The Power of Disclosure Flexibility

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta . Today's episode begins in a subterranean labyrinth. It's 2018 and we're below the streets of Washington, D.C. I've come here in search of clues. So here we are in deck fifty in the stacks of the Library of Congress. I'm opening a door that's marked door twenty. My guide through the Library of Congress's massive collection is a tall, shaggy man. His name is Steve Winnick. He looks a lot like Hagrid from Harry Potter, which seems about right for someone with the title or folklor ist. Steve has already led me through a maze of low ceiling stacks, across a small bridge and into a tiny elevator where the flow numbers go up as we move down. Finally we arrive at our destination . And in here we find row upon row of collection boxes on the shelves. And I'm looking for this collection, which is numbered AFC 1979008 . Steve pulls from the shelf, a cardboard box. Nobody's really used this collection very much, so it's simply, you know, been there waiting for for you, really . The author of this collection is Richard Riley Shepherd, a small time crook and con man who died in 2009 . I've been tracking Riley Shepherd for a few months. My assumption is that there's nothing of significance in the box. But I'm about to discover that the story I thought I was reporting is not in fact the full story. The story that's about to unfold before me is a story of obsession , its power, its beauty, and its costs. This week on Hidden Brain, we bring you a classic episode about the peculiar life of a man named Riley S hepherd. He was a musician and writer who spent decades on a single grand project . Whether that project was a great quest or a great folly , that is for you to dec ide He he was a genius, I think. He just t was a compulsive liar. Quite a master. Dick Scott. Hickey free He was getting out of town Johnny before Dick Scott being Dick, I gotta get this done. They all hated my guts. So I said Support for Hidden Brain comes from Lily. On this show, it's fascinating to discuss the unseen forces shaping the human brain. Consider conditions like Alzheimer's disease, where changes in the brain may develop up to 20 years before noticing symptoms. Talk to your doctor to understand your potential risk factors for dementia due to Alzheimer's disease and ask for a cognitive assessment. Visit brainhealth Matters.com for more information and resources . Support for Hidden Brain comes from the Great Take, presented by Brookdale Senior Living. Families face a tough situation as their loved ones age, times change, and roles reverse. A psychologist specializing in aging dives into the topic of recognizing the tipping point and when it might be time for assisted living . If someone you love is growing older, this conversation may help. Search for episode 21 of the Great Take wherever you listen to podcasts . Support for Hidden Brand comes from LinkedIn. Running a small business means every hire matters. A bad hire can cost you time, money, and momentum. A good hire, they can help grow your business. LinkedIn's new hiring pro screens candidates for you, so instead of sorting through applicants, you spend time talking to only the right ones. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com/slash HB. Terms and conditions apply . I stumbled onto the story as I was contemplating an episode not about obsession, but about fallen heroes. I'd asked hidden brain listeners to share examples from their own lives . One of the messages I hope I did this right was from Stasha Shepherd Silverman. She said her fallen hero was her dad, Riley Shepherd, whom she still loved. I want to say that I had a great relationship with my father. He was totally cool in many ways and a great co ok. Totally into the bigger than the first me that as a young girl, she idolized her dad. She has memories of those days that feel like tiny sparkling gems . My earliest memory of my dad is sitt ing on his lap and him smoking his cigar and he would make cigar smoke rings for me. Stasha would watch them, transfixed, as they rose in the air before her. I thought the smoke rings were magical . There was a lot that was magical for Stasha back then. She still remembers their little apartment in Hollywood, with the Siamese cat and the cat hair, and the hardwood floors. She remembers how much she loved that her dad was around all the time. He didn't have a regular job and he would um sit in the middle of the living room usually wherever we lived and he would type so he was working on things he was I didn't know what. But I would sit under his desk sometimes while he typed away and we would talk in between the pages and he would tell me things about show business. They were in their own little bubble, Riley in his late fifties and his little daughter. Typing, talking, just being together . Sometimes if Riley had a little money, he takes Tasha out to eat at their favorite Hollywood hotspot, a restaurant called the Brown Derby. It was a place where Riley could rub shoulders with famous people, charm them with his warm southern accent, and impress his daughter on their way home. Mm-hmm. You know the Hollywood stars were all around us. We could walk up the street and my father would tell me about movie stars when we walked. He seemed to know everything. Stasha was certain that her dad was something of a star himself . Sometimes he'd tell her about his musical career as a successful promoter, singer, and songwriter. Occasionally he might even sing the song his s ong I'll have a blue Christ mas without you I'll be so blue He told me and he told everyone that he wrote It wasn't true. Billy Hayes and Jay Johnson wrote Blue Christmas. The person who made it famous? Elvis If Riley had written Blue Christmas, money might not have been so tight for the family. I was told constantly that we were artists and that there were artists and there were ordinary people and we were artists . Stasha eventually learned about her dad's most important artistic endeavor, not a song, but a writing project. The encyclopedia of folk music . And that was supposedly his life's work . And it was vast. I mean, there were boxes there, huge boxes of volumes of indexes and things he was working on and books. To fund its creation, Riley solicited money from investors, some of whom he convinced to pour thousands of dollars into the project. Sometimes investors and bill collectors would call to ask when they were going to get paid. He used to get on the phone with all kinds of people and say you didn't get the check ? W hat ? The post office he would constantly rail against the post office, so as a little girl, I also became very militant against the post office . I also would rail against the post off ice. And if I had a pen pal or a friend that I was writing a letter to, I would always write on the outside of the envelope, you better deliver this letter. You know, I was like enraged with the post office that they wouldn't deliver letters, because I just thought they're constantly throwing my dad under the bus and not mailing his checks . For many children, there is a moment when a curtain pulls back and parents are revealed for who they are, imperfect beings, with flaws and failings. But for Starsha, the father she saw when the curtain opened was hard to recognize. It happened one day when she was twelve, hanging out at home. And the phone rang. So I picked it up, I said hello. The caller demanded to speak Old man to me . He scared me . And he told me that my father took his life savings . The phone is in my ear, and he's saying, Your father's a crook . Did you know that ? Your father is a crook . How Stasha responded to that phone call when we come back ? You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta . Support for Hidden Brain comes from Lily. On this show, it's fascinating to discuss the unseen forces shaping the human brain. Consider conditions like Alzheimer's disease, where changes in the brain may develop up to 20 years before noticing symptoms. Talk to your doctor to understand your potential risk factors for dementia due to Alzheimer's disease and ask for a cognitive assessment. Visit brainhealthmatters.com for more information and resources. Support for Hidden Brint comes from Cash App. What if getting started with Bitcoin didn't have to feel overwhelming? If you've been curious about Bitcoin but haven't made the jump yet, Cash App makes it easy. You can set up automatic purchases with zero fees or buy larger amounts also with zero fees. Start small or go bigger. It's designed to