“Stop speaking in code”

I saw you react to a video. If I tell you to leave me alone and you leave me alone, you're legit dead to me, >> right? >> What do you think of that? >> In some ways, it depends. Uh, but in general, I don't think that's a very fun game. I don't, you know, I don't like playing that game where you have to guess at what people mean. It's like don't talk to me means talk to me. I don't know about you, I'm not good at decoding those kinds of signals personally. H how how are you supposed to know? So yeah, I I think being straightforward, weirdly, has to be it's a skill that can be developed and younger people are less likely to have that skill. I remember when I was younger, in college especially, I didn't know how to communicate how I was really feeling to people and I also didn't know if it was safe to do that. And so you use this kind of like angle to get there and they go you you know I'm looking sad today. You know I want to make sure I want somebody to notice that I'm looking sad today. And they go oh you look sad today. Are you sad? And I go no. Why do you ask cuz I want them to ask more. I want them to dig deeper, you know. So I was so close but not quite there. And that is odd to me that we would need to teach people to be straightforward. And yet here we are. >> Because there's more effort needed to obfiscate the thing that we actually want, >> right? It's like, what are you doing? Why are you playing that game? And I think in many ways it's self-protective. It's kind of like flirting but with your emotions. Like making them prove that they care about me enough to dig deeper. And yet I don't it doesn't require me to put myself out there. I don't have to. It is hard to say. Like if I say to you, "Hey Chris, I'm feeling sad today. I don't know like this interview. I don't I don't know how it's going to go." Can you imagine if I had started that way? You'd been like, "Oh, okay." You know that. So, you have to pick your spots. But at the same time, if you are in fact feeling sad, which I'm not, by the way, but there there this is great, but there is a uh there's a way to reveal that that's more socially appropriate. And I think that's where the skill is really um learnable. >> Why do women say things like, "Leave me alone," but actually mean the opposite. How should I know? No. Uh I So I think it can be for a variety of reasons. We could look at it through a cultural lens. And I think culturally women have been more penalized uh for sharing openly than men have historically. I think today, you know, it could go either way. Maybe men are even being penalized more. But I think that's one lens of explanation that people sometimes use is that women have have had to be very careful in how they communicate. And that has been transmitted across time to women today, even if it's not as true as it used to be. So, okay. So, that's that's maybe one lens. Another is that truly social media communication teaches them to do it. And so, that is it's like, hey ladies, this is what you have to do. Never tell a guy X. Instead, do ABC. And other times, it can just be learning. You know, you learn over time, like when you're in fifth grade, that if you pretend to be sad around a boy, he'll pay extra attention to you. >> And then you never learn a better skill. Well, you're still doing that when you're 30. And now people are dealing with it, you know, on when you're trying to connect with them on Hinge or whatever. >> Mhm. I uh Joe Hudson, friend of mine, his daughter was 7 years old, crying in the bathtub and she'd been crying in there quite regularly over the last couple of weeks. And he went in and the way that she was crying sounded kind of angry at the same time. And he said, "Hey, you you know when you're crying, how how often are you sad and how often you pissed off?" She said, "Pissed off?" Okay. Well, why how why are you crying if you're if you're angry? He said, "Well, when I'm angry, everyone runs away, but when I cry, my sister comes and gives me a hug." >> Exactly. >> So, there is this the it's not just the message, it's the way that that's received. And uh yeah, I I think it's a difficult one. Putting yourself learning direct communication or not speaking in shadow sentences, right? Not not >> pointing in the direction of the thing that you mean, but saying it in a way where you don't plant what you want so that it can't be denied, so that you can't ever be invalidated. But you also deny the person the opportunity of actually giving you what it is that you want. They're kind of the same as telling somebody to hit the bullseye on a dart board, but they've got to have their eyes closed, >> right? >> Uh or you're moving it like this all the time. Uh yeah. Okay. I guess passive aggression shadow sentences stuff is similar to passive aggression. What's the role of passive aggression in relationships? You know why it comes about what its role is? >> Yeah, absolutely. So there uh sometimes researchers will call it indirect aggression as well. You know there's multiple names depending on which angle in the literature you you're taking. And that too is one that has been debated and kind of misunderstood over time. It used to be thought that men were aggressive aggressive and then women were passive aggressive or indirectly aggressive. And what more re kind of recent research has shown is that men are just more aggressive