#909 - Charles Duhigg - The Secret Habits Of Supercommunicators

25:10Like, that's actually an authentic thing. And so oftentimes when we see people who engage in performative vulnerability, it's very easy for us to say like, oh, if they're doing it for thousands of people, it must not be real. But of course, you know, that's not true, right? It sometimes, sometimes we say something to thousands or even millions of people and it is very real. It's very authentic. The thing that makes the difference is, are you committed to saying, first of all, do you know your own mind? Do you know your own feelings? Are you genuinely committed to trying to understand what you're feeling and thinking?

25:48And if that's like, I hate Joanna and I want to smear her, then like, own that. Live up to that. Like, accept that that's your goal. And once you do that, if you share it with other people in an authentic way, if you say, like, look, like, I really want to tell 10 ,000 of my closest friends that, like, I have cancer and I'm terrified. That's not inauthentic. That's real. But it's real because the person thought about what they're thinking and feeling, they questioned their own motives and values. And then they tried to be as transparent with the audience as possible. They weren't trying to use any sub -surfuge.

26:24They're trying to say, I want you to understand me. So I'm going to speak to you in this clear and direct way as I can. I suppose there's, yeah, the yacht example is kind of interesting. It's almost like it. It's a something which in the wrong hands, I guess vulnerability is something which is potentially destructive or embarrassing if put into the wrong hands. That might be one way to put it, I suppose. Yeah, I think that's a good way of putting it is that like I'm telling you something that actually you could use against me. Yeah, but if you start spreading the rumor that I bought a cool yacht that does nothing except for, you know, it's yeah, yeah, make me seem cool.

27:05Okay, so that's the real world. Okay, what's the final skill? Okay, so the final skill is... Once you're asking deep questions, once you're proving that you're listening, looping for understanding and sort of showing that, But once you're willing to be vulnerable under the correct definition of what vulnerability is, it's really important that we pay attention to what kind of conversation is happening. I mentioned before that there's these three kinds of conversations, the practical, the emotional, and the social. And then the book, Supercommunicators, there's all these stories about like a CIA officer who's like recruiting overseas spies and why the big bang theory became such a hit because because it was a flop when they made the pilot.

27:49And at the core of it is the thing that, if I become attuned to diagnosing what kind of mindset you're in, if I can just ask myself, like, does this seem like he's in a practical mindset, an emotional mindset or a social mindset? And then I can just do the smallest thing to try and match you there, right? Like you mentioned that you went to your kids graduation this weekend. And I say instead of saying, like, just congratulations, that's awesome. I say, oh, man, what did that feel like to watch your kid walk across that stage? Because clearly, you are, this is kind of an emotional experience for you to go to your kids' graduation.

28:23I'm just going to ask about it. When we can pay attention, just the smallest amount to what kind of conversation is happening. When we can match others and we can invite them to match us, all of a sudden our conversations get much, much better. There's actually a scientific basis to this, which is because of, again, how our brains of evolved because communication is so important to our species. When you're in a good conversation, like this conversation we're having right now, without us realizing it, our bodies start to match each other. So you and I are breathing at it's basically the same rate.

28:56Our heart rates are matching each other. Actually, even the dilation of our pupils is starting to mirror each other. And more importantly, if I could see inside both of our brains, what I would see is our thoughts are becoming more and more similar. Literally, we're using the same parts of our brain with the same type of energy. We're moving through similar neural pathways. And that kind of makes sense that our brains would become similar, because if you think about it, when I tell you about an emotion I'm feeling, you actually experience that emotional a little bit, right? Or if I tell you about an idea, you experience that idea.

29:29So it makes sense that our brains become aligned. But what the neuroscientists that I mentioned earlier have found, and there's a guy named Erie Hassan on a Princeton who's kind of the grandfather of this research, is that the more our brains become aligned, the more we're thinking the same thoughts at the same time, the better we understand each other, the more we feel connected to each other. And most importantly, the more we like the conversation within neuroscience, this is known as neural entrainment. We become nearly entrained. And when we are nearly entrained, it releases this reward sensation, this cascade of neurotransmitters that make us feel good.

30:11And in part, this is adaptive because our brains want us to communicate with the people. They want us to have real conversations. They want us to connect and bond. And so when we feel good, even if we disagree with each other, we still feel good about the conversation. We still feel like the conversation was a success. Now, the thing is, these three types of conversations that I mentioned, they use different parts of our brains. Right? So when I'm talking to my wife and I'm in an emotional mindset, I'm using the basil ganglia, the interior structures of my brain. And when she responds by giving me some practical advice, she's having a practical conversation, she's using her prefrontal cortex.

