Charlie Houpert: Charisma Teacher: Psychology Of Why People Don't Like You! People Are Attracted To These Traits! The Secret To Being Instantly Likeable!
Guests: Charlie Houpert
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
§01Transcript — part 1
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I want to go through these five habits that make people instantly dislike you.
Yes, yes.
So, these are tiny little things that a lot of people do without even realizing that they're doing this sort of stuff.
First one is...
Oh my god, it's so true.
Charlie Hooper is a leading...
Expert in charisma and confidence.
His insights and practical techniques have helped millions of people master communication and body language.
To thrive in both personal and professional relationships.
How important is charisma and confidence?
It's perhaps the most underrated piece of success.
And it's your ability to speak with conviction.
The ability to influence someone.
Ability to connect with people.
I mean, look at Donald Trump.
He talked his way into the literal presidency of the United States of America.
It's so incredibly powerful.
And is it something that you can learn?
Yeah, and I'm a testament to that.
Because growing up, I was invisible.
Not making new friends, not forming connections.
I wasn't dating because there was this fear that I would get hurt.
Where did that come from?
Part of it is through the experiences that I had.
One of them was being sexually abused.
And I felt disgusted with myself.
I was struggling and frustrated with the compensations I'd made as a result of it.
And so I learned all the tips and tricks to develop confidence and became a completely different person.
And we're going to go through all of them.
Amazing.
So there's prey versus predator movement, which is tremendously valuable for first impressions.
And then there's the charismatic traits, which women are attracted to.
The 60-second hack to establish trust and respect.
And then I have six charismatic mindsets for success.
And there's plenty more.
Listen, I've got time.
Okay, so let's break it down.
I find it incredibly fascinating that when we look at the back end of Spotify and Apple and our audio channels, the majority of people that watch this podcast haven't yet hit the follow button or the subscribe button, wherever you're listening to this.
I would like to make a deal with you.
If you could do me a huge favor and hit that subscribe button, I will work tirelessly from now until forever to make the show better and better and better and better.
I can't tell you how much it helps when you hit that subscribe button.
The show gets bigger, which means we can expand the production, bring in all the guests you want to see and continue to do in this thing we love.
If you could do me that small favor and hit the follow button, wherever you're listening to this, that would mean the world to me.
That is the only favor I will ever ask you.
Thank you so much for your time.
Back to this episode.
Charlie, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions of people have benefited from your work and tens of thousands of people have been through your university learning about something.
If you had to explain in your own words what it is that you're doing for those people in a simple way, what would you, how would you say that?
Take all the situations where you're interacting with another person, whether it's at your work, dating, friends and groups, and take the times that you're feeling that you're not
grounded in that sense of confidence that you maybe have when you're sitting at home on the couch with your friend or your family and bring the best version of yourself to those situations.
I think a lot of people also want flowing conversations.
They want to feel like themselves.
They want to be the person that is respected and is admired.
When they walk into a room, they want other people to notice them.
That's one of the big ones that we hear from guys is they want to be the person that anytime they enter a room that women and men take notice of them.
It usually is an acute thing.
So a lot of people show up because there's a girl that they liked and it's not going well or something like that.
Or they went out for a promotion and somebody that they felt was less qualified then wound up getting the job.
So they come in with a very acute.
Social situation that they would like to change.
They'd like to get the girl.
They'd like to get the job.
They'd like to be the leader in their friend group.
But when people have gone through the course, what I see is they speak more about a sense of joy in life and confidence.
Because I think that if you feel disconnected from people, I actually read a thing this morning that some
I said, you know, I came here and I started applying your ideas and I got more tips at my job as a waiter, which was really cool.
But also I felt as if I had fallen into nihilism.
Like I was just, things didn't matter anymore.
And my ability to connect with people is shifting that for me.
I feel more connected, less nihilistic.
It's interesting because when people hear words like phrases like body language and charisma and confidence, they sound like tips and tricks and stuff.
But when I think about the impact that these things have had on my own life, when I think about even presidential elections and how our society
is designed and who rises to the top and who doesn't, so much of it seems to depend on whether you understand naturally or through learning the skills, how to be charismatic, confident, how to sell, how to get someone else in some situation
to believe you, to buy into what you have to say.
Um,
So I guess my question to you is how important is it?
Like someone that has the skills that you teach people versus someone that doesn't, how much of a trajectory shift is that going to be, do you think, on their life?
To me, so there's the external question of what is it going to allow you to achieve in the world?
And then there's the internal question of what is your subjective experience of your life?
Starting with the internal, to me, it's almost everything.
Like if you feel disconnected from the world, it is very, very hard to feel good, no matter how much money you have, no matter how much your six-pack abs are working for you.
Like even if you have adulation and you have things.
But you feel disconnected from the people in your life.
It is very hard to feel good.
On the external side, I think it's tremendously underrated.
And I think this is why people didn't see Donald Trump coming.
Because does he have the best policies?
Does he have the best record?
Does he have any of these things?
He is clearly someone who has gotten to where he has by talking.
He talked his way into the literal presidency of the United States of America.
And if I look just at my own life, at people who were advancing at work, and then when I started focusing on this stuff, it was not the best analyst.
There was a guy who was a better analyst than me, and he did not get the off-track promotion that I got.
And it was just because I'd made–
closer connections with the president of the company than he had.
And so I think it's wildly underrated.
I think a huge myth that people get is that if you get good grades, do what is asked of you in the job description, are generally kind and friendly and speak honestly, that things are just going to work out for you.
But there is a missing piece, which is do other people connect with you and like you and want you to succeed?
And I think it's
perhaps the most underrated piece of success, which is why I put all my attention there.
This wasn't like a play at making a lot of money or having a big YouTube channel.
It was the highest leverage point that I felt and experienced in my own life.
And is it something that you can learn?
That is, yeah, I said there was a big myth.
This is probably the first or second biggest myth is that you can't learn it.
And I believe that for, what, 18 years of my life.
So the first portion of my life was charisma.
is being able to throw a football better than the other kids, right?
Charisma is just the thing that you have at 13 that I definitely didn't have.
And it was only around 18, 19, 20 that I realized that the way that I approached people in conversations had a dramatic impact on the responses that I got.
So it is most definitely something you can learn.
I feel like I'm a testament to that.
And, you know, people have gone through the course.
Also feel that.
And if someone hasn't seen your YouTube channel, what is it you're doing on that YouTube channel?
So say that, you know, we've got someone listening now and they've never heard of your channel before.
Can you explain exactly what you've done on that channel, how long you've done it for and how many situations you've looked at over the last decade?
Yeah.
So...
Basically what I would do is I would look at moments.
It started with a Bill Clinton debate.
That was the first video that I ever did.
And there's this debate moment where Bill Clinton and George Bush Sr.
Are having a town hall.
So it's them communicating directly with people.
And it's known as the moment that Bill Clinton won the election.
And it's him going up to this woman and just she asked some question about politics or the thing.
And he goes up and he says.
How does this impact you?
And he looks her dead in the eye, and you can tell she's just– she's feeling it.
She's connected with him, and he gives his answer.
So it's us breaking down those sorts of interactions.
Some of them are in politics.
Some of them are on talk shows, and some of them are scripted TV shows where I'm just saying, hey, this is obviously a script, but it would work in real life if you did it like Jon Snow did in Game of Thrones or something.
So we use that sort of as the hook because–
A lot of people weren't looking.
Charisma was not a topic that anyone was interested in 10 years ago.
So we would hook people with Game of Thrones or this famous person, but the content of it would be how to handle a group interaction or how to lead more effectively.
And these were things that I wasn't necessarily learning from these videos, but I was learning elsewhere in my life and then commenting on what I saw in these videos.
And that really connected with our audience, and it's helped us get, I think, 6.8 million subscribers at this point.
It's incredible.
And it's actually such an unbelievably powerful way to do it by showing both real world examples, but also fictional examples.
And I was even watching you break down certain interviews that the famous Jordan Peterson interview with Kathy Newman.
Kathy Newman.
That one's great.
And you break down exactly what's going on on kind of both sides and how Jordan ultimately ends up winning that argument by...
Kind of holding his position and Kathy trying to put words into his mouth, et cetera, all of those things.
But you break it down, you break down moments from history, moments that we all know from movies and tell us exactly what's going on in terms of like human connection, conversation, persuasion, leadership, influence in those situations.
Incredibly fascinating.
So let's talk about you.
Yeah.
Because people will look at you now sat here and they'll think this is a guy that's always had confidence.
You're a good looking guy.
You're someone that is clearly a great conversationalist.
You exude charisma.
But if we were to wind back, I know that that's not always been the case.
Yeah, yeah.
So take me back.
You did your research.
So...
I grew up extremely shy.
And still am today, an introvert.
I mean, you could probably see if you flash five or six minutes back to the beginning of this interview.
Like, I started off nervous.
I feel very comfortable now, but my default state is one of shyness, reservedness, and nervousness.
And so that was just how I was for the long time.
And when it came time to graduate high school, they had these superlatives that they would give out.
And I had a class of about 500 people.
And my superlative was most likely to break out of a shell in college.
So I was well-known, but I was well-known for not saying a lot.
So people like didn't know me and then voted for me as the person who one day would show up and reveal themselves to the world, I suppose.
That didn't happen.
I didn't break out of my shell in college at all.
I continued to do the same.
I had a small group of friends.
I wasn't like–
dating or anything like that.
And then it was only when I was about 19 years old that I studied abroad and had gotten so sick of the experience for me at that time in my life of having a massive crush for usually a year.
Forming an entire relationship in my head that we would one day have, and then having that not materialize because they weren't interested or if they were interested, I could quickly talk them out of being interested just by my general awkwardness.
That had happened so many times that I was done with it and frustrated.
So when I went abroad, I made it a mission to figure out what was going on and shift it.
And it was actually very helpful.
And when people ask me, how do you begin to change these things in yourself?
Shift
Changing your environment is so impactful, probably one of the most impactful things because what you don't realize is that your friend and family who love you very much tend to not like shifts that you make to your habits, particularly the way that you socialize with other people.
But when I gave myself the freedom of being abroad.
§02Transcript — part 2
I tried everything.
I worked on my eye contact.
I read every book and would just run little personal experiments, some of which didn't go well.
There was one period of time I remember where the experiment was big eyes.
So I would walk around.
It was so nice to meet you.
And you immediately recoil your head.
I swear I did that probably for a week until somebody said, dude, what are you doing with your eyes?
Stop.
Really?
Yeah.
He was a good friend.
I appreciate him for that.
But it was just mini experiments.
And I started them while I was studying abroad and I continue when I came back.
But by the time that I did come back six months or a year later.
The word in the college campus was like, what happened to you?
You are a completely different person.
You are outgoing and you seem capable of talking, particularly to women at this case.
And then friends were all of a sudden asking me, what should I do?
And so that started sort of a second phase of my life where this was–
The primary focus day to day, you know, after like eating, drinking and maybe getting some money in order to pay my bills,
other people, how to influence them, how to interact with them, how to get better friendships, how to talk my way into a job, you know, all of those sorts of things became the primary focus for me.
Just to spend a second going back to how.
what your sort of internal monologue was like through the awkward years of your life.
How did you feel and what did you think of yourself?
Like if I'd asked you, what do you think of yourself back then?
And you were to answer it honestly, what would you say?
Honestly, which I couldn't have done, but I will tell you, I'm ashamed.
Would have been what I would have said.
And I didn't like, I didn't know this about myself, but like, I didn't have the right to speak up.
Like it, people wouldn't have liked it.
I had, I remember I had one guy and it didn't even bother me because I suppose it connected with how I felt, but he said, Charlie, you're so normal that you're invisible.
And I think that was by design.
Like blending in became a way to be unseen and a way to be safe.
And I wasn't picked on.
You know, like all of those things never happened just because I was there but not in a way that was noticeable.
The problem with that is, yeah, you're safe.
You don't get picked on.
Nothing happens.
But also nothing happens, right?
You're not making new friends.
You're not forming connections.
Other people were forming new groups and expanding, and I was not.
So there was a huge disconnect between how I felt in a more public setting and how I felt in more intimate private settings.
And did you look at some other people who didn't seem to have those challenges as, I don't know, biologically gifted?
Yeah, freaks of nature.
Is that what you thought?
Oh, yeah, totally.
There was clearly– the thought that something could shift in me to get me to have a different response didn't occur until I was 18.
18 or 19 years old.
And I think that's a really important shift for a lot of people is where you start recognizing that it's on you.
It's your responsibility.
And the way that I put it at the time was it's always my fault.
So what I carried from 19 to say 28 or 29 was if this interaction with you and I or anyone doesn't go well, there's something that I could have done differently in order to make it go well.
And so that gave me this fuel to constantly adjust because I was going, okay.
That one didn't go great.
What could I have done?
Where did it break down?
It was three minutes into conversation, but I felt they sort of dropped off when I started answering that question about my boring job in a really boring way.
So let me in this next interaction talk about my job in a way that is a bit more exciting.
And so I was–
really spending a lot of time obsessively reviewing and talking with my co-founder and best friend at the time, like what happened, where did it break down, what could we try differently, and then running these experiments.
It was genuinely an obsession and a thrilling one at that.
What was the difference between the guy who went...
On holiday that day on the plane versus the guy that came back in terms of skills or knowledge?
What was the actual difference in the person?
A willingness to stick your neck out there was the big thing.
So one of the primary things that I did when I went abroad was ask questions that I otherwise would have kept to myself.
