This SKILL Is Our #1 Human Superpower | Charles Duhigg X Rich Roll Podcast

can we roleplay it a little bit okay I eat meat you believe very deeply in a plant-based diet we're going to have a podcast conversation today and I want you to know like some of the stuff I'm going to say it's going to be hard it's going to be awkward Charles doig honors all of us today with an invaluable Insight packed discourse on how to Foster meaningful conversations human beings our superpower is communication that is what has made our species so successful the goal of a ation is not to win it's not to convince the

other person it's simply to understand what they're trying to tell you Charles is a PE or prizewinning journalist author of The Power of Habit which was a literary Sensation that spent an astonishing three years on the New York Times bestseller list and his newly released imprint is super communicators all about the neuroscience and the psychology that shapes our interactions and our connection with others miscommunication happens because we're having different kinds of conversations at the same time so I literally can't hear you the key is that when we do want to have a conversation to know

how to do [Music] it today's episode is brought to you by the awesome organizations that make this show [Music] possible well it's really nice to meet you uh I'm I'm honored that uh you made the track down here I appreciate it and I have to say like you are like at the focal point of important issues and talking about things that matter and so that is really kind of so it's a little scary to sit across from you I feel the same way i' I I've listened to probably half your podcasts and and my wife

is an absolute Super Fan so so believe me this they feel the same way yeah it was great I love how you brilliantly weave story and storytelling into your narratives and when I think about your work and some kind of comparable authors out there I mean there is connective tissue with people like Malcolm Gladwell and Michael Lewis and Adam Grant and even a little Sebastian younger like you have this whole history as a basically a war correspondent right um and all of that you know you can feel that page to page in in your books

and what's great about them is you're tackling big important subjects uh but also subjects with practical meaning for our everyday lives and the way that you integrate story into it makes them page Turners when they could be more like textbooks because the studies that you're citing and you know the kind of research that goes into these could come off as as dull but they're actually really fun books to read oh thank you that is really nice of you to say and I mean it's interesting one of the things that led me to start writing books

was that I was reading a lot of scientific studies and I would see them and I would say like this is fascinating and this is s such an interesting idea and it can help me so much and then 4 hours later I would forget it completely right like I I could not remember what I was I couldn't explain it to my wife or to my friends and I certainly couldn't integrate it into my life the thing I love more than anything else is storytelling I like I just find it fascinating and the thing about stories

is that it's like a delivery device for an idea a that lets you remember the idea right if I tell you some big Insight appropo of nothing it's just in one year out the other but if I tell you a story about myself that delivers that insight and particularly if that story has like a beginning and a middle and an end you hear me struggle with it you hear me make mistakes for some reason it's just what locks in that's that's the way humans learn that's exactly right um and it's something that I try to

kind of model and practice here on the podcast and it's not unrelated at all to the subject matter of of of your new book super communicators um how do I contextualize this I have this Mantra which is basically conversation matters yeah I take conversation very seriously I have an idea of how I like to structure these conversations and what your book kind of informed me of was the many ways in which I was already subconsciously practicing many of these tools that you relate but you provide this framework and the structure to all of this and

and it's all backed by science and I learned a lot and I also learned how I can improve as a conversationalist and this notion kind of crept up as I was reading your book which is that yes conversation matters but it only matters if you understand the nature of conversation itself right and for me to your point around storytelling in this podcast format my my Approach is and has always been that the emotional connection has to come first yeah the information that the guest is intending to impart is a byproduct of that emotional conversation I

think a lot of podcasters and interviewers do the opposite they're all about the information the emotional connection is really not considered or not adequately considered and for me I've got to be able to figure out how to like lock in with this person and then trust that whatever information is meant to be imparted will be imparted as a result of that and of course that emotional connection is often um accomplished through the sharing of stories I'm practicing one of the principles in your book I very intentionally LED with this idea that you scare me and

you're you're you intimidate me as a demonstration of vulnerability because I can't expect you to be vulnerable if I don't you lead the way with that so I'm trying to set the table I'm practicing you know the principles in this book to try to create a situation in which we can have a learning conversation I I love it oh my God you you are amazing so Charles what is this conversation really about what are we doing what what what are we going to do here today should we set an agenda and some goals and some

guidelines well okay so I would suggest we there's two things that that would be helpful an agenda might be like a little bit too formal or goals might even in some cases goals are good but I think that there's like um there's a move right like are we are we going to be formal are we going to be um casual are we people who are having a conversation or is this an interview like figuring that out and oftentimes we just figure that out just by conducting experiments like saying if I interrupt you do you do

you react poorly or do you welcome it um if I laugh do you laugh back and then the second thing is more than goals I think is what do we want to get out of this conversation right like one thing is to talk about my book because I'd love for people to know about the book but the other thing is like I genuinely want to know you better I've listened to you and I think you're a fascinating person and you have fascinating ideas and like understanding how you see the world differently from how I see

the world is definitely a goal that would feel very rewarding to me and it would feel like we had a connection is that yeah I think so uh if I'm going to recite my goals or what I'd like to get out of this obviously I want to cultivate a dynamic that that um is helpful for The Listener that they're going to get something actionable out of this that they'll be entertained that they'll be um motivated to go learn more by by checking out the book and your other work uh but I think if I'm being

really honest Charles yeah what do I really want out of this conversation um and as embarrassing as it is to admit I would say that I want to come off sounding like I know what I'm talking about I want to sounds smart in your eyes and maybe more than anything Charles I want you to like me I to I you are exactly right you put it so much better than I do we want the other person to like us can we do an experiment yeah okay so so you had told me something kind of vulnerable

one of the things that comes up in the book as you know is that our brains are hardwired that when we see vulnerability we listen more closely and when that vulnerability is reciprocated um it's easier to trust and like the other person as I was driving over I was thinking about like where does this book come from and I remembered there's a there's a number of incidents but there's this one that I've actually never talked about before which is my wife and I were on vacation in Florida which was weird because it's not like we

like Florida or really go there very much but we got into this screaming fight in a hallway about money which again was like super strange cuz it's not like something we fight about we don't we're not really Fighters and for some reason I hadn't thought thought about this for years and it just popped into my mind and I was like you know what we were really talking about were emotions like we were talking about the fact that like Liz feels scared that she doesn't understand that's my wife doesn't feel feel scared that she doesn't understand

money I feel frustrated that I don't have someone to talk about money with MH if we had just started the conversation by saying kind of like what you just did just saying actually like let's talk about our emotions and our marriage and how we're relating to each other right now it would have been so much better but instead we started talk we we were going to have this emotional instead of having an emotional conversation an emotional conversation that was disguised as a practical conversation and it was disastrous yeah there's a whole thing in the book

about this right uh I mean once those emotions take over and you know the horse is out of the gate it's really hard to you know kind of reel that back and get each other under control with some kind of grounded understanding about what's really going on but the guiding principles that you lay out out about how to prevent those types of conversations from spiraling out of control I found to be very helpful as well as like the interesting research and statistics around married couples and divorce rates and the things that lead to in the

in the conversational context things that lead to couple staying together or or connected couple staying together or splitting up we're living through this golden age of understanding communication really like we never have before because of advances in neuroimaging and data analytics how easy it is to actually collect data about conversations um we can record them now and transcribe them and as a result there's all these things that you're exactly right that we do intuitively like human beings our superpower is communication that is what has made our species so successful we all have instincts hardwired by

Evolution on how to communicate and we do them sometimes right sometimes we're super communicators we walk into a room and we know exactly what to say we're sitting down with a friend we know exactly how to connect with them but then other times we don't we really want to connect with someone and it just it just doesn't happen and the people who are super communicators more consistently it turns out are just the people who have thought about it a little bit more deeply right they've come up with habits for themselves like asking questions more laughing

when someone else laughs laughing appropo of nothing most importantly matching the kind of conversation we're having and that makes all the difference you think that it's a conscious practice of trying to learn or is it something innate Within These people super communicators are people who um are are by default empathetic people who are interested in connection and um have a high degree of emotional intelligence so they're they understand people on some level I had the exact same instinct which is there are some people like I have a friend named Greg and the way to the

way to figure out who like what a super Communicator is is just think for a minute like if you were having a bad day who would you call that you know would make you feel better and there's probably someone who is someone pop in your mind sure yeah okay so can I ask who it is uh no I'll keep that I don't want um that person is a super Communicator for you and they're probably a super Communicator in general and for a long time I thought this was something that like my friend Greg I thought

he was just born this way but like study after study shows that is not right actually communication and being a super Communicator is just a set of skills that literally anyone can learn and the same way that like even if you weren't athletic as a kid you can learn to become an ultramarathon or you can you can become an athlete just by practicing it that's what communication is nobody is born with a high EQ nobody is born with the ability to like connect with other people rather it's something that they've thought about a little bit

and they've practiced a little bit and they have a they have an idea in their head and that idea becomes an instinct and a habit and so any of us can do this so explain what a super Communicator is then so a super Communicator is someone who manages to connect with you in the most unlikely settings or in the most likely settings but mostly what they understand is that there are that when we have a discussion it's not actually a discussion about one thing rather it's a discussion that contains many different kinds of conversations and

those different kinds of conversations fall usually into one of three buckets there's these practical conversations you know what are we really talking about let's make plans or fixed problems there's emotional conversations how do we feel and there's social conversations about who are we and what super communicators are really good at is they good at diagnosing or figuring out or detecting what kind of conversation is happening and then matching the other person and inviting them to match themselves MH because when we match when we're having the same kind of conversation at the same time we become

what's known as nurly and trained right communication is basically I have an idea or a feeling in my head I want you to experience that same idea or feeling and if I do it well our brains actually start to look alike you know if neural neural studies will show that people will begin thinking alike and the more closely they think alike the better they understand each other in addition like our pupils will start dilating at the same rate which is probably happening right now even though none of us neither of us are aware of it

our breath patterns will start matching each other our heart rates will start matching the electrical impulses along our skin will become similar neural entrainment feeling the same thing at the same time is what communication is and super communicators understand that and they take steps to try and accomplish it rather than than trying to convince you I'm right or rather than trying to um win the argument beneath the surface though this is really about connection it's almost like the communication piece or the conversational piece is a trojan horse for helping people better understand how they can

feel more connected to other people and I I have to imagine that's a big reason why the the afterward the final part of the book is really just about connection and its relationship to happiness because if you can learn to better communicate you will feel more connected to the people you care about and to other people perhaps that you wouldn't suspect you would be able to connect with and over time and overall that leads to Greater Life contentment and and Longevity and yeah so the end of the book talks about the Harvard happiness study which

has been going on for uh almost 100 years now uh a little bit actually over 100 years and what they've done is they've tracked people throughout their entire lives and they it started it was called the grant study when it started and they had this hypothesis that like if they could measure everything and track who was healthy and who was financially successful and who lived a long time and who was happy they would figure out what the determinants of success are and they came up with all these hypothesis it was like started in like the

