Transcript
00:00:00There's a bunch of research that comes out of University of Massachusetts in Amherst that shows
00:00:04that the average person tells something like two lies to a stranger within the first 10 minutes of
00:00:09conversation. We lie a lot when you say little white lies to people just to kind of get through
00:00:14the day, make things a little bit easier, etc., etc. Now, there's a problem with that, which is that
00:00:20there's a literature out there that suggests that people who are telling whopper lies and actually
00:00:24committing crimes, almost always that there's an algorithm that starts with this. If you want to
00:00:29real relationship that stands the test of time, closeness is what you want, and honesty is actually
00:00:35how you get it if you do it right. So consider this. Would you like to be freer and happier?
00:00:40Well, maybe honesty is the way for you to love yourself and love each other more.
00:00:51Hey, friends. Welcome to Office Hours. I'm Arthur Brooks. This is the show about love and happiness,
00:00:57specifically the science of love and happiness, how you can use the science to live a better life and
00:01:02how you can bring these ideas to other people as well. I try to be as practical as possible while
00:01:07bringing you really interesting ideas such that you can use them over the course of your life and you
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00:01:29the more that we spread these ideas, the happier and better off the world gets, I think. And that's
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00:02:39So what do I want to talk about today? I want to talk about honesty. This is something that I think
00:02:45about an awful lot that people have asked me about many times about how much does being completely
00:02:50honest affect your happiness. And it could go either way, right? Being a really honest person,
00:02:55really saying what you think in a society, in a world that doesn't encourage that, what will it do to you?
00:03:03I want to make the case today that honesty is a form of love. I want to make the case that being more
00:03:08honest with others than yourself, if you do it right, and that's a very important caveat,
00:03:14can make you a happier person and can make other people happier as well. And if I do my job,
00:03:18I want to make the case that in point of fact, you can turn the corner in the way that you communicate
00:03:23with other people that makes you known as somebody who is honest out of a sense of love, which will be
00:03:30very life enhancing. I want to talk about why. And then I want to tell you about how to do it, because
00:03:36that's what we do here is the how to as much as anything else. Now, before we get started, I want
00:03:42to ask you a question. What is your most controversial opinion that you're hiding?
00:03:49Now, it doesn't have to be something really horrible and offensive, just for some reason,
00:03:54something that you believe that you don't share with other people for some very good reason.
00:03:58Put in the comments, especially if you like to comment anonymously, that might be a good way
00:04:03to unburden yourself. But I'd like to know, maybe it's feelings about your family that you're not
00:04:08comfortable sharing for whatever reason. Maybe it's your religious beliefs or non-beliefs about
00:04:14religion that are different than the community that you live in. Maybe it's something that you believe
00:04:19that everybody says yes to, but just isn't true as far as you're concerned. I'd love to hear that
00:04:25in the comments, but I'd also like you to think about this and sort of keep hold of it in your head
00:04:30and ask yourself why. Almost everybody has things that they believe to be true or things that they
00:04:36have come to believe are untrue. And they're not forthright about these things. As a matter of fact,
00:04:41they might even lie about their actual true beliefs. Almost everybody has these things. I don't know
00:04:47anybody, as a matter of fact, off of the top of my head, who isn't doing that in some way,
00:04:50shape or form. Think about that thing in your own life and ask yourself, why are you doing that?
00:04:54Why are you doing that? And by the way, I'm going to assume that you have very good reasons.
00:04:59So let's think about why that might be the case. Now, number one, let's say that you have a belief
00:05:03that is at odds with the people that you care about and would affect the people that you care about,
00:05:09potentially. You might just not want to hurt people. You might not want to offend people because
00:05:14that's not a nice thing to do. And out of basic charity, you're not sharing everything that's
00:05:19written on your heart. But actually, there might be fear that's motivating you. There might be a fear
00:05:25that somebody won't like you. They won't love you. They won't admire you. They won't take you seriously.
00:05:31Or even worse, maybe you have an opinion that's so at odds with your employment situation or your
00:05:36school situation that it might lead to professional or social consequences. You might be ostracized.
00:05:41You might be thrown out of the group. Fear, in point of fact, is almost always the motivator
00:05:48of people actually not being forthright with the things that they believe.
00:05:52It is fear for their own personal security or their own personal prosperity is where it comes from. Now,
00:05:57if that's the case for you, it doesn't mean you're a coward. There's something morally faulty about you.
00:06:02On the contrary, that's evolutionary biology. I've talked about this ad nauseum on the program,
00:06:08that evolutionary biology guides so much of what we do. The middle Pleistocene period around 250,000 years
00:06:14ago when the human brain was about its current dimensions. Not its exact configuration today,
00:06:18but we were effectively modern by about that period. And that was a time when all Homo sapiens lived in
00:06:24small kin-based bands, hierarchically arranged, of 30 to 50 individuals that were hunters and gatherers.
00:06:30That was basically the whole human race. Now, during that time, you needed to get along with the people
00:06:37that you lived with. 30 to 50 people, and it was a hostile world. You do not want to be apart from
00:06:43those people. So the result of it is that you had an incredible incentive, a biologically wired incentive,
00:06:49to not rock the boat, to stay in line with what other people think. If you had a differing opinion
00:06:54about something, about, you know, a differing opinion about does elk meat taste good? I don't know.
00:06:59Does that animal skin look good on us? Whatever. Whatever the, you know, the controversy might have been.
00:07:06And you don't think like the rest of the tribe, the rest of the band, you're not going to share that.
00:07:11If you do, if you're particularly at odds with people about things that are important, you might find
00:07:15yourself walking the savanna alone. And that's the perfect way to become a cheetah's lunch.
00:07:21So therefore, our brains are literally wired to be terrified of going against the crowd,
00:07:26of social exclusion on the basis of something that we do. The dorsal anterior cingulate cortex,
00:07:32I've talked about it three or four times on the show for the past 40 episodes or so.
