Special: Guru Right to Reply with Chris Williamson

Decoding the Gurus

Christopher Kavanagh and Matthew Browne

Science, Leisure, Social Sciences, Society & Culture

4.2 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 10 December 2021

⏱️ 108 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Listeners might remember Chris Williamson from our episode on Gad Saad. He was the former love island contestant who interviewed Gad and appeared to have taken an IDW turn. So while Matt & Chris focused their critical attention primarily on the master of irony, Gad Saad, they also raised a rather skeptical eye towards Chris Williamson as well.

And listeners, they were not kind. Not at all...

Nevertheless, Chris W. reached out and accepted our standing offer for any guru covered to come on to the show and respond to the criticisms we made. The result was an interesting and wide ranging exchange that covered issues such as what it's like for a non-specialist to interview famous academics, the incentives and pressures at play in the modern social media ecosystem, and how DTG commentary feels when you are on the receiving side!

For fans of cringe comedy this episode might be particularly enjoyable as off-hand comments and cutting remarks are discussed and dissected for their fairness. But (spoiler!) everyone survives to the end. Chris (Kavanagh) also took a degree of pleasure in watching the alleged 'nice guy' of the podcast squirm over his cheeky remarks. All in all there is some nice symmetry, in that everybody had something to cringe about.

But perhaps this dialogue will alchemically transform that cringe into spiritual gold, and we can all learn something and grow a little as people or podcasters? Or maybe not? Time will tell, ay?

Have a listen and see what you think!

P.S. Sincere apologies for the audio quality, especially on Matt's end. We recorded this at an ungodly hour of the morning and Matt was too zombified to select the good microphone. Or the DISC could have interfered with it... Something like that.

Links

The original DTG episode on Gad Saad with Chris Williamson

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	You're going to. So, Hello and welcome to Dakota Naguer as the podcast, we're an anthropologist
0:29.5	and a psychopologist listen to the greatest science the world has to offer
0:32.4	with trialboats to understand what they're talking about. Just listen to the greatest science the world has to offer with
0:32.6	Traverse to understand what they're talking about. I'm Professor Matt Brown
0:35.8	with me.
0:36.8	Professor Chris Kavanaugh. It's a very bright and early morning here Chris how are you? I'm fantastic my my early morning glow that you can
0:50.0	see through the zoom interface. Your your pallor is particularly pallor. can. sort of incidentally covered on our podcast, a certain fellow called Stan Harris,
1:04.1	very kindly agreed to come and talk to us about some of the issues that we raised and
1:09.2	we have another guess who again we didn't explicitly cover but was kind of caught in the general
1:16.5	crossfire of our main target.
1:20.8	If you introduce it by saying that it's someone from the Gad's episode, then the initial response will be,
1:29.6	oh my god, the godfather has, has arrived to give us a satire election. But no, he did not respond to that fashion. He blocked those as soon as the episode came out. But as you say there was another person involved in that episode, Chris Williamson.
1:49.7	Hello Chris.
1:50.9	Matthew, Christopher, thanks for having me. Yeah. Hello Chris, ahead of Sam Harris. He's not following in the footsteps of Sam Harris. It's just how bad I am at scheduling things.
2:10.0	It's literally been months since. We have this policy which we probably need to consider how far it extends.
2:19.7	And not to you, Chris, I mean, but like we cover some quite bad people and we we currently say that anybody
2:28.4	that we cover has the right to come on and discuss it with us, which probably will continue to do unless we cover a
2:37.2	neo-Nazi or something, we'll probably not invite them on.
2:40.4	But just to be clear, Chris, I'm not saying you're a new and that too.
2:43.0	Thank you.
2:45.0	And Mark, do you have an introduction for Chris?
2:50.0	Yes, well, it's fair to say Chris's mainly podcast. Chris is a mainly a podcast at the moment. Chris has seen a lot of success with his podcast
	...

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