hn-classics/_stories/2007/562014.md

---
created_at: '2009-04-14T18:43:30.000Z'
title: 'Radical Honesty: I Think You''re Fat (2007)'
url: http://www.esquire.com/features/honesty0707
author: jonas_b
points: 55
story_text: ''
comment_text: 
num_comments: 48
story_id: 
story_title: 
story_url: 
parent_id: 
created_at_i: 1239734610
_tags:
- story
- author_jonas_b
- story_562014
objectID: '562014'
year: 2007

---
**Here's the truth about why I'm writing this article:**

I want to fulfill my contract with my boss. I want to avoid getting
fired. I want all the attractive women I knew in high school and college
to read it. I want them to be amazed and impressed and feel a vague
regret over their decision not to have sex with me, and maybe if I get
divorced or become a widower, [I can have sex with them
someday](/lifestyle/sex/advice/a9353/best-sex-positions/) at a reunion.
I want Hollywood to buy my article and turn it into a movie, even though
they kind of already made the movie ten years ago with Jim Carrey.

I want to get congratulatory e-mails and job offers that I can politely
decline. Or accept if they're really good. Then get a generous
counteroffer from my boss.

To be totally honest, I was sorry I mentioned this idea to my boss about
three seconds after I opened my mouth. Because I knew the article would
be a pain in the ass to pull off. Dammit. I should have let my colleague
Tom Chiarella write it. But I didn't want to seem lazy.

What I mentioned to my boss was this: a movement called Radical Honesty.

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![](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)

Universal Pictures

The movement was founded by a sixty-six-year-old Virginia-based
psychotherapist named Brad Blanton. He says everybody would be happier
if we just stopped lying. Tell the truth, all the time. This would be
radical enough -- a world without fibs -- but Blanton goes further. He
says we should toss out the filters between our brains and our mouths.
If you think it, say it. Confess to your boss your secret plans to start
your own company. If you're having fantasies about your wife's sister,
Blanton says to tell your wife and tell her sister. It's the only path
to authentic relationships. It's the only way to smash through
modernity's soul-deadening alienation. Oversharing? No such thing.

Yes. I know. One of the most idiotic ideas ever, right up there with
Vanilla Coke and giving Phil Spector a gun permit. Deceit makes our
world go round. Without lies, marriages would crumble, workers would be
fired, egos would be shattered, governments would collapse.

> Without lies, marriages would crumble, workers would be fired, egos
> would be shattered, governments would collapse

And yet...maybe there's something to it. Especially for me. I have a
lying problem. Mine aren't big lies. They aren't lies like "I cannot
recall that crucial meeting from two months ago, Senator." Mine are
little lies. White lies. Half-truths. The kind we all tell. But I tell
dozens of them every day. "Yes, let's definitely get together soon."
"I'd love to, but I have a touch of the stomach flu." "No, we can't buy
a toy today -- the toy store is closed." It's bad. Maybe a couple of
weeks of truth-immersion therapy would do me good.

I e-mail Blanton to ask if I can come down to Virginia and get some
pointers before embarking on my Radical Honesty experiment. He writes
back: "I appreciate you for apparently having a real interest and hope
you're not just doing a cutesy little superficial dipshit job like most
journalists."

I'm already nervous. I better start off with a clean slate. I confess I
lied to him in my first e-mail -- that I haven't ordered all his books
on Amazon yet. I was just trying to impress upon him that I was serious
about his work. He writes back: "Thanks for your honesty in attempting
to guess what your manipulative and self-protective motive must have
been."

**Blanton lives in a house** he built himself, perched on a hill in the
town of Stanley, Virginia, population 1,331. We're sitting on white
chairs in a room with enormous windows and a crackling fireplace. He's
swirling a glass of Maker's Mark bourbon and water and telling me why
it's important to live with no lies.

"You'll have really bad times, you'll have really great times, but
you'll contribute to other people because you haven't been dancing on
eggshells your whole fucking life. It's a better life."

"Do you think it's ever okay to lie?" I ask.