So I was in a town, a small town.
Costa Rica called her radio.
And I showed up.
I don't speak Spanish, right?
So there's even more reason to, oh my gosh, I could make a mistake and it could go really bad and I could be bumbling.
But I made a rule that I was going to ask, if I didn't know where my classroom was, I wasn't going to like sit with my piece of paper and try to work it out on the map.
I was going to ask a human.
And when it came time to figure out where there was a good restaurant or a good place to go out at night, I was always going to ask someone.
And thanks to that habit, as well as the friendliness of Latin people, that extended my comfort zone and gave me a number of experiences of you put yourself out there, something magical happens.
So that is the easiest tip that I can give is one more sentence.
So when people ask me, like, what is something that I can do to work on my charisma?
I would say you have dozens of interaction in a day if you're in any sort of populated area.
You have an interaction with the Uber driver.
You have an interaction with the person behind the counter.
You have an interaction with the person who you get into an elevator with.
And there's usually a prescribed amount of social interaction that you have.
Maybe it's hay.
Maybe it's even less than hay.
The advice that I give to people is if you want to get started, one more sentence.
One more sentence than usual.
So as you get into the elevator and the normal sentence is what floor.
Anything in addition to that.
What floor are you in?
Oh, have you lived in this building for a long time?
And all of a sudden, you get to know your neighbors because the person that is just the elevator person who you're putting them on floor three now has a name.
And every time it sort of compounds.
And expands and you get to have a wider social circle.
So that's just one piece of the things that I would work on, which is one more sentence with people.
But there's plenty more and I'm happy to dive into first impressions and all that kind of stuff.
Okay, so first impressions.
Yeah.
The big thing that I got wrong, and I see almost everybody get wrong, and it's bad common advice about first impressions, is that just the best way to get people interested in you is to be interested in them.
And what I found is that that is generally true, but it ignores the realities of status, which is I'm sure you experience this.
But a lot of people come up to you.
They're very interested in you, but that doesn't mean that they're going to make a good first impression on you.
It means that you might have compassion for them.
It might even mean that you might feel love for them, but it does not mean that you're going to want to follow up and spend time with them.
Probably you've experienced, I don't want to follow up with this person and spend time with them, even though I see their sincerity of their interest.
No comment.
And I've been on both sides of this, right?
I've been the person who is just so interested in you.
There's a few things that if you just do this before expressing your interest in somebody, it changes the whole game.
So fun, trust, respect.
If you, and this can take 60 seconds or less, can communicate that you are fun, that the person can trust you, and that there is something to respect about you, and then you express your interest in that person, it will completely flip the dynamic on its head.
So we can break it down.
Please.
Fun.
There's a ton of ways to handle this, right?
You can crack jokes.
You can do all sorts of things.
But the easiest way to add fun to an interaction is you take the first question that almost everybody asks you, which is, how are you?
Right?
These are the gimmies that we just say, fine, good, how are you?
Oh, there's a fire, whatever.
And be more enthusiastic than fine.
I would always say be better than good.
So if somebody comes up to you and they say, how are you doing?
You can be fantastic or wonderful or great or ecstatic or electric.
And there's a whole separate conversation about how to make this real inside of yourself because I'm not asking you to paper over anything.
I think that was a mistake that I made early in my charisma career of just too much fake it till you make it.
But if you can genuinely cultivate those feelings and share them, that level of enthusiasm is fun.
Crack a joke, you got fun.
Okay.
Trust.
This is a lot of nonverbal stuff, you know, eye contact, body language, the way that you shake someone's hand.
But it also comes down to if the person feels like you are trying to get something from them.
And there's a number of things that tip us off to this.
But one of these is when you overqualify yourself, which is in direct competition with this need to establish yourself, right?
So there's these– we want to establish that we're interesting people.
We have things going on that you might want to connect with.
But if we drift over into name dropping and selling, we're going to alienate the trust.
So the place that I focus most on with people is.
In most places that I've been, how are you?
Where are you from?
What do you do?
Are like three of the most basic questions.
Go to a college campus.
It's what?
What's your major?
We all have these, and you can think of them now if you're in the audience.
We have these things that we hear all the time, and we probably have habitual answers to them.
Yes.
And these habitual answers are usually not great.
Yes, mine are so bad.
Yeah.
I just remembered mine, actually.
People come up to me and they say, God, you've been so busy.
And then I'll say something like, yeah, always.
And then the conversation's over.
Yeah, yeah.
They've got nothing to hook you to or hook onto there.
So you're able to get away with that.
And one of the things that people do is they build a tremendous amount of confidence and power.
And then all of a sudden you can drop this to a degree because people are still interested because they know you from Dragon's Den or some other things.
But if you're out there and you don't have that yet, like I didn't when I was 19 and 20, or you just want to have more engaging conversations and you want to bring in people that you genuinely connect with, reverse engineer the conversation that you would like to have.
So you could– one of– I have six charismatic mindsets that I think about.
One of them is go there first in humanizing the interaction.
And so this can mean–
If you're in a group of people that are all really stiff and nervous because they don't know if it's okay, crack the first joke.
Be vulnerable first.
Give the first compliment.
Like lead the interaction in the way you want to go because that's what everybody wants.
Like we don't want to be suits.
We don't want to be roles in a company.
We want to be humans.
And that stuff is– everybody wants that.
And whoever goes first becomes the leader.
Okay.
Okay.
So– In your interactions, you're getting asked, are you busy?
So if you could go there first and do the thing that you're wanting.
them to do and work that into the answer of how you're busy or are you busy?
That is going to lead the conversation in the direction you want.
So as a, for instance, I don't know if this is, are you busy?
You know, I have been, but one of the things that I've really been struggling with that I haven't figured out yet at this point is, you know, I'm having some relationship issues or I'm having this or that and the other thing, but like sharing the real thing a level down beneath the surface level stuff that you're tempted to share with people
is going there first and making it okay for them to do it.
And then you say, what about you?
Versus.
They say, hey, how's it going?
You're so busy.
You say, oh, yeah, man, been busy.
How about you?
They're just going to match you, especially given your power as the leader of the company.
They will just match what you do.
But if you go there first, you give people permission to go deeper.
So a lot of people, for instance, what they might want is they want– the thing that they care about is they care about–
Their job, they love what they do and they're really interested or maybe they hate their job and they care more about their free time and their hobbies and the extreme sports that they do.
So in these questions of how have you been, what do you do, where are you from, I have a worksheet in our course that helps people
walk through what a good answer could be that would leave hooks for the person that is an extreme sports enthusiast or does have an interest in that particular niche that they're interested in to hook into.
But if you were to ask me where I'm from and let's say that I want to connect with you in a number of different ways, but the thing that I really want you to know is that I have an interesting business.
I could say.
§03Transcript — part 3
I'm from Philadelphia.
And we're done.
Oh, cool.
I've been to Philadelphia.
Or no, my friend's brother went there.
Is it cold in Philadelphia?
Like this is where we're going to go.
Now we're on weather and sports, which is where most conversations go.
But if I say, you know, I grew up in Philadelphia, but I never really fit in there.
Like a lot of the people in that area wind up spending their whole lives within 20 minutes of where they were born.
And so I traveled throughout my 20s and lived a bunch of places, but I now live in LA just because it's the right place for my business.
And I end there.
The next question that is coming from you is probably, oh, what's your business?
Or where did you travel?
So if I give you a number of different options to hook into here, you're going to take the one that you're most interested in.
And so what I would try to do in these answers with myself and what I advise people to do is take the three topics that you know you'd love to talk about.
Like you'd love to talk about your travels.
You'd love to talk about your business.
And you'd love to talk about philosophy or whatever it is.
And find a way to just leave little crumbs in these common answers that give the right person the invitation to talk to you about that thing.
And this is something that I found really like small talk can suck.
It's very draining to sit here and like, how much more can I say about the weather or local sports team?
I can't keep doing it.
But when you do these sorts of things, man, it opens up the opportunity for connection so much more quickly in interaction.
I hate small talk.
Yeah.
I really hate it.
I find it really draining.
I find it so fake.
And I kind of want to get on to the real stuff.
So you're saying that's how to do it, to leave sort of crumbs in my response that will send us down a more interesting pathway in conversation.
To really think through how do I and what do I want to connect with people over, right?
It's not the weather and it's not the local sports team.
It is, in my case, I want to interact with people that are interested in the same sort of like YouTube space that I'm interested in.
That's one of the things.
Beforehand, I thought that I knew about people.
I was like, I could tell who that guy is.
I know what kind of life he has.
But when you start leaving these clues, people surprise you.
The types of connections that come from people that you wouldn't expect are–
I don't know another word other than like magical.
It's very special to see that the world is full of opportunities where once you saw it as I already know what's coming from this person.
It's just going to be a boring small talk conversation.
And to find that that person could be someone that you do business with or become very close to or winds up being the brother of someone that you date is very exciting to me.
There's a real mindset shift in that, like seeing the world differently as a set of opportunities versus this sort of like fixed thing that you just have to navigate.
Yes.
And also there's a playfulness that can be brought to it as well.
So one of the other things that I talk about is flirting with the world.
So what I mean by this is that when you go out and you're flirting, you tend not to be literal in your answers, right?
There's a playfulness.
You're going to joke with that person.
And what a lot of people do, and I'm guilty of this all the time, is when you're checking out at the store, you're doing anything, you are very literal in your answers.
Can I help you with anything today?
Can I get one other thing?
What floor are you on as you get in the elevator?
And if instead of I'm on floor three, you say, I don't live here.
I'm just casing the joint for rubber.
It's just like that little stuff that is playful, that is what people are dying for.
We're just– so many people are on autopilot.
And when you bring that playfulness, that little flirtatious energy to men, women alike.
Things open up in a very fun and exciting way.
Does that come from confidence?
Because I've noticed that I'd certainly flirt with the world more now that I feel like I have a greater sense of confidence that I didn't have when I was 18 to 25.
Yeah, I think it's a circle.
I think...
It absolutely comes from confidence.
When you feel good, you bring that playful energy to the world.
And I learned to develop confidence by there was a time of faking it till I made it where I wasn't comfortable, but I had this rule in my head.
I'm in the elevator.
I have to say the thing right now.
That's what I did.
And then the interaction went well.
And now I'm building these reps of good experiences where I'm seeing that my belief about the world is this place that I just had to make it through is not true.
There's fun opportunities everywhere.
I really want to make sure I've got everything on this first impressions point as well.
Is there anything else that I need to be aware of?
You talked about nonverbal cues.
And I mean, there's so much information out there that says nonverbal cues are.
that then may be nothing.
Do you think they matter?
And what are the most important nonverbal cues when it comes to making a good first impression?
One of the ones that I see is prey versus predator.
Prey versus predator movement and prey versus predator gesticulation.
So if you think of an animal that is a prey animal, like a little bird or a little rabbit, they're very like herky-jerky and they dart.
And you think of a predator, you think of a lion or like this like sort of languid, slow movement.
Now, you don't have to dial it up to sleepy lion level.
But one of the things that you see with people that feel very afraid is that they dart.
Their eyes are very darty.
The hand goes in, the hand goes out, goes back into the pockets very quickly.
A bit of slowness to your movements, a bit of calm, especially if you're an anxious person, can help a lot.
That doesn't mean you need to lower the energy, but it just means you can slow things down a bit.
The other thing that I find is this is almost pre-first impression.
If you're out at a social event, right, you're at a networking event, you're at a bar, I think a lot of people do not realize the intuitive sense that others have for what is going on around them and interactions they're not directly in.
And so what will happen, and this is connected to the prey thing but not identical, is that people go out to a networking event and they feel very uncomfortable in their own shoes.
And so they're looking at their phone or they're standing by the bar and they're sort of looking around for something or something.
someone to rescue them from their loneliness.
And when you can shift that to, I am going to be comfortable where I am.
I'm going to find one person.
My friend and I would go out to the bar.
And the rule that we had was the most interesting place in this entire bar is the space between our noses, right?
It doesn't matter.
You can say whatever you want.
You can be like, I'm terrified here.
I'm so scared.
I wish I could go home right now.
But we have to engage with one another.
It was remarkable how much easier it was to start conversation when it was started from a place of we're enjoying one another's company and being playful and having a good time here versus two of us just sort of like standing at the bar going like this.
Looking around.
Looking around.
Attention or for.
So, yeah.
So those are two things.
One, prey versus predator movements.
And two, are you exuding this vibe of I don't have it, somebody else does?
That people have an unconscious sense that that is happening around them.
And so making it a conscious point to.
I'm going to be cool in my own space.
When I interact with someone, I'm not going to make them a stepping stone to another person that I'm more secretly attracted to or has the job that I want.
I'm with this person now, and then I can move on.
That had a huge, huge impact on the ability.
Like first impressions became easier because of the pre-first impression.
I mean, there's so much I wanted to dig into there.
On the prey versus predator thing, what is it about slow movements that make someone appear to be higher status?
Because as you said, I meet it.
Thought of the line and then you were talking about some little like rodent that's kind of like darting around and is anxious that it's about to be eaten and then I thought of the line which is kind of just slowly
moving and then I thought of business contexts where you've got the leader in the room who is kind of sat back in their chair they're doing things in a more considered way and maybe the intern who's like dropping the paper and like yeah
Like hitting the glass accidentally in his head.
It's so interesting because it's so true.
Yeah, it's safety.
Safety.
