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0:31

Hello, I'm Alison

0:34

Larkin, writer, comedian, and

0:36

narrator and host of the

0:39

Jane Austen podcast with Alison Larkin.

0:42

Whether you're a diehard Austen fan or

0:44

you have yet to be introduced, I'm

0:47

here to bring her stories into the

0:49

21st century and offer you some new

0:52

perspectives along with other Jane Austen

0:54

lovers. I couldn't start

0:56

this show with anything other than Pride and Prejudice,

0:59

her most famous novel and a truly

1:01

timeless love story. Elizabeth

1:03

Bennet is a young woman who has

1:06

no interest in letting her mother marry

1:08

her off to someone she doesn't love. And

1:11

Mr. Darcy is a proud,

1:13

rich aristocrat with strong

1:16

opinions on the sort of woman he may

1:18

one day tolerate enough to marry.

1:21

Though seemingly at odds due to

1:24

their, you guessed it, Pride

1:26

and Prejudice, their complicated,

1:28

slow-burn romance is sure

1:30

to make even the cynics

1:33

swoon.

1:34

Be sure to listen and subscribe

1:36

to the Jane Austen podcast with

1:38

Alison Larkin wherever you get

1:40

your podcasts.

1:44

Hey there, I'm Perry Carpenter, one

1:47

of the hosts of the Digital Folklore podcast.

1:50

And this is Digital Folklore Unplugged.

1:53

Unplugged episodes allow us to strip back

1:55

all of the production elements and the fancy

1:57

things that we like to do so that we can

1:59

focus on the content of

2:02

the interviews and bring you those

2:04

in a very unedited and raw

2:07

way. On today's episode, my

2:09

co-host Mason and I had the chance to

2:11

sit down with Dr. Lynn McNeil. If

2:14

you've studied digital folklore or

2:16

even folklore at large for a while, you've

2:19

probably heard the name Lynn McNeil before.

2:21

Her name is nearly synonymous with the

2:23

study of digital folklore. And

2:26

her voice has been instrumental in helping

2:28

people understand that our online

2:30

world is just an extension of

2:33

our lives in general. And because

2:35

of that, it's not only a place

2:37

where folklore can arise, but thrive

2:40

at a speed and a scale previously

2:42

unimaginable. So

2:45

on this interview, we all got so excited

2:47

about the topics that we're covering that we went

2:50

over two hours. And so from

2:52

a release perspective, we're breaking this

2:54

into two parts. This is

2:56

part one. And in it, Lynn

2:58

shares her thoughts on the intersection of

3:01

AI and folklore, conspiracy

3:03

theories, the interesting paradox

3:06

of studying folklore from an academic

3:08

perspective, and a whole lot

3:10

more. There's a ton packed into

3:13

both of these parts that we're releasing. Okay,

3:17

with that, let's get unplugged

3:20

with part one. Of our interview

3:22

with Lynn McNeil. We

3:26

thought we'd start off with maybe

3:28

talking about some of the things that have you

3:30

excited right now. So like when you think about

3:34

having a career as a folklorist

3:36

and somebody that teaches others like where

3:38

do you get your passion from right now? What are the things

3:41

that have you interested?

3:42

You know, in general,

3:44

the things that keep me and I imagine

3:46

any folklorist really engaged is that

3:49

folklore does not dilly

3:51

dally with things

3:53

that are no longer relevant, which is paradoxical

3:56

to a lot of people. We think of folklore as sort

3:58

of being this

3:59

out.

3:59

Moted maybe outdated older way

4:02

of thinking but really it is the

4:04

up to the moment Cultural

4:07

barometer that we have at

4:10

our fingertips to kind of say what's

4:12

going on right now And that's frustrating because

4:15

sometimes you really get into something

4:17

and then two days later you look around and gone

4:19

already But I find

4:22

that that ability to keep

4:24

up is one of the things that keeps me

4:26

most interested I have a student right

4:28

now working on the

4:31

AI Cryptid as some

4:33

people are calling her lobe the

4:35

creature who is emerging

4:37

through this almost ritualistic

4:40

Method of AI image generation,

4:43

which I love it's almost an unintentional

4:45

Oh, you were doing a ceremony and you didn't know it

4:48

and now here's this lady but

4:50

that idea as a means of

4:52

symbolically expressing how Uncomfortable

4:56

we all are right now with

4:59

artificial intelligence. I just feel like it's

5:01

perfect It's this incredible illustration

5:03

of the role folklore plays in

5:06

absolutely entertaining us challenging us

5:08

scaring us but also in articulating

5:12

for us

5:13

What we're stressed about

5:15

what we're worried about what we're

5:17

afraid of or what we're really into right now

5:19

And it's this it's not the work

5:21

of practiced artisans to

5:24

create a poetic turn of phrase. It's everyday

5:26

people communicating on this symbolic

5:28

level and I

5:30

Love it.

5:31

Yeah, I want to touch on lobe for

5:33

a second because and I've not done a deep

5:35

dive I've seen some of the surface level

5:38

news reports and some of the

5:40

Twitter the original Twitter thread and things like

5:42

this and it does look like One of

5:44

those issues where there there are questions

5:46

around whether this is a phenomenon that actually

5:49

happens or whether it was manufactured and

5:51

propagated By the first person to

5:53

tweet about it. Yeah, I think either way

5:55

it gets into those more existential

5:57

questions that you're talking about about

5:59

what are some of the horrors that AI

6:02

may bring forward. But then there's probably a

6:04

couple other things that come, which is, I would

6:07

love for you to touch on, does it matter

6:09

whether some of these are true when they

6:11

come out that way? Then also,

6:13

maybe some of the darker

6:16

side of that, which could be some of the othering

6:18

of disfigured people or things

6:20

like that that come through. Do you have any

6:22

thoughts there? I know I hit a whole bunch of stuff at

6:24

one time.

6:25

Yeah, no, definitely. All

6:27

of that is, I think what makes this so

6:30

compelling, we have this technology

6:32

that's available to us right now that appears

6:35

to do things we did not intend

6:38

it to do, which is distressingly

6:40

similar to things we might think of

6:43

as autonomy and free will and

6:45

mind of its own, which is we have sci-fi

6:47

about that, we have literature

6:50

about that. Now, we potentially have reality

6:53

about that, and it's hard to not color that reality

6:55

with other speculative fictional

6:57

things that we've had throughout time that always

7:00

tell us what it's going to do is kill us in the

7:02

end. We're burdened with that presupposition,

7:04

that invention. But

7:09

I think what we have here is a

7:11

situation as with so many legendary

7:13

situations, it doesn't matter at all if

7:16

it's true. There's

7:18

a multi-layered quality

7:21

to the truth of a legend. It

7:23

can be true as in literally true. It

7:25

can be true as in true folklore, is this true

7:27

folklore? That's a question that was asked

7:30

a lot early on about Slender Man. Not

7:33

people saying, is Slender Man real? But is

7:35

Slender Man a real legend? The

7:37

answer

7:37

is yes. Even though

7:40

we know to the day,

7:42

a time when he wasn't, he is now.

