Office Hours with Arthur Brooks - How Lying Sabotages Your Happiness

Starting point is 00:00:00 There's a bunch of research that comes out of University of Massachusetts, Amherst, that shows that the average person tells something like two lies to a stranger within the first 10 minutes of conversation. We lie a lot when you say a little white lies to people just to kind of get through the day, make things a little bit easier, et cetera, et cetera. Now, there's a problem with that, which is that there's a literature out there that suggests that people who are telling whopper lies and actually committing crimes, almost always that there's an algorithm that starts with this. If you want a real relationship that stands the test of time, closeness is what you want, and honesty is actually how you get it, if you do it right. So consider this. Would you like to be freer and happier?

Starting point is 00:00:40 Well, maybe honesty is the way for you to love yourself and love each other more. Hey friends, welcome to office hours. I'm Arthur Brooks. This is the show about love and happiness, specifically the science of love and happiness, how you can use the science to live a better life, and how you can bring these ideas to other people as well. I try to be as practical as possible while bringing you really interesting ideas

Starting point is 00:01:08 such that you can use them over the course of your life and you can explain them to other people. And I appreciate very much that so many of you are writing in to say that you're teaching this material to the people around you all the time. Please do keep doing so. One of the ways that you can spread these ideas, of course, is to share the show.

Starting point is 00:01:23 Please send a link wherever you're listening or watching this to people that you love and people that you know because the more that we spread these ideas, the happier and better off the world gets, I think, and that's exactly what I want. And I dare say that's probably what you want as well. If you're a long time listener, viewer, thank you for staying with us. Please feedback telling us how we could make this show more interesting, how we could make it more useful, easier to look at,

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Starting point is 00:02:28 retreats that are going on teaching this particular material with people that I have trained and some of which I'm actually doing myself. So go to retreats. Dot Arthur Brooks.com. Love to see you. So what do I want to talk about today? I want to talk about honesty. This is something that I think about an awful lot that people have asked me about many times about how much does being completely honest affect your happiness. And it could go either way, right? Being a really honest person, really saying what you think in a society in a world that doesn't encourage that, what will it do to you? I want to make the case today that honesty is a form of love. I want to make the case that being more honest with others and yourself,

Starting point is 00:03:09 if you do it right, and that's a very important caveat, can make you a happier person and can make other people happier as well. And if I do my job, I want to make the case that in point of fact, you can turn the corner in the way that you communicate with other people that makes you known as somebody who's honest, out of a sense of love, which will be very life-enhancing. I want to talk about why, and then I want to tell you about how to do it, because that's what we do here, is the how-to as much as anything else. Now, before we get started, I'm going to ask you a question. What is your most controversial opinion that you're hiding? Now, it doesn't have to be something really horrible and offensive, just for some reason, something that you believe that you

Starting point is 00:03:55 don't share with other people for some very good reason. Put it in the comments, especially if you like to comment anonymously, that might be a good way to unburden yourself. But I'd like to know, maybe it's feelings about your family that you're not comfortable sharing for whatever reason. Maybe it's your religious beliefs or non-beliefs about religion that are different than the community that you live in. Maybe it's something that you believe that everybody says yes to, but just isn't true as far as you're concerned. I'd love to hear that. I'd love to hear that. I'd love to hear that in the comments, but I'd also like you to think about this and sort of keep hold of it in your head and ask yourself, why? Almost everybody has things that they believe to be true or things that

Starting point is 00:04:36 they have come to believe are untrue, and they're not forthright about these things. As a matter of fact, they might even lie about their actual true beliefs. Almost everybody has these things. I don't know anybody, as a matter of fact, off of the top of my head who isn't doing that in some way, shape, or form. Think about that thing in your own life and ask yourself, why are you doing that? Why are you doing that? And by the way, I'm going to assume that you have very good reasons. So let's think about why that might be the case. Now, number one, let's say that you have a belief that is at odds with the people that you care about and would affect the people that you care about potentially. You might just not want to hurt people. You might not want to offend people because

Starting point is 00:05:15 that's not a nice thing to do. And out of basic charity, you're not sharing everything. It's written on your heart. But actually, there might be fear that's motivating you. There might be a fear that somebody won't like you. They won't love you. They won't admire you. They won't take you seriously. Or even worse, maybe you have an opinion that's so at odds with your, if your employment situation or your school situation, that it might lead to professional or social consequences.

Starting point is 00:05:40 You might be ostracized. You might be thrown out of the group. Fear, in point of fact, is almost always the motivator of people actually not being forthright with the things that they believe. and it is fear for their own personal security or their own personal prosperity is where it comes from. Now, if that's the case for you, it doesn't mean you're a coward. There's something morally faulty about you. On the contrary, that's evolutionary biology. I've talked about this at nauseam on the program, that evolutionary biology guides so much of what we do, the middle-plicein period around 250,000 years ago

Starting point is 00:06:14 when the human brain was about its current dimensions. Not its exact configuration today, but we were effectively modern by about that period. And that was a time when all homo sapiens lived in small, kin-based bands hierarchically arranged of 30 to 50 individuals that were hunters and gatherers. That was basically the whole human race. Now, during that time, you needed to get along with the people that you lived with, 30 to 50 people, and it was a hostile world.

