The Exchanges

Q What sort of feedback would you get after you, you did an interview or a show from him that would, you would go back and would make you better?

A There, there, I mean, there's a, there's a lot. Let me think about some of the ones that were really important. I mean, he was the ones, he was the one that started getting me thinking about, um, uh, sentence structure and, and whether or not the brain could follow it. Um, so he had all these yellow and then red flags. Most of them were yellow, and they were the things just to kind of watch out for, as opposed to don't Do these things. Um, so he would be always looking for the word that, T-H-A-T. He would be looking for, um, too many commas. But, you know, he, a couple things that I remember from him. One is that in his office in the CBC, he used to have this big sign that said, we are here today to make a radio, an audio signal, excuse me, And the purpose of that is to constantly remind you that it's all about sound. It's all about sound. Um, and he would say things like, you know, use colors. Colors are really powerful to the ear. Don't tell us she was wearing a heavy jacket. Say she was wearing a heaven, a heavy fuchsia jackdown jacket, right, with, with green and purple and pink. Those are really loud when you hear them. He would say, don't tell us that, um, this guy's busy. Why do you think he was busy? Why did you get the impression that he was busy? Was his phone ringing constantly? Was his desk piled high with papers? Explain what you saw and let us decide if he was bus…

AI assessment note: “he was the one that started getting me thinking about, um, uh, sentence structure”

Q Is this weighing and considering something that you can do on the spot, or is it something that most of us have to go reflect upon or take time to think about? I mean, it seems challenging in the moment to kind of reflect, because then there would seem to be pause, almost unnatural pauses in a conversation.

A No, I, I think we're afraid of silence or pauses in conversation, and there's really no need to be, you know, they, I, I think I wrote this in the book that they did this global survey of how much time we spent, we leave in between one person ending a sentence and the other person responding, and it comes out to less than half a second, which means we're just not actually listening to the end of what somebody says, and Covey wrote in, um, Seven Habits of a Highly Effective People that we're always listening not to understand, but to reply. You can absolutely do that in the moment. Uh, you just, sometimes you're gonna have to ask questions, right? First of all, you gotta listen all the way to the end of what someone's saying, and we so rarely do that. Um, we get distracted by what we're thinking. We're thinking about what we're gonna say next. That's all we're occupying our mind with, and so we're wasting all that time trying to remember, keep in our minds what it is that we're gonna say, and we don't hear a word they're saying. Yes, you absolutely are capable of responding in the moment. Coles, uh, used to write, and this is the, I don't, I'm, I remember, 2007, 2008. He made this distinction between what he called transformative listening and then evaluative listening. So evaluative listening is when someone responds immediately to somebody's suggestion with their judgment. Is …

AI assessment note: “You can absolutely do that in the moment.”

Q In your book, We Need to Talk, you cover some other, I wouldn't call them rules, but sort of guidelines to have better conversations. What are the ones that stick out the most to you as the ones that we can walk away with?

A Well, I'll tell you the one, and it's related to conversational narcissism, the one that people are the most likely to argue with me over, and that is the one about, um, Not offering up your similar experiences. Not equating your experiences with someone else's. Which I just did. So, that's okay. We tend to, someone, that's a little different. What I'm usually talking about in this is when someone comes to you with something which is a struggle or a source of pain for them, and we then tell them about a time when we went through what we say was the same thing. I know just how you feel, we say. Which is the worst possible thing you can say. Um, so let me start there with, I know just how you feel. You never say that. And, and there's a few reasons for it, but for me, the most powerful is that you don't. It doesn't matter if they're talking about their dog dying and your dog died of the exact same thing. You still don't know how they feel. The fact of the matter is, is that when we experience in any kind of pain or travail, your brain immediately Gets to work on softening that memory. Literally right after it happened. And that's a, that's a really good reason, because if we actually remembered pain to its full extent, exactly the way it was when we first felt it, we would be dysfunctional. We would not be able to function in life if we remembered the actual pain of a leg break, …

AI assessment note: “Not offering up your similar experiences. Not equating your experiences with someone else's.”

Q You've done thousands of interviews over all of this time. What are the stories that stand out in your mind from the interviews that you've done?

