Pioneers of AI: Why AI conversations are always one-sided

Is it possible for us to ever wholeheartedly trust a machine the way we would a human? According to Charles Duhigg, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and New York Times bestselling author of The Power of Habit and Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection, the answer is no. And that’s what stops us from being able to emotionally connect with AI chatbots. In this episode of Pioneers of AI, host Rana el Kaliouby and Duhigg dissect what's really happening when people confide in ChatGPT and why real connection depends on reciprocity and vulnerability, two things AI can't offer. Follow Pioneers of AI on all channels:https://linktr.ee/pioneersofai See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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• 1:44Speaker 01

  I use a variety of AI tools in my everyday life and work. But I do use ChatGPT for like as my personal confidant. And I was reflecting on like, why do I trust this AI?

• 1:59Speaker 00

  So when you turn to ChatGPT and you confide in it about something that's happened, why are you doing that?

• 2:08Speaker 01

  I think I use it as a tool for self unpacking and self. I journal a lot and it's just maybe a better kind of interrogation journaling.

• 2:17Speaker 00

  That would have been my guess 100%. When you're talking to chatbot about relationships, you're not turning to it because you think it's going to give you great advice. You're turning to it because it's a very efficient and a very interrogative way of you essentially keeping a diary. Whereas if you call up your friend and you say like, here's what's going on with my relationship. Part of it is that you want their actual advice. Like, are you thinking about this the right way? Part of it is that you do just want to get it off your chest. You just need someone to hear what you're thinking. There's all these different things that a conversation can represent. It's very infrequent that AI offers all of those different things.

• 3:00Speaker 01

  Charles Duhigg is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and a writer at The New Yorker. In his New York Times bestselling book, Super Communicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection, Charles explores the science and art of truly connecting with other people. So what does it mean to be a super communicator? Especially in a world where so much of our connection is mediated through technology. Today, we're taking Charles' research and applying it to our AI-infused lives.

• 3:30Speaker 01

  I'm Rana Elkhalyubi and this is Pioneers of AI, a podcast taking you behind the scenes of the AI revolution.

• 3:45Speaker 00

  Rana, did you live in Egypt? Did you grow up in Egypt?

• 3:48Speaker 01

  I grew up in Cairo and also the Middle East. Did you spend any time in Egypt?

• 3:52Speaker 00

  I did. I used to live in Babalou, near AUC.

• 3:55Speaker 01

  What? I went to AUC.

• 3:57Speaker 00

  You went to AUC?

• 3:58Speaker 01

  Yes, I'm an alum. I was on the board forever. My sister's one too. Did you?

• 4:03Speaker 00

  I was there, I was there 97 to 98.

• 4:07Speaker 01

  Oh, no way.

• 4:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:09Speaker 01

  So nice to have you on the show. Welcome to Pioneers of AI. I wanted to start with a personal story. Like, I've been studying human communication and human connection for over 26 years. And my origin story is I grew up in Cairo and around the Middle East. And then I had an opportunity to go do my PhD at Cambridge University. And it was my first experience living away from home. This is the year 2000, right? So it's a while ago. And the only way I had to communicate with my family back home was through text and like sending emojis with like, I was homesick a lot of the time. And I would just send like a little emoji with like tears. And it just like struck me at some point that while all of the richness of like

• 4:51Speaker 01

  human communication kind of disappears when we're online, it disappears in cyberspace. And that got me down a rabbit hole of like literally engineering, human communication. I got fascinated with facial expressions of emotion. So I wanted to hear your why. You wrote a book called Super Communicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection. Why did you write this book?

• 5:16Speaker 00

  The reason I wrote Super Communicators is because I had written a book called The Power of Habit a number of years ago, which is about the science of habit formation. And I heard from a lot of people who said, you know, this really changed my life. It helped me, helped me build new exercise habits, helped me stop drinking or smoking. And, and that was really powerful. But I, I also fell into this bad pattern with my wife. I was working at the New York Times at that point. And I would come home from work and I'd start complaining about my day. And I'd say like, you know, my coworkers don't appreciate me or my boss doesn't realize what a genius I am. And my wife would do this pretty natural thing. She would give me some pretty good advice. She would say something like, why don't you take your boss out to lunch? And you guys can get to know each other a little bit better.

