So, we're Coover, we're a creative studio based out in the UK. We are a team of technologists, of designers, engineers, artists that cover a broad spectrum of different subjects, different topics. We work with brands and sort of cultural institutions to make a range of pieces, ranging from data visualisations, web-based experiences, installations. We've been working in partnership with IAHK to explore cryptocurrency. We've been doing that through a project we're calling Symphony of the Blockchain, which is an audio-visual experience of cryptocurrency. We've developed a web-based experience that allows users to navigate through the history of the blockchain and explore all those different internal properties and some of those abstract data points that people aren't familiar with and it's been a really fascinating example journey for us that we've got to learn a lot about this underlying technology and sort of finding a metaphor in which we can present it through. We're really keen to take this further and make it a tool of utility and that's the big thing for us is the idea that we can use this as a means for people to compare different cryptocurrencies. The underlying design process of this is to be able to represent properties of cryptocurrency and by having the ability to compare something like Bitcoin compared to Ethereum, Cardano or IOTA allows you to see these inherent properties underlying and just compare them so we want to make it, we really want to make it something where people have never seen it before and they can come to it and use it. They can look for specific dates, they can find forks. Something that's never been conveyed before is the idea that the branches and the forks in the history of blockchains. The idea of using scale and colour in a 3D environment is really well first to be used in a sort of VR experience because you can navigate that space, you can pick things up, you can explore blocks as tangible objects that you can hold in your hand which is going to be amazing to do and we'd also like to expand this work and use it in a ticket on a touring in a sort of an exhibition kind of environment where we can take it to different places and allow people to come to this space and explore those different aspects of cryptocurrency. The challenges for us, I think the main challenge with us was we never had any understanding of cryptocurrency at all. It was on our periphery, the idea of the blockchain of these financial transactions that happened in a very different way to the norm, was entirely new and it allowed us to really investigate that both the technology but the concept as well and what that facilitates on a social level. We've been looking at some webGL technology that is very new, we're trying to push the envelope always creatively in what we can do and both technically what we achieve. Hi guys, thanks very much for coming today. This is a little slot we're going to do on a little bit of ours and the project to be working on. So, yeah, just to start off, hi. Again, thanks for coming. We are with KUVA, we're really excited to be here to show off a bit of the work and some of the stuff that we've been doing on with IOHK and tell you a little bit about what we do. My name is Mark Lundin, I'm the creative director and the sort of founder of KUVA. We are a design studio based out of the UK and I always find it's to give you a bit of background about what we do, it's often better to sort of show some of the work we do rather than explain it. We do a lot of, it's quite dark there, you can't see it, but we do a lot of large-scale sort of data visualization pieces. This is something we did for Twitter last year which is a sort of touring exhibition of their social media data. Again, it's quite dark, you can't see it, but there's a large screen there and there's a sort of a lot of, it's a data visualization piece. We help sort of generate and concept content for different clients. We range, we work with brands such as Adidas, it's a project we did last year. This is the Geneva Car Show, we did a live interactive piece on the background there.  This is something we did for the new school who are a university in New York. We did a piece with. We also have worked on a project for Google. This was a doodle that went on the homepage of Google for 24 hours, which was quite stressful. And that leads us on to a little bit about why we're here today, why I'm here. I want to talk about a really exciting project we've been sort of working on with with the creative team at IOHK. It's really exciting, we call it the symphony of the blockchain and it's launching today. So the symphony of the blockchain is an interactive audio-visual exploration of cryptocurrency and blockchain through Bitcoin. I'll go through a little bit of that later. It's an ongoing research initiative that we're working together with to help bring about the sort of greater understanding of some of the technology that underpins cryptocurrency. So today what I'm going to go through is a little bit about the sort of the design process that we went through to get to our final piece. How we got to where we are, a walk through some of the visualisations that we've done and then show you a little bit about what's coming next, the next stages of the project for the next six months. So how did it all start? Well, basically we started off about a few months ago with Richard and Charles and Jeremy in a room and the brief was basically what does a blockchain look and sound like, which is quite a sort of abstract concept to be honest. We wanted to explain blockchain technology and look specifically at cryptocurrencies. No limitations, no restrictions. That was the brief. So the first step of undertaking this project as a studio was to try and sort of understand the blockchain.  We often work with different pieces of technology that we've never come in contact with. Blockchain was definitely one of those. We've never worked in this space before. It was very new to us. I, by no means, am a mathematician. So just as a word of warning, I may throw in some terminology now and again that is entirely misused and out of context, but hopefully you just get the general gist of what I'm trying to say. So yeah, so we kicked off basically with this period of time where we had to go in and investigate what the blockchain was. This is the whole team. Here's us just sort of throwing some ideas together, basically trying to decipher some of the technology, the implementation and just the concept of what makes the blockchain and how that impacts cryptocurrency. Yeah, and I'm going to say that after doing that, it feels like maybe one of the few design studios that actually can get their head around or talk about myrcal trees and such. So it's quite new. Once we sort of dove into that a little bit more, the next step as a design process is when you're doing data visualisation is to find the metaphor to an object, to a technology. It's really important for us in order to investigate technology and investigate whatever you're trying to represent. You need to find the narrative. You need to find a story. You need to find the metaphor through which you can use as a lens to understand, to critique whatever it is you're trying to display. So we went through many different angles and many different approaches to try and understand this, what it means, what are the technologies underpinning it. Some of the common terms that we kept coming across was these ideas of data as an immutable structure, as it has permanence. It exists and it has interconnectivity with other data structures. These were common threads and common terms that came up in the vernacular as we were investigating it. We wanted to sort of, it very much felt like this idea that these structures had a physicality to them and we hid upon this metaphor of crystal structures. This is very interesting because there's a lot of parallels between data structures in general. They have inherent properties. For example, in structures like this, there are internal chemical constituents that affect a broader macroscopic structure. The internal properties of what makes these has made these broader structures and it's only because of those internally. There's other things like they have, if you think about diamonds, diamonds have infractions inside them, inclusions that affect how they are viewed. These were brought about because of the process, because of the growth and where they came from. It tells a little story about where they came from and these are part of the story. Here's just some examples of the process we went through looking at all these different ways that crystals are represented and the shape and the range of them that all comes from these very fundamental underlying principles. Some more here. This is all just a sort of body of research that we're just trying to formulate this metaphor, this idea of what we could use. We wanted to explore the idea that maybe we could represent things inside the blockchain, inside blocks, using these metaphors so things like the scale of these objects or the value of the blockchain fees, how they might translate into physical properties such as the texture, the lighting, how it disperses light, all these things where they have these connections to the inputs of the data, to the outputs of a visual and sound-based structure. Having looked at this idea of this metaphor and latched onto that in a certain sense, we started to extend upon that, this idea of encapsulating or encoding data within an entity, within a physical permanent structure and placing, positioning, frozen in time, pieces that could be looked at and viewed at in isolation. For example, when a block gets created, it can be moved, it can be held, it can be transacted, it moves around. We found it a very interesting idea to explore and there's some other aspects to it. This is a few pieces of work by an artist called Jack Storm, these two here in the corner. He's an incredible artist, he has nothing to do with cryptocurrency or data structures, however we kind of latch upon this idea that there's these different elements and components that you can view that you can see within this object. I'll talk a little bit more about him later because he's some interesting work he's doing and here's some more examples here, the idea of objects encased and encapsulated in a physical entity. Having moved on from this idea of using this metaphor, using this encoded structures, using crystals as a metaphor, we started prototyping and fleshing out the idea. We started looking at visual explorations of it all, like motion, giving structures mass and what that might correlate to, the idea that transactions might have weight, how they affect other things, how that has effects later on in the network and how we can convey that through things like movement. Another concept is this idea of connectivity, although maybe data structures exist independently, they may