660: Hoaxing Yourself

This American Life

Society & Culture, News, Politics, Arts

4.6 • 88.8K Ratings

🗓️ 27 October 2024

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

People who tell a lie and then believe the lie more than anyone else.

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Prologue: Sean Cole explains why he decided that he would speak with a British accent—morning, noon and night—from the age of fourteen until he was sixteen, and how he believed the lie that he was British must be true. (3 minutes)
Act One: The story of two young people who, in their search to figure out who they were, pretended to be people they weren't. Both were from small towns; both took on false identities. For two years in high school, producer Sean Cole spoke with a British accent. As a freshman in college, Joel Lovell told lies about his own diet and about his parents. (15 minutes)
Act Two: The story of a con man, one of the most successful salesmen in a long-running multimillion-dollar telemarketing scam, who finally got caught when he was conned himself. Producer Nancy Updike talks about the case with Dale Sekovich, Federal Trade Commission investigator. (16 minutes)
Act Three: Shalom Auslander reads his true story, "The Blessing Bee." It's about the time when, as a third-grader at an Orthodox Jewish school, Shalom saw his chance to both make his mom proud, and push his drunken father out of the picture. Part of his scheme involved winning the school's bee on the complicated Hebrew blessings you say before eating certain foods. The other part of the scheme: Sinning. (19 minutes)

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Parents, here is all the evidence that you need that TV is bad for kids, especially public TV.
0:08.0	When Sean was 14, he loved watching those British TV shows. They're always running on PBS
0:13.8	masterpiece theater. Dr. Who?
0:16.4	And then there was this show that I would that I would stay up really late and
0:19.6	watch and tape and watch over and over again the tapes called Dempsey and Make Piece, which was about an American
0:26.5	detective who went to London because he had been like set up at home.
0:30.8	And he was teamed up with a woman who was this aristocrat named Lady Harriet Make Piece.
0:37.0	And I was really on her side.
0:40.0	You know, she's got it going on.
0:42.0	You looked down on the American.
0:43.5	Oh yeah.
0:44.5	What John like what I liked about Lady Harriet make peace and all the other Brits on TV
0:52.4	was there aloofness how they seemed above it all,
0:55.4	how they looked down on Americans.
0:57.7	Which Sean did also.
0:59.4	Convinced there must be something wrong with the nation that produced jocks and bullies who
1:02.2	harassed him in school.
1:04.5	And sometimes, joking around with his friends, he would talk with the British accent.
1:09.0	And then it was just something that spiraled out of control. I know that eventually I was just using an English accent
1:17.3	literally from waking to sleeping, morning noon and night.
1:31.0	Sean spoke with the British accent from the time he was 14 until he was 16. And at some point his mom thought, you know, maybe I need to do something about
1:36.2	this and took him to see a psychiatrist. He was just really, he must, I don't know the different schools of psychology but he he was
	...

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