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Trust me, because I'm an expert.
Been getting good market advice lately?
Bear Stearns is fine!
Help with those nagging symptoms?
The one way to cure
eczema, gout, arthritis...
And consultants at work?
Not losing faith in the professional experts, are we?
Take heart, qualified help is coming right up.
And then call me boorish? I'm not gonna be bullied by your ranting.
Only the experts who are guaranteed to be wrong
get on television.
I'm Ann-Marie MacDonald, and this is "The Trouble With Experts.
- Well, Mark it depends gwho those people are,
obviously I represent...
- Experts, we can't live without them.
They tell us how to fix our cars,
decorate our homes, raise our kids
and cook our meals.
They tell us what wines to drink.
What art to buy.
And what opinions to hold.
As well as how to eat right,
exercise right and live forever.
(MATTHEW STEWART) If you want to go on a diet,
there's someone who's going to tell you exactly
how you should diet and if you want
to clip your toenails there's somebody who's going
to be an expert in that...
- Every day, armies of new experts, analysts, pundits,
consultants and other authorities are churned out to
fill our needs in the media and elsewhere.
(LARRY LEVINE) I'm an expert
in prison survival,
trust me, I'm an expert.
(WOMAN ON TV) Predictions...
- And we often cede our own opinions to them,
because well they're experts, so they know better.
Don't they?
In the 2008 stock meltdown,
we discovered that our most important experts,
our financial gurus, didn't know much at all.
And no expert predicted the recent middle-east revolution,
though everyone had plenty to say afterwards.
So what about all the other experts out there?
Should we listen to them?
Does having expertise mean you make better decisions
and better predictions than regular people?
Or are they just part of a new cult?
An ever growing expert industry that's become our new religion?
(DAN GARDNER) The average expert is about
as accurate as a chimpanzee throwing a dart.
(BEN GOLACRE) It's like a sort of
a vast army of fools and they're afforded
absolute authority in mainstream media.
(TJ WALKER) Huge percentage of experts
are absolutely full of nothing but BS.
And that's your sound bite for today!
- It's time to examine the experts
and see how reliable they are, and we'll start with the experts
who intimidate almost everyone.
Wine experts... whose god-like ratings
tell us mere mortals what we're supposed to drink
to join the fine wine crowd.
These experts are among the snootiest of authorities,
who take one sip of wine and pronounce it to be
pecan flavored with a hint of melted licorice
and stone dust.
But do wine experts really know what they're talking about?
A good place to find out is here in France's Loire Valley.
Frédéric Brochet started tasting wine
on his father's vineyard when he was just 11.
Today, he produces a million bottles a year
of Château Domaine Ampelidae.
But Brochet is also a professor of oenology;
the science of wine, at Bordeaux University.
He says most wine experts can't tell
a great wine from an ordinary one.
And he's proved it in many experiments.
In one study, Brochet asked a group wine experts to taste
two bottles of Bordeaux; one labeled as a fancy grand cru,
the other as ordinary table wine.
In fact, the same wine was in both bottles,
but 54 of the 56 experts preferred the wine
in the better bottle, fooled by what they expected
to taste.
- In his spare time Brochet is also an expert
who consults for Fauchon, Paris' most prestigious wine store.
He holds informal blind tastings here too
for passing shoppers and some professionals.
And he's been known to switch a bottle or two.
Brochet is swapping this 30 dollar Château Chamirey
for this 500-dollar Nuits-St-Georges,
and vice versa.
Will anyone know the difference?
Unlike his real experiments, people here can discuss
the wines and help each other in their detective work.
But even so, most are fooled.
This wine consultant rated the 30 dollar wine higher
than the 500 dollar one.
- This non expert chooses the better wine
in the cheaper bottle.
But the store's young wine consultant corrects her.
Only he's been fooled.
- In one famous study, Brochet found that experts
can't even tell white wine from red wine.
