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I'm so delighted that he's here today to share these stories with us.
And without further ado, here's Ori.
Meet my press agent. It's really fantastic being here.
I just got back from Kansas where
I've been hanging out with the US Army.
And kind of an unlikely person to be at the US Army-we'll get
into that a little bit later-but peace and conflict
studies major at Berkeley and then business here.
And when we think about the US Army,
we really think that they have a tool set,
if you will, and their tool set is very complex.
They have helicopters to basically inflict the will upon people.
They have cannons. They have basically the best machines available
to inflict our way upon the people of the world.
And fighting in the US Army instills one or two responses;
it's either a fight or flight.
And I want to talk to you for a second about fight or flight.
I want to talk to you specifically
about the biology behind these two.
There's a chemical in our brain called cortisol.
And cortisol is, amongst so many others, a stress chemical.
When we get a hit of cortisol, it makes us more amp,
it give us a huge glucose up in our bodies and makes us
be able to deal with the fight or flight situation.
And when you look at fight or flight,
this is how it looks like in society.
This is how it looks like in history-in military history.
But what happens after that cortisol injection, that hit of cortisol.
It often times makes us feel like this.
It's a taxing hormone on us. It makes us feel tired.
It's bad on our bones.
It's a chemical that afterwards leaves us exhausted.
And it's with cortisol in mind that a few months ago,
actually several months ago,
a general from the army got in touch with me
and said he read one of my books.
And this is the weird thing about writing books.
You can be kind of a liberal living
in California and all of a sudden, people read your books.
And this guy writes me and I didn't exactly know who he was.
It turns out he is the general who's in charge of leadership for
the army and he's right now in charged of the entire army.
And he said that they're basically facing a huge problem and the
problem that they're facing is that this is the first time in a
very long time that for ten years we've had back to back combat.
People who had been deployed three,
four times in the course of ten-year career.
And as they come back,
how do you create an army that isn't feeling the effect of cortisol.
And cortisol tends to take,
tends to have an effect like post-traumatic stress disorder,
like problems adjusting.
How do you build a trust-based network in the army?
And regardless of your politics for a second,
think about the implications that the head of the army right now
is thinking about how do you built a trust-based network.
How do you leverage something that the army isn't known for?
Something called soft power.
And for the last year,
I've gone to actually have a lot of conversations
and I've been meeting a lot of these soldiers and
army officers who had this combat experiences.
People like are Keaton who's a helicopter pilot,
served back to back tours.
People like Elliot, served back to back tours, 20 years in service.
What we've done and what I just came back from Kansas,
of all places, is I took these guys and put them here.
Put them in a circle and I got them to talk
amongst other things about their feelings.
And I got them to relate about what it's been like to have
this experiences overseas and what it's like to come back.
And I got them to relate in what I would argue is a more
humane human level and what we've noticed is that a very
weird thing that happens when they get in to the circles.
There is a sort of intimacy.
And that's a word you don't often times see in business.
It's not a word you often times hear in the army that develops.
And here you'll see at the very edge, there's a chair that's empty.
The reason that chair is empty is because
it's the person taking the picture,
and the person taking the picture I brought with me.
Not in a usual suspect in army circles. This is Kelly.
And the thing to know about Kelly is that amongst
other things she practices soft power.
Amongst other things, she's very soft.
She likes to nurture human relationships.
And if the army works on cortisol Kelly functions,
I would say, on a different chemical, oxytocin.
Oxytocin is released primarily when mothers give birth.
And what it does is it actually creates
an instant trusting relationship.
When people are given oxytocin in lab situations,
they trust their partners more.
When a new born is born, its sight of vision is just a few inches.
When you think about that,
that is exactly the distance from the mother's chest to her eyes.
Oxytocin is responsible for those levels of connection.
And what I want to talk about a little bit today is about oxytocin
and about how you can have a leadership model that isn't based
in traditional cortisol but is based on oxytocin instead.
This is what oxytocin looks like.
For me, this is what oxytocin looks like.
This is my wife. I met her seven years ago. It was a blind date.
She wasn't big on emailing or talking on the phone so
we just sat across from each other in the restaurant.
And from the moment I met her,
she was absolutely beautiful and I was obviously taken by her.
Who wouldn't be? And the moment we connected was when we shared
the story about both our mothers being hippies.
