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Are you honest?
Let me ask the question a different way. Have you ever told a lie? You can see the problem. We've all told little white lies. Some of us have even told more than that.
This, unfortunately, is more pervasive than we think. It's called ethical fading. And it's something that Dr. Lenny Wong has spent many years studying. He spent 20 years in the military studying why good cultures turn bad. And I actually learned about ethical fading from him. In a world in which everybody's trying to get ahead, and sometimes we do so by doing things that are ethically questionable, the question is, what can we do about it? This is a bit of optimism.
Lenny, so good to see you. Good to see you, Simon. You and I met a bunch of years ago. I heard you speak at a conference, and you were the one who introduced me to this concept of ethical fading, which I ended up writing about in The Infinite Game. Correct. This concept I find so fascinating, and unfortunately the reason I think it's fascinating is it's pervasive in our society today.
correct me if i get this wrong but ethical fading is the phenomenon where a large group of people a culture of an organization make unethical decisions believing that they are well within their own ethical framework they don't believe they've done anything wrong and yet from an outsider in it is so obvious that something has gone haywire for example a pharmaceutical company
that owns the patent to an essential drug and will raise the price 500%, 600%, 800%, 1,000%, though not illegal, highly unethical. And the people inside that organization will shrug their shoulders and say, there's nothing wrong with it. Right. It's temporarily suspending any notion of right or wrong. And it's very closely related to moral disengagement. So the ethical fading came from a professor of psychology named Ann Tenbrunsel.
It's basically setting aside the ethical dilemma because you just say, well, there's no ethics involved in this. This is just a decision. It's a business decision. It's a cost-benefit analysis or whatever, but there are no ethics involved in this. And so we could just move on and make the decision. And 10 Bresol calls it a form of self-deception, which I find very interesting as well. Not only is that, you said it's amazing that it's so pervasive. To me, it's amazing that we don't even know it.
That it's so pervasive, but we refuse to look it in the face because I think it collapses so much of what humans do and we rationalize away. And it's an ugly thing to look at, to admit that, no, you just told a lie and you just don't want to admit it.
Right. Some of the things that go into that self-deception, we've all done. Let's be honest. We've all done it. Right. It's so pervasive. So for example, everyone's doing it. I had no choice. That's what my boss wanted me to do. And this is my favorite one. It's the system. Right. So in an organization where...
All of the pressures upon someone is to do things that are in self-interest of the organization. So they want you to hit a number at an arbitrary date. All the incentives are
pressure them to hit that number. So both incentives and disincentives, massive amounts of them are thrust upon a person because a few people at the top have thought that this number is more important than anything else. And at the rank and file, what ends up happening is they do anything to appease their boss, fit the incentive program, avoid getting in trouble, or worse, one person does something highly unethical, like at Wells Fargo Bank, when thousands of people open millions of fake bank accounts and other things.
It started, I assume, because one or two people tried it and somebody went, good job. And then everybody else did it. Right. And in those cases, it's the system. And really what we're expecting that person 14 levels below is not for them to tell the truth in the first place because we want them to lie to us.
Do you equate ethical fading and lying as synonymous? For me, it's the easiest example. But I think ethical fading really is the ability to develop hypocrisy in our own minds and live with it. How do we live with ourself? And the answer is ethically faded. I've been in the army in uniform for 20 years, now as a civilian for 20 years. And so in the army, you view yourself as a moral upright person.
cut above and to hear ourselves admit to lying, that really goes against who we think we are. Ethical fading allows us to live with who we really are and who we think we are. And this goes way back to what Jesus accused the Pharisees of doing. It's like, you guys are hypocrites because you're telling everyone to do this.
And when you really look at it, you're not doing it yourselves. And so it's very human, but it's very ugly. And that's why I say, especially in my organization, the military, we don't like to look at it because it really attacks who we say and think we are. And perhaps the greatest form of honesty is to look at oneself and say, I was dishonest. Correct. But look at all the creeds and codes that we have that say dishonesty.
You will never lie, cheat, or steal. Your word is sacred. And it is, but we're also human. How do you have an inspirational, aspirational organization, and yet you fill it with humans? That's what's really hard. So we can either tell everyone, you're really not as good as you think you are, or we could say, you're the best. And let's ignore all this humanness that creeps out every once in a while. Yeah. How did your interest in this show up?
