Amy Alkon || How to Live with Guts and Confidence

It's great to have Amy Alcon on the podcast. Amy's a transisciplinary applied scientist who synthesizes research findings from various areas, translates the findings into understandable language, and then creates practical advice based on the latest science. Alcon writes The Science Advice Goddess, an award winning syndicated column that runs the newspapers across the United States and Canada. She's also the author of Good Manners for Nice People who sometimes say

Bee and I see rude people. She has been on Good Morning America, The Today Show, NPR, CNN, MTV, and does a weekly science podcast. She has written for Psychology Today, Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Times Magazine, The New York Daily, News among others, and has given a TED talk. She is the president of the Applied Evolutionary Psychology Society and currently lives in Venice, California. Thanks for chatting with me today, Aby, Thanks, and we're talking today about my current book on fucology,

A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Compasses. Sure. So wonderful about going through all the other things I'd written, that's my really probably the best thing I've ever written, and I call it a science help book. That's great. I want to just before we dive into that, I want to ask you about your book Good Manners. Sure? Now, was that ironic that I did not say the effort in full when I read the title? Does that mean I am a What does that me say about me? Oh?

It says you're polite because at the root of manners is empathy. And you're thinking, Wow, maybe I have somebody listening who would be offended by that. You are a very empathetic person, and so you're thinking that this is a good thing. Although you know in private, if I were just with you at a table, I think you probably would not have a problem letting it fly because

you know that I love the effort. Yes, you love it, Okay, So I want to let let's dive into your new book, which is so fascinating and helpful for lots of people who suffer from crippling anxiety or low self confidence, a lot of things you know, that they want to undo with themselves. Now, a key theme running through the book is that we have what it takes to be empowered and to be authentic, and it's just in hiding. Could you please unpack that sort of in hiding part a

little bit? Well, I actually just want to take on authentic first, because sure, I actually tell people that they should be inauthentic because the way that we are. You know, if we're wimpy, you don't want to be authentically wimpy. You want to pick values and be authentic to the values you choose. So rather than being authentic to what you came in with and maybe you're you know, like maybe you're a liquor store robber or you know, you want to just be a person that you choose to be.

We want to choose to have courage, et cetera. So basically what I say about having what it takes and being in hiding, it's that the key to the book is that action is the way you correct or you transform yourself. You transform yourself through action. And this is a new idea. It's actually sort of not a new idea because William James in the eighteen hundreds came up. He was sort of the person who got this started. But what I say is the mind is bigger than

the brain. So that action changes emotion. It's far more efficient than the way therapists suggests you do it, which is by coming back to them, buying them an island, whining about your problems every week, and that doesn't change you the way action does. Because action actually, over time rewires the brain and our default behavior from being wimpy to being powerful. That's interesting. I mean, how do you relate that to the growing lidertroren and bodied cognition. Well,

this is basically what my book is about. But you read the book. I'm all about translating these science words embodied cognition. That sounds so complicated. Basically, action drives character. That's the essence of that. That it is far more

efficient to change through acting than just by thinking. And I find that so fascinating, And I actually I'm the best testimony to the fact that it works because I was a loser with no friends until I was fifteen, and then went to New York and became an enormous suck up and had one real friend, and I decided I should change. And I did this through action, although

I didn't know any science then. I was just completely desperate and reached into the sky and thought, I'll try doing this, and doing was the key rather than just thinking, yeah, so what is your definition of a loser? Well, is there an objective definition? Can we scientifically operationalize that term? I didn't. I didn't do that in the book, but I think that we all know what a loser is. Basically, I had no friends. Nobody liked me. I was picked

last for being picked last for kickball. You know, like if there wasn't anybody with a broken leg, you know, I was picked last, and if there was somebody, maybe if they two broken legs, I would then. I mean it was like I was in front of them, but they were basically it. Kids chase me. They bullied me. A group of girls. This is sort of rare for women to do or girls to do. They physically hurt me in junior high school. I mean, I just was

the one nobody liked, nobody respected. And then when I went to New York, I mean mean, oh god, mean as a vegetable for some girls. So and then I got to New York. And so what happened was actually at fifteen, I joined my Temple youth group, and I didn't have my history. So you travel with this history. When you go to the same school and then the same high school with the same kids, everybody just has decided you're a loser and you can't wash the kooties

off of you. But going to my Temple youth group, nobody had known me or knew my history or my pedigree is a loser. So people treated me well and it was so weird. But when you get your first friends in life after not having them for fifteen years, you cling to them like a shipwreck rat on driftwood. And so that's how I became a suck up. You know.

