Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - The Science of Effective Communication | Charles Duhigg

Episode Date: February 28, 2024

The four rules for a meaningful conversation, when to be vulnerable, and how to form the habits of becoming a supercommunicator.Charles Duhigg is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author of the bestselling The Power of Habit and Smarter Faster Better. His new book is called Supercommunicators.In this episode we talk about:How he defines super communicator The four rules for a meaningful conversation How and when to deploy vulnerability How to transform shallow questions in deep onesThe fast friends procedure And how to form the habits of becoming a supercommunicator Related Episodes:Dan Clurman and Mudita Nisker on communicationDaniel Goleman on emotional intelligence and optimal performanceSign up for Dan’s weekly newsletter hereFollow Dan on social: Instagram, TikTokTen Percent Happier online bookstoreSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelOur favorite playlists on: Anxiety, Sleep, Relationships, Most Popular EpisodesFor tickets to Dan Harris: Celebrating 10 Years of 10% Happier at Symphony Space: click hereFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/charles-duhiggAdditional Resources:Download the Ten Percent Happier app today: https://10percenthappier.app.link/installSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to 10% happier early and ad free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. Hey, Dan here. Before we start the show, I wanna tell you about a live recording of this podcast that we're doing in New York City on March 28th. I will be interviewing two frequent fliers

from this show, the legendary meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein, who will be just coming off a three month solo silent meditation retreat, and Dr. Mark Epstein, a Buddhist therapist and bestselling author. The event will actually be a celebration of the 10th anniversary of my first book, 10% Happier, and a percentage of the proceeds

will go to the New York Insight Meditation Center. Come early if you want for a VIP guided meditation and Q&A with me. Thanks to our friends over at Audible for sponsoring this show and the event. Tickets on sale right now at symphonyspace.org. 10% happier podcast, I'm Dan Harris. Hello everybody, how we doing? Whether you like it or not, if you want to get stuff done in this world, you need to be able to communicate effectively

with other human beings. If you want to sell somebody something, if you want them to do something for you, if you want to convince them to see things your way, you usually need to be able to talk about it. This is true at work with your family and pretty much anytime you come in contact with another homo sapien. The stakes are high here. As I have said a million times, we are social creatures, we evolved for interpersonal contact, and if you can't do that effectively, you are likely to struggle and suffer in your life. The good news is that increasingly scientists are studying how to communicate better, what works and what doesn't. Even better news, one of the finest journalists of our age,

Charles Duhigg, is now out with a whole book where he dives into said research and describes in very lucid terms how to deploy it in your life, how to become what he calls a super communicator. Charles is a writer at The New Yorker magazine. Before that, he was at The New York Times. He wrote a massive bestseller called The Power of Habit, which is all about the science of habit formation. And he followed that up with a book about the science of productivity called Smarter, Faster, Better.

And his latest book is called Super Communicators. In this conversation, we talked about how he defines a super communicator, the four rules for a meaningful conversation, how and when to deploy vulnerability, how to transform shallow questions into deep ones, the fast friends procedure, and how to form the habits that are necessary in order to become a super communicator. When you visit Audible, there are endless ways to ignite your imagination. With over 750,000 titles, including bestsellers, there's a listen for every type of listener.

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Hello, I am Alice Levine and I am one of the hosts of Wondries podcast British Scandal. On our latest series The Race to Ruin, we tell the story of a British man who took part in the first ever round-the-world sailing race. Good on him I hear you say, but there is a problem as there always is in this show. The man in question hadn't actually sailed before. Oh, and his boat wasn't sea worthy. Oh, and also tiny little detail almost didn't mention it. He bet his family home on making it to the finish line. Wattenseud was one of the most complex cheating plots in British sporting history.

To find out the full story, follow British Scandal wherever you listen to podcasts, or listen early and ad-free on Wondry Plus on Apple Podcasts or the Wondry app. Charles Duhigg, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me on. I consider it a major oversight, a form of malpractice that we have not had you on thus far. Because you've written books, your new book is about communication, we're gonna talk about that a lot,

but you've written about productivity and habit formation, and those are things that this show cares about a lot. So... Well, I was a big fan of your book. I'm a tremendous fan, actually, and I use the app regularly, so it's a real treat to come and spend some time with you. Well, thank you for saying that, I'm a tremendous fan actually, and I use the app regularly, so it's a real treat to come and spend some time with you.

Well, thank you for saying that, I appreciate it. So how did you get to this subject of communication? It's not necessarily a clean shot from habits and productivity in the tech world to communication, although maybe I'm just not seeing it. Well, I think there was a couple of things that happened. The first is that I had written about habit formation and about sort of where real productivity comes from. And both of those are very internal, right?

It's about looking at yourself. But the more time I spent in the world, the more I realized, a lot of the work that we have to do is on ourself, but 80% of the time that we spend is with other people. And the ways that we relate to other people have enormous impacts on our happiness and on our health and in how we move through the world. I also had this situation I don't think is uncommon, which is I often found that I was coming home from work and I'd had a bad day and I would turn to my wife and I would start complaining about my day. I'd start, you know, my boss is a jerk and my coworkers don't appreciate me and my wife very

Rationally and practically would say oh, you know, let's solve this problem Like why don't you invite your your boss out to lunch and you guys can get to know each other a little bit better And what I should have done is said that's great advice But what I did every time instead is I would have this instinct to be like, to get even angrier or say like, you're not listening to me and I want you to be outraged on my behalf and then she would get frustrated. And I had similar experiences at work

where I became a manager and did a bad job of communicating with others. And I began to wonder, there must be this science to communication and I wanted to understand it. So that was kind of where it came from. The science to communication. So there is a body of research here? There absolutely is. And in fact, in the last 10 years, we are living through a golden age of understanding communication and conversation and connection in a way that we never have before. And one of the big insights that really shaped how I thought about this is when I was talking

to neurologists and I was telling them about this problem with my wife and they would say, well, the mistake you're making here is that most of us think of a discussion as being about one thing, right, where we're talking about where to go to dinner or on vacation. And what they said was, that's actually wrong. That each discussion is actually made up

of multiple different kinds of conversations. And most of them fall into one of three buckets. There's practical conversations, which are about sort of decision making, about trying to figure out what we actually want to discuss. There are emotional conversations, where the goal is not to solve the problem,

but simply to tell you how I'm feeling about the problem, see you acknowledge those feelings, and then share with me your feelings. And then there's social conversations where we're talking about how we relate to other people and how we relate to society. And they said, one of the things that happens a lot is that two people will be in the same discussion and be having different kinds of conversations. So when I came home from work and I was upset, I was having an emotional conversation and my wife responded, again, very reasonably, with a practical conversation. She responded by, let's figure out how to solve this problem. And because we weren't having the same kind of conversation at the same

time, we failed to connect with each other. And that's where the miscommunication comes from. And when I heard that sort of the simple formula for thinking about how to connect with another person, suddenly I was like, oh, I understand why this science is important. I've had the same fight with my wife. And I've also been the person doing what our wives have done. I've been on both sides of this. And I'm sure many people listening can empathize.