7:46

It's breaking that expectation of age, of

7:50

ancientness even as a marker

7:52

of folklore. We don't need that for something

7:54

to become a legend. The same

7:56

is true with Loeb. Was this a real legend?

8:00

really great, creepy pasta was this,

8:02

a performance art project, who cares?

8:05

Now it's folklore, now it's a legend,

8:08

and now it belongs to all of us, which is handy.

8:10

We know there's a person who originated this,

8:13

whatever ideas they had about what this would

8:15

be, they've set it in motion,

8:17

but now it's running

8:19

downhill really fast on its own. And

8:21

we're gonna get a lot of other artistic, folkloric,

8:24

perhaps even filmic versions

8:26

of this before we're done talking about

8:29

it. One of the things that strikes me is

8:31

how classically folkloric

8:34

the creation of Loeb was. We get this origin

8:36

narrative of a prompt that

8:40

is something like, give me

8:42

the opposite of

8:45

Marlon Brando. And we

8:48

get this abstract image that's

8:50

in there. So then, sort of as logical

8:52

humans, all right, so if I asked for the opposite

8:55

of this, is it gonna give me Marlon

8:58

Brando? That's an interest. Is that

9:00

how this machine works? And so

9:02

we have that reversal, and we all

9:04

know, I mean, dating back,

9:06

as far as we know in the study of folk belief, reversals

9:09

are big, ritualistic moments.

9:12

We invert things, we turn 180 degrees,

9:15

we turn our pockets inside out so

9:17

we don't get kidnapped by the fairies. We love

9:20

to reverse things and then have magical stuff

9:22

happen. And so here we have this reversal,

9:25

and this woman shows up with sort of these,

9:28

red, ruddy, perhaps even

9:31

bloody cheeks eyes, this very

9:33

piercing expression looking

9:36

out at the user. And it is a sort

9:38

of instinctively shocking thing. And as

9:41

more requests are made and more images are

9:43

generated, we start to see what

9:45

elements of this image become conservative

9:48

or consistent in this. And a lot

9:50

of it is the bloody eyes. A lot

9:53

of it is that it's women and then

9:55

children. And we do start

9:58

to see a big question. which

10:00

is where is this coming from? Is this us

10:02

or is this a reflection of

10:04

what we've put into AI and it's being

10:07

spit back at us or is this something

10:09

else? I mean, paranormal investigators have

10:11

long used the idea of instrumental

10:14

transcommunication to say that entities,

10:17

spirits, creatures will speak to us through

10:19

our technology, through flickering lights, through

10:22

electrical charge, all of this. Is this

10:24

simply an open gateway that

10:26

something is coming through? Or is this really

10:29

creepy because a lot of the stuff we input

10:32

into AI is really creepy. We've

10:34

seen it before with artificial

10:36

intelligences that went from naive

10:40

newborns to Nazis within

10:42

a matter of days because of what we

10:44

fed it. There is precedent for that. I

10:46

think existing in a world

10:49

of legend and folklore allows

10:52

for both of those things. This is a polyvalent

10:54

tradition. It is both. It is

10:57

a reflection of us and it is perhaps

10:59

the gateway through which something is coming.

11:01

That's really cool. As you were talking

11:03

about this, and I don't know that I've ever had this thought

11:06

before, but when you're training in AI

11:08

with a large language model and you're taking a big

11:10

subsection of the internet and human

11:13

communication, you will naturally get

11:15

belief injected into that because you

11:17

have the way that people communicate across

11:20

different cultures. And so it would be, it's

11:23

interesting, especially when you get to the generative

11:26

AI models where they're competing against each other

11:28

for supremacy, that the

11:30

thing that represents the fundamental

11:33

bits of human consciousness or the way that

11:35

we would approach things start to surface

11:38

and you get the distillations of things,

11:40

whether that be like a low board

11:42

or something else. Again, whether that was

11:45

intentionally manufactured or not, maybe beside

11:48

the point. But I do

11:50

think when you start to get to some of

11:53

the different manifestations of

11:55

things that come back from AI generated prompts,

11:57

you will naturally have the way that.

12:00

some human communities might get together

12:02

and represent those ideas. Absolutely.

12:04

I think it was Jan

12:07

Brinvant, very famous, amazing

12:09

legend scholar and folklorist who described

12:11

folklore as syntax.

12:14

It's the unconscious way

12:16

that we express ourselves. We use

12:18

words, we speak sentences, all of this. We're

12:21

not thinking like subject, verb,

12:24

object as we speak, it just comes

12:26

out that way. Yet if we

12:29

speak natural language into a machine,

12:31

it will divine that syntax for us

12:34

and communicate back with us that way. AI

12:37

really is divining the syntax

12:40

of our folk belief in a lot of ways, that we

12:42

may be wholly unconscious of. In some

12:44

ways, that's the job of a folklorist, is uncover

12:47

the unconscious syntax of what

12:50

are we not aware we're saying as we're

12:52

saying it. It's interesting to think

12:54

about the greater processing power and data

12:57

crunching capabilities of a machine. Is

12:59

that more accurate

13:02

in its reach and breadth, or is

13:04

that less accurate in its perhaps

13:06

in human inability

13:09

to do what we might call ethnography?

13:12

Can a machine conduct ethnography?

13:15

That's an interesting question. Well, I think part

13:17

of that is the thing that seems shocking when interacting

13:19

with these artificial intelligences.

13:22

Is there ability to contextualize things now?

13:24

That seems to be the level that has made things weird,

13:27

and there's enough of it to give the illusion that

13:29

they're capable of so much deeper thought that

13:31

the questions do arise. Also, just

13:34

a comment on the way you describe something that somehow

13:36

never clicked in my brain. The way we interact

13:38

with these is almost so much of a literal

13:41

summoning ritual of prompting

13:44

like, give me this, create this for me, and

13:47

using the proper words to get the results you

13:49

want. That's a weird parallel that I never

13:51

noticed until just now and that's fascinating,

13:53

I think.

13:54

The focus on prompting, that

13:57

there's going to be a skill set out there on the. the

14:00

horizon of how to construct

14:02

a prompt. What is that if not a proper

14:04

awareness of

14:05

ritual invocation?

