David 2: Thank you for joining Classy as Hell. If you've been looking for us the last couple weeks, we were having technical difficulties, but appear to have it all straightened out and hope to be with you every two weeks from now on. Thanks again and enjoy the show.
Shawn: Welcome to Classy as Hell, the podcast where we can't possibly mess this up because we have absolutely no standards. I'm Sean.
David: David. So Sean, you've had a crafting project this week, if I'm not mistaken.
Shawn: You are correct. if any of you have heard me before talking about painting miniatures in my scythe game, I finally got around to getting the expansion with the two extra gaming factions, the Togawa and the Albion factions. And so I spent A very happy day sitting in one position, not eating, not drinking, not moving, and just painting. Teeny tiny details and it was fan freaking tastic. I loved it.
David: Yeah you sat there for hours no eating no going to the bathroom just sitting there hunched over I've been in so much pain by the time I got done
Shawn: when I reach that level of focus, I'm not drinking water, I'm not eating food, hence I don't need to go to the bathroom. I I'm just focused.
David: Yeah, I wasn't even in the the room when I was in the room.
Shawn: Did you say words to me? Probably. Did I answer you? No. Okay. Anywho, yeah, I think that's the most productive part of where I am on the spectrum. Being able to focus on something detailed for long, long periods of time because it engages me. And you
David: Ha ha ha. Do do a great job. Those miniatures turned out fantastic.
Shawn: Thanks. So what are we talking about this week?
David: funny you should mention that. I think we're gonna talk sports.
Shawn: Yeah. yeah, well my local sports team can beat your local sports team.
David: A actually that's a lie. And of course that's what we're gonna be covering. We're gonna talk about lies. this is gonna be a two-part episode. The first one's gonna be about why we lie, the evolutionary standpoint, neurology standpoint. And then next week will be more about big lies. Grifters and con people and li lies that have changed states and governments.
Shawn: Who Wow. I can't wait to hear that one too. But this sounds interesting. I'm thinking it's probably a lot like our episode on gossip. I mean we didn't we didn't just become liars because there's no social benefit to it. Right. We lie because it's part of the social glue that holds our species together, I'm presuming. So I can't wait to hear what you have to say about
David: It's the lubricant that keeps us going.
Shawn: lube.
David: Anyhow, I spent most of my life thinking of myself as an honest person. Not perfect, not incapable of the occasional social lie or convenient omission, but fundamentally at the character level honest. It was part of how I understood myself. Part of what I thought separated me from the people who, you know, wasn't. I'm not so sure anymore. Not because I did something terrible, not because someone caught me in it in in something, but because I spent the last several weeks reading the research online, the neuroscience, the evolutionary biology, the social psychology, and somewhere in the middle of all of it, I realized that the belief itself was the problem. The belief that I was an honest person that certainty, that comfortable sense of being on the right side of this particular line turns out to be exactly where the blind spot lives. And the research on this is not subtle, it's specific. It's measurable and it's deeply personally uncomfortable. Which is why we're here.
Shawn: I don't I I know I tell lies. I'm I'm under no delusions that I'm an honest person. I know I tell lies. So I don't think I'm gonna be as disturbed by this as you were.
David: We'll see. here's the number that started all of this for me. The average person, not a con artist, not a sociopath, not a politician, which is sort of the same as a sociopath. the average reasonable, decent human being tells between one and two lies every single day.
Shawn: Yeah, that's their job is lying. I think that number's low. Is this self-reporting? Pro Yeah, that number's low. I know I lie more than once or twice a day.
David: Well, and there are probably some days where you lie more than two and dimes where you
Shawn: I think there's probably many days where I don't tell a lie at all. I'm just a I'm just at my job, I'm focused on my work, I'm you know I'm not really conversing with people in a way that would generate a situation where I feel the need to lie. If I just am talking to you, I don't lie to you. There's no point.
David: Yeah, so that's why Well, so yeah, it's an average, like I said. Every single day college students double that.
Shawn: hell yeah. How else are you gonna get laid?
David: And when you meet someone for the first time, research shows you'll lie to them within the first ten minutes.
Shawn: here we go. Yes, that's so good, I love it.
David: two, maybe three times before you even know or learn their name.
Shawn: Yes, I love this so much. That is so good.
David: Almost ninety percent of those lies are harmless. You know, white lies. Social lubricant. The kind of small, comfortable fiction that make it possible to get through a Tuesday without hurting six people's feelings before noon. But here's what the research says, that nobody puts on a motivational poster. The people most committed to the personal virtue of honesty, the ones who have built their self-image around being straight talkers, truth-tellers, no nonsense, are statistically among the least equipped to see how much they are lying to themselves.
Shawn: I'd agree with that.
David: the identity is the blind spot. And by the end of this episode, I think you're going to feel the same thing I felt where I first understood that. A specific kind of uncomfortable that doesn't go away when you turn the podcast off. You're well.
Shawn: Thanks. I do have a little bit of a comment about that last statement you said though. mean, how many times since you've known me have you heard me say I'm the kind of person who I I have no poker face, I've got no guile, I can't really be phony. I tend to say what I mean and I mean what I say. But I freely acknowledge that I tell lies. So I don't
David: New error combination.
Shawn: I don't think that jibes for me. I am the kind of person who considers myself a straight talker, but I know I tell lies.
David: But I've also seen you buffer what you say, especially to friends and acquaintances, that you're not as straightforward as you are when you talk to me about them.
Shawn: like I'm saying something in a softened manner. Yep.
David: Yes. I I see that a lot.
Shawn: Okay, and that fits in with what you were talking about, what we call you know, lies to like save someone's feelings. Like we don't want to hurt their feelings, we don't want them to be upset with us, so we soften what we're saying.
David: We're going to spend the rest of our time today looking at lying, not as a moral failing, not as a character flaw, but as a biological fact. A cognitive phenomenon, something the research understands better than most of us want to invent. We're going to cover the brain science of why lying is harder than it looks, the evolutionary argument for why it may have made us smarter as a species, the social function of white lies, and what happens to relationships when you tell them. And we're going to end somewhere, I didn't expect when I started this, at the question of what it means to think of yourself as an honest person. and whether that belief is doing you any favors.
Shawn: I think it's great that one of the points you're gonna talk about is that it's made us smarter as a species. Because you have to imagine something on the fly in real time. Yeah. That takes a lot of brain power.
David: That It it was an interesting thing to learn during all of this. And we're going to get to that here in just a minute.
Shawn: Okay.
David: Now I want to be clear about something before we go any further though. This episode is not permission to lie more. That's not the argument. The argument is that most of us are already lying more than we think. And the belief that we're not is making us worse and understanding ourselves not better.
Shawn: Dang.
David: That's what I want to pull apart today. And Sean is going to keep me honest, which is giving the topic either deeply appropriate or deeply ironic. Possibly both.
Shawn: I think it's deeply ironic. You're asking you're asking the person who started this conversation with, yeah, I'm a liar, to keep you honest. We're both in a world of hurt now.
David: So let's start simple. Why do people lie? Psychologists have been studying this for decades, and they've led it on three core categories. You lie to get something you want, you lie to protect or promote yourself or others, and this one's less talked about you lie to harm someone else. which one do you think is more common, Sean?
Shawn: I think to protect or promote myself or or someone I care about.
David: Very good. Well that's the most common single motivation for both children and adults is avoiding punishment.
Shawn: the right answer? And honestly, that's honestly that's so funny I just said that. But that was my thought process when I like, what's the one that's most common? And I thought, what are the first lies little kids tell? They lie to avoid getting in trouble.
David: Yes they do. Before anything else, before greed, before status, before manipulation, the most ancient, most universal reason a human being lies is because they don't want to face the consequences of what they did.
Shawn: Right. Or to protect someone. They don't want someone they their friend or their loved one or somebody they care about. They don't want them to get in trouble.
David: Yeah, what? Which if you think about it is kind of reassuring. We're not primarily lying to get ahead, we're primarily lying because we're scared.
Shawn: Mm-hmm. Makes sense.
David: But here's the part that doesn't make it into the basic summary. Before most people tell a self-serving lie, they run what researchers call a rapid cost-benefit analysis. Usually unconscious, usually taking about a half a second, does the benefit outweigh the risk of getting caught? If yes, the lie happens.
Shawn: Mm-hmm. And this is why I think lying to keep yourself or someone you care about from getting in trouble is the most common lie. Because You're already in trouble. The benefit of telling the lie is maybe you get away with it and you avoid trouble. If you get caught, you're already in trouble anyway. So the cost-benefit analysis is obvious even to a toddler. Yeah.
David: Yeah, you learn it really quick. We are not moral philosophers in the moment. We're running a spreadsheet, a very fast, very unconscious spreadsheet.
Shawn: Right.
David: And then there's the category nobody wants to include in the polite version of this conversation. The lies we tell ourselves. Self-deception. The lies where you're not trying to fool someone else, you're trying to fool you. Command a positive self-image to avoid the discomfort of knowing something true about yourself that you don't want to know. We'll go deeper into that in a few minutes, because the research on self deception is genuinely the most unsettling part of this whole episode.
Shawn: And I can see why that is, even before you dig into it too deeply. Because this is always the calculation that I run in my head. It it doesn't happen immediately. It takes a little while. But whenever there's someone that I just dislike, like I take an immediate dislike to that person, or I have to work with someone and we don't get along. Right. After a little while, you know, If it if it's someone that I just take an immediate dislike to and I don't have to work with that person or be in contact with that person or socialize with that person, I don't care. Roll on, let it go away. But if I'm in a situation where I have to interact with this person on the regular, I'm gonna try to figure out what the problem is because I have to work with this person or I have to see this person or I have to cooperate with this person on a project or you know, something like that. And the first question that I always ask myself is Is there something in that person you don't like because you don't like that in yourself?
