Cathy Young returns to the show for a wide-ranging conversation about free speech, institutional trust, and the strange incentives shaping public debate today. What happens when universities, media outlets, political movements, and online personalities trade careful thinking for moral certainty, tribal loyalty, or attention?

Michael and Cathy discuss the pressure to excuse bad ideas when they come from “your side,” the rise of activist thinking in education and journalism, and the growing appeal of contrarian figures who seem to thrive on distrust.

They also get into the war in Ukraine, Israel and Gaza, Iran, isolationism, and why defending open inquiry matters most when it becomes inconvenient.

The Zodiac Killer has been treated for decades as America’s ultimate unsolved true crime mystery: one mysterious killer, taunting letters, cryptic ciphers, a strange costume, and a trail of victims across Northern California.

Eddie McNamara thinks that story is wrong.

The victims were real, the crimes were real, but the single mastermind may have been a media-made myth.

Eddie McNamara is the author of Zodiactually: The Real Story of a Fake Serial Killer, Toss Your Own Salad: The Meatless Cookbook, Brooklyn Hardcore, and Two Fare Zone. He’s a former cop, 9/11 first responder, trained chef, and a columnist for Penthouse magazine.

Michael Shermer speaks with Oxford philosopher Carissa Véliz about the long human desire to know the future—from ancient oracles and astrology to AI, surveillance capitalism, predictive policing, and “data-driven” decision-making. Véliz argues that prediction is rarely neutral: the same machinery that collects personal data also tries to forecast behavior, and once institutions start treating predictions as facts, forecasts can become tools of control.

The conversation gets into why privacy matters for democracy, how algorithms can turn human lives into self-fulfilling prophecies, and why extraordinary people often fall outside predictive models.

Shermer and Véliz also discuss the limits of science, the replication crisis, crime statistics, effective altruism, utilitarian ethics, and free will.

Carissa Véliz is an associate professor at the Institute for Ethics in AI at the University of Oxford. Her first book, Privacy Is Power (Melville House) was an Economist book of the year and has been published in seven languages. Her academic work has been published in The Harvard Business Review, Nature, AI & Society, and The American Journal of Bioethics, among others. Her new book is Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future, from Ancient Oracles to AI.