Just to put a, you know, hang a lantern on the three kinds of conversations. Cause I think that's really important. It's a big theme in your book. And I don't want it to just slip by people. The three kinds are first, what is this really about? The second, how do we feel? And the third is, who are we? Can you just walk us through these three again because this seems really central?

It is. It's foundational to what we've learned in the last decade. The practical conversation, that what's this really about is a discussion where the two of us are trying to figure out what we actually want out of this conversation. And then if that's fairly simple, like making a plan or a decision to go ahead and make a plan and a decision together, to figure out what kind of logic we're going to use to make choices together. Most conversations start with what's this really about. Because oftentimes when you sit down to talk with someone, you don't have a formal agenda. You haven't sort of said like, I'd like to talk about finances and then I'd like to talk about, you know,

our feelings about last night's TV show. So there's a little negotiation actually referred to in psychology literature as a quiet negotiation about what are we going to talk about? And also, what are the rules that we'll implicitly agree upon? Can we interrupt each other? Is this something where we can be casual or do we need to be formal? Can we make jokes? So that's the first conversation. The second conversation is the emotional conversation. How do we feel? And this is a very different conversation because the goal here is not to come to an agreement together.

It's to express how we ourselves as an individual are feeling to the other person. And what's important is that we need to see them acknowledge that feeling and then even better if they want to, to share their feelings back with us. And then there's the third type of conversation, which is the social conversation. Who are we? And this is a conversation that's a little bit harder to recognize, but it happens all the time, where I come into a conversation

and I feel like my background gives me a different perspective than your background. And I wanna explain how my background made me who I am, or I wanna talk about other people and how we relate to other people, or I wanna gossip about the office and what's going on there. Those are conversations about how we relate to society

and how society relates to us and how we relate to other people and they relate to us. And that's a conversation about who are we that's different from the other two kinds of conversations. All these conversations are important and good, but what's important is to be having the same kind of conversation at the same time. How do you do that? Because that seems tricky.

Yeah, it's an interesting question. Like, how do we actually make this happen? And the answer is something that's known as the matching principle, which basically says that you have two jobs in every conversation. The first is to actually pay attention to what the other person wants to talk about. And then the second job is to either match them or invite them to match you. So for instance, let's say we get into a conversation. It's a work meeting, let's say. And right off the bat, someone says, okay, look, the goal here is to figure out next year's budget. Okay, it seems like this is a practical conversation, right? But the next person who speaks says, yeah, I want to talk about next year's budget. Okay, it seems like this is a practical conversation, right? But the next person who speaks says,

yeah, I wanna talk about next year's budget because I'm really worried about layoffs and I don't wanna have any layoffs. And then someone else says, yeah, my people are really, really anxious about the layoffs. Like we gotta figure out if we're gonna have layoffs. That's a signal that people aren't actually here initially for a practical conversation.

They're here for an emotional conversation because they're using emotional words like worried and anxious. Training ourselves to pick up on these small little clues about what kind of conversation is occurring allows us to match that person and say back to them, I hear that you're worried and I hear that you're anxious and let's talk about how to mitigate those anxieties

and how to deal with our employees when they're really panicked. And then we can get on to figuring out the actual budget and whether we have to have these layoffs. As a super communicator, what I've done there is I've said, I want to match you. And then I'm going to invite you to match me because at some point we got to talk about the budget. You mentioned super communicator. I want to get to that term in a second. But since we're on the matching principle, is it just about picking up on the words people use or can it be something about body language? Absolutely. Body language is critical, right? Paying attention to the expressions on their face, the tone of their voice, to what you hear. That's incredibly important. And in fact, the other big discovery in the science

is that when we connect with each other, when we're having a genuine conversation, something incredible happens in our bodies. If we could measure it like during this conversation, what we would see is that your pupils and my pupils start dilating at the same rate. The electrical impulses along our skin will start to match each other.

And most importantly, our brains will start to look like each other. That's what communication is, it's known as neural entrainment. The goal of communication is to take an idea in my head or a feeling in my head and help you understand it, help you feel it. And when that works, our brains begin to start looking alike.

And in that moment, as we become nearly entrained, we really connect and understand each other. It is. I think about this a lot, and I apologize if anybody listening has heard me say this, but words escape my mouth hole and jump over an unfathomable chasm to your ears. And then they're cut with your childhood, your biases, your political beliefs, your mood. And it's a miracle that we ever are clearly understood. It's amazing, isn't it?

That like, and we do it like for hours and hours a day without even thinking about it. Yes. Yes. What's interesting is that you and I are both making literally hundreds of small choices as we're communicating with each other. And we're almost completely unaware of those choices because we've evolved to have this capacity.

Humans super power is communication. That's what sets us apart from every other species in a way that's allowed us to thrive. And it's amazing. Yes, and it's amazing that, given that this is our superpower, this is a defining feature of our species, we need it to get through the world.

It's amazing that we suck at it so badly and nobody teaches us how to fucking do it. It's as if like Superman came to Earth and he was like, well, 30% of the time when I jump in the air, I can fly, but 70% of the time I just fall on my face. Exactly. You need that instruction book, right?

And that's what science has tried to figure out in the last decade. And I know in some schools they teach what's called social and emotional learning, which is based in part on some of Daniel Goldman's work about emotional intelligence. And Danny's good friend has been on the show a bunch of times. We'll put some links to his conversations in the show notes. And Danny's work is, of course, based on research done in the halls of academia. So I know that some schools get social and emotional learning, but I certainly coming

up never got taught how to have a successful conversation. And I'm not sure most kids these days are getting that conversation. We've created a world in fact for kids that drives them further into their own information silos and away from connection. Well you're exactly right. That this isn't being taught yet the way that it should be. And that's one of the reasons I wrote super communicators is because I was hoping that we could reignite an interest

in learning how to communicate and have conversations across divides. Another thing that America's gotten worse at over the last couple of years. But there's a simple way, I think, to bring this to kids or to anyone who's listening, which is, and I'll ask you this question, Dan.

So if you have had a bad day, like you're in a terrible mood or you got some bad news and you wanna call someone who will make you feel better, do you know who that person is? Yeah. Okay, who is it? Notwithstanding what I said earlier about having had the same fight

you had with your wife, with my wife, that person is my wife. Yeah. Yeah. And no, let me ask you a couple of questions. And I'm sure your wife is wonderful. Is a wonderful woman. However, is she the funniest person you know? Like if you had to do a comedy show, would you definitely ask her? No. No. But does she laugh a lot when she's funniest person you know? Like if you had to do a comedy show, would you definitely ask her? No, no. But does she laugh a lot when she's talking to you? Yeah, and my guess is that many of the times that she's laughing, it's not in response to something funny.

It's in response to wanting to create an emotional connection or in trying to show you that she wants to connect with you. So here's another question. I'm sure, you know, I'm sure that she is good at talking to people, but is she the best interviewer, you know, like if you were to put her up against your journalism colleagues? When I see her in conversation as a human, not technically interviewing somebody, she can bring information out of people and make them comfortable. So it sounds like she's a super communicator,

not just with you, but with other people. And again, if we were to study how she's communicating with you and others in those situations, what we would see is that she's asking up to 10 times as many questions as everyone else in the conversation. And oftentimes we don't even register it because a lot of the questions are things like, oh that's interesting, tell me more.

