Michael Marshall (Marsh)
16/8/19
As Project Director of the Good Thinking Society charity, Michael Marshall (known to most as Marsh) is the UK's only professional skeptic. He's been regularly promoting and talking about skepticism for over 10 years and was a founder member and is current vice-president of the Merseyside Skeptics Society. He is also a co-organiser of the hugely popular QED Conference held every year (except this one) in Manchester which is well attended by skeptics from all around the world. He was also project leader and figurehead of the 10:23 Campaign which was aimed at raising public awareness of homeopathy – resulting in international coverage and participants in all continents - including Antarctica.
Marsh has given talks all across the UK: to skeptics groups as well as schools and universities. He has spoken at conferences across Europe, in S Africa, Australia and New Zealand, North America and next year in South America. Many people are familiar with Marsh from the popular Skeptics with a K podcast, co-hosted with Mike Hall and Alice Howarth. He has appeared on the fantastic Skeptics Guide to the Universe, God Awful Movies and Inkredulous podcasts as well as hosting the Be Reasonable podcast where he speaks to true-believers in a welcoming, non-judgmental, but robust way. On top of all this, he runs the Bad PR blog where he talks about the dodgy tactics of the PR industry and he also gives lectures to PR students about how to avoid them.
He has written for the Times, the Guardian and The New Statesman. In his MSS and GTS roles, he has successfully campaigned to remove funding for Homeopathy on the NHS in England & Wales, has been instrumental in ending sales of the Shuzi power balance bracelet, he has confronted psychics, faith healers and woo-mongers of all stripes and he even attended a flat-earth conference just so he could investigate the rise of the flat-earth phenomena in the age of social media and YouTube. Marsh will be speaking about the Rise of Flat Earth Belief at tonight's SotF talk, 7:20 Banshee Labyrinth.