House Calls Podcast

Can We Talk?

With guest Fred Dust,

Designer and Author

Hello and welcome to House Calls. I'm Vivek Murthy, and I have the honor of serving as U.S. Surgeon General. I'd like to introduce you to Fred Dust, a writer, speaker, and an expert on conversations. We believe conversations can be healing. And today, we'll be talking about how we can communicate more meaningfully with one another. Stay tuned because this episode is a real conversation starter. How do we have real and meaningful conversations in our everyday lives? This is a question that's been on many of our minds, especially as we gather for the holidays with family and friends. In a world where we need more human connection, we also need more meaningful conversations. But having good conversations can be challenging. On social media, we're used to people shouting and competing for attention. Or we go the other way and become defensive. Or avoid conversation altogether. That's why I invited my friend Fred Dust to talk about how we can have meaningful conversations. Fred built a life and career around designing ways we communicate. From his college days as an activist with Act Up, fighting for people with HIV/AIDS, to his decades of leadership at the design firm IDEO, everywhere Fred went, he saw a need for better conversation. That's why Fred became a conversation designer, creating methods and spaces for people to connect through conversation. Fred's book “Making Conversation” explores why we have reached this point where talking to each other has come to feel so hard, and he provides practical ways we can all set the stage for having meaningful conversations. I hope you'll come away from this episode with concrete tips and a deeper appreciation for the importance of listening, the surprising power of small gestures, and the unexpected ways in which doing things together can actually help us talk to each other. As always, the team at House Calls is eager to hear from you. Please take a moment to rate and review the podcast and send us your ideas for episodes at: HouseCalls@HHS.gov

Fred, thank you so much for joining me on House Calls.

I'm so excited. Thanks for thinking of me and it's so good to see you actually.

It is good to see you again as well. And I'm glad that we're here today to talk about the state of conversation. This is something you and I have talked about in the past before. You've done so much on this topic, thought about it, written about it in a great book that came out a couple of years ago, “Making Conversation.” And I think this is something that's on a lot of people's minds because we've reached this point where it just feels hard to have conversations with people. It feels at times that we're talking over each other, talking past each other. And what I worry about in particular is it feels like we're avoiding conversations, particularly about hard topics, because we're worried about conflict. We're worried about using the wrong terminology. We're worried about creating more difficulty in our relationships and particularly, you know, around the holidays and and this is a time where people come together with other friends and family members and that's wonderful, but it can also be hard for some people who might be getting together with folks who have different politics, different identities, different beliefs. And they may worry about what it's like to have a conversation around the dinner table. So my hope is that today we can talk a little bit about why it's become so difficult to have these conversations and what we can actually do about it to ensure that we can get to the point where we can reconnect through conversation and rebuild what I think is such an essential skill for all of us as individuals and certainly for society. So thank you again for joining me to talk about this. And I'd love to to maybe start, Fred, with just asking you how we got to this point where having meaningful conversations in our everyday lives has come to feel so difficult.

You know, it's funny, Vivek, because I sort of had hoped that we'd be in a different state. Even when I think about when I sort of started writing the book, I was like, Well, it can't get worse. And it does feel like it actually gets worse and worse. And actually, I think you bring up a good point, which is that the worse isn't so much fractious or angry conversations. It's lack of conversation entirely. It's the kind of decision to not have them, which I think is makes me very worried. I'll tell you where I think there are some myths about this, which I think that one of the myths we hold around technology or around conversations is that it's actually a technology question, is that people often think, oh, it's we brought the phone into our lives and then suddenly it's all texting and it's all social media. And I sort of see that we were actually kind of devolving I sort of see that we were actually kind of devolving in our ability to have a conversation over decades, really. And I think a lot of that has to do with frankly, I'm very interested in like the rise of television as a kind of the first media influencer that took over dinner tables completely. You know, it's like the TV tray was invented in like 1952, and after that there was like one after another after another television innovation. And suddenly we, like, gave a place that was all about practicing conversation, the dinner table, over to television. And so I think that we've sort of seen this happen over decades, and it's just been getting worse and worse. And then given that, then add in the pandemic, add in the kind of the social isolation we've been living in. And then I think to your point, the fact that we are in a holiday season, but holiday season in the US often falls around other key moments, elections being one of them. And so there's all kinds of stress that happens in the in our daily life and in our kind of engagement with other people. And so I think we just sort of see that come to a crux as we kind of get towards the end of the year.

