Encore: Owl pursuits

This episode was originally published on March 10, 2023. In 2022, freshmen at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill got a new neighbor: an owl. What wasn't clear was whether the owl was trying to befriend them, or catch them. Sometimes the owl seemed to be chasing students. Other times, it seemed to come in peace. A popular campus Instagram account reported that a woman had actually raised the owl herself. After she was spotted feeding it, the owl sightings stopped, much to the disappointment of students who'd come to consider it as a sort of mascot. Where had the owl come from, and where did it go? Endless Thread host Ben Brock Johnson and producer Grace Tatter talk about how the owl gained online campus fame, and get a surprise update from the person who knows the owl best. Show notes "Animal Instincts https://thisiscriminal.com/episode-one-animal-instincts-1-31-2014-2/" (Criminal) "The Real Killer in The Staircase Might Be … an Owl https://www.vulture.com/2018/06/the-staircase-netflix-owl-theory-explained.html?" (Vulture) "Column: Hinton hears a hoot — the Class of 2026 vs. the HoJo Owl https://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2022/11/opinion-the-class-of-2026-vs-the-hojo-owl" (The Daily Tar Heel) Instagram post of owl chasing student Kaleigh Wilhite https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cj4BdTarrAT/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link (UNC Chicks) Instagram post of owl confrontation at a basketball court https://www.instagram.com/p/Cj1Ny7Zv7yE/ (UNC Chicks) Instagram post with other campus owl sightings https://www.instagram.com/p/CkOtiNuOd5M/ (UNC Chicks) Instagram post of Barb with the owl https://www.instagram.com/p/CkPsB6vOnuR/ (UNC Quirks) Reddit post on r/wellthatsucks https://www.reddit.com/r/Wellthatsucks/comments/yhgl2w/a_few_days_ago_i_was_attacked_by_an_owl_on_my/ about an owl attack "An owl twice attacked a Washington woman. A biologist says it's becoming more common https://www.npr.org/2022/11/02/1133260919/an-owl-twice-attacked-a-washington-woman-a-biologist-says-its-becoming-more-comm" (NPR) This content was originally created for audio. An auto-generated transcript is available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Heads up that some elements (i.e. music, sound effects, tone) are harder to translate to text.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questram School of Business. A recent episode looks at what the rise of the gig economy means for workers, businesses, and the future of work. Stick around until the end of this podcast to preview the episode.

• 0:19Speaker 01

  Flowing ad budget on metrics that look great till the CFO sees them? That's bullspend, and marketers are calling it out in Dashboard Confessions.

• 0:29Speaker 02

  I remember telling my boss, "It'll be good for the brand," when leads were slow. Yeah, it wasn't.

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• 1:21Ben Brock Johnson?

  Hey, Endless Thread heads. It is a holiday weekend and one where a lot of people are headed back to college, or arriving for the first time. Freshmen? Well, we've got a story about college, but no matter who you are, it's not your usual story. This one's a bit of a throwback, like an old yearbook, maybe, or freshman Facebook. Remember when that was actually a thing you could hold in your hand and not a massive terrifying tech company? Anyway, there is a story we did a few years back about a mysterious creature haunting the freshman dorm at UNC Chapel Hill. It comes via lots of help from a Chapel Hill grad, our own Grace Tatter. It's an oldie but a goodie. Enjoy.

• 2:16Speaker 05

  WBUR Podcasts, Boston.

• 2:30Ben Brock Johnson?

  Grace Tatter.

• 2:31Speaker 06

  Yes, that's me, Ben Brock Johnson. That's you.

• 2:34Ben Brock Johnson?

  Who are you again?

• 2:36Speaker 06

  I'm a producer for Endless Thread.

• 2:39Ben Brock Johnson?

  And this is a twofer. It was a Grace week last week, and it's a Grace week this week. I love it.

• 2:45Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, so hopefully people aren't getting tired of my dulcet tones.

• 2:50Ben Brock Johnson?

