Jordan Harbinger || The Art of Charm

talk show host, and world renowned social dynamics expert. As co founder of the Art of Charm, Jordan has helped develop one of the leading self development programs in the world with a special expertise in social capital, relationship guiding, and authentic report. He's also the host of the Art of Charm podcast, where review is leading entrepreneurs, celebrities, writers and experts about psychology, performance, life and success. Thanks for chatting with me today, Jordan hey Man, Happy to be

here with you. I'm I'm glad the show's going well. I know when you started this you're excited, and sometimes people get less excited as podcasts go on, but it seems like you've kept up the passion. Thanks. Man, that's really kind of you to say. You know, I've been a longtime fan of the Art of Charm and the podcast. How long have you been doing this? Just over ten years? Wow? And I got to ask, like, how have you personally

grown in those ten years? Like what was it like when you first started this thing, and you know, and maybe how have you yeah, personally developed. Well, I've switched a lot from focusing on I mean from my twenties to my thirties, right from twenty six to thirty seven now, so the different is huge, Yeah, huge, I mean night and day. I'm married now. Back then I was a law student, you know, I used to be enloired. I'm not. I'm a broadcaster. So it really is this like super

long journey. Everything is different pretty much. Well, first of all, congratulations in the marriage. I thinks I had the pleasure of meeting your wife and oh yeah, I'm gonna go too. And I know it feels like so long ago. Yeah, So I am curious, like, how did you like, why is it called the Art of Charm? Why was charm

the thing that you started kind of revolving around that theme. Yeah, I mean we started the show initially because I wanted to learn networking and relationship development skills to use on Wall Street, because I realized I'd lost my competitive advantage. I was a kid, and I was always coasting through school, just kind of a nerd. And then when I was in college, everybody was as smart or smarter than me, but I really had kind of no qualms about working hard.

Everybody else is getting wasted, so I was able to work everybody. But once I got to Wall Street, not only was everybody smart, but everybody was also a workhorse. So I needed a new competitive advantage. And that new competitive advantage was the soft skills, the networking skills that I just was not getting from school, I was not learning on Wall Street. It was really something that I had thought for years and years and years that some people were just maybe born with it and other people

were able to develop over time. And so for me, I knew that I needed to master that set of skills, and so I started focusing on that, And of course we started having conversations about that with my friends, and one of my other friends got really interested in it, and he's like, hey, let's try out some of this networking stuff, but like, you know, when we talked to women and I was like, oh, yeah, because body language and nonverbal communication might work in dating too, And then

we tried that and it worked like a charm, and we thought, Okay, this is the only thing we want to do now, you know, we don't even want to mess with anything else. Like this is even better than we could have imagined. So you know, we just figured we would focus on that and we did. Yeah, you know, when we go back to two thousand and six, that was great around the height of like the pickup artist era, you know, with the game and stuff. Were you influenced

by that community. No, we started before that stuff happened. And when that stuff happened, we initially got really excited because we thought, oh my god, there's more people out there trying to figure this stuff out. And then we kind of quickly found that it was really creepy and we weren't really on the same page as a lot of those guys. We were like, oh, yeah, you know, you can meet all these cool guys doing it, and you can get free drinks, and you can meet women,

and you can make tons of friends. And they were like there's cheat codes to getting women in bed, and we were like, I don't know. And then we initially thought like, oh, okay, maybe these guys are onto something. So we went and we met with a few groups of these guys, and we just thought, me and my business partner AJ, we were just like, these are the weirdest guys anywhere, Like this is the biggest collection of not even just door key guys, Like I don't mind

a geek, I consider myself one. But these were not necessarily well meaning. Not all of them were bad, of course, but a lot of them are not well meaning. A lot of them were like they really needed therapy, but they were here to learn how to pick up girls or they didn't treat anyone very well, and they wanted to export that to the opposite sex, who they blamed

for all of their social inadequacy. And I thought, me and AJ both thought, we don't not only do we not want to be around these guys, we don't want to give these guys tools to continue being a negative influence and a negative a drain on the world. Really, to put it sort of metaphysically here, and we did. We helped a lot of folks who were well intentioned who you know, maybe had social anxiety or wanted to learn about this stuff, but what it ended up happening

