Dan had a family emergency this week, so instead of It's In the Code we have a special episode. In the first part, Brad speaks to Dr. Jeffery Stoyanoff and Dr. Brian Onishi about their new podcast Horror Joy - a deep dive into horror in hopes of finding joy lurking in the shadows. They talk about the allure of horror films and books, the ways horror provides a window into our contemporary hopes and fears, and why Jaws is actually reallly good f*cking movie.
In the second part, Brad speaks to Dr. Susannah Crockford, creator of Miss Information. She explains the allure of conspiracy theories, what they do for people, and how we need to think differently about the misinformation problem.
Subscribe to Horror Joy here: https://redcircle.com/shows/97996083-5fe9-41d5-824e-f069a412ed76
Subscribe to Miss Information here: https://redcircle.com/shows/21b4b512-ceef-4289-b9fc-76f302f5bd22
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Welcome to a special episode of Straight White American Jesus.
I'm Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
Today, I want to introduce you to two new projects that we have from Access Movie Media.
The first is Horror Joy, a podcast about horror and everything related to it, including the joy.
That might surprise you, but the two creators of that show are here to talk about it.
And explain what it's about, why horror is worthy of your attention when it comes to analysis and commentary and the joy of watching and partaking in horror films and reading horror books, especially in community with other people.
I also have an interview with Susanna Crockford, the creator of Misinformation.
She talks all about why she got into studying conspiracy theories and what they mean for our contemporary moment.
Susanna is just a fascinating person.
She's an anthropologist who grew up in the UK, but has spent most of her research life in Arizona.
And the result is somebody who has an absolutely compelling perspective.
on conspiracy theories, misinformation, wellness, yoga, evangelical Christianity, and so much more.
I hope you enjoy our conversations.
Here is the trailer for Horror Joy, and then my conversation with Brian and Jeff, the creators.
Horror Joy is a podcast by two university professors who take a deep dive into the world of horror.
We're your hosts.
I'm Jeffrey Stoinov, Assistant Professor of English at Penn State Altoona.
I'm Brian Onishi, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Penn State Altoona.
We'll analyze horror films, stories, and games to bring out the big ideas hidden behind some of the most terrifying tales.
Our goal is to find and celebrate the joys of horror beyond the base, carnivalesque pleasures of gruesome deaths and insidious monstrosities.
This season, we'll take a bite out of Jaws, take our first vows of religious horror, We're academic, but not too academic.
While we are professors, we're horror nerds, too.
Talk Zombies with Kelly J. Baker.
And Christian Nationalism with horror podcaster, Lucas Kwong of Monster in the Mirror.
We're academic, but not too academic.
While we are professors, we're horror nerds too.
Join us as we seek to find joy even in horror.
Welcome back to Straight White American Jesus.
I'm Brad Onishi, and joined by two folks, one of whom you've met already if you listen to the show regularly, and that is my brother, Dr. Brad Onishi, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Penn State Altoona, and another guest who is, very soon you're going to understand, his co-host for a new podcast, and that is Dr. Jeff Stoyanoff, Assistant Professor of English at Penn State Altoona.
Brian, Jeff, thanks for being here.
Yeah, thanks for having us.
This is great.
Thanks for having us, yeah.
So, the podcast is coming out soon.
It's part of our Axis Moondi family.
It's an affiliate.
You all are producing it.
You all have the reins.
We're not touching it.
You are doing your thing, but we're kind of entering into a pact here, some sort of alliance.
I don't know what reality show imagery I'm trying to evoke here.
But just super stoked to be affiliated with you guys and your show in any way.
And it's called Horror Joy.
It's basically two horror nerds use their academic training and acumen to analyze horror, interview horror authors, really dig into it.
So I want to talk about why horror is like a worthy genre for such things.
But first of all, I want to know about you two and you being horror nerds.
And so like, what got you into horror?
What keeps you into horror?
Why is this the thing that like, you know, whether it's, you got a free Saturday afternoon or an evening to yourself or whatever you turn to, whether it's film or books or anything else.
For me, it's about reading books, honestly, growing up, uh, I read Goosebumps and all kinds of kind of weird horror stories probably not for kids, but somehow I got a hold of them and Yeah, I loved it from then I went to Stephen King and just read a ton of Stephen King right had the subscription them that
Mom sent us up set and set me up with where I could get a hardback cover every month and just read that as we talked a little bit about on the first couple episodes I Started watching horror movies a little bit later in life I really think that it was my love of horror books that got me and one thing that I think a lot about in terms of horror is just There's something about it that shows me the world right now.
