May 21st, 2009 qaz111
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Guests: Ben Radford of The Skeptical Inquirer, psychic detective Nancy Weber, police Captain Jim Moore, and NJ State Police Lieutenant Bill Hughes wrap up their discussion of the Amy Hoffman murder investigation.
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On this episode of Skeptiko, psychic detective investigations with Ben Radford of the Skeptical Inquirer.
Ben: How do you explain the fact that in at least, you know, if you want to take five, six criteria, how do you explain the fact that in several occasions, at least four instances, the two police detectives remember Nancy Weber saying something different than what she says? How do you explain that?
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April 2nd, 2009 admin
Popular Paranormal Blogger, Greg Taylor discusses re-educating skeptics, and reviewing evidence of controversial science like PSI, and NDE.
Del Mar, CA, April 2, 2009 – Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris when he interviews TheDailyGrail founder, Greg Taylor, for a discussion on balanced reporting on strange, anomalous stuff. During the 30-minute interview (http://skeptiko.com/index.php?id=78) Taylor talks about his role as a counterweight to the skeptical voice that pervades most discussions of the paranormal:
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April 2nd, 2009 admin
Show Notes: Greg Taylor, of The Daily Grail on the New Skeptics
Guest: Greg Taylor, blogger and creator of the popular paranormal website The Daily Grail. Here’s the link to Greg’s article on the Million Dollar Challenge:
http://www.dailygrail.com/features/the-myth-of-james-randis-million-dollar-challenge
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Alex: Welcome to skeptiko where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris.
On this episode of skeptiko, I have a very interesting interview with Greg Taylor, the founder and main blogger over at The Daily Grail, a paranormal website that I think many of you are familiar with or maybe should be familiar with.
It’s a very, very interesting website. It does a great job of balanced reporting on strange anomalous stuff, and also some skeptical stuff, with a real, intelligent edge to it. I’ve always enjoyed it, and I really enjoyed the chance to get to know Greg a little bit and speak with him on this interview. We talked a lot about skepticism and what it’s like trying to be kind of a counterweight to that skeptical voice that is out there in so many places. It’s a very interesting chat. I think you’ll enjoy it. Coming up: my dialogue with Greg Taylor, of the Daily Grail:
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March 9th, 2009 admin
View Show Notes: 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense, Michael Brooks
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On this episode of Skeptiko, science journalist and author of 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense: The Most Baffling Scientific Mysteries of Our Time, Michael Brooks.
“People might say come on science give us the truth about this. I’m not sure people actually want the truth. I think a lot of the time, in science and religion studies, people want validation of their original viewpoint.”
Stay with us for Skeptiko.
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February 28th, 2009 admin
Show Notes: Near-Death Experience Research, Dr. Peter Fenwick
Guest: Dr. Peter Fenwick, neuropsychiatrist, world renown expert on end of life phenomena, including near-death experiences and deathbed visions. His most recent book is, The Art of Dying.
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Alex: Welcome to Skeptiko where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris.
Today, I don’t have much news on the experiments we’re working on but I do have a very, very interesting interview coming up with Dr. Peter Fenwick, one of the foremost authorities on near-death experiences and a really clear and compelling voice about so many of the topics that we talk about here in Skeptiko. It’s a rather long interview so I’m going to get right to it. Here’s my interview with Dr. Peter Fenwick.
Alex: Our guest today is an internationally renowned neuropsychiatrist and Britain’s leading clinical authority on near-death experiences. He’s the author of many, many books including one we’re going to talk about a little bit today, The Art of Dying. Dr. Peter Fenwick, welcome to Skeptiko.
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February 17th, 2009 admin
Show Notes: Is the Dalai Lama an Atheist? Dr. Alan Wallace
Guest: Buddhist scholar and author of the upcoming Mind in the Balance, Dr. Alan Wallace discusses Buddhism and atheism.
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Alex: Is the Dalai Lama an atheist?
“In the framing itself, the question is already skewed. It’s not so obvious to a person who’s totally immersed in western civilization and has almost no glimmering of understanding of anything outside of western civilization. Frankly, so much of the rhetoric, this antireligious rhetoric from the likes of Richard Dawkins and so forth, is just wildly unconsciously and uncritically ethnocentric. Do the Buddhist themselves, and I’m honing in on your question. Do the Buddhist themselves ask are we atheists? Well, I’ve never seen that question posed. In Buddhism that would be regarded as such a dumb and uninformed question that is not even worthy of a response.” — Dr. Alan Wallace
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February 16th, 2009 admin
Show Notes: The Spiritual Brain, Denyse O’Leary
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Alex Tsakiris: Welcome to Skeptiko where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers and their critics. I’m your host Alex Tsakiris.
