Why You Should Listen –
Today from the Bulletproof Radio archives comes an episode with Art of Charm podcast host Jordan Harbinger. Jordan was entering the world of Wall Street when he learned the value of being a confident, charming person. Rather than toiling away with technical work, he started the Art of Charm podcast to teach confidence and the rest is history. Listen to Jordan and Dave talk about Jordan’s path, training yourself to be confident, urban escape, the Art of Charm for women, relationship tips and more. Enjoy the show!
This is the first of a weekly series where we’re releasing remastered versions of some of our best episodes you might not have heard yet. Fridays will continue to have great new guests!
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Dave: Hey, it’s Dave Asprey of Bulletproof Radio. Every now and then, I have just the perfect interview happen. When it happens, I can feel it when I’m doing an interview, and I want to share it with you. The odds are pretty high that you haven’t heard this episode, so I work with the team here to remaster the interview because it was one of the most popular, most impactful ones. I’m re-releasing it as a special edition for you. This has a separate benefit for you because I’m using some time right now to finish the final edits on the brand new book about mitochondria. I’m about to tell you the name of it, and where you can find information on it, but this book is so cool. It’s got so many other things in it. I’m going to finish editing the chapters to meet my deadline, and I’m offering to you right now one of the most impactful interviews I’ve ever done. I think you’ll really enjoy this.
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Today’s guest on the show is none other than Jordan Harbinger, who is the co-founder of a really popular website called the Art of Charm. Their website, funny enough is theartofcharm.com. It’s interesting because Jordan, you might consider to be part of this pickup artist community, which is not something that made him smile when I said that, but there’s this thing. If you’re not familiar with this, there’s a group of guys, historically, who have hacked relationships to go out, and basically, let’s say, take advantage of women. There’s also a group of guys, one that I actually respect, who are like, “alright, let’s teach guys how to go out there, and actually be gentlemen and how to properly interact with women,” because honestly, some of us, like me, when I was a teenager and in college didn’t have a freaking clue. That’s why I’m having Jordan on because Jordan, you’ve definitely had some positive impact on multiple people’s lives. People I know who are like, “I didn’t understand what I was doing, and I just needed to understand the ropes.” Welcome to the show.
Jordan: Thanks, I appreciate it. I schedule this while I was ovulating, so hopefully, my intelligence goes up.
Dave: Nice. Actually, me too. I also scheduled this when you were in some kind of dorky-looking Stevie Wonder glasses. What’s up with that?
Jordan: Yes, it’s not just my red child’s costume, but these, I got this idea from you, obviously. We’re recording late at night. It’s 9:30. Something like that. I mean it’s actually past that, and I thought, “you know what? If you’re going to wear your BluBlockers, I’m going to wear my BluBlockers.” The problem is yours look much better than mine. Mine are like the Jackie Onassis version of the BluBlockers. I’m also blocking some blue with this amber-colored scotch.
Dave: Nice.
Jordan: Bulletproof scotch.
Dave: There you go. It’s better than beer. Now, I’m going to show people who are watching on video what it actually looks like when I work in my office. I’m going to turn off the lights that I’m using for the video. The other one. Damn, it just turned red, and I don’t really wear my glasses at night. I just have red lights, which help with collagen synthesis. They make my skin look youthful, but more importantly, you do that, and it tells your body it’s night time even more so than just not having red light. This is something Steve Fowkes and I talked about on the podcast earlier. It’s actually remarkable, what it does for you, but if I’m recording, I’m going to turn the lights so you guys can see me. That’s the story. Now, you’ve seen both of us in our BluBlockers.
Jordan: Excellent, and I figure, yes, I’ve got to sleep after this, so let’s do it. I’m not really hiding much here, you know? People have seen me in a lot of other videos, and this show is really popular in iTunes, so people know a lot of stuff about me. Now, they get to see me look like a dork with a shiny forehead and some big goggles.
Dave: Nice, and you got that nice headphones on. This is totally cool. For people driving, you’re going, “what are these guys talking about?” Bottom line is we’re cool.
Jordan: Right, right. Even if we do say so ourselves.
Dave: Yes. Jordan, you’ve been kidnapped twice.
Jordan: True.
Dave: What’s up with that, and what did you learn from it?
Jordan: That’s interesting, you know? The first time I got kidnapped, I was 20 years old. What I learned from it was don’t take everything at face value because what happened was, and I’ve talked about this on my show in detail, so I’ll give you guys a short version of course. What happened was I was 20. I got into a cab in Mexico, turned out to be a guy who decided to take me to the ghetto of wherever. I trusted my gut, which is probably the bigger lesson, and didn’t let him get out of the cab when I was at, what people who investigate homicides which we typically call “the secondary location,” which is where the person takes you. The proverbial place where no one can hear you scream. I didn’t let him get out of the cab, and we struggled before we fully got there. Then, I was able to escape.
In the second time, I was able to use some of the same stuff that we teach at The Art of Charm. Rapport-building skills, and basically getting people to like and trust you to provide an opportunity, create an opportunity in which me and my friend were able to escape. This was in Serbia, and we were taken by some state security officers, which are basically just like corrupt militia guys from Bosnia that are now given immunity in the State of Serbia. They were totally fried on some sort of substance. That told me that not only was this stuff great for dating purposes, but holy cow, this could save your life.
Before that, the Art of Charm was always much more than just like dating and relationships advice, but given your intro, there are so many guys out there that are like, “Pick up artist. Pick up chicks.” What we teach at the Art of Charm applies to men, women, married, single, and our clients are Special Forces, all the way down to a guy coding Java script in a cubicle somewhere because everybody uses this stuff for different things. At the core of it is always authenticity, honesty, integrity. That’s really what it’s all about. It sounds funny saying that with sunglasses on, but you know, when in Rome.
Dave: I have to double-down on that. This is something I don’t think I’ve talked about too much. This stuff didn’t always come naturally to me. In fact, I had symptoms of Asperger’s syndrome, and my brain didn’t work very well. When I realized it was important to understand how to interact with others, I decided I would study it, but there wasn’t the Art of Charm. I used to go to the Stanford Barn, which is on Stanford Campus, and it’s this meeting place. During the dot-com boom, every entrepreneur wanted to meet every other entrepreneur. I go there every Thursday night, and I’m sure I was like stiff as a board. I had no clue what I was doing, and I would just force myself to network with all these entrepreneurs until I learned the game, until I became good at it, until I developed intuition and probably more normal social skills. It took 2 years of probably 3 Thursdays a month, going and practicing. It would have been really cool if there was some way to RTFM and take a course. I totally would have signed up for it.
Jordan: Yes. In fact, most of our clients are in this because they want to get a girlfriend, get married and have kids. Very few guys sign up because they just want to play the field. A lot of the guys that try to do that, we end up screening out because I don’t really want somebody here if they’re just like, “I need to get phone numbers and get women to like me.” I mean that’s just such a small-minded goal, and if you don’t get it, then I don’t want you here in the same boot camp as a guy from the Mossad and the Special Forces, Army Rangers, Green Berets and Special Air Service guys because they’re going to be like, “boot camp was great except for this yahoo in the corner that everybody wanted to strangle.”