Basically I would do anything for anybody, and I had this history in New York of helping everybody move, and then when it was time to help me move, they were all in bed with a hangnail or going to the Hamptons. Yeah, you know, I've noticed a pattern that you know, the more I try to please people, the more backfires. In fact, the less people respect me exactly.

And there's a difference. So I write about altruism and kindness to strangers in good manners for nice people sometimes say oh bleep, oh no, maybe because you did see I'm all monkey, see monkey do we're all monkeys? But you know, I write about how we need to pre plan to do kindnesses for strangers because we didn't evolve around strangers, we sort of don't recognize them. But once you pre plan to do that, then you start doing these daily small kindnesses. It's really nice, you feel good.

It's actually in your self interest to do this as well as our society's interest. So that's a choice. So you're being powerful in pleasing people. But the pleasing people you're talking about is what I did. I mean, it was like, you know, every day, countless times I would do things because I wanted people to like me. I wanted them to not be angry at me, because I over perceived what would happen if they didn't like me or were angry with me, what it would mean to me.

And that's the difference between pleasing you know, sort of by because you're forced to do it because you're afraid, and pleasing by choice. Pleasing by being I don't mean really pleasing, it's really being kind and altruistic and choosing to be generous to people. Yeah. I like that. There's sort of like an insecure form of altruism and they a growth oriented form. Oh. I love how you put that. That put a lot of things within that framing of like the D realm versus the B realm, Like Mariam

Maslow talked about deficiency realm deprivation. Is it coming from a place of deprivation or a place of growth and being? And you know, we could put a lot within that framework. Actually, the Barbaro Oquy's notions of pathologic altruism seem relevant. Here's well, right, yes, I write about those where pathological altruism is altruism that harms often both the person who's doing the supposed kindness

and the person they're doing it for. So an example would be your brother is trying to get off drugs and he says, whatever you do, don't let me, don't give me any money. And then when he's jonesing, he cries and cries and says, please please please give me money, and you do because he's crying, when the truly kind thing to do, the non pathologically altruistic thing to do, would be to say, no, I'm going to lock you in my closet and I'll slip plates of food under

the door. But you're not getting any drugs. I mean, that's probably a felony, but forget that first. Yeah, okay, let's talk for a second about how your mind works aying me, because I find trying to follow you difficult sometimes, and I hope not here, no, well even a little bit here. I think it's part of your creativity. As you know, I'm really interested in how people who have different ways of thinking about the world, how that could

be a positive thing. And you know, you've been no stranger to talking about your own personal experiences and its relationship to the research you do. You have this whole section in your book you say, a coming of rage story, which I love. How does your own sort of kind of unique style thinking play a role in this? And as a child and quote feeling like a loser, Well, my thinking is mainly I thought you were talking about ADHD, which I was. That was definitely part of it. Yeah, okay,

but I don't like labeling. You know, well no, but see I don't like that because it's called a disorder. And it's also it's so stupidly named because it's called attention deficit disorder, and the person who has this does not have a deficit of attention. You have too much attention. It goes yeah, exactly, thank you. I was looking for that word. It goes all over the place, basically like a bunch of squirrels on meth running all around, and so adderall helps those little squirrels sit down so I

can focus on my work. And I find it really important to say that I'm on medication because people there's such stigma with that, and it's like, oh my god, I can take this tiny little blue pill and it makes my workday go better. Why not doesn't have bad side effects for me? This is fantastic. And so basically ADHD it is a thing. My mind's like a super ball in a sense, and so it makes connections between

these different areas and science. I'll be thinking about one thing and my mind will go say, hey, wait, look

how that relates. Look at that relationship to that. Oh wow, And so this is part of what I do that I think very few other people do, which is that I synthesize science from a broad base, all across science, so neuroscience and evolutionary psychology and clinical psychology, and I'm versed in all of them, and I could have gotten a PhD. But I found it very unappealing to narrowcasts the way professors have to where you're pretty much you know, you're a unique individual, and that you sort of go

off to different areas, but most people have to stay. If they're in happiness, they can go out to gratitude and humility and forgiveness, but they can't go out to neuroscience and all these other areas and look at hormones. And so that's the thing that's part of this. And see I'm doing this, I sort of ramble. I've like changed. It's like strings the one word I would use to describe as you're untethered. Yeah, I'd like that, like your

book ungifted, untethered see both cases a good thing. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, Well that's what you are with your science writing, right, I mean you're not tethered to a specific paradigm, right, And in fact, what I do is I just wrote about this yesterday. I am never impressed by the idea something is peer reviewed. I write with a sort of and look at the science of the sort of terror that I'm missing something. And so that's a very helpful

place to come from. Maybe it comes from some sort of insecurity, because there's also this credentials thing where people don't value as you as much if you don't have that rubber stamp. I mean, I'm not an idiot. I could get a PhD. You know. You just you do the work. You know, you don't tell your professor to fuck off too often, you know. And so but the thing is to have this other path is sort of exciting.