A Um, well, it depends on It depends on whether you're talking about kind of a story that stands out because it was negative, um, or a story that stands out because it was unusual, or a story that stands out because it was great, right? So the person I have, uh, interviewed more than any other in over the course of my career is Salman Rushdie. Um, and I remember I did one long interview with him, the very first I ever did, Which I think was about a production of Midnight's Children, um, that was happening in Ann Arbor. And after that, he came back to the area a couple times, and his press people said I was the only person that was allowed to have an interview. Why? Because I actually read the book. I guess I didn't realize, but that sets me apart. Um, so Salman Rushdie sits and says,

AI assessment note: “So the person I have, uh, interviewed more than any other... is Salman Rushdie.”

Q One of the things that strikes me about that, and that came up in the, your book, was your ability to acknowledge what somebody has said without agreeing with it, and how important that is to be in the moment, in the conversation, so you're not turning your brain off. Is that a skill you've practiced and developed, or is that something that came natural to you?

A Oh no, that's part of journalistic training. Right? Like you can't, um, you're trying to encourage people to talk, but you cannot give your own opinion. Um, it, it would be very easy for me to get people to give their opinion by pretending I was on their side. Um, but you can't do that. You can't give your opinion. I'm in a registered as an independent. I'm not allowed to tell you what I think. I'm not allowed to march in protest marches. Um, I'm extremely limited as to how often I can express my own thoughts and opinions, and so therefore I had to learn how to interview people sometimes for very long periods of time without either agreeing or disagreeing with anything that they said, just encouraging them to continue talking with my simple, clear, direct, unopinionated questions. So yeah, that was a very conscious training.

AI assessment note: “Oh no, that's part of journalistic training.”

Q You, your grandfather was a famous conductor, William Grant still, um, and you heard a lot of music kind of growing up in the house. Was there a moment when you stopped sort of hearing music and started listening and understanding it, and what was that?

A Yeah, I mean, you know, my whole life I was hearing music. I mean, that's literally what I was doing. It was like background noise for a large part of my My childhood, um, and, and so I think that my default was to hear music, uh, but there, there, there comes a point when you can really, uh, listen to music at a, at a deeper level, and for me, I mean, I'm sure that probably happened a number of times when I had a relationship with music I hadn't had before, but notably, I, I remember thinking that, um, When I first got involved in opera, that I was really listening to music, and it was moving me on a completely different level. And that, for me, a lot of that, for opera at least, didn't happen until I was in college, because I started studying it. Um, before that, I'd heard opera. People don't realize how often they hear opera. You know way more opera than you think. It's in a ton of movies. It's in commercials. It's in Bugs Bunny cartoons. That's where a lot of people know the music from Wagner's Ring Cycle, for example. You've heard a lot of it, but then I got to college, and I had to, uh, sing it, which, which meant I really had to listen, right? And when I really began to listen and heard the relationship of the voice to the orchestra, and all of the complexities of that music, in addition to what the lyrics meant It was a different level of, of listening. And, and, you kn…

AI assessment note: “When I first got involved in opera, that I was really listening to music”

Q with a single question in a limited amount of time with these interviews? I mean, sometimes you, you are time constrained to five or 10 minutes, and sometimes you don't have a chance to sort of walk through a guest in terms of establishing sort of some sort of rapport. You just have to kind of ask really deep penetrating questions. What can, what can people take away from that?

A Well, I would say don't waste any time. So a lot of times I hear people wasting time with a windup. They, they feel like they need to start. Uh, this is going to sound contradictory to what I just said about fairy tales, but I'll explain. So a lot of people feel like they have to start all the way back at once upon a time. So what is this whole issue about anyway? They start way back at the beginning. Um, but that's not what you want from your interview. That's fine for the intro. As quickly as possible in three or four sentence, say boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. This is what had led us up to this moment, but when you start that interview, that first question needs to be a good one. It needs to get to the meat of it. It can be a provocative question. It can be a question that, that reveals how well you know the material But for the most part, that needs to be getting to the heart of the story. It can't, you can't be still doing the intro when you've started the interview. Um, and then you can get stuff done pretty quickly in just a few minutes. I mean, most people don't realize that even the intros on like morning edition that Steve Inskeep does, Those are maybe four minutes long.

