I’m so thrilled to share this conversation with you. Meeting Fred Dust came, as all the best things in life do, through a series of random conversations.
Fred is a former global managing partner at the acclaimed design firm IDEO. He currently consults with the Rockefeller Foundation on the future of global dialogue, and with other foundations, like The Einhorn Family Fund to host constructive dialogue. His work is dedicated to rebuilding human connection in a climate of widespread polarization and cynicism.
I will tread lightly on this introduction. Fred’s book, Making Conversation, is both a straightforward and delightfully lyrical book about how to see conversations as an act of creativity. We are never just participants in a conversation...we’re co-creators. And we can step up and re-design our conversations if we look with new eyes.
I’ll share one surprisingly simple tool from Fred’s book that I’ve started to use in my own coaching work. A director I am working with sketched out a whole script about how they wanted to address some concerns her direct reports had. After reading over the approach, I asked them:
“If you could choose 3 adjectives to describe how you want your reports to feel after this conversation, what would they be?”
They thought for a moment, and provided some words. These adjectives are the goal and the way.
“Looking over this conversation script, do you think you’ll get those three words out of this conversation map?”
On reflection, it was clear that there were some simple changes to make.
Brainstorming adjectives also allowed us to have a deeper conversation about what their goals were - what were they really hoping to get out of the conversation? Searching for those adjectives was clarifying.
This is the power of reflecting on your design principles. It’s easy to get lost in the weeds of an agenda or a meeting...but if you know your design principles, why you’re committing to the conversation and how you want someone to feel after the conversation is over, it can provide powerful clarity when you’re sailing through the fog.
Finding someone else in the world who’s taking a design lens on conversations and communication is so delightful for me. Fred’s work feels like the other side of the coin of my own. Enjoy the conversation and enjoy his book, Making Conversation, which is out now.
You can also find Fred on twitter as @FREDDUST.
Links, Quotes, Notes and Resources
Find Fred on Twitter @FREDDUST
Min 7
I don't consider myself a facilitator. Certainly, I can facilitate conversations and that's what I like to do and I like doing that, but I really consider myself a designer of conversations. What that means is it allows us to kind of step back and say, “I don't have to be the one, I don't have to be in the conversation. The conversation can be successful.” Often what I'll do is I'll design structures for conversations where somebody else entirely can run them.
Min 8
when you start to think of conversation as an act of creativity or if you don't self-identify as somebody who's creative as an act of making, so just like something that you can make, everybody's a maker of some form or another. It allows you to say, “Wait a second, I don't have to just be a victim to this conversation. I can make the construct of the conversation. I can make the rules.”
Min 11
Dining rooms became vestigial in America... Often dining rooms became offices and other things. Then not only that, gradually we put TVs everywhere and so in a world where the last thing… Not to get too intimate, but how does having a television in your bedroom affect your… If you have with your partner? The last thing or first thing you're seeing is something.
Min 20:
Have as few rules as possible
Right now I would say, what I'm finding is four rules are often even too much because I think I had a limit of four. I would say given our brain's capacity during COVID and during the political strife and just this, the social moment we're in and our fear and anxiety, I'm pretty good with two.
Min 32
Against Active Listening
The point is we've adopted active listening and put it into places it was never really intended to be. It was not meant to be the primary language of human resources, HR. It was not meant to be a boss's way of not listening to the complaints of a person who reports them and that's how we use it now. We use it as a way of signaling a subtle form of agreement but not really.
Min 49
On encouraging the world to start designing conversations...and taking time for self care!
“You can do this. Don't think you can't.” But by the way, if you can't, it's okay to just take a break and go lie down on the floor .
Min 53
On keeping a conversations notebook:
write down the conversations you thought really worked and you start to say, “What worked about those conversations?”... you start to discover in your own world, what those things are (that work)
Min 56
On Commitment:
commit to the conversation and the people in the conversation first, not your values and ideas first
Min 60
Re: Ending Principles:
“Anyone who ends five minutes early, an angel gets their wings.”
More About Fred
Fred works with leaders and change agents to unlock the creative potential of business, government, education, and philanthropic organizations.
Using the methodology in his forthcoming book Making Conversation, Fred works with the Rockefeller Foundation to look at the future of global dialogue, and with The Einhorn Family Fund and other foundations to host constructive dialogue with leaders including David Brooks, Reverend Jenn Bailey, and Vivek Murthy to rebuild human connection in a climate of widespread polarization, cynicism, and disruption.
As a former global managing partner at the acclaimed international design firm IDEO, Fred works with leaders and change agents to unlock the creative potential of business, government, education, and philanthropic organizations including the TODAY show, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Mayo Clinic, Kaiser Permanente, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, and the U.S. Social Security Administration. He has collaborated with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Knight Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and Bloomberg Philanthropies to create new frameworks for engaging with stakeholders to improve the impact and reach of their programs.
Full Transcript
Daniel Stillman:
Fred, I want to officially welcome you to the conversation factory. Thank you for making the time for this. I really appreciate it.
Fred Dust:
I'm delighted. You and I have been talking about this for, I don't know what, like a year and a half, two years so-
Daniel Stillman:
Yeah, and thinking about it for a longer. Well, before we get really into it, the first thing I wanted to do is actually, in your book, you talk about keeping a notebook of conversations, tracking examples of conversations that triggered ideal outcomes for us. I wanted to generate some principles for designing this conversation using some inspirations. One of your inspirations is one of my favorite meetings which is the breakfast meeting.
Fred Dust:
Yes.
Daniel Stillman:
Can we talk for a minute about why you like breakfast meetings?
Fred Dust:
Yeah, and I'm trying to think Daniel. I know we met, we've met over tea I think. But usually the way that I, my preferred way to meet and sorry to be, to wax a little nostalgic would be to go to Balthazar. Because Balthazar was sort of the, Balthazar in New York, in SoHo was sort of like the perfectly timed breakfast. I don't know if you used to go there for breakfast at all, but it's a… I'll back up [inaudible 00:01:38]-
Daniel Stillman:
[crosstalk 00:01:39] black nostalgia, go for it.
Fred Dust:
Yeah, of course. Balthazar is amazing. It's like red little booth. It's like if you've been there like a regular as I had for like pretty much 10 years, that meant that you always got the same booth that you wanted.
