Supercommunicators | 1. How to Talk to Anyone
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So, Nick, let me start with this. When is the last time you cried in front of another person? Starting right away at the top. I see. Last time I cried in front of another person was actually just a few days ago when my wife showed me a video of our daughter in her second grade class reading her favorite book to her classmates.

This is Nick Epley, a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago. And the reason I'm asking him this question is because he himself has forced thousands of strangers to sit down and ask and answer this question of each other. And what he's found is pretty interesting. Imagine, for example, that you're on an airplane and the stranger next to you turns to you and they ask you, when's the last time you cried in front of another person? How do you think you'd feel at that moment?

My guess is probably a little apprehensive, right? Now imagine I told you that you have to be that stranger asking someone else that question. How would you feel then? Terrified? Probably. But my goal over the next 30 minutes is to show you why asking this kind of question is actually a great idea. I want to convince you that you should be asking these kinds of questions to your coworkers, to your family members, to the strangers that you meet on the street.

I'm Charles Duhigg, former host of Slate's How To Podcast and the author of Super Communicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection. And this is the first episode in a three-part special series that looks at the science of communication. We're going to explore how to have better conversations, the neuroscience behind how we connect with each other, and why some people can connect with nearly anyone.

Which brings us back to Nick Epley, the guy who likes to ask people about the last time they cried in front of another person. The very first time I did this was at a conference at a hedge fund, a financial decision-making conference, where I thought I'd been brought in to play the part of the entertainer. These were all like C-suite executives, leaders of pension funds and things like that.

Nick was standing in this beautiful conference room and they had hired him to give this big fancy speech. But instead of launching into the speech that everyone expected him to give, he told them all that he was going to force everyone in the room to participate in an experiment. In just a minute, I'm going to pair you up with another person and I'm going to have you discuss these questions.

But Nick pairs everyone up and he tells each person to turn to the stranger that's sitting next to them and to just ask them the question. And then after a few minutes, he tells them that they have to trade places.

And to his surprise, everyone actually does it. After 10 minutes, I mean, the whole room sounded like a freight train going. Everybody was deep in conversation. By 15 minutes, I was getting nervous. Wait a minute, when are they going to stop? I start yelling out five-minute reminders. I finally get to 20 minutes. Eventually, they stop, and I wrangle them back.

couple of them are hugging each other. It was kind of magical that moment actually. And it was without question the best thing that happened in their day. On today's episode, we're going to be talking about one of the most important parts of communication, asking questions. Why does a room full of hedge funders, these masters of the universe, why do they suddenly become willing to talk to each other about something as potentially embarrassing and awkward as crying?

Why do we sometimes have a great conversation on a date and then we fall in love? I think he feels that we could have fallen in love and probably would have without doing the questions. But I'm not sure that I agree. Well, other times we have an okay conversation, you know, pretty good. But there's just really no connection afterward. The reasons why have something to do with asking questions. But only the right kinds of questions have this power.

Within psychology, these kinds of magical questions are known as deep questions. And they're at the core of why some conversations go really well, while others don't. We're going to take a quick break. But when we come back, we'll examine why deep questions are so powerful and how to ask them in everyday life. Stay with us. This message is brought to you by Apple Podcasts.

Applying for Apple Card is quick and easy. Apply in the Wallet app today and see a credit limit offer in minutes. Subject to credit approval. Apple Card by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City branch. Member FDIC. Terms and more at applecard.com. Deep questions on how to ask them is something Nick Epley has spent his whole career thinking about. And the reason why goes back to something that happened when he was a teenager.

When I was a high school student, I was not necessarily the best listener. I was a football player. I spent plenty of time screwing around. And I made a couple of bad choices, really bad ones. I was caught twice by police officers drunk driving. The first time this happens, the cop telephones Nick's parents and he asks them to come pick up their drunk son. And so they get in the car and they go to get him.

And on the drive home, they start lecturing him about what a dumb idea this was, that you really shouldn't be drinking, that they understand what peer pressure is like, but they're really worried about him. All of which went about as well as you would imagine. They were not happy. They were telling me all the ways in which this could really ruin my life. And it kind of washed over me. Like, I kind of didn't really hear it. I wasn't really engaged with it.

