Hello, everybody. Welcome to the American Enterprise institute, thank you for joining us today. We are going to dive right in to talk about the new book everybody lies. The subtitle for about 15 to 20 minutes after that, we will sit down and have a conversation at Columbia University at 5 30 then we will look at the book but hes produced and have the opportunity to defend himself and then we will take questions from the audience and follow the same procedure. Do you want to go first . Thanks for the introduction and for inviting me to this panel. The book everybody lies is about five years of research ive been doing. So i will describe what it is. For the last 80 years, if you want to know what people want, why people do the things they do and what people are going to do, you have basically one main approach. You ask them if you can talk to the survey said they will go out and ask people questions. And there is a problem in this approach which is people tend to lie to surveys to make themselves look good. So if you ask people immediately before are you planning to vote the overwhelming majority of seashore. They dont want to admit that and its kind of considered socially unacceptable to not vote in an election. The general survey asks the men and women in the United States how frequently they have sex, whether it is heterosexual or homosexual and whether they use a condom. You can do the math on this. American women say about once a week and use condoms 20 of the time that these 1. 1 billion every year. American men you ask them the same question and they say they use 1. 6 billion condoms every year in heterosexual encounters and you can see if you think by definition how can it be the same we already know somebody is not telling the truth, so who is telling the truth, men or women. Neither according to the data that tracks every condoms sold in the United States only 600 million or sold. Basically now everyone is lying, men are just flying more than women. [laughter] generally we have relied on surveys because it is the only thing weve had, but we have a new tool to understand which is the searches that people make on google for the last five years and people are very honest and we will tell them things they may not tell anybody else. They will confess to google friends, family members, surveys, even maybe themselves. Why are people so honest on google, theres a couple reasons. You have an incentive to tell the truth, so if you are someone that doesnt usually vote in an election, you do not have an incentive to tell the truth about whether you are planning to vote in the upcoming election, that you have the incentive you probably need information on voting. You may not know where the polling place is because you do not usually vote you have to search in the weeks before on where and how to vote in the polling places and you can see very clearly in the weeks after the election it will be very high in the area. So no matter what people think of the pollsters you can see on the searches they make whether they are actually going to vote. So that is kind of one reason people are honest and it makes sense it is the most intuitive you have the incentive to tell the truth because you need information. The second reason people tend to be honest on google which is more surprising and one of the most surprising things i learned when i started doing research is a lot of people confess false and dense as to google for no obvious reason to use the searches like i hate my boss, or i am happy, i am sad, i am drunk. Why are people telling google this, and i think it relates to the confessional there is something just about saying things and people seem to use it in big numbers to say what is on their mind in almost a complete sentence which i was not expecting at all when i started this research but it definitely caught me by surprise. So what can we learn when we look at these searches . When you look, rock obama was elected and defeated john mccain. There was a big question after did race matter, did people care that obama was black when deciding whether to vote for him, and it was kind of a graphic question that could be complicated by the social busybodies and if you ask americans to overwhelming majority, they would say they dont care. And that is kind of why a lot of people could conclude the postracial society back in the day there was this idea that they voted for obama and said they didnt care that obama was black. So could you use the Google Search because people are so honest and tell things they might not tell anybody else as socially unacceptable attitudes, could use use these to get a real answer that race may have played in the decision . So what i did is i made a map of the search volume and this is the percentage that include a racist word i will not say out loud that you can kind of guess what it is. The first thing that struck me is how common the search was. People are making these searches in about the same frequency as the daily show and economists. As if it wasnt any stretch of the imagination a fringe search. They are mostly mocking. The other thing that struck me is that looked very different from the map i was expected of racism. If he were to ask me where racism is highest against africanamericans in the United States, i would have guessed that racism is concentrated in the south. If you think of the countrys history, we think of racism is having a strong north and south divide. It is the highest, one of the places it is the highest art places like southern mississippi and louisiana. You can also see with dark red is a High Frequency of the searches but its also higher in many places in the north and western pennsylvania and eastern ohio, industrial michigan, upstate new york or illinois. I think the divide reveals it is not north versu north versus sos east versus west. That is much higher and then it kind of drops pretty substantially west of the mississippi river. So, i wanted to see because people are so honest that you use this data to measure how much obama lost, and of course you cannot just compare these two votes for obama because it might be the places by 2008 so that wouldnt be a fair comparison. So i compared it to the previous such as john