And it makes me think.
And that's the thing that I love the most.
Horror continually makes me think about what's happening right now.
What do I have anxieties about?
Uh, think through those and get through those and, uh, microdose anxiety, uh, through horror.
This is something that I absolutely love about it and, uh, the genre of horror movie has also kind of recently taken on a bigger part of my life.
I love movies and so moving from kind of movies generally to focusing on horror has been a really easy transition.
And one that I've taken up.
I've taught it in classes.
And again, it's just something that makes me think.
And I personally, I love it all the way from Goosebumps up till now.
How about you, Jeff?
Yeah, I mean, I say this to Brian a lot.
I think as the English professor here, I'm supposed to say books, but it's movies for me.
They got me started in horror.
I read Goosebumps.
I had the scary stories to tell in the dark, which I think Maybe we should at some point evaluate for how age-appropriate those were, given some of the tales in there were, like, awesome but also horrific.
But I worked at a movie theater for 14 years, and so horror movies were iconic with working at a movie theater.
You think about the projectors, you think about the way film looks on the screen, you think about the way a horror movie looks in a movie theater as opposed to on your television screen.
The Ring, for example, in a movie theater is terrifying.
On your home TV screen, at least back in 2004 or 2005 when it was first on, probably VHS or DVD back in the day, not nearly as terrifying as it was coming out of the big screen.
So there's something about setting up the theater of film in that way.
Horror books, too.
Goosebumps.
I mean, I have an entire box of goosebumps in the attic somewhere that at some point I should probably give away to someone that will read them.
Or I'll just keep them forever.
I'll hoard them.
Stephen King books, to a lesser extent, but I really enjoy Stephen King.
Even some of, like, what people might consider not great horror, like Dinkins, or, like, the genre horror that you go into Barnes & Noble or Books a Million and you see, like, stuff in this sub-genre, and what do we do with that?
Why is that horror rather than fiction?
Like, that's an English professor question, but I think we're thinking about.
So it's just something that has constantly interested me from the movie to books to even video games.
Like thinking about Alice, the video game back in the 90s with how that sort of used horror.
Thinking about even like some games like World of Warcraft, how horror gets incorporated into that.
Thinking about Baldur's Gate 3.
Thinking about Diablo.
Like Diablo is like a super horror based game.
So it's just, it's a really fun genre.
It plays with your mind.
It makes you question reality in really productive ways.
I also think, I'm gonna throw this in here, there are times when you know you're not supposed to be sweaty, but you sweat anyways, right?
Those are the moments that it's the worst to be sweaty.
You're like in the opera and you're sweating.
Okay, but you're playing basketball or working out and you're sweating and it's totally fine.
So if you're anxious, if you're an anxious person, you're like, oh, this is awful to be anxious, like at the airport or whatever.
There's something about watching a horror movie or even reading a horror book where you're like, you know what?
It's okay to be anxious.
This is what I'm supposed to be doing.
There's something about that I think that's potentially helpful and interesting for me.
Yeah, I was not sure where that was going, but I now understand what you're saying, and you're right.
I think what I take from that is you want your heart to be racing, you want to be exhilarated, and horror is a genre that is designed for that in a very particular way.
I think the next question, you know, Jeff, you hit on this, but I think one thing that I've thought for a long time, and Brian, I've told you this as we've been adults, is like,
I don't think that I'm sophisticated enough sometimes to understand horror or even like a lot of things I just I don't I mean I guess I'm just saying I'm a very simple person and every time I've talked to you Brian about horror I've realized I just thought horror was people slashing each other and kind of gory scary movies and I've never been into it because I didn't understand it and then I talked to you and I'm like oh That makes sense.
There's a lot there.
So last time we talked, Brian, you gave us a definition of horror as opposed to fantasy, as opposed to science fiction.
Can you do that again?
And then I want to ask Jeff about horror and fiction.
Yeah, sure.
I think about horror a lot in terms of genre.
I think genre fiction generally gets a bad rap.
But we have these kind of three major sections of genre fiction, right?
We have fantasy, science fiction, and horror.
And I think of science fiction specifically as a kind of forward-looking genre.
It's the world that could be, but is not yet.
And maybe there's a, this is the world that could be, and so we have to kind of do something to avoid that world.
Fantasy is a world that is different than ours, but could be, or could have been ours, right?
All of it's logically possible.
It makes sense, but the monsters kind of live there.
The ogre lives there.
The warlock lives there.
They all live there, and that's just kind of fine.
It's not weird that they live there.
Horror is about our world now, right?
