CIIS Public Programs Podcast

Journalist Celeste Headlee is joined by CIIS professor Zara Zimbardo to discuss ways to have meaningful conversations in a politically and socially polarized time.

A transcript is available below.

TRANSCRIPT

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[Theme Music] 

This is the podcast of the California Institute of Integral Studies, where we bring you conversations and lectures from our Public Programs series featuring world-renowned scholars, leaders, authors, artists, and thinkers. In this episode, public radio journalist Celeste Headley is joined in conversation by CIIS’, Zara Zimbardo to discuss how to have meaningful conversations and why they matter. This event was recorded on February 22nd, 2018 in front of a live audience in San Francisco. To make sure you never miss an episode of the CIIS Public Programs Podcast, find us and subscribe on iTunes or on our website at ciis.edu/podcast. 

[Theme Music Concludes]  

[Applause] 

Zara: Hi, Celeste [laughing]. It’s an honor to meet you and to get to have the opportunity to interview a renowned interviewer and it definitely feels very meta to have a conversation with you about conversation. [Celested: Right.] So I'd like to start by asking, as a professional interviewer question-crafter conversation-cultivator, what lit your fire to create this Ted Talk and also to create this wonderful book that pulls together so much research and lived insight on the value of conversational competence, how it's eroding, and how we can take tangible steps to improve it.  

Celeste: Well, I didn't study journalism in college. I have both of my degrees are in Opera. I'm a professional opera singer. So, I had to do all of my journalism training after I was always already a working journalist. So, when I went to go to figure out how to become a better interviewer, I started reading all of these books and all of this research on conversation—how to make a better conversationalist and I have the benefit of working in a conversational laboratory. Right? I mean I'm literally interviewing dozens of people every week from all different walks of life. And so when I would take all of this advice that they gave me on doing better conversation, it was all crap. I mean, none of it worked. Like, literally when I tried it out, I had to wonder if they even had, the people who wrote these books, did they even follow their own advice? Like, it literally did not work. 

Zara: Things like nod to show you're paying attention. 

Celeste: And look people in the eye while you're talking to them, which ends up being really awkward in practice [Zara laughs]. Or nod your head and say, “Uh-huh. Mhm. Uh-huh.” I mean basically, for generation after generation what the experts have been training is to do is how to pretend that we're paying attention. [Zara: Right.] Instead of just learning to pay attention, right? Which is really authentic, actually. So, I had to start from scratch, right. I had to sort of throw out all those books and...I don't throw them away, I donated them to the library... but start from scratch. And in a number of ways I had to reach into different fields of research that were unexpected because we don't actually have a lot of research on conversation. We have a lot of research on the pieces in isolation. Like we have researched human beings talking and we've researched human beings listening but there's not a whole lot on human beings talking and listening to each other. So you have to sort of find these nuggets in some cases in fields of study that are just unexpected. Like English as a second language and you know places where you may not think you'd find it and then sort of discover how to make it better and then I could take it back into my conversational laboratory and see if it worked.  

Zara: Yeah, and was there a particular... pressing impetus to want to really Marshall all these resources to share it with the world at this time, whether at this time in your life or at this time in our country? 

Celeste: Well, you know the prompt for the TedX Talk was: tell us what bugs you in the world and then tell us how to fix it [laughs]. And you know having covered politics now for going on 19 almost 20 years, we see really clearly how political discussions are breaking down in DC, right? We have no problem saying that politicians don't talk to each other but we also have no problem feeling virtuous about not talking to people who disagree with us, right? We stand on principle and you see somebody with a Trump hat or Bernie Sanders shirt and you feel like you already know what all their opinions are and you don't want to hear them and you feel actually good about not engaging that person or whatever it may be. And it occurred to me that we needed to stop thinking it was somehow a good quality to not engage half of the population. I mean, I don't know how we got to the point where that became sort of a point of pride, [Zara: Mmm] but it needed to end. Because it was the exact same dysfunction that we had no problem criticizing on Capitol Hill. You know, it wasn't that long ago that politicians would argue with each other in Congress and then go home and bowl together or go to each other's kids birthday parties and hang out and have dinner together, whatever it may be. That does not happen in Washington anymore, does not happen. But it also doesn't happen in our own homes. Like I remember my grandparents. They used to have, you know, barbecues or whatever in the summertime and they would invite the whole neighborhood. And there was like, I remember one guy who was always spouting conspiracy theories and they're like, “Eh, that's Larry,” you know. Nobody agreed with him, but they didn't stop inviting him. Right? I mean this dysfunction is not just isolated to Washington. It's all of us. We're constantly trying to unfriend people in real life. Yeah, so it's upsetting 

Zara: And this is something that you've been witnessing over the last couple decades as deteriorating in terms of it sounds like on a number of fronts, in terms of our capacity to pay sustained attention for longer than eight seconds [Celeste laughs] to each other, but also the ease and speed with which we write others off [Celese: Right] and that there's deal breakers of who we might not talk with or not. Seeing the value in reaching across different ideological divides. What do you attribute some of these trends to?  

