Matthew Cox

When you walk into the dentist's office, where's your heart rate?

So a good friend of mine is a dental consultant, and what he does is he creates environments within dental offices so that heart rate comes down.

He will give you choices of Keurigs, choices of teas, choices of magazines, what you can watch, what you listen to during the procedure, what fluoride you can pick, what color toothbrush you can get, perceived control that can bring that anxiety down,

And she'll come back to that dentist over and over and over.

What kind of fish to put in the aquarium?

So we do use certain influence principles to try to hopefully shape outcomes.

But what we don't want to do is manipulate or lie to people.

That's where interrogation gets its bad name.

So I would say about three or four years ago, I started writing a book to help detectives hopefully get better information in their cases from start to finish.

From a handshake, making a good handshake, a dry, warm handshake at this angle and this one to create the right first impression, all the way down to when we get the truth.

And then I pitched it, and I pitched it as a law enforcement book.

And luckily, Matt Holt, my editor, is like, bro, this is not a law enforcement book.

This is a book for parents to have their kids open up to them.

This is for coworkers and colleagues and supervisors.

So we broadened the book out.

We kind of opened up the aperture a little bit, and that's ultimately what it came to.

So the book's called Tell Me Everything, and it kind of draws on a lot of influence principles, like I said, from first impression to confession.

but not from a law enforcement sense, from just a communication sense, is that in today's society, we're so used to memes, we're so used to emojis, we've literally went from Shakespeare back to hieroglyphics with how we communicate.

So what we try to do is we try to open that up a little bit and say, hey, what are best practices in how you talk to anybody on this planet?

And I think we kind of hit the mark there.