The Michael Shermer Show

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.

Stewart Brand has spent a lifetime thinking about tools, systems, civilization, and the long future. Best known as the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog and co-founder of the Long Now Foundation, Brand joins Michael Shermer to discuss his new book, Maintenance of Everything, a sweeping look at what it takes to keep bodies, machines, buildings, institutions, planets, and civilizations from falling apart.
The conversation ranges from the hidden work of maintenance to electric vehicles, bicycles, nuclear power, AI, and even human populations.
Brand makes the case that life itself is maintenance: everything alive must keep itself going, and everything humans build must be repaired, improved, updated, and cared for.
Stewart Brand is the cofounder and president of The Long Now Foundation and cofounder of Global Business Network, the Hackers Conference, and the WELL. He created and edited the National Book Award-winning Whole Earth Catalog from 1968 to 1998. He was the subject of the documentary We Are As Gods (2020). He graduated from Stanford with a degree in biology and served as an infantry officer in the US Army. His new book is Maintenance of Everything.

Can memories survive death? It sounds like the kind of question skeptics usually dismiss before the conversation even starts. But Ian Stevenson was not a carnival psychic or a late-night ghost hunter. He was a respected psychiatrist at the University of Virginia who spent decades investigating children who claimed to remember previous lives, along with cases involving birthmarks, apparitions, telepathy, and other alleged evidence for life after death.
In this episode, psychologist and science writer Jesse Bering talks about Stevenson's strange and fascinating career, the psychology of afterlife belief, why the mind so easily imagines consciousness continuing after death, and what to do with cases that are hard to explain but far from proven.
Jesse Bering is a science writer, research psychologist, and head of the Science Communication program at the University of Otago in New Zealand. He is the author of several books, including: Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That? And Other Reflections on Being Human and Suicidal: Why We Kill Ourselves. His new book is The Incredible Afterlives of Dr. Stevenson: One Scientist's Epic Quest for Evidence of Reincarnation, Apparitions, Poltergeists, and Other Matters of the Soul.

Astrophysicist Hakeem Oluseyi has lived a life that sounds almost impossible: a childhood marked by poverty, violence, and constant upheaval; a teenage obsession with Einstein; a stint in the Navy; addiction and recovery; work as a janitor; and eventually a PhD in physics from Stanford.
In this conversation, Michael Shermer and Oluseyi talk about his new book, Why Do We Exist?, and the biggest questions science can ask: what came before the Big Bang, whether the multiverse is real, why the universe seems fine-tuned for life, what dark matter and dark energy really mean, and why alien civilizations may be far rarer than we hope.
Hakeem Oluseyi is a multidisciplinary astrophysicist, multi-patented inventor, award-winning author and journalist, and internationally recognized educator. His new book is Why Do We Exist?: The Nine Realms of Universe That Make You Possible.