Why People Hear Something Different Than What You Said | Greg McKeown - EP 778

Summary

Podcast Summary: Passion Struck with John R. Miles

Episode 778 – Why People Hear Something Different Than What You Said | Greg McKeown

Original Air Date: June 9, 2026
Host: John R. Miles
Guest: Greg McKeown (bestselling author of Essentialism and Effortless, host of What's Essential podcast, and doctoral researcher at Cambridge)

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the critical yet often invisible gap between what we intend to communicate and what others actually hear—a phenomenon Greg McKeown calls “confident misunderstanding.” As part of an ongoing series on the “connection crisis,” John and Greg dive into how this misunderstanding sabotages relationships, fuels loneliness, and blocks our sense of mattering. Drawing on insights from psychology, personal experience, business case studies, and groundbreaking research, they unpack how to bridge this gap and why deep connection and being truly understood are at the core of human thriving.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Bottleneck of “Confident Misunderstanding”

• (00:02-00:39; 61:57-64:01)
  • Greg McKeown defines the main obstacle in relationships, teams, and organizations: “confident misunderstanding”—acting on the false assumption that we understand each other.
  • Quote: "We are wrong, we think we're right, and we act upon that. And that's it." (Greg McKeown, 00:02)
  • Referenced the “tap game” (Stanford dissertation): tappers thought listeners would get their song 50% of the time; in reality, the rate was around 2.5%. Listeners were equally overconfident.

2. The Mattering Effect & Human Need to Be Seen

• (08:32-13:03; 10:43-11:58)
  • John Miles shares the premise of his book, “The Mattering Effect”: loneliness, burnout, invisibility, and disengagement all stem from a crisis of significance.
  • Greg McKeown connects with this, referencing studies on orphanages: “The first lesson every human learns is that if they're not heard, they will die... not just physically, but psychologically.”
  • Quote: “We could say, to be seen, heard, known, understood... it is a cradle-to-grave need.” (Greg McKeown, 10:43)

3. Distraction vs. Disorientation in the Age of AI

• (15:48-20:24; 22:22-23:49)
  • Greg McKeown frames our current age: we’ve shifted from mere distraction (information overload) to “disorientation” (emotion overload).
  • Quote: “Information overload is one thing, but emotion overload is a different thing. And it’s this emotional noise that leaves us feeling... nausea.” (Greg McKeown, 15:48)
  • John Miles reframes Thoreau’s “quiet desperation” as “quiet disorientation” in today’s digital, borderless world.

4. Understanding as a Social—not Solo—Process

• (11:58-20:24; 29:13-30:14)
  • Deep self-knowledge arises in honest interpersonal dialogue, not in solitary reflection.
  • Quote: “We can only understand ourselves as we're talking and listening and understanding to other people.” (Greg McKeown, 29:13)
  • Diagnostic self-reflection without dialogue leads to rumination and increased misery.

5. Polarization, Safety, and the Breaking Point

• (30:14-35:59)
  • Extreme “othering” (in war and even daily life) flips us into “primal panic”—the deepest level of being misunderstood or devalued.
  • Greg McKeown points to rising polarization metrics: “When I started my research, it was one in six [people] who stopped speaking to a family member or friend... Now it’s more than one in five.” (34:30)
  • Social media–driven “noise profiteering” is heightening the danger: once half of people stop understanding each other, no collective progress is possible.

6. Case Study: Microsoft’s Cultural Turnaround

• (35:59-44:26)
  • Satya Nadella’s first act as CEO was distributing copies of Nonviolent Communication.
  • Core lesson: real change began by increasing the throughput of meaning and reducing organizational noise, not by focusing on innovation or product features.
  • Quote: “He [Nadella] considers it the most important thing he did… a serious kind of change of communication with people… you can map from there a little like the butterfly effect.” (Greg McKeown, 35:59)

7. The Signal-to-Noise Equation for Clarity

• (51:26-55:15; 69:06-69:53)
  • Clarity hinges not on amplifying our message (“signal”), but on reducing emotional, psychological, and contextual “noise.”
  • Quote: “Clarity equals signal divided by noise. A tiny reduction in noise will have a greater impact on clarity than increasing signal.” (Greg McKeown, 51:26)
  • Gandhi’s “reduce oneself to zero”–eliminating ego—is paralleled by Eric Maddox’s “erase my mind” in high-stakes interrogations (see next point).

8. Paradigm-Breaking Examples: Erase Noise, Create Understanding

• (55:15-61:15)
  • Eric Maddox, military interrogator, discovered real intelligence came not from out-talking or coercing, but from “erasing his mind” and truly listening, which led to finding Saddam Hussein in 9 months.
  • Quote: “The key... was what he called ‘I begin by erasing my mind so that I can even begin to visualize their world, their story, their narrative.’” (Greg McKeown, 51:26)
  • Being understood creates the safety needed for others to share crucial information or feelings.

9. A Simple Rule for Transformative Communication

• (47:07-51:00)
  • Referencing Carl Rogers: You may only make your point once you’ve expressed the other person’s point to their satisfaction.
  • The practical loop:
    • Listen
    • Reflect (name and mirror what they mean)
    • Speak (articulate your own perspective)
    • Confirm (ensure your meaning is truly understood)

10. Essentialism and Effortless—Why Confident Misunderstanding Holds Us Back

• (61:57-64:31)
  • The main bottleneck in practicing essentialism isn’t talent, strategy, or execution, but misunderstanding—especially confident misunderstanding.
  • We inherit flawed communication habits invisibly and perpetuate them into leadership roles, perpetuating organizational and relational dysfunction.
  • Quote: “Nothing gets done without correct understanding between people. If people are massively overconfident in their ability to understand and be understood, they just go through life ignorantly wrong. It’s the psychological, the interpersonal equivalent of everyone thinking they’re above average drivers.” (Greg McKeown, 61:57)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “The first lesson every human learns is that if they're not heard, they will die... not just physically, but psychologically.”
  — Greg McKeown, 10:43

• “We can only understand ourselves as we're talking and listening and understanding to other people.”
  — Greg McKeown, 29:13

• “It’s this emotional noise that leaves us feeling... nausea. And it leaves us feeling very reactive, of course, disconnected.”
  — Greg McKeown, 15:48

• “When you drop your defensive judgments and practice that simple loop of listening, reflecting, speaking, and confirming, you create the conditions for real understanding to emerge.”
  — John Miles, 69:06

• “Clarity equals signal divided by noise. A tiny reduction in noise will have a greater impact on clarity than increasing signal.”
  — Greg McKeown, 51:26

• “Nothing gets done without correct understanding between people... their incompetence makes their incompetence invisible. And that’s what’s happening with understanding.”
  — Greg McKeown, 64:01

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Practical Takeaways & Frameworks

• Signal-to-Noise Rule: Clarity in communication increases far more when we reduce noise than when we amplify signal.
• 4-Word Communication Loop: Listen → Reflect → Speak → Confirm.
• Rogers’ Rule: You may only state your viewpoint after accurately expressing the other’s view to their satisfaction.
• Erasing Ego: Adopt a posture of real curiosity. Reduce self-centered noise (“reduce oneself to zero”—Gandhi).

