Got it. So this is the first thing that has changed since our last conversation. It's a big change, obviously. Yeah. The second change that's happened is this rise of AI. Oh yes. Right.

Let's talk about AI. Yes.

Some, some really interesting stuff, some really scary stuff. I don't know if you've ever seen deep fake interviews that are being done. One example is like Joe Rogan interviewing Steve Jobs or Sam Altman, who's the founder of OpenAI. And I like, it gets me thinking, because if someone never heard of this interview or Joe Rogan, you would almost think that they're actually having a real life conversation. And I don't know if you've gotten to that point where like someone has defaked your speaking reels, right?

You've done it yourself? I did it to myself. Okay,

so this is my question is, is it that is the essence of the way humans communicate that even AI today won't really be able to replicate? What is the thing where if you heard an AI speak versus a human speak, what is the difference that like, no, this, because of this, this is the real Vanessa Van Edwards or the real Joe Rogan. How do we tell those apart?

I think the only way right now, and this could change in a couple of years, but right now, and I created deep fakes of myself to see how it would go. So interesting. Right? It did not get right. Not even close. Intonation and emphasis, vocal power. It was really interesting because we uploaded my audio books. So that's, you know, 12 hours of me speaking. We update, we upload a podcast where I was speaking conversationally. So it had dozens of hours of me speaking and it did not get the intonation right. It was my voice, but I'll give you an example. So I have a certain kind of cadence that I speak with. I'll emphasize different parts of a sentence. My deep fake would emphasize the wrong things. And so at the end of a sentence, it would do differently. It would sound different than how I actually sound. I would never talk like that. But it would make it. So the emphasis was so wrong that you knew it wasn't correct and it wasn't helpful. I emphasize words based on what I think is helpful to the listener. When we talk about neuroticism, I emphasize neuroticism because it's a hard word. I slow it down and I want you to hear it. The AI doesn't know that's a hard word. It's not going to add emphasis or more eloquence to that word to help the listener understand. Whereas I am thinking very quickly, what's the most important word in this sentence? Right. What's a word that someone's going to be hard to change? So they didn't get that right. However, however, I think there's a lot of opportunity and I am not that scared. Most of it, I don't think it's helpful to me, but also because I think there's some things that I literally don't have time to do that AI can do for me. For example, people have asked us, hey, I would love to have an option on your website where I could listen to your articles. Well, the only way to do that before was having like a really awful AI voice be like, confidence, strategies. So now we can turn on my voice so people can listen to something kind of like me for the articles. I could never have time to read all 700 articles on my website. But at least my voice can kind of do it. It's better than having a random AI voice do it. I also think that people aren't thinking about AI in terms of communication and relationships. So I'm working on a LinkedIn learning course right now on AI for communication. Oh,

how did that work?

So we're drafting it right now. I'm really excited about it because most people think of AI in terms of like productivity, you know, getting things done, being more efficient. But I'm like, oh, no, no. AI has, it's the shortcut into more charisma. So right now, if you want to write a charismatic email, for example, it's hard. You have to think, the definition of charisma from the research is a combination of high warmth and high competence. Most of our emails that we write nowadays are very sterile. They lack no warmth and no competence because we're in a rush. We write 1,000 emails a day and it's hard to write warmth and competent emails So first we have to make our emails not sterile. That's hard then we have to make them the perfect balance of warm and competent warm is Words that inspire connection happy best both collaborate connects Emojis exclamation points words like yay way yay fab. What's right Sure. Sure. Competent is words that make you want to get things done. Power efficient, brainstorm, um, lead, streamline, efficient, efficient, uh, numbers, graphs, charts, percents, dollar signs. Those are all competent. Right. So trying to sift through all the words and replace them and not make it too long.

That

is a lot of brain power. Now you are already charismatic, so you have to work to get yourself into this email. Who's got time for that?

Sure. And most people are one or the other, right? If they aren't, they aren't actively thinking about it. Most of

us have an imbalance. So a highly warm person really struggles to add competence that feels authentic. And a highly competent person really struggles to add warmth that feels authentic. Well now that we have AI, you can write a bare-bones email and you can tell it if you know what to tell it. Hey, can you make this both warm, friendly, and likable as well as competent, powerful, and efficient? And within 10 seconds you have a very charismatic draft for you to edit. That is efficient charisma. And so I think there's so much wonderful potential there in terms of using it to communicate better.

to the AI model, break that down. So assuming most people are having in-person conversations and they can't use AI to have these conversations just yet, you never know what's gonna happen, what is actually happening that allows you to have that warmth of communication, but also show competence in an in-person conversation?

Well, first of all, a lot of my students, I ask them to write first because it trains you. So whether you do that with AI or not, it's helpful to actually practice with writing first because it's very hard to do in person. So like I think of it as like a practice step ladder. The hardest is in person. That's the last way I want you to practice because when you're, there's so many inputs happening right now that we're in person. We're making eye contact, I'm looking at your nodding, your posture, your hand gestures. I'm thinking about my posture, my hand gestures. I'm also very aware that there's cameras around. It's a lot. So to add warm the confidence on top is too hard. So okay, don't practice in person. Then it's the phone. Actually then it's video. Video is a little bit smaller than phone, then chat, then text, then emails. So I actually would like you people to start actually on those steps because it does train you to use those words. So in person, if you were to skip all the way to the top, there are four ways that we send warmth and competence. Our words, that's one way. Our body language, gestures, posture, facial expressions, our voice, our vocal power, our cadence, our volume, our tone, and our ornaments. The clothes we wear, what's in our background, our earrings, your glasses, your watch, what you're drinking, what you're holding in a profile picture, what's behind you in a profile picture, ornaments. Yeah. So you have a lot of options, four channels that you can choose to play with, because you can add warmth and competence to any of them. Right. So my goal is like, okay, I want you to be authentically warm and competent. I don't want you to do something that doesn't feel natural to you. Which channel do you like the best? Which one feels the most comfortable to you? And then I'm going to give you, there are 96 cues that you can play with, like a recipe. 96. 96 cues. Now I tried to create an encyclopedia of all the cues and there are probably more than 96, but I was able to kind of group them. Like for example, head behavior, just head behavior alone, there's probably 10 to 12. So there's up and down nodding. There's horizontal nodding, there's the side nodding, right? There's a head tilt, there's like fast nodding, like impatient. So even just in that. So I try to bucket them, but you have 96 years of disposal to play with. And so you can choose which of those channels you want to optimize first. Okay.