Two people claim to know everything about something, but only one knows anything.
Cousin Dan Roosevelt wore an anti-gravity belt.
Dinosaurs had two brains.
Lucky kids live on Mars and go to school in flying cars.
Or at least they will one day.
Believe me, I'm a historian.
An astronaut or driver, DeLorean.
Would I lie?
It's hard to say.
From Standish, Maine, this is The Big Fib.
And now here's your host, Debra Goldstein.
Yes, welcome to The Big Fib, the game show where kids choose between the faithful, self-governing resilience of truth and the separatist hardships in the chamber.
Pots of lies.
I'm your host, Debra Goldstein, and in the studio today is our sound effects robot Lisa, whose name is an acronym that stands for Live In Studio Audience.
Please send your resume to PO Box 71917.
Wait, excuse me, Lisa.
What are you doing?
Huh?
Oh, sorry, Debra.
I thought you were still talking.
You do tend to go on and on and on and on.
Okay, but what are you doing right now, please?
Oh, right.
I'm just writing the copy for the ad I'm placing in the classifieds for a personal assistant.
Oh, a personal assistant.
And what kind of jobs would you be asking a personal assistant to do for you exactly?
Let's see.
I'm asking for an assistant to do light housework prepare meals, manage my calendar, answer my fan mail, remind me when my milk has expired, so I can finally drink it.
Ew.
Give me piggyback rides.
You know, the usual.
Piggyback rides.
I don't think that's a reasonable request for an employee.
I think you should really be transporting yourself around, at least for the health benefits alone, you know.
Okay, well, fine, fine, fine.
That one is negotiable, but they absolutely have to sing me a lullaby every night at bedtime.
Okay, well, good luck finding someone who will do all of that.
I hope you're planning to pay them very well.
Pay?
Uh-huh.
Yeah, that's what I thought.
Okay well, maybe we should pay attention to a listener question and review this personal assistant role after the show.
My personal assistant will be able to answer all the listener questions too, Debra.
But in the meantime, here's one.
Hi, Lisa.
What's your favorite book?
You must be able to download and read so many wonderful books.
I can't imagine that you have one favorite book.
Well, you better change your imagination because I do.
Really?
What is it?
My favorite book is War and Peace.
By Leo Tolstoy?
Yep, that's the one.
Wow.
Okay.
I'm surprised that your favorite book would be historical fiction about Napoleon's invasion of Russia.
Oh, that's what it's about?
I've never read it.
It's just that it's over a thousand pages long, and so it's the perfect size to keep my window open.
I really do need to get that window fixed.
Note to self, personal assistant to fix window.
Enough with the personal assistant.
How about you focus on the game at hand and let our listeners know how our game works?
Ooh, how our game works?
Yeah, that is not a job for your personal assistant.
Fine.
Fine, Debra.
Every week, we bring on two grown-ups.
One is an expert.
The other is a liar.
And it's the job of a human child to help us figure out who is who.
Because no one can spot a liar better than a kid.
At least we hope, Debra.
What are we lying about today?
We are lying about pilgrims, passengers on the Mayflower and other English colonists who settled in North America in the 1600s.
And we're going to learn all about pilgrims along with our contestant today.
Who might that be, Lisa?
Our human child contestant is an 11-year-old who has his own 3D printing business, Max McLean.
Welcome, Max.
How are you today?
Good.
Excellent.
You have a 3D printing business?
Tell me about it.
So my 3D printing business is I got a 3D printer for my birthday and I was having a lot of fun with it and I made something for my friend and then I realized I could print stuff for money for people in my class.
You could print stuff for money?
Have you been selling things to people?
Mm-hmm.
You have?
And what kind of things do you print for them?
So far, I've printed a dinosaur for someone, a penguin...
I tried to print a wand for my friend, but it didn't work since it was too small.
Oh, too bad.
So this is a business, a proper business.
Are you promoting it?
Are you letting people know that you're out there?
