Decoding the Gurus

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...

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 de...

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.

...

Ken Wilber, the grand architect of Integral Theory, enters the Decoding chamber (wearing a striking but slightly unconvincing wig) as we explore a worldview that confidently absorbs every religion, philosophy, and half-remembered psychology paper into one majestic, Borg-like synthesis. Resistance, as it turns out, is not just futile... it is probably “first-tier thinking".

This is a world of elaborate, baroque cosmologies. Layers wi...

In this Gurometer double bill, Matt and Chris break out the much-sought-after Gurometer™ to score Teal Swan and Scott Galloway across the 11 recurring guru traits. In one efficient episode, we compare cosmic-certified spirituality with secular man-talk (and a surprising amount of puffer-jacket merchandising). As a bonus, get ready to thrill at Matt's eternal puzzlement at his own simple binary question of 'guru-osity'.

Links

In our never-ending quest to alienate all potential online audiences, we finger-wag about rampant Epstein conspiracism and explain why we are, on balance, anti-murder.

The full episode is available to Patreon subscribers (2 hours, 42 minutes).

Join us at: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingTheGurus

In our never-ending quest to alienate all potential online audiences, we finger-wag about rampant Epstein conspiracism and explain why we are...

In Part 2, Matt and Chris return to Blindboy, now broadcasting from a solar-powered podcast and therefore morally unimpeachable. The darkness, however, remains. Having established in Part 1 that the global elite are a vampiric class of depraved blackmailers who traffic children and delight in cruelty, in Part 2, Blindboy offers us some welcome relief in the form of answering the question of what it looks like to be one of the good ...

In this episode, Matt and Chris turn their attention to Blindboy Boatclub, the Irish podcaster, satirist, and former member of the Rubberbandits. Blindboy is recognisable for his plastic-bag headwear, which has transitioned from a comedy prop into something a bit deeper and more philosophical. His podcast blends ASMR-style delivery, stream-of-consciousness storytelling, and cultural and political commentary, drifting between reflec...

Another episode where the guest is not a sense-making prophet or a galaxy-brained guru, as we engage in academic dialogos with Oxford psychologist Andrew Przybylski. This is a preview of our Decoding Academia series on Patreon (now 30+ episodes deep), where we swap internet gurus and rhetoric for actual researchers and empirical debates.

Andrew’s work spans motivation, gaming, and digital technology. His most recent crime is that he...

We return to some old friends, and almost immediately, we regret the decision. Also, get ready for some heady insights from history, a new conspiracy hypothesis, and Game Theory based insights.

The full episode is available to Patreon subscribers (1 hour, 37 minutes).

Join us at: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingTheGurus

Supplementary Material 45

00:00 Introduction

01:15 Mick Drop

04:44 Scott Galloway's Favourite Conservative

06:37 Konstan...

Ever heard of cognitive dissonance? That thing a psychology lecturer might have explained to you once upon a time, likely using the same UFO cult example everyone else uses. Well, a new paper by Thomas Kelly suggests that the UFO cult example might have been ever so slightly oversold.

Kelly's archival work suggests that the researchers didn't just observe the cult as reported. Instead, they infiltrated it, faked supernatural experie...

Cult Season rumbles on as Chris and Matt expand their minds in an attempt to absorb the cosmic insights of spiritual influencer and alleged cult leader Teal Swan (born Mary Teal Bosworth, 1984). Our intrepid hosts explore her recent appearance on the Just Tap In podcast with Emilio “starchild” Ortiz — a beanie-wearing vessel of pure credulity, lobbing softball metaphysical questions gently into the astral winds.

The topic covered is...

In this Decoding Academia episode, we take a look at a 2025 paper by Daria Ovsyannikova, Victoria Olden, and Mickey Inzlicht, asking a question that might make some people uncomfortable/angry, specifically, are AI-generated responses perceived as more empathetic than those written by actual humans?

We walk through the design in detail (including why this is a genuinely severe test), hand out deserved open-science brownie points, and...

In this interview episode, we are joined by physicists Sam Gregson (Bad Boy of Science YouTube channel) and Tim Henke to examine the rise of science populism: a style of science communication that borrows the tactics of political populism, including grievance narratives, institutional distrust, and conspiratorial framing, while presenting its advocates as lone truth-tellers battling a corrupt academic elite.

We discuss how DTG favou...

We descend once more into the Gurusphere, encountering secret peasant archmages, decline narratives, Epstein emails, and endless moral panics.

The full episode is available to Patreon subscribers (1 hour, 37 minutes).

Join us at: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingTheGurus

00:00 SM 44 PF

00:23 Introduction

01:30 Konstantin Kisin: Not Left Or Right, Just Right

05:20 Boghossian is shocked by pessimistic French people

08:50 Konstantin and Warre...

In a rare departure from our usual diet of online weirdos, this episode features an academic who is very much not a guru. We’re joined by Julia Rohrer, a psychologist at Leipzig University whose work straddles the disciplinary boundaries of open science, research transparency, and causal inference. Julia is also an editor at Psychological Science and has spent much of the last decade politely pointing out that psychologists often d...

We crawl around the dark crevices of the internet so you don't have to. And what wonders we have to show you...

The full episode is available to Patreon subscribers (1 hour, 34 minutes).

Join us at: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingTheGurus

Supplementary Material 43

00:00 Introduction and Banter Allotment

01:23 The Hypocrisy of the Defenders of Western Civilisation

10:0...

We return for Part 2 of our Scott Galloway deep dive, where the vibes remain strong, the confidence unwavering, and the relationship with empirical evidence increasingly… decorative.

Returning to our Modern Wisdom safari, we continue navigating the forbidden terrain of men, masculinity, and male suffering: a topic so dangerous that it requires constant ritual disclaimers, whispered caveats, and the occasional nervous glance around t...

We dig deep into the online world to DO OUR OWN RESEARCH and return with horrors never dreamt of by man.

The full episode is available to Patreon subscribers (1 hour, 23 minutes).

Join us at: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingTheGurus

Supplementary Material 42

00:00 Introduction

11:13 Rogan and Shane Gillis on Nick Fuentes vs Piers Morgan

17:49 Jimmy Carr's Physics Insig...