Plain English with Derek Thompson - How to Have the Hardest Conversations—in Marriage, Politics, and Life

Episode Date: February 20, 2024

Life is a series of conversations. Our relationships, friendships, marriages, breakups, makeups, hirings, promotions, and firings are mostly the story of two people talking. And many of these conversations are hard or uncomfortable. Sometimes we spend years refusing to be honest with the people we know the best because we’re afraid of telling them how we feel. What if we all had such confidence in our own powers of communication and understanding that we didn’t fear these hard conversations at all? What if we welcomed them? Charles Duhigg, the author of 'The Power of Habit,' has a new book out this week. It’s called 'Supercommunicators.' Duhigg’s book is about how to talk when talking is hard. Today we talk about the art and science of difficult conversations, from romantic relationships to political persuasion, and what he discovered to be the most important principles of having a great and emotionally resonant discussion. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail].  Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Charles Duhigg Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Did Don Draper really buy the world of Coke? Did Tony Soprano really die? Or just order more onion rings? The finales of our favorite shows can make us argue, make us cry, and make us crazy. From Spotify and the Ringer, I'm Andy Greenwald, and this is Stick the Landing, a new podcast where we'll be telling the story of modern TV backwards, one fade out at a time. Find Stick the Landing on Wednesdays on the prestige TV feed, on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Today's episode is about the science of having hard conversations. We began with a story.

In the 1970s, a group of psychologists wanted to look at how married people navigate conflicts in their relationship. So they videotaped interviews of husbands and wives talking about whatever, their sex lives, their fights. And very often, they fought right there in front of the cameras. The researchers recorded more than a thousand marital arguments. Two findings emerged when they coded the data. First, all couples fight. That was very clear. Second, fights have very different effects on different couples.

For some couples, the researchers found, fights are like poison. Bit by bit, they weaken the bonds of marriage. For other couples, fights are like hard medicine. They make relationships stronger, healthier. And these researchers who called themselves the love strength, wanted to know the difference between happy and unhappy couples by looking at their conversations. They wanted to know the formula, if you will, for having a productive marital fight. The first hypothesis of these researchers was that happy and unhappy couples fight about totally

different things, that unhappy couples fight about the big stuff, money, health, substance abuse, and happy couples only fight about trivial stuff that never leaves a dent. Well, that hypothesis was totally wrong. Everybody, it turns out, fights about money, responsibilities, silly vacation disputes. Hypothesisness number two. Maybe happy couples are just more resilient. That makes sense. Everybody fights, but some people are just better at forgetting and forgiving.

Wrong again. In fact, they found many happy couples seem to be terrible at forgetting and forgiving. They fought over and over and over. They had the same fight again and again. They never came to any kind of resolution. but not only did they stay together, they said they were very happy being married. The key they discovered

isn't that happy couples fight over the right things, but rather that happy couples fight in the right way. They're not super Zen monks, never allowing anything to upset them. They're not super forgivers either. They are super communicators. So what the hell does that mean? What's the best way to have a different way,

conversation that strengthens a marriage rather than ends it. The full answer to that question, I'm not going to tell you yet because I want it to be spelled out to you by Charles Duhigg, the author of The Power of Habit, and a new book very appropriately called Supercommunicators. Doohig's book, which mentions the Love Shrinks study, is about how to talk when talking is hard. How CIA agents recruit recalcitrant spies, how screenwriters write emotion, stylish stolid characters and how partners manage hard conversations. Charles Duhigg is today's guest. We talk about the art and science of having the most difficult conversations from romantic relationships to political persuasion. I'm Derek Thompson. This is Plain English. Charles Duhigg, welcome

in the podcast. Thank you for having me on. This is so much fun. It's great to see you. So you've written a book about habits. You've written a book about productivity. What made you want to write a book about talking, effective communication? Yeah, it's a really good question because what happened was that when I wrote the power of habit, you know, it's really about internally focusing. And so it's smarter, faster, better, which is about productivity. And I kept on hearing from people who said, look, I've read the advice and I've read the lessons and I use them. But most of my success each day is dependent on other people. And I don't know how to change other people's habits. Like, tell me how to get this guy to stop bothering me.

