The Invisible Rules Of Social Success You Were Never Taught - Charles Duhigg

what do most people get wrong when it comes to understanding communication do you think I think what most people get wrong is they think that it's something that should just happen naturally right that it's something that that that the best communicators are people who don't think about communication but what we've discovered is exactly the opposite if if if you know someone who is just fantastic at connecting with people at communicating and you go up and you ask them you know have you always been like this inevitably what they are going to tell you is no they'll say something like when I was in high school I had real trouble making friends and so I had really had to like study how kids talk to each other or or my my parents got divorced when I was a kid and I had to be The Peacemaker between them the thing about communication is it's just a set of skills it's not even particularly complicated skills it's a set of skills that anyone can learn anyone can become a super communicator but you have to realize that there's skills and you have to practice them a little bit and and you have to commit to thinking about how you communicate to get better at it I suppose communication is quite tightly tied to our sense of self you know it's the it's our expression of who we are so when we look at somebody that's a good or a bad Communicator that's because they are a good or a bad person sense of selfworth comes through as well absolutely I mean that happens a lot and and of course um you can be a bad person and be a great communicator you can be a good person and not be a great communicator um but you're exactly right that like communication is very Central to not only how we think about ourselves but but how we move through the world and and what's interesting is if you think about it communication is so communication is homo saian superpower right it is the thing that has allowed us to to be you know do better than every other species to build families and Villages and towns to pass Knowledge from from one generation to the Next Generation and so our brains have evolved to be pretty good at communication like like we have all of the stuff in our head to be fantastic at it and as a result because it's so important to who we are as a species you're right we tend to judge people like their moral worth on whether they're a good communicator or not and and that that can be a little bit dangerous but it also means that if you want to connect with someone and you're someone who's an introvert you're someone who has trouble connecting it's really just a matter of learning how learning these skills about how communication works and you can form that Bond talk to me about the difference between introverts and extroverts are there advantages and disadvantages that each have each sort of off the top of your head you'd think well extroverts have got all of the advantages here because they're the ones that are more outgoing they're going to have more experience they're going to find Social um engagements less energy sapping uh what what did you come to learn about extroverts and introverts in communication so it it turns out it to to answer that question let me tell you a little bit about what we know about the science of communication so um when I started writing super communicators the reason why is because I had fallen into this bad pattern with my wife which probably is going to be familiar to you and anyone listening to this which is I would come home from long day work I start complaining about my day I was working at the New York Times at that point be like my boss doesn't understand me and my co-workers don't realize what a genius I am and my wife would say this very like practical thing she would say like why don't you take your boss out to lunch and you guys can get to know each other a little bit better and instead of being able to hear her good advice I would actually get more upset right and I would say like you're supposed to be supporting me you're supposed to be on my side why aren't you outraged on my behalf and she would get upset because I was attacking for giving me good advice was not a good scene right and I think many people all relationships have some version of this where where where one person wants to complain and the other person wants to solve the problem and there's there's conflict there and so I was trying to figure out like why this was happening and I went to researchers and I asked them and they said well we're actually really glad that you came and talked to us right now because we're living through this golden age of understanding communication and one of the things that we've learned by studying the brains of people as they communicate with each other is that when you're having a discussion you think it's about one thing right you're talking about your day or like where to go on vacation or next year's budget but actually they said if you look at someone's brain every discussion is made up of multiple kinds of conversations and in general these conversations tend to fall into one or three buckets there's these practical conversations where we're like solving problems or making plans together but then there's emotional conversations where I tell you what I'm feeling and I don't want you to solve my feelings I want you to empathize and then there's social conversations which is about how we relate to each other and and society and they said what we've discovered is if two people are having different kinds of conversations at the same time they usually aren't even aware of it but they literally can't hear each other they literally can't understand what the other person is trying to say and they don't feel connected at all but if you can figure out what kind of conversation is happening and you can match the other person or invite them to match you then suddenly you feel connected even if you don't agree with each other you suddenly feel like you have some type of connection and and it feels like a conversation so what does this have to do with introverts and extroverts a lot of the research that's coming out particularly now says that introversion and extroversion is not necessarily something that we're born with or something that's hardwired into our brain it's a set of habits that we become comfortable with right extroverts often times get more opportunities to practice having conversation to practice having conversations such as emotional conversations right or practical conversations or because they have practice somebody comes up to them with an emotional problem and they try and give them a practical solution and it doesn't go well and they say okay next time next time I'm GNA handle this a little bit differently I'm G to do better I think one of the big differences between extroverts and introverts is simply how much time and space we have and we give ourselves to practice because like anything that's skills-based the first time you play soccer the first time you play Crick it the first time you go and lift weights you're not you're not great at it you got to practice it you got to learn how to do it and it Communications exactly the same way what would you consider the component skills of communication if you were to bucket them together okay so there's a couple of them um and we should talk about what a super Communicator is because I think that'll help people kind of visualize this in their head so so let me ask you a question which is let's imagine you having like bad day right like just terrible day you come home after work you're like and you want to call someone because you know calling this person will make you feel better like you'll just like it do you know who you would call like does that person pop into your mind yeah yeah probably either Luke my tour manager or George who is a friend and has been on the show 10 times okay okay so Luke and George are for you super communicators and you are I guarantee you a super Communicator back to them right you you do it without even thinking about it you just know how to like you know how to ask the right question you know how to show that you're listening you know how to show that you care you know how to each of those things that you're doing with with those two guys are skills and you might not recognize them as skills right now because they just feel so natural to you but they are skills and once we identify them as skills they become fungible we can you can talk to a stranger the same way you talk to Luke and if you do it'll have the same impact that it has on Luke which is that it feels like you're the most wonderful person on Earth okay so what are those skills so one of the things that we know about super communicators and this is the first skill is that and as I mentioned we're all super communicators one time or another but consistent super communicators people who can connect with almost anyone is that they tend to ask more questions like 10 to 20 times as many questions as the average person and some