And Fred, can you say a little bit more about how the advent of media, whether it's television or, you know, innovations that have come since then, how have those shifted our comfort and ability to have conversation?

Well, I mean, what's really interesting about like, if you think about the kind of rise of television is that a lot of things happen sort of simultaneously with like the invention of TV where you suddenly have like meals in front of television. But you also had, like, Walter Cronkite, the first anchorperson anchorman who in essence, became sort of the father figure sitting at our table. And then on the back of that, you started having this kind of joy in punditry that happened around the same time in the sixties. And now suddenly we live in a place where all conversations are happening on onscreen and they're all politicized. And so we actually kind of learn from that. We learn those behaviors and we learn the ways that we kind of like we engage. And they actually what I think is fascinating is now we live with media in every moment of our life, right? We wake up to it, we go to sleep with it, which means that like every time you have a crisis or anything that kind of riles you up, that's the last thing you're dealing with in the end of your day or the first thing you're dealing with in the morning. And so I think there's a bunch of things that prime us to just be more anxious about conversations, forget about necessarily having bad conversations, just be more anxious about what it means to put our voices out there in the world. And one of the things, Vivek, I’ve been thinking about a lot is I'm calling it toxic politeness, which is this whole notion of like instead of politeness being like a nice thing, politeness really being a way of avoiding all the things that we don't want to talk about. And I'm sort of seeing this kind of creep in, yes in corporate cultures and in kind of other places. But I'm actually seeing it happen in families quite a bit as well, which is that we just won't talk about it. We’ll just be what I call toxically polite, which I think is really, I think we're sort of all feeling it in different ways. It's like it's easier to avoid than it is to actually address almost anything daily.

Yeah, that's an interesting term that you use, toxic politeness, because I was literally recently having a conversation with someone who was talking about a group that they were working in where people were so nice to each other at the expense of actually saying what had to be said. And that actually left them feeling worse. And so I think when politeness is traded off or in a sense or I should say it when when you favor politeness but at the expense of authenticity, I think people's sense that like in their gut and one thing I hear people saying all the time is that they crave authenticity. They just want to know what people think, where they stand. And I’m curious, just to take a step back, though, how did you personally become interested in conversations and making them better?

Well, I don't know if you feel this way, but when you start, especially as I wrote the book, I started realizing that maybe I had always been very interested but hadn't kind of realized how it had been, sort of like kind of tuned into my life in a significant way. I will tell you that honestly, I look back to my grandmother and my mother as the people who really primed me for my whole take and my whole thinking and philosophy about conversation. And in part, that's because my grandmother was this truly exceptional storyteller. I mean truly exceptional. And where she could tell like just the perfect story in like 30 seconds, and it would just be this remarkable thing to hear. And then my mother, who was this kind of very special kind of conversationalist in the sense that she was a fabulous listener. She was the kind of person who be you'd be on the street with her and somebody would walk up to her to tell their story to her. It was, she just had that kind of open face. And so ironically, it was a combination of sort of seeing my grandmother, my grandmother as a storyteller and my mother as this kind of unbelievably expert listener that really, I think started it in me. But then most of my life actually had been working in helping people have conversations to kind of make things happen in the world. A lot of the work that I did at IDEO before and still now is about progressing big ideas. And to do that conversation, frankly, is our best tool. It's our only tool. It's our safest tool. It's the only non-lethal tool that we have. And so really I got into how do we think about making this just be the best tool it can be and really over the years, I've started to kind of like I guess the only way to say it is geek out on the history of conversation, the neuroscience behind it, what makes good conversation and just multicultural practices, practices across the world that actually kind of affect and make conversations better so gradually became quasi expert. But it's really it's my grandmother and my mom. As it often is.

I know, right? We get so much from the people we grew up with who shaped our lives. Do you think your mom and your grandmother had somebody who helped shape their ability to have conversation, or was it just something that they had naturally?

