The Cowboy Philosopher

In 2009, an old man died in a California nursing home. His obituary included not just his given name, but a long list of the pseudonyms he’d been known to use. In this classic 2019 episode, we trace the life of Riley Shepard, a hillbilly musician, writer, small-time con man and, perhaps, a genius. Then, on Your Questions Answered, psychologist Leslie John returns to answer your questions about when to share a secret, and when to keep it to yourself.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Today's episode begins in a subterranean labyrinth. It's 2018, and we're below the streets of Washington, DC. I've come here in search of clues.

• 0:14Speaker 01

  So here we are in deck 50 in the stacks of the Library of Congress. I'm opening a door that's marked door 20.

• 0:20Shankar Vedantam?

  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 a title of folklorist. Steve has already led me through a maze of low-ceilinged stacks, across a small bridge, and into a tiny elevator, where the floor numbers go up as we move down. Finally, we arrive at our destination.

• 0:49Speaker 01

  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 1979 008.

• 1:03Shankar Vedantam?

  Steve pulls from the shelf a cardboard box.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  Nobody's really used this collection very much. So it's simply, you know, been there waiting for you, really.

• 1:15Shankar Vedantam?

  The author of this collection is Richard Riley Shepard, a small-time crook and con man who died in 2009.

• 1:23Shankar Vedantam?

  I've been tracking Riley Shepard 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.

• 1:40Shankar Vedantam?

  The story that's about to unfold before me is a story of obsession, its power, its beauty, and its costs.

• 1:52Shankar Vedantam?

  This week on Hidden Brain, we bring you a classic episode about the peculiar life of a man named Riley Shepard. He was a musician and writer who spent decades on a single grand project.

• 2:04Shankar Vedantam?

  Whether that project was a great quest or a great folly,

• 2:09Shankar Vedantam?

  that is for you to decide.

• 2:12Speaker 01

  He was a genius, I think.

• 2:14Speaker 02

  He just was a compulsive liar.

• 2:16Speaker 03

  Quite a master.

• 2:19Speaker 02

  He was getting out of town before he was being tarted feathered.

• 2:24Speaker 03

  I gotta get this done.

• 2:25Speaker 04

  They all hated my guts. So I said, "Well, man..."

• 2:36Shankar Vedantam?

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• 3:21Shankar Vedantam?

  Throughout season six, Alex brings together extraordinary change makers for powerful conversations about grit, determination, and the power of hope to fuel our fight for a better future. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts.

• 3:41Shankar Vedantam?

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• 4:14Shankar Vedantam?

  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-

• 4:28Speaker 02

  I hope I did this right.

• 4:29Shankar Vedantam?

  -was from Stasia Shepherd-Silverman. She said her fallen hero was her dad, Riley Shepard, whom she still loved.

• 4:37Speaker 02

  I want to say that I had a great relationship with my father. He was totally cool in many ways and a great cook, totally into-

• 4:47Shankar Vedantam?

  When we talk, Stasia tells me that as a young girl, she idolized her dad. She has memories of those days that feel like tiny, sparkling gems.

• 4:59Speaker 02

  My earliest memory of my dad is sitting on his lap and him smoking his cigar. And he would make cigar smoke rings for me.

• 5:10Shankar Vedantam?

  Stasia would watch them, transfixed, as they rose in the air before her.

• 5:14Speaker 02

  I thought the smoke rings were magical.

• 5:22Shankar Vedantam?

  There was a lot that was magical for Stasia 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.

• 5:37Speaker 02

  He didn't have a regular job. And he would sit in the middle of the living room usually, wherever we lived, and he would type. So he was working on things. He was working on, 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.

• 6:00Shankar Vedantam?

  They were in their own little bubble, Riley in his late 50s and his little daughter, typing, talking, just being together.

• 6:10Shankar Vedantam?

  Sometimes if Riley had a little money, he'd take Stasia 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.

• 6:28Speaker 02

  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.

• 6:37Shankar Vedantam?

  Stasia 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 song. I'll have a blue Christmas without you. I'll be so blue.

• 7:04Speaker 02

  He told me, and he told everyone, that he wrote the song "Blue Christmas."

• 7:09Shankar Vedantam?

  Declaration. It wasn't true. Billy Hayes and Jay Johnson wrote "Blue Christmas." The person who made it famous? Won't be the same. Elvis. If you're not here with me.

• 7:29Shankar Vedantam?

  If Riley had written "Blue Christmas," money might not have been so tight for the family.

• 7:35Speaker 02

  I was told constantly that we were artists, and that there were artists, and there were ordinary people, and we were artists.

• 7:43Shankar Vedantam?

  Stasia eventually learned about her dad's most important artistic endeavor, not a song, but a writing project.

• 7:51Speaker 02

  The encyclopedia of folk music.

• 7:56Speaker 02

  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 in books.

• 8:13Shankar Vedantam?

  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.

• 8:28Speaker 02

  He used to get on the phone with all kinds of people and say, "You didn't get the check? What? 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 office. 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 enraged with the post office that they wouldn't deliver letters because I just thought they're constantly throwing my dad under the bus

• 9:09Speaker 02

  and not mailing his checks.

• 9:14Shankar Vedantam?

  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 Stasia, the father she saw when the curtain opened was hard to recognize. It happened one day when she was 12, hanging out at home.

• 9:36Speaker 02

  And the phone rang. So I picked it up. I said hello.

• 9:40Shankar Vedantam?

  The caller demanded to speak to her dad. Stasia said he was out.

• 9:45Speaker 02

  His voice was shaking, and I could tell he was elderly. And he just sounded like a mean 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?

• 10:22Speaker 02

  Your father is a crook.

