Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "Why You're Misunderstood" with Charles Duhigg

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"Why You're Misunderstood" with Charles Duhigg · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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  Get a humans welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. Do you ever have a conversation
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  where you realize that the person you're talking to is really just not quite understanding
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  where you're coming from and vice versa. It can be increasingly difficult to have conversations
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  especially about sensitive issues in these toxic and divisive times. Today's guest is
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  an expert on that. His new book is called Super Communicators How to Unlock the Secret Language
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  of Connection. Charles Duhig is an American journalist and nonfiction author. He's a winner
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  of the Pulitzer Prize, you know, that little nod for the work that he did at the New York
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  Times. And his previous book was also fascinating. We get into that a little bit as well. It's
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  called The Power of Habit. He's sort of a world authority on the psychology of how we
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  form habits, how we break habits, how they can be constructive, how they can be destructive.
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  And the focus of his latest book is what great communicators have in common and how you
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  can improve your own communication as well. Please enjoy it as much as I did. They want
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  to know only Charles Duhig. But what we're talking about about Substacks. So you on Substack
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  or do you know those guys? I am. Yeah. So I have a newsletter on Substacks. That newsletter
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  is a success thing. Yeah. Yeah. And I just started it about six months ago. So I'm not
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  really, I'm not really like a pro with the way that some people know. Well, but I like it.
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  I like doing. I know it's fabulous. I mean, there's so much potential. And I've got buddies
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  who are making a fortune from it. So who knows? Yeah. And I exactly. And I am a big, anything
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  that helps writers support themselves. I'm a huge fan. Yes. I mean, the, the fact that
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  it is now actually possible. I hosted a talkback radio show in Sydney for the past two years
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  and was able to leave at the end of last year and just do this largely, you know, because half
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  of the revenue comes from Substack and about half from ads. Oh, so you already have a big
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  substack? Well, big enough. A big enough. Yeah. Yeah. So can I ask like how many, I'm just
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  wondering like at what point it becomes? Like how many subscribers? That's a very good question
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  that my producer would know the answer to, which I don't. I just count the money, Charles.
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  Yeah. No, I mean, I don't know. I'm still at the early stages. I've only been on there for like
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  six months, but it seems to be I had this podcast has a lot of listeners. So you don't need a huge
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  conversion rate for a large number, for a large listener base to then go, oh, we'll get the extra
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  stuff as well. Because I do some bonus stuff on on Substack that you can only get a few. Oh,
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  that's great. Pay a monthly fee. So yeah, like who wants a job these days? Why do you need a job?
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  It's true. It's great. It's true. Knock on wood that it remains. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So
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  thanks, thanks for being here. I love the power of habit when I first read it many years ago.
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  And the new book is particularly interesting because this is sort of my life having difficult
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  conversations. You might call them uncomfortable conversations about things that people usually
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  tip toe around. One of the most interesting passages of the book is towards the end when you
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  start talking about Netflix and the flare up at Netflix and what that tells us about how people
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  communicate. So before we go big, can we go small and can you tell us what happened at Netflix?
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  Yeah, absolutely. And it's a really interesting story because, you know, obviously America has
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  been living through this racial reckoning. And I think it's I think it's around the world, right?
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  I think that you guys are experiencing it in New Zealand and in Australia and in the
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  Commonwealth. And what happened at Netflix is that there was a senior executive who was in a
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  meeting and he used the end word. And this is obviously completely inappropriate. Just to be a
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  linguistic patent, he mentioned the end word. Linguists would say there's a difference between
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  mentioning a word and using the word in the sense that the usage would imply that he was addressing
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  someone that way or he was he was deploying the word. Yeah, so I guess he mentioned. Right.
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  Yeah. So he mentioned the word. He didn't he didn't call any one the end and word. He didn't
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  he was using it to try and illustrate how offensive a potential how offensively pretend. Sorry.
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  He was using it to illustrate how offensive a new show was. But of course there were people in
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  the room who walked away saying, oh my god, this is completely inappropriate. And he ended up
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  getting fired. But what it did is it set off this kind of civil war within Netflix because there
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  had been a lot of people who felt like Netflix had a problem with race that there was unconscious
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  bias and that that that particularly African Americans were not getting promoted as quickly.
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  And then there were a bunch of other people who thought that that's not true at all. Like we're
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  not racist. And and actually the reason you're not succeeding here is not because of the color of
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  your skin. It's because because you you're not you don't have what you need to succeed. And as
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  you can imagine, this just became incredibly contentious. So contentious that it started distracting
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  from the work. It started destroying the culture. It was so bad that read he instincts the the
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  CEO of the company had a meeting with his top of attendance and said, look, if we don't figure out
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  how to how to stop this, how to how to lower the heat, I think it might end Netflix.
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  Now, what would have been totally normal in a situation like that is for the executives to
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  basically kind of stomp down and say, look, we're not going to have this conversation, right? Or
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  or we're going to have this conversation, but it's going to be very tightly controlled to to say,
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  look, leave your politics at home or there's some things that are appropriate to say and some things
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  that are not appropriate to say, I think we've seen a lot of companies do that. But what Netflix did
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  is exactly the opposite. What Netflix did is they said instead, we believe we have to talk about
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  this. And we want to create an environment where everyone has the right to be a part of this
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  conversation. Regardless of whether you're black or white, what your background is, how you feel,
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  the only way that we can really understand each other is if everyone feels safe to talk about it.
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  And so they came up with a couple of principles that we know from experiments and from science
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  and social science are very effective. One in particular is they told everyone at the beginning
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  of each conversation, let's just acknowledge that this conversation is going to be awkward.
