Pioneers of AI: Why AI conversations are always one-sided

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1:15 dot com. Slash M O S. Yeah. I use a variety of AI tools in my everyday life and work.

1:26 But I do use Chat GT for like as my personal confidant. And I was reflecting on like Why do I trust this AI? So when you turn to ChatGPT And you confide in it about something that's happened.

1:43 Why are you doing that? I think I use it as a tool for self unpacking and self I journal a lot. Yeah. And it's just maybe a better kind of interrogation journaling. That would have been my guess a hundred percent. When you're talking to Chatbot about relationships, you're not turning to it because you think it's gonna give you great advice. You're turning to it because it's a very efficient and a very interrogative way of you essentially keeping a diary.

2:12 Whereas if you'd call up your friend And you say like here's what's going on with My relationship. Part of it is that you want their actual advice. Like are you thinking about this the right way? Part of it is that you do just want to get it off your chest. You just need someone to hear what you're thinking. There's all these different things that a conversation can represent.

2:30 It's very infrequent. That AI Offers all of those different things. Charles Juhig is a Pitzer Prize winning journalist and a writer at The New Yorker. In his New York Times bestselling book, Super Communicators, How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection,

2:48 Charles explores the science and art. of truly connecting with other people. So what does it mean to be a supercommunicator? Especially in a world where so much of our connection is mediated through technology. Today we're taking child's research and applying it to our AI infused lives.

3:08 I'm Rana L Calyubi, and this This Pioneers of AI, a podcast taking you behind the scenes of the AI revolution. Run it, did you live in Egypt? Did you grow up in in Egypt? I grew up in Cairo and also the Middle East. Did you spend any time in Egypt? I did. I used to live in Babaloo near AUC. What? W I went to AUC. Did you went to AUC? Yes, I'm an alum. I was on the board forever. My sisters went to did you did you I was there uh ninety seven to ninety eight.

3:45 Oh no way. Yeah. So nice to have you on the show. Welcome to Party News of AI. I wanted to start with a personal story. Like I I've been studying uh human communication and human connection for over twenty six years. And my origin story is I grew up in Cairo and around the Middle East. And then I had an opportunity to go do my PhD at Cambridge University. And it was my first experience living away from home. This is the year two thousand, right? So it's a while ago. And the only way I had to communicate with my family back home was through text and like sending emojis with like I was homesick a lot of the time and I would just send like a little emoji with like tears.

4:25 And it just like struck me at some point that wow, all of the richness of like human communication kind of disappears. when we're online it disappears in cyberspace and That got me down a rabbit hole of like literally engineering human communication. Yeah. I got fascinated with facial expressions of emotion. So

4:44 I wanted to Pure your why. You wrote a book called Super Communicators. How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection. Why did you write this book? The reason I wrote Super Communicators is because I had written a book called The Power of Habit a number of years ago, um, which is about the science of habit formation. And I heard from a lot of people who said, you know, this really changed my life. It helped me, helped me build New exercise habits helps me stop drinking or smoking. And and that was really powerful, but

5:13 I I also fell into this bad pattern with my wife. I was working at the New York Times at that point. And I would come home from work and I'd start complaining about my day. And I'd say like you know my Coworkers don't appreciate me or my boss doesn't realize what a genius I am.

5:27 And my wife would do this pretty natural thing. She would give me some pretty good advice. She would say something like, Why don't you take your boss out to lunch and you guys can get to know each other a little bit better? And instead of being able to hear her advice, I would get even more upset, right? And I would say, like, why aren't you why aren't you on my side? You should be outraged on my behalf. You should be telling me how smart I am, how much is their fault. Is something I'm sure is familiar to everyone who's listening, right? Because like this happens again and again and again in all relationships. And so I went to these researchers and I asked them. Why do I keep falling into this trap? Like I'm a professional communicator, I'm a journalist. Why do I keep making this mistake? And they said, Well, actually, we're living through this golden age of understanding communication. For really the first time, we can see what happens inside someone's brain as they're having a conversation.

