The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - Charles Duhigg: The Art and Science of Communication

Episode Date: May 15, 2024

I admit I was somewhat intimidated when the prospect of hosting Pulitzer-prizewinning journalist Charles Duhigg on the podcast was raised. What caused my angst was the subject matter we would discuss: Communication. Hosting this podcast has been a learning experience, in so many ways. Since listeners are very free with advice, especially when they don’t like the conversational aspect of the dialogues, and would prefer an interview format, I have often had to come face to face with my own failures of communication. Charles had just completed a book, Supercommunicators, which has since become a New York Times bestseller about the tools that so-called ‘supercommunicators’ use to bring out the best in conversations. It includes interviews with, and stories about, people from a wide varieties of occupations and experiences, from a former FRB recruiter, to two people on opposite sides of the current gun-control debate, and even to the creators of Big Bang Theory, about how they achieved their goals of communication. The techniques revealed in the book, and in our conversation, are remarkably illuminating. Perhaps the most important tool, which sounds remarkably simple, but nevertheless is often absent in conversations is to decide in advance what type of conversation one is about to be engaged in: practical, emotional, or social. Without this recognition, the ultimate success of any subsequent conversation is unlikely to be profound. In our subsequent podcast discussion, I wanted to engage in all three types of conversations, with some clarity in advance about where we were going, beginning as always with what took Charles to the starting point of his writing, and concluding with what the impact on his own personal life had been by all he had learned when researching the book. Thinking about the skills he discussed certainly had an impact on my own efforts during the podcast, and I hope will improve discussions on all future podcasts. You, the listeners, will be the judges of course. I hope you will enjoy and be enlightened by the ground we covered. As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project Youtube channel as well. Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Hi and welcome to the Origins Podcast. I'm your host, Lawrence Krause. I was extremely excited when the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist, Charles Duhigg, agreed to be on the program to discuss his new book, Super Communicators. It's an amazing book about how to communicate better and how to do so by giving examples from people who are literally super communicators, people who can break through barriers, achieve a level of communication, and often obtain results that are impossible otherwise.

It's a fascinating book with lots of great examples from former FBI recruiters to heads of juries talking about difficult situations to communicate with others on a variety of different levels. It was somewhat intimidating for me as a podcaster in this regard to have this conversation because I tried to actually utilize several of the skills that are discussed in Charles' book.

And they've been very useful to me, the idea of trying in a conversation to know what the conversation's about for the first time, to reach out and get a level of emotional connection with the person you're talking about and to realize that all conversations, regardless of whether negotiations between hostile parties or a dinner party with friends,

are really win-win circumstances. It was a wonderful conversation. I talked to him about why he got interested in this whole sense. subject and how it had impacted on his own relationships to study how other people communicate. And I talked to him also about how literally how it had affected me in the process of reading it. It's a great conversation about a remarkable subject with a great author. And I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. You can watch it ad free on our Critical Mass Subtext site, or you can watch it on our YouTube channel or Orgeant's podcast YouTube channel or listen to it on any podcast listening site.

I hope you'll consider supporting the foundation that runs the podcast by subscribing to critical mass or perhaps donating the foundation. But either way, no matter how you watch it or listen to it, I'm sure this will have a positive impact on your life and you'll find it as fascinating as I did. Well, Charles Deweig, thank you so much for being here. It's really a pleasure to sort of meet you virtually and be able to talk to you. I'm a fan of your book. Thanks. And I want to, you know, I'm a. I'm acutely aware, in fact, preparing for this, I prepare hard, I do my homework, but this was

emotionally difficult because I thought, I'm going to prepare to have a conversation with someone who's written a book about how to have conversations. And by the way, if you ever want to become acutely aware of how poor your conversations might be, just do a podcast and then wait for people to write to you and tell you all the ways you could be better. than you are. But I want to, you know, I'm going to try and use what I've learned from you a little bit in the book today. And you can see later on, you can judge whether you can guess where I've used, what I've used. But anyway, we'll, we'll begin. But I want to begin, before I talk about the book, and it's the book right behind your head there, Supercommunicators,

your most recent book, of three books. This is, we will get there. And I want to spend a lot of time because it's an amazing book to teach you about how to relate to other people and to ask yourself the questions that most people don't usually ask themselves in the course of conversations. But this is an origins podcast, and I want to begin with your origins. I want to learn a little bit about how you got to the point of writing this book. You grew up in New Mexico. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Now in New Mexico. Where in New Mexico? Albuquerque. Albuquerque. Okay. Yeah. Breaking bad. fame, but anyway.

And then, and I want to know, so, you know, you obviously became a journalist, and I know the path you took there, but I wanted to know about the influence of your parents. What, you know, as a journalist, as someone you went to, and I've, two Ivy League universities, as we'll talk about, were they backgrounds in writers at all? No. No, I mean, they were big readers. So my father was a trial lawyer. And my mom actually became a lawyer while I was in high school.

She went to law school. And being a lawyer is kind of like being a writer. You know, you spend a lot of time writing. And I think that people who enjoy writing end up often become good lawyers. But he was – my dad in particular was a big reader. He just loved reading. And so I think – and I loved reading growing up. I still love reading.

I was going to ask, I mean, I think reading is a key thing for any career and particular, not only just writing, but almost anything. And I think it's a hallmark of seeing whether someone will be successful in many ways. Is they're reading? But I'm always interested in how they got interested. You love to read. Was it because there were books all around the house or was it? No.

I mean, it's interesting because I have two kids now. I have two teenagers. And we try and have books around, like this is a bookcase behind me. But, but, you know, in contemporary, there's that we definitely used to have more books than sort of in a pre-internet and pre-kindle age. But no, I don't think it was because there were so many books around. I think it's just because I was bored. I mean, the truth of the matter is that, like, Albuquerque is kind of a boring place to grow up, but it's not New York City. It's not San Francisco. And so as a result, I just had a lot of free time. And I was not very sporty.

I wasn't very good at sports. And so I would entertain myself by reading. And of course, there were only three channels at that time, right? So there was oftentimes and no internet. So as a result, to fill the time I had to read and I just kind of fell in love with reading. You know, I can relate. I grew up in Canada where there were definitely only three channels and there was hockey on most of the time, which I didn't like to watch. But yeah, reading voraciously is just a, well, it's a wonderful escape when you're young and it's a and and, but what kind of books did you read? Did you read fiction mostly or nonfiction? As a kid, as a kid, I loved reading science fiction. Like I, and I still read science fiction. I still enjoy it. But like, it was a lot of like science fiction and stuff like that.

