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Why We're Wrong About People: The Social Science Every Entrepreneur Needs with Nicholas Epley · Beyond Fulfillment Podcast

• 0:00
  Foreign.
• 0:06
  Nick Epley, welcome to Beyond Fulfillment.
• 0:09
  Thanks, Dave.
• 0:09
  Great to have you here.
• 0:11
  Absolutely.
• 0:11
  We appreciate you taking the time.
• 0:14
  So, Nick, you are a professor at one of the country's top business schools, which is University of Chicago.
• 0:21
  Booth, you've been there for quite a long time, and you've also written two books and had a very successful public speaking career over the past decade.
• 0:29
  Plus.
• 0:30
  And we're actually here talk about your new book as well, which is going to be very useful to our audience of entrepreneurs.
• 0:38
  But just to set the stage for our listeners, can you talk about your backstory and how you got to where you are today?
• 0:45
  Yeah.
• 0:45
  So it was a lot of walking through doors that happened to open for me without any particular purpose as I was going along, except to walk through the next door.
• 0:54
  I was a high school student who hated school, was bored to death.
• 0:59
  I enjoyed playing football and basketball and mostly was interested in girls when I was in high school.
• 1:05
  Not so interested in school.
• 1:06
  Went to college because I loved the football coach, but then got into classes that allowed me to basically set my own pace in how fast I read and how much I read.
• 1:17
  And I got into classes that I was just so excited about.
• 1:20
  Psychology classes and philosophy in particular.
• 1:23
  I went as hard into those courses as I could.
• 1:27
  I started doing research on my own.
• 1:29
  So if you're a scientist, you're kind of a serial entrepreneur.
• 1:32
  You're always starting new things as a researcher.
• 1:36
  I started that started doing research my first year in college, in fact, which is very unusual for people to do research.
• 1:43
  Worked out well.
• 1:43
  I applied to graduate school, got lucky to get in, continue doing research successfully in graduate school, got lucky with a first job at Harvard and then ended up in the psych department and then ended up at the University
• 1:56
  of Chicago.
• 1:58
  All along the way, again, it's none of it.
• 2:02
  You know, in hindsight you can, you can tell some sort of story that, that ties it all together, but in foresight, it is, you know, my career, like many people, I think, is simply grabbing an opportunity that was
• 2:16
  there.
• 2:17
  So we had research starting to work out.
• 2:19
  When I was a faculty member at Booth, we were finding interesting things.
• 2:24
  I thought it would be interesting to write a book to try to make this work more available to people because they're not reading our articles, you know, as much as they would read, read a, read a book.
• 2:37
  And so I wrote Mindwise, that came out in 2014, that started speaking opportunities.
• 2:42
  I paid close attention when I was younger to my PhD advisor, who was an amazing public speaker.
• 2:49
  I watched carefully what he did and emulated that as much as I could in my own way.
• 2:55
  And if you're going to be a good teacher, you're going to be a good speaker.
• 2:58
  That lends itself to opportunities to get out and talk about your research if you publish a book.
• 3:04
  And then the most recent book, I didn't really want to write.
• 3:09
  It was very hard to write the first one.
• 3:13
  But I had a colleague of mine, Dan Gilbert, who's in the psych department at Harvard, advised me, nick, don't write another book unless you feel like you have to.
• 3:23
  And I eventually got to a point around 2020 where I felt like I had to write about the research that we've been doing over the last decade or so.
• 3:32
  And, and that's, that's how.
• 3:34
  That's how it went.
• 3:34
  That was the second book.
• 3:36
  Okay.
• 3:36
  Wow.
• 3:36
  No, appreciate all that context and quite, quite ironic for someone that hated school where your first job out of school is at Harvard.
• 3:46
  I never, Yeah, I hated school so much I never left it.
• 3:49
  What I hated was being told what to learn.
• 3:53
  That's what I hated.
• 3:54
  And I was just bored with it when I was younger.
• 3:57
  But once I got into college and beyond, where there weren't constraints on how much I could learn or what I needed to learn, what I needed to study, I was free to do that on my own.
• 4:10
  Then, you know, the sky was the limit there.