of those questions we don't even register as questions or things like oh you know what' you make of that or like oh did you like that restaurant like like little things that just invite us into a conversation but some of the questions are what are known within psychology as deep questions and a deep question is something that asks us about our values or beliefs or experiences and that can sound a little bit intimidating but it's like as simple as like if you meet someone who's a doctor instead of saying you know oh what hospital do you work at saying oh what made you decide to go to medical school right it's as easy to ask the second question as the first but the second question like invites them to talk about who they are it's a deep question it doesn't appear like a deep question but it allows you to have a real conversation so this is the first skill super communicators ask a lot more questions and they they ask deep questions they ask about instead of asking about the facts of someone's life they ask how they feel about their life it's interesting thinking about uh the two guys that I mentioned because they would both both a lot of the time drop into that and I think there's a sense of being seen when somebody asks you a question about how did that make you feel because at no point are they denying the fact that you felt that way or should have felt that way that it feels like a judgment free zone totally totally and the thing I love about that too and I think that this is that's a really that's a really smart comment because what it also recognizes is when I ask you about your personal experiences I'm asking you about something that you are an expert on and so so let's say we're having a political debate and we disagree with each other and I've got all my facts in my pocket you've got all your facts in your pocket but if I ask you like how did you feel on Election Day like when you saw the results come in how did you feel that you're the expert in how you feel I can't be like oh you didn't feel that way you actually felt this way right like and and then when you ask me how I felt I'm the expert in what I feel and so instead of us trying to out expert each other and out and outd duel each other we're both coming with these authentic experiences that we have and and it allows us to find all the things we have in common because if you voted for someone that if you voted for the person I didn't vote for and vice versa my guess is actually that was the smallest part of that week right was was casting that ballot there was also like waking up the morning after there's taking your kids to school there's you know talking to friends about the election those are all things that we have in common and finding that commonality really helps us also talk about what we don't have in common which is really powerful okay next skill okay so first one is asking deep questions second skill is that once we ask those questions we often think that it's just our job to listen to people and that's a little bit of a misunderstanding of what listening is so what's interesting is that most of the time when we think about listening what we think about is we think about remaining silent right two ears one mouth remaining silent listening to what you're saying maybe we'll nod our head maybe we'll like look you in the eyes and and say like that's interesting that's not that's not listening that's the first condition of listening but you need more to actually be a good listener and in part it's because particularly when we're talking about something that's really sensitive or really important or really controversial or something we have feel conflict over that we disagree with each other there's always a sneaking suspicion in the back of our head that you are not actually listening to me you're just waiting your turn to speak so what do I do to overcome that suspicion well there's actually this technique let me give you the answer the answer is that you have to prove that you're listening you have to prove to the person you're paying attention and there's actually this technique that they teach at like Harvard and Stanford and all these other fancy schools that's called looping for understanding and this is what this is what it is there's three parts to this when you're talking to someone and you get to that point in the conversation where like things are getting real step one is you should ask a question right preferably a deep question try and use like you know ask someone how do you feel about that what does that mean to you why' you decide to do X and then listen to what they're saying in response and when they're done answering the question repeat back in your own words what you heard them say now the key here is it cannot be mimicry right this is what bad salese do they just say back what you just said to them or the last thing that you said what what it has to be is you have you're trying to prove to them that you're actually processing this so it has to be something like you know what I hear you saying is this and and that reminds me of something you said last week because I think they're connected right you're proving to them that you're thinking about what they said and most of us do these first two steps intuitively right this is just like we kind of learned this in school it's step three that I always forget because once you've said to them here's what I here's what I heard you say am I getting this right or you say did I hear you correctly you you ask if you got it right because what you're really doing in that moment is you're asking for permission to ackowledge that you were listening and when you acknowledge that I was listening I become many many times more likely listen likely to listen to you in return this is basic social reciprocity so that's the second skill is prove you are listening ask deep questions prove you are listening through a technique like looping for understanding or maybe just asking followup questions or maybe saying oh man that sounds so hard I I kind of know what that's like I've been through something myself prove you're listening so third oh sorry go ahead no just it it it makes an an awful lot of sense that it it can conversations bad conversations can feel like a game of tennis where everybody is just waiting that turn oh the ball's coming over the net it's coming over it's going to bounce and then oh it's now it's my turn to hit it yeah and those aren't that's not fun right like it's not like and and by the way if you look at transcripts of great conversations what you see is that they're a total mess like like if you have if you have a transcript and everyone's being really eloquent they're saying things in like these really like practiced ways that's not a great conversation it might be a great transcript but like if you were in that conversation you'd be like this is the most boring thing on earth like everyone's just waiting to hit the tennis ball a good conversation is kind of messy and it's it has these nonlinear aspects and that's that's important that's that's how we connect with each other what's the third skill okay so there's two more the third skill is that you need to understand vulnerability and the role of vulnerability in a conversation because most people misunderstand what vulnerability is we we this word has gotten used so much we tend to think it means like you know crying on someone's shoulder talking about like when your mom was mean to you that's not what vulnerability is is vulnerability has a very very spe specific definition in neuroscience and psychology and it's something that our brains have evolved to do which is that when I tell you something that you could judge it creates a sense of vulnerability in me now I might tell you something where I don't care about your judgment I might tell you that I like um I like Star Trek better than Star Wars I think it's a better sh better better plots better acting and you could be like that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard like like the Star Wars is definitely better than St track I don't care I don't care if you agree with me it's not like it's a high stake saying but the act of me telling you something that you could judge it sets off a neural Cascade in my brain that creates a sense of vulnerability and here's what we know is that when I do that if you don't judge me if you choose to withhold judgment and even more powerfully if you share something about yourself that I could judge then it is impossible for us not to trust and like each other a little bit more our brains literally have evolved to use vulnerability as a signal as to whether we should trust other people and that doesn't mean that like I might agree with you it doesn't mean that I might like think you're you'd be a good friend but as as once I am vulnerable with you and you are vulnerable with me once we engage in reciprocal vulnerability and reciprocal authenticity we will trust each other and like each other a little bit more have you thought have you looked at this from an Adaptive