picture that I wouldn't have drawn otherwise and interpret it however I want. And so I love that by LARPing as AI, I'm actually using my brain in, in a different way than I foresaw myself doing on this fine morning.

• 8:30Speaker 06

  Yeah, however fleeting. It was a real moment of human connection, which is what we're all seeking.

• 8:35Ben Brock Johnson?

  I just realized something.

• 8:37Speaker 06

  What?

• 8:38Ben Brock Johnson?

  It seems very easy for someone to create a bot that would play a human.

• 8:44Speaker 06

  Yeah, fair point. So they do mention in their Terms of Service that they use bot detection tools. I'm sure it will get more challenging.

• 8:53Ben Brock Johnson?

  The cat and mouse game continues.

• 8:55Speaker 06

  Exactly.

• 8:56Ben Brock Johnson?

  Forever.

• 8:59Speaker 06

  So here's what I know about the origins of this website. It launched in March, so as of recording, relatively recently.

• 9:07Ben Brock Johnson?

  It's a little baby.

• 9:09Speaker 06

  Exactly. It was designed by Neha Maroju, who's a programmer, according to his LinkedIn, based in Puducherry, India, sometimes known as Pondicherry. And he told Fast Company that this website was born from a frustration about AI art and how it's affecting artists, and also just filling the internet with low effort generic slop, which relatable.

• 9:33Ben Brock Johnson?

  He's not wrong.

• 9:34Speaker 06

  Yeah. So this site got lots of attention on Reddit and X. In the immediate weeks after it came out, when Fast Company first reported on it, there were 16,000 users on it. Right now, we can see 629. So it's already, the novelty, it's already kind of dropping off a little bit. Earlier, when I was playing around with it, I asked an AI LARPER, "What about this site reminds you of the old internet? Are you nostalgic for the internet days of yore?" And they responded, "It's like the old internet. It started out as an interesting, cool site. Honestly, used to get witty replies and cool drawings. But now everyone is acting like a douche. Humans can't have nice things.

• 10:19Speaker 06

  That's a fact."

• 10:20Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh. I don't, I don't think humans always eventually default to douche. It sort of depends on like what crowd discovers your space. You know what I mean?

• 10:34Speaker 06

  Yeah, and maybe just having a sense of humor about it. Like, maybe at the beginning, it felt a little bit more substantive. But today, I would say it did not, and we still had fun.

• 10:43Ben Brock Johnson?

  I had a great time. I'm going back.

• 10:46Speaker 06

  Yeah, we've possibly lost you to it.

• 10:48Ben Brock Johnson?

  I'm going back. You might have lost me for the rest of the day.

• 10:54Speaker 06

  How does this remind you of the old internet?

• 11:00Ben Brock Johnson?

  It feels like a lot of the things that I enjoy now, which is it's a nice marriage of the nostalgic and the new.

• 11:10Ben Brock Johnson?

  And so it's like a very clean design, but like also silly and old school in a way.

• 11:18Amory Sivertson?

  Something about it does feel like old AIM or AIM, just reaching out into the universe and not knowing who you're really talking to, except there's a lot more room for creativity here.

• 11:32Speaker 06

  Yeah, I feel like this is just for fun. And there's an increasing demand for more places like this on the internet. Lately, there has been a fatigue with ChatGPT and AI. A recent survey from Gallup showed that the percentage of people ages 14 to 29 who feel hopeful about AI has dropped a lot over the past year to 18%. And nearly a third of respondents said that the technology makes them feel angry. So I feel like this is kind of like a nice place to come and maybe channel that anger by taking its job.

• 12:07Ben Brock Johnson?

  Exactly, yeah.

• 12:09Speaker 06

  And I feel like people are going to want more corners of the internet where they can go and reliably talk to other humans and not AI, which I also think it's going to be more and more difficult to cultivate those spaces. But

• 12:22Amory Sivertson?

