YouSaid · the spoken record

Micheal Leviton

lines on the record: 39
first: 2022-08-10
most recent: 2022-08-10
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Yeah, right, right. Like, don't listen to me. I'm coming from the, I have the opposite problems everyone else has. So, I mean, like, it's hard to advise. I think that it is really good. I believe in that as a thing that is powerful. And I guess there's all kinds of people who say you got to be vulnerable and that's the way to something I have found that falling apart in front of somebody emotionally, crying in front of somebody. I have found that if it's the right person for you, they're moved by it and they want to be there for you. They are more connected to you when they know the truth about you. Now, I know that there are all kinds of cases where that isn't true, but there are a lot of cases where it is. And so I still have faith that a lot of people who feel imprisoned by the inability to be honest, that like they could find catharsis and they could find something really moving and being honest with the right person. It's really sad to not have anyone really know you and not really know anyone else. I think we should all avoid that, even though it doesn't have to be as extreme as me. I don't know. Maybe that's my best advice.”
2022-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · An Honest Life, with Micheal Leviton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah. So there were things, even in my dishonest days where I felt I was most dishonest that did work really well with people that people really liked. But I felt pretty uncomfortable. So I corrected again. And now I'm probably too honest again, but I'm definitely not as honest as I used to be. I often am saying, oh, when I was younger, I would have done this. I was just like, I shouldn't do that either. That's too honest again. But yeah, so I like to think that I'm more charming now or that I found ways to be more likable than I was when I was younger. I certainly do not have the massive number of problems that I had when I was younger.”
2022-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · An Honest Life, with Micheal Leviton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I can't speak to my own level of charm. There are definitely people who find me very charming and people who are off put by me. Also keep in mind, I have gone through different levels of honesty over time that there was a period where I was really much less honest, where I think I was pretty dishonest. And people really did respond well to it. Asking questions could be used as a dishonest technique where you would get them talking and you'd never have to express anything about yourself. Ira Glass told me that when he interviewed me. Ira Glass said, oh, I got into asking questions originally because it meant I never had to say anything about myself. And I was like, that is incredible.”
2022-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · An Honest Life, with Micheal Leviton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wrote a memoir. This is where I fail. I'm still not perfect at this. Anyone who's dealing with me has to know that I tell a lot of personal stuff to everyone and that I ask personal questions to everyone. That doesn't mean the thing that a lot of people think it means. I've definitely been around people who thought I was in love with them when I was just asking them questions because I was curious.”
2022-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · An Honest Life, with Micheal Leviton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On people. So that's the first thing. The next thing was that I always ask people a lot of questions. That was a big part of my honesty. I'm a curious person. I actually wanted to know about other people. Other people were often made uncomfortable by the questions. I was supposed to ask more standard questions or less invasive questions. There were all kinds of issues with the questions I would ask. It was at one point when I was asking someone a lot of questions and talking to them about themselves that they said, well, you know, you're treating me like I'm really special. And I'm not special to you. You do this with everybody, right? And I was like, yeah, I ask everybody. I'm curious. And she's like, yeah, well, that's, you should basically save this for the people that are special to you. And the things you tell, you told me a story about your family. You shouldn't do that with just everyone because then it doesn't mean anything. That intimacy is earned by you doing those things. Now, this is still troublesome for me. I love telling stories from my life.”
2022-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · An Honest Life, with Micheal Leviton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, well, you're talking about a lot of different things. At one point, I was making rules for myself all the time. That was one of the ways that I could remember what I needed to do. One of my rules was to try to read what people wanted from me and give it to them if I could. Now, that meant if people didn't want honesty, it was absurd to give it to them. If somebody was saying, what do you think of the thing I just did and I didn't like it, I had to read if they actually wanted criticism or if they wanted me to say, I liked it. If they wanted me to say I liked it, why not? It didn't matter. It was an exchange about something else. And so I often, someone would say, what do you think of the show? And I'd say, oh, it was great. That was just necessary. And I didn't feel like I was doing anything wrong anymore. It kind of hurt my heart to do it. It still made me kind of feel ill and made my hands kind of shake to do that kind of stuff every time. But I understood that people, you know, it didn't mean the same thing to them. It meant to me. So that was a big part of it. It was about making people happy and meeting them where they were, that there was no reason to force on.”
