963: Charles Duhigg | Unlocking the Secret Language of Connection

963: Charles Duhigg | Unlocking the Secret Language of Connection

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[00:00:00] Jordan Harbinger: This episode of the Jordan Harbinger Show is brought to you by Nissan. Nissan SUVs Have the capabilities to take your adventure to the next level. Learn more at nissanusa.com.

[00:00:09] Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show.

[00:00:12] Charles Duhigg: Looping for understanding is a habit like I find myself all the time without even thinking about it. Ask a question, preferably a deep question. Repeat back what you just heard the person say in your own words and ask if you got it right. And the reason why this is so powerful is 'cause it proves that I'm listening to you when we're talking to each other. There's something in the back of your head that's wondering, is he actually listening or is he just waiting his turn to speak? And when I repeat back what you just told me, when I ask a follow up question that shows that I was paying attention. When I prove that I'm listening, we are hardwired to want to listen back.

[00:00:50] Jordan Harbinger: Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers, even the occasional gold smuggler, economic hitman, astronaut hacker, real life pirate, special operator or tech luminary.

[00:01:19] And if you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes on persuasion and negotiation, psychology, geopolitics, disinformation, cyber warfare, crime, and cults and more. That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show.

[00:01:34] Just visit Jordan harbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Now, if it sounds like I'm recording this at four o'clock in the morning before a flight to Japan, that's because I'm recording this at four o'clock in the morning before a flight to Japan. So pardon my definitely not yet warmed up voice.

[00:01:50] I think the best part about this voice is that I can say you are a mean one. Mr. Grinch can really hit that low baritone, you know, but it doesn't matter because today. We've got a brilliant thinker, writer and communicator, and one of my favorite repeat guests, Charles Duhig, back on the show again. Today, we'll explore, wow, where do I even begin?

[00:02:09] This episode was just packed with powerful and practical tech for communication and rapport building. We'll explore different types of conversations, what we should be doing in each type of conversation, and how do we evaluate the type of conversation that we're in. We'll also hear how our brains actually synchronize when we get this stuff right.

[00:02:26] That actually seemed like science fiction to me before Charles got into it. Also, vulnerability and rapport. Emotional contagion. Something called stereotype threat, which I found absolutely fascinating and a whole lot more. Here we go with another highly practical conversation with Charles Duhig.

[00:02:47] Love highly practical books like this and Practical Conversations because I feel like this stuff. It really hits home when somebody can apply something right outta the box and have something concrete to use after they listen. So I appreciate you writing a book like that.

[00:03:01] Charles Duhigg: Thank you. Thanks. No, I feel the exact same way.

[00:03:03] It's, and the goal when I was writing Super communicators was really to say I was having communication problems. Like, this is an excuse to call the experts and be like, why do some people manage to connect with everyone else so effortlessly? And then there's times when I talk to my wife and like, we cannot connect with each other.

[00:03:21] And it turns out it's just a set of skills, right? Like it's just literally a set of skills that super communicators know and that any of us can learn and become super communicators ourselves. That's kind of a,

[00:03:31] Jordan Harbinger: well, it's good news first of all, because I think there's a lot of people who listen, I know there are, because they write in emails and they go, oh, I can't use your six minute networking course, which is like a really easy networking course that I offer for free.

[00:03:43] They're like, I, I just can't do it. I'm introverted or you know, I've never been good at this stuff. I'm not gonna start now. I'm 58. I'm not gonna learn this. It's just a, basically they have a medical excuse for not being good with people, and I just don't buy it. I don't wanna blame them, but I get it.

[00:04:00] They've been dealing with it their whole lives and they're like, you know what? Giving up feels good. I don't just have to feel bad about this anymore. I'm just not that person.

[00:04:06] Charles Duhigg: That's absolutely right. And yet, here's what we know about people who become super communicators is that first of all, all of us know a super communicator.

[00:04:13] We are often super communicators ourselves, right? Like if I was to ask you if you had a bad day and you wanted to call a friend who you know would make you feel better, does the person you would call, do you know who that person is? Uh, I have

[00:04:25] Jordan Harbinger: a few options. Yeah,

[00:04:26] Charles Duhigg: sure. Yeah. They pop into your mind right away, right?

[00:04:28] Yeah. And so for you, those people are super communicators and you're probably a super communicator back to them. But then there's these other people who can do this consistently, right? Who can do this with almost anyone. And going into this, I thought to myself, oh, they must be like extroverts or really charismatic.

[00:04:42] Mm-hmm. And it turns out that when I talked to researchers, they said no. Like some of them are extroverts and some are introverts. Some are really charismatic and some aren't. Some are people who like, you know, like to be at home and don't like talking to strangers. And some are people who are outgoing.

[00:04:56] They said it doesn't matter what your personality is like because nobody is born a super communicator. It's entirely just a set of skills that some people learn through intuition or they learn through osmosis picking up from other people. Or you read a book and it tells you how to do it. And once you have those skills, you know how to connect with anyone.

[00:05:13] And that doesn't mean you have to connect with everyone, right? Right. You can still stay home from the party, but it means that when you want to, when it's important to you, you know what to do. That's an

[00:05:22] Jordan Harbinger: important, uh, a few important notes there because I think sometimes people will say, uh, also about six minute networking.

[00:05:29] I don't wanna do this. With everyone. I already have friends or like, I'm retired. I don't need this. And I'm thinking just because you know how to relate to people doesn't mean alright now you never get privacy. You have to live at this local coffee shop and be the life of the party because you have the skills.

[00:05:46] It's like, no, you're not Superman. Where you feel morally obligated to be everywhere at once and solve the world's problems. You just can be that person when you take your glasses off and go into the phone booth and be, you know, shed your Clark Kent costume socially, you know, for me

[00:06:01] Charles Duhigg: that really was driven home.

[00:06:03] One of the stories in the book is about Jim Lawler, the CIA officer. Yeah, that was interesting. Yeah. He was sent overseas to like recruit spies. He'd wanted this job for so long, he worked so hard to get it. He was terrible at it. He was just, he was so bad at recruiting spies. He would go to parties and people would say things like, if you talk to me again, I'm gonna report you to the authorities so you get deported.

[00:06:23] Stop asking me to spy for you. Right. And the CIA basically told him, you're gonna get fired unless you like get better at this job. And there was this, the only potential candidate he had was this young woman from the Middle East who was on vacation in Europe. He pitched her on the idea, tried to persuade her, she said, no.

[00:06:38] She said, I don't wanna talk to you ever again. He came visit her head of dinner one more time and at that dinner he just basically gives up and he's just honest and he is like, look like, I know you're not gonna work with me, but like, I just wanna be honest. Like, I'm so bad at this job. I understand. When you say you're depressed about yourself or you're disappointing yourself, I feel the exact same way.

[00:06:56] Which is when she could start to hear him, right? That's when they connected. And she decided, she ended up being one of the best assets in the Middle East for the next 20 years. But when I was talking to Jim, what he told me was, he said, you know, I learned how to do this. And at first I thought I had to do it all the time.

[00:07:10] Like I had to be honest with everyone. I had to be authentic with everyone, and it was exhausting. And then someone took me aside and they were like, you don't owe this to the world. Like if this is something, if you want to connect with someone, you have this tool in your back pocket. But when you're feeling tired and overwhelmed, you don't have to do this.

[00:07:29] And he said it was like, it convinced him. This is a tool, right? This isn't a behavior, this isn't a personality type. This is a tool that once we learn, we can use when we want to use it.

[00:07:39] Jordan Harbinger: The idea that some spy is just like, I need to recruit you, or I'm gonna get fired. And the other person's like, you know what?

[00:07:46] I didn't like those A guys. Anyway, they, they, they're weird and they have funny hats. I'll spy for America. What the hell? That's just like such a, a hilarious image somehow. Yeah.

[00:07:56] Charles Duhigg: But I think that's kind of what life is like, right? Like I think that, you know, there's another story in the book about the creation of the sitcom, the Big Bang Theory.

[00:08:03] Mm-Hmm. And basically how these guys, the writers figured out how to make the show work. 'cause at first it was a flop. Like they recorded a pilot and people hated it because they couldn't figure out how to get the characters to share emotions with each other, which is really important in a sitcom because all the characters are these awkward physicists.

[00:08:18] Jordan Harbinger: Right. Emotionless guys.

[00:08:19] Charles Duhigg: Yeah. Yeah. And it was really interesting when I was talking to them about it, I was like, so like, was there a scientific process to figuring out like what the solution was? Or did you guys run experiments? And they were like, no, no, we just sat around our living room, like going through draft after draft until eventually we were like, oh, okay.

[00:08:37] I think we got it. We fixed this problem. Mm-Hmm. And then I asked my wife and she said. Yeah, you need to go another 10%. So we went another 10% and like that's it. That's like how much of life works, right? It's very

[00:08:48] Jordan Harbinger: real. That show's funny in ingenious in many ways. You pointed it out in the book. You say it better than I'm about to, but.

[00:08:55] Since these guys are so analytical and scientific kind of not robotic, it's not quite that. I mean, Sheldon is because he's supposed to be this sort of like spectrum type of genius guy. Yeah. But if you watch friends, right? I think it was Malcolm Gladwell that talks about this. You watch friends and when Ross is surprised, he's like, oh my gosh.

[00:09:14] And his eyes go, uh, big and his mouth drops open and then they freeze frame, like sort of like show his face for a good 10 seconds. So that, you know, he's surprised. Like, Hey everybody, Ross is surprised.

[00:09:26] Charles Duhigg: Even with the sound off, you can tell exactly what every character

[00:09:28] Jordan Harbinger: is feeling, right? In Big Bang Theory.

[00:09:30] It's like we don't wanna show anybody doing anything like that because these guys are pretty much devoid of that. So they have to. With a stone face, say something or indicate in a much more subtle way that they're surprised. But oh my gosh, how are we gonna do that without Raj just going, I am very surprised right now.

[00:09:48] Right. And of course no one's gonna be entertained by that. No.

[00:09:51] Charles Duhigg: And part of the problem is that the humor comes from their Yeah. Awkwardness, right? It comes from their inability to sort of communicate easily. And so what the writers figured out was this kind of brilliant thing, which is, and we know this from biology, that all of us have this little sensor in our head that when we meet someone or we encounter someone, we usually pay attention very quickly.

[00:10:11] To their energy and their mood. Like if their high energy and their mood is negative. Mm-Hmm. That probably means they're angry. Yeah. So like, we don't wanna get too close, but if they're low energy and their mood is negative, that might mean that they're sad, that like they need us to console them. And so our brains are trained to notice this within split seconds of seeing someone.

[00:10:31] And so they just decided, this is what we're gonna do. We're gonna start using this for the show so we can have a character come on and they can say something that's completely emotionless, but as long as they get the, they nail the mood and the energy in their voice. Right? Mm-Hmm. And in their gestures, then you're gonna know when two people are connecting with each other, or you're gonna know when they're not connecting with each other.

[00:10:51] At that point, it hardly even matters what the words are because it's all about how I'm matching your mood and energy and what you're showing me about yourself. I

[00:11:00] Jordan Harbinger: wanna put a little, what is it, the dagger cross instead of the asterisk next to this. Because I think this is the energy thing is what a lot of people find exhausting about communication.

