A Bit of Optimism - Supercommunicators with journalist Charles Duhigg

Episode Date: February 20, 2024

Great communicators aren't born that way. They're self-made.Charles Duhigg is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist whose new book, Supercommunicators, explores how some people have unlocked the secret language of connection.Charles and I discuss what makes these "supercommunicators" unique, why we need stories to convey ideas, and how being honest once saved a CIA recruiter his job.This...is A Bit of Optimism.To learn more about Charles's work, check out:his book Supercommunicatorscharlesduhigg.com 

Ronald Reagan and Steve Jobs both spread their gospels because they were great communicators. Ronald Reagan's nickname was the Great Communicator. What a lot of people don't know is they didn't start that way. Both of them used to be awful communicators, but they learned how to communicate their ideas. Charles Duhigg, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, journalist, best-selling author of The Power of Habit, has a new book called Supercommunicators in which he dispels the myth that people are born that way. It turns out every single one of us

can learn to be a supercommunicator. This is a bit of optimism. One of the things that I like about you is your books are different. Oh, thanks. You know, it's like sometimes writers, they write, like, here's a book and here's another book that's kind of like the other book, you know? And I like that your books are different. I mean, the whole point of a good book, and I think it's what, what's so nice about your work as well, which is you're not like, I'm the expert. Let me tell you,

you're like, I'm on this journey. Want to come? Yeah. And that's joyous to read. Bringing people on the journey is actually the most important part of teaching them the idea. Yeah. Right. We, I think when people ask me for advice on storytelling, what I usually say is a lot of people focus on the beginning and the end of the story. But the middle is where everything important happens. Yes. And a lot of people just skip over it. One of the reasons I wrote Super Communicators was because in 2016, the New York Times made me a manager. I went from being a reporter to a manager and I was terrible.

Like fantastically bad. And I went into it and I was like, oh my God, I'm gonna be so good at this. Like I've had bosses my whole life and I got an MBA from Harvard. I was like, I'm gonna kill this. And I was terrible. Like, and the thing that made me crazy

was that I was really good at the logistics part. Like I could like plan everything out and do all the diagrams. It was the communication part that I sucked at. Yeah. And so badly that like, I would make other people angry without even understanding why they were angry and like get frustrated. I was terrible at it. And so that, but also being like, oh, actually there's a lot that I'm not good at. Like, I'm not a genius. And that's OK. And going back to that place, being like, I wrote this book because I wanted to get

better communication, because I was a terrible communicator myself. But then also it was at the same time that Trump got elected. Yeah. Right. And I'm looking around and I'm thinking like all these other people just screaming at each other. Yeah. Right.

Not wanting to have a dialogue at all. And one of the things that I thought was like, we've sort of forgotten. There's some lessons here that we've forgotten about how to. Can we learn? Is it learnable? Absolutely. I mean, the evidence is like completely clear on this. Nobody is born as a great communicator.

Nobody's born as a super communicator. There is no personality type that is more likely to be a super communicator. It's literally all just learned skills. It's fun. I've seen old footage of Steve Jobs and old footage of Ronald Reagan, both considered great communicators. And they sucked. They're terrible. They sucked.

It's shocking. By any standard. They sucked. Yeah. Yeah. Bumbling, incoherent, sucked. So what happened there? Like why?

Let's take as a given that like actually our brains have evolved to communicate, right? Communication is human's superpower. That is why we have succeeded as a species. It allows us to form families and societies. So what happened to those two fellas and a bunch of other people is that instead of sucking and being like, oh, gosh, I don't know why that didn't go well. They sat down and they thought hard about how can I make it go better? And there are these very obvious lessons that once you start looking for them are apparent to you. And in the last decade, science has gotten so good.

We're kind of living through this golden age of understanding communication because of advances in neuroimaging and data analytics. So now it's easier for us to describe those ideas. But the truth of the matter is, all of us are prepared to be super communicators. It's just that some people don't think about it. So define super communicator, first of all, let's start there. So the best way to is, if you're having a bad day

and you know that there's one person, if you call them, they're going to make you feel better. Who is that person? My sister. That person for you is a super communicator. And my guess is your sister is actually a super communicator to many people. Yeah. She just knows how to make you feel listened to. She knows what you need.

