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Michael Shermer

The Michael Shermer Show is a series of long-form conversations between Dr. Michael Shermer and leading scientists, philosophers, historians, scholars, writers and thinkers about the most important issues of our time.

The Michael Shermer Show

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 crisis, COVID and the problem of communicating uncertainty, why humans are so bad at probability, and why even enormous amounts of data can fail to predict individual people or events.
 
Stuart Firestein is a professor of neuroscience at Columbia University and a member of the Santa Fe Institute. He has published over one hundred scientific papers in journals such as Nature, Science, Cell, and Neuron. He is a Guggenheim fellow, a member of the advisory committee for the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His new book is It Could Be Otherwise: Science in the Age of Uncertainty.

Is the Future Unknowable? Uncertainty, Free Will, and the Limits of Science

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 extraterrestrial visitors has such a powerful hold on us.
 
They discuss Roswell, UFO "disclosure," eyewitness testimony, government secrecy, alien abductions, Carl Sagan and Contact, the religious impulse behind UFO belief, and the difference between testimony and scientific evidence. The conversation also turns to the serious scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence: the Fermi paradox, why decades of SETI have found nothing, how rare intelligent life might be, and whether our ideas about aliens ultimately tell us more about ourselves than about anything actually out there.
 
Adam Kirsch is the author of several books of poetry and criticism and a senior editor at The Atlantic. A 2016 Guggenheim Fellow, Kirsch has written for publications including The New Yorker, Slate, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times Book Review, Poetry, and Tablet. His new book is We Want to Believe: How Aliens Went Mainstream and Why It Matters.

Why We Want to Believe in Aliens and Why We Still Haven't Found Them

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 the conversation, Shermer and Sanger shift gears completely and discuss whether religious faith can be rational, the philosophical case for God, the resurrection, the Trinity, repentance and salvation, and whether a future superintelligent AI could become indistinguishable from God.

Can You Trust Wikipedia? Co-Founder Larry Sanger on Wikipedia's Bias and Why He Was Banned

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 proposed law of increasing functional information, the central idea behind their new book Time's Second Arrow. They discuss entropy and the second law of thermodynamics, the origin of life, the Cambrian explosion, emergence and complexity, Stephen Jay Gould and evolutionary contingency, whether evolution has a direction, and why the same basic process of variation and selection may apply far beyond biology. 
 
Shermer also presses them on what evidence could falsify their theory, whether AI could evolve far faster than biological organisms, and the biggest question of all: Does any of this imply that the universe has a purpose?
 
Robert M. Hazen, a geoscientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science, is the author of Symphony in C, among other titles.
 
Michael L. Wong is a planetary scientist and astrobiologist at the Carnegie Institution for Science.

Is There a Second Arrow of Time? A New Law of Evolution, Information, and Complexity

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 discuss whether babies are born with a moral sense, what children and other primates can really tell us about the origins of morality, how parents shape their children's values, classic experiments in moral psychology, and whether science can tell us what is right and wrong. The conversation also turns to abortion, competing rights, immigration, religion, and the growing tendency to misunderstand and demonize people who reach different moral conclusions.
 
Audun Dahl is a professor of psychology at Cornell University, where he directs the Developmental Moral Psychology Lab. His research examines how people develop ideas about right and wrong across the lifespan, from infancy through adulthood, and how moral judgments are shaped by everyday social interactions. He is the author of Between Fixed and Fickle: Why Our Moral Views Keep Changing.

Why Good People Disagree About Right and Wrong

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 functions that natural selection built into human brains. That helps explain why AI capabilities have advanced so quickly, and why increasingly autonomous systems and recursive self-improvement could accelerate the process even further.
 
Shermer presses Wright on what all of this actually means. Does an AI understand what it says? Could it be conscious? Why would a superintelligence ever seek power? Is human extinction a realistic possibility, or science-fiction doomerism? They discuss AI deception and theory of mind, John Searle's Chinese Room, bioweapons and cyberattacks, the risk of a U.S.-China AI arms race, regulation, surveillance, and the growing concentration of power in governments and tech companies.
 
