Up to a billion people use ChatGPT every week, for everything from the mundane to the weird to the deeply personal. It is commonly assumed that these messages are private – between the user and the LLM. It is commonly assumed that these messages are private – between the user and the LLM. But in some cases, human reviewers are reading these conversations and offering editorial feedback to help ChatGPT sound more human.

Reporter Joseph Cox of 404 Media broke the story of Project Lily, Open AI's initiative to use human reviewers to train and improve ChatGPT. He breaks it down for us on this week's Endless Thread.

Show notes:

• Inside ‘Project Lily’: The Humans Reading Your ChatGPT Chats (404 Media)

This episode was produced by Grace Tatter and Frannie Monahan. It was co-hosted by Grace Tatter, Ben Brock Johnson, and Amory Sivertson, and edited by Dave Shaw. Mix and sound design by Paul Vaitkus.

"Should I be joking at a time like this?"

That's the question then 33-year-old Brooke Eby asked herself when she uploaded her first piece of TikTok comedy in 2022, about being diagnosed with a terminal illness. Brooke built an audience of hundreds of thousands of people who were rooting for, and laughing with, her. Sometimes it got weird.

Brooke died due to complications with ALS earlier this month. She was 37.

In 2025, she talked to Endless Thread hosts Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson about how facing death changed her relationship with social media and online community.

Show notes:

• Brooke Eby's TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube
• ALSTogether
• When Your Terminal Illness Makes You a TikTok Star (The New York Times)

This episoded was written and produced by Grace Tatter. It was co-hosted by Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson. Mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski.

The internet is the great connector. Talk with nearly anyone at any time about anything. But that kind of freedom can lead to misunderstandings. Maybe your neighbors discover your cruder, less friendly persona online. Maybe a debate over holiday lore becomes a battle front.

Endless Thread producers Grace Tatter and Frannie Monahan bring two stories to remind us that the internet is a morass of information that no one can ever control.

Show notes:

• "How I became the villain of El Cerrito’s Nextdoor" (Oakland Review of Books)
• Bomellida FAQ (GitHub)

This content was originally created for audio. An auto-generated transcript is available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Heads up that some elements (i.e. music, sound effects, tone) are harder to translate to text.

Get out your graphing calculators, because today's episode of Endless Thread is about a math problem. Specifically: wt(π1, . . . , πm) = m−1 ∑ i=1 wt(πi , πi+1) Now, pencils down. Stumped? So were mathematicians for decades. That is, until the equation was solved in a thread on 4Chan about watching the anime The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya.  Show notes:

• A lower bound on the length of the shortest superpattern (oeis.org)
• Sa-Shi-Su-Se-So: The Secret of Japanese Cooking Basics (Umami Insider)

This content was originally created for audio. An auto-generated transcript is available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Heads up that some elements (i.e. music, sound effects, tone) are harder to translate to text.

Mo lives in Aden, an ancient city in southern Yemen. Built on a volcanic crater, it has castles and beaches set against mountains. It's beautiful. Like the rest of the country, it is also in the midst of an ongoing civil war. This summer, protests broke out over living conditions and basic services in the city -- like electricity, which can be shut off for 18 hours at a time.

But despite these conditions, for the last five years, Mo has been fighting for a persistent dream of his –– a video game internet cafe for his neighborhood. This week on Endless Thread Ben and Amory tell the story of how Mo, against all odds, has kept the lights on (quite literally) at his gaming cafe thanks to his persistence, and the help of internet strangers across the world.

This content was originally created for audio. An auto-generated transcript is available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Heads up that some elements (i.e. music, sound effects, tone) are harder to translate to text.

Ben can make a roaring, rumbling sound with his ears that no one else can hear. He never thought much about it — whether only he could do this, or whether everyone could do this — until he discovered a subreddit called Ear Rumblers Assemble: a whole community devoted to the mysterious and understudied ability to voluntarily tense one of the miniscule muscles in our ears. 

We go into Ben's ear with Dr. Anand Devaiah, and raise questions about how everyone experiences the world differently and the enduring mysteries of the human body.

 

Show notes:

• r/earrumblersassemble (Reddit)
• Thanks to Reddit, a New Diagnosis Is Bubbling Up Across the Nation (KFF Health News)

This episode was produced by Grace Tatter and edited by Dave Shaw. It was co-hosted by Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson. Mix and sound design by Paul Vaitkus.

 

This episode was originally published on March 10, 2023. 

In 2022, freshmen at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill got a new neighbor: an owl. What wasn't clear was whether the owl was trying to befriend them, or catch them.