30:50So it's very hard for our thoughts to become similar if she's using the front of her brain and I'm using the interior of my brain. That's why matching each other is so powerful is because literally what I'm doing when I ask you, oh, what did it feel like to watch your kid walk across that stage? Accreduation. What I'm doing at that moment is I'm activating the same part of my brain that I know is active in your brain. And it's going to make it so much easier for us to become nearly aligned. And then once we're aligned, we can move from emotional to practical to social and back to emotional all together and will understand each other so much better the entire time.

31:26Was this what the Dartmouth study was looking at and that's something to do with a guitarist as well? Yeah, there's a ton there's a ton of studies that have looked exactly at this right like like you mentioned the Dartmouth study they would have people watch these confusing movie clips together and and then they would actually turn off the sound and they were oftentimes foreign movies So the people were actually not even speaking English and there was no subtitles and they would have people just watch watch these movies These movie clips they were super confusing and they put them in groups to try and have them answer these A bunch of questions like what's going on in that scene X and Y and Z the group has to come to again and Satsas And what they found is that some of the groups What became to a consensus faster and easier than others and when they put them in MRIs and they showed them The clips again.

32:19What they found was that those groups that came to consensus really, really quickly, and not quickly, but easily, fully came to consensus. Their brains all looked like each other after they had had this conversation. The first time they were watching the movie in the MRI, their brains all looked different, but the conversation somehow got their brains to look similar to remember and watch these scenes as if they were all sharing kind of the same perspective. And so they're trying to figure out why this has happened in some groups and it doesn't happen in other groups and both civilers, severs is the name of the researcher who did this research.

32:52And what he found is that in the groups that came to consensus, in the groups that became nearly aligned, there was at least one person who was a super communicator. There was someone who like would just ask a lot more questions than the average person. And again, a lot of the questions were like, oh, like what did you, what'd you think of that scene? Or like, you know, oh, what'd you think of what happened next? So there are just questions that invite us into the conversation. They would also do things like repeat what other people said a lot more often. You know Jim, Jim, you had a really interesting thought.

33:23You mentioned that you thought that this one scene was about death, right? They're proving that they're listening. And in that group, people begin modeling themselves after that behavior. So other people start saying it's so prosocial that it sets the tone everyone else wants to follow. one super communicator in a group can cause everyone else to become nearly entrained. And when they're nearly entrained, they hear each other so much better. They like each other so much better. And that doesn't like, they had people in these rooms who like were like conservatives and liberals and people who are from the south and from the north.

33:59Like these weren't people who necessarily like all naturally would have been friends, but just putting that super communicator in the room, having them model those behaviors, It made everyone else feel like that group came together that it clicked. And that's really powerful. Yeah, it's interesting how one correctly positioned person can sort of change the dynamic of a conversation. And I often think about, I often think about, I had this idea recently about why around some people it feels like we have so much to say and around other people, we don't feel that interesting. I'm sure that you'll have read the story about Winston Churchill's mother me too.

34:43Oh, you're going to absolutely love this one. So I wrote about this in my newsletter a couple of weeks ago. So Winston Churchill's mother, I never realized she was kind of a bit of a, how do you say? Like a socialite type thing. Sort of a little like a Hollywood socialite type I think she called Jenny Jerome. So she got to dine with Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone on consecutive nights. So there was the two rivals that were vying the leadership and she got to dine with them on consecutive nights and she said, when I left the dining room after sitting next to Gladstone, I thought that he was the cleverest man in England.

35:20But when I sat next to Disraeli, I left feeling like I was the cleverest woman. And it sort of perfectly explains why around some people it feels like we have lots to say and around other people it feels like we're boring. And I realized a lot of the time what people want, they want to be charismatic, you know, Gen Z even had to recreate it as Riz because charisma was too sort of boomering and uncool. And everybody wants Riz. But when you actually think about, okay, so how do you become charismatic, which is sort of energetic outgoing, going X -roverted likability with sexiness, I guess? It's really hard.

36:01How do you make an uncharismatic person, more charismatic? It's really difficult, but reverse charisma, which is not trying to be interested, interesting to other people, but trying to make them feel interesting around you, that's way easier, that's significantly easier to do. It's way easier. And there's this quote that I'm sure you've heard from my angelou that no one remembers what you said. They only remember how you made them feel. And it turns out that actually the science tells us that's right. Like if you think back to a great conversation you had in the last week, and I would ask you to tell me what people talked about, you could probably come up with like two or three topics that came up, and you will remember nothing specific about what anyone said.

