The Science of Reading People, Captivating A Conversation, Interpreting Body Language, Decoding Facial Expressions & Much More!

Hey, what's up? It's Ben Greenfield. And in today's show, you're not going to learn about how to get fit or how to biohack your brain. No, no, no. Instead, you're gonna learn how to navigate a party with the science of reading people and captivating a conversation, interpreting body language and decoding facial expressions and doing all those things that will turn you into a complete body reading Ninja. The lady who I interview, woman, girl, cool person. Vanessa Van Edwards. She wrote a great book, and you're gonna learn all about it, and you're gonna learn some of her top tactics in today's episode. In this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness show, if you put a name to an emotion, it disarms the emotion in the brain. So, for example, if someone is feeling very, very frustrated and you say, I can see how frustrating this is, even just saying the word frustrating, with a level of empathy behind that allows their brain to get out of the fr. So you ask someone, so what do you do? And that person knows they have about 30 to 40 seconds that they should answer, and they have to stop and give the other person time to answer. It's sort of this back and forth, this volleying back and forth. When you're silent but you're listening at 30 to 40 seconds, this really interesting thing happens.

He's an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America's top personal trainer and one of the globe's most influential people in health and fitness. His show provides you with everything you need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield.

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Hey, folks, it's Ben Greenfield. And when I was going to school at University of Idaho, my roommate, believe it or not, was one of the top vacuum cleaner salesmen in the world. I actually had him on the podcast in a separate episode that I'll link to in the show. Notes for this episode, which you can hop onto over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Captivate but specifically, the reason I'm telling you about this guy was because I was fascinated with his personal library that was chock full of books about how to read body language and how to tell if people were lying to you or if they were attracted to you, and how to negotiate, how to argue, how to successfully enchant people. How to engage in social situations. I guess it was probably like an early version of Neil Strauss's the Game or any of these other kind of social hacking, type of social hacking how to books that are out there or courses that are out there. And I read about every book in his library and got really incredibly interested in the science of human body language and human emotions. And then for the past several years I hadn't really delved much back into the science behind understanding human connections and human interactions and what to do at cocktail parties and bars and dinner parties and all these situations where you're kind of like engaged with people. Until my interest got re sparked when I read this fascinating new book that was actually suggested to me by our former podcast sidekick Rachel Brown. And she highly recommended I read this book and I did and I loved it. It's called the Science of Succeeding with People. And as I usually do when I find a book really intriguing, I folded over a bunch of pages and was able to hun down the author to interview her for today's podcast. So if you ever feel awkward at networking events or you wonder your date really thinks of you, or you wish you could decode people, or you want to learn more about the science of people, then this episode is definitely for you. And as a human behavior hacker, my guest on today's podcast, whose name is Vanessa Van Edwards, actually created a full on research lab to study all these hidden forces that drive us. And she's definitely cracked the code with this new book, Captivate the Science of Succeeding with People. And like I mentioned, she's got a human behavior research lab and a website@scienceofpeople.com and her work has been featured in NPR and Businessweek and USA Today and CNN. Fast Company and Forbes and Apple chose this book in particular as one of the most anticipated books of 2017. So it's chock full of really interesting stuff and we're going to take a deep dive into it today. So Vanessa, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me. I cannot believe you roomed with a vacuum salesman.

I did.

That's the best fun fact ever.

And he was a really good vacuum cleaner salesman. He could like put you like in a dark room where you could just see your silhouette and then he'd ask you a question and tell you to either like lie to him or tell you them the truth. And he would always be able to tell, like if you're lying, you're telling the truth. And that one I could never figure out because he couldn't see your eyes and he couldn't see your hands and he couldn't see your feet, but he would just know. No, it was really weird.

There's all these studies on beyond body language, even, like, the smell of guilt. And I know this is going to go crazy. We're starting on a crazy note. But this study that I read is it looked at skydivers and people treadmills, and it compared their sweat collection and had participants smell these two different sweat pads. Terrible. Horrible. I hope they paid them very well. And then they scanned the brains of the people who were smelling them, and they found that people who smelled the skydiving sweat pads also had a fear response in their brain. So it's very possible that your friend was so in tune with fear that actually when you lie, you. You have this sort of adrenaline cortisol response that maybe he could. He could smell it.

Oh, it totally makes sense. I mean, if you produce pheromones in response to people that you might be attracted to, or you produce, for example, certain toxins and sweat in response to, you know, things that you've eaten that might be, you know, causing you to detox, I could completely understand that certain pheromones might be associated with like, you know, the subconsciously triggered by parts of the brain associated with fear. So that's really interesting that you could emit chemical signals that would let people know that you're, like, nervous or lying or maybe just pitting out.

Right, right. I think that that's the next frontier. You know, we talk about. I think that in the 90s and 2000s, it was the brain. Right. Like, that was the big frontier. Everyone was writing about the brain and how it works and neuroeconomics. I think that the next frontier, if I had to guess, is going to be pheromones or chemical emissions or the scents that we send out. And I think that that's going to start to be used in all kinds of crazy ways. Yes, of course, with dating. I think there actually already is a dating website that matches you by pheromone. Have you seen smell dating?

