The Michael Shermer Show

Jeremy Jones joins Michael Shermer to talk about DOGE AI, government fraud, and the strange reality that some of the biggest problems in public life are both widely known and somehow never fixed. Jones explains how his team uses AI to sort through enormous government datasets, isolate suspicious billing patterns, and surface waste at a scale that would be almost impossible to catch by hand.

They also get into Jones's own background...

Why do some world-changing ideas get ignored, attacked, or buried for years before anyone takes them seriously?

Michael Shermer sits down with The Economist science correspondent Matt Kaplan to discuss the scientists who got there first and paid the price. They talk about why institutions resist new ideas, why careers can depend on defending the status quo, and why being right is often not enough.

They discuss figures like Katalin ...

For decades, developmental psychologist Jay Belsky has focused on one of the biggest questions in human development: how do early experiences shape the lives we go on to live?

In this conversation with Michael Shermer, he explains why childhood adversity can leave deep marks, why some children are far more affected by experience than others, and why averages often hide the most important part of the story. 
 
Belsky revisits the ol...

Publishing likes to imagine itself as a marketplace of ideas with a strong immune system: good arguments win, bad ones fade, and editors act as principled gatekeepers. In practice, it's also an industry with thin margins, status anxiety, and a constant fear of reputational damage.

Adam Szetela argues that a lot of what gets called "cancel culture" in books is better understood as risk management under social media conditions. Outra...

Documentary filmmaker Marcie Hume (BBC alum; Magicians: Life in the Impossible) joins Michael Shermer to talk about her new verité film Corey Feldman vs. the World—shot over a decade, starting in the "Corey's Angels" era and following a tour that unravels in real time.

It goes to some uncomfortable places: how celebrity can create cult-ish dynamics (not just with fans, but with the people working around them as well), how "truth" b...

Christopher Beha grew up Catholic in Manhattan, walked away during the New Atheist era, and spent years trying to build a secular worldview sturdy enough to live inside. It didn't hold. So he kept reading—Hume, Kant, Russell, the existentialists—and kept chasing the questions that don't let you sleep: what counts as evidence, what belief even is, and what you do when reason can't answer the things you still have to decide. 

In this...

Why do people risk everything for love but treat sex like it's no big deal? Why is intimacy the most expensive thing in a brothel? And why do jealousy, infidelity, and heartbreak push otherwise rational people into behavior they later can't explain?

Evolutionary biologist and sex researcher Justin Garcia, executive director of the Kinsey Institute and author of The Intimate Animal, joins Michael Shermer for a candid conversation ab...

In this episode, Michael Shermer walks through the core ideas behind his new book Truth: What It Is, How to Find It, and Why It Still Matters, breaking down how humans confuse meaning with reality, stories with facts, and confidence with correctness.

He also explains why changing your mind is a strength, not a flaw; why extraordinary claims really do require extraordinary evidence; and why "just asking questions" isn't as innocent ...

In this solo episode of The Michael Shermer Show, Michael Shermer responds to the shooting of Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old healthcare worker who was killed by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis during protests over enforcement of immigration law. 

As political debate intensifies, Shermer asks a tough question that most discussions are avoiding: What role does personal responsibility play in emotionally charged, high-risk situa...

Michael Shermer sits down with attorney and bestselling author Kent Heckenlively for a tense, thoughtful, and surprisingly cordial conversation about UFOs, government secrecy, and the idea of "catastrophic disclosure."

Heckenlively argues that something real is being hidden. Not necessarily aliens, but information powerful enough to disrupt energy markets, military spending, and political authority. But beyond stories and secondhan...

In this episode, Michael Shermer talks with filmmaker James Fox, whose work has helped push UFOs, now often called UAPs, out of the tabloid shadows and into congressional hearings, radar logs, and sworn testimony.

Fox has spent three decades interviewing fighter pilots, radar operators, intelligence officials, scientists, and firsthand witnesses. His conclusion is not that we know what these objects are, but that dismissing them no...

What if the deepest human drive isn't happiness, survival, or even love, but the need to matter?

Philosopher and MacArthur Fellow Rebecca Newberger Goldstein joins Michael Shermer to discuss The Mattering Instinct, her argument that the desire to feel significant lies at the core of human behavior. That drive helps explain our greatest achievements, from creativity and moral courage to scientific and artistic excellence. It also he...

What if the way we approach mental health is quietly making things worse?

Psychiatrist and psychotherapist Sami Timimi joins Michael Shermer to examine some of the core assumptions behind modern psychiatry. Why have diagnoses such as ADHD, autism, anxiety, and depression expanded so dramatically—and why hasn't increased access to treatment led to better outcomes at the population level?

Timimi describes how diagnostic categories ha...

What is consciousness, really? Why does it not simply switch on at a single moment? Neuroscientist Niko Kukushkin explains how even single cells can show primitive forms of memory and agency, why the human mind is not a mysterious force floating above biology, and why reducing it to "just neurons" misses what actually matters.

He also discusses the evolutionary gamble of complexity, why bacteria still dominate the planet, and how a...

Francis Crick is best known as one of the figures behind the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA, but the familiar story leaves out as much as it explains. Historian of science Matthew Cobb looks closely at how Crick's life actually unfolded, revealing a career shaped less by inevitability than by luck, conflict, false starts, and a series of highly contingent moments.

The double helix itself may have been waiting to be ...

What do you do when someone believes you shouldn't exist?

Daryl Davis didn't protest. He didn't shout. He sat down, asked questions, and kept showing up. Over decades, that approach has led more than 200 Ku Klux Klan members and white supremacists to walk away from their robes for good.

In this conversation, Davis explains why people radicalize, and what happens psychologically when prejudice collides with a real human being. He sh...