be simple either way. For a limited time, new customers can get $10 added to their balance. Just use code CASHAP10 when you sign up. And don't forget this part: send at least $5 to a friend in the first two weeks. Terms apply. Cash App is a financial services platform Banking services provided by CashApp's bank partners. Bitcoin services provided by Block Inc. brand. For additional information, see the Bitcoin disclosures at Cash dot app slash legal slash podcast This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta . In 1946, Riley Shepherd released a cover of the hit song Atomic Power . It was inspired by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagas All this world is at a tremble with its strength and mighty power. They're sending up to heaven to get the brimstone fire. Riley was a rising talent . He had dark good looks, a soft southern twang, and the guitar skills to make a go of it. He signed with various labels. He seemed like he was headed somewhere. But Riley Shepherd never achieved stardom. Instead, his life took a series of detours . Music researcher and writer Kevin Coffey tracked Riley down many years ago. Riley at the time was eighty-nine. Kevin was interested in preserving the stories of old time country Western performers. He thought Riley might be worth profiling. And full of insider names most people wouldn't recognize. And his Roy's wife was played piano, Lilyhart. Oh really? Yeah. Gradually, Kevin pieced together Riley's backstory . Richard Riley Shepherd was born on a farm near Wilmington, North Carolina in 1918. He dropped out of school in the fifth grade and decided to try his luck at singing. It was a heady time for music in the region. Groups like the Mayners Mountaineers were popularizing what was then called hillbilly music. This world is not my home , I'm just a passing through dangers and my home by far beyond the blue Where many fringes left me and have gone before and I can't be at home in this world anymore . Riley started out playing songs in minstrel shows. Soon he told Kevin he was getting gigs with hillbilly groups like the Dixie Reelers Am O my way to glory I shall be boo Come on my way to glory I shall be moved By the early nineteen forties, Riley had moved to Chicago. He toured with other Hillbilly musicians and did comedy and acting work. He also began cultivating his image as a cowboy crooner . As he created this new persona, he gave himself a catchy moniker, the cowboy philosopher. Where did you come up with that with that? Because I know you were calling yourself the come up with it. Gene Hong Kreak came up with it. Oh, did he ? 'Cause I found an ad from way back in nineteen forty five and you were already using it back then, so Gene came up with that crap . To top off his fancy new title of philosopher, Riley grew a dashing moustache and began scheming up fresh ways to get into the spotlight. The Cosmopolitan Church presents Dr. Richard Riley Shepherd . This is Tasha again. A few years ago, she found one of the old flyers that advertised her dad's lectures. Dr. Richard Riley Shepherd, author, historian, world traveler, philosopher in a series of educational lectures. The world traveler and philosopher was prepared to discuss a variety of important topics. Saturday october tenth God man and science saturday october thirty first democracy and capitalist saturday november seventh origin and growth of fascism. Even as he sought to make a name for himself with his educational lectures, Riley was still churning out songs at a frenzied pace, often releasing a new record every month. But Kevin says Riley wasn't reliable. For a time Riley was able to make it all work, in part because he did have a little star po wer. He'd done well with atomic power and later had another catchy tune titled Cowboy . I got me no wife . I've been the cowboy for all my li fe. I guess I like being free my horse my saddle and me Riley recorded it under the name Dixon Hall. I uh looked out the window and I saw a thing called Hall's clothing . Big sigh. And then uh our Dixon came in. And so I said, well, Dixon Hall. That sounded okay. Uh got me no wife . Got me new . This was how Riley operated. He played fast and loose. He also worked as an agent getting music labels to sign new artists. You see, I tell him, what do you think a publisher is? He's just a businessman. He wouldn't know a hit song to crawl out from under his desk and beat him on the leg. He sold songs to these executives with a combination of bluster and hype. This rule was Which was written by Dick Thomas . Recorded by him on a small label I got him seven thousand dollars advanced and seven cents a copy. Oh, I bet. In those days . Riley was also a hustler in his personal life, where the consequences of his actions were more serious. Marian Kiminek knows this well. She was adopted at birth. As an adult, she searched for and found her biological mother. From her, Marian learned that her father was Riley Shepherd. Marion's mother had met him while working as an actress in Chicago. And uh she said he was very charming, very good looking, he played the guitar and he s ang and uh I guess she was kinda smitten with him and uh She got pregnant. That she told Marion wasn't supposed to happen. He told her he was sterile. And from what I understand he told every woman he was with that he was sterile . The world will never know the reas on the reason why I said we're through Whatever he'd achieved in the music industry it was all winding down by the early nineteen sixties By then, Riley had picked up and moved on to the West Coast. Guilty High Guilty High . He first went to Oregon and then to California. He told Kevin he gave up the music business so he could turn his attention to a new project, an encyclopedia of folk music. But Kevin thinks years of lying and cheating and breaking contracts had simply caught up with him. out of town before he was being tart and feathered. Guilty heart for guilty high . It's perhaps fitting that the place Riley landed for the next chapter of his life was Hollywood. Tinseltown was shiny and bright and full of the kind of transformative stories that Riley loved. He arrived there with his common law wife and his young daughter, Stasha . For a while, he thrived in his new role as Riley Shepherd family man . But like most things in Riley's life , it didn't last. Your father is a crook . After all these years, Stasha still fixates on the memory of that old man's telephone call. Stasia says it was a turning point in her relationship with her father. That night, she confronted him . Right when he walked in the door, I was like, you know, screaming at him, you're a crook, you're a crook . And he looked at me like he turned white and he was shocked and he argued we argued, we fought, I don't remember the exact words, but I remember he stormed out and he went out to his car and he sat there and smoked and he didn't come back inside for a long time. He would just that's what he would do when he was mad. He would go out into his car and pout. But the next morning, Riley did what came naturally to him. He turned on the charm. He tried to smooth things over. He made Stasha pancakes. He told her the encyclopedia was going to make a lot of money , and that his investors would get paid. Stasha wanted to believe him. Well, you know, I loved my dad, and he was very apologetic and sweet and you you want to believe your parents . And also he was very good at convincing. Stasha didn't her dad owed, but she got the sense he was constantly evading creditors. She tells one story of calling home to get a ride . And when my dad picked up the phone, he was pretending to be a Chinese man. He was pretending to be use this accent that like from breakfast at Tiffany's that horrible, you know , was it Mickey Rooney? Anyway, terrible . And but I knew it was him. You know your father's voice. I'm like, Dad . And he was like hung up on me. Riley took every shortcut he could to make a buck . For a time, he wrote porn under the pseudonym Zachary Quill . One of his books, Glowing Heat. Stasha says her mother told her that Riley had worked out a formula. She said, oh well dad used to get all these cheap novels and then he would write porn scenes and he would have typists insert the porn scenes in these crappy novels and resell them. This was Tasha's life. Things were always off-kilter. Confusing. She remembers another time when they had to flee their house before the landlord came, probably because Riley hadn't paid the rent. We got in this rickety old truck with all our stuff jammed in it . And um my father's