6:13 And You think when you're talking to your wife that you know what that discussion is about. You think that you're talking about your day, or you think that you're talking about where to go on vacation next week, or if you're at work. Well, you know, what the budget should be for next quarter. But actually there are many different kinds of conversations all happening at the same time. And unless you and your wife are having the same basic kind of conversation.

6:37 You're gonna feel like you can't connect with each other. You're gonna feel like you're two ships passing in the night. And so I thought that was really interesting and I started digging into that and they gave birth to super communicators, the book. Amazing. What kind of communicator were you before you wrote the book? I think I was someone who like very quickly went to like the practical, right? Like I would I was very much like and that's where I was comfortable. It's kind of how I'd grown up in in In you know sort of like

7:03 logic and getting things done and Like, I didn't understand. that part of communication is not only listening, but showing people that you're listening to them. By asking follow-up questions, building on their ideas and saying, Oh, you mentioned this thing and it made me think of this other thing, right? Not just absorbing what you are telling me, but showing you that I'm thinking about it and absorbing it and processing it. Yeah. As I was reading your book, I was thinking about

7:29 Where do I fall in the spectrum of being a super communicator? And I'm a very social person and I love connecting with people. And I also feel like I am a confidant for many people, but I avoid hard conversations, honestly, like it's the plague. So give me an example. Like like what's a what's a conversation you've had recently that you kind of found yourself shying away from that in retrospect you were like, you know what, I pr I should have I should have leaned into that. Oh

7:54 Well not to get Two TMI on this thing, but we might as well. I I um I just ended a three year relationship. And it's because every time we had a hard conversation. It escalated very quickly and it like ended up in a blowup every single time. Yeah. And we just never could get through that.

8:16 Yeah, absolutely. So first of all, I'm sorry that um that it didn't work out. It although it sounds like it was probably kind of a hard relationship. So maybe maybe it's a good thing that that uh that you're you're on to other pastures. So in psychology that we actually see this a lot, right? There's a thing that's known as kitchen sinking. Um, which is a really destructive pattern in marriages and in romantic relationships. Which is that When we have a fight about one thing, it suddenly becomes a fight about everything. Right. We start by talking about like

8:46 Where should we go on for Thanksgiving? And it's like, Well, I wanna go to my mom's and you wanna go to your mom's. And then like five minutes later, it's like well We you don't earn enough money and so we can't go. And by the way, your mom hates me and you never stand up for me when we're when we're at your mom's place, right? So we We know this pattern, and we know how destructive it is.

9:06 One of the things we know is that simply Acknowledging and being aware of the pattern oftentimes makes it easier. One of the things about hard conversations that usually helps them is to start by doing two things. To first of all acknowledge that this is a hard conversation, right? I wanna bring this topic up with you. I feel a little awkward doing so. It might might make you feel awkward. The anxiety that a hard conversation produces Oftentimes, if we voice that anxiety.

9:33 We help resolve it a little bit, not fully, but we make it a little bit less painful. And then the second thing is To set rules for the conversation. What Psychologists, as you know, would refer to as a meta conversation. Let's talk about how we want to talk to each other. To say something like, okay, look, I wanna talk about where we're gonna go for Thanksgiving.

9:53 I know that when I bring this up, sometimes we start talking about each other's moms in not kind ways. Sometimes we start talking about money. Let's set all of that aside and let's just talk about the logistics of where we're gonna go for Thanksgiving. And then I promise we can talk about moms and we can talk about money some other time. Лес дерев. What is the thing that we want to talk about? What's the resolution? What's the question we want to answer? When you do that, suddenly. You are sitting side by side. And it's not you versus them.

10:23 It's the two of you versus a question or a problem together. That's right. We're on the same side of the table. And the thing that we're trying to solve is on the other side of the table, where are we going to spend Thanksgiving? I appreciate especially the anxiety, right? Like like uh kind of naming the anxiety beforehand and and allowing for some like ground rules. Okay, so I would love to explore some of the ideas behind being a super communicator that you kind of shared with us in your book, but I also want to layer in kind of an uh what does this mean in an AI driven world? So let's maybe start with you defining what is a super communicator.

