June 15, 2026
The Day I Learned People Win Trophies for Professional BS and Why I'm Lowkey Jealous of the Pigeon Mayor Story
This is your News You do not Need podcast
So, you know how some people spend their lives curing diseases, exploring space, or solving climate change? I spent my day learning about a championship for… lying. Competitive, timed, internationally judged lying. And no, this is not a political debate; this is an actual event where people show up and proudly talk nonsense for a trophy.
Here’s how it works: contestants get a totally mundane topic, like gardening, or traffic, or the history of the spoon, and then they have a few minutes to deliver the most outrageous, imaginative lie they can come up with, live on stage. No notes, no props, just you, your mouth, and the unshakable confidence of a raccoon breaking into a trash can at 3 a.m.
The rules are beautifully pointless. You can’t tell cruel lies, you can’t be obscene, and you definitely can’t just stand there and recite real facts. If your story is too accurate, you lose. Imagine failing because you accidentally remembered something from school. It’s like the opposite of an exam: “I’m sorry, your answer contained evidence and sources. You’re disqualified.”
And this is judged, formally, by adults. Real adults. With jobs. They sit there, stone-faced, as someone explains how they discovered a new species of invisible penguin that only appears in mirrors on Tuesdays, and then they seriously take notes like, “Strong narrative, excellent nonsense, good escalation with the flying dishwasher.”
What makes it even stranger is that some of the competitors treat this like a sport. They practice. Somewhere, right now, a grown person is pacing their living room, timing themselves on a phone, trying to improve their mile time in the 400-meter freestyle lie. They probably have warm‑ups: “Red sky at morning, sailor’s warning… unless the sky is actually a government hologram hiding the giant space otter.”
And the audience loves it. People buy tickets to sit in a room and be lied to on purpose, which, if you think about it, is exactly like streaming any dating show, except here everyone is honest about being dishonest. That’s progress.
The winning lies get surprisingly specific. You’ll hear things like, “I once worked as a cloud mechanic, tightening the screws on the cumulus and rotating the rain every 3,000 drizzles,” and instead of saying, “That makes no sense,” the judges go, “Yes, but did the ending stick the landing?” The only place where logic goes to die and grammar shows up late with snacks.
Now, the recent update—the reason this is even in the news—someone just set a new record with a story so bizarre that audience members apparently needed a moment afterward to re-enter normal reality. The routine involved a time-traveling shopping cart, a mayor who was secretly three pigeons in a trench coat, and a local traffic cone running for office on an anti‑pothole platform. At some point, there was also a romantic subplot involving two confused GPS systems arguing over the meaning of ‘recalculating.’
The judges loved it. Perfect score in “originality” and, my favorite category, “sustained nonsense.” Imagine having a medal on your wall that basically says: “I talked absolute rubbish for five minutes and everyone clapped.”
And none of this information helps you. At all. You could have gone your entire life never knowing that somewhere, people are training to be world‑class liars for fun. Tomorrow, you’ll still have emails, laundry, bills, and that one plant that’s somehow both overwatered and dying of thirst. But now, floating in the back of your brain forever, is the knowledge that out there, a champion liar once won a prize by emotionally convincing a crowd that their toaster was plotting a revolution.
You’re welcome.
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