Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
19 Feb 2025 · 129 min
In this three‑part Armchair Expert interview, behavioral scientist Alison Wood Brooks joins hosts Dax Shepard and Monica Padman to unpack the science and art of conversation. The discussion moves from foundational concepts—intentional questioning, the never‑ending follow‑up exercise, humor as a status signal, kindness, active listening, apology mechanics, and group dynamics—to a lively, unscripted deep‑dive into real‑world conversational challenges. The hosts explore generational language (e.g., “cookie boy,” “Tim Boy,” and the proliferation of generational labels), dating etiquette, ghosting, and the negotiation of expectations when using matchmakers. They apply game‑theoretic frameworks such as the battle of the sexes, matching pennies, and coordination games to illustrate how conversational strategies can be modeled as strategic interactions. The conversation also touches on self‑esteem, confidence, and the impact of perceived attractiveness on social outcomes, including discussions of mirror twins and the “hot‑shit” effect where confidence reshapes facial perception. Finally, they outline Kant‑style dinner‑party rules—three‑stage structure, secrecy, and etiquette—as a concrete protocol for fostering civility and listening. Throughout, Brooks weaves research findings, classroom exercises, and anecdotes from speed‑dating, therapy, and personal experience, illustrating how subtle conversational moves shape perception, status, and relational repair.
Chapters
Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, experts on expert. I'm Dan Shepherd, and I'm joined by Lily Padman.
Hi.
Today we have Dr. Alison Wood Brooks. She is a behavioral research scientist and professor at Harvard.
At Harvard.
That's a very fancy—
Yeah, it's Harvard Business School.
That's right. HBS.
HBS. She has a new book out right now called Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves. She is an incredibly good guest.
So fun. And I do think we take for granted conversation. We think we're just gonna show up and be able to do it. I really, really like this in the context, I mean, in general, but dating, which we talk about a fair amount and why a lot of these are not very successful.
You actually put no time into planning how you're gonna converse.
There's like real tricks for conversation.
Yeah.
And it's not disingenuous to use them.
Yeah.
Also, she's an identical twin.
Yeah.
So we had a lot of fun twin chatter.
That part is very cool.
And further imploring us to get a twin expert.
Yeah, we really want that.
Yeah.
She's one of the guests that we have that is a teacher at a fancy school, and their class is like so—
The most impacted.
People really want it.
Yeah, it's one of these favorite classes.
Do you know, I often— I have a recurring dream.
Okay.
That I am not finished. Like everyone's finished with their classes. It's the last semester and I to, like, put my classes in correctly, and now I'm behind, and I'm gonna have to take all these extra classes to graduate. And then I'm also looking at the classes, and I really want this specific class 'cause it's, like, the fun class that everyone wants to take. I have this dream a lot.
I have half of that. I don't ever have the class I'm trying to take, but I have the, like, what happened? We're mid-semester. Have I gone to any classes? There's a final. I wake up on set a lot where I'm directing something I haven't read.
Right.
I'm like, oh my God.
Oof.
It's ill-prepared anxiety.
But her class would be one in my dream.
You should add it. Yeah, you should incorporate it.
Yeah.
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He's an object expert. He's an object expert.
He's an object expert. Most people who love Diet Coke will acknowledge it does seem to be a bit of an addiction.
Yeah, yeah, because it's a stimulant, right?
Yeah.
We cut through so many cases of Diet Coke at HBS at Harvard because so many of the faculty are ADHD and they're self-medicating in tiny doses.
Yeah, it's their over-the-counter Ritalin.
Yeah, in addition to their real Ritalin.
Although Diet Pepsi's becoming more of a thing. I don't know if you guys heard about the new trend.
Say it.
There's a song out called Diet Pepsi, and Diet Pepsi sales are skyrocketing.
Come on.
Yeah, it's real. I want to see the—
She's a big pop star.
I want to see a link to the The data.
Yeah, it's real. Some people have converted from Diet Coke to Diet Pepsi.
I wanted you to say that it was Britney Spears because she had that like amazing— remember the ad back in the day? She was so hot, she was so gorge. I would love to see a resurgence.
Get back in it.
Britney Spears with the Diet Pepsi, she's the one bringing it back. That's what I want.
Addison Rae.
Addison Rae, kind of a new gen Britney Spears, if we're being real.
I don't know that. Is that the case?
Yeah, it is.
It's funny you'd say that because you have a reference in the book, you chose an artist, and I was like, that's a young artist.
Ariana Grande?
Yes. You talk about her video to describe context.
Yes.
Look at you with your memory. Holy moly, Mattelie.
And I was like, wow, you have 3 children. I don't know your age.
I'm turning 40 next month.
Congratulations.
And I am at a major inflection point in my life. You're hitting me at the right time.
You're young.
Where are you from, Alison?
I grew up in upstate New York, in the Finger Lakes. Area. Very Rust Belt-y.
Yeah.
When I was growing up there, not fancy. Since I've moved away and become an adult, it's a beautiful place, and I think the world is more onto it now.
Okay, so what's really exciting, and it comes up quite often, this topic, and in fact, we are in search of a great twins expert.
Am I the expert?
Maybe.
I think I might be the expert.
I think you're too close to it to be an expert.
That's a good point.
Yeah, you won't be as objective.
A lived expert.
Sarah is your identical twin.
Yes.
I don't think I ever really considered this. It's adjacent to self-awareness. We all strive to have a good deal of self-awareness, but you articulate it in the book, and I wouldn't have considered this, is you also have, like, an external version of self-awareness where you get to watch her move through the world and try things and see how they react. That's very peculiar, isn't it?
It is.
In an interesting way.
Seeing if being more outspoken— like, you can't say, well, it's because they look like this. All the factors are the same. So that is very interesting.
And we all have multiple selves, but as a twin, you get to see one of your sort of selves outside of your body. It's an amazing, lucky life. I don't know anything else, but it's really quite something.
Are you mirror twins? Is one of you left-handed and one right?
No.
Oh, bummer. See, that's one of the things I need answered. How many people are like that?
You're right. I'm not an expert. I don't know those answers.
But you're identical.
We're identical. We didn't know we were identical until high school.
What?
The AP biology class was like, hey, can we test you and figure it out?
Oh, wow.
And they did.
And then you lay the results side by side. This was way before 23andMe. And they were identical. I mean, it looked like the same person.
Wow.
My parents didn't know they were having twins until I was out. It sounds like the Dark Ages.
Would you feel like an internal embarrassment when she would embarrass herself?
Of course. In the same way that you do if you're hanging out with your sibling or your very close friend and they do something. There's always a vicarious embarrassment, but this is amplified even more because it's a reflection of you. You're watching yourself do an embarrassing thing as it unfolds live. And you have this normal sibling thing where you're like, stop.
Yeah, you said there's like a combination of things that were helpful. One was being able to see how you seemed in public, but then also you guys had constant, unfiltered feedback.
2 things. You're sort of watching a version of yourself interact in the world. So that's a passive version of feedback where you're seeing how the world reacts to this version of you. But then you're also directly talking to each other in the way that very close siblings do. And you feel even more empowered to be sort of brutal to each other, right? Like, what the hell was that? Ew, gross. Don't do that.
Relentless.
We are still that way. She lives a mile down the road from me.
Oh, she does?
She also has 3 kids, 2 boys and a little girl.
No.
Swear to God.
And is she a professor?
She's not a professor. She's the cool twin. She runs a nonprofit. It's amazing. It's called Prime Coalition.
I never thought of that either. You could only give so many compliments to your identical twin before it would sound— It's like self-toast. It would sound indulgent and narcissistic. You're like, she's beautiful.
She's super smart. Well, beautiful, stunning. Yeah. She's the definition of amazing.
She's the smartest person I've ever met.
There's no one who looks as pretty as her.
Yeah.
You gotta be careful.
Exactly.
Like a weird self-toast.
Yeah.
But honestly, I admire her so much. She's done really amazing things.
So your hair is naturally curly.
Big time.
And you chose to straighten your hair. So you were doing things to try to carve out some individual—
The whole existence, my whole existence anyway, is every moment you're making these choices of, who am I gonna be? How are we similar? How are we gonna differentiate? When are we gonna cooperate and work together and collaborate? When are we gonna compete? She's gonna play the flute, I'm gonna play the oboe, but we're both gonna be in the orchestra. Yeah.
And you were a 3-point shooter, and she was a mid-range shooter.
She's a 3-point shooter.
Vice versa.
I got that Brooks mid-range.
Okay, so you both played basketball. It must have been so fun when you guys came to schools in junior high, and people were like, there's twins on this team.
We're not Quiet Drinking Violet. One of me would have already been a lot. Yeah.
There is this added layer of, like, you like a boy. If he likes you, I don't know, conceivably he'd also like— Was there anything tricky there?
Of course. I think we only dated the same guy once.
What if you said 4 times?
Well, but you did do that.
Maybe when you're young, one year we held hands for a week, and then 4 years later they went on a date. I think that's kind of the extent of it.
All right.
Because that would be really weird.
And are your current husbands similar?
They are similar in some ways, but quite different. She's always had different tastes than me, actually, in suitors, and in the ways that complement how she and I are different from each other. And you saw this a little bit in the book. I was so hard on her about who she was dating. My expectations for who she would end up with were even higher than for myself, which are already so high.
Did you ever feel inferior to her? Or superior? Or both? Both.
Because it's like having a mirror, you actually get a better sense of what you're good at and not good at because you have this example of someone who is actually slightly better or slightly worse than you at certain tasks.
Yeah.
As a psychologist now, for a long time, I would've loved to believe that everything is malleable, everything is trainable and learnable, and you can change so much about yourself. You can do it all. But I think being an identical twin does highlight how many things are outside your control and genetic. Our hands, if you laid them side by side, I could not tell them apart.
Oh!
Our feet, our voices. I still, to this day, answer the phone, hello, this is Alison, because I can't even tell the difference in our voices just on the phone. There are things about our bodies and about your mind that you don't have control over. And then I had my own kids. They each come out so different, and you're like, holy cow. I was like, holy cow, nature's really a thing.
It's fascinating.
It is so fascinating.
So you went to Princeton for undergrad and then you went to Wharton for graduate school. What was the undergrad degree in?
Psychology was my major and I got a minor, they called a certificate there, in finance. Not because I was interested in finance per se, but because I was really interested in economics and this judgment and decision-making behavioral science stuff.
Right, behavioral economics. Yeah.
Wait, sorry, I have one more twin thing. I know— Oh, that's okay. We're past twins. if you have the thing that they all have where you can sort of read each other's minds?
In this book and in my course and in conversation in general, there's so much mind reading that you have to do of all people.
Yes.
Like, we're constantly trying to figure out, what are they thinking about? How are they feeling? Are they interested in this right now? Are they bored? There's this tremendous level of mind reading. I think twins get better at that with each other. This is a hypothesis. This has not been studied, but possibly they get better at it with other people as well because they just had more practice practice doing it their whole development, their whole childhood. But I think that's where the stereotype comes from with twins, is that they can read each other's minds. They've spent a lot of time together. They know each other really, really well, and their brains work similarly.
True. See, we got into a little bit of a chat about the validity of these telepathy tapes thing that's going around. We were using ourselves as examples because we're both quite good at predicting what the other— I'm more inclined to think it's just pattern recognition. And I also think if you, A, observed your sister her whole life, so God, you've seen her react to every way, and then intuitively you kind of know how you would react. You know, input A is gonna equal this stimulus is gonna equal this output. I tend to believe it's that.
Totally.
And what it has shown me is even though we're so good at predicting what the other person will do, we have this tight-knit, which psychologists would call shared reality. You're better at predicting what your twin's gonna do than probably anyone else in the world. And I still don't know exactly what she's thinking and feeling. It just shows you, even when you have so much in common, you had the same upbringing, the same genes, so many shared experiences, you still can't read people's minds.
There's still a mystery element.
You can get close. The more you interact with somebody, the more you actually care and are good at pattern recognition and pick up on patterns in their behavior and how they think, you can get better at it, especially within specific relationships. But you still don't know perfectly what Monica's thinking all the time.
I think what's interesting and worth following up on that thought is, I actually think you probably could always predict, but you're often missing a lot of the context.
Yes, yes.
You don't know what happened. This is the first example that we get to in your book. You know your sister really well, but you don't know if when she stopped at the gas station, someone called her a whore. You know everything else you've observed, but that thing is still floating around. So I do think if you did know all the details, you would be in still the high 90s. It's just we don't really know all the details.
Exactly right.
Okay, so, you know, In graduate school, you start focusing on negotiation?
Yeah. And emotions.
Yeah. Why people's behavior is impacted by their feelings.
Yeah.
So what caught your attention?
I realized that there was a lot of research in clinical psychology about anxiety and the sort of high-level anxiety that requires medication or therapy. And I was like, you know what, though? Everybody's feeling anxious a lot of the time, and it's influencing how they're walking through the world, all of the decisions they're making, all of these choices, how they talk to other people. I wonder if there's a way that we can study anxiety in that way, that's sort of outside the sphere of clinical psych as a pathology that needs diagnosis, which is obviously so important. But what about the sort of lower-grade, normal anxiety that most people are feeling a lot of the time? Let's figure out how that's influencing the choices that they're making as they go through their day. Negotiation was one of the places that we looked, but we also looked at advice When do you seek advice? When do you take advice?
Who do you seek it from?
Who do you seek it from? Do you feel like you have to listen to it?
Dax doesn't seek advice from anyone.
No, I do. But remember I said I seek the advice that I think I'm going to get.
Oh, right.
We did talk about that.
To confirm.
If I want to indulge in this bad behavior, I call a person I know who regularly indulges in that and is not gonna say, you know better. And then when I actually want to change, I call Tom Hanks. Okay, so you end up— So you end up at Harvard teaching negotiation, and you start doing a lot of clinical work and experiments.
Yes.
And it definitely expands out. I have a list of fun things.