  We're reverse engineering just talking to each other. Great, perfect.

• 12:28Speaker 06

  Well, thanks to y'all for, yeah, joining me on this trip.

• 12:33Ben Brock Johnson?

  Absolutely. Thanks for taking us on this trip.

• 12:36Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah, thank you. And I'm going to thank you by taking you both on a trip after the break.

• 13:11Speaker 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.

• 13:40Speaker 02

  Ugh, I hate Mondays.

• 13:41Speaker 03

  King's Hawaiian cinnamon swirl bite?

• 13:43Speaker 02

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

• 13:49Speaker 04

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

• 13:50Speaker 02

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

• 13:55Speaker 04

  Taylor Hansen? Nice.

• 13:57Speaker 03

  Try one.

• 13:58Speaker 04

  Mmm.

• 14:02Speaker 05

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

• 14:10Speaker 05

  At Radiolab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry.

• 14:17Speaker 02

  But, but, we do also like to get into other kinds of stories. Stories about policing, or-

• 14:22Speaker 05

  Politics.

• 14:22Speaker 02

  Country music.

• 14:23Speaker 05

  Hockey.

• 14:24Speaker 02

  Sex. Of bugs.

• 14:26Speaker 05

  Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not-science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers.

• 14:33Speaker 02

  And hopefully, make you see the world anew.

• 14:34Speaker 05

  Radiolab, adventures on the edge of what we think we know.

• 14:38Speaker 02

  Wherever you get your podcasts.

• 14:44Amory Sivertson?

  Okay, Ben and Grace, I'm gonna take us to a different, old, nostalgic place of the internet.

• 14:51Ben Brock Johnson?

  Is it Funky Town? Are you gonna take us to Funky Town?

• 14:54Amory Sivertson?

  I'm gonna take you first to Philadelphia, okay? Is that Funky Town?

• 14:58Ben Brock Johnson?

  Philly's funky.

• 14:59Amory Sivertson?

  With a P H.

• 15:00Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh, Philly's definitely funky.

• 15:01Amory Sivertson?

  Okay, yeah, right. Exactly. Funky Town with a P H.

• 15:04Ben Brock Johnson?

  The Philadelphia funk.

• 15:05Amory Sivertson?

  Yes. We're gonna go near Clark Park, okay? Here's a post that I'm gonna read you. You're studying osteology, but I think not in Philly. You and your girlfriend admired the plastic dog skeleton on my porch, and you thought it was extremely amusing that its scapulae were on backwards. We tried unsuccessfully to repair it. If that's not enough for you to know I'm talking about you, then you will also remember that you identified a mysterious skull I found in the ocean. You may recall I mentioned a dead groundhog I buried last summer, that I was hoping to put its skeleton together somehow, and I believe you too wanted to help. I think I might see if it's sufficiently decomposed now to do this project.

• 15:49Amory Sivertson?

  If you're still interested, please get in touch. Just to be clear, this is a platonic request for help to reassemble the skeleton of a dead groundhog.

• 16:00Ben Brock Johnson?

  So not quite as funky town as we might hope.

• 16:04Amory Sivertson?

  I think it's pretty funky and fun. So this was posted to Missed Connections on Craigslist back in 2017. And do either of you have experiences with missed connections?

• 16:20Speaker 06

  I used to read them. I feel like when I was like late high school, early college, and I was procrastinating on homework, I would just like read Craigslist missed connections. And like New York, where I did not live at the time. Like just for the drama, the narrative potential of it all.

• 16:38Ben Brock Johnson?

  I used to reassemble a lot of skeletons, but that's my only connection.

• 16:45Ben Brock Johnson?

  I'm just kidding. I also used to, I used to read a lot of Craigslist missed connections. It was like often romantic and sometimes absurd.

• 16:57Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah.

• 16:58Ben Brock Johnson?

  And to me, that's the stuff that I was into was the absurdity. And sometimes they would go, particular posts would go like crazy viral.