Sometimes the owl seemed to be chasing students. Other times, it seemed to come in peace. A popular campus Instagram account reported that a woman had actually raised the owl herself. After she was spotted feeding it, the owl sightings stopped, much to the disappointment of students who'd come to consider it as a sort of mascot. Where had the owl come from, and where did it go?

Endless Thread host Ben Brock Johnson and producer Grace Tatter talk about how the owl gained online campus fame, and get a surprise update from the person who knows the owl best.

Show notes

• "Animal Instincts" (Criminal)
• "The Real Killer in The Staircase Might Be … an Owl?" (Vulture)
• "Column: Hinton hears a hoot — the Class of 2026 vs. the HoJo Owl" (The Daily Tar Heel)
• Instagram post of owl chasing student Kaleigh Wilhite (UNC Chicks)
• Instagram post of owl confrontation at a basketball court (UNC Chicks)
• Instagram post with other campus owl sightings (UNC Chicks)
• Instagram post of Barb with the owl (UNC Quirks)
• Reddit post on r/wellthatsucks about an owl attack
• "An owl twice attacked a Washington woman. A biologist says it's becoming more common" (NPR)

This content was originally created for audio. An auto-generated transcript is available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Heads up that some elements (i.e. music, sound effects, tone) are harder to translate to text.

Grab your telescopes because this week on Endless Thread Ben and NPR Short Wave host Emily Kwong take us down two science-related internet wormholes. First, Emily introduces us to the intergalactic world of astronaut fan fiction, starring the crew of the 2026 Artemis II moon mission. Then, Ben takes us through the r/Science discourse on a new LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) study mapping an ancient Amazonian civilization.

Show notes:

• Short Wave (NPR)
• Between change and upgrade (Artemis II fan fiction, Wattpad)
• Scientists Uncover Hundreds of Hidden Structures Beneath The Amazon (r/Science)

This content was originally created for audio. An auto-generated transcript is available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Heads up that some elements (i.e. music, sound effects, tone) are harder to translate to text.

The 190 passengers of a United Airlines flight from Newark, New Jersey to Palma de Mallorca, Spain had settled into their seats for their overnight flight when the captain gave an announcement: everyone had to turn off their Bluetooth devices — or he was going to turn around the plane. This confounded passengers, because Bluetooth is safe for airplanes. It stays enabled when devices are on airplane mode. United even encourages using Bluetooth headphones to connect to in-flight entertainment.

What was going on? The flight crew couldn't say. So the passengers took to...where else? Reddit.

Show notes:

• • UA flight - 'turn bluetooth off or we're turning around' (Reddit)

This episode was reported and produced by Grace Tatter, and co-hosted by Grace Tatter, Amory Sivertson and Ben Brock Johnson. It was edited by Dave Shaw. Mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski and Paul Vaitkus.

The brand Fruit of the Loom is almost ubiquitous in the world of underwear and casual wear. You have likely seen its logo, if not on your own body, on store racks or at least in ads. Now, in your mind's eye, picture it. What do you see?

For years, countless people have been taking to the internet to share their memory of the Fruit of the Loom logo. A lot of them have the same memory – a basket, rather, a cornucopia of fruit.

But they're all wrong. At least, Fruit of the Loom claims that is has never had a cornucopia in its logo and there is little concrete evidence to suggest that the brand is lying. So what could be behind this collective misremembering?

This week on Endless Thread, Ben and Amory embark on a quest for answers: Is the Fruit of the Loom cornucopia simply an example of the Mandela Effect (a pervasive mass-misremembering of a fact or event), or has someone pulled the woolen underwear over our eyes?

Show notes:

• Has the 'Fruit of the Loom' Logo Ever Contained a Cornucopia? (Snopes)
• Black T-Shirt logo (Reddit)
• Alan's Reddit post 

This episode was produced by Frannie Monahan and co-hosted by Amory Sivertson and Ben Brock Johnson. It was edited by Dave Shaw. Mix and sound design by Paul Vaitkus.

This week on Endless Thread it's a producer takeover with Grace Tatter and Kalyani Saxena serving up some delicious online stories. First, Kalyani digs into why the internet is so hungry for perpetual stews (a stew that is simmered and added on to in perpetuity). Then, Grace dishes on a listener conundrum about whether salty Reddit posts are worse for us than sweet ones.

Show notes:

• ZAQ_Makes' Stewtheus (TikTok)
• Want to try perpetual stew? Some tips for avoiding foodborne illness (NPR)
• r/GirlDinnerDiaries (Reddit)
• Does Venting Your Feelings Actually Help? (Greater Good Magazine)
• Endless Thread Subreddit 

This episode was produced by Frannie Monahan and co-hosted by Kalyani Saxena and Grace Tatter. It was edited by Dave Shaw. Mix and sound design by Paul Vaitkus.