Body language expert Blake Eastman debunks nonverbal myths and reveals how AI is revolutionizing our understanding of human behavior and communication!
What We Discuss with Blake Eastman:
- Traditional body language “rules” (like crossed arms meaning resistance or eye movements indicating lying) are often oversimplified and unreliable. Context, individual differences, and cultural factors play a significant role in interpreting nonverbal behavior.
- Detecting lies through body language alone is not reliable. Even trained professionals struggle to accurately identify deception based solely on nonverbal cues.
- Social context and cultural norms greatly influence how we interpret and display nonverbal behavior. What’s considered appropriate or meaningful in one culture may be perceived differently in another.
- AI and machine learning are being developed to analyze human behavior, including facial expressions, voice patterns, and other nonverbal cues. This technology has potential applications in various fields, including healthcare and communication.
- The development of AI that can read human behavior raises both exciting possibilities and ethical concerns that need to be carefully considered.
- And much more…
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For years, self-proclaimed nonverbal communication “experts” have insisted that the way we move our bodies reveals our inner thoughts as clearly as if we were shouting them from a mountaintop (or the roof of a suburban Chipotle, depending on where we live). But the simple truth is that body language isn’t a universal language. Someone’s “shifty” gaze could mean they’re lying about not eating the last slice of pizza at the party, or maybe it’s just their allergies acting up. Someone’s crossed arms might indicate they’d rather be anywhere in the world than on this lousy Olive Garden date with you, or it’s possible they’re trying to appear nonchalant because they really like you, or it could be that this happens to be the most comfortable way to sit after a long day at the office. The fact is, the inner workings of a single human brain are far too complex for anyone else to decode from simple external observation — at least for now. But as our understanding of this internal world evolves, so does the technology we use to analyze it.
On this episode, we’re joined by Blake Eastman, a real body language expert and founder of The Nonverbal Group. Here, he explains why traditional interpretations of nonverbal cues are often unreliable and how AI is revolutionizing our understanding of human behavior. Listen to this interview in its entirety to learn more about the complexities of reading body language, the role of context and culture in nonverbal communication, the potential of AI in decoding human behavior, the importance of self-awareness in improving our own communication skills, and the ethical considerations surrounding the use of AI in analyzing human interactions. Blake also shares insights on using video as a tool for self-improvement and discusses the future of human-AI interaction. Whether you’re interested in psychology, technology, or simply want to improve your interpersonal skills, this conversation offers valuable insights into the fascinating world of human behavior and communication. Listen, learn, and enjoy!
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Miss one of our earlier shows with The 48 Laws of Power author Robert Greene? Catch up here with episode 117: What You Need to Know about the Laws of Human Nature!
Thanks, Blake Eastman!
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Resources from This Episode:
- Behavioral Research and Education | Nonverbal Group
- The World’s First Behavioral Study of Poker Players | Beyond Tells
- Blake Eastman | Instagram
- Blake Eastman | Twitter
- Blake Eastman | LinkedIn
- Body Language | Skeptical Sunday | Jordan Harbinger
- How Much of Communication is Really Nonverbal? An Extensive Breakdown | The Nonverbal Group
- Four Major Myths About Body Language | Psychology Today
- Eye Movement and Lying: Genuine or Junk Science? | All About Vision
- Joe Navarro | How to Identify and Protect Yourself from Harmful People | Jordan Harbinger
- Chase Hughes | The Behavioral Table of the Elements | Jordan Harbinger
- Lie Detectors Are Junk Science, but We Keep Using Them | Reason
- Problems with fMRI as a Tool of Lie Detection | Bill of Health
- Two Truths and a Lie: 100 Great Lie Examples and How to Play | Parade
- David Lieberman | Deciphering What People Really Want | Jordan Harbinger
- Amanda Knox | The Truth About True Crime | Jordan Harbinger
- Dedicated to Finding a Cure for ALS | The ALS Association
- The 2 AM Principle: Discover the Science of Adventure by Jon Levy | Amazon
- Influencers Dinner | Jon Levy
- Bill Nye | Radical Curiosity Saves the World | Jordan Harbinger
- Regina Spektor | Website
- Chuck D | Threads
- Facial Action Coding System (FACS) | Wikipedia
- Is Body Language a Language, and Is It Universal? | Babbel
- How AI Will Revolutionize How We Use Body Language | Science of People
- T-1000 | Terminator Wiki
- Signs You’re Not Well-Liked at Work (And What to Do about It) | Jordan Harbinger
- Konstantin Samoilov | Putin’s Russia: An Insider’s Perspective | Jordan Harbinger
- Malcolm Gladwell | Imperfect Puzzles and Mismatched Demeanors | Jordan Harbinger
- Bell Curve | Investopedia
- Joe Budden TV | YouTube
- 911 Analysis: How Civilian Crisis Responders Can Divert Behavioral Health Calls from Police | Vera Institute of Justice
- AI Models to Transcribe and Understand Speech | AssemblyAI
- Dennis Rodman | The Worm Is Back | Jordan Harbinger
- Nina Schick | Deepfakes and the Coming Infocalypse | Jordan Harbinger
- Ask Jordan Harbinger | Dexa AI
1024: Blake Eastman | Can Machines Read People Better Than Humans?
This transcript is yet untouched by human hands. Please proceed with caution as we sort through what the robots have given us. We appreciate your patience!
[00:00:00] Blake Eastman: Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger show, you will find that there's patterns in people like these perceptual defaults for what they look at. Like I don't trust them, and you'll see themes for where they look in their life for all the signs of not trust. It's a hundred percent a you problem, like you're viewing the world for indications and signs and not to be trusted, and you need to do your own work to see why you just distrust everybody and why you're looking for that.
[00:00:25] Jordan Harbinger: Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger Show. We decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers, even the occasional hacker, real life pirate, special operator or tech luminary.
And if you're new to this show or you wanna tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes on persuasion and negotiation, psychology, geopolitics, disinformation, cyber warfare, crime, and cults and more. That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show.
Just visit Jordan harbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app. To get started today on the show, a very old friend of mine, body language expert, Blake Eastman Blake, is not the kind of body language expert you see Hawking simplistic nonsense on YouTube. He does well serious research about the interaction between humans and artificial intelligence, the importance of social context in reading, human behavior, personality tests, et cetera.
On this episode today, we will explore why no, you can't tell if someone is lying and neither can those people selling you courses about how to tell if somebody is lying. I. We'll also discover how our emotions will soon be read by artificial intelligence even better than humans do. Just using our voice alone or just our face alone.
It's amazing what these machines can do nowadays, and we'll get a roadmap for developing our skills in terms of reading other people and ourselves to gain a deeper understanding of our own human behavior. Now here we go with Blake Eastman,
it's good to have you on the show because for one thing, I've known you for like 10 years. It's gotta be like over 10 years. Yeah. And I remember I was super into body language back in the day as were you and I started off as you might have also started off learning the nonsense bullshit version of body language.
Like, oh, well if they look that way when they're talking, they're lying. But if they look the other way, they might just be accessing their memory and if they look down and up and si, it's like all these different eye accessing cues, which turned out to just be not a thing at all. They were made up by like.
Hypnosis guys who've made up a bunch of other stuff, or like Jordan's feet are pointing towards that door, so it must mean he wants to get out of the conversation and leave. And it's like, well, this chair kind of only allows me to point my feet towards the door. And my favorite, which is, your arms are crossed.
You must be resisting something. And I remember a chiropractor who made us call her doctor or something at a self-help seminar that I was like dragged to, was like, you're resisting the teaching. And I'm like, it's like 65 degrees in here and I'm in a T-shirt. I'm cold. And she's like, but you're also resisting.
And I'm like, this is not real. Yeah. And you and I kind of figured this stuff out over time and I discarded most of it, but you were like, no, I'm gonna get the real science. Mm-Hmm. Which I think is kind of cool. You're like, if there's real science, I'm gonna find it. And here you are. Yeah.
[00:03:29] Blake Eastman: It's just such an interesting landscape.
The truth is, whenever you're studying people, the notion of there being like real science is very. Complex. Mm-Hmm. A lot of studies are done on small sample sizes in a controlled environment. And there's almost this, like this problem in psychology where a lot of the studies are done and you, if you actually were to read most of these, you'd be like, all right, like, this is interesting, but is it not gonna take things from this and implement them in my life?
Mm-Hmm. And unfortunately, that's our culture. Somebody wants to say something, they try to find a study to support it. This study is along that theme. But if you actually read the study, you'd be like, oh, this is, wait, what's going on here? Mm-Hmm. And it's a problem. We are constantly listening to experts who will reference studies and it stops there.
So the critical aspect of someone's thought process is like, oh, well there's a study to support that, so therefore it must be valid. Instead of like, well, let me read this, or let me understand the nuance of that study, or how it was constructed, or the opposing studies or the flaws of the studies like.
Just, that's our culture right now.
[00:04:29] Jordan Harbinger: You're right. It's the culture and it's being exacerbated by Grifters in a lot of ways. There's a, there's a huge podcast, obviously, I will not name it, but they recently did an episode on cannabis and neuroscientists all over Reddit are like, this is not true. It's not slightly wrong, it's untrue.
Mm-Hmm. And the problem is these podcasters have massive platforms, but a neuroscientist who works in a lab with cannabis and has written a bunch of papers about cannabis in the brain has almost no platform. Mm-Hmm. They have a platform among academics that read papers about cannabis in the brain, which is like a.
Maybe low double digit number, maybe a high double digit number to be generous or triple digit number that's low of people who would look at those, even the abstract of those studies. Right. Right. And be like, oh, but a podcaster, I mean, like me or even somebody like, God forbid if Joe Rogan gets ahold of something and says a wrong thing, like we, I feel of a large sense of responsibility for this.
When I get stuff wrong, it sucks. Unfortunately, I'm in a position of getting some small or large thing wrong, like every single week, maybe more. And so I get these emails, I'm like, oh man, we gotta put that in the, in the notes. The problem is though, you can make a lot of money, especially in the health space, just straight up lying to people about pretty much anything, whether it's cannabis in the brain, drinking cold, plunges body language, there's, as you probably know, millions of dollars to be made, telling people that you can train them to detect lies, for example.