• 10:28Shankar Vedantam?

  How Stacia responded to that phone call when we come back. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 10:40Shankar Vedantam?

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• 11:21Shankar Vedantam?

  on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Hidden Brain.

• 11:34Shankar Vedantam?

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• 12:16Shankar Vedantam?

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• 12:30Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In 1946, Riley Shepherd released a cover of the hit song Atomic Power. It was inspired by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

• 12:44Speaker 05

  (singing) Oh, this world is at a tremble with its strength and mighty power. They're sending up to heaven to get the brimstone fire.

• 12:55Shankar Vedantam?

  Riley was a rising talent. He had dark good looks, a soft, southern twang, and the guitar skills to make a go of it.

• 13:02Speaker 05

  (singing) The mighty power of God's own holy hand, atomic power, atomic power.

• 13:10Shankar Vedantam?

  He signed with various labels. He seemed like he was headed somewhere.

• 13:13Speaker 05

  (singing) By the mighty hand of God.

• 13:21Shankar Vedantam?

  But Riley Shepard never achieved stardom. Instead, his life took a series of detours.

• 13:32Shankar Vedantam?

  Music researcher and writer Kevin Coffey tracked Riley down many years ago. Riley at the time was 89. Kevin was interested in preserving the stories of old-time country western performers. He thought Riley might be worth profiling.

• 13:47Speaker 04

  Vaughn Horton. I see you played steel on a lot of your records. Vaughn Horton played steel on all of them.

• 13:54Shankar Vedantam?

  The conversation they had over a crackly phone line was friendly and nostalgic and full of insider names most people wouldn't recognize.

• 14:03Speaker 04

  And Roy's wife played piano, Lily Horton. Oh, really? Yeah.

• 14:10Shankar Vedantam?

  Gradually, Kevin pieced together Riley's backstory.

• 14:16Shankar Vedantam?

  Richard Riley Shepard 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 Maynard's Mountaineers were popularizing what was then called hillbilly music.

• 14:48Shankar Vedantam?

  Riley started out playing songs in minstrel shows. Soon, he told Kevin, he was getting gigs with hillbilly groups like the Dixie Reelers. By the early 1940s, 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?

• 15:32Shankar Vedantam?

  Because I know you were calling yourself the...

• 15:34Speaker 04

  I did come up with it. Gene Autry came up with it.

• 15:36Shankar Vedantam?

  Oh, did he? Because I found an ad from way back in 1945, and you were already using it back then.

• 15:42Speaker 04

  Gee, he came up with that crap.

• 15:46Shankar Vedantam?

  To top off his fancy new title of philosopher, Riley grew a dashing mustache and began scheming up fresh ways to get into the spotlight. The Cosmopolitan Church presents Dr. Richard Riley Shepard. This is Tasha again. A few years ago, she found one of the old flyers that advertised her dad's lectures. Dr. Richard Riley Shepard, 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 10th, God, Man, and Science. Saturday, October 17th, Marriage, Sex, and Reality.

• 16:31Shankar Vedantam?

  Saturday, October 31st, Democracy and Capitalism.

• 16:35Speaker 02

  Saturday, November 7th, Origin and Growth of Fashion.

• 16:50Shankar Vedantam?

  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. He'd signed with one record label, and while his contract was still in force, he'd sign with another. He'd often use different stage names or pseudonyms with different labels.

• 17:14Speaker 04

  Ikey Free was one of the names I used.

• 17:17Speaker 06

  Ikey Free.

• 17:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, Ikey Free, and that was all.

• 17:19Shankar Vedantam?

  For a time, Riley was able to make it all work, in part because he did have a little star power.

• 17:31Shankar Vedantam?

  He'd done well with Atomic Power and later had another catchy tune titled Cowboy.

• 17:37Speaker 04

  I got me no home, I got me no wife. I've been the cowboy for all of my life. I guess I like being free. My horse, my saddle, and me.

• 18:04Shankar Vedantam?

  Riley recorded it under the name Dixon Hall.

• 18:08Speaker 04

  I looked out the window, and I saw a thing called Hall's Clothing.

• 18:17Speaker 04

  Big sign. And then Art Dixon came in. And so I said, well, Dixon Hall, that sounded OK.

• 18:32Shankar Vedantam?

  This was how Riley operated. He played fast and loose. He also worked as an agent, getting music labels to sign new artists.

• 18:43Speaker 04

  You see, I tell them, 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.

• 18:52Shankar Vedantam?

  He sold songs to these executives with a combination of bluster and hype. This role allowed Riley to capitalize on one of his greatest strengths. He was a born salesman. He once boasted that he could have started his own religion.

• 19:07Speaker 04

  Read about Sioux City Sioux, which was written by Dick Thomas.

• 19:16Speaker 04

  Your hair is red, your eyes are blue. I swapped my horse and dog for- Recorded by him on a small label. And he brought it to me. And I said, "If you do what I tell you, you'll make a lot of money." And he did. I got him $7,000 advance and seven cents a copy. It's the biggest money ever paid for a hillbilly song. Ah, I bet. In those days.

• 19:44Shankar Vedantam?

  Riley was also a hustler in his personal life, where the consequences of his actions were more serious. Marion Kiminick knows this well. She was adopted at birth. As an adult, she searched for and found her biological mother. From her, Marion learned that her father was Riley Shepard. Marion's mother had met him while working as an actress in Chicago. And she said he was very charming, very good-looking. He played the guitar and he sang. And I guess she was kind of smitten with him. And- She got pregnant. That, she told Marion, wasn't supposed to happen. He told her he was sterile.

• 20:28Shankar Vedantam?

  And from what I understand, he told every woman he was with that he was sterile.

