In this monologue Tom Guarriello, Ph.D. reflects on two intertwined topics that have occupied his recent YouTube experience. First, he describes the sensation of having one of his videos featured on YouTube – the sudden flood of atypical comments, the awareness of the platform’s reach, and the feeling of power that comes with viral exposure. Second, he delves into the ongoing debate surrounding the "Josh Atkins" get‑well‑card campaign that originated in Super Lunary’s video. He outlines the factual uncertainty (questions of whether a real sick child exists, links to a cancer blog, a Snopes investigation, and the Guinness World Records angle) and then shifts to a psychological analysis of why people react emotionally rather than logically to such appeals. He shares a personal family story about a severely ill three‑year‑old who survived against odds, which triggered his own emotional response to the campaign. Guarriello argues that the tension between logic and emotion is rooted in perceived agency: symbolic actions like sending cards feel actionable, whereas massive, impersonal crises (e.g., global water‑related child mortality) feel powerless. He concludes by thanking subscribers, noting the situation remains unresolved, and emphasizing the enduring conflict between rational analysis and emotional impulse.
Chapters
Well, hi, it's Tom Guarriello. This has been an interesting couple of days for me in regard to my YouTube world. You probably know that a video that I made last week got featured yesterday, or maybe it was Sunday night. And if you've never been featured It's quite an interesting experience. First of all, if you don't know you've been featured, you quickly find out when you see hundreds of comments coming in. You know something's up. And especially when you start to read those comments and you see, hmm, these are not usual, the usual kinds of comments that I get. And these are not, these usual people who are commenting on my videos. So getting featured is something that, if it hasn't happened to you, I suggest that if and when it does happen, you'll really get a feeling for the power of what goes on here on YouTube. And power is power in all of its dimensions. But that isn't really what I wanted to talk about in this video. What I wanted to talk about or kind of two lines of conversation that are going on in regard to this Josh Atkins get-well card issue. The first line of thinking is the whole line of thinking about is this real or is this little— is there really a real person? And is he really a sick little boy, or is this all kind of made up in a hoax? Or is he a grown-up now who was a sick little boy at some point in the past? The internet provides information, much of which is ambiguous. So I'll put a couple of links up in the description here of websites that describe and show pictures in one case of a little boy who sounds very much like the little boy who was described in Super Lunary's original video that my video was a response to. And you know, it sure sounds like this was a little boy. Now one of those entries from a cancer blog that I'll put up here in the notes is a year old. But there's a photograph in there of a boy who they call Josh Atkins who sounds like, with the address that is cited in the original video, that sounds like a little boy who is sick. And who was asking for get-well cards. So I know there's a lot of people who doubt the reality of this situation, and given the way situations like this go, you know, there's even an entry today, by the way, on Snopes by an administrator on Snopes who has an embedded copy of Super Lunary's video in that page. I'll put that link up here too, saying, hmm, I don't know, Sounds fishy to me, but that person had not yet been able to get to the bottom of the— let's call it the veracity of the situation. And that's one set of issues that's going on around here where people are trying to verify that in fact there is such a person. Now the other set of comments, to me as a psychologist, are even more interesting. And that's because these are the comments that really deal with the issue of logic and emotion. Now, if you think about this logically, it makes no sense to send get-well cards to a little boy who wants to get into the Guinness Book of World Records. As many people have pointed out, the Guinness Book of World Records no longer accepts such submissions and what's the logic of it. And as Blunty pointed out in his video, there's a lot of, um, really nasty consequences that can come from millions and millions of get well cards going to anybody. And logically, that makes perfect sense to me. When I made my video, I wasn't being logical. I was being emotional. I reacted emotionally to an emotional video that Superlinary had made. And even more so, I was reacting emotionally because, as I mentioned in my video, this situation reminded me dramatically of a, of a situation in our own family where we had a very, very sick youngster. Um, he was 3 at the time, and he had a very severe and very rare, uh, blood disease. And, uh, this little boy used to hold on to objects that were special objects to him, and he wanted E.T. In fact, he wanted every piece of E.T. paraphernalia that he could find. And, you know, we were all amazed at the fact that, you know, E.T. and the sick little boy and, you know, all of the, the patterns of similarity that ran through his story and through the E.T. story were really powerful for us. And this little boy who really many, many docs gave no chance to survive did survive. And when I saw that video and I saw Super Lunary telling the story of a little boy and telling a story about getting this email from her sister about this little boy, it immediately hit me right in the heart. And that was the place that I responded from— emotion. Not from logic, but from emotion. Sick children evoke emotion. Somebody made a video response saying, you know, why do we care about one sick child and we don't care about millions of sick, dying children elsewhere? I, I, I, and I think that's a valid question, but I think the question is a question about agency. What do we feel we can do something about, however ridiculous and symbolic it may be, like sending a get well card, and what do we feel powerless to do anything about? Millions of children dying for not having drinking water, for example, all over the world. And so why do these campaigns touch us? I think they touch us emotionally, not logically, because logically we can all sit back, as I have since making that video, which by the way, I had no, not the slightest idea would ever get featured. And create the kind of— be part of creating the kind of momentum that this has created. And I think that momentum develops because emotion is a very important part of our lives. And sometimes it just takes over. And logic does not prevail. So anyway, I just wanted to, to do an update on that video and to thank all of you who have subscribed, new subscribers and people who are interested in this, um, because obviously this is a situation that's still playing itself out. And, um, we're going to find out about the facts of the situation. I'm sure people will continue to investigate the facts, and we're going to continue to learn about this un really unresolvable tension and conflict that always exists in all of us between logic and emotion. So thanks a lot, and see you again soon. Bye.
