Why Charisma Is a Sales Skill You Can Actually Learn with Olivia Fox Cabane

Hey everyone, welcome back to Make It Happen Mondays, where we talk about sales, business, entrepreneurship, personal growth, mental health, and everything in between with guests who I truly respect and I think make a positive impact on the world around us. This week, I have Olivia Fox-Cabain on the show. Olivia is the author of The Charisma Myth, which has been translated into 32 languages, and she's coached leadership at companies like Google, Deloitte, and Citigroup. And here's what makes this conversation a little bit different from the other ones. She's autistic, and she actually didn't find out about being autistic until she was well into her 40s when she said life all of a sudden started making sense to her because she grew up in Paris in a household where literally Nobel Prize winners stopped by for breakfast, and she had no idea how to communicate with them or have a conversation with anybody for that matter.

Her classmates even tried to get her kicked out of school for being too weird, and she made a decision. I'm either going to exile myself to a desert island, or I'm going to figure out how to make this whole human thing work. She chose to learn. She found the science, and she decided if she was going to learn to be human, she might as well learn to be the most charismatic version of it, and that's the origins of the book. We break down her framework of presence, power, and warmth, and what it means for sales. We get into why MIT researchers could predict the outcome of a sales pitch with over 80% accuracy without ever hearing a single word of content, and we have a real conversation about where the line is between charisma and manipulation in our profession.

This was a great conversation, so I hope you enjoyed as much as I did. Let's make it happen. Olivia Fox, come on. Welcome to the Make It Happen Monday podcast. How are you today? Thanks, John. It's great to be here. I'm looking forward to it. Yeah, this is going to be an interesting conversation. It is about charisma, ultimately, which I find fascinating, especially in the world of sales and its use or misuse. But we're going to get to that. But as my audience always knows here, I love going back to origin stories, and you have a very interesting origin story. You grew up with a physicist father and a psychotherapist mother. And I got to ask, how were the dinner table conversations around those?

So talk to me. I mean, obviously, both of them had a pretty interesting influence on your life and your career. But talk to us about growing up a little bit. Where did your influences come from? I know you found out you were neurodivergent way later. So I'm curious kind of how that manifested in your early age as well. So total misfit. Let me be up front with that. You got to like this is Paris, right? And it's Paris in the 1980s. And here I come, half American, half French, half Jewish, half Protestant in blue blood, aristocratic Paris. Turns out on top of everything, I'm autistic, which didn't help everything. And so I grew up in a weird household where I didn't have like radio, television, newspapers.

Really? I didn't really know there were other papers than the New Scientist. And so for me, it was normal to have like Nobel Prize winners stop by for breakfast. But I did not have a conversation. So that was a bit awkward. Really? So your parents were that focused on, you know, their own professions, their own world. Was it for them? I'm just very curious on this. Is it was that a conscious choice for them? Did they block out the outside world other than theirs because they, you know, they wanted to or that was just who they were? They were just weird. I love it. Okay, just fucking weird. I love it. Okay, cool. And so did you feel there weren't you said there weren't conversations? Yeah, so it was really the feeling that later on, of course, I heard a lot of other neurodivergent people say is that it felt like everyone else had a manual on how to be a normal human and I hadn't gotten it.

And it turns out that when I was seven, I was brought to a child psychologist who noted down all the autistic traits. But at that time, girls weren't known that they could be autistic. So he essentially said, well, yes, there's all these traits, but she's a girl. So now go away and leave us alone. And later on in life, when my mother told me this, I said, hang on. And so I got diagnosed and 12 hours later, the psychiatrist was like, congratulations, you're autistic. And I was like, well, at least I explained some things. But all I knew is that I was a socially inept teenager to the point of like clinical ineptitude, if you will. And I realized that it really was a diversion path of either I exile myself to a desert island, which is still an attractive path on occasion, or I learned how to make the whole human thing work.

And lucky for me, it turns out that there was science fairly recent on how to interact with humans the best possible way. And I figured if I'm going to learn how to be one of the normal humans, and if I'm going to learn to make humans like me, let's go ahead and do it the best possible way. Why not go ahead and learn to be charismatic? I love it. So I think there's a lot of, well, I know there's a lot of misperceptions about autism itself, right? And the spectrum of autism. You know, I think the uneducated is, you know, there's a physical, you know, some people look autistic. You know what I mean? We all know what that look is. But when that look isn't there, right, where it's, so, you know, how do you as a, because I have a 15-year-old daughter here, and, you know, every kid feels like they're the only one.

Every kid feels like they're, you know, they don't belong and are searching for it. So how has the science evolved, and how are we kind of, where are we, I guess, with the diagnosis of autism? Because especially here in America, we're great at just throwing diagnosis and pills at people just because they're a little different. You know, it's like this ADHD, man. Like, if ADHD was such a thing back when I was growing up, we'd all be on drugs because we were all all over the place. But it was just accepted. Like, I was a little boy, and I was running around like crazy. I didn't, I wasn't ADHD. I was just a little boy with a lot of energy. So help us understand kind of, you know, self-diagnosis, like, where are we in this, in this world of using it as a real, like, you, this is your, you know, what's going on with you versus this is a self-diagnosis and you thinking that you're different when you're just a kid.

Yeah, it's a really complex question, and I can only give you the lived experience I have because I'm not an expert. For me, it was, the words I've heard from almost every single late diagnosed woman is all of a sudden my whole life made sense. And it was, and this is where I'm going to go politically incorrect, women in particular never made sense to me. They're so complicated, and there's six layers to everything they say, and I'm like, just tell me what you mean. But it was, it was, the other thing that was really helpful, it was the explanation that I wasn't a broken horse, I was just a zebra. But it made sense of so many things that, in hindsight, were some of the scary things, like trying to physically beat my brains out against a wall, which turns out is typical for certain autistic profiles.