I haven't seen it, but I totally believe it. And you know what's really interesting about that is they have found that women, I don't know if you've heard about this, who are on the pill, wind up based off of the changes in their hormones, often choosing a mate that is incompatible with them. And that's. I don't think that's based on smell as much as it is based on something else that's going on. Hormonally but then if they get off the pill, in many cases, they find that they're no longer attracted to that person. Isn't that weird?

What I did not know the end of that story. And that is, that is the punchline. Like, that is the most important punchline. See, what's crazy is I think that our bodies are extremely good at chemically matching. So not only are we smelling someone's pheromones, so, you know, women who are on the pill, they aren't smelling the right hormone match because the pill is altering their own hormones. But also we are very good at assessing hormone levels and how they would match us based on physical attributes. So one of the areas that we are studying intensely in our lab is facial features and how hormones can change the shape of your lips, of your nose, of your cheeks, of your jaw, the symmetry of your face. And when you are assessing someone as a potential mate, your gaze drops down to the. It's called super sternal notch. It's that little notch in between your two collarbones, and it tends to bounce between that little notch and mouth, nose, eyes. And the reason for that is because we are subconsciously trying to decide what is this person's hormone levels and would it match us. So, for example, women with higher levels of estrogen, they have very symmetrical faces, usually long necks. If they're going to be a healthy mother, they'll have healthy hair, which long, shiny, well nourished for many months. Then men who have high testosterone usually have a square jaw with the presence of stubble or indication of hair growth and a kind of ruddy. A thick, ruddy neck. And that skin on their neck is thicker.

Right.

And so we don't always want the highest estrogen or the highest testosterone. We want the balance of us. And so it's just a very interesting play that you're reading people on levels that we don't even realize we're doing.

Yeah, it is really interesting. That's one of the, like, the big takeaways. When I was a bodybuilder and you were like, backstage at a bodybuilding show or you're at the gym, you could always tell the guys who were on, you know, what we called on gear, because they actually, when they were taking testosterone or human growth hormone, they had squarer jaws or very furrowed brows and facial characteristics that. That told you right away that they were on hormones. And it sounds to me like what you're saying, what you guys are discovering in your lab is that we can actually, like, subconsciously read the level of different people's hormones and whether or not the they might be someone that we're it. Would it be someone that we're attracted to or someone that we're, that we would be compatible with based on their facial structure?

Yeah, that's actually a good different, that's a good differentiation. So it's, it is compatible and it isn't always mate related. I mean obviously, especially if we're already married or, or we're past childbearing age, you know, that becomes less important. So it's really a matter of compatibility as well as goals. So for example, there's a couple of computer generated faces that we have in the book and what they are is face shapes based on personality. So introverted faces have certain have a look to them versus extroverted. So the ones they found are introverted to extroverted, unreliable to trustworthy, incompetent to competent and non dominant to dominant. So for example, and there's no right or wrong here, but if you are looking to buy a car from someone, you're going to look, you don't care about introversion, extroversion, you don't care about non dominant, but you do care about competence and trust. So you would be looking for facial signals of those two things. Whereas if you're in a business deal and you are looking for a partner and you want them to take charge, you want them to be, you know, really running the business for you, running operations, you would be looking for someone who is both dominant and competent. So we're looking for things to fill our needs and that is an aspect of compatibility.

Very interesting, very interesting. I didn't know that we were going to take a little bit of a dive down this rabbit hole.

I know, sorry.

But you do have in the book specific photographs of people. This is in the quiz in the very beginning of the book, which is how the book starts off. And you take this quiz and it's like, is this a real smile or is this a fake smile? Or does this face mean disgust or embarrassment or confusion or irritation? And it's a test that identifies what you call your PQ score. I believe that pq, correct me if I'm wrong, Vanessa, it stands for Interpersonal intelligence.

Yes, exactly.

Okay, so Interpersonal Intelligence score. Now why is that important? Why would you want to have a high pq? I mean, obviously being able to tell somebody is really smiling versus fake smiling, intuitively we could know that that could be a good skill to have. But in terms of the science or the statistics behind having a high P Is there any actual research that shows that we're going to be more successful if we have a high pq, for example?

Yeah, very much. And so this is. I felt a little snubbed when I left school, and the reason for this is because I felt like I was focusing so much on two other acronyms, IQ and gpa. Right. Like that. I was always, always focused on those features, like my grade point average and my book intelligence. But actually, when it comes to success in the workplace, especially your intelligence, your intelligence, your social intelligence, it matters a lot more than we think. They've found that people with higher PQ make an average of $10,000 more per year than those with low PQ. When you look at high performers in different industries in the workplace, high performers are more likely to be in the top percentile of high pq. There is all of these implications, and we don't know exactly what the cause is. We know there's a huge correlation, obviously, between high PQ and high and top performance. I think that what we're talking about is that pq, it's called soft skills, is sort of the social lubricant of a lot of our interactions. They just make things go faster, go smoother. So you're more likely to be able to get through a negotiation with more of a. On the winning side, if you're able to read someone very quickly, prevent a miscommunication, and build rapport before and after. Right. Like that. That's a very soft skill that just helps glide the negotiation to go a little bit easier. And that happens in every aspect of business. We just are not as aware of it.

