How to become a Super-communicator | Charles Duhigg

[00:00:07] Sometimes I think I'm a pretty good communicator, but sometimes I'm just awful. It's really important to have good skills at communicating. I've done lots of kind of communicating. I've been a public speaker, I've been in sales, I've been an entrepreneur,

[00:00:21] I've been a stand-up comedian, and I've been a podcaster, but my biggest communications have been with writing. And you really always have to put yourself in the shoes of the other person. But fortunately, I just read an incredible book I highly recommended

[00:00:35] called Super-Communicators by my good friend Charles Duhigg. You've previously seen him on the podcast with Jay, what was the book, Bigger, Faster, Smarter, something like that? He's had a bunch of good books. And he has a book called The Power of Habit.

[00:00:49] All those books have been great, but this one just blew me away. I invited him on the podcast and I had a ton of questions for him. And here he is. This isn't your average business podcast and he's not your average host. This is The James Altiger Show.

[00:01:18] Yeah, I see in your bio you're at The New Yorker now instead of The New York Times. Yeah, yeah, so I left it, I left The Times in 2017 and with the intention of trying to figure out which magazine

[00:01:30] I was hoping to go work with and just really have enjoyed The New Yorker. Like I just, I love their, I love the magazine, I love their approach to journalism, so it's been a really happy place.

[00:01:40] I'm always curious, like how often do they expect you to write a column? Like because those columns are very meaty in The New Yorker. Like you must spend, you can't do like one a day or even one a week. You have to spend a lot of time.

[00:01:53] No, no, I usually spend about six months reporting and writing before something comes out. So it kind of depends, I think for a lot of people where The New Yorker is their main gig, they have a certain number of words.

[00:02:06] They have to turn in by or get printed for each year. It's usually like 55,000 words or something like that. Because I have so many other things going on, I don't have to rely on The New Yorker quite as much as some of my colleagues.

[00:02:19] And so I'm into this very nice position where I can kind of choose to write as often or as infrequently as I need to based particularly on like what's going on, you know, that week or that month. What are the stuff you have going on?

[00:02:35] Well, like writing a book and promoting the book and giving speeches and stuff like that, you know, just the rest of life that that ends up taking up time. And so I probably I try and write about two to three articles per year.

[00:02:52] And then, you know, for the last I had one earlier, I had one at the end of last year, but for the two years previous to that, I didn't I didn't write anything at all because I was working on the book.

[00:03:02] Wow. So so this book Super Communicators took two or three years to write? Yeah, three years took three years for me to write Super Communicators. I don't know if I could I don't know if I could spend

[00:03:13] if I would be patient enough to spend that much time writing a book. But I guess that's why your books are so, you know, widely read. Well, I think I think you have to enjoy the activity.

[00:03:23] Like like people often ask me if they should write a book and I and I say, look, if you if you enjoy writing, then you should write an article. And if you enjoy writing an article, then you should think about a book.

[00:03:32] But it only makes sense to write books if you really enjoy writing books. Well, well, also if you like you do a lot of you talk to other people. So I it's faster if you just wrote stories about yourself, for instance. That's true. That's true.

[00:03:46] That would that would definitely that would definitely go faster. I don't think I have enough stories about myself to fill up an entire book. So so for me talking to other people makes it easier, but you're exactly right.

[00:03:54] Like I think I think there's a lot of different ways to to skin the cat there. Well, I bet you do have a lot of stories about yourself for one thing. You know, you've written so like, you know, you've researched all these things

[00:04:05] like like for smarter, faster, better, you want to become a smarter, faster, better human being. Did you become one? Yeah, I think so. I think so. And I think in the in the course of writing super communicators,

[00:04:15] I mean, so when I wrote The Power of Habit 10 years ago, they the impetus was that I wanted to figure out like if I'm so smart and I'm so talented, why do I have such trouble,

[00:04:27] you know, getting myself to go exercise in the morning and why is it so hard for me to like eat less and lose 10 pounds? And so I wanted to understand my own habits and I wrote The Power of Habit

[00:04:35] to basically understand that this book is very similar in that it's born in. I had a couple of experiences where I felt like I did a bad job communicating like consistently, right? Like at work with my wife, with my kids and I'm a professional communicator.

[00:04:50] I'm supposed to be good at this stuff. And the fact that I was bad at it meant that there was something a problem I wanted to solve. And so that was the impetus of it.

[00:04:57] I get to call experts and ask them for their advice on how to be a better communicator and they're willing to talk to me because I'm writing a book about it. After this whole experience, did your communications with your wife become better? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.

[00:05:11] So there was this pattern that I had, which I think is pretty typical where I would come home from work and I would have had like, you know, a rough day and I would start complaining to my wife.

[00:05:20] I'd be like, my boss is a jerk and, you know, my colleagues don't appreciate me and blah, blah, blah, whatever it is. And she very reasonably would respond by saying, look, why don't you take your boss out to lunch and get to know him a little bit better?

[00:05:33] And that might help. And instead of hearing what she was saying, I would become even more upset. I would say like, why don't you have my back on this? You know, you're supposed to be outraged on my behalf. Like, like, why, why, why aren't you taking this seriously?

[00:05:46] And then because I was acting irrationally, she would become more upset. We basically, we both went in wanting to have a genuine conversation with each other and it would fall apart. And so that's the first thing I went and I asked researchers

[00:05:58] about it's like what's going on here? And they said, okay, so here's the, here's the basic thing you need to understand about what we've learned about conversations in the last decade because we've, we've lived through this golden age of understanding conversation because of advances in computing

[00:06:11] and data analytics. You think of your discussion as being about one thing, but actually every single discussion is made up of multiple different kinds of conversation. And in general, almost all those conversations fall into one of three buckets.

[00:06:27] There are practical conversations which is, you know, I'm going to fix your problem or let's make a plan or let's talk about where we're going to go on vacation, what we're going to do about Jimmy's grades. There are emotional conversations where I tell you how I'm

[00:06:41] feeling and I do not want you to solve the problem, right? I want you to empathize or to share with me how you're feeling. And then there are social conversations which are about how we relate to each other, how we believe that our paths have

[00:06:56] shaped who we are today, how we, how we deal with office dynamics and interpersonal dynamics and sort of society as a whole. And they said look what was the basic lesson here is if two people aren't having the same kind of conversation at the same

[00:07:10] time, then they will not connect. They're miscommunicating. So I'm just trying to understand like with your wife then she was trying to solve a problem, but you just wanted empathy. You wanted, you wanted to be exact. I was having an emotional conversation and she was having

[00:07:26] a practical conversation. And so neither of us hurt each other. We completely were at odds. Whereas now when we start that discussion my wife says, do you want me just to listen to you or do you want me to solve this problem with you?

[00:07:40] And I of course am like, oh, oh thanks for asking. Like I just want you to listen. Like I need you to listen to what I'm saying. And in fact, they actually teach this technique in schools to teachers.

[00:07:51] They teach them that if a student comes up and they're upset or they got a problem, ask them do you want to be helped? Do you want to be heard or do you want to be hugged? And those are the three kinds of conversations practical, social and emotional.

[00:08:05] And just knowing that has actually like revolutionized how me and my wife talk to each other because now we know just to ask. Yeah. And do you feel it becomes more and more instinctive to as you practice these different methods of conversation?

[00:08:19] Like so what you're referring to is the matching principle in your book, which is that you have to sort of sense what type of conversation this is and then both kind of and not instinctively, but both agree in some way

[00:08:31] that this is the type of conversation we're going to have. Yeah. Yeah. That I'm going to match you and I'm going to invite you to match me. It's totally instinctual because the truth is communication is humans superpower, right? The reason why homo sapiens have been so successful

[00:08:47] is because we can communicate and it's because we can communicate so well much more richly and deeply than than any other species. And and so our brain is hardwired to have instincts around communication. So once you know what to look for in a conversation,

[00:09:04] you don't have to think about it that hard. It becomes instinctual. So yeah, it's absolutely instinctual for me to notice whether this is an emotional conversation or a practical or a social conversation. And and now that people have heard it, if they practice

[00:09:16] it like literally like two or three times, it'll become instinctual for them to. There's a lot of concepts in the book. It's all very interesting. Like yes, there's these three buckets of conversation, but then I also really appreciated like later on in

[00:09:29] the book in social situations, you know, there's these 36 questions that you describe and but then there's a way of taking each kind of question and making it deeper. So instead of me asking like just where do you live?