Negotiation has been this course that's been taught at every business school and law school for a long time now. It's a great course. The students show up, they take on these roles, and they pretend to be, you know, the manager of a factory, and you have to negotiate all this stuff. It's informative. It's great. As I was teaching it, though, A couple things occurred to me. One, our students at Harvard are already very strategic people. And I was like, do I need to be teaching people who are already quite strategic to be even more hard-driving?
Yeah.
Does that align with my values? That's question number one. Number two, so many of the exercises were like, well, you have to negotiate for a car, or you're gonna go buy a house, or you're gonna negotiate a merger or a really big deal at work. I was like, I'm a grown-up, I don't really have those conversations very often. Maybe once every 2 months? But you know what I do all the time is talk to people in conversations that on their surface should be easy. And then at moments I'm like, ooh, this is maybe not as easy or as fun as it should be. So my sort of aperture of what I was getting curious about and thinking about how to help people was sort of widening.
Yeah, you did experiments on speed dating, parole hearings, doctor-patient interactions, negotiations, sales calls, instant messaging, face-to-face Chinwags between strangers.
What's that? I love that word. Chinwag is literally your chin just, ah, bah, bah, bah. It's a synonym for talk.
Oh, wow.
1930s is why I can say chinwags.
I didn't know.
That's what you do here.
That is true. Chinwag.
You could put all of those under the umbrella of negotiating, right?
It's true.
And I think the things that would be normally studied or you'd be drawn to is all the things you listed are quantifiable. Like, I want this amount, they're offering this amount, the outcome's measurable. But in a romantic relationship, you get into these gradients of leverage and control and power. Those are not easy to quantify and measure the outcome of.
I remember very vividly, back when I was teaching the negotiation course, I had a student raise her hand one day and she was like, so is this just about, like, solving a math problem? Because in the way that those exercises were set up and the way that we think about negotiating, it sort of is, because it's all these things that are quantifiable. You've put numbers on what you care about, and then you try and sort of trade on differences to expand the size of the pie and then claim the largest part of it. And as a psychologist, it made me deeply uncomfortable. Not everything is quantifiable. So much about life and about how we feel towards each other is emotional and trust and fun and love. And I want to keep this private and just felt like we were missing a big piece.
Yeah, I wrote down you said, while strategic and technical skills can help people get ahead in many ways, being a successful person is about relationships, and relationships are about talking And I guess I wonder, did you kind of feel like the previous work in communication and negotiation felt maybe a little too calculated or manipulative? Even when I have people on that'll be like, how to talk to the right, or how to talk to the left, I'm like, the underbelly still feels like the ultimate goal is to get someone to believe the things you do, which I think fundamentally I'm against.
Yeah, and missing a huge part of what it means to be the most human we can be. And we love each other and want to have fun together. And it's like not about just sort of transactional, how can I get this done? How can I get as much information out of you? How can I tell you the most amount of information? Even now, a lot of economists focus very narrowly on information exchange. Are we exchanging accurate information? But so much of the social world is not about information exchange at all. We're just looking to fill time. We're looking to conceal information and maintain privacy. We just don't want to feel awkward around other people. We want to have fun. We want to learn from each other. I felt like that whole bit needed more of a focus.
So you took all these conclusions and then you wove it into a class you called Talk: How to Talk Gooder in Business and Life. I don't know where you got that, but what a stroke of genius it is. How to Talk Gooder in Business and Life. But it became hugely popular. It's a heavily impacted class at Harvard, and you've taught 1,000 students over the last 4 years. You were invited to be a consultant to Wow.
Dang, girl.
Mid-range jump shots now.
You found your way to the Celtics as a basketball player.
It all circles back.
Yeah. Talk is a practical guide to having better conversations in a variety of settings: work, parenting, dating, trying to make connection. And so my first question is, do you think we underestimate the complexity of conversations? I think we all just are like, yeah, conversations, I know how to have them. I'm having them all day long.
Chinwagging.
I might underestimate Actually, what an abstract and complicated thing a conversation is, just on the surface.
I mean, we start learning to talk to each other when we're 1, 1 and a half. You're a toddler. You do it every day of your life with an enormous number of people, very diverse range of conversation partners. So by the time you get to be a teenager and then an adult, it's second nature to you. It feels like you should be an expert, and maybe you are an expert. You see other people who are seemingly amazing at it, and you're like, wow. And then you feel bad if you feel like you're not.
It also has the illusion of being innate, which it's not.
Right.
It's like reading. It's this very abstract thing. I'm making a bunch of noises to transfer the thoughts I have inside of my brain internally into your brain internally. And you're gonna respond in a way that you'll transfer your thoughts. That is highly complicated.
When you look under the hood of what's going on during conversation, it is remarkably complex. You get to this point of acceptance where you're like, of course there's gonna be moments of awkwardness. Of course we're gonna forget to say stuff that we meant to say or say things that we regret. Or interrupt people, or have all these little collisions because it's not second nature. And watching children learn to do it, reading or talking, opens your eyes to how this is not natural. This is not innate. It's hard to learn to read. It takes years to really get good at reading. It takes even longer to learn how to be a good conversationalist, and we get to adulthood and we're still not that great.
Right. So I guess in just thinking it's innate, you might not think that it's something that you could approach mindfully with a tactic. I like that you say people will put 20 minutes into planning their outfit to go meet someone.
Everybody.
Yeah. And they'll put zero thought into when I arrive, what will I talk about? What topics do I bring up? You don't give it any thought.
Think about how much time you spend picking out your outfit, making a reservation at the restaurant, buying your makeup, getting your hair done. And literally during all of that, you could be thinking, what are 2 things we could talk about once we're together? But most people don't do that.
Right. You just take for granted it'll just happen. And then the dates suck.
Right.
Well, yes.
But also, do you think people might feel like that's contrived?
I know people think it's contrived.
Yeah.
So we've asked people. There's tremendous aversion to this idea of forethought, particularly for people that you know really well. And it goes back to this assumption or this hope that it's second nature. You have this feeling that conversation should feel natural.
You say it's the myth of naturalness.
The myth of naturalness. It should feel spontaneous. And invented on the spot, and a little bit magical that you just land on topics that are fun to talk about, and there's never gonna be a lull, and you're gonna just know where to go. And we feel that way even more with people that we know really well and love. We're like, oh, it'll just come. Which is maybe true a little bit more when you know somebody well compared to, like, your work colleague that you don't like. But in all of the cases, whether you're averse or not, when you actually have people plan topics ahead of time, their conversations are measurably better.
Well, I love that you're contrasting it with the other amounts of effort you put in. No one's thinking like, well, I'll just naturally look good, and if I don't naturally look good, it's not a fit, or I'll naturally arrive there. No, none of these things are going to happen. So would you give me a little historical context for conversation, how we thought of conversation, how it's evolved? I was kind of fascinated with the power dynamic of a monarchy and how that affected things. How has our idea of a conversation evolved?
We actually know very little about when humans evolved the ability to have dialogue and talk to each other. Estimates vary quite widely. There are signs in the archaeological record. The fossil of jewelry is a sign that they must have learned to talk by this point because they had to pass that knowledge down across generations in order for it to be trapped in the archaeological record.
Or they even do these super fascinating things. Well, yes, they'll find a necklace of fox teeth, and then they'll do the actual math of how long it would take to procure that many teeth and then string it, and all the work that would be involved. And what you have to acknowledge about this necklace is that it was a group effort.
Exactly. And then they make hypotheses about, well, would they have been able to collaborate on this if they hadn't yet learned to actually talk to each other, communicate in some way?
You would have to be able to tell them, here's what we're making, we're gathering teeth because we're gonna make this project.
Here's the project!
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Someone would have to lay out a game plan.
That's how we're trying to figure out when did humans evolve this ability. Then you fast forward, the book starts in the 1700s when there were all of these monarchies in Europe whose kings and queens told people how to talk to each other. Here are the people who are allowed to talk to each other at these times, and these are the topics, and here are all the compliments you have to say about me.
Yeah.
Right? That was it. And then around the French Revolution and after, in the Enlightenment, and during what was called the Age of Conversation, people started to realize, oh, we can get together and talk about what we want to talk about. And it was in these fancy salons in Paris, and it was happening all over Europe. And so the book zooms in on Immanuel Kant, who was this famous philosopher.
Yes, we love Kant.
And he lived a very fascinating, very regimented life. Most of his life, he would get up and he would go for his walk at a specific time. He would sit down and do his work at a specific time. They called him the Königsberg Clock.
Oh.
So a very regimented guy. He was not wealthy until late in his life, when he was finally able to afford a home of his own.
He couldn't even get a professorship. Blew my mind.
Yeah.
He lived in boarding houses, and he was like a sub-teacher, basically.
He's a sub-teacher, and he would have dinner in these rowdy pubs at night. And as this fancy, very smart philosopher, he would get really annoyed. He's like, this is boring. I want to talk to smart people about my smart ideas. So finally, when he was able to get his own house, he started hosting these dinner parties. Which became very well known. They were highly coveted invitations to Kant's house for these dinner parties. What I found so fascinating to read about and learn is that his dinner parties had all these rules of conversation. So he almost was kind of acting like this little king in his kingdom.
Yeah, yeah.
And his rules were, we're gonna talk about specific topics at the beginning, we're gonna talk about specific topics in the middle, then we're gonna joke at the end. We're gonna have food and wine that mirrors each of the phases of the meal.
I wanna go to this.
He curated the guest list so you wouldn't have 5 physicians. You'd have a physician, you'd have a clergy member. A priest, yeah. So it was gonna be an eclectic group. There were some ground rules, like no interrupting, no monologuing.
No arguing. So surprisingly, he didn't like debate. He didn't really like when people argued about stuff, especially about the French Revolution. He was like, this is for us to have fun and learn from each other, and it should feel delightful the whole time.
Take the ideas or leave the ideas. You don't have to defeat them.
Exactly. And so that was sort of the beginning of it. During the Age of Conversation, This idea was cropping up all over Europe. There were all these philosophers who were pontificating about what it meant to have good, sparkling conversation. It was sort of subversive because it was the first time that they weren't just doing what the king or queen told them to do. And then the Industrial Revolution happened, and people started mixing a lot more. We're not just talking about highfalutin philosophers getting their fancy friends together. People are going everywhere all the time. all the time. You never know who you're gonna run into in all classes and all status. So we need to now figure out, what are we talking about? How are we talking? What are the new rules of conversation?
Well, what you're first describing is that mixing of the classes hugely impacted by the move from rural life to city life. You live within a stone's throw of the rich person.
And you're gonna see them on the road as you're walking past, and you're allowed to greet each other. If you say hi, what are you gonna say? Can you even tell who's who anymore?
Right.
Yes. I love that.
The boundaries really fell apart. So, your framing of this is to think of conversation in terms of a coordinated game, which you take from game theory. Tell me what a coordinated game is.
Yes. So, fast forward. So, all of this mixing is happening. The big experiment in democracy is happening in America. All the Europeans think that Americans are no good at conversation. We're talking about ourselves all the time. They spit while they're talking. I mean, there's all kinds of things. kinds of stereotypes developing. Fast forward a bit more, in the mid-1900s, middle of the 20th century, game theory appears. So these are economists and game theorists like John Nash from A Beautiful Mind. Oh, sure, sure.
Janusz von Neumann.
Yes. Morgenstern, Thomas Schelling. Now they studied what they called coordination games, which were really simple, but at the time they were really hot and flashy. So it would be like the game of chicken as a coordination Any choice 2 or more people are making independently that they can't talk to each other. So like in a game of chicken, you're coming towards each other, you both have to choose, am I gonna go right or am I gonna go left? But you can't talk about it. If you coordinate, you pass successfully. Motorcycles or Sea-Doos or whatever you're on.
Horses with jowls.
Yes, exactly. If you miscoordinate, you collide. That's a simple one. There are non-cooperative coordination games like the Prisoner's Dilemma. Do you know the Prisoner's Dilemma?
The Stanford—
no. No, that's different. That's the Stanford Prison Experiment. There was an experiment where they had—
Oh, okay.
Milgram.
Oh my God, I did it.
Wow, you're good.
I've been trying to remember who did the Stanford Prison Experiment.
And I told her I don't care.
Yeah, but I said I'm going to commit this to memory, and I did.
You did a good job.
You did it. I thought you just had an electric shock just now. I know, I fell. Milgram. That's how I react to the name too. Yes, Milgram did the Stanford Prison Experiment and the shocks.
No.
No?
The shocks we just learned about.
Is different.
That was in England.
That was a different guy.
I thought Milgram did shocks. Or is it Milgram that shocks?
Yeah, yeah. Philip Zimbardo.
Zimbardo did the Stanford Prison. Yeah.
Oh my God.
You flipped them?
Yeah.
Oh my God. Hoisted by your own petard. And you were celebrating and I congratulated you. This is wonderful. God damn it.
This is a horrible conversation.
You were right. Okay, so Zimbardo did.
Yes, Stanford Prison.
Milgram is like the shock. Milgram. Okay.
I'm never gonna be able to—
I'm gonna quiz you at the end.
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Okay, sorry. So yours is separate from all of them?
Different. Forget about Zimbardo. Stanford Prison Experiment. Forget about the shocks. So the prisoner's dilemma is a coordination game that people were thinking about. You imagine there's 2 people being questioned in separate rooms, interrogated about a crime, and they both face a choice, and they can't talk to each other about it, to either stay quiet or snitch.
Uh-huh.
Yeah.
Okay? If they both stay quiet, they're gonna go to jail, but not for very long. If they both snitch, they both go to jail for much longer. So it seems simple that you should stay quiet, except If you snitch and the other guy stays quiet, you walk free.
Yeah, this is great.
Everybody is tempted to betray. And so, this is a non-cooperative coordination game because you're incentivized to not cooperate.
Oh, interesting.
You are also incentivized to cooperate.
That's what makes it hard.
The biggest reward is to walk free.