It's about our reality, and something breaks through.
And specifically, I think, something threatening.
An existential threat breaks through, shows up, something that should not be here.
Maybe it's just something that is outside of the bounds of reason or rationality.
But otherwise, it's just not kind of within the logic of what we think of as our world.
And that's where I think horror is distinct from the other two.
There's obviously overlap.
There's fuzzy borders between all of those.
But that's where I land with horror.
So, in fantasy, if I show up in fantasy, if I show up in Lord of the Rings, there's wizards.
And the wizards are supposed to be there, because it's fantasy.
Like, I'm not scared of... I mean, I'm scared of some of the things there.
I'm scared of Voldemort.
I'm scared of Sauron.
But...
I'm not surprised to find fantastical beings there.
In science fiction, there are things that are not normal because the world has changed in usually a catastrophic way.
Or just in a way that's different than ours.
There might be spaceships, there might be holograms, but there's also...
A plague that decimated everything and now people live in underground bunkers and here we are.
Science fiction, the year 2500 or something.
And horror is about now.
It's about the monsters that break into now.
And that's what makes it about the present.
And I think that's also what makes it even more terrifying.
It's not pushed away into another world or into the future.
It's this world today.
Jeff, let me ask you about fiction.
So what differentiates this from fiction?
And then I want to follow that up by asking both of you.
One of you is an English professor.
One of you is a philosophy professor.
Isn't horror beneath you?
Isn't this a genre unworthy of your intellectual pursuit?
Are you not?
Better than this?
Do you not have tweed coats and a pipe that you might smoke while reading Charles Dickens?
What are you doing in the mud here with horror?
So, Jeff, what's the difference between horror and fiction before we go there?
Yeah, a great question.
As someone whose home period is medieval studies, horror doesn't really exist in medieval studies.
Like, horror is an invention that happens post-novel, and the novel arises in the 19th century.
So, talking about, you said Dickens, so you have Dickens, you have Eliot, you have Hardy, you have all these bricks of books that, you know, are really hard to read, I admit, as an English professor.
Horror comes out of the sub-genre of the gothic.
So the gothic develops in sort of this crumbling Victorian manse of decadence that's slowly decaying as we move into an industrial world.
And then horror pops up.
Well, gothic first.
Horror develops probably then in the 20th century, further in response to things like industrialization, things like war, things like demographic shifts.
It's a way in which authors play out what's going on in our reality sort of from times it can be like a fantastical perspective but in a horrific way to like sort of make you anxious, to make you have an adrenaline rush, to make you question what you know.
A lot of folks in fiction studies would argue, or narrative theory would argue, that there shouldn't be sub-genres like this, really, but that we create them probably more for marketing than anything else.
Fair enough.
It also makes you, like, when I go to the bookstore now, I'm proud to go and look at the literary fiction and then go over to the other section and get into the science fiction or the fantasy or the genre literature.
I want all the people in that section to know that, yes, I do read Dickens, but I want the other snotty people in the, you know, literary fiction section to know that I'm over here reading something about science fiction or something else.
All right, that leads to what I'm getting at, which is like, aren't you better than this?
Come on, you know, talk to the folks with the people who have their noses in the air right now and are like, is horror even worth this kind of investigation?
What are you going to do on this podcast?
How can you dissect Jaws in this way or something else?
So what would you say to those folks?
Yeah, so there's a couple of things.
One, Even going back to your kind of mention of Kendrick Lamar, who's doing the thinking right now, I think is important.
And who's telling the story is also important.
So when we look at something like horror, I think we get a snapshot of something that's going on right now.
This goes back to the question about horror is about our reality right now.
Right.
And this pushes questions of race, of gender, of class, of sexuality.
All of these questions, I think, can get very clearly pushed to the front and showcased in an oddly explicit way.
Right.
There's discussions about You know, how genre fiction seems to be kind of silly, right?
But in many ways, I think that what genre fiction is doing has the opportunity to be more imaginative and more interesting than these other kinds of novels.
I've been reading a lot of pandemic novels, but the most recent one that I've been reading is a very straightforward retelling of The COVID-19 pandemic from the perspective of like a 65 year old woman.
It's incredibly boring.
I won't say the name of the book, but it's just, it seems uninteresting because one, I'm just reliving the thing that I already lived through without actually any kind of interesting spikes in anxiety or questions about how I went through that.
It's just a retelling.
And so there's, again, there's something kind of, A jumping off point from horror that allows an inroad into thinking about what's going on right now, that for me, again, right, and this doesn't apply to everybody, that's fine, is more interesting.
