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Alright, welcome to the Art of Charm. I'm your host Jordan Harbinger. I'm here with producer Jason and today we're talking with Michael Schirmer, founder of Skeptic Magazine and author of several books on belief, writer for Scientific American and multi-time contributor to Penn and Tellers Show Bullshit on Showtime, if you remember that.

We're going to talk about how beliefs form in our brain and why they persist even when they're wrong, even when we might know they're wrong, why people believe weird things and why smart people are even more susceptible to faulty beliefs and last but not least, how our genes influence our political and religious beliefs.

So enjoy this episode with Michael Schirmer. The Art of Charm brings together the best thought leaders, teachers and exceptional individuals to teach you how to be a top performer in life, love, and at work.

If you're new to the show, we'd love to send you some top episodes and the toolbox where we discuss body language, nonverbal communication, persuasion, networking, negotiation, and everything else we teach here at AOC.

In the US, just text Charm to 3-3-4-4, that's C-H-A-R-M-E-D to 3-3-4-4, everywhere else go to the Art of Charm.com. We may not have all the answers, but we definitely have all the right questions. Alright, let's talk to Michael Schirmer.

Michael, tell us what you do in one sentence.

Oh, well, my day job is I'm the publisher of Skeptic Magazine and a director of the Skeptic Society where I have 501-C-3-non-profit dedicated to science education and the promotion of science and reason and critical thinking.

I also write a monthly column for Scientific American called Skeptic, dealing with the same type of topics we covered in Skeptic Magazine.

And you've been on TV a lot. I mean, you've been on pen and tellers, bullshit, you've been on Oprah, unsolved mysteries, what else? I mean, there's so much that I've seen personally and there's probably a lot that I haven't.

Yeah, I've just pretty much done all the talk shows and Colbert, rapport twice, and it's just part of my job, though, is reach out to the media to get our message across that in many cases there are explanations and answers for a lot of these mysteries.

People just don't know them and that the way we arrived at those explanations is through science and reason.

So, you know, that's kind of always my regular job doing that.

So, yeah, just, you know, a lot of the media stuff I just recently did, the other grass Tyson's start-talk and we started Skeptic in the early 90s when you were still pretty much restricted to the major networks and CNN.

And now there's just untold avenues to get ideas out there like podcasts, for example. You can really reach everybody at some point.

You can't do it anymore like in the old days where you just make one appearance on NBC and tonight show and you've reached everybody.

That doesn't work that way anymore. But still, there's, it's kind of a democratization of science in the sense that the media, you know, penetrates everywhere now.

And that's a good thing. So, even though it also promotes crazy ideas like 9-11 Truthism or conspiracy theories or aliens or whatever, because they all have their own web pages, but not the aliens, but the people who believe that aliens do.

But that just gives us skeptics and proscience people and more channels also to promote, you know, what we think is good thinking.

I was going to say, do the aliens use Squarespace?

Yeah, this alien website brought to you by Squarespace.

What's the difference between Skeptic versus just a cynic? Someone who doesn't believe in anything or tries to poke holes in everybody's ideas and spoil everyone's fun?

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