I'm sort of an intellectual entrepreneur and I like that and creating other things, creating a new thing out of all this science I synthesize, and is to say, here's what the science means in real person language, not in some kind of Fuski's And then to say, and here's the practical advice out of the science. That's very exciting. And also I have to say, one thing I'm careful about is I really am careful to not go beyond

the bounds of the findings. So I'm not inventing stuff like oh look this means this because you see this in studies too. There's an MRI an fMRI, you know, brain scan where they say, oh look the purple means that you know, on Tuesdays you walk your dog. Funny, it's true, so crazy true. Okay. So in terms of some of these key practical things in your book that, like you said, don't go too far outside of the science,

but are still helpful to people, what about fear? Can you tell people how they can use fear as a tool for change? Okay, this is so exciting. What I say is fear is not just the problem, it's also the solution. And I'll take you through. There are a couple chapters in my book I should tell you. It's called on Fucology, A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence in case you're just tuning in the middle. So my favorite chapter is your feelings are not the

boss of you. It's not what you feel, it's what you do. So you can be afraid of something, but the fact that you're afraid, I don't see that as a reason to not do it. And I have a lot of productivity in the tips in the book and One example is my own tip from writing. I write to a timer. Why because when you have a blank page, oh my god, you just want to clean out the refrigerator like six times. Because that blank page is so intimidating. It screams that you are not funny, you have nothing

to say. You probably don't understand the science anyway. You know, it's screaming rhyme. Oh it did? That was like a poem. I do that, Biaxon, I'm the You're an accidental poet. Yeah, exactly. So I turn on a timer and I am my clock's bitch. Basically, I turn on that timer. I could type I have nothing to say three hundred times while that timer's going on. I'd use fifty two minutes on. Then I'd take a seventeen minute break. So but what happens is, and you know this, I can probably say

it to me. Hi Chick sent me Hi. He's the guy who did the research on flow. You get into what's called a flow state, where you get into the work and you're excited by it and you forget that you're working, and then these magic things happen. And an important part of this too is the breaks. The breaks, these seventeen minute breaks, and sometimes I'll take longer if I'm tired, because I learned to be nicer to myself

and can talk about self passion. But during that time, what happens is, as opposed to the focused, these tight neural networks you're using, when you focus on writing or translating or reading, your default mode brain processing takes over. That's this background processing. So you can be washing a dish, I just walk away and I do anything but be at the computer, wash a dish, clean a molding, something dumb. And so that's when your brain is doing some background work.

And so when you come back to the computer after taking a walk or taking a shower, suddenly maybe you have an idea. The stuff that looked like sphetty and muddled, and it just starts to look like, oh wait, I see that could go there. And this is why this it's so exciting to do that. So but I want to get to the full question, which is you know about fear. Fear not being the problem, it's also the solution.

And so to tell you what I did when I stood on the street in the rain, realizing in New York, while I was moving myself with this cart with a wheel fell off, and you know, my computer being rained on. I realized I had no real friends, and I had to change my behavior because I thought other people behave disagreeably and people like them and they respect them. Maybe if I act like those people that I will get

treated as well as they do. So I started acting like my boss at Ogilvy and Mather, who was a producer. She would just she just had this quiet confidence. And I'd go to a store, you know, say they gave me the wrong change. Instead of being all whimpy and me, I'd put on Kathy's voice, excuse me, I believe you gave me the wrong change, so you can hear her. I'm talking differently. You put on the whole person. Thank you. I wish my voice forout sexy in real life. And

so this is really important. This is what I found. Even though I did this just out of desperation, what I found was people didn't treat me badly. They would do what I asked or just grumble. Nothing terrible happened, and giant claw didn't come out of the ground and snatch me and drag me under. Nothing bad happened. So I realized, Wow, I get treated well, and so I used her persona as training wheels to become a person

with self respect. And eventually you just should that and you start acting that way yourself after you do that a bunch of times. And at the root of this is something is clinical psychology. It's called exposure therapy, and it's basically exposing yourself to your fears so you see that they're ridiculous. And this is really a marvelous technique.

You do this over and over, and I explain how in the book, because there are important points to this, because now we know so much about learning and memory, and if what I did, if you look at the synthesis of all that research that I put in the book, it tells you, oh, just do this a little bit and go sleep. You know, don't think about it too much, because just this process of acting actually changes your emotion.

