The Jordan Harbinger Show - 232: Daniel Goleman | A Logical Look at Emotional Intelligence

Episode Date: August 1, 2019

Daniel Goleman (@DanielGolemanEI) is a psychologist, science journalist, and author of The New York Times Best Seller Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ. What We Discuss with Daniel Goleman: The pros and cons of technology's influence on the way human beings connect in the 21st century. How we read emotions on a subconscious level -- and why blind people can sometimes still see them. Why sights, smells, and sounds can make us relive traumatic experiences. How emotions become contagious. The science behind why people act like jerks on the Internet. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://jordanharbinger.com/232 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. As always, I'm here with producer Jason DeFilippo. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most brilliant and interesting people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Today, if you've ever heard of the concept of emotional intelligence or EQ, today's guest literally invented the term. Today we're talking with one of the OG science writers when it comes to human behavior and how our people skills actually matter as much or even more than our other cognitive abilities and can be an even greater predictor of success, by the way. Today we'll cover some brain science and how blind people can sometimes still see emotions. This will blow your mind.

The evolution of our brain and why we reflexively mirror the emotions of others is another topic of the day. And this is how we can sometimes read people's minds, so to speak, something I'd think we'd all like to master. We'll even touch on the science behind why we start to look like our partners, how emotions become contagious, and even some of the science behind why people act like jerks on the internet. I was surprised there even was science behind that, but you be the judge.

Daniel and I had a great time doing this show. He and I have a lot in common and really clicked here. This episode was like talking to an old friend. If that old friend, of course, had been one of the most revolutionary thinkers in the field of human performance and behavior. If you want to know how we manage to book all these great guests and manage relationships with high-performing people, amazing folks of all walks of life, and lots of them, by the way.

Check out our six-minute networking course. It's free. It's at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. I would love to teach you these skills. They're not that hard. They take a few minutes a day. And most of the guests on the show actually subscribe to the course in the newsletter. So come join us.

You'll be in great company, even if I do say so myself. All right. Here's Daniel Goldman. One thing that when I was reading the books, I kept coming up on, which is almost cliche at this point, which is that technology is keeping us from connecting. And I think everyone has talked about this or heard about this on the news recently, but I wanted to have you on the show because you're the expert on the science of this instead of just like my parents riffing about how these kids these days don't know how to talk. Well, I don't agree that it keeps us from connecting. I think it makes us connect differently. And in some ways, it creates a deficit.

You know, Facebook, all of that allows us to stay in touch with people that we would be out of touch with. That's good. Our network stays intact. We can keep up on people. We know what people are doing day to day if they bother to post. On the other hand, the way it's not good is that tech is intrusive. And what it intrudes into is face-to-face interaction. I saw a group of probably 14-year-olds sitting at a table hanging out.

Every one of them was looking at their phone. They weren't looking at each other. They weren't even talking. They might have been texting each other. I have no idea. But the way the social brain is designed is for face-to-face interaction in person. And the way people learn from birth on how to be a decent human being is by being engaged with other people. You know, the mirror neuron system, which now is famous, used to be little known, is one way that infants, preverbal infants, learn how to have a conversation, learn how to engage, learn how to pay attention to the same thing someone else is paying attention to.

These are basics of human interaction. And to the extent that kids are spending more and more hours staring at a small screen on a device, they're not being with the other person. And I feel that's going to create a big deficit. It's funny. I was walking with my friend John Levy and his wife yesterday here in New York. And I said, hey, how often do you spot celebrities when you're walking in New York? Because I feel like every time I come to New York for a few days, I see Larry David or Jim. Jerry Seinfeld or somebody walking along the street.

And my friend John said, yeah, all the time. Last time I was with you, we saw Richard Kine from, you know, here and there. And then his wife said, no, I don't really ever see anyone. And then another friend of ours said, no, I don't really ever see anyone. And he said, yeah, but you're always looking at your phone. And then we looked around and all these people were walking down the streets in New York and they were all looking at their phone. And I said, oh, so it's not that you aren't seeing the celebrities because they're not out.

you're not seeing them because you're looking at Facebook or whatever, Instagram. Well, it's not just celebrities. It might be your own children. Your own kids, yeah. It might be your spouse, the person you're dating. Sure. It intrudes everywhere. I just thought the celebrity, because I thought, oh, I'm so lucky.

I see these interesting people out all the time, and I'll go up and say hi. And it's not that I have more opportunity. It's just that I'm. I don't know. The celebrities I know are glad you're looking at your phone. Yeah, I bet. Yeah. I'm the annoying one that's like, hey, I really like your.

show. Oh, God. Somebody knew who we are. We're over it. You mentioned that the more toddlers watch TV, the less they get along with others at school. And that sort of seems like the... Well, I guess when I wrote the book, it was TV now. It's that parents are giving toddlers their own devices that have funny cartoons, they have engaging things, they have stuff you want to watch. And so toddlers don't have face time in real life as much as they used to with their family, with their peers, with people. And that means that they're not picking up the sensibility of how to be socially intelligent. I saw a kid eating dinner with his father the other day. And my wife's due in five weeks, so I'm going to be a father for the first time.

Wonderful. Congratulations. Thank you. And I see these parents eating dinner with their kids, and I'm not judging them because I get the temptation for this, but the kid was watching some anime, some cartoons on his phone or an iPad or some sort of similar device, and the father was eating. And I thought, wow, what a wasted opportunity. Now, they could have been hanging out and talking all day. So I don't want to judge these two particular people. But it seemed like a wasted opportunity because the kid sitting there watching something

looking essentially at the wall on a small screen and his father was right there eating quietly alone. They might as well have been in different rooms. I heard a fellow who's on the team that designed the first iPhone for Apple. And he said, we were all 20-somethings. We're single. We tried to make it as seductive as we could. He said, now I have two kids, and I really regret it. Oh, no.

Wow. That's interesting. The concept of social autism, I think I, did you coin this? Or is this something that, now, this is something that's from the book. But iPods, smartphones, email, I'm wondering if it's worse than TV and what? what TV and radio did to people or if it's just another flavor of the same thing? Well, you know, with every new advance in technology, going back interestingly to writing,

I forget, was it Aristotle or Plato or Socrates, who wrote and wrote and write, who said, you know, the emergence of writing is going to be the death of memory. It used to be in those days they had people who would remember the miss. They would remember the lineage stories. They'd remember all the great stories of your culture. and they'd recite them because they had prodigious memories. And now that's disappeared and it's disappeared because of writing.

I don't know what's going to disappear because of the tech we have now, but I'm afraid it is going to diminish emotional and social intelligence in kids. Right. And that seems likely to happen because people are complaining about it already. And we haven't even seen the full effect of, I mean, the iPhone's been around for 10 years. So we haven't seen the full effect long term on adults. That's true. So today's children never knew a time when they couldn't pick up a device and lose themselves.