50s right 50 even earlier even earlier it started right before World War II and it was started by this guy who started a 25 cent store he funded it the grant um and then ended up hating the thing and no longer giving them any money but what's interesting is that they had all these theories the theory like again this is like early 1930s that if you come from a two parent family you're going to be more successful and healthy as you grow up if you um come from the right stock from prestigious family then you're

going to you're going to have more success in life and live longer that if you come from a poor broken family that you're probably going to have mental mental health issues they had all these hypothesis and they tried to prove all of them and they found that there was only one piece of data that correlated with future success and happiness and Longevity and that was how many people you are connected to when you're 45 years old so if you are connected genuinely connected to a lot of people not like I do business with you but

like we know each other we hear each other we like each other if you connected with enough people when you're 45 and earlier right because you got to lead up to 45 by the time you're 65 and 70 and 75 and 80 you're like three times as healthy as everyone else you're living longer earning more M astonishing it's crazy right and and the question is so how do we connect and for 90% of situations we connect through conversation and being connected doesn't mean I have to talk to you all the time I have a great

friend named Donan whom I love I probably talk to him once every two months but every time we talk it is a great conversation and I feel as connected to him as anyone on this planet there's a sense that when someone's writing about conversation what they're really talking about is negotiation and you know you say in the book like every conversation is negotiation but that doesn't really speak to the thesis of the book because I think there's a mistaken sense and perhaps a lot of people will be led to this book because they're thinking I

need to know how to go into my next meeting and like own the day or like it's you know sort of from a you know you're a business writer like all these business people are going to pick this book up and like you know I I need to figure out how to dominate people and this is going to my tool uh they'll be you know hopefully gleefully surprised that there's a lot more in here um it's not necessarily about convincing people that you're right and everybody's wrong it really is figuring out how to be more

connected to other people and I'm wondering has anybody else like written a book on conversation for the sake of connection without some kind of external you know goal like a like a pecuniary goal being being the real driver behind the discourse there's a couple of books out there and actually my favorite one is this book called difficult conversation um by the the folks from the Harvard negotiation project and it's interesting you mention negotiation because you're exactly right when most people hear the word negotiation they think of a situation where we are fighting over something or

my goal is to beat you or to win right a a zero sum game but within the psy within psychology there's this thing known as The Quiet negotiation which usually happens at the start of a conversation where the goal is not to win the goal is simply to understand what you want out of this conversation right to understand why you're talking to me and so both people can win if we both walk away with an understanding and the way that it happens is it happens through a negotiation where I'm I conduct experiments right I again

I interrupt you or I laugh and I see how you react when you laugh I might laugh back even if you didn't say anything funny in fact most of the time when we laugh it's not in response to something funny it's to show the other person we want to connect that is a negotiation where we're trying to figure out what are the rules for this conversation like what are the rules of how we treat each other what are the rules of like what the goal is and what's really important and the reason why I think

the fact that this book difficult conversations came out of the Harvard negotiation project is people who are professional negotiators they understand that the goal is not to win the goal is to figure out to understand the other side because only if you understand the other side can you figure out what what plan is going to work what offer they're going to accept if you go in trying to win you're denying yourself the most important piece of information which is what how does this other person see the world and that involves a a a deeper dig

probably than most people realize so when you talk about the three types of conversations what is this really about how do how do we feel or you know who are we uh of course every conversation is some blend of those it's not it's not a you know hard and fast rule between the those three distinctions and even the most uh you know what are we really talking about practical conversation um probably has some subtext that relates to Identity and you know some emotional you know kind of conflict like absolutely it's not about like which which

car should we relase maybe it's about wanting to feel like they're not being financially threatened or that their children are going to be safe or you know how this car reflects on who they are and how they will be perceived by their neighbors and their colleague like you know even the simplest things have a lot going on beneath the surface and becoming skilled in understanding that and asking the right questions to get at that when it's not clear really is the road map to successful um meeting of the minds absolutely and and I I love

that you mentioned asking the right questions because first of all one thing that we know about habitual super communicators is that they ask 10 to 20 times as many questions as the average person and many of the questions are things like like what did you make of that or that's interesting what what did you say next like there these questions that are so casual we hardly even register them as questions but they're inviting us in they're inviting us to say more they also tend to ask what are known as deep questions and a deep question

is something that asks someone to talk a little bit about their values their beliefs or their experiences because in doing so they first of all tell you who they are but second of all they often times say something a little bit vulnerable and when we he the phrase deep questions we might think like oh that's so intimate like you're it's a tough but like a deep question can be as simple as saying to someone oh rich I know that you are a lawyer like did you always want to practice law like what what what was

the moment when you decided to go to law school or what did you love most about law school mhm those three questions they're super easy to ask they don't seem overly overly familiar but what I'm asking you is I'm asking you about your experiences that led you to law school I'm asking you about your values what you valued out of law school I'm asking you about your beliefs that you decided to go study the law instead of doing something else with your life and when you respond to me you're telling me who you are like

the difference between someone who says I went to law school because I really wanted to earn a good paycheck and provide for my family and someone who says which is practical that's a practical conversation and someone who says I went to law school because I saw my father get arrested and I wanted to fight for the little guy which is much more emotional and sometimes social that obviously tells me so much about who you are at that point I know what kind of conversation we should be having I know who I know how you see

the world a little bit mhm the example that you give of the jury deliberation I think illustrates this pretty well was that guy's name the guy who was on trial Leroy uh yeah Leroy Reed Leroy Reed um and the Very deaft way in which the um what do you call them chairperson for the he was actually just he wasn't even he wasn't even yeah he wasn't even the the for person he was literally just one of the jurors but his persistence in asking all of these questions and kind of nudging people into unchartered terrain and

getting people to see things a little bit differently um is a pretty fascinating example of of the point you just made well and and what I love about that story like this guy um so this is a jury of a guy who had been arrested for carrying a gun as a as an excon and had severe mental disabilities and so it was unclear whether he even knew that he was committing a crime or knew that he had a gun he never took it out of the box and he got it only because some magazine had

said he needed to do that to become a private investor instigator so so he gets arrested for that he's going to get sent back to jail and the jury of course has to be unanimous either acquit him or send him or find him guilty and they're at each other's throats they disagree with each other and then this one guy this juror who by the way everyone else thought was super weird like most of the people in the room were like worked in factories or stay-at home moms this guy was a university Professor who studied Dairy

da like he came off as like very fish and like everyone else was like that that dude was weird he kept on talking about kofka what he did is exactly what you just said he asked these questions and they seemed like easy questions but he was listening to what people were saying and what he recognized is half this room cares about safety and so they want to follow the letter of the law like they just want to figure out what the law says and apply it the other half of the room cares about Justice and

and about fairness and they don't care what the law says they want to figure out what feels right to them and so I have to talk to these two groups differently I they can align they can come together but on their own they're just going to conflict with each other they're going to miscommunicate but if I talk to the safety one in a practical way and if I talk to the to the Justice group in a more emotional way then I'll be able to see what they help them see what they have in common and

they ended up coming to a verdict do you think that he was trying to drive it in One Direction or another though no I don't I don't and I think what's really interesting is there is this real question right like is this manipulation is I mean I think you got at this before like is learning to become good at communication mean really just a trojan horse for being good at manipulating other people and I think the truth of the matter is once or twice you can use communication skills to manipulate someone but we almost immediately

sense what's authentic and what isn't right this is like the most finely tuned thing in our brain by evolution is to figure F out what's authentic and in that case he had an opinion but he realized that if he tried to use this technique to force his opinion on others they were going to Rebel they weren't going to listen to him they weren't going to see him as an honest broker and we're all poised to distrust other people and so so in order to use the tools of communication in a genuine genuinely effective way you

kind of have to be authentically wanting to communicate with other people wanting to understand what they're telling you you that's an important point to make because it is it did come up when I was reading the book like this is a sort of how-to manual like if somebody really wants to you know amp up their game and how they're going to drive somebody to a certain kind of conclusion in a manipulative way like there's a lot of tools in here that could help that person of course our innate human ability to read authenticity or to

you know detect manipulation um hopefully is stop gap on that but it's sort of like even when you emailed me at the beginning oh like I love the show my way I'm like it seems genuine it seems authentic is it is is this like he just wrote this book on this thing you know and here we are sitting here curious I only hear from you when you need when you need a when you have a book you want to sell right no I think I think that's totally legitimate and and what's really interesting is that

so there's been all these studies that look at how how do people react to to ious offenses and if you if you're walking past me and you accidentally kick me I'll be upset but I won't be that upset but if you walk up to me and you kick me on purpose I'll be much more upset the worst thing of all is if you come up and you say I'm not going to kick you and then you kick me I will be five to 10 times more upset because I feel like my trust has been violated

and this makes sense cuz in a society the way a society works the way Evolution has shaped our brains is that we can't police everyone all the time and so when somebody steps outside of the Norms of fairness we need to over punish them we need to feel so betrayed by that that we hold it against them now one consequence of that is that we all have this like nuclear like betrayal thing in our head that can be set off is that sometimes we're more suspicious than we need to be and and so when someone

