855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About

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Speaker 1 A quick warning, there are curse words that are un-beeped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org.

Speaker 2 Casey's autistic. She says it's puzzling, neurotypical people, and how much they lie.
She's not alone.

Speaker 3 Yeah,

Speaker 4 in our support groups, that issue comes up a lot. For some people, it's very puzzling and they just don't understand the concept.

Speaker 4 And especially because so often lies are just completely transparent.

Speaker 2 She gave me this example. When she worked in HR, they caught this guy who was having an inappropriate relationship with his administrative assistant.
A naked picture of her was on his work computer.

Speaker 2 And still, he denied it, kept lying.

Speaker 4 It's just baffling to me. It's just...

Speaker 4 It's inexplicable. I don't understand the continuing in the lie.

Speaker 4 And I don't understand why they haven't learned at an earlier point that it's not productive, that this is not an effective tool for you.

Speaker 2 Looking around on Reddit, we found a lot of Autistic People writing about this exact thing.

Speaker 2 Here's somebody who posted saying, I recently realized that a lot of things I had always categorized as lies are not seen that way by NT people, neurotypical people.

Speaker 2 Like they say it, knowing it isn't literally true, but they don't think of it as a lie because they don't expect others to believe it.

Speaker 2 For example, here's some things that I always thought were weird, inexplicable lies. And then there's a list.
It was great to see you. Let's do this again soon.
I hope you have a great holiday.

Speaker 2 You are so funny. I love your hairdo.
Where did you buy that dress? I need to get one too. Oh, wow, that's very interesting.

Speaker 1 See you later.

Speaker 2 They continue. I've decided to start translating a lot of NT chatter from its literal meaning into a simple form of, hello.
I want you to see me as friendly, so I am making friendly noises.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 2 Do you relate?

Speaker 5 I do.

Speaker 4 You know, the

Speaker 4 white lies and the polite fictions and the pleasantries that go along with small talk, a lot of Autistic Pre-Express, you know, you do perceive that as lying.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 4 For me, I recognize that it's a cultural structure

Speaker 2 rather than an intent to deceive. And does that make it any better?

Speaker 4 Absolutely.

Speaker 2 She remembers when she realized just how widespread lying is for neurotypical people. She was a teenager, and she says she was heavyset from a heavyset family.

Speaker 4 That's pretty normal to me. You know, I'm not

Speaker 4 offended by or afraid of the word fat.

Speaker 4 But a lot of the people that were my friends were very afraid of that word. And so they would say to me, oh, you're not fat.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 for me,

Speaker 4 that was just baffling. Like,

Speaker 4 I understood that they were

Speaker 4 trying to be kind,

Speaker 4 but I couldn't fathom how they thought that would actually be believed or helpful. I mean, it's a demonstrable fact.

Speaker 2 I have a mirror. I know what I look like.

Speaker 4 It started to make me clue in to this idea of white lies and polite fiction. And then, you know, with the teenage politics, you start to see people who, oh, I'm so happy to see you.
Awesome.

Speaker 4 Let's hang out. And then behind the person's back, oh my God, I can't stand her.
She is just the worst.

Speaker 4 So I started to catch on that this was

Speaker 4 not just widespread, but that this was considered appropriate behavior.

Speaker 2 Now, of course, she's used to it.

Speaker 2 When I talked to her, she was just about to go to a conference where she knew people who barely remember her, who'd be saying, so great to see you, and not mean a word of it. And she's okay with that.

Speaker 2 She ignores it, moves on.

Speaker 2 But she tries to keep things more strictly truthful.

Speaker 2 So you never lie?

Speaker 4 I won't say never.

Speaker 4 I think of myself as sort of practicing radical honesty with tact.

Speaker 4 So I do my best

Speaker 4 to tell the truth in all circumstances.

Speaker 2 I have to say, if that's your philosophy, I find it so interesting to think about what are the very few examples where you do let yourself lie, where you feel like that's the right thing to do.

Speaker 2 What are those?

Speaker 4 So, from a

Speaker 4 moral and scriptural basis,

Speaker 4 one is justified to lie to protect others from individuals who mean to do them harm. So for example,

Speaker 4 there was someone in my life who was in a domestic violence situation and I helped her to get to a safe place. And when her husband called, I said, I have no idea where she is.

Speaker 4 It's quite simply a lie, but it is a lie that is fully justified because it is information to which he is not entitled for

Speaker 4 the protection of life and limb

Speaker 4 of myself or another person.

Speaker 2 That is obviously a very hard example to argue against. She told me another one where her dog pooped all over her car and she was late to a meeting.

Speaker 2 And when she got there, she did not tell the truth about why. She didn't want to gross anybody out.
Also, none of their business. Otherwise, she almost always picks honesty.

Speaker 2 When kids picked on her nieces about their weight, they came to her crying and asked, Am I fat?

Speaker 2 And she says it was really hard not to say the kinds of lies that people said to her when she was their age.

Speaker 2 But she didn't. She said, Let's talk about your body and being fat.
Is there something wrong with being fat?

Speaker 2 Honesty, she says, is the only way to vulnerability and intimacy, which, you know, of course.

Speaker 2 I was very curious how she does not lie at work.

Speaker 2 I definitely do most of my lying on the job. Not here on the air, of course, where everything I say is deeply, thoroughly fact-checked, but just around the office, just white lies.

Speaker 2 I don't understand how you get by without a little pretending now and then in a workplace. I don't actually understand how you would get things done.

Speaker 2 Casey has none of that.

Speaker 2 Okay, let me ask you about a lie that I tell all the time at work. Okay.

Speaker 2 At the end of pretty much any interview I ever do, I thank the person and I tell them how great they were,

Speaker 2 even if they were not great, even if they were not good talkers, even if they were not able to describe the thing that we'd hoped that they would describe.

Speaker 2 That is what I say, because it seems to me to be such a vulnerable thing to ask people to like

Speaker 2 come and talk in an interview and they don't know how it's it's going to go and it's just kind of a nerve-wracking thing that it seems just kind to say you did a good job

Speaker 4 I think that most of the time if the person you're speaking to didn't do well that they're going to know it and so the polite fiction is not going to reassure them so What is the honest thing you could say in that situation?

Speaker 4 The honest thing is, you know, coming to do this, to have these conversations and be open and vulnerable is a big thing. And I really appreciate that you did it and that you made the effort.

Speaker 4 Thank you for that. That's honest.

Speaker 2 I have to say that is, that is really, that's really,

Speaker 2 that's really good.

Speaker 2 Thank you.

Speaker 4 It's honest and it acknowledges them.

