Footage of a lone tourist climbing to the top of Chichén Itzá in Mexico has been viewed 72 million times a restaurant’s demonstration of how you can cut a whole pizza to disguise eating a slice, 82 million. Through that repurposing, Gleason, who now works in advertising in New York, has gone viral again and again. Gleason’s sound has been used in at least 336,000 other videos. When a creator uploads a video to TikTok, they have an option to make that video’s audio a “sound” that other users can easily use in their own videos: lip-syncing to it, adding more noise on top or treating it as a soundtrack. They’re gonna know - is much, much larger. The post has been viewed more than 14 million times, but the reach of its exasperated exchange - Nobody’s gonna know.
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What he came up with - a mocking take on his conflicted inner dialogue - is now cultural history. Surely he, with his performance background, could be among them. TikTok had given so many users their 15 minutes of fame. A few of Gleason’s posts - him dancing to the “Law & Order” theme, a skit about clueless restaurant patrons - had gone modestly viral in the past, and he was intrigued by the possibility of making a megahit. That month, in the early days of the pandemic, American adults spent well over a billion hours on the platform, which had become the most downloaded nongame app in the world.
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In the interim, he recorded two or three videos a day, writing scripts and editing the footage on his phone. When Covid-19 temporarily shuttered indoor dining, he quit and moved back home before attending business school. Just before graduating from college with a musical-theater degree in 2019, he took a job at a nautical-themed restaurant in the Washington, D.C., area, where he served oysters and cocktails with names like Boston Tea Party and Blown Off Course.
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On March 25, 2020, Chris Gleason was in bed at his parents’ house in Pennsylvania, thinking up ideas for videos that might go viral.