Mm-Hmm. And it's just not really true. Was it Joe Navarro that I had on the show? I, I'm trying to remember. It was Joe Navarro and he's like, yeah, I've been a detective with the FBI for this long and agent with the FB or like training all these detectives working with the FBI, all this stuff. And he is like, I'd say a coin flip if you really train someone, if they can tell if it's a lie and slightly better if they're interrogating somebody and they can catch them in a lie through training and getting them to answer things.
But he is like knowing if the cashier at a, a drug store is lying to you about a thing that you ask them because you're looking at their body. He's like, maximum coin flip. Usually people who train themselves to detect lies are wrong more than somebody who's just randomly guessing because they're looking for evidence that is not there.
[00:06:35] Blake Eastman: Yeah, totally. A hundred percent
[00:06:36] Jordan Harbinger: agree
[00:06:36] Blake Eastman: with that. And I think our culture needs to be okay with, you're supposed to be wrong. That's like the whole point of discovery. And if you're the person that's right all the time, it's like dangerous. Like you don't want that, you want ability to look at your thought.
I don't have have that problem. Yeah. And like, I mean, honestly if I were to watch some of the videos of me speaking like 15 years ago about the same topic, I, there would be moments where I would be maximum cringe. Yeah. Like just looking at myself like, why are you saying that? You
[00:07:04] Jordan Harbinger: know, like, what are you doing kid?
I'm pretty sure that I'm leaning forward right now because I have to speak into this microphone. Yeah. And I'm on this chair. Yeah. So someone who's watching the wide angle of the show is gonna go, oh well the body language of these two body language experts actually says that they're not confident because they're lead.
And it's like, it's totally, it says we're in chairs and we were instructed to leave less than six inches between the microphone and us. But do tell, do tell a guy who took a body language course on YouTube last week,
[00:07:29] Blake Eastman: there's so much of that we, we need to understand is there's always this projection of the way people think someone else needs to be.
Yeah. So some people would think that if I'm. Even talking about concepts of body language, that I should look a certain way, right? Yeah. That I should smile. I feel like I need to sit and up and smile. Like, Jordan, it's so good for you to have, thank you so much. Yeah, it's such a pleasure. And that's their, I'll take it concept of what good communication is, and it's really what you're optimizing for.
Like we know each other, like I'm optimizing to have a good time, just have a conversation. I'm not trying to be like, oh, this way, that way, but if I was optimizing for maybe longevity or health or something like that, I might be sitting differently. Yeah, sure. Like I might have my, you know, have better posture or just something I'm always working out, but it's not because the perception of people who are watching.
So there's a distinction between those things.
[00:08:13] Jordan Harbinger: Tell me though, why reading the body language, the lie detection stuff is, is nonsense. Can we get into a little bit of the weeds on that? Because I, I am curious how we once thought, oh, feet pointed towards the door, not making eye contact, touching the nose. I mean, that's stuff people do, I guess, when they're nervous is the reason, because people can be nervous for reasons other than they are lying.
Is that Yeah.
[00:08:33] Blake Eastman: At the heart. Human behavior just so infinitely complex. Mm-hmm. There are so many different mechanisms that can change or move your behavior. But really at the core is the fact that there's this thing I call like the social layer, which is basically when you're in a social space, you're not seeing a pure representation of somebody's thoughts and feelings and emotion, anything like that.
You're seeing that through this mask of social norms, social coordination, social projection. So sometimes someone could show up and they want to act more confident. Mm-Hmm. And they come across a little bit weird, a little bit abrasive, and then you are perceiving that. So the truth is when we look at like body language or nonverbal behavior as a discipline, it's not about meaning, it's about perception.
And that's the biggest distinction. So if I cross my arms and look a certain way, that doesn't mean I don't like the person, but we can map society's bell curve distribution and understand that most people would find a problem with that. It's this sort of unwritten rule or unwritten norms that we have to understand in order to interact in social interactions.
And here's the thing, this is where when I have a hard time with it, so like when anybody who's out there preaching more awareness, more attention to your behavior, being the kind of person that listens better, it is a phenomenal stuff, right? Like I, I like that. The problem is when you take some basically bullshit and you imprint somebody's perception with it, then it changes the way they see the world.
So when you hear like A-C-I-A-I expert said that if somebody scratches their nose, they're lying. Now when that person's on a date and they see the person scratch their nose because their nose is itching, they like, oh my God, there's a liar. That could be a liar. Mm-Hmm. Yeah. Which most of the work around this is not really about like learning the themes or clusters of behavior.
It's nothing to do with that. It's confronting your own perception, your own biases. It's way deeper than most people
[00:10:16] Jordan Harbinger: really realize. My first clue that a lot of the body language stuff was nonsense was when. I started learning that polygraphs weren't admitted in criminal cases, and I was like, why not?
This is a lie detector test. It's like they hook you up to something that reads your, your heart. I forget the name of this machine that you're, I have one. Is it EKG or is that
[00:10:37] Blake Eastman: different? No, it it, the biggest thing that they focus on really in a lot of them, I think maybe not anymore, but GSR Galvanic Skin Response.
Yeah, the Sweating. Sweating, that's like a high level and then heart rate. I have good story for that.
[00:10:49] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I, I'd love to hear it because I thought, oh wow, this really complex scientific machine is only, I can't remember, like 86% effect. And, and there's all, that's not good enough and there's a lot of reasons that they can go wrong, and so they're used as a tool and not as like conclusive proof.
So I thought, huh, okay, if the best science we have today and science is decent right now, can't detect a live better than this, then this human who's dealing with way more channels of input, but also way more lenses and biases and missing certain things and is not sitting there asking this person a set of questions, but is just like, I feel like you're lying and I can't put my finger on why.
That's gonna be way less accurate. But by how much? Because between a coin flip, which is 50, 50 and 86%. Okay. There's a little margin there, but like, uh, not quite big enough for me to say You're a human lie detector.
[00:11:42] Blake Eastman: Yeah. I mean even this is a while. There's a couple studies on f MRI's ability to protect deception.
So they're really looking at like real time activity in the brain and they can't even do it really. So it's, it's not super Oh wow. 'cause we're complex and the deception is not this binary thing. Like you're very rarely, the only way you can do like controlled things is like two truths, one lie. Like you can probably watch a hundred thousand videos of two truths, one lie and start to get better at that.
Not because of behavior, but because there's certain trends and patterns where people might lie the most the first time or they might over like little like patterns, but applying that to day-to-day life and like the spectrum of skill sets. I really feel like dating's probably the easiest place to understand or read behavior.
Mm-hmm. Or predict behavior is a better term. And deception's probably the hardest. And the truth is, most of the people that are good at this, so I used to do, in my class in New York City, I had a little fun thing where the people would sit there, watch 15 clips of the same person lying or telling the truth and had to guess which one it was.
Mm-Hmm. And most of the time it was like 50%. And almost always the people that were very confident were the worst because they thought they knew. Then I had this one guy come in and he got like an 85 and I was like, what the hell? Like, it was just so out of the norm. Yeah. And I was like, wait, what's up with that?
What do do? And he kind of like smirked at me. Okay. And I was like, what do you do for a living? And at the time I think he was the head of the theft department at Bloomingdale's in New York City. Oh wow. And his whole job, the loss prevention Yeah. Was basically loss prevention. Right. His whole job was sitting there.
Knowing if someone actually, he had ground truth, like he knew if they either stole something or didn't. Mm-hmm. And was watching their behavior and like he just developed this sort of pattern and that was the same example of what he does all day. But if we were to test him over the cross of thousands of hours, maybe he would be like 60% or 65.
Sure. But I refer to that as like the art where it's like some people, if you've got people in the same exact social construct doing the same thing over and over again, sometimes they develop this intuition for what's going on, but you can't apply the lessons from that to anything else.
[00:13:44] Jordan Harbinger: There was a guy I talked to years ago and I wanted to interview him, but he declined, which is, you know, unusual.
He worked for a casino group and he could tell who was cheating by looking at the camera, not by looking at their hands cheating. He would just see people do things and he would go watch the guy with a brown shirt, this guy's up to something. And he couldn't explain necessarily why. He said there's reasons if he thinks about it, but initially he just goes, wait, wait, wait.
That guy keep doing that. He keeps going from one table, then he goes to the other table and he goes to this table. That was the only example he would give me, which I think is weird. 'cause don't people think that their luck is over here and now it's over there? And he just said, nah. There's little things that normal people who are gambling they don't usually do.
And then he would start to watch them and he would start to watch the pit boss of if he thought he would colluding or the dealer or other people at the table. And he was like, why is that guy always, he switches tables? But then that guy switches the table later and they end up playing together and he ends up winning more when that guy's there.
And he's like, I think those guys are cheating. I asked him, wow, you must be really good at seeing if somebody's cheating. And he's like, yeah, but I couldn't. He made a joke like, yeah, but I didn't even know my own wife was cheating. And I was like, what are you talking about? And he's like, yeah, my wife like left me for some other guy.
And I thought that was interesting. 'cause I thought, wouldn't you know this? And he's like, no, of course not. I can see people on A-C-C-T-V camera doing suspicious things. And he's like, but I lived with somebody who was doing something that was really suspicious. And he is like, and the worst part, my wife wasn't even a good liar.
So like he missed that whole thing. Mm-Hmm. Like if he was looking at video cameras of people doing something, he would probably catch it. If he's living with somebody and they're doing something, well obviously he doesn't always have his feelers up for that. I just thought that was really interesting.
Like you said, checking for or spotting deception in one context. Like if you're a police interrogator or a terrorism interrogator, you might be able to find terrorists really well. You're not gotta know if your teenage daughter's bullshitting you. It's totally different context, and she might be better at it.
The stakes are
[00:15:35] Blake Eastman: lower. All
[00:15:36] Jordan Harbinger: kinds of different stuff. Yeah.
[00:15:37] Blake Eastman: The context really matters. And the truth is, like if you want to have lenses or glasses for spotting deception, it's a tough way to go through life. Mm-Hmm. Like constantly, because the, the truth is the way to actually detect lies is it is more of an interrogation process.
Mm-Hmm. There, there's no way to just watch someone and be like, oh, they look that way. They're like, you have to catch them. You have to put the traps. You gotta do all these like, interrogation type things. But like, to your point, I, I did the largest study ever conducted on poker players. So like I have a very focused, concentrated niche working with like the top poker players in the world.
