Harvard’s Behaviour Expert: The Psychology Of Why People Don't Like You!

Why do your conversations keep going wrong? Harvard behavioural scientist Professor Alison Wood Brooks reveals the SECRETS to better communication, real connection, negotiation skills and difficult conversations! Professor Alison Wood Brooks is a behavioural scientist with 2 decades of experience in conversational science. She teaches a Harvard course on negotiation and communication, and is the bestselling author of ‘Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves’. She explains: ◼️The ONE word that transforms anxiety into peak performance ◼️The TALK framework for mastering any conversation ◼️Why being "too polite" is secretly destroying your relationships ◼️Why 99% of apologies fail, and the exact formula that works ◼️The question technique that creates connection with anyone (00:00) Intro (02:34) People Need This to Communicate Well (04:38) Giving Wrong Impressions (06:23) Being a Better Speaker and Group Conversations (11:31) Experimenting With Communication Skills With My Identical Twin (12:40) The Science on How to Reframe Anxiety (18:47) If You're Nervous, You're More Likely to Make a Bad Decision (20:16) Asking for a Salary Raise (24:39) The Conversational Compass (32:45) How People Should Really Apologize and When It's Too Much (37:31) The Validation Trick in Any Dispute (42:00) Don't Do This When You Disagree (46:19) Stop Doing This During Disagreements (48:07) How to Be Liked (50:02) The T-A-L-K Framework (51:47) Easy Ways to Have More Casual Conversations (55:13) If You Want to Be Liked, Don't Do This (59:23) The Importance of Asking in Conversations and Dates (01:03:27) Never Do This on a Date (01:07:26) The Meeting Mistake You Shouldn't Make (01:09:27) Poor Communication Skills May Be Blocking Your Career Growth (01:12:02) Ads (01:12:53) The Importance of Kindness in Any Conversation (01:17:20) When to Incorporate Levity (01:23:55) The Science Behind Introverts and Extroverts — Is It Real? (01:27:17) Your Contribution Score in a Conversation (01:41:59) Ads (01:43:56) The Male Crisis: Ask These Questions to Make Friends (01:52:57) 10 Questions to Be Liked (01:56:42) How to Persuade People and Be a Better Salesperson (01:58:47) People Confuse Agreement With Listening (02:09:21) This Is the Only Conversation That Feels Real (02:14:58) What Happens When Replacing Myself With AI (02:19:23) Show Your Real Self at Work: Yes or No? (02:25:14) How to Teach Your Kids to Speak Follow Alison: Instagram - https://bit.ly/3YoQOc4 Website - https://bit.ly/4aH172A TalkStudios - https://bit.ly/3MzbXxF You can purchase Alison’s book, ‘Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves’, here: https://amzn.to/48Nl8Sv The Diary Of A CEO: ◼️Join DOAC circle here - https://doaccircle.com/ ◼️Buy The Diary Of A CEO book here - https://smarturl.it/DOACbook ◼️The 1% Diary is back - limited time only: https://bit.ly/3YFbJbt ◼️The Diary Of A CEO Conversation Cards (Second Edition): https://g2ul0.app.link/f31dsUttKKb ◼️Get email updates - https://bit.ly/diary-of-a-ceo-yt ◼️Follow Steven - https://g2ul0.app.link/gnGqL4IsKKb Sponsors: Wispr - https://wisprflow.ai/DOAC Shopify - https://shopify.com/bartlett SimpliSafe - https://simplisafe.com/DOAC to save 50% on a SimpliSafe home security system. Ketone - https://ketone.com/STEVEN for 30% off your subscription order

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Steven Bartlett?

  People really care about what's making them disliked, and they really want to know how to be liked.

• 0:04Speaker 01

  Okay, so first, this is an exercise that I do in my class at Harvard called 10 Questions to Fall in Like.

• 0:10Steven Bartlett?

  So if I ask someone those questions, they're going to like me.

• 0:11Speaker 01

  It's a great starting point, but let's talk about this because there are going to be little clues about how to be better liked. And it's the most teachable, practical, scientifically rigorous framework in the world for communication. Do you want to hear about it, Stephen?

• 0:25Steven Bartlett?

  Of course I want to hear about it. I want to be the most persuasive, influential, likable talker in the world. So I shall follow your lead.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh.

• 0:33Steven Bartlett?

  It's a lot of power.

• 0:34Speaker 01

  I love it. I love it so much.

• 0:36Speaker 02

  Harvard professor Alison Woodbrooks is a behavioral scientist.

• 0:39Speaker 01

  Who has spent two decades studying conversational science.

• 0:42Speaker 02

  And she's revealing the communication mistakes we all make, the art of negotiation, how to get anyone to like you.

• 0:49Speaker 01

  We all get to adulthood and we feel like conversation should be easy. But as a scientist, when you look under the hood, you realize this is why we have so many awkward moments, why we say things that we shouldn't, why we are boring, why we get angry and hostile. And there's very clear strategies to help us with all of that. Like, one of my biggest findings was how we reframe social anxiety as excitement, which makes you focus on opportunities rather than threats. And that paper ended up being featured in Inside Out, the movie. And then there's small talk.

• 1:16Steven Bartlett?

  I hate small talk.

• 1:16Speaker 01

  I'm going to help you reframe that because it's really important. But the mistake that people make is that they say that way too long and they need to move up this topic pyramid.

• 1:24Steven Bartlett?

  What about in a digital age, do we need to start communicating differently?

• 1:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's clear things that we should do to make our text-based communication better. And we'll go through all of them.

• 1:33Steven Bartlett?

  And you said you'd done an interesting study recently about male friendship.

• 1:36Speaker 01

  Yes, and it's quite troubling.

• 1:39Steven Bartlett?

  So how can I make more friends as a man?

• 1:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, let's talk about that.

• 1:46Steven Bartlett?

  Just give me 30 seconds of your time. Two things I wanted to say. The first thing is a huge thank you for listening and tuning into the show week after week. It means the world to all of us, and this really is a dream that we absolutely never had and couldn't have imagined getting to this place. But secondly, it's a dream where we feel like we're only just getting started. And if you enjoy what we do here, please join the 24% of people that listen to this podcast regularly and follow us on this app. Here's a promise I'm going to make to you. I'm going to do everything in my power to make this show as good as I can now and into the future. We're going to deliver the guests that you want me to speak to, and we're going to continue to keep doing all of the things you love about the show. Thank you.

• 2:34Steven Bartlett?

  Professor Alison Wood-Brooks. What is it that you do? And why do you think it matters so much to the world?

• 2:42Speaker 01

  I am a professor at Harvard and I'm a behavioural scientist. I study how people talk to each other and how they can do it better. I teach a course that I created there called Talk. I wrote a book about it, also called Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves.

• 3:01Steven Bartlett?

  And if someone's chosen to listen to this conversation now, they've just clicked on it, and they're thinking, you know, should I stay or should I go? What promise can we give them if they stay and listen to this conversation? That is based on the work you've done in your book and all the research you've done. What is it that you think the average person can come away with that will have a meaningful impact on their day to day life?

• 3:21Speaker 01

  All of life is about relationships and relationships are about talking. So if they can learn even one strategy that helps them in their conversations, it will massively improve their lives. If you think of everything from work to romantic relationships, friendships, productivity, all of it hinges on having excellent conversations.

• 3:45Steven Bartlett?

  But conversations are easy, right? Like, you just talk.

• 3:49Speaker 01

  We all feel that way. We all get to adulthood and we feel like conversation should be easy because we started learning how to do it when we were one, one and a half years old as toddlers. And we practise doing it with an enormous number of partners, conversation partners, every day of our lives. So by the time we become adults, it feels like we should be experts, like we should be great at it. But as a scientist, when you look under the hood and you see, oh my goodness, all of the complexity that's happening under the hood, you realise, oh, this is why we have so many awkward moments, why we say things that we shouldn't, why we don't say things that we should, why we hurt each other, why we get defensive, why we are boring, why we get angry and hostile.

• 4:33Speaker 01

  And there are very clear strategies to help us with all of that.

• 4:38Steven Bartlett?

  As you were saying that, I was thinking, do you think there's a lot of people that are going through life giving off the wrong impression because they don't know how to talk? Maybe they are disliked, maybe they are misunderstood because they haven't mastered the science of how to have a great conversation.

• 4:53Speaker 01

  On my worst days, I worry that everybody's walking around being misunderstood. When you think about talking, even as I'm talking right now, there's no way to take the entire contents of your mind and all of your personality and say it out loud. And so we're always curating, we're always choosing what, some subset of stuff to share with other people through conversation. And no one is doing that perfectly. And I, and I fear that many people are really struggling with it.

• 5:23Steven Bartlett?

  If you had to pinpoint just a few things that people want when they think about becoming a great conversationalist, like what is it that we actually are aiming at? Is it to be, you know, what is that?

• 5:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, usually people want to be liked, even loved. Usually we want to enjoy our conversations, to not have them be miserable. We want to feel safe and protected and not have it be dreadful and time consuming. And we want to achieve professional goals, so advancing and achieving and making great decisions. So already, the very basic drives of what people are trying to achieve in conversation are actually a little bit more complicated than just like, oh, we're looking for connection. And then when you really dig into it, within all of the goals that people want in those categories, it's like a vast constellation of motives.

• 6:14Steven Bartlett?

  I would like you to teach me how to talk really, really well.

• 6:17Speaker 01

  I don't know if you need my help that much, Stephen, but I'd love to. Even the best communicators have room for improvement.

• 6:23Steven Bartlett?

  No, I think I do. I think I do. Because, you know, I was thinking about this last, this last week and all the conversations I've had, the different types of conversations. I had one conversation where I met someone's family for the first time who works with me. And it was, you know, it was a little bit nerve wracking because that contact, you know, people have, have these moments where they meet the in-laws or whatever, or they meet. For me, it's often meeting someone who works with me's family, I find quite nerve wracking.

• 6:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 6:48Steven Bartlett?

  I think they're kind of probably judging me. I've also had difficult business conversations.

• 6:52Speaker 01

  Because they are judging.

• 6:53Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, they are judging me. And I can feel it. And as I go towards those conversations, I'm like, oh my god. And then I end up just like freezing or being a little bit paralyzed. And you'd think if someone like me who does this for a living, living finds conversations easy, I absolutely do not.

• 7:05Speaker 01

  I actually, the more, you know, I talk to very high level, C suite, very successful people. And in fact, the higher and more successful people are, the more likely they are to be aware that this is really important and that they have room for improvement. It's almost like you're aware that this skill is probably what helped you get where you are. And therefore you want to get even better at it. And you're keenly aware of when you have awkward moments or make mistakes or missteps. And you're like, I would really like to get that out of my life, please.

• 7:39Steven Bartlett?

  Amen. I like ruminate on an awkward encounter I had like two and a half weeks ago.

• 7:43Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 7:44Steven Bartlett?

  I was like, I should have just da, da, da, da. But actually, in reading some of your work, I thought about what I could have done. And we'll get to this, this idea of preparing for those moments, which I typically don't because I assume I should be a natural.

• 7:54Speaker 01

  Can I ask you, as you were talking about these different examples of things that you're ruminating about, do you feel like you have a weakness or like a recurring thing that you suspect you need to get better at?

• 8:09Steven Bartlett?

  I think one of them is, I am a bit of an introvert in my sort of self classification. And as people know who I am more in the world, I think I've become more introverted. So, and sometimes that can be perceived in the wrong way. So my like happy state is kind of being alone or around people that I'm extremely familiar with. If I leave the house and I go say to a gym or something, I have a little bit of paranoia.

• 8:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:32Steven Bartlett?

  So I'm always kind of on edge, which means that this kind of shuts me down more. So when I do have conversations, I can sometimes feel, appear to be a bit more shut down.

• 8:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:39Steven Bartlett?

  And I don't want to carry that into moments where I need to be a bit more open. And then I would say. Generally, I just like hate small talk.

• 8:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're not alone there.

• 8:49Steven Bartlett?

  And I just say it's like a point. This is why I think I podcast, because you can just skip straight into the deep stuff and I can ask people about their trauma.

• 8:55Speaker 01

  You can do that in normal conversations, too, actually. Do you find that you get stuck in small talk?

• 9:01Steven Bartlett?

  Yes.

• 9:01Speaker 01

  A good bit?

• 9:02Steven Bartlett?

  I just try and avoid it. So I've got this funny story. One of the most prestigious people on planet Earth invited me to come to a thing. And I said no, because there would be a hundred other people there. And I just didn't want to be in a room for four hours with a bunch of other people. Like, it just, for me, it's so exhausting.

• 9:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:17Steven Bartlett?

  And if I told you what this context was, you'd burst out laughing. My team were like, "You go to that fucking..."

• 9:25Speaker 01

  And you enjoy it.

• 9:26Steven Bartlett?

  And I'm like, "No, I'm not going. There's too many people there." But that's, that's kind of what I'm like. I love this environment, but I hate small talk and I hate.

• 9:33Speaker 01

  I don't know if that's a weakness as much as it is you learning your preferences. I think it's okay. Maybe we'll get there. But large groups are very stressful. Group conversation and figuring out the structure of like, who should be talking to whom, when, and about what is very overwhelming for the human mind. It's quite different than one on intimate one-on-one conversation, which is much more within your control. And it's much clearer what the purpose is. So we should think about, it maybe not a, we can reframe it, and it's not a weakness, but thinking about your social portfolio. Who are you talking to? Is it the right people? And is it in the right arrangements, in the right group size? So what we're doing right now, one-on-one, is a categorically different

• 10:18Speaker 01

  task than going to a party with a hundred people. So I'm going to help you reframe that later on.

• 10:24Steven Bartlett?

  Why did you choose to do this? All the things you could have done with your life?

• 10:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. Isn't life so fascinating? I often think about the paths not taken. But I'm very happy to be on this path. I grew up in upstate New York, on a small lake in a small town. I was a late girl. Just gorgeous place. And I love playing sports, team sports in particular. I love female friendship from an early age. And probably most formatively, I'm an identical twin. And all of the things I just described, I think are either indicators of how much I love conversation or formed my love of conversation. But either way, I arrived at

• 11:07Speaker 01

  college deeply interested in understanding humans and their behavior. And by the time I got to Harvard, I realized, wow, there are whole fields like social psychology and communication that are purportedly about communication, but nobody's bothered to actually transcribe real conversations and study them at very large scale. And so that's what I've been up to for the last 15 years.

• 11:30Steven Bartlett?

  How has being an identical twin been formative in this regard?

• 11:33Speaker 01

  So my twin's name is Sarah. Being an identical twin, there are many things that are similar to being a close sibling, I'm sure. But an identical twin, it's like you have another version of you in the world. And we share a bedroom, we were on the same sports teams, we played in band together. And so it's sort of like watching a version of yourself up close. And I got to see how she failed and thought, oh, well, I'm going to avoid that. And I would see how she succeeds. She hits an amazing joke, she answers an amazing question. I know that I'm able to do that because we have the same DNA, the same abilities. In a sort of subconscious way, I think I've just been chasing, trying

• 12:17Speaker 01

  to help other people find that in their relationships, in their friendships, in their romantic relationships, in their work collaborations. Because I've gotten to see how amazing that can be for two human beings, how close you can be and how much you can actually understand each other when you communicate well.

• 12:34Steven Bartlett?

  And what research have you done? Like, what are the reference points you're pulling on?

• 12:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:38Steven Bartlett?

  Do you do your own research?

• 12:40Speaker 01

  So much.

• 12:41Steven Bartlett?

  And give me a flavor of the volume.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  Too much, probably. It's almost like I'm a recovering academic. I've been working in academia, doing behavioral science research for 20 years. I know I look impossibly young. I started in graduate school studying emotions, especially anxiety. And not the kind of anxiety that requires medication or therapy necessarily, but the types of social anxiety that people feel constantly, all day long. And figuring out, okay, how does it affect different behaviors? Like how we negotiate or how we take advice from each other? Or how we perform when we're public speaking? These types of things. And then figuring out strategies and tips to help people manage that anxiety more effectively.

• 13:25Speaker 01

  And one of my biggest findings was how we reframe anxiety as excitement. It's a very easy flip to move from it. It's essentially they're the same emotion because they're both high arousal, high energy, high cortisol, stress hormone, high heart rate, sweaty palms. You just change how you think about it in your mind. So literally saying things out loud like, I'm excited, change how your appraisal of it. So you actually experience excitement. It helps you perform a lot better in a lot of different ways.

• 13:54Steven Bartlett?

  So you did a study in 2011?

• 13:56Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 13:57Steven Bartlett?

  The Nervous Nelly Negotiation Study?

• 13:59Speaker 01

  So that one was about negotiation specifically. The, um, this excitement reappraisal, the paper's called Get Excited. And that paper actually ended up being featured in Inside Out, the movie.

• 14:11Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, wow.

• 14:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a great scene where the main character is about to have a panic attack. And Joy sneaks into the little cubicle farm of minions and says, "Stop drawing all of these projections about how things are going to go badly. And instead draw how things could go well." It's so great. I was sitting in the movie theater with my kids and my husband kind of looked down the way and he was like, "Is that your thing?" And I was like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's my thing."

• 14:34Steven Bartlett?

  So what, what did that study show, those two studies? The, the nervous Nelly one, but also the, the one with excitement?

• 14:39Speaker 01

  When we feel anxious, as most people do in negotiations, because it's an intense environment filled with uncertainty and a lack of control, which is the recipe for anxiety, we tend, we want to escape. We either want to relieve that feeling by making concessions or get out of there, right? Just exit the interaction. That was the main finding of the Nervous Nelly Anxiety in Negotiation paper. The reframing anxiety as excitement paper is lots of different ways to convince yourself that you're feeling excited, just by saying I'm excited out loud. And in doing so, that makes you focus on opportunities rather than threats, how things could go well rather than poorly. And it has incredible downstream consequences, helps you sing better, helps you do public

• 15:23Speaker 01

  speaking better, it helps you collaborate more effectively. So it's just a very, it's a very powerful intervention.

• 15:28Steven Bartlett?

  And what was the sort of mechanics of the study?

• 15:30Speaker 01

  So we would bring people in, you tell them, hey Stephen, you're going to be singing karaoke in front of an audience. People start to feel quite nervous about this, naturally. Then, right before they're going to get up and sing the song, we say, okay, an experimenter is going to ask you how you're feeling. Some of you, we want you to say you're feeling excited, and some of you, we want you to say you're feeling anxious. And that alone, when I say, Stephen, how are you feeling right now? And you say?

• 15:59Steven Bartlett?

  Anxious.

• 16:00Speaker 01

  Great, okay, let's go sing the song. You go. People who said, I'm anxious, sing worse compared to people who say, I'm excited. They get out there, they're more in tempo, more on pitch, they have better rhythm, and we measure it with a software when they're actually singing in front of the experimenters.