Got it. Yeah. My pq, by the way, was through the roof, not to break, but I was actually.

Were you at 200? Were you at 200?

No, I was at 180, though. I was pretty proud of it.

Oh, yeah, that's good.

Yeah. So my PQ is not bad. And by the way, you don't have to buy the book to get the pq. Right. Don't you have the questionnaire on your.

Yeah, yeah. If you want to take it, it's scienceofpeople.com quiz. Just kind of play around with it. I also think that we usually think about PQ just in terms of rational thoughts. So you'll get questions like, if you were in a fight with a partner, how would you handle the fight? A, talk to them. B, like, those are great. But the other aspect of pq, which people don't think about a lot, is the reading people, and that is the difference between decoding and encoding. So when you talk about measures of pq, people are typically stronger in one or the other. So decoding is the ability to speed read people, pick up emotions from their words, pick up emotions from their face reading micro expressions. Encoding is the other side which is controlling your social signals. So it's saying, okay, I want to show up as confident or I want to show up as warm or friendly. What do I do with my body and my words to encode or send those social signals? So there's two different sides that we don't usually think about.

Gotcha. Okay, so we can find out our PQ score and obviously that's really relevant to success. And then kind of, you know, in the rest of the book you kind of delve into hacking certain social situations. And one of my favorite parts of the book is you have like this map where it's a map of kind of like the typical social setting, right, where there's like the drinks at the bar and the restrooms and where people leave their coats and their shoes, where they check in, where the food is, where the host might stand, where people are going to, to be milling about, socializing. And then you kind of take a dive into like where you should stand and where you should be. Now tell me about this. I think you call it the social zone. Tell me about where we should actually stand when we are at a cocktail party or in a social setting. Like where's the best place to be and why?

Yeah, so we, I felt that when you walk into a networking event or a party or a holiday party or conference, you're kind of faced these questions of like, where do I stand, who do I talk to, what do I do? And so we decided to do an experiment where we followed hyper networkers or super connectors around rooms. We actually like followed their foot patterns and found that the most effective networkers are standing in very specific places. So first the traps, the places you do not want to stand. The biggest rookie mistake is people start, they stand in the start zone. So the start zone is like the check in area where people are hanging their coats, shoes, basically anywhere in the first five to ten feet of the, of the entrance. And the reason why people like to stand there is because they feel like they're getting fresh people, like they're greeting people. You know, they're able to get someone right as they come in. But the problem is what we noticed was that you get high quantity, low quality interactions if you stand there. And the reason for this is because physiologically or emotionally. When someone first walks into an event, there's a lot happening for them. They are still. They're in the transition from the phone call. They just hung up with the parking. They just paid for the traffic. They just sat in. And they're also trying to find their bearings. They're trying to scope about the room. Do they know anyone? Where's the host? A lot of times they want to get a drink, they want to go to the bathroom, they want to get food. They're in that really. That's the peak of emotions at that moment. So if you catch someone right there, yes, they will likely talk to you and maybe even be grateful to speak to you. But after two or three minutes, they're going to excuse themselves to go do one of those other things, see someone they know go to the bathroom. So that is the worst place to stand. The best place to stand is where people are emotionally and physiologically most comfortable. And typically happens when someone's already got the lay of the land. They've typically done their first checks, either said hello to the host or gone to the bathroom. And we feel most confident, most competent, when we have something in our hand, specifically a drink. We love to have that anchor of that drink in our hand. It could even be water. Doesn't have to be alcohol. But usually after someone has gotten their drink, you will physically see them go, okay, now what? Right. Like, that's the mentality, right?

Then they're ready to socialize, and they're a little bit less in a hurry and able to take on a conversation or able to, like, build a relationship.

And you become the social savior. Right. If you swoop in that moment and there is nothing worse than having a drink in your hand, saying thanks to the bartender, and turning to face a room, and you have no idea who to talk to next, if you have someone who is waiting either within eyesight of that or kind of staying next to the bar, who then says, hey, how's the wine? Whatever opening line it is, you actually become a savior in that moment because they are the most comfortable. And they're also like, what do I do? What do I do? What do I do? What do I do? What do I do? You become that person.