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  And even more, let's acknowledge that I might say things the wrong way,
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  and I'm going to ask you to forgive me. And you might say things the wrong way. And I promise you,
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  I will forgive you. I won't hold it against you. I'll understand that this is happening in good
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  faith. And studies tell us that that's really powerful. That when we acknowledge at the start of
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  a conversation, the mistakes might be made, that it's going to be a difficult conversation. It goes
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  a long way towards moderating. Is it not possible that that then set up a template in which the
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  Dave Chappelle controversy that came a couple of years later was able to flourish because everyone felt
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  super empowered to share their feels? Well, I think so people feel empowered to share their
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  feels regardless. So whether they've been invited to do or not, right? Well, the issue here is
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  that they could have had, you know, they could have done what some companies do, which is to say
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  there's a place for politics and religion. It's not in the office here. We're here to do a job.
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  If you don't like it, there's the bill. But I don't think the feeling was that wouldn't work at
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  Netflix. And part because it's an artistic company, right? They're making TV shows and those
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  TV shows have to be culturally relevant. And so talking about culture, talking about politics is
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  part of their job. But the other part of it is that even when we do say that, it doesn't mean that
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  people actually leave their politics at home. It doesn't mean that they don't bring their
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  feelings and their emotions into the workplace. It just means that we repress them and they
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  end up leaking out in often messy ways. So the counter-argument here, the reason why this is such
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  an instructive example, I think is that there's regardless of whether or not there was racial
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  inequality at Netflix or there was some systemic bias in the company, the attitude that I heard
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  when that all went down from a lot of people on the other side of that was that this is
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  sensorious. This is hysterical. Everybody understands that this word was not being used in
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  a context that ought to be offensive. Therefore, we're sort of playing a word game where we're
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  pretending to take umbrage at something that was not actually motivated by animus or hate. But your
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  point is that that reasoned rational approach gets you nowhere if it bumps into people's emotions.
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  It gets you nowhere if people don't agree, right? I mean, look, any type of controversy that we
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  encounter, we can always say, well, look, you know, there's a way to minimize the controversy.
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  There's a way to minimize a disagreement, except that if I disagree with you and I feel strongly
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  about it, when you tell me let's minimize our disagreement, let's minimize our differences,
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  it doesn't make me feel better. It makes me angrier, right? It feels like you're trying to
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  control me to not give me a voice in this dialogue. And so if everyone agrees that, oh, this isn't
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  a big deal, then that's fine. But the problem with Netflix and with most tough conversations
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  is that everyone doesn't agree, it's not that big a deal. In fact, there's some people who think
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  it's a very big deal. And when the others say you're overreacting, it does not calm us down. It
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  makes us more incense. What about the people who feel it's a very big deal to be allowed to use
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  words as long as they're not motivated by hate? In the wake of that, those people were probably
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  suppressed at Netflix. Well, so I don't think anyone was actually suppressed. I mean, what's
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  interesting about this case study is that, and again, I'm not an expert on what should be
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  allowed in workplaces or what the rules are. No, sure, but it's an interesting thing to tease out
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  for the psychology of it. Yeah. And so what happened was that they basically created these forums
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  where everyone can come to the table and everyone could say what they felt and what
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  they thought. And it wasn't held against anyone, right? It wasn't, if you say something,
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  and it offends me, I'm not going to therefore say, look, you are offensive. I think you're a racist.
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  Instead, I'm going to explain how your words make me feel. Right. And I'm going to try and have
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  you understand me. But at the same time, I'm trying to understand you. I guess I'm like
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  skeptical, Charles, that in the current, and we don't have to dwell on Netflix specifically,
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  but I'm skeptical in the current social justice moment, that when there are certain, I don't
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  know, mob movements or highly orthodox mentalities that can gain a certain authority,
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  that the Decentre still really has a place at that table that is valued as much as the people
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  who subscribe to what is now the dogma. I mean, are you a Decentre? Well, I'm in favor of
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  there being a maximal amount of Decent. So I'm curious about, yeah, I mean, on that particular
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  issue, my views have evolved over the past decade, right? But not everyone is privileged as me.
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  If I'm a person who is, suppose I'm a person of color who's working at Netflix, who thinks that
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  actually, I have some fealty to linguistics and I don't really think that people shouldn't
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  be hounded out of a job for slipping up in that way. I wonder how liberated I would feel to
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  say that. So pretty liberated. I talk to people who said exactly that. I mean, look, I understand
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  that it's easy to paint this in characters, right? To say, like, oh, well, there must have been a
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  woke mob. Oh, there must have been people who felt like they had to bite down on their tongues,
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  except that the actual reporting doesn't bear that out. What we found is that when you create
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  environments where people feel like they could bring their full self to work, they can say things
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  without the fear of those things being held against them, you create an environment where people are
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  proving that they're listening to each other and that we're having an exchange and that everyone
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  belongs at the table. Everyone has a legitimate seat there. That what we find is that all these
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  doomed day scenarios that you're talking about, the Boogie Men, they tend not to show up. I mean,
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  I guess the difficulty. Where the Boogie Men do show up is when we do exactly the opposite.
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  Right. I guess when we say some kinds of conversations aren't allowed.
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  Right. I mean, the difficulty is in ensuring that we actually do create that environment of
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  free expression versus paying lip service to it. The Boogie Men, to take the example of,
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  I'm married to a guy, so a lot of people in my workplace would assume that I might subscribe to
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  a certain orthodoxy about gay pride, for example. I've had religious colleagues come up to me and say
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  that in the whole, take your whole self to work movement of the past decade, it's become
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  completely acceptable in most organizations in Australia for people to bring their whole self to work
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  by a person wearing a dress or a person talking about their same-sex partner, but it's not
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  that acceptable for a Christian conservative to bring their whole self to work by saying that
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  they oppose gay marriage. Well, I mean, are you just speculating or is there something specific
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  you can point? No, that's a specific conversation that I've had, for example, with Christian
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  colleagues who have said that there's a rubric, there's a way of talking about talking,
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  there's a way of talking about conversations which sounds highly inclusive, but actually is
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  sort of just a way of enforcing a new dogma. So I'm wondering how we avoid the pitfall of replacing
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  an old, in this case, homophobic dogma with a new homophilic dogma where, for example, the religious
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  conservative doesn't have a seat at the table. Well, so my guess is that if the religious conservative
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  comes to the table and they say, I think you are evil in that you are living in sin with a man and
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  you deserve to go to hell, that probably wouldn't be accepted or wouldn't be welcomed, right?