  How could they ever?

• 2:53Ben Brock Johnson?

  One thing I know about you is you're the person who introduced the HBO show The Staircase to me.

• 3:09Speaker 06

  Really? Is that true? And one of our high lows and listens?

• 3:12Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 3:13Speaker 06

  It wasn't anyone else of the millions of people on Twitter talking about it?

• 3:16Ben Brock Johnson?

  No, no, it was you. It was you who, Endless Thread folks listening out there, Endless Thread and our podcast department gets together once a week, and we tell each other what our high was for the week and our low, and also our listen. And Grace hit us with the listen, this was months and maybe years ago now?

• 3:36Speaker 06

  Months ago, yeah.

• 3:37Ben Brock Johnson?

  Months ago, with the HBO show The Staircase, which involves some owl action?

• 3:44Speaker 06

  Yes, at least an owl theory. Now, I can't remember if the owl theory ended up in the HBO version, but definitely in the real-life case, the real-life murder case that the HBO show was based on.

• 3:56Ben Brock Johnson?

  There's plenty of owl content in the HBO. But you come to us today with more owl content.

• 4:03Speaker 06

  Yes, from that same part of the country, from the Triangle of North Carolina. For people who don't know The Staircase, the theory, it appears that this woman, Kathleen Peterson, was murdered by her husband, but some people think that she was actually killed by an owl. And that always seemed pretty far out there to me, because I've lived in the Piedmont of North Carolina for most of my life and really hadn't encountered that many owls at all, much less any killer owls, but...

• 4:31Ben Brock Johnson?

  Owls be out there, though.

• 4:32Speaker 06

  Yeah, they do. And I was talking to a friend recently, and she was telling me that in Chapel Hill, where I went to school, there was a lot of chatter about a pretty, I think violent would be the word, violent owl. I'll send you, actually, some of the Instagram videos that were going around.

• 4:51Ben Brock Johnson?

  Okay, all right.

• 4:52Speaker 06

  I'm gonna slack them to you.

• 4:53Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh, god.

• 4:57Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh, my god. Whoa, this owl is like cruising very close to the ground in a parking lot.

• 5:14Ben Brock Johnson?

  I don't blame him for, it's very funny, whoever this person is. I don't blame them for going home after this, because they seem to be dive-bombed by an owl, except it's not really dive-bombing, because the owl is like flying so close to the ground in this parking lot, like maybe a foot off the ground, and then just like careening into the person shooting the video. The caption says, "This Hojo owl got me fucked up. Back to North Campus I go."

• 5:46Speaker 06

  Yeah, so some context, because that probably doesn't make any sense to you, right?

• 5:50Ben Brock Johnson?

  This is very, I feel like this is very Chapel Hill, like, you know, people who know the campus, this makes sense to them.

• 5:58Speaker 06

  Exactly, yeah. So Hinton James is a dorm, I think 1,000 freshmen live in Hinton James. It's one of the biggest dorms definitely on campus, and it's also kind of the shittiest dorm. Like, when you get your housing assignment, going into your freshman year, if you get Hinton James, you're bummed out, because it's the farthest away from the rest of campus. Somehow, it's uphill both ways a mile. I don't know how that works, but it's definitely true. I did live there. And for nickname, we call it Hojo. The North Campus, what he's referring to, are where like there's these beautiful historic buildings with like, the dorms have like pianos in the lobby. That is not at all the case with Hinton James. It's rough.

• 6:39Ben Brock Johnson?

  Hinton James got owls in the parking lot. North Campus has pianos in the lobby.

• 6:44Speaker 06

  Exactly. It's always been character-building to live in Hinton James, but when I lived there, we did not have any dive-bomb owls. I'm going to send you one more video of the owl.

• 7:05Ben Brock Johnson?

  This video is hilarious.

• 7:07Speaker 06

  So, yeah, this one is a girl. Or tell him about this.

• 7:13Ben Brock Johnson?

  It's like...