across the board. And >> including indirectly. >> Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So they have maybe equal levels of women uh with indirect but then when you add or maybe even a little less, but then when you add aggression aggression it's like no guys are in fact more aggressive. But women, I think, are more uh I wouldn't say it's rewarded. It's more socially appropriate for women to be indirectly aggressive typically. And it's also less dangerous. So, think about it this way. If you say to a buddy, you know, you're fighting and you take a swing at him, you're probably going to hold your own at worst. You personally, I mean, you're a big guy, you know, you're you're gonna you're going to hold hold your own at worst. If a woman takes a swing at her guy in anger, that's very dangerous. And so, as a result, women tend to use passive aggression or indirect aggression a bit more simply because it's a it's a safer outlet. And I think I, you know, this is not my area of specialization, but I think there's some evidence that shows that when women are dealing with other women, they're a lot more likely to be aggressive aggressive than to be than if they were dealing with men because the potential physical repercussion coming back to them, given that they're more fragile and more valuable evolutionarily, they're less likely they're less likely to have lethal force be applied because the imbalance just isn't there. >> Correct. I'd have to go back and check on that. I'm almost makes total sense. I mean, female intros competition is the least popular on the internet, most fascin It's got the biggest disparity between um how much you're allowed to talk about it, how little you're allowed to talk about it, and how fascinating it is to study, >> right? >> It is [ __ ] endlessly interesting. the Joyce Bensons, the Candace Blakes, the Cory Clarks, the the [ __ ] Christina Durantises, the Tracy Vancingors with Mean Girl, like all of this stuff is so [ __ ] sick. I remember Rob Henderson taught me this story or maybe it was bus um a woman had been kidnapped by an Amazonian tribe while she was on a tour and she'd been taken into the the the local uh tribe after she'd been sort of taken from her from her touring group. And when she was there, um, a little boy had come up and given her a little parcel, given her a parcel that had some food in it. And, uh, no, sorry, one of the women had come up. Yeah. One of the boys had come up, given her a parcel that had some food in it. And, uh, it was, you can eat this. And she smelled it. And it, it sort of smelled bad, so she didn't want to. And then she went and sort of laid it down somewhere and didn't bother eating it. And then a little bit later in the day, one of the kids fell super ill. M. >> And when asked, "What's happened? Why are you ill?" She said, "Oh, that woman put this thing down near me and I went over and ate it and they chased her through the jungle. You've just tried to poison one of these children." What it turned out had happened was that some of the other women had given the parcel to a child to give to her, knowing that she would either eat it and get sick or put it down and then they could accuse her of it. And I'm like, >> it's a trap. Do you understand just how stupid the male equivalent of that would be? Like if it was a guy that had come in and the guys didn't like him, they would have like man take rock. Man, >> that's literally what I was going to say. >> Man throw rock at like and there's this sevenstep inception thing. Christopher Nolan's designed it. You know, it's got it's got redundancies built in. if she doesn't do it, she'll give it to someone and then it'll hurt them and then we can say that she I'm like, "Oh, I am so glad that I'm not a woman. I'm endlessly glad that I'm not a woman for that reason. I could not navigate that situation at all." Well, and I I was shocked. So, I made I think I've made one or two posts on interexual competition recently and I thought people might find it to be mildly interesting. I find it to be very interesting. You know, it's one of the things we studied in in grad school a bit. And I made this post and I started taking shots from all over the place. It's like, what what you guys have a problem with this? What? I I thought it was just wellaccepted principle. That's why I almost didn't post about it. I I'm out of time. I don't know what people don't know >> and apparently a people don't know about this and b when they find out they get real mad. In other news, Shopify powers 10% of all e-commerce companies in the United States. They are the driving force behind Gym Shark, Skiims, Aloe, and Mutonic, which is why I partnered with them because when it comes to converting browsers into buyers, they are best-in-class. Their checkout is 36% better on average compared to other leading commerce platforms. And with Shopay, you can boost conversions by up to 50%. They've got award-winning support there to help you every step of the way. Look, you are not going into business to learn how to code or build a website or do back-end inventory management. Shopify takes care of all of that and allows you to focus on the job that you came here to do, which is designing and selling an awesome product. Upgrade your business and get the same checkout that I use with Newtonic on Shopify right now. 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