Welcome to this bonus episode of Punk Rock HR. My guest today is Eric Barker. He’s the bestselling author of the new book Plays Well With Others: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Relationships Is (Mostly) Wrong. Eric is a repeat guest and came on the show in 2018 to talk about his book and amazing newsletter called Barking Up the Wrong Tree, where he tells us why everything we know about success in leadership and life is mostly wrong.
Eric has blogged for years about human behavior and self-improvement science. In his first book, he tested the maxims of success that we all grew up with, like “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know”. Now in his new book, Eric takes the same approach, but this time focusing on relationships. He wants people to question whether love does conquer all and if a friend in need is a friend indeed. After all, since the pandemic began, relationships have taken a hit.
Eric debunks the myths around marriage, loneliness, relationships and even work. It is always fun talking to Eric, and if you want to learn more about the research he is doing, grab his new book Plays Well With Others, which is available everywhere books are sold.
Punk Rock HR is proudly underwritten by The Starr Conspiracy. The Starr Conspiracy is a B2B marketing agency for innovative brands creating the future of workplace solutions. For more information, head over to thestarrconspiracy.com.
Loneliness: The Epidemic
Loneliness is something that we get wrong. Eric talks about the research of John Cacioppo, who found that loneliness isn’t about the amount of time you spend with people but about the quality of your connections with those around you.
“Loneliness is how you feel about your relationships — just being proximate to people, if we don’t feel a connection with them, that’s really not very nourishing,” Eric says. “Loneliness is correlated with every negative health metric you can imagine.” Loneliness is subjective, based on how we feel about our relationships.
And in today’s world, loneliness is an epidemic that deserves extra attention. Eric shares that, long before the pandemic and continuing till the present day, some of the social connections we had with people have been displaced by parasocial relationships.
“There’s a lot of research that during the 20th century, we used to hear about bowling leagues and the Elks lodge, and people used to be more religious. And there were all of these things that used to tie people together and add meaning to their life and create community. And basically, a lot of those are gone now,” Eric says.
It all started with television. Eric explains that our TVs became these pseudo-relationships
that began to pull us away from communal relationships and activities. With the evolution of technology, we now deal with social media platforms that effectively replace face-to-face contact.
Now social media isn’t evil, because it has many positive aspects, but we need to be vigilant when using it. “The amount of time we spend on social media ends up coming out of the buddy budget. It ends up coming out of the time that we do spend in actual face-to-face relationships or community activities,” he says. “So we’re often cannibalizing our actual face-to-face and group activities with social media. So we just need to be careful about how we use it.”
Handling Difficult Issues Better
We get many things wrong in life, but more often than not, we get a lot wrong about relationships, specifically romantic relationships. It’s hard at times to express our emotions, but Eric found that bottling up feelings for the sake of peace does more harm than good.
“The big issue is people think that if we get into this serious issue, we’re going to fight, and if we fight, we’re going to get divorced, so I better not bring it up,” he explains. “And the truth is, that’s the wrong way to go, because yelling and screaming really only leads to divorce 40% of the time. What more often leads to divorce is people bottling up and people not expressing their emotions.”
Simply relying on body language is overrated—especially when it comes to a romantic partner. In research done by Nicholas Epley at the University of Chicago, about two-thirds of the time when you think you know your spouse, you’re wrong.
“There’s a pretty low ceiling on how much better we can get at reading people. We need to ask them. Or another strategy is, instead of trying to improve our reading skills, we need to make them more readable. Most often when we’re able to read people accurately, it’s because they are readable people,” Eric shares.
Develop Lasting Relationships
First dates can be nerve-wracking. Despite what some self-proclaimed “love coaches” may say, one-on-one activities like coffee aren’t the greatest way to get to know someone. Eric found that doing an activity or being around other people can help you get more context and improve your readability.
“Both first dates, but also for long-term marriages, doing stuff that is exciting and fun. Putting yourself in a context that already provides the excitement, the fun, the energy, this is really powerful,” he says. These activities should continue throughout the relationship.