So I did a study back in the early 2000s with a friend named Steve Garris, and it's called Lying to Ourselves, where we address this going on in the Army and saying we have a problem. I looked at all the requirements we placed on junior officers. And what we discovered was junior officers have about 256 available training days. And when you add up every single requirement,
that we put on them, it equates to about 297 training days. And so it's physically impossible to accomplish everything that the Army tells them to do in the amount of time we give them to do it. How can we ever develop innovative officers when all they do is run around doing what we tell them to do? But what always bothered me when I wrote that study is if they can't literally do it in the time period we give them, what are they reporting?
And so that haunted me for about a decade. And so I was sitting in my co-author's office, Steve Garris, and I said, hey, Steve, I got a research project I'd like to work on. He says, what? I said, I think even though we don't think we're lying, we're lying to ourselves. He says, I don't know what you're talking about. I am an honest person. You ask my wife. One thing she knows, I will never lie to her. And he's typing away his computer. I said, I think there's something there. Are you listening to me? He says, yeah, I'm listening. He keeps typing away. I said, what are you doing? And he says, I'm
I'm filling in all the mandatory training we're supposed to do saying I did it. And he was sitting at his computer filling it all out. And I said, that's exactly what I'm talking about. How could you sit there and do that? And yet we tell ourselves we're honest people. At the Army War College, we have a lesson on
ethics and ethical fading, we always talk about it. But finally, we are confronting it up in our face that this happens. So this got reinforced. I was talking to a civilian friend of mine, and he's talking about his wife had to move up in the organization because they had fired somebody. And I said, what'd they fire him for? He said, well, the person was falsifying training rosters. They were saying people were attending training who never did.
And it made me realize we have really developed a culture where ethical fading is pervasive, it's allowed, it's not talked about, and it's impacting all aspects of our life. So that's how we got started on this. So the fun example that I talk about where I suffered ethical fading was I had a job where out of the blue, the company announced that we had to start filling out timesheets for
Now, I worked 100% on one account. What do you need to know? I know it, yeah. You know? So we had to hand them in weekly. I never handed my timesheets on time because I'm just terrible at that kind of stuff. And so I would get in trouble.
So I would sit down for the entire week on Friday morning and I would fill out my timesheets. In at nine, out at five. Now, I often showed up at whatever time and I always left later. But who cares? So in nine, out five. In nine, out five. In nine, out five. Done. And I think maybe I was two weeks or three weeks behind because, you know, I'm late. So I'm filling out two or three weeks worth of timesheets here.
in and out, exactly the same time every single day. I go to my boss because somebody has to sign off on my timesheets and he looks at them and he says, "Boy, you're a very consistent worker, aren't you?" Basically pointing out to me that he knows I fudged my sheets and then he signs them. Right. And we go about our day. And that's where I look at the organizations. Organizations create the systems that everyone looks at and says, "That system isn't real." So we create in our mind
an imaginary line that says, that's the fake world. That's the world we lie to. Because someone came up with that system, that process, that they really don't want truth. They just want you to fill it out so all columns are lined up. That's where organizations fall in and encourage ethical fading. We're not really looking for the truth. What we really want to know is, Simon, did you put in an honest work week? Yeah, I did. Okay, here, fill out these timesheets and lie to it. Right. Just reinforce the narrative that we all want to believe.
Language is a big deal here as well. It's the overuse of euphemisms. Like in the United States, torture violates our values. We would never, ever torture. But enhanced interrogation is extremely helpful. Or in the business world or in our personal world, we would never spy on our customers. But data mining, so helpful.
So valuable. Right. Or even referring to human beings as data points. Right. And the overuse of this language where we literally dehumanize people so we can distance ourselves from the impact we may have on their lives, or we create euphemisms so we can, again, create distance from the impact of our decisions because it just makes it easier. Right. Because we don't like the harsh reality of to say, well, I lied. So instead we heard things like, I'm just telling them what they want to hear.
well, you're lying. Or the best one I heard is that's not lying. That's good leadership. I had my boss when I was starting to do this study, came in and said, so what's the study you're working on? And I told him and he says, I don't know what you're talking about. I just don't see any evidence of that. And so I said, well, wait a minute. According to the regulations, I'm supposed to get quarterly counseling from you
on how I'm doing. We've never done that. And yet every annual counseling, there's all these little dates with your initials by it on how we met and talked. I said, we never met and talked. What do you call that? And he says, that's not lying. That's protecting my boss. And so we don't like to hear those words lying or I didn't tell the truth. And even when we came to write up the study, it was hard to write down
that we lie. So we were even looking for different ways of saying lying because it's such a harsh, in-your-face word that makes us confront the evilness that we all know. So here's the uncomfortable question. Is it ever okay to lie? I think the answer is no. Then you have to ask the secondary question. Are you ever boxed in where you have to lie? Not that it's okay. I think that's what we have to transmit is that we're human.