[00:09:44] I can then say, how do you feel about living there? Like is it good if you say I live in a suburb? I was thinking about this as I was reading. I could ask you, oh, people always say suburbs suck, but do they really?

[00:09:55] What are some benefits do you think? Yeah, in the suburb. Oh, that's a great question. Right. Because if I answer that question, I'm telling you so much about myself. I might say like, no, no, no, they got it all wrong.

[00:10:05] Like suburbs are wonderful because I have such close friends there and it's great for my kids. I've just told you that friendship is really important to me, that I have children, that my children's health is really important to me.

[00:10:17] Or if I said like, yeah, it's kind of soulless. Like I really want to move back into the city. I hate the suburb. You know, I'd like to be around, you know, art and I like to be around culture. Now I'm telling you something very different about

[00:10:28] myself that my values are innovation and even if it's a little gritty and hard that I prioritize that so you're that's a great deep question and a deep question just for people who are listening. A deep question is simply something that asks

[00:10:41] someone to describe a little bit more their values, their beliefs or their experiences. And oftentimes as you just pointed out, a deep question doesn't seem deep. Right? If you ask what do you do for a living and someone says I'm a doctor and you say, oh, like why'd

[00:10:57] you decide to go to medical school? Or, you know, did you love being a doctor? Like does it live up to what you're hoping for? Those are both easy questions, but they're both deep questions. Right? Because they're inviting me to tell you something

[00:11:09] about my past and my values and my beliefs. Let's say I want to be better at different types of conversation. What would you say? I mean, actually, I hate this question because it feels like a cliche. I'm just asking you to kind of summarize your

[00:11:24] book without actually, uh, I would say from reading your book that the matching principle is important, but do you also want to control the matching principle a little bit? Like if I want to have an emotional conversation, but I also have a goal that

[00:11:41] I want to bond with you. Do I figure out what kind of conversation you're having and then I match it or do I try to control in some way that you could go from a practical conversation to a emotional conversation? Yeah, it's a great question and it's

[00:11:56] important to recognize every discussion, every dialogue contains elements of all three conversations. So we might start emotional and then we'll move to practical together and then we'll move to social together and then we'll move back to emotional. So the key, I think what you're asking

[00:12:13] is like should I, should I force someone to match me or should I match them? And the truth is it's a lot more organic that what you want to do is if somebody, if somebody clearly has something they want to say they're emotional, they're feeling like worked up,

[00:12:28] it might be a good idea to match them initially and like give them that space to talk about their emotions, to share some of your own emotions, but then invite them to match you in a practical conversation. Say like look, thank you so much for

[00:12:41] sharing with me how you feel that makes a lot of sense. I'm wondering like do you think it'd be helpful to talk about solutions now? Should we should we focus on like like how to solve this problem or or if you want to make it social

[00:12:55] to say to someone, thank you so much for sharing how you feel. I understand that you're upset. Tell me a little bit about how other people react to this like what happens, what happened at work when this issue came up, right? Those are matching you and then I'm

[00:13:08] inviting you to match me and it happens pretty organically in a conversation. Once we're on the same wavelength, we tend to move through the different kinds of conversations together. It's about establishing that wavelength that first that's really important. So it's almost like first you kind

[00:13:24] of tune into the same frequency and and then it's like you can once you're able to do that, then you're able to more easily kind of change the frequency. That's exactly right. And in fact, we I love that you use frequency because one of the things

[00:13:39] that we know and you know this from the book is that when you're in dialogue, when you're communicating with someone and connecting with them, your eyes start dilating at the same rate, even though you don't notice it. Your breast partins start to match each other.

[00:13:52] Your heart rate starts to match each other. And most importantly, your brain waves start to match each other, right? That's communication is that I'm feeling a an emotion or an idea or something and I'm telling it to you so that you can feel some

[00:14:07] variation of the same thing. And as you feel that our brains start to look alike, this is called neural entrainment in the in the neuro literature. And neuro entrainment is communication like when we're communicating with each other and I describe being angry to

[00:14:22] you, you you feel a little angry, you know what it's like to feel angry. Your brain starts to look like my brain and that's how we're connected. And so and once we are connected, once we're on the same wavelength or the same frequency, then we

[00:14:36] can change frequencies together and all follow you and you'll follow me. Let me ask you a question. One time I sold a company and the company that bought my company then fired some people. So an employee called me up very upset at me because I had sold

[00:15:10] the company and now her friends had just been fired. And so she was very upset at me because as you know, she connected the logic maybe incorrectly that it was my fault. Although perhaps I was aware this was going to happen. Things happen when you sell

[00:15:23] companies and she was very upset and I'm just I want to ask you about my technique during this conversation. So I was I was, you know, I acknowledged the feelings and I was her feelings and I was like, it is very upsetting.

[00:15:40] And then but then what I did was I did maybe like it's called a pattern disrupt. I changed my tone completely like just very like the volume went down and I was very like unemotional. And I said, just let me just ask like when was the person fired?

[00:15:55] Like then I just asked like a bunch of factual questions. OK, there's who was there to fire them. OK, so it was someone from the new company. It wasn't me. I didn't fire the person like but I changed the whole tone. I changed the the pace at

[00:16:10] which questions were read answered like it became much more staccato like back and forth. And I wonder, you know, doing some kind of like patterned or stuff like that is a good way to. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. If if I mean, I think if I

[00:16:23] might re say what I just heard you say and tell me if I'm getting this wrong. What you did is you basically kind of you guys were having an emotional conversation and then you invited her to kind of match you in a more practical conversation like.

[00:16:38] Yeah, it's like emotion. Yeah, I understand how you feel. I want to acknowledge that you're upset. You're upset with me, but but now let's talk practicalities. Is this my fault? Like was I was I involved in this firing? And I think that by changing

[00:16:53] your tone of voice and oftentimes we do this almost subconsciously right that we do it for instance when we laugh or when we frown. By changing how you were talking with her, you were signaling to her. I'd like to move to a different kind of conversation

[00:17:07] and you did it in a way that my guess is invited her to join you. Right? If if she had called up and she was like, I'm so upset. You're such a jerk and you said, well, okay, okay, let me ask you some questions like like

[00:17:18] was it my fault? Did you see me there? It wouldn't have gone well, but instead what you did is you you allowed that emotional conversation to happen and then you didn't like start attacking her. You invited her to join you in a more practical conversation, which is

[00:17:33] probably what you needed to have to really resolve this. Yeah, and it worked pretty well. And so I was just wondering if that fit into your into your mind and it sounds like it does. And but but I'll tell you conversational problems I've had

[00:17:47] which I haven't been able to solve like and let me ask you advice on this. Like one time I was living with a real social group of people and I really I mean living in a neighborhood where everybody was super social, everybody had a party all the time.

[00:18:01] It was like nonstop social extrovert heaven for extroverts and I wasn't very good at this. And so sometimes I just be standing around saying nothing and I would try to talk like Hey, how was your work today? Would you do at work?

[00:18:16] You know, but I guess I didn't go to the deeper level. Like had you feel about what you did at work? And sometimes that can be awkward a lot, right? Like how'd you feel about work? Yeah, but let's say you're standing there and and you

[00:18:28] say like hey, how was work today? And they're like it was good and you say something like what was the best thing you did today or like what do you like about your job or you know, if I was thinking of becoming a lawyer like you

[00:18:43] are, what's the what's the thing you would tell me that would be most important for me to know? Like should I become a lawyer? Like those are all three deep questions that are super easy. And once you do that, you're standing there.

[00:18:54] You're kind of like a little bit more introverted and you ask someone like, you know, do you like it? Do you like being a lawyer? Is it is it? Are you glad you did it? They're going to talk. They're going to tell you some amazing things, right?