Eric shares that there are many times in which marriages will go through a phenomenon known as marital entropy. It’s when the relational energy dies down for some reason or the other. It’s not something that we can treat with a simple activity, and we might not be able to recreate the feeling of new love, but Eric believes that we can leverage our surroundings to rekindle our connections.
Eric cites research comparing date nights with exciting activities versus those with pleasant activities. “In psychology, they call it emotional contagion,” he says. “The fact that the energy around you, the emotions around you, you are going to associate them with whoever’s nearby. And so that can help to revitalize and keep a marriage going instead of just Netflix and pizza again.”
[bctt tweet=”‘The big issue is people think that, if we get into this serious issue, we’re going to fight and if we fight, we’re going to get divorced, so I better not bring it up.’ ~ @bakadesuyo. Tune in to the latest episode of #PunkRockHR to learn more!” via=”no”]
People in This Episode
- Eric Barker: Website, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, ”Plays Well with Others: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Relationships Is (Mostly) Wrong”
Full Transcript
Laurie Ruettimann:
This episode of Punk Rock HR is sponsored by the Starr Conspiracy. The Starr Conspiracy is the B2B marketing agency for innovative brands, creating the future of workplace solutions. For more information, head on over to thestarrconspiracy.com.
Hey everybody. I’m Laurie Ruettimann. Welcome back to a bonus episode of Punk Rock HR. My guest today is Eric Barker. He’s the bestselling author of the new book “Plays Well with Others: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Relationships Is (Mostly) Wrong.” Eric’s a repeat guest on the podcast. He came on in 2018, because I asked him to talk about his ecosystem, his book, his amazing newsletter called Barking up the Wrong Tree, where he really tells us how everything we know about success in leadership and life is mostly wrong.
So he came on the podcast and we were kicking things off, and I thanked him for coming on Let’s Fix Work. And he’s like, “Yeah, by the way, nobody wants to fix work.” So true, so accurate. And that’s why I had to have him on again, to talk about his new book “Plays Well With Others.” And he really debunks a lot of myths out there, about marriage and loneliness and relationships, and even about work. I can’t wait for you to hear this conversation. It’s so fun, I just love this guy. And if you get a chance, go out and grab his book “Plays Well With Others.” It’s out everywhere books are sold on May 10.
Eric, how you doing?
Eric Barker:
Pretty good.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Yeah. A little busy these days?
Eric Barker:
Yes. Book launches are like that.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Well, why don’t you tell everybody who you are and what you’re all about?
Eric Barker:
Yeah, Basically I’ve been blogging for geez, 13 years now about the science of human behavior and self-improvement. And my first book, “Barking Up the Wrong Tree,” was all about, basically, stress-testing the maxims of success that we all grew up with, like nice guys finish last, and it’s not what you know, it’s who you know, and just looking at the science, seeing if those things are true or not. Now my new book, “Plays Well With Others” takes the same approach, stress-testing the maxims, but this time about relationships. So does love conquer all? Is a friend in need a friend indeed? And looking at the research, because I think a lot of relationship books tell us what we want to hear. And I think now, especially pandemic, post-pandemic, relationships have taken a hit, so we need the real facts.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Well, Eric, let’s talk about what’s in the book and let’s start off with what we get wrong about loneliness, because I think what we think about loneliness informs what we think about relationships. So what do we get wrong about that?
Eric Barker:
Loneliness we get a lot wrong about. And I was shocked by what I found. Basically, John Cacioppo is the researcher who’s done the most work here. And basically, he found that people who are lonely, and people who are not lonely, both spend about the same amount of time with other people.
Laurie Ruettimann:
God, I was really surprised by that.
