264. Show Your Receipts: Communicating in a Post-Truth World

[00:00:00] Matt Abrahams: The best way to connect and truly communicate is to be curious and respectful. My name's Matt Abrahams and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to Think Fast Talk Smart, the podcast. Today I'm really excited to speak with Fareed Zakaria. Fareed is the host of CNN's flagship International Affairs Program, Fareed Zakaria GPS. And he's a weekly columnist for The Washington Post. He specializes in translating complex geopolitical trends for a broad audience. His insightful book, Age of Revolutions, is out now in paperback. Welcome, Fareed. I have benefited so much from what you do on television and in your writing. Thanks so much for being here. 

[00:00:48] Fareed Zakaria: It's a pleasure to do this. 

[00:00:49] Matt Abrahams: Shall we get started? 

[00:00:50] Fareed Zakaria: Absolutely. 

[00:00:51] Matt Abrahams: You argue we're living in one of the most revolutionary periods in all of history. What specific forces are leading you to make this claim? 

[00:01:00] Fareed Zakaria: So if you look at the base of change, particularly along the kind of key drivers that have tended to produce this kind of sense of society being upended, they tend to be technology in the first instance. Almost always, you know, in my book the Age of Revolutions, I talk about how starting with the Dutch and the invention of the kind of technology that allowed the Netherlands to become rich, you know, this was water management, then financial management, they created the first joint stock companies, the first stock exchange. Then transportation equipment, they invent tour ships that can go around the world. It produces a huge set of revolutions. If you think about the information revolution, this really is the mother of all revolutions at some level because you are almost replacing, or at least replacing in central importance, the material economy and supplanting it with a digital economy.

[00:01:54] And now with AI, that becomes even more true. The second is globalization, which is, we have seen an explosion of globalization on a scale, in the last 30 or 40 years, on a scale like nothing we've seen before. To put it in simple context, globalization, you know, the rest of the world joining in the kind of western open market system, 1950s and 60's, you had Japan joining, 80 million people. South Korea, 40 million people, Malaysia, maybe Singapore, Hong Kong, 5, 10 million. Between 1985 and 1995, roughly, China, India, most of Latin America, Indonesia, you talk about 3 and a half, 4 billion people joining the open world trading system. So that shock, but then the other one, which people don't think about enough is we have gone through enormous cultural change in the last 40 years. Think about the role of immigrants in society, in western societies. And another point I'm trying to make is that this is all happening at the same time. So when you put that all together, this does feel like the mother of all revolutions.

[00:02:57] Matt Abrahams: It's amazing how much has happened, and how much has happened in a relatively short amount of time. In an age where we're in the midst of this information revolution, and information is infinite, and algorithms influence who sees and hears our messages, I'm curious to get your opinion. Do facts still matter or has communication just become purely about identity and emotion?

[00:03:19] Fareed Zakaria: It's become much more about identity and emotion because of the disaggregation of channels. I think the fundamental technological shift here, which is driving all this, is that there used to be centralized modes of communication. You know, think about radio's a one to many broadcast system. That's why in the old days when they'd have a coup, you would try to take over the presidential palace and you tried to take over the radio station, 'cause you wanted the source of political power and the source of information power. Then you went to the TV station and the presidential palace.

[00:03:52] Today in a networked many to many broadcast system, there is no node to take over. There's no hierarchy of information, and in that situation, you are going to see a much greater degree of contested facts, contested narratives, and things like that. It's very disconcerting because it does mean, as you're suggesting, a kind of post-fact or post-truth environment. But it is where we are, and that means that you try hard to make your case as forcefully as you can. You can't rely on authority anymore to say, trust me, this is what happened. You are gonna have to show the receipts.

[00:04:28] Matt Abrahams: You know, if you were to give people advice on how to talk smart in an environment where all the incentives are to speak loudly, what would you tell people to do? 

[00:04:38] Fareed Zakaria: The first thing you try to do if you're trying to genuinely persuade people, as opposed to preach to the converted, which is what I would argue, 90% of what passes for political discourse on television and even beyond television, social media for sure. The first thing you've gotta do is you've gotta try and make the case as plainly, and I don't wanna say unemotionally, but in a way that does not rely on demonizing somebody. You are trying to present the facts and you're trying to say, this is what the landscape looks like. Now, here's why I think what I do.