Well, my mom you know, my mom grew up in a pretty interesting household. She had a brother and the brother was deaf, which I think actually really kind of tuned a lot of the way that family paid attention and connected to each other. By having a kind of deaf sibling, it actually meant that, and at that point, American Sign Language was the primary way that people communicated. It suddenly meant that there was, I would say, a kind of more awareness. And so interestingly, when I was a child, I sort of always thought, well, my mom's a good listener just by nature. She has that kind of listening face. I actually don't think that's the case. I think what I realized decades later is that she sort of learned it by being in a household where listening really mattered. You have to be highly attuned and highly connected to what was going on to make sure that communication was happening among all the family members. So I actually do believe it was practice and I do also believe that mostly it's practice that we sometimes forget that we need to practice in order to kind of get good at it. And that's why we should be out talking to strangers and should talk to the people who drive your taxis or the people you stand next to on the bus, because that's the way we get better at this. And I do believe that's what certainly with my mom, that she was kind of living in an environment that helped her practice listening in a really profound way, actually.

I'm so glad you mentioned that last point, because, Fred, I think many people may assume that you either have these skills, you're born with them, or you just don't. And what you're pointing out, which I think is so powerful, and what your mom's story speaks to, is that these are skills that can be cultivated and that we have to cultivate them. If we don't, they in fact, they atrophy, they weaken, they disappear. And so along those lines, can you talk a little bit about what the key ingredients are for having hard conversations?

I'm going to sorry twist your question in the sense that it's I think one of the hardest things that we do is calling something a hard conversation. And so I think that one of the things that we do and, you know, labeling words actually really matter as we know, and that's that's one of the things that kind of is affecting all kinds of things in our culture and society right now. But when we say hard conversation, we immediately prime for a hard conversation. And so one of the things that I often try to kind of talk about when I do interviews or or write is really thinking about the idea that maybe don't necessarily prime a conversation as hard and also maybe don't enter conversations thinking that you have to kind of have the goal of change. One of the things I think that makes for a hard conversation, especially if like you're going home to family and especially if you're going home to family post, you know, a big political shakeup and all kinds of things that are happening in the world is going in feeling like it's your job to change another person in a conversation. And that's just a no-win proposition in the sense that who wants that? I don't want to enter into a conversation where your primary thing is to change me. I'm happy to have a conversation and I'm happy to have a conversation that ultimately may change me. But I think going in with the intention actually also kind of sets a kind of almost a hostile tone to the way a conversation goes. So one of the things that I try to talk about is not thinking about hard conversations as conversation, as not in my conversations necessarily as hard or not, but also thinking of conversations as a long affect, not like something that's happening in the 10 minutes that you're with somebody. But maybe that 50 minutes you're spending with somebody over five days or ten years. You know, what's what's the long arc of conversation? What's the long arc of change? As opposed to thinking, Oh, I need to need to address this or change something in somebody. Does that makes sense?

That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's especially important because I think many of our attention spans have shrunk over time and we want results very quickly and we think, okay, if we go and have a five or ten minute conversation, big things should happen there. But you're reminding us that human beings over thousands of years have evolved to have conversations and learn about each other over time, and that it doesn't happen instantaneously in the way it seems like it does in this day and age.

It’s true and I also think that we forget, and I think this goes back to this politeness question, which is that some of the most important questions we ask people could deserve more time. Like, how are you? If you think about the context of how we are now, that really there's a lot to dig into when you say how are you? You know, it's like you're you're different today based on something that's happened in the world or something that's happened in your world than you were yesterday. Every day is different. The way we feel in the wake of a shooting or a school shooting or things like that. It's like when you say, how are you? It's something has real resonance and real meaning and you really need to kind of lean into that. And so one of the things I sort of feel like is that we should give more time to some of the things that we actually just think of as kind of kindnesses or little throwaway things. And that's the way we start to discover not just how you are, but who you are and what matters to you. It's those basic things that I think we forgot about sometimes.

Oh, that’s such a good point. Because you're right. I can think of people who have said, how are you to me? And it's felt just like an extension of hi. Like, not like they're looking for an answer, but just the extension of the formality, the greeting. And then other times people ask, How are you? And they'll pause and they'll wait for a response. And then I'm like, Oh, they're actually interested in knowing how I am. And those same words can sound incredibly different. So I think that's a really good point.

And I think, you know, going back to this kind of question about what we don't talk about, I've actually seen and heard from people who talk about avoiding those questions more and more, not going into them, especially if they're with people who they feel like might be different from them. And so they're just like not wanting to kind of like go with what you used to consider one of the most fundamental kind of questions that we ask somebody. So yeah, it's those things that I feel like we're missing and losing when we, when we don't kind of pay attention to those kinds of moments.

So Fred, in your book, you really beautifully lay out a number of principles and then steps, if you will, that we can keep in mind as we're thinking about how to have good, healthy conversations. I was wondering if you could share some of those with us.