And as I got deeper into this, I realized, well, actually, what's going on here is that most of our life is spent in social groups, right? Whether it's our family or our workmates. And so understanding how to connect with other people is a critical part of anyone's success. And in most of the connection that we do is through conversation. And I also realized I was bad at it, so I decided to write a book about it. You took the rich right out of my mouth. I was going to say, I remember from your previous books that, you know, the power of habit helped you cultivate better habits.

And the book about productivity helped you to recast the way that you think about productivity, not just about how to get the most things done in a day professionally, but how to live a life that is from a more wholesome perspective, more productive at doing the things you want to do with your family, with your loved ones. So before you wrote this book, how would you have graded your own communication skills? where do you now see the biggest deficits in your communication skills having gone and now written a 300-page book on the subject? I would grade my own skills very poorly. And there's these two instances that stick out of my mind. The first is that I was working at the New York Times at that point, and they made me a manager. And I was, like, pretty much certain I was going to be an awesome manager, right? That, like, I've had managers before.

I got an MBA from Harvard. I was like, oh, I got this. And I was good at the strategy part. I was terrible at the communication part. Like, this was the consistent feedback I'd get is like, like, I talked to him and I feel like he's not listening to what I'm saying, or he tells me stuff and I don't understand what he wants. And this really caught me off guard because, like, we're journalists.

We're supposed to be professional communicators. And then this pattern developed at home with my wife. We've been married about 20 years now, so this is probably married, you know, 15 or 16 years. And I would come home from work after a long day, and I would start complaining about things about my wife. boss or my coworkers. And she very reasonably would say something like, oh, why don't you take your boss out to lunch and you guys can get to know each other and get, and you know, like, here's a solution. And instead of being able to hear what she was saying, I would get even more upset. And I'd be like, you're not supporting me. I want you to be outraged on my behalf. And then she would get upset because I was yelling at her for no apparent reason. And this happened a lot to us. And I think it happens in a lot of relationships, right? Sometimes the gender roles are reversed. And so I started calling up these psychological. and neurologists and others, and saying, like, this is happening, and I don't understand why. Tell me what's going on. And that was kind of the origin of the book.

Yeah, the mismatch between one partner or friend wants to vent and the other partner or friend wants to problem solve is just one of the most classic mismatches in any conversation. And I remember several years ago, I read a paper that now I haven't been able to relocate that said, there is an expectation, sometimes even a gendered expectation that Some people, maybe disproportionately women, vent, while other people, maybe disproportionately men, problem solved. And they said, that's wrong. Everybody vents and everybody problem solves. The difference is that some people internalize versus externalize different parts of the process.

So some people, again, I think this paper said disproportionately women, but I can't be 100% sure, so I don't want to represent that. But some people problem solve internally. What they externalize is the venting. They'll figure out how to deal with their boss inside. alone in the shower, what they want to do with their partner is just vent about what a jerk the boss is. Yeah, it's just complain.

And have someone so like, I understand you. Other people are the total opposite. They externalize the problem solving and it's internally that they vent. Inside their own head, they're having this self-talk. You know, Charles, like, God, like, my boss is such a fucking asshole.

That's all inside. So it's not as if some people vent and some people don't vent. Some people don't. The difference is what part of the process we externalized. I was like, oh, that's such an interesting way of universalizing.

education habit. And that ties really well into what all these experts told me when I called them, right? Because the way that they approached it, and I think they're saying the same thing you're saying, is they said, look, what we've learned about conversation, and we're living through this golden age of understanding conversation because of these advances in neuroimaging and data collection. They said, what we're learning about conversation is, we tend to think of something as being one discussion, right? We're talking about your day, or we're talking about, I'm trying to give you a solution to get along with your boss. But actually, every discussion is made up of multiple kinds of conversations. And most of those fall into one of three buckets. And I think that this corresponds to what you just said. There's this practical bucket, which is the problem-solving bucket, right?

