Andrew Mayne is a magician, paranormal illusionist, inventor, TV producer and skeptic. One of the most creative and innovative minds in magic, Andrew has written and produced over 40 books and DVDs. Both creator and consultant, he has worked with a number of artists including David Blaine, and Penn & Teller. Andrew’s performance material ranges from close-up and stage, to mentalism and illusion, and he is infamous for his brand of tricks, effects and stunts known as "shock magic". Far from p...
Aug 07, 2010•36 min
When President Obama was inaugurated in January of 2009, he pledged to “restore science to its rightful place” in the U.S. government. And true to his word, the president promptly staffed his cabinet with distinguished scientific leaders, liberated embryonic stem cell research from the Bush era restrictions, and released a memorandum on “scientific integrity” intended to reverse the kinds of problems seen in the Bush years. Since those days, however, the "scientific integrity" agenda does not se...
Jul 30, 2010•31 min
Tom Quinn has spent the past 15 years as a documentary TV writer and producer for Discovery Channel, History Channel, National Geographic and others. He has traveled the world producing programs that explore and deconstruct urban legends, psychic claims, religious myths and conspiracy theories, and has worked with the likes of James Randi and Michael Shermer. He's a graduate of the American Film Institute, he's been a film critic, a story analyst for Universal Studios and HBO, and, in 2005, he r...
Jul 24, 2010•39 min
Our guest this week needs no introduction for those in the skeptical and secular world. After all, he has a frakkin' asteroid named after him. He’s Phil Plait—science blogger extraordinaire for Discover Blogs, where he authors “Bad Astronomy.” Recently, Plait joined Point of Inquiry for a wide ranging conversation about standing eggs on end, Apollo moon landing deniers, wacky yet endearing Hollywood bad science, something called “spaghettification”….and the end of the world. Phil Plait is a skep...
Jul 16, 2010•35 min
Adam Savage is an artist, actor, educator, special effects designer and co-host of the Discovery Channel's TV show Mythbusters . Adam has a diverse background in animation and design, and for almost two decades he has concentrated on the special effects industry for film, theater and television. A prominent skeptic and atheist, Adam lectures in science education and is a strong promoter of critical thinking. Karen Stollznow spoke with Adam in Las Vegas at The Amaz!ng Meeting, the annual conferen...
Jul 10, 2010•27 min
Recently in Amherst, New York, two of Point of Inquiry ’s hosts sat down for a special in-studio episode of the show. One was a conservative (Robert Price), one a liberal (Chris Mooney)—and both were atheists. The topic they tackled: Is there any necessary correlation between one’s disbelief in God and one’s place on the political spectrum? The result was a fascinating—and notably civil, and frequently entertaining—conversation ranging across foreign policy, abortion, stem cell research, animal ...
Jul 03, 2010•31 min
Tom Flynn is Executive Director of The Council for Secular Humanism, Editor of Free Inquiry magazine, Director of Inquiry Media Productions, and Director of the Robert Green Ingersoll Birthplace Museum. A journalist, novelist, entertainer, and freethought historian, Flynn is the author of numerous articles and editorials for Free Inquiry magazine. In addition to The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief , his books include two black comedy science fiction novels, Nothing Sacred , its prequel Galactic Rap...
Jun 25, 2010•34 min
Global warming, we're often told, is an issue we must address for the sake of our grandchildren. We need to cut carbon because of our moral obligation to future generations. But according to Bill McKibben, that's a 1980s view. As McKibben writes in his new book Eaarth: Making Life on a Tough New Planet , the increasingly open secret is that global warming happened already. We've passed the threshold, and the planet isn’t at all the same. It's less climatically stable. Its weather is haywire. It ...
Jun 18, 2010•33 min
Tim Farley is a computer software engineer, skeptic, and creator of the popular website What’s the Harm ? His site answers this salient question with over 670,000 stories of people who have indeed been harmed, damaged, injured, or even killed by pseudoscience and the paranormal What’s the Harm’s catchphrase is: “368,379 people killed, 306,096 injured and over $2,815,931,000 in economic damages.” However, these statistics are calculated from randomly-caught, modern cases documented in English-spe...
Jun 12, 2010•41 min
This week’s guest is Naomi Oreskes, co-author with historian Eric Conway of the new book Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming . Through extensive archival research, Oreskes and Conway have managed to connect the dots between a large number of seemingly separate anti-science campaigns that have unfolded over the years. It all began with Big Tobacco, and the famous internal memo declaring, “Doubt is our Product.” Then cam...