Nick basically ignores the lectures that his parents are giving him. He ignores all of the lessons that he should have learned by getting pulled over and given a second chance. And then just a handful of weeks later, he gets pulled over for a DUI again. And the second time it happened, again, the police officers called my folks and had them come pick me up. And I remember this time, my mom and dad started asking me more questions about kind of why I was here.

why I was doing this, why I thought this was a good idea. And this time, something about being asked why he was drinking, rather than just being lectured at about all the things he had done wrong, those questions caused Nick to start thinking in a different way about his own life. When his parents started asking him questions that started with why, why are you drinking? Why does it feel so necessary to impress your friends this way? It was somehow powerful.

And what's more, those questions, they seem to spark something different in his parents as well. I do remember very vividly at one point my dad shared some stories with me about some mistakes that he had made when he was a kid that weren't too far off from this. And I remember that moment because we'd never really talked. You know, that was kind of the first time like I'd really kind of gotten to know my dad a bit and I could feel a bit more why he was

concerned about me. And that was really powerful. I mean, that really shook me out of, I think, what was a bad path and kind of got my life back on the same direction. I've never been drunk again since I was 17 years old. So Nick gets his act together and he goes to college and then he enrolls in a PhD program in experimental psychology. And he's working on his research and his dissertation. But he keeps thinking back to that moment when he first got pulled over for that first DUI.

Why didn't that near arrest cause him to change? I mean, potentially getting arrested is like a big deal, right? It should probably spark some kind of reflection on what you're doing. But then just a while later, when he gets pulled over the second time, in the exact same situation as before, this time, for some reason, everything changes. Nick suspected that the change had something to do with the fact that his parents started asking him questions rather than just lecturing at him.

but not just any question would have worked on him, he thinks. He suspects there's something, I don't know, almost magical about the questions his parents were asking. And so he starts to wonder, why are some questions more powerful than others? At about the same time that he's starting to wonder this, Nick is also attending these weekly seminars with all of the other grad students where everyone gathers to discuss academic papers. And he hears about something called the FAST Friends Procedure. We had what's called a pro-seminar.

This just magical weekly seminar where all the faculty and the PhD students got together and read a paper called the Fast Friends Procedure based on a series of 36 questions that escalate in intimacy. And by the end of these 36 questions, people tend to feel more connected to each other. That's how you take strangers and make them friends quickly afterwards.

This paper, its full name is The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness, a Procedure and Some Preliminary Findings. It actually has some really interesting results. What happened is that the researchers asked pairs of strangers to come into a room and to sit down and to spend 45 minutes asking and answering a set of 36 specific questions. And once they did that,

They told everyone that they could go home and all the participants assumed that the experiment was over. But actually, the experiment was just beginning. Because seven weeks later, the researchers contact everyone who had been sitting in those rooms and they asked them, you know, just out of curiosity, have you been in contact with that person that you did this experiment with? Now, everyone participating was strangers, right? So they don't know each other and they don't really have a way to contact each other after the experiment. But when the researchers start reaching out to them,

They find that the vast majority of participants had sought out the person they had done that experiment with and they had met up.

There was this one guy who said, you know, I didn't really catch my partner's last name, but I knew his first name was John. And I thought his last name started with an R. And so I went through the directory one night and I called every single John R. until I found the right guy. Another participant told researchers that he went to go have a beer with the person he had done the experiment with. And then a week later, they went to go see a movie together. And a year after that, when they announced they were getting married, they invited everyone in the psych lab to come to the ceremony.

All told, about 70% of the people who had participated in the experiment went out of their way to find their partner. And to Nick, learning about this paper, it seemed kind of amazing. Because getting 70% of strangers to feel like they've made a friend in just 45 minutes, that doesn't really happen. My question was, why aren't we asking these 36 questions of each other more regularly? And so we ran an experiment. When we come back...

