I'll get our team. Welcome to another installment of the Bloody You Project with Bloody David Gillespian, Bloody, Tiffany and Cook is not here. She's on sabbatical and do you know where she is?
D no idea?
She's in India, all right? What she got exactly? What is she doing there? Well, she's gone for a bit of sight seeing. She's gone with a group. She's staying with a bunch of I should have paid more attention.
You've got no idea what she's doing.
No, no, no, no, She's spending some time, like a retreat. And I know that. I saw a podcast podcast at Post today. She just finished spending I think two nights in a monastery or something, and so she's just out and about seeing another very different part of the world. And if her reports or anything to go by, she seems to be enjoying it. But she'll be back next time, so you can you can ask her about India. But yeah, so that's where have you ever been? Have you ever been there?
Oh? Only very briefly as part of a business thing I did. I was there for maybe two or three days in maybe Delhi. I'm thinking, so, No, I haven't. I haven't been to India.
Well you have, but you really didn't say anything.
No. No.
I went to Fiji last year four eighten hours because I had to do a gig and I literally got in, slept, got up. I wasn't named an Ada. Now it's like, but there, Yeah, I would have been. Actually I got in it like yeah, probably sixteen hours or something to do a forty five minute keynote.
The Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.
Hardly, hardly I can I.
Can top that one. So I used to commute regularly to San Francisco when I was doing my tech startup days. So by I commute, I mean I would fly there every fortnight, spent a fortnight there, a fortnight back here. There was one time I had to come back to Brisbane for a wedding on a Saturday night and then be back the following morning. So I think I was actually in town maybe less than ten hours between flights back from the US, and each flight is a twelve hour flight, so that was a bit hectic.
I think it's it's more, isn't. It's like that's if you go to even that. I think it's fourteen.
Yeah, I'm probably measuring a bit from Sydney to San Francisco, which was the bit where I got to sleep.
So yeah, yeah, well you're up the pointy end, right, so you get quicker than the rest of you.
Oh that's right, Yeah, that's exactly right. I've talked to you about that analogy with the education system at some time in the past, haven't I, which is it's all like us all being on a plane and the plane gets to London at the same time, but some of us pay a lot more for our seats and have a nicer ride, but at the end of the day, we still all get to London at the same time.
Oh yeah, I like, I'm not posh at it. Well, clearly I'm not posh, but I if I fly internationally in my old age, I tend to fly business if I can. I'm not trying to sound like a snob. I'd rather I did a gig in Ireland a few years ago and I've never been there till this gig, and they and they're like it was going to cost them too much, and I said, fly me business and put me up somewhere nice and then don't pay me
for the gig. And they're like, Okay, So I got a free trip to Ireland and went business and my mum's mum was born in Ireland, so it was just like a free little holiday. But have you been to Ireland?
Yeah? Once again, very briefly, to inspect a software facility. So I've seen an airport in the inside of an office building.
Wow, you must have done a lot of travel. I bet you're glad those days are over.
Very glad. Yes, it was a big reason why I stopped doing that.
Now, of course, we are not a travel show.
We aren't.
No, we're not. You wrote a You wrote an article which I applauded on LinkedIn, and I'm sure it's up on your website or I'm sure it's somewhere else. But if you're not on LinkedIn, everyone get on LinkedIn. And if you don't follow David Gillespie, follow him. He wrote an article yesterday called Beyond First Impressions, Escaping the Psychopaths Charm and I thought, now, as much as you don't want to hear this, it kind of intersects with my stuff a little bit, not the psychopathy stuff, but like
reading people and first impressions and all of that. But yeah, I found it fascinating and like you were talking essentially about what you see up front is often not what you get further down the line.