14:07

Right. Your grimoire includes

14:10

things like RTX, Ultra HD,

14:12

Ultra Realism, or whatever. Well, and

14:14

if you don't do that right, you may get something

14:17

that comes through that you don't want, that

14:19

is undesirable or potentially

14:21

dangerous. One of the interesting

14:23

things that comes out when you start to read

14:26

what the security scientists

14:28

start to evaluate things like OpenAI

14:31

and the chat GPT model, is

14:33

they talk about the fact that AI has the ability

14:36

to hallucinate and it does it

14:38

with a certainty behind that.

14:41

I'm wondering if that hallucination is

14:44

the distillation of whether

14:47

that is collective belief because there's

14:49

enough indicators out there that it would put

14:51

together and make an inferential model that would then

14:54

say that that is certain, or if there's

14:56

something else there. I

14:59

don't think that that's something else there is woo-woo

15:01

or anything like that. I think that it is the

15:04

model will be naturally tainted

15:07

by or greatly influenced

15:09

by the subset of data that's been fed

15:11

into it, and the inferences that can come, and

15:14

that subset of data will naturally have

15:17

a bias if you're not sampling the dataset appropriately.

15:20

Which is a folk group type of belief,

15:22

right? You've essentially created an AI

15:24

folk group.

15:24

Yes, absolutely. What

15:27

do we not realize we're programming

15:29

it with? What inferences, what

15:31

assumptions, what traditional beliefs

15:34

are we unaware are infusing

15:37

our lives, maybe at such a scale that

15:40

we can't perceive it as an individual,

15:42

but when something that can look

15:45

at that much data at once, they see

15:47

a pattern that we don't see, and they feed

15:49

us back that pattern and we are freaked out

15:51

by it. I think that's fairly reasonable.

15:54

We're getting into really great metaphors for

15:56

divinity and religion and scale

15:59

and all of these. questions that I think make

16:01

this such a right place

16:04

for telling stories. Because of course,

16:06

we are going to tell stories about this

16:09

because we don't understand

16:11

it. That's a big thing

16:14

that we see in legend study and rumor

16:16

study is that when there is an information

16:18

vacuum, we fill it in

16:21

with folklore. Sometimes, and that's not to

16:23

say that folklore is therefore incorrect

16:25

or inaccurate or misleading,

16:28

but just to say that we are rarely

16:31

using it most when

16:33

we have other information

16:35

at our disposal. So we see there's

16:38

early, early rumor scholarship

16:40

by these two psychologists, Alport and

16:42

Postman, this is like the 1940s. They

16:45

came up with what they called, this

16:47

might be their later work, but the

16:50

rumor equation. It was basically

16:52

that the spread of any given rumor. A

16:54

rumor as a folklorist, I would understand that

16:56

to be a short form of a legend. A

16:59

legend is a whole story of rumors, just like

17:01

the kernel statement of what's

17:04

behind that legend. The reach of any

17:06

rumor they said is the

17:08

product of the ambiguity

17:11

of the subject multiplied by its importance.

17:14

So if we have a subject that in

17:17

our contemporary society is really

17:20

ambiguous, but not that important, we

17:23

don't feel provoked to spread

17:25

rumors about that. If we have something that's incredibly

17:27

important but super unambiguous, we know what

17:29

there is to know about it. Yeah, we're not going to need

17:32

to speculate to spread rumors or

17:34

legends to think about the plausibility

17:36

of that. But if we have a situation where

17:38

something is both ambiguous and

17:41

incredibly important to us, it

17:43

is just going to all be this constant

17:46

symbolic articulation

17:49

of concerns because we

17:51

need something to latch

17:53

onto

17:54

when it comes to something that is that

17:57

important to us, and also that totally

17:59

incomprehensible.

17:59

That is such a cool way to think about

18:02

that and that really makes a

18:04

lot of sense. I love that.

18:05

Yeah, I mean, and I think it's not an equation

18:07

that like holds up mathematically

18:10

to anything. I think it's more of an

18:12

ethnographic idea that they liked. I

18:14

mean, they use like little algebraic

18:17

symbols to expose it. But it's one of

18:19

those things that speaks to

18:22

a pattern that absolutely

18:24

exists.

18:25

Well, and you can see people intentionally

18:27

exploit that as well, right? I mean, that is

18:30

what early Q drops were in

18:32

the QAnon world. There are

18:34

people that are looking for meaning, looking for information,

18:37

have a certain worldview, and I'm going to throw out

18:39

an ambiguous statement that anybody

18:41

now can start to put whatever dots together

18:44

they want to and come up with all

18:46

these interesting theories. And that's what keeps that group

18:48

going until the next ambiguous bit

18:51

of information. That's a whole sidebar I really think

18:53

we should explore later because I think one of the things we want to do

18:55

when we get into season two is get into meme

18:57

warfare and disinformation, astroturfing, and all

19:00

of that stuff. So I think we should circle back to

19:02

that later. Yeah, I do too. Getting

19:04

ahead of us a little bit. Why don't we back

19:07

up and go general folklore

19:09

for a second? All right. From your

19:11

perspective, you do have a very well-known definition

19:14

for folklore. So imagine that

19:17

you have a group of all of our listeners

19:19

in a classroom and somebody says, well,

19:21

what is folklore anyway and why am I here?

19:24

What would you answer that?

19:25

Yeah. So, well, I'd answer it with probably

19:28

an hour-long lecture just so. You know,

19:30

step one. We're here for it. It's always going to

19:32

take. Thank you. It's always going to take more explaining

19:34

than it would seem to merit as a

19:36

subject. Nobody thinks folklore. I'm going

19:38

to need an hour to have that one explained to me. But

19:41

the way I define folklore is succinctly

19:44

as informal traditional culture. So

19:47

three tidy words, whole lot

19:49

of ideas encapsulated

19:52

in those three tiny words. So each

19:54

of them sort of need unpacking

19:56

a bit. I usually begin explaining

19:58

folklore by trying to... phrase

22:00

that we use for something, maybe it's a

22:02

way we make a paper airplane. We

22:04

learn that from the people around us, from

22:07

everyday people, from our families, our friends, through observation,

22:10

through non-specific learning. We grow

22:12

up hearing songs and jump rope

22:14

rhymes, and therefore we know them. We

22:16

might learn them at school, but we don't learn them through

22:18

school. That's that informal quality

22:21

of it. The traditional quality of

22:23

it gets at the idea that we're dealing

22:25

with repeated patterns, so that it's

22:28

not new content every time. A conversation,

22:30

the conversation we're having now, is informal. It's

22:33

not we're not scripted, we're not reading from, you

22:35

know, provided material, but it's not

22:37

necessarily traditional. Something becomes

22:39

traditional when we recognize, hey, I've heard that

22:41

before. I've seen that before. I've heard another version

22:44

of that. I've done this in another place. I've

22:46

done this jump rope rhyme, this hand clapping game.

