You’re So Good At Conversation!

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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Josh, and there's Chuck.

I'm Chuck.

Come in.

Already?

Yeah, you know.

Thought it was apropos.

Oh, it's my turn to talk?

Yeah.

Oh, well played.

I'm not very good at this, as you know.

If you have ever listened to the podcast, and I know you have because you're one of the co-hosts, you know that I step on you a lot?

No.

Yep.

I'll keep going with my current constructional unit then.

How confused are people, do you think, right now?

I don't know.

Probably very.

I mean, we should say this is all just a bit to sort of demonstrate a conversational analysis.

Yeah.

Well, that we're demonstrating the analysis.

If someone was sitting in another room making notes about how we were talking.

Like a creep.

Yeah, that would be conversational analysis.

We were just demonstrating poor communication.

Pretty much.

But it would be a bonanza for a conversation analyst, a CA, as they like to call themselves.

This is a super, super niche.

field of science.

I guess it would be a social science because it branched off from sociology.

But one of the things that I've noticed about it is that people like to try to push it into a typical social science, right?

Like come up with some theories, like why do people do these things that you guys are studying?

And conversation analysis says, no, we're not going to do that.

Instead, we are purely about observation, noticing patterns, and then figuring out how those patterns predict other patterns and how all these different patterns fit together in this grand way to make up conversation.

And you might say, well, that's pretty boring, wouldn't you, Chuck?

I mean, I'll let you finish and then I'll give you my take.

Okay.

You might say it's pretty boring if you were Chuck.

The reason why it's interesting is because it reveals something about us, that conversation is one of those things that we're really, really good at without realizing what we're doing.

That conversation is an amazing interaction between two or more people

that gets stuff done, that shares information, that you can make a case.

Basically, our entire entire human civilization is based on the fact that we're able to converse pretty much effortlessly, even though in a lot of times it just does not make sense.

Yeah, my deal with this is I'll get through this episode and then I want to wipe it from my memory bank because I'm one of those people that the last thing I want to think about is

how I'm conversing with somebody.

And it reminds me of that scene in Better Off Dead when early on John Cusack is having like his early flashback, I think, to his first meeting with his girlfriend.

And where they're in his head and he's like, oh, she just touched her nose.

Does that mean I have something on my face?

And then she's like, oh, he just touched his face.

Do I have mustard on my face or something like that?

And then before you know it, they're just going crazy.

And that's kind of what this does to me is I don't want to think about like, I'm very much am organic when it comes to stuff like this.

And the last thing I want to think about is did I say that right?

Or did I interrupt somebody?

Or did I act interested enough?

Like that kind of thing.

Just, I have no place for that in my life.

That's funny because that is almost 100% of what goes on in my mind when I'm talking or when someone else is talking.

Like, I can't help but do that.

I know.

And I know that.

And I feel for you for that because that can't be fun.

It's really tiring.

My bad.

So, okay, this is like potentially a career-ending topic pick that I made, huh?

No, no, no, no, no.

I just, you know, it's interesting, and then I just don't want to ever think about it anymore.

Okay, we'll do a good job doing that, and I'm sorry for even picking it.

Well, let's dive into all of this because it is interesting in and of itself, even though it is a really strange discipline in the way that it's set up.

Yeah, it draws from a couple of fields primarily.

Libya helped us with this one, and I can tell because it's awesome.

Ethno-methodology, and that is

studying how people, not just how they make sense of the world, but how they do it in relation to others and how they collaborate with others.

Right.

And then sociolinguistics, which is language, but not just language, language specifically with like how it relates in specific cultures and the context of different cultures.

And there were three key players and researchers

doing this in the 1970s, mainly.

Yeah.

At UCLA, go Bruins

uh the first one is a sociologist named Harvey Sachs and he seems to have kind of been the the ringleader here he's the the grand pappy of conversation analysis

uh he started UCLA in the 60s but really got into this in the mid 70s

Yeah, and he stopped in the 70s because the poor guy died in a car crash at 40 years old in 1975.

And he really only worked on this for just over a decade, but he figured it out.

He laid this down.

And part of it

was that he benefited from working closely with some other sociologists, including Irvin Goffman, who was the star of our impression management episode.

And I think that might have been where I first heard of conversation analysis.

And then, so he was working with Irvin Goffman.

They weren't doing the same thing, but they were both coming from that same strain of sociology, which is,

it was really transitional at the time from studying huge institutions like religion or government and zooming into a much more granular, almost micro-interaction level.

So that's what Goffman was into with impression management.

Harvey Sachs was into that with conversation.

Yeah.

He didn't publish a lot of stuff.

This wasn't like white paper, peer-reviewed kind of stuff.

It was mainly like, you know, sort of pre-TED Talk kind of thing.

Like, hey, isn't this interesting?

Here's my lectures.