I'm trying to measure it in a utilitarian way. I feel like both people with a reduced sentence is still—
Well, it's better in theory, logically, but if you're the person—
Yes, yes.
You start to get this sense Why these games are interesting to people, 'cause then you can change all kinds of stuff. Who are you imagining in the other room? What's your relationship with them? What do you know about the person? If you did this game 10 times in a row, based on their prior behavior, what do you do in the last round?
Russians have a weird outcome in this game.
Tell me.
I wish I could remember the source, 'cause it'll just sound like xenophobia, but yet, one of these many books that has talked about the prison experiment talked about how Russians asymmetrically will punish even when it costs them.
These games have been studied so much that I'm sure there are lots of cross-cultural findings about how Germans play and how everyone plays.
Yeah.
So economists and game theorists were kind of obsessed with these coordination games. Now fast forward to now. We have whole fields that have been studying social psychology, communication, all of this stuff. And what I realized is even though we have these whole fields that are about interpersonal interaction, not a lot of people had gone to the trouble of actually recording real people talking to real people at very large scale. And the reason they hadn't is because we needed new technology to do it.
Right. You couldn't have film cameras running, although your hometown would love it. Kodak would still be thriving. But yeah, we needed a digital revolution.
We needed natural language processing and machine learning to help us analyze tons of transcripts at once. We just weren't ready to do it until very recently. But as we were sort of like, oh, we should do that, we should record tons of conversations and analyze them, I also Conversation is just like those coordination games that the game theorists were studying back in the 1950s, like Thomas Schelling. He has a famous one where he asks people, if you had to meet up with people at noon tomorrow in New York City, where would you go?
I know what the answer to this is.
Wait, is it a riddle or is it just a fun fun game?
It's just a coordination game.
Okay.
You can't talk about it. Oh, sweet plan. And everybody writes down their answer.
I unfortunately know too much about it.
Let's pick LA.
Let's do it.
Okay.
Yeah. So if you had to meet up with Monica tomorrow somewhere in LA at noon, think in your mind where you would go.
It's not here.
It can't be here.
Right.
Monica, what's your answer?
Cara.
Yeah, same.
Oh, the bar at Cara?
Yeah.
Or the restaurant.
Yeah.
That's exactly what I thought.
Is that just because we know that we—
yes.
The New York one, a lot of people will say the Empire State Building. It's a landmark. Let's see the Brooklyn Bridge. But there is a right answer.
The most frequent one that people say is Grand Central Station.
Everyone will be arriving there.
Yeah. So there is a kind of a high probability logic to it.
It's kind of a riddle.
Kind of a riddle, yeah. Thomas Schelling called them focal points. It's because it's stuff that your mind goes to quickly that you think other people are gonna do.
Yeah. High probability. The first thing you think of when you think of New York, I'll go there.
Yeah. Or here, that's a focal point for you in your shared reality, in your relationship, that helps you It helps you coordinate. So what we realized about conversation is it's just like these coordination games, except every little moment is like a coordination game. When you're trying to decide, what are we gonna talk about next? How are we gonna talk about it? What are they excited for me to ask? Where should we go next? Requires this level of shared reality, these focal points, and this mind reading. But it's so much more than just one choice. Do you stay quiet or snitch? It's like, and now, and now, and now, and now. And you have to make those choices relentlessly.
It's almost incredible we can communicate.
I agree.
It is incredible. That's what linguists will tell you.
Almost everyone can relate to some social anxiety, the fear of small talk, being in an elevator. And that is all present. But in general, it goes shockingly well. It's the anomaly you hear 2 people screaming at each other on the sidewalk.
And even when they're screaming at each other, they're taking turns. They're listening to each other. There is some information being exchanged that they may get the opportunity to rehash later.
Yeah, exactly.
It's still amazing that we are able to do this. And when you look at actual transcripts between real people, whether they're shouting at each other or not, you start to realize, oh, it is a train wreck. We're interrupting each other all the time. We're not actually listening. We're having half-finished thoughts. We get excited about a thing, and then we get excited about another thing.
You said 24% of the time your mind is wandering.
And I think that's an underestimate because as a proud member of the recent legion of middle-aged people who have been diagnosed with ADHD, so this was my research, and it really really hit home. It was very validating. So there was previous research showing that our brains are not built to focus on one thing. So our resting state is mind wandering outside of conversation. In our research, we looked at it in conversation. So we interrupted people every 5 minutes and we were like, were you just listening to your partner? Were you just listening to your partner?
Interesting.
Asking them to self-report.
Which is gonna be, I think, skewed low.
It is way skewed low because people know that it's not polite to say I wasn't Or they're not sure if they were listening because they weren't listening.
They probably thought, oh, of course I was listening, but not really. They probably couldn't repeat.
Or you think you're doing both things. Yeah, I'm listening and I'm wandering.
Which is often true.
Yeah.
So I think this 24% number, one, is staggeringly high and comforting to realize, and two, probably a huge underestimate of what's really happening.
This is why Yuval was saying that an AI companion might actually be wonderful, because they actually know.
I'm so curious and excited to see what happens with it, but you just put your finger on exactly the thing that as a teacher, coach, scholar of conversation, this is what's been on my mind about it, which is what makes someone a good conversationalist is relentlessly trying to focus on the other person and what the other person needs. And AI, if you're talking to a chatbot, they don't have any of their own sincere needs. They are only there to serve a purpose.
And that's the thing that's so interesting about this.
your needs. And what I worry about is that the more we interact with an entity like that, a non-human entity that's just there to serve you, and it's so good at serving you, right?
It's amazing. It's a narcissist machine.
Exactly. Is training us to, when we turn to an actual human, forget that the mission is the complete opposite.
Really? That's so true.
Yeah, I think, A, it's bad muscle memory for future conversations, but I actually don't even think it'll be appealing. Now, it will be appealing to people who are abjectly lonely.
Yeah.
The reward of conversation is the primate social interaction and the approval and the status and the connection and all the web of what being a social primate is. So having it within and out of an object doesn't really get you what you're after.
I'm so curious to start studying who is this appealing to, who is enjoying it and why.
There will be no stakes in that conversation with an AI. There's always stakes between any real one-on-one relationship that come up.
You're going on a journey through someone else's mind.
Yes.
I was just telling Monica, when I'm using the AI to make an image, I actually had to break myself of all my habits I have when dealing with people. And when I was dealing with the AI, the first time it would generate the image, I would go, great. Literally, I take the time to say this to the AI. Great job. Really good start. I think where we could do better— and I did this 4 or 5 times, I was like, I was like, oh, I don't have to do any of this. I can treat it like a fucking slave.
Yeah.
But then what if you lost that skill?
I know.
Yeah. Exactly.
It's like, how often am I doing that? Where then I talk to a human like that?
Yeah.
Just as obviously my muscle memory made me talk to a computer like that, which is insane if you think about it.
It's lovely.
Good job, little guy.
That's nice.
Lovely.
You're a good boy.
They wanna be real boys anyway. This is a ding, ding, ding. 'Cause I was just talking about this with one of our friends. She has somebody in her life who have a lot of friends and struggles with that. And I was like, well, it would be great if there was a robot friend. This person has other outlets and is not fully reliant on her and can go to dinner with this robot and you can program it to have the type of conversation you want. And yes, it sounds scary, but it's unfair because we're good at making friends.
Yes, I was gonna say, I'm saying that and that's a luxury 'cause I have real people in my life and I'm not terribly lonely.
Yeah.
And I think it'll be more appealing. My prediction for what'll make it work work is they're actually going to have to build in tension.
It has to care about things. That's what's gonna help it simulate a real person. Those desires will never be sincere, but you can tell it to pretend to care about things.
It needs the ability to get pissed off at you and be cold to you for it to work.
And complicated. And I mean, ideally not give you what you need all the time.
It's like when they talk about building the sim as a hedonic treadmill, it won't work. Like, if you have a simulation for humans to live in just getting everything they want all day long will be a failed simulation.
What I worry about is people who are already lonely, probably don't love conversation. Maybe they're not as good at it, or maybe they're just more shy, and then they do find AI particularly rewarding. There are so many underserved populations or vulnerable populations why that would be the case. It's like a little bit of a downward spiral then, where it's actually then ruining your muscle memory for how to actually engage with real people.
Okay, so you lay out an architecture in the book to improve conversation. And it's conveniently got an acronym, which is TALK. So we have topics.
Did you backronym that?
What does that mean?
We just learned about that.
Oh my God, teach me. No, I am.
Teach me.
This is like Milgram.
Does it mean you back into it?
Yes.
You're out past your skis a lot.
I feel really ballsy.
Huge swings.
Milgram.
Yeah.
But okay, did you have TALK and then you're like, I'm gonna figure out—
I honestly don't really remember the deductive versus inductive process that What I do remember are the things that struck me as the most helpful and surprising as we were learning them from our research. And then I was able to craft them into a very logical item framework that builds in complexity over time, focuses on the informational transactional things we need to do in conversation and the emotional relational stuff. It's in a way quite ambitious because it's trying to encapsulate the full landscape of what we're trying to do in the social world.
But TALK does stand for topics, asking, levity, kindness. So let's start with topics. You claim small talk isn't the enemy, and I have to push back on that. I talk for a living. I enjoy it so much. But having to talk about—
The weather.
The fucking weather.
But this is the thing. You don't do small talk. You move past it immediately. That's why people like listening to you. It's why people like talking to you, is you don't get trapped in small talk with them.
So tell me why it's not bad. Why should we embrace it?
So many things about the way that we talk to each other are deeply ingrained social rituals. Small talk among them. You have to start at small talk. If you are meeting someone for the very first time, we have to start somewhere, and it has to be a topic that anybody could talk about easily. It's this well-worn place that you're searching— ideally move away from towards something more personalized, more interesting. more exciting. The goal would be to chase the energy away from it. The problem isn't with the small talk itself, but people get trapped there too long.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
They linger, and it starts to feel dutiful and awful and meaningless and shallow. And that's what everybody dreads.
And this is where we get into what we talked about, having a bit of a game plan before you end up places. In fact, you talk about the outcome of dates for a second date is kind of measurable if you go in with a bit of a game plan. So one of the techniques is switching topics. Frequently, you gotta come with some in the holster, I guess.
Actually, we saw this in the dating data. One of the killers of conversation, dating or otherwise, are long pauses. Long pauses happen when you've stayed too long on something that you don't have anything left to say.
Wow.
She's really beating a dead horse.
People start repeating things they've already said about it. They start laughing uncomfortably. The pauses get longer. You gotta go somewhere else.
Yeah. Wait, just can we take a second? Like, that's one of the worst feelings.
It is.
Just even you describing it.
Mirror neuron.
And I think we all do. And that's why people are like, fuck it, I'll just be lonely.
It's this little panicky feeling. Some people feel a great sense of responsibility in those moments to be the one to come up with the next thing. I think a lot of introverts are sort of like, it's not my job, but I'm hating this.
Right?
I'm not gonna fix it, but I feel it.
This is the worst.
Just having this mindset shift of before you even get to that panicky lull type of thing, move. Be more assertive about going to somewhere else.
Don't be afraid to just drop a non sequitur in there.
Oh, yeah! People go right with you.
That's preferred to this long pause. Of course.
Yeah.
I watched this amazing movie last night on the airplane.
Which one?
It was called We Live in Time.
That sounds familiar.
It's with Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield.
Oh, that's right!
Isn't it supposed to be so sad?
I sobbed the whole time.
But you know, there's been social science work on this. On an airplane—
It's worse.
You have a heightened sense of vulnerability.
I was alone and my husband wasn't there the whole thing.
Your kids were gonna miss you.
Also, this movie is supposed to be so sad.
It was amazing.
I loved it.
We're gonna get back to the movie, but the reason I raised it is because I did the thing we were talking about.
I was about to say, I think you're doing it.
I did the thing where you just start talking about something else and it Everybody goes with you, you guys. It's fun.
Wow, you knew that?
Monica knew. She was the one who invited me.
I don't know. You've been saying you know a lot of stuff that you don't actually know. So I feel like this is continuing the pattern you've already—
Welcome to my world.
I knew it. I knew it. Then why'd you participate?
Because I thought it'd be rude not to, 'cause I'm a good conversationalist. Golly. But if you just start talking about something else—
I feel betrayed.
You have been betrayed. Yeah, be careful who you're talking to.
I feel manipulated. Now I don't trust you, and I'm scared.
Now I'm gonna be dumb. Okay, but back to the movie. For real, it's so good.
It's so good.
I sobbed so much.
Okay, asking questions. This makes sense. I just want to give a personal anecdote, and there's a big shout out to Scotty Johnson. So I met this boy early into LA, and everywhere we went, every single girl was in love with him. A, he was objectively cuter than all of us, that's for sure. But it was happening with guys and with girls, and everyone At first, I just chalked it up to, he's magic. You can't really strive for that. You're magic or you're not. But at some point, I was like, this guy asks more questions than anyone I've ever met in my life. And I really made a mental note, oh, I wanna move through the world a lot more like Scotty, and I've gotta really up my game on asking questions. It's so powerful.
Let me ask about Scotty.
Now, I know you just did that.
No, I didn't even do that on purpose!
You're asking a question. Oh my God!
That one wasn't, and I knew it.
It's the fear!
It's the fear! Monica's waiting.
Did he ask particularly good questions, or was he just asking really anything?
He had this ability to seem crazy interested in anything.
And he probably was.
Yeah, by the way, this is an AA thing: acting your way into thinking different versus thinking your way into acting different. Something could feel fraudulent to you on the surface, but you might be shocked with repetition how genuine it gets.
This is a debate that we have in my class all the time. because these students are coming to this class on conversation, I'm teaching them about the types of behaviors that tend to work, and then they try them with intentionality. And of course, through the whole thing, they're thinking, but isn't this manipulative? If I do this with intentionality and knowing that I'm doing it, doesn't that make it, by definition, inauthentic in some way?
Right.
