No, hey, it's that TBT pick from when you wore baggy jeans and shell necklaces,

Alie Wart. I'm back with a pop cultural psychological episode. It's gonna become very dear to your heart because it's about why something is dear to your heart.

First, your dear to me, patrons. Thanks for paying a dollar or more a month to submit your questions toologists. Thanks to everyone who talks and tweets about the show.

Thanks to everyone leaving reviews, which I read every single one. I churn back at you, such as this one written this week by

Michigan Der lady T. Lav who wrote, yeah, love allergies. While sitting in my car in the elementary school pickup lane, I was listening to allergies from my windows down and as another mom walk by, she shouted, hey, that's allergies.

I got so excited to happen upon another alligite in the wild. I became flummoxed and could only reply, yeah, love allergies, finding your own people. So fun.

Lady T. Lav so timely. You have no idea. So, phanthropology. Let's do this episode. You ready? Okay. So phanthropology is indeed a real term. It was coined by Kristen Longfield, a marketing strategist who used to work at trailer park. They make movie trailers and they have a very confusing name if you are not in the entertainment business.

But the fan part of phanthropology comes from the word fanatic, which stemmed from the Latin for a temple or a sacred place and fanatic meant insanely but divinely inspired. But we have been using it to mean a person who helled digs something since the mid 1600s long before we had TV series to gobble up and comic books to love. Although let's be honest, illuminated manuscripts from the Middle Ages.

Kind of like comic books, but with more horses and demon babies and gold leaf. But either way, thisologist happened to meet my now feels a year or two ago. I think and he demanded her business card to give me and I have wanted to record this episode.

At least for a year were both LA based and we kept waiting for the pandemic to pass. But alas, we just recently recorded over the phone and it was such a compelling and interesting look at why we love what we love. We talked for nearly two hours. Didn't even take a P break, to be honest. I just adore her.

So she studied communication and culture at Indiana University, Gohushers and got her masters at UCLA and critical media studies and fan studies.

She has been consulting and on staff as an anthropologist and a researcher at marketing firms and entertainment companies. She runs her own called random machine. We talked so long about so many things that y'all love that I could not cut this down into a single episode.

She's a fiest your ears on a delicious two parter next week. We're going to dive in even more into stands versus fans. Where's the line? Shipping people toxic fandoms formulas on a taining internet fame and this episode you're about to hear we lay all the groundwork talking about the history of fandoms.

A fandom even is Disney bounding her favorite things and sports versus art fanatics, K-pop politics, Trekkies, Star Wars prequels, the curse of the algorithm and what to do when your favorite books are penned by problematic trolls, creating your own fan base, self identifying morality, all kinds of stuff.

So cozy up and get to know and love behavioral researcher and legit professional on her business card unironically, fanthropologist Meredith Levine.

I am Meredith Levine and my pronouns are she her right now you are a fanthropologist. I am.

You're the first fanthropologist I have ever heard of are you the only one on earth? I am by no means the only one on earth. In fact the title is not even of my origin.

The title I heard at while I was still in graduate school I went to a session with a woman named Chris who was working at trailer park at the time who now has her own consultancy called fanthropology.

Hey, and it matched on to what I was studying at the time and said hey I want to do that for a living. And so it stuck with me for the last 10 years of my professional career.

It's so perfect. I love that it just kind of says everything and it also is anthropological right.

It is and I use a lot of mixed methods research in my work increasingly I'm using a lot of analytics dashboards on social platforms.

But I have done participant observation I have done a quantitative research I have done survey design and focus groups and all sorts of other methods that researchers would use in the field.

...