It's the Brian Laris show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone.

The false statements of some top Trump administration officials about Alex Preti brings the issue of discerning truth

from lies from different points of view to the top of the national agenda.

Our next guest offers advice for evaluating information and sources and argues that getting to

the truth is still possible even in what some people call the post-truth world.

Joining us now is Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic Magazine, the executive director of the

Skeptic Society, and the author of a new book called Truth, What It Is, How to Find It, and

why it Still Matters. Michael, and why it still matters.

Michael, thank you for joining us.

Welcome to WNYC.

Oh, thank you, Brian.

Thanks for having me.

Can you start by giving people some background on the skeptic society?

From my past contacts with it, I tend to think of it as almost like a group of atheists or people who believe that,

you know, religion is a matter of things that can't be proven and you would argue against that.

But where would you start to explain the skeptic society as, you know, grounding before we talk about your book for our listeners. Yeah, great question. Yeah, no, we're not an atheist organization. We're not atheists.

I mean, maybe some of my members are. I don't really know. That's not our focus. Our focus is on

science and rationality and critical thinking. So we started the magazine in 1992,

ostensibly to start to debunk a lot of pseudoscience,

you know,

things like astrology and psychics and the spoonbenders

and Bigfoot and aliens and conspiracy theories

...