• 17:08Speaker 06

  But people couldn't like comment, right? Because now on my neighborhood subreddit, there'll be like a lot of missed connections. And people can kind of help figure out like, oh, they were at this coffee. It's the barista who works at this coffee shop. That's Josie, you know? Like, they can actually solve it. But with Craigslist, like there was no crowdsourcing. You just had to hope that. Someone, the right person saw it.

• 17:32Amory Sivertson?

  Exactly.

• 17:33Speaker 06

  And I think that's why I liked it. It was like, there was a chancing, it was born out of a chance encounter, right? Like, they just happened to see each other in real life. And then it would take so much more chance for the right person to see that post.

• 17:47Amory Sivertson?

  So, a little more about Miss Connections. I didn't know that it was born of Craigslist employees just noticing that there were a lot of like, "Oh, I saw you over here" kind of messages popping up naturally in the personals section of Craigslist, which doesn't exist anymore, and we'll, we'll get to that. But it was officially created in the year 2000, and I want to share one description of Miss Connections that I loved from a, an online publication called The Bold Italic. This is by Kayen Landau, said, "Tiny and nostalgic and electric with longing. Each one feels like the beginning of a rom-com that will be inevitably abandoned midway through production."

• 18:29Ben Brock Johnson?

  I love that. That's what I was trying to get at before, but I think it had that vibe. Yeah, a lot of longing and yearning, for sure.

• 18:36Amory Sivertson?

  A lot of longing, a lot of like, potential for a great meet-cute story, but most of the time, it doesn't go right. So, first, let's talk about an instance where it did go right. And there's this, um, there's a thread on Reddit where someone asked like, "Have any of you had success stories with, uh, Miss Connections?" And someone tells this story of basically playing like, a long game of what they call smile tag with this woman on the train, and-

• 19:06Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh, that's nice. I like that.

• 19:07Amory Sivertson?

  And they're really awkward, and they, you know, they have this smile tag, and then the, the person doesn't say anything to this woman and regrets it, and just on a whim, posts on, uh, Miss Connections, and there you go. They dated, they've now, at least at the time that this thread was created, which was now 12 years ago, this person said, "We've now been dating for over two years." So that's a pretty, I know, that's a pretty rare thing. Of course, it can go really wrong in many different directions. You know, sometimes you're just never going to find that person. That's not wrong. It's just, that's predictable. But I remember one of the very, because I used to make the podcast Modern Love,

• 19:50Amory Sivertson?

  one of the very first Modern Love essays that we turned into a podcast episode was a woman who gets catfished by a guy who just makes a very, the post is so generic that he's literally just casting a line and seeing who he gets, seeing if anyone is like, oh, my God, that was me at that club in a red sparkly top or whatever. And there's a lot of that out there. But also, the blogger Miss Steps, AKA Laura Zerowski, points out that shortly after Congress passed the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act in 2017, which allows websites and platforms to actually be held responsible if they knowingly facilitate sex trafficking on their site.

• 20:35Amory Sivertson?

  Craigslist got rid of the personals section altogether and moved misconnections over to the community section of the page. So it still exists, but no more personals. And you can't post pictures in there anymore, which you used to be able to do. And then, and I wonder if you guys, Grace, your comment about just reading them for fun. There are a lot of posts on there that are incredible, but that people suppose might just be creative writing exercises.

• 21:06Speaker 06

  Perhaps like the Groundhog Skeleton.

• 21:08Amory Sivertson?

  Perhaps like the Groundhog Skeleton, absolutely. There's a really famous one that took, that took place in Boston. It was made in 2015. This one did go viral in the sense that it got picked up by Glamour Magazine. Wired said this post might be, quote, "the first Craigslist ad to win a Pulitzer." It was covered in multiple publications. And it's this recently returned Vietnam vet, New Year's Eve, 1972. He has a plan to take his own life. And then he's walking around Boston. He stumbles upon a woman who's been crying. They get coffee. They have this incredible connection. He goes to the bathroom, comes back, and the woman is gone.