Eric Barker:
Yeah, it’s pretty shocking. And what it really comes down to is — that sounds crazy. But when you think about it, we’ve all felt lonely in a crowd. Loneliness is how you feel about your relationships — just being proximate to people, if we don’t feel a connection with them, that’s really not very nourishing. Loneliness is correlated with every negative health metric you can imagine. Whereas solitude is actually a positive, and ostensibly they’re the same thing, but Vivek Murthy, who’s the surgeon general of the United States, has said that, “Solitude is protective. Solitude is a positive.” And it’s really that issue of, loneliness is a subjective experience. It’s how we feel about our relationships. If we feel like people care about us, they’re there for us, but we’re traveling, we’re on a trip, we don’t feel lonely. We might miss them, but we don’t feel lonely, because we feel like we’re a part of something. And loneliness isn’t just having people proximate, it’s feeling like you are really deeply connected to them.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Yeah. Any insights on why we have this so-called loneliness epidemic? I would imagine it’s true, because I hear it on the news from Lester Holt, right? What’s causing it?
Eric Barker:
I mean, it is that issue of connection and so much so we don’t have the connections we used to. There’s a lot of research that during the 20th century, we used to hear about bowling leagues and the Elk lodge, and people used to be more religious. And there were all of these things that used to tie people together and add meaning in their life and create community. And basically, a lot of those are gone now. Robert Putnam at Harvard did a lot of this research, that basically we started having parasocial relationships. And the main problem there was caused by TV, was that TV became this pseudo-relationship, this parasocial relationship, and that led to the decline of a lot of these communal activities in the 20th century.
But now in the 21st century, where you have social media, which is again, replacing face-to-face contact, replacing these communal activities. And I don’t want to jump on the bandwagon that social media’s evil. It can be positive, it can help. The issue is that in the end, you’re probably not going to reduce your amount of sleep because of social media. You’re probably not going to reduce the amount of time you work. But the amount of time we spend on social media ends up coming out of the buddy budget. It ends up coming out of the time that we do spend in actual face-to-face relationships or community activities. So we’re often cannibalizing our actual face-to-face and group activities with social media. So we just need to be careful about how we use it.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Yeah, that makes sense to me. As you were talking, I was thinking about how TV has kind of come around and become a communal effort in a really weird way. During the pandemic, I felt connected to friends and colleagues, because we were watching “Raised by Wolves” and shows on Apple. And just recently, “Severance” was a community event in my life. So do you have any thoughts on the changing nature of TV?
Eric Barker:
Absolutely. I mean, like I said, those parasocial relationships are powerful, and in the 20th century TV came to replace a lot of those seemingly antiquated group activities. And what was really interesting from the research, is that in 2008, WGA, the Writers Guild, had a strike, and some people may remember a lot of shows went on hiatus, couldn’t produce new episodes, the writers weren’t writing. And researchers looked at this and surveyed people. And the experience of having their favorite shows not be on the air was analogous to a breakup. It wasn’t just, “Oh my show isn’t there.” It felt like people were deprived of their friends. And so emotionally we are invested in this, but in many ways, television and social media can sort of be like the empty calories of junk food versus a sumptuous meal. So we just have to make sure that we’re not letting the parasocial relationships of TV and social media completely overtake our actual social lives.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Yeah, that makes sense to me. I mean, when it’s positive, it can be like a sticky glue that keeps people together. Talking about ideas are shared values, right? I mean, that’s what’s going on in my community around “Severance” on Apple TV. But when you don’t have much else, and you don’t have access to it or you run out of shows to watch, that can be depressing. OK, well, we get a lot wrong about relationships, including, we get some stuff wrong about fighting. So can we talk about that?
Eric Barker:
Yeah. Specifically I get into it where it’s probably most relevant for people, which is love relationships. The big issue is people think that, if we get into this serious issue, we’re going to fight and if we fight, we’re going to get divorced, so I better not bring it up. And the truth is, that’s the wrong way to go, because yelling and screaming really only leads to divorce 40% of the time. What more often leads to divorce is people bottling up, and people not expressing their emotions. John Gottman, who’s probably the leading researcher on love and marriage, he even had a great quote where he was like, “Hey, please do that immediately.”
Laurie Ruettimann:
Yeah. I’ve been married for 20 years and I think anybody who’s been married for more than a hot minute knows John Gottman and also, that’s absolutely true. It’s funny that we’re talking about, don’t keep your emotions bottled up and actually express them. One of the things you found is that body language is overrated, and we need to hear people’s voices.
