Blake Eastman: Learn to Read Anyone

Blake Eastman has dedicated his entire life to psychology and nonverbal behavior. In 2009 he founded The Nonverbal Group, a behavioral research and education company in New York City which conducts large scale studies on human behavior and uses a wide range of technologies to systematically deconstruct and improve human communication. Eastman dives deep into how we communicate with one another, including the ability to read nonverbal cues, his thoughts on big talkers vs. silent types, how we can communicate with our partners without complaining, the value of watching ourselves communicate on video, understanding the power structures and social dynamics at work, and so much more. Eastman has also served as an adjunct psychology professor at the City University of New York for six years where he taught General Psychology, Developmental Psychology, and Group Dynamics. He is also a former professional poker player and the founder of School of Cards, the first brick-and-mortar poker school in New York City. Listen and Learn -- Watch the episodes on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/theknowledgeproject/videos Newsletter - Each week I share timeless insights and ideas that you can use at work and home. Add it to your inbox: https://fs.blog/newsletter/ My New Book! Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results is out now - https://fs.blog/clear/ Follow me: https://beacons.ai/shaneparrish Join our membership: https://fs.blog/membership/ Sponsors: Eight Sleep: Sleep to power a whole new you. https://www.eightsleep.com/farnamstreet Sidebar: Accelerate your career. https://www.sidebar.com/shane Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is the problem with relationships. Everybody has a different version of what a relationship is. And a lot of conflict comes from when two people have different ideas of what a relationship should look like.

• 0:08Shane Parrish?

  My uncle gave me this test and without fail, it has predicted every divorce. And the test was so simple. It was like, that is a huge red flag.

• 0:19Speaker 00

  The best paradigm for dates is storytelling, never questions. So as soon as you get in the table, not just like, hey, how are you? It's just like, the craziest thing just happened.

• 0:27Shane Parrish?

  You were on a double date with your wife and you met somebody for the first time and you were like, they're cheating on their partner. How did you come to that conclusion?

• 0:37Speaker 00

  There was two things. One.

• 0:55Shane Parrish?

  My guest on this episode of the podcast is Blake Eastman, who has dedicated his entire life to psychology and nonverbal behavior. In 2009, he founded the Nonverbal Group, a behavioral research and education company in New York City, which conducts large-scale studies on human behavior and uses a wide range of technologies to systematically deconstruct and improve human communication. In this episode, Eastman dives into a number of subjects revolving around how we communicate with one another, including the ability to read nonverbal cues, his thoughts on big talkers versus silent types,

• 1:38Shane Parrish?

  how we can communicate with our partners without complaining, the value of watching ourselves communicate on video, understanding the power structures and social dynamics at work, and so much more. It's time to listen and learn.

• 2:05Shane Parrish?

  I want to start with how I can improve my ability to read nonverbal cues.

• 2:12Speaker 00

  Okay, that's a process. All right. So it starts with evaluating how you process behavior as it is. So it starts with your default approach. The problem is this, we go down through life. We have this like neural net in our head and it's based on all past model of all the interactions that we've had. And the truth is, you have to understand how much you're wrong before you can improve the accuracy of what you're right on. So there's a lot of like pop science stuff, or cultural biases, or just experiences in your life that shifted the way that you view things. And the first is acknowledging all of that. That's like the first step, which is a pretty robust process, which I'll talk about. It's really looking at your perspective for life and how you view social interactions. And then after that, it's increasing your

• 2:57Speaker 00

  behavioral awareness. So this is just the ability to notice and pay attention to the shifts and the variation in somebody's behavior and understand in real time the meaning you're deriving from it. So the truth is, a lot of people, using body language experts, will look at someone's behavior and be like, oh, like this, this means this and this means that. That's not really what you're doing. I think it's more about noticing than making meaning out of. So just like noticing. So for example, like noticing that the way that you're nodding your head at me right now. That is a facet of social coordination. You're showing me that you're listening to what I'm saying. It doesn't mean that you're quote unquote interested. But if we really looked at your head nods over the course of like a six month period, we could find out when you're genuinely or probably really interested

• 3:42Speaker 00

  in something, when you're just socially coordinating because you are like, I gotta shake my head because this is interesting. So it's a multi-step process, but it really starts with confronting all your biases.

• 3:51Shane Parrish?

  That's fascinating. How does it work in terms of cues I might misread then? Because if I don't have knowledge of myself or baseline of sort of how I'm approaching things, and I'm just meeting you for the first time, how can I deal with that situation? Where are there obvious things I can do? What are the things that I'm more likely to misinterpret?

• 4:13Speaker 00

  I think people are, so first you have to understand where you are on this threshold of, I call it literals and contextual. So there are certain people that, I can say these things three ways. Like I say, Shane, how are you? I can say, Shane, how are you? I can say, Shane, how are you? There are people out there that see no difference between those three things. They're all just Shane, how are you? And there's other people that over contextualize or try to extract more value from the tonal shifts in what I'm saying. And the truth is, most people over contextualize certain things. So for example, I'm someone who, like on my team, there's a rule that no one could give me a one-word response. So no one could ever say yes or no. It has to be like, yes emoji, yes gif, or something like that.

• 4:57Speaker 00

  Because I think someone's mad at me when they just say yes. That's my own weird cultural type of thing.

• 5:02Shane Parrish?

  Where you get that passive aggressive like sure.

• 5:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, I'm like, sure what? Like, I can't stand that stuff. And I don't know why, but I have to know that first. So there's behavioral signs of this as well. So you'll have people like watch videos of like a 20-second interaction and they'll say, oh, this person doesn't like them. And I'm like, well, why do you say that? I'm not really sure. And we break down second by second by second and they go like, oh, I think it's the way that they're smiling. Or I think, most people don't know how they're coming up with these perceptions. They don't really understand the origins of it. And when you break it down systematically and they start to see it, they get to understand a little bit more depth. So the, the true work is video work. Looking at videos and understanding what's going on with those.

• 5:43Shane Parrish?

  How does trust form between people? Because it, it has a large indication, the, the non-verbal and also the verbal like cues that we get from other people. And I'm thinking specifically, meeting somebody and forming trust with them in person where you're, you're getting a three-dimensional view of them. But now Zoom, right? It's very common to meet new colleagues over Zoom and not in person. And you have to form a trust relationship with each other. And maybe there's less detail in those interactions.

• 6:13Shane Parrish?

  How do we look for signs that somebody might be untrustworthy? And conversely, how do we convey trustworthiness to other people through these interactions?

• 6:24Speaker 00

  That's a great question. Okay, so trust from a nonverbal perspective is just, you could think of behaviors on a bell curve distribution, right? So certain people are going to act in certain ways that are not in alignment with how society perceives that behavior to be trustworthy. So an example of this is eye contact, right? If all of a sudden your eye contact is constantly darting all around the space, people have a perception of like, why are they doing that? Like, what's going on there? But on the other hand, like if you ask me, Blake, what is the most important moment that happened in your life? And I go, well, the most important moment that happened in my life? I look at you dead at your eyes when I'm saying that. Look, it looks better when I'm like,

• 7:04Speaker 00

  I mean, the most important moment that ever happened in my life? It looks more genuine because it makes sense that I'm looking away to recall an emotional event and then look back at you. So it's in alignment with how society perceives things. And that really, in my opinion, is what it's about. So everybody has their own sort of perceptual lens for what trustworthy behaviors are and aren't. Right? So for me, I always look to have conversations or do things that are like three standard deviations to the right of a bell curve. So like if me and you had a conversation for an hour, we're bringing up topics that you normally don't have with other people, which is going to create a higher level of trust between me and you. So I'm looking for more nuanced topics and nuanced areas to draw that conclusion.

• 7:47Speaker 00

  And then to have the mimicking of my behavior to be associated with the excitement for those things. So for example, like if me and you had like a very long conversation about your children, for example, like your children are obviously important to you. If my behavior is just asking you standard questions and I'm doing all that, but it doesn't actually look like I'm interested, it's like, ah, something's off here. Like, what's this person trying to do? What's this person trying to get? But the truth is, it's different for each person, which is why the puzzle is so fascinating. Because it's, I mean, I've met with executives that have these weird things that like, oh, I never trust somebody who walks in the room and doesn't shake my hand first. I'm like, well, okay, so why? And we look at it and it's like when they were 12 years old, their dad taught them that.

• 8:32Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 8:33Speaker 00

  So you gotta understand that it's build trust, build trust. There's not this like step one, two, three, four, five. It's way more complex than that. But the first thing is, don't be so outside the bell curve distribution of how someone acts that you're just not trusted from the get go.

• 8:49Shane Parrish?

  And how much do we update our information? Once we form an opinion.

• 8:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:54Shane Parrish?

  With you, like, how much information would it take to? Cause I'm not looking for signs anymore, right? Like my brain shuts down. I'm like, oh, this person's trustworthy. Therefore I stop looking for it. Or I say, this person's not trustworthy. Therefore that's all I see. And how do we go about changing other people's perceptions of us? And also changing our own or being open to changing our own perception of other people?

• 9:16Speaker 00

  So like, we have this Bayesian brain and even people that are the most like, think they're the most Bayesian approach. When it comes to human behavior, we get lazy and we build these things and we don't change. And I feel like the only time we're changed is if we're shown we're really wrong. And that's one of the things that I do a lot. So in like, working with executives and programs and training, I get somebody to make a read or a prediction about someone else's behavior. And then I show them like, oh no, you were completely wrong. And they're like, really? And they're like, oh yeah, this was the reason why they boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And enough of those wrongs, it gets people to sort of challenge how they're viewing the world. And then you can start to have the self growth. But it's not an easy path. Like some people will hold on to their perceptions.

• 10:01Speaker 00

  They were like, oh no, like I've been doing this thing for 25 years and it's never got me wrong. All the cognitive and decision-making bias stuff that you're famous for gets applied to behavior every single second of every single day.

• 10:15Shane Parrish?

  You did a lot of work with prisoners. Did you feel safe? Did you feel like you could trust them?

• 10:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, I never felt, you know, my forensic background is no way as robust as some people have been doing this for like 30 or 40 years, but I never felt unsafe in a forensic setting. I just, I just didn't. I view people as like, most people are still reasonable. And if they're sitting down and talking to me, there's a level of reasonable there. And um, yeah, I mean, I think I just, through conversation, through looking at my lens for the world. I used to be scared by people when I was a kid, like a lot of social anxiety, all of that. And there's been so many instances in my life where, you know, even on the street with somebody that's looking like really tough. Or on the way here, something happened where I was like, oh, it's just a person.

• 11:05Speaker 00

  And I believe through discourse and through conversation, anything could be settled. I wasn't really. Yeah, it's a great question. I can't remember fear.

• 11:12Shane Parrish?

  But, but did you feel like you could trust these people to give you honest answers?

• 11:17Speaker 00

  Well, in a forensic setting, like, so, no. So like that, that's one of the coolest, in all forensic psychology, there's a lot of personality tests, which I'm very anti. But forensics has one, it's built by a process, I think this is correct, empirical keying procedure. So it's really cool. What they basically do is they'll like, ask people that have been diagnosed with like schizophrenia, like 15 or 20 questions, and they find the patterns that like 99% of people hear voices in like one ear or two years or whatever it is. And then they ask people those same questions that are malingering.

• 11:51Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 11:51Speaker 00

  And that's how they determine whether or not they're lying or not. There's always, and that's why like, one of the biggest tests, I think still use the MMPI two, Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. It's like 530 questions. And a lot of the inventory is asking questions in different ways. So you don't remember what you said on question 26.

• 12:10Shane Parrish?

  And that's the point of it.