• 16:18Steven Bartlett?

  Just by me saying, I am excited?

• 16:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:21Steven Bartlett?

  So the other day, when I met my team member's family, I should have been saying to myself, I'm so excited to meet them.

• 16:27Speaker 01

  Among other things, so this, and this is important, it doesn't always work, right? If you're terrified, and it's really something dreadful, like you're terrified that your mother's going to die, and turns out, it's going to be hard to get excited about that if she has a terminal illness. But on the margin, if you're sort of torn between feeling nervous or excited, in your mind, if you can really convince yourself that you actually are excited and that things could go well, I'm going to crush this exam, I'm going to, I'm going to tear it up on the basketball court, that flip, if repeated enough, actually becomes more likely to come true. And certainly before a high stakes conversation like meeting your colleague's family.

• 17:07Steven Bartlett?

  So interesting. I really, I have this behind the scenes channel called Behind the Diary on YouTube. And the other day, when I did Jimmy Fallon, because it's kind of outside of my wheelhouse to go on like late night TV in America in like seven minutes to be funny or whatever. So I was shaking myself because I'm a very serious guy. So before I went out, there's a video of me and I said to my team, what I said to myself before the little curtain opened was, this is gonna be amazing, can't wait. You've like prepared for this. Then I said all this nonsense in my head, thinking that it was nonsense. And I walked out, had the best time of my life. It was, it went so great.

• 17:40Speaker 01

  Great.

• 17:41Steven Bartlett?

  And I, I made a video about that, how, you know, I'm not one to believe in things that, without like rigor and evidence, and I didn't have it.

• 17:49Speaker 01

  Now you do.

• 17:49Steven Bartlett?

  Now I do. Now I have a study that proves that it's not.

• 17:52Speaker 01

  This one is interesting. I think this was the beginning of my scientific journey, realizing that the way we talk to other people and the way we talk to ourselves, especially in a repeated sense. If you think about, okay, you did that before Jimmy Fallon. Now what if you do it before the next time you meet a colleague's family? Now what if you do it before you interview Bill Gates? Before you do it, right? If you then get in the habit of telling yourself you're excited and that becomes effective for you, it's incredibly meaningful in accumulation over time, right? So just focusing on one time, yes, it's helpful. But if you can make it habitual, it has this sort of upward spiral effect on people. It was the beginning of my scientific journey, thinking, oh, well, if we can study one phrase like get excited or I'm excited,

• 18:36Speaker 01

  what if we start studying the cascading unfolding ways that people talk to each other? And not just one line, but like every turn of a conversation. No one had done that before.

• 18:47Steven Bartlett?

  And this negotiation study you did, what was the mechanism for that?

• 18:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. That was a more class of the, the literature. People have been studying negotiations for decades now. And there's a really great negotiation course at almost every business school and law school that's based in all of this rigorous work. What had not been studied on in terms of negotiating are people's emotions. It was a, it was about 15 years ago that people, even including scholars, came to the point where we were like, oh, people's feelings matter. When they feel nervous or when they feel angry, that's actually an important distinction, how you feel on the inside versus what you're expressing to your counterpart. So in this paper, what we found is as a base rate, most people feel anxious before and during a negotiation because it is an intense environment. It's probably one of the greatest benefits of taking a negotiation course is that you just

• 19:35Speaker 01

  get reps and so you get more comfortable with the process of doing it. That might be the biggest takeaway from doing a training course like that. And so in this paper, we had that sort of base rate. Look, everybody's feeling anxious. And then what are the downstream consequences of feeling anxious? And what we find, we had people doing negotiations, playing these negotiation games. What we find is that people are much more likely to sort of leave prematurely or make more concessions to relieve the feelings of anxiety.

• 20:05Steven Bartlett?

  Make bad offers.

• 20:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. Or it depends on your goals, right? If you, if your goal is to claim a lot of value, then making concessions and giving money away is not going to help you with that.

• 20:16Steven Bartlett?

  So if I'm asking my boss for a pay rise, for example, and I'm very, very nervous, I'm much more likely to lower my expectations, accept a bad offer and leave the situation prematurely.

• 20:29Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 20:30Steven Bartlett?

  So what do I do about that?

• 20:31Speaker 01

  Oh, so many things. If we're talking about asking for a raise, what you want is to go in there with as much sort of personal power as you can. One way to do that is to get another job offer somewhere else first. So we talk about this as the best alternative to a negotiated agreement, a BATNA. You want to strengthen your BATNA. So if your boss says, no, I'm not giving you a raise, you can legitimately say, I'm going to go take this other job offer because I just got a better offer from the guy down the street.

• 21:01Steven Bartlett?

  What if you don't want to take the other offer?

• 21:04Speaker 01

  Then you need to be honest with yourself about how much power you have in the negotiation. You also probably, a lot of people make the mistake of going in sort of hands on hips, like I deserve more money. There are lots of questions that you should ask first to know, am I negotiating with the right person? Does my company have the funds to actually give me more money? Why, what, how can I justify this in a way that's compelling to them? Right? It's, it's not up to you. It's that they need to want to keep you and to feel like you are being fairly and generously rewarded. And all of that requires asking a lot of questions before you go in and start making demands.

• 21:44Steven Bartlett?

  In that context, how would you try and persuade me if you work for me? So. What would you say? Because I do think, you know, it's very easy to get someone's back up when you walk in and ask them for money.

• 21:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:54Steven Bartlett?

  If you do it.

• 21:55Speaker 01

  100%. I, it's hard for me to answer this because maybe this is sort of my personal values. It's almost like I'm taking off my expert hat for a moment. I think the best way to get a raise is to be awesome. Do things that are valuable and your company is going to give you more money without even having to ask for it. So in my heart, this question of how do we have a conversation where I ask for more money? It's almost like I, I would hope that you don't even get to that point. If you are truly making yourself almost irreplaceable and incredibly valuable, your boss is going to be coming to you and saying, I have to keep you around. You're amazing. You're so incredible.

• 22:39Speaker 01

  That's a much easier conversation to have than walking in and saying, I, it's not fair. I don't make enough.

• 22:45Steven Bartlett?

  I do think that holds to be true. I think that generally if people's first priority is what they want, then they often don't tend to get what they want. But people who have a priority, their first priority is what I can give, tend to get what they want.

• 22:58Speaker 01

  That's right. It's so, it's a bit of a sort of like a mindset shift. If you prioritize other people's needs, if you're thinking about what your boss finds valuable, what the organization finds valuable, and you rise to meet those needs, you make yourself valuable, which is going to come back to you. Hopefully, that's what, that's the hope. And I think often that is the case, almost always that is the case. In the talk framework, and we'll get there, the K is for kindness. And it's not kindness in the sense of like altruism, because I'm going to help my boss and do everything he wants because I care so deeply. That can be part of it. But also it's this sort of loop of like, well, if you give him everything, every, if you give the organization what it needs, that's going to come back to you.

• 23:44Speaker 01

  You will actually become valuable and get what you want as well. That's how relationships work.

• 23:49Steven Bartlett?

  Usually when I interview people, I lead the way. Today, I'm gonna follow. Because you know the outcome me and the audience wanna get to. So I have all this stuff here.

• 24:00Speaker 01

  I love it, props.

• 24:01Steven Bartlett?

  All these props.

• 24:02Speaker 01

  Fabulous.

• 24:03Steven Bartlett?

  And I have these blocks that for anyone that can't see the conversation, say T A L K on them, talk.

• 24:08Speaker 01

  Fabulous.

• 24:09Steven Bartlett?

  And you tell me the best place to start. You know the outcome, you know where I wanna get to. I wanna be the best conversationalist, the best talker, the most persuasive, influential, likeable talker in the world. So I shall follow your lead.

• 24:23Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh.

• 24:24Steven Bartlett?

  It's a lot of power.

• 24:25Speaker 01

  I love it. I love it so much. Let's start with this.

• 24:30Speaker 01

  I want you to think of a conversation that you had recently.

• 24:35Speaker 01

  It has to be more than five minutes long.

• 24:37Steven Bartlett?

  More than five, yes, I can think of one immediately. It was a conversation I had with my girlfriend where I just wanted her to know that I accept the fact that I fucked up. Like, I accept the fact that I should have been more present in a particular moment, and I wasn't. And I just wanted to like.

• 24:52Speaker 01

  Own it.

• 24:52Steven Bartlett?

  Own it.

• 24:53Speaker 01

  And convey that to her.

• 24:55Steven Bartlett?

  And convey that I'm sorry and I get it.

• 24:56Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 24:57Steven Bartlett?

  And this is not one where I'm gonna try and justify my whatever. No, actually, objectively, I should have been more attentive and present.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 25:06Steven Bartlett?

  I just wanted her to know that.

• 25:07Speaker 01

  Yep. So you sort of have an admission of blameworthiness. Why? Why did you want to do that?

• 25:13Steven Bartlett?

  Because I felt that she was right and I regretted my behavior.

• 25:18Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 25:18Steven Bartlett?

  So sometimes I don't feel like she's right. Sometimes I'm here to, you know, respond. In this particular scenario, I thought, you know, actually, on balance, I should have been more present. This was an important time for her. And in hindsight, that's not how I wish I'd behaved.

• 25:36Speaker 01

  Okay. How did you want her to feel during and at the end of this conversation?

• 25:44Steven Bartlett?

  Understood. And

• 25:48Steven Bartlett?

  really, that was really it. It's like, I wanted her to feel understood and

• 25:55Steven Bartlett?

  I guess, like, connected to me. But it's more, it's really more, I just wanted her to not worry that I didn't understand. So she didn't have to say it again. Like, I just wanted her to know that I get it.

• 26:06Steven Bartlett?

  And that in future, I wish I'd behaved differently.

• 26:08Speaker 01

  How did you want to feel during and after this conversation?

• 26:13Steven Bartlett?

  I guess I wanted to offload the guilt.

• 26:15Speaker 01

  Aha, aha. Good, good.

• 26:17Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, because I felt bad. I felt like, no, she's

• 26:19Speaker 01

  And it was weighing on your conscience. You were like, I gotta, I gotta say that. I gotta own this because it's making me feel like a shithead.

• 26:25Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 26:25Speaker 01

  Okay, fabulous. Okay. When we look back on our conversations and try and describe what our goals were, very quickly, you start to realize that our goals are very complicated, that we want a lot of things. I'm also guessing there may have been a time component. Can you talk a little bit about that? Like, how much time did you have to achieve these goals?

• 26:46Steven Bartlett?

  I mean, I never seemed to have enough time. So it was like, it was Yeah, so I had about, probably about 20 minutes.

• 26:54Speaker 01

  Great. Hey, that's pretty good. I wish I had 20 minutes with my husband. Okay. So I have a framework that helps us think about conversational goals. And I call it the conversational compass. Okay? And like a compass that you might use to find your way out of the desert or the forest. The compass helps you decide which way, not to walk, but to talk. Okay? So the X-axis.

• 27:21Steven Bartlett?

  I'll put this on the screen for anyone that can see the video.

• 27:24Speaker 01

  Great. The X-axis, which runs horizontally, is about your relationship.

• 27:29Steven Bartlett?

  Also, I'll link it below.

• 27:30Speaker 01

  So this relational axis, high relational goals are things that you care about that are serving the other person or your relationship. This conversation sounded very high relational. You're truly like, I just really want her to know that I feel like a shithead and that I'm owning it and like, I care and I maybe won't do it again, something like that. Low relational goals are things we care about that serve us. So in this case, you said something like, I want to offload, give her to my guilt. I wasn't, I was feeling bad. The Y axis is about information exchange. High informational goals are hinge on exchanging accurate information. It's sort of the reason human beings learn, develop the ability to communicate at all,

• 28:13Speaker 01

  right, way back when, is to take what's in my brain, communicate it to you accurately. But we care about tons of stuff that is low informational. So it's not about exchanging information, and sometimes it's about concealing it. In this case, you had a high informational goal. You wanted to sort of persuade her, prove to her that you're a good guy and that she should stay with you, essentially, trust you. But you also had low informational goals, like you didn't want it to be emotionally unpleasant to have this conversation. You also had low informational goals, like a time constraint. You needed to protect your time and her time. And so we're always limited by time and cognitive resources.

• 28:53Speaker 01

  So the point of this is to help us plot all of those goals in a logical way. Each quadrant is good. We live in all four quadrants. We're not trying to get to one or another. It's just to help us describe all of the many things that we actually care about, almost to validate them and say, listen, it's legit that you wanted to relieve your guilt. It's super admirable that you wanted to signal to her that like you're owning this mistake. It's legit that you have time constraints. It's legit that you don't want your conversations to be unpleasant. So each of the quadrants gets a positive name. High informational, high relational is about connection. Okay. Often you'll hear communications experts just talk about connection, which is too narrow.

• 29:38Speaker 01

  It's not the only thing that we care about. Down here, low informational, high relational is about savoring.

• 29:44Steven Bartlett?

  What does informational mean in this context?

• 29:47Speaker 01

  Like how much accurate information you are trying to, you need to exchange with each other. If we just sat here kind of quietly and I hummed a song because we, and I said something like, I love your shirt. We're not exchanging a lot of information, but we might be having a very lovely interaction with each other. So not every conversation is about high information exchange, though many people think that it is. You know these people. They're very transactional. They feel like a conversation is where you just say things you know at other people and that they're going to say things they know back at you. That's a big mistake.

• 30:29Steven Bartlett?

  So having fun, I can see is in the bottom right quadrant.

• 30:31Speaker 01

  Having fun, yes.

• 30:31Steven Bartlett?

  Because it's not about huge informational exchange.

• 30:34Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 30:34Steven Bartlett?

  But it is about connections.

• 30:35Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 30:36Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 30:36Speaker 01

  Oh, and it's really important. Many of my students at Harvard almost forget about this quadrant. They're like, if we're not persuading and making decisions, we're not living, right? Like, this is really important, especially over time. If we're not enjoying being with each other, I'm not going to look forward to talking to you again. That's true at work and outside of work. Lower left is essentially discernment. We call it protection. It's protecting your time, protecting your reputation, protecting information. So concealing, keeping secrets, moving quickly. We can't sit here for hours and hours and hours. And then protecting your reputation, like you care about making a positive impression on other people. I want you to see me as smart

• 31:16Speaker 01

  and warm and calm and trustworthy. These are self-serving, low relational or low informational goals. And then we get up to upper left, which is low relational. They're self-serving, high informational. This is a lot of work-related goal, persuasion, making decisions, brainstorming, et cetera.

• 31:35Steven Bartlett?

  So if I want to be liked and have great relationships, I need to be on the right side of this. Is that accurate?

• 31:41Speaker 01

  So what happens if someone who trusts you and loves you tells you something in confidence and then you go tell everybody else?

• 31:49Steven Bartlett?

  You lose trust?

• 31:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it's not that you can only live on this side of the compass because discernment matters for relationships.

• 32:00Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 32:00Speaker 01

  Right? So, and here, you are going to be in a relationship where hopefully you're going to be like brainstorming things together, making decisions together. Even with a friend, you're like, oh, where should we go to dinner tonight? You need to make that, coordinate that choice well together. So I think one aspiration is to try and be over on the right side as much as you can. And in fact, having the mindset of pushing yourself to try and think about your goals that are more pro-social more often is a virtuous goal. But like, listen, we all have actual needs. So like, you can't only live on the right side of the compass. It's about moving around in a way that is savvy and actually serves what you care about.

• 32:45Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 32:45Steven Bartlett?

  Got you.

• 32:46Speaker 01

  Do you have a sense of where your goals from that conversation that you described would be?

• 32:50Steven Bartlett?

  Apologize.

• 32:51Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 32:51Steven Bartlett?

  Which is high relational and not very high on informational. Cause I didn't have a bunch, I didn't have a lot to say. It was just very simply about letting her know that I was sorry. And it wasn't, I didn't have a big explanation or a bunch of excuses or justifications. It was just, listen, I fucked up. Yeah, I get it.

• 33:07Speaker 01

  Can we talk about apologies for a sec?

• 33:09Steven Bartlett?

  Sure.

• 33:10Speaker 01

  I love that you chose this as your example because, and the way you're describing it. I love how you're saying, um, I didn't go into a huge explanation of why I did it or anything. More people should apologize that way. A lot of people, their instinct when they're apologizing is to revisit the problem and sort of make excuses or explain why they did the thing wrong. It's not effective. What is more effective is what you're describing, taking ownership and saying, look, I, I just messed up and I'm so sorry and I feel awful about it. And the most effective component of an apology is actually making a promise to change. If you say to your girlfriend, I've realized I messed up here. I'm not going to do it again.

• 33:53Speaker 01

  Here's how I'm going to be different in the future, like a concrete plan. It's so compelling to hear that you've thought about that and that, and then it's measurable because she can see in the future, do you actually live up to that promise? Do you follow through on this promise to never do, make the mistake again?

• 34:10Steven Bartlett?

  Is there a point where you can apologize too much?

• 34:13Speaker 01

  We studied this. I ran some studies on this. We started by looking at, um, frequency of apologies made during normal conversations. It's quite rare for someone to over apologize, but it does seem like within one conversation, if you apologize more than twice, it starts to be more of a reminder of the bad thing that happened. Like you just keep revisiting it and it brings you back to the negativity rather than moving forward. We also studied apologies in a really large dataset of parole hearings, like among people who had committed really serious crimes. And we looked at the types of apologies that they made in their during their parole hearings. And there, it seems like you actually can't

• 34:55Speaker 01

  over apologize, like more is better. And again, the most effective component is making a promise to change in the future. I'm gonna go, when I get out, I'm gonna be an AA, I'm gonna live with my grandmother. Here's the job I'm gonna do. Whatever the plan is, you're actually more likely to get out of jail.

• 35:15Steven Bartlett?

  And going into those difficult conversations, is there anything one needs to do to prepare?

• 35:20Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 35:21Steven Bartlett?

  Because our lives are full of difficult conversations. And actually, it's the avoidance of them that ends up messing up our lives the most. So when you think about difficult conversations that we all have to have with difficult people, is do I have to prepare for that?

• 35:32Speaker 01

  So this is very natural. Almost every person that you hear talk about communication tends to focus on difficult conversations. I'm going to suggest to you that that is a very narrow view of the conversational world, actually. And in fact, thinking about difficult conversations is a little bit of a misnomer. It's not like there are some conversations that are difficult and some that are easy. It's that in every conversation, there can be moments of difference, where we use different language to mean the same thing, where we have an incongruence in our emotions, where we have a difference in motives. I want to give you advice, but you don't want to take it. Or something dips down to a difference in our identities. I'm American and you're a Brit. So

• 36:16Speaker 01

  anytime you encounter these little fleeting moments of difference in all of these different ways, and maybe there was an image here, let me see, no, it's not here. It looks like layers, we talk about it like layers of the earth. And above the surface are the words and sounds that you hear while people are talking. Right at the surface are people's emotions. So I feel excited, but you feel tired and bored. That's gonna be tough. Right below that are people's motives. What I want to achieve, it gets back to the compass. What I want to achieve is different than what you want to achieve. We're all walking around with a compass in our mind, and they're different from each other. Right below that are our beliefs, right? I believe that immigration is a problem.

