Our guest today, Jennings Brown, is a bright light in an increasingly chaotic cult-content economy. His 2018 podcast on Teal Swan, The Gateway, produced with Gizmodo, sets a high-watermark standard for research, fairness, and sensitivity. A lot has happened since that pod dropped: #MeToo, MAGA, QAnon, COVID, and now a post-reality Supreme Court in which Justice Thomas publishes a concurrence in which he states that COVID vaccines use the tissues of aborted fetuses. All of which is to say: we don’t know how intensely the insanity of the era will escalate, but we do know that clear, ethical reporting on difficult issues is a very thin lifeline back to sanity, communication, and trying to do something.
If you listened to episode 109 (if you haven’t we encourage you to stop here and go there), you’ll hear our criticisms of The Deep End docuseries about Teal Swan. You’ll hear us interview the director, Jon Kasbe. We lean on him, maybe too gently, on the numerous integrity issues with his film. Bottom line: with deceptive edits and a vacuum of expert commentary and research, we feel that this project is a real setback for everyone trying to understand cultic dynamics in the online age. And as we’ll report at the top of the show, before our interview with Brown, the story of this embedment is only getting messier.
Our interview with Jennings steers clear of the muck, because what we really wanted to hear was all about his process, his editorial decisions, and the help he got from his producers. We were also very lucky to have him drop some previously unreported data into the mix. Spoiler alert: it’s about the types of things that Swan used to write in her secret runic alien language.
Show notes:
Jennings Brown — About page with tip line contact info
Episode 109: Who's Afraid of Teal Swan? w/ Jon Kasbe
Jon Kasbe wishing Teal Swan happy birthday
Bits Sola rapping Teal Swan happy birthday
Gizmodo Launches 'The Gateway,' an Investigative Podcast About a Controversial Internet Spiritual Guru
Open Shadow — Paola Marino
Paola Marino on The Deep End (clip)
Jennings Brown — Revelations