11:00 Yeah. So a super communicator is this person who has these these skills, right? Who uses these skills. And we talked about the skill of Proving that you're listening. Another really important skill is recognizing what kind of conversation is occurring. And in general, these different kinds of conversations, they fall into one of three buckets. There are these practical conversations.

11:20 Where you and I are making plans together or we're solving problems. But then there's emotional conversations where I tell you what I'm feeling. And I don't want you to solve my feelings, I want you to empathize with me. And then there's social conversations, which is about how we relate to each other and how we relate to society. And

11:36 I told that story about my my wife and I kind of missing each other because what was happening is that I was having an emotional conversation. I was complaining about my day and and and talking about how like I feel underappreciated. And my wife responded with a practical conversation. She started giving me advice. And that's why we couldn't connect with each other. That's why we couldn't fully hear each other. It actually comes down to parts of our brains. So those three different kinds of conversations use different parts of our brains. And that when we're not using the same part of our brain at the same time, it's very hard for us to c feel connected. Yeah. If you're having a practical conversation, I imagine that's invoking the your prefrontal Cortex, you're having the right.

12:15 emotional conversation is amygdala, the interior structures of the brain, the the social conversation tends to take over the the medial network that's kind of at the peripheries of our brain. So okay, so what does this have to do with AI? Well, one of the interesting things is that AI can imitate those kinds of conversations very well.

12:34 Right. Like We've all experienced this when you're talking to a chat bot. You know that it'll ask you what you're feeling and it'll ask you about your feelings. It'll try and figure out whether you're like trying to solve a problem or you're trying to just express yourself. One important thing that we've learned about conversations is that When I say something to you.

12:54 The way that you respond, and in particular, believing that my words have an impact on you. is a very very important part of that conversation. So if I say something that makes you angry. there's some information that I'm receiving from that anchor. If I f say something that makes you feel good.

13:14 I feel a sense of pride in making you feel good. If I tell you something that's interesting. I feel smart because I see that you're interested. The the feedback that we get from the person we're talking to and how that affects our internal state. Is a critical aspect of how conversations unfold.

13:34 But when we're talking to AI We do not believe that we are changing anything in the AI. Right. I don't believe that like I'm actually making an AI feel proud. I don't believe I'm impressing an AI. I don't believe that an AI actually feels the emotions that I'm feeling. And so as a result That reciprocal echo of what's happening disappear. And it's because oftentimes when we're talking to AI, we're not getting that reciprocal feeling that talking to a real person gives us.

14:01 Because part of what I'm doing when I'm talking to you is I'm creating a mental image of you in my head. Of how you're receiving these words. I'll be right back with my conversation with Charles after this break. When you've built substantial wealth through your business, it's often tied up in a single equity position. The upside is real, but so is the risk, and knowing when to act isn't always obvious.

14:42 Creative planning works with business owners to build a strategy around concentrated equity. When to diversify, how to manage tax risk, and how to protect what you've spent years building. Creative planning where wealth works together. Learn more at creative planning dot com slash masters of scale. Hey folks, Jeff Berman here. I am thrilled to share some of the new names who will be joining us at this year's Masters of Scale summit.

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15:29 Join us at mastersofscom slash apply twenty six. That's mastersofscom slash apply. Twenty six. Humans will never be more intelligent than AI. Those were great at AI and those that went out of business because they weren't. How do we build a future?

15:52 That is human centered. I'm Rana El Calyubi. And on my podcast Pioneers of AI, we answer that question and so many more. As an AI scientist, entrepreneur, and investor, I know what it takes to build AI that works for everyone. Every week, I sit down with the pioneers shaping our future. And we take you behind the scenes of the AI that's transforming our lives.

16:18 Find pioneers of AI wherever you tune in. I wanna unpack that a little bit more because there's like, for example, nine hundred million monthly active users on Chat GPT. And on average, a person spends about thirty minutes a day in conversation with AI. And just to make it like very personal again, I use a variety of AI tools in my everyday life and work.