2022-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · An Honest Life, with Micheal Leviton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would do something and I'd be like, but it's what you told me to do. And they'd go, No, I was just saying the thing you're supposed to say. Now, that's a classic Deborah Tannin communication style mistake, that they're direct informational people and they're indirect rapport-based people who are kind of have good feelings. It's not about the information you're imparting. It's about the feelings. So saying, come by anytime is me saying, I like you. It's not me actually telling you to come by. That's crazy.”
2022-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · An Honest Life, with Micheal Leviton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah. Well, this is incredible because I used to not understand why people hinted at things instead of just saying them. It didn't make any sense to me, but I eventually learned that the hint in their mind was very clear that in a world of people who all hint in the same way, that is directness. Another book, actually the book that influenced me most, and I read it a bit later, so I thought of it last, is Deborah Tannon's book, That's Not What I Meant. And she's a linguist that categorizes communication styles. And she's not actually joking, but I find this book incredibly funny because it's just the way people get confused by communication style differences. So something as simple as, I mean, this is such an embarrassing example. Someone would say to me, oh, come by anytime. And I would show up and they'd be like, what are you doing here? Are you crazy? And it would turn out that they didn't mean for me to actually come. I mean, that kind of stuff happened to me all the time where.”
2022-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · An Honest Life, with Micheal Leviton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. And that plausible deniability, which I couldn't even understand. It took so long for me to accept these concepts. I was like driving my friends crazy. Being like, how does this work? Wait, do you guys do this? Do you actually lie in this circumstance? Why? What happens when you do that? And everyone was just going nuts. Like, Michael, these questions are insane”
2022-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · An Honest Life, with Micheal Leviton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah, I didn't think about how to get people to like me at all. That was just not a thing. And then once I decided to think about it, I was like, I have no idea how people do this. You know, what are the things people do to get people to like them? I just didn't know what they were. I'd never even thought about it. And they all sounded wrong to me also. They all sounded immoral. They sounded like tricking people. They all were false to me. So I had to go through a lot of kind of revising. I also read etiquette books. I read two etiquette books, not covered to cover, but a lot of them. Every single solution they suggested for problems seemed immoral to me. It was actually hilarious reading it being like, oh, well, oh, you don't want to invite someone to your party? Well, just lie. And I'd be like, wait, what? Like they acted like lying was the most incredible thing humans had ever come up with. And it was the most basic idea. That's how you solve everything.”
2022-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · An Honest Life, with Micheal Leviton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, I read a whole bunch of books. First of all, they're like the dating ones, and I didn't get through all of these, but I read the rules or some version of the rules, which is the dating book for women from the 90s. I read The Game, the depraved nightmare book, like the pickup artist book. I read The Art of Seduction, which is actually very different from what it sounds like and is actually this weird scholarly history of getting people to like your ideas or to understand you. It'll talk about like actual seducers like Casanova and Don Juan and stuff, but it'll also talk about Winston Churchill or like Elvis or Joan Diddon or whatever. Anybody who ever had to get people to accept ideas or see them as someone they wanted to be around or someone they wanted to trust a charismatic force. So it's a kind of more open version of what seduction is. That book was actually very useful. I found that book very powerful.”
2022-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · An Honest Life, with Micheal Leviton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But if it makes everybody hate you, how right can it be? Maybe if it makes everybody hate you, it isn't right. Maybe you should think about how other people feel. And that was really the turn was that my ideas about right and wrong and my moral ideas, if other people didn't like them, what was the point of them? You're supposed to try to make people happy and make people enjoy their relationships with you. That's good for everyone, not just for me. It's kind of reorienting my mind around acting in a way that people liked. I know it sounds so obvious to everyone else. I thought that was like people pleasing, you know, like that you were denying yourself and your own values by just trying to do whatever other people wanted of you. But switching my mind to being like, I'm going to try to make other people happy, as happy as I can. And if things go wrong, it's my fault that I'm supposed to read people and see what kind of relationship they want to have and do what I can. And that's kind of how it happened, I think.”
