On the road to the screen, a rich story can flatten into propaganda. On the road to the influencer economy, a complex teaching can degrade into a conspirituality meme. As the Oscar glitter fades, we look at how Amazon could never have signed off on a real nomadland story any more than Gaia TV could have ever done justice to the spiritualities it exploits.In the Ticker, Julian looks at new research into correlations between huffing essential oils and seizures. Matthew looks at Miami’s Centner Academy’s announcement that they’ll fire vaccinated teachers—and wonders whether Kelly Brogan and Christiane Northrup sending kids and grandkids to this elite private school has something to do with it. In the Jab, Julian reviews the state of the nation re: vaccines, and offers three key principles to inject into conversations with the hesitant.Our interview this week is with TikTok anti-disinformation activist Abbie Richards, whose “Conspiracy Pyramid” and tea-time QAnon explainers have gone viral on the next-gen platform. Matthew talks with Abbie about her process, challenges, why she hates golf, and what GenXers (and older cohorts) should keep in mind when they wonder if the kids are alright.Show NotesJim DeFede breaks the Centner Academy storyCentner’s Medical Freedom from Mandated Vaccines (disinfo warning)Biscayne Times profile of the Centner’s: The Privileged ClassTour of the Centner’s Miami penthousePreethaji and Krishnaji, proprietors of O&O AcademyKrishnaji’s culty dad, Kalki Bhagavan: Mystic and the moolah‘It’s Baffling’: Parents Confused After Centner Academy Announces They Won’t Employ People Who Have Been VaccinatedThe Case Against NomadlandWhat Nomadland Gets Wrong About Gig LaborAmazon’s Minimum Wage Hike Comes With Cuts To Other Compensation“Strategic Transparency”: Ann Gleig. “From Sweeping Zen to Open Buddhism: Sex Scandals, Social Media, and Transparency in Western Buddhism” for Buddhism in the West Group. American Academy of Religion, Denver, November 17-20, 2018 (forthcoming)
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You can stay up to date with us on all of our social media channels including Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Clubhouse where every Sunday I host a Clubhouse that is always wonderful because I get to talk to so many listeners and we get to share ideas.
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Conspirituality 49, TikTok Fulfillment Center, with Abby Richards.
On the road to the screen, a rich story can flatten into propaganda.
On the road to the influencer economy, a complex teaching can degrade into a conspirituality meme.
As the Oscar glitter fades, we look at how Amazon could never have signed off on a real Nomadland story any more than Gaia TV could ever have done justice to the spiritualities it exploits.
In the ticker, I'll be looking at new research into data on the link between huffing essential oils and seizures.
Matthew's looking at Miami Sentiners Academy's announcement that they'll fire vaccinated teachers, and wonders whether Kelly Brogan and Christiane Northrup sending kids and grandkids to this elite private school has something to do with it.
In the jab, I'll be reviewing the state of the nation regarding vaccines and offering three key principles you can inject into conversations with those who are still hesitant.
Our interview this week is with TikTok anti-disinformation activist Abby Richards, whose conspiracy pyramid and teatime QAnon explainers have gone viral on the NextGen platform.
Matthew talks with Abby about her process, challenges, why she hates golf, and what Gen Xers and older cohorts, like us, should keep in mind when they wonder if the kids are alright.
This is the Conspirituality Ticker, a weekly bullet point rundown on the ongoing pandemic of messianic influencers who spread medical misinformation and sell disaster spirituality.
First up on the ticker today, all natural side effects.
There are few things more ironic to me about our entrepreneurial wellness subculture than the conspiritualist focus on extremely rare side effects from vaccines that save millions of lives.
On the one hand, they have this paranoid conviction that there is a vast money and power motivated conspiracy between big pharma, the mainstream media, and the government subverting the process and aims of medical science.
Meanwhile, the same demographic aggressively markets and endorses completely unregulated supplements, cleanses, and alternative natural cures.
Essential oils are a case in point.
The rapidly growing global market reached $17 billion in 2017.
$17 billion in 2017, it is projected to be at $27 billion next year.
We've already covered the exploitive and cult-like multi-level marketing structure of the two giants on the essential oil stage, doTERRA and Young Living, along with their strategy of dancing deftly along the line of legality with regards to outrageous medical claims they make along with their strategy of dancing deftly along the line of legality with
Recruits are sold on the opportunity to generate abundance by repping something natural that they believe in, while customers are in turn sold on the concept of being empowered to make their own health choices by using these highly concentrated plant extracts as alternative medicine.
But with regard first of all to all that abundance, a recent pyramid scheme lawsuit shows that 94% of young living members make an average of $1 per month while still being required to purchase hundreds of dollars of oils themselves to stay on the books.
And all claims to the contrary, there is zero evidence that any essential oil or aromatherapy treatment has the ability to cure any illness, and data on the much-touted stress-relieving, mood-enhancing effects of the nice smells remains inconclusive.
But at least they're safe, right?
None of the dangerous side effects of western medicine?
Well, not quite.
Some essential oils like tea tree and lavender can be endocrine disruptors, causing early breast growth in young girls and abnormal gynecomastia in young boys.
But preteen hormone balances aside, the most common side effect of essential oils is an allergic reaction which can result in respiratory or more commonly severe skin reactions.
You should also fire up that nice aromatherapy diffuser you bought in the yoga gift shop nowhere near your baby in the first three months.
As oils like eucalyptus, fennel, peppermint, rosemary, wintergreen, and verbena, as lovely as they sound, are potentially poisonous via infants' more absorbent tissues.
All of that leads me to the story this week in the Academic Times about research into the link between essential oils and epileptic seizures.
The study was done at St.
John's Medical College Hospital in Bengaluru, India.
Essential oils are widely used in that country, especially eucalyptus and camphor, which are included in toothpaste, balms, and tablets.
Now, this is a small study and more research is definitely needed, but of the 350 cases reviewed, 55 were found to have used essential oils prior to their seizure.
The researchers identified 40% of that group as having a first time seizure that was essential oil induced.
The other 60% had suffered previous seizures followed by a seizure that was then essential oil provoked.
Now everyone in that group of 55 were advised to abstain from any exposure to essential oils from then onwards.
They were followed up on over a 1-3 year period.
The results?
None of the first time seizure patients experienced any further seizures and 94% of the already diagnosed epileptic patients had no recurrence after going oil free.
But hey, even if they are unregulated, unsafe, and usually sold as part of an exploitive pyramid scheme, at least essential oils are natural, right?
Oh, man.
That's just devastating.
And you know, what it makes me think of is with people recovering from COVID and long COVID having lost their sense of smell.
I heard this week that there is some preliminary advice from neurologists that smell retraining is going to be advised.
You know, so they're So there's suggestions that, you know, on a sort of disciplined regular basis that you smell strong substances like coffee or peppermint or something like that.
This is going to be a whole new avenue for the aromatherapy.
I'm watching David Attenborough's new Netflix series on colors, which is fascinating.
I'll watch anything that that man is involved with.
But this specific one, he goes into, it's probably about colors, but he also goes into the chemicals that are in flowers and trees and plants and how they interact with animals.
And the idea that taking these highly concentrated oils and then rubbing them on our skin or putting them in our water and drinking them or diffusing them, are either only healthy or at worst benign, it completely goes against everything in nature and what creates those oils and scents in the first place.
And so when you say something like that, like seeing these results of so many epileptic patients no longer having recurrences after going oil-free, I wonder what the crossover is between people who would think that that's bullshit, but then are also anti-vaccination or but then are also anti-vaccination or say that because these haven't been tested enough, then we shouldn't use them.
It's part of that dissonance that just seems to be recurring every time we find out about these new research studies.
I think that in order for information like this to really stick, not only do the studies have to be larger, but also I think we have to look into all of the ritual elements that go into creating the essential oil experience.
Because the way I've seen them marketed and applied, there's kind of like a, I don't know, It's very integratable with notions of pressure points and chakras and stuff like that.
getting out the diffuser and putting it in the right place in the house and figuring out where to dab it on your body and getting the right roller.
And so people, it's very integratable with notions of pressure points and chakras and stuff like that.
So very compelling.
The analogy is very much with like the incense diffuser of a religious ceremony or being anointed somehow, right?
With some sort of special holy substance.
Yeah, and I especially think that the anointment comes in when we're talking about moms selling essential oils to other moms for their children because the children are often being anointed like it's a christening or something like that.
I think of the Netflix series that we did cover with the oils episode and how that one family who is like super oils users are putting it on their babies all the time and then you find out research like this.
But also thinking of the cultural ramifications, my wife was studying perfumery for a little while and I learned a lot more about oils than I ever thought I would.
And one day she was talking with our floor mates who are Muslim and they, he was talking about these oils.
He found out that she was using, you know, going to school for this.
And so he was sharing some of the scents that he uses.
But at one point that he's like, you know, we only put it on our clothing.
We don't put it on our skin, which my wife knew, because that's you don't put that on your skin directly.
Like Muslim culture understands that.
I'm sure there are other cultures that intuitively know not to put these chemicals on your skin.
But in America, we don't seem to have that.
Yeah, that couple wasn't, I think my brain broke when the guy was spraying essential oil of orange in a spray bottle on his children and they were outside in the sun and weren't they in Arizona or something like that?
Oh my gosh, that was so awful to watch.
Yeah, and then when, hopefully not, but if any of their children have serious consequences like that, they're gonna do what we see people do all the time.
They're gonna blame the food system or pharmaceutical companies, and then not understanding that the base materials of pharmaceuticals are the same stuff that they're spraying on their children.
Dosage matters and then parts of the chemistry, but you're still working with the same base materials.
And this is really all within the construction of the wellness space of this sort of odd dichotomy between what is natural and what is unnatural, right?
And it's very much a marketing tool to label something as being all natural, organic, you know, not having any of the negative baggage of pharmaceuticals or something that is deemed unnatural or chemical.
and it's a completely false construct.
All right, Derek and Julian, this story has everything.
There are billionaires, billionaires in India who run cults, a disgusting $17 million Miami Beach penthouse, kids from the families of the disinformation dozen, and an Instagram feed where you can clock the moment of an influencer's redpilling.
So I'm talking about Layla Centner and the Centner Academy.
But it doesn't have anything to do with vaccines though, right?
No, nothing to do with vaccines at all.
So the director, Layla Centner of Centner Academy, this is a swanky Miami private school where tuition starts at $15,000 a year.
Starts, starts, but I just want to point out that that's for part-time preschool.
Full-time preschool is $22,475.
Sixth grade is $29,850.
There are $3,000 in fees for all of these grades.
And then last one that I noticed is that lunch is billed at $230 a month.
is $29,850.
There are $3,000 in fees for all of these grades.
And then last one that I noticed is that lunch is billed at $230 a month.
And I went ahead and I, at my age, when I was seven, I remember we paid a dollar a day for lunch so that I brought it up with inflation.
And so I was paying about $48 a month for lunch in a public school.
So So this is six times more.
Go on, Matthew.
Their Patreons must be rocking to be able to afford that.
Anyway, Layla Centner has told her teachers, or teachers that are intending to be vaccinated, not to get vaccinated until school is out, and that they won't be guaranteed a spot back at the school if they do get the jab.