[00:11:08] They're going right now. These people who are listening, they're going, this is why I don't do this, because I can't put energy into everything. I'm, I'm 49. I don't have energy that left in my, you know, the, the eighties or something like that. So I understand that being energetic all the time. Like right now what I'm doing, I talk like this for a few hours a day at most, and other days I'm like, no thanks, you know?

[00:11:30] Yeah. No, and it

[00:11:31] Charles Duhigg: doesn't necessarily mean being high energy. And in fact, what we know is that if you're having the right kind of conversation, it actually feels very effortless. Yeah. Right. Everyone has experienced this. And I'll actually talk about my own example. So in part, this book started because I, I.

[00:11:43] I got fell into this pattern with my wife where I would come home mm-Hmm. After a long day. And I would start complaining about my boss. And she would very sensibly like suggest a solution. Like, why don't you take him out to lunch and get to know each other a little bit better? And instead of being able to hear her, I would get more upset.

[00:11:59] And then she would get upset because I was upset. Right. And that was really energy taxing, right? Those instances of miscommunication, that's when we feel like we have to overemphasize or we have to be energetic. So I went and I talked to these researchers to ask them like, how do we get better at this?

[00:12:15] And they said, well, here's the mistake you're making. We're living through this golden age of understanding communication for really the first time because of advances in neural imagery and data collection. And you, like most people are assuming that a discussion is about one thing. Mm-Hmm. Right? That a discussion is about your day or, or your kids' grades.

[00:12:32] But actually every discussion is made up of different kinds of conversations. And in general, they fall into one of three buckets. There's these practical conversations where we're solving problems, making plans. There's emotional conversations where I wanna tell you how I feel and I don't want you to solve my feelings.

[00:12:47] I want you just to empathize. Mm-hmm. And then there's social conversations, which is about how we relate to each other and our social identities. And they said, if you're not having the same kind of conversation at the same moment, not only do you not hear each other, you're exhausted. Right? That feeling of like, I was coming home and having an emotional conversation and my wife was having a practical conversation and we were not matching each other, we were not connecting with each other.

[00:13:09] And they said, that's what feels tiring is when you feel like you want to connect and you can't. But if I'm having an emotional conversation and my wife matches me, or if she invites me to match her, which is what she does now, she'll, I'll come home and complain and she'll say. Like, do you wanna come up with solutions together or do you just need to vent?

[00:13:26] Do you just want me to listen? When that happens, it actually feels almost like it takes no energy to have that conversation because then we're on the same wavelength. I. It's actually very rejuvenating as opposed to taxing.

[00:13:39] Jordan Harbinger: This is sort of the crux of the book, right? The three kinds of conversation, practical decision making conversations, emotional conversations, I think, what was the other conversations about identity?

[00:13:48] Social. Oh, social. Yeah.

[00:13:49] Charles Duhigg: Social conversations. Yeah.

[00:13:50] And

[00:13:51] Jordan Harbinger: I think each one of these has what a different mindset or different, it uses

[00:13:56] Charles Duhigg: different parts of our brains. Mm-Hmm. Yeah. So when you're in communication with someone, your bodies and your brains actually become kind of linked. Like, even though we're doing this over zoom, you're on the other side of the country from me.

[00:14:06] Mm-Hmm. Our pupils are actually dilating at the same rate right now. Our breathing patterns are starting to match each other. This happens when we're in a conversation, when you're in a real conversation, a meaningful conversation, and most importantly, the activity inside my brain is beginning to look like the activity inside your brain and vice versa.

[00:14:21] I'm sorry about that,

[00:14:22] Jordan Harbinger: by the way. No, no, it's good.

[00:14:24] Charles Duhigg: It's good. But that's what communication is. When you think about it. If I describe a feeling or an idea. If I do it well enough, you experience that same feeling. Mm-Hmm. And you experience that idea, your brain and my brain become what's known within psychology and neurology as gnarly entrained.

[00:14:42] And the problem is that if I'm having an emotional conversation, I'm using the deep core of my brain. Right? The amygdala. Mm-hmm. And parts related to that. If I'm having a practical conversation, I'm using the prefrontal cortex. And so if you're having a practical conversation and I'm having an emotional conversation, we don't match each other.

[00:14:58] It's very hard for our brains to become entrained aligned because we're using, we're literally speaking different cognitive

[00:15:04] Jordan Harbinger: languages. So I would imagine, and by the way, it's funny that your wife is the one who tries to solve problems while you're venting. Because isn't it usually the other way around the, the stereotype is the other way around.

[00:15:14] Charles Duhigg: It also flips the other way sometimes. Yeah. Some,

[00:15:16] Jordan Harbinger: yeah. The sort of stereo. Have you seen that video? It's not about the nail. Have you seen this? No. It's, oh man. This is like perfect for any in your next keynote or something. So there's a video. If this is an old video, it's a woman saying so, and you can't quite see her head, her whole face, and she says, I just have this pounding headache and it doesn't stop and I can't sleep.

[00:15:36] I. And the guy, they zoom out and they show, she's talking to this guy and he's like, uh, have you, um, and he's pointing at her and she's like, just listen. Okay. And as she talks and complains, they zoom out and she's got this giant nail sticking outta her forehead. And he's like, have you. Tried take, just pulling that thing out.

[00:15:56] And she's like, you always do this. You always try and make it about what I can do. And they start arguing and arguing and arguing and she's like, it's not about the nail. Right. And then he, he has to sort of like pretend to listen empathetically and Yeah. And then it, of course it all goes, it's above wrong.

[00:16:13] Yeah. It's such a good video because of course everybody can kind of relate to this. Like, I just, it's such an obvious solution. She's like, you just need to listen to me.

[00:16:20] Charles Duhigg: You never listen to me. Well, and what this has given rise to situations like the one you're describing in extreme, is this thing that's known as the matching principle in psychology, which says that in order to connect with each other, we need to be having the same kind of conversation at the same time.

[00:16:33] Mm-Hmm. If you have a nail in your forehead, but you're having an emotional conversation, you're telling me about how you feel. It does not matter if I point out the nail in your forehead, you're not gonna be able to hear me, right? You're gonna think that I'm just ignoring you. But that if we match each other, once we become aligned, then we actually move from conversation type to conversation type together.

[00:16:51] And that's really, really powerful In schools. They actually teach teachers how to do this by telling them, if a student comes in and he's upset or she's upset, start the conversation by asking them, do you want me to help you? Mm-Hmm. Do you want me to hear you or do you want me to hug you? Oh, I like that.

[00:17:05] Which are the three kind, the practical, the emotional, and the social. And, and even kids are like, no, no, no. I don't need to hug right now. I just need you to hear what I'm saying. I don't need your help right now. I just need you to hear. It's really powerful. That

[00:17:18] Jordan Harbinger: is powerful. So helped hugged or heard. Yeah, basically.

[00:17:21] That's great. I, I feel like I, sometimes my wife and I do this, we catch ourselves sometimes where she'll say something and I'm like, well, you know what we can do is, and I'm like, oh wait, I think, are you venting right now? And she'll be like, yeah, it's just an annoying thing that happened today. And I'm like, okay, this is a.

[00:17:35] She's not fishing for solutions here, and she'll let me know when she's looking for solutions. She'll say, what, okay, here's this thing that happened. What do you think I should do in this situation? It's not always that clear cut, but because sometimes you don't even know why you're venting. Right? I might vent, and then totally, someone gives me advice and I get annoyed and I go, oh, why am I annoyed that this person's trying to help me?

[00:17:53] Oh. Because I actually don't want that right now. I guess that makes sense. And then, and there's a way, there's a way

[00:17:57] Charles Duhigg: to sidestep that, which is, so one of the things that we know about consistent super communicators is that they ask a lot of questions. They ask 10 to 20 times as many questions as the average person.

[00:18:07] And some of the questions are throwaway questions, like, oh, what'd you do next? Or, what do you think? Sort of inviting people in. But some of them are what are known as deep questions and a deep question asks about values, beliefs, or experiences. And most deep questions don't appear deep, right? So if you bump into someone and their lawyer, a deep question might be, oh, you know, what made you decide to go to law school?

[00:18:26] Mm-Hmm. Or like, what's the best case you ever worked on? Or, what do you love about your job? They invite the other person to tell you something real about themselves, right? However they answer those, you're gonna learn something about their backgrounds, their values, the experiences that they've had. And what we've found is that at the start of a conversation, when we need to take a break and figure out what kind of conversation is happening, sometimes we can just ask, do you need to vent?

[00:18:50] Or do you wanna solve this problem? But sometimes if you just ask a deep question like, why is this bothering you so much? Like, tell me what's going on? Like, why is this such a, this seems to be bothering you more than usual. What's going on? That deep question that reveals what kind of conversation we're all seeking.

[00:19:05] Mm-Hmm. And you appreciate getting that question right? Because sometimes you don't know if you need to vent or you're looking for a solution until someone asks you. It is

[00:19:13] Jordan Harbinger: interesting that these conversations often mesh together, right? So somebody, I think people might go, oh, this is tricky. I don't know what kind of conversation this is.

[00:19:20] An example is that somebody might ask for advice about what to do at work, and then you start solving the problem. But it's not quite clicking or it's they're getting annoyed or they're getting more worked up or whatever. But really the conversation will then like shift to, and Angela's always doing this thing and she's so irritated and you're like, oh, okay.

[00:19:39] So you don't wanna necessarily solve the problem with your boss. It's mostly that Angela ticks you off every day and that sort of spilled over into the performance review. Absolutely. Or whatever.

[00:19:49] Charles Duhigg: And just being aware of the three different kinds of conversations, our brains are programmed to make this easy for us.

[00:19:55] 'cause they evolve to be good at communication. Hmm. Just being aware of those three different kinds of conversations means in that situation that you're able to say like, oh, I don't need to solve this problem. Right. Like, this is actually, she needs to talk to me about how she relates to Angela. That's what we're actually talking about here.

[00:20:10] Or it creates opportunities. You know, if you're at work and you're, before a meeting starts, you're sort of like just shooting the breeze. And you ask someone, what'd you do this weekend? And they say, oh, I went to my kid's graduation. It was great. Mm-Hmm. The easiest thing to do is to say like, oh, congratulations.

[00:20:23] Let's move to the budget. Right. If you just take a split second and you're like, oh, wow, congratulations. Like, what did that feel like to watch your kid walk across the stage? Mm-Hmm? To meet them. They've signaled to you that they have this emotion thing that they're feeling, this pride. Then to meet them there and say, just tell me what was that like?

[00:20:41] Like tell me about it. What were you feeling? That's so powerful, and that takes a minute to have that conversation. But now we're aligned. Now when we move onto the agenda, we're moving on the, onto the agenda together.

[00:20:54] Jordan Harbinger: That's fascinating. And it's a sort of a cheat code, right? Because people are throwing these things out there that we're usually ignoring because we have our own, I don't know, conversational agenda.

[00:21:02] Yeah. But we just have to put that aside for a second. That's probably the tricky part that people need to practice, right? Is going, oh, that was one of those flags that I usually ignore and then get back to work. Maybe I need to

[00:21:12] Charles Duhigg: pick up on that. And it's totally fine to miss them, right? Like the thing that's good is if you recognize later that day, like, oh, I could have asked about this thing and I, I should have asked about this thing.

