The Michael Shermer Show

Publishing likes to imagine itself as a marketplace of ideas with a strong immune system: good arguments win, bad ones fade, and editors act as principled gatekeepers. In practice, it's also an industry with thin margins, status anxiety, and a constant fear of reputational damage ...  Show more

Documentary filmmaker Marcie Hume (BBC alum; Magicians: Life in the Impossible) joins Michael Shermer to talk about her new verité film Corey Feldman vs. the World—shot over a decade, starting in the "Corey's Angels" era and following a tour that unravels in real time. It goes to ...  Show more

Christopher Beha grew up Catholic in Manhattan, walked away during the New Atheist era, and spent years trying to build a secular worldview sturdy enough to live inside. It didn't hold. So he kept reading—Hume, Kant, Russell, the existentialists—and kept chasing the questions tha ...  Show more

Michael Shermer recounts the moment he discovered his name in the Jeffrey Epstein files and uses it as a jumping-off point to tell a few unforgettable stories about con men he's encountered over the years, and how their tactics work. 

Why do people risk everything for love but treat sex like it's no big deal? Why is intimacy the most expensive thing in a brothel? And why do jealousy, infidelity, and heartbreak push otherwise rational people into behavior they later can't explain? Evolutionary biologist and sex ...  Show more