Finding Connection in a Divided World with 'Super Communicator' Charles Duhigg

0:00Being an entrepreneur is a 24-7 job. And when you're hiring, you need a partner that works as hard as you do. That hiring partner is LinkedIn Jobs. When you clock out, LinkedIn clocks in. LinkedIn makes it easy to post your job for free, share with your network, get qualified candidates that you can manage all in one place. For one thing, you can post a job. LinkedIn's new feature can help you write job descriptions and then quickly get your job in front of the right people. You get qualified candidates. At the end of the day, the most important thing to your business is the quality of the candidates.

0:30And with LinkedIn, of course, you can feel confident that you're getting the best. Based on LinkedIn data, 72 % of small and medium businesses say using LinkedIn helps them find high-quality candidates. Find out why more than 2.5 million small businesses use LinkedIn for hiring today. Find your next great hire on LinkedIn. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash altature. That's linkedin.com slash altature to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. This message comes from Capital One. The Capital One Venture X Business Card has no preset spending limit, so the card's purchasing power can adapt to meet business needs.

1:09Plus, the card earns unlimited double miles on every purchase, so the more a business spends, the more miles earned. And when traveling, the Venture X Business Card grants access to over a thousand airport lounges. The Venture X Business Card. What's in your wallet? Terms and conditions apply. Find out more at CapitalOne.com slash VentureXBusiness. Today on the James Altucher Show. It's my camp versus your camp. It's my side versus your side. I'm right and you're wrong. Regardless of how you feel about his politics or his positions, I think one thing that was admirable about Charlie Kirk was that he engaged in those debates, right?

1:46He invited that dissent and invited that disagreement. He was willing to sort of step into the arena and to grapple with it. Even when you disagree with each other, feeling a connection to each other, right? Feeling like I have heard you, I've listened closely, you have heard me, you've listened closely to me in return. We understand what the other person is trying to get across. That instinct to connect with people is so deeply hardwired into our brains. It is the reason why it is homo sapiens superpowers, our ability to communicate and connect. It is what has made us the dominant species. and it's so hardwired into our brain that all you need is like a glimmer of it to entice and encourage the other person to connect with you.

2:29There's this phrase I love called when you're feeling furious, get curious. This isn't your average business podcast and he's not your average host. This is the James Altucher Show.

2:50I am obviously really concerned about just the level of discourse in this country. It's almost a cliche to be concerned about it at this point. But particularly since the Charlie Kirk assassination, there's been so much division, division, division. I watched the video, probably I shouldn't have. It really had, watching anybody get killed is going to have an emotional effect on you. I didn't realize what was going to happen in that video before I saw it. And then I was invited to speak at the Oxford Union, which is this society at Oxford started in 1823. It's the most prestigious debate society on the planet.

3:32There's presidents, kings, Nobel Prize winners have all been invited. And for some reason, I was invited. I honestly have no idea why they invited me and how my name even came up to them. You know, there were some issues I saw that they had debated recently, which I didn't know if I wanted to go. I was confused. And people were telling me, no, no, just say yes, it's so prestigious. And so then all this stuff happened. And I don't like when anybody celebrates any death at all. And it seemed to me that that's what was happening. Regardless of politics, I don't give a shit. but I didn't like the fact that the president of the Oxford Union seemed to be ignoring the fact that a death was involved.

4:17Politically, I don't know where he stands. I don't even know where I stand, as many of you know, at this point. But I decided to say no to that, and I felt... You know that a no is correct when you feel kind of like relief afterwards when you're trying to decide something, and I felt that relief. But in any case, I just get very disturbed. I see every day now my feed on social media is filled with just all this divisiveness. And it's scary to me that people are legitimately hating each other to the point of death. So I invited on Charles Duhigg. He wrote the book, Super Communicators. It also just came out in paperback by coincidence.

4:58I didn't know that. And Charles came on the podcast and I just asked him, how do you communicate with people who are so divisive? Regardless of the issue, regardless of the side of it. And in a short period of time talking to Charles, I learned so much and he made me think about so many things as he often does on this podcast. So here's our discussion.