[00:21:21] Or if you get in the habit of asking these deep questions, which often are just like, tell me what this means to you. Like why is this important to you? And particularly when we're, when we have conversations around conflict, this becomes even more important, right? In the book, there's a chapter about. This experiment where a bunch of, um, gun control enthusiasts came in and a bunch of gun rights activists.

[00:21:40] And these are people who like usually just scream at each other. Mm-Hmm. And they brought them all together in Washington DC and the goal was not to have them convince each other of anything just to see if they could have a civil conversation. But before the conversation started, they taught them this technique known as looping for understanding and has three steps.

[00:21:55] The first is ask a question, preferably a deep question. Secondly, repeat back what you just heard the person say in your own words. And thirdly, and this is the one everyone always forgets, ask if you got it right. Mm. And the reason why this is so powerful is 'cause it proves that I'm listening to you when we're talking to each other.

[00:22:13] There's something in the back of your head that's wondering, is he actually listening or is he just waiting his turn to speak? And when I repeat back what you just told me, when I ask a follow-up question that shows that I was paying attention. When I prove that I'm listening, I. We are hardwired to want to listen back.

[00:22:29] Mm-Hmm. And so to the point that you just raised, a lot of what we do is just get into the right habits. Like I looping for understanding is a habit. Like I find myself all the time without even thinking about it, saying like, what I hear you saying and, and tell me if I'm getting this right is, and once you're in those habits, it becomes automatic.

[00:22:46] You know

[00:22:46] Jordan Harbinger: when someone's doing the opposite, right? Because this is, you feel it. Someone will say, welcome to whatever. And you're like, oh yeah, how you doing? I'm fine. How are you? And you're like, oh man, today, da da, da, da. And they go, what can I get for you? And you're like, yeah, you don't care at all. I mean, I guess I should have expected that 'cause you're just working here, but Ouch.

[00:23:04] Charles Duhigg: Or people who ask a question because they actually want to answer themselves. Like, oh, where'd you go on your last vacation? And you're like, oh, I went to go see my aunt. How about you? And they're like, oh, I went to Hawaii and I lived on a yacht for a week. Right? Like, right. They didn't actually wanna know where I was going on vacation.

[00:23:17] They just wanted me to ask them where they were going on vacation. And we can always feel that. It feels bad. It feels like we're not connecting. They bust out there. Let me show you

[00:23:25] Jordan Harbinger: some photographs. How was your Aunt Aunt's house anyways? Yeah, look at the four of course meals the chef cooked for us every single day.

[00:23:32] Oh, this is, you're one of those guys, huh? Yeah. So one thing I want to clarify, the matching principle. I wanna highlight that matching is not mimicry, right? Because you, you see these clunky folks who learn from books or YouTube and they're the worst at this. And it's so bizarre. The like weirdo kind of hypnosis body language, mirroring copy folks.

[00:23:53] And you put your elbow down like this and they do it and you're like, why are you, eventually you just kind of go, why are you doing that? And then they try and gaslight you and they're like, actually, I'm leading you and you're copying me because something, something NLP. And I'm like, no, you're just being really weird right now and I feel like kind of itchy and I wanna get away from you.

[00:24:12] It's,

[00:24:12] Charles Duhigg: it's exactly right. So you're exactly right. That matching is not mimicry. In fact, it can't be mimicry. And there's all kinds of experiments that have shown how this is true. One of my favorites is that they, these researchers, they had a bunch of friends laugh together and they would record the sound of their laughter.

[00:24:28] Hmm. And then they had strangers laughing together and they would record that as well. And then they would find people and they would play one second of laughter. With 90% accuracy. The listener could tell if they were friends or if they were strangers. What? That sounds impossible. I know, right? But our brains are so fine tuned to detect inauthenticity because particularly in a state of nature, inauthenticity is incredibly dangerous.

[00:24:53] Yeah, it's dangerous. Yeah, exactly. If you're gonna trust someone with your life, if you're gonna trust them with your food, if you're gonna trust them with your family, you are the hair trigger to detect when they're being inauthentic. And so that's why mimicry doesn't work, is because mimicry is inauthentic.

[00:25:08] I'm not actually having a real experience, I'm just imitating your experience. But on the other hand, if you say something vulnerable or authentic, and I engage in what's known as reciprocal authenticity, you just told me about a story growing up. I don't necessarily tell you a story about growing up A, I might just ask a question and show that I'm listening, or B, I might tell you about a meaningful experience in my life if I'm matching you.

[00:25:32] That's very different from mimicry, and as long as it's authentic, it's gonna work. But to be authentic, you have to be true to yourself. You have to look for the thing that feels true as opposed to just saying, oh, he just mentioned a girlfriend. I should mention a

[00:25:45] Jordan Harbinger: girlfriend too. Yeah. And, and sometimes it's even more clunky than that, right?

[00:25:49] It's like the, the body language stuff is, is what really sort of initially made me realize, oh man, this is worse than not matching someone at all. Yes,

[00:25:59] Charles Duhigg: absolutely. And we've all been in that situation where someone says, you know, I, my aunt passed away last week, and they wanna mimic us. And so they say something like, I, I know how hard that is.

[00:26:09] Like I had a pet who died seven years ago, and you're like, that's not exactly, like, that is not the same at all. Like, the way that you might match someone in a situation like that is to say, oh, I'm so sorry. I know how hard that is. Mm-Hmm. Like, tell me about your aunt. What was she like? Because that is a form of matching to say, I understand that you're feeling something.

[00:26:29] I wanna learn more about it if you're willing, but you don't have to. And instead of stealing the spotlight unto myself, I'm going to give you some comforts. That's a form of matching, but it's not mimicry.

[00:26:38] Jordan Harbinger: The example's almost like something from a ridiculous movie or sitcom, right? Like, oh yeah, I remember when my mammy died.

[00:26:46] Oh, your mammy died too. Yeah. Oh, she fell out of her cage. Wait a minute. What? Yeah, it's a ger my gerbil. You know, and you're just thinking like, what, what is wrong with this person? What's going on here? Yeah. It's like a Zack Gakis bit or something that Yes, that's exactly right. And, and it's funny because you just think, wow, how misattuned is this person to, to what's going on?

[00:27:05] Yeah. What's

[00:27:06] Charles Duhigg: going on? And what we know is that like, actually, once you learn these skills or even are just introduced to these skills, our brains evolve to become amazing communication devices, right? Mm-Hmm. Communication is Homo sapien superpower. It is the thing that has, as a species has helped us succeed because it allowed us to build families and then villages and towns and countries.

[00:27:27] And so our brains evolved to be really good at communication. And that means. Now they obviously evolved in a very different time, right? Pre telephones, pre-internet. But it means that when you get exposed to certain skills, those skills become habits much more quickly. Like you internalize the lessons very, very fast because your brain is predisposed to be able to access them and make them into habits.

[00:27:54] And so part of the reason I wrote super communicators is because it's a description of these different skills, these different tools, and once you hear them, you almost start doing them thoughtlessly. Mm-Hmm. And that's why they're so

[00:28:05] Jordan Harbinger: powerful. Part of the the law or CIA agent. So part of, I guess, why this great story went down.

[00:28:12] Is just because he was so, he had just given up. Right. All the pretense was gone. I mean, you, you mentioned people were like, Hey, spy, don't ask me to spy. Just eat your cheesecake and shut up or whatever at these diplomatic parties. That's exactly right. I have to say I've met quite a few CIA case officers and some of them are really good at this stuff, but candidly it's a little scary.

[00:28:33] How many of them are not that

[00:28:34] Charles Duhigg: good at this? Well, it's interesting. So Jim actually became, he started training recruiters and I asked him about this. I was like, and he said the people who aren't good at it are the ones who think they're great communicators. No surprise, they think they have nothing to learn.

[00:28:48] Right. And this is actually born out by the evidence that, like when we talk to people who are super communicators, as I mentioned, they're not one kind of personality. Mm-Hmm. Right. Anyone can become a super communicator just by sort of learning these skills. But what's interesting about many of them who've done it, sort of intuitively done it on their own, there was a period in their life when they were not good at communication.

[00:29:07] They'll say things like, I didn't have very many friends in high school. I had to really like study how to talk to other kids, or my parents got divorced and I had to be the peacemaker between them. Hmm. And it was that experience that just forced them to think like half an inch deeper about how conversations work and about how we connect to other people.

[00:29:23] Once we start thinking about it, we get better at it. And we don't have to think hard about it, we just have to be aware of what's going on. But to your point, the CIA officers who aren't great at this are the ones who say, I'm really good at communication. Mm-Hmm. Because they just stopped thinking about it.

[00:29:41] Jordan Harbinger: I have read books by some of these folks and then talked with them on the phone and they'll talk over me. They don't listen. They don't respond directly to the question. And I'm thinking, you were

[00:29:52] Charles Duhigg: the source

[00:29:53] Jordan Harbinger: for this particular area. How is that even remotely possible? Especially when it's like. They were in the Middle East somewhere where people are slow and value the conversation and the connection and I'm just like, you, how, how did it go?

[00:30:05] Talking over Sheik whatever that you were supposed to get to know and like, I mean he probably really didn't appreciate that. 'cause I don't

[00:30:13] Charles Duhigg: That's exactly, exactly right. And we know that like within our lives and within our companies, we know how destructive that is. Right? Everyone has had a manager who's bad at communication and like you just wanna run away from that person.

[00:30:26] And then everyone's had a manager who like is just really good at it. And even if they're not great at everything, you wanna work with that person. 'cause you feel like they're listening to you, they're doing this thing looping for understanding, they're proving that they're listening to you. You feel like you understand, like you click with them.

[00:30:42] And the same is true in romantic relationships or relationships with our kids, right? That feeling of clicking feels amazing because our brains have evolved to actually reward it. I know

[00:30:52] Jordan Harbinger: people are going, oh well the CIA guys, they just don't care about you 'cause you're a podcaster. The reason this doesn't check out and tell me what you think.

[00:30:59] If you can do this, it makes all your relationships a lot easier. So if you can, if you can do this, you would do it all the time. It's like actors, right? Denzel Washington. He's Denzel all the time. He no way does he just like go home and be like, oh, now I can stop being the coolest guy in the world for a second and just be myself again.

[00:31:17] No, he's Denzel all the time. He's Denzel at the bodega and he's Denzel on the on the silver screen. Come on

[00:31:22] Charles Duhigg: man. That's exactly right. And it becomes very second nature, right? Like good communication. Once you start doing it, it becomes the easiest thing to do. It doesn't take more energy. It takes less energy because instead of having to like carry a conversation that you're like, what am I gonna ask next?

[00:31:36] Like what am I gonna talk about? How am I gonna impress this person? What are they thinking about me? Once you get in the habit that you're like, oh, actually I have a couple questions in my back pocket that I can ask at any time, then all of a sudden it's easy. Like in fact, there was this study that was done by researchers at Harvard Business School.

[00:31:50] Where they were gonna have students have conversations with strangers, which is one of the most anxiety producing kind of conversations Mm-Hmm. That exist. And before they did it, they said to everyone, write down three topics that you might want to discuss. Like, don't take more than 10 seconds doing this.

[00:32:04] And for most people it took like four or five seconds and they would scribble down like last night's game and the movie this weekend and, you know, are, do you like to ski? And then they would shove the piece of paper in their pocket and they would go, have their conversation. And most of the time those topics they wrote down never came up.