have correlations and connectivity between them and how we might be able to express that without linking them directly, we might be able to encapsulate them in something, show some sort of membrane around them that itself communicates an idea of togetherness or how they correlate. That's some more ideas. Sound, of course, is a big part of what we do, let's just see if we can play this here. All of this came about from the idea that it's supposed to be a symphony of the blockchain. The sound, obviously, has to be a big part of it. Here we're looking at these ideas, how those properties translate to things like resonance, what does a block sound like, if it has internal properties that are reflected by data, if you hit it, what does it sound like and how we might translate that. We've done many different routes, and this is just some of the research work that we hit upon. After that, we moved into the prototyping stage. This is where we actually got our tools out and started putting things together and seeing how things worked and how things fit together. It's all well and great having this metaphor and having an idea of how you might represent it, unless you can actually test that against real data, it's just an abstraction. It's just a story really. Here we've actually started connecting to the Bitcoin network. This is really dark, but hopefully you can see a bit of that. We have used Houdini. Houdini, if you don't know, is a 3D modelling tool. It's really quite an amazing piece of kit. It has a lot of parallels with functional programming in the fact that you create geometry in a node-based environment, and that fact is like you're actually modelling the flow of data. You take inputs and you model the flow of data and you end up with some sort of output. Here we actually wrote a plug-in for Houdini that connects to Bitcoin and it pulls in data, real-time data, or data in the past, and it models it through this flow, through this process, and it ends up with some different varied outputs. Here is an example. It's a video. Here what we're doing is this is a block that we're looking at. All these individual shards are transactions within that block and it's distributed over a sphere. This is just a very early prototyping, just smashing together different ideas and getting some output. It's very stochastic in its nature. It's quite random. We're just seeing if we can get a proof of concept working. We then extended that to some sort of renders. You can't quite see it here, but it's quite interesting. It may be not exactly what we're looking for, but this idea that you have this block, you have these transactions in it where the height of them represent the value of that transaction, you can very quickly read this. You can understand something about it, not in detail, but you can understand there's a lot of transactions or there's however many there might be. We really like that idea that you can quickly get a gauge of some data structure. This is another one. Again, very early prototype work where we are doing the same thing where we're distributing transactions over a disk. We're using the height of them by the value again. However, again, it's fairly random in nature, but we still think it's quite interesting. Then some more outputs that renders. It's interesting how you start seeing all these internal reflections and how different transactions might have properties that affect how the light propagates through the volume. It's quite interesting. The end of this is we ended up in this sort of space. This is not a block. This is basically a day in the blockchain. We landed upon this because there's something nice about having this spiral. The idea of the blockchain is it's a link's list. It just moves backwards in time. A revolution in that spiral is a day. You have this idea that you can look at it and quickly gauge the distribution of blocks, how they were positioned, the size of them, the scale of them. You can look at this and see in that day something happened, something occurred and what that was. This is where we finally landed. We've got some early tests of how that might look like as an animated entity. We also went through some applications of how we might apply UI elements of it. The big thing to this is it's quite a complex thing to convey. Even when you make it look beautiful, you still need some supporting copy, some supporting documentation to explain this, explain what you're looking at. Basically, just to summarise and recap where we came from. This is basically the process we came from. We're really excited to have gone on this journey with IOHK and the creator team Richard. We will be launching Symphony today. I'm going to take you through a little walkthrough of where we ended up. We went into a build phase and here we have basically the symphony of blockchains. This is going to go live on the IOHK website. It's basically a web-based experience. You can see this online. You can view this on your mobile and your desktop. Here you can see what we have is again the distribution of blocks in a circle and a spiral. All these blocks represent real blocks in the blockchain. You can navigate down the history of the blockchain all the way through time back to the inception, back to the genesis block. There's an ambient sound happening that is represented of the hash rate that's involved on that day. The amount of input and the amount of processing that was involved. You can select blocks and pull them out from the spiral and view them. Here we're viewing the Merkel tree, which is a binary tree as I'm sure many of you know and it doesn't have any sort of dimensionality. However, we're using concepts from the block, properties inside the block like the fees, the ratio of the fees that are involved to the value of it, trying to approximate how expensive it was to create or mine this block. We're using that as ways to affect how those trees grow. Each block looks fundamentally different and has a different growth pattern inside it. Again, it's not maybe immediately readable, but you can immediately tell that sometimes you get very distorted and contorted tree structures. Sometimes you get very beautiful ornate ones and these are all indicative of properties of those blocks. There is also the sound element from this as well as based upon the transactions themselves in the blocks. The transactions occur over time and the sounds propagate and they build up. Sometimes you get very interesting things because when the blocks are generated a lot of the transactions are grouped together. It actually does reveal something interesting about that. That is going live on the IHK on the website. We're really excited to work with the team to build that. You can go and have an explore and we'd love to get your feedback on what you think about it. We're going to be moving forward that in the next few months. I'm going to take a little bit of time to talk about what's next because obviously we talk about this idea of the symphony and what we see here is very much like the first movement of that symphony. It's very interesting. We found that common language to it but we need to go further. We need to do more. The most important thing is we want to give it utility. That really is the key thing to us. It looks great and it's very interesting as a visual and audio piece bit of art but unless we give it utility it's going to be meaningless. We want to allow people to actually look for blocks, look for dates and be able to traverse and be able to go to dedicated points in the history of the blockchain. The goal really is to create a tool in which we can compare cryptocurrencies. This is where it becomes really interesting because Bitcoin is fundamentally very different to Ethereum, to Cardano, to Iota and visualising them in a way that people can understand something about how they're different. Could be amazing and that's something we've not seen before. I think a lot of people understand there's different currencies but they don't understand the difference between them unless you know the technical implementation. So having a way to compare them is going to be amazing. The idea that you can look at this Bitcoin and you can see here's this dark ominous sound and you might be able to look at another currency and it might be bright and vibrant. The colours might look different. It'll make people ask those questions. What makes those different? Why are those currencies different? I think it could provide a really interesting way to explore that problem. Of course Ada, we're really excited we're going to be working with the team and the Cardano team as well to bring Ada to the platform over the next six months. We are also going to be implementing Iota and Ethereum. All of this is going to be available open source on GitHub so we're hoping that's going to provide the community with a tool that they can fork this and actually create their own and submit it back but that's going to be really interesting too. We also want to do a VR experience. Again it's very dark but the natural thing behind this is that by using these metaphors of scale and size to a block by putting it on the screen you're taking a step away from it. If you've actually seen something in VR being within a room of a large scale is quite a physical response to that because it's quite intimidating to get claustrophobia. So having things like where we can present the scale of a block or as a monolith and stand next to it in size would be incredible. It allows you to read it a little bit easier and also allowing people to sort of co-presence so people can actually navigate the space in pairs or in a group and actually analyse and look at these things and potentially like send transactions to each other would be really great. Jack Storm again this is the artist that I discussed earlier. He's just very incredible. We've been speaking and we've been in discussions with him. He was hopefully going to have a meeting with us and the creative team as he's really keen to kind of start helping making some of these physical entities together. Every time we talk about it it's a physical thing so I think it's important that it would be that we do actually create this somehow and I think that's going to be that could be really beautiful. We'd like to develop this and further into a sort of an exhibition all these disparate ideas around this space of exploring the blockchain and cryptocurrency. We'd like to formalise into a touring exhibition that we can take to places like the Guggenheim hopefully. It's something that we think there's so many avenues to explore and there's such a body of work that we can do so it's really exciting and that's it. Thank you for coming and if anybody does really want to come and chat to us we're here as a team at Coover so we'd love to take the opportunity while we're in a room and while we're all in the same space in Lisbon to actually discuss this a little bit more. So thanks.