5:28Charles, I really wanted to bring you on because, look, as we know, you've been on the podcast many times. You wrote a book called Super Communicators about how to communicate better in a world which is basically being torn apart by lack of communication. And right now, because of all these events, I'm thinking in particular, like let's not, you know, try to overanalyze this. Particularly the Charlie Kirk assassination has sent an already divided world into an even more divided world. what is going on from your perspective well I think it was a tinderbox to begin with right and you had someone who was very popular among conservatives and very unpopular among liberals his death is obviously an enormous tragedy there's no justification ever for violence for political violence for assassination it should be condemned regardless of where it originates from or who its target is but I think into that tinderbox was thrown this very tragic killing and and I think that whenever we feel threatened we tend to revert to our most comfortable place which over the last 10 or 15 years has become polarization right it's my camp versus your camp it's my side versus your side I'm right and you're wrong and so we're seeing a lot of that but I think the other thing that's happening right now is that we're seeing two very different conversations happening.

6:58So among conservatives who loved Charlie Kirk and who knew him, this is really an emotional conversation, right? This is a conversation about this tragedy, about his wife and his children, and losing this bright star. Among people who did not like Charlie Kirk, on the other side, this seems more like a practical conversation. They're saying, look, this is the consequence of policies that make guns easy to own. This is the consequence of language that incites us. And so you see these two kind of clashing conversations. Last time we had talked, we talked about the fact that there's what research in neuroscience tells us is that there's three basic kinds of conversations, the emotional, the practical, and the social.

7:39And what we're seeing right now is some people on the right having an emotional conversation and people on the left having a practical conversation. And then wading into this are these kind of chaos entrepreneurs who really like just basically trolling each other. And they're trying to make it a social conversation. And so because people aren't having the same kind of conversation at the same moment, it's very, very hard for us to hear each other. It's very, very hard for us to feel connected to each other. Yeah. I mean, have you seen the, I mean, it's almost gory to ask, but have you seen the video of him being shot?

8:17I've It is really disturbing. I wasn't expecting it. I looked for it on purpose because I didn't believe that, oh, it's probably like how sometimes people are shot at from a distance. They survive. The bullet graze. Kind of like what happened with Trump. I've never seen like it's like a death right in front of you. It's really horrible. And I know probably 100 million people have seen that video, and I think it's almost dramatic then for people to discuss it. Like I just seeing it, you start to cry because it looks so awful. And then when people, let's say you're on the right and you see people literally celebrating it on the left, like there's no, you can't sugarcoat that.

9:00People were dancing around and saying, yay, even like respected people. Like there's some discussion how the president of the Oxford Union Debate Society was celebrating it. And I mean, there was no ifs, ands, or buts. And I should say, I didn't see any of that. I saw a great deal of debate and I didn't look closely. So it might've been out there and I just didn't see it. But I didn't see people celebrating his death as much as saying, you know, I don't think he's as much of a clear cut figure of sympathy as others are portraying. But if you tell me that there were people celebrating it, I'll believe you, I just didn't see that.

9:35By the way, he's not, there's lots of ways anybody would disagree with him. He had opinions that were where he had thought them out, but they're extreme. Like, you know, you're more likely to have his opinion if you're a religious, conservative, very religious, very conservative citizen, which, you know, tens of millions of people are, but tens of millions aren't. Regardless of how you feel about his politics or his positions, I think one thing that was admirable about Charlie Kirk was that he engaged in those debates, right? He invited that dissent, invited that disagreement. He was willing to sort of step into the arena and to grapple with it.

10:15And I never saw him... Sorry to interrupt. I'm not being a good communicator, but it just occurred to me, it's almost as if he's read your book, Super Communicators, because he would do a lot of those techniques of mirroring and looping and so on. He would try to keep the temperature levels really low when very angry people will get up at the mic and debate him. I think that's right. I think that he always had a policy of engagement, which I think is refreshing. Now, I will say, he is someone who sought out debates rather than agreements, right? As far as I know, and again, I'm not really a student of Charlie Kirk studying his statements, but my impression is that he's someone who sought out debate.

10:58And the goal oftentimes wasn't necessarily to come to a reconciliation as much as to air each side's thoughts in contrast to each other. And that is something that super communicators do really, really well. Another thing that's important to super communicators, which I don't know if it was important to him, it might've been, it might not have been, is that even when you disagree with each other, feeling a connection to each other, right? Feeling like I have heard you, I've listened closely, you have heard me, you've listened closely to me in return. We understand what the other person is trying to get across and we can actually say it back to them even better than they could say it to us in the first place.