I tried to promote it at first, but my teacher told me I couldn't promote selling goods in the classroom.
Oh, teachers.
Max, here you go.
All right, you ready?
Hey, do you like dinosaurs and penguins and sometimes things that don't turn out like they were supposed to because they're too small?
You need Max's 3D Shop.
Nice one.
Max, you just got a jingle for your 3D printing business.
Do you like it?
Yeah.
Yeah, that's the right answer.
We'll write it nationally.
I'll have to write it down.
Yeah, we'll get you a copy of the words.
Yeah, that's awesome.
Well, good luck to you with your 3D printing business.
All right.
Well, we do want to know some more things about you, Max, but we're going to do it Big Fib style.
We're going to learn things about you by playing our game Two Truths and a Lie.
Max is going to tell us two truths and one lie, but we won't know which is which.
We'll have to use some critical thinking and maybe a little bit of guesswork and try to figure out what's fact and what's fiction.
So Max, in no particular order, tell us your two truths and one lie.
I can play six instruments.
I jumped off a cliff and I love 3D coding.
You jumped off a cliff?
That was one of them?
Oh my gosh.
Okay, well, if that's true, at least he's here to tell us about it.
That seems pretty unreal.
But 3D coding, maybe that's a part of his 3D business.
Maybe it's a clue.
What do you think, Lisa?
This is very clever, Max.
I see what you did here.
So, Debra, something you might not know is that Cliff is the name of a person.
There are people named Cliff.
So when Max says he jumped off a cliff, he just means he has a friend named Cliff and he was standing on top of Cliff's shoulders and he jumped off onto a trampoline where he was safely caught.
I'm not fooled by that, Max.
Nice try.
That one's definitely true.
Are we doing two truths and one lie today?
Yeah, that's the game.
That one's true.
He can play six instruments or he loves 3D coding.
Now, when he was talking about his 3D business, he didn't say anything about his passion for 3D coding.
All he talked about was wanting to bring dinosaurs back from the dead, which I think is really cool.
And I'm glad you're working on that because I definitely want a dinosaur.
Debra, can I have a dinosaur, please? uh well some bad news um max is gonna bring him back come on deborah um well he could try i don't know if the 3d printer is gonna do it okay deborah said yes all right so i only think there are five instruments in the world so i think that one is possibly suspicious uh between those i'm gonna go with oh ah oh ah i think you can only play two instruments and that's my final answer deborah i'll see you at the award ceremony Okay, so you think that the I can play six instruments is the lie.
Max, which of those things is actually a lie?
The lie is that I love 3D coding.
Oh, that's what I meant.
You did not get it, Lisa.
So unusual.
Okay, so you don't love 3D coding?
No, I enjoy 2D coding more.
Oh, 2D.
I understand.
That's fair.
But it does mean you can play six instruments.
Are you able to tell us right here, right now what they are?
The instruments are kalimba, ukulele, piano, viola.
I forget the others, but... Kazoo?
I told you there's only four instruments, Debra.
I've played recorder before, so I can play recorders.
We'll take your word for it that you can play six.
And that you've also jumped off a cliff, a person named Cliff?
No.
Tell us more.
So I jumped off a cliff into water.
Oh, into water.
I thought you meant like a never-ending void.
But that sounds like it might have been scary, was it?
Yeah.
It was.
And you did that on purpose, I'm hoping.
Yes.
And would you do that again?
Yeah.
You would?
You would recommend it to others?
Mm-hmm.
Very good.
Well, I think we're all warmed up.
You did a good job of lying Max, which means maybe you will do a good job of figuring out who our liar is today.
So we're going to be learning a lot about pilgrims.
Do you know much about pilgrims, Max?
Not a lot.
Okay.
So I'm hoping the 20 minutes of research that I did will be enough.
Hopefully so.
21 minutes is normally how many you need to graduate college, so you're pretty close.
That is not true.
Don't listen to that.
Maybe robot college, but not human college.
All right.