David: I have heard you make that comment.
Shawn: if I think about it and I'm like, that person does this thing and I don't like it myself when I do that thing, that's why I'm having this knee-jerk reaction of I don't like that person. Because it's something I see in the mirror. And I don't like the mirror. I like the lovely painting in the attic.
David: just to recap real quick, average person lies one to two times a day. College teams, double that. People you lie to the most, friends. Yep. 51% of the time.
Shawn: Yup sorry to my friends out there.
David: Then family about twenty one percent of the time and then strangers. But you don't add to them within the first ten minutes.
Shawn: That's right. They get the lies up front. They get front loaded.
David: Lies are told face to face about seventy-nine percent of the time. Lies told to feel closer to someone you just met almost guaranteed in the first ten minutes.
Shawn: That's probably my biggest category right there. Trying to feel closer to somebody I just met. That's when gonna start telling lies.
David: Okay.
Shawn: That's probably my biggest category. Well, I mean, I I don't see any point in not being honest, we're s we're sitting here talking about this topic, lying. I don't see any point in lying about my lying.
David: Everything.
Shawn: And I will say that the longer I know somebody, the more honest and open I am with them. Okay.
David: So you go from lying to get in with them and then become more open as they get to know.
Shawn: Right, because when I first meet that person I want them to like me. So I'm gonna try and tell lies to impress them or to to relate to them.
David: Alright, let's talk about your brain on a lie. Let's talk about what's actually happening in your brain when you lie. Because this is where it gets genuinely str- First, the basic architecture, when you tell a lie, the brain isn't doing just one thing, like you had mentioned. It's doing four things simultaneously. It has to suppress the true answer. Construct the false one, monitor the false narrative for internal consistency, and predict how the other person is going to respond to it.
Shawn: That's the worst. When you think somebody's gonna respond a certain way to your lie and you tell the lie and they respond the way that you didn't predict that's terrible
David: So you're doing four parallel computations all at once. Where telling the truth requires exactly one. And you can actually see this on a brain scan. MRI research shows three specific regions light up significantly more during deception than during truth telling. The prefrontal part the part of your brain doing the heavy lifting, the anterior cingulate cortex, which monitors for conflict. between computing responses The prefrontal cortex alone is running four processes at once during a line. like the difference between walking and juggling while walking. Both are possible, one is dramatically harder.
Shawn: Well, I struggle with walking and chewing gum, so It's amazing I can tell lies.
David: Now here's the amygdala. The almond shape structure deep in your brain, associated with emotion, guilt, fear, and anxiety. when you lie for personal gain, your amygdala fires. It produces a negative emotional signal, a kind of internal check. Hey, we're doing something we know is wrong. That signal is your conscious. Literally it has a physical address in your brain. And here's the part that should change how you think about the lies you tell, even the small ones. A study published in Nature, Neuroscience, one of the top scientific journals in the world, tracked what happens to the amygdala response when people lie repeatedly. It shrinks. Yay! Every time you tell a self-serving lie, the amygdala response gets a little smaller, a little quieter. And the researchers found something remarkable. The bigger the drop in amygdala activity after one lie, the bigger the next lie would be. Not might be, would be, measurably and predictable. Your brain is literally forecasting its own moral slide in real time on a brain scanner.
Shawn: Wow. That's amazing. I know I've seen studies about brain scans where People have to make a a choice, like something as simple as left or right. Okay. And in the brain scan, you can see the choice being made before the person is even consciously aware of whether they've chosen left or right.
David: Yeah. Yeah, the the brain is just an amazing
Shawn: But I think it's amazing that they can see that level of detail.
David: yeah, yeah. It the difference between one is a person lying and when a person not lining up different parts of the brain is amazing.
Shawn: Have you ever had a polygraph? I never have. I hear if you squish up your butthole it makes it really easy to lie. Or it makes the system like not read your lie better.
David: No, I haven't. Yeah I've heard a number of things. The Mythbusters did an episode that. they put a tack in one of 'em's shoe and you would press against the tack and that wouldn't Yeah, mass affect the results. I guess it it makes it hard to get a an honest read so that when you lie they look about the same.
Shawn: Yeah. The pain would So did it actually work? Did the pain work? Do you remember
David: You know, I think it worked for me, but I can't remember clearly.
Shawn: What about clenching up your anus? Did that work? Did they try the back? okay. 'Cause that's the one I've heard. There was even an episode of Beavis and Butthead about that one.
David: Well, I thought you're going to scientific authority before I-
Shawn: Mike Judge, PhD.
David: The researchers called it a slippery slope. The mechanism being minor lies gradually become easier, which makes larger lies more likely, which makes them easier in turn.
Shawn: It's like a snowball effect.
David: Yeah. Your conscience isn't a wall, it's a muscle. And you can overtrain it into uselessness.
Shawn: Well since I've never worked on muscle training anywhere in my body, I th I can't believe I would work on my conscience any harder than anything else.
David: I'm with you there. One more layer before we move on, and this one's personal. Research shows that lying on a given day decreases your self-esteem, compared to the previous day. Even when the lie isn't caught, even when it's a white lie intended to help someone, the effect holds regardless. You feel worse about yourself and this is happening under the surface, often without conscious awareness.
Shawn: Hmm.
David: And there's a second effect. People who lie more tend to assume that everyone else is lying to them.
Shawn: But they are because everybody lies every day as previously established.
David: But people who lie continuously in a lot, they become more suspicious unless they want to connect researcher links higher lying frequency with higher reported loneliness.
Shawn: Wow, that is amazing.
David: You lied to protect the relationship? the lie made you feel alone. Isn't it?
Shawn: That's sad. in key relationships in my life I know that I just feel better. When I'm honest, even if it paints me poorly, or even if it's going to be a difficult thing to say because I'm afraid of how that right person I care about is going to hear it. But I feel better overall about the relationship because even if they react poorly, if they're angry at me or whatever at least it's out there and it's true and now it can be addressed. Okay. Not like that. I mean I've told you before, I remember one time early in our marriage, I opened a piece of your mail.
David: At least it's out there and try yeah, okay.
Shawn: And I told you about it later and I felt really horrible and I'm like but my the thought in my head was I can't let this be the starting line right in our marriage. I I don't want the kind of marriage where I'm lying I'm keeping stuff from my spouse. because how can I expect to get honesty back if I'm not being honest? And even though I was very scared, I fessed up to it.
David: But I think I handled it pretty good for me.
Shawn: You did 'cause you're a much better human being than I am. But the point is I can personally assert that yes, being honest feels better, especially in those relationships where you actually care about that person. Exactly. It's not like telling the cashier at the grocery store that their new haircut looks great when it really doesn't.
David: investment.
Shawn: Okay, whatever. I don't have an investment with that person.
David: Right? But research shows that even those little white lines that don't affect you as much affect you a little bit.
Shawn: That makes sense.
David: So that's a neurological standpoint. The evolutionary argument is next. Here's the section that's going to reframe everything we've said so far. Because everything we've covered the cost benefit analysis, the four parallel computation, the amygdala break system, all of that implies that lying is a flaw, an unfortunate side effect, a moral shortcoming, even. Something we'd be better off without.
Shawn: I disagree. If we didn't need it, we wouldn't do it. We wouldn't have evolved to lie. It serves some purpose, so continue. I can't wait to hear what it is.
David: Yeah, I think you're on the right track. There's a theory called the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis. I'm so amazed I got through that without stumbling. Great name. It was developed by primatologists in the 1980s, and it proposes this. The relentless social complexity of living in groups who's allied with who Who has food, who's about to betray you, is what drove the rapid expansion of the human brain. Not tool use, not hunting, social maneuvering. The original killer app for human intelligence was figuring out how to manage other people. and a big part of managing other people. is deceiving them strategically. The brain that evolved to outwit a rival also ended up being capable of building cathedrals lying might have just been the on-ram.
Shawn: That makes sense to me So it is very much like gossip.
David: Yeah. Yeah, 'cause in that aspect 'cause a lot of times gossip also includes some exaggeration or lies of admission or
Shawn: You're you're telling the part of it that you feel is relevant, which is maybe not everything. Right. Because every piece of information is too much to convey. So we're always constantly, constantly conveying what we feel are the relevant facts. But in doing so, we're omitting some things that we feel aren't relevant. But omission is deception.
David: But might be.
Shawn: Agree. And it there's no ness n there isn't necessarily in that particular instance that I'm describing, there isn't even necessarily malice in it. Right. You know, I'm not even talking about when you're like what was the one what was the third category at the beginning, lying to cause harm to another person. I'm not even talking about that. we can't just convey every piece of information. No. So in picking and choosing We're omitting and omitting is deceiving. Right. Not necessarily out of an attempt to cause harm, but we just have to edit because we we can't communicate everything all the time.
David: We all perceive things differently. So what you consider important, someone else might consider nothing. They're thinking that's the vital piece right now.
Shawn: Hmm. Yeah, I might Exactly.
David: I get ya. there's even a mathematical model for this. Researchers build a simulation where genes control brains, which invent social strategies, which are used by individuals to compete for mates. And the model shows three phases. A dormant phase, a cognitive explosion phase, where intelligent rockets upward. into a runaway loop in a saturation phase where the cost of having such an expensive brain finally slows things down. The trigger for the explosion, social deception arms race, everybody getting better at lying, and catching liars at the same time. The brain grew to keep up with this social game. And then it got so big it could do everything else too. So our brain got larger because we were lying and trying to catch lies, and it got big enough that it was able to take on other tasks. Now here's where it gets fun. Because if the hypothesis is right, we should see the same pattern in other species, right?
