Offline with Jon Favreau - Offline PC Small Group

Episode Date: March 27, 2025

They weren’t war plans, they were BATTLE plans—that’s the White House's new, extremely believable spin on why J.D. Vance, Pete Hegseth and countless other Trump officials were using a Signal chat to coordinate a military strike. Jon and Max relish the idiocy of what’s now become the most famous group chat in the world, and then dive into Snapchat’s latest feature that’s making teens even more glued to their screens. Then, the guys run through DoorDash’s new partnership with micro loan company Klarna, and why it’s shocking Apple allowed the Severance finale to air. Plus! Max sits down with journalist Charles Duhigg, author of Supercommunicators and host of a spinoff podcast, to talk about why connecting with people you disagree with builds stronger coalitions, and why values unify voters better than ideas. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast. 

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That's an additional 15% off at fast growing trees comm using the code offline at checkout fast growing trees comm code Offline now is the perfect time to plant. Use OFFLINE to save today. Offer is valid for a limited time. Terms and conditions may apply. For Homo sapiens, communication is our superpower, right? It is the thing that has set us above every other species. And even more importantly,

if you look at our nation's history, the world's history, it's these moments when we manage to communicate with people, particularly people we disagree with, that we really accomplish something important. If you think about the Constitutional Convention, it's basically four or five dozen guys who hate each other getting together and arguing for months

and then writing a constitution together. These moments of communication are when we are not only on our best, but usually when we are happiest. [♪ MUSIC PLAYING FADES OUT, MUSIC PLAYING FADES IN, MUSIC PLAYING FADES OUT, MUSIC PLAYING FADES IN, MUSIC PLAYING FADES IN, MUSIC PLAYING FADES IN, MUSIC PLAYING FADES IN, MUSIC PLAYING FADES IN, MUSIC PLAYING FADES IN, MUSIC PLAYING FADES IN, MUSIC PLAYING FADES IN, MUSIC PLAYING FADES IN, MUSIC PLAYING FADES IN, MUSIC PLAYING FADES IN, MUSIC PLAYING FADES IN, MUSIC PLAYING FADES IN, MUSIC PLAYING FADES IN, MUSIC PLAYING FADES IN, MUSIC PLAYING FADES IN, MUSIC PLAYING FADES IN, MUSIC PLAYING FADES IN, MUSIC PLAYING FADES IN, MUSIC PLAYING FADES IN, MUSIC PLAYING FADES IN, MUSIC PLAYING FADES IN, MUSIC PLAYING FADES IN, MUSIC PLAYING FADES IN, MUSIC PLAYING FADES IN, MUSIC PLAYING FADES IN, MUSIC PLAYING FADES IN, MUSIC PLAYING FADES IN, MUSIC PLAYING FADES IN, MUSIC PLAYING FADES IN, MUSIC PLAYING FADES IN, MUSIC PLAYING FADES IN, MUSIC PLAYING FADES IN, MUSIC PLAYING FADES IN, MUSIC PLAYING FADES IN, MUSIC PLAYING FADES IN, MUSIC PLAYING FADES IN, MUSIC PLAYING FADES IN, MUSIC PLAYING FADES IN, MUSIC PLAYING FADES IN, MUSIC PLAYING FADES IN, MUSIC PLAYING FADES IN, MUSIC PLAYING FADES IN, MUSIC PLAYING FADES IN, MUSIC PLAYING FADES IN, MUSIC PLAYING FADES IN, MUSIC PLAYING FADES IN, MUSIC PLAYING FADES IN, MUSIC PLAYING FADES IN, MUSIC PLAYING FADES IN, MUSIC PLAYING FADES IN, MUSIC PLAYING FADES IN, MUSIC PLAYING FADES IN, MUSIC PLAYING FADES IN, MUSIC PLAYING FADES IN, MUSIC PLAYING FADES IN, MUSIC PLAYING FADES We spent a lot of time on the show talking about the way our devices and social media change the way we communicate. We realized this week we rarely talk about what effective, fulfilling communication looks like before it's been warped by our Silicon Valley overlords. So we thought why not talk to a journalist that has quite literally written the book on how to communicate. Max, you spoke with Charles yesterday. Can you tell us a little bit about it?

I was just fascinated to hear about the science of conversation, what makes it work or not work, what makes it feel meaningful or not meaningful, some of which surprised me, what it does for us. And also just to talk to Charles about what meaningful conversation means for our society and politics and the way that our ability to have meaningful conversations is maybe changing in ways that is kind of trickling up into a lot of the bigger stuff that we talk about. And what do you know, a guy who writes a book about conversations, pretty good conversationalist.

Cool, I'm excited to listen to it. All right, so we'll get to that interview in a moment, but first, speaking of meaningful conversations. Meaningful conversation, PC Small Group. Max, they weren't war plans, They were battle plans. I feel better That's the new extremely believable spin from the White House now that the Atlantic's Jeff Goldberg has published all the contents of the Huthys PC small group signal chat He was inadvertently added to by Trump National Security Adviser Mike Waltz a chat that included this message from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth

1415 that's the time, strike drones on target, and then parentheses all caps, this is when the first bombs will definitely drop. This comes a day after Hegseth said that no classified information was shared on the chat, an assertion that was also made under oath to Congress by CIA Director John Ratcliffe and D&I Tulsi Gabbard who were both also part of what has now become the most famous group chat in the world I know which is something we all aim for so you kind of have to tip your hat to them

We all want our group chat to become the center of the world How many of your group chats have been renamed? Huthy Huthy PC small group because I'm at two for me I every conversation I start with more than two people now I make some joke about how it's PC small group and you know what it fucking nails every time It's gonna it's gonna last it's gonna kill for the real question is who's gonna go as a Halloween costume PC small group Whoever figures the most annoying people in DC

Halloween costume PC small group. Whoever figures that out. The most annoying people in DC. Well, unfortunately, as a former host. Because it is March, it is March. And if we get to October and someone goes, is this a PC small group? I don't know, I don't know. The humor has been fantastic, by the way,

just from an offline perspective here. Which I think is part of why, and I know we're gonna talk about this, part of why it has broken through in such a big way. So right after the message that specifies the exact times the bombs will drop, Hegseth writes, quote, "'We are currently clean on OPSEC.'"

OPSEC is short for operational security, which basically means that information is safe and planning has been kept secret. That's the word for it in the government, right? Do we have good OPSEC? Are we keeping everything secret and all that? Hilarious. What do you make of the OPSEC of using Signal as a place

for the most senior White House officials to discuss battle not war plans? So I think in addition to it being very funny that he says we are clean and operational security and the least operationally security cleared conversation to maybe ever happen. I think it actually kind of says it all because he's of course referring to the operational security of everybody else of all of the actual thousands of professionals out on the field because everyone who is in that group chat, it just hasn't even occurred to them that

actually they are the weak link in operational security because the rules might also apply to them or consequences might apply to them. It just has not occurred to them because they think they just float in this space without rules or consequences. And I mean, look, everybody's asking me like, is Signal secure? Is it really safe? Is it not safe? Can it be hacked?

And it like, yeah, anything that is on your phone is hackable because even if like Signal will say like, look, the conversation's end to end encrypted, but somebody can get inside your physical phone. It doesn't matter if the app is encrypted because they can get what's going on in the app. Which by the way, you know, Pegasus, that program, that, you know, they have hacked into people's phones and there's, they call it like Zero Touch.

And this has happened to people. It hasn't, we don't know that it's happened to anyone within the United States, while they call it like zero touch. And this has happened to people. We don't know that it's happened to anyone within the United States while they're in the United States, but certainly people in foreign countries, dissidents in foreign countries, journalists, what happens is you don't even know that someone's inside your phone.

And some state actors, foreign actors have capabilities where they can insert the spyware into your phone without you even knowing. So that could certainly have happened, especially since some of the people in question were outside the United States when this conversation was taking place. On their phones. And I think the entire conversation about are these apps secure, are these phones secure, kind of misses the point, which is that any piece of software or hardware is only as secure as its users' behavior.

