My First Million

#1 Habit Expert: Why Your To Do List Is Making You Less Productive

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Start with the signal

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Summary

At-a-Glance

  • Verdict: Skim
  • Core thesis: Productivity and influence improve when people replace willpower with deliberately designed habits, attention constraints, and repeatable communication routines.
  • Why it matters: The interview offers practical patterns for prioritization, organizational behavior, conflict resolution, and trust-building that can be encoded into operating systems rather than left to individual judgment.
  • Best use: Use the transcript as a framework library for habit design, one-priority planning, attention triage, and communication playbooks; the full video is too repetitive and wide-ranging to justify watching end to end.

Executive Summary

Charles Duhigg argues that habits are persistent cue-routine-reward pathways, so unwanted behavior is usually easier to change by preserving the cue and reward while substituting a new routine. The host illustrates this by replacing cravings for alcohol with M&Ms and later non-alcoholic beer under medical supervision, then using workout clothes and shoes beside the bed to make exercise automatic. The broader operating lesson is to design environments and systems that make desired behavior the default rather than relying on willpower.

The productivity section challenges conventional to-do lists. Duhigg keeps a long “memory list” of everything he may need to do, but selects no more than three items—and preferably one consequential priority—for the next day. He periodically asks whether the previous hour advanced that priority or merely created the feeling of activity. He also treats attention as a scarce asset: inbound messages do not create obligations, and deleting low-value material can be more productive than preserving an unrealistic backlog.

The other major thread is communication as a trainable set of habits. Duhigg recommends asking questions about values, beliefs, and formative experiences; identifying whether the other person is having a practical, emotional, or social conversation; and matching that mode before trying to move the discussion elsewhere. In conflict, his “looping for understanding” method is to ask a meaningful question, restate the answer in one’s own words with an interpretation, and ask whether the interpretation is correct.

The interview also reframes apparently unproductive work. Duhigg contacted roughly 900 former Apple employees for a reporting project despite only a 3–4% response rate because a few exceptional sources could unlock the story. His argument is that deep, original work often requires tolerating dead ends, uncertain returns, and periods that look inefficient. This is useful, but the source contains substantial duplicated transcript material, promotional digressions, and biographical conversation.

Key Takeaways

  • Claim: An entrenched habit is more reliably changed by substituting its routine than by trying to eliminate the entire habit loop. | Evidence: Duhigg describes every habit as a cue, routine, and reward linked by craving; he cites MIT researcher Dr. Ann Graybiel’s work showing that a maze-running habit can reappear in rats even after years away. The host replaced the urge to drink with M&Ms and later non-alcoholic beer. | Implication: When redesigning human or organizational behavior, preserve the trigger and intended payoff where necessary, but replace the problematic action with a safer default instead of expecting willpower to suppress it. | Caveat: The alcohol example was undertaken with a doctor and temporarily transferred costs into weight gain, so it should not be treated as standalone medical guidance.
  • Claim: Small keystone habits can shape identity and propagate standards beyond the immediate behavior. | Evidence: The host slept in workout clothes and placed shoes beside the bed so waking became an automatic cue to exercise. At his roughly 30-person company, everyone stops at 3 p.m. for ten minutes to clean, which he says has encouraged employees to adopt similar behavior at home. | Implication: Choose recurring rituals that visibly express the operating identity the company wants—such as care, responsiveness, or precision—rather than treating rituals as mere task completion. | Caveat: The examples demonstrate plausible mechanisms and personal results, not proof that the same ritual will generalize to every team.
  • Claim: Attention management requires both fast resolution of worthwhile tasks and permission to ignore low-value inbound requests. | Evidence: Duhigg says delayed difficult emails impose cognitive load and grow into larger mental threats, but he also defaults to deleting articles and messages he knows he will never revisit. His rule is that receiving an email or DM creates an option, not an obligation. | Implication: An effective intake system needs explicit triage states—act now, deliberately defer, delegate, or delete—rather than allowing every inbound item to enter an undifferentiated backlog. | Caveat: Immediate replies can sacrifice thoughtfulness, so he explicitly recommends first deciding whether the item is suitable for an immediate response.
  • Claim: A long to-do list can substitute visible activity for priority thinking; Duhigg separates storage from daily commitment. | Evidence: He maintains a long “memory list,” then chooses the next day’s top item the night before. His active daily list never exceeds three items and ideally contains one major outcome, such as developing the outline for his next book; during the day he checks whether the last hour moved that outcome forward. | Implication: Keep comprehensive commitments in a trusted external system, but expose only a sharply constrained execution queue and review progress against outcomes rather than the number of completed tasks. | Caveat: Duhigg is a writer who intentionally avoids deadlines when possible, so a one-item day is less directly applicable to reactive executive or operational roles.
  • Claim: Strong communicators create connection by asking disproportionately more questions, especially questions that reveal values, beliefs, or formative experiences. | Evidence: Duhigg says consistent super communicators ask 10–20 times as many questions as average people. Instead of asking a doctor which hospital they work at, he recommends asking what made them decide to attend medical school, inviting a story about identity and motivation. | Implication: Discovery, recruiting, management, and customer conversations should include questions about why a choice matters, not merely factual questions about roles, requirements, or features. | Caveat: The transcript does not identify the underlying study or methodology for the 10–20-times figure, and Duhigg stresses that people are not obligated to connect in every interaction.
  • Claim: Communication fails when participants are operating in different conversational modes, even when they appear to be discussing the same subject. | Evidence: Duhigg divides conversations into practical, emotional, and social modes. In his budget example, “I’m anxious because I don’t want layoffs” requires emotional acknowledgment before practical budget analysis; his earlier attempts to give or receive advice failed because one person wanted empathy while the other offered solutions. | Implication: Before offering solutions, diagnose whether the person is asking for action, empathy, or recognition of identity and relationships; explicitly secure alignment before changing modes. | Caveat: The three-mode framework is a simplification, and conversations may shift among modes rather than fitting permanently into one category.
  • Claim: Listening becomes persuasive only when the listener visibly proves understanding. | Evidence: Duhigg’s “looping for understanding” has three steps: ask a preferably deep question, paraphrase and interpret the response rather than mimicking it, and ask whether the interpretation is correct. He says acknowledgment of being heard makes the other person roughly ten times more likely to listen in return through social reciprocity. | Implication: Conflict and decision protocols should require participants to verify the other side’s position before rebutting it, creating an observable test of understanding instead of assuming silent attention is sufficient. | Caveat: No source is provided in the transcript for the approximate ten-times effect, and formulaic paraphrasing can feel manipulative if it is not genuine.

Detailed Brief

Original work often requires high-volume, low-yield exploration

  • Claims: Duhigg argues that apparently wasted effort is a normal input to high-quality reporting and creative work because the valuable lead cannot be identified in advance.; He judges emerging work partly by whether he would voluntarily read it if he encountered it elsewhere, not by whether it appears polished or immediately popular.
  • Evidence: For the New York Times Apple series, he contacted roughly 900 former Apple employees through LinkedIn and received responses from only 3–4%; two or three strong sources were enough to unlock introductions and documents.; He cites a New Yorker article about Chamath Palihapitiya and SPACs that attracted limited readership but met his personal standard because he would have reread it himself.
  • Caveats: Tolerance for low-yield exploration needs a bounded budget; without a stopping rule, “deep work” can become a justification for undirected effort.; Personal fascination is a useful quality filter but does not guarantee market demand.
  • Implications: Research and investment workflows should distinguish uncertain exploration from execution and evaluate the former by information gained or option value, not only immediate output.; High-variance sourcing strategies become rational when one exceptional result can compensate for hundreds of failures.

Constraints and reflective routines support deeper thinking

  • Claims: Duhigg calls the ability to think deeply when stressed, rushed, or overwhelmed the enduring “killer productivity app.”; Artificial constraints can sharpen decisions by forcing prioritization rather than allowing abundant time, capital, or options to diffuse attention.; His writing objective is durability: he wants someone to pick up the work in 20 years and still enjoy it.
  • Evidence: He uses a one-line daily entry in a five-year diary and a detailed verbal review of his workday with his wife as cognitive routines for reflection.; He references David Epstein’s forthcoming book Inside the Box as an argument that fewer resources and deliberate limits can increase creativity and productivity.; He recommends the AI novel Void Star because it imagines machine cognition as meaningfully different from human thought rather than merely anthropomorphizing AI.
  • Caveats: The discussion of Epstein’s book is secondhand and promotional rather than a developed presentation of evidence.; Reflection only creates value when it changes a decision or exposes a repeated pattern; journaling alone does not resolve the underlying problem.
  • Implications: Deliberate limits can be used as search-space controls in product, research, and AI-system design.; Retrospectives should be designed to surface repeated failure patterns and produce a changed rule, not merely document feelings.

Authenticity, vulnerability, and calibrated ambition

  • Claims: Duhigg defines authenticity not as revealing everything, but as sincerely choosing which real part of oneself to expose in a given interaction.; Vulnerability creates connection when someone shares something that could be judged and the other person withholds judgment or reciprocates.; He describes “cultivated anxiety” as balancing confidence in established ability with insecurity about whether the next effort will succeed.
  • Evidence: He interprets Ronald Reagan’s joke about Walter Mondale’s “youth and inexperience” as vulnerability used to disarm concerns about Reagan’s age, while acknowledging that concerns about cognitive decline were legitimate.; He points to Steve Jobs asking Stanford students questions for roughly one-third of a classroom appearance and Bill Clinton asking Duhigg what he personally learned from an article.; Despite more than 20 years of writing and major success, Duhigg says concern that a new approach could fail still pushes him to work harder.
  • Caveats: Communication skill is morally neutral: the examples include political persuasion, and effective emotional alignment does not establish that the underlying claims are true.; Cultivated anxiety can motivate preparation but becomes harmful if it produces chronic exhaustion or prevents completion.
  • Implications: Leaders should separate communication effectiveness from factual accuracy and ethical alignment when evaluating persuasive figures.; Selective, genuine disclosure can build trust without requiring indiscriminate personal exposure.

Notable Concepts & Terms

  • Habit loop: The cue-routine-reward structure that explains why behavior becomes automatic and where an intervention can replace an unwanted routine.
  • Keystone habit: A small recurring behavior that influences other behaviors and reinforces a broader identity or standard.
  • Cognitive routine: A mental habit, such as a daily review or priority check, designed to make deeper thinking available when attention is constrained.
  • Revealed versus stated preferences: Behavior reveals what people actually prioritize more credibly than what they claim to value; repeated organizational rituals therefore shape identity.
  • Matching principle: The requirement to match another person’s practical, emotional, or social conversational mode before expecting mutual understanding.
  • Neural entrainment: Duhigg’s term for the interpersonal synchronization associated with feeling connected, heard, and more willing to trust.
  • Looping for understanding: A conflict-resolution sequence of asking, paraphrasing with interpretation, and checking whether the interpretation is accurate.
  • Cultivated anxiety: A deliberately maintained tension between confidence in one’s capabilities and concern that the next project may fail.

Operator Notes / Why Ken Should Care

  • Audit Ken’s inbound workflows and define which message classes create obligations, which are optional, and which should be automatically archived or deleted.
  • Separate the master commitment store from the daily execution view; cap the latter at one primary outcome plus no more than two secondary items.
  • Add a conversational-mode field—practical, emotional, or social—to meeting-prep or coaching prompts so proposed responses do not jump prematurely to solutions.
  • Require decision memos for contentious issues to include a verified paraphrase of the opposing position before recommendations are accepted.
  • Define explicit exploration budgets and stopping rules for high-variance research so low-yield discovery is protected without becoming open-ended.
  • When designing recurring team rituals, test whether each ritual signals a valuable operating identity; remove rituals that create compliance theater without changing behavior.

Source/Metadata

  • Title: #1 Habit Expert: Why Your To Do List Is Making You Less Productive
  • Transcript words: 20308
  • Duration seconds: 3458
  • Timestamp note: No timestamps or chapters were present. The supplied transcript also contains substantial duplicated passages and repeated closing material.
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Full transcript 11638 words · 90 min read
0:00

SPEAKER_00

All right, Charles, I want to show you something. So in 2014, I wrote about how I lost weight. But previously, I used your book a year before because I had a little bit of a drinking issue. And it was frankly ruining my life. And I read your book and the idea of the habit loop changed my life. And that's why I'm so excited to talk to you. Your book changed my life probably more than any book I've ever read.

0:26

SPEAKER_00

And I have read probably thousands of books. So I'll tell you the story. Yeah, I had an issue with alcohol. And I read your book. And you can correct me if I'm wrong. But the way that I distinctly remember it is that a habit doesn't go away. You just have to change part of the routine and replace it. That's exactly right. One of the ways that people continue being stuck on this treadmill, and this sounds very oversimplified, but it's true in my case, you start craving carbohydrates. The day after you drink, you still crave, because I was drinking 20 beers a day, and I still craved the sugar. And so I actually just made a small habit.