Speaker 2 I wasn't, I wasn't expecting you to really like say something so actually useful.

Speaker 2 I'll do you the favor of being honest about that.

Speaker 6 I appreciate it.

Speaker 2 One of the reasons why I wanted to talk to you today is that we're doing a whole episode of our show about inexplicable lies. Lies that just you just think, like, why lie about that?

Speaker 2 In your experience, what percentage of lies are unnecessary lies?

Speaker 4 Can I say 100%?

Speaker 4 I really don't think,

Speaker 4 except in extreme circumstances, that Anne-Frank is hidden in my attic situation,

Speaker 4 I don't think that lying is necessary.

Speaker 4 I think if we have honest, tactful interaction, we're always going to be the better for it.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 2 All right.

Speaker 2 Thank you so much for doing this.

Speaker 4 It's my pleasure.

Speaker 2 I know that it's a vulnerable thing coming in and speaking honestly. And

Speaker 2 I really appreciate you doing that. No, I can genuinely say that

Speaker 2 you were great. You were very straightforward and you spoke in a real way about what you really think, which is what we want.

Speaker 4 Thank you.

Speaker 7 I hope it will be useful.

Speaker 2 What a day on our program. Lies that really just leave you scratching your head sometimes.
Seriously, we have some fun stories for you. From WBEC Chicago, this is American Life.
I'm Ira Glass.

Speaker 2 Stay with us.

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Speaker 2 It's this American Life, Act 1, The Real L-Word.

Speaker 2 Okay, so to kick things off today, we're going to revisit some recent historical events. I think that's all I'm going to say for now.
Dana Chibis, tell us what happened.

Speaker 8 Liz Flock was just starting out as a reporter in 2011, living in DC, working at the Washington Post.

Speaker 8 This was the golden age of blogging and social media. Instagram was just a year old, basically a toddler.
Twitter was five.

Speaker 8 And news outlets realized they could use these blossoming tools of the internet to do a hybrid version of reporting. They called it the breaking news blog.

Speaker 8 Liz was a reporter at the Washington Post's Breaking News blog.

Speaker 10 Called blog post.

Speaker 2 Very original. Very original.

Speaker 10 And

Speaker 10 what was happening at that time was the Arab Spring. So I was writing about protests in countries all over the Middle East

Speaker 10 every day for months on end.

Speaker 8 The job was a combination of actual reporting and aggregation, basically reading other reporters' stories and various social media accounts and repackaging it all.

Speaker 8 I was doing a similar job around this time at AOL News. Our blog was called Surge Desk because we were supposed to create a surge of traffic for the website.

Speaker 8 Only I worked at AOL News, not the Washington Post. So I was reporting on Groundhog Day in Staten Island and writing posts about how solar flares are kind of like the sun is farting.

Speaker 8 Liz was writing about the Arab Spring.

Speaker 10 And I was writing about all these really complicated topics and I was really scared every day writing about them.

Speaker 8 Scared of what?

Speaker 10 Just that the

Speaker 10 responsibility that I had, the tremendous responsibility to write accurately and quickly about all of these really important subjects.

Speaker 8 Yeah.

Speaker 8 And it's just you and one editor, is that right?

Speaker 10 Yeah, it was me and my editor, Melissa. And we were kind of, we were actually the number one traffic driver for the Washington Post for really, for a while.

Speaker 10 So we would get about 3 million page views a month, and we were encouraged to keep that up. So we posted as much as we could.

Speaker 8 To keep up with all this from her desk in D.C., she followed a bunch of social media accounts and blogs.

Speaker 8 The Arab Spring, you might remember, was one of the first big social movements to use these online tools to organize. Rightly or wrongly, it was called the Facebook Revolution.

Speaker 8 One of the blogs blogs Liz followed was written by a 35-year-old Syrian-American woman named Amina Araf, who had recently moved back to Damascus from the U.S.

Speaker 8 Her blog was called A Gay Girl in Damascus.

Speaker 10 She writes about her complex identity of being an out-lesbian in conservative Syria, having grown up in the U.S.

Speaker 10 And on the blog, she writes poetry, she writes history, she writes what are basically like foreign policy op-eds.

Speaker 8 She's openly critical of the Bashar al-Assad regime at a time when the regime was arresting, torturing, and murdering critics and activists.

Speaker 8 In one post titled Irony, there's a photo she's taken of a billboard. On it, Assad's smiling face and the head scratcher of a tagline, Syria believes in you.

Speaker 8 Below the photo, Amina writes, sure,

Speaker 8 in all caps and multiple exclamation points. She's provocative.

Speaker 10 She sometimes writes...

Speaker 10 more sexy poetry, I would say. I forgot about this, but I went back to it and there was was one piece called Testimony of Jasmine.

Speaker 10 And she writes, my sex to your sex, grinding in time with sounds of the city stretched out below. And it goes on and on.

Speaker 8 Legally, I can't let her read you the rest of this poem. FCC Rules.

Speaker 8 So, a young, pretty, Syrian-American lesbian taunting the brutal Assad regime. It's not much surprised when the secret police show up at her house one day.

Speaker 8 On April 26th, Amina publishes a post titled, My Father the Hero. She describes a harrowing scene.

Speaker 8 It was the middle of the night, and these two young, muscly guys in leather jackets rang the doorbell of her family's home. They've come for Amina.
They know about her blog, know that she's a lesbian.

Speaker 8 They threaten to rape her.

Speaker 8 But Amina's father argues with them, chides them. He knows them, knows their families.
He says to them, quote, Do you know what is our family name? You do?

Speaker 8 Then you know where we stood when Muhammad, peace be upon him, went to Medina. You know who it was who liberated Al-Quds.

Speaker 8 You know too, maybe, that my father fought to save this country from the foreigners. He tells them to leave, and they do.

Speaker 8 Amina's post goes viral. Back in D.C., Liz decides to write about it.

Speaker 10 So the second I read her post, my father, my hero, I immediately reach out to her for an interview.

Speaker 10 I mean, we were interviewing lots of activists, but she is like the dream interview because she's so interesting.

Speaker 8 Amina emails her back, and the next day, Liz publishes a post. Syria blogger says she faced arrest but remains defiant.

Speaker 8 In the article, Amina tells Liz, quote, if we want to live in a free country, we need to start acting as though we live in a free country.

Speaker 8 Six weeks later, Liz goes into the office.

Speaker 10 I

Speaker 10 I'm checking the blogs and social media and

Speaker 10 I see that on Gay Girl in in Damascus there's a post not by Amina and it says dear friends of Amina I'm Amina's cousin and I have the following information to share earlier today at approximately 6 p.m.