11:37That's an important aspect because it gets to what the heart of communication is. We think of communication as an information transmission device, but the sharing of information is actually just a byproduct of communication, of how our brains have evolved to communicate. The goal of communication is to make us feel connected to each other because as pro-social beings and as a pro-social species, feeling connected to each other has helped us survive. And so it's great when we can have an intellectual conversation or even an emotional conversation. I can learn from you, you can learn from me. But what's really the mark of a success is do we feel at least a little bit more connected to each other?

12:15And I think that Charlie Kirk did that even with people whom he disagreed with and who disagreed with him. Because he was willing to engage with them, they felt a sense of kinship even if they disagreed on issues.

12:31Take a quick break. If you like this episode, I'd really, really appreciate it. It means so much to me. Please share it with your friends and subscribe to the podcast. Email me at Alcantara at gmail.com and tell me why you subscribed. Thanks.

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15:24Being an entrepreneur is a 24-7 job. And when you're hiring, you need a partner that works as hard as you do. That hiring partner is LinkedIn Jobs. When you clock out, LinkedIn clocks in. LinkedIn makes it easy to post your job for free, share with your network, get qualified candidates that you can manage all in one place. For one thing, you can post a job. LinkedIn's new feature can help you write job descriptions and then quickly get your job in front of the right people. You get qualified candidates. At the end of the day, the most important thing to your business is the quality of the candidates.

15:56And with LinkedIn, of course, you can feel confident that you're getting the best. Based on LinkedIn data, 72 % of small and medium businesses say using LinkedIn helps them find high quality candidates. Find out why more than 2.5 million small businesses use LinkedIn for hiring today. Find your next great hire on LinkedIn. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash altature. That's linkedin.com slash altature to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply.

16:30Being an entrepreneur is a 24-7 job. And when you're hiring, you need a partner that works as hard as you do. That hiring partner is LinkedIn Jobs. When you clock out, LinkedIn clocks in. LinkedIn makes it easy to post your job for free, share with your network, get qualified candidates that you can manage all in one place. For one thing, you can post a job. LinkedIn's new feature can help you write job descriptions and then quickly get your job in front of the right people. You get qualified candidates. at the end of the day, the most important thing to your business is the quality of the candidates.

17:01And with LinkedIn, of course, you can feel confident that you're getting the best. Based on LinkedIn data, 72 % of small and medium businesses say using LinkedIn helps them find high quality candidates. Find out why more than 2.5 million small businesses use LinkedIn for hiring today. Find your next great hire on LinkedIn. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash altature. That's linkedin.com slash altature to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. And so do you think in order for this to work, both sides have to be willing to play the role of, hey, I want to connect? Yeah, I mean, I think yes.

17:45I think if somebody genuinely doesn't want to connect, right, if they're like, look, I just want to yell at you and I want you to stand there and mutely take it, then you're probably not going to have a lot of luck connecting with them, right? But I do think that we all have this instinct to connect. I mean, the truth of the matter is that when you're in an argument with someone and you just take a moment and you say, look, I totally hear what you're saying, but I want to let you know how this issue makes me feel because it makes me feel scared or it makes me feel worried or it makes me feel unhappy.

18:18That when we do that, oftentimes the other person does connect with us a little bit. And they say, look, I don't want you to feel scared. I mean, I disagree with this. I think that everyone should have a gun and you think that guns should be illegal. We disagree on how to preserve our safety, but we both want safety. We want safety for our kids. That instinct to connect with people is so deeply hardwired into our brains. It is the reason why, it is Homo sapiens superpowers, our ability to communicate and connect. It is what has made us the dominant species. And it's so hardwired into our brain that all you need is like a glimmer of it to entice and encourage the other person to connect with you.

18:58And that doesn't mean that you're best friends. It doesn't mean that you agree with each other. It doesn't mean you're going to cry on each other's shoulders. But it does mean that you feel some kinship as two humans trying to make their way through the world. Let me ask you to, just as like for me to see and understand, let me ask you to steel man both sides. And I'll pick a specific situation. So in Congress, the day after or the day of, I don't even know, the Charlie Kirk's assassination, one congressman, I think she was Republican, asked for a moment of silence or a moment of prayer. And I guess the Democrats didn't want that and the Republicans did want that.