• 20:37Speaker 05

  The world will never know the reason. The reason why I said we're through.

• 20:49Shankar Vedantam?

  Whatever he'd achieved in the music industry, it was all winding down by the early 1960s. By then, Riley had picked up and moved on to the West Coast.

• 21:05Shankar Vedantam?

  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.

• 21:24Speaker 06

  He made it sound like he did these moves for different purposes. I think usually he was getting out of town before he was being tart and feathered.

• 21:38Shankar Vedantam?

  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, Stasia. For a while, he thrived in his new role as Riley Shepard, family man. But like most things in Riley's life,

• 22:05Shankar Vedantam?

  it didn't last.

• 22:06Speaker 02

  Your father is a crook.

• 22:11Shankar Vedantam?

  After all these years, Stasia still fixates on the memory of that old man's telephone call.

• 22:19Shankar Vedantam?

  Stasia says it was a turning point in her relationship with her father. That night, she confronted him.

• 22:27Speaker 02

  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 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.

• 23:02Shankar Vedantam?

  But the next morning, Riley did what came naturally to him. He turned on the charm. He tried to smooth things over. He made Stasia pancakes. He told her the encyclopedia was going to make a lot of money and that his investors would get paid. Stasia wanted to believe him.

• 23:21Speaker 02

  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.

• 23:35Shankar Vedantam?

  Stasha didn't know how much money her dad owed, but she got the sense he was constantly evading creditors. She tells one story of calling home to get a ride.

• 23:47Speaker 02

  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 I 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.

• 24:15Shankar Vedantam?

  Riley took every shortcut he could to make a buck.

• 24:20Shankar Vedantam?

  For a time, he wrote porn under the pseudonym Zachary Quill.

• 24:28Shankar Vedantam?

  One of his books, Glowing Heat. Stasha says her mother told her that Riley had worked out a formula.

• 24:36Speaker 02

  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.

• 24:52Shankar Vedantam?

  This was Stasha'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.

• 25:07Speaker 02

  We got in this rickety old truck with all our stuff jammed in it. And my father's Encyclopedia Folk Music was in there, very carefully packed.

• 25:18Speaker 02

  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, wow, 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 of folk music, but my clothes and what few things.

• 25:55Shankar Vedantam?

  By the late 1970s, 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 Stasia's mind, swindling everyone he could. It all ended when Stasia was 18. That year, 1983, Riley Shepard did what he had done many times before. He disappeared.

• 26:22Speaker 02

  He told my mother, who he had been with for whatever, 23 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.

• 26:41Shankar Vedantam?

  For more than a year, Stasia had no idea where he was.

• 26:46Shankar Vedantam?

  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.

• 26:58Speaker 02

  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,

• 27:09Speaker 02

  he was a con man. It's even hard to say that out loud. He was, though.

• 27:20Shankar Vedantam?

  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.

• 27:33Shankar Vedantam?

  By the mid 80s, 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 passed. One day in 2008, she got a call. Her dad had taken a fall in his home.

• 27:53Speaker 02

  And he ended up in the hospital after being alone 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 of me. It was like, beautiful.

• 28:16Shankar Vedantam?

  Riley rallied and moved to a nursing home. When Stasha visited, he seemed agitated.

• 28:23Speaker 02

  And he goes, "You don't, you don't know what it's like in here." I thought he meant the nursing home, because three beds, the guy had the TV on, it was loud. I go, "What are 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. And I did some bad things."

• 28:54Shankar Vedantam?

  Stasha tried to comfort him, but in retrospect, she wishes she'd asked a question.

• 29:01Speaker 02

  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, 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.

• 29:25Shankar Vedantam?

  After Riley died, Stacia 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.

• 29:37Speaker 02

  Dick Scott, Hickey Free, Clem Holly, Johnny Rebel, Dixon Hall, Gene Gilmore, Dick Gleason, Paul Lester, Richard Alexander, Albert Riley, Joe Graham, Richard James Hawke.

• 29:53Shankar Vedantam?

  After Riley died, Stacia had his body cremated. For a long time, she carried his ashes around with her. She'd scatter a handful here or there, which seemed fitting for a drifter.

• 30:05Speaker 05

  (singing) Oh, I never can forget, on that day when first we met. I was never near a heaven in my life.

• 30:15Shankar Vedantam?

  There wasn't much in the Riley Shepard estate. Stacia 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.

• 30:33Speaker 05

  (singing) You leave me all alone, still in every memory. As it all comes back to me, I was never near a heaven in my life.

• 30:45Shankar Vedantam?

  You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 31:02Shankar Vedantam?

  Support for Hidden Brain comes from Instagram. Instagram teen accounts' automatic protections limit who can contact teens, the content they can see, and the time they spend on the app. Teens are automatically placed into teen accounts. Teens under 16 will need a parent's permission to change any of those settings to be less strict. Learn more about teen accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts.

• 31:32Shankar Vedantam?

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• 32:09Speaker 01

  And in here, we find, row upon row, of collection boxes on the shelves.

• 32:17Shankar Vedantam?

  By the time I got to the basement of the Library of Congress, I figured I knew everything I needed to know about Riley Shepard. He was a crook, a con man, a bad husband, and unreliable father. So as folklorist Steve Winick pulls out the Richard Riley Shepard collection from the stacks, I'm not holding my breath.

• 32:36Speaker 01

  Nobody's really used this collection very much, so it's simply, you know, been there, waiting for you, really.

• 32:44Shankar Vedantam?

  Up in his office, Hagrid, aka folklorist Steve Winick, spreads out the papers from the Richard Riley Shepard collection on a table. He picks up a letter.

• 32:56Speaker 01

  The date of this letter is September 7, 1976.