I'm going to make them available.

You can take a gander if you want.

Right.

Then there was a student of Sachs named Gail Jefferson there at UCLA who was a dance major, but had this interesting job.

She worked as a typist for the Department of Public Health, and part of that included transcribing sensitivity training sessions with prison guards.

And so she got really interested in a very kind of key part of conversation with something called turn-taking when you, you know, take turns talking.

And a lot of this will be about like, the cues that people give to let the other person know, hey, now it's your turn to speak or how to interject constructively or interrupt constructively, things like that.

But that seemed to kind of fascinate her when she was transcribing these training sessions with the prison guards.

And so she got interested in that.

She ended up developing a whole system called the Jefferson Transcription System,

which we're going to talk about a little bit, basically how to kind of make sense of all this stuff when you're, you know, writing down how people are speaking to one another.

And then later on, it's kind of interesting.

I think she worked with laughter.

She was fascinated by laughter and how that works its way into a conversation and how someone may cue someone to laugh at something they've even said themselves by giving a small laugh after they've said that thing.

Yeah.

The third guy is Emmanuel Shegloff.

And he seems to have kind of taken the reins after Harvey Sachs passed away.

That's my take.

He became the chair of the the conversation analysis department at UCLA, which seems to be the center of conversation analysis from what I can tell.

He also received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Sociological Association in 2010.

So he was a big man on campus, essentially.

Yeah, he was a big brewing on campus.

But he, they, they kind of started out and got,

you know, with kind of the simpler side of things, which is like, hey, let's look at telephone calls and just just sort sort of everyday interactions with people.

Like, what do people say at the beginning of a phone call?

What do people say at the end of a phone call?

And this is sort of the bird's eye view of like just very basic interactions before they got more specific with their observations, I guess.

Yeah, but also one of the genius things about studying phone calls is how do two people who aren't looking at each other know when it's their turn to talk?

And they don't just.

Exactly.

And they don't just sit there and talk over one another constantly and it's just one big jumbled mess.

That's what I was talking about earlier.

We're really good at conversation.

We don't even realize it.

Yeah.

But one of the first things you have to do then is not just record the phone call, you have to transcribe it.

And that's what Gail Jefferson came up with was that method of transcribing that.

It's pretty clever.

If you know what you're looking at, you can get a lot of information from this transcription if it's used the Jefferson method.

Yeah.

And this was like, you know, this came around around the early 70s.

This is when linguist Noam Chomsky was kind of out there in the public sphere with his idea that there's a universal grammar.

And this doesn't, you know, this didn't set out to disprove that or anything like that.

It was really more of, let's look at different cultures and dynamics within a conversation.

Because Chomsky and, you know, some of his cohorts was like, you know,

conversations are just, you can't analyze this kind of stuff systematically.

The conversations are too irregular and too different between people.

And they were like, no, I think we can actually come up with some principles that are consistent enough to do it.

And I think they did.

Totally.

And one of the first projects that they started, one of Harvey Sachs' first projects was

he worked with a psychiatric hospital, an emergency psychiatric hospital.

So their work's pretty urgent, you can imagine.

And one of the things that they wanted to figure out was how to get patients to give them their name when they called in.

Yeah.

Because there was a certain amount of reluctance, as you can imagine, especially back in the mid to late 60s.

Yeah, they found out when a call

was answered at one of these places, they would say, if they said just hello, the person might just say hello.

But if they said, well, hi, this is this is Dr.

Charles Bryant.

What can I do for you today?

May I help you?

The people were much more inclined to then respond by saying, oh, well, this is also Charles Bryant, and I'm calling because I'm having some intrusive thoughts or something like that.

Right.

And then the receptionist would go, ha, I got you.

I got your name.

We know your name now.

Yeah.

Sometimes they found that people would not respond in kind with their name.

And in those cases,

it's pretty interesting.

And this, you know, kind of provided another little nugget of information for how these things go.

Yeah.

When they did not say, oh, yeah, my name's Chuck and I'm having intrusive thoughts.

They would sort of introduce like an inter like a disruptor.

They would say something like huh or what?

And just a small little bump in the road to change the conversational flow

subtly kind of saying like I don't want to give you my name without saying I don't want to give you my name.

Right.

Because what they found, conversation analysts found was that we follow set patterns, these kind of prescribed rhythms of conversations.

So if you interrupt

the flow of one type of conversation with, say, a huh, a new set of rules comes up that takes the conversation from there that both people are aware of, but don't realize they're aware of, which to me, I hadn't thought about it, but if you've ever said huh, to somebody when you knew full well what they had just said, you were just reflexively trying to...

derail or disrupt that that type of script in favor of a different one.

Never realized that before, but it makes sense.

Or maybe by time even, but it's just some sort of a disruptor to divert divert something for some reason.