• 7:18Ben Brock Johnson?

  This should not be funny, but it's very funny. It's very funny. It's like, I don't really know how to describe it, because it's such a chaotically shot video, but it's like, you see like an owl, again, like flying around, sort of like close to the ground, and like all over the place in this video, but then you see this woman kind of like nope out, like she just like turns and runs and screaming, and the owl, and the owl gives pursuit right behind her. And it's like very funny, although I imagine in the moment, it would be absolutely

• 8:01Ben Brock Johnson?

  terrifying. But like, when I watched the video, I'm like, this is hilarious. She's just getting owl-chased. It's really good.

• 8:08Speaker 06

  As if it's not hard enough to be a college student. Poor girl.

• 8:13Ben Brock Johnson?

  I know, I know.

• 8:14Speaker 06

  But I actually, so I have more context about her specifically. So I heard about this owl living outside of my old dorm, and I did a Google to see what else was about it. And I found this column in the Daily Tar Heel, which is the student newspaper at Chapel Hill, from a first-year who was writing in defense of this owl. He says, yeah, that it's collectively harassing all the freshmen, and that it's kind of scary, but...

• 8:40Ben Brock Johnson?

  Is it freshman-only?

• 8:42Speaker 06

  Yeah, because it's only, it lives outside the dorm. That's only freshmen.

• 8:51Ben Brock Johnson?

  There's something truly delicious about that to me. I'm not sure why, but, okay, sorry, go ahead.

• 8:57Speaker 06

  So, yeah, so Alan, this guy Alan Chen, who's also a first-year, he lives in the dorm that's slightly up the hill, so it's also crappy, but it's a little less crappy, because it's a little bit closer to everything. But he writes this column saying that he thinks this owl is a good thing, that it's character-building, that it's bringing people together. So I was intrigued by that. So I called him up, and I asked him how he originally became introduced to the owl, if it was like through these Instagram videos that were all being posted on this account, UNC Chicks, which is like a meme account that's affiliated with chicks, which is something Barstool-related. And his first encounter with the owl was

• 9:40Speaker 06

  actually courtesy of that girl who we just saw.

• 9:45Ben Brock Johnson?

  Do we have a name for that girl?

• 9:46Speaker 06

  Oh, we do. And sorry, that girl, Kaylee.

• 9:50Ben Brock Johnson?

  I don't want you to start referring to her as like a UNC chick.

• 9:53Speaker 06

  That's true. Yeah, because it turns out, even though the meme account is named UNC Chicks, it's usually bird content is an outlier.

• 10:03Ben Brock Johnson?

  Kaylee.

• 10:03Speaker 06

  Okay, yeah. So Alan was introduced when Kaylee came running into his suite, because he lives with her boyfriend.

• 10:11Speaker 05

  She just sort of came running in frantically one day. She was like, Alan, the weirdest thing just happened. I was chased by an owl for 30 minutes. And I was like, what? An owl? And she was like, yeah, an owl. So naturally, I was like, I want to go see this owl, which is when I went out and, you know, tried to talk to the owl. And I sort of implanted myself in the mythos of owl from that day on.

• 10:43Speaker 06

  I sort of became really fascinated by it. And I was reaching out to people who had owl encounters on Instagram and whatnot. Yeah, so Alan then went to talk to lots of the people who have submitted some of these videos. Oh, I didn't even show you the video. Like, there's a video of someone giving the owl a cigarette.

• 11:03Ben Brock Johnson?

  What?

• 11:04Speaker 06

  Yeah, I'll show it to you.

• 11:05Ben Brock Johnson?

  Actually giving the owl the cigarette?

• 11:07Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 11:12Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh, my God.

• 11:15Ben Brock Johnson?

  Don't give the owl the cigarette, no. Come on, it's also like such a, it's a-

• 11:22Speaker 06

  It looks so sweet there, right?

• 11:24Ben Brock Johnson?

  I know. Owls are so, God, what amazing creatures there.

