Extinction by elizabeth callback. Arthur alan alda is our guest on booktv. His latest book, here it is if i understood you, would i have this look on my face . My adventures in the art and science of relating and communicating. Mr. Alda read the book and i hope you can help me understand a couple of scenes that run through your book. Number one is empathy. Why is that a theme of your book guest i found as i studied the subject which really seriously for the last couple of years while i was writing the book i found it kept coming up more and more and i began to realize the things that i had learned that seem to be essential, good communication, often boil down to empathy. At first i wasnt crazy about that because i didnt trust toward empathy. When i first began to hear about empathy it started to show up in our culture an awful lot a couple of decades ago and when i started to think about it i thought this sounds like a very soft gooey new way an emotionbased thing that im not sure i believe what was being transmitted by that notion and then the more i realized that for me my definition and the way i think about it is not the way everybody thinks about it. There are many meanings that empathy has for different people. To some people it means compassion, it means sympathy, it means giving to the other person and letting them take from you because you havent unbound being bounty of good you can give and empathy to me is useful as a really important tool for communication. I even wonder if you can do communication without empathy but what i mean by empathy is being aware of what the other person is going through, being aware of what state of mind they are in. That gets into a little bit of what scientists call the theory of the mind which is a little bit about what theyre thinking it empathy is more about what they are feeling. Without both of those things you dont know where they are when youre trying to communicate and i think you have to read their face and read their tone of voice, their body language. You have to get a pretty good estimate of whats happening inside or you are not really talking to them. You are talking to a generalized version of them. In a way for all you know you are talking to a wall and spring information at them. This message is going to be internalized by them and remember to buy them so too may empathy is just a tool and its not a tool that necessarily makes you a good person. I think there is too much evidence from the experiences we have in life that empathy can be used for good and for not so good purposes. Empathy is used by they know how you feel and they know how to make you feel worse because they are tracking how you feel as they do their stuff on you. Interrogators know how to use empathy. They know how to take an understanding of how you are feeling and use it against you so they can hear the evidence, tell them what they want to hear. Thats not compassion so a in the book i call the dark empathy. I think we have a tendency towards doing some good for being compassionate. Empathy is a very useful tool in doing that but just and communicating something something far less difficult or in the feelings that you have, parents with children. You want to convey something you feel is important. You love them very much in spite of the crazy things they are doing. You have to be aware of how they are getting it. Suppose they are getting it in the opposite way that you were intending. How you get empathy and how you build it up, how you keep it going and dont lose it, thats almost as important as the idea itself. Was that you said you have been studying this for years. How did you begin and white . Guest i began without knowing i was studying it. At one i was studying improvisation when i was a young or. I think i began studying it as a boy. My mother was gets her phrenic paranoid and i remember from the age of about six studying her face to try to figure out what she was going through. I had to try to understand if what she was saying was reality or just her reality because she had this disease, this mental disease. I just knew her behavior was erratic and difficult to track but i do know i was working on empathy or communication or anything like that. I didnt know when i studied improvisation and yet i was using some of the basic tools. When i did the Science Program i was using those tools connecting to the scientists and it was a conversation. It wasnt that i came in with a list of questions. They didnt go into lecture mode when i asked him a question because i was asking the question. I wanted to understand. It wasnt tell us about Quantum Mechanics is what do you mean by Quantum Mechanics . And i would let go until i got it. So they were taken out of the desire to do a lecture for the camera. They were trying to make me understand. We are the same connection that we would have had if it werent improvisation. It wasnt improvisation. It was really happening in that moment. That dynamic relationship between us is when i began to realize when i left the program, maybe we could teach scientists and communicate on a personal level through the connection that its possible to achieve with an audience and do that while we are teaching them to be scientists so they become not only accomplished scientist that accomplish communicators. As we talked i realize there was all this other stuff happening with scientists. It wasnt just that they were ready to come in a cave science. One scientist told us his training saved his marriage. Another scientist said you have to talk to more people about this. My wife is a art historian and i can understand a word she says. He wasnt getting it. There was lingo, jargon that he wasnt getting. Everything and can be communicated and we can give more context from the other person. Everyday i find out im doing better and im writing a book about it. I spent two years really working on myself to see if i could do for myself what people have done for other people. I talk to people who train other people to have more empathy. You come it was some empathy usually but you can always get more and thats an interesting idea. A lot of people think you are stuck with what youve got but i know people who do it and im working on myself to get more. I had this tool to connect and communicate. Was that you have connection also a Stony Brook University. Why is that . Guest i went around the country trying to find out if the president s of universities would be interested in starting a program to train scientists to communicate. It wasnt a popular idea when i started. This was nine or 10 years ago, maybe more and when president said to me we have too much science toteach than to teach communication. I didnt have an answer for that at the time but i thought about later, what better can you do want to have taught science and to teach comedic asian as an essential part of science . The next thing you do is write about it, talk about it, share it with other scientists. The only university that was interested was Stony Brook University in long island and we have been there for eight years. At stony brook and universities all over the country and universities around the world we have taught communication to over 8000 scientists and doctors its really extraordinary to see people transformed because we dont give people tips. We put them through experiences like improvising exercises and put them with people we want them to communicate with. Host you write about improvisation in your new book. Guest its a good thing to say what its not. Its not common improvisation. A lot of people, most people i think are exposed to improvisation through comedy shows and many actors, many comic actors came out of comedy. This is not that. This is a much more fundamental and then your former improvisation that was invented baby in the 1940s. Its the basis of all improvisation and in many cases, the bowie dont get into that. We are concerned with science. What it does is two important things come at least two. Puts you in touch with people you are trying to communicate with. It also brings out the real person who is within you, the vulnerable you, the person that you might mask when you are afraid of really being there in front of an audience. It makes you talk any kind of foreign way. You dont talk in your natural voice. We dont have an intimate connection with people. Improvisation habituation is connecting with the real you is the other person. Doesnt mean that you cant lose it. You have to keep practicing. Its so strange, isnt it strange that it goes away . We are social animals and yet we retreat from one another. We are built to be in one anothers company. It feels so good. Once you get out of the excommunication state and get into the communication state you are really glad you are there. There is a real component of listening, isnt there . Guest yes. The thing is its not just the description of active listening. It becomes the description of active listening but maybe im exaggerating their corns of experience but i think its really important compared to the verbal description, something you can read in a book. As much as my book is written on paper and i hope people will read it i hope they will find their way through experimenting in finding ways to make this contact to experience. For instance active listening is a very important thing to do, to let the other person know you have heard them and to demonstrate that you heard them and to answer what was said rather than what you want to say next which is a classic flaw was listening or nonlistening or just waiting for the person to finish. Thats my cue to say whatever want to say regardless of what you say. Can you do that really effectively . Maybe. Maybe you get the idea. I think experiences, you can experience the way that gets you habitually to do that. I think its longerlasting and its more fun to do. Kind of an everyday example like that. Its the real experience that happened to me. Its the difference between and experience. Theirs is that those sinuses dont go over 25 miles an hour. I routinely went 40 miles an hour past that speed sign and then a cop stopped me and gave me a ticket and i never went more than 25 miles an hour again at that speed sign. The sign was the tip. The ticket was these periods and it landed on me. I went through something that changed my behavior. Sometimes tips can do that but nothing beats going through something for somebody else in my opinion. Host why have you brought this into science . Guest while i started in the Science Field with this because i was interviewing hundreds of scientists and i realized that we were having a great time together and i was learning science from him and the audience was learning science because it wasnt a lecture. It was just this dynamic relationship we had that involve the person on both sides. Then it was from that experience that i realize people in business, parents and children, mothers, salespeople. In order to help raise money for the center for communicating science that i helped start, i started a Company Called the old communication training act. That will offer the services inc. Indication training and the profits will go to the center for communicating science. For instance our initial program for jobs for women in business to help women navigate problems that are still obstacles in the way of women trying to make progress in their business careers. I think it should have been solved decades ago why cant drafting women, stealing their ideas, promoting their trainees. All these things that women have to advocate and the tools and the competence to be able to do it. We are doing to good things at once. We are helping train women and others in corporations with leadership and teamwork. Its a really happy trajectory and i didnt decide to do it. Just found myself doing it stepbystep. Host in your most recent book you write about the fact thats scientific america asked you to host a series of programs and you have been waiting to do this forever. This was like a dream come true. That first outing was not such a dream come true. Guest thats true, thats true. The producers of the show wrote me a letter and asked me if i want to host the show and i figured out that they probably wanted me to say heres the show this week and read the narration. It didnt really interest me so much. I wanted to talk to the scientists because i wanted to learn from them about their work so i said id be interested if you would let me interview. I didnt know if i could either but i studied improvisation and the only experience i have had was taking over a couple of times in show business, talk shows which is a little different than interviewing scientists. The first interview i did i talk to the scientists who had made a solar panel for a solarpowered car. Ive right away made three huge mistakes. I thought i knew more than i knew and i said this is great, you made this with items right off the shelf. Why did i assume that . I assume something that wasnt true. He said no, we made this from scratch. I didnt even notice how he looked. I wasnt listening to him and answering his questions. Then i reached out and i was trying to be casual and looked like i was really friendly and an office work. I put my hands all over the solar panel and he said please dont touch that. You will ruin it. I wasnt paying attention and i learned pretty quickly i had to really be open and vulnerable. I had to be who i was, acknowledge my ignorance. One of the best things you can do is know you are ignorant about some things. Its a terrible feeling to find out you thought you knew something. It would screw up the interview because questions based on what i thought i knew about their work which was wrong and they didnt know how one camera to save them excuse me you dont know what you are talking about. So i started to realize theres a funny look on this guys face. Whats wrong and i assumed i knew or that i knew about their work. So i began to learn a couple of things. One to let my ignorance show. With curiosity ignorance is a wonderful link to have. The other thing i learned was to Pay Attention to that so we really had a true improvisation between us. Host what where does theory of mind fit into all of this . Gets i think. Mind was one of the things you have to do along with being aware of your feelings. You have to try to have a pretty good estimate of what they are thinking and you are describing Quantum Mechanics and they grow kind of cloudy at the word quantum you had to pick up on that and find out what is this coming from and try to work with them because they dont know what quantum means. Quantum can be used in so many funny ways in our society. They say its a quantum leap. In fact a quantum leap is as small as you can possibly get. If ive got it right one electron from an atom. Thats a. Short distance but its equal as hard as they added ms. Concerned in the way that adam behaved so we had quantum. I can get in the way. You have to try to find out what they are thinking. Thats an example of what im talking about but the term theory of mind, what are the things wrong with it is that its jargon. Its a term given to us by scientists and all it means is that when i talk to you i have an awareness, a feeling that theres something going on in your head that may be different from whats going on in my head. Now that sounds obvious because as adults we all know that to be true. People dont think the same thing otherwise we wouldnt need to talk. We dont have to let that be the funny thing is the term i think comes from a. When you realize that the age of four or five actually believe what they know you know. They dont have the theory of your mind in the area of whats happening in your mind. For instance you show a child that age a cartoon of a woman coming into her room putting a cookie on the desk and then she leaves. Somebody else comes in and moves the cookie to a cabinet. Now the first woman comes back into the room. A child watching the cartoon has seen the cookie go from the tabletop to the cabinet. She knows where the cookie is. You ask her, where does the lady think the cookie is . The lady put the cookie on the table and then laughed. The cartoon lady never saw the cookie go to the cabinet but the kid saw the cookie go to the cabinet and the kid says she thinks its in the cabinet. She knows its in the cabinet because the kid knows its in the cabinet and until a certain age she doesnt have this awareness that you might have Something Else in your mind other than what she knows which is why they say until the age of four or five kids dont lie. They think was the point of flying . You know what i know. So im trying to communicate with people, instead of making use of the idea that this person may have a different idea from what im thinking we will use technical terms as though the other person understands. At four or five years old thinking what they know i know because we forget people have different ideas in their heads with different understandings and different experience. Its very easy to forget that. It has its own jargon and we get so used to it we think like a kid they must understand that too. Host the kid jargon or vernacular be used as a bullying technique and im smarter than you technique . Guest sure, and ive done that in my own life and dinner conversations before and knew how complicated something was that i was trying to talk about. I would talk about it as though i knew more than anybody else. A lot of people have done that. Its not a good idea. I am using terms that im glad to see you dont understand but it transmits to just showing off the one thing its a good idea to remember from that jargon is jargon actually can be useful in the same way that empathy can be hurtful. Jargon whereas you think of it as bad, jargon can be very good. If you and i are in the exact same chair and the same workbench why would you Say Something to me that takes five pages to say when you can say to me in one word . We can work more efficiently together. But if i dont understand that word or a common english word we use in different ways, you should go to some trouble to make sure i understand what you mean by it. Math is extremely hard to communicate because its all special talk when you get into higher ed. Im still trying to figure out a way to help mathematicians communicate better. Lets go where did the title of the book come from . Guest the title of the book came from the fact that the first title didnt go over so well. The first title i used was a question mark. I was talking with the editor about it. A wonderful editor and i really loved working with her. I said, so you havent mentioned the title. What do you think of the tidal . She said well ive heard worse titles. So i thought about it for a few weeks and i thought, the book is really about observing the other versions and finding out whats in their head when you cant communicate very well. It is kind of amusing i think in the essence of the book. Host alan aldas other books are never have your dog stuffed, things ive learned by talking to myself. How did this study that youve been doing over the years help you in your chosen profession . Very