Yeah, yeah. And in terms of actual application, I've started doing this. You know, what I do now is when I'm at one of these events, rather than standing by the door and be like, oh, hey, I want to be the first person that people see when they walk in. And I mean, meet so many people I'll instead go to a place that's kind of like close to where people have gotten their food, right? Or they. They've gotten their food, they've got in, they've got their coats on, they have a drink in their hand. They've done everything that people want to do when they walk into a room. And now that they've just gotten their food and they're ready and they've settled down, I've found that it's actually changed my ability to be able to interact in social situations because people seem less hurried. And it was just like, it seems dumb, but it actually works. I mean, you go and you stand where people are kind of like, like towards the end of the bar, right? Where they have their drink in their hand or towards the end of the food line, and people have their food on their plate and they're ready to go sit down. And, you know, then you. You find that person, you say, hey, you want to go, you know, crash at this table? I've saved a couple of seats, you know, that type of thing.

Yeah. And that's. That makes me so happy because I feel like there are such small things. Like, that seems like such a small thing. But if you know where you need to go, it changes your game, right? Like, it changes that social game because, a, you have much less anxiety because you know exactly where you're going to stand. It helps you with your opening line because you can use context cues, right? So the opening line can be like, hey, how's the wine? Or, oh, I'm so glad you got the pot stickers. They're really good. Do you want to grab a seat? Right there's. It helps you narrow the scope of what your opener is, and then you also make these better quality connections. And that is such a simple hack. And that was my goal, was to try to find very, very simple things that people haven't thought of that are game change.

Now you are a fan of TED Talks. My favorite TED Talk or my favorite podcast is the TED Radio Hour comes out like every. I think it's every Friday. And they do four or five TED Talks that have similar themes, and they kind of delve in. They interview each of the. The TED Talkers, and it's amazing. I love that podcast every week. But what I liked about your book was you actually kind of like dissected TED Talk, successful TED Talk specifically, and you identify what you call the triple threat. In other words, like the, like the three things that you see almost every TED Talker doing to level up their audiences. Can you go into what it is that makes a TED Talk so grand and why this is relevant to anybody listening in?

Yeah. So I also love TED Radio Hour and I was, I really, I'm fascinated by virality and I like virality in every sense of the word. I am fascinated by those people who walk into a room and everyone wants to know them. That's an aspect of interpersonal virality. I love watching like, why do certain TED talks go crazy viral and get so many views and others don't? And so we analyzed thousands of hours of TED talks looking for patterns. And we looked at, I mean, all kinds of variables. I mean everything from gender to if the spooker wore glasses, to the color of their clothing to body language hand gestures. And the biggest one we found was that the most popular TED talkers used more hand gestures. Specifically, we actually counted every single hand gesture in these talks at it took months and months. I'm so grateful for my researchers. The most viral TED talkers on average use 465 hand gestures in 18 minutes. Whereas the least viral TED talkers, though less than 100,000 views, use an average of 272 hand gestures in 18 minutes. And this is really interesting because when I saw this in the data I went aha. This matches academic research about hands and how they are the undervalued key to connection in the sense that when we first see someone, we tend to look at hands first. And this is a survival mechanism. When we see someone's hands, we feel like we can trust them. We know their that the phrase like, you know, what is it showing my. Showing you my hand? Is that the cliche? I'm terrible with cliches.

Yep, it's something like that. Like, it's like a poker. Poker or phrase. Right? Like showing your hand. Ah, forget somebody's going to pipe in on the comments and scream at us for not knowing this. But yeah, I know what you're saying.

Okay. Okay, good. As long as you know what I'm saying. And you know, you know police officers, the first thing they say is get your hands up. Because our hands are our deadliest weapon. So when we first see someone, we like to see hands for intention. This comes out in all these business interactions with public speaking or pitching or one on one meetings where if you can't see someone's hand, part of your brain feels like, I don't know if I can trust them. And it's just a very interesting thing that I think TED talkers, most viral TED talkers Use accidentally in a certain way. They just have to be more handsy with their talking. And that makes them more relatable to the audience because the audience feels like they can see intention.

I like it. So are you saying that when I am talking to someone and they're just standing there facing me, rather than me having my hands clasped behind my back or in my pockets, they should be, like, open at my side. Should they be on my hips? Should they be in front of my body? Or should they just be visible? Like is the main thing. Just have your hands visible.

Visible and comfortable. So I'm very. I talk about body language to not prescribe, like, specific moves. Like, for example, a lot of body language experts will recommend the steeple gesture. I don't know if you've seen this. Like, it's when people put, like, their. They touch their fingers together in sort of like a triangle gesture. Now, that is, yes, a very kind of wise. It's seen as a wise or confident gesture. The problem is, is if you prescribe someone to do that gesture and they don't actually feel wise or confident, or that gesture is super unnatural for them, it looks really inauthentic. And so I would say I don't care what your hands are doing. They could be on there, on your hips. They could be in front of you on the table. They could be in a steeple gesture. As long as they are visible, that's what's most important. But I really want you to make sure you are comfortable.

Yeah. You've got actually four different photographs in the book that show, like, four pretty basic positions where the hands kind of seem comfortable. There's some space between the arms and the torso. The hands are visible. And, like, the chin and the chest and the forehead are in front of the person or slightly up. The shoulders are down and back. So that's what I like about the book is you have a few photographs that kind of show you the right way to show your hands. So we show our hands. That's one thing that we can learn from these TED talkers. What's the second thing?

