I got a team.
It's Stiff and David, It's me, Craig, Anthony, Harper's you project, it's you, It's us, It's the whole bloody vibe.
Tiv Hi, Why Harps?
How are you?
Well?
We've had quite the production before the actual production. And you were out there just punching on with your cat and nothing but love coming from your gob Who won?
You were the cat?
It was a draw? It was a draw.
What was that little fucker doing?
So?
I've got a box of about a dog toilet paper, which is like, who gives a crap? But this one helps dogs, right, And so it's rolls of toilet paper in a big box behind my door. And she got inside that box and was rummaging around. She does that because she knows.
I'm on a podcast.
So does she literally just do that for attention? Do you think yes?
Because she literally will start this stuff when she knows. I don't know whether she sees me put the headphones around my ears, but mischief always happens when a podcast is happening.
We're talking a good afternoon, mister Gillespie.
How's it going good?
Thank you? We're talking before we went live.
I'd like to just revisit this a little bit, because we're talking about how cats can basically eat a can of cat food a day and line the sun and just be fat and lazy. But then when there's some kind of you know, enemy, real or pretend like, they'll kill that shit in zero point three of a second, like the.
Extremely fast reflexestremely fast, much faster than anything that's likely to kill them in the wild, like a snake. So, you know, Tip was saying that all those videos on YouTube of cats punching cobras in the head before the copper even knows what's happened, it's because in real life, you know, in the wild, evolution has equpped these animals to survive contact with things like snakes. And the way it's done it is given wiightening reflexes.
It's incredible.
And when you see these, I don't know what an anxious cat looks like, but these motherfuckers look so laid back, like when the snake strikes, you know, and you just see the cat hit it four times before the snake's halfway across the range that he wants to be. That is imagine if you had those reflex you nine times world championship.
It feels like how I was the snake and my boxing trainer Bryce he was the cat right because I would just be staring. I would just be I'd be so ready, and next minute there'd be a fist through my face and I'd just still be standing there, like.
Ah, I didn't see that coming.
To what level do you reckon?
I mean, you're a fitness coach and you're also an athlete. To what extent do you think you can increase that kind of reaction time or reduce that kind of reaction time and increase your speed and your kind of situational awareness in that Because it seems like it's pretty genetic.
I reckon hugely.
But it comes down to systems in your brain that are beyond the conscious mind because I remember learning it, I remember observing myself in training, and you react. You begin to react to things, to movements that happened before the movements you're watching. So would I would start to weave a punch and throw back and go oh oh, I weave that I didn't even know it was coming. Because in your peripheral vision, you see someone's shoulder move or something happen with their with their hip or their
foot that tells your brain it's coming. And when that first started happening, I was like, oh, how did I know?
That's like that's like yeah, pattern recognition, right, and these kind of physical cues where you know, every time he punches me on, then he does this before the thing hits hits my nose, so and you might not even you probably can't even process that in real time.
So it's just you'll be glad to know. There's really interesting studies about this, so.
Of course you know about them.
It uses mirror mirror on your own networks. Yeah, and the study of being done in baseball players because there's a lot of money in baseball, I guess, And what they're trying to figure out is can you make someone a better hitter? So you've got about three hundred milliseconds between when a baseball leaves the pitcher's hand, a fastball leaves their hand and it's across the plate. So in that three hundred milliseconds, the hitter has got to decide
what to do, and they can't. They don't have enough time to make a decision that there's just not enough decision time three hundred second, so you can't make a conscious decision.
So that's the point. That's points three of.
A second right, only three of a second right. So so in order to do it, what they did is they studied if we just take people who have no training ortoever, you know, just college kids in a room and give them a fast ball, how how often will they hit it out of you know, however many tries, and then do the same thing with a professional ballplayer, and you'd expect the professional ballplayer it has much high percentage.
They connect with the ball approximately twice as often as the untrained person.
Wow.
But the interesting thing is they could get the untrained person there very very quickly, like a very very small number of sessions exposed to that high speed ball with the same pitcher, and they were getting very very close to the level that the professional pitcher would get there. And they surmised that what was actually going on was that there's a set of neurons in the brain call but mirror neur owns where which don't do anythinking at all.