was the pick up guys. They mainstreamed this so much that we couldn't be like, yeah, but at Art of Charm, we don't teach that particular brand because it's like kind of like being a drug dealer. You know, you can't be like, no, I only sell weed. Everybody just lumps you into the same bin as crack dealers and that's where you are, right. So we just got sick of dealing with that, and we thought, well, we're getting older now, you know, we're all in relationships. I'm going to get

married at some point soon, you know. So we just decided to screw it. Let's go back to the original intent, which was relationship management, networking, personal soft skills, social skills and things like that, and get away from any of the dating stuff. Because we still get tons of people at Art of Charm live programs in LA for to

learn how to meet and attract the opposite sex. It's just that they understand the long game, which is and I'm going to use this at work, and I'm going to use it when I get married, and I'm going to use it when I'm teaching an example for my kids. It's not just going to be like what magic words can I say to get women in bed? Which was just too much? Who just couldn't deal? Well, Yeah, I

think we can unpack some of that psychology. I mean, there's some fascinating research showing that people who have undergone sort of trauma in their childhood in any way that actually increases the likelihood that they're going to have entitlement. I've actually been planning on writing an article about this because it's kind of a lot of people wouldn't put the two together, but you actually find higher rates of that amongst people who have had vulnerable childhoods. Interesting applying

that to the pick up ours mentality. Like you said, they're probably some good ones, but you know, just like a lot of what you've seen, what you describe, seems to me like people who have been feel deprived of a normal sort of females childhood, you know, normal relationships, maybe due to social awkwardness or some other disabilities or whatever, and then maybe they've developed a sort of like a compensitory sort of entitlement to women. And that's very unhealthy.

It's not only unhealthy, but I see it coming out in other ways too, where these same guys are also looking for quick solutions in other areas of their lives. And so, for example, once we got out away from all those guys, we started to get invites to a lot of these different events and still many other things like that for years and years and years. And what we found was it wasn't just like meat women. It was also like and biohacking and learn how to make

money online. And we're just like, what is this garbage? It's all just like the get rich quick of your social life, of actually getting rich quick of health, And we just kind of thought, like, what is this rubbish? It's like put the work in, man, there's no substitute for it. If there were people would have figured this out. The Chinese people would have figured it out already. To come out, you know, it would be it would be confusions would it talked about it, But for real, it

just became like this really obvious. Well, I didn't get what I wanted when I was younger, and instead of going now I can change my life and everything will be better. I just got to put the work in it's like no, now I want your milkshake too, and I want everything when I wanted and how I wanted. And it just became really irritating to even be around because it, like you said, it was a bunch of entitled man babies that hadn't really grown out of it.

They just figured out ways to trick certain people into it, and that was unhealthy in itself because they didn't have respect for the women that they were meeting, which to me and AJ seemed like the opposite of what you would actually want to do, because if you're trying to create a great relationship with somebody, you wouldn't join in that relationship or come to that relationship under false pretenses

or with somebody that you didn't respect. And there are horror stories of these guys who were like master pickup artist instructors and then they're like, I'm giving up on everything, and they'd write this blog post about why they're giving up on everything, and I remember reading one that was like, this dumb ass guy, pardon me if I'm not supposed to say that on your show, but this some guy he faked a British accent and he met this girl that he really liked, and then he had to keep

faking it, and then he was like, I just how am I going to deal with this? And I was like, you got to come clean and he's like okay. So he went to her and he came clean and she's like, you're a psycho. Never talk to me again. Wow, Never talk to me. Because of course it wasn't just an accent. She's like, where are you from? Tell me about growing up. They've been hanging out for two weeks in this knucklehead's

faking a British accent. I mean, that is pathologically weird, right, Like you're clearly thinking at that point it's no longer an experiment. At that point. What's going on in your head, I would imagine, is something along the lines of some dialogue along the lines of I'm not good enough as I am, so I'm gonna have to keep up this facade. But then realizing I actually like this girl, I got to break up this facid I gotta stop doing this.