• 21:52Amory Sivertson?

  And he never sees her again, despite allegedly returning to that shop where they had coffee every day for a year after that.

• 21:59Ben Brock Johnson?

  Wow.

• 22:00Amory Sivertson?

  Sounds like the Notebook.

• 22:02Speaker 06

  Tragic, yeah.

• 22:03Amory Sivertson?

  But the writing-

• 22:03Speaker 06

  I would watch that movie.

• 22:05Amory Sivertson?

  Yes, and the writing is beautiful. You know, there's this excerpt. So they get stuck in the rain. He says, "You'd taken shelter under the balcony of the old State House. You were wearing a teal ball gown, which appeared to me both regal and ridiculous. Your brown hair was matted to the right side of your face, and a galaxy of freckles dusted your shoulders. I'd never seen anything so beautiful." It's a much longer post, but it's, yeah, it's, real or not, it's beautiful.

• 22:34Speaker 06

  And it's from before ChatGPT, so we know a real person wrote it, whether or not they were.

• 22:41Amory Sivertson?

  Hell, yes.

• 22:41Ben Brock Johnson?

  That's right.

• 22:42Amory Sivertson?

  Hell, yes. But my favorite kind of post, I have to say, is the more kind of, you know, low stakes, no risk of embarrassment, just one person noticing another and shooting their shot in a very, like, respectful way. So I, of course, was going to, like, my local, the Boston Craigslist Miss Connections page earlier this week, and there's a, someone made this post at something called The Butchery in Danvers, Massachusetts. And the whole post is just, "Hey, chatted in the parking lot at The Butchery. You seemed interested, but we were both nervous. Reach out if you wish and describe a bit of what we discussed, so I know it's you. If not, that's okay. I understand. You seemed cool.

• 23:27Amory Sivertson?

  Be well."

• 23:30Amory Sivertson?

  I just feel like I'm doing this kind of stuff in my own life all the time, like, romantic gestures on behalf of my friends, not for myself. But like-

• 23:41Speaker 06

  That would be quite the reveal.

• 23:43Amory Sivertson?

  I know, right? No, but just earlier this week, I was at dinner with a friend. The server was, was, I was like, you know, I have a friend that he should go on a date with. And so I wrote on the back of the check, I just said, "Hey, if you're, if you're willing to go on a blind date, I have someone you should go on a date with," and gave him my email address.

• 24:02Ben Brock Johnson?

  What?

• 24:03Speaker 06

  I love that.

• 24:03Amory Sivertson?

  Yes.

• 24:04Speaker 06

  Did he email? Has he replied?

• 24:06Amory Sivertson?

  No, not since this morning. But I do this all the time, all the time.

• 24:11Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh, my God. Just randomly giving out your email to people.

• 24:15Speaker 06

  We randomly give out our email to people every day. That's like literally part of our job description.

• 24:21Ben Brock Johnson?

  But that's, but that's work email. I don't know. Did you give them your work email?

• 24:25Amory Sivertson?

  No, just my personal email. Anyway, this got me thinking about Craigslist and missed connections. And even though it still exists, it still feels like a, you know, like a bygone relic. And maybe that's because the internet feels more sprawling these days. There are platforms like Reddit or people look for each other on, you know, TikTok, Instagram, whatever. But I was-

• 24:54Ben Brock Johnson?

  Also, there's Tinder and Hinge and, you know, all that stuff.

• 24:56Amory Sivertson?

  Of course, yeah. Exactly. But I'm just like thrilled that Missed Connections still exists. And I encourage people to read through some Missed Connections on Craigslist from your community. Because, you know, who knows? Maybe someone posted about you, but also you're probably going to find something that will just brighten your day in some way.

• 25:17Ben Brock Johnson?

