Exorcism as a practice was popular, I guess, around the time of Christ and for like a hundred or so years after. Until you guessed it, the movie, the exorcist, and that brought it back into mainstream culture. The film has an impact around the world, particularly that film had such a huge impact. It's just incredible to watch one of these exorcisms with the people arriving around on the floor and so on. What do they really believe? They must have inculcated somewhere. Where are they getting this idea? This is how I'm supposed to act where you and I are assuming they're not actually possessed by a demon. These people, these people
Shermer and Gold discuss: diversity, equity, and inclusion in the media • social justice movements and their motivations • bias in STEM fields • why people believe weird things • exorcisms • UFOs • faith healers • Derren Brown and how magic works on minds • hypnosis • sex and where to have an affair • Ashley Madison • female/male differences in sexual preferences and choices • non-offending pedophiles in Berlin • the curious case of Jimmy Seville: why didn’t anyone notice his pedophilia?
Andrew Gold is a British journalist whose podcast On the Edge with Andrew Gold investigates belief, cults and extreme ideologies. He speaks five languages, has lived in six countries and has made award-winning documentaries around the world for the BBC and HBO about fringe topics, from exorcism and UFOs to abortion and porn stars, and even more controversial terrain, such as his two years investigating pedophiles. On his podcast he has interviewed Richard Dawkins, Amanda Knox, John McWhorter, Gad Saad, Peter Boghossian, Robbie Williams and that Shermer guy…as well as several psychopaths, murderers, cult defectors and a guy who had to eat his friends after a plane crash. The reason he started his podcast is because the UK TV producers who work with the BBC kept insisting that he no longer be visible on-screen in his films because, he was told, they needed “a minority.”