Nice to have you back on the show, Charles. It's been a while, but again, you have a new book coming out and this one is even more aligned with what we talk about on this show and this book is called Super Communicators. And I'm excited, well, AJ and I both are excited to dive in. So why don't you kick us off and let us know with all the books you've written, what was the genesis of this one? Well, you know, about a decade ago, I wrote this book, The Power of Habit, right? And it's about how we build habits in our lives and how we can improve our habits. And I started hearing from readers who were saying, I used what you wrote about and it's been revolutionary, but a lot of my life and a lot of my success is dependent on working with other people. And so my question is, how do I change their habits? Like how do I make them be better? Which of course is not really a question anyone can answer. And then I actually had this thing happen to my own life which is I fell into this pattern with my wife where I'd come home from work and it would be like a long day and I'd be complaining about my boss and she very reasonably would offer some advice. She'd say like, why don't you take them out to lunch and you can get to know each other better. And instead of being able to hear what she was saying, I would get even more upset. And I'd be like, you're supposed to have my back and you're supposed to be outraged on my behalf and then she would get upset that I was upset. And so I wanted to figure out like, what's going on here? If other people are so important to us and to our success and to our happiness, what is it about communication that sometimes gets in the way of really connecting with other folks? So this brings up a great point before we dive into the meat of the book. But I am curious, you've wrote these great books on all these topics that we benefit greatly of having a better understanding. So with each book, how has your habits or your daily routines changed with the research that you do for these books? Oh, pretty significantly. Like I actually, I mean, honestly, the reason I write the books is because I basically want an excuse to call experts and ask them for advice. And so every single time I write a book, it's because I can't figure out something for myself and I really wanna get better at it. And luckily there's people who are studying it, right? And if I just called and said, hey, will you be my personal therapist? They would say no. But if I say I'm writing a book, then they say, okay, now I'll talk to you. And it has been revolutionary. I mean, honestly, since writing Super Communicators, the way that I communicate has completely changed for the better. It's really gotten a lot, it's a lot easier to connect with people now. Yeah, you know, one of the things that really struck me about the book is how difficult it is to sort of pin down what a Super Communicator is. We've all kind of experienced it and felt it in other people and we could recognize it when we've left a conversation or we feel really connected to someone. So I'm curious, as you sat down to write the book and really think about Super Communicators, was there someone that came to mind for you or you're like, I know this person is a Super Communicator? No, it's absolutely. And I think actually there's someone for everyone. So let me ask you guys a question.  Like, does the person you had called, do they pop into your mind right away? Immediately. Yeah, who is it? I just spoke to him before this chat actually, his name's Alex. Okay, and John, is there someone like, who do you call when you're having a tough day? I don't, I usually just go straight to music and music is going to be what allows me to just lose myself, forget about things or feel like I'm listening to somebody else who understands me in that weird way. Like, I'm also a musician. So for me listening to music, there's a lot. And that's a form of super communication. And AJ's live with me. So he knows how I deal with it. So yeah, there's a lot going on. And it's, but again, it was the first thing that I thought about when you asked that question. Yeah, the first thing that popped into my mind. So AJ, for you, Alex, this guy Alex you call, Alex is a super communicator for you. And you're probably a super communicator back for him, right? And the reason you are is because you guys know how to listen to each other. You know how to prove that you're listening. You know how to ask the right questions. You know how to match each other. So if you're feeling down, he'll recognize that and acknowledge that or you guys can feel happy together. John, oftentimes we have the same experience with music and the conversation's different, right? Like I'm not necessarily talking to Pete Townsend or to Bono, but I'm definitely like in conversation with them even if they're not aware of it. And there are some people who can be consistent super communicators. So those people that I just mentioned, there are some people who like they are that person for everyone. They can connect with anyone. And what we've discovered about them is they aren't, this isn't something you're born with. Like they're not particularly charismatic. They aren't super outgoing and extroverts. It's just a set of skills that we can learn about how to communicate better. And when we do that, other people want to communicate with us more. They want to bring us into conversations. And that's really, really meaningful. And reading the book, this idea popped into my mind that I couldn't shake. And then of course, as I'm going through the book, I kept coming back to this idea. Now, when I was younger and YouTube was all the rage and I was doing a lot of searching on that. I liked to listen to lecturers and different ideas and stories. And I found myself gravitating to folks that I felt were eloquent speakers. So there's that. And you can understand that, how they're speaking is very fluent and it's nice. And you can lose yourself in it and feel like you're gaining a lot. But as I have gotten older, I found myself listening more so to people that I feel that have my background. Who may not be the more eloquent speaker, but the way that they communicate just makes me feel more comfortable speaking to them. Yeah. No, I think that's that. My guess is what's happening there is authenticity. So there's a couple of things that consistent super communicators do that we know is what makes them so successful. The first thing is they ask a lot of questions. They ask like 10 to 20 times as many questions as the average person. Another thing that they do is they try and figure out what kind of conversation is happening. And there's basically sort of three big buckets that conversations fall into and they try and match you and invite you to match them. But the other thing that they do is that they try and be authentic. And my guess is that when you're talking to folks who you think of them as it being similar to you, but my guess is that they're actually very different from you in a lot of ways, right?  There's all types of ways that we could find differences but because they're authentic the same way that you're authentic, because they show you that they're trying to make a connection, you feel close to them. And this is the biggest and most important thing that super communicators do is they show you that they want to connect because oftentimes when we go into a conversation there's this anxiety, right? Like does this person want to talk to me? Is this boring? Like are they just wasting time until someone more important comes in? But when someone shows you that they want to connect with you then it's like suddenly the magic box opens and sometimes it's as simple as just laughing with someone to show them that we want to connect. And this is a key point for me because I think in a lot of our listeners and our clients fall into this trap and they want to improve their communication, they default to mimicry. Whether it's picking up what Johnny and I do or someone else that they view as a super communicator they just go, okay, I need to either mimic them or I need to mimic the person I'm in communication with losing that authenticity and it actually works against them completely. Like we feel disconnected from that person who is mimicking us but there is a matching. So you brought up matching a couple of times now there's a matching that is a key component of this and I'd love to break down the differences between mimicry and matching. And we should note that this mimicry is totally natural. In fact, we know that literally everyone does it. It's kind of programmed into our neurology. If I use an odd word in a conversation or if I have a certain grammatical structure it's much more likely you will say that same word in the conversation. And if I'm big and expansive it's likely that you'll kind of be big and expansive and that's okay. But you're right. There's a difference between mimicry and matching. So to explain one of the big discoveries that researchers have had in the last decade is that we tend to think of a conversation as being about one thing but actually most discussions are made up of different kinds of conversations and most of those fall into one of three buckets. There's practical discussions where we're talking about plans or solving problems. There's emotional conversations when I want to tell you how I feel and I don't want you to solve my feelings.  And then there's social conversations which is about how we relate to each other and how our social identities influence how we hear and speak. And what researchers have found is that if you're not having the same kind of conversation at the same moment you're gonna have trouble connecting. And that's what's become known as the matching principle. You have to figure out what kind of conversation is occurring and then match each other. And that's what happened with my wife and I, right? I came home and I was having an emotional conversation. She was having a practical conversation and we just were like two ships passing in the night. Now you're right though that mimicry is not matching. Mimicry doesn't bring any of myself to a conversation. It's me simply imitating you. And when I'm matching it means I have to have the same kind of conversation you're having or I have to invite you to match me in return. And at the core of that is that authenticity that if you start talking about, you know that you gave up drinking and I sobriety has never been an issue for me and I say like, I know, I know what that's like. Like I used to really like jelly beans. That's not matching. That's either trying to steal the spotlight or it's trying to be a mimic. Matching is saying, tell me what sobriety means to you. And as you tell me something I'm gonna hear something in there that corresponds to my own life in a genuine authentic way and that's gonna let us connect. And that example right there evokes a lot of emotion in that question. So a lot of our audience members in technical backgrounds who come to take our programs they default to the problem solving data solution oriented conversation. They're immersed in it daily at work. It leads to compensation and promotion. And then they come to us and they go, well, I'm not picking up on these emotions. You say, I have to be more emotive. You say, I need emotional intelligence but I just wanna get to the solution. So what is the solution to finding that emotion? What is the solution to creating that connection? And what you just shared with us in that question does evoke a lot of emotions, right? What does sobriety mean to you? Absolutely. Well, that's gonna be filled with thoughts, beliefs, feelings about that exact state. And it's gonna invite me to either share those or if I'm in a practical mindset, not to. You're exactly right. And the reason why that question is effective is it's what's known as a deep question.  