The Rich Roll Podcast - Jordan Harbinger On The Art of Communication

Episode Date: May 26, 2017

In all honesty, I don't put that much thought into how I communicate. Jordan Harbinger thinks that's a mistake. Because the signals all of us routinely emit — verbally, physically and often quite subtly — have a profound impact on how we feel about ourselves, how we are perceived by others, and how we navigate the world. Indeed, the social cues most employ by habit, and without conscious awareness, fundamentally forge our entire human experience, more often than not leading us astray from the relationships, career, goals, and reality we desire. The good news? Social acumen is entirely teachable. To be sure, it's an inside job. And that job is hard. But by committing to that work and embracing certain scientifically proven practices and strategies, we can indeed dramatically improve our communication skills and thus positively impact our ability to relate to and with others. Over time, the result is enhanced connection, self-esteem, empathy, authenticity and influence, all of which translate into an enhanced quality of life and an expanded sense of personal fulfillment. Today Jordan joins the podcast to share his experience. A former Wall Street lawyer turned entrepreneur, public speaker and expert in social dynamics, Jordan is the creator and host of the popular Art of Charm podcast. Celebrating its 10th year with over 600 episodes, Art of Charm has been rated one of the top 50 podcast on iTunes and currently receives an amazing 2.5 million downloads per month. Jordan is also the co-founder and owner of a coaching and consulting firm of the same name. Through his Art of Charm bootcamps and training programs, Jordan and his team counsel executives, employees, athletes, soldiers and every day people on the social, psychological, scientific and philosophical skills required to positively transform your career and life. A bit of a disclaimer: despite very much enjoying my experience guesting on Jordan's show back in 2015, I wasn't sure Jordan was the best fit for this show. The idea of exploring how to teach charm just didn't sit all that well with me. It doesn't feel authentic. But in fairness to Jordan, I think his website, podcast and services are inaccurately named. In truth, Jordan's message is much more about the human psychology behind what holds us back — and the journey required to overcome the habits that block us from becoming the best versions of who we really are. And that, my friends, is a subject I deem worthy of exploring. I sincerely hope you enjoy the exchange. Peace + Plants, Rich

The problem that you think you're having or the issue that you think you're struggling with is almost never actually that. You have to go through almost like a testing process to eliminate other variables. Because that thing you think you need to learn, getting to the top and networking and all that stuff, is totally not the problem at all. Most people are focusing on the wrong things. They're thinking, oh man, in order to get the type of people I want in my life or in order to get the type of business for my real estate company, I've got to become like this person I saw on TV or like this person I saw on the internet. And it's just not true. You have to focus on your own strengths. And most people are either not cognizant of all of those strengths, have no plan to work on those if they do, or are so distracted by what

they think other people's strengths are that they never actually work on developing or discovering their own. That's Jordan Harbinger, and this is The Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody. How you guys doing? My name is Rich Roll. I am your host. Welcome to my podcast, the show where each week or often multiple times a week, as in the case of today's show, I sit down and converse long form with some of the best, brightest, most thought-provoking, paradigm-breaking minds across all categories of health, wellness, diet, nutrition, fitness, creativity, entrepreneurship, entertainment, you get the picture, all with the idea of helping provide you, the listener, with the tools required to access, unlock, and unleash your best, most authentic self.

access, unlock, and unleash your best, most authentic self. Today, I sit down with a guy called Jordan Harbinger. Jordan is a former Wall Street lawyer turned podcast host. That sounds familiar. He is the creator and host of the wildly popular Art of Charm podcast. He's also an entrepreneur, a public speaker, and an expert in social dynamics. But actually, Jordan's been at this podcasting game a lot longer than I have, for over a decade at this point, which is amazing. His show, The Art of Charm, which is also the name of the consulting and coaching firm that he co-founded and owns, has been rated one of the top 50 podcasts on iTunes. It currently gets about two and a half million downloads per month, a lot more downloads than I get, and is continuing to rapidly grow with over 600 episodes. His company is one of the best and most sought after consulting firms in the world,

basically training executives and workforces and individuals and people in the military on a variety of social skills to maximize productivity, employee satisfaction, and the like. I was a guest on Jordan's show a while back in 2015. That was episode 366. I'll put a link to that in the show notes if you want to check that out. And I got a couple more prefatory things I want to say about Jordan before we launch another conversation, but first. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time.

It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming

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former patients to help you decide. Whether you're a busy exec, a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself, I feel you. I empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life and recovery is wonderful. And recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. Okay, before we launch into Jordan and the podcast, I wanted to pause for a minute and take the opportunity to read you guys a letter that I got from a fan. Now, listen, I get tons of letters from all you guys out there, hundreds and hundreds, and I just, I can't express to you how much they mean to me. I'm not always

able to get back to everybody and I apologize for that, but I do read all of them and they mean more to me than you can possibly imagine. And I thought it would be cool to read one of these to you guys. It's something I've done before on the podcast on occasion, not often, but I think it's nice to kind of reflect back the messages that I'm trying to put out into the world and really connect with the impact that they're having on individuals out there. So let's just get into it. This is a letter that came from somebody named Adithi. She is writing on behalf of her friend, Siobhan.

And it goes like this. Siobhan is a big fan of Rich, and therefore, in and of itself, he would be doing me a huge favor in dedicating a copy of his book to her. That said, she is an extraordinary person in her own right and somebody who embodies his values and philosophy of living. Three years ago, Siobhan, she goes by Sib, was dealing with the end of her marriage. One path to reclaiming agency in her life was through exercise. Despite never having trained before, she demonstrated the grit and perseverance she shows in so many other areas of her life and literally made herself into an athlete. Last year, 2016, she did 10 Spartan

races. And this year she plans to do four Ironman triathlons. It's an incredible transformation. And you can tell why Rich is one of her load stars. To be clear, Sib is not a glory seeker. Exercise and nutritional changes have taught her that strength has many meanings. She grew up being praised for her ability to weather difficult people and situations. And today I see her discovering the value of not only physical, but emotional and psychological strength. Constantly pushing her physical endurance has forced her to pay attention to her inner life and come to terms with very old beliefs and traumas. Training creates a space that she never had before to contemplate and engage with her

much deeper self. As a result, she has become a more mature seeker of meaning in life rather than just seeking experience. And that is quite a crucial difference. Along the way, she avidly follows everything Rich does and tells everyone about it. Thank you for that. I really think he is a personal hero of hers it's very kind of you to say i realize that what i've described may be common to many of rich's fans but i can only speak to what i've witnessed where i see parallels and where i think sib has been empowered by rich's

podcasts and writings are in her generosity of spirit towards others and her constant striving. She is one of the warmest and big-hearted people I know. I thought having a word of encouragement from someone she admires so much would go a long way in rewarding and motivating her. So thanks for considering this. Okay. So, you know, wow. I mean, how amazing is that? It's just awesome to receive letters like that. And it's the why behind what I do. This is what it's all about for me. You know, the podcast isn't just about diet and nutrition and fitness. It's about helping people like Sib find a holistic pathway forward, a true north to continue to grow and progress and evolve. And I'm really impressed

with the changes that she has made. And Sib, if you're listening to this, congratulations. It's really amazing. And I look forward to following your journey and please keep me posted on how these four Ironmans pan out and more importantly, how you continue to progress and grow emotionally, spiritually, and psychologically. It's a gift to be able to share a story like that. And it's a gift to be able to do what I do. And to know that it's having that kind of impact on people out there means more to me than you can possibly imagine. And if Sib's story stands for anything, it's that that kind of transformation is not only possible, it's plausible, it's completely doable for any of you out there

who are listening, who feel stuck, who feel like they can't find the way forward. Latch onto her story, find hope and inspiration on that, in that, and start to make changes in your life that are going to reset your trajectory, get you thinking and acting and behaving in a new and more productive way that serves your best interest, your best, most authentic, highest self, for lack of a better term. Okay, Jordan Harbinger. So I got to tell you guys a bit of a disclaimer here. I'm going to admit to a little bit of trepidation about having Jordan on. I was a bit skeptical to hear somebody tell me that there is a way to learn how to be more, quote unquote, charming. I mean, this podcast is called The Art of Charm, and that's not really a genre that I'm super interested in.

And I think it's fair to say that this conversation might not be for everybody. But also, I want you guys to give it a shot. Give it a chance. Because I think that his podcast is misnamed, mislabeled. It's really about a lot more than that. And he does have a lot of experience and interesting thoughts on human psychology. And that's something I'm definitely intrigued by. You know, what motivates people to behave the way they do?

How can this be changed and improved? behave the way they do? How can this be changed and improved? Because I think we all have blind spots and weaknesses in our demeanor, in our behavior, in our interpersonal communication. And I think Jordan has a really valuable and valid perspective on this. And I think it's worth sharing. So with that said, I give you Jordan Harbinger. Thanks for having me over to your home-baked studio here in Los Angeles. Thanks for coming, man. This is like a real studio. You got like soundproofing in this room and all kinds of stuff. Soundproofing is a generous term for the sleeping bag that is, I believe, nailed to the wall behind you.

But yeah, the rest of it is soundproofing. But you live in the Bay Area, right? I do, yeah. Yeah, and we have a friend in common who's your neighbor. Yeah, my neighbor right directly across from me was like, hey, you know this guy Rich Roll? And I thought, what a weird collision of worlds. That is weird.

But it does make sense because he's got a bike company and he's into fitness and he's all on top of it. But it shows that you get, you get around rich. That's right. Julian Franco. I was riding his Franco bike this morning as a matter of fact. So yeah, I love, uh, I love his company. Shout out Julian.

If you're listening. Yeah. And if you're not now, you're now you have to. Yeah. Um, cool, man. So we've talked on the phone a bunch of times and, you know, I've kind of followed your path for a little while, but today was the first day that we met. That's right. Which is weird because I know what you look like and you probably know what I look like.

Well, we have, and we also have a lot of, there's a lot of sort of parallels on our path. Besides our mutual neighbor friends. That's right. Both from Michigan, right? You're from Michigan? Oh, yeah. Where are you from in Michigan? Well, I lived there until I was seven.

We moved away. But my whole family and extended family is Michigan, our Michigan people. Everybody went to University of Michigan. Yeah, me too. Southeast, okay. Southeast Michigan, University of Michigan, then University of Michigan Law School. We became lawyers, both of us. Now we both do shows instead of being lawyers.

