59: Captivate: Secrets from Viral TED Talks with Vanessa Van Edwards

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What's next? This is a question we're all having to ask and answer more frequently. I'm Jenny Blake, your host of the Pivot Podcast and author of Pivot. The only move that matters is your next.

Notes from this episode. Visit pivotmethod.com podcast if Change is the only constant, then let's get better at it. Here we go.

Hello everybody. Welcome back to the Pivot Podcast. I am so thrilled to be interviewing one of my kindred spirits today, Vanessa Van Edwards. We have yet to meet in person, but every time I'm on the phone with her we are just going back and forth like we've known each other for years. Vanessa is a behavioral investigator and professional people watcher. She speaks, does research and cracks the code of interesting human behavior for audiences around the world. She is a self described recovering awkward person and we're here today talking about her new book, Captivate the Science of Succeeding With People. So Vanessa is out there teaching people how to succeed in business and life by understanding the hidden dynamics of people and all kinds of nuances that I'm excited to dig into. So Vanessa, welcome to the show.

Oh, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.

You said that you've pivoted many times in your career and are grateful for them. I'm curious, what was the biggest blessing in disguise?

Pivot.

Maybe one that you weren't anticipating, but that set you on this course you're on now.

I actually think that every single pivot I wasn't anticipating, and that is probably because I'm one of those personality types. I don't know if people listening are like this where I really like plans, I really like plans, I really like roadmaps, I like steps and lists. And I never have had pivot on a list. It was never in my business plans. And so I feel like most pivots were long overdue because I felt like any kind of change from the plan was a failure. And probably the biggest one I started. I always wanted to have passive income businesses and the biggest one was realizing that I was totally burnt out in one of my passive income businesses and switching to what I'm doing now, which is writing about people. That was the biggest, scariest pivot because it was a huge vertical change. Like it was same structure of the business, but totally different niche.

What was the passive income business?

So it was my mom. She's a lawyer. And when I was in college, she had a big talk with me where she said, you know, Vanessa, I know that you are thinking about your future career, and I wish that someone had told me that there was other options other than being paid by the hour. As a lawyer, you're only limited to how many hours you can work. She's like, I want you to think about other options. So she signed me up for this seminar called, I think it was the millionaire mind. Like T. Hara Becker, one of those free seminars that she'd heard about. And it was the first time I was ever introduced to this idea of passive income. And she, in this, they talked about like, vending machines. It was, you know, this was back in the day, vending machines and real estate. And one of the options on there was writing, like an information business. So at the time I was young, and so I started writing a blog about teenagers because I was a teenager at the time for adults and parents. So it was kind of like parenting from the kids perspective a little bit and ended up going a little bit viral. Like I had a couple articles written by teenagers to parents and it got picked up by a lot of different outlets. And before I knew it, I was in this business where I was all of a sudden a parenting expert, but I wasn't a parent.

And you know how this works in a lot of the. In a lot of businesses, you can't just produce a product. You have to be an expert as well. And I did not realize how limiting that could be once you become an expert in industry. Like, for example, if you run a software company, all of a sudden you become an expert in software companies. If you create a toy, you all of a sudden become a gaming and toy expert or a play expert. And so all of a sudden I was thrust into this role of being a parenting expert. And I wasn't a parent and I had little interest in it because I wasn't actually doing it. So that was when I realized I had to start shifting, Especially the older I got, I was getting really burnt out on that topic.

So you never took a traditional job out of school? You went straight into this?

I went straight into this. So I was. I worked while I was in college, but I started I started my blog while I was in college and asked my parents, I said, can I live at home? Give me one year and if I cannot pay my own bills by the end of one year, I will go to law school.

And I was on the track to do jd, mba, law school, business school. So they gave me a year. Thank goodness my mom let me live at home. I was able to get out of the fridge, you know, like the most bootleg business you could possibly think of. Like, I wrote my own business cards and like, you know, I mean, I spent on absolutely nothing. And it took about eight months. But that's when the Wall Street Journal finally picked up one of our teen articles. And that's when I started to get hired to do speaking. So I was going into PTAs, I was going into, like teacher conferences and speaking. And that was the very first. That was what was paying the bill bills and what kept me going on that first business.

I love it. I love the idea of a bootleg business.

It was. It was totally bootleg business.