"I advocate never lying in personal relationships. But if you have Anne
Frank in your attic and a Nazi knocks on the door, lie....I lie to any
government official." (Blanton's politics are just this side of Noam
Chomsky's.) "I lie to the IRS. I always take more deductions than are
justified. I lie in golf. And in poker."

Blanton adjusts his crotch. I expected him to be a bully. Or maybe a
new-age huckster with a bead necklace who sits cross-legged on the
floor. He's neither. He's a former Texan with a big belly and a big
laugh and a big voice. He's got a bushy head of gray hair and a twang
that makes his bye sound like bah. He calls himself "white trash with a
Ph.D." If you mixed DNA from Lyndon Johnson, Ken Kesey, and threw in the
non-annoying parts of Dr. Phil, you might get Blanton.

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![](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)
[](//pinterest.com/pin/create/button/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.esquire.com%2Fnews-politics%2Fa26792%2Fhonesty0707%2F&description=I%20Think%20You%27re%20Fat&media=https%3A%2F%2Fhips.hearstapps.com%2Fesq.h-cdn.co%2Fassets%2F16%2F43%2F1477434013-gettyimages-90737598.jpg%3Fresize%3D1600%3A%2A)

Are there any non-annoying parts of Dr. Phil?

Getty Images

He ran for Congress twice, with the novel promise that he'd be an honest
politician. In 2004, he got a surprising 25 percent of the vote in his
Virginia district as an independent. In 2006, the Democrats considered
endorsing him but got skittish about his weeklong workshops, which
involve a day of total nudity. They also weren't crazy that he's been
married five times (currently to a Swedish flight attendant twenty-six
years his junior). He ran again but withdrew when it became clear he was
going to be crushed.

My interview with Blanton is unlike any other I've had in fifteen years
as a journalist. Usually, there's a fair amount of ass kissing and
diplomacy. You approach the controversial stuff on tippy toes (the way
Barbara Walters once asked Richard Gere about that terrible, terrible
rumor). With Blanton, I can say anything that pops into my mind. In
fact, it would be rude not to say it. I'd be insulting his life's work.
It's my first taste of Radical Honesty, and it's liberating,
exhilarating.

When Blanton rambles on about President Bush, I say, "You know, I
stopped listening about a minute ago."

"Thanks for telling me," he says.

I tell him, "You look older than you do in the author photo for your
book," and when he veers too far into therapyspeak, I say, "That just
sounds like gobbledygook."

"Thanks," he replies." Or, "That's fine."

Blanton has a temper -- he threatened to "beat the shit" out of a
newspaper editor during the campaign -- but it hasn't flared tonight.
The closest he comes to attacking me is when he says I am self-indulgent
and Esquire is pretentious. Both true.

Blanton pours himself another bourbon and water. He's got a wad of
chewing tobacco in his cheek, and when he spits into the fireplace, the
flames crackle louder.

"My boss says you sound like a dick," I say.

"Tell your boss he's a dick," he says.

"I'm glad you picked your nose just now," I say. "Because it was funny
and disgusting, and it'll make a good detail for the article."

"That's fine. I'll pick my ass in a minute." Then he unleashes his deep
Texan laugh: heh, heh, heh. (He also burps and farts throughout our
conversation; he believes the one-cheek sneak is "a little deceitful.")

No topic is off-limits. "I've slept with more than five hundred women
and about a half dozen men," he tells me. "I've had a whole bunch of
threesomes" -- one of which involved a hermaphrodite prostitute equipped
with dual organs.

> 'I've had a whole bunch of threesomes -- one of which involved a
> hermaphrodite prostitute equipped with dual organs'

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What about animals?

Blanton thinks for a minute. "I let my dog lick my dick once."

If he hadn't devoted his life to Radical Honesty, I'd say he was, to use
his own phrase, as full of shit as a Christmas turkey. But I don't think
he is. I believe he's telling the truth. Which is a startling thing for
a journalist to confront. Generally, I'm devoting 30 percent of my
mental energy to figuring out what a source is lying about or hiding
from me. Another 20 percent goes into scheming about how to unearth that
buried truth. No need for that today.

