Marshall:

People will remember your voice and the tone of your voice is what will indicate two things for people after what reminds them of you and what they remember about you.

Chris:

I'm excited to have this conversation with you. You and I have spoken on Clubhouse, and we've also spoken on Zoom a couple of times. I think that what you do really fascinates me. I have to admit, Marshall, I really don't fully understand the concepts. So maybe before we continue too far, for people who don't know who you are, can you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit of story about how you got here?

Marshall:

Oh, man. My name is Marshall Davis Jones. I'm a world bridger, and that term came to me by some weird accident, but it was the best way to describe what I wanted to do in the world, and that is connect one thing to something else and be in the middle somehow. That started with spoken word. So I was a competitive poet in the slam poetry community, and it requires you to have a way with words, but also to be able to bridge ideas powerfully to strangers very quickly, who will rate you right now from one to 10 based on how they feel. I learned a lot about how to read a room by making a lot of mistakes in communicating about how important it is to not necessarily just stand on your own opinion because that's what you believe to be true, but to really tap into what others believe and understand and what they value, mastering words was like a thing, like how do you put words together?

I became really good at it and very formidable in that arena, most likely because of my history in battle rap. But one day I had a friend of mine get on stage and he goes, "Tell them, tell them about the blood-leaching demons and things like that." But what stood out to me was one, blood-leaching demons, we need to talk what's going on in your life. But two, the tone that he was using to convey his words, I was like, "I know you, and I know that you don't sound like that. What is that?" But I also knew that for some reason that was what was captivating everyone. When he won at the end of the night, I said, "Bro, what is this?" He was like, "I'm in acting school," which I knew. He said the very first thing that they trained before they teach any other techniques is voice, because the voice is life. That became a germ, and that germ has led me here.

Chris:

How long ago was this?

Marshall:

That was April 2011. What was it? What would they call it? They called it the Grand Slam Finals. So basically, it's like if you're a poet, it's like right before you go to the main event. It's like the AFC Championship kind of thing. Yeah, man, so everybody competes and it's the crème de la crème. It brings in a lot of energy. The Nuyorican Poets Cafe is a place that the bricks, the bricks and those walls are covered in stories, and you can feel that in that room. Then when you bring all of the poets that are drawn to the finals, it's just a lot of electricity, so you really got to bring it. So it was a great night and it changed everything.

Chris:

You said a lot of things that I'm interested in, and I want to follow up with. What I'd like to ask you a question that if you're uncomfortable, like, "Let's not do this," but you said that you used to do battle raps, slam poetry. The way that I envision in my mind is poets write words and they internalize them so that it's part of them. Is it possible for you to recite a piece of poetry or to give us an example of some of the things you might have done in the things that you've referenced?

Marshall:

Oh, man. So, yeah. So I have a poem I can do. Introducing the new Apple iPerson, complete with multitouch. Doesn't it feel good to touch? Doesn't it feel good to touch compatible with your iPod and your iPad? Doesn't it feel good to touch? Doesn't it feel good to touch? No friends, there's an app for that. No life, there's an app for that. You're a complete, we're working on it. Doesn't it feel good to touch? Doesn't it feel good to touch? Doesn't it feel good to touch? My world has become so digital, I've forgotten what that feels like. It was difficult to connect when friends formed clicks.

Now it's even more difficult to connect now that clicks formed friends. But who am I to judge? I face Facebook more than books face me, hoping to book face to Faces. I update my status 420 spaces to prove I'm still breathing. Failure to do this daily means my whole web wide world will forget that I exist or with 5,000 friends online and only five I can count in real life, why wouldn't I spend more time in the world where there were more people that like me, wouldn't you? So that's an excerpt from a poem I actually wrote in 2008 called Touchscreen.

I was sitting in front of my computer and I had MySpace and Facebook, and there was five other competing social media platforms that were trying to be supreme, and my brain just scattered and disintegrated into a few pieces. I was like, "I can't even fathom this right now." I go outside and I just wrote this piece to speak to what I thought was happening. That particular poem wound up taking me a few places. Will.I. Am asked me to perform for his Transform Conference, multiple technology conferences. In fact, someone snuck into my ear that it made its way all the way to Apple Headquarters as something that they played in a meeting. I was like, "Oh." My address is here for the royalty check, but it was interesting to speak to the world. But what resonated at that time was that everyone in the world was feeling the same way and tapping into that, and it seems like people feel that way now.

Chris:

Well, you flowed into it so quickly, and you gave us the explanation on the backstory to it, but I wanted to give you a moment to just acknowledge how cool that was. I loved the wordplay. There's some memorable hooks that you dropped in there, how friends create clicks and then clicks create Friends. There's some other ones there that I'd be embarrassed to try to recite, but I just love that. That was pretty awesome. I can only imagine you on a stage in a darkened room with a spotlight and mic, a room full of people just listening in and probably clapping and just experiencing that. You're doing it here, grounded down, sitting down with a microphone, but the energy, electricity that you spoke about, I can visualize that at least in my mind. Just question about writing, what is the process like for you to come up with something like that? Then how long does it take for you to then make it a part of your whole breathing, speaking so that it feels so natural to you?