What's unique about conversation is maybe for a fleeting second, and you think to yourself, I should ask a question now, and then you do. In that moment, you're sort of nudging yourself to do it, But everything that comes after that is sincere.
I'll also add, it's a reward center activity in that what'll shock you is people are more interesting than you thought they were. You can only discover that through asking them questions because they themselves aren't great at remembering the most exciting detail of their life to share with you at that moment, but you could inadvertently lead them. Yes, at first you're doing it in a way that maybe is calculated, but then you're rewarded for it.
And questions have that beautiful power. You get that reward almost instantly 'cause they're gonna tell you stuff you're like, You're gonna see what is interesting in their answer, and then you can keep asking more. In my class, we do an exercise called never-ending follow-ups.
Ooh.
It would be a pair like you. One person is the never-ending question asker, the other person's just answering. And every time Monica talks, she has to end by asking a follow-up question.
Oh, wow.
And it sounds so extreme, but the experience of it is like Scotty. The experience of it is magic. You immediately move away from small talk. you start learning so much about the other person.
It's funny what a nugget of wisdom improv artists stumbled upon, 'cause you even reference it in your book, using the improv rule of yes, and, not no. Should we play this game? I feel like we should.
Sure, but I'm nervous. Do it.
I'll be the— do you want the switch?
Yeah, so you're gonna ask me questions.
Where'd you get that sweatshirt?
Oh, I got it at Sarah Henler's studio. It's vintage.
Do you go there a lot?
The first time I've ever been was yesterday.
Oh, what took you so long to check it out? out?
I guess I'm just busy. I'm busy.
What are you busy doing?
I work a lot. I have a busy job.
What do you do?
Have you heard of podcasts?
Oh, Jesus.
Oh, I'm not supposed to— that's where it ends. I gotta go.
Fuck this. You're on your own, toots. I don't like that sweater.
Hey. Yeah, you did a good job.
Thank you.
But I felt scared.
Do you wanna try it?
You guys, what are you doing?
He started playing a character. You started asking questions you already knew the answer to. So part of this that matters is that you should do it as yourself.
Well, I knew the answers to what she did for— but I didn't know that was her first time.
You didn't know where I got my sweater.
And I don't know why it took you so long. I would've thought you've been there a dozen times.
You learned a lot very quickly.
That's true.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I guess you didn't learn that I was busy, but—
Yeah.
'Cause you already know that.
We gotta reverse it.
I'm so scared. Okay. Well, I want to ask a serious question.
Okay.
Can I?
Yeah.
You're working on a personal project. It's been taxing, and I want to know how you're doing.
I'm still in the middle of it, so I don't know how I'm doing.
If you do a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the most relief and 1 being agony— that's a weird scale.
I would say 4.
And are you doing anything to help balance it out?
Yeah. Cutting my hair compulsively, and I'm exercising compulsively, and I'm trying I'm trying not to blow my nose, which is new.
Can you tell me more about why you stopped blowing your nose?
I got convinced that I don't actually have allergies, that I've just injured my nose from blowing it so hard, and then it's sending white blood cells to repair it, and then that is snot that I have to then blow really hard to get out, and then I'm just caught in this endless pattern of damaging and repairing, and I feel like I just have to stop for it to end.
Are you an addict?
Oh, like a motherfucker.
That tracks. Okay. But I did know some of the answers.
Yeah, it's hard.
We talk a lot.
Where did you get your pants?
I got these at a local store near where I live.
Okay. Do you notice what all the other moms are doing, and do you feel like you pick up on, like, I'm not sure what pants I'm supposed to be wearing, but somehow everyone knows? How do you pay attention and figure it out?
I love fashion. I actually talk about this with some of my mom friends. a fashionista gets older, you get fewer and fewer touchpoints with people who are actually fashionable, which is alarming because you're like, oh no, I feel myself getting out of touch.
And do you have to factor in your age?
Yes. So I have hundreds of students who are in their 20s, so I get to observe that.
Yeah.
I have fancy colleagues who are all ages and flavors of style. I then have all my community friends, cool parents, and then there's social media. So I'm like, am I following the right influencer accounts? Am I getting the right apps? Calculus for women deciding what to wear in different contexts they find themselves in is so complicated.
Okay, so here's a calculated question I would ask, and I realize how I operate in thinking of this question, which is I would go, have you taken too big of a swing?
Oh, I try not to. So this is part of one of my goals. I used to go much harder when I was in my 20s. I wanted to get noticed. I wanted to be different. I wanted to be the one sort of setting the trend. As I've gotten older, I think it's more about not taking too big of a swing. I don't like that feeling.
Okay. So you haven't like arrived at a restaurant and been like, oh boy, I went too young with this.
No, I played a little safer, I would say. Even today I was gonna wear like a hot pink sweater and at the last second I was like, black. Thank you.
Wait, you said you were afraid to ask that?
No, no, no. So I know that the kind of questions I ask, I wanna get to a time you got embarrassed.
Oh yeah.
Because that's vulnerable. Well, you didn't do it to me.
I didn't even realize you were doing it to me.
You thought this was a random conversation.
I thought you were just asking me. That's so fun.
But I want to get to the point, 'cause I think what's very bonding in a fast pass is as soon as we can get vulnerable. So if I can get to a point where you went too far—
This is something I am always working on in myself about conversation is more quickly revealing my vulnerability, my mistakes, my failures, my moments of embarrassment and shame. I'm so hungry for that. I'm too hungry to get it out of other people, and probably too slow to share it with others.
To me, it's such a fast pass to like, oh great, we're both now laughing at the time I tried to wear combat boots, and you tried to wear this. We've just broken through a layer, and now I can kind of live here.
I have that too, but sometimes it can backfire in a dating— I mean, even the question I asked you was immediately vulnerable. I do tend to do that, even on early dates, because I want to know for myself, What's going on with this person? How introspective are they? How interesting are they? And so I'm like, tell me about your trauma.
And what do they— what do—
how do people—
how do they respond that you think that's not good? They're guarded. They feel threatened.
They often do it, and that's lovely. But then if I then don't wanna go on another date—
Oh, now you feel the guilt.
I feel guilty because I've now put them in a position to be very vulnerable and maybe take things—
And make them feel worse 'cause you actually know them.
Well, that's another bad thing, but I feel sort of manipulative. I put you in a position to be vulnerable. You were.
You trusted me, and then I deserted you.
And I'm like, fuck.
You trusted me with your heart, and I stomped on it. The reframe of that is that you actually gave it a chance. Nobody needs to waste their time small talking with people.
We're getting so off topic, but this is really interesting. I think when I have to do my own sexual inventory, as you have to do in AA, and I think about times I've been irresponsible or not, I think what I underestimated sometimes is it came very easy and natural for me to have those kind of conversations with women. And for a lot of those women, it was such a unique thing they had only experienced with someone they were deeply in love with. And I do think it was quite misleading at times to women, which I fear in their reflection felt like manipulation or something. But it's just kind of how I am.
You're a sharer.
Yes. And I think it fast-forwarded— it's kind of like this thing we learned about in England where the GIs got all these English girls pregnant. Americans kiss really quick. English don't kiss for a long time. They jumped ahead 10 steps.
This is verbal kissing. This is you sharing something vulnerable.
A lot of people will associate that with a very unique kind of relationship they've only had once, and it was love. That's right.
There are people, though, every relationship in their life is like this, and they want nothing else, myself included.
Yeah, same.
I have a colleague at Harvard named Leslie John who's writing a book called Reveal, and it's all about this conundrum of the spectrum from full opacity, where you share nothing, to full transparency. If you could download the full contents of your brain and give it to somebody else as a gift, we're making these choices constantly of how much do we share of ourselves and what consequences come from it. Closeness and skipping ahead and accelerating relationship development is one of the pros. One of the downsides is it really does make you more vulnerable to heartbreak or exploitation, essentially.
Yeah.
I have this in male friendships a lot too, and this runs the risk of sounding arrogant, but I have observed it and it's real, which is a lot of guys are comfortable telling me things they generally won't tell other guys, which is an incredible privilege and it's beautiful. But I may be the only person they do that with. with. And so I'm kind of their best friend. And then maybe they could feel hurt because I don't have a capacity for 150 best friends.
Oh, I think about this all the time. One of the downsides of getting really good at conversation is that you don't actually have the bandwidth to be the best friend, the best boss, the best colleague to 1,000 people. And it's such a first-world problem. If you really work on this skill and people are willing to trust you and share with you and love being with you, the The hard problem then becomes that person actually doesn't have the time and energy to fulfill that role all the time to that many people.
Yeah, I don't see the future solution being I'm less connected in a safe place to chat. It's that I think there's more options for those people to have that experience with multiple people. That's the positive future, is that there's a lot more dudes that are willing to chat about that stuff.
Send 'em my book.
I'm gonna send them your book.
Okay, so asking questions, we got that, but I do wanna I want to ask what a boomer ask is. About myself, I'm shriveling with embarrassment.
It is not about boomers. Let me say that first of all. It is about humans of all ages, and it's named after a boomerang. So it's when I ask you a question. So if I say to you, Monica, how was your weekend?
It was relaxing. How was yours?
Let me tell you about my weekend.
Uh, you're asking so that you can talk.
It can be even more grotesque and direct. You can go like, have you ever been to Tibet?
Exactly. Very specific.
Have you ever been in a fight at Franklin in high Yeah. I'm clearly just trying to—
Very specific. Yeah. So this is boomer asking, 'cause it's like a boomerang. You're throwing out the boomerang, you let them answer, and then you bring it right back to yourself immediately.
Yeah.
People do it all the time. I do it.
God, I hate that I do it. Do you do it, Imani? Yeah.
I think probably everyone does it in certain circumstances. I did it today on the Fact Check, but that's a little tricky.
'Cause it's a product.
It's a product. And so weirdly, it's a mix of these.
And then our feelings get hurt. Well, no, no, no.
Navigating. We both come in sometimes knowing, I'm gonna tell this story, knowing it will lead to a real conversation. I, this morning, was like, oh, my hand looks different. Oh, I'm gonna bring that up on the Fact Check.
Your hand looks different? Yeah.
It's a huge development.
You get a cut, and then it scars, and then you're looking at your hand like, whose hand is this?
You have very lovely hands.
Thank you very much. They were glowing a week ago.
Thank you.
But anyway, so I sat down and I said, have you ever had this experience? To start the conversation.
You're open to hearing, I've had a similar—
Yeah, I did want to know the answer, but also I was like, we're gonna talk about this now.
It's all about the timing. So if you really wanna hear about Dax's hand car experiences, and he shares with you very openly, the important thing is follow up on his thing first.
Yet.
So it feels like you actually care because you do.
Yeah.
Before we get back to your hand changing into a new hand.
Luckily, he did not understand what I was talking about.
Understandable.
You wonder what's better. Come out and tell the story you wanna tell.
So we studied that exactly.
Oh, tell me.
So we randomly assigned people to either start with a question, let someone answer, and then tell a story, or just tell the story. Just telling the story is better. Whether you're bragging, whether you're complaining, or whether you're just saying something weird and neutral.
Yeah.
Like, oh, I think my hand morphed into a different hand. It's better to just share it, which then may trigger reciprocity. That's the hope.
Yeah.
But you don't have control over that, but you're gonna get the satisfaction of sharing whatever the thing you're dying to share, and you hope that the person you're talking to is actually interested and ask about it or share about themselves. Yeah.
Interesting.
What's a gotcha question?
That's almost a gotcha question unto itself.
Oh.
It's not. It's not.
It's not.
A gotcha question is really in the eye of the receiver. If the person feels like you're testing them—
Or leading them.
Leading them, making them feel like you wanna prove how incompetent they are, that they're a liar, expose them as a fraud.
Yes.
So if I were to say, Dax, you said that you were an actor. Are you acting in anything right now?
Oh yeah.
Like, what the hell? You could do it for fun. If we're best friends and I wanna tease you, that's a really funny way to do it. If we are not, and that's a legitimate question, what an asshole.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's a really quick way to make someone feel really bad.
Alison, you can't imagine how many people who only know me from acting will see me at the airport and they'll go, what do you got coming out? And then I go, I have a podcast. and they don't have any sense that it's successful.
Oh, really asking though.
And they feel so— they feel so bad.
But that's not a gotcha question.
The nice thing is what they're really saying is, I like watching you.
Yeah.
I wanna keep my eyes out for something you're in.
Yes.
But when I say I'm busy doing a podcast instead of acting—
They get upset?
I think they feel really bad for me.
No, I'm reading you as you're asking me this to embarrass me, to exploit me, to make me look bad. That's a gotcha question. The same question—
Exactly.
Lobbed from someone who doesn't actually know the answer and really cares about you. Yeah, just wants to know. Great. The importance is, like, sort of caring intention.
Yeah. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. Okay, let's get to levity, probably my favorite part. I could see where people wouldn't prioritize levity.
Can I give you guys a compliment?
Oh, please.
Which is a levity move.
Oh, she's doing it.
Really, I think the reason that this podcast and you guys are so great is because you're so good at balancing gravity and levity. It's almost the whole mission of the conversations you have is you wanna have stuff you take seriously, and you take learning seriously, you take issues and topics seriously, and all the way along, you want it to be fun.
Very nice compliment.
Yeah, thank you.
You accomplished the mission. Thank you.
I agree that that's the mission.
Do you disagree that that's the mission?
No, I was trying to do a really thorough and honest assessment of the motive behind it.
My motive?
Mine.
Oh, let's assess why.
I think the thing that might be truest under all of it is it is my tool to both let go of power and maintain power. By being vulnerable and honest, I'm giving away my power, and I'm scared. But I always have the skill set to steer the reaction if necessary. I do think it's my way of controlling how vulnerable I'll be.
So we've done research on the relationship between humor Wow. Even one joke or one moment where you make other people laugh in a conversation means you're much more likely to be voted as the leader of the group.
Wow.