And so it's not like the organization is trying to teach these people to be perfect because we can't expect you to be perfect because you're human. So we understand that, yes, there will be times that you will lie, but we want you to know you should never have to lie. I'm uncomfortable with this idea of the box because who sets the edges? Exactly right. And that's the problem. So there was a study done about child development.
And they did these wonderfully innovative experiments to show the development of a child's mind, of which one of them was learning to lie, because little kids don't lie. They tell you everything to a fault. And the point that was made in the study was that lying is an important social convention. And the experiment that they set up was a mother and her friend, who are both in on the experiment, meet for lunch, and the mother brings her little kid.
And the friend gives the mother a gift. And the mother says, thank you. I love it. And the kid immediately says, no, you don't. You hate it. And the mother says, no, I love it. And the kid says, no, you have one just like this at home. And you always talk about how much you hate it. And the kid hadn't learned yet this social convention that we have to tell what is a lie in order to not hurt someone's feelings. Right.
Right. But I think the ideal in that is to tell the child it's never good to lie. But mom, you just lied. I know. And I wish I didn't have to lie. So I call BS. All right. End the conversation. What else? What else do you want to talk about, Simon? Wait, no, no, listen, I'll tell you why. Because what you said is I wish I didn't have to, but I do. That's exactly it. But that's the problem, Lenny, which is
If we could all get away with saying, I wish I didn't have to, but I do, it at least makes us aware of the lie. But then we go right back to where we started, which is I have to get ahead. I got to put food on the table. That's what my boss wants me to do. Everybody's doing it. I'm going to get in trouble. Right. It's the first inch of that slippery slope that you start sliding down. Wait, wait. What if we find new ways to tell the truth as opposed to lying?
Because look, your work screwed with my head, Lenny. Like you keep me up at night, right? You're the reason. Go back to the example of the gift. Fine, I'll give it to you. The mistake she made was saying I love it. Right. Thank you so much for thinking of me. No issue. Oh, you didn't have to give me a gift. This is so kind of you. The mistake she made was I love it. The effusive thanks.
For the generosity and thinking of her was where she should have stopped. Yeah. I'm not going to ever give you a gift, first of all, Simon, is what I hear. But yes. But Simon, what if the person says, did you like the gift? Right. Now you play a game of obfuscation, which is unfair. Right. I got you your gift. Did you like it? I mean, this happened to me where I went to see a friend's play and it was easily the worst thing I've ever seen in my life.
I mean, it was abominable. Right. And I meet my friend backstage right after the play. She's still in costume. She's still in makeup. The adrenaline is still pumping. And of course, the first question out of her mouth is, what did you think? Right? Now she knows me to be an honest broker. And I say, oh, it was so fantastic seeing you on the stage. I'm so proud of you. All true. That was good.
So this is what I've started to learn, which is honesty doesn't have to happen in the moment. It can happen at a later date. I still wanted to answer her question, but the problem was she was so jacked up on adrenaline and the timing was too soon that had I said it now, the delta of her excitement to where I was going to put her, that's what would have made her upset. So the next day when the adrenaline was down and her baseline was lower,
I said, hey, can I tell you what I thought about your play yesterday? She goes, yeah, I'd love to know. And I said, you know what? I got to tell you. The script was weak. The directing was weak. You know, it was wonderful to watch you, but I felt sorry for you in the middle of it. She goes, it wasn't good. She could now have a rational conversation with me where the day before there's no way she could have a rational conversation with me. So the challenge that I've put to myself is I have to always be honest, but I don't always have to make that honest statement in the moment.
Right. But I didn't lie. I think that's a great strategy when dealing with people. But I have to challenge you, Simon. What happens when you're dealing with a faceless system? What happens when you're dealing with a bureaucracy that is demanding timesheets? So when you're dealing with people, hey, that's the way to go because people are malleable. And I think you're taking advantage of that. Simon, I don't think you would lie to me. And hopefully you don't think I would lie to you. But I got a feeling both of us would lie to a system.
And that's part of the ethical fading is one of the things you said it yourself, distance. Have me talk to a computer and put in my ID card and digitally sign it. That's so much easier than you look at me in the face and you saying, did you like my podcast?