36:45Right? Like when we're in a conversation, it's not like we're transcribing it. We're not paying attention to the words. What we are paying attention to now if I asked you how you felt during that conversation, you'd actually be able to tell me with like surprising accuracy how you felt at different periods in the conversation. And you'd certainly remember how you felt at the end of it. That's what we tend to remember. This episode is brought to you by Jim Shark. Jim Shark makes the best gymware on the planet. Their hybrid shorts in Onyx Gray and Navy are a complete game -changer that the best men's training shorts in the world.

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37:48Right now you can get 10 % of everything from Jim Shark sight wide by going to the link in the description below or heading to gym .sh slash modern wisdom using the code modern wisdom 10 a check out that gym .sh slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom 10 a check out. Yeah, I mean Adam Masteryani has this great insight around Everything is just vibes basically, which is the same the same sort of realization you've come to you know He's a guy who I think is still in academia He did post grad you PhD did all of this stuff and I think maybe he did his undergrad 15 years ago something like that and he was on the quiz team the quick quiz.

38:27Oh really? I know that I know Adam. I didn't know that he was on the apparently yeah, and And he tested himself to just remember the names of the classes that he took in his first year of undergrad, just the names of the classes. And I think he got 40 % of the names of the class. Right. There's no way I would get 40 % of that. I might get one of those right. Yeah, exactly. And, but he said he can remember how one of the particular lecturers made him feel when when he explained about some of the different, I think he threw a packet of multises into the lecture audience and someone caught them and then he talked about prediction and prediction errors and then he talked about disobedience and obedience when the guy threw them back when he asked.

39:16And he couldn't remember the name of the class, but he could remember the way that he felt. So one of the area, we've sort of talked about the deep conversations, something which a lot of people, have a mortal fear over is small talk. You know, the sort of awkward elevator, the water cooler thing, the sat waiting for whatever. How can people bet to survive small talk? So this gets to this deep questions again. So I give a lot of speeches, right? I give speeches about, and it's usually like a room of, say, you know, a thousand or 5 ,000 people who are like in a trade show. And so when I'm talking about super communicators, I always start up the same way.

39:55I say, in 30 minutes, I'm gonna ask you to turn to the person next to you and ask and answer one question. And that question is, when is the last time you cried in front of another person? And then I ask, who's excited about this? And literally no hands go up, right? Nobody wants to do this. They just came to some conference. They're at Vegas and now here this guy guy on a stage is telling them, I'm gonna force you to like have a conversation, have a therapy session with a stranger who's sitting next to you, right? right? Nobody likes this idea. And then I spend the next 30 minutes explaining why this is going to be what we know about deep questions, what we know about neural entrainment.

40:31And then we do the experiment. And I ask people, and this is based on some work that Nick Eppley, a professor at the University of Chicago, has done because he's done this experiment thousands of times. And I ask people to estimate how much they think they're going to enjoy this conversation that they're about to have, right? How awkward they think it'll be, whether that they're gonna feel close to the other person. And when Nick does this, he actually has them take a poll on a phone and what he finds is that people say before they have this conversation, this is gonna be super awkward, right?

41:01Like, this is not, I'm not, they actually say that they might enjoy it a little bit because like if you're sitting next to your boss, everyone doesn't mind hearing how their boss cried last time. So there's a little bit of criticism. But it's not a huge amount of enjoyment they anticipate. And most importantly, they do not think they will feel closer to the person afterwards. They think they think they will feel even more distant from them because it's just weird to talk about crying with this stranger So then and I do this from the stage We do it you turn to the person next to you spend two minutes asking and answering the question Then you switch places spend another two minutes the room like fills with this cacophony of noise and Then finally if I can get people to shut up for fast enough I Ask them what that experience was like I asked them for a show of hands how many people enjoyed that experience much more than you thought you would.

41:52Every single hand will go up. Because people are bad at estimating what a real conversation is going to feel like. So this gets to small talk. The problem with small talk is not small talk. The problem with small talk is the anxiety we feel when we go into it and the anxiety we feel about asking a deep question. And yet, again and again and again, if we ask that deep question, we will discover the other person loves to answer it. They want to hear us answer our own question and we will walk away having enjoyed that conversation. Well, I'm aware that a lot of people get worried about that level of opening up.

42:38I don't be seen as sort of too keen or too serious. That doesn't seem very fun. It doesn't seem very exciting. But as a to you know fight the fight as a person that likes deep conversations, who likes small talk? No, right. No one. No one likes small talk regardless of what it is. And it's people are very publicly castigating at small talk as well. Say that you know, it's the worst thing in the world. I'm talking about the weather. You know, somebody brings up the weather and he's like, can you believe that? That's all I have to talk about is do you think? Okay, so practically. But let's let's take the weather as an example because you're exactly right that nobody likes small talk.