Or what did you think about that? Or why did that happen? There are these little questions that invite you to tell her more about who you are. And there's a handful of principles that the super communicators can do. And the important thing to recognize is that all of us are super communicators at one time or another. Your wife is a super communicator with you and you are with her. The difference is that there are some people

who have thought about this a little bit more deeply, who have practiced it a little bit more and they can be super communicators whenever they want to be. Cause oftentimes when it happens in our life, it just sort of, it feels like chance, right? Like either we know someone so well, or we walk into a meeting and we know exactly what to say,

but then we walk into another meeting and we can't persuade anyone. Super communicators are people who consistently can do this because they've thought about how conversations work. They've learned to pick up on those cues. They've learned to ask more questions and laugh more. And any of us can learn to do that. I wholeheartedly agree with you.

It's it can be an incredibly skillful way to move through the world, to ask sincere questions. And yet I have found that sometimes people will say, are you interviewing me? And so what am I doing wrong in those cases? Because I feel like I'm taking this principle and misusing it sometimes. I think those of us who are journalists

fall into this a lot, right? And it's actually because it makes us feel comfortable in a situation that might be hard. So there's two things I would say. The first is what's important is the kinds of questions you're asking. And within psychology, there's this thing known as deep questions.

And a deep question is something that asks the other person to describe their values, their beliefs, or their experiences. And these deep questions can be super casual and easy to ask. They don't appear deep. So for instance, you spent a lot of your time podcasting. Do you love doing this podcast or does it feel like a chore? 75% of the time I love it.

Yeah, why's that? Because I get to talk to people like you who are fascinating. So that was a kind of casual question. That was an easy question to ask, but it was a deep question because you just told me something really insightful about you, which is that first of all,

you do this thing that you love, but you only love it 75% of the time, right? You recognize that there's parts of it that you don't love. And number two, I just learned something about your values, which is you value interesting conversations, you value being able to connect with other people. You revealed something about yourself. Now, the way that I make it feel like not an interview

is to share similarly something about myself. And to say, you know, it's interesting you mention that because I'm a writer for The New Yorker and I write books and I, like you, I love most of the activity. But then there's some parts of it that I just find terrifying and hard and that make me feel bad about myself when a chapter isn't going well. And by sharing that with you, I've given you a chance to see who I really am, right?

That I'm someone who can be honest enough to say, like, I get scared when I'm writing. And obviously the fact that I'm mentioning that means that writing is so important to me. So those deep questions that can be really easy to ask and can be as simple as saying, what do you make of that? Like, oh, you, I grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico. You grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Did you like growing up there? Deep questions are a way to draw out who the other person is and what kind of conversation they're looking for. And then when we respond in a similar vein, what we're doing is we're creating that connection and that's what makes it feel like not an interview, but a conversation. At least one thing you're pointing to in all of the foregoing is that these strategies or techniques, whatever you want to call them, can be very skillful, asking questions, dropping in little anecdotes about yourself.

But they can also be unskillful because if you ask too many of the wrong kind of questions or if you talk too much about yourself at the wrong time, you don't read the room, and all of it can at some point start to feel a little technique-y like you're programmed because you read this book and you're trying to do this stuff and it comes off as a little cultish and awkward. And so these are great skills, but they have to be skillfully deployed. Oh, another way I put it is they have to be practiced a little bit, and then you will automatically stop thinking about them.

The book has a bunch of stories in it of different situations where people have used these tools and learned different things. One of them is about this trial. We go into the jury room to listen. They actually recorded the jury deliberations, which has only happened about five or six times in American history. And what's interesting is that there's this one guy who is a super communicator,

who everyone else doesn't actually like. They're talking about whether this gentleman should go to jail for carrying around a gun, and everyone in the room is either stay at home moms or they work in factories. And this guy is a university professor who studies Derrida. So like he's a total outlier in this group

and everyone else, I talked to some of the jurors, they were like, yeah, I didn't trust this guy at first. Like he seemed just too weird to me. And what's interesting is he doesn't talk that much, but when he talks, you can now recognize that it's deliberate, that he has thought about what he wants to say and how he wants to influence or impact other people. And as a result, as you're watching

this jury deliberation unfold, almost invisibly to everyone in the room, this guy dips in and he helps bring everyone to a consensus by listening closely and understanding what kind of conversations other people are asking for, by matching them and inviting them to match him. He only speaks about 7-6% of the entire deliberation, but his comments aren't so impactful that it changes everyone else's mind.

And I talked to him and he said, you know, I didn't really think about it that way. It just felt natural to do this. But it's because he had spent time thinking about conversation because he had practiced it in conversations with his wife or his friends that it became natural and intuitive. And in many ways, that's the goal of the book and of life is to let these instincts that we have,

these intuitions to let them come to the fore. Because very often, particularly in contemporary society, there are things that conspire against those instincts, that make us mistrustful of our intuitions. But the more we learn to listen to those, the more the natural capacity for communication comes out. You've used this term super communicator many times and I have yet to, speaking of malpractice, give you an opportunity to define it. So let's do it now. As I mentioned, all of us are super communicators, right? There are times that you have a conversation and you walk away feeling wonderful. You feel like you really connected to the person or

you walk into work and you know exactly what to say to your boss in order to get them on board with your plan or give you a raise. Those moments when we really connect with other people, those are moments of super communication. And there are some people, as I mentioned, who can do this more consistently. So you mentioned that you would call your wife. When I have a really bad day, I call this guy named Greg. The thing about Greg is that he's not the most insightful friend. He's insightful, but not like, he's not like an oracle.

And he's not the funniest friend, and he's not the most successful friend. But every time I talk to him, I just feel better about myself and the world. He is a super communicator, and he can do this with anyone. It's like this magic power that he has. He is a super communicator because he is thought enough about communication till it's become an instinct and second nature to draw someone out and help them see the best parts of themselves. It's not a technical definition, but a super communicator is someone who has thought enough about communication to know how to recognize what kind of conversation

is happening and then match other people and invite them to match themselves so that we really feel connected to them. And your contention is that anybody can train themselves? Absolutely. There's another story in the book about a CIA officer who on his first posting is like just screwing up the job completely. He's about to get fired and then he manages to recruit one overseas operative during this dinner.

And the way he does it is by basically giving up, just being like, I have no idea what I'm doing here. I'm just going to be honest with you. I'm really, really sorry that I've been harassing you for weeks. And that inspires her to trust him and she becomes one of the best assets in the Middle East. The reason why that's important is because that guy went on

to actually become a trainer inside the CIA and train other agents and intelligence officers had to do this. And what he found was with just about six weeks of classes, anyone could become a super communicator. I talked to one woman who had trained under him and she was like, I'm an introvert, I don't like people. I basically became an analyst

and they forced me into the field. I felt awkward all the time. And he just taught me like some simple lessons and I would just repeat them in my head. And it was like magic. It was like I could communicate with anyone. We all know how to become super communicators once we're given the right instructions.