She knows how to like, she knows how to have a conversation. You're a super communicator, right? You establish a flow with everyone who comes on your podcast. So a super communicator is someone who has thought deeply about how to communicate. And as a result, they have the ability to invite others into the conversation. They have the ability to break through

and make a connection even in the most unlikely of situations. And most importantly, they have the ability and they recognize the importance of achieving what scientists refer to as neural entrainment, right? Where right now in this conversation, if we had enough machines, we would see that our pupils are actually dilating

at the same rate and our heart rates are starting to match each other and our breath rates and the electrical impulses on our skin. And most importantly, if we could see inside our brains. It's a deep mirroring. It's a deep mirroring inside our brains. We would see that our brain waves started to look similar. Our brain activity started to look similar.

That's what communication is. So it's biological connection. Like we have a connection. It's literally biological connection. Wow, that's cool. And if you think about it, that makes sense because the goal of communication is I have an idea or I have a feeling

and I want you to understand it. I want you to experience it. So if our brains become aligned, you're actually experiencing what I'm describing and vice versa. So tell a story of what you consider a great communicator or what they do. So one of the stories from the book is the story about this guy, Jim Lawler, who is a CIA officer and he had just gotten hired as a CIA officer and they sent him over to Europe and they were like, go recruit overseas assets, right? Like go find spies basically and get them to work for the CIA. And he's terrible at it. Like he like, he like, he told me all these stories, like he would go to all these bars and like try and like

chat up attaches and they'd be like, I don't want anything to do with you. There's this one guy, he finally made friends with this one guy from the Chinese embassy. And like, he takes him to lunch like seven or eight times. And eventually he's like, hey, would you consider, you know, telling me some of the gossip you hear and I could pay you for that? And the guy says, you know, actually my family is very wealthy

and they kill people in my country for doing that. Let's not meet again. So he's just terrible at this. It didn't even make a real friend. No, it didn't even make a real friend. So he's at this point when like it's been a year and basically his bosses are like, we think you're going to get fired. Yeah. You're just bad at this.

And this woman comes into town who works for the foreign ministry of her home country back in the Middle East. Yeah. And he never told me which country, but it'll be pretty obvious which one it is. And so he goes and he introduces himself as an oil speculator. He like bumps into her at a restaurant and they develop a relationship and he's taking her out to lunch

and he's trying to recruit her. And eventually he says like, actually, I don't work for an oil company. I work for the CIA. Would you consider helping us out? Because she hated what was going on in her home country. It had just been taken over by Islamic revolutionaries and religious revolutionaries. She was a woman.

In approximately 1979. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. You're guessing which country that is. And she's opposed to the regime. And he's like, we're, we believe in the same thing. Why will you help us out? And she just, she starts crying and she freaks out.

She's like, no, I'm absolutely not going to do this. I'm going to get killed for even knowing you. So he goes to his bosses and he'd already told them that he's trying to recruit her. And they're like, no, we told Washington, D.C. You did this. We told Washington, D.C. You had your first spy. If you don't deliver her, you're going to get fired.

And so Jim, Jim is like, I'm screwed. Like he doesn't know what to do. And so he basically asked this woman, Fatima, to have one more meal with him. And he goes in and he has all these ideas of how to. And like he gets to the meal and he's like, this is just not going to work. Like I cannot convince this person to take a suicidal risk. Right. So she's kind of down because she's about to go back to her home country and she's kind of disappointed in herself.

And Jim's trying to like cheer her up and make her feel better and then after a while like it's just not working and she's not really like they're not connecting and when dessert comes he like he's like i'm gonna be totally honest with you like i'm about to get fired and the reason i'm about to get fired is i am really bad at this job. Like everyone else in my class, they had this like confidence or this something that I don't have. And I'm not even gonna try and get you to work for me. I just, you've been honest with me.

