The Michael Shermer Show Archives

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Situating her analyses within the broader intellectual landscape, First Amendment scholar and philosopher Tara Smith takes up the views of such historical figures as John Locke, Thomas Jefferson and John Stuart Mill, while also addressing contemporary clashes over issues ranging from speech on social media, “cancel culture,” and the implications of “religious exemptions” to the crucial difference between speech and action and the very vocabulary in which we discuss these issues, dissecting the exact meanings of “censorship” and “freedom.”

Tara Smith is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, where she has taught since 1989. A specialist in moral, legal, and political philosophy, she is author of the books Judicial Review in an Objective Legal System (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Ayn Rand’s Normative Ethics: The Virtuous Egoist (Cambridge, 2006), Viable Values: A Study of Life as the Root and Reward of Morality (Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), and Moral Rights and Political Freedom (Rowman and Littlefield 1995). Smith’s scholarly articles span such subjects as rights conflicts, the morality of money, everyday justice, forgiveness, friendship, pride, moral perfection, and the value of spectator sports.

Shermer and Smith discuss:

What is freedom?

What are rights?

How are rights and freedoms won or lost?

Private vs. government restrictions on speech

Social media, tech companies, and censorship

speech and expression

Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission

Speech – Action distinction and where the lines between speech and conduct are blurry

Hate speech = violence?

Is Twitter a platform or a publisher?

Is Facebook an information service or a telecommunications company?

Incitement to violence and the January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection

Libel and slander

Self-censorship

Free expression as speech (flag burning, Madonna’s videos, etc.)

Corporate controls on speech

Compelled speech

How Oliver Wendell Holmes introduced the clear and present danger test, which would become an important test under First Amendment law over the coming decades.

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Can beliefs make you sick? Consider “The June Bug” incident from a U.S. textile factory in the early 1960s. Many employees began to feel dizzy, had an upset stomach, and vomited. Some were even hospitalized. The illness was attributed to a mysterious bug biting workers. However, when the CDC investigated this outbreak, no bugs or any other cause of the illnesses could be identified. Instead, it appears to be an illness caused by the mind — that is, sickness due to expectation.

The June Bug story is one of many striking examples of the nocebo effect, a phenomenon best summarized as the occurrence of a harmful event that stems from expecting it. The nocebo effect plays a role in side effects for some of the most commonly prescribed medications. It provides a lens for understanding how sensationalized media reports that sound alarm about public health might even become a self-fulfilling prophecy. It might even explain the mysterious symptoms associated with Havana Syndrome, during which dozens of US government employees fell ill after reportedly being exposed to an unidentified sound wave in Cuba.

We are just discovering the power behind this effect and how it can be ethically mitigated. Enlightening and startling, The Nocebo Effect is the first book dedicated to investigating this fascinating phenomenon by the foremost experts in the field.

Michael Bernstein, Ph.D., is an experimental psychologist and an Assistant Professor in The Department of Diagnostic Imaging at Brown University’s Warren Alpert Medical School. His work is focused on harnessing the placebo effect to reduce opioid use among pain patients. He is Director of the Medical Expectations Lab at Brown. He is the co-author of the new book The Nocebo Effect: When Words Make You Sick, with Charlotte Blease, Cosima Locher, and Walter Brown. https://MichaelHBernstein.com/ Twitter/X: @mh_bernstein

Shermer and Bernstein discuss:

Placebo

Nocebo

Nocebo and brain imaging

Voodoo deaths and hexes

The psychology of placebo and nocebo effects

The biology of placebo and nocebo effects

The ethics of placebo and nocebo effects

Nocebo and Covid-19

Alternative and Complementary Medicine

Pain, anxiety, depression and other subjective effects

Anticipatory nausea and learning

Risk assessment: expected dread associated + how much is known about the risk

When Psychotherapy harms

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)

Side effects

Patient-clinician interactions

Mesmerism and Benjamin Franklin’s test

Psychogenic illness

Havana Syndrome.