AI assessment note: “Well, I would say don't waste any time.”

Q What does training in listening, um, like specifically to music, like how does that take shape?

A Well, I mean, they even have classes where listening is in the class title. Um, and, and, you know, in order to listen, some of it is unspoken. In other words, if you're playing in an orchestra, um, You can't just watch the conductor, right, who's keeping the beat. You have to actually listen to everyone around you. For tuning, you have to be very careful about shifts in tuning, because both choirs and instrumental groups, the tuning shifts. They can go sharp over the period of a piece, or go flat, And you have to listen for that so that you remain in tune. They also can speed up. They can slow down. You have to be able to listen to that. And even more subtly, you have to be listening to the tone. So you can be playing a piece of music, um, and the, I guess the mood of the group of people you're with affects the, the tone of, of the piece. It could make it warmer. It could make it shriller. And if you're not paying attention, when you come in with your part, you're not going to fit. You have to be paying attention. Are people feeling, um, I guess, uh, sad? Are they feeling mournful? How does that make the music sound? And, and that you have to be listening very carefully for that, uh, to make sure that you're fitting in with the people around you. I mean, I sang in choir since I was I honestly can't even remember by the, it feels like by the time I got to first grade, I'd alrea…

AI assessment note: “training in, in listening to the people around you and learning to match pitch”

Q I want to kind of come back to this notion of compressing a story into a short period of time, distilling this complexity. Um, why, why do we have that? Like, why is that the way that journalism should be?

A Um, I mean, there's only so much time in the day, and that's not even necessarily about our attention spans. It's that you're not expected to be an expert in, um, nuclear issues because there's a plant going up in your state. So I need to tell you Just enough context so you can understand why this matters to you and so that you can take action if you need to without trying to give you a lesson in how nuclear plants work and how they're funded, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Um, my great editor at NPR used to always tell me to, to make it a, a fairy tale, right? Once upon a time blank and then every day blank until at one point this happened and because of this, This happened, and this happened, and this happened, until finally this, and ever since then, blah. Like, there's almost no news report you can't put into that framework, that you can't put into the fairy tale framework. There is some guy, a guy named Brian McDonald, I think his name was, who even wrote the entire Godfather series in that framework. Um, just make it a story with a beginning and a middle and an end. She used to say that a story is like a shark. It has to keep moving forward or it dies, right? Or you can imagine it as a trapeze, where the listener, you have to provide that next rung for the listener. There can't be any gaps or they fall.

AI assessment note: “I need to tell you Just enough context so you can understand why this matters”

Q How does that affect conversations when we're in eco chambers of surrounded by people either through Facebook or, um, through our social network of people who think and act a lot like us? Like we tend to walk away from difficult conversations.

A We do. You've just asked a lot there, so let me try to split apart what you've, you've said. So, I mean, human beings are by nature tribal. Um, we already have a tendency to split into tribes. Um, they have found over decades of research that it doesn't take very long, um, of two perfect strangers sitting in a room together for them to, to, to become a common tribe. Our, our need to belong Exceeds our, our need to be moral. Right? Like, we, they have been able to convince people to break the law and steal after, say, a 10 or 15 minute, um, period of time spent with a stranger. That's how quickly we form these tribes. The, the difference is that now our, our social media and our tech especially is allowing us to, um, Isolate ourselves to just a dizzying extent. And, and into that you add the tendency of people on, on social media to become polarized and how it, it makes us the worst version of ourselves. I mean, for example, email in email, you're less likely to negotiate. You're less likely to cooperate. You're more likely to escalate conflict.

AI assessment note: “We do. You've just asked a lot there, so let me try to split apart”

Q Why do we get defensive? Is that because it's attachment to our opinions?

