Endless Thread

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.

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"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.

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.

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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.

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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

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.

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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.

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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?

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