He served 54 other wine experts
a red and white wine to compare,
in fact they were both secretly the same wine,
only one was dyed red with a drop of food coloring.
Not a single expert spotted the trick.
Brochet says it's all about "grape" expectations.
- Brochet says no wine costs more than 20 dollars a bottle
to produce, and the price of very great wine
is largely driven by mythology and marketing.
- But wine tasters, aren't the only ones dictating our tastes
and in some fields the stakes are breathtaking.
In the multi million dollar world of art,
it's hard to know which paintings have great value
and are worth buying and which are just imitations.
But a good art expert can help you decide, or so you'd think.
Only, here too, top experts can be fooled
by what they expect to see.
This exhibit, at London's National Gallery
is embarrassing.
So disgraceful, these paintings are usually
hidden away in the basement.
But now they're out for all to see.
It's a collection of fakes and forgeries that fooled
the museum's experts and curators for decades.
The museum is bravely displaying its mistakes for all to see,
but it's just a small part of the picture
when it comes to art experts
being fooled by forgers all over the world.
How does it happen?
Meet British artist John Myatt, who forged more than 200 works
by the great masters, from Monet to Matisse,
then passed them off as originals
with the help of a conman partner.
(JOHN MYATT) Nicolas De Stael,
if anybody has heard of him?
- For almost a decade, Myatt fooled
England's top art critics, galleries, museums
and auction houses, in what Scotland Yard called
"the biggest art fraud of the 20th century."
Myatt started forging in the late 1980s,
by visiting museums to study the style
of well-known British painter Ben Nicholson.
(JOHN MYATT) And I looked at the painting,
I stood there for about an hour or so,
until I'd sort of, more or less knew it backwards,
went home and painted something along the same lines,
and it seemed to work quite nicely.
- Myatt says his paintings were amateurish at first.
Yet, he and his partner John Drewe,
took two fake paintings
by well-known French artist Roger Bissière
to the world famous Tate Gallery.
They pretended to be art historians
and fooled the museum's experts
into thinking the paintings were genuine.
(JOHN MYATT) and then two people
in white coats bring the paintings up,
so we're all looking down at the paintings,
and they say: "Oh, they're just so lovely!"
You know, they were painted in
just ordinary house paint, on modern canvasses.
their expert looked at it and he said: "Yeah,
it looks good to me."
I thought it was unbelievable,
I just thought it was just too stupid to be true.
By the mid-90s, Myatt had painted almost
200 fake Chagall's, Picasso's, Miro's and Giacometti's,
and seen them sell at Europe's top auction houses.
Gradually, his forgeries got better,
but he still can't believe that so many experts were fooled.
(JOHN MYATT) They've been told
what they're going to see, and so when they see it,
they see it.
I feel very sorry for experts frankly.
Even the very best expert is fallible.
They will make mistakes.
The best fakers have never been caught.
The very best fakes, are the ones that
you think are genuine, right now,
in the art galleries through the world.
So you don't know whether they're fakes or not.
- Over at the National Gallery,
curator Marjorie Wieseman says even top experts make mistakes,
because, like wine tasters, part of them wants and expects
to believe they've found something special.
(MARJORIE WISEMAN) All art historians,
all curators are looking for the next great discovery.
So that, they want to find an important lost masterpiece.
And sometimes they lose sight of doing the right homework.
I think what gets in the way most often is greed
and not just financial greed but also scholarly greed,
you want to be credited with a great discovery.
- In 2009, a major Hamburg museum
opened an exhibition of Chinese Terracotta Warriors,
only to have them exposed as worthless fakes.
Meanwhile, an art expert
who ran a German state museum, was duped into
declaring that a painting with bold splotches of colour
was the signature of Ernst Wilhelm Nay,
a Guggenheim prize winning artist.
In fact, the artist was a chimpanzee.
(MARJORIE WISEMAN) I think its museums,
auctioneers, private collectors,
art historians, scholars;
I think everyone is vulnerable to that.
