How You Can Access Hidden Markets & How to Be A Super Conversationalist

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Speaker 1 Today, on something you should know, why are there no male waiters at Hooters?

Speaker 1 Then, learning how to play the game of hidden markets. What are they?

Speaker 2 If you want to go to a hot restaurant, if you want to go to see a popular concert, and all the shows might be sold out, and all of these constitute hidden markets, places where if you understand the rules better, you actually might be able to get things that you want.

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Speaker 1 Something you should know, fascinating intel, the world's top experts, and practical advice you can use in your life today.

Speaker 1 Something you should know. With Mike Carruthers.

Speaker 1 Have you ever wondered why there are no male waiters at Hooters?

Speaker 1 Wouldn't that be discrimination? Well, that's the question we're going to start with today on something you should know. Hi, welcome.
I'm Mike Carruthers.

Speaker 1 So men are seemingly just as qualified to serve food and drinks in a restaurant as women are. Yet you won't find any male waiters at Hooters.

Speaker 1 So that seems like discrimination. And a few men thought so back in 1997 and filed a lawsuit against the company.
Hooters ended up settling for about $3.75 million

Speaker 1 and they agreed to open some restaurant jobs to men, but not server positions. The company argued that being female is part of what's called a bona fide occupational qualification or BFOQ.

Speaker 1 It's an exception in the Civil Rights Act that allows gender-based hiring in rare cases where it is essential to the business.

Speaker 1 Hooters claims its servers are part of the restaurant's entertainment experience, not just food service. So the BFOQ applies.

Speaker 1 Now, Southwest Airlines tried the same argument back in 1981, but a federal court ruled that Southwest could not hire only women as flight attendants, saying the airline's main business was transportation, not entertainment.

Speaker 1 And that is something you should know.

Speaker 1 Wouldn't it be great if you could make your own luck or at least tilt the odds in your favor?

Speaker 1 Whether it's scoring a table at a booked out restaurant or landing concert tickets, getting your kids into the right school or even finding an organ donor.

Speaker 1 In many cases, it's knowing how to access what economists call hidden markets. These are markets that don't run on money, but on information, relationships, and timing.

Speaker 1 And if you understand how they work, you can dramatically increase your chances of success. Here to explain this is Judd Kessler.

Speaker 1 He's a professor of business, economics, and public policy at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

Speaker 1 He was named one of Forbes' 30 under 30 in law and policy, and he's author of a book called Lucky by Design. the hidden economics you need to get more of what you want.

Speaker 1 Hey, Judd, welcome to Something You Should Know.

Speaker 2 Thanks so much for having me.

Speaker 1 So take us a little deeper into hidden markets. What are they exactly?

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 2 So there are so many things in this world that are doled out in what I call hidden markets that might not be obvious to you. So it's not a surprise that you don't kind of see them immediately.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 They are allocating things that we care about, things that we want. And I call them hidden markets because they're unfamiliar in the sense that they don't involve prices allocating things.

Speaker 2 That's the way that we're used to kind of getting things that we want in markets is we go to the store, we see a price, we decide if we want to pay that price.

Speaker 2 In hidden markets, the price is not going to help us get what we want. There might be a price, but it's not going to be doing the work.
And that's what makes the market hidden.

Speaker 1 Great. Okay.
So let's talk about some real life examples.

Speaker 2 Well, there's a ton of examples. And if you want to go to a hot restaurant,

Speaker 2 you're going to try to get a reservation, but there might be many people who want to eat at that restaurant, and there might not be good reservations available.

Speaker 2 If you want to go to see a popular concert or a theater production, you might say, okay, let me go get a ticket for that night. And all the shows might be sold out.
There are...

Speaker 2 products that are kind of fad products where

Speaker 2 you would need to wait on a long line to get access to them.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 in those cases, there are prices, like you do pay for the dinner, you do pay for the ticket, but the price is not doing all the work for the allocation.

Speaker 2 And then there are other markets that are even more complex that we play in on a regular basis, labor markets, dating markets, markets for

Speaker 2 college admissions or getting into an elementary school or middle school or high school, where there may or may not be a price that public schools don't charge you, but there's some set of rules that decides who gets in and who doesn't.

Speaker 2 And all of these constitute hidden markets.

Speaker 2 They're places where if you understand the rules better, you actually might be able to get things that you want, which might be unavailable to you if you didn't fully internalize the rules.

Speaker 1 So explain, because in several of the examples you just gave, the rule is first come, first serve, concert tickets, reservations. That's the rule.
And that's what gets you in quicker.

Speaker 1 If you had called sooner, you might get a table.

Speaker 1 I don't know how you gain that. I mean, that is what it is.

Speaker 2 First come, first serve is great because it's in lots of different markets that we play in have some version of first come, first serve.

Speaker 2 And what's interesting about that is that there's actually different versions of it.

Speaker 2 There's first come, first serve races, where it really is about kind of being the first person to click on a, say, a restaurant reservation on a website or the first person to call in.