Coming up, Charles Duhigg talks about the four rules for a meaningful conversation and how and when to deploy vulnerability. I'm Afwa Hirsh. I'm Peter Frankopane. And in our podcast, Legacy, we explore the lives of some of the biggest characters in history. This season, we delve into the life of Mikhail Gorbachev. This season has everything.

It's got political ideology. It's got nuclear Armageddon. It's got love story. It's got betrayal. It's got economic collapse. One ingredient that you left out, legacy. Was he someone who helped make the world a better place, saved us all from all of those terrible things?

Or was he about who created the problems and the challenges of many parts of the world today? And it's not necessarily just a question of our making. There is a real life binary in how his legacy is perceived. In the West, he's considered a hero. And in Russia, it's a bit of a different picture. So join us on Legacy for Mikhail Gorbachev. legacy is perceived in the West he's considered a hero and in Russia it's a bit of a different picture. So join us on legacy for Mikhail Gorbachev. a quick reminder that the free basics course in the 10% Happier App features my meditation teacher

and great friend Joseph Goldstein, who will also be appearing live with me at Symphony Space in New York City on March 28th. Go to symphonyspace.org for tickets and download the 10% Happier App today wherever you get your apps. All right, so let's dive into some of the instructions. Okay.

What are the four rules for a meaningful conversation? So the four rules for a meaningful conversation are first of all, figure out what kind of conversation is happening, right? Look for some clues that indicate to you where the other person's head is at, what they wanna talk about. And the best way to do that is to ask those deep questions.

Simply ask something that asks the other person to talk about their background, their beliefs, their experiences, their values. When they do that, they're going to give you a hint about whether they're in a practical state of mind, an emotional state of mind, or a social state of mind. Once you get that out of the way, and you know what kind of conversation and you've matched each other, then at some point you need to nudge that into emotional territory if you're not already there. You need to ask the other person, this is step number two, how they feel and then you need to acknowledge what they have told you and share something about how you feel. The reason why this is important is because there's this thing that happens inside our brains. It's been hardwired by evolution. When someone else shares with us something that appears vulnerable, we cannot help but

listen to them. And when we share something vulnerable back, we will feel closer to each other, even if we're enemies, even if we have nothing in common, this emotional contagion makes us feel closer to each other. The third step of that conversation is to figure out what each person wants from this discussion. You know, we sit down and we're having a beer together over a hamburger. And in the back of my mind should be this little question. So Dan's meeting with me,

is it just because he wants to be social and catch up? Or is there something he wants to get off his chest? Or does he have a problem that he's trying to solve? And so the way that we do that is we engage in this quiet negotiation. We try experiments. While you're talking, I might laugh and interrupt and see how you react. And I'm going to pay attention to how you react. And that might tell me whether laughing and interruptions is the way that we're gonna communicate with each other or if this should be more formal, that's not appropriate. I'm gonna ask you a question and then as you're answering it, I might remain quiet even after you've stopped speaking

to show that I'm thinking about it. And again, I'm gonna pay attention to how you're reacting to that, to try and figure out what are the rules that you're looking for in this conversation. That's the third step, doing these little experiments. And just because an experiment fails doesn't mean that it's a failure. If every experiment succeeds, then you're not doing science right. These little experiments are to figure out, what do you want from this conversation? What do I want from this conversation? Cause I might not know at first. And what are the rules that we're going to implicitly agree on for how we relate to each other.

Then the fourth step is that at some point we need to take this out of just ourselves and we need to make it part of a bigger conversation about how we relate to other people. So perhaps you're talking about a problem you have. And then I ask, when this happens at work, or when this happens with your wife, how is it different? And when you start talking about that,

what you're telling me about is you're telling me about how you see yourself as a member of society and how you relate to other people. And what's really important is that I acknowledge that, particularly if there's differences. Oftentimes if we're in a conversation, we feel like we should ignore the differences or paper over them.

But if you are black and I am white and we're talking about something like criminal justice, your experiences are very different from mine. The way you relate to society is very different. And if I don't acknowledge that, it feels like I'm not really seeing you. Even something as simple as saying, you grew up in a two parent household

and I grew up in a one parent household and so we might see this a little bit differently, but here's my take on parenting. And then the other person saying like, thank you for sharing that with me, you're right. I think that if I'd grown up in a one parent household, it would have been different. Or that's interesting, for for letting me know that

That's the social conversation. That's the fourth step And if you do those four things you're gonna walk away from that discussion and it doesn't have to take a lot of time It can take like, you know seven minutes, but if you do those four things You are going to walk away from that conversation feeling like you've understood the other person they've understood the other person, they've understood you, and like you actually feel close. And there's one element that we haven't discussed. It's equally important to show the other person that you're listening.

Oftentimes when someone is talking, we might look at them and like stare into their eyes and show our interest on our face. But talking is such a cognitively complex activity, we usually don't notice what the other person is doing, right? We're just focused on like, what next word should come out of my mouth? And so the way that we show this, that we want to connect, is that when someone stops talking,

we prove to them that we were listening by saying something like, what I heard you say was, or it's interesting you mentioned that because I've had something similar in my life. Conversations that have a lot of conflict where it's really tense, there's a whole chapter in the book

about these conversations between gun owners and gun control advocates. Because this group wanted to bring them together to have productive conversations. And what they found was that if they trained them in just one thing called looping for understanding that in a conflict conversation, if I do three things, I first ask you a question,

I repeat back in my own words what I heard you say. And then thirdly, I ask you if I got it right. If I do those three things, almost inevitably you are going to believe that I'm listening to you, that I wanna understand. And then we can't help it, you are going to listen to me in return. Looping for understanding.

So that is a key technique if you're in conflict. Yeah, yeah. And conflict can mean like having a tough conversation, right, like or talking about something where you don't see eye to eye, but particularly if you're in a fight with someone, if you're at the office and you have a foe at the office, if you do looping for understanding,

the relationship's to get better. There are lots of different terminologies here for context. We've done many interviews on the show about the skill of communication. And I've been working for four or five years with these communication coaches who I've talked about a lot on the show, Dan Clerman and Mudita Nisker. They have something called reflective listening, which you just talked about as part two in looping for understanding, which is just to say back to somebody,

what you've heard in your own words. And I have found that to be perhaps the single most powerful communication tool I've ever encountered. That's really interesting. When is that useful? Like what kind of conversation are you having where repeating back, reflecting

what you've heard really seems to make a difference? It's useful in every context. We've just finished talking about meaningful conversations and then conversations where there's disagreement or potential conflict. And not all conversations fall into either of those buckets.

But reflective listening, I have found, works in any kind of conversation because it speaks to a primordial need that we all have that we may not even be aware of, which is we want to be understood. You can reflect back to somebody in any context, and some part of them is deeply satisfied, and they may not know you're doing it.