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  No, but my guess is that if you're having an actual conversation, they're not, they're not actually
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  saying that what they're saying is they're saying, listen, you know, here's my perspective on
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  marriage. I think that marriage should be because of, you know, I think marriage should be
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  X and Y and Z and my church tells me this and that. My guess is that if you actually have that
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  dialogue, they are not trying to push you into a stereotype. They are not trying to say things
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  that make them open to easy attack. Instead, they're explaining what they believe. Again,
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  there's this always this like, I guess the thing that like, I object to in the converse in the
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  question, is it presumes the most cartoonish or stereotypical way that this conversation would
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  unfold? And I'm not saying that that doesn't happen, but I'm saying that those aren't conversations.
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  When we sit down and we actually want to understand someone, when we want to have a difficult
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  conversation, rather than just scream at each other or try and prove each other wrong, when we want
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  to have a conversation, it usually doesn't come down to someone saying, you are evil, you deserve
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  to go to hell. No, it usually comes down to them saying, here's what I think about the world,
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  and then you're sharing what you think about the world. Okay, I'll pop the sort of H.I. component
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  over for a moment because it's not what's most interesting about your work, but I will just
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  sort of note that you don't need to go anywhere near as far as saying that gay people are evil
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  in order to nonetheless get in trouble with a human resources department if you're expressing a
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  point of view that ran counter to what is regarded as being the social justice, the correct way of
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  thinking about things in most organizations. I mean, you know, so this, I suppose this may be.
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  Give me an actual example of something you've heard someone say that you think is not objectionable,
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  but that has gotten them in trouble. Well, it's a climate thing, so they don't say it because
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  they feel they would be persecuted for it, right? But they're saying that they're paranoid. You're
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  falling back on, like, basically, these generalities, right? These characters. No, I was saying there
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  are specific examples of something you have heard someone say that you don't think is objectionable.
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  The point is the point is that the thing is to boo, so they don't say it. The point is that to give
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  a specific example, it would be a conservative Christian or Muslim person in a progressive workplace
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  who feels that to say we're talking about, you say we're producing a radio show and we're talking
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  and we're doing a lot of segments that are celebrating pride and they feel uneasy about promoting
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  a vision of sexuality that's highly promiscuous and celebratory and pro gay. They would feel
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  uncomfortable, not just about saying that they think that it's evil, but about saying, like,
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  personally, I'm not that crazy about being involved in something that involves a lot of gay
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  promiscuity. They feel that that would put them on the outside, but maybe it wouldn't. I mean,
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  maybe you're right. They're paranoid. You feel like you have a lot of colleagues who are talking
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  about gay promiscuity on a regular basis and this is how many people they have to be to make the
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  point. But the point is that what you're asking me is how do we create, how do we ensure that people
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  all get along with each other? That's, I have no idea. Neither do you. But the point is that that's
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  not what I wrote about and that's not what we're talking about. What we're talking about is,
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  is there ways to have conversations that take advantage of what we know about social science
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  that make them better? And the answer is yes. Is it absolutely going to mean that every single person
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  can say whatever they want and they'll never be punished for it? No, of course not. Humans are
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  but are there ways to structure those conversations so that they're healthier and easier to have
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  and that fewer people get offended or fewer people feel like they're misunderstood? Of course.
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  So let's talk about those ways because I think, I mean, one reason why I started with Netflix is I
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  think it touches on something interesting, which is that people will sometimes hear a conversation
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  as being about their identity or about who they are rather than taking it at face value. So,
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  the sort of less provocative or toxic example of this is the married couple where one of them says,
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  I'm feeling this way because some such and such happened at work and the other person says,
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  well, what you should do is go in tomorrow and you should tell your boss XYZ and the person says,
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  I didn't want a solution. I just sort of wanted to be, I wanted to be heard. In other words,
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  so there are two different parallel conversations taking place. Each person has a different perspective
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  about what's actually being trying to be communicated. How do you avoid that pitfall?
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  Well, so I think what's often happening there and I think this happens, I mean, this happens in my
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  marriage. This happens in every relationship, right? Where one person is expressing a feeling and
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  another person tries to solve their feelings and it's not appreciated. What we know is that and we're
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  living through this golden age of understanding communication because of advances in neural imaging
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  and because in data collection, we're learning a lot about what happens inside our brains when
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  conversations occur. And one of the things that we've discovered is that we tend to think of a
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  discussion as being about one thing, right? We're talking about my day or we're talking about
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  Jimmy's grades or we're talking about gay marriage. But actually, there's multiple different kinds
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  of conversations occurring within this one discussion. And if you and I aren't having the same kind
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  of conversation at the same moment, it's very hard for us to connect with each other and it's
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  very hard for us to hear each other. And in general, these conversations, they tend to fall into one
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  of three buckets. There's these practical conversations where we're talking about making plans or
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  solving problems. There's emotional conversations where as you just put it, I tell you how I feel and
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  I don't want you to solve my feelings. I want you to empathize. And then there's social conversations
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  about how we relate to each other and the social identities that we feel like are important to us.
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  And in the example you just gave me, I think what's happening is one person is having an emotional
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  conversation and the other person is having a practical conversation. And they're both legitimate
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  conversations, but they're having different kinds of conversations at the same moment. And so it's
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  hard to feel connected. It's hard to actually listen to each other. And people hardwired with
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  particular biases towards one conversation or another. I mean, the cliche, the gender cliche
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  would be that the woman comes home and talks about, you know, something that happened at work
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  with the subtext being that it's an emotional conversation. And the Mr. Fixit would come in and
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  mansplain to her, you know, what she needs to do about it. Is there truth in that hardwiring?