encyclopedia of folk music was in there very carefully packed . Those were the biggest boxes that we took. And all our other stuff was just kind of strewn in this truck and it wasn't very well packed and when we were driving down the highway I remember this it was so weird. You know, people were pointing at us and trying to get our attention and we were like I mean, I remember my mother being like, why why are they waving at us? And then realizing, oh, our stuff is flying out. Like our slim belongings that we had pared down from selling almost everything else, those things were flying out. Not the encyclopedia folk music, but my clothes and what few things . By the late nineteen seventies, the family had settled in Porterville, California, a town on the western edge of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Riley spent his days working on his encyclopedia and to Stasher's mind, swindling everyone he could. It all ended when Stasher was eighteen. That year, nineteen eighty three, Riley Shepherd did what he had done many times before. He disappeared . He told my mother who he had been with for whatever twenty-three years that he was taking a short trip to Los Angeles. But when she woke up in the morning, she realized that he had taken way more than what you would need for a short trip . And he never came, he did not come back . For more than a year, Stasha had no idea where he was . Eventually she found him living about an hour away in Fresno . They reconnected, but everything had changed . She now saw him for exactly who he was. He glamorized the life of being a grifter. He glamorized the life of being a con man. That's what I understand now, that he he was a con man. It's even hard to say that out loud. He was, though For years, Stasha felt torn between her distaste for Riley's behavior and her love for the dad who made her smoke rings and took her to the Brown Derby . By the mid eighties, Stasha had left Porterville. A few years later, Riley returned to the town and played the role of the old cowboy musician. Stasha mainly stayed in touch by phone as the years pass on the floor for days. And I called him and he goes, honey, I know I'm gonna die But he was so sweet. I can't talk about that, but he said he loved me, and that he was proud proud of me. It was like beautiful . Riley rallied and moved to a nursing home. When Stasha visited, he seemed agitated. And he goes, You don't you don't know what it's like in here. I thought he meant the nursing home, 'cause three beds, the guy had the TV on, it was loud . I go, What do you the nursing home? He goes, No, you don't you don't know what it's like in here and here and he was pointing to his head and i go what what are you talking about he goes i'm i'm i'm flashing back on all the things I did did, and I some bad things . Stasha tried to comfort him, but in retrospect, she wishes she'd asked a question . What bad things? Tell me about those. What were the bad things? Maybe if you tell me about them, you'll feel better. Because I'm wondering what all he would have told me . But he he lived for a little bit in the nursing home. That was the last time that I visited him . After Riley died, Stasha wanted the world to remember her father correctly, so she made sure his obituary included not just his real name, but all the pseudonyms he was known to use. Dick Scott, Hickey Free, Clem Hawley , Johnny Rebel, Dixon Hall, Gene Gilmore, Dick Gleason, Paul Lester, Richard Alexander, Albert Riley, Joe Graham, Richard James Hoff Oh I never can forget on that day when first we met I was never nearer heaven in my life when I There wasn't much in the Riley Shepherd Estate. Stasha packed up some of his letters, a cookbook he'd written for her, and various other papers . But his life's work, the encyclopedia he'd been toiling over all those years, he'd left that to someone else. I was never nearer heaven in my life. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta . Support for hidden brand comes from Sleep Number. Life changes. Your mattress should too. Sleep Number's new collections are designed for personalized comfort that evolves with you. As your body, health, and lifestyle change, you can adjust firmness anytime for lasting support. It's the everything on sale memorial day event from sleep number. Every bed and base is on sale now. Visit a sleep number store near you or learn more at sleepnumber.com . Support for HiddenBrain comes from Progressive where drivers who save by switching save nearly $7 50 on average. Plus, auto customers qualify for an average of seven discounts. Quote now at progressive.com to see if you could save. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. National average 12-month savings of $7 44 by new customers surveyed who saved with Progressive between June 2022 and May 2023. Potential savings will vary. Discounts not available in all states and situations . This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. And in here we find row upon row of collection boxes on the shelves. By the time I got to the basement of the Library of Congress, figured I knew everything I needed to know about Riley Shepherd. He was a crook, a con man, a bad husband, an unreliable father. So as folklorist Steve Winnick pulls out the Richard Riley Really? Up in his office, Hagrid, AKA folklorist Steve Winnick, spreads out the papers from the Richard Riley Shepherd collection on a table. He picks up a letter. The date of this letter is september seventh, 1976. More than four decades ago, Riley wrote this letter to the Registrar of Copyrights. Stasha was 11 years old. So he was working on things. He was working on I didn't know what. In the letter, Riley asks for the forms he'll need to copyright an encyclopedia . He adds a long postscript. He says perhaps someone in the Library of Congress would be interested in the following. Over the past sixteen years, I alphabetically indexed more than forty-three thousand titles of songs, including published versions and variants in English, French, Spanish, et cetera, all of which have enjoyed All the titles he continues have been alphabetically cross-indexed and cross-referenced, with the titles of books they appeared in, along with the editors and publishers. Each reference is clearly coded so that practically every folk song relative to the United States, plus all its known versions and variants, can be easily located. You may be interested to learn that the 43,000 titles are clearly the outgrowth of only 4,000 songs, texts, and tunes. He ends the letter this way. I know only one thing: I am the only person in the world with this amount of cross-indexed, cross-referen ced musical material. Unfortunately, I do not own or have access to a computer in which to feed the information. Perhaps the Library of Congress can offer suggestions? Riley wanted to get his encyclopedia to a wider audience . The chief archivist at the time wrote back and offered the names of potential publishers. He also said he'd like to see some of Riley's work. So Riley sent in the samples that the library now holds. In a follow-up letter, Riley explained how his indexing system worked. Each title is followed by the first line or lines of the song and or versions thereof, and this by the source. Example. Goose hangs high, the Civil War Ballad. It deals with Lee's invasion of Pennsylvan As Steve Winnick sifts through the materials, he slowly grasps the enormity of the project. So he's got forty-three thousand uh individual sheets or two sheets of paper, however long it takes, that he's got to then sort into 4,000 categories. And then in in addition to that, he has to cross-reference each of those with all of the places that they've been published . So he there's an enormous number of cross referen ces within this book that he had to do by hand without the ability to electronically associate one item with anot her . What Riley Shepherd had been working on since 1960 was a monumental accounting of some 200 years of American folk music. It involved a search of nearly every available documentary source. Riley had obtained rare books at great expense, including many that were out of print. He had collated thousands of songs and organized them according to their provenance, discovering Since he did not have a computer, almost no one did at the time, he did everything by hand, cross-referencing song lyrics and mus ical notations and historical footnotes. Crazy as it sounds, the entire system lived largely inside his own head. By the point he wrote to the Library of Congress, he had spent nearly two decades