Shawn: other social species that communicate kinda similarly. Are you talking about primates?
David: Well, primate, smarter animals should be better liars. And the research says yes.
Shawn: Octopi are probably great liars. Is it octopi or octopuses? Octopi.
David: I would think so, yeah. Pop the pop. There's a direct correlation between the size of the neocortex, the part of the brain associated with complex thought, and the frequency of tactical deception across eighteen primatic species. the bigger the thinking brain, the more that species lies.
Shawn: And again, because as we evolve. Managing others in our social group becomes a larger and larger part of our success.
David: Yeah, complex groups require perception at times.
Shawn: Absolutely.
David: let me give you the animal story because these are examples your friends are going to get tonight after you listen to this. This is why you're gonna be talking. Story one. On the Ethiopian savannah, during a dry season when food was scarce, a young chimpanzee named Paul watched a female named Mel spent an enormous effort digging up a large corn. Not corn, corn, C-O-R-M, which is a root.
Shawn: Okay. Mm-hmm.
David: Anyhow she was pulling it from the hard ground. Just as she finally yanked that prize free, Paul out an ear-splitting scream. His mother came running, Mel fled an alarm, Paul stopped screaming, picked up the food and ate it.
Shawn: That little dick. Go to your room.
David: He faked distress to steal food. He was a child and yet it was completely premeditated.
Shawn: Right.
David: Like you said, dick move.
Shawn: Yeah, they should change his name from Paul to Dick. Go to your room, you little brat.
David: story two is about Coco the gorilla, the sign language speaking gorilla.
Shawn: The story of Coco Good the Gorilla breaks my heart. And what happened to her and what they did to her.
David: But she was trained in American Sign Line. And one day, Coco tore a steel sink out of its moorings in her enclosure. Which tell you she wasn't as calm as they portray her all the time.
Shawn: Well she's a gorilla.
David: When her handlers came to confront her about the damage, Coco signed Cat did it.
Shawn: That little cat
David: And pointed to her pet kitten, which was something she'd want it actually to cared for really well from what I understand. gorilla destroyed property, blamed the cat. Then is premeditated deflection with an innocent third party framed for the crime. Coco was running a cover story.
Shawn: Yes.
David: Now here's an interesting one. Story three is the Durango Burry, a species that steals food from other animals by mimicking alarm calls.
Shawn: Ooh, that's a great skill to have.
David: But here's the thing, when researchers studied their behavior, they found that Durangos change which alarm call they use nearly 75% of the time when stealing from the same target repeatedly.
Shawn: Well yeah, they're gonna get wise to it.
David: it knows the same lie won't work twice on the same mark, so it rotates lies. A bird has figured out lie rotation strategy.
Shawn: So even a bird brain can come up with lies. Yeah.
David: I thought that was great. 'Cause yeah, what a great skill to have Mikein Burr should learn that.
Shawn: Do you hear that? It's singing off key on purpose. It's mocking me.
David: where does all this leave us? It means that when your two-year-old looks you dead in the eye and lies about whether they ate the cookie, that child is Not a moral failure. They are exhibiting a cognitive milestone. Research shows that children who start lying earlier tend to have stronger executive functioning, better working memory, and more advanced theory of mind than children who don't. Your toddler lying to you is actually a compliment.
Shawn: Aw, bless their little heart. Now go to your room.
David: You like that line. Alright, let's bring it back down to Earth. Because everything we've talked about so far, the brain chemistry, the evolution, it's all context for the thing that actually happening in your life every single day. White lies. Socializing. The constant low grade hum of small, mostly harmless deception that oil the machinery of human interaction. And the first thing I need to tell you is almost 90% of all lives we tell fall under this category.
Shawn: I I think that's probably fair because like I said, most of the time when we tell a lie, it's not out of malice.
David: The taxonomy here is worth a minute. Because not all white lives are doing the same job.
Shawn: Okay.
David: You're gonna love this next example. Because I've heard you talk about this a lot. There's the social lubricant lie. How are you? Fine. That's not a question, an answer. That's a verbal handshake. Both parties know it, neither cares. It's a ritual that signals I acknowledge you exist and I'm not hostile right now.
Shawn: Яп. at the very beginning of our very first episode, when I'm talking about how socially awkward I am and why I wanted to start exploring these social issues, I talk about how that simple exchange of how are you? Fine, the amount of anxiety that gives me. I've learned to just say good thanks and continue on with the conversation.
David: Yeah. Good strategy. There's the compassion lie. You tell when you're genuinely trying to protect someone from pain. You know, the haircut doesn't look so good because it tastes so good. The first creative work someone shows you, not that great, but you say it is. Researchers have found that people high in trait compassion are significantly more likely to lie in these situations
Shawn: Yeah.
David: Because they're more attuned to the harm that honesty might cause.
Shawn: My friend who's in theater tells a a situational joke frequently about when someone is in a show that's really awful and the things you say to try and make it okay.
David: without lying.
Shawn: Without lying, yeah, the the contortions that, you know, they'll go through to say, Yeah, you were on that stage.
David: Mm. And then and this one is the one that's going to sting slightly, there's the self-protection law. Which most of us categorize as a compassion lie.
Shawn: Hell no, I'm trying to cover my own ass.
David: But which research suggests is actually mostly about protecting ourselves from the discomfort of delivering hard news.
Shawn: Hell yeah.
David: I don't want to hurt your feelings is what we say. I don't want to experience what happens to me when your feelings get hurt is often closer to the truth.
Shawn: Like the lie about opening your mail. Yeah. I feared your reaction. And I only overcame it because it was such a precedent. Because it seems like a a minor thing, opening a piece of mail. But it wasn't minor in my mind. In my mind it was a very big deal because it established how I wanted to interact with you going forward in our marriage. So it seemed like a minor thing, but to me it was a very big deal and I thought Even if he gets angry and yells at me or he's upset or whatever, I'm willing to just take that hit because I don't wanna start down that road. Right. I don't even wanna take that first step. and yeah, it was one hundred percent covering my own ass.
David: Now here's where the research gets genuinely contradictory. And this is what makes it interesting. We all like contradictory stuff. Oxford anthropologist Robin Dunbar came up with Dunbar's number because he ran a simulation online in social networks and network size. And his conclusion was that pro-social lies, white lives, actually strengthened social bonds.
Shawn: Okay.
David: That they may be essential to the smooth running of society and that without them social networks fragment.
Shawn: Absolutely.
David: So white lies hold society together.
Shawn: Are you gonna do a Pee-Wee Herman here and everybody's got a big butt?
David: Well yeah, but
Shawn: I knew it. Liar!
David: Mary Kapler, spent time studying lying in romantic relationships using what she called the lying in an amorous relationship scale. Yeah, she named it liars.
Shawn: Why do people have to come up with these ridiculous acronyms for everything? Come on!
David: At least that one's flooding.
Shawn: This is from the same people that brought us awesome sauce.
David: Kaplar expected to find that kind, altruistic lies told to protect a partner's feelings, would be neutral or positive for the relationship. She found the opposite. Even nice lies told with good intentions hurt relationship satisfaction. Because lies, even harmless ones, create distance. They exclude someone from a part of you they thought they had access to. Which I didn't perfect with your mail example.
Shawn: And that's exactly what it was. I grew up in a household where I saw My parents I mostly watched my mother lie to my father. I presume the lies went the other way as well. I think by the time I was born he just checked out. And that's why I didn't want to have any of that between us. I always wanted to be honest with you and hope that you would always be honest with me. And I'm not saying that like that makes me some kind of noble person, like I owned up to my lie and I'm right. What a great person of moral fiber I am. That's not it at all. It was one hundred percent covering my own ass. Absolutely. And there was cost analysis involved in that. And I decided the cost was more than I was willing to pay. Yeah, it wasn't some kind of noble thing like, I was owning up to my lie to be, you know.
David: And there was cough mouse and was more than you were willing to pay.
Shawn: due to my great moral fiber or something. That wasn't it at all.
David: Kepler found that there's a compound effect. People who tell more white lies report feeling lonelier. Even when the lies were told specifically to preserve a relationship. The road to loneliness is paved with well-intentioned lies.
Shawn: Just like the road to hell.
David: So yeah, moralize you tell even the preserve a relationship causes issues.
Shawn: Because when I tell a lie, even if that other person doesn't know, I know. And that creates the distance between us. Because I know something you don't know. And I can't share that with you. And I and if I'm not sharing important things with you, then what's the point of this relationship?
David: Yeah. The cultural dimension is worth a quick stop too, because what counts as a white lie isn't universal. Researchers comparing German, Canadian, and Chinese participants found that Germans judge blunt truths as significantly more appropriate than pro-social lies.
Shawn: So I'm not gonna get a German person to tell me that my hair looks great when it looks like crap. Pretty much. Dang, alright. I better stay out of Germany.
David: In East Asian culture context, the white lie isn't just acceptable. In many situations it's expected. Failing to produce a polite deflection can actually violate social norms. And Canadians are pretty much like us and we know what we're like. Your honest answer might be someone else's social transgression. And your white lie might be someone else's cultural minimum standard of courtesy.
Shawn: Like all things, it depends.
David: And I'll close this segment with the thing nobody says in the White Lies conversation. Radical honesty, the alternative people sometimes propose when they're fed up with socialized, has its own problems. The people most comfortable delivering completely unfiltered truth tend to cluster around certain personality profiles. And the feedback those people typically get is not, what a refreshingly honest.
Shawn: Yes it does. No, they're assholes.
David: Exactly. Brutal honesty, wielded carelessly, is just brutality with better PR.