Eventually you're gonna have to tell her that you're not really British, And the longer you wait, the worse it's gonna get. And then, of course what happens is she reasonably thinks there's something so wrong with you for lying

about that stupid little thing. I don't want to hear what else you have to say ever, so by and then he three, he said, this stuff is all BS, And I'm thinking, no, self improvement is not all BS because you faked a British accent lying to people, making up story and narratives about people that aren't you because

who you are is not good enough. That's not only bad for you in terms of like the cognitive dissonance that goes into that, but it's kind of like sociopathic in a way if you're doing that to get into bed with somebody. And so we really just wanted nothing to do with that community anymore. It was just totally not for us at that point. That makes a lot of sense. Now I've gotten some of your emails inviting me to some of your boot camps. Can you talk

a little bit about what goes on there? Our boot camps are live programs are in Los Angeles, and people come in for six days and it's residential, so you live on site. And the reason that that's important is because it sounds foreboding, but you can't escape, right and that's actually quite crucial in that you can't get away from the training. And the reason that that's important is because there's a lot I mean, of course you could leave if you wanted to, because there's a lot of

uncomfortable things you have to face. You know, we videotape interactions, We videotape nonverbal community, and a lot of people come in and they don't like what they see. So it becomes really easy if you just go back to your hotel room at night to tell yourself, oh, I'm going to go walk around the city today, or I'm going to take a break, or I'm going to hang out with my friend or you know, something like that, or just get scared and not show up. And we've had

that happen a couple times. So we do it residential and it forms a really nice bond with the other students as well. So you end up with camaraderie, which is great when you're going through things that are tough to have another group of people around you that's going through the same thing. And the house is really nice.

People stay there and come through and the types of people that we get ranged from Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, whatever executives to the technical team, and this week we actually have a house full of Green Berets from the US Army that came from Afghanistan. Yeah, so that's pretty usual. We also had Seal Team six, not the whole team obviously there's like two hundred guys in there, but we had part of Seal Team six come through before the

bin laden mission as well. So we have a lot of clients that are just you know, kids straight out of college, or somebody who's divorced, or somebody who wants to get promoted at work. And then we have sort of the elite military, elite special forces and intelligence units that come through either undercover or not to learn the skills. And they're the same skills, Yeah, for sure. And in

terms of these skills, do you draw anything from positive psychology? Probably, but I don't know what that stuff would be because I'm not an authority in the field of positive psychology, so I don't know. The answer is almost certainly, but I'm not sure exactly what does that make sense? It does, but you've done so many interviews of my colleagues that I feel like you do know. So if that's the field of positive psychology, then yeah, absolutely, Oh of course,

of course, yeah, I get that confused. I think sometimes with the idea of thinking positive and I realize that they're not the same thing. But I don't you know what I'm saying, Like how people are like, uh, visualize this or power posing, and it's like not really because those are pseudosciences, but the actual scientific field of positive psychology, Yes, yeah, you know, just what are the aspects that can kind of give us optimal performance and personal development? I mean

the things you study. I mean, but you know, we try to study scientifically, and I feel like you draw a lot on it. I mean, I've read some of your blog posts where you talk you some of the lingo, and there's good confluence there. I feel like there needs to be better integration between kind of people in your world and people in my world. And you're doing a good job, I mean with that integration by interviewing lots

of these people. But so I just feel like there is an you know, like collaboration, if you know what

I mean, I do, and I definitely agree. I think there's a lot to be done, and that's one of the reasons why I do the shows with Carol Dwack with Angela Duckworth with all these different folks and Susan Kan and folks like that, because really, I mean it is a who's who of your colleagues and yourself on the Art of Charm podcast, because those are the skills that can then be taken and made into applicable skill

sets and then of course adjacent field. So we have in Areli who's been on the show a couple of times, behavioral economics, and we can take things from behavioral economics that people can apply. The only rule for coming on the Art of Charm is that you have things that people can apply and that they are based at least,

if not completely, and in actual science. There's enough anecdotal evidence and the ability to reproduce the things that you're talking about, and it's not just some BS system that somebody made up so they can sell an info product. If that makes sense. Yeah, I really appreciate you said that. You know, when I say your world, I mean we could try to unpack what do I mean by that, because there are so many people that probably drive you crazy,

that are in your space. You don't even want them in your space, Yeah, but they are constantly in your space. It just must be frustrating you sometimes because you can clearly see those who are in it one hundred percent for the marketing. Oh yeah, yeah, of course I see people that are in it for the marketing, and I also see people that are frankly just making it up as they go along, and it's I think it's dangerous.