Like, Signal doesn't need to get hacked. Your phone doesn't need to get hacked. If the people using the phone are so fucking stupid, they're adding random people to the group chat. Like, there's no, like, oh, can Signal be hacked? They added Jeffrey Goldberg to the chat. It doesn't matter if it's secure or not. There's no security solve for being stupid and irresponsible, which is what this was. I'm sure some of you might have heard, I'm sure Tommy and Ben covered this on Pod Save the World, but just so people know, in government, you have your personal phone and then you're issued a government phone. And so your personal phone is just supposed to be for non-government

business. Now they can have like an email app they eventually gave us in the White House that you can put on your personal phone towards the end that is secure. So wasn't there like a whole years long thing with Obama's BlackBerry? There was yeah they're right. So like they try to they try to give you a secure phone. So that's number one. But if you're talking classified information then you have to, there's like a desktop computer known as a high side email system, high side computer, that people who often talk about classified information or send classified information have to go to

the physical space. Now that is cumbersome, especially if you're traveling and stuff like that, though they, you know, if you're the national security advisor, the secretary of state, they have bring people with you and're the national security advisor, the secretary of state, they bring people with you and bring high side systems all over the world with you. So there's a lot that goes into that. The idea that even if it wasn't your personal phone, you'd be like sending classified information over your government phone and not on the high side.

Well, I think we actually, I was a big issue in the 2016 election. I remember that, yeah. People had some thoughts about that. So it was a big issue there. So it's I remember that, yeah. People had some thoughts about that. Email security is the paramount issue. Actually, maybe, apparently, there was something to that. And I'll just say, I mean, Mike Waltz, huge idiot, adding Jeff Goldberg, right?

But if you really look at the whole chat now that we see the whole thing, the signal group started by being like, hey, everyone on this signal group tell us who your point person is from your department to be in this PC small group, right? And that in itself is not classified, right? And so all the people were like, yeah, Mark Ruby is like this person, this person.

So they were into it. It wasn't until Pete Hegseth is like, oh, by the way, here are the plans. Here's what we're doing. And then like, he's actually, I think, even more at fault than Mike Waltz because he was the one that started unleashing classified information on the fucking crew chat.

Although it is notable that not one person in that chat was like, hey, should we take this to the high side? You're right, you're right. Just like everybody was just plowing ahead. And I do think it speaks to, look, the rules, the procedures, like the details of it almost doesn't matter. The point here is that they didn't try or care to follow it

because the consequences burden in their minds is on everybody else, which tells you a lot about how they govern. Well, and this brings me like, let's talk about the coverup. Yes. Or the excuse or the rationalization, whatever you wanna call it.

I wasn't even calling it a coverup. Cause I think that is, that is as it always is worse than the original crime. What do you make of the way the Trump administration is responding to this? I mean, I think you're right that I think that that is the thing that is driving so much attention to it because it's the, you know, the flip flops, the obvious transparent lies. Like all of these officials sound like they're teenagers trying to explain to their parents

why they found like a joint in their car. They're just these like wildly on their face and plausible excuses and this finger point, it's all just reaffirming what made this story so captivating in the first place, which is just the incompetence. Just the like flagrant appalling, but also sort of funny that it just like realizing like,

oh, national security is being run by a bunch of fucking Mr. Magoos. Yeah, it's very veep. It's very veep, yes, right. The fact that they're all bumbling and then they're bumbling the cover up and they're all kind of pointing fingers at each other. I did really enjoy that Trump at one point said that the probe to investigate

what happened here would be led by National Security Pfizer, Mike Waltz, the very same person who added Goldberg to the chat in the first place. It's like, we're going to, yeah, we're going to name one of the office dogs here at Crooked, the head of the task force to investigate who took a shit in the studio. Let's be honest, it's, it's, it's pundit. It's pundit. That's right. So we're naming pundit the head of the task force. Yeah, the head of the task force. But there's all this,

I do think there's something a little more sinister here, which is everyone's like, oh, the lies are terrible. Like, yeah, the lies aren't good because they don't care. Right? Like they don't care if we think they're lying because they don't fear accountability anymore. You can make an argument that they never really did, but certainly now they control Congress We care if we think they're lying because they don't fear accountability anymore. You can make an argument that they never really did, but certainly now they control Congress

and they know that the Republicans are all compliant. They're ignoring the courts as we speak. They have successfully bullied corporate media and law firms. They recognize that at least 40% of the electorate are going to be with them no matter what the fuck they do. And a good chunk of the rest isn't really paying attention. So that gets to something that I have to be honest, I have been really surprised and a little confused by,

which is how big this story has become and the extent to which it has broken through. Like you are gonna have to explain to me why this is the thing, because like, look, it's not ideal to have your like senior most white house himbows blasting out war plans on their fucking gaming discord. Like I agree, that's not good. But I mean, to me, this is like barely top 50 and the worst things that they've done.

Yes. And it like, I'm not losing sleep over the Signal group chat, but I have lost sleep over the fact that they're disappearing college kids for their political opinions and they're blowing up the US economy. But it's like, what am I not understanding about Americans that this is the thing that has gotten so huge?

So first I think we have to separate what has grabbed people's attention with what has like gotten people really concerned or that they're losing sleep over. So I think there's a difference between those. So I think that this is a story that is getting huge amounts of attention. Whether this is gonna be the thing that convinces people

that these are fucking fascist morons is another question. I guess that's true. Maybe they're just following because it's a good yarn. It's a good yarn. It's a good yarn. Yeah, there's something to that. People love a leaked text message scandal. That's true. They just love that.

I guess we all can feel drawn to the drama of that. If it were a bunch of celebrities that were in a group chat that were talking shit, that would be a big story, right? Not as big as this one. This one is involving the private techs of the most powerful people in the world, discussing dropping bombs.

So then you're like, that's gonna get people, if that's not gonna get people's interest, I don't know what is. That's true. There is something to, you are gonna get to see how these people actually talk to each other behind closed doors. And maybe that's the thing that initially pulls people in

and then the thing that keeps them there is the way that they talk to each other behind closed doors and maybe that's the thing that initially pulls people in and then the thing that keeps them there is the way that they talk to each other behind closed doors is like idiots. Yes. And they like, I really think this is not just me applying partisan brain here, although I'm sure it's influencing this, but I really think that you read these text messages and even if you're not offended by the way that they talk about foreign policy, you're not offended by the way that they talk about, you know, our European allies, all of this, the way they're running foreign policy as a protection racket.

They just look stupid. Yeah. And they just like... The emojis. The emojis, the like little kind of passive aggressive back and forth, everyone's falling all over each other to say like who Trump agrees with the most. It's like kind of pathetic.

And then to hear them all lying about it, like I do, I can see how this would change how they look in your eyes. And I do think there's maybe also something to the fact that it's not just that it's a good yarn, it's also one of the first big Trump stories that is not like really depressing to think about. Yes, I also think that, you know,

we would say that there's so much malice and frightening behavior coming out of the Trump administration, right? What they would say, and what I think people who support them would say is like, Trump's an asshole, but he's gonna get shit done. He's gonna get the best people around. Yeah, he's gonna get people there,

and he's gonna piss some people off, but he's gonna get stuff done. When you, the sheen of incompetence now is a tough thing to shake. He's going to get people there and he's going to piss some people off, but he's going to get stuff done. The sheen of incompetence now is a tough thing to shake. Because when you said that like, give us all the control of everything and we're going to get it done because democracy is a little messy, and then they fuck something up like this, then that's a vulnerability. I agree.

And I think there's something particular about how Americans and voters think about foreign policy too, where it's like, most people do not care about the specific details. Like, I think at some point it's referenced in the group chat, like, nobody cares who the Houthis are. And there's truth to that, honestly. Someone who's written about that, tried to get people to care about it, yeah, it's hard. But I think something that we learned from the backlash to the way that Biden did the Afghanistan withdrawal, which like, I will be honest, I was a little salty about at the time because like, yes, that could have been run operationally

a lot better. But I thought the scale of the backlash, given that it was the right thing to do ultimately was a little bit overstated that people do on some level feel like as a baseline, they just want competent governance of foreign policy because that feels very important. And that feels like something where you kind of expect them to just do it really well, like we're America, where the superpower is supposed to be really good at this. And voters seem to punish perceived bumbling

or incompetence in foreign policy, like with Biden's Afghanistan withdrawal in a way that they don't with other issues. And I think that the Biden Afghanistan withdrawal, you know, that will probably be more damaging. I'm sure it will be more. For sure. It has been more damaging to them than I think this will ever be because American troops died.