Marshall:

When I was a kid, I used to play with Legos and they were substitutions for the toys that I didn't get for Christmas. Legos and the idea of Legos has really shaped a lot of my thinking about how to stack ideas and play with them and break them and then put them back together. So it depends on what it is. So when I'm a hired writer for a company that says, "Oh, we want you to talk about procurement." For example, SAP was like, "We want to talk about procurement." There's this, "All right, well what are the Lego bricks to procurement? Then how can I put those Lego bricks together in a way where by the time I'm done, I have something that is memorable, so line for line line?" As far as the embodiment is concerned, something about slam and the competition of slam, what I loved about that art form is that it forces you to have a heightened state of arousal because you're competing.

You're competing and you know that other people want what you want and that's the feelings. You want emotion. What I had to learn when I first started slam, I used to pop lock and move around a lot, and there was this indication that I was overexpressing, and I wanted people to feel and see everything. It wasn't until I started doing the work on the voice that there was this gravity that was about having a controlled explosion, if you will, where it's like you have this energy, but the audience gets to watch it and go, "Whoa!" versus like a Tesla coil in your living room, and that can be a lot. So the embodiment piece was something that came later. It didn't start there. It was like, "Oh, pure raw energy, energy telling me." Now it's like, "Well, here are my bricks and I have a certain level of control over them now because I know what I can do.

I know how to stretch things. I know how to speak within context and environments, and that has now become by osmosis." Poems that, if you go on YouTube right now, you'll find about four different versions of the piece I just shared, and each of those versions will represent a different place that I was in this journey that I'm on. So there's one where it's like, "Yeah, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep." It's like, "Whoa!" It was cool at the time. It was exciting, it was fun. So I guess there's two ways to answer this question. The first is, getting it into the body and making the words dance will help because it does. Usually, heightened performance like that, it does become this choreographed dance, if you will. Then if you can settle in the body it's like the dancer who has spent so much time dancing that they are able to have grace and then it just falls into the body naturally.

Chris:

Is it one of these things that once you internalize it, you don't ever forget it, you could recite it at any given moment?

Marshall:

Yeah. Yeah. You start to lean into what the psychologists are starting to recognize as embodied cognition, which is the understanding that the brain isn't just up in our heads, but that the body is a representation of the mind as well. Usually, for even actors, they usually want to get a cold read, at least that some people have that mentality to get the logic of the words just stuck in there and then they can play with it with their bodies. I have a different approach where it's like the body gets involved almost immediately, and it helps because it encodes things.

Chris:

If somebody is listening to this and they're familiar with slam poetry or battle rap and say to themselves, "All right, that's a very impressive skillset that you have, your ability to manipulate words, to control your tone of voice and to embody these words and ideas in your physical self, and they say, 'I can't do that,'" I want to be able to start to peel this back a little bit and to be able to give our audience something that they could try so that they can start to take steps towards where somebody like yourself is at. You said earlier that voices life and you talked about voice work, so maybe we just need to step back a little bit and just give people an understanding of what does that mean? What is voice work? If I've never heard that term before or understand that there's ways that we can use our voice for different impact and to different affect, tell us a little bit about what that is.

Marshall:

So a lot of times you'll hear someone say something like, "I don't like how you said that to me." Then the person will respond, "What are you talking about? What do you mean?" It's like, "It's the way you said that," and it's this elusive kind of assessment or judgment that comes where you're like, "Well, this is just the way I talk and deal with it," or whatever have you. Most of the time when people think about voice work, they'll say, oh, they think about pitch. There's guys want their voice to be deeper. In fact, I'm going to send you audio so you can hear where my voice was when it started, 'cause I sounded like a man. I sounded creepy best, actually quite embarrassing. But you need to be able to compare and contrast so that people aren't under the impression that it's just puberty, it is not. I was 26-years-old when I started this situation and well past it. But anyway, tone or timbre is the quality of a sound, and that is detected instantly.

Your voice makes an impression on someone in a tenth of a second. That's the same amount of time that timbre of music makes an impression. There's a book by Zachary Waller, or Walker if I'm saying his name, but it's called Nothing but Noise and it's about timbre and music. He talks about voice very briefly, but that very small fraction of a second ... You ever dial when you're listening to the radio, for those who ever turned dials on radios, I'm aging myself, but we used to turn in a car, we used to listen to an actual radio and we had to allow ourselves to turn to different stations. You can tell you're switching stations that, dit, dit, dit, split, split, split, and you're deciding in that split moment whether or not you're going to stay at that station or not. People make those kind of tonal decisions all the time, and your voice is giving away that data like that.

So when I say voice work, what is the appropriate tone for the context of the discussion that you are having right now? A lot of people are brilliant and they have amazing content, and this is actually where I want to lean into Clubhouse. When I first came into your room, on in The Futur room, you were speaking, and I remember instantly being like, "I don't know who this guy is, but I'm listening." Then you told this really beautiful story, and again, I had no idea who you were, but I remembered the gravitas. I remembered how exceptional the delivery of your story was. I'm like, "This guy, whatever he does, he does it well, and he does it at a masterful level." Then the affect of your tone was, I cannot forget it. I was attempting to figure out how I wanted to describe it, but you have a surgical warmth. That's the best way that I could describe it. It's very precise and to the point, but it's warm.

