00:00:00
People really care about what's making them disliked. And they really want to know how to be liked. Okay. So, first, this is an exercise
00:00:06
that I do in my class at Harvard called 10 questions to fall in like. So, if I ask someone those questions, they're going to like me.
00:00:12
It's a great starting point, but let's talk about this because they're going to be little clues about how to be better
00:00:17
liked. And it's the most teachable, practical, scientifically rigorous framework in the world for
00:00:23
communication. Do you want to hear about it, Stephen? Of course I want to hear about it. I want to be the most persuasive, influential, likable talker in the
00:00:30
world. So, I shall follow your lead. Oh my gosh, it's a lot of power. I love it. I love it so much.
00:00:36
Harvard professor Allison Woodbrooks is a behavioral scientist who has spent two decades studying
00:00:41
conversational science. And she's revealing the communication mistakes we all make. The art of negotiation and how to get anyone to
00:00:48
like you. We all get to adulthood and we feel like conversation should be easy. But as a scientist, when you look under the hood,
00:00:54
you realize this is why we have so many awkward moments, why we say things that we shouldn't, why we are boring, why we
00:01:01
get angry and hostile. And there's very clear strategies to help us with all of that. Like one of my biggest findings was how we reframe social anxiety as
00:01:08
excitement, which makes you focus on opportunities rather than threats. And that paper ended up being featured in
00:01:13
Inside Out, the movie. And then there's small talk. I hate small talk. I'm going to help you reframe that because it's really important. But the
00:01:19
mistake that people make is that they say they're way too long and they need to move up this topic pyramid. What about in a digital age? Do we need
00:01:26
to start communicating differently? Yeah, there's clear things that we should do to make our textbased communication better and we'll go
00:01:32
through all of them. And you said you've done an interesting study recently about male friendship. Yes. And it's quite troubling.
00:01:39
So, how can I make more friends as a man? Yeah, let's talk about that.
00:01:45
I see messages all the time in the comments section that some of you didn't realize you didn't subscribe. So, if you
00:01:50
could do me a favor and double check if you're a subscriber to this channel, that would be tremendously appreciated. It's the simple, it's the free thing
00:01:56
that anybody that watches this show frequently can do to help us here to keep everything going in this show in the trajectory it's on. So, please do
00:02:03
double check if you've subscribed and uh thank you so much because in a strange way, you are you're part of our history
00:02:09
and you're on this journey with us and I appreciate you for that. So, yeah, thank you.
00:02:20
Professor Allison Wood Brooks. What is it that you do and why do you
00:02:26
think it matters so much to the world? I am a professor at Harvard and I'm a
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behavioral scientist. I study how people talk to each other and how they can do
00:02:36
it better. I teach a course that I created there called talk. I wrote a
00:02:42
book about it, also called Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves.
00:02:47
And if someone's chosen to listen to this conversation now, they've just clicked on it and they're thinking, you know, should I stay or should I should I
00:02:54
go? What promise can we give them if they stay and listen to this conversation that is based on the work
00:02:59
you've done in your book and all the research you've done? What is it that you think the average person can come away with that will have a meaningful
00:03:05
impact on their day-to-day life? All of life is about relationships and
00:03:11
relationships are about talking. So if they can learn even one strategy that
00:03:16
helps them in their conversations, it will massively improve their lives. If you think of everything from work to
00:03:24
romantic relationships, friendships, productivity, all of it hinges on having
00:03:30
excellent conversations. But conversations are easy, right? Like you just talk.
00:03:35
We all feel that way. We all get to adulthood and we feel like conversation should be easy because we started
00:03:41
learning how to do it when we were one one and a half years old as toddlers and
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we practice doing it with an enormous number of partners conversation partners
00:03:53
every day of our lives. So by the time we become adults it feels like we should be experts like we should be great at
00:03:59
it. But as a scientist, when you look under the hood and you see, oh my goodness, all of the complexity that's
00:04:04
happening under the hood, you realize, oh, this is why we have so many awkward moments, why we say things that we
00:04:11
shouldn't, why we don't say things that we should, why we hurt each other, why we get defensive, um why we are boring,
00:04:18
why we get angry and hostile. And there are very clear strategies to help us with all of that.
00:04:24
As you were saying that, I was thinking, do you think there's a lot of people that are going through life giving off the wrong impression because they don't
00:04:31
know how to talk? Maybe they are disliked. Maybe they are misunderstood because they haven't mastered the
00:04:37
science of how to have a great conversation. On my worst days, I worry that everybody's walking around being
00:04:42
misunderstood. When you think about talking, even as I'm talking right now,
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there's no way to take the entire contents of your mind and all of your personality and say it out loud. And so,
00:04:55
we're always curating. We're always choosing what some subset of stuff to share with other people through
00:05:01
conversation. And no one is doing that perfectly. And I and I fear that many
00:05:07
people are are really struggling with it. If you had to pinpoint just a few things that people want when they think
00:05:15
about becoming a great conversationalist like what is it that we actually are aiming at? Is it to be you know what is
00:05:21
that? Yeah. Usually people want to be liked even loved. Usually we want to enjoy our
00:05:27
conversations to not have them be miserable. We want to feel safe and protected and and not have it be
00:05:33
dreadful and timeconuming. And we want to achieve professional goals. So advancing and achieving and making great
00:05:40
decisions. So already the very basic drives of what people are trying to achieve in conversation are actually a
00:05:47
little bit more complicated than just like oh we're looking for connection. Um and then when you really dig into it
00:05:53
within all of the goals that people want in those categories, it's like a vast
00:05:58
constellation of of motives. I would like you to teach me how to talk really really well.
00:06:04
I don't know if you need my help that much, Stephen, but I'd love to. Even the best communicators have room for improvement. No, I think I do. I think I do because
00:06:11
I, you know, this I was thinking about this last this last week and all the conversations I've had, the different types of conversations. I had one
00:06:18
conversation where I met someone's family for the first time who works with me. And it was, you know, it was a
00:06:24
little bit nerve-wracking because that contact, you know, people have have these moments where they meet the in-laws or whatever or they meet
00:06:31
um for me it's often meeting someone who works with me's family, I find quite nerve-wracking because they're like, I think they're kind of probably judging
00:06:36
me. I've also had difficult business conversations because they are judging you. Yeah, they are judging me and I can feel
00:06:41
it. And as I go towards those conversations, I'm like, "Oh my god." And then I end up just like freezing or being a little bit paralyzed. And you'd
00:06:47
think as someone like me who does this for a living living finds conversations easy. I absolutely do not. you I I
00:06:52
actually the more uh you know I talk to very high level seuite um very
00:06:59
successful people and in fact the higher and more successful people are the more likely they are to be aware that this is
00:07:07
really important and that they have room for improvement. It's almost like you're aware that this skill is probably what
00:07:14
helped you get where you are and therefore you want to get even better at it and you're keenly aware of when you
00:07:20
have awkward moments or make mistakes or missteps and you're like I would really like to get that out of my life please.
00:07:26
Amen. I like ruminate on an awkward encounter I had like two and a half weeks ago. I was like, I should have just da da d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d
00:07:31
d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d but actually in reading some of your work I thought about what I could have done and we'll get to this this idea of preparing for those moments
00:07:38
which I typically don't because I assume I should be a natural. Can I ask you as you were talking about these different examples of things that
00:07:44
you're ruminating about? Um, do you feel like you have a a a weakness or like a a
00:07:52
recurring thing that you suspect you need to get better at? I think one of them is I am a bit of an introvert in my
00:07:58
sort of self-classification and as people know who I am more in the world, I think I've become more introverted.
00:08:06
So, and sometimes that can be perceived in the wrong way. So, my like happy state is kind of being alone or around
00:08:12
people that I'm extremely familiar with. If I leave the house and I go say to a gym or something, I have a little bit of paranoia.
00:08:18
Yeah. So, I'm always kind of on edge, which means that this kind of shuts me down more. So when I do have conversations, I
00:08:23
can sometimes feel appear to be a bit more shut down and I don't want to carry that into moments where I need to be a bit more open. And then I would say
00:08:32
generally I just like hate small talk. Yeah, you're not alone there. And I just say it's like a point. This is why I think I podcast because you can
00:08:38
just skip straight into the deep stuff and I can ask people about their trauma. Like you can do that in normal conversations
00:08:44
too actually. Do you find that you get stuck in small talk? Yes, a good bit. I just try and avoid it. So I I've got
00:08:50
this funny story. one of the most that the most prestigious people on planet earth invited me to come to a thing and
00:08:55
I said no because there would be a hundred other people there and I just didn't want to be in a room for four hours with a bunch of other people like
00:09:01
it just for me it's so exhausting. Yeah. And if I told you that what this context was you'd burst out laughing and my team
00:09:08
were like you go to that [ __ ] you go and you enjoy it and I'm like no I'm not going there's
00:09:14
too many people there. But that's that's kind of what I'm like. I love this environment, but I hate small talk. And I hate
00:09:19
I don't know if that's a weakness as much as it is you learning your preferences. I think it's okay. Uh maybe we'll get
00:09:26
there, but large groups are very stressful. Group conversation and figuring out the structure of like who
00:09:32
should be talking to whom when and about what is very overwhelming for the human mind. um it's quite different than one
00:09:39
on intimate one-on-one conversation which is much more within your control and it's much clearer what the purpose
00:09:45
is. Um so we should think about it maybe not a we can reframe it and it's not a
00:09:51
weakness but thinking about your social portfolio. Who are you talking to? Is it
00:09:56
the right people and are is it in the right arrangements in the right group size? So, what we're doing right now
00:10:01
one-on-one is a categorically different task than going to a party with a hundred people. So, I'm going to help
00:10:08
you reframe that later on. Why did you choose to do this? All the things you could have done with your life.
00:10:13
Yeah, it's Isn't life so fascinating? I often think about the paths not taken. Um, but I'm very happy to be on this
00:10:20
path. Um, I grew up in upstate New York on a small lake in a small town. I was a
00:10:26
late girl, just gorgeous place. And I love playing sports, team sports in
00:10:32
particular. I love female friendship from an early age. And probably most
00:10:37
formatively, I'm an identical twin. And all of the things I just described, I
00:10:44
think, are either indicators of how much I love conversation or formed my love of
00:10:50
conversation. But either way, I I arrived at college deeply interested in understanding humans and their behavior.
00:10:59
And by the time I got to Harvard, I realized, wow, there are whole fields like social psychology and communication
00:11:05
that are purportedly about communication, but nobody's bothered to actually transcribe real conversations
00:11:12
and study them at very large scale. And so that's what I've been up to for the last 15 years. How has being an identical twin been
00:11:19
formative in this regard? M. So, my twin's name is Sarah. Um, being an identical twin, I'm there are many
00:11:26
things that are similar to being a close sibling, I'm sure. But an identical twin, it's like you have another version
00:11:31
of you in the world. And we share a bedroom. We were on the same sports teams. We played in band together. And
00:11:38
so, it's sort of like watching a version of yourself up close. And I got to see
00:11:44
how she failed and thought, "Oh, well, I'm I'm going to avoid that." and I
00:11:50
would see how she succeeds. She hits a an amazing joke. She answers answers an amazing question. I know that I'm able
00:11:56
to do that because we have the same DNA, the same abilities. In a sort of subconscious way, I think I've just been
00:12:02
chasing trying to help other people find that in their relationships, uh, in their friendships, in their romantic
00:12:09
relationships, in their work collaborations, because I've gotten to see how amazing that can be for two
00:12:15
human beings, how close you can be and how much you can actually understand each other when you communicate well.
00:12:21
And what research have you done? Like, what are the reference points you're pulling on? Do you do your own research?
00:12:26
So much. and give me a flavor of the the Too much probably. I uh it's almost like I'm a recovering academic. I've been
00:12:33
working in academia doing behavioral science research for 20 years. I know I look impossibly young. Um, I started in
00:12:40
graduate school studying emotions, especially anxiety and and not the kind of anxiety that requires medication or
00:12:48
therapy necessarily, but the types of social anxiety that people feel constantly all day long. And figuring
00:12:55
out, okay, how does it affect different behaviors like how we negotiate or how we take advice from each other or how we
00:13:02
perform when we're public speaking? Uh, these types of things. and then figuring out strategies and tips to help people
00:13:09
manage that anxiety more effectively. And one of my biggest findings was how we reframe anxiety as excitement. Uh
00:13:17
it's a very easy flip to move from it's essentially they're the same emotion because they're both high arousal, high
00:13:23
energy, high cortisol, a stress hormone, um high heart rate, uh sweaty palms. You just change how you think about it in
00:13:29
your mind. So literally saying things out loud like I'm excited change how
00:13:35
your appraisal of it. So you actually experience excitement. It helps you perform a lot better in a lot of different ways.
00:13:40
So you did a study in 2011 was it? Yes. Yes. The nervous Nelly negotiation study.
00:13:45
So that one was about negotiation specifically the um this excitement reappraisal. The paper's called get
00:13:51
excited. And that paper actually ended up being featured in uh Inside Out the
00:13:56
movie. Oh wow. Yeah. There's a great scene where the main character is about to have a panic attack and Joy sneaks into the little
00:14:04
cubicle farm of minions and says, "Stop drawing all of these projections about how things are going to go badly and
00:14:09
instead draw how things could go well." Which is so great. And I was sitting in the movie theater with my kids and my
00:14:15
husband kind of looked down the way and he was like, "Is that your thing?" And I was like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's my thing." So, what what did that study show? of
00:14:22
those two studies, the the nervous Nelly one, but also the the one of excitement. When we feel anxious, as most people do
00:14:28
in negotiations because it's an intense environment filled with uncertainty and a lack of control, which is the recipe
00:14:34
for anxiety, we tend we want to escape. We either want to relieve that feeling by making concessions or get out of
00:14:42
there, right? Just exit the interaction. That was the main finding of the nervous Nelly anxiety and negotiation paper. The
00:14:49
reframing anxiety as excitement paper is lots of different ways to convince
00:14:54
yourself that you're feeling excited just by saying I'm excited out loud. And in doing so, that makes you focus on
00:15:00
opportunities rather than threats, how things could go well rather than poorly. And it has incredible downstream
00:15:06
consequences. Helps you sing better, helps you do public speaking better, it helps you collaborate more effectively.
00:15:12
Um, so it's just a very it's a very powerful intervention. And what was the sort of mechanics of the study? So, we would have bring
00:15:18
people in. You tell them, "Hey, Stephen, you're going to be singing karaoke in front of an audience. People start to
00:15:25
feel quite nervous about this naturally." Then, right before they're going to get
00:15:30
up and sing this song, we say, "Okay, an experimenttor is going to ask you how you're feeling. Some of you, we want you
00:15:36
to say you're feeling excited, and some of you, we want you to say you're feeling anxious." And that alone, when I
00:15:42
say, "Stephen, how are you feeling right now?" and you say anxious. Great. Okay, let's go sing the song. You
00:15:49
go. People who said I'm anxious sing worse compared to people who say I'm
00:15:54
excited. They get out there. They're more in tempo, more on pitch. They have better rhythm. And we measure it with a
00:16:01
software when they're actually singing in front of the experimenters. Just by me saying I am excited.
00:16:06
Yeah. So the other day when I met my team members family, I I should have been saying to myself, I'm so excited to meet
00:16:13
them. among other things. So, so this and this is important. It doesn't always work, right? If you're terrified
00:16:21
and it's really something dreadful, like you're terrified that your mother's going to die and turns out it's going to
00:16:27
be hard to get excited about that if she has a terminal illness. But on the margin, if you're sort of torn between
00:16:33
feeling nervous or excited in your mind, if you can really convince yourself that you actually are excited and that things
00:16:40
could go well, I'm going to crush this exam. I'm gonna I'm gonna tear it up on the basketball court. That flip, if
00:16:46
repeated enough, actually becomes more likely to come true and certainly before a high stakes conversation like meeting
00:16:53
your colleagues family. So interesting. I I really I have this behind the scenes channel um called Behind the Diary on YouTube and uh the
00:16:59
other day when I did Jimmy Fallon because it's kind of outside of my wheelhouse to go on like late night TV in America and like seven minutes to be
00:17:06
funny or whatever. So I was [ __ ] myself cuz I'm a very serious guy. So before I went out, there's a video of
00:17:12
me and I said to my team, what I said to myself before the little curtain opened was, "This is going to be amazing. Can't
00:17:18
wait. You've you've like prepared for this." Then I said all this nonsense in my head thinking that it was nonsense
00:17:23
and I walked out. I had the best time of my life. It was it went so great. Great. And I I made a video about that how, you
00:17:29
know, I'm not one to believe in things that without like rigor and evidence and I didn't have it.