If American troops had died because of this, this would be... It would not only be the biggest story in the world, but it would be a thing that turned a lot of people like, what the fuck? I don't mean to draw a one-to-one, but it just, no, you're right. But it's the seeing idiocy with this, I think feels maybe a little worse and a little scarier to people because- There's a crack in the facade now. There's a crack in the facade.

And I think whatever else we think of our government, and obviously you and I have talked many times about like, trust in government is very low, faith in institutions is very low. I think a lot of people still start from an assumption that, well, we're good at being in charge of the world, right? We're good at the foreign policy. So that feels a little more surprising when you see like, no, actually they're pretty bad at this one too. When you were talking about like JD Vance and the Europe part of it, I was thinking

that Kate Natopoulos had one of my favorite tweets about this. I saw this. She said, I've come to the sad realization that I'm the JD Vance of my group chats. Overly emotional, slightly unprofessional, confused by what everyone else is saying because I won't scroll up and continually derails plans with late objections. I would say unfortunately I'm probably the Goldberg of the chat, which is quietly observing. You're just a lurker? I'm just a lurker, just enjoying some of the jokes and bits. But then if it goes a little too far,

I might politely try to leave the chat, but I'll probably shit talk it later. To your question about why it broke through so much, Walter Hickey, journalist, he tweeted, the group chat story is breaking through to normies because it's being shared in every group chat. And group chats are the sole conduit of social sharing that does not actively and systematically suppress news content.

Wow. That's a great point. I know. Yeah. It's one of the few places you can scroll the news on your phone where there's not an algorithm suppressing information. Yeah. And it's true.

Like this has been all over my group chats. So what I hear you saying is that the abundance agenda can work if we find a way to say we're going to change housing permitting via group chats. That's right. If we make group chats part of the equation, 99% Assad numbers. Group chats can save democracy. Honestly. That's your takeaway from this. I do. I have been saying a version of that for a while, which is like you wean yourself.

It's the methadone of social media. You wean yourself off social platform by going to group chats. So we are pro group chats and we're pro whoopie PC small group. Maybe. Maybe, maybe. Maybe, maybe.

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with the starter kit, which comes with an MGO 850 plus Manuka honey jar, five honey travel sticks, a wooden spoon and a guidebook. That's manakura.com slash offline to save 31% plus $25 worth of free gifts. All right, let's talk about another app that I hope no one is sharing classified secrets on. Look, at least it's disappearing.

Classified dick pics. Snapchat. Max, earlier this week, you shared a Wall Street Journal story with us about the Snapchat half swipe, which is a quirk in the app's design that has been giving teenagers anxiety and how Snapchat's paid service that, quote, fixes the feature has actually made the whole situation worse. Right. So it's a fix to a fix to a fix.

So the underlying problem is, of course, we all know read receipts, right? And they're very stressful, like being left on read, somebody reads your message, doesn't respond. That's very stressful. If you are, you get a message from someone, you know that as soon as you open it, it triggers their read receipts, so you feel pressure to write back right away. And that stress is especially tough for teens who dominate Snap. That's the app that the teens use, that's where all of their audience is. So Snapchat developed this feature called the half-swipe view reference, where you hold down while opening the message a little bit,

and that way you can read the message without triggering it as read. So it's meant to be kind of a workaround to the read-receipt problem, but this just made the social anxiety of read-receipts even worse, because now you message someone, it sits marked on red because they half-swiped you, you see the recipient is online because of the little green dot next to your name, so now you're worried like, oh my God, are they ghosting me? They half swiped me, they read the message, but they didn't want me to see that they read the message. Exactly, right.

And so now I just realized that they probably read my message, but are not responding. Because they fucking hate me and they're in all of my, because I'm a teenager, so I find this very scary already. So they're in all of my friends' DMs laughing at me.

So Snapchat rolled out a fix to their fix and which they now charge for, $4 a month, because that's how benevolent they are, where if someone half swipes you, you see a little eye emoji next to it just while they're doing it, and the person who is doing the half swipe to you doesn't know that you have that feature where you can catch them half swiping it. But the trick is that it only works if you catch them while they are in the act. So now the results of this has been,

according to the Wall Street Journal story, teen girls who have a heightened sense of social anxiety are paying Snapchat this $4 a month emotional protection racket money for the privilege of spending all day glued to their message folder, watching it to see if someone is half swiping them. And other people who are doing the half swipe

have to avoid leading their friends on read to cause offense, have to worry about getting caught doing the half swipe. So everybody has gone from a little bit anxious to much more anxious, but Snapchat is making a lot of money off of it. The Wall Street Journal interviewed a 15-year-old girl who said, quote, those eyeball emojis have become one of the most stressful things in my life right now.

That quote was so sad. I know, it's sad. Also, there was a paragraph in the piece that said, as adults, we tend to assume that if someone doesn't text back right away, that person is probably busy. But for teens in the throes of a crush, waiting even minutes for a response

can feel like an eternity, even minutes. Yeah, so this was something that I had heard reference before that I thought was really interesting about this story is that teens use Snapchat as basically a substitute for the talking phase and dating where it's kind of that first flirting before you're like actually go on a date where you're kind of feeling each other out.

It's basically supplanted that, which is not a bad thing in and of itself, except that Snap has engineered their app to capture all of the social anxiety from that, ratchet it up to addict people to using their app and now charge them $4 a month. It's really, and per usual, when a social media company tries to make a change, whether to an algorithm or a feature in order to an attempt to fix something, even if it's an attempt to fix something that's gonna make the money, a whole new set of problems emerges and it always speaks to the fact that there's just such a larger problem that's bigger than any one feature or any one social media company, which is being glued to the fucking phone all the time

and having all of your relationships mediated through a device as opposed to in person. Right, and Snap, because it exists to serve teens, and teens have a higher socialization drive and are a lot more insecure about their relationships. So the thing that glues them to the phone most of all is social anxiety. So that's just their business model.

Like whether anyone intends it to be their business model or not whether anyone intends it to be their business model or not, that is what drives engagement on the app, what drives their bottom line. So because that's engineered in, like you're saying, any quote unquote fix that they make, however well intentioned it is or is not, it's going to end up serving that basic function of the app if it works. And again, you know, it's like human instinct to when you try to communicate with someone, you're impatient to wait for a response, right? Sure.

Yeah. Social media and our phones have just amplified that and sped it up, right? So now it used to be like, you send someone an email and you're like, oh, I haven't gotten an email back in a couple of days. No, it's like, it's been 30 seconds. And I see that they have read it and they have not responded yet. I mean, it sucks. And it gets to a point that Charles Doohig made, which is that we are very attuned to

conversations because the environments that we evolved in for millions of years were these big, you know, 100, 150 person collectives. And the way that you survive in the group is by conversing with each other because it's how you solidify the relationships that keep you in good standing with the rest of the group. So it's critically important to our survival to have conversations that feel connected and fulfilling. And our brains are not evolved for these digital environments where you send a message out, especially a message that maybe makes you feel vulnerable because you're a teen on Snap and you're doing this kind of soft dating thing and to just get a wall of silence back, it feels very scary.

Feel shitty. Yeah. Sucks. In other horrible app news, this week DoorDash, the popular food delivery service, announced a buy now pay later partnership with Klarna, the financial tech services company known for offering micro loans for everyday purchases.

As a result, DoorDash customers can now choose to pay for their $40 burrito by taking out a loan via Klarna and paying it back over four installments. It's nuts. Timed to when you get your paycheck too. Oh really? Yep. Cool. What do you think?

Do we like paying for our burritos and four easy installments? So I think that this is a kind of cynical answer by companies like DoorDash to inflation hitting them in a double whammy because labor is more expensive and food is more expensive. So that's both of those are really hitting their bottom line.

And I think the idea is not to get people to finance one burrito delivery. The idea is to get them to develop or maintain a day in day out habit, which a lot of people develop during the pandemic and have had a hard time breaking. They just got used to that. And it's a habit that people increasingly cannot afford.