You know, and the thing about reading that I'll say is after I graduated from college, my now wife and I moved to Egypt together where I just had like an insane amount of free time. And it was really in Egypt that I learned how to read, read nonfiction, but also just, you know, I would spend sometimes six to seven hours a day reading. And it's only when you have like a year where you can just really, really, really invest in books and really, really deeply read. That was, you learn something new about reading, right? You learn something new about understanding how the intricacy of a book works. And so that was a really powerful, you know, and prior to that, I had gone to Yale. And obviously Yale as an undergraduate, you read a lot. But this was different. Like when I was in Egypt,

I was reading nonfiction and was really for the first time getting to absorb a book as a book. And the thing about books, as you know, is that books are different, right? A book is a, a book is a different creature from an article, from a, from a magazine piece, from a, from a novella, a book has to have kind of some, its own sense of integrity as a book. And that's something that I think is hard to learn to do as a writer, but it helps if you can recognize it as a reader. Yeah, well, it's fascinating. You know, it's interesting. I, by the way, I've often found, you know, I've write nonfiction books, but I often found, find that before I write nonfiction book, I often enjoy reading fiction books because it, it, you know, they're all a story in one way or another,

or even nonfiction books and trying to figure out how to frame it is particularly useful. Absolutely. It's interesting. I was going to say, for me, one of the reasons I really enjoy doing this podcast, by the way,

is I mean, I read everything before I talk to someone. And it forces me to read a lot more than I would otherwise in a different sort of way. It's kind of a fascinating experience. And as I say, I was able to dissect your book. But you just pointed out, you made it to, you read, before you get to Yale,

you read science fiction, and I'm always interested when people read science fiction or things like that, asking why you didn't become a scientist then, because everyone should be scientists, right? Well, my wife is a scientist. She's a geneticist. I mean, honestly, like, I think I liked the fiction part of science fiction more than I liked the science part of science fiction. And, you know, the truth of the matter is that I just, you know, I was always good at math and science in high school.

And then I got to Yale and I thought I was going to be an econ major. And then I took a couple of history classes and particularly intellectual history classes. And I just fell in love with it. I mean, I just think that for whatever reason, my brain just, this is not even my brain. It's just, you know, I just love ideas and the humanities. And so, and I love writing. I mean, even since I was a kid, like writing was something that felt very deeply satisfying to me. And so whereas my wife is a, who's a biologist and geneticist.

I think it was deeply satisfying for her to learn about different species and speciation. And she kept to like a big list when she was a kid that she still does of all the bird species she's seen. Like I think it had the same kind of like sense of satisfaction that writing did for me. Well, you know, you went to the right place. I could say that because I was a professor at Yale for nine years. And being on Science Hill, it was clear we were the, not only the poor cousins, but I mean, English and history, history in particular. and I really enjoyed doing some debates on campus with history. And when were you at Yale?

I have to ask, because I was, yeah, I was there 93 to 97. And my wife was actually there at the same time. That's where we met, is in college. Yeah. I taught there till 93, so you never got to take physics for poets class. But although I changed it to physics for lawyers, because I met a lot of pre-law kids, but I never met any poets. I ended up taking, so because we had to satisfy

that group four requirement. You had take three history classes. I took I took fractals and I took a couple of real history classes. Then I also took on electrical engineering. And I had another class scheduled at the same time as EE. But there was a rule in EE that you could bring in a note card for the final exam. And you could retake all of the midterms at the final exam. And the note card could be they didn't specify the size of the note card. So what I did, yeah, I brought in a huge poster board and I had photocopied the entire like text like texts that we were using in like tiny and tiny and I used that and I I walked into that class with an F minus because I hadn't taken any of the exams because I had other classes when the exams were offered and I walked out with a with an

so I'm not sure that says something about Yale or you or it's interesting I think it says something about Yale and you know by the way you can blame me because one of the things I did before I left was we change the science requirements before you came you could basically go through Yale without ever taking a science course. And we changed it so that we felt that was essential. And we changed it and required people to walk up Science Hill or somewhere like it for a little while. But so you majored in history then?

In intellectual history, yeah. Intellectual history, an area that I find fascinating as well. But then you went and did an MBA, so which I think is sort of, I don't know whether that's anti-intellectual history or what, but why the MBA? Is it just for for job reasons or what? No. So I, um, so after we graduated from college, my now wife and my girlfriend, then girlfriend, Liz and I, um, she'd grown up, she'd grown up in the Middle East.

She's American, but had grown up in the Middle East. And so we decided to move to Egypt. And we lived in Cairo for a year, which was fantastic. And then we spent six months actually traveling overland from Cairo, uh, to Europe, which is something that you can't do now, obviously. But back then, you know, you could go to Damascus. and Beirut and sort of just cross all these borders. And then I went back to Albuquerque and I started a company there

that would build medical education campuses for universities. And I realized pretty quickly that like I was not particularly, I didn't know that much about business. And I like business, right? I think business is interesting. Yes. Yeah. And so I was applying,

I applied to law schools and to business schools because law schools seemed very interesting. And, and, you know, when I, when I got into Harvard Business School, it just, I sort of visited. And it's Harvard Business School is kind of unusual in that everything has done with the case method, right? So it's basically, you walk in and you hear a story or you read a story before class about business and then you discuss that story. And that really appealed to me. I thought that was really interesting. I mean, law school is very similar, right? When you're reading cases, you're essentially reading stories. Also, I just kind of lucked out that basically Harvard offered to pay for me to go to business school.

Which is a big, that's a huge thing. Yeah, which was great, which was fantastic. And so, you know, I didn't know what I wanted to do at that point. I actually planned at that point to go back to New Mexico and to go into politics. And I felt like if I was going to be in politics, I needed to have a way to support myself. And I decided between the first and second year of business school, I went back to Albuquerque and I worked in private equity in Albuquerque and decided during that summer that I was going to instead go into journalism. But yeah, that's kind of why I went to business school. And to be

honest, it served me really well. I mean, I think that people who want to be writers, particularly if they want to be journalists, there's an instinct to like go to journalism school or to get an MFA. And if you're doing fiction, an MFA might make sense. But if you want to be a journalist, really getting a degree, a professional degree is much, much better because it, it teaches you a vocabulary and a language that you might not know otherwise. Sure. And, you know, I'm reminded, I'm my friend and who I've had on the podcast few times, Noam Chomsky's always told me when I, when I was at MIT before that, that he, that if you really want to know what's going on in the world, you should read the business journals. Because that's, you know, they don't, it's, they need to know what's really

happening if you want to be successful in business. I mean, all the verbiage and all the hyperbole doesn't matter. It's what's really happening. That's, you know, and it's interesting. So I work now for the New Yorker magazine, but previously I spent most of my career at the New York Times writing for the business, writing, doing investigative business work. And actually the paper I read every day is the Wall Street Journal. Because the Wall Street Journal, you're exactly right. You know, not only do you need to know what's actually going on, like that you can make or lose fortunes based on the accuracy of the information you're getting,

but it's also that when you do discover something, I mean, somebody writes a new article about Donald Trump, it's not going to matter. But you write an article about a company, and like that company reacts. They take it seriously. They want to like, so I love business reporting. Well, and you know, honestly,

you clearly love it. then you've been successful at it. And I don't know how the company's reacted, but you did share a Pulitzer Prize for, for your work on reporting on, on large companies like Apple and others. Yes. Yeah.

