The Michael Shermer Show

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.

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.

Jon Mills, a philosopher, psychoanalyst, and clinical psychologist, joins Michael Shermer to discuss how social justice ideology has moved from a concern with fairness and equal treatment into a rigid moral framework built around oppressors and victims, privilege and disadvantage, good and evil. Their conversation focuses on the tension between compassion and truth: how to take injustice seriously without reducing people to identity categories, what happens when clinicians bring activism into the therapy room, why biological reality has become politically charged, and whether "wokeness" is beginning to lose its hold on public life. Jon Mills is a Canadian philosopher, psychoanalyst, and clinical psychologist. He is Honorary Professor, Department of Psychosocial & Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex, UK, on faculty in the Postgraduate Programs in Psychoanalysis & Psychotherapy, Gordon F. Derner School of Psychology, Adelphi University, USA, and on faculty and a Supervising Analyst at the New School for Existential Psychoanalysis, USA. Recipient of numerous awards for his scholarship including 5 Gradiva Awards, he is the author and/or editor of over 35 books in psychoanalysis, philosophy, psychology, and cultural studies including most recently End of the World: Civilization and Its Fate. In 2015 he was given the Otto Weininger Memorial Award for Lifetime Achievement by the Canadian Psychological Association.

Gad Saad returns to discuss his new book Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind, a provocative argument that empathy is not a moral trump card. Empathy can illuminate suffering, but it can also distort judgment when it is treated as an unquestionable virtue, applied selectively, or insulated from consequences. Saad's central claim is that many Western institutions have learned to treat compassion as a substitute for judgment. In practice, he argues, this can mean extending sympathy toward the wrong targets (for example, criminals over victims), excusing destructive behavior, rewarding ideological conformity over truth, or denying uncomfortable facts in the name of kindness. The result is a moral framework that feels humane in the moment but can produce outcomes that are unfair, irrational, or even dangerous. The conversation covers cultural relativism, islamism, suicide cults, kamikaze pilots, immigration and foreign aid, forbidden knowledge, and why some ideas spread and take hold while others fade away. Gad Saad is a professor and an evolutionary behavioral scientist. He has authored numerous scientific papers and pioneered the use of evolutionary psychology in marketing and consumer behavior. In addition to his scientific work, he often writes and speaks about idea pathogens that are destroying logic, science, reason, and common sense. He is the host of The Saad Truth podcast. His new book is Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind.

Neil deGrasse Tyson returns to The Michael Shermer Show to talk UFOs, aliens, government files, eyewitness testimony, and his new book Take Me to Your Leader: Perspectives on Your First Alien Encounter. The conversation moves from the limits of eyewitness testimony to why secret military files are not evidence of hidden alien bodies, why high-G turns would turn biological pilots into "a pile of goo," why the universe almost certainly contains life elsewhere, and why the real question is not whether aliens exist—but whether anyone has actually produced one. Neil deGrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist and the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, where he has served since 1996. Dr. Tyson is also the host and cofounder of the Emmy-nominated popular podcast StarTalk and its spinoff StarTalk Sports Edition, which combine science, humor, and pop culture. He is a recipient of twenty-three honorary doctorates, the Public Welfare Medal from the National Academy of Sciences, and the Distinguished Public Service Medal from NASA. Asteroid 13123 Tyson is named in his honor. His new book is Take Me to Your Leader: Perspectives on Your First Alien Encounter.

Free speech was supposed to be the great settled achievement of liberal democracy. Then came social media, cancel culture, campus speech battles, hate-speech laws, authoritarian tech control, and a new era of governments pressuring platforms from every direction. Michael Shermer speaks with free speech scholar Jacob Mchangama about why speech protections are weakening around the world—not only in dictatorships, but inside democracies. Their conversation moves from the First Amendment and January 6 to hate speech laws in Europe, Section 230, Elon Musk and X, online anonymity, social media bans for minors, and the enormous promise and danger of AI. Mchangama argues that censorship is less a left-wing or right-wing impulse than a human one: once people gain power, the urge to silence enemies becomes almost irresistible. The real test of free speech is not whether we defend ideas we like, but whether we resist using state power against speech we despise. Jacob Mchangama is the founder and executive director of The Future of Free Speech and a research professor at Vanderbilt University. His new book is The Future of Free Speech: Reversing the Global Decline of Democracy's Most Essential Freedom.

Stewart Brand has spent a lifetime thinking about tools, systems, civilization, and the long future. Best known as the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog and co-founder of the Long Now Foundation, Brand joins Michael Shermer to discuss his new book, Maintenance of Everything, a sweeping look at what it takes to keep bodies, machines, buildings, institutions, planets, and civilizations from falling apart. The conversation ranges from the hidden work of maintenance to electric vehicles, bicycles, nuclear power, AI, and even human populations. Brand makes the case that life itself is maintenance: everything alive must keep itself going, and everything humans build must be repaired, improved, updated, and cared for. Stewart Brand is the cofounder and president of The Long Now Foundation and cofounder of Global Business Network, the Hackers Conference, and the WELL. He created and edited the National Book Award-winning Whole Earth Catalog from 1968 to 1998. He was the subject of the documentary We Are As Gods (2020). He graduated from Stanford with a degree in biology and served as an infantry officer in the US Army. His new book is Maintenance of Everything.

How much of what we call "basic morality" is actually inherited from Christianity? Bart Ehrman joins Michael Shermer for a wide-ranging conversation about one of the biggest moral questions in history: why do we feel obligated to care for strangers at all? Drawing from his new book Love Thy Stranger, Ehrman argues that the idea of helping people outside your tribe, family, or nation was not a moral given in the ancient world. Greek and Roman ethics made room for loyalty, friendship, and civic duty, but not for radical concern for the outsider. He makes the case that Jesus changed that moral equation—and that his teachings still shape the modern West, including many people who no longer consider themselves religious. The conversation also covers Ehrman's own path from evangelical Christianity to agnostic atheism, the problem of suffering, whether pure altruism really exists, and the difference between forgiveness and atonement. Bart Ehrman is the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and The New York Times bestselling author of Misquoting Jesus and How Jesus Became God. His new book is Love Thy Stranger: How Jesus Transformed Our Moral Conscience.