Master Non-Verbal Communication with Poker Tells Expert Blake Eastman
Blake Eastman is the founder of The Nonverbal Group, a long-time professional poker player, and the creator of “Beyond Tells,” the largest behavioral study ever conducted on poker players. Blake’s passion is using visual feedback to teach leaders and teams how to better interpret nonverbal signals and monitor the information that their body gives off.
In this conversation, Blake and Chris demonstrate how to master your communication, on and off the poker table. You will learn how to read the nuances of human emotion, have deeper awareness in social situations, and create greater alignment between your presentation and your intended message.
See above for video, and below for audio, resources mentioned, highlights, topics, and transcript.
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Resources Mentioned:
Additional Forcing Function links:
Experiment Without Limits (peak performance workbook, free download)
Performance Assessment (quiz to reveal your greatest opportunity for growth)
Check out previous Forcing Function Hour episodes.
Topics:
(06:14) To notice and not judge
(14:01) Acting and not acting
(23:13) Focus on the hands
(34:41) Poker face, over-correction, and belonging
(45:06) Attention and the relationship to your word
(51:22) The ROI of social interaction
(01:00:00) Literals and contextuals in business
(01:11:25) Aligning with what you want to be in the world
Podcast Transcript:
Note: transcript slightly edited for clarity.
Chris (00:05): Welcome to Forcing Function Hour, a conversation series exploring the boundaries of peak performance. Join me, Chris Sparks, as I interview elite performers to reveal principles, systems, and strategies for achieving a competitive edge in business. If you are an executive or investor ready to take yourself to the next level, download my workbook at experimentwithoutlimits.com. For all episodes and show notes go to forcingfunctionhour.com.
I am excited to introduce today's guest, Blake Eastman. Blake Eastman is a longtime professional poker player and the creator of "Beyond Tells," the largest behavioral study ever conducted on poker players. Today Blake is the founder of The Nonverbal Group. Blake teaches leaders and teams how to better interpret nonverbal signals from others and monitor the information that their body is giving off.
Blake's training incorporates visual feedback from multiple cameras to surface and reinforce behavior.
Last week I participated in one of Blake's immersive workshops in Las Vegas. I felt like I was gifted a sixth sense. Playing a poker session after the workshop, it felt like everyone was just holding their cards right on their forehead. I couldn't believe how much I had been missing before. I asked Blake to join today's show to share how we can improve our communication on and off the poker table.
Thanks for joining me, Blake. I know this is gonna be a lot of fun.
Blake (01:26): Yeah, thanks for having me.
Chris (01:27): So, how did you get started studying behavior?
Blake (01:30): I think it was something I've always been interested in my entire life. I mean, when I was younger—I didn't deal well with anxiety, specifically social anxiety, and paying attention to people's behavior was something that really, like, calmed me down, and I felt at ease when I was paying attention to people. And then in graduate school, my background was in forensic psychology, and I got really interested in the criminal angle. And then the first time I actually studied behavior was a project called "First Date Files," where we had people come into a restaurant in New York City and record them on blind dates, essentially. So we hosted a series of ten dates, recorded them from multiple angles, and then interviewed both and sort of found out what was going on for each person during the day, and then reverse-engineered behavior to see how much it was in alignment with those sentiments or not.
Chris (02:20): So let's start with the dates. What types of things were people giving off as they were on this first date?
Blake (02:26): So, like, if you think of reading behavior on a spectrum, I would say that dating is the easiest format to read behavior, where deception is probably the hardest and most difficult. So you've got like dating on the left and deception on the right. You usually have a blend of interest, anxiety, and attraction. A lot of people really misinterpret or don't understand signals in dating, just because they're a group or a subset of things that we don't necessarily experience in life, and it's just this weird dynamic where you're sitting down with somebody and you have to get to know them and you know the underlying assumption is that maybe we can move things further. It's, like, a lot of things going on, which makes it a really fascinating place to study behavior. But we've found that the people who were able to read the behavior of the other person were having more successful dates, because the date was more dynamic. It wasn't this structured thing, it was this interesting flow type of situation that was based on behavior.
And it's interesting, when I show people those dates, one of the most successful dates people perceive to be not successful, because it doesn't fall in alignment with what people think attraction or think a good dynamic looks like.
Chris (03:33): So, take us back to your days studying and later teaching psychology. What were some of the findings that translate to your work today?
Blake (03:42): Ah, that's a good question. So, my background is in forensic psychology, with an emphasis on testing. So, psychological test construction. An area known as, like, psychometrics. So I worked on a lot of various assessments. Like, I was trained to assess psychopaths using something called the PCLR and all these psychological inventories that are used in forensic settings. Like MMPI and—There's a bunch of different tools. And a lot of that became really interesting. Some of the methods that they used I found quite groundbreaking. A lot of personality assessment, in my opinion—Like, I don't really—And this is a much larger discussion. But the whole world of personality assessment I find is flawed in a lot of ways, but there are certain cool approaches. Like one's called this thing, like Empirical Keying Procedure, and it's this really cool method of creating a test by asking a population how they agree about certain things, and then when people are malingering or lying they can see when it's sort of out of alignment. But I would say the biggest thing was the semi-structured approach.
So, a lot of these inventories sometimes are semi-structured in the sense where there is a structure, but then you're able to go off that structure and ask the things that you wanna ask to get more details, and I've always thought that like a foundation of a lot of the work we do is a semi-structured approach. And that's probably been the biggest feedback or takeaway.
Chris (05:05): So, you mentioned that part of the early interest in behavior was to feel more comfortable in social settings. Do you find that this has been translated? How has your experience of being at a party or at an event changed with this new knowledge?
Blake (05:21): I don't really experience any social anxiety anymore. It's a thing that's definitely left in the past. I will tell you the nexus or the shift was when I started teaching psychology at CUNY. I started teaching psychology at twenty-one. I was, like, an adjunct professor, and I left that class feeling like a different human being, almost. And I think what happened is because I talked about social interactions and social dynamics and I was leading workshops and classes on it, it allowed me to step into this role of, like, social confidence and social power. But like, yeah, I think my fourteen-year-old self would be pretty shocked in terms of the direction that I took in life. Like, I don't—I was quiet. And just, not shy, but just more quiet. And now I don't shut up. So it's a big difference.
Chris (06:07): What are the types of things that you pick up on that others might miss when you're in a social situation?
Blake (06:14): Oh, wow. I'm so hyper-sensitive to people's behavior that I think if people were to see inside my head it would almost be weird. Or creepy. Like it would just be a different level of awareness than most people are used to. It's kind of what I do for work, what I do for life. I think the biggest difference is I've trained myself to notice and not judge. There's probably more cognitive empathy than people realize. So I'm not saying, like, "Oh my god, this person is X," or, "This person is Y." I'm just noticing. So I'm seeing people as people who are performing these certain behaviors and then trying not to get messed with by those behaviors. So if somebody's a little bit rude to me, I'm not seeing that person as a rude person. So separating the person from the behavior just allows me to maintain a lot more power in social dynamics, where it's sort of hard to get to me. And I've had to do this in my executive coaching career and leadership work and all that stuff, 'cause I deal with tough personalities sometimes.
Chris (07:12): Something that really stood out to me through taking the Beyond Tells immersion of how often we're interpreting social signals through some narrative of judgment. That we already have a predetermined notion of who someone is, and that immediately colors everything that we see. So this almost spiritual pursuit of being able to observe cleanly without this narrative bias—I'd love to hear a little bit about how you become sensitive to these narratives that you have about a person so that you can see them more objectively.
Blake (07:50): Yeah. I call them social frictions, right? Like these narratives that we create for certain people. And it's quite fascinating. It's one of these things that's fundamentally impossible based on just how the brain works to completely reduce. They're always going to be there. So the trick is not saying, like, "Oh, I don't—" Like, I do it all the time. Like I'm like, "Ah, this asshole right here." I'll say something, but then I'll pull myself back and try to understand why. So I have a couple of—I think noticing what your triggers are are important. And you can think of somebody's triggers on a spectrum where certain people they're instantly repelled by, for whatever reason. Whether it's not trusting or not finding them valuable or not finding them interesting. And the other side is certain people that they're just immediately attracted to. I think both of those poles are a very useful inquiry. Like, you should be going down those rabbit holes.
And usually, what I'll find in having so many conversations with people, there is some truth to this notion that if you don't like something there's something that reminds them about you. I'm a pretty big believer in that. In my own life, in working with executives that are—or, just a wide range of industries—people being like, "No way, no way." And then we dig deeper and deeper and deeper and find that like, oh yeah, you have an insecurity about that and they're coming across that way and so forth.