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Religion in the twenty-first century is alive and well across the world, despite its apparent decline in North America and parts of Europe. Vigorous competition between and within religious movements has led to their accumulating great power and wealth. Religions in many traditions have honed their competitive strategies over thousands of years. Today, they are big business; like businesses, they must recruit, raise funds, disburse budgets, manage facilities, organize transportation, motivate employees, and get their message out. In The Divine Economy, economist Paul Seabright argues that religious movements are a special kind of business: they are platforms, bringing together communities of members who seek many different things from one another—spiritual fulfilment, friendship and marriage networks, even business opportunities. Their function as platforms, he contends, is what has allowed religions to consolidate and wield power.

This power can be used for good, especially when religious movements provide their members with insurance against the shocks of modern life, and a sense of worth in their communities. It can also be used for harm: political leaders often instrumentalize religious movements for authoritarian ends, and religious leaders can exploit the trust of members to inflict sexual, emotional, financial or physical abuse, or to provoke violence against outsiders. Writing in a nonpartisan spirit, Seabright uses insights from economics to show how religion and secular society can work together in a world where some people feel no need for religion, but many continue to respond with enthusiasm to its call.

Paul Seabright is a Professor of Economics in the Industrial Economics Institute and Toulouse School of Economics and the University of Toulouse, France. He earned his graduate degrees in economics from the University of Oxford. He was Assistant Director of Research and a Reader in Economics at the University of Cambridge until 2001. He has also been a consultant to private sector firms, governments and international organizations including the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the World Bank, the European Commission and the United Nations. He is the author of The War of the Sexes: How Conflict and Cooperation Have Shaped Men and Women from Prehistory to the Present, The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life, and his new book The Divine Economy: How Religions Compete for Wealth, Power, and People.

Shermer and Seabright discuss:

What is religion?

The landscape of religious numbers: going up or down, when and where?

Why Americans are so much more religious than Europeans

What motivates people to be religious despite (or perhaps because of) its costs?

Religion provides people with meaning, purpose and community, which secularism alone often fails to deliver

Religions as platforms, “organisations that facilitate relationships that could not [otherwise] form”

Other “platforms” in history (markets, marriage broking, international trade)

Popular explanations for religion pp. 180–181.

Role(s) of religion in history and society today

Enlightenment Humanism, Secular Humanism, and other alternatives

Is religion and belief in God(s) adaptive or a byproduct?

Big Gods vs. animism, polytheism, supernaturalism

Why some religions are so much more successful than others

Rituals

Social Gospel vs. Prosperity Gospel

Taxes vs. Tithing

Group selection vs. cultural selection

Cults and New Religious Movements

Why most religions fail but why some succeed

Christianity and violence

Islam and violence

When we colonize Mars will far future humans on other planets be religious?

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From best-selling biographer Max Boot comes this revelatory portrait, a decade in the making, of the actor-turned-politician whose telegenic leadership ushered in a transformative conservative era in American politics. Despite his fame as a Hollywood star and television host, Reagan remained a man of profound contradictions, even to those closest to him. Never resorting to either hagiography or hit job, Reagan: His Life and Legend charts his epic journey from Depression-era America to “Morning in America.” Providing fresh insight into “trickle-down economics,” the Cold War’s end, the Iran-Contra affair, and so much more, this definitive biography is as compelling a presidential biography as any in recent decades.

Max Boot is a Russia-born naturalized American historian and foreign-policy analyst and a senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He has worked as a writer and editor at the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Weekly Standard, and the Christian Science Monitor, and is now a regular columnist for the Washington Post. His New York Times bestseller, The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography. He is also the author of The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power, War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History: 1500 to Today, Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present, and, controversially, of The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right. His new book is Reagan: His Life and Legend.

Shermer and Boot discuss:

What led him to undertake this biography

How to write a biography—with sources, and which to consider as reliable

Early influences on Reagan’s life: family, Midwestern upbringing, education, teachers, mentors, experiences.

Relative influence of genes, environment, and luck.

The Lifeguard

Depression economics influences

Reagan’s attitudes and beliefs on social issues reflecting those of his generation

Radio and Acting

President of the Screen Actor’s Guild and his purported role in preventing a Communist takeover of Hollywood.

GE pitch man

A groundbreaking look at why Reagan left the Democratic Party, showing his reliance on conspiracy-mongering tracts, fake quotes, and statistics—and the influence of both the FBI and General Electric.

Revelations about the role of “white backlash” politics in Reagan’s rise.