• 36:58Speaker 01

  And you believe that AI is a way bigger problem than human immigration. How do we talk about that in a way? And then all of it gets dips down to the sort of hot magma in this layers of the earth model of our identities. So even an easy conversation, we're on a date, or we're two spouses are driving in a car, or friends are hanging out, watching a movie. Like, you can stumble upon these little moments of difficulty anytime, for any reason. And you need to have the skill set to be able to make sure the temperature doesn't get too hot.

• 37:30Steven Bartlett?

  What is that skill set?

• 37:31Speaker 01

  There's fabulous research on this. I have found it incredibly helpful in my life. Research by Julia Minson, Mike Yeoman, Hannah Collins, called receptiveness. So it's receptiveness to opposing viewpoints. And it's both the mindset. When you, when someone comes to you with something that seems crazy, you don't judge it negatively. You have to fight the human instinct to think of it as like, that's crazy. That's wrong. And now I'm gonna win. And now I'm gonna be right and prove you wrong. Because all of those instincts ruin our conversations and our relationships.

• 38:09Steven Bartlett?

  Why?

• 38:10Speaker 01

  It makes us defensive on the receiving end. It makes us sort of accusatory and hostile on the attack end. Once we get into an accusation and defense mode, the conversation is broken down. It's no longer about connection, savoring, protecting and advancing. We're now in this new world that is not achieving any of our goals.

• 38:32Steven Bartlett?

  So someone comes to me and comes to you and says something's crazy. They say, you know, the sky is purple.

• 38:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:38Steven Bartlett?

  It's actually, it's not blue, it's purple.

• 38:41Speaker 01

  Here's a magical phrase that you can say in that moment. It makes sense that you feel that the sky is purple. It makes sense that you feel excited to tell me that the sky is purple. It makes sense that you feel X about Y. Makes sense that you feel skeptical about podcasts. It makes you, it makes sense that you feel annoyed that I speak quickly. It makes sense that you are worried about AI. Whatever people are feeling, whatever they express to you. We can validate that feeling because whatever's going on in their mind is their reality. And we have to say that out loud before we go on to do anything else, even if we're about to disagree with them vehemently. But we have to say the validation piece first, just like therapists do all the time.

• 39:26Speaker 01

  In order for them to feel heard and like, oh yeah, I'm safe here so that I can join you on your side of the table and now we're going to untangle this weird problem together. You say the sky is purple. Tell me more. Like, what, how did you come to feel like the sky is purple? Are you colorblind? Do you see everything in purple? Now I can ask you questions about how you came to that perspective and I can learn about it.

• 39:53Steven Bartlett?

  I guess the risk is you don't want to-

• 39:54Speaker 01

  Validate something wrong?

• 39:55Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 39:56Speaker 01

  Why not?

• 39:57Steven Bartlett?

  You don't want to appear to be saying, because if I say, it makes sense that you think the sky is purple, but it's actually blue.

• 40:03Speaker 01

  The word thinks is important. It makes sense that you feel X about Y, not it makes sense that you think X about Y. Thinking is like a cognition.

• 40:13Steven Bartlett?

  Is there a risk of it sounding patronizing?

• 40:15Speaker 01

  Maybe, but in practice, it feels really, really good. When I run this, so I run an exercise in my class where we go around, let's say there's a group of five students, and you have to share something. We start easy, like share one song you love. And then the next person has to validate that before they share their favorite next song. You go around and around very quickly. And so it feels very contrived to say, okay, you have to say, I love that you love that Taylor Swift song. That's so interesting. I actually don't like Taylor Swift. It feels very contrived, but when you talk to the students after it, they say, yes, I knew what we were doing. It did feel over the top to say that about people's song preferences.

• 40:57Speaker 01

  And still, it felt amazing to have the person next to me say, I love that you love that Taylor Swift song. We are all so hungry for validation that even ridiculous validation feels amazing. So then, when you get to round two and everybody's sharing something that they're really struggling with, and the person next to them says, wow, I'm so sorry, that sounds really, really hard. It makes sense that you feel upset about your mom. Now you've got that habit and you're making them feel quite good about something that actually does deserve that validation. So it's all about like developing these habits, no matter where the difference or disagreement is coming from.

• 41:38Steven Bartlett?

  What's the opposite of that?

• 41:40Speaker 01

  The opposite is what how people naturally respond, tend to naturally respond, which is by trying to win and prove them wrong and prove that they're right. So you say the sky is purple and I say, let's crazy, sky's blue. And then where does our conversation go? It feels terrible for you.

• 41:59Steven Bartlett?

  It's so interesting. I learned this, um, because I employed this person once and this person, when we'd talk about ideas, the first word out of their mouth was always, I disagree. And then they'd make their point.

• 42:12Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 42:13Steven Bartlett?

  And I don't know what it was about it, but I noticed that it would like get my back up.

• 42:17Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 42:18Steven Bartlett?

  And so I'd say, I don't know, I'd say, I think we should do it like this. I disagree.

• 42:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:22Steven Bartlett?

  And then they'd make their point. And I remember thinking, gosh, that's such a.

• 42:24Speaker 01

  And it's so ironic because their goal is to persuade you. At the end of it, they want you to agree with their position. That's not at all how persuasion works. The only way that we change our beliefs is is usually across many conversations and we're around someone we like talking to and respect and have admiration for. And then over time, we sort of bend to the gentle pressure of their differing viewpoint. If I say, I disagree, now let's fight about it. You're you get your back up and you're not having, you're not enjoying talking to me, even if you're right. And right, like it's not about being right or wrong in that moment.

• 43:05Speaker 01

  The goal here is to keep the conversation in an emotional place where it can continue. So you can continue to engage. And that's what these researchers find in this receptiveness research is there, if you qualify your statement saying like, I wonder if the sky could be a different color, rather than the sky is blue with certainty. There are all of these sort of hedging language. You can divide yourself into multiple parts. So if you said to me, the sky is purple, I would say, oh, my gosh, as your friend and as a painter, that is so intriguing to me. As a biologist or as a meteorologist, maybe we should investigate that. Literally dividing yourself into two disagreeing parts. It's usually how we actually feel. So if your mother says something crazy to you that seems crazy to you, you could say, as your daughter,

• 43:50Speaker 01

  I'm so intrigued that you've come to hold that perspective. I'd love to hear more. You know, as a representative of Gen Z, I know my friends would want you want me to say this. It means that you can hold two perspectives at once and it is very helpful to the other person to keep the conversation going. But all of the elements of this receptiveness recipe have this flavor. It's a little surprising. I think often people think of these types of things as weakness because it's like our instinct is to try to win and be right. And instead, what I'm saying is no hedge your claims. Show that you're uncertain about stuff. Validate their feelings. Divide yourself into disagreeing parts because you're not certain about anything in order to keep the conversation going so that you have any shred of hope of persuading

• 44:36Speaker 01

  them over the longer term.

• 44:37Steven Bartlett?

  I remember Talia Sherratt telling me about a study. Either she told me, she's a neuroscientist in London. And she told me they put two people in a brain imaging scanner and got them to like look at photos and come to agreement on the price of something.

• 44:52Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 44:52Steven Bartlett?

  And then eventually in these studies, I'm super paraphrasing here. She's probably like cringing.

• 44:56Speaker 01

  I think I know what study you're talking about.

• 44:57Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, do you could you explain it?

• 44:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, so they studied what what lights up in your brain when you're in a situation of disagreement versus agreement. And it is actually more taxing to your mind when someone is disagreeing with you. It's like these neurological alarm bells go off and all of a sudden, like you described, what was your friend, my back goes up?

• 45:18Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, my back goes up, I get my back up.

• 45:20Speaker 01

  That's it. It's actually in your brain. Your brain goes up and it's hard. It's it's very hard to continue to engage once that process is underway.

• 45:28Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 45:28Speaker 01

  Right? Some people call it amygdala hijacking, which is not quite right. But your brain does look different when you're in a situation of disagreement. So whatever we can do conversationally to sort of. Temp that down so that your back doesn't go up is going to be quite helpful.

• 45:44Steven Bartlett?

  She showed pictures of the brain in these scans when someone disagrees with you. And I think, and I might be getting this inverted, that it was almost like the brain had shut down to receptiveness.

• 45:55Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 45:55Steven Bartlett?

  In that moment, it was like, so I always, when I wrote this chapter in my book called Do Not Disagree, it's an intentionally provocative chapter because people think, what do you mean? Never disagree with anybody?

• 46:03Speaker 01

  No, it's right.

• 46:04Steven Bartlett?

  But I mean, like, don't make the first thing you say, I disagree.

• 46:07Speaker 01

  That's right. It can come later.

• 46:08Steven Bartlett?

  A hundred percent.

• 46:09Speaker 01

  It can come later, but first has to come like, oh, it's so intriguing that you said that. I'm so fascinated and it makes sense that you might feel that way. I wonder if, and then you can go on instead of, I disagree.

• 46:19Steven Bartlett?

  I met a girl called Anne who always said, yes, and instead of but.

• 46:25Speaker 01

  Good.

• 46:25Steven Bartlett?

  And it shocked me because it was so different. I, having a conversation with her, you say something to her and you go, I think this. And she goes, yes, and, and then she would make her point. And it could be a complete disagreement, but I noticed she was doing it and I loved it.

• 46:38Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. And we often think of the yes, and as part of sort of improv comedy, humor, et cetera. They were, the comedians are really on to something much more profound about conversation broadly. If you can come from a sort of mindset or like spiritual place of yes, and essentially you're saying, I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt here, even though what you're saying seems a little crazy. That's what is required to have great relationships. It's like, we're all going to have these moments where someone feels something or says something that seems crazy. And if you react to it in an invalidating way, that's how we kill our relationships.

• 47:18Steven Bartlett?

  Do we need to kill the word but? Because what ends up happening is someone will say, the thing you just said about validating relationships. Yes, I completely understand. I think you made a great point, Alison, but. And the minute I say but, it's kind of like I've just taken an eraser to everything you just said.

• 47:32Speaker 01

  I would love to get rid of the word but. Not but with two Ts, but but with one T.

• 47:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, you never need it. You can make the same point and say "and."

• 47:47Steven Bartlett?

  But it just completely, it just, it immediately says.

• 47:51Speaker 01

  It also reveals that you're sitting there in a state of, "I can't wait." I'm like, on the tip of my tongue is something I can't wait to say that's opposite of what you're saying. And it's, the spirit of it is antagonistic.

• 48:07Steven Bartlett?

  One of the things we notice when we have conversations on this show about conversation is people really care about likability.

• 48:15Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 48:15Steven Bartlett?

  Like, they really want to know what's making them disliked, and they really want to know how to be liked.

• 48:20Speaker 01

  Good. So, being liked is a huge drive,

• 48:26Speaker 01

  but it's just one of many things that we care about in terms of gaining status. So, status is respect, admiration, liking in the eyes of other people. Liking is usually comes from sort of warmth and charm. Admiration often comes from like perceptions of competence. So, we want warmth and competence at once, ideally. Okay, let's go back in time. Should we talk about the TALK framework? Because there are going to be little clues about how to be better liked across the whole framework.

• 48:54Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 48:54Speaker 01

  Okay. Let's start with T. I'm going to push these to the side. T is, first, I just want to say as a whole framework, T A L K is the most comprehensive, teachable, practical, scientifically rigorous framework in the world for communication.

• 49:13Steven Bartlett?

  Did you invent it?

• 49:14Speaker 01

  I did.

• 49:14Steven Bartlett?

  So, you would say that.

• 49:15Speaker 01

  But I didn't, when I first wrote the book, I didn't say it strongly enough. And in the last almost year, I've come to realize why. One part is because most people focus only on difficult conversations, and here we are focusing on all conversations, even the ones that seem like they should be easy and fun. It's all conversations everywhere, personal and professional. The other piece is that I didn't even really intend this as a scientist, but the way we do research is essentially natural language processing, machine learning fits into this new world of AI. So the framework can be used by humans or machines to coach people to be better conversationalists and use as a rubric after the fact of saying, okay, how did this go?

• 49:57Speaker 01

  Did you do well? Let's look at T A L K and evaluate.

• 50:01Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, it's the best in the world ever.

• 50:03Speaker 01

  Thank you, Stephen. Okay.

• 50:05Steven Bartlett?

  Thank you.

• 50:06Speaker 01

  Thank you for recognizing.

• 50:07Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, no, yeah.

• 50:07Speaker 01

  Okay, T is for topics.

• 50:10Steven Bartlett?

  Topics.

• 50:10Speaker 01

  Topics. Topics are the building blocks of conversation. It is what we choose to talk about.

• 50:18Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 50:18Speaker 01

  Very simple. We all have an intuitive understanding that we sort of work through different chunks. First, we're going to talk about your conversation with your girlfriend. Then we're going to talk about the talk framework, then we're talking about the compass, whatever. Working through topics. What I think most people don't realize is that we're choosing topics every time we talk. It's not just at the beginning of a conversation, like an opener. Like, hey, what did you think of this, you know, the diplomat? No, it's every time you're talking, we're making moves to gently stay on topic or switch to something else. What's so beautiful about that is it means we all have power. We all have control to nudge the conversation one way or another. And we can all do a better job with it.

• 51:03Steven Bartlett?

  So what's the game here? To pick better topics, to know what topic we're aiming at?

• 51:07Speaker 01

  There's a lot of goals. It's both about choosing better topics. It's also about how can we make any topic better? Okay, one huge piece of advice that when you start to realize how much your mind is doing during a live conversation is to offload some of that cognitive work to beforehand.

• 51:27Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 51:27Speaker 01

  Okay, so prepping topics ahead of time. This does not mean writing out an agenda before you call your parents or before you call your girlfriend. What it does mean is spending even 30 seconds, maybe even 10 seconds before you're in the chaos of a conversation to think about what you could talk about or what might be important for you to remember to talk about.

• 51:47Steven Bartlett?

  Did you do that today?

• 51:48Speaker 01

  Always. Sometimes you don't have to, right? Like, you did it today. You did extensive prep. You even have things printed on cards here. And in a way, I have been prepping for this conversation for 20 years. I've been studying these things. I designed the framework myself. I've gone on 80 other, you know, podcasts. That's all prep for this moment.

• 52:09Steven Bartlett?

  What about in your personal life?

• 52:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:12Steven Bartlett?

  Can you give me an example of where you prepared topics?

• 52:14Speaker 01

  Every conversation that I know is coming.

• 52:16Steven Bartlett?

  Give me an example.

• 52:16Speaker 01

  So with Kasi before I got here.

• 52:20Steven Bartlett?

  Which is a member of our team?

• 52:21Speaker 01

  Yes, thank you. I thought about, I wanted to ask her what it's like to be moving from London to LA. I wanted to ask her what it's like to work with you.

• 52:32Steven Bartlett?

  She said all good, all good things.

• 52:35Steven Bartlett?

  All good things. Next question. What does A mean?

• 52:39Speaker 01

  So funny. I often will, so you can, it's not rocket science. It's literally just a little bit of forethought. What kinds of questions or topics could I ask you that will make our conversation feel a little bit better than just like winging it in the moment and talking about like some random thing I see in the room?

• 53:00Speaker 01

  I try to do this before every conversation because now I know how powerful it is and how kind it is. If you are calling somebody and you're like, okay, oh yeah, their kid was gonna take guitar lessons, I should remember to ask about that. Or, oh, my friend had this big presentation at work, I should remember to ask how that went. That means you're gonna remember to ask them, and that's super kind, and they're excited to talk about it, too. It makes everything better. So topic prep is a huge deal. In our research, what we find, when you randomly assign people to prep topics or not, the conversations where people have thought ahead even for 30 seconds, they feel less anxious, they're much smoother, there are fewer disfluencies, ums, as, stutters between topics. They cover more topics, which is usually a good thing, more likely to land on good topics.

• 53:46Speaker 01

  You're less likely to blurt, so you're less likely to share things that you don't want to share with people. It's just an incredibly powerful strategy, and it doesn't need to be complicated. I've gotten in the habit of putting like two or three bullet points for people in my Google Calendar notes when you know you have a meeting coming up. And you don't even have to do it right before, like, oh, a week ahead of time, if it pops in my head that I want to ask Steven about, do you want to have children? I might write that as a little bullet point in my calendar note for the time that I'm going to be here with you. And then I'll be more likely to remember it. Do you feel skeptical about this?

• 54:21Steven Bartlett?

  No. I was just thinking it probably makes you more, going back to the point about likability, it probably makes you a more likeable person.

• 54:27Speaker 01

  Much more likeable, yeah. In fact, if you can achieve more of your goals, whether they're high informational, low informational, high relational, low relational, all of that makes you more likeable. You seem more competent, you seem more warm, especially when you lean towards those pro-social, high relational goals.

• 54:45Steven Bartlett?

  Because everyone talks about how if you're interested in someone else, like you were interested in Cosi.

• 54:49Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 54:50Steven Bartlett?

  That must have felt good for her, which must make her like you more.

• 54:53Speaker 01

  We should go ask her.

• 54:54Steven Bartlett?

  That's a good point.

• 54:56Speaker 01

  I ask them, I have my students sometimes do a reflection task where I say, if you had to walk into a room and your job was to make people like you a one out of 10, a five out of 10, or a 10 out of 10, what are the behaviors that you would do to try and pursue those three worlds?

• 55:13Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, so if I wanted people to like me one out of 10?

• 55:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:16Steven Bartlett?

  What?

• 55:17Speaker 01

  What would you do? You tell me.

• 55:19Steven Bartlett?

  You tell, you're the expert.

• 55:20Speaker 01

  I want to hear your, I want to hear your guesses.

• 55:22Steven Bartlett?

  My guesses? I would walk in quiet on my phone, and I would ignore them.

• 55:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:30Steven Bartlett?

  And maybe I'd look up and make some kind of snide comment. I definitely wouldn't notice that they were there.

• 55:34Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 55:35Steven Bartlett?

  And I wouldn't make eye contact with them. I...

• 55:42Steven Bartlett?

  Would maybe be rid of, maybe like, take a phone call?

• 55:44Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. I was gonna say, you know, ones really low. See, probably insults, probably.

• 55:49Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, yeah, I'd offend them.

• 55:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, offend them.

• 55:51Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 55:52Speaker 01

  Maybe take a phone call and then while you're on the phone call, talk about how great you are or something, right? Like some sort of arrogance, et cetera.