And by lose themselves, I mean it get absorbed in something other than what's happening right here in real time. There's a lot about emotions in social intelligence and your other work. And one thing that stuck out is fascinating was there's this blind guy who could somehow still see emotions. Can you tell me about this? And if you need a refresher, because it's been a while since you wrote a lot. the book. I'm happy to provide it. Yeah, provide it. Essentially, this person had damaged the visual cortex of his brain. Yes. And they thought, okay, he's, he's blind. He can't see anything because the eyes

can still take in, as you know, take in light and take in data. But if the visual cortex of your brain is broken, your vision doesn't work. Oh, he had blind sight? Right. It's something, like that. Yeah. So blindsight means that the visual, the message from from your visual sensory system doesn't go up to the cortex. That's the blindness part, but it does go to other parts of the brain. The emotional parts of the brain are subcortical. So you could get an emotional reading. You could also still hear. And voice carries a huge amount of emotional valence. I thought this was fascinating because, of course, you think, oh, well, if you're blind, it means your eyes don't work. And actually, that's not necessarily

the case for everybody who is blind. And in this guy's case, the, eyes were not damaged. It was the brain that was damaged. So I think in this particular experiment, the researchers were showing photos or images of people that were angry, sad, happy, and he could, they thought he could guess what they were, but he wasn't guessing. He was taking it the day. He was sensing it like we do. Right. But what he was picking up was the subcortical part of that information. Right. So we don't think, because when I look at a face that's happy, I think, well, I see teeth and I see the lips moving in a certain way, so that's a smile, that person's happy, but that's not necessarily really what's going on. Actually, that's not what

happens. What you're doing is explaining to yourself how you already know that person is happy. Right. I'm rationalizing it. You're rationalizing it, but your subcortical emotional centers picked it up immediately. So instantly, right? So I don't need to see the slow smile creep and go, oh, well, the teeth, the mouth, the eyes. It's just boom. I immediately sense this, whether or not I can see. Although you, as Paul Ekman, the expert on emotions, knows. you can educate those systems so that you can be more accurate. Really? I know that I took that, is it M-E-T-T-T, the micro-expressions training something?

Yeah, which is at Paul Ekman.com. Right, yeah. I took that and I took it a couple of times because I wanted to get 100, and I got 100 on it. And then I found out that that's actually, it's tricky to get 100 on it more than once, so I just kept taking it. But I think I've more gained the test after a while than learned it. You know, because if you take a test enough times, you get it. Yeah, you understand. Yeah, you see the examples again.

But either way, you can see that you're able to improve within hours of studying these micro- expression. Well, he says within minutes, 45 minutes. Oh, I believe that. Yeah. Maybe I'm slow. He didn't say you get 100. He said you do better than you did it at the start.

Yeah. I think a friend of mine took it with me. like in 86. However, there's a larger point here, which is that the emotional systems, emotional intelligence, being intelligent about emotions is a learned and learnable skill. And you can learn it in, we learn it in life. And if you haven't learned it, like I just started a coaching certification for people who are helping others in organizations and business executives or agencies, whatever,

be better at the parts of emotional intelligence, self-awareness, self-management, empathy, and relationship skills. All of those you can develop. You can get better. It's like growing a muscle. But you need to know how to do it. You need the right systematic learning. If the emotional brain, if the amygdala can see emotions in pictures, even if we're blind, that means that it can detect things even if our thinking brain doesn't, right? It does it all the time. So you have to realize, you know, there's that wonderful book, Thinking Fast and Slow by Anteconoman. Right. So the fast circuitry is the amygdala and everything subcortical, which in evolution was designed to help us survive. That's why it's fast.

The slower circuitry was this later accessory that was added on, the neocortex, the thinking brain, which takes time to figure it out, but probably comes up with a better answer, particularly when we're too impulsive. Ah, okay. So this, it takes data. Our cortex will take data from the amygdala and go, well, you're feeling this way and there's a different reason, or maybe this is an inaccurate perception, whereas the amygdala is kind of like the squirrel brain that says. I was in London the other day talking to about 600 therapists who specialize in treating trauma.

Trauma is a disorder of the amygdala. During the traumatic moment, the amygdala becomes overwhelmed, not. just the amygdala, but the whole network it's involved in. And it gets stuck in overdrive. So the amygdala's job is to detect whether we're safe or there's a threat. And in trauma, post-trauma, you start to see threat where there is none. And it triggers the whole system. So that happens instantly. And what they're trying to do is help people widen the gap between the emotional reaction and how you actually react, what you say and do. That's a definition of maturity is winding the gap between impulse and action.

Yeah, I remember struggling with that more when I was younger and I still do. So hopefully when I'm in 20 years, I should have a nice calm center of gravity. It seems, though, that the emotional brain, the amygdala can remember things and also be afraid of things even if those things are. So let's say if we have a memory of a fear, is that kind of what P.T. is. Are our amygdala remembers some kind of trauma or fear? Well, it's not just that it remembers. It's that it's searching for cues that say it's happening again. And it makes a lot of mistakes in people who've had trauma because it would

rather be safe than sorry. That's his decision rule. So if there's even something vaguely reminiscent, a smell, a tone of voice, it can trigger the whole reaction that you had originally. Yeah, I remember when I was a kid, this is my first experience with this. I was in the car going to soccer practice or something with my friend and his dad was driving. And there was a helicopter, totally normal. It's like a traffic hopper. And he goes, do you hear that? And we were like, yeah, the helicopter, but he had gone immediately gone back to Vietnam for just a second.

And then he came back and turned on the radio and turned it up a little bit. And you could tell that he had had something had happened with that helicopter it was close enough, whatever, lowered than usual, that had triggered something. I'd never seen anything like that before. And I remember my friend goes, yeah, my dad just sometimes does that. That's a sign of trauma. Yeah. Yeah, he definitely had some.

You know, I didn't even realize what that was probably until a decade later. I went, oh, that's, he's having a flashback or something like that. Yeah. So hypothetically, I can't talk about your dad, but people who had battlefield trauma in Vietnam and who did not, probably associated with helicopter sounds because helicopters were everywhere. Yeah. So today, the sound of a helicopter can cue the whole thing.

Right. It's not that you have a memory. It's that your amygdala puts you in the same state that you are in. Right, because that might be an advantage to survive. Survival. Exactly. The amygdala is a brain's radar for threat, and the reason that we have that whole network is to help us survive.

and in trauma, it's not just battlefield trauma. That's kind of the poster boy for trauma. But when I talk to these therapists, most of the people they treat were abused in childhood, emotionally, physically, or sexually. That's the most common. And by the way, they said about 25% of people have that kind of experience, about 1% of whom go into therapy.

Oh, so there's a ton of untreated trauma that's then re-triggered by, certain smells or sights or some other emotional memory, if you can call it that. Yeah, wow. Exactly. And it sheds a little bit of light on when people now, they say, oh, you're triggered or people say trigger warning. This is a bunch of wimps.

It sort of now scientifically makes a little bit of sense if somebody was. Well, in theory, it makes sense, but it could be a bunch of wimps. Well, sure. Yeah. I think it's probably 50-50 wimps. We don't know if people are invoking, oh, that was a microaggression. And, you know. Oh, that's a whole thing.

whole can of worms. Let's not go there. Yeah. But I just mean if someone says, hey. But there is a basis to it. Right. The basis for this. Yeah.