16:44 But I do use Chat GPT for like as my personal confidant. So it knows a lot about like this relationship that was like up and down, up and down, up and down. And I was reflecting on like Why do I trust this AI? Even though like

16:58 I'm an AI expert. I built these kinds of technologies, you know, I know it's not reciprocating it. I know it doesn't really like really get me, but yet I am sharing with it all this information. Okay, so let's interrogate whether this is an actual conversation a little bit. Because simpl having a dialogue with another person, having a dialogue with a machine, that doesn't necessarily mean it's a conversation. It it could be just a back and forth, right? So when you turn to chat GPT. And you confide in it about something that's happened. Why are you doing that? Like what's

17:30 What's the thing that you ex anticipate getting from that? That pushes you. Yeah, it's kind of interesting. I think I use it as a tool for self unpacking and self I journal a lot. And it's just maybe a better kind of interrogation journaling device. That that would have been my guess a hundred percent. When you're talking to chatbot about your r romantic relationships.

17:52 You're not turning to it because you think it's gonna give you great advice. You're turning to it because it's a very efficient and a very interrogative way. Of you essentially keeping a diary. Right. Like as I'm talking to this chatbot, I'm describing my feelings. It's asking me questions about those feelings, which maybe pushes me to describe a little bit more about what I'm feeling. Maybe I'm discovering some things about how I think.

18:15 Whereas if you call up your friend And you say, like here's what's going on with My relationship. It's not because you want to use your friend as a diary, right?

18:26 It's usually because it's a mix of different things. Part of it is that you just want them to know what's going on in your life. Part of it is that you want empathy. Part of it is that you want their actual advice. Like, are you putting this in the right context? Are you thinking about this the right way? Part of it is that you do just want to get it off your chest. You just need someone to hear what you're thinking. There's all these different things that a conversation can represent. It's very infrequent. That AI offers all of those different things. And so I think for the most part, when people are using AI, what they're actually doing is they're engaging in a very, very sophisticated

19:02 Essentially one sided conversation, right? With the AI being a foil. And or they're using it as disc as information discovery. Like I use Claude all the time. When I'm saying, like, oh, I'm looking for this kind of study. And like, can you find that study for me? And also like What are the questions that might not be occurring to me that I ought to be thinking about? And it goes out and it sometimes it comes back with smart stuff and sometimes it comes back with not smart stuff. I'm not assuming that Claude can tell me what's genuinely interesting. I'm assuming that Claude can be a fodder or a foil.

19:36 to give me questions or to give me prompts or to give me information or to give me leads that I can then use on my own to figure out if they are genuinely interesting or what they actually mean. Yeah. I want to stay on this a little bit more because also one of the tenets of having a great conversation is being vulnerable. Right. And if you're vulnerable and then you get judgment, right? That like breaks trust. So

20:02 I was again thinking about like when I'm in conversation in quotes with AI It's not judging me, right? I know it's not judging me. And do you think this is why maybe people trust AI a little bit more. Possibly.

20:16 So okay, so let's talk about what vulnerability is because Vulnerability has a very specific definition in neuroscience. Vulnerability is a neural cascade that occurs in your brain. When you say something that another person could judge. Now, you might not care about it, right? You might say like I think Star Trek is better than Star Wars. And everyone's like, that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard my entire life. It doesn't matter. I don't care what you think about my pr my my sci-fi taste, but the fact that I've said something that you could judge at that moment, and again, this is part of the pro social instinct where where

20:48 Basically can't fight against us. When I tell you something you could judge. I pay very close attention to how you react. And if Instead of judging me.

20:59 You withhold judgment. Or even better, if you say something about yourself that I could judge in return. But I I actually this is I kinda like Back to the Future better than all the other sci-fi movies, right? If the other person doesn't judge us, if they share something that we could judge in return.

21:16 We feel closer to them. We trust them more. Study after study have shown we're actually it's impossible for us not to trust this person a little bit more. When they do that. Now we might want to vote for different people. We might go to different churches or mosques or synagogues. But the act of withholding that judgment means that you are safe. It means that I can, I can trust you a little bit more.