00:07:36That's a little part of the limbic system that's designated, that's been evolved to give us
00:07:41very, very aversive emotions, very uncomfortable feelings, because we're afraid of social exclusion.
00:07:48It gives us a sense of sadness and we don't like it. And so the result is that it's not that you're
00:07:53afraid of being left alone. You're afraid of how you'll feel if you're left alone.
00:07:57You're afraid of the feeling of social exclusion. And that's what will induce you to choose
00:08:03dishonesty over honesty a lot of the time. This is not a moral failing. This is a feature,
00:08:09not a bug on the human genome. But of course, today, that can be maladapted. You can easily
00:08:14see how we would think about walking the frozen tundra and dying alone. And we would port that basic
00:08:22primeval fear into having the wrong opinion in a biology class at the university. I say the wrong
00:08:30thing. I think something that my colleagues think is retrograde. And the result is that I'm going to
00:08:35be socially ostracized or, God forbid, canceled on social media. And that gives me the same primordial
00:08:40terror because it uses the same parts of the brain as the consequences would have been 250,000 years
00:08:45ago, or for that matter, 10,000 years ago. Well, that's anachronistic. We need to move on, but we have
00:08:50to have the proper knowledge. We have to have the proper information set such that we can use the updated
00:08:57circumstances and stand up to our limbic system and choose the way we want to live as opposed to going
00:09:03according to our animal impulses. That's what I really want to talk about when it comes to
00:09:08going your own way. Now, I've talked in the past in this show, I'm not going to talk about it today,
00:09:12but I've talked in the past about my favorite philosopher who's Ralph Waldo Emerson. He wrote
00:09:18Self-Reliance in 1841, an essay, a beautiful essay that was so controversial that his own aunt publicly
00:09:25denounced him for the rugged individualism of going your own way. You know, the whole idea that, you
00:09:31know, that when he talked about that, a very famous expression in that essay was he talked about the
00:09:36hobgoblins of little minds. You've probably heard that expression before. It actually came from
00:09:40Waldo Emerson with the little minds of the conformists, the people who don't believe
00:09:45something, but they say it anyway. And so there's this moral aspiration to be honest
00:09:50in an appropriate, non-hurtful way, but there's a fear about doing it. That's what I want to adjudicate.
00:09:57And the reason is because I believe that you can be honest, and if you do it the right way,
00:10:03you'll be happier. That's what I really want to argue, but it takes skill. So that's where I'm going.
00:10:10Done properly. Honesty is an act of charity toward others and an act of charity toward yourself.
00:10:16Now, I have a friend who is in kind of the same business as me. He's very public-facing,
00:10:20you know, a thinker, a public educator, kind of like me. He's in front of audiences all the time,
00:10:24both in media and in public, doing a lot of public events, et cetera, et cetera. And he talks about
00:10:29pretty controversial stuff. He talks about politics, for example. He talks about public policy,
00:10:33where everybody's constantly at each other's throats in America today, God knows. He takes
00:10:38honesty to an extreme because he says that honesty is an act of love. And committing an act of radical
00:10:46honesty, saying what he thinks in the spirit of love, actually makes him a lot happier. He thinks it's
00:10:51his happiness secret. He regularly disagrees with people on controversial topics. I mean,
00:10:56you know, our friends and he disagrees with me all the time. He doesn't, you know, he thinks I'm wrong,
00:11:00he tells me. When he thinks I'm wrong and I say, "So what do you think?" Just to make it easier,
00:11:05to grease the skids, he doesn't say, "It's fine, whatever." No. So that's wrong, right? And he does
00:11:11that with audiences. He does that with strangers. You know, he believes that getting at the complete
00:11:17truth of things is a favor he's doing to other people. As a matter of fact, he calls those love
00:11:22conversations. Imagine that. His theory is that people can only understand each other deeply and
00:11:28act accordingly when they are completely honest. And he, generally speaking, gets away with it.
00:11:35People have a sense that he's looking out for their welfare and he's offering up his opinion not out of
00:11:40out of egotism and not out of aggression, but as kind of a gift, as it were. He doesn't expect you to
00:11:48agree with him at all. On the contrary, if you don't agree with him, he expects you to tell him.
00:11:52What a way to live, right? Now, as a philosophical matter, you would say that he's Emersonian.
00:11:58Or even better, you'd say he's Kantian. Now, Ralph Waldo Emerson and his best friend, Henry David Thoreau,
00:12:07who wrote Walden, these were called American Transcendentalists of the Transcendental School.
00:12:14And the name was actually taken from kind of their philosophical godfather, who lived earlier than
00:12:20they did in Germany, who was the originator of what we would think of as transcendentalism. That was
00:12:24Immanuel Kant. Kant was the sort of the father of transcendentalism, continental transcendentalism,
00:12:30European transcendentalism. And his whole gig was honesty. That's what he was really all about.
00:12:37Here's a quote from Immanuel Kant in his, perhaps his greatest book called The Metaphysics of Morals,
00:12:44that was published in 1797. It was 1841 that Ralph Waldo Emerson was writing. So this was roughly,
00:12:52not exactly a contemporary, but more or less the same period, just a little earlier.
00:12:56Here's what Kant said, "By a lie, a human being throws away and, as it were, annihilates his dignity."
00:13:05In other words, when you lie to somebody for transactional purposes or for just basic ease,
00:13:11especially because you're afraid, you hurt yourself and you hurt them. And Kant, he believed in complete
00:13:18radical honesty all the time. Now, I will rush to share that Kant was a single man. He never got married.
00:13:29And so it's pretty easy for him to say, "Yeah, yeah. Tell it like it is all the time." He lived by himself.