[00:19:05] Because you're basically showing that you're interested in them. Yeah, you know, you're right. Like that I didn't do that. Like I would say how was work and I maybe I would even say, oh, did you feel shitty about that or happy about it?

[00:19:19] But I should have said something like, hey, my kids are one of my kids is thinking of being a lawyer. What should I would you recommend it and whether they said no or yes, I can get stories out of that. Absolutely. Or in something else you could do

[00:19:33] and I loved that you just brought this up. You could bring with up something about yourself and then invite them to get deep because you've shared something a little bit vulnerable. In that case, it was my kids thinking of becoming a lawyer. That's not super duper vulnerable,

[00:19:46] but you could say something like, you know, like I've had this job for 10. I've had I've been doing a podcast for nine years and I'm trying to figure out like do I like doing it or do I not like doing it? Like like what do you when

[00:20:01] you're as a lawyer, like how do you figure out whether this is the right career for you? Yeah, or like how did how do you determine like the success of your day? You know, I'd have a hard time figuring out if my day was successful or not.

[00:20:13] You and I think that's a wonderful thing to say. That's that's exposing a vulnerability and this is what we know about why deep questions are so powerful is deep questions are powerful because they give us an opportunity to expose a vulnerability. And then if the other person

[00:20:26] reciprocates that vulnerability, we feel really close to them. We feel trusting towards them. So if you say like, I'm just wondering as a lawyer, how do you define success in your day? Because like, I don't know whether I'm successful or not. Like I don't know what the

[00:20:40] definition I'm supposed to use as a podcaster for whether today was a success or not. That's kind of vulnerable, right? Like you're sharing something. I mean, it's not like you're like telling me, you know, you're about your dad or anything like that. But it's it's showing me a

[00:20:53] little bit of who you are. And if that person is like, yeah, you know, as a lawyer, I ask myself the same question some days, some days, I feel totally unsuccessful. Now you guys are sharing something real with each other. Yeah. Okay, let me take it one

[00:21:07] step. Let me make it even more difficult. Let's say I'm in a party and everybody in the room is talking about football and I don't know anything about football. What do I just like sit that one out or is there any? So it's totally fine to sit

[00:21:21] that one out. I will say one of the things that's really interesting about super communicators is they are much more comfortable just sitting there without participating. Like so we're all super communicators at sometimes, but like some people are consistent super communicators, right?

[00:21:36] They they do a much better job of connecting with other people. And if you observe them, what you'll see is in situations where you and I would feel awkward if we weren't participating, they feel totally at home. They just sit on the couch

[00:21:50] and they listen to other people talk and they they realize nobody's paying attention to them. Nobody's noticing that like that they're not saying anything and then they wait for something to come up that they actually are interested in. Now football is a great right.

[00:22:04] I don't watch football either. So I know nothing about football, but I do go to things where the football is playing and like oftentimes people are talking about football and I'm like, I'm like, hey, I don't know this game. Like tell me what I would be

[00:22:16] seeing on that screen if I was you instead of me. Oh, yeah, that's good. Like how often they love that right? Right because they what they love about anything when you love something, you understand the subtleties and the nuances and you love to talk about that exactly.

[00:22:31] And it might be that like they don't want to have a conversation with you. Not everything has to be a conversation. Sometimes you can just like drink your beer and watch the screen until politics comes up or TV shows or something you are interested

[00:22:43] in and then you can jump in. Yeah, that's this is very useful. So, you know, you were you were talking in the book about this guy Jim Lawler who was a CIA recruiter. So he worked for the CIA and his job was to go to foreign countries

[00:23:00] and find out what other foreigners he could run into and get them to work for the CIA secretly. That's right. And that's and he sucked at it at first. He was terrible at it. So, Lawler, thank you for being of this story because like I love this story.

[00:23:15] Lawler like was so desperate to be a CIA officer and he's like 30 is 31 years old. He like finally got a job in the CIA. They send him over to Europe. He's terrible at this. He like literally like every single time he tries to recruit someone,

[00:23:30] they basically like either turn him down or or threaten to report him to the police and he might get deported. And he's just terrible until one day someone in his bureau says hey, there's this woman coming to town who works for the foreign ministry of her home country

[00:23:46] back in the Middle East and and Lawler never told me what country it was but it's going to be pretty obvious. Yeah, I kind of figured it was pretty obvious when she started talking. Yeah, particularly in the time frame also. Right. It's early 1980s. Right.

[00:24:00] And this woman is coming from a place that just had a religious revolution and you know, the the Ayatollah has taken over. We can guess what what country was but she works for the foreign ministry and they're like, look, she's coming to town.

[00:24:14] You should go try and recruit her. So he bumps into her in a restaurant. He bumps right? He he manages to bump into her in a restaurant and actually I have a question about that. Like, yeah, is it because he first did some spying to sort of see

[00:24:28] what her daily routine was? OK, yeah. Yeah. He and some other folks in his bureau like would keep an eye on kind of where she was going. And so like he saw her go into this restaurant. She'd been in a couple of times

[00:24:39] and it had like bar like seating so you could sit. So strangers would sit next to each other and he like darts in and he sits next to her and he strikes up a conversation with her and he tells her that he's an oil speculator

[00:24:51] and they develop this relationship and they're like, you know, he invites her to lunch the next day and they go sightseeing together and like they become friends and she keeps on telling him about like she, you know, she came to Europe because she was so upset

[00:25:04] about what's going on inside her country and she works for the government. But she wants to she wants to reform the government and you know, they're not letting women study things in college and they're making them where where the job and she's really upset. And so eventually

[00:25:17] Lawler says to her. You know, they have this private dinner and he says, look, like I care about the same things you care about about making your country better. And I don't work for an oil company. I work for the CIA. Will you help us figure out

[00:25:34] how to improve things in your country? And she starts shaking her head and crying and gripping the table and say, no, no, no. And and she just she just completely is overwhelmed. She tells them they kill people in my nation for this. I cannot believe that

[00:25:51] you struck up a friendship with me without timing your CIA. If my country ever knows that we went to dinner together, they would arrest me and my family. She just takes off immediately. She she's so upset. So Lawler goes back and he tells his bosses

[00:26:05] who he had already told like I've recruited this woman. He tells his bosses like, nope, she didn't go for it. And his bosses are like, no, no, you don't understand. We already told Washington, D.C. You recruited her like, like if you if you don't make this happen,

[00:26:18] you're going to get fired. Like this is this is this is your job is to recruit this woman. So Lawler is freaking out at this point because he he's going to get fired. And so he realizes he has one last chance with Fatima.

[00:26:30] He can take her to dinner one more time before she never returns his phone calls. And she's about to go back to her home country. She's been there for about a month. So they go to this restaurant and Lawler has this notebook full of ideas

[00:26:43] on ways to recruit her and they sit down for dinner and she's like super glum. Right. And he asks her why and she says, you know, she's going home in a couple of days and she thought that she would like figure some things out in Europe

[00:26:58] and things would get better but she hasn't really figured anything out and she's just really disappointed in herself. So Lawler tries to make her feel better. He tries to cheer her up. He starts telling her like stories about when they were you know sightseeing together reminiscing

[00:27:12] and none of it works. She's super glum. She stays glum. They get to desert and Lawler thinks to himself like, should I make one last attempt to recruit this woman? And he he just decides no, I like nothing I say is going to make her

[00:27:26] can is going to convince her to take a suicidal risk. It's just if I say something she's just going to get up from the table and walk off like I am terrible at this. I have failed. I just need to accept that. And so

[00:27:39] he sort of has this moment where he he's thinking that and instead of trying to cheer up Fatima and try instead of trying to persuade her he just decides to kind of match her and be really honest and he's like, look, I I understand how frustrated

[00:27:55] you are with yourself because I'm incredibly frustrated myself like I'm so bad at this job. I wanted this job so bad and like I see other people who are good at this job and they seem to have something that I don't have and like I understand how

[00:28:09] how hard it is to disappoint yourself and and as he's saying this to her, she starts crying and he feels terrible. Right. He like reaches over. He's like, I'm sorry. I did not mean to make you cry. Like this is not my goal. I just

[00:28:23] you are honest with me and so I want to be honest with you and he starts patting her arm and as he's doing so she says no, no I can do this. This is important and and Loller is like she's so inexperienced and so overwhelmed. He's like,

[00:28:38] he's like, what? No, no, I don't want you to work for me. Like it's fine. You don't need to work for me. Like I I don't want to put you in any danger. I don't want to put you in any risk and she goes, no, no, I

[00:28:47] I hear what you're saying about wanting that we both want the same thing for my country and I think I can help you. The next day she goes to a safe house to get training and covert communications and stuff like that. She becomes the best asset

[00:29:02] in the Middle East over the next 20 years. And when I asked him Loller like why this happened he was like, he said he actually doesn't know why she changed her mind except that during that conversation during dessert for the first time instead of trying to manipulate her

[00:29:20] or persuade her he just matched her. She was she was glum. She was upset. He was he wasn't matching her. He was trying to make her feel better. But instead of he was like trying to solve things and she needed to be hugged. She needed to be hugged.

