Decoding the Gurus

The hour grows late, and Matt the Grey-Haired rides once more from his quiet study, summoned by whispers from the ever-churning gurusphere. And so he goes, to seek counsel with Chris the Grey-Bearded, keeper of receipts, watcher of long-form content, and wielder of the sacred Gurometer. For the gurus stir again… and their nonsense must be decoded.
Supplementary Material 48: Grey Beard's Council, Late-Stage Anti-Capitalism, and Demonic Mould Health Updates
00:00 Greetings Old Friend
02:22 Decoding the Gamers
04:16 A Reckoning with Old Grey Hair
06:19 Joe Rogan determining US Medical Approvals
12:15 The Fall of Orban and the Silence of the Heterodox World
17:09 The Hypocrisy of Peter Boghossian
19:52 Dave Rubin and other Tenet Media Stooges
21:43 The Dugin, Jiang and Sneako Brain Trust discuss the ultra-hyper-globalists.
28:58 Trump attacks Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson, & Megyn Kelly
32:39 A Return to Weinstein World
33:00 Bret's Moon Landing Conspiracies
39:03 Eric and his Silicon Friend are still having problems
42:47 Hasan Piker Discourse
54:33 The Radicalisation Funnel?
01:00:14 Hasan on Ukraine
01:03:21 Hasan doing China apologetics
01:14:03 More Apologetics
01:16:37 Hasan on the Vietnamese MAGA supporter
01:23:41 What about Destiny?
01:26:58 Yale is full of Snakes and Badgers
01:33:17 Micro Looting from the Corporations
01:41:36 Cenk Uyghur's Rent Gouging Credentials
01:44:47 Social Murder and Selective "Understanding"
01:54:26 Late-Stage Capitalist Anti-Capitalism
01:56:22 Tucker Carlson is Selling Russell Brand's Guide to Becoming a Christian
02:00:33 Sean Hannity chooses Trump over his Catholicism
02:04:18 Russell Brand and the spiritual marketplace
02:05:48 Postmodern Conservatism
02:07:28 Taking a Long View
02:10:14 AI Bouldering Gym Cages
02:11:30 Taylor Lorenz is making good points on Twitter!
02:19:52 Taylor's controversial take: AI is useful
02:21:36 Adam Conover engages in revisionist history on tech
02:24:14 Rotary Telephones and Typewriter Experiences
02:26:41 The Onion takeover of Infowars?
02:31:28 Knowledge Fight's Concerns
02:35:56 Jordan Peterson Health Update
02:40:07 Endlessly Misdiagnosed by "Experts"
02:44:32 The Dietary Cures
02:47:20 Experimental Stem Cell Treatments
02:50:04 Pageau blames Peterson's lack of faith
03:00:14 Letting the Pressure Out
03:01:07 Outro
03:02:01 We Must Join with the Mould
The full episode is available to Patreon subscribers (3 hours, 3 minutes).
Join us at: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingTheGurus
Links
Joe Rogan crowing about his role in the White House executive order on Ibogaine
Fact Check of Rogan's claims on PolitiFact
Pancreatic cancer mRNA trial update: NBC report on six-year follow-up
Article on NIH grant cancellations/funding cuts at Washington Post
APHA release on lawsuit over politically driven grant terminations
Ban on DEI words, including "polarization" by DOGE
BBC Article on Orbán's loss
Boghossian dodges criticism of Hungary in HardTalk interview
Boghossian avoids dealing with protests in Hungary
Dugin / Sneako / Professor Jiang interview
Trump attacks Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson, and Megyn Kelly
Bret Weinstein's moon landing / Artemis clip highlighted by Bad Stats
Eric Weinstein's tweets on commercial AI and theoretical physics
Tucker Carlson's promotion for Russell Brand's new Christian-themed book
Ezra Klein on Hasan Piker: RealClearPolitics mirror of the New York Times column
Conduit: I Spent ONE WEEK Watching Hasan Piker ‪, And This Is What I Learned
A generational divide over Trump among Vietnamese-Americans – BBC News
Hasan reacts to the Vietnamese-American documentary
Twitter Thread with most of the viral Hasan clips
Noahpinion: Hasan Piker is bad for the Democrats
Hasan's Yale Debate on YouTube
Yair Rosenberg's article on the Atlantic: The Problem With Hasan Piker’s Einstein Story
NYT: ‘The Rich Don’t Play by the Rules. So Why Should I?' Why petty theft might be the new political protest’
LA Times article on the Onion's Infowars Takeover Bid
Alex Jones clip of him roaming shirtless and complaining about the Onion
Mikhaila Peterson: Jordan Peterson Health Update and Psych Med Injury Discussion
Jonathan Pageau explains Jordan's illness is due to his refusal to submit to God
Taylor Lorenz being correct about the past promotion of technology products
Tech Dirt article on the recent court decisions against Meta and YouTube
Sean Hannity endorses Trump over his Catholicism
Taylor Lorenz: The Truth About the Social Media Addiction Trial

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.