• 5:58Speaker 00

  And instead of being able to hear her advice, I would get even more upset, right? And I would say like, why aren't you, why aren't you on my side? You should be outraged on my behalf. You should be telling me how smart I am, how much is their fault. This is something I'm sure is familiar to everyone who's listening, right? Because like this happens again and again and again in all relationships. And so I went to these researchers and I asked them, why do I keep falling into this trap? Like, I'm a professional communicator, I'm a journalist. Why do I keep making this mistake? And they said, well, actually, we're living through this golden age of understanding communication. For really the first time, we can see what happens inside someone's brain as they're having a conversation. And you think when you're talking to your wife that you know what that discussion is about. You think that you're talking about your day.

• 6:41Speaker 00

  Or you think that you're talking about where to go on vacation next week. Or if you're at work, well, you know, what the budget should be for next quarter. But actually, there are many different kinds of conversations all happening at the same time. And unless you and your wife are having the same basic kind of conversation, you're gonna feel like you can't connect with each other. You're gonna feel like you're two ships passing in the night. And so I thought that was really interesting. I started digging into that and that gave birth to Super Communicators, the book.

• 7:09Speaker 01

  Amazing. What kind of communicator were you before you wrote the book?

• 7:13Speaker 00

  I think I was someone who like very quickly went to like the practical, right? Like I would, I was very much like, and that's where I was comfortable. It's kind of how I'd grown up in, in, in, you know, sort of like logic and getting things done. And like, I didn't understand that part of communication is not only listening, but showing people that you're listening to them by asking follow-up questions, building on their ideas and saying, oh, you mentioned this thing and it made me think of this other thing. Right? Not just absorbing what you are telling me, but showing you that I'm thinking about it and absorbing it and processing it.

• 7:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. As I was reading your book, I was thinking about where do I fall in the spectrum of being a super communicator? And I'm a very social person and I love connecting with people. And I also feel like I am a confidant for many people, but I avoid hard conversations. Honestly, like it's the plague.

• 8:05Speaker 00

  So give me an example, like, like what's a, what's a conversation you've had recently that you kind of found yourself shying away from? That in retrospect, you were like, you know what, I should have, I should have leaned into that.

• 8:15Speaker 01

  Oh, um, well, not to get too TMI on this thing, but we might as well. I, I, I just ended a three-year relationship. And it's because every time we had a hard conversation, it escalated very quickly. And it like ended up in a blow up every single time.

• 8:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  And we just never could get through that.

• 8:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. So first of all, I'm sorry that, that it didn't work out. Although it sounds like it was probably kind of a hard relationship. So maybe, maybe it's a good thing that, that you're, you're on to other pastures. So in psychology, we actually see this a lot, right? There's a thing that's known as kitchen sinking, which is a really destructive pattern in marriages and in romantic relationships, which is that when we have a fight about one thing, it suddenly becomes a fight about everything. Right? We start by talking about like, where should we go for Thanksgiving? And it's like, well, I want to go to my mom's and you want to go to your mom's. And then like five minutes later, it's like, well, you don't earn enough money and so we can't go. And by the way, your mom hates me and you never stand up for me when we're, when we're at your mom's place. Right?

• 9:23Speaker 00

  So we, we know this pattern and we know how destructive it is. One of the things we know is that simply acknowledging and being aware of the pattern oftentimes makes it easier. One of the things about hard conversations that usually helps them is to start by doing two things, to first of all, acknowledge that this is a hard conversation, right? I want to bring this topic up with you. I feel a little awkward doing so. It might make you feel awkward. The anxiety that a hard conversation produces, oftentimes, if we voice that anxiety, we help resolve it a little bit. Not fully, but we make it a little bit less painful. And then the second thing is to set rules for the conversation, what psychologists, as you know, would refer to as a meta-conversation.

• 10:08Speaker 00

  Let's talk about how we want to talk to each other. Say something like, okay, look, I want to talk about where we're going to go for Thanksgiving. I know that when I bring this up, sometimes we start talking about each other's moms in not kind ways. Sometimes we start talking about money. Let's set all of that aside and let's just talk about the logistics of where we're going to go for Thanksgiving. And then I promise, we can talk about moms, we can talk about money some other time. Let's just decide, like, together, what is the thing that we want to talk about? What's the resolution? What's the question we want to answer? When you do that, suddenly, you are sitting side by side. And it's not you versus them, it's the two of you versus a question or a problem together.

• 10:49Speaker 01

  That's cool.