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:02 – The core challenge: Confident misunderstanding.
• 08:32 – The “Mattering Effect” and essential human needs.
• 10:43 – Why being seen/heard is life-and-death for humans.
• 15:48 – From distraction to disorientation in the digital age.
• 29:13 – Why we need others to really understand ourselves.
• 30:14 – Primal panic, polarization, and broken societal bonds.
• 35:59 – Satya Nadella’s playbook: Culture change at Microsoft.
• 51:26 – Clarity = Signal / Noise; why noise is the real bottleneck.
• 55:15 – Saddam Hussein case: How erasing personal bias leads to breakthroughs.
• 61:57 – Essentialism, Effortless, and the true obstacle to execution.

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Further Reading & Resources

• Greg McKeown:
  gregmckeown.com (free “Less But Better” course)
  Books: Essentialism and Effortless
• The Mattering Effect:
  Upcoming book by John Miles
• Referenced Works & Tools:
  • Nonviolent Communication – Marshall Rosenberg
  • Carl Rogers, “Communication: Its Blocking and Facilitation”
  • Thoreau’s “quiet desperation”
  • “Tapper” communication game (Heath brothers, Stanford dissertation)

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Closing Wisdom

“Clarity is rarely found by adding more to our lives. Often it begins by reconnecting with what has been there all along.”
— John Miles, 71:14

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This episode is a must-listen for anyone who’s ever left a conversation thinking they were perfectly clear—only to discover later that nothing was understood as intended. The tools and stories shared offer a compelling case for shifting our focus from louder signals to quieter noise, from talking more to understanding more, and from striving for certainty to cultivating meaningful connection.

Transcript

[John Miles]

Coming up next on passion struck.

[Greg McKeown]

For 10 years, I have been asking the question, what is the primary bottleneck to living out essentialism or effortless ideas in practice? In the world of relationships, teams, organizations, what's the primary bottleneck? And the answer, to my surprise, is that it isn't talent. It's not strategy, it's not execution. The primary bottleneck is like, confident misunderstanding. We are wrong, we think we're right, and we act upon that. And that's it. That's it.

[John Miles]

Welcome to Passion Struck. I'm your host, John Miles. This is the show where we explore the art of human flourishing and what it truly means to live like it matters. Each week I sit down with change makers, creators, scientists, and everyday heroes to decode the human experience and uncover the tools that help us lead with meaning, heal what hurts, and pursue the fullest expression of who we're capable of becoming. Whether you're designing your future, developing as a leader, or seeking deeper alignment in your life, this show is your invitation to grow with purpose and act with intention. Because the secret to a life of deep purpose, connection and impact is choosing to live like you matter. Hello, friends, and welcome back to passion struck, episode 778. Lately we've been exploring the profound sense of isolation that creeps in when the spaces we live in and the institutions we trust slowly lose their humanity. Today, we're taking a massive step forward in our ongoing series launch, looking at the connection crisis, shifting our focus to why your personal sense of mattering and belonging is the absolute foundation for your ability to thrive. Today, we're looking at something that affects every relationship we have the gap between what we think communicated and what another person actually heard. Have you ever been absolutely certain someone understood what you meant, only to discover later that they they heard something completely different? It happens in marriages. It happens between parents and children. It happens constantly in friendships, workplaces, and leadership teams. Most of us assume communication breaks down because people simply aren't listening or because we didn't speak clearly enough. We live in a world where everyone is talking, posting, commenting, and reacting, yet so somehow understanding feels harder than ever. We leave conversations convinced we were clear. We assume we know what someone meant, and often we're wrong. There is a term for this called confident misunderstanding, the belief that we understand one another when we actually don't. It may be one of the biggest hidden obstacles in our relationships. When we feel the exhaustion of this gap settle in, our natural instinct is usually to retreat into our own heads, overanalyze our lives, or try to endlessly hack our daily habits. But the data shows that heavy overthinking only fuels our anxiety. Some of the most important breakthroughs in our lives don't happen in isolation. They happen through honest conversation. And that's exactly why I wanted to bring our guests, Greg McKeown onto the show today. Greg is the host of the acclaimed podcast what's Essential and the globally renowned author of the blockbuster bestsellers Essentialism and Effortless. He is currently conducting groundbreaking doctoral research at the University of Cambridge, studying the deep impact of this understanding gap on human behavior. In this conversation, we explore a surprisingly simple idea. Clarity isn't just about what we say. It's about how much noise we bring into the conversation. You'll hear why even a small reduction in emotional noise can completely change the quality of understanding between people. We'll also dive into incredible stories, from the corporate cultural turnaround at Microsoft to the intense interrogation breakthroughs that led to the capture of Saddam Hussein, to show you exactly how erasing the noise in your mind allows you to truly see another person's world. Before we dive in, if this show helps you feel a little less alone, please share it with one person who's navigating their own messy transition. You can find us on YouTube. And taking just a minute to leave a rating or review on Spotify or Apple podcasts makes a massive difference. If you want the accompanying workbook to help map these insights directly into your life, you can grab [e-mail] now let's dive in with Greg McKeown. Thank you for choosing Passion Struck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life that matters. Now let that journey begin. I am absolutely honored and thrilled today to welcome Greg McKeown to Passion Struck.

[Host Guest / Interviewer (Possibly the author of 'The Mattering Effect')]

Greg, it's been a long time coming. Welcome to the show, John.

[Greg McKeown]

It's a pleasure to be with you. Thank you.

[John Miles]

You are a very well known author.

[Host Guest / Interviewer (Possibly the author of 'The Mattering Effect')]

But I'm actually going to start with your podcast today because I'm a huge fan of it and wanted to give it some airplay. You've recently had on one guest who I've always wanted to have on Matthew McConaughey, who I know personally, and I know him personally from church, of all places.

[John Miles]

Wow.

[Host Guest / Interviewer (Possibly the author of 'The Mattering Effect')]

And then you recently interviewed a friend of mine, Jamil Zaki, about kindness. What was that episode like? Because I know Jamil and I talk a lot about what he studies, which is a little bit different than the kindness gap.

[Greg McKeown]

I'll tell you the thing that stands out to me about My conversation with Jamil was a conversation that I don't remember if it was on or off air, but I am in the middle of new research. A doctorate at the University of Cambridge, a mid career doctorate, which is just a terrible idea, and writing a book on the same ideas. And he shared something that I thought was just such a brilliant insight and gave me a lot of permission and direction of what I was doing. And it was this, that for about a hundred years, psychology departments and then practitioners, so psychotherapists parted ways and psychology departments moved into the quantitative realm. And as a stereotype of the point, you can imagine doing endless surveys. Individuals fill out surveys about their experiences on any number of phenomena. Of course, that's not the only kind of research that's been done in psychology departments. But overstating the point in order to make it, whereas on the other side you've got these practitioners who are at least in conversation with one other person in therapy sessions. So it's an ongoing conversation and so they're developing expertise in that area. But the overlap has been minor. And one of the reasons it's minor, as one of my advisors has pointed out to me, doing the complex interplay between people is so challenging to study it in is so immense, so much is happening. You can see why people have moved to the other side of the aisle. But recently he made the point that perhaps no more than 10 years ago, that a few researchers have emerged who have been using the new technologies that we have, the deep data and very much more recently AI, to be able to bridge the gap. It's called naturalistic methodologies. And that's what I've been doing in my research. It was such a valuable, useful way of naming and framing the problem. And it's affected directly the way that I tried to approach what it is I've been studying. So that's just one insight that I had from speaking with Jamil.