Shawn: How many times, and especially when you're an adolescent, or in those situations, where you're maybe a young adult, in college, you know, you just lie so much more because you're meeting new people all the time and
David: Dogging my homework.
Shawn: Well what I was thinking of is How many unpleasant insults have started with well I just have to be honest.
David: I know in my life there's none of them.
Shawn: Come on! You really don't.
David: I'd I would rather that person be silent and not say anything Right.
Shawn: Yeah. There's been time and we've all felt this way. And I'm and again I'm not trying to make it sound like I'm this person of great moral fiber. I'm trying to think of an example where I was like, I just have to be honest and I said something mean to somebody. I can't think of a specific example, but I know I've done it. I know I've done it.
David: So we're stuck. White lies are damaging in ways we don't fully see. Radical honesty damages in ways we definitely see. The functional zone is somewhere in between, and find it requires constant real-time judgment and context. Relationship depth plays into it, cultural background, and what the other person actually needs in that moment. Which is exhaustive. No wonder we just say fine.
Shawn: that's why while I have learned, because I don't feel comfortable making up an answer and I definitely don't feel comfortable asking the other person how they're doing. You're a total stranger to me and this is a transactional conversation. That's why I just say, Good thanks, and I roll on with whatever I'm trying to transact.
David: Yeah. Okay, I want to go somewhere with you that I didn't expect to end up when I started researching this episode. We've covered the machinery, the brain science, the evolution, the social function, and all of it's been building to this. The most uncomfortable finding in the whole pile of research. It's not about how we lie to other people, it's about how we lie to ourselves.
Shawn: man, don't make me confront my own thoughts and feelings. Ugh. I lived a lie to myself.
David: and we're good at it.
Shawn: I wish I was better at it, honestly. That's so funny. I just said honestly in a l episode about lying. I truly No, that's the same thing. I wish I was better at it. There we go. I'm just gonna say that. I wish I was actually better at deceiving myself. Because Looking in the mirror is just hard. I don't like it.
David: My big like is I I try to convince myself that I'm better at things than I really am.
Shawn: I'd probably do that. Yeah, I think that's probably fair. I'm trying to think of
David: That's probably my most common self-deception is thinking I'm much better at an activity than I am. Although I've gotten better. But yeah, I always wanted to be at the top of things, so you have to lie to yourself somewhat.
Shawn: Right.
David: And the evolutionary argument for self-deception is the one that should actually keep you up all night. Here it is. Self deception evolved to make us better at deceiving other people.
Shawn: Yeah. Or is it a chicken and an egg situation?
David: Well, it could be, but I tend to go with this analogy here. When you consciously lie to someone, your body tends to show it. Subtle stress responses, micro hesitations, things that trained observers and even untrained ones at the unconscious level pick up on it.
Shawn: People that are good lie detectors. Yeah. Get it.
David: But if you actually believe what you're saying, those signals disappear. The best liar in the evolutionary sense is one who has already convinced themselves the lie is true. There's nothing to detect. Because at the conscious level, there's no deception happening.
Shawn: People who have convinced themselves that they're psychic and they spend their time lying to themselves and to everybody else that they're psychic.
David: yeah, yeah.
Shawn: Now some of those people are just out and out con artists, but many, many, many, many people genuinely believe they have psychic ability. Right. Nobody has psychic ability. It's not a thing. But some people genuinely believe that.
David: Genou. Like we talked about recently all in astronomy.
Shawn: Right, so they're not lying. Yeah, astronomy is real. That's an observational field. Astrology is predicting n nonsense. Anywho, but yeah, if you genuinely believe something, you're lying to yourself and you're lying to others. There's no malice necessarily in that.
David: G not a star of the name. Yeah, astrology. Well and the amazing round. No.
Shawn: The part I don't like is when you And this is where the line gets blurry for me. And I'll probably bring this example back up in the next episode too when we're talking about con artists. So if you're someone who j has convinced yourself that you have psychic ability.
David: Okay. Okay.
Shawn: And you set out to convince other people of some bullshit nonsense you just made up. You decide now you're good enough at it that you can make a living doing this and now you're charging people money to lie to them.
David: Right.
Shawn: You've lied to yourself, you've lied to others, now you're actually causing them harm, but you still believe you're being honest that line's blurry.
David: Probably
Shawn: Sorry, I just went off the deep end there. Continue with your thought.
David: That's all right. Me on Best Singer named the engine of this in nineteen fifty-seven, so it's been around for a while. Cognitive dissonance.
Shawn: We've talked about that so much in so many of these topics.
David: When your beliefs and your behavior conflict, your brain experiences genuine discomfort. And rather than change the behavior, which is hard, and we don't like hard things, and which requires effort and accountability, the brain often changes the belief. Quietly in the background without asking you. Wow. You don't lie.
Shawn: No we don't. Which really sucks.
David: You just updated your understanding of the situation.
Shawn: Right, because I never knew I had psychic ability, but then I had this experience and golly, maybe I've been psychic all along and I just didn't know it. Right. I l I know so much more about myself and the world now than I did before.
David: You weren't being selfish, you were looking out for the group. It wasn't your fault. Any reasonable person would have done the same thing.
Shawn: Right.
David: Psychologists call this motivated reasoning. And every single person listening to this does it. constantly, including us, including the researchers who discover it. Everybody.
Shawn: I know I do. Because whenever I'm doing something that I know is questionable, if I'm examining my own behavior, And I'm thinking that's not truthful. Whatever it is. Something I'm doing, something I'm saying. I'm trying to think of an example while we're talking and nothing's coming to me, but I'm examining my behavior I'm calling myself on it in my mind saying that's not truthful. But if I really feel like I need to do that thing to protect myself or to gain something. I'm gonna start to justify it.
David: Yeah, and that makes the light easier because you start believing
Shawn: Right. And that's where the belief in the lie starts. Right. With that justifying why you're doing it.
David: now here's where it closes the loop back to where we started. Remember in the opening, the people most committed to the personal virtue of honesty, the ones who have built their self-image around being straight talkers, no nonsense, the person in the room who tells it like it is, those people are operating with a specific and measurable blind spot.
Shawn: I remember that from the top of this?
David: The identity of being an honest person is what prevents the self-examination that would make them more honest in the first place or in practice. The belief that you're on the right side of the line is exactly what stops you from looking at where the line actually is. I'm not exempt from this. You are not exempt from it. The researchers who publish the papers on it. are not exempt from it.
Shawn: Everyone does it.
David: That's not a reason to give up on honesty as a value. It's a reason to hold it differently. Less like an identity, more like a practice. Something you have to keep doing imperfectly with constant recalibration rather than something you either have or don't have.
Shawn: And hopefully doing this in an environment with people who love you and accept you.
David: Yes.
Shawn: And can Be understanding. If that's not the case, then it's going to be very difficult to be honest. Because if you're going to be attacked when you come clean, you're never gonna come clean. Right.
David: Another cost analysis right there. Here's the one thing I want you to actually do this week. Not lie less. That's not the point. I want you to catch yourself in a moment where you're certain you're the honest one. Where you're confident that you see the situation clearly and the other person doesn't. And just pause there. Because according to everything we've covered today, that certainty
Shawn: Okay.
David: is where the blind spot lives. Yeah, not in the lies that you tell, in the ones you already convinced yourself of. So it's drawing that line without knowing where the line is.
Shawn: Because of my perspective? Right, because from my perspective, I think I'm in the right here. Right. But I can't see from a different perspective, another person or another group, or just the world in general. I can't see that perspective. I can only see from my own perspective. So if we can only see from our own perspective How can we check our own understanding? I I can't not s I can't see from any other perspective than my own. It's not possible.
David: I I think if you stop and really start to think about it and not just react in the moment, you can start to break that down.
Shawn: But this is where I'm terr okay, so again, back to talking about my social awkwardness. This is where I'm terrible at this because I can't process that fast in the moment. This is why I never Can communicate my argument clearly when I'm in an agitated emotional state. Because I don't understand why I feel how I feel, and it'll be like days before I even understand why I'm feeling how I'm feeling. By that time it's a moot point. I don't know that I can do this, but alright.
David: I think you can. You you've gotten better at it over the years of being more in the moment. Okay, so that's episode one of Pants on Fire. We started with the confession. We ended at the same place, Which I think is the right place to end. Episode two is where it gets darker and considerably more entertaining. We're going to look at what happens when lying stops being social and goes pathological. At the historic lies that reshape nations, and at a century of attempts to build a working lie detector, why we build it, why we still use it, and why it fundamentally doesn't work. Plus, and I've been saying this one, the man who invented both the polygraph also invented Wonder Woman and her last o of truth.
Shawn: Stan Lee?
David: One Stan Lee But guy the same guy who invented the polygraph came up with Wonder Woman. And of course the last old truth, when you put it around people then we had to tell the truth. And I find that very interesting that he spent time working on the polygraph and then carrying that through in another project.
Shawn: Okay. here's how I'm feeling about this. I'm excited. Because I love the salaciousness of learning the truth behind a lie. I love the excitement of the reveal. I wonder if anybody out there listening is feeling the same way I am, please drop us a line. Classy as hell at Outlook.com because I'm smiling from ear to ear right now, just waiting to hear about this. And I find it interesting why I'm so excited about this. Like it's a weird thing to feel excited about, but I I I just can't wait to hear what you're gonna talk about.
David: Yeah, it's sorta the same reaction to hot gossip. People are attracted to hot gossip. You're attracted to unveiling the truth. Anyhow, thanks for listening. If you're leaving this feeling slightly less certain about your own self-knowledge than when you pressed play, good. That's the correct response. We'll see you in two weeks and remember if you can't keep it classy.
