Supercommunicators with journalist Charles Duhigg

0:01Ronald Reagan and Steve Jobs both spread their gospels because they were great communicators. Ronald Reagan's nickname was the great communicator. What a lot of people don't know is they didn't start that way. Both of them used to be awful communicators, but they learned how to communicate their ideas. Charles Dewey, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, journalist, best-selling author of The Power of Habit, has a new book called Super Communicators in which he dispels the myth that people are born that way. It turns out every single one of us can learn to be a super communicator. This is a bit of optimism.

0:47One of the things that I like about you is your books are different. Oh, thanks. You know, it's like sometimes writers, they write like here's a book and here's another book that's kind of like the other book. And I like that your books are different. I mean, the whole point of a good book, and I think it's what's so nice about your work as well, which is you're not like, I'm the expert, let me tell you. You're like, I'm on this journey. Want to come? And that's joyous to read. Bringing people on the journey is actually the most important part of teaching them the idea. Yeah. I think when people ask me for advice on storytelling, what I usually say is a lot of people focus on the beginning and the end of the story.

1:29But the middle is where everything important happens. And a lot of people just skip over it. One of the reasons I wrote Super Communicators was because in 2016, the New York Times made me a manager. I went from being a reporter to a manager. And I was terrible. Like fantastically bad. And I went into it and I was like, oh, my God, I'm going to be so good at this. Like I've had bosses my whole life and I got an MBA from Harvard. I was like, I'm going to kill this. And I was like – and the thing that made me crazy was that I was really good at the logistics part. Like I could like plan everything out and do all the diagrams.

2:07It was the communication part that I sucked at. And so badly that like I would make other people angry without even understanding why they were angry and like get frustrated. I was terrible at it. And so that – but also being like, oh, actually, there's a lot that I'm not good at. Like I'm not a genius and that's okay. And going back to that place, being like, I wrote this book because I wanted to get better communication because I was a terrible communicator myself. But then also at the same time that Trump got elected, right? And I'm looking around and I'm thinking like all these other people just screaming at each other, right?

2:44Not wanting to have a dialogue at all. And one of the things that I thought was like, we've sort of forgotten. There's some lessons here that we've forgotten about how to. Can we learn? Is it learnable? Oh, absolutely. I mean, the evidence is like completely clear on this. Nobody is born as a great communicator. Nobody's born as a super communicator. There is no personality type that is more likely to be a super communicator. It's literally all just learned skills. It's fun. I've seen old footage of Steve Jobs and old footage of Ronald Reagan, both considered great communicators. and they sucked.

3:18They're terrible. They sucked. It's shocking. By any standard, they sucked. Yeah. Bumbling, incoherent, sucked. So what happened there? Like why? Let's take it as a given that like actually our brains have evolved to communicate, right? Communication is human's superpower. That is why we have succeeded as a species. It allows us to form families and societies. So what happened to those two fellas and a bunch of other people is that instead of sucking and being like, oh gosh, I don't know why that didn't go well. They sat down and they thought hard about how could I make it go better? And there are these very obvious lessons that once you start looking for them are apparent to you.

3:59And in the last decade, science has gotten so good, we're kind of living through this golden age of understanding communication because of advances in neuroimaging and data analytics. So now it's easier for us to describe those ideas. But the truth of the matter is all of us are prepared to be super communicators. It's just that some people don't think about it. So define super communicator, first of all, let's start there. So the best way to is if you're having a bad day and you know that there's one person, if you call them, they're going to make you feel better. Who is that person? My sister.

4:28That person for you is a super communicator. And my guess is your sister is actually a super communicator to many people. She just knows how to make you feel listened to. She knows what you need. She knows how to like, she knows how to have a conversation. You're a super communicator, You establish a flow with everyone who comes on your podcast. So a super communicator is someone who has thought deeply about how to communicate. And as a result, they have the ability to invite others into the conversation. They have the ability to break through and make a connection even in the most unlikely of situations.

5:02And most importantly, they have the ability and they recognize the importance of achieving what scientists refer to as neural entrainment. Right now in this conversation, if we had enough machines, we would see that our pupils are actually dilating at the same rate. And our heart rates are starting to match each other. And our breath rates and the electrical impulses on our skin. And most importantly, if we could see inside our brains. It's a deep mirroring. It's a deep mirroring. Inside our brains, we would see that our brain waves started to look similar. Our brain activity started to look similar.