They must have reacted, I assume. Oh, no, absolutely. Absolutely. And the truth of the matter is that, like, you know, we often tend to treat business. I, you know, I love talking about business. I love talking about money. I think money is a language and I think it's an interesting language.

And I think particularly among, like, folks who are humanity, who studied the, humanities like myself, they love to sort of poo-poo business. But the truth of the matter is, we spend the majority of our life at work. Our work is very, very important to us and to not treat it as this fascinating terrain similar to our families is to do a disservice to how we actually spend our time in life. Well, yeah, absolutely. And your interest in business, you know, and you now explain to me. I was wondering about the gap between Yale and when I

knew you started the New York Times, I think, at 2006. So I was trying to think of the years in between. And did you start right away, New York Times reporting on business? So let me step back. When you decide you want to be a journalist, did you decide early on that your focus would be related to business because of your background, or was it more general? Yeah. Yeah.

No, I was always interested. You know, like it's customary that people come into a place like the New York Times on the business desk and then they try and get on to politics or something like that. or just move around because it's kind of fun to move around. I never wanted to move around. I always have liked writing about business. Yeah, so I graduated from HBS in 2003, and then I went to the LA Times for three years,

in large part because my wife was doing her PhD at Stanford at that time. So I wanted to be in California. And then I joined the New York Times in 2006. And the way I got the job of the New York Times is, you know, I was in New York. York reporting something for the LA Times and I wrote the editor, Larry and Grascia, this wonderful guy, who's the business editor of the Times. And they had like two openings. They had like an opening for telecom. And I can't even remember what the second one was. It was clearly things that I was not

qualified for. I knew nothing about telecom. But I wrote these long essays or these long memos explaining why I'd be a great telecom reporter. And then when I went in for the interview, Larry said, look, if you could cover anything, what would you cover? And I kind of knew this question was coming. And what I said was I said, oh, I'd cover the insurance industry because like everyone owns insurance and like you use it during the most dramatic times of your life. And like there's so many human stories there. And the reason I said that is because I knew no one had ever answered that question by saying I want to cover the insurance industry. But it worked. It worked. And I ended up writing one story about insurance, but they hired me as an investigative business writer and and the rest of the

I'll come back to that. At the end, I want to ask if you think you'd do that interview differently, or were you illustrating some aspects of your book when you did that interview with that answer, because that's an intriguing one. I think you were trying to elicit. Anyway, let's get, well, I hope we'll have time to come back to it. Your last two books, all of which have done very well, were much more business related. And I was listening to, I think I was, I forget whether it was in the book or not, that you'd spent three years, I think at the end of the book, you talk about, having spent three years on this particular book.

Was your interest in this book, again, did it, you know, this is about conversations. And in some sense, selling and everything else is a conversation. Was what prompted your interest to move in this particular area, which is not directly business related, although there are examples? You know, it was a combination of different things. One of them was just this kind of pattern that I fell into my way with my wife, which I didn't understand, which is I would come home from work, And again, we've been married for 20 years, but I'd come home from work and I would start complaining about my day.

And she would offer me this good advice. Like, why don't you take your boss out to lunch? And instead of being able to hear what she was saying, I would get, I would get even more like annoyed and frustrated and say, like, why aren't you supporting me? You should be outraged on my behalf. And she would get annoyed because I was attacking her for giving me good advice. And so, and you know, the truth of the matter is. And then when I, they made me a manager at the New York Times. And I was fine at doing like strategy and logistics and like was not particularly good at communicating

with my with the people who were reporting to me. And that surprised me because I'm a professional communicator. Yeah. And so the real origin for the book was just me being confused about why something that I do all day long every day. Like why am I not better at it? Right. And particularly when I was covering business for the times, one of the things I would

see was oftentimes the difference between really good managers or really successful executives and unsuccessful executives, the biggest factor was just communication. If you're a CEO of a large company, your job is to communicate all the time. You can't make decisions yourself. You can't do the work yourself. It's to communicate a vision. And in understanding that there were some people who were much better at this than others and that it wasn't about charisma and it wasn't about charm or being extrovert.

It was like a set of skills, understanding how conversations work. That's what got me really interested in trying to figure out what's going on. You know, it is, since you took electrical engineering course, it reminds me when I was chairing an apartment of physics, we included engineering at the time. And I learned that most, you know, the success of even engineers and, but it's also true for scientists isn't always dependent on their ability to do science. It's actually dependent on the ability to communicate to others. In the case of engineers working up through the company, it's communication. And similarly, in scientists, I mean, I know some brilliant people who never got hired because

they couldn't convince the department in a seminar that they were worth hiring. It's really good. Well, I think it's even more profound than that. You know, there's been these studies that have been done of looking at peer-reviewed papers, like which papers get cited more than others. And what the researchers found is that the papers that contain too much new information, they essentially get ignored, right? It's just it's too new. It's too hard to fit it into the scaffolding of knowledge that you have. And the papers that end up getting cited all the time are the ones who understand how to tell you a story about this research

that fits into the story you already know about the field. Like that's the point at which that idea becomes. a viral idea or it gets spread easily. And so I think that, I think to your point, like, communication of science or communication of anything is as important as the underlying thing itself. Absolutely. In general, but I think one of the things, one of the strengths this book and one of the things that are useful for me and I think will be for other people is the personal aspect. Obviously, professional communication is one thing, which is important. And it turns out in the workplace, professional and personal communication are not that different as we talk about.

And I must say it's interesting that your motivation for the book was personal because in terms of what hit me the most when I first reading it was exactly the same thing. And it comes to the, you know, you talk about three major aspects of conversations. We'll go through one each in turn. The three things you have to think about is what is the conversation about, how do we feel, and who are we? Those are basically the three sections of the book. And what is the conversation about?

are you having a conversation with your wife that's different? And it resonated with me exactly that I would go down and with my wife and complain about something and she would offer me advice and I would just get angry because exactly that's not what I was asking. That's exactly right. And then the reverse, you know, and I realize that we're having different conversations. So that, you know, I remember early on in your book, it was that personal aspect that really resonated with me.