Celeste: [Holds up cell phone] This is my cell phone. [Zara: Oh, hey!] I don't attribute all of it to the smartphone. It is not all the smartphones’ fault because the smartphone is literally not making you send a text when you could use the phone. You're choosing to do that, right? It is a phone at heart. Like it's literally created to be a phone but we don't use it as a phone. The average American at this point adult spends —this research is actually a few years old so it's probably worse by now— spends about 30 minutes texting every day and six minutes on the phone. And some companies like Coca-Cola, Cisco, JPMorgan use the phone so little in their business places that they've eliminated voicemail completely. They don't even pay for it anymore. Like that's how little we use the phone. 

Zara: And that used to be a single function device. [Laughs]  

Celeste: Right. and I am not a like, “Back in the good old days, when you wrote letters on parchment…” Like not at all, like, I use my phone for everything. I've got a Fitbit and I have a smart Surface tablet that I love like viscerally. But the problem is that this technology that has the power to do all kinds of things that human beings are terrible at, right, it can do high functioning math. It can keep track of your bank balance. It can do all kinds of things, keep track of your schedule that our brains are not very good at. But what we keep trying to do and keep inventing new platforms for is to replace the one thing human beings are better at than any other species and that is communication. That's the part I don't understand because it's stupid. It's a stupid idea. We don't need yet another app that replaces the thing that we do at such a sophisticated level. We can't even understand because scientists at this point can't even understand all that happens. In a human brain and body when our ears listen to a human voice, we can't even track it. [Zara: Mmm] And yet we want to replace it.  

Okay, so I'll just go further into your question. There's this great research coming out of Princeton right now on a phenomenon called “neural coupling.” And basically they hook all these people up to an FMRI, a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine. And they bring a person in and they have them tell a story, a personal story from their own life. Like in one case she told a story about her disastrous prom. And then they bring in a whole bunch of other people and have them listen and at the same time they're hooked up to FMRIs. And here's what happens: when people are listening in an engaged way, the brain waves of the listeners match in perfect sync the brainwaves of the speaker —perfect sync. In some cases the match is so close that the brain waves of the listener anticipate changes in the speaker's brain by a fraction of a second. It's mind-meld, right? I mean that's just incredible. We don't know why it works. We don't know how it works. But I know we're trying to replace it with Emojis. And there's no replacement for that. 

Zara: That is fascinating. [Celested: Right?] Right, and in terms of all the neurological or did you say neural coupling? [Celeste: neural coupling] that may be happening as well as all of the nonverbal cues  [Celested: Right] and body language and all that's getting conveyed in tone and pausing and silences  [Celested: exactly] which doesn't come across in a text.  

Celeste: It does not and they've even shown that your closest friends and family members are no more accurate at detecting sarcasm in your emails than a complete stranger off the street. So, when I tell my friends this they go, “Oh, I totally believe that's true. But not me. My friends really know me.” I was like, that's not how math works [Zara laughs]. That's not, uh-uh. So, we have this capacity to see that technology impacts other people in a negative way, but we don't accept that it's impacting us, right. We don't think we're addicted to Facebook. We don't think we check our Twitter feed too much, but people do. People. So part of what I have to do is sort of unplug people from The Matrix, right? Like, it's part of my mission, to sort of have people sort of shake themselves awake and realize how much this device really has become part of their neurological processes because the impact is huge. 

Zara: Right and things keep changing so quickly in terms of new devices and then shifting information and communication technologies and then it becomes the new norm [Celeste: Right.] And then has new social norms. Like what used to be rude because you're not paying attention then becomes normalized as well as just the different mediums that shape how we communicate to others and can shape than how we think or even how we relate to ourselves. I'm thinking of Sherry Turkle, who you reference in your book, and her book Alone Together.  

Celeste: Yeah, MIT professor, yup. 

Zara: Yeah, how we expect more from technology and less from each other [Celeste: Right.] and how both you and she talk about some of these different aspects of what might be happening to us as we're internalizing our digital devices in terms of a sense of control of communication. Like I don't want to be in a meandering unknown uncharted conversational waters. [Celeste: Right.] I don't want be... 

Celeste: I don’t want to talk about that.  

Zara: Yeah. 

Celeste: I don’t want to hear about that.  