• 10:49Speaker 00

  Right? We're on the same side of the table. And the thing that we're trying to solve is, on the other side of the table, where are we going to spend Thanksgiving?

• 10:55Speaker 01

  I appreciate it, especially the anxiety, right? Like, kind of naming the anxiety beforehand and allowing for some, like, ground rules. Okay, so I would love to explore some of the ideas behind being a super communicator that you kind of shared with us in your book. But I also want to layer in kind of a, what does this mean in an AI-driven world? So let's maybe start with you defining what is a super communicator?

• 11:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, so a super communicator is this person who has these skills, right? Who uses these skills. And we talked about the skill of proving that you're listening. Another really important skill is recognizing what kind of conversation is occurring. And in general, these different kinds of conversations, they fall into one of three buckets. There are these practical conversations, where you and I are making plans together or resolving problems. But then there's emotional conversations, where I tell you what I'm feeling, and I don't want you to solve my feelings, I want you to empathize with me. And then there's social conversations, which is about how we relate to each other and how we relate to society. And I told that story about my wife and I kind of missing each other, because what was happening is that I was having an emotional conversation.

• 12:04Speaker 00

  I was complaining about my day and talking about how like I feel underappreciated. And my wife responded with a practical conversation. She started giving me advice. And that's why we couldn't connect with each other. That's why we couldn't fully hear each other. It actually comes down to parts of our brains. And those three different kinds of conversations use different parts of our brains. And that when we're not using the same part of our brain at the same time, it's very hard for us to feel connected.

• 12:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, if you're having a practical conversation, I imagine that's invoking your prefrontal cortex.

• 12:34Speaker 00

  Oh, absolutely. Right, right. Prefrontal cortex, emotional conversation is amygdala, the interior structures of the brain, that the social conversation tends to take over the medial network that's kind of at the peripheries of our brain. So, okay, so what does this have to do with AI? Well, one of the interesting things is that AI can imitate those kinds of conversations very well, right? Like, we've all experienced this, when you're talking to a chatbot, you know it'll ask you what you're feeling, and it'll ask you about your feelings, it'll try and figure out whether you're like trying to solve a problem, or you're trying to just express yourself. One important thing that we've learned about conversations is that when I say something

• 13:13Speaker 00

  to you, the way that you respond, and in particular, believing that my words have an impact on you, is a very, very important part of that conversation. So if I say something that makes you angry, there's some information that I'm receiving from that anger. If I say something that makes you feel good, I feel a sense of pride in making you feel good. If I tell you something that's interesting, I feel smart because I see that you're interested. The feedback that we get from the person we're talking to and how that affects our internal state is a critical aspect of how conversations unfold.

• 13:56Speaker 00

  But when we're talking to AI, we do not believe that we are changing anything in the AI, right? I don't believe that, like, I'm actually making an AI feel proud. I don't believe I'm impressing an AI. I don't believe that an AI actually feels the emotions that I'm feeling. And so as a result, that reciprocal echo of what's happening disappears. And it's because oftentimes, when we're talking to AI, we're not getting that reciprocal feeling that talking to a real person gives us. Because part of what I'm doing when I'm talking to you is I'm creating a mental image of you in my head of how you're receiving these words.

• 14:30Speaker 01

  I'll be right back with my conversation with Charles after this break.

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• 16:45Speaker 01

  I want to unpack that a little bit more, because there's like, for example, 900 million monthly active users on ChatGPT. And on average, a person spends about 30 minutes a day in conversation with AI. And just to make it like very personal, again, I use a variety of AI tools in my everyday life and work, but I do use ChatGPT for like, as my personal confidant. So it knows a lot about like this relationship that was like up and down, up and down, up and down. And I was reflecting on like, why do I trust this AI, right? Even though like, I'm an AI expert, I built these kinds of technologies, you know, I know it's not reciprocating it, I know it doesn't really like really get me, but yet I am sharing with it all this information.

• 17:28Speaker 00

  Okay, so let's interrogate whether this is an actual conversation a little bit, because having a dialogue with another person, having a dialogue with a machine, that doesn't necessarily mean it's a conversation. It could be just a back and forth, right?

• 17:41Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 17:41Speaker 00

  So when you turn to ChatGPT and you confide in it about something that's happened, why are you doing that? Like, what's the thing that you anticipate getting from that that pushes you?