If you have a name like Ori, you know that your mother was a hippy.
It means light. And about how our mothers made home made granola and we knew
right there and then that it was a connection.
We knew that this was it.
We actually don't exactly know when we decided to get married,
and I know this is going broad but I'll admit it.
We don't know remember exactly when we decided to
get married because we lied so much about it.
We lied to our families. We lied to our friends.
It was that soon after we met.
This is what instant connections and intimacy looks like for me.
When we look at it from a historical perspective,
we see this as an archetype.
Shakespeare talks about it. Romeo and Juliet, Act I, Scene 5.
This is Baz Luhrmann's interpretation of it.
I'll show it to you in just a second.
The reason I show it to you is because
I used to have a crush on Claire Danes.
But this captures that level of intensity,
that level of finding someone so incredibly drawing from the get-go.
That did not end well, to be clear.
And when we often think of instant connections,
we think about being very impulsive, right?
You meet someone and it's not a rational thing to do.
I wrote a book about decision making.
It's not a rational thing to do.
It seems like one of those impulses that
people follow and bad things happen.
And when we decided to write this book,
my brother and I, we decided to look
at really both the size behind it.
But one of the questions that we had is what happens-Romeo
and Juliet were 12-what happens when grown ups,
if you will, have that same kind of connection?
And we started talking to a lot of different people about their
"Click" experiences,
if you will, when they really clicked with someone,
when they had that oxytocin boost.
And one of the people that I met in a speaking
engagement-this was in Augusta,
Georgia-just stopped me and just said.
"You know, I really have to tell you this story."
And this guy's name is Paul.
Paul is a retired military lieutenant colonel, was special ops guy.
So, very, very kind of tough guy who runs marathons for fun.
And he's a... Paul told me about the story about he was in-charge
of a cleanup project years and years ago.
And he's in-charge of this project and there are all these
people who he's managing in order to write a big proposal.
And one of the people that he flies in is a nuclear
physicist that he flies in from Paris. And her name is Nadia.
The moment that Paul lays eyes on Nadia,
he automatically falls in-love with her.
Unfortunately, he doesn't make the same kind impression on her.
She can't stand him in the beginning because he
tells her something about human relation's never
changing from the time of Aristotle and Plato.
And she sends him a note.
As he's speaking, she sends this note and it says,
"I completely disagree with you."
And he gets in as kind of bewildered and afterwards he says,
"Well, I want to talk to you about it." She says "Anytime, anywhere."
And that night, they get together at the Ritz-Carlton in Pasadena.
It's Pasadena, so I guess they get together in Ritz-Carlton.
And they're sitting across from each other
and they're supposed to talk about war.
They're supposed to talk about catching up and instead,
they just talked about each other's lives.
He talks about being an officer during the Vietnam era
and she talks about being a peace activist.
And at the end of the night,
Paul who has lot more guts than I do says something to Nadia.
He says "What if I told you that I was in
love with you and I wanted to marry you."
And she looks at him and she says
"Well, let's see what's tomorrow brings."
And tomorrow, they have the exact same
thing sitting across from each other.
And at the end of the night, he says, "Well, did you think about it?"
She said "I thought about it." He says, "What did you decide?"
He says that she decided, "I love you, too."
And a month later, they were married.
So, two really beautiful stories like Romeo & Juliet.
We know that didn't end well.
Paul and Nadia - what about these relationships?
And we have a very base question was what is
the long term effects of these relationships.
There's a very interesting study from Holland where researches
found a thousand names from the phone book.
And they reached out to these couples and
there were really three types of couples.
The first couple were Romeo and Juliet couple.
I'm sorry, the first couple were friends. They were friends first.
So these are people who are now married
who originally were friends first.
Second were daters. And the third type were Romeo and Juliet, right?
Instant clickers, instant relationships,
and what they asked is 25 years later.
Let's look at these people's lives and
let's ask them specific question.
And the surprising part of the research
was that almost by every factor,
the couples were the same. They had the same level of education.
They had the same level of household income.
They had an average 2.1 kids.
Here is the difference.
And raise your hands for a second,
how many people are in relationships? Wow, this is a good crowd.
How many people want to be in relationships
or had been in relationships? Can imagine being on a relationship?
