The Power of Strangers: Joe Keohane

From luminary and built-it productions, it's wisdom from the top. Stories of crisis, failure, turnaround, and triumph from some of the greatest leaders in the world. I'm Guy Raaz and on today's show, Joe Coyane, author of The Power of Strangers, the benefits of connecting in a suspicious world. I think this catharsis in realizing that we're not alone in our struggles. I think there's wisdom and understanding that other people's struggles can be greater than ours. And I do think it is possible to do it. It's possible to connect across like fairly broad, social, gender, political differences, all that stuff. It's a relief to know that we can actually live together despite all the people who say otherwise. Why connecting with strangers, a lost arc in this digital age, is so important for our personal and professional well-being. I'm a radio and podcast host. I talk to people I don't know for a living. So you might think I'm an extrovert, right? That I love talking to strangers, that it just comes naturally. But I'm here to admit, it doesn't. In fact, I hate small talk. I'm terrible at it. And that's actually why it started out as a journalist, because armed with a notepad and a microphone, it gave me an excuse to talk to people I didn't know without feeling awkward. But all that said, I'm convinced that talking to strangers being confident enough to approach someone you don't know and make a connection, even if it's just for a few minutes while waiting in line or writing the bus, I am convinced that those interactions make us better people. Those connections help us empathize with people from different cultures and religions, who might have different political views. But I worry that as a species, we are getting worse at having those encounters, especially as we bury our noses into our phones more and more. And that's why I wanted to talk to Joe Coyane. Joe is a longtime journalist and editor of magazines like Esquire, Entrepreneur, and Hemisphere. And he recently wrote the book The Power of Strangers, the benefits of connecting in a suspicious world. Joe believes that making the effort to engage with strangers, yes, even small talk, can not only make your own life better, but can actually make the world better. And now he has an entire book filled with research to prove it. Joe was born to an Irish American family in Quincy, Massachusetts, right on the southern border of Boston. And a family business was a funeral home. But Joe says being raised in and around a funeral home wasn't morbid. It could actually be pretty fun. I think the good part was it gave me access to a parking lot, to a pretty good parking lot. So we used to ride our bikes in the parking lot of the funeral home, and we used to play with a ball in the parking lot of the funeral home, which by far was amazingly indulgent of us in doing that. Like, I don't know if you're like a family coming to, you know, make funeral arrangements in there, or if you're raising bikes around the funeral home. Was your dad the person that, you know, people who were grieving, who see sort of the first one they met at the home to kind of talk through plans? They had a staff, I think, growing up. They probably had 10 or so people working there. There were a few funeral homes, a few facilities that they used. It kind of grew as I got older, they kind of acquired a few more. So it would depend on who was available that day. But my siblings would definitely do it. I remember the office, the main office, was like right by the front door. So you would walk in and you would see the office that people would have these appointments and it would be the first thing you'd see. How would you describe your house? Was it full of laughter and jokes, or was it very serious and solemn? Yeah. There's an old joke about Irish families that there are teasing families, and there are hitting families. Have you ever heard that? Mine was a teasing family. They're really, really funny. My father is incredibly funny. My siblings are really funny. One thing that surprises people that is that morticians are generally a pretty funny group of people. Everybody I met was really personable and kind of nice to be around. This sort of image of this ghoulish kind of one figure and all in black doesn't really hold up. Because it is fundamentally a really social business. One of the things that you have talked about is a kid you already would notice how easy your parents, how it easy they were around strangers. They could just, simply could just talk to anyone. Yeah. They're very good at it. And it's funny when I was doing this book, a lot of the people I spoke to reported something similar and these people could be introverts or extroverts. But the thing I heard over and over and over again was my dad talked to everybody and it mortified me when he was doing it. But we all right, I mortify you. Oh, it didn't mortify me, but it seemed to mortify a lot of other people. The kind of exposure that comes with talking to strangers. If you're a teenager, you feel like everyone's watching you anyways for any sort of violation of any social norm. And so talking to strangers is kind of a violation of social norm. So it was horrifying to a lot of people I spoke to. For me, it wasn't. For me, it was pretty natural. I grew up around social people. I grew up in a neighborhood where people talk to each other. It was, I don't even think it occurred to me as unusual until much later. And I was in a restaurant. I remember one thing in particular. I was in a restaurant with my parents. My father just leaned over and struck up a conversation with someone. And I was probably a teenager at that point because I was finally old enough to realize that this like, this makes me feel something. Maybe it's awkwardness. Maybe it's embarrassment. I'm not sure. But the ease with which he did it. And how receptive people were. Like I've never seen, it's really rare that anyone's ever rude to them. And they do the thing that, you know, people claim drives them crazy. They talk to people on trains. They talk to people in restaurants. But the way they go about it with this kind of spirit of openness and curiosity. And they're also like funny and they're