The Non-Verbal Expert: These Behaviors Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Someone

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 my uncle gave me this test and without fail it is predicted every divorce and the test was so simple it was like that is a huge red flag 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 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 there was two things one I want to start with how I can improve my ability to read non-verbal cues oh okay that's a process all right so it starts with evaluating how you process Behavior as it is so starts with your default approach so the problem is this we go down through life we have this like neural net in our head and it's based on 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 WR 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 out it's really looking at your perspective for life and how you view social interactions and then after that it's increasing your 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 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 in something when you're just socially coordinating because you all right I got to shake my head because this is interesting so it's a multi-step process but it really starts with confronting all your biases that's fascinating H how does it work in terms of cues I might misread then because if I don't have knowledge of myself or a 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 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 all right I can say these things three ways I can 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 ships 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 because I think someone's mad at me when they just say yes that's my own weird cultural type of thing where you get that passive aggressive like sure yeah I 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 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 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 inform forming trust with them in person where 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 um less detail in those interactions how do we look for signs that somebody might be untrustworthy and convert verely how do we convey trustworthiness to other people through these interactions that's a great question okay so trust from a non-verbal 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 IE 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 and I look at you dead at your eyes when I'm saying that look it looks better when I'm like 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 nuan areas to draw that conclusion and then to have the mimicking of my behavior to be associated with the excitement for those things so for example like if um 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 Uh something's off here like what's 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' 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 okay so why and we look at it and it's like when they were 12 years old their dad taught them that right so you got to understand that it's build trust build trust there's not this like step one two 3 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 gu EO and how much do we update our information once we form an opinion yeah with you like how much information would it take to because I'm not looking for signs anymore right like my brain shuts down and 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 H 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 so like we have this basian brain and even people that are the most like think they're the most basy in 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 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 they're 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 you did a lot of work with prisoners did you feel safe did you feel like you could trust them yeah I never felt you know my forensic background is no way as robust as some people who've 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 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 just a person and I believe through discourse and through conversation anything could be settled I I wasn't really yeah it's a great question I can't remember fear but but did you feel like you could trust these people to give you honest answers or 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 year or two years or whatever it is and then they ask people those same questions that are mingering right 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 2 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 and that's the point of it 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 you know people lie for different reasons for shame for embarrassment I remember I I had to ask this inventory about um sex like how have they had sex in the past like 12 months 9 months 6 months 3 months and they're in prison in a men population when you ask that question people get like very like what you saying like people react in a different way and it's like it makes total contextual sense that they would 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 non-verbal cues how would you go about doing that 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 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 you know 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 do you think the biggest talkers are more dangerous than the silent type or I've always in my experience I've always found the silent type to not be I 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 viol 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 are they more like a light switch Yeah I think they're more erratic in that regard like all of a sudden you say something like what you say 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 younger population like you know people in their 20s that are just 25 26 in prison um it's different it's a different time for someone versus 40 or 50 that have had that experience and that lifelong uh 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 we tend to judge people based on their worst choice in some cases right oh I mean I am that is probably like my advocacy like so uh my foundations will be all for uh prison reform all forgiven people second chances I believe that Society it's it's kind of crazy to me that you know 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 and there's just this massive fallacy that people are like well no I no you grew up in a completely different world in a completely different context so be be careful with that 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 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 I want to come back to the trust thing again cuz um you were on a double date with your wife and you met somebody for the first time I believe and you were like they're cheating on their partner within a few minutes uh and I'm wondering like what went into that how did you come to that conclusion how confident were you in that conclusion yeah I was like 100% confident I would have placed a lot of money uh 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 he was doing all these like more like a predator 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 well he didn't say that 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 a little sketch testing the water yeah he was like testing the water 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 Che on your wife yeah H how much of that his ego coming out too like why would he I'm also just trying to like understand his like why would I put 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 I don't think he was I I think also I mean I definitely have a disarming quality to me when I meet people cuz I'm very I'm not really judgmental I'm a I'm have 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 keep going 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 