And she actually sent out a questionnaire, according to the New York Times, to determine this teacher's vaccine status, and it implied that there would be legal consequences if the teachers didn't disclose.
So at this academy, children start the day with meditation.
They are fed not Derek's like trashy grade school diet where he only paid $48 a month.
I mean, holy shit.
I can I can still sort of see the cracks in the pudding you're talking about.
All organic, gluten free, sugar free, dairy free food.
But Centner has this idea that unvaccinated people are suffering from various conditions by simply being around vaccinated people.
Remember that last week we coined the term reverse contagion anxiety and that's what she's on about.
So the email that she sent out read in part, tens of thousands of women, there's no citation here, all over the world have recently been reporting adverse reproductive issues simply from being in close proximity with those who have received any one of the COVID-19 injections.
For example, irregular menses, bleeding, miscarriages, postmenopausal, hemorrhaging, and amenorrhea.
Okay, so the email got instantaneous international coverage.
It was broken by CBS Miami and it made it even to the White House briefing room and it riled up state lawmakers in Tallahassee.
There's a state senator named Jason Pizzo who immediately appealed to the State Department of Education and learned that the department Wasn't going to take any action against the school because it has no policies in place on teacher vaccination.
Now, bear in mind, this is a school that receives public funding through the voucher system.
It also received over $800,000 in PPE, PPP funding last year to keep its doors open during the pandemic.
But I think the whole story raises some really kind of bizarre questions like, is this legal?
First of all, I mean, can a business fire employees for getting a vaccine?
Would it violate HIPAA privacy provisions or the ADA?
But then like if the vaccine is so poisonous that jabbed teachers will harm the children they're with, shouldn't the school also ban children whose parents have been vaccinated as well?
I mean, did she sort of create in her brain an amount of contact hours that she thought would be too much or something like that?
I mean, the parents are going to be closer to the children anyway, and for longer, so wouldn't that be more negatively impactful?
Or does the chain of reverse contagion transmission stop at one, so that if a parent infects their child with their vaccine, it would stop there and not transmit to the other kids?
I don't know.
Yeah, it's some kind of some kind of magical thing.
I also just have to say like, what the fuck happened?
That you're going to be in complete denial of COVID being being contagious.
But now you decide that vaccines are contagious, that you're going to be completely opposed to the tyranny of vaccine passports.
But now you want to fire people for getting vaccinated and know their confidential medical records.
I mean, it's Wild.
And I actually did hear stuff through the course of the week from several influencers about how they were going to turn the tables now and make vaccinated people feel like the lepers, you know?
Well, that's one way of putting it, I suppose.
Right?
Turning the tables.
Anyway, what about service workers?
What about the lunch ladies?
I mean, they're handing out $230 worth of food every month, but aren't they actually getting a little bit too close to the kids?
What if they get vaccines?
Are you suggesting this is just performative?
Well, I don't know.
What about janitors?
I mean, what I think is going on is that if it's as classist as it sounds like, that it's not really about the vaccine, but more about making sure the teachers actually share the ideology, right?
So the people without power, we don't care about how contagious they are.
Not so much.
If you're handing the children their organic smoothie, you're probably fine.
But if you're actually going to communicate and emote with the children and be responsible for their historical education or whatever, then that becomes more important.
It also raises this really weird sort of I don't know.
Endgame question for me, which is, how isolated is isolated enough if the vaccine is contagious?
Because more and more people are going to be vaccinated.
I mean, at a certain point, I think the Sentinels are going to really need their own country where they could, like, party, party like it's 1859.
I'm all for it.
I'm all for it.
Right.
Anyway, is this out of character for the Centner Academy?
It's not, really.
There's a page on their website that's titled Medical Freedom from Mandated Vaccines, and this page goes through the typical anti-vax talking points that conflate vaccination with rising rates of ADHD, asthma, diabetes, autism.
It says, quote, a lot of kids are suffering, and it is up to us as a Miami international school community to rule out any and all possibilities contributing to the rise in chronic diseases and disabilities for our students.
Before we, as a school, mandate anything that could possibly be causing so much harm to our students, studies need to be urged to be conclusive as to whether common mandatory vaccinations lead to various common health disorders.
Then the page points people towards medical and religious exemptions.
So here's the next thing.
The story just gets deeper, though, because the email doesn't cite any sources.
But in it, Centner does say, this was not an easy decision to make.
We made this decision with several doctors who are on the front line investigating the reported issues.
So which doctors, shall we ask?
Of or after the email was sent, Christiane Northrup posted a selfie that's now deleted with Kelly Brogan announcing their support for Centner Academy because they both have kids in their families attending.
Brogan lives in Florida.
Northrup referred to her grandchildren attending the school.
I think these presumably are the children of Christiane's daughter, Kate, who's a life coach, and along with her mom, a distributor for the USANA MLM, which sells herbs and shit like that.
So she deleted this post?
Yeah, she deleted the post.
And I was really, I was bummed that I didn't screenshot it.
But then I was very relieved to see that the Washington Post had actually reported on it before she took it down.
But this is funny, actually, because this is the first thing.
I'm glad you brought it up because it's the first thing that I've seen Northrop walk back.
She also deleted the MLK post.
Ah, right.
From the Health and Freedom Conference.
Okay, well, I wonder if there's some water testing going on that we haven't seen there before.
Anyway, the PTA meetings at Centner must be pretty interesting, and I think they might be doubling as disinformation doesn't break out group coffee clutches.
News reports note that the Academy has invited, has had as special guests, Robert F. Kennedy and Dr. Larry Pilevsky as guest speakers.
Brogan namedrops Pilevsky, who's a New York-based anti-vax pediatrician, in her last book.
So there's a lot of connections here.
Well, we now know all three of the names of the several doctors they talked to, right?
Northrop Brogan and Pavlovsky.
Right.
OK, so I got really interested.
Who is Leila Centner?
Her given name is Leila Samoudi.
She's a first generation Iranian-American born in 1976.
This same week, she posted that she was very happy her mom escaped Iran before the revolution.
So there's some sort of political overtones around authoritarianism that she's trying to she's playing on.
She worked as an auditor for Deloitte after graduating from accountancy programs at University of California and the University of SoCal.
She founded House of Layla Maternity Wear, but that doesn't seem to have gone very far.
In 2016, David Sentner, a mega wealthy tech entrepreneur, proposed to her after organizing a flash mob to dance for her in Manhattan.
Sentner is a techpreneur who basically invented electronic car tolling or a big chunk of it.
And once they got together, Layla became his CFO.
They sold their highway toll administration company to a $13 billion private equity firm.
And after they cashed out, they went on a spiritual quest.
that The Biscayne Times reports, quote, that existential examination, I suppose they were wondering what to do with all the piles of cash, led to periodic trips to India and to receive spiritual counseling from the O&O Academy, a non-denominational meditation school.
Layla Centner, who told the Biscayne Times she had a rough childhood, says the sessions helped her come to terms with the past and fuel her passion So, what is O&O Academy?
This is the corporate rebrand of the oneness movement founded by the Tamil god-man and real estate magnate and cult leader Kalki Bhagawan.
Have you heard of this guy?
No.
He was such a grifter that when the, he's still alive, I think, when the Indian authorities raided his compound in 2019, investigating fraud, they found $67 million in liquid assets just lying around like stacks of gold, bags of cash.
He's following in Sai Baba's footsteps.
He had the same sort of thing.
Pretty much.
Kalki's firstborn son is named Krishna, of course, and has taken over the family dynasty.
He looks quite managerial in the role.
He has a partner named Preetha.
And they mentored together with Tony Robbins, of course.
And Krishna claims he has 10 million followers in India.
So this is where the Sentiners visited.
I think she says in one post that they went five times in one year.
So now, however, they are high-rolling investors and philanthropists and Leila has opened Centner Academy and she talks about the school like it's her life calling after cashing out.
It also looks like a bit of a vanity project.
In July they listed their over-the-top Totally garish Miami penthouse for $17 million.
We're gonna link to an estate agent's 3D walkthrough, and it's totally horrific.
I actually crowdsourced tips for describing the aesthetics, because I don't know much about interior design, and Twitter paid off coming back with, okay, so it looks like Miami fancy, housewives of Atlantic City, frigid billionaire.
My personal favorite was Gaddafi chic.
And my favorite part of the layout was that there was a blue kitchen and dining room right next to an identical red kitchen and red dining room.
You told us to check it out and I did the 3D tour and you also wore not to have eaten before.
And that was good advice.
So I went in on an empty stomach because Penthouse doesn't really even describe what this No, it's very strange.
Yeah, I don't, I can't imagine, like I felt my soul just draining away as I clicked through and followed the circle.
Did you see the weird playrooms as well with nothing inside them for the children?
Yes, there was a lot.
There was the Ferrari children's bed.
There was a lot of gold.
I mean, it was kind of Trump meets the worst of Beverly Hills in terms of decor.
It was really, really bad.
So back to the Academy, what do the parents make of all of this?
There was a parent named Greg Tatar, quoted by CBS, who says, it's baffling.
Why would she not want her teachers to get vaccinated?
I think he also says in that article that he himself got vaccinated.
So I'm wondering whether he's going to be barred from the premises or something.
But I empathize with him because if you go through Leila's Instagram account, there are zero signs of anti-vax activism until January 23rd of this year.
It's uncanny.
There's nothing.
It's all family holiday stuff.
You know, here's I'm really excited about my school project.
Here's me cutting the ribbon.
There's parties, the kids are gorgeous, but then on the 23rd she posts two misleading posts about the VAERS system, basically walking her followers through how not to understand the VAERS program.
She's sort of telling her followers that all of the reports have been verified or they've been proven or everybody's adverse reactions have been investigated when that's not true.
But after the 23rd, it's wall-to-wall anti-vax materials.
It looks like tons of copy pasta from various pseudoscience sites.
Also, the posts escalate.
So she goes from posting two or three times a week to several times per day.
So she also advertises that she's hosting Larry Pilevsky on the dangers of vaccines and Jason Schurka on saving the children.
He's like a pyramid energy person and life coach and then the Save the Children tagline for the event obviously, you know, has some resonance with the She also posts lots of oversharing videos of her students having a great time without masks, hugging each other.
And, you know, when I saw how quickly this happened, I went back to the Medical Freedom page on the website to check as to when it was posted, and Web Archive shows that it didn't show up until April 6th, which is, what, three weeks ago?
So the public facing statement on, you know, this is how we feel about vaccines as a school is three weeks old.
So something happened to Layla and it happened really, really fast.
And it just reminds me of all of the red pilling stories that we've heard over the past year and how Quickly.
You know, somebody can completely do an about face.
And I guess what I really wonder is whether or not the wealth of the Sentiners is going to buffer them from the fallout of this, or whether it means that they can actually maybe afford some good advice.
I am not going to pretend to ever know what it's like to be a billionaire.
And I am not particularly against billionaires in any capacity, although they should pay more taxes, which hopefully will happen here in America.
But if you acquire that much money and then go on a spiritual quest, from my understanding of the spiritual practices, including India, charity is a big component of it.