Daniel Stillman:
Yes.
Fred Dust:
I always could face the clock so I could always make sure that we were running on time. There’s a giant clock on [inaudible 00:02:03]. The wait staff there is phenomenal. They were just like there, there was never a moment where they missed a meeting and so you knew your conversation would never go more than an hour. The reason I like it is that the first 15 minutes, breakfast happens typically, people have probably done their first round of emails, haven't gotten to the real hell of their day yet-
Daniel Stillman:
Right.
Fred Dust:
That will replace like physiologically, it's a great time, our minds are quite active. That place specifically had a very lively atmosphere, but you could still hear people so you, it boosted your energy levels. Then it's like the first 15 minutes is just chit-chat like what you and I had before we got onto this recording and then there's about 30 minutes of like, “Okay, what are we doing? How can we help each other? What's the work?” Then the bill comes and you have a very easy excuse to kind of wrap everything up and you're out. I say that by all conversations, if you're lucky, you're out five minutes before it's supposed to end.
Daniel Stillman:
Yes.
Fred Dust:
Breakfast is just like, I think kind of the ideal circumstances. Like we actually had to remove this specific reference to that because breakfast can happen anywhere. It's like it’s-
Daniel Stillman:
Yes.
Fred Dust:
It doesn't have to be Balthazar. That it just happens to be the place where I've seen the magic really, really work. Maybe I can stop though. The finding of the conversation notebook is, at first it was like a conversation journal or a conversation diary and I was just like, “Yeah, not so much.” Because it's like some people are journal, there's, some people are not. It's like… I really was like, “What's the most common denominator?” It's like just a good notebook of inspiration is a really good place to start so.
Daniel Stillman:
What I loved about this idea is this idea of generating principles and taking inspiration from multiple places. The other one I think you mentioned was the symposia.
Fred Dust:
Right.
Daniel Stillman:
Which I really loved when I was a teenager. This is weird and perhaps unnecessary amount of detail, but I actually arranged a series of, we call them conviviums because that was another sort of format of the-
Fred Dust:
Right.
Daniel Stillman:
The coming together, the sharing of… The reading of poetry and the deepening of discussions and the job of the person to spread around the wine in an intelligent way. To not over-serve or under-serve people.
Fred Dust:
Yeah. No, it's like… In essence, the book is my conversations notebook, right? Because it's basically all the things that I've drawn inspiration for but yeah. I have the good fortune of being… In fact, I was on the phone with him on Friday and will be on the phone again with him Wednesday. He's helping me with a dialogue typology or conversation typology that I'm building on crisis conflict and bridge building and between communities. But what's interesting is I used to go to his symposia which we’re in Greece and they were typically on an Island.
Fred Dust:
Like last year it was going to be in, on Samos which is a Greek Island and then you could swim across the Turkey and we would host another one in Turkey, the Turkish town there. But I always felt like the formal parts of those, because it was famous economists and politicians and whatever, the formal parts were fine. The informal parts then happened in the evening over wine and relaxing on couches and whatever, those were phenomenal and those are the pieces that he really crafted based on the ancient symposia. I think what he did that was different is he let women in, right? Because-
Daniel Stillman:
Sure.
Fred Dust:
Ancient symposium, we’re not allowed to have women. They were obviously, they were men of all class, interesting, in the ancient Greek Polis and artists to politicians, to the highly wealthy, and it was just like gender was not allowed. But another thing that George also does is he has children. Children and family are allowed to run around and what that does as you know is having children around does two things, it both boosts the oxytocin levels. If you've got children laughing, you have the love hormone triggered in your brain which is amazing.
Fred Dust:
Which is why children and dogs are great to have, but also he sort of believed that children were a good reminder of our future, right? If we were talking about the future of, in his case, he's a Democrat which in his context is social democracy. It's like very, very, very progressive politics. But having a child in mind as you're thinking about climate change shifts, the way you have the dialogue in [[inaudible 00:06:45] so.
Daniel Stillman:
This is how deep the rabbit hole goes in terms of being intentional about the kind of environment you're creating because of the kind of conversation that you want to have. You kind of paint this tension of many of us are maybe look at conversations as we are participants of them and instead we can be makers of them. Why is it important to you that we all see ourselves as makers or potential makers of our conversational spaces?
Fred Dust:
Yeah. I think it's really interesting and Daniel I think you and I would agree which is that, I know we've had this conversation like I don't consider myself a facilitator. Certainly, I can facilitate conversations and that's what I like to do and I like doing that, but I really consider myself a designer of conversations. What that means is it allows us to kind of step back and say, “I don't have to be the one, I don't have to be in the conversation. The conversation can be successful.” Often what I'll do is I'll design structures for conversations where somebody else entirely can run them. In fact, I've been doing that for the last couple of years by establishing the rule sets so that it actually feels fair and just and safe for everyone.
Fred Dust:
The reason I think that's important is that when you start to think of conversation as an act of creativity or if you don't self-identify as somebody who's creative as an act of making, so just like something that you can make, everybody's a maker of some form or another. It allows you to say, “Wait a second, I don't have to just be a victim to this conversation. I can make the construct of the conversation. I can make the rules.” That's true even in situations where you feel like you can't. Two things, Daniel, one is, as you know from the book, in many cases, the conversation is already scripted, right? Like by the spaces that we have in conversation-
Daniel Stillman:
By the default patterns and rules that we’re working and living with.
Fred Dust:
That's right. If I say board meeting to you, what do you think of?
Daniel Stillman:
Yeah, exactly. Those terrible long tables with TV at one end and that space says something.
Fred Dust:
Right. Exactly, and so that's not even, I didn't say boardroom, I said board meeting. It's like, so I wasn't asking you to describe the room but that's what you go to. That's the default. If I said AA meeting, you would probably say church basement with-
Daniel Stillman:
Yes.
Fred Dust:
you, know, folding chairs. I said because I've done that with audiences of 1000s of people and they were like the invariably, unless they're super, super, super like on it. That they will describe the space, not describe the rules [inaudible 00:09:24]. We often in, we go, we set ourselves into spaces where the script has already been established for the conversation based on [inaudible 00:09:34] space plays out. There’s so much we can do by just shifting a space which is what, that's why you and I talked about breakfast this morning [crosstalk 00:09:44] [inaudible 00:09:45].