Speaker 2 You can do better in those markets

Speaker 2 even if it doesn't seem like it, even if it doesn't seem like you can game the rules. The first thing is you have to know that the race exists.

Speaker 2 A lot of times when we find that we're blocked out of something, it's because we didn't realize early enough that it was a first come, first serve race.

Speaker 2 If you try to get a reservation at the French Laundry, very popular restaurant in California in the Napa Valley, right? And if you go on

Speaker 2 Thursday hoping to get a reservation on Saturday, you're not going to be able to do it because the first come, first serve race race was run a month and a half ago when they released all the reservations for the following month on the first of the preceding month.

Speaker 2 So the first thing is just to know that a race exists. Second thing is to be there ready to run and with a plan in mind before the race starts.

Speaker 2 Because while you are thinking about exactly what time you want to eat, other people who have

Speaker 2 already decided what they're going to go for are going for it.

Speaker 2 And then there's there's a strategy that I think is hard to play because it kind of goes against our intuition about what we should be doing, which is that in a lot of hidden markets, you have to act as if something that you are not as excited about is actually your first choice.

Speaker 2 In a lot of markets, you can do better by doing what I call settling for silver, by going for something that is not your first choice, acting like it's your first choice.

Speaker 2 And that can actually help you succeed.

Speaker 1 An example of that is.

Speaker 2 Think about the restaurant reservation example we were just talking about. If you know that everybody wants to eat at 7 o'clock or 7.30 p.m.
because that's the desirable reservation time,

Speaker 2 then there's going to be a ton of competition for that reservation. And so if you instead say, all right, look,

Speaker 2 I don't really want to eat at five o'clock, but I really do want to go to this restaurant. I really want to get in.
I'm going to act as if the five o'clock reservation is my first choice.

Speaker 2 And if you go for that first where there's less competition, you actually can succeed in getting stuff that otherwise would be unavailable to you.

Speaker 2 And a restaurant reservation might not be the be all and end all, but the same logic plays out in other markets that we care about more. So

Speaker 2 college admissions is one where when you are deciding where to apply for college, one of the decisions you have to make is if you're going to apply somewhere early decision.

Speaker 2 So early decision, you're agreeing to go to the school. You're committing to go to the school when you apply.

Speaker 2 And schools like this. They like when you are going to come for sure.
They like having high yield. So if you apply early decision, they give you increased chance of getting in.

Speaker 2 And when you're deciding where to apply early decision, you're picking this one school. You might be tempted to go for the school that you really want the best.

Speaker 2 That's your gold choice option, your first choice.

Speaker 2 It might be that that school is out of reach for you, that given your grades and your test scores, you're probably not going to get in even if you apply early decision because it's too competitive.

Speaker 2 And in this case, if you say, all right, I'm going to go for my second or third choice school.

Speaker 2 So you're settling for this silver choice option, but it might be a place where if you apply early decision, you actually can get in. And that is going to be a smarter strategy in a market like that.

Speaker 1 It seems that in those markets, the race itself perpetuates the markets, that you want to get into the restaurants you can't get into, then therefore more people want to go because fewer people can get in.

Speaker 1 And it seems so cool to be able to get in.

Speaker 1 It like boosts the outcome.

Speaker 2 This is, I think, why these types of hidden markets are so prevalent, that one of the strategies that sellers have is to say, I'm going to create excess demand.

Speaker 2 I'm going to have my price low enough or I'm going to cut my supply down enough that there's going to be more people who want something than

Speaker 2 can be served. And you can see this with fad products.
There was a product this summer that is still popular called Laboo Boos. They're these little dolls that they're called ugly cute dolls.

Speaker 2 I kind of find them ugly myself, but

Speaker 2 there is a

Speaker 2 set of articles that came out this summer about how hard it is for folks to get these products. And that's the reason why I have heard of them.

Speaker 2 And once you hear them, you start seeing them everywhere. But the seller, PopMart, has decided that the

Speaker 2 intense desire to get the thing, and this is one that's offered in first-come, first serve races.

Speaker 2 They do drops of the product that you can buy online. It's offered in first come, first serve lines.

Speaker 2 You see people standing outside of a retail outlet when they're going to make some available for sale and they kind of wait for hours to get one. And it's offered in lotteries where where, you know,

Speaker 2 I was in London and Harrods had a raffle, a weekly raffle for a luboo boo doll that they had for sale.

Speaker 2 And so you can see that this is a case where lots of attention is being drawn to the product because there is scarcity. And that can perpetuate demand later on.

Speaker 2 And that might be why the sellers are interested in creating a hidden market for their product.

Speaker 1 What I've always been fascinated in those cases is

Speaker 1 you can't predict, though, that this is going to be a hot product. And some of the products that become hot, you would think, what? Like the Stanley water cup and

Speaker 1 Trader Joe's shopping bags. And they became so hot, but why?