And then the other side for a lot of executives that are in business deals, and maybe even poker players, just sort of understanding why do you trust certain people and not others, because it's not that they're necessarily trustworthy or not trustworthy, especially if you've just met them, it's that they've passed some preconditioned behavioral lens of what it means to be trustworthy socially, and you wanna look out for that as well.
I talk about this quite a bit, where I'll listen to somebody on a podcast, and they're really enthusiastic and they're really, like, really getting into it, and I'm just loving the conversation. And I have no reason to not believe them, because they're an expert in their field or so on and so forth, but like I have a very nuanced understanding of like a certain area of psychology and neuroscience and communication, like, those are the worlds that I play in. And then they'll, like, enter my world and they'll start talking about something, and I'll be like, "You just spoke so emphatically about something that I know to be not true." And I've been working on not, like, completely dismissing those kinds of people, because everybody's going to do this at some point or another.
But I do believe that this is a little bit of a problem in society where people, especially on the internet, get really good at talking about one area, and then they sorta step out of their areas of competency and talk about everything. That's what we saw with Beyond Tells, like a lot of body language experts will talk about poker and have absolutely no idea what they were talking about, and it's just so not grounded in any sort of reality, but people trust that. So there's almost a responsibility as a thought leader or as an industry person to stay in your lane, in a certain regard. And back to your question, looking at the poles is a very useful pursuit for people.
Chris (10:50): Looking at the poles?
Blake (10:51): Yeah, looking at the poles of those two continuums. Like, the one where it's like, "Why don't I like this person?" And two, "Why do I really trust them?" It's like, what are the behavioral patterns, what are the kind of person like—there's biases, latent racism, there's so many prejudices—Like, there's so much stuff that exists there, and instead of making yourself wrong for having them it's better to just understand what they are.
Chris (11:15): Yeah, and it's very fascinating that once we've converged on one of these two extremes to either repel or attract, it's very difficult to change our mind. That these first impressions tend to be very lasting, because we tend to look for evidence to confirm our current beliefs. So trying to withhold a judgment or categorization until we have enough data to really know, as well as acknowledging that all behavior is pretty contextual, so what you're seeing from someone in one situation may not translate to their overall personality.
This brings up maybe an interesting line of inquiry, thinking about first impressions. So, knowing that a lot of people are very informed by our first impression at the table in a social situation, in a business deal, how do you think about creating the right first impression?
Blake (12:09): Oh, that's a great question. So really what it boils down to is first getting the person to where they're their most comfortable. So, the dynamic would be to imagine what you look like in a conversation with your closest friend that you have something called unconditional positive regard. Carl Rogers, I think, the humanistic psychologist, said that it's a worthwhile goal of every relationship, and it basically means that whatever you say you don't feel like that person's gonna run away. Right? Like maybe you say some weird joke or say something offensive, and you know that they're still gonna stay there and they're still gonna love you and they're still gonna respect you and so on and so forth. Right?
So I wanna see what someone's behavior looks like when they're really comfortable, and then build off that. So a lot of, like, the first impressions of engineering, which is interesting, is it's removing the filters of how people want to be perceived. So, like, for example in a lot of leadership positions, leaders wanna come across like good leaders, which makes their behavior weird, because they wanna be professional or they wanna be assertive, and they're miscalibrating what professionalism or assertion looks like from a behavioral level, and then they just come off looking weird, and people are just, "All right, this person's weird." So the whole joke is, like, most of the time when I'm reading behavior or reverse-engineering narratives, I'm reverse-engineering what the person usually wants to cover up. Like if somebody's just present and themselves, there's often not that much commentary. It's like, "Okay, that person's being them." Like, they're great, they're self-expressed, they seem present, they seem all these things. But it's the people that are trying. And the whole notion of trying, and fitting into these cultural norms is the source of a lot of team issues, a lot of leadership issues. Like it's all because we want to be something that we're not and we're miscalibrating.
Chris (14:01): I think that's an interesting divider. It's almost like acting/not acting. What are the traits we're trying to display as some sort of performance, and what are the traits that leak out in a genuine way? How do you differentiate between those?
Blake (14:17): Well, that's, I mean that's a great question. Because there's acting and not acting, and then there's probably like variations of what acting is, right? Like so, one of the more interesting things about a world-class actor is that they're able to understand the nuances of behavior and social norms and facial movement so much to the point that you sit in a movie theater and you become convinced that that person is that person. Like, that's wild. And that just shows you an absolute mastery over the impact of their behavior on others.
Like, the best actors—There's no one better than that. Like, people will say politicians. It's not true. Politicians are sort of like masters of concealment and maintaining a certain status quo, but the best actors in a lot of ways from a behavioral perspective can probably be phenomenal leaders, because they're able to reverse-engineer what is the perception of society and how do I fit into that role? So I mean I do believe that for some clients, like, you know, acting is a pretty good skill to have, and it's something that, unfortunately—It's hard. Like, the leadership dynamics and the social dynamics are extremely complex. I make the argument they're one of the most complex things in the known universe. And I wish I could tell everybody just to like be themselves and be free and be self-expressed. It does not really work like that. Like, you can't show up at a team and just be yourself. Like there's, you have to understand the landscape. You have to understand the norms. Like, and the reality is I've worked in certain organizations that are straight up like Game of Thrones. Like, that's what it is. And the people that are unable to navigate that are at a massive disadvantage.
Chris (15:54): So, I wanna take this to the poker table and, you know, something we've talked about here is the poker table is just a great sandbox for understanding human behavior, where because of the stakes involved, because of the pressure, because of the rapidly changing dynamics, we can observe lots of aspects of our own behavior or the behavior of others that we might not pick up on off the table, but that the same patterns are repeating across. And I know in a former life you used to be pretty skeptical about the existence of tells, but what do you think changed your mind?
Blake (16:32): Our studies. So like, you'd think, everybody's like, "Oh, it makes so much sense." It doesn't really make sense. Like when I was actually playing poker, I didn't believe tells had any value at all. I thought a lot of the stuff was straight-up silly. I was like, "Nobody's sitting at the table with a steeple. Like, people don't do these kinds of things. Like, what are you talking about?" Right? Like, and you know, like these little things that the poker community hears. And then I did the first study of Beyond Tells just to sort of—It was supposed to be just this three-month thing, where I was like, "It would be so useful to actually watch behavior in an uninterrupted view and sort of understand what's going on there." And then as we started going down the rabbit hole it was like, "Oh my god, there actually is something here." Like, "I never thought there would be this much here." And that led to interest.
And we use this thing called grounding theory. It's a research methodology where you don't have a hypothesis, it's where you just go in and you basically create a method for labeling and coding data. And then you see what the data provides. And that's kind of what we did.
Chris (17:34): So, when you're at the table, presumably there's some players who are giving off more tells than others. What types of things are you looking for to say, "This is a player I definitely want to pay attention to?"
Blake (17:45): Yeah, so what we're looking for is essentially potential. So, potential within the themes or the constructs of Beyond Tells. So like, when we did this large study on behavior, we found that there's a lot of things—So a lot of people had this complete misconception about emotion and arousal at the poker table. Like, emotion and arousal are like one of the hardest things to reconstruct. Like, it's just—It's very, very, very difficult to understand it. So what we're looking for is behaviors that are connected to a thought process. So, for example, like the fact that a player that has a marginal hand and is like, "All right, I can play this, I can play this." Like, "Why not?" And they have an arch and a sort of style that we play "cavalier" to the way that they bet, versus when they actually have a really strong hand or a hand on top of their range, they're gonna be more deliberate and more straightforward.
And one of the things is we've been able to validate this in players in our study and in like the super high-roller and other poker sort of landscapes over the course of years of play. So that they're doing the same thing—I mean, I've had people—This is kinda crazy. I've had people in the first Beyond Tells study that came back and played in the third Beyond Tells study, and despite me telling them all of their tells, they still did the same things. 'Cause it was so—It's like a process that's ingrained, and these patterns are hard to sometimes reduce. People would be surprised. But it's not all of the things people think it is. It's not the breathing, it's not the poker face stuff. It's a lot of movement inside the hands, it's a lot of mechanisms, what we call concealment. So it's not the emotion, it's the mechanism a player uses to conceal the emotion that's the tell.
And getting a little bit sort of carried away here theory-wise, but the reason why that's so important is because that's part of a cognitive process. So it's like, "Oh my god, I'm bluffing in this spot, let me not give off as much information as possible." So they become still. Or on the other hand, they've got value and they know they're winning. They're still still, but they're not as still as they are when they're bluffing. And the way you pick that up is through like hyper-changes in eye direction and gaze direction.