It's an electric response to the environment. So it's just whatever is happening in the environment, it just mirrors that back into the brain and takes it as an input. And we use that. Interestingly, the reason I know about this is not because I'm a baseball fan, but because we use it in assessing whether or not someone is
a psychopath when we first meet them. So a lot of people report, particularly women who are much more attuned to this than men, that meeting a certain person gives them an uneasy feeling, and they put it down to women's intuition just to hunch whatever, whatever, And they're saying that what's actually going on there is that that mirror neuron circuit is firing so that they're seeing things that they don't see, things where if you ask them to sit down and describe what are they seeing, just like
at the baseball player, or just like with what Tiff described, describe exactly what told you what was about to happen, they would not be able to tell you.
Yes.
But the mirror network is picking up these little micro movements or expressions or whatever it is that tells them what is about to happen and makes them react without thinking. And that's what's going on in the studies that they've done on similar things with introductions to psychopaths, is you can tell within the first second or two that the
person is giving you the yck. Now, a lot of people dismiss that and say, ah, you know, I just you know, I must be you know, maybe didn't like his color, his tie or whatever, but you know, or just you know, maybe he just said the wrong thing or annoyed me, or I wasn't feeling good, whatever it is. But what the science seems to say is you should trust that, you should go with that if the person is giving you the yick straight away. I tried always be prepared to yeah, go ahead, no, go on, tiff.
Because my first reaction was to date them. After a bit of pattern recognition in my own life, I adjusted that reaction.
Why do you reckon? Why do you reckon? You did that?
Like?
What do you in therapy trying to learn harts?
But what do you think if you just had to have your best guess? Like why did you pick maniacs?
I think there was a few.
Right.
Here's the theory that I first came up with. I think because of my terror of emotional depth. My something in me recognized that there was no real depth or emotional vulnerability, so it felt safe. So that wasn't real. So the pretend like they're very charismatic and that's an easy story to believe.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, so maybe some tings like that out of psychobabble and into what's really going on.
Okay, here we go.
Okay, So psychopaths are extremely confident people because they don't believe that they're ever wrong about anything ever in their lives. So you imagine if you went through your entire life believing you could not be wrong about anything at any time. So that's the way they operate all the time, and
that projects as extreme confidence. And as a general rule, people find confidence attractive much more attractive than their physical appearance, like the average looking people, But if they're confident and average looking, they're more attractive.
I just think that works both ways, as in both genders. I feel like, perhaps biologically, dudes are more interested in appearance, at least for a period of their lifespan than you know, whether or not a.
Woman is confident.
I feel like some guys would actually be attracted to the opposite of that.
I don't know that you probably there's probably hundreds of psychopovel textbooks about that, I'd imagine, But the biochemistry is it works both ways. Yeah, right, So, and I don't know. Look, there are times when when testosterone is doing the thinking for you, I guess, and as you as you get older. I remember one of the primary functions of testosterone is
sex drive, So and your image. Remember that a boy that's just ended puberty has approximately, you know, four hundred times the testosterone they had before they entered puberty, and twice as much as they'll have when they're in their thirties. So you know, that could be doing the thing for you at that stage.
It's definitely not doing the thinking for me. I haven't seen any since the late nineties. Okay, every morning I look out the window, I'm like, fuck, not a drop to be seen, hoping.
For a delivery any day. Now where you can get.
To you probably fine, You'll probably find confidence very appealing then by now.
Well, I'm very attracted to you. Let's say that I have you heard of that book? He probably read that book. We may have spoken about once or twice, I'm not sure. Malcolm Gladwell's blink.
Blink, yeah, absolutely, yes, what a great book.
He kind of speaks to this a little bit, and I'm just going to have to change my earphones because it keeps telling me to change my earphones.
Because my batteries can't flat. So you too, carry on, you to carry on.
We were just say Harps.
Has gone to change his dying headphones.
Well you've just said it, so we don't need to.
Yeah, we'll just talk amongst ourselves. How's the cat going? Is it a lie?
Which she shot?
Shout out?
Now all right here? Oh he's finally back. God knows where he had to get those earphones from. But you have to go into the next county to get them or something.
Did I just ran some bloody target. I'll tell you what's a good thing. I'm very swift.
Yeah, right there.
Tiff thought them for me because she was mad at me because I never wore headphones. Then I thought I'd get fancy and where my bloody sony whatever they are, and they.
