Why Small Conversations Create Big Happiness with Nicholas Epley

0:00And so having things happen frequently and routinely to us is really the secret, I think, to a happy life. The way to have a good day is to have a bunch of happy moments that you string together. The way to have a good week is to string happy days with happy moments together. The way to have a good month is to string those moments together. That's what leads to a good life. And when you do these things routinely, when you turn things into habits, that's when you do them over and over again in ways that keeps bringing that happiness. When I get on the train, I'm automatically thinking about connecting with someone.

0:31They just become routine. And then that changes who you are. It just becomes part of your character and allows you to have these experiences over and over again. Because when it comes to happiness and well-being, it's the frequent moments that really matter and not the intensity of them.

0:49Hello, everybody. It's Guy Kawasaki. This is the Remarkable People podcast. and in some sense, we consider our podcast just an arm of the University of Chicago. And whenever they send remarkable people, we take them all. So today's guest is another remarkable University of Chicago person. His name is Nick Epley. And believe it or not, he is a professor of behavioral science, which is one of my favorite subjects. He's in the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago. And he is one of the leading experts in human connection and social judgment. This is his most recent book. It is called A Little More Social.

1:36And he basically is an evangelist for people to start talking to strangers and begin social relationships and I gotta say that I was a little bit skeptical of what he said and now I'm gonna put it to test. But wow, what a case he builds about building stronger relations. And unfortunately, I don't ever catch a train, so I cannot test some of his theories. But here is the fabulous Nick Epley. Nick, welcome to the show. Nick Epley Thank you so much for having me here, guy. I feel among heroes on this one. So thank you for having me here. You can never go wrong with the University of Chicago. Nick Epley I agree.

2:22And Dana and John Liz, if you're listening, you know, I'm talking about you and Richard Thaler, too. So I want to start with what I consider one of the most interesting stories in your book, which is the story of Jessica. So tell us the story of Jessica. I believe you're referring to Jessica Pan, who was a journalist in the UK, who sent me an email just to connect. She had written about some of our research before, but she called me later with what I thought was going to be more of a conversation about our research. It turned out she was needing a pep talk. That's what it was. She had just gotten a book contract to spend a year of her life living as an extrovert.

3:07And she described herself as a shintrovert, as a shy introvert. She called me up in the summer. I'll never forget it. I was in a little cabin that we have in Wisconsin. And I was pacing across the room with her on the phone. She was telling me how she was going to spend a year of her life living more extroverted. And she was terrified. She thought this was a disastrous mistake that she had committed herself to. And she basically was calling to have me tell her that she wasn't going to have the worst year of her life. And over the course of about an hour, we talked through some of our research and talked about why people tend to underestimate how positively others will respond when you reach out to engage with or connect with them.

3:57Extroversion is a complicated phenomenon. Sociability is one of them. And at the end of that hour, she left and launched her year of living as an extrovert. And by the end of that year, she ended up writing a book called Sorry, I'm Late. I didn't want to come, which is fabulous. That described the year that she spent reaching out a little more often. And I don't have it here in my office. It's at my home office. But one of my most prized possessions is a signed copy of that book from her that says something to the effect of, Dear Nick, thank you so much for changing my life and that of many others.

4:37It worked out well for her. So her story is at least anecdotal evidence that life gets better when you're more social. Is that the bottom line? I think that's the way it is. When you spot opportunities where it would be easy for you to reach out and engage with somebody, but you're choosing not to. Choosing not to because you think now's not the right time or not the right place or this will be mediocre or they don't want to talk to me. because social connection, it turns out, isn't something that just happens to us. It's a choice that we can make. It's a choice we make to reach out and engage with somebody or to hold back and keep to ourselves.

5:18And all too often we find in our research, we choose to hold back too often because we underestimate how positively reaching out will actually go. But can I back up for a second? And if you talk to her soon, I know what it takes to get a book contract because I've done it, I don't know, upteenth times, and you've got to write proposals and all this kind of stuff and pages and work and hours and hours. So my first question is, how the hell do you get a contract for something you do not want to do? I don't understand. Like you woke up and said, ah, I'm a vegetarian. I'm going to write a book about eating paleo all year.