We do screen our clients pretty well. The boot camp’s residential, so it’s not like you can go back to your hotel room at night and get away from somebody that’s annoying you. You’re with the person 24/6 during a week-long program. If you got one guy in there, the whole experience is ruined for everybody, so it’s key. It really is so much broader than that. We have tons of women listening to the show, so it’s very important to me that women go, “every guy needs the Art of Charm,” not “this is creepy and weird. This is manipulative.” We don’t want that rep at all because it couldn’t be further from the truth.
Dave: Honestly, I can say a lot of guys, clients I’ve worked with and just friends. Some of them just don’t have a clue about what to do to form a good relationship. It’s not really the pickup. Like you said, authenticity, integrity. I actually admire what you guys do from that perspective. I don’t have any issue with it. I would not call myself a fan of the general PUA.
Jordan: Oh, no.
Dave: How many? What’s the ratio of girls you hit on to get a number at the bar tonight?
Jordan: Right.
Dave: That kind of stuff is not what we’re talking about. It’s actually creepy, just like you’re saying.
Jordan: Super creepy, yes.
Dave: Draw a big line in the sand there because it’s fascinating. I’m a big fan of Neil Strauss’ writing about that because it’s just too weird to not read, but it’s not the life that I’d recommend for people who want to kick ass.
Jordan: Exactly, yes. I agree. There’s a lot of overlap in the audience though, right?
Dave: Yes.
Jordan: Because a lot of people who, they go, “oh, I want to learn to be really good with people, just like I want to learn to be really fit and really healthy.” They go, “oh, there’s this way to be better with people, and I’m going to learn this.” It just depends. It’s like if you find the Art of Charm first, you’re like, “oh, great.” If you find the Art of Charm after you find some of the pick-up artists’ stuff, you’re like, “oh my gosh. This is what I wanted all along.” If you go far down that pick-up artist’s rabbit hole, you come out weirder than you were when you went in by a factor of about 1,000. You got to be really careful. You’ve talked about this on your show, and I’ve seen you write about this. Toxic information going into your brain is just like drinking poison. I mean you might as well suck down rubbing alcohol if you’re going to start watching videos of guys meeting girls, dressed is Speedos, wearing roller blades and stuff. That’s bad for you. You might think it’s entertainment in the beginning …
Dave: Roller blades and Speedos? Dude, what do you watch?
Jordan: Hey, man, I live in freaking San Francisco.
Dave: Sorry.
Jordan: I drove through the Castro on the way here. That’s actually guys picking up dudes in roller blades but I just morph the example to fit the conversation, but it’s very true. I mean that stuff can really poison your brain because then, you don’t really know what to believe. It’s like getting bad health or bad fitness advice. You listen to enough people, and you go, “wait a minute. I’m supposed to eat 18 small meals a day because I’ve heard that in 18 different, 25 different places. It must be true.” Then, you just get frustrated. Then, you give up on the whole thing and go eat a pizza.
Dave: Yes. It’s true. Getting advice that doesn’t work. It just makes you throw your hands up, and it actually sucks your willpower. You know, a lot of the Bulletproof Diet that’s coming out is about willpower. It just drives me nuts when bad advice just sucks all that energy out of someone that they could use for almost anything. It’s funny that you mentioned kidnapping, or maybe I mentioned it to start, and then, we got on the Neil Strauss because one of the things in his other book, Emergency, I did in Urban Escape and Evasion course.
Jordan: I did that, too.
Dave: Did you? Nice.
Jordan: Yes, yes.
Dave: It was amazing. You get locked in a trunk, and learn what to do when you’re unlawfully detained in Serbia or not, but it is empowering to be like, “yes, I know how to handle that.” It was cool.
Jordan: Yes, it’s funny because I had another Art of Charm student. He learned how to pick handcuffs because that was one of the things we learned at that course. You get really darn good at picking handcuffs. It’s like behind your back, while they’re on you, making the lock pick out of a hairpin. Well, this guy, and I’ll keep this story short. I swear to God, but he always had lock picks with him during the class. We’re like, “listen, batman, you can’t bring your lock picks out to the bar.” He’s like, “okay, fine.” We made him leave it at home one day, and the last day of our field work where we go out during the day and at nights, and practice these stuff, and of course, what does he do? He finds a pair of pink furry handcuffs, handcuffs himself to a girl, and goes, “all right, guys. Where’s the key?”
It turns out, they didn’t belong to anyone. The one day he doesn’t bring his lock picks for the last decade is the one day where he handcuffs himself to a 19-year-old Asian girl who is about 5 feet tall inside of a bar. Bare in mind, this guy is like 45, so she’s not stoked about it. They’re like, “well, we can’t call the cops because this looks weird.” Finally, somebody brings a handcuff key. One of the Art of Charm guys had a handcuff key back at headquarters for one of my pairs of handcuffs that I was practicing on for this course, brings it over and unlocks it. Yes, I mean you just never know when you’re going to need to pick a pair of handcuffs.
Dave: It’s a funny scale, and it’s shocking how easy it is.
Jordan: Yes. It makes me scared for cops.
Dave: One of my drawers over here, I have the pair that I practice on after I finished that course. It’s probably in the back of the drawer somewhere, but I haven’t done it in 3 years, but it’s a neat little party trick.
Jordan: Yes, especially when you can build. You take a hairpin, and you make the pick with the handcuffs in the pin while you’re handcuffed before people. Once you get really good at it, it’s like before you’re finished explaining what you’re going to do, you’re like, “and here’s the pair of handcuffs.”
Dave: Yes. Cops should definitely watch out for that.
Jordan: Yes, no kidding. I bet they don’t like that trick though.
Dave: Yes, I hear that if you hand them their handcuffs, that you usually get to taste their nightstick. It’s just not a good plan.
Jordan: Don’t taze me, bro.
Dave: Yes, and don’t do things that you’re handcuffed. It’s just easier.
Jordan: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Dave: We talked about getting kidnapped, and we talked about so many other cool stuff you’ve done. What made you who you are today? It’s kind of a weird job you’ve got there, to be perfectly honest.
Jordan: Yes, it is. How it started, well, I went to law school, and I had a summer internship at a law firm in New York. The guy who hired me was never in the office. He was always out and about. I mean this guy was from Brooklyn, and he had a tan. What’s wrong with this picture, right? He was rumored to make more money than everyone else as well, and one of the thing that I finally … He caught up with me, and he was like … Rather I caught up with him. He said, “let’s go get coffee.” I think HR made him do it because he was “my mentor,” right, which on Wall Street is like somebody required to pay attention to you once every 3 months for 5 minutes.