They asked the people these questions - three different questions.
And as I read these questions,
ask yourself whether you'd agree or disagree with this, OK?
I cannot imagine another person making me as happy as my spouse does.
There is something almost magical about
my relationship with my spouse.
And what happened was that the people who were the clickers,
the instant connection folks tended to
agree with the statements much more.
They tended to be the ones who felt the most passion in relationship,
who felt the most intimacy in the relationship, even 25 years later.
That was the only difference amongst all the couples.
That initial sense stays with us.
This is what my brother-this is my brother,
a psychologist-this is what he's been
studying for more than ten years.
And what he did is he asked a whole host of very,
very different people a very similar question.
He asked them, "When was the time when you felt
a really magical connection in your life?"
And I'm going to draw on you guys for a second,
is there anybody who has had this kind of magical instant connection?
You right there in glasses. This didn't happen. It did.
I just cold call you. You did? OK. Yeah. I never cold call.
I hate cold calling. It's passe. Yes? So?
So what was experience like? So, yes.
That's cool. Tell me a little bit less.
Who is with and what was it like? Well, I was in a bar.
So we were dancing and stuff. Nice. It's cool.
Anybody else who had this experience? Anybody else had experience.
I'll be a little more brave. Yes, sir.
So I met my wife on a Manhattan Street and I chased her four blocks.
I caught her on the street and we got married.
Nice. And we're living only a couple of
blocks from campus and still married.
Isn't that great? Anybody else had that experience you want to share?
Yes?
My husband, we'd be 34 years in August.
So I met him and we had that instant connection.
And I ask you guys to reflect upon both listening to these stories.
Also, think about an experience you've had
yourself that you don't want to share.
And what Rom, my brother,
found was that when people recall an instant connection,
when they recall that magical experience,
the same emotions tend to come up with them again.
Even when it was 30-some odd years later,
even when it's remembering chasing your wife down the street,
even when you're talking about dancing in the bar with someone,
and that those emotions actually really stay with us.
So they not only define the nature of the relationship.
They have a certain level of...
Again, we're feeling the oxytocin again
even when we think about it years later.
And when you think about these kind of stories,
often times, it's exactly this, right?
It's people meeting each other in a bar,
down the street, they often have a romantic take to them.
We ask a question, "Well, what about at work?" Right?
This is, after all we're trying to talk about careers here.
Paul and Nadia are actually working together.
They are married, been married for 20 years.
They started with company and they're really successful
and talk about how that initial clicking relationship
really affected the tenor of their relationship.
There's a study that look to the bunch of MBA students
and the categorized the MBA students into two sectors.
One were people who naturally clicked and the
other were just people who knew each other, who were just classmates.
And they separated them out and put them in little small
groups and they got them to do a couple of tests.
The first was to a bunch of blocks.
They have to arrange them in different ways -
very menial in purpose, very boring.
And the second one was they have to evaluate application essays.
And what they did is they then compare the application
essays to how the admissions committees score them.
How the clinical professionals did.
What they found was,
time and again, the people who clicked had a very different tenor,
in terms of their interactions.
They're actually much more effective. They build more blocks.
They build them better.
They were more accurate and they were much better at
the admissions application essay.
And the researchers found that there were two elements of difference.
The first element was that the clickers would more
naturally cheerlead each other and more supportive.
It was just kind of a more positive environment that they were in.
And the second element was that there was actually
more conflict with the people who clicked.
And this part is completely counter-intuitive, right?
You think that if someone's clicking, if they're so in love,
everything is going to be rosy for the rest of their lives.
And this is where the studies really shed a light
into an element of these relationships.
A group of researchers from England looked
at string quartet and what it is.
They asked the string quartets were the
people naturally click with each other.
And then, what they did is they measured how
many recording contracts Link Quartets had?
How much they charge for their concerts? Right?
Two huge elements because by the time you
are professional string quartet player,
you're on the top of your game.
And what they found was that again,
the clicking string quartets had more conflict.
Now, the conflict actually directly resulted in
the string quartets having higher paying gigs,
being more successful, getting more recording contracts.
And here is why?
Let's say you're in a string quartet where you're basically
not natural clickers but you just get along decently.
And first violin decides to play a Beethoven piece in one way,
second violin wants to play it in a different way.