Shawn: Keep it real.
David: There we go.
Shawn: Your script was great.
Shawn: Welcome to Classy as Hell, the podcast where we can't possibly mess this up because we have absolutely no standards. I'm Sean.
David: David. So Sean, you've had a crafting project this week, if I'm not mistaken.
Shawn: You are correct. if any of you have heard me before talking about painting miniatures in my scythe game, I finally got around to getting the expansion with the two extra gaming factions, the Togawa and the Albion factions. And so I spent A very happy day sitting in one position, not eating, not drinking, not moving, and just painting. Teeny tiny details and it was fan freaking tastic. I loved it.
David: Yeah you sat there for hours no eating no going to the bathroom just sitting there hunched over I've been in so much pain by the time I got done
Shawn: when I reach that level of focus, I'm not drinking water, I'm not eating food, hence I don't need to go to the bathroom. I I'm just focused.
David: Yeah, I wasn't even in the the room when I was in the room.
Shawn: Did you say words to me? Probably. Did I answer you? No. Okay. Anywho, yeah, I think that's the most productive part of where I am on the spectrum. Being able to focus on something detailed for long, long periods of time because it engages me. And you
David: Ha ha ha. Do do a great job. Those miniatures turned out fantastic.
Shawn: Thanks. So what are we talking about this week?
David: funny you should mention that. I think we're gonna talk sports.
Shawn: Yeah. yeah, well my local sports team can beat your local sports team.
David: A actually that's a lie. And of course that's what we're gonna be covering. We're gonna talk about lies. this is gonna be a two-part episode. The first one's gonna be about why we lie, the evolutionary standpoint, neurology standpoint. And then next week will be more about big lies. Grifters and con people and li lies that have changed states and governments.
Shawn: Who Wow. I can't wait to hear that one too. But this sounds interesting. I'm thinking it's probably a lot like our episode on gossip. I mean we didn't we didn't just become liars because there's no social benefit to it. Right. We lie because it's part of the social glue that holds our species together, I'm presuming. So I can't wait to hear what you have to say about
David: It's the lubricant that keeps us going.
Shawn: lube.
David: Anyhow, I spent most of my life thinking of myself as an honest person. Not perfect, not incapable of the occasional social lie or convenient omission, but fundamentally at the character level honest. It was part of how I understood myself. Part of what I thought separated me from the people who, you know, wasn't. I'm not so sure anymore. Not because I did something terrible, not because someone caught me in it in in something, but because I spent the last several weeks reading the research online, the neuroscience, the evolutionary biology, the social psychology, and somewhere in the middle of all of it, I realized that the belief itself was the problem. The belief that I was an honest person that certainty, that comfortable sense of being on the right side of this particular line turns out to be exactly where the blind spot lives. And the research on this is not subtle, it's specific. It's measurable and it's deeply personally uncomfortable. Which is why we're here.
Shawn: I don't I I know I tell lies. I'm I'm under no delusions that I'm an honest person. I know I tell lies. So I don't think I'm gonna be as disturbed by this as you were.
David: We'll see. here's the number that started all of this for me. The average person, not a con artist, not a sociopath, not a politician, which is sort of the same as a sociopath. the average reasonable, decent human being tells between one and two lies every single day.
Shawn: Yeah, that's their job is lying. I think that number's low. Is this self-reporting? Pro Yeah, that number's low. I know I lie more than once or twice a day.
David: Well, and there are probably some days where you lie more than two and dimes where you
Shawn: I think there's probably many days where I don't tell a lie at all. I'm just a I'm just at my job, I'm focused on my work, I'm you know I'm not really conversing with people in a way that would generate a situation where I feel the need to lie. If I just am talking to you, I don't lie to you. There's no point.
David: Yeah, so that's why Well, so yeah, it's an average, like I said. Every single day college students double that.
Shawn: hell yeah. How else are you gonna get laid?
David: And when you meet someone for the first time, research shows you'll lie to them within the first ten minutes.
Shawn: here we go. Yes, that's so good, I love it.
David: two, maybe three times before you even know or learn their name.
Shawn: Yes, I love this so much. That is so good.
David: Almost ninety percent of those lies are harmless. You know, white lies. Social lubricant. The kind of small, comfortable fiction that make it possible to get through a Tuesday without hurting six people's feelings before noon. But here's what the research says, that nobody puts on a motivational poster. The people most committed to the personal virtue of honesty, the ones who have built their self-image around being straight talkers, truth-tellers, no nonsense, are statistically among the least equipped to see how much they are lying to themselves.
Shawn: I'd agree with that.
David: the identity is the blind spot. And by the end of this episode, I think you're going to feel the same thing I felt where I first understood that. A specific kind of uncomfortable that doesn't go away when you turn the podcast off. You're well.
Shawn: Thanks. I do have a little bit of a comment about that last statement you said though. mean, how many times since you've known me have you heard me say I'm the kind of person who I I have no poker face, I've got no guile, I can't really be phony. I tend to say what I mean and I mean what I say. But I freely acknowledge that I tell lies. So I don't
David: New error combination.
Shawn: I don't think that jibes for me. I am the kind of person who considers myself a straight talker, but I know I tell lies.
David: But I've also seen you buffer what you say, especially to friends and acquaintances, that you're not as straightforward as you are when you talk to me about them.
Shawn: like I'm saying something in a softened manner. Yep.
David: Yes. I I see that a lot.
Shawn: Okay, and that fits in with what you were talking about, what we call you know, lies to like save someone's feelings. Like we don't want to hurt their feelings, we don't want them to be upset with us, so we soften what we're saying.
David: We're going to spend the rest of our time today looking at lying, not as a moral failing, not as a character flaw, but as a biological fact. A cognitive phenomenon, something the research understands better than most of us want to invent. We're going to cover the brain science of why lying is harder than it looks, the evolutionary argument for why it may have made us smarter as a species, the social function of white lies, and what happens to relationships when you tell them. And we're going to end somewhere, I didn't expect when I started this, at the question of what it means to think of yourself as an honest person. and whether that belief is doing you any favors.
Shawn: I think it's great that one of the points you're gonna talk about is that it's made us smarter as a species. Because you have to imagine something on the fly in real time. Yeah. That takes a lot of brain power.
David: That It it was an interesting thing to learn during all of this. And we're going to get to that here in just a minute.
Shawn: Okay.
David: Now I want to be clear about something before we go any further though. This episode is not permission to lie more. That's not the argument. The argument is that most of us are already lying more than we think. And the belief that we're not is making us worse and understanding ourselves not better.
Shawn: Dang.
David: That's what I want to pull apart today. And Sean is going to keep me honest, which is giving the topic either deeply appropriate or deeply ironic. Possibly both.
Shawn: I think it's deeply ironic. You're asking you're asking the person who started this conversation with, yeah, I'm a liar, to keep you honest. We're both in a world of hurt now.
David: So let's start simple. Why do people lie? Psychologists have been studying this for decades, and they've led it on three core categories. You lie to get something you want, you lie to protect or promote yourself or others, and this one's less talked about you lie to harm someone else. which one do you think is more common, Sean?
Shawn: I think to protect or promote myself or or someone I care about.
David: Very good. Well that's the most common single motivation for both children and adults is avoiding punishment.
Shawn: the right answer? And honestly, that's honestly that's so funny I just said that. But that was my thought process when I like, what's the one that's most common? And I thought, what are the first lies little kids tell? They lie to avoid getting in trouble.
David: Yes they do. Before anything else, before greed, before status, before manipulation, the most ancient, most universal reason a human being lies is because they don't want to face the consequences of what they did.
Shawn: Right. Or to protect someone. They don't want someone they their friend or their loved one or somebody they care about. They don't want them to get in trouble.
David: Yeah, what? Which if you think about it is kind of reassuring. We're not primarily lying to get ahead, we're primarily lying because we're scared.
Shawn: Mm-hmm. Makes sense.
David: But here's the part that doesn't make it into the basic summary. Before most people tell a self-serving lie, they run what researchers call a rapid cost-benefit analysis. Usually unconscious, usually taking about a half a second, does the benefit outweigh the risk of getting caught? If yes, the lie happens.
Shawn: Mm-hmm. And this is why I think lying to keep yourself or someone you care about from getting in trouble is the most common lie. Because You're already in trouble. The benefit of telling the lie is maybe you get away with it and you avoid trouble. If you get caught, you're already in trouble anyway. So the cost-benefit analysis is obvious even to a toddler. Yeah.
David: Yeah, you learn it really quick. We are not moral philosophers in the moment. We're running a spreadsheet, a very fast, very unconscious spreadsheet.
Shawn: Right.
David: And then there's the category nobody wants to include in the polite version of this conversation. The lies we tell ourselves. Self-deception. The lies where you're not trying to fool someone else, you're trying to fool you. Command a positive self-image to avoid the discomfort of knowing something true about yourself that you don't want to know. We'll go deeper into that in a few minutes, because the research on self deception is genuinely the most unsettling part of this whole episode.
Shawn: And I can see why that is, even before you dig into it too deeply. Because this is always the calculation that I run in my head. It it doesn't happen immediately. It takes a little while. But whenever there's someone that I just dislike, like I take an immediate dislike to that person, or I have to work with someone and we don't get along. Right. After a little while, you know, If it if it's someone that I just take an immediate dislike to and I don't have to work with that person or be in contact with that person or socialize with that person, I don't care. Roll on, let it go away. But if I'm in a situation where I have to interact with this person on the regular, I'm gonna try to figure out what the problem is because I have to work with this person or I have to see this person or I have to cooperate with this person on a project or you know, something like that. And the first question that I always ask myself is Is there something in that person you don't like because you don't like that in yourself?
