Brian Dunning hosts a popular skeptical podcast, but is the “skeptical community” being pushed to the fringe.

photo by: Skeptiko

(audio from James Rani’s 2013 Amazing Meeting) Welcome back everybody. Moving right along, as they say, get your seats, get your seats. This is going to be a killer panel, I’m so excited to listen to this. Coming up now we’ve got magicians vs psychics…

Is it just me. or does the whole skeptical thing just sound dated? Like this clip from the 2013 Amazing Meeting.

Okay, here is the haiku from magicians vs psychics; both groups flat-out lie, you know, magicians, psychics, only one is honest…

Dated in a Johnny Carson kind of way.

(audio from Tonight Show) James Randi is here tonight and…

But it’s still kind of amazing to me, to look back at just a few short years ago, when real scientists like Richard Dawkins and Neil deGrasse Tyson embraced this guy who, as I explained today’s guest Brian Dunning, the creator and host of the Skeptoid podcast , is a proven liar.

(Alex Tsakiris) This guy was caught lying over and over. He lied about Uri Geller, he lied about Rupert Sheldrake, he lied to dozens of people about The Million Dollar Challenge and that was found out… he lied about his background, he claimed he was this genius with an IQ of 186 and he didn’t have to go to school, because he had this special [library pass]. I mean, his whole story was just one lie after another. You really consider this guy a mentor? In what way was he a mentor, or someone who you would look up to?

(Brian Dunning) Well first of all I want to say I don’t know anything about any of those charges you just threw at him and I don’t judge my friends based on what other people say about them.

Now skeptics still can provide a backdrop, if you will, to the real frontier science that’s going on and I tried to explain that to Brian in this interview but we didn’t get very far. So I’ll include some additional clips at the end of this show.

But it sure seems to me that this whole skeptical thing is over and, like Brian’s new film, Principles of Curiosity…

(audio from film) The result, many of the new science discoveries you hear about on the TV News or read on the Consumer Focused website, really are, more than likely, wrong!

It all sounds a little dated. Stay with me, my interview with Brian Dunning of Skeptoid is next on Skeptiko.

(continued below)

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Read Excerpts:

Alex Tsakiris: Today we welcome Brian Dunning back to Skeptiko. Brian is the creator and host of Skeptoid, a long-running and very popular podcast about Skepticism and he’s just released a new documentary film titled, Principles of Curiosity.

Brian, welcome back to Skeptiko. Thanks so much for joining me.

Brian Dunning: Hey thanks, it’s been a long, long time. A lot of water under the bridge, it’s good to be back.

Alex Tsakiris: How did that lead to this movie,