It's like the neurosurgeon that really cares about opening up the person's brain, and they're not just cold and looking at it like, "Okay, this is a person, but I still have to open them up and I still have to do this procedure, but I'm still dealing with a person," and that affect is what people will remember. Your voice and the tone of your voice is what will indicate two things for people after, what reminds them of you and what they remember about you. There's neuroscience that supports all of this where, and Maya Angelou said, "People will forget what you said, but they'll never forget how you said it," and there's neuroscience to support that. Like in certain memory tasks, they can remember if you said words in a sad way, they will remember that you said them in a sad way more than they will actually remember the word itself; same thing, but with any other tone.

We are drawn tonal decision-making. For example, I go to a restaurant, you go to the waiter or the waitress and you say, "What's good food on this menu? They'll point out this here, this dish, like, "Oh, this is one of our popular ones." But then they'll say something like this, "Well, but you know? This right here, blah, blah, blah," and I'm like that. Why? Because in their tone, I was able to ascertain that that experience was so enriching for them, I want that. When we're speaking to people, people are making decisions about whether or not they want to sound like us. "Would I want to have the experience in my life that would make me sound like that?"

So you take someone who has a problem where they're really agitated, are just, "Ugh! Ugh!" Then you come in and you're like, "Well, I have a solution for you." But that's the feeling that they're carrying. They actually don't want it. They actually want something else. They want a different tone, a different texture. If you're like, "I see where you're coming from," and you have a tone that is calmer, that's smoother around the edges, and they're like, "Ah, I want that. I want to feel like that." I test this with my nieces and nephews when I go visit them. They have a moment where they're upset, and because I understand that children, children are aware of tone at four-months-old. By the time we acquire language, we've already spent an additional 12 months just understanding tone. Kids don't get the words, but they understand tone at least four months and sometimes even sooner.

So if I want to get through to my nieces and nephews when they have a tantrum, I get to their level and I know that I'm using a tone that is counter to the one that they're whining with, 'cause if I give them that or if I give them this because I'm agitated, all that's going to do is exacerbate the situation. But if I come in a tone that is calming and now I'm in control here, it's very interesting how fast, it's amazing how fast certain things just dissipate because we're speaking in a tonal language. So to answer the question about, what is voice work? Voice work is that it is understanding how to modulate your tone, to be assertive, to deescalate, to move things along, to slow things down, to speed things up. All of that information is in your tone. I'll give you another example.

I was on a call and it was like this, and it was a 15-minute call. The gentleman gets on and he is like, "Oh, I have 15 minutes and we're here, and I want to make sure I can be in this call and so on and so on, and let's just talk about what we're going to talk about, da, da, da, da." So we're going in and he asked me, "So tell me something about voice I wouldn't know." I said, "Well, I can hear the urgency in your voice because the time is limited. I can tell that you're already running to the next thing, and I understand that you're trying to be as mindful of our time, and I appreciate that." He took a moment to sit back and because it was like, "Oh, wow," he didn't recognize that his voice was betraying his mind.

Where you are and where you're going, that can be heard. That's when we can tell when people are with us. We can tell when someone is off somewhere else in a distance while we're having a conversation with them. Their tone will betray where they are, where they're going and where they are, and so you want to be able to create a space. That's what people mean when they say, "I want to have a safe space." It's tonal. If I'm trying to deescalate, if I'm having a problem or an argument with a spouse and I have a tone that's very agitated, and it's pretty much like, "I don't care what you have to say, I'm grated. It's sharp, it's pointed." That tone says we have a problem here. So voice work is being able to masterfully move and control the nervous systems of the people who are within earshot of you.

Chris:

You had said something that on that sales call where the person seemed to be speaking faster or that call, not a sales call, where they're speaking faster in that betrayed their mind, is it betraying their mind or is it reflecting their mind? Because I think people speak fast because they think, "I have a short period of time," they're thinking about their next thing. They're also, like you were saying, they're mindful that you have a 15-minute window and you got to get at as much information as possible so they're rushing, 'cause I feel that sometimes, especially those people who are not super self-aware of their tone of voice and how they're communicating with people that it clearly says what they're really thinking versus what the words that they're using.

If somebody says, "I love you," but they say it in a way that isn't reflective of how they truly feel inside, the people who are paying attention will pick up on that right away. You gave the example of the waiter or waitress where they go through, "Here's what popular," probably what they were told to say, they might even be pushing the special of the day because there might be an incentive for them to do that. But when they turn to you, like an aside, "But between you and me," so the tone already changes. It feels like they're letting you in on a secret or something they don't tell other people.

My personal favorite is this other thing and not enough people know about it. Then you said that's when they have you and you're in. But they can also be using that consciously to manipulate you to think, "This is things that most people don't know about and it's a real insider secret." So it could be used in a lot of different ways. One, it could be used to manipulate, it could be used unintentionally to really communicate what it is that you feel inside or you're just totally unaware and you're just doing what you do. Lots of different ways to do this. So as a person who's trained in this stuff, who's super hyper conscious and aware of it, how can you tell if someone's being genuine or can you when they're using their voice in ways to communicate certain ideas?

