Talking

• Smile and look at the eyes.
• Remove filler words.
• Speak with sincerity and passion.
• Speak slow and naturally. Your first reaction is usually outdated. Either it's an answer you came up with long ago and now use instead of thinking, or it's a knee-jerk emotional response to something in your past.
  • Say "I don't know" more.
  • Slow down when you are talking, don't try to play catch up between your mouth and your thoughts.
• Aim to make liberal use of the you pronoun.
• No matter how correct you are, you won't get anywhere by making the other person feel stupid. Not being annoying is more important than being smart. Aim to make friends. Friends are better than money. Almost anything money can do, friends can do better. In so many ways a friend with a boat is better than owning a boat.
• Ask for help instead of demanding it.
• Say "yes, and…" (accept ideas and build on top of them). Make other people feel good. Be positive (optimistic language).
• Favor interrogative-led questions over leading questions. A leading question attempts to get the listener to agree or disagree with a premise you feed to them. An interrogative-led question often begins with the words: who; where; what; when; why. "Did you like the movie?" vs "What did you think about the movie?".
• Remember people's names. Humans want to be significant.
• Dishonest Flattery while effective in some cases, will destroy you long term. If you are unable to find a compliment about another human being that is truthful, you're not trying hard enough.
• In difficult conversations, keep in mind the ultimate purpose and be calm. You don't need to win the conversation. Ensure safety. Control your emotions.
• Share your facts as stories, not global facts. Logic doesn't persuade people. Clarity, storytelling, and appealing to self-interest do.
• Combining walking with talking might be effective for deep conversations. You don't keep eye contact but nevertheless you are very close. For some topics it helps to just talk without having to look someone in the eye. Long pauses are not a problem because there is the landscape passing by that removes the awkwardness.
• Whenever you drop below a certain level of talking with someone, friction accumulates. You get more stuck in our ways, You get stressed and don't have time to maintain the shared context necessary to understand each other.

Interesting Questions

• Use FORD (Family, Occupation, Recreation, Dreams) as fallback topics.
• What's the change you'd do to the current political system?
  • Why hasn't happened?
• Thought Experiments
• Will you eat synthetic meat?
• Things to argue about over the holidays instead of politics.
• Even more things to argue about over the holidays instead of politics.
• Cognitive Reflection Test
• What is your life default stress/drama level 1 to 10? Where are you now?
• Why do people doesn't seem to know how to draw a bicycle?