No, and even if they do know you're doing it, they still like it, right? Like just cause someone gives us a compliment and we know that they're trying to win us over, that doesn't mean that we enjoy the compliment any less. We still like being praised. Can I ask you a question? You are a professional communicator

and it's actually interesting to me that you've been working with communication consultants and experts. What did you see in your own life that suggested to you like, I need to know more about this. I need someone to help me get better at this. Well it was suggested to me that I needed to get better at this. Oh, was it? Yes. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. I am a professional communicator.

I was trained as a broadcaster, so I'm reasonably good at sitting in front of a camera and talking to invisible millions and parting information in a lucid manner to them. That's quite a bit different than one-on-one communication or small group communication. And in those settings, I was often boorish and bullheaded and it was pointed out to me that I needed to, you know, I came up in broadcast news which was very much a star based system, not that I was ever at the level of being a true star,

but I was, you know, surrounded by people like Ted Koppel and Peter Jennings and Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer. Some of them were actually very good communicators, but there was an ethos of, you shut up and do it, I tell you. I think incorporated a little bit too much of that into my personal style. And why do you think you did that? Like if you were to take me back to

before somebody said to you, you got to work on this. What were they seeing that you weren't seeing and what was motivating them on your behalf? Well, what's communicated to me was that there was an impatience and a dismissiveness and an insistence on having it my own way. And why was I doing that? I think in part because of the environment I grew up in, but I think a lot of it was very much part of my preexisting personality.

I think all of us to some degree have an inner tyrant. Mine was reasonably prominent and it doesn't take much looking up the family tree to see where I got that. So yeah, I think I came by it honestly in several ways. So what I hear you saying, and tell me if I'm getting this wrong, is that you had these instincts.

You had these instincts to kind of be a dogmatic communicator or a monarchical communicator. And then you went into this environment where you were actually rewarded for that, right? Because if you're sitting at a desk talking to a camera and you seem authoritative, everyone thinks you're brilliant and you're surrounded by other people

who we think of as being good communicators. And it turns out some of them weren't great communicators on a one-on-one level. And then did you have to unlearn that? Like with the process of working with these experts, was it unlearning things or was it appreciating new behaviors? Well, first of all, that was great reflection.

Thanks. It's a little obvious when we've just talked about it. It feels a little bit more clumsy. Well, so I sometimes get just to, I'm gonna answer your question in a second, but just to pick up on what you just said, I sometimes get in my head about, you know, talking to people in my world who know

that I'm a proponent of reflective listening and know that I'm likely to do it. I will sometimes apologize before I do it and people are like, don't apologize, I love this shit. You know, like, so I don't care for using a technique on me, it's great. Having said that, the question you asked was, did I have to unlearn behavior or new, or learn new behaviors? And I think it was probably both, but much more

the latter. It was once I learned a few skills and started practicing them enough and failing a bunch, and then eventually having a few isolated successes and practice and practice and practice and seeing how it just revolutionized the interactions I was having throughout the day, it just became a self-fulfilling cycle. So I wanna point out two important things that just happened. The first is that you shared something vulnerable

about yourself, right? You told me about something you did badly, that you felt bad about. And that's not like telling me your bank account number or the time that you cried last. But sharing that vulnerability is really, really important because, and again, this is hardwired into a brain. I can't help but like you a little bit more or more importantly, trust you a little bit more. And then if I share something vulnerable in response, you can't help but feel like we are connected on some level.

This is actually just a pro-social instinct that's encoded into our brains. The second thing that happened is that you told me something kind of important about how you move through the world, which is that I heard you say, I often learn about myself by talking to other people, that by experimenting with these different techniques, by paying attention to how they influence other people,

how these conversations go, there's some people who they have to sit down and think about something and write it out with themselves before they know how they feel about it. And then there's other people, and communicators are usually these in this group, who learn how they feel about something and learn about that thing by talking about it with other people.

And you've actually said to me, I'm not only someone who's social, I'm someone who, being social is very important because it helps me understand the world and myself. And both of those things are pieces of information that help us connect. Cause now I know what you wanna talk about. I know that if you bring up an idea, it's maybe because you wanna talk through that idea. Like we can disagree with each other a little bit

and you'll find that interesting as do I because it's in the disagreement that we might see something about ourselves that we didn't know before. That's really interesting. Let me ask you, though, about vulnerability. Vulnerability can be misused or clumsily done. And I've talked about this before with Brene Brown,

who has the well-deserved title of the principal proponent of vulnerability in our culture. What say you about how and when to deploy vulnerability and when not to? So it's a great question. And we should make clear that communication is a tool and like any tool, it can be used for good or bad, right? An axe can chop down a tree and create firewood or it can chop into someone's neck and kill another person.

And what's really important is not the tool itself, it's the wielder of that tool. There are plenty of people who are very talented at seeming vulnerable because they want to manipulate you. What's important for us is two things. I think first of all, to make that vulnerability authentic. If you mentioned that your mom has passed away or you mentioned that you had a child who was seriously ill,

it's not authentic for me to say like, oh, I understand what that's like because I've had an ill child, because I haven't. It's also not authentic for me to steal the spotlight from you and say like, oh, let me tell you all about my aunt and when she got sick. The vulnerability for it to work, it has to be authentic, and then it has to feel authentic too.

And part of communication is this kind of meta thinking, right? Where we're having a discussion, but also observing the conversation a little bit. And when somebody seems vulnerable and it doesn't feel authentic to you, it's good to listen to that. And it's going to happen. It's going to happen. The number one thing though is to not force it. Not force it from yourself, but to allow it to authentically emerge. So maybe even to monitor yourself when you, I might feel,

I've been criticized on this show for, especially early on, for making it too much about myself. So I do try to monitor and yet I know sometimes people want to it too much about myself. So I do try to monitor, and yet I know sometimes people want to hear me talk about myself, but I try to be very careful about when I'm gonna say something revealing and whether I'm deploying that skill skillfully. Does that make sense?

Yeah, so when I ask you about your background, it's very natural for you to be authentically vulnerable with me, right? I've shown you that I'm interested in it. I wanna learn about it. But you're right, probably when people were critical of it, it's because the guest said something vulnerable and then you stepped on that vulnerability

by sharing something about yourself that maybe is related or maybe isn't related or that felt like you were stealing the spotlight from them and their problem onto your own problem, and that feels inauthentic. Even if it feels genuine to you, it seems inauthentic. And so the number one thing when it comes to vulnerability is don't try and reflect the other person's circumstance,

try and reflect their feelings. So if you say, you know, I had a child and then my child was second, we've been at the hospital. My vulnerable response is to say, oh my gosh, that sounds so hard. I'm sure I would be terrified if I was in your situation. Now, I haven't stepped on your story. I haven't tried to steal the spotlight. I haven't told you all about the sick people I know in my life, but by reflecting back your emotion, I've proven to you that I'm listening

and I've exposed something about myself. That's all it takes. Coming up, Charles Duhigg talks about other techniques in his book, including the fast friends procedure, how to transform shallow questions into deep ones and how to form the habits in order to become a super communicator.