So I'm wondering what happens when you go on this spiritual quest and you meet a guru who gives you instruction and your decision to help the world is to start an extremely elite
Well, they do have a foundation and they are referred to in a lot of media pieces that might be puff pieces as philanthropists, but I haven't dug into what they're actually funding, where any of their money is going.
It sounds like the guru wasn't stashing millions of dollars in gold bullion around his house because he wanted to donate it to the poor in his neighborhood, right?
Yeah.
And to be fair, that's great.
I mean, if they have a philanthropical arm that actually does some good, that's great.
But it's just from what I'm seeing here is if your life's calling is education, And then you're actually making education very hard for people if that's what you're actually using your money for.
That just seems suspect to me.
She did bring in Jason Shurka, though, to give the kids a workshop in manifesting abundance, though.
Wonderful service.
She is spreading the wealth around.
But I mean, you know, just on a serious note, this is the same week that Tucker Carlson incited his audience to publicly confront families in the street where children are wearing masks.
So I file all of this into the general category of, you know, children are going to continue to be caught in the middle here and are going to be weaponized in this emerging culture war.
What also jumped out when you had mentioned about all of the real estate holdings that they bought up in Miami and this whole idea of a medical freedom institute, it reminds me of what's happening in Austin and Lake Travis and the Mickey Willis episode that we covered what's going it reminds me of what's happening in Austin and Lake Travis and And then come to find out the same week that Onnit was sold to Unilever.
And I don't know the money, but I do know that it was founded by Aubrey Marcus, who was in the room at the announcement of that real estate and possibly involved.
And that Joe Rogan was an early investor in Onnit.
So I'm sure he did pretty well from that sale.
And you have this emerging medical freedom community forming in Austin.
And so here you have two examples of places that are very anti-vax and are getting a hold of a lot of real estate.
We are watching in real time this cult mentality form.
And I also want to add that The congressional redistricting redistricting just happened where New York and California lost seats and Texas and Florida gained seats for the next 10 years.
And so the the politicians that represent these areas are going to be looking at the moneyed interests.
So we're going to we're going to see a real bifurcation of the medical system, even more so than we have in the coming years if this continues.
We were talking a little bit about this before we hit record.
I think it's extraordinary to think about wealthy people investing in Miami Beach when my understanding is that there's a lot of insurance companies that won't vet properties because of sea level rise and so on.
I'd be really interested to know whether there's pre-planning that goes into that where they buy in regions of the city that They feel will not be underwater or won't be threatened and insurance doesn't really mean anything to them because they can rebuild everything with cash.
It just doesn't, it doesn't make sense.
No, Miami Beach itself.
I mean, no, Miami, there is no, there's no protection for Miami Beach.
Miami, the city possibly, but Miami Beach is one of the hottest regions in the country right now for real estate.
And you are completely surrounded when you're there.
And it's flat.
There's no rise, right?
It's at sea level.
It's just sand in the middle of the water in Isthmus.
I haven't been there.
Oh yeah, and when I've been there a few times, you can walk across the entirety of it in under 10 minutes.
I mean, you're talking blocks.
You're talking a few blocks wide.
That's it.
there's no protection whatsoever there.
And the great owners, who must lose their land in an upheaval, The great owners with access to history, with eyes to read history and to know the great fact.
When property accumulates in too few hands, it is taken away.
And that companion fact.
When a majority of the people are hungry and cold, they will take by force what they need.
And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history.
Repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.
The great owners ignored the three cries of history.
The land fell into fewer hands, the number of the dispossessed increased, and every effort of the great owners was directed at repression.
The money was spent for arms, for gas to protect the Great Holdings, and spies were sent to catch the murmuring of revolt so that it might be stamped out.
The changing economy was ignored, plans for the change ignored, and only means to destroy revolt were considered, while the causes of revolt went on.
It's John Steinbeck from The Grapes of Wrath.
A slam-dunk opportunity to educate the American public about the disappearing safety net, an outright rejection of aging that's affecting tens of thousands of seniors, a number that grows by the year, was sadly missed when Nomadland was made into a movie.
I'm not surprised that it won Best Picture of the Year.
It tells the aspirational story of pulling yourselves up by the bootstraps despite your circumstances, a founding principle of the American ethos.
But as Steinbeck knew, and as the journalist behind the book, Jessica Bruder, knew, bootstraps are an illusion.
Credit Bruder for her detailed investigative work in the tradition of Barbara Ehrenreich and Rebecca Solnit.
The journalist spent years on the road living and working alongside those war campers.
The name given to the growing number of Americans living in campers, vans, even Priuses, traveling from gig to gig depending on the season for meager wages, no health benefits, no assurances whatsoever.
She befriended them and learned their stories.
In fact, to the film's credit, most of the actors are the people in the book.
And I also want to congratulate Chloe Zhao for her victories, the first Asian woman to win Best Director award.
Frances McDormand ended up winning Actress of the Year, but the actual people from the book Nomadland were equally important in the film.
And I hope, as non-professional actors, they were paid their worth.
It is a powerful film, and Bruder does write about their hardy attitudes.
People are resilient.
But she writes about so much more, and what's left out of the film is disheartening.
The opening scene finds McDormand's character, Fern, shitting in the middle of the desert.
You're immediately swept into the turmoil of nomad life.
Moments later, something strange happens.
You see the workers inside of an actual Amazon factory.
In 2017, Jeff Bezos predicted that by 2020, a full one-quarter of all workampers would have been employed in an Amazon factory at some point.
And putting it lightly, Nomadland, the book, is a long critique of Amazon's role in cutting the safety net of aging Americans, skirting labor laws at every turn, and fighting unionization every step of the way.
We really are still picking the grapes that the Joads clawed at.
And everyone who saw the film remembers Linda May, the 60-something dreamer who plans on building an Earthship in the middle of the desert.
And in real life, she acquires the land to do just that.
But what guts me is the Facebook post that Mae wrote about Amazon that was in the book, but that didn't make the script.
And here it is in full.
Quote, someone asked, why do you want a homestead?
To be independent, get out of the rat race, support local businesses, buy only American made.
Stop buying stuff I don't need to impress people I don't like.
Right now I am working at a big warehouse for a major online supplier.
The stuff is crap, all made somewhere else in the world where they don't have any child labor laws, where the workers labor 14 to 16 hour days without meals or bathroom breaks.
There is 1 million square feet in this warehouse packed with stuff that won't last a month.
It is all going to the landfill.
This company has hundreds of warehouses.
Our economy is built on the backs of slaves we keep in other countries, like China, India, Mexico, any third world country with a cheap labor force where we don't have to see them but where we can enjoy the fruits of their labor.
This American corporation is probably the biggest slave owner in the world.
Radical, I know, but this is what goes through my head when I'm at work.
There is nothing in that warehouse of substance.
It enslaved the buyers who used their credit to purchase that shit.
Keeps them in jobs they have to pay their debts.
It's really depressing to be there.
End quote.
How were they able to film inside of an actual Amazon warehouse?
According to a 2020 interview, McDormand simply called Amazon's Senior VP of Development and got access.
But if I had to guess, I'm betting that Amazon read the script first.
I've done enough work in movies to know what access entails.
Any trace of dissension from gig workers or complaints about the rigors of the job didn't make the final cut.
Besides, The Richest Man in the World isn't going to allow criticism in a movie that includes his logo or his space.
It also won't include statistics Bruder makes clear in the book, such as the fact that nearly twice as many women are poorer in America than men, or that women get an average $341 a month less than their male counterparts in Social Security.
And that there are only a dozen counties and one metro area in the entire country where a minimum wage worker can afford a one bedroom apartment.
That Amazon has a week of work-hardening for new gig workers to become accustomed to the physical and emotional demands of 10-hour shifts, which require walking, squatting, and kneeling across 20 miles of concrete space.
Or mention the dispensers of free pain relievers mounted in those warehouses, and what kind of addiction ensues from those free pills.
Or the Amazon cold shoulder given to workers that speak out against the company's labor practices.
And you're certainly not going to hear the anecdotes of these workers about suicide being their exit strategy.
Which doesn't seem to be a big deal to them, given that they live in the desert anyway.
That's what's in the book.
Better to focus on the desert sunsets and makeshift spa sessions with cucumbers and ice water.
America has a sordid relationship with death anyway, and an even more fraught relationship with aging.
We hate it.
Growing numbers of people of all ages inject toxins into their faces to look young, and we think nothing of this strange ritual of avoidance and self-loathing.
Forget the wisdom of aging.
We prefer the lackluster virality of youth.
If the cost includes sentencing more and more seniors to public lands where they fend for themselves and broken-down campers, so be it.
Better to uphold the illusion than care for the wise.
That's how Nomadland won Picture of the Year.
It honors the age-old illusion that hard work pays off even though the reality is that it barely pays anything except as Marvin Gaye once sang.
While watching the film, I just couldn't help noticing parallels to the wellness industry we spend so much time contemplating on this podcast.
The resistance to aging.
The idea that we can defeat nature with just enough supplements and sacred breathwork in nootropics.
That we can avoid discussing the slave labor that did and still provides for our privileges.
The message is never to age gracefully.
It's just, don't age.
To borrow a sentiment from Matthew, the only thing being sold in Nomadland, the movie, is aspiration.
The desire to rise above the circumstances by ignoring an investigation of what led to those circumstances in the first place.
The book lays it out.
The movie avoids the ugly reality at all costs.
And the producers were rewarded for their allegiance to turning a blind eye.
As Wilfred Chan succinctly observed in a February critique in the online magazine Vulture, quote, "...because the film is primarily a character study of Fern, it exchanges Bruder's sharp indignation over capitalist exploitation for a muddled message about individual freedom that downplays the real stakes of gig labor," end quote.
Continuing along those lines, Jack Hamilton wrote one of the best critiques for Slate.
As he frames it, quote, When the film offers Fern a way out of poverty and she chooses not to take it, it's effectively saying, hey, some people are just meant to live this way.
Which is what rich people have told themselves about poor people for as long as those two groups have existed.
End quote.
The truth is Americans love our illusions.
Earlier this week, Rick Santorum, a man who only a decade ago ran a moderately successful presidential campaign, said, well, he said this.
We came here and created a blank slate.
We birthed a nation.
From nothing.
I mean, there's nothing here.
I mean, yes, we have Native Americans, but candidly, there isn't much Native American culture in American culture.
The twisted fantasies of the colonizer remain alive and, well, not exactly well, but present.
Hamilton notes that romanticizing, homesteading the American West persists, ultimately blinding us to the hard truths about how we actually treat our citizens, the stuff of capitalist wet dreams. - Yes.
He also noticed that the film was set in 2011 instead of 2018 when the film was shot, for a reason.
If it was current, the filmmakers would have had to have grappled with MAGA, and Zhao explicitly said she wanted to avoid politics.
But how do you avoid politics when politics created the mess that's driving an increasing number of seniors into vans?
Discussing MAGA would have forced an even more inconvenient truth to emerge.
The people who've been tossed aside are the same people that supported and support Donald Trump in droves.
The filmmakers try to have it both ways and fail.