Yeah, because you're so, you know you're smart, and yet you somehow can't make things work. And it turns out that the beating your head against the wall, physically against a concrete wall, is a really typical thing. The sensory meltdowns where even at age 25 or 30, if I masked, if I pretended not to be autistic for three days straight, I had a conference, for example. After three days, I would have a genuine meltdown of rocking back and forth in a fetal position, hiding in my hotel room. So there were, now I know how to manage around this. So for example, at a conference, I needed a solo break every two hours. In order, I don't have meltdowns anymore, because I know how to manage things. It is, it is a lot of privilege.

I've got white skin, money, a U.S. passport. That's going to help at, if I'm stopped by the police, where so many teenagers who are not white are going to have a completely different experience when they're autistic. And one of the problems there is, there is a genuine issue with autistic people not understanding that sometimes you just have to follow the rules, even when they make no sense. And that asking questions or trying to get elucidation, in some situations, if you got the wrong skin killer, can genuinely get you killed. So I was really lucky that my screw-ups resulted in really bad embarrassment or complete ostracism. Don't get me wrong. Like age 18, like my class hated me so much that some of them created a let's get Olivia kicked out of school club.

Because I was just too weird. Yeah. No way. But, and that was soul crushing, but it wasn't life threatening. Right? So it's, it's a really complex issue. I know that people feel very strongly one way and the other about autism now being a single, I would have been Asperger's 10 years ago. And in fact, that's how I was originally classified. But nowadays it's just all autistic. And I can understand the people who are saying, listen, my kid who will need diapers until he is 50 for the rest of his life, doesn't have the same support needs as you, which you know what? Fair point. So it's a tough one. And I don't have a good answer other than to be very grateful that I was lucky enough that for the things that I was stumbling on, there were answers.

And for me, the nerd that I am, the answer is always in science. And there was science. Hallelujah. I love it. It's interesting you bring that up. I actually have the tattoo on my arm. It says, when you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression. And privilege, you nailed it. It has nothing to do with being grown up with a silver spoon in your mouth. It has everything to do with the fact that when I drive down the street as a white male and I get pulled over by a cop, I can literally roll down my window and say, what the fuck did you pull me over for? And I don't have to worry about it at all. The worst that will happen is you'll get yelled at. Yeah. Like, that's it. Exactly.

So when you were a kid, you kind of recognize this. When did you make the conscious kind of flip to, I have to figure this. I have to figure out people because I'm different. Like, when did that dawn on you? I think when the classmates said they hated me so much they were going to get me kicked out of school because I was just too weird. That was it. I was like, all right, you know what? Let's give this one good try and see if we can figure this out. Lucky for me, it worked. But as said, timing plays a big part in this because charisma was a taboo subject for a long time for good reasons. Why was it taboo? So the main researcher, the great grandfather in charisma science, if you will, Max Weber, grew up under Hitler.

Oh, Jesus. So for him, charisma was like, this is what charisma does. And he's not wrong. Hitler, incredibly charismatic. So there was really this taboo and the first, the turning point was in 1989 when the first study came out showing that charisma was in fact nothing but behavior, which could be turned on and off. And when researchers showed that in controlled laboratory experiments, they could literally raise and lower people's level of charisma as if they were turning a dial just by instructing them to display certain behaviors. Right. 1989, first turning point. And then 2011, John Antonakis, who in science was kind of the guy who really started the modern science of charisma, showed that not only is it behavior, but it can really be taught.

And then it's OK, charisma can be taught. And that's where we go. Yeah, because there is that danger side of this that I want to get into, because I always say, you know, we'll tie it to sales eventually, where, you know, people talk about sales in the profession itself. And I always tell people, if you if you think sales is about convincing anybody of anything, you're you're doing it wrong. It's about helping people solve problems or achieve goals. But and there's a fine line between manipulation, you know, and and helping somebody make a decision. Right. And so because unfortunately, we as humans are pretty easily manipulated subconsciously or consciously. And so I want to use it for good.

But I also want to kind of keep on this track of your recognition of this, because you said, OK, I got to figure this out. But then you went to law school. So like you're 18 years old. They're telling you, get the fuck out. We don't like you. You're weird. And you're like, holy shit, I got to figure this out. Let me go into law. Now, law isn't exactly a, oh, everybody loves me profession. So why did you go from two parents with the backgrounds that they had to recognizing this to then I want to be into the law? The French system is different. We don't have college. We go straight from high school to university. So my options were law school, med school, business, which in hindsight, I probably should have gotten into.

But I loved words with a passion. I still do. And another thing that you'll find in a lot of autistic people is that words are the only things we can depend on. Body language is so hard to interpret. But if someone said something, they have said the thing that word was said. So I had this love of words. And I probably went further in the study of law than I needed to. Fine. One master's would have been enough. I could have stopped there. But you know what? It was a way to get out of France. And so studying in Germany got me master's number two. But more importantly, it got me out of France. And then I left for South America, then New York. And when I got to the U.S., I was like, whee! So, all right, I'm going to push you, though, on this one.

Because you said words are something you can count on. Now, I know this study has been way overused. And I think it's Dr. Albert Moravian's communication model, right? Where it's something like 835-57. Oh, let me be clear. I'm not saying that the words actually have the main impact on communication. If it did, my life would be so easier. Okay. I'm just saying that that's one of the few things that I could cling to. Words were my safe space, the same way that I would disappear into books. I would apparently stop breathing, which it's the hilarious thing is it turns out that a disjointed breathing rhythm, especially when reading. Another autistic thing. I had no idea. I would just get so deep into the book, I'd just forget to breathe.

