The Collapse of Open Inquiry: Sacred Victims and Forbidden Questions
Open inquiry depends on the ability to ask uncomfortable questions and follow evidence wherever it leads. Eric Kaufmann argues that this norm is now under strain. Drawing on history, survey data, and ...
28 Dec 20251h 30min
The Future of Brain Implants: Restoring Speech, Regaining Mobility, Treating Pain
Brain-computer interfaces are moving out of the lab and into real medical use. In this episode of The Michael Shermer Show, Michael Shermer talks with Dr. Matt Angle, founder and CEO of Paradromics, a...
23 Dec 20251h
The Original Alien Craze: When People Believed in Martians
At the turn of the 20th century, millions of Americans, including elite scientists, major newspapers, and cultural icons, were convinced that Mars was home to an advanced civilization. In this episode...
20 Dec 20251h 26min
How AI Sees Science Differently Than We Do
What if the great discoveries of science came in the "wrong" order? The Laws of Thermodynamics were discovered well after the creation of algebra, classical physics, and chemistry, but are perhaps muc...
16 Dec 20252h 7min
Can You Spot a Killer? The Dangerous Fantasy of Criminal Profiling
Criminal profiling promises certainty in the face of horror: this is what a killer looks like, this is how they think, this is how we stop them. But what if that promise is mostly an illusion? In this...
13 Dec 20251h 14min
Why Wars Last Longer Than Experts Predict
For nearly two centuries, international relations have been premised on the idea of the "Great Powers." As the thinking went, these mighty states—the European empires of the nineteenth century, the Un...
8 Dec 20251h 1min
The Emergent Mind: From Ant Colonies to Human Thought to Artificial Intelligence
In this episode of The Michael Shermer Show, Michael sits down with two giants of mind and machine science: Jay McClelland, one of the founders of modern neural networks, and Gaurav Suri, computationa...
6 Dec 20251h 44min
Are We Meant to Leave Earth? Why Humanity May Have No Choice but to Go to Space
Astrobiologist Caleb Scharf joins Michael Shermer for a wide-ranging conversation about the past, present, and future of our relationship with space. Drawing on his new book The Giant Leap, Scharf exp...
2 Dec 20251h 33min