[00:29:35] And so when he hugged her for the first time she could really listen and trust him and he could listen to her and Jim Lawler actually went on to become one of the top recruiters in the CIA's history. He teaches other people how to do recruiting now. Well,

[00:29:50] you know, the cynical side of me says, OK, this is great. This is going to make my conversations better in lots of different situations. But there's a cynical side which says are we really just it's almost like we're computers that if someone puts the right programming in there

[00:30:06] then I can elicit reactions. So like let's say OK, you say he was being honest but let's say that was his technique. He's I'm going to OK, she's feeling I'm going to match her and then boom I'm going to be I'm going to recruit her this way now

[00:30:19] and he could have basically used that done the exact same thing, but did it more as a thought out technique instead of just being you know, quote unquote just being honest and it would have elicited the same reaction. Well, it's interesting. So so you're right. The communication tactics

[00:30:35] and tools and skills can be used to manipulate as as much as connect. But what's interesting is that humans have this very finely tuned authenticity detector. Make audio recordings of friends laughing together over a joke and strangers laughing together pretending to be to be laughing together.

[00:30:58] Oh my God, this is so great. I can't wait to hear what the result is. They would play one second clips just one second of these different of people laughing nothing except for laughter and listeners could tell with 90% accuracy who were friends and who were strangers.

[00:31:17] The reason why not whether they were fake laughing or not or they could tell whether it was fake. They could basically tell whether it was fake or whether it was real. Like are these people really connecting or are they pretending to connect?

[00:31:31] And and that's based on one second of audio totally decontextualized audio. If you think about how the humans have evolved we formed societies where we can't police everyone all the time, right? We can't make sure that everyone's honest. We can't make sure that no one's stealing.

[00:31:49] So what we do is that when somebody does something that feels like a betrayal, we overreact to us to it. If you're walking down the street and somebody kicks you by accident in the leg it's not going to bug you that much.

[00:32:02] If they kick you in the leg on purpose you're going to be furious way more furious than the pain caused by the kick. It's because our ability to detect authenticity is very very high. So maybe you know if you have one conversation with someone and they're so talented

[00:32:22] maybe they can fool you. Maybe they can manipulate you with these tactics. But if you're talking about becoming a spy you spent three months getting to know this person the risk you're going to take includes that you might be killed for it. If they're being inauthentic

[00:32:38] you're going to notice, right? And that's what Lawler said. Lawler said like look if I in the future when I tried to manipulate people when I tried to recruit people without being completely authentic and honest with them it just didn't work. Like the only way

[00:32:55] we're not computers because the only inputs that actually will listen to are real inputs. If you try and make it into something that you're not feeling maybe you'll get away with it in one conversation but with your kids like

[00:33:09] think about how well your kids know the difference between when you're really listening to them and when you're pretending to listen to them. It's true. But I think there's a gray area where you could do both. You could be you can say to yourself

[00:33:24] I'm going to honestly share my experiences because that will then get the response I need. Well, except that what's the response you need? So like like you talk to people all day long right for this podcast like I'm sure that you want to elicit something

[00:33:43] from the other person. You want them to be interesting or you want them to to be open and emotional or you want them to be vulnerable. And I'm sure that you have little little skills that you use to draw that out. But if you're phoning it in

[00:33:59] then it doesn't really work right? No, I agree. But like what I do is and so whether this is a technique or whether this is honest I would say it's a little bit of both. I just become insanely curious.

[00:34:14] So, Charles, I have like an hour or so with you and you wrote just wrote a book about a topic I am really fascinated about which is communication. So anything I don't understand or anything like you say something and if I just have like

[00:34:26] oh that rubs me some way like I can't I can't let that go. I got to ask a question. That's an honest question. Yeah. Although I know I'm going to do that to have a fun podcast. So it doesn't it doesn't demean

[00:34:40] the authenticity of what you're doing simply because it serves a higher purpose, right? I think the example is if somebody spends their entire life pretending to be moral and they only do moral things even if they don't believe it even if they don't feel it

[00:34:55] they're a moral person, right? When just because you're curious for a reason does not mean that your curiosity is inauthentic. If anything, it's actually you being more honest with me saying like look I'm really curious about what you're doing and by the way and in the communication literature

[00:35:13] this is known as a quiet negotiation. By the way, I'm asking you this because I'm hoping that other people will be interested in it too that it makes for a good podcast. That doesn't make our conversation less meaningful it makes it more meaningful.

[00:35:25] Now I know what you want out of the conversation and I believe you've been honest with me. You know it's funny with the kids because parent-kid conversations are a great environment to test this out like the computer programming idea. Like am I

[00:35:41] is my little kid a computer that I could like force a certain response but you still have to combine some authenticity. So I never when they did something wrong when they were little I would never get angry because you know when you get angry at somebody

[00:35:54] they just they tune you out they just walk away or whatever and but I would say someone told me to do this say don't say you're angry say you're disappointed in them but it only really worked if I really did feel disappointed.

[00:36:08] Yeah, but I would sometimes have to produce like sometimes I didn't care that much so I'd have to produce in my brain that feeling of disappointment and then really if I really was disappointed they'd start crying if I said I was disappointed in them.

[00:36:22] So I would I hear you saying and tell me if I'm getting this wrong is that oftentimes when we're talking to someone else we discover what we feel without without realizing it, right? Like like the fact that you had to tell your kids that you were disappointed

[00:36:37] meant that you had to figure out like are you actually disappointed? Look, if you weren't disappointed at all you would not be able to generate any disappointment. Right, right. And that and as you're saying this it's on the memories are coming back like that was pretty clear

[00:36:50] that sometimes I would say this and it wouldn't work if I didn't really feel it like if their mom said go talk to them and I didn't really care then it wouldn't nothing we were always in the black like a like a six year old's BS detector

[00:37:03] is very, very high when it comes to their own parents as anyone who has children can tell you yeah, it's very, very hard to pull one over on your own kids. Let me ask you this so with kids too sometimes and particularly, you know from generation to generation

[00:37:35] different generations disagree with each other about different topics like let's say a sensitive topic right now is this Israel Homa situation and it's very, very generational actually because we see what's happening college campuses and so on and if you you know, I've had this conversation several times now

[00:37:51] if you really feel someone doesn't have the full information or they have misinformation of course you always have to keep the option open that you might be wrong personally but how do you really and you talk about this in the book but how do you personally navigate

[00:38:06] these hard conversations about very painful topics? Yeah, it's a really good question and there's there's a whole chapter in the book about this group that this group that brought together people who are for gun control and people who are gun rights advocates and brought them together

[00:38:23] not to try and get them to agree with each other and not to get them to even even find common ground just to see if they could have a civil conversation without screaming at each other and it was a big success until it went online

[00:38:36] and the reason why it was a big success is because they taught people first of all a technique called looping for understanding that I can describe but more importantly they taught people that the goal of a conversation is not to convince the other person

[00:38:50] it is not to figure out what you have in common the goal of a conversation is simply to understand what the other person is trying to tell you and speak in a way that they can understand you if you've done that the conversation has succeeded