43:16But you don't have to ask that. If someone brings up the weather, you don't have to ask them the last time they cried in front of another person. You can say something like, you know, oh, yeah, it's really been rainy and you mentioned like, you don't like the rain. So I'm wondering like, what got you to move to Seattle? Like, why'd you move here since it's kind of a rainy place? like what was it about the city that you like? And suddenly, that's an easy question to ask, right? That doesn't seem like a deep question, but it actually is. Because inevitably that person is gonna say something like, oh, I fell in love with someone and I moved here to follow them.

43:46Or I got this job opportunity and it just seemed so great, but then it didn't work out. And now I'm working someplace else. Small talk is kind of what we talk, what we, the word we used to describe, boring talk. But you can transition almost immediately to something that's real and meaningful. How can people better start deep conversations in a less awkward way and how can people better receive deep questions in a less awkward way? Yeah, it's a great question. So this guy Nick Eppley I mentioned, who basically he studies deep questions. Once a month, he'll get on a bus in Chicago and he'll sit down next to a stranger and his goal is to ask that person about their hopes and dreams within three questions.

44:33And when he told me this, I was like, oh, this sounds miserable, man. This sounds like, like, I don't want to do this. This sounds terrible. And he was like, no, no, no, it's the easiest thing I've ever done because it usually only takes two questions. Like usually I sit down, I introduce myself, and I'm like, hey, what do you do for a living? And they say, oh, I'm an accountant. And he goes, oh, did you always want to be an accountant? Was that your dream as a kid? And they say, no, no kid wants to be an accountant. I really want it to be an astronaut. But now suddenly he's like, oh, so what happened?

44:59Like, did you, did you try and become an astronaut? Now, now they're actually having a conversation, right? They're talking about like, oh, I had kids and I had to raise them and Nick can say, like, I have kids too. You know, I have five kids actually. And I know it's, there's these challenges to raising kids. Now you're having a real conversation. So I think the way to start it and to respond is to ask something that you're actually curious about. When I ask you, where do you live? basic small talk question. I do not care where you live. It is not something I'm actually interested in. Maybe it is, right?

45:33You live in Austin and I want to learn a little bit about Austin. But if I'm asking you something that's genuinely interesting to me, like, why did you decide to move from the UK to the US? What was it about that? That's actually really fascinating to me. That's something that could seem like a small talk throw away question. But if I'm actually curious about it and I ask it with curiosity, we're going to be having a deep conversation within minutes. You mentioned astronauts. Didn't you look at NASA? Yeah. You learned a lot of stuff from NASA? What'd you learn? Yeah, so this is one of my favorite stories from the book.

46:08So about 15 or 15 years ago, NASA started developing plans to build the International Space Station. And they realized that in addition to all the technical plans that came up with, There was actually this big problem that they needed to solve, which is up until then about the longest NASA mission had been about 10 days in space. And they had basically realized you can send like the biggest jerk on Earth up into space for 10 days and it's going to be fine, right? Like they're going to pick fights with their co -astronauts, they're going to pick fights with mission control, they're just going to be like a pain in the ass, but it's fine, it's only 10 days.

46:45But the thing about a space station is you're sending astronauts up there for three months or six months or 12 months at a time And if you send a jerk into space for 12 months, he's gonna drive everyone else crazy So NASA realizes we need to start choosing astronauts finding astronauts who have emotional intelligence This is actually a lot harder than it sounds though because the problem for NASA is when you make it to the final rounds of an an astronaut interview, you are awesome, right? You're like your handsome or your beautiful, you have like two PhDs, and most importantly, you've been doing interviews your entire life.

47:20Like you know the right answers to every question. And what they realized is they couldn't tell the difference between the people who are faking emotional intelligence from the ones who actually had it. So they turned to this guy, Terry McGuire, the lead psychiatrist from Antsface Flight at NASA. And they asked him to come up with an interview question that will let them figure out who actually has emotional intelligence. And for nine months, he works on this problem and he can't come up with anything. He tests a bunch of questions, none of them work. And then one night he's listening to recordings of old interviews with old candidates and he knows which of those candidates went on to be really good leaders inside NASA and which kind of like washed out.

47:58And as he's listening, he realizes the really good leaders, they're laughing differently than everyone else in the interview. So he comes up with this whole new way of doing his interviews. Now what he does is he brings the astronaut candidate into a room. They're sitting there by themselves. He walks into the room and he's holding his big stack of papers and he trips as if on accident and he spills the papers all over the floor. And then he laughs his big boisterous laugh. He goes like, I cannot believe I did that. And then he pays attention to how the candidate reacts. Because everyone reacts in one of two ways.

48:37Some people go like this. That's really silly. Let me give you a hand. And some people go, that's really silly. Let me give you a hand.