0:48

SPEAKER_00

Every time I wanted to drink alcohol, a beer, I ate a pack of M&Ms. And that sugar replacement actually helped me kick booze. Then I replaced that with non-alcoholic beer. And I got fat along the way, but I was like, I'll get fat and then I'll kick that habit later. [SPEAKER_01] I love this because you're exactly right. [SPEAKER_01] So for folks who aren't familiar with it, the habit loop is what research tells us is that every habit in our life, and about 40 to 45% of what we do every day is a habit. [SPEAKER_01] Every habit has three components. [SPEAKER_01] There's a cue, which is a trigger for the automatic behavior. [SPEAKER_01] And then the routine, right?

1:10

SPEAKER_00

[SPEAKER_01] Picking up the beer and drinking it, or going for a run if you have an exercise habit. [SPEAKER_01] And when we do that, it delivers a reward to us. [SPEAKER_01] Every habit in your life delivers a reward, whether you're aware of it or not. [SPEAKER_01] And over time, our brain begins to associate this cue, this routine, and this reward into a little package that happens almost automatically inside our brain. [SPEAKER_01] And at the core of it, you're exactly right, is this craving.

1:23

SPEAKER_01

And there's a woman named Dr. Anne Graybiel at MIT who's done research on habits. And what she's found is that if you create a habit in, say, a rat's brain for running a maze, and then you remove it from the maze for literally years, and then bring it back and drop it in the maze again, that habit reemerges instantaneously. And it's because this cue, routine, and reward, the neural pathways associated with those three things have gotten thicker and thicker and thicker.

1:33

SPEAKER_01

And so when you start trying to extinguish a habit, when you just say, I'm going to stop drinking, just, I'm going to white-knuckle it and give up cigarettes, because that neural pathway still exists, you still have that craving. You still have that urge. So you're exactly right. The key is, don't try and extinguish the habit. Rather, try and change it. Find a new behavior, eating M&Ms, that corresponds to the old cue, and that delivers something similar to the old reward. [SPEAKER_00] And in doing so, you're overriding that neural pathway inside your brain. [SPEAKER_00] And I did this with the help of a doctor.

1:53

SPEAKER_01

[SPEAKER_00] And I was like, look, the doctor was like, just get fat for a little while. [SPEAKER_00] We'll figure that out later. [SPEAKER_00] So I got fat. [SPEAKER_00] And then that's when I wrote this blog post about how I lost weight. [SPEAKER_00] And the way that I lost weight was very simple. [SPEAKER_00] You had this idea called a keystone habit, which I don't know if you invented that term, but that's amazing because it's a term that everyone uses now. [SPEAKER_00] But basically, my keystone habit was that I would put my running shoes next to my bed, and then I would sleep in my workout gear that morning.

2:13

SPEAKER_01

[SPEAKER_00] So when I woke up, I was in my running gear or in my workout gear, and then when my feet touched the floor, they went into the shoes. Yeah, that's a really smart cue. And yeah, I actually did come up with the phrase keystone habit. [SPEAKER_00] Did you really? [SPEAKER_00] That's awesome, man. Well, my wife is a biologist, and there's this concept of keystone species. And so I was talking through this idea, which exists in the scientific literature, but had never been called this. And we were like, it's a keystone habit. But what I love about what you just said is that there's a writer named David Epstein who's written a bunch of books.

2:40

SPEAKER_01

He will also sleep in his workout clothes. And it's because that cue, when you wake up and you throw your feet out of bed and you're already in your clothes, that cue makes it so easy to take the next step and go out the door, right? Probably at this point when you are running, you're not even thinking about running as you start. You're just on autopilot. You're doing what feels natural. And this is the power of habits, is that we can choose these behaviors that we want to encourage.

2:54

SPEAKER_01

And we can make them not a product of willpower or of white knuckling it, but rather something that happens automatically because there's this part of our brain, the basal ganglia, that exists to make habits. And that's what ultimately makes us successful, is choosing the habits that we want, figuring out how to design them by paying attention to the cues and rewards around them, and then making those behaviors so automatic. You're doing what feels natural. And this is the power of habits,

3:04

SPEAKER_00

[SPEAKER_01] is that we can choose these behaviors [SPEAKER_01] that we want to encourage. [SPEAKER_01] And we can make them not a product of willpower [SPEAKER_01] or of white knuckling it, [SPEAKER_01] but rather something that happens automatically [SPEAKER_01] because there's this part of our brain, [SPEAKER_01] the basal ganglia that exists just to make habits. [SPEAKER_01] And that's what ultimately makes us successful, [SPEAKER_01] is choosing the habits that we want, [SPEAKER_01] figuring out how to design them [SPEAKER_01] by paying attention to the cues and rewards around them, [SPEAKER_01] and then making those behaviors so automatic

3:30

SPEAKER_00

[SPEAKER_01] that you don't have to decide [SPEAKER_01] to go for a run in the morning. [SPEAKER_01] You don't have to decide to skip that beer. [SPEAKER_01] You don't have to decide to sit down [SPEAKER_01] and pound out all those emails [SPEAKER_01] you've been thinking about. [SPEAKER_01] It just happens automatically.

3:48

SPEAKER_01

And as a result, it feels much easier. [SPEAKER_00] My last company, [SPEAKER_00] I think we had 30-ish employees when I sold.

3:54

SPEAKER_00

And then my current company now, we are around that.

3:55

SPEAKER_01

[SPEAKER_00] And both of those stages [SPEAKER_00] are when systems and processes start to really matter. [SPEAKER_00] And there's this phrase in the CEO world, [SPEAKER_00] something like, [SPEAKER_00] you don't rise to your willpower, [SPEAKER_00] you fall to your systems. [SPEAKER_00] Or something like that, [SPEAKER_00] where it's like, [SPEAKER_00] the system is what dictates [SPEAKER_00] whether you're going to be successful or not, [SPEAKER_00] not willpower or how you feel. [SPEAKER_00] And the point being, [SPEAKER_00] at a company, [SPEAKER_00] you have to have systems [SPEAKER_00] because that's what you default to. [SPEAKER_00] And that's what you rely on.

4:29

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. And can I ask you, so when you've thought about the systems you've created, now that you guys are at 30 people and the systems really matter, what's a system that you've developed that you're really proud of? Like an institutional, organizational habit. [SPEAKER_00] I'll give you one really simple example, [SPEAKER_00] but I will say, [SPEAKER_00] people like me, [SPEAKER_00] entrepreneurial people, [SPEAKER_00] we are, [SPEAKER_00] the skill set that is required to start stuff [SPEAKER_00] is the exact opposite, [SPEAKER_00] typically, [SPEAKER_00] of a process creating skill set. Oh, interesting. [SPEAKER_00] I work my ass off

5:13

SPEAKER_01

[SPEAKER_00] at creating and sticking to processes, [SPEAKER_00] but it does not come natural. [SPEAKER_00] But I'll tell you one

5:19

SPEAKER_00

that has made a huge difference. Every day at 3 p.m., the company stops for 10 minutes and we clean. We clean the office because I cannot stand clutter at our office. And what I'm trying to convince my staff, and it's actually working, they're doing this at their homes and everything, which is we're just trying to sweat the small stuff and do the small things really nicely. And it starts with cleaning your bed or making your bed. And so I'm really proud of that. [SPEAKER_01] And I'm sure you're giving everyone [SPEAKER_01] this sense of accomplishment, right? [SPEAKER_01] Cleaning up the clutter [SPEAKER_01] is not that big an accomplishment,

5:53

SPEAKER_00

[SPEAKER_01] but to come together

5:55

SPEAKER_01

and have someone say this is who we are. This is how we prove to ourselves what we stand for. That's enormously rewarding. Yeah. And it actually gets to this other thing that's really interesting about psychology, which is what's known as revealed versus stated preferences.

6:07

SPEAKER_00

[SPEAKER_01] That oftentimes when you ask people, [SPEAKER_01] do you want to exercise every day? [SPEAKER_01] They'll say, yes, I want to exercise every day. [SPEAKER_01] It's really important to me. [SPEAKER_01] But when we look at their behavior, [SPEAKER_01] they exercise twice a week, right? [SPEAKER_01] So the revealed preference [SPEAKER_01] is actually different from the stated preference. [SPEAKER_01] And our brain pays attention to that.

6:21

SPEAKER_01

Our brain actually is skeptical

6:23

SPEAKER_00

[SPEAKER_01] of our stated preferences, [SPEAKER_01] but it pays attention to how we behave [SPEAKER_01] to figure out who we really are. [SPEAKER_01] And so this act of cleaning up [SPEAKER_01] every day at three o'clock, [SPEAKER_01] and I'm sure, [SPEAKER_01] you could go a day without cleaning at three [SPEAKER_01] and the company's not going to fall apart, right? [SPEAKER_01] But it's not about organizing the clutter. [SPEAKER_01] It's about revealing to ourselves, [SPEAKER_01] proving to ourselves [SPEAKER_01] that we are the kinds of people who do this. [SPEAKER_01] We are the kinds of people who we say we are. [SPEAKER_01] That's really powerful. All right.

6:49

SPEAKER_00

So this episode is all about excellence. A while back, I shared my personal framework for building excellence in my own life. And the team at HubSpot turned it

6:56

SPEAKER_01

[SPEAKER_00] into a 30-day operating system [SPEAKER_00] that you can check out right now. [SPEAKER_00] It breaks down the systems [SPEAKER_00] that took me 10 years to figure out [SPEAKER_00] and shows how exactly I use them day to day. [SPEAKER_00] These are systems that genuinely changed my life. [SPEAKER_00] So if you want to build a good life, [SPEAKER_00] scan the QR code [SPEAKER_00] or click the link in the description. [SPEAKER_00] Now let's get back to the show. [SPEAKER_00] How many copies did The Power of Habit sell? Worldwide, it's sold over 10 million now. [SPEAKER_00] So it's- That's crazy. It's been great, yeah.

7:19

SPEAKER_01

And the best part is just getting emails from folks with stories like yours that say, I struggled with drinking for years. And then I finally figured out how to think about the cues and rewards to make this easier to overcome. That's what's really meaningful. [SPEAKER_00] That's crazy, man. [SPEAKER_00] That's a lot of copies. [SPEAKER_00] Did you- [SPEAKER_00] And where were you before? [SPEAKER_00] You were a reporter? Yeah. [SPEAKER_00] So it's- That's crazy. It's been great, yeah.

7:48

SPEAKER_01

And the best part is just getting emails from folks like with stories like yours that say, I struggled with drinking for years. And then I finally figured out how to think about the cues and rewards to make this easier to overcome. That's what's really meaningful. [SPEAKER_00] That's crazy, man. That's a lot of copies. Did you- And where were you before? You were a reporter?

7:53

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. So I was a reporter at the New York Times. I was- And in fact, I continued being a reporter for the New York Times for a number of years after the book came out. Actually, the same year that The Power of Habit came out, I won a Pulitzer Prize for a series I had done at the New York Times. And so 2013 was a crazy year. Was that the Apple series?

7:57

SPEAKER_01

That was the Apple series. Yeah, exactly. The Apple series. And one of the things that I learned, I was talking to Jim Collins, the guy who wrote Good to Great last night on stage because he has a new book out. And he talked about the bewildering fog of success. And that year, 2013, was exactly that for me. On paper, it was the best year of my life. I had a best-selling book. I won a Pulitzer Prize. In reality, it was the hardest year of my life because, when success comes, it can catch you off guard with all of its demands and emotions. And so that was a big year, but also in retrospect, a tough year. And since then, I've written a couple more books, including Super Communicators, which you mentioned. And now I write for the New Yorker magazine.

7:59

SPEAKER_01

[SPEAKER_00] I remember I felt defensive of you when Atomic Habits came out because you were my guy. And I'm friends with James, and I'm sure you are too. But when I saw Atomic Habits come out, I was, but I already read the original. This is... That's very nice of you. The truth is, whatever it takes to get it into people's hands, it feels so good to be able to be the master of your own habits. It feels so good to be the person you want to be. And so whatever it takes to get that empowerment into people's lives, I am all for that.

8:04

SPEAKER_01

[SPEAKER_00] So a lot of our listeners are type A go-getters who are probably a little neurotic at times. And maybe they're like me, where I'm pretty emotional and I react to things fast, which is silly. Is there a way that you have seen a lot of these type A people use the power of habit at work or in their career to be more productive?

8:06

SPEAKER_00

[SPEAKER_01] Yeah. You know, what I hear a lot from executives is them saying, look, I was in this bad pattern that I didn't even recognize was a pattern, which is I knew I had to write an email, right? It was a tough email. I didn't want to deal with a question that the email was asking. I knew I might disappoint someone. And so I would put it off. I would basically be in my inbox. I would say, I'm going to deal with this later. And hours would go by. Days would go by. And what's happening during that period is that there is a cognitive load, a cognitive burden associated with that email going unanswered, right? There's some part of your brain that says, look, you've got this task you need to get done. And it's an unpleasant task. You don't like thinking about it. You shy away from it. But the more you shy away from it, the more it becomes this monster in your head. And sometimes it's the smallest stuff.

8:06

SPEAKER_00

Totally.