So I think often when we think of levity or humor, we have a tendency to think of it as like this bonus, this extra sparkly thing that might happen sometimes, and that's nice. When you actually study the psychology of humor and levity in conversation and its relationship with status and power, it's a core determinant of the status hierarchy. So I think your sense of, I'm doing this to reclaim power and control is legitimate.
Yeah, 'cause when I tell you something that's very revealing, I get immediately scared, as I think most people do.
Yep.
And it's broader than this room, so my mind can't help but imagine however a million people take the thing I just said. And then I can take the legs out from it if I want to at any moment.
And it's this little micro moment of power because you're like, I know I'm gonna say this thing, and I'm pretty sure you're gonna laugh. Just even that power over somebody to evoke that emotional response in that moment is tremendous. And it signals something about you that you have the competence, the wherewithal, the dominance to make that happen again in the future. And people read that as a very core competency.
It's really interesting. I also think it enables you to take big swings 'cause you can neutralize it. I think of Jess. Jess is very, very funny. He's also very, very provocative. So he's saying really provocative things, and if they go sideways, he's great at acknowledging they went sideways to then release the pressure.
A lot of funny people do this, this recovery thing. I mean, you're all That was the joke.
Right.
Right, the recovery of like, well, at least I tried. So in this same research where we're studying humor and power, what we found is even when jokes totally flop, people don't laugh, they think they're inappropriate, they don't think they're funny, you still get a boost in how people perceive your confidence, 'cause you were at least confident enough to try.
Yes.
And even that is admirable.
Okay, kindness. And this is where we really get into listening. I feel like this overlaps a bit with asking questions, but why does it deserve its own category?
Moment to moment, when people are talking to each other, when they're walking through the world, what are kind people thinking about, and what are they saying to other people? I was, as a psychologist, so curious to try and figure that out. And I think we've come up with some pretty concrete answers of what people who are prioritizing other people's needs more frequently than others— these are kind people. And they do some predictable things during conversation. More respectful language that makes people feel worthy and seen and known and understood.
Could you give me an example of respectful language?
Using people's names is a good start. I think you're worthy of even knowing who you are, just as a starting place. Think of how many conversations you've had where you didn't know someone's name. It's a very uneasy feeling. Yeah, because you can't give them that respect. How can I show you that I care about you and respect you if I don't even know your name? That's a weird feeling. Let's slap Just as a start, that's such a basic thing, but every little linguistic choice you make is an opportunity to show respect or not. Positive language is more respectful than negative. It shows people that you like being with them. Literally things like, great, good, awesome, cool, love that. As opposed to negative language that's like, no, uh-uh, hmm, that sucks. That makes you feel like you're not enjoying being with me. And then making people feel like they're worthy of your time and attention, which then ties into the next one. So when we think about listening, there's decades of work on active listening, which is mostly nonverbal cues like nodding, smiling, leaning forward. In our more recent research on listening, what we find is great conversationalists use their words to show people that they've heard them. Those can't be faked. So if you're sitting on Zoom, you can be like smiling and nodding, but you're off to the side making a grocery list or texting your friends. What you can't fake are things like follow-up questions, callbacks, which is your ding, ding, ding, I think.
Yeah.
Right?
Love a ding, ding, ding.
You can't fake a ding, ding, ding if you didn't hear it the first time.
Yep.
Paraphrasing what other people have said. have said, repeating back to them what they've said. Am I understanding you right? There's another piece of kindness that we haven't talked about yet, which is receptiveness to opposing viewpoints. So when you confront a moment of difficulty where you really disagree, many of these same skills, the listening with your words and validating people, that's when it becomes especially important and especially hard to do. Imagine you hate people who had affairs. And in that moment, your friend says, I'm having an affair. And in that moment, what a good conversationalist would do would be, I hear that you're saying you had an affair. It makes so much sense that you're feeling upset about that. Let's consider for a second why this is a bad decision. So before you go on to disagree with them, you have to do that hard work of validating them. And almost everyone skips over that.
My thing was like, totally, you're not a terrible, flawed person. You're not broken. You did something a lot of people do, and we gotta make sure you wake up with your family for the rest of your life. How do we get there?
Exactly.
It's so interesting, this whole topic, because I feel like we think about it I don't know if I'm gonna get in trouble for saying this, but for people who are neurodivergent, like the show everyone loves.
A Love on the Spectrum.
Yes.
I love that show.
I didn't watch it. Everyone loved it. There was a lot of this teaching how to have conversations and active listening, all these tools.
Eye contact.
Yes.
It's so lovely to see that in practice, but it's also kind of arrogant of neurotypical people who are watching and they're like, yeah, they don't know how to do that.
Nobody's doing it all.
No one's doing it right.
I love watching that show. Actually, one of the tactics most helpful on that show, they have these really lovely coaches who come in before their dates, and they have them brainstorm topics ahead of time. And I'm like, yeah, everybody needs to be doing that!
Neurotypical/neurodivergent is a false dichotomy in and of itself. This binary notion. We're all on this weird spectrum with varying degrees of adeptness.
In all different vectors. In all different directions.
There are people who are not neurodivergent who are very uncomfortable eye contact. I talk to them all the time. There are any number of things that they might be struggling with. They don't go to fucking dates with topics. They're just going to let their neurotypicalness take over.
Correct.
Okay, now when you get into a group conversation, it gets more complicated. That seems pretty obvious, but I did want to talk specifically about the status hierarchy effect of a group chat and how it changes within conversations.
I think to some people it's not obvious How much more difficult groups are than dyads, than one-on-one, because it feels like you're doing the same task. You're talking, you're listening, you're with other people. It's clear that it's harder to coordinate, but I don't think we've realized how much harder. Even here, this whole time I'm toggling my eye gaze between both of you. Monica's so patient. She's such a good listener. And we're all doing this calculus that's quite a bit different than if it were just me and and Monica, or just me and Dax together. Make it smaller. As soon as a third person pulls up a chair, everything changes. Someone can sit there, be part of the conversation, and never talk. That's different than one-on-one where you have to go back and forth. And so I think people don't realize that as group size grows, the coordination challenges of all conversations grow exponentially. Every person in the group has a unique shared reality, a unique relationship. What's boring to Dax might be really exciting to me and Monica. So all of those little micro-decisions get even more fraught. And one of the things that we have to navigate is status differences as people get thrown into the mix. Every group has an inherent status hierarchy. So the status hierarchy is determined by all kinds of things. Sometimes it's a formal hierarchy, like at an organization, there's a boss, or on an army battalion, there's the leader.
Well, these companies have levels.
Sometimes it's age, sometimes it's level of learning. Well, sometimes it's expertise, but it's other things. Gender, it's race, it's all of these things that our minds are doing this calculation of who has the most power here, who has the most liking and respect, who's the most influential. And we do this internal sort of ranking in a group, and it affects all the ways that people behave. We tend to look at people who have high status when they're speaking. They speak more, so you look at them. But also when they're not speaking, we look to see their emotional reactions because they determine the norms. Like, are they surprised by this? Are they pissed about this? Should I be pissed about this? Which makes lower-status group members feel invisible. You're literally not looking at them as much. They feel less welcome to contribute. The revelation that we've sort of realized by studying conversations at the topic level, as you move from one thing to another, the status hierarchy shifts from one topic to the next.
Oh, interesting.
We start talking about fashion.
Yeah.
How dare you?
All of a sudden, I am not going to be looking at Dax as much. I'm gonna be deferring to Monica, who's super cool.
She's the emperor.
Oh yeah, I forgot to give you my gift.
Oh, coming.
In a little bit.
If you're good.
If you're good. If you behave yourselves. But if we switch to a new topic on which I have the most expertise, things are gonna change. Imagine there's 5 other people here who have all different expertise and levels of status. So it's shifting dynamically as we move from one topic to the next. It's not like you go to a wedding and the boss guy's always—
Top dog.
Imagine you land on a topic where all of a sudden, low woman on the totem pole has all the value to add. She better feel safe and included enough and welcome to speak when you get to that topic.
You probably don't wanna be ensnared in this, but I can't resist right now. I constantly talk about this. I think status is what we are most conscious of at all times. I think it is driving so much of everything. I think it's just baked into being a social animal. I don't think it's escapable. I think there's a lot of young people who think the solution to this is the eradication of status.
You can't. It's how our brains are built.
Even these movements I see, like main character energy versus supporting cast, all the movement is to get rid of status. And to me, it's just like saying, let's get rid of being bipedal and walk on all fours. We have to acknowledge it's there, accept that it's there, and figure out how to navigate it best. But the notion of obliterating status—
Eradication's not the right goal. The goal instead, the sort of reframe, The frame is when you are in that high-status position, what can you do to lift other people up? When you're in the low-status role and you're marginalized, what can you possibly do to cope with a very difficult position that you're in?
Yeah, it sucks.
It sucks. You have a narrower range of things that you're allowed to say that will be seen as appropriate or as a value-add. So then you're less likely to speak. And if you never speak, you're not actually bringing value. Nobody ever gets to know and what you can do. It's this crazy double bind. Our job is to try and learn as much as we can about each other regardless of status, but you can't eradicate it. It's what we're built to do. And status striving, right? We all want to ascend and maintain.
Whether we're conscious of it, it means more food and safety.
Yeah, food and safety and attraction and reproduction.
Yeah. Okay, I'm gonna jump to apologies.
Ooh, easy.
And I gotta give credit to AA. There's a few things that it forced me to do. I had to embrace them. the dogma. My favorite thing is the 4th step. I've talked about it here before, learning to actually take an inventory of how you feel and what fears are being triggered. That's been so incredible to understand. But being forced to say apologies, make amends, and then getting the experience of delivering some of those and finding out the reaction's not at all what you're afraid it'll be— I don't know how anyone else learns that unless they're in a program that demands it. Because the 10-step, we have to do It's not just, oh, what you accumulated as an addict. It's like daily, how has my behavior maybe impacted someone negatively? And I have an obligation to clean that up, 'cause if I don't clean that up, I will have low self-esteem and hate myself, and I will use. So it's imperative. And through practicing this for 20 years, a few truths have emerged. One is that it never goes bad like you think it's gonna. And then what you realize immediately is like, oh, no one's getting apologized to.
Yeah.
Because the reaction to most people I make amends to or apologize to is, shut up.
When you say that people's reactions are sometimes not what you expect, in what direction are the reactions surprising or have been surprising?
Almost unanimously understanding, comforting, and touched that you did care. I think what people want to know is that you acknowledge that was hurtful and that you're not someone that is disposable, that they don't worry that they've upset.
Can I tell you who I talked to about this?
Please.
Orna. You hang out with Orna Guralnick from Couples Therapy. So this chapter on apologies opens with this story from Couples Therapy, one of the couples on the show.
Which one?
Tashira and Drew. They're from, I think, season 1 or 2. They're amazing. She got pregnant and they started living together. They were in a really rocky place.
Yes.
I think it was in the pandemic phase of the show-ish.
Yeah.
And he would bounce back to mom's a lot. Yes.
And they didn't sleep in the same room, which is fine for those of you who It's fine. But they were in a really rocky place. I thought that they were not gonna end up together. And then you follow them through their therapy, and by the end, one of the things that they got so good at is apologizing to each other. They're not snipping at each other anymore. They're not, like, chewing on their resentments. And so I talked to Orna about it, what she thinks of apologies broadly, and in the context of this couple in particular. And she was like, here's what apologies do. 2 things. One, they show someone that you understand them, that you understand that there was harm to you, and maybe it was at your hands, Maybe it wasn't, but it shows that you understand them and that you are taking some responsibility, that you care that they've been harmed and that you want to be part of the solution. So that if you can show those 2 things, that you understand someone and you're taking accountability, if you can do that without apologizing, you don't have to apologize. However, apologies are the best shortcut that we have to do those 2 things in a sincere and really meaningful way. I really think they're the most powerful thing we have. have in our conversational toolkit.
My kids are great at it. Maybe the thing I'm most proud of my children.
I said the same thing in the book. I wrote this little story about my oldest, Kevin. It was honestly the most rewarding moment, I think, ever as a parent.
What did he apologize about?
Oh, it's a doozy. He was a heck of a toddler. He was like a biter, hitter.
Okay.
He used to headbutt. He has all these big ideas, and he was a late talker. He was so frustrated he couldn't express them.
And because Boys are dumb.
Yeah. Yeah.
So dumb.
Can't communicate. So he was having a tantrum and I picked him up and he flung his head back and he broke my nose.
Ooh.
You can see it's like a little crooked. It's okay. I know I still look great. You look crooked. It's fine.
You're finally different from Sarah.
I'm finally a crooked nose one.
You're welcome. Not an apology.
He had to be maybe 3 at the time. It was so enraging for all the reasons, but I still hadn't taught him to be the kind of person who wouldn't hurt someone like that. He also was 3, so he didn't A hard mothering phase. Fast forward, he's now 9 turning 10. Maybe it was around when he was 7, he was reading Diary of a Wimpy Kid. And the main character, Greg Heffley— we were reading together, and Greg Heffley apologized to Rowley, which is his best friend, which was rare. He's kind of usually, like, a jerk to his best friend. And Kevin paused, and in that moment turned to me, and he was like, Mom, remember when I broke your nose when I was, like, a toddler? And I said, yeah. Oh, my God. Yeah, it wasn't great.
I won't ever forget it, Kevin.
I will never forget. Thank you for the reminder. Now that it's staring back at me in the mirror every day. He looked in my eyes and he goes, I'm so sorry.
Aww.
It was so beautiful. I couldn't believe that occurred to him.
It's more powerful than I love you.
And a lot of ways— I think it is more powerful because it's harder to do, harder to say.
It is the action of loving someone, not just the words.
You're right. You are doing an action by apologizing that is harder and more vulnerable. It is the action of love rather than just saying it.
I know how hard it is for me, and they just did that. They fucking love me.
They're also saying in that moment, I'm saying this to you because I want to have a relationship with you in the future. Because I want you to see me as the kind of person that deserves being in a relationship with, and I want to be with you. And my standards for us are high. Let's get back there.