California governor

1968 Presidential campaign

1976 Presidential campaign

Goldwater and the state of the Republican Party when Reagan entered politics

New evidence about the “October Surprise” and the involvement of Reagan’s aides in political skullduggery prior to the 1980 election

Arthur Laffer and Trickledown economics

Budget deficit

AIDS epidemic

Iran-Contra

Abortion

“Evil Empire”

Gorbachev Geneva summit

Gorbachev Reykjavik summit

Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI/Star Wars)

Reagan on nuclear weapons

Rancho del Cielo

An examination of how Reagan was both different from—and similar to—Donald Trump

Hotspots: N Korea, Iran, Israel, China.

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Since Hamas’s attack on Israel last October 7, the term “settler colonialism” has become central to public debate in the United States. A concept new to most Americans, but already established and influential in academic circles, settler colonialism is shaping the way many people think about the history of the United States, Israel and Palestine, and a host of political issues.

This short book is the first to examine settler colonialism critically for a general readership. By critiquing the most important writers, texts, and ideas in the field, Adam Kirsch shows how the concept emerged in the context of North American and Australian history and how it is being applied to Israel. He examines the sources of its appeal, which, he argues, are spiritual as much as political; how it works to delegitimize nations; and why it has the potential to turn indignation at past injustices into a source of new injustices today. A compact and accessible introduction, rich with historical detail, the book will speak to readers interested in the Middle East, American history, and today’s most urgent cultural-political debates.

Adam Kirsch is the author of several books of poetry and criticism. A 2016 Guggenheim Fellow, Kirsch is an editor at the Wall Street Journal’s Weekend Review section and has written for publications including The New Yorker, Slate, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times Book Review, Poetry, and Tablet. He lives in New York. His new book is On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice.

Shermer and Kirsch discuss:

Settler ideology

Settler colonialism

Colonialism

Decolonization

“The colonizers came to stay—invasion is a structure not an event.” —Patrick Wolfe

Wolfe: “logic that initially informed frontier killing transmutes into different modalities, discourses and institutional formations as it undergirds the historical development and complexification of settler society.”

Genocide and “necropolitical transfer”

Kirsch: “If the definition of a progressive movement is that it believes the future can be better than the past, then the ideology of settler colonialism is not progressive, because it believe the past was better than the future.”

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Biologist Colin Wright joins the podcast to explore one of today’s most contentious topics: the intersection of biological sex and gender.

Drawing on his expertise in animal behavior and evolutionary biology, Colin breaks down key concepts such as biological sex, gender identity, and gender dysphoria. He also examines the shift in societal definitions of what it means to be a man or woman, and how these evolving perspectives fit with long-standing biological principles.

This session was presented at FreedomFest 2024. To see more speeches and sessions from FreedomFest, visit freedomfest.com/civl.

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On balance, will AI help humanity or harm it? AI could revolutionize science, medicine, and technology, and deliver us a world of abundance and better health. Or it could be a disaster, leading to the downfall of democracy, or even our extinction. In Taming Silicon Valley, Gary Marcus, one of the most trusted voices in AI, explains that we still have a choice. And that the decisions we make now about AI will shape our next century. In this short but powerful manifesto, Marcus explains how Big Tech is taking advantage of us, how AI could make things much worse, and, most importantly, what we can do to safeguard our democracy, our society, and our future.

Marcus explains the potential—and potential risks—of AI in the clearest possible terms and how Big Tech has effectively captured policymakers. He begins by laying out what is lacking in current AI, what the greatest risks of AI are, and how Big Tech has been playing both the public and the government, before digging into why the U.S. government has thus far been ineffective at reining in Big Tech. He then offers real tools for readers, including eight suggestions for what a coherent AI policy should look like—from data rights to layered AI oversight to meaningful tax reform—and closes with how ordinary citizens can push for what is so desperately needed.

Taming Silicon Valley is both a primer on how AI has gotten to its problematic present state and a book of activism in the tradition of Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book and Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. It is a deeply important book for our perilous historical moment that every concerned citizen must read.

Gary Marcus is a leading voice in artificial intelligence, well known for his challenges to contemporary AI. He is a scientist and best-selling author and was founder and CEO of Geometric.AI, a machine learning company acquired by Uber. A Professor Emeritus at NYU, he is the author of five previous books, including the bestseller Guitar Zero, Kluge (one of The Economist’s eight best books on the brain and consciousness), and Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust (with Ernest Davis), one of Forbes’s seven must-read books on AI.