Yeah, it reminds me, I was at Google and I thought the only way to advance was to get an mba. So I bought all these GMAT and get into the top business school books. I love books. I have to this day. Never touched them, Never touched them. They got into my house. They just started collecting dust. And I even started Life After College website in 2005, partly because I thought, okay, this will help me get into business schools. And then what ended up is it got its own momentum to the point where I became an author and speaker and all the things I would have wanted to go to business school for without having to go. And it sounds like you took a similar tack.

Yeah, you know, it's really interesting because I frequently I was faced with a similar choice to yours. For me, it wasn't business school as much as was business school, and possibly getting a Master's or a PhD in psychology because I write so much about psychology and sociology now about people. And there are so many times where I'm with people who got the degrees that I would have gotten. And we have totally different perspectives on business. Neither are better or worse. But I'll say things like, I'm just not sure if that's an mvp. I really want to make it an MVP and push it out as soon as possible so I can see if it's viable. And they're like, mvp. Well, I want to make sure that we do a year to two years of research and possibly get corporate funding for the research before we do it. Those are two totally different approaches. And I always wonder if I, if I had gone to business school or gotten my master's, if I would have slowed down my work, but maybe had a totally different end result. So you never know. The difference in perspective there is huge.

Well, I loved reading one of your recent blog posts was on 10 business hacks that you've developed over the years. Kind of your approach to business. And in one of them you say, don't reinvent the wheel. And then you say, but you know, a lot of people reinvent crappy, unsymmetrical, ugly wheels. So not only are they reinventing it, but they're not even picking the right wheel. So I'm curious to hear, as you transition to science of people and in the years that you've built this incredibly successful business based on online videos and courses and tons of other speaking and workshops, how have you stuck to kind of not reinventing wheels that you don't have to, but also being innovative in your own way and staying authentic to who you are? Because I know I've tried to sometimes hitch onto ugly, broke, broken down wheels, and they didn't work. And I didn't know they were broken until I tried. Yeah.

Yeah, okay. So what's interesting is I think that those moments where I decided to either reinvent the wheel or make my own came from very interesting places. So, for example, I was writing on science of people about human behavior. And what I was typically doing, my approach in the beginning, which has changed over time, was to comb through academic research, all the newest research that was out there, find interesting nuggets, and then turn it into a kind of actionable blog post. So this was great because it was very signed journalist kind of thing. It was right at that time when like pop sci was becoming the thing. It was like the time of Malcolm Gladwell and Jonah Lehrer. And like, you know, that was really hot at that time. It's changed a little bit now. So what was happening was I would write this blog post and they would do pretty well. Like, nothing viral, but they would get, you know, comments and likes and clicks. But I noticed that there was a competitor of mine who was basically taking my research and I was reading, you know, dozens of academic articles a day. And if you've ever read an academic article, that's painful. So, you know, these articles were hard won nuggets. He would take my work and just turn it into his own post, basically almost the same title, but would just kind of revamp it a little bit. And was just reposting whatever I was posting in his own words. And it was driving me crazy because there wasn't anything super unique about what I was doing that made it unstealable. And it was taking away from both my creative juice, but also my clicks, my likes, my readers. Like my readers. There was no reason for them to read me when they could read him. So I realized I had to find a way to pivot to something that could not be stealable. And the only way I could think to do that was two reasons. One is I could add in my own stories. You can't steal my stories. Second was to actually do my own research somehow on the topic. That was the moment where I first decided to try to do original research and create our own lab. And so the very first set of experiments I did just on myself. Then I started to recruit other people. Then I realized that was really, like. That was journalists loved it. Right? Like, as soon as I started doing my own research, not only did my readers like it better, but CNN and Huffington Post were like, oh, original research. Yeah, we want to post about that. So in a weird way, it both protected me from having my content stolen, but also made my articles and videos more viral. And so we started officially the lab, the lab version of Science People, moving from just blog to lab in 2013. And that's when we started doing massive original research experiments. And that was a huge turning point in our business.

How did you bolster yourself to get into the research business without having a formal education in it?