Speaker 1 And how unpredictable is that? So you may have all the best of intentions of creating

Speaker 1 a small supply and big demand, but if nobody comes,

Speaker 1 you lose.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean,

Speaker 2 it's not necessarily going to work for a firm to say, you know, I'm going to make it hard to get my product. A lot of times you want to make your product available so people will buy it and

Speaker 2 you can generate revenue.

Speaker 2 There is evidence from psychology and from behavioral economics that people do respond to what others do. There is a herd mentality.

Speaker 2 I see a line form around the block. I do infer that the restaurant is better.
So, you know, I think firms play this game where they, you know, they need something good.

Speaker 2 They need there to be enough people who want to at least, you know, try the thing to make it have excess demand.

Speaker 2 But they may kind of be clever about how much access they give in the hopes that others will see the line around the block and want to join it.

Speaker 1 We're talking about hidden markets, and my guest is Judd Kessler, author of Lucky by Design, the hidden economics you need to get more of What You Want.

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Speaker 1 So Judd, it seems like the way the hidden markets often work is it weeds out the people who really don't want something.

Speaker 1 And your example of the going to the French laundry in Napa Valley at that restaurant.

Speaker 1 And I was just in Napa Valley, but I would never eat at the French laundry because I'm just not the kind of person who's going to make a dinner reservation a month and a half in advance.

Speaker 1 I'm just, I'm not going to do it, so I'm never going to go.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and that's fine. I mean, one of the things that is true of any of these hidden markets is that you need to figure out what it is that you actually want.

Speaker 2 If you're going to try to succeed in a market where what you're going for is something that other people, you know,

Speaker 2 are also going for, that you're in a situation where there is excess demand, you have to decide. First, if it's worth playing.
So in your case, for the French laundry, it's not worth playing.

Speaker 2 And that's fine. There's other great restaurants in the Napa Valley to go to.
But when you are in a situation where you you do want to play, you do want to go to college, you

Speaker 2 hopefully are never in this situation, but you might need a life-saving organ transplant that you can't just go out and buy, that there is a set of market rules that will decide who gets it.

Speaker 2 And in those cases, you have to understand, okay, what are the rules that are going on in this market? What is it that I want? And what is the best strategy that I can use to get it?

Speaker 2 And understanding what the rules are. Is it first come, first serve, like we talked about? Is there a lottery component?

Speaker 2 Can I get on multiple waiting lists by signing up at different transplant centers for that life-saving organ transplant?

Speaker 2 In all of these situations, if it is a market you want to play in, you need to figure out the rules and then figure out what strategy you can use to get what you want.

Speaker 1 Well, I always figure that in cases like you just described, that the people who

Speaker 1 are in charge have figured out that people might try to game the system and that there are roadblocks up. Like you can't do it in two states.
You can only do it in one state And

Speaker 1 you can only be on one list. Like they've already plugged those holes.

Speaker 2 We might like to think that, that everybody is kind of on top of the design of these markets and that if there was a loophole, they would fill it. In reality, that's not the case.

Speaker 2 A lot of markets are created by historical accident or, you know, some well-meaning person creates a set of rules for a market, but isn't thinking about the big picture.

Speaker 2 You can do better for yourself if you recognize that in a lot of these situations, there are ways to improve your chances.

Speaker 1 And has that been studied?

Speaker 1 Have you looked at people who really work the system and do they really do better? Or is this more of a theory on paper?

Speaker 2 It's certainly the case that if you are, say, on multiple organ transplant waiting lists, you will have a higher chance of getting an organ allocated to you.

Speaker 2 And there's prominent examples of you know, people getting organs in locations that were not where we might think. So

Speaker 2 Steve Jobs got a liver that he needed, a liver transplant in Tennessee when kind of everybody knew that he lived in

Speaker 2 California. Now, you know, I don't know that he was on multiple waiting lists.
Maybe he just decided to be listed in Tennessee.

Speaker 2 Tennessee had much shorter waiting times than California. And so, you know, the data does reveal differences in people's ability to get access to scarce resources based on

Speaker 2 how they play in these games.

Speaker 1 So it really depends on how much you want something and how much work you're willing to put into it to get it.

Speaker 2 A good hidden market will reward effort for

Speaker 2 a higher chance of getting access to a good. And in some sense, that's what we want.
I think about this a lot with tickets for live events.

Speaker 2 So, if you want to go see a show, say you want to see Hamilton, and you know that it's very hard to get tickets, and the tickets that are available might be being resold on a secondary market for very high prices.

Speaker 2 But there's a lottery that you can enter for rush tickets,

Speaker 2 $10 if you win for a ticket to see the show. And you can enter that lottery every day.
And the more days that you enter,

Speaker 2 the higher your chance is of winning. And that's good.

Speaker 2 That's a market where we're going to reward dedication because folks who are willing to go to the theater every day to enter probably want to see it more than somebody who's only willing to show up one day.

