Why do you exist? How did atoms and molecules transform into sentient creatures that experience longing, regret, compassion, and even marvel at their own existence? What does it truly mean to have a mind―to think? Science has offered few answers to these existential questions until now. Michael Shermer speaks with computational neuroscientist, Ogi Ogas, about his unified account of the mind that explains how consciousness, language, self-awareness, and civilization arose incrementally out of cha...
Apr 02, 2022•1 hr 42 min•Ep. 259
Michael Shermer speaks with Professor of International Relations, Dr. Jacek Kugler, about his Power Transition Theory which states that an even distribution of political, economic, and military capabilities between contending groups of states is likely to increase the probability of war; peace is preserved best when there is an imbalance of national capabilities between disadvantaged and advantaged nations; the aggressor will come from a small group of dissatisfied strong countries; and it is th...
Mar 29, 2022•1 hr 26 min•Ep. 258
If extraterrestrial intelligences exist, will look anything like us? Are we alone in the cosmos? If we reran the tape of life, would humans appear again? Is there purpose in the cosmos? Shermer speaks with Cambridge evolutionary palaeobiologist Simon Conway Morris whose latest book challenges six assumptions that too often pass as unquestioned truths amongst the evolutionary orthodox. These include the idea that evolution is boundless in the kinds of biological systems it can produce. Not true, ...
Mar 26, 2022•2 hr•Ep. 257
Shermer speaks with world-renowned future forecaster and game designer, Jane McGonigal, about her book Imaginable in which she draws on the latest scientific research in psychology and neuroscience to show us how to train our minds to think the unthinkable and imagine the unimaginable by inviting us to play with provocative thought experiments and future simulations. Shermer and McGonigal discuss: what a futurist is and what they do; counterfactuals: predicting the past; how could the present mo...
Mar 22, 2022•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 256
Shermer speaks with University Professor of Philosophy and Neural Science and codirector of the Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness at New York University, Dr. David Chalmers, to discuss: the hard problem of consciousness; virtual reality, augmented reality, artificial intelligence; VR inside a VR, indistinguishable from Reality; Are we living in a simulation?; Can you live a good life in VR?; Can AI systems be conscious? and more… How do we know that there’s an external world? What is the ...
Mar 19, 2022•1 hr 52 min•Ep. 255
Shermer speaks with Ravi Gupta, the Founder and CEO of Lost Debate , a new non-profit media company that launched in October 2021 to fight polarization and misinformation online. The company has seed funding of over $7 million dollars, with the largest investment coming from Netflix founder Reed Hastings. Before launching Lost Debate , Ravi founded Arena , where he led a team that helped elect over a hundred candidates and launched the largest campaign staffer training academy in the history of ...
Mar 15, 2022•1 hr 39 min•Ep. 254
Shermer speaks with political demographer, former demographics consultant to the United States Department of Defense, and author of The Future Faces of War , Jennifer Sciubba, about her new 8 Billion and Counting . As the world nears 8 billion people, the countries that have led the global order since World War II are becoming the most aged societies in human history. At the same time, the world’s poorest and least powerful countries are suffocating under an imbalance of population and resources...
Mar 12, 2022•1 hr 20 min•Ep. 253
In this conversation with the renowned Ohio State University political scientist John Mueller, author of The Stupidity of War , Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War , and The Remnants of War , we discuss the ongoing crisis in Ukraine and what we might expect from Putin’s Russia in the coming weeks, months, and years, along with Dr. Mueller’s outline for how to end the current conflict and compromise with Putin. That seems unlikely at this point, but the prospects of the tragedy o...
Mar 08, 2022•1 hr 26 min•Ep. 252
Since 2015, there has been a spectacular boom in a nearly 200-year-old delusion — the idea that we all live on a flat plane, under a solid dome, ringed by an impossible wall of ice. It is the ultimate in conspiracy theories, a wholesale rejection of everything we know to be true about the world in which we live. Where did this idea come from Michael Shermer speaks with journalist Kelly Weill whose work covers extremism, disinformation, and online conspiracy theories in current affairs. The conve...
