Shows / Skeptic
Episodes
- Skeptic
A Skeptic’s Guide to Environmental Alarmism
Decades of doomsday forecasts—runaway overpopulation, resource collapse, killer smog, a new ice age, drowned cities, mass extinction—all failed to arrive on…
- Skeptic
The Mind-Weapon Panic: From CIA Psychics and UFOs to AI Apocalypse
A dubious 1959 story about telepathy aboard a US submarine ignited a Cold War psychic arms race. Now AI insiders warn of human extinction. Alex Kalinin traces…
- Skeptic
When AI Builds Skill, and When It Erodes It
Students using an unrestricted AI chatbot scored 17 percent worse once it was taken away, yet customer-support agents get better at their jobs after training…
- Skeptic
The Case Against the Resurrection of Jesus
Bradley Bowen once planned to study under William Lane Craig. Now he applies logic, probability, and history to the three leading Christian cases for the…
- Skeptic
Did Magic Mushrooms Make Us Religious?
Magic mushrooms are credited with sparking humanity’s earliest religious experiences—from Eleusis to the Eucharist. But does the evidence actually hold up, or…
- Skeptic
Islam and Pseudoscience: Close Encounters in the Classroom (and How to Deal with Them)
A philosophy professor at a Moroccan university spends a decade inside classrooms where students invoke Hume, Popper, and Qur’anic verses to defend…
- Skeptic
Digger and the Theater of Power
A skeptical review of Digger, starring Tom Cruise—a film that resists easy political labels and ultimately turns its scrutiny on the audience.
- Skeptic
The Truth About Vaccine Schedules: An Injection of Politics?
A fraudulent 12-child study. An expert committee purged over conflicts of interest that had nearly vanished. A citation that never existed. Dr. William Meller…
- Skeptic
Are Liberals More Depressed Than Conservatives?
Surveys reveal American liberals, especially young women, report more depression than conservatives. But is the gap real, or a difference in how each side…
- Skeptic
What’s It Like to Be a Dolphin? (I Don’t Know and Neither Do You)
Swimming with a dolphin named Malu, Michael Shermer tried to imagine life with flukes, blubber, and a raw-fish diet, and ran straight into the hard problem of…
- Skeptic
Brain-Dependent Dualism: Why the Hard Problem Isn’t Hopeless
Gary J. Whittenberger counters Michael Shermer’s claim that consciousness is forever unsolvable, arguing the hard problem is actually yielding to science. He…
- Skeptic
An Evolutionary Perspective on Socialism
Why do strangers cooperate at planetary scale, and why does centrally planned socialism keep stumbling? Drawing on evolutionary biology, game theory, and his…
- Skeptic
Shadow Evidence: What UAPs, Ghosts, and AI Images Teach Us About Inference
A shadow on a wall can’t tell you everything about the object casting it and neither can a blurry UAP video, a ghost photo, or an AI-generated image. This…
- Skeptic
The Psychology of Being “Spiritual but Not Religious”
Why do humans stay spiritual even after abandoning belief in God? A psychology professor traces the evolutionary wiring behind faith, spirituality, and ritual…
- Skeptic
The Hard Problem of Consciousness Is an Insoluble One
Can science ever explain why brain activity feels like something? Michael Shermer argues the Hard Problem of consciousness isn’t just hard, it’s permanently…
- Skeptic
The Hard Problem of Consciousness Is a Soluble One
What is consciousness, how does the brain produce it, and why does it exist? Philosopher Gary Whittenberger tackles Chalmers’s famous Hard Problem head-on…
- Skeptic
The 9/11 Conspiracy Theories
Michael Shermer takes on the 9/11 Truther movement—melting steel, Pentagon missiles, stand-down orders, suspicious stock trades—dismantling each claim with…
- Skeptic
Hagioptasia: The Feeling You've Never Had a Word For
There’s a feeling you’ve had at the Grand Canyon, near a celebrity, or falling in love: a sense of sacred weight radiating outward. Psychologists now have a…
- Skeptic
The Appeal of the Irrational: Pseudoscience, UFOs, Cults
It appears the more absurd the claim, or the more outrageous the demand, the more effective it is as a winnowing tool. One such absurd claim recently caught my…
- Skeptic
The Kurds and Kurdistan: How History Left 35 Million People Without a Country
To most of us, at least at a first glance, maps appear to describe reality. They show states, borders, capitals, and frontiers with the reassuring precision of…
- Skeptic
Monkey-Man Mystery Explained
Why did hundreds of impoverished Delhi residents swear a monkey-faced creature was mauling them at night? A reporter and a veteran skeptic unpack pareidolia…
- Skeptic
Götterdämmerung in Japan
Was Hiroshima truly necessary? Michael Shermer delivers a searing defense of Truman’s atomic decision, drawing on primary sources to show why Japan’s…
- Skeptic
Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and an Article of Faith About the Dropping of Atomic Bombs
A mathematician turns Michael Shermer’s own skeptical method against his defense of the atomic bombings—exposing how counterfactual arithmetic, unexamined…
- Skeptic
Repatriation and Reburial of Sh*t Needs to Be Stopped
Federal agencies are officially classifying bags of human feces—as well as animal droppings and fossilized coprolites—as sacred funerary objects under revised…
- Skeptic
An Insider’s Look at What Happened When Chiropractic Was Evaluated Scientifically, and Why No One Remembers
A chiropractor spent decades pushing his profession toward rigorous science, certain the evidence would vindicate it. The trials finally came back—null. Then…
- Skeptic
Other Ways of Knowing: Ethno Epistemic Challenges to the Universality of Science
From toe rings for a healthy pregnancy to a president who scrapped AIDS drugs for a dream-given herbal cure, this essay confronts a growing academic movement…