And some of them will sit them down, you'll have them like, why did you make that read? Or Why did you make that call? They can't explain the actual components of it. So they have this rapid cognition and the ability to understand, but they can't reverse engineer it. And not in poker, but in like life and communication patterns and social skills.
Some of those people are some of the most dangerous trainers and coaches 'cause they don't even know what they are doing. So they'll just explain things like, oh, like sit this way or do this. Is that without any mechanistic reason on why
[00:16:36] Jordan Harbinger: there was one genius? I think his name is David Lieberman. You know this guy?
He is a psychologist. He wrote a tunnel books on deception and I could be getting his name wrong. I'll have to check it. I'll have to check the episode number. But one technique that stuck with me for years was when somebody says, let's say they were late. You say, oh, because of the water main break on such and such road.
Now they then have to decide, or you say they were late because of traffic. It must be because of the water main break on such and such. If they're a liar, right? You suspect they're lying. They're gonna have to spend some time deciding whether or not they're gonna agree with your complete fabrication, that there was a water main break on that road, and then say yes or no.
And the hesitation is the thing that he's looking for. Because if you're not lying, you just go, I didn't know about that, but that explains the traffic. But you would do it really fast. But if you go, uh, no. Well, I don't. Maybe there was, that's the lie because you had to think, do I agree with this person right now, even though I'm lying?
That seems weird. How would I know about that? That little pause. Is like how you, but that's how you catch like a teenager in a lie. Yeah. Like I'm still anti all that stuff. You're still anti all that stuff. It,
[00:17:44] Blake Eastman: it goes back to these like theories that lying is more cognitively demanding than telling the truth.
But like, here's the thing, like ultimately we gotta change. Like the perception of what lying even is really matters. So for example, the best way to catch someone a lie is to make some shit up and have them agree. So like speaking to an academic once, I, I don't know, this person just seemed overly agreeing with me and I was like, have you read like the Solomon 2014 meta-analysis that got into all that stuff?
And he's like, oh yeah, great study. I just made that up. Right? It's not a real study. So from, from a societals view, that person lied. Mm-Hmm. But there's deeper mechanisms for understanding why that person lied. And I think those are so much more important. People assume that like lie are bad. And the truth is he might have just felt really intimidated in that moment.
Mm. Or really shy, or really embarrassed or wanting to agree with me because of a ton of reasons. Not even had some sort of Machiavellian real reason on why they lie. And I think the amount of liars out there that are just like overtly lying and navi, they're so much smaller compared to the other reasons on why people do things.
Like people are complex. Yeah. Sometimes you lie to somebody or you say something a little bit off 'cause you don't wanna embarrass them or you don't wanna do this. So it's just so multifaceted.
[00:18:53] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that's true. Someone lying to you to get them to like you, to get you to like them rather that. Yeah. It's not the same as the person who's lying to you because they wanna con you outta your life savings.
Exactly. Like the
[00:19:02] Blake Eastman: intent really matters. Mm-hmm. Sometimes we don't ask enough questions, we don't talk to people enough. We just wanna make that snap judgment and be done. I think you'll be better navigating through life if instead of being hyper-focused, let's say at a world-class ability to spot liars.
Being more curious with why they lied is a better gateway towards understanding them, manipulating them, having them in your life. People are complex and we gotta stop like. Doing these binaries and these labels that just like encapsulate someone.
[00:19:31] Jordan Harbinger: I've started to get really tired of it recently when I was looking at some comments on a video.
I, I don't read YouTube comments because it's like 99% brain dead. But there's a lot of comments on appearances that I'm doing on other people's shows. 'cause it's not my audience. My audience will be like a lot of positive stuff. And then a lot of like weird bible quotes from the usual suspects on YouTube that just comment.
Is that really what it is? Yeah, there's, I don't know what it is. I don't want to offend people here. I'm not saying religious people are mentally ill. Yeah. What I'm saying is there's a lot of mentally ill people on YouTube and what they will do is they will just post a random Bible quote on a video. And at first I was like, oh, I wonder.
What that quote is about. It must be related to my discussion about this. And it's just totally like end times nonsense. And I realize they're just spamming every video of this. Oh, okay. 'cause they're trying to warn nonbelievers that the second coming of Christ is coming in. I'm like, what does that have to do with me interviewing?
Like, I don't know, Andrew Schultz or something. You know, like nothing. And so like talking about the ocean, it's like this person's quoting and I'm like, oh, that's weird. What connection could that have? None. But a lot of the comments that I, I see on other people's YouTube, there'll be a camera right here, like there is here, and someone will say, his eyes were really shifty.
I don't like that guys eyes were shifty. Well, there's lights here, there's a key light here, there's a camera there. There's an audience over there. But then the camera that's facing me is there, and the host is here. Where am I supposed to look? Again? The host. But sometimes I'm making a point for the camera.
Other times the audience is reacting to me. So I'm smiling at them, and then I go turn back to the host, like a normal person would do. In a situation like that who isn't like ridiculously media trained. Mm-Hmm. Or in a giant studio where the lights blind you for the audience, so there's no point in looking at them 'cause you can't see them and you can only see the host.
Right. So you're only looking at the, so these people are like, oh, his eyes are shifty. I don't believe what he's saying. Well, okay, but you're, you're not there. You're at home with a bag of Cheetos and crumbs all over your shirt looking at this video on YouTube.
[00:21:25] Blake Eastman: Yeah. That is kind of how we teach people to read behavior.
Mm-Hmm. To source the contextual reasons on why an event could be occurring. And then assign almost like probabilities, like software will do this too. Like, that's what's so interesting, right? Like all of a sudden, like I could be constantly looking over there or constantly looking over for something because the cue on the time is there.
Mm-Hmm. And people go so quickly to creating some narrative that's usually, and listen, everybody listening to this, if you find yourself along a certain narrative, like you will find that there's patterns in people like these perceptual defaults for what they look at. I don't trust them. And you'll see themes for where they look in their life for all the signs of not trust.
It's a hundred percent a you problem. Like you're viewing the world for indications and signs and not to be trusted. And you need to do your own work to see why you just distrust everybody and why you're looking for that. 'cause the truth is like we are, I hate saying this, but so true. Like humans are such sheep compared to the frame of the way something is framed.
Like you can just frame anything and people see that thing. So I could say, have you watch a video and say like, highlight all the good qualities about this person. Mm-hmm. Or highlight all the bad qualities about this person. Or there could be like some sort of like sassy person in the corner looking around in a bunch of different directions.
No one pays attention to them. And then I could walk up to someone and say, listen, you know who that is? That's the founder of like one of the most deep tech, deep AI tech companies in the world, guys worth like $6 billion. And all of a sudden you frame their behavior as like, Ooh, interesting. That's like the erratic genius.
So we're such a victim of context that we need to do a better job of absorbing more context before we make these real decisions about people.
[00:22:56] Jordan Harbinger: If you are a well-known person, rich, famous, or maybe you have a role like a host or comedian Mm-Hmm. People will say, I love that. No nonsense. I love this no nonsense guy.
Yeah, no nonsense. If I act the same way I would in maybe a conversation with somebody on this show, if I do that same thing in a social context or like at a family party, it's kind of, it's a little bit inappropriate sometimes. Mm-Hmm. Like, oh, you're just not gonna sugar, you're just gonna say what's on your mind.
It's not really how we do things over here at Thanksgiving at grandma's house. Like you gotta play nice a little bit and it's like this is my authentically who I am, but like also me being really polite in front of a bunch of old people who cook dinner for me is also authentically.
[00:23:37] Blake Eastman: Yeah, I mean, and also just like the best communicators have range.
Like they have the ability, whatever the dynamic is, they can give it. Sometimes there's times where you have to be dedicated and listening. Sometimes there are times where you have to be more extroverted and outgoing and all these types of things. And the truth is a lot of these dynamics are governed by these social norms that people don't even see.
What about the
[00:23:55] Jordan Harbinger: uptick in the popularity of true crime has seemed to make people really look at the suspect who's already been convicted of the murder or like is the only suspect in a murder and there's tons of evidence, but not enough to convict. And there's a lot of sort of armchair, this is why we know they did it, kind of folks.
Mm-Hmm. And I, I found this when I had Amanda Knox on the show. Oh, wow. And I got a lot of messages about why, oh, she's a sociopath and she really sucked you in hook, line and sinker. But I read the case, I looked quite a bit at it and I prepped a lot of it. You know, I didn't just take her word for it. I looked at all the fact the, there's a reason she's not in prison in Italy right now.
And the reason is because they found a whole bunch of reasons why they should have let her out. And they did on appeal. And you and I talked about this pre-show. People were saying things like, well, that's just not how people act when they Mm-Hmm. Have their roommate murdered. How do you know what you would act like if your roommate was murdered?
I'm curious. Let me know. I've never had that happen to me. I have no clue how I would react if my roommate that I only knew for a few weeks of course, and didn't spend much time with in another country was murdered. I have no idea. Would I be devastated and fly home immediately or would I just be kind of confused?
I don't know. My dad passed like three months ago for, he
[00:25:10] Blake Eastman: had two years of a LS, like really tough. Oh man. I'm really hard to see, hear that. That's,
[00:25:13] Jordan Harbinger: yeah. Terrible. But
[00:25:14] Blake Eastman: what was interesting for me is to see like how people showed up when I would say he had a LS and how people would, so I'll give you an example.
So one client I. I said, Hey, I can't make it. My dad was just diagnosed with a LS and they were like, no worries, just gimme a refund if you can't make it. Oh. So I was like, right. That's cold, man. Like, that's like one of the most coldest. Yeah. Like how could you, but I quickly went back and I was like, maybe they don't know what a LS is.
I'm pretty sure that's, and that's what it was. Yeah. So a week later when they found out like, oh shit, like this is bizarre. They send flowers, like they were incredible. But the truth is I could have changed my whole relationship with those people. I could have been in a narrative like, who are they? Da da, da, da.
Why not do this? Why not do that? But the truth is, some people don't know what. And as I started going through life, most people didn't know like, oh, okay, like, hope he's okay. I'm like, no, he is gonna be dead in two years. It's an antibiotic thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But also just to see how, um, people handled, like at the wake and at the funeral, like how they dealt.
Some people have a hard time healing with death. Yeah. Sometimes you talk to someone. The reason why they're a little bit more reserved is they're holding it in because it's reminding of them of when they lost their mother two years ago. Sure. But we just make all these judgements about people should be a certain way.