I just don't know if it's overgeneralized. The sound, the sight sound, smell thing really was interesting for me because the rats, these rats, for example, these researchers, I guess, somehow damaged or removed the auditory cortex of the rat's brains. And then they played a sound that they were playing when they were, I think, shocking the rats. theoretically the wretch should not have been able to hear the sound, and yet the amygdala could still hear the sounds. Well, I don't know what theory you're going by, Jordan, but there are really multiple sensory systems in the brain. Some of which go to the cortex, that's what we're aware of, and most of which go to the subcortical areas that we're not aware of.

So there's a kind of optical illusion in awareness, which is that we know everything we're aware of. The fact is we don't. 99% of what comes into the mind for information processing is processed out of awareness. And so it gives lots of room for the kinds of reactions that we're kind of surprised by because it's counterintuitive because of that optical illusion. Could we be, let's say, afraid of a certain type of person because of something that we're not consciously processing? Absolutely. Because I'm wondering, can we find racism in our amygdala? instead of we're just being a racist jerk, maybe like, oh, well, there's something that's being triggered.

Well, I don't know if you're familiar with the literature on unconscious bias, but it's about prejudice in people who feel, I'm not prejudiced. Right. But there are subtle tests that get at unconscious responses that show that, well, yes, you may be prejudiced and not be aware of it. And that's usually the case, right? It's the rule, not the exception. It's pretty normative, yeah. That's right. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Daniel Goldman.

We'll be right back. Thanks for listening and supporting the show. And to learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard from our amazing sponsors, visit Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. And don't forget, we have a worksheet for today's episode so you can make sure you solidify your understanding of the key takeaways from Daniel Goldman. That link is in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. If you'd like some tips on how to subscribe to the show,

just go to jordan harbinger.com slash subscribe. Subscribing to the show is absolutely free. It just means that you get all the latest episodes in your podcast player as they're released. So you don't miss a single thing from the show. Now back to our show with Daniel Goldman. So a lot of what we're hearing from you here and from your work might not even be brand new to the listener,

but that must feel good because you were kind of one of the pioneering works in this area. So now that some of this stuff is in the zeitguise and generally people are conscious of this, now you kind of see it everywhere, or we kind of see it everywhere. We're talking about that pre-show. Well, you know, for years I was at the New York Times as a science journalist, and my job was to spot what's coming, what's in the journals, but that people don't know yet, and announce it, you know, in the science section of the New York Times.

Sure. I'm kind of used to this phenomena where, oh, yeah, I was like one of the first to say that, but now everybody knows it. But that's great. That must be pretty nice to see your work going on. all over the place and being cited so many times you. Well, they don't necessarily cite my work, but it just becomes a meme. I remember, so take emotional intelligence, that was the name of an article that I read in 1990 in a

journal that was written by a guy who was an assistant professor at Yale. He's now the president of Yale, Peter Salovey. And I thought, wow, that is such a great term. However, that journal went defunct. No longer exists. but I did make the phrase well known in the book, Emotional Intelligence. And when I wrote the book, before it came out, I thought, you know, if I one day hear two people use the phrase emotional intelligence and they both know what it means, I'll have succeeded. In other words, I've created a meme.

Yeah. I mean, I think everyone knows what that means now. Yeah, wired a couple months ago ran an article saying, emotional intelligence is the new black. You have to have it. Yeah. Yeah. Even in my friend, Tank Sinatra, who's a big influencer on Instagram, he said to say that your work influenced his life significantly because you took an IQ test as a kid and it came up pretty poor. But then he took a different type of test that included what's going on in this picture with these two older? And he would make up all of these stories. And then so they said, hey, your son's not dumb. He's just really got a different kind of intelligence. Exactly. So instead of thinking he was dumb like he had used to, now he realized, oh, I have a different kind of intelligence.

And that was based upon your research. I'm happy to hear that. Yeah, he was pretty happy to hear that I was going to come and meet you today. Reflexive imitation. This is when we look at photos. We see someone's confused expression. You just gave me or a smile or sadness. And we reflexively imitate the emotion in the photograph.

What's going on here? Why do we as humans do this? What does this do for us? Right. So the social brain, which is relatively newly discovered, tells us that research, affective neuroscience, tells us that there are circuitry in the brain, which makes, helps us automatically sense what the other person feels to the point where we will mimic it. Probably mirror neurons, which are now famous, neurons, are prominent in that.

but there are other circuits as well. So we can mirror what we see, the particularly emotional expressions. Mirror neurons are very attuned to emotions. And there are other circuits that not only give us the same felt sense, but activate in us the same emotions as the person we're with is feeling. It almost sounds like self-help BS because it's so simple, where we look at someone's smile and we start to feel happy

because we're reflexively imitating what they're doing. It seems like something that I would assume evolve from apes because you hear and read and see them doing this all the time. What about when we try to fight that impulse? What happens when we try to suppress our emotions? Because if our emotions are contagious, and that's one of our elements of communication, what happens when we try to stifle that?

I would say our emotions are probably most contagious when we're in neutral, when we don't have some agenda, when we have a social agenda, like, I'm going to scam this guy, or I'm going to seduce this lady, or I'm going to, we have some goal. And then we start manipulating the emotions that can override that automatic resonance. Meaning if I'm trying to get you to feel happy, it's harder somehow, or it overrides what I would naturally do. If I'm talking with you with an agenda and I want you to feel relaxed, So I'm laying it on a little bit thick.

That overrides what you would naturally do. Maybe your gut instinct to be a little bit more careful. Actually, you know, it's interesting. When you get self-conscious about this, it tends to screw up what you're doing. So if you're trying to make me feel a certain way, I'm probably going to, at some level, pick up or he's trying. And it creates a little bit of distrust, which means that it's not going to work that well. Right. Right.

Okay. That makes sense. There's some other tell. And that's probably why people who have, who are sociopaths, for example, they're really good at manipulation because they don't have that thing in the back of their brain that says, you know what you're doing is wrong. Or maybe it doesn't work quite the same way. If I try to lie well, it's pretty transparent because I'm not that good at it. Some people are very good at it. Yeah.

Right. I just talked to a guy who is a very sophisticated investor. and he met with Bernie Madoff a week before Bernie Madoff was imprisoned. Wow. Bernie Madoff was still scamming away. And he thought that Bernie Madoff Spiel sounded pretty good. He was a very sophisticated guy. So Bernie, whom I've never met, I assume, was very skilled at a lot of these interpersonal arts.

We can't really, most of us, we really can't hide this very well. And there's a study in your book that says, look, if your blood pressure spikes because you're trying to suppress something or lie, other people's blood pressure will also raise. So it's very difficult unless you're just an expert in suppressing every other element of your physicality. Other people who are really attuned to what their body's doing are going to feel this. And I wondered about this in a dating or safety context because women will say, oh, this guy just gave me the creeps. And as men, we don't say that as often, probably because we're not as finely attuned to the safety concerns. But what I'm wondering is, when women, for example, or anyone feels this, are they possibly talking about the fact that their body's doing something that they can't quite articulate but is still setting off a fear response? I don't know, but I'd surmise.

