Kat and Charles Save the World - live! This Saturday at 1:00 Eastern on Twitter Spaces! With Kat Viken, Dr Charles Kriel, Radicalized host Heidi Cuda and Straight White American Jesus host Bradley Onishi!

This is the first episode of Kat & Charles Save the World, featuring your favorite two globetrotting filmmakers, Kat Viken and Dr Charles Kriel. They've made two world spanning documentaries, and in this episode they discuss the resurgence of 2020 documentary,  People You May Know. It follows Charles, at the time the specialist advisor to U.K. Parliament Committee on Disinformation. That committee brought down PR firm Cambridge Analytica.

Our guests today are Heidi Cuda,  veteran journalist and author turned pro-democracy truth activist, and Professor of Religious Studies and eminent host of the Straight White American Jesus podcast, Bradley Onishi.

Today, we’re discussing how women are being radicalised online and we have two amazing speakers - Kiera Butler, senior editor at Mother Jones and Dr Mia Bloom, co-author of Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the mind of QAnon. Both of these fabulous women are in our latest film Dis/Informed, which is currently out in Europe. To see it in the US early, follow us on Patreon and look for the movie perk. 

We’ll tell listeners a little of the background for making Dis/Informed, which examines the psychology behind conspiracy theory, and especially how women have fallen down that rabbit hole during the pandemic, and especially ones in the wellness communities. Now, I’m a yoga person, and have long been an advocate of healthy alternatives to taking pills or prescriptions, and making sure my body has the right nutrition, etc. in 2020 I started seeing a worrying trend on my forums - people spreading extreme disinformation regarding not just vaccines and masking, but about pizzagate, linking to QAnon sites and beyond. In this film as with our previous one, Charles went on the road to find out what was up. 

Today, Katharina Gellein Viken and her co-director and life partner Charles Kriel discuss a topic close to their hearts in honour of Fathers Day weekend - their fathers, of course. 

Says Kat, "Our parents shape us. I don’t think I really understood what that phrase meant until I became a mother, how utterly and completely a child is at your mercy and shapes their whole world view and model for how to live and conduct their relationships around how you behave. Your fathers and mothers are your foundation. Some of them are wonderful. Some are okay. Some are unbelievably abusive and crappy, and yet others manage to be a combination of those."

"Charles and I have been together five years but known each other for much longer. We have sometimes struggled with our differences - we are from two very different cultures, America and Scandinavia, we had very different upbringings, and we have a large age gap. But funnily enough that meant that our dads were actually contemporaries. Charles’s father Richard Lowell Kriel was born in 1934, my father Peter Theodor Viken was born in 1930. So my father was older than yours, although he died in 1994 and Dick died in 2011. 
What we can certainly say is both of them were larger than life characters and shaped our lives for better and worse."

Today, we’re discussing a fun topic — Grifter culture. From carnies to scammers to cryptobros, we look at how society has shifted to privilege the grifter.

Our guest today is Ryan Broderick, journalist formerly of Buzzfeed and now author of our  favourite Substack. It’s about web culture and it’s called Garbage Day. If you haven’t subscribed yet, you have to do it.

Welcome to the fourth episode of Kat and Charles Save the World. We’re your friendly globetrotting filmmakers covering all your favourite topics from news and politics to psychology and society issues.