pretty personable people. Just lowers everybody's defenses. And it allows them to continually accumulate friends and funny stories and enjoy vacations more and enjoy dinners more. I mean, my mother called me last week. And she was like, oh, you're not going to believe this. We met these great people from Ohio and a restaurant. And so they became like over there, sitting close to these people in a restaurant. They became friends. Now they're going to go visit these people in Ohio. And now I have this woman that my mother met calling me because she wants me to come speak at her club. Like this is how happens all the time. Well, let me kind of dig into this Irish part of it for a moment. And obviously this is hugely stereotypical. But I have had the experience. And I know lots of other people have had the experience of being somewhere in Ireland and going to a pub and people warmly talking to you, like random people talking to you. It is a very common experience. And I wonder, I mean, the way you describe your parents. I mean, obviously, you're Irish Americans. But I wonder, is there something about Irish culture and tradition that I don't know that just makes it easier or just, you know, that people just talk to strangers? Yeah, it definitely became the culture. I talk about this in the book. I try to figure out why certain cultures become more social than other cultures. So like why a place like Brazil would be warm and chatty in a place like Finland would be kind of standoffish and introverted. And what I kept seeing again and again and again was a strife and social tension often led to more social places because people needed to communicate with each other in absence of like strong central institutions. Right? So in a place like, you know, I spoke to a sociologist from Mexico for the book. You know, Mexico is not known for its strong central institutions. So people have to rely on each other more to navigate the bureaucracy, which can be really convoluted to, you know, ask people for favors watching their cars when they park their car. There are all these things that are done on like a civilian level and not an institutional level that require people to be more socially adept and more open to communicating with others. So for Ireland, given its history over the last, you know, 500 years, that might have made people social. But it's, you know, there's like, like, friendliness isn't just a love of humanity or like a blanket trust in everybody. Friendliness can also function as like a bit of surveillance. And I always thought that was really interesting too. And you go to a small town. People can be very welcoming and many of those people are wonderful and genuinely curious and totally worth talking to. But you also get an element of like, let's see who you are. You know, what are you doing here? Tell me your story. Just to make sure that you're not an agent of chaos, you're just going to come in and like mess up the town. Yeah. So you wrote this book, The Power Strangers, and you write about an experience you had in a cab where you start talking to the driver whose legs were like deliberately disabled. What was the story that happened? Yeah, I was in, I was in the talk at actually on a screenwriting fellowship. And you know, during the days we worked on our stuff and met with people. It was me and three other writers. And then at night we just went to parties. And so we're at a party one night and we're coming back really late. And I remember telling them about journalism, how, you know, the, the, the, the business is collapsing. Like there's no two ways around it. But, you know, while that's regrettable, one thing that I'm always grateful for is that it gave me the ability to talk to people all the time, to talk to strangers all the time. And I found that when you talk to strangers, as long as you let them, they'll surprise you. You know, they might teach you something you don't know. They might reveal a side of themselves that you didn't expect was there. All this good stuff. So one night we call a cab. It's like four o'clock in the morning coming back from this party. And I was like, watch, I'll show you. I'm going to talk to this cab driver because I'm like a fiend for talking to cab drivers. But my wife is too. So we get in and I start chatting with this woman and I'm always fascinated by people who live on a place like Nantucket, especially if you're in a service capacity. You're not a rich person. What that existence is like. So I start talking to her and she says, "We eventually get to where she comes from." She grew up in the Upper West Side of Manhattan and she had these two socialite parents who she told me went in for this fad of binding kids' calves because they had unsightly calves. They wanted her to have slender attractive calves. And she said that this crippled her like she had a limp for the rest of her life. So I was horrified. She told me this and I was like, "What do they do?" And they realized the damage that they did. Did they apologize? Did they take you to like a doctor? How did they make this up to you? And she was like, "No, they made me take dancing lessons." And I was like, "Oh my God, they made you take dancing lessons. Why did they make you take dancing lessons?" And she said, "It's because they wanted to teach her to fall down more gracefully." And I love that image is like a sort of a philosophy in it. Like humans are deeply flawed. We're going to fail. The trick is to do it with a measure of grace. And it really stuck with me. And I thought about it a lot. And that was kind of the seed. I started wondering like, you know, that was such a great interaction and such a great thing that I'll carry with me probably for the rest of my life, just that image, you know, that philosophy. I wonder if we can go bigger on this if there's a book in this. And I started wondering about myself too. Like, why wasn't I doing this as much as I used to? It's so interesting because I think many of us have had this experience where we're walking down a street, right? And for a moment, you just think everybody passing by has a story. It's like shortcuts. You know, it's like you can just stop and then enter into somebody's world and then pause