5:55Yeah, so I think I won't tell you what her reasoning was because I'm not her and I can't tell you. But I will tell you that her reasoning wasn't all that different from mine. When I started down this line of research, you know, a decade and a half ago for my entire career, I've been studying mind reading for a living. Essentially, I study how we make inferences about each other's thoughts and beliefs and attitudes and mostly how we screw that up and misunderstand each other in lots of ways. I remember just very vividly being on a train ride one morning into my office at the University of Chicago when I had this kind of eureka moment where I'm sitting in this train full of highly social people who are all choosing to ignore each other.

6:42And I, too, was a little nervous about reaching out to engage with the person who sat down next to me that morning. And yet I also knew of the decades and decades of research that demonstrated that our moments are better when we're connecting with other people than we're keeping to ourselves. And yet here we weren't doing it. And here I wasn't doing it. And so I tried. And so I think Jessica came from a similar place where she knew all of this research. suggesting that reaching out and connecting with other people might make her feel better, improve her life. She'd also hit a rough patch in her life where she thought she had to try something different.

7:24And she thought, I think, what the hell? Let me give this a try. And while I'm at it, I'll tell people my story. And so that's what she did. I decided, though, one morning, I just remember this with crystal clarity, to try something different. I had a woman sit down next to me. She was about 15 to 20 years older than I was. I was about 35 at the time. I'm guessing she was around 50. African-American woman who was dressed in business attire, ready for work. And she had this fabulous red hat. And there's no reason necessarily think we'd have a whole lot in common and so on. But I decided that morning to try something different to see just what would happen if I tried to have a conversation with her and just pay attention.

8:04And it's not like I haven't talked to people before. Of course, I have talked to plenty of people before, talked to strangers before many times. but this morning I was paying close attention to what happened and so I turned to her after kind of overcoming some anxiety about this and worked up my courage and I said hi I'm Nick I love your hat I have one just like it and you know it's not it's not a killer opening line right this is not all-star stuff for sure but she laughed kind of like you did the ridiculousness of it was clear and she turned to me laughing and then just flowed really easily.

8:42And the way conversation works is it's like finding things you have in common with a magnet. It tends to pull for things you have in common. So the conversation went pretty smoothly, pretty easily. We went from one topic to another talking about, you know, our lives and our families and our jobs and our hope for the future. It was pretty easy. And the 30 minutes was just gone like that. Like it was just over quickly. and I got up to leave and she held my wrist for a moment as I was getting up to leave and she said thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me this morning and there was a sincerity that was clear like I appreciated not being ignored this morning this was nice and my feeling wasn't just that this was nice it was surprisingly nice that the contrast between my beliefs beforehand and my experience afterwards were big.

9:38And if that gap, if that experience wasn't unique to me, if that was common, I thought, well, this could be a big thing. If that's something I generally do that I get wrong, I avoid people because I mistakenly think this isn't going to be okay. Then that is life changing. That's life changing. If it's not just me, if that's a general thing. And that launched 15 years of research. That's what it did. Well, I am the lady in the red hat. Yeah. I never met her again. I never saw her again. I'd never seen her before. And if you ride a different train, you don't ever see each other. So I think that was probably it.

10:18But yeah, I haven't seen her since. So Nick, can I confess to you? So this morning, I'm sitting in this coffee shop. And when I work in this coffee shop, I bring my own keyboard. I don't use the built-in keyboard on the laptop. So I have this mechanical keyboard and it's really clacky, right? And I'm sitting there and I'm working and this guy walks in and he says, I love your keyboard. And I just smiled and I thanked him. And then later on, another guy sat down next to me and he had the same keyboard. Is that right? And yeah. And then I thought, God, you're such a stupid asshole. You're reading this book by Nick Epley about being a little more social and you had the two easiest entrees to being more social because you could just discuss your mutual love of clacky mechanical keyboards.

11:13But no, you're such a dickhead. You're so focused on preparing for an interview about being a little more social that you weren't a little more social. And I felt, I've been feeling bad for three hours. I wanted to get that off my chest. All right. I tell you what, guy, I think you will have opportunity to redo that if you want. These opportunities keep coming up. So you'll be able to make it right someday. I'm going back to that coffee shop right after this interview.