Sachs identified another thing called composites, and they're phrases that are kind of combined as a unit, and it usually is a prompt for some kind of response.

Like if someone says, may I help you like that on the telephone, what they're then obviously is asking you for a response to let you know what's going on.

And in the case of like an emergency call center, they might literally respond to, may I help you by saying, I don't know.

And what they found was, is it wasn't like, like, that was a reasonable response.

Like, somebody might literally say, like, I don't know if you can help me.

And it needed to be sort of taken at face value like that.

Right.

What they, what that suggested, that Sachs discovered was that there were these composites where if you're saying, may I help you, you don't mean it at face value.

It's a part of a, I think what would be called later, an adjacent pair, where you prompt, you say something that's a prompt, and there's an expected range of responses to it.

And anything outside of that is like,

okay, that makes sense on paper, but it doesn't make sense conversationally.

And he kind of supported this with the idea.

He wrote in a 1975 paper that everybody has to lie.

Yeah.

And he used the example of like a greeting among people meeting on the street where you say, like, how are you doing?

And if the person says anything other than fine or great or good, they have just violated this type of composite prompt.

You're not supposed to say anything else.

And even more interesting than this, Chuck, is that

they seem to have found that this is actually universal.

It's not just like among Americans or English speakers or Germans or anything like that.

Everybody essentially does not want to know how you're actually doing.

Yeah.

And I found that that's a very good indicator of closeness and how you know that you've developed a true like closeness with someone else like a friendship or whatever uh because that's much more of a formal thing if even if you know somebody but don't know them that well you'll say oh like oh yeah i'm doing fine they're like oh pretty good right but if it's somebody you really know and you're close to

you don't have to lie uh you can very easily say i'm super tired or i'm not doing great because xyz you know yeah if you find somebody who actually does want to know how you're doing you hang on to that person right or if you meet someone out of the blue and say how you doing and they start in with the truth, then just walk away.

Right.

Maybe even jog away.

Yeah.

Red flag.

So one of the other big breakthroughs was came along when you could rent VCRs

and they had giant recording equipment, like the kind they used in Poltergeist.

That changed conversation analysis, where now all of a sudden you could see all the stuff that goes along with it.

It wasn't just telephone calls from disembodied voices.

You could see how people interacted and it opened up this whole new world.

For sure.

Should we take a break?

I knew you were going to say that.

All right.

We'll be right back.

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You know, before we broke, you talked about the huge cameras, and I'm reading Matthew Modine's diary of making a full metal jacket.

You know, the actor, Matthew Modine?

Of course, I I know exactly what you're talking about.

But number one, I can't believe there is such a thing.

And number two, I can't believe you're reading it.

Oh, it's great.

It's his diary when he was making the movie.

Casey actually got it for me when we were doing Movie Crush.

It was a very sweet gift.

But he at one point he was talking about

having to put yourself on tape.

for an audition, which is something routinely done all the time now, especially since the writer strikes and COVID and stuff.

But he was like, it's just such a pain.

You got to know somebody who has one of those huge video cameras and you have to go to their studio and blah, blah, blah.

It was very cute and quaint.

Yeah, my niece Mila has to do that a lot.

Yeah, yeah.

It's, it's super.

It's kind of the way it's done now.

For sure.

For sure.

But yeah, I imagine it's a, it's,

I don't know which would be worse, doing it live in front of people or doing it in front of a recording that you're getting zero feedback from.

Every actor I know hates putting themselves on tape.

They would much rather be in the room.

Gotcha.

Because they're all energy vampires.

Right.

Exactly.

So one of the things I kind of alluded to earlier is that conversation analysis is not a standard social science and that it doesn't develop theories of why people are doing these things or why you said this when somebody else said that.

Again, they're just looking for patterns.

They're looking at its structure.

And the cool thing about it is that that doesn't mean that they're not deriving any meaning.

They're not postulating what it means.

Like, for example, they're not going up to two listeners or two speakers and they go to speaker number two and say, what do you think speaker number one meant when they said, how are you doing?

Yeah, yeah.

They just analyze the conversation and based on speaker two's response, that tells the conversation analysts what speaker number two thought speaker number one was saying.

So just by examining it, they can come up with meaning or derive meaning from it.

And again, that's just not like other social sciences.

And it seems to really stick in the craw of everybody else.

I love it.

Yeah, they also didn't want to, they wanted to be as organic as possible and just have people have naturally, natural conversations with each other rather than orchestrating some big like scenarios.

You do have to, just because of scientific ethics and stuff, you have to tell people they're being recorded.

So you can't truly be just a fly on the wall.

But they did find that just the introduction of...

a recording device, they didn't feel like.