- Art and wine may be elusive qualities to judge,
but business is made up of cold hard facts.
That's why there are countless business coaches
and management consultants, whose advice fills bookstores.
But what exactly makes them such experts?
When former management consultant Matthew Stewart
stated out he didn't have a shred of knowledge
about business, just a philosophy degree.
But his employer gave him a 3 week management course
that turned him into an overnight expert.
(MATTHEW STEWART) I was an accidental consultant;
I pretty much fell backward into consulting.
The first surprise for me,
was that my absolute lack of training didn't matter.
I didn't know how the stock market worked.
- Stewart soon became a jet set consulting star,
travelling all over the world, advising businesses
and governments.
He explains how anyone can do it if they look
the part - in his book "The Management Myth.
Why the experts keep getting it wrong".
(MATTHEW STEWART) So, there are a number
of simple tips if you want to be an expert; the first thing
is it's important to be tall.
That's always a good way to establish authority.
The second thing is to wear bling bling, shiny things.
Wear things that show that you have wealth, on your person,
... drive the right cars, stay in the right hotels.
Nothing sells like success.
That's very important to establish your expertise.
You demonstrate your knowledge and your expertise
with the result.
The fact that you've turned these forces in your favour
(THE EXPERT MOUTH) Maximize, minimize...
outside the box..
- To pass as a successful expert says Stewart,
you have to sound like one too.
(MATTHEW STEWART) You do need to master
a certain amount of jargon, which meant
I dropped a lot of bottom lines and I tried maximizing things
instead of making them better.
You don't want to say: "Our strategy is based on doing
what we do well" you say: "It's based on
our "core competences".
So, that's how you become an expert.
- In Paris, historian Etienne Augé, believes experts
are our new priests and jargon is their secret language.
(THE EXPERT MOUTH) Total quality management...
(ETIENNE AUGE) Jargon is going to be
the magical terms, you know, like in most religions.
Latin for instance for the Catholic church can be
like jargon, in the sense that you don't understand it,
but the priest does, it means that he's closer
to certain powers that you don't deserve to be close to.
- Matthew Stewart feels that management gurus
are an illusion.
That the whole field is a dressed up façade that pretends
business is a science run on formulas.
(MATTHEW STEWART) There's a notion out there
very important for our economy, that there are these people who
have special access to a kind of expertise,
it's an expertise in how to organize businesses,
how to run the world.
And then that creates this opening for people
to step forward and say: "I am the expert,
I know how to run human organizations
in the same way that you sir know how to build a cell phone
or design a building." And yet it's, it's... unfounded.
- But Stewart says if he was a management expert fraud,
so are all the rest.
(MATTHEW STEWART) You're in a field where
the truth is there are no genuine experts.
The field is quack, the basic idea that there
is a kind of science, a technology that you are,
you can apply on this field, that's just false.
- Yet corporations and governments love to hire
experts anyway, to cover their ***... ets.
(DAVID FREEDMAN) ...basically it's a "cover
your butt" kind of deal. If things later on go down
the tubes, you want to be able to say; you listened to some
pretty smart respectable people, and they were wrong too.
If it goes right of course, then you're a genius.
And you don't really actually have to mention
all those experts who steered you in the right direction.
- There's another area where almost everyone is hungry
for expert advice.
(RADIO) -VITAMIN D. it is a miracle drug
- POMEGRANATE juice - a study says...
- A new study says coffee is good for your heart...
- In our health obsessed society, we look for
wonder foods to help us live forever,
from miracle Omega 3, eggs and salmon,
to lifesaving cereals, packaged more like medicine
than food.
- Pineapple contains a protein-digesting enzyme
called bromelain...
- We seek our magic answers from an army of new nutrition
experts, diet specialists and others who give us precise
advice on what foods to eat and avoid to stay well
or ward off cancer.