lens through okay so can you give me the uh oh totally totally so let's so let's talk about like why why commun from an Adaptive perspective why communication is so important why this particular trait might be even more important so it clearly it's adaptive to be able to communicate right if I can if I can we we know that societies do better than individuals and the way that I can coordinate with a society is I can talk to them and we can become we can share goals together so communication is clearly adaptive but then there's this question about like why would vulnerability be something that's that's adaptive instead of maladaptive something that helps us and the answer is that once we build a society it's very very hard to police that Society without it being really expensive so if if we have rules like you should not murder someone or you should not steal and we have to get cops on every single corner to watch people all the time to if they're stealing it's incredibly expensive it's not efficient it take it undo all the advantages of a society so what we need is we need some system where people learn the rules and they just want to live by the rules right they want to stick by the rules and more importantly if somebody breaks those rules they take real offense at it in a system like that when a stranger comes to town I have to determine whether that stranger poses a risk or not because I can't follow them around with a police officer for a long time and so one of the things that happens is if they show me something that I could use against them if they show me their underbelly if they admit something to me that I could judge they're giving they're giving me a little bit of Leverage they're giving me a little bit of power and and that means and and if I do the same thing back to them we've given each other some power and in that situation we don't have to worry about the police keeping everyone in line because you and I now know something about each other we owe something to each other we've we've taken the measure of the other person by giving them a chance to attack us so if they're the type of person who's an attacker we like gave them a perfect opportunity and they didn't do it and that doesn't mean that like everyone in that Society is going to be moral and ethical all the time but it does mean that in a very when I need to very quickly evaluate whether you're a risk or not looking to the vulnerability and whether it's authentic vulnerability is going to be a real test and there's another interesting part to this which is when people aren't authentically vulnerable we detect it almost immediately incredibly yeah so like if I say like hey you know I just wanted to let you know like um you know I spent all this money on this yacht and like I'm a little stressed about like how much money I spent on it but bro it's a sweet yacht like that does not that's that's clearly not me being vulnerable right that's I mean I said something that aens it's a humble break I said something that you could judge you could be like yeah you spent too much money but like the so that's that's inauthentic or if I go if I ask you where you went on vacation it doesn't take you long to figure out I don't care where you went on vacation I just want to tell you where I went on vacation so I can brag about like this cool Safari I went on our brain If you to ask if you were to ask a question of have you ever gone on a vacation and with your partner and it's been emotionally difficult have you ever had that oh totally that's that's a great question that that was something that happened to me recently and and dude it's weird because you've got this sort of bit of Sweet Sensation you're away in somewhere that's so beautiful but you you and your significant other aren't really getting on and I I don't really know I mean is that common like has that ever happened to you you know like that's an interesting yeah that's exactly that's a fantastic deep question because what you just did is you admitted something vulnerable to me and it didn't cost you much it's not like think like oh this guy's like such a jerk because he went on a vacation with his girlfriend like there's no cost to that type of vulnerability but it is authentic you're you're trying to share something real and meaningful with me as opposed to trying to like send some signal and so so we're very good at detecting authenticity BS yeah I think I've been pretty fascinated by parasocial relationships and um the incentives for online writers YouTubers podcasters you know influences of any kind to try and growth hack or speedrun this sense of relatability and authenticity and connection and um I think faux vulnerability sort of performative vulnerability maybe we could call it um is definitely one of the places that you see this happen um and you know at it's dream this is kind of victimhood pedestalize iation tends to not actually happen from the person it tends to kind of be bestowed on them by by everybody else in a way you don't tend to pedestalize yourself as a as as a victim um but yeah that performative vulnerability that sort of tuning up of things that didn't really affect you all that much or maybe didn't really happen or or a surreptitious way of you're getting gossip in or maybe you're trying to vent to tell somebody something about someone else you know venting this have you looked into venting much as a adaptive mechanism yeah I've looked into office gossip but not venting tell me about it venting is so [ __ ] sick so venting is very much a female intersexual competitive trait uh and the reason is venting allows you to distribute gossip about a potential rival under the aaces of you being a caring compatriot so I'm able to say uh Charles I'm I'm really worried about John uh because you know he's just like he's sleeping with in fact let me I'll pretend we're gonna be we're gonna be women so I'm I'm Christine and you're Charlotte um so Charlotte I'm really worried about uh Johanna uh Yanna is just she's sleeping with all of these guys and like I'm really worried that she's going to get hurt you know like I'm just she doesn't really seem like she's being herself and like you know what am I in that one sentence what am I telling you I'm telling you how much promiscuous sex Joanna is having yeah I'm positioning myself as somebody who is you know I would never I would never do that I would never stoop that low you know I just I care about her so much I have to bring it up exactly so like implicitly you're derating her facundity and her Chastity whilst positioning yours above hers but it's culpably deniable because you're not doing it to gossip I wasn't gossiping like I'm just so worried Joanna I I you know I didn't mean to tell Charlotte like I wasn't trying to like talk behind your back I'm just so worried about you with all of this stuff and it venting it's a very unique uh type of manipulative it can be totally unique type of manipulative sort of social really interesting about that and I think this is true of parasocial parasocial lism in general is lisans parasocial ism is that how we say it oh I I par socialism yeah is it there is something authentic happening there but the authentic thing is I hate Joanna so much that I want to spread [ __ ] about her right like like like that's actually an authentic thing and so oftentimes when we see people who engage in performative um vulnerability it's very easy for us to say like oh if they're doing it for thousands of people it must not be real but of course you know that's not true right sometimes sometimes we say something to thousands or even millions of people and it is very real it's very authentic the thing that makes the difference is is are you committed to saying first of all do you know your own mind do you know your own feelings are you genuinely committed to trying to understand what you're feeling and thinking and if that's like I hate Joanna and I want to smear her then like own that live up to that like accept that that's your goal and once you do that if you share it with other people in an authentic way if you say like look like I really want to tell 10,000 of my closest friends that like I have cancer and I'm terrified that's not inauthentic that's real but it's real because the person thought about what they're thinking and feeling they questioned their own motives and values and then they tried to be as transparent with the audience as possible they weren't trying to use any subterfuge they're trying to say I want you to understand me so I'm going to speak to you in as clear and direct a way I as I can I suppose there um yeah the the yacht example is kind of interesting it's almost like it it it's a something which in the wrong hands I guess vulnerability is something which is uh potentially destructive or embarrassing if if in if put into the wrong hands that might be one way to to put it I suppose yeah I think that's a that's a good way of putting it is that like I'm telling you something that actually you could use against me yeah but if you start spreading