Not Monsters. Not Madmen. Just Men.
The Michael Shermer Show
Michael Shermer
4.3 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 21 April 2026
⏱️ 85 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It is a weakness not to be able to stand the side of dead people. The best way of overcoming it is to do it more often. Then it becomes a habit. That's how to turn your population into killers. How did this happen? How do you get these highly educated, intelligent, cultured people like the Germans? The home of, you know, of Gerta. I mean, come on, Beethoven, wow. And then turn |
| 0:21.6 | them into Gustav Stepping Nazis in a matter of a few years. How does that happen? Is there |
| 0:26.2 | something in the people themselves? Or is it the environment? Is it the culture? What is it? |
| 0:31.0 | And all the assassination attempts on Hitler's life? Mostly failed, just barely. Even the July |
| 0:35.3 | 20 bomb plot at the table not been there to block the energy from the blast, had he had the two bombs in the suitcase rather than only the one, had the meeting not been moved from the concrete building, which would have retained the blast energy instead of wood building with the glass windows, the energy that escapes the room. All that probably would have killed him. |
| 0:52.5 | Yep. And Hitler viewed those |
| 0:54.8 | fortunate events as destiny, making him even more dangerous. When leaders like that start believing |
| 1:02.6 | that they're ordained to do what they consider to be great, that's a very dangerous leader |
| 1:09.6 | when that happens. |
| 1:19.2 | Hey, everybody. It's Michael Shermer. It's time for another episode of the Michael Shermer show. |
| 1:24.6 | Brought to you by the Skeptic Society. Here's our newest issue. Skeptic magazine. Every three months it comes out, go to skeptic.com slash magazine to get yours. |
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| 1:50.2 | Skeptic.bignerv.com slash welcome. |
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| 1:55.9 | All right. |
| 1:56.7 | My guest today is Jack L. High, an award-winning writer who has published hundreds of articles in more than a dozen books. |
| 2:04.3 | He has led workshops and given talks at the Mayo Clinic, the University of Minnesota, Yale University, Harvard University, Stanford University, and many other institutions, along with talks at conferences at the Congress of Neurological Surgeons, the American Psychological Association, |
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