And apparently my parents were just watching over me like she could hear it. And then I'd go, whee! Yeah. Anyway, no, so it was more the one life raft I had. But the Moravian study, you can leave it aside. We've got better data, which just confirms it, by the way. But 2008, this is Alex Pentland at MIT with the Media Lab. They were able to model the outcome of sales pitches, negotiations, and a third thing, business plan pitches, with over 80% accuracy without listening to a single word of content. No way. Confirmed. Yeah. Really? Mm-hmm. Just by watching or by reading? So it was a tripartite. So they were looking at the ratio of speaking to listening, which I'm sure you tell your audience that when your prospect is saying, am I speaking too much?

You've won. Right? That's the goal. Then it was the key emotions were excitement and confidence. And then, yes, the vocal fluctuation and a couple of other things. So they were looking at the whole model. They just cut out the words completely, which then, for me, was really useful going to, when I was with founders at Stanford, being able to say, when you're pitching these VCs with your deck, it's lovely if you're agonizing over every single slide, but realize that MIT Media Lab could have predicted that without a single word of your slide. Now, and was it difficult for you to separate the tonality, for instance, from the words, like when you were growing up, like when somebody said fine, did you know what that meant based on the tonality or no?

It was in the same way that you'll never hear a guy say to a girl, don't use that tone with me, right? There really is a difference between how many tones men hear and how many tones women hear. With my husband, he's a lot more neurotypical than I am, and he will react to people's tones and find them incredibly offensive, where, to me, I just noticed the words, so it has no impact on me whatsoever. That's the positive side. The negative side is when I will completely miss the tone of someone's voice. Now, if I have trained myself, if I pay really good attention, now it's my profession, but it is exhausting. So, after spending, say, a day with a client, it takes me three days to recover, because I have been monitoring all the things that otherwise I normally never do.

Ah, okay. So, again, it's more of the conscious thing for you to say, I have to pay attention to the body language, I have to pay attention to these things, or else I'm like, and that is just all-consuming. So, for you, let's talk about from a sales standpoint, right, because one of the things from a sales standpoint is picking up on all these different subtle cues of body language, of interest. Is that, for you, is that a positive or a negative when you're focusing so hard on trying to understand somebody? Do you miss other things, or does that keep you so focused on that person that that's a really genuinely positive thing, because you're, you're, you're connecting with them so well? So, it can go both ways.

Okay. So, first of all, I, I, it does limit my scope of work, and that I can't work with teams, because I can only handle one human at a time. Okay. There are a lot of people, other people can do other things. I just have that limitation. Yeah. Um, the, let me already flag some of the downsides, because it's easy to say that you can do bad things with charisma. Sure, that's obvious, obvious, but the downsides for the charismatic person. So, when you turn charisma on full blast, one, people can get addicted to you. This is real. And when I tell people originally, they're like, yeah, right. I'm like, no, wait, see what happens. And, because it's a high, and that, that can be a real problem. Um, two, and this is a bigger problem, is when you kind of create that cocoon around the two of you, because you're so focused on them, you're giving them full presence, and the warmth, and the confidence, and so they start pouring their guts out.

And then, an hour later, or the next morning, they realize, oh, God, what have I said? And then, the ego backlash comes in. And that's a real problem, right? That is, yeah. And three, and this is sometimes a bigger problem. So, when we talk about manipulation, my point of view is, anytime you're aiming to change something inside someone else's mind, I view that as manipulation. So, from my perspective, we're manipulating each other all the bloody time. For me, the only two guardrails are intent and impact. If your intent is good, and your impact is good, go for it. Use all the tools at your disposal. But one of the real downsides of charisma, and I've heard this from the high charisma people I interviewed when doing the research originally, was, I can convince people even when I'm wrong.

We can end up raising funds when we shouldn't. Starting, like, launching products that turns out have no future, and all that because of the damn charisma. Yeah. That's, so I was going to ask that quick, because I think a lot of people convince themselves that the ends justify the means. In the sense that, you know, and I'm going to come back to, like, the sleazy sales reps, right? Like, the ones who are, you know, the Glengarry Glen Rosses of the world, the Wolf of Wall Streets of the world. Yeah. I, you know, I look at them, and I'm like, ew, you're everything that's wrong about this profession. But I also empathize a little bit with the sales reps that they were, you know, managing, if you will.

Because I bet that a lot of them convince themselves that the ends justify the means. So, let's look at penny stocks, right? I bet a lot of them had it in their head that, look, I know this guy doesn't have a ton of money, but man, if I just take that extra 10 grand that he has in his, you know, whatever, and this penny stock pops, he's going to be a millionaire. And even though I know he probably can't afford this, it's going to be, so where's that line of the self-manipulation, if you will, to convince yourself from a charisma standpoint that this is the right thing? Because I don't think a lot of people have that barometer all that well of what's intent and what's impact and that those are positive.

Yeah. The single toughest thing, if you're a founder in a company, is to find a co-founder who doesn't fall for your bullshit. That's one. If you're a salesperson and you're an individual contributor, it's having either a buddy, a spouse, a friend, or anyone you can partner with, with whom you can, and don't go to ChatGPT for that, because we know ChatGPT is there just to confirm everything you've just said, right? Make you feel better, yeah. But it's a real problem because the confirmation bias is real. We are predisposed to find justifications for what we want to believe in. And because charisma only works when you truly believe it, the most charismatic people are the ones who are genuine.