Jun 04, 2010•43 min
S. T. Joshi is a leading authority on H. P. Lovecraft, Ambrose Bierce, H. L. Mencken, and other writers, mostly in the realms of supernatural and fantasy fiction. He has edited corrected editions of the works of Lovecraft, several annotated editions of Bierce and Mencken, and has written such critical studies as The Weird Tale and The Modern Weird Tale . His award-winning biography, H. P. Lovecraft: A Life , has already become a collector's item. But critical, biographical, and editorial work on...
May 28, 2010•32 min
This week, we learned that J. Craig Venter has at long last created a synthetic organism—a simple life form constructed, for the first time, by man. Let the controversy begin—and if New Yorker staff writer Michael Specter is correct, the denial of science will be riding hard alongside it. In his recent book Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives , Specter charts how our resistance to vaccination and genetically modified foods, an...
May 21, 2010•38 min
George Hrab is a composer, professional musician, singer, songwriter, podcaster, and skeptic. George is the Host and Producer of the Geologic Podcast , a popular weekly show about music, comedy, science, and skepticism. The drummer in the band Philadelphia Funk Authority, he is a successful multi-instrumentalist musician who has performed on-stage with Elton John, and given a performance in the White House for Bill Clinton. For the past fifteen years he has also been a solo artist, releasing his...
May 14, 2010•27 min
It’s hard to think of an issue more contentious these days than the relationship between faith and science. If you have any doubt, just flip over to the science blogosphere: You’ll see the argument everywhere. In the scholarly arena, meanwhile, the topic has been approached from a number of angles: by historians of science, for example, and philosophers. However, relatively little data from the social sciences has been available concerning what today’s scientists actually think about faith. Toda...
May 07, 2010•38 min
Lois Schadewald's interest in both science and pseudoscience rubbed off on her from her brilliant brother Robert J. Schadewald, a prolific author and debater. When Bob died a decade ago he left behind a legacy of published essays and book chapters, as well as much unpublished material including a complete manuscript on the history of the Flat Earth movement. Lois has seen to the publication of many of these pieces in the collection Worlds of their Own: A Brief History of Misguided Ideas; Creatio...
Apr 30, 2010•30 min
For many of us, chemistry is something we remember with groans from high school. Periodic Table of the Elements—what a pain to memorize, and what was the point, anyway? So how do you take a subject like chemistry and make it exciting, intriguing, and compelling? With her new book The Poisoner’s Handbook , Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Deb Blum has done just that. Blum takes a page from the "CSI" franchise, and moves that familiar narrative of crime, intrigue, and high tech bad-guy catching b...
Apr 23, 2010•35 min
Dr. Robert Todd Carroll is a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, and author of The Skeptic's Dictionary: A Collection of Strange Beliefs, Amusing Deceptions, and Dangerous Delusions . He is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Sacramento City College, where he taught Logic and Critical Reasoning, Critical Thinking about the Paranormal, Law, Justice and Punishment, and World Religions. He is also author of the textbook Becoming a Critical Thinker . Bob is the creator of the popular webs...
Apr 16, 2010•28 min
For two decades now, we’ve failed to seriously address climate change. So the planet just keeps warming—and it could get very bad. Picture major droughts, calving of gigantic ice sheets, increasingly dramatic sea level rise, and much more. Against this backdrop, the idea of a technological fix to solve the problem—like seeding the stratosphere with reflective sulfur particles, so as to reduce sunlight—starts to sound pretty attractive. Interest in so-called “geoengineering” is growing, and so is...
Apr 09, 2010•36 min
Thomas J.J. Altizer burst onto the religious scene in the 1960s with his book The Gospel of Christian Atheism . He was one of the "Death of God" theologians discussed in the famous TIME cover story, "Is God Dead?" Altzier holds an M.A. in theology and Ph.D. in History of Religions from the Universeity of Chicago. Now 83 years of age, Altizer remains a Young Turk among radical theologians, insisting that only Christians can be true atheists and must proclaim the death of God. In this conversation...
Apr 02, 2010•28 min
Paul Kurtz is founder and chair emeritus of the Center for Inquiry and founder of a number of other organizations. A Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo, chairman of the Committee for the Skeptical Inquiry, the Council for Secular Humanism, and Prometheus Books. He is the author or editor of almost fifty books, including his new title Exuberant Skepticism . Throughout the last fou...