Zara: Yeah, I want to be close enough but far away enough  [Celeste: Exactly.] that I can control things. As well as shifting our attention spans or even our capacity to [Celeste: Vote.] listen to ourselves  [laughs] [Celeste: Oh, absolutely] and focus on someone else. And can you speak to that in terms of some of the changes or how you said that you get people to unplug... 

Celeste: Well, first of all... 

Zara: ...To be present in a different way?  

Celeste: ...You have to kind of stop and take stock of how quickly these changes have occurred, right? Because in the early 2000s, only a small percentage of American adults actually owned a smartphone and here we are in 2018. At this point, the United Nations says more people have access to a cell phone then have access to a working toilet. So the rapidity with which this technology has been adopted by the world is just unheard of. And you also have to understand that the research into effects, those kind of clinical studies, take years. Research is slow. So, we're only now beginning to get some of the results back on the effects that the smartphone has on our brains, and it's pretty alarming and it's not just the smartphone. For example, a lot of people tend to keep an email client open on their desktop at all times, right? Like you're working in Word. But in the background, Outlook is open or whatever your email is. Well, it turns out that's deeply distracting to your brain, right? Your brain, part of your brain capacity at all times is thinking about that email client and it's in many ways in sort of fight or flight mode. Like, it's ready to respond and the average person responds to a notification at least goes to look at it within six seconds of it arriving. That's how aware your brain is. Sadly, that means it also drops your IQ because part of your brain is occupied in thinking about that email. It's the exact same thing. This cell phone being visible is distracting not just my brain, but all of your brains too. [Zara: Laughs] They did a study...In fact,  I’m going to put it away… 

They did a study in the UK in which they brought in all these people and they had them sit down and have conversations with perfect strangers. And in half of those situations, they would come in and they would just set a cell phone down on the table. It belonged to neither person, it never made any noise. But those people who had a cellphone present, were something like sixty two percent more likely to say the other person was unempathetic, untrustworthy, and unlikable.  

Zara: Fascinating.  

Celeste: Right? So, how many times do you go to lunch and you just set your phone down on the table? And you think you're good because you don't look at it. Not realizing not only is it distracting your brain, but it's making the other person not like you. So, I mean that's the first thing to me is like don't put it down, put it away. And here's a revolutionary thought, every once in a while, leave it at home. It hasn't been that long since we didn't have smartphones, right ? You can survive without it. Every person in this room grew up without a smartphone. None of you are like 10 years old. So, like you're capable of surviving without your smartphone.  

Zara: Sometimes I need to remind myself about that because technology can create such amnesia where I'm like, back in the day when there was like a cassette [laughs] for you know, leaving an answering machine [message]. For a second I was like, what did we call that artifact? But, you know, and it was like a big deal. Like, how did we find each other in the city [Celeste: Right.] when you can't say I'm a few blocks away and I'm running late. Or did we used to be a lot more talented at staring out windows or waiting or just being comfortable with waiting and pausing and not knowing and being able to find our way around? 

Celeste: Yeah, and it's funny that you bring that up because that's one thing that sadly has been eliminated which is boredom. [Zara: Mhm.] We've eliminated boredom and one thing that we know about human intelligence is that we actually need boredom. Our brains need time to just wander because that's the time when they go into uncharted territories, that's when we are most likely to innovate and come up with creative problems because our brain is undirected, right? It's sort of like forcing your brain to do radiant thinking, but that's also when you're going to be at your most creative. So what does it mean when one of the best tools we have for creative problem solving is gone? We have kids growing up in an era when they're never bored. I mean think of how big a deal that is, right. What a cliché it is to see the kid in the movie going, “Um, I'm bored.” “Well, then go outside,” right? I mean that's such a cliché because we've heard it generation after generation after generation and not anymore. We're not bored anymore. It's a bad thing.  

Like, I took the social media, I deleted the apps off my phone. And even for me who is sort of an evangelist about this, it was hard. But, like, and I also installed a thing on my tablet that only allows me to check those for a certain amount of minutes per day and then I can't even look at the sites anymore. It would just block it and it says, “Shouldn't you be working?” [Laughs] 

Zara: With a little smiley face or cute animal. 

Celeste: Yeah, there's like a little... 

Zara: [Laughs] Yeah. 

Celeste: “What are you doing with your life [Zara laughs]?” And like the first weekend that I installed it, like, I remember I was sitting on the couch and I'm like, “I'm bored.” Like, I literally am sitting here with nothing to do. I gotta go occupy myself and it was fabulous. It was fabulous, right?  

Zara: Yeah! I feel you. [Laughs] For sure. 

Celeste: Yeah! So, yeah.  

