The Michael Shermer Show

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 funct...

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 t...

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 whe...

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 ...

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 w...

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, ...

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 altrui...

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 acti...

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 o...

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 c...

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: Jewi...

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 identit...

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 backwa...

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 practi...

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 ...

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 certain...

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 ...

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 dem...