• 4:12
  Then I, you know, I do whatever I wanted.
• 4:14
  I was super excited and engaged.
• 4:16
  I just wasn't.
• 4:17
  I just didn't find reading textbooks and regurgitating the material to be that interesting.
• 4:23
  Wow.
• 4:23
  Yeah, fascinating.
• 4:24
  So once you got, Once you got to a point where you were free to research whatever you wanted, you kind of dove into that voraciously and thus the results.
• 4:32
  Okay, absolutely.
• 4:33
  Let's just talk about your first book here, mind wise, where it's basically about social cognition and mind reading.
• 4:44
  Like how we try to guess what others are thinking and get it wrong.
• 4:48
  Yep.
• 4:48
  Yep.
• 4:48
  We're the most socially sophisticated species on the planet.
• 4:51
  A lot of our neural capacity, this fat part of our head above our eyes, for instance, much of that is dedicated to social cognition, is thinking about other thinking people.
• 5:04
  We beyond, you know, far beyond our closest primate relative, the chimpanzee, spend a lot of time thinking about each other.
• 5:12
  We live in the largest social groups of all primate species.
• 5:15
  That requires a lot of neural capacity to keep track of who knows what, who believes what, who wants what.
• 5:20
  That helps us coordinate with each other.
• 5:22
  But it's a hard problem to understand what's on the mind of Another person.
• 5:27
  If we can do that well, we can anticipate what they're going to do before they do it.
• 5:31
  Because I can know what you're thinking and maybe what you want.
• 5:34
  And I can also explain what you're doing at any given moment accurately so I can coordinate a work with you a little more effectively.
• 5:41
  So being able to understand the minds of others is hugely advantageous to us, but it's also really hard.
• 5:47
  I can't see your mind, I can't feel your thoughts.
• 5:51
  I'm guessing all the time and mind wise was describing how we guess about the minds of others, why it matters that we guess in the ways that we do and also where we consistently get it wrong and make
• 6:07
  mistakes about each other.
• 6:08
  And then finally about how to do, how to do better, how to understand other people better than we, we might otherwise.
• 6:14
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• 6:56
  Okay.
• 6:56
  And I'm reading some of the footnotes from the book.
• 6:59
  It says proximity gives this illusion of insight to where oftentimes you think because you're around someone much more often that you can actually, you have a better sense of what they're actually thinking when in reality that that's proven
• 7:12
  not to be true.
• 7:14
  It's not as true as we think it is.
• 7:15
  Yeah.
• 7:16
  So one of the big insights I think from our research on social cognition or how we think about each other, it's not that we're terrible at it.
• 7:25
  We are again, the most socially sophisticated species on the planet.
• 7:28
  And it's that we're not as good at it as we think we are.
• 7:31
  We're overconfident in our beliefs.
• 7:33
  And simply being around somebody, spending time with someone, thinking about what's on their minds, makes us feel like we understand them much better.
• 7:43
  But the data suggests that, you know, we do understand them a little bit better.
• 7:47
  But our confidence increases more than our accuracy does as we spend time, more time with people, even spouses who've been married, you know, for many years.
• 7:57
  My wife and I have been married for 30, 30 years.
• 8:01
  There are still lots about my wife that I don't really know.
• 8:03
  Lots of thoughts in the moments that she might be having that I would screw up.
• 8:07
  I still get her the wrong things for her birthday unless I ask her what she wants and then just get what she wants, which turns out to be the best way to understand the mind of another person, even
• 8:16
  when you've known them for a long time.
• 8:18
  Okay, all right.
• 8:19
  And what's give us give the audience one or two nuggets where I know you ended previously with how to get it right.
• 8:26
  That's the last section of the book.
• 8:27
  What are some people can do to just understand people better?
• 8:31
  Well, so let me, let me first highlight two things that, that.
• 8:35
  Well, one thing in particular.
• 8:36
  That.
• 8:37
  Well, two things.
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  Two things that don't work as well as you might imagine.
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  One is reading body language.
• 8:43
  So you could drive away from a bookstore with a truckload of books describing how to read body language better.