trying to put down on paper what was in his head, even as his life fell apart around him, and many of his closest friends and relatives came to think of him as a crook. At the time, as far as I know, um, no one had attempted something this ambitious in terms of um indexing all the songs in America . Riley Shepherd, a man with a fifth grade education, an occasional writer of porn, a con man and hustler, had attempted to create something that would require years of effort by a team of Ph D archivists and a small army of research The fact of the attempt um I think is is actually a significant fact in the history of folk song scholarship in the United States. And it's actually something almost nobody knows about. I wouldn't know about it if you hadn't brought it to my attention. And you know, I've studied this for quite a number of years . I asked Steve to choose a song and explain how Riley had classified it. So he opened volume three, so ran his finger down pages filled with typewritten entries. This is Holloway Joe, which is a sea shanty, and it says this is a short drag or short haul shanty. It was taken from British sailors and Americanized, which means political references were eliminated from the text. American sailors preferred to concentrate on girl s. For example, the British sailors sang, Louis was the king of France before the Revolution, but Louis got his head cut off, which spoiled his constitution. American sailors had more important things to sing about and changed the words to : Once I had a German girl, but she was fat and lazy, then I had an Irish girl, she damn near drove me crazy. The shanty dates back to around the second half of the eighteenth century, though only in England, in the USA, it dates back to the ye ars following the War of 1812. For other English and American versions, see the works listed below, and then uh he gives a long list of books in which this song appears. And he actually gives you the music for the song as well? In for many of the songs he does, yes, he does have uh music for Holloway Joe as well. Who how does the how does the tune of this song go? Do you remember it? When I was a little boy, it's so my mother told me away all the way, all the way, Joe, that if I didn't kiss the girls, my lips would all grow mouldy away, all the way, all the way, Joe. I have to say the impressive thing is you closed the book and you did that. This was all in your head, too. It was . In nineteen seventy-nine, three years after his first letter, Riley got in touch again with the Library of Congress. He said he'd been unable to find a publisher. And so he writes Dear Mr Hickerson, in case you don't remember, I have enclosed a photocopy of your letter to me dated july eighth, nineteen seventy seven. First I want, to thank you for your suggestions and the addresses of possible publishers. I followed up. No funds are available for a work such as mine, though they are interested in what I have done and would appreciate a copy of the Folk Song Finder and Index. It is a voluminous work, so I can understand the reluctance of a publisher to undertake the expense of its publication. So here I am, back to you again. It was an act of desperation. If you were our I cannot ask as much as I have spent in terms of time, work and money, but I would like to recoup at least some of my own expenditures, if not payment for my work and time. In fact, I must recoup some of what I have spent because I have already signed a letter busted . Riley never got what he was seeking. What he was asking was a a significant outlay of money that I just think the library couldn't afford at the time or or couldn't you know uh apportion to that project because as he says in the correspondence in addition to these volumes there are 54 other volumes of this book. Fifty-four other volumes. After nearly two decades of painstaking work came the final indign ity. Rejection . Yeah, I think he was an early casualty, you might say, of the the switch from published books, that is paper books, to computer um documentation. And he's aware of this. I mean, because he tal ks about how it would be great if he could put this into a computer . Would you say that Riley Shepherd was a genius? He he was a genius, I think. I mean it's uh it's Here is a really amazing part. Reilly continued to work on the encyclopedia for the next twenty five years. Since he uh would have sent this to the library in 1979, a lot more versions of traditional songs were published. So if he were trying to keep this book complete, he would have to continue to update it year after year. One of the interesting things is I'm not sure his family actually fully understands what he has done. Uh when I spoke with his daughter Stasha , she just thought her dad was sort of obsessed with this project that never seemed to go anywhere, that never seemed to end, that just grew infinitely. And you know, over the years, she in fact heard from people whom he had borrowed money from and taken money from, and you know, her impression of her dad is not a very positive impression. And in some ways, speaking with you, I get a different picture of this man . Well, um I think that all scholars, and particularly folk song scholars have something of the Riley Shepherd in them. We would like to spend all our time and all our life immersed in the texts and tunes of folk songs. We just can't manage it because we have lives. And so the amount of yourself that you're willing to give to that might vary for different people, but we certainly have sympathy for someone who gave so much of himself to it. I don't know if you're familiar with the uh anthropologist Arnold van Genep. He's the person who popularized the term rites of pass age. And Van Genep wrote a piece called The Research Project or Folklore Without End. And it was about a person who decided to write the definitive work on the evil eye. And he went to his carol in the library and he began getting all the books about the evil eye, and he compiled all of the references that he could find and he took it to his advisor and his advisor says this is a great start but there's still uh other cultures and there's you know ancient Greek and Roman sources that you should look at and so he goes back and he works on those and this continues for years years and and eventually this man dies at his carol in the library and nobody quite remembers what he was doing there. And that's kind of the impression that you get of of Riley Shepherd. But it turned out there was someone next to Riley in his final days as he labored away in his carol . Before he collapsed and was sent to the hospital, Riley was living in a small house. On on D Street in Porterville. He was in rough shape. I thought, you know, he's a little bit disheveled . But Steve Ansly, an Porterville native, says once you got to know Riley, he grew on you. It was Steve's father, Ted, who really knew Riley. Ted was a retired insurance agent and former Porterville mayor. Steve says his dad and Riley bonded over a shared love of music. They would just sit and listen to country Western music, uh the the old country western music, not the not the new stuff. They were friends. They were also business partners. They wrote songs together, they recorded a few songs together . Mainly though, they worked on Riley's encyclopedia. Ted saw the genius in it. Steve says Riley was still consumed by the project. Well he had music spread all over I mean he had tables and chairs and floor and everything and he had this music spread out and he was trying to to get it in e some sort of a um chronological order and by the c by the artist. Uh he was trying to get the artist um with the song and he would have the song and then he would have the artist. And so he would try to cross reference all of those. So it it it it was it was a labor of love, I'll tell you that. But he was uh he just no, I haven't got time for that. I don't want to eat uh uh I Steve and his father both felt they were in the presence of an extraordinary human being. Riley Shepherd was uh was a master. He he did a lot of things, but he was quite a quite a quite a master . Steve's father willingly gave his time to the project , and he gave money, plenty of it. Steve says after Riley died, Stasha got in touch. She was concerned that her dad had conned his dad . But Steve says the money wasn't important . The money doesn't mean anything as far as I saw the enjoyment that it brought to my dad. Riley left his life's work, the Encyclopedia of Folk Music, to his friend, Ted Inslin. They were forty boxes. Ted stored them in his old