[00:39:03] so let's take the Israel Hamas right you're on campus and you're you're talking to someone who's very different than you if you say my goal is to get you to admit that you know Israel is terrible or that Gaza is terrible you're probably not going to succeed

[00:39:19] it doesn't matter how many facts you have at your disposal it doesn't matter what evidence you have they have their evidence like like you came into this conversation already already understanding what you believe if you're not looking to the other person to educate you

[00:39:33] but if you come into that conversation and you say to them look I understand that Israel and Gaza is really important to you I want to understand why it's important tell me tell me what you believe about this situation and why you believe it and

[00:39:47] and here's the deep question tell me why it's important to you like tell me of all the things that we could be talking about this one seems to be really important to you explain to me why okay so you ask that question they answer the question right

[00:39:59] they tell you what their response is then we get to looping for understanding so step one is you ask a question which we just we already did step two is once the person has finished answering the question

[00:40:10] we repeat back to them in our own words what we just heard them say so oh I what I hear you saying is that for you this is a continuation of oppression that has always been aimed at at brown and black bodies and

[00:40:27] you are you don't like the fact that the United States you feel ashamed of the United States is it or or what I hear from you is you believe really deeply in Israel's right to exist and their right to defend themselves and

[00:40:39] and you know we have this precursor of the Holocaust showing how important that is so you repeat back what you heard them say in your own words and then step number three and this is the one we usually forget you ask if you got it right so

[00:40:53] what what is that what does that do so let's say let's say okay somebody says okay I acknowledge that October 7th happened that was clearly done by evil people but so is bombing children an evil thing

[00:41:09] and then let's say someone says that to me and I respond and say so what I'm hearing you saying is that you really don't like the fact that children are getting killed and it's not it's not their fault and then what what's the key thing there with

[00:41:22] did I get that right because when you when you ask if you got it right you're showing them two things number one you genuinely want to understand what they're trying to tell you right you're not you're not just waiting your turn to respond

[00:41:35] you're genuinely listening and you genuinely want to understand it number two it might be that they say yeah yeah no that's right you get you get it but they might also say

[00:41:43] no no no it's not really about the kids I mean kids are part of it but it's more about like even bigger injustices and and you know the systems that create injustice and so now you understand a little bit better and then

[00:41:57] because they feel listened to because they believe you want to understand them they in the again this is hardwired into our brains we can't help it they are more likely to listen to you

[00:42:07] so after repeating that back maybe once or twice or three times having that saying did I get it right until they're like yeah I think you understand what I'm saying then you can say

[00:42:15] can I tell you how I see this from my perspective like would it be okay to share with you why I see this a little bit differently because I want you to understand where I'm coming from and what's interesting there is

[00:42:27] if you truly take out the element that you're trying to convince them then I feel that can work if you say if you say for instance look these teenage girls got raped that on October 7th that could be any anybody we know for instance

[00:42:46] that's just so disturbing to me I don't even know how to respond to it and and then you just leave it at that it's yeah yeah I think that like and that's much more persuasive right like like it might be and

[00:42:59] inevitably what's going to happen is that you guys are going to actually influence each other a little bit like you're both going to agree that rape is terrible that the Hamas terrorists were terrible and and and perhaps Hamas isn't Gaza or maybe you know

[00:43:15] you get to a deeper conversation where you're finding places where you can understand things together but if you just come in and you and we know this from study after study

[00:43:25] anti-vaxxers is a great example of this the CDC when the vaccines first started coming out and people didn't want to get the vaccine the CDC was like look if we just educate them enough about the science they'll get the shot

[00:43:37] like we just need to tell them the facts and doctors would go into these exam rooms and they would try that and the people they were talking to were like no no I know the facts like I've done my own research

[00:43:47] I've gone online and I've read all this stuff that that doctor is not going to convince them that they're wrong that they're ignorant like trying to convince them of anything is is only going to alienate them

[00:44:00] what's much better is this thing known as motivational interviewing where I ask you why you believe that I loop for understanding I show you that I'm listening and then I tell you why I believe what I believe and inevitably some of what we believe overlaps

[00:44:19] and people say like look I don't want to give my kids this shot because it's untested and I think it's dangerous and as a doctor I could say nope I got all the studies it's not dangerous or I could say

[00:44:29] I totally hear that I hear that like your children safety is really important to you the reason why the shots important to me is because I see these kids come in and they're sick and once they come in there's nothing I can do for them

[00:44:42] and so I just worry about their safety when they're when they're unvaccinated now we're talking about the same thing we both care about our kids safety we both care about about the health of our of kids and I'm not trying to convince you that my approach is right

[00:44:57] and you're not trying to convince me but now at least we're hearing each other and you might say like oh yeah like I understand in fact what happens in about 50% of cases is that at the end of the conversation that person says

[00:45:09] okay I'll go ahead and get the vaccine so so they're so why are they convinced but not the doctor so sometimes the doctor is convinced right sometimes the doctor sometimes the doctor the doctor says you know I understand why you don't want to get the vaccine

[00:45:25] and and I agree from your perspective like you shouldn't get the vaccine that's okay but like in what and when if you're saying like in 50% of the time their minds are changed it almost seems like facts are stronger than emotions

[00:45:39] like ultimately facts when people are on a common playing ground all of a sudden then facts when oh yeah no facts become really powerful once we're at a place where we can listen to facts but the problem is that like when we start a conversation in conflict

[00:45:55] I don't want to listen to your facts and you don't want to listen to my facts in fact you don't even believe that my facts are facts and I don't think your facts are facts

[00:46:03] so until we can until we can match each other until we can achieve this neural entrainment and really really connect on some level it doesn't matter what the facts are we ignore them and then you're right once we find something that where we can talk to each other

[00:46:18] where we can connect then facts actually matter because we're listening to them you know it reminds me of like whenever I've gone for marriage counseling like in my past marriage or whatever it always felt like BS to me because the big technique among marriage counselors is look

[00:46:34] you're going to say something or she's going to say something the other person is going to repeat exactly what they said and then like you just said then asked did I get this right and then it's the other person's turn

[00:46:46] and it just feels too much of like a technique when it's orchestrated like that you know with the counselor in the middle and never really worked for me although I guess like intuitively or instinctively it works when people are just having a conversation

[00:46:58] well okay so let me let me ask this first of all I would say it sounds like going into those marriage therapy sessions you weren't necessarily looking for a conversation that like this is something you were willing to do because your wife was asking for it

[00:47:13] but it's not something you were necessarily enthusiastic is that fair yeah or maybe I just wanted to be right all the time yeah and look we don't always like not everything has to be a conversation

[00:47:24] like when I say to my kids like I want to talk about your room I'm not actually looking for a conversation about their room I'm looking for a polite way to tell them you got to go clean up your room right now

[00:47:32] yeah so so let's set that aside whether you actually want to have a conversation now let's say the counselor had told you okay don't repeat back what this person says what I want you to do is I want you to listen to them

[00:47:44] I want you to think about what they've said and I want you to try and explain to me what you are hearing try and explain to me what you think they are trying to tell you like that's actually a really restorative process right

[00:48:02] because if your wife is saying he's a jerk he doesn't provide enough emotional support for me if you say okay here's what I hear you saying I hear you saying when I do things that make sense to me sometimes you see them as being insensitive

[00:48:19] and I hear you saying that that hurts you and that it feels cruel for me to hurt you that way when I can just be kinder did I get that right? at that point she's going to feel listened to

[00:48:32] and you actually might learn something about what's going on in your relationship that you didn't recognize yeah that's interesting so you really there's really a lot of self-awareness involved like you really have to know at a second layer of thinking what is my real goal here

[00:48:49] and you have to have the intelligence to be open to hearing something painful about yourself well and can I just point out you just looped for understanding me you basically restated what I just said in your own words and so I feel listened to

[00:49:07] and you feel like you actually understand me and that wasn't too formalistic that wasn't too awkward sometimes when we're in a marriage therapy I mean look marriage therapy is tough to begin with right it's not going to be a good time regardless it's not a party

[00:49:22] yeah but I think what's important is that like when we are a little bit more self-aware when we just think and it's just literally thinking half an inch deeper about a conversation thinking half an inch deeper noticing half an inch more