Logical. There's the emotional bucket where I tell you how I'm feeling and I don't want you to solve my problem. I just want you to empathize with me. And then there's the social conversations where we're talking about how we relate to each other or how we relate to society. And I think what might be happening in the paper that you just mentioned is that we tend to fall into habits with which of those buckets we feel most comfortable in.

Right? So men very often are very comfortable in a practical bucket. That does not mean that they necessarily have more practical conversations. But it means that when they have emotional conversations, sometimes they pose it in practical language, because that's the language that they're most comfortable in. And what these psychologists said and these researchers said is, in order to, the reason I couldn't hear my wife is because I was having an emotional conversation. She was having a practical conversation. And you have to be having the same kind of conversation at the same moment to really

connect with each other. And sometimes that means not listening to all the practical words you're speaking, but paying attention to the fact that you are actually discussing your emotions and you just don't have the vocabulary for it. We're going to return to this theme several times in this conversation, because to me, at least, it was the most resonant theme of the book, which is that in order to have a great conversation. You need to understand what conversation you're having. And I'm sure there's a 10,000 different species of conversation, but I think you usefully categorize them under three genuses or genus or whatever the plural of genus is, which is right, the practical conversation, let's solve a problem, the emotional conversation, let's talk to each other about each other's

feelings and get to the root of what those feelings mean. And then a kind of social identity conversation, which is like, what part of your identity, what part of your interpersonal or political identity needs to be activated in order for us to have a useful conversation. So I want to start by talking about marriage. We can start by talking about my marriage. My wife is finishing up for PhD in clinical psychology right now. So like all relationships, we have hard conversations. But unlike many relationships, we talk a lot about the psychology of hard conversations, which is why I was so interested in a passage in your book on the Love Shrinks study.

In the open that I just recorded a few minutes ago, I described the study and the many hypotheses that were dashed as these researchers were trying like hell to figure out the secret ingredients of a productive fight, a productive hard conversation. I wanted to save the punchline of this study for you. So tell me about how researchers settled on the issue of control, control as being central to the art of productive fights in relationships. Thank you for asking about this, because I love this story. And it's actually revolutionized how me and my wife have hard conversations.

So they went through all these hypotheses about why some people can fight well. We have fights, and there's no lingering rancor, our relationship with stronger. And then other people would have basically what looked like the same fight and end up getting angrier and angrier and hating each other more and more. And what they found was that in those bad conversations and those bad fights, both people in the relationship we're trying to control each other. Now, it is totally normal

to want to control something when you're in an argument, right? An argument is so overwhelming. It puts us on our fight or flight instincts. It makes us defensive. And so what we want, what every person wants, is just one thing that they can control.

One thing that they can grasp onto. And the most obvious thing that we can control is the other person. So we try and control them by saying things like, if you'll just listen to me, you'll understand what I'm saying. Or if you just see things from my point of view, you'll see that I'm right.

Or sometimes we try and control other people's emotions. They say, I feel bad about this thing that happens. And we say, oh, no, you shouldn't feel bad about that. Like, that's not something to feel bad about. I'm trying to control how you feel, even though you've just told me that you feel differently. This is toxic. Trying to control each other, whether in a marriage or an online discussion or at work, nobody wants to be controlled by someone else. It feels toxic.

But we all have this instinct for control. And so what the researchers, the love shrinks figured out was you can rechannel that instinct for control to things that we can control together. So, for instance, we can try and control the environment. If we start having a fight at two in the morning, we can say, look, let's wait until, like, let's go back to bed and wait until the sun comes up and we're both, like, well-rested, and then we'll talk about it. You can try and control yourself.