and he was like what I was like just get a divorce and he was like obviously L not going to get a divorce I'm like well why are you sitting here like bad mouthing your wives like I don't have anything bad to 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 life wife for this reason I love my wife for that reason and it's just like I really believe I hate that 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 I know you you sort of specialize in non-verbal 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 oh totally I mean like I think there's just this is like all the work that uh gotman did relationship labs and all predicting like signs of contempt and all these things this is the problem with 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 a it's a good question before you get married like what you know what what are characteristics of yeah what should what what's an ideal relationship what does 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 oh they're not that close but it doesn't matter it's that it's what their relationship of a should look like my uncle gave me this test I think it was like a decade ago now and without fail it is predicted every divorce 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 cuz like I'm sitting there and you're both talking to me but you're not talking to each other oh yeah and 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 there's so many interesting Nuance 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 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 going to 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 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 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 why don't we do more of that in terms of like recording ourselves because I mean I'm a big fan of it but I'm sure there's going to be lots of comments on YouTube here 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 um that's something I say to my wife a lot like oh uh 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 I like the feedback like if we're giving a presentation we watch a video to like see ourselves our articulation so that's another big problem so uh in presentations we had a 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 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 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 it's the feedback loop is instant so that's how that was what's was such the value like when I was teaching psychology at cuni I was speaking like 80 to 100 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 what's the biggest thing that gets in people's way when they're presenting uh really just the social construction that a presentation is something different so pe oh it's got this whole cultural narrative oh you got to you have your big presentation coming up it's hyped up as this 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 them every day for the next three weeks do a presentation it' be so much better what is 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 1 hour a day of my time so so that's so so cool that you did that so my question has 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 with a lot of the non-verbal Behavior stuff and movement I have found reliably that the most effective version of someone is when they're the most comfortable barut 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 but 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 cuzz 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 phasal things to getting better at presentation it's like it's different for every person because some if someone you're telling someone listen you're moving your hands too much and they're going to get in their head about moving their hands too much they're going to start looking all weird yeah and some people can take a queue and immediately change it and other people just get them comfortable just get them comfortable and then using video but you hear something else fascinating so what do you show people video of themselves I work once work with this woman um I hope she's hearing this because 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 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 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 worldclass 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 and go right away into that I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about um 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 so power structures oh man that's such a good question uh they are these invisible things that's 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 uh 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 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 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 SE 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 it's kind of crazy uh I I think organizations need to talk way more than they are uh in this siloed environment sometimes 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 skill set that the people skills to sit down with someone and a lot I've Just Seen every a 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 doesn't give them that creative freedom to actually read what's going on is the Delta between where you are and where you perceive the other person like does that influence your how I mean just from like of what you have quote unquote permission to do or say it's all a perception like i' I've worked with people like executive I've work with CEOs that are the most open every all of their behavior suggest 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 yeah they say it over and over and over again and I look at why and they're like I don't want to bother the CEO with this I'm 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 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'd basically like scream at you that's the kind of stuff that I correct so that's the bulk of my when you say something but you're Pat and 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 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 looked like and that's why zoom and video is so important for me cuz 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 describe but when 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 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 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 you have to 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 to at the end of his life he just wanted a redo because the way that he pursued those goals was mutually exclusive from a life of meaning which he later determined which is sort of like this deathbed sort of test right I'm calling it The E Ebenezer exercise I'll credit you with that cuz that's a perfect sort of analogy and also about that destination principle I think there's a major Gap in leadership or organizational culture that whole world between Theory and application so somebody reads a book about maybe radical cander 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 and they'll say listen so 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 oh yeah 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 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 need here my quirks here 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 are there different techniques to enhance your communication I'm thinking specifically with people who are hyper literal because if you're not a hyper literal person you don't tend to think that way by default 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 multiaxle spectrums um 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 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 3:00 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 and I'm like good good and on our session later I was explaining to him like this is why the