Michael Shermer makes the case that the U.S. Founding Fathers were not only steeped in Enlightenment values on which the Declaration of Independence was based, but they were also scientists searching to discover moral truths and values on which to base a rational society, which they succeeded in doing in this document along with the Constitution.

John Demjanjuk lived for decades as a retired autoworker in suburban Cleveland. Then investigators accused him of being "Ivan the Terrible," one of the most notorious guards at Treblinka. What followed was one of the strangest and most troubling Nazi war-crimes cases of the postwar era: extradition, eyewitness testimony, a death sentence, a reversal, and a final prosecution many years later.

In this episode, Michael Shermer talks with Lawrence Douglas, professor at Amherst College and author of The Criminal State: War Atrocity and the Dream of International Justice, about Demjanjuk, Eichmann, Nuremberg, Holocaust denial, and the problem of proving atrocities decades after they happened.

How reliable is eyewitness memory after 40 or 50 years? What did Nuremberg actually establish? Was Eichmann really just a bureaucrat? And can a courtroom ever deliver justice for crimes almost too large to comprehend?

Lawrence Douglas is the James J. Grosfeld Professor of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought at Amherst College and a Guggenheim fellow. His many books include The Right Wrong Man and The Memory of Judgment. His writing has appeared in leading publications such as Harper's, The Wall Street Journal, and The Economist. His new book is The Criminal State: War Atrocity and the Dream of International Justice.

Michael Shermer has been appointed to the newly formed UAP Science Advisory Council, formed at the request of the White House and in coordination with the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the FBI, and other agencies.

The council brings together experts from a wide range of disciplines—including astrophysics, oceanography, molecular biology, anthropology, psychology, artificial intelligence, and instrumentation—to provide scientific guidance on the study of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP).

What does it mean to live well when certainty is unavailable?

Michael Shermer speaks with Massimo Pigliucci about moral character, ancient philosophy, and the difficult art of making decisions without easy answers. The conversation moves from Cicero and Stoicism to the legacy of the New Atheism, asking why rejecting religion is not the same as having a philosophy of life.

They discuss virtue ethics, moral dilemmas, effective altruism, faith, free will, democracy, human flourishing, and the uneasy relationship between facts and values.

From the trolley problem and Peter Singer's drowning child thought experiment to the ethics of charity, the limits of utilitarian thinking, and the dangers of tribalism, this episode asks how we should act when rules fail, consequences are uncertain, and good intentions are not enough.

Massimo Pigliucci is a bestselling author, philosopher, evolutionary biologist, and the K.D. Irani Professor of Philosophy at the City College of New York. His work spans evolutionary biology, philosophy of science, pseudoscience, and practical philosophy. His latest book is How to Be a Happy Skeptic: The Power of Doubt in a Meaningful Life.

Cathy Young returns to the show for a wide-ranging conversation about free speech, institutional trust, and the strange incentives shaping public debate today. What happens when universities, media outlets, political movements, and online personalities trade careful thinking for moral certainty, tribal loyalty, or attention?

Michael and Cathy discuss the pressure to excuse bad ideas when they come from "your side," the rise of activist thinking in education and journalism, and the growing appeal of contrarian figures who seem to thrive on distrust.

They also get into the war in Ukraine, Israel and Gaza, Iran, isolationism, and why defending open inquiry matters most when it becomes inconvenient.

The Zodiac Killer has been treated for decades as America's ultimate unsolved true crime mystery: one mysterious killer, taunting letters, cryptic ciphers, a strange costume, and a trail of victims across Northern California.

Eddie McNamara thinks that story is wrong.

The victims were real, the crimes were real, but the single mastermind may have been a media-made myth.

Eddie McNamara is the author of Zodiactually: The Real Story of a Fake Serial Killer, Toss Your Own Salad: The Meatless Cookbook, Brooklyn Hardcore, and Two Fare Zone. He's a former cop, 9/11 first responder, trained chef, and a columnist for Penthouse magazine.

