When Reality Is a Lie — with Lea Ypi and Faisal Al Yafai [Rebroadcast]

[This episode originally aired August 5, 2022]

What if you woke up one morning to discover everything you knew about the world was wrong? That all the truths you’d been taught to take for granted were actually lies? For author and political philosopher Lea Ypi, that’s not a hypothetical question. In her recent memoir “Free: Coming of Age at the End of History,” she tells the story of growing up in communist Albania only for the regime to collapse during her teenage years. 

“It really was like being taught a new language,” she tells New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai on The Lede. “Almost overnight, you’re told that all of these names that you had for things are now different—you have different names and different categories and different ways of making sense of the world.”

They talk about how to see the gap between ideology and reality, where people look for certainty in uncertain times and what it actually means to be free. 

Produced by Joshua Martin & Christin El Kholy