Andrew Callaway

Failure (prelude)

December 25, 2018 Andrew Callaway Failure, Theory Of Everything 0:41:35 11 Comments

Failure (prelude)

After Meghan Daum’s marriage falls apart she meets some new friends on YouTube. Also, reporter Paris Martineau tells us about a new game changing online harassment tool: the thotbot.

IDW

When Meghan Daum’s marriage ended, she gave up on HBO and Netflix and switched over to YouTube. She wrote about it in a Medium piece called “Nuance: A Love Story.”

Thotbot

Over thanksgiving, while many people were celebrating with their families, Paris Martineau discovered a group of men’s rights activists created a tool to harass sex workers.

Bonus 2018

December 19, 2018 Andrew Callaway Theory Of Everything 0:41:35 0 Comments

Bonus 2018

Earlier this summer at a listener meet up in Vancouver your host learned the difference between Listeners and Fans. Find out why this distinction matters. And if you are a fan or a listener donate now to the 2018 Radiotopia campaign! Also: Benjamen and Andrew talk about 2019 AND a bonus segment from ToE special corespondent Chris.

Victory is ours

December 10, 2018 Andrew Callaway Theory Of Everything 0:41:35 0 Comments

Victory is Ours

Mark Galeotti takes us into the Soviet Gulag to tell us the brutal history of the Bitch War, ToE’s Andrew Callaway checks in on the war on smoking and P.W. Singer explains how #likewar works. Plus Sleeper Net?

BitchWar

Mark Galeotti author of The Vory: Russia’s Super Mafia takes us inside the wild world of the Russian Bitch War.

War on Smoking

Andrew and his mom become the most hated people in San Francisco as they continue to smoke cigarettes while the state burns around them.

LikeWar

In P.W. Singer’s latest book, LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media, he takes us to the #likewar battlefield. We learn how ISIS used social media to take mosul and how sleeperbots won the election of 2016.

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Night Wolves (False Alarm! part xiv)

November 6, 2018 Andrew Callaway false alarm, Theory Of Everything 0:41:35 0 Comments

Night Wolves (False Alarm! part xiv)

The Night Wolves are a Russian biker gang. Their rallies and bike shows run on state TV and Putin gave members medals for their contributions to the annexation of Crimea. The Kremlin outsources violence, propaganda, and intelligence gathering to groups like the Night Wolves because it supports the intentioned ambiguity of Non-Linear Warfare. Trump is now openly calling for a biker gang of his own. Is this the real Russia connection or is it simply more theatrical ambiguity?

New series logo by Val Dorito.

Night Wolves

The Moscow based radio producer Charles Maynes takes us on a ride with Putin’s bikers.

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JK After The Fact (False Alarm! part xiii)

October 24, 2018 Andrew Callaway false alarm, Theory Of Everything 0:41:35 1 Comment

JK After The Fact (False Alarm! part xiii)

A handful of tech barons now own the news but only one can rule the fake news. A chat with the comedy team behind the CBC’s This is That satirical news show turns into breaking news about Elon Musk.

New series logo by Val Dorito.

This Is That

This Is That is a satirical news show on the CBC. They’ve just announced that this is their final season, so we wanted to have them on the show to discuss the challenges of making radio that mixes truth and fiction… and to find out why they’re really moving on.

They started back in 2010, and starting with a story about the closing of the Calgary Aquarium, audiences began to call in angrily believing that their joke stories were actually real.  These phone calls from fooled listeners became a fan favorite section of the show, but in 2016 as Fake News became the talk of town… this became a problem for them.

How Do You Like It So Far?

Plus, Benjamen just appeared on the How Do You Like It So Far? podcast with Wu Ming 1, one of the authors of Q a conspiracy novel that appears to have inspired a real conspiracy theory. You can check it out here, or wherever podcasts are sold.

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Wolfgang (False Alarm! part xii)

October 12, 2018 Andrew Callaway false alarm, Theory Of Everything 0:41:35 1 Comment

Wolfgang (False Alarm! part xii)

The Hoaxers took over the Conspiracy Theory Championship Title from the Truthers in December of 2012 in response to the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary. Eight years later the hoaxers are everywhere, the pizzagaters, the climate deniers, the nationalists, the gaslighters – even the President is a hoaxer. Your host travels to the heart of Hoaxer Darkness: Florida

New series logo by Val Dorito.

Wolfgang Halbig

Wolfgang Halbig is the most notorious Sandy Hook hoaxer out there. Len Pozner, a parent of one of the victims of the shooting, has put together a comprehensive document on the man.

Deepfakes Redux

We received a voicemail from Deepfakes , the reddit user who made a face swapping AI algorithm. His last appearance was in part 2 of False Alarm, Fake Nudes. 

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Mistakes Were Made

September 25, 2018 Andrew Callaway Theory Of Everything 0:41:35 0 Comments

Mistakes were made

We’re taking a short break from False Alarm! because your host made a big big mistake. More on that when we return to False Alarm next episode… In the meantime, we raid Benjamen Walker’s audio vaults for a show about making mistakes and being wrong.

In 2010 when I met Kathryn Schulz she had just published her book, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

Since then she’s joined up with the New Yorker and won a Pulitizer Prize for her story about the upcoming earthquake in the Pacific Northwest called “The Really Big One.”

She’s our main guide through being wrong.

William Kleinknecht is a crime journalist who is appropriately focused on reminding people that Ronald Reagan is actually bad, not good. His book is The Man Who Sold The World.