context was different M and I'm drawing Circles of all the layers of context in that Dynamic and he's like okay I I understand it now and I was like that 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 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 follow 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 yeah 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 um this always comes up with small talk like people hate Small Talk hate Small Talk Small Talk well small talk is a path to Big talk so you have like couple seconds couple minutes of small talk you don't just walk up to someone 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 totally what strategies can we use to enhance our non-verbal communication at work our ability to communicate yeah 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 re-watch those videos and make sure that your intent is aligned with that with or without sound um with definitely with sound um what are you watching are you watching you or are you watching other people's reactions to that's so the exercise of watching other people reacting to you is very valuable in the sense where you'll 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 um people look at the things that don't matter they'll say like I say like so much or I say um or I say uh 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 okay and if we don't have access to video for whatever reason uh if you don't have access to video I would really if I had to give it that I would say I'd want you to record yourself not in a work context record yourself with someone they 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 okay that's for 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 and do you consider writing non-verbal or is it verbal because we sort of like read it with that little voice in our head yeah I mean yeah it's it's I I I'll take non-verbal as everything so all of our software analyzes language patterns it analyzes tonality and I go into every you can't really separate non-verbal from verbal I maybe the only place you could do this is poker and a couple of other things the truth is we we're always so the model for how we read a behavior is 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 a lot of these body language people like take a 10-second clip and be like you know uh because my feet are sitting this way that means this or that and they just like build this narrative 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 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 so that's probably the best way is questions of asking other people of but see this is where it gets what would we ask them 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 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 1 to 10 people are horrible at answering it like do you like that person from a scale from 1 to 10 they're like I don't know but you ask somebody a question would on a scale from 1 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 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 on a scale from 1 to five how many times do do you leave an email from me feeling frustrated because 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 yeah like they're just going to 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 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 you know what's the 8020 like what are the small things that you're going to do that going to have the greatest impact on the team and then also I really do struggle with this in the sense that like I've seen certain leaders be horrible and get incredible things done you violate every book ever written about leadership and work a team to complete death and play this maavan 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 amount them 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 structured and they're like they're actually in perfect alignment with how they should be acting Yeah It's Tricky it's like it's a tricky thing and I don't think that's spoken about enough 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 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 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 setup cameras um also just set it up so that you win like I I feel like a certain structures and certain environmental like just the way an office is integrated like I had 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 Co 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 H because you're just Al line with them and you're looking at them and you're facing that direction I was like huh that's a really cool 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 we not really talking to them we're not there's a huge advantage to sort of being gained by like you I remember somebody said something who met Bill Clinton and I was like everybody's got so many Bill Clinton stories no but well this one's not about this though like oh wait 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 45 seconds how did he do that how did we create that so the amount of people that have given me that bill I'm like and I'm so curious because I've seen some footage of him in interactions uh a close friend told me the story once of walking into a um 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 oh 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 United States right but there's also these like nonble ways of just the piercing eye contact and the way that he looks deep into your soul and it it's there's Ely a balance of both I am so curious though that that was what my friend said he like he never broke eye Conta like he was just very intense but it was like a warm intensity if that makes sense not like a 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 Pro 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 defo is usually the villain cuz 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 the there's a professor out of upen that's done does a lot of stuff uh about Impressions and the structure of someone's face ohes 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 multivariable 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 uh movement you kind of can't predict what the next word is going to be there I just think there's something that the brain loves that it love it loves the chaos guessing exactly and when auto complete in Google exactly no that's the best way of thinking of it like you know what's going to happen and then um I think there was there's one cool study I think out of like upen that found that like people that talk faster are listened to at a greater level even though what they're saying is nonsense like they're 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 confidence yes I mean that's 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 so It's Tricky it's a tricky one it's in the sense that 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 100% 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 there every there's always an answer sometimes it's nice to be like 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 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 uberman does so well of just being this kind of like 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 is 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 I like that are there other things that stand out in terms of identifying incompetence or even deception and I'm relating those two because sometimes people are trying to deceive us and sometimes they're deceiving Us in part because they're they're playing you know prot fake it to 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 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 yeah where they did the double blind and like yeah yeah it was it was great I just made it up yeah 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 they 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 