• 32:59Shankar Vedantam?

  More than four decades ago, Riley wrote this letter to the Registrar of Copyrights. Stasia was 11 years old.

• 33:08Speaker 02

  So he was working on things. He was working on, I didn't know what.

• 33:12Shankar Vedantam?

  In the letter, Riley asks for the forms he'll need to copyright an encyclopedia. He adds a long postscript.

• 33:22Speaker 01

  He says, "Perhaps someone in the Library of Congress would be interested in the following. Over the past 16 years, I alphabetically indexed more than 43,000 titles of songs, including published versions and variants in English, French, Spanish, et cetera, all of which have enjoyed a folk-type tradition within the borders of the United States and Canada."

• 33:42Shankar Vedantam?

  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.

• 33:52Speaker 01

  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.

• 34:08Shankar Vedantam?

  He ends the letter this way.

• 34:10Speaker 01

  I know only one thing: I am the only person in the world with this amount of cross-indexed, cross-referenced 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?

• 34:31Shankar Vedantam?

  Riley wanted to get his encyclopedia to a wider audience.

• 34:36Shankar Vedantam?

  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.

• 34:54Speaker 01

  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 Pennsylvania and the Battle of Gettysburg.

• 35:09Shankar Vedantam?

  As Steve Winick sifts through the materials, he slowly grasps the enormity of the project.

• 35:15Speaker 01

  So he's got 43,000 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 addition to that, he has to cross-reference each of those with all of the places that they've been published.

• 35:36Speaker 01

  So there's an enormous number of cross-references within this book that he had to do by hand without the ability to electronically associate one item with another.

• 35:48Shankar Vedantam?

  What Riley Shepard 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 common roots and pathways that linked different musical traditions together. Since he did not have a computer, almost no one did at the time, he did everything by hand, cross-referencing song lyrics and musical notations and historical footnotes. Crazy as it sounds, the entire system lived largely inside his own head.

• 36:34Shankar Vedantam?

  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.

• 36:51Speaker 01

  At the time, as far as I know, no one had attempted something this ambitious in terms of indexing all the songs in America.

• 37:02Shankar Vedantam?

  Riley Shepard, 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 PhD archivists and a small army of researchers.

• 37:19Speaker 01

  The fact of the attempt, I think, 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.

• 37:39Shankar Vedantam?

  I asked Steve to choose a song and explain how Riley had classified it. So he opened Volume Three, ran his finger down pages filled with typewritten entries.

• 37:50Speaker 01

  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 girls. 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 18th century, though only in England

• 38:32Speaker 01

  and in the USA, it dates back to the years following the War of 1812. For other English and American versions, see the works listed below." And then he gives a long list of books in which this song appears.

• 38:44Shankar Vedantam?

  And he actually gives you the music for the song as well?

• 38:48Speaker 01

  For many of the songs, he does, yes. He does have music for Holloway Joe as well.

• 38:53Shankar Vedantam?

  How does the tune of this song go? Do you remember it?

• 38:56Speaker 01

  When I was a little boy, it's so my mother told me, way holloway, holloway Joe. That if I didn't kiss the girls, my lips would all grow moldy, way holloway, holloway Joe.

• 39:11Shankar Vedantam?

  I have to say, the impressive thing is you closed the book as you did that. This was all in your head, too.

• 39:16Speaker 01

  It was.

• 39:19Shankar Vedantam?

  In 1979, 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.

• 39:29Speaker 01

  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 8, 1977. 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."

• 40:01Shankar Vedantam?

  It was an act of desperation.

• 40:03Speaker 01

  If you were or are serious about the library reaching some agreement with me, I am ready to proceed. My problem is this: I don't know what to ask for in terms of financial remuneration to myself. I do know that 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 lease on a small farm and house in Porterville, California, and expect to move there in approximately six weeks. As I am, as they say in the country music field, "flat busted."

• 40:46Shankar Vedantam?

  Riley never got what he was seeking.

• 40:49Speaker 01

  What he was asking was a significant outlay of money that I just think the library couldn't afford at the time, or couldn't, you know, apportion to that project. Because, as he says in the correspondence, in addition to these volumes, there are 54 other volumes of this book.

• 41:09Shankar Vedantam?

  Fifty-four other volumes. After nearly two decades of painstaking work, came the final indignity: rejection.

• 41:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think he was an early casualty, you might say, of the switch from published books, that is, paper books, to computer documentation. And he's aware of this. I mean, because he talks about how it would be great if he could put this into a computer.

• 41:41Shankar Vedantam?

  Would you say that Riley Shepard was a genius?

• 41:44Speaker 01

  He was a genius, I think. I mean, it's very impressive to see the amount of work that he did on this. And he also had that sort of crazy perseverance that you have to have. So, you know, that's a whole other kind of genius.

• 42:01Shankar Vedantam?

  Here is a really amazing part. Riley continued to work on the encyclopedia for the next 25 years.

• 42:09Speaker 01

  I mean, it is the case that since he 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.

• 42:26Shankar Vedantam?

  One of the interesting things is I'm not sure his family actually fully understands what he has done. When I spoke with his daughter, Stasia, 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.

• 42:59Speaker 01

  Well, I think that all scholars, and particularly folk song scholars, have something of the Riley Shepard 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 anthropologist Arnold van Henep. He's the person who popularized the term rites of passage. And van Henep wrote a piece called "The Research Project," or "Folklore Without End."

• 43:43Speaker 01

  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 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 and years. 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 Riley Shepard.

• 44:25Shankar Vedantam?

  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.

• 44:38Speaker 03

  On D Street in Porterville.

• 44:41Shankar Vedantam?

  He was in rough shape.