And unfortunately, the most lethally charismatic people, hello, Bill Clinton, are the ones who have the ability to absolutely convince themselves, this is the most beautiful woman I've ever met. This is the most important person in the room. I am completely in love with whoever it is that he's meeting in those 30 seconds, right? And there is a reason why there is a positive correlation between narcissism and charisma. In that case, it's not a good thing. I was going to ask. Narcissists convince themselves all the time that they're right, which is why they're so charismatic. Yeah. And I'll tell you, with Bill Clinton, I met him once, and you could literally feel his aura. I couldn't believe. They say some people have it, and I never believed it.

And we were at a restaurant in Washington, D.C., and it was the first time he was running for president, and Chelsea was maybe 10. And that man, we were at the end of the restaurant, and when he came in, every single person stood up and created a line, and it was three or four rows deep. And that man stopped and shook hands with every single one of us. I was three rows back. When he stuck his hand out and shook my hand, I'm not even exaggerating. It was like I was the only person in the room. He looked me dead in the eye, and he was like, thank you so much for coming. I really appreciate it. And I was just like, I felt it. I was like, holy shit. Yeah, that's charisma, man. I've never felt charisma like that before.

I've met charismatic people before. I have never in the moment with a 30-second connection with this person felt charisma, and I felt it. Let me be clear. He is a freak of nature. Yeah. Right? Bill Clinton is famous. He started that when he was three. At the kindergarten playground, there are stories of Bill Clinton going around, introducing himself to all the other kids, and then to the teacher. No way. Yeah. So there are genetic predispositions. I can't turn everyone to Bill Clinton. Let me be clear. Right? Everyone can learn a certain amount of charisma, but there's also the fact that it's what kind of charisma fits you best, your personality, your goal, the situation. And there is a kind of superstar charisma that only happens when you have been working at it since you could walk.

Shakira apparently has that same kind of charisma. Okay. But she started, you know, getting up and dancing in public at four years old. So that's the 10,000 hours right there by the time you're 10. Yeah, exactly. So when did it dawn on you that this could be learned, right, to start? Because you're in law school. You recognize 18. You're like, okay, I'm different. I'm going to go to law school. I love words. And then you move into Stanford. When did you sit there and say, no, this actually can be taught? Was it your self-reflection on this or was something else come up throughout that journey that was like, ding, oh my God, that person was and now they are? So I started with the basic books, the how to win friends and influence people with the usual.

And the books on networking, Keith Ferrazzi's of the world, which by the way, if you're in sales, Keith Ferrazzi's new edition is great. And Robert Cialdini's new edition is, I swear, 20% better than the original, which I did not think was possible. I get it. Right. The purple and yellow one? I got this one, though. I got the other one. So the purple and yellow one, which is the new edition. Yeah, it's better. There's, it's not like 50% better, but I'd say it's 20% better. There's new science. There's, yeah, it's great. So in any event, start with the classics, right? Go ahead. But the, because already in 1989, it had been shown that charisma was behavior and that, and that it could be raised or lower.

It was clear that already at that point, that that behavior could be learned, even if there wasn't yet a, and now let's build the tools. So that was my cue for me of, well, if it's clear that it's just behaviors, then why don't I go look for what is, there must be science out there. And there was, and eventually people started asking me, you seem to be good at this networking thing. How did you get good at it? And my honest answer was, I learned, I'd be happy to tell you. And so that's how it started. And eventually, after a couple of years, Penguin asked me to write a book about it, and that was it. And there you go. So, so it's presence, power, and warmth. Yes. Those are the three. That's those are the building blocks.

Can we break those down? Sure. Each one presence. Let's start with presence. So if you look at it, actually, the best metaphor for understanding these building blocks is, you know how, as humans, we're predisposed to overreact to sugar, fat, and salt. And like, well, we'll react to each one of them strongly, but put all three together, and that's when you get junk food and the taste buds go crazy. It's kind of the same with charisma. It's kind of the same with charisma. We are predisposed to overreact to each of these individually, but put those three together, and you get charisma. So essentially, the questions are, can you move mountains for me? And do you care to do so? Because think about it.

Someone who can move mountains, but doesn't want to move the mountains for you, doesn't impact your life. Someone who really wants to move the mountains for you, but doesn't have the power, same thing, doesn't impact your life. Someone who can and wants to, but is so distracted that they don't know which mountains you need moved. Again, the mountains don't get moved. So the best metaphor for me is really, if you look at presence, power, and warmth, and different studies have different words. Some studies will call power dominance or assertiveness, but essentially, it's those groups of behaviors. I'm so glad you started with presence because if in today's world, if you're looking for, give me the one thing that will give me like the most charisma points right off the bat, that's it.

So explain though, how do you show presence? Yeah, so we're so distracted. And the amount of distractedness is increasing year upon year, that any increase in your ability to pay attention to the other person, that's all it is. The ability for sustained attention on whoever it is that you are interacting with. And you would be shocked at how seldom people get other people's full attention in their daily life these days. So what I desperately want people to understand is this. Charisma does not depend on how much time you have available, but only on how fully present you are in the interaction. As you saw with Clinton, 30 seconds or less, and he bowled you over. You don't need more than the space of time for a handshake and how are you to give full presence.

So I think a lot of, so presence is, you know, we talk in sales like active listening and really paying attention, but there's so many tactics of active listening that aren't present. You know, repeating the words to somebody, okay, I can do that, right? Nodding your head, but you talk about how nodding your head too fast is actually a lack of, right? It can have some issues. Can have some issues. No, so listen, here's my favorite. If you're ever in a conversation and your mind goes wandering and you realize that, focus on your toes. Just for a second. Okay. You focus on the physical sensation in your toes. What that's going to do is it's going to force your brain to scan your whole body from head to, of course, toe.