I think it's dangerous because it can teach people that what they have or the problems they think they have are not solvable, when really it's just because they bought a system that's fake and made up by somebody who feels that they are some sort of profits, you know, and that they're the only one who can teach it. And it's borderline. It's con. It's con. It's a con. It's a con game, and it's a not cult, but it's adjacent to that, like if you don't believe it,

then it won't work. And you know, there's a lot of people doing that, and I just I think that's horrible. Or you have to pay to get the information, the information from the Art of Droum podcast and the Art of Drama is a company. The information is free. The coaching you get at boot camp, it's not secret techniques and everything it's coaching so that you get it down. It's feedback, it's objectivity. That's what you're paying for from

people who've done it thousands of times. You're not paying for secret knowledge that we only give you when you reach levels. Ion Like, that's BS and that's that I think is unhealthy, and I think that's rampant in the field of coaching in general, and I don't like it. I'm not a fan. Yeah, I think you can. A good sort of indicator of that is overclaiming of a product.

I mean, to me, that's one of my biggest indicators. Yeah, like if you're telling me, if you're telling me that your boot camp or that your service will in ten days make you a Casanova. You know. Here's the thing is, like, I don't think anyone should shoot for being in Casanova. Shoot. A lot of the things that a lot of these companies kind of claim you'll become are not really healthy goals.

The people who sign up for don't realize that. You know, you tend to see these overcompensatory mechanisms among people who have been deprived of something, Whereas like most normal I don't know what normal means. I don't really mean to say that, but most I don't think that. Yeah, obviously, I know nobody does, right, Yeah, I think just what I mean to say, most people, I'll just say most people.

You know, we all have had setbacks in our lives, and you know we all have had at least one, you know, big experience in nurch out or that sucked or or something. But most people don't shoot for narcissistic goals. They shoot, really, I mean, I guess you're right, maybe most people don't shoot for narcissistic goals. You think they I mean, I think it's I think it's an indicator of something unhealthy, mentally unhealthy when your goals are so

grandiose relative to who you are. So I'm talking about like as it like a you know, a difference indicator. Like if Kobe Bryant in high school, you know, had goals of being a great basketball player. I mean, he was a great high school player. It wasn't that different. Score wasn't unhealthy, right, but it wasn't like completely out of the realm of Yeah, and it also was a

healthy sort of developmental track. But when you're trying to go from zero to five hundred in ten days, this is my point, this is the point I'm trying to

make that is unhealthy. You know, like, let's say you have intense social anxiety and then you go to a boot camp with the hope because they're pitching it this way, then ten D is not only will you overcome your soci anxiety, which quite frankly, i'd be happy with if I intes social I'd just be happy to not have social anxiety after I mean, that'd be a I mean, of course, yeah, just even if you take the edge off three years of counseling, most people don't have cured

of that, I hear you. But not only that, but they're saying in ten d' is you're gonna not have social anxiety. Plus you're gonna be casanova. Oh my gosh. That sets up these horrible expectations. It sets some horrible expectations, and then, of course the problem then becomes that nobody can hit them. And then the person who's running that particular system or boot camp has to then say, well,

it's your fault. You didn't apply it, yeah, exactly, and then you and then you end up compounding the problem, which is wow, the only solution proffered out there, I can't even do it when really it's it's not possible to be done in that short of a period of time. And so when we people will come to us with

that similar concern, which I think is very reasonable. And the answer is, look, before you come to the program, you should do the prep when we have tons of prep, and then after the program, you're gonna have a couple of years of work to do, but you're going to have guidance and you're going to have resources, but you're not good. The week long program, for example, at Art of Charm, is not the whole experience. The week long part of the experience is a week long residential in

LA but it's not the whole program. The whole program includes the three, four, five, six months of prep and the following couple years where you're applying everything and making sure that you can do it without thinking about it consciously, and you're drilling and you're running all the follow up. You're going to make a leap in the week, but you're not going to fix anything in a week. It's not possible. And anybody who tells you that it is

is lying. And the problem is it becomes a race to the bottom because I remember telling a lot of perspective art of charm clients, well, look, you know you're not going to fix it in a week. You're gonna have work to do. And occasionally we would lose a sale, and this has an happened a long time, but we

would lose a sale. And years ago it would happen even more when everybody and their uncle was teaching you know, pick up artists and dating, and they go, well, this person said I will get this far in a week, and I'm thinking, yeah, you really think they just have better resources than us, or you think they might be lying. And then of course when I follow up afterwards because I want to know the answer. If they're really teaching something that's that much better, I want to know about it,

then they'll go, Nah, this whole thing's a con. Don't ever call me again. And I'm thinking, well, no, not, this whole thing's a con. You got conned because you wanted quick results, and now you're pissed off and you're lumping everyone together, which is one of the reasons we rebranded, because we were just like, look, this is lame. We're dealing with this bottom cruft of people that don't understand