5:31That's what communication is. So it's biological connection. Like we have a connection. It's literally biological connection. Wow, that's cool. And if you think about it, that makes sense because the goal of communication is I have an idea or I have a feeling and I want you to understand it. I want you to experience it. Right. So if our brains become aligned, you're actually experiencing what I'm describing and vice versa. So tell a story of what you consider a great communicator or what they do. So one of the stories from the book is the story about this guy, Jim Lawler, who is a CIA officer.

6:03And he had just gotten hired as a CIA officer and they sent him over to Europe. and they were like, go recruit overseas assets, right? Like go find spies, basically, get them to work for the CIA. And he's terrible at it. Like he like, he like, he told me all these stories, like he would go to all these bars and like try and like chat up attaches and they'd be like, I don't want anything to do with you. There's this one guy, he finally made friends with this one guy from the Chinese embassy and like he takes him to lunch like seven or eight times and eventually he's like, hey, would you consider, you know, telling me some of the gossip you hear and I could pay you for that?

6:36And the guy says, you know, actually, my family is very wealthy and they kill people in my country for doing that. Let's not meet again. So he's just terrible at this. It didn't even make a real friend. No, he didn't even make a real friend. So he's at this point when like it's been a year and basically his bosses are like, we think you're going to get fired. Yeah. You just you're just bad at this. And this woman comes into town who works for the foreign ministry of her home country back in the Middle East. Yeah. And he never told me which country, but it'll be pretty obvious which one it is. And so he goes and he introduces himself as an oil speculator.

7:09He like bumps into a restaurant and they develop a relationship and he's taking her out to lunch. And he's trying to recruit her. And eventually he says, like, actually, I don't work for an oil company. I work for the CIA. Would you consider helping us out? Because she hated what was going on in her home country. It had just been taken over by Islamic revolutionaries and religious revolutionaries. She was a woman. In approximately 1979. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. You're guessing which country that is. And she's opposed to the regime. And he's like, we believe in the same thing. Will you help us out?

7:39And she starts crying and she freaks out. She's like, no, I'm absolutely not going to do this. I'm going to get killed for even knowing you. So he goes to his bosses and he'd already told them that he's trying to recruit her. And they're like, no, we told Washington, D.C. you did this. We told Washington, D.C. you had your first spy. If you don't deliver her, you're going to get fired. And so Jim is like, I'm screwed. He doesn't know what to do. And so he basically asked this woman, Fatima, to have one more meal with him. And he goes in and he has all these ideas of how to, and like he gets to the meal and he's like, this is just not going to work.

8:13Like I cannot convince this person to take a suicidal risk. Right. So she's kind of down because she's about to go back to her home country and she's kind of disappointed in herself. And Jim's trying to like cheer her up and make her feel better. And then after a while, like it's just not working and she's not really like, they're not connecting. and when dessert comes he like he's like i'm gonna be totally honest with you like i'm about to get fired and the reason i'm about to get fired is i am really bad at this job like like everyone else in my class they had this like confidence or this something that i don't have and i'm not i'm not even going to try and get you to work for me i just i you've been honest with me i want to be honest with you like i feel terrible about myself like you just keep on saying you're disappointed in yourself.

9:02I understand that because I am so disappointed in myself. I've wanted this job my whole life and I've screwed it up. And she listens to him and she starts crying and he reaches over and he's like, I'm sorry, I did not mean to make you cry. And she goes, no, no, I think I can do this. And he's like, and he was so freaked out. He was like, he actually said, wait, no, no, no, you don't have to do anything. I don't want you to like, like he's so panicked. And she goes, no, no, I think what you said before that we both want the same thing. I think you're right. I can help you. And she goes to a safe house the next day.

9:34She gets all this training and like covert communications. For the next 20 years, she's the best source in the Middle East. And when I asked Jim why, and Jim became one of the best recruiters in the CIA. He ended up training other officers how to do this. When I asked him like, what's the secret you teach people? What he said was, you have to match people where they're at. Fatima was upset and I was trying to cheer her up. Yeah. Or Fatima was scared and I was trying to convince her she shouldn't be scared. Once I just gave up and said, look, you're disappointed in yourself and I'm disappointed in myself, that's when she could hear me for the first time.