It's fucking awesome. It's so hard, and I wish people could just practice. Monica will tell you, I've gone too far. This is one of my favorite stories. This house has been worked on for 7 years, right? That's how long it took. And we lived here through lots of the construction. And I had all my car chargers plugged into this one extension cord. And I came out, guys were working, they were sawing, and all my chargers were unplugged. And I was late to bring the girls to school. A bunch of things had piled up. And my reaction was, don't fucking unplug my shit! I fucking— there's an extension! Like, I really lost it.
Yeah.
And I dropped the girls off at school, and I'm like, And I'm like, ugh, I feel terrible about this. These guys are working their asses off. I'm an entitled rich person. How ugly of me. I've gotta say sorry. So I come back, and I'm like, guys, guys. There's like 9 or 10 guys working. I just wanna say I'm really sorry about how I talked to you guys. None of you deserve that. I know you're working really hard, and I'm so sorry. And what was funny is this apology went on long enough that I did recognize, oh, this is more painful than the shouting was. This is like male empathy. vulnerability is actually making them wanna throw up more than the yelling. So then I was like, I gotta make sure my apologies are serving the people I'm trying to apologize to.
But this is the crux of kindness always, is figuring out what other people need. Do they need to hear the apology? Most of the time the answer is yes.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
And every once in a while, if you're apologizing like 9 times for the same thing, you're gonna start just reminding the person of the thing that happened that wasn't good. They're gonna be There like, is a tipping point where it becomes too much.
Or you just start feeling like, well, that means nothing.
Yeah.
Because I mean, I'm hearing this all the time and nothing's changing.
Yeah. There is not a single study of live conversation that shows that refusing to apologize or neglecting to apologize is better than apologizing. But the sort of tipping point is when your partner doesn't feel like it's sincere.
Right.
Or you're not doing it well. You're saying like, I'm so sorry you feel that way. There's a lot of ways to give a bad apology.
Mm-hmm.
So you need to apologize But do it well.
And really curb your behavior.
Don't just promise to change, actually change.
I was gonna say, that's one upside of having to do a 10th step as well, is that I'm sometimes on the verge of blowing it.
Blowing sobriety or blowing relational?
Yelling at somebody. And as I'm about to let it fly, I go, I'll be apologizing for this. So weirdly can curb your behavior too if you're in a real habit of doing it.
Because it's part of the healthy suite of skills that is gonna help you do the right thing to begin with.
Yeah.
If you're able to anticipate, it's gonna be super hard for me to stonewall for a while, take space, come back, apologize, give them time, then they forgive me, then we move on. That process can be circumvented by not yelling in the first place.
Yeah.
But we're human. We're all gonna mess up. We're all gonna yell at people sometimes if they break your nose.
You just hope you don't get physical when someone breaks your nose. That's about the best you can do.
His name's Kevin, so I was like the mom from Home Alone. And they're like, hey! I like plopped him down and ran away to look in the mirror at the damage.
Well, Alison, this has been a blast. I hope everyone checks out Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves. And I'm really jealous of everyone that gets to take your class.
Oh, me too. How fun.
You guys, thank you so much for having me. Oh, it was so fun. It was so fun.
So helpful for so many people, I think.
I wanna interview Sarah now.
You should.
I wanna see her.
You can call her.
This is very—
I want them to both come in with the goal of trickiness.
Are you Sarah?
Maybe I am. I love it.
It would be like a sociopath we interviewed. You'll never know what's what.
Exactly. We did a twin trick in my class the first year I ever taught. I didn't tell anyone I had a twin, saved it till the end of the semester. It was our day on deception, and we dressed the same. And I went in and I did the normal milling with the students before. Then you go out to close the door, but Sarah came back in. And she started the class, and she just opened her arms, and she was like, deception, what do we think? And she got the class having a discussion. They went on for, like, 5 minutes.
Wow.
And at some point, a student raised his hand, and he goes, I think we're being deceived right now.
The Monica of the room.
The Monica of the room. The precog of the room. He was like, I think we're being deceived. And so I ran in, and it was like a standing ovation.
Wow.
This is my favorite movie. The Nolan movie.
Yes.
Prestige.
I want to rewatch it.
Yeah, me too.
I want to rewatch it too.
And it was a twin thing, wasn't it?
It was.
In the end, that was the ultimate trick, is it was a twin thing.
Yeah. You got to live the routine.
Yeah.
Yeah. And he, like, loved one girl, but the girl was with— okay. All right, Alison, this has been a blast. I hope everyone checks out Talk. Please come again when you write another book.
Thank you so much, you guys. You're awesome.
Hi there, this is Hermium Permium. If you like that, you're gonna love the fact checker, Miss Monica. Oh, guess what? This is some hot goss.
Okay, great.
Kristin was at the doctor today, and there's an anesthesiologist there. And the last time she met him, right before he gave her the local, he was behind her and she was face down. And he said, welcome, welcome, welcome, as he—
Oh! Yeah.
So then this time, And this time, she was like, oh, I'll bring him a sweatshirt or a t-shirt or something. So she brought him something today. And he said, I need you to know that I was eliminated in the second round of taking Monica on a date.
Wait, what?
Do you remember when you guys put out, like, a—
For Monica and Jess season 2?
I guess.
That's the only time we put anything out, but we didn't even get that far.
Well, he submitted.
Oh, my God.
I know! An anesthesiologist? They're very well paid. They are! That's supposed to be the highest starting salary in 1993 when I was in high school and looked it up.
Oh, my goodness.
I feel—
I feel sorry.
You feel flattered, and then you feel guilty that you feel flattered.
Well, I feel guilty that someone felt eliminated. We need to have her say— we need to have her clear things up.
She's gotta fake an injury.
Bring a new item, like a lighter.
And people will be so concerned. Her shoulder hurts. Just— that's nuts. She doesn't have any issue. I think when they hear anesthesia, people will be off to the races. I find that flattering. Don't you think? Do you think most people would be flattered to hear a doctor have the hots for them? We do that, right?
I'm attracted to that.
Yeah, right? I'm susceptible to that.
I feel flustered.
Okay. Because there's this hot anesthesia artist.
Is he married now? Because that was a while ago.
Married and divorced.
Oh, annulled?
Annulled, yes.
Fraud. Oh.
And consummation.
That's bad.
On her end.
Oh, that's good.
Yes, yes, yes, yes. We should put out as an impromptu annulment.
Great idea.
Robbie, write it down.
Write it down.
Yeah, annulments.
Oh my gosh. Maybe he's a vulnerable boy.
He's certainly a vulnerable boy. You wouldn't listen to this if you were a boy.
Exactly.
And if you were not a vulnerable boy.
Unless you're a cookie boy.
Cookie boys.
Speaking of—
Oh, let's talk.
We have big news. I mean, we've already discussed this before. We have new merch out.
Yes.
And it's fun.
It is.
You want to hear something crazy?
Yeah.
So one of— I was, I was thinking, and I just want to continue to thank the armchairs who showed up in San Francisco. It really made the whole show. Uh, when I was leaving the theater, I took pictures with folks, and a woman had our new t-shirt on.
Which one?
The crow, the mouse, and the cherries.
Oh, as a team.
And I go, oh my God. I got so confused. I thought, are they already out and she bought one? And I go, oh my God, you have one of the t-shirts. And she goes, it's— I know it's pirated. And I go, oh, that's okay. We're actually weirdly making that t-shirt now.
Yeah.
So I saw it as like, it was a really good idea because here this person went on their own and made it.
Great.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, we have all of our limited sweatshirt designs on t-shirts.
On t-shirts.
Available. We have our own shop popping up. We have a pop-up. We have a pop-up merch shop that will be up until we have official merch with Wondery.
Wondery and Amazon.
And that's probably gonna be at the end of March-ish. So until then, we have our pop-up merch that we made our own.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And so get on there. There's— I'm really proud of a lot of the designs. I think they're really cute. So we have those tees, right? And then we have—
So we have the robot. Welcome, welcome, welcome, Matt. And then we have ball sack cowboy.
Yep. We have the, the cowboy on the mic.
On the microphone.
We have duck, duck, goose.
Uh-huh.
And we have—
Crow, cherries, and mouse.
They're on tees now. And we have 2 new tees. We have a cookie boy tee.
Cookie boy time.
And a reverse back tee.
Yeah, that's only for the pervious armchair because I think you are inviting some sexual attention if you're wearing a reverse back shirt.
You might want that.
I would— I'll be wearing one, yeah.
Yeah, it's really cool looking, um, and, and chic and sleek. And we have a sweatsuit— 2 sweatsuits, same design, but one is a hoodie, one is not. And—
What's on the sweatsuit?
It says AE. It has a crow on top of it and a cherry in its mouth and some cherries falling down the sleeve.
Oh, yeah, very cool.
Cool.
I'm going to wear that sweatsuit too.
I know, me too. I'm really excited for the sweatsuit. I'm going to— I'm going to go crewneck. That's my aesthetic. I'm not going to go hoodie. But yeah, that's too much.
You have too much hair for a hoodie. Is that what—
maybe that's part of it. It gets caught up in there.
Yeah.
Although apparently hoodies are the most selling item.
I love a hoodie, but I don't have long hair.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. So just to be clear, we have— we have brokered this deal with Amazon, begged them to let us sell our own merch for a month, which means our turnaround Really quick, so go on order. There's going to be a little bit of delay, but we have this window to sell for a month, basically. So, and it's cute.
Yeah. So get on that. That's that's a good fun update.
Yes.
And everyone's happy about carding. So we give one to my new maybe boyfriend who's married and an old.
Yes, for sure.
And I wonder what what do you think?
When we give a reverse bag.
Yeah. But cookie. Cookie Boy is so fun.
Yeah, he had the confidence to wear a Cookie Boy t-shirt.
Do you think it's—
I wouldn't wear a Cookie Boy shirt.
Really?
No, it sounds to me like I'm advertising like eating out, power bottom, like a Cake Boy.
I would expect you to wear it. Yeah, I would, I would have thought you would have worn it. Confident man would wear it.
What if— hold on a second, this isn't fair.
I think it is.
What about a shirt that says Cake Boy? That's like— it feels like false advertising. Like I shouldn't wear a shirt that says What is a cookie boy? Ask the computer what cake boy—
No, a cookie boy.
I don't know. I don't know.
It's not—
Rob, am I insane? Uh, I don't know what cake boy means, but cookie boy, yeah, I probably wouldn't wear a cookie boy shirt either. Yeah, it's okay.
Well, I thought everyone said we wanted that as a shirt.
Yes, because I want our— we have 70% of the people. Did you find out what cake boy means? Cake boy is someone light and fluffy effeminate, uh, not meaty. Yeah, that's what Urban Dictionary says.
Doesn't mean gay. That could mean baby girl. Yeah, baby girls are—
it's just always used in reference to gay guys. Okay, it's saying metrosexual. Okay, a feminine male. Yeah, a feminine male.
A feminine male isn't gay necessarily. Like, Timothée Chalamet is not gay. He's dating Kylie Jenner.
Oh, this Urban Dictionary is This is a soft, feminine heterosexual male. And the quote is, Jerome ain't gay. He's a motherfucking cake boy. Okay, so Jerome's not gay. He's a motherfucking cake boy.
Oh, okay. Anyway, I—
Hold on a second. I don't want to be— I don't want there to be any upsetness or hurt feelings about this.
Well, there's not. You invented cookie boy.
For you. Yeah. This says a cake boy is someone who's confused for being gay, but it's really straight.
Okay.
Okay.
I think we have had enough.
Do you think in general girls want to be described as masculine?
No.
Because that's a 1-to-1. Do boys want to be described as feminine? I think not.
Now I'm like, should we change up the color of the shirt?
I think it's more the phrase cookie boy than the color.
No, but I'm saying if girls are gonna buy it—
Yeah, I think you just make it straight forward.
Change it to like pink. Oh, listen, don't worry, just leave it. Just leave everything. What is it? Oh my God, I hate this new collection.
Oh no!
Don't buy it. Don't buy— I'm just kidding. It's fine. It's great. I'm excited to wear it. I'll wear it. Okay. Anywho, I forgot what we were talking about.
Let's reset.
Let's reboot. Merch.
We're having a very good time.
Merch.
Yeah, merch is on.
I just did a snot.
All because this is—
this is not— I've been fighting the rain so hard.
No, Cookie Boy's not anything worth unraveling over.
I thought it was cute.
I think it's great.
Okay. There's a kind of masculine shirt on there too that I designed for you.
It's okay. The vast majority of the people who order our stuff are women. I don't mind at all that we have a shirt that's skewing towards women. I'd probably even wear Cookie Boy on this show.
Yeah.
On camera.
Yeah. I think you should wear it on Kimmel. Yeah, do it. Be the man you are.
You are.
You are a cookie boy.
Hold on. Hold on a second, man. I'm a lot of things.
Yeah, exactly.
I don't have to be like— I don't— I can—
You are, though. You're— you're— you're confident.
But that doesn't mean I have to declare myself a cake boy.
Don't make that the same thing.
I think they are very similar. Cookie boy and cake boy.
Cookie boy. Cookie boy is— we invented that. That's a boy who loves cookies.
No, it's a girl who loves cookies. It's you. That's what a cookie boy is.
I think it started with Aaron or something. I forget how this started.
You're the original. You're the OC. Original cookie boy. Okay, I'm a lake boy.
That is not a cool shirt. Probably not. I would be so attracted to to a muscly, tall—
Anesthesiologist?
Anesthesiologist wearing a Cookie Boy shirt. That boy is confident, and I like it.
Look, I wear pink and stuff with a lot of confidence. I'm trying to think what boy— yeah, anywho.
You wore that Gucci. That's—
That's wild.
Yeah.
Flamboyant.
It's flamboyant for sure. Absolutely. It's totally flamboyant. And my pink is very feminine.
Yeah. And it's funny, you like that mixed messages.
But would I wear a shirt that says bottom.