You don't have to think about it for it to be strong, and then you can think about it afterwards, sort of post process it, because it's stronger if you don't think about it, if you go to sleep. So the memory of your acting a certain way and not being responded to, you know, not being chased out of a store with a broom. When you behave with self respect, you learn from that over and over. That's good. And it sounds like this is different than the acting as

if principal? How are they different? Well, okay, what's really important? So you know there was all this? Was that a good question? Oh? Yeah, well, I love your questions. Is always mind candy. So if you have to remember to act a certain way, you're remembering, Okay, I should stand up straight, and I should talk like this, and I should, you know, hold my hands a certain way. Oh, don't dig on my nails. And then what was I going

to say? Okay, you have what's called cognitive overload. You know this, well, your mind tis a day your mind basically goes, oh my god, I'm carrying, like, you know, sixty five fruits in my arms and I'm just going to drop them all on the floor. That's basically what happens.

And so the beautiful thing about acting like somebody else, using somebody else's persona as training wheels is that you don't have to remember anything because we can all I mean, I'm a terrible actress, but I can act like somebody else. We can all mimic somebody even if we do it badly, so you're mimicking their posture and their voice and all

these things. It's a package deal. So all you have to remember is that pitch you wanted to give the guy about your startup, and you're much more likely to be able to do that with confidence to retain your thinking than if you're remembering to do all these act as if things. It's good. I can see that difference. I should tell you. Basically, I call it impersonate your

way to being the real you. Yeah, because what happens is when we're unconfident, there's a confident person, there's a possibility for that person in there and all that Oh my god, I'm a loser and I can't I'm afraid and I'm not going to but that person just needs to start acting that way, and then we build those neural pathways where that starts being our default behavior instead of behaving like a whimp. Which, however, isn't to say that you're totally cured, because I admit this in the book.

I say, look, I'm like eighty twenty. There's twenty percent of me that's like, I'm a loser. They don't want to talk to me. But the eighty percent of me goes like, you're a fucking idiot. You know better than this. Come on, go talk to that person. Don't Either of those thought processes are particularly positive though. Actually, but either I'm an idiot or no one, or I'm a loser. No, actually no. But see, the thing is people who are

self deprecating are confident people. Either that or they're people who really need themselves. No, this is so cool. There's really cool research in the book by Ethan Cross where he talks about talking to yourself and the third person. It gives you distance. And this is a big thing in the book of you Know the Physical and the mental using metaphor like that, you know distance, It really does play out that way in the brain. I lay out all this research that shows that. But it's so

so interesting. Think about how you talk to a friend. You've got more distance on their problem. You could be more objective, and so when I say, Amy, don't be an ass, that's more motivating to me and gets through to me better than just thinking I should do that. Yeah. So do you think authenticity is overrated? Oh? Yeah, it's not even overrated. I think it's terrible authentic. But what if you're not a what if you're authenticly not a loser,

shouldn't you be authentic? Well, okay, here's what I say. Authenticity should be the way I think you should be authentic to values you choose, and I lay out a process in the book for choosing values. And you say, well, what's important to me? And you can't choose fifty thousand things because you'll forget them the most important thing. So for me, one of them is courage living with courage, and supporting freedom is another one, supporting people's rights. So

these are very very important things. And so in a moment where there's some choice of behavior, my values are very clear to me because I've written them down and chosen them purposefully, chosen them because we just think, oh, I'll be a good person. And that's not enough because in that moment where should I act with confident? Should I act with courage? It doesn't You don't have an answer then, like should I be a good person? Well, yeah, that's too vague. So I tell people to specifically choose

your values. Yeah, I do like that, And people do tend to feel most authentic when they are acting in line with their chosen value. So that is the research does bear that out right, because we don't want to admit that we're, you know, a wimpy loser, great we actually there's an authenticity bias where we tend to include all the most positive aspects of ourselves as the authentic part of ourselves and all the other stuff is not really us, which is actually objectively not true. It is

all part of you, right, let's see. I talk about this too in the book about accepting the whole of you, and that's one of the great things. So I'm fifty four and one of the cool things. When I've done readings and things I keep I always say I'm socially awkward. I just say it like that I am. I'm the one at a cocktail party. Now, I never know. I never know when to leave a conversation or how to leave a conversation, you know, and I read online how

do you leave a conversation? I'm still really bad at it. So there's part of me that's sort of uncool, that's desperately uncool. But I accept that with all of me, and I love There's some research by Kristin Neff that I really like. She has these points of you know what it takes to have self compassion, and one is seeing your failings as a thing that connects you to