Starting point is 00:06:41 You do not want to be apart from those people. So the result of it is that you had an incredible incentive, a biologically wired incentive to not rock the boat, to stay in line with other people think. If you had a differing opinion about something about, you know, a differing opinion about does elk meat taste good? I don't know. Does that animal skin look good on us? Whatever, whatever, you know, their controversy might have been. And you don't think like the rest of the tribe, the rest of the band, you're not going to share that.

Starting point is 00:07:11 If you do, if you're particularly at odds with people about things are important, you might find yourself walking the savannah. alone, and that's the perfect way to become a Cheetah's lunch. So therefore, our brains are literally wired to be terrified of going against the crowd, of social exclusion on the basis of something that we do. The dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, I've talked about it three or four times in the show for the past 40 episodes or so. That's a little part of the limbic system that's designated that's been evolved to give us very, very aversive emotions, very uncomfortable feelings because we're afraid of social exclusion. It gives us a sense of sadness and we don't like it. And so the result is that it's not that you're afraid of being left alone. You're afraid of how you'll feel if you're left

Starting point is 00:07:56 alone. You're afraid of the feeling of social exclusion. And that's what will induce you to choose dishonesty over honesty a lot of the time. This is not a moral failing. This is a feature, not a bug on the human genome. But of course, today, that can be maladapted. You can easily see how we would think about walking the frozen tundra and dying alone, and we would port that basic primable fear into having the wrong opinion in a biology class at the university. I say the wrong thing. I think something that my colleagues think is retrograde, and the result is that I'm going to be socially ostracized or, God forbid, cancel on social media. And that gives me the same primordial terror because it uses the same parts of the brain as the consequences would have been 250,000 years ago,

Starting point is 00:08:46 for that matter, 10,000 years ago. Well, that's anachronistic. We need to move on, but we have to have the proper knowledge. We have to have the proper information set such that we can use the updated circumstances and stand up to our limbic system and choose the way we want to live, as opposed to going according to our animal impulses. That's what I really want to talk about when it comes to going your own way. Now, I've talked in the past in this show.

Starting point is 00:09:12 I'm not going to talk about it today, but I've talked in the past about my favorite philosopher, who's Ralph Waldo Emerson. He wrote self-reliance in 1841. An essay, beautiful essay that was so controversial that his own aunt publicly denounced him for the rugged individualism of going your own way. The whole idea that, you know, when he talked about, a very famous expression in that essay was he talked about the hobgoblins of little minds. You probably heard that expression before.

Starting point is 00:09:40 It actually came from Waldo Emerson, with the little minds of the conformists, the people who don't believe something, but they say it anyway. And so there's this moral aspiration to be honest in an appropriate, non-hurtful way, but there's a fear about doing it. That's what I want to adjudicate. And the reason is because I believe that you can be honest, and if you do it the right way, you'll be happier. That's what I really want to argue, but it takes skill. So that's where I'm going. Done properly, honesty is an act of charity toward others and an active charity. And an active charity toward yourself. Now, I have a friend who is in kind of the same business as me.

Starting point is 00:10:19 He's very public-facing, you know, a thinker, a public educator kind of like me. He's in front of audiences all the time, both in media and in public, doing a lot of public events, etc., and he talks about pretty controversial stuff. He talks about politics, for example. He talks about public policy where everybody's constantly at each other's throats in America today, God knows. He takes honesty to an extreme because he says that honesty is an act of love. and committing an act of radical honesty, saying what he thinks in the spirit of love, actually makes him a lot happier. He thinks it's his happiness secret. He regularly disagrees with people on controversial topics. I mean, he are friends, and he disagrees with me all the time.

Starting point is 00:10:59 He doesn't, you know, he thinks I'm wrong, he tells me. When he thinks I'm wrong and I say, so what do you think, just to make it easier, to grease the skids, he doesn't say, you know, it's fine, whatever, no. So that's wrong, right? And he does that with audiences. He does that with strangers. You know, he believes that getting at the complete truth of things is a favor he's doing to other people. As a matter of fact, he calls those love conversations. Imagine that. His theory is that people can only understand each other deeply and act accordingly when they are completely honest. And he, generally speaking, gets away with it.

Starting point is 00:11:35 People have a sense that he's looking out for their welfare. And he's offering up his opinion not out of egotism and not out of aggression, but as kind of a gift, as it were. He doesn't expect you to agree with him at all. On the contrary, if you don't agree with him, he expects you to tell him. What a way to live, right? Now, as a philosophical matter, you would say that he's Emersonian, or even better, you'd say he's Kantian.

Starting point is 00:12:02 Now, Ralph Walto Emerson and his best friend, Henry David Thoreau, who wrote Walden, these were called American Transcendentalists, of the Transcendental School. And the name was actually taken from kind of their philosophical godfather who lived earlier than they did in Germany, who was the originator of what we would think of as transcendentalism. That was Emmanuel Kant.

Starting point is 00:12:26 Kant was the sort of the father of transcendentalism, continental transcendentalism, European transcendentalism. And his whole gig was honesty. That's what he was really all about. Here's a quote from Emmanuel Kant in his perhaps his greatest book called The Metaphysics of Morals that was published in 1797. It was 1841 that Rolfo, Emerson was writing. So this was roughly, not exactly a contemporary, but more or less the same period, just a little earlier.