[Host Guest / Interviewer (Possibly the author of 'The Mattering Effect')]

I always find he gives me the best tidbits off screen as well. When I was starting to try to frame my book that's coming out in October, it's called the Mattering Effect, and I went to two people to help me think about it. One was Dan Heath and the other was Jim. And they both provided really good context in different ways on how to approach it. So I agree with you that he's really brilliant.

[Greg McKeown]

And what is the Mattering Effect?

[Host Guest / Interviewer (Possibly the author of 'The Mattering Effect')]

There have been a lot of books, starting with Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone, that have really explored how our life has shifted. And for me that that shift is really personal. I reached a point where I just felt numb and exhausted. And when I reached that point, I started to really search for answers for why did that happen to me? And I started to see the loneliness epidemic. And people disengaged, burned out, all these different things. And what struck me was they all can't be separate things. They have to be symptomatic of something larger. And I think that something larger is a feeling of insignificance or invisibility. And so there have been some recent books that have explored what mattering is. This book builds on that foundation of what Jenny Wallace and Rebecca Goldstein and others have done. But it gives a systematic framework of if we're losing that sense of significance, how do you build it back? First within kind of our own human operating system. And then once you do that, then how do you scale it beyond yourself into work, your families, your relationships, society at large? So that's what the book does.

[Greg McKeown]

It's a beautiful word, mattering, isn't it? That idea is easy for me to relate to. So there's a kind of a meeting of the minds moment. Because the first lesson every human learns is that if they're not heard, they will die. And that's physiologically true because of course, if your cry is not heard and you're not fed, you will die. But it's also turns out to be psychologically true. Where we have these case studies in Romania, for example, and also in. In England when children were first. I can't remember the name I'm looking for. But when they're put into these hospitals. But that's. What's the word I'm looking for? Orphanages. There you go.

[Host Guest / Interviewer (Possibly the author of 'The Mattering Effect')]

Yes.

[Greg McKeown]

These cases of perfectly physiologically healthy children. In both cases we have these well documented rolling over and dying. So their physiological needs are being met, but not their psychological needs. And it still has a physiological impact. One of the things that I've been studying through these last sort of four or five years is the depth of that need. And you're calling it mattering. We could say, in other words, too, we could say to be seen, heard, known, understood. And that isn't a nice to have. It's a need as deep as. But I think it's as deep as anything minus physical survival. And it's the latest that we understand on this. It is a cradle to grave need. And so it's not just as attachment theory once suggested, just these. These key years of one to three, although clearly that really does matter and is disproportionately important. It stays with us. And I may have interesting thoughts as to how to develop that within ourselves. Counterintuitive insights into how to do that. But anyway, this is a meeting of the minds moment.

[Host Guest / Interviewer (Possibly the author of 'The Mattering Effect')]

I think it's a fascinating conversation. And what you are describing very well is actually what's termed the mattering instinct. That instinct, right when we come out of the womb, is to do just that. We are looking to be felt, to be seen by another. And we carry that instinct throughout our lives. And you are also correct. Psychologically, it's as important to us as safety or love. And what I think people don't understand is when we think of topics like meaning. And there have been some great books on that recently with Brooks's book and Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. Meaning is built on top of connection, which is built on top of the foundation that we stand upon, which to me is mattering. And I put out a book about six weeks ago aimed at this for children called you matter Luma, which is really focused on how do you restore mattering in what I call the wet cement years of childhood. When they're 4 to 8 years old,

[John Miles]

I think there are two intervention points.

[Host Guest / Interviewer (Possibly the author of 'The Mattering Effect')]

You have that age and then you have another age at from 10 to 13 where that cement is starting to take hold. And kids are starting to now be of the age that they can ask the questions and understand what this really means. And if those two reinforcement points, 4

[John Miles]

to 8, 10 to 13 aren't met,

[Host Guest / Interviewer (Possibly the author of 'The Mattering Effect')]

that's where you now go from being able to instill it to now having to self correct it. Which is exactly what happened to me in my life. So I have now spent probably close to 18, 19 years now studying it. This book is really a compilation of over 200 interviews that I've done on this topic.

[Greg McKeown]

Well and beyond the 200 interviews, what you're describing, I think is in that self correction process is the deep work of life to be able to. It's almost like a. The sci fi idea of going where nobody's gone before. And to do that deep work is. I think what it takes is courage. And courage feels terrible.

[Host Guest / Interviewer (Possibly the author of 'The Mattering Effect')]

I am.

[Greg McKeown]

We want as little of it as possible is the general practical rule. Right. We don't want to. It sounds good in books, but in practice it's a terrible feeling to feel courage and the need for courage. But that sounds like what you've done is to go is. Is that 20 year journey, almost 20 years is really about that. The unraveling of how you got here in service of rebuilding something different. Something better. What did I get wrong?

[Host Guest / Interviewer (Possibly the author of 'The Mattering Effect')]

No, I mean, it's absolutely the case. I think we're best positioned to serve the person we once were. And when I saw the impact that this had on me and how it in fact impacted all elements of my life, I started to see it everywhere I looked. And so that's why this book became so important to me, because it's not just about fixing myself. It's so many people out there are completely lost. And this is going to be one of the first questions I was going to ask you. One of the reasons they're lost is, I heard you say this is because they've lost the narrative of their lives. And that's what's plaguing, I think, so much of society today. And when you lose that narrative of your life, it's a very uncomfortable position to be in because it's like being lost at sea and you're in the middle of the ocean and you don't know how to get yourself to safety. That's kind of how I felt when this was happening to me.

[Greg McKeown]

You said a couple of different things there. Let's just build on this idea of people having lost the narrative of their lives. So when I wrote essentialism 10ish years ago, we were firmly in the middle of the Information age, whose primary characteristic or challenge was distraction. And it's not like that has gone away, but as we've moved into the AI age, I don't think it's distraction only. It's disorientation. And that's not a trivial shift as far as I'm concerned. Because information overload is one thing, but emotion overload is a different thing. And it's this emotional noise that leaves us feeling. Well, the word noise fittingly comes from the Latin nausea. And so that this state we're in is a state of nausea. And it leaves us feeling very reactive, of course, disconnected. And I suppose the question that. One of the questions that I've been wrestling with is, well, what do you do about it? And one of the answers that's been most counterintuitive to me is that you don't primarily figure it out. I'm not now saying there isn't a role for self reflection. Course there is. But what I think is that the deepest insights we get into ourselves happen in interpersonal dialogue of a certain kind. And it's so rare. It was rare even before the Information age. It's rarer even now in the AI age. And without it we really are adrift. Back to the point that we started on today, this hundred year separation between psychology and psychologists, let's say, is that when you're studying meaning and psychology and connection and understanding from the point of view of the individual mind, yes, you're going to learn things. But the problem is that mind was not formulated in separation from others. We've already identified if there's no connection between you and others, you can physiologically you can physically die from that lack of connection. So the mind that's been studied for 100 years is an incomplete model, very incomplete to think of it this way. And this is. Thalia Wheatley is one of the leading researchers in the world on this. It's called naturalistic methodologies. And it's like this is a paradigm shift. It's so intuitive. When you hear it, you think, well, how can it be a paradigm shift? But I tried to already put that into context. It's as we learn to understand others and be understood by others that is the most important metabolism of our lives. I write a journal every day. I believe in this. I'm not arguing that self reflection has no place. Nevertheless, I think that what must happen in order to address the loneliness, what I would call the understanding gap, to give a different name to it is must happen between people. And it's in that process that we will learn who we are. And in some ways there is not any reasonable alternative to that because everywhere we go, there we are. Everywhere we go, our thoughts are with us, we are observing us. This is not a great feedback loop loop. In fact we know that's true because rumination and thinking of self literally loads on the same axis as misery. So we know that just thinking obsessively more and more, why do I think that? How am I built? What's going on in attempt to understand ourselves? An attempt to hack ourselves is actually not hacking, but attacking ourselves. And it's really not at all optimal. So learning how to understand and be understood. This is where I believe the big breakthroughs in healing the mattering crisis or the understanding gap lies before we continue.