insurance office. And that's where they sat for years. I kept asking Dad, you know, what are you going to do with these, Dad? What are you going to do with these? And he says he says they're worth a lot of money. And I said, Well, I I know, but what are you going to do with them ? Ted never did anything My dad had a little um little record player in in his office and uh he would put on a lot of Riley's uh country western music . It was fun while it lasted, but it didn't last long . You left me for somebody new. And uh he he he just enjoyed Riley. He enjoyed uh joyous friendship. Won't you please come back? No I'll love you to the end. When Ted Enslin died, Steve gave the encyclopedia to another man Other copies are also floating around. Not long ago, Stasha says a couple who'd invested in Riley's encyclopedia got in touch. They were willing to sell their cop y to her for five hundred dollars. She bought it. She says it's huge. Well, it's it's weird to see the whole thing and how much work he actually put into it. Because after I realized how much my father fabricated on various things from, you know, it he just was a compulsive liar sometimes. He would make things up and, I couldn't figure out why. Why did you lie about that? Why didn't you brag about the songs you actually wrote? Why did you say you wrote Blue Christmas or whatever? And so I became kind of jaded and I began to think that maybe the whole project, the encyclopedia was not even worth thinking about at all . I loved my dad, but I kind of rolled my eyes whenever I thought about these projects because so much so much smoke and mirrors around it . Won't you please come back? You know I'll love you to the end what if you don't come back, my broken heart will never mend. It was fun while it lasted, but it didn't last . You left me for somebody new In the conversation near the end of his life, Raleigh Shepherd doesn't sound bitter or frustrated. He sounds like a man still doing what he loves, honoring the music he had learned as a boy, trying to play Called uh the older you get , the more it's gonna cost to do the things you did when you were young. When an old man's in love, he just thinks he's in clothes. He's not cooking with gas, he's just warming it over . Songs and novels are filled with stories about people with great obsessions. We have strong opinions about such people. When they succeed, when they produce the Taj Mahal or Hamlet or the iPhone, we hail the obsessions that built the monuments of this world . When we count the collateral damage that people with obsessions leave in their wake , especially when those obsessions only produce the unreadable tome on the evil eye or an unpublishable encyclopedia on folk music, obsessions start to look like foll y. Trouble is, you usually do not know whether an obsession is a great quest or a great folly until it's over . Shortly after this episode first aired in 2019, Stasha shared a version of her father's encyclopedia with the Internet Archive in San Francisco. It's now available online. We have a link to it in the show notes . More recently, we reached back out to Starship and she said she remained skeptical of the idea that her father was a genius. What she does know is that he was a man of many secrets. She's discovered even more pseudonyms that he used over the years and many more details about his relationships with women . But it's likely none of those revelations were as shocking to her as that first phone call she received all those years ago. Your father is a cro ok . Across that crackly phone line, those words, Your father is a crook must have landed like a thunderclap . Learning that your parent is the villain of someone else's story is painful. Secrets like this can cause deep ruptures in families. Now, the secrets that most of us hold are not this weighty, but even small secrets can be a heavy burden. Not long ago, we heard from a listener named John who's been carrying a secret like this. When he was in college, John studied abroad in Ethiopia. He lived in a small town, teaching English to high schoolers. One of John's brightest students would hang around him a lot. This student was fascinated by the United States and hungry to learn what it would be like to live there. And ultimately I realized he wanted to go to America. And he wanted me to be his conduit and maybe sponsor to going to America and so this as a you know 18 19 year old uh put me in a precarious situation because I felt like I was in no position to sponsor somebody and wouldn't even know where to start. Um I I told him that I I would I would look around, I'd ask around for opportunities or other people that could help him , but uh it put me in a position where I didn't know what to do and and I you know it made me uncomfortable that he was had sort of thrust this responsibility on me. Uh I st kind of started to prefer other hanging out with other students and other other people when I could . John felt bad about avoiding his student, but he didn't him tagging along. I knew that he would be sort of in my ear the whole time and sort of ramping up this responsibility that he had placed on me. So when he asked me when we were leaving from the the the bus station I lied I told him that we were would be leaving at six thirty in the evening, when in fact we were gonna be leaving at five thirty. So I kind of figured this is the best way to get out of this. Uh the problem is that he was uh pretty keen and asked around and found out that we were in fact leaving at five thirty, so when I got there to meet with my friends and get on the bus, sure enough, there he was, and he came along, and we we had a good time. There was a little bit of that uh uh uneasiness about the whole situation. Obviously I felt horrible about lying to him . But it was a secret that I kind of kept to myself from the others. Obviously my f my friends uh wondered why he was there, but they didn't know that I had tried to keep him away from it by lying to him, and I felt really, really bad that I had done that . John has ruminated on the lie for years. He's sharing it for the first time with a hidden brain audience . From the outside looking in, his secret might seem trivial. Sure, maybe he could have been kind er or more forthcoming with the student. He could have said that he wasn't in a position to help. Why has this secret weighed on him so heavily and for so long? After the break, stories and questions about the secrets we keep and the harm they can cause . You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantham Support for Hidden Brand comes from Liquid IV. When you're on the go, staying hydrated is key to enjoying And right now you can get 20% off your first order with code BRAINE at checkout. It's powered by Live Hydrocytes, an optimized ratio of electrolytes, essential vitamins, and clinically tested nutrients that turn ordinary water into extraordinary hydration. Liquid IV is always non-GMO, vegan, gluten-free, dairy-free, and soy-free. Explore the delicious sugar-free options like white peach, strawberry watermelon, and more. Stay hydrated while you're on the go this summer with Liquid IV. Tear, pour, live more. Go to liquidiv.com and get 20% off your first purchase with code BRINE at checkout. That's 20% off your first purchase with code BRINE at liquidiv .com . Support for Hidden Brain comes from BetterHelp. May is mental health awareness month, a reminder that whatever you're going through, you don't have to do it alone . From loneliness epidemics to anxiety and Sunday scaries to financial stress, right now Americans are struggling. And while most people believe that seeking out support is important, many still don't take that step. That's where BetterHelp comes in. With BetterHelp, you can connect with a licensed therapist who's there with you to listen, understand, and support you on your terms. Schedule sessions conveniently via the app and talk to your therapist by video, phone, or live chat. BetterHelp matches you with a therapist who's with you through life's ups and downs. Because no journey should be alone. Sign up now and get ten percent off at betterhelp dot com slash hidden. That's better hel p.com slash hidden . This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta . Recently, I heard a shocking statistic. 