Annie Rauwerda (Depths of Wikipedia)

ERIC JOHNSON: I'm Eric Johnson. Welcome to Follow Friday, the podcast about who you should follow online.

Every week, I talk to creative people about who they follow, and why. This is a guided tour to the best people on the internet, led by your favorite writers, podcasters, comedians, and more. If this is your first episode of the show, take a moment now and please follow or subscribe in your podcast app.

Today on the show is Annie Rauwerda, the creator of Depths of Wikipedia. This is one of the most delightful accounts I have ever followed. Annie rounds up the weirdest, wildest, stupidest, and most delightfully mundane corners of everyone's favorite free encyclopedia.

You can find Depths of Wikipedia on Twitter @depthsofwiki and on Instagram and TikTok @depthsofwikipedia. And you can find Annie on Instagram @annierau. Annie, welcome to Follow Friday!

ANNIE: Thanks for having me.

ERIC: I'm so excited to have you here. I learned about this account from friend of the show, Josh Fruhlinger. He called you "an influencer within the Wikipedia obsessive community." So, for people who don't know, before you started this project, how would you describe your relationship with Wikipedia? You were already a very active editor, right?

ANNIE: Not really. I had edited a few things, one-off edits. Like if I saw something that seemed a little like bad grammar, or I added someone to a list of notable alumni from a school near me. Tiny things that. But I didn't really know any of the rules. I just loved Wikipedia as a fan.

And they say there's that rule that 1% of consumers are very interested in a product — 1% contribute, 10% are super interested. I don't know if that applies to Wikipedia, but using that model I think I was in the 10%, super interested, but I was not an active editor at all. But I loved it. Wikipedia is the s**t.

But yeah, I started this account two years ago. I was in college. I was a sophomore, and it was during quarantine, April 2020. I, at the time, didn't know about other projects that are similar. There's also a Facebook group called Cool Freaks' Wikipedia Club, which is the same idea. I didn't know about it at the time, but later I was like, "Oh, this is the exact same, pretty much."

It ended up being a bit more time-consuming than I expected because I became really into it. At first, the following was really small, but very loyal. For the first few months, my internship got canceled. I was going to do research in Boston but instead, I was just at home and couldn't really get a job. I was just sitting around on Wikipedia a lot for a couple weeks before I ended up getting another job. That's when I invested a lot of time into the account.

A few months later, it got a bunch of followers. And since then, it's been exponential growth. I think it increases by around 1% or 2% per week. Now that it's 800 something thousand on Instagram, it's a lot.

ERIC: Everyone keeps on sharing it with their friends. It's one of those things where it's very approachable. It's very easy to share it, and someone immediately gets, "Okay. I've seen Wikipedia. I've seen things like this on Wikipedia before." So, an account that rounds them up is just an instant, "Of course, I'll follow that."

ANNIE: The Wikipedia aesthetic is so instantly recognizable. I have a friend who's a designer at Wikipedia, and when I found out that it was a job, the fact that there is a lead of a design team, I was like, "What do you do all day? There's no design on Wikipedia. It is the most basic website." But of course, you do have to decide, where are the lines and buttons, and all the UX things.

ERIC: I remember way back in the day, I had an iPod, and it was before the iPod even had a color. And I jailbroke it and loaded Wikipedia — a snapshot of Wikipedia as it existed at the time on this iPod. I brought it to school and it was like, "Wow, you have all of Wikipedia in your pocket." At the time, that was very impressive. Now it just comes off as lame, but it's been a fascination of mine for quite some time.

ANNIE: Well, that reminds me of the WikiReader, a product you could buy between 2009 and then I think it was sold until around 2014. It was one approximately phone-sized gadget that had Wikipedia loaded onto it.

ERIC: Just Wikipedia, nothing else?

ANNIE: That was it. It was the WikiReader.

ERIC: Huh? I had no idea. Have you ever gotten involved in any editor drama on Wikipedia? I wonder if something being featured by you on Depths of Wikipedia, maybe that causes drama. Maybe it's like, "She's puncturing a little bit of the prestige of the site by pointing out a funny caption or a funny picture on the site."

ANNIE: The editors and other Wikipedia-affiliated people that I've talked to don't seem to be bothered by me making jokes about the site. It's open-source. People can take it and do whatever they want with it and people are pretty good about that.