10:13And within the literature, this is known as the matching principle. There's these different kinds of conversations and that you have to match the kind of conversation that's happening in order to connect. but a lot of it comes down to listening to those instincts that we evolved over millions of years that are sometimes hard to listen to in contemporary society but you know that if somebody is is feeling something that if you feel it with them you feel more connected but he was honest right yes that's a huge part of it has to be authentic and that's part of the problem which is, you know, can you fake these things?

10:53Can super communicators fake these things? Not once or twice, perhaps. But what's amazing is, and again, research has shown this, our ability to detect inauthenticity is like laser sharp. There was actually one of my favorite experiments is these researchers took a bunch of people, friends laughing together and strangers trying to pretend like they're laughing together. and they would play people a half second of the laughter and ask them which is which and people could detect it 92%. Wow. We just know. Our survival depends on it, right? Our survival, absolutely. Our ability to form friendship and community means that I can trust you to watch for danger while I'm asleep.

11:35That's exactly right. And if, by the way, you betray me, I will be so much more angry than if you simply did the same thing but for benign reasons. Yeah. It's an evolution. It's grown up as a pro-social instinct. Are you a better communicator now that you've written the book? Oh, my gosh. So much better. Tell me something. Tell me how you showed up in different circumstances that you show up differently now. So, okay. So two ways. The first way is I ask just a lot more questions. And I ask what are known as deep questions. And so a deep question is something that asks someone about their values or their beliefs or their experiences.

12:12And they usually start with why. So it's and they can be very easy. It can be like, oh, you're a lawyer. Like, did you always want to be a lawyer? Like, why did you go to law school? At what point did you decide that, like, the law was the thing for you? Those are easy questions to ask, but they're all deep questions because they're asking someone about their values or their experiences. And so that's the first thing I do is that I try and ask more deep questions and I try and just listen more closely. But then the second thing is there's this big insight that we think of a discussion as being about one thing, but actually every discussion is made up of multiple conversations.

12:46And most of them fall into one of three buckets. There's these practical conversations, right? We're making a decision. We're fixing a problem. There's emotional conversations where the goal is not to fix someone's problem. It's simply to share. Hold space. Yeah, hold space. And then there's social conversations, which is about how do we relate to other people? How do we think society sees us? and so I used to come home and I would have a bad day at work and I would be complaining to my wife and she would respond with practical advice she'd say like look why don't you take your boss out to lunch and get to know him a little bit better and instead of hearing her I would get even more upset but now I know it's because she was having a practical conversation I was having an emotional conversation we couldn't connect with each other so now one of the first things I do is I try and figure out what kind of conversation are we having like how do I match this other person how do I invite them to match me.

13:34And sometimes it's as simple as just saying like, my wife says this all the time, like, do you want me to fix your problem or just listen to your problem? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love the idea of labeling the conversation. I've had it happen where I was in a bad place and I called somebody for advice and they started fixing. And I said to them, I appreciate your intention of trying to fix it. I need you to not fix it. I need you to just listen to me. So I was able to give instruction to match me at the time. And they probably appreciated that, right? They did. Yeah. And they said sorry. And I've caught myself too, like in the middle of trying to fix something.

14:05I'm just probably like, do you need me to offer you solutions now? Right. I love this idea of labeling. And it's like everybody can remember three things. They're easy. Social, we're having fun. Emotional, how you feeling? Practical, do you want to fix something or do you want to talk about something intellectual? That's exactly right. They're easy to understand. They're easy to remember. And I love the idea that it's not some deep internal skill. You just have to make known the thing that's happening so that we can be on the same wavelength and have that mirroring. That's exactly right. And I think that that's what Steve Jobs and Ronald Reagan and other people do is they walk away from a bad conversation.

14:37And instead of being like, that was a bad conversation, they think to themselves, what did I miss? Like, what should I look for next time? And if you start paying attention, what you notice is like, you're talking to a friend or a colleague and they'll say something in a practical conversation, right? Or at work, they'll say something emotional and it's really easy to gloss over it. They'll say like, my son just graduated. I'm so proud. Yeah. Or I, sorry, I didn't reply to your email yesterday. It was like, I had something going on. And our instinct is to stay on that practical track, right? Like, but if you say like, ah, that's amazing.