So they're professionals, they talked about it, and he says
"You know, John, I want to play this way."
"Well, Eric, I want to play a different way." That's nice.
At the end of the day what they often times
do is they brush the conflict under the rug.
And when it's actually performance time,
the first and second violins aren't agreeing on an interpretation.
With the clicking quartets,
what you had is they actually took conflict head on.
They actually went there and by going there by having those honest
conversations-mixed with that intimacy that they had because they
like each other already-you had a better performing crowd.
So, that initial connection,
that initial oxytocin makes a difference.
But we have also situations where you
don't have that initial connection,
right, where you kind of hate someone from the
get-go over your best neutral about them. What you do then?
Is there anything we can do to actually foster that intimacy?
The first time we met, we hated each other.
No, you didn't hate me, I hated me hated you.
The second time we met, you didn't even remember me. I did too.
I remembered you. The third time we met we became friends.
We were friends for a long time. And then we weren't.
And then, we fell in love.
Three months later, we got married. And it only took three months.
Twelve years and three months "Harry Met Sally".
Anybody didn't see the movie? A few people didn't see the movie.
OK, so Harry. Sally.
They met the first time, he's a total jerk to her.
They're driving cross-country, is awful to her.
Second time they met, he barely remembers her.
But the third time they met, something happened.
I'm going to show you this clip where
was the third time that they met. It's at a bookstore.
And what I'd like you do is paid attention to two things.
First thing is how open you think he is
and how he opens up throughout the clip.
And the second thing is watch her body language.
Watch Sally's body language and see how she walks
towards or away from him during the conversation.
How are you? Fine. How's Joe. Fine. I hear he's fine.
And you're not with Joe anymore? We just broke up. Oh no.
I'm sorry, that's too bad. Yeah. Well, you know. Yeah.
So, what about you? I'm fine. How's married life? Not so good.
I'm getting a divorce. Oh, sorry. I'm really sorry.
Yeah, well, what are you going to do?
What happened to you, guys?
So we're going to look at three elements in which you can,
if you will, will accelerate these clicking connections.
And the first one is what we just saw Harry do, right?
He was vulnerable. It's that easy. He was open with his feelings.
And you think about vulnerability,
you often times think about it as weakness,
as being too soft especially in business.
And the data suggested that leaders who are vulnerable
are far more trusted by their employees.
People who are vulnerable tend to start more intimate relationships.
We talked to a police officer from San Jose,
down the street, who's a hostage negotiator.
When we think about hostage negotiators,
we oftentimes think of guys who are very gruff.
You think of Bruce Willis types, right? And this guy's job is...
Imagine this, someone took a hostage and you have to basically
talk them down and you can't shoot them or anything like
that because the hostages will obviously be killed.
So this guy takes the hostages.
And he's a two-time offender already which means
that by getting caught now with the hostages,
he's going to automatically go to prison for
the rest of his life under three strikes.
The cops have a name for this tough scenario
and it's called 'suicide by cop'.
The guy was so afraid of going to jail for the rest of his life
that he's going to take himself out in a blaze of glory.
He sits there and he talks to this hostage taker.
And he talks to him, imagine this, for 15 hours.
He doesn't try to intimidate him.
He doesn't try to play mind tricks on him.
They just have a conversation.
And at the end of the conversation,
the hostage taker said something about his mother.
And he says, "Yeah, my mother died awhile ago."
And then Greg, our hostage negotiator, sees an opening.
And authentically, he says
"Yeah, I had my mom died on me too just last year. It was really,
terrible painful experience." And all of a sudden, they bond, right?
The most unlikely two people in the world all of a sudden
clicked--the police officer and the hostage taker.
And they bond so intensely that at the end of the scenario,
the guy finally gives himself up and when he goes out,
the SWAT team is ready to pounce on him.
And he says, "Wait. I want to give Greg a hug."
And the SWAT team's still angry at Greg to this day for
the fact that he actually gave the hostage taker a hug.
And you're saying,
"OK, so what's the big deal about two people giving each other a hug."
I would say the big deal is that when people are,
even artificially, told to express a level of vulnerability,
they automatically form a connection and that connection again
all of a sudden changed the tenor of the relationship.
It brings in the soft power element. So number one, vulnerability.
Second one we're going to look at is proximity.