• 8:49
  But it turns out that that doesn't actually increase accuracy a whole lot.
• 8:54
  The data actually suggests that you're probably about as good at this, you know, reading somebody's body language as you're going to, going to get right now.
• 9:02
  I mean, there's some, some variability around this, but, but that is not the royal road to understanding, in part because our bodies don't actually convey as much information as we think.
• 9:13
  And we can mislead people with our body language actually really easily.
• 9:16
  People, for instance, are barely better than chance at detecting whether somebody's lying or telling the truth just by watching them speak and trying to read their body language.
• 9:25
  And there's no data that we can get markedly better by learning to read body language better.
• 9:31
  The second strategy, common strategy that actually doesn't work as well as we might imagine, is taking somebody's perspective, putting yourself in their shoes, and guessing what they're thinking or feeling by doing this little bit of mental gymnastics.
• 9:45
  When we have people do this in our research, they don't get systematically more accurate in understanding what their spouse thinks or wants about something, what their friends think or want, or what strangers think or want about something, even
• 9:58
  though they often increase their.
• 9:59
  It increases their confidence.
• 10:01
  We think we're better when we engage in perspective taking, but we don't actually find evidence that it increases accuracy meaningfully beyond what you're doing already.
• 10:10
  The only thing that does increase accuracy is getting somebody's perspective directly.
• 10:18
  And the way you get somebody's perspective is you just ask them.
• 10:22
  You ask them what they're thinking or feeling or what they want.
• 10:25
  What's interesting about this isn't that the insight is somehow magical or mystical.
• 10:31
  It's that we find that when people are using the strategy, when you ask somebody what they're actually thinking or what they want or what their beliefs are about something, people aren't markedly more confident that they've got the answer
• 10:46
  right when they're using this effective strategy as they are when they're engaging in perspective taking or just reading somebody's body language.
• 10:54
  So this insight that seems somewhat obvious.
• 10:56
  Well, if you want to know what somebody thinks, just ask them.
• 11:00
  We find when people use that obviously effective strategy, they don't really realize just how effective it is.
• 11:06
  And I mean, think about this in your own daily life.
• 11:08
  How often do you actually ask somebody directly what they're thinking?
• 11:11
  How often you go up to somebody, you know, your spouse or a friend or a kid, and ask them directly what they, what they want for, for.
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  For gifts or, you know, how they're feeling at any particular time and really listen.
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  Often we jump to conclusions, we guess, without asking directly, asking directly.
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  The only thing that actually meaningfully increases our understanding.
• 11:33
  Okay, yeah.
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  Seems so simple.
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  And it's interesting that how often people underestimate the power of that.
• 11:39
  Right?
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  Because like you said, seems, seems obvious.
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  The key, the key to becoming better, you know, more socially intelligent is essentially to become a good journalist, learn how to ask questions and listen.
• 11:51
  Okay.
• 11:52
  All right.
• 11:52
  So, Nick, when you released that book that kind of kicked off your public speaking career commercially opened up all sorts of opportunities.
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  Did you see, did you see that coming?
• 12:05
  No.
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  So look, academics, you know, most academics, overwhelmingly academics, spend their time in their offices writing papers for scientific journals that the scientific community reads.
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  But we're not out that often reaching, reaching folks who aren't academics, reaching more popular audiences, folks who are not in the sciences.
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  We're mostly writing for other experts.
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  And so this opportunity to go out and speak commercially, publicly to people and get paid for doing it, something that just a very, very small percentage of academics actually do.
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  Now, an audience outside academia, people outside of academia will only see the academics who do that.
• 12:57
  So it will seem like a lot of us do that, but in fact, almost none actually do.
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  So this isn't something I came up, you know, as I was younger, thinking that this was, you know, was an option for getting your research out into the world to go and speak at big conferences, give keynote addresses,
• 13:15
  do those sorts of things that not only convey your research to a much wider audience, which I think is really, really important because I think our work really matters, but also becomes kind of a business for you as
• 13:27
  well.
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  It's fun to do too.
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  So I enjoy getting up in front of non academics, non scientists, to talk about our research.