That was really hard. So what I decided to do, because I wanted to make sure that our research was rigorous enough where it would be taken seriously by major news outlets. And I also really wanted to contribute to the research that was out there. And specifically, I wanted to do things that I knew the academics couldn't do. So I feel like my relationship with a lot of IB academics out there is symbiotic because they are limited and helped by the irb, the internal review board. They're limited by having only college seniors to practice on. Right. Like, if you read most academic studies, it's like 22 psychology majors participated in this study. Yeah. And I was like, what if I could help them with their research by broadening it, by giving them bigger numbers, by having people from all over the world take this, and because we have so much traffic at the Science of People, we were able to do it. So I would read the end of academic studies. There's a specific part of academic studies at the very end that Says suggestions for further research. And this was the part where I was like, okay, I can help with this. So, for example, one of the studies that we did, we analyzed TED talks. Now, I love TED talks. I watch them all the time. And what I found was there was certain TED talks that went viral and other talks, very similar talks that no one ever watched. And I wondered why. Why was it that certain talks went viral and other ones didn't? And I realized that there was an academic research experiment done by Nalini Ambati at Tufts University that actually hinted at a possible answer to this question. She did a really great study on teachers and found that students rate teachers on their first impressions. And that first impression stays quite permanent. Even after an entire semester of teaching, their first impression doesn't really change. And I wondered, could this be replicated with TED talks? Like, if you just took the first seven seconds of a TED Talk and had people watch that, would their ratings change versus people who watched the entire 18 minutes? So I took her exact setup and her study and applied it to TED Talks with massive amounts of data. So we analyzed thousands of hours of TED talks. We had over 700 people rate these TED talks. And we were able to repeat her findings that we decide how good a TED Talk is in the first seven seconds.

That is so fascinating. What qualities did you find made a talk successful within that seven seconds?

Yeah, so there was five patterns that we found. And a couple of them were Nalini Ambati also hinted at in her study or also in other studies as well. The first one, the most obvious one, was hand gestures. So we actually had our researchers code each of the videos for body language patterns. And one of them was hand gestures, which we counted every single hand gesture, which was a painful process for my wonderful researchers, took hours and hours and hours. But what they found was, is the least popular TED talkers used an average of 272 hand gestures in 18 minutes. The most popular TED talkers. And these are, we do this specifically with view count. It's a very measurable way to do it. So the most popular TED talkers use an average of 465 hand gestures in 18 minutes. 272 compared to 465. That is a massive difference. I mean, that is no small, small change. We think that this happens because charisma or.

Comprehension is actually important from a speaking perspective in that really charismatic speakers speak to you on two tracks. They use their words and they also use their hands, especially on a video where you're trying to Decide how natural is this person, how charismatic is this person. They were looking at hand gestures as a way to gauge how interactive a speaker would be. And so you could almost always predict that the amount of hand gestures will correlate to a very high view count.

That is so fascinating. Does this change how when you give a talk, are you then paying attention to these findings that you discover?

Yes. And so in all of our speaking, public speaking trainings, and mine included, I began to think about not only my verbal script. And this is, I think the biggest hurdle that sometimes we face is we often think about our verbal, right? We think about what we want to say, we think about our script, we think about our bullet points, we think about our stories, but we very rarely think about how we want to say something. And so the how is actually this, this unutilized advantage that we have. And so I started to have myself and my students think about how can you non verbally script what you want to say? So in your elevator pitch, are you talking about a big idea? How big is it? Is it big with both hands? Is it big like a beach ball? Is it big like a salt and pepper shaker? You know, how big is that idea that actually cues people to believe you? Like for example, if I were to hold up my fingers the size of a cell phone and say, I have a really big idea, you'd be like, no, you don't. It's as big as a cell phone, right? Like it's so small. But if I were to hold out my hands as if I was holding a giant beach ball and I would say, I have a really big idea, you would then say, ah, yeah, she has a really big idea. How do you have to hold it with two hands? I know that's a crazy way to think about it, but that is actually how people, they use your hand gestures as an underline or a bold along with your words. So I think one of the keys that lot of people can do is think about how can you non verbally script your elevator pitch? How can you nonverbally demonstrate your ideas so that people not only remember them but also believe you more?

I love that. Yeah, I learned tactics. I went to Michael Port's heroic public speaking event. And even things like if you're sharing three points, point one, and then you'd very deliberately move on the stage point number two, and then very deliberately move again point number three. And so instead of some speakers just to get out their nerves are pacing back and forth really, really with no purpose. But he really Talks about moving with purpose every single time.

And there is also, you know, with that, there's also an ownership of the stage that we really appreciate. So what's interesting in TED talks is they have that red dot carpet. And so in a weird way, that actually limits movement, which means that your hand gestures are even more important. Because if you can't claim the stage, and that's a great thing if you can't, you know, like, for example, when I switch concepts, I always switch positions on stage. So when I'm talking about one concept, I will usually anchor myself on one part of the stage. And when I am moving on to a new topic, I will move locations. Well, in a TED Talk, they usually can't do that. They're usually very limited by their red dot, which means that you have to demonstrate the outline of your content with your hands. And when you do that, people feel like, ah, I'm getting Cliff Notes, right? It sort of feels like you're outlining those concepts along with your words. So you can have your hand on the left, your left hand up. You're talking about one concept, and then you switch concepts and you raise your right hand. That's a very nice, subtle way of telling the audience, we're moving on now. Right? If you're following along, we're moving on, you can go to the next bullet point. So it's just. It's like giving Cliff Notes along with what you're saying.

