The Michael Shermer Show

Polina Marinova Pompliano, founder of T... discusses personal journey, distinguishing the truly exceptional, genius, victimhood, fear, updating beliefs, pursuing goals, and trust. Topics include building trust, hidden genius, luck and genes, building competence, characteristics of successful creators, childhood obsession, and overcoming fear.

Guest Lee McIntyre, Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University, discusses disinformation and protecting democracy with Michael Shermer. They cover topics such as the source of disinformation, erosion of democracy under Trump, the impact of misinformation on voter behavior, effectiveness of masks, balancing extremism, and engaging in meaningful conversations to fight disinformation.

History of church-state separation in the US • Founders' views on religious freedom and minority protection • Inequalities in tax exemptions for religious institutions and secular nonprofits • Cultural preferences and the risk of favoring a specific religion • Influence of the Federalist Society on Supreme Court appointments • Religious freedom and discrimination cases • Defining religion and discrimination against nonbelievers • Abortion rights debate and state authority • Religious right's impact in the 1980 presidential election • Supreme Court rulings on church-state separation • Threat of a constitutional convention to freedom and separation of church and state

Nancy Segal, author of Twin Children of the Holocaust and Gay Fathers, Twin Sons, discusses the fascinating world of twins, including accidental and intentional separations, reunions, and twins in different family arrangements. They delve into twins' history, the gay fathers and twin sons case, immigration and naturalization issues, eugenics, and the relative role of nature and nurture in shaping lives.

Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb announces the discovery of material from an interstellar meteor on the ocean floor. He discusses the analysis of the meteor's composition, address criticism, and the process of submitting his work to peer review. They also explore the controversy surrounding the meteor's origin and the likelihood of extraterrestrial civilizations. The chapter concludes with a discussion on Mars lava tubes and the search for life.

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Edward J. Larson discusses the founding of America, the attitudes of the Founding Fathers towards slavery, and the justification of slavery. They also delve into the U.S. Constitution, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, the Atlantic slave trade, and the push for abolition. The conversation explores the Three-fifths Compromise, the Dread Scott Decision, Abraham Lincoln's reasoning for ending slavery, and the future of race relations in America.

David Burns, a guest on the podcast, discusses the illusion of perfectionism and its negative consequences. The conversation explores topics like the Big Five Personality Scale, origins and consequences of perfectionism, the impact of social media and helicopter parenting, and generational differences. They also touch on subjects such as income inequality, UBI, and the influence of parents on children's lives.

World leaders have promised everything to everyone. But they are failing. Together with more than a hundred of the world's top economists, Bjorn Lomborg has worked for years to identify the world's best solutions. Based on 12 new, peer-reviewed papers, forthcoming in Cambridge University Press' Journal of Benefit-Cost Analysis, Lomborg's latest book highlights the world's best policies. Shermer and Lomborg discuss: perfect solutions vs. practical trade-offs • benefit-cost analysis • time horizons and discounting the future • the value of a statistical life • saving the environment, the poor, the diseased • the millennium development goals • the sustainable development goals • tuberculosis • education • maternal and newborn health • agricultural R&D (more and cheaper food) • malaria • land tenure security • nutrition • chronic diseases • childhood immunization • corruption • highly skilled migration. Bjorn Lomborg is an academic and the author of the best-selling The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It. He is a visiting professor at Copenhagen Business School, and president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center which brings together top economists, including seven Nobel Laureates, to set data-driven priorities for the world. Lomborg is a frequent commentator in print and broadcast media, for outlets including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, CNN, FOX, and the BBC. His monthly column is published in 19 languages, in 30+ newspapers with more than 30 million readers globally. Follow him on twitter @BjornLomborg.

From phishing scams to Ponzi schemes, fraudulent science to fake art, chess cheaters to crypto hucksters, and marketers to magicians, our world brims with deception. In Nobody's Fool, psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris show us how to avoid being taken in. They describe the key habits of thinking and reasoning that serve us well most of the time but make us vulnerable—like our tendency to accept what we see, stick to our commitments, and overvalue precision and consistency. Each chapter illustrates their new take on the science of deception, describing scams you've never heard of and shedding new light on some you have. Simons and Chabris provide memorable maxims and practical tools you can use to spot deception before it's too late. Christopher Chabris is a professor at Geisinger, a Pennsylvania healthcare system, where he co-directs the Behavioral Insights Team. He previously taught at Union College and Harvard University, and is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science. Chris received his Ph.D. in psychology and A.B. in computer science from Harvard. His research focuses on decision-making, attention, intelligence, and behavior genetics. His work has been published in leading journals including Science, Nature, PNAS, and Perception, and he has published essays in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Washington Post. Chris is also a chess master, games enthusiast, and co-author of the bestselling book The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us. Together Daniel and Christopher co-authored the new book Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken In and What We Can Do about It. Shermer, Simons, and Chabris discuss: • How rational vs. irrational are humans? (Daniel Kahneman vs. Gerd Gingerenzer) • Truth Default Theory, or Truth Bias • deception vs. deception detection • social proof and the influence of others on our beliefs • cults • Bernie Madoff • Harvey Weinstein • Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos • Nigerian spam scam • cheating in chess • habits of thought that can be exploited • information hooks we find especially enticing instead of triggering skepticism • scientific fraud and the replication crisis • how to prevent from being a victim of fraud or a con.

Everyone wants to be happy. The question "How can I be happy?" drives countless decisions across the world, and billions of dollars are spent on marketing a wide variety of answers to it. Increasing evidence shows, however, that unhappiness is on the rise. Already known to an audience of hundreds of thousands as "the therapist for everyone," Dr. Saad contends that happiness is not merely a changeable mood, but a process toward which all people can strive by following basic steps known to humans for millennia; happiness can be measured and assessed, and strategies devised to achieve it. Drawing on scientific studies, the wisdom of ancient philosophy and religion, and his extraordinary personal experience as a refugee from war-torn Lebanon, Gad offers a provocative, helpful, and entertaining treatise on how to strive for happiness, win it, and keep it. Gad Saad, PhD, one of the best-known public intellectuals fighting the tyranny of political correctness, is a professor of marketing at the John Molson School of Business at Concordia University, where he held the Research Chair in Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences and Darwinian Consumption from 2008 to 2018. A pioneer in the application of evolutionary psychology to consumer behavior, he is the author of The Evolutionary Bases of Consumption, The Consuming Instinct, and numerous scientific papers and the editor of the book Evolutionary Psychology in the Business Sciences. His previous bestselling popular trade book is The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense. His new book is The Saad Truth about Happiness: 8 Secrets for Leading the Good Life. Shermer and Saad discuss: operational definitions of the "good life," "happiness," and "well being" • emotions • eudaimonia (the pursuit of meaning) versus hedonism (the pursuit of pleasure) • genetics and heritability • cultural components • the Big Five (OCEAN) • marriage (mate selection) • health • exercise and stress reduction • religion • anti-fragility • a playful outlook and curiosity • variety (the "spice of life") • what the ancient Greeks got right about living the good life • how failure may actually be a key to more happiness • persistence, grit, and risk taking • regret and the dark side of consumption and addictions.