Zara: For sure. I mean, there's so much going on in terms of communication and also with our capacity for solitude and to entertain ourselves.  

Celeste: And you keep bringing up our attention spans and you’re saying eight seconds [Zara: Mmm.] and I want to make sure I clarify that Microsoft's does some of the best research into our shrinking attention spans. And what they've found is on the internet at least, our attention spans before we click to a link or look at something else is about eight seconds. And that's one second shorter than the attention span of a goldfish. In conversation, our attention span is maybe 30 to 60 seconds, at the most. And most people talk for more than 30 or 60 seconds at a time, which means you're probably talking too long. [Zara laughs] 

Zara: It seems that one of the other implications in terms of how we're getting rewired. Which also brings up, you know, some of these different mindfulness practices that you're talking to in your book, is around multitasking and the illusion that we have, that we're having undivided attention while we have a bazillion [laughs] tabs open on our browser or just tabs open in our brain [Celeste: Right.] like that.  

Celeste: Tabs open in your brain. [Zara laughs]. Yeah.  

Zara: And feeling like oh, we're being really productive and feeling really stimulated and getting a lot done and multitasking, when it sounds like the research is showing quite the opposite. That we're not actually being present with any of this and that that's also making certain skills atrophy.  

Celeste: Yeah, and that's a really great way to put it. In fact, they say it causes your cognitive abilities to atrophy. So here's the vicious cycle of multitasking. I mean, I think most people are aware we can't multitask. I hope people realize that the human brain cannot multitask. Like, maybe four percent of human brains at any one time in history are adept enough at task switching that they can do that in any kind of functional way. Everybody else can't multitask. Which means your brain really struggles if you're trying to make it switch back and forth from one task to another which is basically what we think of as multitasking. It's not. And the problem  is that the attempt to multitask pumps dopamine into your brain. So you feel great you feel this rush and you also feel very productive, which is a delusion because you're less productive. In fact, the quality of both tasks goes down by somewhere around 25 percent on average. Your IQ drops by 10 points while you're trying to do this because your brain is struggling, right? So you get this dopamine rush, which of course means that at the end of the day, you're going to have a dopamine crash. So you're going to be more fatigued and exhausted at the end of the day than if you had just done one thing at a time, but you also get addicted to that dopamine rush, right? So you want to feel it again and again and again. So you start multitasking more things, right? You're doing a billion things and talking on the phone while you're cooking dinner or you're listening to a conference call. How many people actually sit there and do nothing else but listen to a conference call when they're on a conference call? No one does that. 

I was just giving a speech for Oracle, the cloud platform, and their sales, their marketing team actually forces everyone to be on video at this point because that's the only way they can make sure everyone is not [motions to audience] “Yeah, that's interesting Bob. Uh-huh.” [Zara laughs] And it's especially bad. The effects are especially bad when you're trying to do two tasks that require the same part of the brain, right? So if you're answering email when your conference called, those are both the same part of the brain and your brain can't do both of them. So you're basically forcing it to flush one of them and only pay attention to the other but only pay attention to it in a really diminished capacity. And that's what you referred to, is the other newest research on this which is that over time, while you try to multitask, it actually atrophies your cognitive abilities in a permanent way. So it's like, one thing at a time. One thing at a time. Yeah, put the other stuff down. And it's hard. It's really hard. 

Zara: And so in terms of the power of single-tasking, the route woven throughout your book, you keep returning in different ways and from different angles to qualities or capacities that we can deliberately cultivate. They’re like muscles [Celeste: Right.] that we can actually build and get stronger at. In terms of, it seems like there's so many specific fabulous pieces of advice and insight in the book and that many of them relate to being present [Celeste: Right.] in different ways and being present with listening and all of the focus and attention that that takes. And with what we've just been talking about in terms of our political climate, which is so extremely polarized and with our technological social media climate. Both of those things are really taking tolls on our attention and [Celeste: Yeah.] on this attention economy. And so in terms of ways to strengthen these capacities, what are some of the main lessons that you've learned in terms of how we can do that whether that's in a more professional setting or in a more personal setting.  

Celeste: Well, there's a few things. I mean, literally in terms of remaining mindful in a conversation and being mindful in a conversation, being present in a conversation, means being able to listen to someone. And that's hard because the average person talks about a hundred and fifty words per minute and the average person listens at about 400 to 450 words per minute, which basically means that there's a lot of thoughts running through your head way faster than I'm talking right now. Like, your head is just like, “Zoom, zoom, zoom!” All this stuff going through.  

Zara: Thanks for that visual. 

