Michelle: Most people think the biggest threat to truth is a liar. They're wrong. The person who simply doesn't care about the truth is far more dangerous. And today, we're going to prove it. Mark: Hold on, that sounds completely backward. A liar is actively trying to deceive you. They're the villain in the story! How can someone who just 'doesn't care' be worse? Michelle: That's the million-dollar question, and it's the central idea in a fascinating and incredibly timely book called Bullshit: Why We Fall for It, How It Hurts Us, and Ways to Scuttle It by James R. Kryger. Mark: And the author isn't just a pundit; he's an experimental social psychologist. He actually studies this stuff in a lab, which gives this a whole different level of credibility in our age of endless misinformation. Michelle: Exactly. He’s dedicated his career to understanding this phenomenon. And to answer your question, it all comes down to the game being played. A liar and a truth-teller are playing the same game—they both acknowledge that truth exists. One is trying to uphold it, the other to hide it. Mark: Okay, I'm with you so far. They're on opposite sides of the same chessboard. Michelle: Right. But the bullshitter? They've knocked the whole board over. They aren't playing the game of truth at all. They're just saying whatever is convenient or persuasive, with zero regard for whether it's true or false. They are indifferent to the facts. Mark: It’s like that guy at a party who talks confidently about quantum physics but has only read the Wikipedia summary. He doesn't know if he's right or wrong, and he doesn't care. He just wants to sound smart. Michelle: That's a perfect one-fly bullshit example, as the author would say. He uses a "Bullshit Flies Index" to rate the harm. One fly is harmless, like wine descriptions. Two flies are misleading. But three flies... three-fly bullshit can be catastrophic. Mark: Catastrophic? That feels like a strong word for someone just talking nonsense. Michelle: Does it? Let me tell you a story from the book. A true story. And it's a three-fly example if there ever was one.

Michelle: In 1958, the leader of China, Mao Zedong, launched the "Great Leap Forward." His goal was to rapidly transform China into a communist society. A key part of this was increasing grain yields. Mark: An ambitious goal, to say the least. Michelle: To achieve it, Mao declared war on what he called the "Four Pests." These were rats, flies, mosquitoes, and... sparrows. Mark: Sparrows? Why sparrows? Michelle: The argument was that sparrows ate grain seeds, so getting rid of them would increase the harvest. It was a simple, appealing narrative. So, the entire country was mobilized in what was called the "Smash Sparrows Campaign." People banged pots and pans to keep the birds from landing until they fell from the sky, exhausted. They tore down nests, broke eggs. Millions upon millions of sparrows were killed. Mark: Wow. That's... intense. But did it work? Did the grain yields go up? Michelle: For a very short time, maybe. But what the campaign completely disregarded was the complex truth of the ecosystem. Sparrows don't just eat grain; they also eat insects. A lot of insects. Mark: Oh no. I can see where this is going. Michelle: Without the sparrows, the insect population—especially locusts—exploded. They swarmed the fields, devouring far more grain than the sparrows ever could have. The ecological balance was shattered. Mark: So the simple solution created a much bigger problem. Michelle: A much bigger problem. That ecological collapse, combined with other flawed policies of the Great Leap Forward, led directly to the Great Chinese Famine. Between 1959 and 1962, an estimated 36 million people starved to death. Mark: Thirty-six million. That's just... staggering. And it all started with a bad idea about sparrows. Michelle: Here's the crucial part. Mao wasn't necessarily lying in the traditional sense. He wasn't hiding a secret report that said killing sparrows was a bad idea. He was bullshitting. He had a goal, and he constructed a simple, persuasive reality to fit it, completely indifferent to the actual, complex, scientific truth. He didn't care about the evidence. And that indifference, that disregard for truth, cost 36 million lives. Mark: That's horrifying. So the danger of the bullshitter is that they can get you to believe in a reality that's completely unmoored from the facts. And if they have enough power, they can drag the entire world into that false reality with them. Michelle: Precisely. It poisons the well of knowledge itself. It makes people stop believing that truth is even discoverable. And that brings us to the next big question the book tackles. Why are we, as human beings, so susceptible to this?