Marshall:

There is a saying, and that's a brilliant question because it's the moral dilemma. They say, "You can feign sincerity," and it's true because that is the smallest unit of vocal communication. So there's these stages of amplification, your tone amplifies your silence, and then your voice amplifies your tone in that order, and then your words amplify your voice. So when you're able to get to the core is what makes a great salesman a great salesman. When they say the sign of a great salesman is when they can sell anything. It was always like, "Well, why is that? It's because they're magical?" It's like, "No, it's because they understand what it means to be completely infused with the belief that the product that I have in my hand is the best thing ever."

It doesn't matter what they touch, it matters that in their possession, like when they say, "Sell me the pen," in my possession, this pen becomes valuable. You might give it to somebody else, and like, "Eh, it's just a pen." So the thing that I find interesting is that this kind of control is like giving loaded guns to people. Sometimes a loaded gun is used to protect someone, and sometimes a loaded gun is used to bring harm that was undue. So there's always this weird, I'm pretty like, "Eh," about where and when when I train people because I recognize, I'm like, "Oh, my God, you can really get behind if you understand that what most people think that content which has been been promoted, that content is king."

Well, the king on the chess board is powerful, but then there's the queen, and so maybe tone is queen. But when she moves, when she moves, she moves. She moves the board and she moves people. So when you have mastery over that, that's what makes a great storyteller a great storyteller, because technically, storytellers have to suspend the reality that you're currently living in right now in exchange for a different one and one that is believable, and one that takes you from this place and transports you to another place. So storytelling is in the business world is I guess you could say, well-intentioned deceit because this isn't real yet. It's not real. It's not true, but I'm going to give you a vision of the world that I believe could be, and I want all of you to get behind me. That's where you have the Theranos lady, right?

Chris:

Yeah.

Marshall:

Who was known for her voice. The people would be like, "Oh, her voice was, there was something about her voice." So you see where that led people or anyone that has great charisma that has led people astray. Usually they have these qualities about them that people were drawn to, and so you have to become mindful of who you allow yourself to be drawn to in that regard.

Chris:

The Theranos lady, let's bring that up because she got a lot of money from a lot of people and bought into a vision that was completely, it went against physics. It didn't make sense to anybody. When I watched her TED Talk and then the ensuing documentary films about her, her voice sounds very fake to me. It almost seems like it is an affect that she's applying very consciously, and I wonder why people didn't pick up on that, or maybe you have a different perspective. Can you break some of that down?

Marshall:

You know how certain magic tricks don't work anymore? Like how someone can't sell you a bottle with water in it and say, "This is super nitro juice." No one can do that anymore, right? Because we all figured that one out and we got it. So you can't pull that one over us. I think every generation there is this thing that will go until it doesn't anymore. When Elizabeth Holmes was doing her rounds, she was something exotic to observe. It was like, "Whoa, here's this voice and then here's this idea," and deeper voices are associated with a certain level of confidence and assuredness, and you're like, "Okay, yeah, sure." Once you find out on the other end of it, "Oh man, I got got." There are people who are magicians who watch other magicians and know exactly how they did the trick.

So for someone like you who does this for a living, you're like, "Really? You guys fell for this crap?" But all of those spectators that enjoyed being entertained, they were. There were so many anecdotes about people being drawn to her voice, which let me know that that was doing something. But the documentary comes out, and I don't really think people have leaned in too much into the idea that she had an affect that she was putting on and opening that up, it's almost like that last place where the magicians don't want everyone else to know that there's these things that you can change or manipulate to draw people's attention. If you're doing it for a short period of time like for an investment call where you only have to put that on for an hour at most, two hours, you're not living with it, then you don't really have to pay attention to it.

It's exotic for the moment, but she wouldn't be able to do that twice. Now people will listen to her with a more fine ear. In fact, I believe the Clubhouse started to filter for that as well. All of these social audio apps began to filter, but even still, people were getting scammed on the app. Why? Because for in as long as humans have existed, honesty and deceit have been polar ends of what is required. There are animals that survive and thrive off of lying, giving a different perception of something, and then in exchange for the folly of whoever gets caught, they eat. Then there's other animals that thrive on, "Look, let me show you exactly what I am. I'm a lion. Let me roar. Here I am."

We will always deal with those ebbs and flows. So I don't think there will be a day where you'll be like, "No one will ever be able to pull the wool over my eyes or the eyes of humanity. We'll get more keen, we'll get more fine," but there will always be a new tricks and new puzzles to solve. I think part of us, we had to be predisposed to kind of wanting it. Otherwise, imagine a world where we just looked at everything and was like, "Eh, that's crap. That's BS,". We wouldn't go to the movies anymore 'cause we would be like, "That's not even true." So I think that there's some part of us that wants to be lied to for entertainment purposes, as long as we willingly pay $8.50.

