#53 - How Online Sleuthing Is Impacting Your Relationships

Welcome to the Talk to People Podcast.

My name is Chris Miller, and we are, it's January 14th of 2024.

The best question that I've used in the past two weeks has been, how has 2024 been for you?

So if you are in a conversation, and you don't know what to say, use that question.

I was sitting in church today, I had that question on my mind, that was the first question that I used, and it ended up being an incredible conversation.

So I have that same question for you.

That question is, how has 2024 been?

Is it what you think it's been?

I know in Kansas, it's been unbearably cold.

We are hunkering down, hibernating.

But last episode, we said we weren't going to put too much pressure on ourselves for this new year.

Instead, it was going to be micro adjustments.

So I encourage you, and I ask you that question, how's 2024 been?

If this is your first time you've ever listened to the Talk to People Podcast, welcome.

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We believe that life is built with people, and if we prioritize the relationships around us, we will live fuller lives and be more resilient to stress.

So every episode is either education, entertainment, or introducing you to someone who will help you along that path.

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Now the sponsorship's a little loose because this is actually a newsletter that I've been writing.

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Most people, I've never heard anybody say, hey, you send these out too much.

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So I wanna focus more on writing, and I wanna make sure that your life can be benefited by all of the labor I'm putting into this, because I do think there can be value there.

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And we're gonna be talking a little bit more about the last newsletter I just sent out.

It's two days ago.

I'm gonna unpack it a lot more.

It's essentially going to be like this, but 2.0.

I've been able to think about it.

I'll be able to use some more analogies and personal examples.

It's gonna be a cool episode.

I'm excited about this one.

But the way I'm gonna start is talking about some self-sabotage.

So at the very beginning of this podcast or video, I want to talk to you about how we are shooting ourselves in the foot.

This is a form of self-sabotage that we are all a part of and that we are all guilty of.

The gavel is hitting the judge's desk and saying, guilty, guilty, guilty.

This is something that we are partaking in and it's shortchanging us, our relationships.

We are getting something less than what we actually deserve and something less than we actually need.

So our needs, our biological desires, they're not being met because of this form of self-sabotage we are participating in.

I'm going to start by sharing with you a story.

And if you listen to the story, you'll probably know what I'm talking about.

But at the end, I'll tell you specifically what the self-sabotage is.

I went to a graduate program whenever I was, what, 22 years old.

And I remember the senior year of college for my undergraduate.

That's whenever you're trying to figure out, what do I do next?

Well, I had applied and I had been accepted.

I graduated from undergrad.

In that summer, I received a email welcoming me to the graduate program.

And it said, congratulations, we're so excited to have you here.

It was this official email with the university letterhead on top.

And I'm thinking, man, this is getting real.

And I go through and I read about the orientation.

We're gonna be getting a meal and we're gonna be meeting the faculty.

And I also saw, though, that the email was addressed to me, but it was also addressed to 14 other people.

And I'm sure you've been there before, where you may have been new to a sports league, or you may have joined a company for the first time, or potentially like me, you were joining a graduate program, or a university program, or a vo-tech program, or a pottery class, and you get an email that says, welcome to the class, and there's all these different people that are gonna be in the class with you.

So that was me.

I had 14 other people that were gonna be in the class with me, and I could see all of their names.

So I immediately started clicking through all these people names, trying to see if I could find a profile picture.

And I'm on Gmail.

So not many people have pictures on Gmail.

So as I'm looking for a profile pic, I'm clicking through, clicking through, what do they look like, what do they look like?

And this was like this natural thing that I immediately did.

I knew I was going to be a part of this new thing.

There was a lot of uncertainty, and we're going to talk about that a lot here.

We're going to talk about uncertainty because I think uncertainty keeps a lot of us up at night.

We may be going through a new season of life.

We may be in a new relationship.

There may be some new responsibilities on our plate, and we deal with uncertainty.

Well, I had a lot of uncertainty in my life because nobody in my family had been to graduate school.

I was leaving the state of Oklahoma for the first time in my life, moving out of state.

And whenever I see these 14 people, it's almost like, okay, I can understand a bit more about what I'm getting into and reduce some of that ambiguity, reduce some of that uncertainty.

So I started looking at profile pictures.

I remember even looking at like copying and pasting these people's names and trying to find their social media.

What's funny to me is I was off social media for the most part out of Facebook.

So I'm looking at things where I...

I'm not even on the platform myself, but LinkedIn, Instagram, who are these people?

And I found myself doing this.

I found myself not even focusing on the text, the body text, the email.