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  It's great fun.
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  But I did not see it coming.
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  Given that you've been a professor, you lecture classes and all that, was that transition rather easy for you to just get in front of a different stage?
• 13:46
  It was.
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  But part of it too is that not all researchers are quite as fluent as speakers or lecturers.
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  And so I was also kind of able to do this.
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  And I essentially, I had to audition with a speaking agent.
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  I use WSB in Washington D.C.
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  i had to audition with them so that they would feel confident enough to bring me on as a, as a, you know, as a public speaker and.
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  But then the transition, not so hard.
• 14:20
  In fact, most of my, most of my talks that I give to public audiences aren't anymore that much different from the ones that I give to academic audiences because I've learned two things.
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  One is that most academic audiences don't want to be bored by the minutiae of your research either.
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  They want to know what's interesting about it and so they want the higher level presentation.
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  And second, most non academic audiences are super smart and perfectly able to understand our research if you present it in a way that's, that's clear.
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  We're not doing, we're not doing research that I can't explain to you clearly.
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  And if I'm not doing that, then I'm failing in my job as a science communicator.
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  So I both kind of increase the, the, the intellectual heft of my public talks and I reduce some of the minutiae.
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  I make my, my academic lectures more generally interesting too.
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  So my public speaking has made my academic talks better too.
• 15:22
  Ah, interesting.
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  Okay.
• 15:24
  All right, so let's talk about your latest book, which just came out actually.
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  It's called A Little More Social.
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  And you said that you couldn't not write this book.
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  So explain that for us, please.
• 15:39
  Yeah, so I told my wife after writing Mindwise, after writing my first one.
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  And you got to understand that as academics, as researchers, mostly what we're doing is we're teaching our classes and we're writing academic papers.
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  We're writing scientific papers that we're publishing in journals.
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  And that's a 70 hour a week job for most of us to write a book on top of that, as if you're continuing to be a researcher like I was, becomes sort of like overtime.
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  You do set some things aside while you're doing this but you write it in overtime and it's hard.
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  I'm really, really hard.
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  I told my wife after the first one I would not do another one.
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  But then we started learning things in our research that seemed really important to me.
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  And in particular we started doing research aimed at understanding what seems like a fundamental paradox that sits right at the core, core of human life.
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  And that is that we're highly social creatures made happier and healthier by reaching out and connecting with the minds of others.
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  All the stuff that was in my first book and mind wise.
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  And yet if you look around in the world, there are all these opportunities to connect with other people that we choose not to take.
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  You know, we don't talk to strangers.
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  We lean back and type to each other.
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  Rather than actually using our voice and talking with each other more up close.
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  We stick to small talk.
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  Once we're actually talking, we don't go deeper.
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  We feel grateful, but don't share it.
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  Have a kind thought come to our mind, but don't express it.
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  Need help, but don't ask for it.
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  On and on and on.
• 17:03
  There are opportunities every day to reach out and create meaningful connections that we're choosing not to take.
• 17:08
  And that seems interesting.
• 17:11
  That paradox seems very interesting to me.
• 17:14
  And we started studying it years ago, actually on the trains in Chicago, which is the first place that this paradox kind of struck me when I was sitting one morning on a train on my way into the University
• 17:26
  of Chicago, which I'd done for years beforehand.
• 17:29
  And I was writing a chapter from Mindwise at the time, one of the early chapters describing how we're uniquely social on this planet, made happier and healthier by connecting with others.
• 17:39
  And I had kind of this eureka moment.
• 17:40
  I lifted my head up and I looked around and I noticed that, not the first time, but I noticed it with a deeper insight than I'd observed it before, that we had this carload of people, right?
• 17:54
  Friendly people on the south side of Chicago sitting hip to hip to each other, right?
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  A packed train car and you could have heard a pin drop.
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  Nobody was speaking to each other.
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  And I thought that's, that's interesting and that's weird.
• 18:13
  And does this make sense, what we're doing, Right?
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  It's not immediately obvious that it doesn't make sense.
• 18:19
  Maybe talking to a stranger sucks, right?
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  Maybe it's unpleasant, maybe it's miserable.
