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Every episode
The Michael Shermer Show
30 episodes
Why Good People Disagree About Right and Wrong
Ep 628 · Aug 11, 2026 · 1 hr 57 min
Why do reasonable people disagree so strongly about right and wrong? And why are we so quick to assume that people on the other side of a moral or political issue are irrational, selfish, ignorant, or simply bad? Michael Shermer speaks with Cornell psychologist Audun Dahl, author of Between Fixed and Fickle: Why Our Moral Views Keep Changing, about how human morality develops and why many familiar explanations fall short. They discuss whether babies are born with a moral sense, what children and…
Are We Building a God? AI, Superintelligence, and the Coming Singularity
Ep 627 · Aug 5, 2026 · 1 hr 23 min
Robert Wright joins Michael Shermer to discuss his new book, The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning, and why he thinks the AI revolution may be moving much faster than most people realize. Wright argues that deep learning is not just a new way of programming computers. In an important sense, it resembles evolution: neural networks discover solutions for themselves, sometimes recreating cognitive functions that natural selection built into human brains. That helps e…
Can You Trust Wikipedia? Co-Founder Larry Sanger on Wikipedia's Bias and Why He Was Banned
Ep 626 · Jul 30, 2026 · 2 hr 4 min
Michael Shermer speaks with Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger shortly after Sanger was permanently banned from editing the site he helped create. Sanger tells the story of Wikipedia's founding, how its ideal of open collaboration hardened into a system dominated by a relatively small group of powerful editors, and why he believes its rules on sourcing and "consensus" now produce political and religious bias. In the second half of the conversation, Shermer and Sanger shift gears completely and di…
How to Think Clearly About a World in Crisis: Iran, China, Russia, and the West's Economic Pessimism
Ep 625 · Jul 18, 2026 · 1 hr 4 min
Michael Shermer speaks with political scientist Marlene Laruelle about Russia's turbulent transformation during the 1990s and the rise of Vladimir Putin, why the Kremlin so badly misjudged Ukraine, China's rise and its ambitions regarding Taiwan, why killing Iran's Supreme Leader and much of its senior leadership did not bring down the regime, the limits of foreign aid and sanctions, mass surveillance, economic nationalism, and whether Western democracy can survive an age of economic pessimism a…
The Truth About Sex Differences (Steve Stewart-Williams)
Ep 624 · Jul 11, 2026 · 55 min
How do men and women differ? Where do the differences come from? And how do they shape modern life? Drawing on a century of research and a billion years of evolution, Steve Stewart-Williams explains why many sex differences appear despite socialization, not because of it; why in our mating and parenting patterns, humans are more like the average bird than the average mammal; and why sex differences are sometimes a sign of societal health rather than injustice. Steve Stewart-Williams is a profess…
America at 250: What Did the Founders Get Right?
Ep 623 · Jul 6, 2026 · 17 min
Michael Shermer makes the case that the U.S. Founding Fathers were not only steeped in Enlightenment values on which the Declaration of Independence was based, but they were also scientists searching to discover moral truths and values on which to base a rational society, which they succeeded in doing in this document along with the Constitution.