00:13:34And there might be a reason that he lived by himself. And he was very eccentric, kind of a loner,
00:13:38as a matter of fact. So perhaps that's an easier thing for him to do than you. And that's one of the
00:13:42reasons in this episode I'm going to tell you how I can be a little Kantian or Emersonian. Emerson was
00:13:46happily married. And you can maintain your relationships at the same time, because that's the trick,
00:13:50right? That's pulling the rabbit out of the hat in this way. So how can you be a Kantian? How can you
00:13:56be an Emersonian? How can you make it work for you? Let's go to the present and let's think about
00:14:02somebody who's written philosophically about this, not in 1841 or 1797, but somebody who's writing about
00:14:07it in kind of a more contemporary self-improvement kind of way. And that's from the 1990s, an author
00:14:15by the name of Brad Blanton, who were a pretty big bestseller from the 1990s and early 2000s. He
00:14:21had a book that actually came out in 2005 called Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by
00:14:26Telling the Truth. And he was of this Emersonian belief that you got to go your own way and tell the
00:14:33truth all the time in a way that's actually helpful to people. And he made the case, because he's a
00:14:39modern writer and he's got the data, that when you do that, it has consequences for sure, but it's
00:14:45really, really worthwhile. And he shows in that book, and I'll put the book as always into the show notes,
00:14:49so you can click on it and get it easily if you want. It's nice to read. And then it can reduce stress
00:14:55and your mom told you don't lie because you're going to actually weave this web of deceit and you're
00:15:01going to get caught up in it because you're not going to remember your lies. And then it's hard
00:15:04to stay consistent with a bunch of lies because they're hard to remember. And he says that therefore
00:15:09it reduces stress to say the truth all the time to everybody and you never have to worry about what
00:15:12you told somebody else. It deepens connections with other people because the people who really
00:15:17are your friends, the people who really do love you, they do appreciate it if you do it right.
00:15:20More on that later. And they reduce emotional reactivity because when you're used to getting and
00:15:25giving the truth, you're not going to freak out when somebody says something that's not
00:15:29completely complimentary all the time. On the contrary, if you get nothing but compliments,
00:15:33you're being lied to. That's the bottom line because you're not perfect. Let's go back to a prior
00:15:38episode where we talked about not being perfect. So Immanuel Kant, Ralph Old Emerson, Brad Blanton
00:15:45of that school are making the case that more honesty properly undertaken leads to greater happiness.
00:15:52That's their argument. Now that goes completely contrary to what most people think and how most
00:15:59people act because of the basic physiological functioning of the limbic system of the brain.
00:16:05We lie all the time. But there's nothing strange about that. The fact that we naturally do something
00:16:11and a bunch of philosophers coming along and saying that if we did the opposite, we'd be happier. They
00:16:16very well might be right. Remember, I've made the case again and again and again, that you have two
00:16:20choices in life. And this is the miracle of the amazing human prefrontal cortex, the supercomputer
00:16:26in the front of your head. You can choose to go according to your animal impulses, or you can choose
00:16:32to go against your animal impulses because you're trying to serve your moral aspirations. I mean,
00:16:37people do this all the time. They're attracted to somebody who's not their spouse, but they choose not to
00:16:41pursue that attraction. That's your moral aspiration as opposed to your animal impulse. And guess what?
00:16:48The moral aspiration which goes against your animal impulse actually makes you happier. A lot of the
00:16:54time, going against Mother Nature's animal impulses is the best thing you can do. Standing up to yourself,
00:16:59being at war with these impulses is the act of self-discipline that makes you truly who you are.
00:17:05Go back to my earlier episode about my morning protocols. You think when my clock goes off at 4:30 in the
00:17:10morning, I'm like, "Hooray! It's another great day!" No. I'm like, "Ugh. Gratitude, gratitude."
00:17:18What am I doing? I get out of bed, say a little prayer. I go and I get my supplement stack ready,
00:17:28and I go down to my gym because I want my moral aspirations. I want my day to be set up in a
00:17:34particular way because I've decided to do so, not because it feels good. This is another example of this.
00:17:40Your limbic system is on one side and your need, your desire, your Kantian moral aspiration is on the
00:17:49other. How can you do the thing that the philosophers say will make you happier well enough that the
00:17:55consequences, that the costs don't outweigh the benefits? That's what we're going to come back to.
00:18:03But before we do that, because I promise you I'm going to be very practical today as always,
00:18:06I want to back up and I want to talk about the kinds of lies and why we tell them. This research
00:18:13has always blown my mind. There's a bunch of research that comes out of University of Massachusetts
00:18:18in Amherst that shows that the average person tells something like two lies to a stranger within
00:18:23the first 10 minutes of conversation. We lie a lot. And that's not well replicated. But you know people
00:18:31lie all the time. And the most interesting and reliable part of the social science research on
00:18:37this is the types of lies. There's a very nice article from 2008, which is now almost 20 years old,
00:18:43but there's no reason to think that this would be out of date. Psychologists writing in the Journal of
00:18:47Social and Personal Relationships talked about the big three types of lies. This is actually in the
00:18:53Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. As I mentioned before, it's called Individual
00:18:56Differences and Lying in Everyday Life. It's pretty much on its face. And once again, this goes in the
00:19:02notes like everything else. They classified lies in three types. Number one, are self-centered lies to
00:19:09influence others or to make a good impression. Like, you know, hey, you know, President United States
00:19:14asked me to be his vice president, but I turned him down, right? That's a kind of a self-burnishing lie.
00:19:19That's lifting yourself up. That's a, you know, exaggeration falls into that particular category
00:19:23to make yourself actually look better. People do that a lot. The second type of lie are other-oriented
00:19:28lies to protect the feelings of a person you're lying to. So, you know, people say to me, it's like,
00:19:33you haven't aged a day. It's like, yeah, really? You need to get your eyes checked. Are you kidding me?
00:19:38You know, I'll see people I haven't seen in 20 years and say, wow, you look great. I don't have to have a
00:19:42big lie detector to figure out that that one isn't right. What are they doing? They're actually trying
00:19:45to protect my feelings. They're not going to say, you have lost a lot of hair because it's sort of
00:19:51not polite or they think that it's going to actually be a problem for the relationship. Now, with me,
00:19:55it's actually not going to hurt my feelings very much because the truth is the truth to be sure,
00:20:00but people do that all the time. That's number two. Number three is altruistic lies to protect a
00:20:06third party. That would go into the kind of category of she was with me all night, officer.
