The Michael Shermer Show

We like to think the future can be figured out if we just gather enough information. Pick the right expert, read the right forecast, find the right framework, and the fog will lift.
Simone Stolzoff argues that this impulse often works against us. In his new book How to Not Know, he makes the case for getting better at uncertainty—not as a slogan, and not as an excuse to believe nothing, but as a practical skill: knowing when to act without perfect information, when to distrust easy answers, when to revise your beliefs, and when uncertainty might point toward something worth discovering.
The conversation covers why people cling to conspiracy theories, what cults offer that ordinary life does not, why experts are so bad at predicting the future, how the replication crisis changed psychology, what relationships teach us about irreversible choices, and why the unknown is not only frightening, but also where possibility begins.
Simone Stolzoff is a San Francisco–based journalist and author. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and on the TED stage. He is a graduate of Stanford University and the University of Pennsylvania. His debut book, The Good Enough Job, has been translated into more than a dozen languages. His new book is How to Not Know: The Value of Uncertainty in a World That Demands Answers.

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.

Journalist and author Ashley Rindsberg returns to The Michael Shermer Show for a wide-ranging conversation about the new media world: influencers with audiences larger than cable networks, conspiracy theories built for engagement, and the collapse of trust that followed COVID, censorship, and years of institutional overreach.
Ashley Rindsberg is an investigative journalist and author focused on digital information platforms. He is the founder and editor of NPOV, which looks at how knowledge platforms like Wikipedia are used to distort information and seed damaging narratives online. He is the author of The Gray Lady Winked, an expose on The New York Times, and serves as Editor-at-Large at Pirate Wires, a leading tech, politics, and culture outlet.

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.

The long-promised UFO files have finally been released.
In this solo commentary, Michael Shermer examines the newly declassified documents, photographs, videos, eyewitness accounts, redactions, and government claims surrounding UFOs and UAPs.