Podcast Episode 11: That Time Jack Dorsey & Rick Rubin Met a Nerd Dressed as a Skeleton

For years, people told Jen she was smart.

One man ... a genius himself ... spent seven years trying to get her to believe it. She brushed it off every single time. She wasn't ready to hear it. She wasn't ready to be different. This episode is about what happens when you finally reach for answers and the first hand extended to you belongs to a con man. It's about a message sent into the void to a personal idol, a phone call placed to GoDaddy in front of someone who helped build the internet, a skeleton onesie, a ghost town, and a goodbye to the one person who always saw the truth — even when Jen couldn't see it herself.

Some people spend their whole lives looking for a guru. Sometimes the guru tells you to stop looking.

Episode 11: That Time Jack Dorsey & Rick Rubin Met A Nerd Dressed as a Skeleton is a story about fraud, grief, validation, and a teepee with a hand-painted Wi-Fi sign in the middle of nowhere.

Talk Nerdy To Me® - Episode 11 Transcript

EP. 11 - That Time Jack Dorsey & Rick Rubin Met a Nerd Dressed as a Skeleton

You would think that finding out that I see auras would finally explain everything.

How for five years, with visual confirmation on surveillance footage, I was clearly seeing something other people couldn't.

You would think that that would be enough, that that would be some kind of relief.

But instead, I wanted more answers.

I didn't know how to process that I was actually seeing auras.

I think auras, I think color.

While I clearly knew I had a gift of some sort, and even with the synesthesia diagnosis from a licensed professional, I still thought I was reading and seeing body language.

That's how difficult all of this was to process.

There is a profound desperation that comes with knowing you are different, but not knowing why.

But also being very aware you are closer than ever to figuring out what that difference is.

Welcome to Talk Nerdy to Me.

This is the unbelievably true story.

Once you hear it, you may never experience your own life in the same way.

Still wanting to go into training of some kind, Jen signed up for the free trial of Joe Navarro's body language course.

But she needed more than modules on a screen.

This man had become her personal idol.

YouTube video after YouTube video, she had consumed everything he put out.

His book, What Every Body is Saying, isn't just a best seller.

It's the industry gold standard for nonverbal leaks, the most widely recommended body language book in the world.

And after everything she had been through, Jen desperately needed something real from someone she could actually trust.

So she went for the gold.

She messaged him directly on March twenty-third, two thousand twenty-two at three fifty-eight PM.

Hey Joe, my name's Jen.

First-time caller, long-time listener.

Last July, I publicly wrote about being gang-stalked for the last four and a half years.

After viewing surveillance footage, I was able to spot a gang stalker within fourteen seconds from assessment to visual and by finally taking action.

I have synesthesia and see shapes around people.

It was the first time in my life that people of all different walks of life had the same shape, which is how I knew I was being stalked because it was literally all the same.

I had no idea it was an actual gift, but it did save me.

I then worked with a human lie detector who was going to formally train me on reading people.

Unfortunately, after doing a background check, I found out some of the information about him that made me not wanna proceed with training.

I'd still love to formally study body language, and you were the only other person I could think of reaching out to.

I've been a very long-time fan.

I consider What Every Body is Saying required reading and gift copies frequently.

I was wondering if I could take your online course in exchange for writing about it, which is what I was planning to do with the human lie detector.

I have a voice and an audience, and now I know I have a gift.

I just have no idea what to do with it.

Sincerely, a forever fan.

Please keep doing everything you do.

Jen Friel.

On March twenty-third, twenty twenty-two, at four twenty-eight PM, she got a response.

Jen, you don't need training.

Take a look at the attached.

That's all you need.

Jen was stunned.

Not only had Joe replied, but he had also attached a seventeen-page alphabetized bibliography of his recommended reading on nonverbal leaks.

I then did what any other nerd would do in that moment, and I completely ignored the attachment and instead started to cry.

Hysterically.

I'm talking baby sea lion level.

I don't even know if I was crying just because of his response or because he saw in a single email what other people have told me for years.

I was just confused, excited, elated, and I let it all out

Eighty-four minutes later, now calm and mostly cried out, Jen was able to message him back.

I have since calmed down from crying.

Thank you so much for this information.

If I can return the favor in any way, my strengths include finding the good people in Hollywood and in social media.

Your team is doing an awesome job, by the way.

Many thanks for what you do.

Didn't know I could be a bigger fan.

Surprises all around.

Twenty minutes later, he replied yet again.

You are smart, and you don't need yet another guru.

You just need to study.

Start with Desmond Morris.

Proceed to David Givens.

No one else matters.

They will just take your money.

Mind you, when Joe says anyone else will just take your money, he's including his own body language training course in that statement.

Seven minutes later, Jen replied.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Ordering now very respectfully.

Twenty-eight minutes later, Joe replied with a list of his books and the note, "If you get bored, read these."

Jen scoffed and laughed quietly to herself.

She owned them all.

