1. INTRODUCTION: The World's Most Underrated Art Form

LIFTOFF: The Art & Science of Conversation
Episode 1

In Liftoff's first episode, host Ilana Gilovich shares her passion for conversation as an art form, and begins her quest to discover the secrets of extraordinary conversation.

Featured Guest: 

• Tom Gilovich, Cornell University psychology professor and co-director of the Cornell Center for Behavioral Economics and Decision Research. 

Morsels Mentioned:

• "I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel." - Maya Angelou

Transcripts for all LIFTOFF episodes are available on Buzzsprout.

Transcript

ILANA GILOVICH: [00:00:00] Unless you're a hermit living in a cave, you probably engage in multiple conversations every day. Whether you're exchanging pleasantries with a barista, collaborating with a coworker, catching up with a close friend, or navigating a challenge with a partner, you are conversing constantly. Most of these conversations serve their practical purposes and are quickly forgotten: you get your coffee, you complete your project, you resolve your argument. But once in a while, the ideal circumstances and chemistry collide and something magical happens. Time seems to melt away. You are utterly present and engrossed, and you and your conversational partner are building on one another's ideas, absorbing one another's life experiences and discovering new philosophical or emotional terrain together. You have ceased making normal conversation and you have begun making art through conversation. My name is Ilana Gilovich and I am obsessed with art. I spent 11 years of [00:01:00] college, first as an undergrad, then as a master's student, then as a PhD student studying the beauty and complexity of English literature.

I love to dance, to read, to bask in nature, to experience great theater, but there's one art form that has occupied my mind and heart for quite some time. Conversation. I believe that conversation is the world's most underrated and overlooked art form, and this podcast is my journey to find out why. I believe there are two ways to excel in any artistic medium.

One, you can study a craft and learn specific tactics and methods to increase your skill, like practicing musical scales, breast strokes, or dance moves. Two, you can harness your innate authentic expression, the artistic sensibility that makes you, you, and bring those natural gifts to the table. Most great art consists of these two key ingredients, craft and expression.

So this podcast will offer both [00:02:00] ways of approaching the conversational art form. It provides concrete tips and takeaways for honing your conversational craft, and it explores the broader, more elusive aspects of conversation that depends solely on the two people conducting it. So whether you love conversation and just want to consider it philosophically with me, or you fear conversation and want to learn how to do it better, this podcast is for you.

The main idea woven throughout this podcast is that conversation is art. Your life can change dramatically if you stop thinking about conversation as something that you have or passively consume, and start thinking about conversation as something that you make or actively create with others. The next eight episodes outline the eight pillars I've identified for encouraging extraordinary conversation based on my own dialogues with scientists, artists, dreamers, and thinkers.

I discover what makes a great conversation and a great conversationalist [00:03:00] by talking to people about talking. But first some context. This quest for enriching conversation is a concept near and dear to my heart. Growing up, I frequently heard a term that my parents invented: LIFTOFF. This term characterized the exhilarating, enriching flow state achieved in extraordinary conversations.

Liftoff was the ultimate hallmark of a satisfying social interaction. When my parents returned from a dinner party and I'd ask them how it was, they'd often say it was good, but no liftoff. Liftoff was the holy grail of conversation that elusive treasure encompassing both journey and destination. What's more, my dad, social psychologist, Tom Gilovich, is professionally interested in conversation. My dad is a professor of psychology at Cornell University and Co-director of the Cornell Center for Behavioral Economics and Decision Research. He specializes in the study of everyday judgment and reasoning, and recently he's been [00:04:00] conducting studies on what makes a good conversationalist.

TOM GILOVICH: We looked at all of the patterns and came up with, seemed to us to be three things that make a good conversationalist. And then we, then we wanted to test it in a subsequent study. Uh, so one is more exploratory, the other's more confirmatory, although I don't think we're at the full confirmation stage yet, but I'll tell you what they are.

Uh, the first one is, uh, and I think maybe the most important one we describe by, uh. Using a, a quote that I know you're familiar with by Maya Angelou, that may be the wisest thing. I, I can't think of anything wiser that any human being has ever said about human beings, uh, which is people will forget or will not remember what you said, will not remember what you did, but they will remember how they felt [00:05:00] around you. And it looked like on a variety of these individual measures that we had that the good conversationalists just made the other person feel comfortable either in their warmth, in, uh, providing cues that they weren't being bored, that they really were, they were in this, they were in the here and now in a way that, not good conversationalists can kind of appear like, oh, are they attending or are they not attending?