[John Miles]

Thank you for supporting Passion Struck and

[Host Guest / Interviewer (Possibly the author of 'The Mattering Effect')]

for sharing these conversations with others.

[John Miles]

One of the biggest themes you're hearing in today's conversation with Greg McKeown is that your mind cannot be fully understood in isolation. We simply cannot live a truly essential life without upgrading our ability to communicate about the things that matter most with the people who matter most. If you've ever felt invisible despite working hard, contributing and doing everything you thought you were supposed to do, that's exactly the question I'm exploring in my upcoming book, the Mattering Effect. The book examines why so many people feel unseen and despite doing everything they were taught, should make them feel successful. And what changes when we rebuild a genuine sense of significance. We create companion workbooks and weekly reflections for every single episode to help you apply these conversations more intentionally. You can explore all of it completely [e-mail] Now, a quick break for our sponsors. Thank you for supporting those who support the show. You're listening to Passion Struck right here on the Passion Struck Network. Now let's get back to the conversation with Greg McEwen.

[Host Guest / Interviewer (Possibly the author of 'The Mattering Effect')]

Well, you're absolutely correct, and that's exactly what the book tries to tackle and why it took me so long to try to come up with a framework on how to go after it. Which is why I sought out Dan Heath. Because when I think of frameworks, he and his brother are some of the best at it. Because I, I was just knocking my head against a wall for about 18 months trying to think of like, how do you even approach this? And yeah, but something you said I want to highlight. I put out a substack post about 2 months ago. My sister passed away from pancreatic cancer about 18 months ago.

[Greg McKeown]

And I'm so sorry.

[Host Guest / Interviewer (Possibly the author of 'The Mattering Effect')]

It's just one of those diseases that is one of the worst that's out there. And I happened to be fortunate enough to take one of the last walks with her. And as we were doing that walk, we were talking about Henry David Thoreau and talking about quiet desperation. And when I think about his concept of quiet desperation, he was thinking about a world that had walls because we didn't have the digital world then. And so in this article that I wrote, I adopted it and I said that we have gone from this quietness that he talked about is quiet desperation to now quiet disorientation. So when you said the word disorientation, I couldn't agree with you more, because we've taken that whole quiet desperation and now we've moved it to a world with no walls. And I think that is what's happening to so many of us, is we've gone to this paradigm shift, as you described it, where now we are expected to feel all the issues that are going on. It goes back to Dunbar's number. Like we've gone from a tribe of 150 to now we're expected to be a tribe of 7 billion. And your body was just never meant to have that type of association. Yet that's what we force on ourselves. So no Wonder we're disoriented. So I love that you're thinking about the same thing because it's a profound shift.

[Greg McKeown]

I mean, I've just wrote down quiet desperation versus possibly noisy disorientation, depending how you think about it. But I like both ways of thinking about that. Yeah. I was thinking, as we've been discussing this, about a story that I haven't published anywhere, to my recollection, but it happened when I was a young man. I was on a church mission, and I was paired up with someone who is, as you would expect, really different to me. And that's totally fine. We were getting on just fine. And then somebody had this idea. They said, so we were in, like, a zone of, let's say, 15, 20 of us, and someone said, oh, we should go. And early in the morning, go and. On a creation. And we were in Toronto at the time, and so let's go to Lake Ontario on a creation. And it wasn't my design. And I don't know, for some, for whatever reason, I wasn't like, super, yeah, this is what we should do. But I wanted to support the effort, so we went. And so they're really. It's very beautiful. They're peaceful. You can see Toronto in the gray morning light. Behind us, you can see Lake Ontario. There's. And then right in the midst of this, while someone has just barely finished reading, literally, the creation story, the person I was paired with, my companion, he starts throwing, not pebbles, but, like, big rocks at the seagulls. And then he hits one of them. And so this seagull is just. It's not like. Just hit and flew off. Like, he has damaged this eagle. And not to be too graphic, but he has just paralyzed the seagull. And it's absolutely horrific as far as I was concerned. And the scene of it, too. Like, it's a peaceful scene. And the whole point was creation and honoring that. And I just couldn't even speak to him. I couldn't even look at him. I just was like, what were you thinking? And so we were on public transport all the way home, and the same. I couldn't look at him, couldn't speak to him. I was just in shock. And I suppose that I was moving into that mode. So this was not long after I had been introduced to the power of Rogerian type listing and understanding. And so I had already seen firsthand within months of this experience. So this was very close to having just discovered it in a formal sense, that there was structure to this and that it was repeatable and that you could connect with people in minutes, not months. And to have them say things like, I've never told anyone this, but suddenly they would be doing it. And it was so amazing to me, almost. Almost magic. And so I'm wrestling with this and then this experience happens. And in a way, I think I thought, well, what's it all for if I can't apply it here? Certainly this is a testing moment, right? Can it apply into the thing that I think is so unthinkable or wrong or foolish or whatever the words would be. So after it's a bit more regulated, I ask him, okay, so what were you thinking? Right, but from a genuine, okay, I want to see where you're coming from. I'm still got my own strangeness about. But I can put that aside for a moment. Where's it coming from? And he just explained, look, I grew up on a farm, rural area. Seagulls. We had huge seagull problems. We killed thousands of seagulls all the time. They're just pests. They're rodents to us, and we're a threat to us too. So he didn't say these words, but the spirit of it was, this is as much of a moral moment as killing a fly, maybe stepping on a watch. There's. That isn't what it means to him. And it's in that observation that I suddenly discovered something about myself. And that's this point, this broader point I'm trying to make, that we can only understand ourselves as we're talking and listening and understanding to other people. And it was in that moment I realized, well, I grew up having Jonathan Livingston Siegel, the book read to me. I read it myself. This was multiple times. This was meaningful to me personally. It was meaningful in our family. And I realized, oh, what he did, in my mind, he killed Jonathan. And I thought, right, okay, So I can still hold on to the idea this is not a wise kind thing to have done. That wasn't the thing. Even now, I think, yeah, that's not the thing to have done. But nor did I have to be imprisoned by. By on a moral continuum that was so different in kind to where he was coming from in his own experience with it. And so from that we were able to work through it and became, I would say, better friends afterwards. I remember buying him a poster of Michael Jordan. He was a big basketball player. And it was the wings. One way you've got. Where you've got Jordan wings spread out, called Wings. And it's quite impressive looking picture and just wrote to him, to the seagull killer. And that was just a moment of laughter between us because we had found shared meaning and understanding. And yeah, I think in that simple, in some ways trivial story of my just barely out of youth that I think a lot can be made of how much we start to understand ourselves and only can understand ourselves through understanding other people and being understood by them.