22:48

I've heard this urban legend. I've

22:51

used this customary greeting with

22:53

someone before. And when we recognize

22:56

that traditional element, that, okay,

22:58

this is something that more than one person knows. It

23:00

exists in more than one place. It

23:03

has what other folklorists have called multiple

23:05

existence. That tells

23:08

us that this thing is traditional. It's passed

23:10

on from person to person. And because

23:12

it's informal, there's no single correct version.

23:15

And knowing that it is a culturally expressive

23:17

form helps us get at the idea

23:20

that it is a particular thing

23:22

that we express to other people.

23:24

So it's not just, though it

23:27

certainly touches on, the abstract knowledge

23:29

of informal and traditional things. It's

23:31

when it takes form, the form of a story,

23:34

the form of a custom, the form of a material

23:37

object, the form of a belief.

23:40

And that's where we derive

23:42

what we would call the genres

23:43

of folklore, the lore,

23:45

the actual way this stuff manifests.

23:47

And there's a lot of folklorists out there who are interested

23:50

in the nonspecific stuff, who in fact

23:53

feel that in the history of the discipline, that focus

23:55

on the lore, on the stuff was

23:58

maybe a little bit...

28:00

we recognize a Cinderella story even

28:02

when the name Cinderella isn't used and there's

28:04

no glass slipper. But when there are enough

28:07

elements there, we go, Oh, hey, I'm

28:09

hearing a Cinderella story. It's those conservative

28:11

elements that tell us it's the same story.

28:14

It's the dynamic elements that let

28:16

folklore adapt itself

28:19

to different cultural and communicative context.

28:22

So I can tell the same political

28:24

joke, but about a contemporary politician

28:26

rather than a past politician so that it's more

28:29

relevant to my audience. And that really

28:32

is the inherent power of folklore.

28:34

We're not stuck with the way something happened

28:36

the first time it was told. We

28:39

get to be constantly evolving and updating

28:41

it so that it remains the most

28:44

relevant, whether that's a contemporary society

28:46

on a broad scale or to my

28:48

friend group when I'm telling

28:50

the joke. So there was one other definition

28:52

that a professor that I had gave,

28:55

and this was from Zori Hurston,

28:58

where she says that folklore is the boiled

29:00

down juice of human living

29:03

or the potlicker of human living. It doesn't

29:05

really account for the tradition

29:07

and variation of that, but there's a

29:09

different heart to that as well, that it

29:12

is the thing that just comes out of people

29:14

being people and people being people in

29:16

community that I think is an interesting take

29:18

that she brings to that as well.

29:19

Absolutely. And I do think that

29:22

Zora Neale Hurston's definition

29:24

is so perfect because it is

29:26

so perfectly resonant, right?

29:29

That idea that folklore is this distillation

29:32

of people being people, that

29:34

is the feel of it. And what academics,

29:37

boringly, are constantly trying to do

29:40

is account for the specifics of it, right? How

29:42

can I factually say in

29:44

a way that is maybe applicable

29:47

across examples what

29:49

makes all these disparate things

29:52

the same type of thing?

29:54

How can I say that? And so these

29:57

deconstructions into informal,

29:59

traditional cultural conservatism and dynamism

30:02

or multiple existence and variation become

30:04

a tool. But

30:06

what the essence

30:07

of it is, is absolutely

30:09

that boiled down nature

30:12

of humanity. That's the value

30:14

of it. That's what it gives us. The tools

30:16

to study it and articulate it are

30:18

what academics

30:20

spend their time working on.

30:21

It just got me excited because in a very

30:23

similar vein, there was a friend of mine who started

30:25

listening to digital folklore, the podcast,

30:28

and had no prior background in learning

30:30

about folklore at all. Something they said

30:32

to me that I thought was really interesting, and I want to know your opinion

30:35

on very similar to this, is they were like, so it's kind of like

30:37

social metadata. I thought that was a really

30:39

interesting way to put it because they're like, it's all the

30:41

little underlying metadata encompassed

30:43

by these other things.

30:45

Yeah, that's really interesting because when

30:47

I think of metadata, when I think of

30:49

kind of meta anything, I think of an

30:52

upper scale, like almost a super organic

30:54

understanding of things. And when I think

30:56

of folklore, I think that is correct.

30:58

But I would almost call it a subtext,

31:00

like that idea of syntax is that it's

31:03

an underlying idea. It's not necessarily

31:05

the conscious discussion about

31:08

society or whatever, but it's more the subconscious

31:11

meta conversation about what's going

31:13

on. Alan Dundee's had a

31:15

term that is not in regular

31:17

use these days, but he called it oral literary

31:20

criticism. It's everyday people doing

31:22

the work of literary criticism on

31:24

themselves, basically, that

31:27

people are aware, people can give you, you

31:29

don't need a folklorist to say, what does

31:31

that story mean to you, grandma? Like grandma knows

31:33

what it means to her. A folklorist might have

31:35

a larger read by knowing there

31:38

are multiple examples of that story

31:40

out in the world, but we would never

31:43

turn away from a person's own explanation

31:45

of their own tradition or their own story.

31:48

And I actually think that's what sets folklore

31:50

studies apart as an academic discipline is

31:52

that there's not not trust

31:55

in in the sense of uncritical belief,

31:57

but there's trust in that. everyday

32:01

people are saying valuable,

32:03

viable things, even if they haven't

32:06

trained to say them. They are not published

32:08

authors, they're not fine artists, they're

32:11

not symphonic musicians, but

32:13

kids singing a parody about burning

32:15

down the school are saying something worth

32:18

listening to. We can even ask

32:20

them in a reflexive, ethnographic

32:23

way, what do you think this song means? They

32:25

might say, I don't know, it's funny. Or they might say

32:27

something that opens our eyes

32:29

to some perspective that we would not have had

32:31

before. I think it's that collaborative

32:34

relationship with everyday people that

32:36

acknowledgement that we are also everyday

32:38

people that the discipline really grew into

32:40

that really makes it

32:41

unique. I love that. Can I get

32:43

you really quick because we've used the

32:46

word ethnographic and ethnography

32:48

a couple of times now. That's a folkloric

32:51

term that not everybody may be familiar

32:53

with. Can you describe what that is and

32:56

the significance of that approach?

