Everything Is Fake

In the early 2000s, a young man in New Jersey was writing thousands of fake university essays for paying students. Around the same time, financial analysts in New York were rating toxic debt as safe. And in Silicon Valley, a new business philosophy was taking hold: fake it till you make it.
Jamie Bartlett asks how so many people, in so many different worlds, arrived at the same conclusion at the same time. The answer, he thinks, has a name - The Lance Armstrong Defence. A quiet, creeping logic that says everyone else is doing it so why can't I?
Presenter: Jamie Bartlett
Series Producer: Tom Pooley
Sound Design: Rob Speight
Production Coordinator: Neena Abdullah
Original music: Coach Conrad
Editor: Craig Templeton Smith
A Tempo+Talker production for BBC Radio 4.

In 1987, the same year Hulk Hogan body-slammed Andre the Giant, something else happened that would change America's relationship with the truth forever - a Washington regulator abolished the law that required broadcasters to present both sides of an argument.
What followed was Morton Downey Jr, a furious chain-smoking provocateur who discovered that outrage was more compelling than accuracy. And Oprah Winfrey, who found that sincerity and emotional honesty could be just as powerful. Together, they popularised an idea that has quietly shaped the world we live in - that your truth is just as valid as the truth.
Presenter: Jamie Bartlett
Series Producer: Tom Pooley
Sound Design: Rob Speight
Production Coordinator: Neena Abdullah
Original music: Coach Conrad
Editor: Craig Templeton Smith
A Tempo+Talker production for BBC Radio 4.

In episode two, Jamie ventures into the strange world of 1980s WWF wrestling - where performers and fans share an unspoken agreement to treat the whole spectacle as real. A shared illusion where everyone knows it's fake, but plays along because it feels true. It sounds like harmless fun. And for a while, it was. But Jamie soon wonders: what happens when an idea like that escapes the ring and changes the world?
Credits:
Presenter: Jamie Bartlett
Series Producer: Tom Pooley
Sound Design: Rob Speight
Production Coordinator: Neena Abdullah
Original music: Coach Conrad
Editor: Craig Templeton Smith
A Tempo+Talker production for BBC Radio 4.

Jamie Bartlett is not Steven Bartlett. People mix them up more than you might think - but there is an important difference: Steven Bartlett is one of the most successful podcasters on the planet, and Jamie is not.
So what does Steven have that Jamie doesn't? And what does the answer tell us about the world we now live in?
In this first episode, Jamie digs into the origin stories of the UK's podcast kings - and discovers that in 2025, working out what's true, what's embellished, and what's just a really good story is harder than it sounds.
He also builds himself an AI companion, Jimmy Botlett, because if he's going to get to the bottom of how fakery took over the world, he's going to need all the help he can get.
Credits:
Presenter: Jamie Bartlett
Series Producer: Tom Pooley
Sound Design: Rob Speight
Production Coordinator: Neena Abdullah
Original music: Coach Conrad
Editor: Craig Templeton Smith
A Tempo+Talker production for BBC Radio 4.

Have you noticed that more and more of the world feels, well, fake?
Online there's a daily avalanche of dubious advice and information - about health, money, success, happiness - much of it delivered with total confidence and little regard for evidence.
There's the fabricated reviews, inflated metrics and synthetic content.
Influencers present themselves as authorities. The 'fake it till you make it' mantra has hardened into the business model.
Everything is now content. Performed for likes, not tested for truth.
Meanwhile, institutions once trusted to tell us what is true now compete for attention like everyone else - just as new technologies emerge that can generate convincing false information at scale.
How did we get here? What can we do about it? And, well, do we really care?
In this six-part series Jamie Bartlett sets out to understand how fakery stopped being a flaw and became the operating system of modern life.
This isn't a series about individual liars or shysters. It's about the cultural conditions that made modern fakery not just possible, but incentivised, rewarded, and often indistinguishable from success.
From the scripted spectacle of 1980s professional wrestling to the collapse of the global financial system, Jamie traces the incentives that normalised our fake world. Along the way, he's joined by his AI companion, Jimmy Botlett.
The series builds towards one urgent question: in a future shaped by generative AI and synthetic media, how will we tell fact from fakery - and will we even care enough to try?
Credits:
Presenter: Jamie Bartlett
Series Producer: Tom Pooley
Sound Design: Rob Speight
Production Coordinator: Neena Abdullah
Original music: Coach Conrad
Editor: Craig Templeton Smith
A Tempo+Talker production for BBC Radio 4.