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"The Language of War" How Words Influence Thinking · How To Talk To Humans

• 0:00
  Larry Wilson: Hi, this is Larry Wilson, and this is How to Talk to Humans.
• 0:04
  Larry Wilson: This is the podcast that shows you how to improve your communication skills.
• 0:10
  Larry Wilson: Are you looking to get a better job?
• 0:12
  Larry Wilson: Are you looking to find a relationship?
• 0:15
  Larry Wilson: Are you trying to do things in your life that have frustrated you and eluded you so far?
• 0:21
  Larry Wilson: I can show you so easily how to change that.
• 0:25
  Larry Wilson: Now, I can only do it with humans.
• 0:27
  Larry Wilson: If you're looking to deal with vampires or zombies extraterrestrial, this is not the show for you.
• 0:33
  Larry Wilson: But if you're really looking to improve your communication skills, I can show you what I've learned for 40 years in the show business working with the biggest celebrities and superstars in the world, and their secrets are unbelievable.
• 0:51
  Larry Wilson: What I'm going to be teaching you during the course of this podcast every week are tools that you can use to communicate toward success.
• 1:04
  Larry Wilson: Hi, I'm Larry Wilson.
• 1:08
  Larry Wilson: Thanks again for joining me for another episode of How to Talk to Humans.
• 1:14
  Larry Wilson: And today's podcast could not be more relevant about talking to humans.
• 1:22
  Larry Wilson: As many of you know, I'm notoriously apolitical.
• 1:27
  Larry Wilson: It's not that I have anything against politics, I just really don't understand them.
• 1:36
  Larry Wilson: And I think they're a distraction.
• 1:39
  Larry Wilson: I don't mean to denigrate anyone's interest in politics.
• 1:45
  Larry Wilson: If you're really excited about that, great.
• 1:48
  Larry Wilson: But in my life experience, I see that as a tendency to agitate people and maybe make their lives less harmonious.
• 2:03
  Larry Wilson: I have no desire to feel that way.
• 2:08
  Larry Wilson: But I was gonna talk about something that skirts right on the edge of politics here.
• 2:15
  Larry Wilson: I hope you will forgive me for entering this murky territory.
• 2:21
  Larry Wilson: Uh I only bring this up because at this point in time here in 2026, spring of 2026, we're in the midst of uh international warfare.
• 2:39
  Larry Wilson: And I I immediately remembered something from my childhood, where the very famous poster uh that some child had created that said war is uh not healthy for children and other living things.
• 2:58
  Larry Wilson: Of course, this still continues to be true.
• 3:02
  Larry Wilson: Um that's not really what I want to debate here.
• 3:07
  Larry Wilson: What I found so interesting, and you may start to realize a pattern here with me, when things take place like a war, like the Academy Awards, like uh music video, like the internet, like AI, all kinds of things that bubble up through the culture, I'm always interested in how they impact our communication skills.
• 3:35
  Larry Wilson: Because, as you know, I've said here before, the air is thick with semiotic information, information that's not spoken, that's coming at us all the time.
• 3:50
  Larry Wilson: Whether we perceive it or not, well it's really up to us.
• 3:55
  Larry Wilson: But it is coming at us like it's coming out of a fire hose.
• 4:01
  Larry Wilson: There's so much information.
• 4:02
  Larry Wilson: Now, if you attune yourself to it, if you sensitize yourself to it, then you can start to see it.
• 4:10
  Larry Wilson: You can go, oh, that's what Larry was talking about, this thing of this and whatever.
• 4:15
  Larry Wilson: And so with the war that's going on now, and by the time you hear this, I don't know if the war will be ended, I don't know if it'll be escalated, um, I don't know what will be taking place.
• 4:30
  Larry Wilson: But what was fascinating to me was listening to all the various different people, and and I mean, you know, a famous people, people involved in media and the military and government and politics, all that sort of thing.
• 4:47
  Larry Wilson: The different ways they spoke about what was taking place.
• 4:54
  Larry Wilson: I realize it's hard to detach yourself sometimes.
• 4:59
  Larry Wilson: If you're worried about uh nuclear annihilation, then maybe you're uh too stressed to be able to step back and look at it uh in the way I'm describing here, which is sort of a 30,000-foot view.
• 5:18
  Larry Wilson: It's very detached, very stiff.
• 5:20
  Larry Wilson: But if you are uh worried about nuclear annihilation, I would recommend taking the afternoon off and watching the classic film Doctor Strange Love.
• 5:29
  Larry Wilson: It will either make you feel better or make you feel worse.
• 5:33
  Larry Wilson: I don't know.
• 5:34
  Larry Wilson: I think it's a very, it's a brilliant film.
• 5:37
  Larry Wilson: I think it's funny, and it really captures the zeitgeist of the early 60s when a lot of people really, first time I think they were really concerned about uh nuclear war.
