Talking to Strangers: How we get reading people SO wrong

[00:00:00] Alison: Hello, hello, and welcome to the show today. I wanted to share a book that I just finished with you. You know, again, I'll reiterate it every time, but I think that, you know, the military lifestyle is really hard. One of the best things that we can do for ourselves is to make ourselves as resilient as we possibly can.

[00:00:20] Alison: And I think that growing your brain with mentors who You can listen to our is a great way to help with that mental mindset. And so I just finished listening to a book called talking to strangers by Malcolm Gladwell. And I honestly, I didn't, I don't know that I read the description of it to be quite honest with you, because when I started listening to it, I was like, hold on.

[00:00:50] Alison: I don't, I think I thought talking to strangers that it was going to be like. I'm like, Oh, this'll be good. I have to talk to new people all the time. Right? We're always moving. We're always having to re you know, rebuild our communities and our friends and everything else. Like this'll, this'll be great.

[00:01:06] Alison: Like how, how to talk to strangers. That's not really what the book was about. What it was what it was about really was how bad we are at reading. other people, to be honest with you. And so the book I highly recommend getting it on audible. It's one of the most unique listening experiences. Maybe that sounds a little lame, but that I've ever had.

[00:01:32] Alison: And he says at the beginning of the book, he's like, this is not going to be your traditional. Audible book that you'll listen to, he said, whenever possible cause he's talks about a lot of current events and he said, whenever possible, I'm going to use the original audio of the actual people talking so that you get a better sense of everything.

[00:01:53] Alison: And that's exactly what he did. And it made it really. Really interesting to listen to. And again, I listened to this one. It was like almost nine hours. I listened to it pretty fast. Because it was just, it was really interesting to listen to and really thought provoking, honestly. So he goes all the way back to, and I had no, he goes, he goes back and talks about Chamberlain, who was the prime minister.

[00:02:21] Alison: England at the time of World War II when Hitler was coming into power and made a big show of going to Germany on multiple occasions to meet with Hitler to quote unquote, get the measure of the man, right? I'm going to look him in the eyes. I'm going to shake his hand. I'm going to be in the room with him so that I can really get a measure of him and understand, you know, how, what, what he's doing and how he's.

[00:02:48] Alison: How he's feeling. And he went and met with him four times and literally the day and the whole time Hitler's like, Oh no, I only want this particular railroad. That's all, that's all I'm looking for. We're not, you know, trying to do anything sinister here. This is what I want. And there's, you know, there's no other things.

[00:03:04] Alison: And after the last visit, literally the day after. Germany and Hitler invaded Poland. So clearly what he was getting, Chamberlain was getting from Hitler was, was, was reading him completely incorrectly. And so there was that. And then there was a whole thing about Cuba and all of the spies and the, in the CIA and the DIA.

[00:03:32] Alison: It was really fascinating to hear how infiltrated our highest level of security in our nation. How, how many double agents there were, it was just, it was astounding. And there were some, there was one particular woman, I can't Montez, I think was her, her name. She was like the lead for Latin America and she was a double agent for Cuba.

[00:04:00] Alison: And she was in the organization for like 10 years or something like that as a double agent the whole time, which is just bananas. How can you, how can people write like, that's what the CIA and That's what they do, right? They are supposed to find the bad guys. They're supposed to keep our secrets safe.

[00:04:19] Alison: Like, that's their job. And if people that are in that position are in correctly interpreting people's involvement in the organization, I mean, she passed polygraph tests and things like that, and when you look back at it, and this was interesting, so they sat down with a bunch of people that worked with her and had spoken to her and had one of the gentlemen, Actually administered her polygraph because given evidence that she was potentially a spy and going back, right?

[00:04:47] Alison: Cause every, you Monday morning quarterback, you can do that all day, right? So, and that's pretty much what this is, is looking back, you can see all of these red flags, but We tend to err for truth and think of the positive and they have done all of these great things. They're working so hard. They're so knowledgeable.

[00:05:09] Alison: There's no way that they could be a double agent, right? Or and so, and then, and so there was that part. And then he talks about quite a few other he, this one was really fascinating to me and, and I'm not gonna, okay, so seriously, don't quote me on any of this stuff. I'm trying to go like broad strokes here.

[00:05:30] Alison: Not like the little nitty gritty. Cause he gave like really specific percentages and things like that. But one of the tests that they did, it was a, it was a judge that had a very prolific. Career and had put a lot of people in jail and had not put a lot of people in jail and they ran a test where, so the difference between a judge sitting you know, over presiding over a trial is that he has all of the information, right?

