00:00:00.000So after we read this book and we realized that it wasn't as, like, meaty as it could have been, we thought that since the book itself does not provide very many examples of the concept, we thought we would provide a couple examples.
00:00:15.640So me and Peter have both pulled a couple of little, I'm trying to say examples again, little exemplars of what we think is some of the specific bullshit that we are surrounded by.
00:00:40.640Yeah, because I think a lot of people began rediscovering this thesis in the Trump era.
00:00:45.980There were a lot of people writing about him using this framework, essentially because Trump's relationship with the truth felt very unique.
00:00:54.520Right. Yeah. Like politicians who lie are not a new thing, but he's a liar doesn't feel like an adequate explanation of what Trump was doing or why he was doing it.
00:01:06.840I was like digging around for examples of just like Donald Trump saying bullshit and it's overwhelming. Like he used to say during the primaries that the United States had the highest taxes in the world and people would be like, no, that's not true. But he just kept saying it. Right. And I think that this really crystallized for me when in the first week of his presidency, he claimed that his inauguration crowds were larger than Obama's. Right.0.79
00:01:36.380Which in and of itself is just sort of a lie. But then he trotted out Sean Spicer in a press conference, right? To like dig in on this. And the thing is that there were bird's eye images of the inauguration.
00:01:52.700Right. You could just see side by side that Obama's had more. Yeah. There was a sort of like surreal moment where Trump and his people were all denying the obvious reality of what we were looking at. Yeah. Like literally denying what was in front of all of our faces. Yeah. And that's where I think this analysis becomes useful because lying doesn't seem like a sufficient description of what that is.
00:02:18.920Yeah. Like I associate lying with an intent to deceive the other person. But I don't think that Trump was trying to deceive anyone. Right. So I do think that it's safe to say that stuff like that was something other than mere deception. Right. And I think that that's where Frankfurt's theory of bullshit helps sort of like articulate that intuition we all have.
00:02:44.360Yeah. I always think of contrasting the way that Trump lies with the way that George W. Bush would lie. One of his canonical lies was that he said that the tax cuts that he passed, like 75% of the benefit went to small business owners. And so it sounds like, oh, small business owners. But the way that they're defining small business owners is anyone who owns any stake in a small business, which is basically if you own stocks, you probably have some small businesses in there.0.90
00:03:10.260So it's basically just like a way of saying like most of it went to rich people.
00:03:15.120Oftentimes with Trump, you'd hear people say like, oh, politicians have always lied.
00:03:18.620But I do think, yes, there's a huge difference between the way that Trump lies and the way that previous generations of politicians have lied.
00:03:32.820One of the funny sort of Trump dynamics, Trump-isms that I stumbled across when I was just like, what were Trump's most bullshitty moments was that people realized that he, when asked about his plans regarding a certain policy item that he had no plans for, would always say, in the next couple of weeks, you're going to see our plan for this.
00:03:55.300Right. But I think what's interesting about what Trump is doing, and I think this highlights both a problem with Frankfurt's thesis and a utility that it has. The problem is that I don't think I have identified a lot of real world bullshit that is distinctly not a lie.
00:04:15.860Trump's a good example because he's bullshitting and lying at the same time, I think.0.95
00:04:22.200But I do think that what's happening with Trump, for example, is that his goal is not
00:11:33.080Brooks says, quote, I was especially struck by how much America invests in its own people.
00:11:39.320America spends roughly 37 percent more per student on schooling than the average for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, OECD, a collection of mostly rich peer nations.
00:11:54.800So, OK, so he's sort of sprinkled some facts or fact adjacent things into the column.
00:12:17.860And by the way, there's reason to believe it's not effective.
00:12:20.360Like, our education results are pretty middling.0.98
00:12:23.060We also spend way more on health care than other countries, most of which does not actually produce any fucking benefit.
00:12:28.240And all of these data points are very disconnected from the actual critiques of American capitalism that Brooks is implicitly addressing, right, which he never like tackles directly. He never says this writer makes this critique. And here's why I think that's incorrect, right? He's just sort of gesturing at a left critique that you know is out there somewhere.
00:12:49.580Right. And then being like, but GDP is high. But like critics of like the neoliberal order are not saying that GDP is declining. They're talking about social mobility and inequality and economic dislocation. And Brooks is like implicitly addressing these broad and nuanced critiques by throwing like a small handful of questionably relevant data points out there as if they were sufficient to debunk those critiques. Right. And then declaring victory.
00:13:18.420No one wants us to just spend more on education with no regard to how we spend it.
00:13:25.120We've been shoveling 45% more money into the furnace than every other nation.
00:13:42.980But his focus is not meaningfully on the truth.
00:13:46.060Yeah. I also think it's worth pointing out because I think a lot of people enter into the project of like writing a piece or making a podcast with like, I'm going to defend my point of view. There are people who do that and then engage with the other critiques in good faith. They tackle the harder parts of those critiques. Right. And really try to make the case. And I think that's distinct from bullshit, too.
00:14:12.380I mean, not to get meta, but like, I think that's kind of what we're trying to do on this show.0.62
00:14:48.420She's like, man, in the same way, you know, there's that like lie tracker of Trump's and it's up to like twelve hundred lies or something.0.98
00:14:55.780And like at this point, it would be easier to just count the fucking things he says that are true.0.96
00:14:59.460Like that would be a more efficient process with Maureen Dowd.1.00