Episode 52 - When Lying Matters and When it Does Not

Date: 2018-06-17 | Duration: 24:15

Topics

Lies Lies Lies The impact of lying in different situations

Transcript

[0:05]

But it but bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum hey everybody it’s time to gather around for what’s coming. It’s coffee with Scott Adams. It’s the best time of the day except for those other times of the day, which are pretty good too if you have a good life. And now for the simultaneous coffee. Today we’re going to talk about facts and fact-checking and lies, damn lies. I’m gonna help you sort out when does lying matter, when does it not. Many of you know I wrote a book called Win Bigly, subtitle: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter. What do I mean by facts don’t matter? Because you

[1:08]

rationalists say facts matter. You can’t have science without facts. Facts matter. Yes, yes, yes, facts matter to the outcomes. If you walk in front of a truck and the truck hits you, that’s a fact and it matters. So facts do matter to outcomes. But in the context of persuasion, facts don’t matter because they don’t persuade. I’m gonna walk you through some examples of where facts matter and where they don’t. Why is this important? Let me tell you. If you turn on the news, you’ll see non-stop reporting about President Trump that says some version of, “President Trump has told 943 lies since breakfast.” And you turn on the news again in an hour and it’s “President Trump lied about this, he lied about that, he lied about this.” And then they’ll bring on Trump

[2:10]

supporters and, “Aren’t you bothered by all the lying? The lying! What about all the lying? How can we live with such a liar?” Well, let me tell you, there was a time not so long ago, 2015 approximately, when a very reasonable person could say, “I’m really worried that not adhering to the facts, especially for a president, could cause some big problems.” That was a reasonable thing in 2015. You could say to yourself, “Oh, I like the truth. It feels like when we depart from it, it’s just gonna cause trouble.” And if you’ve got a president who’s not passing the fact-checking, oh, I don’t know, the whole world is gonna fall apart. This is a big, big problem back in 2015. That made sense. But now it’s 2018 and a half, and we’ve actually

[3:11]

seen the horrible impact of all of the lying. So now we can assess: did it matter? Did it matter? So we don’t have to guess now. You don’t have to look at my book and say, “I’m not so sure that’s true.” You don’t have to wonder. You can just look and see what happened. We now have enough history to determine whether lying is bad or it doesn’t make any difference. Let’s talk about some specific examples, shall we? Go to the whiteboard. Yes, let’s go to the whiteboard. Stay with me. We’re turning. All right, so here are some examples. So we’ll look at some examples to see if lying makes a difference. Let’s take the example of ISIS. If you’re in a war, does lying help you or hurt you? What kind of

[4:15]

depends, right? If we’re lying about, let’s say, how long we plan to stay in Syria—let’s say we didn’t plan to stay there forever, but we say we did—let’s say it’s a lie. Is that a good lie or a bad one? Well, it’s a pretty good one because if they think we’re gonna stay forever, then they say it has no point even trying to start this Caliphate again. They were just gonna be here, and why bother? Could we lie to them online to disrupt their recruiting? I hope we are. Yes. So disinformation, lying, building morale even if it’s not true—basically manipulating the truth is a legitimate weapon of warfare. So in the case of ISIS, lying, if you do it right, it’s just another weapon. So in that case, if you use it right, you’re doing a good job in

[5:17]

North Korea. Let’s talk about the military ones again. Suppose we said to North Korea, “We are definitely going to blow you up in a nuclear blast if you don’t do X, Y, and Z.” Maybe we’re bluffing, but it’s still a good lie because it might get us to peace, and peace is way better than nuclear annihilation. So again, wherever there’s war and bluffing and negotiating, massaging the truth a little bit can get you to a good place. Let’s take the economy. If you were to say, “This economy is looking so good, I think the GDP could be someday up in the five or six percent range,” is that a lie? Well, it might not be true and it might be intentionally misleading, but what does it do? It causes people to invest because they say, “Man, it’s looking good.”

[6:18]

This president is telling me the economy is going to be great next year. I’m gonna invest this year so I can get in on this. And what does that cause? It causes the economy to do well, right? Optimism is driven by somebody telling you what the future looks like. Can anybody tell you what the future looks like? Aside from me. So basically hyperbole, exaggeration, outright lying, not getting to the facts—there are a whole bunch of situations where you can move ahead. But let me give you an example where that’s not true: race relations. What is it about race relations that’s different from all of our other topics right now? Well, let me give you an example. Economy doing great, optimism is up, investment is up. I think the report today was that tax receipts are

[7:20]

at an all-time great. Employment is hitting records. ISIS has looked good, our progress there. North Korea is looking good. We’re negotiating on trade in Iran. We don’t know how that’ll all turn out, but at least we’re pushing on things that probably needed to be pushed on. So we’re looking at this world where it feels like almost everything is going well. And what is there that’s true about all those things that are going well? Full of lies. All kinds of Trump untruths and lies and exaggerations, hyperbole, getting facts wrong. It’s just a mess in terms of the truth, and yet every one of those things is doing great. But this one: race relations. All right, so let’s look at the lying variable about this one. Why is