00:20:12In other words, to create an alibi or something where you lie to protect somebody is the way that
00:20:16that works. And so those are the three types of lies that these psychologists actually found.
00:20:22Now, here's the interesting part about that. With close friends and romantic partners,
00:20:26we're most likely to tell other-oriented and altruistic lies, number two and three,
00:20:31because we love them. And we think that we're actually being better with them by doing those
00:20:36things, by lying to them so that we won't hurt their feelings and lying to protect them.
00:20:40But we don't tell very many of these if we really love them, these self-centered lies.
00:20:45I mean, it's very unlikely that I'm going to go home to my wife and I'm going to tell her something
00:20:48great that happened to me professionally that didn't happen, for example. That would be a weird thing
00:20:52to do, as a matter of fact. On the other hand, with strangers, we do the opposite. With strangers,
00:20:58you know, you're sitting next to somebody on the plane and they ask you what you do for a living
00:21:01and you kind of gilded a little bit, perhaps. So you're a writer, really? Really? What's your
00:21:08latest book? Okay, how's it doing? Great, great. People are buying it. It turns out that three people
00:21:12have bought the book, whatever. But the whole point is that you tend to puff yourself up more before
00:21:16strangers and you're way less likely to protect them or lie to them to spare their feelings, especially to
00:21:23protect them because you have no skin in the game. You've got no reason to actually do that. So that's
00:21:28interesting, isn't it? How we approach lies with respect to people close to us as opposed to people
00:21:32farther away from us. Now this is starting to create a taxonomy of lies and I want to add a couple of
00:21:37others that actually come from the research outside of that paper I just talked about. There are two
00:21:42other motives for lying that we can add to the first three. Number one is just sheer laziness. So when the
00:21:49waiter asks, "How's your lunch?" and it's like gross and salty and you're like, "Fine." I mean, technically,
00:21:55that's a lie. I'm not saying that, you know, you got to go confess to a priest because you told that lie
00:22:00necessarily. You figured that one out yourself. But you said that because you didn't want to go to the
00:22:04trouble of explaining, "My fish tacos were just unbelievably salty. I don't know what's wrong
00:22:09with them." Because you look like a complainer and it becomes a problem and people will actually
00:22:13say stuff that isn't true because they want to get in and get out. Sheer laziness is really,
00:22:18really common. These types of white lies, they kind of smooth the flow of interactions. That's what,
00:22:24that's how a couple of scholars put it in a paper called "The Effects of Deception in Social
00:22:29Networks." So that's blaziness. Here's another one. I guess that was number four. So this would be
00:22:36lie reason number five, adding to the first three that I talked about. Little white lies are often a
00:22:41social lubricant and they can actually seem virtuous. You know, you can kind of pat yourself on the back for
00:22:46your sensitivity and tact when you say something that's actually not really true. But, you know,
00:22:53and again, these are not mutually exclusive. These are related to other things that I've talked about
00:22:56here. But you can turn your lying vice into a little virtue inside your own head when you say a little
00:23:01white lies to people just to kind of get through the day, make things a little bit easier, et cetera,
00:23:06et cetera. And people do this a lot, actually. Now, there's a problem with that, which is that
00:23:12there's a literature out there that suggests that people who are telling whopper lies and actually
00:23:17committing crimes almost always that there's an algorithm that starts with this. Little white lies
00:23:23that are a social lubricant that are making your life a little bit easier, or maybe that's the laziness
00:23:27motive, and it turns into something a little bigger and something turns into something a little bit
00:23:31bigger and a little bit bigger. So these relatively innocuous motivations, they tend to be not innocuous at
00:23:39all because this escalates. Dishonest behavior builds on itself. And again, social scientists
00:23:44have shown that nobody actually wakes up one day from a completely virtuous and honest lifestyle and
00:23:49say, "You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to go rob a bank and lie to the cops." No. What they
00:23:54do is they cut corners here and then a little bit more there and a little bit more there. And they can
00:23:58actually, the people who've done, you know, really big dishonest things, like building a completely
00:24:03false version of themselves. I wish there were just some whopper cases out there that it started with
00:24:09little lies, kind of like the ones we're talking about here. So if you're with me still and you want
00:24:14to find a way to not lie, don't lie. I mean, even little things, even these little social lubricants,
00:24:20even these little ease of interaction with people.
00:24:26Okay. So now, why not? I mean, okay, I just gave you, I guess, suppose I just gave you a good reason
00:24:32why not, because it'll turn into, you know, you becoming a congenital liar or something.
00:24:36Maybe not. There's a lot between little lies and ruining your life. But there are some real reasons
00:24:43why lying doesn't really necessarily make life happier, quite the contrary. So let's go in the
00:24:49direction that we usually do in this show, which is, I want to talk about how being honest actually
00:24:56can make you happier or that being dishonest will actually make you unhappier.
00:25:01Right now, you're like Neo in the Matrix. You can keep scrolling, experiencing a simulation of life,
00:25:08or you can wake up to how your attention is being harvested for profit.