It brings you very physically back in the moment. That's one. Okay. Another one is if you feel like the guy is boring, can you look at the person that you're with and imagine what if you were the director of some indie movie and this is your main character. Like a, who was the guy who did Jay and Silent Bob? Oh. Kevin Smith, right? Yes, thank you. Yeah, yeah. Mall Rats. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So some movie that takes anyone, the gas station attendant, and that's the main character of the movie. Can you be the director of that movie and look at that person as if they are your main character? Because guess what? In sales, they are. Yeah, so with that, can you teach, do you feel like, and I ask this a lot on this podcast, can you teach curiosity?

Because I think being present is about being interested in other people and being curious about, genuinely curious about them, not just asking questions to ask questions. So where does curiosity fall on this? It's critical, and I wish I had a good suggestion on that one. I know there are people who are experts on curiosity. That's what I don't know how to teach. It is a crucial, critical element of being able to stay present, being able to actually find the other person interesting. Now, for me, if you want a way around that, the only work around I can offer is this. Sometimes what you can get is familiarity instead. And the way that you know our brain has a hard time distinguishing between imagination and reality, which is why visualization works so well.

If you can imagine that the person you're facing is a long-lost best friend, this is your best friend that you have known since, like, kindergarten. And imagine roasting marshmallows over the fire with them, whatever it is, right? And that can sometimes create, and it's only a few seconds, because that's all you need to get the right neurotransmitters in your head, which will then get you the right body language. So that can get you enough familiarity and even affection to be able to keep you present and even give you some warmth in the interaction. But I agree that curiosity is still the gold standard. It is, and I think it's interesting, because if there's one thing I think I was blessed with, I think it is a, you know, because I asked the question, can, are you born naturally curious or can you develop it?

And I think that genuine curiosity is something you're born with. I think you can be curious, but I think genuine curiosity, I think, is something you're either born with or not. And I think, thankfully, I think I have been. But I also noticed that, you know, I can get away with podcasts by just being curious, right? I just be, like, I don't even need to know. Like, I don't need to do the prep. But I find I'm far more curious when I do the prep. And that's, to me, you used a word that is, I think, the key is the interest factor. If you are interested in something, you become curious in it. And that's a person or a thing or whatever. But if you're not interested, you know, in helping your client, if you're not interested in understanding charisma and how it can be taught, if you're not interested, you're not going to be curious.

And so there's that line of, like, reading through a script versus doing some preparation so that you kind of have some, ooh. And to me, that's sales is I don't need to know a lot about a lot. I need to know a little bit about a lot so I can then dig and dig and dig and ask. Yeah, so there's a fabulous Dale Carnegie quote there. That is, you can make more friends in two months by becoming truly interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you. And my version of that is stop trying to impress people. Let them impress you and they will love you for it. And that for me was the key realization of I was always desperately trying to be impressive so that people would like me.

And instead, by letting them feel impressive, that's how I got everyone to like me. So in the end, in the early stages of trying to make friends, that was the key realization. You push too hard, right? You got to pull versus push. Is there things in this digital world? You mentioned a few things in the updated, you know, some of the new chapters of the book about how there's like the women. Talk to me a little bit about there's something about this, the frequency of, of, of digital communication that even that slight delay harms charisma and it does it more for women than men. Could we, could you explain that a little bit? Yeah. So there, there is some harsh news in gender differences. And I would always rather give you the real data than, and say, listen, this, it sucks, but this is how the world is rather than, it shouldn't be that way.

Sure. But so for example, um, if we start just with clothing, women have to dress a lot more formally than men to get the same level of respect. And we see that in the Valley all the time where a male founder can show up in the hoodie and ripped jeans. Exactly. And to get the same level of attention from the audience, a woman will need a jacket or whatever it is. Now, as far as the digital world goes, that's where it gets fascinating because a lot of my preconceptions turn out to be wrong. When the actual researchers in vocal and digital charisma showed that, for example, I always assumed along with everyone else that lower pitch tones were more charismatic, not true. If you look at Steve Jobs, who had one of the most charismatic speech patterns we can find, he had a voice that was occasionally so high, it went into the female register, but he had the right fluctuation, which is one of the key elements.

And he dropped his voice at the right time. Now, specifically on Zoom, on video calls, this is where it gets fascinating. If there is too much audio compression, if, for example, the bandwidth is bad, they can easily be, and this is worse for women, emotional confusion, where excitement and enthusiasm can be read as anger and impatience. Yeah, you told the story of this woman who was really excited, but because it was a delay, they thought she was angry and she almost didn't get the job. And then all of a sudden, whatever was causing the bandwidth compression stopped, and all of a sudden she started sounding enthusiastic and excited again. And yeah, she got the job in the end. But that's when, because she was being interviewed by a charisma researcher, he was like, oh, this is fascinating.

I think we need to do a study on this. And they did the study, and then they confirmed. But so there's really interesting things where, for example, we all know that it's hard to look at the camera when you're on Zoom. So what do you do? Well, it turns out that just by taping a photo of someone you like, it doesn't even matter if you know that person. It could be Captain America, for all we care. Above the camera and speaking to the stuffed animal photo of, you know, the dial llama, it doesn't matter. Or in terms of the delay you were talking about, it's a tiny delay. It's the time to say blah, blah, right? It's a certain number of milliseconds. If your yes to whatever question is delayed by even that much, it can come across as inauthentic.

I was going to ask you on that one because there's, so yes and, right? So you ask a question, then there's the immediate answer, right? Oh, yes, and confirmation with the milliseconds there. But then there's the thoughtful answer because there's the other side of that where it's like, I'm thinking about… But what has your face done in that thoughtful pause? Okay. That's the key thing. Gotcha. If it's just a freeze and then yes, that's when you get inauthentic. But you're right, thoughtful was the key. Because if when you're thinking, look at what you just did with just now. When I was doing that, right? Those of you who are watching on camera, you'll have a slight looking away because you're thinking.