Fred Dust:
Breakfast shifts the space and creates a different kind of dynamic and establishes a different agenda. The agenda is different because it's bracketed by certain things. Basically, the fundamental argument is that conversation is the most important human tool that we've had probably for the long, one of the longest. Historically, we've gotten less and less good at it and really we have gotten less good at it. There are plenty of historical examples where we’ve, we were better.
Daniel Stillman:
How do you measure or how do you… What's the yardstick for less good at it in this case?
Fred Dust:
Well, as you know in the book, I basically make an argument that at least in the United States or actually really primarily globally, many cases that's I would say Western, that the addition of television, family construct in the 40s really handed dialogue and conversation over to, from the family to the television. In the early 50s remarkable point of innovation for television, we had the TV tray which gave dinner time to the television. We got the… Within a couple of years of that which basically meant that we could skip, we can skip all the things we didn't care about. We had the introduction of-
Daniel Stillman:
You broke up there for just a second, I think it was, you're talking about the clicker, right? [crosstalk 00:11:15] yeah. The TV also changed, instead of having a conversation in the round, we're having a conversation to a wall. We’re not even looking at each other so we're breaking the circle.
Fred Dust:
Exactly, right. Not only that, it's like so we… It's why I think dining rooms became vestigial in America. It's like no longer like that. Often dining rooms became offices and other things. Then not only that, gradually we put TVs everywhere and so in a world where the last thing… Not to get too intimate, but how does having a television in your bedroom affect your… If you have with your partner? The last thing or first thing you're seeing is something.
Fred Dust:
You really have to think seriously. I get the phone thing and I get… I believe Sherry Turkle . Sherry Turkle's was a mega hero of mine, Reclaiming Conversation is like I read the whole thing, yeah. Read over the New York Times piece but it's like… But that's the end of a cycle that we started, [crosstalk 00:12:21] he was the lead, I would say, 80 years ago. Yeah.
Daniel Stillman:
No. Also, there's a quote I have in front of me from your book which is that the rules are the software of the conversation that can be written, tried, and rewritten and one of the biggest risks to a creative conversation is treating the rules as fixed as opposed to a set of constraints to be experimented with. I feel like what you're sort of summarizing there is the designer's mindset. That being a maker is I can make it and I can remake it and somebody has already made it, but I can still remake it even though it's already been made for me.
Fred Dust:
That's right. I'll give you an example from my more historical example of me at IDEO. I think that one of the things that was always interesting at IDEO is that first of all, people believe that IDEO had invented the rules of brainstorming. [inaudible 00:13:13] in the 30s or 40s, I can't remember but it's… In fact, the original rules of brainstorming, the non-ideal rules are way more sophisticated than the one that we know now. I don't know, have you read-
Daniel Stillman:
[crosstalk 00:13:29]. Yeah. They're good.
Fred Dust:
They're genius and he's quite specific. He’s like, “By the way…” That was really one set of rules he had. In his original rules of brainstorming, he'll say, he said, “Hey, and by the way, don't critique, don't judge ideas.” But there'll be judging. That's just going to happen later and there'll be different rules for judging-
Daniel Stillman:
Yeah. Which is like a common critique of brainstorming, is like, “You don't come up with ideas that are well founded.” He's like, “Well, no, you critique it.” By the way, I'm going to suggest we both turn off video. I'm getting a couple of laggy moments and so just-
Fred Dust:
[crosstalk 00:14:07]. Okay. Let me do that. I'm also going to close my window.
Daniel Stillman:
Amazing. There you go. That's-
Fred Dust:
Is that better?
Daniel Stillman:
Yeah. Well, we'll see. Or you can just focus on each other's voices.
Fred Dust:
Yeah. What's weird about this is that we're running my internet off my phone right now so hold on a second.
Daniel Stillman:
It's that's we've all been there. I've had to run entire workshops off of my phone.
Fred Dust:
I know. It's very strange. Okay. Now, it's getting warm in here. Okay. Where were we?
Daniel Stillman:
Well, so I want to ask about rules because you have some rules for rules in your book and I think that it's really great and I think it's worth unpacking the rules for rules. You talk about them being specific, positive, surprising, and brief.
Fred Dust:
Yeah.
Daniel Stillman:
Can we just unfold that a little bit because forming them as positive, formulating a rule as positive may be surprising for people which would satisfy the third constraint but-
Fred Dust:
Yeah. It's really funny because… Hold on, I'm actually looking for the part of my other book where that is. But yeah, it's like the… Part of the point of the inspiration for rules came from rule setting that's happening right now across America in, [inaudible 00:15:22] across the world in kindergartens. Unfortunately, I don't have it right in front of the camera, what the name of the processes. But basically, what they try to do is establish one or two rules for grade schools and kindergartens and the children come up with the rules themselves.
Daniel Stillman:
Is this [Dowe 00:15:44]-
Fred Dust:
A great example-
Daniel Stillman:
Is this the Dowe Academy?
Fred Dust:
No, it's not. Here it's called the Responsive Classroom-
Daniel Stillman:
Right.
Fred Dust:
It's like a thing that's taught and basically what the teachers will work on is how do we make rules for achievement? How do we get something that's going to be our year? It’s going to make us have a better year. Then how is it that it's not negative? An example might be like don't run. It's like so don't know running is like what it's really saying is be safe.
Daniel Stillman:
Yes.
Fred Dust:
Be safe is the positive of don't run because… By the way that I think don't run could be, you can have a 1,000 rules that make you feel like them to be safe which could be like, don't run with scissors, it's like don't run with an axe, that whatever.
Daniel Stillman:
Right.
Fred Dust:
[inaudible 00:16:39]. But be safe is the positive way of doing that. I really believe that we need to kind of be really quite clear around that. I think what's interesting about the be specific and I think Charles Osborne with the original brainstorming rules did a really good job. Is that one of the things that I'm sure you see Daniel in your work, and I've certainly seen in my work is when we're following a rule but we don't know why that rules in place. That comes up a lot for instance in brainstorming, right? Someone's basically like, “Be wild, be un-judgemental, whatever.” There's a specific reason why Charles Gibbs for Why That's The Case.