the rumor that I bought a cool yacht that does nothing except for you know yeah make me seem cool okay okay what's the final skill okay so the final skill is once you're asking deep questions once you're proving that you're listening looping for understanding and sort of showing that once you're you're willing to be vulnerable under the correct definition of what vulnerability is it's really important that we pay attention to what kind of conversation is happening I mentioned before that there's these three kinds of conversations the the Practical the emotional and the social and and in the book super communicators there's all these stories about like a CIA officer who's like recruiting overseas spies and a and why the Big Bang Theory became such a hit because it was a flop when they when they made the pilot and at the core of it is this thing that if I if I become attuned to diagnosing what kind of mindset you're in if I can just ask myself like does this seem like he's in a practical mindset or an emotional mindset or a social mind mindset and then I can just do the smallest thing to try and match you there right like like you mentioned that you went to your kids graduation this weekend and and and I say instead of saying like just congratulations that's awesome I say oh man what did that feel like to watch your kid walk across that stage because clearly you are you're this is kind of an emotional experience for you to go to your kids graduation I'm just going to ask about it when we can pay attention just the smallest amount to what kind of conversation is happening when we can match others and we can invite them to match us all of a sudden our conversations get much much better and there's actually a scientific basis to this which is because of again how our brains have evolved because communication is so important to our species when you're in a good conversation like this conversation we're having right now without our us realizing it our bodies start to match each other so you and I are breathing at as basically the same rate our heart rates are matching each other or the actually even the P the dilation of our pupils is starting to mirror each other and more importantly if I could see inside both of our brains what I would see is our thoughts are becoming more and more similar literally we're using the same parts of our brain with the same type of energy we're we're moving through similar neural Pathways and that kind of makes sense that our brains would become similar because if you think about it when I tell you about an emotion I'm feeling you actually experience that emotion a little bit right or if I tell you about an idea you experience that idea so it makes sense that our brains become become aligned but what the neuroscientist that I mentioned earlier have found and there's a guy named Erie Hassan at Princeton who's kind of the grandfather of This research is that the more our brains become aligned the more we're thinking the same thoughts at the same time the better we understand each other the more we feel connected to each other and most importantly the more we like the conversation within Neuroscience this is known as neural entrainment we become neurally entrained and when we are nearly entrained it re it releases this reward sensation this Cascade of of neurotransmitters that make us feel good and in part this is adaptive because you know our brains want us to communicate with people they want us to have real conversations they want us to connect and bond and so when we feel good even if we disagree with each other we still feel good about the conversation we still feel like the conversation was a success now the thing is these three types of conversations that I mentioned they use different parts of our brains right so when I'm talking to my wife and I'm in an emotional mindset I'm using the the basil ganglia the interior structures of my brain and when she responds by giving me some practical advice she's having a practical conversation she's using her prefrontal cortex so it's very hard for her thoughts to become similar if she's using the front of her brain and I'm using the interior of my brain that's why matching each other is so powerful is because literally what I'm doing when I ask you oh what did it feel like like to watch your kid walk across that stage at graduation what I'm doing at that moment is I'm activating the same part of my brain that I know is active in your brain and it's going to make it so much easier for us to become nurly aligned and then once we're aligned we can move from emotional to practical to Social and back to emotional all together and we'll understand each other so much better the entire time was this what the Dartmouth study was looking at and that's something to do with a guitarist as well yeah there's a ton there's a ton of studies that have looked exactly at this right like like you mentioned the Dartmouth study they would have people watch these confusing movie clips together um and and then they would actually turn off the um the sound and they were oftentimes foreign movies so the people were actually not even speaking English and there was no subtitles and they would have people just watch watch these movies these movie clips they were super confusing and then they would put them in groups to try and have them answer these a bunch of questions like what's going on in that scene X and Y and Z the group has to come to a consensus and what they found is that some of the groups would came to a consensus faster and easier than others and when they put them in MRIs and they showed them the clips again what they found was that those groups that came to consensus really really quickly and not quickly but but easily fully came to consensus their brains all looked like each other after they had had this conversation the first time they were watching the movie in the MRI their brains all look different but the conversation somehow got their brains to look similar to remember and watch these scenes as if they were all sharing kind of the same perspective and so they're trying to figure out why does this happen in some groups and it doesn't happen in other groups and B silers sers is the name of the researcher who did this research and what he found is that in the groups that came to consensus in the groups that became nurly aligned there was at least one person who was a super communicator there was someone who like would just ask a lot more questions than the average person and again a lot of the questions were like oh like what what did what did you think of that scene or like you know oh what do you think of what happened next they're just questions that invite us into the conversation they would also do things like repeat what other people said a lot more often you know Jim Jim you had a really interesting thought that you mentioned that you thought that this one scene was about death right they're proving that they're listening and in that group people begin modeling themselves after that behavior so other people start it's so proo that it sets a tone everyone else wants to follow absolutely one super Communicator in a group can cause everyone else to become nurly and trained and when they're nurly and trained they hear each other so much better they like each other so much better and that doesn't like they had people in these rooms who like were like conservatives and liberals and people who are from the south and from the North like these weren't people who necessarily like all natur would have been friends but just putting that super Communicator in the room having them model those behaviors it made everyone else feel like that group came together that it clicked and that's really powerful yeah it's um it's interesting how one correctly positioned person can sort of change the the dynamic of a conversation and I often think about I often think about I had this idea recently about why around some people it feels like we have so much to say and around other people we don't feel that interesting I'm sure that you'll have read the story about Winston Churchill's mother meeting no have you not heard oh you're gonna absolutely love this one so I wrote about this in my newsletter a couple of weeks ago so um Winston Churchill's mother I never realized she was kind of a bit of a uh how would you say like a socialite type thing sort of a little like a Hollywood socialite type thing she's called Jenny Jerome so uh she got to dine with prime minister Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone on consecutive nights so there the two the the two Rivals that were vying for leadership and she got to dine with them on consecutive nights and she said when I left the dining room after sitting next to Gladstone I thought that he was the cleverest man in England but when I sat next to Disraeli I left feeling like I was the cleverest woman and it sort of perfectly explains why around some people it feels like we have lots to say and around other people if feels like we're boring and um I realized a