I'll tell you about how that experiment and others offer us some answers about why these 36 questions are so magical and how we can ask those questions without coming off like a total weirdo. Stick around. This message is brought to you by Apple Card. Apple Card is everything a credit card should be. It's easy to manage, built to be secure, and gives users up to 3% daily cash back on every purchase. The best part about Apple Card is applying is quick and easy.

Apply in the Wallet app on your iPhone and see your credit limit offer in minutes. Subject to credit approval. Apple Card by Goldman Sachs Bank USA Salt Lake City branch. Member FDIC. Terms and more at applecard.com. So, okay, so let me take a step back.

Do you remember the first time you heard about the fast friends procedure? I do. I think I was in the midst of a breakup when I found it initially, actually. And yeah, I was writing about love because I was going through this breakup and my parents had divorced a couple years earlier. And I was thinking like,

If you've heard of the Fast Friends Procedure, or as it's also known, the 36 questions that lead to love, it's probably because of this person, Mandy Lynn Catron.

Mandy is a writer and a professor of creative writing at the University of British Columbia, and she rocketed to international fame about a decade ago when she wrote a modern love essay for the New York Times. So basically, I had been dating online for, I would say, a couple of years at that point, and sort of having a short relationship here and there. And basically, sort of out of nowhere, I ended up

going out on a date with an acquaintance of mine. And I say out of nowhere because this was someone that I was sort of interested in, but I didn't know him well, and I didn't know that we were on a date. Like, I kind of thought, "Oh, we're just going to the art gallery together because we're both interested in this exhibit."

And after we left the art gallery, we went to a bar and we started talking about love and relationships. And he said to me, oh, you know, I have this theory that actually given enough sort of commonalities, you could really fall in love with anyone. And I said, you know, actually, there is this study. And because, you know, I thought he was kind of cute, I said, I've always wanted to try it. And so we sat down together.

At this bar, I pulled up my phone, I pulled up these 36 questions, and we just passed my cell phone back and forth across the table for hours, just taking turns asking and answering each of these questions. And it was like the rest of the world sort of fell away, and it was just the two of us talking.

Mandy thought this was a kind of interesting experience. And so a few days later, she writes a quick essay about it and she sends it off to the New York Times. And then weeks go by and she doesn't hear anything back from the paper. And so you're sending it at this point where you've just been on one date with this guy? What's the next conversation with him? Yeah, so there was a sort of conversation where I said...

you know, are we dating? Like, is this a thing? And he said, yeah, I think we, I think we are. That's, that's the rousing enthusiasm you want to hear from the other person, but it sounds very real. I should clarify. It was complicated by the fact. So they're dating. They finally get clear on that. And Mandy, at this point, she's kind of forgotten about this essay that she had sent into the New York times back when it wasn't clear if they were actually going to become a couple or not.

And then one day the Times out of the blue emails and they say, hey, we really liked your essay. We're going to publish it. So it was published when we had been together seriously for probably like two or three months. And I thought, oh, God, this is going to be so embarrassing if –

However, Mandy figures, you know, she probably doesn't really need to worry about this, right? This is one small essay. And even though the New York Times is a big newspaper, how many people are actually going to read this one essay about her going on a date?

When the essay gets published, it explodes.

Still to come, if you're looking for love, the simple questions that just might make anyone fall for you. But first... I just wildly underestimated the kind of attention that would come from that experience. And within the first month, the article had been viewed 8 million times. Mandy gets invited on the Today Show. I think what I knew in that moment was that we would become very close.

And she does a bunch of other interviews. She gives a TED Talk. And each time she describes this experience, everyone asks her the same thing over and over. What is it about these questions that was so magical? Why did these questions cause you guys to fall in love? The thing is, though, Mandy's not really an expert on this stuff. She's not a psychologist. She hasn't studied the history of these questions. She just had an interesting experience. But she does have some guesses about what's going on.

For instance, the first few questions in the Fast Friends procedure are pretty easy to ask and answer. They're things like, if you had a dinner party and you could invite anyone from history, who would it be? Or what would constitute a perfect day for you? Like it matters that they sort of start out pretty casual, like icebreaker style questions and then become more intense as you go along. Question number seven is, do you have a secret hunch about how you will die?