But sometimes, I'll post something and then it'll start getting vandalized a bunch. Like when I posted the List of mammals displaying homosexual behavior, it's comically long. There's 170 something mammals that are listed, and that's just the ones that are documented as having homosexual behavior.

I posted it at the beginning of Pride month and then — don't do this, by the way — people started editing it to add in their name or whatever. It's funny, I guess, for two seconds, but then you just feel bad. I don't think they ended up protecting the page, but it was getting a bunch of vandalism. So that happens sometimes.

Sometimes I'll post something that is rather unclear; it's just not good writing and that's why it's funny. And I feel a little bit bad about highlighting that. I feel there are two types of humor that I can do. Category one is "the world is so crazy and here it is, documented on Wikipedia." And category two is kind of more dangerous territory because it could potentially highlight the worst parts about Wikipedia.

The other category is like, "Here's something in the world that's whatever," but the way Wikipedia writes about it is really funny. With that, you just have to be careful because I want to encourage people to start editing. Wikipedia is great and you should get involved because it's another way to volunteer your time. Wikipedia is one which you could make a huge impact, I think.

It's bizarre to me. I feel so proud sometimes when I'm looking at a page that I made or a page that I heavily edited. And when I see, "Wow, I did this. People liked it. People added to it, people made it better." It really makes me feel like I'm part of such a good community. We're all working together to make something good.

ERIC: Well, that's so sweet. And as I said, Depths of Wikipedia is one of my favorite accounts that I followed recently. Now, let's find out who Annie follows. You can follow along with us today. Every person she recommends will be linked in the show notes and in the transcript at followfridaypodcast.com/wikipedia.

Annie, before the show, I gave you a list of categories and I asked you to tell me about some people you follow who fit in those categories. Your first pick is in the category "Someone you don't know, but want to be friends with." And you said Harry Hill, who is on Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok @veryharryhill.

I was trying to think of how to briefly describe what Harry does, and the best I could come up with was "comedian/influencer." But you know him better, so maybe you can expand on that. What are the sort of things that Harry posts that you love?

ANNIE: Upon first glance at @veryharryhill's profile on Instagram, you think, "Oh, this is a run-of-the-mill influencer." This man's Instagram bio is a yellow heart that says "Vibe curator," and then it links his management. And it's a bunch of well-lit selfies, pictures of him traveling, and pictures of him posing in Vegas. And you're like, "Is this really special? Why am I following this?"

But yes, you need to follow because the thing about @veryharryhill is that he's so quick-witted that you could just follow over and die. He's invented his own dialect where he changes words to make them spelled more fancy. Like "do it" is "doette", or "send it" is "Sendette." It makes me laugh every time.

His stories are so long. I watch every single one every single day, and it feels like he's almost giving this meta-commentary on being an influencer. Maybe I'm taking this too seriously, but it does appear to be a little bit of performance art. Everything he says is a little bit ironic. And I feel like even he doesn't know exactly how many layers of irony there are.

One example: He jokes that he's writing a book called Eat, Pray, Influence. Is that true? Honestly, it could be. Is that fake? Honestly, it could be. I don't care. I'll watch anything he does.

He worked at Mashable a while ago writing about trends. And then he became an influencer for Hotels.com, and they paid him thousands of dollars to travel around the world and take photos in hotel pools.

ERIC: Nice work if you can get it.

ANNIE: I know! So, he has about 50,000 followers, which isn't really a quit-your-job-and-focus-on-the-internet-full-time follower count, necessarily, but he's making it work.

Another video that he did that made me really laugh was when he posted a video of him… So, he's gay and his brothers are straight. He went to Vegas with them and he pretended to act straight the whole time. I don't want to describe it; I feel I'm going to ruin it, but it made me laugh out loud.

ERIC: I saw some of those Vegas photos. I think the captions were "Straight Harry strikes again," his whole act the whole time he was there. I guess if you're going to put on a different face, Vegas is probably the place to do it.

ANNIE: The joke that he is straight when he goes to Vegas is so funny to me. He's done it multiple times. Every time he goes to Vegas, he's straight.

ERIC: I saw in this one video he posted a from a "cookie dough flavored whiskey event". It's him in a room with maybe a dozen other influencers and an instructor, and they're being taught how to make cookie dough-flavored whiskey cocktails. He describes it as "like being enrolled in the camp of life, and each day is a new activity with a new counselor," which sounds nice at first blush, but then it's like, what if you think that sounds gross? What if you don't want cookie dough flavored whiskey cocktails?