Chris:

Right. I think we want to be lied to in more ways than just in entertainment. My belief is that not knowing is a scary thing, and we don't have the time to understand everything that is in our lives. So we readily make up stories, so we lie to ourselves. That's the first lie. Then we accept the lies that other tell us from government, from religion, from society, we accept all these lies, and just 'cause it makes us feel a little bit safer. So those who are able to tell the better story tend to be more effective liars. I'm using that word loosely here, everybody. I'm not saying everybody's intending to lie, but we tell each other's stories all the time. We told ourselves a story about how the sun revolved around the earth and the earth was the center of the universe or how the earth is flat. We want to believe in these stories because it makes us feel safe.

Greg Gunn:

Time for a quick break, but we'll be right back.

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Greg Gunn:

Welcome back to our conversation.

Chris:

So when it gets to storytelling, you referenced Clubhouse a couple of times here. What makes for a great story from a voice point of view, 'cause you talked about it intellectually. I'd love to have some examples from you so that we can make it super tangible. Maybe you can tell us a story in a couple of different ways or to tell us what you're doing while you're doing it-

Marshall:

Okay.

Chris:

... so that we can understand, "Oh, that's what's happening."

Marshall:

Okay, so here's the thing. I think that in this particular segment, it'll be better if you do this. So Chris, I want you to think about the last great meal that you had where you were like, "Man, this was awesome." Okay? All right, so you have that image in your mind. Now, I want you to share something that within reason that you're okay with that has been challenging in the last month, but I want you to think about this wonderful meal as you share this story.

Chris:

Oh, this is a tricky one. The tables have turned, ladies and gentlemen. Okay, I'll be super vulnerable and real with you. I'll just tell you 'cause I was trying to look for another story that didn't involve such a personal thing, but I'll tell you. Okay, so I'm going to tell you the story, but I'm going to think about the savory meal. One of the most difficult things I have that I'm trying to work out is learning how to be on the same wavelength as my wife. I think we secretly jockey for control, and so when one of us concedes, it's perfectly harmonious. When we have opposing ideas of control, what it might look like, that's where the tension starts to bubble up. I have to learn how to understand, to be able to control my reaction and my tone in situations like that so it doesn't drive my wife into a place where she's questioning herself and her own opinions. That's a real challenge.

Marshall:

Well, one, I appreciate that. That's honest.

Chris:

Right.

Marshall:

That is vulnerable, and it's challenging 'cause the juxtaposition is coming and then we can discuss what we're doing. I want you to think about the most disgusting, gross thing, you don't want to touch it, you don't want it near you don't want none of it. I don't want you to tell this story because I don't want you to sully how you just told it, but I want you to examine how your body feels right now thinking about that.

Chris:

So you want me to tell you how my body feels just thinking about that thought?

Marshall:

Mm-hmm. Yeah, that like [inaudible 00:37:02]

Chris:

I could taste it in my mouth almost like my saliva tastes different. I feel like my skin is crawling a little bit thinking about this thing. I want to stay clear, six feet away from this thing, and it's super creepy. It is a creature, so when I see one of these insects crawling around the house, I want to grab a tool or something and get rid of it as fast as possible.

Marshall:

There you go. Let's just go back to that other mindset just to wash that image. So what's happening, the part of the brain that looks at parasites, and crosstalks, it's not directly like 100% connected to every node, but it crosstalks to the place where we make moral judgment. The word in Spanish when you like something, it's me gusta, which comes from the Latin gustar, which means to taste, which also lends itself to the English word gestation, which is what we eat. We say things like, "Oh, that left the bad taste in my mouth" or, "We sweeten the deal." Now, a lot of times when we think about flavor and taste, we think about putting things in our mouths, but we actually, the nose plays a huge role in flavor perception. Anyone who lost their of smell also probably felt how boring life could be.

So what happens when you don't want to touch something, you don't want to look at it, you don't want it near you, the body starts to do all sorts of things to protect you. It shuts off the pathways to your airway so you breathe a lot more conservatively. It creates a certain muscular tension to prepare you to make your body something, a destroyer. It's like, "I need to get rid of this problem," and all of that. Imagine if you apply that energy to the story you just told me, it would've had a whole different affect 'cause your mind would be associating the problem with this thing that you don't want to look at and you don't want near you. The body is always doing this best job to keep us alive and our thinking, and this is where I'd like to invite a Venn diagram of imagination, where the middle of that Venn diagram is the word is.

Chris:

Right.

Marshall:

This is that. I think about this wonderful meal that I had, and I think about my wife, and I think about the conflicts that we have. I think these are the things that I could do to draw closer to this image that I have in my mind because I want to be closer to the image that I have in my mind. I don't want to run away from it. I don't want to avoid it. I want to be right here. But if I don't want to be with this image that's in my mind, my tone is going to betray how I feel about the thing. So when we use the imagination, which has been proven fMRI skins, we can imagine this auditory imagery. There's imagery in the nasal area. You can imagine certain smells. That's not like just like, "Oh, it's in your head." It's like, no, you can conjure up these images and they have an effect on how you're perceiving things, and we've Venn diagram all the time. It's the reason why two people can look at the same thing and have totally different polarizing views.