Hi, I'm Anna. And I'm Emily. We're the hosts of Wanderer's podcast Terabbe Famous, a show where we bring you outrageous true stories about our most famous celebrities. And our latest season is all about the one and only Katie Price. You might think you know her, you might have an opinion, but there is way more to the former glamour model than just her cup size. Yes, this is a woman who's gone from pin-up to

publishing sensation. We all have teenage dreams and for Katie it was simple, massive fame and everlasting love. I just wanted to kiss a boy. Just one boy. Well she does kiss a few boys but there are plenty of bumps along the way and when I say bumps I mean terrible boyfriend choices, secret dates with spiky haired pop stars and a tabloid press that wants to tear her apart at every opportunity. And she surprises even herself when suddenly she becomes a role model for a whole new generation of young women who want to be just like her. Want to hear more? Follow Terribly Famous wherever you listen to podcasts or listen early and add free on Wondery

Plus on Apple Podcasts or the Wondery App. Today, hip-hop dominates pop culture, but it wasn't always like that. And to tell the story of how that changed, I want to take you back to a very special year in rap. 88, it was too much good music. The world was on fire. I'm Will Smith. This is Class of 88, my new podcast about the moments, albums, and artists that inspired a sonic revolution and secured 1988 as one of hip hop's most important years.

We'll talk to the people who were there. And most of all, we'll bring you some amazing stories. You know what my biggest memory from that tour is? It was your birthday. Yes, and you brought me to Shoddy, Lifesize, Hard Work Cutout. This is Class of 88, the story of a year that changed hip hop. Follow Class of 88 on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Let me ask about a few other techniques that you describe in the book. What is the fast

friends procedure? The fast friends procedure. I the book. What is the fast friends procedure? The fast friends procedure, I love this. This is an experiment that was done by these two psychology professors who were married. And their basic question was they wanted to try and figure out how can we make strangers feel closer to each other? Like how can we make them feel like they wanna be friends?

So they found dozens and dozens of people and they would bring them into a room, just two of them, and ask them to have an hour-long conversation. And what they did is they gave them a list of questions, 36 questions. And the way it worked was that you would ask a question of the other person, they would answer it, and then they would ask that same question of you

and you'd go back and forth and do this. The big part of the experiment is that people walk out of that room after an hour and this is pre-internet. So it's not like it's easy to like find each other online. They walk out of that room and the experimenters say, okay, thanks, like, catch you later, you know, go your separate ways. And then seven weeks afterwards, they follow up with everyone who had been in those rooms and they ask them one question. Did you seek out the person you were in that conversation with? Now for most of us, if we walk into a room and we have a crazy conversation with a stranger,

we're going to be like, that was a good experience, but I'm never going to see this person again. Instead they found that 70% of the people in those rooms sought out the other person. They looked them up in the phone book. They would walk around campus looking for them. They would go out to beers together. They would see movies together. Three people ended up getting married to the person that they met in this experiment. And the reason why it worked is because the questions were deep questions.

It created a sense of closeness to ask someone deep questions about their background, their values, their beliefs. When we are asked that, and then the other person responds similarly, it's impossible not to feel closer to each other. And I will say, you can look at the times at a piece, the 36 questions that lead to love.

You can find them online and they're wonderful questions. I do them in the car with my kids. They're really just fantastic questions. But the key is to go back and forth and then to reflect on what the other person has said and what it means to you. Now in real life, the questions are things like, you know, tell me about your mother or when's the last time you cried

in front of another person, right? Or what's your biggest mistake? Let's say you're on a first date. If you lead off a first date with like, tell me about the last time you cried in front of another person, it's not gonna go well, right? These questions are really useful

with someone we already know, or in a laboratory setting. But it turns out that these questions, a fast friends protocol, there are versions of them that work in real life. And the way that they work in real life is to usually ask a simple question and then follow up by trying to make it deep,

such as, what do you do for a living? I'm a lawyer. Do you love practicing law? Did you always wanna be a lawyer? When did you decide to go to law school? And then when they say, you know, I decided to become a lawyer because I saw my dad getting harassed by the cops and I wanted to help fight that.

If I say something like, you know, it's really interesting that you mentioned that because I decided to become a journalist because I saw my dad do X and Y and Z. That's a way for us to start establishing this relationship and to feel close to each other. You've touched on the subject of deep questions many times during the course of this interview. Can you just say a little bit more about, tactically, how we can learn how to transform,

I guess, shallow questions into deep questions? There's a guy named Nick Epley, who's a professor at the University of Chicago, who's spent his whole life working on deep questions. And he actually got to it because he got pulled over in high school, he got pulled over for a DUI twice. His parents would lecture him and his teachers would lecture him and the cops would lecture him. He was basically about to like destroy his life, right?

And so his parents sent him to the psychologist and the psychologist, instead of lecturing him or instead of giving him advice, she just asked him questions. And each question was a version of why. So Nick Epley has become convinced that actually, even though we think deep questions are gonna be awkward, they're much easier to ask than we think they are.

And he does these experiments where he'll bring a room of hedge funders together and he'll tell them, okay, what you're gonna do next is you're gonna ask each other the question, ask and answer the question, when's the last time you cried in front of another person? And he asked them, are you looking forward to this? Like, do you think this will be fun?

And everyone's like, no, this is gonna be terrible. I don't wanna talk about that. We're like my hedge fund colleagues. And then they do it, because he's told them they have to, and they love it. They won't shut up. They won't quit talking to each other.

So his point is actually, it's a lot easier to ask deep questions than we think it is. And the way you ask a deep question is just to ask something that says, why or what do you make of that? So for instance, give me what you think of as a deep question is just to ask something that says why or what do you make of that? So, so for instance, give me what you think of as a shallow question. Who's your favorite NFL player? Okay. Okay. So I'll ask you, who's your favorite NFL player?

Well, because I'm loyal to my, oh, uh, I'm now making a deep, I'll just say, uh, Brock Purdy. Brock Purdy. Okay. So let me ask you, why Brock Purdy? Like, what is it about him that you like so much? I don't know Brock Purdy at all. He's the quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers. But my brother-in-law is a 25-year-old who just got a job as a scouting assistant for the 49ers. And it's like the best job in the world. And he's so happy there. And my nine year old son is obsessed with his uncle

and with the 49ers and went out there and got to meet Brock Purdy and he was really nice. Oh my God, you just told me so much about yourself and how you see the world, right? You told me that you have this brother-in-law who you could hate, but actually you really like him, right? I do like him. The fact that he's so excited is meaningful to you.

And then you told me that family is really important to you because your nine year old loves his uncle and actually has a relationship with him. And then that Brock Purdy, like the thing you know about him is not like how many touchdowns he's scored. It's that he's really nice, he's nice to kids. So now I know about your values.

