Here is the full transcript of Harvard behavioural scientist Professor Alison Wood Brooks’ interview on The Diary Of A CEO Podcast with host Steven Bartlett, December 15, 2025.
Brief Notes: Harvard behavioral scientist Alison Wood Brooks joins Steven Bartlett to unpack why so many of us feel misunderstood, awkward, or unlikeable in everyday conversations—and what to do about it. Drawing on two decades of research and her bestselling book “Talk,” she shares the TALK framework, the “one word” reframe that can turn anxiety into peak performance, and the real reasons most apologies and disagreements go wrong.
Alison explains how to move beyond small talk, ask better questions, and use levity and kindness without being fake, so that conversations at work, on dates, and with friends actually feel connecting instead of draining. She also tackles the crisis in male friendship, how poor communication quietly stalls careers, and why learning to talk well might be the most important skill for a happier life.
What Does a Behavioral Scientist Do?
STEVEN BARTLETT: Professor Alison Wood Brooks, what is it that you do and why do you think it matters so much to the world?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: I am a professor at Harvard and I’m a behavioral scientist. I study how people talk to each other and how they can do it better. I teach a course that I created there called Talk. I wrote a book about it also called “The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves.”
STEVEN BARTLETT: And if someone’s chosen to listen to this conversation now, they’ve just clicked on it and they’re thinking, should I stay or should I go? What promise can we give them if they stay and listen to this conversation that is based on the work you’ve done in your book and all the research you’ve done?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: All of life is about relationships and relationships are about talking. So if they can learn even one strategy that helps them in their conversations, it will massively improve their lives. If you think of everything from work to romantic relationships, friendships, productivity, all of it hinges on having excellent conversations.
STEVEN BARTLETT: But conversations are easy, right?
Why Conversations Are More Complex Than We Think
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: We all feel that way. We all get to adulthood and we feel like conversation should be easy because we started learning how to do it when we were one and a half years old as toddlers. And we practice doing it with an enormous number of partners, conversation partners, every day of our lives.
So by the time we become adults, it feels like we should be experts, like we should be great at it. But as a scientist, when you look under the hood and you see all of the complexity that’s happening under the hood, you realize, oh, this is why we have so many awkward moments, why we say things that we shouldn’t, why we don’t say things that we should, why we hurt each other, why we get defensive, are boring, why we get angry and hostile. And there are very clear strategies to help us with all of that.
STEVEN BARTLETT: As you’re saying that, I was thinking, do you think there’s a lot of people that are going through life giving off the wrong impression because they don’t know how to talk? Maybe they are disliked, maybe they are misunderstood because they haven’t mastered the science of how to have a great conversation.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: On my worst days, I worry that everybody’s walking around being misunderstood. When you think about talking, even as I’m talking right now, there’s no way to take the entire contents of your mind and all of your personality and say it out loud.
And so we’re always curating, we’re always choosing what some subset of stuff to share with other people through conversation. And no one is doing that perfectly. And I fear that many people are really struggling with it.
What We Really Want From Conversations
STEVEN BARTLETT: If you had to pinpoint just a few things that people want when they think about becoming a great conversationalist, what is it that we actually are aiming at?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Usually people want to be liked, even loved. Usually we want to enjoy our conversations, to not have them be miserable. We want to feel safe and protected and not have it be dreadful and time consuming. And we want to achieve professional goals. So advancing and achieving and making great decisions.
So already the very basic drives of what people are trying to achieve in conversation are actually a little bit more complicated than just, oh, we are looking for connection. And then when you really dig into it within all of the goals that people want in those categories, it’s like a vast constellation of motives.
STEVEN BARTLETT: I would like you to teach me how to talk really, really well.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: I don’t know if you need my help that much, Steven, but I’d love to. Even the best communicators have room for improvement.
STEVEN BARTLETT: No, I think I do. I think I do. Because I was thinking about this last week and all the conversations I’ve had, the different types of conversations. I had one conversation where I met someone’s family for the first time who works with me. And it was a little bit nerve wracking because people have these moments where they meet the in-laws or whatever.
For me, it’s often meeting someone who works for me’s family. I find quite nerve wracking. I think they’re kind of probably judging me. I’ve also had difficult business conversations.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Because they are judging you.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, they are judging. And I can feel it as I go towards those conversations. I’m like, oh, my God. And then I end up just freezing or being a little bit paralyzed. And you’d think as someone like me who does this for a living finds conversations easy. I absolutely do not.
Why Successful People Still Struggle With Conversation
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Actually, the more I talk to very high level C-suite, very successful people, and in fact, the higher and more successful people are, the more likely they are to be aware that this is really important and that they have room for improvement.
It’s almost like you’re aware that this skill is probably what helped you get where you are, and therefore you want to get even better at it. And you’re keenly aware of when you have awkward moments or make mistakes or missteps and you’re like, I would really like to get that out of my life, please.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Amen. I like to ruminate on an awkward encounter I had, like, two and a half weeks ago. I was like, I should have just… But actually, in reading some of your work, I thought about what I could have done, and we’ll get to this. This idea of preparing for those moments, which I typically don’t because I assume I should be a natural.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Can I ask you, as you were talking about these different examples of things that you’re ruminating about, do you feel like you have a weakness or a recurring thing that you suspect you need to get better at?
The Introvert’s Dilemma
STEVEN BARTLETT: I think one of them is I am a bit of an introvert in my sort of self-classification. And as people know who I am more in the world, I think I’ve become more introverted. And sometimes that can be perceived in the wrong way.
So my happy state is kind of being alone or around people that I’m extremely familiar with. If I leave the house and I go, say, to a gym or something, I have a little bit of paranoia.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah.
STEVEN BARTLETT: So I’m always kind of on edge, which means that this kind of shuts me down more. So when I do have conversations, I can sometimes feel it appear to be a bit more shut down.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And I don’t want to carry that into moments where I need to be a bit more open. And then I would say, generally, I just hate small talk.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah, you’re not alone there.
STEVEN BARTLETT: I just say it as a point. This is why I think I podcast, because you can just skip straight into the deep stuff and I can ask people about their trauma.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: You can do that in normal conversations too, actually. Do you find that you get stuck in small talk?
STEVEN BARTLETT: Yes, a good bit. I just try and avoid it. So I’ve got this funny story. One of the most prestigious people on planet Earth invited me to come to a thing, and I said no because there would be a hundred other people there. And I just didn’t want to be in a room for four hours with a bunch of other people.
For me, it’s so exhausting. And if I told you what this context was, you’d burst out laughing. And my team were like, you go to that f*ing room and you enjoy it.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: And I’m like, no, I’m not going. There’s too many people there. But that’s kind of what I’m like. I love this environment, but I hate small talk.
Reframing Social Preferences
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: I don’t know if that’s a weakness as much as it is you learning your preferences. I think it’s okay. Maybe we’ll get there. But large groups are very stressful. Group conversation and figuring out the structure of who should be talking to whom, when and about what is very overwhelming for the human mind.
It’s quite different than intimate one-on-one conversation, which is much more within your control. And it’s much clearer what the purpose is. So we should think about it. Maybe we can reframe it. And it’s not a weakness, but thinking about your social portfolio: who are you talking to? Is it the right people and is it in the right arrangements, in the right group size?
So what we’re doing right now, one-on-one, is a categorically different task than going to a party with a hundred people. So I’m going to help you reframe that later on.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Why did you choose to do this of all the things you could have done with your life?
The Path to Studying Conversation
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Isn’t life so fascinating? I often think about the paths not taken, but I’m very happy to be on this path. I grew up in upstate New York on a small lake in a small town. I was a lake girl, just gorgeous place. And I love playing sports, team sports in particular. I love female friendship from an early age.
And probably most formatively, I’m an identical twin. And all of the things I just described, I think are either indicators of how much I love conversation or formed my love of conversation. But either way, I arrived at college deeply interested in understanding humans and their behavior.
And by the time I got to Harvard, I realized, wow, there are whole fields like social psychology and communication that are purportedly about communication, but nobody’s bothered to actually transcribe real conversations and study them at very large scale. And so that’s what I’ve been up to for the last fifteen years.
STEVEN BARTLETT: How has being an identical twin been formative in this regard?
The Twin Effect
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: So my twin’s name is Sarah. Being an identical twin, there are many things that are similar to being a close sibling, I’m sure, but an identical twin, it’s like you have another version of you in the world. And we share a bedroom. We were on the same sports teams. We played in band together.
And so it’s sort of like watching a version of yourself up close. And I got to see how she failed and thought, oh, well, I’m going to avoid that. And I would see how she succeeds. She hits an amazing joke. She answers an amazing question. I know that I’m able to do that because we have the same DNA, the same abilities in a sort of subconscious way.
I think I’ve just been chasing, trying to help other people find that in their relationships, in their friendships and their romantic relationships and their work collaborations, because I’ve gotten to see how amazing that can be for two human beings, how close you can be and how much you can actually understand each other when you communicate well.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And what research have you done? What are the reference points you’re pulling on? Do you do your own research?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: So much. Too much, probably.
Twenty Years of Research on Anxiety and Conversation
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: It’s almost like I’m a recovering academic. I’ve been working in academia doing behavioral science research for twenty years. I know I look impossibly young. I started in graduate school studying emotions, especially anxiety. And not the kind of anxiety that requires medication or therapy necessarily, but the types of social anxiety that people feel constantly, all day long.
And figuring out, okay, how does it affect different behaviors, like how we negotiate or how we take advice from each other, or how we perform when we’re public speaking, these types of things. And then figuring out strategies and tips to help people manage that anxiety more effectively.
And one of my biggest findings was how we reframe anxiety as excitement. It’s a very easy flip to move from. Essentially, they’re the same emotion because they’re both high arousal, high energy, high cortisol, stress hormone, high heart rate, sweaty palms. You just change how you think about it in your mind. So literally saying things out loud like “I’m excited” change how your appraisal of it so you actually experience excitement. It helps you perform a lot better in a lot of different ways.
STEVEN BARTLETT: So you did a study in 2011, was it?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yes, yes.
STEVEN BARTLETT: The Nervous Nelly negotiation study.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: So that one was about negotiation, specifically this excitement reappraisal. The paper’s called “Get Excited,” and that paper actually ended up being featured in Inside Out, the movie.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Oh, wow.
The Power of Reframing Anxiety
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah. There’s a great scene where the main character is about to have a panic attack and Joy sneaks into the little cubicle farm of Minions and says, stop drawing all of these projections about how things are going to go badly and instead draw how things could go well.
It’s so great. I was sitting in the movie theater with my kids, and my husband kind of looked down the way, and he was like, is that your thing? And I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s my thing.
STEVEN BARTLETT: So what did that study show? Those two studies, the Nervous Nelly one, but also the one who excitement when.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: We feel anxious, as most people do in negotiations, because it’s an intense environment filled with uncertainty and a lack of control, which is the recipe for anxiety we want to escape. We either want to relieve that feeling by making concessions or get out of there. Just exit the interaction.
That was the main finding of the Nervous Nelly anxiety and negotiation paper. The reframing anxiety as excitement paper is lots of different ways to convince yourself that you’re feeling excited just by saying “I’m excited” out loud.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: And in doing so, that makes you focus on opportunities rather than threats, how things could go well rather than poorly. And it has incredible downstream consequences. Helps you sing better, helps you do public speaking better. It helps you collaborate more effectively. So it’s just a very powerful intervention.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And what was the sort of mechanics of the study?
The “I’m Excited” Experiment
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: So we would bring people in, you tell them, hey, Steven, you’re going to be singing karaoke in front of an audience. People start to feel quite nervous about this, naturally.
Then right before they’re going to get up and sing this song, we say, okay, an experimenter is going to ask you how you’re feeling. Some of you, we want you to say you’re feeling excited. And some of you, we want you to say you’re feeling anxious.
And that alone. When I say, Steven, how are you feeling right now? And you say, anxious, great. Okay, let’s go sing the song. You go. People who said “I’m anxious” sing worse compared to people who say “I’m excited.” They get out there, they’re more in tempo, more on pitch, they have better rhythm, and we measure it with a software when they’re actually singing in front.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Of the experimenters, just by me saying, I am excited.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah.
STEVEN BARTLETT: So the other day when I met my team member’s family, I should have been saying to myself, I’m so excited.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: To meet them, among other things. And this is important. It doesn’t always work. If you’re terrified, and it’s really something dreadful like you’re terrified that your mother’s going to die. And turns out it’s going to be hard to get excited about that if she has a terminal illness.
But on the margin, if you’re sort of torn between feeling nervous or excited in your mind, if you can really convince yourself that you actually are excited and that things could go well, I’m going to crush this exam. I’m going to tear it up on the basketball court. That flip, if repeated enough, actually becomes more likely to come true. And certainly before a high stakes conversation like meeting your colleague’s family.
STEVEN BARTLETT: So interesting. I really, I have this behind the scenes channel called behind the diary on YouTube and the other day when I did Jimmy Fallon, because it’s kind of outside of my wheelhouse to go on like late night TV in America in like seven minutes to be funny or whatever. So I was shitting myself because I’m a very serious guy.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah.
STEVEN BARTLETT: But before I went out, there’s a video of me and I said to my team, what I said to myself before the little curtain opened was, this is going to be amazing. Can’t wait. You’ve prepared for this. I said all this nonsense in my head, thinking that it was nonsense.
And I walked out, had the best time of my life. It went so great. And I made a video about that how, you know, I’m not one to believe in things that without rigor and evidence. And I didn’t have it.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Now you do.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Now I do. Now I have a study that proves that it’s not.
The Habit of Self-Talk
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: This one is interesting. I think this was the beginning of my scientific journey, realizing that the way we talk to other people and the way we talk to ourselves, especially in a repeated sense. If you think about, okay, you did that before Jimmy Fallon. Now what if you do it before the next time you meet a colleague’s family? Now what if you do it before you interview Bill Gates before you do it?
If you then get in the habit of telling yourself you’re excited and that becomes effective for you. It’s incredibly meaningful. And accumulation over time. So just focusing on one time, yes, it’s helpful. But if you can make it habitual, it has this sort of upward spiral effect on people.
It was the beginning of my scientific journey, thinking, oh, well, if we can study one phrase like “get excited” or “I’m excited,” what if we start studying the cascading, unfolding ways that people talk to each other and not just one line, but like every turn of a conversation. No one had done that before.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And this negotiation study you did, what was the mechanism for that?
Anxiety in Negotiations
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah, that was a more class of the literature. People have been studying negotiations for decades now. And there’s a really great negotiation course at almost every business school and law school that’s based in all of this rigorous work.
What had not been studied in terms of negotiating are people’s emotions. It was about 15 years ago that people, including scholars, came to the point where we were like, oh, people’s feelings matter when they feel nervous or when they feel angry. That’s actually important distinction, how you feel on the inside versus what you’re expressing to your counterpart.
So in this paper, what we found is, as a base rate, most people feel anxious before and during a negotiation because it is an intense environment. It’s probably one of the greatest benefits of taking a negotiation course is that you just get reps, and so you get more comfortable with the process of doing it. That might be the biggest takeaway from doing a training course like that.