19:39So there was actually like a shouting match. Clearly the congressmen have not read your books. Yeah. I think what happened there is that someone called for a moment of prayer. And then again, I might be wrong on this, but if I remember correctly, a Republican asked for a prayer to be read out loud or something to be read out loud in addition to the moment of silence. And then there was an objection because that hadn't been done for previous victims of gun violence who had received a moment of silence on the floor. Regardless, it's a dumb debate, right? Like it's clearly people who don't actually care about this issue as much as they care about sort of the theater of making a point.

20:18And I think you're right. Look, in Congress, there aren't a lot of people who want to connect with each other. The truth of the matter is, this is hardwired into our brain. But the U.S. Congress has managed to find a lot of the people who have been able to undo that hardwiring in a very visceral way. And that's scary, because I feel like Congress been, okay, there's been periods of history where it's been more heated than other periods of history. But I feel like in general, throughout my life, Congress in general got along with each other. Democrats and Republicans got along with each other. And now they don't at all.

20:51Yeah, Democrats and Republicans. And I think there's a lot of reaching across the aisle. I think there's a lot of reasons for this. Also, I don't think it's universal, right? I think that there are, I talk to a lot of people in Congress and a lot of them say, I do want to work with my colleagues. I do work with my colleagues. We got stuff done together. But then we have these performers who have really gotten these big stages. It's certainly not limited to one party. What's happening now is that you get more rewarded for it than you used to in the past. It used to be that people really wanted Congress to do their job.

21:21They really wanted them to get together, and they really wanted them to pass good laws. Now, because of gerrymandering, the primary is oftentimes more important than the general election, because of the rise of a media sphere that rewards extreme behavior rather than good policymaking, because of the rise of social media, we see that now it's much more rewarding to have an enemy than to make a friend. And most of us avoid that, but some people don't. And so if you were to steal man both sides, so you're a congressman talking to a congressman, you're AOC talking to Marjorie Taylor Greene or Marjorie Taylor Greene talking to AOC, how would you discuss this?

22:01Because, and I bring this up, not that this is such a weird example, but this is the example. It's neighbor versus neighbor right now on the streets talking about these issues. Well, I don't think it's quite that bad on the streets, to be honest with you. I don't know. I have family who live in conservative states and I don't see them going to war with the liberals living nearby. But I would say, so the first thing I would say is that AOC and Merger Taylor Greene should probably not have that conversation. I don't think either of them really want to connect with the other side. Let's say we have Congressman X and Congressman Y and they come from different states and one's a Republican and one's a Democrat.

22:37How do we sit down together? I mean, this happens all the time. Like literally this is what Congress does. And if you talk to Congress people about how they actually spend their time, What they'll say is, I spend most of my time in Congress trying to understand what's important to the people whom I have to work with because I need them to support me. And they want to know what's important to me because I have to support them, right? There is a system that is built into our politics that you have to work with people who disagree with you. And that doesn't mean reaching across the aisle. Oftentimes, you have Democrats who don't agree with other Democrats and Republicans who don't agree with other Republicans.

23:14That disagreement is at the heart of why we thought the American experiment was worth pursuing. That if you brought people together from different perspectives and they came to a consensus, that consensus would probably be better than any of the answers they came up with on their own and apart from each other. And so I think that the first thing that would happen is that people should ask each other, what matters to you, right? In the book, in Super Communicators, we talk about deep questions. that many of the questions we ask are what are known as surface questions, but that there's much more powerful questions that are known within psychology as deep questions.

23:51And a deep question is something that asks about our values or our beliefs or our experiences. And that can sound intimidating, but an example of that is if you meet someone who's a doctor, instead of saying, oh, what hospital do you work at? Which would be a surface question. Asking, oh, why'd you decide to go to medical school? Which is a deep question, right? It's an invitation to the other person to tell us who they really are, to tell us about their values and their beliefs, their experiences. And so I would say, when Congress people sit down with each other, when it's not firebrands who are just trying to get attention, oftentimes they start the conversation by saying, you know, why did, getting elected to Congress is really hard.

24:31It's a major sacrifice. What was it about this that was important to you? What is it that you want to get done while you're here? That's a deep question. It asks someone why they're here, who they are, what they care about. And if I know what you care about and I can share with you what I care about, we might care about different things, but there's probably some aspects of those things that we have in common. And moreover, if I know what you care about and you know what I care about, then we can figure out how to come to a compromise and give you what you need and give me what I need. Yeah, so that's good.