Alison Wood Brooks: The Science Behind Great Conversations

Hello and welcome back to Franklin Covey's twice-weekly podcast, On Leadership with Scott Miller. I am your host each week, almost 7 years now, nearly 500 episodes taped, where on Tuesdays and Fridays I have the privilege of releasing great interviews on audio and video with a collection of the world's most amazing thought leaders. Sometimes they arrive as CEOs, founders, entrepreneurs. They are academics, researchers, practitioners, all designed to help make you a better leader. This podcast, of course, sponsored by the FranklinCovey Company, known as the world's most trusted leadership firm and founded nearly 40 years ago in part by the renowned author and researcher Stephen R. Covey, of course, who wrote amongst many books the seminal title, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Can you believe this book has sold, gosh, close to 70 million copies in 50 languages? And there is rarely a guest that doesn't say, I loved that book and it changed my life. I'm privileged to be the host each week, twice weekly on this podcast. And today our guest is an expert on something you do Every minute of every day when you are awake, and that is talk. She is a renowned expert on communication. She is a professor at the Harvard Business School. Her name is Alison Wood Brooks, and she's authored this new book titled just that, Talk, whose tagline reads, the science and conversation and the art of being ourselves. Alison Wood Brooks, welcome to On Leadership.

Thank you so much for having me, Scott. How you doing?

I think you may have matched my energy. I like positive people. I like contagious energy. So I advise our listeners and viewers today to buckle up. Don't grab some coffee because you won't need any. We're going to have a great conversation on something that all of us need to improve, right? How do you have small talk? How do you deliver big talk? How do you create airtime? How do you say the right thing in the right moment? How do you— Generally increase your influence by being more effective at talking. Alison, would you rewind a couple of decades? By the time someone like you has become a professor at the Harvard Business School and published a significant book like this, you've done a few things. So at my invitation, check your humility. You were born where and what happened next and how did you get here today?

I was born in a small town in upstate New York called Canandaigua, New York. It's in the Finger Lakes. Uh, in upstate New York. Very rural, uh, very beautiful. It ruined me for every other place in the world. And, uh, I was born an identical twin, Scott. Uh, maybe more importantly than where I grew up is, is with whom I grew up. And that is an identical copy of myself that I got to sit next to and watch navigate the social world every day of my life. Got to watch a weird version of me having tiny successes, big successes, little failures, big failures. So I just got— I got extra feedback. Being a twin is the best. It's real weird, but it's the best. And then I went to Princeton. I fell in love with studying human beings, and I started studying how we feel. Mostly anxiety around each other, which led me to the Harvard Business School, where I was recruited to teach a course on negotiation. And I realized, even though there are whole fields like communication and social psychology, that very few scholars had gone to the trouble of actually recording people talking to each other and studying it at very large scale. And that's what I started to do. I turned what we learned into a very popular course at Harvard called Talk. And then I realized, boy, not everyone's gonna be able to take this course. I better write it down in a book so everybody can learn what we've learned from this new science of conversation.

Alison, I just realized you and I might have been in the same undergraduate class at Princeton.

Stop it.

What year? I'm kidding. I've never even stepped foot onto Princeton. They would arrest me and kick me out based on my SAT and my GPA. Don't I wish, smarty pants. Let's get into your book, TALK: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves. Now, TALK actually is also an acronym as it relates to the architecture of your book. T is for topics, A is for asking, L is for levity— thank you— and K is for kindness. Let's start. You are a researcher, you are a teacher, you are a speaker, you are a coach. You're clearly an author. What are some of the biggest challenges, the ubiquitous challenges that all of us suffer from, that everybody can kind of take a collective sigh of relief to say, these are the things everybody kind of gets wrong, and we'll delve into a few of them?

Okay. The laundry list of things that we get wrong in conversation is so long that I could not possibly enumerate all of them. If we tried to summarize them in categories, it might be something like, Our emotions get in the way. We all feel anxious. We all do weird things to try and dance around status dynamics. We do all kinds of things. Our brains were meant to wander. They're not actually meant to focus on one person at a time and listen to them. Also, we're egocentric. We focus on our own perspective. We project our own feelings and our own thoughts and our own beliefs on other people. And we think that we're good at perspective-taking, that we're good at understanding what other people are thinking and feeling, and actually we're terrible at it. And so in conversation, it gives us this opportunity to try and learn what other people are thinking and feeling, and we so often fail to take advantage of that, of that opportunity.