I hold—
don't dismiss me so quickly.
I'm not dismissing you. I'm just telling you that's not what Cookie Boy means.
I'm— I don't know that anyone knows what Cookie Boy means.
Including us.
Including us. Most importantly, us. And so I think a lot of people are going to be wondering what that person's declaring about themselves.
And you don't think that about reverse back, which is interesting because that Reverse back could easily be gay anal.
Yeah, I hope you know. I think it's just its proximity to cake boy. All right, and cake boy is just a very known saying. I okay that you did. I know you.
I didn't know it.
I didn't know it either.
Rob didn't know it either, but the internet knew.
I think the millennials don't know it.
They don't know cake boy.
I guess Gen. Gen X will probably not be— Gen X men will probably not be buying it. And boomers.
Unless again, like, if I were a bottom, I would totally wear a shirt that said bottom or power bottom, or— because that's what I am. I can't wear a shirt that says queer on it.
No.
It would be wrong of me. I'm not queer and I can't claim that.
Correct.
And now we're just— we're on this continuum. I can't wear a shirt that says Queer. I can't wear a shirt that says bottom. I shouldn't wear a shirt that says cake boy.
I think you could, now that we know the definition. It doesn't mean— it doesn't mean you're declaring that you're gay when you're not and being a hypocrite. And the other one, what was after queer? Bottom. You could, and that would be interesting for people.
Yeah.
Because maybe you are a bottom even in your heterosexual sex.
Meaning Kristen pegs me.
Or you're on your back and she's on top.
I don't think that would constitute a bottom.
I mean, look, definitions.
Because the top is often on bottom and the bottom's on top. The top is riding. Bottoms usually receive penetration.
Right, right. In the homosexual community.
Yeah, they can receive that penetration on top.
You're still—
So I'm saying I can't really be a bottom in Kristin and I's relationship, whether I'm in time and space on top or bottom. It would have to involve some penetration.
He's technically on top, you're saying?
Yes.
Physically in space.
In the top, on bottom.
But he is a bottom because he's getting penetrated. Yeah.
So we could do a shirt that explains all this, because maybe a lot of people are confused.
No thanks. Um, okay.
Now we could call it top bottom and it's a bottom on top.
Well, our— okay, look, not to make this even more complicated, but the, the masculine shirt is cherry on top, which kind of looks like a butt. So that also could be seen as sexual.
Cherry on top sounds good sexually though. There's also a—
Change it to cherry on bottom.
There's also a cowboy riding a penis on one of them.
Yeah, our shirts are disgusting.
That's straight as hell. A cowboy riding an enormous penis.
Anyone who wants to— oh, I see, you're making a joke.
I'm making a joke.
Oh, wow.
I'm pointing out the hypocrisy.
I see.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I think people who are straight don't want to declare that they're gay, and I think I don't think gay people don't want to declare they're straight, and I don't think men who identify as men want to declare they're women.
I don't think anyone needs to declare anything. It's a cutesy shirt with a little mouse on it.
Yes, yes, yes, it is. It's an adorable shirt. I really like it.
I think the deeper problem is we've decided that cookie boy means something that it doesn't.
Again, I blame cake boy.
Right. I mean, I don't— I don't know what to say. A cookie boy has nothing to do with sexual appetite.
Let me ask you this.
This is—
It has to do with loving cookies. Right.
So what if I made shirts that said Tim Boy?
Tim Boy?
What do you think of? Be honest.
A man named Tim?
Oh, okay.
What, what does it mean?
I would think tomboy.
Oh.
I think, oh, it's some other now version of tomboy, but now we're saying Tim Boy.
Oh no, I'm not thinking that. You're not going there. Gen X.
Okay, okay.
Gen X is really upset about words. I think millennials aren't thinking like this, but Gen Z and COVID Gen, they're definitely not thinking about it.
Do they have their own acronym now?
I think they do.
COVID Gen Z?
I heard that once, but I think it's called maybe Gen Alpha or something.
Oh yeah, something like that. Also, my beef with gens now, I may have already aired Okay. It used to be like Gen X covers from 1968 to 1983 or something. It's like this 20-year window virtually. And there's been 7 gens since Gen X. It's like you entitled— all you entitled millennials wanted your own generation every 4 years. I don't even know what I'm saying. Yeah, but, um, yeah, it's this increased uniqueness where they need their own gen every year they were born.
I know, but I actually think theirs makes more sense because millennials Millennials have such— yeah, we have—
That's a good argument.
My brother's in my gen, that we are not in the same— we shouldn't be in the same gen.
You don't think so?
No, he grew up with internet and phones and stuff. I got one in college or late high school.
You know, it's different. So maybe there's legitimate reason for—
Breaking it up more.
Yeah, 'cause every 2 years the world's completely different.
I think so.
All right. Well, I'm learning a lot.
Well, I guess I sort of have an update here. Sort of.
Okay. This is the matchmaker?
Yeah. So I think I dropped an album that the matchmaker entered my life again.
With an option that you didn't feel sad about.
With an option that wasn't crazy to me. And we texted a little bit to make a date.
You and the candidate?
Yes.
Not the matchmaker?
Correct. And so, but it was very just like logistics. There was like one cute exchange, and then it was on to logistics. Right.
Well, you guys sound both Type A. He's got the funds to get a matchmaker.
I guess so.
Yeah.
So this was Saturday, and he said, I have a really busy week. What about next weekend? And I said, yeah, that should work. And he said, "You're in blank, right?" Los Feliz. And what if I started getting very protective?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And I was like, "Yeah, and you're on the west side." And then he never responded again.
He said he was on the west side.
I said I asked the question, and you're on the west side? Question mark.
Ah.
And that was Saturday.
Okay.
He didn't respond.
Oh my gosh!
And so I was like, "He's been killed." Well, no.
I was like, "What?" happen.
But yeah, okay, whatever, who cares, right? And then on Friday, he texted—
6 days later.
Uh-huh, 6 days later.
7 days.
Yeah, yeah. And he said, hey, sorry this got away from me, um, are you still good for this weekend? And I was like, no.
Yeah, yeah, good. Yeah, yeah, good for you.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, because Absolutely. I—
then I felt like, oh, am I just being like doing a normal— like, this is an out.
Finding a way out.
Finding a way out.
Well, 2 things could be happening.
Yeah.
Some of it could be that. What I like about no is I'm not gonna be playing along with this role as you as the boss, and you can call me in 6 days when you remembered. So I won't, I won't participate in that.
Yeah.
Go see me for 6 days checking in going, And we still good.
Exactly. It's not for me.
That's a no. I would— if a— let's just say if a woman did that to me.
Yeah.
I don't even know if I'd respond to the follow-up in 7 days.
Mm, that's interesting.
But I do like that you said no.
I said— and I, at first, I was, I was like gonna be pretty harsh.
Uh-huh.
Yeah. Um, and then I backed off and I just said— what did I say exactly? Let's see what I said.
You left room for him to apologize.
Kind of. I wanted to see how he would respond.
Yeah.
Um, yeah. I said, you're on the West Side? He said, hey, sorry, I lost track of this. Yeah, I'm on the West Side. A week later.
Yeah, yeah.
Are you still good with tomorrow? I said, hey, no problem. I made plans this weekend, but happy to try to schedule something again. And then he said, oh, okay, bummer. Well, we can try another time. And that was it.
Yeah.
And I said, yeah, for sure. I said, next week nights are pretty open for me other than this. And I didn't hear anything back. So it was interesting because I—
So first of all, that was much nicer than I was expecting, and even nicer than I think he deserves.
That's— yeah.
I might have been really direct. No, you can't ghost me for 6 days and then ask, are we still on tomorrow? That's not for me.
That's—
and then allow him to mount a real apology because he owes you an apology, not, hey, I lost track of this.
Right.
I agree. I agree. And that was my instinct. But then I thought, well, maybe whatever. Like, I don't know him.
Maybe he was in surgery for 6 days straight.
I mean, I was just like, I don't— maybe I should give it another, like, offer up some other option. But—
I'm impressed.
Thank you. Well, for me, I kind of thought, oh, this person is used to that being fine.
Sure. Yeah, that's one. That could also be it. But that would be, like, the least generous version, right?
Well, I think it's kind of generous. It's like, For him, women are happy to just go out with him when he's ready to go out with him. She said he's really hot and tall, so like, I don't know.
All the more reason you got to say absolutely not.
Well, I agree, like, good for you if this has worked out for you in the past, but that is not—
but I would just want it to be a little more clear than it's not that you just made plans.
I know it's a no.
Well, because you can't go 7 days and then check in to see if we're still good for tomorrow.
I know.
That's not how I operate.
Yeah. But then I knew—
And not even hurt feelings needy. Just like, that's a—
I just didn't want to get into that. Right. Then it's like, oh, sorry. Or whatever he's going to— I don't want to really have that interaction with someone I don't really know. Although I did. That was my instinct. And I did ask for advice. And I guess it was— I got bad advice.
Well, I don't think there's good or bad. This is a version.
I don't know. But he didn't respond again. So, like, I'm not seeing him, obviously. And that's 2 strikes.
That's 2 strikes. Yeah, with the matchmaker?
Yeah. Yeah.
It's hard for me to know. I have to really fight being judgmental of someone that would be using a matchmaker.
Well, I am.
No, the man.
Well.
Because, yeah, why do I want to be judgy? I want to say you can't farm out that activity. Like, you can't just pay your way into that. It feels like a call girl service a little bit.
You don't think that about the apps, but I guess you're the one scrolling.
I guess they're just both mutually looking around and hoping to find somebody, I guess. But there's something about farming that out to somebody that feels a little entitled. Like, I'm a busy person and I'm just going to have them go find. I like this, this, and this. I'm acknowledging that I'm trying to fight through that.
Yeah, because I think it's—
I'm sure there's a lot of versions that are not that.
I don't think it's that dissimilar from telling all your friends like, hey, I am single and I want you to keep your eye out for me. This is what I like.
Yes. You know what it feels like if you were at the Four Seasons and you called the concierge and said, I need a date tonight?
Yeah.
Like calling the concierge to get you a date is a little bit the— when I want to be judgmental of it, is what it feels like.
Yeah, I understand that. I understand.
And they don't deserve you, anyone that would call a concierge to get you. Okay, can I just say that?
Yeah.
But again, I can't— I can't— I can imagine Bill Gates, who I worship, going, I need help. I always get help from experts when I don't know what I'm doing. So why wouldn't I go see an expert to help me find love?
Yeah.
When I paint it that way and I make it a real person, then I'm right. I'm sympathetic to it and I'm supportive of it.
But I agree with you. I don't think in all these cases it's not necessarily, I don't know how. I do think a lot of it is like, make this easier for me. But it is hard to date.
Yeah.
So I do think, you know, make this easier for me is a, is a real thing to want and pursue.
Yeah.
I mean, of course my ego also went up when he— even when he said, I'm busy, I was like, bitch, I'm busy too.
Everyone's busy.
Yeah, you're not the only— and I do think, like, I mean, I don't know what he knows about me, right? If he knows my last name, I don't know if he's— I don't know. It's kind of what you've talked about before of like the really, really, really gross part of being so insecure, but also like knowing your worth or like having like a strong ego too.
Yeah.
Zero self-esteem and megalomaniacal thinking. That's me.
I know. But I don't think I'm megalomaniacal about it.
You're not as extreme on either ends of the spectrum.
Right, exactly. Yes, but I, I do think there are moments, and I guess it depends on who I'm interacting with. But in this case, when he, when he says like, I'm so busy with no other question, you know, it's not like, I'm so busy. What do you do? What do you— you know, it's just like, this is, this is my life. I'm busy.
If you can work your way into my life, we've got a deal.
Exactly.
That's what's being triggered for me.
Yes. And then what happens for me, which is equal Yeah. Is you have to work your way into my life. This is not gonna work because I'm you.
Yes. I think I could create the statement that would perfectly sum you up.
Okay. I'm scared.
Indulge me.
Okay.
I'm very unattractive, and I'm a hell of a catch.
Yeah, but—
This is your story about yourself. I think you think you're unattractive, and I think you think you're a hell of a catch. Hell of a catch, which is the thing we're talking about.
No, I don't think— no. Okay, I don't think it's— I, I'm not— I don't think I'm unattractive.
Okay, great. That's better than I was expecting you to say. What?
You think you're ugly?
Is that what you said?
Okay, yes, but I, I do think— I think I'm ugly, but that I— there is something overall.
Yeah, overall.
All right, so now I don't even feel bad. Yours Yours is worse. I'm ugly, but I'm a fucking catch.
Yeah, I guess. Although when you say it out loud, it's like, no, I'm—
if I'm ugly, I can't be caught. By the way, that's kind of what mine is. That's what mine's been since I was like 15. Like, yeah, I'm not much to look at, but I'm a fucking catch.
I hate myself. I need to read an upcoming guest book, but I really don't. I don't hate myself. I mean, that's— I don't. I, I do.
You're a catch, and you know it.
I do know it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
If you could get the first end of that thing addressed, uh, you—
I don't know if it would help me to know that, because I think it's— I actually think— Really?
Yes, because you're also right in your honesty that you're also carrying a lot of baggage of, of, of insecurity.
Yeah, I am.
And you're looking for reasons to save yourself the embarrassment of not being Yes, I am. So that's really happening.
Yeah.
And it's strong. And I think if you felt hot—
Yeah.
And you knew you— I mean, you know, you've got a great career, you know, you're super smart, you know, you're personable, you know, you're good in a crowd, but you know all the other things. You're not, you're not insecure about any of those things.
Yeah, that's true.
So if you just added that I'm hot, I don't think your mind would let you go to a place that you're not going to get picked. Even if something didn't work out, you would go like someone with great self-esteem, right? It wasn't a match. Yeah, it's not that I wasn't picked or I wasn't good enough. It's like the audition where it's like, yeah, you were a better actor than so-and-so, but they're fucking Chinese and I need a Chinese guy.