[00:49:36] what's going on in a dialogue makes you a super communicator super communicators they don't have special powers they're not born that way it's literally just a set of skills any of us can learn do you think younger people have just as much ability

[00:49:51] to be a super communicator as older people the reason I ask is it reminds me of Arthur Brooks books comparing you know fluid intelligence with crystallized intelligence i.e. the intelligence of a younger person with the intelligence of an older person taking into account

[00:50:09] their brain changes and so on so I'm wondering if maybe older people are just naturally better no I think that oftentimes older people have a little bit more practice a little bit more experience but there's ten I mean okay when you're a kid

[00:50:25] so sometimes I say the best way to identify who is a super communicator in your life is if you were having a really bad day who would you call that you know would make you feel better like does someone come to mind for you

[00:50:37] yeah that like yeah me too right we know immediately who we would call that person is a super communicator for you you're probably a super communicator for them now if I asked you that same question when you were 11 instead of now your answer might be different

[00:50:52] and it would be for different reasons but you still knew super communicators when you're 11 years old you knew the kids who like were kind of effortlessly popular at school or who everyone just liked to talk to because they just they made you feel better about things

[00:51:07] like it's not about how old we are it's about whether we've learned to think a little bit more about this now I will say most super communicators people who are consistently super communicators most of them if you ask them will tell you that they went through a period

[00:51:23] when they were really bad at communication when they were awkward as kids or their parents were getting a divorce and they were the one who had to be the mediator between them they had to think a little bit more about communication

[00:51:36] because you know their survival depended on it or their happiness depended on it so yeah we can all be super communicators it's just a question of do we want to spend that time and energy to get there well and this is related actually so online

[00:51:53] you've mentioned that a couple times in the book that these conversations are happening in person and online results are different is it because online that authenticity antenna doesn't really work? so I think what it is so I mentioned the chapter about the gun control conversation

[00:52:10] gun control conversation right? and so all these people went there was 100 people 50% gun control 50% gun rights they teach them looping for understanding a couple of other techniques they have a great weekend basically nobody changes each other's mind but they walk away saying like we really connected

[00:52:28] we understand the other side then they set up a Facebook group for all these folks and a couple of additional folks and within 45 minutes people were calling each other jack booted Nazis online right? like it all fell apart once they went online

[00:52:41] and I think what was going on there and this is what research shows us is that we often assume that communicating one way is the same as communicating always right? now we've actually learned to intuit some differences when phones were invented about a hundred

[00:52:57] or became popular about 100 years ago there were all these articles about how no one will ever be able to have a real conversation on the telephone that they'll just use it for like sending stock orders or grocery lists and they were right at the time

[00:53:10] if you listen to how people talked on the telephone they didn't know how to talk to each other it was really hard for them to have conversations but by the time you and I become teenagers we can talk on the phone for like six hours a night right?

[00:53:22] like we learned and in fact what we know is if you are talking on the telephone versus face-to-face without realizing it you will over enunciate your words on the phone if we can see each other like we can on this video call

[00:53:37] if we turned off our cameras right now our vocal variety would become higher as we're putting more emotions into our voice because we can't see each other put differently we have learned different communication techniques for different channels now we've been talking on the phones for over

[00:53:56] a hundred years we've been talking face-to-face for millennia most people got their first email address in like 1997 like we've been talking online when it comes to like texting via emojis that's like seven years ago that started so I think what happens when people make a mistake

[00:54:15] about online is it's that they assume that I can talk to you online the same way that I can talk to you face-to-face but if you can hear my voice you understand when I'm being sarcastic but if I send you a sarcastic email you can't hear the sarcasm

[00:54:30] you think I'm being serious I so part of it is kind of like the things you're missing in text which is the sound and the volume and you know the tone and so on but I wonder also if there's just like this neural

[00:54:44] what did you call it entrainment or entrainment entrainment this neural entrainment doesn't happen because our brains are simply not next to each other well so so you and I are nearly entrained right now right and we're separated I'm in California you're in New York

[00:55:01] there's a lot of distance between us it's not so much the distance that creates entrainment it's whether we have agreed on the same set of rules for this conversation so think about like when we're texting someone we know that the rule is

[00:55:18] you can be very short and bruskin a text and that doesn't mean anything but if I'm short and bruskin an email you might read it differently and if I called you up and I was like James and I said James I'm gonna see you at five okay later

[00:55:32] and I hung up the phone you're gonna be like why is Charles so pissed at me what's going on here right it's because we've agreed on a set of rules for texting a set of rules for email and a set of rules for for you know phone conversations

[00:55:46] and when we forget those rules or we ignore those rules that's when we fail to connect but it doesn't matter if we're next to each other it doesn't matter what type we can entrain just as easily as long as we're in sync

[00:55:58] on what rules of communication we're using I see so if you're online and you're right people say things online they wouldn't say person to person and if everybody just agreed like think first would you say this person to person if you wouldn't then don't text it

[00:56:16] then the rules are a little closer we were a little closer to understanding what the rules are and maybe that then you know entrainment happens a little more easily or it might go the other way where I say okay so when you're online

[00:56:32] it's okay for you to be brusque in a way that you wouldn't be and I'm not going to get offended by that because I understand in texts we're actually brusque with each other the key is just again this is the matching principle

[00:56:44] that like we need to be having the same kind of conversation at the same time it's not just about emotional, social and practical it's also have we engaged in this quiet negotiation to figure out what the rules are for this dialogue

[00:56:59] and then do we both abide by them and the book is all or mostly about one-to-one conversations like you know hot like in some sense most of it's like a high impact you know it's husband and wife colleagues at work difficult conversations or recruiting someone as a spy

[00:57:20] there is also the all social thing which too which is the part I really needed the most but there's also another aspect of conversation one-to-many so if you're giving a talk or you're performing a comedy or something like that if you're giving a talk that's one-to-many

[00:57:37] how would you use these principles in one-to-many? sure so the first question is is that a conversation like do you want to have a conversation with the audience or do you want to just tell the audience what you're thinking and feeling and let them absorb it

[00:57:50] well okay my theory there is that the best public talks are feel like conversations that's exactly right and we're seeing that right now on the campaign trail right there's one candidate in particular who like seems to take an entire room of people

[00:58:08] and make them feel like they're having a conversation with him and it feels organic and natural for the people in that room so what's going on there well often times it's the same basic principle just kind of writ large right if I'm feeling something

[00:58:25] if I'm feeling an emotion I'm gonna show that emotion so I say I am angry I'm angry that this is happening you know there I'm angry that you know whatever the issue is stick in your little the issue of the day or if I'm saying okay and now

[00:58:42] now I know you're angry too tell me that you're angry and the crowd roars back right and then at some point I say being angry isn't enough we need to actually go and try and solve this problem

[00:58:55] the way you solve the problem is by showing up at the polls on election day and voting for me now we've moved on to a practical conversation I want you to go tell your neighbor about this idea I want you to tell your neighbor how important this is

[00:59:09] now that's a social conversation right and if it's good the audience is saying it back to you the audience is looping for understanding they're telling you I wanna go vote I'm gonna go talk to my neighbor often times you help politicians say things like

[00:59:23] promise me you'll go talk to a neighbor tomorrow and people stand up and they shout I promise I promise it's funny how it cycles through all the three types of conversation the you know the practical slash facts the you know are we all feeling

[00:59:39] you know the same way and helping each other you know agreeing that we feel the same way and then social yeah and that happens in almost every conversation what you'll notice is that in every meaningful conversation or every sort of sustained conversation

[00:59:52] all three kinds of conversations come up I wonder is there a fourth thing there also there's a call to action which is vote yeah so I think in that case in that example yeah I think that very explicitly in that example

[01:00:05] and I think that's a little practical right usually falls into the sort of the practical conversation like how do we make a plan like how do we turn this feeling into a plan of action but you're exactly right and it's not like

[01:00:17] it's not like there's no other forms of conversation these are the buckets that many different kinds of conversations fall into but then there's sometimes when like if I go to a movie and like I'm watching a movie next to my kid