and then go to someone else's world. There's a movie. I would say it's my favorite movie of all time. It's called "Wings of Desire" by Vim Benders. And it's about angels in Berlin and before the wall came down. And you're in the heads of dozens and dozens of characters, including Peter Falk is Colombo in this film. And it makes you realize that every single character in a film or on the streets or in your life has a story that you don't know that is totally undiscovered, like that cab driver you met. Yeah, yeah, it's true. And it's a function of this effect known as lesser minds that was hit upon by a psychologist named Nicholas Eppley, working with someone named Julianne Schroeder, another psychologist. And what lesser minds is that psychologists have found, and this is general, this applies to pretty much everybody, we tend to think little of the people of strangers, of people we don't know. That doesn't mean we hate them. It doesn't mean that we want to oppress them or anything like that. It just means that we tend to underestimate their humanity. We can't see inside other people around us. And if we can't see inside them, we don't experience the richness of their experience. We don't see the vividness of their minds. They're just kind of like a closed book to us. And so Julianne Schroeder, who I spoke to for this book, said the way to get past that is to talk to these people. And when you talk to them, it robs you of the ability to maintain this idea that they're not as human as you are, that they're simple organisms in some way, and they're not fully complex, fully fleshed out humans like you are. And once you start thinking of it that way, it really opens your eyes. And it's an indictment of humanity to be like, we go through our days, not fully attributing humanity to the people around us. But it happens, and it's going to be aware of it. But once you realize that, once you train yourself to attribute humanity to everyone around you, it can be overwhelming. When you interact with people, you see these kind of depths, these contradictions, these really rich and vibrant experiences. You see a universe. I always refer to it as like a glass bottom boat tour of the life of someone else. You see that their experience of reality is different from yours, which for me is the path to wisdom. Yeah. But it's also kind of comforting. It's sort of a reminder that our stories aren't unique, and that the experiences that we're going through, the difficult ones, they're not unique. I mean, I, not to minimize our own challenges, but there are seven billion universes on planet earth, you know, every single day. Yeah. And I think this catharsis in realizing that we're not alone in our struggles, which is really good. And I do think there is relief. Like this is something I came back to a bunch of times, and I was doing the book, and even when I was coming up with the idea, why did I always feel a sense of relief when I had a positive interaction with a stranger? And you know, it might be because we just expect so little of these interactions. We're really pessimistic about these interactions. We don't expect them to go well. We don't expect people to be terribly interesting. And when they do, and also, you know, we may have a pessimistic idea of what the world is like. We may have been poisoned by stranger danger propaganda and all that stuff. But when we do find that we can have like a positive interaction, you don't have to worry about that person anymore. It's one little bit of the world that you don't have to worry about. You can say, "Okay, that's taken care of. That bit over there is okay. The rest of it might still be scary to me, but that one I don't have to worry about." And for me, it's just reassuring to know that we can connect with people, that we, once we get past our hang-ups over it, it is possible to do it. It's possible to connect across like fairly broad social, gender, political differences, all that stuff. So when author Joe Cajain decided that he wanted to write a book about talking to strangers, he started by tracking down psychologists who studied that sort of thing. And he discovered a seminar in London called Trigger Conversations, run by a self-described introvert named Georgie Nightingall. And I got in touch with Georgie and she was like, "You know, I'm doing a class on talking to strangers." And I was like, "I'm buying a plane ticket to London like I hope you have a chair for me." And it was great because she's very, very intelligent. She's a good teacher. She's a very good communicator. But she's also, she identifies as an introvert, which is interesting because you would think that anyone who's going to teach strangers how to talk to strangers was going to have to be an extrovert. They're going to have to come naturally to this? Yeah. But it struck me as like what they say about tennis coaches. How great tennis players make bad tennis coaches. It's because it comes naturally to them. They can't articulate what they're doing necessarily. But a mediocre tennis player has to understand every single like, every single moving part of the game of tennis in order to be capable at it. Yeah. So for Georgie saying that she's, she's not naturally extroverted, it allowed her to really dig in to all the different facets of what might seem to be an uncomplicated interaction. And so that makes her a really good teacher because she gets into everything from like our anxiety about it, the structure of a conversation, eye contact, all these, all these different things. Making the class was really invaluable. And so clearly it's people who are trying to improve themselves, right? And get better at doing this for a variety of reasons, whether in the business context or just like to live a more fulfilling life. And how does she start? How does Georgie start? How do you begin to teach? Because I'm a professional interviewer, right? This is what I do. And I've been in this profession in some form for 25 years and I hate small talk. I really do. And so I identify with Georgie being an introvert and I'm curious, how does she teach it? What does she say? It is a lot of training us away from bad habits. So we would start with just talking about how the prospect of