You know, women are generally more empathic, mostly than men. Yes. And it may be, it's interesting what you say, it may be for an evolutionary reason. in that they've had to be better at guessing, is this guy scamming me? He's just trying to get me for a night, or is this like someone I could raise kids with? That's a very important question in evolution.

And I suspect it may make women more sensitive to discrepancies between what someone is seeming to say and what they're actually wanting. The circuitry for suspicion is what protects us. And Malcolm Gladwell writes a little bit about this in blink too, right? Where there's something going on. You see it. You can't articulate it. You get it in the first few seconds and then you can spend the next three years trying to figure out what it is and might not hit it. And this red flag that you wrote about, which are, well, I wrote that it's a red flag. I think you probably agree. These emotional mismatches, when somebody doesn't seem upset, about something upsetting, where the words don't match the emotions. Paul Ekman, who we mentioned earlier, says this is a lie indicator. And I'm wondering if there's any way, have you ever taught people how to use this? Or have you ever, what would you teach somebody about what to observe to use this? Paul Ekman teaches people how to detect lies.

He's taught intelligence agents, police forces, people who interrogate others for living because the fine-tuning that mechanism is very important for what they do. So I would say, I've never done it, but it clearly is teachable and learnable. Yeah. Yeah, I just wondered if there's something where you said, all right, kids, you know, you need to learn that when somebody is telling you something upsetting and they seem remarkably calm, there's something that's not quite right. Or if they seem overly excited in terms of their words, but they themselves are not,

there's something wrong there that you need to pay attention to. I agree with you, but I never said that. Never had to articulate it. As far as this is being used in practice, therapists tune into their own body to sync with their clients and understand them. And I was talking with Dr. Drew. Are you familiar with him? Dr. Drew Pinsky gives a lot of radio advice.

He's been on television a lot. He's a good friend of mine. But I asked him, what's your secret? Because what he will do, which is frankly amazing, someone will call in and say something like, like, well, I just can't find the right friends and, you know, I moved to a new place and I'm having trouble doing this and this and he'll go, uh, Sharon, how long have you been using heroin? And she'll go, how do you know? Oh, yeah. It's just really amazing. I mean, it just looks

uncanny. It looks supernatural. And you think, did he stage this phone call? What's going, but he does it over and over and over. It's, it's amazing. And I asked him, how the hell do you do that? And he said, I try to synchronize the way that I hear, when I hear the caller, I try to think, what, what does this person sitting like and doing with their body when they're talking this way and their energy level? And I don't mean that in a metaphysical way. I mean very literally their level of energy and the way that they're sitting and the way that they're talking and the way that they're asking me this question, the more similar

the physiological state one party is to another, the more easily these parties can sense each other's feelings. That's what you wrote. And it seems like that's what he's doing. That's what Dr. Drew is doing manually. I'm guessing it goes without saying that more empathetic people make better therapists. Is that what empathy is? Yeah, empathy is attuning to the other person's emotions without them telling you in words what those emotions are.

And it means picking up nonverbal signals, tone of voice, the implications. That sounds like he's very sensitive to tone of voice. It's only phone calls. Yeah, it's radio phone calls. He's not even seen the person. No. I mean, on his television shows, of course he is, but that's TV. The whole, I mean, TV's all fake.

Right. But on the radio, this was a radio show I grew up with called Loveline, and it was live. So he couldn't, there was no way for him to get much other information other than asking questions. And, of course, he's an addiction specialist. So a lot of the people that are calling in are not necessarily telling the whole truth about what he's asking in the first place. Oh, he's an addiction specialist. Right. You didn't tell me that.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, that's very important because what it's. means is he's had hours and hours of practice with people who are addicts and can pick up, as you said, tells from them that are specific to that particular pathology. Is this the same thing as synchrony? And you brought this up as well in your earlier work that mothers and children have this level of synchrony. Can you tell us what synchrony is and why this is important? Well, synchrony is a nonverbal attunement, which is a signament. Which is a

sign of resonance or connection or sympatico, real chemistry. And, for example,

people in rapport, there are three signs of rapport. One is full mutual attention. And the

second is a synchrony that arises from that. You'd pick it up if you took a video of two people

interacting or feeling the synchrony, and then you played it back and just watch the bodies.

It's as though they're choreographed. They're exquisitely attuned to each other. that's a sign of that synchrony.

And mothers and children have this, why? Why is it more than that way? Well, attuned mothers and children. Ah, okay. If the mother is self-absorbed, the mother is an alcoholic, the mother is on heroin, if the mother is in some way not able to be present to the child, they won't have it. But if the mother has that, and most mothers do naturally, then, um, that mother is what's called a secure base for the child.

Secure base means I know that if I'm with my mom, shall know what I feel, shall empathize, she'll tune in, she'll care, she'll protect me, she'll guide me. And people who have a secure base, developmental experts tell us, grow up most mentally healthy. That's the best way to start out in life. Is this something we can work on manually? Of course, if you're a mother, you can work on it with your child.

But is this something we can work on with our significant other, with our own kids? Is there a manual process that we can use for this? You know, there's no quick fix. Sure. What I recommend is paying full attention, being fully present to the other person, because everything else follows from there. There's a third ingredient of rapport. One is full attention, one is synchrony.

The third is it feels good. You know, oh, I had a great time with that person. It's because you got into that state with them. So work on trying to do that with as many people as possible? Would you say that that would be the homework for somebody who says, oh, I need that? You could just do it with one person. Yeah. You don't have to do it with many.

Yeah. But I think the point is to monitor yourself. I think it takes a certain level of self-awareness. Like, where is my attention going? Like right now. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Daniel Goldman. We'll be right back after this. Thank you for listening and supporting the show.

Your support of our advertisers keeps us on the air. To learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard so you can check out those amazing sponsors, visit Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. And don't forget that worksheet for today's episode. That link is in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. And if you're listening to us on the Overcast Player, please click that little star next to the episode. It really helps us out.

Now for the conclusion of our episode with Daniel Goldman. Pre-show. We're talking about mirror neuron. and how this is trendy right now. But there's also a lot of pop culture, pop science, BS around it. And you actually came in and said, look, these are multiple systems. It's not just kind of like there are some neurons

that have a mirror on the front and here we are. Yeah, well, mirror neurons got a lot of press early on, but affective neuroscience, or social neuroscience, really, the researchers who study this have realized that there are multiple, networks, circuitry in the brain that are designed to interface with the person in front of us and create this back channel where emotions pass and all kinds of information, the kinds of things you've mentioned before, pass automatically and unconsciously and instantly.

And that keeps interactions on the same page. People who have deficits in these circuits have trouble in interaction, and they have trouble with relationships. People who don't are more successful at them. Is it a biological deficit or is it, oh, your mother was not present so your mirror neuron systems didn't get enough heavy lifting early enough? Could be either because, you know, it's not just nature or nurture. It's both, nature and nurture.

So you have a genetic endowment, which means that in those circuits, the neurotransmitters that communicate along them have a set point at birth that determine in some range for you. But the good news is neuroplasticity, that all of this can be enhanced with practice. And that's good news for emotional intelligence and social intelligence.