Eric Barker:
Yeah. I mean, it’s basically, if we can hear someone, but we can’t see them, empathic accuracy only drops off about 4%. But if we can see someone and can’t hear them, empathic accuracy drops off 54%. So we’re not getting nearly as much from — I mean, we do intuitively pick up some things from body language, but not nearly as much as voice. And when we try to leverage it deliberately, it’s generally not all that helpful, we can go in the wrong direction. Because if somebody’s shivering, you don’t know if they’re nervous or if they’re cold, you can’t read their mind. And especially, when dealing with strangers, if you don’t have a baseline, if you don’t know that them drumming their fingers is a nervous habit and actually doesn’t mean they’re bored, you’re going to misinterpret it.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Well, I wanted to wrap this in a bow, because I think so many people think that they can just look at their spouse and see how they’re feeling. And they know, they don’t have to have a fight, they could just look at their husband and know, “Oh, he’s pissed off.” And maybe they can, but it’s actually that conversation that brings you to greater clarity, right? You’re expanding the pool of understanding, as Crucial Conversations explains it, and getting meaning, but from someone’s voice, I was fascinated by that.
Eric Barker:
Well, when you really need to ask people what they’re thinking, because Nicholas Epley did research at University of Chicago and found that with strangers, we can accurately read their thoughts and feelings 20% of the time. With friends, it hits 30%, and with married couples, it hits 35%. So literally, two-thirds of the time, when you think you know what your spouse is thinking, you’re wrong. And the truth is, there are some things we can do to improve that a little bit, like being motivated. Actually feeling like, “Hey, there’s some loss or gain here if I could get this right.” But the truth is, there’s a pretty low ceiling on how much better we can get at reading people. We need to ask them. Or another strategy is, instead of trying to improve our reading skills, we need to make them more readable. Most often, when we’re able to read people accurately it’s because they are readable people. If somebody has a Botox-level poker face, you’re just not getting much. So getting them to send a stronger signal, that’s what is actually much more effective at improving our reading skills.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Yeah, but how do you do that? How do you make someone readable? Because I’m going to need to know the answer to that.
Eric Barker:
I mean, first and foremost is context. If you’re going to be meeting with someone, if you choose to meet over coffee, then there’s just not a lot of context that’s going to be upping their readability. But let’s say you were to play a sport, if you were to play basketball together, you would see them making decisions, you would see them making choices, you would see whether they cheat or not. You’d see how much they participate, how much they share. You’re going to get a lot more information in that context.
Think about the context — because other people, that’s another context. So if you only dealt with someone in the presence of their boss, would you feel like you were getting a 100% accurate read on them? It’s like if you only deal with someone in front of their spouse, versus if you get people in situations with other people who are asking questions, other people who they don’t feel the need to perhaps censor themselves. And beyond that, we can talk about slightly more controversial subjects. We can do things that get people emotionally invested. We can see how they react when something actually probes them a little bit versus talking about the weather.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Well, I haven’t been on a date in 25 years and I don’t intend to, by the way, never again, you’re just going to — even, if anything happens, I’m done. I feel that way. But so many people go on a first date, and they go out and get coffee or they go and do something in a solitary way. And from what I’m hearing from you, that’s not the greatest way to really get to know someone. Like, go do an activity, go explore, be around other people and get some context, so you can truly read them. Am I guessing right about dating here?
Eric Barker:
You’re absolutely right about dating. But the funny thing is, you’re actually right about marriage as well, and that is that for first dates —
Laurie Ruettimann:
Well, wait, of course, I’m right about marriage. I’m just going to say that.
Eric Barker:
I’m getting an email from your spouse here. He’s saying —
Laurie Ruettimann:
Ah, yeah.