He said, “ask me anything.” I’m pretty sure he wanted me to ask him stuff about being a lawyer here and real estate finance and blah blah blah. What I asked him instead was, “how come everyone says you make more money than everyone else, but you’re never in the office? If it’s all about billable hours, how do you make money because you’re never here? Do you just work from home, and why?” He reeled for 1 second, and then said, “actually, I work from home, yes. You see my stuff coming in on the Blackberry” when people still used those, “but really, what I’m doing is more valuable than what the other technical lawyers are doing” because I noticed the other partners at 1:00 in the morning on a Sunday. I’d walk in to get a Coke and just drunk because we have a pantry. I’m like, “no one’s going to be here,” right? Sure enough, all the partners are in there cranking away.
I thought, “what’s going on here?” You know, they’re closing deals, wrapping things up. Well, I told him that, and he goes, “listen. Technical skills are great. They’re valuable. Those guys job at the highest level of technical skill, they can bill probably a thousand bucks an hour, maybe even close to that. Billing, going through documents, doing a deal for an investment banker. At the end of the day, their billable hours are what make them valuable. For me, I’m bringing in business to the firm, so I get a commission on that, and I can bill my time as a partner, but I can bill the time that I’m selling the deal to the firm itself, not to the client.” The firm literally pays him a bonus, plus his normal salary, plus his billable hours just for going out and making nice with tons of bankers and people that bring deals. I thought, “wait a minute.” This changed the way I look at work because what this means is you can, not only at the bottom level does it matter who you know because that’s how I got the job there in the first place.
At the highest levels of this business, what you’re telling me is technical skill becomes even less valuable as I go up the ladder, and people skills become even more valuable. I sort of grafted in my head. I’m like, “okay. In the early stages, technical skills don’t matter because you’re useless.” You’re an overpaid secretary as a lower associate. Then, 5 years in, it’s all about your technical skills because you’re really, really useful as a lawyer, but you’re still cheap enough to the firm where they can make a ton of cash on you. Then, as you become a partner, your technical skills are at their peak, but you’re really flat-lined in terms of the money you make, unless you’re bringing in business to the firm. Most people can’t do that because they’re weirdos that have spent their entire last decade in an office, filing briefs. The guy who’s out golfing, doing jujitsu, going on charity cruises, that’s what this guy was literally doing.
I remember he had a knee brace once, and I was like, “what happened?” He’s like, “I did jujitsu with a bunch of guys from Morgan Stanley on the weekends and stuff. I’m thinking, “you’re going out and living, and then, you come back and go ‘oh, yes, I need a million dollar check for bringing in Bear Stearn’s biggest real estate deal of the decade to our law firm.'” Then, I thought, “okay. I’m going to work on my networking skills. I’m going to work on my people skills because I don’t want to be competing against all of these guys who don’t care about their life, and are willing to just throw it all away for billable hours and technical prowess, especially because people skills seemed like more fun, and at the end of the day, they’re more lucrative.” You know what happened?
A few months later, well, a year and a few months later, the firm went under because it was heavily leveraged in real estate finance. He walked into another firm, and he got a job as a partner. I know that because that Sirius XM was in the same building as his other firm. I was broadcasting professionally by then, doing the Art of Charm on satellite radio.
It was amazing because I was like, “oh my gosh. This guy walked out of there. Everybody else is in early retirement, and he walked in as a partner to another firm because he had a client book and a ton of friends.” That’s what made me start the Art of Charm as a podcast in law school, and later, as a satellite radio show. Now, of course, again as a podcast because there’s a lot of guys out there and girls that are busted their tail, learning how to be the best CPA around, learn how to be the greatest architect. They’re going, “I graduated from a great school. How come I can’t get a job?” Then, some yahoo like me walks into the office and gets a job because I know the other guy’s college roommate. Boom, my resume goes in a different pile and becomes a formality.
Dave: You know, that sounds like the long version of “it’s not what you know. It’s who you know.”
Jordan: Yes.
Dave: There’s something to be said for that, and you got to know the basic whats. My career had some of that too. I’ve had one mentor early on when I worked at 3Com. One of the now dead networking companies that got bought by someone.
Jordan: Oh my god, I remember 3Com.
Dave: Yes, I forgot who bought them, but they actually were the company that brought the Palm Pilot. The first real mobile device that went to market. It was this time where I’m like, “what is this guy doing in IT? Frankly, who do all the other IT guys not like him?” It was because he didn’t take any time in IT. He was doing the same thing. There’s people who just know how to do this, and so I followed them around for a year, and learned more about how that side of the business happened. That’s why I ended up working as a Project Manager and a marketing person in Silicon Valley versus being a hardcore network engineering geek, which I think would have been much less satisfying.
Jordan: Absolutely. It’s funny you should bring up that specific example because honestly, it is people on the other side of the fence who either don’t like the secret game being played or don’t know about the secret game. If you’re sitting there, and you’re going “I don’t need to network with what I’m doing because blah blah blah,” you just don’t know the secret game being played around you. If you don’t like it, it’s because you’re last pick for kickball most likely, because a lot of people go, “yes, it’s all about who you know. It’s not what you know. That’s a bunch of BS. I hate that.” You know what? I say, “thank goodness it’s all about who you know because now, I don’t have to be a guy who works 85 hours a week, grinding away at a technical skill” because if you’re in a job that requires … Even a billable hour-centric job like a lawyer, if you have the people skills, people go, “ah, you’re now officially the exception to the billable hours rule because you’re the only guy who can sell the firm.”
For your example, I’ve met with a couple of my friends in Silicon Valley here. I live in San Francisco. They’re Biz Dev guys, business development, and basically, these guys are really, really good networkers and front men that work at an office full of genius coders that can create amazing products, but can’t even look anyone in the eye who wants to shake their hand. These guys are the life blood of a company because imagine a company like DropBox, making an amazing product, and then, somebody goes, “what is your product doing?” They’re like, “well, it allows us to the Cloud Store,” blah blah blah blah blah. Everyone’s like, “what?” Then, the Biz Dev guy goes, “imagine your hard drive is in space, and you have unlimited storage, and you just drag things to it. Anytime you have an internet connection, you use it just like it’s connected to your computer, and other people can use the same hard drive. You can use my music, and I can use my music, just like we’re in the same room.” They go, “oh my god, I totally need that for all the documents that we use at Google. How much is it?” You’re like, “a billion dollars.” They’re like, “great, that would save us $1.4 billion. I’ll take it.” You know?
Guys like that, they network, and they do these things all the time. One of the Biz Dev guys that I interviewed for the Art of Charm, he doubled his salary in 2 years, because he got raises every freaking quarter because he just kept bringing in money. Eventually, they refused to pay him more, and he left, and started another company, and started at that pay, or started another company with people. He started higher than that doubled salary. He continues to double his salary because even the VC’s that invest in his company are like, “fine, we’ll pay you more because you’re going to leave, and we can’t afford that.”
Dave: It’s funny. For people who are running companies, listening to the show, and there are several I know of. I think they all already know that you never stop paying the guys who produce the most. In fact, the reason that Perot Systems, Ross Perot’s company was formed is because he did that at IBM. He made his annual quota in a month, and he’s like, “keep paying me.” They’re like, “no.” He’s like, “there’s the door. I see it.” He started a competing company that’s been harassing them for 30 years now.
Jordan: Yes.
