Even before the COVID-19 pandemic had begun, I served as captain of a trivia team competing in both live events at bars and online tournaments on both coasts. Players have come and gone, in-person events went on hiatus as COVID spread, but we remained competitive. The secret? We try to keep a good mix of ages and interests among our players. And rarely do we go into battle without at least one lawyer and one doctor.
And there is one asset we never go without, and it’s proven extremely helpful time and time again. It’s my personal B.S. detector. Everyone should have one.
For those who don’t play trivia, the game works like this: The host asks a question. It may be related to current events or it may be historic. Arts, humanities, the sciences, politics, pop culture, any subject matter may be involved. You have some limited time to confer with your teammates and then you must submit an answer. And here’s the tough part: During those brief ticking seconds, your teammates will shout out their best guesses. Some will be right, some may be close, and some may be a complete moon shot.
Do you see where I’m going with this? Sometimes, it’s easy. A health professional probably knows medicine better than a writer. But sometimes, it’s not so obvious, as when you’re asked to name the highest grossing movie to star Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson (the ludicrous-by-any-standard “Furious 7,” duh). Do you trust the nerdy MIT grad, the college professor, the lawyer, the computer geek? No, you go with the unemployed 23-year-old with a taste for action flicks. Ding-ding-ding!
I offer this life lesson not because I believe my well-honed B.S. detector may have other applications. Take, for example, when an ex-president who has spent a lifetime running cons and whose top White House message-manager coined the term “alternative facts” to describe lying for political advantage is visited by FBI agents. Are you more likely to believe his immediate claims of victimhood and moral outrage over a “break in” and “abuse,” or are you inclined to believe authorities with the attorney general-supervised and court-approved search warrant in hand to look for, among other things, classified documents? OK, that’s too easy. Let’s try a tougher one.