[01:00:32] and we're just like whispering like things we observe to each other you know that's a conversation but maybe it's not emotional or practical or social maybe it's just us sharing with each other but for the most meaningful conversations the ones that actually matter the most

[01:00:49] then you find that these three elements the practical, the emotional and the social what's interesting to me as a podcaster like both of us have been podcast hosts and podcast guests yeah you know and it's interesting because so I've been on a lot of podcasts

[01:01:05] and I see the poor podcast hosts it's like they have their questions in advance and they stick to them and they're just going from one to the next and I don't want to say they're bad podcasters maybe they're nervous or they're just learning

[01:01:19] but those I really get annoyed and they're not like real conversations I think it works for podcasts too like the best podcast are just conversations like I try to imagine you and I are just we haven't spoken in years we're just calling each other up to update

[01:01:36] and then that's the podcast and I think the reason why that approach works is because it feels like you're listening to me whereas if you ask a question I give you an answer and then you just move on to the next question on your list

[01:01:49] you're not really listening like you're not trying to connect with me you've basically got a list of questions you want to get through and think about how frequently that happens face-to-face right I'm saying something and I feel like instead of listening to me

[01:02:02] you're just waiting your turn to speak that's not a conversation where we feel connected to each other but when you as you're very talented at this when you say like look you know I think what you're saying is or here's what I'm hearing or

[01:02:16] or let me show you that I'm listening then it makes me want to listen to you and do the same thing back well the best example in your book was one of the first stories in the book the Felix forgot his last name the FBI negotiator Sigala

[01:02:31] yeah and I love that story like basically it was almost like this magic trick that he did it's totally and what's amazing about about Felix Sigala is it's totally a magic trick this is like if this guy walked into a room

[01:02:46] there is no way you would think he was super communicator he's like pudgy he's got like a like a like a Ted Lasso like a substitute teacher mustache his voice is kind of nasal and reedy he actually as a kid was really really shy

[01:03:01] and his father was a con man right like he was a no his grandfather his grandfather was a con man he was totally ashamed of like like how he had grown up and because he thought had to think about communication he got really good at it

[01:03:15] and one of the things he does that's really powerful is he he uses laughter and we know this about super communicators super communicators tend to ask 10 to 20 times as many questions as other people right just a huge number of questions most of them we don't even register

[01:03:31] because they're questions like hey what would you think about that or like what happened next super communicators tend to laugh more but they're not laughing in response to anything funny they're laughing to show you that they want to connect with you

[01:03:44] and then our natural instinct is to laugh back and we're showing them that we want to connect back and will that laughter register as authentic laughter on that other study that you mentioned yeah I mean I mean yeah yeah like if if if I tell you a joke

[01:04:01] and you kind or not even a joke if I just if you say something and I go yeah I know I totally understand it's you're not going to think that I'm like uproariously entertained by you right but the laugh seems like it's an acknowledgement that

[01:04:16] it's an acknowledgement that you just said something yeah it's an acknowledgement that you said something it is authentic you know with with AI out there now and wearables a thing like what if just on my smartwatch it keeps track of everyone I'm who I'm talking to

[01:04:30] and then when I get home I look at the watch and say okay this guy was authentic this guy wasn't authentic like all this stuff could be made right now the technology is there that's kind of what NASA did right when they were

[01:04:41] when NASA was looking for astronauts they needed to figure out a way to tell the difference between people who are emotionally intelligent and people who could fake being emotionally intelligent really really well but probably we're going to crack

[01:04:52] when you're like in space for six months at a time and you're living next to someone and one of the ways that they found to do that was to pay attention to basically record how people laughed when the interviewer would walk in the interviewer would do something like

[01:05:08] drop all their papers or make some joke and laugh really really loud like bigger than you would expect and then they would pay close attention to whether the applicant matched that laughter or whether they just gave a polite chuckle and that helped them know

[01:05:23] who actually wanted to connect with other people so you're absolutely right we could work that into our technology and figure it out now the better thing is just to actually just pay a little bit of attention right like if you were asking me if you were being inauthentic

[01:05:40] if you were just going down your list of questions I don't need a watch to tell me you're doing that I pick up on it pretty quickly So what's the point of the research you think is the point really just to say this definitely happens even though

[01:06:08] and I'm asking specifically about a research study you mentioned in the book so there's a chapter on negotiation or a section on negotiation and you talk about three Harvard professors William Murie I've actually spoken at a TED talk right after he spoke he's one of the professors

[01:06:25] and they wrote this book Getting to Yes and what struck me in that study was one of the guys had been involved in real negotiations like releasing the hostages and Iran and the Camp David Accords and so on So in the real world he says this happens

[01:06:43] but then they did a study to show that this happens so I wonder sometimes what's actually research and what's we just kind of know this stuff anyway Well, so I do think we all have an instinct on how to communicate right this is communication is human superpower

[01:07:00] and we all we all have evolved to communicate that being said sometimes we don't listen to our instincts sometimes we don't understand how to listen to our instincts also sometimes it's easier for those instincts to thrive when we have skills that we can use

[01:07:15] So are the skills that I'm describing and that William Murie describes are they are they manufactured skills that nobody knew existed? No, they like everyone hearing looping for understanding knows that this is something that's effective but sometimes you need someone to tell you

[01:07:30] look there's a system for this there's a process like instead of letting it happen happenstance just do these three steps and keep these three steps in mind and then you know a couple weeks later it's automatic it's subconscious you do it without even thinking about it

[01:07:45] So I think you're right that part of what's interesting about communications research is that it tends to reveal things to us that as soon as we hear them we say oh, of course that's true like I knew that without knowing it

[01:07:58] but until someone points it out to us until someone teaches us how to do it that knowledge that knowledge isn't usable I see so it's like even though you might instinctively know it or even though you might suspect it that the fact that

[01:08:15] you know somebody did a study and shows that 99 out of 100 times this happens now you can kind of confidently say okay, I knew that worked anyway but now I don't have to think about it like it just works

[01:08:26] I'm going to think about the things that are hard for me but I know like that study in particular showed that negotiation is not a zero-sum game where one person wins the other person loses but that both sides could win and that I think is instinctively understood

[01:08:39] by negotiators but I think if they maybe what you're saying is if they know it in scientific research they could relax on that part knowing that it works and then move on to more difficult parts for them Well, and think about how easy it is

[01:08:54] to get into a mindset where I say my goal in this conversation is to convince you that I'm right like if I can just give you the facts that I know you're going to agree with me right? And if somebody says to you

[01:09:05] look, look, it's not going to work like I understand why you think that but research shows it's not going to work your goal in this conversation should just be to understand each other and that's and if one of you changes your mind

[01:09:18] that's the thing that's going to get you there like both like I understand why that instinct exists to try and just prove to the other person that I'm right and they're wrong but it also is instinctually true that when I tell you it's not going to work

[01:09:32] you know that I'm being right and I guess also like take the hard conversations as an example the more emotional you are in a conversation or the more conversation triggers some emotions maybe you forget these instinctive rules that you know most of the other times

[01:09:49] and you have to be reminded because you say this study happened so I know I shouldn't be angry or try to force feed my opinion or whatever Or just anxious right? Think about like how frequently we go into a conversation

[01:10:01] and we just feel kind of anxious about it as every conversation I ever have Okay right So there was a study that was done by a woman named Allison Wood Brooks at Harvard Business School where she had people write down three topics they could discuss

[01:10:15] before they started having a discussion with a stranger and so it took like seven to ten seconds people would write down like you know last night's TV show and the football game this weekend little dumb stuff they'd put it in their back pocket

[01:10:28] and what they found is that those conversations went much much better after people had done that not because they discussed what they had written down most people didn't ever discuss what they had written down but feeling like you had something to fall back on made them less anxious

[01:10:42] So often times part of teaching these skills is to say to you you don't need to be anxious going into this conversation because you can always ask a deep question like you have something to fall back on and if you're in a conflict situation

[01:10:56] if you're arguing with someone and like you're feeling overwhelmed just loop for understanding just repeat back what you heard and ask if you got it right and that's going to if nothing else give you time to settle down a little bit these skills are important