00:17:35
Now you do. Now I do. Now we have a study that proves that it's not. This one is interesting. I think this was the beginning of my scientific
00:17:42
journey realizing that the way we talk to other people and the way we talk to ourselves especially in a repeated sense
00:17:49
if you think about okay you did that before Jimmy Fallon now what if you do it before the next time you meet a
00:17:54
colleague's family now what if you do it before you interview Bill Gates before you do it right if you then get in the
00:18:00
habit of telling yourself you're excited and that becomes effective for you it's
00:18:05
incredibly meaningful in accumulation over time right so just focusing on one time yes it's helpful but if you can
00:18:12
make it habitual it has this sort of upward spiral effect on people it was the beginning of my scientific journey
00:18:18
thinking oh well if we can study one phrase like get excited or I'm excited what if we start studying the cascading
00:18:25
unfolding ways that people talk to each other and not just one line but like every turn of a conversation no one had
00:18:32
done that before and this negotiation study you did what was the mechanism for that yeah that was a more class so the the
00:18:39
literature. People have been studying negotiations for decades now. And there's a really great negotiation
00:18:45
course at almost every business school and law school that's based in all of this rigorous work. What had not been
00:18:51
studied on in terms of negotiating are people's emotions. It was a it was about 15 years ago that people including
00:18:57
scholars came to the point where we were like, "Oh, people's feelings matter." When they feel nervous or when they feel
00:19:02
angry, that's actually important distinction. how you feel on the inside versus what you're expressing to your
00:19:08
counterpart. So in this paper, what we found is as a base rate, most people feel anxious before and during a
00:19:14
negotiation because it is an intense environment. It's probably one of the greatest benefits of taking a
00:19:20
negotiation course is that you just get reps and so you get more comfortable with the process of doing it. That might
00:19:26
be the biggest takeaway from doing a training course like that. And so in this paper, we had that sort of base
00:19:32
rate. Look, everybody's feeling anxious. Um, and then what are the downstream consequences of feeling anxious? And
00:19:38
what we find people, we had people doing negotiations, playing these negotiation games. What we find is that people are
00:19:44
much more likely to sort of leave prematurely or make more concessions to relieve the feelings of anxiety,
00:19:51
make bad offers. Yeah. Or it depends on your goals, right? If you if your goal is to claim a
00:19:58
lot of value, then making concessions and giving money away is not going to help you with that. So, if I'm asking my
00:20:03
boss for a pay rise, for example, and I and I'm very very nervous, I'm much more likely to um lower my expectations,
00:20:11
accept a bad offer, and leave the situation prematurely. Absolutely. So, what do I do about that?
00:20:17
Oh, so many things. If we're talking about asking for a raise, um what you want is to go in there with as much sort
00:20:24
of personal power as you can, one way to do that is to get another job offer
00:20:29
somewhere else first. So, we talk about this as the best alternative to a negotiated agreement, a BATNA. You want
00:20:36
to strengthen your BATNA. So, if your boss says, "No, I'm not giving you a raise." You can legitimately say, "I'm
00:20:43
going to go take this other job offer cuz I just got a better offer from the guy down the street." What if you don't want to take the the
00:20:50
other offer? Then you need to be honest with yourself about how much power you have in the negotiation. You also probably a lot of
00:20:57
people make the mistake of going in sort of hands on hips like I deserve more money. There are lots of questions that
00:21:02
you should ask first to know am I negotiating with the right person? Does my company have the funds to actually
00:21:09
give me more money? Why? What? How can I justify this in a way that's compelling
00:21:14
to them? Right? It's it's not up to you. It's that they they need to want to keep
00:21:19
you and to feel like you are being fairly and generously rewarded and all
00:21:26
of that requires asking a lot of questions before you go in and start making demands. In that context, how would you try and
00:21:32
persuade me if you work for me? So, what would you say? Because I do think, you know, it's very easy to get someone's
00:21:38
backup when you walk in and ask them for money. Yeah. If you do it 100%. I
00:21:44
it's hard for me to answer this because um maybe this is sort of my personal values. It's almost like I'm taking off
00:21:50
my expert hat for a moment. I think the best way to get a raise is to be awesome.
00:21:57
Do things that are valuable and your company is going to give you more money without even having to ask
00:22:04
for it. So in my heart, this question of how do we have a conversation where I
00:22:09
ask for more money? It's almost like I I would hope that you don't even get to that point. If you are truly making
00:22:15
yourself almost irreplaceable and incredibly valuable, your boss is going
00:22:21
to be coming to you and saying, "I have to keep you around. You're amazing. You're so incredible." That's a much
00:22:26
easier conversation to have than walking in and saying, "I'm I'm it's not fair. I don't make enough."
00:22:31
I do think that holds to be true. I think that generally if people's first priority is what they want, then they
00:22:38
often don't tend to get what they want. But people who have the priority, their first priority is what I can give tend
00:22:43
to get what they want. That's right. It's so um it's a bit of a sort of like a mindset shift. If you
00:22:51
prioritize other people's needs, if you're thinking about what your boss finds valuable, what the organization
00:22:57
finds valuable, and you rise to meet those needs, you make yourself valuable,
00:23:02
which is going to come back to you. Um hopefully that's what that's the hope. And I think often that is the case.
00:23:09
Almost always that is the case in the talk framework and we'll get there. The K is for kindness. And it's not kindness
00:23:14
in the sense of like altruism because I'm going to help my boss and do everything he wants because I care so
00:23:21
deeply. That can be part of it. But also it's this sort of loop of like well if you give him everything every if you
00:23:27
give the organization what it needs that's going to come back to you. You will actually become valuable and get
00:23:32
what you want as well. That's how relationships work. Usually when I interview people, I lead the way. Today,
00:23:38
I'm going to follow, okay? Because you know the outcome that me and the audience want to get to. So, I have all
00:23:45
this stuff here. I love it. Props. I have all these props. Fabulous. I have these blocks that for anyone that
00:23:51
can't see the conversation, say T A L K on them. Talk. Fabulous. And you tell me the best place to start.
00:23:57
You know the outcome. You know where I want to get to. I want to be the best conversationalist, the best talker, the most persuasive, influential, likable
00:24:06
talker in the world. Um, so I shall follow your lead. Oh my gosh, it's a lot of power.
00:24:11
I love it. I love it so much. Um, let's start with this. Um, I want you to think
00:24:17
of a conversation that you had recently. It has to be more than 5 minutes long.
00:24:24
More than five? Yes, I can think of one immediately. It was a conversation I had with my girlfriend where I just wanted her to know that I accept the fact that
00:24:30
I [ __ ] up. Like I I I accept the fact that I should have been more present in a particular moment and I wasn't. And I
00:24:36
just wanted to like own it. Own it and and convey that to her and convey that I'm sorry and I get it.
00:24:42
Yeah. And this is not one where I'm going to try and justify my whatever. No, actually
00:24:48
objectively I should have been more attentive and present. Y I just wanted her to know that.
00:24:53
Yep. So you sort of have an admission of blameworthiness. Uh why why did you want to do that?
00:25:00
Because I felt that she was right and I regretted my my behavior. Yeah. So sometimes I don't feel like she's
00:25:07
right. Sometimes I'm here to, you know, respond. In this particular scenario, I thought, you know, actually on balance,
00:25:13
I should have been more present. This was an important time for her and in hindsight,
00:25:21
that's not how I wish I had behaved. Okay. How did you want her to feel during and at the end of this
00:25:27
conversation? Understood. And
00:25:34
you really unders that was really it. It's like I wanted her to feel understood and
00:25:41
I guess like connected to me. But it's more it's really more I just wanted her to not worry that I didn't understand so
00:25:48
she didn't have to say it again. Like I just wanted her to know that I I get it. Mhm. Mhm. Mh. And that in future I wish I behave
00:25:54
differently. How did you want to feel during and after this conversation?
00:25:59
I guess I wanted to offload the guilt. Uhhuh. Aha. Good. Good. Because I felt bad. I felt like no
00:26:05
actually. And it was weighing on your conscience. You were like, I got to I I got to say that. I got to own this because it's making me feel like a [ __ ]
00:26:11
Yeah. Okay. Fabulous. Okay. When we look back on our conversations
00:26:16
and try and describe what our goals were, very quickly you start to realize that our goals are very complicated that
00:26:23
we want a lot of things. I'm also guessing there may have been a time component. Can you talk a little bit about that? Like how much time did you
00:26:29
have to achieve these goals? I mean, I never seem to have enough time. So, it was like it was
00:26:36
Yeah. So, I I I had about probably about 20 minutes. Great. Hey, that's pretty good.
00:26:42
I wish I had 20 minutes with my husband. Okay. Um, so I have a framework that
00:26:48
helps us think about conversational goals and I call it the conversational compass. Okay. And like a compass that
00:26:56
you might use to find your way out of the desert or the forest. The compass
00:27:01
helps you decide which way not to walk but to talk. Okay. So the xaxis
00:27:08
I'll put this on the screen for anyone that's uh can see the video. Great. Um, the X-axis, which runs
00:27:13
horizontally, is about your relationship. Also, I'll link it below. So, this relational axis, high
00:27:18
relational goals are things that you care about that are serving the other person or your relationship. This
00:27:24
conversation sounded very high relational. You're truly like, I just really want her to know that I feel like
00:27:31
a [ __ ] and that I'm owning it and like I care and I maybe won't do it
00:27:36
again. Something like that. Low relational goals are things we care about that serve us. So in this case you
00:27:42
said something like I want to offload get rid of my guilt. I wasn't I was feeling bad. The why access is about
00:27:48
information exchange. High informationational goals are hinge on exchanging accurate information. It's
00:27:55
sort of the reason human beings learn develop the ability to communicate at all right way back when is to take
00:28:02
what's in my brain communicate it to you accurately. But we care about tons of stuff that is lowformational. So it's
00:28:08
not about exchanging information and sometimes it's about concealing it. In this case, you had a highformational
00:28:14
goal. You wanted to sort of persuade her or prove to her that you're a good guy and that she should stay with you
00:28:20
essentially, trust you. But you also had lowformational goals like you didn't want it to be emotionally unpleasant to
00:28:27
have this conversation. You also had lowformational goals like a time constraint. You needed to protect your
00:28:32
time and her time. uh and and so we're always limited by time and cognitive
00:28:38
resources. So the point of this is to help us plot all of those goals in a logical way. Uh
00:28:46
each quadrant is good. We live in all four quadrants. We're not trying to get to one or another. It's just to help us
00:28:53
describe all of the many things that we actually care about almost to validate them and say, "Listen, it's legit that
00:29:00
you wanted to relieve your guilt. super admirable that you wanted to signal to her that like you're owning this
00:29:05
mistake. It's legit that you have time constraints. It's legit that you don't want your conversations to be
00:29:11
unpleasant. So each of the quadrants get gets a positive name. Highformational, high relational is about connection.
00:29:17
Okay. Often you'll hear communications uh experts just talk about connection which is um too narrow. It's not the
00:29:25
only thing that we care about down here. Low informational, high relational is about savoring.
00:29:31
What does informational mean in this context? Like how much uh accurate information
00:29:36
you are trying to you need to exchange with each other. If we just sat here
00:29:42
kind of quietly and I hummed a song because we that and I said something
00:29:48
like I love your shirt. We're not exchanging a lot of information but we might be having a very lovely
00:29:54
interaction with each other. So not every conversation is about high information exchange though many people
00:30:01
think that it is. You know these people they're very transactional. They feel like a conversation is where you just
00:30:08
say things you know at other people and that they're going to say things they know back at you. That's a big mistake.
00:30:15
So having fun I can see is in the bottom right corner. Having fun. Yes. Because it's not about huge information exchange but it is about connections.
00:30:22
Okay. Oh and it's really important. Many of my students at Harvard almost forget about this quadrant. They're like, "If we're
00:30:28
not persuading and making decisions, we're not living right. Like, this is really important, especially over time.
00:30:34
If we're not enjoying being with each other, I'm not going to look forward to talking to you again." That's true at
00:30:40
work and outside of work. Lower left is essentially discernment. We call it protection. It's protecting your time,
00:30:46
protecting your reputation, protecting information. So, concealing, keeping secrets, moving quickly. We can't sit
00:30:54
here for hours and hours and hours. Um, and then protecting your reputation. Like you care about making a positive
00:30:59
impression on other people. I want you to see me as smart and warm and calm and
00:31:06
trustworthy. These are self-serving, low relational or low informational goals.
00:31:11
And then we get up to upper left, which is low relational, they're self-s serving, high informational. This is a
00:31:16
lot of work rellated goal, persuasion, making decisions, brainstorming, etc. So if I want to be liked and have great
00:31:24
relationships, I need to be on the right side of this. Is that accurate? So what happens if someone who trusts
00:31:30
you and loves you tells you something in confidence and then you go tell everybody else?
00:31:37
You lose trust. Yeah. So it's not that you can only live on this side of the compass because
00:31:43
discernment matters for relationships. Okay. Right. So, and here you are going to be in a
00:31:50
relationship where hopefully you're going to be like brainstorming things together, making decisions together.
00:31:55
Even with a friend, you're like, "Oh, where should we go to dinner tonight?" You need to make that coordinate that choice well together. So, I think one
00:32:03
aspiration is to try and be over on the right side as much as you can. And in fact, having the mindset of pushing
00:32:09
yourself to try and think about your goals that are more pro-social more often is a virtuous goal. But like
00:32:16
listen, we all have actual needs. So like you can't only live on the right side of the compass. It's about moving
00:32:24
around in a way that is savvy and and actually serves what you care about.
00:32:31
Yeah. Gotcha. Do you have a sense of where your goals from that conversation that you described would be?
00:32:36
Apologize. Which is high relational and not very high on informational cuz I
00:32:42
didn't have a bunch I didn't have a lot to say. It was just very simply about letting her know that I was sorry. And it wasn't I didn't have a big
00:32:48
explanation or a bunch of excuses or justifications. It was just listen, I [ __ ] up. Yeah, I get it.
00:32:54
Can we talk about apologies for a sec? Sure. I love that you chose this as your example because and the way you're
00:33:01
describing it. I love how you're saying um I didn't go into a huge explanation of why I did it or anything. More people
00:33:08
should apologize that way. A lot of people their instinct when they're apologizing is to revisit the problem
00:33:13
and sort of make excuses or explain why they m did the thing wrong. It's not
00:33:19
effective. Um what is more effective is what you're describing. Taking ownership and saying, "Look, I I just messed up
00:33:26
and I'm so sorry and I feel awful about it." And the most effective component of
00:33:31
an apology is actually making a promise to change. If you say to your girlfriend, "I realize I messed up here.
00:33:38
I'm not going to do it again. Here's how I'm going to be different in the future. Like a concrete plan. It's so compelling
00:33:44
to hear that you've thought about that and that and then it's measurable because she can see in the future. Do do
00:33:50
you actually live up to that promise? Do you follow through on this promise to never do make the mistake again?
00:33:56
Is there a point where you can apologize too much? We studied this. I ran some studies on
00:34:01
this. Um, we started by looking at um, frequency of apologies made during
00:34:07
normal conversations. It's quite rare for someone to over apologize, but it does seem like within one conversation,
00:34:13
if you apologize more than twice, it starts to be more of a reminder of the bad thing that happened. Like you just
00:34:21
keep revisiting it and it brings you back to the negativity rather than moving forward.
00:34:27
We also studied apologies in a really large data set of parole hearings like among people who had committed really
00:34:33
serious crimes and we looked at the types of apologies that they made in their par during their parole hearings.
00:34:40
And there it seems like you actually can't overapologize like more is better.
00:34:45
And again, the most effective component is making a promise to change in the future. Um I'm going to go I'm when I
00:34:51
get out I'm going to be an AA. I'm going to live live with my grandmother. here's the job I'm going to do, whatever the
00:34:57
plan is. Um, you're actually more likely to get out of jail. And going into those difficult
00:35:03
conversations, is there anything one needs to do to prepare? Because we our lives are full of
00:35:08
difficult conversations and actually it's the avoidance of them that ends up messing up our lives the most. So when you think about difficult conversations
00:35:14
that we all have to have or with difficult people is do I have to prepare for that? So this is very natural. Almost every
00:35:20
person that you hear talk about communication tends to focus on difficult conversations. I'm going to
00:35:26
suggest to you that that is a very narrow view of the conversational world actually. And in fact, thinking about
00:35:32
difficult conversations is a little bit of a misnomer. It's not like there are
00:35:38
some conversations that are difficult and some that are easy. It's that in every conversation there
00:35:43
can be moments of difference where we use different language to mean the same
00:35:48
thing. where we have an in congruence in our emotions, where we have a difference in motives. I want to give you advice,
00:35:54
but you don't want to take it. Or something dips down to a difference in our identities. I'm American and you're
00:36:00
a Brit. So, anytime you encounter these little fleeting moments of difference in
00:36:06
all of these different ways, and maybe there was an image here. Let me see. No, it's not here. Um, it looks like layers.
00:36:11
We talk about it like layers of the earth. And above the surface are the words and sounds that you hear while
00:36:17
people are talking. Right at the surface are people's emotions. So I feel excited
00:36:22
but you feel tired and bored. That's going to be uh tough. Right below that
00:36:28
are people's motives. What I want to that gets back to the compass. What I want to achieve is different than what
00:36:33
you want to achieve. We're all walking around with a compass in our mind and they're different from each other. Right
00:36:39
below that are our beliefs. Right? I believe that immigration is a problem
00:36:44
and you believe that AI is a way bigger problem than human immigration.