Just ran out of juice. They just they just ran out of juice.
So we were talking about Malcolm Gladwell and that book and that that capacity that we seem to have to be able to know something before we could seemingly logically figure it out.
Well, we're very very finely tuned with it when it comes to other humans. So because other humans can potentially kill us, and so we have to learn very very quickly, within seconds, is this someone I can trust or is this someone I can't trust? And so we have a very finely attuned capacity to do that. Our entire growing up lives from the very first second we see our mother's face. The mirror network is firing the entire time to assess what are the signs that another human is dangerous?
I've got a question.
Then I would like for the non psychologist to evaluate why I'm so dumb at it?
Then it's not that you're dumb at it, it's that you don't trust it.
Choose it?
Then I don't choose anything. Now why did I walk towards it instead of away from it?
All because you found the confidence attractive? Wow?
How old were you when this was happening? What age range was this?
Twenty twenties, twenties and thirties? And then I packed up my bat and ball and came home and didn't.
Go And when I'm going to buy two hundred animals over the next thirty years.
And that's me done? Yeah, pretty much, that's done. Yeah. Yeah. Wow.
We were talking before we came on about you probably don't want to talk about this but I'm interested in handball. So you're very heavily invested in handball. Your did you say two or three of your girls played at recently high level and you just came back or they just came back and you're from New Zealand give us a little bit of an insight into this. I know this is very random everyone, but I'm interested in it. I'm interested in it.
Is it European handball?
Is that the European handball? Yeah, it's the stuff that's played at the Olympics. So it's like water polo, but without the water, you know, so very very high speed indoor sport or another way to describe as like futsal, but play with your hands not your feet, and it's full contact, so you know, you can be full body, hard, hit contacted. And I think we talked about this last time when I was saying about that. Why I liked
what Tiff posted it about women boxing. It's the same in handball because they're playing a full contact sport on an indoor court at very high speed. And I love the effect that has on girls assert of and confidence. They have to be pretty confident to run at the line where they know someone's going to hit them, and it's it's a very highly skill sport. It's easy to get to a sort of conversational level with you know,
you pick a ball, you can shoot. People like it because unlike netball, for example, where only a couple of people ever get to score, anyone can score from anywhere. And it's all about, you know, tactics to move the defenses quickly as possible, move the ball, get it in the goal. Very very physical to sixty minute game and you're running from end to end on a forty meter court and in an average game there's going to be fifty to sixty goals scored, so you're running end to
end a lot. So yeah, I think it's a terrific sport. Obviously. I'm the manager of the Australian women's team and also the president of the biggest club in Australia, Brisbane Handball, and we just took two teams over to New Zealand to the club championships there they're once a year thing, and our women's team won and our men's team came second.
And the thing I really loved about our women's team winning is that five of the players and there are seven one court at any time, but there's usally about fourteen in a team because of all the running, you get exhausted, had to be all the time, so it's got rolling subs. And what I loved is that five of the players on that or from our under fifteen girls team, So damn yeah. Getting them to go out there and play against women and beat them I think was an incredible experience for them.
Do they I'm just interested as an xio scientist. Do they have you know, how structured is their training? Do they have strength and conditioning kind of coaches, Do they have rehab people, do they have physios?
I guess they have all of that at that level they have.
So a week of training in Australia at our club is to to our on court sessions which are pretty full on, full of lots of heavy duty cardio type stuff, plus of course skills and drills for ballwork, and then they have one session which is an hour in the gym and then an hour on court with specialist small groups strength and conditioning coaches. So and they're easily training more than any other is because here it's a micro sport. No one is no one does it here in Europe
it's a massive sport. Thirty million people play it. It's second only to soccer in terms of its audience, and even the level that we're out here would be mostly pathetic against European teams that that are training five or six times a week.
Would you be I mean, are you? I don't know, I don't mean you personally, But is is the sport interested in growing and expanding or just having fun and just doing what you do?
We know we want it massively to expand. I look, I think it's a terrific sport. My girls have played netball or lives softball, whatever you name it. They've they've pried everything. They got to a pretty high level with netball, but they're continuing on with this because I think the value particularly for girls. It's terrific sport for boys as well, but it's as with most sports with boys, it's all about how ard you can hit.
Yeah, you know, it's it, you know.