And listen, some of these things I don't really know the mechanism on why. Like, I know they're concealing, I don't know why this is the way that it is. I mean, I found tells in poker players and discussed it with them and they don't even know why. They're like, "I don't know." Like, some of this stuff is just unconscious, and some of it is like, "Oh no, I do that because of XYZABC." So it's just—It's a fascinating world, and I think what's so, so, so cool about poker over every other area in human behavior is that poker is one of the few places we have ground truth. So every single hand, every single hand a player plays, they have an actual hand that we can connect behavior back to. Whereas if this is an interaction, like imagine—Anybody listening to this, I could probably determine with a high level of accuracy if you like someone or don't like someone based on the first ten or fifteen seconds interacting with them. Right? But I need this, like, massive sample. I mean am I gonna follow you with a camera everywhere you go? And, like, it's very difficult.
Whereas poker, you have everybody at the table, you have a similar construct, everyone's behaving in similar ways. It's just a phenomenal area for studying behavior. I mean, I don't really think there's anything better. Probably poker, and then like some sort of team dynamic. Like, those are the two best ones.
Chris (21:08): Yeah. A lot of improvement is tightening your feedback loop. So you have this hypothesis at the table, and usually, it narrows down to, "Is this player strong or weak?" Or another way of saying 'weak' is 'marginal.' "Do they have a really strong hand that's likely a value bet, or do they have a weaker hand that's a bluff or a semi-bluff where they'd rather have you fold?" And immediately seeing at showdown what they have, you're able to calibrate this read you have of the player and say, "Hey, my hypothesis here, my assumptions about that they gave this signal and they had this type of hand, that it was correct." Or that it was incorrect, and I know that something about the way that I'm perceiving their behavior or the way the hand played out is incorrect. And when you see the players who get the best is that they're the best at incorporating this new information into their model.
So statistically this is called Bayesian Updating. That with this new information, I'm updating my prior perception of how this player plays, and the more information that you get, this is where you start to see players diverge in outcomes throughout the session, and that players who are most observant and the best at incorporating this new information are having better and better reads throughout the session, and thus they're able to have more confidence and conviction and have a higher risk tolerance, because they have more margin for error.
So it's a really fascinating way to see how some of these earlier advantages can really compound—not only throughout a session but throughout someone's career as they become more adept at this skill.
You hinted at a couple, like—I think a lot of people's experience with poker tells come from seeing the cinematic interpretation. Say something like Casino Royale, where he scratches his ear and he must have, you know, a seven-high straight. What are the types of things that people get wrong about poker tells?
Blake (23:13): Basically that. That they think it's this byproduct of emotion, when in reality in the biggest games in the world, like, a lot of players are—Everybody's experiencing arousal, but not necessarily emotion. Like, nobody's sitting there—Like, if you play in like a world-class game and a player flops top set, which for those of you now listening is like a really good hand in poker, right, and they know they're ahead, they're not like, "Oh my god, I'm so excited." Like it's like this—You're numb to it. Like you don't feel anything. You're like, "All right, like, top set." Like another hand. All right. But then it doesn't mean that there's no patterns in thinking in the ways that players reproduce thoughts. So I think the biggest misconception is thinking that the face is useful, when it's really not useful at all, because everybody is regulating their face.
So like a lot of the misnomers about micro-expressions and all this stuff—Like, these things happen so quickly, and I doubt the relevance of them in this regard also. But players don't have to answer you. They can just sit there. Right? Like, someone—You can talk to me all you want, I could just, I don't have to—I have no requirement to talk to players at the poker table. Which is one of the most interesting things. Right? So you can try to get people to talk, and try to get people to open up, but they ultimately don't have to. And because of that, we have just found that the hands are the most valuable part of the body by far for poker tells. There is stuff in the face and there is stuff in the body, but if you had to filter through all the noise and create a system that's more usable, you'd be coaching people to just focus on the hands. It's just way easier to interpret than any part of the body. And you have to use them to execute bets, to check your cards. Like, it's the only sort of part of the body with the exception of your eyes (which you could cover with sunglasses) that have to be used so frequently. So it's easier to understand patterns in that movement.
Chris (24:55): Maybe you could give us two examples of a player checking their cards and making a bet, and the differences you might see in their hands, in the way that they handle their chips or their cards?
Blake (25:07): Yeah. So like one example is, I've never seen a player in my entire life that hasn't put a chip on their cards and it's not been a tell. So, that means, like, you check your cards, and then some players will take a chip, and then drop it on their cards as a form of chip protector. Right? So, like, "Oh, I'm protecting the chip." Now, most people, when they think of that as a tell, they think of it as in a binary. Like, they put their chip on their cards, or they don't put their chip on their cards. But what we found is the style in which a player puts a chip on their cards, that often suggests a tell.
So, they check their cards. It's like a hand that they perceive to be, like, playable, and they might just drop the chip on the card. But when they check their cards and it's a hand that they perceive to be very good, they might delicately place a chip on their card. And then it's the hand that is the best, like kings plus, or kings or aces, and they won't even—They'll forget to put the chip on their cards. And I've just never seen it. It's been like a wild thing. I'm like, I'm looking for the person—And—I'm looking for the person, if you're out there, that can consistently put a chip on your cards in a way that we just can't reverse engineer. And I still have not. I've not seen it. So that's, like, an example.
Another example is in the—We call it a string. So a string is a sequence of events that happen. So there—You know this notion of, like, body language, they'll talk about clusters? Like the whole notion of, like, clustering is in a lot of ways completely useless at the poker table. It's—'Cause the behaviors don't matter, it's the sequence of the behaviors that tell a story or create a narrative. So, like, a string—Like from a behavioral coding perspective, a string would be, like, the user checked their cards at like 2.3 seconds and it lasted from 2.3 seconds to 3.6 seconds, and they, you know, 1.3 second card check followed immediately by reaching their right hand to execute the chips and bet. And what we found is that more condensed strings were an indication of strength more than anything else. So, like, if a player is fluid and intentional, they were more likely to be strong, if there was, like, a lot of hesitations.
Now, of course, there's, like, variations in this, and there's exceptions, and so on and so forth, which is why the product is called "Beyond Tells," 'cause I'm trying to get people to break this thing where, like, in poker, for example, if we just take the context of poker and we would say, "Oh, if somebody raises under the gun, they have these hands." Like, nobody does—Like, that's not how poker works. And a lot of the time, poker is adjusting to themes. Like I remember one series, I was talking to a bunch of tournament players, and there was this joke that everybody's like under-the-gun stealing, and the whole joke was like players are opening their under-the-gun range because the perception in poker is you don't open strong hands under the gun. Right?
So there's all these nuances. And poker has evolved that way, but people's understanding of behavior has still been left in what I consider to be the Stone Ages. So they view it from such an A to B relationship, or causal relationship. And it's just not the case. Like, behavior is infinitely more complex than the thoughts that are involved in poker. Right? The amount of decision trees—Like, I don't—Like, you look at like GTO and you can solve for like every single bet structure. Like, solving for every single movement of behavior is infinitely more complex, 'cause there's just more behavioral data, and 95% of it's noise. Right? It's just people moving. But we're such meaning-making, narrative-making machines that we like to make meaning out of these things.
I mean, I was with a player today. I was testing a player, I had him watch six games. I had six players and six players. He did really well. He got actually ten out of twelve right. So I'm like, "All right. Like, in sixty seconds, use the Beyond Tells system." But one he got so wrong. He's like, "Oh, this player's probably an amateur, doesn't play that much, dah-dah-dah-dah-dah." And this player is just entering the super high-roller field and like, playing the biggest games in the world. And it's like, "Interesting. Why'd he get that wrong?" Because that player's alignment was in alignment with the perception of not being experienced, but he wasn't experienced live. He was a super-experienced online player who just looked a little bit weird on live.
So we make meaning out of things that are not necessarily there. And like you said about feedback loop, the, you know, the funny thing is when we released “Beyond Tells” I kept using the copy of Feedback Loop, 'cause I thought that's why it was so innovative. Like, now you could actually see whether you're right or wrong instantly, 'cause normally it doesn't happen, but people weren't as enthusiastic about it as I was. It didn't test well.
Chris (29:25): I think it's a good example of how a little bit of knowledge can be more dangerous than no knowledge at all—
Blake (29:30): Mmm—Mm-hmm.
Chris (29:32): 'Cause we become overconfident. Our last episode with Frank Lantz, he was talking about how when players learn the right opening moves for a game like Go, they actually have a dip in rating, because they become a little bit too over-reliant or systematic or instrumental in their play, and their thinking kinda takes a temporary dip until they actually incorporate this new learning and are able to move beyond it. In the same way, knowing a little bit about tells, there's this danger of over-applying it in an overconfident way, where you think you're seeing something when there's not really anything there, or you make a wrong read in a very high-confident way and make a very large mistake, like the example that you just gave, where 95% of the things you're seeing at the poker table are probably just noise. Maybe there's data there, but there's no way of interpreting it.