So we also found that the TED talkers tended to find reasons to smile. And so this was interesting because smiling actually academically is not always a leadership cue. In fact, a lot of the times, smiling can be seen as a submissive or a supplicant gesture. But we were very surprised to see that a lot of the TED talkers, even if they had the most serious talks, found some reason to smile, especially in the first few seconds. I think that this is because when we first meet someone, we're trying to decide, is this person friend or foe? Is this person going to be on our side? And a smile is the micro expression or the facial expression that we can see from farthest away. So if someone is 200 meters away from us, we can often see smile because the whites of our teeth are sort of like the white of a. Of a flag. Right. If you wave a flag that you're giving up or whatever, it's the same thing with your teeth. It's almost like saying like, friend, friend, friend. Like, it's signaling that. So your best thing upon approach, especially if you're in a big group, is to flash your pearly whites because it's literally like a flag of friendship.

Gotcha. So we show our teeth in a. In not. Not in like a. Like a chimpanzee threatening type of gritting way, but in a way that, that simply lets people see that we are legitimately smiling, not fake smiling.

Yeah. In fact, like, I think that one of the worst pieces of advice that people give is like, smile all the time. Notice how I said they found something to smile about. So it's not like the best TED talkers came out on stage with a beaming smile and were like, hello, my name is Vanessa, and today I'm going to talk to you about important things that you need to know about with like a huge fake smile plastered across my face. It's that they came out and they had some anecdote or some fact or some story that actually genuinely made them smile.

Yeah.

There's nothing worse than someone who I always. The example I always think of is when you check into a hotel at like midnight, after you've been flying all day, and you're just exhausted and you get there and someone's like, hello, welcome to the Hilton. It's so great to see you. And you're just like, whoa, lady, I'm starving.

Let me in the room.

Right, Exactly. That's an inauthentic kind of fake experience that makes you just like. Like it grinds your gears. It would be much better to find those purposeful reasons to smile. So if you're. If you're in a pitch negotiation, your rapport building, those first few questions are actually important, not just for the verbal exchange, but also to find something genuine to smile about.

Yeah. Okay, cool. And by the way, my little trick is a lot of times, like, if there's someone introducing me, I'll always. Like, if I know they're gonna introduce me, I'll Tell them something funny to say. That's, like, totally not true. But that kind of cracks me up. And then we can kind of joke about. And so by the time I'm out on stage, I've already hadn't had an opportunity or excuse to smile. Usually because somebody's saying something stupid about me.

Love it.

So that's. That's my trick. So next time you, the listener, hear me speak, that's what's going on. So what's the third thing?

So the third thing is eye contact. So I try not to do these because they sound so boring when I just list them off like this. People are like, yeah, I get it. Like hands and eye contact and making a smile. I think that what's really important is we're talking about physiology. So these are survival mechanisms. These are things that have been with us for a reason. So the reason that we look for a smile is because. Because it's the way that we see from very far away that someone is signaling to us. They want to be friends, right? We look for hands because they're our deadliest weapons. And eye contact. When we produce eye contact, we generate oxytocin, which is a really chemical for connection. And if you don't get enough oxytocin, it makes you feel very, very disconnected from the person you're speaking with.

It is true. It's the trust hormone. I actually like. Tiny little rabbit hole. I actually purchased that from a chemical laboratory once and injected it for a few weeks on a daily basis to see what happened to my body. And I actually became far more trusting and lovable. And I was snuggling with my kids more and was admittedly also a lot less aggressive in sports and didn't care that much about winning as much as just hanging out with people. So it's a very interesting hormone. Listener, beware if you decide to get it and inject it, because it's not designed for human use. But, yeah, it's quite interesting.

Did you feel there was any. Would you think that it was placebo? Or do you think that it was chemical? Or did you.

Oh, it was definitely chemical. Probably the biggest takeaway I got from it was it's really, really nice before sex. It actually enhances sex to a huge extent because you feel way more connected to your partner because it is something that women release when they're breastfeeding and that both sexes release when they're having sex, especially when they orgasm. And so it's an interesting hormone, but I think a lot of people may not know that when you stare at someone, you release oxytocin. My wife and I have this practice where a few mornings a week, we just stand silently and gaze into each other's eyes for a couple minutes, which is kind of hard to do, and sometimes we crack up laughing. But it's a good way to release oxytocin.

That's really interesting. You know, oxytocin is a funny thing because I was giving a talk to a group of doctors. They do a lot of doctor trainings on bedside manner, and I was talking about oxytocin, and they were kind of giggling, and I asked them, I was like, what is everyone laughing about? And they said, oh, we give oxytocin to our patients to induce labor. We give oxytocin to our patients. And I said, oh, it makes women in labor nicer. And they were like, no, because it induces labor, which is. It's funny in huge doses. Oxytocin has all kinds of interesting effects on the body. It literally induces labor for women.