Vanilla or chocolate, you'll get into a fight like, "No vanilla's better." "No chocolate's better." What are you talking about? Vanilla's da, da, da," and nothing's changed about chocolate and vanilla besides whether or not your ice cream has melted because you're too busy arguing about it. But the view and the point of view is embodied. So one of the things I like to work on and very quickly is in a module I just call it "Good Food, but you can use good food really to do anything. It's not just about food. We use the word taste to describe whether we like something or not, taste in music, taste in food, taste in clothing, so there's this strong connection between that system. In fact, there was a small study in the '60s, I've done a lot of weird research and found all these, it's like one paper that came out and they just didn't. But there were these doctors that they had hookups to this gentleman's esophagus. They noticed that when they set things that were displeasing that the esophagus would spasm, and they were like, "Nah, I don't know."

So they were playing this game of walking by and just saying stuff that would just suck around this person and the esophagus would spasm. So there's this connection to the desire to eat. Even when people are emotional, what's one of the first things they stop doing? Stop eating. So there's a connection between and/or people that also when they're emotional, they eat a lot to get certain things. So there's this connection between how we feel and what we choose to ingest and if/or choose to reject. So this is a very straightforward way to within one context. It's like the menu. "I like that meal there. That was a really good experience," versus "Yeah, mm-mm, I wouldn't eat that. I wouldn't eat that. I wouldn't eat that." My tone is saying, "I wouldn't put it near me. You shouldn't either." Right? Orf, "I'll have what he's having." There's that scene from that film where I'm trying to remember what the young lady's having a great time at the other table and the person goes, "Yeah, whenever that is, give it to me."

Chris:

That's like When Harry Met Sally?"

Marshall:

Absolutely.

Chris:

Yeah.

Marshall:

Right. What was your feeling, though? 'Cause I know that we spoke to it, but I'm curious on, we saw how it felt on one end when you spoke about just describing the feelings, but when you spoke about it the first time, what did you notice for yourself when you were telling the story the first time?

Chris:

It's very hard to hold two opposing thoughts. You told me to capture in my mind the last great meal and think about that and whatever it did for you from a food savory census, and then to talk about something that's an ongoing thing that my wife and I struggle with. So that's a point of frustration. Of course, she thinks, "Well, I'm an idiot. I can't get it," and I think, "She's an idiot and she can't get it." So we're going to have to just work through this for the rest of our lives, I think. So it's hard to hold two opposing thoughts.

Marshall:

Absolutely.

Chris:

So I was trying to continually think about that savory meal while I'm describing this thing, and I saw that it affected the way that I chose the words that I chose. I realized I would not use this word normally, but I was bubbling up, so that's like a cooking visual thing. I imagine a pot boiling or something. So holding a feeling from a different experience and translating it to a story to tell changed the story and changed the way I thought about it.

Marshall:

What if I were to suggest to you that we most of the time are holding layers of thinking, that every conversation is like in Photoshop, you have layers. Depending on what you overlay or blend, determines the overall output of the final image. Sometimes what becomes challenging for us is that we're used to a certain image overlay. Let's say we have three layers to a picture in this, that third layer usually is that. It's like, and then someone says, "No, take this image and put that there." It's like, "Whoa, whoa. I'm used to this image being there. That's the image, that's the context with which I'm used to describing or talking about this thing." When we shift the image, it's a shift of context, and that can be a bit jarring when we have repetitions with a certain conversational dialogue.

It's like you train a lot of people to get over the fear of asking for money because the context with which when it gets to the ask part, "How much will this cost?" The image that they have that's there, that's stuck is, "I'm not good enough. I shouldn't be asking. It may be too much. They may not have it, dit, dit, dit, dit, dit, dit, dit." In all of those contexts, they come to you because they trust you, because they've seen it. You've broken that context 50 ways to Sunday, and you have no fear, and they want to be able to put that image in that spot.

So when they use the words, "It costs X," there isn't a sign of shirking, there isn't a sign of fear, there isn't a sign of resistance or reluctance. Sometimes it takes a little while to break that context. If it was just, "Watch one of my videos and everything will change," they wouldn't keep coming back, but it takes its time. It takes its time to cook the new context and bake it into your experience. So yes, that feeling was like, "Whoa." However, even noticing any subtle change in difference is enough to go, "Wait a minute. What's that? Maybe I can lean into that more." Then it becomes just repetition like everything else that we've done and everything else that you've done.

Chris:

Marshall, can you make it real tangible? 'Cause now you're entering into a space where I think there's going to be a lot of interest here where people do have an unhealthy relationship with money. They're afraid of it. They're afraid to talk about it. They think it's bad social manners. It's culturally taboo to talk about money. It is a sign of self-importance for some people. It's a fear of rejection for others where if I say a number bigger than I think, then they're going to say no and I can't handle the rejections 'cause it's going to crush my soul.

So if I'm imagining a taste, it's probably not a good taste. It's probably not a good physical reaction, a memory or an emotion they're holding in. So can you make it real tangible? You're right, obviously I've talked about it so many different ways, but it takes multiple exposures to a concept for someone to really embody and to be able to do on their own. So maybe we can add to that repertoire of tools by giving them something to do or think about so that the money conversation isn't as uncomfortable as it might be for them today.