ANNIE: No, but you do.

ERIC: Have you tried this?

ANNIE: No, but he's influenced me. I want them. He has a story highlight of when he visited a taping of the People's Court. That's another one that made me laugh. I can't give you all the details, but it's a great one to check out.

ERIC: When he posts something like that, do you then go and watch the People's Court, or has he has done stuff, ironically or not, that then you've gone out and bought the thing that he is promoting?

ANNIE: Oh, no. I have never been influenced. I've never purchased anything that he recommended, but I also hardly ever purchase things that influencers recommend.

ERIC: Sorry, hotels.com. Gotta try harder next time.

ANNIE: But I do feel tempted to adopt his spelling patterns. I also feel like he's influenced me in the sense that if I were in New York soon, and if I did need a quick lunch spot near Times Square, I probably would go to The American Girl Doll Café.

ERIC: Oh my God. I didn't know they had a café. Is that a running joke on his thing?

ANNIE: Well, he just loves American Girl Dolls and I feel like they're kind of in vogue again. The American Girl Doll Cafe is overrun by TikTokers.

ERIC: Wow. So, you said you wanted to be friends with Harry. Let's imagine he calls you up tomorrow and says, "Annie, I just heard you on my favorite podcast, Follow Friday. Let's hang out this weekend." After your lunch at The American Girl Doll Café, what do you want to do with him?

ANNIE: Well, I should say, I don't think we're friends but we're mutuals, and I also met him briefly at a party one time. I don't know if that disqualifies this; I'm just letting you know.

ERIC: Thank you for your candor.

ANNIE: Ooh, but what do we do? That's a tough one. Honestly, this sounds so goofy, but I would want to paint myself the color of metal and then be one of those living statues. I want to do that. I think that'd be fun with him.

ERIC: The two of you would be a duo statue act?

ANNIE: Yeah, but I would only want to do it for 10 minutes and then spend the rest of the time documenting the process.

ERIC: Well, that was Harry Hill, who is on Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok @veryharryhill.

Annie, let's move on to your next follow. I asked you for someone who makes the internet a better place, and you said "Twitter bots," of which there are way too many to count. But a couple of examples that you mentioned in your email are New New York Times, which is @NYT_first_said, and Neural Net Guesses Memes, which is @ResNeXtGuesser. I'm also a fan of both these accounts.

Let's start by explaining what New New York Times does.

ANNIE: Well, it's one of my favorite bots. I'm very pro-bot. I know that it's a big buzzword right now. Elon's like, "How many of your users are bots?" I don't care. I love the bots. Obviously, if you're influencing the elections, it's probably bad. But if you're just telling jokes, that is awesome. Not all bots are bad.

The New New York Times bot is this … it tweets whenever the New York Times uses a word that it has never used before. A great example is when it used the word "deadass" for the first time in an article. And most of them are boring, a lot of them are typos, or just a random word. And that's fine, but what really gets me going is when this buttoned-up institution like the New York Times starts dropping slang like cheugy, deadass, and all those.

I love this account so much that I messaged the guy who made it. And I was like, "Yo, you have the best Twitter bot in the world. Do you know that?" And then we became friends.

So, now I'm forever a fangirl of his Twitter bot. But we are also friends.

ERIC: There's also a companion bot to New New York Times called NYT Bibliography, which auto replies with the year of the oldest book it can find in which that same word has been used, and which is @NYT_finally.

I love the fact that you have these bots that get to such a level, that then they have these hangers-on. They have these also-ran bots that are just part of the whole experience of following them. They're always in the comments.

ANNIE: I love some of those bots. Have you seen the one that takes a Twitter conversation or thread and turns it into...What's that show called? Jury Apprentice something?

ERIC: Jury apprentice? I don't know this.

ANNIE: It's like something Courtroom bot. If you're on Twitter, you've probably seen it probably.

ERIC: … Oh, Ace Attorney?

ANNIE: Yeah, Ace Attorney.

ERIC: So, it turns internet arguments into videos from this video game, Ace Attorney, where it's people arguing in the courtroom … I had not actually seen this bot before. I think I've seen videos like this.

ANNIE: You can just use it whenever. If you're observing a very funny conversation and you want to turn it into an Ace Attorney Court simulation, you just tag them and then it happens.

ERIC: Wow. So, it's not even automatically pulling up viral conversations. You can just summon it at any time. Wow. That's blowing my mind. Then, let's also talk about Neural Net Guesses Memes. I am also a big fan of this one. Could you explain what this bot does?