00:25:12It's happening to people all over the world right now. You don't want to be productized like this
00:25:18anymore. But it's hard. Tech addiction is so potent because it's been designed to tap into your
00:25:24dopamine system. Just like heroin, porn, gambling, you've got the cravings, you're addicted. You don't
00:25:29like it, and I don't either. But I can't just tell you to stop doing it. That's hard. If you want to
00:25:34break free from the system, you need an incentive. Here's one. Why don't you join a phone company that pays you
00:25:40not to use your phone? If you want to reduce brain rot, get Noble Mobile. It pays you to use
00:25:46less data. It gives you an incentive to unplug. Noble Mobile is the phone plan that finally aligns
00:25:52incentives with what's good for you. Use less data, earn money back. And when you do, you'll be living
00:25:58once again in real life. And you're going to like how it feels. If you're like me, you got to be drinking
00:26:03when you're in the gym and you have to be drinking something clean without any calories that will
00:26:08actually give you your electrolytes and all the good stuff. For me, that's Element. LMNT. You probably
00:26:13knew that already. It's a great product that helps you stay hydrated without sugar and a bunch of dodgy
00:26:19ingredients that are found in a lot of popular electrolyte drinks and sports drinks. No sugar,
00:26:24no junk, just electrolytes that actually work. Give it a try. I like it. It's science-backed and made for
00:26:30athletes, fasting, keto, or happiness scientists like me. Anyone who sweats. So how do I use it? I use it
00:26:38in the morning, 4:45 in the morning. I don't like to drink anything with caffeine or anything that peps
00:26:43me up because I like to be real clear and I drink my caffeine later. Element is just the ticket that I
00:26:48need. Give it a try yourself. Right now, you can get a free sample pack with any purchase at Drink Element.
00:26:54That's drink, just like it sounds, lmnt.com/Arthur. Try it risk-free. If you don't like it, they'll refund
00:27:02your order. No questions asked, but you're going to like it. The happiness case against ordinary easy
00:27:10lying starts with, number one, very clear research showing that lying, even little lies, make you less
00:27:19likeable. And people know when you're lying a lot more than you think. There's a bunch of papers out
00:27:26there on what's called humble bragging, which you probably know that expression. Those of you who are
00:27:30from outside the United States, you might not. Humble bragging is when you're bragging, but when you're
00:27:35not bragging, you're actually looking like you're self-effacing, but you're actually bragging.
00:27:41And so it'll be something like, "Ah, gotta go see the President of the United States today,
00:27:45but forgot to get my suit pressed. What a moron I am." That's a total humble brag. You're trying to
00:27:50tell the audience on social media, if that's where you posted it, that you're going to go see the
00:27:55President of the United States, not that you actually think you're a moron because your suit is wrinkled.
00:27:58That's a dishonest thing to do because you're hiding your motivations. People know. People have a
00:28:04hundred ways to detect that. If you think humble bragging is actually serving its purpose, you're wrong.
00:28:11And again, the literature really shows that people who humble brag are despised. It's just really,
00:28:17really terrible. And little lying, even to kind of butter people up, people don't like that either.
00:28:22You might notice that when you go in to buy something and, you know, the person, the clerk or
00:28:28the salesperson is telling you about how great your taste is, that it makes you uncomfortable.
00:28:34The reason it makes you uncomfortable is because you're detecting dishonesty. And when you detect
00:28:38dishonest, you become uncomfortable around the person, meaning that the person has become less
00:28:42likable to you. Well, you're just a salesman when you're doing that, or a salesman who's not being
00:28:47completely forthright. Now, it's probably better than when I go to buy a car, the guy doesn't come
00:28:51out of the back room and say, "Hey, who's the bald guy?" and start making fun of me. That probably
00:28:56wouldn't work either. But the truth is, you don't have to choose between being a jerk and being dishonest.
00:29:01And that's actually where we want to go with that. But the bottom line is, and again,
00:29:05I'll put up a really nice paper from the Journal of Social Psychology that makes this case of
00:29:11disliking and lying to people who lie to us. That's what the name of the paper is. And you'll see all
00:29:17this. We know our brains are so wonderfully complex that we have lie detectors inside us. They're not
00:29:23perfect. The second reason that so-called innocent lying actually doesn't make you happier is that it
00:29:30harms relationships and it lowers happiness by lowering trust. And this is especially true in
00:29:35intimate relationships. So for example, if you're married and your marriage is kind of resting on a
00:29:42bed of mild, relatively innocuous untruths, that bed of untruths actually adds up to mistrust.
00:29:52The reason is because if you don't tell me the truth about little things, I'm not really going to
00:29:56trust you to tell me the truth about big things. And so you'll find, for example, that that spouses who
00:30:02fib to each other, fib to here, where am I going? How much money did I spend? Or even the kinds of
00:30:06lies to protect the other person. Yeah, you look great in that. How do these pants look on me? They
00:30:10look great. They look great. You're never quite forthright with your partner. They won't trust you
00:30:15in the big things either completely. This really, really compromises trust. And I've seen the data on that.
00:30:22I've seen the research on that, but I've experienced that as well. So I've been with Mrs. B for 1988.
00:30:28So we're going on 38 years at this point. We met on July 7th, 1988, Bastille Day in France,
00:30:37of all places. We got to know each other over the next year or so because we were living in different
00:30:41countries. She was in Spain. I was in the United States. And we were learning each other's language,
00:30:44didn't speak a word of each other's languages. But as we did and we started to learn to communicate,
00:30:50I had to wonder why did she fall in love with me? I mean, I honestly wanted to know because
00:30:56she's beautiful. She was interesting. She's smart. And I'm not saying that she was out of my league.
00:31:02I guess she was, but I was really interested. I mean, what was it? I mean, why did you fall in love
00:31:07with me? And you know what she told me? She said, because you're the first man who's been honest with
00:31:11me ever. Completely honest. You never lie. It's a hump. And you know, that I think that reflects
00:31:18very poorly on, on Spanish men, perhaps that she, at least the ones that she had dated, because she
00:31:23said all the guys she'd gone out with before, they were just like, they say whatever they want. I mean,
00:31:27not really terrible things, not really deceiving her in all these ways, but they just weren't
00:31:31reliable. They weren't trustworthy. They weren't honest with her. Look, since, and over the past 35 years,
00:31:37I know lots of Spanish guys who are impeccably honest. Maybe she dated the wrong guys. I don't
00:31:42know. But the bottom line is that she fell in love with me because I was honest, including in the times
00:31:47when it wasn't that comfortable for me to be honest. Why was I honest? I don't know. I mean,
00:31:52I come from a family where that's super highly prized. I remember that my, I think it probably was,
00:31:57it was a tactic on my parents' part. I remember my mother saying when I was a little guy,
00:32:02she used to say, you know, when you were really little, sometimes you'd tell lies, but when you knew,
00:32:07how important the truth was, you became an honest boy, you became an honest person. And I just was
00:32:12beaming with that. That just made me feel so good that I was getting complimented by my mom and that.