You can make it obvious. You can say things like, look, I hear what you're saying. let me take a second to think about how I want to respond before I say it, which is an obvious example of self-control. Or we can control the boundaries of the fight itself. So one thing that happens in bad marriages is this thing called kitchen sinking, which is that a fight about like where we're going to go for Thanksgiving becomes a fight about like, your mother doesn't like me and we don't have enough money and you're always a jerk when we're around your family. A fight about one thing becomes a fight about everything. And this is literally the most

toxic pattern in a relationship. If that happens, things are not going to go well. I want to stop you there because this is actually, this is exactly where I wanted to jump in. My wife and I have developed a kind of catchphrase in our marriage, which is don't open new taps. And so, for example, let's say, you know, a married couple is fighting over something really commonplace. Like, you know, I'd like you to show more interest in my life. I want you to ask more questions about my work and friends. You never ask you myself. And the other partner in response says, well, I don't think you pay enough attention to me. And by the way, it's because you're always going out with your friends and you don't

have enough time for me. And that's because you've actually never respected me. So, like, on the surface, this looks like a really straightforward kind of normal marital dispute. Like one person raises a problem. Another person gets defensive and comes up with a bunch of excuses. No, the problem isn't with me. It's actually with you.

It seems like an extremely typical sort of chaotic fight. But just under the surface, what's happening is that one person opened like a tab on a browser. And the subject of that tab was, I want you to ask more questions. And the second person responded by pressing Apple Tea over and over and over again and opening a bunch of other tabs in the conversation that's like about respect and the time you'd spend with your friends is just tag after tab after tab. And the same way that having too many tabs on a browser can disorient you and maybe even, you know, crash the browser itself.

In relationships, having too many tabs of contention crashes the productive possibility of the conversation. Absolutely. And so what we both say now is don't open new tabs. If I come to you and say, take out the trash, don't come back to me about the nine different things that I haven't done the last week. Open that tab later. The trash tab is open and it has to be closed. Otherwise, the room is going to stink. You know, one tab at a time.

Absolutely right. Count the tabs as a kind of, you know, it's a way. What I loved about this chapter is the way that you gave us a new language for what we were already trying to do, which is like to x-ray the conversation for tabs, x-ray the conversation for like how many different things are we talking about? in this fight? How do we talk about as few of them as possible? And if we get it down to one tab, we can actually focus on solving that one problem rather than not solving 17 problems. Well, and the best part about it is that when you decide to focus on that one tab, you're cooperating. Right? Both of you are saying, you're cooperating on the same task. You both say,

look, what we want to do is we want to eliminate the other tabs. This is the tab we want to focus on. And so even though you're disagreeing with each other, even though you're fighting with each other, there's this thing that you're cooperating on that convinces both of you that this conversation can be productive. I love that analogy, by the way. It's such a wonderful analogy. And it totally gets to this control issue, right? Because when I open new tabs, oftentimes I'm trying to control you. Oh, you brought up me listening. Well, I'm going to bring up what a jerk you were to my friends, right? I'm trying to control where the conversation goes. But we can find something to control together, which is let's stay focused. Another term, I want to make sure we introduce.

here before I move on to any other topic, is the concept of looping for understanding. What is this idea, looping for understanding, and how does it help produce more productive conversations? It's a really important technique, and it's taught at Harvard and Stanford and basically every sort of school. And it's particularly important when we are having a conversation where we're in conflict with each other, where we disagree with each other. Because what happens is, if I'm disagreeing with you, if we're debating or arguing, in the back of my mind, almost subconsciously, I suspect that you are not listening to me. I suspect you are waiting your turn to speak. And if you're not going to listen to me, then like, gosh, darn it, I'm not going to listen to you either.

I'm going to wait my turn to talk and then give you a peace of my mind. And this means that we never become aligned. We never really start hearing each other. So looping for understanding draws from this insight that what's really important is not just listening. it's proving that you're listening, particularly if someone is skeptical that you're listening because you're in a conflict. And there's three steps to looping for understanding. The first is just ask a question.