Starting point is 00:12:56 Here's what Kant said. By a lie, a human being throws away and, as it were, annihilates his dignity. In other words, when you lie to somebody for transactional purposes or for just, basic ease, especially because you're afraid, you hurt yourself and you hurt them. And Kant, he believed in complete radical honesty all the time. Now, I will rush to share that Kant was a single man. He never got married. And so it's pretty easy for him to say, yeah, yeah, tell it like it is all the time. He lived by himself. And there might be a reason that he lived by himself. And he was very eccentric, kind of a loner, as a matter of fact. So, perhaps.

Starting point is 00:13:39 Perhaps that's an easier thing for him to do than you. And that's one of the reasons in this episode, I'm going to tell you how I can be a little Kantian or Emersonian. Emerson was happily married. And you can maintain your relationships at the same time because that's the trick, right? That's pulling the rabbit out of the hat in this way. So how can you be a Kantian? How can you be an Emersonian? How can you make it work for you?

Starting point is 00:14:01 Let's go to the present. And let's think about somebody who's written philosophically about this, not in 1841 or 1797, but somebody who's writing about it in kind of a more contemporary self-improvement kind of way. And that's from the 1990s, an author by the name of Brad Blanton, who were a pretty big bestseller from the 1990s and early 2000s. He had a book that actually came on 2005 called Radical Honesty, How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth.

Starting point is 00:14:27 And he was of this Emersonian belief that you got to go your own way and tell the truth all the time in a way that's actually helpful to people. And he made the case because he's a modern rule. writer and he's got the data that when you do that, it has consequences for sure, but there's really, really worthwhile. And he shows in that book, and I'll put the book, as always, into the show notes so you can click on it and get it easily if you want. It's nice to read. And then it can reduce stress. And, you know, your mom told you don't lie because you're going to actually weave this web of deceit and you're going to get caught up in it because you're

Starting point is 00:15:02 not going to remember your lies. And it's hard to stay consistent with a bunch of lies because they're hard to remember. And he says that therefore, it reduces stress to say the truth all the time to everybody and you never have to worry about what you told somebody else. It deepens connections with other people because the people who really are your friends, people who really do love you, they do appreciate it if you do it right, more on that later. And they reduce emotional reactivity because when you're used to getting and giving the truth, you're not going to freak out when somebody says something that's not completely complimentary all the time. On the contrary, if you get nothing about compliments, you're being lied to. That's the bottom line, because you're not

Starting point is 00:15:36 perfect. Let's go back to a prior episode when we talked about not being perfect. So Emmanuel Kant, Ruffold, Emerson, Brad Lenton of that school are making the case that more honesty properly undertaken leads to greater happiness. That's their argument. Now, that goes completely contrary to what most people think and how most people act because of the basic physiological functioning of the limbic system of the brain. We lie all the time. But there's nothing strange about that. The fact that we naturally do something and a bunch of philosophers coming along and saying that if we did the opposite, it would be happier, they very well might be right. Remember, I've made the case again and again and again, that you have two choices in

Starting point is 00:16:21 life. And this is the miracle of the amazing human prefrontal cortex, the supercomputer in the front of your head. You can choose to go according to your animal impulses, or you can choose to go against your animal impulses because you're trying to serve your moral aspirations. I mean, people do this all the time. You know, they're attracted to somebody who's not their spouse, but they choose not to pursue that attraction. That's your moral aspiration as opposed to your animal impulse. And guess what? The moral aspiration, which goes against your animal impulse, actually makes you happier. A lot of the time, going against Mother Nature's animal impulses is the best thing you can do. Standing up to yourself, being at war with these impulses is the act of self-discipline that

Starting point is 00:17:03 makes you truly who you are. Go back to my earlier episode about my morning protocols. You think when my clock goes off at 4.30 in the morning, I'm like, hooray! It's another great day. No. I'm like, uh, gratitude, gratitude. What am I doing? I get out bed. Say a little prayer. I go and I get my supplement stack ready and I go out of my gym because I want my moral aspirations. I my day to be set up in a particular way because I've decided to do so not because it feels good. This is another example of this. Your limbic system is on one side and your need, your desire, your Kantian moral aspiration is on the other. How can you do the thing that the philosophers say will make you happier well enough that the consequences, that the costs, don't outweigh the benefits?

Starting point is 00:18:00 that's what we're going to come back to. But before we do that, because I promise you I'm going to be very practical today, as always, I want to back up. And I want to talk about the kinds of lies and why we tell them. And this, I mean, this research has always blown my mind. There's a bunch of research that comes out of University of Massachusetts and Amherst that shows that the average person

Starting point is 00:18:20 tells something like two lies to a stranger within the first 10 minutes of conversation. We lie a lot. And that's not well replicated. But you know people lie all the time. And the most interesting and reliable part of the social science research on this is the types of lies. So there's a very nice article from 2008, which is now almost 20 years old, but there's no reason to think that this would be out of date. Psychologists writing in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships talked about the big three types of lies.

Starting point is 00:18:52 This is actually in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, as I mentioned before, it's called individual differences and lying in everyday life. It's pretty much on his face. And once again, this goes in the notes like everything else. They classified lies in three types. Number one, are self-centered lies to influence others or to make a good impression. Like, you know, hey, you know, the President of the United States asked me to be his vice president, about, hey, I turn him down, right? That's a kind of a self-burnishing lie.