I love that. So before we move on, can you briefly share the other four findings from the TED Talk for seven seconds? Yeah.

So let's see if I can do them quickly. So one of them, the next one that we found was vocal power. So this is a really hard nuance, but I think it will make sense to you once I say it. Every single TED Talker is talented, Right? That's the beauty of this study, is that to get on Ted.com, you already have to be the best of the best, right? You're already an expert in your field, an author, a researcher, someone who's making an impact. No one is a schmo, right? Like, no one's taking the stage and is like a terrible speaker. So what really differentiates the good speakers from, I think, the least popular speakers is the difference between being memorized and internalized. So one thing we noticed was that the speakers who got very low ratings in charisma and intelligence. So we had all of our participants rate the speakers on overall quality, charisma, intelligence, and credibility. The speakers that got rated the lowest in intelligence and charisma had a very polished speech. They clearly had practiced. They had really good points. In fact, their points were so good that they were almost scripted or too perfect.

The ones that got rated really high in charisma spoke like they were speaking to you, like they were over a cup of coffee. So for example, I'll try to give you an example of what that was like. So here are the really memorized ones. Today I want to talk to you about the importance of people skills. People skills are an essential part of being human. When you are human, you have to make sure you have high social intelligence. Okay, that's memorized. And the moment your brain hears that kind of cadence, we know that you know what you're talking about, but it's so hard to listen to it.

That's so true.

Right. The very highly charismatic people, they sounded more like this.

People intelligence, one of those things we all know we need but is so hard to get. We know that people intelligence is important, but we usually have no idea how we want to get it. So the question is, how do we level up our social intelligence?

That is awesome.

Yeah, they're very different ways of thinking. And the biggest way was like, I think that the speakers who were really memorized, they knew their stuff, but you didn't feel their belief in their stuff. Whereas with the really good speakers, you knew that they believed it so much it was like they were just explaining it to you from their gut. Now, I don't actually think that that's true. Like, for example, if you look at Brene Brown's talk, that's a perfect example of it. She clearly had practiced her talk, but she speaks to you like she's talking to you over a cup of coffee. And that's the kind of person we like to listen to.

Yeah, makes so much sense. It's true. Something about her delivery and her vulnerability, which is of course the subject of her talks, but she's up there and something about it feels raw and vulnerable and in the moment.

Yep, exactly. So the second kind of non verbal one was smiling. So this one was a really big surprise to me. So by the way, the research says that leaders smile less. Usually alphas smile less. The research says that submissives or people who are want to be a people pleaser or appease others smile more. So I was floored that the most popular TED talkers actually had more quantity of smiles. So like the amount of seconds they smiled and we actually had someone with a stopwatch recording the amount of seconds that each TED Talker smiled, the quantity of smiles, the amount of seconds actually record, it made them more intelligent. They got more higher intelligence ratings the longer they smiled. Shocking to me because it did not match the research.

And what I also found was surprising is I went into the speakers who had the most smiles just to see like were they doing jokes, you know, were they talking about a not serious topic? Actually a lot of the speakers who smiled a lot were not speaking about frivolous topics. In fact, they were talking about very serious things. But what they did is they found reasons to smile and they weren't necessarily like haha funny. They often smiled when they felt very passionate about something. And so what it made me realize is when you are writing a really good talk, especially one where you want inspiration, there's a difference between inspirational talks and informational talks. And you have to know which kind you're giving. An informational talk, you don't necessarily need to have as much smiling. You're delivering pieces of knowledge. Inspirational talk where you're trying to change behavior, where you're trying to change mindset, where you're trying to give aha moments. That's where smiling becomes more important. And that's where you have to look at your material and figure out how can I find a reason to smile? What is there in here that either I am so passionate about or I want to make people so passionate about about that it actually brings me happiness. That was, I think, the difference between those, those TED talkers.

So fascinating. I love how you really break these down to such a micro detail. One of the things I love from captivate for everyone Listening will try and describe it, but it's the voice, it's the smile, it's body language. And you even get into in this book where to position oneself at a networking event. Like there's a diagram of a bar and the doorway and the sign in table. So just to use that as an example, where should people stand at a networking event?

