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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

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?

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, psychology, artificial intelligence, and instrumentation—to provide scientific guidance on the study of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP).

Why I Joined the Government UAP Science Advisory Council

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 altruism, faith, free will, democracy, human flourishing, and the uneasy relationship between facts and values.
 
From the trolley problem and Peter Singer's drowning child thought experiment to the ethics of charity, the limits of utilitarian thinking, and the dangers of tribalism, this episode asks how we should act when rules fail, consequences are uncertain, and good intentions are not enough.
 
Massimo Pigliucci is a bestselling author, philosopher, evolutionary biologist, and the K.D. Irani Professor of Philosophy at the City College of New York. His work spans evolutionary biology, philosophy of science, pseudoscience, and practical philosophy. His latest book is How to Be a Happy Skeptic: The Power of Doubt in a Meaningful Life.

Massimo Pigliucci on Doubt, Moral Courage, and Living Without Illusions

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 activist thinking in education and journalism, and the growing appeal of contrarian figures who seem to thrive on distrust.
 
They also get into the war in Ukraine, Israel and Gaza, Iran, isolationism, and why defending open inquiry matters most when it becomes inconvenient.

Cathy Young: Why Free Societies Need Free Speech

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 of a Fake Serial Killer, Toss Your Own Salad: The Meatless Cookbook, Brooklyn Hardcore, and Two Fare Zone. He's a former cop, 9/11 first responder, trained chef, and a columnist for Penthouse magazine.

The Zodiac Killer Wasn't Real

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 can become tools of control.
 
The conversation gets into why privacy matters for democracy, how algorithms can turn human lives into self-fulfilling prophecies, and why extraordinary people often fall outside predictive models.
 
Shermer and Véliz also discuss the limits of science, the replication crisis, crime statistics, effective altruism, utilitarian ethics, and free will.
 
Carissa Véliz is an associate professor at the Institute for Ethics in AI at the University of Oxford. Her first book, Privacy Is Power (Melville House) was an Economist book of the year and has been published in seven languages. Her academic work has been published in The Harvard Business Review, Nature, AI & Society, and The American Journal of Bioethics, among others. Her new book is Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future, from Ancient Oracles to AI.

How Algorithms Use Your Data to Control You

Batya Ungar-Sargon joins Michael Shermer for a wide-ranging conversation about the historical relationship between Jews and the American left, and why that relationship has become increasingly strained in recent years.
 
The discussion begins with the reaction to October 7 and the political language that quickly emerged around Israel, Palestine, power, oppression, and resistance. From there, Ungar-Sargon traces a longer history: Jewish life in early America, Jewish involvement in the labor movement, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, the civil rights movement, and the role many Jews played in shaping progressive politics in the 20th century.
 
Batya Ungar-Sargon is a columnist for The Free Press and the host of Batya! on NewsNation, where she is a weekend anchor. She holds a PhD in English from the University of California, Berkeley. Her new book is The Jews and the Left.

America at 250: What Did the Founders Get Right?

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