Starting point is 00:19:20 That's lifting yourself up. That's the, you know, exaggeration falls into that particular category to make himself actually look better. People do that a lot. The second type of lie are other-oriented lies. to protect the feelings of a person you're lying to. So, you know, people say to me, it's like, you haven't aged a day. It's like, yeah, really, you need to get your eyes checked. Are you kidding me? You know, I'll see people I haven't seen in 20 years. I say, wow, you look great. I don't have to have a big lie detector to figure out that that one is

Starting point is 00:19:44 right. What are they doing? They're actually trying to protect my feelings. You're not going to say, you have lost a lot of hair because it's sort of not polite or they think that it's going to actually be a problem for the relationship. Now, with me, it's actually not going to hurt my feelings very much because the truth is the truth, to be sure, but people do that all the time. That's number two. Number three is altruistic lies to protect a third party. That would go into the kind of category of, she was with me all night officer. In other words, to create an alibi or something, where you lie to protect somebody is the way that that works. And so this are three types of lies that the psychologist actually found. Now, here's the interesting part about that. With close friends

Starting point is 00:20:25 and romantic partners, we're most likely to tell other-oriented and altruistic lies. Number two and three, because we love them. And we think that we're actually being better with them by doing those things, by lying to them so that we won't hurt their feelings and lying to protect them. But we don't tell very many of these, if we really love them, these self-centered lies. I mean, it's very unlikely that I'm going to go home to my wife and I'm going to tell her something great that happened to me professionally that didn't happen, for example. That would be a weird thing to do, as a matter of fact. On the other hand, with strangers, we do the opposite. With strangers, you know, you're sitting next to somebody in the plane and they ask you what you do for a living

Starting point is 00:21:01 and you kind of gilded a little bit, perhaps. So you're a writer, really, really. What's your latest book? Okay, how's it doing? Right, right. People are buying it. It turns out the three people about the book, whatever. But the whole point is that you tend to puff yourself up more before strangers and you're way less likely to protect them or or lie to them to spare their feelings, especially to protect them because you have no skin in the game. You've got no reason to actually do that. So that's interesting, isn't it, how we approach lies with respect to people close to us as opposed to people farther away from us. Now, this is starting to create a taxonomy of lies. And I want to add a couple of others that actually come from the research outside of that paper

Starting point is 00:21:40 I just talked about. There are two other motives for lying that we can add to the first three. Number one is just sheer laziness. So when the waiter asks, how's your lunch? And it's like gross and salty. And you're like, fine. I mean, technically that's a lie. I'm not saying that, you know, you got to go confess to a priest because you told that lie necessarily. You figure that one out yourself.

Starting point is 00:22:03 But you said that because you didn't want to go to the trouble of explaining my fish tacos were just unbelievably salty. I don't know what was wrong with them because you look like a complainer and it becomes a problem. And people will actually say stuff that isn't true because they want to. want to get it and get out. Shear laziness is really, really common. These types of white lies, they kind of smooth the flow of interactions. That's how a couple of scholars put it in a paper called the effects of deception in social networks. So that's laziness. Here's another one. I guess that was number four. So this would be lie reason number five, adding to the first three that I talked about. Little white lies are often a social lubricant and they can actually seem virtuous. You know,

Starting point is 00:22:44 you can kind of pat yourself on the back for your sensitivity intact. When you say something, it's actually not really true. But, you know, and again, these are not mutually exclusive. There's related to other things that I've talked about here. But you can turn your lying vice into a little virtue inside your own head when you say a little white lies to people just to kind of get through the day, make things a little bit easier, et cetera, et cetera. And people do this a lot, actually.

Starting point is 00:23:10 Now, there's a problem with that, which is that there's a literature out there that suggest that people who are telling Whopper lies and actually committing crimes, almost always that there's an algorithm that starts with this. Little white lies that are a social lubricant that are making your life a little bit easier, or maybe that's the laziness motive, and it turns into something a little bit bigger and a little bit bigger. So these relatively innocuous motivations, they tend to be not innocuous at all because this escalates. This honest behavior builds on itself. And again, social scientists have shown that nobody actually wakes up one day from a completely virtuous and honest lifestyle. So you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to go rob a bank

Starting point is 00:23:51 and lie to the cops. No. What they do is they cut corners here and then a little bit more there and a little bit more there. And they can actually, the people who've done, you know, really big dishonest things, like building a completely false version of themselves, I wish there's just some whopper cases out there that it started with little lies. Kind of like the ones we're talking about here. So if you're with me still and you want to find a way to not lie, don't lie. I mean, even little things, even these little social lubricants, even these little ease of interaction with people. Okay, so no, why not? I mean, okay, I just gave you.

Starting point is 00:24:31 I guess I suppose I just gave you a good reason why not because it'll turn into you becoming a congenital lie or something. Maybe not. There's a lot between little lies and ruining your life. But there are some real reasons why lying doesn't really necessarily make life happier, quite the contrary. So let's go in the direction that we usually do in this show, which is I want to talk about how being honest actually can make you happier or that being dishonest will actually make you unhappier.

Starting point is 00:25:01 Right now, you're like Neo in the Matrix. You can keep scrolling, experiencing a simulation of life. Or you can wake up to how your attention is being harvested. for profit. It's happening to people all over the world right now. You don't want to be product dized like this anymore, but it's hard. Tech addiction is so potent because it's been designed to tap into your dopamine system, just like heroin, porn, gambling, you've got the cravings, you're addicted. You don't like it, and I don't either. But I can't just tell you to stop doing it, that's hard. If you want to break free from the system, you need an incentive. Here's one. Why don't

Starting point is 00:25:38 you join a phone company that pays you not to use your phone? If you want to reduce brain rot, get Noble Mobile Mobile. It pays you to use less data. It gives you an incentive to unplug. Noble Mobile is the phone plan that finally aligns incentives with what's good for you. Use less data, earn money back. And when you do, you'll be living once again in real life. And you're going to like how it feels.