So you kind of trick people into maintaining that expense by saying, well, you're not paying that. You're paying for a quarter of it now. And then when the full charge hits you later, it's gonna be the same day that your paycheck hit, which is a service that Clarina offers because they are a payday loan company dressed up as a tech company. And then we get a big conch

of your paycheck. There's no interest, but the idea is it's developing habits, I think. Yeah, it's tricky because, so there's no interest on the loans, and also they don't give your information to credit agencies so that it doesn't affect your credit score, but. They want you to be able to afford it.

It's not like a credit card where they want you to be able to afford it. It's not like a credit card where they want you to lapse. Right. But because they don't like the credit agencies also do want some of the information. And if the credit agencies and you know, credit card companies or anyone else doesn't know like how much you're in debt because of Klarna and DoorDash, then that becomes problematic when you if you're doing it on DoorDash, then that becomes problematic when you, if you're doing it on DoorDash, but then you take out a loan for a car or something else.

Now we don't know how much debt someone has. And so some people are also saying like, this is like a, could be a hidden recession indicator because we actually don't know. This is like a black box. We don't know that these buy now pay later. Cause there's a couple of companies aside from Clarna that do this as well. And we just don't know how much money is out there or how much debt is out there right now.

It was reading about this and the larger economy around these micro loans that like you said, are like in this kind of secondary black invisible market. I started to realize how many purchases I see this on now. And it does feel like an indicator of things are getting harder to afford and companies are finding ways to trick people into buying it anyway. I read there was some study that said that I think it was 62% of people who take out one of these microloans have multiple microloans running at once.

So it does suggest that they want you to or or at least allowing you to, or incentivizing you to take out a lot of these. I don't think there's anything wrong with taking out one of them if you need to, for whatever reason, of course, but what it's building towards is a habit around it. Yeah, I mean, the best case use is, or the most understandable use case here, is DoorDash is expanding.

So everyone's making the joke about the burritos, financing the burrito, but DoorDash is expanding, so everyone's making the joke about the burritos, financing the burrito, but DoorDash is now, you can get groceries, you can get stuff from other stores, right? So like say you buy a bunch of groceries and you're not gonna get your paycheck till next week and you're a little short on cash, and you're like, okay, I just, I really,

this is gonna be super helpful for me because I need these groceries now, but I'm gonna get paid next week. So that's fine. I think what some people are realizing is when you, yes, there's no interest on the loans, but if you miss the payment, like you could eventually get sent to the debt collector

or some of these companies just like take it right out of your bank account. And then there's overdraft, you know, fees and stuff like that. So it's- Yeah, right, right. It can start spiraling. I mean, look, it is gonna make a hell for a hell of a planet money explainer when the global financial system crashes

because Wall Street propped up a trillion dollar burrito derivative swap market. Where does, how do we get crypto involved in this too? I'm sure, as soon as someone says- Can you Bitcoin? As soon as someone says buy it with Bitcoin. Yeah, that's when we're going to, I mean, look at they want to unload the Bitcoin. I do think part of this is something we've talked about before, which is the financial

model that has always propped up these app services fees, endless VC money because of low interest rates is disappearing. So now companies like DoorDash need to find another way because they can't finance. What they were doing is they were taking a loss in every transaction because they had this endless venture capital money off of low interest loans. They don't have that anymore, so they need to squeeze consumers. So it's a fun economy we're building. You're not looking forward to 2008 redux, but now it's Americans defaulting on their

burritos instead of their mortgages. I am not looking forward to that, though, on the list of problems right now. I don't know where to rank it. I'm going to do the big short for burritos instead of their mortgages? I am not looking forward to that though. I'm on the list of problems right now. I don't know where to rank it. I'm going to do the big short for burritos. I'm going to find out a way to short burritos and that's when we're going to make it big. All right. So final topic. We've been looking for an excuse to talk about Severance, the hit Apple TV show. It just aired its second season finale last Friday.

Show it for those who don't know. The show explores themes about work culture, loneliness, mental health, and in our production meeting on Monday, we caught ourselves debating just how relevant the show and its themes are to topics we frequently cover on the show. So that said, if you don't want this season of Severance spoiled, or you just have no idea what Severance is,

you should just skip ahead to the interview now. Yeah, yeah. Because we're not gonna explain the whole show. No. And we're also not gonna, and we're about to spoil it. We are. So just.

Get ready. Hopefully anyone in the studio, are we spoiling for anyone in the studio? Oh no, Emma. Okay. Sorry, Emma. I think there's gotta be a lot of open up between. We can work around it, yeah.

Okay. Okay, Emma, you should. You should watch it. All right. Okay. Okay, and what do they... Oh, you should. You should watch it. All right, anyway. Okay, what did you think of the finale and basically the whole two seasons so far and how it relates to some of the themes that we talked about? Well, so this is the, like, every week, like I was joking with Julie about this,

I would come into our meeting and say to you some version of, like, I wish they would talk about offline topics on Severance so we could discuss it on the show. But I finally like the more I discuss the show with people, I realized that that I think that's what Severance is. I think that I really think that like it Severance is offline colon, the podcast colon, the TV show. Wow.

And it's not like a take. I like it. It's not succession where like succession is like it's a one for one. It's Fox News. It's the Murdo like succession is like, it's a one for one, it's Fox News, it's the Murdochs, it's commenting on right-wing media. So it like would be very easy for us to kind of talk about its significance. But I think Severance is more oblique about it,

but is absolutely speaking to loneliness, isolation, technology. I have a lot of thoughts on it, but I'm kind of curious if you came around to it since I pitched it a few days ago. Yeah, I've been thinking about it. And what stuck out at me is at one point in the finale, in the season two finale,

when they talk about Keir's eternal war against pain. Yes. And that's basically how they describe what they're trying to do with Severance. Which of course is like, you see the main character, Adam Scott's character, the reason he did Severance is because he lost his wife. And so he didn't want to have those memories and be dealing with that grief during his

work day. And so you go to work and you're a different person, right? And technology as an anesthetic from the pains of the world. Exactly. And it reminds me of some things. Yes. Well, that's what that was for me. That's the biggest connection because it's the whole, you know, technology promises infinite pleasure and all dopamine hits all the time. And I think what we're starting to realize in the show is

like without pain, there is no pleasure and like life is pain and pleasure. And we learned this from during the offline challenge from our friend, Dr. Catherine Price, Dr. Lemke, Dr. Anna Lemke. When we did the anti-severance. Yes. We unsevered.

We unsevered. It was funny too, because on, we wouldn't plan to talk about this, but on White Lotus this week, there was also this line from the Buddhist monk where he says, you can't outrun pain. That's the one thing in the world. Oh, that's interesting.

Everyone tries to. Oh, that's so funny, the two shows. They're all trying to go to different pleasure points and it's different, you know, White Lotus is about different kinds of pleasure, right? It's like sex, it's drugs, it's all, but you can't outrun pain. This is what I love about popular movies and TVs.

It's a kind of art that, even if no one on either of those shows is thinking of themselves as making a show that is speaking to like contemporary political issues and the things that they're talking about in the news, everybody brings that to the set. Everybody brings that to the writing room and it can end up in the show just as a reflection

of what we're all feeling. Yeah, especially at that given moment in time. Right, exactly. Which is I think is what can be so cool about it. So I think there's like, I have a surface level read and a like sub training read which really aligns with yours. I think on the surface, it is about a show about living surrounded by and surrendering to technology run by giant tech companies

that promise they're here to help us to elevate humanity and everyone gradually having this collective realization as we have all had in sight over the last 10 years, that that's all a lie. That we thought the tech company was idealistic and benevolent. It turns out they're a bunch of like weird ass liars with strange like cultish beliefs that are kind of brutal. We thought the technology was here to serve us, but actually we are the cogs. We are the commodity being exploited and kind of like scraped for value and kind of imprisoned.

The more I watched the show, the more the metaphor of the like literal prison in technology was really resonant for me. And it's about that moment of realization. Like the characters have that moment of realization again, the way we all have and how dehumanizing that feels, how outraged I feel and wanting to, I think it's not for nothing that both seasons

have culminated in prison breaks from the prison of technology. But I think what like not for nothing that both seasons have culminated in prison breaks from the prison of technology. But I think what really drove home for me that this is Offline the Podcast, the show, is that what is Severance the show really, really about? Like, what's really the message here? And I think much like our podcast started as about exploitation by big tech, but we ended up kind of coming around and following every thread to like, actually, it's about social alienation at the center

of everything. And it's about how we've lost touch with who we are, like you said, as people, lost touch with our emotions and touch with one another. And that that is the kind of thing that serves the tech exploitation. And it's all of these characters who live these atomized, emotionally isolated lives because they chose that, like Mark chose that, right? That's what he severed.