• 5:49
  Larry Wilson: And uh Stanley Kubrick uh you know directed this masterpiece.
• 5:54
  Larry Wilson: And of course, the genius of it is it's a very serious subject that they treat as farce.
• 6:00
  Larry Wilson: And so it makes it funny because it's not the way you're supposed to handle something serious like that.
• 6:07
  Larry Wilson: But uh if you are able to step back and uh see things from a more detached point of view, there's some very important and valuable lessons to be learned about communication.
• 6:25
  Larry Wilson: Um we see people on the news, on uh social media, um, on the internet, on you know, Instagram, all sorts of things, different people talking about these things, and the world is changing very, very rapidly.
• 6:41
  Larry Wilson: When I was growing up, uh network television news was where most people got their news.
• 6:46
  Larry Wilson: And of course, that's ancient history now.
• 6:48
  Larry Wilson: Might as well be speaking about the Peloponnesian Wars.
• 6:51
  Larry Wilson: That's ancient history.
• 6:53
  Larry Wilson: Now people are getting it from uh YouTube, from TikTok, from uh Instagram, their social media.
• 7:01
  Larry Wilson: So they're it's coming in a completely different way.
• 7:05
  Larry Wilson: And that may be what brought it to my attention so sharply.
• 7:11
  Larry Wilson: Because in Wilson Method, I frequently refer to the three Ds.
• 7:18
  Larry Wilson: Now, before I go any further, I have different things that I bring up about Wilson Method.
• 7:25
  Larry Wilson: The three D's I thought was a useful mnemonic device, you know, like seeing things in 3D.
• 7:35
  Larry Wilson: It's easy to remember.
• 7:37
  Larry Wilson: There's no greater importance attached to it than that.
• 7:42
  Larry Wilson: That's all.
• 7:43
  Larry Wilson: But the 3Ds that I have in mind are determine, define, and deploy.
• 7:50
  Larry Wilson: I want you to determine your goal in every communication before you attempt to communicate.
• 7:59
  Larry Wilson: Then I want you to define the means of transmission because they're all different.
• 8:09
  Larry Wilson: And third is deploy, I want you then to deploy the tools that you're learning in Wilson method, depending on what the actual means of transmission is.
• 8:21
  Larry Wilson: I want to address that second D, define, because that's what came to me so clearly, that what stood out so sharply in all this talk of war recently.
• 8:35
  Larry Wilson: And I realized, oh, none of these people, well, clearly none of them have trained with me, and some of them, I guess, were good communicators.
• 8:47
  Larry Wilson: I'm not sure.
• 8:48
  Larry Wilson: Some of them were very, very poor communicators.
• 8:52
  Larry Wilson: And I would attribute that to they had not defined what the means of communication was.
• 8:58
  Larry Wilson: And the reason I want you to define that, are you speaking to a person face to face?
• 9:03
  Larry Wilson: Are you writing an email?
• 9:05
  Larry Wilson: Is it on Zoom?
• 9:06
  Larry Wilson: Is it a old school hard copy written communication?
• 9:12
  Larry Wilson: Is it uh, you know, on a telephone call with no picture?
• 9:16
  Larry Wilson: All these things are different.
• 9:19
  Larry Wilson: You can't think there's a one-size-fits-all technique of communicating.
• 9:28
  Larry Wilson: If you do, you wind up in this problem that I see abounding now just in coverage of the war.
• 9:38
  Larry Wilson: Because I see people who are not thinking about who they're speaking to, or they clearly have not thought what is my one primary goal in this communication.
• 9:55
  Larry Wilson: They haven't thought about that.
• 9:56
  Larry Wilson: And sometimes there are people who I think are very bright, but they come off as not bright.
• 10:03
  Larry Wilson: And that's because the simplest way I can say is I frequently say in my training, do not bring your barbecued ribs to the vegan picnic.
• 10:15
  Larry Wilson: I know they're the greatest barbecued ribs in the world.
• 10:18
  Larry Wilson: They aren't going to be a hit at the vegan picnic.
• 10:22
  Larry Wilson: Now, I don't know how to make it any clearer than that.
• 10:27
  Larry Wilson: If you are not aware of who you're trying to communicate with, more than likely it's going to be a colossal failure.
• 10:38
  Larry Wilson: You might get lucky, you might catch lightning in a jug, might turn out okay, but more than likely it won't be.
• 10:49
  Larry Wilson: It won't connect.
• 10:50
  Larry Wilson: I don't know how to put it any simpler.
• 10:53
  Larry Wilson: What I was amazed at in some of the coverage, I would hear military people being interviewed about something.
• 11:06
  Larry Wilson: And if you look at this with this jaundiced eye that I'm encouraging you to try, you don't have to do it all the time.
• 11:15
  Larry Wilson: I just mean as an experiment.