And so in this paper, we had that sort of base rate. Look, everybody’s feeling anxious, and then what are the downstream consequences of feeling anxious? And what we find, we had people doing negotiations, playing these negotiation games. What we find is that people are much more likely to sort of leave prematurely or make more concessions to relieve the feelings of anxiety.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Make bad offers.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah. Or it depends on your goals. If your goal is to claim a lot of value, then making concessions and giving money away is not going to help you with that.
STEVEN BARTLETT: So if I’m asking my boss for a pay rise, for example, and I’m very, very nervous, I’m much more likely to lower my expectations, accept a bad offer, and leave the situation prematurely.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Absolutely.
STEVEN BARTLETT: So what do I do about that?
Negotiating a Raise
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: So many things. If we’re talking about asking for a raise, what you want is to go in there with as much sort of personal power as you can. One way to do that is to get another job offer somewhere else first. So will you talk about this as the best alternative to a negotiated agreement? A BATNA. You want to strengthen your BATNA.
So if your boss says, no, I’m not giving you a raise, you can legitimately say, I’m going to go take this other job offer because I just got a better offer from the guy down the street.
STEVEN BARTLETT: What if you don’t want to leave the other offer?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Then you need to be honest with yourself about how much power you have in the negotiation. You also probably a lot of people make the mistake of going in sort of hands on hips, like, I deserve more money.
There are lots of questions that you should ask. First to know, am I negotiating with the right person? Does my company have the funds to actually give me more money. How can I justify this in a way that’s compelling to them?
It’s not up to you. It’s that they need to want to keep you and to feel like you are being fairly and generously rewarded. And all of that requires asking a lot of questions before you go in and start making demands.
STEVEN BARTLETT: In that context, how would you try and persuade me if you work for me? So what would you say? Because I do think, you know, it’s very easy to get someone’s backup when you walk in and ask them for money.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: If you do it 100%. It’s hard for me to answer this because maybe this is sort of my personal values. It’s almost like I’m taking off my expert hat for a moment. I think the best way to get a raise is to be awesome, do things that are valuable, and your company is going to give you more money without even having to ask for it.
So in my heart, this question of how do we have a conversation where I ask for more money? It’s almost like I would hope that you don’t even get to that point. If you are truly making yourself almost irreplaceable and incredibly valuable, your boss is going to be coming to you and saying, I have to keep you around. You’re amazing. You’re so incredible. That’s a much easier conversation to have than walking in and saying, I, it’s not fair. I don’t make enough.
STEVEN BARTLETT: I do think that holds to be true. I think that generally, if people’s first priority is what they want, then they often don’t tend to get what they want. But people who have the priority, their first priority is what I can give, tend to get what they want.
The Kindness Loop
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: That’s right. It’s so it’s a bit of a sort of like a mindset shift. If you prioritize other people’s needs, if you’re thinking about what your boss finds valuable, what the organization finds valuable, and you rise to meet those needs, you make yourself valuable, which is going to come back to you. Hopefully, that’s the hope. And I think often that is the case. Almost always that is the case.
In the talk framework. And we’ll get there. The K is for kindness, and it’s not kindness in the sense of altruism, because I’m going to help my boss and do everything he wants because I care so deeply. That can be part of it. But also it’s this sort of loop of like, well, if you give him everything. If you give the organization what it needs, that’s going to come back to you. You will actually become valuable and get what you want as well. That’s how relationships work.
Introducing the TALK Framework
STEVEN BARTLETT: Usually when I interview people, I lead the way. Today, I’m going to follow because you know, the outcome that me and the audience want to get to. So I have all this stuff here.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: I love it. Props.
STEVEN BARTLETT: All these props.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Fabulous.
STEVEN BARTLETT: I have these blocks that for anyone that can’t see the conversation, say T A L K on them. Talk.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Fabulous.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And you tell me the best place to start. You know the outcome. You know where I want to get to. I want to be the best conversationalist, the best talker, the most persuasive, influential, likable talker in the world. So I shall follow your lead.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Oh, my gosh.
STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s a lot of power.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: I love it. I love it so much. Let’s start with this. I want you to think of a conversation that you had recently. It has to be more than five minutes long.
STEVEN BARTLETT: More than five? Yes. I can think of one. Immediately. It was a conversation I had with my girlfriend where I just wanted her to know that I accept the fact that I f*ed up. Like, I accept the fact that I should have been more present in a particular moment, and I wasn’t. And I just wanted to own it.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Own it and convey that to her.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And convey that I’m sorry. And I get it.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yep.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And this is not one where I’m going to try and justify my. Whatever. No, actually, objectively, I should have been more attentive and present.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yep.
STEVEN BARTLETT: I just wanted her to know that.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yep. So you sort of have an admission of blameworthiness. Why? Why did you want to do that?
STEVEN BARTLETT: Because I felt that she was right and I regretted my behavior.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah.
STEVEN BARTLETT: So sometimes I don’t feel like she’s right. Sometimes I’m here to respond. In this particular scenario, I thought, you know, actually, on balance, I should have been more present. This was an important time for her. And in hindsight, that’s not how I wish I’d behaved.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Okay. How did you want her to feel during and at the end of this conversation?
STEVEN BARTLETT: Understood.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: And?
STEVEN BARTLETT: Really understood. That’s really it. It’s like I wanted her to feel understood and I guess, like, connected to me. But it’s more. It’s really more. I just wanted her to not worry that I didn’t understand so she didn’t have to say it again. I just wanted her to know that I get it and that in future, I wish I’d behave differently.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: How did you want to feel during and after this conversation?
STEVEN BARTLETT: I guess I wanted to offload the guilt.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Aha. Aha. Good. Good.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Because I felt bad. I felt like, no, actually.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: And it was weighing on your conscience. You were like, I got to say that I got to own this because it’s making me feel like a shithead.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.
The Conversational Compass Framework
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Okay. Fabulous. Okay. When we look back on our conversations and try and describe what our goals were, very quickly you start to realize that our goals are very complicated, that we want a lot of things. I’m also guessing there may have been a time component. Can you talk a little bit about that? Like, how much time did you have to achieve these goals?
STEVEN BARTLETT: I mean, I never seemed to have enough time. So it was like, it was, yeah. So I had about probably about 20 minutes.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Great. Hey, that’s pretty good. I wish I had 20 minutes with my husband. Okay. So I have a framework that helps us think about conversational goals. And I call it the conversational compass. Okay. And like a compass that you might use to find your way out of the desert or the forest, the compass helps you decide which way not to walk, but to talk. Okay. So the X axis.
STEVEN BARTLETT: I’ll put this on the screen for anyone that can see the video.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Great. The X axis, which runs horizontally, is about your relationship.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Also, I’ll link it below.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: So this relational access. High relational goals are things that you care about that are serving the other person or your relationship. This conversation sounded very high relational. You’re truly like, I just really want her to know that I feel like a shithead and that I’m owning it and like, I care and I maybe won’t do it again. Something like that.
Low relational goals are things we care about that serve us. So in this case, you said something like, I want to offload, get rid of my guilt. I was feeling bad.
The Y axis is about information exchange. High informational goals are hinge on exchanging accurate information. It’s sort of the reason human beings develop the ability to communicate at all. Right. Way back when. Is to take what’s in my brain, communicate it to you accurately.
But we care about tons of stuff that is low informational. So it’s not about exchanging information. And sometimes it’s about concealing it. In this case, you had a high informational goal. You wanted to sort of persuade her, prove to her that you’re a good guy and that she should stay with you, essentially trust you.
But you also had low informational goals. Like you didn’t want it to be emotionally unpleasant to have this conversation. You also had low informational goals, like a time constraint. You needed to protect your time and her time. And so we’re always limited by time and cognitive resources.
So the point of this is to help us plot all of those goals in a logical way. Each quadrant is good. We live in all four quadrants. We’re not trying to get to one or another. It’s just to help us describe all of the many things that we actually care about, almost to validate them and say, listen, it’s legit that you wanted to relieve your guilt. It’s super admirable that you wanted to signal to her that, like, you’re owning this mistake. It’s legit that you have time constraints. It’s legit that you don’t want your conversations to be unpleasant.
So each of the quadrants gets a positive name. High informational, high relational is about connection. Okay. Often you’ll hear communications experts just talk about connection, which is too narrow. It’s not the only thing that we care about down here. Low informational, high relational is about savoring.
STEVEN BARTLETT: What does informational mean in this context?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Like how much accurate information you are trying to, you need to exchange with each other. If we just sat here kind of quietly and I hummed a song because we that and I said something like, I love your shirt. We’re not exchanging a lot of information, but we might be having a very lovely interaction with each other.
So not every conversation is about high information exchange, though many people think that it is. You know, these people, they’re very transactional. They feel like a conversation is where you just say things you know at other people and that they’re going to say things they know back at you. That’s a big mistake.
STEVEN BARTLETT: So having fun, I can see is in the bottom right corner having fun.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yes.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Because it’s not about huge information on exchange, but it is about connection.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: That’s right.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Oh, and it’s really important. Many of my students at Harvard almost forget about this quadrant. They’re like, if we’re not persuading and making decisions, we’re not living right. Like, this is really important. Especially over. If we’re not enjoying being with each other, I’m not going to look forward to talking to you again. That’s true at work and outside of work.
Lower left is essentially discernment. We call it protection. It’s protecting your time, protecting your reputation, protecting information. So concealing, keeping secrets, moving quickly. We can’t sit here for hours and hours and hours and then protecting your reputation. Like you care about making a positive impression on other people. I want you to see me as smart and warm and calm and trustworthy. These are self serving, low relational or low informational goals.
And then we get up to upper left which is low relational. They’re self serving, high informational. This is a lot of work related goal persuasion, making decisions, brainstorming, et cetera.
STEVEN BARTLETT: So if I want to be liked and have great relationships, I need to be on the right side of this. Is that accurate?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: So what happens if someone who trusts you and loves you tells you something in confidence and then you go tell everybody else?
STEVEN BARTLETT: You lose trust.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah. So it’s not that you can only live on this side of the compass because discernment matters for relationships. Right. So and here you are going to be in a relationship where hopefully you’re going to be like brainstorming things together, making decisions together. Even with a friend, you’re like, oh, where should we go to dinner tonight? You need to make that, coordinate that choice well together.
So I think one aspiration is to try and be over on the right side as much as you can. And in fact having the mindset of pushing yourself to try and think about your goals that are more pro social more often is a virtuous goal. But like, listen, we all have actual needs. So like you can’t only live on the right side of the compass. It’s about moving around in a way that is savvy and actually serves what you care about.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Got ya.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Do you have a sense of where your goals from that conversation that you…
STEVEN BARTLETT: Described would be apologize, which is high relational and not very high on informational because I didn’t have a bunch, I didn’t have a lot to say. It was just very simply about letting her know that I was sorry. And it was, I didn’t have a big explanation or a bunch of excuses or justifications. It was just, listen, I f*ed up. Yeah, I get it.
The Art of Apologizing
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Can we talk about apologies for a sec?
STEVEN BARTLETT: Sure.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: I love that you chose this as your example because, and the way you’re describing it, I love how you’re saying I didn’t go into a huge explanation of why I did it or anything. More people should apologize that way. A lot of people, their instinct when they’re apologizing is to revisit the problem and sort of make excuses or explain why they did the thing wrong. It’s not effective.
What is more effective is what you’re describing, taking ownership and saying, look, I just messed up and I’m so sorry, and I feel awful about it. And the most effective component of an apology is actually making a promise to change. If you say to your girlfriend, I realize I messed up here, I’m not going to do it again. Here’s how I’m going to be different in the future. Like a concrete plan. It’s so compelling to hear that you’ve thought about that and then it’s measurable because she can see in the, do you actually live up to that promise? Do you follow through on this promise to never make the mistake again?
STEVEN BARTLETT: Is there a point where you can apologize too much?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: We studied this. I ran some studies on this. We started by looking at frequency of apologies made during normal conversations. It’s quite rare for someone to over apologize, but it does seem like within one conversation, if you apologize more than twice, it starts to be more of a reminder of the bad thing that happened. Like, you just keep revisiting it and it brings you back to the negativity rather than moving forward.
We also studied apologies in a really large data set of parole hearings, like among people who had committed really serious crimes. And we looked at the types of apologies that they made during their parole hearings. And there it seemed like you actually can’t over apologize. Like more is better. And again, the most effective component is making a promise to change in the future. I’m going to go when I get out, I’m going to be in AA. I’m going to live with my grandmother. Here’s the job. I’m going to do whatever the plan is. You’re actually more likely to get out of jail.
Preparing for Difficult Conversations
STEVEN BARTLETT: And going into those difficult conversations. Is there anything one needs to do to prepare? Because our lives are full of difficult conversations. And actually it’s the avoidance of them that ends up messing up our lives the most. So when you think about difficult conversations that we all have to have or with difficult people, do I have to prepare for that?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: So this is very natural. Almost every person that you hear talk about communication tends to focus on difficult conversations. I’m going to suggest to you that that is a very narrow view of the conversational world, actually. And in fact, thinking about difficult conversations is a little bit of a misnomer. It’s not like there are some conversations that are difficult and some that are easy.
It’s that in every conversation there can be moments of difference where we use different language to mean the same thing, where we have an incongruence in our emotions, where we have a difference in motives. I want to give you advice, but you don’t want to take it or something dips down to a difference in our identities. I’m American and you’re a Brit.
So anytime you encounter these little fleeting moments of difference in all of these different ways, and maybe there was an image here. Let me see. No, it’s not here. It looks like layers. We talk about it like layers of the earth. And above the surface are the words and sounds that you hear while people are talking. Right at the surface are people’s emotions. So I feel excited, but you feel tired and bored. That’s going to be tough.
Right below that are people’s motives. What I want to achieve. Back to the compass. What I want to achieve is different than what you want to achieve. We’re all walking around with a compass in our mind, and they’re different from each other.
Right below that are our beliefs. Right. I believe that immigration is a problem, and you believe that AI is a way bigger problem than human immigration. How do we talk about that? In a way. And then all of it dips down to the sort of hot magma in the layers of the Earth model of our identities.
So even an easy conversation, we’re on a date, or we’re two spouses are driving in a car, or friends are hanging out watching a movie. You can stumble upon these little moments of difficulty anytime for any reason. And you need to have the skill set to be able to make sure the temperature doesn’t get too hot.
STEVEN BARTLETT: What is that skill set?
The Power of Receptiveness in Disagreement
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: There’s fabulous research on this. I have found it incredibly helpful in my life. Research by Julia Minson, Mike Yeomans, Hannah Collins called receptiveness. So it’s receptiveness to opposing viewpoints. And it’s both the mindset.
When someone comes to you with something that seems crazy, you don’t judge it negatively. You have to fight the human instinct to think of it as like, that’s crazy, that’s wrong, and now I’m going to win, and now I’m going to be right and prove you wrong. Because all of those instincts ruin our conversations and our relationships.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Why?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: It makes us defensive on the receiving end. It makes us sort of accusatory and hostile on the attack end. Once we get into an accusation and defense mode, the conversation is broken down. It’s no longer about connection, favoring, protecting, and advancing. We’re now in this new world that is not achieving any of our goals.
