The Psychological Trick Every Marketer Needs To Master Communication

Hey, everyone. Welcome to today's show. Today we have a very special guest. We're joined by Charles Duhigg. He wrote Super Communicators, and it is an incredible book about all the ways you can be a better communicator. And he's here to spill the goods. He's giving you the five things you really need to do to transform your communication. And he's doing it perfectly tailored to marketers. He and I went back and forth to talk about how everything in his book applies specifically to marketers. You're not going to want to miss this. Let's get to today's show. Charles, we are here today because you got a new book, Super Communicators. You were very kind to send us a copy. Thank you. We're going to talk about the book, but our audience here is. It's a lot of business professionals. It's a lot of founders, it's a lot of marketers. And so I want to give you the heads up that in addition to talking about some of the lessons of the book, I think you were one of the best people in the world at wrapping an insight with a story. And that's what most marketers are trying to do. They're trying to say, oh, I've got this piece of information I'm trying to get somebody to believe, and how do I actually really get that cross in an emotive way? And one of the things that really struck me when I was reading the book, it's not just that the book was really good and that, like, you framed the underpinnings of communications and what makes people super communicators, but that you did through. Through such vibrant stories.

Oh, thank you. That's really kind of you.

And I thought that was remarkable.

Well, and it was really important. I mean, it is always important to me. Like, there's a story about, you know, a CIA officer trying to recruit overseas spies and a. I love that one trial. Oh, thanks. Me too. I think that's a great story and. And a trial and what happens inside the jury room. And it's interesting because. Well, let me. Let me mention one thing about, like.

Yeah.

One of the core ideas of the book, because I think this helps explain the importance of stories and why stories are so valuable to marketers and to artists. And I think marketers usually are artists. Right. They're creating an art that's. That's with a. With a goal in mind. So my journey to understanding super Communication started when I was having a problem myself, which is this pattern I got into with my wife that. And we've been married for 20 years. But I would come home from work, and I would start complaining about my day. And my wife very practically would say something like, oh, why don't you take your boss out to lunch and you guys can get to know each other. And instead of being able to hear what she was saying, I would get even more upset, right? I would say, like, why aren't you supporting me? You're supposed to be on my side. And she would get upset that I was attacking her for giving me good advice. I think this is something that anyone in a relationship that they.

They.

They know this dynamic. And so I went to researchers. Yeah, go ahead.

No, I was just. I was just gonna add. There's a. There's this. I saw a clip from Ryan. Ryan Reynolds one day, and he was like. He was talking about his marriage. He's like, biggest lesson is I learned I don't always have to be Captain Solution, right? Like, coming in with a solution, which is sometimes, like, the last thing somebody wants to hear.

And it's not only I don't have to be Captain Solution, it's that they want to throw the captain off the boat, right? They do not want that person showing up. And so I went to researchers, and I asked them, like, why is this happening? I'm a professional communicator. I'm a journalist. And they said, well, it's actually good that you came now, because we're living through this golden age of understanding communication, right? Because of advances in neural imaging and data collection. And they said, one of the things that we've learned is that we tend to think of a discussion as being about one thing, right? We're talking about my day, or we're talking about the problem at work, or we're talking about what we're going to do next with our marketing budget. But actually, every single discussion is made up of different kinds of conversations. And those conversations tend to fall into one of three buckets. There's these practical conversations where we're solving problems together or we're making plans, but then there's emotional conversations, and I might tell you how I'm feeling, and I don't want you to solve my feelings. I don't want you to be captain's solution. I want you to empathize. And then there's social conversations, which is about how we relate to each other and to society. And they said, what we've learned is if people aren't having the same kind of conversation at the same moment they have real trouble hearing each other, which, of course, is exactly what was happening. I was coming home and I was having an emotional conversation. My wife was responding with this practical conversation. We were just. We were failing to hear each other. And the reason why I bring this up because I think for marketing and for artists and for storytelling is the thing that's amazing about a story is it is a bundle of all three conversations that tells you what kind of conversation you're in, right? Think about Cinderella, right? Cinderella starts with something that's very emotional. Her father dies. She has to go live with her stepmother and her evil stepsisters, and they're really mean to her. It draws us in by saying, look, I'm not going to. I have no idea why her father died or how her father died or why did she end up with her stepmother and not with, like, someone else, right? She's a grown. She seems like a grown. Almost adult. Like, anyways, she's.

That.

It doesn't go into all those practicalities. It just says, look, we're going to talk about the emotional experience of this. And then the middle of the movie, the. Is essentially this practical discussion, right? How is Cinderella going to get to the ball? Like, the fairy princess shows up, but there's all these, like, practical rules. Like, the pumpkin turns back from a coach into a pumpkin at midnight. And then. And then you get to the end. Throughout it, there's these social aspects, right? Like, what is it like when she's at the ball? How does she interact with her sister, her stepsisters? What a story does is it signals to you very clearly what kind of conversation you're having at this moment. And that makes it very easy for us to hear each other. It also taps into something that we all know is true, which is it is very hard to remember an idea in abstract. And it is very easy to remember a story someone tells you. When I just mentioned Cinderella, every single person listening, they remember Cinderella. They know exactly what I'm talking about when I say evil stepsisters and the coach and the pumpkin, right? The last time you saw that movie or read that book was probably 30 years ago. And yet we all remember it. And I'll bet you if I was to ask you about 10 ideas you learned two years ago, you wouldn't remember eight of them. So what's really important is to take advantage of storytelling and use it in service to communicating an idea, because that's how the idea becomes sticky. And it becomes sticky because we know whether we know it has an emotional aspect and a practical aspect and a social aspect, and that's what makes it lodge in our brain.