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  I decided to try to have a conversation with that.
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  That morning with somebody who sat down next to me.
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  The conversation was actually delightful when about half an hour, the time disappeared in a Flash.
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  I got up to leave and I remember thinking, you know, after that, that lovely conversation that this was not just nice, but it was surprisingly nice that I had kind of feared before starting this conversation that it would
• 18:51
  be unpleasant.
• 18:53
  I'd kind of kind of anticipated what this conversation would be like.
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  I engaged in a little mind reading myself, thought maybe she wouldn't be interested in talking to me.
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  She wouldn't respond that well.
• 19:02
  Right.
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  She might think I'm a creep trying to hit on her or something, the woman who sat down next to me.
• 19:08
  So I was doing all this mind reading myself and it, it turned out to be wrong.
• 19:13
  That is, the conversation went much, much better than I thought it would.
• 19:16
  And I thought, if this is common, if I'm doing this in a lot of other contexts and this will change how I live my life, and if this is systematic, not just something that I'm doing, this kind of
• 19:30
  misplaced pessimism about how other people will respond when you reach out to connect with them, then lots of us are doing this.
• 19:38
  And that observation that morning on the train then started a whole bunch of experiments.
• 19:43
  You know, a decade and a half worth of research at this point now with over 30,000 people, over 120 published experiments, where we document how across many, many contexts, we can be overly pessimistic about how other people respond
• 20:00
  to us.
• 20:01
  And once I had this data, I just was seeing these effects all around me, seeing people choose to make themselves overly lonely.
• 20:12
  And this research also changed the way I live my life very profoundly.
• 20:17
  Moment to moment, day to day, week to week.
• 20:19
  I'm a friendlier, more open, kinder person.
• 20:23
  I reach out and I pass along compliments routinely now, which feel great both to do and to the person who receives them.
• 20:30
  It changed the way I act as a friend, as a parent, as a husband.
• 20:35
  It changed the way we, the structure of our family.
• 20:39
  It encourages us to adopt later in life, which I explain in detail.
• 20:45
  It's a long story, which I explained in the opening of the book.
• 20:51
  And once I had all that, I felt like I could not share that.
• 20:56
  I thought I would regret it if I didn't try to write another book.
• 21:00
  Sharing this research to people because I think it could change readers lives too, just like it changed mine.
• 21:06
  That's why I felt like I had to write the book.
• 21:09
  Okay, wow, so lot you covered there.
• 21:12
  But it's just the point that I was struck by because it's fascinating.
• 21:16
  So if humans are naturally, we're made happier and healthier through the social interaction, but yet it Seems like the default of the human mind is to be overly pessimistic ahead of time about what that interaction is going to
• 21:31
  be like.
• 21:32
  Is that, is that fair?
• 21:33
  Is that what you're saying?
• 21:35
  To say that it's a default is a little bit strong because there are lots of context that can vary our expectations or our beliefs.
• 21:42
  If you, you know, if a friend comes and sits down next to you on, on a train or in a plane or in a cab, you'll talk right away, right?
• 21:50
  It's no trouble at all.
• 21:51
  If you go to a reunion weekend for your alma mater, you'll talk to folks that you see because you go and you think other people are interested in talking to you.
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  But there are other contexts, and we can predict these based on the mechanisms that we know that create this misplaced pessimism.
• 22:11
  There are places where you're not so sure whether others are interested in engaging with you or not, but you have an opportunity to talk with them, or you're not sure how somebody's going to respond if you reach out
• 22:21
  and express gratitude to them because you haven't done it before in this kind of way with this person.
• 22:26
  And in those cases where there's more uncertainty about the other person's interest in engaging with you, that's where we get systematically misplaced pessimism.
• 22:36
  So it is not an effect.
• 22:38
  These gaps aren't things that show up everywhere.
• 22:41
  We can predict when they're going to be big and when they're going to be small.
• 22:45
  And that's why A Little More Social is a book that's 220 pages and not two pages.
• 22:52
  Because I need to, I need to explain how these effects work, where they come from, why we're mistaken, where we're most likely to be mistaken, and where, you know, this research suggests you can do things in your life
• 23:06
  to live it a little bit better than you might otherwise.
