Most of us think of ourselves as honest. But would we still tell the truth if lying got us what we wanted—and nobody would ever find out? Philosopher Christian Miller joins Michael Shermer to discuss his new book The Honesty Crisis and the uncomfortable gap between having a reputation for honesty and actually being honest.

Christian B. Miller is the A.C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University. He is the author of over 130 articles as well as several books. Thanks to a $4.4 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation, he directed The Honesty Project, one of the largest research initiatives ever undertaken on honesty. His new book is The Honesty Crisis: Preserving Our Most Treasured Virtue in an Increasingly Dishonest World.

What if uncertainty isn’t a temporary problem science will eventually solve, but a fundamental feature of reality? Neuroscientist Stuart Firestein joins Michael Shermer to make the case that the universe may be far less deterministic—and the future far less predictable—than we like to imagine.

Firestein and Shermer discuss chaos and complexity, Darwin and randomness, free will, scientific progress, the replication crisis, COVID and the problem of communicating uncertainty, why humans are so bad at probability, and why even enormous amounts of data can fail to predict individual people or events.

Stuart Firestein is a professor of neuroscience at Columbia University and a member of the Santa Fe Institute. He has published over one hundred scientific papers in journals such as Nature, Science, Cell, and Neuron. He is a Guggenheim fellow, a member of the advisory committee for the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His new book is It Could Be Otherwise: Science in the Age of Uncertainty.

UFOs were once the stuff of tabloids and conspiracy theories. Today they’re the subject of congressional hearings, Pentagon investigations, mainstream news coverage, and a new wave of claims about government cover-ups and alien technology. Adam Kirsch, senior editor at The Atlantic and author of We Want to Believe: How Aliens Went Mainstream and Why It Matters, joins Michael Shermer to ask what changed—and why the idea of extraterrestrial visitors has such a powerful hold on us.

They discuss Roswell, UFO “disclosure,” eyewitness testimony, government secrecy, alien abductions, Carl Sagan and Contact, the religious impulse behind UFO belief, and the difference between testimony and scientific evidence. The conversation also turns to the serious scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence: the Fermi paradox, why decades of SETI have found nothing, how rare intelligent life might be, and whether our ideas about aliens ultimately tell us more about ourselves than about anything actually out there.

Adam Kirsch is the author of several books of poetry and criticism and a senior editor at The Atlantic. A 2016 Guggenheim Fellow, Kirsch has written for publications including The New Yorker, Slate, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times Book Review, Poetry, and Tablet. His new book is We Want to Believe: How Aliens Went Mainstream and Why It Matters.