Tynan: Super Human Social Skills

Transcript

[0:00:28] Charlie Hoehn: You’re listening to Author Hour, enlightening conversations about books with the authors who wrote them. I’m Charlie Hoehn. Today’s episode is with Tynan, author of Super Human Social Skills. Do you ever feel socially awkward? Like you don’t know what to say or do you ever wish you had more friends or better friends? That’s what this episode is all about. Tynan is really good at teaching people how to be likeable, how to have better conversations and how to tell great stories. He actually learned a lot of this in the pickup community. If you’ve ever read The Game by Neil Strauss, Tynan was one of the main characters in the book named Herbal. They say that no man is a failure who has friends. By the end of this episode, you’ll know exactly how to always be surrounded by friends. Now, here’s our conversation with Tynan. Tynan, before we talk about your book, we have to talk about your journey as a person and your trajectory in learning super human social skills. Can you tell us the backstory that laid the ground work for this book?

[0:01:51] Tynan: Yeah, sure. You know, my entire life basically, my childhood, all the way up through high school, college, I was very shy, really introverted and just had social anxiety to the point where like, you know, I had really good friends and I had good friends circle and I’m super grateful for that but if one of my friends brought over one of their friends, that would be like a pretty uncomfortable situation for me if that friend happened to be a woman and especially if she was single then I just had nothing to say, that was very difficult for me. As you can imagine, my dating life sort of followed suit so I got involved in Pickup which probably most people have heard of through The Game which is a book that I was a part of. I just sort of, a very famous book, more several years back but millions of people have read this book. That was sort of the end of my path. I started being this total introvert, really socially awkward and I guess I just sort of realized like if I don’t fix my social skills and I was particularly thinking about dating but if I don’t fix these skills, my life’s not going to end up where I want it to be and when I was exposed to this whole Pickup thing, it was the first time I realized that social skills were a learnable skill. Before that, I just sort of thought you were born with whatever you had and that was that. I went really deep into it and of course it totally transformed my dating life but one of the other big things I noticed was that it transformed my relationships with my friends, even with my family members and especially with new people, my fear of talking to new people was gone. I felt it was much easier for me to relate to new people and yeah, that was sort of my path and now it’s like, I meet people and they find it hard to believe I was ever shy but yeah, I really started off pretty bad.

[0:03:33] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, you breezed through a much more interesting history of your own so I want to go back to as early as high school like what were some of those stories that you – or some of those moments I’m sorry, that you really remember as being painful, you mentioned that if a single girl would come over to one of your friend’s house, is there anything in your mind that really sticks out as that was either the height of me not having social skills or that at that moment I knew I had to go change my life?

[0:04:13] Tynan: Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of – I have tons of those moments, that was my high school experience basically. One that really stands out was this is sort of the tipping point for me actually, I’d known about Pickup for a while and I thought well, whatever, I don’t need that. There was this girl in high school, the last year of high school, actually, the summer after high school, for whatever reason, we started hanging out, I think one of my close friends had a party, she basically started talking to me and we sort of became friends and then almost every day that summer, she would come pick me up in her car and we would drive around and basically just do nothing. We’d drive around, we go eat lunch, we’d go visit one of our friends and I had a massive crush on this girl, I mean, this girl was just the perfect girl in my mind and I had no idea what to do with it, it wasn’t even that I was thinking about what to do, it was just that I knew that I had no idea what to do so why even think about it because I just know I don’t have the answer. You know, I enjoyed her company anyway, the whole summer goes by and at the end, we’re at this party and it’s all her friends so I feel very awkward like I’m just not talking to anybody, I following her around. She takes me kind of into this hallway and she says, “You know Tynan, I have something to confess to you, I think you’re going to be really angry at me.” I thought, “Oh my god, what could this be.” She says, “Well, I have a huge crush on you” and I said “wow, that’s great, I’m not mad at you, I have a huge crush on you, this is amazing” and we kissed. Wow, what a high point for me and I thought, “this is great, this is my new girlfriend, I have this great girlfriend now, we’re going to date, it’s just going to be like the summer.” The next day she went off to school in Chicago and I lived in Austin where you live now. I thought “well, okay, that’s a problem but it’s not insurmountable obviously, we’re going to end up together eventually” and you know, we didn’t really talk, we’d email once in a while, she got another boyfriend and I thought “well, you know, it’s natural, she’s at college, of course she’s going to have a boyfriend, she’ll break up with him and then we’ll start dating.”

[0:06:07] Charlie Hoehn: Was that painful for you?

[0:06:10] Tynan: You know, it was partially painful but I think also I just had my blinders on where I was just sort of like, I was just –

[0:06:15] Charlie Hoehn: Optimism.

[0:06:16] Tynan: I was just like “hey, this girl likes me, I like this girl, this doesn’t happen, this is such a rare event, it obviously means something” and in my mind, it meant that we were going to be together in the end anyway. It just – it’s hard to remember back that far but I guess I feel like I didn’t have that much awareness of how the world worked or what was actually going on. I think it was easy for me to sort of just blind myself to the reality and it became increasingly difficult because you know, then I find out she’s moved in with this guy and that’s like a warning sign obviously and you know, then she’s engaged to him and I’m just sort of like –

[0:06:49] Charlie Hoehn: That’s when you took the blinders off.

[0:06:52] Tynan: I mean, it literally wasn’t till about then and I just thought, I just had this moment where I was like, “wait a minute, this isn’t going to happen is it?” It all just kind of clicked at once and I thought, “man, this has been a – this has taken three years.” I thought, “wow, if my life goes on like this, this past three years, this is like really going to be bad.” You know, the interesting thing about Pickup is you get into it and you try to get all your friends to do it and nobody does it and the reason is that it’s hard to do unless you really hit that low point where you could admit, “hey, this thing that’s very core to my identity is a real weakness for me and I’ve got to get better at it” and I hit that point because of this girl.

[0:07:30] Charlie Hoehn: Wow, do you feel like everybody in the Pickup community had a very similar emotionally painful experience like that in particular? Where they realized, they were totally disconnected from the reality of the situation or they just had no idea what they were doing and that’s what led them to Pickup?

[0:07:51] Tynan: Yeah, I mean, at least of the people who have gotten really good at it, it’s like, the formula for getting really good is hit that rock bottom point where you just realize like, you know, it’s so easy to make up stories in your mind of like how this is going to get better or how – you just need to swipe right to the right person on Tinder or whatever it is. You know, you eventually get to this point where you just can’t make up excuses anymore and you just face that fact like “I’m bad at this. This is a skill, I’m bad at it and I’m not getting better.” I think you need to hit that to really get good at it.

[0:08:26] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, let me ask you Tynan, did you feel like that was heartbreaking? Did that actually break your heart or did you feel foolish, what was that experience like? How painful are we talking here?

[0:08:43] Tynan: Well, I mean, so the most painful part for sure was when you know, she left and I was on cloud nine because I was like, “well, whatever, she left, I knew she was going to leave, we’re going to have this long distance relationship” and then I think it was an email, I don’t actually remember but I just remember that moment when she’s like, “yeah, you know, I think we’re both going off to college, you know, we should just kind of do our own thing.” You know, I mean, it’s not just I was going from normal to a bad place, it was like, “I just thought I had it made” and going to like, “everything that I thought was getting in my head or getting all worked up about is gone.” That was very painful for me. I think like, you know, I probably recovered from it a little bit just because I sort of put the blinders on where I’m like “okay, it’s a setback, you know, I can work around this” because you know, you always want to feel in control and I felt totally out of control at that point. At first actually, for the first year, I was like “okay, well, you know, if I get into better shape, maybe she’ll like me more” so I started running, I ran like 10 miles because I thought that would matter and of course she didn’t even know I was running. But I used it for motivation even back then I was a professional gambler and like, that was my motivation. I was like –

[0:09:50] Charlie Hoehn: Make money.

[0:09:50] Tynan: “If I make more money, she’ll like me more” which you know, that wasn’t even on her radar. Totally pointless. Yeah, it was very painful at first and then I think I kind of came up with weird coping mechanisms that actually worked out okay for me but were not necessarily in line with how the world actually works.

[0:10:08] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah. Did you tell anybody like that this happened to you or did you kind of keep it to yourself?

[0:10:15] Tynan: Yeah, I mean, a few of my close friends definitely knew. You know, two or three close friends. You know, back then, my friends were people who had the same kind of frustrations so I think, you know, it almost, it made me feel better to hear that they were frustrated too and that’s probably why we talked about it.

[0:10:32] Charlie Hoehn: Tell me about your first breakthrough? When you started getting over either this girl or you started realizing that “hey, I’m getting better at this.”

[0:10:43] Tynan: Yeah, I mean I guess there’s just a few moments but a big one for me was that, you know, for one, just to learn that social skills was an actual skill, it’s fun, it has like skill in the word in the name of it but nobody treats it like a skill. You know, I would read all this Pickup stuff online and it’s a very varying quality and it didn’t even, I was so naïve back then, it didn’t occur to me that people were exaggerating and lying. It just never occurred to me that people exaggerate on the internet and so people have these stories and they’re like “hey, I’m this nerd, I like computers, I met this model and now she’s my girlfriend.” It just like, it never occurred to me that somebody would lie about that. I was reading –

[0:11:22] Charlie Hoehn: Because you're a good person.

[0:11:24] Tynan: I wouldn’t like about it, I was like, I was pretty naïve, maybe I still am a little bit, I don’t know but it just, I was like, “Oh I guess this is something that I can learn” and it never occurred to me to try to learn it. I got involved in this whole thing and it all sort of culminated with me, I was way too shy, to nervous to actually talk to girls myself. I would read about this stuff online and I found a local group in Austin of guys who would go out regularly and they would kind of like meet beforehand at someone’s apartment, talk a little bit and then they’d go out together and try to talk to girls. I knew that there was no way I was going to do it by myself so I signed up for this group and I was so scared to go meet these people, I almost didn’t go. I mean, I was really like, you know, very nervous, I’m sure my face was red and all this. I walk in, it’s eight guys sitting around and just you know, little apartment and we go around the group, we’re telling our stories, you know here’s this girl and you know, the story I just told you, I’m sure I told them. My face was so red I couldn’t even look anyone in the eye, I was so nervous in talking about that.

[0:12:22] Charlie Hoehn: You were so embarrassed about yourself, did you notice the guys in the room? Did you kind of look at them and think,”Oh these are my type of guys” or were you like, “I’m ashamed to even try to be friends with these people” or what?

[0:12:36] Tynan: It wasn’t even shame in my story or any of that, it was just that I was just uncomfortable talking to new people. I don’t even know that I had thought about why that was back then but it wasn’t even the particulars of the story, I had no real embarrassment over my story because I thought it was normal because it was normal for all my friends. I just didn’t really know how to talk to people or relate to people. We go through this meeting and there’s a knock at the door late and somebody comes in and it’s like my best friend. We stare at each other like “what are you doing here?” It turns out that he had gotten into Pickup before and we were both way too embarrassed about it to talk to each other about it. We went out and you know, we went to six street in Austin, we went to a club called Spill which I think is probably still there.

[0:13:19] Charlie Hoehn: Wait, one second. When you both had that realization, was it of relief or embarrassment. Were you guys glad to see each other?

[0:13:30] Tynan: Yeah, I think initially it was complete mortification. I see my friend and I’m like, “my god, I’ve been discovered” because already I’m not comfortable being there and here’s my friend, then I guess, very quick, I’m like, “okay, well. Well he’s here too, it’s not so bad.” Then I think, you know, certainly by an hour in, I was glad he was there because I’m like, “this is somebody I know, who I trust, who I relate to and you know, maybe this will be something of a shared journey.” At that point, it was positive. We go out together and basically, he talks to this – we get to this club Spill and I’m terrified, I’ve never been to a club before or bar before, I never talked to a girl I didn’t know before. I mean, my heart rate is like at 200. I thought I was going to pass out, I mean, very nerve wracking for me. But, you know, the deal was that everybody’s taking separate cars so we’re going to meet here and then we’re going to kind of go up and down six street. For people who don’t know six street, it’s just a bunch of bars in a row so you can kind of hop from one to the other. The deal was we’re going to meet there and we’re going to hop from place to place and so my friend who’s actually been talking to girls for like a month or something, he’s like “all right, let’s talk to some girls.” You know, that’s when the panic really sets in. My brain is just trying to come up with any excuse to not do it and the only thing I can come up with is, “no, we’re just meeting here, we’re not talking to girls here.” He gives me this look like “come on man, you know, I know you, that’s the strangest thing I’ve ever heard.” He immediately goes and talks to these four girls at like a high-top table. I’d never seen him talk to a girl before. He and I became friends because we were first in line for star wars together, it blew my mind and I was happy because I was off the hook until three minutes later, he’s like, “actually, my friend Tynan, here, come here.” He beckons to me and I have no choice and I talked to these girls, we talk about rap music, I don’t do a single thing I’ve learned, I probably do it all wrong. The guy who was hosting the meeting comes up, he’s not subtle and he whispers in a very loud voice, “hey dude, she’s into you, ask for her number.” She hears this, my face is bright red and I’m just like, “hey, do you want to give me your number? Maybe we could hang out sometime” and she did. Like, in that moment, I was like, “Oh my god, this really works and this could work for me” and I didn’t really even do anything I learned, it was just like, “I can actually change this.” You know, I was actually talking to that friend a couple of night ago and I was telling him, if it wasn’t for that moment, I don’t think I would have ever gotten it. Or maybe I would have gotten a little bit later but like, I was basically at my lowest and I had this like, pretty much lucky success when you really think about it. That was the moment where I was like “Okay, this is something I can do” and you know from there, I really got deep into it.

[0:16:16] Charlie Hoehn: Amazing. Tell me about the leveling up process? How did you get better and better, was it just sheer repetition, did you get just really good in bars and clubs or were you practicing in every environment?

[0:16:32] Tynan: I definitely practice in every environment. You know, there’s a lot of people, I don’t drink, I hate bars and clubs, it’s not environment I enjoy and so you know, I’d got to Whole Foods, I go to malls but at the end of the day when you’re practicing social skills, you just need to talk to a lot of people and if you’re at Whole Foods or something, there just aren’t that many people who you can get into conversations with so it’s hard to get the repetitions in. I’d say I really learned the skills in bars and clubs but it was like immediately obvious that it was a universal skill right? People often think of Pickup as like, “what’s the line” and all this but really what it is, it’s being proud of yourself as an individual and if you’re not proud of yourself for legitimate reasons becoming someone you can be proud of right? That’s a step. Once you’re proud of yourself and you’re happy with who you are, being able to express that to people in a positive way right? How can I tell stories that explain who I am and are entertaining to the other person at the same time. How can I focus on the positives and reveal the weaknesses but not dwell in them in a way that makes me seem insecure? Then there’s the whole other half of how do I learn about this other person, who do I think about what they want out of this conversation, what they want out of this relationship and how do I get them that? Those are obviously very valuable in dating but they’re totally universal right? I do the exact same thing with my friends, my family, you know, everybody.

[0:17:54] Charlie Hoehn: Absolutely. How do we become proud of ourselves?

[0:17:58] Tynan: Well, I think there’s two sides to that. I think one is, it’s sort of a big question and it’s unknown, it’s not something you fix in a weekend but you think, “Am I living my life by my standards? Am I happy with what I’m doing with my life? Do I spend time in a way that I’m proud of? Am I learning the things I want to learn? Do I treat people the way that I would like people to be treated and I want to be known for treating people?” It’s a big topic and I think it’s something, it takes people years and years to change. You know, a lot of people they’re proud of most of these things but then they say you know, “I’ve got these bad habits, I cut people off, I have a bad temper,” whatever it is and you work on those things. Then I think another half of that is understanding that what people want and what people really want is they want to know who you are as an individual, you know, part of why I was so shy when I was younger is because you see movies in TV and you see what girls respond to and it’s these guys who drive pickup trucks and they go to bars and party and watch sports and all this things that I didn’t do. I just thought, well, you know, subconsciously I thought “well these are the things girls are in to, I don’t have any of them, I guess I better just stay quiet.”

[0:19:09] Charlie Hoehn: Even though those movies are fictional. There’s always an element of truth but they’re on the big screen for a reason.

[0:19:19] Tynan: Yeah. I mean, it’s totally fake and like you know that consciously but I think subconsciously maybe you don’t right? That’s what how advertisement works.

[0:19:27] Charlie Hoehn: Exactly.

[0:19:28] Tynan: I think there’s that process of you know, half of it is actually making your life a life that you’re proud of and the other half is like giving yourself credit for what you’ve got. You know, I’ve always been a nerd and you know, maybe before I would try to hide that and now I’m proud of it, I think it’s really cool. You know, I lived at my RV for 20 years.

[0:19:44] Charlie Hoehn: How did you make that transition? I mean, I know you, you’re a great guy who is fun to be around, fun to talk to but how did you make that shift from being somebody who is embarrassed about being a nerd to somebody who owns it?

[0:19:59] Tynan: Well basically, people made me do it you know? I’d be in all these people that helped me learn Pickup, they were like “hey, you have to talk about who you are, you have to do this” and I saw that the responses were good. It’s not like an overnight thing where you tell a story, someone responds well and you say “hey, I’m cured, I’m just going to talk about myself all the time.” You know, with any social thing, you need positive reference experiences and so you know, I talk to enough people and I see them respond positively and you know, all of a sudden, maybe I start dating a girl who I previously thought was out of my league and she loves that I’m a nerd and you know, what reinforces it better than that?

[0:20:34] Charlie Hoehn: I guess the question I have and the reason I’m pressing you about this Tynan is because, a lot of people may have that experience but their ability to receive that positive feedback may not be there right? They are seeing through a different lens where they rationalize, “Ah this person was just being nice to me” or something along those lines right? How did you rewrite the narrative? Is it because of the social group you had around you that were preventing those negative narratives from taking over?

[0:21:10] Tynan: I mean, I’m sure that’s a factor in it, I think something that I just sort of, I don’t know how I understood this but figured out somehow was that you know, I used to not be the most positive person in the world. I wasn’t super negative but I was you know, somewhere in the middle and I just sort of, I did this exercise with myself and I have no idea where I even came up with this idea where I would just always try to see the positive side of everything, just as a practice and I did it for a month and I thought “hey, I think this is kind of working,” I’m doing it another month, did it another month. But “hey, this is pretty good” and then I kind of forgot to do it the third month. I was like, what happened to that habit, I used to do that. Then all of a sudden I realized I was just doing it automatically. What I really believe, this thing work on with a lot of my coaching clients is I believe that everybody has a set point of whether they noticed the negative more or the positive more. Everybody has a set point right? Everybody’s kind of close to the middle generally and like a slight shift to one side or the other side makes a world of difference right? If you can just go from like slightly negative to slightly positive, that’s huge. An exercise people can do is they can write down, this sounds so stupid, I make people do this sometimes and I always have this big disclaimer, “I know this sounds really hippy and new age but trust me, it works.” Just every day, at the end of the day, you write down – for this example, you write down times that people appreciated you for who you are. It doesn’t even matter that you’re writing it down, you can never look at it again. The point of it is that if you know that you have to write that at the end of the day, it’s training your brain to think of those times throughout the day to be looking for them. Because it’s not that people don’t get this feedback, it’s that they don’t see the feedback.

[0:22:48] Charlie Hoehn: That’s interesting. I mean, and it explains why a lot of these journals where you're focusing on positive things, things you’re grateful for have taken off, I mean, there’s science backing this kind of exact behavior, this exact practice, it does rewire your internal narrative.

[0:23:06] Tynan: Yeah, totally works. You know, people want quick fixes but you do this for a month or two and it’s fixed for life, I can’t remember the last time I had a negative thought. Literally, because I just have this practice.

[0:23:17] Charlie Hoehn: Really?

[0:23:19] Tynan: Really.

[0:23:19] Charlie Hoehn: I have a hard time believing that.

[0:23:20] Tynan: Trust me, look, last week I bought a car and it died within the first day that I bought it and I just don’t care, literally, it doesn’t even feel like a negative event to me. Yeah, people never believe me, I used to write about this in my blog and people are like, “wow, you know, you’re bottling it up, you’re going to explode someday,” it’s really true. I just don’t have negative thoughts anymore.

[0:23:39] Charlie Hoehn: Do you have positive thoughts?

[0:23:41] Tynan: All the time, constantly I’m thinking about how great everything is but that’s a habit too, I do that on purpose.

[0:23:46] Charlie Hoehn: That’s interesting.

[0:23:49] Tynan: Yeah, I took improv lessons a few years ago and it was the first time I really was confronted with thought patterns that I had where you’re forced to see things positively no matter what’s happening so the cliché or the common joke about improv is the practice, yes and, saying yes to everything. You don’t realize how often you say no or yes but. Which is ultimately a no. Everyone does this and it’s not necessarily that it’s a negative thought but it’s that you’re putting the emergency brakes on whatever’s happening in the moment always.

[0:24:32] Charlie Hoehn: Interesting. Just practicing something different and saying yes, I found this in spiritual text as well of gurus saying that they find their inner peace as soon as they started saying yes to everything. That’s kind how I relate to what you just said of, like you don’t have a negative thought, it’s not that things might – I mean, I’m sure you get frustrated every now and then am I right or no? There’s no frustration, there’s no anger, there’s no sadness anymore, it’s just all like things are great.

[0:25:07] Tynan: I mean, definitely no anger. You know, like a little bit of momentary frustration right? Like the past few days I’ve been putting a new floor in for my house and like once in a while you get a warped board and like “god dammit” and that’s fine. Certainly sadness but you know, like I’ve had family members die and like of course that’s sad to me and at the same time it doesn’t really wreck my day or week you know? I just have this habits where like, because I did that thing where I always think of something positive, I’m like, “okay, well you know, hey, they had a disease, now they don’t have to deal with that anymore, what they’d want for me is for me to have a great day because that’s what I want if I died.” I just kind of subconsciously have all this processes that just immediately ride the boat.

[0:25:49] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah.

[0:25:49] Tynan: I wasn’t always like that, it was a process. Have you seen the documentary Catfish? The movie?

[0:26:44] Charlie Hoehn: Yes.

[0:26:46] Tynan: It’s a great movie but one of the lines that really stood out to me in that was when the girl that he’s emailing at the beginning at the movie, she writes that her pet snake died and she wrote back. “Now I have a new pet mouse.” That’s such a great positive spin on what just happened.

[0:27:10] Charlie Hoehn: I love that.

[0:27:12] Tynan: The key too is like, is exactly that where you know, if you find the positive side, it doesn’t have to outweigh the negative because obviously, if a family member dies, the fact that like, they don’t have cancer anymore is not like better than them being alive or whatever. But just to have you, it’s all about just having your brain look for those things.

[0:27:31] Charlie Hoehn: Agreed, 100% That is a fantastic exercise to do. Let’s talk about your book, if you had to pick the one thing from your book, either an idea or a story that listeners of this podcast could take away and be thinking about weeks from now or even taking action on, what would that be?

[0:27:54] Tynan: So I think the general theme of the most important part is to be proactive in your social life. You know we were talking before the show like how your social life is so important. It has such a big bearing on everything you do and even if you are super successful financially, you are not even going to fully enjoy that unless you have the friends and families to share that success with. It’s such a crucial part and yet nobody is proactive about it, right? We all just float down the creek and we see what clicks and what we stick to and to me that’s crazy. It seemed normal to me until I started thinking about it and so in general, be proactive, take responsibility for your social life. One concrete example of that and this is telling that I’ve done, I travel now too much to do then but I did it for a long time, I have a lot of my clients do it is have a weekly event that you do and you always invite all of your friends to it and it could be easy. Like we lived in Austin and Sopranos was on TV, I’d cook Italian food and we’d watch Sopranos. It was like this big weekly thing. A few years ago we lived in San Francisco, we just went out for burgers every Sunday at the same place. So it doesn’t have to be a big deal.

[0:28:58] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, when Breaking Bad is on, I used to cook crystal meth that was a weekly thing, I keep getting in those mess. I remember that, those are some weird weekend’s man.

[0:29:05] Tynan: It’s like everybody wants to be invited to stuff, nobody wants to be the one to put themselves on the line. Even if people can’t go they appreciate the invite. There’s no way you can lose by inviting all of your friends to do one weekly thing and the cool thing is then you have this anchor in your life that when you meet someone new, it’s not like “Oh God, how do I invite this person to something. It’s a dude, I don’t want him to think that I am asking him on a date”. It’s like, “Hey my friends and I have burgers every Sunday why don’t you come along this week?” so easy. So you have this momentum going very easy to add on to it and some objections I get sometimes people are like, “Well you know I think my friends should be putting in the same amount” it’s like look, every relationship you have ever been in, it could be equal but different. You contribute different things and that’s kind of the point, right? Like maybe somebody always brings the mood up, maybe somebody always organize events, maybe somebody is the person who’s there when something bad happens and they need someone to talk to.

[0:30:01] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, they’re complimenting what you’re giving.

[0:30:04] Tynan: Exactly and being the person to organize a weekly event, that’s something that anybody with any personality type can do and so obviously find everything you can do for your friends and do that and focus at what you’re good at but here’s a free one that anybody can do, pick a weekly thing and you become a hub of your friends, everybody is super grateful for it. I did this in San Francisco and I brought these people in who weren’t friends. Now they’re like, I don’t even live in San Francisco anymore, they still do it and they’re all these best friend group when we travel once or twice a year together. So you can facilitate friendships between other people which is a huge service you can provide to people right? I’m sure you could think of people who’ve introduced you to some of your great friends and it’s the greatest gift you can give and it’s easy.

[0:30:44] Charlie Hoehn: A hundred percent, yeah.

[0:30:46] Tynan: And so just being proactive and willing to be the one who does the work.

[0:30:50] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah. I fully agree with this and I get a lot of questions about this myself from readers is how do you go about doing this stuff and I’ve got a million thoughts on this but the big ones are especially so many young people move to new cities now and they’re like, “I don’t have any friends here and I’m a remote worker” something like that. So it’s hard for me to start up my social life. My thing is just find one person that you know who’s a quality person and ask them to introduce you to two people. that are great and just keep doing that because you’ll build up your friends circle or just hang out with that one person as often as possible and do stuff with them because you’re bound to meet more and more people. I did a thing called The Recess Project in Austin for a little over a year which is exactly what you are talking about which is weekly meet ups, I would create events and it started off with just me and 10 friends basically meeting at a big park in Austin every Friday for a couple of hours. Just before the sun set, playing catch because I love to play catch and I get tired of sitting around talking all the time and getting together over coffee. I think everything is centered around sitting and I love to play casual sports so I had a thing going on around that for a long time and that was great and then the final thing, have you ever seen Supermensch, Tynan?

[0:32:30] Tynan: I don’t think so.

[0:32:31] Charlie Hoehn: Are you a big documentary – well I guess yeah, you’ve seen Catfish, you have to see this movie, okay? Promise me you’ll watch it because it’s about this guy who’s one of the most beloved and connected people in Hollywood in the celebrity chef world, everyone knows this guy and he now lives in Hawaii and he hosts these dinner parties where everybody in the area comes to and he’s a fantastic model. If you try to emulate him and you get 2% of the way there, your life will be measurably better. He’s a great one to follow or to copy.

[0:33:17] Tynan: Yeah, so a friend of mine in New York, a guy named Nick Gray, maybe you know him too.

[0:33:21] Charlie Hoehn: Sounds familiar.

[0:33:22] Tynan: He runs a company called Museum Hack, really cool company but he does this where he has maybe not quite weekly but every two to three weeks he has a dinner party at his house and everybody has a nametag. He just orders Thai food like the focus is not the dinner and it’s half of his really good New York friends and then half are people who he and his friends have met since the last one and I think The New Yorker wrote an article about his party. It’s not that hard to do. He whips them up a day in advance and it has such a huge impact on his life but also everybody else’s life. It’s not that hard to create something that’s great for you and great for other people.

[0:34:01] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, it’s totally true. In doing a potluck, just having one place where you all meet up and I guess here’s what I found Tynan and maybe you have some advice on this is at least with The Recess Project it got to the point where people started showing up who I didn’t know and it would put me in this weird position where I was host of having to meet people I don’t know and I am not comfortable really with being a social hub. I am more of an introvert so what would your advice be to somebody who’s like, “Look I love the idea of hosting people or putting these things together. I recognize how important it is socially to have that but how do I get over my discomfort of being the one that everybody is looking to” how do you make it so it’s easy for people who are uncomfortable in that central role?

[0:34:59] Tynan: Well I think you have to look at specifically what’s uncomfortable but I think the general principle there is like it’s going to be a little bit uncomfortable but the rewards are so great that you just do it. It’s like if you want good results, you’ll probably going to have to put in some work and that’s find a situation that works best for you. So maybe you keep it a dinner party of four people because that is more manageable at first or maybe six people. Figure out the thing where it’s least uncomfortable but also at the same time, accept that “hey, if I really want to change and I really want to fix my social circle, it’s going to take a little bit of discomfort and that’s the price I pay and it is going to be worth it.”

[0:35:38] Charlie Hoehn: Absolutely, agreed. As you were saying that I was thinking as well another thing you can do is you can focus not on yourself. You could have divert their attention to somebody else and help them by introducing them to someone cool. If you get good at making introductions and making other people sound great because no one like to brag like you did it at the beginning of this interview where you flew through your history in 30 seconds. So make really compelling introductions for people and connect them and then you don’t have the attention on yourself for very long. It is only for you for 40 seconds.

[0:36:18] Tynan: Absolutely, one cool thing Nick does along that line is in the middle of this party, his little tagline on these parties is always like it’s the most structured fun you’re ever going to have. So everybody’s got the nametag and he’ll say, “Okay we’re all going to talk for 15 minutes and then we’re going to huddle up in a group” maybe 20 people or so and he puts them in a group and then he’ll just have some question and everybody has to answer it. And the other interesting thing he does is he forces people to make speeches. So I do my annual gear post where I pack really light and so he makes me give a speech about that and he basically does this so that then afterwards people have a reason to come up and talk to me which I think is genius. It’s like the next level of that bragging thing but he does this for four or five people so then each of these people have people that are trying to talk to them and you could do these icebreaker stuff like that to give people reason like you are saying to talk to each other.

[0:37:07] Charlie Hoehn: Yes, I love that, this was a hack that I recently learned and started incorporating into my own speeches. I started playing around with putting like recording video of me talking to audience members like the day before my speech and then putting clips of them talking into my keynote because after the speech, those people have as much currency as I do like they were the stars of my speech. So not only does it take some pressure off of me, it makes the audience love it because now they have an excuse to talk to other people there.

[0:37:51] Tynan: That’s a genius idea, I like that for a lot of reasons.

[0:37:54] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, for sure so at this point of the episode maybe some people are thinking, “All right I like this tiny guy. I recognize the value of social skills” still on the fence about this book like what would you say are either reasons they should read their book or some results or success stories of readers who have implemented this stuff in your book?

[0:38:16] Tynan: I think this is one of these areas of life where it is such a low hanging fruit because people don’t work on this, right? It’s like when you first go to the gym you’re like, “Oh my god, I have muscles now or I have lost weight now” and then it gets harder after that. So this is one where we are like with every book I write it’s not beautiful pros. It’s just super practical stuff that actually gets result and so you read this book, some of it is going to apply to you. Some of it isn’t, I can’t imagine somebody reading it and not being able to improve their social life. I actually kind of make it hard for readers to get in touch with me so I don’t hear too much from readers but I do –

[0:38:47] Charlie Hoehn: Well like Amazon reviews.

[0:38:50] Tynan: Oh that’s true, yeah I haven’t read those in a while though. I try not to read it too much. It’s like one of those holes where you can really go deep on but yeah, a lot of people, the people really like the thing that I was talking about earlier with the weekly event. All of a sudden they go from a very desperate social scene to they’re the hub of an awesome social circle and everybody is benefiting from that, storytelling, I have a lot of – I talk a lot in the book about how to tell a good story and that’s a super valuable skill I am always hearing about.

[0:39:18] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, that is a super power by the way that I don’t think the average person really appreciates to the extent that they should. I mean the people who can tell great stories can literary rule society and there is a reason that movies we spend hundreds of millions of dollars getting them made and even more paying to go see them. So how can I start telling better stories today?

[0:39:45] Tynan: Yeah, there’s so much good stories. So I guess the basic structure of a story and I think everybody screws this up is there’s three phases basically and every time I talk about it I call them different things. I should come up with a standardized names but the first one is you need to like, you need to give me the information I need to understand where the story begins, the setting of the story and this should be as short as humanly possible. I was here with my friend and my uncle and we were at the lake, I don’t need to know what you’re uncle’s hobbies are, what his job is, how long have you known it. Irrelevant, I just need to know the basics of why are we at the story, where are we. Then the next phase is what do I call it, the lead up and this is the part where we are getting to the point of why am I telling the story, what’s the point of the story and we are building up. So it’s like, “So there I was, I’m standing in this restaurant and all the way across I see this guy that I knew from high school” and so you don’t need to know why this guy is here, why I’m taking to him and I am building that suspense and this is the part of the story that should be longest part. As long as you have the listener’s attention, you want to be building that attention and they should be wondering. It’s like when you watch a movie and you know the guy is about to get killed. But you still have to watch every step because you don’t exactly know when it’s going to happen. Even if the person knows what’s going to happen, you can really draw this part out to make it emotionally interesting. A story is not about facts, it’s about an emotional experience. So this is the part where every single thing you say in this phase should be making it more emotionally charged and building the suspense. If it isn’t doing that, you shouldn’t say it. Then you get to the point of the story, the drop or the hook or whatever you want to call it and you give that and then you’re done. A lot of people they’d be like, “And…” you know when I was talking earlier about my friend that I met, “And there’s my friend and…” and then they go on and on about their friend but they’ve lost all the tension so there’s no point. So a lot of people screw this up where they give a lot of beginning, no tension and then all of these rambling at the end after I already know the point of the story. So it’s much better to keep those short, keep the tension long and try to keep the story a little bit short. You don’t have to explain every detail because you can let people ask you about details they want to know more about. So I might be like, “So I was on an island with my friends…” and I won’t even explain the island and if they want to know why I have an island I can explain that in a whole other story. So you give people the opportunities to direct the conversation rather than you monopolizing it.

[0:42:12] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, I think the most important thing that you said is that stories are not just like and information. They are about emotion. So what is the emotion that you are trying to evoke from this story and paying attention to how the audience feels as you’re telling it is something that guys I think in particular tend to overlook, I mean it’s just how we are wired and it’s the stuff that we focus on completely different things in developing those. So I think that’s great, do you talk about that in your book on how to tell better stories?

[0:42:57] Tynan: Yeah, it’s a big section.

[0:42:58] Charlie Hoehn: That’s good. I like that. I am reading The Secrets of Story right now because I am just fascinated with people who can tell great stories and this book is written by a guy who’s been a screenwriter for many decades in Hollywood and he breaks down why certain movies work and why other movies don’t. So in addition to getting super human social skills, if you’re more interested in story as well, you can also dive down that rabbit hole. It’s a good one.

[0:43:32] Tynan: I think storytelling is actually similar to social skills and that it’s one of these extremely valuable skills that it very obviously will help your life if you’re good at it but nobody learns it and so if you wanted the people to focus on it and learn it, you have this massive amount of value that you can bring to people. If you can entertain a group just by telling stories, most people can’t do that and you don’t need anything for that. You can do it on a plane, you can do it in a desert. You can do it anywhere and that’s a universal skill and then the times when there’s critical information you do need to share, you can do it in a way that is compelling and you really know that it is having that impact. It’ such a valuable skill and people don’t do it.

[0:44:10] Charlie Hoehn: Right, they don’t and actually to touch on what we are talking about before we started recording, one of the things that just blew my mind when I started learning about story is people care about the hero. The hero doesn’t have to be heroic necessarily but they will invest emotionally in you or the hero of the story but they are very skeptical. They are looking for reasons to not like you at first or the hero of the story, right?

[0:44:46] Tynan: Interesting.

[0:44:46] Charlie Hoehn: So they are very resistant because they’ve been burned before basically with bad stories and it sucks to get invested in a good story and then to have it let you down, it’s emotionally exhausting so they’re looking for reasons to not invest and what the most important thing that I have learned from this book is the very most important thing is it has to be someone that people identify with. It has to be and this is why Pixar was so dominant for a long time. It’s because they picked non-human heroes in every single movie, toys, bugs, monsters, robots, exceptionally difficult to get audiences to care about non-human things. So the writers have to bend over backwards and find every possible way to get the audience to identify and like those characters. They didn’t have to be heroic, they didn’t have to be impressive and the reason I’m bringing this up is because it applies to so many people what you’re really driving at here. It’s like you need to be likable and the way that you do that is you need to be vulnerable and human first. People need to see themselves in you before they latch on to you rather than you trying to impress them and be this super human awesome person. You can be proud of yourself but you have to have the humility to understand this. Does the other person want to build rapport and identify with you as someone that they can relate to and it is safe to invest in.

[0:46:34] Tynan: Exactly and if you are the one, if you’re willing to be vulnerable first that then sets the bar and allows them to be vulnerable and sure, it would be great if we all went 50-50 but it’s another one of those examples. If you just go first and you set the stage then it makes it easy for other people to do it and then you are really doing them a service by building that connection.

[0:46:53] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, what’s an easy way people can be vulnerable in conversations that doesn’t make them look too weak but it’s a human connecting thing you can do? How can they get started doing that better? I know that is not a great question but do you know what I mean?

[0:47:11] Tynan: Yeah, I mean I think the difficulty in it is that the point of being vulnerable is that you share something that’s unique right? And so it’s going to be different for every person but I think a fairly common area is if you talk about your family. You have such an emotional connection to your family so if you talk about a family struggle or something like that or even a relationship that you have with like a younger person that you mentor in your family. Something where it crosses that like, “Hey we are trying to impress each other and tell stories” to like, “I am telling you something real about my life, people who are close to me” I think most people can probably find something in that realm to share.

[0:47:50] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, that’s great advice. So Tynan what is the rest of this year look like for you?

[0:47:57] Tynan: Great question, finishing up I have another book about travel. I don’t know what I am going to call it yet. It’s going to be pretty cool, it’s going to be out in a few months so I am working on that. I’ve been travelling a lot, going on a lot of cruises, go to Budapest a lot, Tokyo a lot. I’m about to go build a cabin out in the woods in a couple of months so that should be fun. I just do random stuff all the time.

[0:48:18] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah and as I recall, you and some friends bought property or something in Budapest right? Or do you have –

[0:48:26] Tynan: Yeah, we bought a flat in the center of Budapest. It is the best city in Europe by far. I haven’t been to all of them but I have been to most of the big ones and it’s by far the best city in Europe. It’s really an amazing place so yeah, my friends and I have been buying property now together relatively inexpensive property in really cool places and that’s like a social thing too, right? Like now I was in Budapest for a few months this year and I think 15 different friends came and visited me. And it’s a lot easier when you have that center of gravity there. So a lot of the things that I do now or almost everything I do I’m sure is in form someway like “how was this going to affect my social group” and especially when I realized that all the best times in my life are quality experiences with my favorite people and so a lot of what I do is how can I create more of those and yeah, the Budapest property and other similar things are exactly for that.

[0:49:14] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, so it’s like setting up social beacons or magnets that attract your favorite people. Why Budapest by the way? What is so great about it?

[0:49:23] Tynan: Oh man, I could spend another hour on that but the gist of it is that extremely high quality of life like I think higher than anywhere else I’ve been for ridiculously low price. So an average day is I wake up, go across the street from my flat, have amazing breakfast like eggs and salad and fruit and yogurt for about $3. Go have lunch or go to a tea place, world-class tea places are in Budapest, the only place in Europe that I know of, world-class tea for like $8. Tea like that would be 50 bucks in the US, go to lunch, three-course meal at a five star restaurant $8, work for a little while, go to the symphony or the opera, $20 for an up front row opera box and then dinner at some super fancy restaurant for 10 bucks. All the while there is thermal baths, there’s this beautiful city with architecture. It’s on the Danube River, it has this amazing bridges. It has beautiful parks, it’s just an unbelievable city and then it’s in the middle of everything. It borders eight different countries or seven different countries, it’s in Central Europe so you can take to Vienna for a day for 35 euros by train. The place is amazing. I love Budapest.

[0:50:31] Charlie Hoehn: That’s awesome so a couple more questions then we’ll wrap up. One do you have a parting piece of advice for aspiring authors? What number of book are you on, sixth?

[0:50:44] Tynan: Yeah, I don’t know six or seven.

[0:50:45] Charlie Hoehn: You are doing a lot.

[0:50:46] Tynan: Yeah, I mean look, I think everybody has a different style and so if you want to write in my style, basically what I do is my goal is to make the most practical books and to get them writing quality wise up to 90%. People find typos once in a while like maybe I can organize it a little bit better but people really like my books because they are super practical and it’s like, “Do this, do this, here’s how things actually work” and they get results. And so a lot of people are trying to make very perfect books, I think give yourself a deadline. Write every single day until that deadline is done and then spend awhile editing and put it out. I think my books are good because I’ve written some books that weren’t quite as good as those books and those books were okay because I wrote some pretty bad books at first and so I think it’s like get your work out there and even my worst books, three and a half stars on Amazon. I’ve still gotten feedback where they’ve changed people’s lives. You want to be able to tell a good story to make it interesting but a lot of books are really about what’s the information that people need to take the next step forward and I think probably everybody has got a book in them.

[0:51:54] Charlie Hoehn: Agreed. How do you decide what your next book is going to be? Because I would think by the time the game came out and the popularity of that, you might have been thinking, “Hey I could write Tynan’s game and share my story with that title and have all the game readers come over” how do you decide what you want to write next?

[0:52:15] Tynan: Yeah, well the first book I wrote was called Make Her Chase You and it was about Pickup and I never even thought about writing a book really before and then this friend of mine he’s like, “You know you’re on the game, why don’t you write a book about that?” and I was “Well…” and I couldn’t come up with a reason so I just did it but I think since then, I don’t care so much about money. Obviously I like money and making money but it’s not my number one priority. And so what I really want to do is I want to write books about stuff that I am in to and excited about that will help people. That’s my motivation. I don’t really make that much money off books compared to other stuff and so I get excited about a topic. I go really deep in it because that is my personality and every time I write a book I think, “Well I guess that’s it. I probably have nothing else to write about” and then I get super into something else. Then I’m like, “I’ve got to write about social skills now” so yeah, that’s it for me and I think I am the worst marketer in the world. I should probably have a series or figure out market research, I don’t know. I should do these things but then I probably wouldn’t enjoy the work and I wouldn’t put my heart into it so maybe it wouldn’t work but yeah, I just write about what I’m excited about.

[0:53:17] Charlie Hoehn: Cool. How can our listeners connect with you and follow you?

[0:53:23] Tynan: Luckily I have a weird name so it is pretty easy to find me. If you search on Amazon for Tynan, you’ll find all my books. My blog is Tynan.com, my Twitter is @tynan. Yeah, those are the best ways to get in touch with me.

[0:53:36] Charlie Hoehn: Awesome, thanks for being on the show man. This was great.

[0:53:40] Tynan: Hey, thanks for having me man. I had a really good time.

[0:53:47] Charlie Hoehn: Many thanks to Tynan for being on the show. You can buy his book, Superhuman Social Skills on Amazon.com. What was your favorite takeaway from this episode? Let us know by leaving a review on iTunes or by posting a comment at Facebook.com/authorhour. Thanks again for listening to Author Hour, enlightening conversations about book with the authors who wrote them. We’ll see you next time.