• 17:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's kind of interesting. I think I use it as a tool for self-unpacking and self, I journal a lot, and it's just maybe a better kind of interrogation journaling.

• 18:04Speaker 00

  That's exactly.

• 18:05Speaker 01

  Device.

• 18:05Speaker 00

  That would have been my guess 100%. When you're talking to a chatbot about your romantic relationships, you're not turning to it because you think it's going to give you great advice. You're turning to it because it's a very efficient and a very interrogative way of you essentially keeping a diary, right? Like, as I'm talking to this chatbot, I'm describing my feelings, it's asking me questions about those feelings, which maybe pushes me to describe a little bit more about what I'm feeling. Maybe I'm discovering some things about how I think. Whereas if you call up your friend and you say like, here's what's going on with my relationship, it's not because you want to use your friend as a diary, right? It's usually because it's a mix of different things.

• 18:49Speaker 00

  Part of it is that you just want them to know what's going on in your life, part of it is that you want empathy, part of it is that you want their actual advice, like, are you putting this in the right context? Are you thinking about this the right way? Part of it is that you do just want to get it off your chest, you just need someone to hear what you're thinking. There's all these different things that a conversation can represent.

• 19:08Speaker 00

  It's very infrequent that AI offers all of those different things. And so I think for the most part, when people are using AI, what they're actually doing is they're engaging in a very, very sophisticated,

• 19:22Speaker 00

  essentially one-sided conversation, right? With the AI being a foil. And or they're using it as information discovery. Like, I use Claude all the time when I'm saying like, oh, I'm looking for this kind of study. And like, can you find that study for me? And also, like, what are the questions that might not be occurring to me that I ought to be thinking about? And it goes out and then sometimes it comes back with smart stuff. And sometimes it comes back with not smart stuff. I'm not assuming that Claude can tell me what's genuinely interesting. I'm assuming that Claude can be a fodder or a foil to give me questions or to give me prompts or to give me information or to give me leads that I can then use on my own to figure out if they are genuinely interesting or what they actually mean.

• 20:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. I want to stay on this a little bit more because also one of the tenets of having a great conversation is being vulnerable, right? And if you're vulnerable and then you get judgment, right? That like breaks trust. So I was, again, thinking about like, when I'm in conversation, in quotes, with AI, it's not judging me, right? I know it's not judging me. And do you think this is why maybe people trust AI a little bit more?

• 20:35Speaker 00

  Possibly. So, okay, so let's talk about what vulnerability is because vulnerability has a very specific definition in neuroscience. Vulnerability is a neural cascade that occurs in your brain when you say something that another person could judge. Now, you might not care about it, right? You might say like, I think Star Trek is better than Star Wars. And everyone's like, that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard in my entire life. It doesn't matter. I don't care what you think about my sci-fi taste. But the fact that I've said something that you could judge at that moment, and again, this is part of the pro-social instinct where we basically can't fight against this. When I tell you something you could judge, I pay very close attention to how you react.

• 21:16Speaker 00

  And if, instead of judging me, you withhold judgment, or even better, if you say something about yourself that I could judge in return. But I actually, this is, I kind of like Back to the Future better than all the other sci-fi movies, right? If the other person doesn't judge us, if they share something that we could judge in return, we feel closer to them. We trust them more. Study after study have shown, we're actually, it's impossible for us not to trust this person a little bit more when they do that. Now, we might want to vote for different people. We might go to different churches or mosques or synagogues. But the act of withholding that judgment means that you are safe. It means that I can, I can trust you a little bit more. Okay, so let's talk about AI.

• 22:00Speaker 00

  So I think what's happening is that you know that AI, even if AI, that AI isn't going to judge you, but you also know that it doesn't have the capacity for judgment, right? So it is a, it is a safe repository, right? The same way that like a safe at my, in my house, like an actual physical safe. That is a safe repository. I can put things into it because I know that it can't, it can't weaponize it against me. It won't weaponize it against me. But there's a difference between that and talking to someone who is deciding not to attack you. The AI isn't making a decision not to attack us. And so we use it as a repository and we're very comfortable using it as a repository.

• 22:45Speaker 00

  But I don't think that we believe that there's reciprocal vulnerability in a way that sort of presses the same buttons inside our head.

