Colorado man shops at Walmart. Then someone snaps a pic, uses a facial recognition site—and asks him for a pic: ‘How did you know?’

Being recognized in public for your work is something most creatives daydream about. Cynically, some content creators recognize this as viral potential and surreptitiously film these kinds of moments as “hopecore” or “joybaiting” content.

As one viral Colorado Walmart encounter shows, a warm moment onscreen isn't always as spontaneous as it looks.

‘Wait … Travis?‘

A content creator (@denverfreewill) posted footage, now viral at more than 26.2 million views, of another creator's original TikTok video of said Walmart encounter. The original creator, Levese (@1evese) appears to primarily post prank content. His Walmart video accumulated more than 67.8 million views.

In Levese's video, he recorded himself—apparently with Meta glasses—surreptitiously taking a picture of a random man at a Walmart. He filmed himself running the man's face through facial recognition website Sherlock Search. The website yielded several online profiles attached to the man, and Levese clicked on the Facebook profile that came up. The profile belonged to Travis Schick who, according to his bio, was “an author based in Colorado and best known for his novel ‘The Redhead.'”

Levese then filmed himself approaching Schick and his wife at self checkout. Again, he did so with Meta glasses rather than his phone, so Schick did not appear to realize Levese was filming him. 

“Wait, Travis? You wrote the book ‘The Redhead'?” Levese asked. After a visibly surprised Schick replied in the affirmative, Levese said, “Yo, no way bro, I love that book, man … It was a really good novel.”

Schick lit up with a smile and shook Levese's offered hand. He asked if Levese read it on creative writing website Quotev, and Levese lied and said yes.

“You've been having us starve for like a minute bro, like you haven't dropped for a minute,” Levese said. Schick replied, “I know. I haven't been doing anything on Quotev lately.”

Levese told him again that he “really [liked] the book ‘The Redhead'” and asked a still-smiling Schick for a picture. Schick acquiesced, and Levese left him with one more compliment.

“You got the Black community on your side, bro,” he finished.

@1evese Let's Make His Book #1 . . . . | #author #caught #digitalfootprint #fyp ♬ original sound – 1evese

Viewers are split directly down the middle on this ‘prank'

Viewers in the comment section of Denverfreewill's reposted Instagram video were charmed by the whole encounter.

“Lowkey, you might have inspired him to write more and pursue his dreams,” one commented. Another said, “You just changed the trajectory of his life.” 

“All jokes aside, this is what people need,” a third said. “Just a little boost.”

Even the rapper Drake got in on the fun, encouraging Schick to publish a new story.

“Trav we need the new new,” Drake commented from his official Instagram account.

However, viewers in Levese's TikTok comment section were concerned by the potential harm of Schick thinking he'd had a real fan interaction, only to potentially go online and see he'd been duped. One commenter called the posting of the video “actually sad.”

“Wait delete this before he sees it he's so happy,” read one comment with more than 566,000 likes. Another with more than 876,000 likes echoed, “Hope he doesn't see this clip.”

“Why would someone do something like this and then post it,” a viewer wrote. “I feel like you've genuinely built him up and destroyed him.”

One person even theorized that this was an undisclosed ad—a common occurrence on TikTok.

“This is an ad for Sherlock search,” they commented.

Is Schick a real author, and did this video help or harm him?

Schick's Patreon bio describes him as a writer who posts almost all of his work on Quotev. It calls “The Redhead” his best-known work, with “over 2,100 reads by over 550 people in just under a year.”

Futurism reported that hundreds of comments from well-wishers have since poured in under “The Redhead's” Quotev page, and that Schick's TikTok following jumped from roughly 150 to more than 12,700 in a matter of days.

Futurism also raised ethical questions about the Meta glasses-filmed video, calling it “manipulative feel-good slop of people in public.”

“Dubbed ‘pervert glasses' for their incognito ability to film anybody in public, the new specs have enabled voyeurs and content creeps the world over, leading to widespread harassment, bullying, and privacy violations,” Futurism wrote. “And now the pervert glasses are also feeding another grim genre of content: joybait. You may have heard of ragebait, which is online content deliberately designed to piss people off, therefore driving clicks and views. Joybait is ragebait's seemingly innocent twin: content designed to stir up those warm fuzzies and make you smile.”

‘A society where we monetize kindness'

Futurism said Levese's video drew in more than 60 million views and 30,000 comments on Levese's TikTok page alone, and has been widely recycled by content farms across platforms. 

Journalist James Vincent, who first flagged the clip, told his followers on X that it embodied “individualized surveillance culture posing as feelgood content.”

“Falling for the original premise of the bait, some excused the privacy violation, arguing the exposure is boosting Schick's work,” Futurism wrote. “But Schick's viral moment is beside the point, as Vincent observes: ‘there may be positive outcomes from this one video, … but the larger effect is creating a society where we monetize kindness.'”

Buzz News has reached out to the creator via Instagram DM and Schick via TikTok comment.