• 11:30Speaker 06

  Yeah, so this owl did become, it became kind of online famous because people were submitting videos to this meme account. And yeah, and lots of people are talking about it in real life, too. So because of all of its online fame, it became something that people were excited to like have their own spotting. So Alan-

• 11:48Ben Brock Johnson?

  This person's shooting it, like, it's like, it's in a tennis court. Now it's in a tennis court. Now it's like lit up, lit up at night by the headlights of a car, like it's in some kind of crime movie. Oh, man, I'm sorry. It's just, it's truly, this owl is clearly, like, it's a mascot. It's becoming a mascot on Instagram. And like, people clearly love this.

• 12:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, exactly. And Alan told me that like people would just gather and go watch owl watching or like, you know, like call people over who- Entire floors of this huge dorm would like come out and all like watch the owl together. People would bring snacks and, and it gave them something to talk about. It was like a bonding experience for people.

• 12:34Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 12:35Speaker 06

  Which like, when you go to a huge school, like, I feel like it could be really helpful. Like, I remember what it was like to be like one of a thousand kids in a huge dorm. It's like, nice to have something to talk about before basketball season. Common experience.

• 12:48Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, a common experience where like everybody can kind of be like on the same side. You know? Everybody's like, oh, check out the owl, you know? Like, it's not like a, this is not like an othering experience, except maybe for the owl.

• 13:02Speaker 06

  Exactly, exactly.

• 13:04Ben Brock Johnson?

  So here's another thing that's coming up for me that I haven't really said yet, which is like, knowing nothing about this owl. This is a piece of wildlife that's living outside in a environment that has been completely taken over by a massive university.

• 13:23Ben Brock Johnson?

  And so like, I guess I would keep my distance, but out of respect for the animal. Like, I might sort of get closer to an animal so I can get like a thrilling view of it. Like, I do that, you know? Like, when I see, I, I get bobcats where I live. And if I see a bobcat, I'm definitely trying to like get a better vantage of the bobcat. But I, I ran into a bear the other day.

• 13:49Speaker 06

  Oh, my gosh.

• 13:50Ben Brock Johnson?

  And it had its babies with it. And I was like, I nope to out of there real fast. So I think like, I would keep my distance out of respect for the animal and out of like wanting it to have its own space in the environment that we share.

• 14:04Speaker 06

  I admire your respect for wildlife. I think I would probably have steered clear of it just because I would be scared. But anyway, it turns out that Reddit loves an owl attack story. So this has been mostly confined to the UNC community. But around the same time that this was happening, there was a post on the subreddit r slash well, this sucks from a woman who got attacked by an owl in her neighborhood twice. And this actually got picked up by NPR, because this Reddit post had so much attention. So you can see some pictures there of, of what owls can indeed do if they, if they get you.

• 14:45Speaker 06

  And we already talked about when I was in college, the podcast Criminal did an article about owls in Chapel Hill because of the owl theory about the staircase, which was in Durham, which is like eight miles away. So they like started that episode with stories about owls swooping down.

• 15:03Ben Brock Johnson?

  So I'm running and I actually lowered the brim of my hat. And about 20 seconds later, I felt a scratch on my head and then my hat disappeared.

• 15:16Speaker 06

  So there is precedent for this happening, especially in the fall. Apparently barred owls feeling territorial for a lot of the reasons you just said. I mean, this part of North Carolina has just developed an insane amount in the past couple of decades. So there are a lot of houses being built, which means a lot of trees are being cut down. All sorts of critters are running out of the woods. And you can't blame them because wild animals are going to be wild animals, to your point earlier. Except for this owl actually might not be totally wild.

• 15:48Ben Brock Johnson?

  Grace, you do have, as I understand it, a, a kind of conclusion to this story about this mysterious owl. But folks will have to wait for another minute while we take a break. We'll be right back.

• 16:20Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken? A podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questram School of Business. What gets lost when work stops looking like a nine to five job?

