INTERVIEW | Make Money by Learning to Read the Room with Pamela Meyer

0:00You're listening to the Travis Makes Money Podcast. What's going on? Everybody, welcome back to the Travis Makes Money Podcast where it's a mission to help you make more money on this episode of the show. I have a new friend, Pamela Meyer. Pam is an internationally recognized expert on deception, detection, social observation, and human behavior. She's the best-selling author of lie spotting and her new book is now coming out. It's called How to Read the Room. She's trained executives, organizations, government agencies, investigators, and leaders around the world on how to recognize hidden behavioral signals, navigate complex interpersonal dynamics, and build trust. Pam, what's up? Welcome to the show. Hello. Thank you. I'm happy to be here. Well, thank you for joining me. I find this area of study to be fascinating, especially because it probably was not the thing that you talked to your high school career counselor about. I assume so let's go back in time. First off, and tell me a little bit about how you got into this. What was the career path for you that was lined out

1:00when you were 16, 17, or what were you thinking? I was going to do it. Well, my first dollar I ever made was in a poker game. Really? Yeah, I was the only girl in the poker game too. I was in a Quaker school, but to say we got shut down. You were setting up an illegal poker operation inside of your fundamentalist school. The guys were all playing poker and I entered the game. I figured out it was bluffing and turned out I had a little bit of knowledge of how to read people. I could turn that into some quick cash and some good birthday and Christmas presents for my friends and family early on. But it was never my set career at all. I actually spent a lot of time with the media business and the film business for quite a long time. What made you have this inclination toward understanding that, do you think? Was there something that you can point to or was it something that came naturally to you

2:00that you couldn't really explain? Well, I think I just had a natural gift for reading people. I probably got that from my mom. My mom would have these big dinner parties and she could always just get everybody talking so to observe her as a kid. After being in the media business for a long time, I had sold one business and I was trying to figure out what to do next. And I went to a reunion. I went to Harvard Business School and I went to a reunion. Everybody's sitting in the room and these guys, the 500 people in the room that I had gone to Harvard Business School with were captains of industry, entry clubs, extra cars, blackberries going, the whole deal. And nothing was new to them or interesting. And this professor got up and he starts talking about what people do when they're being deceptive. And they structure their language, where they lean their posture, what the tells are. And all of a sudden, this group of people from nothing has knew the eyes are up. And I realized now here's a problem that's not solved.

3:03People actually do need to learn this. And this is, in terms of making money, I think this is the key. I'm sure you've heard this from different people, but it's really true that businesses that succeed solve an actual problem for people that they have. Usually that they know they have, not that they need to be educated about. And so I realized, you know, here are all these captains of industry and they can't tell in a negotiation who's lying to them and they can't tell who to trust. And I did further research and it turned out there was all this information housed in the intelligence world and the law enforcement world and nobody had brought it into the popular world. And so telling who's lying and being able to figure out who to trust is a skill reading the room particularly. It's a skill that you can use personally, socially at dinner parties. You can use it in a negotiation. You can use it in a meeting. So I made it my business to figure out like how to train people in this really overlooked social skill, which is observation. What were you doing and how long were you in the media business?

4:05So I was in the media business for quite a while. I started out as a in the film business with a company called Vestron. You might remember the movie Dirty Dancing, that was our big hit. Hmm. All right. Always. I mean, we did a lot of like low-end movies also like I would have screenings at home of chopping mall to remember that CHO, PPI and G. We're shopping all costs you an arm and a leg. Right. I mean, so you know, there's business. You don't have to be the highest quality product to make to make a buck, right? Sometimes you find the right niche. And so I worked I worked for this video company and helped them figure out. I went all over the world buying videos for them and put even them to their system. And that was huge. I loved it. In this huge five love film. And I love movies. Same. Same. I have an obsession I think. Oh really? Okay. What's your favorite movie? Favorite movie. I hate this question. It's so hard for my shoes because I go back and forth between like what's a movie that I would just put on and watch forever.