• 44:42Speaker 03

  I thought, you know, he's a little bit disheveled.

• 44:46Shankar Vedantam?

  But Steve Ensland, a 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.

• 45:05Speaker 03

  They would just sit and listen to country western music, the old country western music, not the new stuff.

• 45:13Shankar Vedantam?

  They were friends. They were also business partners.

• 45:16Speaker 03

  They wrote songs together. They recorded a few songs together.

• 45:21Shankar Vedantam?

  Mainly, though, they worked on Riley's encyclopedia. Ted saw the genius in it.

• 45:28Speaker 03

  They spent hours and hours and hours just collecting all the material and then categorizing it.

• 45:37Shankar Vedantam?

  Steve says Riley was still consumed by the project.

• 45:41Speaker 03

  Well, he had music spread all over. I mean, he had tables and chairs and floor and everything. And he had had this music spread out. And he was trying to get it in some sort of chronological order and by the artist. He was trying to get the artist 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 was a labor of love, I'll tell you that. But he was, he just, no, I haven't got time for that. I don't want to, I just, I got to get this done. This is important. And so he would just, he was funny.

• 46:26Shankar Vedantam?

  Steve and his father both felt they were in the presence of an extraordinary human being.

• 46:32Speaker 03

  Riley Shepard was a master. He did a lot of things, but he was quite a master.

• 46:40Shankar Vedantam?

  Steve's father willingly gave his time to the project, and he gave money, plenty of it. Steve says after Riley died, Stasia got in touch. She was concerned that her dad had conned his dad. But Steve says the money wasn't important.

• 46:59Speaker 03

  The money doesn't mean anything as far as... I saw the enjoyment that it brought to my dad.

• 47:06Shankar Vedantam?

  Riley left his life's work, the encyclopedia of folk music, to his friend Ted Ensline. There were 40 boxes. Ted stored them in his old insurance office, and that's where they sat for years.

• 47:21Speaker 03

  I kept asking, "Dad, you know, what are you gonna do with these, Dad? What are you gonna do with these?" And he says, "They're worth a lot of money." And I said, "Well, I know, but what are you gonna do with them?"

• 47:32Shankar Vedantam?

  Ted never did anything with them. He was old and suffering from dementia. Instead, he just relived his friendship with Riley.

• 47:42Speaker 03

  After Riley died, my dad had a little record player in his office, and he would put on a lot of Riley's country western music.

• 47:56Speaker 05

  (playing music)

• 48:08Speaker 03

  And he just enjoyed Riley. He enjoyed his friendship.

• 48:13Speaker 05

  (playing music)

• 48:23Shankar Vedantam?

  When Ted Ensline died, Steve gave the encyclopedia to another man in town who happened to be a country music songwriter. Other copies are also floating around. Not long ago, Stasia says a couple who'd invested in Riley's encyclopedia got in touch. They were willing to sell their copy to her for $500. She bought it. She says it's huge.

• 48:47Speaker 02

  Well, 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, 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.

• 49:31Speaker 02

  Because so much, so much smoke and mirrors around it.

• 49:58Shankar Vedantam?

  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 preserve it. In fact, he told Kevin, there were still plenty of songs in music that were left in him.

• 50:16Speaker 04

  I'm writing, I'm writing one now. I'm called "The Older You Get, The More It's Gonna Cost You" "To Do The Things You Did When You Were Young." When an old man's in love, he just thinks he's in clover. He's not cooking with gas, he's just warming it over. It goes on like that.

• 50:50Shankar Vedantam?

  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 folly. Trouble is, you usually do not know whether an obsession is a great quest or a great

• 51:34Shankar Vedantam?

  folly, until it's over.

• 51:54Shankar Vedantam?

  Shortly after this episode first aired in 2019, Stasia 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 Stasia, and she said she remains 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.

• 52:36Speaker 02

  "Your father is a crook."

• 52:39Shankar Vedantam?

  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

• 53:24Shankar Vedantam?

  be like to live there.

• 53:25Speaker 06

  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, 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. I told him that I would, I would look around. I'd ask around for opportunities or other people that could help him. But it put me in a position where I didn't know what to do.

• 54:06Speaker 06

  And, and, you know, it made me uncomfortable that he was, had sort of thrust this responsibility on me. I kind of started to prefer other, hanging out with other students and other, other people when I could.

• 54:23Shankar Vedantam?

  John felt bad about avoiding his student, but he didn't know what else to do. This came to a head when John and a few friends decided to take a weekend vacation.

• 54:33Speaker 06

  I made sure not to tell him this because I, I just didn't want 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 bus station, I lied.

• 55:01Speaker 06

  I told him that we would be leaving at 6:30 in the evening, when in fact, we were going to be leaving at 5:30. So I kind of figured this is the best way to get out of this. The problem is that he was pretty keen and asked around and found out that we were in fact leaving at 5:30. 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 had a good time. There was a little bit of that uneasiness about the whole situation. Obviously, I felt horrible about lying to him.

• 55:44Speaker 06

  But it was a secret that I kind of kept to myself from the others. Obviously, my friends 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.

• 56:10Shankar Vedantam?

  John has ruminated on the lie for years. He's sharing it for the first time with the Hidden Brain audience. From the outside looking in, his secret might seem trivial. Sure, maybe he could have been kinder 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?

• 56:37Shankar Vedantam?

  After the break, stories and questions about the secrets we keep and the harm they can cause.

• 56:46Shankar Vedantam?

  You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 57:09Shankar Vedantam?

  Support for Hidden Brain comes from Instagram. Instagram teen accounts' automatic protections limit who can contact teens, the content they can see, and the time they spend on the app. Teens are automatically placed into teen accounts. Teens under 16 will need a parent's permission to change any of those settings to be less strict. Learn more about teen accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts.