And so anyway, let's proceed through. Sure. We don't have as much time as I'd like. but let's proceed through the three aspects of the book. And then I have some general questions for you, which I'll hope I'll get to. I'm trying to, trying to, you know, look at the clock and keep this in segments. But so, you know, there are, you keep things in threes and fours. There are three major questions, the three sections of the book, which I said is,

what's this conversation about, how do we feel, and who are we? And we'll get to what the conversation is about. But you also say there are four rules of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, communication. And those kind of fit together. And to explain these three questions, you know, one of the big insights that I first came across that I thought was really profound is I would talk to researchers and they would say, look, the mistake that we usually make in conversations is that we assume a discussion is about one thing. Like we're talking about my day or we're talking about our kids' grades or where to go on vacation. But they said,

every discussion is actually made up of multiple kinds of conversations. And those those kinds of conversations, they tend to fall in one of three buckets. There's these practical conversations, right, where we're making plans together, we're solving problems together, we're using the prefrontal cortex. That's the first kind of conversation. Then there's emotional conversations, right, where I might tell you how I'm feeling, and I don't want you to solve my feelings. I want you to empathize, and that's using the amygdala and sort of the deeper structures of the brain. And then there's social conversations, which is about how we relate to each other in society and the social identities that are important to us.

And that uses what's known as a distributed network throughout the brain. And what's important is if you're having different kinds of conversations at the same time, you really can't hear each other. You really can't connect, right? When I was coming home from work and I was upset, I was having an emotional conversation. My wife was responding with a practical conversation. Those are both totally legitimate kinds of conversations.

But because we were having different conversations at the same moment, we could not really hear each other. We couldn't listen. Exactly. And in fact, listening and showing your listening, you point out is a, is a, is a key point. The, the, when you talk about before, so you're, you're hitting on what, what is the conversation's all about and you, and you talk about, I guess, the three H's, right? The helpful, hugging or heard. You want to, want to, want to elaborate on that a little bit? Yeah. So this is something that they've started teaching teachers to do in schools that if a student comes up and they're having a problem or they want to talk about something meaningful, that the, the, the, the, teacher often should start that conversation by saying, do you want me to hug you? Do you want me to help you? Or do you want me to hear you? Which are the three different kinds of conversations, right? The emotional, the practical, and the social. And the reason why that's really important is because oftentimes students know what they want. They don't know how to tell you, not just students,

all of us, right? All of us. When I start complaining to my wife and she says, do you want me to help you like come up with a solution to this or do you want me just to listen because you need to vent? I really appreciate it because she's asking me what I want from this conversation. Sometimes I haven't even thought about it myself until she asks. Yeah. And this is one of the things that we know about super communicators is that they show you that they want to connect with you. They try and make it clear that they want to somehow have a meaningful conversation

with you. And one of the ways to do that is to ask someone, what do you need from this conversation? What are you looking to, what are you looking for? and then to share yourself what you need and what you want. Because if we're aligned on our goal for this conversation, and the goal might just be like just to hang out and make each other laugh. But if we're aligned on that goal, it's so much easier to succeed. And you hit the key point so rarely.

And it'd be nice in a conversation to basically, especially if it's clear it's not working, is to ask the other person what, literally what is this conversation about. But, you know, the title of the book, book is super communicators. And I think the first part of the book is where you really hit the most on the unusual people who are so effective, unduly effective at communicating, often surprisingly so. And part of it you talk about this matching principle. Yeah. Want to explain that a little bit? Sure. So this gets to what those researchers told me about the different kinds of conversations.

The matching principle basically says, in order to communicate and connect with each other, we need to be having the same kind of conversation at the same moment. And in the book, for instance, there's a story about the CIA officer. Well, I was just, you anticipated. I want to hear about the CIA and the jury because those are fascinating stories. Yeah, it's really fun. Thank you for asking about them because they're just fun stories. Yeah. You know, this guy Jim Lawler, who's now retired from the CIA, he got hired in the early 1980s. And they sent him over to Europe to recruit spies. And he was just terrible at this job. When you hear about him, you think that this is, why is this guy in this book?

He's never going to be a single. Oh, my. Yeah, he's just like miserable at it. And like, he would go to parties and he would try and like, you know, buddy up to people. And they would say things like, I know you're trying to recruit me to be a spy. If you don't go away, I'm going to report you to the authorities and get you deported. He was just so bad at it. Yeah.

And so he and he basically figured he's going to get fired. And he was right. Like the CIA was about to fire me. He'd been there for a year. He hadn't recruited anyone. And this woman comes to town who works for the. the foreign ministry of the Middle Eastern country that she lives in. And he tries to charm her and he tries to get to,

and like it kind of works. She goes on some sightseeing things with him. But when he says like, hey, I work for the CIA. Would you work for us? She like, she turns him down flat. She's like, they kill people in my country for that. I'm absolutely not going to help you. And he tells his bosses and his bosses are like,

look, if you can't recruit this woman, like, you're definitely going to get fired. You're not doing a great job here. And so he has one final dinner with this woman. And he gets her talking and she's kind of glum and she's talking about how, you know, she's about to go back to her own country. And she'd sort of hoped that that she would figure something out in Europe and like be able to like, you know, fight back against these religious radicals that had recently taken over the country and her revolution.

And she's kind of disappointed in herself. And at first, Lawler tries to cheer her up. He like tells her funny stories and he like tries to reminisce. And it just isn't working, right? She's not, she's not paying any. she doesn't want to be cheered up. And so at some point, he just decides, this is not going to work. Like I am, I'm going to fail at this recruitment and I'm going to get fired.

And he turns to the woman and he just starts being really authentic and saying like, you know, like I understand how you feel about being disappointed in yourself because I am so disappointed in myself. Like I wanted to be on the CIA for years. And as soon as I got here, I figured out like, I'm terrible at it. Like I don't, I don't have this like confidence or something that other people. people have like I'm just bad at it. And it's when he's honest and he reciprocates, he matches her.

Instead of trying to make her cheer her up, he sees that she's disappointed and she's emotional and he shares his own disappointments in himself and his own emotions. That's when she hears him for the first time. And she says, I think I can help you. And she ends up being the best asset in the Middle East over the next 20 years that we've got. And he ends up being the most. And it's most successful recruiters, right? Yeah.