I find the women's version of the sport more pleasant to watch because the skills are more important rather than you know, you know, it's the same size call for boys and girls, and boys can just leap in the air nine meters out from the goal and shoot over the defense. And you know, that's that's power sport as opposed to women have to find a way through without being able to do that. So and these balls are being thrown, you know, shot at one hundred and forty
kilometers an hour. You know, to volunteer to be a goalie in that situation, it is a work of courage in itself.
What's the size of the ball compared.
To the size So the men play with a size three soccer ball and the women play with size two soccer ball.
That's what is that like?
Like?
Is a ladies one like the size of a softball? Like a softball?
No, no, no, no, no, it's bigger than that. So the men's size are probably about a half size imagine about half the size of a soccer ball, so imagine a small soccer ball, and the women's one is a little bit smaller on that, but not massively smaller.
What do you got that goofy smile on your face?
For?
What are you looking at?
I'm trying to look up a video so I can see it.
Can you chend you some videos?
I don't know what size a size three soccer ball?
Well, all balls you would know if because you're an expert in ball sports, all all ball sports work on a standard sizing system.
So yes, yep, yeah, yeah, she's that. She's wow.
And so.
What's your responsibility as kind of the president for Australia so to speak.
A manager? So yeah, they do the logistics of getting them all together and all that sort of thing, basically the same thing I do at the club, which is organizing logistics making it all happen.
And I guess you'd need a sponsorship. Be hard to get low profile sport. But if you're interested, if you're interested, anyone, hit David up. He'll at the very least have a chat to you and probably tell you about the frame rate that birds see at per minute or second, which she told me before the show.
Twelve hundred, twelve hundred per second, humans see at sixty How is.
That even possible? Twelve hundred per second?
Yeah, So if you imagine flying at sixty kilometers an hour between the branches of trees and leaves and so on, and not hitting any of it, you have to see things nice and slow. You have to say so to them. The experience is seeing the world in twenty times slow motion. So for them, it's easy. Hey, I'm just you know, it's like taking a walk flying at sixty kilo meters
an hour through the foliage. And that's why birds, when they're sitting on the road in front of you and you're approaching one hundred kilometers an hour, it takes forever to get off the road because to them, they've got forever they can see you. You're a long way away.
Well they see it twenty times quo wicked than Yeah, but perceptually slower, yes, yes, yes, it's like.
Moving in slow mode for them.
Yeah. Yeah, and they've got plenty of reaction time. And you know, lots of species have these, Like dogs, I think have a sense of smell that's approximately a thousand times more sensitive than humans. And it's just a matter of where evolution has redirected the brain's resources. What do you think human superpower is? Because we have.
One, well, mine's dancing.
I can't obviously, yes, the rest of humanity.
What is our superpower? Critical?
Is one thing?
Problem solving? Critical thing?
No?
No, no, it's no, no, it's a sense thing. What is the thing that humans do better than any other species on the planet?
Wow? Uh, drink beer to guess.
Something around like empathy with other other people's.
Going to she'sail. She's nailed it.
It's we've had this conversation TIF said dogs have empathy.
We've had this, well, look, I can't help her not understanding that her dog's are psychopaths. But in humans, I love them.
That's why I love my dog.
Our superpower is we've redirected and they think from our sense of smell, so we know some pass in our dim dark evolutionary history. We redirected from from we had a better sense of smell, and we've redirected some of the neuronal wiring there to to this business that we were talking about before, which is reading other humans. Our ability to sense the emotions and intentions of other humans is greater than any other animal. No other animal has
what we describe as empathy. But empathy is in fact tuning into the brain of another animal. It's being able to predict what that animal is thinking in real time is our superpower. No other animal can do that. So that's how we've used that sensory network that birds have got in their eyes, cats have got in their reflexes, we've got in our ability to judge the intentions of others.
I reckon there's a lot of people who are not very good at that. I think a lot of we're all.
Very good at it, but we have to learn to trust it.
Oh yeah, and I think a lot of people don't do it though, like a lot of people really don't think about how anyone else thinks.