Yeah, I'll talk about the ones that I think are, for me, still the most resonant one really is that I sort of feel like we've actually gotten listening wrong and we've gotten worse and worse at listening over of our lives. And I actually think there are kind of things that have made that the case. There's there's a whole trend if you Google listening, a thing called active listening, which is this notion that when you are listening to somebody, you should nod and say, go on. And this whole idea that listening is actually for the person being listened to and it's a way of kind of like activating or letting them speak. And and I think that's just that's it's like if you took listening out and just butchered it, it's just like it's like you lose the joy of listening, of really trying to hear somebody's story, of knowing who somebody is. And I often think about listening as a creative act that it's something that is going to spark some moment of recognition or creativity or thinking in your life. And you should be thinking about listening as a huge gift every time you actually get to do it, where we often don't, we often think about listening as a waiting game. So I'm waiting to hear what you say so that I can say what I say. Even when you think about listening, you'll often think about pictures of I mean, I always see like pictures of kids raising their hands in classroom, which is sort of this kind of classicwaiting game. You know, it's like it's your no longer attuned to the conversation. Suddenly you're just waiting to say what you need to say. So that was, I think when I first actually started to work on the book, we thought it was going to be entirely on listening. And I remember being like, Oh, that seems so small. And now after three years, I feel like I'm listening is in fact the most important part of a conversation, the most important work we do. And so that's a key component, I think, especially as we talk about conversations that families might have, especially as we go into holidays, holiday seasons. One of the things I started the book with is this idea of committing, which is it's it was very funny. I was doing a lecture and somebody was like, Well, what happens if I go into a conversation with somebody who I just hate right off the bat, or I know they hate me right off the bat? And I was like, Yeah, that does happen. That happens all the time. And one of the things I've always talked about is if you're going to go into a conversation, commit to that conversation, be in that conversation fully, maybe hold your own ideas and your own values a little more lightly, but commit to the person and be there for that person. And so one of the things that I think about is, can you and I do actively ask people to commit to a conversation beforehand? So can you be here for the next hour or are you like, can you act in these ways? Like often when we do guided conversations, we'll say we're going to act in these three ways. You know, generous, supportive and curious for the next hour, can you commit to that for an hour? And by the way, that makes a lot easier if you're saying commit for an hour as opposed to commit for the rest of your life to those those kind of qualities. And so you can actually ask for people to commit to a kind of conversation that you want to be having. And I think that's especially true as we're going into family context or friend context that we're going to holidays is that it's like you can't ask people to be to commit to being a certain kind of way or being in a certain kind of conversation for the period of time of a dinner as opposed to the period time of their entire life at least, and ask people to commit. And so in many ways, I think that's a perfect way to kind of enter into any kind of dinner table or holiday conversation is asking people to commit to being in that conversation for the next period of time. There's Oh, can I,one of my favorite things to do, actually, this is so it's, it's so dorky but it really does work, is when you're having people in your home or having them for dinner or doing it is not to make the table for them, but actually for the group to collectively make the table that they want to sit at. So I find that actually the act of collectively setting the table together is in fact a creative act where suddenly, if you and I were sitting down to dinner and instead of I'm sitting down to a dinner where you've put out the plates and knives, suddenly we're both doing that. We're both kind of opting in to a way of kind of having a conversation or setting the table for the conversation we want to have. And so we take that very seriously. I mean, this year we're having a very large Thanksgiving, one where it's not really smart to imagine everybody setting the table together. But we're going to do it because we feel like it's such an important kind of ritual act of saying this is a place we are all owning together at this moment. So it's a kind of form of committing by establishing the space you want to have a conversation in.

Gosh, that's really beautiful. And I hadn't thought about that before. This idea that something as small as a ritual, as setting the table together could actually help pave the way for conversation. I'm wondering if you could explore that a little bit more, this idea that sometimes connection, which is something I think we all desire and all need, sometimes that is really well served through conversation, but sometimes there are other ways that we can connect other actions we can take, things we can do together. But can you speak to that a little bit? Like in terms of non conversational ways of connecting that may have helped pave the way for deeper understanding?