then there's questions like you know do you want your your head of Business Development your salesperson to respond that way like you know it it gets interesting but I think that's the easiest way 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 EXC communicado from the tribe and which is certain death 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 like a teeny teeny teeny teen teeny thing and it plays such an important and valuable role in in how we function it I always my wife owns a sleep optimization company and she's all about circadian rhythms and um 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 90 years or 80 years or whatever it's been completely altered yeah 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 uh 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 it's getting more complex not less and it's happening quickly it's like that you know hockey shaped curve of just like whoop complexity is driving up 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 to I totally my perception of how people would respond to it yeah my I mean all these weird things like I'm wearing two different socks right now two different kinds of socks and I was like oh maybe I'll cover my sock and then 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 cuni I had this um so I was wearing the same J crew pants every day cuz 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 going to know but I couldn't find these pants anymore yeah so it was in my head about these pants and my my students looking at my pants so I was like you know what 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 140 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 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 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 going to pick out in 10 or 15 years uh are two different things and 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 well this is my big problem too so I 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 going to be out there on it I think I over analy I mean there's videos of me saying things cuz also I mean I've changed my own opinions on things totally so like I have videos out there that I made in 2016 about poker tails 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 yeah I I struggle with the same thing I think I have to go the what's the Rick Rubin Rick Rubin had great quote about like a creative process is is like you're creating something for the time yeah but I struggle with the same thing of like video of just like oh no of like how this is going to 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 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 um how can we read into the first few interactions with somebody from I 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 yeah dating is a tricky one cuz dra dating is this like it is this weird game still like in the beginning it's this game of like delayed attraction and uh delayed gratification 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 um and one of the cool things I would do is I would ask people in the room like what's their ideal person and they like write a list on the 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 right I think people have this real weird concept of it's almost like mimic desire like there's a desire of what you 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 and their 20s 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 attract 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 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 20 12 years ago I met my she met in my class I had a class called body language explain 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 Ferris a little bit like a New York City Tim Ferris and I was like how attractive girl know Tim this is before Tim was like Tim Ferris right it was just kind of like 4our body had just came out her 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 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 interest at that age right I just cuz the women I had met weren't interested in this kind of stuff and 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 CU then it was all these things that are like truly important to me at the time and continue to grow that solidified this sort of relationship and yeah and then there's all the other game type stuff that you got to do and it's it's even very difficult to even articulate I can tell you what not to do uh I can tell you try not to be someone you're not don't 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 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 put on a add- 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 what and we found that the what's 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 surfac ones they look because and then you you also see all people's biases so you see I show people two people in a date and like in 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 you projecting all your stuff onto the world around you every single second and that really showed you are there questions we can ask on dates that are more revealing of who the other person is 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're 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 the story so as soon as you get in the table not just like hey are you it's just like the craziest thing just happened or just get into some sort of story story are it still is the single most powerful communication tool barnun the problem is people are now in in our society going into performance storytelling which is a lot different than social storytelling so performance storytelling is the when I was seven years old something happened that Chang the course of my life and it's kind of like I find it icky um a real story is just telling a story like you tell your friend friends but it has a beginning it has an end I I find that tell more stories in dating it it will really show you how you connect to someone that's fascinating advice how did nonverbal Styles work across cultures 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 on 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 it's not aggressive to them not aggressive to them they're fine in in 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 or even the way you walk in New York oh well I mean still you can pick out a tourist just by how they're walking right I mean still to this day like everywhere I go I'm like can you hurry up already like exactly because you come from like what are you doing there's like six I still get frustrated how does one person take up the whole sidewalk like those kind so that 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 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 theory 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 just and then their wallet Falls and they have to take their wallet out and tuck it into their like there's a world happening around you what's going on um 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 just 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 it just CU I know what it's like to carry all these damn stands down the block 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 this stand in and I'm like hey guys I have a shoot after this were you willing cuz it's like oh I I see where it's going right so now it's insincere 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 a Meetup and I met you and now I'm here right like just you 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 cuz it comes back to it comes back and even if it doesn't come back I tend to think you most people feel better about themselves knowing they're for others than for themselves 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 and so they sit around waiting for people to recognize their potential for the world to give them what they're what they're owed and