ANNIE: This bot was created by an engineer in San Francisco. And basically the idea of the bot is that it takes a meme, usually just some deranged image, and then it guesses what is in it, so you're using AI. And it only has 1,000 options; I was looking at the source code. So, a lot of the time, if it's a really specific item in the meme, the bot can't really guess very closely. So there's lots of funny examples.

There's a bunch of eggs in the fridge, for example, and it guesses "ping pong balls." It also says it's confidence level and that's really funny. It's very funny when it guesses with 100% confidence but then it's totally wrong. It's also funny when it sees something bizarre and then it's very low confidence.

And the humor is kind of layered because, one, you're laughing at the meme, and two, you're laughing at this idea of a diligent little bot trying its absolute darndest to guess what it is.

ERIC: Yeah. If this is the state that image recognition is, I'm a little bit worried about self-driving cars.

ANNIE: There's this image of Judge Judy, but her face is looking kind of f**ked up. And the caption that's written on the photo is "BALLIFF! WHACK HIS PEEPEE!" This doesn't make any sense. So, this poor bot is guessing, "Oh, maybe it's a book jacket." Confidence is only 1.97%. It's just funny.

ERIC: If that does become a book jacket, then it'll be validated. Someone's gotta make a book with that on the cover and we're good. Here's one a little bit further down where someone has started a fire in a bathroom. The toilet paper is all unspooled on the floor and they have started what looks like a raging fire next to the toilet. And the bot says, "Image prediction: refrigerator, Confidence: 6.2%."

ANNIE: But the good thing is you don't have to worry because this isn't the state-of-the-art image recognition. You can look at the GitHub code and you're going to be, "Oh okay, it's fine."

ERIC: Okay. So, we've got the NYT bot, we've got Neural Net Guesses, we've got Ace Attorney bot. Are there on any other bots that you love seeing updates from that make Twitter so much better for you?

ANNIE: Too many for me to mention.

ERIC: There's one that I love called "Emote! at the Location," which is an alternate band name for Panic! At the Disco such as "Cry! At the Orgy" or "Suffer! At the Post Office."

ANNIE: Do you remember when the leaked court document showed that Roe v Wade might get overturned? That bot briefly had this tweet that was called "Rejoice! At the Court," and then they had to apologize because they were like, "Sorry, this was just automatically generated. I wasn't trying to make a statement."

ERIC: It was just completely random. It just happened to land on "Rejoice! At the Court" at that moment. Oh my gosh.

ANNIE: Very interesting.

ERIC: And then coincidentally, the next day, the New York Times game Wordle...

ANNIE: Fetus!

ERIC: And they had to change that too. That's so weird. The bots are trying to tell us something.

ANNIE: The bots are pro-life. Wake up, guys.

ERIC: You said these bots make the internet a better place. Presumably, everyone listening to this is a human, but what is something you think that all of us human listeners can learn from the example of these bots? Is there something that we can do to make the internet a better place in the same way that they do?

ANNIE: Just stop f**king having takes on everything and just do things because it's cute and happy. Like, post a picture of a meme and make an AI guess it. That's funny. Don't try to make everything about your feelings and opinions. Takes are fine sometimes, but I feel we are approaching "too many takes" territory on Twitter these days.

ERIC: Exactly. Reject hot takes and embrace meme anarchy. Well, that was a lot of Twitter bots. You can find links to all the ones we talked about in the show notes.

[ad break]

ERIC: Welcome back to Follow Friday. Annie, I asked you to tell me about someone who makes you think and you said "all the post-ironic Catholic Instagram pages." A couple of examples you gave are @ineedgodineverymomentofmylife and @praying.

Unlike the Twitter bots, I was completely unfamiliar with these sort of accounts. Could you explain for folks like me who are unfamiliar, what sort of stuff gets posted on post-ironic Catholic Instagram pages, and why they make you think?

ANNIE: We are amidst a revival, don't know if you knew that, but I feel very cool, urban young people are totally into the aesthetic of Catholicism. People are doing the rosary as a bit because it looks cool. And I feel like it's kind of this return-to-tradwife thing.

There was a Vanity Fair article about how there's "the new right," and how there are secular people that are urban… I'm trying to think of examples. Like the women who run the Red Scare podcast were mentioned. And I'm not saying it's good, I'm just saying it's interesting to me because growing up, everyone around me in Michigan was Christian and religious, and it didn't feel cool at least in this way.