lot of the time what people want they want to be charismatic you know gen Z even had to recreate it as RZ because car Charisma Charisma was too sort of boomering and uncool um and everybody wants RZ but when you actually think about okay so how do you become charismatic which is sort of energetic outgoing extroverted likeability with sexiness I guess um it's really hard how do you make an uncharismatic person more charismatic it's really difficult but reverse Charisma which is not trying to be interested interesting to other people but trying to make them feel interesting around you that's way easier that's significantly easier to do way it's way easier and and this there's this quote that I'm sure you've heard from my Angelou that no one remembers what you said they only remember how you made them feel and it turns out that actually the science tells us that's that's right like if you think back to the a great conversation you had in the last week and I would asked you to tell me what people talked about you could probably come up with like two or three topics that came up and you will remember nothing specific about what anyone said right like like when we're in a conversation it's not like we're transcribing it we're not paying attention to the words what we are paying attention to now if I asked you how you felt during that conversation you'd actually be able to tell me with like surprising accuracy how you felt at different different periods in the conversation and You' certainly remember how you felt at the end of it that's what we tend to remember yeah I I mean Adam mastriani has this great Insight around uh everything is just Vibes basically which is the same the same sort of realization you've come to you know he's a guy who I think is still in Academia uh he did uh postgrad PhD did all of this stuff and I think maybe he did his undergrad 15 years ago something like that and he was on the quiz team the qu quiz oh really I didn't know that I know Adam I didn't know that he was on the Apparently uh and uh he tested himself to just remember the names of the classes that he took in his first year of undergrad just the names of the classes and I think he got 40% of the names of the classes right there's no way I would get 40% like I might get one of those right yeah exactly um and but he said he can remember how one of the particular lectures made him feel when he explained about some of the different I think he threw a packet of um malteasers into the into the lecture uh audience and someone caught them and then he he talked about prediction and prediction errors and then he talked about uh Disobedience and obedience when the guy threw them back when he asked and um you know he couldn't remember the name of the class but he could remember the way that he felt so one other area you know we've sort of talked about the Deep conversations uh something which a lot of people have a mortal fear over is small talk you know the sort of awkward elevator the water cooler thing the SAT waiting for whatever how can people better survive small talk so so this gets to these deep questions again so I I I give a lot of speeches right I give speeches about and and it's usually like a room of say you know thousand or 5,000 um people who are like in a tradeit show and so when I'm talking about super communicators I always start it the same way I say in 30 minutes I'm going to ask you to turn to the person next to you and ask and answer one question and that question is when is the last time you cried in front of another person and then I ask like who's excited about this and literally no hands go up right nobody wants to do this they just came to some conference they're at Vegas and now here this like guy on a stage is telling them I'm gonna force you to like have a convers have a therapy session with this stranger who's sitting next to you right nobody likes this idea and then I spend the next 30 minutes explaining why this is a good idea what we know about deep questions what we know about neural entrainment and then we do the experiment and I ask people and this is based on some work that Nick Epley a professor at the University of Chicago has done because he's done this experiment thousands of times and and I ask people to estimate how much they think they're going to enjoy this conversation that they're about to have right how awkward they think it'll be um whether they're going to feel close to the other person and when Nick does this he actually has it has him take a poll on a phone and what finds is that people say before they have this conversation this is going to be super awkward right like this is not I'm not they actually say that they they might enjoy it a little bit because like if you're sitting next to your boss everyone everyone doesn't mind hearing how their boss cried last time so there's a little bit of pism but it's not it's not a huge amount of enjoyment they anticipate and most importantly they do not think they will feel closer to the person afterwards they think they think they will feel even more distant from them because it's just weird to talk about crying with this stranger so then and I do this from the stage we do it you turn to the person next to you spend two minutes asking and answering the question then you switch places spend another two minutes the room like fills with this cacophony of noise and then finally if I can get people to shut up fast enough I asked them what that experience was like I asked them for a show of hands how many people enjoyed that that that that experience much more than you thought you would every single hand will go up because people people are bad at estimating what it what a real conversation is going to feel like so this gets to Small Talk the problem with small talk is not small talk the problem with small talk is the anxiety we feel when we go into it and the anxiety we feel about asking a deep question and yet again and again and again if we ask that deep question we will discover the other person loves to answer it they want to hear us answer our own question and we will walk away having enjoyed that conversation well I'm I'm aware a lot of people get worried about that level of opening up I don't want to be seen as sort of too Keen or too serious that doesn't seem very fun doesn't seem very exciting but as a to you know fight the fight as a a person that likes deep conversations uh who likes small talk no right no one no one likes Small Talk regardless of what it is and it's it people are very uh publicly uh castigating of small talk as well so it's the worst thing in the world we're talking about the weather you know somebody brings up the weather and he like can you believe that all they had to talk about to do their thing um okay so practically let's let's think the weather as an example because you're exactly right that nobody likes small talk but you don't have to ask that if someone brings up the weather you don't have to ask them the last time they cried in front of another person you can say something like you know it oh yeah it's really been rainy and you mentioned like don't like the rain so I'm wondering like what what got you to move to Seattle like like why'd you move here since it's kind of a rainy place like what was it about the city that you like and suddenly that's an easy question to ask right that doesn't that doesn't seem like a deep question but it actually is because inevitably that person is gonna say something like oh I fell in love with someone and I moved here to follow them or I got this job opportunity and it just seemed so great but then it didn't work out and I now I'm working someplace else small small talk is kind of what we talk what we the word we use to describe boring talk but you can transition almost immediately to something that's real and meaning for how can people better start deep conversations in a less awkward way and how can people better receive deep questions in a less awkward way yeah it's a great question so so this guy Nick Epley I mentioned who basically he studies deep questions once um once a month he'll get on a bus in Chicago and he'll sit down next to a stranger and his goal is to ask that person about their hopes and dreams within three questions and when he told me this I was like oh this sounds miserable man this sounds like the like I don't want to do this this sounds terrible and he was like no no it's the easiest thing I've ever done because it usually only takes two questions like usually I sit down I introduce myself and I'm like hey what do you do for a living and they say oh I'm an accountant and he goes oh did you always want to be an accountant was that your dream as a kid and they say no no kid wants to be an accountant like I want to be an astronaut but now suddenly he's like oh so what happened like did you did you try and become an astronaut now now they're actually having a conversation right they're talking about like oh I had kids and I had to raise them and Nick can say like I have kids too you know I have five kids actually