Speaker 10 Damascus time Amina was walking the area of this bus station the post says amina was abducted by three government agents then they hustled her into a red dossier with a window sticker of bashar al-assad

Speaker 10 The men are presumed to be members of the security services. Amina's present location is unknown.

Speaker 8 Liz was shocked and upset by this news.

Speaker 10 This was happening a lot at this point, that activists were getting kind of hauled off the streets, but this was a person that I felt intimately connected to.

Speaker 10 Like, I knew her whole story at this point. Like, I'd read her whole blog.
Yeah. And so

Speaker 10 it was really scary. And obviously, as a gay woman and a woman speaking out against the regime, like, you're thinking that this person's dead.

Speaker 8 Homosexuality was and still is illegal in Syria. Liz writes a post about Amina's disappearance.
So does the Washington Post's Syria correspondent and the New York Times and The Guardian and others.

Speaker 8 Liz calls the State Department. They tell her they're looking into it.
A Twitter campaign gets going, hashtag freeamina, and multiple Facebook groups, which get over 10,000 followers overnight.

Speaker 8 It's a big deal. And then.

Speaker 2 Oh,

Speaker 10 so all of a sudden, doubts start popping up about Amina.

Speaker 10 It really all started very quickly. Like on the same day that she wrote that she was kidnapped or detained by security forces or that the cousin writes that.

Speaker 10 Andy Carvin, who's NPR's Twitter senior strategist and had this huge following, basically asks, has anyone met Amina?

Speaker 8 Has anyone actually met Amina in person? not just on the internet?

Speaker 10 It's a good question.

Speaker 8 In fact, when Liz emailed Amina asking for an interview, Amina had responded that for her own safety, she couldn't talk on the phone. So Liz had sent her questions by email.

Speaker 8 Do you remember the oh fuck moment that you had when you realized people were doubting her

Speaker 8 identity?

Speaker 10 Yes, I remember Andy asking that question on Twitter. And I remember thinking, wow, if this person isn't real, I have interviewed them saying that she is and given them a platform and

Speaker 10 caused this blog to probably increase in popularity. And

Speaker 10 yeah, that's a really scary moment as a super young journalist.

Speaker 10 I don't know if you remember this New Yorker cartoon from 1993 where it says on the internet, no one knows you're a dog, and it has this dog at the computer.

Speaker 10 So obviously people were thinking about this all the way back to the 90s, but I know I wasn't. Like I, it's not that I was trusting everything I read online, but I

Speaker 10 think I just didn't expect this gay Syrian woman activist who was blogging like a lot of other Syrian activists. They were all totally legitimate to be

Speaker 10 someone so different. And

Speaker 10 yeah, I mean, as the story progressed, it got creepier and creepier.

Speaker 8 The Wall Street Journal reported that the photo of Amina on a gay girl in Damascus was actually a photo of a woman named Jelena Lechic, who is of Croatian descent and was living in London at the time.

Speaker 8 So Liz and her editor, Melissa Bell, start trying to figure out who Amina actually is. They look up the IP address of the gay girl blog.
It leads back to Scotland.

Speaker 8 to the University of Edinburgh, and they get a mailing address for Amina from one of her online friends.

Speaker 8 It's a house in Georgia, the state, not the country, owned by an American couple who are studying in Scotland. They narrow in on the wife, a woman named Britta.

Speaker 10 Britta was studying Syrian economic development. She had written about Syria for a Quaker group that she was the head of.
And she had even posted photos of her visiting Syria with her husband.

Speaker 10 And she had posted this photo on the photo website Picasa showing a billboard of a smiling Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad with the slogan Syria believes in you.

Speaker 8 Syria believes in you. It's the same photo from Amina's blog post titled Irony.

Speaker 10 I mean it's not a photo that exists like thousands of times on the internet. It is only in these two places.
And we're like, oh my God, this is the exact same photo.

Speaker 8 That's a smoking gun. Like you never get that clear of an answer.

Speaker 10 Totally. Totally.

Speaker 8 So they got to call Britta, but they can't find Britta's phone number. But they do find Britta's mom's phone number.

Speaker 2 They call her up.

Speaker 10 We explained the whole situation to her. I remember thinking, this is so bizarre.

Speaker 10 Like, I'm sorry, but I think that your daughter is this person posting on this blog, pretending to be a lesbian woman in Syria. And to her credit, she was not like, please leave me alone.

Speaker 10 She basically said, wow, this is so interesting. And I don't think it's Britta.
I think it's Tom.

Speaker 8 Tom, Britta's husband, Tom McMaster.

Speaker 10 And she was like, he's so involved emotionally with Syria. He, you know, his interest has evolved from there.
And she even said, Britta complains about him spending his whole day on the computer.

Speaker 2 Aha.

Speaker 8 One of those husbands.

Speaker 2 What they learn about Tom.

Speaker 8 He's 40 years old, a Middle East fanatic, obsessed with the Israeli-Palestine conflict. He's getting his master's degree at the University of Edinburgh.
There's more.

Speaker 10 We find that Tom's cat is named Miaumar J. Qaddafi, which is basically the Libyan leader, Womar Qaddafi's name.

Speaker 10 It's just getting like ridiculous at this point, to be honest.

Speaker 10 And then we find one more thing.

Speaker 10 And that is we find that Amina gave a five-star review to Tom's ESL school that he has in Atlanta. I know.

Speaker 2 I know.

Speaker 10 And this is when it starts to just feel like, oh my God, this guy is absurd.

Speaker 10 So as Amina A, Amina writes, great school, great teachers. This is probably the best value for anyone who wants to learn English in Atlanta.

Speaker 10 Ah, God.

Speaker 8 Okay, one last important detail about Tom's extracurricular activities.

Speaker 10 So, Amina is super active online, and part of that is flirting with women.

Speaker 8 She's not just writing lesbian erotica. She's on dating sites.
She's had an online girlfriend in Canada for the last six months. The girlfriend started one of the Facebook campaigns to free Amina.

Speaker 10 And Amina, she's also flirting and writing on the blog of this person, Paula Brooks, who has a very popular website about being lesbian called Les Get Real.

Speaker 8 Nice.

Speaker 8 Lesgetreal.com, for those of you who don't remember the sapphic offerings of the internet in the year 2011, was a website where a variety of writers blogged about lesbianism and the lesbian news of the day.

Speaker 8 Amina had written a bunch on LesGetreal.com, and the founder, Paula Brooks, had encouraged her to start a gay girl in Damascus that winter. And Paula told Liz, they'd had a little online fling.