Yeah, induces labor. It can be used for sleep. It's very interesting. But, you know, it is. There's not a lot of research behind it. You don't want to shut down your endogenous production too much. You may want to stick to handshakes and eye contacts. Unless you're a crazy fringe biohacker.

Exactly. I mean, if you're really curious, I would be curious to hear what experiments you could run on it, but, yeah, that's intense. I love it.

Okay, so we've basically got the three things that every TED presenter does is they smile, they show their hands, and they engage in eye contact.

That's right. Those are the. That's the triple threat.

Okay, cool. Got it. An intriguing part of this book, Vanessa, was you at one point did a vow of silence. Like, not like a full on, like whatever they call it the vimpasana or vipassana, like yoga retreat where you're off in some, like, resort for 10 days, but you were, like, living in modern culture, going to come coffee shops and stuff, and you had a vow of silence. Is that correct?

That's right. And no writing, no writing, no emails, no writing on pads of paper. Nothing. Yeah.

Why did you do that?

I found embarrassingly, horribly that I was an interrupter. And I was nicely, gently, nicely called out on this with a friend, and with a lot of my friends and with my husband, I practice radical honesty, which is basically, you know, that you're kindly and directly very candid about things. And she nicely said to me, you interrupt. And I, when I dug into that a little deeper, I found that it was coming from a fear of running out of things to say or not having the right thing to say. Because I had been taught at the very beginning of sort of my adventure into social intelligence that to be impressive or to be memorable, you had to be witty and share great anecdotes and have great answers, when actually a much bigger part of being memorable and being impressive is allowing the other person to be memorable and impressive to you. And so I realized the only way that I would be able to become a better listener would be to quit talking cold turkey. I'm kind of an extreme personality. That's. I never do anything halfsies. So I decided to take a vow of silence, but I didn't want to leave the modern world. I think a lot of people who take vows of silence, which is wonderful, they do it for spiritual reasons, for exploratory reasons. And they go to a retreat or they go on a trip, or they, you know, take time in the. That is great, but it is more powerful, or I would say differently powerful, to carry on with your daily life, but not speak, only listen. Only listen on social media. You know, still checking Instagram, still checking Twitter, still checking email, but only listening, only reading. And I had an away message on that. People knew that I was reading their emails, but I wouldn't be able to respond until I was done with my vow of silence. The more interesting thing was the in person meetings. All my one on ones, all my masterminds, my networking events, my meetings, my team meetings. It was an intense experience because it taught me that people say so much more.

When you're quiet, people say so much more.

Yeah. That you give them the space to go a little bit deeper. And I realize that what happens is in everyday conversations you kind of have a certain amount of time that it's okay to speak. Now it's a little different between you and me, Ben, because we're on a podcast, so you're obviously giving me more time, but in a regular conversation, it's about 30 to 40 seconds per answer. Right. So you ask someone, so what do you do? And you have that person knows they have about 30 to 40 seconds that they should answer and they have to stop and give the other person time to answer. It's sort of this back and forth, this volleying back and forth. Well, when you're silent, but you're listening at 30 to 40 seconds, this really interesting thing happens where you ask someone what you don't ask someone anything. You just. I had a little card during my vow of silence, a little business card that said, I'm taking a vow of silence to become a better listener. Please tell me about me.

I was gonna say, how did you actually communicate with people? And that's how you did. You had a card?

Yeah, I had a little card. I had actually four. I had four flashcards. And that was one of them. The other one was I'm sorry. And. And then I think, thank you for your patience during this experiment. Like that. And so that one, tell me about you was the one that I really started with. And people would give me the same answer they always give. The first 30 to 40 seconds was like, oh, I'm in marketing and I've been doing it for about five years and I grew up here in Portland and blah blah. And. And then I would just be there, right? Like I would just be looking at them. There was no follow up question. There was no anything else. And I. And they would like, look at me. And this happened over and over again. And they realized, oh, wow, like I have more space now. Like, I have more space and I need to fill the space because she's not going to fill the space. So what else is there? And people would, like, take the conversation in ways that you could not imagine. And I learned so much about people and I do a vow of silence now every year. Look at the space.

I like, I was just testing you. Note to my audio editor, do not edit that out. I was testing Vanessa just to see if she would keep on going. That's really interesting. And you actually do this now? I think it's vow of silence. Is it on a yearly basis that people can join you and do their own vow of silence?

Exactly. Yeah. I do it every year, usually in late summer, and I encourage people to take it with me. And it's a really. It takes bravery. I will tell you. I think it takes more. I've done vow of silences that are like meditation retreats. And it's a different kind of courage. It takes a lot of courage to walk into a networking event and not speak.