[Host Guest / Interviewer (Possibly the author of 'The Mattering Effect')]

It's a very troubling story. And unfortunately I've seen this under extreme situations where I was in combat earlier in my career and part of the trauma recovery program process for me was observing what you saw with a seagull, with people. And that is one of the hardest things for me to understand is how in extreme situations we stop seeing the value of another human being at its most extreme form when we're pushed into those situations like that. But the scary thing is for me is that in much of society that viewpoint of the other is becoming more extreme in just ordinary situations, which is where this gets really scary. And this interview is going in many different directions than I thought it would. But they're important topics.

[Greg McKeown]

Well, I think there is a golden thread running through it as it is, even if it's different to the one as imagined. I think you're right in a sense, however awful. What I'm about to say is it's not hard to understand how humans in a military setting come to think of the. Of the enemy as less than human. First of all, you're being told that secondly, it helps to. To. It helps to resolve the cognitive dissonance that fighting and killing each other inherently produces. Has to produce. This is a way to resolve it. But even an even simpler way of saying it is as soon as you see somebody else as threat, then your own psychology reduces into that lizard brain. Into the term I like the most is primal panic. And that's what happens when people feel themselves misunderstood. Well, what, what else can it be? When you feel someone, if they see you, will kill you. Then the most extreme form of being misunderstood, devalued, unseen, unimportant, dehumanized. What else could that be? That, of course, that's what people are experiencing. Of course people experience primal panic. And so in that state, it's very easy to stop seeing other people. Just biologically, we're going to. We move into a. Into that. A different mode. Now, your broader point is, I think, exactly spot on. Which is what happens when. When what I would describe as an artificial process generates the sense that we need to see each other as threat because the same functionality takes place, the same primal panic, the same exaggeration of positions. And we haven't used the word so far, but, but I do think that. I think that the polarization, what we would mean, what I. Yeah, what could be covered by that word is in its richest sense is the. Is the single. It is the primary threat that we face. I believe that. I believe it's more important than any other political difference. So however much I might disagree with somebody about some policy, some issue, however important that is, it is not as important as this, as the growing level of distorting contention that is infecting us. And because in the simplest sense, what is happening is that we're approaching a noise threshold. And the difference between noise being loud and then you pass a point where the decibel level, very small incremental increase of noise makes it impossible to understand the meaning. Anyone who's experienced that with a radio ever in their life, one degree more on the dial, you can still hear words, but you. You don't know what's being said. And so it's very subtle difference. And I think that we are approaching that point. The data is alarming. I think the most alarming statistic for me has been how many people have stopped speaking to a family member or friend because of polarization. When I started my research, it was one in six. When I was writing it up, it was one in five. When I most recently searched for it, as I was writing it up, it was already described as more than one in five. It's not obvious to me that. It is obvious to me that the forces in play right now will continue. And we can be at 1 in 4 and 1 in 3 and 1 and 2. If you get to 1 and 2, okay, now you can't do anything. If you can't understand each other, you can't do anything else. There isn't an anything else. Everything else that you could possibly want to do grows out of the foundation of being able to understand each other, be able to figure out what they mean, figure out what you mean. And you have to have a certain level of safety to be able to do that. And being constantly on this high alert with each other, primarily, I would say, because of social media polarization. Profiteering, I would say, is the primary cause, although there's many others. Yeah, I don't think it can be overstated. The problem, the level of risk we're in now.

[Host Guest / Interviewer (Possibly the author of 'The Mattering Effect')]

And one of my favorite researchers who unfortunately passed away from cancer was Emile Bruno, who really studied this at Wharton and I loved him for the fact that he would thrust himself into conflict of the largest size and he would go and help the other side see each other. Because I think especially here in the United States and in much of the Western world, we are so fixated on either or thinking that it just drives us to one extreme or the other. And I wish people would adopt more both and because it would help us profoundly see the perspectives of others and get us off of these cliffs that we find ourselves on that have become so divisive.

[Greg McKeown]

Here's what I think can be done about it. Actually, let me tell you a story that I think is, is an important illustration of what I think is the solution. It's a business example. You go, so about 10 years ago, Microsoft just had a decade lost decade and they bring in the new CEO, Satya Nadella. He comes in, what's he going to do? He's got no end of things he could do because there's all sorts of innovation cycle problems. They've just canceled Zune, which itself, when it came into existence was two years behind the equivalent product at Apple. And eventually they just fail at it. Right, so that's just one of many illustrations. So what does he do? Very first meeting, I interviewed the president Microsoft, as he told me. The story is that he came in and he gave everyone a copy of nonviolent communication. And that's not normal for that culture. That was a hugely symbolic thing, but also wasn't just symbolic. It was symbolic about the very, what he believed was a, either the central issue or a central issue. And you can map from there a little like the butterfly effect, that symbolic action and how it reverberated outwards. I don't mean that alone, but how that helped to create a tonal change and actual skill development. And he was modeling it constantly. So it wasn't, it was genuinely how he was going to lead. And he considers it the most important thing he did over the next six months, next year was a serious kind of change of communication with people. And in doing that, so he would call people at brand new employees of the company and just ask them questions and listen to them and really try and gather insight from them. And so the logic of this is not the benefits of being understanding, it is the benefits of actually understanding. That is not the same thing at all. Because what people say is not of equal value. There's something that people know that is disproportionately valuable. Anyone he's speaking to as the CEO, they have something that's really a Signal in the noise. They have insight, but the problem about meaningful things is that they feel disproportionately vulnerable to share them. So if you try and scream at people to get them to say what they really feel, well, yeah, that's not really likely to happen. You have to create enough safety and enough genuine curiosity that people go, okay, well, let me share. I will share. I'll try and make sense of this myself with you. He said that all those insights, all those signals is what helped him to be able to define the vision and the strategy for the company. Over the 10 years he's been there, he's gone from 350 billion to 3.5 trillion, depending on the day. One of the few companies ever to be a $4 trillion company, and this is at the heart of it, because it affected those signals. What then help you to make better decisions or less stupid ones, be less wrong at least, which let you to be more innovative, which mean you can do things faster than your competitors because they, they are still dealing with noise while you're dealing with signal and so on. And so he's a signalist. That would be my new language for that. Right? That's what that he leads as a signalist. I love that story. In terms of what can we do about the polarization? That doesn't sound like a polarized story. In one sense it isn't. But what I love about it is that if you can improve through the throughput of understanding, if you can increase the throughput of meaning sharing even a tiny amount, then you disproportionately improve everything because it's the actual bottleneck, it's what the resistance is made of. If I were to say it in simpler terms, I would say it like this. I know that when my wife and I, if we're in an argument, sometimes we'll laugh, maybe we'll laugh afterwards, occasionally in between it, and we're like, we don't even know what we're arguing about anymore. The meaning has been lost. And it just goes to show that threshold moment, if you can reduce noise even a little bit, suddenly everything makes more sense. Everything works. And vice versa is also true. That's really what happened at Microsoft under Satya Nadella. And I think it's a good, an optimistic, but a helpful case study for what we're going through. Our culture is also sick. It is sick for exactly the same reasons. The patterns are the same. The disagreements weren't there over politics, but they were over directions of products and how to communicate meetings. But the dynamics are the same because the symptoms, there's 100 symptoms, but the cause is still the same understanding gap between people.