Okay, yeah, I want to go a little deeper there because in my research you worked on this book for approximately three years, is that right?

Yeah, yeah, just about. Yeah.

That is a long journey. And we're going to get back to. I want to go back a little bit to like, dedicating three years on anything is a big thing. And we're going to get into that. But when you're working on this and you're, you're finding insights, you're finding these ideas. How do you match stories and ideas together? People have a hard time and they're like, well, do I just find a really good story, figure out an idea that goes with it? What do I actually do?

It's actually the other way around. So I'll tell you how I do this. And it is very, very time consuming, but I think it works, it pays off in the end, which is what I'll do is I'll start calling academics. I usually have some, some topic. Like I want to do a chapter on listening. So I start looking for all the people who have written the most cited papers on listening. And I call them up and I usually ask them some variation of a question that goes like this. You know, I've read everything that you've written and I thought this was interesting, and this is interesting, but I. I'm actually not smart enough to know what's the right question to ask you. Like, what should I be asking you about in order to understand listening better? Because inevitably what they do is they tell me something, they tell me a question that would not have occurred to me. Right? The goal of an interview, it's not to get the person to answer your questions. The goal of an interview is to get the person to start thinking for you, thinking on your behalf, and trying to solve the problem for the audience that you're trying to solve. So what happens is, is they'll give me a bunch of ideas. And usually I find one idea that I think is really, really important. So in, in power, in smart, super computer, super communicators, one of those ideas is, for instance, you have to prove that you're listening, right? And that there's a technique to prove that we're listening, which is known as looping for understanding. So that's the idea. And a technique is that I want to teach you. Then the question becomes, okay, I'm not just going to teach you that idea. And that technique, I need to embed it in a story. So then I start looking for the story. The idea comes before the story. And in order to find the story, I usually have to evaluate and reject 40 to 50 stories, right? So I'm, when I'm talking to the same academics, I'm saying things like, hey, just wondering, like, what's the story you love to tell friends over beers about this, about this thing? Or what's the lecture that you, like, you look forward to giving every year? And oftentimes when they answer that question, they'll, they'll hint, they'll say, like, oh, well, there's this really interesting study that was done involving this, like, weird guy who locked himself in a cave or, you know, and they'll tell me all these, all these little anecdotes. And then also I'll just think to myself, like, okay, I have this idea. So let's take looping for understanding, proving that you're, you're listening. What's an environment where, where that's really important. And as I start looking, I, I found that there was this experiment. I actually found this in some clips that had been written, or maybe someone mentioned it to me. This experiment that had been done where they brought together people who were gun control advocates and gun rights activists.

I wanted to talk to you about this. This is one of my favorite stories from the whole book. Hey, guys, real quick. We've gotten a ton of requests in the comments and they're all about prompts. You all want the prompts we're talking about on that show. We see you, we hear you, and now we are ready to share the goods. Click the link in the description below to access our new AI prompt library. This resource features real AI prompts that Kieran and I have covered on this show. We broke them down by category and templatized them so you can fill in the blanks and make them your own. Now you have the frameworks you need to use AI, analyze ads, create brand campaigns, develop product stories, just to name a few of our favorites. Keep telling us what you need in the comments and we'll see what we can do to whip up more for you in the future. Now back to the show.

It's a great story. And, and so when someone mentioned this, I was like, look like. And they actually said, you know, this was a volatile, this was a volatile combination. But because they taught them ahead of time how to listen to each other, it made a big difference. And so at that point, and what they didn't say is they didn't say, they taught them Looping for understanding, right? As a writer, that's what I have to do is I have to take the thought theory and the ideas, and I have to overlay it over the narrative to explain what's actually happening in that story. But once I had that story, and again, I probably looked at and rejected 35 other stories that could have been in that chapter. Once I have that, now I know how to write the chapter because I know that I'm going to open with this anecdote, right? And all anecdotes should be chronological. There's this saying, I work at the New Yorker now, that you can structure your story however you want as long as you accept that the editor is going to restructure it chronologically, right? What comes first goes first. And so now I have a story. Now I have a story that it was an experiment that was done. People showed up. This is what it looked like when they showed up. This is the first conversation they had. This is the second conversation that they had. I can tell that story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. And the middle is really important. And what I can do is I can overlay the idea and the theory to explain what is happening in the story. And as a result, you will remember the story. You will remember, oh, yeah, some gun rights people showed up and some other gun advocates, and they got along, and then they went online and it all fell apart. You'll remember that story, and that becomes the trigger, the cue to remember the idea. Because the idea on its own won't lodge in your brain, right?