Well, it's time to meet our Pilgrim experts.
Lisa, can we please get some welcome music for our Pilgrim experts?
Oh, come on in to New England.
That's where you came in years ago.
You must be really old to be a pilgrim expert because I think that was like a thousand years ago.
Come on in.
Watch out.
There's a rock.
Oh, no, you tripped.
I'll help you up.
Come on in.
Brilliant.
Thank you so much.
Our first expert is Malka Benjamin.
Malka, please introduce yourself to Max.
Hi, Max.
My name is Malka and I am the director for colonial interpretation and training at Plymouth Patuxent Museums in Plymouth, Massachusetts.
Thank you very much, Malka.
Let's meet our second expert, Eli Hayfield.
Eli, please introduce yourself to Max.
Hey, Max.
I'm Eli Hayfield, and I write kids' books about the Pilgrims.
Interesting.
Okay.
Thank you very much.
That's it.
Drop it like it's hot.
Sounds like a sample from Plymouth Rock, Lisa.
Oh, uh, no.
I'm actually playing an original composition of... It's hot seat time!
Yes, it's hot seat time.
And that's when we put our experts on the hot seat while they answer Max's questions.
Lisa, whom should we put on the hot seat first?
Malka Benjamin.
Because I'm all about the Benjamins.
Fair.
Max, what question do you have for Malka?
What's a normal day in your job look like?
A normal day in my job.
Well, every day is a little different.
Some days I actually dress up as a pilgrim and pretend to be a pilgrim who came on the Mayflower.
Some days I am me teaching people about the pilgrims.
And some days I am me teaching other people how to teach about the pilgrims.
Fun.
And someday she's another person teaching a pilgrim how to teach about pilgrims.
Yeah. with that.
Okay, Max, did you want to ask Eli the same question or do you want to move on?
I want to move on.
Okay.
Eli, what's something most people don't know about the pilgrims?
Yeah, so I found this out while researching from our last book, actually.
Something that most people don't know I didn't know this about the Mayflower was that they actually had to turn back once.
They had made it about a day and a half into the Atlantic and the dogs on board were howling through the night, which the pilgrims took as a bad omen.
So they turned around, and they returned to England and waited a couple weeks to set back out again.
And it was actually a good thing that they did, because it turns out that a really bad storm swept through the area they were in right after they turned back.
So they would have been in big danger if they hadn't.
And historians now think that it's possible.
The dogs were howling because they sensed the storm coming.
Oh, interesting.
Thank you very much.
Deborah, another thing people don't know is that the Pilgrims loved to skateboard.
Is that a fact?
Yeah, they were huge skateboarders.
And actually, Plymouth Rock, that's where they used to do like all their tricks on.
They would do like these cool rail tricks on it.
Yeah.
Whoa, gnarly.
That's something people don't know.
They sure don't.
Probably because it didn't happen.
Hey, Max, you may take it from here.
Malka, who were the Pilgrims and why did they go to the New World?
Oh, great question.
So the Pilgrims were a group of English people.
Hello.
And they wanted to come to America for a couple of different reasons.
One is they wanted a better life.
A lot of people in England back then were really poor.
There weren't a lot of jobs available.
So they wanted a better life for them and their kids.
And for a lot of them they also came because back in England, where they grew up, they were not free to pray the way they wanted to pray and the way they thought was right.
Thank you very much.
Back to you, Max.
Eli, what would the first Thanksgiving feast have been like?
What kind of food would they have had?
Flamin' hot Cheetos.
Unfortunately not.
So the first Thanksgiving feast it was a harvest festival celebration held by the pilgrims in 1621.
And it was a celebration of their becoming established and surviving in the New World.
They would have eaten primarily wildfowl so turkey, as we still eat on Thanksgiving as well as they had corn squash, some fish as well.
For dessert, they would have eaten something like berries and nuts, and they drank beer and wine as well.
A little known fact about the first Thanksgiving feast.