Yeah, and this probably seems counterintuitive given the fact that we're talking about conversation, but I feel like some of our greatest ability or moments to kind of create human connection have nothing to do with conversation at all. Or maybe the conversation is something that happens in happenstance on the back of doing something else. And so one of the things that I advise people, especially if they're very concerned about going into a week of events with their family or anything that kind of makes them nervous is maybe think about doing things together more than actually having conversations together. So I love the idea of having people, of asking people to teach you something. So if you're going to have dinner with your mother, have your mother teach you her favorite dish or have your father teach you the favorite dish. Have them, you know, I've talked to people who are like, I don't like golfing, but I go golfing with my dad because it's it's better because we're doing something together, where actually I'm learning something. And so there's a different kind of energy and spirit. And so often my feeling is if you're feeling stressed or nervous about having conversations, think instead about what you might do together, specifically things that that you might actually learn from somebody and then go into that as a kind of third construct for the way you are together. And what you might find is you'll have conversations you didn't think you would have just on the back of doing something together. So very personal, but when I came out to my father, which is an incredibly stressful thing, like it was not something that my mom, it was reasonable and easy to do, but my father made me very nervous. It happened a little bit by accident in the sense that he and I were going for a hike together and we were on the Washington coast and it was over the holidays and we ended up hiking and we got a little lost, And, and we were kind of not side-by-side or face-to-face. I was actually behind him, so he was ahead of me and I was behind him as we're looking for a path. And that, to my surprise, was when I came out to my father. And I think part of it had to do with the fact that it was I was not face-to-face with him. We had already kind of like we were in a slightly destabilized circumstance because we were lost on a hike. And so it actually just felt like it was a more natural and comfortable way to have a conversation than if I were to sit down face-to-face in the living room and have that conversation. So what I like to think about is all the magical moments that happen when you don't think about the conversation first, but think about what you what happens if you're doing something with somebody and what might come out of that.

That is really powerful. You know what it reminds me of? When I was young, my mother used to teach me about yoga and meditation. And one of the things she taught me is that we do yoga, we do things with our body in order to actually pave the way for the meditation that we do afterward. And I realized that when I would do that, I would my mind would settle in to a deeper place when I meditated, if I did the yoga first. And you're reminding me of that because what you're saying so powerful, which is that sometimes doing things together and just being together can help pave the road for having a good conversation together. And I think that that's incredibly powerful because I think sometimes when you want to have a conversation with somebody, you can think, Gosh, how do I just quickly do it? How do I quickly get there? And all that time before just, you know, putzing around the house together or walking in the yard together or doing the dishes together, that's just wasted time because you're not getting to the main event. But what you're helping us understand is that that's absolutely part of the main event and it makes it better.

Planned Parenthood, for instance, like recommends that if you are want to talk to your children about sex and sex education, that you actually do it while you're driving. And and it's funny, I was recently giving a lecture in a college context, and I brought up that fact and like somebody raised their hand and was like, wait, that's how I learned. And that was very funny. Like, everyone's like, Oh, yeah, me too. Like, that's like, it was all in a car. And so what was really interesting about that is that that's a great example of it being a kind of avoidant space in the sense that you're not like staring at somebody. You’re kind of like you're focused on something. For me, I’m very interested in moments where we travel places together, you know? So when you're driving someplace together or you're walking someplace together, in the sense that so much of our lives we're meeting face-to-face or coming at each other. Whereas like if you're going someplace together, you're traveling together, there's already a little bit of a notion that you're kind of fellow travelers, fellow journeyers and so it kind of puts you into a different context for the conversations you have. That's why driving with somebody for 6 hours can be like, you know, that's it. You feel like you're friends for life after that period of time.

Oh. That's so beautiful. I'm wondering also as people, you know, gather, you know, with with family around the holidays. And as they think about other gatherings that they may have, are there any warning signs that people should look out for that might tell them that, hey, this conversation is not going in the right direction I need to course-correct. Anything that you think people should keep in mind as they're trying to craft and and shape a healthy conversation?

