 Hynny, mae'n cyfrifio'r maen nhw'n dechrau'r unig i'w gwahoddiadau'r Ysgolwgr Benlyw'r Llywodraeth Cymru. Fy o fwrdd eich gondol, mae mae'r thirteinth annulelt dateiad o boblwydd. Fy o warffwyr i'w thirteinth yma, mae'n eisiau tyg gyrus oeddoedd i'w thym yn y rheolbu cyllidau i'r wyfion bwysig. Felly, mae'n mahiynau i yna'r ddiw i gyllid Pluto'r ffordd mlyg. Gynnu'n gennymiau i'w rheolfiadau yma, Ac fyddi'r ffordd, rymau i fynd i gael Yvon Metw Yn Gwylau jacketaeth, unrhyw dechrau i gweld Evin yn gwneud, ond maen nhw i'w ddim ar draws i ddrygu'r event. Felly, mae'r fifritig iawn hyd yn ei wneud i'i ddyn ni wedi'i ddim yn rhan fawr. Mae'r fifritig iawn hyd yn ddim yn wedi'r gweithio honno yn fan ei fhyddolol, ac wrth Cellrung arall, wedi gweld efforddon yn y dydd, If you want to, if you're good on social media, if you can use the hashtag FOP 2017, that's festival of politics 2017. We're also broadcasting, we're on Facebook Live, so we're broadcasting. In fact, I've got my iPad, I'll be taking some questions for Evan from Facebook as well. Think of some questions. I should also say, by the way, familiarise yourself with the surroundings, make yourself comfortable. Just to let you know, the two of you are jointly the First Minister, sharing job share. So, the two of you are Ruth Davidson. You're standing in for the Labour Party at the moment who are fighting for a leadership battle, so don't squabble. Anyway, you don't have to take these roles, literally, be yourself. Normally, I would be sitting up here, I'm quite relieved, I'll be honest, not to be in the Presiding Officer's chair today, because I would have a quandary, because quite frankly, the subtitle of Evan's book is what we describe as unparliamentary language. However, so I'm not in that chair, so we will be able to read it at the title. Also, can I say, before we go any further, this is probably the biggest audience we've had. It's clearly the most attractive, and obviously the best-looking and the most intelligent. In fact, I think you've all lost weight since I saw you. So, the absolute ideal audience to talk about post-truth. Because you can tell when a politician is telling separating fact from fiction. But if you do struggle with those concepts, that's why we have, I'm delighted to say, we've got Evan Davis with us who has written about the subject. Evan is in fact an award-winning journalist and broadcaster. He's also the open university's visiting professor of the public understanding of business. Evan attended St John's College Oxford. He got a first in philosophy, politics and economics, as well as finding time to edit the student magazine Charwell. He has a master's of public administration from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He was an economist at the Institute for Physical Studies and the London Business School. He wrote numerous papers, articles and columns for newspapers and magazines while he was there. He then moved into broadcast journalism, joining the BBC in 1993 as a general economics correspondent. I confess that that's the first time I met Evan because I was a producer in the newsroom at the BBC there and was absolutely delighted when Evan joined. He took over from Peter Jay as economics editor shortly after that. Then he moved on, of course, to present the Today programme before finally becoming host of Newsnight. He's continued to write. He published his book Public Spending in 1998. He co-authored the Penguin Dictionary of Economics and the New Penguin Dictionary of Business. Since 2005, he's also presented the Business Reality show Dragon's Day on last night again. In 2011, he presented the BBC Two series Made in Britain with an accompanying book analysing how Britain pays its way in the world. This led to another BBC Two series, Mind the Gap, which explored the economic disparities between London and the region. He invited to introduce Evan Davis to discuss his latest book, entitled Post-Truth, Why We Have Reached Peak Bullshit and What We Can Do About It. We have a chance shortly to have all sorts of questions, so put your thinking caps on, but perhaps we'll just start. Your book's divided into sections, and in the first you differentiate between the types of mendacity that we are exposed to, and the difference between little white lies and the great whoppers that people sometimes tell. Can you explain? Actually, that's why, and I will try not to use the word bullshit too much, but in all honesty it is the word that captures the concept that we are assailed by every day, particularly in public discourse, and which, by the way, we're all guilty of assailing other people with as well in our private discourse. So the lie, the direct lie, is just one form of the kind of concept we're talking about. The direct lie is surprisingly uncommon actually, I think, in political life. Politicians, businesses will generally go to some lengths to avoid telling an absolute direct porgy, but they do exist. Then there's the near lie, which is much more common. That's the, I didn't have sexual relations with that woman. She had them with me, but I didn't have them with her. Kind of careful use of language to kind of avoid actually lying, but nevertheless misleading. There is obfuscation, which is the most common, I think, which is essentially failing to answer the question. Michael Howard versus Jeremy Paxman. It's just a very common, very common form of BS. And then there's a whole other set. I mean, interestingly, Donald Trump has been, a lot of people think Donald Trump is a liar, and I suspect that is the case, but there's something else that he is, which is he's someone who's disregarding of the facts. So Donald Trump will say stuff regardless of whether it is true or not. Now that distinction with a liar was made by a philosopher some years ago. In fact, he wrote a paper. He's an American philosopher called Harry Frankfurt. He wrote a paper called On Bullshit, which was the beginning of the study, the academic study of the topic. And he said, the liar is someone who's quite careful about the facts because the liar wants to oppose the facts. So the liar has to know what the facts are. The bullshitter is someone who actually just doesn't care what the fact is and just says it regardless. And actually, I think Donald Trump is closer to that than he is the liar. Donald Trump will just stand up and say stuff regardless of whether it is true or not. He would probably prefer it was true, but he hasn't really thought carefully about whether it's true. And the Donald Trump kind of disregard for the facts. Well, that is a very, very kind of new phenomenon in sort of political discourse. It's a quite strange, quite strange and alien to us. And that's why we're talking about post truth probably because Donald Trump has just changed our notion of what we do. But that Donald Trump disregard for facts I think is slightly different to the old style political lie that we know and love. And that is, again, different from obfuscation or the near lie. And then, of course, there are lots of other areas of public life where we're exposed to insincerity or inauthenticity or pretending things are not quite as they are. And to be absolutely honest, in my parlance, I think it's a very rich form of human expression is BS. And it comes in a multiplicity of forms. But obviously we're going to focus mostly on public discourse and the way in which the politicians and businesses, too, to some extent, talk nonsense. But I would stress that I think probably we're here mainly because Brexit referendum 350 million and we're here because of Donald Trump. I mean, those are the sorts of things that I think have driven public concern with political lying and mendacity. But I don't think you should believe that 350 million was the first non-fact to be used in an election campaign or referendum campaign. And I don't think you should think Donald Trump is the first person to use BS as a communications device. So we should think of it as a sort of a rich tapestry that goes from the subtle nuance of new labour spin to the industrial scale disregard the facts of Donald Trump to a whole lot of things in between. It's a very rich form of human expression. Thanks for that. And perhaps I'm a little reminded to all of us that I think we all lie to ourselves as well, don't we, as humans? Oh, we do, yeah. And there's more, for example, there's more evidence these days that we believe in confirmation bias. We seek the facts that confirm our own views about ourselves and others as well. In your book you talk about, first of all, the types of lie you get and then you go on to talk about why politicians lie and the different forms that it takes. Yeah, well, this is a bit of a mystery actually. So a big mystery is why on earth is there so much of this stuff? Why on earth is so much that is said kind of just not true or not sincere? I come at this from an economics background. There's a whole Nobel Prize-winning area of economics into why there is so much of this stuff. Because in the kind of pure economic model, economists tend to assume we're all rational, we're all wise beings, we know what we're doing, and as rational people, we would say, if we're buying a second tank car, I'm buying a second tank car from you, and you say, oh, it runs really well. It's very reliable, nothing has gone wrong. That is like, you would say that anyway, whether that is true or not. So I as the buyer should disregard what you're saying completely because it's likely to be complete nonsense. And if I'm not going to believe you, you shouldn't even bother saying it. Why waste your breath trying to tell me this stuff if I'm not going to believe it? And