Fred Dust:
He’ll just be like, he's like, “If you constrain yourself, you will get to less than good.” It's for instance, when people talk to me about empathy, I'm like, “Yeah, sorry.” Not so much empathy, let's go for love because I feel when you go for love, you're… Like the less good version of love is empathy. Or love or the less good version of empathy is understanding or the less good version of understanding is being willing to have a conversation.
Fred Dust:
I'm like, “Let's go out there.” But the reason why is because I know that we're going to get not so great even if we go for love. These [inaudible 00:18:00] be surprising. But I don't know Daniel, but from the book you should recognize, I think surprise is like what makes things work. Like I ran a five and a half hour Zoom thing off the back of UN Global Assembly week. It was spectacular and people were riveted for five and a half hours. I will say the reason that worked is because we had suspense. You just never knew what was going to come next.
Daniel Stillman:
Yes.
Fred Dust:
Literally, we'd be like, “Okay, we're going to stop now and we're going to put you in democratized bathrooms. Somebody that was like a Nigerian entrepreneur, a prime minister and me and we're like, “Okay, we got five minutes, [inaudible 00:18:44] talk about?” I just think not underestimate the element of surprise both in terms of its memorability which I talk about a lot in the book, which is what makes a story memorable is it’s surprisingness.
Daniel Stillman:
Yes.
Fred Dust:
Then brevity is like the opposite of what I've just done which is it's like, “We just don't need a spiel. We need like 45 second clarity on why this rule feels right.” The book has this thing where it's like, I don't know if you noticed that’s where it's like, “Do all this and then or don't-”
Daniel Stillman:
I did notice that.
Fred Dust:
Depending on the context because at the same time if things are going fine, then let's not overthink it. But it's when things are not going well that you have to stop and really rethinking.
Daniel Stillman:
I feel like it's worth bringing up, what this is, are tickling in my brain is brain stuff. Because we were talking about the neuroscience aspect of some of these things. When you're talking about brevity and only having four plus or minus one rules that goes to just a fundamental constraint of the conversation which is the human mind and human memory. We can only keep a couple of things on hand at once.
Fred Dust:
I think that's entirely right. I think the notion of pneumonics and by the way that actually ties to things like space, right?
Daniel Stillman:
Yes.
Fred Dust:
One of the reason I talk about, well, the spaces you have is that pneumonic associations happen because of the spaces that we're in or related to the spaces we're in. It's why, if I say, “Where were you at 911, on 911?” You'll be able to tell me because part of your memory making was built on space, the space you're in. Pneumonics are a significant component of this. Right now I would say, what I'm finding is four rules are often even too much because I think I had a limit of four. I would say given our brain's capacity during COVID and during the political strife and just this, the social moment we're in and our fear and anxiety, I'm pretty good with two.
Fred Dust:
It's like [inaudible 00:20:53], if we have two, that then we will pretty much, I know people remember one and that's… The first one is always be brief, which is like try to stay under 45 seconds in to a single idea. I'm like, “If people can get that, then yeah, we're good.” Then we get much beyond that then… Usually, we can, I can get one more beyond that. Then and over time people will start to adopt it but-
Daniel Stillman:
We're getting towards… Sorry. Based on you breathing in slightly, I was wondering if there was something more you wanted to say about that.
Fred Dust:
No. I was just breathing in slightly.
Daniel Stillman:
I made that to mean… Yeah.
Fred Dust:
Which by the way… Yeah. Which is a good thing to do in a conversation so-
Daniel Stillman:
Right. Okay. Well, so there's the… My, and there's so many ways I can go with this because you talked about silence as a peaceful interruption. Often, if you are in a conversation and somebody is not being brief, right? They're being verbose and they're holding the space too much, there are ways to interrupt them. You talk about a couple in the book, sort of with a question, but also building those silences in. I'm wondering like how you use silence as a tool in conversation.
Fred Dust:
Yeah. Well, so just to… I'll give you a little, I'm going to backtrack a little bit and we'll go back to silence and then we’ll… But interestingly, one of the most simple ways to build, that build silence in is using it in the agenda of your meeting. An agenda just so you know, agenda comes from the ancient Latin. Agenda, this is the stuff that was cut from the book. They were like, “No one cared a lot-”
Daniel Stillman:
I care about this stuff. Conversation-
Fred Dust:
[crosstalk 00:22:28]. Yeah, exactly. But so it comes from the ancient Latin, it actually described a mass so that's why masses, not like religious mass, were actually, the original masses were called agendas. That's how they were put together. If you think about a mass or if you think about any religious service, there's purposeful silenced, whether it be prayer or something else, there is purposeful… There's singing which is, which actually triggers certain kinds of neurochemicals that are positive for us. The way a mass is put together is to build the perfect experience that you can and that's true for many, many, many religious services. It's not just Catholicism.
Fred Dust:
What’s interesting about that is that there is a good example where silence, like you might start with silence in a mass and you might have silence midway through and that's prayer, right? The Quaker services start with silence and that silence is maintained all the way through. Silence, psychologically speaking, there's a lot that studied about the kind of creative potential of silence. The psychology of… Like creativity suggests that being silent for anywhere between 45 seconds to a day will allow your mind to trigger unlikely associations, break down the barriers you have around ideas that come up in dialogue.
Fred Dust:
Which is definitely why you, we'll ask people to sleep on something. Is that it’s like often you'll kind of, it'll, they'll be triggered the next day or it's often why your great ideas come to you while you're on a hike. Like I was just down or in the shower. What you can do and we'll talk about interruption in a second, but one of the things that you can do is you can build a moment of silence into a meeting and so we often think the best time to do that is the beginning, but it can be triggered in 45 minutes in.
Fred Dust:
If you know it’s going to, it's an hour meeting and you know the critical decision making has to happen in the last 15 minutes, when might you put in two minutes of silence? Like 44 seconds, 44 minutes in. What I've found is that I do that a lot sometimes the silence is like, “Just write down some things-”
Daniel Stillman:
Yes.
Fred Dust:
But it just really shifts the dynamics. By the way, everything I'm talking about is as applicable in a virtual context as it is in a-
Daniel Stillman:
Tremendously yeah. Absolutely.