that you can't make change happen overnight. And I was much more interested in talking with like you said, Angela Duckworth and doctor Carrol Dweck and Sam Harris and you know Bill Ny the science guy, than I was talking with like life coach number eleven thousand, who wrote an ebook with revolutionary new insights. You know, I just couldn't handle it anymore. I wanted to run my head through

a while. They have the same pseudoscience background, right. The one person is the only person who they've invented the system, and they're the only one who can teach it. And even if they invented the system in nineteen sixty eight, it hasn't changed since then. That's how science works. As you know, science changes all the time. Anybody who has learned from that person or the people who have developed it usually a huge team, not one guy. They can

all do it. The results can be replicated readily. It progresses every year or every you know, slowly over time. It doesn't stay the same. There's all kinds of things that pseudoscience doesn't have that you can use to identify boloney when you see it. Yeah, good, So let's transition to some of the science you've written about, because I want to cut the theme here today on reducing in social anxiety and increasing your you know, really your confidence.

I think those are huge, huge things for most people. First of all, I got to ask, I want to ask, have you ever suffered from social anxiety personally at all time? Man? Yeah? Absolutely. My entire childhood was basically me hiding from people because I thought if they look at me, they're going to know I'm not cool or somewhere something like that. That was essentially my entire childhood. You're a cool guy, and

it's almost like it's an interesting thing. You're probably like, you are cool, You're a cool person, but a lot of the stuff in your childhood got in the way of just being yourself. Like an insight that you probably didn't realize as a child is that the only way to be cool would actually be to stop worrying so much with your cool. Yeah. I mean, I wish I knew that and could like readily have believed that when

I was younger, And you're absolutely right. The problem was as a kid was that I was so worried about what I had to add to my personality in order to be cool or whatever that I forgot that it or I forgot never knew that being cool and comfortable in your own skin is about the subtractive process. Getting rid of all those little insecurities that make you insecure is the key, not adding things to your personality that

will make you seem cooler. That's exactly That's exactly what it is, and it seems so simple, and yet we don't realize that. Most of us don't realize that when we're teenagers. Of course not, yeah, of course not. We're wired. We're wired to a certain developmental window to care so much what people think of us. I mean, that's actually built into our DNA. Oh yeah, okay, So you've written how can I start a conversation with anyone? And let's couple that with how can you enter a room so

people take notice? So how do you combine those two things? Well, starting a conversation with an Are you looking at specific articles right now or something? So I went through your archive and those are two interesting articles you've written, and I'm wondering, you know, sort of how you like? Let's talk about that initial you have social anxiety you walk

into a room. Can you give some tips that you've learned on you know, starting a conversation with anyone, but also not feeling I think I feel like the second question also is related to like the idea of like how not to hide you know what I mean? Yeah, I agree, and I I can definitely talk about this Rather than going into the mechanics of conversation. I think what might be even better is the yeah, is the how to enter a room? And I'll tell you why.

So the mechanics of entering a room actually are more important than the things that you say. And the way that I can sort of prove this is the following.

If you if you go to the mall, or you're walking down the street or something along those lines, you'll notice that whenever somebody attractive walks by, you take note, or when somebody threatening walks by, you label that, when somebody who's grossly overweight or really thin or tall or short, whenever anybody's around you, you're registering these little judgments subconsciously. A lot of people are yeah, are you looking in

the mirror personally? But I'm saying, you know, when we look in the mirror, you know, we of course we judge, we judge everything. Yeah, And we do that naturally, We're evolved to do that. So I I say that because a lot of people say things like, well, I'm not judge, and it's like, look, this is evolution. You don't have to apologize for your brain trying to protect you or something along those lines. So I just want to be

very clear there. And what we see then in the issues that people come out with are that they know that these judgments may or may not be accurate, but theyre are first impression of people nonetheless. And if that is the case for other people, pass for us, passing other people and things like that, and looking at other folks that we see, then we know that they're doing the same thing to us when they see us at first.

So what that means and the problem or the benefits, the opportunity that's here is that we now know that we can actually create or tailor in some way our first impression nonverbally, because our first impression on others is made nonverbally, and the way that we do that is by managing our body language. Oh big surprise here, right. So a lot of people worry so much about what to say that they forget that it's about how people judge you at first, and so it's easy to say, well, great,

it's my nonverbal communication. So what I'm gonna do is make sure that I have great nonverbal communication every time I walk into a room okay, cool, or next time I go to this networking event or next time I go to work. So what they do is they go, great, all right, I'm gonna stand up straight, I'm gonna take up space, and they do this weird thing where they take up like way too much space when they're sitting down, they stand up way tall and they're looking superman a sure.