and and I know it's there's these challenges to raising kids now you're having a real conversation so I think the way to start it and to respond is to ask something that you're actually curious about when I ask you where do you live basic small talk question I do not care where you live it is not something I'm actually interested in maybe it is right I you live in Austin and I want to learn a little bit about Austin but but if I'm asking you something that's genuinely interesting to me like like why did you decide to move from the UK to the US what was it about that that's actually like really fascinating to me that's something that could seem like a small talk throwaway question but if I'm actually curious about it and I ask it with curiosity we're going to be having a deep conversation within minutes you mentioned astronauts there didn't you look at Nasa did you learn a bunch of stuff from NASA what did you learn yeah so um so this is one of my favorite stories from the book so about 15 or 15 years ago NASA started developing plans to build the International Space Station and they realized that in addition to all the technical plans they came up with there was actually this big problem that they needed to solve which is up until then about the the longest National NASA Mission had been about 10 day 10 days in space and they had basically realized you can send like the biggest jerk on Earth up into space for 10 days and it's going to be fine right like they're gonna pick fights with their Co with their co- astronauts they're gonna pick fights with Mission Control they're just GNA be like a pain in the ass but it's fine it's only 10 days but the thing about a space station is you're sending astronauts up there for three months or six months or 12 months at a time and if you send a jerk into space for 12 months he's going to drive everyone else crazy so NASA realizes we need to start choosing astronauts finding astronauts who have emotional intelligence this is actually a lot harder than it sounds though because the problem for NASA is when you make it to the final rounds of an astronaut interview you are awesome right you're like you're handsome or you're beautiful you have like two phds and most importantly you've been doing interviews your entire life like you know the right answers to every question and what they realized is they couldn't tell the difference between the people who were faking emotional intelligence from the ones who actually had it so they turned to this guy Terry Maguire the lead psychiatrist for man space flight at Nasa and they ask him to come up with with an interview question that will let them figure out who actually has emotional intelligence and for nine months he works on this problem and he can't come up with anything he keeps he tests a bunch of questions none of them work and then one night he's listening to recordings of old interviews with old candidates and he knows which of those candidates went on to be really good leaders inside naswi kind of like washed out and as he's listening he realizes the really good leaders They're laughing differently than everyone else in the interview so he comes up with this whole new way of doing his interviews now what he does is he brings the astronaut candidate into a room they're sitting there by thems he walks into the room and he's holding this big stack of papers and he trips as if on accident and he spills the papers all over the floor and then he laughs as big boy left he goes like h I cannot believe I did that and then he pays attention to how the candidate reacts because everyone reacts in one of two ways some people go like this that's really silly let me give you a hand and some people go that's really silly let me give you a hand everyone knows what's going on in that moment right you made a mistake by dropping the papers and then you made the mistake even worse by overreacting by laughing this huge kind of like inappropriately big laugh like we've all been embarrassed that way and some of the candidates were like oh I'm I'm just going to pretend this didn't happen I'm going to just help you put this under the carpet and some of the candidates were like you know what I know what you're feeling right now like I I know that you're embarrassed and the best way I can remove that embarrassment is I can jump in the boat with you so I'm going to laugh this big boisterous laugh I'm going to match you I'm going to mirror your energy and your affect those were the people who had emotional intelligence and those went on to be some of the best leaders in NASA's history and it's all just paying attention how they laugh in an interview that makes the difference why do humans laugh did you look at this what is it it's really interesting there's a guy named um Provine Robert Provine who's now passed away he was at the University of Maryland he actually studied laughter for years he would he would go like to malls and restaurants and hide tape recorders so he could tape people talking to each other and what he what he found is that about his initial thought was like we laugh when we see something funny and he actually wanted to figure out what like the science of funny was but what he discovered was totally unexpected he discovered that 80% of the time when we laugh it is not in response to anything humorous right like you're not a comedian I'm not a comedian our friends aren't comedians like and yet we laugh all the time so what's happening when we laugh when we laugh we're often times show the other person I want to connect with you and when they laugh back that same reciprocity that I mentioned before and it's because a little bit vulnerable right like if I laugh if I laugh I'm kind of saying like I think that's funny and you could be like oh my God you're such a jerk for thinking that's funny right so so I'm showing you a little bit of vulnerability when you laugh back the most normal reaction you're showing me that you want to connect right back laughter is how we Forge connections with other people the fact that we to do it in response to something funny is actually almost a byproduct it's not the main function of laughter yeah that's interesting it's I don't know I just what an odd sound that emanates but I suppose that also explains why watching a recording of a standup set on Netflix in your house on your own versus going to a comedy club surrounded by 150 other people the level of laughter is way different that's exactly right well in there's actually some so I I don't think someone told me this Theory and and my understanding is it hasn't been proved out but that there's some research behind it oh my favorite my favorite place for Theory to say ex as yet unproven it maybe to be replication crisis out of existence so if there's if if you if you're looking at a group of primates there's a noise that they will make that means that there's like lion or a danger nearby and that noise sounds like laughter and so the theory is that laughter evolved because it's inherently pro-social it's a noise that I make to warn others of danger and most importantly there's a huge sense of relief associated with it because when I know that there's a danger out in the woods and I'm up in the trees then suddenly like I actually feel a sense of relief because I'm not in danger and so the theory is that this is why that weird noise has evolved is it actually has these roots in this very pro-social Behavior which would also help us make sense that like oftentimes a joke is about building up tension and then saying something funny to relieve the tension that's interesting what about when it comes to couples the potentially the most fraught most important communication the the Genesis of your story as well yeah the absolutely best and worst ways that couples communicate so there's there's a lot of um in in the book there's actually like a whole chapter about um the story that involved um the the the growth of marriage therapy as a as a field of research and one of the things that marriage therapists have found is that there's this one pattern that's basically disastrous um they call it kitchen sinking so every couple fights that's just totally that's part of every relationship yeah right there's always like little like yeah disagreements or tension but when some couples fight a fight about one thing becomes a fight about everything right so we start talking about like where are we going to spend Christmas and like within minutes it's likew your mom hates me cuz like and she's not nice and by the way if we earned more money we'd be able to go to Hawaii instead of right so a fight about one thing becomes a fight about everything kitchen sinking that is disastrous that will make the fight toxic and so researchers were trying to figure out why does this happen because it happens pretty consistently even to like couples that like are well matched and they found that what happens is that when we're in a conflict when I feel threatened I want to control something like that's just a normal response to find something to