So this kinda leads to this question of, at the table how do you know what's signal and how do you know what's noise?
Blake (30:35): Yeah. So basically, through the frameworks that we've created, you're able to—That's why the hands are so useful. You're able to see what's signal, 'cause you're able to verify the feedback loops so much quicker. So you're like, "Wow. In, you know, 25 instances of this player raising, they did this 85% of the time, they did this 15% of the time, and it yielded X and Y result." Which is why, like, bluffing or not bluffing or like big polarized spots are hard to verify because you don't necessarily have that data.
So, in a lot of ways, a lot of this stuff, like, you need to have a logical reason on why behavior is occurring, or it's not useful. So there needs to be some sort of logic behind movement, and often the logic is like players wanting to take a certain action.
So, to sort of add on to a point of what you said, like, I've worked with some players that are like, "natural live read players." Like, everybody perceives this player to be a really good player of live reads and they don't really understand the mechanism but they're good at reading. And I've tested them, and some of them are not—They're probably like 60%. Right 60% of the time. But because of the fact they have such a high level of confidence in their ability to read behavior, they take lines or they do things at the table that you would never do. So the other players perceive it to be very confident, and that they have a strong hand. So it's the overconfidence that's actually allowing them to win, not the deep soul-reading into human behavior.
That's why I always tell people, like, at least with Beyond Tells and our Beyond Tells system, like, if you can't reverse-engineer a read, don't go with it. And also, another tip, is like if you're not occasionally saying, "Oh, I don't know," you're doing something very wrong. Like, a lot of the time it's like, "Huh, interesting. I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, oh. There's something. Oh, that's not something." Like, it's sort of navigating that. And just from a playability perspective, to make this skillset practical, you can't follow every single player. Like, you have to have a structure for it, you have to know where you're looking, when you're looking, and why you're looking. And the more that you can do that, the better that you will be.
There was actually an interesting study. Like, the one good study on poker tells, like an academic study, by this guy—Michael—I'm gonna say his name wrong. Slepian? Or—Slepian? I met him, he was a professor at Columbia's business school. He did this really cool study where he showed players' hands, and he had people that didn't even know poker rate whether they had a good hand or a bad hand by observing hands, and it was pretty high. I forgot the number, but it was like people were getting it right like 75% of the hands. And I think, I think 75% of the time or 76% of the time, I think they were picking up on intentionality. That players were more intentional and more direct with strong hands than they were with marginal or weak ones.
Chris (33:17): And I think that's a really good insight, is that as soon as thinking comes into play, where, "Hey, I'm very confident when I need to know how to do, there's a certain level of intentionality that comes along with it, rather than as uncertainty, it leaks out." Something that you said earlier. Any time I tell someone I play poker, it seems, they ask me, "Well, you must have a really good poker face." So this whole notion that we're all just sitting at the table completely stone-faced—Which, a person—This is a misnomer, because if you're stone-faced, people don't really want to play with you all that much, and that's really important, but also that you can't just sit there and give nothing away for hours and hours on end. It's just, it's just too exhausting. So talking about concealment strategy. The couple different variables that you mention I think will be interesting to explore. First is when people feel the need to put on their poker face and give nothing away. Like, what has happened in the hand? It's like, "Oh, okay, now I can't—Now I need to just get really serious." And the other, that there's different levels of stillness. That there's just, "I'm not even blinking," versus, "I'm relaxed but I don't want to make any sudden movements."
So, we'd love to hear you go into what are the types of things that people give away, especially when they're trying hard not to give anything away?
Blake (34:41): Yeah. So, in a lot of ways, people over-correct. So, this is the joke, that players that dedicate a lot of effort to not giving off behavioral information or being, like, let's assume your stoic poker player, right? They're in fact easier for me to process than the players that move a lot. And the reason why is if you perform behavior in the same way every single hand, you're probably not gonna be that good at it. So, like, in the super high-roller, there's a couple players that like if you showed the average person these people, they'd be like, "Wow, how are they so still? They're not giving away any information at all." When in reality when I get hired to break them down, I'm like, okay, good, this is gonna be easy. As opposed to somebody who's moving around all the way—'Cause it's less noise to filter, and it's easier for me to target where to look at.
So, for example, like if a player is sitting here—And for those of you listening, I have, like, two hands on top of each other. And let's say they are always like this in big spots. What I will find is, sometimes they will put more pressure in their hands in certain spots and not in others. Right? So—And this happens even for the world's best players. Like people think that they're immune, and they're just really not, because what they're not realizing is they're dedicating more cognition to not giving something off, and because of that they're becoming way more still. And it's not stillness that's the tell, it's the intensity of stillness that's the tell.
So it's like, "Oh, I don't want to be called that." And some players just—They don't even have an internal dialogue, it's just stuff that they do and don't realize it. And it gets kinda confusing when you're watching it sometimes, and you're like, "Is this person really doing it? Like, is this really happening?" And it's like, oh, yeah. And you go back years and years and years—this is what's so great about online footage—is that you have all that data. And then there's another thing, like, over-calibration. Right? So there's—We say there are two kinds of concealment strategies. One's 'everything is fine,' and one's absolute stillness. So, 'everything is fine,' is like they just act like everything is fine. Right? And then certain players, they just, they don't move that much, they just seem to not change. But then players, like, over-calibrate. Like, they try to show you that everything is really fine. So they'll say things, or they'll, like, in the middle of a really big spot like just start taking a drink of water or take out their phone. And you sort of have to reverse-engineer, like, "All right, is this player overcompensating and trying to communicate that everything is fine, or is this player actually like, I have zero cares in the world because I'm nutted right now and good luck."
And that's a puzzle that depends on the player's personality and your experience and so on and so forth. So it's like navigating that world is—It gets pretty interesting. And like, I'm still a little bit biased in the sense that the spectrum of players I deal with is very—I think this is probably one of my most rare things in poker, in the sense that like I have taught the game to one/two players and have worked with the best players in the world. Like, most people don't have that spectrum. And I always say, poker moves like an F-14 at the top of the game and like the Titanic at the bottom of the game. So like, people don't understand how much the different—Like if you put a sensor in the head of players playing the biggest games in the world, and the sensor in the head of players playing, like, one/two in your local casino, and you were to map those off across the last twenty years, you would see variation in both areas, but the variation at the top of the game would be insane. You would be, like, "Oh my god." Like, the amount of thoughts and the amount of work that players put into their game.
Like, it's weird, 'cause I'm usually like on podcasts explaining this. It's like, Chris, you actually understand this, so it's kind of nice to talk to somebody that gets the nuances of this. But anybody listening, it's just the amount of work that players put into their game, and with the advancements of GTO and the sims and the things that you can do, it's utterly incredible compared to what it was like twenty years ago. But still, at like a one/two game, despite all of that, people are still making mistakes. And that's what's one of the coolest things about poker, is like despite this world of GTO, like, game theory optimal and like understanding, players are not rational. Everybody's operating within their own levels of what rational is. And because of that, it can create behavioral noise.
So what I mean by that is a player—Like, I don't like the continuum of value betting and bluffing, but it's like a good way to sort of understand poker. Right? It's more nuanced than that, but technically you're sort of ahead or behind in poker, right, whenever you're making a bet. But it's based on your sophistication and understanding of a game.
So, there are spots where I've observed players that think they're bluffing, but based on the player that they're playing against they're actually value-betting. Right? So you look at them and their behavior looks like, "Oh wow, this player's like really anxious in this spot, betting with like the third nuts into a player that has the widest range ever, and they're—" You know, and it's, so you have to be able to reverse-engineer that, and a lot of that comes from, like, in my opinion, paying attention to conversations and having the ability to elicit information from players, and then paying attention to, like, reactions and nuances.
So, all right, I have a good example. Everybody listening to this podcast belongs to a bunch of different subcultures. Things in life. So, some of you might, you know, you might be a Shakespeare fan or you might be a Beethoven fan, and because of that, because you understand the complexities of that world, if me and you and another person were in a room, and you and that other person had a really good understanding of Beethoven, and I said something about Beethoven that you two knew not to be true, there's kind of, like, this little thing where you might look at each other and be like, "Huh." Like, "He doesn't get it." Like, "He doesn't get this world." This same exact thing happens at a poker table like every ten minutes, and I'm always so shocked at how often players are willing to give away that they understand the game. Right?
So, and the reason is because at the poker table people—There's this level of belonging in life, and I think poker players all want to show that they belong. Not all. The good ones don't really care. But like, everybody wants to show they belong. So like, the dealer will make a mistake, and everybody gets very, like, "Oh no, you shouldn't do that." Or, you know, a player will sometimes—A player can size in a certain way.