Mar 01, 2022•1 hr 43 min•Ep. 251
An analysis of Russia's war on Ukraine. Will sanctions work? This episode is a reading from Michael Shermer’s post on Substack entitled: “Putin’s Problem: The outlawry of war has forced tyrants to concoct excuses for invading other countries. How should we respond? Evidence shows that outcasting in the form of economic sanctions beats armed conflict” Subscribe to his weekly Substack column: https://michaelshermer.substack.com/subscribe
Feb 25, 2022•23 min•Ep. 250
Political violence rips apart several towns in southwest Texas. A far-right militia plots to kidnap the governor of Michigan and try her for treason. An armed mob of Trump supporters and conspiracy theorists storms the U.S. Capitol. Are these isolated incidents? Or is this the start of something bigger? Barbara F. Walter is a professor of political science and an expert on international security, with an emphasis on civil wars. Her current research is on the behavior of rebel groups in civil war...
Feb 22, 2022•1 hr 45 min•Ep. 249
Shermer and anthropologist Elizabeth Weiss discuss: fossil ownership; how anthropologists draw conclusions about past peoples through their study of skeletons and mummies; why continued curation of human remains is important; why anthropologists should prioritize scientific research over other perspectives; the future of archaeology on its present trajectory toward the politicization of science; why the fossil remains of most Native American sites have tenuous or no connection whatsoever to mode...
Feb 15, 2022•2 hr 8 min•Ep. 248
Hailed as the “first freedom,” free speech is the bedrock of democracy, and it is subject to erosion in times of upheaval. Today, in democracies and authoritarian states around the world, it is on the retreat. In this episode, based on the book Free Speech , Michael Shermer and Jacob Mchangama discuss the riveting legal, political, and cultural history of the principle, how much we have gained from it, and how much we stand to lose without it. Mchangama reveals how the free exchange of ideas und...
Feb 08, 2022•1 hr 49 min•Ep. 247
Shermer speaks with author, journalist, and TV personality Nick Pope about: what it was like working for the Ministry of Defense as their UFO expert; The Believer’s Paradox; separating two questions: Are they out there? Have they come here?; SETI science vs. UFO/UAP science; Roswell; Bayesian reasoning about UFOs and UAPs; the quality of evidence in evaluating UFO claims; the US military UAP videos and what they really represent; The Disclosure Project; why we should keep an open mind; the odds ...
Feb 01, 2022•1 hr 46 min•Ep. 246
Shermer and Sulloway discuss: relative roles of genes, environment, hard work, and luck in how lives turn out; 60s and 70s Harvard culture; his relationship and work with E. O. Wilson, who was recently defamed by Scientific American as a racist; measuring and studying personality; birth order and family dynamics in how personalities are formed; autocratic personality traits and why people follow and support Trump and other autocrats; why if you know a person’s stance on one issue (e.g., abortion...
Jan 29, 2022•2 hr 42 min•Ep. 245
Centuries ago, the principle of Ockham’s razor changed our world by showing simpler answers to be preferable and more often true. In Life Is Simple , scientist Johnjoe McFadden traces centuries of discoveries, taking us from a geocentric cosmos to quantum mechanics and DNA, arguing that simplicity has revealed profound answers to the greatest mysteries. In McFadden’s view, life could only have emerged by embracing maximal simplicity, making the fundamental law of the universe a cosmic form of na...
Jan 25, 2022•1 hr 58 min•Ep. 244
Shermer and Satel discuss: how political correctness has corrupted medicine; how wokeness and social justice activism has corrupted psychiatry; what is social justice and who is really practicing it?; medical models of mental illness and addiction and why mental illness is so hard to treat; addictions to porn and social media; why some people are able to break free from their addictions while others are not; organ transplant markets, and more… Dr. Sally Satel is a visiting professor of psychiatr...
Jan 22, 2022•2 hr 6 min•Ep. 243
Humans are storytelling animals. Stories are what make our societies possible. Countless books celebrate their virtues. But Jonathan Gottschall, an expert on the science of stories, argues that there is a dark side to storytelling we can no longer ignore. Storytelling, the very tradition that built human civilization, may be the thing that destroys it. In The Story Paradox , Gottschall explores how a broad consortium of psychologists, communications specialists, neuroscientists, and literary qua...
Jan 18, 2022•1 hr 37 min•Ep. 242
Michael Shermer speaks with writer, comedian, and five-time Emmy winning Senior Writer for John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight , Jeff Maurer, about the nature of creativity, comedy, politics, culture, and how the television business really works! Jeff Maurer won two Peabody Awards, five Writers Guild Awards, and four Television Critics Association awards. He was one of the original writers of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, where he was promoted to Senior Writer. He left the show to write a poli...