Avoid the pain point of politics by setting it back in time, but weirdly featuring a very modern Amazon warehouse.
Hamilton's critique was written a few days before the Oscars, but his ending is still worth quoting in full.
Discussing things like MAGA and QAnon, he concludes, quote, that's obviously a much more complicated and uglier story, and it's one that Nomadland's makers are about as eager to get into as Nomadland's viewers are eager to hear it.
Telling that story well would make for a better movie, and a far more difficult one.
So, instead, we get beautiful sunsets and transformational acting, a film about poverty that flatters its makers for making it and its audience for watching it.
That audience is certainly not the people that Nomadland is actually about.
And that audience likely doesn't want to spend much more time thinking about those people once the movie is over.
Nomadland makes sure they don't have to.
And if the film moons big on Sunday, that will surely be a reason why.
End quote.
And the film won big, as we know.
I'm also guessing that next year, Exterminate All the Brutes, the brilliant and brutally introspective docuseries on HBO by Raoul Peck, won't be shortlisted for a prize, even though the series grapples with what America actually is, while even concluding with some semblance of hope.
The problem is that on the way to hope, you have to tread through the suffocating thickness of white supremacy, racism, xenophobia, politics, the thing the filmmakers of Nomadland wanted to ignore.
And time and again, ignorance awards you a trophy for participating in the illusion.
Alright, so I have not seen No Man's Land, so I really appreciated getting the heads up, Derek.
And I only heard about Bruder's book from you, too, but I've also read some reviews.
I can't say that I'm that surprised about the laundering of the story here for the small screen.
You know, you mentioned that Amazon must have read and approved the script to grant the team that access, which was, you know, kind of stunning to see.
I mean, we don't know that, but we do know that the director's team romanced them.
I found in one article this thing about...
The filmmakers have given mixed reviews, answers about whether No Man's Land is a political movie.
Zhao told IndieWire last September that she wanted to avoid politics.
Quote, I tried to focus on the human experience and things that I feel go beyond political statements to be more universal, the loss of a loved one, searching for home.
She told Vultures' Alison Wilmore that politics were embedded into No Man's Land every frame, if you look deeply.
It's just, yes, there's the beautiful sunset behind it.
But in an interview with The Wrap earlier this month, Zhao's partner and cinematographer Joshua James Richards says it was, quote, a weird argument to say the movie is making a big critical statement about Amazon.
Quote, I mean, we simply show Fern working there.
We also show a Ford Econoline as well, but I don't think we're making a big critical statement about Ford.
Obviously, you can find politics in anything, unquote.
Such a bullshit response.
It sounds like you didn't read the book.
Yeah, I mean, it's such bullshit.
The book was about, yes, and as I mentioned in the piece, there were elements of the resilience aspect, which is very important, but this was an investigative book about labor practices and it was heavily focused on Amazon.
Pulling forward into that is the biggest amount of whataboutism that I've seen in any of this reporting.
Yeah, it's interesting.
I watched the film last night and the night before, and I watched several different interviews and little documentary featurettes, a PBS one in particular that I thought was really fantastic.
Watching the film, I kind of felt like they were caught between, on the one hand, telling the story of the book, but on the other hand, this Terrence Malick influenced, kind of, you know, very, very self-reflective, very, very subjective, very, very all-of-the-twilight shots, and then using lots of Ludovico Ainaudi, so there was an atmospheric, it was like there was an atmospheric art film they wanted to make,
About the unbearable sort of emotional experience of growing older in this tragic way.
But they can't help but romanticize it because of that setting.
And on the other hand, you have this very painful story of what is going on with people getting older in this kind of exploitive economy.
Deciding as you age that you want to get in an RV or a camper and live your life out there is a perfectly fine decision and people do it.
In fact, Bruder talks about the dichotomy of seeing the work campers in the same camps as people in $40,000 campers that are just out for the summer touring the country.
But even if you decided that you don't want to work in an office and you want to live this life, that is totally fine.
And some of the people actually have made that decision, even though they didn't have to.
But the point of the book is that tens of thousands of people didn't have a choice.
And that is what the movie missed in every facet.
You know, there were two ideas that sort of came up for me as I listened to your review.
And one was the notion of strategic transparency.
Have I talked about this term before?
No, I don't recognize it.
Okay, so it's where someone or something in power discloses enough of the collateral damage of what they do.
To make people believe that they're honest and trustworthy and they're telling the whole story.
So I owe this concept to Professor Anne Gleick who studies abuse in Buddhist organizations and what she noticed in some of the damage control statements and half apologies released by embattled leaders accused of abuse and their lieutenants was that the talking points would usually admit enough wrongdoing to make forgiveness seem reasonable And also to bolster support with the base.
But this is done with the knowledge that if you disclose the full ugly truth, the organization, the relationships would all implode.
So, you know, if you think of a guy cheating on his wife, you know, she knows that he's been flirting with a co-worker.
She confronts him.
He confesses in tears that they've been having an affair.
But then he leaves out how much credit card debt he's racked up to support the affair, and that actually he's been visiting sex workers on every business trip and not telling her, he's been doing coke and Viagra or whatever.
But the sentimentality of his confession makes him look trustworthy.
He's so connected, so heartfelt, you know, he really wants to make good.
And it sounds like This is what's happened with Bruder's book, as it's moved to the small screen, that yes, there's a minimization of the issues of the book, but there's also a deflection through sentimentality.
And like, I already know without watching it that Frances McDormand is gonna blow me away because she's an incredible actress, actor, she always does, she deserves every accolade Out there.
And really, could we expect a great actor to turn down a great part on behalf of a very complex politics?
No.
Like, I don't think so.
I want to interject that McDormand talks about having grown up in a similar environment, a trailer park, and I come from that.
My grandfather owned a trailer park, so I kind of know that environment myself.
And that, you know, there was this origin story that she put forward about Nomadland.
And again, the acting is great.
Great.
The movie, if you don't know the book, the movie is a good movie.
So I want to be clear on that.
Right.
But then during her acceptance speech, she talked about how everyone needs to get back to the movie theater and see all of these movies where they're supposed to be made for in a movie theater.
And right there, I saw a serious disconnection with where the rest of the culture was at in a completely different manner.
Because this is an example of like the Hollywood mentality that we need to go to movies.
Everyone that I know, and myself included, we're not really looking forward to, we're not like, we need to get back to movie theaters.
We've created a culture now where we can have a better experience in our living room.
And I'm not against that, but I'm pointing this out because there's this romanticizing aspect that she's bringing forward.
So when I saw her do it about her industry, I wondered how much of that translated into the process of her filming this after, I'm sure she read the book, So that, you know, what they actually portrayed, I wonder if there was the same sort of disconnection with the culture that took part.
Well, I mean, what is she saying at the Oscars?
Is she saying that, um, is she saying that the movies are the place where we connect with our dreams, that sort of thing?
No, it was specific.
I mean, no, it didn't even go that deep.
It was just, I mean, it was a moment where she said, as soon as we can, gather your family and friends and get back into theaters and watch all of these movies.
So she was making a case for her industry.
Oh, I see.
Okay, right.
So as soon as you can, all of you folks who are out there in your RVs need to drive into the nearest city and go and see the movie in the theater, right?
Well, you know, I think it would be cool if the theaters gave their parking lots to the RV campers, to the work campers, right?
So that they didn't have to get harassed.
That was a big part of the book, actually, that, you know, there is an app and a network on social media for work campers in every town to know what parking lots they can park.
They have, like, legal parking lots, like Walmart, for example.
A number of them offer that for work campers, even if they don't work there.
Some are, some are, hey, you can get away with it.
And then some are like, don't park here.
So that, that actually exists.
So yeah, I let the movie theaters offer that service.
You know, I wanted to, I wanted to say Derek too, in terms of the, the lifestyle choice piece, right?
That, that I, I have no doubt that there are certain people for whom it really genuinely is a lifestyle choice, but even watching the film, I had moments where I was like, Yeah, it sounds like you've come up with a rationalization for the fact that you're in this really desperate situation and this is how you're making the best of it.
Yeah, that's the resilience aspect.
And so then you're talking about the freedom and the fact that you don't have the boot of a mortgage on your neck and you're so relieved now to be living this lifestyle, right?
But I think, Julian, you sent over Slack the PBS sort of companion piece to the film that detailed the kind of grandfather of the working class.
I think we're camping industry or community who actually has wound up making, I don't know, $100,000 a year on YouTube.
More.
Through releasing, okay.
So, so, but he, but he, I was struck by the frankness, both of him, but of everybody who was gathering in his workshops about, okay, well, social security is going to pay out maybe 600 a month, and that might be all you have.
And, and I'm thinking, okay, well, so, I don't know what it means for that to be a lifestyle choice when you cash, you have nothing but your social security check, you're cashing that for gas and a craft dinner that you're going to cook in your camper.
So what happens when these folks get sick?
What happens?
Do they drive off the cliff at the end of life?
Do they leave enough gas in the car to end it all?
I don't understand.
It doesn't sound like a lifestyle choice.
It sounds like if you can be resilient, it's because you have to be until the curtains close.
There's a section near the end of the book where she talks to a few people about that.
And first in the book, she goes into what happens when some of the people have health problems, which is, you know, they either go into debt, they have to reach out to family, whatever it is.
But specifically, there's one of the most haunting paragraphs in the book is when she, a few different people just say, well, we're in the desert.
I'm just going to walk out and then kill myself and then someone will find me at some point.
And that that is the attitude.
Does she track that?
Does she talk to people and then she sort of follows up and sees that that's what they did?
No, no.
Well, Bruder spent years on the road, months at a time, working and living with these people.
So, again, credit to her for this book.
It is an amazing book to have she put herself into that.
She worked for Amazon.
But, no, these are all interviews with Dozens or hundreds of people that she came into contact with.
And it seems like the one that made it into the movie is the older lady who's talking about contemplating killing herself by drinking a bottle of vodka or something and leaving on the gas, the propane.
And if she's still alive in the morning, she'll just light a cigarette.
But the reason she doesn't do it is her dogs.
Right?
She can't bear the thought of leaving her dogs alone and doing that to them.
The two things from your excellent piece that you did on it, Derek, that stood out to me were, A, that it's so many women who are then doing this back-breaking work in their final sort of decade or two of life, right?
That they're in this desperate situation.
And the other I had no idea that Social Security paid out less to women than to men.
By a lot, yeah.
Yeah, it's like half it sounded like, right?
I believe the number was $341 a month less, so I don't know if that's actually half.
But if they're at $500 to $600 a month that they're getting, then that's more than half for some people.
That's insane that that hasn't been reformed yet.
Well, the argument is that men get paid more and work longer than women, so that's the actual argument for why they get paid less.
I see, because it's a calculation based on that.
Yes.
Based upon totally ignoring domestic labor and childbearing and everything that's actually real, and real work.
Right.
Goddammit.
So, I'm thinking about my own grandmothers and my own grandfathers, and the notion that Okay, so I can think of one amongst the four who I think would consider buying a vehicle at a certain point and setting out on the road.
The other three can't see it.
Um, but the thing that I, I mean, we're talking about, we're talking about the folks as though they're making personal individual lifestyle choices and in a way they are, but what happens to the fact that we don't get to enjoy them where we are?
