The Michael Shermer Show

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.

A viral story is spreading across media: a mysterious string of scientists connected to UFOs, nuclear weapons, aerospace, and defense work have disappeared or died under suspicious circumstances. Politicians are calling it a possible national security threat.
Michael Shermer takes a skeptical look.

What kind of person helps build a regime like the Third Reich? A monster? A madman? Or something far more unsettling?
Michael Shermer sits down with author Jack El-Hai to talk about the true story behind Nuremberg. At the center is Dr. Douglas Kelley, the American psychiatrist assigned to evaluate the top Nazi defendants after World War II, including Hermann Göring. What he found was not comforting: many of these men were intelligent, ambitious, psychologically functional, and disturbingly normal.
This conversation gets into the strange duel between Kelley and Göring, the psychological testing at Nuremberg, the limits of psychiatry, the difference between leaders and followers, and the question that still won't go away: how do power-hungry people rise and do evil, and why do so many others go along with them?
Jack El-Hai is an author and journalist whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, Smithsonian, GQ, Wired, Scientific American, and Discover. His books, including The Lobotomist, The Lost Brothers, and Face in the Mirror, have been translated into twenty languages. He lectures widely on writing and medical history. His book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist was recently adapted into the feature film Nuremberg, starring Russell Crowe and Rami Malek.