Encore: Never Gonna Give You Up
Endless Thread
WBUR
4.1 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 26 December 2025
⏱️ 49 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Who gets credit for starting a meme? Usually... nobody — they're made too quickly and organically. In the case of one of the most famous bait-and-switch memes of all time, the "Rick Roll," we may be looking at something experts call convergent evolution. Did the Rick Roll originate with a piece of code on the message board 4Chan, or with a prank call to a local sports show in Michigan? And why does the Rick Roll have such staying power? Is it codified in the DNA of the song itself?
We explore the meme’s origin, the history of the song, "Never Gonna Give You Up," and its impact on both internet users during COVID-19 and on the performer himself.
This episode was originally published on Oct. 08, 2021.
Transcript
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| 0:25.6 | why is innovation in health care so hard? |
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| 0:33.2 | Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. |
| 0:35.9 | Survey, survey, survey. |
| 0:37.4 | Get your survey, ladies and gentlemen. |
| 0:39.1 | We're doing a survey. |
| 0:42.8 | That's the zest I look for in every enlistread taping from you, Ben. |
| 0:50.5 | He's not wrong, though. |
| 0:51.7 | We do have a listener survey, and this is actually really important to us because we, in the new year, just want to keep making the show more of what you want it to be. We want it to be better and better. And so we have put together a short survey, survey, survey for you to tell us what you love about the show, what you want more of, what you could stand a little less of. |
| 1:17.2 | And if you complete the survey, which is available at a link in our show notes, we have an extra episode that we're going to give you. |
| 1:25.1 | We're putting together a bonus episode where Ben and I |
| 1:28.1 | tell all. It's a dashboard confessional. Amory and I are going to drive around in a car |
| 1:34.3 | and confess some things to each other. So if you want that extra episode, all you have to do |
| 1:41.4 | is fill out the survey for us. |
| 1:45.0 | And also, Ben, tell him a little about what we have, what we're scheming up in the new year. |
| 1:49.7 | So we had a user in our subreddit posts, proud to be a threadhead. |
| 1:55.1 | Is that a thing? |
| 1:56.4 | It is now because they had just done their Spotify wrapped. |
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