[00:32:19] Hmm. But afterwards, they all said they were so much less anxious, they were so much more confident. The conversation went so much better than they expected because they knew they had something to fall back on because they knew that if there was a, a silence that they knew what to fill it with. And we can do the same thing really easily just by saying like, oh, you know, when I meet people I should try and ask a deep question.

[00:32:42] Like, instead of asking about the facts of their life, ask them how they feel about their life. If you have that to fall back on, it makes conversations so much easier. It takes less energy. I love the

[00:32:52] Jordan Harbinger: idea of having that plan in your pocket. And you could use the same plan for probably almost every single conversation with a stranger, right?

[00:32:59] Charles Duhigg: Absolutely. Or with a friend, right? Mm-Hmm. And now I find that like when I'm calling up a friend or am about to have a conversation, I just take two seconds before I dial their number to say like in a sentence, like, what's the thing that I really hope we get to in this conversation? And sometimes it's just like catching up and hearing how each other's doing.

[00:33:16] And I want it to be an easy, fun conversation. And sometimes it's like I need to ask about like, do you wanna go on a vacation with me? But I don't. I don't wanna make it hard for them to say no, 'cause I don't wanna make it awkward. And just elucidating that for yourself, which literally takes two to three seconds.

[00:33:30] That makes the conversation so much better and so much easier.

[00:33:36] Jordan Harbinger: You are listening to the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest Charles Duhigg. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Shopify picture. Teaming up like Armstrong and Aldrin venturing into the vast unknown of space. But in this scenario, it's you and Shopify pioneering the path for your business's future.

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[00:34:36] Jordan Harbinger: This episode is also sponsored by Better Help. If I had an extra hour in my day, I would do more video game voiceover stuff.

[00:34:42] Fun fact, I actually did the voiceover in part of Grand Theft Auto. No big deal. But really, if we had all the time in the world, what would we actually do with it? Knowing what truly matters to us, that's the golden ticket. What if therapy could help you figure out what's really important to you so you could make the most of the time?

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[00:35:25] Jordan Harbinger: If you're wondering how I manage to book all these great authors, thinkers, and creators every single week, it is because of my network. And now I'm teaching you how to build your network, the circle of people that you know, like and trust for free over@sixminutenetworking.com. Yes, it includes some of the rapport building stuff that we learned today on this show, and that's what the course is all about, improving your relationship building skills, inspiring other people to develop relationships with you, but in a non cringey networking e, very down to earth way, no awkward strategies, no cheesy tactics that are gonna make you look like a, you know what?

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[00:36:12] You can find the course@sixminutenetworking.com. And again, of course, it's free. And now back to Charles Duhig, you mentioned earlier. The brain synchronization stuff, and I assume that's a little bit of a kind of what's going on here on the phone, for example. Yeah. Speaker listener, neural coupling, I think you said it was called.

[00:36:32] Yeah,

[00:36:33] Charles Duhigg: neural entrainment is another way of saying it. Neural

[00:36:35] Jordan Harbinger: entrainment. Yeah. Sorry, I don't know where I got the other thing, so No,

[00:36:38] Charles Duhigg: no, that's actually another name for it. Oh, it is? Okay.

[00:36:40] Jordan Harbinger: I was like, how would I make something like that up? That sounded stupid. Usually. Yeah. It's a very, usually when I make up something, it sounds ridiculous.

[00:36:46] Okay.

[00:36:46] Charles Duhigg: So, no, and that's the scientific, that's the

[00:36:48] Jordan Harbinger: scientific name for it. Okay. Must be in the, in the book. So we're clearly, we're hardwired for this, right? And do we know if animals do it? I can. I'm guessing whales and dolphins kind of have to, right,

[00:36:57] Charles Duhigg: because, so it's really interesting, like the thing that sets humans apart from every other species, other animals can communicate with each other through sound or through other means.

[00:37:08] They cannot entrain the way that humans do, really. Even apes, I mean, a little bit. But what you don't see is you don't see a sharing. You know, if an ape is upset and worried they'll make a certain noise. Mm-Hmm. And other apes might get worried, but it doesn't necessarily follow. They're worried the same way that the first ape is.

[00:37:25] I see. This is what's made humans special, is that we've evolved this capacity for this neural entrainment through words. I can make you happy just by telling you a story. I can make you sad by telling another kind of story. Oh yeah. If I feel happy and I feel sad when I'm telling them, you're gonna pick up on that.

[00:37:41] And if I'm, if I know how to tell that story, you're gonna feel the same things I'm feeling. That's kind of amazing. It is amazing. Animals can do it a little bit, but this is what really pushed Homo sapiens into the fore

[00:37:53] Jordan Harbinger: when watching comedy. I kind of am aware of this, right? There's, there's certain comedians right now that are really popular, but all of their humor, almost all, it's kind of negative.

[00:38:03] And I don't like it, right? Because I don't wanna feel that way. I noticed that it's almost geared towards like, look at these idiots over there, and we're the smart ones. And I'm like, oh, I don't really wanna feel that way. But there's a certain demographic of people where that is just that that is welcome because maybe they're on the other end of that all day.

[00:38:20] Charles Duhigg: And those comedians, they know how to listen to that audience. Yeah. They know how to pay attention. So it's interesting you mentioned comedians, because laughter is actually one of the non-linguistic ways that we connect with other people. There's been studies that show that in about 80% of the time when we laugh, it is not in response to something funny.

[00:38:38] It's because we're basically in a conversation and we're saying to someone, I want to connect with you. I laugh. And then when you laugh back, you're saying, I want to connect back. It's the most natural reaction on earth. Mm-Hmm. And what's interesting is that you can actually use this. NASA at one point wanted to start finding astronauts who were more emotionally intelligent, and they found that the way to do that was to pay attention to how candidates laughed.

[00:39:03] If I came in, there was this one psychologist. He would come into a room, he would spill all of his papers all over as if on on accident, but it was actually on purpose. Mm-Hmm. And he would like go, ha ha, and laugh really, really big. And then pay attention to how the candidate that he was about to interview responded.

[00:39:17] Because everyone knows you're supposed to laugh along. And some people would be like, huh, you know, that's funny. And then other people would be like, ha, let me help you pick up the papers. It's the people who match us that are signaling, I'm good at emotional intelligence. I'm listening to your emotions. I want to connect with you.

[00:39:35] So comedy is a big part of that, right? Like if we laugh about the same thing, we know and we laugh at each other, we share our laughter together. We know that we both want to connect.

[00:39:45] Jordan Harbinger: That's a great, by the way, that person who invented that, it was brilliant, right? The guy coming in to drop the papers to see how people react.

[00:39:51] It's one of those tests that you think doesn't exist, but that Hollywood would put that in a movie and you'd be like, whoa, the CIA's really tricky. But apparently this is a real thing that NASA did, and it's a, it's genius. The guy

[00:40:03] Charles Duhigg: was named Terrence McGuire. He is passed away now, unfortunately. But I talked to him before he, um, passed and he loved this stuff In interviews.

[00:40:11] He would mention that his sister had died when he was young, to see how people reacted. He didn't actually have a sister. And what was really interesting is there was two tests going on. The first is to see if someone would comfort them. The second was to, if they could pick up on the fact that he was kind of being in inauthentic.

[00:40:28] Hmm. And they would actually ask afterwards, like during that conversation, anything weird happened with Terry and some people would be like. He mentioned his sister and it just, for something about it, it sort of felt off and they're like, you're a super communicator. Mm-Hmm. You are detecting that inauthenticity.

[00:40:43] So he loved stuff like this. He was really, he was a character. My

[00:40:47] Jordan Harbinger: wife is good at that. So we'll have someone on the show. I gotta be really careful about how I, how I put this out there. And she'll go, I didn't like that episode. And I'm like, let me guess you didn't believe the person. And she's like, you know, I think that's it.

[00:41:01] I just didn't believe him. And I'm going, oh, we can never say that because it'll be somebody with this crazy tragic story. That's awful. And she's like, yeah, not that I don't believe things like that don't happen. But there was just something about it. 'cause she'll start checking her email, like instead of listening in the, in the production area.

[00:41:17] And I'm like, that's unusual. You know? And then so I'm like, she knows. She knows. She feels it. And. She's been right a few times where somebody, a few years later, they get outed and it's like, oh, this person actually is like embezzling money from the company and sexually harassed somebody else. And she's like, I knew he was just not cool.

[00:41:34] I don't know what it was. Not all of the things were aligned properly in her brain. You know, the re the cord that was struck didn't resonate. It didn't work. No entrainment.

[00:41:43] Charles Duhigg: And part of that prob like a, there's no entrainment. And part of that is probably the reciprocity, right? That like, I mean, this is particularly true if you're telling a lie, it's hard to maintain a lie, right?

[00:41:52] It's hard to remember like what the lie is. Yeah. And so this is why authenticity often takes way less energy is because you just remember way easily or what the truth is. You don't have to tell a story about yourself. But equally, one of the things that can be disastrous is this constant self-monitoring where you're like thinking like, what am I gonna say next that proves that I'm smart?

[00:42:12] What am I gonna say next to keep this conversation going? That becomes really, really distracting. And in marriages we see this a lot. One of the things that we know about marriages and communication marriages is particularly when we're in a fight with our spouse, we have an instinct to try and control something because we feel overwhelmed, we feel tired, we feel angry, and, and it's very natural to look for something that we can control, like a sense of stability.

[00:42:38] And the most obvious thing is to try and control the other person. Right? And so people will say things like, oh, you got upset at that. You shouldn't get upset at that. That's not a big deal. I'm trying to control your emotion. Yeah. Or they'll say things like, I'm not gonna talk about that. Like, you keep on bringing this topic up and it's just, I'm done talking about, I'm trying to control what the conversation is.

[00:42:57] And that's toxic. Yeah. That is absolutely toxic to try and control each other. You can't ignore that instinct for control. We both feel an urge for it. So the right thing to do is to find things we can control together. Like let's control the environment. If a fight starts at two o'clock in the morning, let's agree we're gonna wait until 10:00 AM when we're both better rested to talk about this.

[00:43:18] There's this thing known as kitchen sinking, which is really is one of the most toxic things in a relationship where we start fighting about like where to go for Thanksgiving. And it becomes a fight about like, your mother hates me and we don't have enough money. Like a fight about one thing becomes a fight about everything.

[00:43:31] Mm-Hmm. That's really toxic. So let's control the boundaries of this discussion or this argument together. Like we're just gonna talk about Thanksgiving. We're not gonna talk about moms, we're not gonna talk about money. We're controlling it together. When we start controlling things together, that's when it becomes much easier to connect.

[00:43:49] Even though we might disagree with each other.

[00:43:51] Jordan Harbinger: That's a good strategy. I think people will probably usually learn in therapy when it's too late. I dunno. Yeah. So thanks for that. I think that's probably right now people are like, pause, write this down. Rewind 30 seconds. Yeah. I think that's a, and we've all done this in relationships at some point, whether it was in high school or college or like last week with our spouse.

[00:44:10] Yeah. And you know, it's gross. It's

[00:44:12] Charles Duhigg: totally natural. And the most authentic thing to say is not like, I don't need to control anything. The most authentic thing to say is like, I'm feeling this need for control and I don't want to control you. Let's find things we can, we can control together. Mm-Hmm. That's real.