80% of people lie to their doctor s. Eighty percent . Doctors promote our well being, they bear witness to our tales of pain , they heal us when we are sick. You would think we would be fully transparent with the people trying to help us . I learned that statistic from Leslie John . She's a psychologist at Harvard University and the author of Revealing: The Underrated Power of Overshar ing. We talked with her on two recent episodes of the show. They were titled Keeping Secrets and Coming Clean . Today, Les lie returns to the show to respond to listener comments and stories about the costs of keeping secrets. Leslie John , welcome back to Hidden Brain. Thanks so much for having me. Leslie in our interactions with other people we spend a lot of time weighing how much of ourselves to share with them. Why is it that so many of us avoid revealing ourselves to others? That's the million-dollar question, right? Um So there are many elements to this answer. The the number one, I think the most obvious answer is that we're scared for good reason. So our minds immediately go into what would go wrong if I said the thing and we worry about rejection and embarrassment and conflict and loss of status , and these are all valid concerns. But there's a problem here because if you think about how to make a good decision, you don't want to just think of the risks of doing the thing, right? You want to also think of the risks of not doing the thing among other considerations. So but again and again, when I give people different what I call disclosure dilemmas, the first thing they go, they very naturally come up with the risks of revealing. And those risks are valid. But the problem is people don't go further unless you prompt them to, unless you say, okay, what about the risks of not revealing? But the other thing that you said that was really key in this question is is this this word, the default. Why do we default? We default to silence so naturally. We don't even realize we're doing it. Right. In your research, uh Leslie, you found that keeping a secret can negatively impact our physical and mental health. Uh describe for me very briefly some of these costs. Yeah, so many studies have shown that holding secrets is associated with all kinds of negative health outcomes. It's associated with depression and anxiety. Uh, it's associated with physiological stress markers, it's associated with greater rumination, with poorer relationships. So lots and lots of negative consequences. Many secrets that we keep um often center on regrets that we have. Uh maybe a time that we lied or stole or cheated someone. Uh here's a message we received from a listener named Claire. So about nine years ago, I was alone on a close family friend's property, and I really had an RGI'd pee. So I popped a squat and uh mid-pee. I look up and I see a security camera on their property pointed right at me. And I was so concerned, you know, what would they think when they saw the video? They didn't even know I was in the property. Um it was just super embarrassing. And so for nine years I couldn't look the um this was my friend's parents either of them in the eye because I just you know I wasn't sure if they saw the video and what they thought and what they were wondering. So for nine years I kept this secret and I didn't tell anyone in my family about it. And then this last summer I finally came clean and told my parents about why I felt so uncomfortable or their friends. And they just looked at me. They couldn't understand why I was telling them this what they thought was a completely pointless story from nine years ago, which had been haunting me for almost a decade. And no one seemed to care. I told, you know, my friend about it, and nobody cared at all after nine years of being so self-conscious. So Leslie, clearly this secret was a much bigger deal for Claire than it was for her parents and her friend. What's interesting is that the story echoed what we've heard from several other listeners, the distress that we feel about our secrets is often wildly disproportionate to the reactions of others, including, you know, our quote unquote victims. Why is it that our secrets have this out sized impact on us Yeah. Oh, Claire, I feel for you. Um the word that it was haunting her. Yes, it was haunting her. And then in the end it was moot. Like it I was hoping she'd say that they got a good laugh out of it at least. Um or maybe they s well maybe they still have the footage and they could laugh about it, but um but it sounds like it was not even you she didn't give laughter, but she did get relief, I think, in the end. And I think one of the reasons why they often affect us more than it ends up being to the person we reveal them to is because for one, we're so used to keeping things inside and so we actually don't have the data that disproves this belief that it's a big deal, right? And this is why I really think of revealing as a skill, as a practice, right? If you do it more, then you realize that you get feedback, you're like, oh, that wasn't such a big deal. Yeah. It's funny because I was thinking about a dear friend of mine. Um recently, we've rekindled our friendship. She we were roommates in college and she said to me, I have a confession to make. When we lived together, I was the one that ate the Oreos . And like I was like, great, I didn't even remember this. But clearly, like that was like the second thing she said to me. One of my favorite psychology studies and findings. It's called the spotlight effect where we think that people notice what we do and care what we think and do more than they actually do, which maybe kinda sounds cynical, but I think it's liberating. One of my best friends, the way he assuages me, he's like, nobody cares . So in this case, like they're literally was a spotlight on her. It was a videotape. But she went down this road of like think about it, okay, so there's there's this tape that exists. It's as if for that to be true, for them to have seen her, they'd have to have like watched all of the footage, right? Like um, and the study that I that uh it was a hilarious oldie but a goodie social psych study where they got one of them was they had people wear berry manilo t-shirts, like big blaring berry manilo t-shirts which, I love Barry Manilo, but maybe they were like uncool or something then. And they forced them to wear it for the day and asked them how many people they thought would notice. And of course, people wearing it think everybody's gonna notice and they'll be a fool, but but really So we're really kind of self-absorbed in that way. I'm wondering if the fact that Claire kept her secret for so long in some ways amplified it in her mind. In other words, you know, the longer she kept it, the more she is thinking about it, the more she's ruminating about it, and the bigger it gets in her mind. But of course, it's not getting bigger in anyone else's mind. Completely, yeah, they kind of start to take uh secrets start to take a life of their own and they compound each other. And one of the reasons is that they're in our head. When we when we're just thinking and cycling and ruminating in our head, we can make some really crazy logical leaps. But if we talk to a friend, then that friend can like help us to realize, oh wait, for that to happen, the person would have had to watch the video. And also if they watched the video, would that have been so bad anyways? Maybe they would have left. Right, right. So there are secrets that have to do with what we've done, but there are also secrets that get at who we are. Here is listener Emma. I was born in nineteen fifty-six, assigned male at birth. When I was four or five, I realized that I wished I'd been born a girl. Through elementary school, I fantasized when I went to bed about what it might like to be a girl. But I was certain that it was the deepest secret anyone could have, and I would never reveal it to anyone. I saw therapists for depression throughout my adulthood, but never fully disclosed these feelings. This went on for almost forty years until twenty early twenty fourteen when my wife suggested that I return to therapy. This time I knew I had to come clean . It was so scary and it took weeks to let it all out into the open. I started my transition in twenty seventeen and have absolutely no regrets now, living authentically as a woman. So one thing that strikes me about Emma's story, Leslie, is that this is not about something that she did, but about who she is. Talk about the difference between those two things when it comes to holding secrets. Yeah. I think that they point to kind of two motives to revealing, right? Something you did the the the kind of feeling maybe shame and concern about what the other person thinks if you reveal it, sort of interpersonal. But these kinds of secrets about your identity are more intrapersonal