Fred Dust:
But one last thing is that, then there's the people who just run on and on. Like me and so-
Daniel Stillman:
Well, this is an interview, is a little different. This not-
Fred Dust:
But I once asked a really skilled interviewer how she stopped somebody from going on and on. She was like, “I've never really learned.” I'm not afraid to interrupt, I do it all the time, so that's one thing but there are a bunch of other ways to do it. Like you can simply ask something like, “What are we talking about here?” Which is like a moment to kind of self and analyze. You can ask the person to be like, “Can you just tell me a version of this story but in 20 seconds?”
Fred Dust:
You can give them some constraints around how to do that. There's a lot of different ways to do it. I think the point there is not to be afraid to do it. We'll talk about this in a moment, but I’ll let you ask more questions but that relates a lot to even recognizing the things that are triggers for you as an individual and that make you furious with people and why silence can help you with that for a moment too so.
Daniel Stillman:
I saw in the book how you talked about building it in the two thirds mark and I think it is such a powerful thing to give people a chance to have a conversation with themselves.
Fred Dust:
Right.
Daniel Stillman:
Right.
Fred Dust:
That’s [inaudible 00:26:31].
Daniel Stillman:
To make that room for, “Well, what do I think on this? But heard a lot of stuff, 45 minutes is a lot of time. Now, let me collect myself before we just go headlong in for the last...” It is slowing down the pace of the conversation which you talked about. Like having that variability, having some surprise and this fast paced society slowing down is definitely a surprise.
Fred Dust:
Well, and that's also really interesting. Yes, and it's like I'm a big fan of… What I often say is like… Right now I'm working with an institution and we're dealing with two things which is the financial sustainability of the institution and then the question of diversity inclusion which actually shifts as far as restorative justice in the institution. When I was sort of saying is like we'll have two kinds of conversations and the conversations that are about the sustainability of the institution and how we're going to survive, those are going to be fast and non-inclusive.
Fred Dust:
Sorry, 200 people, you're not going to be able to hear everything that we're doing about that because that's about making sure this institution continues to survive. Everything that's about culture, diversity, inclusion, race, ethnicity, restorative justice, any of those things, those are going to be slow, public and deliberative and that's because we do not want to get those wrong. Really, we have, we vary paces. It's like… But I'm a big fan of slowing down in crisis. I think crisis triggers as you know that the fight or flight syndrome and we don't actually make great decisions in that context. We just run and run. It's funny because it was Halloween recently, I just was watching some horror movies and it's like all people do is run.
Daniel Stillman:
Yeah. Never a good idea, wait and get an axe. That's-
Fred Dust:
Yeah. [inaudible 00:28:25] just drive the car to them over and over again, whatever. It's just like so… Anyway, there's [inaudible 00:28:31] but I do think [inaudible 00:28:33], I cannot tell you if there's one simple tool just to use [inaudible 00:28:38] silence, that's it’s powerful.
Daniel Stillman:
Well, I feel like the flip side of this… There was something else that was surprising in your book to me, it was a term I hadn't heard before. I think of, I think about working against that fight or flight response in myself in difficult conversations. Active listening is one of my safety valves. Like I have the active listening script and I activate it and I, it helps me slow down the conversation. But you talked about how… I love that you mentioned Eliza which was like… I'd only read about it. I love the fact that you actually had a conversation such as this with this digital fake therapist who just basically active listens to you but has nothing to say and has no opinion.
Daniel Stillman:
That you contrast active listening with creative listening which is about stepping into people's stories. I'm just wondering if you can just paint a little bit, especially since we're talking about designing our conversations and being a creative maker of them, what does creative listening mean to you? Why is it important do you think for people to be aware of this as a different option?
Fred Dust:
Yeah. It means the world to me. To be honest that the chapter on listening was the first, it was the chapter I wrote to sell the book and to be really honest, everyone was like, “You should just write a book on listening.” I was like, “Yeah. I got more to say.” But it's like… But it isn't in essence one of the most substantive elements of the book. Let me be clear, I'm not against active listening everywhere. I'm against active listening in the workplace. I'm against active listening… Well actually, I might be against it most everywhere.
Daniel Stillman:
Let me rephrase, no active listening.
Fred Dust:
However, I will say the origins of active listening have really, are really smart. Where they were originally intended, they were, they're kind of genius. As you know from the book, Carl Rogers who invented Rogerian Therapy, invented active listening, I would say like in the 40s and 50s, it was one of many of the tools that Rogers used. He was a therapeutical genius. But his premise for it was, in the dominant context where psychology really was either dominated by Freud or Young so it really was psychoanalytic. Carl Rogers didn't believe that a universal theory could solve the secrets of our cognition. He just didn't believe that it had to be Freud or Young.
Fred Dust:
What he did is he basically, he built Rogerian Therapy which is really a form of active listening, which was like you saying something to me. Like, “I'm not feeling good today,” and me saying, “Why are not feeling good?” You saying, “I'm not feeling good because I feel like I'm not achieving my goals.” I'm like, “Well, why aren't you achieving your goals?” I'm never really answering the question. I'm never really responding to you and the reason I'm doing that is I'm trying to unlock you. I'm trying to unlock your ability to understand your solution.
Daniel Stillman:
Yes.
Fred Dust:
Because he basically saying like, “I'm not sure I can do it.” By the way, this was not his sole form of therapy. He had other forms of-
Daniel Stillman:
Right.
Fred Dust:
Of [inaudible 00:31:52]. He didn't believe it… He set and reset the rules based on where a patient was. That’s actually, that we suspect that most modern therapists are like that. They’re kind of like talking through. I think it gets a little bit weirder when you get into the coaching therapist space and then to be [inaudible 00:32:14] honest, I have a therapist that is like, she's Rogerian, but she's also just like, “Yeah, but you got to just call your mom.” [inaudible 00:32:22].
Daniel Stillman:
Right.
Fred Dust:
It's like… The point is we've adopted active listening and put it into places it was never really intended to be. It was not meant to be the primary language of human resources, HR. It was not meant to be a boss's way of not listening to the complaints of their… Sorry. A person who reports them and that's how we use it now. We use it as a way of like signaling a subtle form of agreement but not really.