[00:44:26] And that's how you create a connection. Going

[00:44:29] Jordan Harbinger: back to something you said about laughter. It's just occurred to me that it's, that's why it's so awkward when we're, if you're laughing in a room and no one else is laughing, you know that feeling and you're just like, you feel yourself getting hot and turning red because I feel like, oh, everyone's looking at me and I can't stop laughing.

[00:44:44] Oh, it's the worst. It's the worst. And it's that mismatch. Or if we're cry laughing at something and someone else is just playing along 'cause they didn't find that thing as funny as we do and we feel like vulnerable because we are outta control, laughing. And they're like, yeah, that gag was, that was hilarious.

[00:45:01] And you're just like, oh God, I feel so stupid right

[00:45:03] Charles Duhigg: now. No, it happens. Think about being in like that feeling when you're in like a movie theater and something happens on screen and everyone else laughs and you don't, 'cause you don't think it's funny, right? Like you feel different, you feel alienated.

[00:45:13] Yes. From the people who are around you. Mm-Hmm. It's just really powerful. Like we have this instinct, this craving for connection. That's why when we have a good conversation, it feels like so wonderful, is because there's a part of our brain that literally evolved to make us feel good when we connect with another person.

[00:45:32] And when that connection doesn't happen. That craving doesn't go away. Mm-Hmm. We wanna figure out how to do it, but sometimes we get in our own way. Hollywood's figured this

[00:45:39] Jordan Harbinger: out with the laugh track, right? It's like, cue the laughing. Oh, I put, I wanna match the laughing so that I don't feel left out. So you start laughing and it's, here's something that I've noticed.

[00:45:49] I, I watch comedy and I'm like, this guy is not funny at all, or at least for me right now. But they pan to the audience and everyone's laughing and I go, I bet I, and maybe I'm the only person in the world that does that, but I'm like, I bet if that guy right there who's laughing so hard with his girlfriend was at home on his couch right now, he wouldn't even move a muscle.

[00:46:07] That joke was trash. Yeah. But he's in the audience and everyone's like, oh, ha, ha ha. This is hilarious. And I'm like, well, you can't sit there and be like, that sucked. That

[00:46:15] Charles Duhigg: was dumb. And when you're in the audience, it doesn't feel like it's work to laugh. No. You want to connect with these other people who are around you.

[00:46:20] Right. You know, and it's interesting if you go to political rallies, right? The same thing happens at a political rally. We want to connect with a candidate, we want to connect with each other. The best candidates, they prove that they're listening to us. Mm-Hmm. That if we're angry, they show how they're angry.

[00:46:35] If we're worried and we need a plan, they show that they're worried and they're working on a plan. Communication isn't something that happens just one-to-one. Sometimes it's one to many, but the same principles still hold up the same matching principles necessary. You're still having practical or emotional or social conversations, and the people who are really good at this, the people who be, are up on stage and everyone's cheering for, they're the ones who recognize, I need to listen to my audience.

[00:47:00] Mm-Hmm. I need to match them, and I need to prove that I'm listening so that they wanna listen to me. There's

[00:47:05] Jordan Harbinger: this constant adjusting of how they talk to others in order to match them. It that's unconscious, right? Yeah. For most people.

[00:47:13] Charles Duhigg: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Once you get in the habit of it, it just happens again, your brain is designed to do this.

[00:47:18] Mm-Hmm. Sometimes you just need someone to tell you like, oh, by the way, just for the next week, try and notice like what kind of conversation's going on here. And then after a week you just do it without thinking about it. When

[00:47:28] Jordan Harbinger: I read the book, this thing that I, I guess I say used to do, but I'm sure I'd still do it at some point, when I used to ride a lot in taxis, when I lived in New York City, my friends, you know, we'd go out like every night.

[00:47:39] 'cause we were 20 something years old living in New York. And my friends and my girlfriend especially at one time, she was like, wow, that was so weird. Do you do that on purpose? And I said, what are you talking about? And she goes, you started to imitate the cab driver? And I'm like, no, I didn't. I didn't do that.

[00:47:54] And she's like, yes you did. And it would be really obvious if the guy was from like Haiti or something. Right. And he had a really strong accent. I'm not doing this. She's like, I thought you were like making fun of him or something. I don't know. You started talking with this little like, accent, but the cab driver, we would cut across three lanes of traffic and be like, Jordan, you know, three days later because he remembered me.

[00:48:13] And I'm like, okay. So that guy wasn't mad. That happened several times and, and it was very cool and very confusing to girls that I was dating. 'cause the hell has that happening to them ever.

[00:48:22] Charles Duhigg: It's a very natural reaction. So you're probably someone who's predisposed to you probably think about communication, obviously you do.

[00:48:28] You're a podcaster now. Yeah. But even back then, you probably thought about communication and so part of your brain sort of picked up on the benefits of this matching. Mm-Hmm. And what will happen in conversations is if one person uses a kind of weird word, the other person will oftentimes use that same word later on without like doing it on purpose.

[00:48:46] Yeah. It just becomes part of the lexicon. Our grammar structures will become very similar. So if you kind of have like a, a weird way of saying something Mm-Hmm. All start saying that the same way. And the reason why we do that is because, again, this isn't mimicry. And if it's just mimicry, if we're just doing it and it's not authentic, it's probably not going to do much.

[00:49:06] But when you're having that conversation with a cab driver and it feels very authentic to you and you don't even notice that you've sort of, that you have like a little bit of an accent or you're echoing them in some way, it's because your brain wants to match them. It wants to form this connection.

[00:49:21] Mm-Hmm. And it knows how to do it. And sometimes we just have to get out of our own way. Now that does not mean we should put on funny accents. Yeah. When we're talking to people. Right. Not on purpose. When it happens accidentally, it. It's not something that's wrong with us, it just shows that we're actually good at communication.

[00:49:36] Jordan Harbinger: It kind of scared me a little bit after the fact, right? Because people have to tell you about it. You are thinking, I'm talking normally. And they're like, no, you're not. You get, you went full on, you know, Sean Paul, like kind of Jamaican accent with a cab driver or whatever. And it was

[00:49:52] Charles Duhigg: weird. So I grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which is the southwest.

[00:49:55] Yeah. And when I go to the south, like I find that like I start saying y'all, and like, I never say y'all normally, but the thing is, it doesn't feel unnatural to say y'all. Mm-Hmm. Right? Because I'm surrounded by people. It's, it's important to make that distinction for yourself. What are you doing that feels natural versus what are you doing that feels forced?

[00:50:14] So

[00:50:14] Jordan Harbinger: for an important conversation, it seems like, is there value? Trying to plan out what kind of conversation we're gonna have, or do we just go with the flow? But it, that wouldn't work, right? Because if we're trying to solve a problem, we kind of need to get into problem solving mode at some

[00:50:27] Charles Duhigg: point. So what's really, really useful, there was this experiment that was done where these researchers went into an investment bank, and this was a place where like people would scream at each other, like all day long.

[00:50:37] Hmm. What they did is they told every single person, okay, for the next week before each meeting, write down one sentence. And in that sentence just say, your goal for this conversation, for this meeting, and again, this took about four to seven seconds on average. Mm-hmm. Right? Like people would just scribble it down, stick it in their pocket, walking in the meeting.

[00:50:53] Nobody ever read what they had written down to each other. But the angle, the incidence of conflict in those meetings went down by 80%. And the reason why is because when we know what we want to talk about and what kind of conversation we want. It's much easier for us to recognize what other people want and what other kind of conversation they need to have right now.

[00:51:16] And so very often this preparation now, again, it doesn't have to be a lot of preparation, right? It can literally, as I mentioned before, I call my friend, just, I basically write that sentence in my head, what I want to talk about, the mood I hope to establish. But that preparation is really powerful. And there's another kind of preparation that's equally powerful, which is when we are going to talk about something hard.

[00:51:36] mm-Hmm. If we come in and both of us say, this conversation's gonna be awkward, we're both gonna make mistakes. And that's okay. Right? Think about conversations about race or gender. Mm-Hmm. Think about giving someone feedback, right? Like a performance review or listening to a performance review. Those are really sort of anxious conversations.

[00:51:56] And if you start them and study after study shows this by saying, look, let's have a conversation about race. Let's have a conversation about your performance, about gender. I'm just gonna acknowledge it. That start like this is gonna be awkward and that's okay when it's awkward and I'm probably gonna say the wrong thing.

[00:52:11] There's things that I mean, and I'm gonna say them the wrong way, you know, maybe in an offensive way, and I'm just gonna ask you to like, if I do that, just tell me like you don't understand and I'll try and say it differently. You can do the same thing. Like, I want you to be honest with me. When you take that anxiety off the table, it makes a huge difference in how well that conversation goes.

[00:52:32] Jordan Harbinger: So there's a, there's, I'm not connecting one of the cables here. You mentioned that preparing what kind of conversation we want is gonna help us get to the type of conversation the other person wants. Why would me preparing what I want to have happen in the conversation, prepare me to get to what the other person wants.

[00:52:48] I'm not like connecting that because it

[00:52:50] Charles Duhigg: raises our antenna to detect what other people are needing. I see. Okay. Like if I walk into a meeting and I'm like, look, my goal is to come up with a budget and I want everyone to walk away from this feeling content and happy. And we walk in and you are, you're just kind of complaining.

[00:53:04] You're distraught, you're upset. I'm gonna notice that so much more because I'm thinking like, I want this to be easy. I want everyone to be content. You're not content like you're telling me right now. Now, if I hadn't thought this through, I might think if you're upset about whatever you're complaining about, but now my antenna is so primed to be like, why is he upset?

[00:53:25] What's going on here? And it might be because you actually need to have an emotional conversation. First, we're gonna talk about the budget. You're really anxious that we might have to do layoffs. And until we discuss that anxiety and until we get it off the table, and I say like, look, I hear you saying that you're anxious about this and you're upset.

[00:53:41] I promise you layoffs will be the last, last step. We will do anything to avoid them. Now we've both had like a little bit of an emotional conversation. We've acknowledged the emotions. Now we can move on to that practical conversation about the budget without that distraction. So me knowing myself a little bit, just even half an inch more.

[00:54:00] It makes me so more sensitive to the cues and the messages you're sending me. Okay,

[00:54:05] Jordan Harbinger: that makes sense. Thank you for addressing that. 'cause I was just like, this is one of those things where normally people, I would just nod and be like, yeah, and then I'd listen to this later and go, but why was I just not thinking?

[00:54:14] No, I'm glad you asked. Thank you for asking. Yeah, yeah. This is, uh, a lot of this show is just me not understanding things until somebody finally gives up and explains it to me like I'm five. So I appreciate that. The idea of that we can sort of figure out what kind of conversation is happening at any given moment is pretty powerful, right?

[00:54:32] Because you're no longer stumbling in the dark, banging your knee against the proverbial desk, trying to navigate your way through a conversation. Once we realize, oh, okay, it's this kind of conversation, we can start maybe, well asking open-ended questions or eliciting. What this person wants to hear, wants to talk about.