11:52you're listening to remarkable people with guy kawasaki so listen basically you're saying that we kind of suck as mind readers right you're trying to read the other person's mind she doesn't want to be disturbed etc etc so is mind reading like an a normal distribution there are people who are very good and people not good but it's a normal curve or do we just suck as a species right now in mind reading? First off, I wouldn't say that we suck at it. That wouldn't be the right characterization. We're the most amazing species on the planet when it comes to this. There is not another species on the planet that thinks about the minds of others like we do.

12:32And it is as capable as we are, but it's a really hard problem. It's a really, really hard problem. And when you deal with really, really hard problems, knowing what's on the mind of another person, we're imperfect. And so I think that's the right way to describe it. It's not that we're terrible. We're amazing, but we're imperfect. And our imperfections aren't without consequence. They're consequential. But it seems to be that we are overly pessimistic, that we think that it's bad or more bad is going to happen if we are a little more social. So why are we so pessimistic now? I think there are a couple of things that are going on.

13:10One, let's just take as a starting point, it's a hard thing to get exactly right. But there are a few things that get in the way. One is the perspective that we have on ourselves is different from the perspective that other people have on us. And so we tend to focus on our competency and our capability and our agency. Other people tend to care about our warmth. Are we nice and friendly? So when you think, when I thought about having a conversation with the woman in the red hat that morning, I thought, oh gosh, what are we going to talk about? We have nothing in common. We have no reason to engage with each other.

13:43I was worried about whether I was going to be able to carry this out. What she cared about was I a friendly person, a kind person, someone who seemed honest and trustworthy and worth turning into a friend, even if just for a moment. But if I'm reaching out to somebody in a positive way and thinking that they're going to care about my competency when they really just care about my warmth, then I'm going to underestimate how well I'm going to be received when I reach out to other people with kindness. And that could be kindness to start a conversation with somebody just to see somebody and make a connection with them or send a gratitude letter to somebody or pass along a compliment or be honest with someone.

14:24That's going to happen routinely when we reach out to other people in positive ways. Second thing is that social interaction has a magnetic quality to it. It tends to pull us together. And our expectations don't capture that. The dominant norm of social life is reciprocity. If I say hi to you, what do you say back to me? You say hi. I smile at you. You smile back at me, right? I wave to you. You wave back to me. Nobody waves, but everybody waves back to you. But what we find is that our expectations don't really appreciate the strength of that reciprocity, that dynamic process. And as a result, we think we'll reach out to other people in a kind way, and they could respond to us in any way.

15:14And that just tends not to be true. They are tilted towards being kind back to us when we are kind to them first. And then the third thing is that it's hard to learn from these mistakes because pessimism is self-fulfilling. So you passed up conversations with not one, but two dudes this morning who you could have talked with. I'll give you grief for that for the rest of our conversation. Two people, right? And because you missed those conversations, you don't know how well they could have turned out, right? And so optimism gets corrected, gets calibrated. If you believe that talking to me would be pleasant, you'll talk to me and find out.

15:54But if you believe that talking to me would be unpleasant, you wouldn't try it and you might not find out that you're wrong. And so pessimism that can come from these other two sources tends to be self-fulfilling and not corrected because we avoid the data we need to get it right. But do we go back to Neanderthal days and we're not going to exactly have a little social interaction with the saber tooth tiger or the guy from the other clan who's about to kill us. So has society changed so much that we got more upside than downside now? So that's a good question. And many people ask me that. And my answer to that is, I don't know.

16:30I don't know because I can't go back and find out what the actual incentives were like and to find out whether those are actually what are keeping you from talking to the guy with a clacky keyboard this morning, right? Or whether that was just something else in your immediate environment. What I know from our research is that we can explain a lot of what people do by looking at their thoughts and circumstances that they're in right now. So I can predict when you'd be willing to engage or talk with somebody and when you couldn't. We know what can move that around. Whether that's coming to us from some vestigial evolved tendency or not is hard to test.