talking to strangers makes us feel. Do we feel anxious? Do we feel it in our bodies? That sort of thing. There's hangups because people have a lot, there's a lot of inhibitions. There are a lot of things that keep us from doing this. And then we would move to eye contact, which, you know, Jillian Sants from the psychologist talked about this, but she realized at a certain point and this was like an epiphany for her career that she just didn't look at anyone anymore. She lived in Toronto and she looked at the ground and then she looked around and she said everyone's looking at the ground. This is really weird for a social species to do this. And so she started looking people in the eye and it kind of opened up her whole, you know, her whole, whole avenues of research for. So we start by looking at each other in the eye for a long time, which was super awkward, right? Because you don't know these people. And I'm straight like, you know, and so we just do it. You do it for like a whole minute and you look at each other and she was just like, how does it make you feel when you do this? And for all of us, it felt super weird. So she's like, we're going to do it until it doesn't feel weird anymore and you're going to get comfortable with it because you can't have a conversation without looking someone in the eye. We worked on things that had nothing to do with talking. So that was kind of the genius of this too, is that the key to talking to strangers is listening and noticing. So we would listen to each other and we were, you know, George, you kind of taught us about listening, how you listen on different levels and the right level you want to listen to is a level where you're not listening for something you're interested in, right? And this is, we really have to train ourselves away from doing this. But to not do the thing where someone is talking about something and they're just kind of going and then you're like, oh, baseball, I like baseball. And then you just talk about yourself for 45 minutes. I have definitely been guilty of that in the past. But to train yourself away from looking for a thing that you can talk about is super important to relinquish control of the conversation is really uncomfortable and really important. So the goal to Georgie and for the class was to let the person get to the point that they want to get to. And they might not even be able to articulate it. You can help them articulate it by asking good questions. But not leading them, not interrogating them, just asking why is that? What did you hope to gain from that for experience? Who are you? Those sorts of things. Real journalism 101 question. As we go through it, George, he keeps asking, "How do we feel? "How do our bodies feel when we're doing this?" And it was very uncomfortable. This feels really unnatural to do it. You feel really vulnerable. You feel maybe kind of embarrassed. But then going from there to getting into questions, to getting into openers, to getting into ways to get around the social morme against talking to strangers, and it just becomes more and more advanced as you go. But it was great for me because it permitted me to rebuild myself from scratch, which is what I wanted for this. I wanted to be the mediocre tennis player who became the tennis coach. I wanted to be able to articulate every single part of this interaction and really understand all the things that make it valuable, but all the things that make it dauntingly difficult for people. You know, what your describing sense is so helpful, because like who breaks down interactions like this? But I mean, there is such a fine line between coming across like being genuinely interested in someone and being creepy or like being annoying or being intrusive. The nuance is just hard to wrap my head around. And the prospect of getting it wrong is just mortifying. So how do you train for that? Yeah, it's really true. And I'll say vehemently, guy, that I am not encouraging anyone to become the person who like buttonholes someone on a bus and talk to them for three hours, like completely impervious to the signals they're getting. You have to be very literate. You have to be emotionally literate. You have to learn to read body language really well and you have to be respectful. Because people are going to be wary, right? When you come up to someone, they're going to be a little wary of you. They might think that you're actually a threat. They might think that you're trying to sell them something. Or this is some social media player, something gross. The best way to demonstrate that it's not any of those things is to be curious to be respectful, right? To keep your distance, to don't touch them or get too close or anything like that. Do it in public when it's well lit and there are people around. So, you know, they don't feel like they might be in physical threat. But a big thing that Georgie taught me was, because you're breaking a social norm, a great way to do it is to just say that you're aware that you're breaking a social norm. So what, one of Georgie's great insights was, if you're going to talk to someone on the subway, number one, notice something. You know, don't just start talking to someone randomly. You want to notice something about them or something that might be interesting or something that, you know, you might have a comment about, respectful, of course. But then say, look, I know we're not supposed to talk to people in the subway, but can I ask you a question, or can I make an observation or something like that? Just to show, like, you're sufficiently in possession of your faculties to know that you're doing something that's unusual. People find it kind of audacious. They can find it kind of charming, but it'll at least buy you a second, right? It'll buy you a second to ask you a question or make your statement. And then from there, you can just let it go. Depending on what you're talking about or what you're asking, you just follow the conversation, you let the person talk. You know, try a little bit if they're really not in the mood, then just say thank you, and I apologize and back away. But I found I was rejected almost never. You know, I'm also interested in the research data around the benefits