Yeah, I'll echo what Brian's saying.
I might give you a really dumb analogy where I think fiction is like your regular chicken sandwich, but horror is the spicy chicken sandwich.
And I think all of us would be liars if we were to say we would not go for the spicy chicken sandwich.
It's more interesting.
It has more going on.
It sort of makes you sweat, much like Brian said about horror earlier.
It explores the world in ways that aren't constrained by typical reality parameters in fiction, even genre parameters.
Like horror can do weird things where you have sentient houses, where you have creatures from the beyond, if it's sort of a more science fiction twist, where you have time travelers, sort of not like in a romance sort of comedy way.
So it puts us under the microscope in uncomfortable ways.
And I appreciate that about horror, because a lot of genres don't.
A lot of... Fiction, with a capital F. Literature, with a capital L. In your Barnes & Noble sections.
Tired.
Uh, horror's not tired.
Yeah.
Well, the memoirists are going to come for you two on Twitter as soon as this airs, so we'll just get ready for that.
But, you know, all that to say, I appreciate that.
I feel like, you know, I read and try to take part across genres, but I I feel like, you know, in my older age I have finally understood what horror does in some ways, what even like, you know, various genres of science fiction do.
These are books I would have never picked up 10 years ago, but now I understand what they're trying to show me about this world or a world to come.
And it really is oftentimes just a wonderful imaginative exercise that really spotlights, as you say, parts of our condition today that we might leave unexamined if we didn't have such a spectacular kind of presentation of what they are.
Well, the show's called Horror Joy, so we gotta finish by asking, well, what's the joy in all this?
Like, Brian, you talked about microdosing anxiety.
Some folks are like, I don't need any more anxiety.
I have a lot of that.
I'm good at that part.
But I think both of you really want people to understand that horror, actually, in ways you don't expect, brings joy.
So how is that?
There's a couple different ways.
I think going all the way back to goosebumps, right?
When you think about when you get goosebumps, there's a mix of sometimes you get goosebumps when something pleasurable is happening, and sometimes you get goosebumps when something anxiety-inducing is happening, or scary is happening.
And there's a mixing of those two sometimes that happens in horror.
There's also, I think, a sense in which if you're not into horror, if you don't know what horror is about, you've never really kind of read it or watched it, you might think that the horror community is just a bunch of really dark people that think dark thoughts and just are kind of angry and sad and depressed or whatever.
And I think that one thing that we want to showcase is that that's not true.
I've talked to recently horror authors and horror creators and something that I find is the joy in the creative process.
And so we want to highlight a couple of things.
One is, yeah, the intellectual joy.
We're both academics.
We like thinking.
We like reading.
We like watching these things.
The intellectual joy of finding those ideas.
But there's just communal joy.
There's just a sense in which in the community, people like to get together and talk about these things.
And it's not this kind of very, I don't know, depressing conversation.
There's something light.
There's something joyous about it.
And I think there's something there that we want to bring out.
Especially, and we're not going to argue to anybody who doesn't like horror that they should, but if you've ever thought, I don't know, this seems like a weird thing.
Maybe we can give you insight about why it's really kind of, it is interesting.
It's helpful to think about.
Sometimes, too, there is, with horror, this joy when you realize you're not in that situation.
Like, the people in this movie are in this situation.
I'm not in this situation.
So it's a safer move, where you can experience the horror sort of empathetically, where you don't have to be in direct threat in order to experience this condition of horror.
But beyond that, too, I think it also sort of, I mean, like Brian said, it brings community together.
It lets people sort of understand each other.
It creates a belief system.
And we're in a weird sort of period of our culture, maybe, like where belief systems are sort of every which way.
Truth is no longer a capital T. Like we all have this weird wishy-washy ideas.
But horror has certain rule.
This is something like Scream plays on in some really fun ways.
With those rules, there is a shared belief system among the community of horror.
And so what we'll talk about this season, we'll get into religious horror a bit too.
How religious horror works for some folks, it doesn't work as well for others.
But even if you aren't a believer, there is some sort of suspension of disbelief that you have to at least embrace to get into horror.
And I think that shared element is part of that community Brian's talking about too.
It strikes me that these are just the kinds of genres that are fun to do together.
You know, like, when I think about watching Jaws, like, a rewatch of Jaws right now sounds really fun.
Like, I would happily get popcorn and go sit on a lawn somewhere and somebody get the projector out and, like, let's watch Jaws.
I'll do that.
Like, let's rewatch Scream.
You know, why not?
