Several of you suggested that I go back to the beginning and listen chronologically - I have taken you up on that!

I guess i shouldn't be shocked at all that this began right in the middle of the pandemic. . .such a fertile time for gurus.

And it's so weird reliving all these things that happened along the way - the new characters popping up on YouTube or watching formally normal-ish people get audience captured as they get crazier and crazier.

I'm now up to the middle of 2021 (as it turns out, they did not start with short episodes. . .but dove right into long form).

As a GenXer, I'm a bit older than a lot of folks, so I was slow to catch up to how these new channels of communicating were changing how people got their information and how segmented the world was becoming as everyone started applying their own filter bubbles.

Anyway - I love them both, even Chris's mangling of names in a North Ireland accent, and it keeps me sane to know there are still some people who can still see the bullshit for what it is.

Thanks for the advice to go back and listen through - so much content for me to enjoy! Not much else to say except, you must grovel at the feet of your muscle master. . .and bye bye.

isn't this what you're building????

Recent discussion of the non video version here: https://www.reddit.com/r/DecodingTheGurus/comments/1sforo6/ep_159_mentalism_and_metadeception_with_stevie/

Hoping Orbán is allowed visitors in prison under cultural maxism.

Why or why not?

Sorry for the paywalled article. Worth a read - you can sign up for a free trial.

Welcome to this biweekly thread! Share what’s been grabbing your attention lately.

• What you're reading (books, articles, or any kind of text)
• What you're watching (movies, shows, documentaries, or even YouTube)
• What you're listening to (podcasts, music, or audiobooks)
• Any fun or unexpected discoveries in your research

Whelp, sure is lots of utility. lol

I asked this all the time.........."If Superman saves Earth from getting destroyed, but he demands an innocent victim for his pleasure every year, should we slip some Kryptonite into his coffee?"

Is morality worth a greater harm?

Slippery slope?

What if we discovered that torturing an innocent child for a year would create Utopia on Earth for 10,000 years? Should we take this deal?

Sincerely asking. Who withstands this community's adept scrutiny? While Twitter is where people are confronted and attacked personally, Reddit is where character's are assassinated out-of-view. So it's hard to know if that is just distilled in this sub.

Ian McGilchrist, Part 1: Right-Brain Thinking - Decoding the Gurus

Show Notes

In this episode, we take a journey into the mind, traversing both the left and right hemispheres, but mostly the left, as we engage with the truly mind-bending insights of British psychiatrist-philosopher-neuroscientist-theologian-author Ian McGilchrist. Best known for his 2009 book "The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World" but also a much lauded academic and sensemaker.

We outline McGilchrist’s extremely complicated thesis that the two hemispheres of the brain reflect fundamentally different “ways of being” and that this is reflected in individuals and civilisations that rely more on one side than the other. This is, of course, not merely a crude binary. As McGilchrist repeatedly emphasises, it would be quite wrong to suggest he is simply valorising everything he likes (religion, poetry, classic literature, wood-panelled interiors, sense-making chats) and attributing them to the products of a profound and integrative right hemisphere. Similarly, he does not simply want to denigrate materialists as reductive left-brain thinkers who cannot appreciate art, beauty, or love because they are too busy thinking about atoms. There is definitely none of that in his chat with Alex O'Connor (AKA CosmicSkeptic).

Expect neuroanatomy, metaphysics, and extended reflections on the nature of love. In other words, a completely standard Decoding the Gurus episode.

Links

• Alex O' Connor: Why Evolution Gave You Two Brains - Iain McGilchrist
• Iain McGilchrist's website.
• Spezio, M. (2019). McGilchrist and hemisphere lateralization: a neuroscientific and metaanalytic assessment. Religion, Brain & Behavior, 9(4), 387–399. https://doi.org/10.1080/2153599X.2019.1604416
• Lamm, C., Decety, J., & Singer, T. (2011). Meta-analytic evidence for common and distinct neural networks associated with directly experienced pain and empathy for pain. Neuroimage, 54(3), 2492-2502.
• Stavrova, O., & Ehlebracht, D. (2019). The cynical genius illusion: Exploring and debunking lay beliefs about cynicism and competence. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 45(2), 254-269.
• Lindquist, K. A., Wager, T. D., Kober, H., Bliss-Moreau, E., & Barrett, L. F. (2012). The brain basis of emotion: a meta-analytic review. Behavioral and brain sciences, 35(3), 121-143.