• 12:11Speaker 00

  And that's the whole point, right? So there's like this embedded in these forensic instruments, these embedded concept of the person might be lying and we're trying to figure that out. So I think it's, it's just different. But yeah, but I'm, you know, people lie for different reasons, for shame, for embarrassment. I remember I had to ask this inventory about sex, like how have they had sex in the past, like 12 months, nine months, six months, three months? And they're in prison in a men's population. And when you ask that question, people get like very like, what'd you say? And like, people react in a different way. And it's like, it makes total contextual sense that they would.

• 12:46Speaker 03

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• 13:16Speaker 04

  Bonjour, compadre. It's the

• 13:20Speaker 04

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• 13:46Shane Parrish?

  I'm going to use a very subjective term in terms of like toughest or baddest or most dangerous person. If you had to rank them and categorize them sort of like by percentile into less or more dangerous without knowing their background and only having the information from sort of their answers and their nonverbal cues, how would you go about doing that?

• 14:06Speaker 00

  It's a great question. So I would always focus on massively erratic behavior. That worries me more than anything else. So seeing somebody, seeing like a schizophrenic in a full violent rage or episode like that, which society thinks it's way more common than it actually is. It's not, it's like a stigma that these, most people walking down the street that are talking to themselves just continue to talk to themselves. They don't really hurt anyone. But when somebody has really lost their touch with reality and they're violent, I think that's the scariest thing by far. And that's always like, all right, just watch out.

• 14:41Shane Parrish?

  Do you think the biggest talkers are more dangerous than the silent type?

• 14:45Speaker 00

  I've always, in my experience, I've always found the silent types to not be, I, the biggest talkers are the ones that just talk, talk, talk, talk, and they don't really do much, but the problem with them is that like if that threshold of ego or disrespect gets violated, I feel like they feel the need to actually assert themselves. But some of the big tough people are just big and tough and.

• 15:11Shane Parrish?

  Are they more like a light switch?

• 15:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think they're more erratic in that regard. Like all of a sudden you say something like, what you said, like it's, it's quick. Where like some of the bigger, if they want, they'll just, just lay you out right there. Like it's, they're big. They've got that aggression. They've got that power. Um, but yeah, I would definitely say that. And also the, the younger population, like people in their twenties that are just 25, 26 in prison.

• 15:41Speaker 00

  It's different. It's a different time for someone versus 40 or 50 that have had that experience that lifelong.

• 15:49Speaker 00

  It's just, it's completely different when you've been institutionalized and grown up in that area and understand how to handle yourself and how to play the game and how to navigate all these things. But I've met some really, really, really smart people that were like just really ingenious ideas and concepts that came from prison.

• 16:06Shane Parrish?

  We tend to judge people based on their worst choice in some cases, right?

• 16:09Speaker 00

  Oh, I mean, I am, that is probably like my advocacy. Like so, uh, my foundations will be all for uh, prison reform, all for giving people second chances. I believe that society, it's, it's kind of crazy to me that if you were put in that situation, you might, if you, like, people don't understand, you see somebody commit a horrible crime and they do something horrible, but that person has a story. And if you were to touch that person and see every step of that story. Most people would be like, I'd probably commit that crime too.

• 16:44Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 16:44Speaker 00

  And there's just this massive fallacy that people are like, well, no, I, no, you grew up in a completely different world and a completely different context. So be, be careful with that.

• 16:53Shane Parrish?

  Whenever I see somebody who does something that I think is uh not something I would do, I always ask myself, what would the world have to look like for me for that to be my default behavior? And it can be often an illuminating process to get out of your perspective, shift into a different perspective. And you're right, like their behavior makes sense to them.

• 17:14Speaker 00

  Yeah. And when you hear these people's stories, like they're real stories, it's like, like you're doing quite well considering, like just like the most horrible things that people can't even sort of fathom. Um, and if you're not, if you don't view it through their lens and through their perspective, it's impossible to like truly relate.

• 17:34Shane Parrish?

  I want to come back to the trust thing again, cause um you were on a double date with your wife. And you met somebody for the first time, I believe.

• 17:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:47Shane Parrish?

  And you were like, they're cheating on their partner.

• 17:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:50Shane Parrish?

  Within a few minutes.

• 17:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:52Shane Parrish?

  Uh, and I'm wondering like, what went into that? How did you come to that conclusion? How confident were you in that conclusion?

• 17:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was like a hundred percent confident. I would have placed a lot of money. There was two things. One, it was like the gaze direction in the person's eyes. So for, for example, like, you know, an attractive woman walks by, it's not uncommon for men to go like that and glance away. The way that he glanced was like, there was just a certain amount of desire in his eyes, where he just like stared and was like, and what he was doing was doing all these like.

• 18:28Shane Parrish?

  More like a predator.

• 18:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, more like a predator, more like a predator. That's a really good term, predator desire for it. And he kept saying things to me, like little things that were like, are you one of these people that cheat on your wife? Like I could just.

• 18:40Shane Parrish?

  Well, he didn't say that.

• 18:41Speaker 00

  No, but he knew about. He knew about this poker game. And there was like a couple of things that he stated that I was just kind of like, this is a little sketch.

• 18:51Shane Parrish?

  So he's testing the waters.

• 18:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, he was like testing the waters to see, yeah, are you one of us? And I, I think what I did is I, I walked the line of like, oh, I know that game, or I know that, I know that person, but I didn't actually cross it. And then that gave him a little bit of trust with me to kind of go a little bit more. And I'm like, yeah, I'm pretty sure you know your wife.

• 19:10Shane Parrish?

  How, how much of that is ego coming out too? Like, why would he? I'm also just trying to like, understand his, like, why would I put myself in a situation in this double date? Where I'm exposing part of myself I'm trying to hide. I assume he was trying to hide the fact that he was having an affair.

• 19:28Speaker 00

  I don't think he was. I, I think also, I mean, I definitely have a disarming quality to me when I meet people because I'm very, I'm not really judgmental. I'm of, I'm like a low judgment. So I have, I have friends on every spectrum of everything, right? So I, I think I give permission to people to just sort of be themselves. And then they keep pushing and I'm still fine with it. And then they keep pushing. And I'm like, okay, like it is what it is. You go on there. But there's just like these cultural narratives. Like I was at a dinner once. And I was with like six of my friends and one of my friends started like complaining about his wife. And I, everybody else started to like, it was like such a cool dynamic. Everybody else was like, yeah, you know, my wife does that too. And it bothers me. And I looked at my friend, I was like, why don't you just get a divorce?

• 20:13Speaker 00

  And he was like, what? I was like, just get a divorce. And he was like, obviously not going to get a divorce. I'm like, well, why are you sitting here? Bad mouthing your wives, like, I don't have anything bad to say. I love my wife. I love spending time with her. Like, why are we doing this? And immediately the conversation switches to be like, yeah, you're right. Like, I love my wife for this reason. I love my wife for that reason. And it's just like, I really believe, I hate, I hate saying this, but I do believe like people are sheep in that regard. Where there's a narrative and if a powerful person just comes along and shifts the narrative, you see how quickly everybody else falls in line. And we're all on both sides of this. Sometimes we're the wolf and sometimes we're the sheep.

• 20:53Shane Parrish?

  I know you, you sort of specialize in nonverbal, but is there like a way that we communicate about our partner? That would be indicative of like common complaining about our partner versus like, oh, there's something seriously wrong here.

• 21:05Speaker 00

  Oh, total. I mean, like, I think there's just.

• 21:10Speaker 00

  This is like all the work that Gottman did, Relationship Labs and all predicting like signs of contempt and all these things. This is the problem with relationships. Everybody has a different version of what a relationship is. So, one of the reasons why, you know, me and my wife have been together for 12 years. We are together like 99% of the time. It works because both of us have the same definition for what a relationship should quote unquote be. So, we view things through the same sort of lens. And a lot of conflict comes from when two people have different ideas of what a relationship should look like. And there has to be like that negotiation between that. And I think that's hard for a lot of couples. And it's like, it's a good question before you get married. Like, you know, what are our characteristics of, yeah, what should, which was an ideal relationship? What does

• 21:54Speaker 00

  it look like? Some people are like, no, I hang out with my friends, you hang out with your friends, and we get together on the weekends. I've known couples that have been together for 45 years that have that paradigm. To me and my wife, we're like, well, they're not that close.

• 22:05Shane Parrish?

  That doesn't make sense.

• 22:06Speaker 00

  But it doesn't matter. It's that it's what their relationship of a should look like.

• 22:10Shane Parrish?

  My uncle gave me this test, I think it was like a decade ago now, and without fail, it has predicted every divorce.

• 22:18Speaker 00

  What is it?

• 22:18Shane Parrish?

  And the test was so simple. It was like, if you hang out with people, and they talk to each other, but only in transaction, and transaction being like, you get groceries, you change the diaper, you like errands, you know, sort of like day to day life stuff, and they don't ask each other questions. Like, that is a huge red flag for predicting a problem. And it's actually enabled me to like intervene in some friends' lives and be like, hey, we just had dinner last night, but I noticed this thing. Is everything okay? Is like, there anything you want to talk about? And they're like, how did you, how did you know? And I'm like, oh, because like, I'm sitting there, and they're both talking to me, but you're not talking to each other.

• 22:56Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 22:57Shane Parrish?

  And you know, on a one-off basis, that's fine, but like repeatedly, okay, well, now I'm detecting a pattern and something is, something's up.

• 23:05Speaker 00

  There are so many. Interesting nuanced themes. I remember we used to do a bunch of studies in New York City and I had this one couple come in and they they're like, oh, can you can you study us? And I said, sure. So they come into the office and they sat down on a couch and I recorded them from like three different angles. And they're like, what do you see? I was like, I'm not going to say anything. I'm going to leave the room. I'm gonna go get lunch, sit here and watch your interaction and write down what problems you think we, you know, you have. And they did it. And it was like, they saw so many things. He's like, I don't really listen to her. I was looking on the video and she was speaking and I was just kind of nodding my head and distracted and and they both had, I was really impressed to see that level of awareness. But I, I think

• 23:48Speaker 00

  that, you know, video does, in a world with so many different perspectives and perceptual differences, video doesn't lie. It's just like raw data. And I think it's so helpful to like, see yourself on video in a relationship.

• 23:59Shane Parrish?

  Why don't we do more of that in terms of like, recording ourselves because?

• 24:03Speaker 00

  I mean, I'm a big fan of it, but.

• 24:04Shane Parrish?

  I'm sure there's gonna be lots of comments on YouTube here.

• 24:07Speaker 00

  I mean, it's just, yeah, like, sit down. And the truth is, people like, will talk about the observer effect with video and all that. It goes away in like, 10 minutes. Like, if you have like, a small iPhone, you forget about it and you're actually seeing patterns of behavior. And that's something I say to my wife a lot, like, oh, like, let's get a video of it and see what it was actually like, right? Because it's, it's so difficult to just, you ask two people to recall an event. It's just wildly different. It's like, what? And then you show the video and you see that it's like somewhere in the middle of what those two stories were. And I just find that fascinating. So I'm obsessed with video.

• 24:45Shane Parrish?

  I like the feedback. Well, if we're giving a presentation, we watch a video to like, see ourselves, our articulation, our.

• 24:51Speaker 00

  That's another big problem. So in presentations, we had, we had a program for called Dynamic Presentations. I used to do it for, in New York City for like, five years and a lot of corporate stuff around it. And people are obsessed with recording the person on stage. What's more interesting is recording the audience. Because the truth is, I'm always asked, how did my presentation go? I go, I don't know. Let's see the audience. A presentation is for that group of people. So what often happens is a lot of communication experts will watch like, a presentation. And they'll go, well, I think you should move your hands more or less, or I think you should speak up like they're doing that through their perceptual lens. They're not optimizing for the engagement of the audience. So I used to record my presentation and the audience every third presentation for like three years. It was fascinating.

• 25:32Shane Parrish?