00:36:50
Um how do we talk about that in a way and then all of it get dips down to the the sort of hot magma in this layers of
00:36:56
the earth model of our identities. So even an easy conversation, we're on a date or we're two spouses are driving in
00:37:03
a car or friends are hanging out watching a movie, like you can stumble upon these little moments of difficulty
00:37:09
any time for any reason and you need to have the skill set to be able to make
00:37:14
sure the temperature doesn't get too hot. What is that skill set? There's a fabulous research on this. I
00:37:20
have found it incredibly helpful in my life um research by Julia Mincson, Mike Yman's, Hannah Collins called
00:37:26
receptiveness. So it's receptiveness to opposing viewpoints and it's both the
00:37:32
mindset when you when someone comes to you with something that seems crazy,
00:37:38
you don't judge it negatively. You have to fight the human instinct to think of it as like that's crazy, that's wrong,
00:37:45
and now I'm going to win and now I'm going to be right and prove you wrong. Because all of those instincts ruin our
00:37:53
conversations and our relationships. Why? It makes us defensive on the
00:37:58
receiving end. It makes us sort of accusatory and hostile on the attack end. Once we get into an accusation and
00:38:06
defense mode, the conversation is broken down. It's no longer about connection favoring, protecting,
00:38:13
and advancing. We're now in this new world that is not achieving any of our goals.
00:38:18
She says someone comes to me and comes to you and says something crazy. They say, you know, the sky is purple. Yeah,
00:38:25
it's actually it's not blue, it's purple. Here's a magical phrase that you can say in that moment. It makes sense that you
00:38:31
feel that the sky is purple. It makes sense that you feel excited to tell me that the sky is purple. It makes sense
00:38:37
that you feel X about Y. Makes sense that you feel skeptical about podcasts.
00:38:43
It makes you It makes sense that you feel annoyed that I speak quickly. It
00:38:48
makes sense that you are worried about AI. Whatever people are feeling, whatever they express to you, we can
00:38:55
validate that feeling because whatever is going on in their mind is their reality. And we have to say that out
00:39:01
loud before we go on to do anything else, even if we're about to disagree with them vehemently.
00:39:07
But we have to say the validation piece first just like therapists do all the time in order for them to feel heard and
00:39:14
like, "Oh yeah, I'm safe here so that I can join you on your side of the table and now we're going to untangle this
00:39:19
weird problem together." You say the sky is purple. Tell me more like what how
00:39:25
did you come to feel like the sky is purple? Um are do you are you color blind? Are you do you see everything in
00:39:32
purple? Like now I can ask you questions about how you came to that perspective and we can learn I can learn about it.
00:39:39
I guess the risk is you don't want to validate something wrong. Yeah. Why not? You don't want to appear to be saying
00:39:45
cuz if I say it makes sense that you think the sky is purple but it's actually blue. The word thinks is important. It's it
00:39:51
makes sense that you feel X about Y. Not it makes sense that you think X
00:39:57
about Y. Thinking is like a cognition. Is the risk of it sounding patronizing?
00:40:02
Maybe, but in in in practice it feels really really good. When I run this, so
00:40:07
I run an exercise in my class where we go around. Let's say there there's a group of five students and you have to
00:40:14
share something. We start easy like share one song you love and then the next person has to validate that before
00:40:20
they share their favorite next song. And you go around and around very quickly. And so it feels very contrived to say,
00:40:27
okay, you have to say, I love that you love that Taylor Swift song. That's so interesting. I actually don't like
00:40:32
Taylor Swift. It feels very contrived, but when you talk to the students after it, they say, "Yes, I knew what we were
00:40:39
doing." It did feel over the top to say that about people's song preferences. And still, it felt amazing to have the
00:40:46
person next to me say, "I love that you love that Taylor Swift song." Validation. We are all so hungry for
00:40:52
validation that even ridiculous validation feels amazing. So then when
00:40:57
you get to round two and everybody's sharing something that they're really struggling with and the person next to
00:41:03
them says, "Wow, I'm so sorry. That sounds really, really hard." It makes sense that you feel upset about your
00:41:08
mom. Now you've got that habit and you're making them feel quite good about
00:41:14
something that actually does deserve that validation. So it's all about like developing these habits no matter where
00:41:22
the difference or disagreement is coming from. What's the opposite of that? The opposite is what how people
00:41:29
naturally respond, tend to naturally respond, which is by trying to win and prove them wrong and prove that they're
00:41:35
right. So you say the sky is purple and I say that's crazy. Skye's blue.
00:41:42
And then where does our conversation go? It feels terrible for you. It's so I learned this um
00:41:49
because I employed this person once and this person when we'd talk about ideas the first word out of their mouth was
00:41:55
always I disagree and then they'd make their point. That's right. And I don't know what it was about it,
00:42:01
but I noticed that it would like get my backup of course. And so I'd say I don't know. I'd say I
00:42:06
think we should do it like this. I disagree. Yeah. And then they'd make their point. And I remember thinking, gosh, that's such a And it's so ironic because their goal is
00:42:14
to persuade you. At the end of it, they want you to agree with their position. That's not at all how persuasion works.
00:42:21
The only way that we change our beliefs is is usually across many conversations.
00:42:26
And we're around someone we like talking to and respect and have admiration for.
00:42:31
And then over time, we sort of bend to the gentle pressure of their differing viewpoint.
00:42:37
If I say, "I disagree. Now, let's fight about it." You're you get your backup and you're
00:42:43
not having you're not enjoying talking to me. Even if you're right and right, like it's not about being right or wrong
00:42:50
in that moment. The goal here is to keep the conversation in an emotional place where
00:42:55
it can continue. So, you can continue to engage. And that's what these researchers find in this receptiveness
00:43:01
research is there. If you qualify your statement saying like, "I wonder if the sky could be a different color rather
00:43:07
than the sky is blue with certainty." There are all of these sort of hedging
00:43:12
language, you can divide yourself into multiple parts. So if you said to me, "The sky is purple," I would say, "Oh my
00:43:17
gosh, as your friend and as a painter, that is so intriguing to me." As a biologist or as a as a meteorologist,
00:43:24
maybe we should investigate that. Um, literally dividing yourself into two disagreeing parts. It's usually how we
00:43:31
actually feel. So if your mother says something crazy to you that seems crazy to you, you could say as your daughter,
00:43:37
I'm so intrigued that you've come to hold that perspective. I'd love to hear more. You know, as a representative of Gen Z, I know my friends would want you
00:43:44
want me to say this. It means that you can hold two perspectives at once and it
00:43:49
is very helpful to the other person to keep the conversation going. But all of the elements of this receptiveness
00:43:55
recipe have have this flavor. It's a little surprising. I think often people think of these types of things as
00:44:01
weakness because it's like our our instinct is to try to win and be right.
00:44:06
And instead, what I'm saying is no, hedge your claims. Show that you're uncertain about stuff. Validate their
00:44:12
feelings. Divide yourself into disagreeing parts because you're not certain about anything in order to keep
00:44:18
the conversation going so that you have any shred of hope of persuading them over the longer term. I remember Tali
00:44:24
Sharrett telling me about a study either. She told me, she's a neuroscientist in London and she told me they put two people in a brain imaging
00:44:32
scanner and got them to like look at photos and come to agreement on the
00:44:37
price of something. Yes. And then eventually in these studies, I'm super paraphrasing here. She's probably like cringing.
00:44:42
I think I know what study you're talking about. Oh, do could you explain it? Yeah. So, so they studied what what lights up in your brain when you're in a
00:44:50
situation of disagreement versus agreement. And it is actually more taxing to your mind when someone is
00:44:56
disagreeing with you. It's like these neurological um alarm bells go off and
00:45:01
all of a sudden like you describe what was your afraid? My back goes up. What was Yeah, my back goes up. I get my back up. Yeah,
00:45:06
that's it. It's actually in your brain. Your brain goes up and it's hard. It's it's very hard to continue to engage
00:45:12
once that process is underway. Yeah. Right. Some people call it amydal hijacking, which is not quite right. Um,
00:45:19
but your brain does look different when you're in a situation of disagreement. So, whatever we can do conversationally
00:45:24
to sort of tamp that down so that your back doesn't go up is going to be quite helpful.
00:45:30
She showed pictures of the brain in these scans when someone disagrees with you. And I think, and I might be getting
00:45:36
this inverted, that it was almost like the brain had shut down to receptiveness. Yes. In that moment it
00:45:42
was like so I always when I wrote this chapter in my book called do not disagree. It's it's an intentionally provocative chapter because people think
00:45:48
what do you mean never disagree with anybody but I mean like don't make the first thing you say I disagree.
00:45:53
That's right. It can come later. It can come later but first has to come like oh it's so intriguing that you said that. I'm so fascinated and it makes sense
00:46:00
that you might feel that way. I wonder if and then you can go on instead of I disagree. I met a girl called an who
00:46:08
always said yes and instead of but good and it shocked me because it was so
00:46:14
different. I having a conversation with her, you say something to her and you go I think this and she goes yes and and
00:46:19
then she would make her point and it could be a complete disagreement but I noticed she was doing it and I loved it. Yeah. Oh yeah. And you we often think of
00:46:26
the yes and as part of sort of improv comedy humor etc. They were the
00:46:31
comedians were really on to something much more profound about conversation broadly. If you can come from a sort of
00:46:38
mindset or like spiritual place of yes and essentially you're saying uh I'm
00:46:44
going to give you the benefit of the doubt here even though it what you're saying seems a little crazy. Mhm.
00:46:49
That's what is required to have great relationships. It's like we're all going to have these moments where someone
00:46:55
feels something or says something that seems crazy. And if you react to it in an invalidating way,
00:47:02
that's how we kill our relationships. Do we need to kill the word but? Because what ends up happening is someone will
00:47:08
say the thing you just said about validating relationships. Yes, I completely understand. Um I think you made a great point, Allison, but. And
00:47:15
the minute I say but, it's kind of like I've just taken an eraser to everything you just said. I would love to get rid of the word but.
00:47:21
Not but with two T's but but with one T. Yes.
00:47:27
Yeah. You never need it. You can make the same point and say and
00:47:33
but like it just completely it just it immediately says it rever it also reveals that you're
00:47:39
sitting there in a state of I I can't wait. I'm like
00:47:44
on the tip of my tongue is something I can't wait to say that's opposite of what you're saying. And it's the the
00:47:50
spirit of it is is antagonistic. One of the things we notice when we have conversations on this show about uh
00:47:56
about conversation is people really care about likability. Yes.
00:48:02
Like they they really want to know what's making them disliked and they really want to know how to be liked. Good. So being liked is a huge drive. Um
00:48:12
but it's just one of many things that we we care about in terms of gaining status. So status is uh respect,
00:48:18
admiration, liking in the eyes of other people. Liking is usually comes from sort of warmth and charm. Uh admiration
00:48:26
often comes from like perceptions of competence. So we want warmth and competence at once ideally. Okay. Let's
00:48:33
go back in time. Should we talk about the talk framework because they're going to be little clues about how to be
00:48:38
better liked across the whole framework. Okay. Okay. Let's start with T. I'm going to
00:48:44
push these to the side. T is first I just want to say as a whole framework TAK
00:48:50
is the most comprehensive teachable practical scientifically rigorous
00:48:56
framework in the world for communication. Did you invent it? I did. So you would say that
00:49:01
but I didn't when I first wrote the book I didn't say it strongly enough. And in
00:49:06
the last almost year I've come to realize why. One part is because most
00:49:11
people focus only on difficult conversations and here we are focusing on all conversations even the ones that
00:49:16
seem like they should be easy and fun. It's all conversations everywhere personal and professional. The other
00:49:23
piece is that I didn't even really intend this as a scientist but the way we do research is essentially uh natural
00:49:29
language processing machine learning fits into this new world of AI. So the framework can be used by humans or
00:49:37
machines to coach people to be better conversationalists and used as a rubric after the fact of saying, "Okay, how did
00:49:43
this go? Did you do well? Let's look at T A L K and evaluate."
00:49:48
Okay, it's the best in the world ever. I thank you, Stephen. Okay, thank you. Um, thank you for recognizing.
00:49:53
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. T is for topics. Topics. Topics. Topics are the building blocks
00:50:00
of conversation. It is what we choose to talk about. Okay, very simple. We all have an intuitive
00:50:06
understanding that we sort of work through different chunks. First, we're going to talk about your conversation
00:50:12
with your girlfriend. Then, we're going to talk about the talk framework. Then, we're talk about the compass, whatever. We're working through topics. What I
00:50:18
think most people don't realize is that we're choosing topics every time we talk. It's not just at the beginning of
00:50:25
a conversation like an opener like, "Hey, what do you think of this, you know, the diplomat?" No, it's every time
00:50:31
you're talking, we're making moves to gently stay on topic or switch to something else. What's so beautiful
00:50:37
about that is it means we all have power. We all have control to nudge the
00:50:43
conversation one way or another. And we can all do a better job with it.
00:50:49
So, what's the game here? To pick better topics, to know what topic we're aiming at. There's a lot of goals. It's both about
00:50:56
choosing better topics. It's also about how can we make any topic better. Okay,
00:51:02
one huge piece of advice that when you start to realize how much your mind is
00:51:07
doing during a live conversation is to offload some of that cognitive work to beforehand.
00:51:13
Okay. Okay. So, prepping topics ahead of time. This does not mean writing out an agenda
00:51:19
before you call your parents or before you call your girlfriend. What it does mean is spending even 30 seconds, maybe
00:51:25
even 10 seconds before you're in the chaos of a conversation to think about what you could talk about or what might
00:51:31
be important for you to remember to talk about. Did you do that today? Always. Sometimes you don't have to, right? Like
00:51:37
you did it today. You did extensive prep. Um, you even have things printed on cards here.
00:51:43
And in a way, I have been prepping for this conversation for 20 years. I've been studying these things. I designed
00:51:49
the framework myself. I've gone on 80 other, you know, podcasts. I that's all prep for this moment.
00:51:56
What about in your personal life? Yeah. Can you give me an example of where you prepared topics? Every conversation that I know is
00:52:01
coming. I give an example. So with Casi uh before I got here, which is a member of our team.
00:52:08
Yes. Thank you. I thought about I wanted to ask her what it's like to be moving
00:52:14
from London to LA. I wanted to ask her what it's like to work with you. She said all good. All good things.
00:52:21
All good things. Next question. What does A mean? So funny. Um I often will um so you can
00:52:30
It's not rocket science. It's literally just a little bit of forethought. What kinds of questions or topics could I ask
00:52:37
you that will make our conversation feel a little bit better than just like winging it in the moment and talking
00:52:43
about like some random thing I see in the room? Mh. I try to do this before every conversation because now I know how
00:52:49
powerful it is and how kind it is. If you are calling somebody and you're like, "Okay, oh yeah, their kid was
00:52:55
going to take guitar lessons. I should remember to ask about that." Or, "Oh, my friend had this big presentation at
00:53:00
work. I should remember to ask how that went." That means you're going to remember to ask them and that's super
00:53:06
kind and it they're excited to talk about it, too. It makes everything better. So, topic prep is a huge deal.
00:53:12
In our research, what we find when you randomly assign people to prep topics or not, the conversations where people have
00:53:18
thought ahead even for 30 seconds, they feel less anxious. They're much smoother. There are fewer disfluencies,
00:53:23
so ums, stutters between topics. They cover more topics, which is usually a
00:53:29
good thing. More likely to land on good topics. You're less likely to blurt, so you're less likely to share things that
00:53:35
you don't want to share with people. It's just an incredibly powerful strategy and it doesn't need to be
00:53:42
complicated. I've gotten in the habit of putting like two or three bullet points for people in my Google calendar notes
00:53:48
when you know you have a meeting coming up and and you don't even have to do it right before like oh a week ahead of
00:53:53
time if it pops in my head that I want to ask Stephen about do you want to have children I might write that as a little
00:53:59
bullet point in my calendar note for the time that I'm going to be here with you and then I'll be more likely to remember
00:54:05
it. Do you feel skeptical about this? No. I was just thinking it probably makes you more, going back to the point
00:54:11
about likability, it probably makes you a more likable person. Much more likable. Yeah. In fact, if you
00:54:16
can achieve more of your goals, whether they're high informational, lowformational, high relational, low
00:54:22
relational, um, all of that makes you more likable. You you seem more competent. You seem more warm,
00:54:28
especially when you lean towards those pro-social, high relational uh, goals. Cuz everyone talks about how if you're
00:54:33
interested in someone else, like you were interested in Cozy. Yes, that must have felt good for her, which must make her like you more.
00:54:39
We should go ask her. That's a good point. I ask um I have my students sometimes do
00:54:45
a reflection task where I say, "If you had to walk into a room and your your job was to make people like you a one
00:54:50
out of 10, a five out of 10, or a 10 out of 10, what are the behaviors that you
00:54:56
would do to try and pursue those three worlds?" Okay. So, if I wanted people to like me, one out of 10. Yeah. What What
00:55:03
would you do? You tell me. You tell me. You're the expert. I want to hear your I want to hear your guesses.
00:55:08
My guesses I would walk in quiet on my phone and I would ignore them and maybe
00:55:16
I'd look up and make some kind of snide comment. I definitely wouldn't notice that they were there. Yeah.