Even if they get the body language right, then once they get into conversations with people, they start to realize like, oh, I guess I can't really I guess I can't really micromanage all my nonverbal communication while actually staying present in a conversation. And so you end up going back to your default, you know, hunched over computer mode or whatever, and you end up with all these different problems of physiology that you can't micromanage and also stay present in

the conversation that you're having. So what that means is we have to elegate nonverbal communication to the level of habit or it's just not gonna work. Do you follow me so far? Oh? Absolutely, I follow you? Okay, great. So what we want to do is we want to stand up wherever you are right now. I guess, unless you're driving, if you stand up straight, chin up, chest out, shoulders back, and don't exaggerate or you'll look you know,

you'll look ridiculous. This is open, positive, nonverbal communication. It makes you look friendly, it makes you look confident, put a smile on your face. That's the position we want to naturally have, you know, your arms down to your sides, not folded across your chest. This is open, confident, positive body language. Now, if we want to look like this every time we walk into a room, a great idea would be to do this every time you're about to go through a doorway. And this is why we call

this doorway drill at art of charm. So if I'm walking through a doorway and I straighten up and reset to this position, that after a month or two, we're gonna end up developing a habit of doing this all the time and we won't have to think about it anymore. Problem, of course, is you're gonna hear this. You're gonna walk through a doorway and you're gonna go, I already forgot about.

This isn't gonna work for me. So what I highly recommend you do is you go and you grab a stack of post it notes, especially like the lime green or hot pink ones that you can really see, and stick them up in doorways that you pass through all the time every day, like your own doorway, your office doorway, the bathroom doorway, the doorway to your studio or your lab, wherever you are. And when you see those at eye level in the doorframe, not on the door, in the doorframe,

your brain will go, what the heck is that? Oh? Right? Doorway? Drill, stand up straight, reset to that positive, open, confident physiology, and if you do this for long enough, you're going to realize that this has now been delegated, relegated to the level of habit. This is a very positive thing because now that you've got that open, positive, confident body language, other people are judging you as such when they see you, usually when you walk through the doorway to enter the

room that they're in. So when people see you, we also know that when people see you and they make those judgments, that informs the way that they treat you, and that's very powerful because they start treating you as such right, open, positive, and confident. Well, what happens as well is when they treat you that way, what we also know, and this is again hopefully backed up by the science that you're exploring here, we change the way that we behave according to the way that we're treated,

at least in certain respects, most of us do. So if we're being treated as open, positive, confident, friendly, then we will start to change into slowly over time, a person who embodies those characteristics generally speaking. And so this is a very powerful drill because by changing your physiology, we change the way that people think about us, which then in turn changes the way we think about ourselves.

So not only does it change your body language and help you look more friendly and start conversations, it actually changes the way that you start to look at yourself and the way that you start to see yourself. Now, of course, if you have some underlying trauma or emotional issue, it's not going to overcome that. You might still want to look into therapy, but it's definitely going to help the way that you look at yourself and you're not gonna have to think of some clever thing to say

every time you walk into a room. Yeah, this is this is This approach is really interesting. I'm thinking about like for me personally, like I find if you kind of I enter with an attitude of common humanity, that's the best approach for me personally of like you know, like you said, like just not thinking about it can thinking about So the key here is to practice in a way where it becomes a habit so that that doesn't take up cognitive resources. Is that yeah? Yeah, great,

that's funny. I keep forgetting I'm talking to you. Yeah, it frees up cognitive resources because otherwise, if you are using those cognitive resources to think about like I better stand up straight. It's very You need so many and I'm gonna use computer terms here because I'm not a scientist like you. You need so much bandwidth and bits or bites to really be like open, positive, confident, body language, look relaxed. Wait what did Scott just say? Oh crap,

let me focus onbody's saying. Oh shoot, I'm hunching over now. You know that's what's going on in my head and that's a problem. Right, So if I can delegate this to the unconscious of the subconscious. I don't have to worry about it anymore. I can just focus on what you're saying, and I don't have to think about oh am, I taking up too much space, so I'm not taking up enough space. Maybe it don't look confident. Crap I lost track of what he was saying again, Right, that's