Speaker 10 Paula and Amina spoke all the time online and even were engaging in

Speaker 10 like a relationship that it wasn't clear

Speaker 10 how flirty it was slash sexual it was. I think it seems like it was definitely romantic slash sexual.

Speaker 8 And this is over email or they're like.

Speaker 10 This is all online, like email

Speaker 10 and blog posts, and you know, corresponding about the blog posts.

Speaker 8 Liz explained to Paula what was going on with Amina.

Speaker 10 Paula was outraged that this person was pretending to be a lesbian. Yeah.
This man was pretending to be a lesbian.

Speaker 8 Lesgetreal.com posted an apology to readers for publishing 19 articles Amina had supposedly written.

Speaker 8 Time to confront Tom. Liz reaches him on the phone.
He's on vacation with his wife in Istanbul.

Speaker 10 And I remember they're laughing a lot. Like,

Speaker 10 they basically, they laugh off the idea that either of one of them could be Amina.

Speaker 10 And Tom is kind of like sarcastically laughing at me.

Speaker 10 And he's saying, he says something like, look, if I'm the genius who pulled this off, like, I would just say, yes, it's me. And I would write a book.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 a genius.

Speaker 10 Genius.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 10 And then I went through all the connections we had, which at this point were like 15 different connections.

Speaker 10 And I think we called him a second day in the row. And then he started to get aggressive with us.

Speaker 10 And he said, like, thanks a lot for tracking us down and hung up on me.

Speaker 8 Other reporters had figured it out too.

Speaker 8 Liz and Melissa decide to run with the story that a gay girl in Damascus was actually Tom, a white dude living in Scotland. But before they can publish, Tom beats them to it.

Speaker 8 He confesses in a post on A Gay Girl.

Speaker 10 And the title of the blog is changed from A Gay Girl in Damascus to,

Speaker 10 let me find it, a hoax that got way out of hand. I never meant to hurt anyone.

Speaker 2 Hmm.

Speaker 8 It's less picky than a gay girl in Damascus.

Speaker 10 Yeah. Well, actually, he retitles it A Hoax.
Oh, okay.

Speaker 10 And then there's that subtitle. So.

Speaker 8 Tom writes the quintessential non-apology apology.

Speaker 8 Says that while the narrative voice might have been fictional, he was describing a very real situation on the ground in Damascus, and he doesn't think he harmed anyone.

Speaker 8 Maybe you saw the whole thing coming, internet scams being what they are these days. Maybe you're thinking, hey, this whole story is a scam.
I can't believe I paid no dollars for this.

Speaker 8 But calm down a second. There's more.

Speaker 8 Liz and her editor, Melissa, published their story on Sunday, six days after Amina was supposedly abducted. Their headline is, A Gay Girl in Damascus Comes Clean.

Speaker 8 After they post their article, Liz and Melissa are talking with a more senior editor. Everyone's pretty happy with the story.

Speaker 8 But there's something still nagging at Liz, a detail she can't get out of her head. It has to do with that other lesbian she interviewed, Paula Brooks, from Lesgetreal.com.

Speaker 10 She says to her editors, So I interviewed Paula, but I actually didn't interview Paula because she's deaf. And I talked to her father because she's deaf, and he said she can't speak on the phone.

Speaker 10 And her father, like, weirdly knew a lot about the story. And basically, now I'm doubting that everyone is real.

Speaker 2 Do you guys think that Paula Brooks is also not real?

Speaker 8 Liz had emailed with Paula Brooks. Paula had sent Liz a photo of her driver's license as proof of identity.
But Liz had only ever spoken with Paula's dad.

Speaker 10 It's the exact same thing as with Amina. Like, I can't talk on the phone, so I'll have to do it in this alternate way.
And, but in this case, I'm deaf.

Speaker 10 And, you know, I didn't want to doubt Paula being deaf, but the dad was so weird. Right.

Speaker 10 And now I'm basically like, is every single person on the internet actually just a white dude pretending to be someone else?

Speaker 8 So instead of celebrating a great scoop, outing Tom as Amina, Liz dove straight into investigating Paula Brooks.

Speaker 10 So I call back the dad and I basically say, I know you're Paula Brooks.

Speaker 8 Oh, wow. You just went straight for it.

Speaker 10 I think we just went straight for it. Maybe we said, are you Paula Brooks? And he basically just said, yes.

Speaker 2 My name is Bill Graeber.

Speaker 10 Yep.

Speaker 10 He said, I'm Bill Graeber.

Speaker 10 Then I said, like, who are you, Bill Graeber? And it turned out he was like a retired construction worker who lived in Ohio.

Speaker 8 Bill told Liz he'd had some lesbian friends who were mistreated and he wanted to help. He also wanted a platform where he could write in support of repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell.

Speaker 8 The real Paula Brooks, Bill explained, was his partner who didn't know he'd been using her identity online to pose as a lesbian.

Speaker 10 Basically, Bill said that by running Les Get Real, he was surfacing issues for the lesbian community and helping in that way.

Speaker 8 And having a flirtation with Amina.

Speaker 10 Yes. I mean, I would have loved to get those chats between Amina and Paula, aka Tom and Bill, two white men flirting with themselves, each thinking the other one is a lesbian.

Speaker 10 But I never got those chats.

Speaker 10 So we'll have to let our imaginations run wild on that one. But he,

Speaker 2 yeah.

Speaker 10 And Bill, you know what's funny? I still remember this. I was like, Bill, how does it feel to know that you were flirting with another dude thinking it was a lesbian?

Speaker 10 And he was definitely like put off by that. And he

Speaker 10 said this thing to to me. He was just like, It was a major sock puppet hoax.
Crash into another major sock puppet hoax.

Speaker 8 For the uninitiated, a sock puppet hoax is when someone uses a false identity online.

Speaker 8 The day after they published their story about Tom being a Mina, Liz and Melissa published another one with the headline, Paula Brooks, editor of Les Get Real, also a man.

Speaker 2 I mean,

Speaker 2 to the point.

Speaker 10 It's really at this point, you can tell by how plugged in everyone is because we don't even need to explain more than that because everyone knows what's going on and is like glued to their computers.

Speaker 10 I mean,

Speaker 10 some people and Syrian activists in particular were like really upset by the whole situation, especially about Gay Girl in Damascus because it was taking like needed, it was like boy who cried wolf situation, which is like, who's going to trust Syrian activists posting about this after this situation?

Speaker 8 By the time Tom's little lie had rolled all the way downhill, it was a pretty sizable lie with with real-world consequences.

Speaker 8 The Syrian government used it to suggest that everyone in the West was lying about the Assad regime's murderous tactics against activists and bloggers.

Speaker 8 They used it to suggest that gay people in Syria were really just agents of the West.