But then you have brands like @praying — and it used to be @prayingg but they got the good username now — they are selling products, like a crop top that says in bedazzled jewels, "God's Favorite." And models wear these. There is this bikini where on one boob it says, "Father," the other one it says, "Son," and then the bottom says, "Holy Spirit."

I think that the thing about it that makes me think is that you just can't tell how serious it is. That's why it makes me think. It's like, this demographic that you don't always think of as religious, to what extent are they actually embracing Christian religion, and why is this trendy?

And maybe this doesn't say anything about capital-C culture. Maybe it's just some stupid trend, but I think the whole thing is kind of interesting. I feel like we're right at the tipping point where it's approaching mainstream.

ERIC: Are you a part of this revival? Do you have a bedazzled shirt that says "God's Favorite"? Or are you just observing this as an outsider to the whole trend?

ANNIE: I feel like I'm observing it as an outsider.

ERIC: We should probably define post-irony. The basic definition I found was "a state in which earnest and irony intents become muddled."

A non-religious example would be if you unironically listen to Never Gonna Give You Up by Rick Astley, which I do. It's a five-star song. I imagine these two constituencies where there are people who see this as an evolution of their faith and there are other folks who are seeing it as just a trend.

ANNIE: No. I think it's all post-ironic people. People are not buying these clothes because they love God. Why the f**k would somebody who loves Jesus get a Trinity bikini?

ERIC: Okay, fair point. So, it's all post-ironic. Wow. These accounts have tens of thousands of followers. It's completely fascinating to me that this would be such a big trend, that it would get to this level, and people would be that into this aesthetic.

ANNIE: Like, religion as a joke, religion as a bit; the whole idea of that is very funny to me.

It might just be a weird blip; it's just a meme-y topic, like really hot girls doing rosaries on Instagram and being religious in a way where you can't quite tell if they're serious or not.

Maybe it's not important. Maybe it's like when people used to put crayons on a canvas and then blow dry them so the crayons are dripping down and then posting photos of that. Maybe it's just another random trend that means nothing.

ERIC: Like 15 minutes of fame and then people move on to God knows what. Literally.

ANNIE: Can I read you some of the texts of the posts on the meme page, @ineedgodineverymomentofmylife, because they make me laugh?

ERIC: Please do.

ANNIE: "We need an American Girl Doll who saw Joan of Arc burned at the stake."

"NASA just revealed a heaven-like planet where you can drink a beer at the lake. And they're calling it Earth."

There's a screenshot of what's clearly a local news broadcast and it says, "Coming up: Drive-through Catholics." And you see a woman in a car and a priest is putting an ash cross on her forehead.

There's another comic that appears to be God at the entrance, near the pearly gates and it's like, "Did your life be like ooh ah, ooh ah?"

"Vibrators are wrong and unnatural. The Bible said Adam and Eve, not Florence and the Machine."

ERIC: Okay. That's my favorite

ANNIE: That's just a sample. It's mostly just a tsunami of garbage that's all loosely related to religion, but it makes me laugh, and it also makes me think.

ERIC: Has it made you think about anything deeper than that? I don't know if you're religious at all, but has it actually intersected at all with any of your feelings about religion? Or do you look at it purely as this aesthetic thing?

ANNIE: I'm somewhat religious, but I don't see this as...

ERIC: This is not religious.

ANNIE: I'm not waking up and doing morning devotions to this meme page. I just think it's an interesting aesthetic.

ERIC: Maybe that's what comes next. Those were post-ironic Catholic Instagram pages such as @ineedgodineverymomentofmylife and @praying.

We have time for one more follow today. I asked you for someone who makes you laugh and you said Leia Jospe, who is @favetiktoks420 on Instagram.

Like you and @veryharryhill, Leia has been profiled in the New York Times for what she has done with this account. It's attracted more than 50,000 followers. Do you remember how you first started following @favetiktoks420?

ANNIE: I've been following since the very beginning. I'm a huge fan of Leia. I didn't even know her at the time, but I knew that she had worked on the TV show How To with John Wilson. She filmed clips for that, which I love. Also, she would post funny things on Instagram.

I didn't even know her, but one time I went to her stoop sale just as a fan girl and I bought her sweater and I wear it all the time. Anyway, when she was like, "I'm starting this new thing," I immediately followed.