(DR. DREW ORDON) Leafy green vegetables, all
good stuff for the sex life.
- Dr. Ben Goldacre is a well known British science critic.
He says many nutrition experts have even less training
and qualifications than management gurus.
(BEN GOLDACRE) They've call themselves
"nutritionists". What's interesting is that
this group of academics, who work on researching
the relationship between food and health,
who also used to call themselves "nutritionists",
who are now starting to realize they're going to have
to change the name for what they do,
because it's being so devalued and caricatured
by the arrival of this new bizarre profession.
- Goldacre says professional associations often have such
informal standards that anyone can get
some kind of official looking certificate.
In fact, he mailed away for one, from this nutrition association
for his deceased cat - Henrietta -
and got it....
(BEN GOLDACRE) Which shows you don't have
to be a nutritionist, but you also don't have to be
a human being, nor do you even have to be alive
to be a member of the American Association
of Nutritional Consultants.
(JOE SCHWARCZ) Ready, three, two, one... ah
what do you know instead of an explosion, we have a lamp...
- Dr. Joe Schwartz, is McGill University's official
science watchdog.
(JOE SCHWARCZ) The false expert is a huge
problem in the science world.
Many of these experts, professed experts
really are quacks.
(ESSIAC SPOKESMAN) The results we obtained with
thousands of patients with all types of cancers definitely
proves Essiac to be a cure for cancer.
Did you hear that the C word, cure for cancer...
(JOE SCHWARCZ) They are promoting cancer
treatments that do not work; they're promoting dietary
supplements that do not work.
(KEVIN TRUDEAU) This food grade hydrogen
peroxide is the one way to cure cancer, to eczema, to gout, to
arthritis...
(JOE SCHWARCZ) And of course all you have
to do is follow the money to see why they are doing this.
- Schwartz says another problem is that even respectable
experts get hired to do studies with industries that may
compromise their research.
(JOE SCHWARCZ) Once you're getting paid,
it's very hard to be totally objective.
There is always an angle.
You know that the people who are paying you,
want played up even though it's never really stated.
So any time that, there's money involved, I think the expertise
becomes somewhat questionable.
- Ben Goldacre says that endless experts promising easy magic
bullets in the media and on the internet
just distract us from the long term behaviour we need
to stay healthy.
(BEN GOLDACRE) I could write, a, you know,
Dr. Goldacre's healthy lifestyle book, like,
a day-by-day advice diary. And it would say exactly
the same thing on all of the 365 pages; "You should eat
more fresh fruit and veggies every day, for 70 years."
And I'm really sorry about that, I'm really sorry it's 70 years.
I'm really sorry that your 5-day detox diet won't work,
but that's the reality. And I think if you tell people
that their 5-day diet will work, they think: "Well, I can have
some chips and sit around and watch tele all evening
instead of going to the gym."
- Coming up... yes, there are even experts...
- Just how widespread is expert misexpertise?."
Christopher Cerf is a founder of the National Lampoon.
Victor Navasky is former editor of The Nation.
The two men direct the Institute of Expertology;
a wandering academy that goes wherever experts on experts
are needed.
(CHRISTOPHER CERF) Voilà, the Institute
of Expertology...
- Together, they researched a book tracking the great expert
predictions of all times.
For instance:
In 1962, a Decca recording executive
turned down a music group and said:
(CHRISTOPHER CERF) You would think by pure
chance that the experts, even if they had no expertise,
would be right at least 50% of the time.
But we have not found a single expert who was right
about anything.
- Okay, maybe he's exaggerating slightly.
But in their book of predictions, they show
military mavens are no better than other experts.
- Christopher Cerf says that media experts, often known
as pundits, have been mushrooming largely
because the media needs them for endless 24/7 cable channels.
(CHRISTOPHER CERF) More and more, they use
the format of having an expert who is on one side and one who's
presumed to be on the other, who will have a violent
argument right on screen about something.
