Leslie John (on the power of oversharing)
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Umbrella
4.6 • 70K Ratings
🗓️ 17 June 2026
⏱️ 104 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Leslie John (Revealing: The Underrated Power of Oversharing) is a behavioral scientist, Harvard Business School professor, and expert on privacy, self-disclosure, and decision-making. Leslie joins Armchair Expert to discuss growing up in Waterloo, Canada, training professionally in ballet as a child, and how her family’s irrational penny-pinching sparked her fascination with human behavior. Leslie and Dax talk about why people are more open to revealing their dark secrets on a sketchy-looking website over a more official looking one, how one mortifying overshare helped her find lifelong mentors, and what parasocial relationships reveal about modern intimacy. Leslie explains why secrets take up cognitive space, how vulnerability creates trust through social risk, and why we may be better off sharing a little more than we think we should.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome, welcome, welcome to armchair expert experts on expert. |
| 0:03.3 | I'm Dan Shepard. |
| 0:04.2 | I'm joined by Monica Mouse. |
| 0:05.5 | Today we have Leslie John on. |
| 0:07.5 | She is a behavioral scientist and a professor at Harvard Business School. |
| 0:11.9 | And we get to get into parisocial relationships on this one. |
| 0:16.5 | She has a great book out called Revealing the Underrated Power of Oversharing. |
| 0:22.4 | And this is an incredibly interesting conversation about parasycial relationships. |
| 0:27.8 | Parassocial relationships begin to secrets, like the science of secrets. |
| 0:31.1 | There's a lot of fun stuff in here. |
| 0:32.4 | Yeah. |
| 0:33.0 | Please enjoy Leslie John. |
| 0:35.8 | This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. I feel like Spring always does |
| 0:40.3 | this thing where you realize you've been thinking about something for a long time and suddenly |
| 0:44.3 | it feels like, okay, maybe I actually do something with it. Totally. It's less pressure, but more like |
| 0:50.3 | readiness. Yeah, like you've been sitting on an idea or a project or even just a perspective |
| 0:54.7 | you care about. And now you're like, maybe this deserves to exist somewhere outside of my own |
| 0:58.9 | head. In May being Mental Health Awareness Month, there's already this broader conversation |
| 1:02.8 | happening. People are more open, more curious, more willing to engage. Which is where something like |
| 1:07.4 | Squarespace comes in. It makes that jump from idea to actual thing feel |
| 1:12.2 | way less overwhelming. You can build a site that looks good, works well, and actually reflects |
| 1:17.4 | what you're trying to put out there. And it's not just hypothetical. Wabiwob literally |
... |
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