Do podcasting, recovering lawyers. It's crazy. My dad went to University of Michigan Law School. What years, I assume? He graduated, let's see. I think he graduated from law school in 64. Okay. Slightly before I was even born.

So I'm a little bit unattending. Yeah, right. Both recovering corporate lawyers. Where did you practice? Thatcher, Profit & Wood on Wall Street, which doesn't exist anymore because of the whole 2008 thing and the over-leveraging that they put upon themselves. That was a very high-powered Wall Street firm. It was. It was fun while I was there. I had a sweet spot because I show up, I start work there, they give you that cool bonus to start early,

and then you do a bunch of work for like, I don't know, nine months. And they went, all right, we're hitting this weird slowdown. Everything's going to be fine by May. And we don't want to let you guys go because you're a first year associates. May is nine months away. We're just going to pay you full salary and benefits until then. And we're going to let you get experience doing smaller projects and pro bono stuff. So we started doing a bunch of that and then as those ran out they were like you know what you don't even need to come until we need you and so i basically just got paid and then eventually may didn't nothing recovered in may that's crazy so you didn't even have the 80 100 hour work week

no scenario not even close that's unbelievable not even close i basically had like you got three of those completely overpaid to do close to nothing? Or just actually nothing. Did they care if you showed up? There was a time at which they said, you don't have to show up anymore. That was when they were kind of like, look, we're going to be lawyerly about this and not say that we're letting you go. But we are saying that you should definitely try to find another job.

You were like, I wonder how long I could milk this. How long can i sit here and they're like look we're gonna pay you until december 31st you know two thousand there was an end point eight or nine or whatever year that was must have been 2008 and they just said yeah this is when your salary and benefits run out so in this in this is the date we're going to cut off your computer access and this is the date where we're going to turn off your key card and so it sort of phased out generally gradually and they hired all these consultants to try to get us new jobs and everybody was freaking out but it was

honestly the best thing that ever happened to me the quote-unquote layoff if you can even call it that because what happened was i basically was able to i was able to parlay that whole salary and benefits thing into starting this business and you weren't were you looking for a job at another firm for like five minutes and then i realized this is going to be really hard and i'm going to work really hard to get another job that i kind of don't really want and what's the point of doing that when I can just double down on art of charm? And so when did you start? When did you start art of charm? I started it while I was in law school. So Oh, you so it was already going. Yeah. Well, and how did you come up with that idea? Or what was the genesis of? So I had done when? Well, you're familiar

with this, you do your summer associate, essentially internship for a law firm. And this guy had hired me. His name was Dave. And I was still, you're still in law school at this point. And you basically get hired by a law firm. They wine and dine you and they show you how to do stuff. And then they show you some basic stuff. And then you come back later for the job.

Well, the guy who hired me, his name was Dave. And he was so good at networking and relationships. And he was supposed to be like the summer mentor for me you know to show me the ropes but he was never around and so hr basically made him take me out for coffee like hey you got to check off the mentor box on your document for the summer take this guy out for coffee because everybody else was going to see like blue man group and right going out having fancy dinners and was trying to convince you that it's just this amazing lifestyle that you're going to have. Exactly. And I was thinking like, I'm starting to get a feel for how this really is. This guy's never in the office.

So he took me out for coffee and he goes, do you have any questions about what we do? And he's banging away on his Blackberry. Clearly I was a waste of his time. And I got that loud and clear. He wasn't a jerk about it. He was just busy. And I said, yeah, how come you're never in the office, but all the other partners are in the office? you know are you just working from home like how come how come you're not forced to come in like everybody else because i came in at on weekends sometimes and there would be partners at three o'clock in the morning working on a sunday and i thought okay these guys are all here where the heck heck is Dave? So he goes, oh, really? Did people talk about that?

Did the people notice that? And I said, yeah, you know, it's something that people are saying, like you're never around. But he then proceeded to explain that he was bringing in a lot of the deal flow. So he didn't really need to be in the office because he was more valuable outside the office than he was inside the office yeah this bifurcation between rainmaker and uh and the the people that actually have to do the work absolutely right exactly so you're like i'd rather be this guy i'd rather be this guy well it wasn't just i would rather do this because the grass is always greener

this was more like all right when i was kid, when I was in elementary school, middle school, to some extent high school, I was kind of a brainy, nerdy kid. So I could sort of just coast and do well enough to get good grades. Not an unusual story. College and then law school, everybody was pretty smart. But they were also screwing around because they didn't live at home for the first time in their lives. And I thought, okay, I'm not smarter than everyone now but I can outwork everyone now so I doubled down on the work ethic and I outworked everyone in law school and in college and then when I got to Wall Street it

was like oh crap these are the kids who are also smart and also outwork everyone I don't have a competitive advantage anymore so when I met Dave and he showed me this sort of, in air quotes, secret third path to the top of the law game, aside from outworking everybody or being smarter than everybody, I latched onto that real tight. Because I had imposter syndrome, where I thought, I'm the guy here who's going to get fired once they figure out, hey, look, this guy, I don't know how he slipped through the cracks. He's not the smartest guy in the room. He's not the hardest working guy in the room.

I was a great worker. Don't get me wrong. I would still work 20 hours a day like everybody else, but I could only work as much as everyone else. There was no outworking a lot of these people on Wall Street. They were machines, especially the senior people who just had no life. They had sort of given up on having any kind of social life in a family. So this was an idea where I thought, all right, if I learn these skills, then in five years when we're all mid-level senior associates or whatever, everyone else is going to know that you've got to start networking and developing relationships.

But I'll have a five-year time advantage. networking and developing relationships, but I'll have a five-year time advantage. So I doubled down on psychology, applied psychology, trying to figure out how to create those relationships, not in an effort to be like, well, this is going to round up my legal career and not even only in an effort to get to the top of the law game, but mostly in an effort to go, you can't fire me. I brought in a client once two years ago, you know, that kind of thing. Yeah. It's a weird, it's a weird thing when you're in that law firm world. And certainly they don't teach you this in law school and they don't really teach it to you

when you're a young lawyer that your sort of power within the structure is directly related to the amount of money that you're generating. And most people are just working on their billable hours and being good little students because that's what school teaches you to do. It teaches you to follow directions and to be a good little boy and girl.

And then you get rewarded for that. But in truth, the world works quite often in a different way. And I think a lot of people on that partnership track realize too late, oh, man, like if I just channeled some of this energy into generating some big clients for the firm, I would be in equal stead, if not better. Yeah. And the problem is they also don't teach us any of those soft skills, not only in school, but once you get to the firm, it's kind of this idea that you should already know this stuff or maybe it comes naturally to you. So, great, you're in a good spot. Well, I think there's an idea that some people are just like that and other people aren't. Right. So it's not necessarily a teachable thing.

And it's easier in most cases to, it's just like sales. Sales is the easiest job in the world to get. And it's a really hard job to be good at. So rather than saying, come sign up, we're going to teach you how to sell. They go, come sign up, we're going to teach you how to sell. And then you show up. And if you're not good at it, kind of right away, they just fire you because you can't make your numbers or you fire yourself because you can't make any money because you're commission based. And instead of saying, we're going to train you to be a salesman, no matter what, they just kind of take people who have enough raw material

to pack together. And then they turn that person into a quote unquote, good salesman. It's the same thing with the law firm. Yeah, gotcha. So at the core of kind of what you do, it's about human psychology, sociology, it's about human behavior, and it's about teachable skills to improve one's sort of EQ in the world so that you can advance yourself appropriately. Is that a fair description? I mean, how would you describe? It definitely is. Yeah, absolutely.

Essentially, what the art of charm teaches are soft skills and the soft skills that are essentially missing from our education growing up and that are absolutely required at the top level of performance. So when you look at C-level executives and you look at upper management and you look at super high performers, they all generally seek to be better in this area and already have a lot of natural skills. And by natural, I mean they've worked at it for a while, not necessarily inborn skills in this area. Where we find a lot of our clients coming from AOC are there's two groups, and they're really not the groups that you think. Most people assume, okay, the guys and girls that come to Art of Charm,

they tie their shoelaces together and they have tape on their glasses and they don't know how to look people in the eye or something like that. And there's an occasional one or two guys like that every month in one of our programs or something like that. And there's an occasional one or two guys like that every month in one of our programs or something like that. But mostly what we get are super high performers like Green Beret, Navy SEAL, SEAL Team 6 guys coming in because they're in the 95th percentile and they want to be in the 99th percentile. And then we also get guys and girls that say, I've been a software engineer at Amazon for six years, and I just

kind of found out that I'm going to keep getting passed up for promotions unless I figure out what's going on here. And the reason is because they're really great at their technical skill set, and they're really not that great at their soft skill set. So they have this- And by soft skill set, You're defining that as what? So soft skills are things like persuasion, influence, body language and nonverbal communication, leadership and management. And so hard skills, technical skills are I'm a really great network architect or C++ JavaScript whiz, you know, for mobile applications, applications whatever those people are super valuable but once they get to a certain level and you go hey can you run a whole team and architect this whole

product the answer is yeah we don't want jim to do it though even though he's the most technically skilled guy on the team he just doesn't he's not going to be able to handle running the team as well right and so we get a lot of people who've hit this invisible ceiling who go, oh no, I just realized that even though I have my own law practice and I'm really good at IP, I'm never going to get the clients I want because I don't know how to go out there, create relationships with people that are going to bring me business. They're just good at taking care of the business when they get it. Right. Okay. And so to just completely like level with you and be super honest about this whole thing,

like when I hear like this, oh, it's the art of charm. I'm going to teach you to be charming and here's how you're going to be able to, you know, win the girl and get the job because you're going to stand up straight and you're going to make sure that your shoulders are back appropriately

and you're going to learn how to look people in the eye and you're going to win in this way. And I kind of like, I cringe. You know what I mean? I honestly like cringe and I'm like, how can we move beyond this? And I only have my own experience to rely on with this. And I'm somebody who's struggled with self-esteem and addiction issues and insecurity and feeling like everybody had a rule book to life except me and getting bullied when I was young, like all these things, like I'm a perfect candidate for a lot of the programs that

you teach. But my experience has been that I've been able to kind of navigate the world and kind of confront these things and in certain instances overcome them by really doing the hard internal work. Yeah, you have to do that. Self-esteem comes from performing esteemable acts. Character defects come from looking at yourself honestly in the mirror and unpacking what causes you to behave in a certain way that's at odds with the person you wish you could be. And a lot of that is tricky psychology and some heavy lifting and some wrestling with the dark night of the soul. And it's not like, here are the five things that you can do when you walk into a room to influence people. And when you say like, oh, well, you want to be an

influencer. Well, maybe that person doesn't have anything valuable that would be worthy of influence you know what i mean so we're on the same page like disabuse me of my you know like i don't want to be judgmental but i have to be i have to i have to be honest with you that that's how i enter this relationship so i want to understand genuinely better what you do and how like what you do can be distinguished with whatever I'm conjuring up in my mind. It's funny because the and I totally agree with every second, every single thing that you just said, every second of that. What do you mini rant maybe or like my monologue? I completely agree with that. And the reason is because what people are selling when they sell bullshitty, am I allowed to say stuff like that?