Like what happens to the fact that, um, okay, well maybe they're posting their videos to YouTube and trying to monetize things, but like, I also want my grandmother to be in a place where I can go and take care of her laundry and clean her house, but also sit down and hear stories from her.
And if she has to drive to the next sort of fulfillment center job or do leaf blowing or something like that...
I'm not gonna be able to do that.
And I suppose you could sort of, you know, brush that away and say, well, you know, there's FaceTime and shit like that.
And, you know, you can always be in touch.
But I don't know.
I don't know, man.
Like, I can't imagine that this is good for families, actually.
No, it's historically you lived with your family your entire lives.
Right.
That was just part of it.
This concept of, and I left when I was, you know, college at 18 and I never returned home.
And that is very much my generation and maybe a generation or two before that.
But besides that, humans stuck together through four or five generations and then just continued.
So this model that we're working with right now is extremely new.
And then as we can see, this is one of the consequences of that model.
And I also believe that a large part of this is also our own obsession with youth.
With this constant, we want to be younger, we want to look younger, we'll do everything to just feel younger.
I just read a New York Times article this morning about how Generation X is now entering the AARP age.
The article talked about how much Gen X has refused to age, which I think is a damaging aspect of it.
I couldn't imagine.
I don't have grandparents anymore, but even my parents, fortunately both, my mom's retiring next month actually, both have pensions.
I don't imagine I'd have to face them with this life.
But how about the three of us?
I don't have a job that I worked with for over four decades, like both my parents.
I don't have a pension plan going on right now.
No, no.
And so watching this movie, it also just struck me, it's like 60, 70, Isn't that far away from 45?
And so if we're going to continue to see the deterioration of the safety nets, which we're seeing a lot of in the last two decades in America, where does that leave our generation?
And if we don't have the foresight to understand that, we're going to be part of this economy as well.
It leaves our generation thinking about going to the movies, or being told to go to the movies.
Because the thing is, is that like, maybe this feels a little bit, I don't know, left field, but I see a parallel between the laundering of this research into a fictional narrative, And what late-stage capitalism does to culture itself in the sense that, like, you know, Amazon itself is a great actor.
It commands the world stage, you know, it speaks to everyone, it anticipates our needs, it nails all the lines, it makes the theater of global capitalism look gorgeous, gritty, heroic.
I mean, first of all, why wouldn't the company open their doors and put on the best show they can and help launder the subject?
But there's this way in which... I think it's wonderful that actors are able to do their craft, and it sounds like Zhao did a great job with the sunsets.
But if Zhao is close to my age or our age, then maybe she also wants to make a movie about what's going to happen to us.
You know, beyond how plucky we can be, beyond what a good attitude we can have, or how we can pick up and carry on.
I can't read her intentions.
I mean, I've read what she's written.
Jessica Bruder was very grateful for the movie.
She really enjoyed it from the interviews that I've read.
Positively, the movie winning, Will increase book sales, so that could help open more people's eyes to the real problems here.
Those are all net positives, but I just feel like something was seriously missed.
But if she made the movie of the actual book, it wouldn't have won an Oscar.
It wouldn't have won all the awards.
So, you know, how much of it was intentional and going for a specific audience and how much of it was just the movie she in her heart wanted to make?
I can't tell that.
I mean, are you guys familiar with Terrence Malick?
Do you know his films?
Not so much.
So the one that I was really thinking of was, oh God, what's it called?
The one with Richard Gere.
I think it's his second film.
Days of Heaven.
So Days of Heaven is really about these migrant workers who travel from town to town in sort of the early part of the 20th century and take on all these different kind of jobs.
And it's the same sort of thing.
It's like the romance between these two people against all of these incredible, beautiful but tragic vistas, you know, and twilight sort of settings.
And yeah, I feel, I don't know how much of it I would wonder how much of it is motivated by wanting to stay away from some of these more difficult topics, and how much of it is just having this kind of artistic vision.
Well, you know, I think the mold for a lot of this aestheticization of struggle is set, for me, with a famous American film called The Best Years of Our Lives.
Did you guys see that?
No, I don't think so.
Probably 1950s, and it's an extraordinary narrative arc through the lives of three returning World War II vets who are all suffering from PTSD, but of course don't have the language for it.
And one believes that his fiance could never possibly love him because he's disabled.
Another one is an alcoholic who can't hold down a job.
But there's this really sort of rich portrayal of coming to grips with traumatic events.
But then against the sort of contrast and the paradox of a growing and booming and really spiritually bypassing economy and the detritus of the war.
And it kind of, spoiler alert, it winds up in...
an airfield of rusted out American fighter planes, like just junked planes where one of the main characters who used to be a pilot or a bombardier, I can't remember, but he's sort of having his final breakdown with regard to how is he going to but he's sort of having his final breakdown with regard to how is he going to continue in his life and is he going to be able to rouse himself enough to be able to love his
And he finally and he finally makes some sort of commitment.
We don't know how it's going to play out, but as the music soars, you know, he grabs her and he proposes and she accepts and he says something like, you know, we're going to be knocked around.
You understand that, right?
And she says, yes, I understand it.
And he says, it's going to be really difficult.
You know that.
And he's doing two things.
He's talking about his own past coming out of this horrible war.
And he's also predicting the future of the American project.
But the music soars and the whole sort of narrative collapses into this duet where what happens between these two people is the most important thing.
And we can see the trashed planes behind them as kind of like the structural evidence of the ruin of the world.
But what's more important is the personal story.
And that's what the movies do.
That's what they just do.
And you're right.
You're right, Derek.
You film Bruder's book and it's not going to win the Oscar.
We really have to live with that.
The Jab, our weekly segment on the crucial COVID vaccine and the misinformation conspiritualists love to spread about it.
So what's going on here in April 2021 with the jab?
Do we have a reason to still exist now that 42% of the U.S.
population has received at least one dose of the COVID vaccine and 28% are fully vaccinated?
The trend is really good, right?
Yes, but vaccine hesitancy and anti-vax activism are still very strong.
A recent NPR Marist poll showed that 1 in 4 Americans would refuse the vaccine, which is a significant threat to the 80-85% herd immunity numbers we need to effectively contain COVID.
If you're listening to this, I know you're probably already in the choir of those who understand the efficacy and safety of the vaccines, although it was very touching and encouraging a couple weeks ago to hear from several people who had previously been either anti-vaccine or just hesitant but then decided to get vaccinated based on the work we do here on the podcast.
We know that when it comes to hardcore anti-vaxxers, we can't really make a difference.
Just like any dug-in conspiracy theorists, arguing with them doesn't seem to help.
They've come to inhabit an alternate reality, complete with its own facts, assumptions, and logic.
And as flawed as all of that is, it's perpetuated by a circular form of reasoning that self-inoculates against conflicting data by using paranoid generalizations about Fake mainstream news and nefarious big pharma.
As Jonathan Berman, the author of the book Anti-Vaxxers, How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement, pointed out when we had him on the show, roughly 2% of the population are in that hardcore anti-vax group.
But around 20% of the population are vaccine hesitant, they're susceptible, they're vulnerable to the propaganda.
How do we address this?
How do we, in a way, do our part, if you feel called to do so?
You know, the yoga and wellness community, such as it is, turns out to be disproportionately represented in that 20% of the vaccine-hesitant population, along with their shoehorned far-right evangelical neighbors.
We have a real-time stress test of these numbers right now, and in terms of moving the needle, the anti-vaxxers actually appear to be winning.
As a recent BuzzFeed news article shows, they're doing so by leveraging the digital tools that enable scary misrepresentations of data to go viral, like claims that unvaccinated women's menstrual cycles, fertility, and even pregnancies Can be negatively impacted via some kind of magical contagion from women or men who've been vaccinated.
Or confusion about the statistical risks of blood clots.
And even fear-mongering about covered up deaths.
Once any of these false claims is believed by someone who was sitting on the fence, it can become very difficult to overcome the visceral emotional conviction that the vaccines must be dangerous and the truth is being hidden.
So my question is, might it be possible to immunize people from this kind of misinformation?
I know there's no easy answer to this, but I'm a big fan of the idea that the more we model lucid reasoning in the world, the more we inject certain key principles into the discourse, the more we increase the likelihood of people coming into contact with good sense-making in ways that, every now and again, will illuminate the bulb over the head of someone ready to pop.
If you know someone like that, here are three quick principles.
The first is the law of large numbers.
Though it has happened before, it is unusual to have a globally shared experience like the one we're going through with the pandemic, with millions of people getting vaccinated, if they're lucky, all at once.
The larger the numbers get in any data set the higher the likelihood for really low probability occurrences.
The recent incidence of blood clots is an excellent example.
With the AstraZeneca vaccine the incidence has been slightly higher than 1 per 100,000.
That's too high.
But the good news is that it is treatable And doctors now have identified it and know how to recognize the symptoms.
With the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, the blood clot incidence has been at around 2 per million.
Now think of it this way.
Roughly 1 in 11 million plane flights end in a crash, which means it is extremely rare to have been in a plane crash.
But the law of large numbers says that if you gather data on a large enough group of people, you will inevitably then find a significant number who've had the experience of being in a crash.
This doesn't increase the risks of air travel for any individual, but it may increase an amplified perception of that risk.
Now the fact is, if you look at the numbers, you are 100 times more likely to die in a car accident than a plane crash, but of course way more people are terrified of flying than of driving.
We're not intuitively good at large numbers.
So here's the important context-creating statistic.
The incidence of blood clots from COVID infection is around 16%.
That's 16,000 per 100,000 and 160,000 per million as compared to the risk of 1 in 100,000 for AstraZeneca and 2 per million for Johnson & Johnson.
and 160,000 per million, as compared to the risk of 1 in 100,000 for AstraZeneca and 2 per million for Johnson & Johnson.
The second principle is correlation versus causation and anecdotes versus evidence theory.
These two are related and they're fairly quick distinctions I want to make.
Simply stated, the plural of anecdote is not evidence.
Anecdotes are not an endpoint of scientific inquiry, but they can be a good place to start.
All stories, no matter how many, gathered from the wild about scary side effects that have not been subjected to careful analysis are still anecdotes.
They do not add up to evidence, though they may indicate the need for further research.
In one sense, they illustrate the law of large numbers that we were just talking about, but beyond that, they're just stories without any guardrails on verifying important details and causal relationships.
Correlation is not causation means that the fact that I kissed my wedding ring right before buying the winning lottery ticket for example does not mean that this caused me to win.
By the same token getting vaccinated and later dying of liver failure or developing a rare disorder may in fact be causally unrelated even though the correlation can seem like a slam dunk.
Likewise, your common cold almost certainly would have resolved itself whether or not you were megadosing on echinacea.
And third, the background rate.
One very important question when looking at the incidence of certain new conditions in trial groups for any kind of medical research is the background rate.
This means the number of people in the general population who develop certain conditions anyway, regardless of whether or not they are in a trial group for a drug.
Comparing the incidence of something like Bell's palsy in vaccine recipients both to the placebo group and to the background rate in the population is an important part of making sense of trial data.