8:09

SPEAKER_00

[SPEAKER_01] And what we know is that if you build this habit, that your immediate response is to hit reply and just deal with it right away. The benefits of that are huge, right? Now you might not write the most polished email on the face of the planet, right? You might not have all the time to think it through. So you have to question, is this something I can respond to right away? But when we get it off our plate, what we're doing is we're freeing up our brain to think about other things. Our brain is constantly keeping track of the thousands of things that might be threats or might be opportunities or might be crises. And the more that we clear our brain and give it space to think about the good stuff, the opportunities, the ways to move forward, the new ideas, the more we're empowering ourselves to actually get things done.

8:11

SPEAKER_00

So I have, as we speak, I have 349 unread text messages. Okay. And I have a shitload of voicemails, tons of Twitter and Instagram DMs. The amount of inbound and notifications, and partially because I'm on a podcast that has a lot of listeners, but even if you're not that, the amount of inbound notifications that people get, it's unsustainable. So just because you get an email, does not mean you have to reply, right? Because another habit that's equally important is just to ignore. The fact that somebody sends me an email does not create an obligation on my to-do list to respond to them. What it does is it gives me the option to choose, do I want to respond? And so one of the things that I do, because very similarly, there's just an overwhelming amount of stuff

8:13

SPEAKER_00

So just because you get an email, [SPEAKER_01] we have this instinct to hit reply, [SPEAKER_01] does not mean you have to reply, right? [SPEAKER_01] Because another habit that's equally important [SPEAKER_01] is just to ignore. [SPEAKER_01] The fact that somebody sends me an email, [SPEAKER_01] that does not create an obligation [SPEAKER_01] on my to-do list to respond to them. [SPEAKER_01] What it does is it gives me the option [SPEAKER_01] to choose, [SPEAKER_01] do I want to respond? [SPEAKER_01] And so one of the things that I do,

8:37

SPEAKER_01

because there's just an overwhelming amount of stuff

8:40

SPEAKER_00

[SPEAKER_01] that comes in.

8:41

SPEAKER_01

I try and be really disciplined. And my first habit, my first instinct is just to hit delete. When something comes in, and oftentimes someone will send me a really interesting article or there'll be something I'm thinking, oh man, I should really go back and read that. That's really, I want to save that for later.

8:57

SPEAKER_00

[SPEAKER_01] And instead what I do is I hit delete [SPEAKER_01] because I know I'm never going to go back [SPEAKER_01] and read it, right? [SPEAKER_01] And I don't think that we have to get to inbox zero. [SPEAKER_01] I don't think we have to interact

9:02

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with every single thing that's sent to us. I think what we should have is a habit to graze over it and to forgive ourselves for hitting delete. Because ultimately, the most important choice that we make is where to spend our attention. And if we're making that choice based on the whims of other people, because they send us an email or a DM, then we're not actually making a choice. We're abdicating that responsibility. [SPEAKER_00] It's similar to, I think we had Tim Ferriss on [SPEAKER_00] and people make fun of Tim Ferriss [SPEAKER_00] because they're saying, [SPEAKER_00] dude, you're working more than four hours a week. [SPEAKER_00] You know what I mean?

9:31

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[SPEAKER_00] And so he created [SPEAKER_00] his own little trap. [SPEAKER_00] When you have bad habits in your life, [SPEAKER_00] I have to imagine that people [SPEAKER_00] like your buddies are messing with you. [SPEAKER_00] They're saying, [SPEAKER_00] oh, no, my wife is merciless. [SPEAKER_00] What bad habits do you have still [SPEAKER_00] that you have been unable to break? So here's the thing about habits: in our brain, there's no such thing as a bad habit or a good habit, right? The basal ganglia is this part of our brain that creates habits.

10:08

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[SPEAKER_01] And it actually evolved just to do that. [SPEAKER_01] And every animal on earth [SPEAKER_01] actually has a basal ganglia. [SPEAKER_01] If we couldn't form habits, [SPEAKER_01] we would not evolve [SPEAKER_01] because we would have to spend [SPEAKER_01] too much time thinking about

10:26

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whether we pick up the rock or the apple and take a bite out of it. So habits are really important.

10:42

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[SPEAKER_01] But to our brain, [SPEAKER_01] our brain just says, [SPEAKER_01] look, [SPEAKER_01] if there's a pattern of a cue, [SPEAKER_01] a routine, [SPEAKER_01] and a reward, [SPEAKER_01] I'm going to make that easier [SPEAKER_01] and easier to do. [SPEAKER_01] It doesn't say

11:09

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this is a good habit or this is a bad habit. It's up to us to decide which habits are good and which are bad, which ones we want to encourage and discourage. And so I would say I have lots of bad habits, right? Things that, but they're bad habits that I choose. I like to have once or twice a week, I like to have a cocktail when I come home from work, right? And that in some people's eyes could be a bad habit. But for me, it's just a nice way of signaling to myself that I can relax. Some people might see that as a bad habit, but for me, it speaks to how I feel about what I like about life. So I would say the thing that's happened to me as a product of my research

12:18

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is that I've recognized that you get to choose your habits. And just because other people think they're good or bad, that does not mean that they have to be good or bad for you. The key is to have agency, to have control over your life. And the way we do that is by not just focusing

12:48

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[SPEAKER_01] on the behavior, [SPEAKER_01] but by looking for these cues [SPEAKER_01] and these rewards, [SPEAKER_01] looking for these leverage points [SPEAKER_01] that we can use [SPEAKER_01] to change and become [SPEAKER_01] the person we want to be. And frankly, it's challenging. It's challenging to decide which is the thing.

13:13

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[SPEAKER_00] Yeah. [SPEAKER_00] I think that, [SPEAKER_00] I call myself [SPEAKER_00] a high-functioning person. [SPEAKER_00] I think I have [SPEAKER_00] a lot of horsepower. [SPEAKER_00] and the strength of that [SPEAKER_00] is that I can run [SPEAKER_00] through a wall [SPEAKER_00] and the weakness of that [SPEAKER_00] is that I can run [SPEAKER_00] through a wall [SPEAKER_00] because I have this thing [SPEAKER_00] called a five-year diary [SPEAKER_00] where every year [SPEAKER_00] on the same day, [SPEAKER_00] or every day on a page, [SPEAKER_00] I write how I feel that day [SPEAKER_00] and then the next year, [SPEAKER_00] I see the same page [SPEAKER_00] so I can see

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[SPEAKER_00] how I'm feeling [SPEAKER_00] a year prior. [SPEAKER_00] I was joking with Sean, [SPEAKER_00] but my co-host

13:54

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[SPEAKER_00] is that I can run through a wall and the weakness of that is that I can run through a wall because I have this thing called a five-year diary where every year on the same day, or every day on a page, I write how I feel that day and then the next year, I see the same page so I can see how I'm feeling a year prior. I was joking with Sean, my co-host on this podcast, I was saying, dude, I wrote about this thing in my journal this day last year and I complained about the same problem. I'm thinking, if I'm supposed to be this high-functioning person that changes or adapts and grows, I'm sure not doing it. What the hell? Why can't I change? And so it is interesting that you become a prisoner of habits and what you said was cool because you do want to become this person who can change their life. But the fact is, my opinion is most people don't change and I think it's really because I think it's almost impossible to change.

13:55

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Well, and what I hear in that diary that you mentioned is what's known as a cognitive routine. So, what are you really doing when you write that one line? Because writing one line is not life-changing, right? To sit down and write a one-liner about how you feel about your day. But what you are doing is you're creating a mental habit for yourself. And the most important habits tend to be mental habits. In psychology, they're known as cognitive routines and their job is to allow us to think more deeply when thinking deeply is hardest, right? When we're feeling stressed out or when we're feeling overwhelmed or when we don't have that much time, we only have time to write one line in a little diary. What that cognitive routine does, that mental habit, is it causes you to pause and look at the previous year. And the fact that you say to yourself, okay, look, I'm stuck in the same rut that I was a year ago. And actually, I didn't even really recognize that. Or if I did recognize it, I just wasn't paying attention to it. But this is something that's forcing me to think about this rut, to ask myself, why am I in this rut? How do I get out of this rut? Do I really care about this rut that much? Those cognitive routines, these mental habits that we build for ourselves are really powerful because they allow us to do the thing that you just mentioned, which is make decisions without being exhausted. And one of the most powerful is when I come home from work, I describe my day in excruciating detail to my wife. And she does not really care about my day. She doesn't want to know all the specifics of the meeting I was sitting through. But I'm not really doing it for her. I'm doing it for me. This is my cognitive routine to help me review my day and figure out what I did well and what I did poorly. And building those cognitive routines, those mental habits, that is how we end up becoming successful. Because it's those small little habits that determine if we're using our attention wisely or not.

13:58

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[SPEAKER_00] You have this book called Super Communicators. I haven't read it yet, but I read a great article on it. And when I was younger, I read this book called How to Win Friends and Influence People. [SPEAKER_00] Yeah, Dale Carnegie.

14:02

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[SPEAKER_00] Yeah, it changed my life. I'm not naturally a very good conversationalist or a good people person. My family calls me a little neuro spicy. I had to learn a little bit. I had to read a few playbooks on how to have normal interactions. And so Dale Carnegie changed my life. And there was a handful of takeaways from that book. And one of the takeaways was basically if you have a conversation with someone, if you let them do most of the talking and you ask them all about their lives and themselves, they're going to think that it's the greatest conversation they've ever had.

14:04

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[SPEAKER_00] on how to have normal interactions. And so Dale Carnegie changed my life. And there was a handful of takeaways from that book. And one of the books was if you have a conversation with someone, if you let them do most of all the talking and you ask them all about their lives and themselves, they're going to think that it's the greatest conversation they've ever had. Yeah.

14:09

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And your job, your book, Super Communicators, it did a good... I believe the premise of the book is if you ask, not only if you... But you took it a step further. If you ask more questions, but also ask these... You give some questions, but you give a framework. If you ask different types of questions that fall under a bucket that I want you to tell me, you will get people to open up more. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly right.

14:12

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So one of the things that we know is, first of all, we are all Super Communicators at one time or another, right? We all know the right thing to say to our friends to make them feel better. Or sometimes you walk into a meeting and you just know exactly what to say to get everyone on your side. But there are some people who are consistent Super Communicators, people who can seem to connect with anyone, anytime. And the difference between them and everyone else is not this inborn capacity. It's not that they are born with a gift of gab. It's that they think about communication a little bit more and they recognize that communication is just a set of very simple skills that if you practice them, they become habits. And when you start practicing them and using them, you can treat everyone like your best friend and they all respond the same way. And one of those skills is asking questions. Consistent Super Communicators ask 10 to 20 times as many questions as the average person. And some of those questions are just invitations. Like, what'd you think about that? Or did you see that movie? Like, it's invitations into the conversation. But some of them are what are known within psychology as deep questions. And a deep question is something that asks me about my values or my beliefs or my experiences. And that can sound a little bit intimidating, but it's as simple as if you meet someone who's a doctor, instead of saying, oh, what hospital do you work at? Asking them, oh, what made you decide to go to medical school? Right? That second question, that second question is something that invites them to tell you who they really are. They're going to tell you about their dad getting sick and seeing the doctors help him or that they want to be a healer. They want to help their community. Deep questions are the things that allow us to really connect with other people because they invite others to tell us who they are. And then the best part is it's very natural to answer our own deep question herself. To say, oh, you became a doctor because you saw your uncle get sick. That's really interesting. I became a lawyer because I had a brother-in-law who got arrested when I was a kid and I thought that was really wrong. Now we're having a conversation about who we are. We're connecting with each other. And that means that we're going to trust each other more. We're going to like each other more. And more importantly, we're going to be able to hear each other much more accurately.

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[SPEAKER_00] This sounds like such a dumb question, but why do I care? Like, why do I want someone to think that I'm a super connector? Like, why do I want them to open up to me? Yeah, absolutely. So, okay. So there's a couple of ways. And first of all, you don't have to communicate with everyone, right? Sometimes you're going to get in the Uber and you just want to check your phone in the back of the Uber. You don't want to have a conversation with the driver. That's okay. You don't have to have any conversation you don't want to have. But there are times that we do want to connect

14:18

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So there's a couple of ways. And first of all, you don't have to communicate with everyone, right? Sometimes you're going to get in the Uber and you just want to check your phone in the back of the Uber. You don't want to have a conversation with the driver. That's okay. You don't have to have any conversation you don't want to have. But there are times that we do want to connect with other people. And the reasons why is because we are a pro-social species. The way that our brains have evolved is to push us to connect with other people because connecting with other people over time has been the most successful strategy in building things, building communities, building families, building products. And when we connect with someone else, when we communicate with them, even if we disagree with them about some pretty fundamental things, there is this almost subconscious thing that happens within our brain that we're powerless against, which is, if I feel connected to you, if I feel like you're listening to me and I'm listening to you and that we're actually connected somehow and within neuroscience this is known as neural entrainment, in that moment we trust each other more. And if you think about it, trust is at the core of pro-sociality. I can't police you all the time to see if you're a threat or if you're being genuine. All I can do is try and figure out whether I can trust you enough to let you live in the hut next to me without fear that you're going to come in and kill me. And the way I figure out whether I should trust you or not and like you and want to work with you is by connecting with you. Because if that connection feels genuine, then it doesn't mean I'm going to give you my life savings, but it means that for the time being, I've said, this person is at least trustworthy enough that I know who they are. They know who I am. I have a hard time seeing them betraying me. And so as a result, we can live side by side peacefully. And if you think about it in business, trust is everything, right? The reason you're successful in business, the reason you're successful in life, the reason you're successful in romantic relationships is because you figure out ways to connect with other people that are not just transactional, but are real.