I'm not going to believe it because I'm rational. So economists basically think in theory there should be no bullshit. That is basically the kind of economic theory of it all. But we do observe quite a lot of it in real life. Economists, by the way, are interested because they think markets don't work properly because of the fact that I don't know how good the car is means I don't buy the car, I won't want to pay very much for it, so they worry about that. Why on earth is there so much? Look, firstly, and I think the first thing is that a lot of nonsense is actually quite revealing and quite informative. And it sort of tells you... I'll give you the example. I go through it in the book. I go to your house for dinner, you bring out a gwsbryd tart for the dessert, and it's burnt. And it's a nice dinner party, but you have unfortunately burnt the tart somewhat. Now, do I say to you, oh, God, you burnt the tart, or I don't want any, it's burnt? No. I say, oh, don't worry at all, it looks lovely. That's what I say. Now, that is basically a lie. It is nonsense. You learn nothing about your tart from what I have said to you. And interestingly, you know you've learned nothing about the tart from what I've said to you. But what have you... You have learned something about me. I've learned that I'm a well-brought-up boy who's kind of well-mannered. I care for your feelings. And so the choice of my lie is revealing in a kind of subtle way. There's a sort of subtitle there which says, yes, the food is burned, but actually let's not let it spoil the evening, or yes, the food is burned, but I care for your feelings. And you should always look through the lie because there are kind of a deeper communication. And Trump, by the way, always, the American public understood that he disregarded the facts, but they were always thinking he was communicating something to people. You could almost call it dog whistle politics, but he was communicating through his nonsense about what he wanted to signal were his concerns and whose side he was on. So if he says unemployment is 42%, which it isn't, he did say that. He is signalling something about, I hate the kind of establishment liars who are giving you these figures. I care for the people whose jobs are insecure and who feel the economy is working against them. So by his bullshit, he did communicate something. So that's one reason. There's another interesting one, which is fitting in. And I always used the example of my builder who told me it was going to take three months and I knew it was going to be six months. And I thought, what if he had told me it was going to be six months? I would have thought it was going to be a year. So the builder has to say three months in order for me to understand it six months. And it's on dating websites. If everybody shaves five years off their age, if by 36 they mean 41 and you're 41, you better not say 41 or they think you mean 46. So you basically just have to fit in. And a lot of our political culture, particularly the kind of sticking to the party line or saying, yes, I have confidence in the minister or yes, our party's position on this is very good. A lot of that is obviously nonsense, but it's just sort of fitting in with the way we do things. Dabu, actually, is just fitting in with the culture. Jeremy Corbyn came in and said, I'm going to do Prime Minister's questions in a more constructive way. They all say that. And then they find actually just to fit in, you just have to be kind of unconstructive and not score a political point. So there's fitting in. But look, the other area where I think it's... Why we have so much is that basically we're not rational human beings. And quite a lot of the time lying or spin or deceit works on our kind of irrational brain. We have little trap doors into our brain, into the kind of... not the rational brain, but the more instinctive brain. And you can exploit the little foibles and irrational foibles we have to manipulate our beliefs. That's why a lot of it occurs. In the book, I go through the example of psychological pricing. Pricing things at $9.99 rather than $10. That is a form of BS. $9.99 is the same as $10. But it sounds better. So that's why they tried. And I go through an experiment that was tried. They sent a mail order catalogue out. The same catalogue, but three versions. One, the prices ended in zero. One, they ended in nine. And one, they ended in eight. It was a sort of 009988. Three catalogues, identical stuff. Thousands, tens of thousands sent out. And the 99 ones did come back actually as the one with the most sales. So it does work sometimes. And what the best, what the best, most charismatic, instinctively wonderful communicators can sometimes do is manipulate our sort of instinctive beliefs in the way that $9.99 makes us think something is cheaper than $10. And so in the book, I go through some of the sort of, some of the little trap doors into our instinctive brain, telling good stories is a very good way, using emotion in political delivery. Framing an issue. Framing is a very useful political tool. That's where you don't make the abortion debate essentially what both sides want to do. One wants to make it about life, pro-life. And the other wants to make it about choice. They're trying to get you to see, they're framing the debate in the way that favours their side of the argument. Most people are in favour of choice. So if I frame the debate as choice, then you're more likely to see it as I'm pro-choice. Most people are in favour of life, so the other side want it to be about life. So it's about framing. So there are all these ways in which you can, you can sort of try and manipulate our beliefs, manipulate our beliefs by playing on our kind of instinctive rather than our rational brain. So there are ways, contrary to what the economists would think with their sort of rational model, there are ways in which human beings, as human as we are, and our kind of natural affinity to think about things with mental foibles and shortcuts, you can exploit those, and the liar can sometimes, or the insincere politician can sometimes manipulate our beliefs. Can I just check by the way, how much is your book? Well, the e-book was £9.99, and it's discounted now, but actually the actual proper book is £20, so that was a nice honest round, none of that. So by the way, if you want to ask a question, just put your hand up, catch my eye, and I'll try and bring you in as soon as I can. So you started off by saying there that, I think you admitted that lying's always been around, and in fact, in politics, you don't have to go back decades, you can go back centuries and see it, but in fact there are any number of euphemisms for lying in politics and expressions, so Alan Clark famously said he was economical with the actuality during the Metrics Churchill trial, and we took politicians to talk about misspeaking. So the alternative fact, as Sean Spicer now talks about lying, is nothing new, is it? No, look, I think it's important to think, firstly and importantly, remember that by the end of the week, you all will have said something that is not sincere or not true or is on the kind of, the soft end of the spectrum that we're talking about. A smallish proportion of you will have done something a little bit more serious than the kind of, so all of you will have done something like said, oh no, your bum doesn't look big in that, and that's the soft end of the spectrum. Some of you will have done something a little bit more serious like you will have probably exaggerated an achievement on a CV, or you will have said that you're fluent in French when you did it some years back and you haven't spoken it for seven years, or some of you will go a little bit further than that and will have exaggerated an insurance claim or written something on a form that is not quite an expression of what you really believe, but which you think is probably get-away-able with. So this is all of us, and then you come into politics where the incentives to try and present a glossy case are just so compelling, I mean the incentives are absolutely... But haven't the incentives always been there? Yeah, totally. Why was push-tooth the word of last year? Last year it was because of Trump, and it was because... Look, essentially it was this. We were comfortable with a certain vintage of bullshit, which was, let's call it, new labour spin and obfuscation. It was a vintage that ran from the 90s to 2010 and beyond, and it was a vintage of a kind of political lying that tried to avoid lying, did obfuscate, tried to pretend that difficult decisions were not difficult, tried in communication to say when taxes went up to pretend that they hadn't gone up. I mean, literally, even though taxes had gone up, they'd try and pretend that taxes hadn't gone up without actually directly lying about it. So that would've been got used to. And to be honest, it had worn out, utterly worn out. It was dead. It had gone. All that managed messaging and it had got tiresome, and the public, instead of thinking highly of the politicians, had just begun to think that politicians didn't really speak proper English and couldn't be straight, and had gone to distrust politicians. And then along came, let's call them the populists. And the populists spoke in a very different way to the establishment politicians, and I'm talking mainly of Trump here. And Trump, so that the old vintage of nonsense and lying became tired and worn out. And Trump came along with a new kind of, a new kind of BS. And Trump's, I think to some American voters, sounded very refreshing, because what Trump had was that while the old style, you always felt