Starting point is 00:26:01 If you're like me, you've got to be drinking when you're in the gym and you have to be drinking something clean without any calories that will actually give you your electrolytes and all the good stuff. For me, that's element. You probably knew that already. It's a great product that helps you stay hydrated without sugar and a bunch of dodgy ingredients that are found in a lot of popular electrolyte drinks and sports drinks. No sugar, no junk, just electrolytes that actually work.

Starting point is 00:26:27 Give it a try. I like it. It's science-backed and made for athletes, fasting, keto, or happiness scientists like me. Anyone who sweats. So how do I use it? I use it in the morning, 4.45 in the morning. I don't like to drink anything with caffeine. or anything it peps me up because I like to be real clear and I drink my caffeine later,

Starting point is 00:26:46 Element is just the ticket that I need. Give it a try yourself. Right now, you can get a free sample pack with any purchase at Drink Element. That's Drink, just like it sounds, LMNT.com slash Arthur. Try it risk-free. If you don't like it, they'll refund your order. No questions ask, but you're going to like it. The happiness case against ordinary, easy lying, starts with,

Starting point is 00:27:12 number one, very clear research showing that lying, even little lies, make you less likable. And people know when you're lying a lot more than you think. There's a bunch of papers out there on what's called humble bragging, which you probably know that expression. Those of you who are from outside the United States, you might not humble bragging is when you're bragging, but when you're not bragging, you're actually looking like you're self-effacing, but you're actually bragging. And so it'll be something like,

Starting point is 00:27:43 gotta go see the President of the United States today, but forgot to get my suit pressed. What a moron I am. That's a total humble brag. You're trying to tell the audience on social media if that's where you posted it, that you're going to go see the President of the United States, not that you actually think you're a moron

Starting point is 00:27:57 because your suit is wrinkled. That's a dishonest thing to do because you're hiding your motivations. People know, people have 100 ways to detect that. If you think humble bragging is actually serving its purpose, you're wrong. And again, the literature really shows that people who humble brag are despised. It's just really, really terrible. And little lying even to kind of butter people up, people don't like that either. You might notice that when you go in to buy something and, you know, the person, the clerk or the salesperson is telling you about how great your taste is that it makes you uncomfortable.

Starting point is 00:28:34 The reason it makes you uncomfortable is because you're detecting dishonesty. And when you detect dishonesty, you become uncomfortable around. the person, meaning that the person has become less likable to you. Well, you're just a salesman when you're doing that, or a salesman who's not being completely forthright. Now, it's probably better than when you go to buy a car, the guy doesn't come out of the back room and say, hey, he was the bald guy and start making fun of me. That probably wouldn't work either.

Starting point is 00:28:58 But the truth is you don't have to choose between being a jerk and being dishonest. And that's actually where we want to go with that. But the bottom line is, and again, I'll put up a really nice paper from the journal of experimental psychology, social psychology. that makes this case of disliking and lying and lying to people who lie to us. That's what the name of the paper is. And you'll see all this we know. Our brains are so wonderfully complex that we can detect.

Starting point is 00:29:21 We have lie detectors inside us. They're not perfect. The second reason that that so-called innocent lying actually doesn't make you happier is that it harms relationships and it lowers happiness by lowering trust. You know, and this is especially true in intimate relationships. So for example, if you're married and your marriage is kind of resting on a bed of mild, relatively innocuous untruths, that bed of untruths actually adds up to mistrust. The reason is because if you don't tell me the truth about little things, I'm not really going to trust you to tell me the truth about big things.

Starting point is 00:29:58 And so you'll find, for example, that spouses who fib to each other, fib to each other, here where am I going, how much money did I spend, or even the kinds of lies to protect the other person. Yeah, you look great in that. How do these pants look on me? They look great. You're never quite forthright with your partner. They won't trust you in the big things either completely. This really, really compromises trust. And I've seen the data on that. I've seen the research on that, but I've experienced that as well. So I've been with Mrs. B for this 1988. So we're going on 38 years at this point. We met on July 7, 1988, Bastille Day. of all places. You know, we got to know each other over the next year or so because we were

Starting point is 00:30:41 living in different countries. She was in Spain. I was in the United States. So we were learning each other's language. Didn't learn, didn't speak a word of each other's languages. But as we did and we started to learn to communicate, I had to wonder, why did she fall in love with me? I mean, I honestly wanted to know because she's beautiful. She was interesting. She's smart. And I'm not saying that she was out of my league. I guess she was. But I was really interested. I mean, well, what was it? I mean, why did you fall in love with me? And you know what she told me? She said, because you're the first man who's been honest with me ever. Completely honest. You never lie. It's a hump. And, you know, that, I think that reflects very poorly on on Spanish men, perhaps,

