Updated as of 12/2/18
A few weeks ago we had a little contest - a Steak Story writing contest. We narrowed the stories y’all wrote down to three and you picked the winner.
You overwhelmingly chose “A Father’s Love of Steak” by @1ukewilson - who you can see, no longer exits.
Where Is @1ukewilson?
Soooooo … where did this guy go? Welp, before we dig into that - we should discuss the fact that @1ukewilson didn’t actually author Steak Stories Episode 6.
Say What? A Steak-IMPoster???
After we ran the contest, you voted on the winner, announced the winner, convinced our Texan friends to act in the videofilmed Steak Stories Episode 6, edited it, published it, posted it to Instagram, and then showed it on Open Tabs Episode 30 (which currently has 23,000 YouTube views) - it finally came to our attention that this story was actually an excerpt from Food: A Love Story written by Jim Gaffigan!!
Well Sh*t
Ugh.
What are we supposed to do here? The video that exists in our Instagram feed lists @1ukewilson as the author (like it’s a frame in the video). But as you likely know, once you post to Instagram - you can’t change it. We really don’t want to take it down - we spent a helluva lot of time planning, recording, and editing this piece. But at the same time, we don’t have Jim Gaffigan’s permission to use the story, and we are legitimately worried about violating copyright laws. I suppose we could delete it, and the repost a new version of the video - but that will probably just annoy the crap out of everyone.
So far - this is what we’ve done. We created a version of the video without @1ukewilson’s handle on it and posted it to YouTube. We updated the caption of any Instagram post that contains the story and gave Jim Gaffigan credit. Our next step is to contact Jim Gaffigan’s “people” to see if they have any issues with this. The actual story is pretty long, if we luck out - maybe this could propel us into a lucrative career where we transform comedians’ best stories into video.
How Did This Happen?
On one hand, we can see how this happened. When @1ukewilson watched Open Tabs #25 and heardBert’s directive to bomb us with stories about your first experience with steak, he probably thought “Holy shit! That Jim Gaffigan story is perfect for this!” There’s no way he could have predicted we planned to hold an election day event where we had the audience pick their favorite story - and his story would win.
On the other hand, he voted for “his” story. He liked the announcement that “his” story won. He even liked the video we posted. He easily could have DMed us and said, “Ummmmmm … so … I have a confession to make. I didn’t write that story - it’s Jim Gaffigan’s. I’m so sorry!”
We would have figured it out.
So Seriously, Where Is @1ukewison?
To date, we have not had direct contact with @1ukewilson. We suspect he knows what’s up, because his handle “mysteriously” disappeared within the past 48 hours. We’re actually kind of glad he did this though, because we didn’t want people to start blowing his account up. We do have a pretty good idea of what his new handle is, but this new account is private - we can’t be entirely certain.
Here’s the new video. We’ll keep you posted on the Case of the Steak-Imposter when details emerge.