Yeah. And it's only because he figured out, you have to authentically match someone, right? Like you can't, you can't just mimic them. You can't try and cheer them up if they're feeling down. You have to listen to what they're saying and then share in an honest, authentic way, in a reciprocal way, yourself. That's when we feel connected. And it's that sharing, I think, which,

there are themes that I find go through all of the different aspects of communication, the sharing, the preparing for a conversation, which is so unusual. And we, I mean, I do for this conversation now. But when I go downstairs after this and talk to my wife, well, I'd be prepared to find out what I haven't done while I was up here. I would actually say you probably, so there was this interesting study that was done at Harvard Business School where the researchers told students, look, you're going to have a conversation with a stranger in about in about 30 seconds. And they say, before you do this,

just take seven to 10 seconds, write down three topics that you might want to discuss. Like dumb stuff, right? Like did you see last night's game? What are you doing this? So everyone does this. In seven seconds, they scribble down these three topics. Then they stick the piece of paper that they scribbled on into their pocket and they go have the conversation with the stranger. And having a conversation of the strangers like the most anxiety producing thing you can ask someone to do. And so afterwards, the researchers went to everyone and they said, how'd that conversation go? And the student said, you know, we never discussed those three things that I wrote down. Like, they just never came up. But I felt so much more calm and less anxious and confident.

And the conversation went so much better as a result than I anticipated it would because I knew that I had those things in my back pocket. I knew that I had something to fall back on. And I think what's actually happening there is the same thing that happens when you see your wife and you have a real conversation with your wife, which is you may not have scribbled down what you want to talk to your wife but you actually are prepared to have a conversation with your wife because during the day you're thinking like, oh, she would like, I should tell her about this funny thing that I saw or I should ask her about X or Y or Z. We often are preparing for conversations without realizing it and that preparation is why it succeeds.

Preparation, yeah, absolutely. When the conversations do succeed are the ones you're, yeah, you're prepared for even if they don't go in the direction you expect one way or another. Yeah. Let me, I've got four statements of yours. I want you to comment on and then I want to move to how we feel because we won't have time to talk for the jury, which is a fascinating story. It's, you know, it's a typical almost a movie story, right? Well, Van Goghry Man, a one person convinces more or less a whole jury to come around. It's a, it's a real, true life story that's interesting.

But comment on these statements you make. One, every conversation is a negotiation. Yeah. this is some really interesting research that's been done, particularly at the start of a conversation, there is a subtle negotiation that goes on. And it's actually often referred to as a quiet negotiation. And we tend to think of negotiations as the type of thing where like we're battling each other, right? Like I want one thing and you want a different thing. But most negotiations that happen in life, the goal is not to win. The goal is simply to understand what the other side wants.

Right. And this is true of like, if you talk to professional negotiators, they will tell you their job is not to get the largest piece of the pie. Their job is to figure out what the pie looks like and how to make it bigger so that everyone walks away happier than before. And so this is really important in a conversation is that oftentimes we're not thinking in terms of what's the goal of this conversation. What does this other person want? What do I want? But if you just take even like half a second. And if you ask someone, like, you know, do you want me to listen to you or do you want me to help you solve this problem, then oftentimes that's a little bit of a negotiation that makes things much better. Sometimes we negotiate in other ways.

We might at the beginning of a conversation tell a joke and then pay attention to whether the person laughs or not, right? Is this a formal conversation or is this a more casual conversation? We might interrupt each other to try and figure out, is interruption's okay or like, are we each going to take our turns? at the beginning of conversations, we tend to engage in this negotiation without even realizing that. You know, one of the thing I learned for your book, which made me feel a little bit better because people complain that I interrupt too much and I try not to. But one of the people who talk to points out that actually sometimes interrupting is a good

thing because it indicates you're listening, whereas if you just sit or sit there and nod, it's not clear if you're listening. But if you're interrupted, indicates you're engaged and there's something that's someone that said to you that prompts you to respond. I made me feel much better. Yeah. Well, and it's a way, you know, there's a lot of things that we assume about communication that turn out that data shows us that are not exactly right.

And you're exactly right. Interruptions is a good example. And when you think about it, when you're talking to a friend, you guys talk over each other a little bit, right? You say things like, oh, of course. Like you're like, you interject. Well, and I want, these are, some people don't like that I like to think of the things I do here now as conversations and not interviews.

And so it's a give and take. And I think, frankly, I actually think people are fascinated by listening to conversations rather than interviews because it's nice to hear that give and take. We all, that's part of life. Yeah. No, I absolutely agree. You, okay. And here's another thing you said, how do we make choices together? Yeah.

In a comment. Well, oftentimes that's one of the things that we're trying to figure out, right? What are the rules for how we cooperate in this conversation? right? I might make like a, you know, the very formal linguistics folks that talk about them as bids and offers. Like I might make a bid to say like, oh, I'm going to ask you a question about your childhood. And, and I'm and then that other person might accept the bid. They might say, oh, here's, you know, I grew up in Albuquerque. This was like. And they might say like, yeah, you know, it was a long time ago. I don't really think about it that much anymore. And you know, okay, they haven't accepted that bid. And so one of the things that now, if they

Turn down that bid, sometimes we can feel sort of sheepish, right? We feel like, oh, I really stepped in it. I told a joke and nobody laughed. But that's kind of the wrong way to see it. Actually, what you should see it as is a series of experiments that you're conducting. And as you know, as a scientist, the thing is if every single one of your experiments works, you're a really bad scientist. Like, like, of all of my wife's.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like, like the whole goal of doing an experiment is to see which ones work and which ones don't. And so if you tell a joke and nobody laughs, if you've lurked something from it, that's a really valuable piece of data about how this conversation should unfold. Absolutely. And in fact, professional comedians use that regularly. You never see the days that don't work, but they wait until they've weeded out all the stuff that doesn't work. And then the stuff that works is what you see on their Netflix special.

That's exactly right. That's exactly right. And you oftentimes don't figure out what the really funny line is as a comedian until the joke has failed a couple of times. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And it's exactly, it might be just one other thing. And it's, of course, we'll talk about this, reading the audience. In fact, notice, well, one of the things you have here in the book that you talk about is, and people talk about is noticing clues. People, when we talk, when we talk, we're often not listening and we're not looking and we're often preparing a bottle, as you point out, and other things. And when we're, and when we talk, we're often preparing a bottle, as you point out, and, and, and when we're what we should be doing is, and it's hard to train yourself to do that, is to look for the clues. Is someone slouching? Are they looking away? Or even do they laugh heartily at a joke or not? Yeah. And there's a way to train yourself to do this that's actually not only makes you a better listener, but makes the conversation better because it shows the other person that you're listening.

