The Michael Shermer Show

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 wars, including inter-rebel group fighting, alliances and the strategic use of propaganda and extremism. She has spent her career studying civil conflict in places like Iraq and Sri Lanka, but now she has become increasingly worried about her own country. Perhaps surprisingly, both autocracies and healthy democracies are largely immune from civil war; it’s the countries in the middle ground that are most vulnerable. And this is where more and more countries, including the United States, are finding themselves today. A civil war today won’t look like America in the 1860s, Russia in the 1920s, or Spain in the 1930s. It will begin with sporadic acts of violence and terror, accelerated by social media. It will sneak up on us and leave us wondering how we could have been so blind.

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 modern tribal peoples living nearby; the consensus on how long ago migrations began; her lawsuit against San Jose State University for defaming her as a “racist” and blocking her from further scientific study of the fossil collection she has curated for 17 years, and much more…

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 underlies all intellectual achievement and has enabled the advancement of both freedom and equality worldwide. Yet the desire to restrict speech, too, is a constant.

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 of ETIs being out there vs. the odds of ETIs having visited here; an answer to Fermi’s Paradox: Where is everyone?; conspiracies and conspiracy theories, and more… Nick Pope ran the British government’s UFO program for the Ministry of Defense, leading the media to call him the real Fox Mulder. He’s recognized as one of the world’s leading experts on UFOs, the unexplained, and conspiracy theories. Nick is the media’s go-to person for UFOs. He’s made appearances on numerous TV news shows and documentaries, including Good Morning America, Nightline, Tucker Carlson Tonight and Ancient Aliens. He’s also written for the New York Times, for the BBC News website and for NBC’s technology and science site, and has acted as consultant and spokesperson on numerous alien-themed movies, TV shows, and video games. Nick Pope gives talks and takes part in academic conferences, fan conventions, and debates all around the world. He’s spoken at the National Press Club, the Royal Albert Hall, the Science Museum and the Global Competitiveness Forum, and has debated at the Oxford Union and the Cambridge Union Society. Nick Pope lives in the US.

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) you can predict their stance on many other issues; and more… American psychologist Dr. Frank J. Sulloway, author of Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend (1979), provides a radical reanalysis of the origins and validity of psychoanalysis and received the Pfizer Award of the History of Science Society. For decades, Dr. Sulloway has employed evolutionary theory to understand how family dynamics affect personality development, including that of creative geniuses. He has a particular interest in the influence that birth order exerts on personality and behavior. In this connection, he is the author of Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives (1996).

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 natural selection that favors survival of the simplest. Shermer and McFadden discuss: from what was science set free?; what William of Occam’s razor cut; Bayes’s probability razor; Ptolemaic vs. Tychonic vs. Copernican world systems in terms of simplicity; simplicity in math, physics, biology, medicine, and the social sciences; Einstein’s razor: how does relativity theory simplify the universe?; Postmodernism and the search for Truth; McFadden’s explanations for solving the hard problems of consciousness, free will, and determinism, and more …

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 psychiatry at Columbia University’s Vagelos College of Physicians & Surgeons, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a lecturer at Yale University School of Medicine, and a practicing psychiatrist. She holds an MD from Brown University and completed her residency in psychiatry at Yale University. Satel is the author of PC, MD: How Political Correctness is Corrupting Medicine, Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience (with Scott Lillienfeld), and One Nation Under Therapy: How the Helping Culture Is Eroding Self-Reliance (with Christina Hoff Sommers). Dr. Satel lives in Washington, DC.

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 quants are using the scientific method to study how stories affect our brains. In this conversation based on his new book, Gottschall reveals why our biggest asset has become our greatest threat, and what, if anything, can be done. It is a call to stop asking, “How we can change the world through stories?” and start asking, “How can we save the world from stories?”

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 political comedy called I Might Be Wrong: a podcast and several-times-weekly Substack column that covers politics and economics with a comedic voice. Instead of trying to interpret the world from a single viewpoint, Jeff picks apart the thinking behind the viewpoints and digs deep into policy.

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/moods/drives/passions; how the scientific understanding of emotions has changed; thought vs. feeling; system 1 vs. system 2 cognition; mind-body connection: how does our physical state influence what we think & feel?; the neuroscience of emotions: how the brain constructs emotions; Lisa Feldman Barrett challenge to Paul Ekman’s theory of universal emotions; Schachter-Singer theory of emotion; the effects of social context on emotions; and more…