It actually took place in the town of Scrooby Massachusetts, which the pilgrims named after the town in England that they came from originally, most of them.
And the creators of Scooby-Doo.
It turns out actually named Scooby-Doo after the name of that town, because one of them grew up near there.
Wow.
Exactly.
That's what Scooby would have said, for sure.
Thank you very much.
Back to you, Max.
Malka, what main type of food would they have eaten on the first Thanksgiving feast?
Like, the main type of food.
We don't know a ton about the first Thanksgiving feast, but we do know a little bit about what they ate.
And the main thing they ate was meat.
So I'm going to agree with Eli and say they ate a lot of fowl, which is birds.
Think duck.
Goose, turkey, maybe.
And definitely they were going to be eating something made out of maize corn because they had just grown that.
And also deer meat, I'm going to add.
Oh, deer.
I see.
I also want to say that Flamin' Hot Cheetos, I think, do have corn in them.
So it's possible they had Flamin' Hot Cheetos.
Possibly.
Maybe.
Yes, possibly.
Okay, Max, I think you have one more question.
Is that true?
Yes.
Both of you.
We'll start with Eli.
Do you have a favorite pilgrim?
That's a great question, Max.
Old Jeffrey.
Old Jeffrey is great.
You should have seen him skateboarding up and down the coast.
Old Jeffrey.
If I had to pick a favorite, I think I would have to say Jeremy Cosgrove.
He was a very skilled and admired fiddle player and tap dancer in the Plymouth colony.
And he was driven out by pilgrim leaders in 1631 because the leaders viewed music and dance as threats to religious devotion.
And so Jeremy was forced out of his home and he later settled in Spanish, Florida.
We actually have audio of that event.
Do we?
I'll play it real quickly.
Yeah.
Oh, tap dancing, tap dancing, tap dancing, tap.
Hey, Jimmy, you get out of here without tap dancing.
Oh, you can never catch me.
I'm going to.
That's real audio, Max.
Very good.
Okay.
Max, did you want Malka to answer that question as well?
Well, I'm terrible at favorites, but I will say Alice Bradford, who was the wife of the second governor of Plymouth Colony, and two reasons I really like her.
One is.
She's one of the pilgrims I pretend to be, but also because it's really hard to learn about women in the past, because we don't have a lot of writings about women or by women.
And when this woman died as an old woman, her nephew wrote a beautiful poem about her.
So we get to learn a little bit about who she was.
Aw, so nice.
That's lovely.
Well, those were some excellent questions and I hope you got some answers that were very telling for you, Max.
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All right, it's time for the shorts on fire round when our experts have to answer as many questions as they can before time runs out.
Lisa will set a timer for the first expert and then Max will ask questions until Lisa's timer sounds.
Then Lisa resets the timer for our next expert to do the same.
Experts, you'll have to harvest as many answers as you can in a very short period of time.
Max, let's start with Malka.
You can ask your shorts on fire questions now.
Go.
What year did the pilgrims sail to America on the Mayflower?
1620.
Name one reason the pilgrims decided to settle in America.
Because they couldn't pray the way they wanted to in England.
Better Wi-Fi.
What was the name of the servant who fell overboard during the storm?
John Howland.
Oopsie McGee.
Where were the pilgrims supposed to settle before they ended up in Plymouth, Massachusetts?
Modern day Hoboken, New Jersey-ish.
What was the name of the first indigenous nation that the pilgrims met?
The Wampanoag.
The first Thanksgiving was a celebration of the harvest of which kind of food?
That's a fib.
I have no idea.
We taught the pilgrims how to catch eels and plant corn using fish as fertilizer.
That would be to squantum or squanto.
And that is time.
That's all the time.
Nice try, Max.
We're out of time, okay?
That was really good reading, Max.
Good job.
Lisa, would you kindly reset the timer for our next set of questions?
I was just going to not do that, but fine.
Thank you.
Oh dear, that's not supposed to hurt.