You say whatever you want. Bullshitty self-help stuff. Is there like, like you said, the five things you need to do when you walk into a room. And when people ask me to talk about that stuff on podcasts, it's always like, all right, I guess I'll give you a drill or two. And I have great drills for that stuff, but that's not the important stuff. It would be like if I said, all right, Rich, give me your top five weight loss tips. And you're like, okay, build an entirely new set of habits, reprogram your brain about what tastes good instead of what you think tastes good now. And then do that for a

really, really long time and find some physical activity that you love that's medium to high intensity, or I'm just putting words in your mouth here. And people go, yeah, I was kind of thinking like eat kale for breakfast because it's negative, calorie negative, and chew on celery sticks when you want a snack. And you're thinking, yeah, that's all fine and good, but everything, every one of those little bits of cool little gimmicky crap, stacked together, adds up to 1% of what you actually need to do. And so you're absolutely right. It's about heavy lifting. It's about facing your demons. And the things that people say, like one of the chief criticisms we get is your programs a week long, how am I going to come out the other side having improved on anything, this is just another long, dumb self help seminar. And those people are correct in that

you can't get a lot done in a week, unless you have other foundational stuff laid out. So what we do is before you get into the program, ideally, people generally listen to the podcast for a while, which is great, they start applying things for themselves. They find that those things work and they go, oh, okay. When I apply things, they work for me and I can build on those skillsets. So they're not coming in like fix me and staring at me from the couch. They come in expecting to work. Then they do a bunch of the prep work that we give them, which takes months. Generally, they come in for the week long thing that you're in right now, our program house. They come in for that week and then they've got at least a year or two of follow up, not only with us and online, but working on their own ish, right?

They've got to face all that stuff. They've got to go out and apply this stuff and they've got to work with it. And we set them up to succeed in that fashion. But anytime anybody tells you after this three day seminar,, you're gonna be able to do all these amazing things It's complete BS. So we try not to hide the ball at all with AOC. It's always about hard work It's always about the heavy lifting and it's always about facing your demons. The only thing we can do is cut the learning curve That's all we can do. We can't force you to actually do the hard work. And what is the hard work look like? The hard work involves a lot of, I guess, what you would call exposure therapy. So if you're afraid of speaking to groups,

we're not only going to drill the crap out of you during the program with speaking to groups and give you tools on how to do that, but we're going to set you up after the program with a bunch of different classes on things you need to do. Do an improv class. Take a speaking class. Create a keynote. Go and work that keynote in various rooms. Share your feedback. Take video.

Post it on our family page. Get critiqued that way by all the other people. We call the AOC family the program graduates. And get critiqued that way. During the program, that's going to look a lot like, you're you're shy or you're afraid to go up and create conversations okay we get people on the first day of class to we videotape them starting conversations with the way they would normally do it and this serves two purposes people who think i'm already good at this their ego gets demolished and they can learn because their cup gets emptied

out for them if they won't do it themselves before they get here. And people that are not that confident go, all right, I don't know what I'm doing. The videotape shows me that I don't know what I'm doing. Then we're able to give them some tools and pieces to make it work. And we have our improv girls come in and we have our drills and exercises during the class. And then we're videotaping them improve and they can watch themselves improve on the videotape. And we're critiquing body language, vocal tonality, eye contact, the way they sit, stand, walk, and talk. And they can watch themselves improve so that they know, they prove to themselves that it's possible. Because there's no quick fix for any of this stuff. It's all about setting up habits and giving people tools to start those habits.

But you have to hammer the nails down in the frame or it's not going to work. Right. I guess I'm trying to, I'm trying to discern in my own mind, the, the divining line between teaching people skills that empower them to be social animals versus, uh, you know, the manipulation, right? Like, Oh, well, you know what I mean? Cause some people just start wired to be a certain way, you know? So do you ever Yes. Yeah. Good point. Like, I'm not going to try to make you into a person who's going to get up in front of audiences and spin some kind of compelling yarn. I think there's probably, I think you hit the nail on the head. There's probably much more shining a spotlight on areas and going. So, for example, if you came in and you said, well, I really want to get better at speaking because I want to be a speaker. My first thought wouldn't be great.

We're going to get you acclimated to stage and we're going to show you how to work this. And, oh, you want to start conversations because you're a divorced guy and you're single. Let's give you a bunch of cool ways to start conversation. That's never the first thing. That's what bad sort of self-helpy coaches, I think, do a lot. But I would probably say, why do you want to speak? Well, I really need to. Why do you need to?

Well, I'm starting a business and i know that generating business in my niche as a real estate broker i need to be able to speak on stage to get clients really because if you're an introvert the best way to get state to get clients is probably not going to be turning yourself into this extroverted stage performer it's going to be figuring out how to serve your clients in a way that doesn't make you just drive yourself absolutely crazy fighting your nature and swimming upstream the whole time so we would probably work on strategizing that the soft skills that somebody would get though it's not about turning everyone into some sort of extrovert I'm

technically an introvert in terms of the clinical definition, I guess you would say, is if you recharge by being on your own, you're an introvert. And this is oversimplified. But if you need to go out to parties and be social and that recharges you, then a lot of us are extroverted. Most of us are a blend of those two things. Yeah, but your demeanor is extremely extroverted. But it's taught, right?

Because when I was in high school and college and even law school, I was really shy. I never talked to anybody so what you're seeing now is the result of ten years of doing a show and I don't think that everybody needs to go through And do a show for ten years to be a functional social animal I think most people are focusing on the wrong things They're thinking man in order to get the type of people I want in my life or in order to get the type of business for for my real estate company I've got to become like this person I saw on TV or like this person I saw on the internet and it's just not true you have to focus on your own strengths and most people are either

not cognizant of all of those strengths have no plan to work on those if they do or are so distracted by what they think other people's strengths are that they never actually work on developing or discovering their own. Does that make sense? Yeah, I get it. I mean, I think, you know, for me, when I'm sort of pondering what you're saying, you know, everybody comes in with their own unique version of emotional baggage, you know, and what they think is wrong with them or what they write or and I'm sure that, you know, the DSM for can diagnose people into some buckets that you could then divide and easily identify, you know, this person needs this and this person needs this. But if somebody has, you know, let's say somebody comes in and they have poor boundaries and they're a people pleaser, You know, that's a unique set of sort of

psychological conditions that require, you know, sort of an understanding of what that, you know, mental terrain looks like and how to like address it and give that person a sense of how they can create healthy boundaries versus, you know, the type A, you know, alpha guy who comes in who doesn't understand that he's, you know, a bull in a china shop and he's annoying everyone. That's a very different kind of protocol in terms of how to redress that and make that person sort of socially, you know, more socially in tune with his or her environment. Yeah, you're speaking my language big time.

The amount of different types of issues that people come in with, that number is the exact same number of people in the room, if that makes sense, right makes sense right so then how do you design a program around that you got to keep yeah you got to keep the programs really small so you can tailor it to each person anybody who's trying to do that cookie cutter solution with 200 people in the room is not going to be able to do it it's impossible this program is 60 plus hours five six days long residential and we max it out 11. Residential meaning they live. They live here in the house that you're in right now.

Yeah. That's wild. Yeah. They have to stay here because otherwise you're able to unplug yourself from what it is that you think you're, you're able to turn the pressure off by going back to your hotel and plumbing on CNN. We used to have accommodation be separate from the program. You're able to turn the pressure off by going back to your hotel and plumbing on CNN. We used to have accommodation be separate from the program.

And what happened was people would go, yeah, I'm going to be late tonight because I have dinner plans and so on. And then all their excuse processes for not really doing this because we turn the pressure up so high during the day. Those all kick in and you get people going, oh, I was so beat. I took a nap and I just couldn't wake up. I guess I'll go tomorrow instead. And it's like, no, no, no. So now they kind of, for lack of a better word, can't escape us, right? They're getting it done.

It's like rehab for emotional intelligence. Yeah, in many ways, in many ways. And we find that this format works really well for a lot of our clients that are military because they're used to that. It's very, there's also a reason that military, aside from just logistical simplicity. Why are all these military people coming to you? Well, we have government units coming to us, special forces guys, Central Intelligence Agency and NSA guys come a lot. What are they looking for?

They're looking for ways to work better with locals on the ground if they're deployed. Other agencies agencies other people from other countries and diplomats come in spades because their work as a diplomat generally revolves around topics that involve a heavy amount of eq wow so how many people are you putting through these programs every year a few hundred every year yeah And so let's take it back. You meet this senior partner who's the rainmaker in this law firm. He tells you about how he does it. And so where does a light bulb go off in terms of I'm going to create a business?

That's a leap. That's a work from. It's quite a leap. What happened was I decided I need to double down on the networking stuff and i'm not naturally good at it so if i'm going to be more like dave i gotta practice so i read a couple of books i can't remember who recommended these it may have been him or it might have just been what showed up on an internet search and this was like like, how to win friends and influence people. Dale Carnegie. I don't even know what else I read back then, but that was one of them.

And I took a Dale Carnegie course. And I remember listening to the guy speak and doing those drills. Have you ever done one of these? Uh-uh. Well, they basically say things like, all right, when you meet someone, you got to look them in the eye and shake hands. And you can remember things about them. Like there's this thing called the memory palace, you know, this drill.

Yeah, I know this. I mean, and then when you start to talk about this stuff, it makes me think of like interactions that I've had, whatever, wherever I am, you know, meeting somebody on an airplane. Hi Rich, nice to meet you. And then they hand you their business card and then they repeat your name like eight times. And I'm immediately turned off by this person because it feels so disingenuous. And I'm like, this is an inauthentic encounter from top to bottom, and I want nothing to do with this person.