00:55:21
And I wouldn't make eye contact with them. I
00:55:28
would maybe be rid like take a phone call. I was gonna say you one's really low. So you probably insults probably.
00:55:35
Oh yeah, I'd offend them. Yeah, offend them. Maybe take a phone call and then while you're on the phone call, talk about how
00:55:42
great you are. Or something, right? Like some sort of arrogance, etc. Um maybe if they try and talk to you,
00:55:49
interrupt them. Yeah. Uh and be like, "Not now." Or look at my phone midway through what they're saying. Like Yeah.
00:55:55
Yeah. Okay. So there's lots of things you can imagine there. Okay. Already we've touched on topics though,
00:56:00
right? When you think about, okay, I'm talking on the phone in front of them and what am I going to be talking about
00:56:05
that reduces my likability even for someone who's like just observing you talking? I'd get the name.
00:56:10
That's great. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. That's a good way to say you don't matter to me. Yeah. Yeah. Five out of 10 is an
00:56:16
interesting one. You want to do it's probably more blaszeise like you engage with them but not very well.
00:56:24
Talk about small talk topics like you were saying things that you could talk about with anyone that are not personalized at all seem a bit
00:56:30
disinterested um but not offensive just bland. Okay.
00:56:35
Okay. Then we get to 10 out of 10 world. You 10 out of 10 liability. Yeah. What are what are you doing if
00:56:41
you're trying to get 10 out of 10? I am completely focused on them. Good. Um, I'm attentive. I'm
00:56:47
complimentary. I'm gonna flatter them. Yeah. Um, do you think it will seem obquous?
00:56:52
And I don't know if I get it right. Okay. Um, because I'm going to mean it. Yeah. Cuz it's going to be sincere. It's going to be really sincere.
00:56:58
Yeah. I'm going to crack a great joke. Yes. Knock knock. Yeah. Who's there? I don't know. I
00:57:04
like I don't know. My friend, didn't you? Exactly. So, yeah, I'm going to flatter them. Crack jokes. Be very attentive. Get
00:57:11
their name right. Ask them about their grandchild. Good. Okay, let's pause. I want to in
00:57:16
that description already you're moving quite quickly through topics as you're interacting with them. You know that you
00:57:23
can't be circling the drain talking about the weather for long periods of
00:57:28
time. So just briefly let me say we don't need to avoid small talk. In fact, it's a very important social ritual for
00:57:35
people who are strangers to each other, people who haven't seen each other in a long time. It's where we land and say,
00:57:40
"Oh, we're doing conversation now." The mistake that people make is
00:57:46
they stay there too long. Way too long. Any more than like one beat of, "Oh my
00:57:52
goodness, the weather's really warm. It's like summer in California." Then you need to make it more personal and
00:57:58
move up this topic pyramid towards medium talk, deep talk quickly. Right? So small talk is at the bottom. These
00:58:04
are topics anybody can talk about. Tailored talk is more exciting, more personalized, more relevant to your
00:58:10
interests. Deep talk is the peak of this pyramid. Only we can talk about this thing in this special way. Not every
00:58:17
conversation is bound to get to the deep talk, but when it does, we should feel very appreciative. It's one of the most
00:58:23
magical things about being humans. Um, so we don't need to get to deep talk with like the barista at Starbucks or
00:58:29
with your neighbor when they're taking out their trash, but it does happen sometimes and it's quite lovely. I think
00:58:35
I used to put girls off when I was 11 because I used to ask them like the meaning of life too quickly on my mother stole a Nokia phone.
00:58:40
Yeah. And so they would stop texting back. Yeah. So I I think I learned early that like some people just don't like
00:58:46
Well, the joke's on them now. Now you get to do it for your for your life's work. No, but I think we you were on to
00:58:52
something there. It's not that you asked them about the meaning of life at all. You asked it too quickly.
00:58:57
So getting it's about the pacing as we move up here. Most people stay too long at the bottom, but we also cannot jump
00:59:03
to the top often. You kind of have to do the ritual of climbing to feel like you get there in a natural way.
00:59:09
And is that where relationships are built? Deep ones for sure. At the top moments at the top probably, right? This
00:59:15
is where vulnerability takes you. Um, often asking lots of questions,
00:59:20
especially follow-up questions, gets you up the pyramid more quickly. So shall we shall we shift to the A of the talk
00:59:27
framework because A is for asking. Uh topics and asking are
00:59:33
intimately tied to each other. The most common way that people switch topics is by asking a question. So you can use
00:59:41
questions like what are you excited about recently? Or what has been your favorite guest to talk to? Or what have
00:59:47
you and your girlfriend done together recently? You can you do that to switch topics. Once you're on a topic, we use
00:59:53
follow-up questions to kind of dive deeply and move up the topic pyramid.
00:59:58
Um, so are you saying I should ask more questions? Yes. Okay. Well, ask more than they're asking
01:00:04
me. Maybe not you because you spend a lot of time asking questions, but most people the topline advice to make their
01:00:11
conversations better is to ask many more questions. asking. It sounds so simple and it's
01:00:18
almost like everybody already knows that, but doing it in practice is quite hard and it's a skill. And people who do
01:00:25
it well are more successful on romantic dates. They're more successful in work
01:00:31
meetings. They're more successful as collaborators. They're more successful as entrepreneurs in getting funding. All
01:00:36
of it hinges on on question asking. So the topline advice, just ask more
01:00:42
questions. At the very least, don't be a zero question asker. What happens to the fate of zero
01:00:48
question askers? Oh, they're not they're not getting a second date. They're not going to get that funding. They're not they're not
01:00:53
learning enough about their partner to enable them to succeed. If you go on a
01:00:59
first date and you're asking zero questions, which like imagine that we've all sort of been on that date probably,
01:01:05
you want to leave within 10 minutes. When you're on a first date, you have so much to learn about each other. M
01:01:12
you have everything to learn about each other. So if someone's not asking, it's
01:01:17
a real real real problem. Especially I think this is a very especially good
01:01:23
hack for men um on heterosexual dates. Often what they're getting wrong is that
01:01:29
they're not asking enough questions. How'd you know this? From data. From data. Yeah. Yeah. So, we have a thousand speed
01:01:35
dates and we uh the outcome is does your the other person want to go on a second
01:01:41
date with you and we have transcripts. It was an amazing study run by this incredible research group at Stanford
01:01:48
about 10 years ago and you can just measure it. Measure how many questions they ask on each date. People who ask
01:01:54
more questions are enormously more likely to get asked to on a second date.
01:01:59
So much. So, imagine you go on 20 first dates and I say, "Okay, Stephen, you
01:02:04
just have to ask one extra question on those 20 dates. If you do, you'll
01:02:10
convert another date into a second date from just one question per date, according to the data."
01:02:15
Yes. It's true for both men and women, but it's particularly helpful for men
01:02:22
because they ask fewer questions on average than women do. Really? Yeah. Significantly less.
01:02:27
Yes. And the other funny gender effect in the data is that men are just more likely to agree to go on second dates.
01:02:33
They're less discerning in general. But if they want if if men want to get
01:02:39
asked on the second date, just ask more questions. What is it me asking more questions doing to the other person?
01:02:45
It makes them feel heard and like you want to know their answer, that you're interested in them. And so it signals
01:02:51
your interest, but also you learn what's in their mind and what their experience is, which gives arms you with more
01:02:57
information that to then ask more better questions. So it's not just about asking more, although that's a good start. It's
01:03:04
about asking f great follow-up questions. The the the benefits of question asking are almost entirely
01:03:10
driven by the power of follow-up questions. So what? Give me an example of asking a
01:03:15
great follow-up question. We're on a date. It's uh there's food. It's going really well. I've just shared
01:03:20
with you that I went on an amazing walk down the Sunset Strip this morning. And then I would say, "Really? Oh my
01:03:27
god, I've always wanted to go. Tell me tell me about it. How was it?" Oh, incredible. Um, so I got to this
01:03:33
point. I had never been here there before. There was I had to decide, was I going to veer off and go see um the
01:03:40
Marilyn Monroe apartment, which by the way is right next to the Frank Lidd Wright house. Oh my god. or was I going
01:03:45
to go a few blocks away was the um Mendez brothers house. Who's that? The two brothers who killed their
01:03:52
parents. Oh, on Netflix. Yeah. Oh, wow. Okay. So, I would literally right in between and I was at this crossroads. Do I
01:03:58
choose Cultured? Do I choose Morbid Curiosity? Um, and which one did you choose?
01:04:04
I went with Cultured. I was too afraid by myself. You're so cute.
01:04:10
So, okay. So, we Okay, we're off our date now. That was so fun. you were asking such lovely questions and it
01:04:16
really helped to like cheer me on like you actually wanted to hear this story. Um even though it might like someone
01:04:23
else might have been like not that interested and then you feel embarrassed like oh I just shared a bunch of
01:04:28
vulnerable stuff. I was walking alone in LA. I had morbid curiosity about these
01:04:35
two brothers and this story. Um, it's very easy to make someone feel
01:04:40
invalidated in that moment, but follow-up questions make me feel like, oh, he wants to know more. He's coming
01:04:45
with me on this journey. So, did I do the right thing then? Yeah, you were doing great. Okay. Yeah. And what's the wrong thing to have done
01:04:51
for me to just just Oh, imagine if I had been like, "Oh, I went this on an amazing walk down the
01:04:57
Sunset Strip." And you said, "Oh, my favorite restaurant on the strip is a sushi place." Oh, [ __ ] Um, I I went to this amazing restaurant
01:05:04
and I went to this amazing store. Uh, yeah. They carried our mess. I bought an amazing pair of boots. Um,
01:05:09
people do that all the time. Constantly. So, this is called boomer asking. Boomer asking. Not because of boomers. We love What are
01:05:16
you saying? It's for people of all ages. Commit boomer. It's a boomerang. Oh, okay. So, I say to you, um,
01:05:22
I lost subscribers. No, no, we love boomers. So, I say to you like, Stephen, what's your favorite
01:05:28
restaurant? Mr. Chows. Oh, I've been to Mr. Chows. Last time I went to Mr. house. I went with a whole bunch of friends and I had a friend who
01:05:35
was really all the time. Yes. So, I've asked a question. You've shared something with me that is such a
01:05:40
gift. Any sort of self-disclosure is such a gift. And instead of saying, "Oh, who did you go with?" or "What did you
01:05:45
order?" or "What is it like inside? How did you like it?" Um, I bring it the
01:05:50
focus of the conversation right back to myself. People that do that don't know they do
01:05:56
it. Correct. Because I will obviously, you know, I we'll go for dinner or we'll
01:06:01
have, I don't know, 10 of my colleagues there. And then sometimes I'll have one particular colleague who is doing exactly that.
01:06:06
Yes. And they have no idea. Don't you want to be like stop [ __ ] just like ask them about their thing?
01:06:13
They're new here. We're trying to make them feel comfortable. Even one follow-up question might be
01:06:18
enough. And so if you use this mindset of like ask the next question before you
01:06:24
pull it back to yourself, it sometimes can be enough. probably many more follow-up questions is better, but even
01:06:29
just one where I was like, "Oh, who did you go to Mr. Chows with?" and I let you answer and I say, "Oh, I've been there,
01:06:35
too." You can see it happening in their head because you say the word Mr. Chow is your favorite restaurant and they immediately.
01:06:43
It makes sense that people do this. Our brains are incredibly are wired to be egocentric. We know all of our lived
01:06:50
experiences, our own, with 100% accuracy. We lived it. It's all up here.
01:06:56
So, anything that we see or hear in our conversations is of course going to trigger all of these memories and
01:07:01
associations in your mind about your lived experience. And it's such an enemy of good conversation because it
01:07:08
constantly tugs you away from being interested in the other person first. The other thing I've seen in meetings,
01:07:14
which I've had to have a conversations about historically, is when someone will be talking and then someone's listening
01:07:20
going, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah." And I know I'm like, "Oh my god, they've got something to say." And they're like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah."
01:07:26
They'reing them out. They're trying to them into silence so that they can get their point across.
01:07:32
Yes. And I've had to send messages in the past to say, "By the way, you were saying, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah." It made it seem to an objective observer
01:07:39
like you weren't listening and actually you were just trying to say something. So just in the interest of your like, you know, maybe
01:07:44
maybe don't just don't say like how do they respond to that? Oh, because I didn't I constructed it more
01:07:50
tactfully tactfully than I just described, but I thought about it a lot and I just wanted to cuz I'd seen them doing this 30 40
01:07:57
times in meetings. Yeah. And I don't think they realize how it's perceived. Now you know how I feel
01:08:03
during so many conversations for so many different reason. There are so many things like that where you see other
01:08:09
people doing the dastardly conversational thing and it's totally
01:08:14
understandable why they're excited. They have a thing they want to say and it's preventing them from actually engaging
01:08:21
with the person who's talking and and what they're saying. All of these things are understandable. I it's important to
01:08:28
come from a place of like of non-judgment. Mhm. It's because our brains were built to
01:08:33
wander, not focus on another person, because we're deeply egocentric beings
01:08:38
and we focus on our own perspective. Both of those things hold us back from really being able to engage with someone
01:08:45
else. I want to go back to your thing of like a 10 out of 10 likability. that those are the little things, the little
01:08:51
um death by a thousand cuts to your likability are these things where it's like you're not able to actually really
01:08:57
focus on someone else and really engage with what they're saying and ask follow-up questions and then later in
01:09:04
the conversation call back to something they said earlier because you're just that clever. Um are there so much stands
01:09:11
in the way of of doing that. In that particular example I'm thinking about, I started to get
01:09:18
negative feedback from people that worked with this person. And I noticed one day the negative feedback was, I
01:09:24
don't think they're even listening to me. Yeah. Um cuz they're not cuz they weren't really listening. And
01:09:30
so the minute I got the feedback was the minute I thought, you know what, Stephen, you've you've watched this happen. You know, it's objectively true.
01:09:36
You owe it because you're this person's report to have a conversation with them about it because it's getting in the way of their success. The the fascinating
01:09:43
thing for me is if I plot everybody I know and work with on an axis of like self-awareness as it relates to their
01:09:48
communication. Yeah. Some people are just they kind of just got have it. Y
01:09:53
and then some people are on the other end of this spectrum where there's like no apparent self-awareness of of like
01:10:00
how they're coming across and they're so talented and so hardwork but this one thing of like their
01:10:06
communication self-awareness is honestly in some cases the single thing the
01:10:12
single gravitational force on their career trajectory. Yes. And like can people change or is it just
01:10:17
like a genetic thing? They can. Let first let me address there are pros and cons to being at both ends
01:10:23
of that spectrum. If you are too hypervigilant and too self-aware, it
01:10:28
can be distracting. It might mean that you're sort of people pleasing too, which can lead to burnout and
01:10:33
exhaustion. If you're at this lack of self-awareness end, of course, it's going to be a real problem. And so, I
01:10:41
love teaching and coaching people at that end because you can become more self-aware. So many of my students at
01:10:48
Harvard come into the course and that's how they are. What you mean? They are not aware of what their
01:10:56
strengths and weaknesses are. They don't know what they're doing right and wrong. They just know they either hate
01:11:02
conversation or aren't good at it. And so just by going through this talk course, they become much more sort of
01:11:09
cleareyed and open to the fact that conversation is a skill that matters
01:11:14
profoundly. not in a sort of soft skill fuzzy way but as a in a quantifiable way that impacts everything that matters to
01:11:21
them like as like a bottom line almost as like an economic value to them and so
01:11:26
just having their eyes open to the fact that like this is a skill and a skill they need to get better at even if I
01:11:32
don't see them getting massively better in the course of three months it means that they are likely to get better at it
01:11:38
over the longer term because now they know now they get it and now they know that they aren't great at it yet. The
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period. That's shopify.com/bartlet. Are there anything else that you know we
01:12:41
talked about death by a thousand cuts as it relates to being a 10 out of 10 conversationalist and like li like li like li like li like li like li like li like li like li like li like likeable person are there any of these other
01:12:47
small things that we do which are harming us but are tiny that most people
01:12:53
don't know they're doing let's move to K as I'm moving along in this framework um we're skipping L for
01:12:59
now which we would never skip L forever K is for kindness um often we are all
01:13:05
taught this virtue of kindness when we're children and spend the rest of our lives sort of falling short of actually
01:13:12
doing it in practice. I've forever been obsessed with this idea of what are like people who are
01:13:18
actually kind, what are they thinking about and how are they interacting with other people? What kinds of choices are
01:13:23
they making? How do they talk to other people? And so when you say death by a thousand cuts, there are these sort of
01:13:29
mistakes that we make in the respectfulness of our language that undermine our actual kindness to other
01:13:35
people. making sure you use someone's name. You gave this example and the one out of 10 is like use the wrong name.