• 23:08
  Okay, so it's more so the uncertainty.
• 23:11
  Right.
• 23:11
  If you have uncertainty around what a social interaction could potentially be like, then kind of the mind defaults to this misplaced pessimism.
• 23:20
  Is that so uncertainty, Uncertainty breeds misplaced pessimism?
• 23:24
  Yes.
• 23:24
  And uncertainty is, Is more of a description of the phenomena than a real explanation of it, because turns out you have to explain why are we uncertain in this case, when I say hi to you, mostly you will
• 23:37
  say hi back to me.
• 23:38
  I shouldn't be uncertain in that context.
• 23:40
  But what we find, for instance, one of the reasons why we're overly, overly pessimistic is because we fail to appreciate the Power of things like reciprocity in social interaction.
• 23:51
  We're fundamentally social creatures.
• 23:53
  When I reach out to you, you tend to reach back to me in a way that's consistent with the way I reached out to you.
• 24:00
  So if I start a friendly conversation with you or I pass along a kind word, you tend to respond to me in kind.
• 24:07
  But our expectations don't appreciate, don't fully anticipate the power of that reciprocity.
• 24:12
  And so we think kind of anything can happen, right?
• 24:15
  I could try to talk to this person who sat down next to me on the train this morning, and, you know, anything could happen.
• 24:21
  They could, you know, they could give me the middle finger.
• 24:24
  They could pull out a gun, they could start yelling at me, or they could, you know, be nice and have a conversation.
• 24:29
  We think anything's possible.
• 24:31
  It's what our data suggests, that we, we are overly uncertain.
• 24:35
  In fact, mostly because of the power of, of reciprocity and social interaction.
• 24:41
  It kind of truncates the, the range of what's possible.
• 24:44
  Mostly when you reach out to somebody in a positive way, they tend to reach back to you in a positive way.
• 24:49
  But people, people don't quite appreciate the power they have to make that happen.
• 24:55
  Okay, so for the entrepreneurs listening too, right, because this book just came out, what are maybe a couple, if they're hearing this and they can relate to the fact that maybe in their own lives, right, there's uncertainty and
• 25:09
  maybe they're, they're not being as social as they could or should.
• 25:13
  What are some ways to kind of some nuggets and some things to take from that of what they could be doing differently?
• 25:20
  So I'll suggest a couple of things.
• 25:22
  One is to realize that social connection matters.
• 25:25
  It matters hugely.
• 25:27
  It's not a luxury good.
• 25:28
  It is essential for entrepreneurs and business owners in order to get things done successfully.
• 25:35
  You have to be able to coordinate with people.
• 25:36
  You have to be able to cooperate with people.
• 25:38
  People have to be, have to want to work with you.
• 25:40
  Social connection matters.
• 25:42
  Second, social connection is a choice.
• 25:45
  It doesn't just happen to you.
• 25:46
  It's a choice you make to reach out and engage with other people or to hold back and avoid them.
• 25:52
  And so you have power to change the way you choose to interact with other people and choose to engage with people a little more often than you might otherwise.
• 26:02
  Once you start noticing the places where you are choosing not to engage with people, you will see lots of places, I think, where you are overlooking opportunities to connect with folks.
• 26:12
  Whether you're standing in an elevator or walking down the hallway and you're not smiling or saying hello to people, to deeper things, like you're talking with someone, but you don't have a very meaningful conversation with them.
• 26:23
  You just have a shallow one.
• 26:24
  You don't go deeper into the conversation.
• 26:26
  Once you start looking for opportunities to connect, realizing that it's a choice you're making, you'll see a lot of the third important thing is that we tend to underestimate the power that we have to enable other people to
• 26:38
  connect positively with us.
• 26:40
  There are lots of anxieties, fears, concerns we have that create barriers to reaching out and connecting with other people.
• 26:47
  Those barriers tend to be misplaced, right?
• 26:50
  And when we test the strength of those barriers, those pessimistic beliefs we have about other people, we often find them to be mistaken.