a problem, Jordan. In your training, do you encourage people to enhance who you know, who they are, like their traits in addition to learning general principles, like is there a mix of domain general principles as well as domain specific in a way. Well, I'm not totally sure what that distinction means, but I will try to clarify what we do with examples, and you can tell me whether or not we're doing it in the way that you think. So at art of charm, we focus on what we

call this subtractive process. So the additive process would be like, hey, think of a cool story about why you move to la Hey wear a light up hat? Hey where? And that's what these pickup guys were doing, the guys we were talking about before, Right, you need to wear something cool so people notice you act high step that is so that people think your high status, you know, that kind of stuff I kind of consider a little bit rubbish.

So when they're always telling you to do that kind of thing, I think that the message gets lost in the medium. And so we focus on what we call the subtractive process at art of Charm, and what that is is it's like, oh, okay, you're doing a lot of people pleasing, why is that happening? Well, you know the way I was raised, this, that and the other thing, or I was divorced and that affected me in this way.

To all right, let's identify that and then maybe we can work on that, or you can work on that with your therapist post boot camp, because that is causing all kinds of behavioral stuff. That's causing you to try too hard in your personal relationships, which is making people not like you, which makes you try harder, which makes them not like you even more, and you're poisoning all

of your relationships. And people are like, oh my gosh, right, we're subtracting that because you can add all the bells and whistles on that kind of personality that you want, but the underlying issue that's destroying all the relationships is still there. Yeah, that's fascinating and that's very consistent what we were talking about earlier when you were trying to be you, when you felt like you weren't cool as a kid. Yeah, that's interesting, and i'm you know, relating

to what I said. Yeah, I think that does relate in a way, because I'm asking about this delicate balance between authenticity as well as going towards who you want to become but not who you currently are. And it's I feel like it's a constant balancing act. You know, there's some aspects of ourselves that we don't really want to be authentic about, right, but because we want to personally grow and develop out of that. So I was just asking, you know, how you do that balance to

that delicate balancing act with folks. Yeah, it's tough. I mean it's very it's very very tough. But if you have negative personality traits, those are bad things. I would consider that to be like the turd, right. The individual elements, like if you're destroying your own life because you want to help other people so that they like you. Yeah, Like you keep loaning friends money and they keep taking advantage of you, but you want them to like you,

so you keep doing it. That's a problem. Yeah, it doesn't matter or that you now drive a cool car, that you have a cool origin story like these other sort of life coachy type social coaches are training you. It doesn't matter. You're just polishing the turd, right, that is your current level of social fluency. And that's a

huge problem. And so you really do have to dig down to the hard issues, because the tough issues are that's what's really causing the problems, and that's what most people are just simply not willing or not qualified to go dig down and do. They just don't want to, and there's good reason for that. It's scary, you know.

If you go in and you're like, I'm gonna learn how to talk about all this cool stuff and have all this cool new body language, well that's great, but very few people are really excited to come and rip open you know. And I'm not saying we're going to rip open childhood trum, but that's a bad idea and

a job for a therapist, a real therapist. But what I'm saying is nobody's really excited to come in and drill body language for twenty hours over two days and be videotaped looking in you know, not their best, but it's the work that needs to get done. Yeah, I'm kind of skirting around something and because I'm having trouble

articulating it. But it seems like some of the like coolest people I know are those who don't cultivate, don't intentionally try to cultivate what like most people think is cool.

They just like enhance their own quirks. Like I think of like, you know, I think of like Bob Dylan or something like he's not like in he never went through a point where he was like practicing how to stand straight, or he just you know, and he's not a good singer, yet he somehow is going down the history as one of the best musicians of all time. So there's something And oh you know what this does

relate to, Jordan. It relates to an article you wrote on how the secret success is being a contra addiction.

And I think that relates to this because I think there was a point there you made it where you referenced Scott Adams and the talent stack, you know, and the talents it's not about learning how to be someone else or learning how to be cool in some sort of general way seems more about how can we kind of take all these unique best aspects of yourself and the contradictions and kind of combine them in unique ways

right precisely. And you can't do that without the subtractive process, right, because if you're busy trying to add all these layers on and everybody in the whole class is adding all the same stuff on, well, you're hiding the authentic version of yourself and that's just not going to work long term. And to go back to a guy like Dylan actually spend thousands of hours performing, right, it's just that he probably didn't have to go I need to stand up

straight when I walk through doorways that. But he had a different process, a different subtractive process that I think we can all agree it would be impossible for most of us to replicate if we even wanted to. There are millions of musicians right now who would love to replicate Bob Dylan's performance, and it's impossible. And those who try don't. They come across as phony, of course, and

it's just not where anybody wants to be. And so you end up with these different problems that you cannot correct very easy the more layers that you add on, because you're adding to you're not even sure who you are at a certain point in time. Oh, can you unpack that little more? That's a very interesting statement. Yeah.