So our listeners may or may not like it when I do this. Tough luck. I'm gonna ask for some advice on some of the things that I do, 'cause I think they're fairly common for a lot of people, right? My wife Stephanie and I live in Salt Lake City, and once a month, we host a fairly large dinner party. Some weeks it's 65 people, some weeks it's 18 people. We bring in a talent from the agency that I own and have conversations, usually with a thought leader. Sometimes it's an ambassador or a governor, sometimes it's a political strategist or a person on hospitality. Every week— sorry, every month is a different topic. This past week, we had a senior strategist from a US senator join us. to talk about what's happening in Washington and with civility, how to have reasonable conversations in an era of rage. And we had about 18 people there, a smaller than normal one. And the next day I felt a little uncomfortable, just didn't jive like I wanted to. So I called up a few friends and said, hey, give me some feedback. And they know I'm open to feedback because I've been trained by YouTube and Reddit. And so they tell me— Scott, Scott, in your attempt to make everybody comfortable, You sometimes overtalk. You say, okay, well, you sit here and you sit there and no, we're not gonna say this and we're not gonna go there. And by the time you're done, no one wants to say anything because you've given them so many rules. And they said it to me actually lovingly, Scott, you care so much about making people comfortable, you overtalk. And it was such great advice. Teach me and the millions of people who actually are self-aware and can relate to what I just said, What happens when we're over-talking, maybe well-intended, but it's not helpful? What are some ways to roll that back?

Yeah, I think you have a unique combination of traits, which is you care a lot about other people. You're also a very exuberant person. This I've learned in the last 5 minutes of just talking to you. You have a lot of energy. In a lot of contexts, I suspect you also have high status, which is quite a gift. It's a wonderful thing, but it also opens the possibility of over-talking because you have a lot of expertise. So this is a powder keg of a recipe for people who are exuberant, who are caring, and who sometimes have high status to overtalk.

Okay, you have no idea how closely you nailed that, but please keep going.

It's a good thing. I mean, it's care. All of those things are wonderful. Energy is the best thing in the world. Caring for others, the best thing in the world. And having high status is the best thing in the world.

But when you have too much of it, it becomes toxic.

is likely well-earned after many years of hard work and competence and caring and exuberance. So these are all good things, but the combination of them makes you the kind of person who's at risk for over-dominating a conversation.

Yes.

And so in these moments, so for people who are like you, whether it's because they're extroverted, they're high status, they're chatty, they have a lot of ideas, they have a lot of energy, they feel comfortable, whatever the reasons are, A great skill to work on is, is pulling back, giving people space, making sure that you're really listening to them, even if they're slower talking than you, if they're not as energetic as you, if they have lower status than you. It's really important to do this. And this fostering the skill of pulling back and giving people space is hard. It is like relentlessly hard work for people who are exuberant and have things to say. And you really, really need to work on it. I am in your camp, Scott. I'm with you. And people who feel introverted, shy, anxious, quiet, low status, don't feel this way. This may not be a tool or a skill that they need to work on as much as people who tend to dominate airtime. So our strengths and weaknesses are all over the place depending on who we are.

Is this an intervention? Did my wife email you yesterday? I noticed that this podcast was, Well-timed. Let's talk about the converse. Let's talk about the people who perhaps are a little more shy retiring, according to you, have lower status, or maybe they have higher status, they just don't feel the need to share it like I do in every conversation. What advice would you give them when they're with people like me that steal perhaps the airtime? Any advice you would give to them on how they can participate more fully and more comfortably?

Yes. So much of the book focuses on folks who feel anxious or shy or unsure in moments in conversation. Even people like you, Scott, who are confident and dominant and high status and exuberant, you will have moments when you feel uncertain, when there are moments of awkwardness. You're not sure what to talk about next. You're not sure if that joke you want to tell is going to land.

Mm-hmm.

So the book Focuses on these moments, no matter how frequently they happen for you. And for a lot of people, those moments of awkwardness and uncertainty and lack of control happen relentlessly. You're not alone. It's okay. I will say, in the 2 weeks since the book has been out, one of the most wonderful things I've heard about are from parents who have been co-reading and co-listening to the book together with their teenagers, with their middle schoolers. For exactly this reason. It's so obvious to us when teenagers feel inept at conversation. They're anxious, they're scared, they're not confident. And reading this book is gonna give them lots of concrete strategies to do it better. And that translates for adults as well. Can I share a couple of the strategies with you, Scott?