control and the easiest thing for me to control is you like the person I'm talking to so I'm gonna I'm gonna do things like I'm gonna tack you back I'm gonna bring up your mom I'm gonna say things like I'm not going to talk about that I'm gonna try and control what what what topics are allowed if you're upset I'll say things like you shouldn't be upset about that like that's a dumb thing to be upset about I'm going to try and control your emotions that's toxic that's where kitchen sinking comes from so what's the solution well the solution is not to say you shouldn't try and control something because everyone feels that impulse for control that's that's very human but instead of trying to control the other person in the relationship try and find things you can control together like controlling for instance the environment you start fighting at 11 o'clock at night if one person says look I really want to talk about this can we wait until 9 tomorrow morning when we both wake up and we're not exhausted is that okay like now we're controlling the environment together or to say like I want to control the boundaries of this conversation to say like let's talk about Christmas let's not talk about moms let's not talk about money if that's okay like let's just focus on making a decision about Christmas now we're on the same side of the table we're controlling the boundaries of this conversation together and the reason why this is really important why why the best couples the best couples it's not that they don't fight it's that they fight and there's no lasting consequences of it because they they're basically sort of teammates finding things to control together even if they disagree with each other where does that where does that sense of teammates come from well because if you and I are controlling the environment together we're on the same side of the table right like we might disagree about like you know how we should raise our kids but we've both decided like we're going to wait till 9:00 in the morning we're going to do this together we're just going to talk about whether like Jimmy's are allowed to eat like snacks after 3:00 we're not going to talk about like how you were raised and spanking and X right now suddenly we're kind of Partners and figuring out like what's our goal what's what are the how are we going to control this conversation together and what's our goal in now the reason why I think this is really important is because it turns out the exact same thing happens online with social media when social media goes bad when people start screaming at each other when social media becomes like a cesspool it's often times because people are trying to control each other right you make some argument you say I think guns are great and I say you're a [ __ ] you're not even thinking about like all the guns that like kill kids in schools like why are you a fascist like at that moment what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to control you I'm trying to force you into a box I'm trying to force you into the fascist box I'm trying to force you into you're thinking about second Amendment but you should be thinking about the kids when we try and control each other on social media it's very very natural it's very natural online because we're not seeing each other face to face it can become toxic but if we take a step back and we say like look like I actually want to talk about this guns thing like like let's try and figure out like what aspect of guns are we talking about then an online conversation becomes just as good as any other conversation and in fact there's all these interesting studies done by someone again at Dart where he found that even just adding please and thank you if one person in a thread says please and thank you the tenor of the whole conversation improves because please and thank you is a way of me showing you that I want to share control with you as opposed to I want to control you yeah as opposed to like I I'm powerful and you're a dick and so like let let me try and control you as much as I can m what do you think online discourse has done to our expectations of communication so it's a good qu well let me ask you because you you you're online a lot like what do you do you feel like do you feel like the conversations you have online how do they compare to the conversations that you have offline I'm pretty good at posting and ghosting so I'm not maybe the best uh avatar for someone who sort of gets into maybe the kind of interesting cantankerous style back and forth conversations that people are thinking of uh I certainly know that it's done one thing which is which is pretty interesting which is it's given people a sense of surrealness when the real world doesn't reflect the world that they expected from what they learned online um for instance let's say that you are a successful young woman and you have moved up within your industry and have managed to get yourself to a place where where you feel uh pretty sort of competent and well respected and you keep hearing all of these stories online about how you know women are oppressed and there's rampant misogyny everywhere and and you look at your own life and you struggle to see that and you think well actually to be honest sort of being a woman's kind of helped me in many ways I I've I've I've been given opportunities that I'm not sure I would have been given if I was a man but the way that the discourse is put forward online the uh type of conversations that rise to the top the ones that are the most inflammatory obviously it's edge cases right edge cases are exactly what gets the Gana the most attention it's never the reliable woman who worked her way up step by step and didn't encounter any catastrophe along the way it's the the the one that had a awful predatory boss who was making them do terrible things in an attempt to try and climb the totem pole and rightly so that's newsworthy because it's interesting and scandalous uh but you lose the vast majority of the bell curve like the boring Bell curve uh and you just get these edge cases um but I think what that leads to or you know any other highly politicized topic online um I mean you've seen this in uh surveys right when uh people are asked how many X type of people are shot by police every year it's like thousand th% 10,000% 100,000% overx estimations because what is presented online and what is newsworthy if it bleeds it leads doesn't NE necessarily represent what I think is people believe like the number of people that get shot versus the number of people that die by cancer or something and you're like well because people die by cancer every day and it's not newsworthy unless it's some celebrity or whatever um so we have this skewed perspective of how the world's supposed to treat us how other people are supposed to see us different social groups different classes different genders different races different positions within society and then when we encounter evidence in the real world which should be the most real thing that have that doesn't agree with what the online World told us that we should do we end up in massively and you know I realized this when having a conversation with Freya India who's on substack uh she does a Blog called girls brilliant and she was saying a lot of the time jenz gets sort of um criticized for well this the Internet isn't the real world and he said these kids are spending eight to 10 hours a day online then they may be spending twice as much time on the internet as they are asleep the internet is the real world it's real world for them yeah that that is the boundaries of your world and so I think one of the things that's happening there there's a there's a researcher named jay van Bal at NYU who's kind of looked at this phenomena particularly on social media and what he's found is that the problem with social media and the problem with online conversations is that often times they highlight one aspect of identity very very prominently when in real real life that's one of many identities that someone contains right so the thing that we know is that like if I knew that you were Republican I would assume a bunch of things about you that you must be proun you must be Pro Trump you must be anti-immigrant right and if you knew I was a Democrat you would assume a bunch of things about me I must be protrans I must like think kamalo is the greatest thing on on Earth I must like want to just taxs everyone to death whenever we see someone described as by their label then we tend to maximize what we assume their beliefs are into that label now in real life oftentimes if I met you and I'm like oh I'm a Democrat but we're like at our kids soccer game together and you know that I'm also a journalist and like also like I like to do model rocketry and you and I ride bikes together right like that one identity I'm a Democrat there's so many other identities around it because all of us contain multitudes that it doesn't it doesn't shape what you assume about me whereas when we are on Twitter and we go to our