the politician was never quite being straight or telling you what they really thought. Trump, you really did feel he was telling you what he thought. He might change his mind by tomorrow morning, but you never felt he was resiling from his own views. If anything, he was exaggerating his own views. And so it was very funny that on the exit poll of the American election last year, the Hillary Clinton-Trump honesty ratings, who do you trust more, they weren't that different. Hillary was ahead, but they weren't that different, because the public felt she had a certain type of dishonesty that you never quite felt that she was authentic or really saying what she felt, whereas Trump had a different type of dishonesty. Trump's was just lying and telling nonsense disregard for the facts, but a sort of honesty, he came across as kind of more true to himself in a way than she did. So the reason we're talking about it again is that we've passed through this epoch from one kind of BS to a new kind of BS, and it is a political shock to the system to hear someone like Trump so disregarding of facts. I mean, it is just like, wow, I mean, we're not used to that. We're kind of more familiar with that sort of more subtle spin. But there was a lot of nonsense in the spin, you know, a lot of nonsense in the spin. I can remember early new Labour. I can remember Alistair Darling. I can remember Alistair Darling on it. Surely not Alistair Darling. They put up taxes, and Jeremy Paxman is saying, you have put up taxes, haven't you? And Alistair Darling just obfuscating, just simply refusing to admit the blindness most obvious truth. I mean, it was there to everybody to see and refusing to say it, because he didn't want to say it. So it's a, you know, there's a lot of it. I don't think we should think of it as new, but I think we can think of it as new vintage. This is the new style, and it is a very different style, and not altogether welcome, I think. You know, we would rather politicians work regarding of the fact. So if I can give you, I'm sure we'll return to Trump before the head discussion, but I'd say because some hands come up. I just want to confront the perhaps the most well-known lie which you mentioned already, and that is the one that's in this country. That's the £350 million for the NHS that was used in the Brexit campaign, which I believe many people think was really crucial in that winning or losing that campaign. Right. So the £350 million, how many people here believe £350 million out of interest? We send £350 million a week to the EU. Nobody. How many of you believed it at the time of the referendum campaign? Nobody. Oh, no, one. Okay, we've got a gentleman over there. There's a defensible figure, a defensible figure of about £280 million. I think the best figure is down to about £150 million. There's an arguable figure, a gross figure of £280 million, £270 million. So £350 million is not a good figure. I mean, that is definitely not a good figure. That is a really special case. I'm going to tell you why. So firstly, I think that pushed the boundaries of political mendacity in an election. Politicians normally don't do that. So I think it was unusual. And it was interesting to see Boris Johnson kind of repeating it again a few weeks back. So that was unusual. Interestingly, the motive there was to provoke an argument. And it raises a very particular issue and a rather difficult one for people like the BBC. The idea, as far as I can see, was not to persuade you it was £350 million, because £280 million would have done the job fine without direct lie, so to speak. So the purpose was to actually provoke an argument. And the purpose was to distract us with an argument about is it £350, £280 or £150, which to most voters all sound like quite a lot of money going to the EU, rather than to be talking about the economic effects of Brexit. And so it was probably a mistake for the Remain campaign to take on the lie. Because by taking it on, you just weren't talking about the stuff that your campaign wanted to be talking about, you were talking about the stuff that the Leave campaign wanted to talk about. And so that is a very important kind of special caseness about the kind of disregard for the fact there that it was an attempt to change the conversation away towards the issue that the Leave campaign wanted to have. Now, that might have worked. That might have worked. And it certainly was the most memorable fact that came out in the election campaign. I want to make, though, a really important point, and I want to provoke you with this point, because I'm going to guess, because I've done a few of these events, the audiences are always overwhelmingly Remain, and they are overwhelmingly people who are very worried about that 350 million. And so I know that there's a lot of you in here who have that worry. I want you to take away the feeling that... Look, it was a very close referendum, so anything can have been decisive in the referendum as close as that. However, I want you to take away the fact that, on the whole, the public don't rush to a judgment on the basis of one fact. They come to a judgment over time on the basis of what they see in the Daily Mail, what they see on the BBC, what they pick up from their friends, and what they observe about the real world. And my judgment is that, on the whole, the public aren't as gullible as a lot of people think, that implicitly in a lot... I imagine in a lot of your heads, and I know this because I have a lot of friends who believe it like this, Boris Johnson tells a lie, public believed a lie, public vote Brexit, that there's a sort of causal chain there. And my experience from talking to voters is it's more complicated than that. Boris Johnson tells a lie, some of the voters believe it, but a lot of those voters are people who believed it because they already believed the EU was a racket and a gravy train. So it landed mostly on very fertile territory. And most of the people who believed it were already people who were going to vote in that way anyway. Otherwise, there was a high degree of scepticism in the population about everything that was told. And mostly what drove the referendum result was either what the public had observed over a decade or two decades of nameless people or faceless people who they didn't understand in remote places who didn't seem to be elected. Then they saw euro crises and migrant crises and financial crises and they thought that any of these people know what they're doing. Or in some parts of the country, they might have thought, hey, this is my chance to put two thumbs up to a system that isn't working for me, but I just want there to be a change. And so I think, tempting as it is to think the public is stupid and just swallow the lies, my experience is the public are not as stupid as you think. And it's very interesting that every audience you talk to never believe that they're stupid. They only believe that other people with other views are stupid. And that, you know, I'm not gullible, but there are all these other gullible people. And I just think you need to be really careful about that simplification. I'm not saying that the £350 billion didn't have an effect. And maybe it was even a decisive effect given, as I say, the small margin. I'm the same, by the way, with adverts. A lot of people believe, oh, Nescafé advertised coffee, we look at the adverts and then we're like silly brainwash people and we go out and buy Nescafé. I think it's way more complicated than that. Way more complicated. Quite possibly Nescafé, actually Nescafé is the best instant coffee. It is better than the other ones, in my opinion. And it might be that Nescafé... Sorry, I shouldn't say that, I've worked for the BBC. Sorry. But it might be that Nescafé advertised more because Nescafé have more money to spend on advertising because people prefer their coffee. People buy their coffee, they can taste it for themselves, they'll come to a judgment about the coffee. They don't have to be gullible fools to buy Nescafé because it's advertised. So be really, be really careful about jumping to judgments about it. Actually, Ken, I was at the Cheltenham Book Festival last weekend. Hillary Clinton was there promoting her book. I was promoting mine, she had a bigger audience than I did. But yours was huge. She was very much giving a narrative on her of why she lost. Trump told lies, the Russians told lies, James Comey confused people with the FBI investigation. People were misinformed about me. But again, it's too simplistic, Ken. She's well known to the American people. She's been around for 25 years. And the question she should ask is, given all the lies available in the American election, why did people choose to believe those lies about her rather than her lies about herself? And, you know, there's a sort of... You have to ask, people are disposed to believe certain things rather than others. Worry about that rather than, if you like, the liars. Certain lies have traction and may have traction because people have made sort of observations or come to a view. And that's what you need to worry about rather than the actual lie and thinking that this lie mechanically causes the bad behaviour that I know you worry about. Well, Donald Trump says this audience is bigger than Cheltenham. So a couple of pieces here. Now, would you mind standing up when you ask a question? It's solely so the camera and the microphone can get you, that's all. So if you can stand up there, just you first and I'll take the wound after. It's a very simple question. One word that hasn't been used so far is the word propaganda. Now, where does propaganda fit into this