[00:54:50] Like you mentioned with the layoffs thing, and yeah, you're really, you, you're sort of like hitting the bullseye every time, eventually, every time. We know how to listen

[00:54:58] Charles Duhigg: really closely. Again, this is programmed into our neurology and our biology. If you just tell yourself, like, just listen for someone saying something practical or saying something emotional or saying something social, all of a sudden you start noticing it left and right.

[00:55:12] Right. A friend comes to you and they're like, Hey, I gotta discuss this problem at work. And then they say, there's this like one woman that I just cannot get along with. Like, she rubs me the wrong way and I rub her the wrong way. If you're listening for it, you're like, oh, no, actually this is a social conversation.

[00:55:27] Like this person needs to talk about how he sees himself. Mm-Hmm. How he thinks this woman sees him. How he sees her. Like instead of trying to solve his problem, I need to ask him questions and to help him think through what's going on from a social identity perspective. And when you do that, once we just tell ourselves to pay attention.

[00:55:46] We can actually detect what kind of conversation is happening very, very easily.

[00:55:50] Jordan Harbinger: You write in the book, and I'm paraphrasing if someone's using facts and data, okay? It's a decision making combo. If someone's discussing an event that includes a story, especially if that story has feelings, it's a quote unquote emotional conversation, and you give some clues to heed.

[00:56:05] Like if someone told a story or a joke, maybe they wanna share and relate. Are they not offering their own thoughts? And they're simply taking in what you're saying, which often, by the way, I think you note this looks like listening 'cause they're just being quiet. But it's not necessarily that. And then maybe we throw out different types of conversations instead.

[00:56:23] And we've all had this experience, right, where we, we go in and we're maybe we're feeling kind of like caffeinated and we walk in and everyone's like, well, how's it going this morning? And you're like, oh man, on the way here, da da da da. And you tell this story and you think it's funny and everyone else is like, so are we ready to start?

[00:56:36] And you're like, oh, okay. You know, like we're not in that mode. Nobody cares. Right?

[00:56:42] Charles Duhigg: And you're exactly right. So there are a bunch of clues, right? So if someone is telling stories, narrative tends to reflect an emotional or a social mindset, but oftentimes there's some emotion there that's driving the story.

[00:56:54] If I'm not telling a narrative, if I'm just coming in and I'm like, look, let's look at the numbers, or like, you know, we gotta figure out where we're gonna go on vacation next year. Mm-Hmm. Then I'm not looking for an emotional conversation. I'm looking for practical conversation. And you can tell that from how I'm phrasing things or if I keep talking about other people, even in the context of myself, she doesn't understand me, or I really like that guy, or I'm having trouble getting, like figuring out what this team is doing.

[00:57:19] Or accounting all seems crazy. Like why do they keep fighting with marketing? Mm-Hmm. When we talk about groups and when we talk about how people relate to each other, that's a social conversation and each of them require slightly different tools, right? But it all comes down to fundamentally the same thing, which is I wanna show you that I want to connect with you, like when you say something about being proud about your kid.

[00:57:42] I ask you like, what was that like to watch them walking across the stage? What I'm really saying is I wanna connect with you, like I wanna match, I wanna align with you. And it doesn't matter what your answer is. 'cause what your answer is probably gonna be is, you know, I was so proud. I felt so amazing.

[00:57:59] But what you're really saying is, thank you for noticing what I'm saying. I want to connect with you back. That's the important thing. That's what super communicators do. They show that they want to connect in that

[00:58:10] Jordan Harbinger: kind of example or situation. Let's say the graduation one, right? And you say like, what was it like watching your son cross that go over there and get his diploma and you get the follow up questions and they're talk was touch and go at first, you know, he wasn't very good in school and we got him a tutor and he was hanging out at the wrong crowd.

[00:58:25] Do we then reply with a, a similar kind of, here's what I would do, tell me if this is on the right track or not. I would say, well, uh, my son is, he's only four and a half, and so we're not thinking that far ahead. But I will say the, the closest we've come to him graduating is him not being deathly afraid to get in the pool at swim class.

[00:58:45] So I've got like a 1% feel for how you might feel right now. Like he's not hanging out with the wrong crowd. He, he just won't get in the water and then that's great. Maybe we

[00:58:52] Charles Duhigg: have a laugh about that. Yeah. No, that's great because what you're saying is, I listened to what you said, right? I'm proving to you that I listened to you and I'm not trying to mimic you.

[00:59:01] I'm not saying like, oh, I've had the same experience with my 4-year-old or my 5-year-old. But what you are saying is like, I hear what you're saying that like raising children is hard. Mm-Hmm. That there's some anxiety in raising children and I'm gonna go ahead and acknowledge, like I feel that same anxiety, like the fact that I asked you about your son's graduation and you mentioned like it was touch and go for a while.

[00:59:20] There probably means that like there was a lot of anxiety and now you're really proud or relieved that you made it through. And that's something as a parent I can understand too. Even though my kid is younger, I. So the more that I make it obvious that I've really heard what you've said and help us connect on that level, get on the same wavelength, the closer we're gonna feel to each other.

[00:59:39] And in fact, the more trusting we'll feel towards each other.

[00:59:41] Jordan Harbinger: To clarify what you said was subtext, right? I don't have to say I see that you had a lot of anxiety. No, you don't have to say all that. No, no, no.

[00:59:47] Charles Duhigg: Right, exactly. Okay. Exactly. Sounds like, and you don't even have to think it, you don't even think it, your instincts.

[00:59:52] Right. Because you, you've practiced this, your instincts are exactly right. And it's more just a matter of like telling myself, like, I'm gonna let my instincts come out. I'm gonna listen to my instincts. Because like I said, they have evolved to make us good at communication. You

[01:00:07] Jordan Harbinger: mentioned in the book that the best listeners trigger emotions in others and then reciprocate with their own.

[01:00:12] Can you give me an example of that? Because I, I feel like me asking about the graduation, is that what you mean by triggering

[01:00:19] Charles Duhigg: an emotion? Yeah. So trigger might be the wrong word in this context. Usually when you ask an open-ended question, instead of asking like, where did you grow up? Like what was it like to grow up in Albuquerque or like.

[01:00:29] Instead of saying, you know, where do you live? Saying like, oh, like, what, what's your favorite thing about your neighborhood? What you're doing is you're triggering the person to talk about something authentic. And sometimes this is something that's vulnerable and vulnerability kind of has a weird definition to it, right?

[01:00:46] What vulnerable means is simply I'm exposing something that you could judge. Mm-Hmm. I might not care about your judgment, but the fact that I'm exposing something that you could judge feels vulnerable. So if you, if I say the thing I love most about my neighborhood is like just the community is so strong.

[01:01:01] Like we real all really like each other. In theory, you could judge me for that. But when you engage in reciprocal authenticity or reciprocal vulnerability, when you say something like, oh man, I totally know what you mean. Like when I went to college, like it just felt like everyone had each other's back and it felt so good when you reciprocate that same vulnerability, that same intimacy, it feels like you are closer to each other.

[01:01:26] In fact, in the book we talk about this thing called the Fast Friends Procedure. Mm-Hmm. Which is this experiment where they found 36 questions that if people asked them back and forth, they would actually feel like they were really good friends afterwards, even if they were strangers who had nothing in common.

[01:01:40] I. That's kind of the power of this reciprocal authenticity because if one person would ask the questions and the other answer and then they would trade places didn't work. Yeah. But when they went back and forth, it felt

[01:01:51] Jordan Harbinger: close. This is that falling in love questions test that made the rounds a few years ago, right?

[01:01:55] Where it was like 36, 36 questions that make you fall in love. Right? Yeah. I remember reading this me like, I'm gonna use this. And then it was like, not at all remotely. I mean, it's just completely awkward, right? 'cause this is a lab setting and everyone's like, okay, we're gonna do this thing. And you, you bring it to a bar and people are like, uh, get away from me.

[01:02:14] Charles Duhigg: Yeah. Yeah. Not answering that right? But what's interesting is, so there's a guy named Nicholas Ley who's a professor at the University of Chicago, and one of the questions that's in the Fast Friends procedure is, when's the last time you cried in front of another person? He's done this experiment a couple times and he did it in this room, this hedge fund conference.

[01:02:30] He had all these hedge funders in the room and he said, look, in a couple of minutes I'm gonna sign you to go talk to a stranger. And here's the question you both have to ask and answer of each other. When's the last time you cried in front of another person? Now, before we do that, how many of you think this is gonna be a disaster?

[01:02:45] Mm-Hmm. Every single hand goes up and then he sends them off to have these conversations and like he can't get people to shut up. Right. Not a dry eye in the house. He like, he takes 20 or 30 minutes. Yeah. He's like, he's like, please stop talking to each other. Please, please. We gotta get back to this, to this.

[01:03:00] Because the truth of the matter is that like some of those questions, they are hard to ask at a bar or on a first date, but there's versions of them that like people love being asked deep questions. Yeah. Right. And you don't have to ask, when's the last time you cried in front of another person? You can say like, I'm just wondering like, what was the best moment and the worst moment from the last year?

[01:03:20] That's a super normal question to ask on a first date. But that's exactly the same thing. That's a good one.

[01:03:26] Jordan Harbinger: People can use that if you're da if you're out there dating, that's a solid one. I wouldn't recommend rolling up to somebody and being like, Hey girl, when's the last time you cried in front of somebody?

[01:03:34] Uh,

[01:03:35] Charles Duhigg: call the police. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. Um,

[01:03:40] Jordan Harbinger: what if the other person doesn't feel safe with sharing anything? Right. We are like, okay, I'm gonna be vulnerable. And I see somebody has like a Albuquerque jacket on. I'm like, what was it like growing up there? And they're like, who are, I don't freaking know you dude.

[01:03:53] Why are you talking to me? Yeah. Do we go first? Is that the idea?

[01:03:56] Charles Duhigg: Do we, how do we make it safe for them? So one thing to keep in mind is not everything has to be a conversation, right? And sometimes we say we want a conversation and we really don't. Like when I talk to my kids and I'm like, I wanna have a conversation about your rooms.

[01:04:06] What I'm really saying is, go clean your rooms. Right? I don't actually want a conversation. So part of it is we don't have to put that pressure on us to have a conversation with everyone. We have a conversations that we want to, and that's where paying attention to some of the non-verbal cues are so useful.

[01:04:20] So we tend to get them wrong sometimes. Mm-Hmm. As you mentioned, if we're talking and someone else is like interrupting us and joining in, that's actually a very good sign. Like, not necessarily talking over each other, but being like, oh yeah, that's, oh, what'd you do next? And here's what happened to me.

[01:04:36] Right? Mm-Hmm. They're in the conversation. Oftentimes, they're listening really well. Oftentimes when someone's very quiet and just sort of listening, we think they're listening, but that passivity is actually a signal that they're not aligned with us, that they don't want, necessarily want this kind of conversation.

[01:04:52] And the best super communicators, what they do is they see things as a series of experiments in psychology literature. This is referred to as the quiet negotiation that happens at the start of a conversation. And it's a quiet negotiation. 'cause the goal is not to win. The goal is just to figure out what each other wants.

[01:05:11] And so sometimes the way that we do that is we do ask a vulnerable question or we say something vulnerable about ourselves. And when the other person is like, okay, nah, that's not really my jam. Mm-Hmm. If we pay attention to that and if we see it as an experiment, then we know we just got a piece of data.