"I was disappointed when I visited your office," I tell Blanton.
(Earlier he had shown me a small, cluttered single-room office that
serves as the Radical Honesty headquarters.) "I'm impressed by
exteriors, so I would have been impressed by an office building in some
city, not a room in Butt Fuck, Virginia. For my article, I want this to
be a legitimate movement, not a fringe movement."

"What about a legitimate fringe movement?" asks Blanton, who has, by
this time, had three bourbons.

Blanton's legitimate fringe movement is sizable but not huge. He's sold
175,000 books in eleven languages and has twenty-five trainers assisting
in workshops and running practice groups around the country.

Now, my editor thinks I'm overreaching here and trying too hard to
justify this article's existence, but I think society is speeding toward
its own version of Radical Honesty. The truth of our lives is
increasingly being exposed, both voluntarily (MySpace pages, transparent
business transactions) and involuntarily. (See Gonzales and Google, or
ask Alec Baldwin.) For better or worse, we may all soon be Brad
Blantons. I need to be prepared. \[Such bullshit. --
Ed.\]

![](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)
[](//pinterest.com/pin/create/button/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.esquire.com%2Fnews-politics%2Fa26792%2Fhonesty0707%2F&description=I%20Think%20You%27re%20Fat&media=https%3A%2F%2Fhips.hearstapps.com%2Fesq.h-cdn.co%2Fassets%2F16%2F43%2F1477434323-alec-baldwin.png%3Fresize%3D1600%3A%2A)

Alec Baldwin in his natural state

Sony

**I return to New York** and immediately set about delaying my
experiment. When you're with Blanton, you think, Yes, I can do this\!
The truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth. But when I get back
to bosses and fragile friendships, I continue my lying ways.

"How's Radical Honesty going?" my boss asks.

"It's okay," I lie. "A little slow."

A couple of weeks later, I finally get some inspiration from my friend's
five-year-old daughter, Alison. We are in Central Park for a play date.
Out of nowhere, Alison looks at me evenly and says, "Your teeth are
yellow because you drink coffee all day."

Damn. Now that's some radical honesty for you. Maybe I should be more
like a five-year-old. An hour later, she shows me her new pet bug -- a
beetle of some sort that she has in her cupped hands.

"It's napping," she whispers.

I nudge the insect with my finger. It doesn't move. Should I play along?
No. I should tell her the truth, like she told me about my teeth.

"It's not napping."

She looks confused.

"It's dead."

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Alison runs to her father, dismayed. "Daddy, he just said a bad word."

I feel like an asshole. I frightened a five-year-old, probably out of
revenge for an insult about my oral hygiene. I postpone again -- for a
few more weeks. And then my boss tells me he needs the article for the
July issue.

> I frightened a five-year-old, probably out of revenge for an insult
> about my oral hygiene

**I start in again** at dinner with my friend Brian. We are talking
about his new living situation, and I decide to tell him the truth.

"You know, I forget your fiancée's name."

This is highly unacceptable -- they've been together for years; I've met
her several times.

"It's Jenny."

In his book, Blanton talks about the thrill of total candor, the Space
Mountain-worthy adrenaline rush you get from breaking taboos. As he
writes, "You learn to like the excitement of mild, ongoing risk taking."
This I felt.

Luckily, Brian doesn't seem too pissed. So I decide to push my luck.
"Yes, that's right. Jenny. Well, I resent you for not inviting me to you
and Jenny's wedding. I don't want to go, since it's in Vermont, but I
wanted to be invited."

"Well, I resent you for not being invited to your wedding."

"You weren't invited? Really? I thought I had."

"Nope."

"Sorry, man. That was a mistake."

A breakthrough\! We are communicating\! Blanton is right. Brian and I
crushed some eggshells. We are not stoic, emotionless men. I'm enjoying
this. A little bracing honesty can be a mood booster.

The next day, we get a visit from my wife's dad and stepmom.

"Did you get the birthday gift I sent you?" asks her stepmom.

"Uh-huh," I say.

She sent me a gift certificate to Saks Fifth Avenue.

"And? Did you like it?"

"Not really. I don't like gift certificates. It's like you're giving me
an errand to run."

"Well, uh . . ."