other people. It's like, oh, I'm you know, I'm socially awkward and other everybody's flawed in some way, and so if you can look at look at it that way, that's a nice way to be able to tell yourself, Look, I accept me. Accept me for all the weird things I do, because they come with the cool things like the ADHD mind, the super ball that bounces around and finds cool things that maybe other people wouldn't because they're

more quote unquote normal thinkers. I really like that. That That sounds like this recent distinction I saw in the psychological literature between a self abasing form of humility and a more appreciative form of humility that is very conducive to health, where you accept and you accept all of yourself and your limitations, but you don't you don't diminish yourself. There's a healthy form of humility, right. I think that's really important. Mark Leary and Sonya le Mirsky and a few others

have been doing work in that area. Yea, and I just love that because being humble you have to be big. It's like apologizing. You have to be a big person to be truly humble, to be humble in a way that's healthy, rather than self abasing, rather than self hating. That's exactly right. Yeah, or even submissive. Right. Yeah, great, So let's I think naturally the topic that follows from this is self esteem. Oh, I love that I know, and I know that you love that, and you've really

synthesized that. The wide literature on that. Could you please talk about self esteem and some of Mark Leary's conceptualizations of it. Yeah, it's so interesting. So we think of self esteem as I like me? Do I like me? But this actually doesn't make any sense in an evolutionary way. What would have been the function of I like me? So you do something really stupid and you still like yourself. That doesn't stop you from doing the really stupid thing.

What Leary says, He looks at this and says, basically, self esteem is our appraisal of other people's appraisal of us, and then our feelings in the wake of that. Now, this would be what we call adaptive in evolutionary psychology, because if everybody likes you and thinks you're great, for

what you're doing. You want to keep doing that if, however, nobody likes you and you're on the verge of being thrown out of the group, which would have been a death sentence in the time in which our brains are minds that we have now our psychology now evolved, you want to defer. You want to, you know, sort of slink around and be very deferent, you know, act with great deference to the people who are powerful, so you won't get your butt kicked or as sorry, I forgot,

we weren't worn on the radio. And so basically self esteem is other people's thoughts of us and the feelings that they lead to a rise in us, and then how we act in the wake of that. So that makes sense. It's adaptive. And what Patrick and Ellis say this leak or Patrick, they say that self esteem is domain specific. So what this means is you could be great socially but not so great in a work environment. So you would have high self esteem because it's a

measuring tool. It's a measuring tool of how you're thought of by other people and how you should act in the wake of that. So you have high self esteem in socially, but not in the workplace where you need to ramp up your gain. Yeah, that makes sense, and it seems like the need for belonging is intantly tied up with all that. But there's ways of us overriding that, right, there's ways of having a secure self esteem that isn't

so dependent on the evaluations of others. Right, Well, I think that we are always going to be concerned with other people's appraisal of us, But I think it helps much about what other people think of you. We all do. We can't help it. That's our psychology to look under the hood and see that you can think. Oh, and then to understand something else that's important, and that's we're living in modern times with an antique psychological operating system.

It's basically perfect for the time when we were run on your side with loin cloths. But now we've got iPhones and drones. But that hasn't changed. And so an example I give in the book is that you know, if you were in a small band of people, you know, in your loincloth a long time ago, you in your hunter gatherer band, you ask a girl out and she humiliates you. Well, that's your history forever, because you're not going to be in a very different group of people.

It's like the same twenty five to fifty maybe for your whole life. So this is really bad. So and you could be thrown out of the group if you're not liked. Well, you know, this was really a costly thing. But now we still have that same psychology. But we live in this big, modern, transient world. So you go to a bar, you ask some girl out, she humiliates you. Everybody sees, oh, how horrible. That is horrible. But then

guess what, it's a big modern world. So you can go to the next bar right down the street and just do it again, and nobody has seen what just happened. And so that's a way that understanding evolutionary psychology really helps us get around the sort of you know, the stuff, the blocks that puts up for us greatness. So that means I can get rejected forty times in one night. Woo. If you live in a town with a lot of bars, No, see,

the thing is some girl. You know, there's going to be some girl, you know, even for a guy who has a hard time, and you're adorable, so I don't think that's going to happen if you're a guy who's constantly getting rejected. Okay, look at what you're doing. Are you hitting on girls who are you know you're you're a six and they're a twelve? Okay, maybe that's not going to happen. Could you maybe like a nine? Or can you be a twelve? Is that part of the skill?