(BILL O'REILLY) Oh yes! Oh yes!
(BARNEY FRANK) ..I said it wasn't a....
(VICTOR NAVASKY) Are there more than two sides
to every issue? Suppose one person says: "2 + 2 is 7" and
the other person says: "2 + 2 is 5" is the truth
some place in-between? Is it 6?
(Laughs)
- Science writer David Freedman spent two years writing a book
about expert predictions and their accuracy
in many fields.
His conclusion; they're wrong an astonishing amount
of the time.
(DAVID FREEDMAN) Experts are usually wrong.
It's that simple.
Surprisingly, you can actually put a number on how wrong
experts are and it turns out to be, on average,
roughly 2/3 of studies, in the top medical journals
end up being wrong.
- And he is talking about respected academic experts,
but today we're told to get an expert for almost everything.
We need an installation expert to set-up our TV system
and a colour specialist to paint our walls.
(MICHELLE LAMB) Right now greys are popular...
And a relationship expert to sort out our marriage.
(MATT TITUS) ...you shouldn't not be
deceitful, and when you're married, you're married...
- Not to mention the experts we trust with our money
and our government finances in a supposed science
that's actually bogus to look at the results.
(DAVID FREEDMNA) Economists have studied the
wrongness rate in economics journals and have concluded
it's very close to 100%.
Virtually all of the studies published in economics journals
are wrong.
- When the economic bubble burst in 2008, Canadian William White
was the Chief Economist for BIS, the Central Bank
for government ban everywhere
Now in Paris White says even the world's top financial
experts couldn't see past their own pet theories.
(WILLIAM WHITE) I think the experts,
over the course of the last few years, have done a terrible job.
They thought economics was a science.
Fact of the matter is that economics is not a science;
economics is highly dependent upon human behaviour
It would be a lot better if experts were to start off
by recognizing how little we know about
the functioning of the economy.
- But being wrong doesn't affect your expert status,
says this author...
(DAN GARDNER) When it comes
to expert predictions, the rule is;
heads I win, tails you forget we had a bet.
You don't lose guru status simply because
your forecast flops.
- Gardner points out "The Economist Magazine" once ran
an experiment, comparing 10 year forecasts about the economy
and inflation, predicted by a varied group
of experts.
(DAN GARDNER) And among these individuals
were corporate CEOs, economists, some very esteemed
people, and also some London garbage men.
And ten years passed and at the top of the table
were the London garbage men.
- Meanwhile the reign of error continues,
from trivial decisions to the biggest purchase of our lives.
(MIKE HOLMES) Okay, give me a top,
so I've got plenty...
- Meet Mike Holmes, the Canadian TV star who's on
a global crusade to expose experts who do shoddy work
in home renovation.
His latest TV series has a new target; home inspectors.
Yup, they make lots of mistakes too.
Really expensive ones.
Today, Holmes' crew is filming this Toronto house.
It was purchased for 280,000 dollars
after a home inspector expert gave it the A OK
When problems started, the owner turned to Holmes,
who discovered it needed almost 200,000 dollars more
in repairs.
Holmes has seen lots worse, But he says the real problem is
that home inspectors are seen as highly qualified experts,
when many have little or no real expertise.
(MIKE HOLMES) To become a home inspector, you
can snap your finger, there's a one hour course
that you can do online, there's a two week course,
and really, let's think about this; what's their background?
Where do they come from?
Were they builders?
The ones that were builders I want to see as home inspectors,
but if you just worked at McDonald's
and you were tired of working at McDonald's,
and, again didn't know what to do, and you just did
a two week course and all of a sudden
you're a home inspector,
and now you the home owner looks at them as an expert..
- Despite all the evidence, the expert industry
keeps growing, turning out more insta-experts all the time.
Coming up, a visit to expert school.
It is a fantasy to be a guru.
So, there are a lot of people trying to get in.