• 26:57
  So I suggest people think about testing those potentially mistaken beliefs that are keeping them from connecting with others in their own life.
• 27:06
  Then finally, I think the key message from our research, the details matter here, which is why I wrote the book.
• 27:14
  The key message of our research, though, is, I think, fundamentally empowering.
• 27:19
  What we find over and over and over again is that people have more capacity, stronger capacities, better capacities to create meaningful social connections in their lives than they realize.
• 27:34
  And what that means is that we're holding ourselves back too often.
• 27:38
  First for entrepreneurs, for instance, one story and chapter they might find particularly interesting is chapter eight, which is about kindness.
• 27:47
  I opened that chapter by describing Jia Jiang, who is a.
• 27:51
  Who lives in California.
• 27:52
  He was an aspiring entrepreneur afraid of rejection.
• 27:55
  He decided he was going to go out and try to cure his fear of rejection as an entrepreneur by asking somebody some outlandish request 100 days in a row, thinking he would be rejected 100 days in a row
• 28:08
  and then would build, you know, develop the thick skin he needed to be a good entrepreneur.
• 28:13
  Turned out when he actually went out and asked people for help, what he actually found was that people were far more willing to help him than he thought they would be.
• 28:23
  We've documented in this in our research and others in the field have have as well, that we tend to underestimate how helpful others are, how willing other people are to help us when we ask them for help, and
• 28:33
  also how kind they are when we ask them for help.
• 28:36
  Ja even found that when he was rejected, it wasn't actually that negative.
• 28:40
  Jah told me at the when I talked to him while I was putting together this book, he said that he did lose his fear of rejection, not because he developed thicker skin, but because he learned that other People
• 28:52
  were kinder than he thought they were.
• 28:54
  Right.
• 28:56
  And he learned that from practice and experience.
• 28:59
  So I think the key message, you know, the takeaway from this book is one of empowerment, that you are probably more capable of creating social connection, connecting with others meaningfully, working with others well, than you'd guess.
• 29:13
  And the way you find that out is you go out and try it rather than avoiding it, being overly fearful and avoiding it.
• 29:19
  Okay.
• 29:19
  Love that.
• 29:20
  All right.
• 29:21
  And Nick, if people want to get the book, it just came out on Penguin Random House, and it's.
• 29:27
  I guess it's available everywhere.
• 29:28
  Books are sold everywhere.
• 29:30
  Yep.
• 29:30
  Anywhere you.
• 29:31
  Anywhere you like to go get your books, you'll be able to get this one.
• 29:33
  Okay.
• 29:34
  And the book is called A Little More Social.
• 29:37
  Yep.
• 29:38
  Okay.
• 29:38
  All right.
• 29:39
  And Nick, if people want to reach out to you, whether they're seeing this, they have questions, maybe they want to book you for a future speaking engagement or connect with you online for any other reason, what's the best
• 29:48
  way people could reach out to you?
• 29:50
  So I have a website, nicholas epley.com where you can find all of my papers and publications and also link to my speaking agent.
• 29:56
  You can also find me on LinkedIn.
• 29:58
  Just search for my name, Nicholas Epley, and you'll find me there.
• 30:01
  I do not do other social media, though, because I find it makes me miserable and so I don't use it.
• 30:07
  LinkedIn is something kind of new for me.
• 30:09
  I've kind of enjoyed it.
• 30:10
  It's sort of fun.
• 30:12
  I write.
• 30:13
  I get to write fun stories there that I don't get to write or publish elsewhere.
• 30:16
  And so LinkedIn is probably the place.
• 30:18
  You could also email me directly.
• 30:20
  Eplep L E yicagobooth.
• 30:23
  Edu.
• 30:24
  Okay.
• 30:24
  All right.
• 30:25
  We'll link all that in the show.
• 30:26
  Notes for everyone.
• 30:27
  Nick, thank you so much for taking the time to be here and sharing all this incredible wisdom from your journey and your research, your experiences, all that with our listeners.
• 30:36
  We greatly appreciate it.
• 30:37
  Absolutely.
• 30:38
  Thank you so much, Dave.