In an increasingly unstable world this kind of respectful confrontation of the wild discussion happening on the internet is needed.

Presented as objective criticism of conspiracy theories but mostly just Leftists portraying conservatives as nut jobs as if there’s no conspiracies in the Left. What is a woman?

Thrasymachus was an excellent debunker, as was Therisites. Thucydides and EH Carr— Their effectiveness was rooted in their capacity to draw fire power from an array of critical thinking tools, directing that power to their debunking work. I appreciate the importance of “debunking” Qanon, however one can do so, but West’s participation in the UAP debate strikes me as quite unconvincing. I would love to hear someone effectively debunk this stuff, because it freaks me out!! The fact that West’s contributions are so shallow, along with his tendency to cherry pick in ways that are glaringly obvious — well, this kind of freaks me out. If this is the only real debunker we have, then I have no choice but to assume this phenomenon is bigger than I once thought. That is how I happened on West— looking for someone who could tell me this was all hooey, and not finding it… folks, our whole legal system is premised on the idea that multiple corroborated testimonies actually mean something — videos, they just aren’t the only form of evidence — if they were, we would be in big trouble, given the growing sophistication of deep fakes…

Mick is so disrespectful and rude. His skews on data and personal bias keep him and listeners from the truth. He should receive a gold medal for the mental gymnastics he undertakes to explain away anything that doesn’t fit his narrative. There’s not a zero star option or he would get it.

Love the one with Jason Colavito

You are a legend. Keep this up.

The UFO people Mick interviews take us into the rabbit hole itself—which is terrifying. At the end of the interview one knows absolutely nothing. Everything is an intriguing possibility but nothing can be really defined because that would kill off the scene (and their industry). They also gather credibility to themselves by citing government titles or inside knowledge of “programs” but this special access never yields superior evidence. When asked they’ll pivot to describing internal government processes and we’re off down into another rabbit hole. The cumulative effect of the interview is a schmoozy cloud of vague pseudo-authenticity. It’s a feeling-tone of “wow this is an impressive guy, he knows a lot of Military people, but he’s real humble too. Something is definitely up I’ll check out that History Channel show.” They also attempt to use fawning against the interviewer, audience, and UFO community which is a propaganda technique. It’s either a psy op, grift, or both.

I love listening to Mick’s podcast and admire his ability to calmly and effectively converse with people who would have me at wit’s end with their hair-brained ideas on the way the world works. It’s been a while since he dropped a new episode and i’m anxiously awaiting the next!

Mick has previously taken such an assiduous approach to debunking, bypassing the quick thrill of condescension for the hard work for verification, research and self validation of things such as optical illusions and radar imaging artifacts. In this podcast he sets himself on the equally demanding task of minimally confrontational friendly chats mostly with true believers. Don’t listen if you are looking for gotcha moments and anyone “totally destroying” anyone. But do listen if you are interested in the real world and human value of a skeptical approach to bunk and paranoid thinking. Like science proper, rationality and skepticism are maddeningly slow processes that can only help those who want the help. Since irrationality isn’t something that only lives in certain people, rather it lives in all of us some of the time, it behooves us to be both self critical and self compassionate. Because our thinking and perceiving are mostly evolutionarily tuned kluges, we are all using a type of FLIR map of reality. It’s really good at some tasks but error and artifact prone in many other ways. Yes there are clusters of bad thinking, but the world isn’t really properly divided into the coherent folks and the confused. If you haven’t noticed yourself being irrational, you haven’t noticed yourself.

I enjoy listening to the well thought out and polite interaction that Mick has with his guests. Especially when I’m screaming ‘BS’ at my speaker. Great, insightful discussions. Really enjoyed the most recent discussion with the former Moonie. Keep up the great work.

The debate with Paradigm Shift is the best episode so far, Mick. One discussion on the topic of 9//11 conspiracy I never hear much about is the motivation of the supposed conspirators: why would it be necessary to both plant explosives and hit the towers with aircraft? Hiding the installation of explosives seems like it would be much more difficult, involve far more people, than hijacking a number of planes. Was the goal of the conspirators to actually collapse the buildings? Or was it to instill fear? I’d argue that simply colliding aircraft into iconic buildings would achieve the goal, if your goal was to instill fear, even without a collapse. The collapse was an added bonus, so to speak, the icing on the cake, for the conspirators. If however, their goal was to collapse the building, why go through the hassle of both rigging the building with explosives, and then hijacking aircraft, if you’ve already rigged the building with explosives? Why not just blow it up, and save yourself the trouble of having to teach your attackers how to fly planes, and then actually hijacking them? In the countless other smaller explosive attacks by multitudes of terrorists throughout the decades, no terror organization ever tried to obscure the fact that they used explosives. If the conspiracy is, of course, that the US government tried to frame Al Qaeda, my argument still stands: why wouldn’t aircraft be enough, even without a collapse? And operationally, how did it work? Were the technicians observing from a rooftop somewhere remotely to see which floors the aircrafts hit, so that they could trigger the explosives to begin the collapse from those precise floors?

Nice to hear conversations between people who fundamentally disagree on issues but to do so cordially

Mick is one of the smartest polite guys out there. He dives deep into conspiratorial thinking in order to give himself a better understanding. Along the way he’s able to help some people shed light on, and question their own beliefs.