STEVEN BARTLETT: So someone comes to me and comes to you and says, something’s crazy. They say, you know, the sky is purple. Yeah, it’s actually. It’s not blue. It’s purple.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Here’s a magical phrase that you can say in that moment. “It makes sense that you feel that the sky is purple.” “It makes sense that you feel excited to tell me that the sky is purple.” “It makes sense that you feel X about Y.” “Makes sense that you feel skeptical about podcasts.” “It makes sense that you feel annoyed that I speak quickly.” “It makes sense that you are worried about AI.”
Whatever people are feeling, whatever they express to you, we can validate that feeling, because whatever’s going on in their mind is their reality. And we have to say that out loud before we go on to do anything else, even if we’re about to disagree with them vehemently. But we have to say the validation piece first, just like therapists do all the time, in order for them to feel heard and like, oh, yeah, I’m safe here, so that I can join you on your side of the table.
And now we’re going to untangle this weird problem together. You say the sky is purple. Tell me more. Like what? How did you come to feel like the sky is purple? Are you colorblind? Do you see everything in purple? Like, now I can ask you questions about how you came to that perspective and I can learn about it.
STEVEN BARTLETT: I guess the risk is you don’t.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Want to validate something wrong.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, why not? You don’t want to appear to be saying, because if I say it makes sense that you think the sky is.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Purple, but it’s actually blue, the word “thinks” is important. “It makes sense that you feel X about Y,” not “it makes sense that you think X about Y.” Thinking is like a cognition.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Is there risk of it sounding patronizing?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Maybe. But in practice, it feels really, really good when I run this. So I run an exercise in my class where we go around. Let’s say there’s a group of five students, and you have to share something. We start easy, like, share one song you love, and then the next person has to validate that before they share their favorite next thing song. And you go around and around very quickly.
And so it feels very contrived to say, okay, you have to say, “I love that you love that Taylor Swift song. That’s so interesting. I actually don’t like Taylor Swift.” It feels very contrived. But when you talk to the students after it, they say, yes, I knew what we were doing. It did feel over the top to say that about people’s song preferences. And still, it felt amazing to have the person next to me say, “I love that you love that Taylor Swift song.”
Validation. We are all so hungry for validation that even ridiculous validation feels amazing. So then when you get to round two and everybody’s sharing something that they’re really struggling with, and the person next to them says, “Wow, I’m so sorry. That sounds really, really hard. It makes sense that you feel upset about your mom,” now you’ve got that habit, and you’re making them feel quite good about something that actually does deserve that validation.
So it’s all about developing these habits, no matter where the difference or disagreement is coming from.
STEVEN BARTLETT: What’s the opposite of that?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: The opposite is how people naturally respond, tend to naturally respond, which is by trying to win and prove them wrong and prove that they’re right. So you say, the sky is purple, and I say, that’s crazy. Sky’s blue. And then where does our conversation go? It feels terrible for you.
STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s so. I learned this because I employed this person once. And this person, when we’d talk about ideas, the first word out of their mouth was always, “I disagree.” And then they’d make their point.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: That’s right.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And I don’t know what it was about it, but I noticed that it would get my back up, of course. And so I’d say, I don’t know. I’d say, I think we should do it like this. “I disagree.” And then they’d make their point. And I remember thinking, gosh, that’s such a.
The Art of Persuasion Through Connection
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: And it’s so ironic because their goal is to persuade you. At the end of it, they want you to agree with their position. That’s not at all how persuasion works. The only way that we change our beliefs is usually across many conversations, and we’re around someone we like talking to and respect and have admiration for. And then over time, we sort of bend to the gentle pressure of their differing viewpoint.
If I say, “I disagree,” now, let’s fight about it. You get your backup, and you’re not enjoying talking to me. Even if you’re right, it’s not about being right or wrong in that moment. The goal here is to keep the conversation in an emotional place where it can continue so you can continue to engage.
And that’s what these researchers find in this receptiveness research, is if you qualify your statement saying, like, “I wonder if the sky could be a different color” rather than “the sky is blue” with certainty. There are all of these sort of hedging language. You can divide yourself into multiple parts.
So if you said to me, the sky’s purple, I would say, “Oh, my gosh. As your friend and as a painter, that is so intriguing to me. As a biologist or as a meteorologist, maybe we should investigate that.” Literally dividing yourself into two disagreeing parts, it’s usually how we actually feel.
So if your mother says something crazy to you that seems crazy to you, you could say, “As your daughter, I’m so intrigued that you’ve come to hold that perspective. I’d love to hear more. You know, as a representative of Gen Z, I know my friends would want me to say this.” It means that you can hold two perspectives at once, and it is very helpful to the other person to keep the conversation going.
But all of the elements of this receptiveness recipe have this flavor. It’s a little surprising. I think often people think of these types of things as weakness because it’s like our instinct is to try to win and be right. And instead, what I’m saying is, no. Hedge your claims. Show that you’re uncertain about stuff, validate their feelings, divide yourself into disagreeing parts because you’re not certain about anything in order to keep the conversation going so that you have any shred of hope of persuading them over the longer term.
The Neuroscience of Disagreement
STEVEN BARTLETT: I remember Tali Sharot telling me about a study even. She told me she’s a neuroscientist in London, and she told me they put two people in a brain imaging scanner and got them to look at photos and come to agreement on the price of something.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yes.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And then eventually, in these studies. I’m super paraphrasing here. She’s probably cringing.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: I think I know what study you’re talking about.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Oh, do you? Could you explain it?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah. So they studied what lights up in your brain when you’re in a situation of disagreement versus agreement. And it is actually more taxing to your mind when someone is disagreeing with you. It’s like these neurological alarm bells go off and all of a sudden, like you described, what was your phrase? My back goes up. What was your phrase?
STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, my back goes up. I get my back up.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah, that’s it. It’s actually in your brain. Your brain goes up and it’s hard. It’s very hard to continue to engage once that process is underway. Some people call it amygdala hijacking, which is not quite right. But your brain does look different when you’re in a situation of disagreement. So whatever we can do conversationally to sort of tamp that down so that your back doesn’t go up is going to be quite helpful.
STEVEN BARTLETT: She showed pictures of the brain in these scans, when someone disagrees with you. And I think, and I might be getting this inverted, that it was almost like the brain had shut down to receptiveness in that moment. It was like. So I always. When I wrote this chapter in my book called “Do Not Disagree,” it’s an intentionally provocative chapter because people think, what do you mean? Never disagree with anybody.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: No, it’s not.
STEVEN BARTLETT: But I mean, like, don’t make the first thing you say, “I disagree.”
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: That’s right. It can come later.
STEVEN BARTLETT: 100%.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: It can come later. But first has to come like, “Oh, it’s so intriguing that you said that. I’m so fascinated. And it makes sense that you might feel that way. I wonder if.” And then you can go on. Instead of “I disagree.”
The Power of “Yes, And”
STEVEN BARTLETT: I met a girl called Anne who always said “yes.” And instead of “but,” good. And it shocked me because it was so different having a conversation with her. You say something to her and you go, I think this. And she goes, “Yes. And.” And then she would make her point and it could be a complete disagreement, but I noticed she was doing it and I loved it. Yeah.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Oh, yeah. And we often think of the “yes, and” as part of sort of improv, comedy, humor, et cetera. They were. The comedians are really onto something much more profound about conversation broadly. If you can come from a sort of mindset or like, spiritual place of “yes, and,” essentially you’re saying, I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt here, even though what you’re saying seems a little crazy.
That’s what is required to have great relationships. It’s like we’re all going to have these moments where someone feels something or says something that seems crazy. And if you react to it “but” in an invalidating way, that’s how we kill our relationships.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Do we need to kill the word “but”? Because what ends up happening is someone will say the thing you just said about validating relationships. “Yes, I completely understand. I think you made a great point, Alison. But.” And the minute I say “but,” it’s kind of like I’ve just taken an eraser to everything you just said.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: I would love to get rid of the word “but,” not “butt” with two T’s.
STEVEN BARTLETT: But.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: “But” with one T. Yes. Yeah. You never need it. You can make the same point and say “and.”
STEVEN BARTLETT: It just completely. It immediately says.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: It also reveals that you’re sitting there in a state of “I can’t wait. I’m on the tip of my tongue is something I can’t wait to say.” That’s opposite of what you’re saying, and the spirit of it is antagonistic.
Understanding Likability and Status
STEVEN BARTLETT: One of the things we notice when we have conversations on this show about conversation is people really care about likability.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yes.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Like, they really want to know what’s making them disliked, and they really want to know how to be liked.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Good. So being liked is a huge drive, but it’s just one of many things that we care about in terms of gaining status. So status is respect, admiration, liking in the eyes of other people. Liking usually comes from sort of warmth and charm. Admiration often comes from perceptions of competence. So we want warmth and competence at once, ideally.
Okay, let’s go back in time. Should we talk about the Talk framework? Because there are going to be little clues about how to be better liked across the whole framework.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Okay, let’s start with T. I’m going to push these to the side. T is first. I just want to say as a whole, framework T A L K is the most comprehensive, teachable, practical, scientifically rigorous framework in the world for communication.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Did you invent it?
The TALK Framework: Topics and Asking Questions
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: I did. You would say that, but I didn’t. When I first wrote the book, I didn’t say it strongly enough. And in the last almost year, I’ve come to realize why.
One part is because most people focus only on difficult conversations. And here we are focusing on all conversations, even the ones that seem like they should be easy and fun. It’s all conversations everywhere, personal and professional.
The other piece is that I didn’t even really intend this as a scientist, but the way we do research is essentially natural language processing. Machine learning fits into this new world of AI. So the framework can be used by humans or machines to coach people to be better conversationalists and used as a rubric after the fact of saying, okay, how did this go? Did you do well? Let’s look at TALK and evaluate.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay. It’s the best in the world ever.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Thank you, Steven.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, thank you.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Thank you for recognizing. Okay. T is for topics.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Topics.
Understanding Topics: The Building Blocks of Conversation
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Topics. Topics are the building blocks of conversation. It is what we choose to talk about. Very simple. We all have an intuitive understanding that we sort of work through different chunks. First, we’re going to talk about your conversation with your girlfriend. Then we’re going to talk about the Talk framework. Then we’re going to talk about the compass, whatever, working through topics.
What I think most people don’t realize is that we’re choosing topics every time we talk. It’s not just at the beginning of a conversation, like an opener, like, “Hey, what’d you think of this, you know, the diplomat.” No, it’s every time you’re talking, we’re making moves to gently stay on topic or switch to something else.
What’s so beautiful about that is it means we all have power. We all have control to nudge the conversation one way or another, and we can all do a better job with it.
STEVEN BARTLETT: So what’s the game here? To pick better topics, to know what topic we’re aiming at?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: There’s a lot of goals. It’s both about choosing better topics. It’s also about how can we make any topic better? Okay.
One huge piece of advice that when you start to realize how much your mind is doing during a live conversation, is to offload some of that cognitive work to beforehand. Okay. So prepping topics ahead of time, this does not mean writing out an agenda before you call your parents or before you call your girlfriend.
What it does mean is spending even 30 seconds, maybe even 10 seconds before you’re in the chaos of a conversation to think about what you could talk about or what might be important for you to remember to talk about.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Did you do that today?
The Power of Topic Preparation
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Always. Sometimes you don’t have to. Right. Like, you did it today. You did extensive prep. You even have things printed on cards here. And in a way, I have been prepping for this conversation for 20 years. I’ve been studying these things. I designed the framework myself. I’ve gone on 80 other podcasts. That’s all prep for this moment.
STEVEN BARTLETT: What about in your personal life?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Can you give me an example of where you prepared topics?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Every conversation that I know is coming. So with Kasi, before I got here.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Which is a member of our team.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yes. Thank you. I thought about, I wanted to ask her what it’s like to be moving from London to LA. I wanted to ask her what it’s like to work with you.
STEVEN BARTLETT: She said all good things. All good things. Next question. What does A mean?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Joking. So funny. I often will, so you can, and it’s not rocket science. It’s literally just a little bit of forethought. What kinds of questions or topics could I ask you that will make our conversation feel a little bit better than just winging it in the moment and talking about some random thing I see in the room.
I try to do this before every conversation because now I know how powerful it is and how kind it is. If you are calling somebody and you’re like, “Okay, oh, yeah, their kid was going to take guitar lessons. I should remember to ask about that.” Or, “Oh, my friend had this big presentation at work, I should remember to ask how that went.” That means you’re going to remember to ask them. And that’s super kind. And they’re excited to talk about it too. It makes everything better.
So topic prep is a huge deal in our research. What we find when you randomly assign people to prep topics or not, the conversations where people have thought ahead even for 30 seconds, they feel less anxious, they’re much smoother. There are fewer disfluencies. So stutters between topics, they cover more topics, which is usually a good thing. More likely to land on good topics, you’re less likely to blurt. So you’re less likely to share things that you don’t want to share with people.
It’s just an incredibly powerful strategy and it doesn’t need to be complicated. I’ve gotten in the habit of putting two or three bullet points for people in my Google calendar notes. When you know you have a meeting coming up and you don’t even have to do it right before, like, oh, a week ahead of time. If it pops in my head that I want to ask Steven about, “Do you want to have children?” I might write that as a little bullet point in my calendar note for the time that I’m going to be here with you, and then I’ll be more likely to remember it.
Do you feel skeptical about this?
STEVEN BARTLETT: No. I was just thinking it probably makes you more, going back to the point about likability, it probably makes you a more likable person.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Much more likable. Yeah. In fact, if you can achieve more of your goals, whether they’re high informational, low informational, high relational, low relational, all of that makes you more likable. You seem more competent, you seem more warm, especially when you lean towards those pro-social, high relational goals.
The Likability Spectrum Exercise
STEVEN BARTLETT: Because everyone talks about how if you’re interested in someone else, like you were interested in Kasi.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yes.
STEVEN BARTLETT: That must have felt good for her, which must make her like you more.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: We should go ask her.
STEVEN BARTLETT: That’s a good point.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: I ask. I have my students sometimes do a reflection task where I say, if you had to walk into a room and your job was to make people like you, a 1 out of 10, a 5 out of 10, or a 10 out of 10, what are the behaviors that you would do to try and pursue those three worlds?
STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, so if I wanted people to like me one out of ten.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah. What would you do? You tell me.
STEVEN BARTLETT: You tell me. You’re the expert.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: I want to hear your guesses.
STEVEN BARTLETT: My guesses. I would walk in quiet on my phone and I would ignore them and maybe I’d look up and make some kind of snide comment. I definitely wouldn’t notice that they were there.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And I wouldn’t make eye contact with them. I would maybe be rude. Maybe take a phone call.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: I was going to say you need one’s really low. See? Probably insults, probably.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Oh, yeah. I’d offend them.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah. Offend them.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Maybe take a phone call and then while you’re on the phone call, talk about how great you are or something. Right. Some sort of arrogance, et cetera. Maybe if they try and talk to you, interrupt them. Be like, “Not now.”