I've actually had to suppress my own propensity to interrupt and to constantly want to like. And not that I never do this, but to want to bring my own perspective to conversations just from doing interviews like this, where I understand that I'm not necessarily inviting someone on to argue with them or to present my viewpoint as much as to make my audience familiar with theirs. And there's been times where I'VE been called out on that, where people have been like, oh, this person said the wrong thing about whatever, like veganism or weightlifting. Why didn't you correct them? But I think that even though it's something that I might have the propensity to do, the pros outweigh the cons of me having learned how to kind of keep my mouth shut and just let somebody present their views and let my podcast be like a channel for people to present new ideas and to communicate. In many cases, I learned things that I wouldn't otherwise learn if I had stayed stuck in my ways and just, you know, argued and talked.

So it's a skill. It's a skill. I think it's actually a muscle, because what happens is. And I think maybe, Ben, you and I are similar in this way is like, it's our reflex. Like, it's actually like an automatic response to want to jump in and build and go deeper and ask more questions. And that. That's a great skill, but it's a different kind of skill to allow space. And it's taken literally. It's like lifting weights at the gym. It's taken practice. And it's one of the reasons I don't have a podcast. Actually, a lot of people ask, have a podcast, and I don't have a podcast because I don't think I'm as good at that as I would like to be. You are much better than I am, and that is one of the reasons I don't have a podcast.

I like it. Cool. It's just more people to listen to my podcast instead of yours. So you have a fascinating part in the book where you talk about how these researchers put participants in FMRI machines and they recorded their brain activity. And what they recorded specifically was this concept of storytelling. What happens to our brains when we are communicating via stories.

So I always knew that stories were powerful. What I didn't know is that they were a hack. And what I mean by that is I think that most of us, our goal in an interaction is to get someone on the same page. We go on a date and we want to see are we on the same page with this person? Relationship, goal wise, we go on an interview, we think, is this company on the same page as me? Value wise, we go into a pitch or a meeting or negotiation, we think, oh, are we going to be like, page to get this deal done? And we work so hard at building rapport to get those goals right before a date. We think of all these great conversation starters. We can ask and we script out the perfect answers to an interview. What I realized was that actually a much faster way to literally get on the same page was telling a story because it makes your brain sync up with theirs. And the famous famous example of this, when they accidentally stumbled upon this idea, was when a researcher who was researching chimps had a chimp in their lab hooked up to a, I think it was a brain scanner or an activity scanner. And he went out of the office and got an ice cream cone and came back in the office and was eating the ice cream cone. And the monkey saw him eating the ice cream cone. And he noticed the monkey's olfactory center, taste and smell began to be activated as if the chimp was eating the ice cream cone. And it was the first time this sort of famous story where he was like, oh my gosh, like me eating the ice cream cone actually makes the monkey think that their brain is eating the ice cream cone. It's a very similar thing that happens where I can tell almost any story and our brains are this incredible muscle where it tries to think what would I do or feel like or smell like or feel like if I were in that exact scenario? So the fastest way to literally get on the same page as someone is to share a story where you sync up your brain.

So when you're doing this, can you give a concrete example of how we could actually communicate with someone by telling a story versus just engaging in basic conversation? What would be an example of. Let's say I'm sitting next to someone on an airplane, which I'm often doing, and I want to captivate them or speak to them in a way that involves this hacking method of social media storytelling. What would be an example of how I could actually do that?

Yeah, I'll give you a real example. So I was, you know, my book roll and I was flying all over the country forever. It felt like I was on a lot of planes. And so I would get on a plane and someone would say, so, you know, business or pleasure? You know, that was always, that's usually the opening question on a business trip or on a flight. And I would say, oh, business. They would say, oh, yeah. So you know, are you, what are you doing in New York when you get there? Here's the non story answer. Oh, actually I'm launching a book, it's called Captivate and I'm on a media tour. So I'm going on CBS this Morning on Wednesday and I'm really excited about it. Okay, that's the non story version Kind of interesting. Cool. Like some interesting facts or highlights. A better version of that answer, which is what I usually answer is, actually. So I just launched a book and I was terrified that no one would read it. We launched four days ago, and I got a call yesterday morning from the producers at CBS this Morning asking me to fly out immediately on the show. And so I am on this crazy adventure right now, about to go on this show tomorrow morning. Same amount of time. Same amount of time.

I like it.

But I am translating my sense of anxiety and, and surprise and excitement and this passion. And the response is so different. Right. The response to the first one is, oh, wow, how great. Congratulations on that. The response to the second one is like, oh, what? That's crazy. So yesterday morning, my gosh, do you know what you're going to talk about tomorrow? Have you ever done it before? What's the book about? Tell me more about your. Right. Like that's what you get. You get also the passion and the excitement and anxiety. And without a doubt, those people will say, I'll tune in tomorrow. Give me a card for the book. Oh, my gosh, tell me all about it. And that's a very, very different way of thinking about your kind of responses.