Daniel Stillman:
Right.
Fred Dust:
You're like, “Well, this person has been mean to me.” They're like, “Uh-huh”. It's just like, but you're not really listening. That became really problematic for me when my teams had stopped listening and these people were design ethnographers, anthropologists, psychologists and suddenly we'd be in meetings with people that were actually their users and you would hear this. Sorry, you got little bumping, but you could hear the typing, right?
Daniel Stillman:
Yes. Yeah.
Fred Dust:
Which was note-taking. By the way, written note taking, phenomenal. It's like…. Or doodling, phenomenal. Great ways to listen. Or knitting, great.
Daniel Stillman:
Yes, yeah.
Fred Dust:
But taking notes on a computer is not listening. I made the mistake of being like, “Well, who's a great listener in my life?” I thought of my mother and I was like, “I want you all to listen like my mother.” That didn't really work because not all mothers listen very well. We basically had to build a new psychology in script around why we should think about creative listening. The book however is like a hybrid between that work at IDEO, my own research into Quaker listening, gossip, secret telling, my great-grandmother's ability to tell incredibly short, powerful 20 second stories which I call illuminations and my mother's ability to listen and the fact that my mother had, it was work.
Fred Dust:
My mother was raised in a family home where her uncle was deaf so she basically was raised in silence for most of her life and so she was a phenomenal listener, like really highly in tune. There's really that chapter. When I finished the book, my publisher was like, “It's 200 pages but it's kind of sprawling.” I'm like, “It's kind of this sprawling because it covers everything.” Again, just covers all kinds of things. But that chapter is really a combination of that. The fundamental premise, sorry, is listening should be joyful. Well, while we're listening to somebody, to your point, we should also be listening to ourselves.
Fred Dust:
The Quaker concept is, if God is talking, God has always been talking and it's actually why women were allowed to preach in the 1600s, like the first women because why not? God could be talking through anybody. It's like the visual cues of listening really matter, like really seeing people understanding, it's why I think, “Well, I'm having a great communications with my dog right now. It's like brilliant.” We’ve never had better interstitial communications and it's also why we love listening to gossip or we love a secret. A secret is like a non… It’s like a, it's the [inaudible 00:35:55] version of a tweet. It's like a secret is just like this little 10 word story that's just like no scintillating. It captures our attention.
Daniel Stillman:
What I'm hearing you saying, not to actively listen to you but what I am hearing is the mechanistic approaches to listening of like that listening is taking notes. Whereas what they're really doing is filtering through their own mental model and tagging, right? They're not slowing down and connecting which is a different… I suppose I'm just pretty willing here. It seems like in the same way that we should design our conversations in general, we should be specific about the types of listening that we need to do and maybe it's good to have one researcher who's in the room doing all the tagging.
Fred Dust:
That's totally right and there could be a moment where it's like it's good to have somebody who's just active listening or it could be good to have somebody who's just witnessing. One of the last hardest symposium I was at, I was a witness and it fell apart and then they were like, “Okay, you and Kemal, you guys were the witnesses, tell us what happened.” We had to be like, “You guys are, you need to go drink.” It's just like [inaudible 00:37:10] I think Daniel, the… Well, first of all, let me just stop. How do you feel about what I just told you? Does it make you feel conflicted? Does it feel-
Daniel Stillman:
No. It's actually, what I'm remembering a story.
Fred Dust:
[inaudible 00:37:25] to me.
Daniel Stillman:
As you probably have, you have to teach these principles to people and I remember a facilitator who I worked with who would do three rounds of, you put a group of three together and they would do some empathic interviews with each other. In one of the rounds, he asked, he made it so that people could only ask one question and then listen for the whole rest of the, it was five or 10 minutes and people were flabbergasted. They were just, there's a shock. We talk about surprise in the rules. It's like, “Well, you can only ask one question.” They're like, “Well, how can I possibly get good information about this if I only ask one question.”
Daniel Stillman:
Then the experience of it is, “Wow. I just could just relax.” I knew that I didn't have to formulate my next inquiry. All I could do was sit there and nod and how liberating that can be because you used the word witness and I was like, “Witness. I don't think we think of as a necessary component.” Like, “I'm just going to sit here and I'm just going to absorb everything you're going to have to say I'm, it's my job to uh-huh and to keep pestering you with additional questions.”
Fred Dust:
Yeah, and there's so many unique forms like that. It’s like there's the Quaker Clearance Committee which is one where it's like somebody just talks and really all you're allowed to do is take notes and then ask questions that are clarifying. Then if you're a good note taker, then those notes are a gift to the person who you listened to. As you know in the book, I talk a lot about a surprising question, so a great example that I've used recently is, I just met somebody who was dying of prostate cancer on this Island and he, his last night on the Island or to, last of second night on the Island, second last night and we were having a conversation and he kind of opened up about it.
Fred Dust:
He hadn't really talked to anybody about it. Instead of me talking about like a latte, “How does it feel to be almost dead?” or like, “You must feel terrible,” or, “I'm so sorry.” I basically was like, “Well, what's one funny story you have that you can tell in 30 seconds about what you've experienced as you've been diagnosed with cancer?” Then he loved it and he told a really funny story and it opened it up and it allowed us to have a much more broader conversation. Finally, in the end allowed me to make an introduction for his last night on the Island to a psychoanalyst who has been struggling with cancer for four years whereas he's just been diagnosed and I was like, “Let's go have dinner with her.” We did and that was really amazing so.
Daniel Stillman:
We're getting towards… Is a timeless way of building.
Fred Dust:
Yes.
Daniel Stillman:
I want to just draw a circle between the way I think about there's this idea of like we are designing conversations, generating principles and then there are these really specific, we could call them designs for conversations, specific patterns that are just can be eliminations to use… Was it your mother or your grandmothers? Your grandmothers-
Fred Dust:
It was my great-grandmother yeah-
Daniel Stillman:
Your great-grandmothers approach. These inversions of common rules that become patterns that we can create living spaces then ask a surprising and positively oriented question.
Fred Dust:
Right.