Yeah. So you know, when I was thinking about the book, I was like how do I if I had to teach people skills from scratch, like if I had to create a textbook that every student would get in school of like this is how people work, where would I start? And I realized I had to start with how to work a room. Like when you first get into a room, whether that's a party or networking event or a meeting or a conference, I don't know about you, but usually three things pop into my head head. One, where do I stand? Two, what do I do? Three, what do I say? Right? Like, those are like, immediately the first three things. And so we decided to do a huge networking experiment where we partnered with local networking events and mapped out the room. We literally had a corner, a camera in each corner of the room. We filmed the patterns of people moving throughout the room, and we tracked what we call super connectors. So super connectors were the people who gathered the most cards, had the most fun at the networking events. We gave them pre and post surveys and also had the most contacts on LinkedIn. They specifically made very certain patterns around the room. And we found there was a sweet spot on where to stand. And actually, like a football coach, I created a little map. I know in chapter one, this is where you go when you enter a room. One of the sweet spots is right as you exit the bar. So it seemed like the superconductors actually planted themselves in the place where right after someone stands in line to get a drink, they get the drink from the bartender or serve themselves if it's at a party and they turn to face the room. That moment of, who do I talk to? Is so nerve wracking for people that if you plant yourself right in their line of sight so you can say, hey, good to meet you, how's the wine? You're like this social superhero. You become like their savior because you're right where they are, where they're like, what do I do next? And that is the place where you make the best quantity and quality connections.

It's so interesting to hear you talk about this and share all your research and hard in this moment to picture you as any kind of recovering, awkward person. I know we've all had our moments, but I'm so curious to know, speaking of pivot, how did you go from recovering awkward person to where you are now, which is earning a living from writing and speaking and researching people and interacting with people all day long?

Yeah, well, first, I am still very much in recovery.

Very, very much. And I think that that is the key, actually. So there's been a lot. There's a lot of people skills books out there. You know, there's amazing ones. How to win friends and influence people. You know, all kinds of amazing people skills books. And a lot of those books and resources and blogs and courses are written by people who are naturally good with people. And that's great to a certain extent. Like, it's really wonderful to learn from the best. But I found that a lot of them were giving the same prescriptive advice, which is basically be a bubbly Extrovert, right? Like, the bottom line was like, talk more, be more cheerful, be more encouraging, be a cheerleader. And those are all great things if you are naturally an extrovert. But if you're not naturally an extrovert, it was very hard to learn from people who are naturally extroverts. And so what I found was, is that. And you'll see the first line of my book is, I'm a recovering awkward person, not I'm a social expert.

Right.

And I think that the reason why that works is because you have a.

Photo from 1993, which I'm looking at right now. It's pretty fantastic.

I do my bucket haircut, my helmet hair.

Yeah, looking good. I love it. You guys can't see on the podcast, Vanessa has gorgeous, long, flowing, shiny, Pantene Pro V level hair. So this bucket, you call it helmet hair is adorable. Thank you for sharing it.

Yes. And that photo, it was funny. I put that photo on the very front page of the book. My mom was horrified. My mom got a galley copy and she was like, honey, why did you put this horrible picture of you in this book? And I was like, thanks, mom. Thanks a lot. She's like, this was a terrible time period for you. And she remembers. I mean, I would break out in social hives and hives at school because I had so much social anxiety. And she was like, this was a terrible time in your life. And she remembers because it was really hard. And I was like, exactly. Like, exactly. It was the worst time in my life and so socially difficult, that if I could learn these skills one by one manually and try them out and try to adopt them so they actually felt authentic and natural, anyone could do it. Why would I flip that and pretend that it always came naturally to me? Because I think that's the biggest problem that we've had with a lot of the people skills books that are out there. And so I think that that's one of the things that I try to keep front of mind when I'm writing a post or doing a video or doing a podcast is the hardest part, is actually trying to make natural what doesn't come natural. And that is what I'm trying to do most.

I would say that. And you're also great at. Before we hit record, you said, I'm happy to share anything. And I just want this to be authentic and open. And you putting that photo on page one of your book is example that it can be very counterintuitive for people who are doing any kind of creative Work publicly. That actually the more vulnerable and the more real, the closer people come. And that's a social skill in itself that I think our parents generation aren't as familiar with, actually.