This is why starting a coaching enterprise, because I now realize that there are a lot of people, particularly in the working world, where the competencies that build on these basic domains, self-awareness, self-management, empathy, relationship skills. There are about 12 competencies that come up over and over that organizations themselves

find, distinguish their star performers. And it turns out that the ingredients of them can be enhanced. It's like any other skill set. That, of course, makes sense. And I love the idea that our brains are bridging with one another kind of automatically. So there's emotional transference between parties. And there's more if you have good rapport and maybe less if you don't. I'd put it this way.

I'd say this circuitry gets us on the same page and an interaction. For example, you need to know instinctively, intuitively, and these circuits tell you when an interaction is ending. Oh, yeah. There's some people who don't pick that up. Right. Drive you crazy. They just keep talking and talking. They don't know.

It's like you give them every cue you can think of, and they're just oblivious. And that's a deficit in this. That's funny. That's like a Seinfeld sketch right there. Like, well, looking at my watch, backing away, and they're walking forward, and they're saying, well, it's been great seeing you. And they just keep going and going and going. Yeah.

And that's a deficiency in this circuitry. I am very, it's funny. It's funny this comes up now. I'm very, very cognizant of not inadvertently sending those signals. I was in a meeting earlier today, and I really wanted to know what time it was, but I didn't want to check my watch because that's one of those signals. So I took my watch off and put it on the table and had it faced me, and I thought, okay, that's, I'm getting away with this, you know. And but then you've got to turn your phone over because any little distraction. No, but then your eye goes to the watch.

And that's what the person picks up. Right. And that's a big guy up. Oh, you're looking at your watch. Right. And so they don't say you're looking at your watch. They just say that they know you're sending a cue that you want to end. Right.

Tough. Yeah, it is tough. It's tough because now me being infinitely distractible by little devices and things like that, I have to, when I'm with friends, take my phone, put it face down on the table so I can't feel it vibrate. I can't see a screen light up. Make sure my watch isn't getting pings from my phone because, you know, they vibrate now too.

Because otherwise, I will inadvertently tell the person that I'm with who I haven't in forever and that I'm loving every minute of chatting with, I'll be accidentally telling them nonverbly that I want to get the hell out of there every two minutes. And it can't feel good. It's a big problem in modern life. Yeah. And I feel like I'm especially guilty of it, although maybe we all are, just because I'm so sensitive to those little pings. I got a text from someone in their 20s, who I know. And he was astonished that I did not text back immediately. Oh, yeah. Are you mad at me? Yeah. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. But I'm not of the generation that texts back immediately. Sure. Yeah, I also, I have to force myself to not assume the worst if I don't

hear back from. We all have those friends that text back three days later. Well, do you realize what's happened in the last 10, 15 years? The norms for interaction and for attention have changed. They've shifted. It used to be, in fact, in 2007, Time magazine, which then was the big magazine, had a little script. It says, there's a new word in English language. It's a combination of puzzled and pissed off. It's how you feel when someone takes out their Blackberry and starts talking to someone else. In 2007, that was a breach of etiquette.

Now it's standard operating procedure. You know, nobody thinks twice about, oh, my phone's ringing. I'll pick it up and talk to them. The fact that they said Blackberry tells you something. Yeah, sure. Exactly. It's only gotten worse. But what's happened is that the norms have shifted without our noticing. So today, this young guy, young from my perspective, is affronted that I don't text them back.

And from my point of view, it's like, well, I get around to it. So that's just a generational difference. It's like email. So you look at texting like email where it's not urgent. It's just in your inbox. whereas I think people my age and maybe younger are, well, my age, it could be either or, but younger, certainly, it's more urgent than a phone call, which they would never make. So that's one indicator of a whole set of normative shifts that have happened,

which I think in total are giving predominance or priority to technology over people. And that's where I see a problem coming. Sure. Yeah, that's going to be. that can't be good. This is why I've become a big advocate of what's called social emotional learning, which is giving kids lessons in emotional intelligence in a developmentally appropriate way from age five or preschool until they go to university,

because one of the things that kids are challenged on now is tuning in to other people, is empathizing and is managing their own attention. Kids are more distracted than ever. And one of the things that I think is very helpful for them is learning cognitive control. Cogged control is the capacity to put your attention where you want it and ignore distractions. Oh, God, I don't have that. It turns out that it's the same circuitry that inhibits impulse, emotional impulse. So it's a two-fer.

So kids are clearer, more focused, and more calm, which is the best way for them to be in order to learn. It helps the school's mission and it helps the kids in life. It turns out they did a study in New Zealand of cognitive control. They assess kids between ages four and eight and track them down in their 30s. They found that cognitive control in childhood predicted your financial success, your health, better than IQ in childhood and better than the wealth of the family you grew up in. Is this the marshmallow test? The marshmallow test is one way of assessing cognitive control. control. They used the marshmallow test in the New Zealand study, but what they found was that

this ability is an independent dimension in life success. Think about it. Being able to pay attention to the thing that matters to me most right now and not be distracted. That's a challenged asset these days. And it's one that kids are just not learning because technology is systematically destroying it. So I think that we need to be more intentional about helping our kids with these abilities. The marshmallow test for people that don't know, this was essentially, they put a marshmallow in front of a little kid and they said, hey, if you eat it now, you eat it now. But if you wait until I get back from the other room, I have to make a phone call or whatever, I'll be back in five minutes. Then you can have two marshmallows. And some kids, they just sat there

and waited. Other kids ate it right away and other kids, and these are so funny. These kids, they'd come back and they were filming them, of course, and there'd be a kid who's looking down at the floor singing and they'd go, what are you doing? And he goes, well, if I don't look at the marshmallow, I won't be tempted to eat it. And they had these sort of coping strategies where they knew they wanted it and they knew they had that impulse and they were having trouble controlling it. But they came up probably in the moment with the equivalent of covering your ears and saying la, la, la, because they could distract their brain because they knew they wanted to do that. And then if you extrapolate that over 30 more years, you find that they're able to do that with investing,

spending money that they earn, relationships, people skills, fascinating. Well, in that study, those studies were done in Stanford in the preschool. They tracked the kids down 14 years later when they're about to graduate high school, and they found the kids who waited compared to the ones who gobbled it on the spot had a 210-point advantage on their SAT out of 1400. So that's a lot. Which is, I told those are the people at Princeton that make up the SAT. They were astounded. They said, that's bigger than the difference we see between kids whose parents had only elementary school education and kids where a parent has an advanced degree. He said it was stunning. And these were all the children of kids, you know, people at Stanford, graduate students and faculty. That's amazing. How do we get our kids to be, to go for the two marshmallows instead of the one? That's the question. What you do is you say, finish your kids.

your homework before you get your Xbox out. And you enforce that. You delay, you help them delay gratification. Yeah. Yeah. And you reinforce it. That makes sense. It sounds so simple and yet here we are, right?

Well, it's so tempting to just, you know, your kid is bugging you and just, you say, oh, look at, you know, watch cartoons on this iPhone. Yeah. So we have to do it to ourselves, too. Oh, yeah. I'm worried about it because I've got a lead by example and it's not going to be easy, right? You know, eat your green beans and pay attention and read your book. But, Dad, you're on your phone. Okay, you got me there.