Speaker 8 In retrospect, Amina's writing, It's so bad. Like when her father supposedly says to the secret police, you know know where we stood when Muhammad, peace be upon him, went to Medina.

Speaker 8 It's like the 1950s Hollywood version of how a Syrian man would talk.

Speaker 8 But what was good about Amina's writing, Tom's writing, is that it played for emotion. It confirmed what we were all feeling here in the West, what excited us about the Arab Spring.

Speaker 8 Democracy was ascendant, the bad guys were going down, the lesbians were taking over, or whatever.

Speaker 8 Amina was the lie we all wanted.

Speaker 8 I reached out to Tom, Bill, and Britta for this story. Tom and Bill definitely did not want to talk to me.
Britta didn't respond. But the day after he was outed, Tom did some press.

Speaker 8 He said he had wanted to wind Amina down for a while, and he was going on vacation. So having her abducted was kind of his out-of-office message.

Speaker 8 Yeah, man, the internet, huh?

Speaker 3 The internet.

Speaker 2 I mean, it's... Oh, God, I know.

Speaker 10 And it was like so fun for just a short period of time where everyone was just like, is this thing on?

Speaker 2 Can I tell you about what I ate?

Speaker 8 A lot's changed since then. The Washington Post, where Liz worked, is now owned by Jeff Bezos.
Twitter is owned by Elon Musk. Instagram is owned by Facebook.
Facebook has done away with fact-checking.

Speaker 8 And the president has his own social media platform. called Truth Social, where he regularly posts falsehoods and conspiracy theories.

Speaker 8 Kind of makes you long for the good old days, when the internet wasn't dominated by the most powerful and people still cared what was true and what wasn't. The truth, so retro.

Speaker 8 It's a whole new world now.

Speaker 8 Except over here on the dusty old radio, where I still can't say shit or piss or fuck or cunt or cocksucker or motherfucker or tits. Not even tits.

Speaker 8 Because, of course, think of the chaos that would ensue if I did.

Speaker 2 Dan Chives is a reporter on our program. Liz Flock is still a reporter, but now she spent years reporting her stories.

Speaker 2 Her latest book, The Furies, which she traveled to Syria multiple times for, is out in paperback.

Speaker 2 Coming up, An American Dad makes an impassioned argument for more unnecessary lies. Also, Masha Gessen.
That's in a minute from Chicago Bubba Radio when our program continues.

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Speaker 2 This American Life, Myra Glass. Today's show, that's a weird thing to lie about.
We have stories today of unnecessary lies, outrageous lies that make you wonder why lie about that in the first place.

Speaker 2 We've arrived at Act Two of our program, Act II, Bully Pulpit.

Speaker 2 There's a particular kind of lie that somebody who's been on our show a few times, Masha Gesson, wrote about a few years ago.

Speaker 2 And when I read what they wrote, I realized, like, oh, I had not thought about this. as a specific way that a person can lie that is like different from all the other ways a person can lie.

Speaker 2 It's a kind of lie that President Trump does a lot. He kicked off his presidency with one of these lies.

Speaker 2 In the very first minutes, on the very first day of his very first term, you may remember that he insisted that the crowds at his inauguration were bigger than they were.

Speaker 2 Even the photos clearly showed that he was wrong.

Speaker 9 But he also lied about the weather because it was rainy and, you know, the cameras panned to all these former presidents.

Speaker 9 And Trump claimed that when he started to speak, the sun came out and the clouds parted, you know, as though

Speaker 9 God herself were on his side.

Speaker 9 And it was an easily checkable story. It was definitely not true.

Speaker 2 In fact, for anybody who had watched the inauguration, which was a lot of us, like it was just right there. We had just seen it.

Speaker 9 And then he emerges from this and says, you know, that that's something entirely different than we saw with our lying eyes.

Speaker 2 Let me ask you to read. You write about this very enjoyably.
Let me ask you to read this passage. I'm going to hand you a copy.
Let's start here and continue up here.

Speaker 2 We'll skip this a little bit and then we'll keep going. Okay.

Speaker 9 Lies can serve a number of functions.

Speaker 9 People lie to deflect, to avoid embarrassment or evade punishment by creating doubt, to escape confrontation or lighten the blow, to make themselves appear better, to get others to do or give something, and even to entertain.

Speaker 9 However unskilled a person may be at lying, they usually hope that the lie will be convincing. Executives want shareholders to think that they have devised a foolproof path to profits.

Speaker 9 Defendants want juries to believe that there is a chance that someone else committed the crime. People in relationships want their partners to think that they have never even considered cheating.

Speaker 9 Guests want the host to think that they like their fish overcooked.

Speaker 9 These lies can be annoying or amusing, but they're surmountable. They collapse in the face of facts.

Speaker 9 The Trumpian lie is different.

Speaker 9 It is the power lie, or the bully lie. It is the lie of the bigger kid who took your hat and is wearing it while denying that he took it.

Speaker 9 There's no defense against this lie because the point of the lie is to assert power, to show I can say what I want when I want to.

Speaker 9 The power lie conjures a different reality that demands that you choose between your experience and the bully's demands.

Speaker 9 Are you going to insist that you're wet from the rain, or give in and say that the sun is shining?

Speaker 2 I have to say, since reading that passage in your book a few weeks ago, I feel like it's like you gave a name to something that I had known was there, but hadn't put a finger on what it was.

Speaker 2 Like I hadn't named to myself, oh, this is a particular phenomenon, a particular way of lying that Donald Trump does.

Speaker 2 And since I read that, I feel like I see this kind of power lie or bully lie from Trump and from his team come up in the news over and over. So for example, Ukraine started the war with Russia.

Speaker 2 USAID sent $50 million worth of condoms to Hamas. China controls the Panama Canal.

Speaker 2 Yeah, these are bully lies.

Speaker 9 And I'm seeing more and more of the sort of impossibility of standing up to it. Because there are now a lot of these people, right? It's not just Trump.

Speaker 9 In the first administration, it was Trump and his lies and a bunch of psychophants.

Speaker 9 Now they're kind of all,

Speaker 9 particularly Trump and Musk,

Speaker 9 are just kind of running.

Speaker 9 One is constantly getting ahead of the other.

Speaker 9 You know, federal employees have fortunes in the tens of millions with a salary of $180,000.

Speaker 2 That's something that Elon Musk claimed, without presenting any evidence at all, in an Oval Office press event, where he also suggested that Social Security may be sending out checks to people 150 years old.

Speaker 2 Also without evidence. Seems to be flatly untrue.