- Skeptic
Ufology: Withering on the Vine
Eighty years after Donald Keyhoe invented the government cover-up myth, ufology still hasn’t produced a single verified artifact. A sharp dissection of how…
- Skeptic
The Life and Death and Life of Repressed Memories
Unpack the resurgence of the dangerous “repressed memory” myth. Harvard psychologist Richard McNally and social psychologist Carol Tavris dismantle…
- Skeptic
What Is Christian Counseling? How American Christians Split Over the Science of the Mind
Somewhere in America this week, a depressed Christian will sit down across from a counselor who believes that her fundamental problem is not a disorder but a…
- Skeptic
Indigenous Knowledge, Public Money, and Bad Science
How did a debunked indigenous voyage to Antarctica become part of New Zealand’s curriculum? Discover how government funding, media silence, and cultural…
- Skeptic
Texas Education and Christian Nationalism
A $1 billion voucher program, two oil billionaires, and a fight over church-state separation: this piece investigates whether Texas’s new Education Freedom…
- Skeptic
Driverless Cars and Human Error
When a driverless car makes a mistake, everyone pays attention. A robotaxi stops awkwardly in traffic. A Waymo gets confused near a construction zone. A child…
- Skeptic
The Moral Case for Dropping the Atomic Bombs
On this, the 81st anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima (August 6) and Nagasaki (August 9), it is altogether fitting to revisit the moral question of…
- Skeptic
The View From Inside: How Mind Emerged From Mindless Matter
How did lifeless matter learn to feel? Psychiatrist Ralph Lewis traces consciousness from bacteria to human self-awareness, showing step by step how sensing…
- Skeptic
We Can’t Just Lie About Sex Differences
Steve Stewart-Williams addresses misconceptions about evolutionary psychology, refutes charges of pseudoscience, and discusses the political and ethical risks…
- Skeptic
Reincarnation: What Science Says and Doesn’t (or Can’t) Say
Inside a University of Virginia lab, scientists have spent nearly six decades gathering unsettling evidence: children who recall violent deaths, bear matching…
- Skeptic
Lab-Grown Meat: Separating the Science From the “Yuck”
Is lab-grown meat the sustainable future of food or an unsettling science experiment? Dive into the complex world of cultivated protein as this insightful…
- Skeptic
Pathologizing Men
Boys trail girls in school, men lead in suicide and incarceration, yet the old script still labels men privileged. This essay asks why male struggle gets…
- Skeptic
Spy vs. Spy
What inspires people to betray their country? Dive into the secret world of espionage with Michelle Ainsworth’s review of two gripping new books. Explore the…
- Skeptic
Flying Organisms, Not Flying Saucers: The Biological Case for UAPs
What if UFOs aren’t secret military tech or alien invaders, but undiscovered creatures native to Earth’s own atmosphere? This forensic look at UAP flight…
- Skeptic
From Crucifixion to Resurrection: Deconstructing Christianity’s Central Dogma
What did the earliest Christians actually claim about the Resurrection, and does it mean what we’ve always assumed? This forensic deconstruction traces the…
- Skeptic
The Search for Consciousness
Your thoughts leave footprints in your brain, and now we can read them. This essay traces the science of consciousness from fMRI to mind-decoding AI, asking…
- Skeptic
Mysteries, Meteors, and Foo Fighters
Might luminous meteoric dust be a possible explanation for some of the mysterious orbs spotted by pilots in World War II known as foo fighters?As a member of…
- Skeptic
The State of the Trans Debate, 2026
Puberty blockers, suppressed evidence, and a WPATH scandal that reached the Supreme Court: this deep dive traces youth gender medicine from its Dutch origins…
- Skeptic
The Detransitioner’s Dilemma: The Road From “Sunk Cost” to “Radical Acceptance”
Facing the devastating realization of a medical mistake requires rare bravery. This deep dive explores why young detransitioners defy the powerful sunk-cost…
- Skeptic
The Seven Mountains Mandate: The Latest in Christian Nationalism
The Seven Mountains Mandate is a radical movement striving to dismantle American pluralism and transform the nation into a fundamentalist Christian theocracy…
- Skeptic
The Science of the Declaration of Independence
On America’s 250th Anniversary, a New Look at its Founding Document It is altogether proper for so many commentators on this 250th anniversary of…
- Skeptic
Sciencing With a Primate Brain: Reflections on the Nature of Scientific Thought
Your brain wasn’t built to find the truth, it was built to keep you alive. This essay explores why scientific, objective thought feels so deeply…
- Skeptic
How Hype Becomes Automated Consensus
When a clinical psychologist interrogates AI about a controversial therapy’s murky origins, the revealing exchange exposes how institutional hype, aggressive…
- Skeptic
The Terrorist in the Brain
What can Robin Williams and Bruce Willis teach us about dementia? This article explores the complex biological realities of brain diseases, controversies in…
- Skeptic
God Isn’t Dead: The World Is Becoming More Religious
Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the world, having added approximately 350 million followers between 2010 to 2020, compared to only 120 million for…
- Skeptic
The Case for Criticizing Islam Without Hating Muslims
Why liberal societies must protect people, not ideas, from criticism Every tradition begins somewhere. Every religion, moral code, legal system, and political…
- Skeptic
Was Lamarck Right About Evolution?
Lamarck, as virtually anyone who thinks about these subjects at all knows, is far more than out of fashion. Mainstream science and the popular imagination are…