You know, you're playing Xbox, Dad. So you start with self-awareness. Right. Oh, man. This is a fascinating subject for me. Why does conversation online degenerate to vitriol and sex right away and violence and things like that? We see this. Your hypothesis, or maybe this was something that you had picked out that's actually settled

science, I don't know. We're not getting feedback from the other person's face and emotions, so we're not calibrating our behavior. It's called cyber disinhibition. Ooh, I like that. And it happens because the brain is designed, remember, for face-to-face interaction. That's how evolution saw it. Cyber disinhibition. But when we go cyber, when we're online, we don't see the other person. In fact, all we do is we may be typing something. And when you type something and you have no feedback loop, there's no inhibition to the amygdala and to the emotional impulse circuitry. So you will do or say things online that you would never do or say face to face. The reason being face to face, you get those continual signals.

Like, don't say that, don't do that. It's going to screw up the interaction. And I feel this happened almost in real time, although probably not quick enough. If I'm talking with you, for example, we were talking, I think, before the show and you said something like, well, this is just kind of a bunch of bullshit. Well, if that was, if we were saying that about, let's say, Dave's idea, and then we noticed Dave Wince, we would probably then soften it. That's one of those signals, of course. We would say, oh, well, you know, but maybe it's not bullshit.

Maybe I just don't understand it. But if you're typing online, you just double down. Not only is it bullshit, but the person who invented this is an idiot. The reason is that you're being driven by your own amygdala and all of those emotion circuits and there's no prefrontal cortex getting other signals saying, hey, cool it, you know, you're going to screw up the relationship. So you do, it's called an amygdala hijack. You do or say something that you regret later. That sounds very, very familiar. We all do it. The story of my life. Yeah. There's a couple different layers of this, right? There's social awareness of what we sense about

others and then social facility, which seems like it builds on the social awareness, right? It's what we do with the info that we sense. And people who are really good with that tend to be more successful in business and in social situations. What about people who are really bad at it? There's all these sort of folks that seem to... Yeah. Last week, I was talking to the deans of admissions of the Ivy Leagues, but also Stanford

in MIT. And the director of admissions at MIT said, what do we do with people who are basically on the spectrum, who are brilliant, amazing, coding, systems, thinking, whatever, but very awkward with people. And what I said was, well, you know, they'll have brilliant careers, but they'll be different kinds of careers. They won't be team leaders. They won't be rise in the executive ranks as leaders. But they'll be fantastic as individual contributors. And that's a way of letting people excel according to their talent profile. And I really believe in that. I think it's important because I think in many ways, people on the autism spectrum, they have almost,

I would love to reframe autism as almost a superpower for individual contributions some of the time, because I think it gets people often who are on the spectrum, they'll write in pretty discouraged because they feel defective. and yet we see tremendous contributions from people who are. And of course, they can be highly effective. Yes. And this is, I think, a problem in our society is that we judge people according to criterion, which may not be apt. You said you didn't do so well on tests, so you felt when you became a lawyer that your strategy of working very hard in college wasn't going to work because those people were also smart as hell and worked over. Right. It was just, yeah, my competitive advantages were gone.

But then emotional intelligence comes along as a concept. You see, oh, there's this whole other human skill set that's really valuable. And I think people who are fantastic at understanding systems or at coding or some other talent should feel really good about that. Because they're outstanding in their domain of excellence. And the rest of it is just something to adjust to. And we all have that. We all have a profile of strengths and weaknesses across the range of emotional intelligence, for example. And we adjust to it.

You find it something that, if you're lucky, that lets you take advantage of your strengths. People who have a high level of social awareness and also a high level of social facility have a lot of what you term mind sight or a strong ability to exercise or utilize mind site, which is peering inside someone else's mind to deduce their thoughts. which sounds a lot like mind reading, but I think what we're talking about here is, oh, well, Dave felt sad when we said that his ideas were BS, and so now he's affected by this. We're looking at face, voice, eyes, but if you lack this, your mind blind, and how common is this? Well, since I wrote those books, maybe in social intelligence, I've seen research from, from University of Chicago that identifies three different kinds of empathy, one of which is what you're talking about. It's cognitive empathy. It's understanding how the other person thinks, understanding their perspective, understanding how they see the world, understanding technically the mental models that they use to divide the world and so on. And once you have that, you can be very effective in communicating with them. You know how to put something so I'll understand it. A separate kind of empathy, which actually, It has to do with social brain. The first has to do with the neocortex is emotional empathy.

You know how they're feeling. You pick it up because you feel it yourself. You feel it instantly. And that creates, makes it easier to have rapport. It's very important to the helping professions in sales and a lot of situations. And then the third kind is empathic concern. Empathic concern is based in the mammalian caretaking circuitry. And it means that I not only know how you think and how you feel, but I actually care about you.

It's a parent's love for a child, but you have to see how that morphs into other relationships, like friends who really care about each other or a couple or a parent or at work, you know, co-workers with each other or a boss. And so the bosses we love as opposed to the bosses we hate are people who have this ability. We hear about the dark triad and people misusing this type of emotional facility. Talk about this a little bit. We've talked about this on the show, Joe Navarro, Gavin DeBacker. I don't know if these names ring a bell, but they study things like fear and manipulation. Yeah.

So the dark triad is Machiavellianism, sociopathy, and I forget what the third is. You must know. I don't actually. Shoot, I had it written down earlier and it's gone. Anyway, it's people who are manipulative. And what it means is they can be very good at the first two kinds of empathy and don't have the third. They don't care about you at all. They just care about what they can get from you and how they can manipulate you.

And they may be very successful in the workplace. You know, there's a pattern called kiss up, kickdown, where the people who have power over you, you're very charming. to and the people who you don't give a damn about, you're really not charming. I don't know people hate you. But you can get ahead because the people who will make decisions about promoting you think you're great. And that's just one form of the dark triad takes. And the inoculation against it is empathic concern.

And let me say more. I've gotten very interested recently in purpose and meaning, sense of values, ethics. And I'd say that people who are in the dark triad, spectrum, if you will, don't have any of that. They don't care. They only care about themselves. This makes sense. I was going to guess that it was narcissism and it totally is. Narcissism, yeah. Right. It seems so obvious. I didn't even bring it up. Narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism. Yes, exactly. So Machiavellianism, I think psychopathy people know narcissism is so overused. Maybe people know even less.

The big defect in narcissists is that they lack empathy. They actually don't care about other people. They can pick up the signals they need to, but they don't have the well-being of the other person in mind. And people who are firmly in the dark triad, they're studying emotions to use people, to manipulate people. Exactly. And I feel like this is the other side of this other coin. Going back to the autism thing, autism, by the way, not dark triad, just to be very clear here. Thank you. I don't want people to be able to be. be upset. But when you see a lot of people who listen to the show in the past, I've gotten, you know, hundreds or thousands of letters from people that say, hey, I have Asperger's

and I listen to your show a lot because I have to manually learn emotional cues. And by the way, that's the helpful workaround for people who don't pick it up naturally, is to learn, well, I should look the person in the eye. Right. I should shake the hand firmly. In other words, you need to be more intentional about social interaction than most people do. And I feel bad because they, I've got a cousin who's on the autism spectrum. His father, my cousin often has to say, hey, don't stand in front of me when I'm talking and you're talking because you're blocking me out. And it must be so much information to remember.