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[SPEAKER_00] That's fascinating. So I can ask questions that get value-based. What else can I do?

14:22

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So the first thing is ask more questions, right? Ask these deep questions. The second thing is that you need to be having the same kind of conversation as the person you're talking to and explain this. I'll give you an example. So when I started writing super communicators, one of the reasons why was because I had fallen into this bad pattern where I'd come home from work and I'd start complaining about my day and tell my wife, my coworkers don't appreciate me and my boss doesn't realize what a genius I am. And she would give me some good advice. She would say something like, why don't you take your boss out to lunch and you guys can get to know each other a little bit better. But instead of being able to hear her advice, I would get even more upset and I would start saying, you should be outraged on my behalf. You should be on my side. And I couldn't figure out why there was this tension between us and so I went to these researchers and they said, well, the main thing that's happening here is when you're having a discussion, you think you know what that discussion is about, right? You're talking about your day or next year's budget. But actually, if we look inside your brain, what we see is there's a bunch of different kinds of conversations all happening at the same time.

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[SPEAKER_01] And so I went to these researchers and they said, well, the main thing that's happening here is when you're having a discussion, you think you know what that discussion is about, right? You're talking about your day or next year's budget. But actually, if we look inside your brain, what we see is there's a bunch of different kinds of conversations all happening at the same time. And in general, these conversations tend to fall into one of three buckets. There's these practical conversations where we're making plans together or solving problems. But then there's emotional conversations where I tell you what I'm feeling and I don't want you to solve my feelings. I want you to empathize. And then there's social conversations, which is about how we relate to each other and how we relate to other people, the identities that are important to us. And they said, what we've discovered is all three of these conversations are equally important and all three of them will probably happen during a discussion. But if you and the person you are talking to are not having the same kind of conversation at the same moment, you cannot fully hear each other. You definitely won't feel connected to each other. Your trust in each other will not go up. So the key is, this is the second big skill in addition to asking more questions that super communicators, consistent super communicators have, is pay attention to what kind of conversation is happening. Does this feel practical? Does it feel emotional? Does it feel social? What kind of words is the other person using? And then match them. What's known within psychology is the matching principle. If you're talking about next year's budget and you say something like, look, I'm really anxious that we get this right because I don't want to lay people off. As a super communicator, in my head, I should be hearing, oh, you're actually having an emotional conversation right now. We're not talking about the budget. We're talking about how you feel. And I need to empathize with that before we can start talking about practical things. I need to say to you, I understand exactly what you're feeling. I feel exactly the same way. I want you to know my number one goal here is that we don't have any layoffs, that we get to protect our people. So with that in mind, can we talk about the budget, how to actually get that done? In other words, with your permission, can we move from an emotional to a practical conversation together? When I do that, what I'm doing is I'm signaling to you that I'm listening to you, I understand your mindset, and we are getting aligned. We are getting neurally entrained. We are getting in sync, which means that we're going to hear each other much better, and we're going to trust each other more.

14:26

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I'm obsessed with history. I love history, and I've read biographies on a lot of the presidents. And three presidents that are very different, and are very effective communicators are George Washington, Bill Clinton, and Donald Trump. [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. They communicate drastically differently, but I would argue they're all very effective. [SPEAKER_01] I absolutely agree. George Washington was significantly more stoic and mysterious and spoke seldom, and when he did speak, you listened no matter what, and he had this regal status. Bill Clinton was very charming, and then Donald Trump, his shtick is more crude, riffing with you, we're boys.

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[SPEAKER_01] Oh, absolutely. In fact, as a reporter, I've been to a lot of Trump rallies, and whether you like Donald Trump or whether you intensely dislike Donald Trump, going to a rally is well worth the time because what you see is he is a super communicator, and he uses this exact same thing that I just talked about. He leans, he proves he's listening to the crowd by leaning into the type of conversation

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[SPEAKER_01] As a reporter, I've been to a lot of Trump rallies, and whether you like Donald Trump or whether you intensely dislike Donald Trump, going to a rally is well worth the time because what you see is he is a super communicator, and he uses this exact same thing that I just talked about. He leans, he proves he's listening to the crowd by leaning into the type of conversation they want to have. So on a stage, Donald Trump will say something, and if the crowd starts applauding and reacting to it, he'll say it again, and then he'll just start riffing on that. That's why from a stage he often says things that in retrospect look a little crazy is because he's feeding off the crowd. The crowd is telling him if he gets up on stage and he says something emotional, like I worry about the future of the nation because we're being overrun by immigrants, and the crowd just goes nuts, he'll lean into that and he recognizes this is an emotional conversation, right? This is not about the practicalities of immigration reform. This is people feeling like they're lost at home, like they're losing ground, and he'll lean into that. Now, I've also met with Donald Trump one-on-one in settings where he's meeting with reporters. The dude asks questions constantly, right? And a lot of the questions are about him. He's like, what do you think? Why do you think these people hate me so much? Or what do you think about this thing that I did? But the fact of the matter is instead of giving little speeches, he's asking questions. He's drawing you into the conversation. The truth of the matter is that we are all really good at communication, right? Because we're a pro-social species, our brain has evolved to be really good at communication. And the people who are best at communication, it is not because they were born that way. It's because they think about communication, right? Bill Clinton's a great example. If you ask Bill Clinton, were you always a good communicator? He says no. He says that when he was a kid, he actually had trouble making friends with other kids. He didn't know how to talk to them. But he said that in high school, he really studied how kids talked to each other. He felt this is something. And because his parents got divorced, he had to be the peacemaker between them. He trained himself to think just a little bit more about communication. And that's what makes him a great communicator. And all of us can do that.

14:37

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I'm not a Donald Trump supporter, but I am intoxicated. I think he's hilarious. If I have to remove the fact that I don't agree with what he just said, but I can also acknowledge I'm like, that's so funny. Were you intoxicated when you met him?

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[SPEAKER_01] No, I was not intoxicated when I met him. And I would also say I'm not a Donald Trump fan. I, as a particularly as a reporter, I try and not be a fan of anyone that's running for office because you have to be skeptical. But I will say this about Trump is that he comes off as being very authentic. And this is another thing that super communicators do really well, right? You believe that you're seeing the real version of them. And the way that we actually create a sense of authenticity, this has been studied a lot, is that we'll often do something that's a little bit vulnerable. And we tend to misunderstand what this word vulnerability means. We think it's crying on each other's shoulders or something like that. Actually, vulnerability is a very specific thing that happens inside our brain. Vulnerability is a neural cascade that occurs when I say something to you that you could judge. And if in that moment you withhold judgment, and more importantly, if you share something about yourself that I could judge in return, then we will feel closer to each other. So think about when Donald Trump's on that stage, that weird dance he does, right?

14:42

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Yeah. [SPEAKER_01] That, it's not an attractive dance, right? He's not a graceful man. [SPEAKER_01] And if in that moment you withhold judgment, and more importantly, if you share something about yourself that I could judge in return, then we will feel closer to each other. So think about when Donald Trump's on that stage—that weird dance he does, right? [SPEAKER_01] Yeah.

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[SPEAKER_01] That, it's not an attractive dance, right? He's not a graceful man on his two feet. And yet, it's incredibly endearing because it's vulnerable. Now, it's not vulnerable in a way that makes him open to attack. It's vulnerable in that he's sharing something that you could judge. You could say, that's the dumbest dance I've ever seen in my entire life. But when you withhold that judgment, you actually feel closer to him. And so one of the things that he does that all great leaders do is that they reveal things about themselves. They allow these moments of vulnerability when I'm going to say something that I know you could judge. I'm going to make it available to you for your judgment. Because in that moment, you will believe I am authentic. You will believe you're seeing the real me. And that's really, really powerful.

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[SPEAKER_00] I think that word—I hate the word authenticity. I hate that word. [SPEAKER_00] Yes. [SPEAKER_00] And I'll explain why. I think it's bullshit. I actually don't think you should be authentic. Because the fact is, we're all performing. And I want to convince this girl to go on a date with me. I want to convince this employee to work at my company. I want to convince someone to do everything. Saying to be authentic, that's like saying someone just be yourself and they'll like you. No, don't be yourself. Change yourself so you are a better person and then people will like you.

14:58

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So I'm going to push back a little bit because I actually think what you just said is authenticity. I don't think authenticity means it's all an act. I don't. I think authenticity is choosing, not only which act, choosing which part of myself I want to expose right now. Right? Like the truth of the matter is, in this conversation, you could have spent this conversation just telling me how impressive you are, like all of your successes. But instead, the act that you choose, the aspect of yourself you choose to share with me is like a really curious guy who doesn't have all the answers and recognizes that luck is part of it and the hard work is part of it and wants to understand how to get better. I don't think that's an inauthentic display of who you are. I think it's you authentically choosing which part of yourself to share with the world. And I think that I understand the skepticism towards authenticity. The word has become such a bugaboo, meaning so many different things. But what I think for me it means is genuinely wanting to connect with another person and wanting to connect with them on both their terms and my terms and saying, look, this is who I am. I want you to know who I am, the real me, at least to some degree. And I might, that doesn't mean I'm going to necessarily tell you all about my childhood trauma or my drinking problems, but I want you to be able to know who I am on some level, the real me. And I want to know the real you. And it's that act of actually saying, I want to be authentic or I want to be vulnerable that creates the connection. It's not the authenticity itself. It's the act of saying, I'm willing to be vulnerable with you because I want to connect with you. That is the first and most important step for us actually feeling connected to each other.

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[SPEAKER_00] Who's a super communicator that's a famous person that I should go and study? Oh gosh, that's a really good question. There's so many of them. Honestly, one of them is Steve Jobs. And we don't think of Steve Jobs with you because I want to connect with you. That is the first and most important step for us actually feeling connected to each other. [SPEAKER_00] Who's a super communicator that's a famous person that I should go and study?

15:05

SPEAKER_01

Oh gosh, that's a really good question. There's so many of them. Honestly, one of them is Steve Jobs. And we don't think of Steve Jobs as a super communicator, right? Everything about Steve Jobs is he was such a jerk to his employees and he would create this reality distortion field. But if you go and you watch interviews with Steve Jobs, what you see is you see him constantly, authentically sharing who he is and then asking questions and proving to the other person that he's listening to them. Right? So there's a number of speeches he gave at Stanford Graduate School of Business where the clips that get put on social media are the clips of Steve Jobs talking about doing LSD or his vision. But if you watch the entire time that he was in that classroom, what you see is that Steve Jobs, one of the most famous guys on earth, he spends about a third of the time asking the students questions. What do you think about that? Why did you make that decision? What was your experience when you picked up this device? He is a guy who genuinely not only wants you to understand him, he wants to understand you and you get that feeling, right? That's the Bill Clinton thing. I've met Bill Clinton also and the truth of the matter is Bill Clinton genuinely wants to charm and know the people he is talking to.

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[SPEAKER_00] What did he say to you that was an example of charming?

15:08

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[SPEAKER_00] Yeah, I had written this article and it's clear that one of his aides had briefed him that I'd written the article but he comes up and he goes, man, that article you wrote, it was just great. It was just great. And I'm wondering, what was the thing you carried away from it? Because you must know so much about this. It must have been so powerful for you. What did you carry away? And of course, the former president of the United States is asking me about my work. I'm like, oh, Mr. President, let me tell you. I'm so glad he read that, right? I was bowled over by it. But what he did is he asked me a question and he seemed genuinely curious in the response. And to be honest, and maybe I'm just a sucker, I believed him. I believed that he actually wanted to know because he's a curious guy. He wanted to know what I had learned. And I felt wonderful as a result.

15:09

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[SPEAKER_00] What's a good famous example of a speech or a moment in time that you point to or multiple examples that you point to where you're like, that's a textbook example of super communicating? Oh, so one of my favorites is Ronald Reagan. So if you remember, it was a long time ago, so you might have been too young and I was actually too young myself. But when Ronald Reagan was running for the second term, there were all these questions about his mental acuity, right? There were all these articles about the fact that his memory was failing. And he gets up on the stage to debate Walter Mondale. This is the second debate.