• 11:17
  Larry Wilson: You'll be amazed when you see, oh, the military people are speaking a military language, they're not in any way listening to the people who are interviewing them, what they're really trying to find out, whatever that may be.
• 11:38
  Larry Wilson: The political people are speaking in a political language.
• 11:45
  Larry Wilson: And someone may be asking them a question that would be better suited for the military people.
• 11:51
  Larry Wilson: They're answering strictly in a political language.
• 11:56
  Larry Wilson: I can't say this often enough.
• 11:59
  Larry Wilson: Communication is human, and anytime we stray from that, our communication breaks down.
• 12:11
  Larry Wilson: You may not be aware it's breaking down.
• 12:14
  Larry Wilson: You may think, yeah, I told them everything they need to know.
• 12:19
  Larry Wilson: But if you did not connect with them first, so that you could convey your message successfully and create an authentic bond with them, then you may find it's as if you didn't say anything.
• 12:37
  Larry Wilson: You just made duck noises.
• 12:39
  Larry Wilson: And and it could be astonishing to you.
• 12:44
  Larry Wilson: I went out and told them everything.
• 12:46
  Larry Wilson: Maybe you thought you did, but what I just referred to actually are another principle of Wilson Method, the three C's connect, convey, create.
• 12:59
  Larry Wilson: I won't go into it.
• 13:00
  Larry Wilson: I've talked on other episodes of the podcast about those specific three C's.
• 13:05
  Larry Wilson: It was fascinating to me.
• 13:07
  Larry Wilson: I'd see someone else on the media who would be talking about, uh, they'd be someone who maybe was um had a ethical or philosophical point of view.
• 13:21
  Larry Wilson: And that's the language they were using.
• 13:24
  Larry Wilson: But they weren't listening to the person interviewing them, and so they never connected.
• 13:32
  Larry Wilson: And it was fascinating to me.
• 13:34
  Larry Wilson: If you go and listen to these things again, or listen to them as they're coming up in real time, if you're thinking consciously about the things I'm talking about here, I know you'll see it.
• 13:48
  Larry Wilson: I'll see if I can give you uh an example without making this into some uh political fist fight because I really have no interest in that.
• 14:01
  Larry Wilson: Uh I'll leave that to other people who like fighting.
• 14:05
  Larry Wilson: I don't really have any interest in that.
• 14:07
  Larry Wilson: But the military people sometimes did not understand that the people they were being presented to in whatever form it was, maybe it was a radio interview, maybe it's a radio interview of the specific kind of audience.
• 14:26
  Larry Wilson: They were not thinking about that.
• 14:29
  Larry Wilson: And so they made their comments highly technical.
• 14:36
  Larry Wilson: And I I'm assuming, because of the certainty that uh some of these military people are saw, I'm assuming that they really are experts and know exactly what they're talking about.
• 14:50
  Larry Wilson: But I could not understand what they were saying, they were using military speak.
• 14:57
  Larry Wilson: I'm not gonna try to mimic it here because I don't want to be disrespectful.
• 15:02
  Larry Wilson: I'm sure I would get it wrong.
• 15:03
  Larry Wilson: But you know, uh there's a tendency to combine words, uh central command becomes centcom, uh things like that.
• 15:14
  Larry Wilson: And there's nothing wrong with that, except if your audience is not one of you, and you're trying to reach out to them and connect and convey information, then you can't use your jargon.
• 15:30
  Larry Wilson: You and you also can't address things.
• 15:34
  Larry Wilson: Now, uh, I'm just saying this uh focused on the military people, I was saying.
• 15:39
  Larry Wilson: You can't address things saying, oh, uh, we had a drone that had the 6,500 engine that could do eight kilometers that blob.
• 15:51
  Larry Wilson: We don't know what that means.
• 15:54
  Larry Wilson: Now, if you want to explain it to us, great.
• 15:57
  Larry Wilson: You know, give it your best.
• 15:59
  Larry Wilson: But they were speaking their language, because this is what they do all the time, and it never occurred to them that they were bringing their barbecued ribs to the vegan picnic.
• 16:14
  Larry Wilson: I hope you'll join me again next week for another episode of How to Talk to Humans.
• 16:22
  Larry Wilson: This has been Larry Wilson.
• 16:24
  Larry Wilson: I want to thank you for spending this time with me, and I hope you found this information useful.
• 16:31
  Larry Wilson: If you're looking for more, you can find it at thewilsonmethod.com.
• 16:36
  Larry Wilson: There's a ton of stuff there.
• 16:38
  Larry Wilson: That, if you want, you can even speak to me because I'm human.
• 16:44
  Larry Wilson: Send me an email at info at Wilsonmethod.com because I read every single one.
• 16:53
  Larry Wilson: I hope that you'll join us next week in this continuing journey.
• 16:59
  Larry Wilson: And you'll be with me for the next episode of How to Talk to Human.