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  No, so there's actually been a lot of studies looking at this because it is a widespread sort of
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  pattern that people believe is true. And what researchers have found is that it's not accurate,
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  that women and men both tend to speak more practically or more emotionally and equal measure.
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  The difference is that oftentimes we remember very differently what someone has said.
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  So when a man says something very practical, it stands out in our memory. And when a woman says
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  something emotional, we tend to remember that emotionality. And it's this discrepancy in remembering
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  that seems to skew our perspective on what the data actually says. Because when they just
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  record people talking, what they find is that men and women are both equally emotional and
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  equally practical. So even if there isn't a gender split, is there some other split that doesn't
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  cleave along gender, along sex lines where some people are just more rational? Because I feel like,
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  I mean, I feel like I will tend to always reach for the more rational or practical solution to
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  anything, which makes me a less emotionally sensitive person, for example, in my spouse,
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  who will always have a more intuitive capacity to glean what the other person's emotional state is
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  and to mirror that correctly. Well, what often happens is that we develop communication habits
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  that we fall back on. Right? And so if you're in the habit of presenting things in a very dry,
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  very logical, very dispassionate way, that's a source of comfort for you. And so you'll do that.
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  That does not necessarily mean that you are dry and dispassionate, right? Let me ask you a question.
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  When you are expressing something emotional to your spouse, when you're talking about how you feel,
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  do you get super duper weepy or do you get kind of practical sounding? Practical sounding.
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  Now does that mean that you're exclusively practical? No. Or are you feeling something and you're in
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  the habit of expressing it a certain way? But underneath, if we were to pre-all back the covers on
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  that conversation, actually, this is an emotional conversation. It's just that you're more comfortable
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  with a certain kind of phrasing and presentation. Yes. That's right. Yeah.
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  This is what we know is we know that there are these cultural myths that some people are more
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  emotional than other people, that some people are more rational than other people. And when we
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  look at the evidence and we look at the science, it does not seem to be true. What does seem to be
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  true is that oftentimes we inculcate men into talking in very rational ways. And so we teach them
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  a habit that they fall back on. They feel a source of comfort there. And with women, women feel
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  we inculcate them in ways of speaking more emotionally. And so they feel a greater familiarity, a greater
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  a greater comfort with doing so. But that doesn't mean the underlying conversations, actually, are
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  different. It just means that how we've learned to express them. It doesn't mean that we need to pivot
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  in the way that we communicate with someone who is a culture-rated in that way. Like, does the
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  rationalists have to become more empathic and vice versa? Well, I think it's helpful to do so.
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  And I think that that that sounds like a tall order, right? And so I think that there's an
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  easy shortcut to it. Just as long as it's only my spouse who has to change, John Charles.
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  It's right, right. But here's an easy way I think to do it, which is if you ask more questions,
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  then you tend to to let the other person tell you what they're actually feeling or what they're
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  thinking. And in fact, there's a certain kind of question, a deep question that seems to be
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  particularly good at this. And a deep question can sound kind of intimidating, but it's actually
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  just something that asks about someone's values or beliefs or experiences that can be as simple as
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  meeting someone and you know, you know, they're a doctor and saying to them, instead of where do
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  you practice medicine saying, oh, what made you decide to go to medical school, right? What's the
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  best case you've you've ever worked on that you're like you're proudest of? Those are questions
• 24:33
  that allow someone to expose something more about themselves. And my guess is with you and your
• 24:38
  spouse, and tell me if I'm getting this wrong, if you think this isn't right, my guess is that
• 24:42
  instead of trying to be more empathic yourself for him trying to be more logical and rational,
• 24:48
  instead of doing something that feels, feels artificial, that if you were to say to him,
• 24:54
  listen, I'm trying to understand more about how you're feeling. Tell me why this feeling that
• 25:00
  you're describing to me, tell me why it's so important to you. And if you was to say to you,
• 25:05
  listen, I see you getting practical, I see you getting kind of like logical about this.
• 25:10
  Tell me why being practical and logical right now, why it matters to you. What is it represent? What's
• 25:15
  what's important about that? My question to him that you phrased would be reasonable. His question
• 25:23
  to me would just alienate me because I'd say, of course I'm being practical because how else are
• 25:28
  you going to sort out the world out of them by sorting through it in a logical way? What are we
• 25:32
  going to float away on a cloud and get our problem solved? But you actually just told me a lot
• 25:37
  about how you see this, right? You told me that for you, a solution is more important than
• 25:44
  necessarily just an expression. And that's a really valuable insight to say like, look,
• 25:50
  you're someone who finds something really important, not just an understanding, but in finding
• 25:57
  a way forward. And when I'm telling you about my feelings and I want you to understand my feelings,
• 26:03
  it means instead of just telling you, I'm sad. I need to tell you why I'm sad. I need to tell you
• 26:08
  what I think I'm going to do to help talk to the sadness. It's really just about asking how the
• 26:17
  other person wants to communicate, what they're seeking in this discussion. Is there
• 26:25
  this authenticity coming to this in any way or strategy? Yeah, follow. Sorry. No, it has to be
• 26:33
  authentic. Yeah. No, you're in it's a great question because you're exactly right. I think that
• 26:38
  sometimes when we're talking about these different tools or tactics, it can sound like a training
• 26:44
  course for manipulators, right? If you just learn how to ask deep questions and if you learn how
• 26:49
  to prove that you're listening, then you can sell someone a used car. But what's really interesting
• 26:54
  is that it does not tend to work unless it's authentic. So there was a really interesting study
• 26:59
  that was done where researchers created tape recordings of friends laughing together and strangers
• 27:05
  laughing together. And then they would play just one second of all the different tapes for listeners.