[01:11:11] because we remember them when it's hard to remember things I mean this is so valuable it's valuable in a lot of contexts I mean for myself personally I could think of relationships you know marriages and sales negotiating podcasts public speaking I mean there's a lot of different areas

[01:11:29] but just knowing this stuff at a deeper level is really important So can I ask you a question? Sure Okay so you've been doing this podcast for nine years Yeah And I assume in your life I know you've had some conversations have gone well

[01:11:44] and some conversations that have gone less well What do you feel like how are you a different communicator today than you were nine years ago? I think I am more of a blank slate seemed like the wrong word to use

[01:11:59] I am more likely to not have any opinion when I'm talking to somebody and maybe a way to say it is non-judgmental but it's not even non-judgmental I have no reason to judge because I go into a conversation with no opinion

[01:12:17] so I'm not going to judge if they have a different opinion for me and I think that and what I fall back on is curiosity so like what and I feel the curiosity in my body and so I think those two things completely unopinionated

[01:12:35] so I'm able to absorb the other persons and really listen to the other person's opinions and the other thing is just insanely curious So and I allow my body to tell me interrupt here because you have a question Right And when I love about that

[01:12:55] I'll loop for understanding what I hear you saying and tell me if I'm getting this wrong is you've learned to be more in the moment like rather than you've learned to listen and the goal has for you has become

[01:13:09] understanding what the other person is trying to tell you more than trying to figure out who's right or wrong or what the greater truth is but rather hearing what they're saying and listening more closely and being curious to really understand them Is that right?

[01:13:26] Right, which by the way might not be the best podcasting strategy because very successful podcasts are often very opinionated and you know and I had you know so Mehdi Hassan who had an MSNBC show he came on the podcast when his book came out

[01:13:42] and he said there's no way you're neutral on all of these issues and maybe he's correct but at that moment I was really neutral on every issue out there and you refused to believe me I believe you, I believe you I think that like when you're curious

[01:13:58] and when your goal is to understand it's often easy to set our own opinions aside in a very genuine way and you're right maybe some podcasters do really well just by kind of bloviating but I would say even if it's not great for podcasts

[01:14:14] and I actually think it is even if it's not great for podcasts it's good for conversations right like I think do you think you're a better communicator today than you were nine years ago? oh yeah absolutely and part of it is a function of age

[01:14:27] I think because you do kind of learn through experience but part of it, part of it is because I've dealt with look I've let's just take politics as an example I've had on Republican presidential candidates Democrat presidential candidates independence

[01:14:45] I've had people from every side of the political spectrum and I will I will guess that every guest I've had probably thinks I think exactly like they do or at least that you're interested in understanding how they think right like I don't think you agree with everything

[01:15:02] I don't even know if you agree with that but like I know that you want to understand what I'm telling you and like that's what feels good like our brains actually evolved to really feel a lot of pleasure from being understood

[01:15:14] I mean I always use as an example I've had the same business partner since about 1999 like so what is that now almost 25 years and he is pro-life which he'd be happy to admit in public and pro-choice and usually the two don't mix very well and

[01:15:36] and we've talked about this issue many times but I would say in a weird way we've never had an argument about that issue we just we were able to talk about it and and then move on and do you think when you talk about abortion with him

[01:15:55] are you trying to convince him to change his mind? No and nor is he really trying look I've had girlfriends in that time who have had an abortion and he has not judged me or maybe he judges them internally in his mind I don't know but

[01:16:14] we've never really had any kind of fight over it or anything and my guess is like at the core of that and again tell me if I'm doing this wrong is do you guys have a lot of respect for each other? Yeah

[01:16:28] The truth of the matter is no two people agree on everything right my wife and I like she's a biologist I don't really like nature that much to be honest with you Yeah it's boring

[01:16:40] I'd rather go see a movie and eat some Chinese food than go for a hike in the Redwoods but that doesn't mean we can't connect with each other it doesn't mean we don't have a great marriage But that is though part of a successful marriage

[01:16:57] which is that you could have different interests but still be recreational companions for each other Absolutely and know how to talk to each other so when she comes home and tells me about something she saw in nature like we can have a conversation about it where I

[01:17:11] I love her passion and I'm so interested in her passion because she's passionate about it whereas I would have seen the same thing and been like whatever it's another fish I don't care Right Yeah, I know definitely I'm interested in for instance chess

[01:17:27] my wife could have zero interest in that like doesn't know the rules doesn't care doesn't want to hear about oh my gosh this Ding Loren just won the world championship she doesn't care but she we find common ground like

[01:17:41] competitiveness she understands and what makes a competitor and what doesn't so you always can find common ground Absolutely Absolutely, you find that place where you can match each other and that's where the connection starts from Well Charles, when does the book come out? So the book comes out

[01:17:56] No February 20th comes out February 20th People can pre-order now so if it's called super communicators they can find it on Amazon or Barnes & Noble anywhere you go audible on and also if you just

[01:18:09] if people want to reach out to me and I'd love to hear from people if my email address is Charles at CharlesDewhig.com or if you just Google me you'll find my email address on my website

[01:18:19] and I actually read and reply to every reader email that I get Wow, that's impressive It might take a week or two but like you'll hear back from me Again because I think communication is important right like this is real stuff

[01:18:35] Alright then let me add this brings up a question This is where I am the worst at communicating I'm incapable of getting back to people So like someone writes me a bit and usually the nicer someone communicates with me

[01:18:50] but this over emails or text or online or whatever usually the nicer someone communicates with me I feel like I have to really compose a really great response and then two weeks go by and then you're like okay yeah I can't do it

[01:19:06] Something is wrong with me on this I have a mental problem about responding to people Okay so here's the thing I would say as long as you and other people have agreed on that basic rule then it's fine right if I email you

[01:19:19] if we're friends I have a friend who is terrible at email So I'll email him and I'll be like hey you want to have dinner and half the time he literally won't even reply

[01:19:29] right and like it's easy for me to think like oh he doesn't actually like me but no he actually likes me I just understand the rules are he's terrible at email like he just does he is just bad at email

[01:19:40] and that's okay I accept that and I acknowledge that I think the key is it's not that one thing is good and one thing is bad it's who you are but it's about communicating to the other person who you are right

[01:19:52] so that if I send you an email and I never hear back from you I might think it's because you're pissed at me or something like that if everyone knows if you tell people please send me an email I'm bad

[01:20:03] I'm bad at responding but that doesn't mean like I didn't appreciate it versus me going on a podcast and saying if you email me I will email you back now we know the rules Yeah I wonder how I can explain to people the rules in advance though

[01:20:17] Oh so actually I think a lot of people have autoresponders like I'll send an email to someone and I'll get something back that says hey thank you for your note I only check email between you know three o'clock and five o'clock

[01:20:29] from me it's because I haven't gotten a chance to see your email if it's really important send me another email right they tell you the instructions on how to communicate with them and at that point you know I see that's a good idea maybe I should do that

[01:20:43] I always think I can do better but maybe I should just do the autoresponder explain the rules and then communicate when I can I'm afraid it'll make me even worse though like oh I sent an autoresponder that's good enough

[01:20:56] well and the truth is not everything deserves a conversation right like sometimes people send you an email and they're like hey I love your show and they don't want anything in return they just want to know they just want to let you know that they heard

[01:21:08] they loved your show and I love those emails for anybody in my audience I love those emails but I'm not good at responding to them so Charles Stuhig the book is super communicators I love this topic and conversation I probably have a good collection of books about

[01:21:23] communication and particularly as regards persuasion and things like that and negotiation but you cover all aspects of communication what a great book I we didn't even talk stories about the big bang theory how that show became such a great show using some of these techniques

[01:21:40] and you talk about Netflix's internal culture and how they communicate so many great stories in here Charles Stuhig author of also The Power of Habit and I always forget the exact phrasing but better faster smarter or smarter faster better

[01:21:57] and I think you were on for both books right? yeah yeah I love coming on this show it's really fun we have to get you on when you don't have a book exactly yeah that'd be fun well thanks so much Charles it was good catching up also

[01:22:11] and look great book February 20th 2024 super communicators