Speaker 2 Masha says, these kind of lies these bully lies are different from the kind of lies that we've been used to in american politics for most of our history where the two sides you know argue back and forth present evidence try to convince each other or try to convince voters at least

Speaker 2 the bully lie is different it doesn't try to convince you it doesn't present evidence it just tells you to pick a side

Speaker 2 so when the president said that diversity programs caused the plane crash over the potomac when he called the president of ukraine a dictator without elections.

Speaker 2 He didn't lay out a set of facts to make his case. He wasn't interested in rebuttal.

Speaker 2 When he does this kind of thing, Masha writes, he's asserting control over reality itself and splitting the country into those who agree to live in his reality and those who resist and become his enemies by insisting on facts.

Speaker 2 I don't know if it's worth complicating this analysis with this example, but I was actually able to think of one instance of the Democrats doing the kind of bully lie that Masha writes about, and it's a big one that we all just lived through.

Speaker 2 That seemed like it was done more out of desperation than anything else, and not part of a daily pattern of making false claims with no facts behind them.

Speaker 2 The thing I'm talking about is Joe Biden and his advisors concealing how he had aged in office. I talked to Masha about this.

Speaker 2 Like, that basically was making everybody in the country choose: either you accept what we're telling you about Biden or you're against us.

Speaker 9 Oh, absolutely. I mean, I wrote a piece about it at the time saying that

Speaker 9 it was totally Trumpian behavior.

Speaker 9 I did not win any friends with that piece, but that's what it felt like because we could see it. We could see the debate.

Speaker 9 And then there were all these people around Biden who were saying, don't believe your lying eyes. He is in control.
He is running the country.

Speaker 9 It had that feel.

Speaker 2 of the bully lie.

Speaker 2 The reason Masha is so aware of what that feels like is that they grew up in Russia, left, came back, then fled when it became impossible for them to keep living there under Vladimir Putin.

Speaker 2 Masha says the bully lie is significant because it's not a traditional part of American politics, but it is a very standard tactic of authoritarian leaders around the world and in history.

Speaker 2 Masha has actually written and reported a ton about this. They wrote a book about Putin and another one about Russia's recent turn to totalitarianism.

Speaker 2 An authoritarian government, just to remind you, is basically a government run by one person, a strongman leader who holds all the power, which of course is different from our system of checks and balances.

Speaker 2 Masha wrote about the bully lie in their book about Donald Trump's first term. The book is called Surviving Autocracy.
That's what I asked him to read from a little earlier.

Speaker 2 In that book, Masha argues that Donald Trump does lots of things that we normally see from authoritarian leaders. Not just the bully lies.

Speaker 2 And I think it's worth talking about it for a little bit here. I found it eye-opening to see it laid out point by point.

Speaker 2 And I just want to say, if you like the president and you think talking about him this way is just way, way out of line, just stay with me. We talked about that.

Speaker 2 I feel very aware that people who like the president may hear you say the word autocrat and just think it's nuts. And you're just looking for any alarmist thing you can say to make him look bad.

Speaker 2 Can I ask you to make your case for a skeptical listener, what are the things that Donald Trump does that usually we see from autocrats and not from kind of just like regular American politicians who might lie and do whatever it is that they do?

Speaker 2 Like, what are the things that he's doing that are more typical for autocrats?

Speaker 9 Aaron Powell, Jr.: Well, at this point, there's every indication, and by every indication, I mean all the things that he constantly says,

Speaker 9 that he actually thinks that that's how government should work. It should be one person making decisions.

Speaker 2 Aaron Powell, right. You're making me think of him deciding to weigh in and ban congestion pricing in in New York City from the White House.
Exactly. And saying, I'm the king, long live the king.

Speaker 2 Right, yeah.

Speaker 9 Or

Speaker 9 calling out the governor of Maine for,

Speaker 9 I guess, in his opinion, not following his executive order on

Speaker 9 disallowing transgender athletes in sports, with the governor responding that the state of Maine has its own laws and him basically saying, I can't remember the exact quote, but basically saying I'm in charge here and we'll see who wins.

Speaker 2 That is actually almost the definition of an autocrat, acting like you have ultimate and unchecked power.

Speaker 2 And there are other specific things, Masha says, that Donald Trump has done in the last few weeks that are standard moves for an autocrat.

Speaker 2 Number one, punishing press outlets who don't do what he says.

Speaker 2 Trump kicked the Associated Press from covering him in the Oval Office on Air Force One and at major events after they refused to call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, like he wants.

Speaker 2 Autocrats go after their enemies. Donald Trump has been going after so many enemies, publicly.
Former aides, he fired Justice Department officials who prosecuted cases against him.

Speaker 2 And this week, even went after the law firm that is giving advice to one of those officials, taking away their security clearances, which make defending that official harder.

Speaker 2 That is very autocratic leader.

Speaker 2 And then there's Donald Trump's basic campaign message. Make America great again.

Speaker 9 A better future than basically the past is a common trait to

Speaker 9 all modern autocrats. I mean, in the 20th century, we also had some futuristic autocrats.

Speaker 9 The Soviet totalitarianism was probably the most vivid example.

Speaker 9 But all the autocrats have come to power in the world, like in the last 15 or so years on this wave of resurgent autocracies, they're all past-oriented.

Speaker 2 They're saying like, we had a glorious past and we've got to go back to it.

Speaker 9 Aaron Trevor Bowie, yeah, it's make whatever country great again.

Speaker 9 And it's always an imaginary past.

Speaker 9 When you felt comfortable, when you didn't have these anxieties, when your children were just like you, when men were men and women were women, and everyone spoke the same language as you do.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 What do you make of all the things that Trump has been saying lately about taking over Greenland and the Panama Canal and Gaza?

Speaker 9 I think a few things are happening there, and I think they're pretty scary.

Speaker 9 I think the first time he mentioned Greenland which was during his first term, it was probably

Speaker 9 at a moment's inspiration. He probably meant nothing by it.

Speaker 2 Just like out loud trolling or say a noisy thing, it'll get a headline, and who cares?

Speaker 9 Exactly, which is very much what he does all the time.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 9 One thing about Trump, though,

Speaker 9 is that he's very sensitive to being heard.

Speaker 9 Greenland was heard, and because Greenland was heard, it became a kind of a day fix.

Speaker 9 And so now in his second term, he's bringing up Greenland again. I think it's a whole other story.
It's no longer an absurd, trolling kind of meme thing.

Speaker 9 It's beginning to approach policy.

Speaker 9 And I think that the way that he is also

Speaker 9 throwing around the Panama Canal and the Gulf of America.

Speaker 9 Of course he's doing this because

Speaker 9 totalitarian leaders have to promise expansion.