Celeste: Sure. And so at a certain point, in order for you to continue to listen to me, you have to let those thoughts come in and go, right? You can't hold on to them because otherwise it's like when somebody's talking and then suddenly you remember a story that you think is really funny. And so you have to stop listening to them. So you can just keep holding on to remember to say this story and just waiting for them to stop talking so you can tell the story, right? So, which is what we do all the time, right? I mean that's why Stephen Covey says that we're always listening not with the intent to understand but with the intent to reply. And the only way that we know ,that I could find, to train your brain to do that to let stuff go, is through mindfulness meditation. Because literally what that's training you to do is not to resist thoughts, not to judge whether it's good or bad that you're having the thoughts but just to say there's a thought and then go right back to watching your breath 

Zara: Right, or not getting caught up in it.  

Celeste: Exactly, exactly. And you know, another part of that that gets forgotten all the time is that if you are incapable of doing that, if you are literally in a place where you are overwhelmed, in a bad mood, too tired, whatever it may be, it's okay to excuse yourself rather than waste their time by not really listening to them. If you're unable to be present, I think the chapter is called like, “Be Present or Be Gone” or something like that. And that's why I tell people it's okay to say, “I can't focus on you and you deserve my focus. So, put a pin in it and I'll get back to you.”  

Zara: Mhm. Right. So that when we're showing up, we're fully showing up. [Celeste: Right.] instead of pretending and then perpetuating this kind of like... 

Celeste: Head nodding. Right. “Uh-huh. Oh. Mmm.” Yeah. 

Zara: Right, which could also get replaced by a social bull robot. [Celeste: Right.] That's like “Mmm, tell me more. You don't say.” 

Celeste: Yeah, we all become Amazon Alexa. [Zara laughs] That's very interesting, Zara. 

Zara: Please tell that story again.  

Celeste: Thank you. 

Zara: How was your day? [Laughs] 

Celeste: Okay. Yeah. 

Zara: I'm actually not sure if that's how Alexa talks.  

Celeste: The whole rest of this is just going to be us imitating AI.That's the whole rest of the... 

Zara: Right, which is a total other [Celeste: Right.] exploding terrain that we're increasingly engaging with. And so in terms of what you were just talking about of cultivating this quality, you know, there's some some types of listening and this like listening to understand, not listening to persuade, not listening to reply, not listening in order to be able to poke holes in an argument and tell the other person how they're totally wrong, that can be useful and generative in so many ways. And when we're having difficult conversations around tension-filled topics, with people who we might have really differing or even clashing views on certain issues about...could you speak to that a bit in terms of with your work as an interviewer times when you might be interviewing someone who...  

Celeste: Sure. I mean we’re in San Francisco. So, I'm going to assume that a difficult conversation would be with a Trump supporter, right? I feel like that's a relatively fair assumption to make. So the one of the biggest problems, one of the things that prevents us from listening is because we don't think we have anything to learn from that other person, [Zara: Mhm] right.  Number one, we make the assumption that we know everything that they think, right? Which is a wrong assumption. 

Zara: Based on just a couple right pieces of information. [Celeste: Right.] 

Celeste: They’ll say, you know, they're pro-life or they'll say their second amendment supporters, right? And then we figure we feel like we know them. Which we know is crap, right? I mean there's some opinions I'm sure I have that you guys don't agree with me on but that doesn't mean you know the ins and outs of my opinion like you don't know who I am based on that and the same is true for the other side. The other thing you have to keep in mind is that both liberals and conservatives are equally prone to confirmation bias. And this is another one of those things where we like to think the other side is but research shows it's non-partisan. Human beings are the only species that suffers from confirmation bias. Confirmation bias, just quickly, is when you have a strong opinion somebody shows you evidence that refutes that opinion pretty, you know comprehensively and it makes you believe it stronger. Human beings are the only ones that suffer from it and it's non partisan. We all suffer from it. So, but because we believe only the other side does, we are really dismissive of whatever their opinions may be or whatever their experience is.  

So, let's say that somebody gives you an opinion and they back it up with bogus information, right? And you think [scoffs] “Where'd you hear that, Fox News?” Right? Instead of asking the questions of, okay, “So, I'm interested in why you believe that.” Right? So, what where did you learn...not to prove them wrong, but have some curiosity about how they came about this. If they do believe something wrong, aren't you at all curious about why they want to believe it, right? Or do you truly believe that there's another person on this planet from whom you can learn nothing? Do you really think this person got to whatever age they are in life not learning anything you didn't learn? There's nothing they’re an expert in that you don't already know about. Because, come on, they can teach you something. And I say this all the time to people.  