In trials for the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, eight cases of Bell's palsy were reported, one of which was in the placebo group, and this turned out to be at or lower than the background rate.
The background rate gives us a way of grasping that people are inevitably going to develop various conditions for a host of genetic and environmental reasons that may have nothing to do with the vaccine having been administered.
This means rare and scary medical events and conditions will inevitably be present when the numbers of people involved get big enough.
This doesn't mean researchers assume no causal connection, it means more analysis and perhaps further research is necessary to determine whether or not it is there.
In the case of Bell's palsy, a causal relationship turned out not to be there.
But in the case of the rare blood clotting disorder, a causal relationship was in fact established.
My hope is that with friends and family who are perhaps on the fence or have been scared into hesitancy, introducing them to these concepts or introducing these concepts into your conversations might be helpful.
And I think that the important thing to remember is they actually describe a kind of cognitive blind spot that we are all prone to until we are otherwise educated.
Well, I'm very pleased to present this interview with Abby Richards, I'll just read her bio from her website.
Abby Richards is a science communicator who uses social media to discuss disinformation, conspiracy theories, and climate change.
She has created viral anti-disinformation content ranging from the conspiracy chart to her QAnon explainer TikTok series.
She aims to create responsible, informative, and engaging content that helps people better understand the complex world of information in the 21st century.
Abby has established her presence across several platforms and is a trusted voice for her over 250,000 followers.
Her work has been featured by outlets such as the BBC, The Guardian, Euronews, Irish Times, USA Today, Insider, Now This, but never mind all of them, because now she's on Conspiratuality Podcast.
I hope you enjoy this.
I really learned a lot.
Abby Richards, thanks so much for taking the time and joining us here on Conspiratuality Podcast.
Thank you so much for having me!
We're really huge fans of your work, so it's really delighting.
I just want to get the first thing out of the way here, which is that I think that I'm about twice your age and I'm not on TikTok.
I don't really know how it works, but 700 million people are using it.
So what are the main things that Gen Xers and older folks don't get about these new social landscapes, but they really should?
I don't think they understand necessarily How important the parasocial relationships are on there and how attached people become to the people that they follow and how they look to those people for information.
And I also don't think that they understand the algorithm at all.
So like TikTok is just you open up your For You page and you're just fed content that the algorithm knows you will like.
And I don't think The older generation knows what that experience even is or what it means or what the repercussions are.
Do they?
Is this sort of more advanced or more attuned to user preferences than the boomers would experience on Facebook even?
So much more than Facebook.
It's everybody's for you page is very is different and it figures you out very quickly.
There's kind of a joke.
In the TikTok space that, like, if you want to know somebody, you go look at their algorithm.
Like, if I want to know that, if I want to, like, check someone before I date them, for instance, I'd be like, hand me your TikTok.
Like, let me see what's on your For You page, because your algorithm, like, is very telling of who you are.
are.
Um, there's also the joke that, you know, people will be like, it took me like 20 years to realize that I was gay.
It took my family, like, 30 years to realize I was gay.
It took the TikTok algorithm, like, four minutes.
Right.
So you're saying if you hand your phone to somebody that you meet in a bar, they can scroll through it and immediately pick up what personality type, typing, everything that relationship managers have been trying to figure out for decades.
That's just all right there.
Yeah, probably.
I can learn a lot about somebody, and you have to be like literate in TikTok, but if somebody handed me their phone and I could just scroll through their For You page, I would learn a lot about them.
Now, in terms of what you produce and how well it works, what are the basic kind of storytelling and tone rules of TikTok video production?
I don't think that there is just one, because there's clearly a lot of different formulas that work with a lot of different audiences.
So it really depends on, like, finding your own voice.
For me, like, it's being well-researched, but also, like, as you said, with tone, you have to...
Figure out what angle makes your story compelling.
So it's a lot of storytelling, I think.
Yeah.
So to make something go viral, people have to want to keep watching it.
They have to find it interesting.
And people like learning.
So educational content can be really, really powerful on there.
Right.
And I suppose that if there's educational sort of cliffhangers that one episode will lead to another and that the following will increase from there.
Is that part of how it works?
Yeah, it can.
So you can develop a following if you're like, oh, I'm doing like part one, part two, part three.
I know a lot of people followed me for my QAnon series.
But also if you just consistently put out good content, you will generally acquire followers because people want to keep seeing that.
Now you started with golf and the privatization of green spaces, and that's a really eco-activist zone, and I know that you're a climate science student as well.
How did you move from that into conspiracy theories, and is there a link for you?
It felt very accidental at the time.
Looking back, I think there probably were some links.
At the time, it just kind of felt like I was talking about the things that I found interesting.
The golf thing really, like, it started as a joke where I was just like, golf is dumb.
And then, like, I made this video and everyone was like, yeah, like, we should ban golf.
And I just started researching it and I got kind of obsessed with it.
So I was like, this is just the biggest waste of space ever.
I really hate it.
And I think that largely helped me to develop a platform and make connections on TikTok.
And once I had a platform, I just kept seeing conspiracy content because I was seeing it in my comment sections, right?
Or I was seeing anti-Semitic comments.
And I was just more literate in TikTok, which meant I understood how these ideas were spreading.
So I think I was just seeing it more.
And then on top of that, from the Gulf, Videos, I mean, I just kept posting environmental content and I became very involved in Ecotalk, which is a collaborative environmental TikTok page.
And we have to deal, the environmental space in general has to deal with so many conspiracy theories.
So I just kind of got pushed into it through there, I'd say.
There seems to be a demographic overlap in the sense that, you know, I'm wondering if you TikTok-ing on golf is kind of like you TikTok-ing on conspiracy theories in the sense that, you know, you're really Pointing a spotlight at older folks.
I mean, I don't know how many Gen Z folks are playing golf, and it would be really interesting to see whether or not the impact of your golf work actually depresses golf participation amongst particular age groups.
Do you know what I mean?
I know that my videos have turned people away from golf, and I know that there are people who have quit golf after seeing my videos.
That's serious, that's serious stuff, right?
Yeah.
Have you had industry pushback from that, or just sort of like sports bros who don't like it?
I haven't been attacked by big golf yet, but I did have somebody make an entire hate account for me, a golfer.
It was a terrible hate account, I wish he had done a better job.
So, I mean, it was mostly, like, the golfers.
I got bombarded for a while by one professional golfer who was telling all of his, like, 14-year-old followers to go troll me, but that's kind of the worst I got.
And I guess they're golf trollers.
Yeah, I mean, they're not highly effective.
They kept leaving koalas in my comment section.
I was like, okay.
Okay, so now you really, I think, caught a lot of attention for your conspiracy chart.
And it's your own creation.
It's brilliant.
And I think the fact that it, you know, went viral the way that it did shows how effective it is.
How did you settle on the sort of categorization strategy, and especially the thresholds?
So you've got, you know, a grouping of conspiracies that are speculative and more or less harmless, and then a series that, you know, indicate that the person might be leaving reality, as the threshold line says, and then there's science denialism, which starts getting, you know, quite a bit more dangerous, but then You have the anti-Semitic threshold of no return as the kind of final step towards, you know, everything that would be kind of QAnon related or networked.
And I'm wondering whether, in your view, that particular step launches the conspiracist into a new realm of hate speech and actually into a history of violent fantasies and events, and if that's its most telling characteristic.
When I made it, I really, like, I wish I could say that there was a process or that, like, I, you know, like, was deliberating for a really long time about, like, what to call it.
It's just, I just drew on paper for myself.
I wasn't going to post it.
I just made it for myself.
What made sense in my brain.
There was very little structure in how I made it.
I made it and then it made sense to my friends, so I posted online and it made sense to the rest of the world apparently.
The anti-semitic point of no return I thought was just like kind of a funny name for it because they all are anti-semitic because at that point like once you're at the point where it's like there's a group that's controlling the world it always is anti-semitic because it's like based out of the protocols.
Yes, I do think that there is a certain threshold.
Once you've gotten into this idea that there's a group that exists that's controlling the world, whether you think it's the Illuminati, whether you think it's Cabal, whether you think it's Freemasons, it always ends up, it's the exact same narrative reshaped.
And I do think that there is a certain threshold because Once you've gotten into that, you can really justify any other belief.
And also there's a sort of a qualitative belief in who the, I don't know, the fantasized controllers are.
So with with Area 51 or something like that, there might be plausibly good reasons for You know, the government or, you know, security apparatuses to hide aliens.
But when we get to, you know, the cabal or to global banking or the Illuminati, you know that they have nefarious, you know, intentions.
Or that's at least what the conspiracist is trying to tell us.
There's a difference between believing that the government is hiding XYZ, you know, like this program, because, you know, that's a real thing that could happen and that has happened.
Like people in power do lie about things.
They do abuse their power.
Like those are very, very real concerns.
But then once it's like a made up Like fictitious belief system of it that there's an evil group controlling the world and manipulating all things that happen and manipulating history in a way that is genuinely impossible to exist just like because the world's way too complex.
Right.
It's a very different way of thinking about the world.
Now, did you grow up in a skeptical environment?
I'd say I grew up in a pretty skeptical environment.
I certainly don't have parents who are conspiracy theorists or any of that and I didn't grow up in a super religious household.
Um, so I was not, uh, exposed to conspiracy theories, like through my family at all.
But how about and how about as you were you were going through school?
Did you brush up against conspiracism at any point?
Did you?
You know, did you hear about 9-eleven and the World Trade Center seven at a certain point and and and go on a bit of a dive?
Oh, yeah, I mean I wouldn't say like I'd say throughout my childhood just being a kid and Who was discovering the internet, like, very much during its infancy.
Yeah, I saw, like, loose change at a young age.
Right.
Combined conspiracy theories with, like, pseudoscience as well, and how those will blend together, especially when it comes into, like, health and spirituality.
So, I was, like, huge into the What the Bleep Do We Know?
Right.
Big fan of that when I was, like, 12.
Because I thought that that was science.
That's amazing, because the first time that I came across that film, it was actually promoted within the New Age cult that I was in.
Of course, I was at that point, it was maybe 2002.
So I would have been 31 or something.
And, uh, and the weird part was that, was that I, I found out about 10 years later that the reason it had made like an early cut of that film had made its way into our cult was that, um, it had actually been produced by another it had actually been produced by another cult.
By the Ramtha people, and it featured all of Ramtha the Channeler's students, you know, and her chiropractor, whoever he is, Joe Dispenza, and just a whole bunch of personalities that came out of this cultic environment, including Mark Vicente.
Uh, who winds up being the lieutenant at NXIVM and now is the star of the Netflix special, The Vow.
So, it's very odd to hear about these media Making their way into popular culture and into the hands of kids really at the time in which they were actually recruitment tools for you know in real life brick-and-mortar cults in in the early aughts.
Yeah, and when I watched it, like, as a literal child, like, I thought that that was science.
Like, I took it as a documentary about physics.
Right.
Which is insane looking back, but also helps me to empathize with the people right now who, like, watch these things and take it as fact, because they're presented as fact.