The conversation ends with Wright's larger philosophical question: if humanity really is building something with godlike power, what kind of god are we going to build, and are we mature enough to survive it?
 
Robert Wright is the New York Times bestselling author of The Evolution of God (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), Nonzero, The Moral Animal, and Three Scientists and their Gods (a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award). He has taught at the University of Pennsylvania and at Princeton University, where he also created the popular online course "Buddhism and Modern Psychology." He is currently Visiting Professor of Science and Religion at Union Theological Seminary in New York.

Are We Building a God? AI, Superintelligence, and the Coming Singularity

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 whether Western democracy can survive an age of economic pessimism and technological control.
 
Marlene Laruelle is a professor in the Department of Political Science at Luiss University in Rome. From 2011 to 2025, she served as research professor of international affairs and political science at George Washington University. She directs the Illiberalism Studies Program, a transatlantic initiative based in Washington, D.C., and Paris at Inalco. A specialist in Russia and the post-Soviet region, her work examines ideology, geopolitics, and culture, with a current focus on the rise of illiberal and postliberal ideologies in Europe and the United States.

How to Think Clearly About a World in Crisis: Iran, China, Russia, and the West's Economic Pessimism

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 health rather than injustice.
 
Steve Stewart-Williams is a professor of psychology at the University of Nottingham Malaysia. His first book, Darwin, God, and the Meaning of Life, was published in 2010. His second, The Ape That Understood the Universe, was published in 2018. His new book is A Billion Years of Sex Differences.

The Truth About Sex Differences (Steve Stewart-Williams)

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 with Lawrence Douglas, professor at Amherst College and author of The Criminal State: War Atrocity and the Dream of International Justice, about Demjanjuk, Eichmann, Nuremberg, Holocaust denial, and the problem of proving atrocities decades after they happened.
 
How reliable is eyewitness memory after 40 or 50 years? What did Nuremberg actually establish? Was Eichmann really just a bureaucrat? And can a courtroom ever deliver justice for crimes almost too large to comprehend?
 
Lawrence Douglas is the James J. Grosfeld Professor of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought at Amherst College and a Guggenheim fellow. His many books include The Right Wrong Man and The Memory of Judgment. His writing has appeared in leading publications such as Harper's, The Wall Street Journal, and The Economist. His new book is The Criminal State: War Atrocity and the Dream of International Justice.

When History Goes on Trial: Demjanjuk, Eichmann, and Justice After Atrocity

Michael Shermer makes the case that the U.S. Founding Fathers were not only steeped in Enlightenment values on which the Declaration of Independence was based, but they were also scientists searching to discover moral truths and values on which to base a rational society, which they succeeded in doing in this document along with the Constitution.

America at 250: What Did the Founders Get Right?

Astonishingly irrational ideas are spreading. COVID-19 denial, anti-vaxxers compromising public health, conspiracy thinking hijacking minds and inciting mob violence, toxic partisanship cleaving our nations, the return of Flat Earth theory… What the heck is going on? Why is all this happening, and why now? More important, what can we do about it? Does our "right to our opinion" trump our responsibilities? Does the resulting ethos effectively compromise mental immune systems, allowing "mind parasites" to overrun them? Are conspiracy theories, evidence-defying ideologies, and garden-variety bad ideas all species of mind parasites, each of which employs clever strategies to circumvent mental immune systems? In this conversation, based on the book Mental Immunity, Andy Norman shows that minds and cultures have immune systems, and that they really can break down. Fortunately, he assures us that they can also be built up: strengthened against ideological corruption. Can his ideas revolutionize our capacity for critical thinking?

180. Andy Norman — Mental Immunity: Infectious Ideas, Mind Parasites, and the Search for a Better Way to Think

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