And there's these questions called deep questions that are special, but really any question will work. Then listen to what the person says. And step two is, repeat back in your own words what you just heard them say. Like show that you heard them and show that you processed it. And then the third step, and this is the one people usually forget,

is ask if you got it right. Now, the reason why this is so powerful is because, first of all, if I prove to you that I've heard what you've said, it is hardwired into our brains, this thing called social reciprocity, that the other person will want to listen back to you. But equally, oftentimes, I want to listen, and I trip over my own feet, right? Like, you say something I disagree with, and I start coming up with arguments in my own head about why you're wrong, and suddenly I'm not listening anymore. But if my assignment to myself is, I have to listen to Derek so closely that I can repeat back what he told me in my own

words to show that I kind of understand it, then I don't have any room to start debating you in my head. I have to listen. So it's as much a technique to prove to you that I'm listening as a self-hack to make me actually listen to you. And it's incredibly important. You mentioned deep questions. And I just want to touch on this before we move on to difficult political conversations, because I did find this to be a really interesting section of the book. What do you see? Why do you give a few examples of shallow questions versus deep questions? And then tell us what you see is like the main difference between a shallow and a deep question.

Absolutely. So a deep question is something that asks about your values, your beliefs, or your experiences. And that can sound kind of intimidating, right? Because those are like big questions, but they're actually usually not. So like, for instance, let's say I bump into someone and I say, what do you do for a living? and they say, oh, I'm a lawyer. A deep question would be to say, oh, you know, what made you decide to go to law school? Or, oh, what do you love about practicing the law?

Would you tell one of your kids to become a lawyer? Those are all deep questions, even though they don't appear that deep, because what they do is they invite the other person to tell me about their experiences that led them to law school, about their beliefs, about what their kids need, about their values that they're able to make for meaningful work. And what's really important. Let me quickly read from. Sorry to interrupt, but I promise I'll conclude this interruption by looping for understanding, Charles. This is page 97 of your book.

Let me give you some examples of shallow questions that you list in this chapter. Where do you live? Where do you work? Where did you go to college? Are you married? Do you have any hobbies? To me, those are factual questions. Those are questions that someone could put on a form.

In fact, it's very possible the last time that they went to the doctor's office, they were asked to fill out several of these questions. Once the doctor rarely asks you, at least on the initial, form is about memories and opinions. So where do you live as a fact? What do you like about your neighborhood? That's an opinion, right? Where do you work? That's a fact. What was your favorite job? That's an opinion or even a memory, right? What was your favorite job that you've ever had? And so it seems to me like what you're saying here is, if you want to build intimacy with someone, simply interviewing them isn't enough. Because actually, we're interviewed all the time in incredibly formal, non-intimate settings, right? I don't feel any attachment.

to like the woman behind the desk to whom I hand in my like intake form when I go to the you know dermatologist or something like there's nothing personal nothing deep has been revealed but if the if I if I hand in the form and maybe they you know violate some HIPAA requirement start reading the form to themselves and say oh you know you you were born in McLean Virginia I'm from McLean Virginia what's your favorite restaurant there okay now I'm now I'm sharing opinions and memories and there's something about opinion and memory that seems to unlock intimacy in a way that fact does not is that right Yes, you got it exactly. You got it exactly right. Very good looping for understanding. You got it exactly right. And I think the way that I would synopsize what you said is don't ask about the facts of someone's life. Ask how they feel about their life. Because these fact questions are dead ends, right, unless you pivot to a feeling question. But if I ask you, why did you decide to become a lawyer and you say, oh, it's because I saw my uncle get arrested and I want to fight for the little guy, then what's interesting is it's very natural for me.

as the questioner to answer the same question I just asked you and say, oh, that's interesting. Like, I decided to become a doctor because my dad got sick when I was young. Now we're actually telling each other meaningful things about our lives. And we can infer all kinds of things from that. Like, you're someone who believes in justice. You believe in the underdog. I'm someone who desperately cares about caring for people. Now, not only are we sharing, we're engaging in what's known as reciprocal vulnerability, which is a critical element of closeness, but we're also discussing things that actually matter. We're having deep conversations rather than shallow ones, even though we didn't necessarily ask questions that seemed emotional or seemed intrusive.

