The lie guy

Clancy Martin is chair of the philosophy department at the University of Missouri and is known as the lie guy. He left his studies to pursue a career in luxury jewelry.

As I would tell my salespeople: If you want to be an expert deceiver, master the art of self-deception. People will believe you when they see that you yourself are deeply convinced. It sounds difficult to do, but in fact it’s easy—we are already experts at lying to ourselves. We believe just what we want to believe.

Eventually, the business and lifestyle got to him and he returned to academia to study lying.

I went to work on deception not because I wanted to learn how to lie better—I had mastered the art, as far as I was concerned—but because I wanted to cure myself of being a liar. What had started out as a morally pernicious technique had become a character-defining vice. I had to save myself. I needed to understand the knots I had tied myself into before I could begin to untangle them.


Bartenders as social status

From an NYT article on having bartenders at your party, even in tiny little flats.

In my opinion, if you don’t have a bartender at your party, you’re a loser, said Dustin Terry, who lives a floor below Ms. Argiro and said his job was to get models and Saudi royalty into hot clubs. The bartender brings class and sophistication.

If you can’t afford to hire a bartender,he added, you shouldn’t be having a party.

Ugh. What a bunch of pretentious twats. That said, credit to the bartenders for putting up with them and taking their money.