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this one the one that’s just sort of hanging out there? I’ll tell you why. Because there are some lies in this field that weren’t told by the president. The lies on this one topic are told by the media. So the media told you, for example, that the President of the United States said that people who are self-identified racists and Charlottesville marching with tiki torches—the media lied to you and said that the president called them fine people. He didn’t. He said that there were people on both sides of the Confederate statue issue: some want to keep them, some want to get rid of them, and there are fine people on both sides. He was not talking about the racists, but the media told you that. So what happens to race relations? It’s a mess. It’s a freaking mess. What did Hillary Clinton tell you about the

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Trump campaign? All a bunch of racists. What evidence did they give? Well, that doesn’t matter because they were persuading. They didn’t care about the facts. They were persuading. Did they succeed? They did. They did succeed. So the Democrats and the media supporting them lied, lied, lied on this topic: race relations. And they freaking ruined it. They just ruined it. They’re really destroying the country on something that’s as dear to the American experience as anything, which is the whole trying to live with people who are different than you—the ethnic melting pot. That’s the old term; I think there are updated terms for that, but that’s pretty central to who we want to be and how we want to live our lives. Who ruined that? Wasn’t

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the president. Do you remember the president ever saying, “Well, I certainly like to discriminate against this group or that”? Imagine the worst thing that the president ever said. If the media had reported it just objectively—suppose the President had said during his campaign, “We want to seal up the border and deport anybody who’s not legal.” Suppose that was just reported as fact. They would have said, “This president really wants to enforce the laws that are on the books. Enforcing those laws that are on the books will be very bad for the illegal residents of the country, and we have some compassion for them. We hope that this can be worked out.” That would be a completely objective thing to say. And sure enough, he’s not deporting the 14 million people here

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that was a little bit of hyperbole. But if it had simply been reported objectively: “Well, we’ve got a president who says he’s going to enforce the laws that are on the books.” It was the media that said, “Therefore he’s a racist.” Right? Because I’m pretty sure if we had exactly the same issues with Canada, he’d be talking about a Canadian border. Can you think of any reason he wouldn’t? If Mexico had been a high-income country and there were just no immigration problems whatsoever, would he still be talking about them because they’re brown? If we had this enormous problem on the north where those damn Canadians were coming over and stealing our jobs and bringing drugs and crime… and let me avoid the racist wrap and say I have no

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reason to believe that Canadians or Mexicans are bringing a higher level of crime or anything else into the country. I’ve never seen statistics of that nature. So I’m just speaking about the topic in concept here. I’m pretty sure that the president would have been hard on Canadians if they had been the problem. Now take, and you can take this analysis to almost any issue. Today I saw Piers Morgan—there was a news story that a new poll says that Muslims have a far worse view of this president than the last president. Now, some of that is because a lot of Muslims thought that Obama was one. So

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you get a little bit of a bump in popularity if somebody thinks you’re one of them. Some number of people probably thought Obama was just a Muslim, and so whoever came after the person who was mistakenly thought to be a Muslim is going to be a little less popular in the Muslim world. So you got that going on. And then imagine that the media had just covered the Muslim ban objectively. Suppose they said, “Oh, he’s trying to keep a type of destructive thought out of the country, and we don’t know how to identify the people who have that destructive thought—the destructive thought being radical Islam.” And so the same way we would treat, let’s say, a medical quarantine situation: there are a few countries that until we figure out

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how to handle this problem—that we can’t tell who are the good ones and the bad ones—we’re going to put a clamp on that. We’re going to figure out, we’ll get better at it, but by no means do we want to ban Muslims because we’re not banning them from the countries that have good systems and we can check out who’s coming in. Imagine if that Muslim ban had been described in just objective terms. Where does the lie come from? Well, it’s kind of coming from the enemy press. It’s coming from the pundits that they allow on the air. So I would argue again, just summarizing this: if you’re saying to yourself lying is bad, that is so simplistic it’s almost childlike. Lying is pretty much the fabric of our existence. People are marketing, they’re exaggerating their resume, they’re putting on makeup, they’re only filming themselves from the chest up so they can’t

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see that they gained a little weight recently. We’re all sort of lying, exaggerating, putting a little hyperbole on things, especially the people who are saying, “You damn liar, you!” They’re lying too, right? So in this big old lying world where everybody is shading the facts and exaggerating, and sometimes they’re just wrong and we have terrible facts—some of them are worse than others. If you lie on ISIS, the economy, and North Korea, you get not just a good result, you get a great result. You get exactly what you want. If you lie on this stuff, race relations, you’ve got a big problem, and that’s what happened. But pay attention: who did the lying? It was the media’s lying that caused the problems. It was the president’s emphasis on persuasion over facts that is getting us some good stuff: North Korea, economy, etc. So I’m not suggesting that you lie.

