Hey, welcome back to the Personality Hacker Podcast. My name is Joel Mark Witt.

And I'm Antonio Dodge. What does it mean to be a good listener?

How do you know if you're a good listener? And how do you know if people around you in your life are good listeners?

One of the things that I think Antonio and I believe is that we, you know, we're podcasters, right?

So we talk a lot about a lot of stuff but one of the things

that really helps change the world and help humans get along better and move the

needle forward as society is the ability for humans to listen and understand each other.

And it seems like it might be a dying art.

Yeah, well, all of our technologies have been built on the ability to cross-pollinate ideas.

We are all smarter when we're able to do idea exchange

because we can build on each other's concepts and ideas

and find the weaknesses and add creativity and insight and that only happens when we have the ability to listen, as well as speak, right?

So I think a lot of focus is put on the art of persuasion and the art of speaking.

And in the modern world, it feels like,

well, if there's nobody to listen,

then what does it matter if you've built the art of persuasion?

Now, persuasion is intended to incentivize other people to listen, but that still

means that they have to have the ability to listen, like they have to have the skill built. And I think

one of the challenges that we experience is that in particular with social media

is that if you see writing and communicating through text or writing as a form of speaking,

then it's really challenging for us to truly listen to people

on the other side because we have a tendency to dehumanize them.

...