And this one on first take looks very obvious, right?
You're going to be more likely to connect and form relationship with
someone who goes to Stanford than someone who goes to Berkeley,
or someone who lives in Moscow or someone who lives in North Pole.
But what's really interesting about this is how
those last few feet really make a difference.
Excuse me, do you mind? All the rooms are full. Not at all.
I'm Ron by the way. Ron Weasely.
I'm Harry. Harry Potter. So it's true.
I mean, do you have the birth or what, the scar.
Oh, yeah. Wicked.
Anything off the trolley, dears? No, thanks. I'm all set.
We'll take the lot. Wow.
So, has anyone seen a toad? I believe Neville's lost one.
Oh, are you doing magic? Let's see them.
There's a little vulnerability there, right,
where Harry shows the scar. Ron admits not having any money.
But think of the simple fact that these three characters,
it's very archetypal,
spending the rest of their lives together in the same school.
Right? They dine together. They get in trouble together.
They grow up together. And that sense of connection for them
started right there in that train, in that little train booth.
And Harry Potter in a way explains the mystery that was
faced by Stanford researchers studying an MIT dorm.
And there's this weird thing going on this MIT dorm.
This isn't the actual dorm but it was shaped like this.
They tore it down; it was a U-shape dorm. And here is the mystery.
Their residents throughout the dorm, they asked them,
"How many people are you really friendly with?"
And the residents in the middle have a ton of friends,
and the residents living in the edge of
the dorm had no friends whatsoever.
So the first guess, you'd say, "Well, why is that?"
It might be pretty simple, right?
If you're kind of a loner, you live at the edge of the dorm.
Well, the housing assignments were actually random.
So they really sat and said, "Well, what could it actually be?"
And what it came down to was how physically close you live to people.
And specifically when they ask people,
"Who is your best friend in the school, at MIT?
Forty percent of the people said that it was their
next door neighbor. And their next door neighbor,
the place between two doors was distance of 19 feet. And something
really weird happens when you go to the person who lives the
next door down. Thirty eight feet - all of a sudden,
the chances of people hitting it off, of making the connection,
goes down by half. You go down another 19 feet,
it goes down by half again. It's exponential. It's not linear.
Researchers of Bell Lab asked a company-it was a research company-about
who you're most likely to collaborate with,
regardless of interest in the field or anything like
that or education. And in scientific environments,
people are much more likely to collaborate with
people who work exactly right next to them, 10.3%.
When you went down to the other side of the hallway,
it could be the same department,
it could be people working in the exact same project,
the likelihood of them collaborating is 1.9%.
You go down to another floor and it's fraction of a percent.
You go to different building and is almost no chance of people collaborating.
And think of the implications of that,
of when you're having a meeting, do you show up?
When you're having a conversation,
do you have a virtual conversation or do you do something in person?
A study about work meetings found out
that the vast majority of the meetings,
of what was useful about the meetings,
actually happen before and after. Not during because that's
when people were able to develop a little bit of trust with
each other. So this is a really interesting crowd. Why don't
we have a very brief meeting right here. I need six volunteers.
This is going to be fun and exciting,
I promise. Just either stand up or come
on down and I need six people. One, yay. Two, three, four,
five, and I think we have six. I want you guys each
to grab one of these... Chair is what they called.
And I just want you to sit in a circle.
Actually no, sit right here, if you don't mind.
Sorry, there's more space. Just actually form a circle.
Great, great, great. Perfect. Let's give them a round
of applause. That was fantastic circle, fantastic circle.
I'm not going to make you guys actually have
a boring meeting because we've been enough of those but I want
you to do something. I want you to lift your arms and about try
to touch other person's shoulder. And see they're about,
you had to adjust a little bit but most of you literally
sat about arms length apart. And that's how we sit,
like this is a very cultural thing. You can let your arms down. So that's
how we sit in United States. Now I want you to do another thing and this
is going to feel a weird but it's going to be good. I promise.
Are you up for it? Yup. So maybe just say,
just go around right now and just say your names.
Hi, my name is... Hi, may name is Lauren.
Hi, my name is Johnson. I'm Alex. My name is Jay. I'm Hendrick.
