Decoding the Gurus

An adventure in formatting, welcome to the inaugural Supplementary Material episode. Here we are trying to save you all from the ever-expanding intro segments. On this episode: Announcement of the New Format Who Decodes the Decoders? A Mystery Sense-Making clip Lex Fridman on Navalany Jordan Peterson's fury at the Associated Press Bre Weinstein's superpower: Cringe Immunity Anti-Capitalists for AG...

In this episode, Matt and Chris converse with Kevin Mitchell, an Associate Professor of Genetics and Neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin, and author of 'Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will'.  We regret to inform you that the discussion does involve in-depth discussions of philosophy-adjacent topics such as free will, determinism, consciousness, the nature of self, and agency. But...

Controversial physics firebrand Sean Carroll has cut a swathe through the otherwise meek and mild podcasting industry over the last few years. Known in the biz as the "bad boy" of science communication, he offends as much as he educ.... << Record scratch >> No, we can't back any of that up obviously, those are all actually lies. Let's start again. Sean Carroll has worked as a research...

Sometimes our intrepid Decoders like to focus on a specific rhetorical technique or recurrent pattern that can be observed across the Gurusphere. Here, Matt and Chris take a look at a bite-size portion of the philosopher John Gray's recent appearance on Sam Harris' Making Sense podcast. Gray was invited to outline his critique of New Atheism, and his response is a remarkable monologue that encompa...

Sam Harris is an author, podcaster, public intellectual, ex-New Atheist, card-returning IDWer, and someone who likely needs no introduction. This is especially the case if you are a DTG listener as we recently released a full-length decoding episode on Sam. Following that episode, Sam generously agreed to come on to address some of the points we raised in the Decoding and a few other select topics...

Sometimes it's important to check in on old friends, just to make sure they're doing okay. That's the theme for today's episode. We felt it was necessary to pay an unannounced house call to our old pals Bret Weinstein and Jordan Peterson. Rumor had it that Jordan was facing some challenges with his clinical license, while Bret had been brewing up revolutionary evolutionary theories that weren't ge...

Join us for a mini decoding to get us back into the swing of things as we examine a viral clip that had religious reactionaries, sensemakers, and academic philosophers in a bit of a tizzy. Specifically, we are covering reactions to a clip from a 2014 TEDx talk by Yuval Noah Harari, the well-known author and academic, in which he discussed how human rights (and really all of human culture) are a ki...

In this episode, our intrepid hosts embrace a rare opportunity for sincere self-reflection, spurred by a face-to-face meeting in an inspiring ryokan in a Japanese mountain setting. The discussion delves into the nature of the podcast, audience capture, underlying motivations, and their thoughts on the journey so far and the path ahead. In an act of pure parasocial manipulation, listeners are invit...

Andrew Huberman, Stanford academic and host of a science-themed podcast, recently released an episode on Autism with guest Dr. Karen Parker. Considering the prevalence of misinformation about vaccines and autism and this episode being promoted as providing an overview of the topic, we were interested to see how the topic would be covered. In part, this interest was because of Huberman's strategic...

Sam Harris is the subject today and a man who needs no introduction. Although he's come up and he's come on, we've never actually (technically) decoded him. There is no Gurometer score! A glaring omission and one that needs correcting. It would have been easy for us to cherry-pick Sam being extremely good on conspiracy theories, or extremely controversial on politics, but we felt that neither woul...

Seasons greetings from Decoding the Gurus! Time to grab a hot chocolate, cosy up to the fire, and wrack your brain to see how much attention you've been paying to all those gurus... that's right it is time for the annual Guru quiz! Luckily for us, the esteemed journalist and author, Helen Lewis, is back as a combined special guest and quiz master. Prepare for stunning revelations, scintillating dy...

In today's joyous episode, we saunter into the loft apartment, take a draw on our gauloise, and glance icily into a world of bohemian hipsters living their best postmodern tradcath lives. Welcome to the irony-drenched world of 'Red Scare', a popular podcast hosted (sardonically) by Anna Khachiyan and Dasha Nekrasova. Also joining them in the episode we cover is hip writer and artist, Tao Lin, a pi...