• 22:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:53Speaker 00

  Now, if I said to you, okay, Ron, I want you to give me all of your diaries. And, and I promise I'm not going to publish them. And here's something really embarrassing about me that I'm going to give you in return. Please do not publish it, right? Now, we both have something on the other person. You would actually believe that. You would believe that there's like, that there's real intent there. A lot of what communication does is it helps us create a mental model, a sort of a story inside our head of what's happening in the other person. And when it comes to machines, we can be relatively certain about what's happening, right? I, I know that like, if I tell ChatGPT something, it might use it as training data. Maybe it'll show up, so I'm not going to give it like my social security number.

• 23:39Speaker 00

  But if I tell, if I'm like, I hate my neighbor, they're the worst, then I'm not so worried that ChatGPT is going to weaponize that and use that against me. But that doesn't mean that I trust ChatGPT. It means that I trust the repository.

• 23:52Speaker 01

  So one aspect of ChatGPT or AI today that is not like, is kind of behind or non-existent, actually, is their ability to discern our non-verbal cues. So I want to talk about that because I spent my entire career studying facial expressions and how like the majority of the way we communicate is not actually in the choice of words we use, right? It's in all these like silent signals, like our face, our gestures, our vocal intonations. But one of the things we found early on in our research is it really does fall down to whether you're even paying attention, right? Especially now with, with all these devices that are kind of tethered to. You can be in a conversation, but you're not really present and you're not really seeing these signals, right?

• 24:35Speaker 00

  Right. Oh, all the time. And it can happen face to face too, right? Because not even because of devices, just because like, I'm in my head and I'm like trying to, like, if I really care about impressing you, if I'm trying to like, say something really smart or funny to impress you, then odds are I'm not actually listening that closely to what you're saying. A lot of this comes from speed dating is that the people who are thinking about how to impress the other person inevitably seem less impressive than the person who's listening really, really well and who's proving that they're listening really, really well. So the more that I show you, I'm interested in what you're saying, the more that I'm mirroring back your physical gestures or your expressions, right?

• 25:17Speaker 00

  Which is a way of proving that I'm paying attention to those physical gestures and those expressions. That the more that I do that, the more impressed you are going to be with me, even if what I say is not that funny or not that like, you know, show-offy.

• 25:32Speaker 01

  Well, you'll feel connected, right? It's like literally, actually, isn't this how it works in the brain? Like basically the same brain parts light up?

• 25:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's exactly right. So, so when, when we're in a great conversation, our bodies and our brains start to change. So in this conversation, for instance, without us realizing it, our heart rates have started to echo each other, to become similar. Our breathing rates have become similar.

• 25:56Speaker 01

  Isn't that so cool?

• 25:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, even though we're surrounded by like thousands of miles, right? And if we could see inside our brains, what we would see is that your thoughts and my thoughts are becoming more and more alike. We would see like the peaks and the valleys together. And that kind of makes sense when you think about it because if I tell you about something I'm feeling, you actually feel that emotion a little bit, right? If I tell you about an idea, you experience that idea. And within neuroscience, this is known as neural entrainment. The goal of communication is connection. Neural entrainment is the mechanism for that connection. When we have a good conversation, we, our thoughts become similar. And as they become more similar, we feel closer to each other and we feel like we can, we actually can hear each other with higher fidelity.

• 26:41Speaker 00

  And as a result, we can trust each other more.

• 26:44Speaker 01

  You talk about in your book, how like humans have been communicating face to face for a million years or whatever. And we've only started communicating through technology in the last, you know, I don't know, 40 years or so. Do you know if this neural entrainment happens if we are communicating through email or Slack or texting?

• 27:04Speaker 00

  Oh, it definitely can. It definitely can.

• 27:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:06Speaker 00

  But I think that what's important is, I'll also mention, when you achieve that neural entrainment, that's why a conversation feels good, right? That feeling that you get from like being like, oh, that's a great conversation. That's actually like your brain releasing like dopamine and serotonin. Like, there's, there's a bunch of like signal, neurological signals associated with neural entrainment that make us feel good, to make us want to seek out more conversations. And I'm certain that there has been times that you have read an email from a friend and you just feel warm and great. So it can happen. What's important, though, is that that's a learned skill. So one of my favorite examples of this is that about 100 years ago, when telephones first started becoming popular,

• 27:50Speaker 00

  there were all these articles that were published that said, no one will ever have a real conversation on the phone. Right? Because up until then, all conversations had happened basically face to face, maybe through letters. And, and people would say like, look, if you can't hear their tone of voice, if you can't see their expressions, if it's a letter and they haven't sat down and sort of edited it and made sure that they're getting it exactly right and really like, tried to figure out what they want to say and how to say it, you're never going to have a real conversation. That's laughable to us today, but, but what's interesting is that for the next 15 years, they were basically right. If you look at the transcripts of early telephone conversations, what you see is that people used them as telegraphs.