Question 24. How do you feel about your relationship with your mother? And question 35, the second to last question. Describe the last time you cried in front of another person. It matters that both people are doing the self-disclosure. Like, both people are answering every question. And I think it matters that they're not about, like, politics. They're not about...

you know, books that you've read, they're about you. Like they are personal. And I think all of that makes a big difference. And so that creates this sense of like,

shared warmth toward one another that's like built into the process. There's just like, it's so beautiful. I mean, this sounds super cheesy, but like, it just feels so like you feel yourself being noticed in this way that is like really a nice feeling. In the original experiment of the fast friends procedure, the researchers referred to these questions as a process of, and I'm quoting them here,

Sustained, escalating, reciprocal, personalistic self-disclosure. And there's a couple of important ingredients in what's going on that makes these questions so powerful. For instance, the first time that they did this experiment, the researchers used a bunch of different questions, and some of them didn't work at all. But they found that the ones that did work, the ones that made people feel closer to each other, they all had something in common. They prompted people to talk about their values or their beliefs or their experiences.

And that's what a deep question does. As Nick Epley described it to me, instead of asking us about the facts of our life, deep questions ask us to describe how we feel about our life. Deep questions are typically things that are about why.

Why you feel a certain way, why you do what you do. That's a step deeper than what, right? So, you know, if somebody tells me what they do for a living, I say, why? Why did you get into that? Why do you stay in that? And asking a deep question can sound kind of intimidating when it's described that way. But it's as simple as if you meet someone who's a doctor instead of asking them, oh, you know, what hospital do you work at?

You could ask them, "Oh, you know, why'd you decide to go to medical school?" That second question, it's a why question. It's the kind of question that Nick Apley's parents asked him after he got pulled over the second time for a DUI. But I wanted to ask Mandy, how do we actually do this in real life? What if you're like at a party or you're making small talk or I'm trying to get to know a coworker? If it's a situation where we don't really know each other with some degree of intimacy,

Can we still ask these deep questions? Can you really get that intimate with someone you just met? Absolutely. Absolutely.

I mean, the interesting thing about having this article go wildly viral is that I heard from so many total strangers. My email was just absolutely flooded with stories from people who had done this on a date with a total stranger or an acquaintance. I had somebody write to me and say, like, I was on a long road trip with some people I didn't know very well. And the four of us did this and it was so much fun. Again,

I can't even remember getting an email from someone who was like, wow, that was awful. Like just everyone was like sort of abusive about it. And why do you think that is?

I mean, I think we all want to be known. Like we just, it's just sort of who we are as like a species. We want to be known and we want to be seen for who we really are. This is completely authentic. Yeah. Like, let me be who I am and, and reveal that to you in a way that feels safe. And you know, what, like, what isn't to like about having that kind of experience with another person?

All of this happened about a decade ago. And eventually, Mandy wrote a book about his experience and other experiences titled How to Fall in Love with Anyone. Can I ask you a question then? Are you and Mark still together? We are. We are. And it's been 10 years since the article came out. Oh my gosh. We have...

three-year-old twins and we're getting married in May. Oh my gosh. Congratulations. Thank you. Yeah. I'm, I'm really excited actually. Oh my gosh. That's wonderful. And okay. So you're getting married in May. Um, are you, are you going to encourage guests at the wedding to, um, to ask each other? Oh my God, Charles, I am. This is such a great, this is such a great idea. Um,

Okay, I have a vision and I'm going to make little bowls. I'm going to print off the questions, put them in the bowls, and I'm going to invite people to take them out and ask each other questions at the reception. You know what I think might happen? What?

There might be some people who end up getting married from your wedding. Or if not married, at least like, you know, maybe spend some quality time that evening together. That would be magical. But if Mandy wants this wedding experiment to go well, we need to figure out one more thing. Because if you don't have 45 minutes to talk to a stranger and you're at a wedding reception instead of inside a psych lab,

How do you ask these kinds of questions without feeling really, really awkward about it? How do you get deep at an office party, or on the sidelines of a Little League game, or with a stranger on the bus, without completely weirding the other person out? So I went back to Nick Epley and I asked him, how do you do this?