32:58

Yeah. Ethnography is at

33:00

its most basic semantic level,

33:03

description of culture, writing graph,

33:05

specifically writing about culture. It's

33:08

a practice that grew

33:11

up around the idea that

33:13

people, often Western

33:15

European people, wanted to go

33:17

out and explore the world and describe it

33:19

to the people back home and be able to

33:21

say, hey, here is this culture, it is different

33:24

from ours, I'm going to describe it to you.

33:26

It was related in a lot of

33:28

historical ways to the process of ethnology

33:30

which is the comparison of two cultures. Here's how

33:32

this culture is doing things, here's how this other

33:34

culture is doing things. We

33:37

have both the practice of ethnography,

33:40

someone goes and observes and perhaps participates

33:42

in a culture that is different from their own. That

33:45

might be a national culture or an ethnic

33:47

culture, it might be a occupational culture

33:49

or a hobby-based culture. We

33:51

can scale that idea to a bunch of different

33:54

levels. People have done ethnographies of hubs

33:57

on a Friday night. That's a cultural

33:59

group we could come. to understand, one

34:01

of the things that has grown

34:04

out of this study of ethnography is that

34:07

the most responsible way to do

34:09

it is to, one, never assume that we

34:11

can be objective, that we are always

34:13

aware that we are looking at a culture

34:16

through our own culture.

34:18

And that was something that was not present for a

34:20

long time in early ethnographic work,

34:22

that reflection on what biases,

34:25

what assumptions am I bringing to this,

34:27

that my outsider perspective

34:30

is causing me to not see certain things. And it might

34:32

similarly be causing me to see certain things that

34:34

someone on the inside might overlook as normal.

34:37

And we understand this when

34:39

we look back at history, everyone

34:42

has always been looking through their

34:44

own lenses. When the Romans were

34:47

describing the Gauls and the Celts,

34:49

they described what stood out to them,

34:52

and they didn't mention what didn't stand

34:54

out to them. And so we can assume that what they didn't

34:56

mention was pretty much the way the Romans

34:58

were doing it, because it didn't catch their

35:00

attention, right? So we have that same

35:03

idea now. So we try to not

35:05

assume that we can be objective. And we

35:07

also understand that the work

35:10

we're doing is partial. I'm

35:12

not, no one, no ethnographer is ever

35:14

getting the totality of a culture

35:17

when they look at it. And that doesn't negate the

35:19

value of it, it just sort of sets

35:21

it in a more realistic

35:23

vein. So when we talk about doing ethnographic

35:25

work, we're talking about looking at a culture

35:28

or what folklorists might call a folk group, and

35:31

describing their worldview,

35:33

describing the way that they apprehend

35:35

reality and the expressions that they make about

35:38

that reality.

35:40

That leads me to a question that I really want to ask

35:42

that I'm not quite sure how to form it.

35:44

So forgive me for the phrasing of this question,

35:47

but something like I want to figure out

35:49

a way to like convey to listeners, at least

35:51

for me when I'm learning something like this, I'm always I'm trying

35:53

to think of like, how can I look at things differently?

35:56

And like, how can I observe when I'm noticing something like

35:58

Loeb coming up? What like sort of framework

36:00

is going to have in my head to like, okay, how can I observe

36:02

the context of this and the significance of what it means?

36:05

I don't know if there's a way for you to

36:07

easily give out. When you see

36:09

something like this, what is going on in your

36:11

head of how do you look at something like

36:13

a folklorist might? Is there a forensic

36:16

toolkit for folklorists where you can- Yeah.

36:18

What's something someone could take away?

36:20

I love that. Yes. I actually

36:23

wrote a book chapter called

36:25

The Folklorist Toolkit, which was

36:28

building off of another

36:30

of my mentors. I've been so lucky as a folklorist,

36:32

Diane Goldstein, who for a long time

36:34

was the head of the folklore program at

36:36

Memorial University of Newfoundland and then ended

36:38

her career at Indiana University. But she

36:41

wrote about the folklorist toolkit in

36:43

an article distinguishing the work of an anthropologist

36:45

from the work of a folklorist. I'll get to that in a

36:47

minute though. I think that I often

36:50

talk with my students that folklorists

36:52

have this double vision because

36:55

we don't stop being a member

36:57

of the folk and everyday person, a member

36:59

of all of our varied and overlapping

37:02

folk groups through which we code switch

37:04

throughout the day. We have

37:07

a mode of presentation at work that's different

37:09

than at home and when we're hanging out with

37:11

friends and when we're at a sporting event, we are

37:14

constantly members of these folk

37:16

groups all overlapping, all at the same

37:18

time. We are that even when we

37:20

are a folklorist. What the folklorist

37:22

is doing at its most basic

37:25

level is identifying something

37:27

that seems base

37:29

and trivial but that's everywhere

37:32

and saying, what's going on here? Why

37:34

is this persisting? The

37:37

informality of folklore, that key definitional

37:39

trait of informality says, no

37:42

institution is keeping this stuff

37:44

in circulation. There's no AP

37:46

test making sure that you've heard XYZ

37:49

urban legends in high school. There's

37:51

no government licensing that's

37:53

going to make sure that you know how to

37:56

successfully put on a traditional

37:58

holiday dinner

37:59

or breakfast. or whatever, and yet

38:01

these patterns persist.

38:04

So

38:04

the folklorist comes in and says, why? When

38:06

a pattern is starting to persist or

38:08

even starting to rev up, and I'm seeing

38:10

it everywhere, and there's no institutionalized

38:14

explanation for it. There's not a big

38:16

budget production company showing an ad

38:18

for it every 30 minutes on television.

38:21

Why is it persisting? That's,

38:23

I think, learning to spot folklore,

38:25

learning to see that informal traditional

38:28

stuff, and then asking yourself,

38:30

why is this sticking around? If it didn't mean

38:32

anything to us, it would disappear. And

38:35

we've seen that happen. There's a lot of folklore that's disappeared

38:37

because we didn't need it anymore. It wasn't

38:39

saying anything of value to us. So

38:42

when it does stick around, it's our

38:44

job to then say, okay, what's the value?

38:47

What are we saying

38:49

with this that's keeping it a

38:51

useful tool for us? To get

38:54

into that idea of the folklorist's toolbox

38:56

more specifically, and this is much more a

38:58

real sort of academic leaning idea,

39:00

but Diane Goldstein tells us

39:03

that the things that really make the

39:05

work of a folklorist distinct are the concepts

39:08

of tradition, fairly obviously,

39:10

transmission, that concept of

39:12

things being passed on from person to

39:14

person, and genre, that

39:17

we have this focus on. It

39:19

is something different to

39:21

tell a fairy tale than a legend.

