Welcome to Nobody Told Me. I'm Laura Owens, and I'm Jan Black. Is there such a thing as living a truly

honest life? When is deception better than honesty?

What are the consequences of repeatedly lying to ourselves?

And what is the power of honesty in a world full of lies?

Those are some of the questions we'll explore on this episode with our guest, Judy Kettler,

who's an award-winning journalist and the author of, Would I Lie to You?

The Amazing Power of Being Honest in a World That Lies.

Judy, thank you so much for joining us today.

Thanks for having me. I'm happy to talk about this topic.

Well, this is a wonderful topic, and we'd love to start by learning what inspired your wildly popular New York Times article,

how honesty could make you happier, which then inspired the book, would I lie to you?

Well, you know, it was a couple of things. It was like a societal thing and then a personal thing.

So society, culture-wise, I felt like I just had this moment where I was like,

man, the world we are living in, it just feels so dishonest right now. And whether or not it

was more dishonest, and it's always been the same amount of dishonest. I don't know. But we're so

exposed to so much to the 21st

news cycle and social media. There's so much coming at us. And so it just felt like it was such a,

just everything around me felt so dishonest. So that was from the outside. And then on the inside,

I also was struggling. You know, my kids were, they're 9 and 11 now, so back up two years, they were like,

what, 7 and 9?

So at these ages where they were really starting to ask a lot of questions, and I felt

like I wasn't engaging with them in honest ways.

...