If you had just written a chapter about the idea itself with no story, people would have been like, oh, okay, I guess it's kind of interesting and just kind of moved on and would have never thought about it again.

And we see that all the time. There's a lot of good ideas out there, right? I mean, there's academic papers filled with good ideas, and people will read them and they'll be like, oh, that's interesting. And then they just set it aside. It just does not stick. The thing that makes it sticky is the story. And it can sometimes be the story of an idea, right? Sometimes the story is literally the character in the story is that idea. But it's the beginning and the middle and the end, the progress, the overcoming challenges. That's the thing that we recommend that we remember.

Okay, well, I think that you just gave everybody a masterclass in how you actually frame. No frame ideas, whether it be a new product you're trying to release, whether it be a New methodology. You're trying to get people to adopt a solution. You're trying to put out into the world. It's going to fall flat until it's in a story. And that process of wrapping it in a story is always going to be chronological, but it's also going to take a long time to find the right story. You need to go through and try on a lot of different stories to make sure you have one that fits. And, like, when you're doing that, is there any, like, criteria or anything that, you know that makes a good story when you're kind of doing that research?

Yeah, so there's a couple of things. I mean, and the truth of the matter is that the best way to do this is just to. To practice listening to yourself. Like, to practice listening to. When you get interested in something or when you get excited about something, you're sort of an observer of yourself a little bit. There's a couple of things that, for me, are really important. Number one, there has to be some suspense. There has to be something where we're setting up a goal and you don't actually know what's going to happen at the end of that story. Now, let's take Star wars as an example, right? We know in Star wars that the good guys are going to win. Like, they're called the other side is called the dark side. They're not going to be successful, right? So. But we have this willingness, suspension of disbelief that, like, we're like, well, even though the good guys are probably going to win and I want them to win, how are they going to win? So there's some suspense there, and then there has to be some surprise. The reason why stories are so powerful is because humans love surprise. Surprise, particularly surprise that turns. How we see things on its head are the things that tend to lodge very deeply in our memory. And so what I'm looking for in a story is I'm looking for a beginning, a middle, and an end, some sense of drama. And then I'm looking for something where at the beginning of the story, we don't know the end. Or if we do know the end, we have questions about how we're actually going to get to that end in a realistic way. And then something towards the end that surprises me that is unexpected. Right. It turns out that Luke and Leia are brother and sister. I did not see that coming. It turns out that Darth Vader is Luke's father. Right. I know that the good guys are going to win. I know Darth Vader is Going to be defeated. But the surprises along the way, particularly surprises that turn everything I've believed up until that moment on its head. Like, how can Darth Vader be the bad guy if he's Luke's father? Those are the things that make that story successful.

I know I'm a big mystery person and I always find it like the best storytellers. And mystery is like when they tell you right at the jump who did it, right, who killed the person who robbed the bank, whatever. But you're still hooked the entire time because the understanding of how and why is so compelling.

How's it gonna play out? You know, there's this Columbo or the sort of the remake is the show Poker Face. What's amazing about that. Yeah, what's amazing is Ryan Johnson's amazing.

By the way, a master at what we're talking about right now, the director and writer.

And part of it is because he is in dialogue with you as the audience. Right. I mean, that's the thing, is that they're spending time thinking, okay, what is the audience going to say? Shout at their TV at this point? How do we respond to that? We can't have a face to face conversation, but what we can do is we can have a conversation with you where we're anticipating, wondering, thinking about how you respond or how you react to things, and we're going to respond to your response. And this gets to what a conversation is. The reason why conversations feel so good is that, I mean, first of all, communication is Homo sapiens superpower, Right? The fact that we can communicate is the thing that has set our species apart from every other species, that's let us build families and villages and towns and countries and invent our aircraft carriers. So communication is our superpower. And our brains have evolved to crave communication, to crave connection. And that means a back and forth, that means a dialogue. So the best art, the best marketing, the best conversations you ever have, you feel wonderful afterwards because you feel like you have participated, you have exchanged something. And really good art is not a monologue. Really good marketing is not a monologue. It's a dialogue.

Well, one of the things that you point out in the book that I think some people might be aware of, but most of you probably aren't, is the Harvard Study of Happiness, like one of the longest running studies ever around what makes people happy. And it kind of goes to this point that you're talking about the power of connection and the power of dialogue. Maybe break down what that study found and how you kind of reinforce that in your research.