Since she had his attention, she had one more thing to say specifically about his YouTube collaboration with Wired.

Your Wired videos are awesome, by the way.

Really well done.

Clean, informative, and genuinely fun to watch.

My favorite was when they turned the tables on you to read your own body language.

I can only imagine what you experience, but even telling people recently that I've seen these shapes my whole life, they wanna know, "What's mine?"

Yada yada.

It's like telling someone you're a comic.

Immediately people reply with, "Tell me something funny."

Jeff came home later that evening to find Jen's cheeks still saline-stained and puffy.

Having been through so much together as a couple, the surveillance footage was taken during their first year of marriage, he was immediately concerned.

"Why are you crying?" he asked, bracing for whatever was next.

"Because I talked to Joe Navarro," she said.

Still confused, he asked, "Isn't that a good thing? Why are you crying?"

"He told me I'm smart, to stop seeking a guru, and to just read a few books to get the basics, but that anyone else will just take our money."

Still confused, "Isn't that a good thing?"

"It's the best thing ever," Jen said, still crying hysterically.

I really do have special gifts, and while this is new news to me, it certainly wasn't new news to someone I loved very dearly who had spent seven years trying to get that information through my head

One month before my email session with Joe, on February 3rd, 2022, the world lost a very talented and great man I was lucky to call more than just my friend.

I considered him my family.

His name was Gil Prather, and I met him on my episode of the CNBC show, The West Texas Investors Club.

For those unfamiliar, The West Texas Investors Club is essentially Shark Tank with a West Texas twang.

Following self-made millionaires Rooster McConaughey, who also happens to be Matthew McConaughey's older brother, his partner Butch Gilliam, and their Mensa genius best friend, Gil Prather.

The show's philosophy was simple: an MBA means BS.

If they're going to invest in your business, they want to know you first, the person, not the polished pitch deck.

Producers hid the investors' identities from contestants on season one, likely because of the McConaughey connection.

But I'd been on game shows before.

The Price is Right, 25 Words or Less, Suitcase number 16 on the syndicated version of Deal or No Deal

I knew how heavily regulated money exchanges are on television.

I knew that when you make your deal, independent of the TV production, those filings become public.

So when the paperwork came through, I did what any other entrepreneurs could have done.

I Googled the company name.

I was the only entrepreneur on season one who thought to do that.

Producers leaned into it.

They let Jen turn the tables.

The dynamic was either going to be spectacular or combustible.

Good television either way.

Jen.

Impressed.

She is so computer literate, uh, s- savvy.

We have no doubt that if we put her in the right business, she's gonna go through the ceiling.

She's that sharp.

She's the perfect, perfect example of the person first.

Oh, yeah.

It was spectacular.

I hit it off with all three very large personalities and then demanded that I run their social media, and I even ended up on their press tour with them during some of the biggest moments of their lives.

Well, maybe not for Rooster.

Jen's app was also the first exit in their investment portfolio on the show, so it wasn't just a great business partnership.

Through all the additional experiences, their partnership became more like a family.

All four of them were the same type of fabric, just cut and styled a little differently.

But no matter where we were, a red carpet or Butch's helicopter hangar in Midland, Gil would always pull me aside to really talk to me.

I'd lead with questions about whether he needed help uploading his music to YouTube, and Gil would lead with silence.

I didn't know at the time, but he was waiting for me to take a breath

"You know that you're a genius, right?"

Gil would say over and over.

Jen would brush it off.

She figured he was just being nice because she was a tech nerd.

He'd wait for her to breathe and then continue.

"Your eyes move so fast, and you're actually processing the information as they move.

Most people's eyes can move.

That doesn't mean they're processing anything."

Jen would look away.

She has trouble making eye contact when she's thinking, or sometimes just in general, and let the comment pass.

"Have you taken the Mensa test?"

He asked one particular night, sitting at Butch's picnic table inside the helicopter hangar.

"I can't take tests," she admitted, which isn't technically true.

She can sit for countless BuzzFeed quizzes on long drives.

What would have been more accurate is that at the time, it simply didn't interest her.

I didn't know this then, but I have something called stealth dyslexia.

Also called hidden dyslexia or twice-exceptional dyslexia, is what happens when someone's intelligence is so high that it masks the condition entirely.

The person reads well enough to avoid being flagged, but they're working ten times harder than anyone around them to get there.

They compensate.

They adapt.

They find workarounds, chat rooms instead of textbooks, conversations instead of chapters, pattern recognition instead of phonics.

From the outside, nothing looks wrong.

They're smart.

They're resourceful.

They graduated early.

But underneath, the effort is exhausting.

And because they don't fit the stereotype of someone who can't read, the diagnosis never comes.

It hides in plain sight, sometimes for decades, buried beneath the very intelligence that should have made it obvious something else was going on.

Bingo, bango.

I was never good, in quotes, at standardized tests in school.