• 27:11
  And listeners with 90% accuracy could tell the friends from the strangers. And the reason why is
• 27:16
  because we have this finely tuned thing in our head to detect authenticity. It's actually evolved
• 27:23
  with us as homo sapiens because in a state of nature, if someone's inauthentic with you, they're
• 27:27
  very dangerous. So we're almost predisposed to be suspicious of an authenticity. And as a result,
• 27:34
  if somebody comes and they try and kind of manipulate you in a conversation, you might not say
• 27:39
  anything right away, but you know that that guy is a joke. You can smell it. You can smell it
• 27:45
  a mile off. You can smell it. I mean, that's, you know, yeah, but so how does one, there is a,
• 27:51
  there's a risk that all of this talk sounds a little bit, if not manipulative, then a bit opra,
• 27:56
  right? A bit sort of like, you know, here are the, here are the three ways to make your partner feel
• 28:01
  like you're more empathic. Oh, not just your partner. I mean, you talk about a CIA agent who was one
• 28:05
  of the best recruiters who can, you know, who can really bond with other people by finding
• 28:10
  common ground, by getting on their way of length, by exposing himself to vulnerability and so on.
• 28:15
  And yet it reminds me of the, the old groucho marks line that, you know, authenticity is the most
• 28:20
  important thing. Once you can fake that, you've got it made. You could do it. Right? Like what's the
• 28:26
  difference between being inauthentic and authentically deploying communication tools in order to achieve
• 28:33
  an end? I mean, what I would say is that at some point that inauthenticity is not that you're
• 28:40
  actually being authentic. If you're, if you're listening really, really closely to someone and you're
• 28:44
  repeating back what they're saying and you're showing that you're listening and you're asking them
• 28:48
  deep questions and you're trying to understand their emotions and you're expressing your own emotions
• 28:53
  engaging what's known as reciprocal vulnerability. Like you might be saying like, ah, this sucker,
• 28:58
  I'm pulling it over on him, but you're actually pulling it over on yourself. You have become
• 29:03
  authentic. Right? Like it's, you know, if everyone, if you do something long enough and you,
• 29:10
  you fake it, it actually becomes true. Yeah, yeah, that's true. And, and the, so I mean, you also
• 29:15
  talk about these sort of brain studies where if you fake it long enough being on the same wavelength
• 29:20
  as another person, then you are literally actually sort of on the same wavelength. Like your,
• 29:24
  yeah, brain patterns coincide, there are, you know, all kinds of physiological markers that will
• 29:30
  become consistent. You'll be mirroring each other's physical physical behavior and so on.
• 29:35
  Is that, does that happen naturally or is that a calculated process? That absolutely happens
• 29:40
  naturally. That, that is how our brains have learned to communicate is that, is that when I describe
• 29:45
  a feeling or, or an idea, you actually experience that feeling a little bit. You experience that idea
• 29:51
  and as a result, our brains become more and more similar until we're in what's known as neural
• 29:56
  entrainment. We're aligned cognitively. And at that point, we can actually hear each other
• 30:01
  much more clearly. We can understand what the other person is trying to say. Now, you're exactly
• 30:06
  right that that sometimes people try and fake this, right? But what happens is that if you do fake it,
• 30:14
  it tends not to work. And, and if you fake it well enough, then you actually become entrained. And so
• 30:21
  you describe a feeling to me and I experience that emotion. I might not want to. I might be doing
• 30:26
  it for ulterior ends, but we are connected and we are having an honest conversation.
• 30:32
  There are some people who are just naturally good at this, right? I mean, there are people, you
• 30:36
  talk to people who've met Bill Clinton and they'll say like, you know, he shakes your hand and you
• 30:41
  feel like you're the only person in the room, you're the only person in the world. So what's interesting
• 30:45
  is that is that they they aren't not necessarily naturally good at this. In fact, one of the things
• 30:50
  that we know is that most people who are super communicators, well, first of all that that anyone
• 30:56
  can be a super communicator. I thought going into this that there would be people who are charismatic
• 31:00
  or extroverts, but it turns out that what the data tells us and my experience tells us is that they
• 31:05
  come from all walks of life. And people like Bill Clinton is a good example. The people who end up
• 31:11
  being super communicators, it's often because at some point in their life, they were bad at
• 31:15
  communication or they had a real communication challenge. Sometimes people say things like, you know,
• 31:19
  I had trouble making friends in high school. And so I really had to study how to talk to other
• 31:23
  kids or in Bill Clinton's case, sometimes they say things like my parents got divorced. It was a
• 31:28
  terrible divorce. I was the peacemaker between them. I had to really think about how I'm talking to
• 31:34
  my mom and my dad to keep them away from each other's throats. And it's that thinking about
• 31:40
  communication just half an inch deeper that oftentimes makes us much better at it. Right. That's
• 31:45
  what makes us super. There must still be propensities and aptitude, natural aptitudes, Charles. I
• 31:50
  mean, what about neurodivergent people who find themselves, you know, who might be on the spectrum
• 31:54
  where, you know, it's a real struggle for them to sort of what they regard as being to ape
• 31:59
  all of these kind of, you know, mammalian things that you have to do at eye contact,
• 32:05
  nodding along, you know, their instinct is just to just ask the direct question and emotions be
• 32:10
  damned. So folks who are significantly on the spectrum, yes, there is oftentimes a communication
• 32:18
  difficulty there. In part, because they have trouble reading emotions on other people's faces,
• 32:23
  and they have trouble conveying their own emotions. And that can be that can be a stumbling block.