01:13:41
That is really meaningful. You need to know people's names and use them correctly and with appropriate
01:13:46
formality, right? Sometimes it's wonderful to say like, "Hey, honey." And sometimes you need to say, "Um, it's
01:13:52
nice to meet you, Dr. Brooks." Right? Like it you need to be able to read that. Um there is this paper um where
01:13:59
they studied conversations between police officers and citizens in Oakland
01:14:05
actually close to here in normal traffic stops. So when police pulled over citizens and walked up to the car and
01:14:11
said um you were speeding, you know, and they used body cam footage and got all the transcripts from these interactions
01:14:17
and then measured the respectfulness of the language that the police officers were using.
01:14:22
There are some really, you know, not surprising but terrible findings that police officers were using less
01:14:29
respectful language towards black citizens compared to white citizens. But sort of more uh broadly speaking, the
01:14:36
interactions where they were using more respectful language went better. There were less conflicts. There were they w
01:14:42
they drive away without further infractions. So the tiny choices we make in our language and the language of
01:14:50
respect is varies along like hundreds of features of language and it's a very
01:14:55
gradient concept but they have a real impact on how these interactions go.
01:15:01
When we think about sort of like things like systemic bi racial bias that's it comes from that kind of stuff. That's
01:15:08
where it leaks out is in the language we use with each other. So we can all learn
01:15:13
to use more respectful language. Do you think much about
01:15:20
how our emotional state is impacting our ability to accomplish any of these things? Cuz I think, you know, the days
01:15:25
where I'm least likely to be kind are the days where I haven't slept. Yeah. I should probably be avoiding all
01:15:31
conversations that day. It's really I think one of the biggest things I've learned from all of this work is that conversation is remarkably
01:15:38
effortful and it requires quite a bit of energy. Even if you know how to be a
01:15:43
good conversationalist, often we don't have the energy to actually do it. Oh, I don't have the energy to brainstorm
01:15:50
topics. I don't have the energy to continue asking follow-up questions. I'm going to let my egoentrism take over and
01:15:55
boomer ask till the sun comes down goes down. Not like boomers. Not boomers.
01:16:01
Difference of opinion here. I'm going to accidentally use disrespectful language and not repair
01:16:07
that, not correct it. That's kind of what keeps me up at night is that human beings do have limitations. We are
01:16:12
limited in time. We're limited in energy. Our brains are not supercomputers. And so in practice,
01:16:20
people who are great communicators will often fall short of their own hopes because they don't have the energy to do
01:16:27
it. I think Bnee Brown said to me that when she comes home and she's out of energy, she'll just say to her partner, "Listen,
01:16:33
I'm on 10% today, so I can't deal with this now." And what talk about self-awareness, boy, if you can do that,
01:16:38
if you can say and you have sturdy enough relationships at work and at home that you could say, "Dude, I'm like a
01:16:44
two out of 10. You got to cut me a break today." It would be tremendously helpful. It requires quite a bit of self-awareness
01:16:51
to recognize that you're at a two out of 10. And a lot of grace from the people
01:16:57
around you, which means that you're going to have to give them grace in response at some point. Um, that's what
01:17:04
good relationships are. And the L L. Shall we put them in the correct order? Yeah. V A L K.
01:17:11
L is for levity. So, we've talked a bit about difficult conversations and how they can so easily get overheated. When
01:17:17
you think about chats that go off the rails, it's quite easy to think of hostile conflict, difficult
01:17:24
conversations, because they're very salient. They're very memorable. There's might be shouting. There's going to be
01:17:30
hurt feelings, defensiveness. The more common enemy of conversation is actually boredom and disengagement. So yes, do we
01:17:38
get annoyed with each other? Absolutely. But almost every conversation has stints
01:17:44
of disengagement where people aren't interested. And so levity is humor and
01:17:50
warmth to help us avoid disinterest and boredom. And levity is important for sort of
01:17:58
happiness and engagement sake itself. You know, it matters that we're enjoying our time together, but maybe even more
01:18:04
profoundly, if we are not leaning towards each other and interested in what the other person
01:18:10
is saying, we can't achieve any of our other goals. Good conversation requires mutual engagement. So, if I'm bored and
01:18:17
my mind is wandering, which happens a lot because I have attentional issues. It happens to a lot of people a lot. Um,
01:18:24
the human mind wanders uh 25% of the time during conversation. So, it's quite
01:18:29
common. If your mind is wandering and you're not engaged with each other, then you can't
01:18:34
do anything else either. Persuasion, making decisions together, brainstorming, connecting, um, none of
01:18:40
it. So, the L is very important because it makes things fun and enjoyable, but it's also important because we need to
01:18:46
stay here with each other and not disengage. What if you're not a warm person?
01:18:54
It's so fun. I've been accused of being racist. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. People say to me, People say to me a lot like you're very serious.
01:19:00
I'm like, really? I'm I think I come across as serious sometimes. I think you may come across as serious.
01:19:05
I would I think but you do come across as very warm. And so that's an important distinction.
01:19:10
You're using flattery. I've seen that when you're confessing. I'm not I'm giving I'm giving very direct
01:19:15
flattery. Flattery here. High relational. I'm going to you. So there's levity is two parts. It's
01:19:22
humor and warmth. And I always start this part of my class at Harvard by saying to my students, if you're not
01:19:29
funny and you think you never will be, it's okay
01:19:34
because I don't think I'm going to be the one to make you funny within the span of two months if you are a deeply
01:19:39
serious unfunny person. Other people believe that you can get funnier over time. We can talk about that in a in a
01:19:45
moment. Um, what I do deeply believe is that pe anyone can be more warm. And so
01:19:51
warmth moves include anything expressing gratitude. I'm so grateful for your time today. I'm so grateful for you engaging
01:19:57
with the content of my work, flattery, giving compliments, just shifting
01:20:03
topics. So if you can get better at sensing when people are getting bored with a topic and getting more courageous
01:20:08
and assertive about switching more frequently can be very, very helpful for keeping the conversation sort of
01:20:14
bubbling along. Call backs. Call backs are any reference back to
01:20:20
something that you've talked about previously. They're total magic.
01:20:25
It shows that you were listening to someone earlier in the conversation, maybe even earlier in your relationship,
01:20:31
like a month ago. If I can call back to something we talked about, it shows I
01:20:36
heard you. I was thinking about what you said. I was able to retain it in my mind
01:20:42
and I'm clever enough to reference back to it now. And often it has this really
01:20:48
amazing quality where if I bring it up again, it's funny because you're like, "Oh [ __ ] that's super clever."
01:20:54
Um, often pe a lot of people ask me, "How do we end conversations?" Well, and
01:20:59
I have two pieces of advice there. I'm going to bring this back to callbacks. One is nobody knows when to end
01:21:05
conversations. It's the final topic switch. It's the final coordination choice. There's no way to know. There is
01:21:11
no right answer. Um, so it's better to just end it. like be assertive, walk away rather than hemming and hawing and
01:21:17
feeling bad and embarrassed about it. The second piece of advice is that it's a great time to try a call back. The
01:21:24
very last beat of the conversation, you can say, "And I hope you have a great time with your girlfriend this weekend."
01:21:29
Right? Like whatever they they had mentioned, "Oh, I'm going to go we're going to go to see this movie. I hope you have a great time at the movie this
01:21:35
weekend." Right? Showing that like, "Oh, I heard you 30 minutes ago when you told me this thing." That can help to smooth the exit
01:21:42
ramp away. I find it really useful to give people my email address to end a conversation.
01:21:47
That's so interesting. It just ends the conversation immediately. Yeah. Someone will come up to me and say,
01:21:53
"Hey, I've got this business idea I want to pitch." And then they'll start pitching. And if I go, you know, send me here's my email. The convers and I shake their
01:21:59
hand. The conversation ends immediately. Do you feel it is dismissive? Maybe.
01:22:05
However, in the context of like being in the gym and I'm like mid set
01:22:10
and someone comes over and says and I go, "Oh, here's my email. Here's if you want to." It seems to end the
01:22:16
conversation and it feels to be like, "Please help me here." What would be a better way to
01:22:22
I know. I think that's quite good because it it could be perceived as a little dismissive, but that person in the gym is going to be like, "Yeah, he
01:22:28
probably doesn't want to talk about my business while he's, you know, lifting." And you're opening the door to them.
01:22:34
You're saying I really would love to receive an email from you. Um, it is my real email as well. I'm not
01:22:39
giving out a fake one. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you should feel like a jerk if you were giving out a fake. I do read them.
01:22:45
Yeah, exactly. Um, depending on your tolerance. I I also don't I think most
01:22:50
people wouldn't be excited about having a deep conversation with a stranger at the gym. And I think giving yourself
01:22:56
grace for that is also helpful. Like it doesn't make you a bad person. I think
01:23:02
of an important thing that we take from the book and this course is like talking more is not always the answer.
01:23:09
Often it's not often it's important. It's these low informational goals,
01:23:15
right? Like protecting your time, protecting your mental health. Some people, most people are under social.
01:23:21
Loneliness is a real problem. Um they don't have enough friends. They're not connected enough. But some people
01:23:28
probably are overconnected and your social portfolio is too large and there's too many people who need too many things from you. And so thinking
01:23:35
carefully about what are your strategies to sort of stave off over conversation
01:23:40
is quite worthwhile. And is this introvert ambvert extrovert stuff real? It's a great question. People have
01:23:46
preferences about what makes them feel connected to other people. Some people
01:23:52
would love to go to that party with a hundred famous people. Tell me about Zara and my team said that the thing she
01:23:57
wants to do on a Friday after a really really really really really busy week is she wants to go to a busy coffee shop
01:24:03
and be around loads of people. And I was like what? She goes yeah it recharges me. I'm like what are you like psychopath?
01:24:08
And then there's me who after the same week all I want to do is be in a dark
01:24:13
cold room. Yeah. On my own. Yep. Totally. And both of those are fair
01:24:19
and fine. And knowing that about yourself is really helpful. I don't know as that relates to introversion and
01:24:25
extroversion as much as like where what are your preferences for conversation. It's both about how frequently who do
01:24:32
you want to be interacting with and what topics are exciting. Is she going to that coffee shop and talking about work
01:24:37
still or is she like no I can't wait to talk about this weird other stuff to try and get work off my mind.
01:24:42
But there's those people though in society we all know them that are like around people they just become like a social butterfly.
01:24:48
Yeah. They like to talk loads. They're really engaged. They're energized by it. Sure. And then there's us lot who are
01:24:55
just drained by that stuff. And I look at these people and go I'm almost jealous of them. I go I don't know how you do that. Sometimes
01:25:02
for sure whether you when you get excited around lots of people can be a huge advantage because we need to do
01:25:08
that sometimes. I actually think possibly a better indicator of introversion might be if you went into a
01:25:15
party or you were in a group conversation and it was super awkward. Nobody's talking. Do you feel like it's
01:25:21
your job to fix it? Extroverts would be like, "That's my
01:25:27
number one job in life. I am the one. Don't worry. I'm here. I'm
01:25:33
here to save the awkwardness." Introverts are often like, "I'm going to go loiter by the guacamole. It is this
01:25:39
is not my problem, and I don't want no part of it." Yeah. So, sometimes it's not even about the number of people that are around, but
01:25:45
how you're managing conversation. I just put a new quiz on my website that helps people figure out what are your
01:25:52
preferences. What are your natural habits in tricky situations like that and it gives you a sort of typo type?
01:25:59
What type are you? Do you tend to sort of be avoidant? Do you tend to approach and try and fix things? And then
01:26:05
strategies to use and what do you see in terms of percentages there and different? We're going to find out. It's new. It's new. Yeah. Yeah. We're just launching it
01:26:11
so I'm going to find out. And does it have classifications in terms of like Yeah. How many classifications? Yeah. So it's only three types that you
01:26:18
could be um with this quiz and then sort of like strategies that whatever your type is this is going to help you in
01:26:24
terms of topics asking levity and kindness and what are the three categories one one could be
01:26:30
so some one person could be sort of an approach person who's like and I guess probably correlated with extraversion
01:26:36
we'll find out um if it's awkward and quiet you're the one that wants to jump in and fix it there are pros and cons to
01:26:42
this too if you jump in And you might say things or do things that
01:26:48
you don't actually aren't very proud of and might lower your value. Correct. Yeah. There are avoiders who are like, "No,
01:26:54
thank you. I'm just going to I'm going to stay here, but I'm going to not say anything." And then there are people who are like, "I'm out of here. This party
01:27:00
sucks." Right? Like they're the exit the exit people. I feel attacked. No, but I I you know, that's interesting
01:27:07
because is it true that some people who overtalk are less respected? Can you
01:27:13
overt talk? I I had this um this thought many years ago based on again observations I'd seen in boardrooms that
01:27:19
I'd been in and I'd see 12 of my team members in a boardroom trying to come to an idea for a campaign we were doing.
01:27:26
Yeah. And I noticed that one particular person who I shame many years ago in our New York office would talk so much and
01:27:34
too I would say too much to the extent that the next time they spoke I could
01:27:40
see everybody in the room not paying attention and discounting it before it would come. So I came up with this idea.
01:27:45
I was like I think we all have a contribution score. Yeah. Like a credit score. Love that. And it's based on how
01:27:51
thoughtful and valuable our previous contributions have been.
01:27:57
Yeah. And what I would see is with this particular person, I shall call her Katie, the minute she spoke, um halfway through
01:28:02
her first sentence, I could see the person sat next to her basically just pre-rebutling it. Yeah. Like pre- dismissing it.
01:28:08
Yeah. And then on the contrary, there's another particular person in our in our Manchester office back in the day who
01:28:14
spoke so little that the minute they spoke, it was like the room fell silent and we all just swung our heads over to
01:28:20
them because you're like, "Here comes a really good take." So I thought everybody has a contribution score protect yours.
01:28:25
Yes. So group conversation is incredibly complicated and one of the most difficult things is so obvious is just
01:28:32
how do we share airtime? Uh there are always going to be pe people who have high power tend to take up more airtime
01:28:38
just naturally. It's something that high power people need to fight against because it's not productive
01:28:44
and it makes lower power people feel like they're not welcome to join. But then if you just look at airtime balance
01:28:50
the person who's dominating the airtime that is not productive, right? Like especially if they're not the expert.
01:28:57
Okay, that's where things get problematic. You can imagine a balance where okay there might be a group where
01:29:02
we are all dying to hear we need to talk about aerospace engineering and only one out of the 10 of us is an aerospace
01:29:09
engineer. I want to hear that guy talk for 45 minutes and I want to learn everything I possibly can
01:29:15
in that in that time. The it becomes problematic when the person dominating the airtime is not the sole expert or
01:29:22
maybe not an expert at all. There's another piece to this and I love your idea of a contribution score where
01:29:30
talking is not the only way to add value to a group. There are so many roles that
01:29:35
people play. There are timekeepers. There's someone who's writing on the board at the same time. Often the person holding the pen ends up being the most
01:29:42
powerful person because they're making diagrams and taking notes and they decide what is worthy of being up on the
01:29:47
board. There are people who keep the agenda. So, we're saying, "Okay, here are the topics we want to talk about.
01:29:53
here are the goals we came in with. We want to make this decision. I'd like to note that we haven't moved to the
01:29:58
pasture where we're going to make the decision, right? The person who is sort of facilitating the meeting becomes very
01:30:06
valuable. So there's all kinds of so there's goals, there's roles in a group,
01:30:11
and then there's the soul the warmth of it all. The other thing in line with
01:30:16
that that I've noticed from people with a low contribution score in businesses that I've built, whatever is they're bad
01:30:23
switchers and it's it appears to be linked. What I mean by a bad switcher is the group will
01:30:29
be talking about I see. Yes. Yes. They're not they're unwilling to go where the group wants to go and they come keep coming back to
01:30:35
their thing or their like Yeah. or something completely unrelated. Yeah. As if they just needed to say
01:30:41
something. Yeah. And it just it veers the group off the subject. So, the group are talking
01:30:47
about, let's just say we're talking about a campaign we're doing for Starbucks and we're saying, "Do you
01:30:52
think we should do uh an event in Manhattan?" And because it it almost seems like they can't not talk. They'll
01:30:58
say, "I went on a holiday to Manhattan once and it was um and it was uh it was voted
01:31:06
in the top 15 on the Forbes list of best places to go." And you just go and you just look and go, "What? That's not what
01:31:12
What if that person, let me play Devil's Adam for a second. What if they made a joke about New York that was actually
01:31:19
funny? Slightly off topic, great, but actually funny." And then you get right back into right, it's great. So it's not about in that
01:31:27
case it's not about bad switching. It's about egoentrism. You're not reading the room well. You're not serving the goals
01:31:34
of the group. Yeah. Right. Levity, moments of levity often are about briefly switching to an
01:31:40
adjacent topic and then switching back. Yeah. And it's actually worth that side bar
01:31:47
because it's fun and everybody's like, "Oh, thank god we don't have to like circle the drain on New York for a million more minutes." Um the problem is
01:31:54
this guy is chiming in being like let me tell you about the time I went to New York. Yeah. And and and the the collective are
01:32:00
trying to go in one direction. I actually think this about this a lot in the context of podcasting. I would hate to have a co-host
01:32:07
and it would be very hard. It would be so hard because in my mind there's a particular direction I'm I'm
01:32:13
going in. Yes. And if they weren't aligned with the direction I'm going in, it's rough. I
01:32:18
mean, you see it sometimes with on podcast with a co-host where they're going in a direction talking about immigration
01:32:23
and they say like, "But wait, wait, wait, just one thing, one quick thing before we move on." And then you go back, you go to a different direction, like,
01:32:28
"Oh my gosh, oh no." And as a viewer, you're like, "Oh, you are making progress towards the crux of the issue." But this, but I think that's what I'm talking
01:32:34
about. Like, how would you make sure you're moving in the right direction as the group? Yes. And this is a great example because
01:32:40
we we often think of one-on-one conversation is the same task as a threeperson group. As soon as a third
01:32:47
person pulls up a chair, whether it's a podcast co-host or a friend at a bar,
01:32:52
that task, it's a categorically different task now because that third person has the power to take you on
01:32:59
sidebars. It's no longer being co-created intimately between two minds. All of a
01:33:04
sudden, we get into this like coordination kuruffle that can be very, very frustrating. I suspect
01:33:10
that's part of why you don't like groups actually is that you like so strongly prefer one-on-one.