• 16:32Speaker 07

  If I am not committing to be working with you exclusively at a particular point in time for a certain amount of time to do certain types of work, then you can't necessarily expect the employer on the other side to provide guarantees either.

• 16:46Speaker 00

  Follow Is Business Broken wherever you get your podcasts. And stick around until the end of this podcast for a preview of a recent episode about the changing dynamics of the gig economy.

• 16:59Speaker 01

  Flowing ad budget on metrics that look great till the CFO sees them? That's bull spend and marketers are calling it out in Dashboard Confessions.

• 17:08Speaker 02

  I remember telling my boss, it'll be good for the brand when leads were slow. Yeah, it, it wasn't.

• 17:16Speaker 01

  Cut the bull spend. LinkedIn lets you target by company, job title and more. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com/campaign. Terms and conditions apply.

• 17:30Speaker 07

  Does anyone know where the bass is?

• 17:33Speaker 03

  Hey, Bose here. When your next track starts, listen for the decisions that the artist makes. The vocal pushed right up front. The bass that weighs half a beef. That sample from a 70s underground gem. Every choice deliberate. With Bose, you'll hear it all. Your music deserves Bose.

• 18:06Ben Brock Johnson?

  All right, Grace, I'm loving this story. I need to know more. What's next?

• 18:13Speaker 06

  So I'm going to send you one last Instagram post. So this is from an account called UNC Quirks. So people submit pictures of quirky things around UNC. And yeah, a student saw this woman feeding this owl, a dead mouse. And the woman said that she'd raised the owl from an egg. So it turns out this owl was perhaps not a wild owl, but a pet owl.

• 18:38Ben Brock Johnson?

  What?

• 18:41Speaker 06

  Somehow makes the story all the more bizarre. Yeah. And then after this encounter, after this freshman named Izzy saw this encounter, the student stopped seeing the owl, at least for a while.

• 18:53Ben Brock Johnson?

  So wait, does that mean that she like took the owl back? Home?

• 18:57Speaker 06

  Unclear, like if she just like rescued it. Yeah, if you like go to the next one, you can see her like kind of kissing the owl.

• 19:05Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah. Well, they're kissing each other.

• 19:09Speaker 06

  Yeah, they clearly love each other. So like unclear, did she take it back home? Or did she just like rehabilitate it? I saw one comment on TikTok saying that the woman was the commenter's mom. So I did reach out to that person on TikTok to be like, is this really your mom? She did not get back to me. She didn't get back to me. Yeah, so the identity of the owl owner is a mystery.

• 19:33Ben Brock Johnson?

  What an interesting and strange tale of this mysterious owl and its mysterious owner and its mysterious behavior. Thank you, Grace, for bringing this story.

• 19:44Speaker 06

  Thanks for listening.

• 19:55Ben Brock Johnson?

  And that is where our short episode would have ended. Except that woman Grace reached out to on TikTok hoping to talk to her mom. Well?

• 20:07Speaker 06

  Yep. On Monday morning, I received a text from the woman who helped raise the Hojo owl.

• 20:14Ben Brock Johnson?

  Hojo mom. And she was a hoot.

• 20:17Speaker 06

  She sure was.

• 20:18Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh, come on, Grace. Give me one chuckle. Geez, God. All right, Grace, what did she have to say?

• 20:26Speaker 06

  Well, she started out with the important stuff.

• 20:29Speaker 07

  You know, I'm not a crazy person.

• 20:32Speaker 06

  Barb told me that she's been rehabbing wildlife in the Chapel Hill area for decades. She asked us not to use her last name because in North Carolina, you actually need a special license to rehab raptors. Last March, a friend from Durham, which again, basically is the town over from Chapel Hill, called Barb about a baby owl that had fallen out of its nest.

• 20:54Speaker 07

  You know, you could fit her in the palm of your hand. You know, she was just a tiny little thing.