• 57:39Shankar Vedantam?

  Support for Hidden Brain comes from Air France. Air France Business Cabin offers comfort throughout the journey with priority check-in, boarding, and lounge access. Onboard, enjoy menus from renowned French chefs, wines and champagne selected by a sommelier, and free high-speed Wi-Fi. When it's time to rest, settle into a fully adjustable lie-flat bed with added mattress comfort. The art of travel elevated, because Air France Business Cabin goes further in every detail to make your journey exceptional.

• 58:15Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Recently, I heard a shocking statistic. 80% of people lie to their doctors. 80%.

• 58:31Shankar Vedantam?

  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.

• 58:45Shankar Vedantam?

  I learned that statistic from Leslie John. She's a psychologist at Harvard University and the author of Revealing: The Underrated Power of Oversharing.

• 58:57Shankar Vedantam?

  We talked with her on two recent episodes of the show. They were titled Keeping Secrets and Coming Clean.

• 59:06Shankar Vedantam?

  Today, Leslie returns to the show to respond to listener comments and stories about the costs of keeping secrets. Leslie John, welcome back to Hidden Brain.

• 59:15Speaker 07

  Thanks so much for having me.

• 59:19Shankar Vedantam?

  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?

• 59:30Speaker 07

  That's the million dollar question, right? So there are many elements to this answer. The number one, I think the most obvious answer, is that we're scared, for good reasons. 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,

• 1:00:15Speaker 07

  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 this word, the default. Why do we default? We default to silence so naturally, we don't even realize we're doing it.

• 1:00:41Shankar Vedantam?

  Right. In your research, Leslie, you found that keeping a secret can negatively impact our physical and mental health. Describe for me very briefly some of these costs.

• 1:00:54Speaker 07

  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. It's associated with physiological stress markers. It's associated with greater rumination, with poorer relationships. So lots and lots of negative

• 1:01:17Speaker 02

  Consequences.

• 1:01:18Shankar Vedantam?

  Hmm. Many secrets that we keep often center on regrets that we have, maybe a time that we lied or stole or cheated someone. Here's a message we received from a listener named Claire.

• 1:01:33Speaker 07

  So about nine years ago, I was alone on a close family friend's property and I really had an urge I'd pee. So I popped a squat and mid pee, I look up and I see a security camera on the 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. It was just super embarrassing. And so for nine years, I couldn't look the, 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 a secret and I didn't tell anyone in my family about it.

• 1:02:18Speaker 07

  And then this last summer, I finally came clean and told my parents about why I felt so uncomfortable around 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. 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.

• 1:02:55Shankar Vedantam?

  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 outsized impact on us?

• 1:03:22Speaker 02

  Yeah. Oh, Claire, I feel for you.

• 1:03:26Speaker 02

  The word, 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, or maybe they, maybe they still had the footage and they could laugh about it. But, but it sounds like it was not even, she didn't even give laughter, but she did get relief, I think, in the end.

• 1:03:43Speaker 07

  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?

• 1:04:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:04:07Speaker 07

  And this is why I really think of revealing as a skill, as a practice, right? If you do it more, then you realize, you get feedback. You're like, oh, that wasn't such a big deal.

• 1:04:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:04:16Speaker 07

  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.

• 1:04:34Speaker 07

  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 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, there 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.

• 1:05:14Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:05:14Speaker 07

  Right? Like, um, and the study that, that was a hilarious oldie but a goodie social psych study where they got, one of them was they had people wear Barry Manilow t-shirts, like big blaring Barry Manilow t-shirts, which I love Barry Manilow, 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 He's gonna notice and they'll be a fool, but but really, nobody notices. So we're really kind of self-absorbed in that way.

• 1:05:45Shankar Vedantam?

  Hmm, 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.

• 1:06:02Speaker 07

  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 actually had to watch the video. And also, if they watch the video, would that have been so bad anyways? Maybe they would have laughed.

• 1:06:34Shankar Vedantam?

  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.

• 1:06:44Speaker 05

  I was born in 1956, a signed 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 40 years, until 20, early 2014, when my wife suggested that I return to therapy. This time, I knew I had to come clean.

• 1:07:29Speaker 05

  It was so scary and it took weeks to let it all out into the open. I started my transition in 2017 and have absolutely no regrets now, living authentically as a woman.

• 1:07:43Shankar Vedantam?

  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.

• 1:07:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that they point to kind of two motives to revealing, right? Something you did, the kind of feeling may be 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 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.

• 1:08:35Speaker 02

  If it's really core to who you are, it's important that some people know, people close to you, because knowing, being known for who you are is incredibly important. But it also doesn't mean that you have to tell everyone. 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.

• 1:09:19Speaker 02

  It's an ongoing, interactive dialogue.

• 1:09:23Shankar Vedantam?

  Hmm. 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 several.

• 1:09:39Speaker 04

  Affairs without my wife knowing for past few years. And it was so shameful that I would compartmentalize it like it was like a different person. And I kept that from her until she found out that I told her about everything. So right now I'm in sexual addiction recovery, trying to make things better for myself and for her.

• 1:10:18Shankar Vedantam?

  So Leslie, I can really hear the pain in Dean's voice. 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. We're worried about how they will judge us if we come clean.

• 1:10:37Speaker 02

  Yes, absolutely. And that's a completely valid concern. It's especially valid when just 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 is antithetical to that. And so then you're like, well, who am I?

• 1:11:17Speaker 02

  And he said compartmentalize, and that's kind of a coping mechanism is to compartmentalize that. But it's not the healthiest of coping mechanisms.