• 28:29Speaker 01

  Oh, how interesting.

• 28:30Speaker 00

  They would call up the grocery store. They would be like, here's my order. And the other person would say, okay. And then they would hang up immediately. Like, there was, there was no awareness that you could have some back and forth and some chit chat. Now, what's interesting is that after about 15 years, everyone used the phone for real conversations. By the time you and I were in middle school, we were having conversations that were like seven or eight hours long each day. Right, they're the most important conversations of our life. So what happened there? What happened is that we learned to use telephones. And in fact, when you're talking on the phone, without you being aware of it, there are certain rules that you will follow. You will oftentimes over-annunciate your words on a phone.

• 29:15Speaker 00

  You will put more emotion into your voice than if you were talking to each other face to face. And it's because part of your brain realizes this person can't see my face. I need to like signal to them what I'm feeling through the tone of my voice.

• 29:29Speaker 00

  We are living through those first 15 years when it comes to online communication. And so some people are really good at it. They know how to do it. Some people aren't. Sometimes it happens just by accident. Sometimes it doesn't. But what's important is the way we get better at it is by recognizing that there are different rules for different kinds of communication, right? When I call you on the phone, it's a different kind of conversation than when I send you an email. And there's different rules governing how we feel connected to each other. And I need to be aware of those rules and live by them if I want to connect with you through those means.

• 30:06Speaker 01

  Don't go anywhere. I'll be back with my conversation with Charles in just a minute.

• 30:29Speaker 02

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• 31:08Speaker 00

  Hey, listeners, Bob here. If you listen to Rapid Response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show because every Friday we release a second Rapid Response exclusively in the Rapid Response feed. The guests and topics are just as compelling and timely, from Ford CEO to NASA's administrator to the lessons from the devil wears Prada. It takes about 10 seconds to find. Just search Rapid Response wherever you listen to podcasts and hit follow to make sure you never miss an episode. I hope to see you there.

• 31:45Speaker 03

  Humans will never be more intelligent than AI.

• 31:49Speaker 04

  There's going to be two types of companies. Those are great at AI and those that went out of business because they weren't.

• 31:54Speaker 05

  How do we build a future that is human-centered?

• 31:59Speaker 01

  I'm Rana Elkhalyubi, and on my podcast, Pioneers of AI, we answer that question and so many more. As an AI scientist, entrepreneur, and investor, I know what it takes to build AI that works for everyone. Every week, I sit down with the pioneers shaping our future, and we take you behind the scenes of the AI that's transforming our lives. Find Pioneers of AI wherever you tune in.

• 32:32Speaker 01

  So let's dig into that. So you you reached out with a really thoughtful email, which actually, you know, made me feel that you had really taken the time to get to know me and the show. And it was just like very thoughtful and it was awesome.

• 32:46Speaker 00

  Thanks. Yeah. Well, I'm a fan of the show. So it's easy to do that when you like, when it's a show that you like.

• 32:51Speaker 01

  Thank you. We appreciate that. But yeah, but but you clearly like, you know, if we were to unpack that email you sent, like, what was right about it? Because I did feel like, you know, this was like a real genuine moment of connection. I was like, oh, I'm excited to like actually have this conversation. It was great.

• 33:10Speaker 00

  So I think, okay, so this is a great. Thank you for bringing up this example because this is fascinating to me since I wrote the email. So I think, okay, so there's a couple of things happening there, right? One is that I'm anticipating your expectations. In a world of AI, a well-written email is no longer a signal of something that you should pay attention to. Right? So it used to be, it used to be that I could basically go through my inbox, and if something was well-written, I'd pay attention to it. And if it wasn't, I'd be like, do I really need to like, is this something scammy? Now, we've lost that important signal, a signal that we've used for literally thousands of years, that something that's well-written is something that I should pay attention to.

• 33:53Speaker 01

  Human-generated.