Starting point is 00:31:21 that she, at least the ones that she had dated because she said all the guys she'd gone out with before, they were just like, they say whatever they want. I mean, not really terrible things, not really deceiving her in all these ways, but they just weren't reliable. They weren't trustworthy. They weren't honest with her. Look, since over the past 35 years, I know lots of Spanish guys who are impeccably honest. Maybe she dated the wrong guys. I don't know. But the bottom line is that she fell in love with me because I was honest, including in the times when it wasn't that comfortable for me to be honest. Why was I honest? I don't know. I mean, I come from a family where that's super highly prized. I remember that my, I think it probably was, it was a tactic on

Starting point is 00:31:58 my parents' part. I remember my mother saying when I was a little guy, she used to say, You know, when you were really little, sometimes you'd tell lies, but when you knew how important the truth was, you became an honest boy, you became an honest person. And I just was deeming with that. That just made me feel so good that I was getting complimented by my mom and that. I remember doing that with my son Carlos, too, and he's really super honest. I have to say, sometimes to a fault where it just makes me uncomfortable, you know, a young guy, my son Carlos, our son Carlos, Esther and my son, my son Carlos. But it's a big value in our family. It's a big value in our marriage. And that's the truth that you will harm your intimate relationships with just the easy lies.

Starting point is 00:32:39 I've got the data and I've got the experiences that actually show that while little lies will protect moment-to-moment harmony, it will compromise moment-to-moment closeness. And I'm telling you, friends, when it comes to a good marriage or a good friendship, closeness beats harmony eight days a week. It just does. if you want a real relationship that stands the test of time, closeness is what you want, and honesty is actually how you get it,

Starting point is 00:33:10 if you do it right, which is where I need to go next. All right. Now, I believe, based on all the things that I've told you here, that Kant and Emerson have got the better of the argument, that the place to scene brain doesn't have it right, as long as you get serious about honesty

Starting point is 00:33:27 and you get good at honesty. Okay, so that's where we get practical here. how can you make sure honesty improves your life? How can you be more of virtuoso in honesty? I'm not saying that you could be honest and never have any conflict. You're going to have more conflict, but where it makes your relationships better and not worse. Here's where it starts.

Starting point is 00:33:48 Number one. And of course, all these things are validated, so I'll give you the studies, but this one might sound counter-rituitive nonetheless. If you want to be more honest and you want more honesty in your life, the first thing that you need is to seek and accept honesty from other people. I know people who are trying to be good Contians, good Emersonians, who want to dish out the honesty, but they don't want honesty from other people. They don't want the truth. My dad used to say, I don't want the truth, but I need it to be excellent, to be a good man. I actually need it. And I think he really believed that. Probably that's the basis of this big family value of ours.

Starting point is 00:34:22 But I mean people all the time who are really quite willing to tell the truth to everybody, but they become really prickly when they're presented with truths that they find difficult to accept. The tendency is to dish out criticism and being unable to take it. And that's the style of a narcissist. That's the style of a thin-skinned jerk, as a matter of fact, and is not an expression of love. I'll put a nice article from Psychology Today in the notes. The narcissist dilemma, they can dish it out, but they can't take it. So here's the first commitment to me.

Starting point is 00:34:54 if you want to go on this journey. Commit yourself to honesty that starts with a commitment to be honest with yourself and to demand and expect honesty from other people. Now, part of the deal is when people are honest with you,

Starting point is 00:35:11 they're going to give you the truth as they see it. So you have to make a commitment not to be offended when people tell you when they give you the truth, right? But you also have to remember that people's opinions are not facts, meaning that you have to use your judgment and the truth that people are giving you to decide whether or not it is something you should accept. And that takes a lot of wisdom and it also takes a lot of intestinal fortitude.

Starting point is 00:35:34 It takes a lot of strength. And it takes practice, is the bottom line. Sometimes what you will hear will be intended to offend you when you do this, as a matter of fact. But you can almost always choose not to take offense. Bottom line. Step one. Be honest with yourself and demand honesty from other people. even when it hurts.

Starting point is 00:35:56 Okay, now that's hard. I'm a defensive soul. Boy, oh boy, oh, is it important in my life. Here's the second protocol for living an honest life. Offer the truth to everybody always to heal, never to harm. So you see, here's the thing. If you have a belief about anything, you have any controversial view or whatever it is,

Starting point is 00:36:17 if you're using it as a weapon, you're using it wrong. If you're trying to convince people about your political opinions, for example, If you're using them as a cudgel against people with whom you disagree, you're doing it wrong. You know, you're going to get what psychologists call the boomerang effect. The more you argue, the less people are going to agree with you if you're using your values as a weapon. But if you use them as a gift, you can get away with a lot. You know, in my teaching about human happiness, nobody watching us doesn't know that universities are tricky places these days. I mean, things that would have been ordinary knowledge.

Starting point is 00:36:53 a few decades ago, you have to tread really lightly or walking on eggshells because there's been, especially for the past 10 years or so, this climate of sort of cancellation and self-censorship and a lot of professors are frankly terrified to say anything even remotely controversial. But I'm committed to speaking the truth about the science, the behavioral science and the neuroscience and the conclusions that it comes to, which means I'm not going to lie to my students. I can't do it. It can't be done. It's not right.

