Jonah Lehrer

She sees a problem, tries to address it, she gets shot down, and then when management grudgingly agrees to do something in the form of this training, the founders of the organization immediately make it worse.

And you know, Jon Ronson, when he was on the show a couple weeks ago, I was talking to him about, um, Jonah Lehrer, and he mentioned that one of the reasons that Jonah Lehrer's fall from grace was so spectacular bec- was because the distance between Jonah's public persona and his perceived sin was so large.

Like Billy Bob's Big Titty Crab Shack isn't going to fall apart because management misgendered someone.

Did that happen?

He was taken down by our frenemy, Michael Moynihan, who was some sort of idiot savant, maybe just an idiot, who... who read Jonah's book and realized that he had fabricated some Bob Dylan quotes in the book.

I mean, by today's standards, I've got to say, like one of Jonah Lehrer's main transgressions was, I mean, really dumb, but quotes, you know, at the end of the D.A. Pennebaker, Bob Dylan documentary, Bob Dylan's read in this article about himself in the newspaper, he smoked 60 cigarettes a day.

And Bob Dylan looks up and says, I'm glad I'm not me.

And which is a great line.

Yeah, but oftentimes when I meet Michael, the conversation arises.

I think, you know, speaking of Jason Ardy and everything, Michael, I think, is really genuinely, you know, has agonized for years about whether or not he did the right thing with Jonah.

You know, he got a call from Jonah Lehrer's agent at one point, a sort of hotshot, you know, big agent agent.

who said, is this enough to ruin somebody's life over?

Every CD I've ever seen is exaggerated, only their most favorable portrait.

But when you start to get into the clearly not humanly possible claims, you know, that I actually was the first person to... uh be a professor of he monk who's stepped on the moon you know so claims that really defy defy possibility for which there's a clear track record i think that's when you get into trouble and when there are many many such claims it really speaks to the fact that the person telling those claims is a fabulist i mean what does a fabulist mean it's a type of person that's just can't help themselves they lie about everything they lie the way people breathe and there are lots of these people every once in a while we find out in the movie shattered glass this reporter was one Jonah Lehrer, he's a writer in the New Yorker magazine.

By the way, maybe about two decades ago, somebody said, you really need to work with Jonah Lehrer.

And I ended up not getting around to it.

And then I found out that he made up everything he wrote.

We can only imagine what that would have been like.

Michael Moynihan was talking in the fifth column that he had helped to expose Jonah Lehrer, and he said he was at one point worried Jonah Lehrer would kill himself.

It's horrible, again, to have the floor fall out from under you like that, but that doesn't mean fabulism is excusable.

It's not.