Dave: Yes, don’t feed the enemy that way. Pay your good people.
Jordan: Yes. You have to. Competence is a skill. A lot of people are going, “great, so I don’t have people skills. I wasn’t born with this. Thanks a lot for rubbing it in my face.” What we do at AOC, at the Art of Charm, our job is to teach emotional intelligence and “people skills.” Not just networking and not just dating, but people skills, emotional intelligence in a way that anybody can learn and master. You can come in, and say, “I just got divorced, and I have otherwise been coding Python whatever in a cubicle for a decade. What do I do?”
We can come in, and say, “okay, let’s fix your non-verbal communication, your body language. Let’s teach you how to read it in others. Let’s teach you proper eye contact, vocal tonality.” I don’t just mean really basic stuff. We can teach that, but some of the guys that come like the Special Forces guys, those are the commanding presences. They’re here because they want to be humanize themselves to an enemy, really get people to like and trust them, lead people quite possibly to their death by being charismatic enough to generate a strong connection. That’s the same skillset tuned to 11 instead of 4.
Dave: One of the things that intrigues me here is you talk about training confidence or building confidence. I mean is confidence a learned skill at all?
Jordan: Yes.
Dave: Is it something that’s an integral part of you?
Jordan: No. That’s a great question. That’s the thing. Nobody’s born with it. Sometimes, people go, “well, that’s not true because I know young people that … You know. My brother was always confident growing up. Now, he still is.” Well, here’s the thing. Some people are born into environments or create environments around them at younger ages where confidence makes sense. We take our mindsets largely from of course, ourselves, but also external circumstances. If you’re young, and you love science fiction, and you don’t like going outside to play because you’re smaller than the other kids, you’re going to grow up feeling like, “wow, social interaction is kind of painful,” because you got bullied. You don’t like it. Being alone makes you feel safe. That type of thing. Then, you get out into the working world where it matters who you know. You’re like, “I don’t want to have to get to know new people all the time. I want to isolate and code by myself and plug in headphones and work in an office with a few people or work from home.” Of course there’s some genetic aspects to this, but most of it is environment.
Now, on the other hand, you might have had a brother who was half a foot taller than you and weighed 50 pounds more, and he’s really good at sports. I mean just pretty much everything he tried, he nailed it. He wasn’t that great in school, but it didn’t matter because we don’t prize that as kids in America. We prize athletic prowess, and so he became the coolest kid. Everybody wanted to be his friend. He started getting used to social interactions, parties, girls, attention from the opposite sex, dealing with authority in the way that only he knew how, which was like, “whatever, bro. I’m cool everywhere else. I don’t care if the third grade teacher thinks I’m a trouble-maker.” That guy turned out to be pretty damn confident because none of the pain of social interaction is associated. He doesn’t associate any of that stuff, right? Even though you grew up in the same house, you have vastly different feedback as a kid. That’s what creates those complexes because a little emotional wound, or a little emotional seed as a young person grows into an entirely complex different set of beliefs as an adult and as a young person for that matter, as well.
One of the things that we’ll teach at the Art of Charm is your beliefs influence your actions, which influence your results. You can’t just … It’s like the pick-up guys. You can’t just pretend to be this cool guy, and then suddenly, everybody likes you and treats you differently because you don’t believe it. You’ll self-sabotage. It won’t work, but if we can change your mindsets to something that is working for you, your body language, all those non-verbals will naturally fall into place. That will influence your results. Then, what happens then is people start treating you differently. Then, you go, “oh, maybe I am this confident, charismatic guy.” After a lot of habits are ingrained, a lot of things are internalized, people start treating you a lot differently. Therefore, you start living the part. You start acting the part. Your mindset changes to where that identity shift happens where you’re like, “oh, I might be like a core geek, but I’m not an insecure core geek” because you’ve addressed the problem. No one else sees you that way anymore. You stop. Eventually, if you let it go, you stop seeing yourself that way too.
This isn’t just like, “whoo whoo. Meditate on this grasshopper.” There’s science that shows our physiology changes the way people react to us, just as well as it changes our mindsets, and of course, that our mindsets are what program our physiology. We work on manually addressing mindsets, physiology, and of course, giving you a lot of exposure to the ways that those things change. That’s what boot camp is. It’s just constant drill and exposure to stimuli that are probably pretty terrifying. I videotape it, and go over the tape with you, and say, “this is what you look like when you’re talking to a stranger. This is how you sound when you’re trying to convince somebody of something you don’t believe in.” We do that enough for 6 days, and it will change your mindsets. I mean everybody breaks, right? I mean it’s not something we say at AOC, but we should.
Dave: The power of feedback, whether it’s from a tech gadget, or whether it’s just from a system like that, it’s amazing. I taught at the University of California for several nights a week for like 4 or 5 years. I’ve got tons of time. I’m just not nervous in front of a crowd. It’s like once you’ve given enough lectures, you’re like, “I’ve given a lecture with my zipper down. Whatever.” It just doesn’t matter.
Jordan: Yes, on purpose no less, right?
Dave: How did you know?
Jordan: That’s how you lost your job at the university.
Dave: I thought I was good, and I’ve done a lot of keynote work. Then, I trained with this guy, Jerry Weissman who wrote in one of the major books about this. Exactly the same process you’re talking about, but what you do on stage. This guy has ruthless video camera, and every little thing like “no, no. Do that. No. Eye contact.” I thought I was pretty good, and this guy completely ups my game. It took 4 days, and it was just for what you do on stage. Honestly, some of the reason that I’m successful today is because I learned how to project my energy, and I’ve learned how to calm down. Although it was a whole anxiety thing that I don’t have anymore. That feedback loop is what really just took me from pretty good to like … You know, I’m pleased with how I present now. I honestly know that I’m going to go out there, and I’m going to deliver real value to the audience. Doing that, rather than on stage, but just in one-on-one, actually is brilliant. It’s something that I think is a value.
Jordan: Excellent. Yes, I mean it is something that you can’t really get anywhere else. People go, “I’ll just ask my sister about this.” It’s like, “listen, man. You had your whole life to ask your sister about this.” That’s the other thing is that it’s really hard for people to get feedback that aren’t trained because you don’t know what you respond to. A lot of people go, “what kind of girls do you like?” They’re like, “you know, tall that are pretty.” “Short ones that are curvy but thin.” We don’t really know, but when we see it, we’re like, “oh, yes. That.” It’s the same thing when you’re talking about and training somebody for this. A lot of people will giveback like, “you know, I just want somebody that’s going to”… Well, I’ll give a dating example for that matter.
I asked my mom when I was younger how to meet girls. She was like, “just be really nice, and complement her clothes. Tell her she looks pretty, and stuff like that.” You can imagine how well that worked with girls that didn’t like me already. I mean that was an epic fail and really embarrassing. She didn’t tell me because she wanted to point and laugh. This is my own mom. She told me that because if she already liked me, which she was teaching me how to be a good boyfriend or a good husband. She wasn’t teaching me how to attract somebody.