15:12

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[SPEAKER_00] And Walter was younger than him, yeah. Mondale was younger than him and Mondale was seen as this wonderkind, right? His reputation, he had never lost an election before. And he was seen as this smart brain. And Ronald Reagan gets up on the stage and one of the first things he says is he makes a joke, he says, I want you to know that during this debate, I will at no time make fun of my opponent's youth and inexperience. Right? And everyone kind of laughs because they all realize what he's talking about. He's saying, look, I'm not going to make fun of the fact that he's younger than me because he's going to say as he makes a joke, he says, I want you to know

15:19

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that during this debate, I will at no time make fun of my opponent's youth and inexperience. Right? And everyone laughs because they all realize what he's talking about. He's saying, look, I'm not going to make fun of the fact that he's younger than me because he's going to say I'm too old and that my memory's going. And what it did is, first of all, it was vulnerable, right? It's him admitting that there's this criticism of him that he's aware of. It's exposing something that other people could judge. But then by making a joke of it, he completely disarms the issue. In that moment, his mental acuity stopped being an issue. Now, if you'll remember, actually later

15:53

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in his second administration, this becomes an issue because it turns out that he's suffering from what people think are early signs of Alzheimer's dementia. So it was totally a legitimate issue to bring up during the election. But he just did this jujitsu by being a little bit vulnerable about it and making a joke of it that all of a sudden it became an attack that didn't have any teeth. That's an example of super communication. And he just connected with people in that moment in a way that surprised everyone. [SPEAKER_00] So asking [SPEAKER_00] value-based questions, [SPEAKER_00] getting tactical vulnerability. [SPEAKER_00] Yep. [SPEAKER_00] What else?

16:29

SPEAKER_00

[SPEAKER_01] So figuring out [SPEAKER_01] what kind of mindset, [SPEAKER_01] what kind of conversation [SPEAKER_01] is happening. [SPEAKER_01] Are you in an emotional mindset? [SPEAKER_01] Are you in a practical mindset? [SPEAKER_01] And then the last one [SPEAKER_01] is super communicators succeed [SPEAKER_01] because they not only listen, [SPEAKER_01] but they prove [SPEAKER_01] that they're listening. [SPEAKER_01] So there's this myth [SPEAKER_01] that the key to listening [SPEAKER_01] is close your mouth [SPEAKER_01] and open your ears. [SPEAKER_01] And that's the first step [SPEAKER_01] to listening. [SPEAKER_01] But it turns out [SPEAKER_01] study after study shows

16:50

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[SPEAKER_01] that is not enough on its own. [SPEAKER_01] The key to listening [SPEAKER_01] is to make listening [SPEAKER_01] an active process. [SPEAKER_01] It's to prove to you [SPEAKER_01] that I am paying attention [SPEAKER_01] to what you're saying. [SPEAKER_01] And you actually [SPEAKER_01] just did this really well. [SPEAKER_01] You repeated what I said, right? [SPEAKER_01] You were like, [SPEAKER_01] okay, here's the three things [SPEAKER_01] I've heard from you. [SPEAKER_01] You're proving [SPEAKER_01] that you're paying attention to it. [SPEAKER_01] So if I'm in a conversation [SPEAKER_01] with someone, [SPEAKER_01] particularly if I'm

17:08

SPEAKER_00

[SPEAKER_01] in a conflict conversation [SPEAKER_01] where we're disagreeing [SPEAKER_01] about something, [SPEAKER_01] what I should do [SPEAKER_01] is I should use this technique [SPEAKER_01] called looping for understanding, [SPEAKER_01] which is step one [SPEAKER_01] is I'm going to ask you a question, [SPEAKER_01] preferably a deep question. [SPEAKER_01] Tell me why this issue [SPEAKER_01] is important to you. [SPEAKER_01] Tell me what you really think [SPEAKER_01] about this question. [SPEAKER_01] Why this matters. [SPEAKER_01] I'm going to listen [SPEAKER_01] to your answer. [SPEAKER_01] And then step two is [SPEAKER_01] I'm going to repeat back

17:30

SPEAKER_00

[SPEAKER_01] in my own words [SPEAKER_01] what I heard you say. [SPEAKER_01] And the key here [SPEAKER_01] is not mimicry. [SPEAKER_01] If I just mimic you, [SPEAKER_01] it doesn't work. [SPEAKER_01] The key here

17:37

SPEAKER_01

is to prove to you that I've actually been thinking about what you've been saying. I've been paying attention. So what I heard you say is I heard you say that you wear your workout clothes. And I think that what I'm really hearing you say is working out is a keystone habit for you. It's a way that you tell yourself who you are. You prove your discipline in the morning. That's step two is I'm repeating back what I'm hearing. I'm adding something to it. And most people do this intuitively, step one and step two as they get older. Step three is the one that I always forget is that when I say that, I ask you if I got it right. Did I hear you? Am I understanding

18:07

SPEAKER_01

the role that exercise plays in your life correctly? Did I get it? Because what I'm doing in that moment is I'm asking you for permission to acknowledge that I was listening. And if you acknowledge that I'm listening to you, you become something like 10 times more likely to listen to me in response. It's this inborn instinct known as social reciprocity that when we think someone's listening to us, we want to listen to them. And so super communicators prove they are listening.

18:29

SPEAKER_01

Because what I'm doing in that moment is I'm asking you for permission to acknowledge that I was listening. And if you acknowledge that I'm listening to you, you become something like 10 times more likely to listen to me in response. It's this inborn instinct known as social reciprocity that when we think someone's listening to us, we want to listen to them. And so super communicators prove they are listening. They don't just sit there. They don't do the Dale Carnegie thing. They don't just ask question after question after question. They layer on top of that, proving that they're paying attention by saying things like, oh, it's so interesting you mentioned that because something similar happened to me. Or I want to ask you about this thing that you said before because it reminds me of this question I've been thinking about. They prove that they're paying attention. And in doing so, we believe that they are listening to us because in fact, they are listening to us.

18:31

SPEAKER_01

[SPEAKER_00] Dude, this is so interesting. And it becomes meta because as you're telling me things, I'm thinking, all right, I have to make sure that I do a loop when he's... No, but then the nice thing is, first of all, you do a lot of this stuff intuitively because you are a good communicator.

18:33

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[SPEAKER_00] It's not intuitive. I'm telling you, I had to learn all this. I was a really uncomfortable 14-year-old. And do you know what changed my life? And I don't mind admitting this because I'm happily married, but reading books on how to meet women. When I was 14 and 15, I looked like Napoleon Dynamite. I was really goofy looking. I was uncomfortable. I didn't have a lot of guy friends. People didn't particularly like me. And I read all of these books on how to pick up girls. It wasn't a matter of hooking up, although that would have been awesome, which didn't happen. But it was, I just want to be accepted. And so I read pretty much every book you could ever find about how to pick up a girl. And what you learn is that those, it starts where you just learn the tactics of how to have a conversation. But then you realize that the secret in all of this is to becoming a good person who's worthy of love and who's worthy of other people's attention. And that is the true secret. And that is a good one.

18:34

SPEAKER_01

Okay, so I'm going to point something out that I think is really interesting. You as an authenticity skeptic, what you just told me was really authentic, right? You told me that you read books about picking up girls, which is something that in your head, you know I could judge. I could be like, oh, this guy's a dirt bag. You're the kind of guy who reads books on picking up girls. But by sharing that with me, by saying something that you know I could judge, by being a little bit vulnerable, it actually brings us closer together.

18:35

SPEAKER_01

You're exactly right. Authenticity is not having a trick in my back pocket that I can use. Because if it's not genuine, it's not real. And people are going to feel that. Authenticity is actually sharing with you who I really am with full knowledge that you could hold it against me, but trusting that you're not going to. Because we're going to learn things about each other that make us feel closer. [SPEAKER_00] You're not, I wouldn't say that you're the most prolific author. In terms of books, it seems like you find a topic and you go super deep.

18:37

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So I have this basic desire with everything I write, which is to write something that I genuinely believe 20 years from now, someone can pick it up and just love it. And actually, I do this myself. I buy old copies of magazines. I just bought In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, which kind of created the true crime genre. [SPEAKER_00] Yeah, one of my favorites. Yeah, it's wonderful. I found a copy of the original which is to write something that I genuinely believe 20 years from now, someone can pick it up and just love it. And actually, I do this myself. I buy old copies of magazines. I just bought In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, right? Which created the true crime genre.

18:59

SPEAKER_01

[SPEAKER_00] Yeah, one of my favorites. Yeah, it's wonderful. I found a copy of the original New Yorker magazine that it was printed in and I bought it online from eBay. And so as a result, if that's your goal is to write something really big, it does take time. In part, it takes time because you don't know what the big idea is when you start the process. [SPEAKER_00] Speaking of old magazines, [SPEAKER_00] I collect old magazines. [SPEAKER_00] Here, here's a— [SPEAKER_00] Oh, really? [SPEAKER_00] Oh, wow.

19:24

SPEAKER_00

You have the first issue [SPEAKER_01] of George. That's going for like $10,000 online right now. I've had this for three years, my friend. Really? I'm a Kennedy historian and I owned a publishing company, so I had these. I still get my Thrasher magazines, my skate magazine. Oh, it's amazing. I read that you cold call, I think I read this, that you cold call 900 people to get a source for a book. Is that right? Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. [SPEAKER_01] It was actually, [SPEAKER_01] so it was the Apple series. [SPEAKER_01] So the series is about [SPEAKER_01] looking at the global economy [SPEAKER_01] through the lens of Apple. [SPEAKER_01] And getting people inside Apple

19:58

SPEAKER_00

[SPEAKER_01] to talk is really, really hard. [SPEAKER_01] It's a very secretive company. [SPEAKER_01] And so what I did is I was thinking, [SPEAKER_01] the only way I can do this [SPEAKER_01] is through mass pitches. [SPEAKER_01] And so I'd go on LinkedIn [SPEAKER_01] and look for people [SPEAKER_01] who are former Apple employees [SPEAKER_01] and I would email them and say, [SPEAKER_01] look, my name is Charles Duhigg. [SPEAKER_01] I'm a reporter. [SPEAKER_01] This is what I'm working on. [SPEAKER_01] Can you please talk to me? [SPEAKER_01] And the yield was really low. [SPEAKER_01] The yield was three or 4% of people [SPEAKER_01] even bothering to respond.

20:14

SPEAKER_00

[SPEAKER_01] But all you need [SPEAKER_01] is two or three great sources [SPEAKER_01] to introduce you to other sources. [SPEAKER_01] And so this has always been [SPEAKER_01] my reporting technique is [SPEAKER_01] if you want to write something great, [SPEAKER_01] if you want to create anything that's great, [SPEAKER_01] you just have to waste a lot of time [SPEAKER_01] because you don't know [SPEAKER_01] what's going to pay off. [SPEAKER_01] You don't know which person [SPEAKER_01] you're going to email [SPEAKER_01] and they're going to say, [SPEAKER_01] yeah, I have all these files. [SPEAKER_01] I can share them with you. [SPEAKER_01] And so I think a big part

20:30

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[SPEAKER_01] of making important big things

20:31

SPEAKER_01

is being okay with spending an entire week and saying, nothing productive happened during this week. I tried again and again and again and none of it paid off because that is the process of finding something amazing. [SPEAKER_00] And so it's interesting to say [SPEAKER_00] that a lot of your productive time [SPEAKER_00] feels unproductive. Well, and I think that that's a key. So the idea, that book is called Smarter, Faster, Better. And the idea behind it is what I mentioned before, that throughout history, the killer productivity app has been thinking more deeply, particularly when thinking deeply is hardest. [SPEAKER_00] So tell me about your routine then.

20:57

SPEAKER_01

[SPEAKER_00] So let's say you had a deadline [SPEAKER_00] for an article [SPEAKER_00] or you had a deadline for a book. [SPEAKER_00] What is your daily routine [SPEAKER_00] in order to think deeply? So oftentimes, I won't have a deadline. I'll try and not have a deadline. So I have all the time I need. But my process for thinking deeply is that I do to-do lists in a very specific way. My to-do list at no time has more than three things on it. And hopefully it only has one. [SPEAKER_00] For the day? For the day, right. So I have a memory list. All the things I want to get done go on my memory list. And that's very long. But the night before, every night,

21:22

SPEAKER_01

I look at the memory list and I choose what is the number one thing on my to-do list for the next day. And I'll write that down. And this is actually a routine, the cognitive routine, that forces me to think about priorities, right? And what I'll do is periodically during the day, I force myself to take a break and to just take a step back and ask myself, the way I spent the last hour, is it getting me closer to that one thing on my to-do list? Or is it actually me distracting myself? [SPEAKER_00] So you only do one, [SPEAKER_00] you would consider [SPEAKER_00] a successful day [SPEAKER_00] just doing one thing? [SPEAKER_00] Yeah, I mean, to think about priorities, right?

21:49

SPEAKER_01

And what I'll do is periodically during the day, I force myself to take a break and to just take a step back and ask myself, the way I spent the last hour, is it getting me closer to that one thing on my to-do list? Or is it actually me distracting myself? [SPEAKER_00] So you only do one, you would consider a successful day just doing one thing? [SPEAKER_00] Yeah, I mean, it's going to be a big thing, right?

21:52

SPEAKER_01

My to-do list, for instance, for tomorrow, because it's Saturday, but I'm going to be, I have a to-do list for tomorrow. My to-do list for tomorrow is to come up with the outline of my next book. Now, I'm not going to be able to do that in a day, right? And that's a huge task. But I intend to sit down at nine o'clock in the morning with a pad of paper and I'm just going to start outlining. And those outlines are going to be terrible. And then I'm going to get up at 10:30 or 11, and go get a snack. And I'm going to ask myself, am I writing stuff down just to write stuff down? Or is this actually getting me closer and closer and closer to understanding what the outline is? There is so much in life that can distract us from what's important. And the people who are most successful are the ones who empower themselves to be masters of their time and their attention.