STEVEN BARTLETT: Or look at my phone midway through what they’re saying.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah. Okay. So there’s lots of things you can imagine there already. We’ve touched on topics though. Right. When you think about, okay, I’m talking on the phone in front of them and what am I going to be talking about? That reduces my likability. Even for someone who’s just observing you talking.
STEVEN BARTLETT: I’d get the name wrong.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: That’s great. Yep, yep, yep, yep.
STEVEN BARTLETT: That’s a good way to say you don’t matter to me.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah. Yeah. 5 out of 10 is an interesting one. You want to do it probably more blasé. Like you engage with them, but not very well. Talk about small talk topics like you were saying, things that you could talk about with anyone that are not personalized at all. Seem a bit disinterested, but not offensive, just bland.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Okay. Then we get to 10 out of 10 world.
STEVEN BARTLETT: 10 out of 10 likability.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah. What are you doing if you’re trying to get 10 out of 10?
STEVEN BARTLETT: I am completely focused on them.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Good.
STEVEN BARTLETT: I’m attentive, I’m complimentary. I’m going to flatter them.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yep. Do you think it will seem obsequious?
STEVEN BARTLETT: I don’t know if I get it right.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Okay.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Because I’m going to mean it.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah. Because it’s going to be sincere.
STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s going to be really sincere.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah.
STEVEN BARTLETT: I’m going to crack a great joke.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yes.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Knock, knock.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah. Who’s there?
STEVEN BARTLETT: I don’t know.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: You’re like, I don’t know. Panicked, didn’t you? Exactly.
STEVEN BARTLETT: So, yeah, I’m going to flatter them. Crack jokes, be very attentive, get their name right. Ask them about their grandchild.
The Topic Pyramid: From Small Talk to Deep Talk
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Good. Okay, let’s pause. I want to, in that description already, you’re moving quite quickly through topics as you’re interacting with them. You know that you can’t be circling the drain talking about the weather for long periods of time.
So just briefly, let me say we don’t need to avoid small talk. In fact, it’s a very important social ritual for people who are strangers to each other, people who haven’t seen each other in a long time. It’s where we land and say, “Oh, we’re doing conversation now.”
The mistake that people make is they stay there too long. Way too long. Any more than one beat of, “Oh my goodness, the weather’s really warm. It’s like summer in California.” Then you need to make it more personal and move up this topic pyramid towards medium talk, deep talk quickly. Right.
So small talk is at the bottom. These are topics anybody can talk about. Tailored talk is more exciting, more personalized, more relevant to your interests. Deep talk is the peak of this pyramid. Only we can talk about this thing in a special way.
Not every conversation is bound to get to the deep talk, but when it does, we should feel very appreciative. It’s one of the most magical things about being humans. So we don’t need to get to deep talk with the barista at Starbucks or with your neighbor when they’re taking out their trash. But it does happen sometimes and it’s quite lovely.
STEVEN BARTLETT: I think I used to put girls off when I was 11 because I used to ask them the meaning of life too quickly on my mother’s Nokia phone.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And so they would stop texting back.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah.
STEVEN BARTLETT: So I think I learned early that some people just don’t like, well.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: The joke’s on them now. Now you get to do it for your life’s work. No, but I think you were onto something there. It’s not that you asked them about the meaning of life at all. You asked it too quickly. So getting, it’s about the pacing as we move up here. Most people stay too long at the bottom, but we also cannot jump to the top. Often you kind of have to do the ritual of climbing to feel like you get there in a natural way.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And is that where relationships are built?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Deep ones for sure. At the top moments at the top, probably. Right. This is where vulnerability takes you. Often asking lots of questions, especially follow-up questions, gets you up the pyramid more quickly.
So shall we shift to the A of the talk framework? Because A is for asking. Topics and asking are intimately tied to each other. The most common way that people switch topics is by asking a question. So you can use questions like, “What are you excited about recently?” Or, “What has been your favorite guest to talk to?” Or, “What have you and your girlfriend done together recently?” You can do that to switch topics.
Once you’re on a topic, we use follow-up questions to kind of dive deeply and move up the topic pyramid.
STEVEN BARTLETT: So you’re saying I should ask more questions?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yes.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, well, ask more than they’re asking me.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Maybe not you, because you spend a lot of time asking questions. But most people, the top line advice to make their conversations better is to ask many more questions. Asking it sounds so simple and it’s almost like everybody already knows that. But doing it in practice is quite hard and it’s a skill.
And people who do it well are more successful on romantic dates, they’re more successful in work meetings, they’re more successful as collaborators, they’re more successful as entrepreneurs in getting funding. All of it hinges on question asking. So the top line advice, just ask more questions. At the very least, don’t be a zero question asker.
STEVEN BARTLETT: What happens to the fate of zero question askers?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: They’re not getting a second date, they’re not going to get that fund. They’re not learning enough about their partner to enable them to succeed. If you go on a first date and you’re asking zero questions, which, imagine that we’ve all sort of been on that date, probably you want to leave within 10 minutes.
When you’re on a first date, you have so much to learn about each other. You have everything to learn about each other. So if someone’s not asking, it’s a real, real, real problem. Especially, I think this is a very, especially good hack for men on heterosexual dates. Often what they’re getting wrong is that they’re not asking enough questions.
STEVEN BARTLETT: How’d you know this?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: From data.
STEVEN BARTLETT: From data?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah. So we have a thousand speed dates and the outcome is, does the other person want to go on a second date with you? And we have transcripts. It was an amazing study run by this incredible research group at Stanford about 10 years ago. And you can just measure it, measure how many questions they asked on each date.
People who ask more questions are enormously more likely to get asked on a second date. So much. So imagine you go on 20 first dates and I say, okay, Steven, you just have to ask one extra question on those 20 dates. If you do, you’ll convert another date into a second date from just one question per date, according to the data.
Yes, it’s true for both men and women, but it’s particularly helpful for men because they ask fewer questions on average than women do.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Really?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Significantly less.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yes. And the other funny gender effect in the data is that men are just more likely to agree to go on second dates. They’re less discerning in general, but if they want, if men want to get asked on the second date, just ask more questions.
The Power of Follow-Up Questions
STEVEN BARTLETT: What is me asking more questions doing to the other person?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: It makes them feel heard and like you want to know their answer, that you’re interested in them, so it signals your interest. But also you learn what’s in their mind and what their experience is, which gives arms you with more information to then ask more, better questions.
So it’s not just about asking more, although that’s a good start. It’s about asking great follow up questions. The benefits of question asking are almost entirely driven by the power of follow up questions.
STEVEN BARTLETT: So give me an example of asking a great follow up question.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: We’re on a date, there’s food, it’s going really well. I’ve just shared with you that I went on an amazing walk down the Sunset Strip this morning.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And then I would say, really? Oh my God, I’ve always wanted to go. Tell me, tell me about it. How did you go?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Oh, incredible. So I got to this point, I had never been there before. There was, I had to decide, was I going to veer off and go see the Marilyn Monroe apartment, which by the way is right next to the Frank Lloyd Wright house.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Oh my God.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Or was I going to go, a few blocks away was the Menendez brothers house. Who’s that? The two brothers who killed their parents.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Oh, shit. On Netflix.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah. So I would literally right in between. And I was at this crossroads. Do I choose cultured? Do I choose morbid curiosity?
STEVEN BARTLETT: And which one did you choose?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: I went with cultured. I was too afraid by myself.
STEVEN BARTLETT: You’re so cute.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: So, okay, so we, okay, we’re off our date now. That was so fun. You were asking such lovely questions and it really helped to cheer me on. Like, you actually wanted to hear this story even though it might, like someone else might have been like, not that interested. And then you feel embarrassed, like, oh, I just shared a bunch of vulnerable stuff. I was walking alone in LA. I had morbid curiosity about these two brothers.
In this story, it’s very easy to make someone feel invalidated in that moment. But follow up questions make me feel like, oh, he wants to know more. He’s coming with me on this journey.
STEVEN BARTLETT: So did I do the right thing then?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah, you were doing great.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah.
STEVEN BARTLETT: What’s the wrong thing to have done for me to just, oh, imagine if.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: I had been like, oh, I went on an amazing walk down the Sunset Strip. And you said, oh, my favorite restaurant on the strip is a sushi place.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Oh, shit.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: I went to this amazing restaurant and I went to this amazing store. Yeah, they carried Hermes. I bought an amazing pair of boots.
STEVEN BARTLETT: People do that all the time, constantly.
The Boomerang Effect
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: So this is called boomerasking.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Boomerasking.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Not because of boomers. We love it. It’s for people of all ages whom it boomerang. It’s a boomerang.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Oh, okay.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: So I say to you, that’s why I lost subscribers. No, we love boomers. So I say to you, like, Steven, what’s your favorite restaurant?
STEVEN BARTLETT: Mr. Chow’s.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Oh, I’ve been to Mr. Chow’s. Last time I went to Mr. Chow’s, I went with a whole bunch of friends. And I had a friend who was.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Really all the time.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: So I’ve asked the question, you shared something with me that is such a gift. Any sort of self disclosure is such a gift. And instead of saying who did you go with or what did you order or what is it like inside? How did you like it? I bring it, the focus of the conversation, right back to myself.
STEVEN BARTLETT: People that do that don’t know they do it.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Correct.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Because I will obviously, you know, I will go for dinner or we’ll have, I don’t know, 10 of my colleagues there. And then sometimes I’ll have one particular colleague who is doing exactly that.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yes.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And they have no idea.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Don’t you want to be like, stop?
STEVEN BARTLETT: Yes. Just like ask them about their thing. They’re new here. We’re trying to make them feel comfortable.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Even one follow up question might be enough. And so if you use this mindset of like, ask the next question before you pull it back to yourself, it sometimes can be enough. Probably many more follow up questions is better. But even just one where I was like, oh, who did you go to Mr. Chow’s with? And I let you answer. Then I say, oh, I’ve been there too.
STEVEN BARTLETT: You can see it happening in their head because you say the word Mr. Chows is your favorite restaurant and they.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Immediately there’s an association.
STEVEN BARTLETT: I’ve got a brilliant story about Mr. Chow’s that I need to tell everybody.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: It makes sense that people do this. Our brains are incredibly, are wired to be egocentric. We know all of our lived experiences, our own, with 100% accuracy. We lived it. It’s all up here. So anything that we see or hear in our conversations is of course going to trigger all of these memories and associations in your mind about your lived experience.
And it’s such an enemy of good conversation because it constantly tugs you away from being interested in the other person first.
Communication Self-Awareness in the Workplace
STEVEN BARTLETT: The other thing I’ve seen in meetings, which I’ve had to have a couple of conversations about historically is when someone will be talking and then someone’s listening going yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I know, I’m like, oh my God, they’ve got something to say and they’re like yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They’re yering them out.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yes.
STEVEN BARTLETT: They’re trying to, yeah them into silence so that they can get their point across. And I’ve had to send messages in the past to say by the way you were saying yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It made it seem to an objective observer like you weren’t listening and actually you were just trying to say something. So just in the interest of your, like, you know, maybe, maybe don’t. Just don’t say like how do they.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Respond to that people?
STEVEN BARTLETT: Because I constructed it more tactfully, tactfully.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Than I just described.
STEVEN BARTLETT: But I thought about it a lot and I just wanted to, because I’d seen them doing this 30, 40 times in meetings and I don’t think they realize how it’s perceived.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Now you know how I feel during so many conversations for so many different reasons. There are so many things like that where you see other people doing the dastardly conversational thing and, and it’s totally understandable why they’re excited. They have a thing they want to say and it’s preventing them from actually engaging with the person who’s talking and what they’re saying.
All of these things are understandable. It’s important to come from a place of like, of non judgment. It’s because our brains were built to wander, not focus on another person. Because we’re deeply egocentric beings and we focus on our own perspective. Both of those things hold us back from really being able to engage with someone else.
I want to go back to your thing of like a 10 out of 10 likability. Those are the little things. The little death by a thousand cuts to your likability are these things where it’s like you’re not able to actually really focus on someone else and really engage with what they’re saying and ask follow up questions and then later in the conversation call back to something they said earlier because you’re just that clever. So much stands in the way of doing that.
STEVEN BARTLETT: In that particular example I’m thinking about, I started to get negative feedback from people that worked with this person. And I noticed one day the negative feedback was, I don’t think they’re even listening to me. Yeah, because they’re not, because they weren’t really listening.
And so the minute I got the feedback was the minute I thought, you know what Steven, you’ve, you’ve watched watch this happen, you know, it’s objectively true. You owe it because you’re this person’s report to have a conversation with them about it because it’s getting in the way of their success.
The fascinating thing for me is if I plot everybody I know and work with on an axis of like self awareness as it relates to their communication, some people are just, they kind of just got have it.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yep.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And then some people are on the other end of this spectrum where there’s like no apparent self awareness of like how they’re coming across and they’re so talented and so hard working. But this one thing of like their communication self awareness is honestly in some cases the single thing, the single gravitational force on their career trajectory.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yes.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And like, can people change or is it just like a genetic thing they can.
The Spectrum of Self-Awareness
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: First, let me address. There are pros and cons to being at both ends of that spectrum. If you are too hypervigilant and too self aware, it can be distracting, might mean that you’re sort of people pleasing too, which can lead to burnout and exhaustion. If you’re at this lack of self awareness end, of course it’s going to be a real problem.
And so I love teaching and coaching people at that end because you can become more self aware. So many of my students at Harvard come into the course and that’s how they are. What you mean they are not aware of what their strengths and weaknesses are. They don’t know what they’re doing right and wrong. They just know. They either hate conversation or aren’t good at it.
And so just by going through this talk course they become much more sort of clear eyed and open to the fact that conversation is a skill that matters profoundly. Not in a sort of soft skill, fuzzy way, but as a, in a quantifiable way that impacts everything that matters to them, like a bottom line, almost as like an economic value to them.
And so just having their eyes open to the fact that like this is a skill and a skill they need to get better at. Even if I don’t see them getting massively better in the course of three months, it means that they are likely to get better at it over the longer term. Because now they know, now they get it and now they know that they aren’t great at it yet.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Are there anything else that you know? We talked about death by a thousand cuts as it relates to being a 10 out of 10 conversationalist and likeable person. Are there any of these other small things that we do which are harming us but are tiny that most people don’t know they’re doing?
K is for Kindness
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Let’s move to K as I’m moving along in this framework. We’re skipping L for now, which we would never skip L forever. K is for kindness. Often we’re all taught this virtue of kindness when we’re children and spend the rest of our lives sort of falling short of actually doing it in practice.
I’ve forever been obsessed with this idea of what is like people who are actually kind of, what are they thinking about and how are they interacting with other people? What kinds of choices are they making? How do they talk to other people?
And so when you say death by a thousand cuts, there are these sort of mistakes that we make in the respectfulness of our language that undermine our actual kindness to other people. Making sure you use someone’s name, you gave this example and the 1 out of 10 is like use the wrong name. That is really meaningful. You need to know people’s names and use them correctly and with appropriate formality. Right.
Sometimes it’s wonderful to say like, “Hey honey.” And sometimes you need to say, “It’s nice to meet you, Dr. Brooks.” Right? Like you need to be able to read that there is this paper where they studied conversations between police officers and citizens in Oakland, actually close to here in normal traffic stops. So when police pulled over citizens and walked up to the car and said, “You were speeding,” you know, and they used body cam footage and got all the transcripts from these interactions and then measured the respectfulness of the language that the police officers were using.
There are some really, you know, not surprising but terrible findings that police officers were using less respectful language towards black citizens compared to white citizens. But sort of more broadly speaking, the interactions where they were using more respectful language went better. There were less conflicts. There were. They drive away without further infractions.
So the tiny choices we make in our language and the language of respect varies along hundreds of features of language. And it’s a very gradient concept, but they have a real impact on how these interactions go. When we think about sort of like things like systemic racial bias, that’s it comes from that kind of stuff, that’s where it leaks out, is in the language we use with each other so we can all learn to use more respectful language.
The Impact of Emotional State on Conversation
STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you think much about how our emotional state is impacting our ability to accomplish any of these things? Because I think the days where I’m least likely to be kind are the days where I haven’t slept. Yeah, I should probably be avoiding all conversations that day.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: It’s really. I think one of the biggest things I’ve learned from all of this work is that conversation is remarkably effortful and it requires quite a bit of energy. Even if you know how to be a good conversationalist, often we don’t have the energy to actually do it.
Oh, I don’t have the energy to brainstorm topics. I don’t have the energy to continue asking follow up questions. I’m going to let my egocentrism take over and boomerang till the sun goes down. Not boomers, not boomers.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Difference of opinion here.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: I’m going to accidentally use disrespectful language and not repair that, not correct it. That’s kind of what keeps me up at night is that human beings do have limitations. We are limited in time, we’re limited in energy. Our brains are not supercomputers. And so in practice, people who are great communicators will often fall short of their own hopes because they don’t have the energy to do it.
STEVEN BARTLETT: I think Brené Brown said to me that when she comes home and she’s out of energy, she’ll just say to her partner, “Listen, I’m on 10% today, so I can’t deal with this now.”
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: And talk about self awareness. Boy, if you can do that, if you can say, and you have sturdy enough relationships at work and at home that you could say, “Dude, I’m like a 2 out of 10, you got to cut me a break today,” it would be tremendously helpful.
It requires quite a bit of self awareness to recognize that you’re at a 2 out of 10 and a lot of grace from the people around you, which means that you’re going to have to give them grace in response at some point. That’s what good relationships are.
L is for Levity
And the L. L, shall we put them in the correct order? C A L K. L is for levity. So we’ve talked a bit about difficult conversations and how they can so easily get overheated. When you think about chats that go off the rails, it’s quite easy to think of hostile conflict, difficult conversations because they’re very salient, they’re very memorable. There might be shouting, there’s going to be hurt feelings, defensiveness.
The more common enemy of conversation is actually boredom and disengagement. So, yes, do we get annoyed with each other? Absolutely. But almost every conversation has stints of disengagement where people aren’t interested.
And so levity is humor and warmth to help us avoid disinterest and boredom. And levity is important for sort of happiness and engagement sake itself. You know, it matters that we’re enjoying our time together, but maybe even more profoundly, if we are not leaning towards each other and interested in what the other person is saying, we can’t achieve any of our other goals.
Good conversation requires mutual engagement. So if I’m bored and my mind is wandering, which happens a lot because I have attentional issues, it happens to a lot of people a lot. The human mind wanders 25% of the time during conversation. So it’s quite common.
If your mind is wandering and you’re not engaged with each other, then you can’t do anything else either. Persuasion, making decisions together, brainstorming, connecting, none of it. So the L is very important because it makes things fun and enjoyable. But it’s also important because we need to to stay here with each other and not disengage.
STEVEN BARTLETT: What if you’re not a warm person?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: It’s so funny.
STEVEN BARTLETT: I’ve been.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Excuse me, is that you’re a friend?
STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, yeah, yeah. People say to me, people say to me a lot like, “You’re very serious.” I’m like, really? I think I come across as serious sometimes.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: I think you may come across as serious, I think, but you do come across as very warm. And so that’s an important distinction.
STEVEN BARTLETT: You’re using flattery. I’ve seen that.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: When you’re complaining, I’m not. I’m giving very direct feedback.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Flattering, high, relational. I’m into you.
Humor and Warmth
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: So there’s levity is two parts. It’s humor and warmth. And I always start this part of my class at Harvard by saying to my students, if you’re not funny and you think you never will be, it’s okay, because I don’t think I’m going to be the one to make you funny within the span of two months.
If you are a deeply serious, unfunny person, other people believe that you can get funnier over time. We can talk about that in a moment. What I do deeply believe is that anyone can be more warm.
So warmth moves include anything. Expressing gratitude. “I’m so grateful for your time today. I’m so grateful for you engaging with the content of my work.” Flattery, giving compliments, just shifting topics. So if you can get better at sensing when people are getting bored with a topic and getting more courageous and assertive about switching more frequently can be very, very helpful for keeping the conversation sort of bubbling along.
Callbacks. Callbacks are any reference back to something that you’ve talked about previously. They’re total magic. It shows that you were listening to someone earlier in the conversation, maybe even earlier in your relationship, like a month ago. If I can call back to something we talked about, it shows, I heard you, I was thinking about what you said. I was able to retain it in my mind, and I’m clever enough to reference back to it now.
And often it has this really amazing quality where if I bring it up again, it’s funny because you’re like, “Oh, shit, that’s super clever.”
A lot of people ask me, how do we end conversations? Well, and I have two pieces of advice there. I’m going to bring this back to callbacks. One is, nobody knows when to end conversations. It’s the final topic switch. It’s the final coordination choice. There’s no way to know. There is no right answer. So it’s better to just end it. Like, be assertive, walk away, rather than hemming and hawing and feeling bad and embarrassed about it.
The second piece of advice is that it’s a great time to try a callback. The very last beat of the conversation, you can say, “And I hope you have a great time with your girlfriend this weekend.” Right? Like, whatever they had mentioned, “Oh, I’m going to go, we’re going to go to see this movie. I hope you have a great time at the movie this weekend.” Right. Showing that like, oh, I heard you 30 minutes ago when you told me this thing that can help to smooth the exit ramp away.
Ending Conversations
STEVEN BARTLETT: I find it really useful to give people my email address to end the conversation.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: That’s so interesting.
STEVEN BARTLETT: It just ends the conversation immediately. Yeah, Someone will come up to me and say, “Hey, I’ve got this business idea I want to pitch.” And then they’ll start pitching and if I go, do not send me, here’s my email, and I shake the hand, the conversation ends immediately.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Do you feel it is dismissive?
STEVEN BARTLETT: Maybe. However, in the context of being in the gym and I’m mid set, yeah, that’s fair. And someone comes over and says, and I go, “Oh, here’s my email. If you want to.” It seems to end the conversation and it feels to be like, please help me here. What would be a better way to.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: I know, I think that’s quite good because it could be perceived as a little dismissive. But that person in the gym is going to be like, yeah, he probably doesn’t want to talk about my business while he’s lifting. And you’re opening the door to them. You’re saying, “I really would love to receive an email from you.”
STEVEN BARTLETT: It is my real email as well. I’m not giving it a fake one.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. You should feel like a jerk if you were giving out a fake email.
STEVEN BARTLETT: But I do read them.
Understanding Social Preferences and Conversation Dynamics
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah, exactly. Depending on your tolerance. I also don’t think most people would be excited about having a deep conversation with a stranger at the gym. And I think giving yourself grace for that is also helpful. Like it doesn’t make you a bad person.
I think one important thing that we take from the book in this course is like talking more is not always the answer. Often it’s not. Often it’s important. It’s these low informational goals, right? Like protecting your time, protecting your mental health.
Some people, most people are under social loneliness is a real problem. They don’t have enough friends, they’re not connected enough. But some people probably are over connected and your social portfolio is too large and there’s too many people who need too many things from you. And so thinking carefully about what are your strategies to sort of stave off over conversation is quite worthwhile.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And is this introvert, ambivert, extrovert stuff real?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: That’s a great question. People have preferences about what makes them feel connected to other people. Some people would love to go to that party with a hundred famous people.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Tell me about Zara. My team said that the thing she wants to do on a Friday after really, really, really, really, really busy week is she wants to go to a busy coffee shop and be around loads of people. And I was like, what? She goes, yeah, it recharges me. I’m like, what are you? Like, psychopath? And then there’s me, who after the same week, all I want to do is be in a dark, cold room. Oh, my God.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yep, totally. And both of those are fair and fine. And knowing that about yourself is really helpful. I don’t know as that relates to introversion and extroversion as much as, like, where. What are your preferences for conversation? It’s both about how frequently who do you want to be interacting with and what topics are exciting. Is she going to that coffee shop and talking about work still? Or is she like, no, I can’t wait to talk about this weird other stuff to try and get work off my mind.
STEVEN BARTLETT: But there’s those people, though, in society, we all know them that are, like, around people. They just become like a social butterfly.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah.
STEVEN BARTLETT: They, like, talk loads. They’re really engaged. They’re energized by it.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Sure.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And then there’s us a lot who are just drained by that stuff. And I look at these people and go, I’m almost jealous of them. I go, I don’t know how you do that.
The Awkwardness Test: A New Way to Understand Your Type
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Sometimes for sure, whether you get excited around lots of people can be a huge advantage because we need to do that sometimes. I actually think possibly a better indicator of introversion might be if you went into a party or you were in a group conversation and it was super awkward. Nobody’s talking. Do you feel like it’s your job to fix it?
Extroverts would be like, that’s my number one job in life. I am the one. Don’t worry, I’m here. I’m here to save the awkwardness. Introverts are often like, I’m going to go loiter by the guacamole. This is not my problem and I don’t want no part of it.
So sometimes it’s not even about the number of people that are around, but how you’re managing conversation. I just put a new quiz on my website that helps people figure out what are your preferences? What are your natural habits in tricky situations like that? And it gives you a sort of type hot type. What type are you? Do you tend to sort of be avoidant. Do you tend to approach and try and fix things and then strategies to use?
STEVEN BARTLETT: And what do you see in terms of percentages there and different?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: We’re finding out it’s new. It’s new. Yeah, yeah, we’re just launching it, so I’m going to find out.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And does it have classifications in terms of like, how many classifications?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah, so it’s only three types that you could be with this quiz. And then sort of like strategies that whatever your type is, this is going to help you in terms of topics, asking, levity and kindness.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And what are the three categories? One could be.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: So one person could be sort of an approach person who’s like, and I guess probably correlated with extraversion. We’ll find out. If it’s awkward and quiet, you’re the one that wants to jump in and fix it. There are pros and cons to this too. If you jump in and you might say things and do things that you don’t actually aren’t very proud of.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Might lower your value.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Correct?
STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: There are avoiders who are like, no, thank you. I’m just going to, I’m going to stay here, but I’m going to not say anything. And then there are people who are like, I’m out of here. This party’s going to suck. Right? Like, they’re the exit. The exit people.
The Contribution Score: Why Less Can Be More
STEVEN BARTLETT: I feel attacked. No, but I. You know, that’s interesting because is it true that some people who over talk are less respected? Can you over talk?
I had this thought many years ago based on, again, observations I’d seen in boardrooms that I’d been in. And I’d see 12 of my team members in a boardroom trying to come to an idea for a campaign we were doing. And I noticed that one particular person who I shan’t name many years ago in our New York office, would talk so much. And too, I would say too much to the extent that the next time they spoke, I could see everybody in the room not paying attention and discounting it before it had come.
So I came up with this idea. I was like, I think we all have a contribution score, like a credit score.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Love that.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And it’s based on how thoughtful and valuable our previous contributions have been. And what I would see is with this particular person, I shall call her Katie. The minute she spoke, halfway through her first sentence, I could see the person sat next to her basically just pre rebuttaling it, like pre dismissing it.
And then on the contrary, there’s another particular person in our Manchester office back in the day, who spoke so little that the minute they spoke, it was like the room fell silent and we all just swung our heads over to them because we were like, here comes a really good take. So I thought everybody has a contribution score. Protect yours.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yes. So group conversation is incredibly complicated. And one of the most difficult things is so obvious is just, how do we share airtime? There are always going to be people who have high power tend to take up more airtime just naturally. It’s something that high power people need to fight against because it’s not productive and it makes lower power people feel like they’re not welcome to join.
But then if you just look at airtime ballot, the person who’s dominating the airtime, that is not productive. Right. Like, especially if they’re not the expert. Okay. That’s where things get problematic.
You can imagine a balance where, okay, there might be a group where we are all dying to hear. We need to talk about aerospace engineering, and only one out of the 10 of us is an aerospace engineer. I want to hear that guy talk for 45 minutes, and I want to learn everything I possibly can in that time. It becomes problematic when the person dominating the airtime is not the sole expert or maybe not an expert at all.
There’s another piece to this, and I love your idea of a contribution score where talking is not the only way to add value to a group. There are so many roles that people play. There are timekeepers. There’s someone who’s writing on the board at the same time. Often the person holding the pen ends up being the most powerful person because they’re making diagrams and taking notes and they decide what is worthy of being up on the board.
There are people who keep the agenda. So we’re saying, okay, here are the topics we want to talk about. Here are the goals we came in with. We want to make this decision. I’d like to note that we haven’t moved to the pasture where we’re going to make the decision. Right. The person who is sort of facilitating the meeting becomes very valuable. So there’s all kinds of. So there’s goals, there’s roles in a group, and then there’s the soul, the warmth of it all.
Bad Switchers and Topic Management
STEVEN BARTLETT: The other thing in line with that, that I’ve noticed from people with a low contribution score in businesses that I’ve got, whatever is, they’re bad switchers.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Mm.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And it appears to be linked. What I mean by a bad switcher is the group will be talking about…
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: I see. Yes, yes, yes.
STEVEN BARTLETT: You know what I mean?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: They’re unwilling to go where the group wants to go. And they come. Keep coming back to their thing or their. They’re like, yeah.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Or something completely unrelated.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah.
STEVEN BARTLETT: As if they just needed to say something.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And it just. It veers the group off the subject. So the group are talking about. Let’s just say we’re talking about a campaign we’re doing for Starbucks, and we’re saying, do you think we should do an event in Manhattan? And because it almost seems like they can’t not talk, they’ll say, I went on holiday to Manhattan once. And it was. And it was voted in the top 15 on the Forbes list of best places to go. And you just go. And you just look and go. That’s not one.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: What if that person. Let me play devil’s advocate for a second. What if they made a joke about New York that was actually funny, slightly off topic, but actually funny. And then you get right back into. It’s great. So it’s not about. In that case, it’s not about bad switching. It’s about egocentrism. You’re not reading the room well. You’re not serving the goals of the group. Right.
Levity. Moments of levity often are about briefly switching to an adjacent topic and then switching back. And it’s actually worth that side bar because it’s fun. And everybody’s like, oh, thank God I don’t have to, like, circle the drain on New York for a million more minutes. The problem is this guy is chiming in, being like, let me tell you about the time I went to New York.