Marshall:

Copy that. So there's something in neuroscience called affordances, and affordances is the fancy word for anything that you can do with your hands, so that's anything. If I have a glass of water on the table an affordance is that I can reach for, grab it and drink it, I can do that. If my wallet is on the table, if my keys are hanging up, my affordances are I can grab those keys. I can move them, I can remove them and put them in my pocket. I can afford to do that. When you're in a store for an expensive object, the affordance is I have to be able to exchange a certain amount of money to be able to touch it. If I buy it, I can touch it. So what is the affordance? How can you feel that you can afford the experience of receiving the funds? That's actually the wrong way to look at it. The way that we are looking at it is that you have this thing in your possession.

The word sale actually comes from reluctant. When someone sells something, they're not eager to give it up. They're not in a rush. They actually really want it, but they're willing to give it to you for a price. It's a different perspective. I want my time actually, because what I'm giving up in exchange for your money is time control. I will be beholden to whatever it is that you are asking of me, and I actually want that. I want to hold it. The curiosity is whether or not they can afford to have that from you. There's two things that we can look at here when it comes to lean into the food metaphor here, McDonald's. McDonald's is selling you a burger for two bucks. So it's excitement in neon and, "Bing, bing, bing, bing, bang, bang, bang, ba, bong, buy," and they're just getting people rolling in and out. If you go to some place like a Caviar Russe or something, it's a very expensive restaurant.

It's a dining experience where there's a certain understanding that what has been prepared has been prepared well, and that in order to have this experience, you're going to have to pay for it. So if we look at the Venn diagram perspective and lean into it. If you know for a fact that what it is that you have and then in your body, what it takes for you to prepare it, what it takes for you to plate it, to put it down, what it takes for you to design it, what it takes for you to map it out, you're very well aware of this experience and you are offering it to the other person. I want everyone to take a moment really quickly to do this exercise. I want you to just gently extend your hand as if you are just offering someone something that they can take or not. I want you to feel what that feels like. Here's this object, this item that you are unveiling, that you are showing, and it is in your hand.

I want you to feel it, and I want you to feel in this item, it's like the person can take it or not, but if they do, there's a price. I want you to lean into what that feels like. What does that feel like? Alternatively, take that hand back. I want you to put your hand down, but in your mind's eye, I want you to feel like that person needs to take it. What does that feel like? I'm not even trying to change my affect at all, but just this gesture, just, "I need you to take this from me," changes my whole being. It makes it sound like I'm pushing the item on the person. It makes me feel like, "Why am I so eager to get rid of this thing? It must not be valuable if you're willing to get rid of it so easily. Your time must not be so valuable if you're willing to get rid of it so easily." This is an embodied feeling.

When we give of ourselves, when we offer ourselves over, when we open our hand, what is the intent? Because that will shape the tone with which it is heard from the other person. When you are there, "You know, you can have this or you won't. It's okay, I'll put it right back in my pocket 'cause I'd rather it stay with me." That thing that we're talking about here is our time. Here's my time, energy, and effort, and I would prefer it stay with me and my family and the people I care about. I'd rather watch Netflix. I'd rather play video game, I'd rather do something else. But for a fee, I'm willing to let you have this. It's no longer about your affordances, it's about theirs. Same thing with a very expensive meal. Think about how it's brought to you at a nice restaurant, how things are laid down, how things are put down versus how a bag is handed to you at Chick-fil-A. "Here you go, boom, thank you for your 14 bucks."

Keep them moving. Now, if you can do that at scale because you have a product that's an impulse buy, fine. But most of the clients that I'm imagining that you're talking to and the people that listen to you are people who want to have long relationships with the people that they're working with. 20,000, 30,000, 40,000, 50,000, 100,000, $200,000 relationships are usually a little longer than, "Thanks. Here you go. Take your bag." So it becomes an embodiment practice of how you value the physical form that you bring, 'cause the final product is a product of your physicality. It's not just the final product. Most people who are very proud of what they've made, think of a chef or a sculptor or a designer that knows what they're doing and then understands the typography, understands why they put this weighted thing here in the essence of feeling like, "Ah, this is, mm."

If you value it, if you it, that becomes apparent immediately when you try to exchange it. When you talk about something, think about a thing or an object that you have that is your most prized possession. In fact, if you want to try this exercise of imagining it, right? Think about something you would never give away, something that is unsellable, like, "I wouldn't, I wouldn't, not a day." Think about what it means to you. Think how it feels to talk about it, to remember it, because your body, the embodiment, your affordances, the way that you would touch it, the way that you would hold it or something of value, you just let them see it like a baseball card or something like that. You're like, "Yo, this is a Michael Jordan rookie card from whatever." The way you would want people to handle it like, "This is precious cargo."

When we are able to handle our offerings with that same fragility, that same value, and when I say fragility, I don't mean ... 'Cause people might make mistake me for that, saying like, "Oh, you be fragile." It's like, no, you treat your time and you treat your energy like it is fragile. You treat your relationships like they're fragile. When people don't care, they just bust through your house, kick things over, just whatever. "We're just making space." When you do that, the people, they feel that and they don't like it, unless you're playing football, then you just knock them all over the place. But when you're exchanging meaningfully the embodiment of how something is treated, it's not separate from what's happening up here. So that would be my suggestion. I think to the point is that something you do very well.