There's an interesting set of studies on there's a suggestion that one way to tell that someone is a psychopath is that they are either tone deaf, color blind, or I don't mind bitter drinks, And all of those things have in common and InIB to finally differentiate. So, yeah, tone deaf means you can't properly differentiate the tones in music, colorblind means you can't properly differentiate the colors, and preferring bitter things means you can't properly differentiate whether something is
bitter or sweet. So those are all differentiation things that require a lot of neuronal processing power. And there's a theory that says because psychopaths have no empathy and they don't have any empathy, that part of that network that would have been secondered to producing empathy also doesn't work for the other things in their lives. So we've secondered our sense of taste, our sense of smell, our eyesight, et cetera into the empathy network, and the suggestion is
that it's impaired all throughout. So the same network is doing all of those things. And that's why you'll see studies if you go looking for it, where they'll say the way to tell a psychopath is they like black coffee, or they drink straight spirits or things like that.
Wow, that's I think you'd want to dive deep into that before you start thinking everyone who drinks black coffee that you're a sociopath or a psychopath. It's like there's all these color blind people now running around the house.
I wouldn't recognize. Recommend this is a diagnostic tool that you will find studies, and there is buy a chemistry to back it up. But it's so let's fage it as one of the things to pay attention to.
My God, TIF, do you like bitter drinks?
I just can't.
I just can't.
But how does David know all of this stuff about everything in the world.
That's why he's our he's our resident savant. He's a rain man. He's rain man in a bad suit. I mean, how can I say that's why we.
Get him on?
Well, I mean that like there, yeah, I don't know, I opened the door, but like understanding how other people think. In psychology it's called theory of mind. And you and I have both spoken about this, but yeah, there are a lot of people who are fucking terrible at understanding how other people think.
You know, and it's not it's not that so it's not listen to you, Yes it is, Yes, it is.
That's that it is. That's a conscious level decision about So if we put it into a more everyday term, right, if you're walking out into the street and the car is about to hit you, there's a there's an automated system that recognizes the signs that a car's are about to hit you and get your adrenaline pumping quickly gets you out of the way, quickly, before you've even had time to have a think about, oh, there's a car
about to hit me. What you're talking about is that second system, the bit that's a second or two down the line, that is consciously trying to make decisions on manual I'm talking about the fully automated system that happens within the first second. And I know you talked about Malcolm's book there blink, he talks about the first ten seconds. I think that's way too long. The first ten seconds. You know, we've thought an essay about it. It's not the first one second. It's one it's under a second.
It's the base four players having to make decisions about what to do with their bodies before the ball even leaves the pitcher's hand. Yeah, do you remember that Tiff said she knew what to do before the punch even began.
It's interesting because there's another idea or concept or construct or whatever you want to call it in psychology called the false consensus effect, and that is quite a well known thing that talks about the fact that most people think that other people think like them. Like they assume that, you know, so they assume that their intention will be the other person's experience, you know what I mean. It's like, well, I'm being very clear? Am I not being clear with
my words? I'm saying, you know, and so therefore they should understand me.
But there's a great model of this called tit for tat, and I think we've talked about it before, which is most humans operate most empathetic humans operate on the assumption that everybody else has good intentions. So and we operate on a model called tit for tat, which is we will default to doing the right thing and being trustworthy
and being honest with another person. If we meet a stranger and the stranger says, can I borrow a dollar, will lend them a dollar and will assume that they will give it back to us, you know, when they no longer need it, and so we operate on that as a default. So most of humanity, the part of humanity that are not psychopaths, most of humanity work on that basis, which is, we start from honest, we start from trust, and the only time we change from that
is if the person proves themselves to be untrustworthy. So we start trusting them, and then they don't give the dollar back and we say, oh, okay, so you can't be trusted, and from then on we'll be dishonest with them too, So we'll believe that if they're dishonest, we have carte blanche to be dishonest as well. Until they are honest again, we immediately switch back. So if they suddenly prove themselves to be honest, we'll switch back to
being honest. And humans operate on this tit for tat model, and it's been proven study after study after study after study, being replicated ad nauseum. All of us work on tit for tat. Psychopaths don't. Psychopaths have the reverse model, so they default to the proposition that you are untrustworthy, that you will lie to them, and they work on that presumption in their dealings with you right from the get go.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think there's a space in the middle where you. I don't necessarily trust everyone up front.
But that is because I've been burned a hundred times.
So neither do I automatically think they're going to steal a lye or cheap I don't think that either. I just think they have the potential for that. So for me, I tend to just pay attention for a while, you know, not mistrust them, not trust them somewhere in the middle.