The Challenge of Co-Hosting and Group Dynamics
STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah. And the collective are trying to go in one direction. I actually think about this a lot in the context of podcasting. I would hate to have a co host.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: It would be very hard.
STEVEN BARTLETT: It would be so hard because in my mind, there’s a particular direction I’m going in, and if they weren’t aligned with the direction I’m going in, it’s rough. I mean, you see it sometimes on podcasts with a co host where they’re going in a direction, talking about immigration.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: And they say, like, but wait, wait, wait. Just one thing. One quick thing before we move on. And then you go back, you go.
STEVEN BARTLETT: To a different direction. Oh, my gosh. And as a viewer, you’re like, oh, you were making progress towards the crux of the issue. But this. But I think that’s what I’m talking about. Like, how do you make sure you’re moving in the right direction as the group?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: And this is a great example because we often think of one on one conversation as the same task as a three person group. As soon as a third person pulls up a chair, whether it’s a podcast co host or a friend at a bar, that task, it’s a categorically different task. Now, because that third person has the power to take you on sidebars, it’s no longer being co created intimately between two minds. All of a sudden we get into this like, coordination kerfuffle. That can be very, very frustrating. I suspect that’s part of why you don’t like groups, actually, is that you like so strongly prefer one on one.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, I think that’s true. I think that’s true. I prefer one on one. I prefer the depth.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: And.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Small talk feels like really disingenuous sometimes.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Can I push you? Do you think it’s about control? Because imagine you had a co host. The problem that the reason you’d feel so frustrated with that. Yes. It’s about the flow of the conversation getting to a magical moment. It’s also like, oh, you have to relinquish control to someone else in that moment.
STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s interesting because I was with a colleague of mine the other day and we were interviewing some people. So we just say we’re interviewing three people.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah.
The Challenge of Co-Leading Interviews
STEVEN BARTLETT: The first interview, I told her to lead the interview and I enjoyed the interview because I could watch her go in her direction. Felt very like a straight line. The second interview, I didn’t say anything. And what happened is I started asking them a question. Now I’m sat there asking this guy a question because I’m trying to figure out this particular answer. So I’m kind of like circling this issue, not kind of giving it away. And I’m getting one step closer and another step closer. And then my colleague comes in and asks a completely different question.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: And you’re like, oh.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And I’m like, oh, no. I was like, so close to figuring out this thing about them that I suspect is a red flag. So like, and then she came and asked the question and then I’m sat like, oh my God, no, no, I have to go right back to this completely different subject and start thinking.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: And you’re never going to get your answer.
STEVEN BARTLETT: So anyway, afterwards I had a conversation with her and I said, listen, when we do interviews, I think we need to clarify who’s leading.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: That’s right.
STEVEN BARTLETT: I’ll sit and listen when you do it. Then when I do it, you sit, you know, and so I think that’s part of it.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: That’s part of the roles thing I was talking about before too. Right. Like, there’s this role of, like, you’re scribing, you’re keeping time, whatever, but also having clarity about, like, who’s the topic leader here.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: And clarity, especially in a group of three, can be incredibly helpful. And lack of it is chaotic.
STEVEN BARTLETT: A nightmare.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Beyond Likability: What Really Matters in Conversation
STEVEN BARTLETT: What is the most important thing we haven’t talked about as it relates to likability and having great conversations? And dislikability, if that’s a word.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: I want to distance ourselves from likability. I think likability is one very narrow goal of good conversation.
STEVEN BARTLETT: What other things do people care about? Do you know why I use certain words?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Tell me.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Is because the audience have told me so. Tell me what they care about, please. They care about dealing with narcissists.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Good.
STEVEN BARTLETT: They care about how to have difficulty.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Because they struggle with it.
STEVEN BARTLETT: I guess so. Yeah.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah. It’s an interesting label. It’s very accusatory of other people.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Very accusatory.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Because I think everybody thinks the person they disagree with is a narcissist. It’s like a nice way to like just.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: So a reframe of it is they struggle with disagreement.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Okay.
STEVEN BARTLETT: The other thing is they care a lot about difficult conversations. It’s the bane of their life. They struggle with them, they avoid them. They think if they could only get good at it, then they’d be everything they want to be. They care about being liked. They care about avoiding things that make them disliked, that they’re unaware of that they’re doing. I would say. And I guess the fifth one is they care a lot about persuasion, remarkably. And Julian Cheshire, who did that TED Talk about Speaking, told me this. People don’t really care much about listening.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: He told me he did too, because they don’t know. It’s funny. It’s so interesting to hear you say those things to me. Those are all very related to each other and revealing that people don’t have great instincts about their strengths and weaknesses. And what’s hard and easy about conversation, persuasion, difficult conversations, thinking other people are narcissists and being liked. They’re all related to mismanaging conflict and disagreement and struggling to manage moments of difficulty.
Well, the social landscape of all conversation is so much broader than people realize, I think because you are so narrowly focused on these very noticeable, memorable, salient moments of disagreement that we’re like, oh, shit, that’s hard. And we got mad and it ruined and we broke up, of course. But you’re also super boring, like 80% of the time. And also you’re not really listening to other people. You’re missing so many opportunities to actually learn from people because you’re not listening. You’re not asking enough follow up questions. You’re not asking enough questions at all. You’re spending too much time talking about yourself.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Like, obviously this is what people like. Because the thing that I will remember the most is the conflict, the issue, the problem, the emotional situation. People don’t think they’re boring.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Like, it’s hard to. It’s a much harder thing to notice.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: And it’s a much harder thing to get feedback about because no one’s going to be like, hey bro, you’re boring.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah. And if the things I’m interested in by way of me being interested, I think they’re interesting.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah.
STEVEN BARTLETT: So I think that I’m just making stuff up. Pokemon, I think that’s the most important interesting thing in the world.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: And let me now tell you everything I know about Pokemon.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.
The Purpose of Conversation: Interest Over Interesting
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: It’s like this misunderstanding of what the purpose of conversation is not to say things we know at other people. It’s about finding things we’re both interested in and then learning everything that you know about that. Like now I’m just going to like take a journey through your brain of everything that you think and feel about this thing that we’re both interested in.
And on that journey we might land in this magical place where I’m learning stuff from you. You find me quite charming. We’re laughing together and we feel seen and known and understood. But it’s definitely not going to be me telling you about Pokemon if you’re deeply disinterested in it.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And there’s just the difference between being interesting and interested. We think that, yes. Like, I think that the game of being interesting is to show you life.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Is not about walking through life giving like mini speeches or like mini TED talks. Right. It’s about conversation is interactive. It’s co-created with two independent minds. Entrepreneurs make this mistake a lot too. They may be driven by Dragon’s Den and Shark Tank. You feel like it’s not your fault. You feel like you need to stand up there and pitch your idea. And in order to be successful, you give the most compelling public speech about it.
Most entrepreneurs or business owners actually are talking to investors and colleagues and potential partners, strategic partners in conversation. And so before you get to the point where you’re like, let me tell you about my amazing company, you need to ask them a million questions and get to know them and understand what their pain points are and how many kids they have and what they actually care about. So if you’re lucky, the thing and product or service you have actually fills that need and be like, guess what? I have this amazing thing for you. Wouldn’t you love to invest in it?
Perspective vs. Perception: The Spy’s Lesson
STEVEN BARTLETT: Andrew Bustamante said something for me about this. He said he’s a spy for the CIA for about 10 years. And he said, one of the things you have to train yourself to understand as a spy is that there’s a difference between your perspective, which is like, what I see right now.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yes.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And in my perspective, I see a mirror over there and there’s an award. And I see some things behind you. I see two cameras over your shoulder. I see that there’s a wooden beam over there behind you, by the way, and there’s, like, some green tape above there. And then there’s your perception.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yes.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Your perception is all this shit. Like, I couldn’t see any of this stuff behind me.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: That’s right.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And he said, like, as a spy, they train you to sit in the other person’s perception, because if you can’t do that, you’re never going to be able to persuade them. Like, you have to realize that actually you sat in front of me have a different brain.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: And the only. I can guess what’s in your brain. I can guess. Maybe there’s a mirror behind me. Maybe there’s art, Maybe there’s just a wall. I can guess based on what I see, based on what I’ve experienced. We’re in a room, so I’m going to guess there’s some sort of wall behind me and not out into the street. But we’re really bad at guessing.
Tons of psychological research suggests that human beings are terrible at using our own experiences to guess other people’s perceptual realities. Guess your perspective. So instead of guessing, I need to ask you, hey, Steven, what do you see behind me? I need to ask you directly, how does that make you feel? Why do you think it was built that way? What do you feel when you’re sitting here? Why do you think it’s asymmetrical? Why do I see books but you don’t? The only way to truly understand another person’s mind is to ask them and to talk about it.
Key Questions for Understanding Others
STEVEN BARTLETT: So when I go into a business meeting or I’m trying to persuade someone to, I don’t know, join our company, whatever, at the beginning of that conversation, are there key questions that I should be using to understand their ideology? Like understand the hero’s journey that they have in their head of them.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: You should ask more and listen to their answers and then ask the next question.
STEVEN BARTLETT: What kind of questions?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: A good one that I like to start with is “what are you excited about lately?”
STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Right. It’s very revealing of what is top of mind. You asked me that question today, loved, also implies that you knew what they were excited about previously. So it can help you kind of revisit that a bit over time. Whatever. Everyone has an answer to that question. Even if they’re terribly depressed, they’re excited about something. Maybe the prospect of making a friend and anything that someone is excited about means you can stay on that topic and ask more. Oh, well, what could I do to help you do that? Right. Like we can just carry on down that path.
STEVEN BARTLETT: When I asked you that question three hours ago, you said two things you said about putting this curriculum into schools, but you also talked about men and their conversations. And you said you had done a study recently.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah.
STEVEN BARTLETT: About men. This is me remembering what you said.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Call back, loving it. Loving it.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Thank you for that. But men in their conversations. You said you’ve done an interesting study recently, which you can’t go into the details about, but it was revealing about male friendship.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yes.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Are men bad at communication? If so, why are we bad at communication?
Gender Differences in Conversation and Friendship
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Conversation’s hard. When you look under the hood, it looks more like a train wreck. You’re being diplomatic than I will be. I’ll be less diplomatic in a moment. It looks more like a train wreck than a sort of tidy script that you would see on a TV show. It’s messy. We make mistakes. We have to repair it. We need to check our understanding. We need to make apologies constantly. So perfection is not the goal for anyone in conversation.
When you look at gender differences, there are real gender differences. We know that in friendship, women tend to actually face each other and talk to each other. Men tend to do activities right shoulder to shoulder. We’re fishing, we’re playing basketball, we’re in fantasy sports on our computers.
This project that I did recently, I always spend lots of time analyzing transcripts at very large scale. This project, though, I was observing conversations live, and for whatever reason, that was much more visceral than what I usually do as a scientist. And it was all men meeting other men for the first time and sort of trying to forge friendships.
And what was so hard to watch is that they don’t. They really struggled with vulnerability. Vulnerability is such a key component of friendship. Friendship experts say you need consistency. So interacting repeatedly, positivity, having fun together. But maybe most importantly, vulnerability. Like sharing not only your feelings with each other, but, like, what are you struggling with? What are your hopes and dreams? What are your goals? What do you want to get out of this?
It was so maddening to watch these men have hundreds of conversations and, like, none of them asked those questions or talked about those things with each other. As a woman, it was almost shocking because it’s sort of like what women would probably talk about within the first three minutes of the conversation. And I couldn’t believe, I was like, wow, this is really, this really seems like a massive difference.
And I worry that large scale, the leap from being basketball buddies or fantasy sports buddies into vulnerable conversation feels so scary and risky that men are unable to make the leap. And that’s a huge part of what’s holding back men from having meaningful friendships. And we know that loneliness is so much worse for men than for women.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And they have way less friends.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yes. A ridiculous proportion of men report having zero close friends. 40% potentially.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Wow.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: It’s quite troubling. And I think their conversation skills and courage, listen, everything that we’ve talked about, choosing good topics, shifting to new topics when they get boring, asking good questions, asking follow up questions, finding moments of levity, apologizing, listening, all of these things take a surprising amount of courage and confidence.
And it feels like this thing. For men who have been socialized to believe that vulnerability is a sign of weakness, it feels like it’s like almost takes too much courage for them to make that leap in their relationships. And it’s quite problematic.
The Male Friendship Crisis
STEVEN BARTLETT: Men are 400% more likely to say they have no one to turn to in a time of crisis. Half of men say they are unsatisfied with their friendships. Men’s number of close friends has dropped by 30 to 40% since 1990.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Men come to rely on their, in heterosexual relationships, come to rely on their partner for emotional fulfillment and support. Women do not. So when, you know, woman, the female spouse dies, men have to remarry to fill that void. They don’t have that friendship. When a husband dies, a woman has her friends to support her.
STEVEN BARTLETT: So how can I make more friends as a man?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: I think it’s really one conversation at a time. The power you have as an individual is signaling to other men. Hey, let’s take this courageous. Like here’s a question you can ask. What have you been struggling with recently? What do you hope to achieve? But what have you, but what kind of thing have you been thinking about that you haven’t shared with anyone before?
STEVEN BARTLETT: And in the study you did, what kind? Give me a flavor of how the conversation sounded.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Hey man, you want to get. Oh, this, this hot dog is gross. Yeah, it’s really gross. Yeah, this is. Yeah, I don’t like the food. I’m going to go take a nap. It’s like narrating what’s happening around you. Sometimes they’d be like, where are you from? Or.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And then that would turn into a narration.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Oh, I love Chicago. How’s that team?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: I hate the Chicago Bears. Oh yeah, I remember when so and so played there. Then you devolve into the sports talk, which can be important, but even can you move a step beyond and be like, did you ever feel vulnerable when you played football in high school? Right? Or like, what did you struggle with in terms of sports? Why didn’t you play college sports?
Whatever, whatever the topic is, you can take that next step to make it actually personal and vulnerable and interesting so that you walk away one step closer to having an actual friend and not just someone you say things you know too.
STEVEN BARTLETT: I did a talk in Canary Wharf couple of maybe a year ago and a kid stood up in the front row. You’ve got to bear in mind there’s 500 young. When I say young, I mean probably 21. They’re all working in this part of London called Canary Wharf where you kind of your first job after university. 500 people in this room.
Kid stands up, front row says, hi, my question is, I want to know how to make friends. And it was shocking to me because I could see 499 of his peers stood next to him. But he had the guts to stand up in front of all these people and say, hi, Steven, my question is, how do you make friends?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: It’s a fabulous question, isn’t it?
STEVEN BARTLETT: If he’d asked you that question, he might be listening now.
How to Make Friends: Starting Conversations
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Hello, friend. It starts with hello. And the number of times that I have run conversation exercises as part of my class. And the students at the end of that very first session say, this is the first time I’ve turned to the person next to me and actually talked to them. It’s like every time I do that first session. Thank you. Thank you for the opportunity to turn. Giving us a reason to turn to each other and actually talk. Get to know my classmates, even that takes tremendous courage.
Especially if there are norms of not doing, of coming in, sitting down at a desk or in an auditorium and being on your phone. So literally turning to someone next to you and saying like, hey, I’m Alison. What’s your name? Where are you from? Starting right?