Yeah. Tom worked with them for a decade and he didn't even cry e like maybe to Tom spend. Exactly. Or maybe Tom was crying at home or maybe they had a So you just gotta give people a little bit of, yeah. And the truth is the people that are like that, that have the tendency of making others wrong, that say things should go a certain way or knock away, there's a lot of suffering in their own lives, man.
They suffer a lot because it sucks going through life thinking everybody should be a certain way and they're not being that way. Right. Being
[00:26:51] Jordan Harbinger: disappointed
[00:26:51] Blake Eastman: every single time. Every time. Yeah.
[00:26:52] Jordan Harbinger: Exactly. It's funny. Well, I shouldn't say that. I should say, it's interesting you mention a LS because that disease terrifies me.
It's the worst one. I, it's, it's the worst one. So for people who don't know. And I, I hate that I'm asking you to explain it a little. Yeah. But I'm sure you're up on it. Yeah. Can you explain it a little? Because it's gotta be just one of the worst things. Yeah.
[00:27:11] Blake Eastman: So a LS is a motor neuron disease where essentially your motor neurons start just dying off.
What's tough about a LS is like most people will live between two to five years, but as you go down, that progression, every a LS patient's progression looks completely different, but you just start losing muscle function. So for my dad, he was diagnosed three months after he was diagnosed. He lost the ability to move his tongue, so he couldn't speak anymore.
Then he lost the ability to move both arms, then both legs, and within a year he was fully, essentially paralyzed and could only communicate with eye gazing technology. Oh
[00:27:45] Jordan Harbinger: my God. I
[00:27:46] Blake Eastman: mean, like I get like a mo, like, but it was like the best and worst thing that happened to me as a person. Like it was horrible to see.
Yeah. The thing it did for me as the gift my dad gave me, I. Is my anchor for everything is I don't have a LS. Yeah.
[00:28:00] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. So
[00:28:01] Blake Eastman: like yesterday, like the flight was delayed for like four hours and I was, it was like late, I was in the plane and for a second I caught myself going like, oh, I just wanna land. And I'm like, you're in a plane.
You have access to all these shows. You have your health. Mm-Hmm. You don't have a LS. And I always come back to that and I think at the end of the day, like it's nothing matters except your health. Right. And yeah, it's just something that's so important. Just being grateful for even the emotion of frustration like that you could have that.
Yeah. It was really, really hard to see. If anybody has anybody that goes through that, please reach out to me. I've had already four or five calls. Mm-Hmm. With families that just 'cause I just, you know, my A plus personality, you find all the doctors and you do all the things. And all the stuff. Good idea.
Yeah. I mean, I would do the same thing. Yeah. You go down that rabbit hole, but you wanna hear something interesting. Going back, if I were to start all that over, like I spent a ton of money on all alternative treatments and let's fight this. I don't think that's what my dad truly wanted. He was doing that for the family.
Yeah. If I were to go back as soon as he was diagnosed, I was like, we're stopping everything. We're doing a crazy four week vacation while you can. Yeah. Yeah. Forget the right foods. Just live your life. Eat fried shit every day. Eat fried shit's. Go out with a bang. Right. Let's not try to do all this. And I had to accept that my dad, the way he was showing up with the disease was not how, but how do I know how I would show up?
That's interesting. How do you ever know? Right. But yeah, and it's a challenge, like why aren't you carrying more? Why are you trying to like, you know? Yeah.
[00:29:28] Jordan Harbinger: So it's tough. It's funny you mention that. I was reading a email for our feedback Friday segment and somebody was furious at their relative who had a terminal illness because they're sitting around playing Candy Crush on their phone all day, which is like the epitome of wasting time according to everybody.
That's what that person wants to do. They're kind of like, they've kind of given up. They're not spending no time with their family. They just, they don't wanna travel, they don't wanna do anything. And they have their reasons for it. And they've been like, look, I don't wanna travel. I don't wanna spend the money.
I don't wanna do it. I'm going soon. I'm relaxing. This person is having a really hard time accepting that. Which I understand. 'cause I'm like, dude, candy Crush, let's go on a cruise. I'll pay for it. Don't spend the, but the person's like, no, I have six months left. I don't care if you'll spend it with my phone and land on the couch.
No.
[00:30:11] Blake Eastman: I mean, it's all about like, so for me, like I remember like the toughest conversation was like literally like one of the ending talks for me and my dad. Like over text message. Mm-Hmm. It was like the cry five times. But like I said to him, I was like, what do you want your legacy to be? Do you want me to like create a foundation?
Do you wanna, 'cause I'm all about like entrepreneurial creation and make stuff. And then he just said, I'll live through you. I fucking love God. You're gonna make me cry on this podcast. I lost it, dude. I started just like tearing up and I was just like, oh my God. And like going back to the discussion on kids, that was like one of the things that like talk about a legacy, right?
Yeah. Like, uh, body language tip. If somebody does this with their ear, they're trying to hold back too. Yeah. And also like it's just, but I'll tell you one thing for anybody that's going through anything, family dying or any sort of issues, the greatest thing about it was that I was fully complete with my dad.
Really? There was nothing left unsaid. There was no resentments. There was no, we had all the conversations, we had all when he passed, and oddly I was with our friend John Levy when he passed. Oh my gosh. Who was one of the best people to be with? 'cause we were with like 20 people and we were doing all this stuff and he's a very caring guy.
He is not gonna be like, here. You're harsh in my vibe. I mean, John, John was like, we're inviting your family over to Dick. Like he, he's just wonderful like that. Yeah. He jump to, he jumps to help and connect and he was like one of the perfect people to have around. But I was at peace. It wasn't, oh my God, I wish I would've said this.
I wish I would've said that. My mom and my sister were at peace. So if there's any conversations that you need to have with people, I have a big thing, like me and my wife, like we try never to ever leave like angry. 'cause it might be the last time you see that person. Yeah. Oh my gosh. You know? So like, if you have a little
[00:31:49] Jordan Harbinger: fight or whatever, just clean it up.
That's interesting in the timing there. And for the, the reason we mentioned John Levy, well when you were with him, but he's Yeah. An adventure sign or studies the science of adventure, which is kind of a thing that I was like, okay, you made that up. Which, yeah, fair enough. He's gotten a lot of media.
'cause his thing is he has people over to his house is a very creative way to network. Mm-Hmm. He has people over to his house and you're not allowed to say who you are or what you do, but you make dinner. And everybody switches stations and there's like a guacamole station. Mm-Hmm. And you make this like mediocre burrito dinner type thing.
But I remember the first one I went to, I've been to a bunch now. The first one I went to. Oh. And I meet show guests at these things all the time. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Because the people that are incredible, I was washing dishes and I was like, why is this guy in a bow tie? William explaining how the soap connects bonds to things.
And it was Bill Nye the science guy. 'cause at the end you telling everybody who Yeah. I was like, I knew. They're like, how did you not know? How did everyone spotted? That guy did know. Yeah. I'm like, I'm just sort of like, I'm a Mr. Wizard guy. Right. This is like eighties zoo Canadian, I think Canadian tv.
Kinda like right aged out of it. But yeah, I was making guacamole with this really nice gwn. I was like. Okay. What did you say her name was? She's like, Regina Specter. And I was like, oh, hi. Nice to meet you. You know? I was like, really? It's funny 'cause you're making brownies with some guy and he is like cursing up a storm.
He is like, I never made brownies in my life today. He's like the founder of Public Enemy. Oh wow. It's funny. Just making brownies with like that dude. It's just a, it is. So, yeah, being around that got like such an incredible community. Yeah. And a big heart like that is quite funny. Let's switch gears a little bit.
Yeah. Because we, we definitely got off topic and yet somehow brought it home. Good job, Blake. Judging by your posture right now, I can tell that you are ready to support the fine products and services that support this show. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Chewy. We have two hairless cats that get nothing less than the royal treatment, uh, which is basically the only way you're allowed to treat a cat.
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[00:35:43] Jordan Harbinger: If you're wondering how I manage to book all these great authors, thinkers, creators, scientists, every single week, it is because of my network and I'm teaching you how to build the same thing for yourself for free over@sixminutenetworking.com.
I know I'm not booking for a podcast. Why do I care about that? This course is not about booking for a podcast. It is about improving your relationship building skills and developing connections with other people in non cringey non what's in it for me? Very down to earth way. No, no awkward strategies, no cheesy tactics, nothing that's gonna make you look or feel bad.
Just practical exercises that'll make you a better connector, a better colleague, a better friend, a better peer. It's great. Even if you're retired, it's great if you're new in your career. Yes, it works for autistic people. These are all questions I've gotten in the last 48 or so hours. It look, it takes like five or six minutes a day, really.
It's a light, light lift, and many of the guests on our show subscribe and contribute to the course. So come on and join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. You can find the course@sixminutenetworking.com. Now back to Blake Eastman. I like the idea, I find the idea that most reading behavior is about reducing our own faults and biases is quite interesting.
Mm-Hmm. But it's also kind of really hard to do that. Yeah. Goes without saying. That's like a lifetime of lifetime of work. Of work. Yeah. And the problem is the person who says they've done this and can tell if you're lying, it's like the last person you should ever listen to. Yeah. About this.
[00:37:06] Blake Eastman: I think reduce is the wrong word.
I think it's all just be aware of it. It's not about reduction. 'cause your brain, I mean, you've had a go, a couple of good predicting processing people on this podcast. Your brain is processing its reality based on past models. And it's very hard sometimes, like, oh, it takes, it's hard to change. Behavioral change is not easy.
Mm-Hmm. But just the awareness of noticing like, oh, I made that person wrong right there. That is half the battle. The danger is when you don't notice, the danger is when you actually think that's what's actually occurring. Mm-Hmm. And the truth is, the more you hear other people's stories, the more you understand how often you're wrong, the better the mechanism works.
So for example, if somebody sat in front of a video and they saw all these people doing things and they made all these predictions, and then they got the real reasons on why the person was acting the way that they were acting. It adjusts the feedback loop to show where they're wrong. And then, then hopefully they started like, oh, I'm making incorrect inferences about people like everywhere I'm going, that's not, most people like 90.
I don't know what the percentage is, but most people are just gonna go through life, never changing their lenses or glasses for the world. They're gonna suffer because of those glasses and it's just useful to be able to catch like what things bother you? What aspect when you meet someone for the first time and you just don't like them, you don't know the person.