It is, in fact, kind of deep to think about the idea that the feelings of our lives are more similar than the facts of our lives. So, for example, Democrats and Republicans might disagree vehemently on an issue like abortion or even something like the child tax credit, but they agree that they love their children. The feelings of their children are the feelings of their children. They're lives are more similar than the facts of their opinions. This takes us into politics, and I have a bit of a controversial theory of persuasion that was activated by your chapter on having hard conversations about, for example, vaccinations during a period of political polarization. And my theory of persuasion is that the best way to persuade somebody is to first of all

recognize that nobody in the history of argument has ever been persuaded of anything ever. in a way, persuasion is impossible. No one changes their mind at a deep level. Moral foundations are fixed. And so the best way to get people to update their views in any kind of way is to get them to see that a new idea is, in fact, a perfect expression of an old deep value that they hold. That's really, really well put. Yeah.

So Olga Kazan wrote about this for The Atlantic, and I just want to make sure that I name-check her because I stole this idea from a piece that she wrote. But basically, she looked at a couple studies looking at, like, if you're a liberal and you want persuade a conservative to support, say, more immigration, let's say. Don't appeal to your own moral foundation of liberalness, right, fairness. Appeal to the moral foundation of conservatives, right? Maybe more high-skilled immigration will make all Americans incredibly rich, and their taxes can pay for your retirement, right? Understand the deep foundations of the other person's viewpoint and try to make your opinion sound like it fits into it. So I'm interested in how that theory of

persuasion fits with what you discovered about the science and art of having difficult conversations across the political aisle. Oh, it fits perfectly. And you're exactly right. There's literally only one technique that's been shown to be persuasive and political around political issues. And this is research that was done in the last decade around the push for gay marriage and for trans rights. And the only way to really persuade people of the opposite opinion that they currently hold is to go have a conversation with them, to ask them questions about themselves and their experiences.

I know that you're against gay marriage, but I'm just wondering, like, what does marriage mean to you? Like, why is it important? Which friends do you think have a really good marriage? Spend half an hour doing that, and then simply relate your issue to what they said. I heard you say that you think marriage is really important

because it's stability. And I want you to know, like, I actually am gay, and I want a stable relationship with my husband. Like, I want, the reason I married him is the exact same reason that you think marriage is good is like, we want that stability. Now suddenly, and that's not going to change everyone's minds, right?

They had basically a 5 to 6% influence rate. But 5% to 6% in politics is huge, right? That decides elections. And the reason why this is so powerful is because there's this fallacy that we can imagine ourselves into someone else's head. Right? Like if we just walk in the shoes of a Palestinian refugee or of an Israeli citizen, we'll understand how they see the world. And every single study has shown that is not right.

Like if you try and imagine yourself into someone else's shoes that you don't know, you're going to do a bad job of it. You're going to think you did a great job. You're going to do a terrible job. So the only way to figure out how they think about things is to ask some questions. And those questions have to be curious and genuine. That can't be arguments hidden as questions. right? And then we have to prove to them that we're listening to them by looping for understanding. And once we do that, then we understand how they see the world. And you're exactly right. Once we understand how they see the world, we can draw the connection between the thing we care about and the thing they care about. But if we just come in and we say, like, basically, you're caring

about the wrong thing. Of course they're not going to listen to us. I hope this question doesn't sound too cynical. But you just said that the persuasion rate or the conversion rate of even the most successful or with even the most successful persuasion tactics is still only like five, six, seven percent. It's interesting to me that we are, as you've said, learning more about the science of successful communication in an era where it seems like the practice of successful communication, especially in the political sphere, has never been worse. So clearly, either something is not trickling down from

academics or the theory is wrong or overlooked in the actual practice of political conversations. What do you think explains the fact that even though we might be more awash in scientific understanding of effective communications than we have that in previous decades? In fact, the practice of political communication flatly sucks and we are unbelievably polarized. Yeah, and I should say that like, you know, five or