I mean, if you spend so much time trying to be liked by others or trying to get by with others by adding layers to your personality, by telling cool stories that are fake, by buying things that you don't want to impress other people, right, that type of and beyond that, of course, you're going to end up in relationships and with friends that you don't really want in order to be a certain kind of person that you

think is desirable. And then that's going to dictate the job that you get, and it's going to dictate the women that you date if you're a guy, or the men that you date if you're a woman. It's going to dictate the clubs that you go to, the restaurants you go to, the hobbies that you indulge in. And then after a while you might think like, Wow, I'm really miserable and yet I have everything. And the answer is, because you have everything that somebody else wants, you don't

have anything that you want. Yeah, I mean, I'm thinking of this as the concept and humanistics they coology, you know, alienation from self or disintegration that Young talked about. The more that you care what other people think of you and you go towards that, or the more and more you alienate yourself from your own self, and that leads to all sorts of disorders. You know, that splitting process

is very unhealthy. So yeah, I absolutely agree. And what you just said also releads to start Okay, Rodin, is it wrong to outgrow your friends? You know? Would you say that if you have certain friends where you realize that you're not really being your most authentic best self with that, it's okay to outgrow them. Yeah? I think so. I think it's very natural to outgrow friends. And here's the thing. This doesn't mean you have to ditch all of your friends. A lot of people are like, Okay,

I can't hang out with any emailed friends. It's not what it means. You're allowed to outgrow people in certain areas and you're allowed to grow into other folks. But it doesn't mean that you should throw away a childhood friend because they're not doing exactly what you want anymore.

There's a lot of things that you can take from friends, or value that you can take from friends that it doesn't mean that you have to hang out twenty for seven and so I think the only time you should stop hanging out with somebody or spending time with them is if they're not trying to grow in their own way. They don't have to grow the same direction as you, but they should be growing at all times just like

you should. Or if they've got something where they are actually taking away from you, like they constantly call you to complain and only to complain, or they borrow money from you and they don't return it, or they've got some sort of other problem that is dragging you down, or like they're an energy vampire. You don't want that in your life. But if somebody's just like really into art and you're really into sports, you can hang out with them less. But it doesn't mean they're not a

good friend. Does that make sense? Do you see the sort of the distinction here that's really important. I think a lot of people when they go on these self development journeys, they like only hang out with other self development people or people are at the level they want to be at, and they find themselves very isolated, and I think it's unhealthy. That is unhealthy. I like that. Yeah,

it's an important thing to encourage people. People that they don't have to have friends who are exactly like them or even have the same opinions. I mean, you don't even have them. You don't have them, Mary Solon, who agrees with everything that you agree with. You know, that's not the point. But as long as you're both helping each other grow, then that's very beneficial. So I'm right on board with that. Jordan, thank you so much. I'm so glad we I got a chance, you know, for

you to finally be on this podcast. Is there anything you'd like to add? You know, I would love it if people who are listening to this podcast would check out the Art of Charm podcast because you're already listening to a podcast and clearly we're into the same stuff. Oh,

you know, sure, so I would love that. And you know, at the Art of if you don't know where to start, because I've got eight hundred and twenty eight episodes or eight hundred and twenty nine is of today, go to the Art of Charm dot com, slash Best, or just search for us in the Apple Podcast or wherever we've got some great stuff with Neil Degras, Tyson, Shaquille O'Neil, Mike Rowe, Peter diamandis Tony Hawk. I mean, there's scientists,

there's athletes, there's all kinds of great people. Thanks Jordan, thank you, what the best to you. Likewise, take Karen, talk to you soon. Thank you so much for listening to The Psychology Podcast with Doctor Scott Barry Kaufman. I hope you found this episode just as thought provoking as I did. If something you heard today stimulated you in some way, I encourage you to join in the discussion at the Psychology Podcast dot com. That's the Psychology Podcast dot com.