The Michael Shermer Show

If we could explain everything happening in your brain, would there still be something left to explain about you? Physicist Avshalom Elitzur thinks so—and argues that accounting for consciousness may require changing the laws of physics. In this lively conversation, Michael Shermer challenges Elitzur on why subjective experience should be anything more than a product of the brain, whether an AI could be conscious, and what a ...

Would World War II have happened without Hitler? Would someone else have built Apple without Steve Jobs? Jared Diamond joins Michael Shermer to ask how much history depends on particular people.

From Darwin's discoveries to the rise of Christianity, Diamond considers when someone is truly irreplaceable, when someone else would have done much the same thing, and how we can tell the difference.

Jared Diamond is the Pulitzer Prize-win...

How did 19 hijackers evade the world's most advanced intelligence apparatus despite years of warnings? Twenty-five years after 9/11, journalist Gerald Posner joins Michael Shermer to explain the security failures that left America vulnerable. Those failures, compounded by government secrecy, have helped sustain suspicions that officials orchestrated the attacks or deliberately allowed them to happen.

What does the evidence show, an...

Most of us think of ourselves as honest. But would we still tell the truth if lying got us what we wanted—and nobody would ever find out? Philosopher Christian Miller joins Michael Shermer to discuss his new book The Honesty Crisis and the uncomfortable gap between having a reputation for honesty and actually being honest.

Christian B. Miller is the A.C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University. He is the a...

What if uncertainty isn't a temporary problem science will eventually solve, but a fundamental feature of reality? Neuroscientist Stuart Firestein joins Michael Shermer to make the case that the universe may be far less deterministic—and the future far less predictable—than we like to imagine.

Firestein and Shermer discuss chaos and complexity, Darwin and randomness, free will, scientific progress, the replication crisi...

UFOs were once the stuff of tabloids and conspiracy theories. Today they're the subject of congressional hearings, Pentagon investigations, mainstream news coverage, and a new wave of claims about government cover-ups and alien technology. Adam Kirsch, senior editor at The Atlantic and author of We Want to Believe: How Aliens Went Mainstream and Why It Matters, joins Michael Shermer to ask what changed—and why the idea of ext...

Why does the universe produce ever more elaborate forms, from atoms and minerals to cells, organisms, brains, technology, and civilization? The familiar laws of physics can explain much of what happens in nature, but Robert Hazen and Michael Wong argue that something important has been missing: a law describing how evolving systems generate and select new forms over time.

Michael Shermer speaks with Hazen and Wong about their propo...

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 disc...

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...