I wanna be honest with you. Like, I feel terrible about myself. Like you just keep on saying you're disappointed in yourself. I understand that, because I am so disappointed in myself. I've wanted this job my whole life and I've screwed it up. And she listens to him and she starts crying and he reaches over and he's like, I'm sorry,

I did not mean to make you cry. And she goes, no, no, I think I can do this. And he's like, and he was so freaked out. He was like, he actually said, wait, no, no, you don't have to do anything. I don't want you to like, like he's so freaked out. He was like, he actually said, wait, no, no, you don't have to do anything. I don't want you to like, like he's so panicked. And she goes, no, no, I think you're, I think what you said before that we both want the same thing. I think you're right.

I, I can help you. And she goes to a safe house the next day. She gets all this training and like covert communications for the next 20 years. She's the best source in the Middle East. And when I asked Jim why, and Jim became one of the best recruiters in the CIA, he ended up training other officers how to do this. When I asked him like, what's the secret you teach people? What he said was, you have to match people where they're at.

Fatima was upset and I was trying to cheer her up. Or Fatima was scared and I was trying to convince her she shouldn't be scared. Once I just gave up and said like, look, you're disappointed in yourself and I'm trying to convince her she shouldn't be scared. Yeah. Once I just gave up and said, like, look, you're disappointed in yourself and I'm disappointed in myself, like that's when she could hear me for the first time. Yeah. And within within the literature, this is known as the matching principle, right? There's these different kinds of conversations

and that you have to match the kind of conversation that's happening in order to connect. But a lot of it comes down to listening to those instincts that we evolved over millions of years that are sometimes hard to listen to in contemporary society. But you know that if somebody is feeling something, that if you feel it with them, you feel more connected. But he was honest, right?

Yes, that's a huge part of it. It has to be authentic. And that's part of the problem, which is, can you fake these things? Can super communicators fake these things? Once or twice, perhaps. But what's amazing is, and again, research has shown this, our ability to detect inauthenticity is like laser sharp. There was actually, one of my favorite amazing is, and again, research has shown this, our ability to detect inauthenticity

is like laser sharp. There was actually one of my favorite experiments is these researchers took a bunch of people, friends laughing together and strangers trying to pretend like they're laughing together. And they would play people a half second of the laughter and ask them which is which. And people could detect it 92%. Wow. We just know. Our survival depends on it, right?

Our survival, absolutely. Our ability to form friendship and community means that I can trust you to watch for danger while I'm asleep. That's exactly right. And if, by the way, you betray me, I will be so much more angry than if you simply did the same thing, but for benign reasons. It's an evolution. It's grown up as a pro-social instinct. Are you a better communicator now that you've written the book? Oh my gosh, so much better. Tell me something. Tell me how you showed up in different circumstances that you show up differently now. Okay, so two ways. The first

way is I ask just a lot more questions and I ask what are known as deep questions. And so a deep question is something that asks someone about their values or their beliefs or their experiences. And they usually start with why. So it's, um, and they can be very easy. It can be like, Oh, you're a lawyer. Like, did you always want to be a lawyer? Like, why'd you go to law school? At what point did you decide that like the law was the thing for you? Yeah. Those are easy questions to ask, but they're all deep questions because they're asking someone about their values or their experiences. And so that's the first thing I do is that I try and ask more deep questions and I try and just listen more closely. But then the second thing is there's this big insight that we think of a discussion as being about one thing, but actually every discussion is made up of multiple conversations.

And most of them fall into one of three buckets. There's these practical conversations, right? We're making a decision. We're fixing a problem. There's emotional conversations where the goal is not to fix someone's problem. It's simply to share. Hold space. Yeah, hold space.

And then there's social conversations, which is about how do we relate to other people? How do we think society sees us? And then there's social conversations, which is about how do we relate to other people? How do we think society sees us? And so I used to come home and I would have a bad day at work and I would be complaining to my wife and she would respond with practical advice. She'd say, like, look, why don't you take your boss out to lunch and get to know him a little bit better? And instead of hearing her, I would get even more upset. But now I know it's because she was having a practical conversation and I was having an emotional conversation.