It's safety.
I mean, prey animals are hunted, and that's what you have to be, head on a swivel, if you're a prey animal.
You want to move slow?
You're dead.
It's over.
We're animals that are highly attuned to social status.
And so when we feel low on the totem pole, we feel less safe.
And so one of the things that– the ways that we exhibit that is we move more quickly.
We have our head on a swivel.
We have to be aware of everything that is going on.
We can't take our time because we don't– at some level, that mammalian or reptilian brain is telling us that we are unsafe in this environment or at least less safe than the leader who feels very slow.
Another thing that you'll see–
in terms of status and people who feel are, is the ability to be seen looking at others.
And so one of the things that happens, and this is, I don't mean, I can explain how this doesn't contradict the point about focusing on someone else, but when you do turn your attention to someone else, what you'll see the guy at the bar who feels uncomfortable or the intern do
is they'll often look with their eyes, but not with the rest of their body.
They're doing this.
of stuff because they're afraid to be seen looking.
But when you take the person who is more comfortable, they will turn their head and sometimes their chest and their whole body towards others.
And they can be caught looking because they're not threatening that other person.
They're not harming them.
They're not– they're comfortable versus there's a fear of if they see me looking, I'm in trouble.
Right?
And so these are little– I wouldn't say that you need to spend all your time focusing on these hacks, but they work both ways.
So it's one thing to notice that, but if you actually consciously go to the body, I think this is one of the fastest ways to influence how you feel, like state in the moment.
Instead of doing this and the prey darting and the sitting with the hands in the pockets, right, that creates a loop of feeling uncomfortable.
So one of the first things that I would do when I was going out to a networking event or a bar or anywhere where I felt uncomfortable was dance floor.
Because on the dance floor, I can go, ah.
And open up and feel more comfortable through my body because I'm signaling to my body as I expand my arms and dance and wave them that I'm safe, right?
And so it's a two-way loop.
So if you notice yourself at a networking event or a bar or anywhere where you're feeling uncomfortable and you notice that you're doing this and you can say, okay, I can't go to my brain and make these anxiety go away up here, but I can choose how I hold myself.
This is the Jordan Peterson stand up straight, right?
There's this body loop feedback that we get.
And if you do it by opening up your body language, revealing your vocabulary.
vulnerable spots, which are the parts that you have veins, it's your neck, it's your inner elbow, it's your hands, right?
Standing like this, a little bit more open.
That tends, and I can feel it now.
I don't know why I didn't do it at the beginning.
I'm a little bit rusty, geez.
I feel immediately more grounded, right?
I feel immediately more safe, comfortable, and like I can take my time.
In this interaction rather than having to get the answer right for you, right for the audience.
Like I might have went on going like this.
I was going to say before you pointed that out that it's really self-fulfilling.
Like the intern who's on edge, who's dropping the paper is then going to make,
certain behaviors which are going to kind of reinforce their insecurity and low status which is then might be pointed out they might notice it themselves which makes them feel shit again
which makes them more on edge and twitchy which is going to increase the probability that they conduct some kind of behavior which is and it's this downward spiral where you're like you feel stuck at the bottom of that and you're saying that by
influencing the things you've described you know moving a bit slower being expansive with your body you can start to
trigger the loop from the other way.
You can start to make yourself feel safe.
If you feel safe, you're more likely to do the higher value things, which make you feel safe and you spiral upwards potentially.
Yes.
Yeah.
This is not an insight unique to me.
Tony Robbins, when at his events, I don't know if you've gone, they talk about incantations or one of the things that he does is prior to going on stage and he advises people to do this before they have a big moment is he will like bang his chest and go, hoo, hoo, hoo.
In his Tony Robbins way, and he'll have oftentimes a phrase that is like, I'm here to inspire, or like, I love myself, I feel wonderful.
And I would do this before I went out, right?
I would, before I got in the taxi, before I went anywhere, I would go, I love myself, I love myself, I love myself.
And I would just build this physical body energy connection.
And it's real.
It happens.
It makes a dramatic impact on how you show up because oftentimes you only get 30 seconds, right?
It's not a lot of time when you're sitting down in that interview before the person starts to form an opinion about you.
So going in with that energy that is like, look, I approve of me and I'm going to have the body language communication that tells you that that's how I feel.
People often pick up on that.
You can think of interactions.
As two people who are storms of beliefs encountering one another.
And if my storm of belief is, I'm not really sure about this.
I don't really think I deserve this job.
And you probably shouldn't talk to me.
And your storm of belief is, I don't know a lot about this guy, but let's find out.
§04Transcript — part 4
I'm going to win.
You're going to pick that up and you're going to, you know, I don't think this guy deserves the job, whatever.
But if the belief is, I deserve to be here.
I love myself.
I can be comfortable.
I can be human.
And I'll be okay if this doesn't go the way that I'd like.
That's what wins out in these.
It is the higher conviction belief that often bleeds through in interaction and becomes the one that defines that relationship.
At least for that limited time in that context.
It's funny because I think about my nonverbal cues all the time.
I meet so many people in so many different contexts and a lot of the time I'm like tired and my head has a million tabs open.
So I try and influence like how I'm showing up with like my body language and eye contact and...
Outside of the things we've discussed, is there anything else that you think I can do to try and leave,
I don't want to be rude.
That's what I don't want to be.
I was going to say I want to be warm, but there's something...
I want to be myself and I don't want to be rude.
Accidentally rude.
Mm-hmm.
So you worry that you might come across as accidentally rude?
Yeah.
Because, I don't know, you meet people, like my assistant, Sophie, she walked in here now, hiya!
She's just got like 24-7 energy.
And I ain't got that.
Yeah.
I'm not that guy.
And I'm not going to fake it.
And I've never been good at faking it.
But is there anything else that I could accidentally be making people dislike me just with small things?
No, I can say the areas where I felt most connected to you, which is I think the opposite of rude.
Rude is like I'm not interested in you as a person.
The areas where I felt most connected to you is where one of us, again, went there first and like said the thing that was real.
It's the moments where–
You stop, neither of us is trying to perform at all for the camera.
And there's still a sense of the audience is there, but yeah, that's, that's where I feel any rude.
It's just, no, gone.
Interesting.
And when you say that, I think about like everyday interactions.
And is there ever a situation where like going there first is a little bit too strong?
Try it.
That's what I would say.
So the thought is the one that you have, everyone has, right?
No, I can't.
Because if they didn't have that thought, they would have already done it, right?
I will tell you a brief story that my brother reminded me of today as we were driving in.
I was like, I need my charisma stories.
And he said, you can tell the one about me.
Your brother who's in the green room?
Yeah, yeah.
Okay.
We went to a networking event.
And for whatever reason that day, I was just in this zone of I'm going to be a professional because this is a networking event.
And the channel wasn't established at this point.
And he came with me.
And so I'm going in there and I'm going through the line.
I'm filling out my card.
What's your name?
Charlie.
You know, what do you do?
Okay, I'm getting my information.
I put my badge on.
I walk through and he goes behind me and they say, what's your name?
He says, dragon.
And she says, excuse me?
I said, no, no, write dragon on the card.
It's going to be great.
And so he then starts a conversation with her and they're like just being playful.
And he puts dragon on his chest.
And I'm going in trying to impress people with my professionalism.
And people are like, what's up?
He's like, Dragon here.
And he was a hit, right?
He didn't have anything to do with the networking event.
He didn't have anything to do with the context of why people were there.
But the interest that he got was so much immediately more than I was getting.
being the one that actually had the business that was somewhat related to the thing.
And so even I believe that these rules on how we should engage are set in stone.
And what I think few people have done, if you think of your entire life, you're either hitting it perfect, undershooting, or overshooting.
Everyone's fear is of overshooting, but they spend almost all of their lives undershooting.
Overshooting as in coming on too strong.
Yeah, and it's okay, but there's type one and type two errors, right?
And if there's a perfect middle ground of like, wow, that was a trauma dump on that person would be an overshare.
Or like, ooh, I maybe shouldn't crack that joke at a funeral would be going there first type of a thing.
We have...
Less than a dozen of those usually in our life.
And we have hundreds and thousands of undershooting.
So what I'm encouraging people to do is take the risk of the overshoot because you're already missing.
Like you're under what is available to you in terms of the potential to create connections.
And the question here is, which I think informs all of this is, is your goal to blend in, get through and not make a splash?
Or is your goal, what is your goal?
And for me, it's like, I want to connect.
I want to connect with the people that would most connect with me.
And in order to do that, I have to be willing to be seen.
Okay, so on the other end of this, what are the mistakes people make that cause disconnection?
Talking about yourself, is that...
I don't think so.
In what sense?
So like if you walk into a room and you immediately...
Start talking about yourself, is that going to be, if you're over-talking?
Good question.
It's about, do people have opt-in points?
So are you stopping and giving the person a chance to re-opt into that line of communication?
So this is, again, one of the things we work on on those initial questions is,
okay, you want to share your values early in the interaction, but am I just going to give you my life story, right?
I'm not giving someone a chance to opt in.
But if I make it three to five sentences and I say, you know, I grew up on the West Coast and it was perfect because there was surf everywhere.
And then I met my wife, but, you know, she's super close to her family and I just wanted to be a family man.
So now I live in the middle of the country and whatever.
You give like three hooks that people can hook into and then you're done.
That's fine.
But.
Some people don't give a chance for anyone to step in and get a word in edgewise.
So that's another piece that I think.
And I could also ask them, right, if they surf or something.
Yes, exactly.
But also you will see that sometimes early in an interaction, if you indicate.
These points of like people, people will often comment on what you have to say.
They won't, you don't need to ask them necessarily.
Like if you give that thing that they like, you often don't have to, like they will jump in with the thing that connects to it.
So interesting.
You know, throughout this conversation, you've repeatedly made reference to the fact that connection happens at a deeper level, but also.
The paradox is that we don't walk around offering the deeper level.
Um,
Which is what I've always figured out and, like, found out on this podcast is the deeper the conversation, the more I feel, like, connected to the person.
Yeah.
And, yeah, it's really interesting.
I was just thinking about interactions that I've even had today.
And, you know, like the person that I spoke to in the gym, would I have rolled up to them?
And what could I have said to them that would have been...
God has passed the fluffy small talk.
Because I met someone in the gym that I've known for a...
Loosely known.
Yeah.
And it was one of those interactions where they go, hey, how are you?
You're in LA now?
Hey, yeah.
Where are you going to live?
I'm like, I don't know.
And they're like, so yeah, fires.
Did you...
Are you okay?
Yeah, yeah.
And I just...
So let's do this.
How...
Where are you going to live?
I think I even probably asked you.
Everyone's asking because I posted where I'm going to live.
Yeah.
Take a person in the gym.
You don't know anything about them.
And I know context, it's going to be dependent on what you want to learn about them.
What types of things do you wish you could connect over more?
And I know there's this sense of like whatever they want, but like you clearly care about business.
You clearly care.
Like what opportunities do you want to open up for yourself?
Do you want to find a surf buddy?
Do you want to find a, what is it?
Yeah, so in that particular conversation, I think, because I'm kind of new here, maybe what I would have been interested in is I actually really wanted to know something about their professional life that they told me about previously.
But also, I'm like looking for friends here.
Yeah.
Cool things to do, people to see, new networks.
Amazing.
You got it.
So it's, where are you going to live?
You're like, honestly, I'm not sure.
I'm looking for cool places to live, cool places to go, new networks of people.
I should have fucking said that.
Yeah, and it's...
So I think it's what we mentioned earlier, but the thing that happens is that people try to get through rather than connect.
And I think that informs a lot of the questions that people have.
They say, yeah, but couldn't it go wrong?
It's like, yes, it could.
But you have to consider that not connecting is also it going wrong.
Like the number of chances that you meet to connect with your potential spouse, potential incredible friend.
I don't want to.
Be nightmarish or scary for people, but like the amount of incredible people that have walked in and out of all of our lives is saddening, right?
Because we didn't say the thing and we didn't, it's like, oh my gosh, you guys would have connected so well if just one of you could have like put it out there, the thing that you were interested in, but it just doesn't happen 99% of the time.
There's a certain individual listening right now who really wants to connect.
In fact, they feel so disconnected and so lonely in their life.
And they're hearing everything you say, but there's a barrier that has always stopped them adding one more sentence, going deeper with the stranger.
And no matter how much they listen to this kind of advice, they still go through their life in this state of kind of getting through life, not connecting.
Do you have any idea, A, is that true?
Like, does that person exist and have you met them in your audience?
And B, like, what is step one to starting to break down that barrier?
Because I think I even feel a little bit, as you were speaking, I was thinking, yeah, like, why didn't I say that in the gym today?
Like, what is it about me that meant that I just tried to get through and get back to the weights?
It's like a book.
Bad habit or?
I think there's a number of things.
In your case, and I've experienced this, I don't know if you have this, but when you get into a position that is a lovely one to be in of relative power, right?
Like people want to come on the show.
They want to know what you're up to.
They maybe want to go to the parties that you're going to.
One of the ways to not– to avoid having to constantly set and enforce boundaries is to shine less bright.
And so I don't know if you feel this, but I notice myself not following some of my own advice these days.
And when I reflect on why, it's because if I say that I have a YouTube channel and they say how many subscribers and I say how many subscribers–
Then they want my phone number.
Then they want my this.
§05Transcript — part 5
And in order just to circumvent all of that, yeah, I like work from home.