Daniel Stillman:
Right. Building silence. Not surprisingly, you described your book as sprawling. I think it's a delightful romp. There's another way of classifying it, but-
Fred Dust:
[inaudible 00:41:19] adventure.
Daniel Stillman:
Yeah, exactly. It's like there's the [inaudible 0000:41:23] and there's a whole thing. Anyway, that and I don't suppose many people mention a timeless way of building in their books in general. My editor was like, “Why are you bringing this in towards the end?” I'm like, “Because it's important for people to understand that a pattern language matters.” But I don't have a background in architecture, I have a background in industrial design. I'm hoping maybe you can just talk about why or how your design background comes into the way that you're looking at and thinking about the world-
Fred Dust:
Yeah-
Daniel Stillman:
As designable.
Fred Dust:
[crosstalk 00:42:00]. It's really interesting because as you know like Christopher Alexander's book of pattern language, breaks down, just for those of you who are listeners who might not have read it or heard it or seen it, it's a quite a tome that I often give to people when they first started thinking about design. Because what he does is he looks back at the historical precedent for 1000s of years of history for why things get built in certain ways. It's everything for, what's the role of an Inglenook? Which is like a four person little table by a fireplace that's kind of embedded and why have an Inglenook and then all the way to what's the role of the beer hall to what's the role of a town square?
Fred Dust:
It just kind of gets bigger and bigger and bigger. What's interesting about that is that it both relies on history, but it suggests that there are cultural patterns. I would argue cultural patterns that cut across cultures which by the way matters. The power of sitting in a circle with no table in front of you, on the floor is as powerful in Western culture for different reasons as it is in indigenous Western culture, as it is in African culture, as it is in South American. There’s different reasons why that circle holds power. For us, it might be because we learn that as a child because we, our favorite conversations were in kindergarten cross-legged on the floor with a beloved teacher.
Fred Dust:
For indigenous people, it might be that their most spiritual experiences happen in a circle or it might be that the most political experiences happen sitting in a circle. Really, it varies wildly and yet we can see that the pattern persists and that's a good thing. We need those patterns. It's weird that you said it because I have another notion, I have two other notions for books but one is to basically do a pattern language. Like that's quite literally a more broken down version of this. That's like… Because as you know I really liked my chapter, like my little subsections to be no longer than two to three pages.
Fred Dust:
Often, [inaudible 00:44:15] rules and I'm like, “I don't know why we couldn't break it down to paragraphs, everything from like one-on-one or to you alone or frankly you and your dog.” Because it's like I really do believe in interstitial communications especially with… You alone, you and your dog, you and your friend, partner, person you hate person, person you love whatever, all the way up to countries and the world so I feel like I'd be really interested in doing that. That's one book on my plate and the other is the community kit which is just basically how fast can you jumpstart community? Because I believe you can do in minutes if you need to.
Daniel Stillman:
If you're sourcing timeless waves of building.
Fred Dust:
[crosstalk 00:44:59]. Exactly. It's like… We moved to an Island, this Island two months ago and we had built a community within days of… Like that never happens on this Island. Like it takes years to do that.
Daniel Stillman:
What was your approach? How did you design your-
Fred Dust:
Our approach was very simple. It was like go to the town store, there was only one town store and, but it was owned by an artist because I went to go buy cups and instead I bought a piece of his artwork which was a great compliment to him. He wanted us to meet other people and so it's like literally, he kind of became the host. Then we also, I was like, “We're going to hire a caretaker,” and we were like, “We're going to hire a woman lesbian caretaker,” the first on the Island ever. It turns out everybody was like, “That was the best hire ever.”
Fred Dust:
Like, “She's our most beloved community member.” Like, “We've known her since she was four and watched her struggle through all these things.” It's like… That was me hiring the way I've hired in real life. It's like that's like, I always just focused on like, “Let's get the black gay person.” It's like, “Because we need the different voices.” Ironically, what we did here is no different than what I do when I built my team for making conversation that the business, it's what I did when I used to make teams at IDEO. Is just you just plan it in the same way so.
Daniel Stillman:
Also, Fred, our time for this particular conversation is growing towards the end very rapidly and I want to kind, there's one more sticky note that I have here for my notes. There’s lots more in the book that I didn't take out and put on this piece of paper to be my guide, but there's this quote where you talked about, I want this book to give you the hope I found. I thought that was a really beautiful sentiment. I know that a lot of people look at the current conversation in America and we're recording this on the eve of our election, can you, what is the hope that you found for the future of conversations for us?
Fred Dust:
Well, I'll tell you a little surprising funny story which is that I was, that I had talked about a school for severely addicted children in the opening of the book. Then I was doing an interview, it wasn't really, I didn't need to do it because I was done with the book, but one of young women who went to the school asked if I would interview her so I did. I interviewed her and it was fascinating and so revealing and stuff I would never put in the book because it's just like it was so personal. Yet at the end she was like, “Can I ask you a question” I said, “Yes, of course you may.” I’d interviewed both her and her mother, and she was like, “The question is, are you cured?"
Fred Dust:
I was like, “Well, I wasn't sick.” It's like was my first response and then I was like, “Wait a second. I was absolutely sick.” It's like… Because I was, when I started the research I was like… Originally, the book was to be why we lost conversation in the world and halfway through I'd pivot it to be like, “No, it's about people who actually do have the hardest conversation of their lives and they do make it through using creativity.” I realized that I was cured and so what I thought wasn't going to go in the book that is in fact as you know it's like the final paragraph of the book is that story.
Fred Dust:
But what's interesting is that I did that by being like relentlessly seeking out people who were normal every day, people who somehow had a conversation they never thought they could have and they did it through creativity even if they didn't realize they were being creative. When you spend three years, because that's really what it was doing that, you're like, “We can do this.” I will say to you and your listeners, our job right now in the wake of an election that we don't know what the outcome is but in the wake of a year that we know is going to be continuously to be tumultuous and hard if not worse than that is for us to be unrelentingly good about retelling the stories of when conversations have happened that were good and had good outcomes and where everyday people did it.
Fred Dust:
That's my job. That's my sole purpose right now is like, “You can do this. Don't think you can't.” But by the way, if you can't, it's okay to just take a break and go lie down on the floor like and [inaudible 00:49:49]. But it's like it's our job as humans. It's why we're here, is to discovering the people. Daniel, as you know it's like, I think you can do that with your Trump or Biden voting neighbor. I think you can do that with your… Your job is to do that.