is trying to manipulate us they can get away with it once or twice but we detect it really quickly because we've evolved to to detect it it's it's not a good long-term strategy it's never I mean and there's study after study that shows this I think the other part of it is that like when we genuinely connect with someone we feel it feels wonderful right like like this conversation like finding someone who like you understand them and they understand you it just feels so good our brain has evolved to make it feel good that's what

has helped us build families and societies and cities and countries it's contingent upon in-person communication though and I think some maybe maybe you have a ripple on that or whatever but the point that I wanted to make is that there's a certain urgency to this book given the State of Affairs you know across the world right now and the nature of of discourse particularly online and the level of kind of Acro acony and lack of understanding lack of empathy uh you know inability to or or lack of a desire to truly understand um that's driving

a lot of uh the issues that we're seeing not just politically but in almost every you know kind of factor of our of our lives right now totally I I went to something over over the holidays um there's a 100 people in the room and they asked and these are all Democrats and they asked how many of you know someone who voted for Trump and one hand went up like that's not that's not a good case for situation for our country like you're exactly right like and that's that's the political like the fact that we're

having such trouble communicating with each other we've forgotten something about how to connect with each other that is deeply troubling for a democracy for a society for just a group an organization a group of friends yeah I think there's a certain Retreat like we're just reluctant to even have those conversations because they're so acrimonious and time and time again when we have dipped our toe in or tried to engage um on on difficult subject matter it hasn't gone well and so we just sort of tell ourselves well this is this is pointless and yet if

you go into that conversation saying I want to have a learning conversation by which I mean my goal is not to win my goal is not to convince you that I'm right my goal is not even necessarily to make sure that you understand me my goal is to understand what you're saying to understand how you see the world at least a little bit if you go into that conversation with that as your definition of success then that actually that conversation actually ends up feeling wonderful right like when you talk to someone and they're honest about

who they are in a way and you're like I would never be that person but it's fascinating to hear them talk about how they see the world it's not scary and it's not hard it feels so so meaningful but to do that we have to go into the conversation and say we're going to walk away without either of us convincing the other all I want to do for this conversation to be success all I want to do is understand why you see the world the way you do the science is in people hot and cold

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below and use code Rich Roll to get $150 off your purchase well explain the scenario with uh the the gun control gun rights um Advocates uh because I think that kind of underscores absolutely and I have a question for you because I think this actually comes up in recovery a lot and I'd love to hear your thoughts on it if if you're open to um so yeah so a number of years ago uh not that many years ago a group of researchers brought together a bunch of gun rights enthusiasts people who actually lobbied on behalf

of gun rights and in in their states and and in Washington DC and an equal number of gun control activists and the goal was to bring them together and not to have them convince each other not even to have them find Common Ground just to see if they could have a civil a conversation where everyone could walk away from it saying I'm glad I did that I learned something and before they started talking about guns they taught them some skills and the most important skill that they taught them was this thing called looping for understanding

and this is a really big important technique particularly when you're talking about a conflict with someone looping for understanding has three three steps you ask them a question particularly if you can ask a deep question even better you repeat back to them what you just heard them say say in your own words and then the third step and this is the one usually we forget you ask them if you got it right so these are groups that literally hated each other I mean these are people who had done battle over laws before and had marched

against each other they bring them all to the room they teach them this technique and then they find these they watch these conversations unfold and somebody says something about AK-47s I love to take AK-47s hunting cuz it reminds me of when I went hunting with my dad and a gun control activist says let me tell you what I heard you saying not I'm going to tell you what I think you should have thought but rather I hear you talking about the importance of your family and that guns are connection to your family did I get

that right there's something we again we have evolved for this when someone does looping for understanding we can't help but trust them more because we believe that they're trying to understand us equally what studies show is we can't help but listen more closely to them because we believe they've listened to us that reciprocity is kind of an automatic Instinct so in this context with this group this disperate group of people there was some training involved before you allow these people to engage with each other and it was conducted sort of as an experiment can we

even do this and the results were were were pretty good like it it it came off as if some of these people were having some of the most meaningful conversations they ever had absolutely they felt really connect to these people who saw the world very differently from them um and it was sort of deemed a success and at the conclusion of this event the idea was brought up to bring it online yeah like let's create a Facebook group and we'll moderate this Facebook group to some extent and we'll have people on the ready to kind

of chime in and you know nudge it in One Direction or the or or the other if it starts to go off the rails this experiment less successful goes off the rail like literally within 45 minutes of getting online people were calling each other Jack booted Nazis like the same group of people the same group of people there were some new people who had come in but the same group of people are like attacking each other and so that says everything well but they managed to get Beyond it and and this yes no so so

let me let me talk a little bit about what they found which is the problem was that people were coming to the online conversation assuming that the same techniques and the same rules applied as when they were face to face and what happens is every time we change a format of conversation or communication there's a change in the rules most of this is instinctual when phones first became popular there were all these articles and books written saying people will never have meaningful conversations on the telephone it's too weird you can't see the other person's face

you can't see their expressions that you and I are both Gen X when we were in high school and middle school we had conversations all the time that we're Super Rich we learned how to use that channel of communication and what's interesting is if you notice how people speak on the phone they speak differently than they speak in person without realizing it they over enunciate they tend to invest a little bit more emotion in their voice if they're feeling an emotion they tend to signal that they're listening much more dramatically we just learned how to

do that instinctually our kids are learning how to do that online so with this group once they were online when the moderators were able to go to them and sayl you're treating each other as if you're still back in Washington DC as if you're still face to face and as a result people are getting really upset you're saying something sarcastic and you can hear the sarcasm in your head but they don't read it as sarcastic they think you're being serious and so they're getting offended when they say to them change how you're communicating particularly change

what you focus on controlling the conversation gets better not for everyone right like online is still sort of a cesspool as anyone who goes on Twitter knows but for a lot of people it got a lot better so where does that leave you in terms of how you reflect on online discourse in general and the hope that it you know could be a little bit healthier than it currently is so the thing that I carry away from it is to say I need to pay attention to what the rules are for this particular kind of

communication right like writing a letter is different from writing an email is different from sending a text they all have their different rules and they're not hard rules to figure out right it's okay to be brusk in a text it's not okay to be brusk in an email I need to say dear so and so and thank you so much but once you start noticing those rules and once you start holding yourself account to them you start seeing that it makes the communication better there was one study that was done that was super fascinating looking

at Wikipedia moderators arguing with each other and fighting with each other and they found that if one person just started saying please and thank you in their comments like 40% of the other people would simmer down and would become much more polite so when you're online in a forum one of the rules is say please and thank you but when I'm texting I don't have to say please and thank you and if I just pay a little bit of attention and start developing these instincts what kind of communication is appropriate for what kind of setting

it's going to get better it's hard to imagine it's going to get better it well okay so you have to do I mean 45 minutes from that was the most meaningful conversation of my life to you know name calling and anybody you know who who's listening or or watching this knows full well when they leave a comment or they look at comment sections or they engage with Twitter whatsoever it's a hair trigger to go from zero to 100 in terms of acrimony and and the like so there's something weirdly H like built into our human

brains that that lends itself to that rapid kind of descent into bad behavior so so let me ask about a different setting um because one of the things that I've I've really loved about your writing in this show is talking about your own recovery journey and I was listening to one the other day and you were talking about when you went to rehab for the first time I I I think it was the first time and you were there I think for like six months is that right 100 days 100 days okay and I imagine

that day 100 was really different from day one in terms of how you reacted to the conversations sure so what happened like what you you probably there was part of your brain I'm imagining tell me if I'm getting this wrong there's part of your brain that like someone's telling you something and you're like you're full of like I don't like like this is nonsense even if I want to change like you don't hold you're just in some respects like that person online who says like you're an idiot you you believe this and you're you're a

Nazi what happened in those 100 days that made you a different listener and speaker well I guess I would say first of all like right off the bat that I went to rehab ready to change so I had a level of willingness and receptivity I didn't go in resistant to new ideas and and being to do things differently I was definitely receptive to that so I wasn't I wasn't kind of armored up against it um but I guess by day 100 I'd done enough work and had spent enough time with this group of people in

these counselors and had already begun to see the results in my own behavior and how I felt um that made me more emotionally invested in the veracity of of what was being shared with me [Music] um I don't know if that answers your question it it totally so he here's what I heard you say and tell me if I'm I'm getting this wrong you're doing the uh do almost automatically now you went in you said you went in receptive for change and I would actually suggest to you that a lot of people who go online

are actually more receptive to change than we think they are because they're showing up for the conversation right there's some people who just get up to like you you know be stirs but a lot of people show up if you're having a conversation about gun control with people who disagree with you there's some part of you that is ready to to hear something else you think or do you think it's an instinct to try to convince other people that you're right and they're wrong those aren't mutually exclusive right you showed up I'm sure again tell

me if I'm getting this wrong you showed up that first day and I've heard this in a lot of AA meetings you showed up that first day saying I I want to change and by the way I know more than you do about myself sure there's a lot of that I mean I guess I would say prior to going to rehab I'd already been in a lot of AA meetings and you know the first the first 100 AA meetings I went to I would say that I went in thinking I'm not going to be able

to relate to these people there's nothing they're going to be able to tell me that I don't already know you don't understand the uniqueness and the severity of my problems um there's nobody here who can help me I'm here because the judge told me I had to be here so you're sitting in the back with your arms crossed begrudgingly but you're there so to your point on some level there is a receptivity to change and doing something different otherwise you wouldn't have shown up in the first place and the other thing I heard you say

and again I'm doing now I'm self-conscious about it tell me if I'm getting if I'm is this like as a result of how many years did you work on this book and years yeah so the other thing that I heard you say though is by day 100 you felt what it was like to have an authentic connection to have an authentic conversation like my guess is if I talk to you on day 100 it's not that you believed everything that everyone was telling you and on day one you weren't it's that you you felt what

it's like to connect and it and I think an understanding that that connection is driven by or is correlated with the extent to which you're willing to be vulnerable and and your ability to be present and non-judgmental in the presence of somebody else's vulnerability to be able to receive that as well as to give it and I think that the same thing happens in less dramatic ways throughout life and including online like I mean we've all had this experience where like you're emailing with someone and suddenly they send you something that like they've clearly thought