2022-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · An Honest Life, with Micheal Leviton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was a few different things. A few different things made me realize I had to be less honest. Pretty much everything in my life was going really badly. I couldn't really keep a job honesty caused a lot of problems in being able to make enough money to live. Also, I was even having problems with my family. I had written something about my family that was just brutal outing a lot of difficult things that had happened. And I expected my family to be okay. And my dad was troubled by it. That was causing a lot of problems. And my girlfriend, who I loved, everything went wrong. And then I started trying to see other people and everything was going wrong. And I had also, I had problems with all my friends. I would have estrangements with friends like every week, you know, everything was so difficult. Finally, someone I went out with actually who I was having kind of a bad date with, one of my early bad dates, said to me, you think this stuff is right. Like you have this value system. You think it's right.”
2022-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · An Honest Life, with Micheal Leviton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Would feel like my partner doesn't know me, or I don't know the person I'm with. Like we're strangers. If she's having all these feelings I don't know about, that's so stressful and depressing. Like I don't get to know my girlfriend and she knows that I don't really know her. I mean, that seemed horrible. But now I have a different perspective that I can see why people don't show everything all the time. My heart still tells me a lot of people have relationships where they just don't know each other, where they don't share what's going on with them and that that isn't good either, that there's a balance.”
2022-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · An Honest Life, with Micheal Leviton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It didn't at the time I really stuck to the idea that I was really happy that I had a girlfriend who trusted me to tell me even these incredibly difficult things, that that was really powerful to me. And I still, of course, I assume she didn't tell me everything that she still was hiding things of different types like anybody does or omitting things. But she did bring up a lot to me. And some of the things she brought up to me really changed me and helped me a lot. You know, some of her complaints about me were really life-changing. So the whole time I really wanted to hear it all. That was my attitude. It was just, it got so destructive that I couldn't deal with it anymore. And only afterwards was I like, yeah, I guess maybe relationships could, maybe you could have like a timing or a tact or you could pick your battles or you could wait a while before bringing up something or you could work it out on your own without involving your partner in it that those things have value. They don't make you just a liar.”
2022-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · An Honest Life, with Micheal Leviton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, there's what people do all the time, which is that they work it out internally. They decide whether to leave or not, you know, without talking to their partner about it. So I was constantly engaged in these questions about whether we were happy. And because maybe she just feels upset about something that just happened that day, but the conversation would become much bigger because we would actually talk about it instead of her just complaining to her friends about it and then moving on or just thinking, oh, that's so annoying and then moving on, she would bring it up to me and I was like excited to know where I stood with her all the time. So I didn't want her to hide from me if she was upset at me. I didn't want her to hide from me if she was having thoughts about somebody else or that she wanted to potentially break up with me. I was happy that she was being honest with me, but it did escalate a lot.”
2022-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · An Honest Life, with Micheal Leviton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of the time it was like I'm considering leaving you, or I'm unhappy about this thing should I leave you. And she would break up with me a lot, you know, and then decide again that she wanted to be with me. So there was a lot of this kind of.”
2022-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · An Honest Life, with Micheal Leviton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it was a gradual thing, I think, that Eve really wanted to be honest for all kinds of reasons. And I gave her that permission. So this fantasy that I had that I could change people and show them that being more honest had this beauty to it and that they could trust me to hear their honesty and these things, that that actually pretty much worked over time. But once I was in that situation, it became clear that there was a lot of trouble in that problems that I couldn't have anticipated.”