kerry in the previous election. What you see when you do that is a very strong significant relationship that places the highest search volume at the places in appalachia and michigan that support much more than the previous democrat candidates. And you can start controlling for anything you would like. Controlling for education or demographics were political views and nothing changes the relationship, that was a big factor. Overall, i conclude that obama lost about four Percentage Points of the racism that is much higher than you would get from any other measure. And it was about a one or two percentage point from the increased turnout. When the trump phenomenon was starting out, they said a lot of racially charged comments, and people were questioning how is he doing so well saying these things that hes not supposed to say and was racism driving some of his support. They asked me for the data on the search volume and he set up all of the variables whether it was age or education or economics or trade exposure, the same correlation he could find was the racist search volume so this of course didnt mean that everybody that supports trump is racist but it does mean some of the supporters were and they did try some of the progress in the primary. And i think that there are just all kinds of things you can do in this data. I talk about them in the book whether it is predicting a turnout or measuring child abuse you can measure in the data or ive done data on doityourself abortion and pretty much this book is kind of depressing and horrifying but i put a lot of jokes so you wouldnt notice. Theres a lot of value to know these parts of the human psyche that we do not usually talk about. So i will give one more example of the research that ive done. If you go to the San Bernardino terrorist attack in 2015 when the two americans shot up their coworkers at a party and right afterwards, as soon as this attack happened almost within minutes, you saw a huge spike in the nasty searches about muslims. The number one search immediately after this attack was kill muslims which is another one it isnt clear what people are looking for but they do express these. They really were getting out of control immediately after this attack. Four days after the attack, barack obama gave a speech to the nation and basically tried to calm down some of this islamic phobia because he wants to address these attitudes that were getting out of control. And it was a nationally televised speech that got a lot of attention and was covered by the big news outlets and the speech was fine probably unlike a lot of people in the room im an obama supporter and i found the speech beautiful and spectacular and thought he was at his best. He talked about how it was a moving kind of sermon he talked about the responsibility of all americans not to give into fear and to appeal to freedom in its hour responsibility to treat everybody the same, no matter their religion. So it was a very moving speech and all of the traditional sources really loved the speech and gave it great reviews whether it is in the New York Times or the la times or other organizations. They really hits the south of the park as far as explaining to people why they shouldnt give into islamist phobia. So i did get to see minute by minute i decided to see what happened to the searches for kill muslims and i hate muslims and all of these searches. How did they compare before. I did the comparison and i found not only did they not drop as obama had hoped, but they didnt even figure out the same, they skyrocketed everything they were saying its totally backfired. So this was kind of surprising. There was one line he did give that did seem to have a different response which is obama said we have to remember they are our friends and neighbors. They are sports heroes and the men and women who will die for our country. As soon as obama said this he saw a huge spike in interest that for the first time the top description on google was not muslim terrorists or refugees, irefugeescome it was muslim athletes followed by muslim soldiers. And they stayed up for about a week afterwards. And i think you can kind of compare most of the lines of that speech about the responsibility. There were lectures and sermons and they didnt tell everybody anything they did not already know. You compare that to the line about athletes and military heroes and that was provoking new information. So we wrote this up in the New York Times analysis of the speech and i dont think its crazy when you write an article in the times that some powerful people will see that including people in the president s office, because two weeks later obama gave a speech about islamic phobia but this time in the baltimore mosque. He basically stopped with all of the lecturing in the sermon and talked about how it was anybodys responsibility to do anything. Instead, he doubled down on the curiosity strategy. So he talked about how the Muslim Americans are athletes and soldiers but he also talked about how they are farmers and merchants and said Thomas Jefferson had a copy of the koran and said they built the skyscrapers of chicago. This speech also got a lot of attention it was on national tv. You do see many of the searches immediately after this speech actually did go down, so you saw it drop in the searches for kill muslims and i hate muslims. So those are just two speeches and i will not say that is a science of how you calm down is one of phobia, but it does show the power of the data that you can turn something as seemingly unpredictable as an angry mob into Something Like a science and we are at the point of more Research Needed to be done but now we have these people that are not necessarily a very small number of people, these people do the searches and they may not be picked up by the survey and will not agree to come into princeton or harvard to participate in a laboratory experiment. But they do make crazy searches on google and we can use this to potentially understand how to calm down an angry mob. A lot of times we pat ourselves on the back for these great speeches but they just may be backfiring. So that is the theme of the book as there is so much we can learn about people from all this