Speaker 1 I think you would want to know, what are your odds of winning before you go to all this work? You know, it's like the Powerball. I mean, you could buy 10,000 tickets.

Speaker 1 You're still probably not going to win because,

Speaker 1 you know, and that's going to cost you $20,000 because the chances of winning are so small.

Speaker 2 I don't advise playing the Powerball for just that reason. You know, these are situations where there are winners.
There are folks who end up going to see the show.

Speaker 2 They provide a certain number of tickets to each performance.

Speaker 2 And so, you know, if it

Speaker 2 is something that you want to do, if it is something that you want to see, then it is worth it to try to enter the lottery. Maybe not going to the theater every day.

Speaker 2 That might be only for the true diehard fans because the chance of winning might be low. But this is not something that is unknowable.

Speaker 2 You can kind of do research and figure out in the situations that you are interested in winning something.

Speaker 2 What are the odds of success there? And then decide for yourself,

Speaker 2 is it worth entering?

Speaker 2 You might look at a line around the block for a cupcake that you really want from Magnolia Bakery, and you can kind of see how fast the line is moving and decide, all right, I know it's going to take 30 minutes for me to get this cupcake.

Speaker 2 Is it worth waiting for? And make a strategic decision then.

Speaker 2 And so you can observe the market, figure out its rules, get a sense of what it's going to cost you to participate, and then decide if it's worth doing and whether it's worth doing then or some other day.

Speaker 1 I wonder about the markets that don't exist. And here's what I mean.

Speaker 1 I think people think,

Speaker 1 and maybe it's true and maybe it's not, that, for example, you go to a restaurant, a really, really popular restaurant, you can't get in for months.

Speaker 1 But if Tom Cruise walks in the door and wants to sit down and eat, my guess is they'll find him a table. So how did he get a table? What's that game? And whose table did he get?

Speaker 1 who's now not eating at that table because Tom Cruise walked in the door.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's tough. I mean, you know, a lot of markets will have loopholes like that, you know, who you know rather than what strategy you play.
So that's harder to provide advice on.

Speaker 2 You know, maybe the advice is it's a good idea to become a

Speaker 2 movie star. Yeah, I would love to be a movie star.

Speaker 2 But, you know, I

Speaker 2 would urge folks who are not movie stars to not get discouraged about that.

Speaker 2 It could be that, you know, for that market, the hot restaurant, you know, being the celebrity is helpful.

Speaker 2 It could be that there are other markets where, you know, it's your friend's restaurant. And so you get the corner table every time.
And so you're the celebrity in that case.

Speaker 2 There are people, I should say, who

Speaker 2 try to

Speaker 2 bend the rules for themselves by kind of acting more like celebrities than they are. So there was a

Speaker 2 spate of articles recently about folks who pretended to be their own personal assistant. So they would

Speaker 2 try to make a reservation at a restaurant, not be able to get in.

Speaker 2 And then they would have, you know, they would call again, pretending, usually with a disguised voice or maybe via email and say, oh,

Speaker 2 I'm a personal assistant for this person and they would really like to come to the restaurant. And they found that that worked, that it often was the case that

Speaker 2 a restaurant or trying to get access to some live event, that there were tickets being reserved for

Speaker 2 celebrities, but you could kind of fake your way into being one if you were creative.

Speaker 1 What about hidden markets? Because they're hidden markets that maybe people don't understand that would be worth knowing.

Speaker 2 There are a lot of hidden markets that you control. You are the one who decides the rules of the hidden market.

Speaker 2 And one of the important ones is the hidden market for your time and attention, because that is a scarce resource that many more people may be wanting to access than you have available.

Speaker 2 And you're the one who gets to decide how it is allocated. In that case, you have to decide, all right, am I using my scarce resource in the way that I want?

Speaker 2 Am I responding to emails from people who kind of email me the most times with the most follow-ups? That might not be the most efficient or equitable way to respond.

Speaker 2 Am I setting recurring meetings and going to them week after week, even if I don't think that that's the kind of best use of my hour, you know, in this week when I have other things to do.

Speaker 2 And so when you think about yourself as somebody allocating scarce resources, you can kind of think,

Speaker 2 am I doing what I want to be doing in terms of giving people access to this resource?

Speaker 1 Well, as I listen to you talk about hidden markets, it becomes clear that hidden markets weed out the people who aren't really willing to work that hard or don't really want something and rewards the people who are willing to work the system, play the game.

Speaker 1 And in some ways, I guess that's more fair because the people who really want it and are willing to do the work are more likely to get it. I've been speaking with Judd Kessler.

Speaker 1 He's a professor of business, economics, and public policy at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

Speaker 1 And he's author of the book, Lucky by Design, The Hidden Economics, You Need to Get More of What You Want. And if you'd like to read it, there's a link to it at Amazon in the show notes.