We couldn't connect with each other. So now one of the first things I do is I try and figure out what kind of conversation are we having? Like how do I match this other person? How do I invite them to match me? And sometimes it's as simple as just saying like my wife says this all the time. Like do you want me to fix your problem or just listen to your problem? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love the idea of labeling the conversation. I've had it happen where I was in a bad place

and I called somebody for advice and they started fixing. And I said to them, I appreciate your intention of trying to fix it. I need you to not fix it. I need you to just listen to me. So I was able to give instruction to match me at the time. And they probably appreciated that, right? They did, yeah.

And they said, sorry. And I've caught myself too, like in the middle of trying to fix something, these problems. Do you need me to offer you solutions now? I love this idea of labeling. And it's like, everybody can remember three things. They're easy, social, we're having fun, emotional, how you feeling, practical, do you want to fix something or do you want to talk about something intellectual? That's exactly right. And they're easy to understand. They're easy to remember. And I love the idea that it's not some deep internal skill.

You just have to make known the thing that's happening so that we can be on the same wavelength and have that mirroring. That's exactly right. And I think that that's what Steve Jobs and Ronald Reagan and other people do is they walk away from a bad conversation. And instead of being like, that was a bad conversation. Yeah. They think to themselves, what did I miss?

Like, what should I look for next time? Yeah. And if you start paying attention, what you notice is like you're talking to a to a friend or a colleague and they'll say something in a practical conversation. Right. We're at work. They'll say something emotional and it's really easy to gloss over. Yeah. They'll say like, my son just graduated. I'm so proud. Yeah. Or I sorry, I didn't reply to your email yesterday. It was like I had something going on. reply to your email yesterday. It was like, I had something going on and our instinct is to stay on that practical track. Right. Like, but if you say like, ah, that's amazing. Tell me about your son or what's, what was going on yesterday. Is it, is it anything that like, it's helpful to talk through that person? All of a sudden we are, we are matching them and they're more willing to listen to us. And more importantly, importantly when we say let's talk through this issue and then let's get back to the budget planning they're going to go there with you

i i love that idea also which is it's okay to go off script yeah in fact it's in fact you have to go script or the script hardly even exists it's a it's a it's a falsity that we think that there's a script yeah yeah we need to hold ourselves to yeah that's that's so good. It's so good. What is your hope for the book? I know it's a big question. My hope is that is twofold. I'm hoping that people read this book and that they get something as powerful from it

that improves their own life, that they can use it. And then secondarily, this is very grand aspiration, but I hope that I'm part of encouraging a bigger discussion about how we can as a nation and as humans have conversations with people who are different from us where we where we do connect. Yeah. Right. Those are the most if you think about like the origin of America, America was born in conversation.

The constitutional convention were people who hated each other. Yeah. Having a conversation until they had a constitution. Yeah. And around the world, our best moments are moments when we have a hard conversation with someone whom it is hard to have that conversation with. You can't make peace with your friends. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

So I'm just, I'm curious because you had many jobs before you became a writer. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I did. So what did you study? So you grew up in New Mexico. What did you, like, you went to school where? So I grew up in New Mexico and I went to Yale.

And there I started studying intellectual history. And I just completely fell in love with it. Like I felt. Intellectual history. Intellectual history. And I just completely fell in love with it. Like I felt- Intellectual history. Intellectual history. So it's about the history of ideas and trying to trace how does an idea spread from one group to another group? How does an idea take purchase in society? What happens when that idea takes purchase? Right? So- That's so fascinating.

I love it. Give me an example. So one of the big ideas throughout intellectual history is antisemitism. This question like, why does antisemitism exist? Why does it rally so many people? It's obviously like such a toxic, toxic idea. And it's always rooted in stories. The way that anti-Semitism is passed is through stories, through the story of the blood libel,

through the story of the banking conspiracy theories. I think that ideas don't exist outside of the stories that we tell each other because that's how we explain them. And I think for both of us as writers, one of the things that, I mean, the reason I started writing books instead of just magazine articles and newspaper articles is because I realized I was getting exposed to all this fascinating research and ideas through scientific studies. And literally I would read them and I would be like, that's so interesting. And half an hour later, I couldn't even describe it to my wife.