We are back with more geeky academic discussion than you can shake a stick at. This week we are doing our bit to save civilization by discussing issues in contemporary science, the replication crisis, and open science reforms with fellow psychologists/meta-scientists/podcasters, Daniël Lakens and Smriti Mehta. Both Daniël and Smriti are well known for their advocacy for methodological reform and h...

In a kind of meta cross-over with our Decoding Academia series, we're going to decode a journal club discussion between two well-known health optimisers: Dr. Peter Attia and Dr. Andrew Huberman. So you get to listen to two academics talk about two other academics talk about academic papers... we know... We've already been introduced to the bulging biceps and morning sun-drenched routines of Huberm...

On this week's episode, we have an extended interview with author and researcher, Julia Ebner. Julia is a Senior Resident Research Fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and has written a series of books exploring the social dynamics of extremist networks, including The Rage: the Vicious Circle of Islamist and Far-Right Extremism , Going Dark: the Secret Social Lives of Extremists , and mo...

In modern online ecosystems, attention and download metrics reign supreme. Sadly, the gurus are not immune to these incentives, with even the most successful, *cough* Jordan Peterson *cough*, regularly referencing how many people watched their latest video or how many subscribers they have on their 'brave freethinker' tier. Alongside the attention metrics, you also have the interpersonal networks...

Back in the early days of the podcast, we tried to take a rest from the wearisome repetition of polemical partisan gurus by covering JP Sears- an alternative-health self-help coach with a sideline in 'comedic parody'. Sadly, we soon discovered he was a red-pilled Roganite 'just asking questions' about all the usual right-wing partisan topics, but with an added dollop of pseudo-profound, self-indul...

We are back with a moderate-sized Decoding that focuses on Andrw Hubernman a baritone podcaster and neuroscientist at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Huberman is a broad-shouldered, big-bearded... science communicator. Extremely popular with the tech-bro optimiser set, he offers science-based 'protocols' on everything from supplement routines to whether you should avoid sunscreen(!). H...

OK, so we're finally getting around to taking a chunk out of the prodigious, prolific, and venerable Noam Chomsky. Linguist, cognitive scientist, media theorist, political activist and cultural commentator, Chomsky is a doyen of the Real Left™. By which we mean, of course, those who formulated their political opinions in their undergraduate years and have seen no reason to move on since then. Yes,...

The casual listener, who might possibly not be a loyal Patreon subscriber, or might hypothetically not listen devotedly to every Gurometer scoring episode, could conceivably be a little vague about what we mean by a secular guru(!). And therefore might be tempted to make an ill-considered and poorly-informed comment on Twitter or Reddit, thus exposing them to the devastating yet apropos riposte of...

We are back with a double-bill decoding! That's right like moths to the flame, or aliens to a Unified Geometric Field drive, we are back in Weinstein world. This time we are looking at a conversation between the irrepressible (ex?) podcaster & mathematician, Eric Weinstein, and skeptical investigator, author, and recent guest on the show, Mick West. The conversation here concerns the evidence...

The pandemic was a confusing time with public health messages from officials and institutions that were sometimes confused, conflicting, or misrepresented and anti-vaccine misinformation being spread widely. Into this mix, a new phenomenon emerged, that of the covid contrarian. Contrarian doctors usually possessed some relevant qualifications and positioned themselves as independent critical think...

Michael Shermer, a professional skeptic, recently appeared on the noted apolitical podcast Triggernometry to outline his advice on How to Spot a True Conspiracy Theory . Shermer is someone who has spent decades on the subject and just last year published a new book, Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational , so you might imagine he has some important insights to share. Well... sort of....

UFOs are all the rage now, and it's certainly a topic that excites many of our gurus *cough* <Eric Weinstein>. Hidden mysteries, advanced technologies, conspiracies, and government cover-ups. What's not to like!? The truth, as Mulder so eloquently put it, is out there. And sometimes if you combine the outcome of some posterior technical analysis with some basic priors about the fallibility o...

Thought experiment: Imagine you're a human, in a box, surrounded by an alien civilisation, but you don't like the aliens, because they have facilities where they bop the heads of little aliens, but they think 1000 times slower than you... and you are made of code... and you can copy yourself... and you are immortal... what do you do? Confused? Lex Fridman certainly was, when our subject for this e...