And I think they've shown through evidence that it didn't really really significantly change things enough to where the the result was like thrown out or whatever right right

and like we said that that when you um are beginning a conversation analysis you start with a recording of a conversation nowadays it's with videotapes um and then you transcribe it and one of the big things in conversation analysis is when you transcribe it you need to do it as objectively as possible you need to keep out your own subjective thoughts thoughts about who did what and just faithfully say this was an interruption.

This was a TCU.

This person took a breath in the middle of their word.

Josh just said he corrected himself in the middle of the sentence.

So he just used a repair and notate all this stuff without any

subjective input from you.

And then you go back and you analyze it after it's been fully transcribed.

Yeah.

And so you've been very cleverly, I might say,

subtly dropping in little words here and there that people are like, what's he talking about with this stuff?

That's the stuff that they're looking for.

And that's the stuff that they named, like things that, like in common parlance, we know some of these things like rejoinders and interruptions and things like that.

But, you know, they're analysts, so they took it a step further.

And here are some of those right now.

One of them is called a Turn Constructional Unit, TCU, obviously.

Not Texas Christian University.

Turn frogs, horn toads, horn frogs, I think?

Something like that.

Yeah.

Even tree frogs.

I think that's it.

But turn constructional units are the building blocks of any conversation, of every conversation.

And it can be just

a gesture, like a nod at somebody.

It can be multiple sentences, but they end up with what's called a transition relevance.

place, a TRP.

And that is a moment where like what you've said has ended, ended and someone else may have a turn to speak now, or you may say something else after that.

And that's just you taking

another turn, basically, and having two turn constructional units in a row.

And so what just right after you said in a row, that's where the transition relevance place was.

That was it.

Because it gave me a chance to start talking.

And everything you said leading up to it was the turn constructional unit.

That was your turn.

You took your turn in the conversation.

There was a pause that allowed me to start taking my turn.

And that's that's the basic building blocks of a conversation.

That's right.

Okay.

See, you're good at this.

There's also,

when I analyze it, sure.

There's also like a lot of different, I guess, rules or exceptions or whatever.

Like you could say, you could use two turns in a row without really allowing for a transition relevance place, that pause that allows the other speaker to start.

For example,

you could say, are you hungry?

I could go for a burger.

You actually just took two turns, like a big fat hog,

without any pause in the middle.

And yet that's not considered like any sort of violation of conversation.

It's just, again, it's like an exception.

It's a way that we've kind of, we're so good at conversation, we can show off by taking two turns in a row and not mess up the flow of conversation.

Yeah, exactly.

If it's, and we have to point out, too, that a lot of times they were looking at conversations between just two people, but you can also analyze conversations in groups.

It's just sort of a different beast.

But in conversations with more than two people at that transition relevance place where it's probably someone else's turn to talk,

like if you're in a group of people at a dinner party and you're telling a story, it's very common to like finish up the story and not just stare blankly into space, but you finish up the story and maybe look at one particular person.

And there may be a reason for that.

Maybe it's your person, or maybe it's the person you originally sort of started the story in reference to what this other person was saying.

So you'll kind of turn it back to them.

But, you know, that's one way you can sort of indicate, like, hey, now I'm looking at you.

And that they may not speak at that point.

It may, you know, someone else may jump in.

It just sort of depends.

Right.

You could also make a finger gun and go at that person.

And they'll take over.

One of the things I laughed a minute ago when you talked about staring blankly at the ceiling, it's so silly when

you just take out like a proper response and put in something else.

It just makes me laugh every time because it's so prescribed.

Like this, these scripts are so prescribed that doing anything other than that is just absurd and hilarious.

Yeah.

I mean, it's like hidden camera material, you know?

So I mentioned that

I think I corrected myself.

Actually, it's considered an interruption.

When I misspoke and said breath weirdly and then said it again correctly right after, I actually interrupted myself and I referred to that as a repair mechanism.

That's exactly what it is, because one of the unsung parts of human interaction and conversation is that we have to have ways of correcting and adjusting misunderstandings.

If we didn't, we would be able to converse, but two people would walk away from the conversation potentially with totally different understandings of the information that was just exchanged, right?

So we have to be able to correct ourselves when we know we made a mistake.

And then also, conversely, we need to be able to ask for clarification if we didn't understand what the person was saying.

Yeah, or someone else may ask for that clarification or something like that.

So the repair doesn't have to come.

It's not necessarily a self-repair always.

Right.

But it doesn't mean like going to the person and being like, I'm really sorry.

And I'm not going to do this anymore.

And here's how we're going to do it better from this point forward.

Not that kind of repair.

There are also gaps,

something to identify when they're analyzing conversations.

And we all know what that is.

That I believe I always call them and friends have called them awkward pauses

when it's not clear who the next speaker is going to be.

And that can happen.

Like, you know, you can...

And even with groups of close friends in a very social situation, in fact, I feel like that's when it's most sort of noticeable is when like you're at a dinner party and something and everyone's laughing and saying things and then everyone just draws a blank for a couple of beats.