It came from, you know, just I look around all the time for interesting bits and pieces, and one that sort of came through my feed, if you like, yesterday warning because I'm trying to put something out every day now just because keep me in practice. And yesterday morning, there was this experiment out of the Duke University in the United States. And look, you'd be familiar with these kinds of experiments, you know, because you're in the area of psychology, and so there's a lot of BS experiments
done in psychology. But this one, this one struck me as a little bit interesting. This was one where they are What they did was they asked people to value sort of like a garage sale box of stuff. So they give people a box of stuff that was closed, and then they'd say, right open the box up and give us a value for the things that you find in the box. And then they do that and I think it was maybe five or ten boxes they'd do
that and ask them to value them. Now, of course, being a psychology experiment, there's a trick you know, there's a hidden trick. And the hidden trick here is that all the boxes have exactly the same value, but they don't tell them that. But the box are arranged differently. So in some of the boxes, the items at the top are much more valuable than the items at the bottom. So you might find a necklace or something at the top of one box, and you know, and someone's old
shoes or something at the bottom of it. But the value of the boxes was all approximately equal. But what they found is that people always valued the boxes where they found the more valuable things first much much higher than where they found the more valuable things last or in the middle. So and what they said was, Okay, this proves something that's been proven quite a bit in psychology,
which is that first impressions count a lot. So our first impression of something, and in this case it's the first impression of the box, is that this is a more valuable box because the first thing I saw was more valuable, and even if I eventually got to something that valuable in another box, my first impression had a lot more weight. And so I considered that other box where I found someone's old sneakers at the top to be less valuable than the one where I found the
gold chain at the top. And so this confirmed previous research, and that in itself is an interesting The twist in this research is that what they did was they got that cut of things, just like everyone else does. But then they said to the people, we'd like you to come back tomorrow, so don't give us a value now. So there was another group, a control group. Don't give us a value now. Go home, think about it, come back tomorrow and tell us what you think the value
of the boxes were. And what invariably happened is when people came back tomorrow and then gave their assessment of the value, they were much more likely to get it right. So they were much more likely to say, you know what, these boxes are all about the same value and that was the correct answer. So if you gave people time, if you gave them a night to sleep on it, if you like, and do whatever else, I mean, who knows. They might have googled things, done some valuations themselves, or whatever.
Whatever they did, it didn't matter. The point was when they came back twenty four hours later, they got the right answer. They'd had time to properly digest and so this was an interesting study because if you translate that into relationships or workplaces or anything else and start to think about the evolutionary reason why we operate on first impressions, that's to me, that's where it starts to become really interesting.
I always find it interesting when you ask the question why why would humans why would be environmentally involved in favor first impressions, because this is not something unique to people who do psychology studies. I mean, as you would know, this is everybody everything. All the time we judge something.
We do judge a book by its cover. We do make a snap judgment about whether we want to pick the book up and read it, whether we want to watch the television show, whether we even want to listen to Craig or his guest, you know, within the first few seconds of hearing about it. And the reason we do that is because our brains and bodies are optimized to save energy, and one of the most expensive things we can do is think. It is an absolute energy hog.
Twenty five percent of the energy we can use is spent thinking, and that's for an organ that occupies about two percent of our body. So it's a massive energy hog. Now, in these days of food everywhere, all the time, far too much of it. We probably don't think too much about energy scarcity, but if you needed to find the food to supply that twenty five percent, and food was really scarce, as it is in any hunter gatherers society.
I don't know if you do. You watch that show alone that's been on SBS where the people you know in the wilderness, you know, think of those people and how keen they would be to waste energy When you're getting one fish to eat, if you're lucky every three days, you're not wasting energy on anything. And our bodies are optimized that way, our brains are optimized that way. So we take lots of shortcuts. And one of the shortcuts we take is first impressions. So we figure and evolutionary
has told us. Evolution has told us that most of the time we're right. More often than not, if we make a judgment in the first few seconds, we're right. And that was the rule that was being applied by these people when they looked at these boxes in this garage sale experiment. The first thing they saw was valuable.
First impression. This is a valuable box. No more thinking required, look at all that energy I've saved as But if you force people to expend the energy, if you force people to actually think about it, you get a different result. Now why I say this is important with psychopaths is psychopaths rely on us making judgments on first impressions because everything about a psychopath is fake. They lie about everything, and they spend their entire lives working very hard on
a first impression that sells you. Most people when they first encounter a psychopath will tell you that they are the most charming, fabulous person they have ever met. And that's because they are very very good at reflecting back to you exactly what you want to say. They are masters of first impressions. And if we only operate on a first impression, we will get sucked in every single time,
both as an employer of psychopaths and in relationships. Yes, operate on a first impression and you are in danger. So I guess the tip out of all of this is don't take the time, get the you know, the extra night into the process, get the twenty four hours, get the backup research. You can and will probably make the correct decision if you put the first oppression aside and say, you know what, I'm not making a decision
about this until tomorrow. Give your brain time to digest everything it saw, if it's if it's a job application, give give yourself time to follow through a process of checking the information you're being given, because it's too late after you've ended over the job or entered into a relationship with this person. So that's the lesson out of this, I think, which is, yes, we do work on first impressions,
but there's a really easy cure time. Give yourself time to spend that cognitive power, to spend that thinking on thinking about whether your first impression is right. So had you asked those people with the garage boxes on the first day when they did it, which is the most vailable box, they would have said what everyone else said, which is the one I saw with the most valuable
thing at the top. But don't ask them, don't ask, don't get them to make a decision there, and then ask them the next day and you get a very different answer. And that's a rule we should be thinking about in our whole lives, which is give yourself time when encountering new information to decide whether your first impression is correct.