Or maybe your mouth will purse. And all those signs are signaling, I'm thinking. And so that's going to give the thoughtfulness that the just freeze wouldn't. Okay, cool. Because I had to, early in my career, because I'm a high D on the disc scale. And when you ask me, I'm a visual versus an auditory versus a kinesthetic. I'm a very… And so when you ask me a question, my immediate reaction is to give you an answer. Yeah, yeah. You know, for the most part, I'm pretty good at that. But, you know, I've always, I've gotten myself in a lot. And I tell sales reps all this all the time where, have you ever given an answer to somebody where they've asked you a question and you've given what you thought was just a perfect answer, right?

And then afterwards, they say, well, what I meant to say was… And you're just like, son of a bitch. Like, I just went on for two minutes answering the question that wasn't even the fucking question. So how do you balance that with, like, I guess, you know, from a charisma standpoint or like an engagement and getting people to trust you, there is the, like, are there… I mean, I just ask clarifying questions. Could you give me an example? Help me understand. Are there other ways that you can kind of slow yourself down while still maintaining that trust and forcing yourself to think a little bit before you answer? Yes. So first of all, the… As long as you are clearly thinking, and so using your whole body language to communicate that you're thinking, the thoughtfulness works in your favor, right?

The… It's not an easy one because it can't be a systematic at every answer because otherwise the conversation is going to get stilted. But this is the one that I try to remind myself, and it's a tough one because hello autistic. People don't always mean their words. And I have to remind myself that sometimes, especially with small talk, the words that are being set on the surface, just like in the ocean, can be going in a completely different direction than the deeper currents. And so sometimes I try to ask myself, hang on, is there a deeper undercurrent? What are they really asking with this question? But it's not an easy one. So I don't have a straightforward answer. Also, possibly because frankly, charisma is so much more about body language than it is about the words, that most of the tools and techniques are going to be about how to… Because the first impression is made in two seconds.

Exactly. Right? So everything happens before you've even opened your mouth. And I heard… And so what are some of the ways that… I mean, I've heard like greeting people with an open hand. You know, there's certain things that are… That automatically get you. But then there's the small talk just because I want to try to develop rapport with you. You know, that like kind of the fake, oh, I see you're a fisherman and I fish too. You know, that bullshit. Or those are beautiful plants behind you. They're gorgeous. When I, you know, I have no plants in my background. You know, so like, I guess what are some of the… What are some of the authentic ways that subconsciously without the fake, you know, rapport building crap that we can do to open that door?

Maybe not be the most charismatic person, but get you open to receiving this conversation. The fundamental rule is that whatever your mind believes, your body will manifest. So because there is so much body language emanating from us every minute, like you probably weren't aware of your eyelids fluttering in front of your eyes until I mentioned it just now. You might not have been paying attention to the weight of your tongue and your mouth or how your feet were positioned. And by this time, you've probably forgotten about your eyelids again. And this is everything that we are emanating and it's only a tiny part that we're emanating. So the real key is to get your mind right. If you get a charismatic mindset, you will automatically have a charismatic body language.

And the charismatic mindset, your goal is really to learn how to like people. You're going to need to learn the confidence and there are ways and tips and tricks on emanating power in your body language. Sure. But the fundamental key is if you can find people interesting and likable, that charisma isn't so much how you make people feel about yourself. It's really more how you make them feel about themselves. I like that. So, so many different questions I have about this. Where, what, when did you write this book? The original was in 2012. And you revised it recently? Yeah, because as it turns out, online charisma is a whole different beast from in person, right? That split second, the thoughtful pause works a lot better in person than it does on video where a lot of our micro expressions are being lost.

That's just one example of how different online versus in person charisma is. I think this is actually, let's go back to the networking piece because I think one of the things that I worry about, quite frankly, is how COVID kind of broke us. It was an inflection point of charisma, in I think, a lot of ways, or human connection, a lot of ways. Because you and I, I mean, I'm older than you by a decent amount. But, you know, we grew up with the face-to-face, right? With, like, you know, going to an event and shaking hands and meeting people. And then everything shifted to this. And this, I can kind of fake my body language a little bit here. Like, you don't necessarily see what's happening below the fold here.

And I can, for 30 minutes, I can kind of hold it together. I mean, experts can obviously pick up on a lot of things, but most people can't. And so, I feel like this is why everything's become, or relationships and everything else feels so transactional. You know, again, even the dating apps, right? It's like swipe left, swipe right. There's no more, like, I got to go figure this. I have to go fail. I have to go put myself in an awkward position to understand that I don't connect with people or I do connect with people. How do you coach this younger generation on human connection, on authenticity, and to be present, to listen, right? Because I just feel like almost all of it is so transactional now.

And it's not their fault. Like, they've been born into this world here. So, what can we do to undo that damage, if you will? So, some of the most useful training for charisma is improv training. And it's incredibly uncomfortable at the beginning, but it is for life in general, for being able to respond to all kinds of situations. This is some of the best training you'll ever get. Now, that being said, the good news is that because you're right, things that become so much more transactional, if you can be one of the few people who genuinely likes people, genuinely finds them interesting, and there are, in fact, tricks you can use to, if you need to, let's say you're dealing with a difficult person, because that's going to happen.