The interesting thing is there's been some quite interesting models done of things that we do that give us guidance about whether to trust someone or not, because we don't automically trust unless the person we're dealing with is like us. So the more like us they are, the more likely we are to automatically trust them. And if there are any differences, so now they're not the same race as us, they speak a different language from us, they're a different
religion from us. If there are any obvious differences between them and us, then our likelihood of trust decreases and we start to behave like you described great, which is I'm just going to give this a few cycles first before I completely trust this person. But the more like you they are, the more likely you are to trust them straight out of the gate.
Yeah, that makes total sense.
I used to be overwhelmingly to my own detriment trust trusting with everybody and then running businesses, owning businesses, employing people and all that stuff that comes with that. Not with everybody, very small percentage of people, but people that I really loved, really loved, really trusted, really valued, just stole money from me, like repeatedly and took every opportunity, not not.
Most, of course, but some and you.
Know, like people that were very high on my list of people that I cared about. And it didn't happen one time, it happened, you know, way more than a dozen times. And yeah, so you get to the point you think, well, actually trusting people automatically, which I have always done, has not served me at all. It's actually caused significant problems, so, you know, rather than and also I don't hate them. I don't want any ill to come to them.
I don't, you know. And but for me.
It just takes a while where I go, oh, let's just see, let me just let me just pay attention for a while, and I'll see what happens and whether or not I trust you.
But although the other thing to remember is the first thing we talked about, which is there is that first second. Then if your gut, if you want to describe it any other way, if you get that feeling in the first second that and you might you won't be able to pin it. It'll just be there's something off with this person.
Yeah, trust that.
Yeah, Yeah, I think that's a kind of almost an interpersonal superpower.
Hey, I wanted to ask you something before we go. I read that.
Your book Toxic at Work has just been translated into Japanese and it's just hitting the shells in Japan.
Firstly, congratulations. Secondly, I wanted.
To ask you, how do you know that what they've translated is what.
You fucking do? You know what I mean?
It's not like people, you know, it's I trust people and I have an AI to check things. So I actually uploaded it to an AI.
You just contradicted yourself with that second sence.
I trust people also I double check on aigo.
I don't trust people. That's funny.
How did tell me a little bit about the process of that, Like, how does that work?
It sounds a lot more impressive than it is from my perspective, in the sense that I don't do much. My publisher in Australia gets out there at book fairs and so on and sells translations of various books. A lot of my books are like there's Korean versions, Portuguese version, Spanish versions, you name it. This is the first Japanese one I think I've had. But it doesn't have a lot to do with me other than saying, yeah, I'm okay with that publisher publishing that book in that language.
Have you ever had something where they've had to bring this to you and say, this idea or this story or this concept culturally is not a great fit. Can you give us another example or another story, or can you say this a different way.
Oh yeah, absolutely. I can't off the top of my head think of examples, but it has come up. It came up a couple of times, I think in some translations around teen brain maybe brain reset. It was, yeah, particularly the stuff about anarex here. Sometimes they're a little cautious about that in some cultures. And yeah, they usually don't ask to do a different version. They usually just ask is it okay if we leave this out right?
Usually say sure, yeah, yeah, well perfect. Well make congratulations on the handball, congratulations on the new book. I'll send you.
I'll send you a video of some handball TIFs so you can see what I'm talking about.
I'm intrigued. I'm going to go look it up.
You could. Maybe you'd probably be.
Good people in the face.
I might, I might, she'd be she'd be very very good at it. I suspect rules about it. If you can't just go up and start punching people, it's not like boxing.
You can then you do the hands in the air emogens. I did not know. I did not know. She would be quite good because she's pretty fast and powerful, and she's.
A bit of a brute. She's a bit of a weapon.
Yeah, well, when you next come up to Brisbane, Tiff, you need to give me a yell. I'll get you onto a handwalk, Cord.
Right eight October. I'm there.
Yeah done, Wow, that's next month. Yeah yeah, are you going to actually do it?
We'll get video of it. You'll see proof, Craig.
That'd be great, say only if only that bloke would drop off the testosterone. I'd be on like a shot, you know how I keep looking out the window in the morning.
All right, David, we'll say goodbye fair but as always, thank you sir.
Yeah, pleasure to see you later. Thanks TIV, thank you,