Mm-Hmm. How do you not like them? Yeah, it's probably based on 80% of the time it's something you don't like about yourself. The other 20% of the time it's some unresolved conflict with someone that you met. Like I met someone that had a voice that just like a very like LA Valley and I was just like, I am not gonna be able to do this.
She was wonderful. She just talked weird, like, you know, like just
[00:38:38] Jordan Harbinger: give people some slack and life is easier. That's funny that you mentioned that. It's also funny that I believe before the show you were saying whenever somebody says X percent of people do this. It's impossible to ascertain. You just did it twice and I know I'm an a-hole.
Point that out. I said like
[00:38:52] Blake Eastman: 80%, like 20, like like generals. Any Yeah, sure. But anytime you hear any percentage of people don't, don't listen. Don't listen. So like 90, tune us out immediately. 93% of communication is not non-verbal. Actually, this, I have a better one. Whenever it's precise, don't listen. I see.
So whenever it's like 93% or 92, it's like that's some study that articulated the behavior certain ways. It just like can't be repeated.
[00:39:16] Jordan Harbinger: Right? That's that's true. Yeah. You just pick a different sample and it's like, oh. Turns out it was 61. Yeah. Tomorrow 61 here. Tomorrow, next year it's gonna be 55. I know you're doing some interesting stuff with AI and body language.
Detection prediction? Is that the what? Tell me you're doing it. Yeah. So,
[00:39:30] Blake Eastman: um, I have a company called Behavioral Robotics. That's the end goal is to teach machines to read human behavior or predict human behavior. Okay. Right now we're deep in a phase of using ai, specifically computer vision to deconstruct all facial movement.
So for example, right there, the way that you moved your, your, yeah, your forehead. I did that on purpose actually. Okay. So that was,
[00:39:49] Jordan Harbinger: but I didn't think you would notice it. Good skillset. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:39:52] Blake Eastman: So we have like a mechanism for mapping the speed, morphology, duration, and timing of that movement. So like right now, we, we have a system called Cheshire that measures and quantifies smiles.
Ah, we have the ability to there.
[00:40:05] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. That's a, a cat from Alice Wonderland with the giant mug. There we go.
[00:40:07] Blake Eastman: I, I, I have pet names for all my systems. Yeah. Like, I have like Sherlock system and like that's a great part about being a founder. You can, yeah. You can name stuff weird.
[00:40:15] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Yeah. It's, but you know, when the government does that and they, they name these things and they're, yeah.
It's crazy. Acronyms who came up with that sometimes great, but usually they're not. Yeah. That's pretty awesome. So is this similar to. Is it called Facts Facial
[00:40:29] Blake Eastman: something coding. So the Facial Action Coding system, yeah. Is a system that measures underlying muscle movement. Yeah, it's facts is actually, we kind of have our own version of facts.
Like, okay, it's based on facts, but upgraded it's facts, but it's way more complex. So if you think of the lines of data, the facts is just one line of like 15 data sources. Part of the reason is I'm trying to really massively build off that work and there's, I can have like a very complicated, I'm trying not to go into for that, into the nuances of facial action coding system.
Keep yellow belt level. It's more about picking up patterns in people's movement and comparing it to the person. So if you've ever been online and seen like someone like Smile and they're like happy, like that's nonsense. Like someone just moving their face in a facial configuration, that doesn't mean that they're happy.
Okay? So a lot of these like emotion AI or sentiment analysis tools, they're making inferences that are based on facts and there's, this is the whole rabbit hole of questionable, whether research or not, can you actually identify emotion? The face is like a hot topic in neuroscience and emotion and all that.
So we don't really care about that. Like this is what we care about. Like if we follow Jordan over the course of 60 hours and we look at your smiles, we find that there's this distribution or buckets of the way that you smile. There might be like Jordan's like genuinely really interested and excited about something.
There might be like the, okay, move on. I don't really care about smiling. Right? Like all these variations. And we find that in most people they're quite durable. So like machines can predict those models and understand the person and be able to sort of sift through that data set.
[00:42:03] Jordan Harbinger: That's really neat and also scary.
'cause I find, and my wife calls me out on this all the time, I often smile because I'm thinking of something wildly inappropriate that should never be shared. And she'll be like, what's so funny? And I'm like, oh, that thing that that guy, uh, on Netflix said, and she's like, what? We're watching, like something that's not funny.
And then she's like, what? Tell me. And I'm like, oh, I really don't want to, so like, I
[00:42:26] Blake Eastman: gotta tell her to like record a video of it. So it's probably like this really cool timing where it's like you're kind of regulating it a little bit. Like you're trying to hold it back a hundred percent and then the grin comes up and then you start thinking about it and you're like, should I say this right now or not?
[00:42:39] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. The good thing is now I have kids and I go, oh, I was just thinking to that time that Jaden said something really funny. Yeah. And she's like, oh, okay. And, but it's never that. Yeah. It's
[00:42:49] Blake Eastman: so completely never that completely different. And then also just using this as a, almost like a social diagnostic tool.
Mm-Hmm. So predicting if someone is like, what are the patterns of behavior that makes someone unlikable? Ooh. Like, why do we not like people? Mm-Hmm. And we're taking more, a way more data-driven approach by like, so one of the most interesting questions I love is like we do a conversation study and in all programs and everything we do, this question is so revealing.
It's on a scale from one to five, how likely are you to invite this person to a dinner with your closest friends? Oh, interesting. It's so much better than any, like how much would you like, right. Because it's grounded in action. That's interesting. And then I see certain people, they never get invited. And it's like, all right, why?
What are the underlying patterns in their communication, the Pacific quality of their voice, like the types of things that they're saying. And why do some people always get invited? And what we're solving for is just this understanding that society has these perceptual type of things here, and yeah, that's what we're trying to unlock and understand.
Can people identify reasons always why they don't like someone? Because I, I feel like often I can't do that. No, no. That's my, that's that's my gift. I see. My gift is looking at someone and be like, you know what? Likes, I can know exactly why. Yeah. Like it's your smile timing. It's the conversational tone.
It's the negative frames, it's the this, it's that. Like I can piece part 'cause that's what I've been. That's what I do for a lot of companies and people. I just look at it like, alright, why am I coming across like a dick? Like this was obvious. Like you can sort of see it, but people
[00:44:12] Jordan Harbinger: don't see it. My wife is good at that.
I'll say, I don't know why the ash was not super crazy about her. And she'll go, well, the reason is because this and then this other thing and then this other thing. And then they'll be like, one thing I didn't notice or share, maybe don't share her opinion on. And then she'll say, and there's more, but whatever.
I'll be like, no, no, no. Tell me more. That's great. And then I'll say, the thing I noticed was this. And she's like, well, not only that, and she'll just add on. And I'm like, yeah, that person really did all those things. But for me it almost goes unnoticed. It's like, oh, they did one annoying thing and Jen's like, no, that she did like 10 annoying things.
[00:44:43] Blake Eastman: If you were to watch video of the interaction, it's easier. That makes sense. So if you were to sit back and just watch like, oh, okay, okay, okay. I see that.
[00:44:50] Jordan Harbinger: And I, and we use video. I'm
[00:44:52] Blake Eastman: obsessed with
[00:44:52] Jordan Harbinger: video. There's also, you're right, it is, there is some tone where someone's trying to get you to, this is one thing I've identified that drives me nuts if someone's trying to get me to like them.
And it can be the tone that they're using. A little humble brags that are just un unnecessary. I don't like that. And I feel like it's, I used to call it trying too hard, but that's not really fair because of course everybody wants to be liked. It's the reason that they're trying to be like, that drives me nuts.
If they're just like a young, insecure kid, I really don't. That I don't mind. I get it. Mm-Hmm. You're 19. You're hanging out with grownups. You wanted us to take you in as one of us. That's actually totally fine. But when it's another adult, I'm like, what do you want from me? Mm. You're not being honest with what you want from me.
And that freaks me out a little bit. You just tell me flat out, yeah. What is this? Yeah. Like if you're like, buttering me up to have you on the podcast or something like that, just I respect you more if it's a clunky ask than if you're like, I'm gonna just subtly name drop all these people. Yeah. That part, that stuff drives me off the wall.
Yeah. Just to get into
[00:45:50] Blake Eastman: it. Yeah. Also, so this was so interesting, like the path to someone is predicting their bell curve of experiences. Like one of the big things I teach, right? So like. I see a fan wants to connect with you or whatever, right Before they even walk up to you. I would be thinking as a fan, what is his average fan like experience look like?
Mm-Hmm. And let me try to do something different. You did this on me like 12 years ago. Well, I'm a huge fan. Let me explain what you did to me. All right. I'm not a fan. It was so smart, and so I never Oh, good. Because I thought this was going No, no direct. No, I never forgot it. I think the first podcast we did like 12 years ago.
Oh man. Or 13 years ago, maybe. It was a long time ago. Yeah. For whatever reason at that time in my life now I've been in box zero for like close to a thousand days, but at the time in my life smoking, I was very bad on email. And I knew about you. I liked you, and I didn't answer the email. And you replied back, do you remember this?
No. So you replied, well, maybe you replied back. You were like, Hey Blake. I think it was something along as like you framed it as like, I was really looking forward. To talking to you. Like you framed it in such this crafty way where it was just such this cool compliment without being a compliment. And it's like, I was hoping that we could do this podcast almost like it wasn't gonna happen.
And immediately I was like, oh no, I would love to do the podcast. Ah, that's so interesting. But the way that you reached out was so like genuine and human and not like, okay, fuck this guy. Like, and, and immediately after reading that email, I liked you without even meeting you in person. I was like, that's such a crafty way of like being just real and to the point and straight.
Is this a Gmail? Do you think
[00:47:22] Jordan Harbinger: you still have
[00:47:22] Blake Eastman: that? I a hundred
[00:47:23] Jordan Harbinger: percent have the email. I'll find it. Yeah, find it. It's, you'll find it. It's gonna be an old email from me. Uh, of course in my old company. Yeah. But that should make it easy to find. Just find the first email thread from you, from me. So don't you love email for that reason?
Mine is just the archival aspect of it. Mine is mostly. I have to say on, for the record, mine is mostly gone because I left my previous company and I would've had no way to of go back and make a copy of all that email and put it in my new inbox. I don't, it's completely impossible. Uh, and not in accordance with the agreement Yeah.