  Why don't we take that approach? I mean comedians effectively take that approach without recording the audience because it's based on oh, that joke got a laugh. I'm going to use that next time. That joke fell flat. I'm not going to use that next time.

• 25:44Speaker 00

  It's the feedback loop is instant. So that's how that was what was such the value. Like when I was teaching psychology at CUNY, I was speaking like eighty to a hundred hours a week, both at my office and both instant feedback loop of what story worked, what story didn't work, like did that land, did that offend somebody? And you just start to develop this quicker repertoire of things that actually work, but that comes from that audience interaction. But most people when giving a presentation, they're not even present enough to do that because they're so in their head about the presentation. So it's sort of a skill set that comes after you've been more comfortable being on stage to be able to process and sort of predict the behavior of an audience.

• 26:20Shane Parrish?

  What's the biggest thing that gets in people's way when they're presenting?

• 26:23Speaker 00

  Really just the social construction that a presentation is something different. So people, it's got this whole cultural narrative. Oh, you gotta, you have your big presentation coming up. It's hyped up as this different thing. You're just talking to a group of people and they're responding by shaking their head and nodding and you're sitting up there. I think that's the first construct that needs to be broken. And then also just people just don't put in the reps. Like that's something that just takes time and most people work so hard for a presentation and they do it and it's like, oh, it's flood of release where they should have just done every day for the next three weeks through a presentation. It'd be so much better.

• 27:02Shane Parrish?

  What does putting in the reps mean? Does that mean crafting your story and positioning it for the audience? Does it mean your intonation? Like, how do you actually go about working on that? Like, how would you make me an expert presenter if you had three weeks and you had one hour a day of my time?

• 27:19Speaker 00

  So that's so cool that you did that. So my question is always be, what was the constraint? So if you said three hours a week, one hour a day of your time, the first week would probably be reps of just, let's get you comfortable. Let's, so the thing is, a lot of the nonverbal behavior stuff and movement, I have found reliably that the most effective version of someone is when they're the most comfortable. Bar not, every single time. So the, the whole joke is people think I teach like, oh, stand this way. No, like, step one is get you to the level where you're the most comfortable, where you feel the most free, and then build on top of that. So I try to get you there first. And I wouldn't be focusing on, I mean, it really depends. If you're doing like a TED Talk that was like 20 minutes, I'd probably tell you just to rehearse it and get that down.

• 28:04Speaker 00

  But if you're doing like an hour presentation or the most presentations that people have to do, it would be all outlines, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat. And it's a, it's a careful balancing act to like, understand where you're at. Cause some people with a lot of anxiety, I will know, or some people that are trying to get it right, I won't be focusing on little details. It's a way more dynamic process. Like, so some people that have like these facial things to getting better at presentations, like, it's different for every person. Cause some, if someone, you're telling someone, listen, you're moving your hands too much. And they're gonna get in their head about moving their hands too much. They're gonna start looking all weird.

• 28:40Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 28:40Speaker 00

  And some people can take a cue and immediately change it. And other people, just get them comfortable, just get them comfortable. And then using video. But you're gonna hear something else fascinating, so what do you show people? Video of themselves. I worked, once worked with this woman. Um, I hope she's hearing this, cause I, I, I love her, but not to call her out. So I, she gives one of the worst initial presentations I've ever seen in my entire life. She was extremely flat. She was like moving her hands. She literally spoke like this for an entire 20 minutes. And I, it was like painful to watch. And at the end of the video, I was like, okay, so let's see what we're working with. And I put her video on her like projector. And the first thing she says to me is like, I need a nose job.

• 29:24Speaker 00

  And it just shows you like that's where that person's perception is focused on like we're focused on these weird little different things that no one else recognizes or no one else cares about. And I truly believe that the most world-class best presenters are truly about their audience and not about themselves. They're not trying to come across a certain way. They're trying to like, I even feel that now, like I'm stepping more into my own self after the first 20 minutes. Like at first, it's a little bit, you know, it's a little different. I'm trying to be more measured. Now it's more me coming out of it. And the truth is, how do you get to that immediately and build from there?

• 30:00Shane Parrish?

  And go right away into that. I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about workplace and sort of power structures and social dynamics. How can you teach me to understand the power structure at work and social dynamics? How would you go about that?

• 30:15Speaker 00

  So power structures, oh man, that's such a good question. They are these invisible things. That's what I, when we talk about reading the room in a corporate structure, that's what we're talking about. We're talking about power structure, talking about permissions, all these things. The first way to do it is to do this exercise where you sort of do a decision tree of the potential, like show people what the potential landscape could be. So for example, let's say all of a sudden, a new CEO gets pulled in and we want to say, okay, what is this CEO going through? Is this CEO just pushed in by the PE company? Does the CEO have performance-based incentives? Like, what are they trying to do? And just

• 30:58Speaker 00

  map out all what quote unquote is possible and then start using the data and evidence that's coming in on a daily basis to like cross out which one it is. And then sometimes just to straight up ask. I think that's something that a lot of organizations don't do. I can't, I can't tell you the amount of times where I'm just like, so I have this really cool perspective because I work with often the entire C-suite. So like the COO, CTO, like everybody I work with. And it's like, you two need to talk about this because this is blocking, you two need to talk about this. But the amount of communication that just doesn't happen at like a personal level or just a level that's like blocking decision-making is kind of crazy. I think organizations need to talk way more than they are in this siloed environment sometimes.

• 31:45Speaker 00

  If you just were able to have those conversations, you would be able to navigate and see the power structures way easier. And people just don't have that social skillset, that the people's skills to sit down with someone. And a lot of I've just seen every lot of people get power structures. Oh, I'll give you a good one. If you are falling in line with a power structure, it's often very difficult to navigate it. Meaning if it's like, oh, my God, this person is this, and this person is this, and I'm just this, you're very rarely going to be able to see eye to eye with that person because you perceive them here and you perceive yourself here. And I feel like people do that a lot inside of organizations and it doesn't give them that creative freedom to actually read what's going on.

• 32:29Shane Parrish?

  Is the delta between where you are and where you perceive the other person, like, does that influence your how?

• 32:37Speaker 00

  I mean, just from like, of what you have quote unquote permission to do or say, it's all a perception. Like, I've worked with people like executive, I've worked with CEOs that are the most open, every all of their behavior suggests that they're the most open, honest, come to them with problems. But people don't come to them with problems because they're CEO.

• 32:59Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 33:00Speaker 00

  They say it over and over and over again. And I look at why they're like, I don't want to bother the CEO with this. Like, they said seven times this year, come to me with this specific kind of problem. Yeah, you're right. But I just don't know. You get in your head like that.

• 33:14Shane Parrish?

  How much of that do you think is cultural too? Because I worked with a CEO who said that. But the minute you came to him with a problem, he basically like scream at you.

• 33:24Speaker 00

  That's the kind of stuff that I correct. So that's the bulk of my when you say something, but you're patent, a lot of these people often just don't understand, a lot of executives don't understand the impact of their own behavior. So I have met people that are wonderful, wonderful, wonderful people. But yeah, the way they give feedback, oh, my God, it just ripped the person apart. And they're like, no, I love them. They're one of my best people. I think they're great. I'm like, well, let's take responsibility for what that interaction look like. And that's why Zoom and video is so important for me. Because sometimes when you work with an executive or you work with anybody, and you tell them something, they don't see it like the way that you described. But when

• 34:06Speaker 00

  you show them on video, that feedback, I was like, listen, go back 20 years in your career, if you were given this feedback, how would you feel? They're like,

• 34:14Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I, and I do this cool thing. It's the exercise that really works. So, you know, leadership principles and all that stuff. I'm not there to tell somebody how to lead. I'm not there for any of that. I'm there just to make sure that their intent is aligned with their behavior. So I do this thing where I'm like, close your eyes and imagine you're at your funeral and everybody you've ever worked with in your entire life is there. What are the stories and things that you're saying about you? And I just make sure that those things are in alignment with their behavior. And they choose and solidify what those things are. And then I kind of hold them accountable to making sure that they're carrying out those things.

• 34:51Shane Parrish?

  It's kind of interesting, right? Because it's almost like a destination analysis, which is like, there's a difference between getting what you want and then wanting what's worth wanting. And then also, the way that you employ a strategy to go about getting that thing. So like, if you want the right destination, and you have to know how to get it, but then also it's like, am I getting it in a way that I'm going to be happy with at the end of my life? And you can think of Ebenezer Scrooge. A great example of somebody who went after goals, whether consciously or unconsciously about sort of being the wealthiest, most well-respected, most well-known person in his community, accomplished all of those goals. But what did he want at the end of his life? He just wanted a redo because the way that he pursued those goals

• 35:36Shane Parrish?

  was mutually exclusive from a life of meaning, which he later determined, which is sort of like this deathbed sort of test, right?

• 35:43Speaker 00

  I'm calling it the Ebenezer exercise. I'll credit you with that because that's just a perfect sort of analogy. And also about that destination principle, I think there's a major gap in the leadership or organizational culture, that whole world between theory and application. So somebody reads a book about maybe radical candor or some like concept, and then the way that they apply it is completely different. So for example, some people just have like tonal aspects of their voice that society or 80% of people perceive as harsh. And they'll say, listen, I'm just being totally honest here, but. And it's like, okay, that's coming across a little bit strong, a little bit this. And what I've been fascinated by is not everybody sees that.

• 36:29Shane Parrish?

  Oh, yeah.

• 36:29Speaker 00

  So some people see it and some people don't. And like, I'll, I'll, I'll play it back for them and they go, I'm just giving them advice. And I'm like, you really don't hear the difference between that? And they're like, no. And that's why you get some people in an organization that are hyper literal and some that are more contextual. And you just, they clash. And that's why it's like, you said one word answer. You said this, you said that, uh, back and forth. But it's all this, just.

• 36:53Speaker 00

  It's all this cool narrative of everybody seeing the world differently. And it's like my job to solve the puzzle of documenting that and bringing them together and show them. And that's usually the best step. Like, I really believe that, uh, the personal, like, operating manuals that sometimes people, I've seen some people do them that are so good. And just like, listen, you hear my quirks, hear my things about me. You get it all out there first so that you create the narrative and not somebody else is imagining the narrative.

• 37:21Shane Parrish?

  Are there, there are different techniques to enhance your communication? I'm thinking specifically with people who are hyper literal. Cause if you're not a hyper literal person, you don't tend to think that way by default.

• 37:33Speaker 00

  It's harder. So it's easier to deal with the people that are more contextual and lower them down than the hyper literal. It becomes like certain people on spectrums and multi-axial spectrums.

• 37:44Speaker 00

  I sometimes have worked with people that I have to like, yeah, it's basics, basic. And they're like, interesting. So I had a client once that, um, uh, this is years ago. This is maybe like 14 years ago in a, or 15 years ago, in a bar in New York City at three o'clock in the morning. Not in a bar, I'm sorry, in a diner. He walks into the diner and I was like on a double date. And he walks into, he walks in and he goes, Blake, how are, and introduces everyone. Hey, how are you? How are you? How are you? And everybody starts hysterical laughing. And I'm like, good, good. And on our session later, I was explaining to him, like, this is why the context was different. And I'm drawing circles of all the layers of context in that dynamic. And he's like, okay, I understand it now.

• 38:30Speaker 00

  And I was like, it was inappropriate for that dynamic. And I have so much empathy for people that don't see the world that way, because it's so, so, so hard.

• 38:38Shane Parrish?

  It's it's learned almost for people like that, right? It's like now, next time he knows in that situation, but it's not intuitive for him. It's like a learned behavior and algorithm he's following.