Yeah, no, it's a great. I love this study. So. So for anyone who's not aware of it, there's this study called the Harvard Study of Adult Development that started over 80 years ago. And what. What the researchers initially wanted to do, and this is pre World war, World War II, is they wanted to follow around thousands of people or follow around a bunch of Harvard students for their entire lives and. And figure out what made people healthy as they got older, what made them happy, and what made them successful. And eventually it was expanded to include thousands and thousands of people because the original participants got married and they had children, and they would study the spouses and children. They also enrolled a group of young people from South Boston as sort of a counterpoint to Harvard students. And they had all these crazy theories, like, again, this is like, way long ago, right? They had these theories like, well, the happiest and most successful and healthiest people all went to Harvard. That is not true. Right? Not true. Or they came. They came from good, prominent families. Also not true, it turns out. But what they found is that as they looked at people who were 65 years old, they found that some of them would live much longer. They were much healthier than their peers, and they were much happier, and they were much more successful. However, they happened to define success. And what they found is the only correlate with. With being happy, healthy, and successful at age 65 is having at least a handful of close relationships at age 45, which often means you've had them for much longer than just, you know, the previous years. And this gets at something that's really fundamental about human psychology and human biology. You know, the. The US Surgeon General has said being lonely is the equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day in terms of its impact on your health.

That's terrifying, by the way, just to, like, totally to pause.

Terrifying. Yeah. When we. And the way that we form these relationships with other people, the way that we have meaningful relationships is usually through conversations. Right. It doesn't mean it has to be a conversation once a week or even once a month. It could be a conversation that you have once a year with someone, but it has to be a real conversation, a conversation where you've set time aside and you feel connected to each other. It's. That connection is the thing that makes us feel like our lives are worth living. It brings us happiness and meaning, and it improves our health. It also brings us more success because we tend to get exposed to opportunities that we would not have seen on our own. And so the most important investment that you can make in your future, in addition to education and working hard, is to develop real relationships with people and then to nurture those relationships over the years. That's the thing that's going to keep you healthy and happy and successful.

Coming off of that, we're coming at a period of time where this book and this research is perfect. Coming off of the pandemic and Covid and a period of time where everybody got really isolated. And I think people who maybe had really good communication skills, they kind of got rusty. And there was probably a group of people who were coming up with their development who just quite frankly, were delayed in acquiring them because of the just facts of life and the isolation we were all going through. If you were giving everyone the cheat sheet to be a better communicator, the ways to manage a conversations, the questions to ask to have a great dialogue, what would you tell us?

So what I would say is it's a great question and. Well, let me ask you something. During the pandemic or today, if you were having a bad day and. And you wanted to call someone who you just know would make you feel better, just talking to them would sort of help.

Yeah.

Do you know who you would call?

Yeah.

Yeah. Who is?

It depends on what it was. Probably my partner or my parents. I have a lifelong best friend. So it's. It's like it's a handful of people, probably.

Yeah. And there's probably different. Different kinds of people you call for different things.

Yes.

But what's interesting is for you, those people are super communicators. And you're probably a super communicator. Back to them. Right. You know what question to ask to help them figure out what's going on. You know the right thing to say. And it's not just in those situations. Sometimes we walk into a meeting and we know exactly how to pitch our idea to win everyone over. We are all super communicators at various moments. But there are some people who can do this consistently. And when I started writing this book, I thought it was because they were really charming or extroverted or because they were.

That's what I would.

With the gift of gab. Yeah. But it's actually exactly the opposite. It turns out that, like, being charming or, or curmudgeonly doesn't really have any impact on whether you're a super communicator. Neither does being an extrovert or introvert. What does make a difference is that the people who can do this consistently. They have recognized that when they talk to your, to their friends, when you talk to your friend or your parents, that there's a set of skills that you're using and that we think of those skills as being unique to this conversation or this relationship. But they're actually skills that we can use with anyone. Right. They're things like asking the right kinds of questions about proving that we're listening, about showing that we want to connect. And so the thing that I would say to folks is both during the pandemic and today, there's almost this self limiting myth that we fall into that communication is hard and the truth is. And that some people are good at it and some people aren't. And the truth is we are all great at communication. Our brains have evolved to be great at communication. And once we recognize the skills, and that's sort of what super communicators does, it talks about these skills. Once we recognize the skills that make us super communicators, then we can start to use them with anyone and they very quickly become habits.

What are those skills? Like you, you, you mentioned throughout the show, you, you need to prove to somebody that you're listening. How do you, how do you actually prove to somebody that you're listening to them?

That's a great question. And, and so I think there's two big skills that it's worth talking about. The first is one of the things that we know about super communicators is that they ask 10 to 20 times as many questions as the average person. They ask a lot of questions. And some of those questions we hardly even register as questions are things like, oh, what'd you say next? Or oh, what'd you think about that? Right. Questions that are kind of designed to draw us into the, to the, to the discussion. But some of the questions are what are known as deep questions. And a deep question is something that asks us about our values or beliefs or experiences. And that can sound a little bit intimidating, but it's actually as easy as, for instance, if you bump into someone and meet them at a party and they say they're a doctor. Instead of saying, oh, where do you practice medicine? Saying, oh, what made you decide to go to medical school? What do you like about being a doctor? Right. When I ask that question. And that's, it's not an overly intrusive question.

Right.