Well, I can before you do that, in the safety of our counseling session now, I don't associate with any of those tendencies, just so you know. I've never felt any of those. I'm sure there's a diagnosis. Please continue.

I think someone like you, not to make it too personal, but I think that on one hand you risk over-talking, so taking too much airtime. The other risk is you lean on levity a lot. And I think for a lot of— that is not a common problem and it's a great problem to have. But nonetheless, sometimes it can be a little bit overwhelming in terms of getting down to moments of sincerity, getting the balance of gravity and levity. Right, in a conversation. So let me bring us down a little bit. Um, when I'm thinking about people who feel anxious in conversation, who need empowerment, um, starting with T is for topics. One of the most empowering things we've discovered in our research is, is this idea of topic prep. Some people prep topics on their own. They've figured this out in their lives that it's awesome, and they kind of hide it from the world cuz they think it's embarrassing. For those of you who already prep topics, lean into it, talk about it. It's the best thing. For those of you who aren't already doing it, you gotta get into it. Here's the idea. You just spend 30 seconds before every conversation, not just the formal ones, not just work meetings, not just the big, important, hard ones. Literally every conversation in your life. When you know you're gonna call your mom, you know you're gonna see your kid after hockey practice, you know you're gonna see your friend for dinner. I want you to spend at least 30 seconds just thinking about what should we talk about? What happened in their life since the last time I saw them? What is going on in my world that they're gonna be interested to hear about? A little bit of forethought, almost effortless, no time, makes the conversation so much better. You feel less anxious in those moments when you don't know what to talk about. You feel, uh, there's fewer disfluencies. So ums, uh, stutters, long pauses. You find more mutually rewarding topics and the whole thing becomes more efficient and Enjoyable for everybody involved. So spend that time prepping. If you're gonna make a dinner reservation and plan out your outfit, why not think a little bit about what you're gonna talk about once you get there?

Of all the things I don't do well, which are many, I've realized from your book, it's been very helpful to me. I think I actually do that pretty well. I'll be in the shower in the morning time and I will be giving an entire speech. My wife will come in, she stops saying this, who are you talking to? Because she knows I am rehearsing How I think a conversation is going to go, you know, high level or even low level. I do this frequently with our sons, right? So I understand what is my energy, what is my frequency. He left the car this morning at drop-off kind of a curmudgeon. I want to set the tone right. How am I going to set the conversation up for success? I think that's one of the few things I do right. The book is called TALK, and it's an acronym I mentioned: Topics, Asking, Levity, Kindness. Let's just do A couple of those. I'm guessing when you go to dinner on a date or you're out with your wife at Valentine's or whatever it is, do we always know what topic's gonna come up? How do you choose topics and manage them well when you don't know you're going to a dinner where they're gonna have a conversation around customer service? You have no idea who's gonna be there. How do you do that when you're in an uncomfortable, new situation?

Yeah, in some— on some level, a conversation is a recipe for anxiety. The recipe for anxiety is uncertainty, exactly what you're describing. I don't know what people are going to say. I don't know what they're going to talk about. I don't even know what we need to talk about. And lack of control, right? So half the conversation is not controlled by you. This is a very profound and important thing to recognize in your own mind and about the whole enterprise. You only have control over your own Choices. And yet people are gonna be responding to you at every moment of the conversation, giving you a spontaneous new context that you have to respond to that you didn't have control over. Okay? So of course we cannot plan everything. A good conver— conversation is the combination of, uh, forethought and then flexibility in the moment. Uh, so what does it mean to choose good topics and manage them well? It starts by thinking ahead with that topic prep before the conversation. And when you're thinking about what are these topics we should be talking about, It's important to align them with your goals. You, we all have needs and sincere goals and desires for each conversation. Now, sometimes my students will say like, I don't have a goal. I'm just talking to my kid cuz I love 'em. And I'm like, well, yeah, you just said your goal. You wanna spend time with them. You wanna show them that you love them. You wanna learn about their mind. You wanna role model good behavior for them. You wanna be happy, right? Wrapped into love are a lot of sincere desires. When we talk, when we go out on a first date, you gave the example of a first date. There's even more goals. Right? We want to persuade this person to be attracted to us. We maybe want to see them again for a second date, or maybe we just want to figure out if this is the right person that we'd like to continue dating. And so in pursuit of these goals, we should know what we want and be choosing topics that actually help us on our pathway to achieving these goals.