Yeah, and I would say that maybe I'll back up and say that one of the things I think that’s important, I write about this in my book and I think about this a lot, which is this idea of intentional interruption. So recognizing when you feel like things may be just not salvageable or something being so good that you want to make sure you interrupt and mark the fact that something really remarkable happened. But that means being really cognizant of kind of the context. And one of the things that I think is really key to manage hard conversations or any conversations good conversations is getting really good at noticing change in the room. And what that means is actually often that you're feeling the things that you're feeling, but you're also watching and sort of seeing how other people are feeling. And so it's one of the hardest things to do, both to kind of shift a hard conversation or kind of acknowledge a great conversation is to recognize that, wait, something different is happening, a different moment is happening. One of my favorite stories about this is a I interviewed for the book a woman who was quite religious and had this sex positive book club because she and her friends who were all in their sixties and again, very religious, really wanted to read “Fifty Shades of Grey.” And they didn't want to do it by themselves. They were, like, too embarrassed to just read it on their own. And so they decide they were going to read it as a group. So they read it and they came together in a book club context to talk about it. What was interesting is she was saying it was so awkward, you know, most of the questions were like, do people really do that? Is this this real? Like, is that? But they said that after they had the conversation, even though it was an awkward, weird conversation, they suddenly felt that like they had changed, that suddenly they could talk about a little bit more than they could talk about before. What I think is really fascinating there is that in that case, there was a a text that they used to actually help them move towards that change. So they didn't have to kind of own the conversation themselves. They could basically say, oh, this is not about us. It's about this book, but then start to explore something. And then the important thing is at the end of that, realizing that they had changed, they had kind of altered the way they have conversations with each other. And so one thing is, is to pay attention to feel how a conversation is feeling And mark up the good things, as well as the bad things. But also when things are bad, not to be afraid to think about intentional interruption and what I love about the holidays frame is that we have so many different ways of intentionally interrupting, ways that we don't have in normal day to day conversation. It is okay in a holiday context often to ask for a silence or a moment of prayer or moment of meditation or like, that's actually a fairly standard procedure. We will it is okay to talk about something you're thankful for, for instance, on some holidays. It's okay to sing, which is a really spectacular way of interrupting a conversation. You know, they find that people who sing together, they just gel so much more. And so we have all these pretty spectacular ways of interrupting hard conversations that are only available to us in places where we have ritual or cultural context that are holiday based. So we have a lot of things at our fingertips that we have that we can use now in the next kind of couple of months that we can't use every day of the year.

Hmm. These are really good tips. I'm actually going to use some of these in my own life.

I think singing is way underrated. Like, it's like I was once in a meeting that had gone wildly awry and a woman who was in the room raised her hand, was like, Can I say something? And everybody was like, Please do. And instead she stood up and she sang and she didn't just sing. She sang a lullaby. Which if you think about lullabies, are meditations on life and duration of life and will you be there the next day and and love and her I would say 45-second lullaby shifted the entire way that the meeting went for the rest of the day, like radically. Because suddenly not only was it this remarkable moment that you didn't expect, but was also this moment to meditate unconsciously, albeit, on life and the fleetingness of life, and begin to realize we didn't want to waste a day. Get creative. Have something in your back pocket that you can pull out like that if you can.

What a beautiful story. I’m trying to imagine my being in that room and just feeling the energy shift when someone does something so unexpected as sing and no less a lullaby. You know what I love about what you're saying, and just I'll tell you a little bit of what I'm taking away is it sounds like the listening piece is really central, our being able to listen to not only active listen, but creatively listen is essential. And that commitment you talked about in the beginning, about committing to conversation, I think is that’s something I think we don't often do. We sort of tentatively edge our way and ease our way into a conversation often unsure about what the other person is hoping for. But I like that notion around committing to conversation. There's one other thing you write about which I found to be really compelling, which is around clarity, around being mindful of the words that we use and the impact that they have. And I think in particular, being mindful of the fact that not all words mean the same thing to different people. And I think being thoughtful about the words that we use, recognizing they might be polarizing to some people, you know, as we may not think it's a big deal. I think that's really essential. And finally, I think you're helping me realize also that a lot of these conversations need a little bit of courage, too, that they need us to sometimes get over a little bit of discomfort we have and maybe some discomfort we think the other person may have. But so often I have found that when I have witnessed or been a part of conversations that are marked by what you're talking about, an openness, humility, a willingness to listen, that usually everyone is happy that they were part of that event, even if there were moments of discomfort. So I think these are some great tips that you've offered all of us. If we do all of this well, not just as individuals, but as a society, learn how to have better conversations with one another, with more honesty, more authenticity and more curiosity and humility, what do you think the world will look like?

