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This American Life

855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About

This American Life

This American Life

Society & Culture, News, Politics, Arts

4.688.8K Ratings

🗓️ 2 March 2025

⏱️ 63 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Unnecessary and outrageous lies that make you wonder — why lie about that in the first place?

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  • Prologue: Kasey, a woman who prides herself on her truthfulness, tries to help host Ira Glass figure out how to stop lying about one specific thing. (10 minutes)
  • Act One: Producer Dana Chivvis talks to reporter Liz Flock about a strange experience she had in 2011. (21 minutes)
  • Act Two: Host Ira Glass talks with M. Gessen about a lie they've been seeing out in the world a lot recently — the “bully lie.” (15 minutes)
  • Act Three: We find someone brave enough to stand up and make a case FOR lying. That person is producer Ike Sriskandarajah. (8 minutes)

Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.org

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Transcript

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0:00.0

A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbeaped in today's episode of the show.

0:05.8

If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org.

0:12.2

Casey's autistic.

0:13.8

She says it's puzzling, neurotypical people, and how much they lie.

0:17.9

She's not alone.

0:19.3

Yeah, in our support groups, that issue comes up a lot.

0:25.0

For some people, it's very puzzling and they just don't understand the concept.

0:31.4

And especially because so often lies are just completely transparent.

0:38.0

She gave me this example.

0:39.7

When you worked in HR, they caught this guy who was having an inappropriate relationship with his administrative assistant.

0:45.6

A naked picture of her was on his work computer.

0:49.2

And still, he denied it.

0:51.5

Kept lying.

0:52.8

It's just baffling to me.

0:54.6

It's just, it's inexplicable.

0:58.5

I don't understand the continuing in the lie.

1:02.2

And I don't understand why they haven't learned at an earlier point

1:06.5

that it's not productive, that this is not an effective tool for you.

1:13.8

Looking around on Reddit, we found a lot of autistic people writing about this exact thing.

1:19.1

Here's somebody who posted saying, I recently realized that a lot of things I'd always categorized as lies are not seen that way by NT people, no, typical people.

1:27.4

Like, they say it, knowing it isn't literally true, but they don't think of it as a lie because

1:31.4

they don't expect others to believe it.

...

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