It's like Mad Libs where you just fill in the person's name, and the rest of it's already written out in their head. Well, Jordan, let me tell you. I'm glad you asked me that, Jordan. You know, like that. It's all rehearsed that's that plays into like my spine you know like my my back goes up when i start hearing about this i definitely get it and and here's here's that's why my path is the way it is i took the dale carnegie class and i remember thinking all right i'm i'm not maybe the most switched on guy when it comes to this, but I do know that the guy in the sweater vest at the Learning Annex who's telling me that the way

to get people to know, like, and trust me, I think that's our term and not theirs, but whatever, to know, like, and trust me, if you're not getting promoted, if you're not getting in the relationships that you want and the friendships that you want, it's not because you don't have a firm effing handshake, man. it's not because your eye contact is slightly distracted it's not because you forgot that rich's daughter plays tennis at ucla that's not why people don't freaking like you man so when i heard that stuff i just thought wait a minute this is so surface level where's the real stuff where can I learn the real deal? This is not the real thing.

The real thing has to be more nuanced. And so I started reading everything I could and getting my hands on anything I could. Me and my business partners, all of us, would read like Dale Carnegie, sure. We'd read some of this other stuff. And we actually started to test it, which nobody does. They just kind of go, oh, that makes sense. And then they read another book about it. We were working on this stuff and working on the body language and hiring these different coaches

and consultants that we could find to work with us and what we realized is a lot of people who write books entire books on subjects and this is no surprise for you i'm sure they'll write a whole book about something and then when you meet them and you ask them questions about it 50 of authors are kind of like yeah i don't don't know. I'm not sure. And you'd start to wonder, did you even write this book? Or have you tested any of the things that you put in this book? And what we found for a lot of self-help books and things like that, the answer was no. They just put it in there.

The things had clever rhyming phrases so you could remember them. And then when you try to apply it, it worked 10% of the time. And the idea is you're supposed to blame yourself, right, when it doesn't work. And that wasn't gonna work for me because I could just sit there and go, oh, I didn't do it right. But if I got onto a Wall Street law firm,

I managed to speak a bunch of different languages and things like that. You mean to tell me I can't learn what's in a Dale Carnegie course because I'm too dumb? That's not gonna work for me. That explanation is not gonna work for me. That explanation is not going to work for me. So when I went to all these different classes and things like that, I started to think,

maybe I'm doing some of this wrong, but there's a whole lot of this that I'm doing right that still isn't working. And so we started to test and run things on our own. And we realized that most of what people are selling in self-help land is complete bullshit. So what did you stumble upon that turned the table for you or that, that started to work for you? So, and you're doing this while you're still in your third year of law school or? Yeah, this is second and third year of law school. But are you thinking this is a business or you're just trying to figure this out for yourself? No, I'm not thinking,

yeah, I'm just trying to figure it out for myself. I got you. Yeah. I wasn't thinking people should learn this stuff. I was just thinking this is pretty cool and I enjoy doing it enjoy doing, you know, you're going to be headed to wall street the following year. Yeah. And, and you have this opportunity to perhaps become a protege of this partner, right? So you're trying to, you're trying to get your shit straight so that you can show up at the best version of yourself. Exactly.

Exactly. And I knew I had a lot of similar baggage, like you mentioned, where I didn't struggle with addiction or anything like that, but I was coming from being a super shy kid, being a geeky kid, being really quiet, always thinking like, oh, people are looking at me or something in school, all that weird crap. That had to go because it was driving me crazy, and I realized that I have to have an internal locus of control and figure out how I can make these changes. I'm not going to move. I've done a lot of traveling, and I've realized no matter where I move in the world, there I am. I'm still me, and I still have all the same crap wrong with me. It sucks that that's true.

It does suck. I always just thought I'm going to change my environment, and it's going to be great there. Oh, wait. It's not great in Israel. I'm going to go to Mexico. It's going to be great there. All right. Still the same baggage.

You did quite a bit of travel after college? Tons. where you're teaching a bunch of places overseas right like serbia yeah like that yeah so i went and did my senior year of high school in germany and i ended up getting placed in the former east germany and it was it was still regular old germany at that time but it had just gotten this is the fall of the wall plus seven years and the family that i lived with they grew up in a communist socialist country and the host father who was like this physical education teacher he just he was so good at making connections and knowing people and getting them to do favors and doing favors for them he showed me how that worked and i thought that was fascinating and i also remember thinking well too bad it doesn't work like that in America, which it totally does. It's just less overt, right?

And in socialist countries, it's like, what are you going to do for me? In America, we try to sort of pretend that we're not doing it that way, but we are. That your relationships are not quid pro quo. Transactional, quid pro quo. Yeah. And don't get me wrong. I love the idea that we can just all be super giving and generous. And I like to think that I'm that way, too. However, if people go out there and just go, I'm not worrying about any of that. It's not true. That's not how successful people tend to roll. I'm this new man.

And then I realized, oh, okay, I'm just still the same guy in a lot of ways. I grew up a lot over there, but not as much. I'm not a completely different person. So I ended up going to Israel. And then there was this thing called the Intifada, which is essentially an uprising, made the area a little dangerous where I was living. So it was a mid-semester. Couldn't go back to school. Went to Mexico.

From Mexico, I met a couple of diplomats. They were really influential for me they showed me a lot of stuff that they had learned probably at like the farm with the CIA where they really worked but they were showing me a lot of this really cool stuff and I thought this is really awesome that stuff works really well I wonder if anybody can learn that and I thought they hire these people for this you know as diplomats for a reason after that I started learning Russian because that's what they told me to do uh to get a job in mexico i went to ukraine i started learning russian ukraine yeah are you trying to angle yourself for a cia job or i was at that point

yeah i was like you apply to the cia i did and i got a bunch of attention from them and they still send letters to my parents house um that didn't work out, though. I found out what their salary was, and I said, maybe law is better for this. No, that's not entirely true. I did find that the bureaucracy was too much for me. I did end up working at the embassy in Panama for a while in college, and that was 2001, so my security clearance came through really late, and I ended up working at the embassy in Panama. Then after that, I moved to Serbia, where I got a job teaching English.

And I had a scholarship or a fellowship from the Department of Defense while I was there. And then I but everywhere I moved, I was able to reinvent myself, which is great. I made a lot of progress doing that. However, I still hadn't solved, like you said, done any of the heavy lifting, all of the really big issues, the elephant in the room, I just kept walking around that thing. I just kept walking around it until I realized I had a lot of fear around being vulnerable in relationships.

And that I found is a almost universally human slash, especially men have that same thing. So I started talking about that on the podcast and which is the art of charm and my business partner happened to be really really good with women and he loved all the body language and networking stuff and he's like you know this is great for jobs but check this out when we mix that with this stuff that i know we can go out and meet tons of people and it's going to be really fun for our social life and that took over probably the next five or six years of my life because it started to become like a magic freaking post all right well so just to kind of i'm trying to anchor myself in the timeline here so so um after this wave of layoffs in 2008 and you have this idea to start this business i

mean was the idea i mean so it's 2008 right right? 2008, yeah. And was it a podcast or was it a blog? It was a podcast. Oh, it was. So you're very early. Yeah, we started in 2006. I know you just like, you're at 10 years with this thing. 10 years, yeah. That's insane. Like super early. I guess podcasting really started like in 2006, but no one was really doing it. We started December 2006 is when we started. Oh, you did? Yeah. 2006. Yeah. So you were still – you were in law school when you started a podcast. I was a 2L, as we call it. Wow.

Yeah. Nobody was podcasting then. No. In fact – I mean, what was on the iTunes homepage at that time? Tech stuff. Right. Because imagine who knew how to even access tech stuff.

And frankly, at that point, if memory serves itunes was text based and so it was a menu that you would navigate and only the front page had album covers and it was only music if you had a show like you you couldn't i mean don't be ridiculous you couldn't upload cover art for your podcast that wasn't gonna happen and so you would navigate through a set of menus. So the only people that knew how to find podcasts were just big old geeks like me who were going to go deep on some blog, figure out there were internet radio shows. And we were listed with internet radio shows. So you could click on one, and it was a live stream of Soma FM out of Brussels, Belgium, playing techno music or something. brussels belgium playing techno music or something and then there would be some guy talking in one language another language and then this week in tech or whatever with leo laporte like those those are the shows that were in there that was it and then we threw our stuff in there and then

and the idea the core idea was what at that time the core idea at that time was look we can teach you all these dating skills and the reason it started is like a help, help, help guys figure out how to like meet women. It was because we started teaching all the networking stuff that we were learning and nobody gave a crap. Surprise. What did work among law students and college students, which is where we found a lot of our audience was. Oh, and also it can get you to stop being such a schmo around all the women that you actually like and so our clients our first clients from art of charm we never thought this was going to be a business we started getting email from we had a couple clients one was an immigrant to

denmark who was from i think ethiopia or eritrea or something like that and he said i'm having trouble making friends i'm like the black guy in my town, and I don't know what to do. So we started giving him drills and exercises to meet people. Super success. And we, is you and a law school buddy of yours? He was a cancer biologist at the time in a PhD program for cancer biology. His name's AJ, and he still works with me. I got you. But you guys were in school at the same time?

We were both in school at the same time, yeah. And so were your law school classmates, did they know you were doing this? Yes. And they made fun of me to no end. Some of them good natured and some of them not so much. But I remember a group of female law students get they they met with me once in the reading room. Not I should say ambushed, but it was because they didn't tell me they were going to meet me there. They go, we want to talk to you about what you're doing. And I thought, oh, crap, this is going to

be like the you're a misogynist conversation at Michigan Law. So I go down and I'm just like, all right, bring like, tell me what you think the problem is. And maybe we can talk about it like mature adults. And they go, we're obsessed with this. This is so fascinating. We have ideas on other show topics. And I thought like, wait a minute, you guys, I thought would be antagonistic towards this because all my male friends were kind of like, this is so stupid. What a joke. You guys are such losers. The women loved it. They loved the fact that somebody was teaching this stuff to guys because they were having as many problems as women do now, finding guys that were able to be vulnerable, didn't

mind getting a little bit of rapport, were able to take feedback, thought about things like nonverbal communication, trust, and things like that. So women actually were our biggest fans, even though our audience was men. Does that make sense? Yeah, I got it. I got it. The idea that a podcast could be a business at that time, though, is anathema. Yeah.

