Interview with Virginia Heffernan on Edge, the dangers of Scientism, & Culture Wars
Decoding the Gurus
Christopher Kavanagh and Matthew Browne
4.2 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 26 February 2022
⏱️ 142 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this week's show we have a broad ranging discussion with the well known journalist and author Virginia Heffernan. Virginia has written a bunch on the topic of technology, social media, scientism, and especially the Edge organisation. We discuss her research into Edge and related figures but also range further afield to cover debates in academia, the culture war and gurus, anthropology debates in the 90s, race & IQ rationalists, and other such topics.
One short service note is that Matt is incognito for part of the conversation as he had a prior appointment so you will have to endure Chris functioning on his own but do not fear our intrepid psychologist re-emerges to offer some words of wisdom at the end. Also, the conversation with Virginia was recorded in advance of the events in Ukraine so no recent events are discussed (which is probably for the best).
For those who want to do a bit more digging on the topics discussed, below are a bunch of related articles and you can also follow Virginia on Twitter (@page88) and check out her new podcast 'This is Critical' which encourages people to look critically at a wide array of topics, which is quite on brand for us!
Links
- Virginia's piece on Edge & John Brockman
- Virginia's essays on Wired
- Virginia's Substack piece on Jordan Peterson
- Virginia's Substack piece on Peter Thiel
- Virginia's Website
- Virginia's book: Magic & Loss- The Internet as Art
- Insider article on the sordid tale of Chris chan
- Two articles Chris wrote on his ancient blog about the Captain Cook debate (part 1 and part 2)
This Week's Sponsor
- Check out the sponsor of this week's episode, Ground News, and get the app at ground.news/gurus.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | You're going to. Oh, Hello and welcome again to Decoding the Guru's it's the podcast we're an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand what they're talking about. I'm Matt Brown with me is Chris Kavanaugh and sometimes we have friends on guests on to have a bit of a chat |
| 0:45.7 | they tell us what they think about things we tell them what we think about things |
| 0:49.2 | and together we make sense of this crazy world don't we Chris we do we do on occasion and we've got a |
| 0:57.3 | lot of them coming up we've done a lot of interviews Matt on our roster of super brains that we've spoken to. |
| 1:06.0 | We have timber on toast of the YouTube channel that we were singing the praises of. We have Liam Bright, noted philosopher and Leibohu, a prize |
| 1:18.3 | winner, Leibhume, prize-winning philosopher and Julian Walker from |
| 1:24.8 | some spirituality podcast are good colleagues in the fight against the |
| 1:29.8 | ADSC and so so we've got even more booked. |
| 1:35.0 | Exciting famous names like Josh Zeps for instance. |
| 1:39.0 | Oh, we got Josh Zeps. |
| 1:40.0 | That's right. |
| 1:41.0 | We've got him. |
| 1:42.0 | We're gonna, we're gonna debate Rogin. |
| 1:45.0 | We're not, we're not, I try to get out, but they keep pulling me back in. |
| 1:49.0 | But that's only because it's Josh that we'll agree to do that and then we haven't we have more there's more |
| 1:58.4 | Oh, well wait mad there's more |
| 2:00.5 | There's a veritable slew of interviews because you keep booking them. |
| 2:05.0 | That's right. I just want to talk to people. |
| 2:08.0 | I just want to talk to people. You know, you're on your own mind, it's, you know, sometimes. |
| 2:13.7 | It's not enough. |
| 2:24.0 | Yeah, I just have it up to here with your sunny disposition and your constant reference of psychology theories. |
| 2:29.0 | So you're like polyamorous but for podcasting. That's right, I need hot takes, feed me them, feed me them them what do you think about gurus tell me that's that's |
... |
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