My name is Gabriel. And why don't I get
you guys to literally sit knee to knee,
like touching knees. And what I want you to do now,
again, very simple. Just tell me what you ate for breakfast today
if you had breakfast at all. A banana. Eggs I don't have breakfast.
An apple. Eggs. I had Coco Pops. A question for you guys,
how does it feel sitting knee to knee? Other than weird and everyone's
breath smells great. It's fun. It's fun? We feel closer and connected
to everyone. Really? Yeah. We're friends, right?
I don't know if you can see them from here.
I don't know if you can see their faces. There's a
little bit of... They're smiling more. And notice,
and I'm going to pick on you,
notice his body language now as it was before. You're kind
of leaning in to each other. And thank you. This is the meeting.
You did a fantastic job. Thank you.
These last few feet really make a difference but these last few inches
make a whole lot of difference. And try this out,
and I've seen this happen in the army. I've seen this happened
in the hospitals. I've seen this happen in corporations.
When there's a conflict in an organization,
they get people to literally sit knee to knee.
I'm not trying to make any converts here, or something like that,
but I would talk to them afterwards and see whether
if it actually felt different. I mean,
you felt connected just by talking about breakfast foods and by your
names and yet there is that rush of oxytocin that we talked about.
And we talked about that there's a research from Berkeley about the NBA,
about the power of touch. What they did is they look at all
30 NBA teams in the 2008-2009 season and then counted the number
of times the players touched when they're celebrating,
when they were hugging each other,
when they give high-fives,
when they give fist bumps. And what they found out was
that the teams where there is more touch were actually
much more successful by the end of the season.
And the theory is that touch translated into greater trust,
that people kind of felt a little bit closer to each other and that
collaboration is actually really good in the court. So we can be
vulnerable. We can try to literally stick ourselves next to each other.
The last thing we're going to look at is people who have this
is as a natural trait. They're called high self-monitors. I want
you to meet Dina Caplin. Dina has a problem in her life. The biggest
problem that Dina has in her life is that she gets invited to too
many wedding invitations every year. And she gets invited to these
invitations where people invite her that she's barely met.
And she's natural when she goes into it. If she was in this room,
if only Dina was in this room,
people just naturally like her. She's not just likeable by being very
beautiful but she has that natural kind of personality and probably a
lot of us have met someone like that. Some people probably in here are
like that - people who can form this natural instant connections. A Stanford
researcher try to figure out what is it about people like that,
how is it that they're able to form these connections.
What they did is they got a bunch of people to answer
questions and whether they agree or disagree with these
questions. And see whether you agree with this,
"I find it hard to imitate the behavior of other people."
Ask yourself this question,
"I have trouble changing my behavior to suit
different people and different situations."
And lastly, "I can make impromptu speeches even on
topics about which I have almost no information."
Dina would have answered no to the first two
questions and yes to the last question.
And it's not that Dina is fake,
it's not that Dina is dis-ingenious in any ways.
The thing about people like Dina is that
they naturally meet us where we are,
as opposed to trying for us to meet her where she is.
She naturally mirrors us, and when people naturally mirror us,
we naturally tend to like them.
She's saying, "Well, it's great for Dina."
It's fantastic for a cocktail party and maybe it's even fantastic
if you want to get a lot of wedding invitations.
What about when you guys graduate?
A team looked at high self-monitors and low self-monitors and normal
people after they graduate and they looked at their career fields.
And what they noticed was that high self-monitors
tend to change jobs as much more frequently,
but there's a difference.
The high self-monitors were much more likely to be in
the center of networks and the reason that they change
job so frequently was because they were getting promoted
so rapidly that they got different job offers.
They are much more successful. They are making more money.
They are able to have higher positions in less time and
when you look at their position within the company,
by any social theorist would say,
who is the person you want to be in this equation, right?
You want to be the guy in the center?
So for an average person,
it takes 18 years to get into the center of the network.
And guess how long it takes a high self monitor. Six months. Almost.
Thirteen months.
A high self-monitor can achieved within
13 months what it takes a normal person, someone like us, 18 years.
And it's not that they're natural schmoozers.
It's not that they have the ability to pass more business cards.
It's just that they mirror themselves into the situations.
They're able to be more fluid.
And that brings us back to the army.
It brings us back to forms of leadership,
when we think of leadership, when we think of the corporation that
was actually created by generals,
the men of corporation, the hierarchy.