It's this thing called looping for understanding that is particularly important. Yeah. Yeah. Talk about that. It's so important. It's critical. And particularly in conflict conversations, right? When we, when we're discussing something that we disagree about or we might be in a, have some tension or in a fight with each other, when we are in a conversation like that, there is a sneaking suspicion in everyone's minds that the other person is not actually listening to them. They're just waiting their turn to speak. Right. And so one of the things that we have to do in those situations is we have to prove that we're listening to. And it's not what we do while someone is speaking that proves to them that we're listening to them. Because speaking is such a cognitively intense activity. We don't tend to notice what the other person is doing while we're speaking. It's what you do after they finish speaking that matters. And there's this technique that they teach at Harvard and Stanford, a bunch of other schools called looping for understanding. It has three steps. Step one is ask a question and preferably

a deep question. And we can talk about what those are. Step two is after the person has answered the question, repeat back in your own words, which you heard them say, not mimic them, but actually show them that you've been processing what they're talking about. And then step number three, and this is the one we often forget, ask if you got it right. And the reason why this is so powerful is not only does it convince the other person that I'm listening, which makes them more likely to listen to me in return. It's a way to discipline myself to actually listen. because it's not even if I want to listen closely to you you know if you say something I disagree with

there's part of my brain that's like no you're wrong I'm totally going to tell you why the guy you want to vote for is terrible but if my job is to listen to you closely enough that I can repeat back I can sort of synthesize what you just said in my own words and ask you if I got it right that that that quiets that voice in my head I really have to pay attention and so this looping for understanding it particularly once it becomes a habit It becomes a habit very, very easily and very quickly. Once it's a habit, it's really powerful. Of all the book, things, the book I thought, this is most fascinating.

You talk about it in the context of this difficult conversation. And we're now in this context, the book happens in the how do we feel part of your book, which is trying to understand where some, what, it's perhaps the hardest conversations to have with married people is to try and, is to try and relate emotionally and ask the right emotional questions, not the wrong ones, but this, the example where you talk about looping, and by the way, I had planned to implement that, and I try a little bit, but I planned when I thought we might have two hours because I was going to loop everything you said, but I don't have time to loop as much as I'd like, but where you use this looping is a conversation which, where you think

people might not, well, it would be impossible for people to listen to the other side, which is the example of the gun of gun. And why do you elaborate on that? Because I think it's a fascinating story. And I'll mention that, you know, you have been looping. One way that we have of looping is asking follow-up questions, right? Like it basically takes step two and three and kind of like combines them together. But yeah, so there was this experiment that was done where they brought together gun rights advocates and gun control activists, right?

And these are folks who like they all knew each other. They like had spent years shouting at each other and screaming at each other across picket lines and demonstrations on the floors of legislatures. And so they brought all these folks together. And the goal of the experimenters was not to see if they could get them to agree on anything. It was just to see if they could have a civil conversation. And so before the conversation starts, they actually teach them this technique, looping for understanding. And then they ask them to sort of ask each other these deep questions, right? questions about, you know, their experiences, their values and their beliefs. And what happened?

I talked to a number of the participants. One woman told me, you know, this is a woman who there had been a school shooting when she was in school in Las Vegas. And now she has daughters of her own. And there was an incident on campus where they thought there was a school shooter. And she's just completely traumatized by this. And she told this story of what had happened to her. and to her daughter to this guy who owns 47 rifles, right? And like thinks that the Second Amendment is the most important part of the Constitution. And he said, look, what I hear you saying, and tell me if I'm getting this wrong, is that is that this experience really like traumatized to you.

And you don't want your daughter or any other kids to experience that trauma. You've carried this around for decades. Am I getting that right? And she says, yeah, you're getting that right. talked to her, she was like, she told me that that was one of the most important conversation she's had to know that someone who she disagrees with, someone she saw as the enemy, that they can listen to her, they can understand what she's saying, that it made her want to listen to him in return. And when he started talking about the fact that guns were how he had bonded with his father

and that it's he uses hunting to bond with his sons, she had heard people say that before, but she hadn't really heard them. And now for the first time, she was, able to hear him and say, say back to him. What I hear you saying is that like, you don't see guns as this instrument of death. You see guns as this instrument of connection. Of connection, of bonding. Yeah. And you know, I'm glad you brought up because it's not just her life was changed. I'm not so surprised that she was changed, but he in particular, by her saying, I understand where you're coming from. He said to you, I think that this was this conversation changed was one of the most significant conversations he'd ever had.

And if I'm right, those two people continued to converse and communicate to each other well after that experiment happened. And it's a remarkable uplifting example to hear about because just those two people are on the opposite sides of the spectrum, communicating about how they understand or they think they understand what the other person's feeling, has a breaks down this immediate barrier of suspicion and automatic. rejection that it's fascinating. That's absolutely right. And I think the reason why it's so powerful, and of course we all know this is because we all know what it feels like to be scared for our kids,

right? We all know what it feels like to find something that allows us to bond with our kids that feel special. And particularly in today's society, we tend to focus on our differences. If you're a Trump voter and I'm a Biden supporter or vice versa, like that becomes the like the most dominant thing in how we see each other. But the truth of the matter is, I think about politics one percent of the time, right? So do you? Like, I don't care. Like my, my neighbor might have a different sign on his lawn for different candidate than I do. But like the things we have in common are the pothole that's on the street and our kids go to the same school and we're worried about taxes. We have so much more in common than we do that divides us. And in the history of this nation

and of this world, the moments we're most proud of, they are not the moments when everyone agreed with each other. They are the moments when people disagreed with each other and we managed to coexist. To coexist, yeah. I mean, in fact, we'll almost end with it. I want to get to the commonalities because I think that's a key factor. I do want to talk about this, elaborate a little bit more before moving on to this,

this notion of trying to find out how the other person feels and show you're listening. these psychologists who you talk about, talk about exactly how to get someone to communicate and open up. And it's often by asking what you might think are emotional questions. And they have something called the fast friends procedure. Some people think you may have to work into it. But they point out that you can get there fairly quickly. You want to comment?

