The premise of this provocative BBC series is all in the title: Everything is Fake (and Nobody Cares). Across six 30 minute episodes, Jamie Bartlett’s docu-podcast dives into our recent history to explore how truth has become malleable and unimportant to so many people. The series covers, among other things, the end of the fairness doctrine; the ways Trump’s love affair with wrestling has shaped his presidencies; the rise of anti-vaxxers; and, of course, AI.
Although each episode of Everything is Fake is more or less standalone, over the course of the series, various forms of fakery all build on each other, exposing an interweaving web of "bullshit," as Bartlett refers to it.
In Episode 1, we hear about how two of the UK’s most popular podcasters – Steven Bartlett (no relation to the host) and Jay Shetty – have both invented a significant portion of their much-lauded origin stories. Neither have had any real ramifications for these alleged untruths.
Throughout the rest of the show, the "scammers" Bartlett investigates are frequently on both The Diary of a CEO and On Purpose. Similarly, Lance Armstrong’s notorious excuse for the doping scandal (everyone was doing it, so he’d have been a fool not to) is repurposed by numerous others.
It feels like the rot has already fatally set in...
These themes of fraud and grifting become increasingly interesting as Everything is Fake goes on, while Jamie Bartlett’s thesis grows richer and deeper.
Oprah Winfrey’s famous espousal of "living your truth" sounds harmless on its face, even empowering, but Bartlett draws a clear line between it and the toxicity of our current reality, where the truth is viewed as subjective, not objective. And many of the examples that Bartlett digs into revolve around the fact that, in a battle between two of these "truths," the better story almost always wins, not the most accurate one. The danger of spin is frighteningly clear.
Perhaps the most admirable thing about Everything is Fake is that Bartlett practices what he preaches when it comes to advocating for nuance. As host, he makes a genuine effort to approach his interviews without preconceived notions, and remains open to complexity.
This journalistic rigor is particularly evident in Episode 5, where he talks to Dr Aseem Malhotra, whose doubts about the Covid vaccines won him fans as influential as HHS secretary RFK Jr. Intercut with that interview, Bartlett dissects Malhotra’s controversial claims with another doctor, and it is enlightening to hear how numbers can be genuinely misread and important context ignored in such heated discussion. Public discourse has never been good at diving into the details, but even less so in this post-truth era. Maybe it is naive for Bartlett to take Malhotra’s misreading of the data as genuine, and not in service of an agenda. Nevertheless, the subsequent lowering of the temperature results in a conversation a lot more illuminating than it may have been if he’d have approached from a more aggressive stance.
In a deliberate gimmick that will be familiar to anyone who listened to either season of Shell Game, Bartlett co-hosts the podcast with an AI voice clone of himself, amusingly named Jimmy Botlett. Whereas Shell Game wove its voice clone into the whole fabric of its episodes, in Everything is Fake it’s closer to a peripheral punchline, more distracting from the substance of the show than edifying. It does all build to something in the final episode, but again, if you’ve listened to Shell Game, The Last Invention or Are We Doomed?, it’s not a particularly revelatory way to end a series that has otherwise been thoughtful and dense with ideas.
It would be unfair to ask a six-part BBC podcast to solve what is arguably the biggest problem facing humanity today, and Bartlett doesn’t attempt to. Over the course of the series, the lack of solution-orientated thinking sometimes evokes a sense of nihilism.
It feels like the rot has already fatally set in, and things are just going to get worse as AI continues to expand its tentacles into society.
Yet, if there is hope to be found here, perhaps it’s in the very existence of a show which is so willing to patiently dive into the nitty-gritty of complicated situations, that refuses to rush to judgement or embrace the easy. As long as podcasts like Everything is Fake continue to be made, maybe we aren’t doomed quite yet…