What we thought was, we'll do this no one's gonna listen to it except our friends and family because who's gonna even there's 800 shows on itunes no one's gonna even find us there's too many things out there 800 there were about 800 and i remember printing up these little business cards these cheap ones and guys who were bartenders at all the bars that we would go to, they would ask for stacks of these because they would always see these guys striking out. And we're like, give them the card and tell them to download the show. And so we built this little cult following in Ann Arbor, Michigan. And we started meeting up with some of the guys. And they're all really good, normal people.

These aren't like these weird predator-type guys. They were all just lovable, dorky guys like us who wanted more experience doing this. And so we had the client in Denmark and then another couple of regular Joes. And then we had this mortgage banker from California go, how much is your phone coaching? That's all we had on offer at the time. And I said, it's a hundred dollars an hour. And he goes, you guys are way too cheap. And he gave us like a $5,000 retainer at this point. And he goes goes you should raise your prices but not for me because i gave you the idea to raise your prices and i said all right fine so we started teaching him a bunch of stuff he taught it to his sales team and then he flew us out to california to teach his sales team directly because

they were they were converting really well right with some of the body language and non-verbal stuff that we were teaching and he goes you guys teaching dating stuff is is small fries small potato bullshit you guys have a much bigger idea here you just don't even get it and he was right we didn't get it it took us years to get it right but that you had that sort of cornerstone first corporate client right to kind of yeah you know confirm that you were on to something yeah and in terms of developing the curriculum that you began to teach like how did you arrive upon these you know, confirm that you were onto something. Yeah. And in terms of developing the curriculum that you began to teach, like, how did you arrive upon these, you know, these sort of skills and, and, and tools and, you know, this, this sort of test that you're giving people to bridge this gap.

So what we knew is that we didn't know enough about this stuff to really be legitimate coaches at this point in time or trainers or consultants it was very tempting to go oh all right this is a business now and then start doing what everybody else does on the internet which is claim that they know how to do something and they're an expert in some area and then somehow make money off of it and i i still hate that idea i think it's such crap that people do this. There's a lot of that. I think it's just this outright scam and that's why when people go, how do I know this stuff works? I'm like, don't buy anything from

Art of Charm. Go listen to a couple episodes of AOC. Try the stuff that you hear. If you think it's crap, then it's crap. If you like it and it works for you, now you have something free that you tried. I don't want to talk anybody into anything, but especially back then I just thought I'm not gonna hold myself out as a coach this is ludicrous I've been doing this for a couple years at most and um and we started to

to eventually figure out all right we need to have a real curriculum but we don't really know how to get it so we had been picked up by Sirius XM Satellite Radio at the time, right about a year and a half after we started the show. And they said, you can get guests and you can request them to come to the studio in New York. Because I'd moved to New York to work on Wall Street. And I said, awesome. So I started emailing all these authors, all these high-end consultants. Sirius XM show while you're a first-year associate at Wachtel? Where is it, Wachtel?

It was a Thatcher. And pro tip, not a great idea. But luckily, our show was on at 8 p.m. Did they know? Did the firm know that you were doing it? They did and they didn't. So the guys and girls, I should say, the people on my level, they all knew. The people a couple rungs above me, they all knew.

The secretaries, they all knew. The partners couple rungs above me they all knew the secretaries they all knew the partners a few of them knew but not everybody in upper management had no idea so what it looked like was every friday thankfully only on fridays it was a little bit more palatable at 7 p.m i would go downstairs and i would run like to you know two blocks to the train, not even. Go up to Midtown. Go up to this building. What is it? There's a publisher.

McGraw Hill building is where it is. Go all the way up there. Do my two-hour show. Come back to the office and slip in and go, all right, everybody, catch me up. And my friends would go, all right, we're doing this. We're doing this. You go handle these little doctor people. Leave your suit jacket on the chair. So it looks like you just ran out.

Exactly. And sort of the idea was if anybody asks, I went to dinner or something like that, or I went to go get never even happened. The partners, they would be listening to the show in the conference room where everybody was working while I was doing it. They loved it. They didn't care. It was just funny that I had a life outside the law firm I think how dare you how dare you but also they were like

this is really cool they would call in with fake fake questions or real ones you know or they'd be making fun of another guy at the firm on air it was really fun and we started to grab guests that were way we were punching way above our weight in terms of if we were podcasters and I said hi Robert, Robert Cialdini, can you come and talk about your book influence? He would have gone, go fly a kite. I don't even know what a podcast is. Yeah, because you're on Sirius, you can- But I'm on Sirius.

So he's going to book a ticket and fly to New York and talk about this on our show. So we started to do that with regularity. Like, is there, what was that like at that time? Like you getting a, you get a decent paycheck for doing that from Sirius? Or how did that work? Sirius didn't pay that much. But what it did do is we were allowed to advertise Art of Charm podcast on the show. So you're still doing the podcast and the I Got You.

Still doing the podcast. And so we were able to. And like, what kind of downloads are you getting at this time? Maybe like 70,000 a month. Which is funny because that's what we get on like our lowest day now right if i got 70 000 downloads on anything but a sunday this time i would probably think something's broken but back then it was we danced in the kitchen when we saw 24 downloads our first week because we thought people are listening to us all over the world

there was like one at south africa two people in Canada, a bunch of people in Ann Arbor, Michigan that we told about the show and one guy in New York and a couple in California. And that was, we were stoked. So we started to fly these experts in and basically just ask them questions that we had, give us drills and exercises that they would come up with. And that was the beginning of our curriculum. give us drills and exercises that they would come up with. And that was the beginning of our curriculum.

And we didn't even think about teaching it in live programs until one of our phone coaching guys was a street performer. He's a well-known illusionist magician type guy. And he started doing a street performance style show. And he goes, all right, I need to learn some of the stuff that you guys are teaching. And we were teaching him stuff on the phone. And he goes, look, I just want to come and learn from you guys for a week straight i can't be doing this once a week for an hour crap i got to learn from you for a week i'm gonna go then prep for my show which i think he was doing in like vegas or something like that and then i'm gonna bounce and we said we

don't really do that and he goes i'll give you five grand which for him was a pittance and for us was ridiculous amount of money. And we said, you got a deal. And then we looked at each other and said, crap, we got to figure out what we're going to teach this guy. So we, we assembled the curriculum. We actually hired a consultant who teaches how to create things for like college courses and basically a product designer, curriculum designer paid that person essentially all

of the money that that guy gave us developed the first iteration of the curriculum. We've been iterating on that for 10 years. I gotcha. That's cool, man. So you got some juice early on, people who are wanting what you were selling, and that had to feel good to get that kind of solid feedback. And then when the law firm thing kind of goes away, you're already kind of set up, right? Yeah, yeah.

So you had a lot of momentum at that point. We had a lot of momentum. We had a lot of momentum at that point we had a lot of momentum we had a lot of momentum at that point um not as much as i probably should have if i were where i was then and somebody or if you were sitting in in that same that same seat should i quit my law job i have this and this and this going i would say absolutely not you're so much further away from being a standalone than you think you are but at the time i kind of had no choice because the economy was in the tank and they were laying us off for lack of a better word but also i was young enough and naive enough to think we're just inches from this taking off which is a joke i mean we were right we were like

years right right right right and are your miss do you stay in touch with some of your michigan classmates so they all just lawyers all over the country right now and judges and stuff like that? Lawyers, probably, yeah, clerks by now, maybe some judges in smaller courts. So wait, so you graduated law school in 2006? 2007? 2006, yeah, 2006. Right on. And 10 years of doing the podcast.

It's crazy because you've navigated this, you know, the whole gamut of this podcast world from 800 podcasts on iTunes at the time to what is it like? 400,000. 400,000. I mean, most of those are defunct. Yeah, they're all unplugged now. I don't know how many are really active podcasts still. I don't know. More than 800 though?

Probably, yeah. Probably, yeah. And what is your, like, how do you, when you look back on that, like, let's talk about the state of podcasting a little bit. Because it's become, like, a thing. You know, like, I was. It's trendy as hell right now. Yeah, I mean, unlike you, I was not an early adopter. But still, when I started mine in 2012, it wasn't, like, a cool thing to do.

You know, it wasn't like it is now. When did it start getting trendy? Do you remember? I don't even know. It was when cereal blew up, I think. Was that 2014 or 2015? I think it was like two years ago, maybe two years ago, maybe 2015.

I don't know. It became a thing and then suddenly like everybody's, I don't know about you, but like I get a lot of calls from people saying, tell me how you started your, I'm thinking about starting a podcast, which was not a call that I was getting, you know, in 2013 or 12, you know? Yeah, I do know. And that's interesting in its own right.

So how do you think about like the art of podcasting and the business of podcasting and what have you learned and, you know, what mistakes have you made? I think that the business of podcasting is something that you should not do under pretty much any circumstances. I was going to ask you if you read Ryan Holiday's article on this, but he actually quoted you in the article. The reason he wrote that article was because him and I talked about podcasts and we were just talking about it for whatever reason. And I said, I'm thinking about why I started talking about, Oh, I know why I was, I had given a couple of

talks. Why it's pleased for the love of God. Don't start another podcast was the title of his article. And I think my talk title was why you shouldn't start a podcast. And it was basically very similar points. And he was at the roundtable where I was giving this talk. And we started talking about that afterwards via email and in person. And the reason is because of those reasons he mentioned. It's trendy. It's much more work than people think. You can't outsource recording, really.

I mean, if you don't want to do your show one day, there's no show. You can't scale beyond your personality. You can't scale beyond your personality. You can't scale beyond your personality. And frankly, I know you have a popular show. It's a lot of work. Most people think, oh, I can talk for days. All I need to do is clip on a microphone and then, I don't know, like upload it or something. No, that's not how it works.

There's so many hidden moving pieces. It's got to be a show. That's not how it works. There's so many hidden moving pieces. It's got to be a show. in how they allocate their time and what content they're going to consume and what they're going to pass over. So you're seeing the quality of podcasts increasing, I think, and that's why you're seeing the ascendancy of all these people that worked underneath Ira Glass now starting their own shows. Exactly. And it is a lot more work than I think people realize for sure. I mean, the amount of work, I mean, and you do multiple shows. You do like shows.