challenging, right? Because you're you're you make you kind of question what do I reveal of myself and not if I don't reveal this, am I being inauthentic? One way that I think about these things is if you have an identity that is core to who you are, but it can be stigmatizing , if it's really core to who you are, it's important that some people know, people close to you, because knowinging be known for who you are is incredibly important. But it also doesn't mean that you have to tell everyone. Um, so you can be really selective about who you choose to share and not. And what Emma did here was beautiful in that Emma worked with her wife. She worked with a therapist. And it's also not, I also want to highlight that disclosure is often, especially with these very hard fraught ones, it's a process. It's a campaign. It's not a one-shot thing. And I think that also hopefully liberates people into thinking, well, if I didn't quite describe myself right this time, like I will have another conversation. It's an ongoing interactive dialogue. Sometimes the secrets that we keep are so at odds with the person who we want to be, it can be very difficult to bear. Here's a message we received from a listener named Dean. I had um several affairs uh without my wife knowing for the past few years and uh it was so shameful that I would um compartment alize it like it was like a different person. And I kept that from her until she found out. Then I told her about everything . So right now I'm in sexual addiction recovery trying to make things better for myself and for her . So Leslie I can really hear the pain in Dean's voice. Uh he used the word shameful to describe his secret. And this is a recurring theme that we heard and that you've explored. And a central reason I think that we try and keep things from others. Um we're worried about how they will judge us if we come clean. Yes, absolutely. And that's a completely valid concern. It's especially valid when it's the people that you're really close to and you love them and you feel like you've wronged them. This is kind of one of the hardest types of disclosures to make. He also hit on this this point, he said, it's like I'm a different person. And that's a kind of self-dissonance that is a really hard thing to deal with . Because, you know, we like to think of ourselves as, you know, faithful, kind to our spouses, but then there's this thing we did that is that's is antithetical to that. And so then you're like, well, who am I um and he said compartmentalize and that's kind of a coping mechanism mechanism is to compens compartmentalize that but it's not the healthiest of coping mechanisms one of the things that I think is interesting about secrets is why we're keeping them. Are we keeping them in our interest or are we keeping them in the interest of someone else? Yeah. Talk about that tension, Leslie. Oh, that's exactly where my mind was going as well. I think that this is a core thing when thinking about whether to reveal a secret. What's your North Star? What's your purpose? Is your purpose because sometimes we reveal secrets because we just feel so guilty and ashamed. And it's it's more to make ourselves feel better to share the burden than it is to actually grow from it. And so, you know, think to yourself: is this something that I'm doing to alleviate burdens to myself? And if that's the case, is telling my spouse the right thing, or is that just gonna impose the burden on her? Perhaps it's better to talk about it with a therapist than in that case, right? Um whereas if your motive is to really understand your relationship better and what your goals are and how you relate to each other, well then that might be an integral way of starting such conversations . When we come back, what happens when you learn that someone has been keeping a secret from you . You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta . Wasn't that delicious? So good. Your bill, ladies. I got it. No, I got it. Seriously, I insist. I insisted first. Don't be silly. You'll not be silly . People with the Wills Fargo Active Cash credit card prefer to pay because they earn unlimited two percent cash rewards on purchases. Okay. Rock, paper, scissors for it. Rock, paper, scissors. Shoot! No ! The Wells Fargo Active Cash credit card. Visit Wells Fargo.com/slash active cash. Terms apply . Longstanding Advice Show, an Ambie Award-nominated Best Personal Growth Podcast that's back with new episodes and a new host, to me, Mike Pesca. Each week I tackle a listener question ranging from travel to finance to relationships and beyond, with help from a world-class expert, you know, someone who actually very much knows what they're talking about. Think of it as eavesdropping on someone else's therapy session, without the copay or awkward silences. You've got questions, we'll find the expert So follow how to with Mike Pesca wherever you get podcasts. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta . Keeping a secret can gnaw at you . Leslie John at Harvard University has found that it can harm our physical and mental health and damage our relationships . Leslie, I'd like to talk a bit about family secrets. Hanno is from Germany. The last time Hanno saw his maternal grandfather alive, his grandfather hinted that he had a shocking secret, that he was an officer in the Nazi forced labor service during the Holocaust, and that he had witnessed or even Joe Were members of the local Jewish community had been forced into and the house then put on fire over their head, and he had been a part of the chain of command. So Leslie Hanno went on to say how troubled he is by learning the secret. Uh he now feels a terrible sense of responsibility for the actions of his family members, uh people who are long since deceased. Hanno is obviously not responsible for the actions of his grandfather , would he have been better off not learning this terrible secret? Oh, geez, that's such a hard question. Um I guess it depends how you define better off, you know ? Um I think one of the things that makes this so hard is that Hanno does not have the opportunity to make more sense of it by speaking with his grandfather again. And I think that's really the challenging thing because when we have these hard truths in our history and we learn about them, the way that we can metabolize them is by talking about them with the people who went through it and understanding their perspective and what it was like and their motives and how they think about it. That gives us some closure, some sense making, some sense of certainty. It's incredibly therapeutic. And I feel sad for Hanno that he didn't have that opportunity. And so often we think about these moments of revealing as a one-shot, right? But like we can go back to the person and if they're alive and we can continue to engage in a conversation and ask them more questions. Um, because there's will be a point where we're no longer able to do that. Hmm. In some ways, Hanno's story reminds me that there are some secrets that are actually held not by just individuals and not just by families, but by entire groups of people. Yes, completely. And those are really interesting because they introduce this element of social pressure, right? It's like this unspoken thing that we all know, but we don't want to talk about. And then even if someone does want to say something, they feel like they can't because they assume that others also don't want to talk about it, right? This is this idea that like if nobody is talking about it, we assume that nobody wants to talk about it . But what we can do in these situations is try testing the waters, broaching the topic. So here's an example, not of a dark family secret, but like a friend of mine was just telling me this. She was at a she was at a meeting at work and they were sitting around a table and it was super frustrating. They weren't getting anywhere. And normally, like, you don't say that, you don't say it's frustrating. Like people were just kind of grinning bearing it. And she finally she said, you know what? I'm gonna say it. She said, I feel frustrated. And then as soon as she said that, everyone else said, oh my gosh, thank you, I feel frustrated too. Like there was this collective relief and this collective bonding. And then they were able to move forward. I want to stay with Hanno's story for a second. I'm struck by the fact that many Germans to this day, you know, still feel the shame of the Holocaust. Many keep secrets like Hanno's family does. But it's also striking that many Jewish Holocaust survivors prefer not to