Michael Shermer speaks with Oxford philosopher Carissa Véliz about the long human desire to know the future—from ancient oracles and astrology to AI, surveillance capitalism, predictive policing, and "data-driven" decision-making. Véliz argues that prediction is rarely neutral: the same machinery that collects personal data also tries to forecast behavior, and once institutions start treating predictions as facts, forecasts can become tools of control.

The conversation gets into why privacy matters for democracy, how algorithms can turn human lives into self-fulfilling prophecies, and why extraordinary people often fall outside predictive models.

Shermer and Véliz also discuss the limits of science, the replication crisis, crime statistics, effective altruism, utilitarian ethics, and free will.

Carissa Véliz is an associate professor at the Institute for Ethics in AI at the University of Oxford. Her first book, Privacy Is Power (Melville House) was an Economist book of the year and has been published in seven languages. Her academic work has been published in The Harvard Business Review, Nature, AI & Society, and The American Journal of Bioethics, among others. Her new book is Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future, from Ancient Oracles to AI.

Batya Ungar-Sargon joins Michael Shermer for a wide-ranging conversation about the historical relationship between Jews and the American left, and why that relationship has become increasingly strained in recent years.

The discussion begins with the reaction to October 7 and the political language that quickly emerged around Israel, Palestine, power, oppression, and resistance. From there, Ungar-Sargon traces a longer history: Jewish life in early America, Jewish involvement in the labor movement, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, the civil rights movement, and the role many Jews played in shaping progressive politics in the 20th century.

Batya Ungar-Sargon is a columnist for The Free Press and the host of Batya! on NewsNation, where she is a weekend anchor. She holds a PhD in English from the University of California, Berkeley. Her new book is The Jews and the Left.

Jon Mills, a philosopher, psychoanalyst, and clinical psychologist, joins Michael Shermer to discuss how social justice ideology has moved from a concern with fairness and equal treatment into a rigid moral framework built around oppressors and victims, privilege and disadvantage, good and evil.

Their conversation focuses on the tension between compassion and truth: how to take injustice seriously without reducing people to identity categories, what happens when clinicians bring activism into the therapy room, why biological reality has become politically charged, and whether "wokeness" is beginning to lose its hold on public life.

Jon Mills is a Canadian philosopher, psychoanalyst, and clinical psychologist. He is Honorary Professor, Department of Psychosocial & Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex, UK, on faculty in the Postgraduate Programs in Psychoanalysis & Psychotherapy, Gordon F. Derner School of Psychology, Adelphi University, USA, and on faculty and a Supervising Analyst at the New School for Existential Psychoanalysis, USA. Recipient of numerous awards for his scholarship including 5 Gradiva Awards, he is the author and/or editor of over 35 books in psychoanalysis, philosophy, psychology, and cultural studies including most recently End of the World: Civilization and Its Fate. In 2015 he was given the Otto Weininger Memorial Award for Lifetime Achievement by the Canadian Psychological Association.

America's criminal justice debate usually gets reduced to two options: abolish the system or lock everyone up forever. Economist Jennifer Doleac thinks the data point somewhere else entirely.

In this episode, Michael Shermer speaks with Doleac about what rigorous research can tell us about crime, punishment, deterrence, prison reform, and public safety.

Doleac argues that America has built much of its criminal justice system backwards: too little certainty of being caught, too much faith in long prison sentences, and not enough testing of what actually works.

Jennifer Doleac is the Executive Vice President of Criminal Justice at Arnold Ventures, a philanthropy focused on evidence-based policy. Before that, she spent over a decade as an economics professor, conducting academic research. She is a leading expert on the economics of crime and discrimination, and a vocal proponent of using rigorous research to inform policy. She frequently writes for outlets including The Washington Post, TIME, and Bloomberg Opinion, and she hosts the Probable Causation podcast on law, economics, and crime. Doleac holds a PhD in Economics from Stanford University. Her new book is The Science of Second Chances: A Revolution in Criminal Justice.