[Host Guest / Interviewer (Possibly the author of 'The Mattering Effect')]

Greg, I'm going to just share a story with you and I'll try to keep it as short as I can. So I first met Steve Ballmer in 2005. I was senior executive at Lowe's, reporting directly to our cio. And at that point in time, Lowe's was one of the only big box retailers that wasn't running Microsoft operating systems in our store because it was so costly. And not only that, it opened you up to security vulnerabilities and all kinds of patching and overhead. So we ran a very Unix based ecosystem and because of that, all our registers were really dumb terminals and we were just running this simple OS on them. But it was extremely powerful because our systems rarely went down because each store could function independently in the way that it had built. And I remember Bomber coming in and having this meeting. It was myself, Steve, our CIO and one of my peers and he was like just pounding his fist on the table, how dare you not use Microsoft products. What you know, and it was just. If you knew Steve Ballmer, you know

[Greg McKeown]

what I'm talking about. Of course. No, for those that don't know him, you just look up his famous you can do. It's one of the first viral memes of the Internet is him screaming is the developer's speech. And you just can search that up Steve Ballmo developer speech and you'll see a certain glimpse of a way of operating. Carry on with your story please.

[Host Guest / Interviewer (Possibly the author of 'The Mattering Effect')]

So I fast forward six years from that and now I'm a CIO at Dell and one of the presidents I'm working with is this guy Ron Gehrigs, who's in charge of our smartphone strategy. And we had two devices we were going to launch on the Android, which is what we wanted to launch the streak on. And then this Microsoft platform and we had made the decision we were going to go to Android. So Bomber flies out, has this meeting with us and it's the exact same meeting he had with me at Lowe's. He's vehemently just caustic screaming at us, et cetera. And we stood like we did at Lowe's. We're not changing, were going with Android. And then he unfortunately met with the CEO of Dell who came out of that meeting and told us we're launching the product on the Microsoft os. And I remember Garrick said he had like a team meeting of his direct reports and he said we're dead on arrival. And that's exactly what happened. So then I fast forward three years from that point and Ballmer asked me to come and become the CIO at Microsoft. And I'm on my round of interviews, going around and just meeting one executive after another who is just miserable. The whole environment there is just infighting and more infighting. And the last interview I have was with Satya, who begged me to take the job and just give it two or three years because he thought there would be change in the works. And he was explaining to me what his vision was, which is exactly what he implemented. But I personally didn't think I could last that long in the environment. So that's my Microsoft.

[Greg McKeown]

That's fascinating story, right? And it's not really a story about whether you should have made a different decision or not. That isn't even the point about the story. In a way, the story, one way to think about it is how much all of us are conditioned in certain ways. Oh yeah, your experiences with Steve Ballmer. Right. Like not the only conditioning experiences, but those experiences previously. When you then see it again at my Microsoft, you go, look, I can't sign up for that kind of feeling all the time. And yes, actually you're a different thing, but we don't know will you be successful? Is, is one person, is it going to turn it around? Is there going to be something different coming from it? And fortunately, I would say in a lot of ways he has been successful. But I love the story, I love the background, I love the, the support of this observation. Yeah, they were famous for it, right? That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard, screaming that in meetings, then you go from that to nonviolent. Communication is a big culture shift that's being attempted. But building on it, though, it's the reason I even shared the Satcher story that we went down this sort of Microsoft riffing. Here is a solution that is an antidote. And it was first described in 1952 by Carl Rogers. And, and I'm not going to suggest that he's the only person who's ever written about this, but it was a very important breakthrough. Certainly he thought that, you know, of course, Carl Rogers, but so many people don't now, but Carl Rogers was arguably the most important influence psychotherapist of the 20th century. Certainly within therapeutic circles, he's considered the most important. He gives a talk, it's called Communication on Its Blocking and Facilitation. It's one speech. He published it later in Books verbatim as the same speech. But he describes in there what he felt was a test tube solution, that is a micro solution to what he thought was the big macro problem of problems of the time. And he said if you follow this simple procedure, then you can take put people in rooms in totally polarized positions and help them to make enormous progress in rapid periods of time if they'll obey a single rule. Are you familiar with this? Am I already sharing something you already know or is this on the edge of that knowledge?

[Host Guest / Interviewer (Possibly the author of 'The Mattering Effect')]

It's on the edge of that now I'm so very familiar with Carl Rogers.

[Greg McKeown]

Of course, so much has been written and validated about Roger's general views, but this particular article, this particular finding has been much, much less studied, perhaps for some of the reasons we've already discussing. But this is the rule. The rule is you only get to make your point after you've made the other person's point to that person's satisfaction. That's it, right? So now that's the change in the normal communication shape. And he said when that, when you do this, he says if, especially if he says if you bring a third person in, right? Like a neutral, he called them an understanding catalyst. So someone who's a neutral third party, who is just there to help people do that because it sounds so simple. But my goodness, in practice people can struggle with this so deeply it can be one of the hardest things they've ever tried to do. And then at the end he throws down this gauntlet in a way. He says what we need to do is take this test tube solution. We need to replicate it, we need to codify it, refine it, scale it. So 72 years later, I can't find any academic publication that has done this. Now there might be, it could be under different names and so on, I don't know. But I've looked pretty deeply and can't find anything. And that's what I've been doing is to try to do that. And so one of the things in the process, so we've been literally built a listening lab. You bring two people in at a time and help facilitate this rule. And so all sorts of people, we've had a head teacher, principal and one of their teachers had a police chief, one of his direct reports. We have husbands and wives, we've had parents and children, all sorts of dynamics, business and non business business partners, all sorts and have been studying the interchange and how, what to do and so on. You can simplify this process into a four word loop. And it's this, right? It's listen, reflect, speak, confirm. That's it, right? That's the entry point.

[Host Guest / Interviewer (Possibly the author of 'The Mattering Effect')]

Yeah, it's pretty simple.

[Greg McKeown]

It's a loop that really matters. And there's a balancing within these steps because listen is okay, that's me making it safe, let's say, for you to say what you mean. And the reflect is then me trying to find words to name what it is that you mean, haven't yet said out loud, but you really do mean better than you can. So I'm saying what you mean. Well then they're having got to that clarity and that might take a few iterations, but then it's my turn, right. I need to be able to know how to say what I mean, which is itself a new skill. My experience is almost nobody says what they mean for lots of reasons, including they haven't figured out what they mean yet. This is not nothing. And then the final step and that's in the loop is confirm, that is, I don't take it for granted that just because I've said what I mean, even if I've said it clearly, even if I'm practiced at it, I don't assume there's been understanding they have to say what I mean. And so there's this kind of very simple but clean equilibrium there in that pattern. And you can look at it graphically and you can break down specific skills and phrases that people can use in each of them to try to reduce the noise and increase the signal flow between people. And it's been really quite shocking to see, to see how this has played out in these sessions.

[Host Guest / Interviewer (Possibly the author of 'The Mattering Effect')]

Greg, I know you're a big fan of Gandhi's work, so if you just took what you suggested with that loop, what would happen if you combine that with Gandhi's idea of reducing oneself to zero? Because as I see this, if in a lot of what you're talking about here is ego and removing oneself of ego. So to me it would have a compounding effect the way I think about it. But I'm interested in your thoughts.