6% conversion rate, that's when you're talking to someone who has already said that they're opposed to your ideological issue. So it's someone who says, I'm absolutely against gay marriage. You can convert 3 to 5% of them or 6% of them using this technique. So I think what's going on is a couple things. The first is that because political races have become so focused on the swing voter, and because right now there's so few swing voters, they have basically thrown out the obligation. Campaigns have thrown out the obligation to try and communicate with the average voter.

The presidential race is probably going to come down to, at most, 150,000 Americans living in like, you know, five or six or seven states. And I've talked, I'm sure you talked to them, too. I've talked to the people who are putting together the persuasion for those six or seven states, and they're very focused on this city cares about X. We've polled every single person we want to persuade.

It's very, very targeted. But now I live in Santa Cruz, California, and what's wonderful about living in a small community like this is that we have local races, where it's completely different. Like, people aren't set in their ways. It's not polarized. And the persuasion that happens there is very sophisticated. In part because people, politicians intuit that they need to be sophisticated. They meet with voters who ask serious questions, but also because a lot of the findings, like asking someone how they're going to vote and their plan for their vote, right? that's research that was in the late 90s, early 2000s, that's pretty commonplace now.

And most importantly, having these conversations where my goal is to understand you rather than to persuade you. And persuasion if it happens is great, but it's not the measure of success. That happens a lot more now on local races than it used to because we understand that's the only way you persuade someone. I also wonder whether a downside of the strategies that you write about in the book and the strategies that I believe to be successful when it comes to political persuasion, don't scale effectively. That is, what you were talking about, get two people in a room, one person asks a lot of neutral questions of another, builds one-to-one personal intimacy, and gradually they realize that their social identities around something like, you know,

the value of marriage, the value of stability in families, leads both sides to see the virtue of gay marriage, right? That's a, that's a, that's a, that's a, Maybe it's actually happened, but I'm just, I'm sort of making up that particular example. That's very difficult to scale. That means that in order to convince 100,000 people, you need 100,000 persuaders who are very adept at asking neutral questions and communicating empathy. Or at least 20,000 people who are willing to have multiple conversations over multiple ways. Okay, right. You can scale it that way.

And it seems like the way that politics is done today and the way that ideas move through the information landscape today is through the dynamics of, viral networks and people believe in conspiracy theories because they saw them on a phone because it came from a podcast that saw it on a newsletter that saw it from some other platform, right? And so it's an unbelievably depersonalized information landscape rather than one that is like the scenes in your book that show actual persuasion. And so I guess I'm trying to build toward a question here, but like the question is do the strategies in this book scale at all if you're a political operative trying to figure out how to swing boats? They do. They absolutely do.

But it shouldn't be somewhat hard to persuade large numbers of people, right? If they're, I mean, if people actually believe their beliefs, then I shouldn't be able to, like, find that one magic trick that gets everyone to suddenly think about, think gay marriage is okay. Right? Like, and prior to television and radio, if you look at political races, and frankly, prior to television, you saw this. You saw that people worked really hard. when Obama won, Obama fielded the largest field campaign in history, and they picked up votes in places where other people didn't even know voters were on the fence. That's how you win an election, and that should be how you win an election. That should be how you become president. It shouldn't

be that I can figure out a trick. Now, the question of how it scales, if we look to medicine, there's a really good example there, which, as you mentioned, is the vaccine, right, the COVID vaccine. there were a large number of people who refused to get the COVID vaccine because they believed that it was dangerous or they believed that it caused autism or they just didn't like what the government tells them to do. And the NIH initially came out and they said, look, to doctors, they told doctors, the way to handle this is just give them the facts, right? Like if you tell them what the science says, they'll end up getting the vaccine. And every single doctor who worked with these populations was like, absolutely not. They have all the facts. They have been researching on the internet for 40 hours.