We learned that Cobell invented severance because she wanted to escape the grief from her mother dying, or they're living this isolation because they're inside Lumen, which has chosen that for them. But all of the characters have the same arc, which is that they feel drawn,

maybe like despite themselves, to relationships. And to feel like that is actually the thing that has been missing without me realizing that I'm missing it, even in this sterile environments that are supposed to be so hostile to forming connections with each other, right? Like Irving and Bert, they're not even supposed to meet and they distrust each other so much, but they form this bond that completely changes who both of them are and that leads them to this like kind of liberation. Yeah. And this kind of like emancipation.

I think this idea that like we're all finding our way back to relationships and putting that at the center of our lives. It feels very relevant to me. And you might ask, well, if everyone wants that kind of connection and wants those relationships, why is it so hard to put those relationships at the center of your life? And I think the answer you're getting from Severance and also from other shows like this, I think from White Lotus as well is relationships are hard, right? And they involve rejection and grief and uncomfortable moments and sort of fumbling over each other's insecurities

and I think technology can help us live more fulfilling lives if used correctly. But it cannot act as a shortcut for like the difficult work you have to do in life to build meaningful relationships. Right. And like a lot of, and especially in severance, it is, it's not just like these tech overlords being like corporate exploitation, it's them playing God. Yes. Right.

Which is what we have seen in some of these tech companies as well, which is like, we, our technology is going to solve a problem that humans cannot solve through their own relationships. Oh, that's true. Yeah, it's a very much like the algorithm will push you towards the conversations that we want you to have and the relationships that we think that you should be having, which just so happens to be good for our bottom line. Yes, and it's also just like, you know what?

Humans, whatever, they fuck everything up. Right, the eagles should be in charge. It's almost like it's the tech, the tech worldview of government and democracy, right? Which is like, oh, it's so messy and they're not doing anything that's inefficient. And we can build an algorithm to fix all this. All of it makes it so wild to me

that this show is produced and distributed by the smartphone company. And the more I was like, this is a meta, like the Severance floor is your phone. And I was like, it's made by the phone company? I feel like Ben Stiller and Adam Scott incepted Apple to approve the show. They did something amazing.

Like you wonder if Apple at some point gave Ben Stiller and Dan Erickson a note that was like, you know, hey guys, we couldn't help but notice the villain of your show is an evil giant tech company that is like exploiting and killing people. Like maybe what if the season ended with Lumen inventing the iPod shuffle? Everybody's friends again.

Like everyone goes home and it's like all is forgiven. What if there was like a cool update to Severance? You know, we presented in a big event. Hey, what if one day everybody goes, all the innies come down to the seventh floor and they all find their Severance chip, new U2 album loaded on there. No, look, Ben, Dan, if you're listening,

I don't think that James Egan, who's the villain at the center of the show, who runs Lumen, I don't think that he's Steve Jobs, obviously, there's not much that binds them together, but it would be very funny if he showed up in one episode in a black travel. I just think that would be funny. Oh, I hope that we don't have to wait as long as we did

for the second season, for the third season. They have said that it's gonna be shorter, but to me, it's one of the best shows in decades. I know, I'm gonna miss it. Well, I'm gonna be rewatching it over and over again. Yeah, me too, because it's one you really have to pay attention to. I'm gonna miss it. Well, I'm gonna be rewatching it over and over again. Yeah, me too, because it's one you really have to pay attention to. I rewatched the last episode last night and I picked up a ton of great stuff.

And also, there's a basketball game in the middle of it. Oh. It's just like that, like basketball announcement music shows up and then there's a marching band. So it's like a fun little break. The marching band is insane and so fun. It's so fun. It's so fun.

Also, Ben Stiller and Dan Erickson, if you're listening and you think we got it all wrong, you're welcome to come on the pod and discuss. We'd love to have you on any time. Absolutely. You know, offline at crooked.com. Just reach out to one of our producers. All right, quick housekeeping. On the new episode of Assembly Required,

Stacey Abrams sits down with Sky Perryman, President and CEO of Democracy Forward to break down Trump's most brazen legal battles. Then Mandela Barnes joins to discuss Wisconsin's crucial Supreme Court race, an election that could reshape 2025. We love Mandela. We love Stacey. Love it was just in Wisconsin for campaigning around the Supreme Court race. So exciting times there. Tune into this important conversation now on the Assembly Required Feed or on YouTube. After the break, Max talks to Charles Duhigg, author of Super Communicators. Offline is brought to you by Sundays.

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And it's a lot, when we switch to Sundays, it's a lot easier than the food that you keep in the refrigerator and you open the package and it's kind of messy and smells weird. But Sundays is great and it just stays fresh on the shelf. Unlike other fresh dog food, Sundays does not require refrigeration, just like I said, or preparation because of their air drying process. Just pour and serve. And when you start a Sunday subscription you'll automatically get 20% off and free shipping on every reorder, cancel or

pause your subscription anytime with their 100% satisfaction guarantee. Every order ships right to your door so you'll never have to worry about running out of dog food again. Get 40% off your first order of Sundays. Go to Sundays4Dogs.com slash offline or use code offline at checkout. That's Sundays4Dogs.com slash offline or use code offline to check out that Sundays4Dogs.com slash offline or use code offline. We are back. Joining me is Charles Duhigg, a wonderful journalist whose work I have been reading for years and the author of among others the book Super Communicators, How to Unlock the Secret Language of Communication. A year after that book came out, so many people are clamoring for more that he has released

a three-part podcast, also called Super Communicators, just out with Slate. Charles Duhigg, thank you for taking the time. Thank you so much for having me. This is such a treat. So I want to start by asking you why is having good conversations important? And I want to start here because someone who saw your book on a shelf might think that the title just refers to this as like a business question, you know, how to negotiate better. But you take a much broader view on the value of conversations, right?

Oh, absolutely. I mean, if you think about it, for Homo sapiens, communication is our superpower, right? It is the thing that has set us above every other species. And even more importantly, if you look at our nation's history, the world's history, it's these moments when we manage to communicate with people, particularly people we disagree with, that we really accomplish something important. If you think about the Constitutional Convention, it's basically, you know, four or five dozen guys who hate each other, getting together and arguing for months,

and then writing a constitution together. These moments of communication are when we are not only on our best, but usually when we are happiest. Yeah, it's amazing they managed to write the constitution without the benefit of Happy Wellness Podcast. Although maybe Ben Franklin was potting back in the day or doing these. It's because they didn't have social media to distract them.

That's true. That's how we, yeah. So we're one step forward, two step back. And I mean, good conversations are more than just a means to an end, right? I mean, it was something that I really took away from your work is that they are kind of vital for our wellbeing as people in and of themselves, right?

Absolutely. There's this study that I love that folks might have heard of called the Harvard study of adult development where they followed thousands of people around for years and years and years trying to figure out what makes you successful and happy and healthy at age 65. And the only correlation that they found was having a handful of close relationships at age 45 ensures your health, your happiness and your success as you get older. We know that being lonely is the equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day, which is a lot of cigarettes, right?

That's not a small number of cigarettes. And the way that we connect with other people, the way that we form relationships that are nourishing to us is usually through conversation. It's by calling someone up we haven't talked to in six months and saying, hey, what's going on with you? Or sending them a note or a text.

Conversation is the thing that allows us to be most human and to find the connections in life that make life worth living. I think this idea that conversation is one of the most innately human things about us is so interesting and is one of the things that has really reshaped how I think about the kinds of conversations that I should be having because... Oh, it's interesting. If you read a lot of evolutionary anthropology, there's this idea that the environment that we evolved for that made us human, it made us what we are when we kind of spent millions of years in these big collectives of like 100, 150

people and so much of how you would function in that environment and survive in it was your ability to maintain relationships with everyone else in that community and maintain a feeling of connection with came from regular conversation so there's a very real sense in which We are evolved to need Adjusted a base level in the same way that we need food and water Regular conversations with the people around us that make us feel bonded to them. That's absolutely right And in fact, it's really interesting because of advances in neuroscience We now know that when you're in a conversation,

just like you and I are having a conversation right now, your body and your brain actually starts to change. So without us realizing it, even though we're separated by miles because we're on the internet, our breath patterns have begun to be similar to each other. Our heart rates have begun to match each other. Even the dilation of the peoples of our eyes are starting to get similar.