Eric Barker:
No, it’s for both first dates, but also for long-term marriages, doing stuff that is exciting and fun. Putting yourself in a context that already provides the excitement, the fun, the energy, this is really powerful. Not just on first dates, it’s a great idea on first dates. But for marriages, there’s this phenomenon, I’ll call it marital entropy, where there’s regression to the mean, there’s energy dies down. And the best way to treat that, because we can’t just turn it on, we can’t just create that feeling of new love that we had before, but we can leverage our surroundings. And there’s research basically where they compared couples who went on exciting date nights versus pleasant date nights. And exciting ones, adrenaline makes the heart grow fonder. To go roller coasters, horseback riding, to do fun stuff, that energy you basically — In psychology, they call it emotional contagion. The fact that the energy around you, the emotions around you, you are going to associate them with whoever’s nearby. And so that can help to revitalize and keep a marriage going instead of just Netflix and pizza again.
Laurie Ruettimann:
I know so many couples who have children and have been married for an extended period of time, and their kids move out, and they don’t have anything in common, right? Or they don’t know what they have in common. And many of them become addicted to traveling, and they just go places, right? But I often think, and I suspect this is true talking about entropy, that they’re just taking their lives that they live in Raleigh, North Carolina, or Chicago, Illinois, and just moving it to Paris, right? They’re not doing those exciting things. So were you surprised by that research around bringing that excitement and that adrenaline into a relationship? Because it makes sense, but it’s not like anybody’s talking about this, Eric.
Eric Barker:
No, they’re not. Maybe that’s why we have a 40% divorce rate.
Laurie Ruettimann:
For sure. And maybe this is why you’re going to be the new Doctor Phil.
Eric Barker: We’ll see about that, but I don’t know.
Laurie Ruettimann:
You couldn’t do worse than Doctor Phil, that’s for sure. Well, I love it, so what else are we getting wrong about marriage? Because I’m taking notes, man.
Eric Barker:
I mean, Gottman found that there are four key things that really strongly lead to divorce. He calls him his four horsemen. And that’s criticism, defensiveness, contempt, and stonewalling. And basically, complaining is fine for marriage, it’s actually good, it helps raise issues. But criticism is when you make it personal. That’s when you didn’t take the trash out, and you didn’t take the trash out, because you’re an awful person. That is really bad. As well, stonewalling is when you emotionally shut down. So it’s when you just tune out, when you stop listening to your partner when they’re angry. Defensiveness is when you don’t hear them out, they attack you and you attack right back, and it just escalates. And contempt is when you start to see your partner on a lower plane than you are, that their thoughts and feelings aren’t as important as yours.
Gottman’s four horsemen are predictive of divorce over 80% of the time. And that’s really important to keep in mind, that you’re not doing these four things. But the interesting thing is, even with the four horsemen, marriages can be happy and stable as long as couples repair, as long as couples take the time in the midst of an argument to show some compassion, tell a joke, hold their hand, to just not turn it into an all-out war. The other key thing is that Gottman found that we often focus on the negative. Well, if we can just improve the negative, everything will be fine. But I have a not-negative relationship with 99% of this planet, because I don’t know them and they don’t know me. Neutral is not love.
And that’s what Gottman found. Is that, basically, it’s not so much the negative it’s that we need to increase the positive. We need a five-to-one positive ratio, five positives for every negative. And Shelly Gable who did research at UCSB found that the positive and how we celebrate it can actually be more important than the negative. We all know couples who bicker back and forth, who are still pretty happy. And that’s just because with all the negative, they’re still outpacing that with a significant amount of positive feelings in their relationship.
Laurie Ruettimann:
It’s so funny that we’re talking about Gottman, because I’ve been married now for a little while and I’ve written about this, that we at one point went to marriage therapy. And I’m always super-curious about what people do for a living, so I kind of tried to go deep on this therapist and I’m like, “Do you use this stuff for career advice?” And she said, “All the time.” That fundamental Gottman curriculum applies to career advice, it applies to life choices, life changes. So do you find that to be true, too, because the four horsemen in a marriage can be the four horsemen in your workplace?
Eric Barker:
I mean, for the most part, absolutely. I mean, a lot of these things are true in general with relationships. Where a good perspective to take with your spouse is to, Alain de Botton talked about this, where he said basically treating them like a child. Not in the sense of being condescending, but in the sense of, if a child got angry and called you a name, you would not immediately respond by calling them a poopy head. You would just understand they’re a child, they’re cranky, maybe they need a nap, it’s OK. You’d focus on solving the problem. You wouldn’t take it personal. It’s a kid, they do this.
