Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Mehrotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? And of course, is business broken? Listen wherever you get your podcasts. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. 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 with 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 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. It's gotten out of control. I mean, it's like they side-eye you every time you walk outside to take the trash out. You said they're side-eyeing 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. They're homebodies. Yeah. Ben took the neighbor's report, said he'd look into it, and then he called her back. 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. Oh, really? Okay. Yeah, so this is from a clinical psychologist. It says that your brain often misinterprets dirty looks due to negativity bias and personalization. Okay, you're not talking about psychological health because I know what side-eyeing is and I'm not imagining things. If you're not familiar with Ben Palmer, you might have felt discomfort listening to that call. And then maybe it dawned on you. 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. This tip line is a bit. This Ben is a comedian. How dare you? Oh, OK. 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. 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. 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? No, I didn't like any of those jobs. I just had to do them. The one job I've always wanted to do is comedy. Another side hustle Ben had while trying to make it, appearing on Court TV. All rise for Judge Joe Brown. It just started with another stand-up comedian friend of mine. 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. Ben's friend tells him that if they're chosen, they'll get flown out to L.A. and then they can split the winnings 50-50. And I'm like, all right, let's do it. So Ben and his friends come up with a fake dispute. A comedian who walked off stage because he was getting heckled and was now in breach of contract for not completing his set. 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. Promoter Ben Palmer is suing a performer for breach of contract. 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. Laughing at his own jokes. That's not good. I did it once. Joining him in court is his witness and fellow comedian, Ben Palmer. I did it twice. Michael Albanese is suing Benjamin Phil Palmer for $4,000 for a refund. I did as many times as I could before eventually they go, hey, you've been on these shows before. We can't have you on. But it all worked out for Ben. He doesn't need those court TV payouts anymore. 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. I'm Amory Severson. And you're listening to Endless Thread. Coming to you from WBUR, Boston's NPR. Today's episode, Ben Palmer's Brain. Ben first tried his hand at stand-up back in 2008, when he was living in Ohio. Yeah, I just had a bunch of weird ideas that I've prepared for a long time. and went up and did it. And it didn't go as great as I thought it was going to go. You don't say. It probably was a bomb. But in my head, I heard maybe one or two laughs. And they probably were awkward laughs. But that was enough for me to keep trying. Was it political in any way? What was the... No, not at all. It was very weird, absurd. 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. Like on Facebook. None of the corporations of 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. Back around 2015 corporations like Uber were making Facebook pages but they weren responding to comments left by customers Their page was just filled with complaints and issues people were having and nobody was responding to them So I was like, well, I'm going to respond then. And so that's where it started. 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. Ben started to make videos narrating his Facebook exploits. Over 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. Ben replied to Gina, posing as a Walmart employee. While we're disappointed to see you go, we understand how you may feel strongly about BioLatex manufacturing. We hope you change your mind and shop at Walmart again. 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. 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? 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 half. So you definitely met my standards there as far as that goes. 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. Why do you want that? Because I'm like, I'm trying to delay 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. I usually try to go as long as I can, but there gets a point where I start to get tired of the person. Do you have a record? Yeah, I went three months with a politician who thought I was somebody I wasn't. This was Ted Yoho, a former Republican congressman from Florida. He was the congressman who called AOC an F&B. 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. A couple of years later, Yoho stumbled onto a website Ben's friend had made. Parler Social was the name of it. 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. Parler Social was a parody of that site. 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. Ben told Yoho that his name was Eric, and that he worked for Parler Social. And he offered to help Yoho start a podcast. Ben contacted the lawyer for Sasha Baron Cohen, the comedian who plays Borat. Very nice! That lawyer provided Ben with a release form that Baron Cohen gets people to sign when he's interviewing them in character. In these recordings, Yoho told Ben that he had a name for the podcast that he wanted to make. God, Country, Family. You know, pretty much God, Country, Family. Everything I ran on. Sorry, you cut out. I cut out. Yeah, Goddammit, Family or something. God, Country, Family. Oh, okay. Ben chatted with Yoho often. At one point, they talked about a gun safety program that Yoho had proposed. 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. 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. Get some target practice in. Even if the targets were, you know, six-year-old boys and girls as the targets, you know, if that saves a life, then hey. Well, and have the parents come out with you. Yoho trusted Ben. He even told Ben that he had, in fact, called AOC an effing bee. A reporter heard me say something. He said, what was that about? I said, no 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 go after that. Right. And he said, did you call her an F&B? And I said, no comment. But truth is, as I walked away by myself, I said, what an F&B. 