So, for example, like, I'll be at a poker table, like the main event last year, I sat down and the first like five hands somebody made this crazy bet on the turn and me and this European pro across from the table just looked at each other and laughed. So, we both signaled to one another that we know that there's no way, shape, or form that that bet was correct in any world of poker. It was just this ridiculous, misplaced over-bet. But we were signaling that we understood that. So, think about the implications of that. Right? Like, maybe in a spot I could over-bet him and smirk and smile. Right? Like there's these nuanced levels of the game that I think the average poker player does not care enough about, and the players are literally telling you their understanding of the game.
Like, I mean literally. There are people at the table that tell you which school of thought they come from. Like, "Oh, you know, like, I took a Solve For Y class," or, "I took an Upswing class," or, "I took a School of Cards class," or I took this. And it's like, "Okay, great. So if you took an Upswing class, and you took that, like, what class did you take?" Oh, I know those ranges. Like, you're able to reverse-engineer how a player is actually thinking, or their school of thought or approach, and I don't think people interact socially enough to really unlock that world. And when you do, it's incredibly valuable.
So, yeah. Long rant, but that's, yeah. I'm a big believer in that, I think it's one of the most under-utilized edges in poker by far.
Chris (42:30): I think if there's a surprising thing that I've taken away from poker that applies to the rest of my life, it's a sense of empathy. We often make the mistake of assuming that others think like us. They have similar beliefs, they see the world similarly. And that's just not the case at all, but that through their words, through their actions, people are telling you all the time who they are if you're willing to listen. And as Blake was saying, especially in a game of information asymmetries, where poker is about getting more information than you're giving, it is unbelievable how much information people will give you about themselves, how they're feeling that day, how they think about the game, their level of experience, what their goal is in this session, what their current mental state is, how they're perceiving other players, if only you ask and listen. And I think there's a large amount of nuance that's missed in that we're just narrowly looking at the two cards in front of our face, and not thinking about the perception of everyone else at the table and how that dynamic is continually shifting.
And it's something that Blake hinted at which we really don't experience until you hear those two different explanations for a hand. A low-limit amateur and one of the top players, that they are not even playing the same game. The things that they are looking at, the options that are being considered are not even in the same universe, but if you don't realize who you're playing against, you're just gonna make fundamental mistakes. So it feels like this, I wanna say, key skill is just to be present, to be aware.
Something you talked about at the workshop, Blake, that I think is a good thing to discuss, is just paying attention. I realized how much after the session that I'm just off in my own world when I'm at the table. Part of it being, you know, I'm used to playing online, I'm used to getting a lot more hands, and the action can be very slow. But when you're in person, even though the action is slow, there's just so much more information available to calibrate, to understand the people who you're playing against. What advice do you have for someone who finds themself distracted while they're playing, a little bit off in their own head. Like, how do we be more aware, present, paying attention to the things that are happening around us?
Blake (45:06): It's a great question, and I think it's, you know, it's so tricky, in the sense that I think—First of all, humans aren't really designed to pay maximum levels of attention for long periods of time. Like, if you're somebody who can sit there and focus for ten hours, you're just this sit out, you know, four standard deviations to the right of the bell curve savage kinda person. Like, I envy that kinda thing.
So, I like to think of things like, first, what things you can control. So, certain things like sleep, and even diet. Like, people don't understand—Like even poker players that eat—Like, they choose the absolutely worst foods. Like, things that are gonna cause instability in blood sugar and lead to these, like, energy crashes and stuff like that. So like, I always assess those things first. And then really it's—I mean, it's different everywhere you go. But like, it's why you're playing poker in the first place. So it's really understanding, like, what are you here to do? Like, are you here to just enjoy yourself? Because if you're to enjoy yourself, like, why don't you just have a couple of beers and just enjoy yourself instead of trying to make it like you're this advantageous player? Right? Or are you here to be competitive? Or are you here to pay for that house that you wanna buy? Like, what is the actual reason for why you're playing poker?
And usually what happens is, when you work with players, the first reason is not the real reason. Like, it takes some work to actually get to why they wanna play poker. And you know, like, that's used—I think that it's become such a standard, like, "You need to know why you're doing stuff." I think it should be changed to, like, "You really need to know what the actual 'why' is. Like, don't just say something." And then it's really establishing a relationship with your word. Like saying, like, "I'm gonna focus for the next ten minutes and set a timer and focus for the next ten minutes because you said that you were gonna focus for the next ten minutes." Not for any other reason, but because you said you would do it.
I think that muscle is fundamentally weak in a lot of poker players, and it needs to be built. So a lot of players will do, like, meditation and like all these different things that are amazing and things that I do, but at the end of the day, if you could build a relationship to your word, it doesn't matter how you're feeling, because you're gonna perform. Right? And you're just gonna step up and play. And, but yeah. The amount of conversations that I've had, and it's like, the whole joke is like, I'll take a B poker player whose play is a solid B game every day over somebody that oscillates between F and A. Just, mathematically the average is lower, right, but like—I mean, I work with some talented people that just can't get out of their own way.
And this is also a function of age. So, you wanna hear something funny? We stopped—I have been in the poker industry for like, I guess it's like fourteen years now, right, like we're owning poker companies, and about seven years ago we completely stopped marketing to anybody under the age of 35. Isn't that interesting? Just above 35. And the reason why is there's just a certain maturity, a certain thing that comes from knowing yourself. 'Cause like a lot of these 20-year-old kids are just basket cases, 'cause I know, 'cause I was a basket case at that age. Like, you know what I mean? So it was just so much easier to deal with people over the age of 35 that were successful. Like, I would know from the first email whether or not a player could be successful or not. Just the way that they structured their thoughts and how serious they were about the game. And I don't think people—I don't think people do that.
So I would say, like, the short answer is to develop a relationship to your word, and find all of the environmental factors that break your ability to maintain focus. Like, the amount of people that bring their phone and just play on their phone all day, it's crazy. It's, like, insane to me. And they say they enjoy poker. So what do you do, you just enjoy sitting there and just folding for eighty percent of the time and then checking Instagram? Like, what are you doing, man? Like, play poker! Like, you know? And I think that's, like, a systemic thing.
And also just go look at any poker field. These people are not healthy. Like, they don't have good habits, they don't have good routines, they don't have good—And that stuff's really, really, really important.
Chris (48:57): Yeah. I think about it as creating the conditions for success, of, "What can I do off the table to maximize my odds of success on the table?" That's really how I approach performance, is, "How do I get my best self to show up? What can I do ahead of time to feel prepared, feel energized, feel inspired?" I like that you said, "Pick a length of time to be present, and just set a timer." I think setting a timer is one of the most underrated productivity strategies, which is, "I'm going to do this one thing for this amount of time." And setting the timer is the hardest part of that, is just to reduce all of the other options. So, intentionality goes a really long way.
I'm getting this image of these two different poker games. Maybe those listening can have this image with me themselves. So the first game it's a bunch of guys wearing headphones, no one's really talking, everyone's really serious, feels like everyone's very focused, there's just not a very fun atmosphere, it's more serious, "Hey, we're all here to play." And the second game, maybe there's a lot more talking, people are showing their cards after they fold, there's a little bit more of a community aspect. So those who are there to have fun are more likely to stick around, because they're having fun and there's a lot of information being shared, maybe some playful needles. And this is just presumably a much more enjoyable atmosphere to play.
And it feels like one of these meta-skills of playing live poker is adding value to making the game fun and enjoyable to everyone. This is one of the biggest shifts that I think I had to make, as I came from an online background and I just wanted to give nothing away, I just wanted to execute my strategy, and don't need to talk about sports or whatever else is going on. I just want to do my own thing. And realizing that everyone has a role to play at the table, and that being social, being someone who's fun, being someone who adds value, not only makes you more likely to be invited, but also can help your expected value at the table as well, because of the information that people are giving off, which you can use.
So, I've seen you in action, I know how good you are at this. I would like to know a couple tips you have for just making your poker game more fun.
Blake (51:22): First of all, there are multiple games going on in the game of poker. Which a lot of people don't get. So, for example, like, there's been times where within the first thirty minutes, like, I take this crazy line. Just something that you never do. And my friend and I always contemplated this. Like, if you get invited to a home game, does it make sense to just triple barrel the first hand, and show no matter what? And it's basically like—
Chris (51:50): So, you run a crazy bluff, and everyone sees it.