[00:05:13] So you're not doing, you're not, there's not a lot of ad hominem. There's not a lot of name calling. There's not a lot of screaming, because otherwise you're turning off a whole bunch of people. The second thing I think you have to do is you have to marshal the facts. When I say the receipts, you have to have real evidence, real data, so that people can see that you are coming to your conclusions from an honest place of analysis, rather than a preconceived place of this is my team and I'm rooting for my team. And the third, and this may sound like it's contradictory to the second, you have to be able to establish a connection, almost an emotional connection, with the person reading you, viewing you.

[00:05:55] And what I mean by that is you have to establish trust and you can do it in different ways. One way is to not demean the other side. Do it in a way that says, look, I'm trying to be as honest and honorable as I can here. This is the situation as I see it, it seems to me we're going down a bad path and here's why. So if you do those three things, you are likely to help, the way I think about it is lead somebody down a series of steps. Now, they may not get to the place you want them to get to, but at least they've gone down those steps and they've seen that you're trying to go down those steps honorably and reasonably and fairly, and then they may back away.

[00:06:32] Matt Abrahams: What I heard you say is that it starts with respect. You don't start with challenging and vitriol. You then provide the facts and then connect in a way that's genuine, authentic, and that's how you can foster understanding, which is different from agreement. I think that gets conflated a lot where we see understanding and agreement being the same thing. As somebody who does both writing and video camera work, many people are finding themselves having to be on air more. I mean, much of our communication now is visual. If you're a leader in an organization, you have to have a camera presence. What have you noticed has helped you be successful in making that transition from writing and speaking in meetings, into being on camera, in a way that we all could benefit from some of the advice that you've learned?

[00:07:22] Fareed Zakaria: What I am struck by is visual media is actually quite, it's the opposite of what most people think. It selects for a lot of things, but one of them is intelligence. Think about it this way. If you have an article that you're reading in a long magazine, say The Atlantic or The New York Review of Books, or the Harvard Business Review, it's not quite that long. They can often meander. They can often be parenthetical. You can't do that on visual. People will stop, they'll click off, they'll switch the channel. They'll stop watching the YouTube video. You have to stay focused. You have to be linear. There has to be a narrative. You have to be saying something important.

[00:08:00] You can't be doing a lot of throat clearing. So that I think I'm just, I happen to be good at because that's my way of thinking and talking anyway. And I tend to think that it's also that I am myself. I don't put on airs. I don't try to speak in a very fancy way. I, if you watch my show compared to, let's say you pull up a broadcast from Peter Jennings or Tom Brokaw, old anchors of 20 years ago, they would speak in these perfect clipped sentences with a, usually a low Midwestern baritone.

[00:08:34] And I don't talk like that. I talk the way I would talk to you normally. I also will have an occasional, um, in there. I think that conveys to the viewer, this is a real human being and you're getting him talking the way he normally talks. I, I tend to think that's an advantage. It's maybe partly I say that because I don't think I could pull off this sustained staying in that anchorman mode, but I do think it's an advantage.

[00:09:00] Matt Abrahams: So I'm hearing concision and authenticity are really important, and the visual medium is not as forgiving. And these are skills that you can learn and you have to practice, and yet it's becoming more and more relevant and important. I want to tie in some of your work on revolutions to things that we think a lot about, which is entrepreneurship and disruption. Many of the revolutions you described started with radical ideas that eventually became mainstream. Are there lessons we can learn that can help entrepreneurs and activists take their disruptive ideas and make them more generally acceptable? 

[00:09:36] Fareed Zakaria: I think that more than anything else, the ones that seem to succeed have two elements to them. One is luck. I will be totally honest with you, and I think anyone who doesn't admit this is just being silly. You know, you get the right time at the right place. The timing worked. Other factors came together to make something happen. But the second is a certain kind of determination, a certain doggedness.

[00:10:03] You, you can't get too disheartened when you're trying to do something and you have to be willing to ride the ups and downs. The way I think about it is so many of the people who I've seen who've been successful entrepreneurs, the, the company that worked was their third company. They were determined to find something that works and you adjust and say, okay, the market doesn't want this, or the consumer doesn't want that, but you are going to do something. You're going to make it work in some way or the other. 

[00:10:29] Matt Abrahams: So it's determination and taking advantage of the situation that is around you. 