That I had with my old company, so I would never do that anyway. How will AI amplify human interaction? I know you're coding all this stuff, or you have coded all this stuff. You mentioned it's a robotics company. Yeah. We call it behavioral robotics. What are we trying to do with the
[00:48:04] Blake Eastman: robots? So hopefully the robots understand us at a more nuanced level than maybe even people do.
So people have a predict, you remember you said that whole analogy you gave me, where somebody's looking over to the left or right. And there's a thousand reasons on why people don't have the cognitive capacity to do that. Machines do they have the ability to predict? Based on their own past models, which are way bigger data sets than me, or you have in our head come up with reasons.
So I think I'm hopefully gonna be the person that like solves this and be one of the people that pioneer it. But I am, AI is a tool. People don't talk about technology. We've been building technology for our entire life. Like that's, we invent the spear. We could finally hunt from a long distance. Sure, there's gonna be pros and there's gonna be cons for absolute sure there's gonna be misuses of it.
There's gonna be so many things. But I think at the end of the day, it's gonna serve human society or the human race in a very powerful way. That's my view.
[00:49:00] Jordan Harbinger: If you can create machines and robots that read all that stuff, you'll be able to create AI that has all the same nuanced, nonverbal, and verbal communication as a real human, a specific real
[00:49:12] Blake Eastman: human way.
More nuanced. 'cause also, they'll always be bias in reading, but machines won't have that like emotional level of bias and machines won't be sleepy and a little frustrated. Like they'll just be able to look at the raw. They'll have to be trained and there'll be biases in them. So we built a system. I I, now I'm get into the details of this all, but like you're also mapping human perception.
For example, if I were to speak in New York City on a stage in my same style and people were to perceive me, they'd be like, oh, that guy's confident, that guy's like energetic, all these things. If I do that in China, like he moves his face too much. He's too carry. Interesting. It is so relative to culture and to certain dynamics that it depends, like there's certain podcasts like here.
I know, I've heard you curse, so I know I could curse. Yeah. So like cursing, I feel comfortable. All these things, I feel comfortable. Other podcasts create a dynamic where it's just like, okay, don't curse. You might not wanna do that on, you might want or whatever. Yeah, yeah. It's gonna cut it out. So the dynamic that you're in, the construct that you're in, it weighs so heavily on how behavior and movement is perceived.
[00:50:12] Jordan Harbinger: Why are we teaching robots to breed humans? There's gotta be a a reason. Um, is it like medical care robots that can keep old people company? I don't know. There's,
[00:50:20] Blake Eastman: I mean, there's so many use cases. Sure. Like the use cases are absurd. Like, let, let's use medicine for example. Medicine. We can probably by aggregating data of people with early onset Parkinson's or dementia, there are clues in terms of losing faceless paralysis and all that stuff that a machine I didn't know might be like, okay.
And for some disease that we don't even know, like if your machine is watching you all the time and having this database, it's picking up on things that you never would. So it could have prob, if I had a machine in my dad, it would've predicted things like, we don't have these models yet, but if I were to build it, there were asymmetries in him that I didn't notice as a son because it's like my dad's just getting a little older.
Yeah. Now looking back at it, I'm like, uhoh? Uh oh. Yeah. Like I would've seen certain things. There's also the ability for diagnostics, coaching, education. Just imagine if Siri, you walked in the door. Siri was able to blend like the language models of like GPT and then like what we're building together and it's like, Hey, Jordan, like you all right man?
You seem a little off today.
[00:51:18] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.
[00:51:18] Blake Eastman: And you're like, yeah, I don't know. And you could have like an honest conversation with something like that that just like catches you, I mean the new cases are insane and robots are gonna be in the home for sure at some point or another in our lifetime for sure. Yeah.
You want these things to have a greater level of awareness.
[00:51:34] Jordan Harbinger: It's gonna be really interesting when, in 10 years, I mean, God forbid I get a diagnosis. Of early onset, something from like YouTube, Hey, you've been uploading a lot of videos and one side of your face isn't moving as much as it should. You should go get checked out.
'cause you might have a stroke in the next 90 days or something.
[00:51:52] Blake Eastman: Yeah, there might be something there. I mean, it's crazy. The fact is, as long as you have the ability to. Process like obviously more data the better, right? Like that's kind of like the central key point behind the entire advertising space.
This is also how you get terminators. So you gotta be careful as long as when the Terminators come in, as long as they're using our a PII am happy as long as I'm profiting from the, as long as construction of the human when it takes me out and it's like, are you using behavioral robotics? We are. Okay. I made it, you know?
[00:52:18] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Blast me in half with your machine gun. Yeah. That actually the T 1000 was kind of, he didn't have this API installed, remember? He was just kind of, that's why Yeah, it's stoic. Stoic. That's why that guy was never, maybe he was, but I don't remember him in many other movies. Arnold. That's a good point.
Yeah. Yeah.
[00:52:34] Blake Eastman: He was, uh, he was in, um, X-Files, John Doggett.
[00:52:37] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, okay. Yeah. I mean, look, he did a fine job. I'm not saying anything about that. I would love to hear more about the least liked person kind of thing. Yeah, I mean, I sort of went off on what drives me nuts and you went off on the fan thing, but I'm very curious about.
What makes somebody dislikable in groups? Because I feel like that's a question we get all the time. Yeah. Oh, I'm getting feedback from my superiors that I'm not well liked, but
[00:53:00] Blake Eastman: I don't really understand why. So one of the big ones is a low level of social coordination, specifically in the face. Okay. So a lot of our nonverbal behaviors in our face, people like to think that they're emotions, but they're just byproducts of coordination.
So for example, like one of the coolest things about humans is that we can, there's an information exchange by our movement. Mm-Hmm. So that right there, yeah. You went Mm-Hmm. Yeah. Like that shows me that you are listening. Like you're watching a video of me, you're not shaking your head at me. That's a good point.
Right? That'd be weird. Like you're just listening. So people that have low levels of social coordination specifically in America struggle. So for example, like you take somebody from like Russia and you put them on a team in America and the Russian is just looking in the screen like this, and it's like what I, everything is interesting.
Yeah. And then you see someone else like, well, are you interested? Are you not interested? Da da da dah. But then there's like this distribution. So too much social coordination. People don't like when you're like, oh, okay. Yeah, me. Yeah. Okay. Like, so there's this sort of balance, but specifically on team dynamics, people with low levels of social coordination, the problem is you're not communicating to other people that you're even listening or you understand.
So people are lost when they're communicating with you.
[00:54:02] Jordan Harbinger: I, I got a buddy who escaped Russia after the draft from Putin, and he was telling me about when he went to McDonald's the first time in Russia, back in like, I think it was the eighties or the late eighties or their early nineties, whenever they opened up the first Moscow McDonald's.
One of the things him and his friends were excited about was they heard that the girl who serves you at the cash register smiles at you. And I was like, and and he is like, this is the Soviet Union. People did not smile at people they did not know, especially in a business context. It was absolutely not a thing.
So they were like, we're gonna see if this girl really smiles when we order our food. And Interesting she did because they were trained to by the United States. I mean it's
[00:54:44] Blake Eastman: all that, I was in Japan two weeks ago, right? I got really sick. I order Uber. I had asked for ketchup accidentally. 'cause it was like the default description thing on my, wait.
My Uber, Uber Eats. Uber Eats. I was like, you're getting in a car. Sorry. There's there ketchup in the car. Sorry. I over confused. I ordered Uber Eats, the delivery guy comes, he takes everything out. He looks at the printout and it says Ketchup. And he's like, oh. Says sorry four times and bows to me like three times.
I'm like, dude, totally fine. Thank you so much. Imagine if that happened in Amer in New York. Yeah. I would be like, what is wrong with you? Yeah, yeah. Wherever you are, it influences that. So that's why like social coordination patterns differ depending where you are on the planet. Social projection differs.
Like in Japan, the culture is more of like this politeness. Mm-Hmm. Where in New York sometimes, like one of the things I love about the place I was born and raised is when there's that like weird New York City asshole, but polite at the same time. Like that honesty of just like, yeah, you know, do this or
[00:55:44] Jordan Harbinger: because
[00:55:44] Blake Eastman: of what I was raised
[00:55:45] Jordan Harbinger: in New York is like that.
You can go into a coffee shop and somebody says something and another person who's not in that conversation chimes in it looks a little rude to an outsider, but then they're talking, but they're actually yelling because they're. One, it's across the room, there's traffic and other people are talking and they're just talking over those people and it's fine.
And it's, it's accepted. It's, it's,
[00:56:03] Blake Eastman: and just like the pacing of things. Like I'm still, to this day when I go to coffee shops outside of New York City, I'm just like, what the fuck? Like, do your job. Like, like let's go chop, chop. Go. Let's hurry up. Thirsty. Chop, chop, chop.
[00:56:14] Jordan Harbinger: That's why everybody hates New York.
Yeah, exactly. Alright, and now our artificial intelligence is going to feed your human intelligence something from our sponsors. We'll be right back. This episode of the Jordan Harbinger Show is brought to you by booking.com. Booking do? Yeah. It's finally time for summer travel. We're looking forward to taking a couple months off to spend with the kids.
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I am more than happy to surface that code for you, fix broken codes where I can. It is that important that you support those who support the show now for the rest of my conversation with Blake Eastman. Have you heard about this matching concept that Gladwell wrote about with matching, I forget what exactly what he calls it.
Matching and mismatched. And it had to do with friends where his theory, this is his sort of theory, and I may be getting it slightly wrong, but he said a lot of us grew up watching friends. True on friends, the sitcom, they're all matched. Right. When Ross is surprised, he's like, and his jaw drops and his eyes get really wide and he takes a deep breath in and he pauses and he freezes and every they zoom in on his face.
Mm. So now everybody thinks this is what normal people look like when they're surprised. So he also brought up Amanda Knox because she was mismatched and we don't trust people. Yeah. Who are mismatched. So she wasn't crying and screaming and tearing her hair out when her roommate got murdered, she was like hugging her boyfriend and kissing him a little bit and just staring.
And they were like, she did it based on her eyes or whatever because she was mismatched. That's
[00:59:25] Blake Eastman: Gladwell's theory on this. No, I, I mean that's my same philosophy. I don't know about the whole friends type thing, but like our version of matched would be behavior is in alignment with what society's bell curve distribution thinks it should be in alignment with.