48:50Everyone knows it's going on in that moment, right? You made a mistake by dropping the papers, and then you made the mistake even worse, by overreacting, by laughing this huge kind of like inappropriately big laugh. like we've all been embarrassed that way. And some of the candidates were like, oh, I'm just gonna pretend this didn't happen. I'm gonna just help you put this under the carpet. And some of the candidates were like, you know what, I know what you're feeling right now. Like I know that you're embarrassed. And the best way I can remove that embarrassment is I can jump in the boat with you.

49:22So I'm gonna laugh this big, boisterous laugh. I'm gonna match you. I'm gonna mirror your energy and your affect. those were the people who had emotional intelligence and those went on to be some of the best leaders in NASA's history. And it's all just paying attention how they laugh in an interview that makes a difference. Why do humans laugh? Did you look at this? What is it? It's really interesting. There's a guy named I'm, Provin, Robert Provin, who's now passed away. He was at the University of Maryland. He actually studied laughter for years. He would go like to malls and restaurants and hide tape recorders so he could take people talking to each other.

49:57And what he found is that about his initial thought was like we laugh when we see something funny. And he actually wanted to figure out what the science of funny was, but what he discovered was totally unexpected. He discovered that 80 % of the time when we laugh, it is not in response to anything humorous. Right? Like, you're not a comedian. I'm not a comedian. Our friends are comedians. Like, and yet we laugh all the time. So what's happening when we laugh? When we laugh, We're oftentimes showing the other person I want to connect with you. And when they laugh back, that same reciprocity that I mentioned before, and it's because it's a little bit vulnerable, right?

50:35Like if I laugh, I'm kind of saying like, I think that's funny. And you could be like, oh my God, you're such a jerk for thinking that's funny, right? So I'm showing you a little bit of vulnerability. When you laugh back, the most normal reaction, you're showing me that you want to connect right back. Laughter is how we forge connections with other people. The fact that we also do it in response to something funny is actually almost a byproduct. It's not the main function of laughter. Yeah, that's interesting. I don't know. It's just what an odd sound that emanates from us. I suppose that also explains why watching a recording of a stand -up set on Netflix in your house on your own versus going to a comedy club surrounded by 150 other people, the level of laughter is way different.

51:24That's exactly right. Well, and there's actually some, so I don't think someone told me this theory and my understanding is it hasn't been proved out, but that there's some research behind it. Oh, my favorite place for theory to say. Exactly. As yet ungroup, and it may be to be replication crisis, doubt of existence. So if there's, if you're looking at a group of primates, there's a noise that they will make that means that there's like lion or a danger nearby, and that noise sounds like laughter. And so the theory is that laughter evolved because it's inherently prosocial, it's a noise that I make to warn others of danger.

52:04And most importantly, there's a huge sense of relief associated with it because when I know that there's a danger out in the woods and I'm up in the trees, then suddenly I actually feel a sense of relief because I'm not in danger. And so the theory is that this is why that weird noise has evolved, is it actually has these roots in this very pro -social behavior, which would also help us make sense that like oftentimes a joke is about building up tension and then saying something funny to relieve the tension. That's interesting. This episode is brought to you by AG1. Over the span of about a year, I tried pretty much every green string that I could to see which one was best, and I came across AG1 and I've stuck with it for over three years because it's the best.

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53:23And if you're still unsure, they've got a 90 day money back guarantee, so you can buy it and try it every single day for three months, and if you don't like it, they'll give you your money back. You can get a year's free supply of vitamin D3K2 and 5 free AG1 travel packs by going to the link in the description below or heading to drink AG1 .com slash modern wisdom. That's drink AG1 .com slash modern wisdom. What about when it comes to couples? Potentially the most fraught most important Communication with the genesis of your story as well. Yeah, no, absolutely best and worst ways that couples communicate So there's a lot of, in the book, there's actually a whole chapter about the story that involves the growth of marriage therapy as a field of research.

54:14And one of the things that marriage therapists have found is that there's this one pattern that's basically disastrous. They call it kitchen syncing. So every couple fights, that's just totally, that's part of every relationship. Yeah, right. There's always like little like, yeah, disagree, and answer tension. But when some couples fight, a fight about one thing becomes a fight about everything. Right? So we start talking about like, where are we going to spend Christmas? And like within minutes, it's like, well, your mom hates me because like, and she's not nice. And by the way, if we earned more money, we'd be able to go to Hawaii instead of, right?

54:50So a fight about one thing becomes a fight about everything, kitchen sinking. That is disastrous. That will make the fight toxic. And so researchers were trying to figure out why does this happen? Because it happens pretty consistently, even until couples that are well matched. And they found that what happens is that when we're in a conflict, when I feel threatened, I want to control something. Like that's just a normal response to find something to control. And the easiest thing for me to control is you, like the person I'm talking to. So I'm going to do things like I'm going to attack you back.