about out and they've they've taken time to write this and suddenly you're like oh this isn't just a transactional relationship like we're developing a real relationship and at that point you crave that out of that conversation right the same way that that you learned to Crave authenticity and vulnerability I don't think that it disappears because we're not face to face and I don't some of my closest friends are with people that I really only talk to on the phone now but I think that what is key is kind of a humility to say I'm going

to let myself experience the pleasure of connection even when it's not obvious that it should be occurring right I'm going to let I'm going to go into this Twitter fight I'm going to listen to this conversation I'm going to try and say something open and vulnerable and honest and some people are going to tell me that like you know I'm an idiot and flamy but some people are going to say thank you for saying that and I'm going to let myself invest in them saying thank you you for saying that I'm going to see there

the potential for connection and pour into that that requires a great deal of optimism because I think if you're going to do that you're signing up for just a world of pain that gets packed in with you know the few people who acknowledge the goodness and all of that and and not everyone's cut out for that nor should they be like why subject yourself to and by the way not everything should be a conversation right like when I say to my kids like let's talk about your room I'm not really looking for a conversation about

their room I'm trying to be polite and telling them they got to go clean up their room MH not it it's fine to like recognize when we don't want to have a conversation when we just want to like shout and scream or we just want to listen to other people scream or say like you're just not worth the time the key is that when we do want to have a conversation to know how to do it right to know to know that there's these three types of conversations that if I ask deep questions it'll help

if that If You're vulnerable I need to reciprocate that vulnerability somehow I need to show you that I've heard what you said I need to prove that I'm listening well on the subject of of managing and navigating difficult conversations let's just use a very practical example it's Thanksgiving dinner you're there with the family and the crazy uncle and the what you know like the whole pasti of opinions yeah historically these dinners have not gone well they go off the rails politics comes up whatever it is right and it it it devolves into acrimony and shouting

Etc what is walk me through a strategy to have a different kind of experience can we role playay it a little bit like so so you're you're the crazy uncle you just told me something something totally crazy right like either that you think you know all the Democrats should be locked up and thrown into jail lizard people rule the world something like that it'd be super easy for me to say like that's ridiculous UL right it'd be super easy for me to try and give you evidence but what if I said to you you know

can you tell me why like why does that seem important to you what is it about that that that is either scary to you or hopeful uh which which opinion are we taking here whichever one you want you get to dealer's Choice uh or or let's do it this way what do you think is something we we disagree on oh I eat meat you eat you you believe very deeply in a plant-based diet okay so I could tell you why I eat meat like I can tell you I believe in the protein and like or

I could say like it seems like the moment you decided to stop eating meat when you look back at it what does that moment mean to you that moment in retrospect was a very important decision that in ways I couldn't predict at the time would completely change the trajectory of my life but it was a decision that was made at the time out of a concern for my own health and on some level was motivated by Vanity uh it wasn't it wasn't uh you know some kind of um uh altruistic idea that it was the

better way to go over time it became something else different um but I think it was something that I see now as a a kind of symbolic dividing line um that set in motion uh a journey towards understanding health for individuals but also planetar to having a greater sensitivity around ethics and moral morality and it's a decision that has kind of shaped a worldview that uh that now I feel that I that I feel very strongly about you just told me so much about yourself right and like you told you told me so much about

how you see the world and how you see yourself and what's important to you and let's say this was the conversation over the Thanksgiving meal if I asked you that and you answered that way and if I said in response like and this is actually true this is what I would say is the the thing that's hard for me is I agree with everything you just said like I actually wish I didn't have this craving to eat meat and it actually feels like a like a moral failing to me sometimes my wife was and you're

the Habit guy I'm the Habit guy I'm the Habit guy I'm supposed to be able to do anything and like I there's all these things I struggle with I struggle with getting myself to exercise I struggle with eating more healthy because like there are times when I'm just like I just want a hamburger like now we're having a conversation not about like what we disagree about we're having having a conversation about the fact that we both feel something similar we both feel like we want to change and sometimes we struggle with change and I would

mirror back to you in in a good faith gesture of trying to better understand after I do the repeat back and all that I would say to you I understand those compulsions around food and how they um can be used to uh ameliorate or treat uh difficult emotions or how they they they are part and parcel of their own habit Loops Etc and I think one of the reasons why initially going entirely plant-based worked for me and helped me interrupt those habit loops and build different habits and break the cycle of craving is because they're

so binary yeah and that and that for me is not unrelated to recovery which is also binary either you're drinking or using or you're not there is no gray area there's no it's very black and white yeah and if you apply that template to food you can say well these foods are just off the table I don't do that in the same way that I don't drink and my brain my lizard brain could kind of understand that and it removed a lot of the um decision fatigue around it to just say well that's off the

table so this is a real conversation right like we we are having a real dialogue and and let's say you were having this with your uncle at the at the dinner at the Thanksgiving table and let's say it's not plant versus meat but it's I think Trump is the greatest thing on earth or I think Trump should be put in prison you're not going to change his mind just by just by disagreeing with him but if you ask him that question like like tell me why this is important for you like we could be talking

about anything but this is this clearly matters to you a lot tell me why why that's a deep question it's an easy question to ask but a deep question and what they're going to say is they're going to tell you who they are they're going to tell you what matters to them and then the next key is not to attack them for being vulnerable right don't say like well of course you know of course it's important to you because you're a fascist right but rather to say like to prove to them that you've heard them

say like I I understand that this is important to you because this is what you just told me and and let me know if I'm getting that wrong let me tell you like why it's important to me cuz it's for very similar reasons and and we see them a little bit differently but we both care about the security of this country or we care about the security of our neighbors that's a better conversation that does not mean we're going to walk away having convinced each other I'm still going to go vote for my guy you're

going to vote for your guy but the goal of a conversation is not to win it's not to convince the other person it's simply to understand what they're trying to tell you and the place where that understanding is going to meet or that ven diagram is going to overlap is going to be beneath the surface where the values reside absolutely values beliefs and experiences in addition to this idea of of looping you also talk about uh this thing called the matching principle MH we're matching right now our beards are kind of the same we're both

wearing blue button- down shirts we're both wearing Apple watches a little we conferred we had a phone call this morning yeah your hair is a little a little bit more glamorous than mine is um yeah so and and actually one of the things that's really interesting is in Psychology these are known as so as the social chameleon Instinct that often times in a conversation if you just watch two people they'll start to physically mirror each other in their movements if one person uses an unusual word the other person will use that word later in the

conversation in fact there's this one study that was done this is a terrible study but they I mean it was well done but they went into a bar and they basically tried to figure out who had the best luck at getting someone to go home with them they did this over many nights and they found they could predict the the likelihood that someone would like bring someone home based exclusively on how much they mirrored their physical gestures W so that's that's a little bit manipulation right but but at a deeper level what the matching principle

says is when I am having an emotional conversation you should match me and when you then want to move into a practical conversation you should invite me to match you that miscommunication often happens not because people are saying things the other person can't understand miscommunication happens because we're having different kinds of conversations at the same time so I literally can't hear you we all know some subconsciously or otherwise when we're not matching like we're not in sync the energy is off like we're not we're not connecting right now even though we're talking amongst ourselves like

we're missing each other yeah yeah and and often times it's frustrating right because like I do want to connect with you and like for whatever reason it's just not happening and at that moment there's a couple of tools that are available to us one is to ask a deep question that's going to help me understand are you an emotional mindset a practical mindset a social mindset like what do you want to talk about also that emotional or that reciprocity like reflecting like showing you if you show me some vulnerability to show you my vulnerability but

overall you can do this simply by asking almost any question and by inviting someone so I I mentioned that laughter is really interesting there's been all these studies looking at when people laugh and about 80% of the time people do not laugh in response to humor 80% of the time when we laugh it's because we want to show the other person that we want to connect with them and when they laugh back they're showing us that they want to connect too with a caveat yeah which is that that laughter has to has to vibrate on

the same kind of level like the veilance of that laughter the the the um I don't know what how how would you characterize different types of laughter but they they need to be yeah like the if if somebody's not laughing enough or they're laughing too much there's a mismatch there and that's going to interfere with that desire to connect that's exactly right so like in this conver like when you say something and I kind of go and you laugh back with the same basic intensity the same energy the same mood we're going to feel connected

we're signaling to each other now if I go and you go I'm gonna know like we're not on the same wavelength right or if I think something's really funny I laugh uously and you just kind of politely chuckle cuz you know you're supposed to chuckle we will both know that we're not connecting with each other and in fact Nasa uses this yeah this is what I wanted to get into the NASA psychiatrist and how he learned how to vet the astronauts who were going to go into the space station I love I love this story

because this guy he he's unfortunately no longer with us but I talked to his daughter and a bunch of his colleagues um and he was kind of a kooky guy to be honest he was a little bit like uh he was always on nice with NASA but he was the guy who had to sign off on every single astronaut applicant if you didn't get his sign off and he didn't say you were psychologically ready then you couldn't you couldn't get accepted by NASA and he had this problem particularly as they started looking for astronauts who

had more emotional intelligence because they were changing from short missions in the 1980s to going into space for a long time and so they needed people who could get along really well who could connect and he's trying to figure it out and the problem he has is every time he would ask an applicant to like tell him something that would indicate if they're good at emotionality they' practice the question like these are these are like the right stuff guys and women right they knew exactly what to say he couldn't break through so then he figured

out by listening to old interviews and figuring out who had done well in NASA and Who had who had not done well he figured out that the people who were good astronauts they laughed differently and he started doing this thing where he would walk into every interview he'd be wearing this garish yellow tie he'd be carrying some papers he would spill the papers as soon as he walked in with look like an accident and then he would laugh pretty loudly and then he would go my daughter this morning she told me to wear this tie