David: I have heard you make that comment.
Shawn: if I think about it and I'm like, that person does this thing and I don't like it myself when I do that thing, that's why I'm having this knee-jerk reaction of I don't like that person. Because it's something I see in the mirror. And I don't like the mirror. I like the lovely painting in the attic.
David: just to recap real quick, average person lies one to two times a day. College teams, double that. People you lie to the most, friends. Yep. 51% of the time.
Shawn: Yup sorry to my friends out there.
David: Then family about twenty one percent of the time and then strangers. But you don't add to them within the first ten minutes.
Shawn: That's right. They get the lies up front. They get front loaded.
David: Lies are told face to face about seventy-nine percent of the time. Lies told to feel closer to someone you just met almost guaranteed in the first ten minutes.
Shawn: That's probably my biggest category right there. Trying to feel closer to somebody I just met. That's when gonna start telling lies.
David: Okay.
Shawn: That's probably my biggest category. Well, I mean, I I don't see any point in not being honest, we're s we're sitting here talking about this topic, lying. I don't see any point in lying about my lying.
David: Everything.
Shawn: And I will say that the longer I know somebody, the more honest and open I am with them. Okay.
David: So you go from lying to get in with them and then become more open as they get to know.
Shawn: Right, because when I first meet that person I want them to like me. So I'm gonna try and tell lies to impress them or to to relate to them.
David: Alright, let's talk about your brain on a lie. Let's talk about what's actually happening in your brain when you lie. Because this is where it gets genuinely str- First, the basic architecture, when you tell a lie, the brain isn't doing just one thing, like you had mentioned. It's doing four things simultaneously. It has to suppress the true answer. Construct the false one, monitor the false narrative for internal consistency, and predict how the other person is going to respond to it.
Shawn: That's the worst. When you think somebody's gonna respond a certain way to your lie and you tell the lie and they respond the way that you didn't predict that's terrible
David: So you're doing four parallel computations all at once. Where telling the truth requires exactly one. And you can actually see this on a brain scan. MRI research shows three specific regions light up significantly more during deception than during truth telling. The prefrontal part the part of your brain doing the heavy lifting, the anterior cingulate cortex, which monitors for conflict. between computing responses The prefrontal cortex alone is running four processes at once during a line. like the difference between walking and juggling while walking. Both are possible, one is dramatically harder.
Shawn: Well, I struggle with walking and chewing gum, so It's amazing I can tell lies.
David: Now here's the amygdala. The almond shape structure deep in your brain, associated with emotion, guilt, fear, and anxiety. when you lie for personal gain, your amygdala fires. It produces a negative emotional signal, a kind of internal check. Hey, we're doing something we know is wrong. That signal is your conscious. Literally it has a physical address in your brain. And here's the part that should change how you think about the lies you tell, even the small ones. A study published in Nature, Neuroscience, one of the top scientific journals in the world, tracked what happens to the amygdala response when people lie repeatedly. It shrinks. Yay! Every time you tell a self-serving lie, the amygdala response gets a little smaller, a little quieter. And the researchers found something remarkable. The bigger the drop in amygdala activity after one lie, the bigger the next lie would be. Not might be, would be, measurably and predictable. Your brain is literally forecasting its own moral slide in real time on a brain scanner.
Shawn: Wow. That's amazing. I know I've seen studies about brain scans where People have to make a a choice, like something as simple as left or right. Okay. And in the brain scan, you can see the choice being made before the person is even consciously aware of whether they've chosen left or right.
David: Yeah. Yeah, the the brain is just an amazing
Shawn: But I think it's amazing that they can see that level of detail.
David: yeah, yeah. It the difference between one is a person lying and when a person not lining up different parts of the brain is amazing.
Shawn: Have you ever had a polygraph? I never have. I hear if you squish up your butthole it makes it really easy to lie. Or it makes the system like not read your lie better.
David: No, I haven't. Yeah I've heard a number of things. The Mythbusters did an episode that. they put a tack in one of 'em's shoe and you would press against the tack and that wouldn't Yeah, mass affect the results. I guess it it makes it hard to get a an honest read so that when you lie they look about the same.
Shawn: Yeah. The pain would So did it actually work? Did the pain work? Do you remember
David: You know, I think it worked for me, but I can't remember clearly.
Shawn: What about clenching up your anus? Did that work? Did they try the back? okay. 'Cause that's the one I've heard. There was even an episode of Beavis and Butthead about that one.
David: Well, I thought you're going to scientific authority before I-
Shawn: Mike Judge, PhD.
David: The researchers called it a slippery slope. The mechanism being minor lies gradually become easier, which makes larger lies more likely, which makes them easier in turn.
Shawn: It's like a snowball effect.
David: Yeah. Your conscience isn't a wall, it's a muscle. And you can overtrain it into uselessness.
Shawn: Well since I've never worked on muscle training anywhere in my body, I th I can't believe I would work on my conscience any harder than anything else.
David: I'm with you there. One more layer before we move on, and this one's personal. Research shows that lying on a given day decreases your self-esteem, compared to the previous day. Even when the lie isn't caught, even when it's a white lie intended to help someone, the effect holds regardless. You feel worse about yourself and this is happening under the surface, often without conscious awareness.
Shawn: Hmm.
David: And there's a second effect. People who lie more tend to assume that everyone else is lying to them.
Shawn: But they are because everybody lies every day as previously established.
David: But people who lie continuously in a lot, they become more suspicious unless they want to connect researcher links higher lying frequency with higher reported loneliness.
Shawn: Wow, that is amazing.
David: You lied to protect the relationship? the lie made you feel alone. Isn't it?
Shawn: That's sad. in key relationships in my life I know that I just feel better. When I'm honest, even if it paints me poorly, or even if it's going to be a difficult thing to say because I'm afraid of how that right person I care about is going to hear it. But I feel better overall about the relationship because even if they react poorly, if they're angry at me or whatever at least it's out there and it's true and now it can be addressed. Okay. Not like that. I mean I've told you before, I remember one time early in our marriage, I opened a piece of your mail.
David: At least it's out there and try yeah, okay.
Shawn: And I told you about it later and I felt really horrible and I'm like but my the thought in my head was I can't let this be the starting line right in our marriage. I I don't want the kind of marriage where I'm lying I'm keeping stuff from my spouse. because how can I expect to get honesty back if I'm not being honest? And even though I was very scared, I fessed up to it.
David: But I think I handled it pretty good for me.
Shawn: You did 'cause you're a much better human being than I am. But the point is I can personally assert that yes, being honest feels better, especially in those relationships where you actually care about that person. Exactly. It's not like telling the cashier at the grocery store that their new haircut looks great when it really doesn't.
David: investment.
Shawn: Okay, whatever. I don't have an investment with that person.
David: Right? But research shows that even those little white lines that don't affect you as much affect you a little bit.
Shawn: That makes sense.
David: So that's a neurological standpoint. The evolutionary argument is next. Here's the section that's going to reframe everything we've said so far. Because everything we've covered the cost benefit analysis, the four parallel computation, the amygdala break system, all of that implies that lying is a flaw, an unfortunate side effect, a moral shortcoming, even. Something we'd be better off without.
Shawn: I disagree. If we didn't need it, we wouldn't do it. We wouldn't have evolved to lie. It serves some purpose, so continue. I can't wait to hear what it is.
David: Yeah, I think you're on the right track. There's a theory called the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis. I'm so amazed I got through that without stumbling. Great name. It was developed by primatologists in the 1980s, and it proposes this. The relentless social complexity of living in groups who's allied with who Who has food, who's about to betray you, is what drove the rapid expansion of the human brain. Not tool use, not hunting, social maneuvering. The original killer app for human intelligence was figuring out how to manage other people. and a big part of managing other people. is deceiving them strategically. The brain that evolved to outwit a rival also ended up being capable of building cathedrals lying might have just been the on-ram.
Shawn: That makes sense to me So it is very much like gossip.
David: Yeah. Yeah, 'cause in that aspect 'cause a lot of times gossip also includes some exaggeration or lies of admission or
Shawn: You're you're telling the part of it that you feel is relevant, which is maybe not everything. Right. Because every piece of information is too much to convey. So we're always constantly, constantly conveying what we feel are the relevant facts. But in doing so, we're omitting some things that we feel aren't relevant. But omission is deception.
David: But might be.
Shawn: Agree. And it there's no ness n there isn't necessarily in that particular instance that I'm describing, there isn't even necessarily malice in it. Right. You know, I'm not even talking about when you're like what was the one what was the third category at the beginning, lying to cause harm to another person. I'm not even talking about that. we can't just convey every piece of information. No. So in picking and choosing We're omitting and omitting is deceiving. Right. Not necessarily out of an attempt to cause harm, but we just have to edit because we we can't communicate everything all the time.
David: We all perceive things differently. So what you consider important, someone else might consider nothing. They're thinking that's the vital piece right now.
Shawn: Hmm. Yeah, I might Exactly.
David: I get ya. there's even a mathematical model for this. Researchers build a simulation where genes control brains, which invent social strategies, which are used by individuals to compete for mates. And the model shows three phases. A dormant phase, a cognitive explosion phase, where intelligent rockets upward. into a runaway loop in a saturation phase where the cost of having such an expensive brain finally slows things down. The trigger for the explosion, social deception arms race, everybody getting better at lying, and catching liars at the same time. The brain grew to keep up with this social game. And then it got so big it could do everything else too. So our brain got larger because we were lying and trying to catch lies, and it got big enough that it was able to take on other tasks. Now here's where it gets fun. Because if the hypothesis is right, we should see the same pattern in other species, right?