And then there's, you know, I think you've both mentioned this, but there's also a moment here where who's thinking and who's...
who's really giving us the landmark pieces in the genre.
And I think of, like, Get Out, you know, and Jordan making that movie in a way that, you know, horror's usually been dominated, right, by, you know, by white cis men.
And so I think there's interesting things happening there.
N.K.
Jemisin is another person who's really more in the fantasy world, I think, but still, it's just a reminder that we have You know, authors of color, creators of color, you know, lesbian, gay and other queer creators doing great things.
And so just exciting in that regard, too.
All right.
When does it drop?
Give us the details.
What are some of the aspects of the first season that you want to highlight?
And let us know how we can find you.
So episodes one and two should drop on June 3rd.
We're doing a kind of shorter introduction episode.
Episode two is all about Jaws, like you said.
We offer an analysis of communities.
We do a little bit of a queer reading of Jaws.
But we move on to religious horror.
We're gonna talk to Paul Tremblay, who is one of my favorite horror authors.
So talking about kind of being a horror nerd, Kind of love talking to horror creators, and Paul Tremblay is really high on my list.
We have a couple of academics that we're going to be talking to.
Lucas Kwong and Kelly J. Baker will talk Christian nationalism and horror, and we'll talk about zombies and horror.
Lots and lots of other stuff along the way.
You can find us at HorrorJoyPod on Instagram.
You can also send us an email at HorrorJoyPod at gmail.com, all one word, or on YouTube at HorrorJoyPod, all one word.
Great stuff.
Well, Brian and Jeff, thanks for stopping by.
Thanks for telling us about this.
I'm really excited about it.
I listened to the episode on Jaws, and it was awesome, just illuminating.
And I learned a bunch, and I know that others will, too.
And there's just a lot ahead in terms of breaking into a genre that doesn't always get the intellectual investigation it deserves.
And I think you two are going to be some unique voices in that space to give us that.
So look forward to the drop, and catch you guys soon.
Yeah, thank you again.
We're excited.
Thank you.
You don't really know what you can believe because there's so many sources saying so many different things.
It's weakening trust between the media and the audience.
I'm pretty sure that I have shared fake news, but I didn't realize it until someone corrected me.
No one knows what to trust and what not to trust anymore.
Misinformation, a threat to democracy, public health and maybe even the human species as a whole.
Or is it?
What does this word really mean and why has it become such a hot topic?
I'm Dr. Susanna Crockford, an anthropologist who studies conspiracy theories and the ways they affect religious, spiritual, and other communities.
While there is a lot of talk about misinformation floating around, there are few trustworthy sources where you can learn what it is and how it works in yoga communities, online message boards, wellness spaces, church congregations, and of course, social media.
Come for the wacky ideas about biohacking and election rigging, stay for the research on the effects of these ideas on public health and democracy.
Misinformation debuts May 24th, 2024, and episodes will be released weekly.
Find it anywhere you get your podcasts.
Because misinformation matters.
See you soon!
Joined today by Dr. Susanna Crockford, as I just mentioned, who is an amazing scholar, an anthropologist, somebody who's written widely on so many things related to conspiracy theories, to wellness communities, spent so much time in Sedona, Arizona, writing ripples of the universe out with Chicago University Press.
I could go on and on, Susanna, but just want to say thanks for coming by.
Thank you so much for inviting me.
Very excited to be here.
Well, we're here to talk about your brand new series.
It's called Misinformation from Axis Mooney Media, produced in conjunction with the Institute for Religion, Media and Civic Engagement and with a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation.
And it's just an amazing series, and I can't wait to introduce people to it and to share it with the world.
This is a series about misinformation, which we, of course, are thinking all about here in the United States because of the elections.
Let me start by asking you this.
We hear a lot about this topic, but I'm not sure that a lot of us have ever You investigated it from an academic standpoint.
What inspired you to do a project on the mechanics and the essence of misinformation?
I came from a perspective of originally studying conspiracy theories and that's just because they were there in my field site that I first went to in Sedona, Arizona and people were talking about chemtrails and they would just be like, oh look they're spraying a lot today and I'd be like, they're what?
And it's really weird for me, and I went on this whole journey of kind of going from, why do people believe these weird things?
Why wouldn't you trust the government?
You know, obviously they're not spraying poison into air that they breathe as well themselves.
Do you know, obviously people just scoff at that.
You believe the government?
And so I had this like moment, I was like, actually, I guess I, I guess I do.
Or at least I believe certain government agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency.
And why wouldn't I?
Why don't you?
