I'm Alan Alder, and this is clear and vivid conversations about connecting and communicating.

People stress about what that first question should be.

I mean, you go on LinkedIn and you see all these debates about,

what question should you ask in an interview or what question should you ask on a first date?

It almost doesn't matter what that first question is, but what matters a lot is everything that

unfolds after that? Are you listening to the person's answer? Are you searching for points

of interests and excitement? And are you ready to chase that

energy and keep your focus on the other person by asking a follow-up question? So I do think

follow-up questions matter more. And they can't be predicted in the way that that original

question could be planned or you could think ahead about it.

Follow-up questions are totally spontaneous.

That's Allison Wood Brooks.

She's a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School.

She teaches an award-winning course there called Talk.

And she recently developed that course into a book called Talk, The Science of

of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves. This is going to be so great. Even before we got

on the show, we were already talking about talking. Well, Alan, I got to eavesdrop on your

conversation with Graham, and you were

giving me a compliment. That's what a dream scenario to enter in and hear people saying nice things

about you. Thank you. I was saying what an excellent talker you are. We're not all excellent

talkers, even though we all talk all the time. And even excellent talkers aren't excellent all the time.

What I love about what you've done is you've thought about talking and you've studied it so

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