[01:05:27] We didn't just make a faux pa. We just learned that this person doesn't want to talk about backgrounds. Right. Maybe they're in a more practical mindset. At the beginning of a conversation, people will act, will often experiment with interrupting each other. They'll experiment with laughing. Is this a formal conversation?

[01:05:42] Is this a casual conversation? Is this a conversation where we talk over each other? Is this a conversation where we take turns? No one thing is right or wrong. It's the mindset of saying, I don't mind conducting experiments at the beginning of this conversation. And if the experiment doesn't work, that's okay because my wife is a scientist.

[01:06:00] If every experiment she did was a success, she'd be the worst scientist on Earth. Mm-Hmm. That's not why you do experiments is to prove what you already know. So trying those little experiments, paying attention to how people react. What you'll find is you ask that question, you kinda get the sense like they're not into like talking about this.

[01:06:18] You shift to something else and suddenly you've connected. Because instead of trying to force it, you're really paying attention.

[01:06:27] Jordan Harbinger: This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest Charles Duhig. We'll be right back. This episode of the Jordan Harbinger Show is brought to you by Nissan. Ever wondered what's around that next corner, or what happens when you push further?

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[01:08:28] And if you can't remember the name of a sponsor or can't find a code, shoot me an emailJordan@jordanharbinger.com. I am more than happy to help surface that code for you. Yes, it is that important that you support those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Charles Duhigg. So it almost seems like the beginning of a conversation, if it's gonna be a longer interaction, and by that I mean maybe it's new colleagues at work that you're gonna see a lot.

[01:08:54] Yeah. It almost seems like one of the best things you could do is. Experiment with different conversation types. Like you said in the beginning, like maybe you tell a story and if nobody bites, you move on to something more practical. And then maybe they loosen up later and you try the story thing again, or the emotional thing again.

[01:09:10] Or you listen for somebody else to do it, or you try and trick someone else into telling a story. I don't know, to see if you can shift the conversation. And I feel like at some level that happens, like you said, subconsciously, but you really kind of have to be, it does help to have your hand on the steering wheel a little bit, right?

[01:09:25] Yeah. I

[01:09:26] Charles Duhigg: mean the more you're aware of it. So the next meeting you go into, notice what happens at the beginning of the meeting. 'cause what you're gonna see is you're gonna see people almost unconsciously doing these experiments, trying to figure out like, how is this meeting gonna work? How are we all gonna talk to each other?

[01:09:42] And what you'll notice is that some people will do something and if it doesn't work, they just shut up. They like go into the background. And some people, and these are usually the leaders, these are usually the super communicators, these are the people who influence things. Some people, they'll try something, they'll tell a joke and nobody laughs and then they try something else and they figure out like, what do we need right

[01:10:02] Jordan Harbinger: now?

[01:10:03] Now I know this is an abrupt shift and I'm just gonna acknowledge that, but we have limited amount of time. I would love to talk about some of this social identity stuff that you mentioned. It's a huge topic. There's probably a whole different episode of the show in here, but there were some interesting tidbits on this, especially stereotype threat.

[01:10:21] And again, this is like, this is just a complete non-sequitur, but whatever. I thought this was fascinating, man. Can you explain what this is?

[01:10:28] Charles Duhigg: Yeah. So stereotype threat is this thing that was essentially discovered by this guy, Claude Steele, who's a social scientist. He noticed even in classes where students were equally prepared and had scored very similar on, for instance, the SAT, he noticed that in, in many of those classes, black students would get worse grades than white students.

[01:10:49] Mm-hmm. And at first he thought maybe like the instructor was like biased or unconscious bias or something like that. But it turns out that was not what that was going on. There's this thing known as stereotype threat, which is, if I know that there's a stereotype out there about me, I become a little preoccupied with trying to prove that stereotype wrong.

[01:11:07] And it turns out that the places where the black students were performing lower than their white peers were always on timed tests. If there was no time limit, it was completely even the scores. But if it was timed for some reason, the black students would underperform. Hmm. And when Claude started interviewing them and doing research on this, what he found was it's because oftentimes these were in courses where they knew there was a stereotype that because of the color of my skin, I'm not as good at this.

[01:11:35] Right. Particularly courses that, um, around language use and rhetoric, English classes and like, I wanna disprove that stereotype. I don't wanna prove it right. And that's enough of a distraction that it makes me double check my answers and I run out of time in stereotype. It's been documented again and again and again.

[01:11:53] Is it is why stereotypes are so dangerous is because you don't even need someone in the room saying the stereotype. It exists in people's heads and it changes how they behave. And this is why it's really important. This is how it applies to conversations. Is that what we found? Is that the way you overcome that.

[01:12:12] You acknowledge all the different identities that people possess, right. So in the book, we tell the story of, for instance, anti-vaxxers and how doctors were trying to talk to anti-vaxxers. And at First National Institutes to Health said, okay, here's what you do. Just give them the facts. If someone comes in and they, they're like, the vaccine is dangerous for covid, just give them the facts.

[01:12:32] Once they know the facts, they'll change their mind. Yeah. This graph's gonna change everything. Trust me. Yeah, exactly. And the doctors are like, are you kidding me, man? Like, these guys have been researching on the web for like the last three weeks. Yeah. Like, I'm not gonna show them a graph that's gonna change their mind.

[01:12:45] What they found was the way to inter have those conversations is to ask questions that draw out other identities. I know that you're worried about the vaccine, you've heard some stuff about it. I'm just wondering, as a parent and as a a member of the FI local fire department, the volunteer fire department, does that give you a different perspective on these questions?

[01:13:07] As somebody who grew up during the polio era. Mm-Hmm. Or I'm gonna tell you about my different identities. Like say like, I'm a doctor and you know, the science is important to me, but I'm also a parent myself, just like you. And the thing that kills me is that sometimes kids come in and they've already gotten sick and they ask for the vaccine and I can't give it to them at that point.

[01:13:24] Like it's too late. Mm-Hmm. When we bring up all those other identities and all of us possess dozens of identities, right? When we bring them into the conversation, what we do is we erase the stereotype threat. Instead of saying, you're a black student, or you're a white student, or you are a woman in a math class, or you are a, a man in nursing school.

[01:13:46] Instead of forcing people into that stereotype, forcing it into their head, when we say, you're so much more than that one thing I just mentioned. And all of those identities belong in this conversation. That's when stereotype threat goes

[01:13:59] Jordan Harbinger: away. Man, that's fascinating. This whole I, I know I'm harping on the social psychology element instead of the communications element here, but it would be fascinating, and they probably did this, but it would be fascinating to see if you took a bunch of African American students and who have the stereotype in their head, but then you found, I don't know, some folks from France or something, or from Africa who are like the top of their class, and then they were in the exact same situation and there's like a stereotype.

[01:14:23] The stereotype is I'm the smartest one in my class. Like that's the program that's running in the back of my head, you know? What do you mean? I'm not as good at math. I'm the

[01:14:30] Charles Duhigg: best at math. They've actually done that. It's amazing. It's amazing what we infer in what we worry about without actually completely being conscious of it.

[01:14:40] Mm-Hmm. And so in one of the experiments that Claude Steel did, one of the stereotypes that's very pernicious is that African Americans will do worse on tests of general intelligence. If you grew up black. You've been exposed to people who are say things like, you can't do as good on an IQ test. Mm-Hmm.

[01:14:56] Black don't do as well as an IQ test. It's obvi. It's completely wrong. The bell curve thing, right? That whole thing. Yeah, exactly. There's no truth to it whatsoever. But that stereotype exists. And so if you tell students, this is a test of general intelligence, this is a test of iq. What we'll see is the stereotype threat.

[01:15:13] We'll see this pattern of minority students doing worse than white students scoring lower, not doing worse, scoring lower because they, they run out of time. But if you tell them the opposite, if you say, I'm gonna give you this test, same test. I'm gonna give you this test, it is not a test of general intelligence.

[01:15:28] It's a test of this very specific thing. And we know from studies that like, there's no racial bias here, then they will perform the similar way. Mm-Hmm. When you acknowledge the stereotype and you take it off the table, I. Then you help eradicate stereotype threat. And one way to do that is to take it off the table.

[01:15:46] But in society it's really hard to do that, right? Like, yeah, I can't say like, oh, by the way, like there's no racism in in New York City. I mean, you're gonna bump into it at some point, right? It's filled with crazy people so that instead of trying to take it off the table, what we can do is we can say, you are so much more than one identity.

[01:16:05] And in fact, one of the researchers who worked on this, who's black herself, she said that every day before her son would go to school and he had a big test, she would say, look, you've studied hard for this test, you're gonna do well on it. But I want you also to remember, you're a great athlete, you're a great son, you're a great friend.

[01:16:21] You do all these other things. Well, I. You are so much more than just a kid in a math class. Mm. That didn't mean that he hadn't studied for it, but it means that that stereotype threat went away and he was able to actually perform at his best. That's

[01:16:38] Jordan Harbinger: so powerful. The fact that stereotype threat exists, I'd never heard of this.

[01:16:42] Obviously it makes a lot of sense and it's, man, what an annoying to say the least thing to have going on in the back of your head when you're taking a test or doing anything for that matter, because it's already hard. That's the point. It's a fricking

[01:16:55] Charles Duhigg: test. Yeah, no, it's true. And both of us are, are white, so we, we don't really know.

[01:17:00] I don't really know.

[01:17:00] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[01:17:01] Charles Duhigg: But I do think that one of the things that happens is that it's really easy to stop thinking about how we're communicating. It's really easy to stop thinking about what's going on until we get in the habit of it. And that's why this like vaccine example is such a great example.

[01:17:16] For a doctor, the most natural thing to do is to say like, look, I'm a doctor. Like I know the science. Mm-Hmm. But they're really good. Doctors are the ones who do this thing called motivational interviewing where they say, I know that like, as a pastor, you feel one way about vaccines. And as a parent you probably feel a little bit different.

[01:17:33] And as a, a member of our community, you probably feel a little bit different. And by the way, I'm all those things. I'm also a parent. Like, help me think through how should we think about this with these different hats on. That's when people start becoming malleable and start saying things like, I can see it from a different perspective, or I can see it from your perspective.

[01:17:51] And that doesn't mean we're necessarily gonna agree with each other, but it means that we understand each other.

[01:17:55] Jordan Harbinger: There's so much here that I think people can apply right outta the box that we can be more aware of to help guide our conversations. I, I know we have a little tiny bit of time left. We'll see.

[01:18:04] I. What about tips for online communication? Because, look, we're doing a lot of this in real life. A lot of what we just talked about works really well for real life communication. But man, I'm doing a lot of online communication maybe Absolutely. Almost certainly more than in real life

[01:18:18] Charles Duhigg: now. Well, and what's interesting is I talked about how I mentioned that our brains have evolved to be good at communication.

[01:18:23] Mm-Hmm. Of course they evolved before there were even telephones. Right? Right. Like, so one of the things that's really important about online communication, about any change in communication is to recognize that different channels, different forms of communication, have different rules. So a great example of this is that when telephones first became popular about a hundred years ago, there were all these articles that said no one will ever be able to have a real conversation on the phone because you can't see each other.

[01:18:47] It's not gonna work. At first they were right people. If you read the transcripts of early telephone conversations, it's basically people like giving each other grocery lists or stock trades. They used it like a telegraph, not like a telephone, but of course, by the time you and I were teenagers, we could talk on the phone for like 12 hours at a stretch.