The fact that I graduated at 16 without reading a single book speaks to how resourceful I was, especially considering this was the early 2000s and done via AOL chat rooms and various online forums.

Without these very important and very significant diagnoses, even if I could take the test well, pursuing something like Mensa would have then meant it was one more thing that made me different from everyone else.

I couldn't process yet that these were gifts.

To me, they were quirks, parlor tricks, sometimes difficulties, and more things that I knew I could do but didn't help me feel seen.

I was born knowing I'm different.

I have always known, but it wasn't until these last few months finally knowing what I have that I could understand how I fit into the world.

For the first time, I stopped identifying as the odd woman out, and oddly, that felt even stranger.

The last time Jen spoke to Gil was January 6th.

She told him the good news that she was finally understanding her gift in reading people, that she was going into a training program.

She could hear his smile through the phone as he told her how proud he was, that he always knew she was special, and how happy he was that she was finally seeing it for herself

The last thing Gil said was, I love you.

The last thing I said was, I'll see you soon.

It was the only promise to Gil that I never kept.

I find that okay knowing that he never mentioned how ill he actually was.

Like the outlaw Gil was in life, his celebration would be no different.

A twenty-four-hour jam band session in Terlingua, Texas, a ghost town on the edge of the desert just north of the Mexican border where the pavement gives way to dust and the rules of the outside world stop applying.

On the drive down somewhere outside El Paso, Jen got a call.

An email migration she was in charge of hadn't gone through.

She needed to handle it immediately.

But they were in the middle of nowhere.

No hotspot, spotty cell service in a stretch of desert she wasn't even sure existed on a map.

We pulled over to this hole-in-the-wall place, and to call it even a hole-in-the-wall place is extraordinarily kind.

There was a teepee-like structure.

There was a handwritten sign that just said Wi-Fi.

I'm also wearing a skeleton onesie during this because it's coincidentally my travel uniform.

Hilariously, though, I never connected the dots that I was also wearing that en route to a ghost town.

But as we arrived, I opened up my laptop in the one spot of shade that I could find to protect my softly spring-like Irish skin.

And as I did, I looked up and I immediately recognized the person sitting on the other side of the teepee.

It was Twitter and Square co-founder Jack Dorsey.

With a single look, he knew that I knew who he was, which is weird because normally people can't tell when I recognize them.

I have something called resting processing face.

Plus, my eyes were hidden behind my massive Tom Ford glasses.

And again, I am dressed as a skeleton, so I should definitely stand out, but almost in a way that causes people not to look in case my fashion bordered on clinically insane.

But Jack is obviously not normal.

Jen kept her eyes on the prize.

She had an email migration to fix.

And in what might be one of the coolest moments of her tech career, she sat across from Jack Dorsey and had to place a call to, uh, GoDaddy customer support.

Being a techie and using GoDaddy is the equivalent of being a professor at a prestigious institute and offering a syllabus on your learnings about the ABCs.

I wouldn't even pass judgment on it if I wasn't in front of Jack Dorsey when it happened.

I placed the call and was very careful to omit words like GoDaddy support and even customer pin number, which is technically redundant.

Jeff could see that Jen was acting strange, but considering the circumstances, he thought nothing of it.

This is for a very important client, and this must be handled immediately, I said loudly in my firmest, authoritative voice.

Both parts were actually true.

Jeff, who had read what I typed on my screen, which was a very simple note in big, bold black letters that read, that's Jack Dorsey, understood why I was acting so weird.

Then Jeff looked up and he took a shallow breath.

While still on hold with GoDaddy, Jen used just her eye movements to ask Jeff what he was seeing.

She could tell he was in shock about something, and it certainly wasn't Jack Dorsey.

How can anyone get bigger than Jack Dorsey, she thought.

Jeff indicated for her to check her texts, which she could read from her laptop screen.

It was a link to a Google search for Rick Rubin.

The tall, Santa-like bearded man who looked a hell of a lot like the guy who had just walked directly past their table and was now sitting down with Jack Dorsey.

Rick Rubin is widely regarded as one of the most prolific and influential music producers in history.

He shaped multi-platinum records across hip-hop, heavy metal, rock, pop, and country over four decades.

I didn't know who he was at first, but I knew it was important because I've only seen Jeff get starstruck one other time.

And hilariously, it was when that guy came into our apartment.

True story, and I'll wait to let Jeff tell you about that more in his own words.

Rick Rubin and Jack Dorsey, two of the most influential people in modern culture, having lunch together at a random spot in the middle of nowhere West Texas that Jen and Jeff only pulled into because of a hand-painted Wi-Fi sign and an email migration that refused to go through.

Jen had picked the seat directly across from them, the only one with shade.

And this was not a small property.

There was a teepee for context.

This had Gil Prather written all over it, Jen thought, smiling.

He would move mountains for those he loved, and in this moment, he was moving icons.

Sometime later, the migration went through, and as Jack cleared his plate, Jen went in for the kill.

Carefully, because again, she was already in her skeleton onesie.