Mar 26, 2010•32 min
Dr. Scott Lilienfeld is Professor of Psychology at Emory University in Atlanta. Scott is a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, a Consulting Editor for Skeptical Inquirer and the Founder and Editor of the CSI journal Scientific Review of Mental Health Practice . He’s a regular contributor to Scientific American Mind , and is Psychology Today's Skeptical Psychologist, where he investigates questionable, controversial, and novel claims in psychology. His principal areas of research inclu...
Mar 19, 2010•42 min
Victor Stenger is Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Hawaii and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado. He is also founder of Colorado Citizens for Science. He’s held visiting faculty positions at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, and at Oxford in the United Kingdom, and has been a visiting researcher at Rutherford Laboratory in England, the National Nuclear Physics Laboratory in Frascati, Italy, and the University of Florence in Italy. Stenger’s sea...
Mar 16, 2010•37 min
We live in a science centered age—a time of private spaceflight and personalized medicine, amid path-breaking advances in biotechnology and nanotechnology. And we face science centered risks: climate and energy crises, biological and nuclear terror threats, mega-disasters and global pandemics. So you would think science journalism would be booming—yet nothing could be further from the case. If you watch 5 hours of cable news today, expect to see just 1 minute devoted to science and technology. F...
Mar 12, 2010•33 min
Robert J. Miller is Rosenberger Chair of Christian and Religious Studies at Juniata College in Pennsylvania. A Fellow of the Jesus Seminar since 1986, he was Scholar-in-Residence at Westar Institute in 2001. He is the of author numerous books, including Born Divine: The Births of Jesus and Other Sons of God , The Jesus Seminar and Its Critics , and editor of The Apocalyptic Jesus: A Debate and The Complete Gospels . In this conversation with host Robert Price, Miller discusses his work as a Jesu...
Mar 05, 2010•37 min
For the scientists who study global warming, now is the winter of their despair. In the news, it has been climate scandal after alleged climate scandal. First came “ClimateGate,” then “GlacierGate,” “Amazon Gate,” and so on. In public opinion polls, meanwhile, Americans’ acceptance of the science of global warming appears to be declining. Even a freak snowstorm now seems to sow added doubt about this rigorous body of research. In response to growing public skepticism—and a wave of dramatic attac...
Feb 26, 2010•42 min
Victor Stenger is Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Hawaii and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado. He is also founder of Colorado Citizens for Science. He's held visiting faculty positions at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, and at Oxford in the United Kingdom, and has been a visiting researcher at Rutherford Laboratory in England, the National Nuclear Physics Laboratory in Frascati, Italy, and the University of Florence in Italy. Stenger’s res...
Feb 24, 2010•34 min
Ian Rowland is a Mentalist and Mind Reader living near London, UK. The world’s foremost authority on cold reading, he is the author of the Full Facts Book of Cold Reading . In this book, Rowland has defined and categorized the different types of psychic readings, and created a taxonomy of cold reading techniques. Rowland was the first person to lecture on cold reading to the Magic Circle and his book has been described as “the definitive work” on the subject by Derren Brown, James Randi, Martin ...
Feb 19, 2010•31 min
Recently, there was another nail in the coffin for vaccine skeptics. The British medical journal The Lancet took the dramatic step of retracting a 1998 paper that lies at the root of modern vaccine denialism. Authored by a doctor named Andrew Wakefield and his colleagues, it was heavily touted as having uncovered a new cause of autism—the measles, mumps, rubella vaccine, or, the MMR vaccine. Not so fast. Twelve years later, there are more problems with the paper than you can count—and yet someho...
Feb 12, 2010•37 min
Banachek is an American mentalist and skeptic. He has written numerous books and invented various magic and mentalism effects, and is often sought out by top entertainers such as David Blaine, Lance Burton, James Randi and Criss Angel. He has been the recipient of a number of awards and recognitions, including the Dave Lederman Memorial Award (Awarded for Creativity in Mentalism) and the Dunninger Memorial Award (Awarded for Distinguished Professionalism in the Performance of Mentalism), both aw...
Jan 25, 2010•29 min
Frank Schaeffer is New York Times best selling author whose books include three semi-biographical novels about life in a strict, fundamentalist household: Portofino , Zermatt , and Saving Grandma , and also the memoir Crazy For God: How I Grew Up As One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back , which is now out in paper back. His latest book is Patience with God: Faith for People Who Don't Like Religion (or Atheism) . In this conversation w...
Nov 06, 2009•47 min