So you sit down next to someone on the New York subway with one of your kids with you who are like, dad, don't embarrass me. What's the first question? Because if you start with when's the last time you cried in front of another person, they're probably not going to react positively. That is not a good conversation opener. Not in real life. Like in our experiments, it works. I mean, because people, they feel they're given license to have that conversation. But

You have license in daily life to be interested in other people too. Like that's what it means to care for somebody. You have a license to care about somebody. Right? So for instance, we were in New York a little while ago and I was there with my, with my daughter Sion and multiple train rides. I had conversations with people. One of them, woman came down and sat next to us and she,

I asked her, you know, are you looking forward to your day today? That was my first question. And she said, no, I'm going to try to find my brother who's schizophrenic, ran away last night and spent the night on the streets.

And right away, because this was something about, you know, what are you looking forward to? Something meaningful. It wasn't just what you're doing or how's the weather. It was something personal. And right away, she knew I was interested. She shared this super meaningful thing with me. We had a very powerful conversation that I think it was uplifting for both of us, even at a hard moment. And this is kind of the key to asking these kinds of deep questions, says Nick. It's not about the question itself.

It's about showing the other person that you want to learn from them, that you're interested in them. What matters is showing that you want to connect. There's not a magical list of questions to carry with you. There are questions that have properties in them, properties that reflect interest. And, you know, the last time you cried in front of another person is one of those, right? That gets really meaningful. But when I, when I sit down next to somebody, I can make that moment great.

by trying to take an interest in that person. And I know if I really take an interest in that person, I try to get to know what do they care about. I know we'll find stuff we have to be interested in each other. And then for me, at least, the questions often just flow from one to another. Right. And when your mind is open to engaging, the words often follow. And here's the thing. There's one other big insight that Mandy and Nick found to be really helpful in becoming better at asking questions.

It's important to ask deep questions, right? But you also have to remember that it takes practice to get good at that. And if the first couple times you do it, it feels awkward, that's totally fine. If the person next to you on the bus, if they blow off your question and they don't want to have a conversation, that's okay. That doesn't mean that you failed. What matters is that you keep practicing at it. And eventually you'll get to a point when asking these questions is like the most natural thing in the world.

And the thing that we've learned is that even if this doesn't work all the time, it's still completely worth learning how to do this. What I think happens when you become somebody who does this a lot is you become an expert at spotting opportunity. Like a person sat down next to me on the train. We were there one-on-one. I said hello. She said hi back. That was an opportunity. Why wouldn't you choose to do that?

Yeah. It's just dumb. It's just dumb to have bad conversations. You don't have to do that. You can have good ones, right? So that's what I choose to do. I have good ones. And then you make nice friends and it's better. It's better. So the next time you're on an airplane or on a bus or you're at a party or you're making small talk with someone, turn to them and ask them a deep question. And you might think to yourself, this is going to be weird. It's going to be really awkward.

But I think what you'll find is that if you ask a question with genuine curiosity, the other person is delighted to answer it. And then you should ask another question and share something about yourself and then eventually ask them. So just out of curiosity, when's the last time you cried in front of another person? Thank you to Nick Epley and Mandy Lynn Catron for their help with this episode.

If you'd like to learn more about Nick's work, I recommend his book Mindwise. And you can read more about asking questions and so much more about how we connect with other people in my book Super Communicators, How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection, which you can find on Amazon or Audible or at your local bookstore. And you can find me at my website charlesduhigg.com or on Substack, where I have a newsletter, The Science of Better.

Next time on the podcast, how we speak to one another without words. I'll talk with researcher Dustin York about the science of nonverbal communication. And we'll explore how nonverbal communication helped the Big Bang Theory become one of the most successful TV sitcoms of all time.

If you enjoyed this first episode, why not share it with a friend? And better yet, please, if you get a chance, rate and review us. It helps introduce the show to even more people, and it just makes us feel really good inside. Super Communicators was produced by Sophie Summergrad and Derek John, who also did the sound design. Our technical director is Merritt Jacob. Joel Meyer is our supervising producer. I'm Charles Duhigg. See you next time. ♪