He gets sent over to Europe as his first assignment. He can't recruit anyone. Like the people keep on telling him like I'm gonna report you so you get deported because like you gotta quit harassing me. And he's about to get fired and he's freaking out. And there's this woman that he's been befriending for like six months who works in the foreign ministry of her country in the Middle East. And he's been trying to recruit her and she just gets freaked out and she cries and runs away. And so they have one final dinner and he just gives up. He's just like, this isn't gonna happen. And he just decides to be authentic with her. He's like, look, I understand why you're disappointed about going home because I'm really disappointed in myself. Like I'm about to get fired from the only job I've ever loved. And they, and instead of trying to cheer her up or instead of trying to like convince her that this is the right thing to do, he just says something real. And that's when she can hear him and she agrees to become an asset and she becomes the best asset in the Middle East for the next 20 years. And the reason why is because he started asking her a certain kind of question, deep questions. And a deep question is something that asks about our values, our beliefs, our experiences. And they're really easy to ask. If you bump into someone and they say, what do you do for a living? I'm a lawyer. Oh yeah, what made you decide to go to law school? Like what's it like being a lawyer? What do you love about your job? Those are super easy questions to ask but they're all deep questions because they ask and invite the other person to tell you something real about themselves. And that's how a conversation starts. And with that, there is a level that we need to then match in that vulnerability. So if you ask just deep questions, one after the other, after the other. And I know Brene Brown has this jelly jar metaphor. If you're asking the other person to throw jelly beans into this jar and you're not responding with any vulnerability back, well, you're gonna actually break that trust. You're gonna break that opportunity for connection. And that's not a conversation. That's an interrogation, right? Nobody likes being interrogated for any reason. You're exactly right. So how do we do that? How do we match them instead of just asking questions? There's a couple of things. The first thing is to listen closely to what they're saying and get on the same wavelength with them. I had this experience recently where I was at a meeting and before the meeting started, we were just kind of chatting and I asked some guy, how was your weekend? And he said, oh, it was great. I went to my son's graduation. And it would have been really easy for me just to say, oh, congratulations, that's amazing. Okay, so let's get down to the agenda.  What did it feel like to watch your kid walk across that stage? And he told me and then I said, I answered the same question I asked, which is a virtue of deep questions, is that we can answer them ourselves and it doesn't seem weird. I said, my kids are in middle school and high school and I think about them going to college and I'm so excited for them. But I'm also kind of worried because it means they're gonna leave home and I really like them. Right now we've both shared something about ourselves. It's not an interrogation, it's us sharing who we are and matching each other, matching each other in an emotional conversation about our pride and our children. And at that point, like, we're fast friends. We're gonna be able to hear what each other is trying to say. And a nuance there that I wanna pick up on for the audience is it doesn't mean that you're matching the exact emotion. So he might have been elated that his child is graduating and you have a sense of sadness that there's emptiness that's about to happen. But it's the fact that you were able to contextualize what that feeling is like for you. That's the matching that we're talking about. That's really, really well put. And you're right. When we talk about matching what we're talking about is is it a practical conversation, an emotional conversation, or a social conversation? I'm gonna meet you on that wavelength.  That's mimicry. But if you indicate to me that you're sort of an emotional, you're thinking about emotional things, like to ask and to share something emotional of myself, even if it's very different, that feels like we're connected. Yeah, it can be tricky when we again want the formula. We want the shortcut to the solution. And oftentimes we'll default to, oh, you said you were happy. Now I'm gonna share a time that I'm happy and look for those connections, which can actually be disconnecting if you guess the emotion wrong or you then change the subject completely to you. Or you steal the spotlight. It's even worse when someone says something sad and then you come in with your own, right? You know, it's a tough weekend because my aunt passed away. Oh, I totally know what it's like to have your aunt pass away. Seven years ago, my pet dog died and it was just really, really hard. That's not me trying to connect with you. That's me trying to steal the spotlight from you, right? And that doesn't feel good. But the way that I can connect, the way that I can match you is to ask a question and say like, oh, I'm really sorry to hear that. Like, what was she like as a person? Then I'm showing them that like, actually I want to have this conversation that they just introduced. I want to meet them where they are. And after a while, I can say like, you know, like she sounds like a really amazing person. My own dad passed away about six years ago and he was kind of amazing the same way. That's how we really get to know each other. And for our clients, they usually work in analytical fields as AJ was saying. So they're in their head a lot working things out. And so when it comes to connecting with people, we're already programmed to be able to do that. We're social creatures, but in order for that to activate, we have to work on our presence. And if you work in an analytical field, which you are very comfortable being in your head, you have to learn how to be present. But all of the keys to be able to make these connections, you have in you. But if you spend all of this time in your head, those muscles aren't being used. So I think it also scares some of our clients because the transformation that they're gonna be making into being better communicators is going into an uncomfortable place. Because they're unable to work through things in their mind in order for all of those, the matching and synchronization to happen. The good news is what you're really talking about is you're saying like we have this group of people who sometimes are their habits have gotten rusty around communication. And the nice thing is our brains are actually designed specifically to make communication habits and to make them easier. If you think about it, communication is Homo sapiens superpower. It is the reason our species has succeeded so well. That's the way we're able to form families and then villages and then nations. And as a result, our brain has evolved to be really, really good at communication. However, our brain evolved in a very different time, right? When we were on the planes. It was not a time when there was Twitter and there was Slack and there was emojis and there was that. So oftentimes we have forgotten how to listen to those instincts. And what super communicators do and what the book does is it says, look, here's a list of exercises you can do. And it's gonna reawaken those instincts. It's gonna reawaken those habits because once you get into the habit of asking deep questions, it's gonna feel very, very natural. Like you're gonna think back and be like, didn't I do this all the time? Like this is just how I am because our brain is designed to do that. Well, this is why I love it so much because with some simple tools, they're gonna see their communication skills skyrocket. And all they need is that guidance in order to use those tools to unlock that because it's there, it's inside of them. But you brought up an interesting point and this is the other thing that I was thinking about in reading the book that kept coming up, which is we're now finding ourselves going from a in real life to the virtual world and asynchronous communication and communication that is not guided on being present, right? We're now chatting with somebody who may be chatting with 500 people at the same time and thinking that there's an actual connection because they answered my chat, right? But at the same time with that, our communication in that virtual world is getting more and more prolonged. And what I'm seeing from earlier generations, I'm Gen X, so there is an AJ as a millennial and we're both seeing now that the Zoomers, of course, are coming up with their own issues in communication due to being in the virtual world prolonged. And of course, now I see all of the kids walking around with the goggles on and so we're gonna have communication issues where it's not only are we trying to match and synchronize with each other, there's also grammatically things are changing due to being walled off into a world with its own communication, its own slang. And signals are missing when we look at nonverbal communication and some of the subtleties that go along with listening. And in those worlds, it speeds up the process of communication where it evolves into its own thing. That's exactly right. And I saw this very dramatically. One of the chapters in the book is about this experiment where they brought in a bunch of gun rights enthusiasts and a bunch of gun control activists. And they taught them basically some techniques for face-to-face communication. Most importantly, this thing called looping for understanding to prove that you're listening to each other. And it was fantastic. People walked away saying like, I never thought I'd have a conversation like this with someone that I saw as an enemy. And then they set up a private Facebook group for them and everyone goes on the Facebook group to start chatting, continue the conversation.  It was like immediate, right? And so there's an interesting question, what's going on there? Like why, and I'll say I'm Gen X too and I love Gen X rules. Sorry, AJ, millennials are great too. I have kids who are Zoomers and so I see this with them. One of the things that's happening is that we tend to forget that different forms of communication have different rules. And it's particularly easy to forget that now. A favorite example of this is that about 100 years ago when telephones first became popular, there were all these studies saying no one will ever have a real conversation on the telephone because they can't see each other. And what was interesting is if you look at the transcripts of early telephone conversations, they were right. People would basically have these like stilted weird conversations. They didn't know how to do it. Now of course by the time you and I and AJ, by the time we were teenagers, we could talk for like seven hours a night on the phone. And it was like most meaningful conversations of our lives. That's because we learned the rules for phones are different from the rules for face to face. And in fact, even though you're not aware of it, when you're talking on the phone, you'll over enunciate your words. You'll put more emotion into your voice because you know that the other person can't see you. The thing is when we go online, the same thing happens but sometimes we forget to do it. Telephones have different rules than speaking. Email has different rules than telephones. Texts have different rules than emails.  And oftentimes we're so busy, we're so overwhelmed that when we sit down to write that email, we forget to remind ourselves of what the rules for email are.  And if I was speaking, you could hear the sarcasm. But when I type it out, I forget that you can't hear that sarcasm. And so you read it as being serious and suddenly you're upset. And what we find that super communicators do, particularly with the online education or communication, is that they just take half a second to say to themselves, I'm sending a text instead of an email, how is a text different? And once we start doing that, it becomes very automatic. And then we become like our kids and we learn how to do it just intuitively. And that's the thing, this communication, we've now quadrupled the forms of communication just in this conversation we've talked about here, sending photos with emojis and vision pros. But with that, the speed also loses what we have from the in-person communication where you're sitting down to coffee with a friend. You're slowing down, you're taking in all of the signals, whereas Slack is fast, text a couple emojis, let's move on to the next thing, we're multitasking. Like I would never go meet a friend for coffee and have my laptop open and my Slack and my phone digging and checking my Apple Watch. So we're robbing ourselves of the ability to process all of the signals that are a big part of communication. And we hear from our clients, I wanna be a better listener, AJ or Johnny.  