Before we start in with my interview with Christian Science writer Denyse O’Leary, I want to take a minute and give you a non-update of the medium experiment. I say non-update because we kind of got about half way into trial three and then decided to revamp things substantially including adding a new voice mail system for mediums to use. So I’ll have more information for you on that in just a couple of weeks. Also a quick update on the Psychic Detective project I’ve been working on Ben Radford, we had been communicating quite a bit in trying to nail that down and hopefully in a month or two, we’ll have follow up on that as well. Finally, the dogs that no experiment is still out there kicking around and my one best dog is back in trial so I hope to have some information on that it’s been very slow going in terms of getting any trials completed. Just kind of normal life stuff for folks makes it hard for them to complete that experiment apparently.
So kind of a non-update update there but coming up, I have what I found to be just fascinatingly frustrating conversation with one of the authors of The Spiritual Brain, Denise O’Leary.
Alex Tsakiris: Welcome to Skeptiko, Denise O’Leary. It’s a pleasure to have you. We’ve had a nice e-mail exchange here and we’re going to talk today about the book that you’ve co-authored titled The Spiritual Brain. But before we get into that I thought maybe you could tell us a little bit about your bio, your background, what you do up there in Toronto.
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February 4th, 2009 admin
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Alex: Welcome to Skeptiko where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris.
In this episode, I have coming up an interview with Mike Tymn, author of book, The Articulate Dead. But before getting to that, I want to spend some time in bringing you up to date on some things that are happening with OpenSourceScience medium experiment of course that we’ve been engaged in. Now I’ve received a number of e-mails last week from folks asking me to respond to some of the comments that were made in the last episode of the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe with Dr. Steve Novella. As most of you I’m sure know, about a year ago, the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe agreed to collaborate with us on a medium demonstration/research project. As I’ve documented on this show, that’s kind of evolved in the research project that we’re doing right now today.
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December 12th, 2008 admin
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Listen to interview (MP3 39:19min, 18MB)
Click here to join this experiment as a skeptical participant
“I’m just as curious to see what the results show. I know that I see examples everyday. I see it in my work, I see it at my events. I see it with the attendees, when the mediums are there and they’re giving them unbelievable, evidential, information, one piece right on top of another. So, I’m extremely curious to see how this rolls out.” — Janice Ervin
Alex: Welcome to Skeptiko where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris.
On this episode, I want to update you on the medium experiment we’ve been working on. Now for those of you who aren’t familiar with this experiment, of course we’re trying to find out if psychic mediums can really talk to the deceased. This last week, I had the chance to talk to Dr. Steven Novella from the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe show about the collaboration on this experiment we’ve been working on and I think we’re ready to move forward.
Now this experiment has taken a long time to get off the ground. As a matter of fact, looking at my calendar, it’s been almost a year since I appeared on the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe show and we initially hatched a plan to do this research. So for those of you who don’t remember, I thought it might be useful to dig up a clip from that episode and bring up all up-to-date on what we had discussed. Here it goes.
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November 28th, 2008 admin
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On this episode of Skeptiko, Lieutenant Bill Hughes of the New Jersey State Police discusses the controversial nature of working with psychic detectives.
“To be honest with you, I really don’t give a damn what they think or what they say. I know what I saw and I know what was there. I mean, how can you be that close-mind? How can you be a journalist and be that close-mind? In this case, Nancy was on the mark on a lot of things.” — Lieutenant Bill Hughes of the New Jersey State Police
Stay with us for Skeptiko.
Alex: Welcome to Skeptiko where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris.
Today on Skeptiko, we’re going to continue our investigation into the double homicide, psychic detective case of Amie Hoffman that occurred back in the mid-1980s. Now you recall that on the last episode of Skeptiko, we had an interview with Nancy Weber, the psychic detective who worked with law enforcement on this, and she provided a very succinct, very lucid description of the information that she provided law enforcement. So let me play you that clip from the last episode. This is an interview with Nancy Weber in which she’s listing the information that she provided law enforcement as part of her assistance as a psychic detective in this case.
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