[01:19:06] Mm-Hmm. Right. There were some of the most important conversations of our life, and it's because we learned how to use telephones differently than face-to-face. And in fact, if you're talking to someone on the phone without realizing it, you'll be start to over annunciate your words. You'll put more emotion into your voice because you know that they can't see you.

[01:19:23] The same thing is true of different forms of online communication, and oftentimes we forget to remind ourselves that different forms of communication have different rules. So sending someone a text with emojis mm-hmm. Is different from sending them an email. Is different from sending a slack, is different from having a conversation on the phone, is different from talking face to face.

[01:19:43] But when we get really busy and we stopped thinking about that. We treat them all the same. And so I write something to you and that's sarcastic and I can hear the sarcasm in my head and I forget, you can't hear that sarcasm. Right? Right. You're gonna read it as serious and you're gonna be offended. And so just taking a split second to remind ourselves, I need to sort of think a little bit differently about whether it's a text or an email.

[01:20:07] Once we get in the habit of doing that, it becomes very, very natural. And one of the things, particularly for online communication is simple politeness. Like we found that there's been all these studies where people are like arguing online. If one person starts saying, please, and thank you. Mm-hmm. Then it actually makes the entire conversation better.

[01:20:26] Everyone else starts getting more polite. And if one person says, you should never try and be sarcastic online, right? Unless you're using like a little winking face emoji, unless it's a close friend. And when people are just more polite and less sarcastic, online conversation dialogues gets so much better.

[01:20:41] Jordan Harbinger: That's fascinating. Turning the conversation around online is tough, right? Because a lot of people, they don't even, they're not interested in that. And I know this because unfortunately, I also get in these moods where I'm like, you're gonna start some, some shit. I'm gonna start, I'm gonna do that, and then I'm never gonna check it again.

[01:20:55] Or I'm just like in a certain mood and then three hours later I see the reply and I'm like, I'm not engaging with that. And then it's like, oh, I kind of started that though. Oh, well, delete. Yeah. Right.

[01:21:04] Charles Duhigg: No, it's, it happens all the time. But if we just are in the habit of being like, okay, let's think about like what does this channel of communication require?

[01:21:11] Mm-Hmm. It's very easy to figure it out. Have you

[01:21:14] Jordan Harbinger: noticed much of a difference between, let's say Zoom or online face-to-face communication like we're doing right now versus us sitting there? I mean there as an interviewer, it seems like there's something in person that might be kind of sort of missing over the internet, but I can't put my finger on it.

[01:21:30] It's not body language really, because I'm sort of, I mean, I can see you. You can see me. Yeah. Maybe we can't see the lower half of the body. I don't know if that matters. What do you think the

[01:21:40] Charles Duhigg: answer is? That we can have almost as pure conversation through any channel. Mm-Hmm. But you're exactly right that the less information that we have through that channel, the harder it's gonna be.

[01:21:48] Right? So like if I text you versus send you an email Yeah. A text is gonna be fast. It's gonna have a little emojis in it. Like, you're not gonna get as much information as, as if I write in an email. Yeah. Or if I'm talking to you on the phone or face-to-face. So what happens when we're face-to-face is that when I look at something, you know what I'm looking at.

[01:22:06] Oh yeah, that's true. So if I stare off into the corner and we're face-to-face, you know that I'm staring off in the corner. But if we're on a Zoom screen and I go like this and I look off into the corner, you don't know if I'm distracted or if I'm just kind of gazing. And so as a result, there's just a little bit less information.

[01:22:21] That doesn't mean that we can't compensate for that, we can't overcome that. The same way that we put more emotion into our voice when we talk on the phone. But the key is to tell ourselves, like if my natural habit is to like look off in the corner all the time. Mm-Hmm. It's important to come back and make eye contact sometimes.

[01:22:38] Right. To show you that I'm listening to prove that I'm listening. Just think about like, what are the strengths and weaknesses of this particular format of communication because we can't be face to face all the

[01:22:47] Jordan Harbinger: time. Right. I have a production screen. Over here that makes sure my backup is going or like, yeah, stuff like that.

[01:22:54] So I look over there occasionally, but I always try and hide it. It's impossible to do 'cause you're looking at me right the almost the whole time. So I look over there real quick and I just kind of come back and I look over there real. I try to minimize it because I was, man, I was so embarrassing. I was interviewing Anderson Cooper and at the end I was like, do you have any tips?

[01:23:10] I really get a chance to ask an expert. And he's like, who's over there, your producer? And I was like, kind of. But no, it's just a screen that shows that I'm still recording. He is like. Yeah, it's a little bit weird that you just kept looking over there and I was like, gosh, darn it. What a Right. I really didn't wanna hear that from Anderson Coover.

[01:23:25] And

[01:23:25] Charles Duhigg: it, and it means that like sometimes it, sometimes just at the staying at the start of a conversation, I'm gonna be looking over here. It's just, 'cause I have this screen that shows me if it's getting backed up. I do that now. That's really powerful.

[01:23:35] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I have to do that now. And I forgot during this episode and I was like, oh man, I should probably say

[01:23:41] Charles Duhigg: something about that.

[01:23:42] It's okay. It's okay. I knew that you were in the conversation. I could feel it.

[01:23:44] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, but you're right. I now go, by the way, if you see me looking over here, it's a production screen. I'm not, you know, making faces at somebody else or whatever. So anything you see that I'm doing that, just ignore it. I'm just making sure it's still recording.

[01:23:55] But it's, you're right, there's all these little subtle things that we have now. I would imagine there's somebody who's on Zoom calls regularly that has to look at a graph while they're talking and they're just never looking at the camera. Totally. And it's gotta be so bizarre for everybody else. It's hard.

[01:24:09] Charles Duhigg: It's really hard, right? Like we've all been on that zoom call Mm-Hmm. Where everyone's like looking over, they have a screen over here. And so all of us aren't really, no one's really looking at each other and it feels harder like it does unless somebody says, by the way, all of us have to look at this thing over here.

[01:24:23] It's okay. Mm-Hmm. Then like once we acknowledge it, then it takes that, that anxiety away.

[01:24:28] Jordan Harbinger: The weird part of that is though, you're right, if we were all in the same room, we would also all not be looking at each other at all. We'd be looking at the wall with the screen is, but since I already know that, that's where I'm looking.

[01:24:38] I know what you're looking at and so we don't have to say it exactly. So you're right. We have to call out all this weird stuff, like, yeah. Hey guys. This over here is the thing that's important. And it's like, oh, okay. And it sounds weird at first, but you're right. If you don't do it, it's like, what is his prize?

[01:24:51] Hello? Are you here or what? Yeah. Are you paying attention?

[01:24:54] Charles Duhigg: No, totally. And I find that I do it automatically now on Zoom calls. I'm like, yeah, I have to read from this thing, so I'm gonna look away from the camera. Mm-Hmm. I hope that's okay. And once you say it once, you never have to say it again. Right, right.

[01:25:04] Like, it's like giving everyone permission to look away from the camera. 'cause we're acknowledging that like, I'm not just paying attention to my producer over there, I'm actually reading something. Yeah. Man. And, and

[01:25:13] Jordan Harbinger: we're ne we're never gonna kind of go back to that. Right. We're never gonna get rid of communication modes like this.

[01:25:20] So. And we, and our brains aren't gonna evolve to the point where I can see what you're seeing and red. That's never gonna happen either. So we're kind of like, this is like the new thing you gotta do every time. Yeah.

[01:25:29] Charles Duhigg: And it'll become second nature, like for our kids, by the time they're our age, using Zoom will feel as natural as talking on the phone.

[01:25:37] Yeah. Man.

[01:25:38] Jordan Harbinger: Well, thank you very much, man, for joining us. I know we went through a lot today. I know that I, I jumped around a little bit.

[01:25:43] Charles Duhigg: No, I loved it. It was great. Thank you for having me on. This was so much fun. I've got

[01:25:49] Jordan Harbinger: some thoughts on this episode, but before I get into that, you're about to hear a preview of my interview with a former FBI agent on how he gets people to reveal the truth.

[01:25:58] Charles Duhigg: With elicitation. People don't realize that you're using elicitation techniques on them. You're just setting up a psychological environment that predisposes them to want to tell you information they wouldn't otherwise tell you. Typically, elicitation doesn't use questions. There's a human predisposition to correct others.

[01:26:17] If I wanna get information from you, I will just give you what we call a presumptive statement. You're gonna corroborate and say, yes, that's true, or you're gonna say, no, that's not true. It's this. We'll tell our students, see that person over there. Go get their pin numbers for their bank accounts. If I can get some stranger to like me, the brain automatically ascribes all the rights and privileges of a friendship that took maybe years to develop.

[01:26:42] Jordan Harbinger: For more on how you can use elicitation techniques used by the FBI to negotiate better salaries and more, check out episode 4, 6 7 on the Jordan Harbinger Show with Jack Shafer. Again, y'all know I love practical stuff like this In the book, there is so much more that we just didn't even get to because of time.

[01:27:02] Now remember, there's four basic rules. One, pay attention to what kind of conversation is happening. Two, share your goals. Ask what the others are seeking in that conversation. Three, ask about others' feelings and share your own. And four, explore if identities are important to this discussion. Now, of course we touched on all of this during the show.

[01:27:21] If you wanna do a deeper dive on at the book I, it is something I can recommend. And by the way. It's like six, seven hours long. It's not one of those like 15 hours. Oh, my publisher wanted six more chapters so that we could pump the price up by $3. Like it is a decently packed book that is not extra long just for the sake of being long.

[01:27:37] So you can actually consume this thing in like a day or a weekend, depending on how fast you read all things. Charles duh Hague will be in the show notes@jordanharbinger.com. You can also ask the AI chat bot also on the website, which is new and improved. There's new version up there for you now.

[01:27:50] Transcripts are in the show notes, advertisers, deals, discounts, ways to support the show. All at Jordan harbinger.com/deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. We've also got the newsletter every week. The team and I dig into an older episode of the show and dissect some of the lessons from it.

[01:28:05] So if you are a fan of the show, and I hope you are, and you wanna recap of important highlights and takeaways, or you just wanna know what to listen to next, the newsletter is a great place to do just that. Jordan harbinger.com/news is where you can find it. Don't forget about six Minute Networking over@sixminutenetworking.com.

[01:28:20] I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. I love talking with you there. This show is created, an association with Podcast one. My team is Jen Harbinger Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty Mil, OC Campo, Ian Baird and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others.

[01:28:37] The fee for this show is you share it with friends. When you find something useful or interesting, the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. So if you know somebody. Who's passionate about communication, loves a little social psychology, definitely share this episode with him.

[01:28:50] In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn, and we'll see you next time. You are a mean one, Mr. Grinch. Your heart's an empty

[01:29:05] Charles Duhigg: hole. You are a Ghana

[01:29:08] Jordan Harbinger: something, something.

[01:29:09] Charles Duhigg: You got garlic in your soul. These lyrics cut out right here. For some

[01:29:15] Jordan Harbinger: reason, I'm still record.

[01:29:17] Record. Sorry, chase, dude.

[01:29:20] Charles Duhigg: Oh my gosh. So really

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