These mechanisms are just starting to be uncovered even by modern science, how these things work. I mean there’s all these scientific studies that come out, and our AOC alumni send them to us all the time. The running joke is, “and science gets 1% closer to knowing what we know at boot camp 2 years ago,” or whatever because it’s like, “oh, when somebody walks this way, and they look confident, they’re more attractive.” People follow them as a leader, and this leadership trait is attractive in the opposite sex, blah blah blah. It’s like, “well, yes.”
People who study AOC principles, concepts, read body language, stuff like that. That’s a given, and when we see it for ourselves, it’s like, “oh, yes. Duh.” If you try to mimic it, and you don’t have the mindset right, people go, “oh, that guy’s a try-hard.” It’s like, “well, what’s the difference between the try-hard and the naturally confident guy?” They might look 99% the same. There’s some nuance there that’s not matching. That’s what we train you to develop because I can’t train you to fake it. I can train you to develop it in yourself, but I can’t just give it to you. If I could, you and I would be having this conversation on my jet.
Dave: Nice. It’s the whole authenticity and integrity thing. I believe you can pick that up in other people. You have to be very, very skilled as a con artist to get around that, and basically, you need to be a little bit of a sociopath.
Jordan: Yes, yes. If you’re a sociopath, that’s one of the things we screen for at AOC because if you’re a sociopath, you’ll pick stuff up on the first and second day, and then we go, “oh, wow. That’s not good.” Because if you’re picking up stuff that quickly, chances are you shouldn’t be there in the first place because if you can perfectly mimic and fake everything, there’s like a 99% chance you’re not going to use it. You’re going to be up to no good because that’s what sociopaths do.
I interviewed one on my show. He was a narcissistic psychopath. It was funny because he said things like, “I’m glad to be on your show.” Then, I’d make a joke, and it’s like, “oh, that’s funny.” At the end of the show, on the recording, I was like, “so those things that you were saying, you were saying that because you knew that’s what I wanted to hear.” He goes, “listen. I’m not going to lie to you. I told you I wouldn’t lie to you. Yes, I know that you want me to laugh at things, and I will exactly what I’m supposed to laugh. I will tell you exactly what you want to hear because the result I want is I want you to share this show because you think it’s good. I want you to increase my image because it feeds my ego. That’s the only thing that I care about.” I was like, “damn, I need a shower. That’s creepy.”
Dave: That’s scary.
Jordan: It’s so scary, and he was very open, so props to him, he’s literally a narcissistic psychopath. I mean he just tells people exactly what they want, and the thing is you look at it, and you go, “man, he gets great results with this.” It’s just like … you can’t do it because as soon as you or I try to tell somebody something we know is just patently BS just to get a certain type of result, and where we know it’s going to hurt their feelings, this thing in the back of our mind kicks up and screws it all up for us because we don’t really want to do this. It makes us feel like crap, but for him, he just goes, “suckers. I’m getting exactly what I want. These people are so easy.” He told us on the show. He’s like, “humans are toys.” We have to really make sure that this is based on authenticity and integrity because if not, you just run such a risk of doing things that are unhealthy for yourself because getting what you want is not always really good for you. That sounds like a cliché, but sometimes, we need to work on ourselves, and not work on actually getting what we want. That’s the premise of the whole show, right?
Dave: Well, yes if it’s a cliché example, but if you ask a farmer what he wants a hundred years ago, he’s like, “I want bigger horses.” You’re like, “actually, maybe not. You have to feed them. Wouldn’t a tractor be a little bit more interesting?” He didn’t think of that, so sometimes, doing the work, chopping the wood, carrying the water kind of thing teaches you a few things, so there’s value. There’s value in work, and there’s also value in chainsaws. You got to find the balance.
Jordan: Yes.
Dave: I’m still a little skeptical that you can really train confidence, other than through like a feedback method like that. Are there exercises you can share on the show for people to, I don’t know, have better non-verbal communication, more confidence?
Jordan: Sure, yes.
Dave: Throw out some knowledge here. People want to hear it.
Jordan: Yes, it absolutely … By the way, it is absolutely a feedback system. All we can do are give you the tools, run you through countless drills so that some of the stuff starts to get internalized, start to build habits with you, so that when you leave, you continue to work on it. We give a lot of support coaching after the fact, as well because no, you won’t come into a week-long program and come out being like, “ta-da, I’m totally a new man.” You’ll feel great, and you’ll continue to move forward, but you can’t learn confidence because of the process. It’s really a process of unlearning a lot of crap that you’ve picked up over the last 35 years or however how old you are when you come in. It’s not just adding layers on your personality. It’s a subtractive process, not an additive process. That, unfortunately, takes a lot longer, and it’s a lot more work. You have to be very open, or it’s just not going to happen if you want to come in an learn some tricks.
I do have some cool drills that I can in this format as well. One of the things that people fail to realize is that first impressions are not made when you decide to make them. First impressions are made when you become a bleep on someone else’s radar. I’ll put in a dating context because I think it’s easy, and it’s fun for a lot of guys listening and the girls as well because they’ll identify. Girls are sitting at the bar, 3 of them or 4 of them or whatever. They’re hanging out. They’re having fun, and then, a group of guys walks in. Now, the girls turn around and see the guys walk in because often, women are very aware of who’s in their environment. They’ve evolved that way. It’s a safety concern, as well as a sexual reproductive concern. The guys are hanging out, and the guys go, “wow, those girls are cute.” Then, the guys go, “alright.” Average guy says, “all right, let’s grab drinks and hang out.” They go, and they grab some drinks. They check out the girls again or whatever.
They go back to the table when they get it. They’re watching some basketball, hanging out. Then, a couple of the girls go to the bathroom, and 1 or 2 of them stay at the bar. Then, by that time, the guys had a drink or 2, and he walks up to them, and says, “hey, what are you guys drinking?” They’re just like, “oh, hey.” They may be polite but not very open or forthright about it. Maybe they’re even rude about it. The guy goes, “women are really tough.” Well, here’s the problem. His first impression was not made when he decided that he had enough liquid courage, and he was going to sack and walk over there and make it happen. His first impression happened when he walked into the bar with his hands in his pockets or slouched or whatever, or even just a neutral first impression. Not good nor bad, but then, he waited a while. The girls saw him looking over in their direction, not doing anything, pretending to watch basketball, having a couple of drinks.
By the time he came over there, they had already decided, “we’re less interested in this guy. He doesn’t really have this boldness that maybe worked and I’d naturally be attracted to.” Now, maybe they don’t realize this. This happens subconsciously, but the first impression was made when he became a bleep on their radar, not when he decided, “all right. Now’s the time to make my move,” or whatever. That’s a common misconception. Your first impression is generally made right when you walk into a room because that’s just generally when you become a bleep on other people’s radar. This works in business as well. Any context where you’re making a first impression, which is generally every time you meet new people.