• 1:11:27Shankar Vedantam?

  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?

• 1:11:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:36Shankar Vedantam?

  Talk about that tension, Leslie.

• 1:11:38Speaker 02

  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 going to impose the burden on her? Perhaps it's better to talk about it with a therapist than in that case, right?

• 1:12:21Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:12:41Shankar Vedantam?

  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 Vedantam.

• 1:12:59Speaker 07

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• 1:13:30Shankar Vedantam?

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• 1:14:08Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 1:14:12Shankar Vedantam?

  Keeping a secret can gnaw at you.

• 1:14:16Shankar Vedantam?

  Leslie John at Harvard University has found that it can harm our physical and mental health and damage our relationships.

• 1:14:27Shankar Vedantam?

  Leslie, I'd like to talk a bit about family secrets. Hano is from Germany. The last time Hano 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 joined, in the ethnic cleansing of Jews.

• 1:14:50Speaker 03

  Probably had been at least a witness to one of those burnings of wooden synagogues in Poland, where members of the local Jewish community had been forced into, and the house then put on fire over their heads. And he had been a part of the chain of command.

• 1:15:10Shankar Vedantam?

  So Leslie, Hano went on to say how troubled he is by learning this secret. He now feels a terrible sense of responsibility for the actions of his family members, people who are long since deceased. Hano is obviously not responsible for the actions of his grandfather. Would he have been better off not learning this terrible secret?

• 1:15:31Speaker 02

  Oh geez, that's such a hard question. I guess it depends how you define better off, you know? I think one of the things that makes this so hard is that Hano 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.

• 1:16:17Speaker 02

  It's incredibly therapeutic and I feel sad for Hano 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. Because there will be a point where we're no longer able to do that.

• 1:16:41Shankar Vedantam?

  Hmm. In some ways, Hano'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.

• 1:16:54Speaker 02

  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 that she was at a, she was at a meeting at work

• 1:17:37Speaker 02

  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 grin-baring it. And she finally, she said, you know what? I'm going to 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.

• 1:18:05Shankar Vedantam?

  I want to stay with Hano'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 Hano'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, Leslie?

• 1:18:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that one reason we keep secrets is out of kindness 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 have much more positive outcomes. And I don't mean, you know, make it OK at all,

• 1:19:13Speaker 02

  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 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, and the goal isn't kind of growth and narrative sense-making, then 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 very close to the person because, one, you understand them better,

• 1:19:58Speaker 02

  but, two, they chose to confide in you.

• 1:20:01Shankar Vedantam?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:01Speaker 02

  How special is that?

• 1:20:10Shankar Vedantam?

  When we come back, could keeping a secret ever be a good thing? You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 1:20:28Shankar Vedantam?

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• 1:21:43Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. 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.

• 1:22:01Shankar Vedantam?

  Her book is titled Revealing: The Underrated Power of Oversharing. 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. He grew up in an evangelical Christian community and would spend upwards of 70 hours per week knocking on doors to proselytize. But then, one day, when he was in his mid-20s, Philip realized he was actually an agnostic.

• 1:22:35Speaker 07

  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.

• 1:23:16Speaker 07

  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 around 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 2024. It was just a train wreck.

• 1:23:57Speaker 07

  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 continuing to conceal my beliefs for as long as I did out of fear.

• 1:24:19Shankar Vedantam?

  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. Talk about the difficulty 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.

• 1:24:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it takes so much courage. 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, 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. He said he breached kind of a social contract of intimacy with his wife.

• 1:25:21Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:25:43Shankar Vedantam?

  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.

• 1:25:54Speaker 02

  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. There's 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 concealed 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 is deeply, intrinsically rewarding.

• 1:26:38Shankar Vedantam?

  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, where a house divided when we have a secret, because we have this desire to hide and this desire to reveal.

• 1:26:53Speaker 02

  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 put your finger on these things, then they become much more manageable. And you you kind of embrace the duality and complexity instead of hiding from it.

• 1:27:16Shankar Vedantam?

  We also heard from some listeners who argued that it's not necessarily a bad thing to keep your cards close to your chest. 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?

• 1:27:56Speaker 02

  Oh, this is such an important point. Exactly. So the point isn't we should always share more. In fact, the people that reveal the most wisely, the best revealers, are the people that have the most disclosure flexibility. What that means is, they have the widest range. They can go from total openness, baby with their spouse, to like, complete guardedness in like, a high stakes negotiation. So it really is about having the range. Now, that being said, yes, I think that I keep discovering more and more benefits of being a bit more open a lot of the time. I think that we should have more tolerance and trust and empathy for people 100%. And I also think that, in a lot of situations, we should share more. In fact, one very powerful way of building trust

• 1:28:41Speaker 02

  is actually to share, to reveal sensitive information literally builds trust.

• 1:28:50Shankar Vedantam?

  A listener named Tracy called in to share that she thinks keeping a secret can be pleasurable.

• 1:28:56Speaker 07

  At the end of the day, I don't keep secrets, but I love secrets. I love listening to secrets. I love having secrets. When I got married, my husband said to me, you know, "You love secrets." I just wonder, where does the love of secrets come from? And is that normal? Do other people feel this way? Thank you.

• 1:29:19Shankar Vedantam?

  So Leslie, can you tell Tracy if she is normal?

• 1:29:23Speaker 02

  Tracy, you're normal. I bless you.

• 1:29:27Speaker 02

  I love this. It's such an important point. In fact, I asked people, I did a little survey, and I asked the nationally representative sample of 300 Americans recently, have you-- Ever enjoyed keeping a secret? And forty nine percent said yes, so about half of the people. And um I love keeping secrets too, but there's a difference, right? There are different kinds of secrets. And the secret that comes to mind when I hear, listen to Tracy was these secrets of like, kind of these moments of shared understanding and mind meld. Like, for example, when my work husband, my bestie at work, we should kind of share the same sense of taste in ideas. And so when someone's presenting something and we think it's boring, like we'll look at each other. And we have this like lovely little delightful grin.