2022-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · An Honest Life, with Micheal Leviton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At the time, I was looking for the right kind of person. So I kind of imagined that I would sell these things and then somebody else would, if they wanted to continue with me, that they would feel happy they knew where they stood, and then they could tell me those things about themselves, that they would realize, oh, I'm talking to an honest person, I can be honest too, you know, and then they would shed their oppressive honesty that they felt they had to do for other people and be honest with me. That obviously wasn't what was going to happen, which I figured out pretty fast. That was my hope”
2022-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · An Honest Life, with Micheal Leviton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I had a girlfriend for most of my 20s, and when we broke up, that was my first time really learning how to date at all. So that was when I was 29. So when I first started, I was very hung up on the idea that I didn't want to deceive anyone. And I knew what my likely flaws were and the things that they probably wouldn't like about me. And I figured I should just tell them those things right up front because it felt like tricking them if I didn't. And my friends advised me. They said, no, that's not tricking people. You put your best foot forward until they like you and then they find out if they forgive those things later. Or maybe they'll have a different perspective on them later. But I didn't think that was right. So I felt I should tell them any potentially troublesome information about myself from the start. Otherwise, it's like getting them to date me under false pretenses. I don't know. It felt like a con. That was how it started.”
2022-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · An Honest Life, with Micheal Leviton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Somebody would steal their wife or something, and people didn't want to be vulnerable anymore. And my mom was incredibly upset because men's group could talk about her or talk about what's going on without her knowing because everyone was keeping it confidential. And if her new boyfriend told her anything, everyone would think he was horrible and he was breaking confidentiality. So there was a lot of drama that came out of it. And some people kind of felt for a period that we had ruined family. We had been too honest for family camp and we'd ruined it. No one would want to talk anymore. Everyone was afraid everyone would steal their wives and it was pretty rough. I'm sorry, I'm laughing. I'm laughing. My dad still goes. My dad still goes. Yeah, yeah. I haven't gone since 2007.”
2022-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · An Honest Life, with Micheal Leviton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the shortest way I can say it is that my mom left my dad for someone else from family camp and that then they all continued going to family camp together and working out their divorce in front of us and kind of in front of family camp. So this happened in 2000. So that's when I was 1920 and I'd been going to family camp for three years or something like that. And that was being worked out every year kind of in one way or another until my last year there in 2007. So that's like seven years of kind of arguing about what was going on with my parents, both the man, my mom left my dad for and my dad were in the men's group together, which was a subtext to everything that was going on in men's group for that entire time, the kind of joke that they ruined men's group because everyone was afraid that if they said anything that”
2022-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · An Honest Life, with Micheal Leviton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, a lot of people, I think, at family camp became incredibly close friends and, you know, you felt like they knew you in a way that the people in your regular life didn't.”
2022-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · An Honest Life, with Micheal Leviton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There are a lot of reasons to do group therapy, and there were lots of types of group therapy at Family Camp. There was one where you'd sit in a circle, you know, and there's one where there's an audience. But the one where you'd sit in a circle, you know, they'd have men's group or women's group or teen group, children's group, elders group. So you'd also just do therapy with people that are of your demographic or that are relating to the kinds of things you're talking about, and also that it's confidential among that group. you could talk about your issues as a husband or as a parent without your kids there or without your wife there and also that you were relating to other people that you would see that other people other people could comfort you they could express that they have the same situation feeling the energy of other people responding to your deepest problems being vulnerable in front of other people instead of just a therapist has its power so i think that was the idea they of course do group therapy in so many areas of life and aa you know is all done in groups”
2022-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · An Honest Life, with Micheal Leviton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I call it family therapy camp. That's not the official name of it. But my family for a week every year in the summer would go to the top of this mountain in the woods. Everyone would sleep in tents. And there were facilitators, which was what they called the therapists. I guess you're not supposed to call it therapists because they were there in an unofficial capacity. But there were facilitators to help people do therapy in front of an audience. And you'd kind of be in the woods.”