I would like to become a well known expert.
I'd like to be on CNN one day.
[¶]
- The expert industry onkeeps growing.
Partly because manufacturing experts has become
a whole new business.
There are people who claim they can turn anyone into an expert,
in just a few days, yes, even you.
Welcome to Expert School.
- TJ Walker teaches people to look and sound like a TV expert
in days.
(TJ WALKER) ... Because imagine if I came
out here today; "I'm going to really coach you how to be
great on your image.
(Laughs)... And really impress people that you're the world's
greatest expert." What are you noticing?
(FEMALE STUDENT) At least it's not your fly.
(Laughs)...
(TJ WALKER) When it comes to being
an expert in the media, if there's one thing that's off,
that's the only thing anyone will remember.
- His students pay anywhere from 2,000 to 7,000 dollars.
They range from successful doctors and business people,
to PR reps who want to become known in their fields
as TV pundits.
Like Sarah Harding, a former Miss Fitness,
trying to get known as a TV exercise expert.
(SARAH HARDING) Absolutely, I'd love to be
an expert, I want people to see
me as an expert in my field of specialty.
(STERLING THOMAS) I would like to definitely
become more of a well-known expert
in the short sales arena, I'd like to be on CNN one day.
(DR. LEA LAGOS) I'd like to become a sport
psychology expert that goes on to news shows and sports shows,
to discuss sport psychology and how it impacts athletes.
- TJ says there's an enormous hunger for experts because
of the massive growth of cable TV.
(TJ WALKER) There's a huge need for pundits
these days for one reason; it's cheap!
The cheapest thing to do is to have an opinionated host,
and bring in a couple of opinionated people;
one on one side of a debate, one on another,
and it's virtually free.
And it is a fantasy to be a pundit.
It is a fantasy to be a guru
to many people; it's a very attractive career option.
It can be intoxicating.
So there are a lot of people trying to get in.
- TJ says you can become an expert by writing a book
or having a degree in something.
But the easiest way is just to get some media training
and then some exposure.
Because once you're on TV once, you're seen as an expert,
and print and radio will want you too.
(TJ WALKER) All right.
What's the easiest way to get quoted?
I guarantee you'll get quoted this way.
The easiest way to ever get quoted is this!
(motion to hit) That's right. Attack!
(BILL O'REILLY) ...Blaming everybody else in
the world and call me bullish.
(BARNEY FRANK) I'm not going to be bullied
by your ranting...
- TJ's golden rule is never sound uncertain.
The more absolutely sure of yourself you sound,
the more likely you are to make a career as a TV expert.
So, always say "always" and always say "never",
but never say "maybe".
(TJ WALKER) Any time you can state
something with finality; absolutely, always, must,
he has to do this, any time you can do that,
we're going to quote you again and again and again.
- So another classroom of premature pundits
marches out to sell certainty.
Part of the growing army of experts,
who are just experts at giving opinions.
A Berkeley professor is the world leading expert on experts.
He's been scrutinizing experts closely for 20 years.
Professor Philipp Tetlock followed 300 top government
and media experts over two decades,
as they made 82,000 predictions.
These included political predictions about world events.
Questions like...
- The results; the experts barely did better
at their forecasts than monkeys throwing darts...
that's like random guessing.
And the more well-known and certain the experts were,
the more often they got it wrong.
(PHILIP TETLOCK) The very worst experts,
the experts whose predictions were furthest from reality
had very strong opinions.
The formula for getting it really wrong
is to have very strong opinions, to be unwilling to revise them
in response to new evidence and to be willing
to make predictions that go out far on time.
(GERALD CELENTE) We're going to see
depression level unemployment rates, 22-25%.
(JEFF RUBIN) 200 dollars a barrel of oil!
(JIM CRAMER) Bear & Stearns is fine,
do not take your money...
(PHILIP TETLOCK) And if you have the combination
of all those things, you go off a cliff.