Right. Like that kind of thing. And that's important, understanding where your outside, that's the coolest thing. So like the bell curve, I just think about everything on the bell curve, but like you always wanna be on the right side of the bell curve, like thinking of iq, higher IQ to the right, lower key on the left.
If you do something too radical that's on the right side and it messes up, you immediately become the left side. That's right. So, right. That's true. Like you try to ask a question that's like, let me try to get in with this person. Ask like make an offensive joke. Then they're like, my wife's that. And you're like Uhoh and other side.
Right. So you have to understand what average is before you start moving over to the right or left.
[01:00:11] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. It's like artists, right? They're trying to be on that cutting edge of right side. Exactly. That's a perfect example. But when you look at really shitty art or you hear something that's like terrible music, you just go your experiment.
Mm-Hmm. Did not work. Mm-Hmm. Go to the back of the line. Go to the left side of the bell curve. The matching in the, the social context thing. I think a lot of autistic people have problems with this, right? Oh yeah. Because they have to like expend conscious cognitive bandwidth. Oh yeah. To be like. Oh, that person just told me good news.
I should smile and look at them. Oh, but that was late. Am I gonna be weird now? Screw it. I don't know what the timing's supposed to be like. Just smile. Stop smiling now. Keep listening. This is how it was explained to me by somebody who was on the spectrum, and I was like, that sounds exhausting, very exhausting.
If you just tell me something like, oh, I just got promoted at work, I just automatically smile and say like, oh, that's really exciting for you. Mm-Hmm. Meanwhile, an autistic person is sometimes anyway, has to be like smile, ask, follow up question, listen to answer. Do I engage on the follow up answer? Eh?
Probably not. Continue on with conversation, but not all of that is, it's not automated. So it comes across that. Even that can come across as clunky and it's like, oh, how exhausting is this? Yeah. It's also
[01:01:16] Blake Eastman: not linear. That's what's so hard. Like when we communicate, it's like a massive decision tree. Mm-Hmm.
So like there's a way, a style. So when you think about linear steps in a social interaction, you come across linear. So you come across like, okay. Oh, that's great. Hi. Like an N
[01:01:31] Jordan Harbinger: PC and a video game. Exactly. Yeah. Which
[01:01:33] Blake Eastman: is coded linear. Well, now they're a little bit better, but like, yeah. And yeah, I've had clients that were on the spectrum in various cases.
And I remember I had one person, I, I showed a video where this, these two people are talking and one person clearly offensive the other person, and you show it to like everybody. And they're like, oh, that's offensive. And I showed the video to him and he goes, I don't understand. Why would you be, he's just giving feedback.
Yeah. And he didn't see all of that nuance. Right. And once I explained it all, and I have the most compassion for the, because I don't even know what it's like to walk through society constantly not knowing what's going on. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Like that's, it's hard. And that was one of the reasons behavioral
[01:02:08] Jordan Harbinger: robotics could hopefully help that you mentioned earlier, using video as a powerful tool for self-development.
I would love to hear more about this because, and I sort of mentioned like YouTube diagnosing me. I said 10 years, let's make it like 40. I've mentioned YouTube diagnosing me. How do we use video of ourselves to get better at this? Is that possible? Yeah,
[01:02:27] Blake Eastman: definitely. So the first thing I love about video is video is a pure medium.
Mm-Hmm. So in the world of like reading yourself or looking at others, there's all these biases. Video is video, it's just like raw data in front of you. Mm-Hmm. And it shows you what reality is and there's so much value in that. So like one of the most helpful things is I did it for a while, I did this like video journal.
So I found that when I was writing, like I tried journaling and like, I don't know, I found I was like full of shit when I was journaling. I'm so optimistic that I'd be like, everything's gonna be okay. Like IRS is coming after me and I'm like, millions of dollars in dead. And I'm like, you'll be fine. I'll be fine.
Then there's this video of me recording it in the office and like when I watch it, like I almost wanted to cry like. Must have been like 26 years old. I had like giant bags under my eyes. Yeah. Stayed up. Like my face was all puff. I looked like unhealthy and I'm like, yeah, just another month and everything's gonna change.
And I'm like, it's not gonna change kid. It's a year and sometimes a couple years, a couple of times when you watch video, you get to see aspects of your state that you can't see when written. Yeah. Also, if you have a lot of zoom meetings or a lot of interactions, like sometimes stepping outside of the video, you can see things in others because it's too cognitively demanding to like talk and watch people for most people.
But then if you watch a video like, oh, that person didn't like that, or that person that you can see way more and it's just a snapshot of objective reality. Also, like if you want, uh, relationship coaching, right. I had this people come in, I did a study in my office called the Brown Couch Study. We had like this big brown couch and it was, couples came in for like assumed like couple coaching.
I see. Like relationship coaching. But they would just come in, they'd sit on a couch. I would record them for 45 minutes and I would leave the room. Then they would expect me to analyze it. And I go, no, here's the, here's what you're gonna do. You watch the video and tell me your problems. So they would sit there and they would notice, like I cut my wife off a lot.
Oh, interesting. Or like, he speaks 90% of the time and I barely speak. Like, and all these themes that you won't see when you're in it. So video just provides this incredible lens for improving yourself. So basically they don't even need you to do this. That was the whole joke. I was like, you see your problems, right.
Like, you know, that would be $500. Yeah. I mean, I wasn't, I wasn't a relationship coach or anything like that, so I was just like doing, and it was, it was fascinating to see the, the little themes and then like how certain couples were like. There's a Joe Button's line that like they're so, he's a rapper.
For those who don't know. Joe Button. Yeah. Button. Like they're so amazing on the outside. They have to be horrible inside. It's just a beautiful way of discussing it. And these certain couples that were just like postulating and be like, sweetheart, it was just like, uh, what's going on here? Right? Like, use video in your life if you are recording Zoom meetings or you're on any video, reviewing your footage is very
[01:05:10] Jordan Harbinger: valuable.
Have you ever heard of like nine one one call behavioral analysis where they record the call and they run it through some sort of sentiment, whatever. And I think it's widely known to be bs. I'm actually maybe gonna do a skeptical Sunday episode about this. It's one of those things where they run your voice through and they say like, oh, this person is way too calm for what's going on in this context.
Something along those lines. Vocal
[01:05:32] Blake Eastman: analysis is sort of interesting. There's prosthetic qualities to our voice, like pitch tone. What is that? Prosthetic is, I like to think of it as like the melody of a voice. Okay, Jordan, how are ya versus Jordan, how are ya? Right? Like those kind of aspects. Timber, there's all these things.
They're very similar to how we process facial expressions and nonverbal behavior. Okay. Are there certain themes relative to a dynamic that are useful? Yes. Should you be making real time implications? Like I would never in a million years want a 9 1 1 system that was rerouting based on vocal quality.
And the reason why is people handle trauma differently and people handle. An example that I was saying before, like, you know, Navy Seals in an active shooter environment, they're not gonna be like, oh my God, send someone Mm-Hmm. They're probably gonna be calm, collected, and the best person that you want on the scene.
Right? Like, I'm gonna kill him with a pen ambulance, he, I'm doing this. Don't send anyone. I got this kind of thing. But some people, for me, if I were to call 9 1 1, I've listened to so many 9 1 1 calls, if something happened to my wife, I would try to be as common as collected to get the information that I need as quick as possible.
Yeah. Yeah. But that's not a byproduct of me not flipping the fuck out. 'cause my wife is not doing well. Right, right. So the problem is we have, there's a lot of modulation and control over our behavior and that morphs it. Do I think it could be helpful for certain things? Yeah. I mean there's probably some use cases that I'm maybe not thinking of right now that can be.
Valid. I think what's, you know what's, I think it's better for, I think it's better for training. So being able to understand when someone's maybe hysterical. Mm-Hmm. How you train a 9 1 1 officer to modulate their tone. I see. Listen, slow down. I'm gonna help you. I. It'd be better for that discourse than it would be for identification.
[01:07:16] Jordan Harbinger: They're always hiring people for those jobs, and I'm, I'm like, oh my gosh, can you volunteer some hours a week? Oh, yeah, because it would be fascinating. It would be, on the other hand, it might be really traumatizing because you're hearing people's worst day of their lives all the time, and then it, it's probably like 99%.
I can't find my cat. Can you send someone to help me find my cat? And you're like, oh God. And then the next call is like somebody being murdered on the phone or like missed calls from apples. Oh yeah. Like the
[01:07:45] Blake Eastman: thing, you know, right? Yes. Like all these types of weird edge cases. I, I bet you it would be so different, like if you were in like a town in middle of America.
Mm-Hmm. Versus a big city. Sure. Or what
[01:07:55] Jordan Harbinger: district you're in. It's, it's kind of, you know how like gambling, one of the reasons is it's addictive is you don't know if you're gonna win or lose. So you have like Yeah. Variable. Variable. Yeah. Variable reward or something. Variable reward schedules. Yeah. This is the inverse of that, right?
It is variable terror. Kind of variable trauma. So it's like cat call, butt dial, butt dial, butt dial again. Yeah. Somebody who's too lazy to call the police. Non-emergency number. Somebody who has a minor fire that's in their kitchen that's already out and they're not sure what to do. Traumatizing double murder in the background while you're talking to a child.
Yeah. And you're just like, wow, okay. I was not primed for this, or I'm now, I'm always primed for that, waiting that it's
[01:08:34] Blake Eastman: gonna come. Right. Even
[01:08:35] Jordan Harbinger: though night's five days a week out of your six day work week are just like, where's my cat? How do I find my car? It got towed. I'm, I'm assuming
[01:08:43] Blake Eastman: cops, FDNY, like all first responders, probably deal with a similar thing.
Right. That's true. That's true. Like showing up and it's nothing versus, oh my God, this is serious. You mentioned
[01:08:50] Jordan Harbinger: that
[01:08:50] Blake Eastman: voice
[01:08:51] Jordan Harbinger: would
[01:08:51] Blake Eastman: be the first breakthrough, one of the first breakthroughs in ai. What, tell me what you mean by that. I think that in terms of processing and bucketing voice is just easier than the face.
Mm-Hmm. And it's just fewer moving parts. Literally. It's fewer moving, fewer moving parts. Like you can kind of see things almost like a histogram, like you can just like visually see certain aspects to it. I know from my own thing. So we used to do. Just from the translation period. So we use, uh, the API assembly.ai, which is, it's absurd how good translation is right now.