I do four shows a week. To me, just doing one a week is like almost a full-time job. I tried to go to two and I was like, this is unsustainable. I don't know how I could possibly do that. So I don't know how you do what you that. So I don't know how you do what you do, but I think there's a lot of people who think it is easy. And I think the biggest sort of mistake that I see people making is they get into podcasting, not because they have a love of the medium or an appreciation for what the format is strengths are, which is like a long form conversation, but they see it as a lead generator

for something else they're doing. And so they'll do some bullshit crappy 30 minute Skype interview that they're ill prepared for, that they haven't done any research around and they're not really even that interested in speaking to the person. I've been on the receiving end of this

because when you write a book, you do a lot of these. And then I'm like, is anybody listening to this? And I would say more and more, the answer would be no. Yeah. I think the typical podcast, and this is aside from the people that bought a product that's supposed to be like, here's how you do it. Write down these questions. These are what you ask every single guest that you have on your show. What's your favorite food? What's your

favorite book? What's your favorite piece of software? What apps do you use to stay in shape? What's your workout routine like? I would imagine these are questions that you get so often. Or questions that quickly reveal that they don't know anything about me or whoever else they're interviewing. Were you a born natural athlete? Have you ever had any health challenges? Like, I'm envisioning you getting questions like, were you always an athletic guy? And it's like, did you look at my effing bio?

Even beyond that, them seeming or feeling bored doing the interview. And it's like, if you're bored doing the interview, is somebody supposed to be interested in listening to this? You know what I mean? And that's okay. I used to do that, though. I so and that's okay i used to do that though i'll fucking admit it i used to just do what do you call it mail it in i used to mail

it in uh-huh um well 10 years 10 years of doing this four shows a week not every show is going to be a home run i would imagine right but like what have you what what is you know what have you learned like what has been the biggest sort of teachable moment or experience in your thousand episodes or however many you've done? I actually – I should count them because they're not all numbered the same way because we have Minnesota Monday and Fan Mail Friday. You're right. I should look into that. But the biggest takeaway from me – one of the biggest takeaways from me was a lot of shows out there are trying to go, like you said, it's a lead gen thing or whatever. So they go, all right, I got to talk about things that people are interested in

with people that are interesting. So they go, it's called stand on the shoulders of giants. They actually have a term for this. And what it means is look up who's popular in your niche. So you're a fitness guy. You have an audience in the fitness niche and they go all right so i'm going to interview rich roll and i'm going to interview this guy and this guy and this guy and this guy and the trainer from biggest loser and or jillian michaels or whatever and they got this whole list of people and they're a fitness guy too and so once they release their show with all these authoritative names on it thereby osmosis also authoritative in that niche. And what that unfortunately means is that every single person who has that same outcome in mind of being a fitness guy or a diet, that guy, a nutrition guy, they've all got

interviews with you, Ben Greenfield and Jillian Michaels and 50 other people. And they're all the same because their, outcome is not i want to make a great show that's really valuable their outcome is i want to breed authority for myself so when i do the show when i do the art of charm i'm only thinking what's going to be really interesting for the audience to learn from this particular guest and then in addition to that sort of one step outside that people often ask how you got how do you guide your brand how do you know who you're going to have on the show how do you select guests they always think there's some crazy google level algorithm for me to go well their authority factor times their networked audience times their social media times their it's nothing like that all i

look for is am i interested in this person so when I interviewed you so many years ago now somehow probably like three or four I don't know how long it's been I don't think it's been that might have been two or three years I think it was like two two and a half it seems like a long time ago for some reason but maybe not I guess no I'd already moved it to San Francisco I remember talking in my kitchen even back then I wasn't nearly I'd like to think as decent of an interview as I'd like to think I am now. But I was interested in what you were doing because I'd heard from probably Ben Greenfield or some mutual friend that you used to be this overweight dude that smoked.

And now you're this jacked, skinny guy who does ultra-endurance stuff. And I thought, how is that even possible? That doesn't sound right. and now you're like this jacked skinny guy who does ultra endurance stuff and i thought how is that even possible well that doesn't sound right i think it's probably i don't even know if i believe this so i started researching it and then i was like i really this is interesting for me so i had that conversation and people go why do you have a fitness guy on your show it's about psychology and i'm like well if you actually listen to the interview there's a lot of psychology in there about self-development growth and overcoming overcoming addictions, both to, I think, fast food and cigarettes, among other things that we probably talked about. I never smoked.

That must have been somebody else. But I was definitely a junk food addict and overweight and addiction recovery and all that kind of stuff. But no, I appreciate that. I think I would say the same for my litmus test for guests. I don't, sometimes I'm like out and I'm like, oh man, I need somebody right away. Yeah, there's that. That happens from time to time.

I try to avoid that. But I'm not looking for who are the most influential people to have on the show that are going to boost my profile. I'm looking for people that like sort of trigger something inside me that makes me want to learn more about them. And it's an, it's like a, an intangible thing that I can't even put words to, but I know it when I see it. And I'm sure you have people email you all the time and say, oh, you should interview this person. This person would be perfect. And maybe

on paper they are. Um, yeah, there's a lot of, but you but you're like yeah but i'm not feeling it you know and i and i used to just say well everybody seems to think i should interview this person and then i do and then it's a lackluster interview and so i've learned like it has to be a self-generated thing it does it it does in it not only does it come through in your voice when you're interested in the person you're talking to not only does it come through in the fact that you're motivated to research that person more and make a better show that way, it shows up in this weird... I haven't probably articulated this very well,

and I probably won't here. It shows up in this weird way where, look, your audience listens to you a lot. Chances are. Most people who are listening to shows listen to something like 60 to 80 percent of that show just to kind of across the board and they listen to every episode of that show almost all the way through so they're on the same page as you 60 to 80 percent of the time which means that unless you choose something that is just

wildly in left field you're going to be in the same zeitgeist collectively as the rest of your audience is no matter what so i've done shows where i talk about my trip to north korea right and people go oh you did a show about north korea but your show's normally about human behavior the audience loves it because they just go wow you applied a lot of the aoc teachings and you applied them to the stalinist propaganda that you saw in north korea fascinating episode because people who are listening of that to that they're not necessarily interested in my life per se they're interested in the same things that i'm interested in and those interests overlap and dictate where i want to take

a vacation what languages i'm learning, where I'm going to do special experiences and things like that. They all sort of congeal into this glob of similar interests, similar principles, and things like that. There's very few things that I could talk about on Art of Charm that I think would be of zero interest to my listeners. I've even talked about language learning because I'm learning Mandarin, and that resonated well with a bunch of people. Because you're going to be going back to the CIA,

right? That's right. Yeah, I got to go back. You're using this podcast as some kind of propaganda machine for whatever your hidden agenda is. There's little signals in the back, in the rear of the show that you can't hear that control your mind. People will believe that. I should be careful when I say stuff like that. that. I should be careful when I say stuff like that. All right. Well, so help me understand the essential sort of psychological profile of the average person who comes to you for help and how you get them over the hump. So I would imagine that it would be fair to say that it's somebody who feels like they want an extra edge. We've talked about this earlier, but like wants that little extra edge, you know, professionally, or is having difficulty sort of

socially navigating their environment. And so, you know, what is something that you could provide, like somebody who's listening to this, who might find themselves in that scenario as we speak to help them kind of you know think differently about how to approach those uncomfortable situations sure so going back to some of the this is funny because we talked earlier about not having 10 snappy ways to dress better to be more confident but i will do you want a practical drill or do you want something more sort of, well, maybe the, give me the general and then give me the practical. Sure. So for, for a lot of people, what it comes down to, and they're, like I said, the number of issues in the room is the exact same number of people in the room. But the, the general principle here is that the problem that you think you're having,

or the issue that you think you're struggling with is almost never actually that. You have to go through almost like a testing process to eliminate other variables. Because when people call, they usually say something like, hey, you know, I'm recently divorced and I'm just having a lot of trouble navigating the social sphere. I'm recently divorced and I'm just having a lot of trouble navigating the social sphere or or I moved to a new town and I'm really finding it hard to make personal and professional connections because the last place I lived was my hometown. I grew up with everyone or I'm in a new job and it's much more corporate or much different environment than the last one I was in. And then we get the military guys that come in for just completely, totally different reasons, which we can sort of push them aside for now, because it's very specific to military stuff that nobody cares about listening to this probably, or very few. And so what we find is we go, all right, we have them fill out an intake document on the phone with one of our coaches.

Generally, it used to be me. I used to do all these myself. And it's something like, all right, is there any addiction problem? What was your household like with your parents growing up? Do you have brothers and sisters? How old are they? What do you do for work? How long have you lived in your town?

What other areas? What do you want to focus on when you come in? And it's funny because people say, well, I want to focus on making a new social circle in this new town because I just moved and I want to reinvent myself and I got this great new job. Great. And then you look at the rest of the intake document and it's like, yeah, I did have addiction problems growing up. Yeah, my parents did.

Well, I have brothers and sisters, but I don't talk with any of them anymore. Oh, my relationship with my parents isn't that great. And they come in and they go, all right, I'm ready to learn some strategies about how to make a new network in this town and schmooze and network in my corporate environment so that I can get to the top of this. And we go, got good news and bad news. The good news is you're in the right place. The bad news is that thing you think you need to learn about getting to the top and networking

and all that stuff is totally not the problem at all. Right, right, right. Yeah, I'm with you on that for sure. And I think in general, human beings are not very good objective arbiters of what's going on with them. No. Just speaking for myself. Same here. I find my voice intolerable. I can't listen to my own podcast. I think that I'm constantly waiting for the shoe to drop and everybody to find out that I'm this fraud. Imposter syndrome.

I'm just spinning all kinds of crazy, insecure yarns in my mind that I've fabricated. I need solid people like my friends and my board of advisor people around me to give me that objective feedback about where I'm doing well and where I'm going awry. And I think a lot of people don't have that or don't value that kind of relationship with the people that they spend time with. So we're all kind of spinning in these orbits without any kind of real understanding of where we're at. It's so true. And and honestly i would be lying if i said i'm so self-aware that i don't have to worry about that the truth is everybody has blind spots or they wouldn't freaking be called blind spots and the only way to get them is from like you said the

board of advisors people that you surround yourself with that you have a really great trusting relationship with and ideally you're showcasing enough vulnerability with them and them with you that they don't have to color their feedback or sugarcoat things and you can get really good honest and frankly insightful hopefully feedback the problem is a lot of us only have one or zero people in our life that we can really depend on that are insightful caring and are willing to be vulnerable enough with us and us with them to get that kind of feedback in the first place.