• 56:00Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 56:00Speaker 01

  Um, maybe if they try and talk to you, interrupt them.

• 56:03Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 56:04Speaker 01

  Uh, be like, not now.

• 56:05Steven Bartlett?

  Or look at my phone midway through what they're saying.

• 56:07Speaker 01

  Uh huh. Yeah, okay. So there's lots of things you can imagine there.

• 56:11Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 56:12Speaker 01

  Already, we've touched on topics, though, right? When you think about, okay, I'm talking on the phone in front of them. And what am I going to be talking about that reduces my likability, even for someone who's like just observing you talking?

• 56:23Steven Bartlett?

  I'd get their name wrong.

• 56:24Speaker 01

  That's great. Yep, yep, yep, yep.

• 56:26Steven Bartlett?

  That's a good way to say you don't matter to me.

• 56:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Five out of 10 is an interesting one. You wanna do it probably more blasé, like you engage with them, but not very well. Talk about small talk topics, like you were saying, things that you could talk about with anyone that are not personalized at all, seem a bit disinterested. But not offensive, just bland.

• 56:48Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 56:49Speaker 01

  Okay, then we get to 10 out of 10 world.

• 56:52Steven Bartlett?

  10 out of 10 likability.

• 56:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. What are, what are you doing if you're trying to get 10 out of 10?

• 56:56Steven Bartlett?

  I'm completely focused on them.

• 56:58Speaker 01

  Good.

• 56:59Steven Bartlett?

  I'm attentive, I'm complimentary, I'm gonna flatter them.

• 57:02Speaker 01

  Yep. Do you think it will seem obsequious?

• 57:06Steven Bartlett?

  I don't know if I get it right.

• 57:07Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 57:09Steven Bartlett?

  Cause I'm gonna mean it.

• 57:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, because it's gonna be sincere.

• 57:11Steven Bartlett?

  It's gonna be really sincere.

• 57:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:13Steven Bartlett?

  I'm gonna crack a great joke.

• 57:14Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 57:15Steven Bartlett?

  Knock, knock.

• 57:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, who's there?

• 57:16Steven Bartlett?

  I don't know.

• 57:18Speaker 01

  You're like, I don't know, my panic. Exactly.

• 57:21Steven Bartlett?

  So, yeah, I'm gonna flatter them, crack jokes, be very attentive, get their name right, ask them about their grandchild.

• 57:27Speaker 01

  Good. Okay, let's pause. I wanna, in that description, already you're moving quite quickly through topics as you're interacting with them. You know that you can't be circling the drain, talking about the weather for long periods of time. So just briefly, let me say. We don't need to avoid small talk. In fact, it's a very important social ritual for people who are strangers to each other, people who haven't seen each other in a long time. It's where we land and say, oh, we're doing conversation now. The mistake that people make is.

• 58:00Speaker 01

  They stay there too long, way too long. Any more than like one beat of, oh, my goodness, the weather's really warm. It's like summer in California. Then you need to make it more personal and move up this topic pyramid towards medium talk, deep talk quickly, right? So, small talk is at the bottom. These are topics anybody can talk about. Tailored talk is more exciting, more personalized, more relevant to your interests. Deep talk is the peak of this pyramid. Only we can talk about this thing in a special way. Not every conversation is bound to get to the deep talk, but when it does, we should feel very appreciative. It's one of the most magical things about being humans. So, we don't need to get to deep talk with like the barista at Starbucks or with your

• 58:43Speaker 01

  neighbor when they're taking out their trash, but it does happen sometimes and it's quite lovely.

• 58:49Steven Bartlett?

  I think I used to put girls off when I was 11 because I used to ask them like the meaning of life too quickly when my mother stole the Nokia phone.

• 58:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:55Steven Bartlett?

  And so, they would stop texting back.

• 58:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:57Steven Bartlett?

  So, I think I learned early that like some people just don't.

• 59:00Speaker 01

  Well, the joke's on them now. Now you get to do it for your life's work. No, but I think you were on to something there. It's not that you asked them about the meaning of life at all. You asked it too quickly. So, it's about the pacing as we move up here. Most people stay too long at the bottom, but we also cannot jump to the top often. You kind of have to do the ritual of climbing to feel like you get there in a natural way.

• 59:23Steven Bartlett?

  And is that where relationships are built, deep ones?

• 59:25Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 59:26Steven Bartlett?

  At the top?

• 59:27Speaker 01

  Moments at the top, probably, right? This is where vulnerability takes you. Often, asking lots of questions, especially follow-up questions, gets you up the pyramid more quickly. So, shall we shift to the A of the talk framework? Because A is for asking. Topics and asking are intimately tied to each other. The most common way that people switch topics is by asking a question. So, you can use questions like, what are you excited about recently? Or what has been your favorite guest to talk to? Or what have you and your girlfriend done together recently? You can do that to switch topics. Once you're on a topic, we use follow-up questions to kind of dive deeply and move up the topic pyramid.

• 1:00:13Steven Bartlett?

  So, you're saying I should ask more questions?

• 1:00:15Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:00:16Steven Bartlett?

  Okay. Well, ask more than they're asking me?

• 1:00:18Speaker 01

  Maybe not you because you spend a lot of time asking questions. But most people, the top-line advice to make their conversations better is to ask many more questions. Asking, it sounds so simple and it's almost like everybody already knows that, but doing it in practice is quite hard and it's a skill. And people who do it well are more successful on romantic dates. They're more successful in work meetings. They're more successful as collaborators. They're more successful as entrepreneurs in getting funding. All of it hinges on question asking. So the top line advice, just ask more questions. At the very least, don't be a zero question asker.

• 1:01:00Steven Bartlett?

  What happens to the fate of zero question askers?

• 1:01:02Speaker 01

  They're not, they're not getting a second date. They're not going to get that funding. They're not, they're not learning enough about their partner to enable them to succeed. If you go on a first date and you're asking zero questions, which like, imagine that, we've all sort of been on that date probably, you want to leave within 10 minutes. When you're on a first date, you have so much to learn about each other. You have everything to learn about each other. So if someone's not asking, it's a real, real, real problem, especially, I think this is a very, especially good hack for men on heterosexual dates. Often what they're getting wrong is that they're not asking enough questions.

• 1:01:44Steven Bartlett?

  How'd you know this?

• 1:01:45Speaker 01

  From data.

• 1:01:47Steven Bartlett?

  From data?

• 1:01:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So we have a thousand speed dates and we, the outcome is, does the other person want to go on a second date with you? And we have transcripts. It was an amazing study run by this incredible research group at Stanford about 10 years ago. And you can just measure it. Measure how many questions they ask on each date. People who ask more questions are enormously more likely to get asked on a second date. So much so, imagine you go on 20 first dates and I say, okay, Stephen, you just have to ask one extra question on those 20 dates. If you do, you'll convert another date into a second date from just one question per date.

• 1:02:28Steven Bartlett?

  According to the data?

• 1:02:29Speaker 01

  Yes. It's true for both men and women, but it's particularly helpful for men because they ask fewer questions on average than women do.

• 1:02:39Steven Bartlett?

  Really?

• 1:02:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:41Steven Bartlett?

  Significantly less?

• 1:02:42Speaker 01

  Yes. And the other funny gender effect in the data is that men are just more likely to agree to go on second dates. They're less discerning in general. But if they want, if men want to get asked on the second date, just ask more questions.

• 1:02:55Steven Bartlett?

  What is me asking more questions doing to the other person?

• 1:02:58Speaker 01

  It makes them feel heard and like you want to know their answer, that you're interested in them. And so it signals your interest, but also you learn what's in their mind and what their experience is, which gives, arms you with more information to then ask more better questions. So it's not just about asking more, although that's a good start. It's about asking fuck great follow up questions. The, the, the benefits of question asking are almost entirely driven by the power of follow up questions.

• 1:03:27Steven Bartlett?

  So what, give me an example of asking a great follow up question.

• 1:03:30Speaker 01

  We're on a date, it's, uh, there's food, it's going really well.

• 1:03:33Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:33Speaker 01

  I've just shared with you that I went on an amazing walk down the Sunset Strip this morning.

• 1:03:38Steven Bartlett?

  And then I would say, really? Oh, my God, I've always wanted to go. Tell me, tell me about it.

• 1:03:43Speaker 01

  Oh, incredible. Um, so I got to this point, I had never been there before. There was, I had to decide, was I going to veer off and go see, um, the Marilyn Monroe apartment, which by the way, is right next to the Frank Lloyd Wright house.

• 1:03:57Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:03:58Speaker 01

  Or was I going to go a few blocks away was the Menendez Brothers' house?

• 1:04:03Steven Bartlett?

  Who's that?

• 1:04:03Speaker 01

  The two brothers who killed their parents.

• 1:04:06Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, on Netflix?

• 1:04:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:07Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:04:08Speaker 01

  So I would, literally right in between, and I was at this crossroads. Do I choose cultured? Do I choose morbid curiosity?

• 1:04:17Steven Bartlett?

  And which one did you choose?

• 1:04:18Speaker 01

  I went with cultured. I was too afraid by myself, by myself.

• 1:04:22Steven Bartlett?

  You're so cute.

• 1:04:23Speaker 01

  So, okay, so we, okay, we're off our date now. That was so fun. You were asking such lovely questions and it really helped to like cheer me on. Like you actually wanted to hear this story. Even though it might, like someone else might have been like not that interested. And then you feel embarrassed, like, oh, I just shared a bunch of vulnerable stuff. I was walking alone in LA. I had morbid curiosity about these two brothers and this story. It's very easy to make someone feel invalidated in that moment, but follow-up questions make me feel like, oh, he wants to know more. He's coming with me on this journey.

• 1:05:01Steven Bartlett?

  So did I do the right thing then?

• 1:05:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, you were doing great.

• 1:05:03Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:05:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:03Steven Bartlett?

  And what's the wrong thing to have done? For me to have just, just.

• 1:05:07Speaker 01

  Oh, imagine if I had been like, oh, I went on this amazing walk down the Sunset Strip. And you said, oh, my favorite restaurant on the Strip is a sushi place.

• 1:05:14Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, shit.

• 1:05:15Speaker 01

  Um, I, I went to this amazing restaurant and I went to this amazing store. Yeah, they carried our mez. I bought an amazing pair of boots.

• 1:05:23Steven Bartlett?

  People do that all the time.

• 1:05:24Speaker 01

  Constantly. So this is called Boomer Asking.

• 1:05:27Steven Bartlett?

  Boomer Asking?

• 1:05:27Speaker 01

  Not because of boomers. We love.

• 1:05:29Steven Bartlett?

  What are you saying?

• 1:05:30Speaker 01

  It's for people of all ages. Commit Boomer As. It's a boomerang.

• 1:05:34Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:05:34Speaker 01

  So I say to you, um.

• 1:05:36Steven Bartlett?

  I lost subscribers.

• 1:05:38Speaker 01

  No, we love boomers. So I say to you, like, Stephen, what's your favorite restaurant?

• 1:05:43Steven Bartlett?

  Mr. Chow's.

• 1:05:44Speaker 01

  Oh, I've been to Mr. Chow's. Last time I went to Mr. Chow's, I went with a whole bunch of friends and I had a friend.

• 1:05:48Steven Bartlett?

  People do that all the time.

• 1:05:50Speaker 01

  So I've asked the question, you've shared something with me. That is such a gift. Any sort of self-disclosure is such a gift. And instead of saying, oh, who did you go with? Or what did you order? Or what is it like inside? How did you like it? I bring it, the focus of the conversation right back to myself.

• 1:06:07Steven Bartlett?

  People that do that don't know they do it.

• 1:06:10Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:06:11Steven Bartlett?

  Cause I will, obviously, you know, I will go for dinner or we'll have, I don't know, 10 of my colleagues there. And then sometimes I'll have one particular colleague who is doing exactly that.

• 1:06:20Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:06:21Steven Bartlett?

  And they have no idea.

• 1:06:22Speaker 01

  Don't you want to be like, stop?

• 1:06:24Steven Bartlett?

  Yes, stop. Fuck no, just like, ask them about their thing. They're new here. We're trying to make them feel comfortable.

• 1:06:29Speaker 01

  Even one follow-up question might be enough. And so if you use this mindset of like, ask the next question before you pull it back to yourself, it sometimes can be enough. Probably many more follow-up questions is better. But even just one where I was like, oh, who did you go to Mr. Chow's with? And I let you answer, then I say, oh, I've been there too.

• 1:06:49Steven Bartlett?

  You can see it happening in their head because you say the word Mr. Chow's is your favorite restaurant. And they immediately go, boom, I've got a brilliant story about Mr. Chow's that I need to tell everybody.

• 1:06:57Speaker 01

  It makes sense that people do this. Our brains are incredibly, are wired to be egocentric. We know all of our lived experiences, our own, with 100% accuracy. We lived it. It's all up here. So anything that we see or hear in our conversations is of course going to trigger all of these memories and associations in your mind about your lived experience. And it's such an enemy of good conversation because it constantly tugs you away from being interested in the other person first.

• 1:07:26Steven Bartlett?

  The other thing I've seen in meetings, which I've had to have a couple of conversations about historically, is when someone will be talking and then someone's listening going, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I know, I'm like, oh my God, they've got something to say. And they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They're yaring them out.

• 1:07:41Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:07:42Steven Bartlett?

  They're trying to yare them into silence so that they can get their point across.

• 1:07:46Speaker 01

  Yes, right. Yes.

• 1:07:47Steven Bartlett?

  And I've had to send messages in the past to say, by the way, you were saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it made it seem to an objective observer like you weren't listening and actually you were just trying to say something. So just in the interest of you were like, you know, maybe.

• 1:07:58Speaker 01

  Maybe don't.

• 1:07:59Steven Bartlett?

  Just don't say like.

• 1:08:00Speaker 01

  How do they respond to that?

• 1:08:01Steven Bartlett?

  Well, because I didn't, I constructed it more.

• 1:08:04Speaker 01

  Tactfully.

• 1:08:04Steven Bartlett?

  Tactfully than I just described, but I thought about it a lot and I just wanted to, because I'd seen them doing this 30, 40 times in meetings.

• 1:08:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:12Steven Bartlett?

  And I don't think they realize how it's perceived.

• 1:08:16Speaker 01

  Now you know how I feel during so many conversations for so many different reasons. There are so many things like that where you see other people doing the dastardly conversational thing. And it's totally understandable why. They're excited. They have a thing they want to say. And it's preventing them from actually engaging with the person who's talking and what they're saying. All of these things are understandable. It's important to come from a place of like, of non-judgment. It's because our brains were built to wander, not focus on another person. Because we're deeply egocentric beings and we focus on our own perspective. Both of those things hold us back from really being able to engage with someone else.

• 1:08:59Speaker 01

  I want to go back to your thing of like a 10 out of 10 likability. Those are the little things, the little death by a thousand cuts to your likability are these things where it's like you're not able to actually really focus on someone else and really engage with what they're saying and ask follow up questions. And then later in the conversation, call back to something they said earlier because you're just that clever. There's so much stands in the way of doing that.

• 1:09:26Steven Bartlett?

  In that particular example I'm thinking about, I started to get negative feedback from people that worked with this person. And I noticed one day the negative feedback was, I don't think they're even listening to me.

• 1:09:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. Because they're not.

• 1:09:42Steven Bartlett?

  Because they weren't really listening. And so the minute I got the feedback was the minute I thought, you know what, Stephen, you've watched this happen. You know it's objectively true. You owe it because you're this person's report to have a conversation with them about it because it's getting in the way of their success. The fascinating thing for me is if I plot everybody I know and work with on an axis of like self-awareness as it relates to their communication. Some people are just, they kind of just got the habit. And then some people are on the other end of this spectrum where there's like no apparent self-awareness of like how they're coming across. And they're so talented and so hardworking, but this one thing of like their communication self-awareness is honestly, in some cases, the single thing, the single gravitational

• 1:10:26Steven Bartlett?

  force on their career trajectory.

• 1:10:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:10:29Steven Bartlett?

  And like, can people change? Or is it just like a genetic thing?

• 1:10:32Speaker 01

  They can. First, let me address, there are pros and cons to being at both ends of that spectrum. If you are too hyper vigilant and too self-aware, it can be distracting. It might mean that you're sort of people pleasing too, which can lead to burnout and exhaustion. If you're at this lack of self-awareness end, of course, it's going to be a real problem. And so I love teaching and coaching people at that end because you can become more self-aware. So many of my students at Harvard come into the course and that's how they are.

• 1:11:06Steven Bartlett?

  What do you mean?

• 1:11:06Speaker 01

  They are not aware of what their strengths and weaknesses are. They don't know what they're doing right and wrong. They just know they either hate conversation or aren't good at it. And so just by going through this talk course, they become much more sort of clear eyed and open to the fact that conversation is a skill that matters profoundly, not in a sort of soft skill fuzzy way, but as in a quantifiable way that impacts everything that matters to them. Like a bottom line, almost as like an economic value to them. And so just having their eyes open to the fact that like this is a skill and a skill they need to get better at, even if I don't see them getting massively better in the course of three months,

• 1:11:49Speaker 01

  it means that they are likely to get better at it over the longer term. Because now they know, now they get it. And now they know that they aren't great at it yet.

• 1:11:57Steven Bartlett?

  The world of business looks entirely different today than it did 15 years ago. Back then, building a brand meant having huge budgets, warehouses, office space and lots and lots of staff. But now you can start a business with your laptop and idea and the right tools. And I would know more so than anybody else because that's exactly what I did. Shopify is one of our longstanding sponsors on this show and they're a brand I often refer people to when they're starting their businesses because it's a tool that contains many more tools within itself. And when you're starting out, everything is everywhere. It's messy and it's confusing. So having everything in the same place is incredibly useful. Shopify puts store design, payments, inventory, shipping, and even AI tools all in one place. And you can sell directly from your website or on social media, essentially wherever your customers spend their time. It's truly a brilliant business tool.

• 1:12:42Steven Bartlett?

  So if you want to give it a go, head to Shopify.com/Bartlett and sign up for your $1 per month trial period. That's Shopify.com/Bartlett.

• 1:12:53Steven Bartlett?

  Are there anything else that, you know, we talked about death by a thousand cuts as it relates to being a 10 out of 10 conversationalist and likeable person. Are there any of these other small things that we do which are harming us by a tiny, that most people don't know they're doing?

• 1:13:08Speaker 01

  Let's move to K as I'm moving along in this framework. We're skipping L for now, which we would never skip L forever. K is for kindness. Often, we're all taught this virtue of kindness when we're children. And spend the rest of our lives sort of falling short of actually doing it in practice. I've forever been obsessed with this idea of what are like people who are actually kind, what are they thinking about? And how are they interacting with other people? What kinds of choices are they making? How do they talk to other people? And so when you say death by a thousand cuts, there are these sort of mistakes that we make in the respectfulness of our language that undermine our actual kindness to other people. Making sure you use someone's name.