Shawn: other social species that communicate kinda similarly. Are you talking about primates?
David: Well, primate, smarter animals should be better liars. And the research says yes.
Shawn: Octopi are probably great liars. Is it octopi or octopuses? Octopi.
David: I would think so, yeah. Pop the pop. There's a direct correlation between the size of the neocortex, the part of the brain associated with complex thought, and the frequency of tactical deception across eighteen primatic species. the bigger the thinking brain, the more that species lies.
Shawn: And again, because as we evolve. Managing others in our social group becomes a larger and larger part of our success.
David: Yeah, complex groups require perception at times.
Shawn: Absolutely.
David: let me give you the animal story because these are examples your friends are going to get tonight after you listen to this. This is why you're gonna be talking. Story one. On the Ethiopian savannah, during a dry season when food was scarce, a young chimpanzee named Paul watched a female named Mel spent an enormous effort digging up a large corn. Not corn, corn, C-O-R-M, which is a root.
Shawn: Okay. Mm-hmm.
David: Anyhow she was pulling it from the hard ground. Just as she finally yanked that prize free, Paul out an ear-splitting scream. His mother came running, Mel fled an alarm, Paul stopped screaming, picked up the food and ate it.
Shawn: That little dick. Go to your room.
David: He faked distress to steal food. He was a child and yet it was completely premeditated.
Shawn: Right.
David: Like you said, dick move.
Shawn: Yeah, they should change his name from Paul to Dick. Go to your room, you little brat.
David: story two is about Coco the gorilla, the sign language speaking gorilla.
Shawn: The story of Coco Good the Gorilla breaks my heart. And what happened to her and what they did to her.
David: But she was trained in American Sign Line. And one day, Coco tore a steel sink out of its moorings in her enclosure. Which tell you she wasn't as calm as they portray her all the time.
Shawn: Well she's a gorilla.
David: When her handlers came to confront her about the damage, Coco signed Cat did it.
Shawn: That little cat
David: And pointed to her pet kitten, which was something she'd want it actually to cared for really well from what I understand. gorilla destroyed property, blamed the cat. Then is premeditated deflection with an innocent third party framed for the crime. Coco was running a cover story.
Shawn: Yes.
David: Now here's an interesting one. Story three is the Durango Burry, a species that steals food from other animals by mimicking alarm calls.
Shawn: Ooh, that's a great skill to have.
David: But here's the thing, when researchers studied their behavior, they found that Durangos change which alarm call they use nearly 75% of the time when stealing from the same target repeatedly.
Shawn: Well yeah, they're gonna get wise to it.
David: it knows the same lie won't work twice on the same mark, so it rotates lies. A bird has figured out lie rotation strategy.
Shawn: So even a bird brain can come up with lies. Yeah.
David: I thought that was great. 'Cause yeah, what a great skill to have Mikein Burr should learn that.
Shawn: Do you hear that? It's singing off key on purpose. It's mocking me.
David: where does all this leave us? It means that when your two-year-old looks you dead in the eye and lies about whether they ate the cookie, that child is Not a moral failure. They are exhibiting a cognitive milestone. Research shows that children who start lying earlier tend to have stronger executive functioning, better working memory, and more advanced theory of mind than children who don't. Your toddler lying to you is actually a compliment.
Shawn: Aw, bless their little heart. Now go to your room.
David: You like that line. Alright, let's bring it back down to Earth. Because everything we've talked about so far, the brain chemistry, the evolution, it's all context for the thing that actually happening in your life every single day. White lies. Socializing. The constant low grade hum of small, mostly harmless deception that oil the machinery of human interaction. And the first thing I need to tell you is almost 90% of all lives we tell fall under this category.
Shawn: I I think that's probably fair because like I said, most of the time when we tell a lie, it's not out of malice.
David: The taxonomy here is worth a minute. Because not all white lives are doing the same job.
Shawn: Okay.
David: You're gonna love this next example. Because I've heard you talk about this a lot. There's the social lubricant lie. How are you? Fine. That's not a question, an answer. That's a verbal handshake. Both parties know it, neither cares. It's a ritual that signals I acknowledge you exist and I'm not hostile right now.
Shawn: Яп. at the very beginning of our very first episode, when I'm talking about how socially awkward I am and why I wanted to start exploring these social issues, I talk about how that simple exchange of how are you? Fine, the amount of anxiety that gives me. I've learned to just say good thanks and continue on with the conversation.
David: Yeah. Good strategy. There's the compassion lie. You tell when you're genuinely trying to protect someone from pain. You know, the haircut doesn't look so good because it tastes so good. The first creative work someone shows you, not that great, but you say it is. Researchers have found that people high in trait compassion are significantly more likely to lie in these situations
Shawn: Yeah.
David: Because they're more attuned to the harm that honesty might cause.
Shawn: My friend who's in theater tells a a situational joke frequently about when someone is in a show that's really awful and the things you say to try and make it okay.
David: without lying.
Shawn: Without lying, yeah, the the contortions that, you know, they'll go through to say, Yeah, you were on that stage.
David: Mm. And then and this one is the one that's going to sting slightly, there's the self-protection law. Which most of us categorize as a compassion lie.
Shawn: Hell no, I'm trying to cover my own ass.
David: But which research suggests is actually mostly about protecting ourselves from the discomfort of delivering hard news.
Shawn: Hell yeah.
David: I don't want to hurt your feelings is what we say. I don't want to experience what happens to me when your feelings get hurt is often closer to the truth.
Shawn: Like the lie about opening your mail. Yeah. I feared your reaction. And I only overcame it because it was such a precedent. Because it seems like a a minor thing, opening a piece of mail. But it wasn't minor in my mind. In my mind it was a very big deal because it established how I wanted to interact with you going forward in our marriage. So it seemed like a minor thing, but to me it was a very big deal and I thought Even if he gets angry and yells at me or he's upset or whatever, I'm willing to just take that hit because I don't wanna start down that road. Right. I don't even wanna take that first step. and yeah, it was one hundred percent covering my own ass.
David: Now here's where the research gets genuinely contradictory. And this is what makes it interesting. We all like contradictory stuff. Oxford anthropologist Robin Dunbar came up with Dunbar's number because he ran a simulation online in social networks and network size. And his conclusion was that pro-social lies, white lives, actually strengthened social bonds.
Shawn: Okay.
David: That they may be essential to the smooth running of society and that without them social networks fragment.
Shawn: Absolutely.
David: So white lies hold society together.
Shawn: Are you gonna do a Pee-Wee Herman here and everybody's got a big butt?
David: Well yeah, but
Shawn: I knew it. Liar!
David: Mary Kapler, spent time studying lying in romantic relationships using what she called the lying in an amorous relationship scale. Yeah, she named it liars.
Shawn: Why do people have to come up with these ridiculous acronyms for everything? Come on!
David: At least that one's flooding.
Shawn: This is from the same people that brought us awesome sauce.
David: Kaplar expected to find that kind, altruistic lies told to protect a partner's feelings, would be neutral or positive for the relationship. She found the opposite. Even nice lies told with good intentions hurt relationship satisfaction. Because lies, even harmless ones, create distance. They exclude someone from a part of you they thought they had access to. Which I didn't perfect with your mail example.
Shawn: And that's exactly what it was. I grew up in a household where I saw My parents I mostly watched my mother lie to my father. I presume the lies went the other way as well. I think by the time I was born he just checked out. And that's why I didn't want to have any of that between us. I always wanted to be honest with you and hope that you would always be honest with me. And I'm not saying that like that makes me some kind of noble person, like I owned up to my lie and I'm right. What a great person of moral fiber I am. That's not it at all. It was one hundred percent covering my own ass. Absolutely. And there was cost analysis involved in that. And I decided the cost was more than I was willing to pay. Yeah, it wasn't some kind of noble thing like, I was owning up to my lie to be, you know.
David: And there was cough mouse and was more than you were willing to pay.
Shawn: due to my great moral fiber or something. That wasn't it at all.
David: Kepler found that there's a compound effect. People who tell more white lies report feeling lonelier. Even when the lies were told specifically to preserve a relationship. The road to loneliness is paved with well-intentioned lies.
Shawn: Just like the road to hell.
David: So yeah, moralize you tell even the preserve a relationship causes issues.
Shawn: Because when I tell a lie, even if that other person doesn't know, I know. And that creates the distance between us. Because I know something you don't know. And I can't share that with you. And I and if I'm not sharing important things with you, then what's the point of this relationship?
David: Yeah. The cultural dimension is worth a quick stop too, because what counts as a white lie isn't universal. Researchers comparing German, Canadian, and Chinese participants found that Germans judge blunt truths as significantly more appropriate than pro-social lies.
Shawn: So I'm not gonna get a German person to tell me that my hair looks great when it looks like crap. Pretty much. Dang, alright. I better stay out of Germany.
David: In East Asian culture context, the white lie isn't just acceptable. In many situations it's expected. Failing to produce a polite deflection can actually violate social norms. And Canadians are pretty much like us and we know what we're like. Your honest answer might be someone else's social transgression. And your white lie might be someone else's cultural minimum standard of courtesy.
Shawn: Like all things, it depends.
David: And I'll close this segment with the thing nobody says in the White Lies conversation. Radical honesty, the alternative people sometimes propose when they're fed up with socialized, has its own problems. The people most comfortable delivering completely unfiltered truth tend to cluster around certain personality profiles. And the feedback those people typically get is not, what a refreshingly honest.
Shawn: Yes it does. No, they're assholes.
David: Exactly. Brutal honesty, wielded carelessly, is just brutality with better PR.
