The Skeptics Guide #1094 - Jun 27 2026
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
You're listening to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.
Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Thursday, June 25th, 2026, and this is your host, Stephen Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella. Hey, everybody. Cara Santamaria. Howdy. And Jay Novella. Hey, guys. So, of course, you've noticed that Evan was not on the show last week. He's not on the show this week. And this is because we have a sad but serious announcement that we have to make. Evan has resigned from the SGU. So he will no longer be on the SGU. I know this is not a surprise to many of you, but to many others who are not involved in our online communities where this has been a topic for over a week. This may be coming as a total surprise. So we'll give you the background on it.
These are events that are very, very rapidly developing. It really started just really now, just like a week and a half ago. Is that correct? Yeah. So it came to our attention that unbeknownst to any of us, Evan had a private ex, you know, slash Twitter account. And on that account, he was expressing his political views and a lot of personal views and And over 2025, I think is when really this started to happen.
Why did Evan resign from The Skeptics Guide and what were the circumstances?
So it was over the last year or so. And he said a lot of hateful, unskeptical, dehumanizing, terrible things on his Twitter account on X.
And to be clear, the account wasn't private. We knew back when we were all, maybe not we all, but back when many of us were on Twitter, like I've followed Evan. I haven't touched Twitter since it became X. I might have like auto posted some episodes. But from what I understand, he was posting under his moniker that he's always had Evan SGU. But he was posting almost like in a pretty under-the-radar way. Like he wasn't even doing a lot of public posts. He was making a lot of replies to other people's posts.
Yeah, I mean, I don't think, you know, J-Bob and I are not on X. I post the show there, but I don't read a single post. I mean, I'm not following anybody. I'm not reading anything there. So we just, I think because of the character of X, you know.
Yeah, the climate very much changed. And yeah, yeah.
But the more important thing here is the content of what Evan was posting. It's all on our SGU Reddit and on Discord if you're interested. A lot of it involved the Israeli-Gaza war and just American politics in general. So first and foremost, none of the rest of us share any of these views, find them even acceptable. But to clarify, this is not about Evans politics. It's not that they were, you know, leaning right or that they were conservative. it's that they were hateful, dehumanizing, and a lot of them were like conspiracy theories and unskeptical, and there's no other word for it, which is just, you know, it's sad and shocking to the rest of us. How could this have happened under our nose, right?
I mean, that's an obvious question that a lot of our listeners are asking. Like, how could we not have known this? You know, again, for background, a couple of things. Again, we obviously knew Evan's basic political leanings. But he was systematically keeping these views from us over recent years. And he admitted to that. He didn't feel comfortable talking about them with us. We all know he's a very private person, even more so after Perry passed away. I think that was his sort of primary outlet for this kind of stuff. And he just kept it to himself. And I think he compartmentalized it from not only from us, but from his skepticism. You know, he basically became radicalized in an echo chamber on this one issue.
He has a range of issues. and we never had the opportunity to talk to him about it, which might have had a moderating effect. We never worked through any of it with him. It was just all happening in the background, walled off from everything else.
That bears sort of like deeper explanation. Like when you say we never had the opportunity to talk to him about it, just to clarify, what I'm hearing is not we didn't have the time or the energy. No, he didn't tell us.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:01–1:21
2
Why did Evan resign from The Skeptics Guide and what were the circumstances?
1:21–13:10
3
How did the SGU hosts explain they missed Evan’s private posts and radicalization?
13:10–44:10
4
What steps did the SGU team take after discovering Evan’s online activity?
44:10–1:06:27
5
What was Kara’s colonoscopy experience and why does the team recommend screening?
1:06:27–1:26:19
6
How will Evan’s resignation affect SGU’s editorial policy and future direction?
1:26:19–1:51:17