Yeah, absolutely. So these are those deep questions, right? it turns out that one of the things that super communicators do is they ask, they ask 10 to 20 times as many questions as the average person. And some of those questions are deep questions, which is a question that asks us about our values or beliefs or experiences. And that can sound kind of intimidating, but it's actually much easier than it sounds. If you bump into someone, for instance, who is a doctor, it would be very natural to ask them, like, where do you practice medicine. But a better question, a deep question is to say, oh, what made you decide to go to medical

school, right? Or what do you, do you like being a doctor? Like, what do you love about it? Now, those aren't hard questions to ask. It doesn't feel like overly intimate or that I'm asking you about emotions. But what I'm doing is I'm inviting you to say something meaningful and deep and real, right? I'm inviting you to tell me who you actually are. Like asking why you became a journalist, for example. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Right. Like that's, that's a chance and you learn so much about the other person you learn people love to relate to that and they love to absolutely and so one of the things that super communicators do is they ask these deep questions not and deep questions they when we think about them in the abstract it can feel sort of like too much right

like we're getting too intimate too quickly but what research and study after study finds is you can basically get to a deep question within two questions you can get someone talking about their hopes and dreams. And they love it. Nobody minds being asked about who they really are. Exactly. There's a set of questions. We don't have time now to go to showing how you can change what you would ask and make it a stallow question, a deep question. But I do want to put a caveat in before I move on. When I read this, I thought, okay, this is fine and good, but we live in the modern world right now. And I've been writing a lot about this, and I hear a lot about it, where people are afraid to ask questions, and in fact, in some, in academia and some of the workforce, with concerns about

harassment and other things, there's this dichotomy because you can ask what you think is a deep question, but it could be viewed as intrusive. And so I think that, yeah, go on. I think there's two answers to this. The first is when you do ask a deep question or any question, it's important to pose it as an invitation rather than a mandate, right? So saying like, oh, what made you decide to go to medical school? I'm inviting you to tell me something about who you are. But I'm not mandating that you have to get personal. Like, it could be very easy for someone to say, like, oh, I was just good at science and

I was interested in it and I decided to become a doctor. Okay. So then we'll move on to something else. Whereas saying to someone, you know, this is particularly true around identity issues, right? Yeah. Saying to someone, you know, as a black woman in this workplace, like, Like, what do you think about racism? That's not a question where I'm inviting you.

That's a question where I'm sort of mandating that you answer that. And so we always want to think about making invitations instead of mandates. Yeah. I will push back only when I was chair of physics department. I was told we had meetings and we were counseled on harassment and other things. And I was told, for example, that asking my assistant, you know, did they have a good time on their vacation? was harassment. I mean, I wasn't allowed to. And I was like, wow. And I thought it was an invitation to. And so it's, I think one of the reasons, frankly, people are very unhappy in the workplace

now is that you can't have adult conversations that are true communication. I would say, I mean, that sounds like a particularly extreme case. Yeah, of course it does. But not to question another HR department, but I, I don't think many people would get on, would get tagged to say like, you know, but definitely saying there's a difference between saying, you know, Oh, you were on vacation. Like, what was the best thing you did? And like, you know, how much did you spend on vacation? What did you wear to the beach?

Versus being like, oh, you're off last week. Was it a good week? Yeah, I know. I would think so. And I agree. And I think to be human, those are the best ways to. And I think they're the best ways to create good working relationships too. But I do point out that I think it's one of the problems now.

Before I move on, in fact, talking about hard questions, which is the last thing you talk about. And I want to get to it and then spend three minutes asking you some personal questions. throughout the book I was thinking of my wife in many ways who was who correct who helps me in my communication and and but her statement always because I do tend to talk about myself too much and people anyone who listens to my podcast knows that but but her point is all just to ask more questions in some sense without in all three areas of the nature of conversation what I was thinking throughout is that's generally the case. Just ask more questions is probably the best way

to communicate. Ask questions, but also ask questions that share something about yourself. Or if you ask a deep question, feel free to answer that question yourself. Because there is a difference between a conversation and an interview, right? We've all been in that situation. You're at some party and someone's just asking you question after question. You're like, oh my God, like, I did not come here for an interview. I came here to have a conversation. Yeah. And so oftentimes, you know, there's this idea of reciprocity of reciprocity of vulnerability and authenticity. And sometimes that means saying to someone, you know, why did you decide to become a doctor? And they say, oh, it's because I know my dad was sick as a kid. And it's answering that same question yourself and saying, oh, you know, I became a lawyer because I saw my brother get arrested. Right. And that doesn't mean, that doesn't mean that I have to spend like try and steal that spotlight and spend the next 10 minutes telling you all about myself. But it does mean that you shared something with me, and I want to show you that I'm willing to share with you. And it's your share, especially if you share a vulnerability, I think it opens up other people

who might not want to share their vulnerabilities. You point out in the book that it invites people, if they feel like it, to once you show you're vulnerable and once you show you trust enough to share your vulnerabilities, it again breaks down barriers of suspicion and other things. And in fact, that's part of the how you feel conversation a little bit. But the last part of the, we have a few minutes left and and I don't know how rigorous your cutoff is whether we have to do it to the minute or not. I'll try to. Is the who we are conversation and and which is where you really focus on on hard conversations. And in fact, you talk about one actually one example with in Netflix, which I still find absolutely ridiculous. I still find ridiculous. I'm going to say it's an example

of someone who in the context of explaining to people how inappropriate certain things are uses the N word to demonstrate how inappropriate would be to use the N word and got fired because of it. It's not the first example. You know that it happened in the New York Times too. A well-known science journalist at the New York Times was explaining to kids when someone asked them about using the N-word why it wasn't appropriate to use the N-word and he got fired because he used the N-word and explaining it. That's a level of ridiculousness in our society that we don't have time to deal with right now. But it does, but dealing with those kind of hard conversations, people are, which are often identity related. I was kind of intrigued with this dichotomy

in the last part of your book because commonalities are so important as you talk about. But at the same time, there's a, you know, there are discussions of using identity as a way to relate to people. And there's sort of two sides of a coin because I think focusing on identity is part of the problem when people have a unique identity instead of realizing, as you point out, and it's a title of another book, We Are Multitudes. You point out that we all have many identities. And so focusing on one is part of the problem.

Focusing on many is part of the solution. That's my little. That's exactly right. So after this incident at Netflix, when the company really like basically spiraled into a civil war, right? There were people who felt like this guy getting fired was totally inappropriate and other people who felt like, of course he had to get fired. there's a race problem. And Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix and the founder,

he could have very easily said, look, we're not going to discuss this. Like this is a conversation belongs at home. It doesn't belong here. But instead, what he said was we have to discuss this. But there's a right way to discuss it. And there's a couple of rules. The first rule is, let's just acknowledge at the outset, this is a hard conversation, right? It's an uncomfortable conversation. I am probably going to say something wrong. Like between my brain and my lips, I might get screwed up and I'm going to ask you to forgive me in advance. And I promise you, if you say something the wrong way, I'm not going to take offense. I'm going to ask you to explain. But then number two, exactly as you raised, one of the things that happens in these social

conversations or these identity conversations is that when we focus on one identity, we tend to force people into a corner. We force them into a stereotype. Like if I say to you, oh, you know, as as a black man at this company, how do you feel about X? Well, now like all these other interesting aspects of you, I've essentially like just ignore and said, I'm going to focus exclusively on the color of your skin. But if I say, look, as a black man, I imagine that this company, you experience things differently than I do. But I know you're also a manager as am I. And I know you're also a father. And so you probably think about this in terms of your kids.

and you're a member of, you know, the party planning committee. And given all those different hats you wear, how do you see this question that we're discussing? When I do that, instead of trying to force someone into a corner, instead of trying to force them into a stereotype, what I'm essentially saying is I'm saying, I recognize that we have a lot in common, but there's also some things that we don't have in common. And I want to understand what your experience is like. And those differences are as important and as valuable as are similarities. And so I want to create space for you to tell me how those differences impact you.