You know, what I think is fascinating is that we often think about the future as one thing that we all share. In fact, the future is many different things, and we're seeing and experiencing different futures based on the context that we are in. I, and you know this, I live most of my life in a very rural context, a place that actually is very different for me. I'm one of the few out gay men. I know for a fact I vote differently than the community I'm in. And yet it's a conversational community. And I say this in the sense that it's like you do not go to the grocery store and expect that you're not going to have a half an hour or anything, but a half an hour conversation with the person who's behind the cash register. And you do not go to the hardware store and think that you're not going to talk about the latest pests you have or whatever driving. It's it's just the way it is. And I always laugh because you do errands that you would do in Washington or New York that would take you 3 minutes and they take you 30 minutes. It is it is a conversational community. And that's of things I'm very interested in now in the work that we're doing now is how do you build conversational cultures and conversational communities? And what I would say is that that kind of investment in each other on a day to day level about little things, not big things about, you know, how to get rid of the snake in my basement or how to do this or how to do that. Actually, are the things that kind of create the bonds that allow you to have other kinds of conversations. I'll tell you, one of the more remarkably moving moments of my life living in this community was we had a neighbor who we were very different from, and he politically in a lot of different ways. He during the pandemic, he was deployed into New York City as a paramedic. And so he was there for the first six months of being in the pandemic. And when he came back, he came over to our house and we've been neighbors forever. We'd had conversations. We'd never had conversations around hard issues. We just had conversations. He sat down. We were outside at this point, as we all remember we were. And and he told us, blow by blow, what he'd seen while he was in New York, kind of doing this pandemic recovery work as a paramedic, and was incredibly emotional and incredibly deep and incredibly painful. And he walked away and I was like, why did we have that conversation? And one of the things I realized is that he was a father and he didn't want to bring this home to his daughter and his wife. And so he didn't feel like that was a conversation he could have safely. But we had built over the kind of years of having non-essential conversations, not about serious topics and the kind of muscle, not about serious topics the kind of muscle, the practice to be able to have a conversation about something much more difficult. So in answer to your question, what does the world look like? We can see our world and what it looks like by kind of going out to places where they do work, where communities are together for each other, where people do support each other, where sometimes they are in active disagreement about about things politically and yet active alignment about making sure the community thrives. And and that's I think what we want is a world where we can be in disagreement but still aligned on the notion that we want to survive as a community, survive as a collective, survive as a species. And that’s what I would expect happens if we have a conversational community and conversational cultures. We really get to live together and keep moving and persisting in ways that we might not otherwise. That's very dramatic?

Well, what a hopeful vision to have of the future and also to remind us that it's possible because it's happening right now, as you mentioned in your community, where you live, and in other communities around the country. It may not make the front pages of the paper, but the fact that it's happening gives us hope that we can, in fact build more conversations like this. I also just love the point that you made, that this starts with the small things. It's not always about having the conversations about the biggest issues we disagree on, but it's about conversations about small things that are important in our life. As somebody once told me, a professor, it's the small gestures, not the grand gestures that cement our bonds with one another. And I love that you emphasize that. You know, Fred, I want to thank you so much for for being a part of this conversation, for helping shed light on something that I think is so vital to the survival of society and to all of us thriving, which is our ability to build bridges between one another through conversation. I want to end with just a one rapid question for you. If you could pick one person who you never met before but who you could speak with and have a conversation with, who would that be? And that person could be dead or alive.

Oh, God, Vivek, I’m so disappointing. It’d be like Taylor Swift, probably.

That's okay.

I mean, I'm not joking. It's like I really admire, we were talking about music before, but I really admire the people who can communicate through other forms of, kind of of expression. And so I'm very interested in like, believe me, it would be like Joni Mitchell or or Taylor Swift.

Well, that sounds perfectly fine. I actually like Taylor Swift's songs. I like Joni Mitchell as well. And and I think it's a really interesting point that we communicate with each other in so many ways through spoken word, through music, art. And as you mentioned in the very beginning, sometimes just by doing things with one another and being in each other's presence. And so I appreciate you for everything that you have done for writing this wonderful book, for sharing these practical tips on how we can have better conversation, and for being a friend who I've come to know now over several years who actually models and lives this. I think about my conversations with you and you've always been so curious, so inviting in conversation. It's so easy to talk to you. And I think that I can understand why somebody like you has written this book because you're certainly well qualified to. So thank you, Fred, once again for joining us. I wish you the very best and I'm just grateful to have you in my life.

Likewise, Vivek. It's always amazing to have a conversation with you, so I really appreciate the time and thanks for asking me.

That concludes this conversation with Fred Dust. Join me for the next episode of House Calls with Dr. Vivek Murthy. Wishing you all health and happiness.