And so organizations are faceless. And a lot of times that ethical fading is so much easier because we're digitally signing it or marking. I read your agreement thing in the beginning. That's 23 pages long. I read it and understand and agree to it. Sure, I'll do that.
We've all agreed to everything none of us have ever read. I know. If they just said I agree and didn't say I read and understand, I'd be fine. But I didn't read it. I didn't understand it. But I want my product. So give it to me. And so that's what I'm saying. When you're talking person to person, ethical fading doesn't happen as readily as put me in front of a kiosk, put me in front of a toll booth, put me in front of something I want that's just blocking me from getting something I need.
Hey, I hate to say it. We're human. Now, you got to be careful. I'm not making excuses for lying. I understand. Hypocrisy is the word that you used before to explain this. And it seems to me, and I can only refer to my own lifetime because I didn't live earlier. But if you look at how divided our nation is,
If we sit back in our academic ivory towers and you evaluate without putting our own points of views and political points of views and what either side is saying, both sides are filled with unbelievable hypocrisy. And the funny thing is, is the attack that one side makes on the other side is to point out their hypocrisy. But the hypocrisy on both sides, that a party or a group of people hold two opinions that are absolutely diametrically opposed in logic. Right.
But what we say is you're a hypocrite and it's implied as, and I'm not. And I'm not. And that's not true. The answer really is you're a hypocrite and I'm a hypocrite.
And if anyone could do that, if a party could do that, if a group of people in debate could do that, that seems to me like the most essential starting point to actually get to progress and conclusion. Right. Because what's wrong with admitting that we're human? Now, some humans are more despicable than other humans. So we'll say let's take them out of the picture. But still, there's nothing wrong with saying I'm human. I haven't led a perfect life.
I will find dirt on anybody because I think they're human too. But, and this gets back to the army, we create a type of person that we say, oh, an army officer never tells a lie. Now, they should never tell a lie. They should think lies are wrong, but they should also admit that they're human because that's part of self-awareness.
But this binary world that we live in, I really love this. I mean, simply saying, look, you're a hypocrite. We shouldn't actually attack the person. We should attack the behavior. Let's start there. So what you said was hypocritical. That is pure hypocrisy. And we are hypocrites too. Just hearing that, just saying those words out loud to you, it lets the pressure out that we can actually have a rational conversation now. But you'll never get elected to office, Simon. Or would you? No.
Yeah, that's a good question. Is our society ready for that? One of the hardest places I had this discussion with was at West Point, because at West Point, a cadet will not lie, cheat or steal or tolerate those who do. And it is very binary. Now, what's nice about West Point is West Point started saying that is a very tall hurdle for any young person.
And so it used to be that you got kicked out if you violated that at all. Now, what they've discovered is that you could make a mistake and you realize that a cadet should not lie, cheat or steal or tolerate those who do. But we're not going to kick you out because that would cause you to lie about the fact that you did make a transgression. We're going to offer now discretion. We're going to have you be developed. We'll have you meet with a mentor and discuss what happened and we'll work through it. See, what we shifted to is you're human.
You aspire to be a person who never lied, cheats, or steals. And more importantly, you aspire and we will help you. Exactly. And we all admit lying is not good. The system is designed to help you. Right. But we're not going to say, and the consequences of you lying are so steep that you won't even admit you lie. I got this from your work, that the punishment for telling the truth was greater
than the punishment for lying. So if you told the truth, I didn't complete this, it would hurt your promotability. But if you lied, you're more likely to get promoted. If everyone else is lying too, then it makes it easier. So we start creating an expectation that you have to be perfect. When you're talking about young people, when you talk about soldiers, when you talk about employees, when you're talking about children, we have to really think hard. If you're expecting them to be perfect, what do you expect them to do when something isn't perfect?
The obvious next step for us to talk about is, well, how do we change this? Like, how do we combat ethical feigning and what's the solution? Yeah, I'm just an academic, so I don't come up with actual answers. But I think you're onto something here.
which is the solution is to turn truth and honesty, not into an absolute, but into an ideal, a striving. It's an idealism. It is still an absolute. Okay, okay. An aspirational absolute rather than a current state absolute. Right. It's still an absolute. It's still something everyone should try for. And yes, we could draw the line and say, no, that was not truthful. So it's absolute. But what we can't do is say,
And I want you to surround me with all these people that never lie. I want you to surround me in a system that always tells me exactly what I want to hear and somehow live in that system because that's a false world. I think this is where the solution lies. This has to be a striving. Or as an organization, we say, we believe honesty is important. Duh.
