The Future of Brain Implants: Restoring Speech, Regaining Mobility, Treating Pain
Release Date: 12/23/2025
Did Jesus Really Change Western Morality? Bart Ehrman
The Michael Shermer Show
How much of what we call “basic morality” is actually inherited from Christianity? Bart Ehrman joins Michael Shermer for a wide-ranging conversation about one of the biggest moral questions in history: why do we feel obligated to care for strangers at all? Drawing from his new book Love Thy Stranger, Ehrman argues that the idea of helping people outside your tribe, family, or nation was not a moral given in the ancient world. Greek and Roman ethics made room for loyalty, friendship, and civic duty, but not for radical concern for the outsider. He makes the case that Jesus changed that...
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Lionel Shriver on Immigration, Religion, and the Decline of the West
The Michael Shermer Show
Michael Shermer sits down with novelist and essayist Lionel Shriver for a wide-ranging conversation about what happens when old political labels stop making sense. Shriver reflects on the strange moral and political confusions that now shape debates over immigration, identity, religion, and the meaning of tolerance. They discuss why immigration has become, in Shriver’s view, the central political issue of this century; why support for illiberal ideas is often framed as compassion; why the culture of fiction and publishing has grown more timid; and how writers can still engage seriously...
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The Biggest Blind Spot of the Climate Movement: Nuclear Energy
The Michael Shermer Show
Zion Lights used to be deep inside the environmental movement: protests, arrests, road blockades, the whole thing. Then she started looking closely at the evidence around nuclear power and found that much of what she’d been told about energy, risk, and climate solutions didn’t hold up. In this conversation with Michael Shermer, she explains why anti-nuclear politics has done real damage, and why reliable energy matters far beyond moral posturing. She speaks from experience about Extinction Rebellion, energy policy in Germany and France, fear around Fukushima and Chernobyl, energy poverty,...
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DOGE, Government Fraud, and AI Audits
The Michael Shermer Show
Jeremy Jones joins Michael Shermer to talk about DOGE AI, government fraud, and the strange reality that some of the biggest problems in public life are both widely known and somehow never fixed. Jones explains how his team uses AI to sort through enormous government datasets, isolate suspicious billing patterns, and surface waste at a scale that would be almost impossible to catch by hand. They also get into Jones’s own background—growing up in Luxembourg, landing in Chicago, and seeing firsthand how different systems shape people’s lives—before moving into a broader argument about...
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Heretics: The Scientists Who Were Mocked But Later Proven Right
The Michael Shermer Show
Why do some world-changing ideas get ignored, attacked, or buried for years before anyone takes them seriously? Michael Shermer sits down with The Economist science correspondent Matt Kaplan to discuss the scientists who got there first and paid the price. They talk about why institutions resist new ideas, why careers can depend on defending the status quo, and why being right is often not enough. They discuss figures like Katalin Karikó, whose work on mRNA was dismissed long before it helped transform modern medicine, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, who faced fierce backlash for arguing that...
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Shermer Says 7: Responding to Fan Mail … “Who Was Jesus?”
The Michael Shermer Show
Michael Shermer responds to a remarkable letter from a group of eighth graders at a Christian school in Texas who say they’ve been praying for him and want to talk about Christianity, Jesus, and the Bible.
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Why the Same Childhood Doesn’t Affect Everyone the Same Way
The Michael Shermer Show
For decades, developmental psychologist Jay Belsky has focused on one of the biggest questions in human development: how do early experiences shape the lives we go on to live? In this conversation with Michael Shermer, he explains why childhood adversity can leave deep marks, why some children are far more affected by experience than others, and why averages often hide the most important part of the story. Belsky revisits the old nature-versus-nurture debate, but pushes past the usual framing. His argument is not that childhood determines everything in some simple, uniform way....
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Who Gets to Edit Culture? Sensitivity Readers & Censorship in Book Publishing
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. Adam Szetela argues that a lot of what gets called “cancel culture” in books is better understood as risk management under social media conditions. Outrage compresses timelines, collapses context, and turns interpretation into a moral referendum. A handful of motivated actors can create the impression of a mass...
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Filming Corey Feldman & “Corey’s Angels”: The Weird World Behind the Curtain
The Michael Shermer Show
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 some uncomfortable places: how celebrity can create cult-ish dynamics (not just with fans, but with the people working around them as well), how “truth” becomes a slogan—used to frame criticism as persecution and to keep tight control of the story, and how living on camera can turn real life into...
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Can a Skeptic Believe in God?
The Michael Shermer Show
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 that don’t let you sleep: what counts as evidence, what belief even is, and what you do when reason can’t answer the things you still have to decide. In this conversation with Michael Shermer, Beha makes a case that skepticism and belief aren’t enemies—and that some debates go nowhere because people...
info_outlineBrain-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 neurotechnology company developing one of the most advanced high-data-rate brain implants in the world, similar to Neuralink. These devices record activity from individual neurons, making it possible to restore speech in people with paralysis, reconnect the brain to external devices, and potentially treat chronic pain and neurological disorders with far greater precision than existing approaches.
Angle explains why progress in neuroscience has been limited not by biology, but by data—how much information we can actually read from the brain, and how fast. He describes how patients who can no longer speak may soon communicate fluently using only brain signals, why invasive implants can sometimes be safer than long-term drug treatments, and what it takes to bring a brain implant through FDA approval and into the clinic.
The conversation also touches on the larger questions raised by this technology, including autonomy, consciousness, and what happens when the boundary between brain and machine begins to blur.
Matt Angle is the Founder and CEO of Paradromics, a neurotechnology leader developing the world’s most advanced and clinically viable brain-computer interface (BCI) platform—bridging human thought and digital capability. Paradromics’ BCI platform records brain activity with unmatched precision, capturing data at the level of individual neurons. This advanced technology enables the decoding of vast amounts of brain data, opening the door to next-generation treatments for paralysis, chronic pain, addiction, mental health conditions, and more. With the power of AI, this platform has the potential to radically shift how healthcare providers approach some of the most challenging medical conditions.
Angle earned his PhD in Neuroscience from the University of Heidelberg, followed by postdoctoral research at Stanford University. Paradromics engineered its first clinical product, the Connexus® BCI, received two FDA Breakthrough Device Designations, and performed the first-in-human neural recording in May 2025. The company is now preparing to launch a clinical trial in early 2026, pending regulatory approval.