01:33:17
Yeah, I think that's true. I think that's true. I prefer one-on-one. I prefer the depth and
01:33:24
small talk feels like really disingenuous sometimes. Can I push you? Do you think it's about control?
01:33:30
Because imagine you had a co-host. The problem that you the reason you'd feel so frustrated with that, yes, it's about
01:33:36
the flow of the conversation getting to a magical moment. It's also like you had to like relinquish control to someone
01:33:42
else in that moment. It's interesting because um I was with a colleague of mine the other day and we
01:33:49
were interviewing some people. Mhm. So we just say we were interviewing three people. Yeah. The first interview I told her to lead
01:33:56
the interview and I enjoyed the interview because I could watch her go in her direction. Felt very like a
01:34:02
straight line. The second interview I didn't say anything and what happened is I started asking them a question. Now
01:34:08
I'm sat there asking this guy a question because I'm trying to figure out this particular answer. So I'm kind of like circling this issue, not kind of giving
01:34:14
it away and I'm getting one step closer and another step closer and then my colleague comes in and asks a completely
01:34:20
different question and you're like and I'm like, "Oh no, I was like so close to figuring out this thing about
01:34:26
them that I suspect is a red flag." So like, and then she um came and asked the question and then I'm like, "Oh my god,
01:34:32
no. Now I have to go right back to this completely different subject and stop and you're never going to get your answer." So anyway, afterwards I had a
01:34:38
conversation with her and I said, "Listen, when we do interviews, I think we need to clarify who's leading." That's right. I'll sit and listen. When you do it,
01:34:44
then when I do it, you sit, you know? Yep. And so I think that's part of it. That's part of the roles thing I was
01:34:50
talking about before too, right? Like there's this roles of like you're scribing, you're keeping time or whatever, but also being having clarity
01:34:57
about like who's the topic leader here. Yeah. And clarity, especially in a group of three, can be incredibly helpful. Uh and
01:35:03
lack of it is chaotic. A nightmare. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What is the most important thing we
01:35:09
haven't talked about as it relates to likability and having great conversations and dislikability if that's a word?
01:35:15
I want to distance ourselves from likability. I think likability is one very narrow goal of good conversation.
01:35:21
What other things do people care about? Do you know why I use certain words? Tell me. Is because the audience have told me.
01:35:28
Should I tell you what they care about? Please. They care about dealing with narcissists. Good. They care about um how to have
01:35:33
different because they struggle with it, I guess. So, yeah. Yeah. It's an interesting label. It's
01:35:39
very accusatory of other people. Yeah. Because I think everybody thinks the person they disagree with is a
01:35:44
narcissist. It's like a nice way to like just So, a reframe of it is they struggle with disagreement.
01:35:51
Yeah. Okay. The other thing is they care a lot about um difficult conversations. It's the
01:35:57
bane of their life. They struggle with them. They avoid them. They think if they could only get good at it, then they'd be everything they want to be.
01:36:02
Yeah. They care about being liked. Y um they care about avoiding things that
01:36:07
make them disliked that they're unaware of that they're doing. I would say
01:36:14
and I I guess the the fifth one is they they care a lot about persuasion remarkably. And Julian Treasure, who did
01:36:20
that TED talk about speaking told me this, people don't really care much about listening.
01:36:25
And he told me he did two because they don't know. It's funny. It's it's so interesting to hear you say
01:36:31
those things. To me, those are all very related to each other and revealing that
01:36:37
people don't have great instincts about their strengths and weaknesses and what's hard and easy about conversation.
01:36:45
persuasion, difficult conversations, thinking other people are narcissists,
01:36:51
um, and being liked. They're all related to mismanaging conflict and disagreement
01:36:59
and and have struggling to manage moments of difficulty. Well, the social
01:37:05
landscape of all conversation is so much broader than people realize, I think,
01:37:11
because there were so narrowly focused on these very noticeable, memorable, salient moments
01:37:19
of disagreement that we're like, "Oh [ __ ] that's hard." And we got mad and it ruined and we broke up.
01:37:24
Of course, but you're also super boring like 80% of the time.
01:37:30
And also, you're you're not really listening to other people. You're missing so many opportunities to
01:37:35
actually learn from people because you're not listening. You're not asking enough follow-up questions. You're not
01:37:41
asking enough questions at all. You're talk spending too much time talking about yourself. Like, obviously, this is what people
01:37:47
like because the thing that I will remember the most is the conflict, the issue, the problem,
01:37:53
the emotional situation. Yeah. People don't think they're boring. Like on it's it's a it's hard to it's such a
01:37:59
it's a much harder thing to notice. Yeah. And it's a much harder thing to get feedback about because no one's going to
01:38:05
be like, "Hey, bro, you're boring." Yeah. And if the things I'm interested in, by way of me being interested, I
01:38:11
think they're interesting. Yeah. So, I think that I'm just making stuff up Pokémon. I think that's the most
01:38:16
important interesting thing in the world. And let me now tell you everything I know about Pokémon. Yeah. It's like this. It's like this
01:38:22
misunderstanding of what it the purpose of conversation is not to say things we know at other people.
01:38:29
It's about finding things we're both interested in and then learning everything that you know about that. Like now I'm just going to like take a
01:38:37
journey through your brain of everything that you think and feel about this thing that we're both interested in. And on
01:38:42
that journey we might land in this magical place where I'm learning stuff from you. You find me quite charming.
01:38:48
We're laughing together and we feel seen and known and understood. But it's definitely not going to be me telling
01:38:54
you about Pokemon if you're deeply disinterested in it. And there's just the the difference between being interesting and
01:39:00
interested. We think that Yes. Like I think that the game of being interesting is to show you
01:39:05
life is not about walking through life giving like mini speeches or like mini TED talks, right? It's about convers
01:39:14
conversation is interactive. It's co-created with two independent minds. Entrepreneurs make this mistake a lot
01:39:20
too. They they may be driven by, you know, Dragon's Den and Shark Tank. You
01:39:26
feel like it's not your fault. You feel like you need to stand up there and like pitch your idea and in order to be
01:39:33
successful, you give the most compelling public speech about it. Most
01:39:38
entrepreneurs or business owners actually are talking to investors and colleagues and potential partner
01:39:43
strategic partners in conversation. And so before you get to the point where you're like, "Let me tell you about my
01:39:49
amazing company, you need to ask them a million questions and get to know them and understand what their pain points
01:39:56
are and how many kids they have and what they actually care about. So if you're lucky, the thing that and product or
01:40:02
service you have actually fills that need and be like, "Guess what? I have this amazing thing for you. Wouldn't you love to invest in it?
01:40:10
Andrew Bustamante said something to me about this. He said um he's a spy for the CIA for about 10 years and he said
01:40:16
one of the things you you have to train yourself to understand as a spy is that there's a difference between your
01:40:22
perspective which is like what I see right now. Yes. And in my perspective I see a mirror over there and there's an award and I see some things behind you.
01:40:28
I see two cameras over your shoulder. I see that. There's a wooden beam over there behind you by the way. And there's like some green tape above there. And
01:40:35
then there's your perception. Yes. Your perception is all this [ __ ] Like I couldn't see any of this stuff
01:40:40
behind me. That's right. And he said like as a spy, they train you to sit in the other person's perception because if you can't do that,
01:40:47
you're never going to be able to persuade them. Like you have to realize that actually you sat in front of me have a different brain.
01:40:52
And the only I can guess what's in your brain. I can guess. Maybe there's a
01:40:57
mirror behind me. Maybe there's art. Maybe there's just a wall. I can guess based on what I see, based on what I've
01:41:03
experienced. We're in a room. So, I'm going to guess there's some sort of wall behind me and not out into the street.
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But we're really bad at guessing. Tons of psychological research suggests that human beings are terrible at using our
01:41:16
own experiences to guess other people's perceptual realities. Guess your perspective. So, instead of guessing, I
01:41:23
need to ask you, hey, Stephen, what do you see behind me? I need to ask you
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So when I go into a business meeting or I'm trying to persuade someone to I don't know join our company whatever at
01:43:49
the beginning of that conversation are there key questions that I should be using to understand their ideology like
01:43:57
understand the the hero's journey that they they have in their head of them you should ask more and listen to their
01:44:04
answers and then ask the next question. What kind of questions? A good one that I like to start with is what are you excited about lately?
01:44:10
Okay. Right. It's very revealing of what there's is top of mind. You asked me that question today. Loved it.
01:44:16
It's it also implies that you knew what they were excited about previously. So, it can help you kind of revisit that a
01:44:23
bit over time. Whatever there has an answer to that question, even if they're
01:44:28
terribly depressed, they're excited about something. Maybe the prospect of making a friend.
01:44:33
Um, and anything that someone is excited about means you can stay on that topic and ask more. Oh, well, what what could
01:44:39
I do to help you do that? Um, right? Like we we can just carried carry on
01:44:45
down that path. When I asked you that question three hours ago, you said two things. You said about putting curriculum into schools,
01:44:51
but you also talked about men and their conversations. And you said you had done a study recently. Yeah.
01:44:56
About men. This is me remembering what you said. This is back. Loving it. Loving it. Thank you for that. But men and their
01:45:03
conversations. You said you've done an interesting study recently which I can't go into the details about, but it was revealing about male friendship.
01:45:09
Yes. Are men bad at communication? If so, why are we bad at communication? Conversation's hard. When you look under
01:45:15
the hood, it's looks more like a train wreck. You're being diplomatic than I will be. I'll be less diplomatic
01:45:20
in a moment. Um, it looks more like a train wreck than a sort of tidy script that you would see on a TV show. It's
01:45:27
messy. We make mistakes. We have to repair it. We need to check our understanding. We need to make
01:45:32
apologies. constantly. So, perfection is not the goal for anyone in conversation.
01:45:38
When you look at gender differences, there are real gender differences. Um,
01:45:43
we know that in friendship, women tend to actually face each other and talk to each other. Men tend to do activities,
01:45:49
right? Shouldertoshoulder. We're fishing, we're playing basketball, we're in fantasy sports on our computers.
01:45:56
This project that I did recently, I always spend lots of time analyzing transcripts at very large scale. This
01:46:03
project though, I was observing conversations live. And for whatever reason, that was much more visceral than
01:46:09
what I usually do as a scientist. And it was all men meeting other men for the
01:46:14
first time and sort of trying to forge friendships. And what was so hard to watch is that they don't they really
01:46:23
struggled with vulnerability. Vulnerability is such a key component of friendship. We friendship experts say
01:46:30
you need consistency. So interacting repeatedly, positivity, having fun
01:46:36
together, but maybe most importantly vulnerability. Like sharing not only your feelings with each other, but like
01:46:41
what are you struggling with? What are your what are your hopes and dreams? What are your goals? What do you want to get out of this? It was so maddening to
01:46:48
watch these men have hundreds of conversations and like none of them
01:46:55
asked those questions or talked about those things with each other. As a woman, it was it was almost shocking
01:47:01
because it's sort of like what women would probably talk about within the first three minutes of the conversation.
01:47:08
And I couldn't believe I was like, "Wow, this is really this really seems like a massive difference." And I worry that
01:47:15
large scale the leap from being basketball buddies or fantasy sports
01:47:21
buddies into vulnerable conversation feels so scary and risky that men are
01:47:29
unable to make the leap. And that's a huge part of what's holding back men from having meaningful friendships. And
01:47:36
we know that loneliness is so much worse for men than for women. And they have way less friends.
01:47:41
Yes. Yes. I Ridiculous proportion of men say report having zero close friends.
01:47:48
40% potentially. Wow. It's quite troubling. And I think that I
01:47:55
think their conversation skills and courage. Listen, everything that we've talked about, choosing good topics,
01:48:02
shifting to new topics when they get boring, asking good questions, asking follow-up questions, finding moments of
01:48:07
levity, um apologizing, listening, all of these things take a surprising amount
01:48:12
of courage and confidence. And it feels like this thing for men who
01:48:18
have been socialized to believe that vulnerability is a sign of weakness. It feels like it's like almost takes too
01:48:25
much courage for them to make that leap in their relationships. And it's quite
01:48:31
problematic. Men are 400% more likely to say they have no one to turn to in a time of crisis. Um half of men say they are
01:48:38
unsatisfied with their friendships. Men's number of close friends has dropped by 30 to 40% since 1990.
01:48:47
Men come to rely on their in heterosexual relationships come to rely on their partner for emotional fulfillment and support. Women do not.
01:48:55
So when you know a woman a female spouse dies, men have to remarry to fill that
01:49:00
void. They don't have that friendship. When a husband dies, the woman has her friends
01:49:07
to support her. So, how can I how can I make more friends as a man? I think it's really one conversation at
01:49:13
a time. The power you have is sign as an individual is signaling to other men,
01:49:18
hey, let's take this courageous leap. Like, here's a question you can ask. What have you been struggling with
01:49:23
recently? What do you hope to achieve? But what have you been what kind of thing have
01:49:28
you been thinking about that you haven't shared with anyone before? And in the study you did, what kind Give me a flavor of how the conversation
01:49:35
sounded. Hey man, you want to get Oh, this this hot dog is gross.
01:49:40
Yeah, it's really gross. Yeah, this is Yeah, I don't like the food.
01:49:48
I'm going to go take a nap. It's like narrating what's happening around you.
01:49:54
Sometimes they'd be like, "Where are you from?" Or,
01:49:59
and then that would turn into a narration. Yeah. Oh, I love Chicago. It has that team.
01:50:05
Uh, I hate the Chicago Bears. Uh, oh yeah, I remember when so and so played there. Then you devolve into the sports
01:50:11
talk, which can be important, but you can you move a step beyond and be like,
01:50:17
did you ever feel vulnerable when you played football in high school? Right? Like or like what did you struggle with
01:50:23
in terms of sports? Why didn't you play college sports? I whatever wherever the
01:50:28
whatever the topic is, you can take that next step to make it actually personal
01:50:34
and vulnerable and interesting so that you walk away one step closer to having
01:50:39
an actual friend and not just someone you say things you know to.
01:50:45
I did a talk in Canary War for a couple of week couple of maybe a year ago and a
01:50:50
kid stood up in the front row. You got to bear in mind there's 500 young I say young I mean probably 21. They're all
01:50:56
working in this part of London called Canary Wolf where you kind of your first job after university. 500 people in this
01:51:01
room. Kid stands up front row says, "Hi, my question is um I
01:51:08
want to know how to make friends." Mhm. And it it was shocking to me because I could see 499 of his peers stood next to
01:51:14
him. Mhm. But he had the guts to stand up in front of all these people and say, "Hi, Stephen. My question is, how do you make
01:51:20
friends?" It's a fabulous question, isn't it? If he had asked you that question, he might
01:51:25
be listening now. Hello, friend. Starts with hello. And
01:51:30
the number of times that I have run conversation exercises as part of my class and the students at the end of
01:51:37
that very first session say this is the first time I've turned to the person next to me and actually talked to them.
01:51:43
It's like every time I do that first session, thank you. Thank you for the opportunity to turn the re giving us a
01:51:49
reason to turn to each other and actually talk get to know my classmates.
01:51:54
Even that takes tremendous courage especially if there are norms of not doing of coming in sitting down at a
01:52:00
desk or in an auditorium and being on your phone. So literally turning to someone next to you and saying like hey
01:52:06
I'm Allison. What's your name? Where are you from? Starting right. God we don't do that in the UK. It's
01:52:11
like creepy behavior. It's okay. And that's you do need to read the room, right? like it's maybe not appropriate in all situ. It's a it
01:52:17
can be a shame. It depends on the norms. Once you are engaged with people, it's all of the talk things. What topics will
01:52:24
they actually find helpful to them? Are you asking questions? Are you listening and asking follow-up questions? Are you
01:52:31
moving beyond just trading things, you know? Are you learning about each other in a
01:52:38
way that feels revealing? That's where real relationships come from. What is um
01:52:43
what are these here? Yeah, let's find out. This list of questions here. Oh, this is an exercise that I do. This
01:52:50
is based on a very well-known exercise called 36 questions to fall in love. Oh, I heard about that. Yeah, Arthur Aaron. It was it was in the
01:52:56
New York Times many years ago. It's based on some academic research. This is 10 a subset of 10 of those 36 questions.