because like and now I look like a clown and laugh again and what he was looking for is that person that applicant they knew that they should react but would they match his laughter would they match his affect and hisy energy or was it different because they're all practiced enough to know that they're supposed to do something but the ones who are different who just he's laughing uously and they're like that's cute those are the ones who don't take connection really seriously and connection being critical if you're going to send astronauts into space in a

confined you know room for months at a time or how however long they're up in theace right so their ability to connect with each other is correlated with their ility to cohabitate and problem solve without going sideways which NASA had had issues with in the past right absolutely absolutely and and it's not just laughter right so he would do this other thing which I loved um this is a little manipulative but it's his job to manipulate it this Ro he would he would eventually get someone to talk about some type of personal tragedy they had

he would ask questions until they talked usually about someone who' passed away and then he would say you know I totally I understand how painful that is cuz my sister passed away from cancer um just uh when we were young and we talk a little bit about it and then he would pause a beat and he would look to see if the other person asked him a question back because when we're being interviewed we don't usually ask questions we just answer them but the people who are really good at connection they would say something like

oh man like what was that like or like how was that on your mom or you know do you still think about her and then they would relate it back to their own experience and say like I think about Jim all the time it it's been 12 years but like I still have dreams about him that's not necessarily meaning that they're better or worse as people but they are people who think more about connection and take it more seriously yeah and there were the candidates who just didn't react at all in the face of that

who on paper look fantastic but that's a data point an important data point that tells you um in a tense situation cohabitating orbiting the Earth and something goes astray that that person is is going to be more challenged in how they interrelate with their fellow astronauts yeah it's just going to be more work for them yeah that's so interesting hey everybody today's episode is brought to you by seed gut health I talk about it all the time on the podcast you know it's important if you've even listened to a few of my podcasts I think

I've maybe devoted I don't know a dozen to two dozen episodes to the microbiome you got to take care of your gut health if you want to have Optimal Health how do you do that well your nutrition your lifestyle habits sleep all of these things play into that but it's also important to find a really good Prebiotic and probiotic how do you do that well there's a lot of nonsense out there so you got to follow the science and the best evidence-based product that I found out there is seeds ds01 daily symbiotic I've been taking

it for I don't know over 3 years at this point every single day there's just a tremendous amount of science behind this product I urge you to check it out and right now it's a great time to do that because you can get 25% off your first month of seeds ds01 daily symbiotic hit the link in the description below to visit seed.com roll and use code Rich roll2 get on it to bring it back to another kind of practical application here um I'm thinking of something I think most people can relate to which is when

you have a disagreement with your partner your spouse the person you're dating the person that you're most intimate with um we talked earlier about uh divorce rates and what distinguishes couples that that are able to stay together and those that end up splitting and it would be cool if you could elaborate a little bit on the nuances of that um and then to get into kind of how to approach a hard conversation with your partner over the subject matter that tends to historically inflame each other there's been a lot of research on this and a

lot of it recently that's been really fascinating um one thing that we do know is that couples the happiest couples the ones who everyone fights but some people are able to sort of you know brush off the fights and for some people they become repeated fights the people who can brush them off are the people who tend to mirror each other more they tend to match each other so so what's an interesting thing that would happen in a lot of arguments and and psychologists would videotape couples having an AR having arguments is that they would

be heatedly discussing something and in some cases someone would make a joke they tried to basically kind of lighten the atmosphere and if the person laughed at that joke and then made another joke that couple was going to do fine like even if they disagree with each other on everything mhm but in just as many cases somebody makes a joke and the other person's like huh yeah okay what I was saying was right they're not matching each other that matching in fact John gotman who's you know kind of The Godfather a lot of this has

said that matching is the most important principle in evaluating whether people are going to remain married or not but then there's a second thing which is this question like how do we match each other in an authentic way which is in in bad fights when we're going to have a hard conversation and it's going to go poorly it's often times because we're trying to control each other right I'm saying things to you like I don't want to talk about that or you know or or if you say that one more time I'm going to walk

out of the room or you know I you're telling me that you're angry and I I don't think you have the right to be angry or you shouldn't have been angry right I'm trying to control you in that conversation and you're going to try and control me back and it's going to be toxic the alternative is to find things that we can control together because when we're in a fight our Instinct for control is very very high we feel threatened we want to control things but rather than trying to control you or trying to control

you know what you think if instead I try and control the environment right I'm saying let's have this let's have this conversation when we wake up in the morning because it's 2 o'clock right now in the morning and we're exhausted let's wait until we're better rested if I'm trying to control myself if I'm saying things like okay let me let me just take a second to think about what I want to say before I say it if I try and control the boundaries of the argument which is rather than saying you know this is a

fight about your mom and money and where we're going on vacation to just say this is an like we're having a conversation an argument but it's just about this one thing let's let's keep focus on this one thing environment self and and boundaries of the fight if we're controlling those instead of each other we can control them together and at that point we're actually on the same side of the table right we're disagreeing with each other but both of us are saying things like look like let's just let's get remain focused on where we're going

for vacation let's not make it about everything else we're cooperating in shaping what that argument is like and so often times before you go into a hard conversation it's worth just sitting down and thinking to yourself like how do we how do we find things to control together because our instinct is going to be to control each other to try and control each other was incredibly revelatory oh yeah yeah I mean I feel like my wife and I are very good at this without necessarily having a conscious awareness of this rubric per se but I

think it's so important and fascinating that this what you just explained really is the differentiator between couples who stay together and couples who split yeah it's not about not fighting and it's not about not having heated arguments it's it's about control and it's not about repressing the impulse to control or trying to transcend that impulse to control but channeling it in the direction of controlling the parameters of the conversation and inward to better comport ourselves in the context of that heated exchange absolutely and when you can agree upon the control mechanism the boundaries as you

put it um yeah there's this sense of like oh we're arguing about this thing but we're actually in agreement on the more important thing so even though it feels like we're on opposite sides we're actually team members as we try to problem solve even if there's no conscious awareness of that and think about if we move that from the marriage to the workplace think about how much more complicated it can get if I'm in an argument with my boss my boss has the right to control me the most natural thing for my boss or my

manager is to tell me what to do to like exert control over me but if if this a particularly good manager a good boss and they're gifted then they'll recognize like I can't do that if I try and control you it's just going to inflame this disagreement we need to figure out what to control together I'm going to give up some of my power as your boss so that we can and and that's not that different from a marriage because oftentimes in a marriage one person is the boss about money a little bit one person

is the boss about kids a little bit and so we have to give up that control and say like look like I know more about our finances than you do but I want us to figure out how to control this together and once you make that step it's lifechanging on the subject of bosses we all or not we all but I'm sure a lot of people have had that experience where they're in a meeting there's a lot of people in the meeting and the person who kind of emerges from that Dynamic with the most respect

from everybody else isn't the person who comes in and sets the stage and dominates the conversation it's very often the person who leans back is quiet almost the entire time very occasionally chimes in with a question a very astute question and then leans back and lets everybody else talk and then half an hour later does it again yeah and never really necessarily even expresses their opinion what is it about that archetype or that practice of these principles that you talk in the book that Commander our level of respect and and and make us you know

want to be kind of emotionally connected and invested in that person as a leader so what's interesting there's been a bunch of studies that have looked at have looked exactly at this and in fact in some of them they sort of create these false situations where they they bring strangers together to have a meeting and see if they can do it well or not and what they find is those people that you're talking about the super communicators we remember them as being very quiet but if you watch a videotape of them what you see is

that they are quiet about making arguments or they are quiet about being the center of attention but they're often saying a lot of other stuff they're often being like Oh that's interesting oh tell me more about that huh you know he Jim had a good point will you bring that point up again they're giving these little interjections that nobody else even notices and the reason why we feel so why we like them why we feel so positive towards them is because they're inviting everyone into the conversation they're making it easier for us to speak up

in that group now what's interesting is when they've looked at how ideas move through a group like that what they find is that if there's a disagreement over something or an idea that everyone has to endorse very often someone will say that idea and it will go ignored and then the super Communicator will say the idea again and they'll say it in a way that makes it easier for other people to hear or they've just earned so much trust that everyone gets on board and they never say oh the super Communicator changed our mind they

never say the super Communicator like one over the day but actually that super Communicator is laundering other people's ideas and in doing so they're making them easier to hear and more palatable to consider and that's incredibly valuable a super Communicator is not someone who super Caris they're not someone who's like the life of the party they're not someone who who you know is always saying the smartest things they're oftentimes someone who you just really like having around and you can't really necessarily say why they're not your funniest friend or your like most insightful friend but

they just like they just make everyone feel heard they make it easy for us to talk to each other and if you videotape what's going on in those rooms and you watch them what you'll see is that person is hearing what other people are saying they're proving to them that they've been heard by repeating it and through the act of repeating it they're making it easier for the group to process the idea or the statement what percentage of the population do you think are are super communicators so I think the one distinction is we're all

super communicators sometimes right like when you're talking to your wife I mean you're a super Communicator in general but we all of us everyone listening at moments is a super Communicator it's that some people can habit do it some people can do it much more consistently than others and what we find is about 15 to 18% of of at least the American population is really good at this that's that's higher than I would have thought yeah and what's interesting is that if you there's been interviews done with people who who are called super like I

call Super communicators and and often times when when they're interviewed they say things like I was really shy as a kid or I I was really awkward as a kid I take myself for instance like as a kid I um I was super pudgy like into high school and uh and I was super into debate and like all that mattered to me was winning debate rounds which of course made me a huge hit with the ladies on the weekend you say that with like a twinge of like sort of embarrassment you should wear that as

a badge of honor well no it is though embarrassment because like it it it messed me up when I was in my 20s it made it hard for me to be a good friend to people MH super commun ators often times have had an experience where they were bad at communication and as a result they just started thinking about it a little bit more they started developing those instincts and those habits it's not something that like some people are good at and some aren't it's something anyone can learn to do and usually it's because they've

had a negative experience that makes them think like I got to get better at this so I want to move on to habits in a minute because I got the Habit guy here and I would be flogged by the audience if we didn't talk about habits but before we move off of this is there where do one begin with this process of of trying to understand and practice uh the art and the science of conversation like how can somebody immediately even before reading this book uh take away a few tools that they can bring into

their next conversation whether it's a casual one or a difficult one so so some tools deep questions like when somebody says something to you it's the easiest thing to do is to ask them a deep question to ask them oh why did you think that why was that important to you oh you liked that movie what was it about that movie that like really stood out for you deep questions are really powerful looping for understanding even casually just proving to you that I'm listening because often times we don't know if someone's listening but if I

repeat back what you just said and particularly if I ask you if I got it right you feel like you're listened to but then the other thing is those are some of the tools we can use honestly the way the goal is just make ourselves more sensitive to this right to be thinking about it almost instinctually and what I find and I've done this myself is at the end of the day if I sit down and I think about like the best conversation I had that day or the worst conversation I had that day and