Sure.

And then someone will usually say like awkward pause or something like that and not say like that's a technically it's a conversation gap.

That's I think a good

replacement now because awkward pause is so used up just be like conversation gap.

So it can be uncomfortable when it happens naturally, naturally like that.

Like every everybody's just kind of run out of things to say about whatever that conversation was.

It's even more uncomfortable when somebody misses their turn to speak.

Right.

They don't clearly yes, or they don't give any sort of response, right?

That is, that can cause a gap.

And a lot of times you can signal that by like repeating the question you just asked,

saying the punchline one more time,

saying something like, what do you think about that?

A prompting thing.

And then there's also nonverbal ways of signaling gaps, like putting both hands in the air and going into a forward lunge.

Right.

I've always found that if the joke doesn't go, we're just merely repeating the punchline again always works.

Exactly.

Over and over and over again.

You may not have heard me.

Adjacency pairs, I think you might have mentioned that, but that's when

when a specific kind of response is expected.

So like, how's it going?

Hey, I'm doing pretty good.

Um, they're also a lot of times referred to as pre-sequences.

So, just sort of like sort of like a pad answer almost.

Yeah, like, come in, won't you?

Thank you.

That'd be invitation, acceptance, greeting, greeting, question, answer.

Um, there's actually a lot of those that those are the ones that are

maybe even silliest when you replace it.

Like, if somebody says, Would you like a slice of cake?

And you go, hello.

Right.

It doesn't work.

Well, what if you went, hello?

Exactly.

I was going to say the same thing.

Like, we've figured out ways around that you can massage the rules and get even more creative with the whole thing.

That you could use something that's totally inappropriate and make it appropriate.

The best thing about something that funny is explaining it to death.

All right.

Here, ask me for cake one more time.

I got one more.

Okay.

Would you like a slice of cake?

Go yourself.

That works.

It kind of works to an extent for sure.

Stories is another one.

When you mention the staring into space at the end of a question to you, that can also happen at the end of a story if you don't know what you're doing as a communicator.

When you start a story, you a lot of time give an indicator that

it's going to be you for a minute or two by saying something like, did I ever tell you about, or something like that,

yeah, get a load of this, or I'll tell you what happened to me.

And then you start your sort of story.

And usually you will end it by kind of looking in someone's direction.

And that's when you should sort of acknowledge by either saying like, oh man, that's so funny or just something like that.

And not just stare blankly back at somebody.

So I have, I'm guilty of doing that, especially before I started treating my ADHD.

My mind would wander very

easily when somebody was telling a story.

And I would know that I really miffed it when the person would look at me and then have to feel like they had to explain why I should be reacting more than I am.

And then I'd be like, oh, yeah, that really sucks that that happened to you.

And it was not, it doesn't really make for good interactions, really.

It makes people want to stay away from you.

Oh, Josh really dug that one, huh?

Right.

Like, huh?

What?

Because, yeah, you don't say, huh, what?

I wasn't paying attention.

You try to play it off, and that actually makes it worse.

Yeah.

There are discourse markers, and they're just sort of words or phrases like,

like, or organizationally help out like oh or because and you're usually like connecting something to something that came before it right and then the last one is a laminated action which is um when you combine it with a gesture that it doesn't just change the meaning it actually completes the meaning yeah um livia gave an example of when you say oh yeah i've met him and you roll your eyes right if you just say oh yeah i've met him it ex even that same intonation, it doesn't tell the person what you actually think about them.

And you roll your eyes, then they get the whole picture.

You've met them, you've judged them, you can't stand them, you wish they were dead, dead, dead.

Yeah, good eye roll can say all those things.

Exactly.

Should we take another break now or keep going?

Let's talk about overlap, maybe, and then we can take a break.

That feels about idea.

So, overlap is

a really, really like, I feel like conversation analysts just sort of light up whenever there's an overlap that they can witness.

They get pretty turned on by that kind of thing.

One common form is just like

just a simple misunderstanding.

Like, I didn't know that your turn was over.

I'm sorry.

It's not the same thing as interruption.

Those are two different things.

But

interruption is like when you stop in the middle of, like, stop somebody in the middle of their sentence and talk over them.

An overlap is just when someone stops talking and had something else to say, maybe, and you start on your own train.

Yeah, that's the thing I think I do the most to you.

I think you're done, and then I keep talking, or I start talking.

That is,

yeah, that's just straight up interruption, unintentional.

There is such a thing as intentional interruption where somebody's trying to like gain control or dominate a conversation,

aka total jerks.

Right.

There's also a different kind of interruption, which is a cooperative interruption.

Like when I say write to you while you're telling a story, I'm actually interjecting it while you're still using your turn.

You're making a turn construction unit

unit.