5:06Yeah. Which is like what is like to me a objectively amazing film, you know what I mean? So like if I'm answering for the latter, I usually go with something like the departed. But if I'm answering for the former, I would go like action comedy like the other guys. That's just a movie you can put on whenever, wherever and watch the whole thing and still laugh at all the jokes and just find my fingers. So that's great. We can talk about film for an entire hour. Yeah, that's true. But anyway, I wasn't made to yeah. I mean, so I was in media business a long time. I also worked for National Geographic and helped them figure out how to develop new businesses and cut their films down. And then I, you know, I had my own internet business which I ended up exiting from. And when I sold that business, that's when I tried to figure out what to do next and I came across trust, deception, deception, breeding people. I was going to say you had to have so like a compelling feeling during that meeting in order to

6:07get you to, I mean, not derail, but to, but to hard pivot like that into a completely different feel that had to, you had to feel like some sort of inner like pull toward this thing. Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. I do a lot of speaking and a lot of training and because I come from a media background, when people come to my speeches and they come to my training, they're entertained. Like, I really think there's a huge gap in the world out there where people don't understand that if you're in a business world and you're going to a boring meeting, no one's coming back to you. You really need to get them the same entertainment they would get if they were in the movies. And so I really try to make what I do incredibly entertaining for that reason. So there's a little bit of a media strain running for my work for sure. Yeah, yeah, I'm sure that's a major advantage. That's like my favorite thing is speaking out as stuffy business conference and he's linking the audience laugh, you know, it's best. It's the best. Yeah, it's the coolest feeling. Okay, so let's talk about live spotting. So how long in research and prep and how did the book come together,

7:07did you get publishing deal like how did all that unfold? So I was, I've been the beneficiary of so much luck in my life. I was working on this book because I'd found the material fascinating and I was really planning on creating like a training system at that time. And a guy I know who, and I had huge experience in the internet, guy I know who's an editor at a book publisher called me up and said, well, you do an informational interview with my niece. She's interested in getting into the internet world. And I said, sure, well, you look at my book proposal. I sent them a book proposal and they bought it that day. And yeah, I've said, I never had an agent for my first book. And it just went. It was a very, it's right time. So it's another thing about, yeah, and it's also, it's another lesson on making money, which is that you've got to hit the zeitgeist at the right time. You need to solve a problem. You need to hit the zeitgeist. You got to entertain people. Yeah, definitely like right in the middle of that luck conversation, you know, because it's easy for people from the outside to point it all success

8:08and just be like, oh, they got lucky. It's just a matter of circumstance. Their parents were this or they had this education or this background. And they can just point out and go like, they're just lucky. I'm not lucky. And then you have the other side, which is like, I pulled myself up by my bootstraps and I figured it out. And I was a one man show or one woman show. And everything is because of me. And it's like, yeah, there's, there's a little bit of fairy dust sprinkled into every success story, you know, a little bit of luck, a little bit of timing, a little bit of something that you didn't really have much control over. A little bit of alchemy, if you will, that helps bring all the pieces together. But you still got to show up, do the work, look at the opportunities and take advantage of them as they come along. And then every once in a while, you might end up striking at the right time, which obviously you did. Right. And you also need to know to cut date is a little bit of smarts involved in that too. When things don't work out, you get yourself out. So yeah. Knowing when to take the pit. Right. And you know, for me, the other piece of it is, really understanding what you're going to enjoy. I mean, if you're not into it and someone tells you it's a great,

9:09it's a great business to get into, forget it. You're not going to enjoy it. You're not going to be, I love what I do. I mean, I really, I'm lashing all day long. People who work with me are laughing all day long. We just, we find this material so interesting. We find people so interesting. We find making them entertaining, so interesting. And so if you're really into it, I'm sorry, it's not necessarily passion, but you really have to be engaged in what you're doing. You're just not going to. Yeah. Like some aspect of what you're doing anyway, you know, like even if it's not the thing, right? Like, that's why I love Mike Rose work with 30 jobs and all of the trades work that he's found that people have derived purpose and meaning and pleasure from even. Right. And they're like, you know, working in sewage drains. But there's something about the minutia of the work they found to be compelling. And that's really all you need is like something about it that pulls you further into figuring out something or solving a problem for somebody or writing the copy on your emails

10:12or a bit of research that you find fascinating to or something that's super interesting. So how do is this sort of how you came out with the new book now? How to read the room? Where did this come from? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what you're saying is really important for room reading because every room can be fascinating even the sewer, even the sewer. If you're looking around and you're looking carefully at everything else that people miss. And so part of what I realized, you know, I spent a long time telling everybody where I've been at the reception epidemic, which we did have. And a lot of people didn't believe me, but that's part of why I went around the country training people had a spot liars. And now like a whole country, people know how to spot liars, which is fantastic. But I think we're in a much more serious situation now. I mean, there's a trust issue now. And so for a long time, we said, no, we're polarized. We're in a much more serious situation. People don't trust institutions as much as they used to. They don't trust each other. Our rooms are filled with all this disinformation that's coming out at scale.

11:13And we really need to understand, we need to pause, and we need to understand what's happening in the room. We need to find a much more interesting way to connect to people. I'm where I live in Washington, DC. I'm telling you this, this is really true. You go to the dog park, people won't, I'll hear this. Oh, my dog's not playing with that guy's dog. That guy's a maga guy. I'm like, excuse me, I think you've overcorrected a little bit. Yeah, I mean, this is a Washington thing, but we've overcorrected. My dog can't associate with the dog. With your dog. That's insane. Welcome to DC. And so, we need to back up. We need to pause. We need to look much more carefully at what's going in the room. And we have to connect in a much different way with people. Because there's so many different ways in which the room can be fascinating. And people will be helpful and interesting to us if we don't just discard them. Can you speak a little bit more to the importance of sharpening this skill in your tool belt? Yeah, I mean, if you think about any business

12:15that you're in, where you're working on a team, you could have the most brilliant people in the world on your team, but teams fail first socially before they fail intellectually. They always do. And so, this is a very first fundamental step, which is navigating social complexity and understanding what's happening in the room, figuring out who has influence, figuring out who's already discarded you, figuring out who agrees with you, knowing when to back channel. These skills are the definition of success. You can have geniuses. It doesn't matter if you burn them out, because they don't like you, or they haven't given you the feedback you need to hear. You're never going to get the best work out of them anyway. So it's a very fundamental first step, and everybody's skipped it. What are some of the fundamentals here, Pam? What can we do to start working on this skill immediately? So the first thing you need to do, much harder than you think, is you simply need when you walk into the room, pause, and don't talk until you have something to say that's actually connected to what someone else is saying.

13:17Sounds simple. You would be amazed at how many unbelievably talented, well off CEOs I've worked with that cannot do it. Yeah. You got to do it. It's great hearing things that you've picked up anecdotally as from somebody like yourself who has researched them extensively, because this is so before this show is called Travis Makes Money, it was called Build Your Network, and we talked about networking and getting into the right rooms and how to talk to people and things like that. And this was one thing that I talked about a lot, and it was just because I found it to be anecdotally helpful for me on a personal level, but it was something that I had difficulty convincing other people about, because like you said, it sounds simple, but it's not that simple, but it is also like the most powerful position to step into a room with. If you just are willing to shut up and observe, see who's talking, who's dominating the conversation, who people are interested in, who people are turning their attention to, who people are not turning their attention to.

14:18Like you can learn, like pick up so much rich data on interpersonal interactions, if you're just willing to stop talking and look around for a second before you open your mouth. That's exactly right. And the other thing that I find that the reason people can't do it, they can't regulate themselves because they have something they have to get out in the meeting that they have to set, which is wrong because influence actually is a long-term process. A lot of times the most important decisions get made in the post-mortem of the meeting. There's always time after the meeting to write the memo and to call somebody up and say, you're not on a like the way that went. I'm actually not with this project. Actually, I think Susie was undermining it, whatever they want to say. But we think in the moment that we have to have our impact, there are lots of ways to have an impact. You don't have to do it in that very single moment. Yeah, can you talk a little bit more about influence where it comes from and how you can build it? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the first thing to remember is that

15:18this is universally human. None of us like to be told what to do. None of us. There's this psychological thing called reactance and it has to do with being told what to do. When the more someone pressures you and if you have kids, you know those, you have teenagers, you particularly know this, the more someone pressures you, the more they're gonna get and the more they're gonna react, even if they seem like they're a people pleaser and they're compliant, nobody likes it. And this is the biggest problem with influence. We have to take an indirect path. We want to do it effectively. So there are many ways that you can do that. I mean, if you can use a back channel, you can go off and talk to somebody temporarily and a back channel. You don't do it too much or people think you're a political animal, but you can pull somebody aside. You can be as you had on your podcast, many of them for many years, an incredible connector, a networker, and that can be your way of influencing. You can fill gaps. Think the hardest and most, the hardest way to influence, but by far those who've worked their way up a corporate ladder,

16:19what they've been able to do is they're kind of precision movers, they think about the timing really carefully. So they ask themselves, am I gonna make this move now or can I take the long view and wait? And then there are other ways to do it, which is just to track the chain of influence. Figure out who's got the budget, who's making the decision, who's talking in their ear, who's talking in the person's ear, and the person that's talking in their ear, and map that out and get yourself in that way. There are many ways to do it if you think about it, but most people just don't think about it, and it's blurred out. Yeah, I've gained a lot of perspective around the idea of the relationship between value and influence, and it seems more and more apparent to me, the more I look at these things, the more I get to know really smart people like yourself, that the amount of value that you have to offer is directly correlated to the amount of influence that you can gain, is that true? Is that false and am I thinking about that correctly? That's so interesting.

17:20I mean, I think there are a lot of people out there that have enormous value that are undiscovered, so they don't have influence. And so one way... So the perception of that... Yeah, yeah, that may be much more what that's about, because on one way you can be influential is to be the one that ends the meeting by saying, okay, what have I missed who hasn't talked? What does so-and-so have to say? And kind of figure out what we call this in room reading the negative space, who wasn't there, whose camera was off, who didn't get a chance to speak, who might be quietly kind of gonna go off to the Slack channel afterwards, gonna be passive aggressive towards you. That is space you have to be aware of as well when you're reading the room, and sometimes, sometimes, not always, but sometimes the most knowledgeable person, the person with the most interesting insight just doesn't get noticed. Yeah, so you sort of have to retrain your psychological tendencies. Cause it's easy. That's a great way of putting it, yeah. Yeah, cause it's easy to look over the unnoticeable things.

18:23It's like your brain is trained to focus on the person talking, or you know, like the thought exercise of like, don't picture an elephant, and it's like that's the only thing that you can picture, or like don't think of the color blue, and it's the only thing that you can think of. And it's sort of similar where like you get psychologically trained over your lifetime through everything, all the inputs that are put into the hardware, the software in your brain. You have to try to psychologically override some of those tendencies so that you can train yourself to notice things that most people would not notice. Yeah, I mean, one of the things you can do, you're absolutely right. One of the things you can do in terms of that retraining, when there's big action in the room, there's a big conflict, people are yelling at each other, someone says something surprising, the boss makes a joke, nobody likes, whatever it is, it's sort of like a moment. Train yourself not to get out the popcorn and start watching, but instead to watch what happens right afterwards. Right, if someone makes a joke,

19:24or someone says something super risky, where is everybody's eyes going? Who are they looking at for the reaction? What are you seeing in terms of who's leaning towards whom? If you start to watch right after that action occurs and you watch carefully, and you can do this on Zoom as well, you'll have a much better sense of the dynamics of the room because it's not really, the room is really, it's about watching context, it's about watching an entire system, a whole ecosystem of people and their relationships and the vibe that they create. And that shifts throughout a meeting, quite significantly. How do you know when to trust your gut reaction on some of these things? Like if you are doing this and you notice that this interaction just happened and then you look at the body language of this person and you find yourself sort of like making assumptions where not really supposed to make assumptions, but in this case, we kind of do need to make assumptions and a lot of times intuition can be correct because it is working on a much broader volume of information than your conscious mind is able to work on

20:25in a given time. How do you balance the, you know, like how much stock I guess do you put in that intuitive feeling? So, all right, you've interviewed, how many people have you interviewed, would you say? Over a thousand. Okay, you've interviewed over a thousand people. That's a lot, I've interviewed almost that many people too. So we're pretty good readers just by virtue of so much experience. Most people don't have that kind of experience. If you don't, here's what you need to think about, which is that when you instinctively trust somebody or you're instinctively repelled by them, what you're really doing is you're seeing an inconsistency between their words, their body language, their messaging. So when you sense that inconsistency, oh, you know, they said they really wanted to deal with me but their shoulder went up or they said they really wanted to do business but I got that flash of contempt across the face or the joke landed or the smile landed a little bit too late in the rhythm of the conversation. Those are inconsistencies that actually spell

21:26a reason to be distrustful. That's what your intuition is picking up on. You've got kind of a radar for that intuitively just because you've been across the table from so many people. If you haven't, you can actually look for those inconsistencies and let those red flags go up and they will inform you accurately. Yeah, Pam, I love this conversation and I wish we had more time. The book is How to Read the Room. The first book is Lice Bauting. For anybody who's listening to this that wants to improve this skill, which should be everybody, please go pick a copy of both of Pam's books, Lice Bauting, How to Read the Room. Pam, where else do people can go? Fantastic. Connective with you. PamelaMire.com. It's me, why you are PamelaMire.com. PamelaMire.com. Go check something stuff that Pam's working on as well as picking up the copies of her books. Pam, thank you so much for taking the time. I'm very grateful. Fantastic. This is a total pleasure. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. We solve your money problems, but it's easier to solve the rest of your problems. We got some money in the bank, so let's start there here on the TravisBakesMoney podcast.

22:26Thanks for tuning in. Catch you guys next time. Peace. Thanks.