Speaker 1 Judd, thanks for explaining this awesome thank you so much

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Speaker 3 Hey, how are you? Thanks for having me on.

Speaker 1 Sure.

Speaker 1 So we're all having conversations every day. I mean, that's generally the way we communicate with people.
And I doubt many of us stop during a conversation and think, how's this conversation going?

Speaker 1 How are my conversation skills? Yet some people are really good at conversation. And why is that? What makes a great conversationalist?

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's a great question. And luckily for us, there are researchers who are asking those questions.
How do the conversations work?

Speaker 3 Because if you think about it, our ability to communicate is essentially our superpower, right? Homo sapiens is a species.

Speaker 3 The reason why we've succeeded so well is because we can communicate better than any other species. But it turns out that communication is more complicated than we thought it was.

Speaker 3 And our brains have evolved to be particularly good at it. And the first thing that's really important to understand is that there's many different types of conversations.

Speaker 3 When we're talking to someone, we assume we know what we're talking about, right?

Speaker 3 That we're having a discussion about a movie we saw or where to go on vacation next but actually when researchers look inside our brains as we're having a discussion what they see is that we're having multiple kinds of conversations all at the same time and in general these conversations they tend to fall into one of three buckets there's these practical conversations where we're making plans or solving problems together but then there's also emotional conversations where i tell you what i'm feeling And I don't want you to solve my feelings.

Speaker 3 I want you to empathize with me. And then finally, social conversations, which is about how we relate to each other and how we relate to society.
And what researchers have found is that

Speaker 3 when people miscommunicate, it's because they're having different kinds of conversations at the same moment.

Speaker 3 That in order to really connect with each other, in order to really be able to hear each other, we need to be having the same kind of conversation at the same time.

Speaker 3 And within psychology, this is actually known as the matching principle, that successful communication requires having the same kind of conversation at the same moment.

Speaker 1 So give me an example of when that goes goes wrong and maybe when that goes right.

Speaker 3 Sure, absolutely. So

Speaker 3 one of the reasons I started writing this book is because I fell into this bad pattern with my wife. I would come home from work.
I was a reporter at the New York Times at that point.

Speaker 3 And I'd start complaining about my day. And I'd say, you know, my boss doesn't appreciate me and my coworkers don't realize what a genius I am.

Speaker 3 And my wife very reasonably 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?

Speaker 3 And instead of being able to hear what she was saying, I would get even more upset, right? I would, I would say things like, why aren't you outraged on my behalf?

Speaker 3 You know, you should be taking my side. She would get upset because I was attacking her for giving me good advice.
So what was happening there was that I was having an emotional conversation.

Speaker 3 I was telling her how I feel. And she was responding with a practical conversation.
She was trying to solve the problem.

Speaker 3 And both of those are legitimate conversations, but because they were different conversations at the same moment, we couldn't hear each other.

Speaker 3 So an example of how that goes well is what we do now, which is when I come home and I'm complaining about my job, my wife will often say, Do you want me to help you solve this problem?

Speaker 3 Or do you just need to vent and get this off your chest? And I'll say, Oh, you know, I just need to vent. This isn't that big a deal.
It's just, I had a frustrating day.

Speaker 3 And then, you know, after I complain for a little while and she empathizes, eventually she might say, Hey, is it okay if we talk about some solutions?

Speaker 3 Like, in other words, could we move from an emotional conversation to a practical conversation together? And when we do that, things work fantastically.

Speaker 1 Well, that's brilliant and seemingly so obvious. And yet, well, and men have the reputation of always wanting to solve something.
And when someone tells us something, that

Speaker 1 our go-to response is to try to solve it, even when the other person isn't necessarily looking for a solution.

Speaker 3 Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
Because oftentimes for some of us who were raised

Speaker 3 where practical conversations were the easiest kinds of conversations to have, that's our habit.

Speaker 3 We fall back into a practical conversation, particularly in a sort of sticky situation, a situation where it seems like the stakes are a little bit higher than just sort of, you know, shooting the breeze with someone.

Speaker 3 We fall back on what feels familiar. Now, that doesn't mean that we can't change.
And it also doesn't mean that men have fewer emotional conversations than women.

Speaker 3 What we know from research is that everyone has emotional conversations.

Speaker 3 But again, because sometimes men and sometimes in certain settings that we learn to communicate in a practical way, we tend to fall back on that, even when we're discussing emotional topics.

Speaker 1 So what else is going on in a conversation? Maybe similar to that, but kind of under the radar, because people don't think in the way you just described it.

Speaker 1 They just think we're having a conversation.

Speaker 1 But there's a lot going on. And what else is going on that I may have missed?

Speaker 3 Well, I think one of the things is, so it, you know, and these are the tips for how to become a better conversationalist, how to have more successful conversations.

Speaker 3 The first is to just pay a little bit of attention to what kind of conversation is occurring and to match others or invite them to match you. So that's number one.