When History Goes on Trial: Demjanjuk, Eichmann, and Justice After Atrocity
Ep 622 · Jun 27, 2026 · 1 hr 32 min
John Demjanjuk lived for decades as a retired autoworker in suburban Cleveland. Then investigators accused him of being "Ivan the Terrible," one of the most notorious guards at Treblinka. What followed was one of the strangest and most troubling Nazi war-crimes cases of the postwar era: extradition, eyewitness testimony, a death sentence, a reversal, and a final prosecution many years later. In this episode, Michael Shermer talks with Lawrence Douglas, professor at Amherst College and author of…
Why I Joined the Government UAP Science Advisory Council
Ep 621 · Jun 23, 2026 · 29 min
Michael Shermer has been appointed to the newly formed UAP Science Advisory Council, formed at the request of the White House and in coordination with the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the FBI, and other agencies. The council brings together experts from a wide range of disciplines—including astrophysics, oceanography, molecular biology, anthropology, psychology, artificial intelligence, and instrumentation—to provide sci…
Massimo Pigliucci on Doubt, Moral Courage, and Living Without Illusions
Ep 620 · Jun 20, 2026 · 1 hr 34 min
What does it mean to live well when certainty is unavailable? Michael Shermer speaks with Massimo Pigliucci about moral character, ancient philosophy, and the difficult art of making decisions without easy answers. The conversation moves from Cicero and Stoicism to the legacy of the New Atheism, asking why rejecting religion is not the same as having a philosophy of life. They discuss virtue ethics, moral dilemmas, effective altruism, faith, free will, democracy, human flourishing, and the uneas…
Cathy Young: Why Free Societies Need Free Speech
Ep 619 · Jun 16, 2026 · 1 hr 30 min
Cathy Young returns to the show for a wide-ranging conversation about free speech, institutional trust, and the strange incentives shaping public debate today. What happens when universities, media outlets, political movements, and online personalities trade careful thinking for moral certainty, tribal loyalty, or attention? Michael and Cathy discuss the pressure to excuse bad ideas when they come from "your side," the rise of activist thinking in education and journalism, and the growing appeal…
The Zodiac Killer Wasn't Real
Ep 618 · Jun 13, 2026 · 1 hr 39 min
The Zodiac Killer has been treated for decades as America's ultimate unsolved true crime mystery: one mysterious killer, taunting letters, cryptic ciphers, a strange costume, and a trail of victims across Northern California. Eddie McNamara thinks that story is wrong. The victims were real, the crimes were real, but the single mastermind may have been a media-made myth. Eddie McNamara is the author of Zodiactually: The Real Story of a Fake Serial Killer, Toss Your Own Salad: The Meatless Cookboo…
How Algorithms Use Your Data to Control You
Ep 617 · Jun 9, 2026 · 1 hr 34 min
Michael Shermer speaks with Oxford philosopher Carissa Véliz about the long human desire to know the future—from ancient oracles and astrology to AI, surveillance capitalism, predictive policing, and "data-driven" decision-making. Véliz argues that prediction is rarely neutral: the same machinery that collects personal data also tries to forecast behavior, and once institutions start treating predictions as facts, forecasts can become tools of control. The conversation gets into why privacy matt…
Batya Ungar-Sargon: Why the Left Sees Jews Differently Now
Ep 616 · Jun 6, 2026 · 55 min
Batya Ungar-Sargon joins Michael Shermer for a wide-ranging conversation about the historical relationship between Jews and the American left, and why that relationship has become increasingly strained in recent years. The discussion begins with the reaction to October 7 and the political language that quickly emerged around Israel, Palestine, power, oppression, and resistance. From there, Ungar-Sargon traces a longer history: Jewish life in early America, Jewish involvement in the labor movemen…
From Equality to Equity: How Social Justice Becomes Ideology
Ep 615 · Jun 3, 2026 · 59 min
Jon Mills, a philosopher, psychoanalyst, and clinical psychologist, joins Michael Shermer to discuss how social justice ideology has moved from a concern with fairness and equal treatment into a rigid moral framework built around oppressors and victims, privilege and disadvantage, good and evil. Their conversation focuses on the tension between compassion and truth: how to take injustice seriously without reducing people to identity categories, what happens when clinicians bring activism into th…
Can Science Fix Criminal Justice?