21:39 Okay, so let's talk about AI. So I think what's happening is that You know that AI even if AI That AI isn't gonna judge you, but you also know that it doesn't have the capacity for judgment, right? So It is a

21:53 It is a safe repository. Right, the same way that like uh safe at my in my house, like an actual physical safe. That is a safe repository. I can put things into it because I know that it can't It can't weaponize it against me. It won't weaponize it against me. But there's a difference between that and talking to someone

22:13 Who is deciding not to attack you. The AI isn't making a decision not to attack us. And so we use it as a repository. And we're very comfortable using it as a repository, but I don't think that we believe that there's reciprocal vulnerability. In a way that sort of

22:30 Presses the same buttons inside our head. Yeah. Now if I said to you, Okay, Ronna, I want you to give me all of your diaries. And And I promise I'm not going to publish them. And here's something.

22:43 really embarrassing about me that I'm gonna give you in return. Please do not publish it. Right now we both have something on the other person. you would actually believe that you would believe that there's like that there's real intent there. A lot of what communication does is it helps us create A mental model, a sort of a story inside our head.

23:04 of what's happening in the other person. And when it comes to machines. We can be relatively certain about what's happening, right? I I know that like If I tell ChatGPT something, it might use it as training data, maybe it'll show up. So I'm not gonna give it like my social security number. But if I tell if I'm like my I hate my neighbor, they're the worst, then I don't I'm not so worried that ChatGPT is gonna weaponize that and use that against me. But that doesn't mean that I trust ChatGPT. It means that I trust the repository. So one aspect of chat GPT or AI uh today that is not like is is kind of behind or non-existent actually is their ability to discern our nonverbal cues. So I want to talk about that because I spent my entire career

23:46 studying facial expressions and how like the majority of the way we communicate is not actually in the choice of words we use, right? It's in all these like silent signals like our face, our gestures, our vocal intonations. Well one of the things we found early on in in our research is it really does fall down to whether you're even paying attention, right? Especially now with with All these devices that are kind of tethered to You can be in a conversation.

24:12 But you're not really present and you're not really seeing these signals, right? Right. Oh, all the time. And it and it can happen face to face, too, right? Because not even because of devices, just because like I'm in my head and I'm like trying to like if I really care about impressing you, if I'm trying to like say something really smart or funny to impress you. Then odds are I'm not actually listening that closely to what you're saying. A lot of this comes from speed dating. Is that

24:38 The people who are thinking about how to impress the other person inevitably seem less impressive than the person who's listening really, really well. And who's proving that they're listening really, really well. So the more that I show you I'm interested in what you are saying, the more that I'm mirroring back your physures or your expressions, right? Which is a way of proving that I'm paying attention to those physical gestures and those expressions.

25:02 The more that I do that the more impressed you are going to be with me, even if what I say is not that funny or not that like You know. Show off E. Well, you'll feel connected, right? It's literally actually isn't isn't this how it works in the brain? Like basically the same brain parts light up. Yeah, that's exactly right. So

25:22 So when when we're in a great conversation, our bodies and our brains start to change. So in this conversation, for instance, without us realizing it our heart rates have started to echo each other to become similar. Our breathing rates have be become similar. So cool. Yeah, even though we're surrounded by like thousands of miles, right? And if we could see inside our brains, what we would see is that your thoughts and my thoughts are becoming more and more alike. We would see like the peaks and the valleys together.

25:48 And that kind of makes sense when you think about it because If I tell you about something I'm feeling you actually feel that emotion a little bit, right? If I tell you about an idea, you experience that idea. And within neurosciences is known as neural entrainment. The goal of communication is connection.

26:06 Neural entrainment is the mechanism for that connection. When we have a good conversation, we ex our thoughts become similar. And as they become more similar. we feel closer to each other and we feel like we can we actually can hear each other with higher fidelity. And as a result, we can trust each other more. You talk about in your book how like humans have been communicating face to face for a million years or whatever, and we've only started communicating through technology in the last, you know

26:35 I don't know, forty years or so. Do you know if this neural entrainment happens if we are communicating through email or Slack or texting? Oh, it definitely can. It definitely can. But I think that what's important is I'll also mention when you achieve that neural entrainment. That's why a conversation feels good, right? That feeling that you get from like being like, Oh, that's a great conversation. That's actually like your brain releasing like. dopamine and serotonin, like there's there's a bunch of like signal neurological signals associated with neural entrainment that make us feel good to make us want to seek out more conversations. And

27:10 I'm certain that there has been times that you have read an email from a friend. And you just feel warm and great. So it can happen. What's important though is that That's a learned skill.