Whenever the companies give me their list of values and honesty is one of them, I always make fun of them. I'm like, if you have to write honesty on the wall, you've got bigger problems. But we believe telling the truth is important. By the way, everybody thinks they're honest. First of all, it has to be a verb. Tell the truth. That's number one. Because everybody knows they don't always tell the truth, but everybody thinks they're honest. So tell the truth, right? Number one. And say, you will get punished here more
If you lie about the mistake, then tell us the mistake. That if you hide the indiscretion, then tell us the indiscretion. Because if you tell us, we can help you.
If you tell us, we can coach you, we can sit down, we can discuss the circumstances, we can figure out alternatives. If you felt trapped, we can work together to figure out alternatives, especially if it's person to person, because we have solutions for that. But I think that's what these systems and organizations have to become. They have to become coaching organizations rather than judging organizations. Well, and I go further, is that the Army is a profession, okay? And a profession means...
means that we have these kind of standards. It means that we have these kind of expectations, but it's also a bureaucracy. And it fights between these two identities. The bureaucracy says, tell me everything's okay. It wants statistics. It wants metrics. It wants all the measures of the world is good. That's the bureaucracy kicking in. And what I say is, everything that you said, yes, that should happen. But organizationally, I think we have to tell
The soldiers saying, we will try our hardest not to lead by getting you to tell me everything is okay. We have to create a safe space for you to be able to tell me. That's supposed to be what the suggestion box is, right? Right. That's a huge step you're asking for. Right. That's a huge step you're asking for. I'm an idealist. But I'm just saying the system cannot rely on processes,
and checklists that you force the person to tell you everything's okay because they know that's what you want to hear. They know that you well-meaningly want to make sure every soldier drives away in a vehicle that's been inspected. But don't do it by making the soldier say, my vehicles have been suspected. Do it by making a leader go down there and spend their time checking. So my solution to your question is, how do we solve this? My answer is leadership. What I'm saying is,
Leaders, if you want to know something and it's really that important that you will spend your time checking on it, then go check on it. If you want to know, did everyone qualify at the range? Then sample 10% of them and you'll find out, did everyone really qualify at the range? Right. Instead of asking for a roster. And the uncomfortable part of this is that we discover the lie when the vehicle crashes and we find out that it wasn't inspected.
Then we find out that the entire system that we've been relying on for vehicle maintenance is all a charade. We go around and say, it's not just this unit. Holy mackerel, it's this unit and this unit. No one's doing this. Why aren't they doing it? Because they view it as ethically fading. They really don't want to know the truth here. They just got to get through this process to go on leave.
And this has nothing to do with military. Your career happens to be a military one. You now teach at the military. But this is an organizational issue. Companies are exactly the same. I mean, you look at that 2008 housing crisis. Everybody was saying checks and balances and it's safe. And nobody ever checked. Right. Right. Then all of a sudden, all of the corruption or instability or broken systems were all revealed after the whole thing collapsed. Of course. Right.
Right. Because as long as the charade is working, as long as everybody thinks it's stable, including us, then we just go about our merry way. Right. I call it mutually agreed deception. You know I'm lying. I know I'm lying. But neither of us really care. So let's move on with it. It's sort of like remember the old days, Simon, when we scored a exit row seat.
And the flight attendant would come around and they give the mandatory talk. And then they say, are you willing and capable? And you look at this 76 pound person sitting beside you that, you know, cannot lift that exit door if they wanted to. Right. Right. Or they don't speak the language and you know, they really don't know what's going on. And they say, are you willing and capable? Have you understand everything? If so, respond with a verbal yes. And the entire row would say yes. And then you say, yeah, right. You know, so,
So that's that mutually agreed deception. And that's what we can't create in organizations is that they know we're lying. We know we're lying and everyone's happy because we love to be living in this hypocritical world that we've created. And there's laziness all around, right? Right. The leader doesn't want to have to go down and check the vehicles. And again, it doesn't have to be every vehicle. As you said, it's a sampling. You can do samplings or you can do it randomly. Like there are ways around this. But I think the net of this is leadership is hard work. Leadership is hard work and you can't do everything.
So if the vehicle's being inspected, is that important? Then inspect them. But if it's not that important, then think of some other way. It's me and my timesheets. Like what my boss should have done is said, Simon, I know you left at seven o'clock the other night because you and I met at six o'clock. So why don't you go back and redo your timesheets? And I say, well, boss, I don't remember what times I came and left because I haven't done these in three weeks.
