Shermer Says 4: Venezuela, ICE in Minnesota, UFOs & UAPs, and Social Norms Around Single-Sex Spaces
The Michael Shermer Show
Michael Shermer
4.3 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 12 January 2026
⏱️ 52 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this unscripted solo episode, Michael Shermer reflects on a dizzying start to the year and what it reveals about truth, power, and public judgment. From events in Venezuela and the limits of exporting democracy to a viral Planet Fitness controversy, the Minneapolis ICE shooting, and renewed claims about aliens, Shermer keeps returning to the same question: What actually helps, and what only feels like a good idea in the moment?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to another episode of the Michael Shermer Show. I'm your host, Michael Shermer. This is an fourth episode of Shermer Says, in which I'm going to offer a few thoughts unscripted mostly on the deposing at a Venezuela dictator, Nicholas Maduro. |
| 0:18.1 | The trans woman caught masturbating in the California Planet Fitness Women's |
| 0:23.9 | locker room, the Minneapolis Ice Shooting, which has dominated the headlines for the |
| 0:29.3 | last several days. |
| 0:30.9 | And of course, the perennial announcement that the disclosure of aliens visiting Earth is |
| 0:35.1 | coming any day now. |
| 0:37.0 | And all of this in the first 11 days of January. |
| 0:40.9 | Yes, I'm recording this on January 11th. |
| 0:43.7 | My intention was to start the year off by recording a few episodes about my forthcoming |
| 0:49.4 | book, Truth, what it is, how to find it, why it still matters. |
| 0:56.8 | The pub date is January 27th, which is like an eternity from now, given the news cycle with a half-life of about two hours. It's just |
| 1:02.6 | astonishing. I mean, I go back to the, you know, coming online in the early 1990s when the, |
| 1:09.4 | you know, news cycle was days and weeks where like my monthly column |
| 1:13.4 | in Scientific American, you know, would just go on and on for weeks of people discussing |
| 1:17.7 | it. |
| 1:17.9 | Now nothing lasts more than a few minutes to a few hours or if it's a huge cultural event like |
| 1:23.1 | the ice shooting than a few days. |
| 1:25.8 | Anyway, so, wow. |
| 1:27.4 | Okay. So on this, wow, okay. |
| 1:27.8 | So on this particular case, I have notes that I'm going to kind of scan through and read |
| 1:33.5 | from, but mostly these are unscripted. |
| 1:36.2 | The deposing in the Venezuela dictator Nicholas Maduro, yeah, that's a good thing, right? |
... |
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