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Mak: All right, let's do it. Why don't you tell everybody a little bit about who we are and what it is that we're doing here.
Linds: Yes, ⁓ I Lindsay and you are Mac ⁓ and are exes. We are friends ⁓ And podcast is about ⁓ a conflict. You and I are facilitators, coaches ⁓ of this practice, this ⁓ within this community called Honesty. ⁓ Pretty much our whole first season is us grappling with this conflict we have about being involved in this community that has sort of a troubled past with a problematic creator. And so we will be dissecting this conflict that we are experiencing over being involved in this still.
Mak: Yeah, kind of in the hopes that the listener might glean some insight into the broader self-help or personal development world. based on the very particular and personal experiences that you and I have had in this world. How is it that we came to the decision in the first place to start having these conversations, to record them, and to potentially release them in podcast form?
Linds: I was in Costa Rica at your retreat center and we were talking with each other about our experience with radical honesty. We were enjoying the conversations and thinking maybe other people would get something out of listening to what we have to say.
Mak: But why would anybody find any of that interesting?
Linds: Right. Yeah, honestly, we have a pretty unique perspective on something that ended up basically being a psychotherapy cult.
Mak: You and I met in 2013. Immediately, you've introduced this idea, radical honesty, to me. And from the jump, we took it on as the kind of basis of how to be in relationship with one another. Over the years, both of us got more involved. You became COO, I was administrative director following you. We both became supervisors and trainers of other people teaching this stuff. I became an owner. So we really started off. at the bottom and worked our way up through the ranks and eventually took it over from Brad around 2021 when he kind of retired. And so the period that we're going to be talking about here in season one is from the very beginnings of Radical Honesty back in the early 1990s up until about 2021 when Brad exits the picture. Because from that point, a whole lot of things start to change. And we want to focus here in season one, exclusively on our personal journeys and experiences as individuals and in relationship to one another in the first few years with the very particular and specific way that radical honesty was up until that period in 2021. Things start to change after that, and we are going to reserve any of the evolutions that happened beyond that. We'll save for season two. When we'll bring in more voices, more perspectives that will surely be very different from ours. We wanted to really allow ourselves to kind of have these very personal conversations with each other and explore and work through what we've been through.
Linds: Yeah.
Mak: Hey, Lindsay.
Linds: Hey Mac! Let's record our first episode of season one.
Mak: Lindsay, would you kick us off with a little bit of the origin story of Radical Honesty and maybe a bit about Brad himself?
Linds: Yeah, I'll do my best. Radical Honesty, How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth is a book that was written by Brad Blanton, originally self-published in 1995, I believe. Brad was a psychotherapist for decades. Over all of those years of providing therapy, he worked out this idea that people could get more benefit from doing group work rather than doing one-on-one work with a therapist. And he ended up developing these workshops where he would bring together a group of people to practice being honest with each other in ways that are out of the ordinary.
Mak: The that he developed mostly came from old school Gestalt therapy, which had a focus on self-awareness, confronting yourself, not shying away from anything. And he took it a bit further and said, yeah, and we're going to speak out loud about that stuff and be fully out loud, fully self-expressed all the time. That was his big idea.
Linds: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Right. Very much about boldly expressing yourself and all of your emotions. So if you're mad at somebody, you tell them you're mad. If you're sad about something, you say you're sad. If you're feeling turned on, you tell the person you're turned on, regardless of what the other person thinks.
Mak: He also drew a lot of inspiration from Werner Erhart and the self-actualization movement. In fact, ripped some things directly from Est meetings in the late 70s, early 80s. Those were generally bigger groups of sometimes hundreds of people and they were called large group awareness trainings or LGATs. One of the things that Brad took from the LGATs and from Est in particular.
Linds: Mm-hmm.
Mak: was a very rigid set of rules from the beginning that was meant to force the participant to submit to the teacher or leave. They wanted a high degree of control because in both cases, they have some idea about the way that people ought to be, the way that they ought to see the world. And so in order to shift them as quickly as possible to fit that mold, you need a high degree of control, right?
Linds: Brad and many other people who created things like this also have their sights set on changing the world in some way. And Brad definitely had that same vision. How much better the world would be if everyone could just be more honest in this way that he claimed to be.
Mak: Yeah. And another common thread between Brad's radical honesty and those old self-actualization groups is the mission to enlighten the maximum number of people as fast as possible. Est's goal was to wake up everyone in a weekend. Brad's goal was, had a couple different ways of phrasing it. An entire year of psychotherapy in only eight days. How you could become enlightened in just a few seconds.