• 1:13:51Speaker 01

  You gave this example in the one out of 10 is like use the wrong name. That is really meaningful. You need to know people's names and use them correctly and with appropriate formality, right? Sometimes it's wonderful to say like, hey, honey. And sometimes you need to say, it's nice to meet you, Dr. Brooks, right? Like it, you need to be able to read that. There is this paper where they studied conversations between police officers and citizens in Oakland, actually close to here, in normal traffic stops. So when police pulled over citizens and walked up to the car and said, you were speeding, you know, and they used body cam footage and got all the transcripts from these interactions and then measured the respectfulness of the language that the police officers were using.

• 1:14:36Speaker 01

  There are some really, you know, not surprising, but terrible findings that police officers were using less respectful language towards black citizens compared to white citizens. But sort of more broadly speaking, the interactions where they were using more respectful language went better. There were less conflicts. There were, they walk, they drive away without further infractions. So the tiny choices we make in our language and the language of respect is varies along like hundreds of features of language and it's a very gradient concept, but they have a real impact on how these interactions go. When we think about sort of like things like systemic racial bias, that's, it comes from that kind of stuff.

• 1:15:21Speaker 01

  That's where it leaks out is in the language we use with each other. So we can all learn to use more respectful language.

• 1:15:29Steven Bartlett?

  Do you? Think much about how our emotional state is impacting our ability to accomplish any of these things because I think, you know, the days where I'm least likely to be kind are the days where I haven't slept.

• 1:15:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:43Steven Bartlett?

  And I should probably be avoiding all conversations that day.

• 1:15:46Speaker 01

  It's really, I think, one of the biggest things I've learned from all of this work is that conversation is remarkably effortful and it requires quite a bit of energy. Even if you know how to be a good conversationalist, often we don't have the energy to actually do it. Oh, I don't have the energy to brainstorm topics. I don't have the energy to continue asking follow-up questions. I'm going to let my egocentrism take over and boomerask till the sun comes down, goes down.

• 1:16:11Steven Bartlett?

  We like boomers.

• 1:16:12Speaker 01

  Not boomers.

• 1:16:13Steven Bartlett?

  I have a difference of opinion here.

• 1:16:17Speaker 01

  I'm going to accidentally use disrespectful language and not repair that, not correct it. That's kind of what keeps me up at night is that human beings do have limitations. We are limited in time, we're limited in energy, our brains are not supercomputers. And so in practice, people who are great communicators will often fall short of their own hopes because they don't have the energy to do it.

• 1:16:41Steven Bartlett?

  I think Brené Brown said to me that when she comes home and she's out of energy, she'll just say to her partner, listen, I'm on 10% today, so I can't deal with this now.

• 1:16:49Speaker 01

  And what, talk about self-awareness. Boy, if you can do that, if you can say, and you have sturdy enough relationships at work and at home that you could say, dude, I'm like a two out of 10, you got to cut me a break today.

• 1:17:01Speaker 01

  It would be tremendously helpful. It requires quite a bit of self-awareness to recognize that you're at a two out of 10. And a lot of grace from the people around you, which means that you're going to have to give them grace in response at some point. That's what good relationships are.

• 1:17:20Steven Bartlett?

  And the L.

• 1:17:21Speaker 01

  L. Shall we put them in the correct order?

• 1:17:23Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:23Speaker 01

  P A L K. L is for levity. So we've talked a bit about difficult conversations and how they can so easily get overheated. When you think about chats that go off the rails, it's quite easy to think of hostile conflict, difficult conversations, because they're very salient, they're very memorable.

• 1:17:42Speaker 01

  There's might be shouting, there's going to be hurt feelings, defensiveness. The more common enemy of conversation is actually boredom and disengagement. So, yes, do we get annoyed with each other? Absolutely. But almost every conversation has stints of disengagement where people aren't interested. And so levity is humor and warmth to help us avoid disinterest and boredom. And levity is important for sort of happiness and engagement sake itself. You know, it matters that we're enjoying our time together. But maybe even more profoundly, if we are not leaning towards each other and interested in what the other person is saying, we can't achieve any of our other goals.

• 1:18:27Speaker 01

  Good conversation requires mutual engagement. So if I'm bored and my mind is wandering, which happens a lot because I have attentional issues, it happens to a lot of people a lot. The human mind wanders 25% of the time during conversation. So it's quite common. If your mind is wandering and you're not engaged with each other, then you can't do anything else either. Persuasion, making decisions together, brainstorming, connecting, none of it. So the L is very important because it makes things fun and enjoyable, but it's also important because we need to stay here with each other and not disengage.

• 1:19:04Steven Bartlett?

  What if you're not a warm person?

• 1:19:08Speaker 01

  It's so funny.

• 1:19:09Steven Bartlett?

  I've been accused of being very serious.

• 1:19:10Speaker 01

  Asking for a friend.

• 1:19:11Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, people say to me, people say to me a lot, like, you're very serious. I'm like, really? I think I come across as serious sometimes.

• 1:19:17Speaker 01

  I think you may come across as serious, I think, but you do come across as very warm. And so that's an important distinction.

• 1:19:24Steven Bartlett?

  You're using flattery. I've seen that on your compass.

• 1:19:26Speaker 01

  I'm not. I'm giving, I'm giving very direct feedback.

• 1:19:28Steven Bartlett?

  I've got your compass here and it says flattering. Flattery, high relational, I'm going to you.

• 1:19:34Speaker 01

  So there's, levity is two parts. It's humor and warmth. And I always start this part of my class at Harvard by saying to my students, if you're not funny and you think you never will be, it's okay. Because I don't think I'm going to be the one to make you funny within the span of two months if you are a deeply serious unfunny person. Other people believe that you can get funnier over time. We can talk about that in a moment. What I do deeply believe is that anyone can be more warm. And so warmth moves include anything, expressing gratitude. I'm so grateful for your time today. I'm so grateful for you engaging with the content of my work. Flattery, giving compliments.

• 1:20:16Speaker 01

  Just shifting topics. So if you can get better at sensing when people are getting bored with a topic and getting more courageous and assertive about switching more frequently can be very, very helpful for keeping the conversation sort of bubbling along. Callbacks. Callbacks are any reference back to something that you've talked about previously. They're total magic. It shows that you were listening to someone earlier in the conversation, maybe even earlier in your relationship, like a month ago. If I can call back to something we talked about, it shows I heard you, I was thinking about what you said, I was able to retain it in my mind, and I'm clever enough to reference back to it now.

• 1:20:59Speaker 01

  And often it has this really amazing quality where if I bring it up again, it's funny because you're like, oh shit, that's super clever. Often, a lot of people ask me, how do we end conversations well? And I have two pieces of advice there. I'm going to bring this back to callbacks. One is, nobody knows when to end conversations. It's the final topic switch, it's the final coordination choice, there's no way to know, there is no right answer. So it's better to just end it. Like be assertive, walk away, rather than hemming and hawing and feeling bad and embarrassed about it. The second piece of advice is that it's a great time to try a callback. The very last beat of the conversation, you can say, and I hope you have a great time with your girlfriend this weekend, right?

• 1:21:43Speaker 01

  Like whatever they had mentioned, oh, I'm going to go, we're going to go to see this movie. I hope you have a great time at the movie this weekend. Right? Showing that like, oh, I heard you 30 minutes ago when you told me this thing. That can help to smooth the exit ramp away.

• 1:21:57Steven Bartlett?

  I find it really useful to give people my email address to end a conversation.

• 1:22:01Speaker 01

  That's so interesting.

• 1:22:03Steven Bartlett?

  It just ends the conversation immediately.

• 1:22:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:05Steven Bartlett?

  Someone will come up to me and say, hey, I've got this business idea I want to pitch. And then they'll start pitching.

• 1:22:09Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:22:10Steven Bartlett?

  And if I could, you know, send me, here's my email, the conversation, and I shake their hand, the conversation ends immediately.

• 1:22:14Speaker 01

  Do you feel it is dismissive?

• 1:22:17Steven Bartlett?

  Maybe, however, in the context of like being in the gym.

• 1:22:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:22Steven Bartlett?

  And I'm like mid set.

• 1:22:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's fair.

• 1:22:24Steven Bartlett?

  And someone comes over and says, and I go, oh, here's my email, here's, if you want to, it seems to end the conversation. And it feels to be like, please help me here. What would be a better way to?

• 1:22:36Speaker 01

  I know, I think that's quite good because it could be perceived as a little dismissive, but that person in the gym is gonna be like, yeah, he probably doesn't want to talk about my business while he's, you know, lifting. And you're opening the door to them.

• 1:22:48Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:48Speaker 01

  You're saying, I really would love to receive an email from you.

• 1:22:52Steven Bartlett?

  It is my real email as well. I'm not giving it a fake one.

• 1:22:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you should feel like a jerk if you were giving out a fake email.

• 1:22:57Steven Bartlett?

  I do read them.

• 1:22:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Depending on your tolerance, I also don't, I think most people wouldn't be excited about having a deep conversation with a stranger at the gym. And I think giving yourself grace for that is also helpful. Like, it doesn't make you a bad person. I think of an important thing that we take from the book and this course is like, talking more is not always the answer. Often it's not. Often it's important. It's these low informational goals, right? Like protecting your time, protecting your mental health. Some people, most people are under social. Loneliness is a real problem. They don't have enough friends. They're not connected enough.

• 1:23:40Speaker 01

  But some people probably are over connected and your social portfolio is too large and there's too many people who need too many things from you. And so thinking carefully about what are your strategies to sort of stave off? Over conversation is quite worthwhile.

• 1:23:55Steven Bartlett?

  And is this introvert, ambivert, extrovert stuff real?

• 1:23:58Speaker 01

  It's a great question. People have preferences about what makes them feel connected to other people. Some people would love to go to that party with a hundred famous people.

• 1:24:09Steven Bartlett?

  Tell me about it. Zara and my team said that the thing she wants to do on a Friday after a really, really, really, really, really busy week is she wants to go to a busy coffee shop and be around loads of people. And I was like, what? She goes, yeah, it recharges me. I'm like, what are you, like, psychopath? And then there's me, who after the same week, all I want to do is be in a dark, cold room.

• 1:24:29Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:24:29Steven Bartlett?

  On my own.

• 1:24:29Speaker 01

  Yep, totally. And both of those are fair and fine. And knowing that about yourself is really helpful. I don't know as that relates to introversion and extroversion as much as like where, what are your preferences for conversation? It's both about how frequently, who do you want to be interacting with and what topics are exciting? Is she going to that coffee shop and talking about work still? Or is she like, no, I can't wait to talk about this weird other stuff to try and get work off my mind?

• 1:24:56Steven Bartlett?

  But there's those people, though, in society, we all know them, that are like, around people, they just become like a social butterfly.

• 1:25:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:03Steven Bartlett?

  They like to talk loads, they're really engaged, they're energized by it.

• 1:25:06Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:25:06Steven Bartlett?

  And then there's us lot who are just drained by that stuff. And I look at these people and go, I'm almost jealous of them. I go, I don't know how you do that.

• 1:25:14Speaker 01

  Sometimes, for sure, whether you, when you get excited around lots of people can be a huge advantage because we need to do that sometimes. I actually think possibly a better indicator of introversion might be if you went into a party or you were in a group conversation and it was super awkward, nobody's talking. Do you feel like it's your job to fix it? Extroverts would be like, that's my number one job in life. I am the one, don't worry, I'm here. I'm here to save the awkwardness. Introverts are often like, I'm gonna go loiter by the guacamole. This is not my problem and I don't want no part of it.

• 1:25:55Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:56Speaker 01

  So sometimes it's not even about the number of people that are around, but how you're managing conversation. I just put a new quiz on my website that helps people figure out what are your preferences? What are your natural habits in tricky situations like that? And it gives you a sort of type hot type. What type are you? Do you tend to sort of be avoidant? Do you tend to approach and try and fix things? And then strategies to use.

• 1:26:19Steven Bartlett?

  And what do you see in terms of percentages there?

• 1:26:21Speaker 01

  We're gonna find out. It's new. It's new. Yeah, yeah, we're just launching it. So I'm gonna find out.

• 1:26:26Steven Bartlett?

  And does it have classifications in terms of like?

• 1:26:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:28Steven Bartlett?

  How many classifications?

• 1:26:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's only three types that you could be with this quiz. And then sort of like strategies that whatever your type is, this is gonna help you in terms of topics, asking levity and kindness.

• 1:26:41Steven Bartlett?

  And what are the three categories one could be?

• 1:26:43Speaker 01

  So some, one person could be sort of an approach person who's like, and I guess probably correlated with extroversion, we'll find out. If it's awkward and quiet, you're the one that wants to jump in and fix it. There are pros and cons to this, too. If you jump in and you might say things and do things that you don't actually, aren't very proud of.

• 1:27:04Steven Bartlett?

  And might lower your value.

• 1:27:05Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:27:05Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:06Speaker 01

  There are avoiders who are like, no, thank you. I'm just gonna, I'm gonna stay here, but I'm gonna not say anything. And then there are people who are like, I'm out of here. This party sucks, right? Like, they're the exit, the exit people.

• 1:27:17Steven Bartlett?

  I feel attacked. No, but I, you know, that's interesting because is it true that some people who overtalk are less respected? Can you overtalk? I, I had this, um, this thought many years ago, based on, again, observations I'd seen in boardrooms that I'd been in. And I'd see 12 of my team members in a boardroom trying to come to an idea for a campaign we were doing.

• 1:27:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:40Steven Bartlett?

  And I noticed that one particular person, who I shan't name, many years ago in our New York office, would talk so much and too, I would say too much, to the extent that the next time they spoke, I could see everybody in the room not paying attention and discounting it before it had come. So I came up with this idea. I was like, I think we all have a contribution score.

• 1:28:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:01Steven Bartlett?

  Like a credit score.

• 1:28:02Speaker 01

  Love that.

• 1:28:03Steven Bartlett?

  And it's based on how thoughtful. And valuable our previous contributions have been.

• 1:28:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:11Steven Bartlett?

  And what I would see is with this particular person, I shall call her Katie. The minute she spoke halfway through her first sentence, I could see the person sat next to her basically just pre rebuttling it.

• 1:28:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:21Steven Bartlett?

  Like pre dismissing it.

• 1:28:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:23Steven Bartlett?

  And then on the contrary, there's another particular person in our in our Manchester office back in the day, who spoke so little that the minute they spoke, it was like the room fell silent and we all just swung our heads over to them.

• 1:28:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:34Steven Bartlett?

  Because you're like, here comes a really good take.

• 1:28:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:36Steven Bartlett?

  So I thought everybody has a contribution score, protect yours.

• 1:28:39Speaker 01

  Yes. So group conversation is incredibly complicated. And one of the most difficult things is so obvious is just how do we share airtime? There are always going to be people who have high power tend to take up more airtime just naturally. It's something that high power people need to fight against because it's not productive. And it makes lower power people feel like they're not welcome to join. But then if you just look at airtime balance, the person who's dominating the airtime, that is not productive, right? Like especially if they're not the expert. Okay, that's where things get problematic. You can imagine a balance where, okay, there might be a group where we are all dying to hear, we need to talk about aerospace engineering and only one out of the 10 of us is an aerospace engineer.

• 1:29:23Speaker 01

  I want to hear that guy talk for 45 minutes and I want to learn everything I possibly can in that in that time. The it becomes problematic when the person dominating the airtime is not the sole expert or maybe not an expert at all.

• 1:29:39Speaker 01

  There's another piece to this, and I love your idea of a contribution score, where talking is not the only way to add value to a group. There are so many roles that people play. There are timekeepers, there's someone who's writing on the board at the same time. Often the person holding the pen ends up being the most powerful person because they're making diagrams and taking notes and they decide what is worthy of being up on the board. There are people who keep the agenda. So we're saying, okay, here are the topics we want to talk about here, the goals we came in with, we want to make this decision. I'd like to note that we haven't moved to the pasture where we're going to make the decision, right? The person who is sort of facilitating the meeting becomes very valuable.

• 1:30:21Speaker 01

  So there's all kinds of, so there's goals, there's roles in a group, and then there's the soul, the warmth of it all.

• 1:30:28Steven Bartlett?

  The other thing in line with that, that I've noticed from people with a low contribution score in businesses that I've got, whatever, is They're bad switches.

• 1:30:37Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:30:38Steven Bartlett?

  And it appears to be linked. What I mean by a bad switcher is the group will be talking about.

• 1:30:44Speaker 01

  I see. Yes, yes, yes.

• 1:30:44Steven Bartlett?

  Do you know what I mean?

• 1:30:45Speaker 01

  They're not, they're unwilling to go where the group wants to go and they come, they keep coming back to their thing or they're, they're like.

• 1:30:51Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, or something completely unrelated.

• 1:30:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:54Steven Bartlett?

  As if they just needed to say something.

• 1:30:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:56Steven Bartlett?

  And it just, it veers the group off the subject. So the group are talking about, let's just say, we're talking about a campaign we're doing for Starbucks. And we're saying, do you think we should do an event in Manhattan? And because it almost seems like they can't not talk, they'll say,

• 1:31:15Steven Bartlett?

  I went on holiday to Manhattan once and it was, and it was, it was voted in the top 15 on the Forbes list of best places to go. And you just go, and you just look and go, well, that's not one.

• 1:31:26Speaker 01

  What if that person, let me play devil's advocate for a second. What if they made a joke about New York that was actually funny? Slightly off topic.

• 1:31:34Steven Bartlett?

  Great.

• 1:31:35Speaker 01

  But actually funny. And then you get right back into.

• 1:31:37Steven Bartlett?

  Right.

• 1:31:38Speaker 01

  It's great. So it's not about, in that case, it's not about bad switching. It's about egocentrism. You're not reading the room well. You're not serving the goals of the group.

• 1:31:49Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:49Speaker 01

  Right? Levity, moments of levity often are about briefly switching to an adjacent topic and then switching back.

• 1:31:57Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:57Speaker 01

  And it's actually worth that sidebar because it's fun. And everybody's like, oh, thank God. I don't have to like circle the drain on New York for a million more minutes. The problem is this guy is chiming in being like, let me tell you about the time I went to New York.

• 1:32:12Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. And, and the collective are trying to go in one direction. I actually think this, about this a lot in the context of podcasting. I would hate to have a co-host.

• 1:32:21Speaker 01

  It would be very hard.

• 1:32:23Steven Bartlett?

  It would be so hard because in my mind, there's a particular direction I'm, I'm going in.

• 1:32:27Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:32:28Steven Bartlett?

  And if they weren't aligned with the direction I'm going in, it's rough. And you see it sometimes with, on podcasts with a co-host where they're going in a direction, talking about immigration.

• 1:32:37Speaker 01

  And they say like, but wait, wait, wait, just one thing, one quick thing before we move on. And then you go back.