(DAVID FREEDMAN) We get the experts who give us
the wrongest answers and give it to us in
the most certain terms, they're the ones who get quoted
in the mass media, we hear the most from them.
They're the wrongest.
(CHRISTOPHER CERF) So if you were actually
thoughtful and admit that there are many sides to an issue,
you don't get hired and you don't get heard
and you're not an expert.
So, more and more, because of that process
over many years, only the experts who are
guaranteed to be wrong get on television.
(DAVID FREEDMAN) If we were
a lot smarter about it, if we wanted better answers,
we'd look for the very unconfident expert,
or the expert who is stammering and wondering
and constantly contradicting him or herself.
I think boring experts probably as a rule are more right.
- In almost every field we examined,
we heard similar praise for the unsung, uncertain expert.
(MARJORIE WISEMAN) When you have an expert
that is absolutely certain, for me that's when
alarm bells go off and I automatically say: "Hmm,
no, there's something wrong here, I want to find out more."
(WILLIAM WHITE) I think real experts should
appear more uncertain, particularly in the area
of economics.
But, of course it's hard to work your way up
the career ladder like that.
- But Matthew Stewart says certainty is exactly what
business consultants are selling.
(MATTHEW STEWART) Now maybe that's why
I don't particularly like the expert business,
I mean I'm always questioning myself
and I'm riven with self-doubt.
- The laws of physics are predictable,
but human behaviour is too complex for anyone
to accurately predict.
Yet, in uncertain times, we crave certainty in our lives.
Is there any area where you can be a successful expert
and admit to being uncertain?
We searched the skies for it.
(WEATHERMAN) For the greater metropolitan
area today's forecast, 30% chance of showers
with 50% chance of thunderstorms...
- Here at Environment Canada, weather forecasts are
always given with percentage probabilities
behind every prediction.
In fact, for longer-term forecasts,
there's a warning on their site that says their predictions
are no better than chance.
Senior climatologist, David Philipps.
(DAVID PHILIPS) I mean it's like saying:
flip a coin, throw a dart, turn the roulette wheel.
We have to say something, we can't just sort of
put a blank map and say: "The weather this month
has been cancelled" so, the best way we can communicate
is to give them something, but then to also suggest: "Eh,
user beware, don't trust it."
Almost anything is possible.
- So why don't all our experts give us similar percentages
for their predictions?
And why do the most confident and cocky experts
usually get heard most?
Your relationship, that doesn't have a divorce in it.
And you'll be more happy than what you are right at the present time.
[¶]
And you'll be more happy than what you are right at the present time.
¶ [theme music]e
to turn. I'm in my mid-50s.
I'm white, relatively well to do.
I don't know who the hell I'm going to get stuck
in prison with, you know I mean are these people rapists?
Are they murderers?
The effect on my family has been just horrible..
(LARRY LEVINE) Well you know what?
I'm an expert at this, you've been to my website.
You know that I did ten years; I did all the custody levels.
I'm going to be blunt with you Mark, you're screwed
but we're going to do some damage control...
- Meet Larry Levine, the latest addition
to the expert industry.
Larry is an ex-convict but now he advises
terrified white-collar criminals about what to expect
in jail.
He's a prison expert, who gives a crash course
called "Fedtime 101".
(LARRY LEVINE) Don't go to the showers
in the middle of the night is an example.
Don't go places alone.
Not necessarily the other inmates you have
to worry about, you've got to worry about the staff.
(LARRY LEVINE) When I tell you about
what's going to happen on the inside of a prison,
on the other side of the fence, you need to trust me,
because I'm an expert.
- Who can say whether Larry's assured expertise really works?
But many clients are desperate to believe him.
Because they're scared
and there's nowhere else to turn.
And that may be why we all turn to experts.
We live in a hectic world, with endless
bewildering choices and we are too overwhelmed
to work things out for ourselves.