Linds: Mm-hmm.
Mak: by getting dumb, you know, and dropping your mind.
Linds: Right, right, which was kind of a joke and also yes. Yeah.
Mak: Yeah.
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But that's the whole thing that I think if we're going to be charitable, we could say, I don't know, but you could say that perhaps the good intention behind that is that, yeah, we want to wake everybody up. But such rigid adherence to that very lofty goal can lead to a lot of collateral damage while chasing the big dream.
Linds: Are we going to be? Yeah, so, so much of the way that Brad did this was very much this like, wake up, you fucking dummies. You know, it wasn't like, come on, honeys, it's time to get up and get with the program. It was like, you all are sheep. You're living miserable lives. You're full of shit. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. It was so much fun.
Mak: Right. You don't know your ass from a hole in the ground. And we loved it. So without giving us a long lesson, can you just give us the bare minimum that we need to know about radical honesty in order to orient ourselves to all of the conversations that you and I are going to be having over the course of this season?
Linds: Brad's interest was to break free from the jail of our minds. He wanted us to be grounded in our sensate reality, bring more awareness to what's happening in my body right now in this moment on the level of sensations. What do I notice happening in front of me? And then being able to simply report those things out loud. And so he would often talk about this looking like an out loud meditation, meaning it's an awareness practice. We are simply noticing and reporting out loud to other people.
Mak: Yeah, and it was really intended to be a fully embodied kind of expression. There was a high focus on congruence. You're saying this thing, but your tone of voice, your facial expression, your body language does not match.
Linds: And the point of that was so that we aren't just carrying around all of this shit that we haven't processed. And so sometimes that would end up looking really harsh because it could look like I'm really fucking mad right now. And so you are going to hear that and I'm not going to just tell you. Yeah, I'm kind of mad at you. I'm going to fully embody my anger so that I can fully experience it in the moment that it's happening so that it can pass through me and I can get back to just like being a neutrally behaving human being.
Mak: Yeah, and I think that one of the major underlying philosophies of Brad's there is that it is poisonous to withhold what is true and shut yourself down. He really believed in this idea that the people who were most withheld, who pretended the most, ended up not only psychologically ill, but oftentimes physically ill as well. He claimed to like... heal a lot of people from various different physical ailments and stuff just by getting them to be more expressive and to open up and tell the truth.
Linds: and that these are the people who are going to cause harm in the world. These are what all of the problems in society stem from.
Mak: Yeah. There was this firm belief in freedom through unbridled self-expression. That's what freedom looks like. Freedom from shame, freedom from any kinds of chains or restraints. I am who I am and I don't have to apologize for it, basically. And a high degree of personal responsibility if I'm completely responsible for myself and all of my experience. That's just all me, you know. And so therefore you too.
Linds: Mm-hmm. Uh-huh. Yeah, I'm not responsible for you. You are responsible for yourself.
Mak: And the idea that unfiltered, unbridled self-expression not only liberates you, but also opens the door to a deeper kind of connection that is not available when you are withholding certain aspects of yourself. There was also a lot of emphasis on cleaning up unfinished business from the past. This push. to go have those conversations directly and out loud and really confrontational in a way that most therapeutic approaches would not recommend.
Linds: Yeah. Mm-hmm. And with Brad, it was, you must, I don't even want to work with you if you aren't going to agree that you will go talk to this person and by this date, this must be done. Even if the person has told you that they don't want to talk with you, it doesn't matter. You go and you do it anyway. You mentioned there being no boundaries in the past and that
Mak: Yeah. Right.
Linds: could absolutely also be said for how sex and sexuality and attraction were talked about. The things that are taboo to talk about elsewhere, anger and sexuality, I feel like are what fueled so much of what was happening.
Mak: It's like, you want to avoid talking about this, so we're going to talk about it, you know?
Linds: Yeah, there are certain things you don't like about your body. Not only do we want you to talk about those things, we want you to stand up in front of the group and do it while everybody's eyes are on you and or even naked.
Mak: Mm-hmm. Yeah, naked. You have terrible fantasies that you just couldn't imagine saying out loud. Okay, say it out loud to the whole group right now and see how they respond. You know? Yeah.
Linds: Mm-hmm. Yeah, the things you feel most ashamed of, the things you're most proud of, you know, the things that you want to like brag about.