Alison, the A in TALK represents asking. Ask more and better questions. Again, it's kind of counterintuitive to me because my wife will say to me— my wife always sits on the right side of me at restaurants and dinner parties so she can put her left hand on my knee and clench it, which means you've asked 7 questions, let them answer the second one. I actually think it's rooted in my curiosity and interest in others, but I also think I, like most things, my strengths become my weaknesses when I overplay them. Do you find that most people underplay this as a strength or overplay? What has your research shown and how do we ask more, better questions?

We know from lots of data, both from dating conversations, hundreds of thousands of them, and from conflict conversations, so negotiations, hundreds of them, and work meetings, we— I know the answer to this is that most people don't ask enough. So you actually are a rare bird. It is very uncommon for someone to ask too many questions. There's one dataset we have from sales calls, which is a very unpleasant adversarial sort of context where you can see when asking too many questions really becomes too many. And even there, even when you're asking, let's say, 2 to 3 questions per minute, which is a lot, even when you get there, the effects on likability, information exchange, persuasion, all the things we care about, it's Still better than being in the very low bucket of asking too few. So it is much more common to go asking too few questions and leave the conversation and the other person said, oh my God, they didn't ask me anything about myself. That's a very bad scenario, and it's— that's much riskier than asking too many.

My wife and I will play a game, and when I say my wife and I, of course I mean me, and we'll go out to dinner with a couple and we'll get in the car and I'll say, well, they didn't ask me a single question about myself the whole night.

I know.

And to interrupt my pity party, my wife will say, well, how could they? You asked them 74.

Yeah.

And so it's been a good— it's just been a good measure. Thank goodness for Mrs. Miller.

Well, she's right, but she's right. She's right, Scott, but she's also not right because your weakness that you're gonna keep working on is giving people space in your conversations, and you ask a lot of questions. However, people can ask questions back. They can answer and ask a reciprocal question or ask a follow-up question in the same breath. So this argument of like there wasn't space to ask is not actually correct. When we look at, at good conversations, good conversationalists, it's very ping-pongy.

Yeah.

Everybody's asking a lot of questions. Everybody's trying to get deep. Everybody's sharing things about themselves. I think we have a lot of, um, preconceived notions about what balance and, um, uh, and, and the sort of trade-offs between, let's say, breadth and depth, for example.

Yeah.

We think, oh, well, we gotta stay on one topic the whole time to get really deep on it and have a meaningful conversation. Or we're gonna, we're gonna skip across the tops of lots of waves, lots of topics, when in fact you look at the best conversationalists and they achieve both. They're getting really deep on a topic quite quickly, they're learning a lot about their partner, they're sharing a lot about themselves, and as soon as it starts to get boring, they move to a new topic. So you can actually aim to achieve all these things at once.

No pun intended, your book did really speak to me because I'm learning a lot, you know, 56 years old, And after 500 of these episodes almost, I'm learning a lot about my frequency, how am I received, right? I have a massive blind spot in terms of how I am received by other people. I don't fully appreciate that. I'm coming to learn that. But I think between my frequency and my sort of anxious state, it comes across as over-talking, asking too many questions. I'm trying to kind of dovetail a better awareness of my questions and my topics and my levity to make sure that I'm a good conversationalist and a sincere one, and to your point, give space for them to show their interest back to me. Let's talk about levity. That's the L in TALK. Use humor and warmth to keep conversations fizzy and engaging. Riff on that for a few minutes.

Oh my gosh. Okay, I think this is going to resonate with you, Scott, but also with everybody. When we think of a conversation that gets derailed, it's very easy to think of hostility and conflict, anger. It's— that's so often how our conversations go badly, and so obvious, right? It's like loud, and it's right in your face when things get derailed that way. The quieter killer of conversation, and perhaps the more common one, is boredom. It's quiet. It's a problem with disengagement. There's not a lot of yelling. It's just the conversation is quietly dying. It's like a Yeah. It's like a sleeping pill rather than at knifepoint, this death of conversation. So what we love about moments of levity are that they're the antidote for boredom. Any move that keeps things fresh and fizzy and exciting and engaging, that's levity. And it's not just this sort of extra bonus thing that some people are good at and might happen when the stars align. No, this is a core determinant of good conversation and status hierarchies. It's how we determine who's Who's competent here? Who's listening here? Who's able to deliver a joke or a moment of warmth or bring us back down to earth or switch topics when the conversation really needs it? So levity, so powerful.