Like you tell me you listen to the podcast over and over and take notes on what we're sharing and you tell me your favorite guests. So I know you're listening, you already have the skills to listen, but we're distracted, we're not paying attention in these key moments that super communicators slow down, recognize that those things get in the way of communication and become more present to be better listeners. And I think a really important aspect of that, I think that's really, really well put is recognizing for ourself the difference between a conversation and not a conversation. There are some times, if I'm on Slack, I probably don't wanna have a conversation. Sometimes I talk to my kids and I'm like, we need to have a conversation about cleaning your rooms.  So what's important though, is that there are these times when we just wanna transmit information, we just wanna basically kind of have this like back and forth that's like sort of like side by side monologues. But there are times when we want to have a conversation and we have to remind ourselves that when I sit down at that meeting, it's not about me just transmitting information, it's about me getting to know this person and giving them space to get to know me. When I go to coffee with my friends, it's not about us getting caught up on every single thing in each other's life, it's about us having like a real conversation, even if it's just on one topic. And reminding ourselves before we go into a discussion, this is a conversation versus this is something where we need to exchange information, that's really powerful and that's something that super communicators do and it becomes a habit. Well, one point before we get into what you've learned in the research for this book is 30 years ago, maybe they're getting together with somebody for coffee would be more indiscriminate.  Where now it's you better, you have better earned my time for that coffee day. And perhaps the conversation is something that we need to have in person and not over Twitter or we have earned each other's trust enough where it's like, you know what, you're pretty cool. We should, we should hang out face to face and solidify this relationship. And it's really important that we do that. If you think about just even 50 years ago, most Americans, they belong to a church. They might belong to like a rotary club. They had like their bowling league. We saw people all the time and we talked to them. And now like I can sit in my house and basically not talk to anyone besides my family for like a week if I want to without any, without anyone noticing. But the problem is that when we are doing that when we're not investing in relationships we're robbing ourselves of something. The best example of this is this thing called the Harvard study of adult development which has been going on for a hundred years now. And they followed thousands of people around and trying to figure out what makes them healthy and successful and happy as they get older. You guys know the study. Yeah, we had Dr. Waldinger on. Oh, great, right. So yeah, so the big takeaway is there's really only one thing that matters which is your health, your happiness and your success at age 65 is entirely dependent on having at least a handful of close relationships at age 45. Which of course means you've had those relationships for longer than just the last year, right? And it's because connections with other people, you don't have to have a ton of them but you have to have people that you have a real connection with and you have to create time and space to nurture that connection. I have a friend, I've not seen this guy, he's one of my closest friends, I haven't seen him in three years. We probably talk on the phone like every five or six months. So it's not like we spend a lot of time but I make time for that phone call. I set aside two and a half hours to talk to him on the phone and we have a real conversation and I feel so connected to him. I know that he's got my back and I've got his. If you don't create that time to make a relationship, to make a connection, you're robbing yourself of something really, really valuable. And you mentioned this earlier, you are each other's super communicators. So what that Harvard study is saying is that find your other super communicator. Maybe you have a different style of communication and you bring up in the book the story behind the Big Bang Theory. And we look at this group of friends who is terrible on the emotional intelligence front but they communicate and they're each other super communicators around physics and science and how they see the world. So I think a lot of times we get a little too caught up in having everyone like us and being everyone's super communicator and not enough time and energy spent with doubling down on the people that we're close to being super communicators with that as Johnny said, have that same background, have that feeling that we wanna spend more time with them instead of chasing all the connections that social media tells us are important, collecting those numbers and likes and followers, et cetera. And there's another aspect to that as well. And this is something that we see from our clients time and time again, which is they become isolated and maybe the one super communicator that they do have in their wife is their significant other. However, there's still the dynamic of man and woman, husband and wife, head of household and a matric of the household. And that dynamic has to play out or the relationship begins to teeter and wane and dilute itself. So you're going to need that super communicator outside of that. So the relationship can remain intact and be strong as it needs to be for everything else that goes on. And AJ and I hear it all the time where people had gotten isolated, they hadn't done much since things had opened back up because they had gotten comfortable or maybe they're, well, yeah, they had just, they had gotten content in that lifestyle and then have recognized all of a sudden that their marriage is in trouble and it's been rocky where it never was in the past because there was those outlets. If your partner is also your shrink, you're in trouble, right? And that also indicates why we need different kinds of super communicators in our life. Like I need, I need, there's some things I've discussed with my wife that I don't want to discuss with anything else. But when I want to talk about politics, I call my friend Greg. When I want to talk about business, I call my friend Donan. When I want to talk about sports, I have like a thousand different people I could call, right? Depending on who's up and who's down in the leagues. But the point being that the reason why each of those relationships work is because we actually want to connect with each other. We show we want to connect with each other. And more importantly, we ask each other questions, we prove that we're listening and that's really, really important. You had mentioned before sort of this example of the experiment with these gun advocates and these gun control folks. And the thing that made the big difference face-to-face was this technique called looping for understanding. And it's built on this theory that we've been talking about fun conversations, but sometimes we have tough conversations, right? Sometimes we go in and we just know like, I'm not looking forward to this because I disagree with this person or I have to sit next to my uncle at Thanksgiving. And so we get anxious about it. And in those conversations, what happens is in our head and their head, there's this little suspicion that this other person isn't listening to me. They're just waiting their turn to speak, right? Whether we want it to there or not, it's there. So what we have to do is we have to overcome that. We have to prove that that's not right. And the way to do that is to looping for understanding has three steps. Number one, ask a question, preferably a deep question. Number two, repeat back in your own words what you just heard the person say to show them that you've been processing it. And step number three, and this is the one people usually forget, ask if you got it right.  As Johnny just said, like you say something and I start like coming up with counterarguments in my head and suddenly like three minutes have passed and I didn't, I don't know what you, but if my assignment for this conversation is to be able to repeat back to you what you're saying, I'm hacking my own brain to pay close attention to you and to put those other voices out of the way. There's another interesting point to that as well with more of a question of sometimes I will ask people to define a word that they are using to make sure that we both understand that word on the same page. Due to being walled off in all these different communities, communities use words differently. And a better way of understanding people was if I hear one of those buzz words, like, hey, I know that you just used this word. I have a working definition or we use it in the house as well. I just wanna make sure that we're on the same page as we move further in this conversation. Can you let me know how you are using it? I'm sure they appreciate that so much, right? Because you're exactly right. We fall into these, the point of language is to communicate what we're really trying to say. So there is no right or wrong definition of a word. There's what the word means to me and can I get and hopefully it means the same thing to you. And think about some of the phrases like DEI or far right or MAGA, like those mean so many different things to so many different people. And if you just throw it into a conversation without sort of saying like, look, here's what I'm actually talking about. Cause once I usually say, here's what I'm actually talking about, usually we get aligned, usually we can connect. But if I throw in some catchphrase, then the person on the other side is thinking like, oh, like he's one of those people. Right, social identity becomes part of the conversation. And now we're juggling different social identities. And if we might be using language from a certain social identity that the other person doesn't fully understand or sees it in a different manner, well then we're actually having a disconnect that's gonna lead to distrust and not the whole point of communication which is trying to build and foster that connection. That's exactly right. Which doesn't mean we have to have the same social identities to connect. In fact, what we know is when we're having a social conversation, when we're talking about how we relate to society, how our backgrounds influence us, oftentimes the most important thing to do is to acknowledge our differences. But it's not to acknowledge just one difference.  So we probably see policing differently. Then what I've done is I've shoved you into this stereotype and I've shoved myself into a stereotype. But on the other hand, what's true is that every single one of us has many identities, right? We contain a multitude of identities. And if I say to someone, look, I'm wondering, as a father, you probably feel strongly about policing, but I know you're also a lawyer and that probably gives you different perspective on it and you're a black man and that probably means you have different experiences with cops than I do. And I know that you mentioned that you had an uncle once removed, you got arrested once. Given all those different hats that you wear, how do you think about policing? At that point, what I've done is I've acknowledged all the differences between us. I've brought them on the table, but I've made it so that these are not oppressive identities. These are rather an opportunity for me to bring my full self to the conversation, to invite you to bring the full self to the conversation. And so when an identity comes up, what's important is don't just make it one identity, make it multiple identities. And I think that opportunity to clarify is also so important, right? If we default to internal stereotypes and our internal picture of that identity, and we're then communicating based off how the other person across from us appears or acts with ever clarifying is this identity really? How you experience things that is even an important identity to you? Because there are situations where people grew up in completely different neighborhoods where their experience of what you think their social identity is has nothing to do with actually how they experienced the world. So by acknowledging it, we're giving an opportunity to actually clarify. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. And it's really powerful. And we're certainly multifaceted, right? The identity that I might be public facing, right? Is one facet of a multifaceted identity that you're only seeing one glimpse of. Yeah. And when we only see that one glimpse, that's when we fall into stereotypes.    You're probably a sibling, right?  You probably have a partner who you bring a lot of like nurturing and sustenance to.  And if I just say, oh, Johnny is a white guy. What do you think about this? It doesn't give you a chance to bring your full self. And it makes you feel like I've unfairly niched you into a stereotype that doesn't really apply. And why would I want to speak for all white people? Exactly. I don't do my best. That's a lot of conversations. That's a lot of tasks. I don't want to upset anybody, but I do my best. Now, we started this conversation with you being vulnerable and sharing communication with your wife and how you're having two entirely different types of conversations and that was leading to miscommunication. I'm curious after researching the book, talking to all of these researchers and professors around communication, how do you now suss out or what do you use to actually realize and recognize, oh, I'm having this type of the three types of conversations? So the first thing that I do is I just ask questions, hopefully deep questions, like taking me and my wife, now when we start that conversation, she or I will very often say, look, do you want me to help you solve this problem or do you just need to vent and get this off your chest and you just want me to listen? And actually in schools, they teach teachers to do this. They teach them that if a student comes up and they're upset to ask them, do you want to be helped? Do you want to be heard or do you want to be hugged? And then of course, this is the three kinds of conversations, the practical, the emotional, and the social. And the reason why that's really powerful is because we often like being asked what kind of conversation we want. Or I just ask another deep question, like tell me what you make of that. Like it seems like to my kids, it seems like you're really proud of that RPC you did. Tell me why you're proud about it, like what did you like about it?  You're gonna know right away if you listen for it. But then the next thing that is important and the thing that I've tried to bake into my own life is this looping for understanding, proving to the other person that I'm actually listening to them. And sometimes you can do that just through it. Sometimes it's like, hey, what I hear you saying is tell me if I'm getting this wrong. And sometimes it's just asking a follow up question, a follow up question that like clearly shows I was paying attention to what you were just telling me and I wanna draw on that. That, those two things, asking deep questions, proving that you're listening, they're really powerful. And what happens is that when we use those techniques, the other person wants to listen to us more as well. So it's not about us giving up our agency in this conversation. It's not about us like not being able to say what we believe and what we think or even trying to be influential. But it's about setting the stage that both of us know that we wanna listen to each other and evidence that we wanna connect. And I know for myself and the way I was raised, emotions were seen in almost a negative light as a guy. Hide those emotions, why are you crying? Be more in my dad's definition of masculine around showcasing my emotions, recognizing other people's emotions. And I've talked to many of our listeners and our participants, our clients and they feel very similarly in their experience. So what I've recognized in the men's work that I do that there's a broader range of emotions and it can be difficult at first if you aren't really used to sharing your emotions to really describe them and understand them and then even harder to pick them up in other people. So when we talk about the emotional conversation and the communication around recognizing these emotions, how do you build out that skill set to be more comfortable, to actually express the vulnerability of saying, hey Charles, I feel like you're saying this or I feel like this is the emotion that I'm recognizing in you. So it's a really, really good question. And the truth is that oftentimes we have habits, right? It's not that men are less emotional than women. It's that men are much more comfortable with a certain kind of conversation in general, according to studies. And they fall back on those habits. So I might have something emotional I wanna talk about, but I'm gonna talk about it as if it's a practical topic because my habit, I'm much more comfortable talking about practical things. That doesn't mean the emotions aren't there. So how do we bring those out? Particularly if we don't wanna like have like big kumbaya circles and really cry on each other's shoulder. You don't have to do any of that. You don't even have to talk about emotions when you're having an emotional conversation. It can be as simple as seeing that someone else is laughing and laughing with them. In fact, in the book, there's a story about how NASA changed how they were looking for astronauts because they needed to find astronauts with more emotional intelligence for longer missions in space. The problem was that astronauts, by the time they get to the final round of interviews, they're really good at faking emotional intelligence, right? It's really hard to tell who actually has it. So one of the interviewers, the psychologist, he started doing his interviews where he'd walk into the room and he would spill all these papers all over the floor as if it was by an accident.  And then he would pay attention to how the candidate laughed back because some people, they know that they're supposed to laugh along with him. So they'd go like, that's funny. Yeah. And then some people, some people would match him and they would go, let me help you pick up those papers. This is crazy. The people who matched him, they were showing him that they wanted to understand what he was thinking and feeling. And we can do the same thing with our friends. When we're in a conversation and someone says, man, I went to see my son's graduation and I was so proud, that's an emotional conversation.   You don't have to say like, you know, I cried when I saw my kid graduate. The emotions aren't about negative, hard, big things. Emotions are just about acknowledging that sometimes we feel things. And if we're talking about the budget, for instance, which seems like the most practical thing on earth, saying, look, asking a deep question, saying like, what are you worried about when we're in discussing this budget? You're gonna hear people say things like, actually, like, I think the budget's fine. I'm just anxious because if it doesn't work, I'm gonna have to lay people off and like, that's gonna be awful, right? I'm not asking him, how do you feel? I'm not asking him to bear his soul. I'm asking, what does this mean to you? And they're telling me, this is a practical conversation, but there's also an emotional element to it. And we need to put that on the table too. It's such an important clarification for those of us who default to the practical conversation in almost every context. And the last piece that I just wanna discuss from the book that I thought was really helpful for our audience members is this idea of preparing for conversation and how a little bit of upfront preparation can actually impact small talk, interviews, your ability to connect with friends, and even have difficult conversations. I know for a lot of our listeners, they're probably in a place being growth-minded that they prepare for speeches or for really difficult conversations that they know ahead of time. But preparation really goes a long way and super communicators leverage it to their advantage. So what's a quick guide that our audience can use to better prepare themselves for conversations? And what's fascinating is when we talk about preparation, we're talking about seven to 10 seconds of work. So it's not like, it's not like, so there was this experiment that was done at this investment bank where this was a place where people screamed at each other like all day long or fights constantly. And these researchers came in and they said, okay, look, for the next week, what we want you to do is before every single meeting, everyone needs to write down just one sentence on the next card. Write down what you hope to accomplish in this meeting and what mood you hope to establish. And so people would take this and it literally took seven seconds. People would just scribble something down, they'd shove it in their pocket, then they'd go into the meeting. Nobody ever told anyone else what they had written. Nobody ever like said, like, well, I want us all to be happy. But the incidence of conflict went down by 80% that week in those meetings. And it's because people knew for themselves what they wanted to get across and what their aspiration was for how this meeting is gonna go. Think about how often we walk into a meeting and we haven't spent that seven seconds writing a sentence. We walk into a meeting and we're like, I'm not sure what I want out of this. Now I'm gonna let other people set the tone. If we just take a second and we're like, look, here's the thing I'd like to come out of this with. Like I wanna know like what the questions are we need to address. And like, I know that this is a tense time but I want everyone to remember that like we're on the same team. If you just take four to seven seconds and tell yourself that, that meeting is gonna go better. But it's a habit we have to get into. And it's not even something that has to be shared publicly. I think that's really important for the introverts. You don't come in with your little post-it note shoving it at everyone's face. You can keep it in your pocket but it does clarify for you in those moments where we might default to being in our head. We might get flushed with the motion and not find the words that we need to communicate effectively in those moments. We've got something to fall back on.   And then they were like, okay, beforehand, we want you to write down three topics you might talk about.   They went and they had the conversations. They found that almost no one talked about those three topics, right? Even though they had written them down, nobody. But everyone said that they enjoyed the conversation so much more. They felt so much more confident. They felt so much less anxious because they knew that they had this safety net in their pocket if they needed it. And it's sometimes just feeling like we have that safety net that means that we don't need it. Yeah, I encourage our clients just to have a few stories like have a mission statement, have your origin story, have your dream story of what you would like to accomplish. And those are not gonna come up in every conversation. However, when you have it in your back pocket, you feel so much better. And then when it does come up, you're prepared to hold court and have some fun. Absolutely, particularly if you're focusing on making authentic, right? I'm not trying to shoehorn my mission into this conversation, but like we're talking about our company's values. And like the fact that I can recite our mission is pretty impressive. Thank you for stopping by Charles as always a fun conversation. Where can our audience find out more about this latest book? Yeah, so it's called Super Communicators. It's on sale now in all the bookstores where you normally go. And if you wanna get in touch with me, if you just Google my name, Charles Duhigg, I'm the only Charles Duhigg on earth, or the power of habit or super communicators, my website will come up. And I'll mention that on my website I actually list my email address, which is Charles at CharlesDuhigg.com. And every email I get from a reader or a listener, I respond, I read it and I respond to it. Cause I feel like again, like connections are what matter. And if someone's gonna take the time to reach out to me, I wanna honor that and reach out back out to them. So if anyone has on any like thoughts or suggestions or insights of your own, Charles at CharlesDuhigg.com, I can promise you I'll see it. And I would encourage you to buy Super Communicators. Thank you Charles, we're excited for your next book. Thanks guys, have a great day.