Jan 15, 2022•1 hr 37 min
xtraordinary advances in psychology and neuroscience have proven that emotions are as critical to our well-being as thinking. In this conversation, Shermer and Mlodinow explore the new science of feelings. Journeying from the labs of pioneering scientists to real-world scenarios that have flirted with disaster, Mlodinow shows us how our emotions can help, why they sometimes hurt, and what we can learn in both instances. Shermer and Mlodinow discuss: the difference between emotions and feelings/m...
Jan 11, 2022•1 hr 53 min•Ep. 240
We humans like to think of ourselves as rational creatures, who, as a species, have relied on calculation and intellect to survive. But many of the most important moments in our history had little to do with cold, hard facts and a lot to do with feelings. Events ranging from the origins of philosophy to the birth of the world’s major religions, the fall of Rome, the Scientific Revolution, and some of the bloodiest wars that humanity has ever experienced can’t be properly understood without under...
Jan 04, 2022•1 hr 58 min•Ep. 239
Does power corrupt, or are corrupt people drawn to power? Are entrepreneurs who embezzle and cops who kill the result of poorly designed systems or are they simply bad people? What sort of people aspire to power anyway? Are there individuals among us who should never be given the title of president, or CEO, or PTA leader lest they build their own dictatorship? Michael Shermer speaks with Brian Klaas, a renowned political scientist, Washington Post columnist and creator of the award-winning Power...
Dec 28, 2021•1 hr 41 min•Ep. 238
For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike — either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiti...
Dec 21, 2021•1 hr 33 min•Ep. 237
Rulers throughout history have used laws to impose order. But laws were not simply instruments of power and social control. They also offered ordinary people a way to express their diverse visions for a better world. The variety of the world’s laws has long been almost as great as the variety of its societies. In this conversation, Shermer speaks with Oxford professor of the anthropology of law, Fernanda Pirie, who traces the rise and fall of the sophisticated legal systems underpinning ancient ...
Dec 18, 2021•1 hr 28 min•Ep. 236
Shermer speaks with Jason Riley about Maverick — the first-ever biography of Thomas Sowell, one of the great social theorists of our age. In a career spanning more than a half century, Sowell has written over thirty books, covering topics from economic history and social inequality to political theory, race, and culture. His bold and unsentimental assaults on liberal orthodoxy have endeared him to many readers but have also enraged fellow intellectuals, the civil-rights establishment, and much o...
Dec 14, 2021•1 hr 37 min•Ep. 235
A new virus descended on the human species in 2019 wreaking unprecedented havoc. Finding out where it came from and how it first jumped into people is an urgent priority, but early expectations that this would prove an easy question to answer have been dashed. Nearly two years into the pandemic, the crucial mystery of the origin of SARS-CoV-2 is not only unresolved but has deepened. In this conversation based on the uniquely insightful book, Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19 , Matt Ri...
Dec 11, 2021•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 234
Michael Shermer shares his thoughts on life and death, in an emotional remembrance of his friend and business partner of 30 years, Pat Linse (1947–2021), the co-founder of the Skeptics Society and Art Director of Skeptic magazine.
Dec 07, 2021•19 min•Ep. 233
Research shows we are missing 50 percent of our lives because we aren’t paying attention. Many of us often feel mentally foggy, scattered, and overwhelmed. Why is it that no matter how hard you try, you seem to find yourself somewhere else — if you’re even aware you’ve drifted off to that place. In this conversation with the acclaimed neuroscientist Amishi Jha, she recounts what her neuroscience research revealed, and shows why whether you’re simply browsing, talking to friends, or trying to sta...
Dec 04, 2021•1 hr 33 min•Ep. 232
In this conversation with Jason Hill based on his book What do White Americans Owe Black People? Racial Justice in the Age of Post-Oppression , Shermer probes the philosopher on the arguments for and against reparations. In this provocative and highly original work, philosophy professor Jason Hill explores multiple dimensions of race in America today, but most importantly, a black-white divide which has grown exponentially over the past decade. Central to his thesis, Hill calls on black American...
Nov 30, 2021•1 hr 41 min•Ep. 231
Michael Shermer speaks with renowned biblical scholar and historian, Bart Ehrman, about: how we know Jesus existed and was crucified; how these questions are different epistemologically from those about Jesus’ resurrection and the claim that he died for our sins; how Christians deal with the trinity problem: How can God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit be one and the same and yet separate and different? (“God sacrificed himself…to himself…to save us from himself.” How is this possible?); How Christia...
Nov 27, 2021•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 230