Instead, I was immediately trying to reduce this uncertainty.

This uncertainty of what this new chapter was going to be for me.

And the best way I found myself doing that was by looking up the people.

And I think a lot of us do this.

We are going to be moving into a new chapter of life, and we want to reduce uncertainty of that new chapter, that novelty.

And we are particularly thinking about people.

So let me talk about the human brain real quick.

The human brain, how do you really draw a human brain?

Got that little cord that goes into everything else, the spine.

The human brain is interested in survival, okay?

And the way that we survive historically, I'm sure you've seen Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

You have your triangle, and the things at the bottom are the most basic in elementary.

And the higher up you go, you get to self-actualization, right?

But at the bottom, you have your food and your water and your shelter, and it goes to the top.

Well, one of those needs that we have and that the human brain is particularly wired for is the need to belong.

And I'm just going to say people, the need for people.

Because back in the day, whenever we're chilling in the isolated and insular tribal life, we lived in isolated tribes and insular communities, meaning there wasn't other communities around us.

And the 60, 70 people that we had, we needed to really be a part of.

If we did not exist in this tribe, more than likely we weren't going to survive because we were going to be more susceptible to, I know this sounds probably salacious and cliche, but saber-toothed tigers, we were going to be acceptable to other tribes that were enemies.

If we got sick, we were less likely to be able to deal with that because we were sick and we couldn't go gather food for ourselves.

We couldn't heal ourselves.

So we needed to be around people, and our human brain is really essentially wired for people.

The majority of the energy our brain uses is either about meeting people in the future and the social interactions we're going to have.

So a lot of people have anxiety about that.

For instance, me moving to graduate school.

Anxiety about future interactions.

Another, if we're not worried about that, more than likely we're thinking about current interactions.

So right now, as I'm talking to you, even though you're not even present, I'm thinking about this.

So what we're saying currently, current interactions, and then we're thinking about past interactions.

Ah, shoot, I shouldn't have said that.

Dang, why didn't I do that?

Man, did I sound that stupid?

I know this is a tangent, but oftentimes pastors say there's three sermons.

The one you preached, the one you wish you preached, and the one you should have preached, or something like that.

All saying, we think about things after we say them.

So our brains, since we are so wired for people, we're constantly thinking about anxiety with future interactions, anxiety with current interactions, and anxiety about past interactions.

Now, this all generates into us being very curious people and us being very socially centric people.

So we want to know, we want to gather information, but we also want to be able to thrive among a lot of different people.

So historically, to figure out more information about people, we would do two things.

These two things, the first is, think about Lewis and Clark and their explorers.

We would take part in exploration.

So we would walk the windy road, go find new places to discover.

The second is conversation.

Conversation is social exploration.

That's where you can find new things.

Something that is hidden, when discussing, we uncover it.

And we get to learn new things about new people.

That's how relationships are built.

That's how we share about ourselves.

Conversation.

But something has entered the chat in the past, what, 20 years, and I mean more than 20 years.

But like with the boom of the internet, we now have technology.

Well, we've always had technology, but we have digital technology.

And this is in the form of, say, the internet, the mobile phone, and social media.

So now, if we want to find out more about people and satisfy our socially curious brain, we don't have to go meet people face to face, have conversations with them.

We don't have to be like Lewis and Clark in the boat and be chilling there, trying to meet new people, explore new things.

All we have to do is hop on social media, get to the Instagram, Twitter, Facebook homepage, and start searching.

And if we have a name, we can look up that person.

And it's funny because we turn into these digital explorers.

So like Lewis and Clark, looking for new things, we are chilling in our living rooms, looking at a cracked phone screen, reading about these people whom we've never met.

We haven't met them in person.

We haven't talked to them.

Yet we are learning things about them.

So this whole premise, this whole activity, this self-sabotage practice that we're all taking part in, it's called Virtual Front Loading.

Virtual Front Loading.

Virtual Front Loading is when we are researching, extensively researching things online about people before meeting them in person.

99% of the time, when we find ourselves doing this, 99% of the time may be a bit of an exaggeration.

The majority of the time when we find ourselves doing this, it's not necessary.

So me being that potential or the future graduate student, going to that new place, that wasn't necessary for me to go and look up everybody.

But since I did, what happens is I acquire knowledge about people and I put it in a bag, okay?

And this bag is, or how about this?

I put it in a jar.

I'm going to...

This may be obnoxious.

I don't know what this is going to sound like online.

But I just dumped out all my dry erase markers out of my marker jar.

And I have these table tennis three-star.