I will shine less bright, and I realized this years ago when I was doing breakdowns and I was doing all of these famous people.
I'm like, I'm going to do one on Justin Bieber because he was such a bright–
excited young kid.
And then I looked at him at the time, he was 16 to 18, he was on Jimmy Fallon and he was so flat.
And I was like, why is he so flat?
And then he cracked a joke and the audience, it wasn't even funny.
And so if you get to a position where any sort of output from you
calls in this just wave of attention and energy, people often shut that down, which is a sad thing.
And I want to stop doing that.
People shut themselves down.
Yes, they shut themselves down.
They stop making an effort.
Because then you have to have to.
have boundaries and you have to tell that person, Hey, I don't give out my Instagram or I don't want to trade numbers or you have to find a way to navigate disappointing other people that are interested in going, having a deeper connection that you don't feel it with them.
Does that happen with like beautiful people as well?
Cause I'm almost certainly, I imagine they just get it all the time.
Everywhere they're going, people are trying to connect.
Yeah.
Well, and I think, you know, in terms of things to watch out for, I didn't realize this cause I do think,
It's not necessarily a good thing, but young women, I think, realize this as they hit puberty, that there's going to be people interested in you that don't really want to get to know you, right?
They're interested in you because you're beautiful.
They're interested in you for these other reasons.
Same thing tends not to happen with young men.
And so I got to 19 and–
I wasn't wanted in any of the locations that I was at, right?
And so there was a ladies'night, but I couldn't get in.
And so people were very honest with me.
I got direct, clear feedback about the type of people that wanted to connect with me.
And if someone did, it was only ever because they wanted the pleasure of my company.
There was nothing to get from knowing me.
When things started to boom, I was not prepared for the ways that people adjust and manipulate when they perceive that someone has power.
And so people entered my life that I thought liked me and I realized later liked me.
My ability to be a person.
provide a paycheck or my ability to do this.
And it was very sad for me.
It was really, really difficult to experience.
But as I withdrew and stopped making videos and said, you know, I'm not running the, I'm not running this business.
My co-founder is going to take, you know, he's in charge of the paychecks from here on out.
The people that almost immediately withdrew from me was– I'm very grateful to have seen it but was unprepared for the transactional nature that can happen when you start to accumulate power.
And I say that because if there's a spec, particularly young men, but it's true of women as well, just be aware that–
As you grow and hopefully become more powerful in the world, the level of deception and the level of even just in the lightest, like people trying to please you and make you happy is going to escalate.
And you're going to need to develop a discernment that I just never needed when I was in my young 20s.
To understand who's trying to manipulate you and get things from you and what's real.
Yes.
To understand this subtle difference between like who likes me for me and who likes me for these status things that I can– am connected to or can provide.
And yeah.
I mean, is there any such advice you can give someone to figure out whether they're–
being used or the relationship is authentic and real.
Yeah.
Well, I can give some not to do's.
That's where I'm at today.
This is niche.
But if you're a business owner, be very careful about making a single– I made a single person my, like, point of contact to the business.
And–
That meant that any feedback that came from like the front lines of the business was coming up, funneled through him and spoken to me.
And any thing that I said to him was then distributed to the business.
And I wasn't doing enough direct connecting with people on the ground.
And what happened over a course of years is I learned, and I didn't find this for years.
Is that I was being, a generous word would be like, there was some fudging of the truth and then there were outright lies.
Be very, very careful about making one person your eyes and ears in any aspect of your life.
But I did that in the business and didn't, you know, touch base and connect directly with people and say, hey, is this, how are you feeling?
Is this true?
And I lost those direct connections and it wasn't required in a company of my size.
It was just a foolish novice entrepreneur mistake that I'd made.
Happens so many times.
It happens a lot in business.
People listening to this now, if you're working in a business and there's a manager in between you and maybe the top of the business,
Managers have a tremendous power to control narratives.
Yeah.
Everyone wants power, I would say.
I think that's a fair statement.
Pretty much everyone wants power, and we can define whatever power means.
But I guess there's two paths to attaining power.
There's...
Delivering value for people and being useful.
And then there's what you described there, which is,
is manipulating the situation so that you're perceived as being necessary.
Yeah, and it's making sure that your name is on the project, right?
In a group project, there's always people that are doing the majority of the work and there's people that are making sure that they're presenting the most important piece or making sure that their name is on the project.
Narcissists, sociopaths.
Some of the videos you've made on your channel before speak to...
This type of behavior.
Yes.
What were the things that you missed that are like characteristic of narcissists?
Because I know you've made videos about this subject where you analyze other interactions with other people, but for someone who might not be aware of some of those subtle cues, what kinds of things?
My co-founder and I had several conversations about this person where we said, man, and we had these dozens of times.
I wouldn't be shocked to find out that he was lying on his job application.
And we would just say that to each other.
And so if you find that there's just a doubt that you don't believe that somebody says that they were very successful in a thing, it just doesn't look like it.
You know, there's that phrase in business, which is if there's doubt, there's no doubt when it comes to hiring and firing.
I didn't follow that.
So just pay attention to your doubts.
And if you need to write them down, but it's.
The voicing of it in a weird way was a way of blowing off steam and not addressing the
core issues.
So that was one thing.
And then I think the last thing is it's this, I felt guilty verifying.
I felt guilty verifying his job application.
I felt guilty going to the guy that he said had offered him a job whose number I had and saying, hey, wanted to check on this because that would have been an indication that I didn't trust him.
And it was my way of saying,
I trust you.
I know you won't hurt me.
And maybe you can trust me that I won't hurt you too.
Nevermind that they were not reciprocal relationships.
But the reason that I'm so interested in these sorts of things is because
I had, by the time I was 28 or 29, built the life that I dreamed of when I was 18.
I had the girlfriend that I wanted.
I had more money than I dreamed of.
I had the dream job.
And it fell apart because these core things hadn't been addressed.
And when I say fell apart, it wasn't like the world took it from me.
It was like my own I fell apart in my ability to sustain them.
Or it fell together.
Thank you.
That's the truth.
No, that's the truth, man, is I'm so grateful for the ways in which it broke down.
And I think there's many times in my life and when I've seen other people where they get fired or the thing doesn't work out or the first business fails and you're like, oh, it fell apart.
And you're right.
You get five years down the line.
It's like, no, man, that fell together.
Yeah, because if it wasn't you being your true aligned, authentic self, whatever that means, then it wasn't real anyway.
It was something you hold.
together.
And it sounded like it was exhausting to hold that together.
Yes, unconsciously, very.
Life shouldn't be exhausting to hold together.
So if you're exhausted holding your life together in the relationships and the people, then it's not sustainable and it's not real.
Yeah.
Well, I'm curious, and you're taking business on this because I've since found business mentors that there's so many mentors that are like, here's how to build your business so that you can sell it.
And the implicit understanding there is that this thing is a pain in the butt.
You don't want to have it and you'll be happier when you can get rid of it in exchange for a lot of money.
And there's a guy, Joe Hudson, who I've mentioned before, who talks about, you know, what if a billion-dollar business was not a business that was valued at a billion dollars, but it's a business that you wouldn't sell for a billion dollars?
The things that you got to do, like if you had to sell it and you could never do that thing again, you wouldn't take that deal.
And when you think–
How would I run this business if it had to be my billion-dollar business today?
What sort of things would I allow myself to do?
What sort of things would I cut out?
It's a total paradigm shift on business.
What an amazing question to ask yourself.
What an amazing question to ask yourself.
So the way that I heard that was,
If I wanted to run this business like a business that I would never be prepared to sell, what are the decisions I would make today?
Okay, so you'd get rid of the toxic people that are destroying your peace, irrespective of how many clients you might lose or the short-term net loss of that or how it might disgruntle people.
You would probably set a pace that you could go,
at for 50 years and you'd probably disregard like metrics and
Growth numbers and stuff like that.
Yeah.
You'd focus on doing work that you truly love, not what the audience want, not what the clients are paying you for, but what you truly love.
And you'd work with stakeholders and partners that treated you with the respect and the courtesy and the same energy, love, curiosity, fun that...
You need to do this for 50 years.
So you like wouldn't work with assholes.
Yeah.
Even if they were paying you a lot of money, you'd say no to a couple of million dollars.
I guess that's my answer to that question.
Yeah, that's the answer to that question.
Oh, is it?
Okay.
Right?
I mean, of course it is.
It's the opposite of what you would do if you were building to sell, which is I'm going to get someone else to be the front man because I don't want to do it.
I'm going to have them do the boring thing that I don't like.
It's, yeah, instead of, no, no, no.
Like, why are we doing these things that we don't like?
You wouldn't tolerate.
Exactly.
There would be zero tolerance.
Exactly.
And.
You may or may not wind up with a billion dollars, but what I have found is as I lean into that, that's where these leaps and breakthroughs are.
It's linear thinking to figure out how to please the audience and please other people in most cases.
But there's these exponential leaps that you make when you're like, what do I want to see in the world?
That's where you go from zero to one.
That's where you make the thing that has never been made because you want it.
Yeah.
So.
It's a hard place to get to.
You've got to have, I think, life failure a few times before you kind of figure out what you've described there.
And I can certainly relate in my life to that.
So even when I think about this podcast, I speak to two people.
Jack, I think I had this conversation with Jack the other day.
I was like, in order for me to do this for like 20 years, what am I going to need to do today?
What am I going to need to sacrifice today in order to do it for 20 years?
And I can kind of tell you like just a top line thing is when a guest request comes on my list and it says they have, this has happened, they have 70 million followers.
And their stories there, what they've done, et cetera.
And it's like this, Steve, we know that this is going to get huge numbers.
But I don't want to sit there for two and a half hours and speak to this person because I have no interest in fucking pop music in South America.
I know that the long-term decision to do the show for 20 years means in that moment I have to say no.
Because...
If there's multiple days in a row where I show up to this set and I sit down and I wasn't looking forward to it, I'm going to end up where you said you ended up, which is that feeling of like burnt out, broken, lack of meaning.
What gives you the strength to say no to the superficial win?
Especially when there's like a, this would be great for you.
Wisdom of fucking up so many times in my life when I did that.
Burn.
And also being able to look forward at someone like Joe Rogan and watch his interviews where he talks about this and realizing that this principle of if you want to go far, you have to play like long-term games and make long-term decisions.
And so now knowing what a short-term decision is versus a long-term decision and actually being really aligned with Jack, who's...
Who runs this show,
Because me and Jack are aligned on these things now quite intuitively.
And we've kind of learnt together.
We've like made the short-term decision, gone, fuck, that was a bad idea.
§06Transcript — part 6
So you kind of build this sort of collective wisdom that the right thing to do for the long-term health of this show is,
is having a set of principles.
And I really wish people understood that because especially when the show gets big, there's so much pressure to change.
I've got a good example.
I wasn't going to say this, but I think I should probably share it because this is the diaries here and that's what we're meant to be sharing our diaries here.
On the last episode we uploaded was a debate format with four guys on it.
And we're talking about the world and stuff.
It's the first time we've ever done that.
And I had a meeting with some people the day after that episode came out.
And someone in the room was saying, oh, we should add a woman to the panel because the optics are bad.
And I remember what I said in that room.
I said, we should never, ever do something purely for optics.
The reason why we should add a woman to the panel that we just did, and this is something we will do in future, is because we genuinely believe it will make the conversation better.
And I said to them, and there was 12 of my teammates who work on this team in the room, I said, if we ever do stuff for optics, we slowly slip away from our integrity.
And there's a paradox there because you think the high integrity thing to do is to,
like cater to optics, what things look like.
But actually the high integrity thing to do is to ignore virtue signaling and to do what's best for the conversation.
And I just reiterated in that room that like the reason why in the future we're going to make these panels.
More diverse is because we believe that it's better for the audience.
It's better for the conversation.
That's the only reason we'll ever do it.
And that's a prime example of learning over time.
You've got to ignore virtue signaling.
You've got to ignore, because these things come and go.
What's virtuous today will be like cancelable tomorrow.
And you've got to stay anchored to a set of principles.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We digress.
No, we do not at all.
That is the second.
Six charismatic mindsets that I talk about.
That is the second, which is I care more about my character than my reputation.
Let's do that then.
What are these six charismatic mindsets?
So we talked a little bit about the body language and the stuff.
Really, I land much more in the mindsets and the ways of being.
And this is to me closer to the core.
First one is no matter what, I will be okay.
And I'm feeling nervous on the way to this conversation that we're going to have.
I'm in the car getting over here.
I'm thinking, do I need to prepare?
No matter what, I'll be okay, right?
I go in here, and this is true in any social scenario.
We can often bring life or death stakes to the interview, to asking the girl out, to whatever it is.
Literally just saying the phrase in your head to yourself, no matter what, I will be okay, has this calming, clarifying thing that helps you focus on what you actually want to do and get out of this circumstance and helps you stop focusing on how do I be safe?
Because how do I be safe is how do I do less?
How do I say less?
And just kill any chance of connection, right?
So that's the first one.
Second, I care more about my character than my reputation.
Very easy for, would have been like for you in that moment to, oh shoot, what are people going to think?
The optics of this are not good.
The leadership that you demonstrated by not just disagreeing, but by revealing your character will pay dividends, not just in how you guys handle optics.
It teaches everyone on the team.
What matters, which is fundamentally the character, what is the case, not what looks like it is the case.
And you also were able to bring it back.
And I think this is the thing where we're talking about listening to criticism is like you didn't just hear it and reject it.