Yeah, I guess so. I, I— but I, I wonder if I just had like 100% self-esteem, no insecurities, I felt so good Yeah. I don't know that I would ever find some— I mean, I already am never finding someone, so I guess what would be the difference? But—
Yeah, you're in a zero risk.
I guess that's true.
Yeah.
But I think I would still—
And I don't say that to be mean. I say that to be— that's a really good part of your counter-narrative CBT training, which is like, I'm not risking anything. But I think if you had those other components, I think you would, because there's also this kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, which is like you're not actively going out there and spotting someone and making it fucking happen.
Yeah, I'm not.
So you're in the incoming call business, and guess what? You don't love the incoming calls. And then also you didn't select them. And there's all— but if you had those other things, it wouldn't be about like who's gonna knock on your door one day. You're like, every time you saw someone that interested you at all, you'd be like, oh, I'm gonna go make that fucking Fucking happen right now. What's up? What are you doing? Do you like coffee? Do you like bagels? Here's the things I like, and I cook. You would hit them, and if they didn't respond, you wouldn't give a fuck because you're like, I'm hot and I got a great career and I'm everything.
Yeah, I don't do that. I don't know how to do it. I don't know what that's like. Yeah.
And I think most people don't. Yeah.
And I think a lot of people are afraid to go pursue It's scary.
I think my success in life has solely been as I wasn't afraid, or I overcame my fear to go say hi to everyone at the bar that I liked.
Yeah.
I just got in there, and these other guys that they probably would have rather been with just never came up and said hi to them, and they were stuck with me. But I'll take it.
It worked out.
Yeah.
But okay, I have a bad question.
Okay.
Do you think My stomach growls. Also, this is kind of a ding, ding, ding because this is for Allison. Conversations, dating, talk, talking. So this is very relevant, actually. It is, accidentally. You do recognize, right, that like— or am I wrong?
I mean, or am I right? Or am I right?
Do you ever get to the place Arrgh! Yargh!
Arrgh!
Not everyone's physically beautiful. Or am I wrong about that?
I think you're a bit wrong about that. Look, I'm not one that would deny there are things happening on a primitive level, which is like symmetry. These— we know these things are real.
Yes.
We know fertility is somehow deduced by looking at— like, things are happening that I will not be denier of. In fact, I find it annoying when people pretend that some people aren't going to— 98% of people are going to find Brad Pitt attractive.
Exactly. We can acknowledge that's the truth physically, just by looking. No personality.
Right.
But Kristen, like, I think 100% of people will see— just see her face.
Yes. But I can think of— and I'm not going to name them out loud because I don't want it to run the risk of sounding mean.
Yeah.
But there are— I know many women who decided they were hot as fuck and sexy, and they are.
Right.
And a lot— and they have made it in show business, some of them.
Right.
And you don't think—
And you can do that.
But you don't think on face— I mean, you can do— I mean, I think confident, but that doesn't do anything to their— are you— you think it like morphs their face?
It 100% morphs their face.
Yeah.
Because they're carrying themselves like they're hot shit.
Yeah.
You're like, fuck, they know they're hot shit. You then go, what am I missing?
Yeah.
And you go like, oh yeah, her fucking hair is awesome. Yeah. And then that's— oh, what a smile. Yeah. Look at her eyes are this. And you go like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh yeah. But if they walk in like this, you're like, oh God, they've been told they're a mess their whole life. It does. It does.
No, it does. You're right. You're right. But even—
and I just know because I'm speaking, I am the beneficiary I'm very sure of that. That has been my angle for a long, long time. And it hasn't worked all the time. A lot of girls are like, no, buddy, you're not fucking— you're presenting yourself as some 10. You're not. That certainly has happened.
No.
Yes. No, it's happened a bunch of times. But it's also worked a bunch.
I think you potentially like personality more than your average guy.
I think you're right. And I think it weirdly is a sign of my My confidence, which is I don't need a trophy woman. I don't need to be seen with a woman that's hot. Yeah, but I need to be with the coolest woman in the room. Right. For sure. So sure, there will be men who don't prioritize that. And what a blessing you've weeded them out.
Yeah, but I'm like, there's no one left.
No, there are a lot of dudes.
I kind of think there's no one left. It's like the Guys with the— with who, who respect a woman's personality and like is attracted to that and like that, they're gone. They're taken. Like, those people are— for women, that is the most attractive thing.
I think that is overly pessimistic. Okay, well, there's numerous reasons why great people find themselves single all the time.
Annulment.
Annulment's one of them. But their partner didn't grow with them.
Right, right.
That's true.
Whoa. Okay. We're lost.
We are lost indeed. Okay.
Um, but my thing about you shaving your sides has always been about that.
I know, but that's— I know, but it's not me.
You don't know what me— like, well, you can't say because you've filled in what that means from something else you've seen? No, no.
I— and then this is the other swing that I'm talking— I know me.
Yeah, yeah.
I am not unclear about me. Like, I know who I am, and I like that person. So I am not going to be like, I guess maybe I'll change up this whole me in order to be—
Broadcast.
Exactly, to broadcast or be more, like, overt attractive to people. I'm like, no thanks.
See, I think you were assessing that whole suggestion on aesthetic.
Yeah.
And my story about you is actually, you had been a chameleon your whole life. And in this show, I had— we have friends who go, oh my God, I didn't know that side of Monica.
Uh-huh.
You have become more and more yourself.
Yeah, that's true. And just with age, probably.
And you are a chameleon. unique on a level that shaved sides make sense. You're thinking of it in this, like, really ironclad aesthetic and punk rock, but you're missing the point that I'm making.
I know the point you're making.
Actually, I'm one of the most unique people here. I'm one of the most original people here, and I'm different.
I know that.
And this thing is a visual cue that I am.
I know. I know what you're saying. But, but you might not be hearing what I'm saying, which is I get that.
That's not who you are.
I am not someone who— and I like this about me— I am not someone who is like, look at me, I'm so unique, I'm so special. For me, I'm like, you get to know me and you have that— you make your opinion, and hopefully you come to that conclusion. Yeah, but I am not here to— yeah, to like throw that in your face. And I like that about me. I don't— I don't love when people need to do that.
Yeah. You're like, I want people to find out I have a great body. Literally.
Well, that is—
and I want people to find out I am like this very unique person.
Yeah.
I hope everyone is like, you know, willing to be presented with one thing and then have to climb through some layers to find out all this great stuff. That's what I'm saying.
That's why I'm ugly. Like, if you have to get over the hump of my face, then—
Oh my God. I was warned about this, but here I am.
Okay, let's do it.
We have to—
Yeah, we gotta wrap up.
Yeah, we really do.
Suzanne's almost here.
Oh my God.
Okay, great. We are resuming. We had to break to interview, and I have since been out in the rain. Is it obvious?
I see some spittle.
I feel something on my forehead.
Oh yeah, that's true. I put my hair up.
I would hate for Well, if we weren't completely in. Oh, geez. That's a real— yeah. Okay. Wow, wow, wow. Well, the listener won't give a fuck.
Okay, so some facts for Alison.
Okay, great.
I loved this episode. I thought she— it was really interesting. Just the most basic topic possible. We really do take for granted. I've thought about it a few times in conversation.
Yeah, the thing that stuck with me that I really liked is this fallacy of naturalness, that everyone thinks that everything should happen organically, or that means it's not a good fit.
Yes, exactly. And even just like boomerang questions I've noticed from people. Even me, I think about ending on a question. You know, I've just been more aware, which has been interesting.
Oh, I'm such a boomerang questioner. So embarrassing.
Group hierarchies in conversation. That's really fascinating to watch.
Yeah.
Yeah. I loved it. Okay, I'm gonna play a tiny bit of Diet Pepsi, a song by Addison Rae.
Okay.
That comes up in the episode.
She's my kind of gal. Makes me— it makes me rethink Diet Coke.
Yeah, you might need to—
I have to weigh her against my affinity for Bill Gates and Diet Coke.
Oh God, that's a lot to balance.
Yeah. You know what I like about that? That she likes that her boyfriend's got a Costco chain on?
Oh.
That says a lot.
This is like cookie boy.
This is like— I respect her. She's not like trying to have some dude in Gucci. She's like, her man looks good in this Costco chain. She's like a real chick. I'm gonna have a Diet Pepsi. Do you like those things?
Costco chain?
Yeah, I think that's a cool detail of it.
Yeah, I mean—
Okay, go ahead.
No, it's great. But it's exactly what I said about Cookie Boy.
How so? Tell me. Explain the connective tissue.
Confidence.
Cookie Boy.
Yeah.
But— It's exactly the same.
It's the same. Okay. How many people are mirror twins? About 25% of identical twins are mirror twins.
That's not good enough.
You want it 90.
I gotta stop saying it. I thought the majority of twins did this.
I know, but you can still ask because maybe Maybe you'll find one of the 25%. Yeah.
One in every 4 people I ask will say yes.
Exactly. Okay, so we talked about coordination games, game theory for a little bit, which was interesting. And there's some classic ones. Prisoner's dilemma, which we spoke about.
Uh-huh.
The battle of the sexes. Okay, I'm gonna read about that for a second.
Okay.
The game involves 2 players, boy and girl, deciding either going to a football game or going to an opera for their date, which respectively represent boys' and girls' preferred activity, i.e., boy prefers football game and girl prefers opera. This example is a 2-person non-cooperative non-zero-sum— that's called a TNNC— okay, game with opposite payoffs or conflicting preferences.
I don't know why it's zero-sum, because whoever wins is going to win everything and the other person's going to get nothing of what they wanted. That feels like the definition of zero-sum. Okay, We'll keep going.
Because there are 2 Nash equilibria, this case is a pure coordination problem with no possibility of refinement or selection. Thus, the 2 players will try to maximize their own payoff or to sacrifice for the other. And yet non-zero sum for you if you lose, I guess.
Zero sum is chess. You can't kind of win. You can't win halfway, right? You either win or you lose.
Yeah, exactly.
Poker, you could come with $200 and leave with $300.
Right.
Other people could also have 400. Someone could be down. There's varying degrees of success.
Yeah.
But this feels like it's all or nothing. It would be zero-sum.
Oh, this does feel zero-sum, you're saying. I see, I see.
You're either gonna get to go see your thing you wanted or you're not. You're gonna be stuck at the opera.
Right, okay. Thus, the 2 players will try to maximize their own payoff or to sacrifice for the other. And yet the strategy without coordination will lead to 2 outcomes with even worse payoffs for both if they have disagreement on what to do on their date.
Okay, which is all— they'll have to go to a prison cell or something as the third option if they don't agree. It's got to be something worse than the football game for her and the opera for him.
That's all it says.
Okay, that's pretty good. I like it.
Jesus, it has a chart, but I don't get it.
But really quick, yes, if there's a third option that they are penalized with for not agreeing, then yes, it's not zero-sum.
Sure, maybe All of them have that element.
Yeah.
Now there's a matching pennies game.
Ooh.
This game is a 2-person zero-sum game. In order to play this game, both players will each need to be given a fair 2-sided penny. To start the game, both players will each choose to either flip their penny to heads or tails. This action is to be done in secrecy, and there should be no attempt at investigating the choice of the other player.
Let's keep it honest.
After both players have confirmed their decisions, they will simultaneously reveal their choices. This concludes the actions taken by the players to determine the outcome. The win condition for this game is different for both players. For simplicity in explanation, let's denote the players as Player 1 and Player 2. In order for Player 1 to win, the faces of the pennies must match.
Okay.
This means they must be heads against heads.
You gotta be tails or heads.
In order for Player 2 to win, the faces of the pennies must be different.
Oh no.
The payoff/prize of this game is receiving the loser's penny in addition to your own.
Okay.
2 pennies.
Okay. Kind of outdated.
Well, you'd keep playing and playing. Yeah. Looking at this matrix, we can conclude a few basic observations. 1, for all scenarios, there will be a winner and a loser. 2, this is a zero-sum game where the payout to the winner is equal to the loss of the loser.
Like it.
3, there is no pure strategy Nash equilibrium. We didn't— we don't know what that is.
Right.
Okay.
That would be a third. That has to be a third option that's less bad than the, uh, worse outcome and not as good as the ideal outcome.
Non-cooperative games are generally analyzed through the non-cooperative game theory framework, which attempts to predict players' individual strategies and payoffs, and in order to find the Nash equilibria. I love this.
The wordage.
This is so fancy and hard. Oh, I'm gonna, I'm gonna become an expert in game theory.
Oh, I hope you do.
I'm not smart enough for that, but I want to be, so maybe I will. Okay, that's that. Kant's dinner party rules. Conversation structure.
We need to know these if we're gonna host a Kant dinner party.
I know, and I want to. Conversation structure. Dinner conversation should have 3 stages: narration, argumentation, Jesting, lighthearted plays of wit. Code of secrecy. Dinner party conversations should not be discussed with anyone outside of the dinner party.
Ooh.
Purpose. The goal of—
That one's gonna be hard for me. If I hear something great at the dinner party, I will keep the anonymity of the speaker, but I might wanna get the message out.
Yeah. Yeah.
I'm gonna violate that one.
Okay.
I just want you to know upfront.
Not invited. Okay. Purpose. The goal of Kant's dinner parties was to encourage civility and listening to others. Kant believed that participants would hear each Other dinner party etiquette tips: RSVP, arrive on time, be respectful of the host's practices, beliefs, and environment. That's bad for you. You won't eat the gluten bread.
Okay.
Be a good conversationalist.
And I'm gonna smoke cigarettes.
Be a good conversationalist. Bring a gift or something for the party to enjoy.
Oh, okay.
Parties should be limited to 9 people and no fewer than 3 to avoid side conversations.
Yeah, side conversations. I was just with my whole family, and there was some side conversing.
There was, and it was driving you a little nuts. Yeah, it's a little— All right, that's it.
That was everything?
Yeah.
Okay, wonderful.
Bye.
Love you.
Love you.