It's not an awkward question. But what I'm really doing is I'm saying, oh, tell me something, tell me something about what matters to you. How you see your motivation and your motivation, your values. That's exactly right. And that's incredibly powerful. So with the first skill is learn to ask more questions, and particularly ask deep questions. Now, the second skill is that on its own is often not enough. Right. Then we get to the proving that we're listening part. Because one of the things that happens is that during casual conversations, but particularly during conflict conversations, when we disagree with someone, when we're talking about something that's tough to discuss, like race or politics, when we just met each other and it feels kind of awkward, there is this sneaking suspicion in the back of everyone's brain that the other person is not listening to them. They are just waiting their turn to speak. Right? We've all experienced that. And so what we have to do is we have to prove that we're listening to the other person. And there's this technique known as looping for understanding. They teach at Stanford and Harvard and a bunch of other places that's very, very effective at this. And it has three parts. The first step is to ask a question, preferably a deep question. Right. The second step is, once that person has answered the question, repeat back in your own words what you heard them say. And what's important here is the. This is not mimicry. This is not me saying the exact same thing you just said. Rather, this is an opportunity for me to prove that I was paying attention and more importantly, to prove that I'm processing what you're saying. Like, I'm seeing what you're really trying to get at. I'm seeing the connections between it. And then the third what you're saying.

Is you really have to interpret what they said and give them your interpretation back to them.

Exactly. And it doesn't have to be the most sophisticated interpretation on earth. Right. But. But it has to be something that shows that you're just kind of processing it. You're thinking about it. And then the third step, and this is the one that we always forget, is ask if you got it right, because one of two things will happen. First of all, you might say, okay, here's what I hear you saying. I hear you saying that, you know, you're voting for your guy and I'm voting for my guy. And the reason you're going to vote for your guy is because you're really worried about security and you feel like. You feel like your kids will be more safe with him in office. Am I getting that right? Do I understand you? One of two things is going to happen. The first thing that's going to happen is that they might say, no, I don't think you understood me. Which is useful, right? Because I might not have heard. The second thing is they might say, yeah, I think you understood me. And what's happening in that moment when I ask if I'm getting it right, is that I am asking for you. I'm asking your permission to acknowledge that I am listening. And there's this thing hardwired into our brain by evolution that when we do that, when we believe someone is listening to us, when we acknowledge that they're listening to us, we become more willing to listen in return. So if I want someone to listen to me, the best thing that I can do is prove that I'm listening to them and get them to acknowledge that I'm listening to them.

It's almost like once you prove that you're listening to them, like the conversation, skepticism, which is kind of what you're describing. Somebody who's just like, this person's just out to tell me their bit and move on to the next person over there. And we all kind of have that by default. Once you loop for understanding, you prove that you're listening, that kind of goes away and then you can actually have a real dialogue.

That's exactly right. And by the way, that was great looping. You. You just proved that you were listening to what I was saying. Right. You summarized what I said. And, and oftentimes when we, when we do that, sometimes we don't have to say, did I get it right? Sometimes we can just ask a follow up question. Sometimes we can just create a silence for the person to say, yes, you got that exactly right. You understand what I'm saying? And what's nice is that our brain is again evolved in such a way that once we understand these skills and we practice them once or twice, they become habits very, very quickly and we start doing them without even having to think about them. And that means that it takes the awkwardness out.

That was on my list for you. You spent three years working on this book. You researched a bunch of stories. You went through so much. What do you actually use in your day to day life? What has changed about how Charles shows up with his family, with. With his friends, with his coworkers?

Yeah, Well, I will say that in fact, this happened just the other night. We were at the dinner table. I have two kids and my wife and we were at the dinner table and I was like monologuing. I was actually monologuing about Dune, the Dune 2 movie. And that was different from the book. And at one point my wife was like, you know, there's this book you might want to read called Super Communicators about how to do this better. So I am certainly not a consistent expert, but what I have found is that after writing this book, I first of all ask more questions. I ask deep questions, I prove that I'm listening. But I also pay a lot more attention to what kind of conversation we're having. Right. I try and figure out, does it seem like this person is coming from an emotional place or a practical place? Are they really asking for my advice or are they just. They want to share how they feel? Or maybe it's a social conversation, they're talking about other people and how they think that they're seen by other people or that the experiences and social identities that are important to them and just being a little bit more aware of what kind of conversation is happening and then thinking to myself, I should match this person or I should invite them to match me. That makes a huge, huge difference. You know, as you mentioned in the book, there's a story about Jim Lawlor, the CIA officer, and he got sent over to Europe in the early 1980s as a brand new hire by the CIA to recruit spies. And he's just terrible at it, right? He's just really, really bad.

So bad.

And it basically, it basically is going to get fired. His bosses tell him, like, look, we. You're just not cut out for this until. Until he meets this one woman from the Mid east.

And.