No, we're not going to have a woman on the podcast.
It was.
If we do that, we do it for the right reasons, right?
So I care more about my character and also the optics of, oh, I screwed up.
Now I have to fix it or I screwed up.
I have to dig my heels in.
I think a lot of this is going on right now with Elon Musk and the salute that he did is I can't say, hey, I made a mistake.
I can't say I didn't mean that by it.
I can't do any of that.
I have to dig in because I don't want to be seen to be weak or I don't want to be seen to be–
This salute thing, though.
Let's do it.
Let's do it.
Let's do it.
I'm writing this video.
Yeah.
So Elon Musk, if you've ever seen him on stage, he is a very eccentric.
Totally.
A little bit awkward sometimes individual who goes up on stage and it's like, and I've literally seen videos where he's like,
And, you know, on the red carpet, I don't know if you saw that.
It's like that red carpet walk that he did where he starts going like this.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
He's making weird faces.
This is...
This is his.
So I'm not defending him at all.
But if you have a lens of empathy and you look at the bigger picture and you also say, listen, this guy has no track record of not saying what he thinks.
So if he tells me that that wasn't what he was doing in that moment, he has no track record of like...
Holding his tongue.
Yeah.
And it's funny because I consider myself to be apolitical, but one of the things that really turned me off when I saw the commentary around that was the left side of politics didn't seem to exert any...
What's the word?
It was just all, the reaction was so predictable.
I watched the video and thought, oh, no, he's just being Elon Musk.
That's what he does on stage.
Just a bit wacky.
And then the whole like, oh, no, he's a Nazi.
This is a Nazi salute.
I just thought I find it to be disingenuous.
Yeah.
Well, there's a ton here.
Politically, I think this is why the left loses elections.
Yeah, I know.
It's because...
There's so much winning.
There's so much happening that you could critique today.
Trump launched a meme coin.
You know what I mean?
Like there's– like you could speak on so many things.
And to put the focus on this is why they continue to lose elections in the United States of America because I agree with you.
I don't see any reason to believe that this is a hidden–
reveal of Elon's politics as regards the Third Reich.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The guy's a weird dude who moves weird, and he literally afterwards said, my heart goes out to you.
And his response to it on Twitter, which is complicated by the mass media, right?
Because there's– I'm going to make this video too.
The ability to say sorry.
In personal relationships is fundamental and critical.
And if you can't own your mistakes and apologize to someone, you will erode every relationship that you ever have because you will make mistakes.
And if you can't repair them, they just, it's like a bridge that never gets any maintenance.
It doesn't work.
Do you think he should have said sorry?
This is the question when we're talking about a couple of things, mass media.
And then I think there's a space between sorry and that wasn't my intention.
And instead what he did was– because I–
I think what he should have said was that wasn't my intention.
What he said instead was he made a bunch of puns about like different Nazi stuff, like random things.
But do I think he should say sorry?
No, I don't think he should say sorry.
If he said sorry, can you imagine the mainstream media?
Exactly.
Oh my gosh.
Exactly.
So this is the problem.
I'm going to make this video, which is if you look at the most, this is tragic.
The way that we have culturally ruined saying sorry, like with our media, because if you look at the most powerful men, Andrew Tate, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, they all got the memo.
Never apologize.
Never, ever, ever.
It doesn't matter what you did.
Never apologize.
And what do you get as a result?
More power, right?
It like– because when you do say sorry, even if it's appropriate, even if it would have been appropriate in a private circumstance to do that, the outcome in the media loop, if you look at–
you could take someone going back to like Aziz Ansari who had a Me Too situation where the girl was unhappy with how the date went.
But it was all consensual, but she felt pressured by him, and he went on a very deep, heartfelt apology.
destroyed, you know, end of his show, completely over for him.
Years later, people look back at that story with a different cultural lens and go, that, okay, yes, you're sorry for that.
Of course, that makes sense because that's the appropriate response.
I'm really sorry.
I didn't, that wasn't what I wanted.
That wasn't my intent.
I didn't want it to go that way.
Or I didn't want you to feel that way.
That way as well.
And that human response translated to the mass media is so destructive to your career, which is–
it's really tragic because that's the type of thing that you would want to have two people hash out and find resolution to themselves but doesn't appear to be possible in–
global media today.
It happens on both sides.
It's the right mischaracterizing the left, the left mischaracterizing the right.
And I, especially through this election cycle, I just saw that over and over again, because as someone who genuinely believes when I'm at home alone and I'm watching these videos, genuinely believes that I'm apolitical.
I find good things on both sides.
I find things on the left that I think that's correct.
And I find things on the right, especially as it relates to some things around business, that I think, okay, I think that's the best thing.
And I look at both sides, I think, objectively.
And I'm saying I think because I never really know my own biases.
And I think you're both lying about each other.
And this is the kind of world we've gotten into now where, as you say, it's like there's no hope for truth anymore, it seems.
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Is Trump charismatic?
The most charismatic, yeah.
So if we interpret charisma as the ability to succeed based on force of personality, right, if that's one view of it, the ability to influence and succeed, you have to give it to people that you might not agree with.
And Donald Trump absolutely gets that.
So does Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for the record, right?
These people that...
Are not there for their technical prowess, but are there for their ability to speak, definitely.
I think what I've heard is that he's likable in person, like a lot of people that meet him like him.
And he has this thing that I haven't totally identified that drives the left crazy, but it needs to be, rather than being demonized, I think it needs, I want to explore it.
I want to understand what it is, is...
He's like very tough to stay mad at in the sense that what he did, he's repeatedly in his base forgiven.
for things that would have been upsetting to them and would be upsetting if any other Republican said or did the things that he does.
There is a relationship I think that he has with shame.
And so if you look, it's like the first debate that he ever did.
Boom, here comes the question.
You call women fat pigs.
You know, this is career ender right here.
What are you going to say?
You've called women you don't like fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals.
Your Twitter account is...
Only Rosie O'Donnell.
Well, the audience erupts and Megyn Kelly can't get a word in, and it was an entire campaign of that, like Teflon.
Nothing sticks to him.
And so...
§07Transcript — part 7
You don't have to like it for there to be something meaningful there.
And I actually want to go back because I think the most impressive thing that he's done is not win the presidency.
I think the Democrats fielded some less than excellent candidates.
But my God, the way he took over the Republican primaries was insane.
Because if you go back and watch those debates, which I currently am.
The first time.
The first time.
Oh, yeah.
I watched it all.
Entirely against him.
He doesn't have an audience on his side.
There is no one that is on his side.
And to watch him go down the line, take out Jeb, take out Ted, take out Marco, and win the entire audience blow by blow is...
Fascinating to me.
You're someone that analyzes this.
Yeah.
So what did you, because I've watched all of those debates.
In fact, I've watched them so many times, those Republican debates with like Jeb and his weak energy.
And, um,
I can't remember what he was calling Ted Cruz.
It's like Lion Cruise or something.
Lion Ted.
Yeah, Lion Ted.
I've watched all of those, but you watch it and you go, this is atypical behavior.
This is not how to be a president.
What is he doing right there?
I think that is the thing.
He's like, he is him through and through.
Like there's not a crack in him.
And so many times, this is, when people criticize you or criticize anybody, one of the things you'll see is, let's say that there's a comedian and they're on stage and somebody's heckling them and say, you can't tell that joke.
That's bad.
If you crack in that moment, more of the audience says, ooh, I don't know if you should have said that.
But when you double down and triple down and quadruple down and endlessly down, you actually take more people with you.
And this guy doesn't crack.
He–
Anytime he's attacked, I don't think he has defense in his repertoire.
Like every time it's offense.
So whenever somebody comes at him, he doesn't respond.
He barely responds.
That's not true.
He goes, you should see what he's doing.
You know, it's always, always offense.
He's willing to brawl in those situations.
And I think.
We are animals.
There is a– especially in that Republican primary with people like Jeb, there's a simple thing of like, oh, this guy just owned that dude, right?
He just completely made him seem like a child who was interacting with an adult.
Like as he whimpered away or trailed off, this is something that I teach people is when you're speaking–
Just as a matter of habit, and you can break this rule once you've established it, but if you're a–
Shy person, finish your sentence before you let someone cut you off.
Find a period.
And then the other person can jump in.
But if we're talking and you jump in and I just switch the trail away, it has this sense of fragility, weakness, and it encourages people to speak over you.
If you look especially at the first debate.
The people that he was arguing against got run off constantly, and they hoped that the moderator would bring them back into the debate.
And it's not ideal that politics works like that, but it was a bludgeoning game.
It was just like he makes these people look–
weak in front of them as he dictates the pace and what's going to happen and he's not listening to anybody and the audience starts lining up behind him.
It was, yeah, I have to go back and the video will have much more precise moments of this, but that is what I've seen is just I've started to compile things.
So that was the second.
That's the second.
Of the charisma.
We're going to do this.
Number three.
Well, so I'm glad that we're doing it in this order because it gets the caveats out of the way, which is the third one is I have impeccable honesty and integrity.
And you can see how exactly what we were talking about is like, well, not really.
There's ways in which power moves not always following honesty and integrity.
But when I think of that deeper form of charisma, the kind where like Socrates, Jesus, you know, like the people that are not just charismatic for a time but are charismatic forever and we look to as paragons of who we want to be and have this leadership.
quality that is not just transactional but moves people to become better versions of themselves, which is ultimately what I aspire to.
And I suppose I've used charisma in two different terms.
One is can you influence and the other is do you awaken the best in people?
If we're using that second term, I am honest and I have high integrity is fundamental to that because–
What I found is that even if you tell small lies, for instance, you're running late, you text your friend, I'm on the way.
You're not on the way.
You got to brush your teeth.
You got to get ready.
You train this learning in yourself that is sometimes I lie.
Sometimes I'm not to be trusted.
And when you lie sometimes, you hurt your ability to speak with conviction all the time because there's some part of your brain that is going, am I telling the truth?
Am I saying the real thing?
Because sometimes I don't.
And so it influences your capacity to influence with conviction and for people to know that you stand by your belief.
What's really interesting.
Exactly what you've said, I noticed in a friend of mine, and I had to say, we're really great friends, and we've been friends for a long, long time, but I can't trust you because I see you telling small lies to other people.
That's so brave of you.
Which makes me think that when you speak to me, I have to figure out what the truth is.
And this is something which I think ties into point three here, which is if you observe someone willing to tell tiny lies to other people, even a little bit,
exaggerating stories knowingly when you know the truth, you know that X didn't happen, you go, oh my God, maybe the things they tell me as well aren't true.
Yeah.
So it erodes it in all different places.
One of the things that I didn't catch early on that you just brought up was I...
Sometimes had like, there were things that I wouldn't say, like I wouldn't have that conversation with a friend.
I wouldn't bring that to them.
And that is a lapse in integrity because that's, look, I have this opinion.
I have this feeling.
You're someone I care about, but I'm not going to say it to you because I don't want to create friction or I don't want to do this.
I'm not going to lie to you about it.
I'm not going to tell you I trust you implicitly, but I'm just not going to bring it up.
It took me nine years to get to that point with this person.
It's hard.
It's very hard.
But when you do that, God, it is such a deep form of love.
It is such a deep form of respect.
And it respects the deepest part of that person, which is...
I know that these are your behaviors, but there's a you in there that is deeper than these habits that you have.
And I want to speak to that person because I want you to know that I would like to connect with you and I would like to trust you, but I can't because of this.
I think that is an aspect of friendship that is often overlooked, which is you've got your friends that you have fun with.
You've got your friends that celebrate you, you know.
Which friends do you have that will lovingly pull you aside and tell you these sorts of things?
There are usually vanishingly few.
And when you get them, if you're someone who watches this show, probably, it's deeply appreciated, especially when it's done in a loving and respectful way.
So when you can be that for someone else, it's like, it's, yeah, it's a relationship maker.
But you're right in what you said earlier.
I have to be the one that leads with it.
What's that phrase you used?
Go there first.
That's the sixth one, yeah.
So number four.
So number four.
I don't need to convince anyone of anything.
Interesting.
Yeah.
So a lot of times we think, I need this girl to like me.
I need to make the sale.
If this employee joins the company, it's going to be great.
You know, I need this particular individual to like me.
All the tips and tricks and mindsets and whatever it is that we're talking about today, I hope you take broadly to your life to increase the percentage, to increase the odds that are something good.
But with any particular individual, you do not want to drop into convincing them.
You want to live invitationally to people.
There's an invitation to connect.
There's an invitation to sell.
I'm willing to go there and tell you more about the product.
I'm willing to share more about the things that I care about.
But when you get stuck on convincing people.
They feel that there's something missing in you that needs something from them, right?
And when you do that, particularly with loose connections, it's very alienating.
Now, there are times when this isn't about convincing where it's appropriate in a relationship with like a husband and a wife to communicate clearly your needs.
This doesn't mean you convince them, but it means you do state what you're wanting and needing in the relationship.
But there is– like convincing is when you won't drop it, when you won't put it down, that you won't accept someone's answer as it is.
And much more important than convincing is filtering.
And this is– you could have tried to convince everyone in your initial friend group that they should all be entrepreneurs.
They should all do this, and you'd still be there today working on getting the next person to agree and have no businesses and no podcast.
But when you stop trying to convince and you–
Reveal yourself.
Make invitations.
I'm going this way.
Who would like to come with me?
I'm selling this product.
Who would like to buy it?