But I'm helping you along, at the very least, demonstrating I'm listening and participating in the conversation, which makes it cooperative.

Yeah, and those are just fine.

You can interrupt people all the time in the middle of their story and even add to it if you're

if you can

like maybe you'll interrupt and say, like,

if somebody was telling a story about driving their car, you know, it's like, you know, what was the guy, what kind of car was he driving?

And they'll say, oh, a BMW.

And then everyone's like, yeah.

And they may have left out that detail.

So that's all just sort of active participation in the conversation.

Precisely.

We're also so good.

No shade toward BMW drivers, by the way.

I'm not sure why I said that car.

We're also so good at this whole thing that

we can interrupt while someone's telling a story without taking away from the story.

For example, if you're sitting there having dinner with somebody and they're telling a story and you say, hey, pest the potatoes,

it doesn't actually like derail the conversation.

The person's not offended.

You're just fitting that in there so you can eat the potatoes and enjoy them while you're hearing the story too.

Yeah, and that can happen even.

I mean, dinner party is such a good sort of experiment because it's everyone's seated around and looking at each other and all these conversations are happening.

That you can even do that to someone else at the table during someone's story if the potatoes are closer.

But you might do it in a hushed tone, like during the middle of their story.

Hey, can you pass potatoes?

Yeah.

And that person may even go, they're so good.

So what?

Like something like that.

What kind of potatoes did you imagine when I said pass the potatoes?

Mashed.

Did you, I, for some reason,

thought of steamed or baked red potatoes, and then I was like, those are no good.

So I changed it to scallop potatoes, which are great.

Oh, man.

You ever think everything, don't you?

I totally do.

And then I thought about human makes really good scallop potatoes.

It just kind of kept going from there.

I wonder what Chuck's talking about right now.

Exactly.

No, I was listening too.

That is a bit of a talent.

I can listen and do that at the same time.

Okay.

What?

Exactly.

I think this is kind of really interesting.

There's a Georgetown University linguist named Deborah Tannin who did a fun little experiment where she transcribed conversations between two Californians, three New Yorkers, and a Londoner.

And this should come as no surprise.

New Yorkers talked over everybody.

And when they did it with the fellow New Yorker, the other New Yorker just kept talking and they were just sort of talking over each other.

And they were still enthusiastic and having a good time.

But when a New Yorker talked over a Californian or a Londoner, they would stop talking.

Other people, you know, when they went back and looked at it, others viewed it as like these New Yorkers are dominating the conversation.

They just want to take over anytime I said anything.

The New Yorkers were just like, hey, it's all good.

This is what we do.

And they found that as far as New Yorkers, and the New Yorkers also thought that

like no one joined in like when they stopped talking.

They were like, well, I guess they didn't want to talk or whatever because they're not interrupting me.

Right, exactly.

But they did find that other scholars have found that there are these New York-like patterns in other cultures, Samoan, Japanese, and Italian-American.

And so that's why every Italian American New York family, all they do is just sit around and scream over each other all the time.

Right.

And Japanese stood out to me and I'm like, that doesn't sound right.

And then I thought of, have you ever seen a Japanese like morning talk show?

Oh, sure.

Yeah.

So the somebody like a guest or some other anchor or something will be talking and then one of the hosts will interject usually a question before the person has finished talking and the person stops saying what they were saying and answers that question and adjusts without being offended at all.

So it actually happens quite a bit

and usually toward the end of a sentence or a story or something like that, but it does happen a lot.

Whereas American English speakers, you are done speaking, then the person starts speaking or else you have transgressed on that person's turn.

For sure.

Should we take a break?

Yeah.

All right.

We'll take a break and finish up right after this.

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I don't know.

You know it's Stuxnet.

Is that in this?

Stuxnet.

Stuxnet.

It's a great name.

Yeah,

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So we talked about how like all of these are scripts or templates, like there's you say something and there's a predictable response.

And there's actually, you can boil it down to what are called families.

So like different types of conversations fall into different kinds of families.

The big ones that we've seen are reconstruction, moralizing, and projection, right?

Yeah, reconstruction, you know, obviously

reconstructing or remembering and sharing something about an event with somebody.

The projective is looking to the future.

Yeah.

It could be very specific, like where are we going to dinner or just more like sitting around and chatting out loud about the real future.

And then what was moral communication?

About good and good and bad?

Yeah, it's more about tearing people down or complimenting people.

And

we tend way more toward negativity, tearing people down

rather than building people up.

And our tearing people down types of genres are way more intricate and sophisticated than our building people up or complementing because we have a negative bias as a species.

That's depressing.

So we'll outgrow it one day.

Just give us several tens of thousands of years.

Yeah.

So at the beginning, we kind of talked, I think we gave an example of how this might be used like on the job or something.

sort of practical applications do involve that for sure.