STEVEN BARTLETT: God, we don’t do that in the UK. It’s like creepy behavior.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: It’s okay. And that’s. You do need to read the room, right? Like it’s maybe not appropriate in all situation. It can be a shame. It depends on the norms. Once you are engaged with people, it’s all of the talk things. What topics will they actually find helpful to them? Are you asking questions? Are you listening and asking follow up questions?
Are you moving beyond just trading things you know? Are you learning about each other in a way that feels revealing? That’s where real relationships come from.
STEVEN BARTLETT: What is, what are these here? Yeah, let’s find out this list of questions here.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Oh, this is an exercise that I do. This is based on a very well known exercise called “36 Questions to Fall in Love.”
STEVEN BARTLETT: Oh, I heard about that.
The 10 Questions to Fall in Like
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah, Arthur Aaron. It was in the New York Times many years ago. It’s based on some academic research. This is a subset of 10 of those 36 questions. An exercise I do in my class called “10 Questions to Fall and Like” instead of love.
STEVEN BARTLETT: So if I ask someone those 10 questions, they’re going to like me?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Probably. Yeah. More than if you didn’t ask the questions. What you want to do is you actually go back and forth and ask each other these questions. So the first one is what are you excited about lately? Next is what is something you’re good at but don’t like doing? What’s something you’re bad at but love to do? Is there something you’d like to learn more about? Is there something you’d like to learn how to do?
What can we celebrate about you? Has someone made you laugh recently? What’s something cute your kid, friend, pet or partner has been doing? Did you grow up in a city? And have you fallen in love with any new music, books, movies, shows lately?
It’s just 10 questions that are of this flavor. That many people, but I suspect lots of men don’t ask that are a great starting point. It’s just the first turn, right? You have to actually listen to what the person says and ask follow up questions to really deepen the conversation and move up that topic pyramid. But these are good questions. You could prep just one or two of them. You could carry two of them in your back pocket all the time as go to topics for people. So when this opportunity arises, you could ask them.
I like the one what are you excited about lately? That’s my go to with a lot of people. Also like have you. Are you obsessed with any shows right now is a pretty good one too. But the key is not just asking that question, but actually asking follow up questions about like why do you connect with that show? What do you see in the main character? Do you see anything from the main character that you see in yourself? You know, you got to get more, got to get deeper into it.
The original research with the 36 questions to fall in love suggests that going through these 36 questions makes you like each other a lot. And certainly these 10 questions would help you start. If you need the excuse, I would love for your listeners to blame me if you’re feeling, if they feel nervous to ask questions like this, especially boys or men. Say, like, I saw this crazy lady on Diary of a CEO and she said I should try asking this question. So I’m going to try.
Even my students at Harvard find that quite helpful to have a scapegoat to point at me and say, my professor made me do this. It doesn’t matter who makes you do it, whether it’s yourself or someone else, the fact is that you’re doing it and they’re going to answer this question and then you can ask a follow up and it’s the beginning of a friendship.
STEVEN BARTLETT: I did that when I was younger to a girl I was interested in. I’d seen that Ted talk about 36 questions, whatever. And I said to her over text message, I was like, I was, I want to play a game with you, something that I’ve just watched. Are you willing to play it with me? She said yes. I asked her these six questions and at the end of it I told her about the research and whatever in a non creepy way.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: You’re a real dork.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, but it did, it did exactly that. It taught me that vulnerability is the doorway to connection.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: That’s right. It’s the doorway to connection. It’s what makes relationships real. Without it, you don’t have real friendship. Right. It’s again, it’s consistency of interaction, positivity. So you can’t be plagued by negativity and fighting and anger, but positive fun, being relaxed around each other, having positive experiences. But then vulnerability. You have to learn these things about each other so that you feel known to each other and feel like they’re uniquely sharing stuff with you.
The Art of Persuasion
STEVEN BARTLETT: What about persuasion? Have you got any, any useful, actionable advice for me on how to be a better salesperson? And when I say salesperson, I don’t mean I’m trying to sell someone a car. I mean trying to convince other people of my ideas.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah.
STEVEN BARTLETT: So that when I do talks in companies, oftentimes someone will stand up and say I’m trying to persuade my boss to do x innovative thing. They won’t listen to me. Have you got any tips for me to persuade them? But also persuasion is at all levels. Right?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Down, left, right. In organizations, in the world, we are.
The Power of Validation in Persuasion
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Persuaded by people we trust and like and admire. Right. It’s people we interact with and over time we bend to their view or we are compelled by what they’re sharing with us because we know that they are smart and trustworthy and we like them.
Persuasion doesn’t often happen within the bounds of one conversation. It could if you are asking lots of questions and able to sort of sit on the same side of a table together and say, “Hey, let’s learn as much as we can about this complicated tangle of yarn, whatever that topic is. Let’s see if we can pull threads together and figure this out.”
We were talking earlier about receptiveness to opposing viewpoints. Ironically, if you push yourself to learn as much as you can about the other person and validate their views, however you view those views over the longer term, you are more likely to be persuasive because they’re willing to stay engaged with you and listen to what you have to say in return.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Because they feel heard and understood.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah. And they trust that you’re not a jerk and that you’re reasonable and that you’re open even to their crazy viewpoints.
STEVEN BARTLETT: I have learned that actually in my relationships that if I make the other person feel heard and understood, they validate.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: You validate.
STEVEN BARTLETT: If I validate.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: That’s a good word, validate. And validation is not equivalent to agreement. You can validate, validate, validate, validate, validate, and then go on to vehemently disagree. And probably that disagreement is going to go a lot better after you’ve validated them quite a bit.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Like the mistakes I made in maybe past relationships were when I didn’t validate, it was kind of like a broken record. The person continued to make the same point because they didn’t feel heard and understood.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: That’s right.
STEVEN BARTLETT: But if I validate, remarkable thing happens where the kind of record player stops and then you can make your case.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: It’s like a magic trick. There’s really beautiful research recently that people conflate agreement with listening. I only think you’re listening when you’re agreeing with me. And when you disagree with me, I feel like you’re not hearing me. You’re not listening. Because obviously what I’m saying is so sensical and so compelling that if you’re disagreeing with it, you’re literally not hearing me.
Agreement and listening are not the same thing, but in our minds, we get mixed up about it.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, so I should start every sentence with “I agree,” even if I don’t. Interesting. I agree.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: I think you should start with “Tell me more.” “It makes sense that you feel this way and I’d like to understand how you came to hold this viewpoint.” I think you should start with validation before you do anything else.
The Undervalued Skill of Listening
STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah. Julian Treasure, what he said to me was that he did two TED talks. One of them about speaking, one of them about listening. Rough numbers. He said the one about speaking did 40 million views. The one about listening did like a fraction of that.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah. Listening is a weird concept to codify and most people don’t realize that it’s a very, very high level skill.
STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s interesting as to why they don’t think it’s important. I think we think of things, active things.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: That’s right. And speaking in particular, public speaking is very nerve wracking. It’s like an activity that makes people incredibly nervous. So any little thing that you could toss my way that might reduce even a sliver of that anxiety and make me better at it, people are so hungry for. It’s sort of like more obvious, right? It’s more salient, it’s more active.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Like you’re saying listening is easy, just say nothing.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Literally. Oh, listen. People think that listening is like, “Oh, just sit there.” When in fact it’s incredibly effortful, it’s incredibly hard because our minds are built to wander, right? Our minds are wandering at least 25% of the time, probably a lot more than that.
And people who are good at it, when we think of people who are charismatic, likable, smart, savvy, it’s not because of what they’re saying. It’s because of how they’re listening and reacting to what they’ve heard.
The Spy’s Secret: The Power of Deep Listening
STEVEN BARTLETT: Mike Baker, who’s another spy who was a spy for 20 years, I think with the CIA in America, said to me that much of the job of being a spy and persuading and manipulating a target in a foreign land to give over secrets, he said to me that he would, for example, let’s just say it was in Afghanistan. He would land in Afghanistan, he would find the taxi driver that was driving the government official who he wanted secrets from.
And he said to me, he might spend seven weeks in that taxi doing nothing but listening to this guy, listening to the taxi driver, because he said most people in their life have not had someone listen to them uninterrupted for like 10 minutes. And when you listen to someone, they will offload about themselves.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Especially if you ask follow up questions.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Exactly. So, and he asked like, “So what are you doing?” And when you’re listening, he was just asking them and just, you know, asking a follow up question. And they would take me down the path they wanted to take me.
And by week seven of the eight weeks, I would understand what motivates them. And I would have heard in week seven that their son has a knee injury and they’re very worried about their son’s health. And then in week eight when I got in the taxi, I’d make a proposition. I’d say, “I know your son has a bad knee, we can take care of him.”
The Three Parts of Listening
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: This is exactly the same thing that I was saying about entrepreneurs, right? You got to have a relationship. Ask questions, questions, questions, questions, questions. Before you finally get to the thing where you’re like, “I have a proposition for you.” Yeah, right.
Two things about listening. First, I’m not surprised to hear that a taxi driver is a very simple relationship. They’re serving one very clear purpose in that person’s life. Interacting with someone like a romantic partner or a work colleague, it’s called multiplexity. They’re serving many more roles.
Your girlfriend is lover, friend, co-chef. You keep a home together, you’re coordinating domestic tasks. So she’s serving all of these purposes that’s much more complicated to sort through. And there will be conflicts of interest between those roles that she plays in your life. A way that you would talk to the future mother of your children is quite different than how you would talk to your chef. And yet she is both of those things to you, right? So a taxi driver is easier to talk to in a way because it’s simpler. Okay, that’s one thing.
The next thing is about listening as a skill. Like the spy is saying, I’m not surprised to hear that he’s asking follow up questions. Often people think of listening as something that happens silently. You’re just sitting there absorbing, and that is part of it. But listening is actually three parts.
The first is perception. I’m seeing you, I’m observing everything that’s happening about you during our conversation and everything in your environment. And then there’s auditory cues. I’m hearing your voice, I’m hearing these acoustic things. Yeah. And the tone of your voice and how quickly you speak. So we take in all this stuff, then we process some of it, we elaborate on some of the things that you’ve said. And I think more deeply, I can’t process all of it because it’s a lot of information.
What’s so unique about conversation is there’s a third step where I can reflect back to you what I’ve heard. I can say, “Oh, that’s so interesting that you met this guy who was a spy who rode in the taxi. Can you tell me more about that?” I’ve now indicated to you that I was listening, that I’m curious, that I want to know more.
So our instincts are to think about nonverbal cues like smiling and nodding, quietly leaning forward. Advanced listening, people who really develop the skill of listening actually use their words to show people that they’ve heard them by validating, affirming, asking follow up questions in a group. You can paraphrase and say like, “Oh, Stephen, Stephen said this, Kassi said this, then he said this. I think together what we’re really talking about is status.”
STEVEN BARTLETT: You know, that nodding and that stuff. Is that good or bad?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: It’s useful. That’s what we think of as active listening, which has been studied for decades. It doesn’t indicate that someone is hearing you at all. They could be thinking about their grocery list and smiling and nodding at the same time.
It is useful, though, to convince your partner that you’re listening to them and that matters, even if it’s not connected to what you’re thinking about at all. If you were to not smile and nod, the omission of it would be jarring. So in that sense, it’s like normative. You have to do it. It’s sort of like Listening 101, but Listening 201, 301 is using these verbal cues to show someone you’ve heard them.
The Role of Silence in Communication
STEVEN BARTLETT: You understood the objective when we sat down. I want to become the best talker, conversationalist, the most persuasive, most liked person on earth. That was the objective that I gave you. The brief. Is there anything that we haven’t talked about that we should have talked about?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: We haven’t talked about silence. Wrote a chapter about silence that I dropped because I think it’s an entirely separate book. It’s kind of ironic that this book is called “Talk” because we do so much communicating between the lines. There’s so much information exchanged in just a shared glance.
When people don’t know each other well, long pauses are a sign that the conversation’s not going well. So if you’re on a first date and you feel like the conversation is dying and you’re in, have that panicky feeling of “What do we talk about next?” That’s legit. You should not let that happen. You should go in with topics prepped and not let, or this list of lovely questions and ask those questions.
Later in a relationship, after you’ve known someone a long time, longer pauses are a sign that you’re comfortable with each other, that you could sit in total silence and companionable silence and that it’s comfortable and nice. So it means different things. As relationships evolve, there’s so much we can do in our conversations that are not about the words we say to each other too.
There’s another chapter I dropped. Do you want to hear about it, Steven?
STEVEN BARTLETT: Of course I want to hear about it.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: It’s about talking in the digital age.
Communication in the Age of AI
STEVEN BARTLETT: So this is what I was going to ask you about as well is now we have large language models which are writing lots of AI slop for us. And if you log into social media, even email slack channels, sometimes in WhatsApp, I look at the messages that I’ll take responsibility as well. Sometimes that I’m sending, sometimes that I’m receiving. And because of AI, they’re getting increasingly less soulful when I scroll certain social media platforms which I shan’t name. I feel disconnected from people now.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yes.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Because my comments are all like AI slop stuff with a big M dash and “Oh my God, this is so amazing, Steven.” And you know that no human writes like that.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah.
STEVEN BARTLETT: In a digital age, in an AI world, do we need to start communicating differently so that people, you know, I’ve started doing intentional spelling mistakes.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: I love that.
STEVEN BARTLETT: If you go on my LinkedIn, you’ll notice that I have totally disregarded grammar.
The Reality of Digital Communication
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Okay, let me start by telling you about an exercise that I do in my class. I think it’ll be thought provoking for you. So your question is about the content of what we type to each other. So text-based communication, whether it’s on social media or over text or over email. And there are clear things that we should do to make our text-based communication better. Mostly make it shorter—emails, shorter, use headings, use bullet points, get to the point, think about what other people need, only give them that. Okay.
But I think more broadly what is quite thought provoking is to think about how your life proceeds. These days, your conversational life unfolds. So in my class I ask my students to do a communication audit of like 20 to 30 minutes in their life where you transcribe every incoming and outgoing message across all digital and face-to-face modalities. So your DMs, your emails, your texts, your phone calls, your Zoom calls, your face-to-face interactions, all of it.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Can you imagine?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: No, it’s quite hard. The sort of top line thing you notice is that it’s so much. It’s just a crazy amount of communication that’s happening in our lives now when only maybe 20 years ago it was like 10% of what it is now. I think we all feel that sort of overwhelm.
Not only is it a lot, we’re constantly sort of toggling and adjusting from one mode of communication to the next. So I’m talking to you while I’m texting under the table, while I hear my emails going and knowing that my DMs are blowing up. That mental adjustment is really exhausting. And across each of those modes, we’re engaging in different ideas and different threads, different topics with different people. And so you start to realize how braided and overlapping all of these things are.
And it’s quite hard to keep it all straight and to make all of these decisions about, well, who should I be responding to? We then default to the people who are right in front of us. But any other mode of communication we’re like, well, who should come first? Who gets my attention first? And attention is love. Right? Who gets my love?
