If Books Could Kill - 'On Bullsh*t' and the Pundit Industrial Complex [TEASER]

Episode Date: August 10, 2023

For this month's bonus episode we dissected Harry Frankfurt's gloriously brief bestseller and applied the concept to our favorite op-ed page.  To hear the rest of the show, support us on Patreon:https://www.patreon.com/IfBooksPod

So, 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. So 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. So yeah, what are yours, Peter? Maybe the foremost example quote unquote is not a discrete example, but Donald Trump as a concept. Yeah, that's the obvious one. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I think a lot of people began rediscovering this thesis.

In the Trump era, there were a lot of people writing about him using this framework. Essentially because Trump's relationship with the truth felt very unique, right? 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.

Yeah, it's kind of incredible. But I 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? Which in and of itself is just sort of a lie. But then he trotted out Sean Spicer in a press conference, right? Yeah. To like dig in on this. And the thing is that there were bird's eye images of the inauguration. Right. You could just see side by side that Obama's had more.

Yeah. There was sort of like surreal moment where Trump and his people were all denying the obvious reality of what we were looking at, like literally denying what was in front of all of our faces. And that's where I think this analysis becomes useful, because lying doesn't seem like a sufficient description of what that is. Yeah. Like, I associate lying with an intent to deceive the other person,

but I don't think that Trump was intent to deceive the other person, but I don't think that Trump was trying to deceive anyone. 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 Frank Fertz theory of bullshit helps sort of like articulate that intuition we all have. Yeah, I always think of contrasting the way that Trump lies with the way that George W. Bush would lie. One of his canonical lies with 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. So it's basically just like a way of saying, like most of it went to rich people. Right, right. Oftentimes with Trump, you'd hear people say,

like, oh, politicians have always lied. But 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. I don't even know people who lie the way that Trump lies and the way that previous generations of politicians have lied. I don't even know people who lie the way that Trump does. Like it's like, oh, sorry, you missed the concert last night. No, I was there. Yeah.

You be like, what? One 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 gonna see our plan for this. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a lot. But I think what's interesting about what Trump is doing, and I think this highlights both a problem with Frank Fertz 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 alive. Trump's a good example because he's bullshit-ing-enlying at the same time, I think. Yeah. But I do think that what's happening with Trump, for example, is that his goal is not to obfuscate the truth per se. His goal is to advance a narrative about himself. To him, there's no material distinction between what is true and what makes him feel good. Yeah. And so yes, he is lying at these various points, but he is also bullshitting.

Right. He is lying almost by coincidence. Because you could say that when Trump says like we fast-tracked production of the COVID vaccine, right, or like minority employment rates are higher than they've ever been. Those are true statements, but they're kind of doing the same thing, as when he's lying.

No matter what he's saying, he is always saying Donald Trump rules. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So the one that I kept thinking of actually was, remember in Nudge, part two, we talked about their medical malpractice thing, we're gonna solve medical malpractice.

Yeah, yeah. In that section, we read like a brief little excerpt of this. But I just want to read this again. So they're talking about how medical malpractice lawsuits contribute to health care costs. And they say consider this fact. Both health care customers and taxpayers are now forced to pay for the 85,000 medical malpractice lawsuits that are filed each year. These lawsuits cost a lot of money.

Estimates range from $11 billion to $29 billion per year. Exposure to medical malpractice liability has been estimated to account for 5-9% of hospital expenditures, and that this is the bullshit part. Of course, these particular figures are controversial and may be exaggerated, but no one doubts that many billions of dollars must be paid each year to buy insurance and fend off liability. This is obviously very different than the Trump example, but I think this is like an unbelievably corrosive form of bullshit that is fucking everywhere, where you're basically trying

to illustrate a problem, right? The central thesis of this chapter of their book is that malpractice lawsuits contribute to healthcare costs. And they give you some numbers, right? It's a lot of $29 billion, it's $29 billion, it's 5% to 9%. And they immediately just caveat it. Yep. To the point where it's meaningless,

they're like, well, these numbers might not be true, but everybody knows that malpractice lawsuits are a huge problem. Right, the focus is the narrative, right? Exactly. I think this is the phenomenon that I was pointing out earlier. And I think this is the one circumstance where Frankfurt's formulation is like spot on.

The making an argument in this sort of like roundabout way where like you drop in a fact, you maybe do a little comparison, you give a caveat, you shrug away, anything that might prove you wrong. Yeah. And you have not like produced a logical thread that can lead you to the conclusion

that you're claiming and yet you claim it. You write a whole chapter of your book about how malpractice lawsuits are a major driver of health care costs. The one place in the entire chapter you actually try to support that. You're like, eh, these numbers are probably exaggerated. We don't really know.

It's a couple billion out of a $4 trillion of health care spending economy. Then why the fuck did you write a chapter about this? You can't at the most basic level say that this should be a priority. There are other issues that are more expensive than this where we do have evidence that they are problems. It essentially invalidates the entire fucking chapter.

Why is this in your book? But then they just like move on. They're like, well, anyway, medical malpractice, such a job, this is how we could do it. But we see this all the time in these articles and these books, which is like, anyway, nobody can really say if this is a problem. But it's a problem.

Right. Yeah, that's a very common form of bullshit. And also, aligns with my colloquial understanding of what bullshit is, right? Like, when I read a Friedman op-ed or whatever, my brain is just screaming at me. Like, this is fucking bullshit. Yeah.