Like what you really appreciate is you appreciate kindness. Yeah, I guess that's true. You asked me for a shallow question and I said, who's your favorite NFL player? And it was as simple as you saying why? That turned you from shallow to deep. Right. And the other person never will feel

like you're being overly intimate. Right? If you say, why did you say X or Y, YX, they're just going to feel like you're interested in them. They're never going to be like, oh my god, that guy is really, really intrusive. We've talked about a bunch of really winning and scientifically validated ways to become a super communicator. It strikes me that in many areas of, if not all aspects of personal development, personal growth, whatever, the biggest obstacle is just remembering to do the thing that you've told yourself you want to do. You have been on, you know, on the scene for a while, but I think I think it's reasonably safe to say really burst

into the national consciousness through a book about habits. And I'm curious what you would recommend from that perspective about how we form these habits. You're exactly right. And thank you for asking the question that way, because the answer to how do we make this instinctual is to make it into a habit. Let me just give a little bit of perspective on how habits work. We think of a habit as one thing, but it's actually made up of three parts.

There's a cue, which is a trigger for this behavior that's hopefully automatic. There's the behavior itself, the thing that we think of as the habit, and then there's a reward. Every habit in your life delivers a reward to you, whether you're aware of it or not. And so let's think a little bit

about how we make these behaviors instinctual, habitual, when it comes to conversation. The first thing we have to do is we have to sort of remind ourselves and learn to look for the cues, right? So if you say something vulnerable, that should be a cue for me to be vulnerable myself or to acknowledge your vulnerability.

If you show me that you're interested in a practical topic, that you just want to figure out what the plan is, that should be a cue for me, that this is a practical conversation, that this is about what's this really about. So just training ourselves to look for those cues is pretty easy. Like actually, now that I've said it, most people are trained on how to do it, who are listening, and you'll think about it the next time you're in a conversation. Then there's the routine, right? And we spend a bunch of time talking about it,

the behavior that you use to draw someone out or to connect with someone. Here's the important part. You have to give yourself a reward or you have to recognize the reward. The more we let ourselves experience the reward, the more those instincts will become habits. Secondarily, if a conversation doesn't go well, but you did all the right things, you asked the deep question, maybe for whatever reason, you just didn't click. It's important to let yourself feel good

about that as well. To say like, look, I talked to Dan today and I really wanted to talk about this one thing in the book and we never got to it. But rather than feeling bad about that, because I think I did everything really well, I'm gonna focus on the fact that like, I tried. I tried, I actually was really good at asking deep questions

And I've learned something I've learned that like when talking to Dan like ask this kind of question not that kind of question That's where we kind of hit some gravel, which didn't actually happen But I'm just using it as an example to let myself feel good about Trying these things makes it into a habit. I'm giving myself a reward and that Q routine reward, as it becomes more and more reinforced, you'll just start doing it automatically. Yeah, I found that absolutely to be the case for me. Can I ask you something about that?

I imagine when someone told you, Dan, you suck at one-on-one conversations, you gotta go work. I imagine that was hard to hear. Yes. And then I'm guessing that talking to those consultants the first couple of times, you're like, look, like this guy's full of it. What did you do to start building those habits?

How did you reward yourself that made it easier to hear that criticism and to react to it? I'm a little bit of a mutant when it comes to habit formation in that I don't actually struggle that much. The stubbornness that I referenced early on is both my superpower and my Achilles heel. So if I set my mind to something, I will do it.

And I sometimes will do it even then even when I am In the face of good arguments that should dissuade me The I did have doubt when I was interacting with at first with my communications coaches What I did persevere though and and I did specifically with reflective listening. I just Tried it a bunch at first first I couldn't remember to do it and I would beat myself up for not remembering to do it. But a couple of times I remembered to do it and one key thing that was really helpful

was that Dan and Mudita would say to me, don't wait for some big moment to do it. Do it in mundane conversations. And as soon as I just started doing the thing, I saw how positively people reacted to it. And then it was off to the races because it was so clear from early on that people loved it,

that I just was so powerfully incentivized to keep doing it. And one other thing I will say is that because I had these coaches, I would then go back to Dan and Mudita and tell them about it. And that was a reward too because they were so happy that I was getting it right. Yeah, and what I love about what you just said

is it's exactly the habit loop, right? They helped you identify a new cue, like don't wait for some deep thing, just look for any mundane topic that you can reflect back. And then not only did you feel a reward and you allowed yourself to recognize the reward from that behavior, but then it was reinforced by talking to your coaches.

There's been a bunch of experiments showing that when we decide that something is a reward, it actually becomes more rewarding. So for instance, saying like, you know, it's hard to ask a reflective question, but I did it and it really worked. Simply just saying that to yourself and then having someone else say it to you

or telling them about it, it actually makes that reward more rewarding. Yeah. The thing was, Dan Clerman who said to me, and I think I'm saying this accurately and if I'm saying it accurately, I think it's true, that savoring victories in the sphere of personal development can put the learnings into your molecules in a pretty profound way. Is that true? Absolutely. Absolutely. And not only savoring the victories, oftentimes it's very healthy to re-remember something in the way that you wish you had done it. So I do this all the time. You know, I screw something up. I say the wrong thing in a conversation. I approach

someone the wrong way. And then I'll say like, okay, so what should I have done differently? And I'll actually replay in my head the whole scene where I did exactly the right thing. And I'll do that two or three times until that memory seems as real as what actually happened. Because what I'm doing is I'm training my brain,

like this is what you should do next time. We as a species are so prone to paying attention to our mistakes, right? And that's healthy because when you're in the jungle, if you make a mistake, it's gonna kill you. So you wanna really pay a lot of attention to your mistakes. But in contemporary society, we can make a lot more mistakes

without it meaning that we're gonna die. And so this capacity to pay attention to our mistakes, it sometimes reinforces the negative lesson from that mistake. And we need to take advantage of saying, okay, I know what I should have done differently. I'm going to think that through and pretend that's what I did so that next time I'm in that situation, that's the instinct that comes out. We're bumping up against the end of our time here, but let me bring you back to the question of the stakes here. Why are these communication skills so important for us as individuals

and for us as a collective, as a species? They are vitally important. Like, I think most of us like America, like we think it's a good experiment. When you think about like what sets America apart from other places, historically it's been that we can have conversations across divides, right? The Constitutional Convention was a bunch of people sitting down and arguing with each other and deciding together when they hated each other, deciding together what the Constitution

should be. If you look at all the times that we're most proud of, not only in this country, throughout the world, it's usually because people manage to have conversations with each other and to come to a consensus, to behave and act in a way that makes the world better. But also if you just look at the individuals, there is like literally hundreds of studies that show in order to succeed at business, having some technical skills is important at the beginning of your career. And then pretty quickly, once you become senior,

it's all about communication. That's what a CEO does. A CEO spends all of their time communicating their vision over and over and over again in different ways until they've sort of aligned everyone. The best team you've ever been on is probably a team over and over and over again in different ways until they've sort of aligned everyone. The best team you've ever been on is probably a team where the leader of that team was someone who was a super communicator who drew you out and made you feel like your contributions

mattered. Every marriage, every marriage succeeds or fails based not on whether the people like each other or they have anything in common, it's based on whether they can communicate with each other well. We are living through a period where not only have we forgotten how to communicate a little bit and some of that is because of politics and some of that is because of the internet. But for some people, communication has become a negative thing, right? They would rather be someone who knows how to shout louder than the other side than someone who knows how to talk to the other side and understand what they're saying. And particularly as we go into this political season, we face a choice. And the choice is,

are we a nation that wants to have a conversation, to learn from each other, to come together as a people, or are we a nation, and are we individuals who want not to have conversations, but just to scream at each other? Because if I can scream louder than you, then maybe I win, or if you can scream louder than me, and the truth of the matter is, if we both scream as loud as we can, nobody ends up winning.