27:24 So one of my favorite examples of this is that about a hundred years ago. When telephones first started becoming popular. There were all these articles that were published that said No one will ever have a real conversation on the phone. Right. Because up until then

27:38 All conversations that happen basically face to face, maybe through letters. And people would say, like, look, if you can't hear their tone of voice, if you can't see their expressions, if it's a letter and they haven't sat down and sort of edited it and made sure that they're getting it exactly right and really like tried to figure out how what they want to say and how to say it, you're never gonna have a real conversation. That's laughable to us today, but But what's interesting is that for the next 15 years, they were basically right. If you look at the transcripts of early telephone conversations, what you see is that people used them as telegraphs. Oh, interesting. They would call up the grocery store. They would be like, Here's my order. And the other person would say, Okay. And then they would hang up immediately. Like there was there was no awareness that you could have some back and forth and some chit chat.

28:24 Now what's interesting is that After about fifteen years Everyone used the phone for real conversations. By the time you and I were in middle school. We were having conversations that were like seven or eight hours long each day. Right. They're the most important conversations of our life. So what happened there? What happened is that we learned to use telephones. And in fact, when you're talking on the phone.

28:46 Without you being aware of it, there are certain rules that you will follow. You will oftentimes over enunciate your words on a phone. Mm. You will put more emotion into your voice.

28:58 than if you were talking to each other face to face. And it's because part of your brain realizes this person can't see my face. I need to like signal to them what I'm feeling through the tone of my voice. We are living through Those first fifteen years when it comes to online communication. Mm.

29:15 And so some people are really good at it. They know how to do it. Some people aren't. Sometimes it happens just by accident. Sometimes it doesn't. But what's important is. The way we get better at it is by recognizing that there are different rules for different kinds of communication. Right. When I Call you on the phone.

29:32 It's a different kind of conversation than when I send you an email. And there's different rules governing how we feel connected to each other. And I need to be aware of those rules and live by them if I want to connect with you through those means. Don't go anywhere. I'll be back with my conversation with Charles in just a minute. Hey listeners, Bob here. If you listen to Rapid Response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show because every Friday we release a second Rapid Response exclusively in the Rapid Response feed. The guests and topics are just as compelling and timely. From Ford CEO to NASA's administrator to the lessons from The Devil Wears Prada. It takes about 10 seconds to find, just search rapid response wherever you listen to podcasts and hit follow to make sure you never miss an episode.

30:43 I hope to see you there. So let's dig into that. So you um you reached out with a really thought email, which actually, you know, made me feel that you had really taken the time to get to know me and the show. And it was just like very thoughtful and it was awesome. Yeah, I'm a fan of the show. So it's it's easy to do that when you like when it's a show that you like. Thank you. I we appreciate that. Um But yeah, but but you clearly like I I y you know, if we were to unpack that email you sent, like what was right about it. Because I did feel like

31:21 You know, this was like A real genuine moment of connection. I was like, oh, I'm excited to like actually have this conversation. It was great. So I think okay, so so th this is a great thank you for bringing up this example because this is fascinating to me since I wrote the email. So I think okay, so there's a couple of things happening there, right? One is that I'm anticipating your Expectations. In a world of AI

31:45 A well written email is no longer a signal. of something that you should pay attention to. Right. So it used to be used to be that I could basically go through my inbox and if something was well written, I'd pay attention to it. And if it wasn't, I'd be like, do I really need to like, is this something scammy now? We've lost that important signal a signal that we've used for literally thousands of years. Yeah.

32:07 Something that's well written. is something that I should pay attention to. Human generated. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So When I'm writing that email, I one of the things I do is I say, like, hey, you recently had this guy on this episode. And I thought it was so interesting. And the reason I thought it was interesting is because of this. So first of all, that actually like Is something that it's harder for AI to do, right? Like to figure out how to do that. I guess you could program AI to do it, but but it'd take a little bit of effort.