Yeah, one of the things I advise people is to trust slowly and respect slowly. And I don't say that because I want them to think everybody is a potential enemy or but I just say, you know, it's like, how many people do you meet where initially they're exactly what you said, charismatic, charming, affable, likable, you know, they're articulate and all of that, and then down the track they're nothing like that, or their energy is totally different.
And it's quite a significant percentage of people, even people who say to me, when we first started going out, it was like this, and then it's like three months past, and then this curtain got drawn back onto the actual person and it had been you know, a fucking charade for three months or six months or or one week sometimes for example. But did you ever read that book Blink by Malcolm glad Well.
Yeah, I did, Yes, the whole book about first impressions. Yeah. Yeah, So this is that part of this research is really old news, like that book and lots of others, plenty of plenty of research that confirms, yes, we do, in fact work on first impressions. So as if anyone needed that proof to them, there's a mountain of research that proves we do. The interesting part of this is how
do you fix that? And you know it's maybe a statement of the bleeding obvious, will give yourself time, but this is this experiment actually proves it.
So when when, for want of a better term, when are snap judgments? Okay? Because we don't always have the luxury of time, right.
So when you're on I guess, when you're starving to death on a loan, then snap judgments are a pretty good idea because you want to conserve mean energy and the cost of expending energy thinking about things is real and maybe more than the cost of getting it wrong if you make a snap judgment. So, and you might say, well, where's your evidence for that, Gillespie, Well, the evidence is
evolution favors it. We wouldn't have gotten to this point with this built in facility if evolution didn't say people who tend to make snap judgments tend to survive better than people who don't.
Yes, yes, well yeah, and I mean there are a lot of instances where we have to especially not so much in twenty twenty four, but still, I guess sociologically in a way. But like evolutionarily, there were so many dangerous situations and so many predators, and so much inherent risk in the world that we, not me and you, but live in that you had to be constantly vigilant and constantly or at least regularly making decisions quickly because it was a lot more life and death back then.
It's how we developed. I mean, you know, no, you don't like me going off topic on these things, but it's interesting how we developed. The thing that is essentially a sixth sense about what other humans are speak, are thinking, is using that exact capacity. So in our evolutionary environment, there's the quick and the dead, and the way to be the quickest is that if somebody else's did you know, there's that old joke about you know, running from a bear.
I don't have to run faster than the bear. I just have to run faster than you and me.
Yeah, that's right.
And so that applies in an evolutionary sense, which is that we developed to facility to communicate with each other which did not involve having to think about communicating with
each other about danger. So we develop the ability to read each other's movements, expressions, even tone in the voice, and understand danger without the word danger actually being said, and so that is done using a facility in human brain which is called mirror neurons, which essentially we have neurons that are mimicking the things that they see in others at high speed sublight speeds, well not sublight, but
light speed mirroring. So even before we have time to even think about what's happening, our brain has already figured out what's happening from what it's read from other humans and the way they're interacting. Now, when you apply that in modern society, what that means is that we can read each other's more oceans on autopilot, we feel. It's almost like we are directly connected to another person. When we see another person experience pain, we experience it too.
We feel it, and we call that empathy. But it's actually a really powerful mechanism that was evolved to protect us from danger, which is we know about something being dangerous before we can even think about it being dangerous, before even the person that it's happening to can think about it being dangerous. It's all happening in milliseconds and protecting us, and we're running and then five minutes later, as we're running along we start to think about what
exactly am I running from. I don't know, but my brain said run. And that facility is the thing that psychopaths lack. By the way, they cannot they cannot read another person's emotions on autopilot like that. They actually have to do the thinking bit, and that delay while they
think about what we're feeling is often detectable. So one of the surest ways to detect whether a person in a group of people may be a psychopath is watch how the group reacts to something traumatic happening, either on television or in a movie or in real life, or someone telling a story about something traumatic in their life. Don't look at them, look at the people listening and see how they react to that event. Most people will react automatically and in almost at light speed in terms
of real time reaction. Some people will have to think about it, and that delay will be noticeable.
Yeah, do you know how I know I'm not a sociopath, But a sociopath would say what I just said, by the way, exactly what a sociopath would say. But I cry about four times a day when I watched emotional shit on Instagram, like some soldier coming home and his kids running up to him or her. I'm like, oh my god, I've.
Got some bad news for you there, Craig.
Don't tell me they're not real.
No, No, I don't know. Maybe they are, maybe they're not. I don't know. But your reaction is interesting, girl, So blubbering like a baby when something emotional is presented to you.
So there's a chance I'm still a psychopath.
That's a possibility, is actually an indication of a failure of the higher order control mechanisms of an emotional response.
So psychopathe shut up, Gillespie, shut up.