Ep 614 · May 29, 2026 · 1 hr 7 min
America's criminal justice debate usually gets reduced to two options: abolish the system or lock everyone up forever. Economist Jennifer Doleac thinks the data point somewhere else entirely. In this episode, Michael Shermer speaks with Doleac about what rigorous research can tell us about crime, punishment, deterrence, prison reform, and public safety. Doleac argues that America has built much of its criminal justice system backwards: too little certainty of being caught, too much faith in long…
Gad Saad: When Empathy Becomes Dangerous
Ep 613 · May 26, 2026 · 1 hr 30 min
Gad Saad returns to discuss his new book Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind, a provocative argument that empathy is not a moral trump card. Empathy can illuminate suffering, but it can also distort judgment when it is treated as an unquestionable virtue, applied selectively, or insulated from consequences. Saad's central claim is that many Western institutions have learned to treat compassion as a substitute for judgment. In practice, he argues, this can mean extending sympathy toward the wrong…
Why We Cling to Certainty, Conspiracies, and Bad Predictions
Ep 612 · May 19, 2026 · 1 hr 2 min
We like to think the future can be figured out if we just gather enough information. Pick the right expert, read the right forecast, find the right framework, and the fog will lift. Simone Stolzoff argues that this impulse often works against us. In his new book How to Not Know, he makes the case for getting better at uncertainty—not as a slogan, and not as an excuse to believe nothing, but as a practical skill: knowing when to act without perfect information, when to distrust easy answers, when…
Neil deGrasse Tyson on UFOs, Government Files, and the Physics of Alien Claims
Ep 611 · May 16, 2026 · 1 hr 15 min
Neil deGrasse Tyson returns to The Michael Shermer Show to talk UFOs, aliens, government files, eyewitness testimony, and his new book Take Me to Your Leader: Perspectives on Your First Alien Encounter. The conversation moves from the limits of eyewitness testimony to why secret military files are not evidence of hidden alien bodies, why high-G turns would turn biological pilots into "a pile of goo," why the universe almost certainly contains life elsewhere, and why the real question is not whet…
From Newspapers to Influencers: Who Controls Reality Now? (Ashley Rindsberg)
Ep 610 · May 14, 2026 · 1 hr 18 min
Journalist and author Ashley Rindsberg returns to The Michael Shermer Show for a wide-ranging conversation about the new media world: influencers with audiences larger than cable networks, conspiracy theories built for engagement, and the collapse of trust that followed COVID, censorship, and years of institutional overreach. Ashley Rindsberg is an investigative journalist and author focused on digital information platforms. He is the founder and editor of NPOV, which looks at how knowledge plat…
The New War on Free Speech: Why Power Turns Everyone Into a Censor
Ep 609 · May 11, 2026 · 1 hr 19 min
Free speech was supposed to be the great settled achievement of liberal democracy. Then came social media, cancel culture, campus speech battles, hate-speech laws, authoritarian tech control, and a new era of governments pressuring platforms from every direction. Michael Shermer speaks with free speech scholar Jacob Mchangama about why speech protections are weakening around the world—not only in dictatorships, but inside democracies. Their conversation moves from the First Amendment and January…
The UFO Files Were Declassified Today
Ep 608 · May 8, 2026 · 31 min
The long-promised UFO files have finally been released. In this solo commentary, Michael Shermer examines the newly declassified documents, photographs, videos, eyewitness accounts, redactions, and government claims surrounding UFOs and UAPs.
