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Decoding the Gurus

"Mini" Decoding of Michael Shermer's Advice on Conspiracy Theories

Decoding the Gurus

Christopher Kavanagh and Matthew Browne

Science, Leisure, Social Sciences, Society & Culture

4.21.1K Ratings

🗓️ 21 June 2023

⏱️ 86 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

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.

Join us as we cast a quizzical eye over suggestions that every reasonable person should be a conspiracy theorist, Barack Obama may have been controlled by shadowy masters, the CIA invented the very notion of conspiracy theories, and that what we really need is to return the good old days when anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish conspiracies were commonplace and spoken of freely... yes, really!

Back soon enough with a full waffle episode!

Links


Transcript

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0:00.0

You're going to be. Oh, Hello and a

0:26.2

welcome to Decoding the Guru's a podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist

0:30.0

listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand what they're talking about.

0:34.4

As always, I am Matthew Brown. He is Chris Kavanaugh. I remain the psychologist.

0:41.3

He still is the anthropologist and today Chris we are doing a

0:45.0

surprise impromptu mini decoding. It's coming as a surprise to me to the audience to

0:52.2

everyone but you have your ducks all in a row I assume what are we

0:57.0

doing here today well it shouldn't come as a surprise to you because I mentioned it for like a month but but never mind because

1:06.4

you say a lot of things I do say many things I do and so this is a mini decoding episode meaning it doesn't have all the

1:19.2

bells and whistles of a normal episode and notably as with previous many decodings you haven't

1:27.1

listened to the content yet so you'll be coming at the clips fresh and

1:32.4

haven't had your you're kind of pre-game analytical session.

1:37.4

I do have clips and there is a targeted piece of content and we are going to very shortly dive into that content.

1:47.0

It's just that I've went slightly further afield from that initial topic.

1:51.0

So slightly less many, it's more a medium-sized coding.

1:58.0

Yeah, I get it, I get it, like a novella rather than a short story, but not really.

2:02.0

It's not a Uykalski size clip. like a novella rather than a short story but not really.

2:02.8

It's not what we're talking about here but a little bit longer than a nine minute

2:10.2

Sam Harris coding.

2:13.4

All right, cool, cool.

2:15.3

All right.

2:16.3

So I'm with the audience here.

...

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