Mark: That's a terrifying top-down example. But the book also talks about why we, as individuals, fall for this stuff. It even has a word for it, right? "Bullibility"? Michelle: Yes, bullibility. And the author is very clear: it has almost nothing to do with intelligence. Some of the most bullible people are incredibly smart. The book uses the perfect, painful example: the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme. Mark: Of course. The biggest financial fraud in history. But wasn't that just Madoff being a very convincing liar? Michelle: He was a liar, yes. But the scheme's success for decades relied on the bullibility of his investors. Think about what he was offering: consistently high returns, year after year, whether the market was up or down. Around 10-12% like clockwork. Mark: Which, in the world of finance, is basically impossible. It defies logic. Michelle: It absolutely does. And thousands of sophisticated investors, hedge funds, charities, and even celebrities poured their life savings into it. The book highlights the story of a man named Stephen Greenspan, who lost a significant amount of money. The irony? Greenspan is a psychologist and one of the world's leading academic experts on... gullibility. Mark: You're kidding me. An expert on gullibility got taken by the biggest scam of all time? How is that even possible? Michelle: Greenspan wrote about it himself. He admitted to "profound ignorance of finance" and a "lazy unwillingness to remedy that ignorance." He invested in a feeder fund without even really knowing Madoff's name was attached. He saw other smart people investing, he heard about the great returns, and he just... went along with it. Mark: I get that. You see everyone else getting rich and you think, 'I must be missing out.' The fear of being left behind, that social pressure, it overrides the logical part of your brain that's screaming, 'This is too good to be true!' Michelle: Exactly. The book points to a few key psychological factors. One is our tendency to believe what we hear by default. It actually takes more cognitive effort to disbelieve something than to accept it. Another is our motivation. We wanted to believe Madoff was real. The idea of a safe, guaranteed 12% return is so much more appealing than the messy, unpredictable truth of the stock market. Mark: It's a preference for the comforting bullshit over the difficult truth. And once you're in, you're motivated to keep believing because admitting you were wrong means admitting you were a fool. Michelle: And that's a huge psychological barrier. One investor, after the collapse, said, "We all hoped, but we knew deep down it was too good to be true, right? We deluded ourselves into thinking we were all smarter than the others." They were participating in their own deception. Mark: Wow. So it’s not just about being tricked. It’s about our own minds being fertile ground for bullshit to grow. That’s a much scarier thought. So how do we fight this internal pull? How do we make our own minds less... bullible?

Michelle: And that's where the book gets really practical and, honestly, empowering. It argues that the solution isn't to become a bitter cynic who trusts no one. It's about becoming a better detective. The author suggests adopting what he calls a "Columbo mindset." Mark: Like the old TV detective in the rumpled trench coat? Peter Falk? Michelle: The very same. Think about how Columbo operated. He never came in hot, accusing people. He was humble, almost bumbling. He'd ask simple questions. He’d seem to be leaving, then turn back at the door and say... Mark: "Oh, just one more thing..." Michelle: Exactly! That "one more thing" was always the killer question that unraveled the whole story. The Columbo mindset is about being relentlessly inquisitive, but in a disarming, non-confrontational way. It's about being genuinely curious about how people know what they claim to know. Mark: So it's less about shouting 'You're wrong!' and more about asking, 'That's interesting. Can you walk me through your evidence for that?' It's about curiosity, not confrontation. Michelle: You've nailed it. The book says one of the most powerful questions you can learn to ask, of others and yourself, is simply: "How do you know this to be true?" It forces a distinction between an argument—a theory or opinion—and evidence, which is factual support. Bullshitters thrive on arguments but crumble when asked for evidence. Mark: That feels like a tool I could actually use. It doesn't require me to be an expert on everything. It just requires me to be curious and to not take claims at face value. Michelle: And it requires what the book calls "intellectual humility." That's the recognition that your own knowledge is limited and that your beliefs might be wrong. A bullshitter knows just enough to think they're right, but not enough to know they're wrong. Intellectual humility is the antidote to that. It's being okay with saying, "I don't know, but I'm willing to find out." Mark: It's like giving yourself permission to not have an opinion on everything. In a world that demands instant hot takes, that feels revolutionary. Michelle: It is! It protects you from your own tendency to bullshit, and it makes you a much better detector of it in others. When you're not focused on defending your own position, you're free to genuinely evaluate the claims being made.

Mark: So, when you put it all together, it seems the battle against bullshit isn't really an external fight against villains and liars. It's an internal one—a commitment to valuing truth and evidence, and having the humility to question ourselves and others. Michelle: That's the core of it. The book makes it clear that a world with less bullshit isn't something we can just wait for. It's something we have to build, conversation by conversation. Mark: What’s the first step? If someone listening wants to start building their own bullshit detection wheelhouse today, what's the one thing they should do? Michelle: The book suggests a simple starting point: get comfortable asking, "How do you know that?" Ask it of the news article you're reading. Ask it of the politician on TV. Ask it of your uncle at the dinner table. And most importantly, ask it of yourself. Ask it not as an attack, but as a genuine, curious question. If we all did that a little more, the world would be a much clearer, and safer, place. Mark: A great question to ask ourselves, too. I think we all have our own little "Smash Sparrows" campaigns going on in our heads sometimes—simple beliefs that feel right but we've never really checked. We'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Find us on our socials and share the most outrageous piece of bullshit you've had to navigate recently. Michelle: This is Aibrary, signing off.