00:32:17And I remember doing that with my son, Carlos too. And he's really super honest. I have to say,
00:32:21sometimes to a fault where it just makes me uncomfortable. You know, a young guy,
00:32:25my son, Carlos, our son, Carlos, Esther and my son, Carlos. But it's a big value in our family. It's a big
00:32:32value in our marriage. And that's the truth that you will harm your intimate relationships with just
00:32:37the easy lies. I've got the data and I've got the experiences that show that while little lies will
00:32:47protect moment to moment harmony, it will compromise moment to moment closeness. And I'm telling you,
00:32:54friends, when it comes to a good marriage or a good friendship, closeness beats harmony eight days a
00:33:01week. It just does. If you want a real relationship that stands the test of time, closeness is what you
00:33:07want. And honesty is actually how you get it. If you do it right, which is where I need to go next.
00:33:13All right. Now, I believe based on all the things that I've told you here, that Kant and Emerson
00:33:19have got the better of the argument that the the place to seem brain doesn't have it right. As long as you
00:33:26get serious about honesty and you get good at honesty. Okay, so that's where we get practical
00:33:31here. How can you make sure honesty improves your life? How can you be more of a virtuoso in honesty?
00:33:40I'm not saying that you could be honest and never have any conflict. You're gonna have more conflict,
00:33:43but where it makes your relationships better and not worse. Here's where it starts. Number one,
00:33:49and of course, all these things are validated. So I'll give you the studies, but this one might
00:33:52sound counterintuitive. Nonetheless, if you want to be more honest and you want more honesty in your
00:33:58life, the first thing that you need is to seek and accept honesty from other people. I know people who
00:34:04are trying to be good Kantians, good Emersonians who want to dish out the honesty, but they don't want
00:34:08honesty from other people. They don't want the truth. My dad used to say, I don't want the truth,
00:34:13but I need it to be excellent, to be a good man. I actually need it. And I think he really believed
00:34:18that. Probably that's the basis of this big family value of ours. But I meet people all the
00:34:23time who are really quite willing to tell the truth to everybody, but they become really prickly when
00:34:28they're presented with truths that they find difficult to accept. The tendency is to dish out criticism
00:34:33and being unable to take it. And that's the style of a narcissist. That's the style of a thin-skinned jerk,
00:34:39as a matter of fact, and is not an expression of love. I'll put a nice article from Psychology Today
00:34:46in the notes. The Narcissist Dilemma. They can dish it out, but they can't take it. So here's the first
00:34:54commitment to make if you want to go on this journey. Commit yourself to honesty. That starts with a
00:35:00commitment to be honest with yourself and to demand and expect honesty from other people. Now, part of the
00:35:08deal is, when people are honest with you, they're going to give you the truth as they see it. So you
00:35:14have to make a commitment not to be offended when people tell you when they give you the truth,
00:35:19right? But you also have to remember that people's opinions are not facts, meaning that you have to
00:35:25use your judgment and the truth that people are giving you to decide whether or not it is something
00:35:29you should accept. And that takes a lot of wisdom, and it also takes a lot of intestinal fortitude.
00:35:34It takes a lot of strength, and it takes practice is the bottom line. Sometimes what you'll hear will be
00:35:40intended to offend you when you do this, as a matter of fact, but you can almost always choose not to
00:35:46take offense. Bottom line. Step one, be honest with yourself and demand honesty from other people,
00:35:53even when it hurts. Okay, now that's hard. I'm a defensive soul. But boy, oh boy, is it important
00:36:02in my life. Here's the second protocol for living an honest life. Offer the truth to everybody,
00:36:08always to heal, never to harm. So you see, here's the thing. If you have a belief about anything,
00:36:13if you have any controversial view or whatever it is, if you're using it as a weapon, you're using it wrong.
00:36:19If you're trying to convince people about your political opinions, for example, if you're using
00:36:24them as a cudgel against people with whom you disagree, you're doing it wrong. You know, you're
00:36:28going to get what psychologists call the boomerang effect. The more you argue, the less people are
00:36:33going to agree with you if you're using your values as a weapon. But if you use them as a gift, you can get
00:36:40away with a lot. In my teaching about human happiness, nobody watching us doesn't know that
00:36:47universities are tricky places these days. I mean, things that would have been ordinary knowledge
00:36:53a few decades ago, you have to tread really lightly. You're walking on eggshells because
00:36:57there's been, especially over the past 10 years or so, this climate of sort of cancellation and
00:37:03self-censorship. And a lot of professors are frankly terrified to say anything even remotely
00:37:08controversial, but I'm committed to speaking the truth about the science, the behavioral science
00:37:15and the neuroscience and the conclusions that it comes to, which means I'm not going to lie to my
00:37:18students. I can't do it. It can't be done. It's not right, unethical. So here's how I do it. I commit
00:37:24to myself that everything I'm going to teach my students is an expression of love and never something
00:37:29that's going to try to be funny for the sake of humor or controversial because I'm trying to be edgy.
00:37:35Those are a cudgel in their way. When, by about the third week of the class, my graduate students,
00:37:41they trust me. They trust me because I have their best interest at heart. And literally,
00:37:45before I go out to teach every day, I pray for them. I pray for my students. I say,
00:37:48"Make every word that comes out of my mouth a way to lift them up and bring them together in bonds of
00:37:53happiness and love," which I would say at the beginning of this podcast as well, because that's
00:37:59the prayer I say before I get on the air. So that's truth to heal, not truth to harm. And it will almost
00:38:06never, almost never lead you astray. I've almost never seen it turn into a big catastrophe for
00:38:13somebody who's trying to do good. People know your motives, because once again, we have a spider sense
00:38:19about that. Now, one of the ways that you could do this too, by the way, when you're trying to love
00:38:23with truth as opposed to harm with truth, is you look for the virtues rather than the imperfections of others.