• 21:00Speaker 06

  Barb took the baby owl home and her son-in-law bestowed it with the name Owl-ison. Like Allison, but you know, with an owl. And over the next few months, Barb fed Owl-ison a steady diet of frozen mice. Her family got used to having Owl-ison around and Owl-ison got used to them.

• 21:19Speaker 07

  We would have a bonfire in the backyard at night and she would fly. And she would be on the back of my chair and she'd just sit there and piddle with my hair, believe it or not. And so she just didn't have that fear, I guess, that she needed to have. So that's the one thing I did wrong. I imprinted too much, as they say.

• 21:45Speaker 06

  In the fall, Barb said they started seeing Owl-ison less and less until finally she'd been gone for three or four days.

• 21:53Speaker 07

  I said, well, maybe this is the time, you know, maybe she's found other owls. You don't know. It's a wild animal. And then she would come home, you know? So we never went very long without seeing her. And the last time she flew off, and I hadn't seen her the whole week. And then I got a call.

• 22:15Speaker 06

  The call came from someone who lives or works in a student apartment complex on South Campus and who knew about Barb's passion for wildlife. Barb realized that the owl he was calling about was probably Owl-ison.

• 22:29Speaker 07

  I guess she just liked the people. He said she would sit on the windowsill and look in at the students, you know, when they were in their rooms. And that's when I knew, uh-oh.

• 22:43Speaker 06

  Even though Barb had heard that the students really liked Owl-ison, she was worried that the owl might accidentally hurt someone. So she took Owl-ison home for the night and then to a wildlife rescue near Pittsboro, North Carolina. She told me that she always planned to release Owl-ison into the wild eventually. Barb is still able to keep tabs on her owl friend. The folks who work at the rescue will send Barb pictures of Owl-ison from time to time.

• 23:10Speaker 07

  She has hundreds of acres to fly around in, so she's doing whatever owls do.

• 23:18Ben Brock Johnson?

  Indeed, whatever owls do, which is maybe dreaming about her checkered past of terrorizing freshmen.

• 23:26Speaker 06

  Maybe, although I have to admit, Ben, after talking to Barb, I felt a little bit guilty about calling Owl-ison possibly violent. I think she was just friendly, but-

• 23:36Ben Brock Johnson?

  She was just trying to play with some people's hair.

• 23:38Speaker 06

  Exactly.

• 23:40Ben Brock Johnson?

  Come over and hang out.

• 23:41Speaker 06

  Exactly. I think she was misunderstood.

• 23:45Ben Brock Johnson?

  So misunderstood. I was like trying to figure out how to make a joke about like, you know how owls don't poop?

• 23:51Speaker 06

  I did not know that.

• 23:53Ben Brock Johnson?

  You didn't know that?

• 23:55Speaker 06

  No, wait, no, they do. Oh, my God, Ben, I almost put a cut about this owl wearing a diaper. They do poop and I have a cut to prove it.

• 24:04Ben Brock Johnson?

  They don't poop, Grace.

• 24:05Speaker 06

  I'm gonna play you the sound. I have-

• 24:08Ben Brock Johnson?

  Grace, I hate to tell you.

• 24:10Speaker 06

  I have-

• 24:10Ben Brock Johnson?

  Owls don't poop. How much would you like to bet, Grace?

• 24:15Speaker 06

  Um, I literally have tape about an owl wearing a diaper to play for you.

• 24:19Ben Brock Johnson?

  Hey, you don't, you don't, that doesn't necessarily mean the owl's pooping if the owl's wearing a diaper.

• 24:25Speaker 06

  Uh, no, I think she talked about poop. What, what should we bet?

• 24:30Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh, this is tough. This is, this is tough, dude. What would you like to bet?

• 24:37Speaker 06

  I don't know. Ice cream, ice cream sandwich and a drink, an ice cream cone, all three.

• 24:43Ben Brock Johnson?

  All right, you're on.

• 24:44Speaker 06

  Okay. Well, how are we going to prove it though? Because Barb, who seems like an owl expert to me, told me that this owl-

• 24:51Ben Brock Johnson?