[Greg McKeown]

I want to connect directly with the Gandhi question, but I want to do it this way and you'll see why there's a. In the early 1900s, you've got the first telegram and radio operators. So there's new cutting edge technology. And the people that were trying to utilize those technologies started using a metaphor for what they're doing. Signal and noise. We've been using that as a metaphor throughout the conversation. Signal was the message you're trying to Send and noise is everything in the atmosphere, right? Like the literal physical noise interference that exists. And they knew from very early on that there was a relationship between the two. And they knew the relationship was approximately more signal power will help. And if you could reduce noise power then that will also help. But it took 50 years until there was researcher put was able to articulate the mathematical relationship. So the law of information communication, and if I were to summarize that law in its simplest possible form, it would be this is clarity equals signal divided by noise. Now that is really important. And unless somebody's particularly mathematically inclined, it won't be obvious even when you first hear it, what the importance of that is. But what it means is that noise is the determining factor. A tiny reduction in noise will have a greater impact on clarity than increasing signal. That's the point. And in fact, if you just want to stay mathematical for a moment, if you can reduce noise to zero and what happens to clarity is it reaches almost to infinity, that is the law. And that isn't just like a nice idea. That law has been utilized by almost all technologies that are trying to send out messages or receive them ever since. So that is a great deal of our modern life is shaped by that. It's a very profound insight. All right, so if you can reduce the noise, clarity increases. That's the importance. Now you use the phrase, I know the phrase, of course, used that phrase myself. That Gandhi, one of his key input insights for being able to have this disproportionate impact in India was to reduce himself to zero. If I can cut out that noise, then that will help. And he was clearly, clearly correct. We're going to tie all these together. It's also almost verbatim language that I got from Eric Maddox. Okay, so we're going to take this signal to noise ratio equation. Okay, we're putting that aside. Gandhi, you've mentioned, we touched upon it. Now I want to talk about Eric Maddox and this will all thread together. Eric Maddox was, he worked in the intelligence agency and he was a Mandarin translator, but he also took an eight week course in interrogation techniques. So that's just minimum standard basic certification for being able to do interrogation. He does it, he almost fails the class. He doesn't like it. He doesn't like what he's learning in there. And he just goes, okay, put it aside, go back to what I was doing until the Iraq war erupts. And as they're trying to gather together personnel, they're just literally looking through, okay, who has These two things checked on their, in their employee file and he matches the combination. What it means in practical terms is he is sent immediately out of the blue to the front lines, in, to Crete in Iraq with no, he's never interrogated a prisoner ever. And now he is required to do that 10, 12 hours every single day. So the military would go and collect people that they thought might have information of interest and he would follow a procedure, a protocol. And the protocol was exactly as I'm about to describe it. Well, I already know you're guilty and I've got your, all the information here in this vanilla envelope here. I already know you're going to Guantanamo for the rest of your life. The only way that you can get less than Guantanamo for the rest of your life is to cooperate with me. And if he could have somebody successfully go from a state of non cooperation to cooperation, that's called breaking them. And he states the number that in this industry, if industry is the right word for it, but in this discipline, globally the rates are about 4% success rates, so very low success rates using this approach. And he does this for days. He hates doing it. He thinks the whole thing is stupid, as he did in his interrogation class. But he doesn't either have the courage to do anything different or doesn't perhaps even know there's a different way. Just doesn't think this is a very good way. Until one of the prisoners turns to him and says, straight to him, just eyeball to eyeball, he says, you don't get me and you don't want to get me. And that pierces him because he knows that's true. He knows that's built in, baked into the protocol he's using. And it's. Yeah, well, that's it. You've named it. We feel naked. What's. What on earth? What are we doing here? I don't even want to understand the other person. I'm assuming the whole story is what I already have defined. I'm just trying to coerce them using that existing story. So out of fear they're going to break. Well, from then on he's okay, I'm not doing this anymore. And so instead what he does is he moves into. I don't even. I would just a signalist, right? I don't have better language than this. He just goes in there, listen to really lose himself in the other person's story. Okay, tell me all about it. Tell me everything. Just keep them talking. That was the goal. Just keep them talking so I can keep hearing and Understanding, he said when he did this, he said every person we spoke to, he says he now believes that with everyone in life are dropping breadcrumbs for us and they're testing to see whether there is real interest. What level of safety am I at? How much do they want to understand? And if they don't, if they're just here to judge or if they've already judged, I'm not interested. I know from the testing. And he said he found that they were all sharing it. And when he listened and understood, they just keep going and keep telling. He said by the end of an interrogation he knew already very clearly it didn't take expertise. He felt five places they've lied. It wouldn't get stop them all away. Just keep letting him talk and talk. But he could feel those shifts, those, let's say micro body glitches. And so you just go back to them, okay, listen, I've heard your whole story, but there are these five moments that you've talked about this. Let's go back and talk about each of these and what's really going on. So Eric Maddox starts doing this and within nine months has the most complete picture of Saddam Hussein's network of anyone in the military in the world. Nine months. Compare that 11 years with finding Osama bin Laden. Nine months. Some of the prisoners were helping him. Now they were fully part of his leadership team in being able to put this network together. And he's able to identify exactly where Saddam Hussein, on the last day that he is in duty is where he. They identify exactly where he is. And there was the night before, the moment we all remember where Saddam Hussein is found coming out of what was called the spider cave or whatever, a spider hole. And this is Eric Maddox. Okay, Eric Maddox, what's the connection? Back to your original question with Gandhi, Reduce myself to zero. He said the key to doing this was, was what he called I'm going to erase my mind. I begin by erasing my mind so that I can even begin to visualize their world, their story, their narrative. And so that I think is a, is a similar point, the noise. Now he doesn't use this way, but Carl Rogers, he doesn't use the word noise, but the enemy that what he calls the blocker is our tendency to evaluate other people before we've understood them. And he said that this is the idea, that's the noise in the equation. So reading, putting that aside, pausing and trying to lose ourselves, where do they come from? How are they seeing it? What do they understand? What does this mean to them and staying with it is the, is just the key to getting signals to be revealed and connecting those signals. Whether it's Gandhi in India, whether it's Satya Nadella at Microsoft, whether it's Eric Maddox in the middle of one of the noisiest environments you could even imagine. In those kinds of environments there is such a way to break through. And so this intent to understand and be understood and no other intent represents a significant paradigm shift from what we are doing now and what we have even experienced in our lives. And once we discover it, the world opens up to us.

[Host Guest / Interviewer (Possibly the author of 'The Mattering Effect')]

Greg, what you're going to find is so uncanny here about this whole discussion is the mattering effect is all about the mattering signal and how it gets erased, which I call through the slow fade and then how we rebuild it. And so that, so the whole book is the architecture of rebuilding the signal.

[Greg McKeown]

It's beautiful.

[Host Guest / Interviewer (Possibly the author of 'The Mattering Effect')]

I had no, no idea we would have this type of conversation, but I really appreciate it. We didn't even get to talk about your two phenomenal books, so I'm going to just bring them up because if the. I'm sure that's what the readers

[John Miles]

came

[Host Guest / Interviewer (Possibly the author of 'The Mattering Effect')]

in to hear about.