of talking to strangers. Because the conclusion of your book is not like, hey, do this fun thing, it's kind of quirky. You know, I mean, it's what you're saying is that there's also real data that backs up the argument that we should be talking to strangers. Yeah, yeah. This has been demonstrated in research by Eppelene Trotter, but mainly by Gillian Sandsstrom at the University of Essex, who's done tons of work on this. People who talk to strangers, number one, go in very pessimistic about how it's going to go, right? So their expectations are very low. It's not a high bar to clear, and the bar is always cleared. People tend to really enjoy it and find it surprisingly pleasant, and enjoyable, and maybe life-referming, maybe enriching in some way. But Sandsstrom and Eppelene Trotter have found, at least the people who did these studies, who participated in these studies. They came back and they've reported that they felt happier. They felt more connected to the places where they live, and the people that they live among. They might have felt more trusting. They might have felt more optimistic about humanity, just by virtue of having like a pleasant interaction with one stranger. We've seen that talking to strangers, and these can even be passing interactions, can alleviate feelings of loneliness, which is really important, because right now loneliness is a, you know, frankly crippling social problem for a lot of Western nations. It causes a great deal of damage both for the individuals, but also for societies. It can lead to radical views and violence and all kinds of stuff. And also, it causes a great deal of damage both for the individuals, but also for societies. And also, talking to strangers, you know, as equals, can reduce partisanship, it can reduce prejudice. There are all these benefits to what seem like pretty simple interactions, but you know, we know that they're more complicated than they. Interacting with other people, forcing ourselves to confront, you know, their complexity and kind of engage with their reality, is really enriching. It makes us feel more rooted in the world. It makes us more empathetic. And it makes us feel better about the people that we share a planet with, which is a pretty remarkable thing for, you know, just chatting with someone at the Starbucks you go to or something. When you think about how to talk to somebody, it makes them all talk, right? And he described yourself as being maybe a bit more at ease with it, and have always been. Do you practice topics or ideas in your mind? Like do you say, well, we could talk about this or this or that? Is it that strategic and that thought out? Yeah, it's definitely early on. I did this thing once when I was an editor. I sent a young staffer and, you know, I found again and again and again in this book that young people tend to suffer from pretty, pretty significant social anxiety, just the lack of practice, you know, in real life. Yeah. But I was like, he was having a lot of romantic difficulties. And I was like, why don't you just go to bars and ask people for like to be your therapist? Like just go talk to bartenders and see what they see what kind of advice they get in bargur. And like see what the, and he was horrified. Like I had to, I had to brow beat him this poor guy into doing this. And he was very unhappy about it, but he did it. This is the, you know, guy, this is the joy of being an editor. So he goes out and he spends two days, he spends a whole weekend going to bars and just being like, listen, can I ask you a question? I got a situation on my hands, like I would love some input. And people were fantastic to him. They were great. They were like, yeah, okay, I'm all in. Like tell me your story. And he's very candid about it. He didn't tell his personal stuff in the actual story because that was personal. But people really responded to it and they really liked it. They liked the challenge. They were flattered by the fact that this kid was like asking them for advice. You know, no one ever asks anybody for advice. So that's pretty flattering when you do it. And then just the challenge, you know, the challenge of taking your life experience and trying to use it to help somebody else. So you'd never met before. Also knowing that whatever you say is just going to disappear into the air when you're done. But that sort of approach I really like. You know, I used to, I used to write for the Boston Globe and the legendary editor of the Boston Globe was a guy named Marty Baron, who was in Spotlight. So I remember when I was young, I already took me to lunch. And we were just talking and I'm a 24 or 25 or something like that. And I remember at the end of the lunch, he turned to me and he said, "Give me some free advice." And so this guy is like a Titan, right? This guy is like a hero. He's the best newspaper editor in the country. And he's asking some like kind of punk 24-year-old or 25-year-old for free advice. And I love that. And I do that all the time sometimes just being like, you know, tell me something new. Give me some free advice. And people are like, "Okay, okay, yeah. Now I'll take you up on that." And they tend to be really responsive. And when they tell you something, you get a little taste of who they are and what their life is like. And sometimes you get some pretty good advice. Do you remember the advice you gave to Marty Baron? I told him to fire all of his columnists and hire me. He did not take me up on my advice. I tell you, I was kind of a handful in my 20s. If you go back to the earliest humans, thousands of years ago, you might think they kept to themselves, you know, trying to avoid strange and unknown tribes. Because after all, it was a dangerous time. But Joko Haynes says, "No, that's not the case." Talking to strangers is what made early humans strong. I went back through the anthropological record because I wanted to understand the reality of how, you know, hunter-gatherer bands existed. Because tribalism has a pretty bad name, right? We think of tribalism, we think of like, it's a closed, fixed group of people that hates the other people who aren't them. The reality is much more complicated. There was a guy named Douglas Fry, who studied