And think about tones and corporation for a minute
and think about how you can change that tone.
I'm going to show you two videos. They're going to be very similar.
The first video I'm going to show you is...
This is something really, really pretty amazing.
It's people who strap parachutes to
their skis and go down the mountain.
So I'm just going to show you a little bit of this clip.
What do you think? Pretty intense? Yeah. Crazy?
Anybody want to do it? Yes. A couple of people.
How does this room feel? How do you feel when you watched it?
Tense. Tense.
Excited. Excited, energized. I'm kind of in awe with these guys.
What I did is we're going to see the exact same movie
and we're just going to change the music.
How does it feel?
And when you think about this video,
it's the exact same message, right?
It's exact same content and yet you can change the tone
and whether it's the army or business or classroom,
you can change the tone by being a little softer.
All of a sudden, you can see the beauty of this thing.
You can understand why someone would do something crazy like that.
The elegance in it.
And that if you want to,
whether it's by how we interact with each other,
how close we sit with each other, how open a person that we are,
how much we meet people where they are,
we can change that tone as well.
And it's a lot easier said than done.
But I think that from a generational perspective,
from a chemical perspective, there's a lot to be said for oxytocin.
I'd argued, in our beginning,
that oxytocin is maybe the more important of the two chemicals.
We know how to deal with fight or flight.
The question is how can we really leverage oxytocin,
how can we leverage that soft power,
how can we leverage intimacy towards the exact same goals.
So I really, really appreciate being here and it's fantastic here
again at Stanford and I think we have a few minutes for our Q&A.
So thank you.
Yes, sir. I have a question in one of these instant connections.
The way he's talking in the media about how people meet quickly,
they click and then, they get married in Vegas and how obviously,
that doesn't work it.
Is that a perception bias or what happens there?
vIt happens a lot. It is a perception bias.
So the longitudinal study that we talked about that a lot of people,
25 years afterwards,
are find that people were actually pretty similar afterwards
in terms of the instant connection versus the people who
were more kind of knew each other for a longer time.
So can you get any infatuated? Yes.
Can you make really dumb mistakes in Vegas? Yes.
The thing though is that we actually go in the exact opposite way.
We try to think about, especially in business,
we try to think, we try to have kind of first grader mentality.
If someone really liked each other,
let's separate them so they're not on the same team.
Let's discourage people from dating in the office,
let's discourage them from being friends.
While all the data suggested,
the opposite might actually be much more effective.
So yes, you can be infatuated and yes,
just because you meet someone who you think is really
pretty doesn't mean you should marry her.
But the converse of that is that you shouldn't discount something
just because you had those first initial strong feeling.
Yes, sir? So, I mean, I think oxytocin also has the dark
side to it in that it promotes ethnocentrism.
And it also being shown in study that it increases the amount of...
an anger they feel when they're betrayed.
So how do you balance between the light side which
is you feel in a group and the dark side when people
outside the group are trying to enter?
You feel you want to protect yourself and attack other people.
And on the fun side, you said that people, when they're closer,
they work together better.
So does that mean if you promote an oxytocin-based environment,
you're going to make silos more easily occur and people
basically base their relationship on closeness rather
than this collaborative means that goes beyond just their
emotions and beyond how they feel at first sight.
That's a good question. When you want to create collaboration in
a large institution or an environment,
theoretically just put a bunch of people on
Facebook and they'll collaborate together.
The problem is that people don't actually do that.
The problem is that in order to build a real trust-based environment,
you need to have some level of emotional connection. So you're right.
If I'm outside of the circle,
if I was outside, if these six people who
sat here were having lunch together,
would any of you walk up to them and say,
"Hi. My name is Ori. I'd like to join you for lunch." No way, right?
They were obviously a closed off system which can be problematic.
And at the same time what if you're trying to get that specific
circle to be more intimate with each other or if you're trying
to get them into a circle to be more trusting.
We look at it from a societal perspective,
the government asks everyone.
I'm sorry, the government has a huge database that they
collect that basically ask a zillion questions about people's
relationships or friendships, things like that.
And one of the questions that they asked is how many confidants,
very, very close friends people have.
The numbers over the years have been basically pretty much steady.
And on average, the most frequent answer given is three.
People on it have about three confidants.