Speaker 2 That's like

Speaker 2 it's like it's an axiom.

Speaker 2 What are you saying? No, what do you like? They have a rule book that they have to follow? Absolutely.

Speaker 9 I'm actually half serious.

Speaker 2 You are serious. There are certain things that they do.
For example, they pick some group in society to be the like, these are the people who we hate, who are ruining things for the rest of us.

Speaker 2 That's one thing they do. Exactly.
And then another thing is that they call to some sort of golden age that they're going to recreate in the future.

Speaker 2 And then you're saying another one is just we're going to expand.

Speaker 9 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 We're going to take over other lands.

Speaker 9 And what it is, I think, is it's a promise of greatness.

Speaker 9 It's a trade-off. Generally speaking, autocratic regimes don't,

Speaker 9 in the long run, prove economically beneficial.

Speaker 2 To the population.

Speaker 9 And

Speaker 9 right, they're usually economically beneficial to the actual autocrat and his cohort. And

Speaker 2 you

Speaker 9 will not necessarily be personally better off.

Speaker 9 So what is he going to actually give them? What he's going to give them is a sense of belonging to something greater.

Speaker 2 Aaron Powell, Jr.: And the something greater is a country that's expanding its borders?

Speaker 9 Yeah, yeah, the greatest country in the world that is expanding its borders.

Speaker 2 Aaron Powell, Jr.: Okay, so obviously nobody knows what's coming next.

Speaker 2 But if you see Trump as a kind of autocratic ruler and you worry about him taking more power in that way, what are the things you'd be looking for next? Like what are the markers of it going further?

Speaker 9 Well, the problem is that we're always looking for that one thing or those three things. And now once we check them off, we're living in an autocracy.

Speaker 9 The problem is it's actually always a gradual process.

Speaker 9 And it's happening much faster here than it's happened in any country that I'm familiar with.

Speaker 2 Really?

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 9 I mean,

Speaker 9 it took Putin

Speaker 9 quite a long time

Speaker 9 to establish

Speaker 9 actual authoritarian rule and then another number of years to turn that regime into a totalitarian one.

Speaker 9 The way that Trump is taking a sledgehammer to government

Speaker 9 is certainly unprecedented in my memory.

Speaker 9 But I think that things that we have to look for,

Speaker 9 you know, some of them

Speaker 9 you can sort of measure like

Speaker 9 when they start consistently ignoring court decisions that are not favorable to them.

Speaker 9 So far they've ignored some, it seems like, but

Speaker 9 it doesn't look like it's consistent. But at some point I would expect them, or let's say I will fear, that they will say

Speaker 9 these court decisions that go against the government are illegitimate.

Speaker 9 So that will be a huge marker. But then there are softer things like

Speaker 9 shifting consensus. And I think it's already happening.
Powell, like that's one way of understanding

Speaker 9 what people have also been calling the obeying in advance that we have seen sort of all over the place.

Speaker 2 The most vivid example of it is by far not the only one, right?

Speaker 9 But it's Mark Zuckerberg's little address when

Speaker 9 he announced that they were not going to have fact-checking on Facebook anymore. He kept saying, you know, things have changed.
This is a new moment.

Speaker 9 We're going to move our operations to Texas because that's the new moment we're living in.

Speaker 9 And

Speaker 9 all of these things are sort of ways of saying, look, I'm fully accepting that Trump has created a new reality and I'm going to take all my things and move into that reality with him and live there with him.

Speaker 9 And anybody who refuses to do that, they're going to be left out in the cold.

Speaker 2 Masha Gesson. Their book about Donald Trump and his autocratic tendencies is called Surviving Autocracy.
These days they're an opinion columnist at the New York Times.

Speaker 2 They recently wrote in the Times, life under autocracy can be terrifying, as it already is in the United States for immigrants and trans people.

Speaker 2 But those of us with experience can tell you, most of the time, for most people, it's not frightening. It is stultifying.
It's boring. It feels like trying to see and breathe underwater.

Speaker 2 because you're submerged in bad ideas, being discussed badly, being reflected in bad journalism, and eventually in bad literature and bad movies.

Speaker 2 Just this week, lawyers nominated for top positions in the Justice Department, including Solicitor General, were asked if the President could ignore or disobey a court order. And they hedged.

Speaker 2 They did not say that he should obey. Vice President Vance said earlier this month that judges should not be allowed to control what the President does.

Speaker 2 Act 3. In Defense of Unnecessary Lies.

Speaker 2 Well, it's been nearly a whole hour talking about far-fetched lies that do not seem to make the world a better place at all. Our tone, I'll admit, has been skeptical, sometimes incredulous.

Speaker 2 In this act, we turn that around. I present one of our coworkers here at the radio show, Ike Srieskondarasha.

Speaker 11 Sometimes, in my own life, just for fun, I'll make up something and tell people. Here's one from years ago.
Remember Karl Rove, the guy who helped get George W.

Speaker 11 Bush elected to be governor and then president?

Speaker 11 I told my friend Charles that this man, well into his 60s, was really only 36.

Speaker 11 He just looked old. I guess I like the world where things aren't quite as they appear.
and the people running the show are more like children in grown-up suits.

Speaker 2 And Charles, he went with it.

Speaker 11 So hard that years later he came back and told me he'd told dozens of people before catching the lie. Which, to be honest, made me feel great and enjoy the lie even more.

Speaker 11 That strangers I never met got to step into this funny little warped reality.

Speaker 11 But sometimes, These lies of amusement don't work out so well.

Speaker 11 Like for instance, when my dad came to visit me years ago and was staying over in my small apartment, he noticed a diploma on my desk, ordaining me as a minister.

Speaker 12 I still remember that very well. It was a certificate,

Speaker 12 some kind of certification.

Speaker 11 My dad.

Speaker 12 My first impression was you had changed your religion from Hinduism to some other unknown cult.

Speaker 11 It would have been easy to correct this misunderstanding and tell my dad the real story that my friends had asked me to officiate their wedding and to legally marry them, I had to get ordained in an online church.

Speaker 11 It just seemed funnier to go along with the story that I was now a minister in a Christian cult.

Speaker 12 It came as a surprise to me for so many generations we have been following this religion. So I

Speaker 12 was a little disappointed, but

Speaker 12 things happened.

Speaker 13 As soon as he came home, he told me.

Speaker 2 My mom.

Speaker 13 I thought it was odd because you would have told me about it if you were doing something like this. So it came as a huge surprise to me too.

Speaker 11 While my dad met my fake conversion story with resigned disappointment and no follow-up questions, my mom just called me.