“Move fast and break things.” —Mark Zuckerberg, 2012

“We didn’t take a broad enough view of our responsibility.” —Mark Zuckerberg, speaking to the U.S. Senate, 2018

“Generative AI systems have proven themselves again and again to be indifferent to the difference between truth and bullshit. Generative models are, borrowing a phrase from the military, ‘frequently wrong, and never in doubt.’ The Star Trek computer could be counted on to gives sound answers to sensible questions; Generative AI is a crapshoot. Worse, it is right often enough to lull us into complacency, even as mistakes invariably slip through; hardly anyone treats it with the skepticism it deserves. Something with reliability of the Star Trek computer could be world-changing. What we have now is a mess, seductive but unreliable. And too few people are willing to admit that dirty truth.” —Gary Marcus

Shermer and Marcus discuss:

The AI we have now and the AI we should want

AI, AGI, Generative AI, ChatGPT

What’s the problem to be solved?

12 biggest threats of Generative AI

The morality of Silicon Valley

How Silicon Valley manipulates public opinion

How Silicon Valley manipulates government policy

Data rights

Privacy

Transparency

Liability

Independent oversight

Incentives good and bad

Private vs. Government regulation of AI

International AI governance.

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From the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic to the rise of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) initiatives and Artificial Intelligence, in this episode Steven Pinker, Matt Ridley, and Michael Shermer challenge conventional narratives and explore how we can continue to move forward.

They discuss the state of democracy, autocracy, and the lessons learned from historical crises, while offering insights into how innovation, rationality, and education can lead us through challenging times.

This session was presented at FreedomFest 2024. To see more speeches and sessions from FreedomFest, visit freedomfest.com/civl.

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Matthew Stewart is an independent philosopher and historian who has written extensively about the philosophical origins of the American republic, the history of philosophy, management theory, and the culture of inequality. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and Harvard Business Review, among other publications. In recent years he has lived in Boston, New York, and Los Angeles, and is currently based in London. He is the author of Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic and An Emancipation of the Mind: Radical Philosophy, the War over Slavery, and the Refounding of America.

Shermer and Stewart discuss:

What does the phrase “The Law of Nature and Nature’s God” mean?

What is heretical about the origins of the American Republic?

Religion of the founders: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Jay, James Madison, Thomas Paine

Ethan Allen and Thomas Young

The Enlightenment influence on the Founding Fathers

John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Rene Descartes, Baruch Spinoza

Ancient Greek influences on the Founding Fathers

Epicurus’s Dangerous Idea

Lucretius’s “swerving” atoms

Theism, Deism, Pantheism, Atheism

Reason and empiricism

Self-evident truths

Morality and the origin of right and wrong

Happiness and its pursuit

The religion of freedom

Enslaving other humans: what were these people thinking and feeling?

Should they have known better?

Racists or creatures of their time in which nearly everyone held such views?

Monogenism vs. polygenism

Abolitionism

John Brown

Frederick Douglass

Theodore Parker

Abraham Lincoln

Civil War cause: slavery or states’ rights?

Religious supporters of abolition: Quakers, William Wilberforce

How did American slavery lead to civil war?

Why did the war result in emancipation?

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From precognitive dreams and telepathic visions to near-death experiences, UFO encounters, and beyond, so-called impossible phenomena are not supposed to happen. But they do happen—all the time. Jeffrey J. Kripal asserts that the impossible is a function not of reality but of our everchanging assumptions about what is real. How to Think Impossibly invites us to think about these fantastic (yet commonplace) experiences as an essential part of being human, expressive of a deeply shared reality that is neither mental nor material but gives rise to both. Thinking with specific individuals and their extraordinary experiences in vulnerable, open, and often humorous ways, Kripal interweaves humanistic and scientific inquiry to foster an awareness that the fantastic is real, the supernatural is super natural, and the impossible is possible.

Jeffrey J. Kripal holds the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University. He is the author of numerous books, including The Superhumanities: Historical Precedents, Moral Objections, New Realities, The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge, Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred, Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion, Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal, and just published, also by the University of Chicago Press, How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else.

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