Hi, thank you very much, and nice to see everybody. Thanks for hosting us here. We'll tell you a little bit about Petel. We are from the Whiteman Institute of Science in Israel. And we're having a little bit of different approach and different audience than most of the people here. So I think it'll be interesting for you for the next 15 minutes. So I want you to meet Jonathan. Jonathan is a Israeli, one of Israel's 600 physics teachers, high school physics teachers. And he's a very good teacher. He has two classes, mechanics class and electromagnetic class, 11th grade and 12th grade. And four years ago, me and Nadav came to Jonathan and said to him, listen, we have this amazing platform. It's called Moodle. All the lecturers in university are using it. Actually, you don't say LMS in Israel, you say Moodle. And we said to Jonathan, listen, you have to use it. It's great. And then Jonathan says, OK, let's hear. What do I need to do? And we said, OK, you have a little bit of some steps to go through. The first one is onboarding. So what you need to do is you have to learn all of these things. And Jonathan said, wow, it's a lot of things to learn. How would I do it? And we said, no, don't worry. The most lecturers just use two out of this. And he said, but these two aren't used for my students. They won't use just for if I put my PDFs and file submission. My students won't come to use it. So we said, OK, that's a problem. And then Jonathan said, wait, what about content? I'm used to working with a textbook. I have the Ministry of Education gives me a textbook. And I get all my content there. And he said, can I get content from Moodle? And we said, no, you get an empty course. And Jonathan said, wait a second. So I need to put all my content by myself, to my students, and pass the onboarding. But I said, no, wait, wait, I am a teacher. I'm also a physics teacher. I did a wonderful course. And we have some friends. You can use an amazing Moodle community. And Jonathan says, great, what do I need to do to use the community? And I said, listen, there are some buttons here. And you just need seven clicks to back up and seven clicks to restore. And Jonathan says, I've never seen those buttons. I'm used to sharing. And basically, all these three steps that we found crucial to get Jonathan, which is a physics teacher and not a lecturer who has to use Moodle in his course, he couldn't pass him. And this, we started on a journey together and to pass on these three steps for Israelis, high school, physics, and chemistry and biology teacher, which is called Pettel. So what did we do? The first thing we do is we added on Moodle, not on a different site, on Moodle and OER, a shared repository for all of Israel's physics teachers. This repository is full of interactive activities, diagnostic questions. And the model of operation is that the teacher inside Moodle is collecting the items that he needs. And assembles his own personal teaching sequence. His personal teaching sequence needs to be good in order for students, which are 10, 11th grade students, to get inside the course. So we put them in a new position as a designer. And we're talking about blended learning. So the teacher has a class of 20 students, 15 students, and they're getting out doing their homework, inside class, or the projector. So it's a complete different thing than university talking to an audience like this. So this was the first thing that we added. And then we said, wait a minute. If Yonatan has done two courses, one in mechanics and one in electricity, every teacher in Israel is basically has to teach the same curriculum. So how can we use the power of Israel's physics teacher? What we did is we did a public profile, again, inside the moodle platform for every teacher. And this public profile contains all of the things that Yonatan wanted to share. So for example, if he did a wonderful quiz or a wonderful peer assessment, he then shares it to his public profile, which is available to all the physics teachers in Israel. If he done a magnificent course, he can share it also. And he can copy from other teacher's profile. And we did something that, apparently, Adab said it will take a long time. For me, it was something a very, very obvious thing. He said, hey, do you have this crazy thing that you can just press a button and it will send an item to a different teacher? And Adab said no. But then he did it possible. And now we can, before that, we can just send items from teacher to teacher just using a send item. Not no restore, no and nothing. And now we're doing a review mechanism. So if I download from a great assignment, I can now, Yonatan has a pop-up. Please review this item for more people that they're looking in the OER if they can better choose this product. Another thing is that we saw that a lot of teachers are working in peers. And these teachers want a collaboration inside the course. But they don't want to see the students. They don't want to see the results. So I can ask and be a peer of Nadab. And then I can see his course, know that on his students, and just take resources that I like from his course. So to put all this in modal terms, which I don't know how to do, I will hand it on to Nadab. Yes, thank you. So we captured some video clips to show you how it looks like. There are many, many features in the platform. So only some highlights of things we thought would make you excited a little bit. So this is, I think, it's a preview, but this one is a slide. So this is one of the courses. It's OK. And what I'm doing is I'm a teacher. I want to add a new activity to the course design. And I'm clicking the material repository. It's exactly the one that the formal curriculum is using, the Ministry of Education. So I'm clicking Dynamics. And it will switch to a catalog, an OER catalog. It's actually a split category inside the same instance of model with courses that have modules, resources, and activities. And a lot of metadata attached to each one of them. Thank you, Mike. Churchwood for this amazing plugin, support for metadata, is the basic for everything here. You can see how we can filter down, search everything, and pick up the right activity for my next phase in my curriculum. Once I found it, there is a button that showed me the list of all the courses I'm teaching. And then the section I'm going to put it, the unit, click it, and it's there. Now when it's there, suppose I change it or I make something completely different. I want to share it back to the repository. I turn to turn editing on, and there is this share button that Asaf talked about. I have three options to share it, to the main public category, repository, or to another teacher, send it directly to another teacher, or send it to myself, to another course I'm teaching. This is the metadata. Popup, dialogue that shows up. I can put. OK, well, that was very quick. The last button is copy an entire unit, an entire section from one course to the other. We found it very useful also. I think this is it. I was a little bit quick, but I hope you get the picture. I'm thinking forward. So once the OER is, once the activity was shared by teachers or sent to other teachers, we added on top of it a social network. So with the special profile, in the user profile, you can see all the courses is publicly sharing to other peers to go in and see how it's teaching. And also a list of all the OER objects that this specific teacher was sharing to the public catalog. So there's two ways to find OER objects. And activities, if you are a teacher. And if we are taking a step backwards, like a bigger overview, there is a complete social network that teacher can interact with on top of content that is shared, modified, and reused. Let me see. OK, back to Asaf. Hope it was. So it's pretty quick, but I'm sure if you have any more questions, we are here in the end of the day. So basically what we said was that let's give all our teachers two shelves in the supermarket to search for content. One is content-based. And we've done a lot of content from academia here. And one is how we share content modern days. We look for content in Facebook, in Twitter. So the same way to look at content is with people. The next thing we did is what to put on these shelves of the supermarket. And what we did is we did a project with three years of converting resources from a lot of resources that were textbooks, worksheets that were in the Ministry of Education in Israel. We just did a conversion to interactive activities. So we filled this repository with converted materials from Israel's textbooks. And we got the approval of the Ministry of Education to use all the physics education textbooks in this manner. And we converted all these resources into interactive modes which are accessible to high school students. So it cannot be boring. And we've tried to fill the whole curriculum. And the whole curriculum turned out to be not that big. 400 resources are keeping all of the physics teachers able to conduct a blended learning. We can see that half of the resources were shared by other teachers. The next thing is that we've got a great supermarket with great things on our shelves. But I think as our keynote presentation was in the beginning, it's not enough. We had to put the skills. And we have to implement it into a physics teacher to convince Jonathan to come on board. So before we invited Jonathan, we put in a leading team of academic faculty, leading teachers, and technology experts, like Daven and others, who designed the system. And then we implemented it in an activation group of early, 30 early users of teachers. These early users worked for one year with 1,500 students, high school students, and all over Israel. And we got tons of feedback throughout this year of how to design the system to be suitable for high school teachers and students in Israel. We were worried about passing the Chasm of the technology adoption cycle, passing how we will be able to not get the early adapters, which is easy, which I think we believe in university. We are working mostly in them. But in high school, it's a very small amount of people, how we get into the learning majority. So we did a whole bunch of new things on the onboarding phase. Daven will show you some of them. Yeah, quickly. The onboarding is a very challenging phase. I will zoom in into the quiz module, because it's one of our major unfavorite. We know the setting, the setting page was very challenging for the teachers. So we narrowed down to four presets. These are the four presets that the teacher, first time he sees model, he don't need to go into all the settings. It's an apedagogical language. You understand what to choose. The other thing is we make the settings very minimalistic. So even if you go into it, you will not be overwhelmed with all the options. These are only what is necessary. The student took the quiz. Now there was another challenge. It was very hard to teach her to understand all the statistics. The wonderful statistics model has, because they're not versed with statistics. So we extended the UI, the report UI of quiz overview with some widget. These are interactive plugins. You can see immediately what students did not go and try the quiz, which one finished. Clicking on each one of the graphs will immediately filter down the list of students in the table. You can check with the students, send them a message, maybe put them in the group. So we can later on do some access restrictions for only a small group of students that need to be a little bit more exercise in some competency that they didn't really understood fully. So what? We have two minutes. Two minutes. Before the 10 minutes extended time. OK. It's not the problem. I'm sorry. No panellists. So also, extended the course format to get the teacher and the student a better overview of where they're standing, what assignment need to be graded, what, as a student, I have two days before assignment and it escalates as the time goes forward. This one, OK. If you remember a long time ago, there was a different context. We have cohorts, groups, groups. And we needed something more. We needed inside assignment, something more fragile, internal teams, teams that are always changing with students in K-12. It's not fixed groups like you usually have in groups. So we developed a special interface. Here you can see a short clip. A teacher or students can set up teams that are only relevant inside the assignment. And you can drag and drop and set up different type of teams on different assignments. Really, very quickly, obviously, if somebody wants to see it more in depth, we will show it later. So all these four things are part of the onboarding features, tweaks we added to make teacher life more easy onboarding. Very quick. Thank you. So only after we finished this onboarding improvements, we said, let's call Jonathan. Let's call the teachers. And we decided to call all of Israeli physics teacher. Out of 600, 150 showed up. And now we are mentoring them throughout the year with a group of 15 mentors. And we have 100 teachers who are active. We found that it changed a lot of Israelis' periphery. A lot of teachers from all over the country, the ones who are alone in their school, are using this because this is their way to connect to other teachers inside the center of Israel. We have a lot of Arab teachers who find this the way to connect to other teachers. This is the social network that they were looking for. We're doing also national workshops of how to assemble a course out of an OER catalog. This is a very crucial tool for them. They use it around 150 minutes per week a teacher. And it's a blended learning. So they also do it in school and after school activities. So to conclude, what is our future plans? We are looking at all these giants. And we want to do the personalized experience for every one of these. All of these giants have more than a billion users. But it's still the most personalized platform that there is. So how come they got so personalized? First, they all rely on a web 2.0 experience platform. Every one of us can change the web. Then they encourage us to do things inside the system. After that, they store the big data. And then only then you can personalize. This is our next goal, is to do very intense analytics. For instance, if there is one question, one assignment, inside the teacher takes from the OER, he passes it in class. He's got the old data. He can compare it to his national data and see how it is compared to the national data. And then we can give him a recommendation, what you should do next. This recommendation can rely on his social activity or on expert knowledge of competencies. But the thing is that we need to put everything in one platform. So the final slide, Jonathan has got three stages to pass to make Pete here happy. But the first stage is what we're doing now, the analytic stage. We believe that the same steps that made Petel, a hub for all of Israelis, physics and science teachers, can be also the same idea for the world. If Moodle wants to take a step further than universities, further than colleges in specific areas, if he wants to get to Ministry of Education of whole countries, it has to give a complete solution of onboarding process specific to this country, on content specific throughout an OER inside Moodle, the community of teachers and analytics inside, not in a different platform that cannot connect. And this, in our eyes, should be the product that Moodle should deliver if she wants to get in better places than universities. And we'll do it the afternoon. We need to convince everybody that this is what's going to be. So thank you very much for your time. Thank you so much. Thank you for a brilliant presentation and just completely thoughtful about how you're extending and how you approach it. To keep things on track, we're going to forego a question, like a question format. So we'll jump into the next session. But Asaf and Adav, please find them and ask any questions throughout the session.