You know? I love exaggeration or you know, is there something you're doing? Are you coming off this too desperate? I write about Shialdini and scarcity in the book We value what's scarce, not what's you know, put its head in her lap in the first five minutes. And so that's the thing too. You know, first, if you aren't hard to get, act like you're hard to get, and then become hard to get. Become a person with confidence who doesn't just roll over for anyone and act like

a puppy dog. You know, is thinking that you'll get a girl that way or get a guy that way, because that's not We don't want people who you know, are just going to roll over for us. We want people who seem valuable and a little bit out of reach. Yeah, yeah, I know. That's this applied demand model of relationships. Right, So let's talk about shame. That's another motion that's related to self esteem. People self esteem tend to experience a lot of shame in their lives. This is so interesting.

We have a mythic view of shame too. This idea that shame is I suck and guilt is. There was a lady at Yelle who came up with this idea of what shame is. Right, and HEREK can look it up very fast because I forget her name, and I just for the moment forget. See this is a thing where okay, I just found it. The thing is, this is the new me. The old me would have been like, oh my god, I can't remember every single thing, but like you have shown growth, no right, But the new

me is like, god, I have a bad memory. This sucks. Okay. So what it was? It was Helen black Lewis. She was in nineteen seventy one. She came up with an idea that shame involves a negative evaluation of the self, and guilt stems from a negative evaluation of an action taken. Well, guess what, that's not supported. And Dan Sneysser did some wonderful research on this with his colleagues that you see us be and they found that shame is basically they

explained shame as an emotion program. So emotions are motivational tools. They're not just decoration for your life. So they say shame is an emotion program. It's a defensive system that evolved to keep us from getting devalued by people in our social world, like self esteem, what other people think of us eke. So they say that the feeling of shame is information driven and it's brought on by the sense that other people could find out about our yikky growth, dishonorable,

unfair behavior and downgrade us reputationally because of it. So shame is basically like an inner crisis PR specialist. So recognizing this this is really helpful because you understand that part of the reason that you feel well, I don't want people to see this is that we have this emotional program in us to avoid our being downgraded by other people. So these behaviors will make you feel a

shame because they're trying. Your shame is to protect you from engaging in actions that would cause you to be devalued. That makes sense. It's part of the overall social protection system that self esteem operates on as well. Yeah, No, that makes a lot of sense. There are probably lots of other things. In fact, I found in my own research that imposter syndrome is another one that is related to those other two as a protection system. It's actually

we don't actually think that we're imposters. It's actually a self presentation strategy to help minimize the impact of rejection. If that makes sense, right. No, I agree with you on that. I've read that stuff, and I really this imposter syndrome. I think that I thought about this the other day that people who feel that way should look

through your success. We tend to just see ourselves where we are and not see little bits and pieces that if you look back and see all the things you did to get to where you are, you know, you see that's you're not there for no reason. The people who promoted you are not morons. They didn't promote you because they were on drugs. You know, there's a reason

you're there now. There's sometimes people who have their jobs where you think like, oh my god, they you know, clearly they had an uncle in the business or something. But you know, for most people that's not the case. You know, and it's really really important to break things down into these small little bits and see what got you there, and to also understand, you know, part of this is our problem with failure. And I think failure

is really helpful. You know, if you can say, you know what, I'm human and I'm going to fail and accept that as part of it, then you can turn it into a tool and also take risks and not say your feelings are the boss of you, not let them be the boss of you, but say, you know, I'm going to try my best. See that's me courage. Courage is one of my values. So I have to try my best and if I fail, okay, that kind

of sucks. But will I be living in the gutter because I did something, I tried something that was a little scary. Probably not. So what's the worst that could happen? You know that's something in the book too, that kind of thinking, that cognitive reappraisal. What's the worst that could happen if I fail at this? You know, a few people, a few readers will think I'm dumb or whatever again hate mail. And something about you that I know is

that you have some really enormous courage. I remember the story of getting solictening feedback from dates you talked about, and I thought, maybe you could tell the listeners about what you did, because not a lot of people would be able to do that. Yeah, this is a survey I did like they have in hotels. I just I had worked on myself and gotten better in the self respect and behaving with courage department through this thing of acting like my boss from time to time and seeing,

oh wow, that works. But I was still really desperate in the love department, and I was just chasing guys kind of like you know, the way a golden retriever chases a hot dog down the hill with all that subtlety. So the guys were just like one guy he shook my hand at my door and then bolted down the street. You know, that was the kind of thing that was happening to me. And I thought, I can't even get sex.