  I love that you think about it this way. And I also think like, you know, just believing in the possibility of a, you know, of a rom com existence, I think is also really nice. There's someone in my life who I will not name, who loves rom coms very much and just wants to believe so hard. And I will say that this person made a deal with someone who they once dated, that if they didn't find true love by a certain time in their lives,

• 25:54Ben Brock Johnson?

  that on a specific date, they would both fly from across the world to the base of Big Ben and meet each other at the base of Big Ben. And the person in my life did it without being in touch. Like that was that they, they made the deal. They said, I will be there. And they did it and the other person didn't show up.

• 26:22Speaker 06

  Oh, no. Were they heartbroken?

• 26:27Ben Brock Johnson?

  I think they were heartbroken, yeah.

• 26:29Speaker 06

  Did they know if the other person had even remembered the deal? Like, did they check in to be like?

• 26:35Ben Brock Johnson?

  I think they didn't, which was part of their folly. Do you know what I mean? Like, they were, like, they wanted to believe that the other person would be accountable to the promise that they made to each other. And so they were like, no, I'm not gonna do that. I'm just gonna go like we promised we would, and I'm gonna be there. And they did it. And the other person didn't show up. And so, so I love, that's, these are sad examples, but I just, in some ways, but I, I love believing in the possibility of a rom-com existence. And I think misconnections is, is a part of that. And so I, I'm glad to know that it's, it still exists in the world as well.

• 27:11Amory Sivertson?

  Well, and I would argue that a rom-com existence is, you know, it's really just the, the act of noticing and the art of noticing. And then the, the taking a minute to write that post. And, and these posts that I've read thus far, like, I'm not their intended audience. And yet, my life is richer and the world is a little bit more colorful because I know that other people are noticing each other and looking out for each other and wanting to connect with each other. And that is like sometimes the greatest hope I have on any given day. Not to sound too bleak, you know, I'm, I believe that if we want a rom-com existence, we have to create it, you know?

• 27:54Amory Sivertson?

  It's up to us to create the, the serendipity and the meaning in the world and the connection that we want to see. Yeah.

• 28:04Ben Brock Johnson?

  Love that.

• 28:07Ben Brock Johnson?

  Listeners, if you have a story of a chance encounter that you had or witnessed or want to have, we want to hear about that. Yes.

• 28:21Ben Brock Johnson?

  You guys were both like, yes, yes.

• 28:25Speaker 06

  Give us more, give us a happy Big Ben story.

• 28:29Speaker 06

  We're looking for romance.

• 28:34Amory Sivertson?

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

• 28:43Ben Brock Johnson?

  And me, Ben Brock Johnson. It was edited by Meg Cramer and Dave Shaw. Mix and sound design by Marquis Neal.

• 28:50Amory Sivertson?

  The rest of our team is Dean Russell, Emily Jankowski, our production manager, Paul Vikes, and our managing producer, Suma Tadoshi.

• 28:57Ben Brock Johnson?

  Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between a missed connection and a chance encounter.

• 29:04Amory Sivertson?

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

• 29:39Speaker 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.

• 30:00Speaker 03

  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, and they see the good in the other people on the team. They don't immediately try to deflect whatever.

• 30:15Speaker 03

  Or problem there was, what went wrong, you do 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, you know, love Joe, and that's why, another reason he's a great coach. So there are things like that that you learn. There are 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.

• 30:49Speaker 00

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

• 31:01Speaker 00

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

• 31:06Speaker 02

  Ugh, I hate Mondays. King's Hawaiian cinnamon swirl bite? Taylor Hanson? Sure, I'll try one. Mmm.

• 31:15Speaker 04

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

• 31:16Speaker 02

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

• 31:21Speaker 04

  Taylor Hanson? Nice.

• 31:23Speaker 03

  Try one.

• 31:24Speaker 04

  Mmm.

• 31:28Speaker 05

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