I'm Alan Alder, and this is clear and vivid conversations about connecting and communicating.

There was one thing, it would be the one big thing, the lack of confidence in the concept of truth at all.

And that, you know, no one knows what to believe.

It gets back to that famous line from Steve Bannon in the 2016 election cycle,

where his recommendation was just flood the zone with shit,

and then people won't know what to think.

And then we'll tell them what to think.

Okay, this is this is a recipe for disaster. This is not good. What I'd like to do is get back to,

you know, older ideas that there actually is a objective reality. There is a truth to be known.

And the fact that we can't know it 100% doesn't mean we shouldn't try. And, you know, the line, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

You know, we don't have to be omniscient to know something about the world that we can be confident is true.

That's Michael Shermer, one of my favorite writers on the difficult subject of what's real and what isn't.

He has a new book looking for an answer to one of today's existential questions.

What is truth?

This should be really fun for me because I've enjoyed your essays in Scientific American for decades.

Thanks.

They don't appear in Scientific American anymore, do they?

No, the column ended in 2019.

So I did 214 consecutive months.

That's 18 years.

Wow.

Yeah.

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