21:52

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[SPEAKER_00] I think you, if I had to guess, you read a lot and you've written like three or four different books on drastically different topics. Yeah. And so you're an onion. You've got layers of interesting knowledge. What have you read in the last year, whether it's a book or an article or a podcast or a YouTube video that you would suggest that I consume?

21:54

SPEAKER_01

So, okay. There's a couple of them. There's this book named Void Star. It's actually a novel. And it came out like seven or eight years ago. And it's written by a computer scientist. It's about AI. And first of all, it's just a great novel. It's fun to read. Particularly because we're living through this age of AI, he is the first writer I've encountered who tries to actually get inside an AI's head, right? And say, if people actually were interacting with AI, what would that look like? Because an AI isn't going to be like a human. It's going to be something significantly different. So I found that book to be really, really profound. And then in addition, let me think what else. So David Epstein, as I mentioned, he has a new book coming out called Inside the Box, which is about how constraints actually make us better. That when we have constraints around us, when we have fewer resources than we need, when we create artificial limits for ourselves, it actually pushes us to be more creative, to be more productive. And I think that's been really, really important because we live in an age of surplus and excess, right? If you're starting an AI company, the first thing you do is you raise billions and billions of dollars. But what David's saying is actually avail yourself of those surpluses of resources if you can get them. But when you're thinking about how to make decisions, give yourself constraints because it's the constraints that show you the right path forward.

21:55

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[SPEAKER_00] Dude, you're really fascinating to talk to. You make me want to become an author. You should be an author. You're fascinating to talk to too. You have the natural disposition for it, the curiosity. [SPEAKER_00] I don't know if I've got the grit for it. It seems really hard. For any of your best works, so The Power of Habit as well as some of your articles, at any point, were you, something's here, something's here, this is going to hit? [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. So I think what happens is very similarly, I'll say that oftentimes the chapters that get the most attention [SPEAKER_00] if I've got the grit for it. [SPEAKER_00] It seems really hard.

22:07

SPEAKER_01

[SPEAKER_00] Did you, for any of your best works, so like The Power of Habit as well as some of your articles, did you, at any point, were you like, something's here, something's here, this is going to hit? [SPEAKER_00] Yeah.

22:09

SPEAKER_01

So I think what happens is very similarly, I'll say that oftentimes the chapters that get the most attention are the chapters where I was like, oh, that wasn't my best chapter. Like, I could have, I should have done better and I cannot reread my stuff. If I reread my stuff, it's like, oh, this is so painful. It's so bad. There's so much I could have done so much better. But I will say that there is usually a point where I'm like, I would actually read this. Like, there's something going on in this that if I encountered it in the wild, I would read it. And that doesn't mean it's poetic. That doesn't mean it's perfect. But there's just something there that I find personally captivating. The trust I'm having, the bet I'm making is that if I find it captivating, there's going to be at least some other people like me who also find it captivating. So I wrote this article for The New Yorker about a guy named Chamath Palihapitya.

22:10

SPEAKER_01

[SPEAKER_00] Yeah, the SPAC thing. [SPEAKER_00] Yeah, it was, I like that stuff.

22:14

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, it was about Chamath and about SPACs. And it was about Chamath is an operator, right? He's a guy who sells a dream pretty actively. And so I wrote an article about him selling the dream and why actually sometimes in economic cycles, the salesman, the bullshit artist is actually the most important figure because he helps everyone else believe in what the economy can be. And it was an article, it didn't do that well, not that many people read it, but I loved it because I would have read the hell out of that thing. If I had come across that article in the magazine, I would have just read it two or three times. That's ultimately what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to write something that so amuses and delights me that I would read it. And so hopefully other people will too.

22:15

SPEAKER_01

[SPEAKER_00] Yeah, man, I'm leaving this conversation invigorated. [SPEAKER_00] Oh, good. [SPEAKER_00] Me too. [SPEAKER_00] What age did you become successful financially? So actually after The Power of Habit. I would say I was probably late thirties. [SPEAKER_00] Were you broke?

22:21

SPEAKER_01

No, I wasn't broke. I wasn't broke. I was working at The New York Times. But one of the reasons I wrote The Power of Habit was because I was really happy being a reporter and my wife was pregnant with our first kid and I was like, I don't know that we can afford to live in New York with kids on my salary. I'm a reporter. I don't earn that much money. The only way that I can make this work is to go write books. I need a secondary line of income to be able to continue living in New York, to continue our lifestyle that we have. And I will say, I'm curious if this is true of you as well. Like once I started making money, the scarcity mindset was with me for a long time and actually is still there.

22:22

SPEAKER_01

It's still there. [SPEAKER_00] If you grow up with scarcity, it doesn't go away. It's traumatic. And it also teaches you that money does not solve your problems. [SPEAKER_00] I think it removes so many problems. It removes so many problems. And I've talked about this on the podcast. The scarcity mindset was with me for a long time. [SPEAKER_00] And it's still there. It's still there. [SPEAKER_00] If you grow up with scarcity, it doesn't go away. It's traumatic. And it also teaches you that money does not solve your problems.

22:34

SPEAKER_01

[SPEAKER_00] I think it removes so many problems. It removes so many problems. I've talked about this on the podcast and this is a very douchey thing to say, but I say it all the time. The people who say it doesn't make you happier, I think are doing it wrong. It definitely makes you happier because it removes so much uncertainty.

22:35

SPEAKER_01

[SPEAKER_00] But we have quite similar tendencies. I've noticed this about you is that you're quite paranoid. We've agreed that you're one of the bestselling authors of all time. And yet you say you're a horrible author. There's this commonality, not with all successful people. I know a lot of successful people that were like, I felt like I was great and I knew I was going to be great and I was confident the whole time. But then there's a whole other subset of people, which I think I fall into and it sounds like you fall into, which is I'm shit. I have to prove myself. I suck. I suck so much. I have to do this. It's all going to go away. And frankly, it's exhausting, but I do find it very useful.

22:36

SPEAKER_01

I totally agree. And I think of it as cultivated anxiety. And I think you're right. I think it's actually a blend of those. Because if you asked me objectively, am I a good writer? I'd say, look, I've been writing for 20 years. I spent all my time thinking about how to write in ways that make people desperate to finish the chapter they're reading. So objectively, I am a good writer, but it's also this cultivated anxiety of like, well, my previous books were okay, but I want to try something new for my next book. And that could fall on its face. I need to work really hard to make sure it doesn't. I think both of us probably do that, right? Like success is a combination of feeding the insecurities that push you to be better. And then also taking comfort in the securities that you can be better. You know what you're doing if you push yourself hard enough.

22:36

SPEAKER_01

[SPEAKER_00] The thing that I love about capitalism and business, and I'm not even into business that much. I just think that capitalism has some of the more practical ways to bend the earth to your will. So what I loved about my journey of going from fat to skinny is like, check this out. I manipulated myself. Isn't that awesome? I changed my tiny world, just being my body. I set a goal and I did it. Yeah.

22:38

SPEAKER_01

[SPEAKER_00] And that's what I like about entrepreneurship is even if it's just a small business, it doesn't matter what it is. It's just a really cool, it's a very practical way to kick your dent into the world and say, this is my world that I've created, even if it's just my bedroom. Absolutely. And that is mastery, right? Mastery is envisioning something in the world and then making it real. [SPEAKER_00] And it is so satisfying. Well, thanks for doing this.

22:42

SPEAKER_00

[SPEAKER_01] Thank you. Thanks for having me on. This is super fun. I hope you realize how much of an impact you've had on me. Thank you. I really appreciate you saying that. And I love the show. I love listening to the show. And by the way, when you come out to California, let me know. We'll go. Do you surf? [SPEAKER_01] Poorly. Okay. [SPEAKER_01] Poorly. Every single day. So we'll go surfing together in Santa Cruz. It'll be fun. All right. Let's do it. All right. That's it. That's the pod. Like, why do I want them to open up to me?

22:52

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, absolutely. So, okay. So there's a couple of ways. And first of all, you don't have to communicate with everyone, right? Sometimes you're going to get in the Uber and you just want to check your phone in the back of the Uber. You don't want to have a conversation with the driver. That's okay. You don't have to have any conversation you don't want to have. But there are times that we do want to connect with other people. And the reasons why is because we are a pro-social species. The way that our brains have evolved is to push us to connect with other people because connecting with other people over time has been the most successful strategy in building things,

23:23

SPEAKER_01

building communities, building families, building products. And when we connect with someone else, when we communicate with them, even if we disagree with them about some pretty fundamental things, there is this almost subconscious thing that happens within our brain that we're powerless against, which is, if I feel connected to you, if I feel like you're listening to me and I'm listening to you and that we're actually connected somehow and within neuroscience this is known as neural entrainment, in that moment we trust each other more. And if you think about it, trust is at the core of pro-sociality. I can't, I can't police you all the time to see if you're,

24:03

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if you're a threat or if you're being genuine. All I can do is try and figure out whether I can trust you enough to let you live in the, in the hut next to me without, without fear that you're going to come in and kill me. And the way I figure out whether I should trust you or not and like you and want to work with you is by connecting with you. Because if that connection feels genuine, then it doesn't mean I'm going to give you my life savings, but it means that for the time being, I've said, this person is at least trustworthy enough that I know who they are. They know who I am. I have a hard time seeing them betraying me. And so as a result, we can live side by side

24:41

SPEAKER_01

peacefully. And if you think about it in business, trust is everything, right? The reason you're successful in business, the reason you're successful in life, the reason you're successful in romantic relationships is because you figure out ways to connect with other people that are not just transactional, but are real.

24:57

SPEAKER_00

That's, that's fascinating. So I can ask questions that get like, I think you said value-based. What else can I do? Okay. So,

25:06

SPEAKER_01

so the first thing is ask more questions, right? Ask these deep questions. The second thing is that you need to be having the same kind of conversation as the person you're talking to and explain this. I'll sort of give you an example. So when I started writing super communicators, one of the reasons why was because I had fallen into this bad pattern where I'd come home from work and I'd start complaining about my day and tell my wife, you know, like my coworkers don't appreciate me and my boss doesn't realize what a genius I am. And she would give me some good advice. She would say something like, why don't you take your boss out to lunch and you guys can get

25:35

SPEAKER_01

to know each other a little bit better. But instead of being able to hear her advice, I would get even more upset and I would start like saying, you know, you should be outraged on my behalf. You should be like, you should be on my side. And I couldn't figure out why there was this tension between us and so I went to these researchers and they said, well, the main thing that's happening here is when you're having a discussion, you think you know what that discussion is about, right? You're talking about your day or next year's budget. But actually, if we look inside your brain, what we see is there's a bunch of different kinds of conversations all happening

26:05

SPEAKER_01

at the same time. And in general, these conversations tend to fall into one of three buckets. There's these practical conversations where we're making plans together or solving problems. But then there's emotional conversations where I tell you what I'm feeling and I don't want you to solve my feelings. I want you to empathize. And then there's social conversations, which is about how we relate to each other and how we relate to other people, the identities that are important to us. And they said, what we've discovered is all three of these conversations are equally important and all three of them will probably happen during a discussion. But if you and the person

26:36

SPEAKER_01

you are talking to are not having the same kind of conversation at the same moment, you cannot fully hear each other. You definitely won't feel connected to each other. Your trust in each other will not go up. So the key is, this is the second big skill in addition to asking more questions that super communicators, consistent super communicators have, is pay attention to what kind of conversation is happening. Does this feel practical? Does it feel emotional? Does it feel social? What kind of words is the other person using? And then match them. What's known within psychology is the matching principle. If you're talking about next year's budget and you say something like,

27:10

SPEAKER_01

look, I'm really anxious that we get this right because I don't want to lay people off. As a super communicator, in my head, I should be hearing, oh, you're actually having an emotional conversation right now. We're not talking about the budget. We're talking about how you feel. And I need to empathize with that before we can start talking about practical things. I need to say to you, I understand exactly what you're feeling. I feel exactly the same way. I want you to know my number one goal here is that we don't have any layoffs, that we get to protect our people. So with that in mind, can we talk about the budget, like how to actually get that done? In other words,

27:44

SPEAKER_01

with your permission, can we move from an emotional to a practical conversation together? When I do that, what I'm doing is I'm signaling to you that I'm listening to you, I understand your mindset, and we are getting aligned. We are getting neurally entrained. We are getting in sync, which means that we're going to hear each other much better, and we're going to trust each other more.

28:04

SPEAKER_00

I'm obsessed with like, I love history, and I've read biographies on a huge, a lot of the presidents. And three presidents that are very, very different, and are very effective communicators are George Washington, Bill Clinton, and Donald Trump. Yeah. They communicate drastically differently, but I would argue they're all very effective. I absolutely agree. George Washington was significantly more stoic and mysterious and spoke seldom, and when he did spoke, you listened no matter what, and he had this like regal status. Bill Clinton was very charming, and then Donald Trump, his shtick is more like, way more crude, like riffing with you, like we're boys.