01:53:03
An exercise I do in my class called 10 questions to fall in like instead of love.
01:53:09
So, if I ask someone those 10 questions, they're going to like me. Probably. Yeah, more than if you didn't
01:53:14
ask the questions. Um, what you want to do is you actually go back and forth and ask each other these questions. So, the
01:53:21
first one is, what are you excited about lately? Next is, what is something you're good at but don't like doing? What's something you're bad at but love
01:53:27
to do? Is there something you'd like to learn more about? Is there something you'd like to learn how to do? What can
01:53:32
we celebrate about you? Has someone made you laugh recently? What's something cute your kid, friend, pet, or partner
01:53:37
has been doing? Did you grow up in a city? And have you fallen in love with any new music, books, movies, shows
01:53:43
lately? It's just 10 questions that are of this flavor that many people, but I
01:53:49
suspect lots of men don't ask. That are a great starting point. It's
01:53:55
just the first turn, right? You have to actually listen to what the person says and ask follow-up questions to really
01:54:00
deepen the conversation and move up that topic pyramid. But these are good questions. You could prep just one or
01:54:08
two of them. You could carry two of them in your back pocket all the time as go-to topics for people. So, when this
01:54:15
opportunity arises, you could ask them. I like the one, "What are you excited about lately?" That's my go-to with a
01:54:22
lot of people. Also, like, have you are you obsessed with any shows right now? Is pretty a pretty good one, too. But
01:54:27
the key is not just asking that question, but actually asking follow-up questions about like why do you connect with that show? What do you see in the
01:54:33
main character? Do you see anything from the main character that you see in yourself? you know, you got to get more
01:54:39
you got to get deeper into it. The original research with the 36 questions to fall in love suggests that going
01:54:45
through these 36 questions makes you like each other a lot. Um, and
01:54:50
certainly these 10 questions would help you start. If you need the excuse, I
01:54:55
would love for your listeners to blame me. If you're feeling if they feel nervous to ask questions like this,
01:55:02
especially boys or men, say like, "I saw this crazy lady on Diary of a CEO and
01:55:08
she said I should try asking this question, so I'm going to try." I my even my students at Harvard find that
01:55:13
quite helpful to have a scapegoat to point at me and say, "My professor made me do this."
01:55:20
It doesn't matter who makes you do it, whether it's yourself or someone else. The fact is that you're doing it and
01:55:26
they're going to answer this question and then you can ask a follow-up and it's the beginning of a friendship.
01:55:33
I did that when I was younger to a girl I was interested in. I'd seen that TED talk about the 36 questions, whatever.
01:55:38
And I said to her over text message, I was like, um, I want to play a game with you, something that I've just watched.
01:55:44
Are you are you willing to play it with me? She said, yes. I asked her these 36 questions. And at the end of it, I told
01:55:49
her about the research and whatever in a non-creepy way. You're a real dork. Yeah. But like, but it did it did exactly that. We I it
01:55:56
taught me that vulnerability is the doorway to connection. That's right. It's the doorway to connection. It's what makes
01:56:02
relationships real. Without it, you don't have real friendship, right? It's again, it's consistency of interaction,
01:56:08
positivity. So, you can't be plagued by negativity and fighting and and anger,
01:56:14
but positivity, fun, being relaxed around each other, having positive experiences, but then vulnerability. You
01:56:20
have to learn these things about each other so that you feel known to each other and feel like they're uniquely
01:56:27
sharing stuff with you. What about
01:56:32
persuasion? Have you got any any useful actionable advice for me on how to be a
01:56:39
better salesperson? And when I say salesperson, I don't mean I'm trying to sell someone a car. I mean trying to convince other people of my ideas. So
01:56:45
back I when I do talks in companies often times someone will stand up and say I'm trying to persuade my boss to do
01:56:51
X innovative thing they won't listen to me have you got any tips for me to persuade them but also persuasion is at
01:56:57
all levels right up down left right in organizations and in in the world we are persuaded by people we trust and
01:57:04
like and admire right it's people we interact with and over time we bend to
01:57:09
their view or we are compelled by what they're sharing with us because we know that they are smart and trustworthy and
01:57:14
we like them. Persuasion doesn't often happen within the bounds of one conversation.
01:57:22
It could if you are asking lots of questions and able to sort of sit on the same side of a table together and say,
01:57:28
"Hey, let's learn as much as we can about this complicated tangle of yarn, whatever that topic is. Let's see if we
01:57:34
can pull threads together and figure this out." We were talking earlier about receptiveness to opposing viewpoints.
01:57:40
Ironically, if you push yourself to learn as much as you can about the other person and validate their views however
01:57:49
you act you view those views over the longer term, you are more likely to be
01:57:55
persuasive because they're willing to stay engaged with you and listen to what you have to say in return
01:58:01
because they feel heard and understood. Yeah. And they trust that you're not a jerk and that you're reasonable and that
01:58:06
you're open even to their crazy viewpoints. I have learned that actually in my relationships that if I make the
01:58:13
other person feel heard and understood, they validate. You validate. If I validate, that's a good word. Validate. It's and and validation is not
01:58:20
equivalent to agreement. You can validate, validate, validate, validate, validate, and then go on to vehemently
01:58:26
disagree. Yeah. And probably that disagreement is going to go a lot better after you've
01:58:31
validated them quite a bit. Like the the mistakes I made in maybe past relationships were when I didn't
01:58:36
validate, it was kind of like a broken record. the person continue to make the same point because they didn't feel heard and understood.
01:58:42
That's right. But if I validate, remarkable thing happens where they the kind of record player stops and then you
01:58:47
can make your case. It's like a magic trick. Um there's really beautiful research recently that
01:58:53
um people conflate agreement with listening.
01:58:59
I only think you're listening when you're agreeing with me. And then and when you disagree with me, I feel like
01:59:05
you're not hearing me. you're not listening because obviously what I'm saying is so sensical and so compelling
01:59:11
that if you're disagreeing with it, you're literally not hearing me. Agreement and listening are not the same
01:59:17
thing, but in our minds, we get mixed up about it. Okay. So, I should start every sentence with I agree, even if I don't.
01:59:24
Interesting. I agree. I think you should start with tell me more. It makes sense that you feel this
01:59:30
way and I'd like to understand how you came to hold this viewpoint. I think you should start with validation.
01:59:37
before you do anything else. Yeah. Julian Treasure, what he said to
01:59:42
me was that he did two TED talks, one of them about speaking, one of them about listening. Rough numbers, he said the
01:59:47
one about speaking did 40 million views. The one about listening did like a
01:59:52
fraction of that. Yeah, listening is a is a it's a weird concept to codify and most people don't
01:59:58
realize that it's a very very high level skill. It's interesting as to why they don't
02:00:04
think it's important. I think we think of things active things. That's right. And speaking in
02:00:10
particular, public speaking is very nerve-wracking. It's like an activity that makes people incredibly nervous.
02:00:16
So any little thing that you could toss my way that might reduce even a sliver of that anxiety and make me better at
02:00:23
it, people are so hungry for. It's it's sort of like more obvious. Yeah. Right. It's more salient. It's more
02:00:28
active. Like you're saying, listening is easy. Just say nothing. Literally. Oh, listen. People think that listening is like, "Oh, just sit there."
02:00:34
Yeah. when in fact it's incredibly effortful. It's incredibly hard because our minds are built to wander, right?
02:00:40
Our minds are wandering at least a 25% of the time, probably a lot more than that. And people who are good at it.
02:00:46
When we think of people who are charismatic, likable, smart, savvy, it's
02:00:52
not because of what they're saying, it's because of how they're listening and reacting to what they've heard.
02:00:58
Mike Baker, who's another spy, who was a spy for 20 years, I think, with his CIA in America, said to me that much of the
02:01:04
job of being a spy and persuading and manipulating a target in a foreign land to give over secrets, he said to me that
02:01:11
he would, for example, let's just say it was in Afghanistan. He would land land in Afghanistan. He would find the taxi
02:01:18
driver that was driving the government official who he wanted secrets from. And he said to me, he might spend seven
02:01:23
weeks in that taxi doing nothing but listening to this guy. Yes. Listening to the taxi driver. Yes.
02:01:30
Because he said most people in their life have not had someone listen to them uninterrupted for like 10 minutes. And
02:01:35
when you listen to someone, they will offload about themselves. Especially if you ask follow-up questions.
02:01:41
Exactly. So, and he and he asked like, "So, what are you doing?" And when you're listening, he was just asking them and just, you know, asking a
02:01:46
follow-up question. And they would take me down the path they wanted to take me. And by week seven of the eight weeks, I
02:01:52
would understand what motivates them. That's right. And I' I would have heard in week seven that their son has a knee injury and
02:01:58
they're very worried about their son's health. And then in week eight, when I got in the taxi, I'd make a proposition
02:02:03
to them. I'd say, I know your son has a bad knee. We can take care of him. This is exactly the same thing that I
02:02:09
was saying about entrepreneurs, right? You can you got to have a relationship. Ask questions, questions, questions,
02:02:14
questions, questions before you finally get to the thing where you're like, I have a proposition for you.
02:02:20
Yeah. Right. Two things about listening. First, I'm not surprised to hear that a
02:02:25
taxi driver is a very simple relationship. They're serving one very clear purpose in that person's life.
02:02:32
Interacting with someone like a romantic partner or a work colleague, they what we it's called multiplexity. They're
02:02:37
serving many more roles. Your girlfriend is lover, friend, co-chef, you keep a
02:02:45
home together, you're coordinating domestic domestic tasks. So, she's serving all of these purposes. That's
02:02:51
much more complicated to sort through and there will be conflicts of interest between those roles that she plays in
02:02:56
your life. A way that you would talk to the future mother of your children is quite different than how you would talk
02:03:01
to your chef. And yet, she is both of those things to you, right? So, a taxi
02:03:07
driver is easier to talk to in a way because it's simpler. Okay, that's one thing. The next thing
02:03:12
is about listening as a skill like the spy is saying. I'm not surprised to hear that he's asking follow-up questions.
02:03:19
Often people think of listening as something that happens silently. You're just sitting there absorbing. And that
02:03:25
is part of it. But listening is actually three parts. The first is perception.
02:03:30
I'm seeing you. I'm observing everything that's happening about you during our conversation and everything in your
02:03:35
environment. And then there's auditory cues. I'm hearing your voice. I'm hearing these acoustic things like mhm.
02:03:42
Yeah. Mhm. And the tone of your voice and how quickly you speak. So, we take
02:03:47
in all this stuff. Then we process some of it. We elaborate on some of the
02:03:52
things that you've said and I think more deeply. I can't process all of it because it's a lot of information.
02:03:58
What's so unique about conversation is there's a third step where I can reflect
02:04:03
back to you what I've heard. I can say, "Oh, that's so interesting that you met
02:04:09
this guy who was a spy who rode in the taxi. Can you tell me more about that?" I've now indicated to you that I was
02:04:15
listening, that I'm curious, that I want to know more. So, our instincts are to
02:04:21
think about nonverbal cues like smiling and nodding quietly, leaning forward.
02:04:27
advanced listening. People who really develop the skill of listening actually use their words to show people that
02:04:32
they've heard them by validating, affirming, asking follow-up questions. In a group, you can paraphrase and say
02:04:40
like, "Oh, Stephen, uh, Steven said this, Cassie said this, then he said this." I think together, what we're really talking about is status.
02:04:47
You know, that nodding and the mhm stuff. Is that good or bad? It's useful. That's what we think of as
02:04:53
active listening, which has been studied for decades. It doesn't indicate that someone is hearing you at all. They could be thinking about their grocery
02:04:59
list and smiling and nodding at the same time. It is useful though to convince your partner that you're listening to
02:05:05
them and that matters even if it's not connected to what you're thinking about at all. If you were to not smile and
02:05:12
nod, the omission of it would be jarring. So, in that sense, it's like normative. You have to do it. It's sort
02:05:18
of like listening 101, but listening 2011 301 is using these verbal cues to
02:05:24
show someone you've heard them. You understood the objective when we sat down. I want to become the best talker,
02:05:31
conversationalist, the most persuasive, most liked person on earth. That was the objective that I gave you the brief.
02:05:37
Is there anything that we haven't talked about that we should have talked about? We haven't talked about silence. uh
02:05:44
wrote a chapter about silence that I dropped because I think it's an entirely separate book. It's kind of ironic that
02:05:50
this book is called talk because we do so much communicating between the lines.
02:05:55
There's so much information exchanged in just a shared glance. When people don't know each other well,
02:06:02
long pauses are a sign that the conversation's not going well. So, if you're on a first date and you feel like
02:06:07
the conversation is dying and you're in have that panicky feeling of what do we talk about next? That's legit. You
02:06:13
should not let that happen. You should go in with topics prepped and not let or or this list of lovely questions and ask
02:06:20
those questions. Later in a relationship, after you've known someone a long time, longer pauses are a sign
02:06:26
that you're comfortable with each other that you could sit in total silence and companionable silence and that it's
02:06:32
comfortable and nice. So, it means different things as relationships evolve. There's so much we can do in our
02:06:41
conversations that are not about the words we say to each other too.
02:06:47
There's another chapter I dropped. Do you want to hear about it, Stephen? Of course I want to hear about it. It's about talking in the digital age.
02:06:54
So, this is this is what I was going to ask you about as well is now we have large language models which are writing
02:06:59
lots of AI slop for us. Yes. And if you log into social media, even email, Slack channels, sometimes in
02:07:05
WhatsApp, I look at the messages that that look, I'll take it responsibly as well.
02:07:10
Sometimes that I'm sending, sometimes that I'm receiving and because of AI,
02:07:20
they're getting increasingly less soulful. M
02:07:25
when I scroll certain social media platforms which I shan name um
02:07:32
I feel disconnected from people now. Yes. Because my comments are all like AI slop
02:07:37
stuff with a big M dash and oh my god this is so amazing Stephen and you know that no human writes like
02:07:43
that. Yeah. In a digital age, in an AI world, do we need to start communicating differently
02:07:50
so that people do you know what I've started doing? Intentional spelling mistakes.
02:07:56
I love that. If you go on my LinkedIn, you'll notice that I have totally disregarded grammar.
02:08:02
Okay, let me start by telling you about an exercise that I do in my class. I think it'll be thoughtprovoking for you.
02:08:08
So, your question is about the content of what we type to each other. So textbased communication whether it's on
02:08:15
social media or over text or over email and there are
02:08:21
clear things that we should do to make our textbased communication better mostly make it shorter emails shorter
02:08:28
use headings use bullet points get to the point think about what other people need only give them that okay but I
02:08:35
think more broadly what is quite thoughtprovoking is to think about how your life proceeds these
02:08:41
days your conversational life unfolds. So in my class, I ask my students to do a communication audit of like 20 to 30
02:08:47
minutes in their life where you transcribe every incoming and outgoing message
02:08:53
across all digital and face-toface modalities.
02:08:58
So your DMs, your emails, your texts, your phone calls, your Zoom calls, your
02:09:04
face tof face interactions, all of it. Can you imagine? No.
02:09:10
It's quite hard. Yeah, it's the sort of topline thing you notice is that it's so much it's just a
02:09:19
crazy amount of communication that's happening in our lives now when only
02:09:24
maybe 20 years ago it was like 10% of what it is now. I think we all feel that
02:09:30
sort of overwhelm. Not only is it a lot, it's a we're
02:09:35
constantly sort of toggling and adjusting from one mode of communication to the next. So, I'm like talking to you
02:09:41
while I'm like texting under the table, while I hear my emails going and knowing that my DMs are blowing up.
02:09:48
That mental adjustment is really exhausting. And across each of those modes, we're like engaging in different
02:09:55
ideas and different threads, different topics with different people. And so,
02:10:00
you start to realize how braided and overlapping all of these things are. And
02:10:06
it's quite hard to keep it all straight and to make all of these decisions about like well who does who should I be
02:10:11
responding to. We then default to the people who are right in front of us but any other mode
02:10:19
of communication we're like well who should come first? Who gets my attention first? And attention is love right like who gets my
02:10:26
love essentially. The thing that my students note about
02:10:31
this exercise, which is completely mind-blowing, and I would recommend that anybody try it, is that only face-toface
02:10:38
conversations feel real in retrospect and while they're happening.
02:10:43
Yeah. Now, that doesn't mean that the other ones aren't important. Of course, email is so important for transactional
02:10:49
information exchange, but it's not real. It's not what the human brain was built to do. our brains evolved to do this
02:10:57
face to it's why I prefer doing an interview like this in person than on Zoom
02:11:02
because it's real and we're going to have it's so engaging and we're going to have a real memory of it later. And that
02:11:08
memory might be sort of vague. You'll be like, "Oh, I knew this like, you know, middle-aged white woman with brown hair.
02:11:14
She had a lot of energy." Right? Like that might be the extent of what you remember, but it's it was real and we
02:11:20
can hold that memory. And I think what I find so troubling,
02:11:26
there's a lot I find troubling, but this um our conversational lives have become
02:11:31
very unreal.
