What was the last lie you told? In Truthless, the new narrative podcast from The Ringer, host Brian Phillips talks to real people about their best tales of deception. Every episode explores the story of a single lie in the words of the person who told it. We talk to a man who faked his own death, a woman who faked her identity, a famous actor who faked his entire résumé, and more. Episodes 1 and 2, “The New Coat” and “Flying High,” are out now. Subscribe on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, and tune in every Tuesday for a fresh story of deceit from the most cunning liars in the world: normal human beings.
Earlier this year, for reasons I didn’t entirely understand at the time and possibly don’t understand now, I started asking my friends to confess their lies to me. I’d been thinking a lot about lying in general, mostly due to what I could best describe as … [waves hands at everything outside window]. George Santos was still in office, Sam Bankman-Fried was not yet in jail, and the world seemed overrun with scams, grifts, deception, misinformation, propaganda, forgery, and brazenly devious bullshit. Every synonym for dishonesty I could think of was enjoying its moment in the sun. Even “codswallop” seemed poised to make a comeback. So, I started texting my close acquaintances: How would you feel about recounting the biggest lie you’ve ever told and sending it to me in a voice memo?
At that point, I’d been working for a couple of months on a new podcast, which would be a sort of ripped-from-the-headlines look at deceit in contemporary society. It seemed to me, as it did to many other people, that the collapse of our collective idea of the truth was the most consequential cultural shift happening in the present day; so, I thought, let’s talk about it. I’d almost finished making a pilot episode about Bankman-Fried and the rise of crypto scams, and the pilot wasn’t bad—it might have led to a reasonably good show—but it was also a lot of what you’d expect. There was a segment on Charles Ponzi and the origin of his eponymous scheme. There was a segment on how money acquires value and one on the inherent absurdity of building a betting market around a currency that hardly anyone uses as currency. There was also, I’m sorry to admit, some well-intentioned pontificating about the erosion of the American dream (again: [waves hands at everything outside window]).
All well and good, but I was missing an intro—a segment that would draw listeners in. This was ostensibly the function the voice memos from my friends would serve. It would be funny, I thought, to hear normal people describing regular, everyday lies—relatable lies—and then cut to the pathological charlatans in the news. As a podcast strategy, this made almost no sense, and I knew it. For one thing, my friends’ lies wouldn’t have a terribly strong thematic relation to the rest of the show (since most people don’t lie like George Santos). For another, I don’t have that many friends, and I’d probably have even fewer once I started mining their personal lives for podcast content. You always dream of a new narrative show running for at least 50 or 60 episodes. I was setting myself up to run out of material after about seven.
Still, I started pestering people. And because my friends are both lovely (otherwise I wouldn’t be friends with them) and slightly twisted (otherwise they wouldn’t be friends with me), they came through with the voice memos. More than I’d expected. And it was about 10 seconds into the first of these recordings that I realized all the work I’d put in on the pilot had been wasted, that Sam Bankman-Fried wasn’t really whom I wanted to talk about, and that I would have to have a delicate conversation with my producers about tearing up the whole concept of the show and starting over.
Because the stories I was getting? They sang. This was one of those moments when life humbles you in the most useful way. I’d spent so much time writing and rewriting and recording and rerecording, yet the spontaneous voice memos my friends sent me were about one billion times more captivating than anything I’d produced. Listening to regular people talk about the trouble they’d gotten into by lying was spellbinding to me. Moreover, these stories about wild, desperate, and hilarious schemes concocted in the course of everyday life—sometimes regretted after the fact and sometimes not—were also surprising in a way that my pilot was not. They were unpredictable.
“This should be the podcast,” I said to myself.
The stories were also more illuminating than I’d expected. They said more about the age we’re living in, even though no one involved was trying to be intellectual or abstract at all. Every lie, it turns out, is a window into someone’s life. The struggles they’re facing. The ambitions they’re harboring. The world they’re living in. Every lie shows you a person in a moment of conflict. Every lie tells you something about the imagination of whoever concocts it. A retail worker so desperate to quit his job that he conceives an outrageous story. A mail-room drone at a global investment bank who lies his way up the corporate ladder. A high school kid so eager to see a band that he devises an elaborate cover story to fool his girlfriend’s parents. Every one of these tales lights up a particular corner of modern life, a particular set of problems endemic to that corner, a particular set of characters trying—often in ingeniously self-defeating ways—to navigate them.
I was worried my producers would be mad when I pitched the idea of scrapping all our work. But they listened to the recordings my friends sent and had the same reaction I did. And so we followed up with some of the folks who’d sent me voice memos, and we started reaching out to more people to ask for their best tales of deception. The result is a new Ringer podcast we’re launching today: Truthless, a show about lies in the lives of real people. In each episode of Truthless, I talk to one person about a lie they’ve told, and we explore the story behind it. The motives behind it, the process of devising it, the consequences of telling it, the scramble not to get caught. Some of our guests are celebrities. (I won’t spoil things by telling you which ones.) Some of our guests could be your friends or neighbors. If you have a great story about a lie, one of our guests could be you.
Everybody lies. Along with eating, sleeping, breathing, and knowing how Taylor Swift reacted to Kansas City’s latest touchdown, lying is one of the nearest things there is to a universal human experience. I don’t want to overcomplicate the point, because the stories in Truthless aren’t complicated—they’re funny and sometimes moving. But over the past few months, I’ve talked to a whole lot of people about the lies they’ve told. And what I’ve realized is that our national discourse on dishonesty and misinformation has been missing a piece, and that piece is the role lies play in everyday life.
Lying is simultaneously the most normal and the most potentially destructive human activity. It would be impossible to navigate normal life without lying, but lying is also responsible for countless catastrophes, dating back to the time when our earliest ancestor crawled out of the sea, looked around, and said, “One thing’s for sure. I’ve never lived in the sea.” And I don’t think we can understand dishonesty on the largest scale—dishonesty as a defining force in our culture—without understanding the role deception plays in our individual lives.
And that’s why we’re making Truthless. Well, that and the fact that stories of deception in real people’s lives are often a lot of fun. When you read a lie in the headlines, it’s usually enraging, stressful, or terrifying, sometimes all three. But when you get to eavesdrop on a regular person confessing a lie? That’s just a great story.
Trust me.
Host: Brian Phillips
Producers: Mike Wargon, Conor Nevins, and Vikram Patel
Sound Design: Kaya McMullen
Mixing and Mastering: Scott Somerville
Subscribe: Spotify