The willingness to be vulnerable is super important. And I think it's something that is very tricky for a lot of people, particularly men who see it as a weakness. They're terrified of it. They don't see anybody else in their environment doing it. And it's the last thing that they're, you know, that they're inclined to do without some serious prodding and encouragement. And my experience has been nothing but positive that when I'm willing to go there and be vulnerable, that's the path to healing. And that's the path to empathy with others. I definitely agree with that. And I think the problem is that, or one of the problems with that is that getting to that point can be excruciatingly painful if you've built up enough scar tissue around your issues that getting down to brass tacks, getting down to the raw stuff, it's going to hurt just getting there. Yeah, because you kind of have to burn the house down to rebuild it, right? And if you have people coming to you, let's say it's a real estate salesperson and they want to learn how to kill it in their area. And they're what my wife calls super dupers.

You meet them and you're like, hey, I'm Jim. How are you doing? Super duper. Everything's always great. When I see people like that, I'm like, that guy's hiding something. Well, like I don't trust that guy because I don't feel that that's a genuine, authentic expression of of where he's at right now. The cliche. Sure. Yeah.

The cliche is that person going and crying in their car after the meeting because they have nothing else to do and they can't go home because their wife lives there with another guy or something like that. Right. It's like a cliche when you see people who are putting on that front but and beyond that the sort of mask and the artifice that you have to throw up to try to pretend like everything is cool requires so much energy and it's like that house of cards right but the idea that you would let somebody in and be and tell them like you're you're not uh you're're not Superman and you're not impervious is too frightening. And so you create this prison around who you are that keeps you trapped.

Well, because if you open the door, the wind will come in and blow the house of cards down. And frankly, that – And then who are you? What's that? And then who are you? And then who are you? Right, of course. And additionally, what happens if you let someone in and then they don't like what they see well that would crush you even more according to the construct that you've built in your mind that's the confirmation

bias they already have of course they have you know like oh if they knew then they would hate me right yeah and and we we get some guys like that in but but I would say that 60, 70 plus percent are the guys that go, look, you know, I'm in a new relationship. I want to make it really great. Or I just got out of a relationship. I need to figure out who I am outside of this relationship. There's a lot of guys that are, like I said, hitting the invisible ceiling in their career where they go, I don't know what the issue is. I just know I'm not getting promoted to management level stuff. And I know it's got something to do with me.

Just know I'm not getting promoted to management level stuff. And I know it's got something to do with me. And it's not what HR says or what their manager says, because no one's going to say, you know, the problem, Joe, is that people just they think you're kind of a dick. No one's they're going to go, well, we're looking for somebody who has a little bit more experience managing Java mobile applications to run this team. And you go, I've got eight years of experience. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll get you on the next one. We're saving you for something else. they give you a euphemism but really the reason is they either can't tell you because it's legally to their disadvantage or frankly they can't even articulate

the reasons why they just know that you're not the guy yeah and that and that person has a light dusting of self-awareness to know enough that it is probably something that they did, but they don't have enough self-awareness to understand what that is, let alone to know how to begin the process of unpacking it so that you can transcend it. And what we do at our boot camps and things like that often is, I would say 20-25% of the time, the recommendations for post-program follow-up are everything we do for the program follow-up generally. And also, you should probably see a therapist every couple of weeks because now that we found out this thing with your parents or your brothers and sisters and da-da-da-da, that's outside of our level of qualification. And you're going to need to do that, handle that with an ongoing set of therapy.

and you're going to need to do that, handle that with an ongoing set of therapy. I don't want to convey for a second that what we do is like, instead of getting your shit together with a therapist or even a medical professional, I think that the reason a lot of therapists send their clients to us after they've done some therapy is because they can't teach some of the tactical, technical, and hands-on stuff that we do. But those are very two distinct things. And I just want to make sure that on this show I'm very clear that we're not doing that whole thing where it's like, don't go to that doctor. Go to the Tony Robbins experience or whatever. We're not doing that at all.

Well, growth and evolution, that's a lifelong journey. There's nothing that you're arriving at like, oh, at the end of this period of time, you will be, you know, in this place where you will no longer be required to be introspective and take inventory of how you're behaving and living and, you know, and acting. So, you know, I'm glad to hear that. So how do you, like right now, when you look on the internet, there's so much snake oil, there's so many people with, you know, crazy overpriced eBooks and there's a lot of, um, you know, kind of, uh, emails sort of subscription based email services that get you stuck in these

funnels, these sale funnels that you can't escape from unless you buy a certain product. And, and it's, it's, I think for the average person, it's difficult to discern what's real from what's not real, right? So how do you kind of talk about that and think about that? Man, most of that stuff is not real. And I know people are like, but I assume Art of Charm stuff is real. That's one of the reasons why I say don't buy anything at first. Like don't buy our course right now. don't even look at the freaking sales page just listen to the podcast because if people aren't willing to give away the information for free in my opinion there's

kind of something wrong there and that's not necessarily true for every niche if you're doing some sort of very specific type of plan for them particularly, you have a right to charge for that. It involves your time and energy and effort. However, for the information itself, as far as I'm concerned, that stuff should be free. And that's why we do so many shows for AOC. I like that because it saves me from going, look at all these snake oil salesmen. But we're different. Just apply what you're hearing.

If it works for you, there's more where that came from. Most of it's free anyway. But I think that it's very common now to see snake oil online for personal growth because it's really hard to freaking quantify whether or not it's your fault that it didn't work or whether or not the product is complete malarkey It's different with things like fitness and nutrition although there's just as much slash more snake oil because it's a bigger niche Well, there's a lot of craziness and there's crazy wacko stuff as well like one thing I heard recently that was I I would have to even mention this to you, but I Probably this is thing. I bring up to all my fitness buddies that hcg diet have you heard of this what is that hcg human i'm gonna butcher this human chorionic gonadotropin or

something like that what that is it used to be made from pregnant woman's urine now it's synthetic but basically it's something that they use to kick your gonads into um overdrive to keep producing hormones and things like that. So you take like a certain amount of that every other day or whatever, and you only eat four to 500 calories and you lose all this weight. Well, surprise, of course, you're losing weight. One, you're starving yourself. But what HCG is doing, and this is your department more than it is mine. It keeps your hormones and metabolism going artificially through this this hormone or this catalyst for hormones.

It doesn't sound like a very good idea. It's obviously really bad for you. Right. The thing is, it works really well to lose tons of weight really quick because you're starving yourself and your metabolism is not slowing down into starvation mode because of this drug that you're taking. Yeah. And what happens when you stop taking it?

Yeah. You get all kinds of effed up, I would imagine. And so when I see things like that, and then I see what you'd mentioned, which are overpriced e-books. Back in our original days, it was probably what, like DVDs were on everything. It was like a 27 DVD set about nonverbal communication. And then you get that product, because I've looked at everything. You get that product and it's a four day or five day seminar run by some shysty internet marketer. And all it is is video of all the speakers coming on talking and then

pitching their crap on video, wearing their sweater vest at their learning annex 15 States away. And it's just it's that and then in order to get the real secret you got to go to their website and get the super secret there's always another velvet rope and another vip room behind that one you know and it's the constant upsell and i subscribe to a lot of these sites because i just like sort of forensically i'm like so interested i'm like i want to i want to i want to like sort of forensically I'm like so interested I'm like I want to I want to I want to like sort of peer into the psychology and the sociology of like how this stuff works

and I'm like I can't believe people like fall for this stuff I can and just to kind of forensically understand how they put the whole thing together I thought for a while the exact same thing right who's buying this dumb crap who's even listening to this stuff? And the truth is, when I talk to friends of mine that are marketers, I try to hang out with really nice, good, well-meaning people. But you'll be in a room and you'll see some people and your friends will go, this is one of the guys who runs this other thing. And you find out they're like big time millionaires off like this stuff that you think is. So it's always amazing to me. like the stuff that you think is so it's always amazing to me anyway it's it's um it's enough to drive you to homicide in some ways especially when you see people taking advantage of others

in a way that's extremely unfair like my one of my and i put this in air quotes for those of you listening favorite things is when somebody teaches you how to make money online and you go oh so you're teaching people how to make money how did you make all your money teaching people how to make money and you go wait a second hold on i'm trying to wrap my mind around this and it's not happening it's an ouroboros oh is it what is it called yeah ouroboros like the snake eating its tail it's a it's a cycle of yeah the people who have, there's a lot of people like that. And I'm sure some of that wisdom that they impart is, I have no judgment on that, but it is true.

Like their business is teaching people to create a business like theirs that teaches other people how to have an online business. Exactly, yeah. Which for me means, and that's all fine and good on its face. It's just, it's not my thing. I think it's a little shady.

But if you zoom in far enough, you go, well, wait, so how did you make your first dollar? Well, I made it teaching other people how to make their first dollar. So you lied. That's all there is to it, right? You lied telling people that you're rich and that you made it in this way so that you could sell this product. So really, they've never had a real incentive to make their product work. They've only had incentive to market it better, which is completely backwards, in my opinion.

Well, it's built on marketing, not on an actual business. And this is why I love telling people, don't buy anything from us, just listen to the show. Because since I'm not selling anything, the only thing that speaks is your own results whether you apply it or not if you don't apply it and you don't do it then that sucks for you and doesn't suck for me if you apply and it works it's great for you and it's great for me so it's win all around and i can sleep at night because i'm not worried like oh you didn't apply this thing you learned tough crap i'm driving home on my Maserati. Can't talk.

Bye. And that's what I see all these guys as. Right, right. All right. So we got to wind this down, but maybe you can leave everybody with, you know, one, like, what do you see? What is like the most typical kind of consistent strain of individual that comes to you who needs help?

And what do you just wish like, oh, if they just knew this, like they wouldn't even need me. Like if they could just understand that their life would be so much better if they just did X or could understand Y the way that I've come to see it. Can you answer that or is that too amorphous? No, I think I can do this and you can just stop me. I'm going to do a practical, a very practical drill to address something that I think is a really common fallacy or misconception. So what a lot of people worry about is how do I make a good first impression or start a conversation? And they are always like, what do I say? What do I say?