[00:05:58] Alison: He has the, the record and the, you know, past offenses if there are any and all of that information, but then he also has. the in person ability to look at the person, right? I'm going to look them in the eyes. I'm going to read their body language. How are they behaving? Are they acting remorseful? Are they, whatever the case might be, right?

[00:06:18] Alison: So they took the judge's arrest or you know record and they took, they ran those same records through an AI program and they were looking for the or the people who reoffended . So he just comparing, how did they behave?

[00:06:42] Alison: Did they go on to be a lawful citizen and they never had any issues again?

[00:06:45] Alison: So the AI program only had the ability to look at the record, what they were seeing in front of them, past offenses what happened, the arrest report, all of that stuff. That was all the AI had. Whereas the judge had the person sitting in front of them and the success rate of AI in predicting, future crimes was 60 percent accuracy.

[00:07:11] Alison: The judge was 20%. So the judge who has the ability to look the person in the eye, read the body language, really get the quote again with the quoting Chamberlain, the measure of the man or woman was only 20 percent successful. So clearly we have. Some issues with taking those cues and reading those people.

[00:07:34] Alison: Right. And so one of the examples one of the examples that they gave was all American. player. He had broken up with his girlfriend and took her by gunpoint and tried to shoot her, but the gun misfired. So he was arrested. He went to court. They set his bail at a million dollars cause no one's coming up with that, right?

[00:07:59] Alison: So he's obviously not going to get out on bail. And then after a few days, the judge reconsidered the case and was like, this is an all American guy. He has no prior history. This is, you know, he just made a mistake and set the bail at 20, 000. So then he got out and a week later. shot his girlfriend dead.

[00:08:21] Alison: So, you know, it's just, it's one of those and, and not, not, that's a terrible thing that happened, but it's like we clearly have an issue with judging people correctly. And then a couple of the other things that they talked about. Were some of the really big cases that we heard, like Bernie Madoff and the financial, I mean, that was decades.

[00:08:48] Alison: And there was a, an analyst who doubted him and kept going to the SEC and saying, man, this, there's something going on here. Like this is, this is not adding up. And he just was so slick in the room. That he got away with it for decades, right? And he had a billion dollar Ponzi scheme going on, right? And then they he talked about Sandusky.

[00:09:10] Alison: And he was the the, one of the football coaches at Penn State. I'm, I, I, gosh, if you had to live under a rock to not have heard about that happening. That he had molested hundreds of, of boys. And that... The president of the school knew about it. He was fired. Sandusky ended up killing himself. The whole, the trial, it was just, it was a hot mess.

[00:09:34] Alison: And the, what they talked about is you know, when people would bring up things or see something. So there was another coach who saw something in a locker room and didn't interfere at that time and went later to the president or the head coach of the football team. Cause Sandusky was like a defensive coach or something.

[00:09:58] Alison: I can't remember. He wasn't the head coach and went to the head coach and was like, this is what I saw. And, or this is what I think I saw. And The head coach was like, you know, Oh my gosh, well, if you take a look at Sandusky, right, he was a foster parent. He was had so many kids that he had taken care of so many camps and gave back and gave back and gave back to the community with events and and all of these things.

[00:10:27] Alison: And it was just really hard to imagine that they, he would be committing these acts. Like it just, it didn't make sense. Right. So it was like, you must have misinterpreted what you saw because there's no way, right? And then it's just thing after thing after thing after thing and then all of a sudden it's like, okay, this happened.

[00:10:46] Alison: And there are all of these hundreds of lives that were affected because of this one person. So there was that and then there was a they talked about the Amanda Knox trial. The she was in Italy, a student in Italy, and her roommate was brutally killed in their apartment. And they turned it into...

[00:11:04] Alison: that it was a love triangle thing between Amanda Knox and her boyfriend. and the roommate. And it was like, if you look at the evidence and everything, it just, it makes no sense at all. But it's fascinating to hear like the, the, the arrest reports. And again, he pulls in all of the audio, like there's parts of the trial that you can hear.

[00:11:25] Alison: And then Amanda Knox later wrote a book about it and he pulled excerpts from the book and where she was reading and talking about what had happened. And in all of, in a lot of these instances, The, the problem that we have is if someone is properly matched personality wise, what you see is what you get, right?