I mean, think about this. If I'm looking at you because I know that's polite and there's somebody next to me and I have to remember not to put my hand up in front of their face and lean in front of them, while talking and holding a conversation, it just seems like you're juggling everything that you would normally keep in your pocket. And usually the subcortical brain does all of that while without our having to think about it.

Right. Imagine if you have to think about it. That's what I'm saying. Yeah, it's a big, it's a lot of things to keep track. It's like instead of carrying everything you have in a backpack and walking around New York, you've got to keep everything in your hands and in order to use your phone, you're literally juggling things.

It's as though, you know, No, there's a little miracle going on right now, and it's this. The sentences we're speaking contain and are ruled by and directed by syntactic rules, which we couldn't even enunciate or articulate if we're forced to, nor could we say before we started out on a sentence, what words are we going to string together in that sentence? Sure. That's the same kind of miracle.

If we had to keep track of that, you know, it would be, we couldn't even speak. It would be impossible. One thing that my cousin can't do is understand or process sarcasm. And you wrote about sarcasm, and it really lit this up for me because sarcasm is so nuanced. And I've lived abroad a lot, and a lot of people from other countries who is English as a second language, they just don't really get the sarcastic jokes that people are making in English because there's so much going on with sarcasm. Are you able to explain the brain activity? what's going on here because not really none not anymore it's been a minute i think the idea from the book was that i can say oh yeah i really want some coffee at nine p.m and somebody who doesn't

process sarcasm will go and if they're really nice make me a nice steaming cup of coffee at nine p.m and i'm thinking what the heck are you doing because he didn't pick up tone of voice right the tone of voice the fact that nobody wants caffeine that late because it's bad for you and the way I'm indicating that was the tonality that I was saying it in, maybe even the speed, the cadence, everything. All that has to be processed manually by somebody who is maybe has Asperger's. I give talks around the world, and I found the jokes that work here do not work in other calls. Oh, yeah.

Brutal. And you find that out when you're on stage and nobody laughs. Exactly. And you go, hmm. I have a friend. who was giving a lecture in Japan, and he was going around giving the same lecture in different places. And he had these jokes that he had used successfully in the States,

and nobody would laugh in Japan. And he asked his translator about it, and then the next time everybody laughed his jokes. And he said, why are laughing? Translator said, oh, I told them now you should laugh. Hey, look, I think that's a great idea. Hey, they're supposed to laugh at the following points of my talk. And at the end, they're supposed to stand up and clap for five straight minutes.

In the old days with the studio audience, you know, they'd have a sign. Applaud laugh. Yeah, applaud, laugh track. And if they didn't get enough laughs, they had a pre-recorded set. Yeah. I found it fascinating that partners, romantic partners, people that live together, start to look like each other. And I always thought that was BS. But the way you explain it makes a lot of sense, which is that since we have synchronicity,

we have good rapport with each other. we start to synchronize, which means we're using the same emotions, which since emotions are culturally anyway, maybe a little dependent, but we're using the same facial muscles. We're using them often at the same time, often in the same amount, because we're spending so much time with them. So we're watching the same funny thing together and laughing the same amount because that's how you keep rapport and build rapport. So we actually develop similar facial wrinkles and lines.

That is fascinating. And I think you should say how they figured that out. How did they figure that out? where they had people match pictures, male and female. Isn't that right? I think I'm remembering. I can't remember, actually. And so it turned out that people who didn't know any of the people they were evaluating were able to match couples because of this.

Oh, so you say who's this person's partner and they just find somebody who looks in. That's incredible. You know what? I'm not 100%. Yeah, we'll have to look that up. Let's cut that out. Yeah. No, we can just leave it in it.

Hey, if that's BS, let us know. Somewhere there's a researcher working on this right now that's listening to this, and they'll let us know. Now, if we can find out why people start to look like their pets, I'll be really impressed. I don't think that's the same thing. I don't think it's the same concept. Might be. Might be. Never know.

Why do we think more clearly when we're in a good mood? When we're in a bad mood, what's happening is our amygdala and the related salience network is saying to us, hey, there's something important that you should be thinking about or paying attention to. So it diminishes the range of bandwidth of attention for everything else. The point of emotions in evolution, its thought, is to make us pay attention to what's important right now. So if you're in a good mood, actually from a neural point of view, a good mood is the absence of negative emotion. That's what a good mood looks like. the brain.

Okay. And so if you have a negative motion, I'm really anxious, I'm really angry. It kidnaps your attention. This, that actually makes a lot of sense because that's why things that inhibit areas of our brain tend to make us feel good, right? Like alcohol and marijuana, because they're turning off the areas of the brain that might have the negative, or turning down the areas that might be negative emotion. This is something a little surprising.

There is a feel-good network in the brain, the dopamine chicketry. But if you look at people in different moods with an MRI, it's the absence of negative emotions that people will tell you they're in the best mood. I read it when I was reading about this in the book, I remember going, huh, okay, I think I had to go to the dentist right after that. and I thought, well, I'm going to make damn sure to joke around and hang out a little bit before the treatment because I want them in a good mood so that they're thinking clearly if they're going to start drilling around in my teeth. And I think that's a good practical to have. Oh, you're going in for surgery? Make sure your doctor likes you. Make sure they associate you with a positive experience.

Well, you know, it works the other way. There's a famous study. It was in the Journal of American Medical Association about doctors who were sued. and doctors who aren't. Right, right. It turned out that the ones who are not sued weren't any more adept at medicine. They made the same number of errors and so on,

but they had better relationships. They joked around with their patients. They had rapport. They took time to be sure they answered all their questions. And the other doctors didn't. And those were the ones who didn't joke around and so on or the ones that got sued. That I think is, that makes perfect sense, right?

Nobody wants to sue somebody that they like, but maybe it goes a little deeper than that. I think it may not. Yeah, it may not. Maybe it's that simple. In which case, it's the easiest practical of the whole show, which is, hey, spend five minutes making sure. Well, what they found was it took about two and a half or three and a half minutes

more for doctors to establish that rapport, but it was certainly worth it. They also got better compliance. Patients would actually take their meds. They would do what the doctor told them. Yeah. Wow, brilliant. Oh, man, I love that. there are different domains of EQ or emotional intelligence, right?

So being aware of one's emotions, self-awareness, we talked about that a little bit, managing emotions, appropriate emotions for context. Beyond that, though, motivating oneself, self-control. Well, actually, lately I've been folding motivation into self-management. I think it's a version of, yeah, achieving your goals, you know, growth mindset, all of that. Those are ways to manage yourself. That makes sense, yeah. And then those are the kind of things that we talk about primarily here on the show. And then, of course, last but not least, recognizing emotions in others or empathy.