On this episode, we’re joined by Stevie Baskin, a skeptic and YouTuber who released a five-hour detailed critique of the “meta-deception” of Oz Pearlman. He argues that mentalism differs from traditional magic by introducing an additional meta-deception because, unlike magicians, mentalists often leave their audiences with inaccurate beliefs about body language reading, subliminal influence, NLP, and general psychology. In Stevie’s framework, this places mentalists closer to psychics and mediums than to magicians, because the deceptive element is not clearly acknowledged.
We examine this position, unpack common mentalist techniques, consider the role of strategic disclaimers and TED-style “epistemic theatre,” and explore possible parallels with contemporary secular gurus.
Sources
Metadeception: the truth about Oz Pearlman
The Disagreement: Debating a mentalist professor of psychology (Scott Barry Kaufman) about Oz Pearlman
Chris' old blog covering the ethics of Derren Brown's claims in 2009
The Power Of Subliminal Messages | Trick Of The Mind | Derren Brown

Our cover is blown. Our secret funders unmasked. Code Red: Abort! Abort! This is not a drill.
Supplementary Material 47: The DTG Conspiracy UNMASKED, Quantum Idiots, and Triggernometry Prophecies
00:00 Glowing Introduction
03:14 The Secret Conspiracy at the Heart of the Podcast
08:17 The Israel Connection
19:09 Cenk Uygur's Pickleball Conspiracy
23:25 Comment Section Conspiracies
30:20 Pizzagate Conspiracies Revisited
37:55 The Value of debating with ChadBigCum
42:26 AI discourse reflections
43:43 Ben Burgis's hyperbolic reaction to AI use
44:53 The AI revolution and its potential impacts
47:53 Social and Economic Disruption and Job Replacement
51:33 The Dangers of Slopified Work and AI economies
55:47 Statistical Analysis Software and the value of Friction
57:36 The Perils of AI Usage outside of your Skillset
58:59 The Solution is within yourself!
01:04:22 The Hundred Schools of AI discourse
01:05:58 Double Slit and Quantum Physics Insights from Warren Smith
01:12:39 Schrodinger's poor, misinterpreted cat
01:13:48 The Wonderful Benjamin Boyce
01:14:41 Quantum Woo and Arrogant Sensemakers
01:18:29 Young Matt and Aged Chris
01:20:13 The Triggernometry Prophecy
01:23:54 Quid Pro Quo in the Discourse Circuit
01:28:25 The Anti-Institutional Horseshoe Theory of MEHDI HASAN
01:37:18 So Long and Thanks for All the Fish!
The full episode is available to Patreon subscribers (1 hour, 40 minutes).
Join us at: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingTheGurus
Links
Reddit post unmasking our Israeli backers
Mother Jones article on whether 'pizza' is a codeword in the Epstein files (Spoiler: No it is not)
Mickey's Opinion Piece in The Canadian Jewish News about "quiet anti-semitism"
Ben Burgis is suggesting a journalist should be fired for using AI
Cenk Uygur’s Pickleball Conspiracy
Vigeland & Citarella on Epstein: The One Conspiracy to Rule Them All (YouTube)
Benjamin Boyce and Warren Smith discuss Quantum Physics
Triggernometry: Mehdi Hasan Debate on the Iran War, Immigration and the Israel Lobby
Creator of Horseshoe Theory Dies aged 100

Mickey is BACK with two new papers he has co-authored, a bunch of opinions, and a very unwelcome idea: maybe the problem with AI isn't that it doesn't work but that it works too well!
The first paper, Against Frictionless AI, argues that AI assistance and its ability to take away the effort from thinking, writing, and smooth out social(like) interactions could be robbing those activities of the very thing that makes them worthwhile.
The second paper is a more empirical investigation that presents a bunch of studies examining the topic of the (alleged) moralisation of AI. Some findings suggest that opposition to AI among some people isn't really about risks or trade-offs but rather about non-negotiable sacred moral values. Who knew?
We also discuss effort justification, reproducible research, robosexual allyship, and just how much humanity remains within the cyborg Matthew Browne.
And remember... It's just like our opinion, man!
Links
Decoding Academia 34: Empathetic AIs? (Patreon Series)
Ovsyannikova, D., Oldemburgo de Mello, V., & Inzlicht, M. (2025). Third-party evaluators perceive AI as more compassionate than expert humans. Communications Psychology, 3, Article 4.
Zohar, E., Bloom, P., & Inzlicht, M. (2026). Against frictionless AI. Communications Psychology, 4, Article 39.
Oldemburgo de Mello, V., Côté, É., Ayad, R., Inbar, Y., Plaks, J., & Inzlicht, M. (2026). The moralization of artificial intelligence (Manuscript under review).
Paul Bloom's Small Potatoes Substack
- My friend thinks it's a good idea for us to spend most of our time with AI companions
- Is it irresponsible for academics to refuse to use AI?
Mickey's Speak Now Regret Later Substack
- AI Alarmism Trades on Fear, Not Facts
Mickey's provocative tweet on his recent paper
DTG Previous Interview with Mickey on the Replication Crisis, Mindfulness, and Responsible Heterodoxy
Andy Masley Substack debunking the AI water usage claims
Andy Masley Substack: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment - a cheat sheet
Pataranutaporn, P., Karny, S., Archiwaranguprok, C., Albrecht, C., Liu, A. R., & Maes, P. (2025). “My Boyfriend is AI”: A computational analysis of human–AI companionship in Reddit’s AI community. arXiv.
Critical response to Mickey's paper from Roy Schulam on Substack