• 1:32:41Steven Bartlett?

  They go to a different direction.

• 1:32:42Speaker 01

  And you're like, oh, my gosh.

• 1:32:43Steven Bartlett?

  And as a viewer, you're like, oh, you are making progress towards the crux of the issue, but this. But I think that's what I'm talking about. Like, how would you make sure you're moving in the right direction as the group?

• 1:32:52Speaker 01

  And this is a great example because we often think of one-on-one conversation as the same task as a three-person group. As soon as a third person pulls up a chair, whether it's a podcast, co-host, or a friend at a bar, that task, it's a categorically different task now because that third person has the power to take you on sidebars. It's no longer being co-created intimately between two minds. All of a sudden, we get into this like coordination kerfuffle that can be very, very frustrating. I suspect that's part of why you don't like groups, actually, is that you like so strongly prefer one-on-one.

• 1:33:31Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, I think that's true. I think that's true. I prefer one-on-one. I prefer the depth and small talk feels like really disingenuous sometimes.

• 1:33:40Speaker 01

  Can I push you? Do you think it's about control? Because, imagine you had a co-host, the problem, the reason you'd feel so frustrated with that, yes, it's about the flow of the conversation getting to a magical moment. It's also like, oh, you have to relinquish control to someone else in that moment.

• 1:33:58Steven Bartlett?

  It's interesting because I was with a colleague of mine the other day and we were interviewing some people. So we're just saying we're interviewing three people.

• 1:34:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:07Steven Bartlett?

  The first interview, I told her to lead the interview and I enjoyed the interview because I could watch her go in her direction, felt very like a straight line. The second interview, I didn't say anything and what happened is I started asking them a question. Now, I'm sat there asking this guy a question because I'm trying to figure out this particular answer. So I'm kind of like circling this issue, not kind of giving it away. And I'm getting one step closer and another step closer. And then my colleague comes in and asks a completely different question.

• 1:34:35Speaker 01

  And you're like, oh.

• 1:34:36Steven Bartlett?

  And I'm like, oh, no. I was like so close to figuring out this thing about them that I suspect is a red flag.

• 1:34:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:42Steven Bartlett?

  And then she came and asked a question and then I'm sat there going, oh my God, no, no, I have to go right back to this completely different subject and stop.

• 1:34:49Speaker 01

  And you're never going to get your answer.

• 1:34:51Steven Bartlett?

  So anyway, afterwards, I had a conversation with her and I said, listen, when we do interviews, I think we need to clarify who's leading.

• 1:34:56Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:34:56Steven Bartlett?

  I'll sit and listen when you do it, then when I do it, you sit and, you know.

• 1:34:59Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:34:59Steven Bartlett?

  And so I think that's part of it.

• 1:35:02Speaker 01

  That's part of the roles thing I was talking about before too, right? Like, there's this roles of like, you're scribing, you're keeping time, whatever. But also being, having clarity about like, who's the topic leader here?

• 1:35:12Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:13Speaker 01

  And clarity, especially in a group of three, can be incredibly helpful. And lack of it is chaotic.

• 1:35:19Steven Bartlett?

  A nightmare.

• 1:35:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:35:22Steven Bartlett?

  What is the most important thing we haven't talked about as it relates to likability and having great conversations and dislikeability, if that's a word?

• 1:35:29Speaker 01

  I want to distance ourselves from likability. I think likability is one very narrow goal of good conversation.

• 1:35:35Steven Bartlett?

  What other things do people care about? Do you know why I use certain words?

• 1:35:39Speaker 01

  Tell me.

• 1:35:39Steven Bartlett?

  Is because the audience have told me. Shall I tell you what they care about?

• 1:35:43Speaker 01

  Please.

• 1:35:43Steven Bartlett?

  They care about dealing with narcissists.

• 1:35:45Speaker 01

  Good.

• 1:35:46Steven Bartlett?

  They care about how to have difficult.

• 1:35:47Speaker 01

  Because they struggle with it?

• 1:35:50Steven Bartlett?

  I guess so, yeah.

• 1:35:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's an interesting label. It's very accusatory of other people.

• 1:35:54Steven Bartlett?

  Very accusatory.

• 1:35:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:56Steven Bartlett?

  Because I think everybody thinks the person they disagree with is narcissist. It's like advice words, like, just.

• 1:36:00Speaker 01

  So a reframe of it is they struggle with disagreement.

• 1:36:04Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:05Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:36:05Steven Bartlett?

  The other thing is they care a lot about difficult conversations. It's the bane of their life. They struggle with them, they avoid them, they think if they could only get good at it, then they'd be everything they want to be.

• 1:36:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:16Steven Bartlett?

  They care about being liked.

• 1:36:18Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:36:19Steven Bartlett?

  They care about avoiding things that make them disliked that they're unaware of.

• 1:36:23Speaker 01

  Ah.

• 1:36:24Steven Bartlett?

  That they're doing.

• 1:36:24Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:36:25Steven Bartlett?

  I would say, I guess the fifth one is they, they care a lot about persuasion. Remarkably, and Julian Trezor, who did that TED Talk about speaking, told me this. People don't really care much about listening.

• 1:36:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:36:39Steven Bartlett?

  He told me he did two TED Talks.

• 1:36:40Speaker 01

  Because they don't know. It's funny, it's, it's so interesting to hear you say those things. To me, those are all very related to each other and revealing that people don't have great instincts about their strengths and weaknesses and what's hard and easy about conversation. Persuasion, difficult conversations, thinking other people are narcissists.

• 1:37:06Speaker 01

  And being liked, they're all related to mismanaging conflict and disagreement and struggling to manage moments of difficulty well. The social landscape of all conversation is so much broader than people realize, I think, because they were so narrowly focused on these very noticeable, memorable, salient moments of disagreement that we're like, oh shit, that's hard. And we got mad and it ruined and we broke up.

• 1:37:38Steven Bartlett?

  Of course.

• 1:37:39Speaker 01

  But you're also super boring, like 80% of the time. And also, you're not really listening to other people. You're missing so many opportunities to actually learn from people because you're not listening, you're not asking enough follow up questions. You're not asking enough questions at all. You're spending too much time talking about yourself.

• 1:37:59Steven Bartlett?

  Like, obviously, this is what people like, because the thing that I will remember the most is the conflict, the issue, the problem, the emotional situation. People don't think they're boring.

• 1:38:10Speaker 01

  I know. It's hard to, it's such a, it's a much harder thing to notice.

• 1:38:15Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:15Speaker 01

  And it's a much harder thing to get feedback about because no one's going to be like, hey, bro, you're boring.

• 1:38:21Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. And if the things I'm interested in, by way of me being interested, I think they're interesting. So I think that, I'm just making stuff up, Pokemon, I think that's the most important, interesting thing in the world.

• 1:38:31Speaker 01

  And let me now tell you everything I know about Pokemon. It's like this misunderstanding of what the purpose of conversation is not to say things we know at other people. It's about finding things we're both interested in and then learning everything that you know about that. Now, I'm just gonna like, take a journey through your brain of everything that you think and feel about this thing that we're both interested in. And on that journey, we might land in this magical place where I'm learning stuff from you, you find me quite charming, we're laughing together and we feel seen and known and understood. But it's definitely not going to be me telling you about Pokemon if you're deeply disinterested in it.

• 1:39:11Steven Bartlett?

  And this is the difference between being interesting and interested, we think.

• 1:39:15Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:39:16Steven Bartlett?

  Like, I think that the game of being interesting is to show you.

• 1:39:19Speaker 01

  Life is not about walking through life, giving like mini speeches or like mini TED Talks, right? It's about conversation is interactive, it's co-created with two independent minds. Entrepreneurs make this mistake a lot, too. They, they, maybe driven by, you know, Dragon's Den and Shark Tank, you feel like, it's not your fault, you feel like you need to stand up there and like pitch your idea. And in order to be successful, you give the most compelling public speech about it. Most entrepreneurs or business owners actually are talking to investors and colleagues and potential partners, strategic partners, in conversation. And so before you get to the point where you're like, let me tell you about my amazing

• 1:40:03Speaker 01

  company, you need to ask them a million questions and get to know them and understand what their pain points are and how many kids they have and what they actually care about. So if you're lucky, the thing that, and product or service you have actually fills that need and be like, guess what? I have this amazing thing for you. Wouldn't you love to invest in it?

• 1:40:23Steven Bartlett?

  Andrew Bustamante said something to me about this. He said, um, he's a spy for the CIA.

• 1:40:27Speaker 01

  Cool.

• 1:40:28Steven Bartlett?

  For about 10 years. And he said, one of the things you, you have to train yourself to understand as a spy is that there's a difference between your perspective, which is like what I see right now.

• 1:40:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:40:39Steven Bartlett?

  And in my perspective, I see a mirror over there and there's an award and I see some things behind you. I see two cameras over your shoulder, I see that, there's a wooden beam over there behind you, by the way, and there's like some green tape above there. And then there's your perception.

• 1:40:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:40:50Steven Bartlett?

  Your perception is all this shit. Like, I couldn't see any of this stuff.

• 1:40:53Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:40:53Steven Bartlett?

  Behind me.

• 1:40:54Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:40:55Steven Bartlett?

  And he said, like, as a spy, they train you to sit in the other person's perception. Because if you can't do that, you're never going to be able to persuade them. Like, you have to realize that actually, you sat in front of me, have a different brain.

• 1:41:05Speaker 01

  And the only, I can guess what's in your brain. I can guess, maybe there's a mirror behind me, maybe there's art, maybe there's just a wall. I can guess, based on what I see, based on what I've experienced, we're in a room, so I'm going to guess there's some sort of wall behind me and not out into the street. But we're really bad at guessing. Tons of psychological research suggests that human beings are terrible at using our own experiences to guess other people's perceptual realities. Guess your perspective. So instead of guessing, I need to ask you, hey, Stephen, what do you see behind me? I need to ask you directly, how does that make you feel? Why do you think it was built that way? What do you feel when you're sitting here? Why do you think it's asymmetrical? Why do I see books, but you don't?

• 1:41:50Speaker 01

  The only way to truly understand another person's mind is to ask them and to talk about it.

• 1:41:56Steven Bartlett?

  I asked my assistant Sophie to find me a reliable security system for my new place in LA. What she discovered is that most available options have the same issue. They're reactive and only take action after someone has broken into your house. Simply Safe, who sponsors this show, has a completely different approach. If someone's lurking near your home or office, their AI-powered cameras detect them, then human agents who act like a remote security guard take action, speaking directly to the intruder, letting them know they're being watched on camera, and if necessary, triggering a siren or spotlight to scare them off. Or they can call 911 for police dispatch. This immediate response is why I went with Simply Safe. No one else approaches security in the same way. They have no long-term contracts or hidden fees, so you can cancel at any time.

• 1:42:41Steven Bartlett?

  They also have a 60-day money-back guarantee. My audience can save 50% on a Simply Safe home security system at simplisafe.com/DOAC. That is simplisafe.com/DOAC. There's no safe like a Simply Safe. You know, every once in a while, you come across a product that has such a huge impact on your life that you'd probably describe it as a game changer. And I would say for about 35 to 40% of my team, they would currently describe this product that I have in front of me called Ketone IQ, which you can get at ketone.com, as a game changer. But the reason I became a co-owner of this company and the reason why they now are a sponsor of this podcast is because one day when I came to work, there was a box of this stuff sat on my desk.

• 1:43:26Steven Bartlett?

  I had no idea what it was. Lily in my team says that this company has been in touch. So I went upstairs, tried it, and quite Frankly, the rest is history. In terms of my focus, my energy levels, how I feel, how I work, how productive I am, game changer. So if you want to give it a try, visit ketone.com/steven for 30% off. You'll also get a free gift with your second shipment. And now you can find Ketone IQ at Target stores across the United States, where your first shot is completely free of charge.

• 1:43:56Steven Bartlett?

  So when I go into a business meeting, or I'm trying to persuade someone to, I don't know, join our company, whatever, at the beginning of that conversation, are there key questions that I should be using to understand their ideology, like understand the hero's journey that they have in their head of them?

• 1:44:15Speaker 01

  You should ask more and listen to their answers and then ask the next question.

• 1:44:20Steven Bartlett?

  What kind of questions?

• 1:44:21Speaker 01

  A good one that I like to start with is what are you excited about lately?

• 1:44:24Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:44:24Speaker 01

  Right? It's very revealing of what is top of mind. You asked me that question today. Loved it. It also implies that you knew what they were excited about previously. So it can help you kind of revisit that a bit over time. Whatever, everyone has an answer to that question, even if they're terribly depressed, they're excited about something, maybe the prospect of making a friend. And anything that someone is excited about means you can stay on that topic and ask more. Oh, well, what could I do to help you do that? Right? Like, we can just carry on down that path.

• 1:44:59Steven Bartlett?

  When I asked you that question three hours ago, you said two things. You said about putting curriculum into schools, but you also talked about men and their conversations. And you said you had done a study recently about men. This is me remembering what you said.

• 1:45:12Speaker 01

  Call back. Loving it. Loving it.

• 1:45:15Steven Bartlett?

  Thank you for that. But men and their conversations. You said you'd done an interesting study recently, which I can't go into the details about, but it was revealing about male friendship.

• 1:45:22Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:45:23Steven Bartlett?

  Are men bad at communication? If so, why are we bad at communication?

• 1:45:27Speaker 01

  Conversation's hard. When you look under the hood, it looks more like a train wreck.

• 1:45:31Steven Bartlett?

  You're being diplomatic.

• 1:45:32Speaker 01

  Than, I will be, I'll be less diplomatic in a moment. It looks more like a train wreck than a sort of tidy script that you would see on a TV show. It's messy. We make mistakes. We have to repair it. We need to check our understanding. We need to make apologies constantly. So perfection is not the goal for anyone in conversation. When you look at gender differences. There are real gender differences. We know that in friendship, women tend to actually face each other and talk to each other. Men tend to do activities, right? Shoulder to shoulder. We're fishing, we're playing basketball, we're in fantasy sports on our computers. This project that I did recently, I always spend lots of time analyzing transcripts at very large scale.

• 1:46:16Speaker 01

  This project, though, I was observing conversations live. And for whatever reason, that was much more visceral than what I usually do as a scientist. And it was all men, meeting other men for the first time and sort of trying to forge friendships. And what was so hard to watch is that they don't, they really struggled with vulnerability. Vulnerability is such a key component of friendship. Friendship experts say you need consistency, so interacting repeatedly, positivity, having fun together, but maybe most importantly, vulnerability, like sharing not only your feelings with each other, but like, what are you struggling with? What are your, what are your hopes and dreams? What are your goals? What do you want to get out of this?

• 1:47:00Speaker 01

  It was so maddening to watch these men have hundreds of conversations and like, none of them asked those questions or talked about those things with each other. As a woman, it was, it was almost shocking because it's sort of like what women would probably talk about within the first three minutes of the conversation. And I couldn't believe, I was like, wow, this is really, this really seems like a massive difference. And I worry that large scale, the leap from being basketball buddies or fantasy sports buddies into vulnerable conversation feels so scary and risky that men are unable to make the leap.

• 1:47:44Speaker 01

  And that's a huge part of what's holding back men from having meaningful friendships. And we know that loneliness is so much worse for men than for women.

• 1:47:53Steven Bartlett?

  And they have way less friends.

• 1:47:55Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. Ridiculous proportion of men say, report having zero close friends. Forty percent, potentially?

• 1:48:03Steven Bartlett?

  Wow.

• 1:48:06Speaker 01

  It's quite troubling. And I think that I think their conversation skills and courage. Listen, everything that we've talked about, choosing good topics, shifting to new topics when they get boring, asking good questions, asking follow up questions, finding moments of levity, apologizing, listening, all of these things take a surprising amount of courage and confidence. And it feels like this thing for men who have been socialized to believe that vulnerability is a sign of weakness. It feels like it's like almost takes too much courage for them to make that leap in their relationships. And it's quite problematic.

• 1:48:46Steven Bartlett?

  Men are 400% more likely to say they have no one to turn to in a time of crisis. Half of men say they are unsatisfied with their friendships. Men's number of close friends has dropped by 30 to 40% since 1990.

• 1:49:01Speaker 01

  Men come to rely on their in heterosexual relationships, come to rely on their partner for emotional fulfillment and support. Women do not. So when, you know, a woman, a female spouse dies, men have to remarry to fill that void. They don't have that friendship. When a husband dies, the woman has her friends to support her.

• 1:49:22Steven Bartlett?

  So how can I, how can I make more friends as a man?

• 1:49:24Speaker 01

  I think it's really one conversation at a time. The power you have as a, as an individual is signaling to other men, hey, let's take this courageous leap. Like, here's a question you can ask. What have you been struggling with recently? What do you hope to achieve? But what have you, but what kind of thing have you been thinking about that you haven't shared with anyone before?

• 1:49:45Steven Bartlett?

  And in the study you did, what kind, give me a flavor of how the conversation sounded.

• 1:49:49Speaker 01

  Hey, man, you want to get, oh, this, this hot dog is gross. Yeah, it's really gross. Yeah, this is, yeah, I don't like the food.

• 1:50:02Speaker 01

  I'm gonna go take a nap. It's like narrating what's happening around you. Sometimes they'd be like, where are you from? Or...

• 1:50:13Steven Bartlett?

  And then that would turn into a narration?

• 1:50:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:50:15Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, I love Chicago. It has that fucking team.

• 1:50:19Speaker 01

  Uh, I hate the Chicago Bears. Oh yeah, I remember when so and so played there. Then you devolve into the sports talk, which can be important, but you... Can you move a step beyond and be like,

• 1:50:31Speaker 01

  did you ever feel vulnerable when you played football in high school? Right? Like, or like, what did you struggle with in terms of sports? Why didn't you play college sports? Whatever, wherever, whatever the topic is, you can take that next step to make it actually personal and vulnerable and interesting so that you walk away one step closer to having an actual friend and not just someone you say things you know to.

• 1:50:58Steven Bartlett?

  I did a talk in Canary Wharf a couple of weeks, couple of, hmm, maybe a year ago, and a kid stood up in the front row. You've got to bear in mind, there's 500 young, I say young, I mean probably 21. They're all working in this part of London called Canary Wharf, where you kind of, your first job after university. 500 people in this room, kid stands up front row, says, "Hi, my question is, um, I want to know how to make friends."

• 1:51:24Steven Bartlett?

  And it was shocking to me because I could see 499 of his peers stood next to him. But he had the guts to stand up in front of all these people and say, "Hi Stephen, my question is, how do you make friends?"

• 1:51:34Speaker 01

  It's a fabulous question, isn't it?

• 1:51:36Steven Bartlett?

  If he'd asked you that question, he might be listening now.