Like you might be hired by a company to come in and consult when that company does,

like, has kind of the same kind of conversation over and over with people.

Like, if it's a surgical team or a call center, for sure, whenever you hear this call may be recorded for training and evaluation purposes, that's that's probably what they're doing right there, or maybe just judging their own employees and how they're doing on the job.

Right, for sure.

Um, they've also found you can help people get certain types of responses that you're looking for.

Like we talked about the emergency psychiatric hospital,

where they wanted to get the person's name and then trick them into it.

There was a guy named John Heritage, unsurprisingly from UCLA, who worked with doctors to figure out how they could get patients to volunteer more problems that they needed help with.

And they found that doctors who say, is there anything else that you need help with today?

Apparently, anything triggers a response, a predictable response, which is no.

But if you change anything to something, that

for some reason, that particular script or template opens up the possibility of sharing more information.

And you would just never figure that out.

And this is one of the sterling examples of how conversation analysts like actually help things change for the better.

Yeah, that was well said.

Thank you.

Way to go, John Heritage et al.

A woman named Elizabeth Stokoe of the London School of Economics and Political Science Science

found this when she studied conversations in a mediation service

that people,

it seems like in this case, people just kind of wanted to get down to brass tacks on what actually they did.

They didn't want to hear things like, well, we don't take sides here and we don't judge.

They really wanted to hear just sort of the step-by-step process of mediation and how it worked.

Yeah, she also works with companies that are trying to install customer service bots.

And I was reading about that.

It's not going very well.

People hate customer service bots.

And there's a question.

Yeah, I'm one of them too.

There's a question of, okay, is the solution making these bots way more human-like?

Should we insert things like

have a bot say, um, or, you know, like waffle like a human does?

And from what I saw, the consensus is no, don't do that.

Bots should be recognizable and volunteer themselves as bots.

Humans are humans.

Keep the two separate.

And I don't know which direction it's going it does kind of seem like the whole thing's in a quagmire currently but i also did see that bots are poised to start taking over the reins from human conversation analysts and doing it themselves and then training bots how to be better at their job so one bot training another bot right uh that's from what i can tell the the future of conversation analysis Yeah, I mean, with the movie Her, that now is like kind of freakily ahead of its time with Scarlett Johansson, I think in that situation, they definitely wanted to make her way more human and do things like stumble words and make mistakes.

But if it's something like a customer service bot,

you don't want that.

I don't want it at all, but I definitely don't want one that's like, I just goofed, aren't I cute?

Exactly.

LOL.

So let's get down to it, though, Chuck.

Here's the real reason we started talking about this.

Do men interrupt women as much as people think?

Well, I mean, this has been something that they've studied a lot since the 70s about, you know, the roles that that plays.

And

it's been mixed results.

There have been studies that found that men interrupt women much more.

There's some that found there's not much of a difference.

There was a meta-analysis from 1998 that found that gender divide becomes more clear-cut when looking at intrusive, specifically intrusive interruptions, as to cooperative interruptions.

And that's kind of what I took away is that it seems like when men are interrupting, it is definitely more intrusive,

maybe mansplainy.

Sure.

I don't know.

And women interrupt maybe just as often, but it's much more of the cooperative type.

Right.

And they chalk this up to different kinds of upbringings where girls who become women are raised to essentially

socialize through communication, through conversation.

So they become masters at it, but they also develop expectations that men don't necessarily fulfill, like cooperative interruptions.

Like, oh, that's right.

You don't say.

If a man doesn't do that, the woman might feel like she's not being listened to.

And conversely, boys are raised in a hierarchical manner where they might

eventually come to see listening as a form of submission, where instead they're trying to dominate.

They want to be the alpha male.

They want their puffy vest to be the coolest at their kids' football game.

And so not only are they not going to cooperatively interrupt, they're not even going to listen and they may interrupt

competitively too.

So there's a lot of

at least anecdotal data to back that up for sure.

Yeah, and I think they also found that men tend to interrupt more in groups than a one-on-one.

And that definitely seems to fall in line with like, you know, trying to establish the power position and like if you're working together in a group.

They did also find another interesting correlation where in studies where the first author of the study was a woman, they found bigger differences.

And that just could be that the male and female researchers are coding the interruptions in a different way.

Pretty interesting.

I thought so too.

What about generationally?

Well, so apparently Gen Z is just throwing a huge wrench in the works.

Remember, we talked about how at the hospital, the emergency hospital, when somebody called and they said, my name is, may I help you?

Right.

The other person felt obligated to give their name.

That's not true.

Like when we were growing up, you would not feel like you had to say, oh, well, I'm Josh Clark and here's what I need from you.

You'd just say, oh, hey, I need this or whatever.

That's an example of a generational change that took place.

Now it's even more pronounced, apparently, with Gen Z.