Once again, I felt the thrill of inappropriate candor. And I felt
something else, too. The paradoxical joy of being free from choice. I
had no choice but to tell the truth. I didn't have to rack my brain
figuring out how to hedge it, spin it, massage it.

> I had no choice but to tell the truth. I didn't have to rack my brain
> figuring out how to hedge it, spin it, massage it

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"Just being honest," I shrug. Nice touch, I decide; helps take the edge
off. She's got a thick skin. She'll be okay. And I'll tell you this:
I'll never get a damn gift certificate from her again.

**I still tell plenty of lies** every day, but by the end of the week
I've slashed the total by at least 40 percent. Still, the giddiness is
wearing off. A life of radical honesty is filled with a hundred
confrontations every day. Small, but they're relentless.

"Yes, I'll come to your office, but I resent you for making me travel."

"My boss said I should invite you to this meeting, although it wouldn't
have occurred to me to do so."

"I have nothing else to say to you. I have run out of conversation."

My wife tells me a story about switching operating systems on her
computer. In the middle, I have to go help our son with something, then
forget to come back.

"Do you want to hear the end of the story or not?" she asks.

"Well...is there a payoff?"

"Fuck you."

It would have been a lot easier to have kept my mouth closed and
listened to her. It reminds me of an issue I raised with Blanton: Why
make waves? "Ninety percent of the time I love my wife," I told him.
"And 10 percent of the time I hate her. Why should I hurt her feelings
that 10 percent of the time? Why not just wait until that phase passes
and I return to the true feeling, which is that I love her?"

Blanton's response: "Because you're a manipulative, lying son of a
bitch."

Okay, he's right. It's manipulative and patronizing to shut up and
listen. But it's exhausting not to.

One other thing is also becoming apparent: There's a fine line between
radical honesty and creepiness. Or actually no line at all. It's simple
logic: Men think about sex every three minutes, as the scientists at
Redbook remind us. If you speak whatever's on your mind, you'll be
talking about sex every three minutes.

> There's a fine line between radical honesty and creepiness. Or
> actually no line at all

I have a business breakfast with an editor from Rachael Ray's magazine.
As we're sitting together, I tell her that I remember what she wore the
first time we met -- a black shirt that revealed her shoulders in a
provocative way. I say that I'd try to sleep with her if I were single.
I confess to her that I just attempted (unsuccessfully) to look down her
shirt during breakfast.

She smiles. Though I do notice she leans back farther in her seat.

The thing is, the separate cubbyholes of my personality are merging.
Usually, there's a professional self, a home self, a friend self, a
with-the-guys self. Now, it's one big improper mess. This woman and I
have either taken a step forward in our relationship, or she'll never
return my calls again.

When I get home, I keep the momentum going. I call a friend to say that
I fantasize about his wife. (He says he likes my wife, too, and suggests
a key party.)

I inform our twenty-seven-year-old nanny that "if my wife left me, I
would ask you out on a date, because I think you are stunning."

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She laughs. Nervously.

"I think that makes you uncomfortable, so I won't mention it again. It
was just on my mind."

Now I've made my own skin crawl. I feel like I should just buy a trench
coat and start lurking around subway platforms. Blanton says he doesn't
believe sex talk in the workplace counts as sexual harassment -- it's
tight-assed society's fault if people can't handle the truth -- but my
nanny confession just feels like pure abuse of power.

> Now I've made my own skin crawl. I feel like I should just buy a
> trench coat and start lurking around subway platforms

All this lasciviousness might be more palatable if I were a single man.
In fact, I have a theory: I think Blanton devised Radical Honesty partly
as a way to pick up women. It's a brilliant strategy. The antithesis of
mind games. Transparent mating.

And according to Blanton, it's effective. He tells me about a woman he
once met on a Paris subway and asked out for tea. When they sat down, he
said, "I didn't really want any tea; I was just trying to figure out a
way to delay you so I could talk to you for a while, because I want to
go to bed with you." They went to bed together. Or another seduction
technique of his: "Wanna fuck?"

"That works?" I asked.

"Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but it's the creation of
possibility."