violence in hunter-gatherer societies really extensively, probably more extensively than anybody else. And he found that these groups, these bands of hunter-gatherers, were actually much more cosmopolitan than we give them credit for. So the idea here is, it's called fusion fission. And what it means is that there wasn't a fixed group of people who just like stayed together forever. They found ways to interact with strangers, with other groups, right? And members would leave one group and go to another group, and then maybe come back with like a friend, and then that person would join this group, and somebody found a mate and started a family with another group. And what happened in this traffic between these different bands is what they call cross-cutting ties. Which is when you have all these slightly, you know, they're like fairly stable, but still kind of amorphous. They're fuzzier on the edges. These little so-called tribes, these little bands. And they're trading people all the time. It becomes a hedge against violence. This is Fry's argument. Is that because they're a cross-cutting ties. So we may, if we're in competition for resources, look across the valley and see this other group, and just be like, "Pate those guys. keep all the resources. Right. But if your cousin's over there, you're going to be like, well, my cousin's over there. Maybe that's not so bad. And then if you need to interact with them to share information, to share water, to share food supplies, whatever the needs of your band dictate, you can just go to your cousin. And your cousin's going to be like, this person's okay. We can talk to this person. So while we are very wary of strangers, you can also make the argument that, you know, civilization wouldn't have occurred if it wasn't natural to some degree for us to live amongst people we don't know. Right? Because if we were inherently xenophobic, this city would just be on fire right now. Um, if you took, you know, I was talking about guy named Michael Tomasello, who's an evolutionary psychologist, a Duke who's great. And he, this is early in the research, um, we were talking about apes because I get into apes in the book. Um, and Tomasello is like, yeah, we're, we're the hyper cooperative ape. Like we are the ultra cooperative ape. And I laughed and he was like, yeah, people always laugh at that. But like, go pack a seven train with chimpanzees and watch what happens. Right. It's not going to go well. It's going to be a blood bet. Um, so yeah, I was trying to kind of move the perception away from the idea that we're by default xenophobic. It's much more complicated. It depends on the context. But when we are comfortable, when we are, you know, we're not under, we're not at war, we're not under threat. We do have a remarkable capacity to do this. We don't do it. And one of the reasons why you write is because we are as a species inherently afraid of rejection. Right. We don't, this is why, and you were, you were the editor of Entrepreneur Magazine. This is why some people become entrepreneurs, but the vast majority of people don't because to, to start a business, you have to be prepared to hear no and to hear your ideas socks or if it's so great, why isn't, why are there a million people done it? It's the same kind of principle with approaching a stranger and being rebuffed. It's, it doesn't make us feel good. So there's something about that, I think inside of us as a species. And I, again, I'm just, this is pop psychology here, but I have to think there's something about us as a species that's resistant to it because it's a survival mechanism. Yeah. There's some pretty interesting research on how people would use sort of traditional societies would use, I don't even know what the word would be, ostracization, how like they would ostracize people to punish them. And it was incredibly painful and it was incredibly dangerous. I mean, there was one, one group that referred to it as leaving matters to the forest, the Mabuti, I think. When they would ostracize somebody, they would just be like, all right, pal, you're on your own. And that person would die because they, they were social. They needed other people around, but they needed other people around to get food. So yeah, there's a pretty good argument you can make that we internalize that, that being rejected and being ostracized is incredibly painful because for the better part of our life on this planet, it was a death sentence to be rejected. We're not accustomed to this, you know, it tends to be really hard and people take it really personally. You know, the good news is that, like I said, according to this, this Nick Eppley stuff, it's pretty rare to be rejected. Some people might be in a rush, they might be kind of confused about what you're doing. That's not necessarily rejection. Someone being like, get the hell away from me is rejection, but it's also a sign that you've done something very wrong, right? You're coming across as a creep or you're coming across as a threat. But normally, people do tend to be pretty responsive, surprisingly responsive. Eppley and Schroeder recreated this famous study they did in Chicago where they had people talk to strangers on the train. And you know, you think it's the Midwest of Chicago. This is a little friendlier than other places. And then they redid in London. Londoners tend to think of themselves as the most unfriendly people in the world, which is hilarious because I never experienced it that way. But they could be a little loof, they could be a little chilly. And they got the same exact result in London. On the tube, having Londoners talk to other Londoners on the tube and found again that very, very, very few, if any, were rejected. And most found that it was pleasant, it was interesting. The people were smart, they liked them, they enjoyed their commute. So our fear of rejection is disproportionate for sure. If you were to make an argument, the argument to somebody who wanted to gain the skill, right? Because some people have it naturally and some people have to develop it. Would you say, hey, you know, this is really, this could be a great thing for you because you could collect stories about people that you have other stories to