It takes a brave man to be a guinea pig. But somehow AJ Jacobs has made a career out of it. Jacobs has detailed his attempts to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica cover-to-cover (The Know-It-All), to literally follow every rule of the Bible (The Year of Living Biblically) and in his latest book, The Guinea Pig Diaries, he reveals a whole new slew of experiments he bravely endured. eMusic’s Pat Rapa had a hilarious conversation with Jacobs about some of his most oddball challenges, including practicing Radical Honesty and spending a month following his wife’s every whim. The full interview is after the jump.

AJ Jacobs blames his love of participatory journalism on his parents. They were normal. “My dad, he wasn’t a carnie, he wasn’t a drunk, he wasn’t a drug addict, he wasn‘t a spy or a trapeze artist. He was just a nice, regular dad. I have nothing to write about my childhood,” Jacobs says with a chuckle, on the phone from his New York City apartment. “So, to find interesting things to write about, I kinda have to put myself in interesting situations.” In his latest book, Jacobs recounts some of his smaller, and weirder, forays into self-inflicted behavior modification. Sometimes it’s fun, but usually it involves a lot of research and vigilance. Jacobs spent a couple months practicing Radical Honesty, a don’t-hold-anything-back movement that had him ditching white lies for blunt dickishness. He also put his daily life in the hands of rational thinking, his wife, and George Washington. While scientists and journalists always fret about affecting what they observe and strive for fly-on-the-wall objectivity, Jacobs jumps right in. “Yeah, I’m not a fly on the wall. I’m a fly right in the middle of it. I like to get in there and mix it up,” he laughs. “When I took anthropology in college they called it participant observation. You go native, as they say.”

Radical Honesty sounds like a great idea at first, but when you put it into practice, it’s crazy. Did the experiment change you? Are you back to telling little white lies?

Well, it’s definitely made me aware of how much I lie, and how much we all lie. You can’t believe it until you start to pay attention. I’ve probably lied during this interview and we’ve only been talking like three minutes. It’s kind of shocking. I’m more aware of it, and I take note whenever I lie. I’m back to telling a good number of white lies, maybe not as many as I used to. And I don’t practice full Radical Honesty because as you say, it’s just crazy. It’s just constant confrontation. You’d lose friends. I’d be divorced by now. I wouldn’t have a job.

But I do try and practice sustainable Radical Honesty. One of the things I’ve just figured out is… positive radical honesty. We generally think of brutal honesty, you know, saying like, “your ass looks fat in those jeans.” But, there’s also the other side. Like, during this month, I called the guy who was my first newspaper editor at a small newspaper in California. I was thinking about how he was a great mentor so I called him up and told him how much I appreciated him. And he was probably freaked out by it, because he hadn’t heard from me in 10 years. But, I think he was also pleased. I hope.

Do you think that’s still Radical Honesty?

Yeah I do. Brad Blanton, who is sort of the crazy man who created Radical Honesty, a delightful character, says we should start our sentences with either “I appreciate you for” or “I resent you for.” I’ve tried to keep the “I appreciate you for” and don’t do as much of the “I resent you for.” So, he would definitely call me a wussy, and say that I’m a superficial dipshit, as he once referred to me.
Part of what motivates Blanton seems to be a love of confrontation and shock, a desire to get people off their game.

I agree. He talks about, in this book, the excitement of total honesty and saying what’s taboo. And the rush, it’s almost like a drug, a high.

When you’re doing this experiment — or any of them — you can either a) tell people’s what’s up and get a little bit of a pass for your weirdo behavior or b) you can not tell them and, what, apologize to everybody when it’s all over?

It’s a bit of quandary. Because if I do tell people, then it’s still awkward and still unpleasant. But if I don’t tell them, am I lying to them? So usually I wouldn’t tell them immediately because I wouldn’t have time. It was all about just spewing what was on your mind. But eventually in the conversation, if they’re still there — and that’s a key point because they might have left, offended — if they’re still there then I would tell them.