Speaker 3 But number two is that people who pay attention to conversations, one of the things that they'll notice is that oftentimes there's someone who's asking questions, but they're not asking any question.

Speaker 3 They're asking a special kind of question that's known as a deep question. And a deep question is something that asks me about my values or my beliefs or my experiences.

Speaker 3 And that can sound a little bit intimidating, but it's as simple as if you meet someone who's a doctor instead of asking them, oh, you know, what hospital do you work at?

Speaker 3 You can ask them, oh, did you always want to be a doctor? Like, was that your dream as a kid? That second question is pretty easy to ask. But what it is, is it's a deep question.

Speaker 3 It invites someone to talk about their values, their experiences, the things that matter to them.

Speaker 3 And one of the things that we know is that in a great conversation, people are asking each other deep questions because a deep question is an invitation to say something real and meaningful.

Speaker 3 And this is actually the second skill for people is that if you make asking deep questions into a habit, what you'll find is that other people want to talk to you more, that they like you more, that they're more persuaded by you.

Speaker 3 Deep questions are really, really important. And one way to think about them is instead of asking people what they think about their life, ask them how they feel about their life.

Speaker 1 Oh, I like that. Well, give me some more examples of deep questions.

Speaker 3 You know, it's as simple as if I ask someone, oh, what part of town do you live in? Oh, I live in the Heights. Oh, then a follow-up deep question is, oh, what do you like about the Heights?

Speaker 3 Why'd you decide to move up there? Right.

Speaker 3 Or, or if I'm talking to you, oh, Mike, I love your podcast. It's a really interesting podcast.
I'm just wondering, like, what's your favorite part of doing the podcast?

Speaker 3 Because it seems like it takes up a lot of time, so you must really enjoy it, right? Those are deep questions.

Speaker 3 Those are questions that invite the other person to tell me how they feel about something, how they feel about where they live, how they feel about the work that they do.

Speaker 3 It's even as simple as if you find out someone went to a different high school than you in the same town. You can say to them, Oh, you went to Valley High.
What was that like?

Speaker 3 Like, do you feel like going to Valley kind of changed who you are?

Speaker 1 And what does that lead to?

Speaker 3 Well, what that leads to is it leads to what's known as neural entrainment.

Speaker 3 One of the things that we know about a conversation is that when you're in a good conversation, your body and your brain starts to change.

Speaker 3 So even during this conversation, even though we're separated by many miles and talking over the internet, without us realizing it, our breath patterns and our heart rates have started to match each other.

Speaker 3 If I could measure the dilation of the pupils of your eyes and my eyes, what I'd see is that they're starting to dilate in symphony with each other.

Speaker 3 And even more importantly, if I was able to look inside your brain and my brain, what I would see is I would see that our thoughts are becoming more and more similar, that literally on a graph of how we think, that the peaks and valleys are starting to occur at the same time.

Speaker 3 And that kind of makes sense when you think about it, because if I tell you about something sad that happened to me, you actually feel that sadness a little bit.

Speaker 3 If I tell you about a new idea, you feel the excitement of that new idea. So it makes sense that our brains would begin to coordinate, to begin to look similar.

Speaker 3 But what researchers have found is that when we're in a conversation, this is the goal of a conversation. And within neuroscience, it's known as neural entrainment.

Speaker 3 And what's important to understand is that the goal of having a conversation is this entrainment.

Speaker 3 The reason you feel so good after a good conversation is because your brain is literally releasing dopamine and other reward sensations to encourage you to have more conversations like that.

Speaker 3 And so when I ask you a deep question and you tell me something meaningful, and particularly if I respond in kind and I tell you a little bit about myself, we encourage that neural entrainment.

Speaker 3 We start to like each other more. We start to trust each other more.
Even if we disagree with each other, we feel connected to one another.

Speaker 3 And that's the goal of a conversation is to feel that sense of connection.

Speaker 1 Have you ever been in a conversation though, or it's not even a conversation yet? You're talking to someone and they ask you one of those deep questions and it feels very intrusive. Like, no, you,

Speaker 1 you don't get to ask that yet.

Speaker 3 Right. No, and I think there's a real important difference between a question that invites someone to tell us something and a question that mandates that they tell us something.

Speaker 3 So for instance, if I was to ask you like, oh, you know, what was your relationship with your dad like? Well, that's kind of a mandate, right?

Speaker 3 Like, like I'm basically saying like, I expect you to say something real and meaningful and deep. But if I ask something like, oh, just, you know, did you enjoy growing up in Albuquerque?

Speaker 3 Was that a good place to grow up? Are you close to your parents? Like, that's an invitation.

Speaker 3 That allows you to say, oh, yeah, let me tell you about Albuquerque. Or it allows you to say, yeah, we're really close.
You know, I like them a lot.

Speaker 3 And so it's important when we create these questions to pose them as invitations rather than mandates.

Speaker 1 Well, it's interesting because to hear you talk about it, of course, a conversation with deep questions in it is going to be more interesting and productive than not.