28:50

SPEAKER_01

Oh, absolutely. In fact, as a reporter, I've been to a lot of Trump rallies, and whether you like Donald Trump or whether you intensely dislike Donald Trump, going to a rally is well worth the time because what you see is he is a super communicator, and he uses this exact same thing that I just talked about. He leans, he proves he's listening to the crowd by leaning into the type of conversation they want to have. So on a stage, Donald Trump will say something, and if the crowd starts applauding and reacting to it, he'll say it again, and then he'll just start riffing on that. That's why from a stage he often says like things that in retrospect look a little crazy

29:30

SPEAKER_01

is because he's kind of feeding off the crowd. The crowd is telling him if he gets up on stage and he says, you know, something emotional, like I worry about the future of the nation because we're being overrun by immigrants, and the crowd just kind of goes nuts, he'll lean into that and he recognizes this is an emotional conversation, right? This is not about the practicalities of immigration reform. This is people feeling like they're lost at home, like they're losing ground, and he'll lean into that. Now, I've also met with Donald Trump one-on-one in like, you know, settings where he's meeting with reporters. The dude asks questions constantly, right?

30:05

SPEAKER_01

And a lot of the questions are like about him. He's like, what do you think? Why do you think these people hate me so much? Or what do you think about this thing that I did? But the fact of the matter is instead of giving little speeches, he's asking questions. He's drawing you into the conversation. The truth of the matter is that we are all really good at communication, right? Because we're a pro-social species, our brain has evolved to be really good at communication. And the people who are best at communication, it is not because they were born that way. It's because they think about communication, right? Bill Clinton's a great example. If you ask Bill Clinton,

30:36

SPEAKER_01

were you always a good communicator? He says no. He says that when he was a kid, he actually had trouble making friends with other kids. He didn't know how to talk to them. But he said that in high school, he really studied how kids talked to each other. Like, he felt like this is something. And because his parents got divorced, he had to be the peacemaker between them. He trained himself to think just a little bit more about communication. And that's what makes him a great communicator. And all of us can do that.

31:00

SPEAKER_00

I'm not a Donald Trump supporter, but I am intoxicated. Like, I think he's hilarious. Like, if I have to remove the fact that, like, I don't agree with what he just said, but I can also acknowledge I'm like, that's so funny. Like, were you intoxicated when you met him?

31:15

SPEAKER_01

No, I was not intoxicated when I met him. And I would also say I'm not a Donald Trump fan. I, like, I, as a, particularly as a reporter, I try and not be a fan of anyone that's running for office because you have to be skeptical. But I will say this about Trump is that he comes off as being very authentic. And this is another thing that super communicators do really well, right? You believe that you're seeing the real version of them. And the way that we actually create a sense of authenticity, this has been studied a lot, is that we'll often do something that's a little bit vulnerable. And we tend to misunderstand what this word vulnerability means. We think it's like

31:51

SPEAKER_01

crying on each other's shoulders or something like that. Actually, vulnerability is a very specific thing that happens inside our brain. vulnerability is a neural cascade that occurs when I say something to you that you could judge. And if in that moment you withhold judgment, and more importantly, if you share something about yourself that I could judge in return, then we will feel closer to each other. So think about when Donald Trump's on that stage, you know that, like, weird dance he does, right? Yeah. That, like, it's not, it's not an attractive dance, right? He's not a, he's not a graceful man on, on, on his two feet. And yet, it's incredibly endearing

32:28

SPEAKER_01

because it's vulnerable. Now, it's not vulnerable in a way that, like, makes him open to attack. It's vulnerable in that he's sharing something that you could judge. You could say, that's the dumbest dance I've ever seen in my entire life. But when you withhold that judgment, you actually feel closer to him. And so one of the things that he does that all great leaders do is that they reveal things about themselves. They, they allow these moments of vulnerability when I'm going to say something that I know you could judge. I'm going to make it available to you for your judgment. Because in that moment, you will believe I am authentic. You will believe

33:04

SPEAKER_01

you're seeing the real me. And that's really, really powerful.

33:08

SPEAKER_00

I think that word, I hate, I hate the word authenticity. I hate that word. Yes. And I'll explain why. I, I think it's bullshit. I actually don't think you should be authentic. Because the fact is, is that we're all performing. And I want to convince this girl to go on a date with me. I want to convince this employee to work at my company. I want to convince someone to do everything. Saying to be authentic, that's like saying someone just be yourself and they'll like you. No, don't be yourself. Change yourself so you are a better person and that people then will like you.

33:39

SPEAKER_01

So I'm going to push back a little bit because I actually think, I think what you just said is authenticity. I don't think authenticity means It's all an act. I don't. I think, but I think authenticity is choosing, not only which act, choosing which part of myself I want to expose right now. Right? Like the truth of the matter is I could, in this conversation, you could have spent this conversation just telling me how impressive you are, like all of your successes. But instead, you, the, the act that you choose, the aspect of yourself you choose to, to share with me is like a really curious guy who like doesn't have all the answers and, and recognizes that

34:17

SPEAKER_01

luck is part of it and the hard work is part of it and wants to understand how to get better. I don't think that's an inauthentic display of who you are. I think it's you authentically choosing which part of yourself to share with the world. And I think that, I, I understand the skepticism towards authenticity. The word has become like such a bugaboo of meaning like, meaning so many different things. But what I think for me it means is genuinely wanting to connect with another person and wanting to connect with them on both their terms and my terms and saying like, look, like this is who I am. I, I want you to know who I am, the real me, at least to some degree.

34:58

SPEAKER_01

And I might, that doesn't mean I'm going to necessarily tell you all about my childhood trauma or my drinking problems, but I want you to be able to know who I am on some level, the real me. And I want to know the real you. And it's that act of actually saying, I want to be authentic or I want to be vulnerable that creates the connection. It's not the authenticity itself. It's the act of saying, I'm willing to be vulnerable with you because I want, I want to connect with you. That is the first and most important step for us actually feeling connected to each other.

35:30

SPEAKER_00

Who's a super communicator that's a famous person that I should go and study?

35:35

SPEAKER_01

Oh gosh, that's a really good question. I mean, there's so many of them. I mean, honestly, one of them is Steve Jobs. And we don't think of Steve Jobs as a super communicator, right? Everything about Steve Jobs is like he was such a jerk to his employees and he would create this reality distortion field. But if you go and you watch interviews with Steve Jobs, what you see is you see him constantly, authentically sharing who he is and then asking questions and proving to the other person that he's listening to them. Right? So there's a number of speeches he gave at Stanford Graduate School of Business where the clips that get put on social media are the clips of Steve Jobs

36:12

SPEAKER_01

talking about like doing LSD or like his vision. But if you watch the entire time that he was in that classroom, what you see is that he, Steve Jobs, one of the most famous guys on earth, he spends like about a third of the time asking the students questions. Like, what do you think about that? Why did you make that decision? What was your experience when you picked up this device? He is a guy who genuinely not only wants you to understand him, he wants to understand you and you get that feeling, right? That's the Bill Clinton thing. Like, I've met Bill Clinton also and like the truth of the matter is Bill Clinton genuinely wants to charm and know the people

36:47

SPEAKER_01

he is talking to.

36:48

SPEAKER_00

What did he say to you that was an example of charming? Yeah, I had written this article

36:54

SPEAKER_01

and it's clear that like one of his aides had briefed him that I'd written the article but he comes up and he goes, man, that article you wrote, it was just great. It was just great. And I'm wondering, what was the thing you carried away from it? Because you must know so much about this. It must have been so powerful for you. What did you carry away? And of course, the former president of the United States is asking me about my work. I'm like, I'm like, oh, Mr. President, let me tell you. Like, I'm so glad he read that, right? I was bowled over by it. But like, what he did is he asked me a question and he seemed genuinely curious in the response. And to be honest,

37:26

SPEAKER_01

and maybe I'm just a sucker, I believed him. I believed that he actually wanted to know because he's a curious guy. He wanted to know what I had learned. And I felt wonderful as a result.

37:36

SPEAKER_00

What's a good famous example of a speech or a moment in time that you point to or multiple examples that you point to where you're like, that's a textbook example of super communicating?

37:49

SPEAKER_01

Oh, so one of my favorites is Ronald Reagan. So if you remember, it was a long time ago, so you might have been too young and I was actually too young myself. But when Ronald Reagan was running for the second term, there were all these questions about his mental acuity, right? Like people, there were all these articles about the fact that his memory was failing. And he gets up on the stage to debate Walter Mondale. This is the second debate.

38:13

SPEAKER_00

And Walter was younger than him, yeah.

38:17

SPEAKER_01

Mondale was younger than him and Mondale was like seen as like, like his reputation, he had never lost an election before. And he was seen as this like wonderkind, right? Like the, like his brain was so smart. And Ronald Reagan gets up on the stage and one of the first things he says as he makes a joke, he says, I want you to know that during this debate, I will at no time make fun of my opponent's youth and inexperience. Right? And everyone kind of laughs because they all realize what he's talking about. He's saying like, look, like I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna make fun of the fact that like he's younger than me because he's gonna say I'm too old

38:51

SPEAKER_01

and that my memory's going. And what it did is, first of all, it was kind of vulnerable, right? Like it's him admitting that there's this criticism of him that he's aware of. It's exposing something that other people could judge. But then by making a joke of it, he completely disarms the issue. Like in that moment, it stopped, his mental acuity stopped being an issue. Now, if you'll remember, actually later in his second administration, this becomes an issue because it turns out that he's suffering from what people think are early signs of Alzheimer's dementia. So it was totally a legitimate issue to bring up during the election. But he just did this jujitsu

39:29

SPEAKER_01

by being a little bit vulnerable about it and making a joke of it that all of a sudden it became an attack that didn't have any teeth. That's an example of super communication. And he just connected with people in that moment in a way that surprised everyone.

39:45

SPEAKER_00

So asking value-based questions, getting tactical vulnerability. Yep. What else?

39:54

SPEAKER_01

So figuring out what kind of mindset, what kind of conversation is happening. Are you in an emotional mindset? Are you in a practical mindset? And then the last one is super communicators succeed because they not only listen, but they prove that they're listening. So there's this kind of like myth that like the key to listening is like close your mouth and open your ears. And that's the first step to listening. But it turns out study after study shows that is not enough on its own. The key to listening is to make listening an active process. It's to prove to you that I am paying attention to what you're saying. And you actually just did this really well.

40:28

SPEAKER_01

You repeated what I said, right? You were like, okay, here's the three things I've heard from you. You're proving that you're paying attention to it. So if I'm in a conversation with someone, particularly if I'm in a conflict conversation where we're disagreeing about something, what I should do is I should use this technique called looping for understanding, which is step one is I'm going to ask you a question, preferably a deep question. Tell me why this issue is important to you. Tell me what you really think about this question. Like why this matters. I'm going to listen to your answer. And then step two is I'm going to repeat back in my own words

40:59

SPEAKER_01

what I heard you say. And the key here is not mimicry. If I just mimic you, it doesn't work. The key here is to prove to you that I've actually been thinking about what you've been saying. I've been paying attention. So what I heard you say is I heard you say that like, you know, you wear your workout clothes. And I think that what I'm really hearing you say is working out is a keystone habit for you. It's a way that you tell yourself who you are. You prove your discipline in the morning. That's step two is I'm repeating back what I'm hearing. I'm adding something to it. And most people kind of do this intuitively, step one and step two as they get older.

41:34

SPEAKER_01

Step three is the one that I always forget is that when I say that, I ask you if I got it right. Did I hear you? Am I understanding the role that exercise plays in your life correctly? Did I get it? Because what I'm doing in that moment is I'm asking you for permission to acknowledge that I was listening. And if you acknowledge that I'm listening to you, you become something like 10 times more likely to listen to me in response. It's this inborn instinct known as social reciprocity that when we think someone's listening to us, we want to listen to them. And so super communicators prove they are listening. They don't just sit there. You know, they don't do

42:13

SPEAKER_01

the Dale Carnegie thing. They don't just ask question after question after question. They layer on top of that, proving that they're paying attention by saying things like, oh, it's so interesting you mentioned that because something similar happened to me. Or I want to ask you about this thing that you said before because it reminds me of this question I've been thinking about. They prove that they're paying attention. And in doing so, we believe that they are listening to us because in fact, they are listening to us.

42:37

SPEAKER_00

Dude, this is so interesting. And it becomes like meta because as you're like telling me things, I'm like, all right, I have to make sure that I do a loop when he's like...

42:46

SPEAKER_01

No, but then the nice thing is, first of all, you do a lot of this stuff intuitively because you are

42:50

SPEAKER_00

a good communicator. It's not intuitive. I'm telling you, I had to learn all this. I was a really uncomfortable 14-year-old. And do you know what changed my life? And I don't mind admitting this because I'm happily married, but reading books on how to meet women. When I was 14 and 15, I looked like Napoleon Dynamite. I was really goofy looking. I was uncomfortable. I didn't have a lot of guy friends. People didn't particularly like me. And I read all of these books on how to pick up girls. It wasn't a matter of hooking up, although that would have been awesome, which didn't happen. But it was like, I just want to be accepted. And so I read pretty much every book

43:25

SPEAKER_00

you could ever find about how to pick up a girl. And what you learn is that those like, it starts like where you just learn the tactics of how to have a conversation. But then you realize that like the secret in all of this is to becoming a good person who's worthy of love and who's worthy of other people's attention. And that is like the true secret. And that is a good one.