00:38:29And so this is something that I would recommend that you do systematically, that you look for something
00:38:35beautiful and tell them honestly. I mean, don't look for something and lie to them about something
00:38:41that's not a virtue or something that's not an element of beauty in somebody else. Look for something that's
00:38:46actually there. And there's something good in everybody. There's something wonderful in almost
00:38:51everybody. Look for it and tell them. And that's the kind of truth that establishes the credibility such
00:38:56that even when you have to say something is difficult, they're going to know that it's not
00:38:59not motivated by animus. It's not motivated by ill will. Now, at this point, let me take a slight
00:39:07detour and make this point. Telling the truth all the time, not lying, is not the same thing as going
00:39:14out of your way to point everything out. And again, I'm not trying to split hairs here, but when your
00:39:22spouse says, "Do I look good in this?" and she or he doesn't, and you say, "I don't think it's the best."
00:39:29That's very different than when your spouse comes downstairs wearing some particular clothes and
00:39:35you don't think it looks good to say, "Hey, you look terrible today." That you don't have to do that.
00:39:39You don't have to volunteer absolutely everything because that's not an expression of love either.
00:39:44It's being judicious and having prudential judgment about this as part of how you're going to be a
00:39:50truthful person as well. They ask, you don't lie, but you don't have to bring things up constantly either.
00:39:57It's not a lie of omission to not give every criticism that crosses your cortex all the time.
00:40:04And that's another way that you offer truth to heal, not to harm.
00:40:09Number three, make the truth appealing. Turn your wrong into, "Here's a way I think you can think
00:40:17about this issue differently." You see what I'm saying, right? I mean, both of them are the truth,
00:40:21but one of them is constructive as opposed to destructive. You're making it appealing from other
00:40:26people. If your boss asks, "Hey, do you like working here?" It's not right to lie and say you do and you don't.
00:40:32But you can say, you know, there's a bunch of things that I've been thinking about that could make this
00:40:37job a lot more interesting and fun. That's a constructive answer to that question. You answered
00:40:42his question, by the way, and he's going to get it that what you just said. But at the same time,
00:40:47you're not just laying it out there like, no, this place is crummy, it sucks. This place could be
00:40:53better and I have some ideas and I want to make it better. And there are very few bosses who are so
00:40:59thin-skinned. Then they're going to fire you over that. Your honest feedback will not always be
00:41:04appreciated, of course, but it can help you hold on to some of the benefits of what would have been
00:41:10pro-social lies without the costs of losing other people's respect and losing respect for yourself.
00:41:16I've been imitating my friend with his love conversations and experimenting with a lot more
00:41:20honesty. And this is a lifelong project for me. I mean, again, according to my wife, it's something that
00:41:26comes pretty naturally to me, but we could all be better me too. Okay. So I am trying to make sure
00:41:32that that's the case. And one of the ways that I'm doing that is by asking people to give me their
00:41:36unvarnished views, which is why I ask you as viewers of this to tell me the truth. And as you see it in
00:41:44the comments, it doesn't mean I'm going to agree with you, but you know, there's no reason for you to
00:41:48write something you don't think. And, and, and I would appreciate it if you wrote me what you do think,
00:41:53if you feel like doing that, I'm also out of a spirit of respect, more forthcoming with my personal views,
00:41:59even when they're out of step. And, and again, I'm an academic and a lot of my views, I have very
00:42:03heterodox views about many issues, social issues, political issues, economic issues. I'm just not
00:42:09a typical academic. And I'm, I'm over the past seven years in particular, I've been quite open
00:42:15about that. So far so good. I haven't gotten divorced or beaten up or fired, and I feel freer than I ever
00:42:22have before. And Pat, perhaps paradoxically, I'm, I'm actually less concerned of the opinions of other
00:42:27people as I do this. And, and you can as well, you can be free. And when you're freer, you are happier.
00:42:36That's the bottom line. So consider this, would you like to be freer and happier? Well,
00:42:41maybe honesty is the way for you to love yourself and love each other more. Take a couple of
00:42:47questions and we'll be done. Uh, one from Kenwood, just one word, Kenwood, it's like share, but you
00:42:52know, Kenwood, um, office hours at author works.com. What are a few things Ken would ask that I should
00:42:58focus on during this coming summer. And then my senior year of high school, I have almost nothing
00:43:03planned. Don't want to waste it. Well, uh, already you're, you know, winning Kenwood to say,
00:43:08I got a whole summer and I don't want to waste it. Good for you. Fantastic. So here's what I would
00:43:14recommend, um, a couple of things, a couple of resources, uh, go back to my protocols for health
00:43:19and happiness, morning protocols and eating protocols. There's two separate shows. Watch those. You, we have
00:43:25PDF downloads that you'll actually get in the show notes that will, you know, the, the documents that
00:43:31take you through the science and how to set up your day. Now don't make the perfect, the enemy of the
00:43:35good. You don't have to do it exactly the way that I do, but I would recommend starting to get into
00:43:38habits of living habits of living that will take them out of willpower and cognitive load and turn
00:43:43them into automatic things. And the way that you pray, the way that you exercise, the way that you eat,
00:43:48that will be really science-based and really helpful for you. That's the first thing I would recommend.