Shawn: How many times, and especially when you're an adolescent, or in those situations, where you're maybe a young adult, in college, you know, you just lie so much more because you're meeting new people all the time and
David: Dogging my homework.
Shawn: Well what I was thinking of is How many unpleasant insults have started with well I just have to be honest.
David: I know in my life there's none of them.
Shawn: Come on! You really don't.
David: I'd I would rather that person be silent and not say anything Right.
Shawn: Yeah. There's been time and we've all felt this way. And I'm and again I'm not trying to make it sound like I'm this person of great moral fiber. I'm trying to think of an example where I was like, I just have to be honest and I said something mean to somebody. I can't think of a specific example, but I know I've done it. I know I've done it.
David: So we're stuck. White lies are damaging in ways we don't fully see. Radical honesty damages in ways we definitely see. The functional zone is somewhere in between, and find it requires constant real-time judgment and context. Relationship depth plays into it, cultural background, and what the other person actually needs in that moment. Which is exhaustive. No wonder we just say fine.
Shawn: that's why while I have learned, because I don't feel comfortable making up an answer and I definitely don't feel comfortable asking the other person how they're doing. You're a total stranger to me and this is a transactional conversation. That's why I just say, Good thanks, and I roll on with whatever I'm trying to transact.
David: Yeah. Okay, I want to go somewhere with you that I didn't expect to end up when I started researching this episode. We've covered the machinery, the brain science, the evolution, the social function, and all of it's been building to this. The most uncomfortable finding in the whole pile of research. It's not about how we lie to other people, it's about how we lie to ourselves.
Shawn: man, don't make me confront my own thoughts and feelings. Ugh. I lived a lie to myself.
David: and we're good at it.
Shawn: I wish I was better at it, honestly. That's so funny. I just said honestly in a l episode about lying. I truly No, that's the same thing. I wish I was better at it. There we go. I'm just gonna say that. I wish I was actually better at deceiving myself. Because Looking in the mirror is just hard. I don't like it.
David: My big like is I I try to convince myself that I'm better at things than I really am.
Shawn: I'd probably do that. Yeah, I think that's probably fair. I'm trying to think of
David: That's probably my most common self-deception is thinking I'm much better at an activity than I am. Although I've gotten better. But yeah, I always wanted to be at the top of things, so you have to lie to yourself somewhat.
Shawn: Right.
David: And the evolutionary argument for self-deception is the one that should actually keep you up all night. Here it is. Self deception evolved to make us better at deceiving other people.
Shawn: Yeah. Or is it a chicken and an egg situation?
David: Well, it could be, but I tend to go with this analogy here. When you consciously lie to someone, your body tends to show it. Subtle stress responses, micro hesitations, things that trained observers and even untrained ones at the unconscious level pick up on it.
Shawn: People that are good lie detectors. Yeah. Get it.
David: But if you actually believe what you're saying, those signals disappear. The best liar in the evolutionary sense is one who has already convinced themselves the lie is true. There's nothing to detect. Because at the conscious level, there's no deception happening.
Shawn: People who have convinced themselves that they're psychic and they spend their time lying to themselves and to everybody else that they're psychic.
David: yeah, yeah.
Shawn: Now some of those people are just out and out con artists, but many, many, many, many people genuinely believe they have psychic ability. Right. Nobody has psychic ability. It's not a thing. But some people genuinely believe that.
David: Genou. Like we talked about recently all in astronomy.
Shawn: Right, so they're not lying. Yeah, astronomy is real. That's an observational field. Astrology is predicting n nonsense. Anywho, but yeah, if you genuinely believe something, you're lying to yourself and you're lying to others. There's no malice necessarily in that.
David: G not a star of the name. Yeah, astrology. Well and the amazing round. No.
Shawn: The part I don't like is when you And this is where the line gets blurry for me. And I'll probably bring this example back up in the next episode too when we're talking about con artists. So if you're someone who j has convinced yourself that you have psychic ability.
David: Okay. Okay.
Shawn: And you set out to convince other people of some bullshit nonsense you just made up. You decide now you're good enough at it that you can make a living doing this and now you're charging people money to lie to them.
David: Right.
Shawn: You've lied to yourself, you've lied to others, now you're actually causing them harm, but you still believe you're being honest that line's blurry.
David: Probably
Shawn: Sorry, I just went off the deep end there. Continue with your thought.
David: That's all right. Me on Best Singer named the engine of this in nineteen fifty-seven, so it's been around for a while. Cognitive dissonance.
Shawn: We've talked about that so much in so many of these topics.
David: When your beliefs and your behavior conflict, your brain experiences genuine discomfort. And rather than change the behavior, which is hard, and we don't like hard things, and which requires effort and accountability, the brain often changes the belief. Quietly in the background without asking you. Wow. You don't lie.
Shawn: No we don't. Which really sucks.
David: You just updated your understanding of the situation.
Shawn: Right, because I never knew I had psychic ability, but then I had this experience and golly, maybe I've been psychic all along and I just didn't know it. Right. I l I know so much more about myself and the world now than I did before.
David: You weren't being selfish, you were looking out for the group. It wasn't your fault. Any reasonable person would have done the same thing.
Shawn: Right.
David: Psychologists call this motivated reasoning. And every single person listening to this does it. constantly, including us, including the researchers who discover it. Everybody.
Shawn: I know I do. Because whenever I'm doing something that I know is questionable, if I'm examining my own behavior, And I'm thinking that's not truthful. Whatever it is. Something I'm doing, something I'm saying. I'm trying to think of an example while we're talking and nothing's coming to me, but I'm examining my behavior I'm calling myself on it in my mind saying that's not truthful. But if I really feel like I need to do that thing to protect myself or to gain something. I'm gonna start to justify it.
David: Yeah, and that makes the light easier because you start believing
Shawn: Right. And that's where the belief in the lie starts. Right. With that justifying why you're doing it.
David: now here's where it closes the loop back to where we started. Remember in the opening, the people most committed to the personal virtue of honesty, the ones who have built their self-image around being straight talkers, no nonsense, the person in the room who tells it like it is, those people are operating with a specific and measurable blind spot.
Shawn: I remember that from the top of this?
David: The identity of being an honest person is what prevents the self-examination that would make them more honest in the first place or in practice. The belief that you're on the right side of the line is exactly what stops you from looking at where the line actually is. I'm not exempt from this. You are not exempt from it. The researchers who publish the papers on it. are not exempt from it.
Shawn: Everyone does it.
David: That's not a reason to give up on honesty as a value. It's a reason to hold it differently. Less like an identity, more like a practice. Something you have to keep doing imperfectly with constant recalibration rather than something you either have or don't have.
Shawn: And hopefully doing this in an environment with people who love you and accept you.
David: Yes.
Shawn: And can Be understanding. If that's not the case, then it's going to be very difficult to be honest. Because if you're going to be attacked when you come clean, you're never gonna come clean. Right.
David: Another cost analysis right there. Here's the one thing I want you to actually do this week. Not lie less. That's not the point. I want you to catch yourself in a moment where you're certain you're the honest one. Where you're confident that you see the situation clearly and the other person doesn't. And just pause there. Because according to everything we've covered today, that certainty
Shawn: Okay.
David: is where the blind spot lives. Yeah, not in the lies that you tell, in the ones you already convinced yourself of. So it's drawing that line without knowing where the line is.
Shawn: Because of my perspective? Right, because from my perspective, I think I'm in the right here. Right. But I can't see from a different perspective, another person or another group, or just the world in general. I can't see that perspective. I can only see from my own perspective. So if we can only see from our own perspective How can we check our own understanding? I I can't not s I can't see from any other perspective than my own. It's not possible.
David: I I think if you stop and really start to think about it and not just react in the moment, you can start to break that down.
Shawn: But this is where I'm terr okay, so again, back to talking about my social awkwardness. This is where I'm terrible at this because I can't process that fast in the moment. This is why I never Can communicate my argument clearly when I'm in an agitated emotional state. Because I don't understand why I feel how I feel, and it'll be like days before I even understand why I'm feeling how I'm feeling. By that time it's a moot point. I don't know that I can do this, but alright.
David: I think you can. You you've gotten better at it over the years of being more in the moment. Okay, so that's episode one of Pants on Fire. We started with the confession. We ended at the same place, Which I think is the right place to end. Episode two is where it gets darker and considerably more entertaining. We're going to look at what happens when lying stops being social and goes pathological. At the historic lies that reshape nations, and at a century of attempts to build a working lie detector, why we build it, why we still use it, and why it fundamentally doesn't work. Plus, and I've been saying this one, the man who invented both the polygraph also invented Wonder Woman and her last o of truth.
Shawn: Stan Lee?
David: One Stan Lee But guy the same guy who invented the polygraph came up with Wonder Woman. And of course the last old truth, when you put it around people then we had to tell the truth. And I find that very interesting that he spent time working on the polygraph and then carrying that through in another project.
Shawn: Okay. here's how I'm feeling about this. I'm excited. Because I love the salaciousness of learning the truth behind a lie. I love the excitement of the reveal. I wonder if anybody out there listening is feeling the same way I am, please drop us a line. Classy as hell at Outlook.com because I'm smiling from ear to ear right now, just waiting to hear about this. And I find it interesting why I'm so excited about this. Like it's a weird thing to feel excited about, but I I I just can't wait to hear what you're gonna talk about.
David: Yeah, it's sorta the same reaction to hot gossip. People are attracted to hot gossip. You're attracted to unveiling the truth. Anyhow, thanks for listening. If you're leaving this feeling slightly less certain about your own self-knowledge than when you pressed play, good. That's the correct response. We'll see you in two weeks and remember if you can't keep it classy.
Shawn: Keep it real.
David: There we go.
Shawn: Your script was great.
