Astrophysicist Hakeem Oluseyi has lived a life that sounds almost impossible: a childhood marked by poverty, violence, and constant upheaval; a teenage obsession with Einstein; a stint in the Navy; addiction and recovery; work as a janitor; and eventually a PhD in physics from Stanford.

In this conversation, Michael Shermer and Oluseyi talk about his new book, Why Do We Exist?, and the biggest questions science can ask: what came before the Big Bang, whether the multiverse is real, why the universe seems fine-tuned for life, what dark matter and dark energy really mean, and why alien civilizations may be far rarer than we hope.

Hakeem Oluseyi is a multidisciplinary astrophysicist, multi-patented inventor, award-winning author and journalist, and internationally recognized educator. His new book is Why Do We Exist?: The Nine Realms of Universe That Make You Possible.

A viral story is spreading across media: a mysterious string of scientists connected to UFOs, nuclear weapons, aerospace, and defense work have disappeared or died under suspicious circumstances. Politicians are calling it a possible national security threat.

Michael Shermer takes a skeptical look.

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.