And you need to be able to have a conversation with them. If it's a small annoyance in the other person, find small things you can approve of. I don't care if it's their nice glasses, their shoes are shined, they were on time, whatever it is. Because what that does is, if you find enough small things, the brain isn't great at understanding scale. And so, if you can lump in the small things, you remember the fascinating studies on how a morning commute impacts happiness more than becoming paraplegic. Remember those, right? So, the small things can really add up in both good and bad, use them up, adding up to good. Now, if it is a big, difficult person, that's when you need to go nuclear. And again, all you're trying to do is, for a few seconds, get your mind right, to get the right neurotransmitters run through your brain.

Imagine, I don't care what you have to, that they've just gotten a terminal illness diagnosis this morning. Then their spouse asked them for a divorce. Their dog got run over. And finally, their car got all four flat tires on the way to work. I don't care what you have to imagine. This is the worst day of their life. And what it will do is that it will get enough of the right chemicals in your system to get you out of fight or flight mode. And more into the sympathetic nervous system, parasympathetic, sorry, the PNS. And what that will do is it will get you the right body language to then calm yourself down and be able to have the interaction with someone who is otherwise really difficult. Nice.

Do you believe, when you talk about getting in the right mindset so that you can either receive or give in a lot of ways or listen or be present, do you believe in positive affirmations and self-positive talk and those type of things? So it depends for what. So you can visualize winning the lottery all you want. It's not going to win the lottery. For me, the visualizations are really useful if what was holding you back was the internal belief. So there's some fascinating things where visualizing yourself playing a certain measure on the piano or visualizing yourself taking certain free throws is actually going to impact your muscle building and your skill. Yeah. I saw that recently where somebody did some study of people lifting weights versus people visualizing lifting weights.

And the people visualizing lifting weights, like increase their muscle mass by like 15% and they never touched a weight. It is stunning. So if the block was internal, that works. Now, if the block is external, the visualizations have no impact whatsoever. You can visualize, I'm going to be a millionaire all you want, but that's an external circumstance for a lot of it. The system is built such. So visualizations are useful to impact yourself. Your mindset, your confidence, even your muscles in some cases. But that is the scope of their power. And they're incredibly useful because guess what? Charisma starts in your own mind. It starts in the mind and then it begins in the mind, goes everywhere else.

Yeah. And I think that I think so many people have that negative self-talk that it's only going to manifest itself in the conversation. Yeah. As far as like your confidence and everything else. Yeah. So a lot of it is fascinating seeing all the big tough guys, especially in the Silicon Valley system, where it turns out they all want to display more power. And it turns out for them, the route to displaying more power. That tough, big emotion is through the mushy, soft emotion of self-forgiveness. Because self-compassion and self-forgiveness are the key to not having your inner critic show up all over your face in your body language and therefore ruin your level of power that you hoped to display through your body language.

So ironically, self-forgiveness and self-forgiveness and self-compassion are some of the best routes to power. Interesting. So is that why, I mean, well, that goes back to the narcissist, right? Of like, how do you, I think, I mean, that's a whole different topic of narcissism and what that entails, but especially when you come across one. But I think, do you think that my, my challenge has always been thinking about these successful people and I'm going to put success in quotes, right? Because success is different for everybody as far as the definition is concerned. But it almost feels like every, it's like you have to be a raging asshole to be like super, uber successful, right? Because there's very few examples that I can point to that of like, you know, really powerful, really successful people that aren't genuine assholes or have screwed people along the way.

There's a bigger problem there. Please. If you've ever heard of the metamorphic effect of power. So what this is, is the brain on power, the brain when it, and it's in studies, they've done it for even small things, small amounts of power. Your brain physically changes. It's as if it becomes drunk on power and you look at the brain on power and the brain on alcohol and they're freakishly similar. And with the metamorphic effect of power, which is how your brain physically changes, it means that you can even have a nice guy starting out who will genuinely be a different guy, a raging asshole later on, because that's what power does. So we now have the actual neuroscience to show that, yes, power does, in certain measures for certain people, corrupt you.

It turns you into a different person with a different brain. So when you hear people don't change, right, they do. They do. In good and bad. Listen, the good news is wonderful. If you look at neuroplasticity and that neuroplasticity is our whole life, you get someone who was born with literally a quarter less of the brain matter than she should have, who shouldn't be able to walk, who learns how to play the piano because her brain reorganized. You can have a blind man who can climb Mount Everest with a camera affixed to his tongue because the brain learned to interpret those signals in a way that then allowed him to walk up Everest. So there's amazing things about neuroplasticity. It is extraordinary.

And then you have the fact that people can really become raging assholes because, yes. Yeah, because you kind of see that. You're like, wait a minute. I thought they were kind of cool. And now they're like, what the fuck? You know, I mean, Elon's kind of a mass example of that. Like, everybody loved the guy before. Everybody thought, I mean, it was a little neurodivergent. And I think everybody agreed with that. And then, but until he hit the politics and he got that power where he was standing up with the, you know, chainsaw and all that other stuff, all of a sudden it was like, dude, who the fuck are you? And the ketamine. Yeah. Well, don't forget the ketamine because that was like, back when it was weed, he was much nicer to your eye.

But, well, ketamine. But then, I mean, again, it opens up a whole nother conversation because you hear all these examples of ketamine therapy where it helps people break through PTSD. And all these different things. So, it's basically, he's just using it more. Like, why would somebody like that be using ketamine? Is it to open things up or to feel normal? Like, why does that drug kick in for somebody who's on that path? If ketamine makes all things feel possible. If ketamine gives you a permeable sense of self and allows you to, and this is the one I think that is the one that is used for PTSD, allows you to rewrite your brain circuitry, therefore allowing you to rewrite certain traumatic experiences.