Mak: Anything taboo, anything that you're not supposed to do or say. That was the thing.
Linds: Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot to pull apart about all of this. Our intention for season one is for folks to listen to this in the order that we release these episodes.
Mak: For me, the biggest benefit of listening in sequence is to witness the transformations and the shifts in perspectives that happen gradually over time. And that trajectory might be missed if you are watching things out of order. Okay, I want to give people an idea of what to expect in season one. The next two episodes are completely dedicated to Lindsay and your story, the kind of space that you were in at that time. And then the following two episodes are dedicated to my perspective ⁓ and ⁓
Linds: Mm-hmm.
Mak: Lindsay is at the origin of all of that as far as radical honesty is
concerned because she's the one who introduced me to it on our first date. That's what defined our relationship more than anything else. Beyond those storytelling episodes, we then shift gears.
Linds: I'm ruined. Yeah, absolutely. We do. We wanted to use the book basically as a vehicle for us to dig into and pull apart more of what is this practice about? What did we think of it when we first encountered it? When we first read the book. Sorry, I'm laughing because the cat on my shoulder is chewing on my glasses.
Mak: Huh.
Linds: ⁓ So it ended up just being like a really good jumping off point for
Mak: Lionel! you summarize a lot and like kind of make sense out of what Brad is saying there. It's kind of like real time reactions to re-encountering a lot of these ideas for the first time in maybe a decade. How it is that we put them into practice with each other, because primarily that's how you and I trained ourselves, was by doing it hardcore on the daily. Just the two of us, no supervision.
Linds: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. And for hours a day.
Mak: For years. What was it that was so compelling to us? Because Brad is really provocative and intense, and so are we.
Linds: Yeah, just to put it very simply, intensity junkies tend to be people who are going out and doing physically intense things. For us, it was more like emotional intensity and relational intensity and a desire to be operating in the world in a way that is radical. For me, that was a big part of it. Yeah.
Mak: Yeah. Yeah. I want to live life differently. You know, I'm thinking most of these kinds of podcasts or documentaries are generally very titillating in an expositional way, just pointing out all of the stuff that was really messed up. And that's not what we're after really. This isn't a cult expose. It's more of a dissection of what we went through, what the philosophy and practice are, how we feel about things now compared to the way that we did when we started, what has evolved for us, and really grappling with that idea of, is this worthy of being called a cult or not?
Linds: And is there anything worth continuing to bring out into the world?
Mak: The lessons that we learned and the red flags that we missed could be so valuable for other people who are on the same trajectory, for other people who are looking for some answer, some way to be, some way to fix their life or their relationship, some new community to join, some place to belong. And anytime people gather around an idea and close themselves off to competing ideas or outside influences.
Linds: Mm-hmm. ⁓ huh.
Mak: The kinds of things that developed in our world are just going to develop no matter what the idea is. It's about the social structure that's created around those things that leads to these problematic group dynamics. I also think that this could be really interesting for facilitators and coaches and therapists and anybody who's working with people. We've learned lots of lessons, oftentimes the hard way.
Linds: We've gotten a ton out of doing this together and it's just been super fun for me. I just like want to keep going and I think there's so much more that we can talk about.
Mak: I mean, I second everything that you just said. The whole process has been really impactful for me. And I think the main driving force was simply having these conversations with you. And I think back to the romantic period in our relationship, we just love talking to each other. And so be able to like bring that back into our relationship and talk about these things that interest us.
Linds: Yeah.
Mak: especially since we have such a long shared history now. These are not conversations that I could have with many people.
Linds: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, totally. So we want you to stick around and listen to the episodes that are coming out next. We recorded so many episodes. We've got like a full rich season already.
Mak: So stick around, season one is really quite the journey of the exploration of this conflict that Lindsay and I have had via conversations over the past four months. And I have no doubt that it will be as enriching for the listener as it has been for us.
Linds: Yeah, same. Awesome. Yeah, you know, for the first time, I am actually just having this thought, ⁓ if somebody else was doing this podcast, I would totally want to fucking listen to it. ⁓ It's funny, really haven't thought of it from that perspective before, but I was like, ⁓ man, yeah, especially being a facilitator, being a coach.
Mak: What? ⁓ Right.
Linds: You know, if people end up listening, I'm going to be so appreciative. Like, I'm really going to want to be expressing that every time too when we're ending, like the more that we get an impression of like, okay, 20 people actually listened to episode one. Like fucking thank you because we loved doing this.