because they're doing that nothing happens because there's no action so there's no response that's absolutely genius it and and in my opinion that's what leadership is so leadership is that stepping up and and doing that it's not waiting for it's I'm going to lead and I love it cuz 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 and I always get in those sometimes and I'm like oh it's the awkward elevator silence and perfect everybody laughs laughs instantly right I want to switch gears a little bit what's the Rockefeller method Ro okay so I read I think it was Titan um the book and there was a lot of lessons in that book but there was one story that fascinated me and it was uh Johny Rockefeller was in a 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 is what we do and it was and he was like well can you find out do do like a little study and find out how much can you do it with without without ruining the Integrity of it and I was like that's absolutely fascinating like that way of thinking and it's so cool to be like just Rockefeller sitting there as 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 uh it it it comes up in weird like SAS 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 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 cuz 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 what else did you take away from that book Titan or or lessons from Rockefeller so many like I I found the um the uh 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 um just the the ruthful 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 I learned this in graduate school I had a really good professor I wish I remembered his name but he our I was teaching 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 terrorism class yeah so I got like my certificate in terrorism studies okay cuz I went to John J which was a criminal justice want give people cont around this so it was really cool we had like people from uh intelligence agencies com and 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 and genius I was like it's I 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 because 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 T more tangible value from a book so tell me your workflow you go from Kindle to notion if I remember correctly yeah good Kindle to readwise readwise to notion okay and then what do you do with it 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 want to 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 uh 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 year out the other year so I've been doing a better job of like highlighting things that I want to remember and I've been I'm wanting to use um this like Japanese method of flash cards to just basically create flash cards for my event so I just start to keep things because 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 podcast like I'll know a ton of researchers that I could reference but I forgot their names so I'm like yeah that person from upen 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 skulski like uh how why zebras don't get altered determinism Behavior he's like while he's deep in biology he's pretty cross disciplined like 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 a lot easier now well let's switch to AI you're a master researcher uh I'm curious about your process around using chat GPT to get up to speed on something or or how do you leverage AI to go about learning a new subject yeah it's it's ridiculous cuz six months ago I was like h don't know like it 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 uh 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 subdiscipline and the leaves as the academics that Cor respond 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 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 philosoph philosophical approach all 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 used to have to do that research or had a research team and have somebody like do this and now I literally do it in a couple prompts it's it's absurd it's like absurd for workflows um so then what do you do with it you have the leaves you have the people's name 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 and predictive process are you asking chat GPT I've lately have been asking chat GPT and the response is are pretty good it's pretty good the problem so what I I I sort of back tested this and did it on things that I have an intimate knowledge about right so I I was like what are the discrepancies of research in Universal of facial expressions and emotionality and and I'm like oh whoa but I did it like six months ago and it wasn't Oho 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 nonble behavior from every academic Journal that I've just been collecting I could build my own little language model on that and just ask questions and query that I mean there's different ways of doing it but I mean AI 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 principal perspective that a machine can't do the same thing in fact it should be way better than we 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 going to 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 there and every time someone blinked they clicked M on a keyboard and and it got cross validated and made sure it was right and all that 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 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 yeah so like I am using it to develop inventory iies 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 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 fix 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 so for a great example this is a personal example but my my dad pass pass away like literally 2 weeks ago from a 2-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 like oh my dad passed away and they don't have the mimicking like the empath 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 like I just feel really weird about death like okay thanks for but you should probably tell people that cuz 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 when this person said something that there should have been Co social coordination and that's the truth like like all of these like I mean 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 that's not a judgement on how you responded but we're going to tell you how that's perceived 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 those like 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 re people in to be more normal we're actually giving up sort of we're almost putting a ceiling on progress yeah so this is my whole thing so we want to be to the right side of the building curve not the left yeah so we 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 going to 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 it 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 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 and I say that cuz 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 yeah I like that a lot are there any other things you use chat GPT for um I should use it more and more I mean we use I mean I'm using chap BT to build some of them this is kind of meta but I'm using chap GT 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 a mechanism for determining assertion in text so I said I posted in chat GPT like 300 separate like words not words phrases um 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 like all right assertive and passive rank all of these it was phenomenal at it it it like perfectly mimicked my like what I perceive to be Nuance 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 yeah it's phenomenal that but it goes into like hundreds of details that we can't even to comprehend exactly 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 and now it's just like yeah it's incredible I don't know how else