Like it would just like kind of escape from my brain. And so the thing I realized, and I think you do this really well too, is if I can take an idea and I can embed it in a story, then everyone can carry it around in their back pocket. That makes it easy to remember. Yeah, they tell the story is not the idea. That's exactly right. Do we believe in a concept unto itself without a story?

I don't think so. And I don't think so. And that's one of the things that in intellectual history you learn, is that the way- The story is the king. The story is the key. And this is kind of something that motivates my writing. I think that there are these vast structures that we are often blind to. And those structures influence our lives so much. And the more that we can illuminate them,

whether they be habits, whether they be business, right? And when you illuminate those, you give people more options. Because for the first time, they can say, oh, that's not a given. Like, I get to choose what makes sense to me. Can you tell me a story of something you wrote, an article, a project you worked on in your professional career? It doesn't matter whether it was commercially successful or not. But that you absolutely loved this project. You absolutely loved this thing. And if every project you ever worked on was like this one thing, you'd be the happiest person alive. Yeah.

So there's – I wrote this piece for The New Yorker about two years ago about SPACs. Do you remember? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was about this guy Chamath Palihapitiya. Well done. Yeah. Thanks. I think I got a little bit wrong. I loved this piece. I loved writing this piece. I loved writing about Chamath. I loved like it was just so colorful and fun. And I love finance. Yeah. Nobody read it. It was like one of these things where like it was like, oh, the New York audience is not into finance the same way I'm love finance. Yeah. Nobody read it. Like it was like

one of these things where like it was like, oh, the New York audience is not into finance the same way I'm into finance or not into this guy who's like bombastic and weird the way that I am.

But I was just so gloriously happy to have written. I was like, it was just fun. Like this guy, like he like drops F-bombs all the time. He like tries to piss off

other people because he thinks it helps him sell things. Like he says ridiculous things. He left his wife when she had cancer in order to go marry someone younger. Like it's just this story where you're like, this is ridiculous. I cannot believe that this guy exists. It was just so much fun to write. But you've written fun things before. Yeah. So what is it about this one that sort of...

I don't know. You answered this question very quickly. Honestly, I think it's because it wasn't popular. Like it just, it felt like for the first time, it's something I can point to that I'm like, I wrote that for me. And the thing is when you're a professional writer and you know this, is that you become a professional writer because you love writing. It's easy to fall out of love with writing. Yeah.

It's hard and like you get into this place where it doesn't feel – it doesn't feel the way it used to feel, right? It doesn't feel special anymore. And I had felt that way for a long time. And then I wrote this piece and I was like, oh yeah, this is what, this is what I liked. Like I, I liked, I like writing things that surprise me by what ends up coming out of my fingers. And it felt like that. And actually what's interesting is literally the next thing I did is write the proposal for super communicators. Like I was like, I was like, I was like, okay, now I think I'm at a place where I can write. Put you in a great state of mind. I remember what it's like to love writing. Yeah. Tell me an early specific happy childhood memory, something specific that I can relive with you. That's a

really good question. Well, okay. I'll tell you two, one that's happy and one that's not. Um, when I was a kid, I once made this newsletter about how I wanted to be a babysitter. So I put together, I spent like three days on this newsletter advertising myself. And it was funny and it was wry and it had like terrible twos. And I thought it was hilarious. My parents thought it was hilarious. And they were like, if you put this up, nobody's going to hire you as a babysitter. Like this is not what they're looking for.

But that's one of the first times that I found that writing just felt so good. Then when I was in high school, I became a debater. And I was so focused on winning. I would actually wake up and I would look in the mirror. This is a crazy thing. I would look in the mirror and I would say, you are crap if you do not win this weekend. As a result, when I got to college, I really didn't know how to be a good friend to people. Like I was so competitive.

result, when I got to college, I really didn't know how to be a good friend to people. Like I was so competitive. But when I look back on that, I feel so lucky to have had that experience to, it was like Steve Jobs being a terrible communicator that like, it's when we fall down that we actually learn how to do something really well. And so those are two things that, that stand out. Was there a specific incident of you, when you say, you looked in the mirror and said, if you don't win, you suck. Like, was that a, was that you thinking of a particular time? Literally every morning.