Essentially, the thing that my students note about this exercise, which is completely mind blowing and I would recommend that anybody try it, is that only face-to-face conversations feel real in retrospect and while they’re happening.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Now that doesn’t mean that the other ones aren’t important. Of course. Email is so important for transactional information exchange, but it’s not real. It’s not what the human brain was built to do. Our brains evolved to do this face-to-face. It’s why I prefer doing an interview like this in person than on Zoom, because it’s real and we’re going to have—it’s so engaging and we’re going to have a real memory of it later.
And that memory might be sort of vague. You’ll be like, oh, I knew this middle-aged white woman with brown hair, she had a lot of energy. Right. That might be the extent of what you remember, but it was real and we can hold that memory.
And I think what I find so troubling—there’s a lot I find troubling, but this—our conversational lives have become very unreal. And that’s why we feel so disconnected and lonely. And that loneliness is just outrageously high. We’re not having real interactions and real relationships.
Even having this device here, by the way, it is a portal to another place. So devices replace our conversations because we’re on here instead of engaging, they also disrupt. So if it’s on a table in front of you or you hear it buzzing or dinging in the background, it distracts your attention away from having a real engaged interaction.
AI and the Future of Communication
STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you have any advice for anybody in a world of AI where it’s going to be really easy to make our communications generatively using ChatGPT or whatever else? I just have noticed that what I started—what I’ve started to discount—and there’s certain, there was, there’s certain team members that I have that have really leant into the use of AI for all of their comms and I noticed myself ignoring them.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Because when they sent me an email report of something that happened in one particular scenario, every email report I knew was written by AI. So I didn’t think it was worth reading because I actually want to hear from them.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah.
STEVEN BARTLETT: I trust them in their opinion. My relationship is to their experience and their knowledge. And when I realized that it was all just AI because of the formatting of it, I started ignoring it. That three or four weeks goes past and I thought, you know, I should tell them.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah, they should know.
STEVEN BARTLETT: So I went and had a conversation with them. I said, this is just a perception thing. But I’ve noticed myself now not paying the same attention I used to because I want to know what you think and because it feels like I’m speaking to ChatGPT.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: What’s their comeback to that?
STEVEN BARTLETT: They were really thankful and they completely changed and it completely immediately—even though I now know they’re still using—it’s so crazy because I know they’re still using it. They built this bot basically for this particular part of feedback which they’re using. All they’ve done is change the prompt into their bot to make it sound a little bit more human.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah. Yeah.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And I’m now reading it again because I can’t tell the difference.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Oh, my goodness. They were very thought provoking. I think there’s two things going on there. One, you are invested in people. That’s what we get invested in. We care about people and relationships. As soon as you feel like you’re not getting them and you’re getting some weird proxy of them, we’re less motivated to engage with it. That’s going to be—that’s totally normal.
STEVEN BARTLETT: I’ll tell you the context. It was a—it’s interview feedback. So they’re interviewing someone and then the feedback they’re sending me was written by AI.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah.
STEVEN BARTLETT: I trust their experience and their intuition and their ability just to feel someone. I don’t know if I trust ChatGPT to interview my candidates.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah.
STEVEN BARTLETT: So I just wanted—I was getting it from that person.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: So there’s this relational replacement thing where you’re like, oh, and you just want to disengage. There’s this other piece that’s sort of more meta, which is that LLMs sort of push our communications reversion to the mean—a right to the middle. So it literally is taking the personality and weirdness and creativity out of it.
Can I tell you, I did an experiment this semester in my class. I had my students do office hours with an AI version of me.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Okay.
STEVEN BARTLETT: I prefer it.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Well—
STEVEN BARTLETT: That’s a risky—
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: The reason I actually think she is better than me in some ways. I want to preface this by saying I think chatbots are—most chatbots are deeply problematic. But this one, its goal is not to convince users to talk more with her. It’s to sort of coach them on their questions related to conversations so that they can prep and perform better in their real conversations with humans. Okay.
I do think she’s better than me in many ways. Most importantly, she’s available. She’s available all the time, whenever they need her. And I’m a nightmare to schedule with.
Number two, she’s not grading them. So anytime a student comes to me and has office hours, there’s this conflict of interest where they’re worried—they should be. I am grading them. I do care about them as people. And also I am going to grade them at the end of the semester. That’s a weird—that makes a relationship quite weird.
STEVEN BARTLETT: So they don’t ask dumb questions and—
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: I have to question their motives because I’m like, are you here because you’re actually interested in what you’re asking me or because you’re trying to impress me and get a better grade? Right. That’s a weird context. So she’s less judgmental in a way.
I guess the other thing that she can do is what you were saying, which is after they talk with her and get advice about their conversations, she gives them feedback about how the conversation went. She says, here are the topics we covered. Here’s how many questions you asked. Here were the moments of levity. Here’s how well you were listening and doing kindness.
Even if I as a human can think those things, I do not have the bandwidth or time to craft the feedback to the students—to 200 students at once.
So in short, I feel incredibly torn about all things AI. I think there are use cases like this that are really amazing and intriguing and make things easier and more efficient. And as a manager, policymaker, that’s why it’s so troubling. Because as long as things continue to—AI continues to make individuals’ lives easier and more convenient, I don’t know how we can stop and regulate it.
The Human Advantage
STEVEN BARTLETT: I think as well that in a world of AI and robots, it’s going to be very tempting to overlook the most human skills. And those that don’t, those that fight against the ease of allowing a chatbot to speak for you, will develop a superpower, one that’s going to be even more scarce in the future. Which is all the things you said in this framework—really understanding how to be with a person IRL and have great conversations, I think is going to be such a superpower.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: It is. Talking—talk is the advantage that humans have over AI. It has always been true that conversation is the skill that matters most for achieving everything you want in life. But it just seems more obvious now that we need to lean into that even more.
STEVEN BARTLETT: The irreplaceably human stuff.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Correct. And some of it, I don’t even know if irreplaceable is the right word. It’s the things that no matter what the future holds for us, the things that are still going to matter. I’ll put all my chips on a bet. When I think about what I need to be teaching my kids, I can imagine worlds where work is no longer a thing and innovation is no longer a thing. But I cannot imagine a world where they’re not going to need to connect with other human beings and talk to them well and joyfully and with respect in real life. In real life, yeah.
STEVEN BARTLETT: I think you were talking about boomers earlier on. I think boomers are much better conversationalists than Gen Zers.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: And because they have more reps, they—
STEVEN BARTLETT: They have more repetitions and they grew up in the real world where they were forced to develop the skills.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: That’s right. It’s part of the reason that I think we see a lot of sort of misunderstanding and judgment between the generations is that right now the people who are alive have experienced very, very different realities. And the skills that you have developed in those different realities are quite different. And it means that we actually are more different from each other across the generations.
Strategic Authenticity at Work
STEVEN BARTLETT: On the front of your book “Talk,” it says “The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves.” Do you think we should show up to work as our authentic selves?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: There’s a great phrase—what a great question. There’s a great phrase by a scholar named Juliana Pillemer, who’s at NYU, called “strategic authenticity.” Okay. If you were to bring your full self to work, it would be a nightmare for you and everyone around you.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Tell me about it.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: At the beginning of my class, I have people do this thing that’s, okay, identify your type, your conversation types. And there’s 13 good types and 13 bad types of—you know, there’s the asker and the curious cat and the chatterbox and whatever. The whole thing is a strawman because we’re all all of those things. We all have habits that are good sometimes and habits that are bad sometimes, and our behavior shifts radically from one situation to the next.
I’m not going to behave the same way at a bachelorette party in Vegas as I do when I’m doing bath time with my children. If you did, it would be insane, and it wouldn’t serve anybody’s goals.
STEVEN BARTLETT: What happens in Vegas?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Hot pink wigs, apparently. And Chippendales.
The point is that our behavior shifts from one conversation to the next, even from one moment to the next in every conversation. And it should. That’s what it means to read the room and read the context. In a gym, my husband has a saying: “Athletes adjust.” And it’s exactly right. Good conversationalists adjust.
So if you in your mind are, this is who I am, and I’m going to bring that whole self to every space that I inhabit, it’s not going to go well.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Strategic authenticity.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah. Bring the things that make the values that make you. You bring them to work. It’s the things that you care about and are uncompromising about. But you can adjust your behavior to fit the needs of the situation.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you pretend and act?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: No. This is a great question. We like to debate this in my class about authenticity, manipulation. What is real, what’s sincere? I guess sincerity might be the right word to use. Let’s use question asking as an example.
Imagine that we get to a point in the interview where you’re like, “Oh, I think I need to ask a question right now.” You might not be dying to hear the answer to it, but you know as a good interviewer that you need to ask that question in that moment. That doesn’t mean that you are evil, unkind, insincere, manipulative. It means that you’re trying to live up to the goal of the conversation and trying to live up to the goal of, “Hey, we’re going to learn as much as we can from each other. I want to show you respect and interest in your perspective. I want to have a good conversation that itself lives up to who you are.” That’s the whole point of being here. You know what I mean?
STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, of course. Yeah.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: So these fleeting moments of insincerity, I think people over focus on that as a signal of inauthenticity.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, fine.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: If it’s tied to a more overarching goal of, “I want to be a good human being and a good conversationalist,” often because I want to serve the needs of others.
STEVEN BARTLETT: So you can be slightly insincere in the pursuit of sincerity.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: And those moments of insincerity are gone in an instant. As soon as I ask this question that maybe I’m not dying to hear, “How was your weekend?” You’re going to give me an answer and I’m sincerely going to search for something in there that I am interested in and I’m going to ask a follow up question and make it better.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, so when I met you, you did ask me how I was doing.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Was that the question I’ve been dying to ask you is about children?
STEVEN BARTLETT: Me and my girlfriend are trying at the moment, so hopefully.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Steven, I’m so excited for you.
STEVEN BARTLETT: What are you excited about?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: I just think it’s one of the most miraculous things that you can experience as a human being and I’m hopeful for you.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Good luck. Yeah, I hope you get to experience that. It’s a very different experience to add to your resume.
The Great Unknown of Parenthood
STEVEN BARTLETT: I know, and I think that’s why I’m excited by it. Because it is the great unknown. And in some respects in my head this might be the wrong framing, but it feels like the great sacrifice.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah, it’s both. You know what I always say, it’s the most self interested and least self interested thing you can do. Self interested in the sense you’re making a copy of yourself. Okay, talk about narcissist, but it’s just incredible. Life is no longer about you.
STEVEN BARTLETT: That’s terrifying to hear. It is terrifying to hear objectively. I understand what you’re saying and I agree. But it’s also as a statement for anybody to know that they’re kind of…
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Giving up your current sense of self.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Self for someone else you’ve never met.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Oh, you’re giving it up. Not you’re giving… Giving up might not be the right phrase. You’re evolving into a different version of you. For them, the more freedom and resources you have before kids means you may experience that as a more as a loss, but you also have more to gain. It really is. It’s really incredible.
It’s easy to focus on fertility and having children and to ask probing, prying questions about, you know, how many do you want? And whatever. But I think it’s easy to focus on the birth process and overlook how long childhood is. It’s 18 years. And I think the major project of it is helping kids learn to talk to other people.
Teaching Children to Communicate
STEVEN BARTLETT: And how do you do that? I’m sure there’s loads of parents screaming right now, how do I set my kid up so that they can talk well, communicate well?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: I think it’s what we’re doing every moment of every day. You’re interacting with them directly and sort of role modeling what you think that looks like, helping them through difficult moments, helping them both fail and succeed. It’s very important. And we’re hoping to adapt the Talk course for high schoolers and younger children quite soon.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Do I need to get them off YouTube and all that stuff?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yes.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And screens?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yes.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Is a little bit of YouTube okay?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: A little bit of anything might be okay. Digital stuff is hard, though, because you give them an inch, they take a mile and it becomes habitual.
STEVEN BARTLETT: So what do you do with your kids?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: It’s a constant evolution and learning. And we give them 20 minutes a day. Yeah. On a computer that doesn’t move and nothing moves. They can’t carry it with them.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And what age does that change?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: To be determined. They know that they’re not getting a phone, a phone phone. I’m getting more and more extreme. I feel like maybe never, but certainly not until ninth grade. And then social media, much later than that. It’s an interesting… We’ll see how it goes. But it’s just such a slippery slope and it’s so bad for them. Jonathan Haidt’s done a wonderful job, Angela. My friend Angela Duckworth is doing great work. Matt Gensko at Stanford, trying to help schools sort this out.
STEVEN BARTLETT: I have that straightforward, too.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: No problems.
The Closing Question
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Alison. We have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they’re leaving it for. And the question left for you is, if your life was a movie and the audience were watching up to this point, what would they be screaming at the screen telling you to do right now?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: What a fabulous question. Thank you, previous guest. Leave Harvard. Save the children with Talk. Devote all of your time and resources to helping every high schooler in the world learn to do this better.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Why?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: I think it’s the ultimate human skill and everyone has the potential to do it well. And it’s not a zero sum game. The more people who do it well, the better off we’ll all be.
STEVEN BARTLETT: You said save. Why did you use the word save?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: I think we’re in a period where we actually are needing to save them from digital addiction and loneliness. We’ve gotten to a place that we need to roll back and it’s really scary. And I think one first step is let’s get the devices out of school, ideally out of families, in their hands. But then the next step is what rises to replace it. And I think it could be this talk curriculum.
STEVEN BARTLETT: So are you going to do that? You’re going to leave Harvard? Is that an announcement?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Are they aware?
STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s an exclusive. Alison, thank you so much. Thank you for the work that you do because it’s very important work and it’s very timely work considering everything that’s going on in the world at this moment in time. And this book is the definitive book on the art of… You said it yourself. The framework that you’ve built here is one that’s deeply based on science and research.
And oftentimes when we have conversations about communication, it’s full of platitudes and opinions and a lot of generic things that aren’t supported by scientific rigour. But you’ve done the research. You’ve committed so much of your life to this subject, and you’ve managed to write it all in a way that’s truly accessible to people like me who are simply, you know, Muggles, big words sometimes.
So it’s a wonderful entry, but also a sort of an expansive look into the science of great talk. We’ve touched on several things in this book, but there’s so much more we could have gone through. So I’m going to leave that to the audience. I’m going to link it below for anyone that wants to read it.
But also thank you because I think of these issues as being issues that are really foundational to the most important things in our lives, like family, like friendships, like relationships, like the success and the pursuit of our goals. And what you’re giving people here is a roadmap to reach their highest potential through this thing called talk. And that’s a really wonderful thing. So if anyone wants this book linked below. Highly recommend. Is there anywhere else one should go to get more of your work? Is there a place?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Sure. AlisonWoodBrooks.com has this new quiz that’s so fun. Find out your conversation type, get really clear advice, little tips about how to navigate things and all the science that’s underlying those tips. Very, very soon you can go to talkstudios.com and find out more about this curriculum that we’re developing for high schoolers.
STEVEN BARTLETT: I’ll link both of them below. Dr. Alison Wood Brooks, thank you so much.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Thank you so much, Steven. Thank you for amplifying my work. And I just think what you’re doing here is fabulous. So thank you.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Thank you.
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