02:11:36
And that's why we feel so disconnected and lonely
02:11:43
and that loneliness is just outrageously high. We're not having real interactions
02:11:48
and real relationships. Even even having this device here, by the way, is it is a portal to another
02:11:55
place. So devices replace our conversations because we're
02:12:00
on here instead of engaging. They also disrupt. It's so if it's on a table in
02:12:06
front of you or you hear it buzzing or dinging in the background, it distracts your attention away from having a real
02:12:13
engaged interaction. Do you have any um advice for anybody in a world of AI where it's going to be really easy to
02:12:18
make our communications Yeah. generatively using chat GBT or whatever else?
02:12:25
I I just I just have noticed that what I start what I've started to discount and there's certain um there was there's
02:12:32
certain team members that I have that have really lent into the use of AI for all of their coms and I noticed myself
02:12:39
ignoring them. Yeah. Because when they sent me an email report of something that happened in one
02:12:45
particular scenario, every email report I knew was written by AI. So I didn't think it was worth reading because I
02:12:51
actually want to hear from them. Yeah. I trust them and their opinion. My relationship is to their experience and
02:12:56
their knowledge. And if I when I realized that it was all just AI because of the formatting of it, I start I started ignoring it. That three or four
02:13:02
weeks goes past and I thought, you know, I should tell them. Yeah, they should know. So I went and had a conversation with them. I said, "This is just a perception
02:13:08
thing, but I've noticed myself now not paying the same attention I used to because I want to know what you think
02:13:15
and because it feels like I'm speaking to chatbt." What's their comeback to that? They were really they were really
02:13:20
thankful and they completely changed and it completely immediately even though I now know they're still using it's so
02:13:26
crazy cuz I know they're still using it. They've built this bot basically for this particular part of feedback
02:13:31
which um which they're using. All they've done is changed the prompt into
02:13:37
their bot to make it sound a little bit more human. Yeah. And I'm now reading it again because I can't tell the difference.
02:13:42
Oh my goodness. That's so thoughtprovoking. I think there's two things going on there. One, you are
02:13:47
invested in people. That's what we get invested in. We care about people and relationships. As soon as you feel like
02:13:52
you're not getting them and you're getting some weird proxy of them, are we're less motivated to engage with it.
02:13:58
That's going to be that's totally normal. I'll tell you the context. It was a it's interview feedback. So, they're interviewing someone and then the
02:14:04
feedback they're sending me is was written by AI. Yeah. I trust their experience and their
02:14:10
intuition and their ability just to feel someone. I don't know if I trust Chat GBT to interview my candidates.
02:14:16
Yeah. So, I just wanted to feel like I was getting it from that person. So, there's this relational replacement
02:14:23
thing where you're like and you just want to disengage. There's this other piece that's sort of more meta which is
02:14:28
that LLM sort of push us our communications a reversion to the mean like a like a right to the middle. So it
02:14:35
literally is taking out the personality and weirdness and creativity out of it. Can I tell you I I did an experiment
02:14:42
this semester in my class. I had my students do office hours with an AI version of me.
02:14:48
Okay. Okay. You preferred it. Well, that's a risky experiment. That's
02:14:54
a risky the reason I actually think she is better than me in some ways. I I want to preface this by saying I think chatbots
02:15:01
are most chatbots are deeply problematic. But this one its goal is not to convince users to talk more with
02:15:07
her. It's to sort of coach them on their questions related to conversation so that they can prep and perform better in
02:15:14
their real conversations with humans. Okay. I do think she's better than me in many ways. Most importantly, she's
02:15:21
available. She's available all the time whenever they need her and I'm a nightmare to schedule with. Uh number
02:15:26
two, she's not grading them. So, anytime a student comes to me and has office hours, there's this conflict of interest
02:15:33
where they're worried. They should be I am grading them. Yeah. Like I I do care about them as people
02:15:39
and also I am going to grade them at the end of the semester. That's a weird that makes a relationship quite weird. So,
02:15:45
they don't want to ask dumb questions and I have to question their motives because I'm like, "Are you here because you're actually interested in what
02:15:51
you're asking me or because you're trying to impress me and get a better grade, right?" It's a weird context. So,
02:15:56
she's less judgmental in a way. I guess the other thing that she can do is what you were saying, which is
02:16:03
after they talk with her and get advice about their conversations, she gives them feedback about how the conversation
02:16:10
went. She says, "Here are the topics we covered. Here's how many questions you asked. here were the moments of levity.
02:16:15
Here's how well you were listening and doing kindness. Even if I as a human can think those
02:16:22
things, I do not have the bandwidth or time to craft the feedback to the students to 200 students at once.
02:16:30
So I in short I feel incredibly torn about all things AI. I think there are
02:16:36
use cases like this that are really amazing and intriguing and make things
02:16:42
easier and more efficient. And as a manager policy maker, that's
02:16:47
why it's so troubling because as long as things continue to AI continues to make
02:16:52
individuals lives easier and more convenient, I don't know how we can stop and
02:16:59
regulate regulate it. I think as well that in a world of AI and robots, it's going to be
02:17:07
very tempting to overlook the most human skills. Yes.
02:17:12
And those that don't, those that fight against the ease of allowing a chatbot
02:17:19
to speak for you will develop a superpower, one that's going to be in even more scarce in the future, which is
02:17:25
all the things you've said in this framework. Yeah. like really understanding how to be with a person IRL and have great
02:17:31
conversations I think is going to be such a superpower. It is talk
02:17:36
is the advantage that humans have over AI. It has always been true that
02:17:41
conversation is the skill that we that matters most for achieving everything you want in life.
02:17:48
But it just seems more obvious now that we need to lean into that even more.
02:17:54
The irreplaceably human stuff. Correct. And some of it, I don't even know if
02:17:59
irreplaceable is the right word. It's like the things that no matter what the future holds for us, the things that are
02:18:04
still going to matter. I'll put all my chips on a bet. When I think about what
02:18:09
I need to be teaching my kids, I can imagine worlds where like work is no longer a thing and when innovation is no
02:18:16
longer a thing, but I cannot imagine a world where they're not going to need to connect with other human beings and talk
02:18:23
to them well and joyfully and with respect in real life. In real life. Yeah.
02:18:30
I think uh you were talking about boomers earlier on. I think um boomers are much better conversationalists than
02:18:37
genzers and because they have more reps. They have more repetitions and they grew up in the real world where they were
02:18:43
forced to develop the skills. That's right. It's part of the reason that I think we see a lot of sort of like misunderstanding and judgment
02:18:49
between the generations is that right now the people who are alive have experienced very very different
02:18:55
realities and the skills that you have developed in those different realities are quite
02:19:01
different and it means that we're we actually are more different from each
02:19:06
other across the generations. Um, on on the front of your book talk, it says, "The science of conversation and the art
02:19:12
of being ourselves. Do you think we should show up to work as our authentic selves?"
02:19:20
There's a great phrase, what a great question. Um, there's a great phrase by a scholar named Juliana Pillmer, who's
02:19:26
at NYU, um, called strategic authenticity. Okay.
02:19:32
If you were to bring your full self to work, it would be a nightmare for you
02:19:41
and everyone around you. Tell me about it. At the beginning of my class, I have people do this thing that's like, "Okay,
02:19:47
identify your type, your conversation types." And there's like 13 good types and 13 bad types.
02:19:54
You know, there's like the asker and the curious cat and the chatterbox and whatever. The whole thing is a straw man
02:20:00
because we're all all of those things. We all have habits that are good
02:20:06
sometimes and habits that are bad sometimes. And our behavior shifts
02:20:11
radically from one situation to the next. I'm not going to behave the same way at a bachelorette party in Vegas as
02:20:17
I do when I'm doing bath time with my children. If you did, it would be insane
02:20:22
and it wouldn't serve anybody's goals. What happens in Vegas?
02:20:28
wigs apparently andale dancers. Um um
02:20:34
the point is that our behavior shifts from one conversation to the next even
02:20:40
from one moment to the next in every conversation and it should that's what it means to read the room and read the
02:20:46
context and adjust. My my husband has a saying athletes adjust and it's exactly right good conversationalists adjust. So
02:20:53
if you in your mind are like this is who I am and I'm gonna bring that whole self to every space that I inhabit, it's not
02:21:02
going to go well. Strategic authenticity. Yeah. Bring bring the things that make the values that make you you bring them
02:21:09
to work. It's the things that you care about and are uncompromising about, but
02:21:15
you can adjust your behavior to to fit the needs of the situation. Do you pretend and act?
02:21:21
No. This is a great question. I we like to debate this in my class about um
02:21:27
authenticity, manipulation, what is real, what's sincere. I guess sincerity might be the
02:21:33
right word to use. Let's use question asking as an example. Imagine that we get to a point in in the interview where
02:21:40
you're like, "Oh, I think I need to ask a question right now." You might not be dying to hear the
02:21:45
answer to it, but you know as a good interviewer that you need to ask that question in that moment.
02:21:51
That doesn't mean that you are evil, unkind, insincere, manipulative. It
02:21:58
means that you're trying to live up to the goal of the conversation. And trying to live up to the goal of, hey, we're
02:22:04
going to learn as much as we can from each other. I want to show you respect and interest in your perspective. I want
02:22:09
to have a good conversation. that itself lives up to who you are. Like that's the
02:22:14
whole point of being here. You know what I mean? Yeah. Of course. Yeah. So these fleeting moments of like
02:22:21
insincerity, it I think people overfocus on that as a signal of inauthenticity.
02:22:26
Okay. Fine. If it's tied to an more overarching goal of like I want to be a good human being and a good conversationalist often
02:22:33
because I want to serve the needs of others. So you can be slightly insincere
02:22:40
um in in the pursuit of sincerity. Yes. And those those those moments of
02:22:45
insincerity are gone in an instant as soon as I ask this question that maybe I'm not dying to hear how was your
02:22:52
weekend. Um you're going to give me an answer and I'm sincerely going to search for something in there that I am
02:22:57
interested in and I'm going to ask a follow-up question and make it better. Okay. So when I met you, you did ask me how how I was doing. Was that
02:23:04
I The question I've been dying to ask you is about children. Uh me and my girlfriend are trying at
02:23:10
the moment. So hopefully Stephen, I'm so excited for you. What are you excited about? I just think it's one of the most
02:23:16
miraculous things that you can experience as a human being and I'm hopeful for you. Yeah.
02:23:22
Good luck. Yeah. I hope you get to experience that. I It's a very um it's a very
02:23:29
different experience to add to your resume. I know. And I think that's why I'm excited by it because
02:23:35
it is the great unknown. And in some respects in my head, this might be the wrong framing, but it feels like the great sacrifice.
02:23:41
Yeah, it's both. And you know what I always say, it's like the most selfenter self-interested and uh least
02:23:47
selfinterested thing you can do. Self-interest in the you're like making a copy of yourself. Yeah. Okay. Like
02:23:52
talk about narcissism, but it's just inc. It really life is no longer about you.
02:23:59
That's terrifying to hear. M it is terrifying to hear objectively like I understand what you're saying and I and I agree but it's also as a
02:24:06
statement for anybody to know that they're kind of giving up your current self sense of self
02:24:12
for someone else you've never met well you're giving it up not you're giving giving up might not be the right
02:24:19
phrase you're change you're evolving into a different version of you for them
02:24:24
the more freedom and like resources you have before kids means it's you may experience that as a more as a loss.
02:24:31
No, that's good. Thank you for that. But you also have more to gain. It
02:24:36
really is. It's um really incredible. It's easy to focus on like fertility and having children and to ask probing
02:24:43
prying questions about, you know, how many do you want and whatever, but I I I think it's easy to focus on
02:24:48
like the birth process and and overlook how long childhood is. It's 18 years.
02:24:53
And I think the major project of it is helping kids learn to talk to other
02:25:00
people. And how do you do that? I'm sure there's loads of parents screaming right now like, "How do I h how do I set my kid up
02:25:06
so that they can talk well?" Yeah. Communicate well. I think it's what we're doing every moment of every day. You're interacting
02:25:12
with them directly and sort of role modeling what you think that looks like. Helping them through difficult moments,
02:25:18
helping them both fail and succeed. It's very important. Um, and we're hoping to adapt the talk course for high schoolers
02:25:25
and younger children quite soon. Do I need to get them off YouTube and all that stuff? And yes, and screens.
02:25:32
Yes. Is a little bit of YouTube. Okay. A little bit of anything might be okay.
02:25:38
Digital stuff is hard though because they you give them an inch, they take a mile, and it becomes habitual.
02:25:43
So, what do you do with your kids? It's a constant um evolution and learning and we give them 20 minutes
02:25:51
a day. Yeah. On a computer that doesn't move and nothing moves. They can't carry it
02:25:57
with them. And what age does that change? Uh to be determined. They know that they're not getting a phone like a phone
02:26:06
phone. Um now I'm getting more and more extreme. I feel like maybe never, but um
02:26:11
certainly not until 9th grade. and then social media much later than that. I mean, if I I it's like it's an
02:26:18
interesting we'll see how it goes, but it's a it's it's just such a slippery slope, but it's so bad for them.
02:26:24
Jonathan Heights done a wonderful job. Angela, my friend Angela Duckworth is doing great work. Matt Gensko at Stanford um trying to help schools sort
02:26:32
this out. I have that to look forward to. No
02:26:37
problems. Allison, we have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest. not knowing who
02:26:42
they're leaving it for. And the question left for you is, if your life was a movie and the audience were watching up
02:26:48
to this point, what would they be screaming at the screen telling you to do right now?
02:26:56
What a fabulous question. Thank you, previous guest.
02:27:05
Leave Harvard. Save the children with talk.
02:27:13
devote all of your time and resources to helping every high schooler in the world
02:27:19
learn to do this better. Why? I think it's the ultimate human skill
02:27:26
and everyone has the potential to do it well and it's not a zero- sum game. The
02:27:31
more people who do it well, the better off we'll all be. You said save. Why did you use the word save? I think we're in a period where we
02:27:39
actually are needing to save them from digital addiction and l and loneliness.
02:27:45
We've gotten to a place that we need to roll back and it's really scary.
02:27:51
And I think one first step is let's get the devices out of schools ideally out
02:27:58
of families in their hands but then the next step is like what rises to replace
02:28:03
it and I think it could be this talk curriculum. So, are you going to do that? Mhm.
02:28:08
You're going to leave Harvard TBD. See, is that an announcement? Are they aware? It's an exclusive. Is that the
02:28:15
thumbnail? Allison, thank you so much. Thank you for the work that you do because it's very important work and it's very timely
02:28:21
work considering everything that's going on in the world um at this moment in time. And this book is the definitive
02:28:27
book on the art of you said it yourself. The framework that you've you've built here is one that's deeply based on
02:28:32
science and research. And oftentimes we want to have conversations about communication that's full of platitudes
02:28:38
and opinions and a lot of generic things that aren't supported by scientific rigor. But you've done the research.
02:28:44
You've committed so much of your life to this subject and you've managed to write it all in a way that's truly accessible to people like me who are simply, you
02:28:52
know, muggles and don't understand big words sometimes. So, it's it's a wonderful
02:28:58
entry, but also um a sort of an expansive look into the science of great
02:29:05
talk. We've touched on several things in this book, but there's so much more we could have gone through. So, I'm going to
02:29:10
leave that to the audience. I'm going to link it below for anyone that wants to read it. But also, thank you because I think of these issues as being issues
02:29:16
that are really foundational to the most important things in our lives, like family, like friendships, like relationships, like the success and the
02:29:22
pursuit of our goals. And what you're giving people here is a road map to reach their highest potential.
02:29:28
Yeah. Thank you. Through this thing called talk and that's a really wonderful thing. So if anyone wants this book, it's linked below. Highly recommend. Um is
02:29:35
there anywhere else one should go to get more of your work. Is there a place? Sure. Um Allisonwoodbrooks.com
02:29:40
has this new quiz that's so fun. Find out your conversation type. Get really clear advice, little tips about how to
02:29:48
navigate things and all the science that's underlying those tips. um very very soon. You can go to talkstudios.com
02:29:54
and look up find out more about this curriculum we're developing for high schoolers. I'll link both of them below
02:30:02
Dr. Allison Wood Brooks. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Stephen. Thank you for amplifying my work and I just think
02:30:08
what you're doing here is fabulous. So, thank you. Thank you.
02:30:15
Make sure you keep what I'm about to say to yourself. I'm inviting 10,000 of you to come even deeper into the diary of a
02:30:21
CEO. Welcome to my inner circle. This is a brand new private community that I'm
02:30:26
launching to the world. We have so many incredible things that happen that you are never shown. We have the briefs that
02:30:32
are on my iPad when I'm recording the conversation. We have clips we've never released. We have behindthe-scenes
02:30:37
conversations with the guest and also the episodes that we've never ever released. And so much more. In the
02:30:44
circle, you'll have direct access to me. You can tell us what you want this show to be, who you want us to interview, and
02:30:49
the types of conversations you would love us to have. But remember, for now, we're only inviting the first 10,000
02:30:56
people that join before it closes. So, if you want to join our private closed community, head to the link in the description below or go to
02:31:01
daccircle.com. I will speak to you then.
02:31:16
Oh, hey. Ah.