Speaker 1 And yet we tend not to gravitate to that. We tend to stick with the shallow questions about the weather and whatnot,

Speaker 1 which doesn't get you very far.

Speaker 3 You know, nobody really likes shallow questions. Nobody really likes being at a party and having someone ask them, you know, oh, where do you work? Oh, do you know my friend Jim?

Speaker 3 Oh, you know, what kind of car do you drive? That's not fun.

Speaker 3 But when someone asks a real question a deep question they say oh oh you work at microsoft like what's that like is it is it a cool place to work that at that moment it's very very easy in fact much easier for me to continue the conversation now that doesn't mean that i have to say like oh you know i'm going to tell you my whole life story or how i'm fighting with my boss right now no but it means that i can tell you how i feel about microsoft what i like about it what i don't like about it and at that point you can tell me what you like and you don't like about your job and what we're going to find is that we have things in common, things that we would not have guessed otherwise.

Speaker 3 And it's those commonalities that make a conversation robust and easy.

Speaker 1 So, Charles, you know, it just occurred to me: if you get two people together to have a conversation, and both of them have heard your advice, or read your book, or, you know, and are really into asking deep questions, and they're asking each other all these deep questions,

Speaker 1 it seems like that could get exhausting.

Speaker 3 No, no, not at all. I mean, well, let me ask you.
You've been asking me a bunch of deep questions during this discussion. Do you feel exhausted?

Speaker 1 No, but I don't think I've been asking deep questions in the way you described it. Am I?

Speaker 3 But yeah, yeah, you are, right? You're asking me like, you know, how does this stuff work? What do you make of it? Why does this seem important to you? Those are deep questions.

Speaker 3 In fact, what we know is that asking deep questions is less exhausting. What's exhausting is trying to keep a conversation going when it's just boring, right?

Speaker 3 When it's like, okay, I've already talked to you about sports and I've talked to you about movies. What else can I possibly talk to you about?

Speaker 1 That brings up an important question. As you said a few moments ago, everybody hates those kinds of questions.
Those, how are you? What's new?

Speaker 1 What kind of car do you drive? But we all do it. So it must serve a purpose because if everybody uniformally, universally hates it, why don't we all just stop doing it?

Speaker 3 I'm not sure that it serves a purpose. I mean, I don't do it.
Like, you can start with a service question.

Speaker 3 When we first got on the line, you asked me where I am today, right? And I told you I'm calling in from Santa Cruz, California. And you said, oh, you're down in Southern California.

Speaker 3 But from there, if we were just chatting, I would say, like, oh, what do you like about living down there? Like, do you enjoy it? Or do you sort of wish that you could move to a big city? Right?

Speaker 3 That's a pretty easy thing to ask. So oftentimes we can ask a shallow question as the first question because it's just, it's just a simple way to start the conversation.

Speaker 3 But I don't really have many shallow conversations or ask many shallow questions because almost inevitably the second or third question I ask is, oh, like, that's interesting.

Speaker 3 What do you like about that? Or what do you make of that? That's what makes the conversation interesting and real. And when a conversation is interesting and real, it's not exhausting.

Speaker 3 It's actually very rejuvenating.

Speaker 1 And that's what happens when people say, oh, I love talking to Charles. He's so interesting.
It's because you're asking me things

Speaker 1 that make me feel smart because you asked me my, basically for my thoughts.

Speaker 3 That's exactly right. So part of it is that I'm asking you real questions, which are interesting.
Everyone likes being asked real questions.

Speaker 3 But the other part of it is that I'm also answering some of those questions myself. Oh, you like living in Southern California because of this reason?

Speaker 3 Here's why I like living in Northern California, right?

Speaker 3 A conversation is a back and forth. It's a give and take.

Speaker 3 It's a dialogue. And so when a conversation is really good, it's not because one person sounds really smart or one person is asking great questions.

Speaker 3 It's because both people are sharing with each other.

Speaker 3 And what's interesting is if you think about the best conversations that you've ever had in your life, the ones that kind of stand out in your memory, If I was to look at a transcript of that conversation, I guarantee you, it would look like a mess.

Speaker 3 In the best conversations, we are not speaking in complete paragraphs. We are starting ideas and then we're getting distracted by other ideas.

Speaker 3 And then I'm interjecting with questions, and then you're talking, you're speaking on top of me. Those are what great conversations look like.
They look like a mess.

Speaker 3 But in the moment that you're having them, you feel connected to the other person. And so it's a great conversation.

Speaker 1 You know, it's interesting.

Speaker 1 As you said that,

Speaker 1 I can't really think

Speaker 1 of great conversations. Well, great conversations don't come to mind as quickly as great conversationalists I have spoken to.
I don't even remember what we talked about.

Speaker 1 I just remember thinking, I really like talking to this person.

Speaker 1 They make me feel smart or

Speaker 1 they're interested in me. I don't remember the content of the conversation.
I just remember the person.