And most importantly, the activity in our brain, if we could look at both of our brains, what we would see is that your and my neural activity is becoming more and more akin, more simultaneous. And that makes sense when you think about it, because if I describe an emotion to you, you actually feel that emotion a little bit, right? Or if I describe an idea to you, you actually feel that emotion a little bit, right? Or if I describe an idea, you experience that idea. Now, what's interesting though, is that the more and more our brains become similar,

what's known within neuroscience as neural entrainment, the better we're able to understand each other, the more closely we can listen to each other. And more importantly, even if we disagree with each other, we will feel connected to each other. We will have a dopamidic and a serotonin reaction that makes us feel good. And that's why you feel so good after having a great conversation. This is literally a product of evolution.

Our brains want us to be pro-social because being pro-social makes it more likely we will survive. And the way that our brains do that is they make it really pleasant and pleasurable for us to connect with each other. I'm glad that you brought up the kind of advances that we've gotten from neurological research because something that I kept find myself kind of thinking about reading your book was contrasting it with a book that is very different but tackles a kind of similar set of questions. The 1936 book by Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People. And I'm wondering kind of how much this book was

in your head as you were writing yours and if there may be anything that you feel like with the benefit of all these scientific advances we've had in the last 90 years that strikes you as maybe that that book got wrong. Well, so what I think that book got right is that a huge part of connection is showing you that I wanna connect with you, right? That oftentimes what happens in a conversational breakdown is that very often one person doesn't feel like the other person wants to connect with them

or they're feeling judged or they're feeling X or Y or Z. And I think what Dale Carnegie, and it's a kind of cheesy book, right? But it's a book that's been read for, you know, almost a century now. One of the things that he gets right is he says, you know, you should always use people's names, you should ask them questions about themselves. I mean, all of those are tactics that sort of show you, I want to connect with you. Now the place where at no fault of his own, because it was fairly early and

understanding how the brain works, the place where he sort of falls down is that sometimes this becomes very formulaic, right? I'm going to use car salesman, so I'm going to ask you three questions, and then if you cross your arms, I'm going to cross my arms. And what we know is that there's a hint of truth in that. We know that, for instance, when we're having a dialogue with someone, we think we know what that dialogue is about, but actually every dialogue is made up of multiple kinds of conversations. And these kind of conversations tend to fall into one of three buckets.

There's practical conversations where we're solving problems, we're making plans, and emotional conversations where I don't want you to solve my feelings, I want you just to empathize, and social conversations where we sort of relate to each other in society. And we know that in order for us to achieve that neural entrainment I mentioned, for our brains to start looking similar, we should be having the same kind of conversation at the same moment. And within psychology now this is known

as the matching principle. Dale Carnegie kind of gets at that, right? He says like, if someone's happy, you should be happy. And if they're sad, you should be sad. But the problem is without understanding really what's happening there, it can feel very robotic and manipulative. If they're sad, you should be sad. But the problem is without understanding really what's happening there, it can feel very robotic and manipulative.

And so in one sense, I think what we're doing is we're taking a lot of the learned wisdom of connecting with people and we're explaining the scientific underpinnings of it in a way that means that we can build on it as individuals. The idea, and you mentioned this, that there are kind of three kinds of conversation and the third kind is one about who we are and kind of shared identity.

That was something that really surprised me, but the more I've sat with it and thought about it, the more I've thought, of course, I can think of so many conversations I have had that are in kind of a sub rosa way about like establishing shared values and establishing shared identity and establishing shared identity and like we're in this group and we're all in it together. And I feel like that really dovetails with what you were talking about, about conversation is serving this kind of evolutionary survival function too. Oh, absolutely.

In fact, 70% of our conversations are social conversations and we usually don't register them. So you and I both worked at the New York Times. And when we say like, Oh, what was it like for you at the Times? What was it like for me? That's a social conversation. Because what we're actually talking about there is how much do we affiliate with this organization, this institution that we're no longer part of? Like, what were the experiences that we had with other people in there, some of which were positive and some of which were less than positive, right? And it gives me a sense and you a sense of how to calibrate the other person.

How do they exist in a social milieu? What identities are important to them? The fact that you mentioned that you are someone who's a journalist as opposed to mentioning that you're married or a father or any of the other identities that you could mention. That tells me something about how you see yourself and what's important about the values that you carry to yourself. And that, of course, is the ability for us to find a common ground, that we can find a place where we come together even if we disagree with each other.

Right. It's a great point. And of course, you know, before we started rolling the microphones to record this conversation, you and I have never met before. How did we open our conversation? By talking to each other about this shared set of experiences. We both worked at the New York Times and it is something that you do so instinctively you don't even notice.

I didn't even realize that I was doing something that you talk about being done in your book. It's kind of crazy to see it. And what's interesting is that there's a part, there's essentially a network in your brain that exists when you have this social conversation. And unlike the prefrontal cortex for the practical conversation or the amygdala and the basal ganglia for the emotional conversation,

the social conversation involves a lot of different parts of the brain. And what's important there is that if I was to say something like, hey, you know, what was it like working at the New York Times? And you were to say, I don't know, that's behind me. Like, let's just get down to business. I would feel immediately

that you're not trying to connect with me, right? And the reason why is because you're actually forcing the conversation into a part of your brain that's different from the part of my brain that I sort of invited you to join me in. And that discontinuity, that lack of entrainment, that's when in a conversation where you all of a sudden think like,

oh, we're just not connecting with each other. I don't know why, but're just not connecting with each other. I don't know why. But this is the neurological explanation for it. It's kind of a beautiful image to imagine two people talking to each other, lighting up different parts of their brain, trying to get the same two parts of their brain to light up together so that they can connect.

Exactly. I want to ask you more about something that you mentioned earlier about kind of strategies for conversation. Before we get to that, there's this experiment that you talk about that I thought was so interesting where researchers got a bunch of people together, paired them up, and then got each pair to ask one another a set of 36 personal questions. Can you tell us what happened after that? Absolutely.

This is known as the Fast Friends Procedure. And I actually, I give a lot of speeches and I ask one of these questions from the stage and force people to ask and answer each other, which is when's the last time you cried in front of another person. And people think they're going to hate this. They think this is going to be the worst experience of their life and they love it. This is one of the best conversations they've had in the past week. So what these questions come from, these 36 questions, is there were these two researchers,

Arthur and Elaine Ahrens, who wanted to figure out if there was a procedure that could make any two strangers into friends. And they tried all kinds of things and nothing really worked until they gave them these 36 questions. And the 36 questions, they start off pretty easy. The first question is, if you could have a dinner party with anyone from history, who would it be? But pretty quickly they get to sort of intimate things. Like, do you have a hunch about how you will die?

Tell me about your mother. And then the second to last conversation is, when's the last time you cried in front of another person? And people would go back and forth asking and answering the questions, only took about 45 minutes. And then everyone would leave the experiment. All the participants would leave and they thought the experiment was over. But the experiment was actually just beginning because the errands, the researchers would

contact everyone who had participated in this seven weeks later and they would ask them, just out of curiosity, did you ever follow up with that person you did this thing with? Like, did you ever talk to them again? Because they hadn't exchanged contact information. And people would say things like, yeah, you know, I know his name was John and his last name started with R. And so I got out the directory and I called every single John R in the directory

until I figured out who it was. And then we got a beer together. One person actually said that he had a beer with the woman that he had done it with. And then a week later, they saw a movie together. And when they got married a year after that, they invited everyone in the lab to come to the wedding.