discuss the horrors that they witnessed or that they experienced. They don't talk to their friends and family about what happened. I'm wondering what this tells you about the nature of secrets, Les lie. Yeah, I think that one reason we keep secrets is out of kindness, um, and not wanting to burden people, right? Not wanting to burden people about the horrors one has experienced. And that's totally valid and fair and understandable. It's not always good to talk about the things that are bothering you. Sometimes if you talk about the things that are bothering you, you end up perseverating on them and thinking about them even more. So perhaps there's that reluctance too. There's been research on this Holocaust survivors who have been able to make sense of what happened to them are have much more positive outcomes. And I don't mean, you know, make it okay at all, but to kind of develop a deeper understanding of why this happened to them, all of the understand their feelings throughout it, the complexities of it. The people who are able to process that and and and tell their story, they do so much better at moving on to the future and growing. But if we just kind of vent about it all the time and the goal isn't kind of growth and narrative sense making, then that's that's not the good kind. I do think though that I know this from data that people think that they're going to be more of a burden than they actually are. And in fact, so often people are happy to hear your disclosures. I mean you would be happy to hear a story like that, but you would feel you would feel very close to the person because one, you understand them better, but two, they chose to confide in you. Yeah. How special is that ? When we come back, could keeping a secret ever be a good thing? You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta . Wasn't that delicious? So good. Your bill, ladies. I got it. No, I got it. Seriously, I insist. I'm gonna be silly. You know me silly . People with the Wells Fargo Active Cash credit card prefer to pay because they earn unlimited 2% cash rewards on purchases. Okay. Rock, paper, scissors for it. Rock, paper, scissors shoot. No . The Wells Fargo Active Cash credit card. Visit Wells Fargo.com slash active cash. Terms apply . We all need advice, but it's not always clear who to ask, even in 202 6. Enter how to, the long-standing advice show and AMBI Award nominated Best Personal Growth Podcast that's back with new episodes and a new host, who? Me, Mike Pesca. Each week I tackle a listener question ranged Think of it as eavesdropping on someone else's therapy session without the copay or awkward silences. You've got questions, we'll find the experts and the answers. So follow how to with Mike Pesca wherever you get podcasts. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta . Leslie John is a psychologist at Harvard University. She studies the science of secrets and self disclosure, how much we share of ourselves, and the benefits and costs of doing so . Her book is titled Revealing the Underrated Power of Overshar ing . So Leslie we talked earlier about how families or even nations of people can carry collective secrets, and often this happens not through explicit discussion, but via the more subtle norms of a group. We heard from a listener named Philip,, uh he grew up in an evangelical Christian community and would spend upwards of seventy hours per week knocking on doors to proselytize. But then one day when he was in his mid-twenties, Philip realized he was actually an agnostic. Now that was difficult enough, but on top of that, the group I was a part of maintained a very strict set of rules around apostasy if someone broke with doctrine and excommunication if someone broke the rules. So that is I was at risk of losing my wife of four years, my family, my friends, my community, pretty much everything if I spoke out or acted on my beliefs . So I didn't for years . And I wound up suffering all of the side effects that Leslie John alluded to, psychologically, physiologically, socially, you name it. Um but the desire for coming clean so to speak and having that sensation of it simply feels good, just built up, I started confiding in a childhood friend about the problem. It felt really good to be able to express myself honestly without judgment, but because this friend was round my age and female , it also constituted a breach of trust and the emotional commitment with my wife. It hastened the demise of our already shattered marriage and we divorced in the summer of 202 4 . It was just a train wreck. Now that a little bit of distance has gone by, though, I can point to the things that I did wrong and say okay, I learned something from that. But the thing that I regret the most still is the continu ing to conceal my beliefs for as long as I did out of fear. Leslie, what strikes me in Philip's story is that he was incentivized to keep his secret by his faith community. And this is true in a lot of settings, not just religious ones, um, talk about the difficult y of fighting not just our own feelings of shame and remorse about a secret, but going against the norms and expectations of the communities to which we belong. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean it takes so much courage . Uh, Philip, you are so courageous. I admire you so much, and thank you for sharing your story. One of the things that's so hard here is because it goes against the norm, it feels like you are wrong and which makes it hard to validate yourself and this is already a really hard thing to come to terms with um to really understand about yourself so it kind of impedes self-learning. But the thing that really gives me hope is that Philip did find that ally, the woman he confided in. Now, he said he breached kind of a social contract of intimacy with his wife, but I think him saying that also I could feel the realization that, well, you know, your spouse is someone, in my view, we should be going for total emotional intimacy, right? That means you can tell them anything . And and if you're not at that stage or you're not working toward it, then I think that's something to take note of and and you can make a change. I mean I believe his spouse was part of that same faith community. So in some ways, you know, talking about what was going on in his mind would have been a challenge to the faith community and to her. Right. And so that he's self-criticizing, he says he breached my wife. But in some ways, you could think of his non-telling her as an act of kindness because as we talked about a little bit earlier, sometimes when you share something with someone, it then becomes a shared burden and it would have become a burden to her. So you can kind of play it both ways. Those these things usually are not black and white. I also thought it was interesting to me, the beautiful takeaway in the end of how he said, I regret having conedceal it for so long. And I can't tell you the number of times I've heard this. Being able to be who you are and feel known for who you are and reveal it is deeply intrinsically rewarding. Right. I mean, he talks about this almost burning desire he had to come clean, to get the secret off his chest. And it's almost like we have these competing forces within us, Leslie. We're a house divided when we have a secret, because we have this desire to hide and this desire to reveal. Totally. And that's why I think like really trying to like take the temperature down a bit and thinking, what are the risks of revealing? That's natural, but what are the risks of not revealing and what are the benefits? And like if you can kind of start to think put your finger on these things, then they become much more manageable. And you re kind of embrace the duality and complexity instead of hiding from it. We also heard from some listeners who argued that it's not necessarily a bad thing to keep your cards close to your chest. Uh listener David writes, sometimes we need to recognize that we don't need to know everything about a person to enjoy their company, and sometimes we need to respect that not everyone is comfortable sharing their secrets with us. While your guest may feel that we should share more, I would argue that we should be more tolerant of each other, and that tolerance will lead to more trust, and that trust will lead to more disclosure. What do you think of David's point here, Leslie, that we should focus more on tolerance and building trust rather than feeling pressure to disclose our secrets or demand that others tell us their secrets. Oh, this is such an important point.