So that's why I think this is so important. That's one of the reasons I wrote this book now is because we are a people as a species, as a nation, as just humans. We have always succeeded by communicating. And there are times in history when we've been better at it and worse at it. Learning how to do it hopefully makes us better.

I think we're joking earlier when you talked about an inner monologue of, oh, there was one thing in the book I really wanted to talk about and I didn't get a chance. But before I let you go, was there something in the book that you really wanted to talk about that I didn't give you a chance to talk about? No, I mean, I'll mention a couple of fun stories. So in the 1990s, NASA had to figure out

how to find a different kind of astronaut, because they were talking about building the space station. People were going to go into space for six months to 12 months. And up till then, most of the missions had been pretty short, like a week. And so NASA realized, like, we've got to find people who are actually good at communicating with each other, who are good at connecting with each other

because they're like in a tin can for a year. They're gonna make each other crazy if they're not good at this stuff. And the problem that they had is they had a psychologist who had to look at every applicant. And what he found was that he was very bad at figuring out who was genuinely good at communication. Because when you make it to the final round of an astronaut interview, you have learned how to answer questions. Like you know how to like fake empathy and fake connection better than anyone else, fake emotional intelligence.

And so he's working on this, he's trying to figure out like how do we actually tell who's good at this and who's just pretending to be good at this. And he's listening to old recordings of people and some of whom became great astronauts and some of whom did not become great astronauts. And he notices that the great astronauts, they laugh differently than everyone else. Most importantly, they laugh the same way he laughs with the same basic energy and the same basic intensity

whenever he would laugh. So he changes how he interviews. Now when he comes into an interview, he comes in wearing this garish tie, he walks into the room, he spills his papers, and then he laughs uproariously about it. And about half the candidates would also laugh uproariously, they would match him.

And about half the candidates would think it was weird that he was laughing uproariously and would sort of chuckle because we know we're supposed to respond to laughter with laughter, but they wouldn't really do it. They wouldn't match him. Then what he would do is he would, at some point during the interview, he would talk about how he felt when his sister passed away

when they were younger. Now, this guy actually didn't have a sister. So this is all an act. He would frown and he would sort of let a quiver into his voice and then he would pay attention to how the astronaut applicant reacted. Did they ask him questions? Did they talk about a loss they had experienced

in their own life? Did they match him or did they give him his space and let him have his moment without engaging with it? That doesn't mean that they're a bad person, but it means that they don't take connection as seriously as everyone else. So they've changed a little bit because this has become public knowledge,

but the way to become an astronaut is to laugh the same way someone else, the interviewer laughs, and then to ask some questions and emote yourself when they show some emotion. I love that story because when we talk about nonverbal communication body language, it turns out that there's a science to that as well. And the science is when we match someone's energy and we match their intensity, what's known in psychology is valiance, then that's how we show them that we want to listen. And it turns out about 80% of laughter, as I mentioned, is not in response to something

funny. When we laugh, we laugh to show the other person we want to connect with them. And when they laugh back, they're showing us that they want to connect with us. And you and I have laughed a lot in this conversation. Neither of us has said anything particularly funny, right? I just I'm laughing right now and you're laughing back. It's because I'm showing you I want to connect with you and you're accepting my invitation, you're showing me, do you want to connect back?

And I just love that. And I love that there's so much science here, that this is a judged to be a worthy field of academic endeavor, especially given that it's such an undervalued skill in the culture at large. Yeah, yeah. No, we're very lucky to be living during this time because our understanding is increasing so much. Well, thank you for adding to it.

Thank you. Thanks for having me on. And may I say like, I hope this doesn't seem like a compliment just for comments like, you're really good at this. Like you're really good at like, I mean, one of the things I appreciate is you're really good at asking questions

and kind of listening closely and showing with your questions that you're listening closely, but then also offering yourself up, not in a way that feels intrusive, but that feels genuine. I feel like this is kind of a masterclass and being a super communicator. I appreciate that very much, thank you.

Before I let you go, can you just please remind everybody of the name of the book and any other resources you put out into the world, please just plug everything. I have a copy here. It's a super communicators, how to unlock the secret language of connection. And if anyone wants to learn more about me or more about my books, I also wrote The Power of Habit and another one called Smarter, Faster, Better. If you just Google my name or any of the book's names, my website will come up. And I'll mention I actually have my email address on the website and I read and respond

to every single email I get from readers because I sort of feel like if you spent the time to share with me, I have this obligation to kind of reciprocate. So anyone who wants to send me an email, I at CharlesDewhig.com, it might take a couple days or a week, but I promise I'll read it and write back. Amazing. You're making me feel bad about my lack of generosity in that regard. You shouldn't feel bad. Well, this was a pleasure. Thank you so much. Really appreciate it. You're doing a positive thing, yet again, by putting this book out into the world. So thank you. Thank you for much. Really appreciate it. It's, it's, you're, you're doing a positive thing yet again

by putting this book out into the world. So thank you. Thank you for having me on. I've really enjoyed it. Thanks again to Charles Duhigg. You heard me mention some other podcast episodes during the course of this podcast episode, including my conversations with Dan,

Clermann and Mudita Nisker. I've put links to both of those episodes in the show notes. Before I go, I just want to thank everybody who works so hard on the show. 10% happier is produced by Gabrielle Zuckerman, Justine Davy Lawrence, Smith and Tara Anderson, DJ Kashmir is our senior producer, Marissa Schneiderman is our senior editor,

Kevin O'Connell is our director of audio and post production, and Kimmy Regler is our executive producer. Alicia Mackey leads our marketing team and Tony Magyar is our director of podcasts. And finally Nick Thorburn of the Great Band Islands wrote our theme. If you like 10% happier, I hope you do, you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus and the Wondery App or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey. Where can I get help hiring people with disabilities?

There are hundreds of thousands of Canadians with disabilities who are ready to work. And many local organizations are available to help you find qualified candidates and make your workplace more accessible and inclusive. Visit canada.ca slash right here to connect with one near you today. A message from the government of Canada. Being an actual royal is never about finding

your happy ending, but the worst part is, if they step out of line or fall in love with the wrong person, it changes the course of history. I'm Aresha Skidmore-Williams. And I'm Brooke Sifron. We've been telling the stories of the rich and famous on the hit Wondery Show Even the Rich, and talking about the latest celebrity news on Rich and Daily. We're going all over the world on our new show, Even the Royals.

We'll be diving headfirst into the lives of the world's kings, queens, and all the wannabes in their orbit throughout history. Think succession meets the crown, meets real life. We're going to pull back the gilded curtain and show how royal status might be bright and shiny, but it comes at the expense of, well, everything else. Like your freedom, your privacy, and sometimes even your head. Follow Even The Royals on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Even The Royals early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus.