Daniel Stillman | How to Design Conversations that Matter

Srini Rao: Daniel. Welcome to the unmistakable creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join


Daniel Stillman: us. Thanks for having me. I'm really excited. Yeah. It is


Srini Rao: my pleasure to have you here. It's funny because even on the cover of your book, the one of the blurbs is actually from a former guest, Dave gray.

And I was introduced to you by another former guest and received a copy of your book. Good talk, how to design conversations that matter. But before we get into all of that, I want to start by asking what I think is a very relevant question to your subject matter expertise. And that is what social group where you're a part of in high school and what impact did that end up having on.

Where you've ended up with your life and what you've


Daniel Stillman: done with your career. That's a really interesting question. Like sometimes high school is a blur. I have one really good friend still in my life from high school. And he seems to remember so much more about high school than I do, which is extraordinary.

What I remember about high school is being stuck in the middle, right? I was in a really big high school. I went to a school called Stuyvesant in New York City, which was like a nerd school. I know it. Yeah. And so and we were talking before we got started about some of the people who are trying to like check off the bio data lists in their life, they're trying to like the arms race to build an amazing, resume in their lives.

And there's definitely people like that at Stuy who are like, Going from zero period to 10th period nonstop and I don't know when they hit a wall in their lives I don't know what they were gunning for as kids I think a lot of pressure from their family and I think I was I had a friend group I remember we would like we had a couple of spots that we hung out at and they we were smart kids We were theater kids, but it was a ragtag group of misfits.

There wasn't one thing That it's like there was the there were jocks at Stuyvesant, there were cheerleaders. They weren't there was the quote unquote popular kids. There was like the Asian mafia. And I remember just feeling like drifting along.

I had friends who just worked really hard and the pressure turned me off. And so I think I was. I remember my friend Liz telling me in high school, she's Daniel, you're not, I'm not smarter than you. I'm just more disciplined. That's I get A's and you get B's. And you just don't work as hard as me.

And I was like, yeah, that's really interesting reality. And so I think those are some some things I learned about life, like definitely to try and not coast as much and not to, it sounds so weird to just rely on what's easy or what my native intelligence is. And also just to weirdly enough, like I had these memories of hanging out in the old building where we hung out in the theater and I grew up, my mother was like really into show tunes and I loved singing and dancing and music.

And in a way, like I thought then going to Stuyvesant. I had these two choices as a kid. I'd applied to it's like you have to apply to a specialized high school. If I hadn't, I would have gone to my local high school and probably like just gotten eaten alive in the neighborhood I was living in New York City at the time.

So going to LaGuardia, I applied and got into LaGuardia, which was an art school and I applied and got into actually Bronx science. I had to transfer later to go to Stuyvesant. This is my biggest shame in life is I wasn't smart enough to get into Stuyvesant on the first try. It's my secrets out now, but I had, I'd made this choice of Oh, art or science.

And I think I thought I had to choose and high school, I'm lucky I was at a high school that afforded me some of both. And I think the rest of my life has been integrating those parts of myself. Yeah. Those two different paths.


Srini Rao: Yeah. I guess for me particularly I remember when I was visiting a friend at MIT and they had friends from Stuyvesant there was, which is probably no surprise to you.

I think the thing that I wonder about going to high school in an environment like that. Is that you mentioned the sort of narrative of basically improving your bio data or basically checking off the boxes of society's life plan is so prevalent, particularly in such a high achieving, driven environment.

How in the world? Do you transcend something like that when it's so deeply embedded? Because I don't think that's stays true just for high school. I think it becomes even more true in adult life, depending on the environment that you're in. I think part of what has shaped my worldview is the fact that I've been so far removed from what people would call a normal job for so long.

That and on the flip side of that one of my friends points out, which is fair that I don't have the context that many people do when they live that way because I'm not living that way anymore. And that's really important. I think it's like with all things, it's important to have a support system.


Daniel Stillman: And I feel like I was lucky to have a friend group that was diverse. It was, we were the, I don't think we were a circle in the Venn diagram. We were an overlap of many Venn diagrams. And so having people who were hardcore math geeks and also hardcore theater nerds in the same corner of the cafeteria was valuable.

So I feel like there was a lot of support for being however you want it to be. Even at Stuyvesant, I there were the kids who clearly were getting a lot of external pressure from their families to to strive, but I think in my friend group, there was a lot of support for. Being who you were like we had somebody who was writing the school newspaper and wanted to basically build like her own little village voice inside of the school.

I we had somebody who was always marching and protesting things, and we had people who were like just getting straight a pluses on the hardest math that you could ever imagine doing. At all. And we could all be friends. And I think that's the beauty of a place like New York city and be of a place like style where that's part of the process is you are going to get, you can have a friend, you can have support, you can be loved for whoever you are and for whatever your path is.

So I feel in a way lucky that I fell into an accepting group of loving people. So how's it affected my life? Yeah, I feel like I've been able to follow a little bit of my own path but the pendulum swings. I definitely, like many people you try to get the job and you try to get the salary and when I hit a wall it's either reinvent, it's the infinite game, right?

So either you change the rules or you stop playing. And so for me, it's it's always about finding out why I'm playing in the first place. Thanks. I think that's a really wise observation that a lot of people don't spend a lot of time thinking about the idea that the game is infinite.


Srini Rao: The only purpose of succeeding in the game is that you get to keep playing it. But I think that culturally we have this myth of the, I've made it moment where you think, okay, I'm going to have this one accomplishment that is going to basically not only make me feel like I've made it, but signal to the world that I have in fact made it.

Yes. And. It's amazing how false that turns out to be, no matter what the accomplishment is.


Daniel Stillman: Yeah. Stasis doesn't exist. Shakespeare I've got Shakespeare quotes flying around my head because of my education, but there's a sonnet that says, when I consider that everything that grows holds in its perfection, but a little moment.

It's like the later stanza says that like at its height things decrease and that's just but we see that and that's just the natural order. Nothing can grow infinitely forever and either a run out of resources or be. Change its strategy somehow, except for maybe mushrooms. We got an amazing wedding present, by the way.

I just got married recently. Somebody gave us a mushroom growth medium in a bag. It showed up and we're like, what is this block of like sawdust and powder? And it says, it's a blue oyster mushrooms on the side. And we figured out what it was. And boy, oh boy, our mushrooms amazing. Those things grow like nothing.

I don't know if you've ever tried this. I don't know if you like mushrooms, but it's the best pet. If you could ever


Srini Rao: have mushrooms, we're going to have a conversation about psychedelics.


Daniel Stillman: In terms of mushrooms, you can grow in your house. Easily highly recommended. It's like the most amazing tapping into this.

It's this tiny thing and then tomorrow it's it's literally three times the size. I don't know how they do it. I think they're tapping into an amazing amount of nutrition in that bag. So that may be the opposite case of things like mushrooms are some of the oldest, largest organisms in the world.

They may break that rule, but for mammals, it's not like that. We have to. We have to continually find nourishment. We have to continuously grow and evolve in order to survive. I think where did the you end up going from high school. And what in the world led you to conversational design?


Srini Rao: Because like almost everybody I interviewed, this is not one of those careers that you're going to find in a high school guidance counselor's guidebook to say, Oh, this might be a good choice. So there's also two types. There's there's probably more than two types. What I term conversation design, I came at it from a group that I worked with in 2015 who called their facilitation practice.


Daniel Stillman: Conversation design. So designing human group conversations in order to serve a team and an organization to change how they work these days, the last couple of years, conversation design has come to mean like human computer. Conversation design. So the people who design the apps and scripts that run Siri and Alexa and hey, Google, okay, Google all those things.

That's not a name. I can listen. Yeah. There you go. There we go. It's a portal that


Srini Rao: apparently responds


Daniel Stillman: to, okay, Google, by basic. That's amazing. I love saying, okay, Google, to Alexa, and I'm sorry for everyone who's listening to this. If your things are lighting up in your room, I apologize. I was, but for me I we were talking, I was talking about this high school decision of art and design that really continued to play in my life.

I the, I don't know, the longer short story is I came to design. The idea of design from my interest in science. So I thought okay I'm good at science. I thought okay, I'll go study physics. And I was like, okay, this is not really working out. I can't, I don't think I'm good enough at this to have the kind of freedom and flexibility.

I want, I was working in a research lab in my undergraduate and I realized that postdocs just wander the land going from wherever it's like you, you wind up in Kansas or you wind up in Missouri. Or I was like, I'm not going to be living in New York city doing this. I just made that determination that I was just not good enough at it to be the best or to have enough freedom to do to play that game.

And, but I still loved science and I loved, I had always loved teaching and somewhere along the line I was working some of these little jobs after college between the worlds of science and not science. So working with biopharmaceutical venture capitalists, like just helping them do research and talk to universities and find emerging technologies.

in dialogue with people about science. That was a thing I could do, right? Just speak science to people or with people in common language. And so this idea of I grew up going to the Museum of Natural History, and the idea of being able to create. Spaces for people to learn that like I did, you just walk into the museum and you just learn, you look around and you pick up facts and you're put in the context of a million years of evolution.

And I just had this dream. I remember looking at the New York Times, the New York Times is where you used to get a job postings back in the day. And I remember seeing a job for an exhibit designer. I was like, this is a job. That's amazing. That's amazing. Excuse me. And I did some research. I went and I found some people I like, I knew I couldn't get that job.

And I went and I talked to some people who did something like that. And I remember talking to this guy who was the chair of a one year associates degree program and exhibit design. And I'd made the determination, I was like, I have a bachelor's, I didn't want to go back for a lesser degree.

I wanted to maybe I was still in the bio data arms race. Like I wanted a master's. If I was going to go back to school, I wanted a master's if that was the way to get into this thing. To And then I remember this guy saying to me, he's I went to Pratt and I studied industrial design and there's a studio and exhibit design.

And you can learn more about exhibit design, but you also learn more about design. And so I took his advice and I went to a thesis, presentation at Pratt. And I remember I learned pretty much everything I ever needed to know about design and that presentation from the exhibit design department. That design is.

Macroscopic you're designing like the whole floor plan for an exhibit. And there's the microscopic, which is like the touch, the feel, the human scale, and then connecting to people to the scale in the middle. And so I went to Pratt and I quickly realized that design is amazing and hard.

And and I realized that exhibit design was a weird industry that was slow moving and super political, but I discovered human centered design and design innovation. And that's what I started doing. And. And I don't think I knew it then, but design is a conversation. It's a conversation with users, with customers, with stakeholders, and the big struggle of being plopped into this innovation consultancy is there's all of these conversations you have to navigate.

And I remember like the first What you might call conversation design designed for a conversation that would drive the whole process, which was design thinking these four phases of discover, define, develop and deliver that we started organizing our, projects by helping the client along on this process, having a narrative to structure.

The whole complex dialogue within just gave scaffolding, gave something to hold on to. And so that's where I started to love design and it was only much, much later that I got into caring about facilitation and organizational change. And meeting a group that called their facilitative process conversation design, where I was like really confronted by that because I'd seen so many evolutions of design, as I'm sure you have from human centered design to experience design to customer experience design and.

This idea of like service design now it's wait, what does it mean to design a conversation? And that's really the exploration that I've been on my podcast about for the last couple of years. It's what is the conversation made of if we are able to design it? And I think we do design it in all sorts of scales in our lives.

Yeah. So it's, I've just been on the voyage of discovery with it. It's still a weird, the weirdest job title I've given myself. Some people, it's very confronting. It's certainly a conversation starter. But I when you look back with new eyes, I just start to see the ways in which I was trying to.

Design conversations, going into a research conversation with a customer. You don't go in with nothing and you've got this mind map that I'm looking at that you made of the book, that's your map for the conversation. And even I quote my mother in so many of these interviews she will enjoy this.

She always, she was saying like, Daniel, I don't always want to design my conversations. Yeah. And I'm like, mom, that's a design decision. Which is super meta, choosing to go in with improv. Yes. And is a design for a conversation where this is the name of the game. The game is called yes. And if you know the game, yes.

And you can play improv. And if you get tired of playing the S and game, you can say, Hey, everyone, let's play the game. No, but, and that's a totally fun game to play too. If we know that's the game we're playing, what usually happens. And Teams and organizations that I work with is that they are not playing the same game.

And so the key to designing the conversation is can we all just be playing and name and decide to play one game at the same time. Yeah, it's totally fine to play the game. No, but it's a fun game. I think that what


Srini Rao: I appreciated so much as somebody who loves mental models and frameworks is the fact that you extracted conversation into all of these different frameworks and really detailed it in a way that I'd never seen before.

And I, much like yourself I have conversations for a living and I was just looking at this and thinking, wow, there's so much here. You have what you call the conversational OS canvas. And I believe it has something like nine components if I remember correctly. I don't if I'm counting.

I want to start with invitation because I think that writing this blog post about how to design a system to maximize your creative output and one of the components of it I've been coming, trying to come up with this acronym for the word create and after four or five months of it, I finally landed on create reflect Express, amplify, tell, and evolve.

And the tell part was about promotion and promote getting telling people about your work. When I got to the sort of fear of asking people for help, I realized that the way I framed it is don't think of it as asking. Think of it as an invitation. So with that in mind, I will tee it up to you to talk about the concept of invitation.


Daniel Stillman: Yeah. I'm, it's really interesting that you pulled that one out. It is so core and I, in earlier versions of the OS canvas, I put it in the middle of the grid because it's so central. It's so much where things start from invitation is really, I learned about diagramming and pulling apart conversations visually from a podcast interview we, I had on Paul Pongaro, who's a professor of cybernetics.

And he diagrammed conversations a little bit differently than I do. And I learned this idea from him that a push, a shove or an outstretched hand are still invitations, right? They're more like initiations. Like when you're on a mosh pit and somebody shoves into you, it's an invitation to mosh.

If anybody remembers mosh pits hashtag nineties kids. So that's an invitation. The question is can you make your invitations invitational? And so when I'm looking at your mind map, breaking the ability to break something down and to think about what can I control. That, that to me is like from the design perspective, I can mold physical materials and industrial design.

It taught me that making something out of glass and making the same thing out of wood or plastic, it asks different things of me. And so understanding the material of conversation. Is what my process has been about. And so with invitation, we can add to the mind map here. We can break down what makes an invitation inviting, and this is the intrinsic versus an extrinsic motivation.

And so to invite somebody to a party, you can say you have to be there. Otherwise mom will be really upset. And that's using emotional pressure or habit or tradition to motivate somebody. And that's, those are all extrinsic motivations, intrinsic motivations are play purpose and potential, which is like a three P model that I think it was Lindsay McGregor in her book, prime to perform put together.

And and it's, and in descending order play present enjoyment and purpose is, and potential are a little bit more future oriented. Yeah. Invitations. And you look at it with any good copywriting model, like what is it, I don't know if ADA, like attention, interest, decision, action.

The invitation needs to be clear and concise and to grab people's attention. Because there's so much noise in the world and so making an invitation that is as clear as crisp and present tense as possible as immediate and clear and speaks to the person and their interests is so much more powerful.

And that goes to this is where design is all about empathy, because designing for someone else means trying to understand what they want and what they need. There's obviously limits to. How we can enter into the mindset and mentality of other people. But the core is what is really going to be motivating to this person.

And can I frame this invitation in a way that speaks to their values and to their needs? And yeah, you talk about asking versus telling, asking is creating an opening, it's opening a door. What is it? I think it was Krista Tippett, who said that it's very hard to resist a generous question that questions elicit responses in their likeness.

And so a generous. Exciting question and invitation can elicit a generous, exciting answer. And actually a perfect example of this, I just I want to be as self referential as possible. You had my friend Kara Thomas on your show. Her serendipity cards are questions that change the direction of your life.

Absolutely. You ask a different question and you will have a different life. And so questions are open, are doors that open opportunities and that, or they close doors. This is the different, this is you as a conversational wizard this asking a very close ended question of what did you have for breakfast this morning?

And you're like even that you can shift and swerve and expand. Yeah. Into getting to somebody to tell you everything about their life. Totally just from breakfast. You can go from breakfast to you pull on that thread. The whole sweater can fall apart. And that's about the thread of the conversation, which we can get into.

Yeah. But what are you, what kind of game are you trying to get somebody to play with you? And it was like, if it's if you're appealing to intrinsic play purpose and potential, like you're going to get the most juice from people. More creativity comes out of those juicier questions, those deeper invitations.


Srini Rao: It's funny, I love the idea of a thread that you can pull that will unravel because like I, that's the first time I thought of it that way because I think that's effectively what I do. But the other metaphor that I always come back to is that I think humans are like onions and the job of an interviewer is to just keep peeling layers until you get to the core.

You talk about interface, which I think struck me in particular because we have so many different interfaces for our conversations and it could be a Facebook conversation, text messages a conversation like the one you and I are having. And you talked about the four qualities where you're talking about relational quality, knowledge, capacity, location, negative space.

Can you expand on those and talk about how they impact our conversations? Yeah.


Daniel Stillman: Yeah, absolutely. And I would just like to point out that everyone should read. I'm trying to find it right now. The onion wrote this amazing article and it was probably easily a decade ago that scientists declare 90 percent of time humans spend staring at glowing rectangles, so much of our conversations are through glowing rectangles.

They and these conversational interfaces affect the conversation. I think we're noticing it more now. Because some clients I work with, we can have the conversation on zoom and we can do breakout rooms and all the things that zoom can do. And I have other clients, like if when you do work with google, you have to do work on, you have to have your meeting on meat and their version of meat does different things than the rest of the world's version of meat.

They have some of these features that are emerging and you're like, wow, I can't do this here. I literally can't do something that I am used to doing. So in the world, back when we used to be able to hang out and talk to each other and touch each other on the shoulder, when I would set up a room for a meeting or a workshop and I would come in and there's a story about this in the book, that they'd made the three tables in a U with everyone sitting on the outside and like a screen at the front and the relational quality of that space is saying sage on the stage. They just assumed I would be teaching and coaching and talking primarily through slides and that everyone would be sitting back taking notes and being good students.

And that was not what was going to happen at all. I don't use I use slides as little as possible, if at all. I like because I think it puts people to sleep. And puts me to sleep. And the experience is always dynamic. And so slides are static. I'd rather draw something that we need to talk about. And so the relational quality of that room was center to the edges.

If you were just like, do you draw that there's only one type of conversation that's supposed to happen. It's me at the front. And so during the break, I rotated the middle table and moved the tables from a you to three tables that with people on either side and the, and I remember this really clearly, even though this is like more than 10 years ago now everyone came back into the room and they were like, what happened?

Because from 20 feet away, it still looks the same. There's chairs and tables. But they, it felt different, which is, which really blew me away. I was like, this space feels different to them. And different things are possible in this space now and the, those four qualities of space, relational quality, knowledge, capacity, location, and negative space.

Those came from a friend who I was talking to while I was writing the book. And I was coming up to the interface chapter and honestly, I didn't know what to, like I knew that interface affected conversations. Like I knew that you've ever been on dating that when iPhones to iPhones chat, they have one color and when iPhones to Androids chat, they have another.

And it turns out there have been articles written about this, that people judge those Android users as lesser than you. Not like they're like, Oh, they. This guy is not an iPhone user. Oh, he must be a little low rent. Cause he's doesn't have like the premium phone. And so I think slightly less of him because he's an Android user.

That is a signal that's being sent through an interface. Somebody designed that interface. Somebody designed that affordance. Affordance is the term that UX designers use to describe like a thing, a feature that affords a certain ability. That gives us a certain quality. Like you literally know, I don't think anybody in Apple designed that feature so that there could be subtle dating discrimination, but they did design it to make the Apple ecosystem seem more exclusive and coherent.

Yeah. So they othered everything that was not native to the platform and that brings in power and inclusion into the, the interface itself is creating a power dynamic, but like a disjointed. message. And so the interfaces that we're using are telling us things that we can and can't do all the time.

So you, they either make some things easy and they make some things hard. And these interfaces that we're using have are evolving very quickly. They're getting smarter all the time. They're still in a way they're not allowing us to do some of the things that we do in person. So when I used to like Hey, grab a partner, have a quick conversation and come back.

I can actually do that pretty well on zoom. I actually have more power in zoom than I do in the real world. I can force people to come back when I want them. I don't have to like, clap once if you can hear me. Okay, everyone now settle in the interfaces actually gives me tremendous control over the conversation that they, that nobody had ever I think expected or anticipated.

But the four qualities of interface that are in the book came from these four different Japanese words for for space, waba, tokoro, and ma and my, I was telling my friend about this chapter I was writing and I was like, I don't really have a framework for this yet. I had the story about the tables like I knew that space affected conversations a great deal.

I knew that the physical and digital interfaces that we use change it a lot like note taking and journaling changed the interface of the conversation that we have giving somebody a template, giving somebody a sticky note. A sharpie and a sticky note in workshops says one idea per sticky note determined by the size of your pen and the size of your piece of paper.

If I give somebody a fatter marker and a smaller piece of paper, they can only put one or two words on it. That interface changes the kind of conversation that we can have. And so those, but those four words really got me thinking about. These really subtle ideas of knowledge capacity of a space I've worked with clients where you're not allowed to use the walls.

I remember reading that. Yeah. And you have to take it all down every day. And I'm like, what the actual is going on here? That like we can't have a persistent conversation from day to day about these, this super duper important project for one of your biggest clients, and we have to take it down and put it back up every time means that there's a disjointed quality to our conversation.

The interface, instead of supporting it and creating consistency and coherence is inducing extra labor, which is just crazy. It's funny because it reminds me of an experience my roommates and I had recently where we all divide up towards one of our roommates is a really good cook and he cooks and but somehow we were ending up with a ton of groceries that we were throwing away and it was inconsistent.


Srini Rao: And so I had the crazy idea to go and get a magnetic menu that would just be put on the fridge that we could write on. Yeah, and it was amazing how much less shit we came back with from Costco with like we have enough food to eat, but we're not throwing anything away and suddenly there's a consistency to everything and somehow just that act of that visual reminder completely changed the conversation.


Daniel Stillman: Yeah, this is like the families who try to use Kanban boards. For just their lives or you make a chore board for kids suddenly doesn't become Abstract it becomes concrete and that's so it's it's important the place you have the conversation matters right this is having the converse having a board meeting at the beach would be awesome, but the papers would fly everywhere

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And I think it's because as an ADD person, I get overstimulated easily and I just find any other stimulus other than listening to their voice to be really distracting. Yeah. Which is so strange to me. But like in the example of interface, like I'm just curious to hear


Daniel Stillman: what you have to say about that.

Yeah. But this, so this goes to understanding the material of conversation from a biological or human perspective. I know you're a science fan as am I. There have been some studies so reality, if you how many terabytes or exabytes is reality? There's not a lot of good studies on what that I've seen.

We certainly know how much data we're creating, which is more than ever before. There's just a ton of data out there, but if you try to just do a VR reality, it's a lot of data. It's just terabytes and terabytes streaming constantly are working attention the amount of stuff that we can actually focus on me high checks at me high and Robert Lucky, who was separately Robert Lucky was at Bell Labs and check.

See, I've got his name is so hard to pronounce. I did it once the first time he wrote flow. They estimated That our working attention is about 120 bits per second, like a biological limit. One person talking is 60 bits per second. That's just the data of one person talking, which is why cross talking and having like being in a meeting where two or three people are talking at the same time, literally breaks your brain.

Like all I have to do is have two people talking in either ear, separate things and your mind will like. You can't listen to two people talking at the same time. You'll say, Whoa, wait, hold on a second, Tom. What are you saying? Okay. Susan, say what you're saying. Okay. Thank you. I think what you're saying is this, okay, now can you go?

All right, great. Thank you. We cannot have multi threaded multi part conversations that are out loud. We just can't do it. And that's not even including visual stimulus. So you were a hundred percent, right? I think this idea that everything should be video. A lot of people ask me like, Oh, how do I get my team?

Oh, my company won't turn on video. I really want them to turn on video. And I say why do you want them to turn on video? And they're like I want them to be more engaged because people are being disengaged. I'm like video won't get you dis get engagement video. We'll just let you know when people are disengaged.

Like how you get engagement is a whole other question. And so choosing to have a pure phone call and everyone's working on a Google doc, that's a totally, that can be a totally engaging meeting. You don't need to have video for it. And you're right. Like some of us are kinesthetic thinkers. I like to walk around and gesticulate wildly while I think and talk.

And Yeah. That can really help people with, as opposed to this idea that I have to be rooted in front of a camera and be thinking about what I look like. And that's something else that you talk about interfaces, Google meet automatically makes your video really small, whereas zoom is, I'm sure you've noticed, and many people have noticed the default is I am of equal size as all other participants.

And that's crazy. The idea that I need to be looking at myself, it's I remember this with my, with when I'm, when my therapy went to went remote. I'm like, wait, I don't need to look at myself during therapy. That's crazy. And there's an option. You can turn it off. But that's an option. I have to choose to turn it off.

And so setting up the conversation. And saying, Hey, we're just going to do audio is creating a much more like low bandwidth conversation. In the book, I also talk about this, that the fight we've all had with our friends when they call us, when we texted them, I'm going to bar X and they go, Hey, are you at bar X?

I'm like, dude, I told you we were going to bar X. I didn't stutter in my text. We're going there. Come there if you want to come there. Don't call and ask me if it's cool there or not. Yeah. I can't hear you because I'm at the bar. I told you. And calling is the completely wrong interface when texting of simple information is the right mode.

Texting is the wrong way to break up with somebody. Everyone knows that. Anybody you've kissed, anybody you've met in real life, I think deserves a call. And this is what the interfaces in our lives allow us to do now. The power dynamics are such that, and the dating apps have told us that people are.

Replaceable that we can find a perfect person that meets our bio data requirements and that there are enough people out there that I can just cycle infinitely through them until I find somebody who checks all my boxes. And therefore I do not need to tell them anything about why I've broken up with them.

I don't even, I can ghost them. Yeah. I don't have to say, sorry, dude, don't want a third date. I can just never respond to them. So that's like interfaces really do change the conversation tremendously. I love the fact that we're just on, on Zencaster. Yeah. It's so much easier. It means I can actually look at my notes.


Srini Rao: For me too. And I can be dressed however I want or not have showered. So speaking of power dynamics, I think that what I really appreciated was that you did a very expansive view on power. And every time I think about power and I'm sure you're familiar with the book, I can't help but think about Robert Greene's work in the 48 laws of power.

And you read that book and part of it part of you cringes. Because it just all seems so manipulative. And at the same time, that this actually plays out in virtually every area of life. Like he's not pointing out anything that isn't true. But I think that what I appreciated about the way that you approached this was that you looked at power through a lens of being good for anybody who was involved.

So I think that what I want to do as weird as this might sound, and maybe it will actually work is when you look at these The six types of power and you overlay it off over the debate. How would you explain it? I think that to me is a perfect


Daniel Stillman: place to talk about this. That's so interesting.

So the one type, the, so the six types of social power is one model. What's not on that model is negative power, which I think is actually the most powerful type of power. When somebody. Just doesn't give a fuck. So we can go through these six types of reward powers. Like I have something that I can give to you if you do something that I like, right?

Coercive power is I'm going to make them an offer. You don't refuse. Like it looks like a reward, but it's not really a reward. It's there's really punishment if you don't do what I asked for. Yeah. Referent power is the weirdest one. Sometimes it's called charismatic power. And that means I want to be like somebody who's good.

And honestly Wallace tried to use referent power during the debate when he said, Hey this would actually serve everyone better if we acted like normal, nice people. Like he tried to appeal to an ideal to get people to act well, but he didn't actually have any coercive power. Like we talked about this before our, before we started recording, if he had actually had a mute button, if he could actually mute somebody who was speaking out of turn, he would have had tremendous power.

He wouldn't have to refer to. Referent power. He can't throw somebody out of the debate. So his legitimate power as the moderator of the debate, he actually has very little power because he can interrupt somebody, but he can't throw them out. So there's very little ultimate power that he has in, in, in the conversation.

What, Our president Donald Trump has is negative power. Negative power is the most powerful type of power because that means you don't care about anything. If you don't care about the punishment and you don't care about the reward, you really can't do anything because you can't coerce somebody. You can't reward them, right?

It's anarchy. Anarchy is really hard to beat, and that's really, I think the situation we're in is a person who I think wants to just keep playing. I don't know what his other goal is. I think he doesn't want to lose the election. I think that's probably that's really important to him is to not lose.

And I don't know if there's anything he won't do to get that. I can just very comfortably go on record that I think he's lied to the American people about the seriousness of the global pandemic that we're in, both at the beginning in the middle and in the current stage we're at now about how serious everything was.

So I don't think there's anything he won't say or do to try and look good and to stay in play. Just also as a native New Yorker. We all have known Donald Trump a long time, and his comfort with looseness of the truth, adding floors to his buildings in Atlantic City, and saying that a building he's building is the largest ever, even though it isn't saying that he's doing well when he's not and going from bankruptcy to bankruptcy and that works fine when the game is small, like the game is hotelier.

But here we're working with reality and it's actually really hard to I, I don't know if the bill will come due because the attention span of the American people is very small. And so I don't know if anybody will hold him to account on any of these things, but certainly when you, all you crave is power and you don't care which type of power you have.

For which type of power you use, that's really hard to beat. So I will get off my soapbox. No. It was


Srini Rao: fantastic. I think that was like a, such a great example to explain the concepts. And I thought what more relevant example to, to talk about conversational power.

So rather than continuing down the conversational operating system in the interest of time there are a couple of things here that I do want to ask you about. I love this idea of conversations with yourself and changing your mind because I was thinking about this I'm writing a post an article on how to build more creative confidence, because I think that was one of the things that I saw from many of our readers who said that when we had an email that was titled if you had the courage to pursue your dreams, what you do, and that was probably the most and most responded to email I've ever written in quite some time.

And so it struck me that this was a huge issue for people. But you offer this very interesting five part framework about changing your mind and break it into adversity, belief, consequence, disputation, and energy. Can you expand on those and talk about how we might use those in our lives?


Daniel Stillman: Yeah.

Yeah. That comes from the positive psychology world. That's just one of many ways to shift the conversation that you have with yourself. And that's actually a really That was something I didn't really expect to have happen as part of my research, because I, like many people, when I think about conversations that need designing, I was coming at it from teams and organizations and users and teams about products, like the idea that I was having conversations with myself is something I never really noticed or thought a lot about.

And so there's research about it and it's not surprisingly really hard to study inner speech, but the consequences of the facts are huge. At least I've heard two different numbers. One is 900 words a minute and the other is 4, 000 words a minute is the speed at which we can think. We can talk at about 125 words a minute.

Which means there's always going to be more to say than can be said. And it means that we can have really quick, fast, powerful conversations with ourselves and cadence in conversations is such a powerful way to change conversations. When conversations are getting hot and there's no conversation thermometer, but we know when a conversation is getting heated up.

We try to cool it down, try to slow it down. And the way that I generally try to cool conversations down is by literally slowing down the pace of turn taking. Because if you're having a really fast argument with somebody, there's, it's a rat a tat of response, and attack, and slowing things down.

Slowing the space down between each turn, slowing the pace of your voice down helps regulating your own breathing helps just slowing everything down and really clarifying that you're hearing somebody. I'm really hearing what you're saying. You sound really angry. And it sounds like you're angry about these three things.

Like that's actually makes the person heard. They go, yeah, I am angry about those three things. They, but once they are heard, they can relax. And even just recounting these kinds of interactions, like my own heart rate, my own breathing gets elevated. And so this is where this idea of design and having durable designs that we can transpose from one type of a conversation to another comes in.

I think slowing things down in turn taking in pace. In tone works in, in, in one on one and group dialogue, and it really works with conversations with yourself. It's just harder to do because we're the only people there and there's, except for the fact that there is a host of people inside of us. Yeah.

All of the voices. I've got a fully functioning simulation of my parents, right? That it was funny as we're having this conversation about heated arguments. It sounds like conversations I have with my mom.

Yeah, totally. Totally. And if you want to redesign that conversation, you have levers you can pull.

You can invite her to it. You don't really have, you can have, you do have power. You can stop talking to your parents until things change, right? I've done it. It's really painful, right? And I feel terrible. It was not a fun time in my life when I did that. But I think some people are like, oh, I can't do anything about my conversations with my parents.

You don't have to talk to them, right? You have, you do have, you have power in the relationship. That's hard, but my point is that exerting power can often have blowback. Force begets force, and this is true in relationships. You can't make anybody do anything for, as we were talking about invitation, I can, if I forced if I coerce somebody to do something, I don't get the best from them.

I get the worst from them, right? Because you can't coerce somebody's heart and soul. You can only coerce their body and you can get compliance. And that is. A hundred percent true, equally true, if not even more so true with ourselves. And so I know you've had, I was, I have on my download list your conversation with Kristin Neff about self compassion, like this is a thing.

How can I change my conversation with myself? And there are tools to it. Like, how do I slow down my conversation with myself? So this is the point of yeah, those five of the AEIOU process of breaking down a conversation with myself of adversity. Sorry. A, B, C, D, E wrong letters breaking down the conversation with myself and journaling creates an opportunity for me to slow down the conversation because I'm using a pen and a paper, I'm taking the conversation out of my head and I'm putting on a piece of paper so I can see it.

And I'm slowing it down because I can't write as fast as I can think and I'm going to go through all five steps because I'm I've just sat down and I've created an intention and an invitation to myself to say, Okay, I'm going to write these five things. I'm going to set a timer for 10 minutes.

And this is one of the things that also makes invitations powerful is their time limited and their Yeah. Not infinite. Hey, Srini, do you want to come to a party at my house that never leaves? You can never leave and it never ends? Once you join the party, it never stops? No maybe if the party is really awesome, but can I come to the party first and see if I like it and then leave?

No. You have to agree now to come over and never, ever leave. That's terrible. Nobody would ever agree to that. So when you say to your mind, you say to yourself, Hey, let's talk about this, the diversity and let's rotate it around in our minds. And let's look at it from a couple of different ways.

We don't have to agree to any of them. We're not committing to any of them. And this, by the way, is a classic negotiation tactic. I went to Harvard's Negotiation Institute for the best week long intellectual vacation I've ever had. And this is a powerful negotiation tactic where you say, that's an interesting number, but that's a really interesting offer.

Are there any others we can consider? Yeah. And I'm not saying I'm committing to one. I'm not saying I'm refusing it. I'm saying yes and cool. And so I love that number. Thank you for that number. Where did you get that number from? Are there any other numbers that we could consider? And so the ABCDE method is saying what is the adversity that I'm experiencing?

Like just write it down in the facts and separating facts from feelings is the first powerful step in the arc of that conversation. You don't start with the adversity is so and so is a jerk, right? The adversity is so and told me to leave the company. They made an offer for me to leave the company.

This is not a hypothetical story, right? The adversity is the adversity is, I thought that I was going to stay here and you want me to go, right? The belief is that means that I'm unlovable, or the belief is that means that there's no other options for me in the world. All the beliefs. That come after that all the feelings I have about it are separate from just at least stating the facts.

Separating facts and feelings like in is like separating matter and anti matter. It is so powerful to look at them and they're different. Yeah. Let's do this. There's one other theory. Actually, before we do that I want to actually ask you about a life experience I had in terms of conversation, and this is something we probably should have covered when we're talking about the canvas.


Srini Rao: So I think you and I are talking about my Netflix debut and I was very mindful about my words, but it made me think back to an experience I had in college, which I included in this post recently from about the 10 universal principles that You know, from Hindu mythology that can guide our lives even still today.

And one of them was about choosing our words. Every now and then some woman sent me this very irate email, which clearly she took a lot of time to compose. And I just deleted it because I don't respond to show. I was like, that's great. What exactly were you expecting to come from this?

But that's not the real story here. So in college. My sophomore year of college, I had a friend who freshman year was very close. She lived across the hall from me and I called her and forgot to hang up the phone. And the answering machine recorded me saying where she never, she like never had a life last year.

And of course I just set it off the cuff. And in 11 words, I basically did irreparable damage to a friendship to the point where that was the end. That was it. Yeah. And it made me very made me think a lot about why the words you use matter, whether it's when you send an email or when you say something as stupid as I did.


Daniel Stillman: Yeah. Yeah. Speech acts are real acts. I, my, my parents were. Very weird. I was raised with a surprising amount of Hindu mythology. I grew up reading Amar Chitra Kata. You're the, you're that one. I'm that one guy who grew up watching, reading those amazing comics. That's how I know all these stories. Yeah. And that's me ditto.

And then my parents taught us all Sanskrit. So we could read, look up words in the Bhagavad Gita. And so words really matter. And that's what I was taught as a kid, is that the word is a seed and behind that seed is an action that you can learn about that word. This is all in the Dhatu Pata you look up root words in the Sanskrit English dictionary, and then you go into this book called the Dhatu Pata, where you look up the seeds of the words.

And then you can find these actions in which you can understand the essence of the word. And. Words, this is something my parents taught me that we're in the Iron Age, the Kali Yuga. In the Golden Age, you were responsible for your thoughts. Here in this Kali Yuga, in the Iron Age, you're only responsible for your actions.

Thank God. But speech acts are real acts. Saying to somebody that you never had a life. It hurts. And I see in the mind map that you made, like you pulled out the stuff about error and repair. And there is science that studies conversational analysis studies, large group masses of conversations.

And find out, finds out like what the racetrack, the shape of the project is. I had Elizabeth Stokoe on my podcast. She wrote a book called talk, which comes at this from a truly scientific angle in terms of analyzing masses of conversations. The greater good in action project. Is what I sourced for the apologies where they did a cycle.

There was a psychological study where they said what are the components of a good apology? Acknowledging the offense, providing an explanation that is as short as possible and doesn't erase the offense, express remorse and try to make amends. But this is the essence of conversation. I cannot force somebody to keep staying in conversation with me.

And so even if I say a good apology, I can't necessarily fix the mistake that I made because the other person doesn't have to accept the apology. I could design the best apology in the world with the best apology technology available, which we have available to us right now. And we cannot force somebody to accept it.

And that's one of the honestly. I think that's one of the hardest things to deal with as an adult, is that you can't always fix everything that goes wrong. Sorry doesn't necessarily fix anything. And it's really hard. It's really sad. Speech acts are real acts. Saying you're sorry can help, but we cannot force somebody to get over it.

Which is, and also memo to everyone, like that makes things worse. Just get over it. Why can't you accept my apology? It's just not help. That's like telling somebody to relax when they're tense. People are complex and complex things respond nonlinear to nonlinearly to stimulus, right?

When you say somebody to relax and they get more upset with a nonlinear response to stimulus, so you cannot make somebody do anything. You can invite as much as you can. You can make amends. You can you could try to donate millions of dollars in their name to their favorite cause if it doesn't necessarily, it's not going to necessarily get them back to the table, which is hard and sad.

Yeah. Let's do this. I want to finish with one final area, which is just a personal interest to me, just because we do these monthly unmistakable prime community. You talk about facilitating. group conversations. And something that I think about a lot is that when you get 10, 12, 15 people.


Srini Rao: Yeah, the tendency is either for one person to monopolize the group or even my, my community manager called me out on and she said, you give certain people too much attention and you need to come. And so I wonder in the context of that as the backdrop, how do we make those kinds of interactions more effective?


Daniel Stillman: Yeah it's hard because there's math. There's physics of the conversation that are not changeable. David Gray, who I also had on my show and I a huge fan, he's taught me so much on my show. He talked about this fact that if you're at a party and you see a group of 10 people in a circle, you can be sure that there's probably somebody very funny or very famous in that circle, right?

Like holding a conversation together of that size requires a Or it requires a pattern, right? It requires a design. And so the oldest design for a conversation that I know of is the circle and Native Americans and many traditional cultures would come together and they would sit in a circle and there's the talking stick, the passing of the peace pipe.

Everyone speaks, everyone gets to speak and we speak in turn. That is the easiest design for a conversation, but it requires high commitment. And high self control for us to speak to the center of the conversation, the purpose of the conversation, and not to say, I don't like what the person before me said.

And so having a a round table conversation requires a lot of time. If there's a lot of people, it goes linearly, right? More people, more conversation length. And when you go past the pizza. Size of the pizza rule from Amazon. If we two pizzas can feed depending on how hungry the people are, five to 10 people, a circular conversation becomes really hard and boring, but also it sucks to go last and that circular conversation.

And so we need better designs for the conversation. And that's where breaking out into small conversations and coming back and hearing from each group is so powerful breaking out and sharing out or doing fishbowl conversations, having a smaller group in the center, having a hot seat. Really using the clock intentionally is so important because there is that sense of Oh, so and so only got five minutes and this other person got 10.

So should we be using a timer? Does that make it unnatural or does it make it honest? And these are really hard decisions that people have to make. I just had Adam Kahane on my show. I haven't published his episode yet. He's, he facilitates dialogue with like civil wars. He's, so he's facilitated conversations about the transition to democracy in South Africa and the ending of civil wars in Columbia and Guatemala.

And he's used timers in some of those conversations, at least in the beginning to make sure that everyone has. One minute to check in to set the boundary that everyone should participate and everyone will participate equally and sending that powerful signal when you have larger conversations. If you've got 2030 or 50 people on a conversation, that's when you really have to use very thoughtful and intentional designs for conversations to break up the conversation and to rejoin it.

Otherwise, like you said, people are the exclusion factor is really high. The floor can only be held for a very short period of time by anybody before people start to feel anxious. Turns are actually very naturally short across all cultures. So talking for more than a couple of minutes, people start to get bored.

And so we need to have variety, we need to have movement, but it does require thoughtful and careful facilitation and to have rituals and patterns for those conversations so that people know what they're getting into. So if you say to everyone, Hey, everyone, you are going to just hypothetically, I'm going to just help one person for 30 minutes today and your job is to take notes and then I'm going to put you into breakout sessions and you're going to talk about what you heard and then you're going to come back and we'll just hear what some of your insights were on the chat after you've had some of your breakouts and that's it.

That would be that's a great conversation if I know that's what I'm signing up for and coming into Yeah, I heard one person get really deep help and I got to talk about it with some other people So I got to feel connected It doesn't matter that I didn't have that, you know that conversational juice with the guy at the head of the table And that's a really different conversation than trying to help five people in a roundtable conversation or trying to have 10 people or get everybody to be able to help get helped.

We just have to change the center of the conversations. In order for those type of things to be possible, and that's honestly that part is the thing that's most fun for me is like drawing out the conversational possibilities, getting people to design agendas that work that matter. I have a an online archive that I've been building to help people understand what some of those conversational possibilities are so that.

Yeah we need to just be more creative in the way we design our conversations in order to make them work for all the people that are involved and for you, because it's exhausting if you have to do too much work each time to like reign people in or say, Hey, can you pump the brakes? Like somebody else needs to talk.

That's active facilitation. Whereas if you set up a principle, a pattern, a game that everyone knows that we're going to be playing, then the pattern does the work and you don't have to do as much work. And I believe highly in lazy facilitation the less you should do less work and make everyone else do more work, but that only works if you set up good principles.


Srini Rao: For mainly selfish reasons, I have to ask you this just as a single guy. Two questions. How does it play out in your relationship with your wife? You mentioned that you just got, if she's here listening, I'm even more curious this time. You're going to answer this because my listeners always joke that every person I interview is a reflection of some problem that I'm trying to solve in my life.

One of them said, yeah. So who's our latest dating expert? To me, this is you're just as good as person as any to ask this question, like, how does this play out in your conversations with your wife, but even in general, in romantic relationships or a dating context.


Daniel Stillman: Yeah, so I was just, I'm Googling it right now.

The Four Horsemen of Relationships. I was just I don't know if you get sketchplanations. I love these guys. This guy draws like a really valuable or useful principle. I think it's every day or every week. And he just drew the Four Horsemen of Relationship Apocalypses. And I think, I can't remember, it maybe comes from the Gottman Institute.

These are conversational problems that happen and ways to work around them. So they talk about criticism rather than owning, like you're so lazy versus I'm frustrated that you're not, whatevering, washing the dishes. That's owning your own feelings instead of putting it on the other person.

Contempt rather than appreciating people. Defensiveness versus owning your side of the experience and stone while stonewalling. Like saying I don't want to talk about it and just walking off versus engaging a dialogue or being able to take care of yourself. I thought those are really interesting in terms of watching out for bad conversational patterns because they basically said if they saw relationships with this, that they were like in big trouble, criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling.

What I've noticed in my own relationship, and I feel so lucky. To be in relationship with Janet is like I've done work on myself with my own self conversation so I can self soothe. I don't when she's upset with me, I can manage myself when I've done something wrong. I'm very introspective and I really like to share my process and how I'm rethinking things and so I can verbally process and that helps her but I've also like I've I also have what I would maybe term conversational self control.

And so I think what really happens a lot in this, I don't want gender, we we didn't even talk about gender and conversations, which is a huge topic. Do men and women have different conversational styles? Maybe what's more interesting is why it's probably not biological. It's probably social.

We're acting out certain behaviors. There's a male ish behavior, which is problem fixing and another male problem, which is Not being introspective for being self aware and so what happens a lot and I learned this over and over again certainly my dad didn't took a long time to learn this is when somebody comes with to you with a problem you don't tell them the solution.

You ask them more about themselves and their problem. This is the asking versus telling polarity in dialogue. If you, if somebody comes to this is a problem. They're not necessarily saying, please solve it for me. And so I have the conversational self control to say to Janet, do you want me to coach you?

Or to fix this or to empathize with you or something else. Yeah, like I pump my own breaks and say Hey, what's my role here? And she's I think some people would get annoyed with that. Potentially, I, it's possible. I've, we're like just listen to me. Why do you have to like, ask me what I need? In this case, she respects and appreciates the fact that I'm like what do you need from me in this moment?

And I think it's so easy to go into problem solving mode. And. And so if she wants problem solving, she's going to get it and I'm going to problem solve with her. If she's wants to know what I think, I will tell her, but she might not want that. She just might want me to say, that sounds really hard, honey.

Tell me more about that. And just to soothe her and to be with her, which is also something that people really need. And so it's about both of us knowing what we need. And both of us bringing the best of ourselves in that moment and managing ourselves. So I think that's a really core thing is like building expectations and boundaries around your conversational styles, because I know a lot of people I've coached guys who look.

They just don't even know that they're doing it. I was working with this guy and he was using the stories in the book where he used this design thinking framework to facilitate a dialogue with his wife around their to do list. And he did the importance and the difficulty matrix and mapped everything out with her and she was like, I feel so heard.

I'm. Really feel like you're on board with everything that needs to happen and we're prioritizing the things that are going to be the most impactful. This is so exciting. He facilitated this dialogue with her and it wasn't about taking power in the conversation. It was about creating a space for a deeper conversation about what do we need to do together?

To make sure that our lives are going to be functional. And that's a really different conversation than Hey, honey, do this. And he goes and does it right. He's participating equally in the structuring of the dialogue. And I think that's so important. In terms of just being fully present in a relationship, I don't know that's my current thinking is, yeah, that


Srini Rao: was great.

No, it it was funny because it reminded me that like I remember I was going through this really bad breakup and if you have a lot of friends who are life coaches, that's exactly what they do. They go into life coaching mode and I remember calling a friend and she starts spouting off.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know what? I don't want you to be my life coach. I want you to just shut the fuck up and listen to me and be my friend. I don't have the solution to this problem.


Daniel Stillman: More power to you to knowing what you need and want and asking for it. That's critical. Yeah. But so that, so like a mature relationship requires both people be that aware, right?

And so a lot of there's that life coaching switch or there could be a self soothing switch Oh honey, that sounds so hard. It's don't just mope about it with me. Help me fix it. Oh, I, oh, but I just want to, oh, it's no, you actually have to be able to shift modes from coach to co conspirator and co consultant.

Yeah. But by choice, not by habit, I think that's like maybe the promise in the book is I would like people to have conversational range and to be able to lead a whole host, a whole range of conversations that they need to lead, not just be great life coaches, but also to be great companions. And also life coaches don't necessarily, like I've worked with coaches and I coach people who are like, Daniel, can you just tell me how to do it?

I get the sense that, you know. Please stop making me , think about it. And I think that's yeah. Let's not pretend that there's a good solution to things sometimes. Yeah. But if the person has to ask for it, they have to say, what is the right, what is the best practice, what is the right way to do it?

I'm like, cool. All right. So we've, I've really gotten you to reflect on it and we've resolved all your inner pieces on this. Let's talk about what I think are some best practices and if they maybe re relate to your challenge. Cause then we finally gotten to that part of the conversation where, you know, I, there's a, there's the four quadrants of conversational leadership in the book between asking and telling and focusing on problems and focusing on solutions.

A lot of us really go to telling about solutions because that is a place that seems powerful to tell somebody what the solution is to their problem when we haven't spent enough time asking and inquiring about what they think their real problem is. So I think moving from that asking problem focus to telling solution focus has got to be earned.

And that's true in good consulting relationships. It's good in organization. It's true in organizational leadership and is 100 percent true in relationship conversations as well. Just being intentional about how we're showing up in the dialogue.


Srini Rao: Wow. This has been mind blowingly cool. You just packed it with so much insight and wisdom that's practical, applicable and it's been funny and insightful.

So I have one final question for you which I know you've heard me ask yeah, for all of our interviews with that single creative, what do you think it is that makes somebody or something


Daniel Stillman: unmistakable? Yeah. I was talking to Janet about this yesterday. Okay. And. I true to my conversational style, I had her list out some things that she thought before I shared my own.

When I think about the idea of being unmistakable, to me, it's what's core to that is uniqueness. There's no way for me to confuse you with someone else. And uniqueness is it's so elusive in some way, because we're all so similar in many ways. But we, I think the thing that is all, the only thing that's truly unique about us is our story, our narrative.

And we, we didn't talk a lot about threading a narrative and conversations, but. Story and narrative is so dear and important to my heart and in my life. And I think you could copy somebody else's program, or you could write somebody else's book, people do that, right? You could copy everything somebody else is doing, but you'd have a different reason, a different motivation, a different why for doing it.

And that is uniquely yours. That is absolutely uncopyable. You can't copy somebody else's story. Because it's going, you're going to live it out in your own way and your own time. And it's happening now instead of happening then. So it's yours. And so to me, I think the only way to really be unmistakable, and this is something I practiced myself in my own work is to really be clear on the story of not just what I do, but why I do it, how I got here.

That's uniquely mine. And it's what the story is of what I've, where I've come from is what drives me forward. And I think that is. Absolutely. The core of being unmistakable.


Srini Rao: I love it. I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and share your story and your wisdom and your insights with our listeners.

Where can people find out more about you, your work, the book and everything that you're up to? So first off, it's nice to talk to another conversational nerd slash wizard and cause You know, you ask really great questions about this topic, which is so near and dear to my heart. I think conversations are what our lives are made of, and doing them better and participating in them better is important.


Daniel Stillman: If people want to follow along, the Conversation Factory is where My podcast is, you can also find links to downloading a couple of chapters of my book. And some, I'm just going to put up some early chapters of the audio book up there too. And they can learn about my coaching and consulting work there too.

So the conversation factory is just the easiest place to go there. If you want to say hi on Twitter, I'm at DA Stillman. I'm not there as often as I should be, or could be, but really just the conversation factory. It's my life. Awesome.


Srini Rao: And for everybody listening, we will wrap the show with that.