And you might very well say, look, the fact that on black doesn't really actually matter. Like that doesn't really shape how I see this. But I've given you space and you've hopefully given me space to explore the multitudes that we all contain. And that's really, really important, particularly when we're having these difficult discussions. Absolutely. And I happen to think, I mean, I've written, I focused so on about this, this notion of people, this sense of victimization because of one aspect of identity is, and focusing on that instead of our commonalities is a huge part of the problem what's going on. And, and I was actually surprised because you talked about a vice president for sort of diversity and equity who I expected to hate because I've encountered many of these people. And I was amazed because, they talked about having guidelines for conversations, no blame, the opposite things of what I'm used to talking about. But you end the book by saying commonalities are what allow us to learn from

each other, to bridge differences, to begin talking, understanding, and working together. Conversations about identity are what reveal these connections and allow us to share our full selves. And the point is not conversations about one identity, but are many identities. And I think that's the moral. You know, and I think about this, I, you know, Particularly in the post-George Floyd world, I think about this a lot because I've had a lot of conversations with friends who are parents who are black. And they see policing differently and they see they see parenting differently and what you have to warn your kids about. And the reason those conversations are so valuable to me is because we are both parents, right? We both want our kids to succeed.

But the other reason they're valuable is because their experience is very different from my experience. And so hearing about their experience helps me understand them and their world. And it also helps me reflect on my world. And oftentimes it's our instinct to downplay differences and to upplay similarities. But the best conversations are ones where we acknowledge our similarities and our commonalities and we acknowledge our differences in a way that allows everyone to define how they are different. And that's the other thing that Renee Myers, you mentioned it at Netflix, one of the wonderful things she did is she came and she said, look, we have to have conversations

about race and everyone has a seat at this table. Everyone has had a racial experience regardless of the color of your skin. And everyone belongs here. And creating that sense of belonging is as important as creating that sense of inclusiveness. Exactly. And I think the point of, you know, to summarize somewhat you said in the point of the book is that, you know, not only conversations, not are they negotiations, But a good conversation is win-win, is everybody wins.

It's not one person wins, another person loses. Everyone gains, you know, you're in conversations because, as you point out in the afterwards book, we are healthier, happier people because we're social beings. And when we stop being social beings, we become unhealthy. And part of being a social being is to know how to communicate and learn. So a conversation is to learn about, is to expand your world by learning about how other people's worlds. And I think that's the, and you know, that's, that's for me, the beauty of science, too, is to expand my world by learning about other things. Let me, I know we're essentially at a time, but I have four quick questions if you have 30 seconds.

Good. Sure. Your time is valuable, but I, I could go on for a long time. But I, let me ask one thing. What was, what was your, what was your biggest surprise in writing the book? I think my biggest surprise was, I assumed going into this that super communicators were people who were kind of born to it, right? they were extroverts or they were really charming. And what all the research tells us is that's not true at all, right?

It's a normal distribution. It's not about your personality or your characteristics. It's simply a set of skills and anyone can learn those skills. And so that was really surprising, but also hopeful to. Yeah. I mean, in fact, speaking of hopeful, the fact that, I mean, you went into it thinking that, it's interesting you went into it, therefore thinking there are some people who could do things that none of us can attain, but why write a book if that's the case? So I assume you

hoped at some level that there were some lessons that all of us could get out of it. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And when I discovered pretty quickly was it's exactly, it was something that all of us can attain. Any of us can become a super communicator. And in fact, we often are super communicators without even realizing it. But we can do that deliberately and we can do it consistently just by understanding a handful of skills, like asking deep questions, looping for understanding. Those transform our conversations. What are your biggest hopes then for this book,

other than being very successful, of course, and something else? I mean, my biggest hope is that people draw on this to have conversations that they're not having. You know, when our parents were in high school and middle school, they took a course called like home economics or interpersonal relations or something.

We used to teach communication skills in school. And the schools became more technical that fell out of the curriculum. And that's okay. But we're seeing the price of that today, right? We're seeing neighbors who have trouble having conversations because they have different lawn signs for different politicians. My biggest hope is that people start to say like, actually, like, I can connect with

anyone and I want to connect with people in my life that I'm having trouble doing. So here's a recipe to do it pretty easily. Wonderful. And are you, has it has this, you went into this with a hope that this would help your your relationship, your wife. Are you happier? Has it affected your life personally? Oh, yeah.

No. In a way. In a very positive. I mean, not only my conversations with my wife, right? But obviously. But also my conversations with my kids. I mean, honestly, like, you know, being, I used to, one of the ways to think about these deep questions is to ask,

instead of people asking people about the facts of their life, ask them how they feel about their life. And I used to, like, just batter my kids with, like, fact questions. Like, what did you do today? Nothing. Did you learn anything at school? No. But now I ask all these feeling questions. I'm like, oh, I saw that you were hanging out with your friend, you know, after school, Spencer.

Just wondering, like, what do you admire about Spencer? Like, why is he a good friend? And, like, suddenly my kids open up and they have all these things to say. Especially in their teenagers, it's a great way to do it. I've been twice and it's nice. Well, good. I'm not going to ask you the last question, which, by the way, was one of the first questions I thought of ask. I couldn't resist because it's earlier your book.

I was going to ask about what you thought about your father and what effect he had on you. But we'll save that for a future conversation. I love it. And as I expected, this was a really enjoyable conversation. I hope you enjoyed it too. And I want to thank you. Me too. Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me on.

It's been a real pleasure. I hope you enjoyed today's conversation. This podcast is produced by the Origins Project Foundation, a nonprofit organization whose goal is to enrich your perspective of your place in the cosmos by providing access to the people who are driving the future of society in the 21st. century and to the ideas that are changing our understanding of ourselves and our world. To learn more, please visit Originsproject Foundation.org.