• 38:46Speaker 00

  And it is intuitive for some people. And it's right now in this room, there's just this invisible norms of how I should act on a podcast, how you should be like, and if you don't know those norms, you're sort of like ostracized. And sometimes one of the things that happens is these like hyper or really successful people who violate those norms get modeled. And it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, like Elon Musk could violate all the norms he wants. Steve Jobs can too, but like, you can't, you don't have that authority. You don't have that that contextual understanding of who you are. So you have to sort of play the game in the beginning. This always comes up with small talk, like people hate small talk, hate small talk, hate small talk. Well, small talk is a path to big talk.

• 39:30Speaker 00

  So you get like a couple of seconds, a couple of minutes of small talk. You don't just walk out to someone and like, hey, like, so tell me, what's the biggest conflict between you and your wife right now? It's like, what? It's very off putting, right? Like, there's a gradual process. But if you don't understand those things, life is hard.

• 39:44Shane Parrish?

  Totally. What strategies can we use to enhance our nonverbal communication at work?

• 39:51Speaker 00

  Our ability to communicate?

• 39:52Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 39:53Speaker 00

  I think one, step one, obviously, I've been repeating this over and over and over again, is get as much video as possible of you interacting. So everyone out there listening to this, if you work, I promise you, you have a good amount of video on Zoom, on whatever, you just basically want to rewatch those videos and make sure that your intent is aligned with that.

• 40:12Shane Parrish?

  With or without sound?

• 40:13Speaker 00

  Uh, with, definitely with sound.

• 40:15Shane Parrish?

  And what are you watching? Are you watching you? Are you watching other people's reactions?

• 40:18Speaker 00

  So that's, so the exercise of watching other people reacting to you is very valuable in the sense where you understand when you're losing people, when people are disinterested, when they're engaged, so on and so forth. But also understanding aspects of you, I believe that most people, you need somebody else to help you with this. People look at the things that don't matter. They'll say like,

• 40:45Speaker 00

  I say like so much, or I say um, or I say ah, like you're missing the picture of what you're trying to sort of convey. So part of the process is like coming up with almost like a series of words that you'd want to, like, how do you want to come across in this interaction? Well, I want to be enthusiastic, I want to be interested, I want to be to the point, and then making sure that your behaviors are in alignment with that and landing for the people in that way. But a lot of it is like breaking down video and just analyzing video. Like, that's the best way by far.

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• 42:14Shane Parrish?

  Okay, and if we don't have access to video for whatever reason?

• 42:18Speaker 00

  Uh, if you don't have access to video, I would really, if I had to give you that, I would say I'd want you to record yourself, not in a work context, record yourself with someone that you have a true unconditional positive regard with, someone that you know is not judging you, that you're a close friend, and I'd like you to look at your tonal patterns, your movement, how you are. That's how you should be at work.

• 42:42Shane Parrish?

  Okay.

• 42:43Speaker 00

  That's for sure. It's like 95% of people. And every once in a while, there's a certain percentage that's not that, but that's, I think, a good standard to follow.

• 42:53Shane Parrish?

  And do you consider writing nonverbal, or is it verbal? Because we sort of like read it with that little voice in our head.

• 42:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's, I, I'll take nonverbal as everything. So all of our software analyzes language patterns, it analyzes tonality, and I go into Ever, you can't really separate non-verbal from verbal. I mean, maybe the only place you could do this is poker. And a couple of other things. The truth is, we're always, so the model for how we read behaviors, we're looking at behavior within a context and we're coming up the reason for why it occurs. If you don't have like words, you don't understand the context. That's why like a lot of things, like a lot of these body language people like take a 10 second clip and be like, you know, uh, because of my feet are sitting this way. That means this or that. And they just like build this narrative.

• 43:39Speaker 00

  Words allow you to understand the consistency of that narrative. So it's, it's so much better to have the full picture as much data as possible.

• 43:48Shane Parrish?

  I like that. Is there a way that we can look at our emails and evaluate our, our communication by like sort of like looking outside in or questions we can ask other people to evaluate how effective our communication is?

• 44:00Speaker 00

  So that's probably the best way is questions of asking other people of, but see, this is where it gets.

• 44:05Shane Parrish?

  And what would we ask them?

• 44:06Speaker 00

  So this, this is where it gets interesting, right? So like, you have to have a leadership style and a presence and a history. Of being the kind of person that could sit there and be like, hey, everyone, I'm really trying to improve how I am on emails. So I just want you to know, like, when I send you an email, do you have any like weird stories of an email that I sent you that you thought I was a certain way or I was frustrated of a certain way? But a lot of leaders or executives, they can't even create the like space or the dynamic to do that. Most people be like, no, you're fine. So like, I love these questions where we do all these like perception research, right? So you go like this, you say, how do you think that interaction went on a scale from one to 10? People are horrible at answering it. Like, do you like that person from a scale from one to 10? They're like, I don't know. But you ask somebody a question.

• 44:51Speaker 00

  Would, on a scale from one to five, how likely are you to invite this person to a dinner with your closest friends? And the answer is so easy for them to answer. So I like questions that are about predictive type of things.

• 45:03Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 45:04Speaker 00

  Right? Not about just your trait, because it allows them to conceptualize and give a better answer. So I would be asking questions like, you know, on a scale from like, just tell me, let's go from one to five, how many times do you leave an email for me feeling frustrated? Cause they can easily give you the answer instead of searching for it and. But let's be real, a lot of people don't want to do that work.

• 45:26Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 45:27Speaker 00

  Like, they're just gonna protect themselves from that. And, and listen, also, I think we have a problem in this kind of like self-help, personal development world, where I think a lot of, let's say like, like thought leaders and leadership and all, I think they're disconnected from what leaders actually go through. And the reason why I'm saying that is, is like, all this stuff is easy in theory, but I see some of these people, like, they're pulled in six different directions. Their board wants them to do this, their stock is at this, this team is this, and I, it's so much harder than just like, oh, you know, be a little bit more happy in the morning. And I feel like, you really, as like a coach, you have to feel like,

• 46:11Speaker 00

  you know, what's the 80/20? Like, what are the small things that you're gonna do that are gonna have the greatest impact on the team? And then also, I really do struggle with this in a sense that like, I've seen certain leaders be horrible and get incredible things done. They violate every book ever written about leadership and work a team to complete death and play this Machiavellian game of just when they're about to fire, just about when they're about to quit, give them enough of reinforcement. And I see they're like the dark side of everything that I'm teaching. And I'm like, they know exactly what they're doing here. And I call them out, and I'm like, you know exactly where they're doing it. And then you look at their KPIs and their metrics and how the, how the organization's structured. And they're like,

• 46:53Speaker 00

  they're actually in perfect alignment with how they should be acting.

• 46:57Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 46:58Speaker 00

  It's tricky. It's like, it's a tricky thing. And I don't think that's spoken about enough.

• 47:02Shane Parrish?

  Do you think all behavioral is contextual or environmental in that case? Because their environment is those KPIs. The environment is the culture. The operating environment of the organization is your environment. So the way to address that is to change the environment?

• 47:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think all optimal behavior is within a construct of your environment. So the more you have context, the more you stand, understand an environment, the more your behavior can be designed or Modified to navigate that environment.

• 47:32Shane Parrish?

  Are there things that we can do in our environment that we control individually outside of the context of an organization that we can use to improve our behavior that come to mind for you?

• 47:42Speaker 00

  Set up cameras. Also, just set it up so that you win. Like, I feel like certain structures and certain environmental, like, just the way an office is integrated. I had worked for one person a long time ago that had like a desk, and he had a like really large desk, and then there was a chair. And he would, every time somebody came to the office, he would like walk behind his desk, like shake their hand, and then bring them to like a couch setup where they were faced one-on-one. And that's before Zoom and before COVID. This is how they did all their one-on-one sessions. And it was just like a simple way of getting, making sure the person feels really heard, because you're just aligned with them.

• 48:20Shane Parrish?

  Totally.

• 48:20Speaker 00

  And you're looking at them and you're facing that direction. I was like, huh, that's a really cool.

• 48:24Shane Parrish?

  And I mean, we do this all the time with our kids, with friends. We grab our phone and like we're talking to them, but are not really talking to them.

• 48:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:32Shane Parrish?

  And we're not, there's a huge advantage to sort of being gained by like, I remember somebody said something who met Bill Clinton.

• 48:39Speaker 00

  Oh, everybody's got so many Bill Clinton stories.

• 48:41Shane Parrish?

  No, but, well, this one's not.

• 48:43Speaker 00

  About this, though. Like, oh, wait.

• 48:44Shane Parrish?

  Well, so this was like, and I was like, oh, what did you take away from that? And this person like looked me in the eye and they said, "I felt like the most important person in the room for forty-five seconds. How did he do that? How did we create that?"

• 49:00Speaker 00

  So, the amount of people that have given me that build, I'm like, and I'm so curious because I've seen some footage of him in interactions. A close friend told me this story once of walking into a,

• 49:14Speaker 00

  he was with him and they walked into like a conference center, and there was a cleaning lady cleaning. And she got really like, I'm not supposed to be here. And he walked right up to her. And he looked at her with a level of presence and focus for two and a half or three minutes. That people were like, huh, you know? And part of me is this, it's like, first, there's definitely this halo or this thing of he's the president or former president of the United States, right? But there's also these like nonverbal ways of just the piercing eye contact and the way that he looks deep into your soul and it's, there's definitely a balance of both. I am so curious, though.

• 49:48Shane Parrish?

  That, that was what my friend said. He's like, he never broke eye contact. Like, he was just very intense. But it was like a warm intensity, if that makes sense, not like a.

• 49:57Speaker 00

  There's also, I, I think this is all about that perceptual bell curve. So I think there are qualities and tonality, the, the way the gaze, the shape of someone's face. It's kind of like these, these whole old ancient process, um, ancient practices of like determining if somebody's going to be a criminal or not, based on their facial structure. And, and the fun, the interesting thing about that is like, our culture supports that. Like William Defoe is usually the villain. Cause he's got that really like angular sort of like type of face. Like he was perfectly casted in one of the Spider-Man movies, right? Like, and there's certain things about like, there's a professor out of UPenn that's done, does a lot of stuff about impressions and the structure of someone's face.

• 50:37Speaker 00

  And like, that stuff's an advantage in life. Like some people have a face that's going to be more trustworthy or a face that's going to be more aligned with attraction or whatever it is. So I definitely think it's, it's multi-variable, right? There's so many different variables. And when they come together, you get that like really gifted communicator that just has that ability. But I will tell you one thing. So one of the big things that I've noticed in the best communicators is they have range. So the, they have the ability. There's a lot of shifts in their tonality. There's a lot of movement. You kind of can't predict what the next word is going to be. There's, I just think there's something that the brain loves that. It loves, it loves the chaos.

• 51:15Shane Parrish?

  Keeps you guessing.

• 51:16Speaker 00

  Exactly. And when you're.

• 51:17Shane Parrish?

  Auto-complete in Google.

• 51:19Speaker 00

  Exactly. No, I think the best way of thinking of it, like you know what's going to happen. And then, um. I think there was, there was one cool study, I think out of like UPenn that found that like people that talk faster are listened to at a greater level, even though what they're saying is nonsense. Like it's just not, like that happens to me every once in a while. Like I'll listen to somebody and I'll be like, I sounded really good. And then I replay it and they say the same thing three times. I even catch myself doing that. I was like, I just said that the same thing three times. Like, but I, I'm passionate about it. So it sounds good, you know? Yes. I mean, that's.

• 51:52Shane Parrish?

  How, how are we on the other side of this though? Like, one of the biggest things that you can do in life is pick out people who are incompetent but sound competent from competence. Are there, how do we go about doing that?

• 52:06Speaker 00

  So it's tricky. It's a tricky one. It's in the sense that

• 52:13Speaker 00

  I believe that certain people speak with, I was like a lot like this when I was younger. I would talk about things so confidently that I knew nothing about. And my wife really changed my perspective on this. When we first started dating, she was like, you have a responsibility with that level of conviction. And I was like, you're a hundred percent right. Like, I definitely, like, I'm not really sure. So it's like, this is my opinion about this thing, but not like it's absolute fact and nobody else. And I think when you find somebody like that, I like to look for, I don't knows. So whenever I talk to any expert and is every, there's always an answer. Sometimes it's nice to be like, oh, I don't know. Or there's not always an answer to something, right? They don't always, because I feel like there's a compulsion to always contribute or always to be confident.

• 52:58Speaker 00

  And the truth is, it's just not possible. Um, and then also there's just little traits of humility of when someone was wrong, or how they were wrong, or why they were wrong, that come up in language and are not prompted. Like, it's refreshing to hear an expert say, I was really wrong about that. Um, I think this is one thing that like Huberman does so well of just being this kind of like.

• 53:25Speaker 00

  Like, you know, senior, uh, very distinguished professor, tons of research, but has this like boyish kind of passion for science and for that. And I think that comes across as that's the new expert. One person that's not just, I have all the answers and trust me and I'm right, but one person that's able to have humility and adapt over time.

• 53:49Shane Parrish?

  I like that. Are there, are there things that stand out in terms of identifying incompetence or even deception? And I'm relating those to you because sometimes people are trying to deceive us and sometimes they're deceiving us in part because they're, they're playing, you know, fake it till you make it sort of thing, where it's not necessarily, necessarily intentional deception, but it is sort of like masking a base level of incompetence.

• 54:14Speaker 00

  Yeah. So that's, so the, I think the best way, so on the non-verbal behavior spectrum, dating is probably the easiest paradigm to understand and deception is the hardest because it's so multifaceted. It's so complex. Uh, I don't know if there ever will be a system that can predict whether or not someone's lying or not, because it's just, it's a nuance that's very difficult to encapsulate. I think the easiest way is to throw out fake information and see how people respond. So I've done this in academic settings where I meet someone that I just, I think they're a little bit full of it. So I just like make up studies. I'm like, have you read that, like Dillington study in like 2014? And they're like about that. And then I'll say something and they're like, yeah, I think I've read it. And I'm like,

• 54:59Speaker 00

  yeah, where they did the double blind and like, yeah, yeah, it was, it was great. I just made it up. And this is the trick though. It's not to make a judgment call about that person. So I don't do something like that and go liar, how can it? But I know that in terms of how they're willing to be seen, they're willing to sacrifice that for being read in on the no, right? And they, they want to be perceived that way. So it's, it's an interesting sort of character thing. And there's questions like, You know, do you want your your head of business development, your salesperson to to respond that way? Like, you know, it it gets interesting, but I think that's the easiest way.

• 55:35Shane Parrish?

  Because ultimately, I mean, there's a very innate biological function in us that is self preserving. And the self preserving instincts that we have mean that we want other people to like us. Because for thousands of years, if we weren't liked, we died. And by liked, I mean, we we got kicked out of the tribe. So sometimes we would fake things, I would imagine, to stay within the tribe rather than get excommunicado from the tribe, which is certain death.

• 56:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, people have to be reminded, we're so bad as humans of looking at time. But the amount of time we've been around on this planet utilizing exactly what you're talking about is like this, and then the time that we're navigating all these crazy structures, it's a teeny, teeny, teeny, teeny thing. And it plays such an important and valuable role in in how we function. I always, my wife owns a sleep optimization company, and she's all about circadian rhythms. And very anti these lights, right? And what's so fascinating is like, if you look, we have had our sleep dictated by the sun in the same way for so long. And just over the past like ninety years or eighty years, or whatever it's been, completely altered.

• 56:48Speaker 00

  That's so, so, so new. And just we are, the time that we're going into right now is the most socially complicated ever. It, there's nothing ever like it. We've got, you know, tons of political, everything, everything is so nuanced right now. That there isn't, it's not just about your survival, it's about survival and looking good. When you post this Instagram post and making sure it doesn't offend this, this, this, this. It's getting more complex, not less. And it's happening quick. It's like that, you know, hockey shaped curve of just like whoop, complexity is driving up.

• 57:22Shane Parrish?

  Well, we did that right before this started, I moved a book, right? Because I didn't want that book in YouTube, and I didn't want people commenting on that book.

• 57:28Speaker 00

  So I totally.

• 57:29Shane Parrish?

  My perception of how people would respond to it.

• 57:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, my, I mean, all all these weird things, like I'm wearing two different socks right now, two different kinds of socks. And I was like, no, maybe I'll cover my sock. And then I'm like, I don't care about my sock. Like, we do that, like, we just, we, and. We over index these things that other people don't even notice. So there's, when I was teaching psychology at CUNY, I had this, um, so I was wearing the same J. Crew pants every day because they were really comfortable. And I started like, all right, I'm just wearing the same pants like every single day and I have like two pants. And I was like, I think people are gonna know, but I couldn't find these pants anymore.

• 58:06Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 58:07Speaker 00

  So it was in my head about these pants and my, my students looking at my pants. So I was like, no, let me ask. So I basically set up this cool thing where I was like, hey, everyone, like a month into the course, I had like a hundred and forty students or whatever. Um, I was like, there's something about me that hasn't really changed. What is it? And I had everybody like fill out a little form and they gave it to me. And only one person knew, and guess what? They worked at J. Crew.

• 58:33Shane Parrish?

  Uh huh.

• 58:34Speaker 00

  And they said, you really love our pants. You must have so many. And it was just this moment where I was like, no one cares. No one really cares. And I think we spend so much time on those things and not enough time on connection and not enough time on really like getting the other person, getting out of our own head into what's like actually occurring.

• 58:57Shane Parrish?

  So it's interesting because I have a different approach to this, which is I believe nobody cares in day to day life and interactions. A video lasts forever. So what people care about today and what somebody's gonna pick out in ten or fifteen years are two different things. And then that adds like a layer of complexity to thinking about how things play across time. Or not about what people remember or not about their experience in the moment, but now I can go back and analyze that video and like nitpick everything.

• 59:29Speaker 00

  Well, this is my big problem too. So I've, I've had to get a, a lot of personal coaching with my coaches about video. So if I had to give a presentation in Madison Square Garden. Tonight, I'd be ecstatic. But if I have to make a video that I know that's gonna be out there on it, I overthink, I overanalyze. I mean, there's videos of me saying things. Because also, I mean, I've changed my own opinions on things.

• 59:52Shane Parrish?

  Totally.

• 59:52Speaker 00

  So like, I have videos out there that I made in 2016 about poker tells that over the past eight years, I've completely changed my mind and thoughts about that. There's videos of me saying things that I completely disagree with today. And I, oh, I, yeah, I, I struggle with the same thing. I think I have to go the, what's the Rick Rubin? Rick Rubin had a great quote about like, a creative process is like, you're creating something for the time.

• 1:00:17Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:17Speaker 00

  But I struggle with the same thing, like video of just like, oh no, of like, how this is gonna be perceived. Or, you know, I'll be more effective at this kind of conversation a year from now. This is my second podcast in god knows how many years. Like, those type of things. But do people really care? I think we care more than, you know, they do.

• 1:00:37Shane Parrish?

  You brought up dating. What are the things that we can take away from this conversation and apply to dating? Whether we're a guy, a girl, it doesn't matter. How can we read into the first few interactions with somebody from a, am I trying to determine if I want to spend my life with this person, or see them more? Or how do we, how do we use this information in that specific context?

• 1:01:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, dating's a tricky one. Because dating is this like, it is this weird game still. Like, in the beginning, it's this game of like, delayed attraction and delayed gratification. And it's, there's so much nuance to it. I, I'll tell you one thing. I think that, so I, I used to do this, I used to teach a dating class in New York City. And one of the cool things I would do is I'd ask people in the room, like, what's their ideal person? And they like, write a list on that piece of paper. And then I go, okay, the last three relationships in your life, how, how many of them met that criteria? And they would all like, laugh, and it would never be one to one.

• 1:01:41Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:01:42Speaker 00

  I think people have this real weird concept of, it's almost like memetic desire. Like, there's a desire of what you think. Think you want, but what you actually want. And I feel like the first step in really dating is like, what do you really want? And for a super young, super, somebody's young in their twenties or whatever, you don't know, it's going to take some time to sort of like figure it out. But I think doing that work of like, what, what makes me happy? Like, what am I looking for in somebody else? And not going for the traits of just, I mean, attractive is an instant quality for the most part, right? You see somebody, you know, if they're attractive or you're attracted to them or not. But there's sort of like these deeper things. Like I remember like, uh, me and my wife met, it was, it was so funny. We met in like twenty, twelve years ago, I met in my, she met my class. I had a class called Body Language Explain.

• 1:02:26Speaker 00

  She was in the second class ever. And she walks in and I was like, okay, what do we got here? And during the, she sits down and then during, during our conversations, this, uh, she, on my bookshelf. She said, you know, you remind me of like, you remind me of like Tim Ferriss a little bit, like a New York City Tim Ferriss. And I was like, he has an attractive girl in that Tim. This is before Tim was like Tim Ferriss, right? It was just kind of like four hour, body had just came out or four hour work week. And I was like, and she really read that book. And I, she was like, oh, I love him. I love his books and da, da, da. And I was just kind of like, huh. Like it was this qualifier that was like different. And I was like, yeah, I think I'd like to, I never thought that. I never had the concept that my partner was going to share my interests at that age. Right.

• 1:03:10Speaker 00

  I just, cause the women I had met weren't interested in this kind of stuff. And I met somebody that was like really interested in self-development. And I was like, I didn't realize how important this is to me. And it was so funny, cause then it was all these things that are like truly important to me at the time. And continued to grow, that solidified this sort of relationship. And yeah, and then there's all the other game type stuff that you gotta do. And it's, it's even very difficult to even articulate. I can tell you what not to do. I can tell you, try not to be someone you're not. Don't.

• 1:03:45Speaker 00

  Everybody's got a song playing and sometimes you just need to dial the volume up and down. Some people try to play a completely different song. So they try to become someone completely different to be more of a chameleon for that person. And then after three or four dates, it's just like, this is not really me. You don't want to be too much yourself and too authentic and too straightforward. But it's funny, our first date, uh, my first study ever was on dates. So I rented a restaurant in New York City. This was in 2008 in the subprime mortgage crisis. I put on a ad on Craigslist, $50 to set you up on a 30 minute date. I got like 300 applications and I set up a series of dates. People came in 30 minute date and then the guy would leave and I would ask what's going on like was.

• 1:04:26Speaker 00

  And we found that the so interesting is when you show people these dates, what they perceive to be the best date is not the best date. So the best date is the one that was a little bit more awkward, a little bit weird, but it had more depth to it. And those people connected at a much deeper level. The surface ones, they look because and then you, you also see all people's biases. So you see, I show people, two people on a date and like, and one, the female is by society standards far more attractive than the male. And people immediately don't think that she's interested in him because of that reason. So they just make you projecting all your stuff onto the world around you every single second. And that really showed you.

• 1:05:05Shane Parrish?

  Are there questions we can ask on dates that are more revealing of who the other person is?

• 1:05:11Speaker 00

  I don't, I don't, I, if the best paradigm for dates is storytelling, never questions. Because when you fall into this question and all right, so if we take, if we write a story out, let's say you told me, like before we started this, you were telling me a story about your kids, right? And we list that out. There were so many threads of connection between me and you in that story. It would have been impossible for you to do that in a question and answer. So like, even when I was dating people, I, uh, when I was like helping people with dates, I would say, start off with story. So as soon as you get in the table, not just like, hey, how are you? It's just like, the craziest thing just happened. Or just get into some sort of story. A story are, it still is the single most powerful communication tool, bar none.

• 1:05:54Speaker 00

  The problem is people are now in, in our society, going into performance storytelling.

• 1:05:59Shane Parrish?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:06:00Speaker 00

  Which is a lot different than social storytelling. So performance storytelling is the, when I was seven years old. Something happened that changed the course of my life and it's kind of like I find it icky. A real story is just tell the story like you tell your friends, but it has a beginning and has an end. I find that tell more stories in dating, it will really show you how you connect to someone.

• 1:06:21Shane Parrish?

  That's fascinating advice. How do nonverbal styles work across cultures?

• 1:06:27Speaker 00

  No, they're so different. The trick is this. So I have this thing called the anywhere on the planet approach. And the sort of concept is you can be dropped anywhere in the planet and you could observe and you can look at things. So you can look at like the proxemic differences between a midwestern interaction versus the Middle East. Middle East people, they talk quicker together. The behavior will be perceived as maybe a little bit more aggressive in the way that I move and this. It's a cultural construct. It's how they interact.

• 1:06:57Shane Parrish?

  It's not aggressive to them.

• 1:06:58Speaker 00

  Not aggressive to them. They're fine. In New York City, the way I was raised around my friends, like we were brutal to each other. Constantly making fun of each other, like insulting people like left and right. It was part of the cultural construct.

• 1:07:11Shane Parrish?

  Or even the way you walk in New York.

• 1:07:14Speaker 00

  Oh, I mean, still.

• 1:07:15Shane Parrish?

  You can pick out a tourist just by how they're walking, right?

• 1:07:17Speaker 00

  I mean, still to this day, like everywhere I go, I'm like, can you hurry up already?

• 1:07:21Shane Parrish?

  Exactly.

• 1:07:24Speaker 00

  Like, what are you doing? There's like six, I still get frustrated.

• 1:07:27Shane Parrish?

  How does one person take up the whole sidewalk?

• 1:07:30Speaker 00

  Like those kind, so that's one of the interesting things. Like now I just get like really interested. So I see someone on an elevator and there's two people and they're blocking the other side. And I'm just like, you really don't have the concept that other people are, and I don't think people do. I don't think people have that fury of mind that other people are interacting in this world. And it's why it's so infuriating for the people who do have that. But I just don't like, even on the plane today, somebody was literally holding back yesterday. Everybody is walking on this line and they're trying to get their little luggage out and they're just. And then their wallet falls and they have to take their wallet out and tuck it into their. There's a world happening around you. What's going on?

• 1:08:15Speaker 00

  That's like my one prompt for everybody listening is like, there's a world happening around you. And I think it's very healthy to sometimes make your behavior about others and not yourself. So how can you optimize your behavior for the people around you as opposed to what you're going through? It's a very helpful exercise for people that are in their head. And I think the best communicators and the people that are the most well liked are consciously doing this. They're putting other people first and it's just sort of like a reaction or a way of doing it. I mean, I walked in here and I was like, just as a default approach, they were unloading gear. And I was like, hey, do you need help? And I picked up a stand and brought it in like it's it just, because I know what it's like to carry all these damn stands down the block.

• 1:09:01Speaker 00

  It's just putting others first. It can change your life and change what you get back. You just can't do it from a place of trying to get something. Like, like it's super weird if all of a sudden I bring the stand in and I'm like, hey, guys, I have a shoot after this. Were you willing to da, da, da, da, da? Because I was like, oh, I see where it's going, right?

• 1:09:17Shane Parrish?

  Because now it's insincere.

• 1:09:18Speaker 00

  It's totally insincere, right? There's an order to it. And I think approaching life from that perspective, I promise you, I always say this, you can never measure the ROI of a social interaction. You have no idea what one interaction will lead to. I mean, I went to a, an, a meetup and I met you and now I'm here, right? Like, just never know what one thing is going to do. So it makes sense that you want to show up in a way that's about others as much as possible in these interactions because it comes back to, it comes back. And even if it doesn't come back, I tend to think you've, most people feel better about themselves knowing they're for others than for themselves.

• 1:09:57Shane Parrish?

  My good friend Peter Kaufman has a saying, um, which is go positive and go first and you really unlock the world. In a way that you can't even anticipate the second, third, fourth, fifth order consequences of that. But his theory is most people don't go positive, go first. They want to go positive, but they want the other person to go positive first.

• 1:10:17Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:10:17Shane Parrish?

  And so they sit around waiting for people to recognize their potential, for the world to give them what they're owed. And because they're doing that, nothing happens because there's no action. So there's no response.

• 1:10:29Speaker 00

  That's absolutely genius. And in my opinion, that's what leadership is. So leadership is that stepping up and doing that. It's not waiting for it's I'm going to lead. And I love it because like, everybody can be a leader. You ever been like on an elevator? And it's like awkward. And like the person who speaks up first and everybody laughs? It's like leadership right there. You broke the cultural norm and you said something.

• 1:10:50Shane Parrish?

  I always get in those sometimes and I'm like, oh, it's the awkward elevator silence.

• 1:10:54Speaker 00

  Perfect. Everybody laughs.

• 1:10:56Shane Parrish?

  Laughs instantly, right? I want to switch gears a little bit. What's the Rockefeller method?

• 1:11:01Speaker 00

  Okay, so I read, I think it was Titan.

• 1:11:06Speaker 00

  The book and there was a lot of lessons in that book, but there was one story that fascinated me and it was, John D Rockefeller was in an oil barreling facility. And he was watching his group of people barrel these oil barrels. And like, back in the day, you would take tar and you'd put tar all around the barrel and then you'd put it and you'd hammer it. And he's sitting there watching this and he's going, why do you use nine or 10 or whatever pieces of tar? And they were like, I don't know, Mr. Rockefeller, it's just what we do. And it was, and he was like, well, can you find out, do it, do like a little study and find out how much can you do it without, without ruining the integrity of it? And

• 1:11:47Speaker 00

  I was like, that's absolutely fascinating, like that way of thinking. And it's so cool to be like, just Rockefeller sitting there is like Titan of industry, looking at this really small process and being like, How can we optimize that? So after reading that, I made this like Rockefeller method internally, where every quarter I would sort of view things from that perspective, right? And it comes up in weird like SaaS ways right now, where it's like, oh, wow, we spent a lot of money on this, like, reach out to them and see if we could maybe get a bulk discount. And the amount that comes back from that method is absurd. Like, just, it just works. And then also just think about it like in my own life, like, where am I putting extra tar on

• 1:12:27Speaker 00

  that I don't need to put tar on? And it's so helpful, because I am a very big control, do it myself ethos. It's like often hard for people to work for me, because I'm like, I'll just do it, I'll just do it. And I have to almost get people around me that I'm like, listen, the thing I value the most is when you say, no, I'll do it, and I'll do it better than you. And then you back that up, like, and it's, and I need that sort of culture around me. But the Rockefeller method was very helpful for that.

• 1:12:54Shane Parrish?

  What else did you take away from that book, Titan? Or lessons from Rockefeller?

• 1:12:59Speaker 00

  So many, like, I found the, the, when he was discussing how he didn't know how to give away his wealth, I thought that was like the most interesting problem ever. He's like, I need to build a whole, I don't know how to do this anymore. And how people were constantly asking, just the, the ruthfulness of some of it all, of just the early monopolies were not a thing, and just squeeze out, squeeze out, squeeze out, everything. I found that really interesting. Yeah, I mean, the funny thing is, the thing I take away most from that book is that one story, is that Rockefeller method out of everything. Also, I learned this in graduate school, I had a really good professor, I wish I remembered his name, but he, I was teaching,

• 1:13:44Speaker 00

  it was like a terrorism class or something like that. And he, the way we did it was, we had to read six books in the class.

• 1:13:50Shane Parrish?

  Terrorism?

• 1:13:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I got like my certificate in terrorism studies.

• 1:13:53Shane Parrish?

  Okay.

• 1:13:54Speaker 00

  Because I went to John Jay, which was a criminal justice.

• 1:13:56Shane Parrish?

  Just want to give people context around this.

• 1:13:58Speaker 00

  So it was really cool. We had like people from intelligence agencies coming give presentations and do all these things. So what he had us do is, he had us read like six books, and the only assignment for the entire class was to read a book and take five passages out of the book, highlight it, and write why they're important to you.

• 1:14:19Speaker 00

  And

• 1:14:19Shane Parrish?

  Genius.

• 1:14:20Speaker 00

  I was like, it's I still do that to this day. So I still try to like, I have like a Kindle connection where I just like highlight certain things. Cause you highlight so much and then it all goes in one ear, out the other ear. But if you highlight five things that could actually improve or impact your life in a certain way, or change your perspective, so much more tangible value from a book.

• 1:14:39Shane Parrish?

  So tell me your workflow, you go from Kindle to Notion, if I remember correctly.

• 1:14:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, good. Kindle to Readwise, Readwise to Notion.

• 1:14:49Shane Parrish?

  Okay. And then what do you do with it?

• 1:14:51Speaker 00

  So like, I have this, different colors mean different things. So I'm trying to improve my writing right now. So blue is a, I like the way a sentence or a paragraph is structured. Red is, I need to do like more research on this. Yellow is one of those things that I wanna sort of like take away from a lifetime perspective. And I've been trying to also, I have a difficult time retaining a lot of what I read. I'll remember aspects of this day for the rest of my life. Like, I'm very good at like experiential memory. But like, things just go in one ear, out the other ear. So I've been doing a better job of like highlighting things that I wanna remember. And I've been, I'm wanting to use, um, this like Japanese method of flashcards. Yeah, it's just basically create flashcards for my events. So I guess it's hard to keep things.

• 1:15:35Speaker 00

  Cause I remember when I used to teach, I used to like have all these like cool things in my head that I could pull from. And now that I'm doing more like podcasts, like I'll know a ton of researchers that I could reference, but I forgot their names.

• 1:15:46Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:46Speaker 00

  So I'm like, yeah, that person from UPenn, like I'd rather know their name. So just trying to be more intelligent about how I remember the sources and the things that are leading up to it. And then there's just certain like people or writers or authors that I use as like anchor points. Like one of them is like Robert Sapolsky, like, uh, how why zebras don't get ulcers, determinism, behavior. He's like, while he's deep in biology, he's pretty cross-disciplined. Like he'll pull from different areas. So it sends you down all these rabbit holes and I like to like document it in the best way that I possibly can. But I think AI is making that a hell of a lot easier now.

• 1:16:22Shane Parrish?

  Well, let's switch gears to AI. You're a master researcher. Uh, I'm curious about your.

• 1:16:29Shane Parrish?

  Process around using ChatGPT to get up to speed on something, or how do you leverage AI to go about learning a new subject?

• 1:16:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's it's ridiculous because six months ago I was like, I don't know, like we would just make things up and now it's great. So one of my big things is I say I have a prompt that if I'm looking at an academic discipline that I don't know a lot about. I say, I want you to imagine this academic discipline as the branch. And I want you to imagine the subcategories as the, I'm sorry, as the, not the branch. I want you to imagine the base of the tree as the discipline, the branch as a sub-discipline. And the leaves as the academics that correspond to that, and it does it for you. So like it goes into neurobiology, like I've been really interested in predictive processing, which is this sort of universal theory for how

• 1:17:24Speaker 00

  consciousness really is like how we process our world. And it's a it's a rabbit hole, to say the least, right? So it has all these different philosophical approach, all of that. In order to understand that world, I need to understand the bigger macro principles behind it and like who the key players are in it. And I mean, you used to have to do that research or have a research team. I'd have somebody like do this and now I literally do it in a couple of prompts. It's absurd. It's like absurd for workflows.

• 1:17:53Shane Parrish?

  So then what do you do with it? You have the leaves, you have the people's name.

• 1:17:57Speaker 00

  And then I try to look for, so I try to look for what are the three biggest sources of conflict? So what are they disagreeing about? Like where is the big fight in predictive processing?

• 1:18:07Shane Parrish?

  Are you asking ChatGPT?

• 1:18:09Speaker 00

  I lately have been asking ChatGPT and the responses are

• 1:18:14Shane Parrish?

  Pretty good.

• 1:18:14Speaker 00

  It's pretty good. The problem, so what I I sort of backtested this and did it on things that I have an intimate knowledge about, right? So I was like, what are the discrepancies of research in the universal of facial expressions and emotionality? And I'm like, oh. Whoa, but I did it like six months ago and it wasn't oh whoa, it was bad. I was like, you just made up a person. This is not real. This is misappropriated. It is getting considerably better to the point of where I'm really trying, starting to trust this tool. In six months from now, I think I'll have full confidence in these things. And also you could do like cool things like we have a pretty robust database of all like the PDFs on nonverbal behavior from every academic journal that I've just been collecting. I could build my own little language model on that and

• 1:18:56Speaker 00

  just ask questions and query that. I mean, there's different ways of doing it. But I mean, AI has helped me with behavioral coding more than anything else. So I started this other company called Behavioral Robotics with the goal is to teach machines to read human behavior. Because if reading human behavior is all about these complex decision trees, there's no reason from a first principle perspective that a machine can't do the same thing.

• 1:19:16Shane Parrish?

  In fact, it should be way better than we are.

• 1:19:18Speaker 00

  It should be way better because the camera on you is not just Blake's worldview. It's all these modeled out worldviews that can predict and understand. And I think it can be something really special. It's gonna take a lot of time to get there. But um, you know, my first big study on beyond tells, I spent like a stupid amount of money, like maybe quarter million dollars manually coding, like we counted 550,000 blinks. Somebody, so we had a team of like 70 people sit there and every time someone blinked, they clicked M on a keyboard. And it got cross validated and made sure it was right and all this. Not anymore. My machines do it. Like just run it. Amazon Web Services, every blink, exactly when it happens. Accuracy is incredible. It's, it's amazing.

• 1:20:01Shane Parrish?

  So how are you using it aside from that? Like what else are you doing with it? Because you had some interesting takes on like how you're leveraging AI.

• 1:20:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, so like I am using it to develop inventories and scales to better predict people that have social challenges. So for example, like we're building something right now that's like a facial heat map. So basically,

• 1:20:24Speaker 00

  It could understand when I'm saying, so I'm having a language just by words, right? So basically, our system takes all your movement and breaks down to raw data. Coordinate data, so like where the hands and fixed points of the hands are moving. Facial data, and a lot of this stuff is, you can do it open source, but we're starting to refine it. So we're starting to understand like the composition of wrinkles in people's faces. And then understanding how their facial movement changes the wrinkles to better classify behavior. And we know every word that everybody says at every second it says. So then in interactions, we could easily create summaries and inventories for like, this is something where this person should have shook in their head or shown some sort of facial reaction, but they didn't.

• 1:21:08Speaker 00

  So a great example, this is a personal example, but my, my dad passed away like literally two weeks ago from a two-year battle with ALS. Right? So horrible disease, horrible, but to see how people handle death and react to death from my level of expertise has just been really fascinating. So some people are like, oh, so like, like, why aren't you coming? I'm like, oh, my dad passed away. And they don't have the mimicking, like the empathy, like, I'm so sorry. They don't know how to do that. They're like, oh, okay. And then I'm like, and I have to know. So I'm like, listen, in that moment, you just, I just feel really weird about death. I'm like, okay, thanks, but you should probably tell people that because that's going to impact that. So we can use machines to sort of identify that, right? We could basically know that like, there's a low level of facial animation in this person's face.

• 1:21:53Speaker 00

  When this person said something that there should have been social coordination. And that's the truth, like, like all of these, like, I mean.

• 1:22:02Shane Parrish?

  So it's almost like blind spot identifying for people because it's like, hey, you should have responded in this one way, you responded in a different way.

• 1:22:12Shane Parrish?

  That's not a judgment on how you responded, but we're going to tell you how that's perceived.

• 1:22:16Speaker 00

  Exactly. So everything we do is about perception, not meaning. The biggest problem with this industry of non-verbal behavior and body language is it's pushed towards meaning, not perception. And the truth is, it's just understanding that your behavior is outside the distribution of what would be perceived as socially relevant. And that's a lot more complex, like all of those like.

• 1:22:35Shane Parrish?

  But there's also another angle to this, as we, we keep talking about this, this is amazing for, for classifying behavior. But our society progresses because of people who are outside of the the norm, like on an individual basis, it might be very detrimental to you on a societal basis. It's hugely advantageous to society to have people who operate outside the norms. So I wonder, like, to what extent if we try to rein people in to be more normal, we're actually giving up sort of, we're almost putting a ceiling on progress.

• 1:23:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, so this is my whole thing. So we want to be to the right side of the bell curve, not the left.

• 1:23:13Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:14Speaker 00

  So I'm never pushing people towards normal. I'm getting them to understand normal, to be themselves in the most powerful way as possible, and to make sure they don't have behavioral blind spots that are completely gonna be like really ostracized by society. Like, okay, you can't do that kind of thing. But I, there's nothing more that I love when a person is just themselves and just themselves. Like, and that's a very attractive quality. That's like, that's the definition of charisma in a lot of ways. Like, somebody just walks in the room and they, they own it. You're like, who is this person? Like, they must be someone, they must be something. But the truth is, first, you want to understand what normal is before you can break normal, right? Like, that's how you know you're doing something that's on the right side of the bell curve.

• 1:23:57Speaker 00

  And I say that because when you try something that's on the right side of the bell curve, and it doesn't work, you become the left side of the bell curve. So that's why you're always trying to push in the right way.

• 1:24:06Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, I like that a lot. Are there any other things you use ChatGPT for?

• 1:24:11Speaker 00

  Um, I should use it more and more. I mean, we use, I mean, I'm using ChatGPT to build some of them. This is kind of meta, but I'm using ChatGPT to build some of the language models that index and label communication because it's phenomenal at that. So, so for example, I was like trying to create a mechanism for determining assertion in text. So I said, I posted in ChatGPT like three hundred separate like words, not words, phrases that were from a conversation. And I said, I want you to create an inventory on a scale from one to five measuring assertion. First of all, what do you think is the opposite of assertion? And it's like, oh, probably passive. So, all right, assertive and passive, rank all of these.

• 1:24:56Speaker 00

  It was phenomenal at it. It like perfectly mimicked my, like, what I perceive to be nuanced understanding of like the way someone structures a phrase. And then you ask it, I said, okay, better yet, give me the rationality behind why. And it was like, because this answer is a little bit short and the other person's a little bit larger and it's and I'm like, yeah, you got it.

• 1:25:18Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:19Speaker 00

  It's phenomenal.

• 1:25:19Shane Parrish?

  But it goes into like hundreds of details that we can't even

• 1:25:22Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:25:22Shane Parrish?

  comprehend.

• 1:25:23Speaker 00

  We can't even begin. And like to me, this is my world of nuance. So I'm like, oh, this thing gets it. So I'm using it. I can do that to build out inventories like super quickly. Like it would have taken a lot of time and effort to do that. I'd probably hire some like, some PhDs to like sit there and blah, blah, blah. Now it's just like, it's incredible. I don't know how else to describe it. I mean, yes, it's not AGI. Yes, there are so many other things. Yes, there's flaws. Yes, there's this, but as a tool.

• 1:25:52Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:52Speaker 00

  It is incredible.

• 1:25:54Shane Parrish?

  You use coaching as a tool. You have a lot of coaches. Tell me about the process you use to select coaches? And what's the difference between a great coach and a good coach for you?

• 1:26:08Speaker 00

  That's a great question. Okay. So, uh, process is not so much, I'm always, I always look for people that either I have had some sort of experience with. I like to follow people also, or I like to be coached by people that I believe are living their, in alignment with their values. Like I've, I know coaches out there in the world that I'm like, you're saying that, but your whole team hates you. Like, how could you ever coach that? So I'm looking for that first. Do they show up? Because I tend to stop listening to somebody if I don't see that they're, they're teaching something and not applying it. I also just like a, uh, maybe like a tougher coach.

• 1:26:49Speaker 00

  I want somebody that's going to call me out on my bullshit because I can be very convincing and I can argue and they've been in and a stop. That's bullshit. Like one of my coaches, um, Jocelyn Hermansasio, she is very quick to call me out on anything. She's like, that doesn't sound right. Like she just gets to the point and gets to the heart of what's going on. And my other coach, John Michael Morgan, is very good at saying like, well, you said this two weeks ago and now you're not saying this. Like, I think it's very difficult to get people to hold us accountable and for us to be our word and all that. And then also I just, coaches for other things like running and I just like coaching. Yeah. If you're a coach and you don't have three coaches, you should stop being a coach.

• 1:27:28Shane Parrish?

  Well, it's really interesting, right? Because it's a shortcut to sort of. Expertise in a way, which is like, they don't have the expertise, they shouldn't be a coach. But from your point of view, it's like, I can hire a coach who's done this, taught it. I can get up to speed rather quickly, no matter what the subject is. Whether it's holding me accountable, or like, learning how to run longer distances, or whatever objective I'm trying to achieve. I now have access to sort of a better quality of thinking than I do in my immediate vicinity.

• 1:27:58Speaker 00

  A hundred percent. And there's so many different, and also just like, I'm at point A, I want to get to point B.

• 1:28:04Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:04Speaker 00

  And I want to get to point B, but I want to minimize the suffering.

• 1:28:08Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:08Speaker 00

  That I'm getting to point B. Find people to help me along that way. It's also my biggest. So if I were to go back, I always say this, I would go back 21 years old, and it was like, what advice would you give your 21 year old self? I would say, get a coach, but my 21 year old self would probably tell my 38 year self to grow up. I don't even.

• 1:28:26Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, exactly, right? Well, let's go back to that a little bit. I did want to touch on this before we wrap this up, which is, you were a terrible student.

• 1:28:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:28:35Shane Parrish?

  Up until university.

• 1:28:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:28:37Shane Parrish?

  What changed?

• 1:28:38Speaker 00

  Uh, I felt like a complete failure. I think I had this identity that I was a smart person. And I went to school and at this moment where this kid next to me was going to West Point, kid to the left was going to Harvard. And I was like, I can't believe I just like wasted this whole thing. And I was like, this is when everything changes. And literally, it was the.

• 1:28:57Speaker 00

  It was a massive identity shift for me. I had two big identity shifts. That, that moment, when I shifted, and when I started teaching psychology. Those are the two big things that shifted me.

• 1:29:07Shane Parrish?

  Go back to high school.

• 1:29:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:29:08Shane Parrish?

  What was the shift?

• 1:29:10Speaker 00

  I was just like, I'm going to take school very seriously. I'm going to go to Harvard. I'm going to get my JD MBA. I made a decision that this is what I want. And it went a completely different way, but it, I still worked like that, yeah.

• 1:29:23Shane Parrish?

  Then your actions aligned with that identity?

• 1:29:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, a hundred percent. Like, I was sitting, I remember vivid conversations with my mom. She's like, Blake, like, what's the difference between like, a 95 and an 88? I'm like, you don't understand. Like, I need my GPA to be four. It was like, the first time I really like, applied myself to something. I, I mean, except for like, maybe gaming or a couple of other things that I did when I was younger, but um. I overcorrected, to say the least, and I was like stressed and dealt with a lot of other things. And I think I calibrated it like twenty one or twenty two to like, okay, now I know not to. And also, there's just like weird systemic things. So in like City University, if anybody's still going there, like CUNY has the weirdest grading system,

• 1:30:05Speaker 00

  where an A is ninety two and above from a numerical point. So there's no point in getting a hundred or a ninety three. There's no difference. So like, if you're studying to get a hundred on a test, it's stupid. Like, study for a ninety, get nineties across everything, be nice to the professor, you'll get an A. So it was just like seeing all this type of stuff. And then also, like, being in school had me like question a lot about psychology, question a lot about research. I learned how to critically think, and then I applied that critical thinking to the, which I think was what you're supposed to do.

• 1:30:40Shane Parrish?

  Totally.

• 1:30:41Speaker 00

  Um, but I'm like, this study seems kind of like bullshit. Like, there's not that many people here and like, what's going on? And it really opened my eyes to like the flaws of research and how data can be manipulated. I had a very early experience with that, where I had a, my professor was an adjunct and he was the head of data analysis at the MTA at the time. And I had just done a study in my like experimental design class. And I was like, yeah, I'm doing this study. He goes, you seem really happy with your study. I says, yeah. He's like, give me the data set. I vividly remember handing him a flash drive that had SPSS, my data set. He goes, what do you want it to show? I was like, significance, of course. And he's like, watch this. And literally ten minutes later, he's like, there you go. And it blew my mind. It blew my mind.

• 1:31:25Speaker 00

  That man blew my mind about how data could be manipulated. And he taught me at a very young age. He was like, this was happening everywhere around. And he gave an entire class on how data is manipulated.

• 1:31:37Shane Parrish?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:31:37Speaker 00

  In day to day life. And I remember being like, oh, my God. Like, this is so cool. Like, this is such a.

• 1:31:44Shane Parrish?

  Well, imagine now, right? You just uploaded for ChatGPT and you're like, I want to show this. Give me the logic, give me the reasoning, lay it out with references. And you got a draft paper right there.

• 1:31:54Speaker 00

  Oh, that's another ChatGPT point. So I probably spent maybe a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in hiring data scientists to clean and to produce dashboards for beyond tells. ChatGPT, I could have done it all in a weekend.

• 1:32:09Shane Parrish?

  Twenty bucks, yeah.

• 1:32:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, just sitting there. Insights are incredible.

• 1:32:15Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, I like the point about not, you know, after 93, it doesn't matter. So you might as well just optimize for 93.

• 1:32:23Speaker 00

  But that's how this is. This is a systemic problem in organizations. Well, so. Set the metrics and you're like, oh, okay. So I need to do this more than this if I want to move up, right?

• 1:32:32Shane Parrish?

  Well, so this is interesting. One of my kids came home and he had a science fair project. And I was like, oh, that's an interesting topic. And it didn't seem like something he was super interested in. I was like, why'd you pick that? He's like, well, if I pick what I wanted to, I'd probably win. And then I'd have to present at like the regional science fair. And I don't want to present at the regional science fair, but I want to get a good grade, but I don't want to get like a really good grade. So he's like, he's already thinking in terms of like optimizing for, it's a really interesting approach.

• 1:33:00Speaker 00

  I mean, that's just like a sign of hyperintelligence, in my opinion, like Well, no, but that's like the joke where a lot of people was like, a lot of wealthy people would be like, oh, I wasn't smart. I was lazy. And I'm like, yeah, but laziness embeds that level of sophistication, right?

• 1:33:17Shane Parrish?

  Uh, I get to interview the best people in the world. How can I ask better questions?

• 1:33:22Speaker 00

  Oh, well, these were really good questions. So one of the things I'm doing right now, I could do it on you. So we're doing a thing on how to ask better questions. So we're taking some really good question people, like one of the people that I've seen evolve is Tim Ferriss, his ability to ask questions in a certain way. And we basically take every single interview he's ever had, and we analyze all the behavior. And we're looking at the nonverbal and contextual language patterns that do that. So I'll have to let you know, because this is something that I'm like, I could do it for you, too.

• 1:33:51Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:33:52Speaker 00

  Um, I think.

• 1:33:53Shane Parrish?

  Oh, God, those early interviews are terrible.

• 1:33:55Speaker 00

  But that's, that's like the beauty of, so like, I've seen so many people, like people that put themselves out there. Like, I find it so magical to see someone shift over years. And it's something that I've been like, almost like afraid to do on video in a lot of ways, like not giving myself permission to just be myself on video. I'm being myself in person, but something about the video, like we spoke about, is like, whoa. But you see people change and you see people like warm up and you see people become different over time. And I feel like that's so, that that process is so much cooler than like just seeing a master. Like, anybody that puts themselves out there, and applause to you for doing this right now, you're seeing their improvement from where they started to where they ended. And I think the lessons in improvement.

• 1:34:39Speaker 00

  Are the greatest lessons. Like, why did they go from the first ten podcasts, they're asking questions this way? And the next ten, they shifted, like, why?

• 1:34:47Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:48Speaker 00

  Right? And understanding that context is, um. Oh, that's a good one, is, uh, like, ask somebody. Is there any context that you think I need to know? In order for me to ask a better question, or to make this a better question?

• 1:35:03Shane Parrish?

  I like that.

• 1:35:04Speaker 00

  Cause sometimes people don't give enough context, and you, they have to be prompted to. But once you give them the ability to give them more context, that works. And that's also a quick tip. That's probably my single biggest communication tip for everybody in a corporate culture. The more context, the better. It's just that simple.

• 1:35:19Shane Parrish?

  I like that.

• 1:35:20Speaker 00

  It's works.

• 1:35:21Shane Parrish?

  One question before the last question. So the penultimate question, I guess, is, we were talking about writing earlier. And the power of writing in terms of thinking. Can you expand on that?

• 1:35:32Speaker 00

  It's, over time, I have seen more and more that it is probably one of the most powerful self-developed mediums, self-development mediums over anything. Uh, I think that people, we're in a war, especially for those who are thinkers. I know I'm a thinker, I spend a lot of time in my head and not being present and thinking and processing. There's no checks and balances up here. There's no one to stop and say, hey, that's kind of not the right idea or not. When you write something out, you're creating reality. You're taking your thoughts and you're putting it out into reality. And then there's an ability to critically examine that. And I just feel like it's so much help, it's so helpful. It allows you to structure your ideas. It makes you a better thinker. It makes you a better communicator.

• 1:36:14Speaker 00

  It's evidence of how you've shifted your thoughts and your principles and ideas over, over time. I think a writing practice is so, so, so important.

• 1:36:21Shane Parrish?

  I think of it in terms of reflecting as well, right? So, mental reflection, I tend to just keep going over the same things a lot. But when I write it down, it's like, oh, that doesn't make sense. You're checking your own thinking in a way, right? Because now you're, and I prefer pen and pencil, even if I like shred it or burn it after.

• 1:36:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, me too.

• 1:36:40Shane Parrish?

  Um, but you're checking your own thinking, and it's the process by which I discover I don't know what I'm talking about. But it's also the process by which I know where to look for more information. Where to go about it and learn what I'm talking about in a way that I can convey clearly to other people. But it's also how I get new ideas. And importantly, how I give up ideas.

• 1:37:01Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 1:37:02Shane Parrish?

  Uh, which I don't think we do a lot of these days. And so there's like an ego thing to it, where it's like, you're practicing. That's a really good sentence. You want to keep it in, then you're like, oh, I gotta get rid of it.

• 1:37:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:37:14Shane Parrish?

  Doesn't fit with the piece, right? And but then you're giving something up and you're sort of, and then you can give it to other people and get feedback. Cause they don't see all the thoughts that you have in your head that you see. And so like they're giving you, oh, this doesn't make sense. And now all of a sudden it's like, oh, I've got something here.

• 1:37:31Speaker 00

  Yeah. And you talking about this makes me want to bring back this practice. So I started journaling. And I started to realize that because I'm such an optimist, I lie in my journals. So what I started doing was I made a video journal. And I sat in front of the camera and I spoke to myself every day. And I have some of these videos where it's like, the IRS is coming after me. Like, it was like the worst business moment.

• 1:37:58Speaker 00

  All this crazy stuff. And I have a video of myself like being like, yeah, things are okay. And I have like big dark circles under my eyes and I look like, oh, you poor kid. Things are not okay right now.

• 1:38:09Shane Parrish?

  Well, because you have a different perspective.

• 1:38:10Speaker 00

  Exactly. Exactly. But also if I would have watched even that video after I recorded it, I probably would have seen that things are not so okay.

• 1:38:19Shane Parrish?

  With your analysis, of course.

• 1:38:22Speaker 00

  The best kid. So I think it's a helpful.

• 1:38:24Shane Parrish?

  But that optimism can be helpful, right? Which is.

• 1:38:26Speaker 00

  I mean, it's how you get through it as an entrepreneur. I mean, it's how you push through, right?

• 1:38:30Shane Parrish?

  That's how Elon saved Tesla effectively.

• 1:38:34Speaker 00

  That book's insane.

• 1:38:35Shane Parrish?

  But I'll, I won't say a lie, but you know, close to a lie and save the company through that lie. Raise money and now we have this, but had that not happened. Whether he was deceiving himself or deceiving other people, or didn't even know he was deceiving himself or deceiving other people. Uh, objectively speaking, it was sort of fiction that saved the company. So then do the ends justify the means? Do the?

• 1:39:02Speaker 00

  I mean, I think so. As an entrepreneur, like there's, there's like true belief in being able to create something.

• 1:39:09Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:10Speaker 00

  And you're not necessarily knowing what the path looks like, but you're going to create something, right? And then there's just flat out like lies, like, and that line is I think a lot different, like intent is a lot of a, of a different thing, but they, but you know, a lot of people maybe they started off with, with that, uh, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I think that's what happens. I think people try to protect, protect, they lose their values and then. Somewhere else. But yeah, I mean, everybody does it like everybody, any, any VC pitch I've seen. Come on. It's like.

• 1:39:43Shane Parrish?

  It's a hockey stick right after this month, right?

• 1:39:45Speaker 00

  Exactly. It's like, all right, no, our, our users are, we're redefining what active users is.

• 1:39:51Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:51Speaker 00

  But they're growing up. Like, it's like, come on, we, we all know the game. Um, yeah.

• 1:39:56Shane Parrish?

  The question we always end with is what is success for you?

• 1:40:00Speaker 00

  Success for me is pretty simple. You write things down and you accomplish it. That's success. I believe success is a personal journey in whatever you want to do. So some people don't actually know what their version of success is, and it just happens to them. So I think it's really helpful to sit there and be like, you know, I want a relationship where there's no friction and I have the love of my life. And like, I, I texted my wife. I was like, I miss you already. And we were gone for like eight hours and it was like, that's on the list. So I have a successful relationship. The business right now is not necessar- there's certain things that need to get changed this year, certain things that need to change. That can be listed and I can measure if I'm successful or not. Cause the truth is, if you don't do that, you're likely playing somebody else's game.

• 1:40:43Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:44Speaker 00

  And it's just so, it's so hard to live that life.

• 1:40:47Shane Parrish?

  Well, thank you for taking the time for this incredible conversation.

• 1:40:50Speaker 00

  This is great, great questions.

• 1:40:58Shane Parrish?

  Thanks for listening and learning with us. For a complete list of episodes, show notes, transcripts and more, go to fs.blog/podcast or just Google The Knowledge Project. Recently, I've started to record my reflections and thoughts about the interview after the interview. I sit down, highlight the key moments that stood out for me, and I also talk about other connections to episodes and sort of what's got me pondering that I maybe haven't quite figured out. This is available to supporting members of The Knowledge Project. You can go to fs.blog/membership, check out the show notes for a link and you can sign up today. And my reflections will just be available in your private podcast feed.

• 1:41:41Shane Parrish?

  You'll also skip all the ads at the front of the episode. The Farnham Street Blog is also where you can learn more about my new book, Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments Into Extraordinary Results. It's a transformative guide that hands you the tools to master your fate, sharpen your decision-making, and set yourself up for unparalleled success. Learn more at fs.blog/clear. Until next time.