55:23I'm going to bring up your mom. I'm going to say things like I'm not going to talk about that. I'm going to try and control what topics are allowed. If you're upset, I'll say things like you shouldn't be upset about that. Like that's a dumb thing to be upset about. I'm going to try and control your emotions. That's toxic. That's where kitchen syncing comes from. So what's the solution? Well, the solution is not to say you shouldn't try and control something because everyone feels that impulse for control. That's very human. But instead of trying to control the other person in the relationship, try and find things you can control together, like controlling, for instance, the environment.

55:59You start fighting at 11 o 'clock at night. If one person says, look, I really want to talk about this. Can we wait until nine tomorrow morning when we both wake up and we're not exhausted? Is that okay? Like now we're controlling the environment together. Or to say like, well, I want to control the boundaries of this conversation, to say like, let's talk about Christmas, let's not talk about moms, let's not talk about money if that's okay. Like, let's just focus on making a decision about Christmas. Now we're on the same side of the table. We're controlling the boundaries of this conversation together.

56:30And the reason why this is really important, white, white, the best couples, the best couples, it's not that they don't fight. It's that they fight and there's no lasting consequences of it. because they're basically sort of teammates finding things to control together, even if they disagree with each other. And the reason why does that sense of team mates come from? Well, because if you and I are controlling the environment together, we're on the same side of the table, right? Like we might disagree about like, you know, how we should raise our kids, but we've both decided like we're gonna wait till nine o 'clock in the morning, we're gonna do this together.

57:05We're just gonna talk about whether like Jimmy's allowed to eat like snacks after three o 'clock. We're not going to talk about like how you were raised and spanking and excellent. Right? Now suddenly we're kind of partners in figuring out like, what's our goal? What's what are the, how are we going to control this conversation together? And what's our goal in it? Now the reason why I think this is really important is because it turns out the exact same thing happens online with social media. When social media goes bad, when people People start screaming at each other when social media becomes like a cesspool.

57:40It's often times because people are trying to control each other, right? You make some argument. You say, I think guns are great. And I say, you're a moron. You're not even thinking about like all the guns that like kill kids in schools. Like why are you a fascist? Like at that moment what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to control you. I'm trying to force you into a box. I'm trying to force you into the fascist box. I'm trying to force you into you're thinking about second amendment, but you should be thinking about the kids When we try and control each other on social media. It's very very natural It's very natural online because we're not seeing each other face to face It can become toxic, but if we take a step back and we say like look like I actually want to talk about this guns thing like Like let's try and figure out like what aspect of guns are we talking about?

58:30Then an online conversation becomes just as good as any other conversation. In fact, there's all these interesting studies done by someone who, again, at Dartmouth, where he found that even just adding, please and thank you, if one person in a thread says, please and thank you, the tenor of the whole conversation improves. Because please and thank you is a way of me showing you that I want to share control with you. as opposed to I want to control you. Yeah, as opposed to like, I'm powerful and you're a dick. And so like, let me try and control you as much as I can. What do you think online discourse has done to our expectations of communication?

59:13So it's a good, well, let me ask you because you're online a lot. Like what do you, do you feel like, do you feel like the conversations you have online? How do they compare to the conversations that you have offline? I'm pretty good at posting and ghosting, so I'm not maybe the best avatar for someone who sort of gets into maybe the kind of interesting cantankerist style, back and forth conversations that people are thinking of. I certainly know that it's done one thing, which is pretty interesting, which is it's given people a sense of surrealness when the real world doesn't reflect the world that they expected from what they learned online.

59:56For instance, let's say that you are a successful young woman and you have moved up within your industry and have managed to get yourself to a place where you feel pretty sort of competent and well respected and you keep hearing all of these stories online about how women are oppressed and there's rampant misogyny everywhere and you look at your own life and you struggle to see that. And you think, well, actually, to be honest, sort of being a woman's kind of helped me in many ways. I've been given opportunities, so I'm not sure I would have been given if I was a man. But the way that the discourse is put forward online, the type of conversations that rise to the top, the ones that are the most inflammatory, obviously it's edge cases, right?

1:00:38Edge cases are exactly what gets the garner to the most attention. It's never the reliable woman who worked her way up, step by step and didn't encounter any catastrophe along the way. It's the one that had an awful predatory boss who was making them do terrible things in an attempt to try and climb the totem pole. And rightly so, that's newsworthy because it's interesting and scandalous. But you lose the vast majority of the bell curve, like the boring bell curve, and you just get these edge cases. But I think what that leads to, you know, any other highly politicized topic online I mean, you've seen this in surveys, right?