construct of post-truth when in fact very expert propagandists were around during the Second World War, during the First World War, peddling what looks and sounds like what you describe as post-truth? Very good question. Propaganda is just a combination of all the things that we're talking about, deployed in a very direct way. Propaganda falls into the two categories of the kind that Hitler deployed that was very effective, but, by the way, was also falling on very fertile territory because a traumatised German nation through defeats in Versailles in the First World War, the Versailles settlement, the inflation and the wiping out of middle class savings meant there was a kind of grasping for something and Hitler's narrative for a section of the population had a kind of a compelling appeal. Hitler was obviously the most egregious and ghastly example of mental manipulation that we would cite. Then, of course, there's a lot of other propaganda, which is pretty see-through and which probably works on the people who want to believe it and doesn't work on the ones who don't want to believe it. Very interestingly, in the Soviet Union, the population was fed quite a lot of propaganda through the whole period of Soviet communism. By the end, by the end of it, Brasian F-Zera, it just washed over the public. Once you've had four decades of seeing a complete disconnect between what you're told and what actually is the case, it's not that you believe what you're told, it's that you just blasé and don't even bother about it. Everybody knew what the situation was and the propaganda no longer, it had worn out. It was like new labour spin. It just reaches a point where it's run out of its potency. Propaganda is the same. Of course, you're right, it isn't you and it isn't unique to Western country. Occasionally, those psychological operations do have an effect, but often they don't. I'm often driven to think about what we get from private companies. I don't know whether you watch the John Lewis Christmas ads closely, which are a form of a mental manipulation. I think am I a sucker for those, because I do tend to have a look at it and have a tear in my eye at the emotional thing. That is a propaganda and it does work on me. As it happens, I do shop quite a lot at John Lewis. Maybe I'm proving I am a gullible fool. I also ask myself, would it work on me if you think of some political cause or some commercial company, the most evil company in the world, trying the same thing? A little kid wanting to give the present can't wait for Christmas to give the presents to his parents or the dog or whatever. Would you be emotional about it if it was from that evil company? I don't think I would be. I think I would sit there and think, oh, this evil company, they're trying to manipulate my emotions. What's interesting about some of propaganda, like that John Lewis ad, is that I'm a sort of willing accomplice to it, really. I'm quite happy for it to move me, which is back to the point. I'm happy to believe 350 if I'm already on Boris Johnson's side. And if I'm not, I'm quite resilient in the face of the propaganda that's coming my way. I've got a good question from Facebook here, but I'm going to bring it in here. Before I ask you the question, the question here, by the way, on Facebook from Kayleigh is, is there a difference between how men and women are regarded in truthfulness, and so I've got a woman to ask. You can just see there's a gender difference. Yeah, clearly we are more truthful. But you've thought a lot about lies, so I'm going to ask you a question about lying and what we can do with it. If you look at last year's Ipsos Moray poll on trust, the top 20 per cent of trusted professions were nurses, doctors, teachers, judges and scientists. I'm a scientist, that's why I'm mentioning that. And then at the bottom 20 per cent, it was politicians and journalists. And it seems to me at the top, those professions I mentioned, they achieve a lot in life. They do a lot of positive things, not unequivocably, but they achieve a lot. Whereas we might hope the people in the bottom 20 per cent, I mean, I hope the politician I vote for achieves well on my behalf and on behalf of other citizens. But it doesn't, it's not always the case and I depend upon journalists to try and analyse and to give me an analysis of what's being said. So given that you've thought about lying and we're not in a good place at the moment, what do you do if you're a journalist to try and make life better for me? Because I want my politicians to be trusted so they can do good things for all of us. Well, that's a very good question. And a very big question. So let's first just quickly analyse why doctors and scientists are at the top and politicians and journalists are at the bottom. Broadly speaking, it's because the people at the bottom in their daily profession are desperately trying to sell you stuff, whereas the people at the top are not. Obviously, when we're trying to sell you stuff and journalists are trying to sell you stuff, they're trying to make you watch their programme or buy their newspaper, they never want to be inaccurate or false, but they are trying to make the story as sexy as possible so that you're engaged and you buy it. So the journalists are selling stuff. The politicians obviously are selling the whole time. They're selling their case to you. And the people who are selling are the ones who have an incentive to push the boundaries of honesty to try and get you believe stuff that works in their favour. So that's why the doctors and the scientists, broadly speaking, they don't have that problem. They just tell you what they think and that's why they're, I think, so much more trusted. I don't think, by the way, that they're more honest. I think in their lives, their daily lives, I imagine the doctors are the same as everybody else when it comes to exaggerating anecdotes or when it comes to filling out insurance forms or paying tax or all these other things. But that is the... their job involves their selling. The substantive part of your question was how we... how we, if you like, aid the political process to make the politicians more honest. I'm not going to throw this right back at you, but I'm going to do a little bit of throwing this right back at you. So we have these three players. We've got the politicians. We've got the intermediaries, the journalists, who are going to communicate what the politicians say. And we've got the... we've got the receivers, which is you, who have to listen via us to what the politicians say. Now, our job, and I think we do this, you know, with mixed success, is to honestly report, as clearly report, what the politicians are thinking and saying. We need to expose the lies that they say, so we need to help you come to a judgment by saying it isn't 350. It could be 280. It could be 150. So we need to hold them to account for the facts or for the judgments they make. And we need you to come to judgments about the politicians based on your values and what we've told you about what they say. So it's a sort of triangular relationship. Now, let's ask what happened when we have the most classic political lie or near lie. I have no intention of putting up taxes in an election campaign. Someone says I've no intention of putting up taxes. Read my lips. Read my lips. Our job is to say, careful here voters, they've actually praised this more carefully than you think. They've said I've no intention of putting up the rate of income tax. That leaves them a lot of room to put up other things in the income tax. Or have you noted, by the way, they haven't mentioned national insurance because they don't want to close all their options. That means they can still put up a tax on income, national insurance, without putting up our income tax. Count the spoons when these people leave your home. So our job is to tell you that. And I think, by the way, we would tell you that. I think we would tell you that. So I'm going to say a lot of the time I think we do our job. Now let's just throw this back at you. What do you do when a politician says, what do you do when the politician says, yes, we're going to put up taxes? When they're honest and they say, folks, the money's running out, I think to be honest, to meet the aspirations you have for the NHS and transport, all these things, we need to put up taxes. What do you think you do? Do you think over the last 40 years you, in your behaviour, have taught the politicians that the right thing to do is to go into the election campaign parading those kinds of things? Well, you'll have your own view of whether that's what you've taught the politicians. But I can absolutely tell you the politicians have thought about this. They have lots of them from different parties have come to the conclusion that there is no reason or incentive for them to say that. Because if they say that, you will punish them. And they think back to the 92 election, John Smith, the general election, John Smith shadow chancellor gave a very frank shadow budget, very honest, huge tax rises. He was punished by the Conservatives in the election campaign. You would expect that. But they felt they were punished by the voters. And they've really never wanted to have an honest conversation about tax ever since. Now, I want you not to think this is just some model of dishonest politicians. You know, oh, if only we had politicians who are like our doctors, the world would be a better place. No, the reason you've got those politicians is you get the politicians you deserve. And I really think, you know, we all need, the three of us in this relationship need to think about the conversation and how