17:12So are you saying that in general, we should just assume that it is okay to be a little more social? Are there some definite signals like, I do not do this. This is not the right circumstance. Or can I just go blindly through life and try this with everybody? Yeah, no, no, no, no. Our data do not suggest that. Our data suggests that you underestimate how positively things will turn out. But look, life does have its risk to it. There are dangerous environments and we have some sense of what those environments are, our data suggest that when you're on the fence, you'd like to reach out to somebody.

17:49It seems safe and easy, like in the coffee shop this morning. It's safe and easy to do. And it could just be a moment, right? It doesn't have to chew up your entire day. When we're on the fence, we'd like to reach out and engage with somebody, but we think other people aren't so interested in engaging with us. Those are the moments where you can choose to enrich your life by reaching out a little more often. Those are the critical times, I think, where our mistakes can get in our way. I would never tell somebody to talk to some random stranger who comes up to you in a back alley. But the people who approach us in our lives are sometimes different from the people that we might approach.

18:22They suggest that when you're on the fence, you'd like to, but you're nervous about how it will go. Those nerves and those moments are probably too strong. And those are the moments to try reaching out. Okay, so now, Nate, let's suppose you're a billionaire this is a big supposition on my part because i'm not even close but if you're a billionaire or politician or something and i'll tell you a little side story so i once spoke at an event where cheryl sandberg from facebook now meta was also speaking and she pulls up and she has an entourage nick i swear of 20 people she has a personal assistant her personal assistant as a personal assistant.

19:03Her bodyguard has a bodyguard. Her driver has a driver. It's 20 freaking people, right? So now I'm thinking about your book. I'm thinking about this situation with billionaires and politicians and leaders and Tim Cook. And those people are not catching commuter trains. They're not saying hello to black women with black or red hats. So what does it mean when all those people are removed from all of this? One of the things that we find is that people underestimate how much they're going to learn from other people in conversation. So that's another thing that we get out of interacting with other people.

19:37Not only do we gain some emotional lift, but we also learn things, learn perspectives that we don't have, gain information that we wouldn't have guessed, learn things about other people that we might not have anticipated. And so when you're isolated in this way, I'm not saying anything here that I think is not pretty clear to anyone who's paid attention out in the world to what happens to folks in these situations. It can be isolating, right? You don't actually connect with a lot of people. You don't actually have friends. It can be lonely at the top, but you also stop learning stuff. You become disconnected from other people in ways that give you a distorted view of what reality can look like when you're too disconnected.

20:16I think those are the two big things. And I would make a case that if these people are shut off from learning things from other people and the leadership positions they have, this is a huge negative for society. It would seem to me that of all people, they should learn the most from other people, right? They're being isolated now. Yeah, so look, some of the most famous, wonderful CEOs through history have been those who have reached out and connected with everybody in the organization. Herb Kelleher, CEO of Southwest, the founder and CEO of Southwest, was notorious for going into the airplane hangar in the middle of the night and hanging out with the guys for a little bit and connecting with them, right?

21:00Both kind of learning from them, but also making it clear that he cared for them. And those employees would do anything for Herb when the company needed it. And folks who are able to reach across and reach out and engage with other people who establish those kinds of connections are often the ones who are really admired out there in the world. So can you tell us other benefits that people can derive? You already talked about alerting other perspectives and getting a broader point of view. What else do you get by doing this? So the big thing you get are connections, right? Relational connections.

21:38And those might just be momentary. So the woman in the red hat with me on the train that morning was a friend just for a minute, right? But it made that minute better. And it turns out those minutes, those moments are the things that really define happy lives when you have those moments routinely over and over and over again. And some of those, of course, moments then turn into relationships that are longer lasting or can be more meaningful in those moments. They can give you a sense of connection to other people. And those are among the most satisfying things that we get in our lives. It's not just that moment is better as positive that is a good thing but it also establishes connections with people and so every friend you have now was at one time a stranger to you right was at one time somebody you didn't know and sometimes they can lead us to do really big things in our lives reach out and connect to other people both you and I have adopted children for instance and that's a choice to reach out and engage and bring people into your life that enriches not just their lives but enriches your lives immeasurably i mean changes our lives in ways that make them almost unrecognizable from what they were before brings love into our lives in ways that you might not have imagined beforehand and so there there are small things that it can bring but also really big ones that come from relational connection, love in our lives.