[16:30]

I’m suggesting that you know the difference between a time when the truth is absolutely the best way to go and when shading the truth gets you a better result, such as dealing with ISIS, dealing with North Korea, dealing with the economy. Those are my points for today. Scott, answer the question: does Trump lie for no reason? Well, you’re using lying as a big catch-all. I would say President Trump has several categories that people like to lump together as lying because it makes that number bigger. One would be hyperbole, where he simply exaggerated. Let’s say the crowd size is 10,000 and he says, “Ah, there’s 20,000. It’s the biggest I’ve ever had.” That’s intentional and it’s persuasion, it’s not facts, and it has a good result. It makes him seem like he

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has more energy, makes him seem more popular, gives him more power to do the job for which he was elected. So lying about his popularity actually improves his popularity because people say, “Hey, I need to get part of that energy. Everybody likes that guy apparently, according to him.” Then there’s a category of just not having the right fact. There are some times he just remembers a fact wrong, and if he remembers it wrong in a way that helps him, he’s more likely to use it, I would assume, because you’re not going to talk about the things that are bad for you. So some of them he just genuinely doesn’t have the data, or it’s out of date, or he read a wrong source or something. But he knows the difference—this is very important. He knows when it matters, and so far he’s been right, because there’s nothing that he’s been, let’s say, contrary to the fact-checkers, none

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of it seems to matter yet. Then there’s the category of—all right, so we did it—he’s just wrong. Then there’s a special category that you’ll see President Trump do that you don’t see other people do very often, which is he will sometimes just make up a fact because it doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t matter, and it works for his persuasion. If, for example, he’s persuading about the economy and he says, “I talked to this small business owner and he said he’s going to double his production this year,” and let’s say he just made it up—there is no small business owner, he didn’t double his production—well, does it matter? No. You look at that and say, “Hey, I better double my production too.” And next thing you know, the economy is doing well

[19:34]

because everybody’s excited. When can I lie to my partner? Lying to your loved one is a dicier proposition. Here’s the deal: if you’re President of the United States and you have a greater good in mind—the economy, national defense—lying isn’t the same thing as when you do it to your spouse. Those are different things. Yes, tax revenue is up. I don’t know what that means in terms of the deficit exactly; I haven’t seen that calculation yet. I sometimes wonder if Scott is trying to convince us or himself because he works so hard at justifying. Well, that’s the beauty of it

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not being 2015. In 2015, that was a reasonable thing to say: “Does Scott believe this or is he just trying to rationalize his opinion?” But in 2018, you can just objectively look at the data. Economy is up, so is lying. North Korea is doing great, lying is way up. You can see for yourself that it didn’t make a difference. You don’t have to wonder anymore. So if you’re asking yourself, “Am I trying to turn myself into a pretzel to justify this thing?” I say to you, just look at it. Everybody’s looking at exactly the same thing now. All these things are doing well and the lies didn’t matter. They just didn’t matter, except for the ones the media told because they were destructive lies, not constructive lies.

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Somebody’s saying, “So lying is good, so much cheating and stealing.” Now, that’s a stupid thing to say. Sometimes I can’t tell if people are even serious with their criticisms. And when I say that, I mean I actually can’t tell literally. I can’t tell. So I just let that comment go by. It’s like—oh well, that’s like—I’ll be right back, don’t go anywhere. Let me read that criticism again. “Oh, so you’re saying lying is terrific in every case? Every case you should lie to everybody, including your spouse? And I guess lies and murder are good too, right, Scott? Right with your pretzel logic?” Scene. All right, what’s the difference between lying to get ahead and cheating to get ahead? I’ll tell you what’s the

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difference between lying to get ahead and cheating to get ahead. You’re using an analogy for reasoning. Just don’t do it. Don’t make analogies. It’s like saying, “Well, Scott, what really is the difference between lying to get ahead and driving your car into a tree?” Driving a car into a tree is bad, so therefore logically… stop with your analogies. You’re not going to persuade anybody with those. All right, under code, don’t lie, cheat, or steal. I think that’s a great code. So for those people who just never want to lie, cheat, or steal, I think that is a very honorable and good code. Don’t run for president because you don’t have a chance, but in your private life, that’s an excellent rule. It would be good for business—people would trust you. Good for

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your personal life. Yeah, I think in your personal life probably honesty is absolutely the best. See? All right, I’m sure this will all be taken out of context. I’ve given it about an hour before somebody says “Lying is good” and makes that a headline with my picture on it. Probably this picture. But all right, that’s all for now and I will talk to you later.