[Greg McKeown]

Let me connect the dots if you want. You put this at the beginning, but for 10 years I have been asking the question, what is the primary bottleneck to living out essentialism or effortless ideas in practice? In the world of relationships, teams, organizations, what's the primary bottleneck? The answer, to my surprise, is that it isn't talent, it's not strategy, it's not execution. The primary bottleneck is like confident misunderstanding. We are wrong, we think we're right and we act upon that. And that's it? That's it. There's a tapper game that was invented. You may be familiar with it given that you know the Heath's work, but it's a 1990 dissertation written by PhD student at Stanford University. And it wasn't the main thing even that she wrote about. But the first experiment she ran was a game where two people, two dyad. So she had 40 in total, 40 people. And they had the experiment three times. And the experiment was person one would tap a song to person two and person two had to guess the song with no words, no music, no humming, no singing, just tapping. But before she did that, she asked the question, well, what's your confidence level as a tapper? How confident are you? The lister will get it. And on average they said 50% across the 120 experiments. In practice, they were successful three times out of 120, so two and a half percent. Now. She didn't ask the listeners their confidence level. So I've replicated the study more than once and found that that listeners are as confident or more. So you have this perception problem and it's not about some peripheral issue. It is about the primary mechanism of life. Because nothing gets done without correct understanding between people. So it's not nothing. It's not trivial. And if people are massively overconfident in their ability to understand and be understood, then they just go through life ignorantly. Wrong. It's the psychological, the interpersonal equivalent of everyone thinking they're above average drivers.

[Host Guest / Interviewer (Possibly the author of 'The Mattering Effect')]

Right.

[Greg McKeown]

Their incompetence makes their incompetence invisible. And that's what's happening with understanding, is that we learn communication is the most important skill in life. Understanding is the most important skill. Within that, we learn what skills we do have for how to do that from our family of origin primarily. And that's where it's invisible. No one announced to us. This is really limited communication by the way that you're observing here. This is, this is really dysfunctional, in fact. And you'll have to learn some new. No one ever says that. So you're just going through life invisible, taking those skills with you, taking them with you. Become the CEO of Microsoft. That doesn't mean you've learned better skills. It just means that you are in a position to utilize your same skills and cause unintended damage all along the way. This is the primary bottleneck to living out essentialism. Why essential things are so much more vulnerable. Trivial things are safe and easy, like an importance iceberg. The top is easy, obvious and safe. Underneath, it's way down below, enormously valuable. Those are the essential subjects with the essential people in our lives. You just can't live out essentialism without learning how, without upgrading your ability to communicate with people who matter most about the things that matter most. And so that's the bridge from essentialism to the subjects that we've been talking about today. This is the unlock. This is how to unlock people, relationships, teams, organizations. This is the core, this is the heart of the matter.

[Host Guest / Interviewer (Possibly the author of 'The Mattering Effect')]

And well, Greg, I love the discussion today. Where can listeners find out the most about you?

[Greg McKeown]

Well, look, one thing people can do is they can just go to Greg McEwen.com they can sign up for a free course. It's called Less but better. It's a 30 day email course, comes with printables. It's a high quality course. You'd normally pay money for. It's for free. They can sign up there in about 10 seconds. If they do that, then they'll become part of the ongoing conversation. And great to have them.

[Host Guest / Interviewer (Possibly the author of 'The Mattering Effect')]

And please check out his books, Essentialism, which sold millions of copies, and Effortless, of which I always thought it was funny when I read Essentialism, because Effortless is actually in the book.

[Greg McKeown]

Very much so, but it's.

[Host Guest / Interviewer (Possibly the author of 'The Mattering Effect')]

But I don't think a lot of people got it. So I was glad you. You wrote the second book.

[Greg McKeown]

Yeah, it's not. It's. Yeah, I agree. They missed the second paradigm shift. And I think that's to some extent, because books can contain one big paradigm shift. That's my sort of one of the lessons. And so I really wanted to go there because there's so many people who are just buried in the noise we've been describing. Overworked but underutilized and particularly insecure overachievers. That's who I wrote the book for, Effortless for. They're just so burdened by mental models they don't even know are there. Like, one of my favorites is that people believe that easy equals lazy and insecure. Overachievers do anyway, and just. They don't. Those aren't the same things. And so once you can unlock that, you can open a very different kind of way of living. Or just. I'll maybe say it this way, you don't write a book called Effortless because you think life is easy, or even that it should be. You write it because life is a catastrophe, and it is for almost everybody almost all of the time. That's what I've learned listening to people. Oh, my goodness. That I don't think I've ever spoken truer words than that. So Effortless is an attempt at saying, look, if you can't work harder, if you already did that, you're already doing that, then what if there is a gentler, wiser, smarter, better, even easier way to take off some of that edge, make life that a little more livable, a little more doable, a little less exhausting, a little less harsh on you and everyone around you? And so it's. I wrote that as a kind of. It's like an insecure overachiever's guide to healthy productivity. And I really have. Have enjoyed being able to see people find that at the right time.

[Host Guest / Interviewer (Possibly the author of 'The Mattering Effect')]

Greg, I know you don't do many podcast interviews. I'm so grateful and so honored that you gave me the opportunity to come on Passion Start, because I know it's going to be profound for our listeners. Thank you again so much for coming, John.

[Greg McKeown]

It's been my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

[John Miles]

That brings us to the end of today's conversation with Greg McEwen. One of the profound concepts that I hope stays with you as you walk away from this episode is is the core rule of communication. Clarity equals your signal divided by the noise. When things get tense at home or at work, our default reaction is usually to turn up our signal power. We speak louder, we argue harder, or we over explain our side of the story. But the math reveals that cutting out the noise is what actually changes the equation. A small drop in emotional noise yields a massive increase in true understanding. When you drop your defensive judgments and practice that simple loop of listening, reflecting, speaking and confirming, you create the conditions for real understanding to emerge. In our next conversation, we're tracing this

[Host Guest / Interviewer (Possibly the author of 'The Mattering Effect')]

exact arc to its ultimate destination.

[John Miles]

I'll be joined by global researcher and bestselling author Marcus Buckingham to explore a question that makes a lot of leaders uncomfortable. What if the force that drives the highest levels of performance isn't pressure, accountability, or incentives, but love? Marcus has studied millions of data points on human behavior, and he's discovered that extraordinary work doesn't come from force and compliance. It comes from environments where people feel truly seen, valued, and safe enough to bring more of themselves to what they do. We're going to look at why certain experiences stay with us while others disappear and map out exactly how you can stop your daily interactions from drifting into cold, invisible spaces.

[Marcus Buckingham]

But when we humans try to vocalize the extreme positive experiences that we have in life, the word we use is love. And I kept changing it. Frankly, over the years, I kept changing it to something more palatable to the business world, like passion or joy or engagement or satisfaction. And those are really good words. But the actual words people use, they don't use delight. They'll use. The word they use is love. So really, for me, it was a wake up call to go listen. As a researcher, if people are spontaneously using a word or a set of words, you don't dismiss it or try to change it for them as though they were wrong. You interrogate the word. What do they mean?

[John Miles]

Until next time, remember that flourishing is rarely found by adding more to our lives. Often it begins by reconnecting with what has been there all along. I'm John Miles, and you've been passion struck

[Greg McKeown]

sa.