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 Bachman, in person at Liberty University in Virginia. Ben brought some gifts to the taping, including child-shaped target cutouts. And that's when he realized, OK, yeah, this isn't right. But he had to really put it in his face. How did he react? Angrily. Did you ever see the documentary Free Solo? Yeah, I did. If you haven't seen it, Free Solo is a documentary about rock climber Alex Hunnalt, 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 as reactive as most people I have a very low threshold for 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? Maybe I need to get my amygdala checked out. 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 going to go, Hey, I found out who you really are, you know? And then I'm like, Oh 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 going to film the next day. And right before that happened, they, they picked me up. I get out of the car and the producer goes, she goes, Ben, you're a comedian and you live in Atlanta. And I was like, yeah, because 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. 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. The amygdala is firing off. And so I felt that way. I was like, oh, no, she's about to 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. Today, Josh 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 goes swimming towards that one egg competing to see which one can fertilize that egg? Yeah. I am amazed that yours won. More investigating Ben's brain after a break. At Radiolab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories. Stories about policing or politics, country music, hockey, sex of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers. And hopefully make you see the world anew. Radiolab, adventures on the edge of what we think we know. Wherever you get your podcasts. Business leaders listen. Over half tune into podcasts daily. Reach them with CitySpace Productions, the creative studio from WBUR's business partnerships team. CitySpace Productions crafts custom podcasts for businesses that showcase expertise, deepen connections, and drive engagement. Turn your vision into a podcast. Visit wbur.org slash creative studio. 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 and started posting videos like the one you heard at the beginning of this episode, I don't know how many of them are actually illegal. He got a whole new level of attention. His most viewed video from this series features a teacher. She wanted to report the parents of a kindergarten student at her school. And it looks like they have a child who was born in New York, which makes them an American citizen. Yeah. So we're looking to deport the parents and leave the child. Right. Like I said, I don't know if they're here illegally. I just think it's odd, you know, very odd. 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. Yeah, because you normally see those people where? Like in the city. Got it. OK. Hispanics out of place now in country, not where they belong in city. 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. 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. 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 U.S. citizens and more than 11,000 parents of kids who are U.S. citizens. 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. teaches at school, wants kindergarten child's parents deported. You make it sound terrible. You make it sound like it's terrible. Oh, well, I'm just writing down what you're telling me. Okay. 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. And so despite her ability to help you find the water, you feel like she should be put in a van and driven across the board No it not No that not at all what I saying What I saying is it worth an interest It worth a peek It becomes uncomfortable for them once they have to sit with it themselves as opposed to putting it out on somebody else, like, you know, an official like me. Have you had any breakthroughs with any of the callers in real time or more so just people watching these? 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. 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 lines for yourself that you won't cross to get a laugh? 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, 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 doxed. 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. 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? 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. 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. The real people being the real ICE and the real DHS. 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? Well, it's a YouTube channel, not a YouTube page. But I appreciate that they are watching me. And 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. 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. He's planning another stand-up tour. He is doing comedy full-time. Now his only other jobs are pretend. 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 standup. 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. 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, 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 a lot more spreadable. I don't know if spreadable is a word, but I just try it. Yeah, of course. We'll take it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of things that are spreadable. Yeah. I think of my comedy like peanut butter. And some people are allergic to it and most people are not. Yeah. Thank you for using your superhuman amygdala for comedy goals. I'm really happy about my amygdala. I hope you've never felt better about your amygdala in this day. In this moment. It's definitely top 10 amygdala day for me. 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. Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was written and produced by Grace Tatter and co-hosted by me, Amory Sebertson. And me, Ben Brock Johnson. It was edited by Meg Kramer, mixed in sound design by our production manager, Paul Vykus, who also pitched this episode. Props to Paul. The rest of our team is Dean Russell, Chiosna Bernadotte, Kalyani Saxena, Emily Jankowski, and our managing producer, Samita Joshi. Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between a real customer service agent and Ben Palmer. 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, endlessthread at wbur.org.