This is actually a really healthy attitude in marriage. It’s a really healthy attitude with every relationship to realize that we can all be cranky children at times and to not take it so personal. Focus on the problem at hand, don’t get caught up in name-calling and all that kind of stuff, it doesn’t help. But to just realize that, every now and then all of us can be a little bit difficult. We could be a little more patient. If we treat people like children without the condescension, it can really help grease the wheels on all our relationships.
Laurie Ruettimann:
I’m immersed in this weird world of human resources, even though I try to quit it all the time, right? And one of the things that we’re talking about a lot in human resources is well-being. And I have the sneaking suspicion that we’re getting a lot of it wrong. A lot of it’s not evidence-based, right? So you tell me what are people getting wrong about well-being?
Eric Barker:
When I looked at the research, in terms of happiness, one thing that I found that was extremely powerful, this was worked by Brett Ford at University of California, Berkeley, is just a perspective shift, in the sense that so often when it comes to being happier, increasing wellbeing, we’re thinking about ourselves and from the focus of ourselves. What do I need to do? What do I need to accomplish? What do I need to get? And the truth is, that so much of our happiness comes from our social relationships. So taking this unilateral “me” perspective is really not as helpful as thinking about ourselves as part of a network, part of a family, part of a group. How can they help me? How can I participate? What do I need to do for them? What can they do for me?
When we pull the camera back and see ourselves as part of a group, it’s really helpful in terms of increasing happiness, because so much of our happiness comes from our relationships. The Journal of Socioeconomics found that improving your social life is the equivalent of making an extra $131,232 a year. Now I don’t think you’re going to get a $131,000 raise this year, but I think you can improve your social relationships a little bit. And like I said, the happiness level is equivalent. We just need to shift that focus. Instead of me, me, to think about as part of this group, how can we, how can I navigate this situation and evolve others to make us all happier?
Laurie Ruettimann:
The one thing I think the wellness or well-being industry gets right is their attacks on smoking. So can you talk about that?
Eric Barker:
Smoking, in particular, is certainly bad for your health, I’m not going to question that. But the interesting thing about smoking that I talk about in the book is the fact that we often think that, “I don’t want secondhand smoke. I don’t want to smoke myself.” OK. But we actually have to think about ourselves, again, in terms of relationships, in terms of bad habits, s the fact that if someone else is smoking, it actually makes me more likely to smoke. So the danger isn’t just secondhand smoke, “That smoke’s going to get in my face.” The danger is, we are dramatically influenced by the people around us. It’s much more dangerous to me that my friend’s smoking might lead me to smoke than my friend’s blowing smoke and me inhaling that. So it’s a big issue for us to just think about how potentially the bad habits of those around us can really negatively influence our lives.
Laurie Ruettimann:
That’s so interesting, because when I read about that, when I read about that influence on our own behavior, it made me think about how many team-building events I went to, where I drank more than I planned on drinking, because other people around me were drinking. And also how many people I saw, who I didn’t know were smokers, were stealing a cigarette from someone else behind the building, right? Who smoked because they were drinking, and that’s what they did once they started drinking and hanging around other smokers. So that influence on our behaviors is just so powerful, it’s so surprising, Eric.
Eric Barker:
The Good news is, we can also turn it on its head. We can spend more time with the people that we want to be like. To think about the people in your life who have handled and navigated a lot of challenge, as well, with good habits, who are doing the positive things, who have built systems and just a lot of good behaviors in their life. If we spend more time like them, we will become more like them. So this is a minor shift. You don’t have to kick anybody out of your life. But if you just reallocate some of that, just like we talked about relocating time away from social media. But if we also reallocate some of that friend budget, perhaps away from the smokers and perhaps to the people who are having great marriages, great family lives and kicking ass at work, that can have a really positive influence on us, as well.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Man, Eric, I need more of those people in my life. I feel like with COVID, I know the same six people.