• 32:28
  That does not mean that they don't have as many emotional conversations or as many practical
• 32:32
  conversations. It means that it's harder for them to align. But beyond that, a situation where
• 32:38
  like someone is is diagnosably neurodivergent, the data just doesn't say that there are some
• 32:45
  people who are who are born better communicators than others. In fact, what we know is that the people
• 32:50
  who think they're really good communicators, they oftentimes are not the best communicators,
• 32:54
  right? Because they aren't thinking about it. There was there was a study that was done in the CIA
• 32:58
  where they were trying to figure out who were the best communicators. And they found that the
• 33:03
  strongest prediction of who was good and who was bad is to ask people how good are you at
• 33:09
  communication. And the people who said, I'm really good at communication, they weren't great.
• 33:14
  The people who said, you know, I struggle with it and I want to get better and I'm trying harder,
• 33:19
  they were usually super communicators. Right. What's your what do you what do you think that is?
• 33:24
  I think because when we think we're good at something, we stop thinking about it. And it's that
• 33:31
  it's that thinking about communication that makes us better at it. It also means that we feel
• 33:36
  this obligation. You know, one of the things that we know that super communicators do is that
• 33:39
  they ask more questions and they tend to they tend to match the people's emotions. But they also
• 33:44
  do things to try and signal that they want to connect with you. And it's that it's that signaling
• 33:50
  that's often the most important thing that's telling you like, I want us to have a connection.
• 33:56
  And we can do that through words, we can do that through language 80% of the time when we laugh
• 34:00
  in a conversation, it's not in response to something funny. It's to show someone that we want
• 34:05
  to connect with them that we like them. And when they laugh back, which is the most natural
• 34:09
  thing to do, they're saying, I want to connect back. Yeah. I mean, another big if I assume I'm a great
• 34:15
  communicator, I probably don't feel an obligation or a burden to signal to people that I want
• 34:20
  to connect with. Right. I just assume that we're connected. Yes. Whether we are or not. I mean,
• 34:24
  there may be an additional explanation for why people misdiagnose their own ability as communicators,
• 34:30
  which is that they misdiagnose what communication is and they mistake talking a lot for being a good
• 34:36
  communicator. I mean, I think I would hazard a guess that most people who think that they're good
• 34:40
  communicators are blabbermouths who steamroll over other people and think that that makes you a good
• 34:45
  communicator. Oh, I can't, you can't shut me up. I'm a great communicator. You know, wrong
• 34:50
  definition. I walk into every conversation and everyone else is silent. I guess I convinced them
• 34:54
  all that I was right, which of course, what they're really thinking is you are such a piece of
• 34:59
  work. Yes. Right. And do you notice in super communicators, I mean, one thing that I am mindful of
• 35:06
  is building a rapport before you get to the difficult stuff, right? So normally, I would shoot the
• 35:13
  breeze with someone for at least half an hour before talking about something that has the potential
• 35:18
  to get their hackles up. Like if you take the first 10 minutes of our conversation, I did that wrong
• 35:24
  because I didn't know that the Netflix thing was going to go where it did, right? But it ordinarily,
• 35:29
  if I'd known that the Netflix thing was going to turn into some mild disagreement between us,
• 35:33
  I would have put that at the end. We would have done all this. I would have started, then I would
• 35:37
  have raised the Netflix thing and not knowing that I was going to go into the kind of woke cancel
• 35:41
  culture angle, but you probably would have been more receptive and we wouldn't have had the
• 35:45
  mild friction that we had at the beginning. So does it matter what order you're doing things in?
• 35:50
  So certainly getting aligned is really, really helpful before we have a difficult conversation.
• 35:55
  And by the way, I don't mind at all the fact that we're not aligned on the Netflix thing.
• 35:58
  No, sure. I think it's interesting. But I will say that oftentimes, so when we discuss it as
• 36:05
  shooting the breeze, sometimes we actually are kind of inadvertently disparaging what's actually
• 36:10
  going on, right? So our conversation in the last 10 minutes, I wouldn't say it's super casual.
• 36:16
  We're just shooting the breeze. We're not talking about the weather. We're actually talking about
• 36:19
  real meaningful things, but what we're doing is we're both trying to match each other. We're both
• 36:24
  listening to what the other person is saying. And you're saying, oh, here's something that Charles
• 36:29
  thinks is important, right? And I want to signal to him that I understand that he thinks it's
• 36:35
  important to comment on it. And I'm doing the same thing. Now, we're not talking about race and we're
• 36:40
  not talking about woke mobs. And so it's a little bit easier to get aligned on that. But it's
• 36:44
  the alignment that we're establishing at the beginning of a conversation that helps us navigate
• 36:50
  through those trickier parts. And oftentimes, you know, one of my favorite examples of this is that,
• 36:56
  you know, I think everyone's had this experience. You go into a meeting and you're sitting around waiting
• 37:00
  for the meeting to start and you ask one of your colleagues, like, how is your weekend? And they say,
• 37:05
  oh, is great. I want to go see my kids graduation. And the easiest thing to do is to be like,
• 37:10
  oh, congratulations. That's really great. Okay, let's get down to business. But a much better
• 37:15
  thing to do is the thing that will help you align and only take a couple of minutes is to say,
• 37:19
  oh, man, that's amazing. Like, I imagine, like, what were you thinking or feeling watching them walk
• 37:25
  across the stage? Like, was that a big deal for you? Now, that's a deep question, right? It's,
• 37:30
  it doesn't appear a deep question. It doesn't appear overly intimate, but it's asking someone to talk
• 37:34
  about how they see the world and how they see their children. And when we do that, it can feel like
• 37:40
  shooting the breeze. But what we're actually doing is we're getting aligned in what kind of
• 37:44
  conversation we're having so that when we do get down to business and we start talking about where
• 37:48
  layoffs are going to happen, it's easier for us to do that. Is there a cultural difference do you
• 37:53
  notice between different countries? I don't know how much experience you have living in other
• 37:57
  countries, but I mean, my sense is that if that happened to me, it wouldn't land in an Australian
• 38:07
  context the way that it would land in an American context because Aussies are so much more allergic
• 38:14
  to phoniness than Americans are. And there's a certain politeness in America. There's a
• 38:18
  have a nice day culture where, you know, Aussies, you know, you ask them whether or not the best
• 38:24
  meal of their life was nice and then Aussie will say, oh, yeah, it was all right. Where's
• 38:27
  in America? It was so awesome. You know, is there a difference?