It's not that psychopaths can't experience emotions, it's that they can't experience the higher order control of emotions. So one of the things that quite a few studies have identified about psychopaths is that they do feel the four basic emotions, one of which is sadness really really powerfully, and so will inexplicably cry in response to something emotional being projected when others around them don't find them, you know that intense Wow.
Okay, so you've just cleared that up for me. Now.
I'm not trying to diagnose or anything there, Craig. I'm just I'm just saying that it's not. It's not the get out of jail free card you think it might be.
Oh, that's a pity. That's you know, there is there is a term in psychology for what you're talking about, which is understanding how other people think, which is called theory of mind. Yes, that's the that's the capacity to understand someone else's version.
It's a bit different theory of mind.
It's a bit different, but it's kind of understand. It's having an insight into someone else's kind of Well.
Theory of mind is important because it, as far as we know, we're the only species capable of doing it,
which is understanding what another person's perspective is. So, you know, there's famous examples of the chimpanzee experiments where they taught chimpanzees to talk endlessly, you know, taught them whole alphabets et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and they comprehensively failed theory of mind every single time because never once, even after they could talk essentially by pointing to symbols and all that sort of thing, never once did they ask
the human what they thought or how they reacted. Because to them the concept that the human was thinking too was an impossible concept. And that's what theory of mind is is putting yourself in somebody else's shoes. Now, the interesting thing about theory of mind is psychopaths are really really good at it. They have to spend their life doing it because the rest of us are doing it automatically on empathy autopilot, where our mirror and your owns
are firing. We understand what someone's thinking without even thinking about it, whereas a psychopath actually has to think about it and then decide to imitate that behavior. So theory of mind is something that psychopaths are really really excellent at, and that's possibly why I think the theory of mind study suggests that most people can't do theory of mind under the age of about three, I think is about
the number. So that when they've done the studies on very young children, they you know that, you know, the sorts of studies they do where they they ask them to think, you know, is the lully under you know, under that hat or under that one, and what would the person have been thinking and all that sort of thing. That doesn't work on a young child. But a young child is capable of empathy, very very capable of empathy. But they're not capable of theory of mind.
And I think that's the thing is they can understand how other people think. They just don't care.
That's right. They have a very good understanding of how you think, but the only purpose in understanding that is to manipulate you.
Well, that actually gives them a strategic and sociological advantage really, that they can understand how you think. You know. That's have you in all your businesses? I guess over the years you've employed a fair few people or no, like yourself, have you higher? What's your I've employed about five hundred people, not anymore, but over the years, And did you fuck it up? Did you employed people and then three months?
Absolutely?
Oh?
Absolutely. I think anyone who says to you, no, I've always perfectly employed, you know, I've never ever made a mistake in someone I've employed is lying, is absolutely lying. Because the reality is we do go with first impressions. We do believe what is put on a resume. We do believe what people tell us because all humans default to believing. Remember we've talked before about this tit for
tap thing, which is in human interaction. The thing that holds us together as a community is that we default to believing what other humans tell us. And the only time we don't believe what they tell us is when they prove that they are a liar. And even then, if they then seek forgiveness and then be honest, we'll give them another chance. So our default is to believe what people tell us, and unfortunately that works against us.
That plus the first impression in a job interview means we've got a very low probability of detecting a psychopath. But the cure to that is give yourself time and check their references.
Exactly. I made a fair few mistakes, I'll be honest. But also the other thing too is you know, so it's almost like the distance between person and persona like in the interview you get the you know, you get the show, the Craig Show or whatever it is. You know, it's like, well, this is a person you're trying to be. Yeah, this is a person trying to be what they think they need to be to get over the line in this context, yep, yeah yeah.
So but unlike when you're dating someone, so the same thing applies when you're potentially seeking out a mate. You know, if you're on a first date with someone, it's a job interview, but it's less formal, and it's you've got less backup should you choose to use it in that when you're employing someone, even though a lot of people think, you know what, my judgment is fabulous, I love this person. They are terrific. I'm not going to check anything, and
that's what a lot of people do. But they could check it if they wanted to. They could verify the references. They could talk to people who've worked for this person, which is what they should do. They could make sure they understand what every minute of this person's career look like, not just the bits they've chosen to highlight on their resume. They could do that. But when you're potentially interviewing a partner,
let's say you don't have all of that. All you've got is the facade, and you've got to give yourself time if you cannot decide based on the first impressions of that facade, this person is ideal for me, because the more ideal they are, honestly, the more likely they are a psychopath, because that's what psychopaths are good at. Doing which is giving you the mask you want to see.
So the great news is everyone, if you think you've found your dream partner, you've probably found a psychopath.
So don't sign your house over to them.
Yourself sometime and do a prenup whatever that is. We'll say goodbye fair but mate as always entertaining and we appreciate you.
Thanks mate, absolute pleasure, see you, Greg