If you're a table tennis person, you know that these are creme de la creme.

I've had them in my closet for so long.

I haven't used them, so I'm going to use them now.

Let me take it out of the box.

Okay, so when we go online, run Instagram, and we are looking up someone, we are learning information about them.

And this jar right here symbolizes, or is the, yeah, symbolizes what our future relationship is going to be with them and the way we think about it, the way that we're approaching it, our psychological capacity and container for this relationship.

So imagine I'm looking you up and I go on Instagram and I read that you are from Oklahoma, you used to play soccer, you used to play RuneScape, and I see all the stuff on Instagram, maybe just on the about, or I see your top posts.

But then I see something like, oh, you go to church.

So I'm like, oh, okay.

He goes to church, it's a Christian church.

Oh, it's a Assemblies of God church.

It's a bit more Pentecostal, which not only is this person Christian, then maybe he lifts his hands during worship, or maybe he speaks in tongues.

And without knowing it, what we do is we start to take all of this information and illustrate what this person is and who this person is.

So our illustrations and our attributions start to fill the jar, okay?

So there goes a ball in the jar.

And I'm continually looking at this person's page.

Oh man, this person's in a relationship.

Look, they're engaged.

Oh, let me look at this person's, but let's click, who's this person engaged to?

And it's like, oh look, here's this person, and we can learn all about them.

And this digital sleuthing, as I'm talking about it, I feel like it makes me look weird, but it's funny though, because we all do this, right?

And we all click the links on all of the pages to see what this person's up to, and another ball goes into the jar.

Now, what we're doing is we're learning information about these people.

Like I said, our brains are very socially curious.

We're interested in survival.

Security is one of our most basic needs, and uncertainty is typically at odds with security.

If we don't understand what's happening, if we feel uncertain, we don't feel secure.

So we want to get rid of uncertainty, and whenever there's people around, we want to learn about them, especially if we're going to be sharing the same space with them.

So our brains are going in and we're reducing this uncertainty.

And as we're doing it online, we're dropping balls into the jar.

Now we are getting to know things about people.

So whenever we do meet them in person, typically we're showing up with the empty jar, right?

Because we don't know anything about this person, but actually since we've been doing a little bit of our virtual front loading, our digital sleuthing, we know a little bit more about them.

So instead of showing up with an empty jar, we actually have, let's see here, for visual effect, it's important.

We have four things in here, four assumptions that we've already made about this person.

And we carry them into the conversation that we're gonna have with this person.

Now, conversations, the whole premise of conversations, it's a give and take process.

We call it conversational turn taking.

And one of the best ways to be a good communicator and to establish good relationships is to think about the concept of reciprocity.

So both people need to be putting something in, in a conversation, if one person is talking the whole entire time, more than likely that's just a monologue.

It's not gonna actually establish a relationship.

But if you, as someone in the conversation, you recognize, oh, hey, I've been talking about myself a lot.

Let me ask a question.

So this back and forth process helps us discover things about one another and it allows for serendipity.

So imagine I meet you for the first time, I have no idea who you are.

This jar is empty and I say, hey, how are you?

We start talking.

I learned that you're from Oklahoma too.

Wow, out of 50 states, we're from the same state.

That's pretty cool.

So that process of me figuring out that one thing, it's serendipity and it allows for that in-person discovery.

And this in-person discovery is so important because even though I could have gone to Instagram, figured out where you're from.

And then I would have put that ball in the jar.

If I figure it out on Instagram, it feels different in the long term.

If I'm actually in person with you and I learned that you're from Oklahoma as well, it hits different.

And this isn't just me saying this.

So I'm gonna set this jar with four balls aside real quick.

I'm gonna come back to it because it's my visual illustration and I wanna have this visual illustration.

But I wanna show you about this study.

There was, there's this book that I just finished, my favorite book in 2023, right here.

It's called Together by Dr.

Vivek Murthy.

He's the Surgeon General.

And it's all about the healing power of social connection.

And in this book, he talks about a study that was done by a Stanford professor named Paolo Parigi.

I hope I said that name right.

Now, the Stanford professor, he used to work with Airbnb and Uber.

So both of these are services and companies that specialize in reputation.

Like you need to have good reputation for Uber, or what's that called your rating?

Your Uber rating, Airbnb, a host rating.

Now they have guest ratings.

And what Paolo Parigi did was he actually looked at couch surfing data.

So if you know what couch surfing is, it's essentially like Airbnb, but you're sleeping on people's couches.

It's more targeted towards travelers instead of tourists.

Oftentimes it's free.

It's like a whole community.