I wonder too about being 12, thinking that this was, and why wouldn't you think that this was just a documentary about the wild and crazy world of physics, what, did something come in and sort of like shut that pathway down at a certain point or become like, at what point did that become kind of a weird memory from childhood instead of something that you pursued and sort of built upon as a reality principle?
I don't know if I even have, like, in my own brain enough of a narrative around my relationship with it to give a good answer to that.
I think it was something I watched and liked, and then, you know, you're a kid and you just move on to the next thing.
Right.
If I had been in, like, a more vulnerable situation, Where I needed answers desperately.
Right.
I probably could have gotten attached to it, but I think I just had support systems and it just wasn't something I needed at the time.
It wasn't the right thing for me to grasp onto at the time.
Yeah, it's interesting because it almost feels as though you were just a little bit too young at 12 that, you know, somebody who was maybe spending more time out of the house or had moved out or, you know, Uh, was, you know, living online or gaming or something like that, that there might have been less of a social context to make that seem less like entertainment and more like reality.
But it sounds like, it sounds like, you know, it sounds like it's something that you could come across and kind of, and kind of absorb and be entertained by like a Star Trek episode or, you know, or, or, or something else like that.
Yeah.
I mean, what, what, do you know what year it came out in?
I don't, but let, let me just look.
What?
Cause I'm not, I used 12 as like a random number.
I'm not entirely positive exactly what age I was.
It's 2004, actually.
Oh, wow.
But I believe, I believe that I had, that we had access to an earlier cut of that.
So that's the first date that I'm getting.
It might be that... 2004 would have been it, but I definitely didn't watch it then.
You would have been eight?
Yeah, okay.
So I wonder, was it like on VHS or something?
No, I swear I saw it on Netflix.
Oh, okay.
That's when Netflix was sending out DVDs, right?
No, I think it was just when Netflix had started streaming, so I might have been slightly older.
I could have been 14, maybe.
That's wild.
That's amazing.
But I do think that whatever age it was, yeah, it was something I absorbed.
I genuinely thought it was science.
I thought it was really cool that they had cast a deaf actress as You know, as the main character.
It was probably my first exposure to a deaf actor.
As a cult researcher, like, immediately I would say, oh, that was a really good recruitment tool because it was plausible, it was entertaining to you.
If you had wanted to follow up on it, there would have been all kinds of pathways to do that.
And, you know, you might have found your way to the Ramtha organization in Washington State.
Yeah.
So, you know, I do this long-form journalism on cults and conspiritualists and there's this thing called Brandolini's Law that always feels like it's hanging over my head.
And it's basically, Brandolini was a, or is a, he's like a coder guy who came up with this tweet that went viral back in 2013.
And he basically just said the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.
So I'm wondering, like you and I work in such different forms, I'm wondering if you feel this too or is short-form TikTok work a kind of like rejection of that axiom?
Short form TikTok work is not in any way shape or form a rejection of that axiom.
Okay, right.
It is exhausting.
It is genuinely exhausting because you can just throw lies out there and see what sticks.
And it takes no energy whatsoever but to debunk them and to do it in a way that like also I'm combating something that by its very nature goes viral.
And now I have to take something that doesn't generally go viral, which is like debunks, and figure out a way on top of that to make it actually have reach.
So, I would say it's thoroughly exhausting work.
And I just want to clarify, I didn't mean to imply that there isn't, like, an enormous amount of research that goes into the debunking, but also the strategy.
But there's something about the attention expenditure on behalf of the viewer, the consumer, that is That is quite different.
Like, you know, when people go through point by point and they say, you know, this is everything that Mickey Willis got wrong in Plandemic, they wind up with like, like a 4,000 word essay.
But like, just the form of what you do, that can't be, that can't be what happens.
It can't be 4,000 words.
It's got to be, it's got to be, is the average like two minutes?
Is that the upper limit?
No, the upper limit is 59 seconds.
Oh my God.
Yeah, I have to cut every single script, so I'll basically script something, and it'll always be too long, and then I'll have to cut it, and then I'll have to film it, and sometimes I'll even have to speed up my voice.
Right, as you're editing?
Yeah, in my editing, just so that I can fit everything in.
Because they're so nuanced and it's really, really tough.
And you have to go for a bigger idea, which is what I try and do.
Like, I'm not the person who's going to debunk every single thing that's wrong in Plandemic.
But I do think it's very interesting to talk about, like, why we're believing that.
And I think that that's also a helpful thing for people to understand.
Well, how has the feedback been?
In general, it's been great.
People have been incredibly supportive.
They believe in my work and they like what I'm doing and they like that I've found a new platform to use and have gotten to experiment with my voice and with Addressing these issues in a way that's new.
So the feedback's been really good.
Obviously, you get the haters, but overall, I feel like everybody's been really supportive.
Now, when somebody brings the hate, what really gets them?
Like, where do they get most activated?
Because I'm guessing that that's where you're most effective.
I think it's usually anti-Semitism, I would say.
Because you'll get that one from both sides where people get very defensive, and they You just see it everywhere.
So, especially with the chart, right, where I labeled it, the antisemitic point of no return, that got a lot of very antisemitic people very upset with me.
And you said, but from both sides, so there are also people who don't consider themselves to be anti-Semitic who are queuing on boosters and who are very offended that you're making that charge?
I mean, when it comes to talking about anti-Semitism, you get it from the left and the right.
Now, I would say, like, it's very different From both those sides, because on the left it's much more about Israel, but if I just say conspiracy theories are anti-Semitic, just for saying the word anti-Semitic, I will get comments being like, Free Palestine.
I'm like, I'm not Israeli, I don't know what you want me to do with that.
I don't live there.
I'm just talking about anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories.
So people are just touchy around anybody speaking about it.
And then when it comes to conspiracy theorists, they oftentimes have no understanding.
I'd say the vast majority have no understanding that the rabbit hole ends with the Jews that like they don't know that and they will deny it um so they don't like it and then on then there's also just Regular anti-Semitic neo-Nazis and trolls who, like, they've doctored my chart, they have sent me hate mail, they've made a cartoon of me, like, they've, you know, done everything.
How's the impact of that for you?
Like, how has it, you know, are you comfortable talking a little bit about the, you know, the impact on your General well-being as you go through that stress it gets to you.
It's gotten to me less and less I think you get Unfortunately, you get kind of used to it.
It's like the first time it happened.
It actually the first time I got You know, I got attacked by some wannabe Nazis was for the golf stuff and I Which made no sense to me, but was the most afraid I think I ever was.
Versus when I was like really being more attacked.
I had already been exposed to it and I think I had more systems in place to protect myself.
It's never good.
It certainly never feels good.
At the same time, If I'm pissing off Nazis, I'm okay with that.
I think I'm doing a good job.
I would say it's not the most draining part.
I think the most draining part is just like the never-ending just spread of these lies and watching people who aren't hateful fall into them.
For me, that's far more emotionally draining than The actively hateful people.
And when you see people that who wouldn't be naturally given over to these ideologies falling in, do you have, like, has that happened in your personal circles?
Have you have you known people who you wouldn't have expected to buy into particular conspiracy theories who suddenly find themselves there?
And it's very mystifying.
I don't have anyone I'm super close with that is completely absorbed with these things.
Obviously, they've, like, touched my periphery.
Like, I have some, like, you know, like, cousins that are, like, friends of friends.
And I hear a lot about it.
And I've seen how they've infiltrated people close to me as well, like, And I've seen things that I believe that I realize now were not true and were conspiracy theories.
Or at the start of the pandemic, I got into a fight with my dad, who is a very skeptical, very rational, and very intelligent guy.
And he was arguing that COVID was made in the lab.
He wasn't saying it definitely was.
He just thought that it might have been.
Right.
I got, we got into a very heated debate about it and obviously he doesn't like believe that now, but at the start of the pandemic when we were all very like nervous and we didn't know what was going on, that was an option that he considered.
So I've seen how even like somebody who I considered very skeptical and rational can fall into that.
Did you have the feeling that that particular argument had to be charged because it represented kind of a fork in the road?
That if he began to really sort of pursue the information sources that were tending towards that argument, that He would start bumping up into claims about, I don't know, PCR tests, or he would start bumping up into claims against case rates, or, you know, the WHO and its, you know, evil people.
I still have a hard time imagining that for him.
He's like so, you know, he really takes his sources seriously.
Right.
That said, like, you know, he's a He's a yogi.
He's a big yogi guy, deep into that culture.
So he's certainly susceptible in that way, but at the same time, I know him and I don't think he would fall into it.
So I never really saw it as a fork in the road necessarily, but I see how it certainly could be for a lot of people.
You know, one of my favorite parts of your QAnon Explainer series is the cup of tea that I think you start every episode with.
I do.
And there's something, I mean, we talked in the beginning about, you know, you have to find the tone and the storyline that's going to grab your particular viewership and your demographic.
And I'm wondering, there's something about, there's something about, okay, we've gotta have, we've gotta have a comfortable conversation here.
And it has to be downregulated.
And we should be relaxed about this.
And we should take care of ourselves as we're discussing this.
And so I'm wondering, do you feel that that particular affect or that tone has been successful or that it speaks to a need amongst Gen Z viewers?
Yes.
And it's something I did not know at the time when I made my first video.
I don't think I knew that I had done that.
And once I realized that I had, I kept doing it.
I think people fundamentally, they want to feel safe and secure.
Right.
Right.
And that's why they turn to conspiracy theories is because it's giving an answer that there's someone to blame.
They don't necessarily have to actually make changes in the world.
And they get like an in-group that makes them feel safe and secure.
And I think That the emotional response to that content um which is often like anxiety producing doesn't help and they continue to seek out more and more of these narratives that give them answers even though it's making them more anxious.
So what I do is try and counter that so that like if they see my content like the first thing they feel before like I am jumping in with some uh You know, some debunk that's scientific or anything.
I want them to first just feel comfortable and safe.
So, like, if I'm going to talk about something that is genuinely terrifying, like QAnon, right?
Because it ends in authoritarianism and it's filled with hatred and it's just, like, causing so much anxiety and stress and hatred in the world.
It makes sense for me to Dress down, do it in my sweatpants, do it in my pajamas, and drink some tea, because I think that we all need to relax, and I want to convey that general vibe in my videos.
You know, it's really striking, you're, you know, I've just learned, I thought it was a two minute limit, and you're telling me it's 59 seconds, but you're spending two or three of those seconds on the tea, maybe four.
And so that's like a super important choice, like the narrower the window goes for, you know, what you're what you're going to choose content wise, the more important those choices get.
And so it's just really impressive that that's that that's so central, actually, because the other thing that the other thing that the other thing that really sort of strikes me about the tea is that it moves at a non TikTok rhythm.
Right.
Um, like... In that it slows down?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, you actually open with... I think the bag is bouncing up and down and you're watching the tea steep.
Uh, not in every video.
I did that in, like, one.
Yeah, none of my... My videos don't necessarily follow the exact same format.
Right.
Um, I remember doing that in, like, my Save the Children video, but I think I also opened it as a skit.
So, I really just do what I want for that video, but I try and...
Focus on making people feel comfortable and also, like, make myself feel comfortable.
I need the tea.
I don't want to talk about this either.