A Well, yeah, we're very attached to our own opinions. Um, it's mostly because we see, we tend to see a lot of disagreement as an attack, as a personal attack. If someone says you're not using the best laundry soap, People often will interpret that even if it's subconsciously as a criticism of what you've chosen to do, that you don't know what you're doing or whatever it may be. So we, we do interpret those as attacks. You know, it's interesting. They, they've, they've studied the benefits, especially the neurological benefits and emotional benefits of conversation, and in every single circumstance, conversation is good for you. It doesn't matter if it's a simple chat with somebody, with your Uber driver. It doesn't matter if it's somebody that you know really well, or someone you don't know at all. It's, it's, it's beneficial for you neurologically, emotionally, physiologically, in every situation, except two. Only in two instances does conversation have negative impacts, emotional impacts, and they are, one, as you can imagine, a, something that has a negative tone. Someone criticizing you, attacking you, et cetera, right? The only other instance in which it'll have a negative emotional impact is if someone's offering you help.

AI assessment note: “it's mostly because we see, we tend to see a lot of disagreement as an attack”

Q I want to talk about this complexity in a second, um, in terms of simplifying and distilling a message, which you worked at NPR for, I think, 11 years. You started in 1999. Is that approximately right? Yeah. Is that where you honed this ability to sort of work within the medium?

A Yes, absolutely. Now, I want to be really clear. This is a really common, um, source of confusion. I didn't work for NPR until through the 2006. So NPR is national public radio, right? That's one network in, in public radio. There are other networks. There is American public media that which puts out marketplace. There is PRI public radio international that puts out shows like the takeaway. So we have a bunch of networks just like you have CBS, NBC, et cetera, et cetera. And those networks sell shows. They say, say these are the shows we're making. Fresh Air, Morning Edition, whatever. And then you have the consumers. The consumers are the local public radio stations, which are for the most part independent bodies. So the vast majority of public radio employees do not work for NPR. They work for a local station, WGBH or WQXR, whatever it may be in your, your local area or region. And those local public radio stations by programming from one of the networks. Yeah.

AI assessment note: “Yes, absolutely. Now, I want to be really clear.”

Q Do you think music's changing based on that? Like our, our listening and focus is going away. Is opera changing? Is classical music and the way that it's played by orchestras changing to try to morph with the times, I guess?

A Um, with the caveat that I don't actually know. I mean, I don't really know that. I'm sure there are researchers and scholars and people who pay attention to this stuff and look into it and know. Um, my gut feeling is that it's, it's probably not changing classical music too much. Um, and I, I, I mean, I, popular music has always been intended to be, to require less focus and attention. Than classical. I'm not making casting aspersions. I don't think that makes popular music any less important, significant, or difficult than classical. It's just a different kind of entertainment, right? So I don't know that, I don't know that it is changing that, except that I, I do know that, you know, we, our attention spans are kind of shrinking. Um, and maybe that's contributing to Uh, ticket sales going down as each generation flows into the next in concert halls. Maybe people just don't have the attention span anymore to listen to a Mahler work, if they ever did, frankly. He needed an editor. But, um, maybe, maybe people just don't want to sit for that entire time. Right? I mean, even though people loved the Lord of the Rings movies, lots of people complain about how long they are.

AI assessment note: “my gut feeling is that it's, it's probably not changing classical music too much.”

Q Do you think that also plays because we read to our, like when we're reading, we also read in our heads?

A Maybe. I mean, a lot of it is that when you're reading, if you don't understand something, you'll go back and reread it. And we do this so naturally, we often don't even realize that we've done it. You can slow down when you're reading. You can speed up and skip over something, you know, but when you're listening, you can't skip over stuff, mainly because, I mean, even if you do, if you stop listening for a few seconds, you don't know when to come back in, if you know what I mean. Like, it's unlikely you skipped the right amount of material. And, and especially in, in radio where everything is show so truncated, where I'm trying to tell a very complicated story, say about the, um, Iran nuclear deal, for example, and I've got three minutes. Um, that's a, you have a very short amount of time to tell some, sometimes very complicated stories. So every word counts. I think that I think of radio, um, I think of radio as poetry. Because those are two particular art forms that are quite limited. There's so many rules and so much going on that you, that in a way you're, you're, it's quite limited in what you can and can't do. But, but if you master the form, it rises above, right?

AI assessment note: “Maybe. I mean, a lot of it is that when you're reading”