You know, girls can always get sex, and why am I poison ivy and so out of desperation, but also because I think, like I think that you should make your life fun and even your problems and your failure's fun, I created our date a customer satisfaction survey like in hotels, and I had all these points, you know, please fill this out, and then it was your date clean and odor free. Would you go out and a date with

this person again? Why or why not? You know? And I handed them all out to these guys who went to this cafe I went to where there were a lot of cute guys and also electrical outlets. I used to write there, and they all one guy would bolt when he saw me. They all were horrified, except for one really sweet science professor at Yale, I think in Princeton, and he came and sat down at my table and

told me, basically, I was too eager. I took all the you know, fun out of it for a guy because I did all the work, and that I needed to basically, you know, act like with self respect. He didn't say that, but I knew that was the answer. I needed to do that in dating as well as in the rest of my life. And so that was a great thing that I did, because I did sort of this sort of folk version of research, you know, at a very small sample size, but it told me what I needed to know, and it was fun and

maybe laugh that's awesome. I've often wanted to ask for feedback but have been too shy to do. So. I think that's wonderful that you just go for it. Thanks. Well, you know, you could get some horrible and hurtful feedback and people. This was before the age of social media, so nobody put the thing online or anything. So cool. Now I know it's really terrible. It's really terrible, and

so you know, you have to be mindful of that. See, if you know something that you do, it has potential to ruin you emotionally for a long time or you know, ruin your career when you're thinking of doing it. Yeah, let's talk about victimization. Now. You argue that refusing to ask like a victim can be a very powerful thing. Oh yeah, Well, basically it's the old your feelings are not the boss of you, and that you can be afraid to respond to somebody with courage, But that doesn't

mean you should not do it. I talked about that earlier and so people. You know, David Boss, who's an evolutionary psychologist, showed this footage. Actually I think he talked about it. Sorry. Atf' psite conference they had prisoners look at people. A group of people, some of whom were crime victims, and they looked at how they walked. The prisoners all picked out the people who were they would

victimize as the people who actually were victimized. It turned out, and you know, there's something to this of you know, who behaves like a victim, and maybe that ends up making you a victim. You can't always avoid being victimized by people, but a lot of times you can simply by refusing to let them do it by saying no. You know, and at first like saying no will be

it huge and tear fine thing. But the more you say it, the more you'll see that it doesn't have terrible consequences, providing you're not being mugged in an alley and the guys think give me, give me your wallet, and say, that's not a time to say no. If you're like here, sir, would you like my here's my

American Express? Are you a comedian? As well? As they applied the trans inter disciplinary scientist, I thought, you're just gonna call me gender fluid, so well, you know it's I think that this is ann on PC thing to say, but you know it's it makes sense per Jeffrey Miller's mating mind of what you know, men used to show women that they've got some chops as a mate. There aren't a lot of women who are really funny and really on PC. And I'm one. Amy Dresner who edits me,

who wrote my for Junkie, She's another. We both spend all day laughing coming up with this obscene humor and but being truly funny, not cutesy funny. I hate qutes funny. And so I've spent many years coming up with this stuff and basically my way of entertaining myself when I had no friends. There were two things. One was reading a million books and the other was just sort of going in places in my mind and thinking, I'd see, you know, squirrels anthropomorphized and stuff like that. My mind's

always doing that. Yeah, it sounds like you've really like self upgraded in your whole mind. And actually I almost said the word system and that it actually leads into a question I wanted to ask you, is do you think having systems is better than having goals? Oh? Yeah, I write about this and I actually first heard about this from Scott Adams. Soals goal is I'm going to lose weight, you know, I'm going to know is I'm going to lose ten pounds, so and a system is

I'm going to live healthy from now on. So what you can fail very easily at a goal because you had a cupcake that night, So then you suck. And what happens when you make your goal'd say that you lose ten pounds, Then where are you left with? You're left with nothing but a system. If you screw up, if you have that cupcake, you can say, Okay, I have a plan. My plan is to be healthy. I didn't do so well tonight, but tomorrow was another day. I'm going to do that. I'm going to take a walk,

I'm going to lift some weights, you know. And so it's a much healthier way and a much less it's self loathing promoting way to approach problems in your life, things you'd like to change. I like that. I want to bring up a related subject too, which is small wins, which is based on research by Carl Wich. It's classic social science research, and this is a way to think about it. Say that you're a guy, like keeping up guys,

but you approach some girl. You know, you're terrified. You see her every day in the cafe and you finally approach her and she's mean to you. But the great thing the way to see this is not oh I failed, I suck, but you today did something different and better. You were courageous. You went up and approached that guy. How cool is that? That's a small win. So to see things that way, that helps you get up and do it again the next day. So you think, Okay,

I succeeded. How cool. Maybe I'll have another success, Maybe I'll get a little further along, maybe she'll only spit at me once. That. I love that small wins and also small losses cascade down as well, like if you get rejected, like how do you deal with these setbacks so that you don't smile downward? Well? I think also is that a fair question? Yeah, oh no, it's a great I like the small losses. That's a great way of putting it. So I like looking at it that way.