And instead of trying to cheer her up or convince her of something, he's just very honest with her and he tells her all about his own anxieties and how disappointed he is in himself. And when he does that, she's able to hear him and say, I feel the same way. I want to help you. I think we can help each other. And she becomes one of the best assets in the Middle east over the next 20 years. And when I talked to Jim about that, he's retired now and he went on to actually train other people how to recruit in the CIA. When I talked to him about that, what I said was, okay, so once you figured that out, were you just like, great at it? And he said, no, no, actually, I basically lucked into connecting with this person. And then for the next two years, I thought I knew how to do this. And so I would kind of use this formula. And it didn't work because it wasn't authentic. That. What I learned is like, you have to use you have to be authentic. You have to engage in reciprocal authenticity and reciprocal vulnerability. And so the other thing I would say is that the way that this affected me is to say, is to be gentle with myself and recognize if I have a conversation and it's awkward, or if I have a conversation and it doesn't go as well as I had hoped, that does not mean it's a failure.

Right.

It's an experiment. It's an experiment where I have learned something about how to connect next time. And then I analyze. Maybe I forgot one of my lessons. Maybe I forgot one of these skills. Maybe I just started monologuing about how, like, you know, the spice must flow and what they left out of the movie. But as long as I learn from that experiment, it's not a failure. It's an opportunity to get better.

As somebody who approaches every conversation through the practical lens and not the other two, this is one of the things that I'm trying to work on the most, because I do see it when I get it right, when I meet somebody with emotion, when they need to be met with emotion, it is just a transformational interaction. But I love that you can also be kind on yourself and you're not going to get it right all the time. And it's about reflecting and being like, oh, what should I have done differently? What did I learn from that interaction so I could have a better one next time?

That's exactly right. And it's also to remember that the goal of a conversation is not to convince you that I'm right and you're wrong. And the goal isn't to convince you I'm smart or you should like me. The goal of a conversation is just to understand how you see the world and to talk in such a way that you can understand how I see the world. If we walk away from a conversation and we understand each other a little bit better, even if we still disagree with each other, even if we still think each other are morons, we're actually. That conversation has been a success because when I understand you and you understand me just a little bit, we feel connected to each other. And that connection is the platform that allows us to build a relationship even if we disagree.

So you were just talking to us about what type of conversation you're having. The other thing that I really took away, this goes back to the gun rights versus the other side of that argument story, which I do want you to kind of tell and give people a bit of insight into, is where that conversation happens, because you kind of alluded to, they have this dialogue and then it goes online and it kind of goes a different direction because the conversation's happening in a different place. And you've learned a lot and talk a lot about the book around how to understand where the conversation is happening. And I think if you're a marketer or if you're anybody who's communicating professionally, where that conversation is taking place is a very important variable.

Yeah, absolutely. And so, yeah, so just for folks who haven't read the book, so there's this experiment where they brought together these gun rights advocates and these gun control activists and, and, and these were people who knew each other, right? They'd like been screaming at each other, you know, over at rallies for years. And they bring them together and the goal is not for them to convince each other of anything or even to find common ground. It's just to see if they can have a civil conversation. And so they teach them this technique, the looping for understanding. And, and it, it sort of revolutionizes, transforms how these people talk to each other because it just feels so good to have someone, particularly someone who you feel like does not understand you, prove that they're listening, prove that they're trying to connect with you. And so they have this two day experience in Washington, D.C. and it's really, really powerful. And then everyone goes home and they set up a Facebook group for everyone to continue the conversation. Everyone gets onto the Facebook group and within 45 minutes they're calling each other jackbooted Nazis, right? It all falls apart immediately.

Instantly.

Instantly. And so they're trying to figure out why, and they're trying to figure out how to make it better. And they do make it better. They do make, they do figure out techniques to make those online conversations easier. And we can talk about some of those. But underlying it is this one common idea, which is different channels of communication require different rules. One of my favorite examples of this is telephones. About 100 years ago, when telephones first became popular and widespread, there were all these articles that appeared that said one, no one will ever be able to have a real conversation on the phone because up till then all conversations had happened face to face, right? Or through letters, but mostly face to face. And so there are these writers who said, look, if you can't see the other person, if you can't see their gestures and their facial expressions, you're really not going to be able to have a conversation with them. And what's really interesting is that at the time, they were right. If you look at early transcripts from telephone conversations. People use them like telegrams. They use them to send stock orders or grocery lists, not to have dialogues. But then, of course, by the time you and I and everyone listening was in high school, we could have telephone conversations that lasted seven hours. And they were like the most meaningful conversations.

Fantastic, right?

They were great. They were real conversations. And so the question is, what happened? What changed? The answer is we learned the rules for talking over the telephone versus talking face to face. And in fact, we learned them so well that we're not even aware that we. That we. We've learned them. When you're talking on the phone without, without noticing it, you will over enunciate your words. You will put about 20% more emotion into your voice because you know that the other person can't see you. You know the rules for speaking over a phone so well that you don't even realize that you know those rules. Now let's take this to today, right into the digital age where, where you know, the, the first email was sent, like 30 years ago. There's some forms of communication we have been using for less than a decade. In the contemporary age, there are so many more channels of communication, and each channel has its own rules, right? Sending a text is different from sending an emoji is different from sending an email is different from talking to someone. Sarcasm is a great example of this. If I'm talking to you and I say something sarcastic, I know you can hear the sarcasm in my voice. If I'm typing an email and I say something sarcastic, if I think about it, I'll know that you can't hear the sarcasm. You might take me seriously, you might get upset unless I somehow signal through an emoji or something else that I'm being sarcastic. When this breaks down is when people forget that different channels have different rules and they stop thinking about those rules, right? We're in such a hurry that we treat an email like a text, like a voicemail, like a voice message. When we stop just taking half a second to say, like, okay, look, I'm going to send a text instead of an email. What's the rules about texts? That's when miscommunication occurs. But if we remind ourselves, they can be as robust as every other form of communication.