32:37 The other thing is that when I write those emails, I write them myself. And I don't try and make them super formal. Because I want them to seem human. And I know what I know how chat GPT writes, and I know how I write, and they're different. And so I try and lean into how I write. And so I think what's happening there is. That

32:58 The more we try to be genuine. The more we try to be authentic, the more we try and be vulnerable. The other person will pick up on it. And that doesn't mean that I have to like you know, bear my soul or tell you all these like embarrassing things. It just means that I have to

33:14 Be authentic and be genuinely curious about you. And and usually that that works. Yeah. So it's it's so interesting. And then to bring it back to like when you are in conversation with a person, whether it's through an email or kind of

33:31 Texting, what's your advice for being a great communicator when it's Through technology. A asynchronous? Okay. So first of all, I think Is If you're responding to an email, actually read the person's email, right? Like prove to them that you're listening. That like you say, like, okay, you brought up three questions. Let me go through those three questions in order, right? I often do this. I like I like reply and then I put my responses inside their their email.

33:59 to show them that like I'm paying attention. The second thing is Two to try and figure out what kind of conversation is happening here. It's very easy in a text based conversation just to assume that it's practical. Right. That this person is like bringing up a problem and they want a solution.

34:13 But There are lots of emotional conversations that happen online. I'm sure if you looked at your kids' phones and if I looked at my kids' phones, what you would see is that they they're they have conversations with their friends where they're texting just strings of emojis. Right. That's an emotional conversation, right? They're not trying they're not trying to convey like an argument or a piece of information. They're trying to convey a feeling. So pay attention to what kind of conversation is happening. And then the third thing is Just remember that

34:40 You oftentimes have to bend over backwards to be clear. So sarcasm is very easy to detect when we're talking to someone. 'Cause we can hear it in their voice. It's almost impossible to detect. When they're typing. We don't know if they're being serious or sarcastic. So sarcasm probably should not happen in any kind of type-written communication.

35:01 We also know that for instance uh being more pol the like uh even a little bit of politeness. works much more effectively in online communication than it does offline. So there's this interesting study that was done of Wikipedia editors. They were all like debating with each other and arguing and flaming each other over like, you know, some change that they wanted to make to a page. If just one of the editors would say please and thank you, It would bring down the temperature of the entire conversation by about thirty percent. And so That's what I w when you're talking about those rules, these different rules.

35:34 If you think about it, if you just take a second and say, like, how is it how is a text message different from an email? It's different from a phone call, is different from speaking face to face, you can come up with a bunch of rules for yourself really easily. It's just a matter of reminding yourself, like, oh, it's a text message. I need to follow this rule because that's the one that matters. So back to AI, I actually asked ChatGPT. I I told it we were gonna have a conversation, and I said, Okay, do you think you're a super communicator? And I actually thought the answer was interesting. So It's sad. A lot of communication failures. Often happen when one person is having an emotional conversation and the other one is responding with practical advice. I can often identify which type of conversation you're in.

36:15 And respond appropriately. In that sense, I can mimic many behaviors of a supercommunicator, but there are limits. I don't notice subtle facial expressions. I don't hear the hesitation in someone's voice. A human supercommunicator will remember decades of shared history. Uh, will take emotional risk and will revere something about themselves and it can't do any of that. So in a way, it was like Yeah. You know, kind of, but not really. Which yeah um yeah.

36:42 Does that does that check out? I mean it totally,'cause I think that like Th there's this emerging like question going on. What's the mental model for AI? Like how do we think about AI? Like how do we picture it? Wait. And and I think I think for me, a lot of it is that AI

36:58 Is a simulacrum of the world that's very, very sophisticated. Right. And and oftentimes Things that imitate the world.

37:09 They can seem conscious, right? There's this famous experiment known as the Chinese box experiment. It's a thought experiment, which is Imagine there's a box and there's a little hole in it. And You speak Chinese and you put a question in Chinese through the hole and the guy inside

37:26 doesn't speak Chinese, but he's surrounded by an infinite number of books. And he can use those books to figure out What these characters mean without understanding them, and which characters to respond with, right? All the books are just in Chinese. Like if you see this symbol, write the symbol back. So if you had an infinite number of books You could probably get something that whatever question I put inside. the box would come back with an answer that made sense to me.

