Hello and welcome to Trigonometry I'm Francis Foster I'm Constantine

Kitchen and this is the show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

And a fascinating guest we have for you today. He's a science writer, historian of

science, he's the founder of the Skeptic Society, the editor-in-chief of the Skeptic magazine.

He's very skeptical, basically, is what I'm saying.

Michael Sherman, welcome to Trigonometry.

Thanks for having me on.

I'll try not to get triggered for this hour. Well, the idea is that you trigger people with our help, so that's what we're trying to work towards.

Well, apparently, I do sometimes trigger people on the far left and far right, which means I'm doing my job.

That's exactly what we do on the show.

Those are two groups of people we have triggered a lot recently,

and I'm sure we'll do that more of that together.

But before we get into it, just and I'm sure we'll do that more of that together.

But before we get into it, just for anyone who doesn't know who you are,

most people will do but for anyone who doesn't just tell everybody who are you,

what is your journey through life, how do you happen to be sitting here talking to us?

Oh, well, the main trigger, as it were, is my new book, Giving the Devil is Due, my latest book, my 13th book actually.

My life's work really involves trying to understand

what truth is, that is how do we get to the truth? We want to know what's true, not just

what I want to be true, but what's actually true, empirically true,

using empirical science and reason and rationality and critical thinking, and that's the core of skepticism is you start off assuming that the

claim is not true until proven otherwise because most of us most of the time

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