Yes, I'm going to learn how to talk about it in a compelling and interesting way that speaks directly to your problems, but I'm not going to convince you.
So much more powerful.
This is like a pretty incredible sales tip.
I was thinking about even on marketing copy when you're trying to sell something, if you're trying to force it down someone's throat versus inviting them if they're the right type of person for it.
To give it a try.
And it's the long game too.
Like the short game is I need to make rent this month.
I need to make a sale.
And we all have situations in our life where we feel that pressure.
But if you build your business or your relationships from this level of I'm not going to convince anybody, the sustainability,
of them is so much better because now you don't have relationships that require you to be like, come on, come out tonight.
You know you want to.
You want to do that.
You have people that opt in when they want to and can step aside when they don't.
And your relationships flow much more organically when you drop the convincing.
With or without you energy.
Yes.
People talk about that.
Yes.
Yes.
Invitational.
Yeah.
Invitation energy.
So the fifth is that I proactively share my purpose.
And I think this podcast sets people up to do that in an excellent way.
But this is where I talk about early in the interaction.
There's so many times where we just don't talk about what we care about.
We talk about small talk.
We talk about the weather or the baseball team.
Making sure that you are sharing with people the things that you care most deeply about and that you're here to do is so powerful.
So high charisma.
I believe high charisma.
If you think– I don't know if you remember the show, but it was very influential to me.
There were these guys, The Buried Life, a long time ago when MTV used to run TV shows.
And they were guys who–
had this their own bucket list.
And on every episode, they would go scratch an item off of their bucket list.
And at the end, they would help a stranger in the street.
They would say, what's an item on your bucket list?
And they would do that with them.
And in their second season, one of their bucket list items was play basketball with Obama.
And so they walked around Washington, D.C.
And just said,
Hey, we have this thing.
We're the buried life.
We want to play basketball with Obama.
We're trying to prove that you can live your dream.
Can you help?
And they just went bang, bang, bang down the line.
And within like three days, they're in a senator's office, right?
Just from–
§08Transcript — part 8
Sharing, this is what I'm doing.
This is what I care about.
Can you help?
They didn't have anything to exchange.
They didn't have anything other than the participation in a dream.
And when you are connected to your dream, like the real one, not the one that's like, I want to make enough money, but the one that is, oh my God, that's like, I want to prove to people that anything is possible and it's real.
People like to participate in that.
They like to give help in order to do that.
So what wound up happening is that the senator reached out.
They set up a meeting, and Barack flaked.
He didn't.
He flaked.
He didn't show he had something come up.
So they aired the episode and they never got to play with him.
Except...
Episode airs, Barack's in the White House with MTV on in the background, and he sees these guys, the Buried Life, talking about how they want to play basketball with Obama.
And he contacts his aide.
He says, why haven't I played basketball with these guys yet?
And the same aide who had heard, he said, well, you had something come up that day.
We couldn't do it.
He says, get them out here.
And so they went and they played basketball at the White House with Barack Obama.
And it came from just sharing their purpose with people.
Is that what manifestation is?
I think if manifestation is just thinking happy thoughts and waiting for them to happen, that to me is wishful thinking.
But yeah, if it's putting your energy and your intent and your request for support behind the thing that is most important to you, like that's the reality of manifestation.
And I think that's why a lot of–
People like Conor McGregor, you know, when they hit these places, they talk about the power of manifestation, I think are often misinterpreted because it's not just seeing it or thinking about it.
It's putting your full life force behind it, reaching out, asking for help, and contributing your part of the pie as well.
I love that.
Yeah.
I love that.
It's really, really important.
Number six.
Number six.
We've said this one before.
I go first in humanizing the interaction.
Humanizing the interaction?
Yes, which is to say whenever you're with a group of people, there is an expected social norm.
Right.
And it is usually less than people wish that it was.
It's the thing that you described earlier is I wish that my employees would get to what's really going on.
And it's the ability to be the first one, like I told the story about my brother, to crack the joke about the dragon name tag.
Right.
And that made everybody in the event funnier.
Now they all want to crack jokes and they all want to be playful.
It's the ability to give a compliment first.
Sometimes people are afraid that it will disrupt their status if they're too complimentary.
And we did talk about how at the beginning of an interaction, it's useful to establish fun, trust, and respect.
But then– Feel free to pour it on, right?
Yeah, yeah.
compliments, and then vulnerability, right?
Going first, sharing the vulnerable thing.
There's a fine line, of course, between trauma dumping and just outpouring without checking if the other person is with you and wanting to go there with you.
But
Yeah, to dive into the thing that is unsettled in you or that hurts or that you're working on and you're not sure about.
Man, we go there first.
It's like the room transforms around that.
It's like everyone's like, oh, me too.
Yeah, I'm also struggling.
Yeah, I also wish we could laugh more.
Yeah, I also am really– I love that person's sense of style but didn't want to be weird and say so.
So when you go first and humanizing the interaction, it is–
It is the essence of leadership.
Sharing your imperfections.
I saw this in one of your videos.
That's kind of what you're talking about there, right?
It's being willing to show the chinks in your own armour.
Yes, it is.
I think a lot of people like me have an idea that charisma is looking like someone else that they admire.
It is– and they don't know that person's internal dialogue, right?
They don't know all the internal questions going on inside of them.
And when instead you can start with where you are, which so people will ask me, how do I deal with anxiety?
And one of the things that I've said, and I've done it a handful of times on this podcast, is speak to it.
Like I felt nervous when I was coming in here.
Like if the thing comes up inside of you and it feels like you can't say it.
Give it a risk.
Say it.
It often creates a depth of connection that you wouldn't be anticipating.
What about humor, being funny?
Being funny?
So we haven't talked about this, but there's– I think about charismatic types of people.
The five types that I think of are high conviction, authentic, funny, empathetic, and energetic.
And so basically high conviction are people that they're that belief storm that when they encounter you, they just win.
That's Conor McGregor.
He's 19 years old, pimple-faced guy saying he's going to be a champion of the world without a waiver in his eye.
Steve Jobs, the story of Mike Scully, who was one of his chief officers who came and worked for him.
I don't know if you're familiar with it.
Do you know what he said to him?
What did he say?
So they're having a meeting and Scully's not going to join.
And he says, do you want to sell–
You want to sell flavored sugar for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?
And Scully was at Pepsi at the time?
Yeah, he was at Pepsi.
And so he says, ugh.
Yeah.
And there's this belief that I'm going to change the world and this solidness behind it.
That's high conviction.
Donald Trump is high conviction, right?
When he loses elections, he doesn't lose elections, right?
It's a level of certainty that he's going to win that is just next level.
So that's one type of charisma.
It's incredibly powerful.
There's downsides to it.
It can be difficult to integrate feedback.
And I think you've seen that with like Conor McGregor.
You know, it's, it's, uh.
When you develop high conviction, it's also really important to have some areas of your life where you're able to listen and where you're able to integrate feedback.
Anyway, there's the authentic type.
This is– I think Trump has a degree of this as well.
This is number two, right?
This is number two.
But the way that I'm– it's a different kind of authenticity, I suppose, than Trump, which is–
I trust this person exactly to say what they think in front of me, whether I like it or I don't.
And I think Joe Rogan got big off the back of this.
This was the– like if Joe disagrees with that guy, he's not going to be rude to him.
But you're going to get– you're going to know about it, right?
He is going to have his comedian friend on that he wants to have on because he wants to have him on.
And when you do authenticity over a period of time, it creates just unshakable trust.
Like I've seen this person do things that could be damaging to our relationship and just continue to move forward.
So I know that they're not trying to please me with their behavior and I can trust the things that they say and I can trust the things that they do and I can rely on them.
I feel safe to rely on them.
That's the authentic type.
Third type is funny.
These are your comedians.
These people are just fun to be around.
Like you hang out with them.
They're cracking jokes the whole time.
They bring a levity.
Everyone else is talking literally and they're going to bring in something that is just non-literal.
So any comedian is going to fit this.
You're Kevin Hart.
You're whoever.
Take your pick.
Empathetic.
To me, Oprah is the paragon, but I think you have become the Oprah of the podcasting world in many ways.
That's a massive compliment.
But empathetic people, they do really, really well one-on-one.
And they...
They help other people to feel seen, right?
They ask a question with a sincerity that makes the other person share the thing that they might not have shared in many other groups.
And we all deeply want to feel safe to share ourselves.
But we don't because we're in louder groups or all different sorts of things.
So when we get in contact with an empathetic person, they might not talk very much.
But man, do we leave liking that person.
Like, oh, he had a great conversation.
We need to do that again.
Uh,
And then the last one is your energetic type.
This is probably the easiest one to add.
I think of early Will Smith.
I think of the way that people walk onto talk shows where they would come onto Jimmy Fallon dancing onto the stage or something like that.
This is an individual who may not be very witty with their humor, but they make people smile because the energy that they bring to an interaction is just like two degrees higher than you would expect.
Right.
So it's, he doesn't need to be like funny, ha ha, can crack a joke.
But the guy who's first on the dance floor at the wedding is like, you know, committed to the thing.
That's energetic.
And I think Jack Black is someone who has a comment.
He is funny.
Like he can crack a joke.
But the energy that he brings to everything he does is what sells it.
So this comes from commitment to the bit, right?
You don't like start off dancing like this and then look around and realize nobody likes it and stop.
It's if you're able to sustain a level of energy, enthusiasm, and positivity that is one or two degrees higher than the people in the room.
At first, there's like, I don't know, and then they join in because everybody wants to relax and dance and feel better or at least to witness people doing that.
And when it's committed, that's when it really, really works.
So when I think about these five charisma types that you talk about, you could be several of them and you could potentially be all of them.
Yeah.
So someone could be high conviction, authentic, funny, energetic, and empathetic.
Sure.
And is that like the holy grail?
That's like the singularity where the universe explodes.
No, you're right.
You could be.
You could be all of these.
I do find that conviction and empathetic tend to move in opposites of one another.
Like I wouldn't expect Conor McGregor to like hold space for me very well.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But that's not required, right?
You can have a degree of conviction.
Obama.
He struck me as being high conviction at times.
Yeah.
Yes, we can.
Yeah.
And also empathetic when he cried on the stage after the Sandy Hook thing.
I think he's a great.
example of those moving up together.
He's also authentic.
He's funny.
Yeah.
Energetic, I guess.
I mean, he was, he riled people up.
He, I mean, he's a generational talent as a politician.
He's, yeah.
So he's, he's definitely next level.
That's the other thing.
I've started to look back at some of the presidents that we've had and we've had some statesmen that have been,
You can have your opinion on them.
§09Transcript — part 9
But when I look at the people that have won, they're the charisma candidate in a lot of the cases.
Isn't it crazy?
I don't think it's that crazy.
That's the thing.
We tend to overlook it and then pretend that we live in a world based on rubric merit as opposed to this is literally a popularity contest.
How did this person make me feel?
Yeah.
How do I feel when I'm around them?
Or how do I feel when I witness them on stage?
Do I believe that I can trust them without ever having had a one-to-one conversation?
So Obama's, he's a charisma freak.
He's incredibly high charisma.
What you just said there just goes to highlight how important these skills are.
Because if you can rise to the top of society and become the leader of the free world by mastering charisma, like Dave at his job or like me as a podcaster,
it just goes to show that like talent and merit and skills and maybe even my education are secondary to my ability to...
Make people feel a certain way.
I think in most, I think, let me see if this is true.
Certainly true in LA to a ridiculous level.
But even in the industry that I was in, which was consulting,
I wound up getting off-cycle raises, preferential treatment, though even decades later I feel strange saying it on camera.
And it was– like I said, there were better analysts than me.
There were guys that I liked that I went to to help me with my work and–
It was not because I was the best analyst.
It was because I had established relationships with people that liked me and wanted me to do well.
And it's obvious.
What is nepotism other than familial connection, right?
And so if you just remove the family from it, that's charisma.
This person cares and wants me to do well and likes me.
But it's not nepotism.
It's something else.
It's a charismatic connection that you have with that person.
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How do I use this idea of charisma and body language and interpersonal skills to improve my prospects in work, whether that's in an interview setting for a new job or if I'm looking for a promotion?
So the first thing that I always thought about with interviews and trained people to think about was...
The interview does not start when you land in the room with that person who is
Is got the piece of paper in front of them with your resume.
It starts when you leave your house, if you're taking an Uber, you need to talk to the Uber driver, right?
You need to get warm.
You need to get comfortable.
You need to get those vocal cords moving.
You need to be dynamic.
When you enter the building, if it's a large building and it has a security guard, one more sentence.
Remember, hey, how's it going?
You see a lot of fresh faces in here, you know?
Yeah.
Hopefully this is not the last time you see me.
That type of a thing.
It just makes you feel a little bit more comfortable.
Instead of reviewing whatever technical stuff that you think you need to know, that needs to be dropped before the interview.
That's either in there or it's not, like 15, 30 minutes in advance.
Then you go upstairs.
There's a secretary.
Same thing.
There's other candidates.
Same thing.
By the time you sit down across from that person, you're warm.
You're ready to go and you're not starting from zero in order to be an engaging human because there are going to be those initial questions.
Did you get in all right?
Did you do this?
Just a little bit, a little bit extra and it's going to be attuned to the situation, but it'll come through.
And you've opened a couple of tabs on the way here, right?
Exactly.
Exactly.
Like, how'd you get in?
I'd be like, yeah, I met Rick at the door.
He's awesome.