Eric Barker:
Believe me, I had already decided to write this book in 2019, I was putting the proposal together and everything. And it was two weeks after the deal for the book closed, that California, where I live, locked down. I went from, “OK, hey, this is good. This will be a helpful book” to, “Oh my God, everybody’s going to need this.” All of a sudden I became a man on a mission, I heard the “Rocky” theme. I was like, “Oh God, this is going to be really important, because people, we’re all going to lose it. We’re going to be like animals with their skills withering in captivity.” I mean, I’m going to forget how to shake hands by the time this is over. So I felt it was really incumbent on me to do a great job, because all of a sudden, this topic became dangerously more relevant than I had ever guessed it would be.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Well, I published a book during COVID and I was “robbed.” I’m using air quotes, right? Nobody robbed me of anything. But I was “robbed” of doing a book tour, and I did everything virtually via Zoom. And it was nine months before I even signed a book for someone in the flesh. It was really depressing, like this is just not fun. So I’m excited to do it again, I guess, because I’m a masochist. But I want to know about your upcoming press. Are you going to be out there pressing the flesh? Are you comfortable doing that? What does a book tour look like in this post-COVID environment?
Eric Barker:
Well, I mean, honestly, book tours are less common these days. And honestly, I don’t think they’re quite as effective. Book tours, how many people actually show up versus reaching out to people on an email list or doing podcasts and stuff like that? So I really wasn’t that concerned about it, because that wasn’t a key linchpin of my marketing strategy in that sense, so I wasn’t too worried about it.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Well, I’m so excited that you came back on the podcast for this bonus episode. We’re big fans of your work over here. We still don’t know a dang thing about you. I’m going to find out the truth, Eric, at some point, what’s really happening behind the dark screen? Well, until then it was a real pleasure to have you on. And where do you want people to go to get your book?
Eric Barker:
Oh, I mean, “Plays Well With Others” will be available, all major book sellers. And if people are more curious about my blog and my newsletter, my URL’s a little difficult, so if they go to —
Laurie Ruettimann:
You still have not fixed this, yeah.
Eric Barker:
Yeah. If they go to EricBarker.org, E-R-I-C-B-A-R-K-E-R.org, that will redirect them to the difficult to pronounce Japanese URL.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Wait, you have to quickly tell us the story behind it, like you did last time. For those who don’t know, what’s your URL, and why you pick that?
Eric Barker:
Oh, my URL is bakadesuyo.com and that is Japanese, because I took Japanese in undergrad, my last name’s Barker. And I found out the first day of Japanese class that my last name means idiot in Japanese. It’s actually worse than that, because in the Japanese sentence structure is not, “I am Barker.” It’s not, “my name is Barker.” It is, I am Barker. So watashi wa bakadesu means “I am Barker,” watashi wa bakadesu means “I’m an idiot,” they’re the same sentence. I’ve never had a Japanese person forget my name ever, so it’s a good icebreaker. But anyway, so bakadesuyo.com is me triumphantly saying “I am Barker” or me triumphantly saying “I’m an idiot,” whichever people care to interpret it as. But it tends out to be difficult for people to spell. So E-R-I-C-B-A-R-K-E-R.org will get them to the right place.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Well, we’re going to send them to the right place, Eric, don’t you worry about it. And whether you are an idiot or not, is not for me to decide, but I’m glad we’re colleagues. I’m glad you came back, and it was really nice to catch up with you. Good luck on your book tour.
Eric Barker:
Thanks so much.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Hey everybody. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Punk Rock HR. We are proudly underwritten by The Starr Conspiracy. The Starr Conspiracy is the B2B marketing agency for innovative brands creating the future of workplace solutions. For more information, head on over to thestarrconspiracy.com. Punk Rock HR is produced and edited by Rep Cap, with special help from Michael Thibodeaux and Devon McGrath. For more information, show notes, links and resources, head on over to punkrockhr.com. Now that’s all for today and I hope you enjoyed it. We’ll see you next time on Punk Rock HR.