I just write like three sentences about why I think it went well or went poorly I start seeing these patterns about myself and about other people right if if I asked you to describe the most meaningful conversations you've had with your wife they would probably not be the easiest or funnest conversations sure but you'd be able to talk to me about them for hours so if we just make that into like a slight daily habit we're like we don't even have to write it down just on the way home from a meeting think like I

tried to get this idea across and it didn't like why why did I have trouble with that or or like me and this guy really clicked like what did I do right that's how we learn to develop that instinct and anyone can do that what about the person who is highly avoidant and does everything in their power to not have to have those hard conversations how do you put that person in a mindset with some tools that makes that hard conversation they're avoiding a little bit of an easier lift absolutely so the number one thing

you can do is you can say at the beginning of the conversation this is hard for me to talk about I am going to make mistakes this is going to be awkward and I really want to talk to you about this then there's there's a couple CH there's a chapter in the book about conversations about race and Netflix stuff yeah the Netflix stuff like Netflix getting torn apart over this this executive who used a racial slur and just almost you know causing a civil war inside the company the way that they learned to have conversations

about this was to to go in and say everyone belongs in this room everyone has a legitimate perspective on race and they're all different and this conversation is going to be awkward and you're you might say something wrong and I might say something wrong and I'm going to try my best to to be gracious about that sometimes just by acknowledging that something's going to be hard we make it a lot easier and think about how frequently like we never do that in convers right we're never like maybe maybe if it's something really important I'm like

rich I got to talk to you about something it's been bogging me for a long time but most of the time if we're going to talk about something deep I'm not going to say that but if I said hey Rich like we're GNA have a podcast conversation today and I want you to know like some of the stuff I'm gonna say it's gonna be hard it's gonna be awkward like some of the stuff I say like I probably am G to Mis phrase it and and you might ask me questions that I don't understand like

the whole goal which isn't true that didn't actually happen but or I'm going to be up in my head and then I'll say something and then I'll be trying to listen to you answer but I'm thinking why did I ask that question exactly exactly like the reason we shy away from conversations is because they don't feel safe and because we're worried of the unknown that particularly in conversations about race the thing that happens most often in conversations about race according to studies is that white people are afraid they are going to say something accidentally racist

and most of these studies been done with with um conversations between black and white people black people are worried that their friend is going to say something insensitive and so if you go into this conversation you're like don't say anything racist don't say anything racist like I'm not a racist like but I just got to be really careful about what I'm saying it's really hard to have a real conversation right but if we go in and I say to you look I'm really worried about saying something offensive to you and if I do I apologize

and please tell me cuz I really want to understand it removes that you deflate the tension the dynamic and that doesn't mean it's going to be easy yeah it doesn't mean the conversation's going to go great but it's going to make it easier an added layer to this is disabusing people of of this notion that the key to a great conversation is simply to listen more I certainly think there is a dir of listening skills out in the world and we could all do better in terms of how we show up and pay attention and

and let everything go to be present with the people that we're conversing with but there's a difference and I want you to elaborate on this between just the general notion of listening and this idea of deep listening or active listening yeah so what you don't want is you don't want an an interrogation right you don't want an interview where and we've all felt that way right like I'm asking questions you're answering you never ask me a question back or vice vers Versa what you want is a back and forth a conversation is a flow where

we're aligning with each other the way that we do that is two steps first of all you mentioned active listening when I'm speaking I'm not actually paying attention to how you're reacting communication is so cognitively intense that as I'm talking if you're staring intently at me if you're nodding I might notice it probably I won't it's what you do after I stop talking that convinces me whether you're listening or not do you reference what I just said do you build on what I just said do you repeat what I said in your own words are

you showing me that you're listening and then then we get into the reciprocity part which is if I have shared something with you you need to share something with me right and and that doesn't mean you say you know my wife just passed away and I say I totally understand man my grandma passed away 12 years ago that's not sharing that's trying to steal the spotlight but but if you say something like I just lost someone and I say that is really hard and I'm just impressed you're out today I when I've been in your

shoes it's been it's been miserable mhm like I've shared something about myself and you've shared something about yourself that feels real you're demonstrating actively that you heard this person that you understand what they're saying and you're reflecting back some level of relatability around that idea and equally that I'm not judging you so what's really important about vulnerability is that when someone says something vulnerable even if they don't care about what my judgment is they're very attuned to whether I'm judging them or not and they think negatively so if if you say something vulnerable and I

say like I've been there I I I get that what I'm showing you is not only the reciprocity but like I'm not judging you for this but if it's not received well if it's received with judgment or it's dismissed or ignored that's a loud and clear signal that like this okay no more of that not going to sh not going to be like I'm just we're not going to be connecting today you know that was a misfire and so let me just figure out what I need to extract from this person and I'm going to

move on you burn my fingers once I mean and I do this with my kids all the time like that conversation like let's talk about your room then they're like Dad I really want to clean my room but but I want watch this show and instead of listening to them I'm like no you're going to clean the room right now like basically what I'm teaching them is like don't be honest with me yeah it's it's yeah it's hard can we talk about habits I would love to absolutely um well the first question I have for

you so this book comes out in 2012 it's a Smash Hit uh three years on the New York Times bestseller list right is that right yeah I mean that's just insane right so my first thing is and it reflects back to to Super communicators is when you approached writing this new book that has to loom large and rent space in your head like like did you feel this pressure to write a book that was going to live up to this you know stunning success most people are never going to be able to replicate in their

life like did that sty you creatively like what was that interior experience so so it's interesting you mentioned the Power of Habit and now super communicators which are separated by a decade cuz there was actually a book in the middle that not that many people read and that's exactly why is because like I I had I became a basket case like it's actually a good book but like I I was mentioned this earlier like I remember I had written the first chapter of this book and it was Christmas and we were in Costa Rica and

I was on the beach and I was thinking to myself like if I fill my pockets with stones and I walk into the water I won't have to finish this book unbelievable and you're exactly right the pressure was so big like I just I felt like I felt like both a genius like I know what I'm doing but also like what if I have no idea what I'm doing and and the book did not live up to its potential for exactly that reason and so when it came to this book but you broke the seal

I broke the seal I broke the seal I I I I had the sophomore slump when I was writing this book I basically went back to tax and I was like you know what I'm never going to write anything as successful as Power of Habit like and honestly Power of Habit had very little to do with my skill it was just lucky right like it was the right time that's not fair I it had something to do but like it was luck there's a lot of great books that don't end up on the bestseller list

for three years and so once I said like actually you know what I'm never going to have as much as success it's also I should mention that same year that Power of Habit came out I won the Pulitzer Prize for my work at the New York Times so like if you really want to like screw with your head yeah have a bestselling book and win the pz prize in the same year that was for the reporting on Apple exactly yeah so so yes it affected me for a little while once I worked through it what

I said with this book was okay I came to Power of Habit because basically I wanted to figure out why I was having so much trouble eating less and exercising like if I'm so smart why is it so hard for me to do this and so I called up experts and I asked them and from that came the book and this time I did the exact same thing I waited until had a big question which is I had all these experiences in 2017 where I was just bad at communicating I was made a manager at

work and I basically like it all up I did a bad job of communicating with people and I came out of that and I said you know what like the thing I want to call up experts and ask them about is like what I need to do differently like how do I get better at this and at that point it wasn't a question of like whether I'm going to to write a best-selling book it was a question of whether I'm going to write a book that actually I think can help me and other people and

that released a lot of the pressure mhm and and the truth of the matter is this book probably will not be as big a hit as Power of Habit I don't think anything I will not win another pit a prize but it comes from an honest authentic place of curiosity obviously you know the best work is always going to come from that and the work feels important even if it isn't a runaway bestseller like it feels like for the for this time we're living in for the people who need this book that it will offer

them something valuable in reflecting back on on the 10 years that have elapsed since since the Power of Habit um how has your life changed as a result of practicing what you learned in that book and have you gleaned any new new insights on habit formation and change as a result as a a result of the last decade of experience um so what what's interesting is if you had asked me in like 2011 what would cause more of a life change having a bestselling book or winning the polter prize I would be like oh the

polzer prize right like and I was completely wrong like pter prize is fun it's a nice recognition from your peers writing The Power of Habit has changed my life not only because it put me in touch with all these people who told me their stories and and it helped convin me that sharing research through stories can really improve the world but because the more I thought about habits and the more I tried to live it like the I I felt like I had an obligation to live up to what I had written the more I

started to realize I had been focused on habits that were easily measurable how frequently do I go running what do I weigh how many drinks am I having a week you know how many hours am I spending working and when I started paying attention to it what I realized is that the most powerful habits were actually mental habits right and those are harder to track how often do I let myself get angry at something I shouldn't get angry at how often when my kid comes up and they say something to me do I only half

listen how often am I taking a minute to like ask myself like am I making the right choices right now instead of just being on autopilot and what I've been convinced about and this is a little bit why I wrote super communicators is that is that those mental habits those internal habits are much much more important than the external habits and they're harder to track you have to pay closer attention to them but when you do you really begin improving your life and the way that you track them is often by talking to other people

about them that's great Insight because when you think about it those mental habits or these Loops that we're in dictate our behaviors some level they're creating that framework through which we perceive the world and respond to it and they're insipid in that they don't naturally occur to us as something that we should notice and track necessarily and and often times they're hard to track unless you come home every night and this is what I do and you tell your wife you know like I got angry at two things yesterday and today I only got angry