[00:10:33] Fareed Zakaria: Maybe the thing about luck is to recognize when fortune is favoring you and ride the wave. And that does take skill and that does take, you need to be prepared, you need to work hard, and you need to ride the wave when you see the wave coming. And the other side to it is recognize when you are against the wave. I remember having this fascinating conversation with George Soros once. And he said, you and I do the same thing. We look at the world and try to analyze it. The difference is I put my money where my mouth is and you don't have to. I said, okay, given that, what do you think are the differences in the way we approach it? And he said, I'll tell you I think one of the principle differences.

[00:11:10] People who are intellectuals get very wedded to their ideas and they're very wedded to their theories and they're slow to notice that the world is disconfirming your idea. He said, if I see that the market is telling me I'm wrong, I will sometimes wait, but it's very expensive to wait and so you really need to take in that feedback that the market is telling you you're wrong. And there are times when I have made a bet and the market is telling me I'm wrong, and I'll bet against myself twice as hard on the opposite side of that bet because I've realized that the market is right and I'm wrong. And intellectuals tend to be way too stubborn in holding onto their theories. And you know this from being at a university, 'cause people in a way get famous for their theory, right? 

[00:11:56] Matt Abrahams: I think that's a really valuable point. In addition to tenacity and recognizing, and being able to observe the patterns to decide what decisions to make, we need to be willing to let go and cut bait. And that's so hard. There's so many things that conspire against that. I'm gonna be very curious to hear your thoughts on this. I and a fellow colleague at the GSB, Rachel Konrad, have become very concerned about how teens communicate and the challenges that they have. I'm sure you've seen the same decline that I have, that critical thinking, interpersonal communication among teens has really taken a hit. Do you have thoughts on what parents, teachers, communities can do to help adolescents communicate better? 

[00:12:39] Fareed Zakaria: I do. I hate to be clichéd about this, but I do think that Jonathan Haidt is dead on when he talks about the effects of phones and social media, and it's the combination of the two, I think, and I have personal examples. I've seen this with my kids, and in one case, one of my kids put aside their smartphone for two years, they only had a flip phone and it totally transformed the way in which they had the ability to connect and think and savor life almost. I think that the thing about a smartphone, which is like a supercomputer in your pocket, is it creates a certain kind of learned autism.

[00:13:16] What I mean by that, say when you and I were younger, we were in a awkward social situation. We're at a cocktail party, school mixer, you have to make your way around, right? Like you have to figure out what to do. You find somebody you can talk to, you look around sheepishly and hope that you catch somebody's eye. You are engaged in social interaction. Today, you know what happens. The minute somebody feels socially awkward, take out their phone. And they're on their phone and they're now looking at Instagram or they're connecting with some friends. But those are people that already know.

[00:13:49] You're not engaging in the hard work of social interaction, which is with the people you don't know. Breaking the ice, finding a way in. Similarly, if you're listening to a lecture, the minute it gets boring for you, you take out your phone. You're not asking yourself, okay, is there something interesting here? Is there something I can connect with? Is there, no. So that's what I mean by the learned autism, right? Like it, you immediately retreat to yourself. And the supercomputer in your pocket allows you to retreat to yourself so quickly that you lose the muscles of doing those other things that you should be doing. I think that's most of it.

[00:14:24] I do not believe that kids today are stupid or, they're good, they're hardworking, they have good morals, they have good ethics, but I think we have given them the biggest temptation you could ever imagine. Imagine if you and I were trying to study in the old days, and you were given a machine on which you were told, you can watch every movie that has ever been made, every song that has ever been recorded, you know, here, or you could do your homework. You are giving them an impossible temptation. And so I just think the degree to which you can limit it is the best you can do.

[00:15:01] Matt Abrahams: Absolutely. I do agree that social media phones absolutely have implications. I do think adults in kids' lives can take action by role modeling, good communication, walking through the decisions that we make as we communicate with others, just so that we can make sure that these skills are, at least, demonstrated and encourage. 

[00:15:22] Fareed Zakaria: Yeah, I would, I'll give you an example. In my family, we always sit down to dinner together. No phones at the table, and we always talk. Now, contrary to what a lot of people think, we don't talk about the world and international affairs and what's going on. We talk about just pretty mundane stuff. I think that's the more important, 'cause I want, I don't want them to have to feel like characters in my movie. It's about what happened in their day and what happened in the dog's life and things like that. And that I think just, it seems very simple, but it does seem to me that it's a fairly good force multiplier. And when I've talked to them, they often point out that when they talk to their friends, it's becoming uncommon for family to just sit together dinner and have that meal together and sit down, talk. No phones. It's usually, let's be honest, it's 30 minutes, but it's a very useful 30 minutes. 

[00:16:14] Matt Abrahams: Absolutely. And I love that you take the time to do that. And I'd love to be a fly on the wall on those conversations because in my mind, I would imagine one thing and you're telling me it's something very different.

[00:16:25] Before we end, I like to ask three questions of everybody. One I create just for you, and then the other two are similar across all the episodes. Are you up for that?

[00:16:32] Fareed Zakaria: Sure.

[00:16:33] Matt Abrahams: You have made your career, or part of your career, by asking tough, insightful questions of people. What makes for a good question and do you have a go-to question that you like to ask people?

[00:16:46] Fareed Zakaria: No, I think that's a mistake. I think that ,in general, you really should be listening to people and watching them, and that's each person has a different button you want to press. I think the most important thing, and you've said it, it is being genuinely curious and genuinely believing that everybody has a story to tell. Everybody has something to teach you. Everybody has a lesson you can learn, and I really do believe that. And if you have that kind of curiosity, it's fun to ask people questions. If I go to dinner parties and I find that, like, people have just asked me lots of questions, I leave disappointed because I know what I think. I'm only learning when I'm listening, not when I'm talking. 

[00:17:24] Matt Abrahams: Absolutely. One of the mantras we learned from another guest we had on the show was, it's all about being interested and not interested, and when you take that approach, it can be very helpful. I'm curious to know your answer to this. Who's a communicator that you admire and why?

[00:17:38] Fareed Zakaria: Well, there are many, but let me give you one right now just because it's top of mind. I think Mamdani, the new mayor of New York, is remarkable. He may be one of the best communicators I've seen because he's figured out the medium of the moment, you know, these short form videos, they're very expertly done. They're not, this is not amateur. Remember, his mother is one of the great directors of our age, you know, so they're done, right. But then he brings to it a kind of intelligence, imagination, and authenticity. So the imagination is, if, I dunno if you remember, he's advocating for rent freezes, right?

[00:18:17] So he jumps into the Long Island Sound in February in freezing waters in his entire, in his full suit. And he comes out saying something about how he's freezing and how he wants to freeze the rents. That's the imagination, to get your attention to, he, that is really very compelling. That, that mixture of intelligence, imagination, knowing the medium and being authentic. I should say, I find many of his ideas deeply troubling and I don't agree with the substance of the policies, but I am irresistibly drawn to the power of his communication skills. 

[00:18:55] Matt Abrahams: Isn't it interesting how somebody can appreciate and understand the new way of communicating, new technologies, and still bring that authenticity intelligence to take advantage of it? Thank you for sharing that. Final question for you. What are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe? 

[00:19:15] Fareed Zakaria: I would start with authenticity because I think that's where you get the trust. Some say, you know, clarity and, you know, kind of a concision. And then the final one is probably that leap of imagination that allows you to be a little different. That allows you to do something arresting. That gets you into the top tier, I think. 

[00:19:36] Matt Abrahams: So it's about authenticity, clarity and concision, and creativity and imagination. And I think when you combine that recipe together, you get great communication and certainly you are a good example of putting those together. I appreciate all of the ideas and best practices you have shared, and I really appreciate the intelligent conversation that you role model for all of us. Thank you for your time and best of luck on your paperback of Age of Resolutions. 

[00:20:06] Fareed Zakaria: Thank you so much. This was so much fun. I actually learned a lot while doing it.

[00:20:12] Matt Abrahams: Thank you for joining us for another episode of Think Fast Talk Smart, the podcast. To learn more about managing complex issues and communication, please listen in to episode 161 with Jen Psaki. This episode was produced by Katherine Reed, Ryan Campos, and me, Matt Abrahams. Our music is from Floyd Wonder. With special thanks to the Podium Podcast Company. Please find us on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to subscribe and rate us. Also follow us on LinkedIn, TikTok, and Instagram. And check out fastersmarter.io for deep dive videos, English language learning content, and our newsletter. Please consider joining our Think Fast Talk Smart Learning Community at fastersmarter.io/learning. You'll find video lessons, learning quests, decision boards, an AI coach, and book club opportunities. Again, that's fastersmarter.io/learning to become part of our Think Fast Talk Smart Learning Community.