the committee's questions truthfully

and to offer the American people what

I know about President Trump

Michael Cohen is a guy who is going to

prison in two months for lying

to Congress.

I don't believe that Michael Cohen is capable

of telling the truth.

You're a pathological liar.

I have lied.

But I am not a liar.

Michael Cohen's credibility was on trial

during his momentous hearing.

His testimony if believed could have

major implications to the Trump presidency.

He's only been threatened by the truth.

So how do we ourselves decide this proven

liar is telling the truth?

You can't. This is Professor

and author David Smith.

He literally wrote the book on lying.

I write on this kinda $%%$ all the time here.

So we decided to ask him how can we know for certain

if Cohen is telling the truth.

There is no objective foolproof way of

telling whether someone is lying

or not,

especially someone who's skilled in the art of impression

management by his own admission Michael

Cohen has lied for Donald Trump

for ten years.

He knows how to handle

impression management.

And someone very skilled in this craft could easily

pass say a polygraph test

or body language checks polygraph

detects stress

it doesn't detect lies.

There's no real science of body

language. Someone who seems calm

self-possessed and self-assured may

just be a very very good liar.

We can't place our

hopes in science delivering

a foolproof way of determining

whether or not someone is telling the truth.

So how do we ever know who's telling

the truth who's not?

Their word just isn't good enough.

We need evidence we need corroboration,

we need documentation.

Luckily for Cohen There's a lot of documentation

and providing the committee today

with several documents a copy of the

check Mr Trump wrote from his personal

bank account. Copies of financial statements

and copies of letters I wrote at Mr.

Trump's direction.

But even hard evidence can also be open to

interpretation scrutiny

and reasonable doubt.

Obviously Mr. Chairman,

the witnesses may produce documents suggest

incriminates the president.

Yet he lies to banks all of those

lies were done on fraudulent documents

documents that he

forged.

Nothing he says or produces has any

credibility.

Even something as objective as an audio recording

is subject to reasonable doubt,

making people question what they're hearing

and what they're seeing.

The fact is the president does bring up cash

but he says don't pay

with cash! Listen to the tape.

It says cash.

We live in a world where spin

and the media is pervasive people find

it difficult to know what to believe.

We are in search of the truth.

The president has made many statements of his own

and now the American people have a right

to hear the other side.

They can watch Mr. Cohen's testimony

and make their own judgment.

It turns out that judging for ourselves may

maybe the worst way to find the truth.

So some people think just go

with your gut.

Unfortunately that's a very treacherous

way of determining whether someone

is lying or not because it plays right into

confirmation bias.

Confirmation bias is the tendency to interpret

evidence as confirmation of one's

existing beliefs.

So if you're the sort of person who wants

to see Donald Trump taken down

you're going to naturally be inclined

to give Michael Cohen

the benefit of the doubt.

Despite his track record.

By the same token if you're a fan

of Donald Trump then you

are going to be inclined to be very very

suspicious of the truthfulness

of Cohen's claims.

This force is so strong that we'll believe

just about anything to enforce our worldview

will even lie to ourselves.

And there may be no better example of this than

Cohen's testimony.

Replublican members of Congress used their time to discredit Cohen

based on his history of deception.

There's no truth with you whatsoever.

That's why.

That's important to you to look up here

and look at the old adage that our moms taught us-

liar liar pants on fire.

No one should ever listen you

and give you any credibility.

And Democrats thanked Cohen speaking the

truth regarding Trump.

You want to talk about an agenda?

My friends on the other side of the aisle refuse

to bring any of these people up before the committee.

So today for the first day we have

one witness who voluntarily

is coming forward to testify.

Your side ran away from the truth.

And were trying to bring it to the American people

when.

Our precious world views are under threat.

It's so easy for us to lie to

ourselves.

To form a false picture.

To let our biases take over.

As human beings were natural born liars.

We're all biased we're all self-serving we

all deceive ourselves

and only way that we can really guard

against this is to understand

that we are all vulnerable to self-deception.

The entire Trump presidency is on the line

with Cohen's testimony.

And regardless of his veracity it looks like this

hearing has done little more than push two opposing

worldviews deeper into the sand.