The Big Bang Wasn’t the Beginning? Exploring Cosmic Origins
Release Date: 05/27/2025
The Power of Common Knowledge: Steven Pinker on Language, Norms, and Punishment
The Michael Shermer Show
Common knowledge is necessary for coordination, for making arbitrary but complementary choices like driving on the right, using paper currency, and coalescing behind a political leader or movement. It’s also necessary for social coordination. Humans have a sixth sense for common knowledge, and we create it with signals like laughter, tears, blushing, eye contact, and blunt speech. But people also go to great lengths to avoid common knowledge—to ensure that even if everyone knows something, they can’t know that everyone else knows they know it. And so we get rituals like benign hypocrisy,...
info_outline
Jim Lampley on Hosting the Super Bowl, Calling Tyson’s Fights, and His Friendship with O.J.
The Michael Shermer Show
Jim Lampley’s story is a 50-year travelog of an unlikely career that catalogs the evolution of sports television—from his emergence as the first sideline reporter, through hosting and covering 14 Olympics, to working with all major sports networks. In this episode, Lampley reflects on his experiences in boxing, the evolution of the sport, and the genius of athletes like Muhammad Ali and George Foreman. The conversation also explores the unpredictability of life and how chance events shape our paths, the importance of mentorship, and the impact of performance-enhancing drugs. Lampley offers...
info_outline
The Assassination of Charlie Kirk: Shermer Reflects on Political Violence
The Michael Shermer Show
In this solo commentary, Michael Shermer reflects on the assassination of Charlie Kirk and places it in the larger context of political violence, the psychology of radicalization, the dangers of false beliefs, and the role of free speech in intellectual discourse.
info_outline
The Fate of Nations: Why Ignoring Human Nature Dooms Politics
The Michael Shermer Show
Science writer Nicholas Wade explains how human nature continues to shape—and sometimes destabilize—modern civilization, and argues that ignoring the effects of human nature on politics is one of society’s greatest mistakes. Drawing on anthropology, evolutionary biology, and history, Wade shows how deep-rooted traits not only shape the outcomes of certain political beliefs and systems, but also affect how people form families, religion, and social order. Nicholas Wade has worked at Nature and Science, and, for many years, at The New York Times, where he was an editorial writer and...
info_outline
How to Protect Children from Social Media and AI
The Michael Shermer Show
Parenting today often feels like an uphill battle, with technology invading every corner of our kids’ lives. From the rise of social media addiction to the growing mental health crisis among children and teens, parents are grappling with how they can create a healthy, balanced relationship with technology for their kids. Drawing on her decades as a psychologist studying the impact of technology and mental health, Jean Twenge offers evidence-based advice for raising independent and well-rounded children. Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University and the author of...
info_outline
The Future of Space Exploration Amid NASA Mission Shutdowns
The Michael Shermer Show
In this episode of The Michael Shermer Show, Michael Shermer interviews Alan Stern, a prominent planetary scientist and astronaut. Stern discusses his recent suborbital flight, the differences between government and private space initiatives, and the scientific implications of UFO sightings. He also shares insights about the evolution and future of space exploration, including details about the rarely talked about upcoming termination of dozens of already paid-for NASA missions. Alan Stern is a planetary scientist, astronaut, and author. NASA has selected him to be the first researcher NASA...
info_outline
Why Do Humans Speak?
The Michael Shermer Show
In a radical new story about the birth of our species, evolutionary biologist Madeleine Beekman argues that it was not hunting, fighting, or tool-making that forced early humans to speak, but the inescapable need to care for our children. Beekman reveals the “happy accidents” hidden in our molecular biology—DNA, chromosomes, and proteins—that led to one of the most fateful events in the history of life on Earth: our giving birth to babies earlier in their development than our hominid cousins the Neanderthals and Denisovans. Faced with highly dependent infants requiring years of...
info_outline
Depopulation: The Silent Global Emergency
The Michael Shermer Show
Economist Dean Spears explains the forces driving global population change, from past fears of overpopulation to today’s concerns about declining birth rates. He contrasts the perspectives of biologists and economists on population growth and highlights the role of human ideas and innovation in sustaining progress. Spears also discusses misconceptions about zero-sum economics, the links between population, health, and economic well-being, and the rise of anti-natalism. The conversation covers population size and environmental concerns, government policies on family planning, and why cultural...
info_outline
Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyper-Persuasion
The Michael Shermer Show
Because brainwashing affects both the world and our observation of the world, we often don’t recognize it while it’s happening―unless we know where to look. As Rebecca Lemov writes in her new book The Instability of Truth, “Brainwashing erases itself.” What we call brainwashing is more common than we think; it is not so much what happens to other people as what can happen to anyone. In her work, Lemov exposes the myriad ways our minds can be controlled against our will, from the brainwashing techniques used against American POWs in North Korea to the “soft” brainwashing of social...
info_outline
How Foreign Governments Influence U.S. Universities
The Michael Shermer Show
In an era of globalized education, where ideals of freedom and inquiry should thrive, an alarming trend has emerged: foreign authoritarian regimes influencing American academia. In her new book Authoritarians in the Academy, Sarah McLaughlin reveals how higher education institutions—long considered bastions of free thought—are compromising their values for financial gain and international partnerships. Her investigation uncovers the subtle yet sweeping influence of authoritarian governments, exposing university leaders who prioritize expansion and profit over the principles of free...
info_outlineBy most popular accounts, the universe started with a bang some 13.8 billion years ago. But what happened before the Big Bang? And how do we know it happened at all?
Cosmologist Niayesh Afshordi and science communicator Phil Halper offer a tour of the peculiar possibilities: bouncing and cyclic universes, time loops, creations from nothing, multiverses, black hole births, string theories, and holograms.
Incorporating insights from Afshordi’s cutting-edge research and Halper’s original interviews with scientists like Stephen Hawking, Roger Penrose, and Alan Guth, Afshordi and Halper compare these models for the origin of our origins, showing each theory’s strengths and weaknesses and explaining new attempts to test these notions. But most of all, Afshordi and Halper show that this search is filled with wonder, discovery, and community—all essential for remembering a forgotten cosmic past.
Niayesh Afshordi is professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Waterloo and associate faculty at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Ontario, Canada. His prize-winning research focuses on competing models for the early universe, dark energy, dark matter, black holes, holography, and gravitational waves.
Phil Halper is a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and a science popularizer. He is the creator of the popular YouTube series Before the Big Bang, which has had several million views. His astronomy images have been featured in major media outlets including The Washington Post, the BBC, and The Guardian, and he has published several papers in peer-reviewed journals.