I think what's hard for people, especially marketers and folks watching the show today, is that they kind of have a story and they kind of want to put it out in the same format across every different channel. And what you're saying is like the Incremental upside of actually taking and recrafting and making it, which, by the way, if you're in the heart of marketing, the heart of a channel, like if you do TikTok or if you do LinkedIn or whatever it may be, you know, you, you. The data will show you that more people engage when you do kind of that native approach. But it still doesn't stop all of us from kind of forgetting that and getting lazy with it. But you're saying, like, this is just fundamental to how humans are. Like, we, we abide by the rules of where we're having that conversation, whether it be digital, whether it be phone, whether it be in person, doesn't really.

Matter where we're impacted by those rules. Right? And the goal is to kind of get to a place where, much like talking on the phone, the rules just, we know the rules without even thinking about them. So if anyone listening has a teenager, I would encourage you to go home. And if you dare, ask your teenagers to show you their texts and to try and find a text that's just a string of emojis and ask them to decipher what those emojis mean, what that message means, and what they'll tell you is that that message is kind of like hieroglyphics. There's like, there's a message they were sending and it's usually an emotional message. Right. Our kids have learned to use emojis as an emotional form of communication. And they don't even think of it as like a set of rules. Like, right. What the thumbs up means and what it really means to them. It's very intuitive. And for those of us who are older, it's less intuitive because we haven't been using it since we were as young as they were and we have less time and we're busy. But you're exactly right that these rules are real and it doesn't take much time or much discipline to remember them. But if we do want our communication to be effective, it behooves us to just spend half a second thinking about what's the rules for this channel of communication? How do I stay within them and still get my message across?

I love that. One other thing, as we're getting towards the end of the show today, I want to talk about something you talk about in the book you've talked about in other interviews is that humans are just really good at sniffing out anytime people are disingenuous, right? Like, they're just when people are being inauthentic. And if you are marketing a product. I think it's one of the core failures of marketers sometimes is that they marketing can come off as very inauthentic, disingenuous, selfish, hey, I just want you to buy my thing. It's not about you at all. How do you avoid being disingenuous?

It's a really good question. So, again, a little bit of this goes back to evolution. In addition to our brains evolving to be really, really good at communication, our brains have evolved with this hair trigger for inauthenticity. And that makes sense when you think about it, because, you know, eons ago, if a stranger came to your village and they pretended to be friendly and they actually weren't, that was really dangerous, right? You're letting down your guard. They could attack you. And so our brains are very, very primed to notice any inauthenticity. And one of my favorite examples of this is an experiment that was done by these two researchers where they. They taped a bunch of friends laughing together, and then they taped strangers laughing together. And they would play for listeners just one second of those clips, just of the laughter. And listeners with like 90% accuracy could tell the difference between the strangers and the friends. They knew exactly who was genuinely laughing together and who wasn't. And it's because of this hair trigger that we have. So the question becomes, so how do we not activate that hair trigger, right? How do we not run a foul? And the truth is that we all know the answer. It's that you have to actually be authentic. Like, if I'm just trying to sell you my cleaner, I need to be honest with you that I'm trying to sell you my cleaner. I shouldn't pretend like I'm trying to sell you, like, a really meaningful experience with your daughter around scrubbing the bathroom, because nobody has that experience. We've all done that because nobody's like, I can't wait to scrub the bathroom with my daughter. This is the most meaningful. Now, on the other hand, if we think about those ads that stand out in our mind as being so effective at selling something, it's usually because it's saying something authentic and real, right? I mean, the famous one is the coke. I'd like to give the world a Coke commercial, right? I mean, you look at that and you think to yourself, I understand what these people are saying. I understand what they're trying to say is we should all come together, and there's this thing we all drink. There's this thing that brings us together, right? When you think about Those tear jerking commercials or when you think about the funny commercials that you see online, they work because they're being authentic to themselves. And that doesn't mean I can't try and sell you something. It means that I have to be authentic in telling you that I am trying to sell you something.

Yeah, you have to admit that you're trying to sell something or you have to tell. What I would say is, you also have to tell the audience the truth that they have, are afraid to tell themselves, the thing that they kind of know or sometimes maybe they'll tell their best friend, but it's not like this publicly talked about thing. And you could, you could say like, no, I know this truth and we are in on this, in this situation together because of it. Right?

Like, that's exactly right.

There's not that many ways to come off really authentic, actually.