to raise it. It's not just dishonest politicians and the journalists intermediating. It is also about these, you know, the way we incentivise them. And I, in a more optimistic note, I actually think honesty may be a winning strategy at the moment. I mean, I actually think in 1992 the politicians came to the conclusion it wasn't a winning strategy. I think now we may have moved on. Now it may be a winning strategy. You know, we're in a serious time in our nation's history, blah, blah, blah. It might be the public are kind of more willing to listen to something that sounds like a serious addressing of the nation's... Can I share with that, Evan? I mean, I know that you will return to a more optimistic note, because I've read your book, but so far you've told us that politicians are lying. The politicians think the public are lying because they say they'll vote for taxes when they clearly won't. And journalists are lying to both of us, so that's... Journalists are doing their best in difficult circumstances. But in this last election campaign, for example, one of the arguments goes that Theresa May was more honest. She unveiled a manifesto in which she said to pensioners, I'm not going to keep the triple lock. I'm not going to make any false promises on tax on national insurance. Whereas Jeremy Corbyn said, we're going to abolish tuition fees but it was a little bit vague about and held out at least the hope that we'd get rid of debt as well without saying how we'd pay for it. I mean... It's a really good question. So who is more honest and does it pay? Obviously I have no opinion because I can't have a BBC so I won't say who's more honest. But I do think... I think certainly there are politicians who interpret the election resulters yet another lesson in do not confront the public with a difficult decision during an election campaign because it simply doesn't help. And if you want to be in power, just avoid all difficult decisions. Avoid saying anything because you'll just be punished. So that is certainly one interpretation. By the way, I just want to say... I'm a little sceptical of that. I know everybody you talk to, all the Conservative Party workers say it was the social care pledge that destroyed them on the doorsteps. The interesting thing in the polls about that very surprising election result, the one that caught us off guard again, was that actually there wasn't a collapse in elderly people's support for the Conservatives in the election campaign. There was a surge in young people's support for Labour. And I don't know whether that really supports the idea that it was the social care pledge that destroyed the Tory campaign. It looked like it did, but in some ways I don't believe young people's voting was determined by the social care pledge. I mean, I just don't think it was. I've never heard young people talking about that. Were they bought over by an element of... They were bought over by fees, and they were bought over by the idea that there was something new, fresh and more youthful and change. So as it happens, while lots of politicians have taken the view that Theresa May told the truth and she was punished, I'm actually not sure that's right. I mean, I think there might be something else going on. Well, the other thing is about authenticity because authenticity is, in other words, for truth in some ways. And everyone said that of the two, Jeremy Corbyn was the authentic. Well, it was a rerun of the American election. You had a political outsider who seemed very true to himself and always said what he believed, and then you had a much more kind of controlled, sort of managed candidate, insider, who you never quite felt was letting go and really letting you know what she truly believed. The message was too managed, and that's why all these maybot, robot, you know, Theresa May was never herself, was a sort of thing during the election campaign. And people said the same about Hillary. I've got a lot of questions. We want to take that Facebook question because actually that's a agenda about gender because that actually does, I think, raise a very interesting question. Is it coincidence that the controlled managed insider in the American election and the British election was a woman and the kind of more authentic, I say what I mean, outsider was a man in those elections? And I think it is possible. I don't know, I've no evidence on it, but it is a gender element to that. Well, our scientist said it clearly was, and she's a scientist. Theresa, not Theresa, Hillary Clinton said last week when she was down at Cheltenham, she said women get punished if they're advocating for themselves, but they're rewarded when they advocate for other people. We don't like it when they're kind of pushing themselves. We expect men to do that and not women. And I think there's possibly something in that. However, however, I also do happen to believe that, you know, there were faults in the Theresa May and the Hillary Clinton campaign that were quite large and you just wouldn't put them down to gender. I mean, they were, the message was just too managed, it didn't feel authentic and I don't think you just say that's because they're both women, I think you just say they were clinging to a political communication style of the 2000s that had just worn out and we just fed up with it. We just fed up with people not saying what they really think and authenticity. Like Jacob Rees-Mogg, the darling of the Conservatives at the moment, the guy comes across as really believing what he says. He doesn't resile from his views, he believes what he says. And suddenly that, after 30 years politicians not quite saying what they believe, someone who says what they believe does feel like a very refreshing change. He uses Victorian means of communicating. I've got a lot of questions, I'd like to zip through some questions and there's a lady up there first and then I'll just move on. Yes, I've got six already, I've caught my eye before new ones. Hello, can you hear me? Hi, Evan, sorry. Looking at currently and also in the new future from an economics point of view, have you actually, could you give us a diagnostic view, do you think Theresa May or the negotiating team in terms of the Brexit is very, it's not far from us, isn't it? Are they lying or have you spotted any lie? And also if in the ideal world as a journalist and an economist combined, any mechanism we can minimise or prevent because Brexit fundamentally is an economic transaction probably the biggest in the century, isn't it? So I'd like to hear your take. Brexit is a huge thing. Funny enough, one of the areas where we do tend to lie, mislead and where it is a kind of accepted social convention is in the bluff of a negotiation. And at the moment, I mean, I can't really give you any useful advice about where we're going or what the outcome is going to be because we really don't know who is bluffing or we just do not know. No European negotiation has ever ended anything other than five minutes before midnight or actually five minutes after midnight. So they always end when they end. And the fact that they're stuck in the run-up to that midnight tells you nothing about whether it's going to end well or going to end badly. So I absolutely do not rule out the case that this could end really badly. And I equally don't rule out the case that it could just end as all these negotiations do with some kind of muddle through thing at the last minute when they'll say, oh, we pulled it out of the bag. I'm surprised. It was difficult and we've done it. So I don't know. I mean, I think there is some bluffing going on. One of the problems with negotiations is that people can believe their bluff and then they can get locked into their bluff and then you don't get a good outcome because people continue the bluff beyond the point at which or their mutually inconsistent bluffs continue. We don't care. We don't mind no deal. The other side said we don't mind no deal and then in no time you've actually got no deal even though both sides would prefer to have a deal. So all these kinds of things can get you in a great tangle and I would be surprised if there wasn't some bluffing going on and a bit of brave facery going on, people putting on a brave face and some bluster and some scare tactics. But equally, I can't tell you whether they really believe it. I just don't know. So I don't know where this is going to go. The economic consensus, it's not unique, it's not the only view among economists but by far the majority view is that we need a deal, we need trade, that trade with Europe is more important than trade with the rest of the world and that Brexit that somehow inhibits trade with Europe will not be helpful. The reason for that is to do with our supply chain integration with the European Union, that our industry is integrated, the famous mini car park that goes backwards and forwards five times, it gets made in one place, goes across the border to put into a component that gets put back and then in another component and then finally it's put in a car somewhere else. The supply chain integration is the thing that worries a lot of business, being able to get things backwards and forwards. So that's definitely a worry but are we going to lose, are we going to have cues at the port? I just don't know. I really don't know, no one does and we just have to wait probably about a year before we really know whether they're bluffing or we're bluffing or what the outcome is. Again, it's another decision though it's not a decision taken by experts, it's a decision taken by the people and politically and so experts can't really necessarily resolve it. There's a person on