But the premise is that she posts the absolute, most cringy TikToks you can imagine. It's like dudes with really gelled hair who are showing off their abs, and maybe they're saying something weird, and it feels like they kind of lack self-awareness. The whole perspective of the @favetiktoks420 account feels like it's millennials peering at teenagers and being like, "Oh, my God. What is going on here?"

Her captions are always funny and the comments always crack me up because there's this recurring cast of characters in all these TikToks. I feel like it's oddly positive. It's not really mocking them; it's more just observing them and cheering them on, but also being a bit aghast. I don't know if that really sums it up.

Sometimes, she'll interview the creators, so it feels fairly friendly, but I do think that it shows me a different side of TikTok. Because my for-you page is usually just learning content, and these TikToks are much more like, "Oh, I'm a hot 16-year-old and here's what I think about being a man."

ERIC: "Here's what I have learned in all of my years." The description of the account is "The best unintentional art of this generation. I look at TikTok so you don't have to (heart emoji)." Then there's a trigger warning: "expect everything."

So, you've been following this since the very beginning. You mentioned that these are very different from the sort of TikToks that you would get in the app. Do you specifically follow this aggregator for the reason that she's bringing these together? Do you follow other aggregators of TikToks to get a different perspective on what people are seeing?

ANNIE: Yeah, it's so fun. One of my good friends, Ena Da, has a meme page called Park Slope Arsonist. The name comes because there was a tweet, and I could be getting this tweet wrong, but it was something to the likes of, "Why are there all these fires in Park slope?" So, she changed her name to Park Slope Arsonist and replied something like, "Oh, no one tell him." Then the name just stuck.

She's not actually burning down the city. She will post on her story, 20 or 30 TikToks a day, and those are pretty similar to what I see in my for-you page.

ERIC: So, more educational, more learning-based?

ANNIE: More viral, funny content, but then this @favetiktoks420 is lots of teenagers just saying the most stupid thing you can imagine.

ERIC: What do you think makes a funny TikTok of the type that Leia is rounding up on @favetiktoks420? Is it just cluelessness? I'm trying to put my finger on what it is that you think her bar is for identifying what's worth sharing with this big audience?

ANNIE: Well, it's just when someone is so drunk with confidence that they are saying the most crazy thing. I'm trying to find a good example. I can't find a good example but I feel like it's when people think they look really hot, or when people think the story they're telling is really gripping, but in reality, it's just a little bit cringy.

ERIC: True story, I had not heard of this account before, and when I pulled it up, I started watching the videos and I thought it was all just one guy at first because all these 16-year-old boys have the same hair and the three facial expressions they know how to make for the camera.

So, I started watching them and I was like, wait a minute, why does he have a beard in this one and not this one? Then I Googled it and I realized this is a compilation of a lot of different similar-looking dudes.

Well, that was Leia Jospe, who is @favetiktoks420 on Instagram.

As a reminder to everyone listening that our supporters on Patreon have access to a fifth bonus follow from Annie. Just go to Patreon.com/followfriday and donate any amount starting at just $1 to unlock that.

Annie, before we go, let's make sure that listeners know how to find you online. Where do you want them to follow you?

ANNIE: Well, I'm not asking them to. They don't have to follow me, but if they're not annoyed with me yet, then you're definitely welcome to. On Instagram, @annierau. On Instagram also, @depthsofwikipedia. @depthsofwiki on Twitter, and @depthsofwikipedia on TikTok.

I have a personal TikTok that I'm hopefully going to start posting on more. So, if you want to be a founding member of that, you can follow @anniierau on TikTok as well.

ERIC: Don't worry, there will not be a quiz on this. All of those links will be in the show notes. You can follow me on Twitter @HeyHeyESJ and please subscribe to the Follow Friday newsletter at followfriday.substack.com.

If you like this episode, then check out the past Follow Friday interviews with Amanda Aronczyk from Planet Money, Josh Fruhlinger from The Comics Curmudgeon, and Tom Scott from YouTube.

Follow Friday is a production of LightningPod.fm. Our theme music was written by me and performed by Yona Marie, our show art was illustrated by Dodi Hermawan, and our social media producer is Sydney Grodin. Special thanks to our Big Fri Patreon backers, Jon and Justin.

That's all for this week. This is Eric Johnson, reminding you to talk about people behind their backs … and when you do, say something nice. We're off next week, so I'll see you on July 8th!