Starting point is 00:37:21 Unethical. So here's how I do it. I commit to myself that everything I'm going to teach my students is an expression of love and never something that's going to try to be funny for the sake of humor or controversial because I'm trying to be edgy. Those are a cudgel in their way. When by about the third week of the class, my graduate students, they trust me. They trust me because they have their best interest at heart. And literally before I go out to teach every day, I pray for them. I pray for my students. I say, make every word that comes out of my mouth a way to lift them up and bring them together in bonds of

Starting point is 00:37:53 happiness and love, which I would say at the beginning of this podcast as well, because that's the prayer I say before I get on the air. So that's truth to heal, not truth to harm. And it will almost never, almost never lead your stray. I've almost never seen it turn into a big catastrophe for somebody who's, who is, you know, trying to do good. People know your motives, because once again, we have a spider sense about that. Now, one of the ways that you can do this, too, by the way, when you're trying to love with truth as opposed to harm with truth, is you look for the virtues rather than the imperfections of others. And so this is something that I would recommend that you do systematically, that you look for something beautiful and tell them, honestly. I mean,

Starting point is 00:38:38 don't look for something and lie to them about something that's not a virtue or something that's not an element of beauty in somebody else. Look for something that's actually there. And there's something good in everybody. There's something wonderful in almost everybody. Look for it and tell them. And that's the kind of truth that that establishes the credibility such that even when you have to say something is difficult, they're going to know that it's not motivated by animus. It's not motivated by ill will. Now, at this point, let me take a slight detour and make this point. Telling the truth all the time, not lying, is not the same thing is going out of your way to point everything out, right? And again, I'm not trying to split hairs here. But when your spouse

Starting point is 00:39:23 says, do I look good in this? And she or he doesn't, and you say, I don't think he's the best, right? That's very different than when your spouse, you know, comes downstairs wearing some particular clothes and you don't think it looks good to say, hey, you look terrible today. That you don't have to do that. You don't have to volunteer absolutely everything because that's not an expression of love either. It's being judicious and having prudential judgment about this as part of how you're going to be a truthful person as well. They ask, you don't lie, but you don't have to bring things up constantly either. It's not a lie of omission to not give every criticism that crosses your cortex all the time. And that's another way that you offer truth to heal, not to harm.

Starting point is 00:40:10 Number three, make the truth appealing. turn you're wrong into, here's a way I think you can think about this issue differently. See what I'm saying, right? I mean, both of them are the truth, but one of them is constructive as opposed to destructive. You're making it appealing from other people. If your boss asks, hey, do you like working here? It's not right to lie and say you do and you don't. But you can say, you know, there's a bunch of things that I've been thinking about that

Starting point is 00:40:36 could make this job a lot more interesting and fun. It's a constructive answer to that question. You answered his question, by the way, and he's going to get it at what you just said. But at the same time, you're not just laying it out there. Like, no, this place is crummy. It sucks. This place could be better, and I have some ideas. And I want to make it better.

Starting point is 00:40:56 And there are very few bosses who are so thin-skinned, then they're going to fire you over that. Your honest feedback will not always be appreciated, of course. But again, help you hold on to some of the benefits of what would have been pro-social lies without the costs of losing other people's respect and losing respect for yourself. I've been imitating my friend with his love conversations and experimenting with a lot more honesty. And this is a lifelong project for me. I mean, again, according to my wife, it's something that comes pretty naturally to me, but we could all be better me too.

Starting point is 00:41:30 So I am trying to make sure that that's the case. And one of the ways that I'm doing that is by asking people to give me their unvarnished views, which is why I ask you as viewers of this to tell me the truth and as you see it in the comments. It doesn't mean I'm going to agree with you, but, you know, there's no reason for you to write something you don't think. And I would appreciate it if you wrote me what you do think, if you feel like doing that. I'm also out of a spirit of respect more forthcoming with my personal views, even when they're out of step. And again, I'm an academic. And a lot of my views, I have very heterodox views about many issues, social issues, political issues.

Starting point is 00:42:06 economic issues. I'm just not a typical academic. And I'm, I'm over the past seven years in particular, I've been quite open about that. So far so good. I haven't gotten divorced or beaten up or fired. And I feel freer than I ever had before. And Pat, perhaps paradoxically, I'm actually less concerned of the opinions of other people as I do this. And you can, as well, you can be free. And when you're freer, you are happier. And you are happier. And that's the bottom line. So consider this. Would you like to be freer and happier? Well, maybe honesty is the way for you to love yourself and love each other more. Take a couple of questions, and we'll be done. One from Kenwood. Just one word, Kenwood. It's like share, but, you know, Kenwood. Office

Starting point is 00:42:54 Hours.Otherworks.com. What are a few things Kenwood asked that I should focus on during this coming summer and then my senior year of high school. I have almost nothing planned. Don't want to waste it. Well, already you're winning, Ken Wood, to say, I got a whole summer and I don't want to waste it. Good for you. Fantastic. So here's what I would recommend. A couple of things, a couple of resources. Go back to my protocols for health and happiness.

Starting point is 00:43:21 Morning protocols and eating protocols is two separate shows. Watch those. We have PDF downloads that you'll actually get in the show notes that will, you know, the documents that take you through the science and how to set up your day. Now, don't make the perfect the enemy of the good. You have to do it exactly the way that I do, but I would recommend starting to get into habits of living, habits of living that will take them out of willpower and cognitive load and turn them into automatic things.

Starting point is 00:43:44 And the way that you pray, the way that you exercise, the way that you eat, that will be really science-based and really helpful for you. That's the first thing I would recommend. Second, I go to my reading list. I have a reading list on my website, very easy to find, and go through a few of these things and maybe more. Because at summertime, I mean, you read the summer.

