Talk Shows on Mute

What remains when the words stop doing the work

Brandon Boyd from the band Incubus once said the idea for “Talk Shows on Mute” came to him on an airplane. A talk show was playing on the seat-back screens, and he started narrating for the other passengers. Then he realized that a time would probably come when television would watch us while we watched it.

He wrote a song about it.

The song references Orwell’s 1984 and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Two books about manufactured reality.

The most important line in the song is the last observation. That someone is more endearing with the sound turned off.

Boyd meant it as a critique of the media. I think it’s much, much bigger than that.

I think the sound is where most people hide.

Hi, I’m Neela,

I’m a COO in tech.

I’ve been watching people on mute for twenty-five years.

This newsletter is what I see.

Subscribe if you’re a watcher too.

Harvard Spent Grant Money Proving That Vibes Are Real

In 1993, Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal at Harvard published research on what they called “thin slicing.”

They videotaped teachers in their classrooms, then showed silent clips to strangers who had never taken the class, never met the teacher, and knew nothing about the subject being taught. They asked them to rate the teacher’s effectiveness.

Ten-second clips.

Then six.

Then two.

At the end of the semester, the actual students in those classrooms filled out their own evaluations of the same teachers. Students who had spent four months listening to lectures, doing assignments, and sitting tests.

The two groups agreed. The strangers who watched two seconds of silent footage reached the same conclusions as the students who had been in the room all semester.

The point was not that two seconds magically revealed everything about a person.

The point was that humans are constantly collecting information, often before we realize we are doing it.

Ambady took it further. She recorded surgeons talking to their patients, then stripped the audio down to just the tone of voice. Just the sound of how a doctor spoke to the person in front of them. That tone predicted whether the surgeon had been sued for malpractice.

The patients weren’t evaluating skills per se. They were evaluating something harder to define.

Did this person respect me?

Did they care?

Did I feel safe with them?

Humans are not just listening to what is being said.

We are listening for alignment.

The words matter.

But when the words, tone, and body tell different stories, we notice.

That is where trust starts to disappear.

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The Mirror Years

I could read a room in thirty seconds and become whatever it needed me to be.

Job interview about leadership? I’d soften my voice, lean in, and talk about people like they were gardens I tended.

Strategy conversation? I’d square up, get crisp, throw numbers around like confetti.

Culture question? I’d slow down and get thoughtful, like someone who journals.

I was never one person in those rooms. I was several. And all of them were convincing.

I landed gigs that way. Every single one of them made me fucking miserable.

Because they didn’t hire me. They hired an avatar of me that showed up for forty-five minutes in a conference room. And then the real one had to go to work every day in a place that was built for someone who didn’t exist.

In 1974, a psychologist named Mark Snyder introduced a concept called self-monitoring. High self-monitors are social chameleons. They read the room constantly. They adjust their behavior, their tone, their face, their posture depending on who they’re talking to and what they think that person wants to see.

Low self-monitors are the opposite. What you see is what you get, regardless of the room, regardless of the stakes.

Being able to adapt is a useful human skill. Leaders need it. Parents need it. Anyone who has ever tried to manage another person’s feelings needs it.

The problem begins when the performance never turns off.

Snyder’s research found that high self-monitors are more likely to adjust their behavior specifically in job interviews. The performance is often good enough to work.

I know it works because I was good at it. I also know what it costs.

I stopped running the routine in interviews because burnout is a boring way to die, and life is too short for that shit. But stopping didn’t make the skill disappear. It just changed what I used it for.

I started watching for it in other people.

A few years back, I interviewed a man for a senior role. Management-level. Everything was perfect on paper.

He sat down and placed both hands flat on the table. Palms down. I’ve seen that move a hundred times. It’s supposed to communicate steadiness. Groundedness. He answered every question well. His stories had beginnings, middles, and endings. And none of that was the problem.

The problem was that he wasn’t one person. His voice changed register depending on whether the question was about leadership, failure, or strategy. His body language rearranged itself for each answer. When I asked about managing conflict, he leaned forward and softened. When I asked about growth targets, he squared up and got nice and crisp.

His body told different stories that didn’t match.

Maybe he was nervous. Maybe he code-switches under pressure the way a lot of people do, and it doesn’t mean anything about who he is at work on a Monday.

But I recognized the pattern because I used to run it. And it doesn’t survive. Not long-term anyway.

I know because I got hired that way. Every time. I was the mirror. And every time, the same thing happened. If hiring were easy, LinkedIn wouldn't exist, and neither would my whisky cabinet.

That’s the difference between a culture fit and a culture add. A fit is a mirror. An add is a window. I kept getting hired as a mirror, and mirrors don’t have opinions, ideas, or bad days. They just reflect whatever is standing in front of them.

I will always hire the window over the mirror. It is not a neutral stance. I am different. I have always been different. Every room I’ve walked into has had to adjust for me.

Which is what hiring is. You are introducing a variable into a system. If the system doesn’t respond, the variable was redundant. You just spent six months recruiting and onboarding a human screensaver.

The whole point of bringing someone new into an organization is that the organization becomes slightly different afterward. Not uncomfortable for the sake of discomfort. Different in the way that a kitchen is different when someone walks in who actually knows how to cook. Everyone else was making burnt toast. Now there’s a soufflé on the table, and half the team is mad because they liked the burnt toast, while the other half is wondering why they’ve eaten burnt toast for seven years.

I have never once regretted hiring someone who brought something the room didn’t already have. I have regretted every single mirror. Mirrors crack. Always.

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The NYC Subway Was My Harvard

My uncle used to sit on his porch in Trinidad and watch people walk past. He could tell you what kind of day someone was having before they reached the gate, and he knew it because he was reading the walk, not waiting for the introduction.

He never used the word “performance.” He would not have known what executive presence coaching was. But he was the most effective thin-slicer I have ever met.

If you've read anything I've ever written, you know what my family left me. Habits. And this one stuck.

I did it on the NYC subways for fifteen years. Watching. Not the way tourists watch, with curiosity. The way my uncle watched from the porch was with purpose. You learn the whole car in ninety seconds if you know where to look.

Who’s performing calmly? Who is actually calm? Who is about to start something, and who is about to piss on the subway car? The subway is the greatest mute show on earth, and nobody in New York knows they’re in it.

I brought it to work. To meetings. To every room where someone was talking, and I needed to know whether the talking was the point or the cover.

We live in an age of permanent recording now. Zoom calls and body cameras and twelve angles on every public moment. Everyone is being watched on mute, whether they signed up for it or not. The seams are showing on people who never thought anyone was looking.

Watching people with the sound off is not a trick. It is one of the oldest human skills we have. Before language, we had observation. Before explanations, we had instinct. Before someone told us who they were, we watched what they did.

And I want to be honest about something before I wrap this up.

We are all performing. I am performing right now. Writing is a performance. So is silence.

It only becomes a problem when you do it for so long that you forget there’s someone underneath.

Below is a raw, two-minute clip of a conversation I had in 2024 about social media, follower counts, and why I reject fast growth.

I hate doing these…You'll probably see that.

Ten years ago, I started to watch myself the way I watch everyone else. It is the hardest version of this skill, and I am not good at it yet.

Because when you stop performing, some rooms don’t want you in them anymore. The ones that still do are the only ones worth being in.

Thank you so much for reading.

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Shout-out to Fihmiya Hamdan for inviting me to her podcast two years ago.

Smashing that ❤️ button or sharing this post keeps the wheels on this greasy squirrel wheel.

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