One of the drills that we give that I love to give is every time you walk through a doorway for the next, let’s say, arbitrarily, 2 weeks, because what we’re trying to do here is plant seeds for a habit. Straighten up your body, so straighten up your spine, chin up, chest out. Not exaggerated like, “Yaaa” but like shoulders back. Yes, none of that. Yes, exactly, but just upright confident posture, string pulling up your head, as well as down your spine. It’s a really confident posture. Chin up, smile on your face is a really important part of this drill because it makes you open and engaging.
If you do that every time you walk through a doorway, and I don’t mean when you’re at work. I mean even in your own house, your bedroom door, your bathroom door, your front door. If you’re doing this when no one else is looking, it starts to change your physiology. It becomes a habit, and then next time you walk into Starbucks, and you see somebody that you’re interested in or a business contact, you’ve already got your posture, your smile. You’re already aligned properly. Literally, not chakras or whatever, but your spine is literally aligned. You look great. You look confident. You look open. You’ve got a smile on your face. This is engaging. You’re no longer thinking about it because if you’re trying to put on a great first impression by thinking about it, you’re going to be so non-present and not in the moment. You’re going to have to micro a process, every aspect of your non-verbal communication, which is 1: impossible, and 2: certainly makes it really weird to hold a conversation with somebody who’s only thinking about that because they’re on another planet. It’s weird.
If you can master those non-verbals, just make them an internal process, not only are people going to start. You’re going to start feeling different, of course, but people are going to start treating you differently. That’s the beginning of the positive feedback loop that we’re trying to create when it comes to non-verbal communication. Imagine if everybody started treating you as a confident, upright, positive guy, you’re going to start to feel a lot differently than you would if you walked in slouched, invisible, just crumpled up into a little ball. I mean, physiology is so huge.
Now, if you want to take that to another level after that, after you get that down, most people are terrible at eye contact. We videotape people at the Art of Charm, at our boot camps, in our workshops. We actually say, “okay. How do you think your eye contact was during that interaction?” They’re like, “it was great. It was solid. It’s spot on.” We go, “let’s go to the videotape.” Looking at the floor, looking at the hand, looking at something else, looking out the window, and people are always consistently surprised by how they don’t smile. And they have terrible, terrible eye contact. When we can fix that.
You start to become much more engaging, much more present and much more charismatic because that’s really just the combination of those factors. The way that we work on this, because a lot of people go, “oh, eye contact is really scary.” I agree. It can be very scary, especially if you’re used to looking at the floor when you walk and not looking people in the eye. We say, “all right. After you’ve got the non-verbal thing down, look everybody in the eye for the next couple weeks again, just long enough to notice their eye color.” What this does is it takes the pressure off of, you know, “look everyone in the eye,” because then, you either do 1 of 2 things. You go, “uh, this is really scary.” You get weird anxiety that makes you do silly things or just lose focus because you’re trying to make eye contact and/or you do the death stare when people are trying to be too intense, and they’re trying to be intimidating. They look right at you, and they’re looking through you because they’re trying to make good eye contact. That’s also really creepy and really [incongruent 46:05] for most people. It’s bad. It’s not good. It’s probably even worse than having poor eye contact or out there.
Dave: I need to work on my death stare. I’m 6’4″. I’ve always been either fat or muscular or some combination of the above. You’re already the biggest guy in the room. Everyone knows you could probably kick their ass by sitting on them. That plus a death stare really wasn’t a very good combination for me, but I don’t think I have a death stare anymore. Yes, it’s a legitimate thing, and without feedback, how would you ever know any of this? That’s why this is fascinating to me, but I want to know. Do you ever get people who are in permanent or somebody permanent, long term relationships who go through Art of Charm? Guys with girlfriends, guys with wives?
Jordan: Yes, all the time. Actually, around 30 plus percent of our clients either are in long-term committed relationships and/or married. I should say or married.
Dave: That’s what I was going to say.
Jordan: One’s a subset of the other, now that I think about it.
Dave: You’re in San Francisco. All that [crosstalk 47:04] thing. Who knows?
Jordan: Yes, exactly, exactly. Those guys will come through because a lot of people go, “oh, I don’t need this. I’m married.” Then, there’s that other subset of guys that go, “I need this because I’m married.” My argument is if you’re married, and you think you don’t this, I’m thinking, “so let me get this straight. Since you’re now in the most important relationship that you’ve ever been in in your whole life, now you don’t need relationship skills because somebody signed a piece of paper?” It’s like, “let’s look at the divorce rate, and see what the success rate is of this piece of paper holding you together.” I think you need it more when you’re in a committed relationship because your communication matters more. The things you’re going to teach your kids matter more. It’s not just about meeting girls on the internet, or something like that or at bars and clubs. It’s more of a communications skill.
Yes, actually around a third of our clients are in relationships, married, wanting to put these stuff into practice both in their relationship and/or their business. That’s really where this stuff shines. It’s because if you’re in any kind of role, sales role or even just selling yourself because people buy you, right? Inside work and outside work. Nobody buys a product. They buy you.
Dave: Even if you’re a developer, you’re still in sales, whether you know it or not, like whether people take your proposal for writing a new API seriously or not. It’s sales, and it’s just easier for some people because they have the skills or because they grew up that way. That was something that was hard for me to learn, like the best tech rarely wins.
Jordan: Yes.
Dave: The best tech that could be explained by someone coherently in a way that made other people with money want to do something always wins.
Jordan: Exactly. I mean think about it. Look at something like Windows, right? Not to pick on that, but Linux is just obviously so much so superior, and yet why does everybody run Windows? Well, at some point, and I know some tech guy’s going to e-mail me and be like, “this is wrong.” At some point, they were just better at selling that dish, right? They were just really, really good at getting that into people’s hands and being like, “look how easy this is.” Linux is actually easier. It doesn’t break as much. I mean there’s a million that are better about it, but Windows is the dominant OS. Even with Mac OS out there, it’s dominant by far. That’s because somewhere, somebody to say … Part of the rise of Apple is because people go, “hey, look how awesome and easy this is to use.” It’s so intuitive that it sells itself, but you have to do that about yourself, to yourself, to your product.
I go to these conferences all the time, and people have awesome apps. I tell them, “you know what? This is so great. It’s too bad you’re going to fail because nobody’s ever going to find out about this because you needed 58 minutes to tell me how this thing worked. It’s totally going to be life-changing. This other guy has a thing that does what yours does, maybe 10% of it, and it doesn’t even do that part as well, but he told me in 30 seconds. Now I want it in 30 seconds. If it takes you 30 seconds to close somebody to get that little app and it takes you 58 minutes to close somebody to get that big app, you’re going to lose. It’s just not going to happen.
People buy you, they don’t buy your product. They don’t buy your service. They buy you. People buy things because they like and trust you. They can relate to you. Anybody who hires anybody at their place of their work know … They call this, in consulting in Wall Street, they call it, I think it’s the “airport rule.” What it is, is all things being equal. Because you’ll look in someone’s resume and you’re like “eh, they’re qualified.” They’re over the medium bar of qualification for whatever position this is. The real question and the reason that they take you out for meals and they reason that they have you talk to multiple people at any given firm or company is because they want to know if you’re going to get along with them.