And he took this, if you're watching, I'm trying to find the information because there's this GQ article that talks a little bit about it, but he took this couch surfing data where he looked at a whole bunch of different hosts on the couch surfing platform.

So people who are opening up their house for others.

And then he looked at a whole bunch of different guests and from this data, one of the findings that he found was people who knew more about the person that they are going to be meeting.

So hosts that knew more about the guests and guests that knew more about the hosts before meeting in person.

It resulted in a weaker, it lowered the potential for a strong relationship.

Okay, this is, I need to be a bit more precise with how I'm saying this.

So let me find where I need to be, hold on.

Okay, I found it.

What we found is that when the couch surfer had more information about that other person, he or she was going to meet.

The resulting friendship after they met was weaker than in a world where the couch surfers did not have that amount of information about the unknown other.

Where he says, the friendship that resulted was weaker because it's easier to form relationships digitally because you can learn all of this information.

But these relationships are potentially less binding.

Let me read on a little bit more.

It feels like you have a lot of connections, but do these connections mean what they used to?

And the big question that this comes down to is how are you getting to know the people in your life?

Because it matters how you're getting to know them, because the benefits will be different.

If I get to know all of this information in person, I have that in-person discovery, and it feels a lot different.

But if I show up with the full jar, and I have to rearrange all this stuff, or I have to take some of it out, and that's the funny thing about social media, is we go on there and we think we know stuff.

This is the thing about internet and with people and just sociology in general.

Like the nuance of human beings is we want to get to know things about people, and we do it in like the easiest way possible.

And typically, that's not face to face.

And the information we get actually ends up being subpar information.

And we think we know things about people when we really don't.

So we show up with this jar that's full.

And whenever this jar is full, it's a lot more difficult to put any water in here, anything that's going to benefit me.

And what we find ourselves doing is we show up with stuff.

And if we want to put new stuff in there, we're going to have to either take something out or we're just going to have to put it on top.

And this stuff gets pushed down.

So we get our information that we're learning from that person and we start dumping it in the cup.

But we already have stuff in there, right?

So this whole entire time, we're like, well, I'm learning good stuff about you.

But in order for me to actually get it and actually enjoy this benefit of the relationship, either need to take it out or like, now these things are even hard to take out, right?

And another way that I can show this to you is, we'll do a little experiment.

I went rogue.

I wasn't supposed to pour water in there.

I saw, I think, so many cool Instagram visual aids where they dump water in cups and it looks really cool.

This was a fluke.

I should have just kept it with the ping pong balls.

But let's do something.

I want you to, as you're listening, if you're driving, don't do this, but I want you to close your eyes, okay?

Now, I want you to open your eyes and I want you to look at everything that's red in the room.

Focus on everything that's red.

It's about to ask you about it.

So I see a few things that are red in my room.

Okay, now I want you to close your eyes again and I want you to tell me about everything that was green in your room and in your surroundings.

Now, more than likely, wait, actually open your eyes.

Now, look at everything green, okay?

Now, look at everything green, everything green in your surroundings.

Now, more than likely, you're able to see much more green things in your surroundings now than you were when you were looking for things that were red.

And that's what happens, is when we are digital sleuths and we do this virtual front loading, we get things, we pick things up, and then when we meet them in person, we're trying to confirm things because everything that we have walking in, it's like only looking for things that are red.

We miss the green stuff.

So this stuff that we're holding in our cup, it actually kind of intrudes the perception and it prevents us from having the serendipitous in-person discovery, and instead it's psychological noise.

We have to deal with it.

We are wired to confirm things.

If we have something, we're going to do what we can to stick it around, like confirmation bias or negative attribution theory, which is whenever we're reading about someone, we're much more likely to attribute negative intent compared to whenever we're actually talking to them and getting to know them.

So all of these things play into this process of virtual front loading.

And I think the less that we do, where we're looking people up before we actually get to know them in person, the better.

Now I do think there is some exceptions.

I need to be even handed.

I am hosting a podcast where I have guests and I want to have the best podcast that I possibly can.

So I do some guest research whenever I have guests on and that means that I'm looking them up.

I look at their company website or I look at who they are, what they've done, what their social media is like.

If they have a book, then I'll try and read their book.

Another thing is, I've done a lot of job interviews.

I've given job interviews and I've been the recipient of job interviews.

So whenever I was interviewing for Oracle, I looked up a lot about Oracle.

I remember I was interviewing for Amazon Web Services and I looked up a ton about Amazon Web Services.

I had all of their principles on note cards.

They have some pretty good stuff regarding HR, organizational framework.