There's this musician, a jazz pianist named Darrell Davis and there's a great PBS documentary about him called Accidental Courtesy. And he’s an African-American guy and he has made his hobby in his off time to convince people to leave the KKK. And he's so successful at it that he basically dismantled the KKK operation in the state of Maryland. And when people ask him, “How do you, what do you say to them? How do you convince them? How can you be so persuasive?” He says, “I don't say anything to them. I listen to them” and he said something really important. He said by actively listening to them, I am passively teaching them about myself. And sometimes people just want to be heard. And that's something you can do and I don't care how vile you think their opinions are. It doesn't matter how bad they are. You can still listen to them and you can learn from them and the act of listening is a bond between human beings. It can create an intimacy that changes hearts. 

Zara: Mhm, right. And something I appreciate that you said in your book, is that at times the goal, right, is not to change minds but to open the. [Celeste: Right.] That there can be some unexpected connection, that you can learn something that you can be in a place of genuine curiosity, not pretending to be curious which might be one of those conversational skills that you categorized as “crap” earlier. We're displaying curiosity. But actually, what seems also related to a practice of humility. To in terms of that, [Celeste: Yeah] we don't know what we don't know. And to be able to say at times like, we don't know or to question where we get our knowledge from [Laughs]. [Celeste: Exactly] That there's so much that we don't know about someone else, which seems like that can intervene into some of the... When you speak about unconscious bias or stereotyping or where it's taking a little bit of information about someone saying like, “Oh, I know your whole worldview. I know you already.” Which is a monologue [Celeste: Yeah, exactly] you have with yourself. Not actually a dialogue with someone else. 

Celeste: That's exactly right. And it's also, I mean, we have now, you know, by some implicit bias tests, partisan politics and partisanship is a stronger indicator of implicit bias than race. In some cases, not all cases, were pretty racist. But you know in the 19... during the days of Watergate something like eight percent of Americans said, they'd be unhappy if a person from the other political party married into their family. By like the 1980s, I think it was, I think it was up to maybe 40%. And at this point in our lives, it's up like 80 to 90% would be unhappy if someone from the opposing political party married into your family. I mean, consider what that means for a moment, right? I mean, that's Romeo and Juliet, right? 

Zara: That would be a mixed marriage or yeah. 

Celeste: Right. Like that would be in the 17th century, a Jew marrying a Catholic, right? That's where we are on politics. Really? I've been covering politics forever and let me tell you the politicians are not worth that loyalty. [Zara laughs]They're not worth the loyalty. 

In terms of having genuine curiosity about someone, sometimes I'll make it a game. Right? Like I'll meet somebody, people here, I, you know work for NPR, NPI and at parties and they decide they're going to have political arguments with me. It's just exhausting, but I'll turn it into a game, right? You know, they'll come up and start trying to argue with me about guns or whatever it may be. And, I'll say, “Listen…”  

Zara: “...I'm at a party.” 

Celeste: I know [Zara laughs] but I bet in eight questions, I can find something you and I agree on. Give me eight questions and I'll find it. And yeah, I can usually get it in two because like food and dogs are really good [Zara laughs]. I can pretty much find, right, like the great unifiers: dogs and tacos, right? I mean... 

Zara: Yeah, it's transcendent.  

Celeste: Exactly. Absolutely. So I mean, this is something you can do. Let's say you feel yourself getting into an argument with someone and you can say you know what, hold up. We're about to get in an argument and I don't want to, so give me five questions. [Both laugh] I can find something we agree on. Let's start here: tacos, right? You got me, tacos. No tacos? Dogs. Okay, we're there. Right? 

Zara: I mean in San Francisco, it might be burritos. But yeah. 

Celeste: Okay, fine. Fair enough. Nachos, even, right? So, I mean, you can make human connections and turn it into a way for you just to reclaim your own humanity. And humanity is not solitary. Our basic humanity is social. Like I was talking about us all having confirmation bias and being, as far as we know, the only species that suffers from it, that can be seen as a weakness, absolutely. But it can also be seen as a strength. 

Zara: How so?  

Celeste: Because that, well, because what it means is that we are dependent on each other. That we rely on each other for our checks and balances. And the reason that's a strength is because human beings are basically a hive mind. We don't, we haven't dominated the planet because we're the strongest or the fastest or the most dangerous. When we lose to a mosquito in an one-on-one often, right? We're not impressive. We're not even the smartest, right? That's probably dolphins and whales and maybe octopi. A dolphin can project a holographic image of a fish into another dolphin's brain. Yeah! We can't compete with that. But the one thing we do better than any other species, so far as we know, is communicate and collaborate. And that means throughout history, you're not messing with one human being, you're messing with a bunch of human beings. And we can be very specific in our communication. “Doctor, here's where it hurts. Here's a situation in which it hurts. Here's where it ranks on the Pain Scale,” right? I mean, we are, our communication skills are to use your word, “transcendent.” To go back to neural coupling. They are so sophisticated. They're intangible. That's what we do really well. And so, anything that requires us to rely on each other is a good thing. And here's one of the things, this is one of the things that you know again to go back to the very beginning, one of the things that for me made right in this book so imperative, is that research shows by some measure, empathy has dropped. Yeah, 40 percent over the past 30 years and most of that has occurred since the year 2000. But that whole thing of us using a hive mind requires empathy. It doesn't work without empathy. Empathy means that we're willing to help someone else even if there's nothing in it for ourselves. That's what needs to happen in order for us to help each other as a race. Right? You want to talk about, like, the basics of humanity—empathy is it. And it's breaking down because we're isolating each other, because we're isolating ourselves. 