Right?
Like, that's going to help.
So that's the number one thing.
And then in interviews, you don't know what questions you're going to get asked.
But if you can take what you're going to get asked and put it into a story format.
And have a beginning, middle, and an end that has like an up, down, up sort of curve to it.
And what I mean is that they're going to say, tell me about something that you really struggled with in your career.
And if in advance you have thought,
through your career.
And you have the three big moments that happen to you, which is you took over this project, you quit this job and left, moved to this one, and you did this other thing.
And then you backwards figure out the story of those.
And so the story has this
And agitating, you know, it's got the– you establish that I was working at this company and then there was a problem.
And then you agitate the problem.
It was really bad and no one could solve it.
No one could figure it out.
And so I did X, Y, and Z.
And as a result, it turned out really well.
And then this other thing happened.
You get three to five of those things that you know are your core stories.
You have no idea what questions are coming, but I promise you, you're going to slot those five things into it.
So you don't need– you will not be surprised in the moment if there's a question that you haven't prepared for or heard because probably there's a story when it comes– this is the fit portion of the interview that you can just– you have your story ready.
And it demonstrates any of the values that you think this company wants, which is I'm tenacious.
I work hard.
I know the industry, and I can work well with people.
That's built into your stories.
And then one tip is that at the end of an interview, there's always that moment where they say, do you have any questions for us?
And what I've seen sitting on the other side of the table is people either ask a question they don't really have because they feel like they're supposed to or they say, no, I don't have any questions.
And it's just a missed opportunity.
And so this one I have to give credit to my co-founder.
He came up with.
And this is one of the things I did not anticipate.
I got the most positive responses.
Like I got the job because of this question type of a thing.
And the question is,
Is, okay, so let's say that this interview went really well and a year from now I got the job and you're looking back.
What would I have had to have done in order for you to feel like it was a good decision?
Like what things will I have had to have done in that role?
And so typically the person goes, I like that.
That's a really good question.
And it does a handful of things.
One, you've gotten them to imagine the interview going really well and them hiring you, right?
And then second, they're going to lay out for you exactly what you need to do in the role to excel.
And that is something that every boss wants.
It's like I want you interested in knowing what I need from you in order to do a good job.
And you can take that same principle.
And you could bring it into conversations if you want to get a raise sooner than you think you were going to, to go in and say, hey, I'd like to get a raise.
You can make it clear.
I'd like to do it faster than usual, but I want to make sure that it's totally worth it for you.
So six months from now or eight months from now, in order for me to get this raise, what would I have had to have done for it to be a no-brainer, obvious to you that this was–
valuable.
And then they will go and tell you the things that you could do.
And if it's a company that says, no, you can't, maybe you don't want to work there, but they'll just give you the playbook and then do those things, keep up with that person.
And you're now off track for promotions, right?
You're not just doing whatever they say.
And the bummer is you might've done those things anyway, but if you don't have the conversation in advance, they're not going to give you a raise in most cases.
So interesting.
Cause this could be applied to like,
Anybody in any role.
role that is selling anything.
I'm thinking of a personal trainer who meets their client on the first day and says, six months from now, what would I have done to have made you happy?
Or I'm thinking of, you know, marketing industries, agencies turning to their clients at the start and saying, if we're still working together in 12 months and you're really happy, what would I have done?
And they'll lay out exactly how they want to be treated and their expectations.
So you can meet and exceed them.
Yes.
Yeah.
And it shows that you care in that initial moment.
You mentioned something earlier on, which you said you were in South America and you thought your life was going to be focused on figuring out how to pick up women.
Yeah.
What are women attracted to, in your opinion?
I know this is somewhat...
Yeah.
Stereotyping and generalized.
But are there anything that as a man I could do to make myself more attracted to a woman and vice versa?
Mm-hmm.
When I see men approach women, particularly in the U.S., every culture is different.
I've lived in a number of different places.
There's that moment where they're just sussing out, does he feel like he has a right to speak to me or not?
And sometimes they're not immediately warm.
And by immediately, I mean in the first five seconds.
And there's a difference between the guys that I've seen get more comfortable and they just ride that 5 to 10 to 15 seconds out and then the women are laughing and the guys that take that first initial bit of she didn't initially like love everything that I said and then they go, okay, and they walk away.
So conviction is a huge, huge piece of it.
I think another big element is that a lot of guys come in with just, man, they have these
boring habits.
And I don't think they can conceive of what it's like to be a woman and get asked the same boring thing 10 million times.
And this is true on dating apps and it's true in the bar.
So on dating apps, it's pay, right?
Or something like that.
In a bar, it's do you come here often?
It's what is your major or something like that.
So having...
Any sort of initial line that is just not that, right?
Make it true.
You don't need to tell a fake story.
But the one that I fell back on in so many different social circumstances was, hey, I don't think I've met you yet.
I'm Charlie.
And the reason I love this is, one, it's portable.
It can be a house party.
It can be a bar.
It can be whatever.
But unspoken in that is that I'm the type of person who knows a lot of people here, which I didn't say that.
Yeah, that's true.
But it comes through in that.
It's like I'm the man about town.
I know different people here.
So that was always just an easy one to have.
And I think to have that in your back pocket is very helpful.
But in terms of what they want, the first thing is just general human attraction.
§10Transcript — part 10
And this isn't like I want to sleep with you.
I want to marry you.
It's just do I want to engage in conversation with you?
Do you have an interesting story?
Am I excusing myself at the first minute to go to the bathroom?
First chance I get.
Is she filling in gaps in conversation with her own contributions or do you have to carry the entire load yourself?
That's how you know if you have that basic human attraction.
It doesn't mean that she likes you or wants to be with you.
It just means that she's down to converse and interact with you.
The second thing that is probably one that most guys miss is.
Do you authentically have and have you communicated to her that you have standards beyond her being beautiful?
And for most men, this is just a no.
This is unfortunately, if they look back on their lives and they go, okay, has there ever been a time where I was physically attracted to someone and–
She did something that made me go, okay, I'm not interested anymore, whether it was be rude to a waiter or unkind or cold or just not have fun in the way that I would like to have fun, which doesn't mean she's a bad person.
It just means she's not a match for me.
So many men, especially when they're younger,
Don't have standards.
They have that one standard.
So the weird thing about that is it feels like, oh, well, if I have a standard, I have a smaller group of people that are going to work with me.
But actually, women want to be liked for more than their looks.
People want to be appreciated for–
their inside for who they are as a person.
And if you can't feel and communicate that, you know, oh man, like I often go out, I don't meet people that I have as much fun with as you, you're so funny.
Or like, I love how affectionate you are.
Like, like most people wouldn't come onto the dance floor with me and we're the only ones out here or whatever it is.
If you can communicate to her that you have a standard that she is hitting and that is making you aware that you're a match for her,
It shifts that power balance from she's on a pedestal because she's beautiful and I'm going to pursue her the whole time to genuinely you come in and you're actually filtering for these things.
So you will be subconsciously wanting to find the person.
who's going to go cut up the dance floor with you or trying to find the person that is affectionate as opposed to the person who is a bit colder.
Is there an element to this as well where people will shit test you?
Like they will test to see if you have standards.
Yes, yes.
Because if men and women, so I will subtly, because I heard about this thing called shit testing where like someone will subtly mistreat you to see how you react.
Yeah.
And if you react in that moment and you just kind of accept it and tolerate it, they'll therefore treat you in the future in the same way.
But also they will be less attracted to you and view you as lower status.
Whereas she might show up.
45 minutes late.
And if you're still sat there, then that in and of itself is showing that you'll kind of tolerate anything and that she's, or he is higher standard, higher status than you.
Yeah.
I, at the beginning of one of my relationships that wound up being a multi-year relationship, but, uh, we were just sort of getting started.
And I remember we had plans to meet on a Sunday night and I had been very amenable up until this point.
She canceled and I said, no problem.
You know, canceled, no problem.
And I saw what was happening.
I'm breaking my own rule.
I'm being– I'm moving plans in order to make space with her.
And so we have a thing Sunday night.
It's 9 p.m.
We're supposed to meet at 10.
She calls me and says that, sorry, I can't come.
I'm with my family and I'm going to, you know, I just can't make it.
Also, unfortunately, this week, you know, I have this thing on Monday and this other thing Tuesday, and then I have work Thursday, Friday night.
So the only way.
that I can see you this week is going to be Wednesday night.
And I had earlier that day made plans to go out with my friends on Wednesday night.
And though it was a challenge for me, I thought about this earlier and I said, oh, that's a bummer.
Then I don't think I'm going to be able to see you this week.
She said, what?
What do you mean?
I have plans on Wednesday.
Well, then we're not going to be able to see each other.
And she starts getting upset and nervous.
I don't know what to tell you.
I just am not free on Wednesday.
Okay, let me call you back.
And she calls me back in 15 minutes.
Okay, I'm going to come over.
Oh, my God.
You just reminded me of so many investment conversations I've had with founders who pitch me their business and email me and go, Steve, we've got a million pounds left in this round.
You can put the million in, but we need to know in three days'time because we've got so much interest.
And I remember one over the Christmas break where I said, don't worry about it.
I can't give you an answer in three days.
I take two weeks to speak to my team, do some analysis, due diligence.
I come back two weeks later and I go, we're not interested.
Is there any way you might be interested?
Please.
I've just, A, you told me there was three days for me to make a decision at first.
And I told you I didn't want to do that.
I took two weeks.
I came back and said no.
And now you're chasing me?
Yeah.
And it's so interesting how...
But you can't...
The problem with this as advice is it has to be true.
Yes.
This is don't play.
I mean, games.
Okay.
You can, at first, I understand you're 18.
You've got nothing on your social calendar.
You technically.
Are available every minute of the day to be with this girl that you would really like to be with.
The advice is often just say no, that you can't hang out when she does it, which I think is very confusing.
Instead, fill your calendar.
You like start to build your life outside of this thing.
If you're this business, get other options on the table, have other balls in the air that are going for you.
So it's a hack, but starting to calendar your social life, which is not something I like to be very flexible.
But when you have that, it actually makes you much more charismatic.
And I see this all the time.
So there is something to this.
Don't play the game.
You don't need to fake it.
But if you find that this is not working in your life, start to take steps to fill your calendar.
Even if one night is like on Tuesdays, I watch this TV show and then take a luxurious bath after.
Like, no, sorry, I can't do it Tuesday.
And this can all get adjusted when you're in a relationship and it's ongoing.
There's a give and take that is, of course, going to occur.
But man, yeah, there is.
There's these power games that people play.
There's these who is more in demand.
And like it or not, it has an impact.
I went through some of your best performing videos of all time on your channel.
And it was interesting that I could see kind of themes in them.
I could see several of the best performing videos had similar themes.
And one of the really...
Prominent themes was five habits that make people instantly dislike you.
So that's a video about Brie Larson.
And around the time of the Avengers Captain Marvel thing, she had a string of interviews that were pretty alienating to people.
Some of the things that she did, goodness, it was...
Having to win every joke exchange.
They're talking about, for instance, who's the most powerful Avenger, right?
And they're sort of being playful with each other.
Like, well, Thor is the most powerful.
And she adopts this attitude of, well, actually my character would kill yours.
And there's a well, actually quality.
Like, well, actually I would win.
Actually I would win.
Actually your character is just a mere mortal and I would win.
And it...
Is like cute once, but it becomes frustrating to have someone have to win every banter exchange between friends.
And so I think people saw that and they saw some of the reactions of the cast.
And so that's one is like to have to.
Win every banter exchange and have a burn that you come out on top of, not a good one.
Another one that she did is to interpret ambiguous communications negatively.
So for instance, in this particular video that I did, she's on that Wired autocomplete interview.
And there's one question that is, does Brie Larson work out?
And in a way that doesn't, to at least to Americans, like clearly communicate sarcasm.
Maybe it's different to Brits.
I don't know.
You guys have a different cultural code.
She says something to the effect of like, is that a personal attack?
Really?
Yeah.
And then she doesn't laugh.
And she also– so there's two options there.
You could say–
Is that a personal attack?
And you could laugh, right?
Or you could say, is that a personal attack?
Personal attack.
Everyone on the internet thinks that I'm so fat.
Just trying to jump on me.
I'm trying to lose weight.
Like you can double and triple down until it's clear that you're being absurd.
Yeah.
But she said it once and it came through as hyper defensive.
And the thing that I talk about is you want to interpret ambiguous communications charitably.
This is a big one.
This is one of like, if you've watched the show, Ted Lasso, this is full of this.
People will come up to him and.
I just did a video that had this clip where he's on the airplane.
If you know Ted Lasso, he's an American guy going to England.
And somebody says, you know, you're going to coach the football team, the soccer team for us in England.
Man, they're so bad.
This is going to go horribly.
You're a legend.
And then he responds, well, you know, I haven't lost yet.
And he's just got this general positive demeanor.
He takes that ambiguous communication and responds with grace and charm and doesn't make it a fight.
That works so well, that purposeful misinterpretation of ambiguations early on that are maybe not the friendliest.
This often will take people that are trying to take digs at you and make them flip.
And in the case that somebody was just a bit socially miscalibrated, it gives them the opportunity to, you know, not be cast as the bad guy in the interaction.
So that was something else that she did wrong.
Interesting.
Also, if others are watching the interaction and if you have a bias towards interpreting the communication well.
Yeah.
The person that was maybe taking a dig at you is going to look pretty ridiculous, and you're going to probably come off looking pretty good.