Blake (51:53): Yeah. Everyone sees it. And you just show. Whatever hand. And like if everybody folds, great, you make some money, if you get called down—It's great. And what a lot of people don't understand in poker is most poker players are playing one game. Especially, like, online players. They're playing like the maximize EV game, or maximize their expected value. So they're making these decisions that over the long run make them the most amount of money. And when you're playing or get invited into a live game, you're now playing a very weird game in the sense that you're trying to maximize your EV, but being a player with such a significant edge, you want to be invited back. Right? So it's this notion of you're maximizing for game access. Like, you wanna be invited back, you wanna be able to play in these lineups, you wanna be able to do all that. And that requires you to do a lot more than just take money off of the table. Right? It requires you to be the kind of person that adds value to that dynamic.
And I really think that there's so many different ways, and I've seen, and I've helped players add value in so many different ways. Add value could be telling cool stories. Right? So like I had one really high-level poker client that I worked with and I was like, "Listen, these people want stories. So let's cultivate your, you know, eight stories about the DGEN poker—Everybody wants to hear these things." And you teach this sort of mechanism where—The storytelling is probably one of the most effective communication things—Like, nothing else compares for a wide range of reasons. It's like people let their guard down with stories, people see themselves in your stories, like—I could talk about this for days. But basically, it's so easy to tell a story, 'cause somebody could say something and you can just go, "Oh, that reminds me of a story," and just leap into a story. And like the connection could be kind of weak, but people don't really care. It's like, "Oh, this is interesting."
So all of a sudden, you become this player that's good, but, "You know what, the value that they provide, it's, oh, they were just telling me this story of when they like bluffed Phil Ivey in this crazy spot, and like they know all these people," like, so that's one sort of added value. Right? Like, but the other value is, like, you can connect them to other games, you can help them, you can bring alcohol and drinks, you can provide experiences. And I think a worthwhile pursuit from everyone is knowing their value and then knowing how to communicate that value to a group of people. That is the edge that is required in these games.
So, like, even in the games that I, like, played when I was younger, everybody knew that I was one of the best players there, but a lot of the people there, like, they saw it as almost like a father/son dynamic with me. They would give me, like, feedback, and give me advice, and like some of their feedback was stupid. Like, it was really bad feedback and really bad advice, but like, I was like, "Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense." Like, "Thank you." Like. And they liked that dynamic.
And like, I'll tell you a story. So we all went out to drink at this—What's the name of the alcohol place in the Plaza Hotel? Anyways, it doesn't matter. But like just, we were all drinking. It's like eight of us, we're drinking. And they're ordering, like, bourbons. And this bill was gonna be insane. So what I did was I went to the bathroom and I got the cocktail waitress. And at that time, like, I had a Bank of America credit card that only had a $1,500 limit on it. And I said, "Listen. Like, I wanna pay for whatever it is. This card only has a $1,500 limit on it, so whatever it is, I'll pay for it cash. But just, please, if it gets declined, don't come to the table and say it's declined. Like, I'll come back. All right?"
So, at the end everybody's getting ready to go and she comes with the bill and the bill was like, I don't know, $2,100 or something like that, with tip. Right? And she gave it to me and she was like, "He took care of it." And that one little gesture—Do you have any idea how many times people brought up that story of how Blake bought everybody drinks? 'Cause they all knew I was the poorest person there, but I did something for them. And I wasn't really even being—At that time, to be honest with you, I think it was out of a sense of my own self-worth issues. Like, I wanted to provide even though I wasn't providing—But I knew that would have longevity, and I knew that would get me invited back to games. And I think too often people—This is a life lesson. Too often people focus on the immediate gratification of EV, instead of really understanding the long-term value of a social interaction.
And the thing is you could directly measure, like, the ROI of a spot with a simple equity calculator. Like, you can do that. You could say that this makes money X amount of a time. You can't measure the ROI of social interaction. It is very difficult to sort of understand how those connections—And to be honest, like, to this point, when I started the Nonverbal Group, people were like, "How are you, like, at 25, like, consulting at this level? Like, how is it possible?" And it was from the poker game.
So, when I started the Nonverbal Group, I talked to those people, and I was like, "Hey, can you intro to me?" And they were like introing me to the head of global leadership of all these big companies, and they were like, "Okay, we'll work with you, 'cause the COO recommended you." And it really accelerated my career. I never went through an RFP, I never submitted proposals, I just got gigs because I knew people. And I was never in a million years planning to do that. Right?
So it's—Too many people don't understand—And this is the value of people. Like, people are so, like, we're too scared of people. We're either too scared or too, like, this person won't add value.
All right. So one of my favorite add-value stories. I went to a Running of the Bulls in Pamplona, Spain when I was, like, 21. Right? It's this crazy thing, which is—It's kinda messed up, and I wouldn't do it again, but I didn't know what it was back then. But long story short, we couldn't get a hotel, and I was with five or six people, and they were, like, "What are we gonna do?" Like, it was like light raining out, like, "We're gonna have to sleep in the streets." It's like, "Don't worry, I've got an idea." And they were like, "What's your idea?" And I was like, "Don't worry." So, like, five o'clock in the morning, when everyone's tired, I walked to a bank, I took out my ATM card, and I curled up beneath an ATM machine.
And everybody was like, "How did you even come up with that idea?" And the story was, when I was seventeen years old, I was in the corner of 34th Street at the old Citibank, and there was this homeless guy mumbling and frustrated that they put a security guard inside of the Citibank. And I was like, "What was that?" And he's like, "It's bullshit." And he was cursing about it. And I was like, "What's bullshit?" And he's like, "I used to live there, man." And I was like, "Oh, that sucks. Like, that really sucked." And it stuck in my head, and I was like, look, the ROI of that social interaction from that homeless person, like, gave me this edge in this weird lineup, like, four years later in my life. Right? So I really believe in that. Like, people have so much value, and you should be mining for that value instead of just cutting them off or finding them not interesting.
Chris (58:32): So much gold there. I'm really into decision-making frameworks and thinking about when to pick one option over the other, and something I've seen over the years is that the option that optimizes for the long-term is almost always the right decision. So if you recognize, "Hey, what has long-term interests in mind?" Doing that. And a really good illustration of, you don't know how things will return to you, and giving it away without expectation of return. So thinking about everyone that you meet as a potential friend, collaborator, ally, and having that approach creates conditions for that possibility.
I think this is a really good transition, as we talk about being sensitive to social dynamics, to talk about your, how you translated this work to the professional world. Something that I really respect about you is you've taken all of your experience from understanding poker and behavior and that types of context and used that as a sandbox to demonstrate how all these patterns are occurring within teams and organizations, and these same dynamics are playing out in terms of people are communicating how they feel about others, or signals are being misinterpreted by others and everyone's kind of extrapolating off of that.
So, I'd love to hear just briefly how you see these types of patterns play out within a business context.
Blake (01:00:00): Yeah. I mean, if poker was interesting, business context is, like, I don't even know how to describe that one. It, I have—All right. So, let me give you an example. Okay. So, I have been obsessed with this. This is a really cool thing. So if I were to, you know, me and you went out to dinner, we know each other, we've talked to each other, so on and so forth. If all of a sudden you said something like, "Hey, Blake, podcast was great, would love to catch up when I'm in Austin next time," right, and I answered, "Sure." Period. What would you think about that? Would you make meaning out of that? Would you think it's not a problem? Like, what would you say?
Chris (01:00:38): I would interpret that as, you know, maybe Blake isn't super psyched for me to roll through Austin, and maybe if I do come he wouldn't go out of his way to see me.
Blake (01:00:48): Okay. So, we would call you a contextual. So, when I've been working with teams, I've been finding that there's two kinds of people. There's contextuals, and there's literals. So, contextuals make meaning when there's a lack of information. Literals just see, "Sure." "He wants to go to dinner with me." And then within contextuals, there's variations of how much context people create. Right? So, like, I believe that a healthy dose of contextual sourcing is very valuable. But some people will stress and agonize for weeks about the fact that somebody just said "Sure." to them. You know what I'm saying? So, you're right. So that's not you, but when in teams, one of the most fascinating things I've seen, is, wow. You've got these eight people working together. Five of them are contextuals, and three of them are literals. And then I'm running the team off-site and I predict with a high level of accuracy what the tensions are gonna be. And they're like, "How do you know?" It's because the contextuals and literals are interacting. So somebody writes, you know, a whole paragraph, and someone goes, "Yes." And then I ask the person, like, "Why were you rude?" "Rude?" "I said, Yes. I'm doing it." Right?
So like, I recently ran an off-site, which was so wild, and I knew this one person was going to be perceived as the problem, and everybody started making comments to me, like, "You know what? Yeah. Todd is so nice. I'm so shocked." And the reason why is because they predominantly interacted in Slack, and Todd was the one who was like, "Yes. No. Okay. Sure." And it's just like a simple example of something that creates social friction inside of a team or inside of an organization. And that's, like, a simple example. I mean, there are people that have over-exaggerated facial displays. People that have a high level of facial concealment and don't give off any facial information. There's so many examples of these things that create social friction, like when I work with a team or when I work with a leader it's my job to sort of figure out the puzzle and retrain and rebuild skill sets. And sort of, what I call it is this concept of behavioral leadership, and it's like using behavior as a mechanism for being a more powerful and effective leader.