Speaker 13 So when we spoke the next time, I brought it up and I asked you about it. Then you started laughing.

Speaker 13 Then I knew it was just a joke. Then I had to tell dad.

Speaker 12 I was relieved. I didn't have to think about it anymore.

Speaker 11 Did you think it was a good joke?

Speaker 2 Yes,

Speaker 12 it's an excellent joke.

Speaker 11 Is that a lie?

Speaker 12 It's a white lie.

Speaker 11 Honestly, this all surprised me that my dad couldn't tell I was joking. Mostly because I learned this type of joke from him.

Speaker 12 What did you say?

Speaker 11 I've just been doing your joke. The joke you make all the time where you lie about something.

Speaker 2 I didn't know that.

Speaker 13 He does that a lot, yes.

Speaker 11 My dad tells people he came to America by going through a tunnel under the wall. Other times, it's a boat.

Speaker 11 When I was a kid, he told me the stretch marks on his shoulders were from a fight he had with a tiger. I told everybody.

Speaker 11 But my favorite lie he told happened during a math class my dad used to teach at Madison Area Technical College. My good friend Buskis was taking it and I decided to go with him.

Speaker 11 And before the lesson started, my dad introduced me to the class.

Speaker 12 I do remember that I introduced you as a foreign exchange student from Nicaragua.

Speaker 12 Although you didn't look like a Nicaraguan.

Speaker 11 Why did you say that?

Speaker 12 Because we had students from Central American countries. I wanted to make use of that and came up with this idea.

Speaker 11 Well, I understand why it's plausible, but why did you even tell a lie about where your son was from instead of saying, my son is here?

Speaker 12 I just wanted to play a practical joke with my students. It is also for...
Buskas, who knows the real story and who started laughing.

Speaker 11 My dad and my friend Buskis started laughing so hard they were wiping tears from their eyes.

Speaker 11 The rest of the class seemed confused why their teacher was misidentifying a new South Asian student as being from Central America.

Speaker 11 It was very funny, especially for those of us who have to field a lot of those, where are you from originally types of questions.

Speaker 11 Anyone carefully observing my dad might notice he has a tell,

Speaker 11 quick eyebrow raise, and a big grin.

Speaker 11 I have the same tell,

Speaker 11 and people close to me know it, but apparently, that doesn't make it any less frustrating to live with.

Speaker 11 Early in our relationship, my now-wife Emma told me it was driving her crazy. She didn't want to look over her shoulder to check for my tell or second-guess everything I was telling her.

Speaker 11 Like, do you really want to go to an info session on a timeshare in Juarez?

Speaker 11 Or what do you mean the president says he will raise the black flag of ISIS over the White House? She told me to stop.

Speaker 11 Neither of us remember the exact lie that drove her over the top, but she remembers the feeling very clearly.

Speaker 6 I wanted an actual answer about whether it was how you felt or what you wanted to do or where where we should put the thing or should we whatever, you know, something kind of day-to-day

Speaker 6 and the accumulation of getting not real answers that I then had to parse and say,

Speaker 6 but just what do you, I just need you to tell me straight so we can move on from this. I think that was the thing that took me to wanting you to stop.

Speaker 11 Emma compared it to this thing I did when I was 26 and had just moved into my own apartment when I used to use my kitchen drawers for non-kitchen items, which

Speaker 11 is not exactly a lie, but felt like waking up on the set of a surrealist play.

Speaker 3 It's just confusing.

Speaker 6 And this was, you know, when we first started dating or maybe even before.

Speaker 6 And I was looking for something in your kitchen. You had maybe like two forks and two spoons.
And I was probably looking for one of these forks or something.

Speaker 6 And I opened a drawer like a logical place to have silverware and instead found either boxers or DVDs, like Seinfeld box set.

Speaker 5 And it was funny, but it was also

Speaker 6 maddening.

Speaker 11 Emma didn't want to live in Wonderland. It's too crazy.
Too hard to find the forks.

Speaker 11 If we were going to make plans together for the rest of our lives, she wanted straight answers. So I stopped lying to her.

Speaker 11 For years, I packed this part of me away in the dresser I ended up buying for my underwear.

Speaker 11 But now we have two kids, and I've brought lying back into our house, especially with our oldest.

Speaker 5 Just recently, like a day ago, what did you say?

Speaker 2 You looked at his foot and you were like,

Speaker 2 you're like, where did you get all these toes?

Speaker 3 Why do you have 10 toes most people only have six and now he's four and like wise to you

Speaker 4 and he was like

Speaker 2 what what it's like you're joking

Speaker 11 leroy gets it so far he hasn't asked me to stop yet maybe you would like to try this in your own house in fact Maybe it's a valuable lesson for your kids. Trains them to determine fact from fiction.

Speaker 11 It seems useful in our world.

Speaker 2 Ike Seris Kandaraja is one of the producers of our show. By the way, his friend Charles, who Ike lied to about Karl Rove, Charles told me recently that he never thought that that was true.

Speaker 2 He lied to Ike about believing it and also about telling others just to amuse himself.

Speaker 2 If I could turn on the page,

Speaker 2 the time then I'd rearrange just a figure too.

Speaker 2 Close my eyes, my eyes, close my eyes.

Speaker 2 But I couldn't find a way.

Speaker 2 So I'll settle for one day to believe in you.

Speaker 2 Tell me, tell me, tell me lies.

Speaker 2 Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies.

Speaker 2 Boy Brogram is produced today by Diane Wu.

Speaker 2 The people who put together today's show include Jendai Bonds, Michael Comete, Angela Gervasi, Catherine Marie Mondo, Stone Nelson, Nadia Raymond, Ryan Romery, Lily Sullivan, Frances Swanson, Christopher Swatala, and Julie Whitaker.

Speaker 2 Our managing editor is Sarah Abdurrahman. Our senior editor is David Kestenbaum.
Our executive editor is Emmanuel Berry.

Speaker 2 Special thanks today to Andy Carvin, Anna Starchesky, Anna Cahada, Natasha Nelson, Ira Kramer, Eric Garcia, and Matt Miller. Our website, thisamericanlife.org.
I know you.

Speaker 2 You're living your life, doing stuff. You need something to listen to.
What are you going to listen to? Go to our website. You can stream our archive of over 800 episodes for absolutely free.

Speaker 2 That is still happening. Again, thisamericanlife.org.
This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks as always to our program's co-founder, Mr.

Speaker 2 Torrey Malatilla. Have you heard he is doing a one-man show? based on the children's book, The Very Hungry Caterpillar.
It opens this way.

Speaker 10 Is this thing on? Can I tell you about what I ate?

Speaker 2 I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of this American Live.

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