the balcony up there. Yes, someone got me out of there. Yes, to you. Just when the microphone moved away and I waited. Thank you. I'd like to go back to the statement you made about Boris and his 350 million statement and to ask you and other people here if Jess Phillips had made that statement about the 350 million do we think that there might have been a different impact? My point is that I think that our tolerance of the lies depends on class to start with that we have a fundamental belief that a Tory has a right to govern that his educational background the fact that he'd been to Oxford he'd been to public school the fact that he had the right accent Jess Phillips with her Birmingham accent I don't think would have been quite so tolerated the political party that we somehow believe that Tories have a right to govern that they must actually be right and that really as a woman she didn't really have any opinion about economics and she should really just stick to talking about women's issues so I think it's quite a complicated issue when we look at our tolerance of who is actually telling the lie. Right, that is such a I'm going to disagree with you I'm going to disagree with you quite strongly I think there are a lot of people for whom what you have said is correct but I think there are probably as many people who are the absolute precise opposite of what you have said and I you know when first direct the bank was was citing this famous story goes probably apocryphal they did research and they found that the leads accent was the most true the Yorkshire accent was the most trusted in the country which is one of the reasons they cited themselves in leads because they felt that that the call centre banker banking staff would be more trusted if you had that than if you had some people from other parts of the country so I actually thought when your question started that you're going the other way that Jess Phillips would be more believed than Boris Johnson because I start from the premise Boris Johnson wasn't believed you're starting from the premise Boris Johnson was believed I would start from the premise he wasn't Jess Phillips who comes in it with a less baggage and is not an excitonian and an upper class would have had more cut through if she lied so I just I couldn't disagree more I really couldn't disagree more but look you can ask people here my view is this if you like Boris Johnson and you like the whole Boris persona and the scrubbing of the hair and all of that you might well feel disposed to believe him if you hate Boris Johnson you will be very resilient in the face of his in the face of his claims and it's actually one of the reasons why I keep making a point to people you're all resilient in the face of the enemy fire you know when the people you oppose say stuff you don't believe it the bullshit you all need to worry about is the friendly fire because you're all believing that and you're all you're swallowing it up you're living in an echo chamber and some of it is going to be true because you're right about everything and so you're right to believe everything but some of it isn't going to be true and that's the stuff you're believing and you need to worry about so no, I don't agree with you but a very fair point I want to take it to a few questions here Back to the world of business I think we'd all prefer people to tell the truth I'd welcome your comments on the effect of telling the truth on Gerald Ratner that's a good one and you're not the first person to have asked me that Gerald Ratner what a famous wonderful case right he used a slightly different word and he said all his jewellery is rubbish and he famously said it cost the same as a Marks and Spencer sandwich and doesn't last as long and what a terrible thing to have done and it destroyed his business and he did it just because he needed some funny lines for a speech to the institute of directors well, you know that's actually I think a rather special case because actually he was lying when he said his product was a bad product his product was actually quite a good product it wasn't an expensive product it was a cheap, cheerful, you know bit of jewellery it was more for kind of the lower end of the market it was more for something to wear out somewhere where you don't mind if you lose it or drop it or gets broken it probably wasn't something you would buy for life but you might buy it for the next six months and then it gets passed off or thrown away but that product was actually a good product and it had a purpose and his fatal undermining of the magic of it was just made it very unappealing a lot of brands perfumes, clothes the things we wear and the things we show a lot of brands have a sort of aesthetic quality a sort of smell about them a kind of we choose maybe we choose Adidas over Nike or we choose a certain perfume over another perfume because we have a sort of aesthetic emotional connection to that brand and what what Ratner did was he just destroyed that aesthetic quality and it was quite unnecessary because the brand was fine so it was a rather special case but I actually don't think the product was CRAP I think the product was a perfectly good product for the price point but he just destroyed the magic of it it was a tragic tragic case he's talked about it and written about it it really was a terrible terrible disaster it was a really serious business disaster we'll take some more here, just the man in the orange do you think the issue is not really the lie but the fact that because you weren't entirely clear about what distinguished what trumped us to what was existing before you were saying it's a new type was a new vintage but on that aspect do you think that the difference is now that the relationship between the truth and what he said doesn't matter what matters is the narrative it's just the victory of the narrative and the consequence of that is that not the case and it's a question to a journalist that there is no consequence anymore to lying right so so the difference with trump was his disregard for the facts so trump would say things like unemployment isn't 5% it's more like 30% I've even heard it's 40% which is a disregard for the facts and that is new does that is the narrative the important thing yes and it always has been the public are not grasping on to facts the public are coming to broader judgments about what's the story here what is the kind of underlying character the underlying point rather than the fact the public can't my judgment is the public don't care whether it's 5 or 42 they basically want to know what kind is this politician on do they get my problems do they know what I'm feeling and they're coming to judgments on that kind of thing so the narrative has always been more important than the fact trump was new because he disregarded the facts and put more emphasis on the narrative does that mean facts don't matter I wouldn't go that far but I would say the public I mean the public I would say this the public know Donald Trump plays fast and loose with the facts the famous phrase written in the Atlantic magazine piece about Trump was the public took him seriously but they didn't take him literally and they're not stupid they know that he plays fast and loose with the facts they voted for him for other reasons than that by the way and they just he's like a storyteller he's like one of your mates who just always when you go to the pub just sort of spins a ridiculously exaggerated yarn and you just you know that and you just discount it as soon as you hear it so I don't think that fact that Trump is disregarding facts is helping him and I don't think it's hurting him I think the public are just seeing through it and ultimately the public will judge him on where he delivers stuff you know I think ultimately he will be judged on the substance have the jobs come back has North Korea ended its nuclear weapons program has Trump actually achieved anything has he made healthcare cheaper better or whatever has he achieved anything is what I think will ultimately destroy or you know destroy or make him the bluster is just bluster the tweets are just tweets and the public will probably get tired of them and the public will see through them if they you know they'll just discount them it's a bit like you know if you if a newspaper exaggerates the headlines day after day after day the public see the headline and they just they just discount it they just assume that the story is not as good as the headline and they just spot the pattern but doesn't matter because I mean in Trump's case when Nixon lied over Watergate he resigned but then when Bill Clinton lied about you know not having sexual relations and not inhaling either and other things he survived and now Trump doesn't care at all he just says anything I mean is Nixon the one we should admire because he had the decency and the honesty to recognise but he actually lied he deliberately said we weren't nothing to do with Watergate that was actually a worse lie which is... I don't know I think if Trump told as serious a lie as Watergate I think he probably would be in trouble most of the time what you're getting from Trump is just it's more sort of hot air lies rather than I mean they are like the one the other day that Obama didn't write to the the widows of of military personnel who had been killed in action look I don't know I think the public at the moment they just know what they're getting with Trump and so they're not kind of punishing every misstatement because they don't there's no news value in it there's no information in it they're not they're not believing them where the public will I think punish someone