So we seek advice on how to live our own lives
and find it in many new preachers.
From personal trainers...
to sexperts and parenting experts.
Our growing dependence on expert
just creates more of them.
(BEN GOLDACRE) I think we're too easy
on ourselves.
If we caricaturize this process as being about
exploiters and victims.
I think it's much more interesting than that,
I think it's that we want to have these experts,
and there are people who want to be experts
and we are all playing this game together.
We want someone to come in and say "Don't worry anymore,
do this and it will get better!"
And if someone is gonna say: "Feel better now."
Then feeling better now is almost as good as
fixing the problem.
(WILLIAM WHITE) It's like the little child
that always wants to believe that somebody's in charge,
and I think one of the most important moments in my life
actually was when I began my professional career
at the Bank of Canada, and what became perfectly clear
was that there wasn't actually anybody in charge.
But I think we all want to believe that somebody knows
and somebody really understands, because the alternative,
confront all of this, what is essentially chaos,
is very difficult for people to live with. I think.
(MATTHEW STEWART) We look for certainty
and the experts give us that.
They tell us that it's all-okay, that someone knows
how it all works.
They have a lot more in common with witchdoctors, or shamans
than they would like to admit and that we tend to admit
to ourselves.
(FORTUNE-TELLER) And the relationship will be
a relationship that doesn't have a divorce in it
and you will be more happy than what you are right
at the present time....
- For millennia, we have used clairvoyance,
palm readers and other fortune-tellers
to guide our actions and tell us what's
going to happen in the future.
But in today's modern world, we are too sophisticated
to believe in fortune-tellers.
So we look for replacements.
It's been said that those who make a living
from their crystal ball, are condemned to eat
shattered glass.
But that doesn't seem to be true for those
behind the glass of our TVs who continue to talk...
because we are desperate for someone to point the way,
any way at all.
(MATTHEW STEWART) There's a tribe when
they're out on a hunt, they don't know which way
to go, their shamans take out a bone from a carcass,
they examine the cracks, they throw it on the ground
and if the cracks point in a certain way,
they go off in that direction.
It turns out that that is an effective way for them to avoid
preconceived notions; if they sit down and discuss
"where should we go?" they tend to go in the same
direction all the time.
Whereas if they rely on the cracks in the bone,
and they imagine that it involves some expertise,
that sends them off in directions that they might
not have gone and that ultimately proves more fruitful.
(DAVID FREEDMAN) In the end, we have
to make decisions, we have to do things.
So sure experts of course play a role in our society.
If nothing else, they sometimes give us
the confidence to act.
Typically doing something is better than doing nothing.
- Back in England, forger John Myatt
was finally caught by police and sentenced to a year in jail.
But when he got out, a surprise was waiting.
The Scotland Yard police inspector who'd arrested Myatt,
hired him to do a family portrait,
and so did the prosecutor and some court officials
who appreciated his unusual talents.
Today, Myatt makes a good living.
Selling his forgeries honestly for Legitimate Fakes Limited.
He's painting this fake Monet for Ronnie Wood
of the Rolling Stones, whose face will appear
on one of the figures.
But Myatt is still fooling the experts.
Police think 120 of his 200 fakes are still in circulation
with private owners, art dealers
and perhaps museums who value them.
And Myatt would just as soon leave it that way.
(JOHN MYATT) Well, if they do own it
and enjoy owning it, and everybody thinks
it's authentic, you know, including the experts,
then why on earth would anybody want to come along
and say: "You know, I painted that."
- So, perhaps there is some benefit in getting
the wrong advice from experts, if the result leaves you happy.
Then again, there's definitely an expert
out there somewhere with a totally different view.
As Yogi Berra once said: It's very hard to make
predictions especially about the future.
"Subtitles": DBcom Media
can catch up on our entire season at: cbc.ca/doczone
I'm Ann-Marie MacDonald. Thanks for watching.
[¶]