And so it's a sort of long-term process of investigating why people believe the things they believe.
And why, especially when some of those things seem very different, sort of weird, sort of non-consensus-based, things like vaccines are poison, they're spraying poisons into the atmosphere to kill us all, they're trying to force some sort of reset of the economy to socialism.
Why do people believe this?
I really came from this questioning perspective of, oh, that's weird.
And I, as an anthropologist, try and understand things from people's own perspective, rather than just going, you're wrong, and you're stupid, and you're stupid for believing that.
So there's a lot in common, I saw, between conspiracy theories and religion.
Because a lot of religious belief, if you're not a believer, sounds deeply weird.
Hey, I grew up Anglican, so a lot of Catholicism to me.
I was like, what, you literally think that's body?
That's weird, why would you think that?
2016 happened, and you know, it happened to me much the same way it happened to everyone else, like a truck hitting you.
I absolutely did not think Trump was going to get elected.
I remember watching the election night on Fox News, because that's what they have in Arizona, and just being like, why?
Why is this happening?
And obviously a lot of people were asking these questions too, and these words became very popular to explain it.
Misinformation and disinformation.
And I was like, no, no, no, you're looking at this the wrong way.
It's not just that people are being told false things and they believe it and therefore they make the wrong choices.
That's too easy.
Because actually, people believe things that are not real all the time.
We all have beliefs that are tenuous or completely untrue.
And not all of them are dangerous.
Not all of them suddenly lead to this outcry that democracy is heading into darkness.
So why now?
What is it about this particular sort of information now and what can we do about that?
If we understand how it works, how can we get through it?
So that was why I wanted to make this series because I felt like a lot of people were making the same sort of mistakes I made first off in my journey towards trying to understand conspiracy theories that like Why are you believing this weird stuff?
I think you might just be wrong.
And that's that is actually not a helpful way to approach it.
That's not actually going to help you understand anything, because all you're then going to think is, well, if we give them the right information, well, then they'll believe the right thing.
And there's this idea of right and wrong belief there that really needs digging into and unpacking because people believe all kinds of things.
What we need to think about is how is power working through these various different ideas, right?
What are these ideas and claims doing?
Because there are differences between these claims.
If I say I think that the government is poisoning everyone with chemtrails, well, so what?
But if I'm a presidential candidate and I say the election's been stolen from me, well that's actually a claim that does something and that is a way of trying to seize power.
And so one of the things I want to do in this series is really unpack and parse the difference between what is the claim that people are making because they distrust government institutions and what are the claims being made by people in power to try and maintain that power or seize power illegitimately.
Is power the best way to understand the difference between misinformation and disinformation, or what other aspects of those two categories do we need to understand?
So misinformation is, I mean, simply put, false information.
I prefer to think of it as contested information, because it's information that people from various different positions are not going to agree on, for various reasons.
Whereas disinformation is slightly different.
Disinformation is wrong or contested information that is being spread on purpose for a reason, and that reason is usually something nefarious, right?
It's usually because people are up to no good.
And I think disinformation, the way I've come to understand it, is basically like false advertising.
You know, it's like the claims that you can put about products, for example, when you want to sell something, but the product just doesn't do that thing.
So you're knowingly making a claim that is not supported by evidence or empirical reality, but you're doing it to gain something.
And in the case of product, you know, quite an obvious thing, what you're trying to gain, you're trying to make money.
And obviously that translates into things like snake oil salesmen and all of the kind of medical misinformation and marketing that exists.
But political claims are doing something else because then you're not, not only trying to make money, trying to make money.
It's as if you've ever got a Trump fundraising email, a Democratic fund.
Yeah, Joe Biden at this point texts me about every 10 minutes.
I think my spouse thinks I'm having an affair with Joe Biden because it's a lot of texts.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's like really like personal as well.
It's Brad, I need you right now.
Brad, I see you brushing your teeth.
Stop.
And give me $5.
Have you thought about giving me $5?
America needs you to pay $5.
I see you eating toast.
Okay, put it down.
Get on your computer and send me $10.
Thank you very much.
It's Kamala Harris, by the way.
Okay.
So they are trying to get money from you, but they are also trying to get you to believe in them, right?
They're trying to get you to commit to them.
They're trying to make sure that you support them.
only when you cast your vote, but also in all of the other political activity you may take part in, which could be anything from protest to, I don't know, storming the Capitol, if that's what you should choose to do with your time, right?