Wow. That's really sweet. And if you want to look up the questions, they're online. It's called the Fast Friends Procedure. And the reason it works is because it's escalating intimacy, but also because we're going back and forth. It's what's known as vulnerability reciprocation. That when I tell you something that you could judge, and you choose not to judge me, but

instead to tell me something about yourself that I could judge, we cannot help but not feel closer to each other. It's literally hardwired into our brain to like each other more, trust each other more, and feel closer. So, part of what fascinates me about this story isn't that asking someone deep personal questions would produce this kind of spontaneous bond between them because on some level that's what makes the story so charming, right? Is you kind of, you know there's some kind of payoff coming and then it's very satisfying

when you find out, you know, two participants became friends, two became married. What really fascinates me about this story is that even though we know these sorts of conversations can be incredibly rewarding and bonding, we have to get herded into mass psychological experiments in order to have them. Why do you think that is? Yeah, so there's a guy named Nicholas Epley at the University of Chicago who studied this question extensively. And what he's found is that we're very bad at forecasting how a conversation is gonna go. What we tend to do is we tend to focus on

how awkward we believe it will be to ask a deep question rather than will the other person tell me something interesting. Because if I ask you, when's the last time you cried in front of another person? All I'm thinking about is like, I'm going to ask this question, you're going to think it's weird and then like it's going to be, but for you, you get the question and you think like, oh, when is the last time I cried? Oh, you know, like a couple of weeks ago, you know, I was talking to my friend and X and Y and Z. We're bad at forecasting

how a conversation will go. Now there's a way around this though, which is number one is to simply practice asking deep questions. And a deep question has a very specific definition. It's something that asks about a value or a belief or an experience. And that can sound kind of intimidating, but you don't have to start by asking someone

when they cried. You can ask, if you meet someone who's a doctor, instead of asking them, you know, what hospital do you work at? You can ask them, oh, what made you decide to go to medical school? Right? That's a deep question. And it doesn't seem overly intrusive, but it invites the other person to tell me who they are. Offline is brought to you by Quince. Vacation season is nearly upon us. This year, treat yourself to the lux upgrade you deserve with Quince's high quality travel essentials at fair prices.

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And it is much cheaper than a lot of other clothing places for your next trip Treat yourself to the lux upgrades you deserve from quince go to quince.com slash offline for 365 day returns plus free shipping on your order That's Q ui nce dot com slash offline to get free shipping and 365 day returns quince.com slash offline to get free shipping and 365 day returns. quince.com slash offline. The thing that is so striking to me is that I think we know that we like being asked these questions, right? But at the same time, it is very, it can sometimes be very difficult for us to go out and do it. Even if we are in the middle of a conversation, we appreciate being asked those questions. Like an experience that I feel like I have had many

times as a professional journalist, so maybe you have had a similar experience, is that I'll meet somebody and maybe it's, you know, at a party or a date, I'm meeting them for the first time and we'll get to the end of the conversation. I'll ask them a lot of personal questions because that's just something I feel very comfortable doing because I've been trained to do it for my day job. They'll get to the end of it and they'll say, wow, this was a really great rewarding connection that we had and I'll be kind of thinking to myself,

well, I don't feel that way at all because you didn't ask me a single thing about myself. You didn't ask, right. Right. So it's, what is going on there, do you think? So I think what it is, you know, the first book I wrote was named to the power of habit. And it's all about how habits emerge in our brains. I think what's happening there is literally habituation.

You are simply, you have gotten comfortable asking questions and you've been habituated. And it's not that the person talking to you doesn't want to ask you a question. It's that they have no practice asking you a question. And so as a result, it feels that the barrier to doing so feels too high. Now I'll tell you, there's a way around this, which I've used many times because I find myself in the same situations as you, which is that I, at some point I'll say to someone, ah, you know, I've been asking you questions all night. I'm sure you have some questions for me. Let me, let me give you a chance to ask me a question.

And what's fascinating is that they will have questions. There's all these questions that they want to ask you. Right. They're just not practiced at knowing how to do it gracefully. Yeah. And then when you invite it, suddenly it opens up these floodgates. Well, I mean, to, to talk more about something that you are clearly thinking through a lot in your book,

which is how to give people the strategies and tools to kind of overcome this and to have the kind of conversations that we all know on some level we want to have, I feel like there's this tricky element to achieving emotional reciprocity, where it can feel so meaningful if it feels real, but we've all had an experience where it feels like it's coming across as practiced or as transactional. And that can feel really alienating because it feels like almost like a trick or off-putting if we feel

like someone is going through rehearsed steps in order to win that reciprocity from us. I wonder what that says about the nature of emotionally open conversation that we find it so valuable when it feels real, but almost a little threatening if it feels like it's not as genuine. Absolutely. We feel like it's manipulative. And again, this is a product of evolution because back in a state of nature when we lived in tribes, if someone shows up and they tell us that they're not a risk and they are actually a risk,

they were incredibly dangerous, right? Letting our guard down was really unsafe. So our brains have a hair trigger. Now the question is like, how do we avoid this? How do we recognize it and how do we avoid it? We actually tend to recognize it pretty easily, right? We've all been at that party and someone asks us where we went on vacation, and we realize within like 10 seconds that they don't care where we went on vacation.

They just want to tell us about their vacation and like the big fancy yacht they were on. But I think the way that we avoid this unintentionally is to actually just ask questions where we're curious about the answer. When it feels manipulative or when it feels false, it's usually because I'm not asking you a question because I'm curious how you'll answer it. I'm asking you a question because I want to learn something or I want to speak about something myself. Right. And so I think that if we spend time practicing being curious, that's actually the best technique that we have.

And I think as a journalist, I assume you do this all the time, that when you are at that party and you're asking those questions, you're asking those questions because you actually want to know the answer and the other person can feel that. Well, that gets to something that I really found myself wanting to ask you about as I was reading the book or listening to the podcast is how you think about guiding people who want to develop this skill and want to get better conversation through the certain tension that maybe exists between on the one hand wanting the goal to be authentic, genuinely meaningful conversations, but on the other hand, the way you get there

is often kind of, you know, learning or practicing strategies in a way that maybe cuts against it being something that feels like it's organic and comes from within. Well, I think part of it is disabusing ourselves that learning and practicing strategies is a negative thing, right? Like if you've practiced making a meal 10 or 15 times and you're finally good at it, it's

not like when you make it for me, it's an inauthentic meal just because you practiced it, right? It's true. Yeah. It's actually a better meal. It's a meal where you care enough about me that you practiced doing this before serving it to me. And I think the same thing is true of conversation.

We assume that some people are born good at conversation and communication and others aren't, right? That some people are born with a gift of the gab. But every study shows us that is not true, right? We are all super communicators at one point or another. And the people who are consistent super communicators, if you ask them that if they were always good at it, they'll say things like, no, in high school, I had real trouble making friends and I had to study how kids talk to each other or my parents got divorced and I had to be the peacemaker between them. Nobody is born a great communicator, but by practicing it, oftentimes out of necessity,

that's when we become good. So the number one thing I would say to people is give yourself a break, practice this a little bit and give yourself the grace to know that like, the first time you cook that souffle, it's not gonna be the best souffle you've ever, on earth, right? And the first time you try asking a deep question, it might be a little awkward,

but the third or fourth time that you do it, it's gonna feel natural, and you'll have learned to do that. Mm-hmm. Well, let me ask you about something else. So it's been about a year since your book came out, you're now revisiting the topic for your podcast. And on the one hand, a year is not very long,

especially in kind of book world, but on the other hand, so much has happened in the last year. I feel like especially in relation to how we think about communication and connecting with people in a way that it feels very relevant to me right now. Like so much over the last year, you know, we have thought about, you know, the problem of kids disappearing into their screens and screen time addiction to the point that schools are now banning phones. There's been a whole discourse on the epidemic of social isolation that was, you know,

helped along by a big Atlantic cover story. We're thinking about, you know, youth male loneliness is maybe now a political phenomenon that might be related to some voting trends, especially after the election. So do you find any of this kind of like swirl of broader context around the social or political significance of our ability to have conversations impacting how you think about it or maybe even just how you talk about the lessons from your work on it. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I'm working on a piece for the New Yorker right now trying to understand how social

movements come together. And a lot of it is looking at what the Trump campaign and the Republicans campaign did right before this last election. And if you look at their tactics, they engaged in a tremendous amount of community building. They went into neighborhoods where people felt lonely and where people felt like they were disconnected from their neighbors and they knocked on their doors and they said they weren't trying to persuade them. These weren't swing voters.