You're like, "This is valuable and I know it's valuable, and if you want it, you can have it for this fee. If you don't, that's fine. I know other people that you can probably go to if I'm not the one for you." That comes across every single time I watch you examine someone who wants to learn how to close, or they figure out what the da, da, da, it's the same energy. People say, "Oh, know your worth," and that becomes very abstract and ethereal when you leave it in the brain to abstract. But when you think about what you're going to do with your hands and with your body and your physical form, and you're like, "If I valued this vessel, how would I handle things?" Then it's no longer abstract and in your mind, but now it's in your body. Then it's everything that you touch, the way that you put your mark on it will be clear.

Chris:

I like that approach. It's a different one than the one that I try and help people with, so it's adding some ammunition to the arsenal, things that I can use to help people. So your approach seems to be very much physical, psychological, and feeling based. So once you're able to associate a positive feeling or experience, and you talk a lot about hands and body, then you can see it in a different light, perhaps the body will tell the mind how to think and how to speak and the word to choose. So I quite like that. That was really cool. Thank you. When you say to think about something that's not sellable, what comes to your mind when you say, "I have something I would never sell to anybody?"

Marshall:

This is going to be, I guess, a bit on the ethereal side because from very young, I've had to learn how to let go of things I've valued for life's circumstantial reasons. So I don't have a tangible item that I can say, "This does not qualify." But if I were to give it a moment, it's the place where I don't know what people mean when they say they sell their soul. But I think I've gotten to a place where I recognize that isn't for sale and it's intangible, which I don't like because there's a part of my mind that always wants to be rooted in, Because to be fair, Chris, I don't have many physical possessions where I'm like, "Oh no, heir looms."

The only things that I have that are fragile is I've collected a lot of trust from people, people talk to me about things and they tell me things, and I have a lot of stories in here. People that felt like my ear was the ear to hear a thing. I think this part of my personality base and probably what makes this work work for me, is in that the fragility of relationships, those are the things that I ... It's like people, I won't trade one relationship for another. They're like, "Oh," which makes navigating business very interesting because you have all these different vectors and angles and people are willing to betray others all the time to get to the coins. So that would be the thing, which is, I guess it's not brick-and- mortar, but I know what it is.

Chris:

Right. The reason why I asked you that question is 'cause I think I netted out the same place where you do. I have things, but things are just that, they're replaceable. I'm not an overly sentimental person. Like you said, you don't have any heirlooms or something that's not replaceable, 'cause I even think about pictures of my children, but they're digital, so they exist somewhere if I needed to pull them down. It's the kind of world that we live in. I think it goes to this whole trend that we live in a increasingly dematerialized culture where we pay more for less physical things. We pay for experiences, and the iPhone is a perfect example of how many different devices and physical things that replaced from the map books that we used to carry in our car. You're old enough to know-

Marshall:

Yes. Yes.

Chris:

That was the way you could navigate Los Angeles, otherwise you're screwed, to the camera, to an appointment book, just so many different things, a daily planner. So it is increasingly becoming more difficult to come up with a physical thing that you can hold in your mind and hold it in your imagination as something. But it was curious how you answered that question. I've enjoyed this conversation with you. If people want to dig deeper, do some voice work, and they're turned on by this physicality, this embodiment that you have been talking about, how did they find out more about you and where can they go?

Marshall:

All right, now, so mindbodyspeak.com, M-I-N-D B-O-D-Y Speak, S-P-E-A-K.com. You can get up before and after and hit me in the inbox.

Chris:

Where can they find you on social?

Marshall:

Marshall Davis Jones on Instagram, Marshall Davis Jones on LinkedIn, and those two things. I would need your course direction on massive omnipresence on all of these channels, Chris, 'cause you got it on. You here, you're there, you're everywhere.

Chris:

The illusion of being everywhere at the same time, forever and always. Yeah. Marshall, it was a pleasure talking to you, and I appreciate your time. I hope everyone that's watching or listening to this finds value and they dig deeper into your content. I think mindbodyspeak.com, right?

Marshall:

Mm-hmm.

Chris:

Is that correct URL? Mindbodyspeak.com is the perfect URL for what it is that you do? I can't believe you got that, but it's perfect. It says everything. It's super easy to remember too, 'cause everything that we've been doing, all the exercises, your stories are about your mind, your body, and how you use your voice and how you communicate with the world, so thank you.

Marshall:

Absolutely. Thank you. I am Marshall Davis Jones, and you are listening to The Futur.

Greg Gunn:

Thanks for joining us this time. If you haven't already, subscribe to our show on your favorite podcasting app and get a new insightful episode from us every week. The Futur Podcast is hosted by Chris Do and produced by me, Greg Gunn. Thank you to Anthony Barro for editing and mixing this episode, and thank you to Adam Sandborne for our intro music. If you enjoyed this episode, then do us a favor by rating and reviewing our show on Apple Podcasts. It'll help us grow the show and make future episodes that much better. Have a question for Chris or me? Head over to thefutur.com/heychris and ask away. We read every submission and we just might answer yours in a later episode. If you'd like to support the show and invest in yourself while you're at it, visit thefutur.com. You'll find video courses, digital products and a bunch of helpful resources about design and creative business. Thanks again for listening, and we'll see you next time.

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