Hey, it's Rachel Cook, your modern mentor. And today, we're going to talk about bullshit,

because it can be found all around us. But how do you know when it's actually harmful and dangerous?

John Petrachelli, social psychologist and author of the new book, The Life-Changing Science of Detecting Bullshit,

joins me for a conversation to help

decode, demystify, and push past the BS. Oh, and yes, it's science. John Petrachelli,

author of The Life-Changing Science of Detecting Bullshit, welcome to the show. It's a pleasure

to have you here. Yeah, thank you for having me.

It's a pleasure. I have been looking forward to digging into this one with you. I read it.

I loved it. I took a lot away from it. And I would love it if we could start with just a little bit

of background. I know that this is your first book. And I'm always curious how a scientist and a researcher

sort of chooses the lane that they want to play in.

So tell us a little bit about what drew you to this topic.

Where did this book come from?

Yeah, well, first of all, I'm really just an old college professor of psychology, and I've

been conducting research in social psychology for about 20 years now, And I've been conducting research in social psychology

for about 20 years now. And about five years ago, I picked up Harry Frankfurt's On BS book,

which was actually just a 20-page article written in 1986, but then later changed to a book in 2001. I had read it maybe three

times before I started to think, gee, this ought to be a behavior that social psychologists

have a lot to say about. It seems very pervasive, ubiquitous behavior.

And when I took a look at the existing literature on BSing and BS detection,

I was amazed to find very little to nothing about the behavior.

And I thought, I love this concept of the behavior,

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