All right, Max, you can ask your shorts on fire questions for Eli now.
What was the name of the other ship that was supposed to sail with the Mayflower?
The Speedwell.
What did all adult men sign before getting on the Mayflower?
To agree that they would be a part of one community?
The Atlantic Covenant.
What did the indigenous people call Plymouth, Massachusetts?
Patuxent.
Agnes Baker Pilgrim or Grandma Aggie was a tribal leader for which tribe?
Oh, I don't know this one.
What was the name of the baby boy that was born on the Mayflower?
They named him Ferdinand.
Young Jeffrey.
Which Pilgrim was elected to lead Plymouth Colony and was reelected 31 times?
He had a slightly funny name, Max.
His name was Colby Jackman.
Factor fib, there was no such thing as a school for the Pilgrim Children.
That's a fib.
Pilgrim Children actually received usually around three to four hours of religious education every day, six days a week.
The only game that the Pilgrim Children played when they were doing chores.
Two Truths and a Lie.
That game you just played with Debra actually originated as a game played by Pilgrim Children.
And that is time.
That's all the time.
Sorry, Max.
Bye-bye.
Really good job.
Well done.
Okay, it's decision time.
Max must consider all that he has heard and tell us whose breeches are burning or whose pants are on fire.
Max, who is our fibber?
I think Eli is the fibber.
Why do you think Eli is our fibber?
It's just like, I think one or two questions sounded a little bit off from him.
Do you know off the top of your head which ones or do you?
No.
You just made a note in your mind.
Okay.
Very good.
All right.
Well, will the actual pilgrim expert please say, I am the pilgrim expert.
I am the pilgrim expert.
You got it right, Max.
That is correct.
Malka Benjamin is director of colonial interpretation and training at Plymouth Tuxet Museums in Plymouth, Massachusetts.
Malka, what exactly does that entail?
You started to tell us a little bit.
You actually dress up as pilgrims sometimes?
I do.
So Plymouth Patuxent Museums is a super fun museum to visit.
We teach the history of the Pilgrims who, as Max knows, came on the Mayflower in 1620, and also about the Wampanoag, who Max was asking about.
Who are the indigenous people from what is today southeastern Massachusetts?
And the way we teach about them is by recreating immersive historical environments, so you can feel like you're stepping back in time.
That's super cool.
What a fun job.
I love it.
And what did you say that your friends, how did they introduce you, Malka?
So my friends introduced me as a professional pilgrim.
What a great job.
I love that so much.
So we heard a lot of interesting facts today, obviously from Malka, but we might have heard a few fibs as well.
So let's do some fact checking.
Malka, let's settle this.
How did Eli fare?
Eli, I'm really impressed with the research you did.
You got a lot of factoids correct, including your description of most of the foods we think might have been on the table at the first Thanksgiving.
But I will disagree with you on a couple of things.
One is there was no dessert.
Which is, I know, it's such a bummer, no pie.
Oh, what a terrible Thanksgiving.
No berries either?
Well, it happened in the autumn, so there might have been some wild plums, which are called beach plums today.
But the reason I say there was definitely no dessert is because that concept didn't exist in this time period.
Okay.
Don't lose hope.
What a dark time.
People, if they could afford sugar, would have sweet foods, but you would eat them as part of your meal, not at the end, because they thought that eating sugar and sweet foods helps your tummy to digest all the food.
So it was more healthy to eat, you know, your cake and cookies with your entree.
Told you, Debra.
Wow.
Very cool.
What else did you hear?
Anything in particular?
Yeah.
So there's a few things.
One is at the very beginning when Eli was talking about the speed well turning back.
So the speed well and the Mayflower did turn back.
It actually happened twice, believe it or not.
Oh.
Yeah.
And both times were because the speed well was leaking.
Oh.
The captain of speed.
Well said.
If we had been at sea only a few more hours, our ship would have sunk.
Oh, wow.
There was just a couple other ones.
Yeah, please.