Zara: And in that isolation becoming less practiced at recognizing others’ emotions, or feeling them. 

Celeste: Or caring. 

Zara:  Or caring. Mhm. 

Celeste: A third of Americans have never even met their neighbors. And yet, human beings are so socially dependent that if you are friendly with your neighbors, you'll live longer, you're less likely to get diabetes, you're less likely to have a cardiac arrest, you're less likely to suffer from depression. I mean, we require those little daily interactions and yet, we feel okay about it to bury our heads in our cell phones so that we don't make eye contact with the Uber driver because then he might start talking to us. But, people who engage in regular small talk with their barista and the person in the elevator you're trying not to look at, those people live longer, have healthier hearts, less prone to depression, etc. etc, etc. That communication is very good for us and that communication we are purposely intentionally cutting out of our lives. 

Zara: And would you say or what have you found in terms of with your personal experience and also research around some of the intergenerational differences around communication, isolating ourselves, capacities for listening and attention.  

Celeste: So human beings just aren't good listeners. I mean that research has been around for very long time, like the 1940s and 50s. We're just not great listeners. It's something we actually have to work out in practice, right? If you ever had a baby, you know  human beings not do not come out of the womb knowing how to listen, right. And I think I hear a lot of complaints from people that they think Millennials and the generation after Millennials, which people are calling iGen, are bad listeners, but the research is the opposite. It's actually people over 50 and 60 that are worse listeners than Millennials. They're better listeners and there's all kinds of theories. We don't know why; I could posit my own. But the one thing we do know is that Millennials are way more likely to think that texting is actually authentic conversation and it's not like categorically, provably it is not. It is not the same as conversation. It's not as effective communication. It's not doing what you want it to do [laughs]. We are our worst version of ourselves and digital communication that is provable and reclipcable and all of those things. But they are more likely to think that those digital interactions are actually human contact, which is not great. I mean, I feel what appears to be the case is that older people are aware that digital communication doesn't replace this. 

Zara: Right, that it's like a side dish. 

Celeste: Right? That doesn't stop them from texting right but they're aware that it's not the same. Whereas Millennials and the generations after are more likely to be like, what are you talking about? I had a great conversation with my friend just today (over text), right? 

Zara: I want to shift gears for a moment and ask about a chapter from your book that I believe recently was excerpted and was making some of the rounds on social media, where you're talking about that it's important when we're listening to someone else talk about a personal experience to not rush in to equate our experience with theirs. Or say like, “Oh, that reminds me of myself and something that happened to me” which might feel like empathy but can produce the opposite dynamic and one of the things that you named which really gave me pause when I was reading it was “Conversational Narcissism.” Could you unpack that a bit? 

Celeste: Sure, which is not my term. It's sociologist Charles Durbin [Zara: Mhm] who first wrote about that. And so, it's a natural process when someone is talking about like, say I started saying okay, my father died. He did, but I was nine months old, very long time ago. Right, say I started talking to you about that. It’s very natural for you to go, “Oh, I know what you're going through. You know my mom died last year. Blah, blah, blah.” That's really natural. And you're right, for many people, it does feel like they're being empathetic and you are also right that the effect is actually quite the opposite. It is conversational narcissism in that literally, what we're doing is we're taking the focus, right, off of someone else who's trying to relate their own experience and their own feelings. And they're going, “Look at me in my experience. I know exactly how you feel.” And you don't. You don't know how they feel because your similar situation is not the same. The person they lost is not the person you lost. You’re a different person. It's a different time. They're in a different situation. It's not the same.  