And actually, you know, it really sucks, first of all to be nice to yourself because it really hurts, you know, all this stuff, that self esteem, the shame brush, these things. We can't stop those those are emotions are automatic. We can't you know, there's no switch I'm going to dial down my shame, you know, my shame where you can turn something in your head, but so understanding that that you're going to feel bad, but also this thing of the big world we're living in, you know that they're

what's so great. Dating is a numbers game. Meeting somebody's numbers game. Go out and talk to twenty five women in a week, maybe you'll get three dates. Even if you're kind of hopeless at getting dates. Maybe two of them feel, you know, like, okay, you're kind of cute. And the thing is, if you're bad at doing things. You know, one thing that I found when I'm bad at something, I'll sometimes mention that aloud because that takes

a certain sort of confidence to say that. You like to say publicly, Hi, I'm an author and I wrote a book on confidence, and I'm socially awkward. You know, there's comfort in my saying that with myself and people. Even if you're bad at things, this is something that connects us. Nobody wants to hear about how great you are at a cocktail party. What's funny are your stories of humiliation, you know, and so and that's the thing to think of, you know, it's to be a person

who fails at things? You know, we all do. And to understand that that person you're talking to, you know, they probably stepped in poo on the way there, you know, got in their shoe and then got someone their tie or people don't wear ties anymore. But you get what I mean. I do, I do. People are all They're all screw ups. We're all screw ups. Yeah, But I also just reconceptualizing the notion of failing. If like, what if someone who isn't a good match for you isn't

interest in you, Isn't that a win not a failure? God? Yeah, And so that's what I was saying. Technically that's a win, right, like will be a failure if you ended up with that person, it would be. And actually looking at the thing if you have a pattern, if people are always rejecting you, to say, am I going for people who are you know, who are too much out of my league?

Or do I need to change something about myself? A thing that guys can do is to dress better, you know, to not wear shirts made out of some kind of thing that would melt if you stuck a match on its. I think that's been my problem. Coshmer spetters, get a good haircut, shoes. There are girls or gay guy friends. Not all gay guys are, you know, into fashion, but generally you can find a friend who's a girl or gay guy to go shopping with you and help you

pick out a few things, spend some money. It's an investment, but you can even get stuff on eBay, you know, to have these nice here I am, I'm a presentable guy. Good shoes really important. Girls look at that those things? Oh no, and no open toes. This is something Jeff Miller did a sort of casual study on this, and women hate. We don't want to see your hairy toe knuckles. Why I think that's a really wise advice. You say

it's time to slip into somebody more comfortable. Can you please explain that double one gendre Well, Basically, this is what's so hopeful and exciting about this research I pulled together and on folcology, and it's that there is a process to living as a confident person, to having the biggest life you can, to having the best person in your life and the best job, to getting the things you want. And it's basically acting as a confident person.

And you start by finding some person, you use them as training wheels, use their persona and go out there a few times, and you know, be that person when you're afraid, when you have to ask for something. No one will know you're doing this unless you're a woman.

You're talking like a man or something like that. And you'll start to see that your fears are ridiculous, that people treat you with respect, that they might shrug a little or grumble a little, but no, no, but he's throwing you out, chasing you out of the restaurant with a broom because you ask for your stake to be sent back and do those things. It's very very important I have those little years. Do this. Here's a test.

Here's a test for yourself. And over time you'll start to be able to do that as yourself, and you'll start to see change in who you are. It changes your It makes changes in your brain to the point where your default behavior is no longer being a timid, fearful whimp, but being a person who is powerful. And then even those times when you feel I suck, no one wants to talk to me, that that part of you that's powerful will tell that other part come on,

don't be an ass. Oh I love that. Oh you know, this is such an empowering chat today, and your book is very empowering. I thank you for all the great work you do for the field and for public science communication. Thank you so much. And I want to ask everyone buy my book Unfuckology, a Field Guide to Living with scuts and Confidence. It's science help and it can help

you change and become powerful. Yes, I will that. In the show notes, Amy, do you think we should go on the road together and do a comedy routine science communication. We'd be so great. We'd be so good because you're a great foil for me and also, I mean we really would be good at that. That'd be really fun. Okay, I'll consider it, Amy, I will too. Thanks again, have a great day you too. Thanks for listening to the

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