[00:11:45] Alison: Like they're nervous or agitated or they're, you know, you're going to see. What we say are the classic signs of that, like the red face, the hemming and hawing, the, you know, ringing of your hands agitation moving around. Like those are, you know, those are signs that darting eyes that someone's uncomfortable.

[00:12:06] Alison: Right. But what happens? If you have someone who is just socially awkward, right? And that was the case with Amanda Knox. She's really socially awkward. And so she doesn't always respond how you would think someone would respond in a situation. Because that's just how she is. And it's the same thing with with Bernie Madoff is he is a mismatched personality type.

[00:12:32] Alison: Like he has this confident kind of, he doesn't have the demeanor of someone who is committing a billion dollar Ponzi scheme, right? So we're just, we're really bad at reading those things. And then some of the other topics that he talked about and This one was, it was interesting too, was he talked about suicide.

[00:12:55] Alison: He talked about Sylvia Plath, who was the poet and oh gosh, who was the other poet that was really sex and sextant, who was also, she was another, she won a Pulitzer prize. But he talked about how in general poets tend to be tend to be very. Kind of melancholy a lot of mental kind of issues and that's not saying that everybody is, but, but a lot of them are.

[00:13:23] Alison: And so he was talking about the two cases of of Sylvia Plath and, and and Anne Sexton and what they went through and, and then suicide in general. And this one was really fascinating to me because he talked about the Golden Gate Bridge. that that is one of the situation, one of the places where suicide is very high off of that bridge.

[00:13:46] Alison: And they've talked about putting in all of these different countermeasures to reduce the amount of suicides on the bridge. And by, you know, putting a net under it or installing higher fences, things like that. And there's always been a lot of pushback from the public. We don't want to spend money on that.

[00:14:04] Alison: If someone wants to take their life, they're going to find another way to do it. Da, da, da, da, da, da, which honestly, straight up, honestly, I probably would have said the same thing. If someone's determined to take their life, if you take away one method, they're just going to find another. But what he was saying is that in a lot of instances, it's a coupled response.

[00:14:25] Alison: So it's not, it's they're in a particular place. And that matches with taking their life like the Golden Gate Bridge. Right. But if you take the person out of that particular situation, they might not have the proclivity for taking their life. I'm not, I might not be ex, I'm not probably, I know I'm not explaining that very well.

[00:14:44] Alison: 'cause he went very in, in depth into detail in it. But this is what was really interesting. The statistic, and it stuck in my head, is that there were 500 and 500 and something people who. We're attempting to take their life by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge that were restrained, physically restrained, pulled back by a bystander or by somebody, right?

[00:15:09] Alison: 500 people. So you would think if you have the mentality of that, if someone is intent on taking their life, they're going to find another way to do it. So of those 500 people that were prevented from jumping off of the bridge, you would think that the number would be really high of those that actually did end up taking their life.

[00:15:28] Alison: The number was 25, 25 of those 500 people went on to take their life. The other people just went on with their life. And I thought that that was fascinating because I had that same mentality. So just this whole book was just like, it just really made you challenge the way that you think about things. And some of the situations that he talked about are really, They're really hot topics.

[00:16:00] Alison: There's, there's a lot of controversy around a lot of them. And it, it is just a very, this is what their arrest report said. This is what they said in the interview, playing the stuff like exactly verbatim. And then just kind of dissecting and looking back at the evidence. It was just, it was fascinating.

[00:16:18] Alison: And then one of the other ones that I wanted to share with you as well was they talked about and some, it kind of seemed kind of random at the time, but when the topic came up, cause like the suicide one, I was like, wow, that we're okay. We're changing topics. So we're going to talk about suicide now that I don't understand where this comes from, but that's it.

[00:16:38] Alison: 500 people, only 25 reoffended. Whereas all of us are like, well, if they're going to do it, they're going to, what's the point. Right. So. So another topic that he talked about was sexual assault and how prolific it has become on college campuses. And he talked about a couple of different trials that had happened and situations that had happened.

[00:17:01] Alison: And what was really fascinating to me is that and he went into talk about how alcohol affects people, right? And the incidents of. People drinking too in an excess to the point of blackout has drastically increased over the last couple of decades, drastically increased. And so has the violent assaults that have happened linked to alcohol.

[00:17:31] Alison: And what was really interesting is, so he talks about, you know, the effects of alcohol on the body, what it does, it really, and how you can literally, continue to have a conversation and get up and walk out of a room and get in a car and go do these and not have any recollection of it at all in a blackout state, but still be a functioning human is really freaking scary, right?