 

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True Lessons (False Alarm! part xi)

September 12, 2018 Andrew Callaway false alarm, Theory Of Everything 0:41:35 0 Comments

True Lessons (False Alarm! part xi)

I set out on this False Alarm! journey with a quest to figure out how to better deal with this blurry line between fiction and reality. Phase Three of False Alarm! begins with a return to this question… can fiction help us see the truth? Jeffery Lewis, Nuclear expert tired of people ignoring his direct warnings, thinks it can. So he just wrote a novel – a fictional account of what led to North Korea bombing America.

I also recently came across a non-fiction book, a book that argues it is Logic that will enable us to better deal with our new reality  Dr. Eugenia Cheng wants us to think about logic in a brand new way.  Plus ToE’s Andrew Callaway gives us an update on our False Alarm! Hero Stormy Daniels.

New series logo by Val Dorito.

Fictional Warnings

Jeffery Lewis is a Nuclear arms expert who has turned to fiction to get his message out. He believes that his new novel The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against The United States is perhaps the most effective way for him to warn us that we wouldn’t learn much of a lesson from nuclear war.

Emotional Logic

Dr. Eugenia Cheng has spent her whole life fighting for math and logic–but in her new book, The Art of Logic in an Illogical World, she argues that emotions are just as important. For me, she dispelled a myth that logical and emotional are opposites. She believes that we need a lot of logic and emotions to make good decisions

Stormy Save Us

We revisit Stormy Daniels who we saw at the Gossip Gentleman’s club back in Fake Nudes (part 2 of False Alarm!). Suffice it to say, a lot has happened since then!

Photographed by Annie Leibowitz for Vogue

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Second Time as Fake (False Alarm! part x)

August 23, 2018 Andrew Callaway false alarm, Theory Of Everything 0:41:35 1 Comment

Second time as fake (False Alarm! part x)

The Nazis believed the secret to turning a lie into a truth was repetition, for the Spiritualists it was denial, have computers come up with something new? Phase two of our mega-mini series concludes and we return from our tour of the 1930s and 1880s. ToE’s Special correspondent Chris wraps up his liar’s guide to American history and your host is forced to deal with the Backfire effect! 2018 is not the first time truth, fiction and lies have merged together. In the 1850s, people turned to the dead for answers. In the 1930’s, Hitler and the Nazis tried to remake the world using magic and pseudoscience. 

 

New series logo by Val Dorito.

Torture as Alchemy

Special correspondent Chris wraps up his five part liar’s guide to American history with a story about George W Bush and torture.

Spiritualism's Afterlife

On the evening of October 21, 1888, Maggie Fox delivered what she thought would be the death-blow to Spiritualism. She was wrong.

Ada Calhoun concludes her telling of The Sisters Who Spoke To Spirits and your host examines how Spiritualism beat the death-blow.

The Backfire Effect

In 2005, political scientist Brendan Nyhan coined the term, “Backfire Effect.” add definition

In 2015, it was debunked… but your host can’t let it go.

from The Oatmeal

Artificially Intelligent News

Blaise Agüera y Arcas is at distinguished scientist and the founder of the Artist and Machine Intelligence program at Google. He’s not frightened of sentient AI blowing up the planet or AI robots taking all our jobs, he’s scared about fake news.

portrait of Blaise made by old AI

Going Fascist

We also are saying goodbye to historian Erik Kurlander auther of hitlers monsters, he tells us why its possible that it could all happen again.

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Heavenly Truths (False Alarm! part ix)

August 7, 2018 Andrew Callaway false alarm, Theory Of Everything 0:41:35 1 Comment

Heavenly Truths (False Alarm! part ix)

A prehistory of post-truth and an alternative history of the Civil War. Our exploration of the Nazi Supernatural concludes with Werewolves and Mass Suicide. Plus: another installment in our False Alarm fairy tale, the little boy from part one (now designing clothes for the Emperor) gets a surprise visit from a little girl in a red coat!

2018 is not the first time truth, fiction and lies have merged together. In the 1850s, people turned to the dead for answers. In the 1930’s, Hitler and the Nazis tried to remake the world using magic and pseudoscience. 

In phase two of False Alarm! we’re going to bounce between the second half of the 19th century, the interwar years and the present to find out if we are doomed for a repeat.

New series logo by Val Dorito.

The Lost Cause

Special correspondent Chris reminds us that the leadership of the Confederacy didn’t wait long to change their whole story about their reason for starting the Civil War. Just one month after the end of the war, everything was suddenly different.

Post-Modernism for the Right

Marci Shore explains how the political right adopted post-modern language of the left for their own purposes… and why we should all be reading more Hannah Arendt.

Hannah Arendt

Check out Peter Pomerantsev’s Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible and some of those Eastern European dissidents.

Nazi Werewolves are REAL!

Erik Kurlander’s story of the supernatural and the Third Reich concludes the same way the Third Reich did… with Werewolves!

Nazi mass suicides

Dutch radio producer Julie Blussé shares a story about the German civilians who killed themselves at the end of the war.

 

Julie Blussé’s new season of Tijdgeest will air on Dutch radio around mid-November in OVT,  (Season 1 is available already). 

Florian Huber’s book is called Kind, ersprich mir dass du dich erschiesst, der Untergang der kleinen Leute 1945 (Child, promise me that you will shoot yourself – the demise of the ordinary man 1945) is available in German. For German speakers: there was also a documentary made about life in Demmin after the mass suicide epidemic, which hit this town especially hard. It’s called Über Leben in Demmin.

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