So there's a difference, but disinformation is that use of information, use of communication to do something to gain power, to subvert the normal order of politics, which, you know, in an ideal world would be based in good faith, you know, in an ideal world would be based in good faith, clear arguments, logic But in the real world, that's not what happened.
Right?
And instead we have, and especially over the last few years, this kind of zone that has been flooded with shit.
And that is disinformation.
So I think misinformation exists as just part of the way humans communicate and part of our fallible forms of logic and communication.
But disinformation is something, in fact, a lot more serious and a lot more damaging, especially on a political level.
One of the things that you really point out in the series that I think people should look forward to is that the answer to all of this is not just getting rid of all the information that is wrong.
Because if you try to understand these things from the human perspective, you come to the conclusion that a lot of times People want information that fits their desire, or fits their worldview, or fits their personal interests.
And so they pursue information as something that fits an already existing sense of self and world, rather than shaping themselves according to whatever information seems to be true or accurate.
And I just think that's something that is really going to interest people, is that we have to probably think about answers that are more complex than simply, well, if we just had online fact checkers and people who could detect when they're talking to a Russian bot on Facebook, this would all go away.
And to me, that's a great takeaway from the series and something I think people should be interested in.
You spend some time talking about people and wellness and things.
You spend time on Goop.
We spend time, which is Gwyneth Paltrow's brand.
We spend time talking about the Great Reset Theory.
There's episodes on yoga, which I think are fantastic with some of the world's experts on those things.
There are, of course, an episode on elections and J6.
But just as by way of a preview, one of my favorite episodes of the series is the episode on biohacking and Brian Johnson.
So there's probably people right now who know exactly who that is and what this dude is up to.
But talk to me about Brian Johnson and biohacking and how that fits into a kind of broader framework of misinformation and or disinformation.
Brian Johnson is a Silicon Valley tech bro.
Then maybe that's a little rude.
He owns a company.
He's a very wealthy man.
He's a millionaire, maybe even a billionaire.
I don't know.
But he's very well known, especially on Twitter, but in the media because he puts himself out there on the media because he has this thing called the protocol.
And the protocol, he says, is extending his life, possibly indefinitely.
He's trying to live forever.
Which is, if you know anything about the ideologies behind Silicon Valley, well a lot of what their, not only technology, but their lifestyle and wellness habits are geared towards this idea that you can extend human life indefinitely and not just live forever but stay young forever.
So Brian Johnson claims that he has an epigenetic age of an 18 year old And he does various practices in order to maintain this epigenetic age.
Which is biological age.
Yes.
Well, yes.
It's the age that if you do certain tests, those tests claim that you are.
I personally think that age is measured by how many times the Earth has gone around the sun since you were born.
So he claims an epigenetic of 18, but how many times has he gone around the sun?
It's 42, 43.
Okay, okay.
Yeah, he's in his 40s.
And, you know, he's a real Twitter main character because there's a lot of pictures of him where he looks like death itself and is kind of publicizing himself as being like, I'm 18 years old, ask me how.
And then this protocol involves things like, you know, eating lots of supplements rather than actual food, getting blood transfusions from his 18-year-old son, and also this wonderful device that he...
Onto his penis and wears at night.
So he has various of these practices.
And what does this have to do with misinformation?
Is that, well, what are these claims underlying wellness?
And I talk to a very, very learned guest, a media scholar called Alina Chiara, about this and I'm like, what do we mean by wellness?
What are wellness claims?
Can they actually be quantified?
Or is it more the subjective feeling of I'm feeling good?
I'm feeling better.
This makes me feel better about myself.
And in Brian Johnson's case, he does, you know, now sell supplements for lots of money.
So there's always that sense of what is this information doing?
What are these claims doing?
Are you actually 18 when you are in fact 40 whatever?
And if you are making that claim, what are you trying to do with that claim?
Well, quite often it turns out what they're trying to do with that claim is sell some sort of product.
And quite a lot of wellness claims come up in this category.
Well, this is actually something that I have studied a lot.
I have a lot of fondness for wellness practices.
I don't think there's anything wrong with feeling better, right?
Makes you feel good.
That's good.
The problem with it is when you take those claims too far and you try and do it in an exploitative or extractive way.
Or what a lot of them do is they sort of hide or occlude the systemic advantages that these people have.
Brian Johnson is a millionaire.
Gwyneth Paltrow is a millionaire.
That's why they look that good.
Can afford all kinds of things that you and I cannot.
And that's why they look like that.
And that's why they can make these claims about their health and their longevity.
But actually it turns out it's just, you know, being able to afford better health care.