Speaker 3 That's exactly right. And this is what we know is that people don't tend to remember what you talk about.

Speaker 3 They tend to remember how they felt during that discussion. And there's something valuable there.
Now, that doesn't mean that what you talk about is meaningless, right?

Speaker 3 You might have trouble remembering exactly what you discussed with some great conversationalist. But you kind of remember generally the themes.

Speaker 3 And in the back of your head, there's probably some ideas that you've embraced that came out of that conversation that you don't even think of as being related to that conversation anymore.

Speaker 3 But because you remember having the conversation, because you remember having this positive association with that discussion, it makes those ideas easier to remember and to penetrate into your brain.

Speaker 3 But you're exactly right.

Speaker 3 The thing that usually sets people apart from having a great conversation is not only that they're both saying interesting things, it's that they both feel good in the moment.

Speaker 3 And that's often because they're aligned. They're having the same kind of conversation at the same time.
They're sharing things with each other. They're asking deep questions.

Speaker 3 They're achieving vulnerability.

Speaker 3 And oftentimes people misunderstand what that word means, vulnerability, but it's an important component of how we have a good conversation.

Speaker 1 Let's talk about difficult conversations, because that's a topic that I think everybody struggles with, and everybody struggles with it, because we're all going to have those difficult conversations that you'd really rather not have.

Speaker 1 And how do you do that?

Speaker 3 And so in difficult conversations, one of the things that we can do at the outset is we can acknowledge that this is a difficult conversation and we can say what our goal is and ask the other person what their goal is.

Speaker 3 I want to talk to you today, and I know this is going to be kind of an uncomfortable conversation, but I want to ask you for a raise.

Speaker 3 And the reason why is because I've been working here for three years and I think I really deserve it. But before I start, let me ask you,

Speaker 3 what's important to you in this conversation? What are you hoping to get out of it? Right. When we do that, we're both explaining what our goals are.
That makes the conversation much, much easier.

Speaker 3 But then the second thing that we can do that's really, really valuable is we can ask the other person, we can prove to the other person that we're listening to them.

Speaker 3 And there's actually a technique for this. We tend to think of listening as something where you open your ears and you close your mouth.

Speaker 3 But actually what studies show is that that's the first step of listening, but that's not the entirety of listening.

Speaker 3 What's really important, particularly in a difficult conversation, is that I prove to you that I'm listening to you.

Speaker 3 Because there's always a suspicion in the back of your head that I'm not listening to you. I'm just waiting my turn to speak.

Speaker 3 And the technique for proving that I'm listening to you is known as looping for understanding. It has three steps.
Step one is I ask you a question, preferably a deep question.

Speaker 3 Step two is that I ask you, is that I repeat back what I heard you say in my own words.

Speaker 3 So I don't mimic what you've said, but I rather try and prove to you that I was paying attention, that I'm thinking about it.

Speaker 3 What I heard you say is this, and it reminds me of something you said last week.

Speaker 3 And step three is, once I've repeated back what I heard you say, once I prove to you that I was listening, at that moment, I want to ask you if I got it right.

Speaker 3 I want to say something like, you know, did I hear you correctly? Am I getting this completely?

Speaker 3 Because at that moment, what I'm actually doing is I'm asking you for permission to acknowledge that I was listening.

Speaker 3 And if you acknowledge that I was listening, you become much more likely to listen to me in return.

Speaker 3 And so those are the two most important steps we can take during a hard conversation to make it easier.

Speaker 1 Well, this is some great advice because I think we all struggle at times with conversation, or I think we spend a lot of time having conversations that don't really matter much.

Speaker 1 And this is a way to not do that. I've been talking with Charles Duhigg.

Speaker 1 He's a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author of the book, Super Communicators, How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection. And there's a link to his book in the show notes.

Speaker 1 Thanks, Charles.

Speaker 3 Thank you so much for having me. I really, really appreciate it.

Speaker 1 Have you laughed today?

Speaker 1 If not, you might want to put that on the top of your to-do list. Laughter truly is good medicine.
It decreases stress, it boosts immunity, and can even help you lose weight.

Speaker 1 Laughter changes your body chemistry. A good old-fashioned belly laugh actually burns belly fat by lowering your cortisol levels.

Speaker 1 And even just anticipating or thinking about laughing starts that process. So how much weight could you potentially laugh off?

Speaker 1 Well about four pounds a year if you've got a healthy laugh life. You'll need to laugh for about a total of 15 minutes a day.
It doesn't have to be all at once. Every chuckle counts.

Speaker 1 And that is something you should know. You know, I like to remind people there are are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of episodes of something you should know.

Speaker 1 And even if you're a regular listener, you can't have heard them all. So I invite you to scroll down on whatever device you're listening on.
All the episodes are right there.

Speaker 1 Find some episodes you haven't heard and binge a little and enjoy. I'm Micah Ruthers.
Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.

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