• 1:30:08Speaker 02

  Or or my husband and I, when we have this shared understanding of something and we're at a dinner party and and we just know this that we're both thinking the same thing. Like, that's a beautiful, beautiful moment. Um, and it really enhances intimacy because it's it's the specialness of that person and that relationship. There's a one of my favorite psych studies, another oldie but goodie is they got them to play footsie with each other underneath the table. And they were having having a conversation with other people there. And half of the people that were playing footsie were were supposed to keep it a secret. And then they measured at the end like how enjoyable that task was. And it was the ones that played footsie that that were charged with keeping tasked with keeping it a secret that had the most fun, right?

• 1:30:51Speaker 02

  So it's it's having this like special thing together that can be very fun and bonding and beautiful.

• 1:30:58Shankar Vedantam?

  I mean, I think this is also true at an organizational level. You know, there there are things that sometimes an organization or a company is trying to do. And it's it might be, you know, a trade secret. They might be working on something that is, you know, a joint project that the rest of the world doesn't know. And clearly, those are the kinds of situations that draw people together. So even if it's not an intimate relationship, a shared secret can bring people together.

• 1:31:21Speaker 02

  Yes, I love that. I love that. It can be really motivating. And you can see even this, like at a group level, keeping secrets, positive secrets, like a surprise party. Isn't it so fun when, you know, you're in on the fact that your friend is having a surprise fortieth for their spouse? And then you're at the soccer field and you see the spouse and you see their friends and you all have these like furtive lovely glances. It's just a really, really sparky, beautiful moment.

• 1:31:46Shankar Vedantam?

  Yeah, I've often thought that the people who are enjoying the surprise enjoy the surprise more than the person getting the surprise.

• 1:31:53Speaker 02

  Oh, I completely agree. Like, I would not want a surprise party because I like the anticipation and the savoring and I like to be able to control things. But yeah, that's so well put. It's interesting, though, because when you mentioned companies and trade secrets, so it also made me think of work that I've done with my colleague, Ryan Buell, on how when companies reveal things, not trade secrets, not everything, but when they reveal surprising things, some of the benefits we see when people reveal things, we also see when firms reveal things. Like, we worked with this large credit card company in Australia, where what they did was they decided to reveal the downsides of the credit cards, right?

• 1:32:37Speaker 02

  It's like anti-marketing, like, hey, there's a high interest rate. So they did this for the credit cards, and what they found was that this actually didn't scare customers away. It enhanced trust and it increased customer lifetime because the customers trusted the bank more.

• 1:32:54Shankar Vedantam?

  Leslie says the same pattern often holds in our personal relationships as well. When we lean towards sharing our thoughts with others, it can increase the trust between us and the people we care about. The problem is, often, we don't even realize all that we're keeping to ourselves. Leslie wasn't fully aware of the extent to which she was holding back until she started paying attention and documenting this behavior in herself. She now keeps a list of the times she has revealed secrets and the times she has not.

• 1:33:24Speaker 02

  I'm doing some little data collection here because I'm a nerd. I've got a column here that says "said" and a column that says "unsaid", and I'm going to tick off. This is really high-tech.

• 1:33:36Speaker 02

  Okay, so I wake up in the morning. I roll over in bed. I say, "Hi, Colly." What I don't say is, "I slept really badly", and when I don't sleep well, I can't... Regulate my emotions. We go into the bathroom. We stand in front of the mirror. We're brushing our teeth. What I think to myself is geez, I feel older than I thought I would at this age. And I'm 45. How come I still have acne? I think these things, but I don't say them. We're not even down in the kitchen yet. We're just, we're just in the bathroom and already my little tally here is four to one. Uh, I could go on, but I won't.

• 1:34:17Speaker 02

  Um, and, and so my point isn't that like, we should say all of the things that are in our mind. You don't want that. I don't want that, but rather I think we should consider saying the things more. And before I started doing this for myself, I didn't even consider saying, oh, you know, I thought I, the thoughts about my body or whatnot, when I, when I had these when looking in the mirror. And now, because I think about it more, I share more. And, and those, that's a perfect example of where sharing is really a good thing to do. Because, you know, it's if I share how I feel about myself, then my partner knows me better. And that's fundamentally intimacy building. If I tell him the, the practical thing that I slept crappily, well, then he's going to know

• 1:35:00Speaker 02

  that the rest of the day, he's got to like, kind of treat me with kid gloves because he knows me, but he can't read my mind.

• 1:35:11Shankar Vedantam?

  We can't read each other's minds. So should we follow Leslie's advice and share more of those bathroom mirror thoughts that we usually keep to ourselves? Next week, listeners share their stories of self-disclosure and how other people responded when they reveal more about themselves.

• 1:35:37Shankar Vedantam?

  Leslie John is a psychologist at Harvard University. She's the author of Revealing: The Underrated Power of Oversharing. Leslie, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

• 1:35:48Speaker 02

  Thanks so much for having me.

• 1:35:53Shankar Vedantam?

  Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristin Wong, Laura Kwerel, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor.

• 1:36:15Shankar Vedantam?

  If you love Hidden Brain, please check out our new YouTube channel. We have episodes for you about courage, choking under pressure, an overlooked tool to simplify your life, and so much more. You can find us at youtube.com/hddenbrain, or just click the link in our show notes for today's episode.

• 1:36:37Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.

• 1:36:48Speaker 02

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