Chris (01:02:58): So, let's start with perception. I think similar to the image at the poker table, it's really enlightening to see how others perceive our actions and create a narrative out of things that might not have any meaning whatsoever. So you gave the example of giving one-word responses, which just might be a communication style, but could be interpreted in any number of ways. How would I become aware of how others on my team are perceiving me?
Blake (01:03:27): You ask them. That's the thing that doesn't happen in corporate cultures. People don't communicate enough. They communicate in these freaking silos of, like, how I should be or how I shouldn't be. Like, you have an onboarding process in which you have, like, a communications sheet and you say, like, "These are my triggers and these are the things that," like, you have an actual discussion.
Like, the lot—Most of the problems that I have observed in teams are a result of people not communicating, or not having the tools to understand how you communicate. So, for example. Like, feedback. Feedback is, like, discussed so much in corporate culture. It's like a joke of a thing. But the reality is, in order to give feedback, you need to give feedback in a way that that person's going to hear it. Right? So like I've reviewed one-on-ones where it's like, it's comical, man. It's like, "So, Chris, yeah, so you've been doing great work here, but let's just go over some things that I want you to work on." And it's just like, "Ugh. They're not gonna hear you." Like, they're not gonna process that. Why? Because you made them wrong in like the first five or six seconds. Right? And you know, I've worked with some very senior managers that, like, I sit down and I like to show them these videos, and they were like, "Huh, I never realized that." And I'm like, "Really?" And they don't, right?
And we need to understand the impact of our communication, and then we need to communicate in a way that the person can hear us. Most people don't get that. So most people don't understand the impact of how they communicate. They don't understand that they can come across as a little bit abrasive, or a little bit rude, or disrespectful. And they don't take ownership of that, or sometimes—Not even to say that they don't take ownership of that. They, it's just completely outside of their actual awareness. Like, they have no idea that they're coming across a certain way. And when I show them on video, they're like, "Oh, I'm a little mean." I'm like, "Yeah, you are." Like, "We need to work on that."
And then it's this sort of whole process. So what we do is this thing called the Behavioral 360. So this is the thing. I'm not—I think a lot of corporate cultures use these personality assessments. You know, Myers-Briggs and DISC and all these different things. And they have their uses sometimes. But people leap into these labels, man. Like they're all, "Oh, I'm an INFTJ, and dah-dah-dah-dah-dah." And the reality is you're way more complex than a sixteen-trait sort of assessment. Like you're a human being with hopes and wishes and so on and so forth. And our Behavioral 360 is designed to not really—We don't really care much about personality, we care about perception. So we're trying to understand how you perceive behavior, so that we can give you sort of like triggers and red flags of like, "Oh, you're gonna be bothered by this kinda person." And then on the other side, we're trying to use machine learning and behavioral analysis to try and understand how the world perceives you.
So for example, like, what's pretty wild is like, you know, how can I do that? Like, how do I go into a culture—Literally, man. It's like ten minutes of, like—I just got a new engagement just now. And I asked the person. He heard me speak, and he was like, "I have no idea how you reached that many conclusions that were so accurate in just spending one day with us. Like, I don't understand that." And I was like, "Well, what I'm doing is that I'm sort of creating this source of—It's not what Blake perceives, it's I'm modeling out how the team is perceiving this behavior, and that's how I'm able to draw all the conclusions and draw all the interactions, and it's like stepping outside of myself. 'Cause sometimes I love working with, you know, a literal person.
But one of the things with me is never give me a one-word answer. That's a demand. So, like, if you work for me, you can't give me a one-word answer, 'cause I'll make meaning out of it and it will distract me. If you work with me, you can't come to work, like, if you just broke up with your boyfriend or girlfriend and you came to work and you're frustrated by it, you gotta tell me. Because it's—I'm so focused about it in my space. That's an agreement between me and the person. Right? Like, or just go home. 'Cause I can't—That's not gonna work with me. And it's part gift, part weakness. But it's the New York City Subway station motto, it's the best thing. If you see something, say something. So every single person listening to this podcast right now, there are probably a set of conversations that you don't wanna have because you didn't say something in the beginning. And life is a hell of a lot easier if you just say something in the beginning.
So, for example, if I said, "Hey, Chris, you want to meet up?" And you said—I wrote a whole paragraph, and you said, "Sure." I would say something. I would be like, "'Sure'??? Like, we had a great time." Dah-dah-dah-dah. I would just get to the bottom of it, because I don't wanna see you six months from now at a conference and be like, "Oh, it's Chris. Like, did we have something weird?" Like, I just want to get to the bottom of what is it. And you'll find when you approach life like that it is a hell of a lot easier, 'cause a lot of people stay in their head and they don't bring their thoughts into the real world. And also, you know, it doesn't mean be a basket case and be a, you know, there's a tactful way in doing it, but it's getting at the source of what's disturbing communication, and I don't think people are brave enough to go down that inquiry or have the tools to actually do that.
Chris (01:08:44): I really love the application of ownership here. That people are already making meaning out of your behavior, and it's very easy to dismiss that and say, "Well, that's not what I mean at all," or, "That's not the type of person I am." And this concept of ownership is taking responsibility that you can control the way that you are perceived, or at least influence that, and so there's a meta-level consideration here of, "What is the impact that I want to have, and what is the style of communication and presentation that's gonna have that type of impact?" Where you can't control how others are interpreting your behavior, but you can present yourself in a way that they're likely to have the interpretation that you'd like.
So, taking the outside view, I think this is one of the most valuable skills that we could have as humans. It's one of the hardest ones, because if there's anything that's hard to be objective about, it's ourselves. But it's very easy to see something from the outside. Like, we're giving advice to a friend, or we watch a video of ourselves in a meeting and say, "Huh, who is that guy? I don't even recognize him." That we can see things from the outside if we have that feedback. But I think we can cultivate that skill in ourselves, of thinking, "How am I being perceived? Given the empathy that I have for the person on the other side of the room, on the other side of the table, on the other side of the screen, if I do this, how is that likely to be interpreted?" And just adding a little bit of space and intentionality before we say that thing in a meeting, before we send that email can reduce or even eliminate a lot of these communication gaps that occur, where people hear what we're trying to say.
So I really love that you presented that, hey, having all the cards on the table from the forefront, like, "Here's what's going on with me today." "Hey, here's what I'm trying to do, here's what I'm trying to accomplish." It takes away a lot of the noise from the interpretation. So it's better to tell someone what you're trying to do rather than have them read between the lines and likely get it wrong.
I think the other aspect of knowing how you're being perceived is that empathy. Knowing how to perceive others, so being sensitive to that context, to understanding what they're trying to get across to you, what they're trying to accomplish, even if their actions say otherwise. What recommendations do you have for clients who are trying to kind of discern some of this nuance in team communication?
Blake (01:11:25): So, first of all, I think an important thing—Empathy is a really big buzzword in corporate environments. "Empathetic leadership" or "injecting empathy in your leadership style." We're moving to this more people-focused style of leadership. And I think one thing that people don't get about empathy is that there's two kinds of empathy.
I mean, it's funny, 'cause when you say things like, 'There's two kinds of empathy,' reality is, humans just make up words for things, and it becomes like labels. So I always feel words. But like, psychology, like, certain areas of psychology will say that there's two kinds of empathy, which is emotional empathy and cognitive empathy. So emotional empathy in a lot of ways, or at least how I like to perceive it or explain it, is understanding the emotion the person is experiencing, which is not as useful as people would think. And let me explain. So one thing I think everybody should get used to using is something called the emotional wheel, or emotional granularity scale, which is just a circle that just highlights a bunch of different emotions. Like, emotions are way more complex than "frustrated," "anger." And like, the really crazy thing about emotions is they're social constructs. Like, they're created in society in a lot of ways, and there's a lot of interesting new literature that would suggest that emotion is not necessarily maybe universal. Like people are experiencing it in a lot of different ways.
But I think the cooler part of empathy is something known as cognitive empathy, which essentially is the reason why that person is experiencing that emotion. Right? And the inquiry of cognitive empathy is so valuable as a leadership fundamental, because we get in our own heads—And it's so connected to poker, too. It's like, we get in our own heads and we think that everybody thinks about poker like we do. So, for example, for me, I am still to this day so confused that people wanna work for me. I am such an entrepreneur that when someone talks about their skill sets, I'm like, "Why don't you just do your own thing? Like you're, so, like—" And I have to keep myself in check and make sure that, like, "Oh, people don't see the world the same way." Like, it's still a gap for me. Because I view it in the lens of, like, "What's their angle? Like, do they just wanna, like, work for a little bit, and get this, and leave?" Right? Like it's this weird thing in the background.