Yeah. And you get in the book into how to use hooks, how to use struggles, how to use unique words to do this. And for those of you listening in, you might notice that I do this in podcasts, like when I introduced Vanessa today, I introduced her using my story of a rainbow vacuum cleaner salesman who I roomed with when I was going to college, rather than just saying, hey, you're about to hear an interview with a girl who wrote a book about how to captivate people. And, you know, I do those type of things because I know, opening the kimono for you, that it will intrigue you and make you a little bit more likely to listen in. Hopefully the information is interesting enough for you that you listen in anyways. But, you know, take that as a lesson when it comes to conversation and how you're actually going to interact with people, because you'll find that when you tell stories, you actually, you get a lot more engagement with people and conversations just become a lot more fun, in my opinion.

Yeah. And I love that. Also a hook for me. That was also what I grabbed onto when I first started chatting with you and we went down this great rabbit hole.

Right, Exactly. So you also talk about the nut job in your book and how nutty people drive you bad poop crazy. And one of the things that you Talk about is this nut job, like, how to deal with difficult people. Can you talk about this little hack that you describe in the book about how to deal with difficult people?

Yeah. So this is something that I come across all the time in my work. We get so many questions about difficult people and how to disarm them. And I wanted to know, is there a hack? Like, is there something simple that can be done? Yes, of course. Therapy with a difficult mother. Of course. Great. Or, you know, like, there's. There's deep ways to do it, but I think if you have to have a one who's a little bit crazy or being a little bit difficult, it would be this. And it's based on a piece of research out of UCLA by Matthew Lieberman, who found that if you put a name to an emotion, it disarms the emotion in the brain. So, for example, if someone is feeling very, very frustrated, and you say, I can see how frustrating this is, even just saying the word frustrating, with a level of empathy behind that allows their brain to get out of the frustration and kick in their logic. Right. So instead of being in that emotional place, they go into their more logical place, which helps them be more solution oriented. So the nut job stands for name, understand, and tame, which is first, figuring out what is the emotion that's happening here. How can I put a name to it or add a label to it? For them, understanding is the second thing. So once someone feels like, okay, you named it, you nailed it, you heard it, how can we go into what exactly is happening? Why did it happen? What's the cause of it? Understanding it more Notice, that is not solution. That is not finding a solution. It's just understanding the causes of that frustration. And the last one, the very final step is tame, which is, okay, I feel like I've named it. I feel like I understand exactly where it's coming from. How can we transform it? That might be a solution, but it also might not. It also might just be event. And so that last step is sort of, how can you get this person out of difficulty into a functioning communication pattern?

I've actually been utilizing this strategy, and she doesn't listen to the podcast. So I can totally say this with my wife since I read this. So now when she's frustrated, I can basically get right on board with her by naming that she's frustrated, right? Hey, babe. Jessa, I know you're frustrated about this, and I understand that it's something that just doesn't seem to make sense to you and that this. This is an incredibly frustrating thing that you're going through right now. And then go into the understand point where you basically, you know, I guess the way that I would explain this would be engaging in conversation with, like, learning a little bit more about this. Like, you know, do, like, why is it that you think that the dog is doing this? And. And, you know, what have you learned so far from the vet? And what do you think that we can do about this? And then finally, then you transform. Then you actually answer the question. You figure out a way that you can help them. But, yeah, I think this name understand transform protocol makes a lot of sense now. You spend like 10 pages in the book going into it on a much deeper level than I just did. But it's a really, really cool way to encounter people who might otherwise turn something into a conflict. So I love that section of the book as well.

Oh, I'm so glad. And like, hopefully with compassion. Right. I think that the hardest thing is, like, when we're with a partner or a colleague who's like, driving you crazy, as I say, bat poop crazy. This process, it sort of takes the judgment out where it allows you to try to, you know, go into more of the compassionate framework, even if that wasn't your instinct, as opposed to impatience or frustration, which is often what happens when we're frustrated by someone.

Yeah, exactly. So in the book, you have, like, the social game plan where you can take a party or networking event or social situation, you can develop a map for it and learn how to work the room, find the sweet spot for making the connections. You've got the micro expressions, the seven universal facial expressions, and how they can be used to predict people's emotions and interact with them. And then you have the conversation sparks where you can kind of hack conversations by knowing certain words that will literally generate dopamine or oxytocin in the people that you meet. And it really is a fascinating book. We don't talk a lot about social psychology on the show as much as we do about nutrition and fitness and biohacking and meditation and things like that. But this book is actually really interesting, and I would encourage those of you listening in to grab it and give it a read. And I am going to link to it and all the other things that Vanessa and I talked about, including her Science of People website in the show notes. And you can grab the show notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com captivate that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com and in the meantime, Vanessa, I want to thank you for coming on the show and sharing all this stuff with us. I love this book and I want to thank you for writing it.

Oh, thank you so much for using the tips and giving me a shot. I really appreciate it.

Awesome. All right, folks, well, thanks for listening in. And until next time, I'm Ben Greenfield, along with Vanessa Van Edwards, the author of Captivate the Science of Succeeding With People. Signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have a healthy week.

You've been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast. Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness and performance advice.

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