The airport rule is this; basically all of the things being equal, which they usually are. If you’re going to hire somebody, especially for consulting, they ask themselves this question: Can I stand this person if I’m stuck on a layover with them for 12 hours? If the answer is “no,” you’re not getting hired even if you have a sterling resume, because they know that nobody’s going to want to work with you. When you’re in consulting or law or any position that’s high-level professional, you’re working 12, 14+ hour days with those people, and if there’s somebody there that everyone hates, it screws up everything and costs millions of dollars in loss productivity, damages, all kinds of stuff.
They’ve measured this, and they just won’t hire you. No amount of money, no amount of brilliance you bring to the table is worth having you there if people don’t like you, and so they’ll test that.
Dave: That’s one of the things that maybe they teach you in consulting land, but most people don’t know that until they’re pretty far along in their careers if they ever figure it out.
Jordan: Right, yeah. If you start hiring people, you know it. Before that, you just wonder why you’re not getting jobs.
Dave: Yeah. That’s exactly right. Now, there’s another question for you though. You don’t take women on, right?
Jordan: No. It’s for guys only. The reason for that is, and you know this just because you know a lot of guys and we’re the same way, I’m sure, at least at some level, if I’m having you come in and I’m saying “tell me how you got to where you are now,” and I mean the bad stuff and share it with everybody and learn how to be vulnerable for the sake of learning communication, you might do that with a bunch of brothers that you trust after hours and hours. If you throw one girl in there, even if it’s my maid cleaning up my kitchen during boot camp, we will pause because the guy will go “Well, when I was little, my parents didn’t pay a lot of attention to me” and then his glance goes right over to her because he’s self-conscious and it’s really, really hard to be vulnerable as a guy, and it’s basically impossible if there’s a female in the room. It’s evolutionary, we’re not wired for this, we don’t like doing this, and so we don’t need to make that any harder.
Of course, the other things are, things that make men charismatic, confident, attractive, they don’t all directly translate to women, so we have separate classes for women. We have separate coaches.
Dave: You do?
Jordan: Yeah, we do. They’re not boot camps that are residential. They’re different, but we found the magic formula for guys. It’s that we don’t coach women at all, we just don’t have week-long residential boot camps for them.
Dave: I was going to ask about that because the skills are different and I know they have old fashioned charm schools for women. I don’t think that’s probably going to actually teach charm but you might put on a lipstick, but I have no idea what they do at those schools, like serve tea or something. What would be different for a woman who’s like “I need to work on my social skills.” What would the differences be between what a guy would learn and what a woman would learn?
Jordan: A lot of it overlaps, and of course the confidence and things like that, but it depends on what the social skills are going to be used for. For dating, unfortunately, the skills for women are completely different than they are for men. In a business environment, they’re largely the same. Unfortunately, that’s a buy-product of women needing to take on a larger, more masculine role in a corporate work place. Unfortunately, that’s where women have all these issues because it conflicts a lot with the identity that they might have at home. Those things can start to interfere. It’s really hard for board of directors mom to come home and be nurturing wife or nurturing mother, sometimes. It’s a balance. People who are listening, who are doing that successfully know just how hard that is.
As guys, we don’t really think about it because we can be tough guy at work and then we come home and we’re a softy with our kids, but we’re basically the same guy with the volume turned down a lot of time. The skills for women really, really depends. For women, they’re much more adaptive. It’s much more “Alright, what do I need to give this person in this situation? Who do I need to be right now?” It’s more about choosing your role in a given situation for women then for men.
For men, we know “Okay, I need to be nice to this person because they’re a kid and they’re going to cry” or “this employee will respond to this.” For women, they have to know “Alright, I’m in the workplace. Does this person need a foot in their butt or do they need a little bit of handling and nurturing?” Women are really uniquely suited to be more adaptable than men are in these roles.
If you’re a mid-level or high-level manager as a female, you might go to your younger employees and really show them, “Hey, listen, I care about your development and your career, I’m here to nurture you and I’m also here to crack the whip when necessary.” That’s a skill that women really should work on developing, is knowing what role to be at any given time. They’re usually really good at it. It’s really challenging, I don’t envy that at all. I think that’s probably really, really hard. If you get it wrong, everybody thinks “She’s such a hard ass, she wants to be a man” or “oh, why can’t she be more tough? She’s not cut-out to be in this kind of work place. This is for tough people.” It’s really lose-lose for a lot of women in either in both at home and in the workplace that they’re trying to balance that.
The skills are much similar for women but it’s about when to use them is what the question then becomes. Does that make sense? I know it’s kind of a weird answer to that question.
Dave: I think it makes great sense. I’ve always found, if I want to get stuff done in a meeting in corporate America, I love having at least one woman in the room, because the guys tend to do a lot less chest bumping and all that. I also know a bunch of women who really don’t have social skills. That’s probably because I worked in Silicon Valley for so long. It’s clearly social skills training is just fundamentally different for men and women, and there’s got to be an overlap in the venn diagram, but I’m just trying to put myself in their shoes and it’s hard to do because I’m a guy.
Jordan: Yeah, it’s basically impossible. It really is.
Dave: Now, we’re coming up on the end of the show and there’s a question that I ask everyone, and you probably heard, because you listen to this show. Top 3 recommendations for people who want to perform better at life. I don’t mean just from Art of Charm, I mean from all the stuff you learned.
Jordan: Sure. Well, I thought about a ton of different answers to this and I figured, okay, I’ve got this massive laundry list, and if I have to think of the top 3, it’s going to be really tough so I don’t want to be all fancy and be like “there’s this one unique online tool that you really need” so I might be relatively vanilla with this answer but here’s the thing, people always ask me how I am so insanely productive and part of it is because I have an awesome assistant and stuff like that. The other thing is I really stick to my calendar religiously. I mean if I sent a screenshot and I could do this, if anyone cares, but it’s every 15 minutes of my day from 8AM or 7:30AM, because before that I like to have flex time to wake up, but everything is scheduled all the way until the end of my day.
15-minute blocks with people’s phone numbers, things start on time, they end on time. People know when that’s going to happen. The reason is because I have crazy ADHD. It’s hard for me to focus if I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing at any given moment. If I have a phone call that’s scheduled, let’s say, 20 minutes and it ends in 7 because something comes up or we conclude, I go, “13 minutes, Facebook, oh, let’s make some more coffee.” I’m almost unable to organize right on the spot. I’m great at thinking on my feet but I’m not great at organizing on my feet, if that makes sense. I knew that was a weakness of mine, and I see that in entrepreneurs all the time. They’re like “Oh, I got to work on this today.” Then they do everything but that. They never eat the proverbial frog. Getting a calendar, putting important things on it and your appointments and sticking to it, where if it’s not on the calendar, it doesn’t happen, and if it’s on the calendar, it absolutely happens will be something that will change your life.
Dave: I love it. I could not double down more heavily on that one. I was literally complaining to my wife tonight that she didn’t put something on my calendar that she wanted me to do. I’m like “If it’s not in there, I’m not going to remember, it’s tomorrow. For God’s sake, tomorrow morning you’re going to remember?” I just go to the calendar. Calendar and productivity, I love that one. Thanks for saying that. By the way, no one’s ever said that in the entire history of the show. That was awesome. What are the other two?