An exercise that I've done with a lot of people is, like, if somebody comes across a certain way, we write a circle on a piece of paper, and we write, like, "John was frustrated." And I'm like, "All right, take a step back. Let's list all the reasons why John was frustrated." And I'm like, "One. Like, I don't know, they came late and their car broke down." And we just, and the whole point of the exercise is, like, if we go for five minutes or ten minutes, it's insane. You just write down all the things that make humans frustrated. Right? And then you look at the thing, and I'm like, "All right, of all these things, how many of these things would you also be frustrated by?" And they circle all the things that they would be, you would be frustrated by. And then it's like, "Have you ever come to work frustrated by one of these things? Oh yeah." So it's like, "Okay." It's sort of connecting people to the human experience. And a lot of leaders just forget to do that.
And one thing, you know, leadership gets brought up a lot, and something that I'm trying to combat is this notion of good leaders and bad leaders. It's one of these things that just makes—It frustrates me. Leadership is one of the most sacred, hardest, and challenging things to do. And the fact that in our society we like to divide that skillset into good and bad is utterly ridiculous. It's insane to me. And the reason why is if you tell a leader that their behavior is bad, they're not gonna listen to you. And if you tell a team that that behavior of a leader is bad, they're gonna view their leader a different way. So, like, the way that I like to think of it is, like, you know, leadership is this noble pursuit, and the reality is it's a lot about it, it's about alignment. It's like making sure that someone's principles are in—How they wanna come across, or how they wanna lead, is aligned with their behavior.
And it's not my job to tell anybody how to lead. It's just my job to make sure that they're in alignment. And, you know, there's a really powerful distinction there, and I've said things to my clients, and then have done the exact opposite the next day. Like, this is what it is. And, to be human is to have inconsistencies and to have to inquire—But it's all about creating an alignment. And that is not just leaders. For people. Like, you need to know what kind of stand you want to be in the world. You need to know what kind of person you want to be. And you need to live a live that's in alignment with that. And I don't think a lot of people have gone down that inquiry.
And also, you don't have to be a people person. Like, you don't—That's a choice. There's nothing holding you back. And sometimes—Listen, I've worked with leaders that, like, have told me. They're like this: "Listen, Blake. I hate this job. I wanna get out of here. I don't really like what—" And it's their company. Right? So I'm like, "Great. Let's be vocal about that, with the team. Let's stop this lying stuff. Let's say your job is to exit in the next eighteen months, and it's gonna be hard, and you're gonna learn a lot, and so on and so forth and that, and get everyone on the same page and stop trying to act like you're a coaching-style leadership when it's the last thing in the world that you wanna do, because it's not coming across as effective for these people. They can see through the bullshit.
So alignment and stating what your principles are, and then living that, like, that's the highest form of leadership, because then people know what they're getting on board for.
Chris (01:16:55): I love that. I'm just processing here, where it's the mixed messages that gets us in trouble, where we're trying to say one thing, but communicating another, or communicating something that's not in line with how we actually think and feel and want to interpret. So how can the signals that we're given be accurate to the message that we're trying to send?
Blake, I think you have shared so much brilliant stuff here, and I think there's a lot that can be applied in any situation, at any table, whether it's a poker table or a board room. I would just love to know, for someone who's interested in improving their understanding of their own behavior, as well as being more aware and observant of the behavior in others, what advice would you have? Where would you want to point them?
Blake (01:17:43): Record yourself. First thing. Video solves for reality. I just bought that domain, too, solveforreality.com, 'cause I believe so much in that principle. Video solves for reality in a way—You have to be disconnected from your perception of things. And you will be able to learn so much more about yourself. That's why I love working with clients on, like, I look at Zoom, I look at during meetings, and I'm like, "All right, let's break this down." And I think so many people would have so many insights into their behavior if they said, "How do I wanna show up in the world?" And then they watch a video, and ask themselves, "Is it in alignment with that?" Right? So like, one of the—A framework that I just came up with with one of my coaches was that you're either leaving people bigger or smaller. 'Cause I have a tendency to rip apart, and it's like I'm very brutal on myself, and I'm—Like, I'm more hard on myself than anybody, but I can be hard on people. So, they'll say, like, they'll say something wrong, and I'll be like, "This idiot."
Like, and I can sometimes dismiss people and make them smaller. And it's this thing I don't want. I wanna make people bigger. So just—I love binary, like, in terms of decision-making. Like, I'm either leaving somebody smaller or bigger. So if somebody comes over with an idea for like a company and I know it's not going to work, I can rip them apart and tell them how it's not going to work, but I wanna make them, like, you know, and I'm so inspired by your craft, I wanna leave them bigger. Right?
So, with that framework, I can now look at all of my coaching interactions and ask myself, "Did I leave them smaller or bigger?" And I've looked at some and I'm like, "Eh, that's kind of a smaller one, it's not, eh." "Like this one, wow, I really left them bigger. Like, how was I showing up? What happened that made me so, like, why'd I do that?" Or, "This person I made really big, and this person I made, like, a teeny bit big. Like, what was that, there?"
And I think the only way to solve that, especially if you're new to this thing, is video. I think it's the most powerful under-rated communication tool, period. And that's why I'm so obsessed with using it in our practice and what we do. You should sit down with your loved ones and videotape—Listen. Like, videotape if there's any mothers or fathers out there, you know, you could videotape your interactions with your kids and ask yourself, "Is this how I wanna be with my kids?" Like we used to do—We, this really cool thing, this couple came up to me and was like, "Can you dissect our behavior as a couple?" And I was like, "All right, come into the office." So they came into the office, and I recorded them having a conversation on this big couch in my old office. And I was like, "Listen, I'm gonna leave for thirty minutes. You're gonna watch the video, and then we're gonna talk about it when I get back."
And I got back and they had all the insights. It was so fascinating. Like, I didn't have to say a single thing. He was like, "You know what? I really don't listen to you." And she's like, "Yeah, that's what I've been telling you." Because you're not able to process it in real-time. You need to see outside of yourself, and video is easily accessible. When I started my company, it was very hard to record yourself. You needed cameras, our office was bugged—But now you have an iPhone. You can just set your iPhone up in the middle of a meeting and record yourself and review the tape. Every athlete does this. I mean, this is a known practice. Talk about feedback loops. Like, being able to have that video is an incredible method for that feedback loop.
Chris (01:21:07): I think that all change is seeded with awareness, and this is such a great example of that, how our interpretation of reality is usually off in interesting and unpredictable ways, and trying to get an objective lens on the things that we would rather tell ourselves the convenient stories, the ones that help us sleep well at night. So I watched the video. Anytime that I give some assignment that's around objective tracking, so, track where your time is going, track your energy levels, track where you're getting distracted, track what you accomplish in a day, the results are always surprising in surprising ways. And the wonderful thing about having something objective like a record of decisions or a video of your interactions is that you can't deny it. It's sitting there right in front of you, and once you have that awareness that gives you the affordance, the permission to say, "How does this compare to how I want to be showing up, what I want to be prioritizing, who I want to be?" And it's so much easier to make that, that shift. It's just closing the gap between this actual video, this image of yourself, and that image of yourself as you want to be. And what are those differences, how can you start to close that gap?
So, yeah. I think that's a wonderful place to start, is if there's something that you want to change, particularly your behavior, how can you get some objective footage, so you can say, "Hey, are you really like that, or is the way that you're showing up in the world a little bit different than you'd like to believe?"
Blake (01:22:43): Yeah. Exactly.
Chris (01:22:44): Blake, I'm so honored and grateful for you, coming on and sharing some of your really valuable work. If someone listening, you know, wants to learn a little bit more about what you do, potentially have the opportunity to work together, where would you wanna direct them?
Blake (01:22:57): Just reach out, nonverbalgroup.com. You can check out, we have a newsletter that I send every Monday called the Behaviorlist, and I give tips and sort of strategies for optimizing your communication. So, nonverbalgroup.com/newsletter, or just reach out, blake@nonverbalgroup.com.
Chris (01:23:12): Thank you so much for joining us today, Blake. See you all again soon.
Tasha (01:23:16): Thank you for listening to Forcing Function Hour. At Forcing Function, we teach performance architecture. We work with a select group of twelve executives and investors to teach them how to multiply their output, perform at their peak, and design a life of freedom and purpose. Make sure to subscribe to Forcing Function Hour for more great episodes, or go to forcingfunctionhour.com to sign up for our newsletter so you can join us live.