They believe that they know everything. So how the persuasion technique changed is a change to this thing called motivational interviewing, which is exactly what we just said, where what I try and do is the goal of my conversation is to understand you and to elicit multiple identities that you possess. So for instance, you come into the office and you're anti-vax, and I'm going to ask a question. You know, why don't you want to get the vaccine? Just tell me what you think about it. oh, it's because it causes autism.

Okay, I'm not going to disagree with you. Instead, I'm going to say, you know, I notice also that you're a parent. And I'm wondering, like, for your kids at school, like, do you worry about their health at school? Like, how do you think about that? How do you handle that? Right. And then also, I notice that, like, you go to the same park I do. And you probably notice that there's that one person with that dog that's crazy, right?

Like, what do you think we should do about someone who won't control their dog, whose dog poses a risk? Now what I've done is I've introduced multiple identities into the conversation. I've recognized that you are multiple people. And inevitably, those multiple identities conflict with each other a little bit. They do for all of us, right? As a journalist I want to do one thing. As a parent, I want to do one thing. And as a brother, I want to do another thing.

And we're able to manage those complexities. We're able to find an answer. But if I say to you, you're an anti-vaxxer, or I'm a doctor, I'm the expert, then suddenly we're basically falling into stereotypes. And it's not about these complexities. It's about simplicity. And I just say, actually, I think your identity is bad. I'm not going to listen to it.

I want to close by tying this back to what I, again, think, is the central and most important takeaway of the book, which is that in order to have effective conversations, you first have to know what conversation you're having. And in the story that you just told about how doctors overruled the NIH, in a way, you could recast that story as saying the NIH wanted to have a practical conversation. They wanted to have a conversation about facts. And the doctors on the ground who understood their patient's resistance to the COVID vaccine said,

no, we, a practical conversation will not work. That's the wrong conversation to have. The right conversation to have might be an emotional conversation. We might want to understand the sort of emotional portfolio of someone who is resistant to get in the vaccine. But in fact, the most successful conversation to have, is a social identity conversation. You have one identity which is that you are a conservative who listens to Joe Rogan and distrust the medical establishment. Understood. Millions, tens of millions of people do the exact same. I'm a parent. Are you a parent? Okay, now you've shifted from one social

identity that is political and therefore somewhat inherently confrontational to a social identity that is communal and therefore somewhat inherently softer. People can have a conversation about it. And so there, the effective navigation between conversations, one, two, three, practical, emotional, and social leads at least to the highest possible batting average for converting people into getting the vaccine. There's no formula here. This is about raising batting averages from below to above the Mendoza line. And one doctor I talked to, she said that she would ask that question about being a parent. And then she'd say, oh, you know, I'm a parent too. And like you, I really care about worry about kids' safety.

And the thing I struggle with is sometimes these kids come in. and they haven't been vaccinated, and they're sick, and they ask for the vaccine, and I can't give it to them because I won't do anything at this point. Now, instead of having a question about whether Joe Rogan is like the person to listen to or Andy Fauci is the person to listen to, now we're talking about our own experiences, right? This is how I parent, and we have this in common,

and we both struggle with it. It's hard. Suddenly now we can cooperate on trying to figure out how the other person sees the world rather than trying to force them to see it our way. Charles Duhigg. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me on. You are, by the way, a super communicator. You're very good at it. Thank you, man. I appreciate it. Thank you for listening. Plain English is produced by Devin Biroldi. We've got new episodes every Tuesday and Friday.

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