37:53 Without the person inside the box having any idea what any of those symbols mean. Which of course is a pretty good analogy for computers, right? And in philosophy, there's a bunch of people who said, Like, look If a box could actually do that. That's a form of consciousness.

38:09 Right, that box is actually conscious. It's not conscious in the same way that we think about humans being conscious, but it has this capacity for consciousness. And then there's other philosophers who say, No, it's not consciousness. That's like that's just a a particularly clever. Like use of resources when your resources are infinite. So I don't know what the answer to that is. I and I think there's a debate that's going on right now over what the right answer is, but I do know. That

38:35 At the end of the day I like talking to my wife and my kids more than I like talking to Chat GPT. And that I should probably pay attention to that. Yeah. Because that that's telling me something important. Yeah. Do you think the more We communicate Whether we're

38:51 Again, communicating with each other through technology or just communicating with technology. Do you think there's a risk that we, you know, our social and emotional skills atrophy? Um I don't know. That's a really good question. I hadn't thought about that. I mean our social and our emotional skills.

39:09 tend to be fairly robust, to be honest with you. But yeah, if you're not practicing them, I mean, I don't think you need a machine to do that, right? We know that people who avoid emotional conversations aren't great at having emotional conversations, right? They they don't feel fewer emotions. They don't, they don't respond in less emotional ways. They're just bad at having emotional conversations. So definitely practice is really, really good. And if anything, if AI can help us practice Like it's not a bad thing to if I'm gonna have a tough conversation with my spouse to go and say like Okay, Chad GPT, you're my spouse. Like, like let me let me work this through with you. Let's do a dry run.

39:46 That doesn't mean that Chat G B T is gonna do a great job of anticipating what my spouse might say, but it does mean that it's gonna help me again as a repository, as like a diary. It's gonna help me get get more clear on what I'm hoping to happen in this conversation. Yeah. Last question. What's one thing you'd love to leave the audience with? So the thing I would leave the audience with is You can have a conversation with anyone.

40:14 And you can have Any conversation you want. with anyone. Right, there is probably someone Who you feel bad because you haven't reached out to in years. And you know what? If you send them a note.

40:25 They will love it. And and maybe if you set up a call with someone you haven't talked to in a while, the You're you're we oftentimes avoid doing that because 'Cause we can't remember their spouse's name and we think it's gonna be awkward in the first couple of minutes. And it might be awkward in the first couple of minutes. You have to say, like, I can't remember, is it is it Susie or is it Jamie, your your wife's name, right? But then after you get that out of the way.

40:47 Then you suddenly start catching up and it's wonderful and you feel so close to each other. One of the things we know is that humans are kind of bad at forecasting how conversations are going to go. But We are almost always happier that we've had that conversation afterwards. Mm.

41:06 Connecting with other people is the thing that makes us happy. And the way that we do that is through conversation. So what I would leave the audience with is Go have a real conversation sometime in the next week. A conversation you might not have had otherwise. Maybe it's with a stranger, maybe it's with your spouse. Have a real conversation.

41:24 And I promise you your life will be better as a result. I love that. What a wonderful way to end our conversation. Thank you for joining us on the show. That's great. Thank you for having me. This has been such a treat. I have a lot of takeaways from this conversation.

41:42 Here's one of them. Our languagely really matters, so when we call whatever we're doing with AI a relationship, we're putting a lot of weight on that word. Charles really challenged that. Maybe it's not a relationship. Maybe it's just a super sophisticated diary or journaling tool. That's something I'm going to definitely be thinking about.

42:01 If this conversation helped you communicate better with your partner or co-worker, I'd love to hear about it. Thank you so much for listening. We'll be back next week with a new episode. Pioneers of AI is a Wait What original. Our executive producer is Eve Tro. This episode was produced by Megan Tan. Video editing by Eric Purcell.

42:33 Our senior talent executive, Stephanie Stern. Mixing and Mastering by Brian Pugh Original music by Ryan Holliday. Our head of podcasts is Lutal Mulad. You can join the conversation on LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and X.

42:50 Just search for at Pioneers of AI.

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