And something very interesting happen in 2002-2003,
right around when people started doing a lot more social networking.
Guess what is the model or the most frequent answer does given
right now in terms of how many confidants people have.
One? One? Yes?
Ten.
Ten. Seven. Zero.
The mode is zero.
That we've given up in the idea of building across
silos and building a ton of connections, we've, I think to a degree,
lost out on the intensity of the connections,
the intimacy of the connections.
But I would agree with you that you need both.
The last thing you need is a completely solid organization where it's
"us versus them". However, when you're in an
"us versus them" situations, it also builds intimacy.
Yes? In the middle. Yes? I just want to know, do you think...
Did your research or findings either consciously
or subconsciously change how you lived your life?
Or are these things you try to do a little more...
since you started doing this kind of research?
If I was a better person. I guess a couple...
Honestly, the best biggest two differences are...
One is, the guy whom I'm writing current book with.
This guy named Judah. I met him at this party and we just had a
really great conversation and it was like,
"What are you doing?" "Oh, I'm writing about instant connections."
And all suddenly, we had that click.
And I remember I was just walking away and I was like
"Wait a second. I just..."
My research says, he actually followed this type of relationships.
And I went to him and I did something and
I've never done this to anyone else. I went back to him and said
"You know what, you look like someone who
I want to be friends with. Can we be friends?"
And it felt a little first grade-y, and it felt a little silly.
It was like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, let's."
And we had dinner and now he's someone who
probably we're closer with anybody else.
In terms of how I try to behave,
the biggest thing I aspire towards: A, show up always.
When a general from the army calls,
even if you don't know exactly what generals do,
you show up in the same office.
And b, is the idea of being high self-monitoring in
terms of really meeting people where they are and
I think there's obviously a philosophy around that.
But there's so much I think to be said about how
can I actually present myself in a softer way?
And I know I'm a guy living in San Francisco;
that's not exactly a huge problem that I have.
But I think it's a continual path for me personally.
Yes, hi.
You're talking about self control. And I lack it all.
and how those adapt themselves to the people that they meet.
I was wondering whether if this kind of mentality
gets embedded into you over time,
where as you keep on adapting to circumstances?
Do you not become over dependent on outside forces?
That you do not have one identity of yourself
that cannot be put up and discussed because,
again, you just keep on connecting?
Yeah, the research suggests that it really is them.
So, people who are... This suggests a couple of things.
One is that it's an innate thing. People are born with it.
And two is that, it's not that they don't have a personality.
It's not that they're going to...
Dina is going to be a very different person if she's here than
if she's at a big party or she's at an investor meeting.
It's just that she's going to be able to modulate her.
There's a slide that I skipped to, the restaurant test.
Think about sitting in restaurant; it's very quiet.
There are candles.
A high self-monitor is going to be able to match that environment.
A low self monitor . It's going to talk a little bit about this.
They're going to not know how to modulate
themselves to the environment.
Now interestingly, you sometimes want low self-monitors
in your work because they're the ones who are going
to give you more honest feedback about something.
So you want a combination but it's the high self-monitors
who are going to modulate themselves more,
who going to end up being more successful.
So depends on which side of the equation you want to be on.
I think we have time for one more, two more.
You talked a lot about what happens after oxytocin
is created that it forms these instant connections?
So, I was wondering what the research shows about when this happens,
what makes two people click?
So the mystery, we looked at specific psychological
factors like the vulnerability, the touching and things like that.
Smell, actually plays a really big role
so that in one study they put people,
women, in the room and they had them look at pictures of guys.
And they found the guys much more attractive
if there was a hidden swab,
like in the corner, taken from this guy sweat.
So that, yeah, sweat a lot. That's the ticket.
We're also much more attracted to people who are
similar to us so that if someone has the same name
you're likely to give them more money than if...
And if any if your name is Steve, just by being asked,
if you think that someone has the same birthday,
the same horoscope, even the same finger print pattern.
And we're really only starting to understand the neurology of it.
There was a recent study that found out
that when people have emotional pain,
we feel it exactly the same way as physical pain in our
brains so that we are naturally kind of built in order
to build these connections and we're finding out.
But let me know what you found out
in terms of your personal research.
And, perfect. OK. That was absolutely terrific. Thank you so much.