23:10And it's hard to think of a bigger thing in our lives than that. Just as an aside, Nick, as you said, we both have adopted children. And I have to tell you, I'm 72 years old. I've had a lot of beautiful and wonderful moments in my life. But I don't think anything can top the beauty of an adoption. That is a truly beautiful process and so rewarding and so, I get all choked up just thinking about adopting. So psychologists will sometimes say that we are the most social species on the planet. And what they mean by that is a few things. But one thing that they mean is that we can care for non-kin, that is non-biologically related kin, friendships, family members, in ways that no other species really does.

24:02Not to the same extent that we can. And that phenomena, I think, shows that better than any other is how you can make families so strong. I have to say, I've had this discussion with some men and these men think that unless my child came from my loins, I can't love the child. And I said, you're being so freaking stupid. Once they put that baby in your arms, everything changes. And Nick, let's just be honest, right? The involvement of most men in the birthing of a child, it lasts about 30 seconds, nine months before. And I don't know how we got on this topic of adoption, but it is truly a beautiful thing.

24:42If those guys with the clacky keyboards had said, hey, I heard you adopted kids, I would have had a bunch. Maybe that would have come out if you'd said, hey, I love your keyboard too. Guess what? Okay, so Nick, you convinced me I'm going to be a little more social. I'm going to carry more keyboards and all that. But now you've got to give us the Nick Epley best practices. What do I do? I've made the decision. I've crossed the chasm. I'm going to be a little more social. I'm looking for red hats and clacky keyboards. How do I start this? What do I do? Yeah. So I think there's a common misunderstanding, not a total misunderstanding, but one that's off a little bit where the belief is that what you say is really what matters, that they're like some magic words there's some great opening lines that you can use to get a conversation going but remember what we care about ourselves is our competency and so we're focused on those things other people care about our warmth and in any given moment what you say to somebody that might be kind that might invite them or welcome them into a conversation with you is going to vary depending on the context that you're in i actually think the more important thing is to change your mindset when you're out in the world.

25:58Not to focus on specific things to say, but to change your mindset about other people. Once you start taking an interest in other people, you start realizing other people are mostly pretty kind. They're mostly pretty interesting. As Bill Nye, a famous science guy, once noted, everyone you ever meet knows something that you don't. Everyone's got a story to tell you. Everyone is remarkable in their own way. once you realize that and your job is to figure that out you just approach people differently you just engage with them differently i love to ask people when i sit down with them because i've taken an interest in them one of my favorite things to ask people is what's your story what's your story everyone's got one everyone's got a story about how they got here doing whatever they're doing now right and they understand they're not talking about how did you walk to wherever you are today.

26:53But that then opens up a lot. But I think the key first step is changing your mindset about other people and you take an interest in them. And when you take an interest, you start noticing people. You start noticing people where there might be opportunities to engage or talk. You have a kind thought about somebody. You notice somebody's keyboard and you comment on it or their hat and you pass along a kind thought to them. And I think that changes everything. So would you say that an introvert is an extrovert who has been wounded or something? If you and Susan Cain walked into a bar, right? She's Miss Introvert and you're Mr.

27:32Social, like what happens? Can't some people just be introverts and be happy and life goes on? Oh yeah, of course. People can. What the data suggests though, is that even introverts are uplifted when they're in conversation or engaging with other people to the same extent that extroverts are. In the same way that people benefit from exercise, regardless of how much they typically exercise, our data don't suggest that everybody should change the way they live. But like Jessica, who found herself in kind of an unpleasant point in life and she wanted to make her life better. For all of us, if you want to make your life a little better, reaching out, taking easy opportunities to engage with other people, I think is a simple way to make your life better, regardless of how extroverted or introverted you are.

28:23And my advice to anyone who's thinking about this is just to try it, like just start testing it a little bit, right? You don't have to believe me. You don't have to believe our data. We've seen this in over 30 ,000 people now. We've run through over 120 published experiments and a bunch that we just haven't gotten around to publishing yet, this is a robust tendency to underestimate how well things will go. And if you think you're holding yourself back too much from engaging with other people, you can go out and try it yourself and learn where you're holding yourself back unfairly in your own life.