39:24

It is something different to engage

39:26

in a rite of passage versus

39:28

a calendar custom. And more

39:30

than any other discipline, anthropology,

39:32

sociology, other folks use ethnographic

39:35

theories and techniques.

39:37

Folklorists

39:38

pay attention to tradition, transmission,

39:41

and genre in a way

39:43

that I believe really

39:45

connects with that expressive

39:48

mode of everyday people. People

39:50

choose, even if it's a very

39:53

unconscious or subconscious choice, we choose

39:56

to communicate in a proverb rather

39:58

than summing up an opinion with our

40:00

own speech. We choose to deploy

40:03

a meme when we want to make a point,

40:05

rather than just make that point in our

40:07

own words. We are doing

40:10

something that means

40:12

we're choosing a genre in order

40:15

to transmit an idea in

40:17

a traditional way

40:18

when we share folklore.

40:21

Those three concepts, yes,

40:23

are useful tools for folklorists, but I think also

40:26

really start to get at

40:29

what this is, this vernacular

40:32

communication that people

40:34

are doing. That makes so much

40:36

sense. I never thought of genre

40:39

that way despite all of the things like I've read that

40:41

never clicked until just now as a way

40:43

of thinking about that. That is really cool.

40:45

Yeah. We need to be careful

40:47

as folklorists to not impose

40:49

our genres on other people. Genres

40:53

are learned through one's

40:55

cultural upbringing, through one's worldview,

40:57

and it's very tempting to go out into

40:59

the world and say, oh, is that a song

41:01

that you sing at night in front of children? That's a lullaby.

41:04

But no, that's a genre we

41:06

have. We have to parse out

41:08

other people's genres. I

41:11

find this fascinating because as a folklorist,

41:13

we do have very specific academic

41:16

definitions of many genres. I was

41:18

part of a Twitter conversation once where

41:20

someone was asking, are urban legends

41:23

folklore? I

41:25

came in and was like, yes. Here's official

41:28

folklorists, yes, they are. Other

41:30

Twitter users, non-folklorists, were saying

41:33

very interesting things like, well, in my opinion,

41:35

no, they're related

41:37

but different. I'm going, it's not a

41:39

matter of opinion, guys. Come

41:42

on, it either is or isn't. I'm

41:45

trying to think of some other, is

41:48

five an integer? It's

41:51

like, yes, you don't have an opinion.

41:54

But I had to remind

41:57

myself of the tenets of my

41:59

discipline, which is, is that, hey,

42:01

I'm not here to tell people, hey,

42:04

that story, that's a myth, not a legend, or

42:06

vice versa. I'm a little

42:08

bit here to learn from them. Tell me why you

42:11

don't think urban legends are folklore. Like what

42:13

does folklore mean to you, emically,

42:15

intrinsically, that I'm missing, that

42:17

distinguishes it from urban legends. As an academic,

42:20

my students still gonna need to learn to articulate

42:22

the difference because it's important. And because

42:25

those differences can alter how we

42:27

perceive people. Fairy tales are

42:29

told knowingly as fiction, as

42:31

fantasy, as transformative, marvelous

42:34

escapism. That doesn't mean they don't contain

42:37

truths, but they're not told as literally true.

42:39

When someone tells you the story of Puss

42:41

in Boots, you don't respond by going like,

42:43

yeah, I don't really think that's possible.

42:46

Because it's a fairy tale, it opened with once

42:48

upon a time, it closed with happily

42:50

ever after, it framed itself in its

42:53

fictionality. Legends, on the other

42:55

hand, are told as true, right? If someone

42:57

tells you a legend, like the King of

42:59

the Cat, it's a very well-known Irish legend about

43:01

a talking cat, someone tells you that story,

43:03

they are telling you that they think there's

43:06

at least a passing chance that that actually did

43:08

happen. And you are absolutely expected

43:10

to be like, yeah, I don't

43:12

think that's possible. Because as a

43:14

genre, legends are rhetorically

43:17

different than fairy tales. And

43:19

if I approach people

43:22

and have them tell me a story, and they tell

43:24

me a story in which bizarre and miraculous

43:26

things happen, it really

43:29

matters. If I know

43:32

that they are telling me that as fiction or

43:34

as potential facts, and my

43:36

understanding of what this persistent

43:39

traditional pattern in their culture means

43:42

is gonna depend a lot on whether they're telling

43:44

it to me as fiction or fact. So it is

43:46

an important distinction for an academic

43:49

to make, but it's not for the goal of

43:51

telling people they're wrong about what they would

43:53

call any of their

43:55

expressive content. This just brought

43:57

to mind a question that I'm super curious

43:59

about your answer. but it's a bit of a weird question. The

44:01

study of anything academically is almost

44:04

in a way the pursuit of absolute truths

44:06

that can be applied to analyze something. Is

44:08

that directly at odds with the study of folklore,

44:11

which is studying how we colloquially understand

44:13

things? Is there an interesting sort of head-butting

44:15

going on

44:16

there? Yeah, it can be. It

44:18

can be sort of a paradox. And what it does

44:20

for me, though, that helps reduce

44:22

the impact of that paradox is that

44:25

we distinguish the

44:27

stuff of folklore and it's natural,

44:29

we might be tempted to

44:31

say, organic processes from the

44:34

study of it. And that's

44:36

something that we don't do as much with

44:38

more institutionalized forms of culture, like

44:40

literature or art history or music appreciation,

44:43

where we study them in the academy because

44:45

there are correct distinctions

44:48

between those forms that are institutionalized.

