Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchWhat Makes You "You" When Everything Is Just Atoms?
Episode 576
What is consciousness, really? Why does it not simply switch on at a single moment? Neuroscientist Niko Kukushkin explains how even single cells can …
3 months, 3 weeks ago
Rethinking the Discovery of DNA
Episode 575
Francis Crick is best known as one of the figures behind the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA, but the familiar story leaves out as muc…
3 months, 4 weeks ago
How One Black Man Dismantled the KKK, One Conversation at a Time
Episode 574
What do you do when someone believes you shouldn't exist?
Daryl Davis didn't protest. He didn't shout. He sat down, asked questions, and kept showing…
4 months ago
The Collapse of Open Inquiry: Sacred Victims and Forbidden Questions
Episode 573
Open inquiry depends on the ability to ask uncomfortable questions and follow evidence wherever it leads. Eric Kaufmann argues that this norm is now …
4 months ago
The Future of Brain Implants: Restoring Speech, Regaining Mobility, Treating Pain
Episode 572
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 wit…
4 months, 1 week ago
The Original Alien Craze: When People Believed in Martians
Episode 571
At the turn of the 20th century, millions of Americans, including elite scientists, major newspapers, and cultural icons, were convinced that Mars wa…
4 months, 1 week ago
How AI Sees Science Differently Than We Do
Episode 570
What if the great discoveries of science came in the "wrong" order? The Laws of Thermodynamics were discovered well after the creation of algebra, cl…
4 months, 2 weeks ago
Can You Spot a Killer? The Dangerous Fantasy of Criminal Profiling
Episode 569
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 …
4 months, 2 weeks ago
Why Wars Last Longer Than Experts Predict
Episode 568
For nearly two centuries, international relations have been premised on the idea of the "Great Powers." As the thinking went, these mighty states—the…
4 months, 3 weeks ago
The Emergent Mind: From Ant Colonies to Human Thought to Artificial Intelligence
Episode 567
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 mo…
4 months, 3 weeks ago