Oh, wow. This is a routine that I would go through. It was like a ritual every single morning. My entire identity. I mean, I was like a chubby kid. I was awkward. I like, I was in New Mexico

as kind of like an outsider perpetually. And the thing about debate is you go into a room and one person is a winner and one person is a loser. And like my whole identity was wrapped up in it. And it felt so pure and good. But the only way that I could think to make myself better at it was like to make it everything. So like telling myself in the mirror every single morning, I would do it before I brush my teeth. I would look in the mirror and I'd say,

if you do not win this weekend, you are crap. It made me feel both bad and good. It made me feel like I was pushing myself as hard as I could push myself. But then when I would lose tournaments or lose rounds, I felt terrible. And to this day, I cannot remember a single round that I won. And I can tell you every single debate round that I lost. Like I remember all of them.

Do you know what's so interesting about those stories, which is when you make it about something external, when you make it about the winning, you are not at your best. Yeah. Right. And when you wrote the babysitter newsletter, it was for fun. Yeah. And when you glow about the story of the CIA recruiter, you relate to him in such a way, which is when he made it about winning, he couldn't do it. But when he finally just let go and was himself and when you i mean it sounds corny but when you practice what you preach when you just are yourself and in life for the fun of it and you're curious writer self who sees the world as this magical playground and you're not writing for anyone everything works i absolutely but, but the question I have, and maybe you have an answer to

this is how do we remind ourselves of that when it's hard to remember, right? Do you know George Saunders, the story writer? He's a wonderful person and a wonderful writer. And he said that basically like the question he asks himself all the time is he's, he knows how good it feels to be kind. He knows how much he likes himself when he is a kind person. So why the hell are there these moments when he's unkind? Yeah. And I feel the same way. Like, how do we remind ourselves to listen to that internal voice that tells us this is what you love?

This is what how do we how do we ignore? So there's multiple answers. This is what, how do we, how do we ignore? So there's multiple answers. And I think you need multiple answers because they don't, they're not all easy to do at the same time. And so you have multiple solutions. I mean, one is to start with why, which is to have a true north. And then you get to have this filter going, am I doing that? So like my why is to inspire people to do the things that inspire them.

So literally, is this doing that? And I catch myself, like, I'm tired, I'm grumpy, I'm in a Starbucks, I'm not friendly. And I say to myself, I literally will catch myself and say, are you inspiring the barista? No. Okay, well, change. You're like, you have to do this all the time. You know, like that's that is who you are. Right. And it is the thing that brings you joy. So do it, you idiot. You know, and I'll catch myself and I have little reminders. So like I wear the color orange somewhere on my person almost always. And that is not there for decoration. That is there because it stands out. It's so damn bright.

And the color orange is this color of optimism. It just reminds me, like maintain this disposition. Show up to inspire. And I think your disposition is really to encourage people to be themselves. I think that's right. And I think your best work

and when you are your best self is when you just sort of smile and say, I guess I'm human and just enjoy that. I think that's absolutely true. I think that's a very, and there is this thing about, I find that I am happiest when I'm humblest, oftentimes because something is humble. Exactly. Not by choice. It's not that like, I'm just a humble human being. It's like, I just screwed something up really bad. I used to joke. I'm the most humble person I know. I could talk to you forever. Thanks so much for coming on. I really your work helps us be more human. Oh, thank you. And I really hope everybody reads your book because I think we all need to be a little more human today. I really hope everybody reads your book because I think we all need to be a little more human today.

As long as I think there are a large number of people who are committed to asking hard questions, I think we're okay. Thanks so much. Thanks for having me. If you enjoyed this podcast and would like to hear more, please subscribe wherever you like to listen to podcasts. And if you'd like even more optimism, check out my website, simonsenik.com, for classes, videos, and more. Until then, take care of yourself, take care of each other. A Bit of Optimism is a production of The Optimism Company. It's produced and edited by Lindsay Garbenius, David Jha, and Devin Johnson. Our executive producers are Henrietta Conrad and Greg Rudershan.