Everything was on a note card.

Annie and I went through all of it, quizzed.

I didn't get the job because they were no longer filling for the position.

I don't know what that looked like.

But I did a lot of research on the people who were interviewing me because I wanted to have things to talk about.

So I do think that virtual front loading can definitely be beneficial to us.

But I think most of the time, it's not critical and we're actually shooting ourselves in the foot.

So next time someone reaches out to you, you can do a little research, right?

But the more time you spend looking at who they are, the more you're taking away the blank canvas and that in-person discovery away.

The next time you join a sports league and you see the roster and you're tempted to go look at who are these people, or you get a new job, or you do this, you do that.

If it's not critical for you, and that's a good question, what is critical?

Because if you're high in anxiety, you'd probably say different things are critical to someone who's low in anxiety, because there's more fear there.

But if it's not critical, then don't do the digital sleuthing.

Don't do the virtual front loading, because you're shortchanging yourself, potential relationships, who you are, and what you could be doing, because there's nothing like having that conversation where you're like, boom, whoa, this is so great.

And I think about that grad school experience that I had with 14 people and I was looking through it.

And whenever I met everybody, I had to rewire.

I had to go back and be like, oh man, I was wrong about this.

Oh man, I was wrong about that.

And I'm glad I did that.

I'm glad I didn't just run with it and not talk to anybody and be like, oh, I know who that is.

They shopped at Express and I know who that is.

They voted this way.

No, no, no.

If this resounds with you, then I would just encourage you to prevent yourself from doing that.

If you find yourself getting into it, I think the big change here is to think about the power of in-person discovery and to acknowledge that it matters how we get to know each other.

It matters.

And the benefits are going to be much different depending on how we navigate that process.

And we're always going to navigate that process.

The relational escalation model, starting with initiation, and it goes to all these different stages.

At the end, it is integration.

And there's another one, but it's like initiation and you're asking questions and intensification, and then you take risks.

And before you know it, you all are integrated into a unit.

Now, how you walk the staircase really matters.

And I want to make sure that you're getting the most benefits and building the best relationships you can.

So I encourage you to walk that staircase in person.

Something I want to plug is that in 2024, I'm going to be moving a lot of my work, and it's going to be entrepreneurial.

I'm not going to be getting a paycheck from any company or organization.

Rather, it's all going to be the work that I create through my business, and also support from the Patreon.

So if you've never checked out my Patreon, you can at talktochrismiller.com.

I have a Patreon button there, and it'll also be in the show notes.

It'll be the first link in the show notes.

But I want to give people an opportunity.

If the podcast or the newsletter has added value in your life, one of the things that I've found is, I found it through the Bible, but I found it also through life.

Where your treasure is, your heart will be there also.

So if you really want to get better at something, if you really value something, one of the best ways to ensure that you're going to invest in it further is by putting your treasure there.

It's by investing in there with your time, with your money, with your resources.

So the Patreon that I have, it's pretty simple.

I mean, the five bucks a month is the bottom tier.

So it's not much, but there's different options and the benefits for you are where your treasure is, your heart will be there also.

And all the research shows that if you invest in something, you're more than likely to take it seriously.

The people who get free courses versus the people who pay $1,000 for a course, it can be the same person for the same course.

The person who pays the $1,000 is more likely to finish the course.

So from one stance of, I would love your support.

And then the second stance of, I want you to get the most of this.

So if this is important to you, to improve your life with better conversations, relationships and community, I would love to help you.

I'm spending a lot of time trying to create content that's gonna be helpful for you in that process, to walk that staircase, to navigate that path.

And I'd also love for you to be a part of it.

So if you do choose to be a Patreon supporter, I will be sure to send you a handwritten note, figuring out the benefits as I go along.

I feel like I've promised things and it's been hard for me to like look at what that means.

For instance, one thing I wanna do is a live Q&A.

So I'll schedule one of those, but I'd love your support.

It's gonna be a new thing for 2024.

I've had some people in 2023 do it, but and shout out to them, by the way, I know I talked about it on episode 50, Annie was kind of grilling me about it.

But in 2024, I'm gonna be leaning a bit more into it because this is a very entrepreneurial year.

But I also want to give you all the opportunity to continue to grow this platform and grow the newsletter.

Now, with that being said, that's what I've got today.

So the problem with virtual front loading, it matters how you get to know one another.

All right, well with that, that's it.

I hope you enjoyed this one.

Shoot me an email or a message or anything like that.

And I'd love to hear from you.

But as always, we'll see you next time, folks.