You mean literal translation? Yeah, no translation from right now as I'm talking to actual text. So like we, oh, oh, transcription. Yeah, transcription. Sorry. Yeah, transcription and translation actually. But like transcription was what I was referring. It is insane. I used to pay people like a lot of money an hour.
I, I know to do all of our videos and now, like when we were checking, we're talking about 99% and I would like, no one says a hundred, but like a hundred percent accuracy even with what you just did. Right. So that would be the hard, that was the technical times and it's picking it up right now.
[01:09:51] Jordan Harbinger: Like it's just so cool.
The one thing that did not work was when I interviewed Dennis Rodman, that machine was like. I don't know. I have no idea what's going on here. It was all wrong. And so we had a human do it. And you know what happened? She was like, I have no idea what he's saying.
[01:10:07] Blake Eastman: Really?
[01:10:07] Jordan Harbinger: Just get why? It was just like, he is a mumbler.
Oh, okay. And he was also like doing, you know what NAD is? It's like this anti, yeah, yeah. Of course. He was doing an N-A-D-N-A-D drip
[01:10:17] Blake Eastman: during your podcast, during the,
[01:10:19] Jordan Harbinger: which was so annoying, by the way, and the nurse kept getting in the shot. But what the, if you turn that up too high, you just, you start melting.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I was like, can we turn down the drugs? Because I'm trying to have a conversation here, but my transcription, as soon as from the Philippines was like. Y'all gotta help me. Yeah. I don't know what's going on. I have no idea what he was. So we would listen and we would go, did he say?
And then one of us would get it and we'd go, oh, now I can't unhear it. Mm-Hmm. But it was really, really hard. So somewhere along the lines, they're gonna use, they're gonna be like going for the ones that we marked as like the least accurate. And they're gonna be like, aha, we should run this through the machine now.
I mean, it's only gonna improve, right? I
[01:10:54] Blake Eastman: mean, the truth is like, you can probably do this right now, but in a year or two it would be way more seamless. You could use deep fake with facial movement on top of vocal characteristics from his face. Mm-Hmm. Like around here. And the words that weren't clear make him clearer.
I guess that's true. Like, Hollywood's been doing this stuff for a year, but like That's true. It takes a long time to do it. Yeah. It's two, $2 million to get a scene corrected, broke, all that stuff is coming to reality. I mean, I, with my dad, I, I tried to clone his voice right when this stuff started. I saw it from when I tried to where, when he passed and I was like, what the hell?
Like it went from zero to a hundred so quick.
[01:11:29] Jordan Harbinger: All of it's growing. It's gonna be really interesting when you can clone an actual personality by just taking. By that point, 10,000 hours of Jordan Harbinger having conversations with somebody, you'd be able to get a reasonable approximation of what I would do or say in pretty much any situation.
That's a conversational one. Yeah, I mean,
[01:11:45] Blake Eastman: like one of the interesting things I would be interested, like you take all your podcasts, all the questions, you ask everything, and you put it like just even into GPT-4. You say like, what are the themes of this person's communication? I did that for some of my speech.
It was absurdly accurate.
[01:11:59] Jordan Harbinger: We have a machine called dexa, which is ai, and it indexes everything that I've ever said. Oh, I thought like a DEXA scan. Oh, sorry. No, it's an AI quote unquote machine. It lives in the cloud. But in it indexes everything on the Jordan Harbinger show. People can play with it. Jordan harbinger.com/ai.
Oh, cool. And you can say like, what would Jordan say is the best way to get a raise at work? So you don't have to find a clip in the show. Oh, it just
[01:12:20] Blake Eastman: indexes it or, yeah, you
[01:12:21] Jordan Harbinger: don't have to find a clip in the show where I tell one person how to get a raise at work. I will just explain to you in text form.
How to get a raise at work using this machine. I mean, those, it's really cool, mean those,
[01:12:31] Blake Eastman: those, in one of my programs, we give people access to a basically A GPT for their own behavior. So you can ask itself like, how many times did I say the word What? So you said the word what? Duh duh, duh. How many times did I use a vocal filler?
What was my conversational balance? The crazy thing is when you have the, like those search inventories or those search UIs, it's like infinite where you could ask something,
[01:12:52] Jordan Harbinger: right? Yeah. Like it's so cool. There's a lot of, I get queries back sometimes of what people have typed in. Some of it's a little disturbing and scary 'cause people are trying to get me to do some, I'm like, what is this person trying to get me to do?
Oh, you
[01:13:04] Blake Eastman: see the query? Like, yeah,
[01:13:05] Jordan Harbinger: I can see like people trying to like, has Jordan Harbinger ever said anything racist? And it'll like stretch to get like J Luckily the team's kind of on it, so they're like, um, can you just make it say no? Instead of like, well, he said a few questionable things and feedback.
They were jokes folks and it's like, can we not do that? That's crazy. But there's other stuff that people will ask. That is really complicated and I'm like, I don't know anything about that. Yeah. It turns out the DEXA and AI thinks that I do based on things that I've said over eight years or however long it's been.
I own all my old intellectual property as well. I should literally just have them index all of that too. 'cause there's 11 years of stuff from other shows that I've done, especially if you include my live radio show, which is like two hours long. That's like spur of the moment kind of stuff. Yeah. That's pretty cool.
Yeah.
[01:13:51] Blake Eastman: And also just see like patterns in your own thing. Like how often do you, what's the average question length I should ask? You know, like
[01:13:57] Jordan Harbinger: all these
[01:13:57] Blake Eastman: just cool
[01:13:57] Jordan Harbinger: things I should ask that like, I wonder if it can tell, I haven't tried this, but I wonder if, if I could say, what percentage of uh, each podcast hour does Jordan Harbinger do the talking?
And it's like, well, 35%. Maybe that's too much. Maybe it's normal. How does that compare with the average of other podcasters? Maybe I talk more, maybe I talk less. I don't know. I'm curious. Jordan harbinger.com/ai is where people can play with that though. Cool. And it indexes everything. I
[01:14:20] Blake Eastman: want to go troll
[01:14:21] Jordan Harbinger: you now.
Do it. Do it. Yeah. I mean, it's virtual me, so I won't really know until I look at the queries later. But go for it. Blake. Thanks so much for finally, well, finally coming on the show slash coming on the show again. Yeah, I guess we did it 12 years ago, but, and I totally remember it, but, but this, this one was much better.
Thanks for having me, man. You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger show for our interview with Robert Green, one of the most acclaimed authors of our time. Robert's insight into human nature is second to none, and there's a reason that his books are banned in prisons, yet widely read by both scholars and leaders alike.
If we just sit in our inner tube with our hands behind our head and crack open a six pack of beer, the river of dark nature takes us towards that waterfall of the shadow.
[01:15:06] Clip: Yeah. So when we're children, if we weren't educated, if we didn't have teachers or parents telling us to study, we'd be these monsters.
We're all flawed. I believe we humans naturally feel envy. It's the chimpanzee in us. It's been shown that primates are very attuned to other animals in their clan, and they're constantly comparing themselves. Your dislike of that fellow artist or that other podcaster. 99% sure that it comes from a place of envy.
For sure. You are not a rational being. Rationality is something you earn. It's a struggle. It takes effort. It takes awareness. You have to go through steps. You have to see your biases. When you think you're being rational, you're not being rational at all. You go around, everything is personal. Oh, why did he say that?
Why is my mom telling me this? And I'm telling you it's not personal. That's the liberating fact. People are wrapped up in their own emotions, their own traumas. So you need to be aware that people have their own inner reality. People are not nearly as happy and successful as you think they are.
Acknowledging that you have a dark sight, that you have a shadow, that you're not such a great person as you think can actually be a very liberating feeling. And there are ways to take that shadow and that darkness and kind of turn it into something else. If you wanna learn more about how to
[01:16:32] Jordan Harbinger: read others and even yourself, be sure to check out episode one 17 of the Jordan Harbinger Show.
Loved catching up with Blake. Really insightful. It's kind of nice to add a layer of real science over this whole body language thing. By the way, Blake's wife is an amazing sleep expert. If anybody needs some sleep coaching, I am happy to refer you over to her. And who doesn't want more? Z's, all things Blake Eastman will be on the show notes@jordanharbinger.com.
Advertisers deals, discount codes, ways to support the show all at Jordan harbinger.com/deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. Also, our newsletter, wee bit wiser. A little gem from us to you every single weekend under two minutes, something that will have an immediate impact on your decisions, your psychology, your relationships.
Jordan harbinger.com/news is where you can find it. Don't forget about six minute Networking over@sixminutenetworking.com. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn where all the sane people are and dwindling. But whatever this show is created an association with Podcast one, including Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Foggerty, Ian Baird and Gabriel Rahi.
Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is you share it with friends. When you find something useful or interesting, the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. So if you know somebody who is interested in body language, artificial intelligence, human behavior, definitely share this episode with him.
In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn, and we'll see you next time. This episode is sponsored in part by the Disorder podcast. I love that podcast name. I kind of wish I thought of. It doesn't fit my show well, it actually fits my life, but it doesn't really fit my show.
If you're someone who's intrigued by the complexities of global politics and the forces shaping our world, then you should download The Disorder podcast. It's a weekly podcast that explores global chaos and why countries struggle to collaborate effectively, but also offers insight into possible solutions.
The disorder is meticulously structured to connect seemingly disparate issues like artificial intelligence, climate change, kleptocracy, neo populism, showing how they all contribute to the current global instability. Jason P, he's a senior analyst at NATO and a fan of this show. So he is a great taste in podcast.
He ensures that each episode is rich with authoritative insights and informed analysis. And in one episode, they dove into the tragic murder of Alex Navalny, who is a famous dissident in Russia, in case you were born under a rock. But it's not just a recap. They brought in Bill Browder, who's been on our show twice.
He knew Navalny personally. He's really been a thorn in Putin's side. There's a definite hit out for Bill Browder. Together they explore Navalny fearless pursuit of democracy, his strategy against corruption, and how the west has the power to challenge Putin effectively if we, you know, get our ish together.
So if you're looking to understand the intricate tapestry of global geopolitics, and you wanna get a handle on the complexities that define our times, download the disorder wherever you get your podcasts.
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