tell or you could make new friends. Or is it more just this kind of, hey, this is an ephemeral moment that's actually going to improve you and make you happier and make you more empathetic and make you better in navigating the world? Is that the reason why somebody who might be skeptical should think about doing, being more intentional about this? Yeah, I try to sell it not as like a vegetables. So I wouldn't lead with the idea that this is like a bomb for partisanship and racism and things like that because that feels like duty. I try to make it seem personally enriching to people because it is, you know, it really is. It's a, there's a sociologist named Elijah Anderson who had a great line where he said that when you talk to people across borders of difference, people are different than you are. It gives you, it gives you a life that couldn't otherwise be led. And I really like that. It just gives you access to the world in a way that you didn't have before. You know, recently I've been thinking about this more and this, I didn't put this in the book because I didn't think of it at the time. But we're remarkably cynical and pessimistic about our fellow humans. And I'm starting to wonder if that's the result of getting incomplete data. So if I'm experiencing the world of my phone or on Twitter or things like that, I'm not going to have a super positive perception of what humans are. Like Twitter is pretty negative. There's some great stuff on it, but it's, it's pretty ugly. It can be pretty ugly. You read the news, the news tends to focus on negative things. When we withdraw from the world, and I think we have in a way, when we withdraw from the company of other people, like in-person contact, we start to rely more and more and more on news sources and social media to form our perception of what the world is and what motivates people. And it becomes very negative. And then that gives us that negative perception makes it even less likely that we're going to make the effort to engage with people. When I was doing this book, I met a lot of people who had a hard time, people who were traumatized, people who had been attacked, people who had dealt with, you know, really vehement racism. And these are people who advocate for doing this, for going out and having these conversations. And they kept telling me again and again that it made them feel better about people. Like Danielle Allen is a political scientist at Harvard. She talks to strangers all the time. She's actually running for governor of Massachusetts now. But she said that though I've had bad experiences in public, talking to people on a regular basis makes me feel better about humanity. And for me, I think it's a question of data. I think it's a question of gathering better data than we're getting at present, which is just poisonous stuff. And I, you know, I always joke I came out of 2019. I was the only person I know who felt better about humanity come out of 2019, right? Because I had just been gathering data. And I found that I could connect with people. I could talk to people. It was comfortable. They were, you know, overwhelmingly interesting and funny and lovely. And they were just good. And I didn't have to worry about them. There's a lot that we have to worry about. It's just kind of doing those sort of street level interactions on a regular basis and connecting with people just gives you a healthier perception of humanity. It doesn't mean that I think people are good. I don't think they're good. I don't think they're bad. I think it's all context a lot of the times. But it was really reassuring to just get like a view of humanity that wasn't just the garbage that I had been ingesting, you know, most of my time. Have you seen the show Ted Lasso? No, not yet. I don't have Apple TV. I need to get it. It's just just briefly like as a character, right, at least in the first season. You know, he's just eternally optimistic and positive and kind and friendly. And he strikes up conversations with strangers and he gets rejected and rebuffed. But he just keeps pushing forward, you know. And I don't think anybody who watches that show doesn't want to be at least sometimes a version of him during parts of their day. Yeah. I need to see it. It's just great. I would add Matthew McConaughey to that small fraternity. I don't know if he read his memoir, but he's just game. He's just out there. He's present. He's curious. He's open without being like vain or preening about it. He's just in there, you know. I always think of like, I've been thinking a lot about what, what it would mean to be a patriotic American. Like what I love about America. And that sort of attitude is kind of unusual. But I think it's actually, I think it's more common than you might think those sorts of people. Those sorts of people who are just out there who are there for people there to talk, they're curious. They're really fluid, socially. I don't know if they do exist. Yeah, I don't know if you get that way just from doing it. You know, you lose your fear of rejection when you realize that it's just kind of rare. It's not as common as you think it is. But I love that as an ideal. One of the things I love about America is just the reputation we have for just being good at talking to people. You know, when Americans go abroad, I might spend time in Helsinki. No one talks to strangers in Helsinki. So everybody just thought it was hilarious that I was comfortable doing it. But I love that. I love that. You know, we live in a diverse place that's always changing and it's made us kind of socially adept in a way. I think a lot of that is falling apart a little bit now. But at its best, America is Ted Lasso. It's someone who's just like, sure, I'll give it a shot. Like I'll talk to this person. And I think that's kind of the way forward for us in a way. Like curiosity is the way forward. You know, engaging with one another. And pushing back against dehumanization and all these kind of poisons to our society and like, deriving our national identity from that kind of society. I really like that idea. You've been the editor of Entrepreneur magazine from the perspective, like Put your entrepreneurs head on for sec. Why do you think that developing