2022-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · An Honest Life, with Micheal Leviton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My parents, I think, set me up for the idea that we would be pretty isolated, that by being yourself, you would meet the right people. You know, the right people would be attracted to you. And the people who couldn't be honest and couldn't understand you would be repelled by you and that that was a good thing. There were the people who wanted to really know you and that wanted to understand you. And those were the only people that counted. I didn't really need to worry about the judgment of anybody else, which is really not a great strategy in retrospect. But it was very moving as a kid because I didn't have to take in all of this horrible stuff from other kids by not caring what they thought. I was very free in a way that other kids weren't. And I genuinely didn't care. I mean, it's a terrifying thought. But I really felt very little. I was laughing while people were making fun of me. I saw the absurdity of it.”
2022-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · An Honest Life, with Micheal Leviton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sense, I would consider it and try to change my behavior, or I would accept it. But most of the time, that wasn't even what people were shaming you about. They were shaming you about things that I had been given the faculty to see as nonsense or see as disingenuous. So I didn't have to take it in. It was like it didn't count.”
2022-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · An Honest Life, with Micheal Leviton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, other people's judgment was not very useful to me. Like, it didn't make any. I got to choose what to accept and what not to from other people's judgments. And a lot of the time, and again, it lacks compassion in my mind now. But when kids would make fun of me, I would feel embarrassed for them. I thought they sounded stupid. I'd be like, you guys believe in the beauty standards of the world? Like, you guys believe that the thing that you were taught to think is cool is cool. Like, don't you guys interrogate anything? Like, you guys just really just accept all this stuff. There's a scene in my book where I talk about the kids are making fun of each other for picking their nose. A kid makes fun of me for picking my nose. And I'm like, we all know that everybody picks their noses, right? Can't we just accept this? You've all picked your nose before. Why would you make fun of somebody else for picking your nose? I was very embarrassed for them. I was like, what kind of idiots you would make fun of somebody else for something you do? I didn't even understand it. If someone judged me for something that was true that made...”
2022-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · An Honest Life, with Micheal Leviton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And over again, I wouldn't have been able to accept the reality that I would be considered nerdy at a lot of points in my life for wearing glasses or that I would be made fun of for wearing glasses. And once I was allowed that, I could think things like, oh, that's so absurd. It's ridiculous that people think glasses are nerdy. I'm embarrassed for the people who think that because they've just accepted societal ideas that make no sense that are so silly. And I was spared shame a lot of time because I could accept things in that way and allowed me to confront what I thought about society's negativity about glasses.”
2022-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · An Honest Life, with Micheal Leviton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Things you were ashamed of that were just a part of who you were, you could accept them if you were allowed to. My parents, I think, were of the idea that hard things to accept shouldn't be avoided because then you never really emotionally acclimate to them. You were being protected from them, but it meant that when they came up later in life, you would feel destroyed. The shame would destroy you because you were never allowed to confront it. As a child, things that I found shameful or like wearing glasses, I remember I was like felt like nerdy because I wore glasses. But I was like, well, I should just accept that I'm going to wear glasses for my whole life. It's not going to change. I'm going to need glasses. That's who I am. I might as well accept it. If someone had instead spent the whole time being like, no one would ever think glasses are nerdy. That's not real. If they said glasses are nerdy, that's just one person and no one else in the world thinks that. If the whole thing was glasses or cool and trying to tell me this over.”
2022-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · An Honest Life, with Micheal Leviton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It makes me feel like a psychopath to say it, but I didn't really grow up with a lot of shame. And the idea was that if you were ashamed of the thing, you know, why were you doing it? If you thought it was wrong, or you thought it was embarrassing, maybe just don't be that way. And then you don't have to hide anything. You could just be yourself because you can stand behind it. Now, sometimes there are things that couldn't be avoided, like I believed I was ugly as a child. And I could be ashamed of being ugly, but I thought, well, what's the point of that? I mean, I might as well just accept the realities of my situation. Why don't we all just accept the realities and like do that instead of being consumed by shame all the time and having to like pretend I thought I was good looking or something? You know, I mean.”
2022-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · An Honest Life, with Micheal Leviton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's one of the troubles honesty, even though it made a lot of people mad at me and not like me, it was really positive for me, especially as a child. It wasn't positive for the people that had to deal with me, which is unfortunate. But it felt good for me. It was really nice that I felt free to ask all the questions I wanted to ask and to comment on things and tell people my observations and to kind of see the absurdity in a lot of situations. But other people didn't appreciate that absurdity. They felt called out by it or confronted or criticized, or it just made them uncomfortable. Sometimes it betrayed emotions.”