• 38:31
  So there definitely is different norms that establish the baseline, right? So one of the things
• 38:38
  that we find is that I don't know much about Aussie culture, but in the UK, oftentimes,
• 38:46
  there is a fear of discussing something that's too openly emotional and so it's couched in
• 38:54
  other terms. Whereas in the US, and you know, particularly if you're on a talk show, sort of
• 39:00
  expressing things as emotional as possible is welcome. Now that doesn't necessarily mean that
• 39:06
  Americans are more emotional than Londoners, but it does mean that there are norms around us and
• 39:14
  that we oftentimes base our behavior on the norms that we observe. And this is why those social
• 39:19
  conversations are so important. A good example of this is office gossip. So office gossip is actually
• 39:26
  an incredibly important part of how a company builds a culture. And the reason why is because
• 39:32
  it's a way for us to explain the norms or the standards or the mores to each other without having
• 39:38
  to be overt or overbearing about it. When we say like, oh, I can't believe Jim drank so much
• 39:44
  last night, he was like so inappropriate. What we're really saying is within this culture,
• 39:49
  it's not okay to get like sloppy drunk, right? Or if we say like, I can't believe Susie keeps
• 39:54
  hitting on the interns. What we're really saying is in this culture, that's not appropriate.
• 39:59
  Like there's there's certain standards that we hold ourselves to. Right. And the same thing can
• 40:04
  happen just in everyday conversation that when when I signal to you something about my personality
• 40:13
  and how I've learned to communicate, it's a way for you to understand the norms that I was
• 40:19
  established in. And sometimes we have to we have to understand and acknowledge those norms in order
• 40:24
  to move forward. I for instance would would disagree a little bit. I don't think Americans are more
• 40:29
  fake than Aussies. I don't think they're more comfortable with fakeness than Aussies. I think
• 40:34
  that sometimes what an American says that feels genuine to the American can come off to an Aussie
• 40:41
  as insincere. And that sometimes and I will say this as an American, sometimes when Aussies say
• 40:46
  things that that they mean as sincere, it comes off to me as as not that way. But that's not because
• 40:54
  not because we're insincere. Any of us are more sincere, insincere than the other. It's because
• 41:00
  we've learned slightly different ways of expressing. Oh, I'm sure. I'm not claiming that the
• 41:03
  nation of Australia is less fake. But does the Australian does the Australian temperament or the
• 41:09
  maybe to such a lesser degree, the British temperament strike you as insincere or needlessly brusque?
• 41:15
  I guess I guess sometimes needlessly brusque, but I mean that being said like most of the Aussies I
• 41:25
  know they really enjoy life. They're not like getting in my face and being like let me tell you
• 41:33
  all about your problem is rather they're like where can we go have a beer? Yes, yeah, that's true.
• 41:38
  That's true. And so then that's a form of social bonding and I suppose one could interpret it as
• 41:44
  being kind of phony camaraderie in some way. Yeah, there is a there's a kind of, she'll be right
• 41:49
  culture, you know, everything's chill, everything's cool, everything's got a duck's back, which I guess
• 41:53
  could land as equally phony to the have a nice day culture just in a different direction.
• 42:00
  We're talking exactly. We're talking a lot, Charles, about the sort of
• 42:02
  fairly conversations, but you're talking your book about there being three broad types of conversations
• 42:07
  and the and conversations about how we feel, which are basically about how we feel is only one of
• 42:11
  those types. The other ones being conversations about, well, who we are, which is sort of more
• 42:17
  of a Netflix conversation, right? You know, when conversations bump up against tribal identities
• 42:22
  and actually start sort of we can feel attacked on the basis of a subtext that may or may not have
• 42:28
  been intended. And then there's a conversation, which is a what's this all about conversation?
• 42:32
  What's this all about conversation? So what's this all about conversation is oftentimes us having
• 42:38
  a very practical conversation trying to figure out what do we actually want out of this conversation?
• 42:43
  Right? And we do this often at the beginning of each start of a conversation without even realizing
• 42:47
  it. It's often referred to as a quiet negotiation by psychologist within the discipline.
• 42:54
  So for instance, when we start this conversation and you ask me how I'm doing, one of the things
• 43:01
  that you're doing is you're inviting me to talk about kind of what's important to me at this
• 43:07
  particular moment. And that's a fairly like benign question. So you might not get to anything deeper.
• 43:12
  But if I say to you like, oh my gosh, do you like, you know, what's the best part of this this
• 43:18
  podcast? Like what do you what do you feel good about when you get across in a podcast?
• 43:24
  One of the things I'm asking you is a very practical question. Like I'm on your podcast, what are
• 43:28
  you hoping that I will provide and deliver that you think your listeners find is important?
• 43:35
  And that's often times what happens in a conversation is at the start of it, we ask questions
• 43:41
  and we conduct experiments to see if the other person wants to play along. Right? I might get informal
• 43:48
  and to see if you are I might be casual to see if you get formal. I might interrupt you to see
• 43:54
  if interrupting each other is okay. And there's no one right answer. But during that, what's this
• 43:59
  really about conversation? What we're trying to figure out is, what does each of us want from
• 44:03
  this exchange? So it's not an explicit what's this all about? We're not saying can we just have
• 44:08
  a conversation about the the dinner party next Thursday? It's yeah. I mean, sometimes we are, right?
• 44:14
  You say to your spouse, like, look, we got to figure we got to choose a menu. Let's choose a menu.
• 44:18
  Or we're here to talk about the budget for next quarter. Let's talk about the budget. Yeah.
