Welcome to this interview. I'm very pleased today to be interviewing Dr Michael Schmer.

And Dr Schmer, hello and thank you very much for agreeing to be interviewed.

Thanks for having me.

Nice to see you.

Great.

So I think we have plenty of stuff to talk about.

Dr. Sherman is one of the founding members of the magazine Skeptic and you have

written many books you have written books like why people believe weird things

why Darwin matters the signs of good and evil, the moral arc, heavens on earth,

giving the devil his due reflections of a scientific humanist, and also conspiracy why the rational believe irrational.

So I think there is plenty of stuff to talk about and as we have been discussing so far,

I think we should definitely talk a lot about skepticism,

echo chambers and especially issues concerning science and morality. So if I may ask, start by asking your personal question, what made you

found the magazine skeptic? Oh well here's what it looks like. Here's an old issue with Carl Sagan on the cover after he passed.

And then here's our latest issue on culture wars, which we're going to get into cancel culture and

woke, progressive, trans, race, immigration, abortion, all that stuff.

We cover all those kind of topics.

In the early days, we mostly dealt with the supernatural and the paranormal things like science and religion and miracles and superstitions,

astrology, UFOs, conspiracy theories, all that kind of stuff.

That was kind of old school skepticism about, you know, claims that were being made in the

1960s and 70s about, you know, kind of new age phenomenon.

Since then, the last few years we've shifted to talking about more culture, war

...