• 1:51:40Speaker 01

  Hello, friend. Starts with hello. And the number of times that I have run conversation exercises as part of my class and the students at the end of that very first session say, "This is the first time I've turned to the person next to me and actually talked to them." It's like every time I do that first session. Thank you. Thank you for the opportunity to turn, the reason, giving us a reason to turn to each other and actually talk. Get to know my classmates.

• 1:52:08Speaker 01

  Even that takes tremendous courage, especially if there are norms of not doing, of coming in, sitting down at a desk or in an auditorium and being on your phone. So literally turning to someone next to you and saying like, hey, I'm Alison. What's your name? Where are you from? Starting, right?

• 1:52:23Steven Bartlett?

  God, we don't do that in the UK. It's like creepy behavior.

• 1:52:25Speaker 01

  It's okay. And that's you do need to read the room, right? Like, it's maybe not appropriate.

• 1:52:29Steven Bartlett?

  It's a shame.

• 1:52:30Speaker 01

  It's a, it can be a shame. It depends on the norms. Once you are engaged with people, it's all of the talk things. What topics will they actually find helpful to them? Are you asking questions? Are you listening and asking follow-up questions? Are you moving beyond just trading things you know? Are you learning about each other in a way that feels revealing? That's where real relationships come from.

• 1:52:57Steven Bartlett?

  What is, um, what are these here?

• 1:52:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, let's find out.

• 1:53:00Steven Bartlett?

  This list of questions here.

• 1:53:01Speaker 01

  Oh, this is an exercise that I do. This is based on a very well-known exercise called 36 Questions to Fall in Love.

• 1:53:07Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, I heard about that.

• 1:53:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, Arthur Aron. It was in the New York Times many years ago. It's based on some academic research. This is 10, a subset of 10 of those 36 questions. An exercise I do in my class called 10 Questions to Fall in Like Instead of Love.

• 1:53:22Steven Bartlett?

  So if I ask someone those 10 questions, they're gonna like me?

• 1:53:25Speaker 01

  Probably, yeah. More than if you didn't ask the questions. What you wanna do is you actually go back and forth and ask each other these questions. So the first one is, what are you excited about lately? Next is, what is something you're good at but don't like doing? What's something you're bad at but love to do? Is there something you'd like to learn more about? Is there something you'd like to learn how to do? What can we celebrate about you? Has someone made you laugh recently? What's something cute your kid, friend, pet, or partner has been doing? Did you grow up in a city? And have you fallen in love with any new music, books, movies, shows lately? It's just 10 questions that are of this flavor that many people, but I suspect lots of men, don't ask. That are a great starting point. It's just the first turn, right?

• 1:54:10Speaker 01

  You have to actually listen to what the person says and ask follow-up questions to really deepen the conversation and move up that topic pyramid. But these are good questions. You could prep just one or two of them. You could carry two of them in your back pocket all the time as go-to topics for people. So when this opportunity arises, you could ask them. I like the one, what are you excited about lately? That's my go to with a lot of people. Also, like, have you, are you obsessed with any shows right now? It's pretty, a pretty good one, too. But the key is not just asking that question, but actually asking follow up questions about, like, why do you connect with that show? What do you see in the main character? Do you see anything from the main character that you see in yourself? You know, you gotta get more, gotta get deeper into it.

• 1:54:55Speaker 01

  The original research with the 36 questions to fall in love suggests that going through these 36 questions makes you like each other a lot. And certainly, these 10 questions would help you start. If you need the excuse, I would love for your listeners to blame me. If you're feeling, if they feel nervous to ask questions like this, especially boys or men, say, like, I saw this crazy lady on Diary of a CEO, and she said, I should try asking this question, so I'm gonna try. I, my, even my students at Harvard find that quite helpful to have a scapegoat, to point at me and say, my professor made me do this. But it doesn't matter who makes you do it, whether it's yourself or someone else, the

• 1:55:37Speaker 01

  fact is that you're doing it, and they're gonna answer this question, and then you can ask a follow up, and it's the beginning of a friendship.

• 1:55:46Steven Bartlett?

  I did that when I was younger to a girl I was interested in. I'd seen that Ted Talk about the 36 questions, whatever. And I said to her over text message, I was like, I wanna play a game with you, something that I've just watched, are you willing to play it with me? She said, yes. I asked her these 36 questions. And at the end of it, I told her about the research and whatever, in a non creepy way.

• 1:56:06Speaker 01

  You're a real dork, yeah.

• 1:56:07Steven Bartlett?

  But like, but it did, it did exactly that. We, I, it taught me that vulnerability is the doorway to connection.

• 1:56:12Speaker 01

  That's right. It's the doorway to connection, it's what makes relationships real. Without it, you don't have real friendship, right? It's, again, it's consistency of interaction, positivity, so you can't be plagued by negativity and fighting and anger, but positively fun, being relaxed around each other, having positive experiences, but then vulnerability. You have to learn these things about each other so that you feel known to each other, and feel like they're uniquely sharing stuff with you.

• 1:56:43Steven Bartlett?

  What about persuasion? Have you got any, any useful, actionable advice for me on how to be a better salesperson? And when I say salesperson, I don't mean I'm trying to sell someone a car. I mean, trying to convince other people of my ideas.

• 1:56:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:56:58Steven Bartlett?

  So that when I do talks in companies, oftentimes someone will stand up and say, I'm trying to persuade my boss to do X innovative thing. They won't listen to me. Have you got any tips for me to persuade them? But also persuasion is at all levels, right?

• 1:57:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:57:12Steven Bartlett?

  Up, down, left, right, in organizations and, and in the world.

• 1:57:15Speaker 01

  We are persuaded by people we trust and like and admire, right? It's people we interact with and over time we bend to their view or we are compelled by what they're sharing with us because we know that they are smart and trustworthy and we like them. Persuasion doesn't often happen within the bounds of one conversation.

• 1:57:35Speaker 01

  It could if you are asking lots of questions and able to sort of sit on the same side of a table together and say, hey, let's learn as much as we can about this complicated tangle of yarn, whatever that topic is. Let's see if we can pull threads together and figure this out. We were talking earlier about receptiveness to opposing viewpoints. Ironically, if you push yourself to learn as much as you can about the other person and validate their views, however you, you view those views, over the longer term, you are more likely to be persuasive because they're willing to stay engaged with you and listen to what you have to say in return.

• 1:58:14Steven Bartlett?

  Because they feel heard and understood.

• 1:58:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. And they trust that you're not a jerk and that you're reasonable and that you're open even to their crazy viewpoints.

• 1:58:23Steven Bartlett?

  I have learned that actually in my relationships that if I make the other person feel heard and understood, they.

• 1:58:28Speaker 01

  Validate, you validate.

• 1:58:29Steven Bartlett?

  Validate, that's a good word.

• 1:58:31Speaker 01

  Validate, it's, and, and validation is not equivalent to agreement. You can validate, validate, validate, validate, validate, and then go on to vehemently disagree.

• 1:58:40Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:40Speaker 01

  And probably that disagreement is going to go a lot better after you validated them quite a bit.

• 1:58:47Steven Bartlett?

  Like the, the mistakes I made in maybe past relationships were when I didn't validate, it was kind of like a broken record. The person continued to make the same point because they didn't feel heard and understood.

• 1:58:55Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:58:56Steven Bartlett?

  But if I validate, remarkable thing happens where they, the kind of record player stops and then you can make your case.

• 1:59:02Speaker 01

  It's like a magic trick. There's really beautiful research recently that people conflate agreement with listening.

• 1:59:12Speaker 01

  I only think you're listening when you're agreeing with me. And then, and when you disagree with me, I feel like you're not hearing me. You're not listening because obviously what I'm saying is so sensical and so compelling. But if you're disagreeing with it, you're literally not hearing me. Agreement and listening are not the same thing, but in our minds, we get mixed up about it.

• 1:59:34Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, so I should start every sentence with, I agree, even if I don't.

• 1:59:37Speaker 01

  I would.

• 1:59:37Steven Bartlett?

  Interesting, I agree.

• 1:59:38Speaker 01

  I think you should start with, tell me more. It makes sense that you feel this way and I'd like to understand how you came to hold this viewpoint. I think you should start with validation before you do anything else.

• 1:59:54Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, Julian Treasure, what he said to me was that he did two TED Talks, one of them about speaking, one of them about listening. Rough numbers, he said the one about speaking did 40 million views. The one about listening did like a fraction of that.

• 2:00:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, and listening is a, is a, it's a weird concept to codify. And most people don't realize that it's a very, very high level skill.

• 2:00:17Steven Bartlett?

  It's interesting as to why they don't think it's important. I think we think of things, active things.

• 2:00:22Speaker 01

  That's right. And speaking in particular, public speaking is very nerve wracking. It's like an activity that makes people incredibly nervous. So any little thing that you could toss my way that might reduce even a sliver of that anxiety and make me better at it. People are so hungry for, it's, it's sort of like more obvious.

• 2:00:40Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:40Speaker 01

  Right, it's more salient, it's more active, like you're saying.

• 2:00:43Steven Bartlett?

  Listening is easy, just say nothing.

• 2:00:44Speaker 01

  Literally, oh, listening, people think that listening is like, oh, just sit there.

• 2:00:48Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:48Speaker 01

  When in fact, it's incredibly effortful. It's incredibly hard because our minds are built to wander, right? Our minds are wandering at least a 25% of the time, probably a lot more than that. And people who are good at it, when we think of people who are charismatic, likeable, smart, savvy. It's not because of what they're saying, it's because of how they're listening and reacting to what they've heard.

• 2:01:12Steven Bartlett?

  Mike Baker, who's another spy, who was a spy for 20 years, I think, with the CIA in America, said to me that much of the job of being a spy and persuading and manipulating a target in a foreign land to give over secrets, he said to me that he would, for example, let's just say it was in Afghanistan, he had landed in Afghanistan, he would find the taxi driver that was driving the government official who he wanted secrets from. And he said to me, he might spend seven weeks in that taxi, doing nothing but listening to this guy.

• 2:01:41Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:01:42Steven Bartlett?

  Listening to the taxi driver.

• 2:01:43Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:01:43Steven Bartlett?

  Because he said, most people in their life have not had someone listen to them uninterrupted for like 10 minutes. And when you listen to someone, they will offload about themselves.

• 2:01:52Speaker 01

  Especially if you ask follow up questions.

• 2:01:54Steven Bartlett?

  Exactly. So, and he, and he asked, so what are you doing when you're listening? He was just asking them and just, you know, asking a follow up question and they would take me down the path they wanted to take me. And by week seven of the eight weeks, I would understand what motivates them.

• 2:02:08Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 2:02:08Steven Bartlett?

  And I would have heard in week seven that their son has a knee injury and they're very worried about their son's health. And then in week eight, when I got in the taxi, I'd make a proposition to them. I'd say, I know your son has a bad knee, we can take care of him.

• 2:02:21Speaker 01

  This is exactly the same thing that I was saying about entrepreneurs, right? You can, you gotta have a relationship, ask questions, questions, questions, questions, questions, before you finally get to the thing where you're like, I have a proposition for you.

• 2:02:33Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:34Speaker 01

  Right? Two things about listening. First, I'm not surprised to hear that. A taxi driver is a very simple relationship. They're serving one very clear purpose in that person's life. Interacting with someone like a romantic partner or a work colleague, they, what we, it's called multiplexity. They're serving many more roles. Your girlfriend is lover, friend, co chef, you keep a home together, you're coordinating domestic tasks. So she's serving all of these purposes. That's much more complicated to sort through and there will be conflicts of interest between those roles that she plays in your life. A way that you would talk to the future mother of your children is quite different than how you would talk to your chef.

• 2:03:17Speaker 01

  And yet she is both of those things to you, right? So a taxi driver is easier to talk to in a way because it's simpler. Okay, that's one thing. The next thing is about listening as a skill, like the spy is saying. I'm not surprised to hear that he's asking follow up questions. Often, people think of listening as something that happens silently. You're just sitting there absorbing, and that is part of it. But listening is actually three parts. The first is perception. I'm seeing you. I'm observing everything that's happening about you during our conversation and everything in your environment. And then there's auditory cues. I'm hearing your voice. I'm hearing these acoustic things like, mm, uh huh, yeah, uh huh. And the tone of your voice and how quickly you speak. So we take in all this stuff.

• 2:04:02Speaker 01

  Then we process some of it. We elaborate on some of the things that you've said, and I think more deeply. I can't process all of it because it's a lot of information. What's so unique about conversation is there's a third step where I can reflect back to you what I've heard. I can say, oh, that's so interesting that you met this guy who was a spy who rode in the taxi. Can you tell me more about that? I've now indicated to you that I was listening, that I'm curious, that I want to know more. So our instincts are to think about nonverbal cues, like smiling and nodding quietly, leaning forward. Advanced listening, people who really develop the skill of listening, actually use their words to show people that they've heard them

• 2:04:47Speaker 01

  by validating, affirming, asking follow up questions. In a group, you can paraphrase and say like, oh, Stephen, Stephen said this, Kasi said this, then he said this. I think together, what we're really talking about is status.

• 2:05:01Steven Bartlett?

  You know that nodding and that mm hmm, mm hmm stuff? Is that good or bad?

• 2:05:05Speaker 01

  It's useful. That's what we think of as active listening, which has been studied for decades. It doesn't indicate that someone is hearing you at all. They could be thinking about their grocery list and smiling and nodding at the same time. It is useful, though, to convince your partner that you're listening to them, and that matters, even if it's not connected to what you're thinking about at all. If you were to not smile and nod, the omission of it would be jarring. So in that sense, it's like normative. You have to do it. It's sort of like listening 101. But listening 201, 301 is using these verbal cues to show someone you've heard them.

• 2:05:40Steven Bartlett?

  You understood the objective when we sat down. I want to become the best talker, conversationalist, the most persuasive, most liked person on earth. That was the objective that I gave you the brief. Is there anything that we haven't talked about? That we should have talked about?

• 2:05:56Speaker 01

  We haven't talked about silence. Wrote a chapter about silence that I dropped because I think it's an entirely separate book. It's kind of ironic that this book is called Talk. Because we do so much communicating between the lines. There's so much information exchanged in just a shared glance. When people don't know each other well. Long pauses are a sign that the conversation is not going well. So if you're on a first date and you feel like the conversation is dying and you're in, have that panicky feeling of what do we talk about next? That's legit. You should not let that happen. You should go in with topics prepped and not let, or this list of lovely questions and ask those questions. Later in a relationship, after you've known someone a long time.

• 2:06:39Speaker 01

  Longer pauses are a sign that you're comfortable with each other. That you could sit in total silence and companionable silence and that it's comfortable and nice. So it means different things as relationships evolve. There's so much we can do in our conversations that are not about the words we say to each other too. There's another chapter I dropped. Do you want to hear about it, Stephen?

• 2:07:03Steven Bartlett?

  Of course I want to hear about it.

• 2:07:05Speaker 01

  It's about talking in the digital age.

• 2:07:07Steven Bartlett?

  So this is, this is what I was going to ask you about as well is now we have large language models, which are writing lots of AI slop for us.

• 2:07:14Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:07:15Steven Bartlett?

  And if you log into social media, even emails, Slack channels, sometimes in WhatsApp. I look at the messages that are, that are, I'll take responsibility as well. Sometimes that I'm sending, sometimes that I'm receiving. And because of AI.

• 2:07:34Steven Bartlett?

  They're getting increasingly less soulful.

• 2:07:38Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 2:07:39Steven Bartlett?

  When I scroll certain social media platforms, which I shan't name,

• 2:07:46Steven Bartlett?

  I feel disconnected from people now.

• 2:07:49Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:07:49Steven Bartlett?

  Because my comments are all like AI slop stuff.

• 2:07:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:07:52Steven Bartlett?

  With a big M dash and, oh my god, this is so amazing, Steve. And you know that no human writes like that.

• 2:07:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:07:58Steven Bartlett?

  In a digital age, in an AI world, do we need to start communicating differently?

• 2:08:04Steven Bartlett?

  So that people.

• 2:08:07Steven Bartlett?

  Do you know, I've started doing intentional spelling mistakes.

• 2:08:10Speaker 01

  I love that.

• 2:08:11Steven Bartlett?

  If you go on my LinkedIn, you'll notice that I have totally disregarded grammar.

• 2:08:15Speaker 01

  Okay. Let me start by telling you about an exercise that I do in my class. I think it'll be thought provoking for you. So your question is about the content of what we type to each other. It's so text based communication, whether it's on social media or over text or over email. And there are

• 2:08:34Speaker 01

  clear things that we should do to make our text based communication better. Mostly make it shorter. Emails shorter, use headings, use bullet points, get to the point. Think about what other people need, only give them that. Okay. But I think more broadly, what is quite thought provoking is to think about how your life proceeds these days. Your conversational life unfolds. So in my class, I ask my students to do a communication audit of like 20 to 30 minutes in their life, where you transcribe every incoming and outgoing message across all digital and face to face modalities. So your DMs, your emails, your texts, your phone calls, your Zoom calls, your face to face interactions, all of it.

• 2:09:21Speaker 01

  Can you imagine?

• 2:09:22Steven Bartlett?

  No.

• 2:09:24Speaker 01

  It's quite hard.

• 2:09:25Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:26Speaker 01

  It's the sort of top line thing you notice is that it's so much. It's just a crazy amount of communication that's happening in our lives now. When only maybe 20 years ago, it was like 10% of what it is now. I think we all feel that sort of overwhelm. Not only is it a lot, it's a we're constantly sort of toggling and adjusting from one mode of communication to the next. So I'm like talking to you while I'm like texting under the table while I hear my emails going and knowing that my DMs are blowing up. That mental adjustment is really exhausting. And across each of those modes, we're like engaging in different ideas and different

• 2:10:09Speaker 01

  threads, different topics with different people. And so you start to realize how braided and overlapping all of these things are. And it's quite hard to keep it all straight and to make all of these decisions about like, well, who does, who should I be responding to? We then default to the people who are right in front of us. But any other mode of communication, we're like, well, who should come first? Who gets my attention first? And attention is love, right? Like, who gets my love essentially? The thing that my students note about this exercise, which is completely mind blowing, and I would recommend that anybody try it, is that only face to face conversations feel

• 2:10:53Speaker 01

  real in retrospect and while they're happening.

• 2:10:57Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:59Speaker 01

  Now, that doesn't mean that the other ones aren't important. Of course, email is so important for transactional information exchange, but it's not real. It's not what the human brain was built to do. Our brains evolved to do this face to face. It's why I prefer doing an interview like this in person than on Zoom. It because it's real and we're going to have it's so engaging and we're going to have a real memory of it later. And that memory might be sort of vague. You'll be like, oh, I knew this, like, you know, middle aged white woman with brown hair, she had a lot of energy, right? Like, that might be the extent of what you remember. But it's it was real and we can hold that memory. And I think what I find so troubling, there's a lot I find troubling, but this, our conversational

• 2:11:44Speaker 01

  lives have become very unreal.