So it's nice to have like a definition that like provides a lens through which you can look at these and be like, yes, I think that this is actually technically bullshit. What are your examples? You said you read some Maureen doubt. We'll get to the doubt in a second. I have one primary example here, and this is a recent David Brooks column.

As soon as we were talking about bullshit, I was like, I bet Brooks is where, where this begins and ends for me. You opened a new tab. You're like, Brooks, give it to me, man. I tell you that I just like clicked on his name on the New York Times website and just like shows one of the first of the three columns I saw. I was gonna do that with Pamela Paul,

but I was like, it's too easy. It's too much of a duck best if I go back to that fucking well. I do feel like it's mean how quickly I went to the Brooks page and how quickly I decided on a piece. I was like, this works. Like the first one I clicked on, I was like, damn, that title looks like bullshit. Yeah.

I clicked on it and I was like, oh yeah, here we, this is it. It's always a little dismay when you have a negative expectation about somebody and you're like, oh, I shouldn't like assume the worst and then it's just immediately confirmed. You're like, oh, I shouldn't like assume the worst. And then it's just immediately confirmed. You're like, no, my cynicism was absolutely justified. So this column by David Brooks is called the power of American capitalism.

Okay. And I think that as we've sort of touched on, this style of op-ed is quintessential bullshit in my colloquial understanding of the term and also, I think, in Frankfurt's formulation. So, I'm going to send you the opening paragraph. Okay. He says, the mighty Mississippi rolls on.

I'm sorry to say within Vizelan. If you don't live near it, you might never think of that wide, powerful river. You may associate it with old Mark Twain stories. But every day 24-7, it rolls on. American capitalism is kind of like that. You can invent fables about how America is an economic decline. You can rail against neoliberalism, but the American economy doesn't care.

It just keeps rolling on. How did you find such a perfect example so fucking quickly? I'm telling you it was the first thing I clicked. It's like, what is he even fucking doing here? It sounds like the Friedman stuff. It just spin in your wheels like you got to get a paragraph out of it. The premise of this is that I think that's supposed to be that the reader forgot about the Mississippi River. Yeah, that the reader forgot about the Mississippi river. Yeah, we can all forget about the Mississippi the same way we can all forget about capitalism.

I guess. So the premise of the piece is that despite the haters and naysayers, American capitalism has continued to be a resounding success. The primary data point here is that America's GDP has continued to increase, which is, of course, true. He points out a handful of other facts. He cites that recent Atlantic piece by Jean Twinge. I don't, I guess is how you pronounce it.

Oh my God. She's my example. Oh shit. You're going to love it, Peter. I won't dive in, but she says, of course, that households headed by millennials are making more money than previous generations did. I love that we're fucking both finding exactly the same bullshit. Millennials are fine.

What's everybody complaining about? Brooke says, quote, I was especially struck by how much America invests in its own people. America spends roughly 37% more per student on schooling than the average for the organization for economic cooperation and development, OECD, a collection of mostly rich peer nations. So, okay, so he's sort of sprinkled some facts or fact adjacent things into the column. Yeah, fact-ish.

And what they all have in common is that they are like relatively disconnected data points, lacking any context, right? Like investing 37% more in education than peer nations might be a good thing, or it might be a bad thing if it's not effective. Right. And by the way, there's reason to believe it's not effective.

Like our education results are pretty middleing. We also spend way more on health care than other countries, most of which does not actually produce any fucking benefit. And all of these data points are very disconnected from the actual critiques of American capitalism that brookses implicitly addressing, right? Which he never 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. 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, but 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, no one wants us to just spend more on education with no regard

to how we spend it. We've been shoveling 45% more money into the furnace than every other nation. This is where I think that, like, Frankfurt really is able to articulate something that I wouldn't have quite put that way without him. He's not quite lying, but his focus is not meaningfully on the truth. 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. I mean, not to get meta, but I think that's kind of what we're trying to do on this show. Yeah. I think we were pretty fair to David Brooks in our David Brooks episode. I was as nice as I could be. Yeah. We only made one research assistant joke. That's right.

I feel like that's generous. And it was so subtle that people tried to tell us about the research assistant story. Did you know? I don't think people were like, did you know? We're like guys. That's why I made an extremely weird out of context reference to a research assistant guys. Yeah, it was just a coincidence that you happened to mention that. I have a more endowed example. Yeah, it was just a coincidence that you happened to mention that.

I have a Maureen Dowd example. She's like, man, in the same way, you know, there's that like lie tracker of Trumps and it's up to like 1200 lies or something. And like at this point, it would be easier to just count the fucking things he says that are true. Like that would be a more efficient process. With Maureen Dowd, it's like, what isn't bullshit? Right. Like I try to get through her columns to like make fun of them on Twitter and like,

I can't even fucking do it. I'm like, there's nothing here. Like, I can't, I can't say anything about this because it's just fucking vapor. No, she is an enormous victory for the feminists. Speaking of problematic comparisons. No, no, no, this is just literally just listen. Speaker 07. Speaker 2. Speaker 07. Speaker 07. Speaker 07. Speaker 07. Speaker 07. Speaker 07. Speaker 07. You're going to go there.

Take me there, Peter. Everyone always says when we get a really incompetent woman in these positions, that will be a victory for a feminism, right? Like, it's not just that you need to have successful female politicians. It's like they should be bumbling fools like the guys are and that will be a sign of progress. In journalism, we are to some degree there or at least Maureen Dowd has a foothold. There's this piece from January titled Nancy Pelosi liberated and loving it. Oh my God.

And it's about Nancy Pelosi's transition from being the speaker of the house to being a regular house member in the minority. Okay.