And that might be the hardest one for a lot of folks. Maybe, but maybe not. There's some really interesting research on this in the workplace. And it turns out that on most tests of emotional intelligence, and there are many now, women as a group tend to do better than men on empathy, except among top 10% performers. There are no gender differences. Men, by the way, tend to be better at managing upsets and so on than women in many tests. And that disappears too.

So the men are as empathic as the women. The women are as steady and centered as the men. That is surprising because it goes against the gender stereotypes that we're so used to, especially here in North America. Well, to me it says that it just underscores the fact that these are learned and learnable skills. You can learn to be more empathic. You can learn to manage your upsets better. If we're able to educate ourselves and our brains and have plasticity when it comes to that,

that brings your earlier point, which is that temperament is not destiny. So naturally anxious or shy people can train their brain. We know that for fact. Right. And this is why I'm trying to get programs in emotional intelligence into schools. And by the way, it's taken off. It's actually a good. It's about time, right?

I think it's past time. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I think that these skills, you even mentioned in your work as well that there are, there's evidence that people who have better social skills are better able to handle things like, anger, of course, and violent crime tends to go down. Abuse patterns can get broken. Social intelligence, social skills. We could actually correct a significant portion of societal ills by giving people skills that they might not have developed because of their upbringing. There was a meta-analysis of these school programs about more than a quarter of a million students, some with the programs, some without, and found that all anti-social behavior, decreased. Violence in schools, bullying, you know, dropping out, substance abuse, all of them went down. Pro-social behavior, I like school. I feel someone there cares about me. I enjoy going

to school. I'm not going to cut class. And academic achievement scores went up by 11%. So it's a situation where if you give the kids the skill to manage, for example, bull, I'll tell you a story, New Haven, Connecticut, middle school, these 12-year-old boys are going to gym class, and the three kids, the kid in front is this pudgy kid, not very athletic. The other two are jocks, and the jocks are making fun of the kid, the pudgy kid. And one of them says to the kid in a very sarcastic tone of voice, ugh, so you think you're going to play soccer, like dripping with disgust. And the pudgy kid stops, takes a breath, turns around, this could easily turn into a fight in school. And he says to him, yeah, I'm going to try to play soccer, but I'm not nearly as good as you are. What I'm good at is art. Show me anything I can draw it really well. Someday, I like to be as good as you are at soccer. And at that, that kid who was just putting down, comes up, puts his arm around him and says, oh, you're not so bad. I'll show you a thing or two. That was called a put-up. That kid learned it in social emotional learning. They call it social development there. And he learned.

learned it as a strategy for handling a tense situation. So kids love this stuff because it helps them get along with their peers. And, you know, kids after age 5, 6, 7, stop caring so much about their family and care everything about the other kids. Sure. Their friendships. So anything that's going to help kids with the melodramas of childhood, which always involve other kids. Sure. is going to help them through life. And that's what they're finding.

I feel like I've used a lot of these put-ups through my whole life to survive certain situations when I was doing security or working with intelligence stuff or government or even just at work going, uh-oh, this person who's in a higher position than me feels threatened. I need to lower my status in their eyes in a way that's not so low that he views me as pathetic or not useful, but also mitigates the threat. And then he wants to help me. there's all this kind of social chess happening, but it doesn't have to be that complex. But the earlier you learn this as a kid, the better off you'll probably be as an adult. The formula for put-up is simple. You say something positive about the other person that you believe

and something positive about yourself. That's all it is. And it sounds like something only kids would use, and yet it's something adults need to be. I think it changes any social chemistry. Yeah, absolutely. Daniel, thank you. This has been incredibly interesting. I really, really appreciate it. Quite a pleasure. Thank you, Jordan. Great big thank you to Daniel Goldman. We'll be linking to his books in the show notes. Of course, his most famous work is probably still emotional intelligence.

That's just the seminal work on the fact that it's not all about IQ, which now seems like common sense. You know, everybody kind of knows that, Jason, but it's not, back then it was what? There's a whole other set of people skills, and it turns out people who are good at these go further in life than people who can just do math really well or have good cognitive abilities. Who knew? Now it's like, oh, yeah, now it's, if you're not aware of that, it's like, were you born under a rock? I mean, this really did turn everything upside down. Before that, people's skills were like sort of this unquantifiable mystery. They're still unquantifiable in many ways. They're just not as much of a mystery.

People are paying attention to that stuff now. But when this book came out, it was like, holy cow, there's a whole thing where people aren't just weirdos that look at a calculator all day. You know, it's very, very interesting how this shook up not only the self-help industry, but business, science, research. I mean, it really was a turning point. We're going to look back at this book, and it's going to be around for 50 more years, at least. On that note, we're teaching you how to connect with great people

and manage relationships using systems and tiny habits, speaking of people skills, over at our six-minute networking course, which is free, Jordan Harbinger.com slash course, and I know you'll do it later, right? But the problem with kicking the can down the road is that you can't make up for lost time when it comes to relationships, when it comes to networking, The number one mistake I see people make is postponing this and not digging the well before you get thirsty.

Once you need relationships, you are far too late to make them. Ever gotten a call from somebody? Hey, old buddy, old friend, I need you to join my MLM. Yeah, we know how that feels. Don't be that guy. These drills are designed to take a few minutes per day. This is the stuff I wish I knew decades ago. This is not fluff.

This is crucial. And you can find it all for free at jordanharbinger.com slash course. And by the way, most of the guests here on the show, they subscribe to the course, they've done it, they're doing the newsletter, come join us, we'd love to have you. And speaking of building relationships, tell me your number one takeaway here from Daniel Goldman. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram, and there's a video of this interview on our YouTube at Jordan Harbinger.com slash YouTube. I read everything, especially reviews that I see on Apple Podcast. So if you'd like to help other people find a good show, in my humble opinion, go to Jordan Harbinger.com slash subscribe. and we'll show you how it's done.

This show is produced in association with podcast one, and this episode was co-produced by Jason DePhilippo and Jen Harbinger. Show notes and worksheets by Robert Fogarty, music by Evan Viola, and I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Our advice and opinions, and those of our guests are their own.

Do your own research before implementing anything you hear on the show. And remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful, and I hope that's in every single episode. So please share the show, with those you love and even those you don't. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you listen,

and we'll see you next time. This episode is sponsored in part by Something You Should Know podcast. Finding a new great podcast shouldn't be this hard, so let me save you some time. If you like the Jordan Harbinger show, you'll probably like something you should know with Mike Carruthers. It's one of those shows that makes you smarter in a practical, useful way. Same curiosity vibe we go for here, just in a fast-focused format. Mike brings on top experts and asks the exact questions that you should. want to ask, and the topics are all over the place in the best way. Recently, they've covered

things like why we care so much what other people think, the benefits of laughter, why sports fans get so invested, and what makes people like you or not. The through line is always the same. Smart ideas you can actually use in real life. Something you should know has been featured in Apple's shows we love, and it's got thousands of five-star reviews because it's consistently interesting. So if you want another show that scratches that I want to understand how people in the world really work, Itch, search for something you should know wherever you get your podcasts. Look for the bright yellow light bulb and start listening. You can thank me later.