The K is for kindness, and your description is try to prioritize your partner's conversational needs. I'm laughing because so much of my marriage is coming to My mind right now. Stephanie, my wife of 15 years, my only wife, and my best friend, and my own personal Reddit, who keeps me usually employed and friended in spite of my best intentions to destroy all that, will say to me, you need to talk less. You need to talk softer. You need to talk calmer. Stop telling me what you think I should say.

Mm-hmm.

Because one of my common refrains is, I just wish you would say. And she'd say, oh, I know you do. You tell me 3 times a day you wish I would say this. Talk about the need to prioritize your partners. By the way, that can also be business partners. It could be best friends. It could be your pickleball partners. Conversation. You know, real quickly, I used to live— well, I do— we do live downtown Salt Lake City. Like, you cannot get any closer to the Capitol than our home. And for years, my office was upstairs. And like you, I'm an author and I write for a living. And so I would watch these 2 ladies, probably in their 60s, walk around an elementary school campus. And they would walk around every day at like whatever it was, 3:30, and I would just watch them and the one woman talked the entire time. Like the entire time, every day, 5 days a week for 3 years.

Wow.

And I just, I wanted to find the friend and say, oh my gosh, 'cause I'm sure she would say, I know, she never shuts up. Maybe she wouldn't. Maybe she would say, no, this is our relationship. It works for me. I'm a listener. Partner is defined more broadly than just your spouse or partner. Talk about how we prioritize our partner's conversational needs.

Yeah, in the book, we— I use the word partner to refer to anyone that you're talking to. It's your conversation partner. So this could be a friendship, this could be a romantic partnership, a marriage, it could be with your child, your parent, your colleague, your work bestie, your enemy, your negotiation counterpart, the sales guy at the used car store. And every relationship in your life is just a repeated sequence of conversation, spent time in conversation over time. Even a stranger that you meet today, you could imagine that's the beginning of your sort of relationship line over time. You never know when you might run into that person again in the future, right? So thinking about the conversation dynamics, what are their needs right now in this conversation, and what are they going to need in the If we can push our very egocentric human brains to think about other people's needs even a little bit more than we do naturally, everything is gonna go better. I love your example of the old ladies walking around. Every relationship does kind of fall into a conversational equilibrium where maybe you get in a groove where somebody does most of the talking, or somebody does most of the telling jokes, the other person's laughing all the time. That's totally fine as long as both people feel like their needs are, are being met. And our needs as human beings are incredibly complicated and they're hard to figure out unless we actually talk about it, unless we ask people what they care about, uh, and give each other feedback. Your wife is giving you such a gift. You said earlier, Scott, that you're learning over many episodes of this podcast and over your life, you're learning more about your, your weaknesses. And I was feeling curious.

Yeah.

I'm curious about how. How are you learning? Where are you getting that feedback? One source sounds like your wife, but probably it's leaking out from other sources as well. Part of what makes conversation so hard is that we don't get a lot of feedback about what we're doing well and not well.

Well, I might be unique in this because I do receive a lot of feedback, right? You can't host a podcast like this and not have a lot of feedback in of, again, my many weaknesses, many of which I've talked about today. some of which you've even validated responsibly, graciously. One of my strengths is my courage, and my courage also is very much grounded in asking people for feedback. So after a party, I will call 3 or 4 trusted friends, and they know that I'm not looking for validation. How did that go? How could I be a better host? And they'll tell me straight up, Scott, when you do this, this, and this, this is how it feels. And it's such a gift to me.

Yeah.

And they know that they're safe. They know I'm not going to dispute it or deny it or deflect it. I generally want to make people feel more comfortable, and I can't do that if I have blind spots. And these blind spots can't become non-blind unless I ask about them. So that is something I have learned to do well over time with reps.

Do you think you're good at giving that feedback to other people?

Too good. Most people don't ask it from me because I sometimes lack diplomacy.

Yeah.

And lack graciousness, and I can— I will deliver it the way I want to receive it, which is straightforward and hard. So I have to be much more careful when someone asks me, because I can eviscerate someone verbally if I'm not thoughtful to calibrate it in a way in which they want to receive it, not how I want to receive it.