Starting point is 00:44:03 the best thing ever. And actually reading things you don't have to read, but are of your own volition, but are highly intellectually and psychologically nutritious, morally so as well. I really recommend and love everything on that particular reading list. And anybody else's reading list that you want as well, read more and think more, ponder more, is it for that. And then here's the third thing I would recommend. I would recommend, if you've got a lot of time, is to find a way to serve other people more. I would recommend to find a way to serve other people more. I would recommend finding a way to volunteer, going places where you have never seen yourself exactly in communities of people that you wouldn't ordinarily encounter and actually serving

Starting point is 00:44:42 them in a spirit of love more. I would have a summer of discipline, learning, and love through service. That's the summer that I would build. And it'll be one of the best summers of your life. Blake writes in at the website, what's one principle or practice in your morning and evening framework that you personally find really hard to follow. Yeah, I mean, there's a few. I mean, it's like I wouldn't have to have a protocol if it were all easy, just falling off a log. But the evening protocols are much harder for me than the morning protocols. Getting up at 4.30 in the morning,

Starting point is 00:45:14 it's easy for easier for me than a lot of stuff for staying really disciplined at night. Sometimes I'm not as disciplined about my device use as I should be because I got something I'm thinking about or I'm waiting for messages from people or I'm just distracted. So, messy device use. But even more, here's the big one. Uh, sweets. I just can't. I can't get off the sweets. It's not, it's not good for, I mean, look, this is not the end of the world. I know. But the truth of the matter is that the research is getting stronger and stronger, that highly refined sugar, especially with highly processed foods, it's really, really bad for you.

Starting point is 00:45:52 And, you know, if you gave me, you know, on a desert island, I could, I only had a week to live and one food item, it would be, you know, gram crackers with Nutellus matter. It's like, I'm like a, or a bag of candy corn. It's pathetic. The bottom line is that my brain loves glucose spikes. And so the one thing I really struggle with is sweets. Now, I don't drink alcohol, which probably has something to do with it, by the way. I used to drink a lot of alcohol, especially in my 20s and 30s. And when you drink a lot and then you stop, one of the things that people have in common is that we do that, is that they tend to get really, really addicted to the sweet stuff. So it's probably related.

Starting point is 00:46:32 least is Mohammed al-Kameel writes in, what are the benefits and disadvantages of naps? What's the optimal time and duration for a retired 57-year-old person to get a better energy during the day and a good sleep at night? Very dependent. Different people respond to this in different ways, but there are a few napping protocols that I recommend. Number one is that keep in mind that people who nap, if they do it right, they can get better overall rest, but they almost always have worst night's sleep. So there is a trade-off, no matter what, there's going to be a trade-off. Here are the two rules. If you're going to nap, I don't nap because I'm a bad night sleeper to begin with. And I take a nap during the middle of the day. I'll probably not going to sleep at night.

Starting point is 00:47:15 So you got to do you. My friend Ariana Huffington, she takes tons of naps. And it's one of the great secrets to her career. And she's even written a book about it. So different strokes and, you know, different physiologies. But here are the two rules for people who would take naps. Number one, don't nap in the seven hours before you go to bed. If you go to bed at 10 p.m. don't nap after three. It's really, really important. And your body, your circadian rhythms will be interrupted. Your sleep architecture will get messed up if you're napping too close to bedtime.

Starting point is 00:47:45 Second is don't go into a deep sleep, generally speaking. So make it short. You know, and a three-hour nap is highly problematic. We actually get into cycles of deep sleep. Stay in the more shallow cycles of sleep. And by the way, those are the two protocols. people follow in countries that nap a lot. You know, I've lived off and on in Spain.

Starting point is 00:48:03 In Spain, the siesta, when does it happen? It happens right after lunch. Now, that means that people will typically take a cat nap at, you know, 3.30 to 4 or something like that. And that's because they're not going to bed before midnight. You know, if you're in Madrid, for example, people are up all hours, as a matter of fact. That's a, you know, I'd say 4 o'clock nap. That's so late.

Starting point is 00:48:22 Not in Spain. And they generally speaking, try not to go into a deep sleep. My father-in-law, you know, life. long after lunch siesta taker, he would have keys in his hands. He would go to sleep with his keys in his hands. And a big, you know, it was like an old guy with a going on and keys, like 75 keys, old school. And he would keep him with his hand and he would be falling asleep, falling asleep, until his hand would relax and his keys would fall on the floor and wake him up. That was this, that was his secret. That's what I recommend. It's actually, if you're going to do that,

Starting point is 00:48:54 make sure that you're doing it in a disciplined way that doesn't interrupt your nighttime sleep and an experiment. Thanks, Mohamed. with that and happy napin. We're done. Let me know your thoughts at office hours at arthurbrooks.com. Like and subscribe on Spotify, Apple, YouTube, wherever you are getting this podcast. Leave me a comment.

Starting point is 00:49:11 Again, just be honest. It's all good. I can take it. Follow me on socials, Instagram, LinkedIn, all the other platforms where there's original content coming out every single day. And please do order the meaning of your life. My newest book,

Starting point is 00:49:25 get it for somebody that you love, get it for a million of your closest friends. and to learn more about all these ideas and please do share this podcast because I want to reach as many people as we possibly can. I'll see you next week.

Office Hours with Arthur Brooks - How Lying Sabotages Your Happiness

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