Do they care about this conversation or not? So that was one hypothesis we had based on all of these large data files. Uh, another is, uh, a lesson. About conversation. That's a general lesson about life. There's no substitute for enthusiasm. Uh, the, the people who are in it are better conversationalists than people who are just me.[00:06:00] 

Are they in it or not? Um, and, and you get more dynamic, more energy in the soundtrack for the. Good conversationalists, but they're not yelling. There's a lot of modulation of in and out as well, uh, cues to, uh, enthusiasm. And then third, uh, we called this anyone who's not a. Tennis fan won't know what the heck we're talking about, but we called it the David Ferrer hypothesis because he was this Spanish tennis player who was indefatigable.

He could run any ball down, would never get tired. Uh, I think he was ranked like the fifth highest player in the world at one time. He never won a major 'cause He wasn't as large as the other players, didn't have as much power, but he earned the respect of everybody. He'd just get anything back and, uh, conversations a lot that way.

If I am. [00:07:00] Confident that you're gonna deliver something back that kind of meets the Maya Angelou, uh, criterion as well. I'm just relaxed. I don't have to worry about the ball's gonna come back. It's not fun to play tennis with someone who can't hit the ball back to you. It's not fun to have a conversation with someone where you have to be worried, not just about your contribution, but about their contribution.

And, uh, so a good conversationalist is like David Ferrer. Just always returning stuff. 

ILANA GILOVICH: Wow. I love this because that's so practical and tangible, and I think, yes, we are aiming for this elusive inspired flow state of conversation, but I think a lot of, a lot of what prevents people from having those kinds of conversations is anxiety, like we talked about, and the idea that you could really focus on not only these three things, but it feels like the, the latter two are almost subdivisions of the first one.

TOM GILOVICH: Yes, exactly. 

ILANA GILOVICH: And. It ties in so neatly to your interest in psychology because [00:08:00] so much of what social psychology is about is us being predictive machines, and the idea that basically a good conversationalist puts their conversational partners to. Predictive meaning making machine at rest by returning things, by offering a lot of great nourishment for the conversation by exhibiting enthusiasm, and you can kind of allow the person's mind to, to be at ease.

TOM GILOVICH: Yeah. Yeah. And as you said that it opens up opportunities for. Uh, ways to prepare before a conversation. You know, you're gonna know, you're gonna talk to this person. What are the most, and if. Enthusiasm's a big thing. What do I want to talk to this person about? What's interesting about this person? People are fascinating and you can always find something about each person.

Just rehearse that ahead of time. What's the, what's the most promising terrain about this person? What do I most want to know? What is this person [00:09:00] as opposed to people in general most likely to be interested? Uh, we prepare. For all sorts of things. We tend to think, eh, if I'm a good conversationalist, I can wing it and some can, but a little preparation doesn't hurt even a good conversationalist, uh, you know, review ahead of time what you want to do.

And, uh, you know, the Maya Angelou hypothesis also gives us, uh, some advice. It suggests that, you know, what people care about is, uh. Someone being interested in them, someone not judging them harshly, someone setting the stage so that they have a, uh, an opportunity for social connections. But another way of thinking about the Maya Angelou hypothesis, people are nervous about conversation while recognizing that you're partner is, and part of your job as a conversationalist is to reassure them that dials down your own anxiety.[00:10:00] 

That's so much the lesson of social psychology. It's not so much the objective circumstance. It's the meaning you assign to it. And, uh, the good conversationalists are able to get people to think about what has been happening in a more congenial fashion.

ILANA GILOVICH: As you can hear, this fixation on conversation runs in my family. My dad helped me think broadly about what makes an engaging conversationalist, someone who can reassure their conversational partner by providing cues of enthusiasm and attentiveness, and by returning the ball with responsive questions or remarks.

Across the next eight episodes, I break down the who, what, where, when, how, and why of great conversation featuring some of the most dynamic conversationalists I know. So settle in. Let's Talk. Liftoff was created and directed by Ilana Gilovich and produced by Greg Hanson. The featured guest on this [00:11:00] episode was Tom Gilovich.

If you liked liftoff, please share it with your friends and be sure to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts, so the power of potent and playful conversation can continue.