• 44:22
  And there's a framing. I mean, you know, sometimes the easiest way to broach something that
• 44:26
  it's potentially has it as in a conversation. Suppose that you need to address something with your
• 44:31
  spouse, something that they did a couple of days ago that's been bugging you. Rather than launching
• 44:35
  straight into it is to create some kind of a framing device there where you give context to the
• 44:40
  conversation before the conversation even begins. And you say, listen, there's something I've
• 44:45
  been thinking about. Do you mind if I just offload it? I don't mean any offense, but can I just have
• 44:50
  the floor for a second? And can you listen to me in a spirit of generosity or something like that?
• 44:55
  Is that part of that toolkit? Oh, absolutely. And I think that's really powerful, right?
• 44:59
  Like, and the thing that I love about what you just said is that you asked permission.
• 45:04
  You said, look, there's this thing I need to talk to you about. It's been bugging me.
• 45:07
  Do you mind if I like take the floor for a moment? Do you mind if I bring this up?
• 45:11
  And what you're really doing is you're basically asking permission to have this kind of conversation
• 45:16
  in the way that you need to have it that you want to have. And you're giving the other person
• 45:20
  the ability to say what they want, right? They might say, absolutely, like I'd love to hear
• 45:24
  and then I would like to respond if you don't mind. Yeah. What has texting and emailing?
• 45:31
  In particular, texting done to all this because I find myself vastly preferring texting people
• 45:36
  because in the context of texting, it's not necessary to do those to have those kind of preemptive.
• 45:42
  You know, I can't call somebody who I haven't spoken a couple of weeks and just launch into what
• 45:45
  I want to talk to them about. We have to do the niceties. We have to do the how are you going?
• 45:49
  Some people love that. They prefer the phone. They'd like to just talk for four minutes about something
• 45:53
  before they get to the point. It would be rude and curt for me to just call somebody and say,
• 45:58
  Hey, about this thing and then start launching into it. It's not rude at the moment in culture to send
• 46:03
  a text that says, you know, do you mind if I send a send over a document for you to have a look at
• 46:09
  without saying, I hope you're doing well. Has your mum recovered yet? You know, is the dog
• 46:15
  all right? Isn't the weather nice? Is it changing?
• 46:19
  Okay, so let me ask you a question. If you're going to, if that document says, by the way,
• 46:22
  I think you're a jerk. Here's all the things that are wrong with you. Do you feel just as comfortable
• 46:27
  sending a text to me like, Hey, by the way, I'm going to send you right. So I think that we calibrate
• 46:34
  a little bit. And I think what's happening there is that we recognize that there's different rules
• 46:38
  for different forms of communication. And when we, when we forget those rules or we pretend those
• 46:43
  rules don't exist, that's when we get into trouble. So one of my favorite studies illustrating
• 46:47
  this is that about 100 years ago, when telephones first became popular, there were a bunch of studies
• 46:53
  that said, no one will ever be able to have a real conversation on the phone because you can't see
• 46:57
  each other. And now we would say that's ridiculous. But what's interesting is that at the time,
• 47:02
  those studies were right. The early transcripts of telephone conversations, people did not know how
• 47:08
  to talk to each other on the phone. They basically used them like telegrams, like they would send
• 47:13
  shopping lists or grocery lists or stock orders. Now, of course, by the time you were a teenager,
• 47:18
  and I was a teenager, we could talk on the phone for like seven hours a night, some of the most
• 47:22
  important conversations of our life. And it's because we learned what the rules for talking on
• 47:27
  the telephone are that are different from talking face to face. And when we're talking on the phone,
• 47:31
  without realizing it, oftentimes we'll over-enunciate our words a little bit. We'll put more
• 47:35
  emotion into our voice because we know that the other person can't see our expressions.
• 47:38
  Yeah. Now, there's all these new forms of communication, right? We've been talking on phones
• 47:42
  for a hundred years. We've been texting for like 20 years at most. And if you're in my case,
• 47:48
  more like five years and slacking and using emojis, like I don't even understand what half of the
• 47:53
  mean. So just be aware of the eggplant emoji, Charles. Yes, my kids have told me exactly that.
• 48:00
  Yeah. But what's interesting there is that there are these different rules for different forms
• 48:04
  of communication. And if I take a second and remind myself that like texting is different from
• 48:10
  emailing is different from calling someone, I know what to do. I know what form of communication
• 48:14
  is best. I know how to have that. But sometimes when we're so fast moving or we just let ourselves
• 48:19
  get lazy, we forget. And we pretend that these differences don't exist. And that's when we usually
• 48:25
  get the trouble. In defense of the early people using the telephone, it probably cost about
• 48:28
  150 bucks a second into these dollars. So they're shopping with us. What do you want to say? I
• 48:34
  need to, I need tomatoes. Okay. I'm going to get a tomato. It's by your pro. You're probably
• 48:38
  right. I wonder, you know, there's a lot of fretting and hand ringing from a certain generation
• 48:42
  of people at the moment about kids these days who don't know how to look each other in the eye.
• 48:46
  And who never talk to each other, you know, who have had their communication abilities
• 48:51
  deranged or impeded by constantly being on screens and consuming everything from Tiktok
• 48:55
  and Instagram comments. Do you give any credence to that? Well, what I would say is that having
• 49:01
  conversations and practicing conversations is really useful and important. Now, my kids have
• 49:07
  conversations. To hear the rest of this conversation, go to uncomfortableconversations.substac.com slash
• 49:14
  listen and you will get your own personal premium podcast feed with at least three extra episodes
• 49:21
  of the podcast every month and heaps of extra stuff, including the remainder right now
• 49:26
  of the fabulous conversation you've just been hearing. If it was worth listening to this much of,
• 49:31
  don't rob yourself of the rest. Well, let your phone right now. And search for uncomfortable
• 49:36
  conversations in the substandard.