Yeah, except for being authentic. Right. To sort of say, like, look, you're feeling this thing and, and like, this is something we usually don't talk about. But as the, the ad creator, as the marketer, I'm feeling it too. And I want you to know you're not alone. Like, this is a real feeling. This is something we all experience. You know, I think about this a lot with like, the truth is that a lot of the, the food products out there, the nutrition products, they are designed to help me feel healthier, to help me believe that I'm taking care of my health, to help me lose weight. And sometimes, sometimes they come on and it's like this ripped guy who's like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna get so buff in 10 minutes. All you have to do. And we all know, like, nobody gets buff in 10 minutes. Right? Like, it's not about like taking one like, supplement in the morning. So the ads that I think are the most meaningful are the ones who are like, look, our product, it cannot make you buff overnight. But, but it will help if you take. But it will help and will help you be disciplined. And taking, taking the supplement in the morning is a reminder to yourself that you're taking care of your body. And hopefully it'll change the other decisions that you're making. When we're authentic about what we are trying to communicate to our audience, that's when I think the piece of marketing becomes real and meaningful and important.

Could not agree more. Okay, to close us out, you spent three years on super communicators. How did you pick it? Like, what I'm trying to get at is picking ideas is very important. And you're somebody who really writes a lot. You write books, you write very in depth articles. I think you're a master of also picking the right thing to focus your time and energy on. How do you do that?

And this was the same thing that I ran into when I wrote the Power of Habit about a decade ago. I go through a lot of ideas that I don't write about, in part because either I think the idea isn't broad enough or the idea is really hard to elucidate. So for a while, I wanted to write about a book about how people found meaning in life. And the problem was I worked. I worked over it with my editor again and again and again. And like, it was just really hard to pin it down. Like. Like, what does meaning in life actually mean? Right. When I wrote the Power of Habit, it's very, very specific what a habit is. Like, everyone knows what a habit is, right? And we feel habits in our own lives. And we could say the habit loop, the cue, routine, reward. Meaning in life is just too ephemeral. Now, communication is also a little bit.

Ephemeral, but at the same time, everybody knows what it is too.

Everyone knows what it is. Everyone does it. And we all know when we've had a great conversation, we know how that feels, right? We know that it feels wonderful. And when we don't have a great conversation and we wanted to, we know that disappointment. And so I spend a lot of time trying to figure out what is something as a. What is a problem that I have in my own life that isn't unique to me? What is a problem that I have that I think all kinds of people have? Yes. And for Power of Habit, that was, if I'm so smart, why is it so hard for me to lose weight and go running in the morning and eat more healthily? And for super communicators, it was, if I'm such a great professional communicator, why do I have such trouble at work and at home connecting with the people who are most important to me? And it takes a long time to find the right idea, to find that. That little kernel that encapsulates something. But the more time you allow yourself to spend looking for it, when you find it, the more pure it is and the better qualified you are to answer it.

And the way you just said it's almost. There's also just a simple distillation in truth to a great idea at the end of the day, right? Where you can. Once you find it, you can say it in a sentence or two, you can say it in 500 pages, or you can say it in a sentence or two. And that's like the power of a really scalable idea.

I totally agree. And I actually think a lot about the TV show Mad Men. So there's this one episode where they're trying to come up with a tagline for a product, and Peggy's complaining about it, and Don says something like, it's going to take forever to figure out what it is. And as soon as we come up with a tagline, everything else will fall into place. And what's interesting is that Mad Men is actually a show about making a TV show, right? Everything that they say about ads in that show is also true about making a TV show. They were talking about their own writers room. And for every single episode that they create, there is one thing that they want to say in that episode. And it might take them forever to figure out what it is they want to say. They have to go through a bunch of drafts, but once you figure it out, everything else falls into place. It's the work leading up to that reveal that's the hard part.

My favorite story was the Red Bull failed. When he was starting, Red Bull was actually volunteered at his friend's agency, advertising agency, to get the creative work for Red Bull done. And they had been working on Red Bull for over two years, and they couldn't come up with a tagline. It was just like, that was the thing. And his friend, who owned this agency, would come to him every day with different options, and he was like, no, no, no. And at one point in the middle of the night, his friend calls him and he says, it gives you wings. And he says, yes, that's it. And then they immediately shipped everything. They launched the brand and becomes, over time, this amazing phenomenon. But it's like it took so long for them. Like you say, those two years went into getting to that right answer, that simple end answer. But once you get there, it unlocks everything.

And by the way, if they had come up with it gives you wings. A week after getting the account, they might not have been able to recognize that it was the right. The rack tagline. Right? They might not have recognized what that tagline, the possibilities of that tagline. The work we do along the way to the solution to the end of the story is the most important work. And to the outside world, it looks like the end of the story happened right away, and then all the work happened afterwards. But it's actually leading up to that that prepares us to do that.

Work. I love that. That's a perfect note to hit on. Charles, I really appreciate giving us your time. Thank you so much for sharing your book with us super communicators. Everybody should go check it out. And thanks for joining us on Marketing against the Granule.

Really appreciate you. Thanks for having me. This was a lot of fun. Thanks, Charles. This data is wrong every freaking time. Have you heard of HubSpot?

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