So before we get started, / what I'm gonna do / is I'm gonna clarify my goal for you, / which is not to teach a game of gotcha. / Lie spotters aren't those nitpicky kids, those kids in the back of the room that are shouting, gotcha, gotcha, / your eyebrow twitched, / you flared your nostril, / I watched that TV show lie to me, / I know you're lying. // No. // Lie spotters are armed with scientific knowledge of how to spot deception. // They use it to get to the truth, / and they do what mature leaders do every day. // They have difficult conversations with difficult people, / sometimes during very difficult times, / and they start up that path by accepting a core proposition, / and that proposition is the following. // Lying is a cooperative act. // Think about it. // A lie has no power whatsoever by its mere utterance. // Its power emerges when someone else agrees to believe the lie. // So I know it may sound like tough love, / but / look, / if at some point / you got lied to, / it's 'cause you agreed to get lied to. // Truth number one about lying. // Lying is a cooperative act. // Now, / not all lies are harmful. // Sometimes we're willing participants / in deception for the sake of social dignity, / maybe to keep a secret that should be kept secret secret. // We say, nice song. // Honey, you don't look fat in that. // No. // Or we say, / favorite of the digerati. // You know, I just fished that email out of my spam folder. // I'm so sorry. // But there are times when we are unwilling participants in deception, and that can have dramatic costs for us. // Last year saw 997 billion // dollars in corporate fraud / alone in the United States. // That's an eyelash under a trillion dollars. // That's 7% of revenues. // Deception can cost billions. // Think Enron, / Madoff, / the mortgage crisis, / or in the case of double agents and traitors like / Robert Hansen or Aldrich Ames. // Lies can betray our country. // They can compromise our security. // They can undermine democracy. // They can cause the deaths of those that defend us. // Deception is actually serious business. // This con man, / Henry Oberlander, / he was such an effective con man, / British authorities say he could have undermined the entire banking system of the Western world, and you can't find this guy on Google. // You can't find him anywhere. // He was interviewed once, / and he said the following. // He said, look, / I've got one rule, and this was Henry's rule. // He said, look, / everyone is willing to give you something. // They're ready to give you something for whatever it is they're hungry for, / and that's the crux of it. // If you don't want to be deceived, / you have to know what is it that you're hungry for. // And we all kind of hate to admit it. // You know, we kind of wish we were better husbands, / better wives, / smarter, / more powerful, / taller, / richer. // The list goes on. // Lying is an attempt to bridge that gap, / to connect our wishes and our fantasies about who we wish we were, / how we wish we could be / with what we're really like. // And boy, are we willing to fill in those gaps in our lives with lies. On a given day, / studies show that you may be lied to anywhere from 10 / to 200 times. // Now, granted, many of those are white lies. // But in another study, / it showed that strangers / lied three times / within the first 10 minutes of meeting each other. // Now, when we first hear this data, / we recoil. // We can't believe how prevalent lying is. // We're essentially against lying. // But if you look more closely, / the plot actually thickens. // We lie more to strangers than we lie to co-workers. // Extroverts / lie more than introverts. // Men lie eight times more / about themselves / than they do other people. // Women lie more to protect other people. // If you're in an average married couple, / you're going to lie to your spouse in one out of every / 10 interactions. // Now, you may think that's bad. // If you're unmarried, / that number drops to three. // Lying's complex. // It's woven into the fabric of our daily and our business lives. // We're deeply ambivalent about the truth. // We parse it out on an as-needed basis, sometimes for very, very good reasons, and other times / just 'cause we don't understand the gaps in our lives. // That's truth number two about lying. // We're against lying, / but we're covertly for it / in ways that our society has sanctioned / for centuries and centuries and centuries. // It's as old as breathing. // It's part of our culture. // It's part of our history. //