**I lied today.** A retired man from New Hampshire -- a friend of a
friend -- wrote some poems and sent them to me. His wife just died, and
he's taken up poetry. He just wanted someone in publishing to read his
work. A professional opinion.

I read them. I didn't like them much, but I wrote to him that I thought
they were very good.

So I e-mail Blanton for the first time since our meeting and confess
what I did. I write, "His wife just died, he doesn't have friends. He's
kind of pathetic. I read his stuff, or skimmed it actually. I didn't
like it. I thought it was boring and badly written. So I e-mailed a lie.
I said I really like the poems and hope they get published. He wrote me
back so excited and how it made his week and how he was about to give up
on them but my e-mail gave him the stamina to keep trying."

I ask Blanton whether I made a mistake.

He responds curtly. I need to come to his eight-day workshop to "even
begin to get what \[Radical Honesty\] is about." He says we need to meet
in person.

Meet in person? Did he toss down so many bourbons I vanished from his
memory? I tell him we did meet.

Blanton writes back testily that he remembers. But I still need to take
a workshop (price tag: $2,800). His only advice on my quandary: "Send
the man the e-mail you sent me about lying to him and ask him to call
you when he gets it...and see what you learn."

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Show him the e-mail? Are you kidding? What a hardcore bastard.

In his book, Radical Honesty, Blanton advises us to start sentences with
the words "I resent you for" or "I appreciate you for." So I write him
back.

"I resent you for being so different in these e-mails than you were when
we met. You were friendly and engaging and encouraging when we met. Now
you seem to have turned judgmental and tough. I resent you for giving me
the advice to break that old man's heart by telling him that his poems
suck."

Blanton responds quickly. First, he doesn't like that I expressed my
resentment by e-mail. I should have come to see him. "What you don't
seem to get yet, A.J., is that the reason for expressing resentment
directly and in person is so that you can experience in your body the
sensations that occur when you express the resentment, while at the same
time being in the presence of the person you resent, and so you can stay
with them until the sensations arise and recede and then get back to
neutral -- which is what forgiveness is."

Second, he tells me that telling the old man the truth would be
compassionate, showing the "authentic caring underneath your usual
intellectual bullshit and overvaluing of your critical judgment. Your
lie is not useful to him. In fact, it is simply avoiding your
responsibility as one human being to another. That's okay. It happens
all the time. It is not a mortal sin. But don't bullshit yourself about
it being kind."

He ends with this: "I don't want to spend a lot of time explaining
things to you for your cute little project of playing with telling the
truth if you don't have the balls to try it."

Condescending prick.

I know my e-mail to the old man was wrong. I shouldn't have been so
rah-rah effusive. But here, I've hit the outer limit of Radical Honesty,
a hard wall. I can't trash the old man.

I try to understand Blanton's point about compassion. To most of us,
honesty often means cruelty.

But to Blanton, honesty and compassion are the ones in sync. It's an
intriguing way to look at the world, but I just don't buy it in the case
of the widower poet. Screw Blanton. (By the way: I broke Radical Honesty
and changed the identifying details of the old-man story so as not to
humiliate him. Also, I've messed a bit with the timeline of events to
simplify things. Sorry.)

**To compensate** for my wimpiness, I decide to toughen up. Which is
probably the exact wrong thing to do. Today, I'm getting a haircut, and
my barber is telling me he doesn't want his wife to get pregnant because
she'll get too fat (a bit of radical honesty of his own), and I say,
"You know, I'm tired. I have a cold. I don't want to talk anymore. I
want to read."

"Okay," he says, wielding his scissors, "go ahead and read."

Later, I do the same thing with my in-laws when they're yapping on about
preschools. "I'm bored," I announce. "I'll be back later." And with
that, I leave the living room.

I tell Blanton, hoping for his approval. Did anything come of it? he
asks. Any discussions and insights? Hmmm.

He's right. If you're going to be a schmuck, at least you should find
some redeeming quality in it. Blanton's a master of this. One of his
tricks is to say things with such glee and enthusiasm, it's hard to get
too pissed. "You may be a petty asshole," he says, "but at least you're
not a secret petty asshole." Then he'll laugh.