15:09Tell me about your son. Or what was going on yesterday? Is it anything that like, it's helpful to talk through? Yeah. That person, all of a sudden, we are matching them. Yeah. And they're more willing to listen to us. And more importantly, when we say, let's talk through this issue and then let's get back to the budget or planning, they're going to go there with you. I love that idea also, which is it's okay to go off script. Yeah. In fact, you have to go off script. Or the script hardly even exists. It's a falsity that we think that there's a script that we need to hold ourselves to. Yeah. That's so good.

15:44It's so good. What is your hope for the book? I know it's a big question. My hope is that is twofold. I'm hoping that people read this book and that they get something as powerful from it that improves their own life, that they can use it. And then secondarily, like this is very grand aspiration, but I hope that I'm part of encouraging a bigger discussion about how we can as a nation and as humans have conversations with people who are different from us where we where we do connect. Yeah. Right, those are the most, if you think about like the origin of America, America was born in conversation.

16:25The Constitutional Convention were people who hated each other having a conversation until they had a constitution. And around the world, our best moments are moments when we have a hard conversation with someone whom it is hard to have that conversation with. You can't make peace with your friends. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I'm just, I'm curious because you had many jobs before you became a writer. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I did. So what did you study? So you grew up in New Mexico. What did you, like, you went to school where? So I grew up in New Mexico and I went to Yale. And there I started studying intellectual history.

17:00And I just completely fell in love with it. Intellectual history. Intellectual history. So it's about the history of ideas and trying to trace how does an idea spread from one group to another group? How does an idea take purchase in society? What happens when that idea takes purchase? Right? That's so fascinating. I love it. Give me an example. So one of the big ideas throughout intellectual history is anti-Semitism. This question, like, why does anti-Semitism exist? Why does it rally so many people? It's obviously, like, such a toxic, toxic idea. And it's always rooted in stories. The way that anti-Semitism is passed is through stories, through the story of the blood libel, through the story of the banking conspiracy theories.

17:44I think that ideas don't exist outside of the stories that we tell each other because that's how we explain them. And I think for both of us as writers, one of the things that, I mean, the reason I started writing books instead of just magazine articles and newspaper articles is because I realized I was getting exposed to all this fascinating research and ideas through scientific studies. And literally I would read them and I would be like, that's so interesting. And half an hour later, I couldn't even describe it to my wife. Like it would just like kind of escape from my brain. And so the thing I realized, and I think you do this really well too, is if I can take an idea and I can embed it in a story, then everyone can carry it around in their back pocket.

18:24That makes it easy to remember. Yeah, they tell the story is not the idea. That's exactly right. Do we believe in a concept unto itself without a story? I don't think so. And I don't think so. And that's one of the things that in intellectual history you learn is that the way - The story is the king. The story is the key. And this is kind of something that motivates my writing. I think that there are these vast structures that we are often blind to. And those structures influence our lives so much. And the more that we can illuminate them, whether they be habits, whether they be business, right?

18:53And when you illuminate those, you give people more options. Because for the first time, they can say, oh, that's not a given. Like, I get to choose what makes sense to me. Can you tell me a story of something you wrote, an article, a project you worked on in your professional career? it doesn't matter whether it was commercially successful or not but that you absolutely loved this project you absolutely loved this thing and if every project you ever worked on was like this one thing you'd be the happiest person alive yeah so there's I wrote this piece for the New Yorker about two years ago about SPACs do you remember yeah yeah yeah it was about this guy Chamath Palahapitsia well done yeah thanks I think I got a little bit wrong I loved this piece I loved writing this piece I loved writing about But Chamath, I loved like it was just so colorful and fun and I love finance.

19:43Nobody read it. It was like one of these things where like it was like, oh, the New York audience is not into finance the same way I'm into finance. They're not into this guy who's like bombastic and weird the way that I am. But I was just so gloriously happy to have written it. I was like, it was just fun. Like this guy, like he like drops F-bombs all the time. He like tries to piss off other people because he thinks it helps him sell things. Like he says ridiculous things. He he left his wife when she had cancer in order to go marry someone younger. Like like it's just this story where you're like, this is ridiculous.