He's going to say, fine, I'm going to let you get away with it this once. But now I'm checking. Right. Are we satisfied that we have a good solution here? Look, the first solution, though, is admit that this phenomenon happens. Yeah. Because then we self-regulate. Then we say, you know, I think I'm starting to ethically fade here. I think I'm coming up with excuses because I'm just trying to get what I want. So that's at the personal level.
Then we kick it up to an organizational level and we start saying, wait a minute, am I forcing the employees or subordinates to lie on this because I just want them to know that this is important? And now I'm making them say this. So at the personal level, we have to admit it and then say, am I doing it at the organizational level? We have to say to ourselves, am I creating a culture where I'm expecting people to lie to me?
And so I shouldn't do that. Leadership is not always at the top of the organization. Being a whistleblower is a form of leadership where I'm going to point out what you are making us do. The system that you've created for whatever short-term gains is forcing behaviors in this organization that are unethical and sometimes illegal. And because we said leadership is hard work, I'm going to be the one to call it out and tell my boss and say, hey, boss, I need to have an uncomfortable conversation with you.
The risk is you could lose your job. Yeah, and that's why I temper that with saying I don't advocate whistleblowing. I advocate get with your buddies. And when you go into the meeting, you say, let's tell her the truth. Finally, we're going to tell the truth on this as a group, on this and this. But she doesn't want to hear the truth on this. So we'll just ignore that for now. But on these three things, we're going to go with the truth. And if she wants to tell us the lie to her, we're going to make her tell us.
So I don't go for the whistleblowing because that'll be the last whistle you blow in the organization if you do that. But this is very, very, very important what you're talking about, which is it is a form of whistleblowing, but there's safety in numbers. If I go into my boss's office, I'm going to lose my job. But if I get together with my colleagues, we all know what we are subjected to. And if we go in and say, this is what is happening, we need you to be aware. We're not accusing you of anything. We want you to be aware of this.
And if you want this to continue, we need you to tell us
to lie. Exactly. Like I said, you got to use your wisdom on saying, look, she's backed into a wall on this number. It can't be an accusation. It has to be a discussion of what the situation we're in and the pressures we're under. Not like, boss, you're a liar. You're making us a liar because then they're going to dig in their heels. And to openly understand reality. Okay, boss, you need us to lie to you on this one. But on these, I think you could cut us a break because it'd be better for us
and you if we had a relationship where you trusted us to tell you the truth on everything that we could. That's the ideal because we live in an imperfect system and we're imperfect people. So let's try to do as best as we can given who we are and where we live. If I were to summarize what I've learned on this, ethical fading is a real thing and it is fact. We're all human. Yeah. Fact. All organizations are made up of human beings. So if all human beings are imperfect,
and at various times we're all hypocrites and we lie, then that means that every organization, which is made up of all these imperfect beings,
at various points, are hypocrites and they're systemic lying, institutionalized lying. Yeah. So what we should do is sensitize ourselves to what is this phenomenon? I do it. When do I do it? I want to minimize that. But then there's a next step in saying, and I don't want to be a party to creating that environment for somebody else. And I choose to be a part of a solution. I choose to be a part of moving myself, my friends, my organization towards being
more honest, more ethical every day. And so when I find myself in the situation, I will be the leader I wish I had. I will gather my friends together. We will lead in a productive manner, make these things known.
so that we can as a collective with our superiors and our subordinates find a solution. And if our bosses are under such extreme pressure that they want us to continue to lie, then at least be honest about the lying. Tell us to our face, I want you to lie, which most will struggle to do. They will use euphemisms, guys, guys, I don't want you to lie. We have to hit our shareholder value. Of course, I don't want you to lie, but we have to complete our requirements.
And to continue to point out to the hypocrisy until either there's a solution or an instruction to lie. And because the instruction to lie is way too difficult for someone to give, we hope that they choose the easier option, which is to find a solution, which isn't that what we all want anyway. What you're essentially saying is take down the facade, the facade of everything's perfect. Everyone's telling the truth. Take that down and say, okay, look, this is the way it is. This is reality.
Let's be truthful with one another. It's really what it is. And so that's not a bad conclusion to this whole discussion we had, Simon. Lenny, from one imperfect person to another imperfect person, I'm glad that we had an imperfect conversation. Who would have thought we'd get together and both admit that we're imperfect? And I feel a little bit closer to perfect in my imperfect way today. Oh, it's been fun. Thanks for your time. I really do enjoy talking to you. All right. Take care.
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