I have yet to learn that trick myself. Consider how I handled this scene
at a diner a couple of blocks from my apartment.

"Everything okay?" asked our server, an Asian man with tattoos.

"Yeah, except for the coffee. I always have to order espresso here,
because the espresso tastes like regular coffee. The regular coffee here
is terrible. Can't you guys make stronger coffee?"

The waiter said no and walked away. My friend looked at me. "I'm
embarrassed for you," he said. "And I'm embarrassed to be around you."

"I know. Me, too." I felt like a Hollywood producer who parks in
handicapped spots. I ask Blanton what I should have
done.

![](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)
[](//pinterest.com/pin/create/button/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.esquire.com%2Fnews-politics%2Fa26792%2Fhonesty0707%2F&description=I%20Think%20You%27re%20Fat&media=https%3A%2F%2Fhips.hearstapps.com%2Fesq.h-cdn.co%2Fassets%2F16%2F43%2F1477434856-ari-gold-entourage.jpg%3Fresize%3D1600%3A%2A)

My Ari Gold moment

Warner Brothers

"You should have said, 'This coffee tastes like shit\!' " he says,
cackling.

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**I will say this:** One of the best parts of Radical Honesty is that
I'm saving a whole lot of time. It's a cut-to-the-chase way to live. At
work, I've been waiting for my boss to reply to a memo for ten days. So
I write him: "I'm annoyed that you didn't respond to our memo earlier.
But at the same time, I'm relieved, because then if we don't nail one of
the things you want, we can blame any delays on your lack of response."

Pressing send makes me nervous -- but the e-mail works. My boss
responds: "I will endeavor to respond by tomorrow. Been gone from N.Y.
for two weeks." It is borderline apologetic. I can push my power with my
boss further than I thought.

Later, a friend of a friend wants to meet for a meal. I tell him I don't
like leaving my house. "I agree to meet some people for lunch because I
fear hurting their feelings if I don't. And in this terrifying age where
everyone has a blog, I don't want to offend people, because then they'd
write on their blogs what an asshole I am, and it would turn up in every
Google search for the rest of my life."

He writes back: "Normally, I don't really like meeting editors anyway.
Makes me ill to think about it, because I'm afraid of coming off like
the idiot that, deep down, I suspect I am."

That's one thing I've noticed: When I am radically honest, people become
radically honest themselves. I feel my resentment fade away. I like this
guy. We have a good meeting.

> When I am radically honest, people become radically honest themselves

In fact, all my relationships can take a whole lot more truth than I
expected. Consider this one: For years, I've had a chronic problem where
I refer to my wife, Julie, by my sister's name, Beryl. I always catch
myself midway through and pretend it didn't happen. I've never confessed
to Julie. Why should I? It either means that I'm sexually attracted to
my sister, which is not good. Or that I think of my wife as my sister,
also not good.

But today, in the kitchen, when I have my standard mental sister-wife
mix-up, I decide to tell Julie about it.

"That's strange," she says.

We talk about it. I feel unburdened, closer to my wife now that we share
this quirky, slightly disturbing knowledge. I realize that by keeping it
secret, I had given it way too much weight. I hope she feels the same
way.

**I call up Blanton** one last time, to get his honest opinion about how
I've done.

"I'm finishing my experiment," I say.

"You going to start lying again?" he asks.

"Hell yeah."

"Oh, shit. It didn't work."

"But I'm going to lie less than I did before."

I tell him about my confession to Julie that I sometimes want to call
her Beryl. "No big deal," says Blanton. "People in other cultures have
sex with their sisters all the time."

I bring up the episode about telling the editor from Rachael Ray's
magazine that I tried to look down her shirt, but he sounds
disappointed. "Did you tell your wife?" he asks. "That's the good part."

Finally, I describe to him how I told Julie that I didn't care to hear
the end of her story about fixing her computer. Blanton asks how she
responded.

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"She said, 'Fuck you.' "

"That's good\!" Blanton says. "I like that. That's communicating."

Esquire Editor-at-Large A.J. Jacobs is the author of A Year of Living
Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as
Possible, published by Simon & Schuster.

Published in the July 2007 issue