the skill, and it may be an obvious question, but I'm just curious to hear you're taken. Are these skills, if they're skills, and I think they are, or practices, let's say, are they important for somebody who wants to become successful? as an entrepreneur? Yeah, I think so. I mean, there's an argument you can make that people who work in tech don't necessarily have to do it, but they do, especially when they become managers. When they start to accumulate power, you really need to be able to connect with people. Yeah, it's interesting, you know, having come from the background of working at entrepreneur, I used to hear that all the time when I talked to people. Again, it's remarkably common that people would be like, you know, my dad used to make me talk to strangers and I hated it. But now I understand the value of it. I interviewed a construction superintendent who was like late 30's really successful woman working in, you know, what's traditionally a male industry. And she was a shy kid and her father said he used to make her call the pizza guy on Fridays. And he wouldn't give her an order. She would have to figure out what to order from talking to the pizza guy because he was a plumber and he knew that it was really valuable to be able to communicate with people. And she was uncomfortable doing it and now she attributes like part of her success to the ability to be so so socially adept that she's comfortable talking to an architect and talking to a pipe fitter and talking to like the demo guys, all these people speak in a different way. But because she's gotten so good at talking to everyone, she can size people up quickly, she can connect with them, she can understand what motivates them, what they need. All those things are invaluable. You know, that social and adeptness is really valuable to be put into any situation, connect with someone and talk to them and learn from them, you know, and the kind of bigger picture benefits of it are you meet clients. You talk to people who give you maybe a different perspective on what you thought was happening in the marketplace or in the world. You get a better sense of what motivates people, what's important to them, how to talk to them. You understand the market a little bit more. You understand how you're perceived, which I think is really, really important for entrepreneurs, especially when you're the boss, to understand that it's important how people see you. Right. I think a major mistake that a lot of managers make is not caring about that. It's not my concern, how people perceive me, but that makes people hate you after a while, like to understand how you're coming across, which you can learn to do by studying the reaction that people are having to when you're speaking. Are they interested? Are they laughing? Are they backing away? Are they uncomfortable? All those things. It's really important. It's really invaluable. And I definitely learned that from my father, but I learned it from a lot of the entrepreneurs they spoke to, too. A lot of whom, you know, had these kind of, this burning zeal for entrepreneurship, but also confessed that they were uncomfortable doing this and they recognized that they needed to do it. They needed to get out there and they needed to practice and they needed to get proficient at it. You know, writing a book like this is a really optimistic book and it's an optimistic take. And it's, it's, it's, it's aspirational. It's, basically, you're making the argument that the world will be a better place if we, if we do this, if we open up and talk to strangers and I wonder whether the process of writing this book changed, changed you or your kind of maybe made you a little less cynical if you were. Uh, yes. Yeah. The short answer is absolutely, but it absolutely changed my life. You know, growing up, like I said, growing up in Boston where it is the prevailing mode is cynical and skeptical and kind of hostile and cutting in a lot of ways. I came out of that. You know, my family wasn't like that. They're very funny, but they weren't me. But there's a lot of like verbal combat that happened from the time I was a small child, just with friends, you know, out in the street. Um, and there's a lot of cynicism and, you know, I, I came through journalism. I've been a journalist for, for more than 20 years and there's a lot of cynicism in that business. There's a lot of skepticism and skepticism. I would argue is very good. Cynicism was pretty bad. Um, but I can't say that I was like a polyanna. I mean, I've never been the kind of person who's just like love is the answer. I don't think love is the answer. You know, I think that's a gross oversimplification of how humans respond to things. Um, I was, you know, I tend to be judgmental. I tend to be pathologically impatient. Um, this stuff didn't come naturally to me. Um, but doing it, um, it really changed me. Uh, it really did. It's a much more optimistic now. Even as the world is like on fire, right? Like we're, we're entering dire straits here. And I think that's, that's really true. I don't think that's an overstabement. Um, but from my own personal experience and also kind of studying the deep history of humanity, we do have an amazing ability to cooperate. Um, if we feel comfortable doing it, if we make the effort to do it and we're mindful of the complexity of it and the difficulty of it, but we're also, we also appreciate how valuable it can be in terms of building societies and holding societies together. Um, I think we can figure this out, but I think a choice needs to be made and I think it's going to be years of rebuilding, you know, you look at American politics. I think this is a 20 year project, but it starts here. I think this is where it starts. This is Joe Cajan, author of the book, The Power of Strangers, the benefits of connecting in a suspicious world. Fun fact, Joe used to play bass in a 12 piece funk band that jammed out in Philadelphia clubs and Baptist churches, which is one good way to be people. Hey, thanks for listening to the show this week. The music for this episode was composed and performed by Drop Electric. I'm Guy Ross and you've been listening to Wisdom from the Top, from Lumary and built to productions.