at one thing and like I think you want a medal for that yeah give me give make tell me how great I am but but I I think that it's there's this interesting question like why is connection to other people so powerful like why does it cause us to live longer and be happier and part of it is because it's just fun we're hardwired to like other people but part of it is that we don't learn about ourselves until we describe ourselves to other people it's the act all the the best conversations I've had with

my wife I have learned so much about me that I didn't know before I started that conversation and that I didn't know I was going to say and so the act of talking to someone the act of being honest with someone every single day is is how you build the right mental habits there's a saying in in recovery if you if you want to know what your character defect are like get into a relationship you know uh because when you're on your own you can get you can get away with a lot of stuff where

you can rely on our infinite capacity to rationalize and to engage and denial or to turn to a blind eye to things that are deserving of notice but when you're in an intimate Dynamic there's nowhere to turn and there's nowhere to run and those conversations or the interaction with someone with whom you're intimate with that shit's going to come up and you're going to have to deal with it and reckon with it and then you're going to really understand what your limitations are in terms of how you're communicating or how you're acknowledging or mirroring or

taking responsibility for your side of the street and and I find with my kids it's become even my my kids are now 12 and 15 and if I call like a customer service representative and I'm a little like brusk or or you know not like my kids are like Dad that was you sound you're speaking my language right now my kids are constantly on me for not being kind enough with customer service people it is my weakness totally me too me too and by the way like I just I want to make this call as

fast as possible like I do not want to like have an emotional exchange with person when they're like I'm like just get to the point yeah yeah just tell let's solve this problem you don't have don't have to ask me all these pleasantries yeah anyway sorry I'm stck and then my kids are like Dad you sounded really you sounded really mean on that call and it's like oh God you're exactly right why can't should talk to you about this this is a this is something I'm working on but it's good and it's good to encourage

them to say that I I thank them for saying it because like we are they're holding you to account they're holding to account and none of us are going to be our best selves on our own we're only going to be our best selves because other people are helping us see who we actually are on this subject of habit formation and habit change the architecture of of this book you know pivots around this idea of of the The Habit Loop so let's just frame this a little bit and explain that because I want to get

a little bit deeper absolutely so so we we tend to think of a habit as one thing but actually what we know is that there are three components to every Habit in our life and 70% of what we do every day is Habitual there's a q 70% 70% you you have hundreds of habits that that you don't recognize and I don't recognize that shape how we behave and every single one of them has the three same things there's a q which is like a trigger for that automatic Behavior to start there's the behavior itself or

the routine which is what we think of as the habit and then there's a reward every habit has a reward whether we're aware of it or not so if you think about like the first time you backed your car out of the driveway into the street like you really had to pay attention to everything right you're look at the windows and then you know the 30th time it's basically on autopilot you can like fiddle with the radio while you're doing it if I could see inside your brain what I would see is that when you

safely make it into the street there's a small small reward sensation in your brain and that is how your brain particularly your basil ganglia has learned to encode that Q routine reward into something that happens automatically that's what a habit is by definition if if you say 70% of everything we do every every single day is is is a habit on that level um the level of of mindlessness that's guiding us every single day is kind of astonishing so we have tomorrow um Dr Ellen Langer is coming in do you know her from Harvard and

she talks a lot about this like all the emphasis is on mindfulness and that's great but we need to really actually understand the extent to which we're mindless yeah so in to such a degree throughout our day and habit is a Mindless perpetration of of a behavior that's exactly right whether it's serving you or not serving you nonetheless and and by the way some of that mindlessness is really important right if if we had to every single time we saw an apple in a rock on this on the ground we had to decide which of

them would be good to eat no we wouldn't we couldn't function we couldn't function right like again every every animal on Earth has basil ganglia that exists in their brain simply to make habits because without that you get overwhelmed of course I see everything through the lens of addiction and Recovery I can't help it um there isn't much difference between the Habit Loop and the addiction cycle if you just replace um Q with craving routine with Indulgence and reward with repercussions it's really not that different and over time I've really come to this place where

I have a much broader definition or belief in what addiction is and isn't to the extent that it isn't just you know the the alcoholic who can't stop drinking or the person with the who can't pull the needle out of their arm on some level it is just Haywire Behavior it's just a different it's different nomenclature on habit and on some level along this spectrum I think we can all identify ourselves with some Behavior or some compulsion that we mindlessly engage in that isn't serving us and yet we're either unaware of it or we lack

the capacity or the compulsion to overcome it or transcend it I think it's that and in fact if you look at DSM now they they Define a lot of addiction as a habit dysfunction right so smoking is a great example 100 hours after your last cigarette nicotine is out of your blood system and yet we all know people who years after they gave up smoking still crave one with their breakfast right that's not because they're physically addicted to nicotine anymore it's been years it's because they have a habit dysfunction around nicotine that still exists in

their brain often times those negative patterns in our life as we get older they actually served a good purpose when we were younger right it was a it was a rational choice we made when I go to a party I have a drink I feel better I'm like more social it's not irrational to say this is a decision I made that that was a good decision but then a habit is when we stop making that decision but continue acting on it that's when it becomes something that we feel like we lose control over and that

can be destructive to us and I think you're exactly right every single person has some addiction addictions and and part of maturing is sitting down and saying which addictions do I want to keep like I have to clean I have to clean our house every morning like it's just like it drives me crazy I'm addicted to having a clean house that's okay right now it was not okay when we had infants and toddlers And so part of life I think is figuring out like which addictions are the right ones to have and which are which

do I need to fight sure and if you think you don't have any addictions you can engage in in the the the sort of pattern interrupt that you suggest which is not about um all the focus historically when it comes to um Breaking Bad Habits and forming new ones is on the routine or the behavior right um yeah and you're drawing attention to the Q and the reward as a different lens into kind of understanding it like keep the queue keep the reward just swap out the routine and if you struggle with that then that's

going to tell you you know whether this is a more of a compulsion than you might want to believe well and and one of the things I you mentioned in one of the transformation podcasts this idea that I've like referenced a dozen times since then and I'm going to get the phrasing wrong but that in order to change how we behave in order to transform we have to do something that feels unnatural like the Contra what do you do you remember what you call the cont do do something do something uh out of your comfort

zone you the pattern interrupt is to is to do something different and that action really is the control panel here um we have this tendency to think it's the other way around that belief drives action or a decision drives action um or that our emotional state has to be in a certain place in order to change when in truth you have to take the action first and everything else follows the emotional state that you're seeking is a result of the action not a precur precursor to it exact and and one of the things I carried

from that is to look at my own actions to look at myself as someone as a scientist who's conducting experiments right and the thing is my wife is a scientist if every experiment you conduct is a success you are a bad scientist right you're not you're not discovering anything new and by the same token like if I'm trying to change self I should conduct experiments and if the experiment doesn't work that does not mean I'm a failure it does not mean that like I can't change it means I just learned something that gets me closer

to the right answer like I am a Scientist and also takes the Judgment away from it because now I'm just someone who's looking for knowledge do you think it's easier to break a bad habit or to form a new habit or how do you think about that dichotomy or is that even a dichotomy so so the first thing I would say is there are no habits that are inherently bad habits right it's just whether we judge them to be bad or not like there is a time that having a drink for you was the right

choice and then there was a time that it wasn't mhm um and that habit didn't go from being like there's nothing inherent about that habit that's good or bad so the the first step is just to acknowledge like it's my judgment that determines which habits I want to encourage and which habits I want to discourage to answer your question it's definitely harder to change at all that right because because the way the habits work is that that literally that Q routine reward creates a neural pathway in my brain as the as the electrical impulse moves

through that pathway more and more and more as there's dopamine and endoc canbids the pathway gets L thicker and thicker and thicker and so it's easier for for uh a synapse to sort of exert an along it so once that habit in my head that habit there right I can I can extinguish it they've done experiments with rats they put the rat in the Maze learns the maze they bring the rat back two years later and the rat can like immediately go through that maze so it's harder to change a habit than to build a

new one that being said it's way more rewarding to change a habit than to build a new one like talk more about that so let me ask you what's more meaningful to you like your Ultra career or that you gave up drinking oh gave up drinking right it's not even close because when why tell me why uh I think that has been not only one of the hardest things I've ever contended with um but the most meaningful for just you know a huge number of reasons that has not just changed and improved my life but

has had a ripple effect on everybody that I care about I and that makes total sense to me and in this case like changing that habit was more powerful because changing the Habit proved something to yourself about yourself right you learned something about who you were by changing that behavior you probably learned something about other people you you you were able to do something you couldn't do before now running Ultras is super duper impressive right like I can't run an ultra but it's a completely different thing and I think it's a different thing because it's

a habit it's a new habit you created you learned how to do it you got good at it you it was hard but like you figured it out but changing a habit that is so much harder and yet so much more meaningful the implication of what you just shared is that I did this on my own with willpower under you know my own opes and nothing could be further from the case and I think one of the most meaningful Gifts of sobriety is a recognition of my own innate powerlessness and The Importance of Being connected

to other people and orienting uh my life around things that are larger than the egoo or my own personal gratification um because sobriety is the result of the Collective and it's a spiritual program so it broadened my aperture on what it means to pursue a meaningful life and what that meaningful life could look like and it rearranged my value set and upended my priorities and what I thought was and was not important I I think that's that is very well put and and the thing that it makes me think of is This basic question like

why are we so interested in transformation like you're obviously fascinated by it I'm fascinated by it like why why is transformation so interesting to us because we could be talking about all kinds of other stuff and I think the answer is because we have learned that it provides such disproportionate results the transformation that happens is not simply I'm going to stop drinking or I'm going to stop eating or I'm going to stop being angry that is the the physical manifestation of it but then there's thous thousands of other benefits that come from it that's why

transformation transformation seems like a a superpower like a a booster but like being a super Communicator transformation is is a possibility for all of us I think it is uh you know a tickle in the back of everyone's brain and soul uh I think on some level we're here to grow we're here to transform we're here to you know to evolve literally uh and and I think when we connect with that and we engage with that um we become more whole as a result we have more to give as a result of it and it