What do I say? And this is something that I've always thought I need to learn this. I need to learn what to say. And if you're shy, it's about not knowing what to say. And if you're quiet, it's about not knowing what to say. And if you don't know how to speak to people, it's about not knowing what to say. And it never is, it never is that. And so the reason that I talk about this so much is because I think that first impressions are actually made, I don't think, I know that first impressions are actually made i don't think i know that first impressions are actually made non-verbally it has nothing to do with what you say or don't say and if you don't believe me you can walk down your nearest street and find yourself making quick little judgments about

everybody that walks by it doesn't have to be like that girl oh no thank you it can be a judgment like that guy's really tall it looks a little scary this guy's tattoos i wonder what his past is like. These judgments happen instantly. It's part of the way that we were evolved. It's a safety concern. They evolved before language evolved. Exactly.

Exactly. And so we have this built in. Every person has it. Anybody who says they don't judge people based on their looks is lying to themselves mostly and probably to others. So since we know that nonverbal communication is what dictates the first impression, what we know is that our nonverbal communication gives off signals and we're communicating whether we want to or not. And so in order to communicate better or more confidently, we have to have great nonverbal communication.

And so what people do is they go, great, got it. All right, chest back, shoulders up, chin up. Now I'm going to go to that networking event or this mixer or this job interview. And I'm going to have great nonverbals, great first impression. Check, check. Thanks, Jordan. Not quite. Because what happens is they walk into the room and they start having the conversation and then slowly but surely they start to shrink a little bit and they default back to their computer working position or their, I feel intimidated position or whatever sort of situation that they're in. Their body starts to tell and communicate that because our bodies are terrible at lying and they always reflect our emotional state.

Almost always reflect our emotional state. So what that means is in order to keep great, positive, open, nonverbal communication while we're actually doing something else because we can't multitask we have to build it in as a habit and so we do what we have is called the doorway drill and what this is is put some different colored post-it notes up at eye level on your doorways inside your house those will break the pattern of you just walking through the doorway absent-mindedly and every time you walk through that doorway and you notice that post-it note stand up straight chest up shoulders back chin up smile on your face and you don't have to exaggerate it you'll just look like a total idiot if you do that but if you if you create that positive open body language and you do that every time you walk through a doorway in your own house you start to relegate

this to your quote-unquote lizard brain right it becomes autopilot and this is great because the next time you walk into a networking event or star or whatever, that open, positive, nonverbal communication should be your default now. That's great. It does create a really great first impression on other people. But what's more important is the other side of that virtuous cycle. So you've created great outgoing communication. Now, on the other side of that cycle, we know just from the same thing of walking down the same concept, walking down the street and making those judgments about people, people are making judgments about us now. However, instead of there's the guy with the slopey back that's clearly working on the computer all day, it's there's the upright,

smiley, open, confident, friendly, whatever type of positive attributes you attribute to people with great nonverbal communication that's now being attributed to you. And we know also that other people's judgments oftentimes guide our behavior, not necessarily their judgment, but the way that they treat us. So if they treat us differently, like more friendly, more confident, more interested or interesting or attractive, even then they, they start to treat us that way on the regular. We start to behave a little bit more that way. And it reinforces our verbal and nonverbal communication in that way.

And this isn't some sort of like hoopla, visualize it and it will be that way. Again, if you don't believe me, just try it. You have nothing to lose. You're going to end up with a straighter back, worst case scenario. Yeah, I got that. All right, so we've been sitting here for an hour and a half. What has my nonverbal communication told you about me? I mean, I'm biased by the fact that I like you, so there's that.

But what I actually really appreciated about your verbal and nonverbal is you're a skeptical guy, and also you don't sacrifice your – and this isn't a cold read or anything. You don't sacrifice your credibility for anything, which I think is a freaking great idea when you're doing a show. I take a lot of flack for it, not from my listeners who appreciate it, but I think from a lot of guests. Because if you don't call people out on things like what makes your stuff different from other shysters online, you won't get it. I mean, honestly, your nonverbals are great because you're an athlete and you're probably used to standing upright and running 100 miles at a time. That's generally really good. I don't know what your lower back says at the end of the day. It might be screaming.

But you're really obviously in great shape and very healthy. That always contributes really well to nonverbals. And it is probably one of the reasons why we evolved communication nonverbally first. One, it predates language. But two, any indicator of health is going to indicate healthy offspring so i just i know i just made that weird but you indicate that you're yeah no i was like i was like worried about what you might say about what you know like what should i do differently than what i'm doing i think you know for me the way

i think about this it's sort of i think of it from the inside out and and kind of what you just spoke to and i i think you agree with that but also but also you're trying to look at how you can change state by going outside in, right? So these are like outward manifestations, physical behaviors that you can adopt that will have a state change on your internal sense of self, right? Yes. But I think in terms of creating something you know that is real and sustainable it has it has to come from the inside so like i don't really i'm not really thinking about like how i'm sitting because i've done whatever i've done to be in a place where i just sit the way that i sit right it's i would and there's things i could do better like i don't

you know when i go in and i deal with like i have plenty of work to do. Believe me, I'm not like saying I have any of this figured out because I don't always navigate social situations as gracefully or as, you know, sort of opportunely as I should. But, you know, maybe I should think about these things more. I don't really think about them that much. Well, I want to agree with you and add to this. Right. You're 100 percent right. You got to do the internal work. and that's always what matters more. The reason that the nonverbal stuff is important is because when I'm looking at somebody, I'm only giving it the 51%, right? I'm looking at the guy with a tattoo on his arm, and I'm not thinking, huh, well, you know, maybe he got that when he was young, and he thought it's stupid now, and he doesn't want to remove it because he's saving up for a new car.

No, we just go tattoo may be dangerous next. Right. That's what our brain is doing. So I want to just caution people and don't go, well, that person's slouching slightly. So all these negative associations are probably true. It's not the case. It's it's merely when we do things like the doorway drill and we try to have great nonverbal communication, all we're doing is trying to spark a 51% positive versus 51% maybe negative impression

that we're making. It's not, oh, well, this person, they looked this way and their chin was at a 10 and a half degree angle upward. They must do this and this, and this must mean something about them. If you're sitting in that chair and you're uncomfortable you might just sit a little differently it has no real reflection on your personality it might have a reflection on some of your internal state blah blah blah but as any hostage negotiator interrogator super spy person will readily acknowledge you can't really read people's minds by reading their body you can only take an educated guess and anybody who tells you otherwise is completely full of crap

good talking to you man likewise man this is fun yeah cool super fun awesome so if you're digging on jordan the best way to connect with him is the art of charm podcast yeah you're already listening for the art of charm.com right yeah that's the website that's right the Art of Charm podcast. You're already listening to the podcast. Theartofcharm.com, right? Yeah. That's the website, right? That's right. The Art of Charm. Search for it in the podcast app that you're listening right now.

I'd love to. And again, I stand by this. Just listen to some of the episodes and see if you like it. I'm not asking you to buy or do anything. Right on, man. How do you feel? I feel good. I feel like I need to sit up straighter whenever I talk about this stuff.

You're sitting up pretty straight. I don't have the skill set to analyze your nonverbal communication. That's right. Maybe I need to have my pelvis tilted 12 degrees more and then, you know, that means something else. All right. Cool, dude. Thank you. Peace.

Plants. All right. We did it. What did you guys think? Take a moment and hit Jordan and I up on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram and share your thoughts, your comments, your perspective on that conversation. Before I let you go, a couple of quick announcements. We just launched a new online meal planner service.

It's called the Plant Power Meal Planner. I'm so psyched about this. I'm so proud of what we built in cooperation with the team at Leiter. If this is new to you, if you haven't heard me talk about this yet, basically it's thousands of plant-based recipes right at your fingertips, unlimited meal plans and grocery lists. Everything is totally personalized and customized based on your goals, your food preferences, your allergies, your time constraints, robust customer support from a team of experts. There's even grocery delivery in 22 metropolitan

areas via Instacart. Early feedback has been amazing. Thousands of people are already on board. People are really digging it. So positive, the response, the early response, and I'm really psyched about that. All of this is available for just $1.90 a week. When you sign up for a year, basically 99 bucks a year or 14 bucks a month, you can learn more and sign up by clicking meal planner at the top of any page on my website, richroll.com

or typing in meals.richroll.com. And if you're already using it, if you're enjoying it, share your favorite recipes on Instagram. I've been resharing a couple of those and that's been really cool to see people digging on it. Also, we have a retreat coming up, Plant Power Ireland, July 24 through 31, at this incredible manor called Ballyvalane on 90 acres in the Irish countryside. Seven days of transformation with Julie and I, as well as the happy parallettes are going to

come by for a couple of days. We're going to cook amazing plant-based food. We're going to eat, we're going to run, we're going to meditate, we're going to do tea ceremony. We're going to have super intense workshops on everything from creativity to relationships, to nutritional instruction. We have Ayurvedic treatments. We have glamping tents. It's going to be super fun. It's also going to be intense because it's designed to really help you unlock that best self lying dormant within and transform your life wholesale. So if this sounds like something you would be keen to attend, you can find out more at ourplantpowerworld.com.

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I send one out every Thursday. It's called roll call, basically five or six resources that I've stumbled across over the course of the week. Generally a couple articles, a podcast I listened to, a documentary I watched, a product that I'm enjoying, uh, no affiliate links. I'm not trying to sell you anything. These are honestly just things that I've enjoyed or things that have inspired me or informed me on subjects. And I'm really digging sending this out every week. People seem to be enjoying it. So if you would like in on that, you can just make sure that you put your email in on my website. There's plenty of places where you can just enter it and that will subscribe you to the email blast. Again, I'm not going to spam you. It's not about that. It's just helpful stuff. Also, when you're on my site, we have signed copies of Finding Ultra. We got signed copies

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shaving gel, and post-shave gel. All you gotta do is pay shipping. I wanna thank everybody who helped put on the show today, Jason Camiolo for audio engineering and production. And also he started working on the show notes and these scripts that I'm doing. He's doing a great job. Sean Patterson for help on graphics, all the motion graphics, the pictures that we put together for each episode. That's Sean. Thank you, Sean. And theme music as always by Anilema. Thanks for the love you guys. See you back here in a couple of days until then be well and love wide and love deep.

Peace. Plants. Thank you.