• 2:11:50Speaker 01

  And that's why we feel so disconnected and lonely. And that loneliness is just outrageously high. We're not having real interactions and real relationships. Even even having this device here, by the way, is it is a portal to another place. So devices replace our conversations because we're on here instead of engaging. They also disrupt. It's so if it's on a table in front of you or you hear it buzzing or dinging in the background, it distracts your attention away from having a real engaged interaction.

• 2:12:28Steven Bartlett?

  Do you have any advice for anybody in a world of AI where it's going to be really easy to make our communications generatively using ChatGPT or whatever else? I just I just have noticed that what I start what I've started to discount. And there's certain there was there's certain team members that I have that have really lent into the use of AI for all of their comms. And I noticed myself ignoring them.

• 2:12:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:12:55Steven Bartlett?

  Because when they sent me an email report of something that happened in one particular scenario, every email report I knew was written by AI. So I didn't think it was worth reading because I actually want to hear from them.

• 2:13:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:13:06Steven Bartlett?

  I trust them. In their opinion, my relationship is to their experience and their knowledge. And if I when I realized that it was all just AI because of the formatting of it, I started ignoring it. Then three or four weeks goes past and I thought, you know, I should tell them.

• 2:13:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, they should know.

• 2:13:19Steven Bartlett?

  So I went and had a conversation with them. I said, this is just a perception thing, but I've noticed myself now not paying the same attention I used to because I want to know what you think.

• 2:13:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:13:28Steven Bartlett?

  And because it feels like I'm speaking to ChatGPT.

• 2:13:32Speaker 01

  What's their comeback to that?

• 2:13:33Steven Bartlett?

  They were really they were really thankful and they completely changed and it completely immediately. Even though I now know they're still using it. It's so crazy because I know they're still using it. They've built this bot, basically, for this particular part of feedback, which.

• 2:13:47Steven Bartlett?

  Which they're using, all they've done is changed the prompt into their bot to make it sound a little bit more human.

• 2:13:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:13:53Steven Bartlett?

  And I'm now reading it again because I can't tell the difference.

• 2:13:55Speaker 01

  Oh, my goodness.

• 2:13:56Steven Bartlett?

  They were very thoughtful.

• 2:13:57Speaker 01

  That's so thought provoking. I think there's two things going on there. One, you are invested in people. That's what we get invested in. We care about people and relationships. As soon as you feel like you're not getting them and you're getting some weird proxy of them, we're less motivated to engage with it. That's going to be, that's totally normal.

• 2:14:14Steven Bartlett?

  I'll tell you the context. It was a, it's interview feedback. So they're interviewing someone and then the feedback they're sending me is, was written by AI.

• 2:14:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:14:22Steven Bartlett?

  I trust their experience and their intuition and their ability just to feel someone. I don't know if I trust ChatGPT to interview my candidates.

• 2:14:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:14:30Steven Bartlett?

  So I just wanted to feel like I was getting it from that person.

• 2:14:34Speaker 01

  So there's this relational replacement thing where you're like, oh, and you just want to disengage. There's this other piece that's sort of more meta, which is that LLM sort of push us our communications of reversion to the mean, like a, like a right to the middle. So it literally is taking the personality and weirdness and creativity out of it. Can I tell you, I did an experiment this semester in my class. I had my students do office hours with an AI version of me.

• 2:15:02Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 2:15:02Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:15:04Steven Bartlett?

  Can they provide it?

• 2:15:05Speaker 01

  Well.

• 2:15:06Steven Bartlett?

  That's a risky experiment. That's a risky.

• 2:15:08Speaker 01

  The reason, I actually think she is better than me in some ways. I want to preface this by saying, I think chatbots are, most chatbots are deeply problematic, but this one, its goal is not to convince users to talk more with her. It's to sort of coach them on their questions related to conversations so that they can prep and perform better in their real conversations with humans. Okay. I do think she's better than me in many ways. Most importantly, she's available. She's available all the time whenever they need her and I'm a nightmare to schedule with. Number two, she's not grading them. So anytime a student comes to me and has office hours, there's this conflict of interest where they're.

• 2:15:48Steven Bartlett?

  Worried.

• 2:15:49Speaker 01

  They should be. I am grading them.

• 2:15:51Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:51Speaker 01

  Like I do care about them as people and also I am going to grade them at the end of the semester. That's a weird, that makes a relationship quite weird.

• 2:15:58Steven Bartlett?

  So they don't ask dumb questions.

• 2:16:00Speaker 01

  And I have to question their motives because I'm like, are you here because you're actually interested in what you're asking me or because you're trying to impress me and get a better grade? Right? That's a weird context. So she's less judgmental in a way, I guess. The other thing that she can do is what you were saying, which is. After they talk with her and get advice about their conversations, she gives them feedback about how the conversation went. She says, here are the topics we covered. Here's how many questions you asked. Here were the moments of levity. Here's how well you were listening and doing kindness. Even if I, as a human, can think those things, I do not have the bandwidth or time to craft the feedback to the students, to 200 students at once.

• 2:16:43Speaker 01

  So I, in short, I feel incredibly torn about all things AI. I think there are use cases like this that are really amazing and intriguing and make things easier and more efficient. And as a manager policymaker, that's why it's so troubling. Because as long as things continue to, AI continues to make individuals' lives easier and more convenient, I don't know how we can stop and regulate,

• 2:17:15Speaker 01

  regulate it.

• 2:17:16Steven Bartlett?

  I think as well that in a world of AI and robots, it's going to be very tempting to overlook the most human skills.

• 2:17:25Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:17:26Steven Bartlett?

  And those that don't, those that fight against the ease of allowing a chatbot to speak for you will develop a superpower, one that's going to be even more scarce in the future, which is all the things you've said in this framework.

• 2:17:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:17:41Steven Bartlett?

  Like really understanding how to be with a person IRL and have great conversations, I think is going to be such a superpower.

• 2:17:46Speaker 01

  It is. Talk is the advantage that humans have over AI. It has always been true that conversation is the skill that we, that matters most for achieving everything you want in life.

• 2:18:01Steven Bartlett?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:18:01Speaker 01

  But it just seems more obvious now that we need to lean into that even more.

• 2:18:08Steven Bartlett?

  The irreplaceably human stuff.

• 2:18:10Speaker 01

  Correct. And some of it, I don't even know if irreplaceable is the right word. It's like the things that no matter what the future holds for us, the things that are still going to matter. I'll put all my chips on a bet. When I think about what I need to be teaching my kids, I can imagine worlds where like work is no longer a thing and innovation is no longer a thing. But I cannot imagine a world where they're not going to need to connect with other human beings and talk to them well and joyfully and with respect.

• 2:18:40Steven Bartlett?

  In real life.

• 2:18:41Speaker 01

  In real life. Yeah.

• 2:18:44Steven Bartlett?

  I think, you were talking about boomers earlier on. I think boomers are much better conversationalists than Gen Z'ers and...

• 2:18:52Speaker 01

  Because they have more reps.

• 2:18:54Steven Bartlett?

  They have more repetitions and they grew up in the real world where they were forced to develop skills.

• 2:18:58Speaker 01

  That's right. It's part of the reason that I think we see a lot of sort of like misunderstanding and judgment between the generations is that right now, the people who are alive have experienced very, very different realities. And the skills that you have developed in those different realities are quite different. And it means that we actually are more different from each other across the generations.

• 2:19:23Steven Bartlett?

  On the front of your book, Talk, it says, "The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves." Do you think we should shut to work as our authentic selves?

• 2:19:34Speaker 01

  There's a great phrase, what a great question. There's a great phrase by a scholar named Juliana Pilimer, who's at NYU, called strategic authenticity. Okay?

• 2:19:46Speaker 01

  If you were to bring your full self to work, it would be a nightmare for you and everyone around you.

• 2:19:56Steven Bartlett?

  Tell me about it.

• 2:19:57Speaker 01

  At the beginning of my class, I have people do this thing that's like, okay, identify your type, your conversation types. And there's like 13 good types and 13 bad types.

• 2:20:08Speaker 01

  You know, there's like the asker and the curious cat and the cheddar box and whatever. The whole thing is a straw man because we're all, all of those things. We all have habits that are good sometimes and habits that are bad sometimes. And our behavior shifts radically from one situation to the next. I'm not going to behave the same way at a bachelorette party in Vegas as I do when I'm doing bath time with my children. If you did, it would be insane and it wouldn't serve anybody's goals.

• 2:20:39Steven Bartlett?

  What happens in Vegas?

• 2:20:41Speaker 01

  Hot pink wigs, apparently, and Chippendales dancers.

• 2:20:47Speaker 01

  The point is that our behavior shifts from one conversation to the next, even from one moment to the next in every conversation. And it should. That's what it means to read the room and read the context. And my husband has a saying, athletes adjust. And it's exactly right. Good conversationalists adjust. So if you in your mind are like, this is who I am and I'm going to bring that whole self to every space that I inhabit, it's not going to go well.

• 2:21:17Steven Bartlett?

  Strategic authenticity.

• 2:21:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. Bring, bring the things that make, the values that make you, you, bring them to work. It's the things that you care about and are uncompromising about. But you can adjust your behavior to, to fit the needs of the situation.

• 2:21:33Steven Bartlett?

  Do you pretend and act?

• 2:21:35Speaker 01

  No, this is a great question. We like to debate this in my class about authenticity, manipulation, what is real, what's sincere. I guess sincerity might be the right word to use. Let's use question asking as an example. Imagine that we get to a point in the interview where you're like, oh, I think I need to ask a question right now. You might not be dying to hear the answer to it, but you know, as a good interviewer, that you need to ask that question in that moment. That doesn't mean that you are evil, unkind, insincere, manipulative. It means that you're trying to live up to the goal of the conversation and trying to live up to the goal of, hey, we're going to learn as much as we can from each other.

• 2:22:19Speaker 01

  I want to show you respect and interest in your perspective. I want to have a good conversation. That itself lives up to who you are. Like, that's the whole point of being here.

• 2:22:31Speaker 01

  You know what I mean?

• 2:22:32Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, of course, yeah.

• 2:22:33Speaker 01

  So these pleading moments of like insincerity, I think people over-focus on that as a signal of inauthenticity.

• 2:22:40Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, fine.

• 2:22:41Speaker 01

  If it's tied to a more overarching goal of like, I want to be a good human being and a good conversationalist, often because I want to serve the needs of others.

• 2:22:50Steven Bartlett?

  So you can be slightly insincere

• 2:22:54Steven Bartlett?

  in the pursuit of sincerity.

• 2:22:56Speaker 01

  And those moments of insincerity are gone in an instant. As soon as I ask this question that maybe I'm not dying to hear, how was your weekend? You're going to give me an answer and I'm sincerely going to search for something in there that I am interested in. And I'm going to ask a follow-up question and make it better.

• 2:23:14Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, so when I met you, you did ask me how I was doing. Was that?

• 2:23:17Speaker 01

  The question I've been dying to ask you is about children.

• 2:23:22Steven Bartlett?

  Me and my girlfriend are trying at the moment, so hopefully.

• 2:23:25Speaker 01

  Stephen, I'm so excited for you.

• 2:23:27Steven Bartlett?

  What are you excited about?

• 2:23:28Speaker 01

  I just think it's one of the most miraculous things that you can experience as a human being. And I'm hopeful for you.

• 2:23:35Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:35Speaker 01

  Good luck.

• 2:23:36Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:37Speaker 01

  I hope you get to experience that. It's a very, it's a very different experience to add to your resume.

• 2:23:45Steven Bartlett?

  I know. I think that's why I'm excited by it. Because it is the great unknown. And in some respects, in my head, this might be the wrong framing, but it feels like the great sacrifice.

• 2:23:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's both. And you know what I always say? It's like the most self-interested and least self-interested thing you can do. Self-interested, you're like making a copy of yourself.

• 2:24:05Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:06Speaker 01

  Okay, like talk about narcissism. But it's just, really, life is no longer about you.

• 2:24:12Steven Bartlett?

  That's terrifying to hear. It is terrifying to hear objectively. Like, I understand what you're saying and I agree. But it's also, as a statement for anybody, to know that they're kind of giving up.

• 2:24:24Speaker 01

  Your current self sense of self.

• 2:24:26Steven Bartlett?

  For someone else you've never met.

• 2:24:28Speaker 01

  Oh, you're giving it up not, you're giving, giving up might not be the right phrase. You're changing, you're evolving into a different version of you for them. The more freedom and like resources you have before kids means it's, you may experience that as more as a loss.

• 2:24:45Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, that's good.

• 2:24:48Speaker 01

  But you also have more to gain. It really is. It's really incredible. It's easy to focus on fertility and having children and to ask probing, prying questions about, you know, how many do you want and whatever. But I think it's easy to focus on the birth process and overlook how long childhood is. It's 18 years. And I think the major project of it is helping kids learn to talk to other people.

• 2:25:14Steven Bartlett?

  And how do you do that? I'm sure there's loads of parents screaming right now. Like, how do I, how do I set my kid up so that they can talk well?

• 2:25:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:25:21Steven Bartlett?

  And communicate well.

• 2:25:22Speaker 01

  I think it's what we're doing every moment of every day. You're interacting with them directly and sort of role modeling what you think that looks like, helping them through difficult moments, helping them both fail and succeed. It's very important. And we're hoping to adapt the talk course for high schoolers and younger children quite soon.

• 2:25:41Steven Bartlett?

  Do I need to get them off YouTube and all that stuff?

• 2:25:43Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:25:44Steven Bartlett?

  And screens?

• 2:25:45Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:25:48Steven Bartlett?

  Is a little bit of YouTube okay?

• 2:25:50Speaker 01

  A little bit of anything might be okay. Digital stuff is hard, though, because you give them an inch, they take a mile, and it becomes habitual.

• 2:25:57Steven Bartlett?

  So what do you do with your kids?

• 2:25:59Speaker 01

  It's a constant evolution and learning, and we give them 20 minutes.

• 2:26:05Steven Bartlett?

  A day?

• 2:26:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, on a computer that doesn't move. And nothing moves. They can't carry it with them.

• 2:26:12Steven Bartlett?

  And what age does that change?

• 2:26:14Speaker 01

  To be determined. They know that they're not getting a phone, like a phone, phone. I'm getting more and more extreme. I feel like maybe never, but certainly not until ninth grade. And then social media, much later than that. It's an interesting, we'll see how it goes, but it's just such a slippery slope, but it's so bad for them. Jonathan Haidt's done a wonderful job. Angela, my friend Angela Duckworth is doing great work, Matt Gensko at Stanford, trying to help schools sort this out.

• 2:26:48Steven Bartlett?

  I have that to look forward to. More problems.

• 2:26:53Steven Bartlett?

  Alison, we have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question left for you is, if your life was a movie and the audience were watching up to this point, what would they be screaming at the screen telling you to do right now?

• 2:27:09Speaker 01

  What a fabulous question. Thank you, previous guest.

• 2:27:19Speaker 01

  Leave Harvard, save the children with talk. Devote all of your time and resources to helping every high schooler in the world learn to do this better.

• 2:27:36Steven Bartlett?

  Why?

• 2:27:38Speaker 01

  I think it's the ultimate human skill and everyone has the potential to do it well. And it's not a zero sum game. The more people who do it well, the better off we'll all be.

• 2:27:47Steven Bartlett?

  You said save. Why did you use the word save?

• 2:27:50Speaker 01

  I think we're in a period where we actually are needing to save them from digital addiction and loneliness. We've gotten to a place that we need to roll back and it's really scary. And I think one first step is let's get the devices out of schools, ideally out of families in their hands. But then the next step is like what rises to replace it? And I think it could be this talk curriculum.

• 2:28:19Steven Bartlett?

  So are you gonna do that?

• 2:28:21Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 2:28:22Steven Bartlett?

  You're gonna leave Harvard?

• 2:28:23Speaker 01

  TBT.

• 2:28:24Steven Bartlett?

  So is that an announcement? Are they aware? It's an exclusive? Is that the thumbnail? Alison, thank you so much. Thank you for the work that you do because it's very important work and it's very timely work, considering everything that's going on in the world at this moment in time. And this book is the definitive book on the art of, you said it yourself, the framework that you've you've built here is one that's deeply based on science and research. And oftentimes we'll have conversations about communication. It's full of platitudes and opinions and a lot of generic things that aren't supported by scientific rigor. But you've done the research. You've committed so much of your life to this subject and you've managed to write it all in a way that's truly accessible to people like me who are simply, you know, muggles and don't understand

• 2:29:08Speaker 01

  Hardly.

• 2:29:09Steven Bartlett?

  big words sometimes. So it's a wonderful entry, but also a sort of an expansive look into the science of great talk.

• 2:29:21Steven Bartlett?

  We've touched on several things in this book where there's so much more we could have gone through, so I'm going to leave that to the audience. I'm going to link it below for anyone that wants to read it. But also thank you, because I think of these issues as being issues that are really foundational to the most important things in our lives, like family, like friendships, like relationships, like the success and the pursuit of our goals. And what you're giving people here is a roadmap to reach their highest potential.

• 2:29:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:29:42Steven Bartlett?

  Through this thing called Talk, and that's a really wonderful thing. So if anyone wants this book, it's linked below. Highly recommend. Is there anywhere else one should go to get more of your work? Is there a place?

• 2:29:51Speaker 01

  Sure. AlisonWoodbrooks.com has this new quiz that's so fun. Find out your conversation type, get really clear advice, little tips about how to navigate things and all the science that's underlying those tips. Very, very soon, you can go to TalkStudios.com and look up, find out more about this curriculum that we're developing for high schoolers.

• 2:30:12Steven Bartlett?

  I'll link both of them below. Dr Alison Woodbrooks, thank you so much.

• 2:30:18Speaker 01

  Thank you so much, Stephen. Thank you for amplifying my work. And I just think what you're doing here is fabulous. So thank you.

• 2:30:24Steven Bartlett?

  Thank you.

• 2:30:29Steven Bartlett?

  Make sure you keep what I'm about to say to yourself. I'm inviting 10,000 of you to come even deeper into the diary of a CEO. Welcome to my inner circle. This is a brand new private community that I'm launching to the world. We have so many incredible things that happen that you are never shown. We have the briefs that are on my iPad when I'm recording the conversation. We have clips we've never released. We have behind the scenes conversations with the guests, and also the episodes that we've never, ever released. And so much more. In the circle, you'll have direct access to me. You can tell us what you want this show to be, who you want us to interview, and the types of conversations you would love us to have. But remember, for now, we're only inviting the first 10,000 people that join before it closes. So if you want to join our private closed community,

• 2:31:13Steven Bartlett?

  head to the link in the description below, or go to D O A C circle dot com. I will speak to you then.