data is on the internet that did not used to be there. And right now i will take the attacks from the other panelists. [applause] we are going to have a conversation about the book. Its a relatively small part of it. A small part of it is about internet porn. We are not necessarily in the opening conversations so, i very much enjoyed this book. To give the opportunity to share his individual thoughts on the book. I think maybe some people will take lessons from the presentations. Maybe it is too bad that he happened to have done that but its too late for that to stress that any further. Today i went to the museum of American History where they had an old Telephone Directory but it was from the 18 hundreds so it was just a directory from philadelphia and it had each person and from the men in the directory it had their profession. There was the captain, shop lab cooper and agent, the gentleman, the gardener, the cord, gunsmith, someone whose occupation was shoemakers tools, baker and turpentine distiller and a few others. It made me realize theyre used the available data and everybody kind of used to know everybody. So in the one sentence we had this data that we didnt have before and thought how much we can learn. Maybe part of that is a feeling that we need to learn about the data because people are harder to know about. You ask the precinct captain how many could get out to the polls next month, whatever it is. So it is good for us to have the historical perspective. Re everybodregarding everybodyd a couple of thoughts on this. I am actually impressed at how honest people are and i always tell people if you want to find out what people are doing the best idea is to ask them. You wont get it completely right. 60 of americans vote. Maybe 70 will say they were planning to vote or they voted after the election. Certainly more people plan to vote than they actually do. Iit is and lighting if you say you plan to vote but you dont because something comes up. After, they ask people if they voted and in a few Percentage Points more they say they did then they actually do but it is not that far off. When you ask people who they plan to vote for, its very accurate. Hillary clinton at 52 of the vote and actually got 51 . They were off in some states which i do not think the evidence doesnt point to people lying. It points to the differential nonresponse to explain that. Why people are so honest in the poll was given when he talked about motivations. Why you should respond to the survey in the first place, that i have no idea. If someone is trying to make money by shy spent 45 minutes answering someones question thatthat silly so im not goino do it. But if you are going to answer a poll, you might as well be honest and the whole point of answering the political poll is to say yes i support her or yes i support him. In the 1950s, it was a little different in the era of the gallup poll, not that many people were surveyed. You would be one of the 1500 americans. Your vote be counted. Would be counted. You would be in the newspaper the next day. 51 of americans that talked about 1951, 1950s, whatever it was, whatever the attitude was coming he would have a big impact into was rational to respond to. If you are going to respond no, you might as well tell the truth maybe not about how many you are using when you have sent us. I think people might be misremembering. You know, like they dont remember exactly in the past year. When it comes to voting i see no reason to think people are not sincere. Is that true self a person that looks up who you are you dont spend 24 hours a day looking. Who you are when you look up racial jokes is not necessarily your truth either. That is just another aspect of who you are. The question is what is the incentive to tell the truth, so when someone gives a talk that says everybody lies, it raises a certain paradoxical element. There is an incentive to get things right in the sense if you get things wrong, people like me come in and have the goal of discovery and would like to learn things. Im very interested in this idea of Data Journalism. Its become important. Lets say we have three on this panel right here. It is playing a large role in my personal life and in the life that you consider of our society. We had a lot of discussion recently in science about can we trust science just because something is published in a top journal, should we believe it. So a journal like science or nature its like a brand name. We see this in the Data Journalism. When they make mistakes, they tend to correct themselves. Others are just sort of out there. I dont think that he lives but he makes a lot of mistakes. I dont know that there is such an incentive to get things right. Apparently he doesnt think that is an incentive. [laughter] he may have an incentive to make you doubt you never did anything wrong. For me, ive made enough mistakes in my career like im already wet so i dont want to be duncan and the tank one more time. We used to have a saying about politicians that it would be great if they could first to send a politician to prison and then let them out because first we wouldnt have the suspense of when they are going to get caught and all that and they would have much more sympathy having been imprisoned for a while. So maybe it should be required for every dat day the journaliso make some big mistakes right away. Maybe they will save those mistakes for the second book. Is the value kind of organically generated data and limited to people but beyond that doesnt add much to what we already knew . How much did you lie while you were standing there . The only reason i would have called it everybody lies except for me. They compare peoples individuals into the actual voting behavior in the survey, so it is people voting but theres also now a growing problem with surveys a lot of people voted and said they did and which is bizarre. Weve talked about this before and im going to write a column, it played a role in some of the those that are often the random meanderings that are a bigger problem. But we have a definitional difference on what constitutes lying. Andrew thinks you have to be consciously aware that you are deliberately misleading a survey and i think people