Michael Shellenberger: Conspiratorial Propaganda

Decoding the Gurus

Christopher Kavanagh and Matthew Browne

Science, Leisure, Social Sciences, Society & Culture

4.2 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 18 April 2025

⏱️ 127 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode, Matt and Chris pour themselves a stiff drink and slip into the fever‑dream crossover of Jordan Peterson and Michael Shellenberger, a conversation that opens with the claim that Western Europe is now the single greatest threat to free speech; yes, croissants and GDPR apparently out‑authoritarian China and Russia. According to Shellenberger, we can now rest safe as free speech has been restored and “America Is Back!” thanks to God-Emperor Trump and the living avatar of honest utterance, Elon 'Horus' Musk.

Our hosts marvel as Shellenberger insists USAID is a rogue soft‑power leviathan that somehow staged January 6th, sabotaged the 2020 election, and deserves to be nuked from orbit... although he can’t quite prove any of that YET. Alongside the conspiratorial drivel there is also a heavy serving of Peterson's obscurantist mythicism and dinner‑party anthropology as he explains how Hungary is a model democracy, the US nation beset by parasites, and that this is all inevitably connected to how people are not paying enough attention to Jesus.

But that is not all! You will also learn about Manly Men vs. Gentlemen, Musk’s “move fast and break government” ethos, and the revelation that free speech is not a nice‑to‑have but a must‑have—unless you are a lawyer, journalist, or student on the wrong side of the Trump administration.

So buckle up for an hour of dystopian déjà vu, as two self‑styled rebel intellectuals morph into state propagandists, cheerleading every single action of Trump and Musk while lecturing the rest of us on free thought.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Hello, welcome to Dakota the Gurus, the podcast for an anthropologist and a psychologist,
0:31.5	listen to the greatest clients the world has to offer, and we try to understand what they're talking about.
0:35.6	I'm Matt Brown, and with me is the Snowy to my Tintin,
0:39.7	co-investigator, extraordinaire.
0:42.6	What's her name again?
0:43.4	Christopher Kavanaugh.
0:44.9	That's right.
0:45.7	Yeah, he's the anthropologist.
0:47.4	Yeah, there you are.
0:48.3	What are you?
0:50.0	Oh, by process of elimination.
0:52.5	You're the psychologist.
0:53.7	That's right.
0:54.5	You could have deduced that.
0:55.8	You could have deduced that, Chris.
0:56.9	If I had a formula, I would have worked that out.
0:59.9	And I do note Matt here, you're, what is it?
1:05.4	Neo-Neo-colonialism, because you are the product of a colonial state, Australia.
1:11.6	Yes.
1:12.6	But you're kind of the offshoots of colonialism, right?
1:16.6	You were also a prison colony.
1:17.6	So you're a prison colony, colonial state.
	...

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