43:46

SPEAKER_01

Okay, so I'm going to point something out that I think is really interesting. You as an authenticity skeptic, what you just told me was really authentic, right? Like you told me that you read books about picking up girls, which is something that like in your head, you know I could judge. I could be like, oh, this guy's a dirt bag. You're the kind of guy who like reads books on picking up girls. But by sharing that with me, by saying something that you know I could judge, by being a little bit vulnerable, it actually brings us closer together. You're exactly right. Authenticity is not having a trick in my back pocket that I can use. Because if it's not genuine,

44:19

SPEAKER_01

it's not real. And people are going to feel that. Authenticity is actually sharing with you who I really am with full knowledge that you could hold it against me, but trusting that you're not going to. Because we're going to, because we're going to learn things about each other that make us feel closer.

44:35

SPEAKER_00

You're not like, I wouldn't say that you're the most prolific author. Like you, well, in terms of books, like it seems like you find a topic and you like go super deep.

44:46

SPEAKER_01

So I have this basic, this basic desire with everything I write, which is to write something that I genuinely believe 20 years from now, someone can pick it up and just love it. And actually, I do this myself. Like I buy old copies of magazines. I just bought In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, right? Which kind of created the true crime genre.

45:06

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, one of my favorites.

45:07

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, it's wonderful. I found a copy of the original New Yorker magazine that it was printed in and I bought it online from eBay. And so as a result, if that's your goal is to write something really big, it does take time. In part, it takes time because you don't know what the big idea is when you start the process.

45:26

SPEAKER_00

Speaking of old magazines, I collect old magazines. Here, here's a- Oh, really? Oh, wow. You have the first issue

45:33

SPEAKER_01

of George.

45:34

SPEAKER_00

That's like going for like $10,000 online right now. I've had this for three years, my friend. Really? I'm a Kennedy historian and I owned a publishing company, so I had these. I still get my Thrasher magazines, my skate magazine. Oh, it's amazing. I read that you cold call, I think I read this, that you cold call 900 people to get a source for a book. Is that right? Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

46:00

SPEAKER_01

It was actually, so it was the Apple series. So the series is about like looking at the global economy through the lens of Apple. And getting people inside Apple to talk is really, really hard. It's a very secretive company. And so what I did is I was like, the only way I can do this is through like mass pitches. And so I'd go on LinkedIn and look for people who are former Apple employees and I would email them and say, look, my name is Charles Duhigg. I'm a reporter. This is what I'm working on. Can you please talk to me? And the yield was really low. The yield was like three or 4% of people even bothering to respond. But all you need is two or three great sources

46:38

SPEAKER_01

to introduce you to other sources. And so this has always been my reporting technique is if you want to write something great, if you want to create anything that's great, you just have to waste a lot of time because you don't know what's going to pay off. You don't know which person you're going to email and they're going to say, yeah, I have all these files. I can share them with you. And so I think a big part of making important big things is being okay with spending an entire week and saying, nothing productive happened during this week. I tried again and again and again and none of it paid off because that is the process of finding something amazing.

47:16

SPEAKER_00

And so it's interesting to say that like a lot of your productive time feels unproductive.

47:22

SPEAKER_01

Well, and I think that that's a key. So the idea, that book is called Smarter, Foster, Better. And the idea behind it is sort of what I mentioned before, that throughout history, the killer productivity app has been thinking more deeply, particularly when thinking deeply is hardest.

47:36

SPEAKER_00

So tell me about your routine then. So let's say you had a deadline for an article or you had a deadline for a book. What is your daily routine in order to think deeply?

47:46

SPEAKER_01

So oftentimes, oftentimes I won't have a deadline. Like I'll try and basically not have a deadline. So I have all the time I need. But my process for thinking deeply is that I do to-do lists in a very specific way. My to-do list at no time has more than three things on it. And hopefully it only has one. For the day? For the day, right. So I have a memory list. All the things I want to get done go on my memory list. And that's very long. But the night before, every night, I look at the memory list and I choose what is the number one thing on my to-do list for the next day. And I'll write that down. And this is actually a routine, the cognitive routine, that forces me

48:22

SPEAKER_01

to think about priorities, right? And what I'll do is periodically during the day, I force myself to take a break and to just take a step back and ask myself, like, the way I spent the last hour, is it getting me closer to that one thing on my to-do list? Or is it actually me distracting myself?

48:41

SPEAKER_00

So you only do one, like you would consider a successful day just doing one thing? Yeah, I mean, it's going to be a big thing,

48:48

SPEAKER_01

right? Like, my to-do list, for instance, for tomorrow, because it's Saturday, but I'm going to be, I have a to-do list for tomorrow. My to-do list for tomorrow is to come up with the outline of my next book. Now, I'm not going to be able to do that in a day, right? And that's a huge task. But I intend to sit down at nine o'clock in the morning with a pad of paper and I'm just going to start outlining. And those outlines are going to be terrible. And then I'm going to get up at 10, 30, or 11, and go get a snack. And I'm going to ask myself, am I writing stuff down just to write stuff down? Or is this actually getting me closer and closer and closer to understanding

49:22

SPEAKER_01

what the outline is? There is so much in life that can distract us from what's important. And the people who are most successful are the ones who empower themselves to be masters of their time and their attention.

49:34

SPEAKER_00

I think you, if I had to guess, you read a lot and you've written like three or four different books on like drastically different topics. Yeah. And so you're like an onion. You've got layers of like interesting knowledge. What have you read in the last year, whether it's a book or an article or a podcast or a YouTube video that you would suggest that I consume?

49:51

SPEAKER_01

So, okay. So there's a couple of them. There's this book named Void Star. It's actually a novel. And it came out like seven or eight years ago. And it's written by a computer scientist. It's about AI. And first of all, it's just a great novel. It's like, it's just fun to read. Particularly because we're living through this age of AI, he is the first writer I've encountered who tries to actually get inside an AI's head, right? And sort of say like, if people actually were interacting with AI, what would that look like? Because an AI isn't going to be like a human. It's going to be something significantly different. So I found that book to be really, really profound.

50:25

SPEAKER_01

And then in addition, let me think what else. So David Epstein, as I mentioned, he has a new book coming out called Inside the Box, which is about how constraints actually make us better. That like when we have constraints around us, when we have fewer resources than we need, when we create artificial limits for ourselves, it actually pushes us to be more creative, to be more productive. And I think that's been really, really important because we live in an age of surplus and excess, right? If you're starting an AI company, the first thing you do is you raise billions and billions of dollars. But what David's saying is actually avail yourself of those surplus of resources

51:04

SPEAKER_01

if you can get them. But when you're thinking about how to make decisions, give yourself constraints because it's the constraints that show you the right path forward.

51:16

SPEAKER_00

Dude, you're really fascinating to talk to. Did you, you make me want to become an author. You should be an author.

51:22

SPEAKER_01

You're fascinating to talk to too. You have the natural disposition for it, the curiosity.

51:26

SPEAKER_00

I don't know if I've got the grit for it. It seems really hard. Did you, for any of your best works, so like The Power of Habit as well as some of your articles, did you, at any point, were you like, something's here, something's here, this is going to hit? Yeah.

51:39

SPEAKER_01

So I think what happens is very similarly, I'll say that oftentimes the chapters that get the most attention are the chapters where I was like, oh, that wasn't my best chapter. Like, I could have, I should have done better and I cannot reread my stuff. If I reread my stuff, it's like, oh, this is so painful. Like, it's, it's so bad. There's so, I could have done so much better. But I will say that there is usually a point where I'm like, you know, I would actually read this. Like, there's something going on in this that if I encountered it in the wild, I would read it. And that doesn't mean it's poetic. That doesn't mean it's perfect. But there's just something there

52:15

SPEAKER_01

that I find personally captivating. The trust I'm having, the bet I'm making is that if I find it captivating, there's going to be at least some other people like me who also find it captivating. So I wrote this, this article for The New Yorker about a guy named

52:27

SPEAKER_00

Chamath Palhaptia. Yeah, the SPAC thing. Yeah, it was, I like that stuff.

52:32

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, like, it was about Chamath and about, and about SPACs. And it was kind of like, Chamath is kind of like a, I, con artist, that's not fair. But Chamath is an operator, right? He's a guy who, like sells a dream pretty actively. And so I wrote an article about him selling the dream and why actually sometimes in economic cycles, like the salesman, the, the, the bullshit artist is actually the most important figure because he helps everyone else believe in what the economy can be. And it was an article, it didn't do that well, like not that many people read it, but I, I loved it because I would have read the hell out of that thing. If I had come across

53:10

SPEAKER_01

that article in the magazine, I would have just read it like two or three times. That's ultimately what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to write something that like, so amuses and delights me that I, I would read it. And so hopefully other people will too.

53:26

SPEAKER_00

What, yeah, man, I, I'm leaving this conversation invigorated. What, Oh, good. Me too. What age did you become successful financially?

53:36

SPEAKER_01

Ooh, actually extra power of habit. So I would, let's see. So I was probably late thirties. Were you like broke? No, I wasn't broke. I wasn't broke. I was working in the New York times. But one of the reasons I wrote the power of habit was because I was really happy being a reporter and my wife was pregnant with our first kid and I, I, and we were living in New York and I was like, I don't know that we can afford to live in New York with kids on my salary. Right. I'm a reporter. I don't earn that much money. The only way that I can make this work is to go write books. Like I, I need a secondary line of income to be able to continue living in New York, to continue our,

54:12

SPEAKER_01

the lifestyle that we have. And so, and, and, and I will say, I'm curious if this is true of you as well. Like once I started making money, the, the scarcity mindset was with me for a long time

54:23

SPEAKER_00

and actually is still kind of,

54:24

SPEAKER_01

it's still there. It's still there.

54:26

SPEAKER_00

If you grow up with scarcity. It doesn't go away. It's traumatic.

54:30

SPEAKER_01

And, and it also teaches you that like money does not solve your problems.

54:34

SPEAKER_00

I think it, I think it removes so many problems. It removes so many problems. And like, I've talked about this on the podcast and this is a very douchey thing to say, but I say it all the time. The people who say it doesn't make you happier, I think are doing it wrong. It definitely makes you happier because it removes, removes so much uncertainty. But we have quite similar tendencies. I've noticed this about you is that you're quite paranoid. Like we've agreed that you're one of the bestselling authors of all time. And yet you say you're a horrible author. And like, there's this like, I think there's this commonality, not with all successful people.

55:05

SPEAKER_00

I know a lot of successful people that were like, I felt like I was great and I knew I was going to be great and I was confident the whole time. But then there's a whole other subset of people, which I think I fall into and it sounds like you fall into, which is I'm shit. I have to prove myself. I suck. I suck so much. I have to do this. It's all going to go away. And frankly, it's exhausting, but I do find it very useful.

55:23

SPEAKER_01

I totally agree. And I think of it as a cultivated anxiety. And I think you're right. I think it's actually a blend of those. Because if you asked me objectively, am I a good writer? I'd say, look, I've been writing for 20 years, man. Like I spent all my time thinking about how to, how to write in ways that make people desperate to finish the chapter they're writing. So like objectively, I am a good writer, but it's also this cultivated anxiety of like, well, my previous books were okay, but I want to try something new for my next book. And that could fall on its face. I need to work really hard to make sure it doesn't. I think both of us probably do that, right?

55:56

SPEAKER_01

Like success is a combination of feeding the insecurities that push you to be better. And then also taking comfort in the securities that you, you can be better. You know what you're doing if you push yourself hard enough.

56:10

SPEAKER_00

The thing that I love about capitalism and business, and it's like, I'm not even into business that much. I just think that capitalism, there's some of the more practical ways to kind of bend the earth to your will. And so like, what I loved about my journey of going from fat to skinny, it's like, check this out. I manipulated myself. Like, isn't that awesome? I changed my tiny world, that just being my body. I set a goal and I f***ing did it. Yeah. And that's what I like about entrepreneurship is even if it's just a small business, it doesn't matter if it's what it is. It's just a really cool, it's a very practical way to kick your dent into the world and say,

56:45

SPEAKER_00

this is my world that I've created, even if it's just my bedroom.

56:48

SPEAKER_01

Absolutely. And that is that mastery, right? Mastery is envisioning something in the world and then making it real

56:54

SPEAKER_00

and it is so satisfying. Well, thanks for doing this. Thank you. Thanks for having me on. This is super fun. I hope you realize how much of an impact you've had on me.

57:02

SPEAKER_01

Thank you. I really appreciate you saying that. And I love the show. I love listening to the show. And by the way, when you come out to California, let me know. We'll go. Do you surf? Poorly.

57:11

SPEAKER_00

Okay.

57:13

SPEAKER_01

Poorly. Every single day. So we'll go surfing together in Santa Cruz. It'll be fun.

57:18

SPEAKER_00

All right. Let's do it. All right. That's it. That's the pod. Haha Haha Haha Haha Haha Haha Haha Haha Haha Haha Haha Haha Haha Haha Thank you.

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