  I think we need to go for the internet for this one. Are you Googling? Okay, here's, this is tough. This is tough.

• 24:58Speaker 06

  Oh, they, pellets, pellets. You, I knew that because we've all dissected. Did you dissect an owl pellet in school?

• 25:05Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yes, I did.

• 25:06Speaker 06

  I think that counts as poop.

• 25:08Ben Brock Johnson?

  No, it doesn't because they regurgitate them. That's not poop.

• 25:12Speaker 06

  Okay, but also why did this-

• 25:13Ben Brock Johnson?

  If it comes out of your mouth, I'm pretty sure it's not poop. It's, we don't describe it as poop. I'll go into the next most relevant, popular, uh, Google search, which is, do owls have buttholes? And search, in spite of common misconceptions, yes, owls do have butts.

• 25:36Speaker 06

  Well, obviously.

• 25:37Ben Brock Johnson?

  According to Alexa Answers, owl pellets are coughed up from the mouth because they eat food whole. So they have to emit the bones and fur. They still pee- They still pee and poo.

• 25:47Speaker 06

  Yes, thank you. Okay, you owe me, because bird poop, look at bird poop. It's just like the white, like, it's like, like, liquid stuff, but-

• 25:56Ben Brock Johnson?

  It's a kind of ice cream, like, when you think about it.

• 26:02Speaker 06

  Anyway, I think that-

• 26:03Ben Brock Johnson?

  I guess I lose. I guess I lose. But I'm just gonna say, I hope an owl never poops on either of us.

• 26:10Speaker 06

  They, I hope that too.

• 26:11Ben Brock Johnson?

  Or pellets on either of us, because that shit's gross, dude.

• 26:14Speaker 06

  That's also gross.

• 26:15Ben Brock Johnson?

  Uh, Grace, thank you for never giving up on solving owl mysteries.

• 26:19Speaker 06

  Oh, my gosh, you're welcome. Got to keep it real for my alma mater and for Endless Thread.

• 26:25Ben Brock Johnson?

  See you next week, owl fans.

• 26:28Speaker 06

  Bye.

• 26:49Ben Brock Johnson?

  Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston.

• 26:52Speaker 06

  This episode was produced by me, Grace Tatter, and co-hosted by?

• 26:57Ben Brock Johnson?

  Me, Ben Brock Johnson, who just lost a bet about whether owls poop or not. Uh, mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski.

• 27:06Speaker 06

  The rest of our team is Amory Sivertson, Quincy Walters, Dean Russell, Nora Sacks, Amy Gurrell, Matt Reed, and Paul Vitkus. And yes, owls do poop.

• 27:19Ben Brock Johnson?

  And vomit, apparently. So we leave you with that, folks.

• 27:58Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken? A podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questrom School of Business. Follow Is Business Broken wherever you get your podcasts and listen on for a preview of a recent episode featuring Brandeis University Professor David Weil on a question at the heart of the gig economy. When an app controls how you work, is it really just a platform or is it your employer?

• 28:24Ben Brock Johnson?

  It is very true that the platforms allow, let's say, drivers to find riders much more easily in a way that would be impossible absent the Uber or Lyft technology. Yes, the technology's connecting people, but the technology is also doing all the kinds of things that we usually associate with management. Setting the rate of pay, setting the pace of work, deciding on who gets the job and who doesn't. Monitoring the performance of that party. There's a lot that these technologies do that are all about what we would call management.

• 29:06Speaker 00

  Find the full episode by searching for Is Business Broken wherever you get your podcasts and learn more about the Marotra Institute for Business, Markets, and Society at ibms.bu.edu.

• 29:20Speaker 03

  Hey, Bose here. On your next track, listen for the decisions. Distortion on the bass, the vocal right up front, every choice deliberate. With Bose, you'll hear it all. Your music deserves Bose.

• 29:36Speaker 01

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