Exactly right. Exactly right. Life is not a series of one-way speeches. It is a series of conversations. It's very easy to forget that what we're putting out into the world is not like a news article or an op-ed. It's landing on a real human mind. And how it lands and how they hear you and what they understand of what you're saying completely depends on their needs and desires and their mindset. And we don't have control over that. So even if you love getting direct feedback, that you live for that, it makes you so much better, we have to learn how other people like to receive feedback or how much they like to be asked questions or how much levity they enjoy. And if they signal it to us in tiny ways, like are they laughing at our jokes every time or are they sort of unamused, we learn to tone it back, right? So we're picking up on these tiny microexpressions of feedback, but it's often not enough. So we're bound to get it wrong in many, many ways. Your feedback habit of giving direct feedback, it feels like a little bit like a kindness wobble that we— it is actually important if you want people to listen to you to deliver feedback and ideas in a way that they like to receive it.

Well, I take that as a compliment because even Kindness Wobble would be generous to use the word kindness to describe me. Loyal, generous would be words to describe me.

Caring, caring.

I think I'm a caring, caring chap.

Long-term care. Kind of— you're a long-term kindness person.

Often we talk about— That's what I am. I am. Yeah, yeah. You don't call me for validation. You call me to tell you the truth. about your skills, your talents, your relevance, how grounded to reality. If you want a friend that will validate your untetheredness to reality, call someone else. But if you wanna be more successful, be more self-aware, you call Scott Miller. Let's move on.

Love it.

Every agent's worst nightmare is when they ask their author, so tell me who your book is for, and the author says, oh, it's for everyone. Okay, so nonsense, maybe except for Stephen Covey, whose book was for everyone, and I think James Clear, Atomic Habits, they can own that space. But your book comes pretty close. I think your book would be extraordinarily well for anybody who is speaking for a living, anyone who is selling for a living, which of course we all are, we just don't acknowledge it, right? But if you're in sales formally, meaning like you have a sales goal and a commission number, talk about who you hope reads this book and what changes for them.

I think this should be required reading for every person on the earth. I think what you just described is correct. I went and talked at an entrepreneurial startup boot camp at Harvard last week. And I think one of the things, whether you're in sales or entrepreneurship or selling anything or wanting to persuade people, you have to realize that life and work are not a series of pitches where you're just like speaking to people who don't have minds. Life is a series of conversations. And so before you pitch your whatever you're selling, whether it's a company or a service or a product or whatever, where before you pitch it, you gotta learn about that person. You gotta know what they actually care about. You gotta ask them questions. And so I had these entrepreneurs do an exercise where they asked never-ending follow-up questions. Every time they talked, I wanted them to ask a follow-up question to their partner. And learn as much as they could, and they were not allowed to pitch their business while they were doing it. Okay. Then phase 2 is now that you've learned as much as you could about this person, now you can tell them what you're up to. And I don't want you to tell them everything about your startup and who works for it and what you're doing. I want you to tell them exactly what they need to know about it. They might only need to know 2 things. Uh, and that's what you need to, to say to them. Um, So in addition to like obvious business applications for everyone who's trying to sell anything, I also really want kids to read this. I want teenagers to read. I want them to feel savvy and competent and confident in their conversations. I want parents to read it so that they feel better in their conversations with their kids and empowering their children. I want underserved populations to read this so they can figure out how to pull themselves up by their bootstraps by talking to people competently and confidently and and sort of taking over the world. I want executives to read it so that, like you, Scott, they stop dominating the airtime in all of their meetings, so that our organizations don't get lost to seriousness, that they continue to incorporate levity. I want everyone to read this. And I know that's a dissatisfying proposition, but it's true. Everyone has to talk to people to achieve all of their goals. And I've, I've worked on developing this content in this course at Harvard as a conservative test of like what resonates with some of the best people who are already the best communicators in the world. And now it's all locked in this, in this book, Talk, that anybody can read. And that's really exciting to me.

Alison Wood Brooks, saving the world from themselves through the new book, Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves. Thoroughly enjoyed this. My wife thanks you immeasurably for the book and our time today. Wishing you great success.

Thank you so much, Scott. You're amazing. And my shout-out to Stephanie too. Stay strong, Stephanie. You're doing great.

And we'll see you back here for a new conversation on leadership.