44:51

And we start getting into music

44:53

history and it turns pretty folklore-pretty

44:55

quick, it turns out. But when

44:57

things are guided by institutions,

45:00

it is easier to be definitive and say, oh,

45:02

if you're calling a memoir a novel,

45:05

you are incorrect. Whereas

45:07

with a folklorist, if you want, what you're trying

45:09

to do is be a folklore student and you

45:11

call a myth a fairy tale, we might say you

45:13

are incorrect. But just everyday people

45:15

in the world, our goal is not

45:18

to say you're wrong about what you call

45:20

these sorts of forms, it's more of a, and

45:23

this actually is key to

45:25

the discipline of folklore studies because what we

45:27

largely are not, and this is not to say

45:29

that there aren't some instances of it, but we

45:32

are not interventionists. A lot

45:34

of sociological work, a lot of the,

45:37

say, medical humanities, the goals

45:39

are interventionists. We want to change

45:42

behavior, we want to fix this

45:44

public health issue, we want to make

45:47

different the way something happens

45:49

in a society, and folklorists largely

45:52

are like, we wanna understand, that's what

45:54

we wanna do, we wanna get it, we wanna get what

45:56

you're saying, we don't wanna change what you're saying now,

45:58

this has gotten tricky. here with you

46:01

guys brought up the advent of QAnon, with

46:04

fake news, the purposeful dissemination

46:07

of sticky in a folkloric

46:09

way misinformation. Suddenly,

46:11

folklorists are like, maybe we do want to change

46:14

the way people are doing things. That is

46:16

a huge, enormous

46:20

identity crisis in the discipline right

46:22

now. We have thrived on

46:25

agnosticism in a lot of ways as

46:27

a real point of pride. In our discipline,

46:29

I am not here to say whether Bigfoot is real

46:32

or not. I am here to take seriously

46:34

the people who want to tell me that they think

46:37

they saw him. That's great. I believe

46:39

in that. All of a sudden, we

46:41

cast that same legendary

46:44

work in the frame of politics

46:46

or

46:46

public health.

46:48

We see an area

46:50

in which it actually does matter to

46:52

me if someone believes or doesn't

46:54

believe the information that they're sharing

46:56

with me. That is tricky.

46:59

That is a place at which

47:01

I hear folklorists now beginning

47:03

these conversations.

47:04

After the break, the conclusion

47:07

of our interview with Dr. Lynn

47:09

McNeil.

47:15

Welcome back. Do

47:18

you feel as though there's kind of a tipping point in which the study

47:20

of folklore now is almost more important than

47:23

ever because of the advent of the internet and all

47:25

of the things, but also the study of it is

47:27

more difficult to justify? Something,

47:30

Perry, you were telling me about before is you had a hard time finding

47:32

online folklore programs or accessibility into

47:34

it at the same time.

47:35

Yes. There's my short answer. Yes,

47:38

absolutely. Understanding

47:40

what folklore is, understanding

47:42

how it moves, understanding how it influences

47:45

people, it's tied

47:47

to so many other disciplines, linguistics,

47:50

psychology, sociology, anthropology.

47:52

It is the understanding of humans,

47:55

but uniquely it's the understanding of humans

47:57

on their terms rather than the understanding

47:59

of the world.

49:44

And

50:00

then of course you get to 2016 and 2015, 2016 and beyond, you start to

50:02

see that, oh, there

50:07

are these interesting traces of

50:09

things that look like legend and things that look like

50:11

traditional manipulation of belief for

50:14

some other kind of more nefarious

50:16

outcome and you see that struggle. One of the

50:18

things that keeps surfacing over

50:20

and over and over kind of cross discipline is

50:23

the idea of in grade

50:26

school even injecting some kind of

50:28

media literacy. Would you then

50:31

also advocate for not only media

50:33

literacy but the ways that folklore

50:36

and belief intersect with that and the ways

50:39

that belief may be used to other people

50:41

or to create distinct social differences

50:44

for the purpose of something negative

50:47

or propping myself up maybe even?

50:49

Yes, I think

50:51

that some sort of media literacy

50:54

vernacular culture literacy is

50:56

something that should go along with this.

51:00

The most difficult thing about it

51:02

though, and you brought up

51:04

the idea that a lot of the times we

51:06

use these materials to other someone,

51:09

a group of people or an individual or whatever,

51:11

and this is something that we see happen on like the microcosmic

51:14

dyadic scale. Two people do this

51:17

to each other. Three people in a relationship

51:19

will attempt to dehumanize

51:21

the other person so as to be more comfortable

51:23

with harming them or insulting them and

51:25

we see it on a societal scale. This

51:28

is a human conundrum that we are dealing

51:30

with.

51:32

The hardest thing about it is

51:34

that the people you,

51:36

each of us, most need to

51:38

fact check

51:39

are ourselves.

51:41

The people it is most fun

51:43

to fact check are our opponent

51:46

in whatever realm we are working in.

51:49

So media literacy, learn how to find your

51:51

sources, learn how to fact check and stuff like

51:55

this, those are all wonderful skills

51:57

for people to learn. It's that people don't... them

52:00

on

52:00

themselves.

52:02

And they don't deploy them in the true,

52:04

I hate to use the word insidious, but

52:06

insidious way that folklore

52:09

enters our lives. We think about

52:11

urban legends as these identifiable

52:14

friend of a friend narratives that

52:16

we hear. And when I talk about them in classes

52:18

with my students, my students will say, how could

52:20

anyone believe that? That's so

52:23

ridiculous. And it's like, yeah, it sounds

52:25

ridiculous written in a textbook

52:28

about, you know, global politics.

52:30

Of course, that sounds ridiculous. That's not how

52:32

you encounter it

52:33

as folklore. You encounter it as

52:36

folklore when you're in high school and you're

52:38

at the dinner table with your family and your dad

52:40

looks up and goes, did you guys hear what happened yesterday?

52:42

And that's it then boom, urban legend, urban

52:45

legend comes next. And it's not

52:47

a CNN article or a Fox

52:50

News article or an MSNBC broadcast.

52:52

It's our friends, our family,

52:54

our parents, and it's not often

52:57

bizarre and crazy

52:59

sounding stuff. Cause usually it's stuff

53:01

that fits right in with our worldview.

53:03

It's something that we don't like, but that we're

53:05

like, yeah, no, that is, I bet that

53:08

did happen. That is how the world works.

53:10

And everyone

53:11

is susceptible to this. And again,

53:13

so it's not, it's not fact checking

53:15

a fake news article. It's fact

53:17

checking my parents, my friends,

53:20

my colleagues, myself, and

53:23

we don't do that instinctively. That's

53:25

horrendously uncomfortable. And,

53:28

and we aren't in that realm

53:30

of formal research all the time. And so

53:32

this really is highlighted by that informal

53:34

versus institutional culture divide.

53:37

Fact checking informal culture

53:39

is often impossible. And the genre

53:41

difference is what distinguishes a joke from

53:44

a legend. Almost the only

53:46

thing is whether or not it's being

53:48

pitched as true because we have

53:51

many urban legends that structurally

53:54

have punchlines. There's the reveal

53:56

at the end. And if it

53:58

were told as did you hear

54:01

about the guy who, you'd laugh, because

54:03

it would be a funny social commentary. But

54:06

when it's pitched as, no seriously,

54:08

like my hairdresser's cousin's next-door neighbor

54:10

did this. Suddenly, it's not funny because

54:12

now it's like biting social commentary. We

54:17

react differently based

54:19

on how, again, like the people closest

54:22

to us who are not trying to defraud

54:24

us, there are bad actors in the world.