• 33:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. So when I'm writing that email, I, one of the things I do is I say like, hey, you recently had this guy on this episode, and I thought it was so interesting. And the reason I thought it was interesting is because of this. So first of all, that actually like is something that it's harder for AI to do, right? Like, like to figure out how to do that. I guess you could program AI to do it, but but it'd take a little bit of effort. The other thing is that when I write those emails, I write them myself, and I don't try and make them super formal because I want them to seem human. And I know what, I know how ChatGPT writes, and I know how I write, and they're different. And so I try and lean into how I write.

• 34:36Speaker 00

  And so I think what's happening there is that the more we try to be genuine, the more we try to be authentic, the more we try and be vulnerable, the other person will pick up on it. And that doesn't mean that I have to like, you know, bare my soul or tell you all these like embarrassing things. It just means that I have to be authentic and be genuinely curious about you. And and usually that works.

• 35:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it's so interesting. And then to bring it back to like when you are in conversation with a person, whether it's through an email or kind of texting, what's your advice for being a great communicator when it's through technology?

• 35:18Speaker 00

  Asynchronous? Okay, so first of all, I think is, if you're responding to an email, actually read the person's email, right? Like, like, like, prove to them that you're listening. That like, you say like, okay, you brought up three questions. Let me go through those three questions in order, right? I often do this. I like, I like reply, and then I put my responses inside their their email to show them that like I'm paying attention. The second thing is to to try and figure out what kind of conversation is happening here. It's very easy in a text-based conversation just to assume that it's practical, right? That this person is like bringing up a problem and they want a solution. But there are lots of emotional conversations that happen online. I'm sure if you looked at your kids' phones, and if I looked at my kids' phones,

• 36:01Speaker 00

  what you would see is that they they're, they have conversations with their friends where they're texting just strings of emojis.

• 36:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 36:07Speaker 00

  That's an emotional conversation, right? They're not, they're not trying to convey like an argument or or a piece of information. They're trying to convey a feeling. So pay attention to what kind of conversation is happening. And then the third thing is just remember that you oftentimes have to bend over backwards to be clear. So sarcasm is very easy to detect when we're talking to someone because we can hear it in their voice. It's almost impossible to detect when they're typing. We don't know if they're being serious or sarcastic. So sarcasm probably should not happen in any kind of typewritten communication. We also know that, for instance, being more like, even a little bit of politeness

• 36:49Speaker 00

  works much more effectively in online communication than it does offline. So there's this interesting study that was done of Wikipedia editors. They were all like debating with each other and arguing and flaming each other over like, you know, some change that they wanted to make to a page. If just one of the editors would say please and thank you, it would bring down the temperature of the entire conversation by about 30%. And so that's what I, when you're talking about those rules, these different rules, if you think about it, if you just take a second and say like, how is it? How is a text message different from an email? It's different from a phone call? It's different from speaking face to face? You can come up with a bunch of rules for yourself really easily. It's just a matter of reminding yourself like, oh, it's a text message. I need to follow this rule because that's the one that matters.

• 37:34Speaker 01

  So back to AI, I actually asked ChatGPT. I told it we were going to have a conversation. And I said, okay, do you think you're a super communicator? And I actually thought the answer was interesting. So it said, "A lot of communication failures often happen when one person is having an emotional conversation and the other one is responding with practical advice. I can often identify which type of conversation you're in and respond appropriately. In that sense, I can mimic many behaviors of a super communicator, but there are limits. I don't notice subtle facial expressions. I don't hear the hesitation in someone's voice. A human super communicator will remember decades of shared history, will take emotional risk, and will revere something about themselves, and it can't do any of that." So in a way, it was like,

• 38:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:20Speaker 01

  You know, kind of, but not really, which,

• 38:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. Does that, does that check out?

• 38:25Speaker 00

  I mean, totally, because I think that like, there's this emerging like question going on. What's the mental model for AI? Like, how do we think about AI? Like, how do we picture it? And I think, I think for me, a lot of it is that AI is a simulacrum of the world that's very, very sophisticated. Right? And and oftentimes, things that imitate the world, they they can seem conscious, right? There's this famous experiment known as the Chinese box experiment. It's a thought experiment, which is, imagine there's a box and there's a little hole in it. And you speak Chinese and you put a question in Chinese through the hole, and the guy inside doesn't speak Chinese,

• 39:09Speaker 00

  but he's surrounded by an infinite number of books. And he can use those books to figure out what these characters mean without understanding them and which characters to respond with, right? All the books are just in Chinese. Like, if you see this symbol, write the symbol back. So if you had an infinite number of books, you could probably get something that whatever question I put inside, the box would come back with an answer that made sense to me, without the person inside the box having any idea what any of those symbols mean, which of course is a pretty good analogy for computers, right? And in philosophy, there's a bunch of people who said like, look, if a box could actually do that, that's a form of consciousness, right? That box is actually conscious.