Jordan: It’s funny because that’s such an easy and obvious one, and yet it’s totally not. Another thing that I think is great, and this might not be the greatest tool of all time but I make a lot of introductions and usually, it’s something like this; “Hey, can you introduce me to Dace Asprey
“Sure.”
“Hi, Dave. I’m seeing my friend, Jordan Harbinger. I think he would be a great connection for you, your show” and blah, blah, blah, a little about Dave, a little about Jordan. You read it and you’re like “Okay.” I really have no real feel for you other than that. I just ask for that intro and you don’t know me from Adam I use SoundCloud, and I stole this from our mutual friend, Jason Gaynard as well. I use SoundCloud and I record an audio introduction. I’m like “Hey, Dave. This is Jordan. I want to introduce you to my friend, Sam. You know what, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, here’s a little about him, a little about me.” I don’t know what it is. It’s a hell of a lot more personal. It’s a little bit harder to refer to on the fly because it’s audio but you fee like “Oh, I’m getting introduced to this person almost like I was right in front of them.”
You hear how people describe them in the vocal tonality and some of the non-verbal communication really comes into play, that you get a subconscious feel for “oh, this guy gives off a certain vibe. He relates to people in a certain way.” I make intros using SoundCloud instead of just e-mail. That has resulted, according to people that I’ve introduced to each other, a much higher success rate, a much higher hit rate. Honestly, people accept the introductions a lot more when I do it that way. If you make a lot of introductions, and I think most entrepreneurs do, and most people in general who are just kicking ass at life, they do that. Try it, instead of e-mail, try SoundCloud, or YouTube for that matter. Keep it unlisted or your channel will be super weird.
You can introduce at a much more personal way, and it is awesome, and it really changes the impact that you have on all of those people. They associate you, because it’s really hard to go “Yeah, someone introduced us via e-mail a while back. I don’t remember who it was.” If they remember your voice, they’re like “Oh yeah, Jordan introduced us via SoundCloud, and that was like 3 years ago. Yeah, that’s right. I remember that, and he said that you just got back from Indonesia when I met you. When was that? Oh yeah, 2013. Got it.” It’s such a better way to introduce people. SoundCloud for introductions is definitely one of my tops for sure.
Dave: Alright, you got one more left.
Jordan: Excellent. This is another thing that I think has been mandatory just for my sanity. I have an app on my phone called Line2. There’s a million different second line apps, Grasshopper’s one of them. This is a phone number I can give to anybody. I know you probably don’t just go “Hey, everybody. Call me on my cellphone,” because that would be just time management suicide. You have to think about who you give your number out to. With this app, I’ve got Line2, you don’t ever have to think about it. You go, “Yeah, here’s the number and you can call anytime.” Even if they’re in Australia, if they call you at 4:00 in the morning, it doesn’t matter because it’s off at night. It’s got hours. It can set hours.
You can give it to somebody that you meet once for 5 minutes and if they turn out to be a weird stalker person, well they don’t have your cellphone number. They have a Line2 number that you can turn them off and block. You can block in your regular iOS too, but you don’t want them calling you from different numbers and blah, blah, blah. It’s very different. You can text with it, you could turn it off during certain hours. It has a separate voicemail inbox that e-mails you things. I can go on vacation, come back, and I’ve got all of my voicemail e-mailed to me from that phone number. Tons of text messages that I can also check online, and it’s become just like literally having a second phone that all meshes into my one device. I never have to think about who has my contact info. I never have to think about calling somebody and then having my number and then what.
I never have to worry about missing a message or anything like that. It’s cheap. It’s like 15 bucks a month and I think I can get a toll free number for, I think, like an extra 5. It’s amazing. It really will change the way that you communicate with people, because you don’t have to pre-screen people. You can just let anyone contact you, if that’s what you want to do. If you’re on a sales role, you’re running a business, you want that, but damn, you don’t want them to have your cellphone number.
Dave: Nice. Protect the number. I have a different strategy on that front. I’m just booked every 15 minutes of everyday, just like you, but I’m usually, because I live on an island, I’m always on Skype or on the phone. You’re going to call me on my cellphone or you’re going to cold call me, it’s like what?
Jordan: Who the “F” is this?
Dave: Even if I know who you are. I want to talk to you but I’m recording a podcast or I’m talking to someone, it’s like maybe you ought to schedule that call. Otherwise, I’m probably not going to do it because I’m either playing with my kids or I’m working, or being a dad, being a husband. I guard my time really carefully. It’s not because I’m a jerk, it’s just because otherwise, there isn’t any time.
Jordan: I think you’re right. I think it does come down to guarding your time. The only thing is when you’re first starting, I think a lot of people aren’t like … I had to get time-nazi mode develop over a few years. It didn’t happen right away. When you’re first starting, you don’t have a choice. If somebody who wants to buy something from you and you only get that once in a blue moon, calls you at 11PM, because they’re in Australia, you’re going to answer it. Here’s the thing, it will drive you insane. If you’re married, it’s going to just ruin your relationship if you take calls at 1:00 in the morning from bed. The best way to do that is to not know you’re getting a call.
Dave: Yeah. I put the airplane mode on at night, and if someone wants to call me, actually there isn’t a way to reach me at night. I’m sorry, I’m asleep. I’ll wake up and maybe I’ll miss an important call. I got my sleep. It was worth it.
Jordan: Right. You and I can afford to do that I think, but I think in the beginning when you have to be uber hustle mode, like things will blow up without you and burn down, and your business is gone, that’s not going to happen to you. It’s not going to happen to me, but if you are bootstrapping and something crashes and they can’t reach you, and you’ve got a demo in the morning, well dang it, you need your phone on. But you need to have circles of trust and stuff like that. This app helps you make that happen.
Dave: Awesome. Well, Jordan, thanks for being on the show. It’s been fascinating to talk about the other side of high performance, like high-performance relationships and just owning your own behavior even when you’re not aware of it. URL, Facebook, Twitter, what coordinates should people know about so they can learn more about what you’re doing at Art of Charm?
Jordan: I think honestly, since you guys are already watching/listening to a podcast, just check out the Art Of Charm in iTunes or Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. Of course, if you’re one of the rare few who stream from the web, theartofcharmpodcast.com, has our 300+ hours of stuff. We have an app for Android and app for iPhone that streams and plays it too. People can get that a lot of ways, but I would say not necessarily “Hey, buy this thing for me.” I mean, I’ve got so much free stuff, consume the heck out of the free stuff. Then, if it starts changing your life, which it’s designed to do, then call me and we’ll think about next steps. Rather than hawk something, go enjoy the free stuff. You’re already listening to podcast. After you get done listening to Bulletproof Radio, go check out The Art Of Charm. That’s pretty much it.
Dave: Good deal. Thanks man, have a good night. You can take your shades off once we turn down the lights.
Jordan: Yeah, I got to do that.