Yeah. And it's really counterintuitive that we think that to be impressive and to be interesting, we have to be the most impressive and the most interesting. And you might have heard the very famous phrase cliche to be, you know, to be interesting, be interested. That does work. However, I always found that phrase not enough information. Like I didn't, I didn't know what to exactly do with that. Actually, to be interesting, you have to put out the things that people haven't heard a million times before. And that often means sharing mistakes, asking for advice, sharing vulnerability, and sharing the complete story. Right? Like the complete story of me understanding how people work is that I didn't always understand how they worked and I had to figure it out. And so I think that that's what we are all doing all the time, every day, is trying to figure out who am I? Right? Like how do I work? And then how does that fit in with the people around me? Because what we are all craving is that sense of belonging.

Totally. What surprised you most from the time you started working on Captivate to when you finished or even after you sent it off to press?

Hmm, that's a good question.

What surprised me most? You know what? I think it was that people's response to the book told me a lot about them. So now that people are starting to read it, just as people are just getting their early galley copies, is that what people resonate with is different for everyone. So I think that we all have different social needs that we are trying to fill. So for some of us, it's. We are desperately craving a sense of belonging. For others, it's being recognized, feeling like our accomplishments and our intelligence is heard. For others, it's being entertaining, making people laugh, giving people aha moments. For others still, it's more ego driven. It's having accolades and prestige. And what I realized is different chapters speak to different people, different hacks speak to different people. People. And in a way, it's almost like.

A guide into what matters to you. And I never expected that to happen from the book. I expected sort of it to be chronological. You know, I start with chapter one and they all kind of build upon each other. But no, actually certain chapters speak to different people. I love that.

It's so nice when the book really takes on new life as people read it. And I know it might sound like an author cliche, but it is. And it's so interesting how people interpret different parts. What makes an impact, what stands out, what they represent, remember? And so the question in Pivot that gave me hives was, what's next? And I'm curious for you, as you're launching Captivate and you have this very successful business, what's on the horizon for you now, having really mastered this part of your career in a sense.

Oh, gosh, that is the question that I'm faced with every day. And I would actually say that I have to wait and see. And I hate that answer because I really like plans, as I mentioned. But what I don't know, and this is what I'm wondering, is what will people want when they are done with the book? Will they want an online course? Will they want a workshop? Will they want group coaching? Will they want one on one coaching? I don't know what they want. And I feel like I could guess, but I think that that would not serve my readers. So in a way, I'm kind of waiting to see what people ask for. And that's very uncomfortable for me. But it's, I think that the smartest place for me to be right now.

I love it. And I was in the same position too, after Pivot came out, that I set up all these pilots. You talk about MVPs. Me too. That you're actually not supposed to know the answer. That it's just by having options and having small experiments. That's our half. And then the other half is getting feedback from readers and the market and letting those pilots or experiences, experiments take on a momentum of their own. But it's very hard to know in advance.

And I don't want to be so set on my path that I don't recognize what people are actually asking for, which I have. I've made that mistake in the past. So this time I'm trying to be open to what people want and then try to deliver that as opposed to telling people what they want.

Do you think that no matter what, you'll continue down the science of people path or do you envision opening up in some way?

I think I'll always be talking about people skills. It's just. Or human behavior in general. I could see myself doing different niches. You know, the next adventure for me is parenting. So, you know, that's coming hopefully in the next months to few years. And I could see, you know, right now I run the science of people. I wouldn't mind doing the science of parenting and. Or the science of pregnancy. So I think that different niches based on, you know, this general topic of human behavior, I could see that coming next.

I love it. And it's such a great example of your skill for and love of research and original research and creating new approaches that you've done in your business so far, which is really fun to hear about. Vanessa, thank you so much for being here today. Huge congrats on the book. Where can people find you if they want to keep in touch?

Yeah. So the lab is scienceofpeople.com you can come play in the lab. You can read all of our latest experiments on Shark Tank and Ted and Vocal Power and all that fun stuff. And then the book captivate is wherever books are sold.

Amazing. Vanessa, thank you so much and happy launch.

Oh, thank you so much, Jenny.

Bye.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Pivot podcast. Make sure you don't miss an episode or my insider tips and templates by signing up for Pivot List, a curated twice monthly newsletter where I share the inside scoop on what I'm reading, watching, listening to, and the latest tools I'm geeking out on. Sign up@pivotmethod.com pivotlist get show notes from this episode@pivotmethod.com podcast and connect with me on Twitter at Jenny Blake.

Remember, build first, then your courage will follow. Hasn't it always.