Yeah, and that episode is really fantastic because it goes into wearables, it goes into the ways that people can use wellness practices on their consciousness, on their brain, and it really pulls a window back on an industry that makes claims about helping people, whether it's live forever or hack their minds, and what's behind that in terms of power, in terms of who's to benefit from that.
And who is available to receive those benefits?
As you say, it seems for a lot of folks, if you're very affluent, that's available to you.
And yet if you're not, there's a chance that using some of those products will lead to more surveillance of you rather than, uh, liberation or freedom or something akin to that.
So that episode to me is just a must listen and it's, there's so much there that you won't expect that you'll, you'll hear about, uh, and, and get into.
If I were teaching that, I mean, someday I hope that I get to teach that episode alongside the epic of Gilgamesh, because I just want to read students the oldest story we have of a half man, half deity trying to be immortal and like failing miserably because he falls asleep and other things happen.
And then, you know, Brian Johnson, who lives like half an hour from me.
I live right near him.
We have very different sized houses and cars, and I'm sure I don't have anything I wear at night, so.
But yeah, I would love to teach that in that way.
All right.
I guess the final thing I'll ask here is what should we understand about religion and conspiracy and misinformation?
Because I will just say you do not make the claim that all religion is misinformation and religion is the devil and religion, if you're religious, you're a stupid person.
So.
This is not that series.
But I think you do draw some comparisons that are really helpful about religion and misinformation, religion and conspiracy theory.
I've used those in my own work.
You've been extremely helpful as a scholar for me to understand these things.
What's a basic understanding in your mind of how that might operate?
Why religion is so important to this discussion is, following on from what I was saying about how easy it is to kind of just say these people, whoever they are, are just believing the wrong things and they need correct information.
Well, it's like, correct for...
And who gets to say?
And when you bring religion into that mix, well, who gets to tell you what is the right religion to believe in?
You know, and if we have freedom of religion, then the answer to that should be, well, no one.
You get to choose for yourself.
But no religion is empirically verified in any way.
That's what, at least in our secular context, religion is, right?
It is belief about meta-empirical beings that cannot be validated or verified by things that we can see and feel and touch.
If we're allowed to have beliefs about Jesus being the son of God, or whatever, then why am I not allowed to also, for example, believe that the US government is trying to poison me via chemtrails?
Why is one protected, perhaps legally, and why is another a dangerous conspiracy theory?
So this is why you really have to bring in that wider context of not necessarily destabilizing the notion of truth.
I don't think you need to go that far, but you need to understand that all truth
are situated right and that whoever is authorizing a truth gets a lot of power and therefore you should be very careful about what sorts of claims are authorized and when they are what happens right what is allowed to happen what can what sorts of claims can be made and so the point is never to sort of deride religion like you said or to say that well religion is just the same as conspiracy theories that's not the case at all but it is
to point out that both of these categories are partial and based on a kind of an institution or a group of people that authorize those claims.
And so there needs to be some sort of oversight of those institutions.
Whether that is, say, I don't know, the Catholic Church or the Environmental Protection Agency.
Our trust in these institutions is based on our ability to have oversight of them and to understand when things do go wrong that there is some redress and accountability for those things that have gone wrong.
If we do not have those, we lose trust in institutions.
Fantastic.
And that's it's just a bit.
I mean, what you just said is just the tip of the iceberg of of the ways the series goes into great detail about the very issue.
And I love the way you put that about who authorizes truth.
That's such a fantastic and succinct way to to explain that to people.
Friends, there is so much more in the series.
There's seven episodes.
They're each an hour long.
And you're going to meet characters you don't expect.
You're going to meet the Brian Johnsons.
You're going to meet Naomi Wolf and talk about The Great Reset.
You're going to get to hear from Gwyneth Paltrow, as I mentioned.
It's just one of those rides that goes places you don't think you're going to go.
And I really love that.
Check the show notes so you can subscribe.
The show will be out May 24th, 2024.
Susannah, what are the best ways people can follow along with you as you're writing and talking about this series and other things that you are up to?
You can follow me on Twitter, which I guess I'm supposed to call X these days, but never, I will never just call it X. It's at Suz Crockford, S-U-S-C-R-O-C-K-F-O-R-D.
I should really give myself an easier to spell name.
No, I love your Twitter handle because you study conspiracies and your Twitter handle is literally sus.
And like the kids these days, like Gen X is, you know, if you say something sketchy, they're like, what?
But if you say, I think that's sus, they're like, oh.
So I think it's perfect.
And I think you probably designed it to reach your Gen Z students.
And you're playing four dimensional chess and none of us even know it.