to to describe it I mean yes it's not AGI yes there's so many other things yes there's flaws yes there's this but as a tool yeah it is incredible you uh 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 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 applying it um I also just like a maybe like a tougher coach um I want somebody that's going to call me out on my because I can be very convincing and I can argue and no no no stop that's like one of my coaches um josin herio she is very quick to call me out on anything 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 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 so if you're a coach and you don't have three coaches you should stop being a coach 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 uh 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 yeah 100% And there's so many different and also just like I'm at Point a I want to get to point B yeah and I want to get to point B but I want to minimize the suffering that I'm getting at 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 were go back 21 years old and it was like what advice would you give your 21y old self I would say get a coach but my 21-year-old self would probably tell my 38y self screw off I don't need 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 yeah up until University yeah what changed 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 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 were the two big things that shifted me go back to high school what was the shift 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 jdmba 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 then your actions aligned with that identity yeah 100% 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 game 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 I calibrated it like 21 or 22 to like okay now I know not to and also there just like like weird systemic things so in like City University if anybody's still going there like cuni has the weirdest grading system where an a is 92 and above from a numerical point so there's no point in getting a 100 or a 93 yeah there's no difference so like if you're studying to get a 100 on a test it's stupid like study for a 90 get 90s 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 appli that critical thinking to the the which I think is what you're supposed to do totally um but I'm like this study seems kind of like 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 say yeah he's like give me the data set and 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 10 minutes later he's like there you go and it blew my mind it blew my mind that man blew my mind about how data could be manipulated and he taught me at a very young age he was like this what this was happening everywhere around and he he was and he gave a an entire class on how data is manipulated oh yeah in day-to-day life and I remember being like Oh my God like this is so cool like this is such a well imagine now right you just uploaded to chat gbt 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 oh that's another chaty BT point so I probably spent maybe $150,000 in hiring data scientists to clean and to produce dashboards for Beyonds chat GPT I could have done it all in a weekend 20 bucks yeah yeah just sitting there there insights are incredible yeah I I like the point about not uh you know after 93 it doesn't matter so you might as well just optimize for 93 but that's how this is this is a systemic problem in organizations they set the metrics and you're like oh okay so I need to do this more than this if I want to get move up right 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 you was super interested in I was like why' 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 reasonal science fair but I 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 I mean that's just like a sign of hyper intelligence in my opinion like the ab well no but that's like the joke where a lot of people will 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 sophistication right uh I get to interview the best people in the world how can I ask better questions oh well these were really good questions so one of the things I'm doing right now I can 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 Ferris 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 non-verbal and contextual language patterns that do that so I have to let you know because this is something that I'm like I can do it for you too like um I think oh God those early interviews are terrible but that's that's like the beauty of so like I've seen so many people like people have 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 been myself in person but something about the video like we spoke about is like who 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 end and I think the lessons in Improvement are the greatest lessons like why did they go from the first 10 podcasts they were asking questions this way then the next 10 they shifted like why 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 I like that CU 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 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 I like that this works 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 it's over time I have seen more and more that it is probably one of the most powerful self-develop mediums self-development medium 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 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 I think of it in terms of uh 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 yeah me too 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 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 got to get rid of it because 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 because 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 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 oh 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 taxes I remember 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 a you poor kid things are not okay right now well cuz you have a different perspective now 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 with your analysis of course I would been like you look the best kid so I think it's a helpful but that optimism can be helpful right which is I mean it's how you get through it as as an entrepreneur I mean I how you push through right that's how Elon saved Tesla effectively insane 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 I mean I think so as an entrepreneur like there's there's like true belief in being able to create something yeah 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 the but you know a lot of people lot maybe they started off what's that uh the road to hell is paved with good intentions I think that's what happens I think people try to protect PR detect 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 a hockey stick right after this month right exactly it's like all right no our users are we're redefining what active users is but they're growing up like it's like come on we we all know the game um yeah the question we always end with is what is success for you 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 NE 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 cuz the truth is if you don't do that you're likely playing somebody else's game yeah and it's just so it's so hard to live that life well thank you for taking the time for this incredible conversation this is great great questions

Channel: The Knowledge Project Podcast

Views: 450,307

Keywords: Shane Parrish, Farnam Street, The Knowledge Project, Farnam Street Podcast, Mental Models, shane parrish podcast, shane parrish the knowledge project, shane parrish interview, shane parrish video

Id: YrMiKxPV_Ig

Length: 97min 37sec (5857 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 09 2024