00:43:51Second, I go to my reading list. I have a reading list on my website, very easy to find and, and,
00:43:57and, and go through a few of these things and maybe more because it's summertime. I mean,
00:44:01that's what you read the summer. That's the best thing ever. Um, and actually reading things you
00:44:06don't have to read, but are of your own volition, but are highly intellectually and, and psychologically
00:44:11nutritious morally. So as well, um, I, I really recommend it. Love everything on that particular
00:44:17reading list and, and every, anybody else's reading list that you want as well, read more and think
00:44:22more, ponder more, use it for that. And then here's the third thing I would recommend. I would recommend
00:44:28if you've got a lot of time is to find a way to serve other people more. I would recommend finding
00:44:33a way to volunteer, um, going places where you have never seen yourself exactly in communities of
00:44:40people that you wouldn't ordinarily encounter and actually serving them in a spirit of love more.
00:44:44I would have a summer of discipline, learning and cert and love through service. That's the summer
00:44:51that I would, uh, that I would build. And that'll be one of the best summers of your life. Blake writes
00:44:56in at the website, what's one principle or practice in your morning and evening framework that you
00:45:02personally find really hard to follow? Yeah. I mean, there's a few, I mean, it's like, I wouldn't have
00:45:06to have a protocol if we're all easy, just falling off a log, but the evening protocols are much harder
00:45:12for me than the morning protocols getting up at four 30 in the morning. It's easy for easier for me
00:45:16than a lot of stuff for staying really disciplined at night. Sometimes I'm not as disciplined about my,
00:45:21my device use as I should be because I got something I'm thinking about or waiting for messages from
00:45:25people or I'm just distracted. So messy device use, but even more, here's the big one, uh,
00:45:33sweets. I just can't, I can't, I can't get off the sweets. It's, it's not, it's not good for me.
00:45:39Look, this is not the end of the world. I know. Um, but the truth of the matter is that the research
00:45:44is getting stronger and stronger, that highly refined sugar, especially with, um, highly processed
00:45:50foods. It's really, really bad for you. And, you know, if you gave me, you know, on a desert island,
00:45:54I could, I only had a week to live and one food item, it would be, you know, graham crackers with
00:45:58Nutella smash. It's like, I'm like a baby or, you know, a bag of candy corn. It's pathetic.
00:46:04The bottom line is that my brain loves glucose spikes. And, and, and so the one thing I really
00:46:11struggle with is sweets. Now I don't drink alcohol, which probably has something to do with it. By the
00:46:17way, I used to drink a lot of alcohol, especially in my twenties and thirties. And, and when you drink a
00:46:22lot and then you stop, one of the things that, that people have in common is that we do that is that
00:46:27they tend to get really, really addicted to the, to the sweet stuff. So it's probably related.
00:46:31Last but not least, uh, is Mohammed Al-Kamil writes in, uh, what are the benefits and disadvantages
00:46:37of naps? What's the optimal time and duration for a retired 57 year old person to get a better energy,
00:46:44get better energy during the day and a good sleep at night? Very dependent. Different people respond to
00:46:49this in different ways, but there are a few napping protocols that I recommend. Number one
00:46:53is that is to keep in mind that people who nap, if they do it right, they can get better overall
00:46:58rest, but they almost always have worse night sleep. So there is a trade-off, no matter what,
00:47:03there's going to be a trade-off. Here are the two, uh, rules. If you're going to nap, I don't nap
00:47:08because I'm a bad night sleeper to begin with. And if I take a nap during the, during the middle of the
00:47:12day, I'll probably not go to sleep at night. So you gotta, you gotta do you. My friend,
00:47:17Arianna Huffington, she takes tons of naps and she, it's one of the great secrets to her career.
00:47:21And she's even written a book about it. Um, so different strokes and, you know, different
00:47:26physiologies, but here are the two rules for people who take naps. Number one, don't nap in the seven
00:47:31hours before you go to bed. If you go to bed at 10 PM, don't nap after three. It's really, really
00:47:37important that your body, your circadian rhythms will be interrupted. Their sleep architecture will get
00:47:42messed up if you're napping too close to bedtime. Second is don't go into a deep sleep, generally
00:47:49speaking. So make it short, you know, and a three hour nap is highly problematic. We actually get
00:47:53into cycles of deep sleep, stay in the more shallow cycles of sleep. And by the way, those are the two
00:47:58protocols that people follow in countries that nap a lot. You know, I've, I've lived off and on Spain.
00:48:03In Spain, the siesta, when does it happen? Happens right after lunch. Um, now that means that people
00:48:07will typically take a cat nap at, you know, three 30 to four or something like that. And that's because
00:48:13they're not going to bed before midnight. You know, if you're in Madrid, for example, people are up all
00:48:19hours. As a matter of fact, that's a, you know, it's a four o'clock nap. That's so late, not in Spain.
00:48:23And, and they, they generally speaking, try not to go into a deep sleep. My father-in-law, you know,
00:48:29lifelong after lunch siesta taker, he would have keys in his hands. He would go to sleep with his keys in his
00:48:35hands and big, you know, it was like an old guy with the keys, like 75 keys, old school. And he would
00:48:41keep it with his hand and you'd be falling asleep, falling asleep, and falling asleep until his hand
00:48:46would relax and his keys would fall on the floor and wake him up. That was just, that was his secret.
00:48:50That's what he did. So that's what I recommend. It's actually, um, if you're going to do that,
00:48:54make sure that you're doing it in a disciplined way that doesn't interrupt your nighttime sleep and,
00:48:57and the experiment. Thanks Mohammed with that and a happy nap. Uh, we're done. Let me know your
00:49:02thoughts at office hours at arthurbrooks.com. Like, and subscribe on Spotify, Apple, YouTube,
00:49:07wherever you are getting this podcast. Leave me a comment. Again, just be honest. It's all good.
00:49:14I can take it. Follow me on, on socials, Instagram, LinkedIn, all the other platforms where there's
00:49:19original content coming out every single day. And please do order The Meaning of Your Life,
00:49:24my newest book, um, get it for somebody that you love, get it for a million of your closest friends,
00:49:28and to learn more about all these ideas. And please do share this podcast
00:49:32because I wanted to reach as many people as we possibly can. I'll see you next week.