These were low propensity voters, people who already believed in the Republican message. And yet the way to get them to the polls was literally just to introduce them to two or three other people. What we know is that, and if you think about it throughout history, this has been true, right? The civil rights movement, the moments that we are proudest of as Americans are not moments when everyone agreed with each other. Rather, they were moments when people who disagreed with each other came together to

form a community and to get along with each other and to work for something together. And so the thing that I think about a lot right now, whether it's young men sitting at home and feeling lonely, whether it's kids with social media is what's most important is for us to teach them the importance of building community and to tell them it's okay to practice this. It's okay to try at this. It's okay to be friends with someone you disagree with because that is actually how we build the communities that are the strongest.

And I'm hopeful that we are, things can't get much worse on this front, right? So I'm hopeful that we're at a point where people are recognizing This is something we have to practice with each other something have to we have to teach our kids is something where we have to Call up a friend we haven't talked to in nine months or go to church Even though we don't really go to church and meet the person next to us That is how we build communities and that's honestly how we make our lives more rewarding I mean it really goes back to the point you made about 70% of conversations are on some level about identity, social identity, who we are.

And I guess one lesson that you could draw from that is if your goal is to create some sort of a social movement or political movement or just any sort of group-based identity or project that that has to start with meaningful person-to-person, emotionally open conversations. That's absolutely right. And in fact, one of the things that we know from a lot of the social science that's being done right now around political and movement organization is that when you build a coalition around an issue, it tends to be very flimsy, right?

It tends to fall apart. It tends to feel transactional. But if you build a coalition around shared values and you have room within that coalition for people who actually disagree about issues, then that's what becomes sustainable. And in many ways, if you look at the last election, that's sort of the story of that election is that the right was building communities around values, shared values. The left was building communities around values, shared values. The left was building communities around issues. And those issues are important.

But the more durable communities are the ones that are built around a shared value or a shared belief. Right. Which is why we have, primarily why we have conversations is not to achieve some specific concrete material aim. It's because of this, you know, evolved indeed that we have to form bonds with other people and to form communities.

Because it feels good, right? It's not transactional. There are transactional conversations, but nobody walks away being like, that was the best transactional conversation ever. They walk away saying like, oh, I really liked that person. Yeah, right, right.

Well, I want to ask you about the role that technology has come to play in our conversations. I feel like I am spending more time than ever communicating with people thanks to tools like Slack or Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, whatever. But I'm not sure that I feel more connection from those conversations. So I guess where I'm left sure that I feel more connection from those conversations. So I guess where I'm left is, do you think that this technology is on net good or bad

for our conversations with people? I think it's a net good, but we have to learn how to use it. Yeah. So one of my favorite examples of this is like a hundred years ago when phones first became popular, there were all these studies that appeared that said no one will ever have a real conversation on a telephone, which actually made sense because if you think about it up till then, all conversations have been face to face, right? Maybe sometimes through letters. But they said, look, if you can't hear the other person, if you can't see them, if you can't see their expressions, you're never going

to really connect with them. And what's fascinating is for the next 15 years, they were exactly right. People did not know how to use phones. They use them like telegrams. They would call up the grocer and say, here's my order, and then hang up the phone. Right. Now, by the time you and I and everyone listening, by the time we're in middle school, we can talk for like seven hours a night on the phone. Right. They're the most important conversations of our life. So what changed? We learned how to use phones. And in fact, there's things that you do on a telephone today that you don't do face-to-face without even realizing it. All of us will overemphasize our words

by about 30% when we're talking on the phone. We'll put about 20% more emotion into our voice than if we were talking face-to-face. Because we're compensating. Exactly, we're compensating. And so when it comes to social media the question is is the the channel the method of communication is there something wrong with it or is it that we are learning the rules and sometimes we forget those rules right when it gets to email it's really easy or texting it's really easy to get transactional to be like hey can you meet thou can you meet then you what about this, this flight instead of saying like, Hey, how are you or spending the time to talk to like, write a note that say like, I'm feeling kind of down today because this happened and I'm thinking about that.

But if we remember these three kinds of conversations and that all three kinds of conversations are important to us, right? The practical, the emotional and the social. If we imbue our different forms of communication with those different kinds of conversations, we will feel close to other people regardless of the method of communication. It's when we forget.

It sounds like the distinction you're drawing is kind of one of intentionality. If that if we bring intentionality to say a phone conversation, we are still able to aim for and produce some amount of a actual meaningful emotional exchange. I would argue that I think that you could do that for sure with, you know, a text message,

with a group chat that it's definitely possible to do that. I feel like I've done it. I do feel like it's, you know, to what you were talking about with compensation. There's a lot that you have to compensate for when you're not in person together, you can't see their face, you can't hear their voice. So there's a lot more work that has to go into it. But if you're intentional,

you probably can achieve some amount of that. I think where I start to become personally more worried or skeptical about our ability to bring that intentionality is digital platforms that are not, I guess it's not even about whether it's one-to-one, maybe it's about whether it's private versus public, because so many of our exchanges now happen on platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram,

where there's an element of public performance in it. Even if I'm commenting on a post that you made, I know many other people will read it and it's hard to bring real emotional vulnerability when you also feel the pull of performance. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And I think you're exactly right. The performative aspect is the critical thing here because there's a difference between

a conversation, which is a back and forth, where we're both sharing and listening, and a performance where I'm on a stage and you're watching, and I'm not asking you as the audience to participate. And I think you're exactly right, that within our head for right or wrong, many of these forms of communication, we start to think of them as performative, right? My goal in communicating is for you to hear me,

to hear what I have to say, rather than for me to equally hear what you have to say, to engage with you, to have a back and forth. And that's fine, performance is important. And there are times when we should be performative, but there are also times when we should have a conversation. And the most powerful thing, and studies show this, the most powerful thing that you can do when you're corresponding with someone electronically, whether it be on social media

or over email, is two things. Number one, if you ask a question and then don't give your own answer until they answer, it tends to change the tenor of the conversation. Number two is if you have the smallest amount of politeness, it will overcome all kinds of conflict. And this comes from studies of looking at Wikipedia editors talking to each other. If just one person starts saying please and thank you, the temperature goes down by 60%.

And so I think part of this is us thinking about that intentionality you mentioned. When I go online, am I going online to have a conversation or am I going online to perform? And if it's performance, that's okay. But then I shouldn't be surprised when other people don't necessarily wanna listen to me when they wanna perform back.

Well, it's reassuring to know that so many of the lessons and things that work with face-to-face interaction and conversation can also apply with, you know, Wikipedia comment sections or text-based interactions. And it does bring me some confidence that we can bring our humanity to those spaces as well. Oh, absolutely. And do you have kids? I don't.

Okay. Okay. So I have two teenagers and anyone who's listening, if they have teenagers at home and you dare, go and ask your teenagers to show you their text messages, which is terrifying. But what you'll see is that in those, there are these strings of emojis. Like they'll just send a string of emojis to their friends and their friends will respond with emojis of their own. Those are emotional conversations. Right. Yeah. They're younger than us. They're native to it. Right. Exactly. They are learning how

to have emotional conversations through text messaging. And those of us who are older, we didn't grow up with that. And it feels a little weird and foreign and dumb. So we don't do it. We don't practice it. But my faith in our ability to communicate with each other is even stronger than it was before I started working on this book. Because we want to communicate with each other. I want to be able to talk to my neighbor, even if he has a lawn sign that's different from my lawn sign, right?

Because who we're going to vote for or whatever the lawn sign says, that's 1% of what I think about every day. And 80% of what I think about is the pothole that we both have to deal with in front of our houses. We can connect with anyone. We just have to know what the strategies and the tactics are for it and to want to connect. Well, I think you're right that people want to connect.

And any listeners who want to learn how to connect, the book is Super Communicators, the podcast, the same name, put out by Slate, Charles Duhigg. Thank you so much for joining me. Thank you for having me on. This was such a treat. This is great. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, John Favreau, along with Max Fisher. The show is produced by Austin Fisher and Emma Illich-Frank. Jordan Cantor is our sound editor.

Audio support from Charlotte Landis and Kyle Segland. Dillon Villanueva produces our videos each week. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Ari Schwartz, Madeleine Herringer, and Adrian Hill for production support. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.