1:01:20When people are asked how many X type of people are shot by police every year, it's like 1 ,000, 1 ,000%, 10 ,000%, 100 ,000 % over estimations, because what is presented online and what is newsworthy, if it bleeds it leads, doesn't necessarily represent. What I think is people believe, like the number of people that get shot versus the number of people that die by cancer or something, and you're like, well, because people are tied by cancer every day, and it's not newsworthy, unless it's some celebrity or whatever. So we have this skewed perspective of how the world's supposed to treat us, how other people are supposed to see us, different social groups, different classes, different genders, different races, different positions within society.

1:02:02And then when we encounter evidence in the real world, which should be the most real thing that we have, that doesn't agree with what the online world told us that we should do we end up in the dissidents massively and you know I realized this when having a conversation with Frey Rindia who's on sub stack that she does a blog called Girls Brilliant and she was saying a lot of the time Gen Z gets sort of criticized for well this the internet isn't the real world and he said these kids are spending eight to ten hours a day online then they may be spending meaning twice as much time on the internet as they are asleep.

1:02:43The internet is the real world. Is real world for them? Yeah. That is the boundaries of your world. And so I think one of the things that's happening there, there's a researcher named JVMBaval at NYU who's kind of looked at this phenomena, particularly on social media. And what he's found is that the problem with social media and the problem with online conversations is that oftentimes they highlight one aspect of identity very, very prominently when in real real life that's one of many identities that someone contains, right? So the thing that we know is that like if I knew that you were Republican, I would assume a bunch of things about you that you must be pro -gun, you must be pro -Trump, you must be anti -immigrant, right?

1:03:28And if you knew I was a Democrat, you would assume a bunch of things about me. I must be pro -trans. I must like think Kamala was the greatest thing on earth. I must like want to just tax everyone to death. Whenever we see someone described by their label, then we tend to maximize what we assume their beliefs are into that label. Now in real life, oftentimes if I met you and I'm like, oh, I'm a Democrat, but we're like at our kids soccer game together and you know that I'm also a journalist and also like I like to do model rocketry and you and I ride bikes together. Right? Like that one identity.

1:04:06I'm a Democrat. right? And there's so many other identities around it because all of us contain multitudes that it doesn't shape what you assume about me. Whereas when we are on Twitter and we go to our little thing, our little description in Twitter, it's like, proud to be part of the resistance. You're like, January 6 was the best day ever. Like, we're actually just giving into one identity. We're giving into one label and it makes that conversation harder. Now, you asked, though, what's happening to our conversations as a result of this, right? With Gen Z, spending all this time online, the internet is their real world.

1:04:43So what I would say is this, there's actually a lot of room for hope. And the reason why is this story from about 100 years ago. So when telephones first became popular around the world, but also particularly here in the US, when phones first became popular, there were all these articles that appeared that said, No one will ever have a real conversation on the telephone. Because up till then, every conversation that happened face to face, right? And they were like, nobody will be able to do this on the phone. If you can't see the person and make eye contact with them, if you can't hear all the nuances in their voice, you're never going to have a real conversation.

1:05:20And what's really interesting is if you look at the transcripts from those early phone conversations, they were exactly right. People did not know how to use phones. They used them like telegrams. They would call up and they would say here's what I was like here's a here's what I need on the stock market Or they call up and say here's my grocery order and then the other person would say okay, and then they would both hang up like there was no back and forth There was no give and take Now you fast forward a little bit like when you and I and everyone else listening was in middle school And we could talk on the phone for like seven hours a night, right?

1:05:51Like we loved talking on the phone And so and there were some of the most important conversations of our life at that point And so what happened, what changed, what changed was we learned how to use telephones. And we learned how to use that technology. And what's interesting is when you are on the phone, you actually talk differently. All of us do. You will over -enunciate your words by about 30 % on the phone. You'll put about 15 % more emotion into your voice than if you're talking to someone face -to -face. because you know subconsciously that they can't see you. You need to, you need to signal.

1:06:26So you actually learned a bunch of skills for phone conversations. Right now we are living through a period of people learning skills for online conversations. And like we're like those, we're like that first 15 years after phones came out and we came popular, right? Like it's a lot of screaming, it's a lot of like, a lot of mistakes, but it's from those mistakes that we learn. and Gen Z, these I have two teenagers at home, I'm a dad. Both my teenagers, they know how to have real conversations over text. I don't know how to do that. They have emotional conversations with emojis. We don't need to despair for the future because we learn how to be good at communication, be good communicators, our brains crave being good communicators, and they teach us how to do it.