is actually funnily enough is when they're more honest and they lie because then you feel duped you kind of believe the person and they lied and so you were misled I don't really feel the American public I don't know do they feel misled by Donald Trump I've said so much that's ridiculous I don't think I don't know how misled they really feel we'll have some more questions here there was somebody caught my eye right in the middle they're not holding up to it now the man in the back with the massage hi Evan can you tune me up and tell me what we can do about it okay so look here's a really good question what can we do about it so firstly we need to make sure that when we think about decisions why or who we vote for or how we interact with other people we have to make sure that we're we're not punishing honesty so we just need to be careful about that as voters and citizens don't punish honesty because we don't want to get into a low road where we're all you know scrapping around in the mud thinking the worst of people and then getting the worst from them so we need to not the second thing is you need to be open minded as I say a lot of what's a lot of the dangerous beliefs are the ones that you're believing because they comfortably gratify your sense of how the world works and some of that will be correct and some of it won't be so you need to be more you need to be more open minded about the other side of the argument when something comes that feels just too comfortable and too reassuring just think actually what is is that really right or is that wrong so be open minded the third is this is that one of the things that characterises our country at the moment and in fact the whole of the west is we're very divided more so than I can remember between I suppose Remain and Brexit is the most obvious manifestation of it but there's a sort of more of a cultural division too between I suppose you might call it metropolitan liberal or cosmopolitan and other parts of the country David Goodhart's written a rather good book about people who feel like they're citizens of somewhere and others who feel like they're a citizen of anywhere but there's a sort of division and the tribalism is causing a lot of there's a link between yes and tribalism the more tribal we are the more likely we are to believe stuff that is on our side of the argument so one of the important ways to get a more honest public discourse is to try and lower the temperature of the argument and to have more respect for people on the other side of the argument and it's funny because I have Remainer friends who will only talk about Brexit voters dimwit nut jobs who you know got the country into a huge mess and they're gullible fools and you know they're going to pay for it because we're about to go to Helen the Handcart and I sort of say to them you know that's that's not a very good way of trying to get them to change their mind or see your side of the argument you know rather than shouting at the other side as to how stupid they are actually shouting less listening more and having more empathy funnily enough is a better way of getting the other side to believe less propaganda and it's probably also a way of getting you to believe less of your own propaganda Can I say Evan just to recognise where you're sitting here because what happens across the well of this chamber is usually someone from there is shouting that somebody there it's interesting isn't it I'm in favour of adversarialism actually I think there's a great merit to the shouting argument and it does get to it does get to a certain truth over time but I think you can have too much of a good thing and at the moment the divisions are such particularly on social media particularly on Twitter which is a sort of mechanism for raising the heat of the argument which entrenched positions causes tribalism well sorry it starts with tribalism and hardens that tribalism and hardens positions and gets people to believe stuff just because that's what my team believe and that is I think one of the things that I would caution against so that's my third one end the division, be open minded and reward honesty are the three things that we can all do and obviously more of the BBC and programmes like Newsnight because we do try I've got some questions to the media about the gentleman sitting here as well I wonder what you feel about the propaganda effect of I wonder what you feel about the propaganda effect of omission of facts in public discourse quite recently I was at a news stand at the BBC history magazine which I like very much because it featured the century of the stewards and when I opened it I discovered the century was when they reached London but failed to deal with the many centuries where they were elsewhere I'm not going to answer the BBC history magazine that doesn't sound ideal but the bigger point I think is omission selectivity with the facts is a huge part of the process that we're talking about and the phrase economical with the truth which actually goes back quite a long way but economical with the truth became a popular phrase when Robert Armstrong the civil service went to an Australian court and was accused of lying and he said I didn't lie I was economical with the truth and funny enough he wasn't he was correct I mean he didn't tell a direct porgy he tried to mislead without telling a direct porgy but just by omitting a useful and relevant fact that the court would probably have wanted to have heard so yeah he he was economical with the truth and I think it's actually just one of the ways in which misleading in which arguments are made misleading and I think it makes one important point which most of the time is the argument we have in public discourse is not about a fact which is why the 350 million was so unusual it's not normally about a fact is it 350 or 280 the argument is normally about a kind of a bigger belief you know is immigration too high are students are foreign students adding to the migrant stock of the UK or not these are not answered by one fact these are quite complex judgments that have a lot of facts built into them but the argument isn't an argument about the fact if it was we could resolve them fairly quickly normally it's about is that fact relevant is that fact countered by 10 other facts that go the other way is that fact entirely correct because that's the 2010 data but the 2016 data showed something different doesn't it so it's not normally about a fact it's normally about the sum of all the facts an emitting facts is a way of a way of massively misleading sometimes which is why the fact check websites of which the BBC have one reality check, Channel 4 news has one fact check and then a really good one is called full fact which is an independent outfit although they're called fact checkers normally they're kind of taking a factual claim and they're giving you the full picture around that claim the claim is probably in some limited way true but the full picture is more complicated and I think that's what the emission of facts gets you to that emitting a fact is a way of distorting an argument and most argument is not about one fact or other but about a kind of a bigger piecing together of the facts can I just ask just a couple of questions up here the the rule of journalists again just to return to that because when I read your book I was actually initially thinking it might be quite cynical and it's not, I didn't find it cynical at all quite the reverse but there is a cynicism for me talk about your predecessor Jeremy Paxman he used to have this adage which was that when he's interviewing a politician he says why is this lying bee lying to me now I have to say I find that I mean really depressing because it induces, it is cynical it implies that it doesn't just imply that everyone's lying to you all the time it's actually encouraging it because what you're doing is you're saying if you want to be a politician you have to learn to lie convincingly that's the story that he's telling in that it's confrontational it actually reduces trust rather than increases trust I think it actually increases dishonesty rather than honesty and the approach they take have a role in either encouraging creative critical thinking which you were talking about as opposed to cynical thinking short answer yes Ken so I don't think the Paxman style encouraged politicians to lie but I think what it did in the end do over many years was encourage them to obfuscate and just put up big defensive barriers that kind of meant one way of looking at it is this there were two brilliant interviewers Paxman and Humphreys who had this adversarial, forensic kind of quite aggressive style with politicians actually I think other interviewers thought we need to be like that that's how to make great interviews and the sum of too many people trying to be Paxman and Humphreys when really there are only two Paxman and Humphreys and they are Paxman and Humphreys too many people did cause this kind of political dialogue with journalists to be too to become too you know basically it was just bigger and bigger bigger and bigger armory being built up by the interviewers and bigger defences being built up by the politician and it might have it might have worn out I always hold the view that you want a kind of a range of the interview styles out there and so Paxman and Humphreys were brilliant and did it in the way they should have but we maybe lost the full textural kind of pallets that you would want so you need somewhere where the politicians don't feel they're being pounded in order to get their view but actually it's quite good to be some places where they are pounded