54:27

There are money-making fake

54:29

news generators. They are less

54:31

the danger than when the story they

54:33

create becomes. So

54:35

folkloric has entered that folk transmission

54:38

process that we hear it from

54:40

a family member as

54:42

something that happens.

54:44

That's the danger level

54:46

of disinformation, and that's

54:48

where it's so convoluted

54:51

and difficult that those fact-checking

54:54

skills even when we've learned them, just don't

54:56

get deployed.

54:58

This happens also in ways that are neutral

55:01

or benign, and so don't seem

55:03

problematic. An example is I

55:06

think all folklorists have this moment.

55:08

I was in a PhD-level contemporary

55:10

legend class. Folklorists call

55:12

urban legends contemporary legends. It's a

55:15

slightly more accurate nomenclature. Someone

55:17

was telling a story that

55:20

I found myself, the words came out

55:22

of my mouth before I could stop it. That

55:25

actually happened to a friend of a guy my dad worked with.

55:27

Then I was like,

55:28

like, it

55:30

was- Kuyster, say moment. Yes.

55:32

Oh, yes. I always think

55:35

of it as the Simba in the Will-de-Vese stampede

55:37

moment where the camera zooms in and little

55:39

Simba's in the Will-de-Vese are coming. I'm

55:41

like, oh. It was the story as I heard

55:44

it. My

55:46

dad, it was one of his favorite stories.

55:49

As far as I know, he

55:51

at least heard it as though it happened to a friend

55:53

of this guy he works with. This guy, they

55:56

were investing business,

55:58

investment advisors, and this guy had a- client

56:00

down in LA and he went to travel

56:02

down to LA to meet with his client in person and he had

56:04

to stay overnight and his client was like, hey, I'm

56:07

going to this party tonight. I know you're in town with nothing

56:09

to do. Do you want to come with me? You know, there's going

56:11

to be a lot of, you know, like Hollywood muckety

56:13

mucks there. Like you, you might get to meet

56:16

some, you know, important people or whatever. And the

56:18

guy's like, well, I don't know. Like I wouldn't fit in.

56:20

I'm, you know, I don't know how I feel about this. And his

56:22

client's like, oh, come on, you know, like just

56:25

come with me and there'll be good food if nothing else. So he

56:27

goes and he ends up, you know,

56:29

doing that awkward thing. We all do at parties where we don't know anyone

56:31

standing by the food and eating constantly. And

56:33

there's this other guy standing by the food

56:36

table, just eating constantly. And so

56:38

he's like, well, at least I'm not alone in my awkwardness.

56:40

And so he makes friends with this guy and this guy's name is Bob.

56:43

And he has all these funny stories about like,

56:45

you know, people in LA and all this stuff.

56:47

And he's super friendly and he makes this guy feel at

56:49

home and even introduces him to like some

56:51

big names. And he's like, see, okay, cool.

56:53

I was, I was wrong. This was great. So as he's

56:56

leaving the next day, he calls up his client

56:58

to just be like, Hey, thanks for inviting me to that party.

57:00

And when you see him next, will you tell

57:02

Bob that I really appreciated how he sort

57:04

of took me under his wing and made me feel comfortable. And

57:06

the client was like, which Bob and he's like, you

57:08

know, Bob, that guy I was talking to by the food table and the

57:11

client goes, Oh, you mean Robert De Niro?

57:13

And that's like put them right there's our

57:15

punch line. And if of course, as we tell

57:17

that story, it was Robert De Niro, who is such

57:20

a good down to earth guy that he is mistaken

57:22

as friendly non famous Bob

57:24

by an average Joe. We

57:27

tell that story about a particular kind

57:29

of actor. We tell different stories

57:32

about other kinds of actors, stories where actors

57:34

are pretentious and think too highly

57:36

of themselves and all of that stuff. But

57:38

anyways, as far as I knew,

57:40

I mean, my dad told me that story as like a

57:42

you will not believe this. Like that

57:44

guy I work with, this happened to his

57:47

friend. And it was like, no way that's

57:49

crazy. And I totally believe that. So I'm like,

57:51

yeah, Robert De Niro is probably a pretty good guy. You

57:53

know,

57:53

he seems he seems like a good guy. Totally.

57:56

It wasn't nowhere in that story

57:58

when I heard it when I was young.

57:59

maybe junior high, high school, nowhere

58:02

was the word legend ever said. It

58:04

was never like a, well, I heard or a

58:06

friend of a friend. It was just like, oh my gosh, you will not believe

58:08

this. It had that veracity. What folklorist

58:11

Elliot Oring describes the rhetorical

58:14

stance of the friend of a friend as being

58:17

close enough to be validating, but

58:19

just distant enough to not require

58:22

immediate or not enable immediate

58:24

verification. It was

58:26

that. It was perfect. I had

58:28

no reason to disbelieve it until the

58:30

evidence of it's in this book of

58:33

urban legends. Like, are you saying it

58:35

actually happened to your dad and is also

58:37

in this book of urban legends? It was like, am

58:40

I? It gave me so much more

58:42

sympathy for my students when we

58:44

talk about a legend. They say, oh, well, that actually

58:46

happened to my grandpa. I'm like, maybe

58:48

it

58:49

did.

58:51

Probably

58:51

it didn't. It

58:53

is that that was a very long and roundabout

58:55

way of saying, we are up against an incredible

58:59

challenge when it comes to what

59:01

skill set it is that would

59:03

make us question that

59:05

mode of learning.

59:07

Again, that's a benign one. Who

59:09

cares if that's true or not? It's an interesting

59:11

commentary on Robert De Niro. But

59:13

if that story were about vaccines or

59:16

elections,

59:18

or crime, or

59:19

the safety of children, I might

59:22

act on it in a really different way, while

59:24

believing it just as much.

59:26

That's

59:27

the danger, really.

59:29

I know you said loath to use the word, but

59:31

it is insidious, even if the things that are

59:33

benign. I think the story is really illustrative of that.

59:38

Thanks so much for listening and thank

59:40

you to Dr. Lynn McNeil for spending

59:42

time with us. Be sure to check out

59:44

the show notes for more information about Lynn

59:47

and her work. If

59:50

you haven't yet, please go ahead and go over

59:52

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59:54

us a five-star rating, and leave us a review.

59:57

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the show. If you have any questions,

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1:00:04

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1:00:08

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1:00:21

That's all for now. Thanks

1:00:24

for listening.

1:00:32

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