Did you keep a mental list of people with whom you’d have to smooth things over when the project was done?

Oh, absolutely. I did a lot of emailing and calling to apologize. I even had to apologize to the intern at Esquire who transcribed my interview with Brad Blanton. And I just felt terrible, because the things that came out of both of our mouths during that interview were completely inappropriate. And also, and this is probably too much information, but, in the spirit of Radical Honesty: I forgot to turn off the tape recorder when I went to take a pee. So she had to listen to me take a pee. So I had to apologize for that.

That’s rough.

I know. Since then, I haven’t had anyone transcribe my interviews. I do it all myself.

You like to do researched-based projects, where you look things up and talk to experts as you throw yourself into the fray. But for your mid-’90s Noah Taylor experiment you just had to wing it. You resemble the actor who’d generated some buzz in 1996’s Shine, so you went to the Oscars pretending to be him, to get a taste of real Hollywood fame. That was intense, very on your feet. But my question is this: Does it bum you out that that he’s not a big star right now? Do you feel like he’s let you down?

In a weird way, I am a little disappointed. You know, I don’t blame him. I’m sure he’d rather be a big star. Imagine if it’d been Russell Crowe. When I tell the story, I always have to explain that this was an actor who sort of had his 15 minutes of fame 10 years ago. …

Right.

But I’m always hopeful that Noah Taylor will be back. … Right now, trying to rent my services out to bar mitzvahs and weddings as a Noah Taylor look-alike, that’s not a good fallback job.

Do you still look like him?

I think I do. It was disturbing, he was in a movie where he played Adolf Hitler. So, yeah, that one was not good for my self esteem.

In Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace muses about a future where video-phones fall out of popularity because users suddenly realized the people they were talking to paid as little attention to the phone call as they themselves did. Essentially, people found out nobody’s phone call was too important to clip your nails during. This came to mind when I got to the part about your uni-tasking experiment. You put on a blindfold while talking on the phone. This isn’t just not multi-tasking, it’s an obligation you have to pay complete attention to someone else.

Right. That’s wonderful. I love that. I’ve thought of that, like when you’re on the video-phone. It is harder to multitask because, yeah, people will be busting you. It’ll be interesting to see if everyone starts multi-tasking on video phone and everybody just accepts it as, like, ah yeah, he’s vacuuming… Or maybe they’ll just see an infinite loop of the person playing strict attention.

You’re a hardcore multi-tasker, but has the uni-tasking thing changed you?

I still multi-task, but it’s significantly less. By the way, just so you know, I’m not multi-tasking right now. I’m not doing anything, no clipping of my toenails. Just staring at my blank wall. You know, there’s an element of stress to multi-tasking. And there’s something very lovely about talking on the phone without doing anything else.

I’m sure the makers of the Lotus Focus Wii meditation game never expected anybody to cheat at it. The point of the game is to sit very still on a mat, so you loaded up a suitcase and put that on the mat in your place. Talk about a shortcut to Zen.

It is quite anti-Zen. It’s totally antithetical to enlightenment. But it is a way to win at the game.

You’ve done so many of these projects that, as you point out, your wife doesn’t even bat an eyelash when she sees you’re wearing a chastity belt.

It’s interesting, I was walking down the street and I couldn’t find a hat except for this big Russian hat. It was cold but I was wearing shorts. And I saw a friend and he was like, “What experiment is this for?” And I was like, “It’s nothing. It just happened to be my outfit today.”

I’m in the middle of this health one that I think will be my final radical self-improvement experiment, trying to be the healthiest person alive. Then I’ll try another genre, see what else there is out there. But I do love this genre, it’s so fun. It’s almost like being an actor. You just get to dive into a role and learn about this fascinating topic.

If you could retain everything from your experiments, wouldn’t you be the most perfect person in the history of the world?

That would be awesome. But unfortunately, the retention is part of the problem. I retain some of it, and I keep some of it, so I’m better than I was. But I am still a work in progress, a fixer-upper.