Now your brain does this for a very good reason, right? Your brain literally goes in search of these similar experiences. Let's say that you told me you were making dinner and you cut your finger. My brain is going to go in search of similar experiences when I cut myself to try to put context to understand how painful that may be, right. It's trying to feed me information. The mistake we make is when we then verbalize that. That information is really valuable to me and to no one else. Right? [Zara: Mhm]  And what Charles Durbinwould writes about was about the shift response, right? In other words, when he's talking about conversational narcissism, he's talking about you shifting attention back to yourself. Instead of a support response, which is a response that continues to support the other person and encourage them to continue talking. And we tend to shift response all the time. And I think one of the examples I use in the book is like someone saying, “Oh, I need to get new shoes” and I go, “Oh, me too. I've had these for like five years and they're really worn down.” That's a shift response. And sometimes we do it more subtly, right? Sometimes we do it by withholding full attention. So like your friend will say, “I need to ask for a raise” and you go, “Oh, mmm.” And they'll say, “Yeah, I'm going to ask for like maybe $5,000 more” and I'll go, “Oh, yeah.” And then they’ll say “You were trying to get a raise too” and I’ll go, “Oh, yes!” And then you finally reward them [Zara: Right.] with your attention. 

Zara: “With being more animated and attentive and present. Mhm.  

Celeste: Yeah. We all do it. It's not.. it's all of us. Yeah.  

Zara: Right, which seems another way of turning it more into ultimately a monologue than a dialogue… 

Celeste: Right, which is understandable because, you know, one of the big eye openers, was for me, was this research that came out of Harvard in 2014. And what they found was that talking about yourself, what they call “self-disclosure,” activates the exact same pleasuring center in the brain as sex and heroin. Or chocolate. It's inherently pleasurable to talk about yourself, but it deceives us because the pleasurable experience we're having is very often not shared, right? So you can go on a date and come away from that date feeling awesome. And be like, “Oh my God, we totally clicked” and then be shocked that they never call you again. But that's because your pleasure center was like feeding you orgasmic energy all night, and you feel fantastic, and they're like, “Oh my God, will this person ever stop talking about themselves,” right? So it's understandable that we do this because it feels great. The people in the study even accepted a lower salary in order to continue talking about themselves, right? They offered them more money if they would talk about anything else. And they said no, I’d rather just keep talking about me [Zara laughs] and what I know, and what I like and yeah. So, I mean, that's how strong a pole that is and it's hard to stop doing that.  

Zara: Yeah, indeed. [Laughs] Well, even in just reading your writings on that, I have just been trying to practice a different type of mindfulness of just noticing and observing when there's that impulse to be like, “Oh, that reminds me of the time when I had this or I can relate…” 

Celeste: And it happens all the time, right? 

Zara:... to just watch that come. Let it subside and kind of see what shifts, to just kind of hold the reins on that impulse; where it's coming from. Yeah, and it can take on a particular potency when it's particularly someone's talking about a very difficult situation or if someone's grieving, you know, as well as with the pressure of wanting, like, the right thing to say or wanting to maybe not be voyeuristic with someone's pain...  

Celeste: Yeah, and sometimes you don't know what to say.  

Zara: ...also and wanting to say like I too, you know, struggle.  

Celeste: Yeah. and it’s understandable. Sometimes you don't know what to say. And so we fill it in with the subject we know more about than anything else. Ourselves, right? I totally get that. It's awkward. You don't know what to say. But instead, you can just ask questions and encourage them. That's what a support response is. You can even say, “I don't even want to say, I mean, there's nothing I can say that can help you. How can I help you? What are you going through? What do you need from me?” Right? I mean, you can continue to give support responses instead of just constantly falling back on…. I just imagined the little woman in my head, right, all the time, you know, and you can cut that out.  

Zara: Curious to ask after being in these fields of having conversations professionally and interviewing people, what feels like your edge now, in terms of what you're practicing. 

Celeste: I think, for me, that my edge is that I'm trying to be more analog in the midst of my technology. Like I'm trying to be really intentional about how I use technology at this point because I use it a lot but I'm trying to use it smartly. And what I've been trying to do is really sort of ask myself some hard questions about what it is I really want. Because I'm busy all the time, but I'm busy doing what, right? What's my end goal of all this busyness or am I just busy for the sake of busyness? Right? And that's a tough thing to sort of separate out. What was my goal in all of this at the beginning? Why am I still doing all of this stuff? So for me, that's sort of how I'm trying to sift through how I spend my time and doing what to find what sort of the nugget is of what it is I wanted and using technology in a way that actually helps me instead of distracting me all the time. So that's... It's a lot.  

Zara: Definitely no shortage of opportunity to practice [laughs]. 

Celeste: Yeah. Yes.  

Zara: Celeste, thank you so much again for being so generous with your time.  

Celeste: My pleasure.  

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You've been listening to the podcast for CIIS Public Programs. Audio production was supervised by Lyle Barrere at Desired Effect. If you liked what you heard, you can subscribe on iTunes or visit our website at ciis.edu/podcast. 

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