Why Everything Falls Apart—And How to Keep It Going (Stewart Brand)
Ep 607 · May 5, 2026 · 1 hr 4 min
Stewart Brand has spent a lifetime thinking about tools, systems, civilization, and the long future. Best known as the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog and co-founder of the Long Now Foundation, Brand joins Michael Shermer to discuss his new book, Maintenance of Everything, a sweeping look at what it takes to keep bodies, machines, buildings, institutions, planets, and civilizations from falling apart. The conversation ranges from the hidden work of maintenance to electric vehicles, bicycles,…
The Scientist Who Tried to Prove Reincarnation
Ep 606 · May 2, 2026 · 1 hr 39 min
Can memories survive death? It sounds like the kind of question skeptics usually dismiss before the conversation even starts. But Ian Stevenson was not a carnival psychic or a late-night ghost hunter. He was a respected psychiatrist at the University of Virginia who spent decades investigating children who claimed to remember previous lives, along with cases involving birthmarks, apparitions, telepathy, and other alleged evidence for life after death. In this episode, psychologist and science wr…
Why Do We Exist? Hakeem Oluseyi
Ep 605 · Apr 28, 2026 · 1 hr 11 min
Astrophysicist Hakeem Oluseyi has lived a life that sounds almost impossible: a childhood marked by poverty, violence, and constant upheaval; a teenage obsession with Einstein; a stint in the Navy; addiction and recovery; work as a janitor; and eventually a PhD in physics from Stanford. In this conversation, Michael Shermer and Oluseyi talk about his new book, Why Do We Exist?, and the biggest questions science can ask: what came before the Big Bang, whether the multiverse is real, why the unive…
Shermer Says 9: The "Dead Scientists," Explained
Ep 604 · Apr 24, 2026 · 16 min
A viral story is spreading across media: a mysterious string of scientists connected to UFOs, nuclear weapons, aerospace, and defense work have disappeared or died under suspicious circumstances. Politicians are calling it a possible national security threat. Michael Shermer takes a skeptical look.
Not Monsters. Not Madmen. Just Men.
Ep 603 · Apr 21, 2026 · 1 hr 25 min
What kind of person helps build a regime like the Third Reich? A monster? A madman? Or something far more unsettling? Michael Shermer sits down with author Jack El-Hai to talk about the true story behind Nuremberg. At the center is Dr. Douglas Kelley, the American psychiatrist assigned to evaluate the top Nazi defendants after World War II, including Hermann Göring. What he found was not comforting: many of these men were intelligent, ambitious, psychologically functional, and disturbingly norma…
Flourishing in the Age of Algorithms
Ep 602 · Apr 18, 2026 · 1 hr 8 min
What actually makes a life feel meaningful? In this conversation, Daniel Coyle joins Michael Shermer to talk about why fulfillment rarely comes from optimization, status, or trying to "win" at everything. Instead, it grows out of connection, shared effort, curiosity, and the kinds of projects that pull people out of themselves and into real community. Coyle makes the case that flourishing is not a mood and not a hack. It's a process. It happens in groups, in relationships, and in the messy work…
What Really Prevents Cognitive Decline
Ep 601 · Apr 14, 2026 · 58 min
What actually causes cognitive decline, and how much of it can we do something about? In this episode, Michael talks with neurologist and neuroscientist Dr. Majid Fotuhi about dementia, Alzheimer's, memory loss, and the everyday habits that shape brain health over time. They discuss why Alzheimer's is only part of the story, why some people remain mentally sharp into old age, and what the evidence says about exercise, sleep, diet, stress, and cognitive activity. They also cover ADHD, attention,…
How Christianity Made America—and How America Remade Christianity
Ep 600 · Apr 11, 2026 · 1 hr 31 min
Why does religion still dominate American politics when so many other wealthy democracies secularized long ago? In this episode, Michael Shermer talks with historian Matthew Avery Sutton about the long relationship between Christianity and American power. From the Puritans to Lincoln, from the Scopes trial to the Religious Right, from slavery to same-sex marriage, this conversation tracks how religious belief has shaped the country, and how politics keeps reshaping religion in return. Matthew Av…
What Turns Sand Into Cells? How Nonliving Matter Becomes Alive
Ep 599 · Apr 8, 2026 · 1 hr 27 min
How does something living emerge from something that isn't? In this episode, Lee Cronin pushes the question back even further: before cells, before DNA, before biology as we usually think of it, what kind of process could make matter start organizing itself into something alive? He and Michael Shermer get into assembly theory, RNA, autocatalysis, and the deeper puzzle of whether causation and selection may already be at work long before the first organism appears. The conversation also branches…
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