You can also rewrite your brain for bad as well as for good. And in his case, for bad doesn't feel bad. He's rewriting it to feel like he's God. Well, this is the means to the ends thing, right? Oh, we're going to, like, I'm going to do everything we can to go to Mars because this world is screwed, right? And we're going to, it's the environment. Who's screwing it up? Exactly. I'm like, dude, if you took a few of those trillion you got and put it back into this earth, I think we'd be okay. Like, my wife's an environmental scientist and climate control, you know, climate initiatives and sustainability. And it's like, these problems are fixable and we have the money to do it. We just need to redirect that money towards the stuff that matter.

Which leads me to my last question about Kind Earth. Talk to me about why you went from charisma and all these cool stuff that you're doing with startups and everything else. And then you started Kind Earth. So talk to me about that. So being in the valley, you're always going to hear about cool signs that's happening. And I had heard about cellular agriculture, which is when meat is cultivated. And then I heard about things like air protein, where people are turning car exhaust into protein, industrial emissions into protein. People are growing food in air. And I was like, wow, this is blowing my mind. And so I started looking into what were the implications of that. And if you start looking at all of them, whether it's food security, whether it's water use, land use, obviously animal welfare, but also the health impacts, all of it.

And so simultaneously with the work, this is just the side pro bono work, if you will. I was very, very, very fortunate. I love working with social entrepreneurs. If any of your audience are in a social mission or part of a charity, I love helping. So please ask me. Charisma is really useful for this stuff. But I was incredibly fortunate to meet some of the people who were at the origin of the alternative protein movement saying, hey, we can actually create protein without, for example, clear cutting the Amazon, without polluting all the waterways in the US with everything that's going into the rivers. And so it is, please don't believe any journalist that tells you it's around the corner. It's not.

It never was. And the scientists were always very clear about this. And we've learned the hard way that we have to be really, really careful about how they take things. But mammoth meat is a reality now. So is wagyu beef. So is everything from tuna to, but it is in small quantities. We can create one mammoth meatball. And even then, it's still going to be 50% something else, right? We are starting to be able to produce meat at a quantity that could eventually be sold at an eventually commercial level. Scale is going to be a problem for a few years yet. So it's a fascinating area. The science is amazing, but it's a few years off. Okay. And so it was just for you from a passion standpoint, you were fascinated in it and you want to try to do what you can to have an impact because it is obviously not going in the right, a great direction right now.

And, you know, my hope for AI is that, you know, outside of the dystopia side of the house of Terminator waking up and killing us all, you know, the utopia side of the house of fixing cancer and solving, you know, environmental issues. I mean, the power of it is there. We just, again, need to direct it in the right direction. It could do amazing good, but humans being humans, it's up to us to decide where it's going to go. Okay. All right. Last question. This is going to be very selfish on my end. Body language. We talked about charisma. I want to go back to that for just a second because I noticed myself doing it. And it's been something I've been curious about. So when I interview, when I sit on a call like this, this is my body language.

My hands are folded kind of between my laps. I'm a little bit closed right now, but it's me. It's me being interested, right? Leaning in. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And me leaning in. But this is a closed body language. Whereas, you know, the confidence of me sitting back in my chair like this and having my chest out, which one shows more charisma? So I'm going to give you an answer that involves high heels. When I talk with women about how to display confidence and power on stage. And one of my thoughts on stage, you know, the amount of brain percent it's going to take to keep you upright is going away from your ability to give the presentation. However, if it's also giving you a 20% boost in self-confidence, you know what?

Go for it. So it's really a question of if you're losing, say, 3% on charisma, but because you're comfortable that way, you're gaining, I don't know, 30% on interesting questions and enjoyment of the interview. Screw the charisma, dude. Okay. It's really a question of, in the end, what is going to make this fun and enjoyable for you will make this fun and enjoyable for the other person, even if, in pure charisma terms, yeah, you might lose whatever percentage it is, but screw that. Okay. Because I've been conscious of that for the past month or so, and I'm like, wait a minute. And then what happens is, because I'm conscious of it, I start to fuck around where I'm like, wait, maybe I should put my hands like this, and I need to sit back straight, and I need to do this, and now I'm not listening to the conversation.

And so I'm just, I kind of go back to my original, like, okay, I'm curious. Your comfort level, your ability to enjoy the conversation is the key ingredient in having an interesting and enjoyable conversation. Love it. It's that simple. Perfect. All right. Well, we can end there, and we're going to leave a lot for the books coming out and everything else that you're working on here, Olivia. Where can people find out more information about what you're working on and where to find out all? Because I think this is a fascinating topic that more people need to figure out. Thank you so much. So charismamith.com, there's some sample chapters they can download, there's some videos they can watch. I think all the PDF of all the exercises is even downloadable on the website.

And the science is so cool because I had a lot of help from awesome researchers, including Professor Oliver Niebuhr, who I want to give a shout out to, who's the leading researcher on digital charisma. So credit where it's due. I had a great team on this new edition, and they were awesome. Very cool. Well, Olivia, this has been a fantastic conversation. Thank you so much for joining. It was truly a pleasure. Thank you, John. Absolutely. And everybody, I hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as I did. And like I always say at the end of all these podcasts, go out there and make somebody smile today. Because no matter how bad your day is going or how bad you think it went, if you make somebody smile today, you know you had a good day.

And the world needs a lot more of that right now. So thank you all very much. And I will see you on the other side. Hey, thanks again for listening to the show and for all your support throughout the years. This is one last reminder to check out my training programs at jbarrows.com or leave a five-star review on your favorite podcast platform or G2 if you've already gone through my training or sign up for my newsletter. Any of those will help ensure I can continue to bring you free content and great conversations like the ones you just heard without having to annoy you with sponsors. Again, let's make it happen in 2026 together.