[00:17:58] Alison: That you can continue to be continuing to be moving through your life. Nothing happening. Like they, he told a story of a gentleman, Who went out drinking with his buddies in Florida and four days later woke up in a hotel in Las Vegas and they went and talked to the front desk and the front desk was like, yeah, he seemed, seemed perfectly fine to me.

[00:18:22] Alison: I didn't see anything amiss. So he wasn't like falling over drunk and slurring and everything like that. He has no recollection. Four days, four days, no recollection. It's just, it's crazy. So anyhow, so the effects of alcohol on the body that women. are, you know, with with women's liver and not liberation, but we're trying to prove ourselves right?

[00:18:49] Alison: Like we can be just as strong as guys are and all of these things and we shouldn't be held back. And so in that We can drink just as much as guys can drink and physiologically we cannot because well you can I mean you can physically You can physically drink as much as a guy can but the physiological effects on your body are completely different and he gave The scientific stuff behind that, like, you know, the, the, the guy drinks this much alcohol and the girl drinks this much, the same amount of alcohol.

[00:19:20] Alison: And his blood alcohol level is like 0. 56 and hers is like 1. 3, right. Which is blackout drunk. And it's just, it, it's so fascinating. So anyway, so what happens is. And the thought in, in, in campuses and the girls who, the two victims and the the two trials that he was speaking of, they were both completely intoxicated.

[00:19:44] Alison: The the women and both of them don't remember. They were completely blackout. They don't remember anything. And they say, What do you think needs to happen? So like in this one particular trial that was I can't remember what school it happened at, but he was a, he was a swimmer, like an all American swim team.

[00:20:04] Alison: And she was just a student at the school and he was assaulting her and she was like unconscious and some people came up on it and. and then he tried to run away. So that's kind of what happened. And when he's going back and, and at the end of the trial, he's saying that you know, what is he going to do as he moves forward?

[00:20:28] Alison: And I think that we need to really talk about alcohol on college campuses and things like that. And which honestly is the right direction. When you look at the, at the, at the evidence of what alcohol does to our bodies and the female in the case the victim in the case was like, why are we talking about alcohol?

[00:20:47] Alison: We need to be, it needs to be self defense for women and it needs to be consent talks or, you know it needs to be teaching the male population of schools about consent and things like that. And that's what we need to be doing. But the thing is, is when you drink to excess, to the point where you black out or even before that you don't have the physiological ability to be able to employ whatever tips and your tactics that you have in self defense.

[00:21:24] Alison: You're, you literally can't do that because of the alcohol that's in your body and for the, for the males. They, when you add alcohol in you, one of the things that goes away initially is reasoning, right? So you can talk until you're blue in the face about consent and how important it is, but you pour alcohol on top of that and now it goes out the window.

[00:21:45] Alison: Like they're just, you know what I'm saying? So it was just, it's so, it was so fascinating. It was so fascinating. And then he talks about. Some of the some of the cases like Sandra Bland, who was pulled over in prairie mound, I think it was in Texas for failing to signal a lane change and it turned into getting pulled out of her car and like you, they play, he literally plays the dashboard audio from the police officer's car so you can hear everything that happens and it's just, horrifying, honestly, to sit back and listen to that.

[00:22:26] Alison: And just how, like you can just hear when it turns to, Oh crap, this is really going sideways fast. And some of the other cases as well 

[00:22:39] Alison: it was just, okay, so that's it. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna go into it anymore. I hope that made sense. It's, it's definitely, it's, it's a very intellectual listen. There's a lot of there's a lot of heavy topics that are talked about, but it's all in. It's just fascinating to think about how poorly we read each other, honestly, and that we really need to.

[00:23:04] Alison: Open our eyes a little bit more too and not just assume and, and that's kind of the fine line, right? Because you don't want to walk around thinking everybody's a predator and out to get you. But you can't always be like, Oh, well look at, they have a beautiful yard and they've got this family. And clearly they're totally fine.

[00:23:24] Alison: And they've got like, you know, a dungeon in their basement. I, you know what I'm saying? Like you just, you can't just, you have to be very, very thoughtful in how we interact with each other. It's just, it's fascinating. Okay. So highly recommend, but you gotta, you gotta kind of be open to that's what it's about.

[00:23:44] Alison: Cause again, I thought it was going to be like, Oh, let's figure out how we can interact better with each other. And this is really about how we have gotten it wrong for so long. And and it was just really fascinating. Okay. That's it. I hope that made sense. And until next time.