little thing our little description in Twitter it's like proud to be part of the resistance or like January 6 was the best day ever like we're actually just giving into one identity we're giving into one label and it makes that conversation harder now you asked though what's happening to our conversations as a result of this right with Jen Z Spending All This Time online that that the internet is their real world so what I would say is this there's actually a lot of room for Hope um and the reason why is this this story from about a hundred years ago so when telephones first became popular around the world but also particularly here in the US when phones first became popular there were all these articles that appeared that said no one will ever have a real conversation on the telephone because up till then every conversation had happened face to face right and they were like nobody will be able to do this on the phone if you can't see the person and make eye contact with them if you can't hear all the nuances in their voice you're never going to have a real conversation and what's really interesting is if you look at the transcripts from those early phone conversations they were exactly right people did not know how to use phones they used them like telegrams they would call up and they would say here's what I here's like here's here's here's what I need on the stock market or they call up and say here my grocery order and then the other person would say okay and then they would both hang up like there was no back and forth there was no give and take now you fast forward a little bit to like when you and I and everyone else listening was in Middle School and we could talk on the phone for like seven hours a night right like we loved talking on the phone and so and they were some of the most important conversations of our life at that point and so what what happened what changed what changed was we learned how to use telephones and and we we we learned how to use that technology and what's interesting is when you are on the phone you actually talk differently all of us do you will over enunciate your words by about 30% on the phone you'll put about 15% more emotion into your voice than if you're talking to someone face to face because you know subconsciously that they can't see you you need to you need to signal so you actually learned a bunch of skills for phone conversations right now we are living through a period of people learning skills for online conversation and like we're like those we're like that first 15 years after phones came out and became popular right like it's a lot of screaming it's a lot of like a lot of lot of mistakes but it's from those mistakes that we learn and gen Z these I have two teenagers at home I'm a dad both my teenagers they know how to have real conversations over text I don't know how to do that they have emotional conversations with Emojis like they are we don't need to despare for the future because we learn how to be good at communication uh be good communicators our brains crave being good communicators and they teach us how to do it dude awesome let's bring this one into land what a great place to finish I uh I I I love it I've been very much thinking about communication over the last few years and uh I think an interesting element is how closely tied it is to our sense of self that um what maybe some some people have got in the back of their mind is well you know it's all well and good you saying that I can work on my communication and I can build up these skills but I don't want to be fake you know I want to be me and it's so funny how nobody attributes their natural god-given pickle ball ability to them and if I was to say well you went and got a coach didn't you and you you improved your dink game and you improved your serve but did you not want to have you know your real were you're not worried about your real serve coming out like what about that you've lost it your inner your inner pickle baller like you've repressed them you've ruined it yeah exactly I started working with a a speech therapist about three four years ago addiction coach and um one of the things that a bunch of friends said to me was dude you I mean you got to be careful what if you what if you totally lose all of the the character you know and but nobody says that about well I you know you're 270 and you know 28% body fat and you go but what about all of that beautiful fat that you spent all of this time building up what you know you going to replace it with this Muscle really is that the real is that is that muscle really you and it's just odd you know and when you see it you can't and see it there's certain things that we have that are very tightly tied to our sense of self right our thought patterns the texture of our mind the way that we speak the language that we use the way that we enunciate and um there's other things that aren't like our waistline uh and when you confuse the two when you confuse I mean you you get into some pretty hot water you stop learning right you stop improving yourself because you assume that something is inherent or god-given or inborn or unmut and the truth of the matter is all of it's just skills can I ask you a question actually hey on that so I mean what what's interesting about so you moved here from the UK right you moved to the UK to the US you're still clearly still clearly a Brit like I I I doubt anyone bumps into you and they're like oh that guy GRE grew up in Austin yeah Australia I get accused of a lot but yeah okay okay so do you feel like have how you communicate has it had to change since you've moved to the US a little bit because yeah well the cultural way markers that you rely on it's it's interesting being an immigrant which I am to a country that speaks the same language as you because you forget that you're an immigrant if I was in Mexico or Thailand I would be permanently reminded of the fact that I'm not from there people don't look like me people don't sound like me uh but you you're snuck under the radar here and um it's odd because you're culturally displaced you know if I want to use an example for a chocolate that everybody would have eaten as a kid I can't really use Cadbury's because Cadre is a British brand I can't really talk about Yorkshire Tea or Newcastle Brown Ale or The Inbetweeners so I have to do this weird sort of projection and I have to think okay what would Charles what is the equivalent sort of ruminative thing that Charles knows that is the parallel of the thing I'm trying to use so you have to sort of go around the houses quite a lot um there's certain sort of lexical things we have an interesting uh difference with plurals versus you guys so um we would say uh Manchester United are having a bad season this year whereas you guys would say Manchester United is having a bad season this year um trash can sidewalk you know little bits and pieces like that um but I just sort of I don't know it it's becoming more natural to me uh and yeah maybe this is what going native is like and I'm gonna have a text in tne within the next few years who knows well and what I love about that about this going native aspect is that like it's actually like what your brain what your brain was created to do right was to make it easier and easier and easier for you to communicate and and my guess is if you went back to the UK you would slip right back into mentioning cadburry and and the pluralization and if I moved there eventually I would too and I'd start seeing lift and boot and and it's it's I our brains are amazingly versatile when it comes to communication and a huge part of it is just giving it the skills that it needs and then thinking about this and and and working on it and being willing to experiment and practice and then we become super communicators I love it dude so good where should people go with everything that you do and write and talk about yeah absolutely so if um I have a stack if people want to come sign up for my newsletter it's called the science of better um you can find a sign up for that on my email or on my my website which is Charles dog.com DUI g g or if you just Google The Power of Habit which was the first book I wrote or super communicators you will definitely find um my website and actually I have my email address on my website and I will say I read and respond to every single email I get from a reader so you may regret that after this uh after this episode sometimes sometimes it takes me a little while go for my pretties and Destroy his inbox but I would love to hear from folks and and if you do want to buy a copy of super communicators you can find it at Amazon and brns and& Nobles and and most importantly your local bookstores so heck yeah Charles I appreciate you until next time thank you so much thanks for having me on do you think that your algorithm on YouTube is a bit of a God is able to know things about you that you don't know about yourself well the YouTube gods have selected this episode spe specifically for you bespoke so go and go and check it out