partly because the public love it and partly because it just tests the different side of the politicians so you see a different side of the same politician and partly because sometimes they are a lying be lying to you and it's good to see that exposed by a clever interviewer interesting when I got the job at news night after Paxman the BBC line to me was there's only one Jeremy Paxman so we want you because you're not Jeremy Paxman and no one thinks you're trying to be Jeremy Paxman so don't try to be Jeremy Paxman interestingly the comments I get from viewers are mostly why aren't you more like Jeremy Paxman and and the reason is I just can't be because Paxman was in his own way very brilliant but I do think you do want to arrange I do think like you want some adversarianism in your political system because it does get you somewhere you don't want so much of it that it's the only language of politics or the only language of interview that you'll get character or whatever now there's a couple of questions there's one on the balcony up there yes sorry I can't do justice to everybody there's a few hands here you sort of already addressed this but given what you said about the 350 million and everything it seems to be that you're arguing that the whole post-truth concept isn't itself a sort of manipulation of the truth to sort of oversimplify and make more palatable what is a genuine rift in the views of society so given that do you think it will actually help being more open minded and getting out of our echo chambers to accept an uncomfortable truth that there are instead of one correct view that is the perspective that I have and one misled that we need to discover the facts for and stop people believing a lie there are two equally valid but incredibly divergent perspectives on the world well look I don't think we just have to accept there are two equally valid but very different perspectives on lots of sub-issues within those broad value systems we need to reach an agreed position and I do think we'll reach a more constructive agreed position and a better agreed position if we tend to gravitate towards truth rather than accept lies and you know and nonsense so I think there is a constructive public discourse to be had and I'm not I'm optimistic in the long term that we do tend to gravitate towards truth when we've tried all the alternatives beforehand so I'm sort of optimistic that we get there but I'm also my view is we should try and get there I mean I don't think we should just be fatalistic and say will they believe their nonsense I believe my nonsense hey that's how the world works no I think we should have a dialogue I'm not going to persuade those people to change their values or their underlying kind of vision of where we should be as a society and we've got to come up with a view on how many students we admit to this country we've got to come up with a view on what kind of customs we're going to have post-Brexit we've got to have a view on do we want workers on boards in British companies and these are things we've got to come to a view on and it's just better if we have a constructive dialogue for all these sub-issues rather than just saying well we all disagree let's live with it so no let's not be fatalistic about this let's prove the dialogue and we can reward honesty we can make true facts have more weight in our conversations and our discourse than alternative facts that are not true let's not be stupid about this there's something there that we need to work on but let's not also be hysterical or fearful that somehow human beings have changed in this era and now we've all become this new species that doesn't care about welfare of our country or welfare of our citizens or truth or honesty we are still a normal we're still the same people we were 20 years ago and we're certainly the same species that we were and that means we do tend to want things to be better rather than worse peaceful rather than warlike richer rather than poorer these are all things that I think we do believe and share and let's work to try and get those things to the fatalistic about it let's hear the woman here one last question so I wanted to just touch on something a lot of people have accused the mainstream media including the BBC of bias based on experiences such as the independence referendum Brexit, the way they've treated Jeremy Corbyn I don't want to start to be about is the BBC bias or not but what I wanted to say was if we accept that that is people and in the post truth world we're living in for a lot of folk they're not really seeing a big difference between reading something in the BBC reading something on the telegraph reading something on RT or even further to the utter fake news how can we bring back some kind of trust in the authenticity and the believability of what we're institutions that we did believe in right look the only way to get trust if you're an institution there is only one way to get trust and that is to be honest so there's no shortcuts there's no sideline I have these you can't put lipstick on a pig and make people believe it's not a pig for very long and I've had dinners with the city grandees in the city and they say we've got a terrible image problem people don't like the banks you're a journalist Mr Davies what can we do to improve our image and I say if you have a bad image and you're bad you don't have an image problem and it's a and so here's the thing the only way to get the trust back for the BBC is to be honest now the question is is are we being honest or are we being biased and the BBC will just take a different view I think from some of its critics my view the BBC just does its best it can't do any better than that the fact that some people don't believe it is important but what is the BBC to do is criticisms from other side as well there are lots of people who believe we're establishment lackeys like the telegraph you know the right wing there are loads of people who believe the opposite and so what the BBC has to do is listen it has to read the critiques and say is this telling us something about us but the BBC has to remain true to the judgement being fair to all sides of the argument your protection against the BBC and I think you need protection against the BBC because the BBC will make mistakes it's not perfect it just does what it does and does it as best it can your protection is that there are alternatives to the BBC and I hope that over one year, five years, ten years you will come to judge the BBC's output not on whether the BBC has been on this occasion or in this broadcast bashing Jeremy Corbyn too much or giving information that you didn't find agreeable about this or that I hope you will judge it by looking at its record over time over time and comparing its record with other people and you know I don't want the BBC to be thought of certainly of proof I just don't think we should have that role we do our best the telegraph does its thing the sky and ITV do their stuff and I think you should consume all of these and the canary, you know the left wing the left wing journal that's very Corbynite and you should judge them over time and you'll come to a judgement about which is more honest but we can only do our best we have to listen to what critics say but ultimately we just have to do what we do which is to be fair to both sides of the argument and I you know I think lots of people at the BBC who have their own views obviously you'd probably say the BBC has a metropolitan liberal bias I mean that probably true of all the media but one thing I will say about my colleagues is everybody at the BBC understands the role is to be fair to both sides of an argument not to be so even-handed that it's like well on the one hand some say the earth is flat some say the earth is round not like that but to be fair to facts, to judgements, to expert opinion and to both sides of the argument and you know I regret that there are people who don't trust us and I just think we have to do what we do and the worst thing for us to do would be to say let's start being nice to Jeremy Corbyn because I don't accept the premise that we haven't been nice to Jeremy Corbyn I just don't accept it or we need to change the way we cover the Scottish referendum we need to tilt it more this way because this side are complaining we can't work like that that's not how an organisation like ours should work we have to listen to the criticisms to make sure that we aren't going off the rails but if we don't think we are going off the rails we have to stay on the rails we mustn't we mustn't bow to political pressure we have to be honest to what we see as a situation and I really do I do hope that you realise that search the everybody at the BBC makes a real effort to be fair to all sides of an argument however much they come in for and however much criticism they get and I hope you all totally believe that no no no so I couldn't dig I couldn't resist that dig no can I say that is actually a very good note it's a note of honesty to end on which is great as I say I we didn't get a chance to really explore some of the conclusions that you had about how to be more critical ourselves but it's a great book and I can ask you all to join me in thanking Evan Davis and Open University as well for jointly sponsoring us but Evan for a fantastic talk this afternoon here at the Scottish Parliament I would say to you Evan is now available downstairs I think you can just I think I've got 25 minutes I'm meant to be going to the Greens conference for the next 25 minutes so if you've got any more questions go and grab Evan Down's series and thank you all very much today for coming along