is the ultimate teacher because it mirrors back to you who you are and the possibilities of who you could become and as you inch towards that your sense of possibility continues to grow in lock step with your ability to be of Greater service to other people and I think over time that instills your life with a greater sense of purpose and satisfaction and happiness and contentment and gratitude I think that's absolutely right and and you know we've been talking about a lot of a lot about connection with other people but I think one of the

things you're talking about again tell me if I'm getting this wrong is connection with I did it right is Con is connection with oursel right that like one of the things that happens when we change is that we connect with ourself in a more profound way that's not guaranteed like you know there's mindfulness and there's mindlessness but like actually like connecting with these aspects of my own personality or my own thoughts that I I've looked away from on purpose or I've never seen that also feels really important well that is the engine of change and

transformation because in order to do that to your point earlier you have to get uncomfortable why is it uncomfortable because it's somewhere you don't really want to go and there's a reason why you don't want to go there and behind that door if you're willing to open it is some Revelation about who you are that you'll have to reckon with and that's not going to be fun but on the other side of that is that sense of of of being more interconnected with who you are that greater sense of self actualization and authenticity um that

allows you to kind of navigate the world feeling more like a you know I don't want to get too woooo about it but you feel like a you feel more yourself you feel more integrated it feels right there is an energy about it and I think the more that you like bump up against that or flirt with that that becomes its own habit Loop like you want more of that and you believe that you are capable of accessing it because you've had a taste of it you feel you felt the reward how and and I

think I think you're exactly right that anyone can experience that and sometimes you just need like you need that first step right like you just need to know how to start which I think is what your show does it's what I try and do with my books like nothing you listen to is going to give you all the answers but if it gives you the first answer then you're you're right likely to find the other ones on your own yeah and momentum has its own unique and very powerful spiritual energy like once you kind of

have the ball rolling we all know that experience of how much easier it is to go to the gymm when you've been going a a lot and you go out of town things you you interrupt that that habit Loop gets interrupted it's very difficult to get back into it so momentum is key like if you like are there studies on that I almost feel like it's a physical force of the universe oh it's so there's this like there's actually two interesting things there's the science of small winds which kind of tries to explain why momentum

is so important and then what's known as the hot hand fallacy which is that often times in you know the you'll see like ball like like guys will feel like they uh they can make a free throw and if they've made three in a row they're definitely going to make the next one and it turns out statistically that's wrong but the science of small winds is that if you get this momentum and particularly if it's starts small that it actually makes us believe disproportionately that bigger gains are within reach and belief being crucial as to

trying an engine of change that often times we don't even understand how close something is to hand because we've never thought to grasp it but suddenly I think my grasp is much longer than it actually is and it turns out it's easy to get one of the things that that you realize when you've been in the rooms the secret rooms a while is you really can't predict who's going to get it and who isn't that's really I've had countless experiences where somebody comes in they're new and you're like oh that that person's going to stick

around like they're they're totally all in on this it's going to be fine and then that person goes out they relapse they overdose they die another person comes in and you're like this dude's Never Gonna it's never going to work for this guy he's just you know he's he's just not here remarkably that person becomes over time this remarkable example of a life transformed through sobriety and it's left me to wonder like how do you think about the difference between people who are able to change and those for whom it eludes it's a really good

question and I mean there's a bunch of like answers we've heard before right that you have to you have to struggle until the pain the the fear the pain outweighs the fear of change right I don't totally buy that I mean I think for some people that's right but like what I've found and I will say I think um and as someone who who attends meetings I please tell me if you think this is a wrong thing to say but I've attended I'm not a problem Drinker and I've attended a number of AA meetings and

have found them some of the most powerful experiences of my life like they've helped me think about myself and my own patterns and what I want to change about myself and how hard it can be and I think everyone should at least attend one meeting a public meeting at some point just to just to see what's possible and I don't know why sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't I think there's something mysterious and ineffable about it a little bit except the one thing I do believe is that the people for whom it works it

doesn't work the first time right there's this guy James prasa who studied how we quit smoking what he found is that most people who quit smoking will tell you that they it was a spontaneous quit quit they just decided one day I'm not gonna smoke anymore and they manag to do it and then he goes and he looks at their life and he finds that on average they've quit smoking seven times previously they forget that they've quit mhm but what happened is the first time they quit smoking they get it for a week and then

their mother-in-law comes into town and they're super stressed and they grab a cigarette and now part of them has learned when my mother-in-law is coming in town I need something that's going to keep me away from the cigarettes and then the second time and the third time and the fourth time it's a different thing each time until they just learn enough about themselves that there's nothing magical about the seventh time they're not a different person they've just conducted enough experiments mhm that's the thing that I think and I'd be curious if you think this is

right or wrong that's the thing that I find when I change and I watch other people change it's because I've screwed up that change before and like finally I'm I'm recognizing like this is what I did wrong do you think that's right I think there's some truth in that in the intellectual sense but I think it's short changing the emotional piece there which does go to the pain you know kind of discomfort situation where the pain exceeds the fear of doing something different um I don't know like I don't know I don't know the answer

to this I think this is like the 64,000 question right um it's often mysterious and I don't know that it could be you know reduced to some kind of explanation um but I think it has to do with somebody's pain tolerance their belief in their own capacity their sense of possibility the idea that change is possible to begin with I think is important um an awareness of a different path uh guidance and accountability and then connection to other people yeah you know my experience is that habit change like fundamental like really hardcore addiction stuff doesn't

happen in isolation or in a vacuum it only happens when there's deep connection to other people who care for you in a non-judgmental and an empathetic way and I think anybody who's experienced you know one of the these meetings as you have you'll also see a model of of what you talk about in in the super Communicator book because people lead with vulnerability there is a tremendous outpouring of empathy there is a significant lack of judgment yeah and there is there is this matching thing where everybody's energy is matching and they're meeting each other and

we're feeding off of each other and there's also no advice being given it's an exchange of experiences and that means storytelling when you tell your story and another person's story is reflected back to you in a way that matches there's a sense of connection that I think leads to that belief in a greater possibility for for oneself and I I think it's really potent and and powerful and I think those principles have dictated like how I host the podcast and how I think about advocacy around the things that I care about I very rarely if

ever give anybody advice I share my experience yeah and that's a welcome that to invite people in to the conversation as opposed to a one-way Arrow coming from me outward I think that's really powerful and yeah and you're you are an expert on yourself right nobody nobody can say like you don't know what your experiences were yeah they might maybe you know but it it it it invites me to talk about who I am and to know that like I'm an expert on myself and that hopefully we learn a little bit from each other sure

so as you go out into the world and you start talking more and more about conversation and connection and communication are you optimistic and and hopeful about raising the seing of Consciousness on conversation and connection and communication individually and more broadly I am cautiously you know like this is this is going to be a tough year right because the election's going on election year we're going to hit a fever I think we're gonna it's going to be an insane year it's going to be it's going to be hard and and there's going to be so

many instincts to not have conversations to like just Shout and scream at the other side the the one thing that gives me hope is that after I wrote The Power of Habit and this was totally unexpected I started getting these emails from people who would say things like I I had a porn addiction and I didn't understand and then I read your book and I was able to like move through it or I I went to AA for the first time or I gave up smoking or I've started running marathons and I've lost 20 pounds

and like when I when I was when I was writing the book I I didn't think it would impact people and I at least so profoundly and and I think the reason it did impact people is because there is actual science that can tell us how our brains work that can tell us how to get better and and sharing that science has helped a lot of people I'm hoping that sharing the science about communication and what we know about convers ation and connection that if at some moment someone is standing there and they're about to

scream at the person who's going to vote for someone else or that wants to give them a vaccine or doesn't or believe vaccines are evil or whatever it is if there's just that slight moment when they like remember something about this conversation or something they read and they say okay look instead of instead of screaming I'm just going to ask them a deep like why is this important to you I don't I don't think it's G to make this year you know Wine and Roses but it's the only thing I can think of to help

the world get better well if hundreds if not thousands or hundreds of thousands of people engage in a pattern interrupt where they say where they don't react impulsively and just ask that very question that's its own ripple effect I think think so yeah that's pretty cool and we've done it before like this nation was born in conversation democracies exist because we have conversations we can do it again conversation matters it's true um I think we did it did we achieve our goal I think so I think so I don't learning conversation we did we definitely

had a learning conversation I feel like I know you a lot better and um and I think you're very very smart and I like you a lot good so my goal is achieved yes um here's what we talked about Charles let recap everything did I get that right got are you in agreement with what we covered today all right cool um this was delightful uh I really appreciate it your work is inspirational and your work is important and like I said at the outset it has real world ramifications the impact that it has on everyday

lives with very practical tools and and guidance I think is is laudable and and powerful and I want you to know that like it is important the work that you do so thank you for coming here today and I similarly yeah come back absolutely we'll talk about ultramarathons or whatever I'll just I'll match you wherever you're at buddy all right come up to Santa Cruz we'll go surf thanks man peace that's it for today thank you for listening I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation to learn more about today's guest including links and resources related

to everything discussed today visit the episode page at Rich roll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive as well as podcast merch my books Finding Ultra voicing change in the plant power way as well as the plant power meal planner at meals. ral.com if you'd like to support the podcast the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple podcasts on Spotify and on YouTube and leave a review and or comment supporting the sponsors who support the show is also important and appreciated and sharing the show or

your favorite episode with friends or on social media is of course awesome and very helpful and finally for podcast updates special offers on books the meal planner and other subjects please subscribe to our newsletter which you can find on the footer of any page at Rich roll.com Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Cameo with additional audio engineering by Kale Curtis the video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis with assistance by our creative director Dan Drake portraits by Davey Greenberg graphic and social media assets courtesy of Daniel CIS thank you Georgia

Wy for copywriting and website management and of course our theme music was created by Tyler Patt Trapper Patt and Harry mathys appreciate the love love the support see you back here soon peace [Music] PL [Music]