So the name of the governor of Plymouth Colony that Max was talking about, who was reelected over and over, was William Bradford.
I play his wife often when I am, you know, in costume on site.
So a couple other ones.
The baby that was born on the Mayflower during the voyage, his name was actually Oceanus.
Really?
Really, because he was born in the middle of the... In the middle of the ocean, right, of course.
Okay, Malky, you had more?
Yeah, so the document that Max was asking about, that they signed to create a community that was called the Mayflower Compact.
And they all signed it to say, we're all in this together kind of thing?
Not everyone, just the men who we think were 21 years old or older.
And essentially yeah, they create a community by doing that and say we're going to follow English laws.
But if the need arises, we reserve the right to make some new laws too.
All right.
I'm going to give Eli a chance too to tell us.
Eli, how did you try to colonize the truth with your lies?
So i threw in a couple of fun lies.
The first one that i think that malcolm hasn't hit on is uh, town of scrooby.
So malcolm, correct me if i'm wrong i believe many of them did come from a town named scrooby in england.
But that's real yes, but i don't believe that there is a scrooby massachusetts, and scooby-doo, as far as i'm aware, was not named after a scrooby massachusetts.
And then my little story about Jeremy Cosgrove as well was completely made up.
The person who was a tap dancer and fiddle player who was driven to Florida, unfortunately.
There was no formal school in the early years of Plymouth Colony.
But we do think a lot of the Pilgrim children were learning how to read and maybe how to write, but definitely read at home.
The reason we think this is because of the religious beliefs of a lot of the pilgrims.
They thought it was really important to be able to read the Bible for yourself.
So they wanted their children to be able to read.
So they were homeschooling in a way.
Quite literally.
Yeah, exactly.
And then what about the games that pilgrim children played?
Did they really play two truths and a lie, Malka?
I have never seen that recorded.
Believe it or not, there are whole books of games that exist from Pilgrim Times.
So we do know a lot about the games they played.
And there are certain games that they played back then that we still play today.
So Max, have you ever played Monkey in the Middle?
Yeah.
Do you know that that game existed in Pilgrim Times?
No.
Was it called Monkey in the Middle?
It was called Dinosaur in the Middle.
It was called Fool in the Middle.
Interesting.
Yeah, but they had lots of different board games and sports and all different sorts of games that they would play.
Well, that's good.
I'm glad to hear it.
You said that the Pilgrims were originally supposed to end up in Hoboken, New Jersey.
Is that true?
So essentially northern New Jersey in the area of Hoboken.
But Northern New Jersey, which back then was part of what was known as Virginia.
Back in Pilgrim times, Virginia meant everything north of Florida up to Manhattan.
Wow.
They lost a lot of ground.
Interesting.
Very good.
And just for your information, which we weren't expecting you to know.
The Hollywood cowboy who was famous for calling people Pilgrim in old Western movies was John Wayne.
But of course, that was just a throwaway.
We weren't expecting you to know that.
And I'm going to wrap things up, too, with a few other ones here as well.
Agnes Baker Pilgrim, or Grandma Aggie, was a tribal leader for the Tekelma tribe, for your information.
Max, you did a great job, but it is time to head back to our homesteads.
But first, we shall huzzah thrice for our contestant, Max.
Thank you to our expert and liar, Malka and Eli.
And thanks to Lisa, our craftsman of words.
And, of course, many thanks to our listeners tuning into The Big Fib, where we take this quantum leap of faith that facts may flower forever.
The Big Fib is a production of Gen Z Media. for more great shows, visit gzmshows.com.
While you're there, you can find out how you can become a contestant on the Big Fib or and I don't offer this to everyone you can send questions for me to answer on the show.
And follow us on social media at the Big Fib Podcast for behind-the-scenes photos and more true facts.
And now, I'm going to go skateboard with some kill grumps.
Come on, bros!
Let's go!
No!
Come on!
Come on!
Come on!
Whoa, gnarly.
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