Right.
Right.
Well, that comes through too.
So there's kind of like a sympathetic identification, I think, that like, well, we've got to talk about this, but let's get let's get cozy first.
That's literally it.
You nailed it.
Have you been able to watch any of Cullen Hobock's Q-Doc on HBO?
I am two episodes in.
Now, you did an amazing take on the trailer, which was...
Which was ridiculous.
And HBO did not sue you.
I saw the caption in the TikTok saying, you know, HBO, please don't sue me.
But just for the listeners, we'll put it into the show notes, but Abby plays two characters discussing the trailer for the QAnon special at HBO headquarters.
And they're talking about how they're going to turn this super violent ideology into something that looks like, you know, a video game with, with superhero music over it.
Um, so anyways, super funny.
Um, how's the actual documentary unfolding for you?
What are, what are your impressions so far?
I don't, I'm not going to like, I think once it's over, I'll do some sort of discussion about it.
Cause like, I don't want to like make any sweeping claims.
Um, especially cause I have only seen the first two.
Um, I thought the second one was better than the first, the first one, like they spent way too much time talking about. - QAnon's predictions being right?
- Yes.
Yes.
- Is like a justification.
- Which they weren't. - They spend like, yeah, they weren't.
And they provide a quick, a very quick 10-second cut of Travis View just being like, well, you know, if you throw a bunch of stuff out there, you know, you have thousands of drops that mean, that could mean anything, and then you can go tie it to whatever you want, that like, you can form those narratives.
But I think people believe what they hear First, and people will leave what they hear for the longest amount of time, so I don't think that that was the smartest coverage.
The second episode was a bit better, like I mean that was just more of like a deep dive into Jim and Ron and Fred and that's been interesting to watch so I would have to see all of it before I can like say like thing good or thing bad which I mean it'll probably be somewhere you know I was I just
I had this thought that it seems like your arch-villain in terms of internet persona in this landscape would be Ron Watkins.
And that somehow on TikTok you're making moves towards creating a kind of anti-8kun.
And I'm wondering who you are...
collaborating with, like, who are you finding?
Like, so there's followers, but there are other people that are doing similar work or that you're going to be working with or, or that you're finding common cause with.
Oh yeah.
I mean, I have so many people who I'm constantly talking to, to first learn more.
Um, so I'm just kind of talking to different experts who understand things that I don't.
Right.
And I have them, um, I will get them to, uh, check over most of my videos.
So like all of my QAnon, um, videos were reviewed by several different like QAnon experts.
Oh, that's great.
Yeah.
I just, I don't, I'm, I live in constant fear of putting out false information.
Um, I just don't want to make things worse.
So I was getting people to review all my scripts and whatnot.
And then, I mean, like lots of journalists who I'm talking to, different experts in different spaces, because conspiracy theories touch so many different realms of research and expertise and different, like, aspects of the world.
So, um, I learn from a lot of different people.
Um, and then there's also content creators who I work with and I talk to.
So like, you know, like there's one who focuses specifically on sex trafficking misinformation because she does legitimate volunteer work for like to prevent sex trafficking and to work with victims.
And she cannot stand all of the misinformation, which is like a huge viral problem on TikTok.
Everybody thinks they're about to be trafficked.
So and then like, you know, political TikTokers in general that I work with or that I talk to.
Um, so like so many people.
Can we just back up a bit?
You said, you just said that so many people on TikTok believe that they're about to be trafficked.
So, so if, if, if I was scrolling, I might come across your debunk of Save the Children, but then I might pass on by and see somebody else's TikTok about their fears that they are being trafficked.
And those fears might be unreasonable.
They might be dramatized or, Oh so TikTok has a severe problem of like I'd say like the sex trafficking panic in general is huge on there so a lot of viral like a lot of viral videos of like
Zip-tying your car means you're being marked to be trafficked or having somebody write this on your car means you're, you know, you're about to be trafficked or like always look under your car because someone might be hiding there so that they can cut your ankle and then grab you.
There's just, these are everywhere.
And they get millions and millions and millions of views and likes because they present as activism and they present as a warning.
So then everybody will share it with their friends.
Everybody will boost it in the comments because TikTok users know how to make something go viral.
And they believe that, you know, because they have good intentions, they believe like it's important to know that like this is a mark that you're going to be trafficked without necessarily understanding that, first of all, it's really not.
That's not at all how trafficking works.
And that they're just causing this unnecessary panic that's doing a lot of harm to actual trafficking prevention.
That's amazing.
I mean, the T becomes that much more important, I guess, right?
Yeah, we all got to calm down.
A massive panic.
I just saw one the other day of a girl who thought that she was almost trafficked in a Target because there was a woman and her daughter following her around the Target.
And it actually just sounds like, you know, there was a woman and her daughter that kept being near her in a target.
And I think that's what I'm And it has millions and millions of views, and she's convinced that it's trafficking because she's been exposed to so much of that content.
And I don't want to delegitimize her panic and her fear.
I think that it's scary to be a woman in the world, but it's far scarier if you're constantly being exposed to false information that you are about to be kidnapped.
Wow.
This is a stunning thing that I did not know.
Okay, so I'm going to absorb that for a while.
It's a whole deep dive.
Right.
Um, okay.
So, um, question for you.
Jen Pisacki calls you from the White House and says, we would like you to do some TikToks for, um, uh, against disinformation on behalf of the Biden administration.
Uh, what do you say?
I think that part of my success lies in, uh, My unaffiliation to any major, you know, political groups or organizations and
I don't, like, I think people trust me because I am a person rather than like an organization that they know or like, you know, a label or a logo.
They trust me and I don't want to be incorporated into The government in that way.
And because, you know, like I'm, I'm so happy to do those debunks and I will continue to do them and like, but I don't want to do them under the name of somebody else.
I think that then I lose a lot of my own legitimacy.
Well, it's almost as if you are cutting a pathway, the same pathway that mainstream journalism publications have to cut, which is, you know, to recognize that there were 75 million Trump voters in the last election and that you're to where
Your affiliations, your politics on your sleeve is going to immediately alienate a huge portion of your potential viewership.
And so it makes sense to me.
It's almost like you're trying to do a very neutral kind of journalism that's also comforting and funny.
Yeah, I mean, I don't claim neutrality.
I have very strong views, right?
Like, I'm the girl who wants to abolish golf.
But I don't want, especially with something this touchy, I don't want anyone to think that I'm a puppet or, like, a shill.
And I know they already do, right?
I already get comments that, like, I'm a CIA plant, and it's like, I'm definitely not.
Right.
But I'm...
I think that talking about these issues when you really have to be careful that you're not coming across as someone who's literally being paid by the cabal to tell lies.
So it's important to me that for that reason I am independent.
And I think that Organizations and platforms and, like, people who want to see me succeed, like, I think that they should also understand that.
Like, I don't think I should be scooped up into work for another organization.
Like, I should remain independent because that's where a lot of my credibility is.
I'm thinking that that even extends to the tech, right?
That you're obviously doing this editing.
You're clearly using your... Is it just your phone and then iMovie or something like that?
Yeah, I just use my phone.
I usually use Videoleap, but I will also sometimes use Adobe.
It has that feeling, right?
It has that feeling that you are just a person in the world.
And I think you're right that if it got any shinier, first of all, it probably wouldn't look like it belonged on TikTok.
But on the other hand, it also wouldn't feel like it was this DIY You know, I, as an individual, I can actually tell the truth about something.
And I don't, and I don't need anything special for that.
I don't need, I don't need a grant.
I don't need funding.
I don't need a, I don't need a scholarly position or a political appointment.
I can just do it.
Yeah.
I mean, I think that like my background, like my, you know, my background in science and the fact that I'm a grad student and I have literally made my, my, Grad work like largely about like climate change and disinformation and affiliations that I have and the work I've done like lends to my credibility.
I just think as long as it's clear that I stand on my own so like, um, I don't want to make my videos look super polished and film them in a studio or behind a desk.
I like that they come across like I'm filming them on my phone in my own home because I am.
I shot them myself and I edited them myself because that's how I capture my voice best.
I mean, I still would love grants so that I can keep doing the work because it's a lot of time and effort.
But that voice and capturing that certainly matters.
So can we imagine a granting body that you could transparently accept funding from that would not denigrate or degrade your credibility?
Or are you really just stuck doing this for free?
No, I definitely can accept grants.
There's just no way that I can continue doing this for free.
I'm currently at a loss of profit.
I have a very small Patreon.
I think that I'm comfortable working with non-profits, I'm comfortable working with think tanks and different organizations, and I'm comfortable working with platforms and consulting different people and organizations.
But I will do that transparently and On the condition that I still criticize.
I look at NPR, when they cover something, they'll admit to whether or not they're funded by them, but that doesn't really taint their coverage.
Uh, if I were to get grants, there are certainly grants I would not accept, but... I suppose if Jen Pisacki calls you from the White House and says, can you consult on this thing, you could say, you could say, yeah, if, you know, if I can bring my camera and do TikToks of how the conversations go.
Yeah, I'm happy to consult.
If you want, like, consultation, and I agree with...
The thing that you want consultation on?
Like, if you are genuinely trying to combat conspiracy theories and you're doing good work, um, yes.
And I understand that, like, you know, like, there are specific platforms that I will not mention that I don't, like, love.
But I still have to work with them and like conspiracy theorists don't like that at all because they don't understand that the world is complex and that a lot of people are hired by organizations that they might not even like love or like corporations that they might not even love and that like that's how you try and make them better.
Yeah, I mean as long as I agree with the work that I am doing, I see no, I don't have a Thank you so much for taking the time.
Oh, thank you for having me.
I love this.
I love this podcast.
I'm so glad that it exists because I think that the intersection between conspiracies and spirituality is so fascinating.
And I'm glad that you're providing this resource for people.
So a brief addendum to this interview.
The work just never stops on TikTok for Abby Richards.
After we filed this interview, she became aware of and then tackled a manufactured panic on the platform.
The supposed announcement on TikTok of National Rape Day scheduled for April 24th.
This was not a thing.
So, here's Abby doing the Lord's work, notably I think in an ecosystem that seems totally bubbled off from mainstream scrutiny.
There was only minor coverage of this issue while, as Abby points out in a separate Instagram post, April 24th videos received over 200 million views and were never even labeled as false information.
So here she is.
So there are a lot of TikToks right now claiming that a group of men decided April 24th would be National Rape Day.
But I can't find any of those videos, and neither could USA Today, and neither could anyone at TikTok.
TikTok users created this panic alone.
We awareness videoed it into existence.
And it perpetuates dangerous myths about rape.
The vast majority of sexual assaults are committed by somebody that the victim knows, not hypothetical strangers online.
8 out of 10.
And 9 out of 10 if the victim is a child.
Spreading awareness of fake threats does harm, like it's been incredibly traumatic for survivors of sexual violence who now feel extra unsafe.
Also, like half these videos are men threatening to punch the imaginary internet rapists.
Like, okay, do you want a sticker?
I can't speak for everyone, but I personally don't feel safer with you threatening violence to protect me.
I would much rather you just support legislation like funding for sex ed or affordable healthcare for survivors.
