Hey, I'm Kwame Christian and you are about to step into the world of Negotiate Anything,

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Charles, thanks for joining us today. Thank you for having me. This is really exciting for me.

Yes, likewise, my friend. So how would you get it started by telling us a little bit about yourself and what you do?

Sure. My name is Charles Duhigg. I'm the author

most recently of Super Communicators, which is a book about the science of connection and conversation.

Previously, I wrote a book called The Power of Habit about 10 years ago and another book called

Smarter Faster, Better. And right now, I'm a reporter at the New Yorker magazine. And I used to be a

reporter at the New York Times. Very nice. We're excited to have you. We at A&I were fans of your work. I've gobbled up your books. So I'm excited to chat with you about this. And when it comes to your most recent book, just tell us about the central thesis of the book. What was it that you have accomplished with this? Absolutely. And let me, I'm a fan of A&I as well. Like, I think the work you guys do is wonderful. So this book, Super Communicators, kind of started for me a couple years ago when I found myself falling into this pattern with my wife that I did not like. And the same thing was happening at work. I would come home from a long day at the office and I would start complaining to my wife

about my boss and my coworkers and they don't understand me. Nobody appreciates me. And she very practically would give me this good advice. She would say something like, you know, why don't you take your boss out to lunch and you guys can get to know each other a little bit better? It's good advice, right? but instead of being able to hear what she was saying to me,

I would get even more upset.

And I would say like, you know,

you're supposed to be supporting me.

You're supposed to be on my side. Why aren't you outraged on my behalf? She would get upset that I was attacking her for giving me good advice. And I think anyone in a relationship, I'm assuming yourself, we all fall into this pattern, right? This is just part of what happens, that the conversation should go well. It's clear how we could make it easy and instead it does not go well. And so I started calling up researchers and asking them like, why? My wife and I've been married for 20 years, like, why does this keep happening? And they said, well, look, we're actually glad you called because we're living through this golden age of understanding communication because of advances in neural imaging and data collection. And they said,

...