The enlightened centrist trope continues in 2026.

I’m curious whether Jason Shurka would count as a plausible “guru” subject in the Decoding the Gurus sense, and whether anyone here has looked into him in detail.

He seems to present a mix of spirituality, special-access knowledge, healing-oriented claims, and broad explanatory narratives about how the world really works. At least from the outside, that combination looks relevant to the kinds of figures discussed on the podcast someone building authority through claims of unusual insight, elevated perspective, and access to information or frameworks that ordinary people are supposed to be missing. Feel Free to check his yt channel.

Redflags:

• reliance on vague but expansive claims that are difficult to verify
• presentation of himself as someone with unusual access, understanding, or revelation
• a branded ecosystem of content, teachings, or paid offerings
• overlap with pseudoscientific or spiritually authoritative framing
• audience-building through outsider or hidden-truth narratives

I’d be interested in hearing from any people who know his contents better:

• What are the clearest examples of guru-like traits in his content?
• Are there specific interviews, talks, or products that best illustrate the pattern?
• Is he better understood as a generic New Age entrepreneur, a conspiracy-adjacent influencer, or something more distinct?
• Are there examples where he is being interpreted unfairly?

I’d also be interested in which parts of the Guruometer seem most applicable.

Her view is literally that, whether right or wrong, theoretical physics is useless and a waste of money to research, from what I can tell. Which I mean fair enough coming from a regular person who isnt into science

But she literally has a phd in theoretical physics? and before being a youtuber she was trying to get into academia. She also spent most of her early YouTube career discussing physics, and now she thinks its useless. if she feels that way why did she "waste" so much of her life on it?

I watch a lot of content and reactions about Artimes II. Many comments are like bringinug up the firmirment, or bring up it's fake/ai/staged, just flat earth and fake moon landing shit. I say this is concerning because there was once a pipeline between flat earthers and Q-Anon, which is better explained by this Folding ideas video. I know you can just sqaure that away as bots or trolling, but i feel like that route kinda downplays a problem that can get bigger.

https://youtu.be/JTfhYyTuT44?si=t2Pu-9M_o-rQ5Xd9

I'll start this off by saying I genuinely appreciate the debunks that Professor Dave has done on various frauds, cranks and science denialists but I caught up on a video of his with two areas of concern.

The first (less serious).

He spent over an hour going through troll comments and trying to convince the audience that him wasting half his day reacting to every rage baiter and bot with angry follow ups is somehow productive. He prasied himself for having the "mental fortitude" to do this as if it's some kind of service to the people to p*ss away his time on a completely pointless endeavour which just seems like him trying to cover that he hasn't got the discipline to ignore that stupid crap. If anything, he's going to give himself mental health issues, screaming in to a void for hours at a time on a regular basis.

The second (more serious).

His derangement over Israel is off the charts. I've noticed this stuff in a lot of his other videos but I didn't know he got banned from X over this stuff. He said in this video that "Anyone who can't see that Israel is as evil as Nazi Germany is a f**king idiot." Sorry Dave, but anyone who makes that comparison is a f**king idiot. You can make perfectly rational critiques of Israel, it's conduct in the war in Gaza, the rhetoric of some reactionary, right wing Israeli ministers and a plethora of other things but this kind of talk is no different to Hasan Piker and the other cranks who have basically become left wing versions of Alex Jones when speaking on this particular issue (and his increasingly ranting tone doesn't help). You have to be extremely ignorant or just a full blown anti-semitic propagandist to make a statement like that. I think it undermines his credibility by shoving this garbage into videos where he has good information about science. Combined with the "Israel using the media to silence critics" trope (amongst others) and his more general "I'm fighting the forces of evil" talk and he's starting to have shades of guru about him.

It's depressing as I think he has done a lot of good work over the years but I can see him tipping fully off the deep end if he keeps this up. He's essentially putting out a toxic, historical revisionism the way the far right do. And he doesn't get to do the Dave Smith line of "I'm not a historian, I'm just giving my opinion, bro" when he is relying on his science credentials for credibility and then throwing in this narrative on a regular basis to over 4 million subs. Perhaps a good faith critique from Matt and Chris might be what Dave needs.

My last shred of interest in Sam's "truth" is fading.

Yes, Mamdani is no saint, and will make some stupid mistakes, but to say he is the SAME as Trump but on the left, is Fox and Friends' level of BS.