Exactly, exactly.
And when we see people...
defend themselves against words, with some exception, when somebody's like saying that they're going to hurt you, it communicates
an insecurity and a defensiveness, which is like, why do you need to defend yourself against the opinions of another, right?
Like the Trump thing where he said about only Rosie O'Donnell.
Yes, yeah.
It's like, I don't need to defend myself against this.
And it sub-communicates that this is not a big deal.
More than saying, that's not a big deal.
You are sub-communicating that's not a big deal by not defending it.
And that's what we do when we actually feel comfortable.
Let's say if somebody were to tease something that you're not at all insecure about.
I don't know what it would be.
Maybe your business success or something.
They come in and like, yeah, well, you know, Stephen, real struggling these days.
You're going to laugh.
You're going to add on to it.
And sometimes a way through this is to tag the joke that's made at your expense, which is to add a yes and on top of it.
So if somebody ambiguous interpretation is saying, yeah, you know, Stephen, his businesses just aren't working really well.
You'd be like, oh, my God, dude, you have no idea.
§11Transcript — part 11
I've been pulling my hair out with the last few weeks, just like things are falling apart around me.
You can do that because you, I'm assuming, feel very comfortable with your level of business success.
And when you can, again, there is a difference when you start to sense a pattern in somebody.
That is a different route that you want to take.
But if it's just one banter thing that is at your expense to double down and make it a joke that you're in on is often very, very powerful.
Fascinating.
I'm going to ask you one last question on this.
One of your...
Best performing videos is titled Speak Like a Leader, Make People Respect You.
In fact, there was two of your top performing videos that were about speaking like a leader, speaking well, which is fascinating to me that people really want to learn how to speak well.
What advice would you give to someone who doesn't feel like they're a good oral communicator on how to speak like a leader?
The ability to answer non-literally and bring in fun and jokes into the interaction, the ability to get to values in a conversation, which is a lot of the stuff that we talked about, to
take people to the thing that they actually want to connect over.
Versus the weather and all that sort of stuff is part of it.
You seem to take a pause as well when you're thinking.
Some people fill in the gaps a little bit.
Yeah, generally, and I'm sure I've made this mistake, but if you can replace any filler word, any crutch word that you have with silence,
Silence is a vacuum.
And the cool thing about vacuums is that they pull attention to you.
And I think people dramatically, dramatically underestimate the amount of silence that they're afforded.
If I look back actually at my early videos, I dramatically underestimated the value of silence.
I thought that I had to get it all out there and be super interesting really fast in order to keep that AVD really, really high.
And I've since seen and learned that when you have a story and you learn the beats where you've set up the–
And so there's these lines that you'll say in a story.
It's like, you know, the craziest thing happened the other day.
So I'm right.
Like you, you are, there's, there's these hooks and you get an intuitive feel for where you've got the audience on the edge of their seat.
And especially then to just take a breath or have a pause, you don't need to think all of this out, but that becomes second nature.
That's very valuable.
And it comes from the way I've seen people do is when you record yourself, tell a story and just watch back how many ums and uhs you have in it.
When I watch my own podcasts, I'm sure you've felt this.
Yeah.
Oh my gosh.
It's horrifying.
You begin to see your own little habits come through.
Does body language matter when I'm speaking?
I think so.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There's a couple of things that I tend to teach people, which is a lot of people form a tiny little box for themselves where maybe they'll move their hands like this and it's, they got this thing going on.
For people that can't see, you're just kind of waving it like a ping pong.
I'm kind of waving my hands in a little circular thing and my elbows most importantly are pinned to my sides.
If I lift my elbows off my sides.
And I start talking a little bit like this.
And if I was to say, you know, over here and my brother's in the green room over there and I gesticulate, there's two ways to gesticulate.
I can take my finger and I can point six inches from my face the direction that my brother is.
Or I can lift my entire arm and point over there.
The space that you fill is...
One, captivating.
This is something that we talk about in a lot of our videos, which is you don't need to invade other people's space.
You need to fill your own complete.
When you fill your space completely, it is much more captivating.
So when you're on stage to gesticulate with the full width of your wingspan, like, look, I know you guys on this side of the room are feeling this, but over here, right, versus I know you guys on this side of the room think that we have to do this.
But over here, it just, there's a level of discomfort that is.
Comes through in it versus get those elbows off the sides.
It makes a huge, huge difference.
Also helps you speak louder, makes you more dynamic.
What's the most important thing we haven't talked about that the audience are probably screaming to know at this exact moment in time?
When it comes to confidence, one of the mindsets that I see really help people.
Is that there are no superiors, that you go into your workplace and you think that you've got to treat your boss differently, or you go into a bar and you think you have to treat the beautiful woman differently.
And yes, there is status.
And yes, we arrange ourselves in sorts of hierarchies.
When you realize, and as I did in my job, and this is why I got the raise off cycle, it's why everything started working for me, you're not dealing with roles.
You're not dealing with investors.
You're not dealing with avatars of beauty.
You are dealing with people and the people that they love the most in their life that they would do the most for.
They connect with over the same things that you connect with your friends over.
There's different interests, but the underlying themes of those things are the same.
What they love to do for fun, what fills them up, what brings them joy, not.
looking prim and proper and perfect.
And so like a willingness to make that mistake is, I see is often the essence of confidence.
And when I have dropped it and another friend has picked it up, I see it all the time.
It goes back to what you said about convincing versus invites.
Don't convince people, give them invites to connect.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's a really interesting point that I never heard before.
And I,
can immediately see how I can action that in my own life.
Because even I find myself convincing people all the time, trying to convince them, especially if they don't know.
I'm like, I do this, I do this, I do this.
Even when I land into the US, it's a border force.
I'm like, what are you doing here?
What do you do?
I'm like, I'm going to podcast.
I'm going to start a business.
Brings out that little voice.
I could just say holiday.
I'm here for a fucking holiday.
Let me through.
We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest without knowing who they're leaving it for.
All right.
And the question that's been left for you is, what is the most important thing you are doing to increase your well-being?
Aw.
Well, we haven't talked about this and without opening a can of worms.
I have done roughly quarterly psychedelic journeys for the last couple of years.
And I was someone who had never done that before.
When I was 30, I was the most straightest person you ever met.
I didn't drink.
I didn't do any of that.
Why are you doing it?
Why am I doing it?
Honest answers only.
To connect with my heart and have that be the primary thing that I bring into every interaction.
And it has helped me address the barriers to that, the shame.
And we didn't go super deep today into it, but the things that I've alluded to in my past that...
I thought made me broken or unworthy of showing up fully.
Where did that come from?
Yeah.
Hmm.
The belief and the experiences that I had, and there were many, and it feels late in the podcast to jump into them, though.
We can jump into them if you want to.
I'm open to it.
One of them was being sexually abused.
One of the things that I got from psychedelics was the ability to go back into that experience and realize what it had–
what compensations I'd made as a result of it because– It was always something that I remembered.
I was old enough to remember.
I was probably about 10-ish.
But the way that I took it was, this is my fault.
I did this.
I must have wanted this or else it wouldn't have happened.
It's that infinite responsibility even at a young age that I took, which I can see is crazy.
And therefore, this doesn't bother me.
I'm not affected by this.
And in these experiences to break, to just crack entirely and my heart to spill out of my chest in pain and tears.
Grief for the loss of soul connection that was impacted by that experience.
I'm so blessed to have had the chance to reconnect with my soul.
And I want so deeply to offer that to other people.
And perhaps this adds some context to the shift in charisma from something that you do to the essence of who you are.
And that's...
That's how I want to teach it going forward, and that's what I–
That's the core gift that I want to pass forward to others.
That emotion is still on the surface.
Mm-hmm.
Because it costs you something that you...
What are the mixture of emotions you feel?
Today, I feel so much love.
I feel so much love.
Like, I hear this voice in my head say, I love you.
Like, I hear it so much.
I feel it constantly.
It's such a fucking gift and a blessing.
And so much grief for the years that I didn't feel that.
And that I had to be more than I was in order to.
Come approximate a fraction of that.
So it's today.
Ecstatic joy and gratitude.
And when I think back on it, it's...
Compassion, which is not what I felt before.
I felt revulsion for myself when I thought of what had happened to me.
I felt disgusted with me, with my body, with my center.
I love being me more and more.
And so, yeah, I think part of the mix is the,
I'm glad you asked because it's what I want to give to other people, whatever I can related to this.
I think the only way I can give it is by speaking to what I lost for a long time as well.
I didn't believe in souls for my whole life.
You know, there was none of that.
That word was empty to me.
And to have it come back and to first feel the ache of it coming back, the excruciating pain of like the separation from this.
And then the reunion is just like every day.
I like pray and gratitude for that.
So.
I, um...
That's why I bought the business is for this to spread that to as many people as I can.
Thank you.
Yeah.
It's really a beautiful thing that you just shared because I just know that there's people out there that,
are at some stage in that journey.
You know, it's a sexual abuse is something that I think from my very sort of naive
experience of speaking to people that have been through that is a very unique, complex range of feelings and emotions that someone who's not been through that might struggle to understand.
Because an objective observer says you felt you'd done something wrong.
Yeah.
You carried the shame.
You carried the guilt.
You carry disgust.
It doesn't make, it doesn't appear to make sense.
So by way of you sharing it, you're going to enable a lot of people who are struggling in a similar way to make sense of what they're experiencing.
But also to offer them tremendous hope that at the end of that journey, however long that might take them, they're going to arrive at alignment.
Yeah.
they're going to come back to themselves.
Yeah.
The shame was so underneath.
It was so pushed down.
I wasn't aware of it.
You know, as you said,
earlier, what were you feeling back then?
I said shame, but I was, it came out sideways.
It came way in perfectionism or seeking approval or trying to rescue and save other people, all the things that we talked about today.
It was only through direct contact with that repressed feeling of self-disgust and responsibility.
That I was able to move through it and heal it and to sit with the worst thoughts that I had about myself, which is, like you said, you did this, you wanted it, you
deserve it, you, you know, all of that stuff that gets, sounds so freaking strange even to me to say, but to know that that's,
the common response to something like that?
Oh, man.
It has helped me understand people so much more because I think, you know, I have my own history and my own shames.
But when you see the way that people internalize the things that have happened to them as if they're broken, as if...
They deserved the misfortunes of particularly their early life and even late life.
It's so sad.
And I can see now how sad it is, but you couldn't have convinced me before.
Is there anything that you wish this...
This grown man in front of me could say to that boy,
§12Transcript — part 12
I wish that someone could have...
I just needed someone to sit with me.
Someone to.
Sit and wait.
Without blame, there was not opportunity for an adult to just sit that I trusted and just listen.
So if I could send anything back to myself, then it would just be.
An adult to listen to me.
And today what I've had to send back internally is that I just listen to myself.
I listen to myself so much more.
And it's only through listening to myself that I can get through all the shame and then finally hear that voice of, I love you.
Like, I love you.
I love you.
You couldn't be loved more.
Thank you.
Thank you.
There's so many reasons why I feel so grateful to you.
I mean, your work over the years has helped so many people make sense of a world that appears to be very confusing, especially as like a young man, but even also as a young woman,
understanding why we're struggling in our lives can feel...
Like a Rubik's cube of a bunch of different factors that we were either given across the dining room table from our parents or biologically or whatever.
And you've helped us to understand the most important thing in the world, which is humans, what it is to be a human, how to be an effective human in whatever context, how to be an
ineffective human, and to really turn the lights on to many of the things that we do and don't do without knowing it at all.
And all of this gives us a greater chance of becoming whoever we want to be.
And I'm also grateful to you because your willingness to share your early experiences, this early abuse that happened, and to reflect on it.
And to talk to us so openly and honestly about the complexities of it.
are going to help so many people who are at some stage in that process to feel seen and heard.
And to also, maybe most importantly of all, offer them hope that they can come to where you've arrived at today, where you love yourself.
Thank you, man.
And you have that love in yourself.
Thank you.
What a gift.
That's a hell of a blessing.
Thank you.
I highly recommend everybody, if they want to hear more from you,
They have to go and check out your channel.
I'm going to put it on the screen and link it everywhere because you're on a journey.
And I think people are more fascinated now than ever before to really follow that journey and understand what truly charisma is, what loving yourself is, what we should be aiming at.
And I'm, I mean, having spoken to you today, I'm so, I'm almost obsessed with your work and what's going to pour out of you in this season of your life.
And I'd highly recommend everybody to go check out the channel.
It's unbelievable.
You're back.
You took a hiatus.
Yeah.
But you're back and there's a new, there's a new.
Essence to you, which I think is incredible.
Yeah.
So please go check out Charlie's work.
Please go check out his channel.
Please go check out his university.
I'm going to link all of that below.
And is there anything else that if people want to reach out to you, how do they do it?
How do they get more from you?
Yeah, we have a course called Charisma University, which is...
You asked me a lot about the tips, and quite frankly, they're not top of mind, but they're in there.
That's a 30-day program for people to go through and start to implement these things in a very actionable way.
way.
So if they're curious, they can check that out.
Just Google Charisma University.
And I think that's it.
I'm happy we finally got to the tears, Stephen.
I was worried that your reputation would fail you.
Thank you.
Thanks, man.
It's been a pleasure.
It really, really has been.
Isn't this cool?
Every single conversation I have here on the Diary of a CEO, at the very end of it, you'll know, I ask the guest to leave a question in the Diary of a CEO.
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