Welcome to this video. Today you're going to learn how to use eventually and ultimately. This is a question that a student had asked and it's a great question, so I'm happy to answer it for you. Of course, I'm Jennifer from jforsenglish.com and this channel is dedicated to helping you feel confident speaking English in public so you can take your career and your life to the next level. Now, before we go any further, make sure you subscribe and hit that bell icon so you're notified every time I post a new lesson. Now, let's dive in with this video. Let's talk about the difference between eventually and ultimately. First of all, you should know that both of these are adverbs and both of them are talking about a period of time. So they are very related and there's only a subtle difference between them. So just pay attention to that subtle difference that'll point out at the very end. So first, let's talk about eventually. As I said, eventually is an adverb. We use it to say after a period of time. The amount of time is unknown. So it's an unspecified period of time. So I could say she called eventually. And this means she called after a period of time. How long? We don't know. So you would have to ask a follow up question to find out. Before we go any further, let's talk about the placement of adverbs. This is for the placement of both eventually and ultimately. As you can see, you can put the adverb at the very end. She called eventually. You can also put the adverb at the very beginning. Eventually, she called. You can also put the adverb before the main verb. She eventually called. All three of these placements are acceptable and it doesn't matter which one you use. Now, although eventually means an unknown period of time, we commonly use it to mean a long time. Longer than you wanted or longer than you expected and implies there was some difficulty involved or some frustration involved or some effort involved that you didn't want. You didn't need. You didn't expect. So let's say I can't find my ring and it's obviously very important to me. So I tell my friend, oh, I can't find my ring anywhere. And then she asked me later, did you find your ring? And then I can say eventually, eventually. So notice, there's like, oh, it took a long time. There was a lot of effort involved, a lot of frustration involved. And notice, I can just reply with that one word eventually. Now, if I want to turn that into a full sentence, it would be I eventually found my ring. Remember, the placement is flexible. So I could say eventually I found my ring, or I found my ring eventually doesn't matter which one you use. Now let's talk about ultimately. Ultimately is also an adverb. It also means after a period of time. But with ultimately, our focus is on the final result. So we're not talking about the process, we're not talking about the duration, we're just talking about the final result. For example, I could say he ultimately wants to move abroad. He ultimately wants to move abroad. Now this means after a period of time. But I'm not focused on the passage of time. I focus just on the final result, the final result being him moving abroad. So that's where my focus is. It's more future focus. Whereas eventually, eventually is really about the time now until he moves abroad. It's about that passage of time. Whereas ultimately is really about the final end result. That's where our focus is. So really, that's the difference between the two is just where our focus is. Eventually, our focus is on the passage of time. Ultimately, our focus is on the final result. So I could say I ultimately found my ring. And then if I say that, I'm not talking about the searching, the searching, the searching, the time that went by. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about just the fact that now I have my ring. I'm talking about the final result. So you can use both depending on context and just remember there's that subtle difference. Now you know how to use eventually and ultimately. So it's your turn to practice. I want you to leave two example sentences, one with eventually, one with ultimately in the comments below. And if you found this video helpful, please hit the like button, share it with your friends, and of course subscribe. And before you go, make sure you head on over to my website, jforrisenglish.com, and download your free speaking guide. In this guide, I share six tips on how to speak English fluently and confidently. And until next time, happy studying. I know you'll eventually become fluent in English. I know you'll ultimately become fluent in English. So now it's your turn. Put your examples in the comments below. I'll see you in my next video. Bye.


Symptoms of the Dark Night of the Soul In our previous video, we introduced the Dark Night of the Soul. Today, we'll explore the common signs that one may be going through the spiritual crisis. These can include feelings of profound sadness, a sense of disconnection or isolation, deep questioning of one's life purpose or meaning, and a feeling of being stuck or lost. In our next video, we'll discuss the significance and potential benefits of this transformative process.


Yeah, definitely difficult. Circumstances both sides, very unexpected. But it's one of those things where you got to control what you can control, buy by the rules, hope that at the end of the day, the NBA has both teams in their best interest and then kind of go from there. So we had pretty casual evening, to be honest, as a team last night playing pickleball, just having some dinner together, hanging out. And then they kind of caught wind, I think that we were going to be playing early afternoon. So that was sort of what the mindset was. Preparation sort of stayed the same that way. Looking ahead to tomorrow, from a team standpoint, is it big because it's the next one? Do you highlight it given the implications that it could have in terms of these two conference standards? No, I don't think we'll blow it out of proportion. Obviously, we know sort of the implications of the game in terms of standings, but there's still a lot of games left in the season, regardless of the outcome tomorrow. But it's just another test, another opportunity to get better. Greg Logan with Newsday. Joe, obviously the schedule has changed. So now it's a back to back, and it seems like there's uncertainty about who will be available tomorrow. How do you guys negotiate stuff like that? And then what does a blowout of this magnitude do for you? Yeah, I think regardless of who plays and who doesn't, we hope to go out, compete, play the right way, and improve and get better. And then tonight or this afternoon, I thought we played particularly well. I think we started a lot better, which has been sort of a focal point for us here as of late, just because it seems that we've been a little slow out of the gates since the all-star break, really. So for us to come out and kind of impose ourselves early on was a good step for us. Bruce Beck with NBC New York. Joe, in general, do you appreciate the professionalism of your ball club being ready, playing hard, playing well, despite another incident of social unrest? Yeah, definitely. I mean, at the end of the day, this is our job.  And when you're asked to go out, lace them up and play and perform, that's what you've got to do. And you've got to do it to the best of your ability. And for us today to come in and with everything that's going on, mentally being able to lock in, have that approach, I think it says a lot about the group and just the professionalism of the organization. Tina Servasio with Fox 5 New York. Hi, Joe. Within the theme of the back-to-back tomorrow not knowing who's going to play and with guys being out today, what's been the formula in the way that you guys have performed, regardless of the lineup, regardless of the rotation, and with so many different guys on the floor each night? I think it's just one of those things where there's been so much uncertainty over the course of the season where guys know that they're going to have opportunity. And it's a chance for you to come in and play and help out. And we also know that long-term, though, too, you might get yourself into a series in the playoffs where you're going to ask something of the 12-13 guy on the roster. And we need everybody to have confidence in one another to be able to come in and play when their number is called. And sort of the season up to this point has been no different in that regard. Christian Winfield with the New York Daily News. Hey, Joe, two quick ones for you. First, obviously, D'Angelo spent quite some time here in Brooklyn before he ended up in Golden State and then in Minnesota. Just what's it like playing against him? And do you guys still have that friendly connection, or is it new team, new rival? No, I mean, D'Angelo is still my boy at the end of the day. Me and him, we keep tabs all the time. I see him in the off-season. And then regardless of where he's playing, he's still going to be my boy. And we developed a special connection of all he was in Brooklyn, Ed Davis as well. So it's always good to see those guys. Yeah.