1:07:20Dude, awesome. Let's bring this one into land. What a great place to finish. I love it. I've been very much thinking about communication over the last few years. And I think an interesting element is how closely tied it is to our sense of self. That what maybe some people have got in the back of their mind is, well, you know, it's all well and good. You're saying that I can work on my communication and I can build up these skills. But I don't want to be fake. I want to be me and it's so funny how nobody attributes their natural God -given pickleball ability to them. And if I was to say, well, you haven't got a coach, didn't you?

1:07:56And you improved your dink game and you improved your surf. But did you not want to have, you know, you're real, were you not worried about your real surf coming out? What about that? You lost it. You're inner pickleballer. Right. You've repressed them, right? You've ruined it. Yeah, exactly. I started working with a speech therapist about three, four years ago, a diction coach. And one of the things that a bunch of friends said to me was, dude, I mean, you gotta be careful. What if you totally lose all of the character? But nobody says that about, well, you know, you're 270 pounds and you know, 28 % body fat.

1:08:29And you go, well, what about all of that beautiful fat that you've spent all of this time building up? You're gonna put a replace it with this muscle, really? Is that the real you? Is that muscle really you? And it's just odd, you know, and when you see it, you can't see it, there's certain things that we have that are very tightly tied to our sense of self, right? Up for patterns, the texture of our mind, the way that we speak, the language that we use, the way that we enunciate. And there's other things that aren't, like our waistline. And when you confuse the two, when you confuse, I mean, you get into some pretty hot water.

1:09:01You stop learning, right? You stop improving yourself because you assume that something is inherent or God -given or inborn or immutable. in the truth of the matter is all of it's just skills. Can I ask you a question actually? Hey, on that. So, I mean, what's interesting about, so you moved here from the UK, right? You moved to the UK to the US. Where you still clearly, still clearly a Brit, like I doubt anyone bumps into you and they're like, oh, that guy grew up in Austin. Yeah, Australia, I got accused of a lot, but yeah. Okay, okay. So do you feel like, how you communicate? Has it had to change since you moved to the US?

1:09:41A little bit because... Well, the cultural way markers that you rely on, it's interesting being an immigrant, which I am, to a country that speaks the same language as you, because you forget that you're an immigrant. If I was in Mexico or Thailand, I would be permanently reminded of the fact that I'm not from there. People don't look like me, people don't sound like me. But you're snuck under the radar here. And it's odd because you're culturally displaced. You know, if I want to use an example for a chocolate that everybody would have eaten as a kid, I can't really use cadbury's. With cadbury's and British brand.

1:10:19I can't really talk about Yorkshire T or Newcastle Brown ale or the In -Betweeners. So I have to do this weird sort of projection and I have to think, okay, what would Charles, what is the equivalent sort of a ruminative thing that Charles knows that is the parallel of the thing I'm trying to use. So you have to sort of go around the houses quite a lot. There's certain sort of electrical things. We have an interesting difference with plurals versus you guys. So we would say Manchester United are having a bad season this year. Whereas you guys would say Manchester United is having a bad season this year.

1:10:57Trashcan, Sidewalk, you know, did a little bits and pieces like that. But I just sort of, I don't know, it's becoming more natural to me. And yeah, maybe this is what going native is like and I'm going to have a text and twang within the next few years, who knows? Well, and what I love about that about this going native aspect is that like, it's actually like what your brain, what your brain was created to do, right? Was to make it easier and easier and easier for you to communicate. And my guess is if you went back to the UK, you would slip right back into mentioning Cadbury and Depluralizations and if I moved there eventually I would too and I'd start seeing the lift and boot and and it's It's I our brains are amazingly Versatile when it comes to communication and a huge part of it is just giving that the skills that it needs and then thinking about this and and and working on it and being willing to experiment and practice and then we become super communicators.

1:11:58I love it. Dude, so good. Why should people go? Thank you so much. So, I would like to tell you everything that you do and write and talk about. Yeah, absolutely. So, if I have a sub -stack, if people want to come sign up for my newsletter, it's called The Science of Better. You can find a sign up for that on my email or on my website, which is CharlesDuhig .com, D -U -H -I -G -G, or if you just Google the power of habits, which is the first book I wrote or super communicators, you will definitely find my website. And actually, I have my email address on my website. And I will say, I read and respond to every single email I get from a reader.

1:12:33So you may regret that after this episode. We'll see. Sometimes it's a little while. Go full my pretty's and destroy his inbox. But I would love to hear from folks. And if you do want to buy a copy of super communicators, you can find it at Amazon and parts. Nobles and most importantly your local bookstores. So yeah, Charles, I appreciate you. Until next time. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me on.