20:18I cannot believe that this guy exists. It was just so much fun. But you've written fun things before. Yeah. So what is it about this one that sort of. I don't know. You answered this question very quickly. Honestly, I think it's because it wasn't popular. Yeah. Like it just, it felt like for the first time, it's something I can point to that I'm like, I wrote that for me. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. And the thing is when you're a professional writer, and you know this, is that you become a professional writer because you love writing. It's easy to fall out of love with writing. Yeah. It's hard. And like you get into this place where it doesn't feel, it doesn't feel the way it used to feel, right?

20:56Yeah. It doesn't feel special anymore. and I had felt that way for a long time and then I wrote this piece and I was like oh yeah this is what I liked I like writing things that surprise me by what ends up coming out of my fingers and it felt like that and actually what's interesting is literally the next thing I did is write the proposal for super communicators I was like okay now I think I'm at a place where I can write I remember what it's like to love writing. Tell me an early, specific happy childhood memory. Something specific that I can relive with you. That's a really good question. Well, okay, I'll tell you two, one that's happy and one that's not.

21:39When I was a kid, I once made this newsletter about how, I wanted to be a babysitter. So I put together, I spent like three days on this newsletter advertising myself. And it was funny and it was wry and it had like terrible twos and I thought it was hilarious. My parents thought it was hilarious and they were like, if you put this up, nobody's going to hire you. So maybe this is not what they're looking for. But that's one of the first times that I found that writing just felt so good. Then when I was in high school, I became a debater. And I was so focused on winning. I would actually wake up and I would look in the mirror.

22:12This is a crazy thing. I would look in the mirror and I would say, you are crap if you do not win this weekend. As a result, when I got to college, I really didn't know how to be a good friend to people. Like I was so competitive. but when I look back on that I feel so lucky to have had that experience to it was like Steve Jobs being a terrible communicator that like it's when we fall down that we actually learn how to do something really well and so those are two things that that stand out was there a specific incident of you but when you say you looked in the mirror and said if you don't win you suck like was that a was that you're thinking of a particular time literally every morning this is a routine that I would go through that was like a ritual every single morning.

22:54My entire identity. I mean, I was like a chubby kid. I was awkward. I was in New Mexico as kind of like an outsider perpetually. And the thing about debate is you go into a room and one person is a winner and one person is a loser. And like my whole identity was wrapped up in it. And it felt so pure and good. But the only way that I could think to make myself better at it was like to make it everything. So like telling myself in the mirror every single morning, I would do it before I brush my teeth. I would look in the mirror and I'd say, if you do not win this weekend, you are crap. It made me feel both bad and good.

23:34It made me feel like I was pushing myself as hard as I could push myself. But then when I would lose tournaments or lose rounds, I felt terrible. And to this day, I cannot remember a single round that I won. and I can tell you every single debate around that I lost. Like I remember all of them. Do you know what's so interesting about those stories, which is when you make it about something external, when you make it about the winning, you are not at your best. Yeah. Right? And when you wrote the babysitter newsletter, it was for fun. Yeah. And when you glow about the story of the CIA recruiter, you relate to him in such a way which is when he made it about winning he couldn't do it but when he finally just let go and was himself and when you i mean it sounds corny but when you practice what you preach when you just are yourself and in life for the fun of it and your curious writer self who sees the world as this magical playground and you're not writing for anyone And everything works.

24:42I absolutely. But the question I have, and maybe you have an answer to this, is how do we remind ourselves of that when it's hard to remember? Right. Do you know George Saunders, the story writer? He's a wonderful person and a wonderful writer. And he said that basically like the question he asks himself all the time is he knows how good it feels to be kind. He knows how much he likes himself when he's a kind person. so why the hell are there these moments when he's unkind and I feel the same way like how do we remind ourselves to listen to that internal voice that tells us this is what you love this is what how do we ignore so there's multiple answers and I think you need multiple answers because they don't they're not all easy to do at the same time and so you have multiple solutions I mean one is to start with why which is to have a true north and then you get to have this filter going, am I doing that?