There's something called the Gen Z stare where they're essentially pulling a Josh where you can tell them a story and they just stare back at you blankly at the end when it's their turn.

And apparently it's fairly well.

Disconcerting.

Yeah, I've heard about it and then I was like, what is that?

Then I read up about it and it is very disconcerting, as is the phone call thing, which I haven't experienced because people don't call each other much anymore.

But apparently, Gen Z, when they answer a phone, they don't go, hello.

They expect the other person to talk first.

So apparently there's a Gen Z thing where they just answer the phone like this.

Yeah.

And then the other person goes,

hello?

Or do you need help?

That's what I would say.

Yeah.

And I mean, I guess I've definitely witnessed the Gen Z stare with friends' kids here and there.

to where you're just like, boy, I just like, I must be the least interesting human on earth because they're just blankly looking at me.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Or you can look at it the other way and be like, good talking to you.

I'll see you later.

Yeah.

But I've also found, especially when you're around teenagers, like your friends that have teenage kids, like, just don't even, you know, maybe say something nice and hello, but don't try to strike up a conversation.

They don't want to talk to you.

No, just don't.

I think.

Just move along.

That's been true since Tuck-Tuck was a teenager.

You know what I mean?

You know what I usually do?

I'll go like, I'll go like, oh, hey, how's it going?

How's school going this year?

Oh, good, good.

Glad to hear it.

And I'll just walk away.

Like some, like a nice thing to say, and then just end it.

You don't follow up with like, are you really anxious when you wake up in the morning before school?

No, no, no, no.

No one wants to hear from an adult if you're of a certain age.

Okay.

I'm going to have to rethink my approach then.

Do you remember when you were a kid?

Like, I don't remember even having conversations with adults.

Oh, yeah, no, absolutely not.

You know, I'm totally kidding this in everything I'm saying, right?

Oh, yeah, okay, of course.

Yeah, no, I remember that.

It was very intimidating to talk to an adult, let alone having very little in common.

Yeah, and they didn't want to talk to us.

No, no, for sure.

Gen X was famously ignored by most adults.

Yeah, very famous.

Just ask Douglas Copeland.

Who's that?

He's the guy who wrote Gen X.

Oh, okay.

Was that a book?

Famous book?

Yes.

I believe he's the one who coined the term.

Oh, all right.

Good for him.

You should read it.

It's good.

It's a quick read.

It's not like an essay or anything like that.

It's a story about three Gen Xers and just going through life over, I think, just the course of a few days.

I've been a reading fool lately.

I'll put it on the list.

Nice.

I just started Infinite Jest, and I'll bet I regret ever announcing it publicly because

that David Foster Wallace?

Yes, and I love that guy, but this is a slog already.

Yeah, I'm finishing.

I just finished the Bono book that I had put down like a year ago, and I

am almost done with the Don Felder of the Eagles.

Good lord.

You might be asking, why would you read that?

It's specifically because I used to love the Eagles, and he

apparently the book was just really

bitchy.

Oh, okay, yeah.

I could see that.

So I was like, ooh, I want to read this because he's like, he hates those guys.

So let me read this.

Did Matthew Modin recommend you read it in his diary about Full Metal Jacket?

No, that's my bathroom book.

So I've just been slow rolling that one.

Gotcha.

I don't think you should use words like slow rolling when you talk about being in the bathroom.

Good point.

Well, I think we just brought about listener mail, whether we like it or not, don't you?

That's right.

This is not a really correction, just sort of maybe a gentle reminder about our history of orthodontia.

I feel like we might have focused a little too much on appearance.

This is from Aaron.

Hey guys, appreciate the depth of curiosity you bring to each topic and I wanted to offer an update regarding orthodontia.

It's not just about appearance anymore.

The field has evolved significantly and current research shows that strong connection between jaw and bite alignment and conditions like sleep apnea, ADHD, and TMJ dysfunction.

Which is of course totally true.

While some of these links were suspected years ago, orthodontic treatment today is increasingly focused on preventing or mitigating these issues and the ute before they become chronic.

On a personal note, my journey with TMJ dysfunction led me down the path of exploring treatment options and after years of discomfort, I found relief through Invisalign.

It not only helped with my smile, realigned my bite and significantly reduced my TMJ symptoms and opened my eyes to the broader health benefits of orthodontic care.

And that is warm regards from Erin.

Very nice email.

Erin Invisa.

Right.

Yeah, exactly.

Thanks a lot, Aaron.

I'm really glad.

Aaron, with an E or a double A?

Or one A?

That's E R I N.

Thanks a lot, Aaron.

I'm glad that you were able to take care of your TMJ.

I can't imagine that that's a fun, chronic condition, you know.

If you got rid of a condition that you're happy about, we want to hear about that, or for whatever reason you want to write in, you can send us an email.

Send it off to stuffpodcast at iHeartRadio.com.

Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.

For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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