Hello, everyone. It's Michael Shermer, and it's time for another episode of the Michael

Shermer show. Hey, guess what? This is the 500th episode. I can hardly believe it myself.

And I wasn't even really keeping track until I just noticed a few days ago that we just released

number 498. I thought, oh, I should record something special. So here it is. This is mildly unscripted, but I just want to address a couple of big issues on what is truth anyway, what is skepticism.

But first, just thank my team for, you know, helping me make this possible.

Thanks, this technology for the podcast platforms and recording devices, cameras, microphones, all that that

everybody has now, which makes the quality of the guest's side of the recording, you know,

even better than it's ever been. And of course, thank you to you, the listeners and viewers on all

our different platforms.

You know, over 100,000 an episode, really astonishing that I can reach that many people,

which was never possible in the past. We actually started the Caltech Monthly Science

lecture series back in 93, April of 93 when The Amazing Randy gave our first talk,

and we put on monthly lecture series for almost 25 years at Caltech.

So I think it was over maybe 350 different lectures and then conferences as well,

a dozen international conferences.

And at some point, we started doing in-conversations at a small home in Altadena,

a town no one had heard of until the massive fires.

That house survived the fires.

But then I realized that we don't even need to have live events and still reach everybody and don't have to fly speakers in and sell tickets and all that is much easier this way.

So thank you so much.

The podcast is supported by the Skeptic Society and Skeptic Magazine.

We are a 501C3 nonprofit science education and research organization and it's your

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