• 39:53Speaker 00

  It's not conscious in the same way that we think about humans being conscious, but it has this capacity for consciousness. And then there's other philosophers who say, no, it's not consciousness. That's like, that's just a particularly clever like use of resources when your resources are infinite. So I don't know what the answer to that is. I, and I think there's a debate that's going on right now over what the right answer is. But I do know that, at the end of the day, I like talking to my wife and my kids more than I like talking to ChatGPT, and that I should probably pay attention to that.

• 40:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:27Speaker 00

  Because that, that's telling me something important.

• 40:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. Do you think the more we communicate, whether we're, again, communicating with each other through technology or just communicating with technology, do you think there's a risk that we, you know, our social and emotional skills atrophy?

• 40:44Speaker 00

  I don't know. That's a really good question. I hadn't thought about that. I mean, our social and our emotional skills tend to be fairly robust, to be honest with you. But yeah, if you're not practicing them. I mean, I don't think you need a machine to do that, right? We know that people who avoid emotional conversations aren't great at having emotional conversations, right? They, they don't feel fewer emotions. They don't, they don't respond in less emotional ways. They're just bad at having emotional conversations. So definitely, practice is really, really good. And if anything, if AI can help us practice, like, it's not a bad thing to, if I'm going to have a tough conversation with my spouse, to go and say like, hey, okay, ChatGPT, you're my spouse. Like, like, let me, let me work this through with you. Let's do a dry run.

• 41:28Speaker 00

  That doesn't mean that ChatGPT is going to do a great job of anticipating what my spouse might say, but it does mean that it's going to help me, again, as a repository, as like a diary. It's going to help me get, get more clear on what I'm hoping to happen in this conversation.

• 41:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. Last question. What's one thing you'd love to leave the audience with?

• 41:48Speaker 00

  So the thing I would leave the audience with is

• 41:53Speaker 00

  you can have a conversation with anyone and you can have any conversation you want with anyone, right? There is probably someone who you feel bad because you haven't reached out to in years. And you know what? If you send them a note, they will love it. And maybe if you set up a call with someone you haven't talked to in a while, you're we oftentimes avoid doing that because because we can't remember their spouse's name and we think it's going to be awkward in the first couple of minutes. And it might be awkward in the first couple of minutes. You have to say like, I can't remember, is it Suzie or is it Jamie, your wife's name, right? But then after you get that out of the way, then you suddenly start catching up and it's wonderful and you feel so close to each other.

• 42:34Speaker 00

  One of the things we know is that humans are kind of bad at forecasting how conversations are going to go. But we are almost always happier that we've had that conversation afterwards. Connecting with other people is the thing that makes us happy. And the way that we do that is through conversation. So what I would leave the audience with is go have a real conversation sometime in the next week, a conversation you might not have had otherwise. Maybe it's with a stranger, maybe it's with your spouse. Have a real conversation. And I promise you, your life will be better as a result.

• 43:10Speaker 01

  I love that. What a wonderful way to end our conversation. Thank you for joining us on the show. It was great.

• 43:15Speaker 00

  Thank you for having me. This has been such a treat.

• 43:22Speaker 01

  I have a lot of takeaways from this conversation. Here's one of them. Our languaging really matters. So when we call whatever we're doing with AI a relationship, we're putting a lot of weight on that word. Charles really challenged that. Maybe it's not a relationship. Maybe it's just a super sophisticated diary or journaling tool. That's something I'm going to definitely be thinking about. If this conversation helped you communicate better with your partner or coworker, I'd love to hear about it. Thank you so much for listening. We'll be back next week with a new episode.

• 44:02Speaker 01

  Pioneers of AI is a Wait What original. Our executive producer is Eve Tro. This episode was produced by Megan Tan. Video editing by Eric Purcell. Our senior talent executive is Stephanie Stern. Mixing and mastering by Brian Pugh. Original music by Ryan Holiday. Our head of podcasts is Lital Mulad. You can join the conversation on LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and X. Just search for @PioneersOfAI.