New Podcast ! Inside Outside Upside Down
Hey Mak.
Hey Lindsay.
Lindsay: Shall we officially announce our podcast, Inside Outside Upside Down, to the folks in the Radical Honesty world?
Mak: I suppose we’re overdue, as we’re nearly halfway through the first season already! How about you kick us off with how we decided to do a podcast in the first place?
L: Great!
Back in November of last year we began talking with each other about our personal and professional experiences with Radical Honesty. We’ve talked a lot about these things over the years, but had been pretty out of touch for a while, and when we were at your retreat center in Costa Rica at the same time over the winter, we had a lot to catch up on!
We got a lot of value out of our conversations about our past experiences as Radical Honesty participants, as well as contract workers, board members, co-founder/owner (for Mak) of the company, and current RH facilitators and coaches. During our talks we wondered whether others might also find some value in the lessons we’ve learned, the ways we’re continuing to learn and grow, and the overview we’ve got about the culture of Radical Honesty.
M: We half-joked that maybe we should start a podcast on the topic, and concluded that at the very least, it would be good for us to have more structured conversation with each other, for our own benefit, and that we could record the conversations and see where that led us.
Pretty quickly, the idea took hold and we started seriously thinking of those recorded Zoom conversations as podcast material. We kept meeting every week… talking and recording… until we felt like we had a full season of material. And now we released our first episode on March 25th. We’ve since released 5 more episodes with another 12 or so on deck, which we’ll be releasing every Wednesday.
L: And we’ve already begun recording Season 2!
Okay, so what do you want people to know about Season 1? What can folks expect to hear if they choose to tune in?
M: We start by taking a couple of hours each to tell our personal stories, a bit about our past as a couple that was deeply involved with RH during our time together, how we really took that on as the foundational way that we related to each other, and how having only that one tool in our belt sometimes got us into trouble.
After telling our stories, we dive into Brad’s original book, Radical Honesty, using it as a vehicle to revisit Brad’s philosophy and practice as we see it after over a decade of experience.
L: Yeah, so we spend some time looking critically at Brad’s methods, pulling apart what we think was troublesome and in some cases harmful, from what we see as the nuggets of wisdom and sound advice. We basically used the book as a framework to sort through our thoughts about Brad’s methods, our own practice of Radical Honesty, problems that we perpetuated in our early years as RH trainers, and our current facilitation of the work.
M: Revisiting the book after so many years really helped me recognize how much my thinking has changed over the past 13 years since we met. My experiences occupying various roles within the organization have shown me a lot about group dynamics, dogmatism, and the influence of power in relationships.
While Brad’s original idea of Radical Honesty is intriguing (to many), it is missing a lot of nuance, and I think that’s something that we end up bringing into the conversation over and over.
L: Right, so some readers might be wondering why we’ve created a podcast largely to criticize Brad’s Radical Honesty when we’re still a part of this company, community, and practice. I’ll say that part of the reason is that you and many others put a lot of time and effort into breaking down the company and culture and building it back up in a healthier way.
What else would you tell people who wonder why we’re doing this podcast, taking a pretty critical look at Radical Honesty and its past?
M: The kinds of discussions that you and I have been having are really applicable to many groups in the “self-help” and spiritual spaces. In this first season, we keep the subject matter pretty tight, in that we only discuss our very personal experiences in the “old school” version of RH, Brad’s RH, which for me is up until 2021 and 2022, both because that’s when Brad officially steps down and the new institute takes over, and because around that time, things start to really shift in culture, leading to some pretty significant reforms.
After spending so many months discussing Brad’s RH just between the two of us, I’m curious to get some feedback and for us to open up the conversation to include more points of view, and to start discussing the transitional period in more recent years, and looking at how RH is being practiced now and what it may look like in the future.
L: Great, so yeah, maybe listeners can learn a little something from our mistakes, take away some tips about red flags to look out for in other organizations, and hopefully be entertained along the way!