2022-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · An Honest Life, with Micheal Leviton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He wasn't allowed to do that. And he thought that was oppressive. So he started to live in such a way that it rejected that, you know, but also kept a lot of the bluntness and tactlessness of his family lineage. So my mom's side of the family, they lied a lot and demanded that my mom, even as a very small child, help them with their lies and kind of had a value system of, yeah, I can say horrible things about everyone. And they'll never find out, you know, and you're a collaborator with me on these lies. And my mom found that so oppressive that she really liked the relief from that that she got from my dad. That's my suspicion. So at 14, they kind of started to adapt to each other and figure out this way to be together, which had all kinds of difficulties and problems, but starting at 14, they were together and they had me when they were 28. They had had a pretty solid system that had become at that time.”
2022-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · An Honest Life, with Micheal Leviton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, and you'd have to ask them about that, about when in their lives they kind of how this worked for them, how it developed. But the sense I get is that my dad's family had elements of wild honesty and brutality. I don't think of myself as having a lot of brutal honesty. It was more uncomfortable and unpleasant honesty or, you know, mostly just made people uncomfortable. It wasn't very mean. But my dad's family definitely had a lot of mean honesty in it and that kind of got him used to that idea that you were going to get criticized and it was important to know where you stood with everyone, that that was a value of his family history and that a lot of people didn't like them for that reason. So he had something to imitate. But then he also had things in his family that he didn't like, that they weren't allowed to talk about certain subjects. He felt that sex was taboo. You weren't allowed to talk about it. And that if he was too open about his emotions.”
2022-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · An Honest Life, with Micheal Leviton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It wasn't really necessarily calculated. My parents just had this way of living that valued honesty. And our family had our own definition of honesty that didn't really have any bearing on the way anyone else talked about it. So that's why I call us a little honesty cult, just my family was like a little cult. We had our own definitions of words. You know, we didn't allow omission. Omission, usually people don't even think of that as lying in most cases, but we did. It was just the way my parents ended up, you know, they met when they were 14. They were reactive against their family backgrounds. And they kind of together as young teenagers came to a way of being together. And when they were raising kids, they were that way. So they didn't explicitly say these things. They didn't say these are the rules of our little honesty cults. They didn't even think of it that way at all. They just thought of it as the way we were and that we had our own values like everybody else has their own values.”
2022-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · An Honest Life, with Micheal Leviton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm used to it now. Yeah, it's been about 12 years of omitting things. So now it doesn't feel wrong to me. I notice it every time I do it, though.”
2022-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · An Honest Life, with Micheal Leviton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I don't think I've told any lies today. I've omitted some things which used to feel like a lie to me. Like telling someone I have plans tonight and not telling them what the plans were specifically. I did that already.”
2022-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · An Honest Life, with Micheal Leviton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Most people are not explicitly taught how or when to lie as a child, but whether it's glossing over difficult truths, telling little white lies or sometimes big ones, lying is something that most of us all end up doing in one way or another. Rider Michael Leviton grew up in a family that never lied. In the Leviton household, honesty was the only policy. Following this principle, he lived a life of brutal honesty for three decades, and by the age of twenty nine he could only recall ever telling three lies, but in a world unprepared for his truthfulness, this led to complications in his schoolwork and of course love life. He's channeled that unique perspective into his creative work as a musician, songwriter, as well as a writer. His book To be honest, a memoir, explores the concept of truthfulness deeper. Here's Michael in conversation with our producer, Catherine Hughes.”
2022-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · An Honest Life, with Micheal Leviton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Welcome to Intelligence Squared. I'm Connor Boyle, coming up on the podcast, Michael Leviton, the writer and author whose work explores why we lie and why honesty might not always be the best policy as a society.”
2022-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · An Honest Life, with Micheal Leviton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT