The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 29 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Eastman: Toxic, Machiavellian Leaders Often Achieve Incredible Results
“I've seen
Certain leaders be horrible and get incredible things done.
They violate every book ever written about leadership and work a team to complete death and play this Machiavellian game of just when they're about to fire, just about when they're about to …”
Eastman: The easiest way to spot pretenders is testing with fake information
“I think the easiest way is to throw out fake information and see how people respond.”
Eastman: ChatGPT could do $150,000 of data science work in a weekend
“So I probably spent maybe a 150,000 dollars in hiring data scientists to clean and to produce dashboards for Beyond Tells. ChatGPT. I could have done it all in a weekend.”
Eastman: Reading body language requires observing shifts, not assigning fixed meanings
“So the truth is a lot of people using body language experts will look at someone's behavior and be like, oh, like this means this, and this means that that's not really what you're doing. I think it's more about noticing than making meaning out of.”
Eastman: People quickly conform whenever an influential person shifts social narratives
“I hate saying this, but I do believe like people are sheep in that regard. Where there's a narrative, and if a powerful person just comes along and shifts the narrative, you see how quickly everybody else falls in line, and we're all on both sides of this. Som…”
Eastman: Video recording observer effect disappears within ten minutes
“The truth is, people, like, will talk about the observer effect with video and all that, it goes away in, like, 10 minutes. Like, if you have, like, a small iPhone, you forget about it, and you're actually seeing patterns of behavior”
Eastman: Communication experts critique presentations through subjective lenses, not audience engagement
“A lot of communication experts will watch like a presentation And they'll go, well, I think you should move your hands more or less, or I think you should speak up. Like they're doing that through their perceptual lens. They're not optimizing for the engagemen…”
Eastman: Emulating norm violations by Musk or Jobs fails without authority
“Or really successful people who violate those norms get modeled. And it's like, whoa, like Elon Musk could violate all the norms he wants. Steve Jobs can too. But like, you can't, you don't have that authority. You don't have that, that contextual understandin…”
Eastman: Nonverbal Behavior Cannot Be Decoded Without Verbal Context
“You can't really separate nonverbal from verbal. I mean, maybe the only place you could do this is poker and a couple of other things. The truth is, We're always, so the model for how we read a behavior is we're looking at behavior within a context, and we're …”
Eastman: Leadership Thought Leaders Are Disconnected From Real Executive Pressures
“I think we have a problem in this kind of like self-help, personal development world where I think a lot of
Let's say like thought leaders and leadership and all, I think they're disconnected from what leaders actually go through.”
Eastman: True expertise is signaled by spontaneous admissions of ignorance and error
“I like to look for I don't knows. So whenever I talk to any expert and is every, there's always an answer. Sometimes it's nice to be like, oh, I don't know. Or there's not always an answer to something, right? They don't always, because I feel like there's a c…”
Eastman: Coaches who do not have three coaches should stop coaching
“If you're a coach and you don't have three coaches, you should stop being a coach.”
Eastman: Internalizing hierarchy prevents workers from navigating corporate power structures
“If you are falling in line with a power structure, it's often very difficult to navigate it. Meaning if it's like, oh my God, this person is this and this person is this and I'm just this. You're very rarely going to be able to see eye to eye with that person …”
Eastman: Team members are banned from sending one-word text responses
“Like on my team, there's a rule that no one could give me a one word response. So no one could ever say yes or no. It has to be like, yes, emoji, yes, gif, or something like that, because I think someone's mad at me when they just say yes.”
Eastman: Nonverbal trust relies on conforming to societal bell-curve behavioral expectations
“Trust from a nonverbal perspective is just, you could think of behaviors on a bell curve distribution, right? So certain people are going to act in certain ways that are not in alignment with how society perceives that behavior to be trustworthy.”
Eastman: People update behavioral assumptions only when proven completely wrong
“When it comes to human behavior, we get lazy, and we build these things, and we don't change, and I feel like the only time we're changed is if we're shown we're really wrong”
Eastman: Presenters are universally most effective when they are comfortable
“The most effective version of someone is when they're the most comfortable. Bar not, every single time. So the whole joke is people think I teach like, oh, stand this way. No, like, step one is get you to the level where you're the most comfortable, where you …”
Eastman: Subordinating yourself mentally prevents effective navigation of corporate hierarchies
“If you are falling in line with a power structure, it's often very difficult to navigate it. Meaning if it's like, oh my God, this person is this, and this person is this, and I'm just this. You're very rarely going to be able to see eye to eye with that perso…”
Eastman: Major gap exists between leadership theory and practical behavioral execution
“I think there's a major gap in the leadership or organizational culture, that whole world between theory and application. So somebody reads a book about maybe radical candor or some, like, concept, and then the way that they apply it is completely different.”
Eastman: Concrete Predictive Scenarios Produce Better Feedback Than Rating Scales
“You say, how do you think that interaction went on a scale from one to 10? People are horrible at answering it. Like, do you like that person from a scale from one to 10? They're like, I don't know. But you ask somebody a question, would, on a scale from one t…”
Eastman: The best communicators maintain attention through unpredictable vocal tonality shifts
“So one of the big things that I've noticed in the best communicators is they have range. So they have the ability. There's a lot of shifts in their tonality. There's a lot of movement. You kind of can't predict what the next word is going to be. There's, I jus…”
Eastman: A UPenn study shows faster speakers gain more attention despite nonsense
“There was one cool study, I think, out of, like, UPenn that found that, like, people that talk faster are listened to at a greater level, even though what they're saying is nonsense.”
Eastman: Deception is the hardest nonverbal behavior to detect systematically
“On the nonverbal behavior spectrum, Dating is probably the easiest paradigm to understand and deception is the hardest because it's so multifaceted. It's so complex. I don't know if there ever will be a system that can predict whether or not someone's lying or…”
Eastman founded Behavioral Robotics to train machines to read human behavior
“So I started this other company called behavioral robotics with the goal is to teach machines to read human behavior. Because if reading human behavior is all about these complex decision trees, there's no reason from a first principle perspective that a machi…”
Eastman: MMPI-II detects lying by repeating questions across 530 items
“There's always, and that's why, like, one of the biggest tests I think still use, the MMPI-II, Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, it's like, 530 questions, and a lot of the inventory is asking questions in different ways, so you don't remember what y…”
Eastman: Managing contextual communicators is easier than dealing with hyperliteral people
“So it's easier to deal with the people that are more contextual and lower them down than the hyperliteral.”
Eastman: I completely disagree today with my 2016 poker tell videos
“I have videos out there that I made in 2016 about poker tells, that over the past eight years, I've completely changed my mind and thoughts about that. There's videos of me saying things that I completely disagree with today.”
Eastman predicts full confidence in ChatGPT's research queries by mid-2024
“In six months from now, I think I'll have full confidence in these things.”
Eastman: Research team is analyzing behavioral patterns across Tim Ferriss's interviews
“So we're doing a thing on how to ask better questions. So we're taking some really good question people, like one of the people that I've seen evolve is Tim Ferriss, his ability to ask questions in a certain way. And we basically take every single interview he…”