Daniel Stillman:
Yeah. It's our human job to do it.
Fred Dust:
It's our human job.
Daniel Stillman:
Right.
Fred Dust:
There is really nothing more important I believe.
Daniel Stillman:
Well, I'm wondering if there's anything left unsaid. Is there anything else that-
Fred Dust:
Yeah, I will say this because depending on when you're going to drop this, people are going to be heading out home to Thanksgiving and whether that's virtual home or not or they're going to be headed home to high holidays and some sort. It doesn't, that doesn't really matter what it's going to be. I would say that my one piece advice to you is if you can't talk, and there are many reasons you can't talk, it could be things we have fraught conversations while we're cooking because of weight issues in my family. Or it could be I have a Trump voting or a Biden voting relative who I know, voted that way.
Fred Dust:
It really can range wildly. If you can't talk, then just do together. Just be together and do something together. I have a young woman who just reached out to me to say that, after hearing me lecture, she went to her father-in-law and she was like, “I don't want to have a conversation and I don't really want to learn how to play golf but why don't you teach me how to play golf?” Their bond has just been profound through that. She was like, “It's been good enough,” and that's all we need right now. I would keep that in mind.
Daniel Stillman:
Yeah. This is almost like the equivalent of the person who knitted in their meetings to help them, to help her stay present, just to help her stay connected. It’s-
Fred Dust:
That’s right.
Daniel Stillman:
It's the third object in the conversation.
Fred Dust:
[inaudible 00:51:55]. The whole book is like that, which is like it's like, “Do it or don’t.” It's like force the conversation unless you feel like you can't and then just make together. It's like this is an alternative to if you can have a conversation. It's exactly right. It's just like figure out what's working and then lean into that and then get better and better at figuring out how to make that work more.
Daniel Stillman:
It's such a gentle approach to design, right? It's not didactic, it's not imperialistic, right. It's you're saying like there are some principles but you will find your own principles and practice.
Fred Dust:
That's right. It's also that recognizing that forget the methodology of design and forget the methodology of… This book is anti-methodology. As you know it's like it's why it's like a little hard to pin down because I'm like, “Yes, but not until you say no” But it's just like, “Just make. Just create, make, figure it out, steal from other things you've seen. That's all. Okay.” That's all creativity.
Daniel Stillman:
This is maybe a question for myself is that I feel like the current status of maybe just the world in general is that people do want answers. People call me as I'm sure they call you and they want tips. They want tips and tricks and their tips and tricks are plenty, but this question of experimenting and being present and connecting, there's no formula in that case. I feel like that disappoints people a little bit or that is the formula and that's not enough for them.
Fred Dust:
Yeah. It's like… The book is like jam packed with tips and tricks. It's like, “Borrow what you can borrow and then, but if it doesn't work, steal from something else.” It's why I love [inaudible 00:53:43] started with a conversation notebook because what happens when you start to kind of write down the conversations you thought really worked and you start to say, “What worked about those conversations?” Is you start to discover in your own world, what those things are. It's like and then… I will just go really quickly to this, a black woman finance person in HR in a really big… She asked me, she called me up.
Fred Dust:
I know she was in a lecture and she asked me the question which is like, “I find myself getting triggered. What do I do?” I was like, “Just pause.” Because it's like because I was thinking about all the moments where I get triggered and I had a very specific story about being triggered. I remember being triggered and having a situation where I was like, “Wait a second. I can jump down this person's throat and just tear them a new one or I can pause.” I paused and then I just stopped and I was like, “Is this the conversation you want to be having in that person?”
Fred Dust:
That person was like, “No, it's not. I was like, “Okay.” Then we became like, it was great after that. There’s all kinds of places where, just be quiet for a moment, works in a triggering moment. You can basically say, “Wait, how do I do that? Is this the right way to approach this or do I need a moment?” That they apply everywhere but you have to kind of find the ones that work for you in the right situations.
Daniel Stillman:
Yeah. Asking the question, is this the conversation you want to be having? Then if they say no, being able to walk away takes a tremendous amount of personal self-control, like to be able to walk away from that intense moment. It’s non-trivial.
Fred Dust:
It's not trivial and yet it's like… But I think that's great because as you know the opening chapter of the book commit and basically like commit to the conversation, but that means commit to the conversation and the people in the conversation first, not your values and ideas first so that's counter for many people. What I say is like, “If you can't commit, then don't and the conversation will be better for not having you in it.” But if it's like, “Let’s get… Like a work context and then boss we can stop whenever.”
Fred Dust:
But there's like a, in a board meeting, when you're… I'm on a lot of boards and there's always somebody who's always the naysayer and is always like, “Well, I don't really believe in the organization, but it's important that I'm there because I'm like the one who's keeping the truth on.” You're like, “Yeah, no, not really.” If you're not committed to this organization, then just get off the board. It's just like, “We don't need you. We're fine.” I guess I would just say like there's a lot of ways we can kick this stuff around.
Daniel Stillman:
Yeah. Well, have you had that conversation with that person to ask them to make their choice? Like, “Do you want to be here?”
Fred Dust:
Invariably. What's weird is like, I had this recently with a friend of mine. This is a very specific kind of solution but I mean all the time. First of all, with all my teams, I've been like, “You guys don't want to show up, no problem. Or you want to show up and just cry in the corner, no problem.” That's actually fine. During this moment, I'm like, “You have a red flag day, don't even worry about it. Don't show up.” But in more serious circumstances, yes. It's like the person who told me that, about the board that she was on, but I was sitting with my friend and I, and we were both immediately… My friend is like the opposite of me.
Fred Dust:
She's like very wealthy 65 year old woman, very wise in the way of dialogue and conversations and we're both like, “Yeah, you should just get off that board.” She was like, “But I love that board and I gave all my money to it because I like…” Whatever, and we're like, “Yeah, but you should still probably get off that board.” What she did is she didn't get off the board, but she actually recommitted. She was like, “Okay, well, in my role as such and such, I can finally, I could, I can fire the CEO because I can get the board to get behind me on that.”
Fred Dust:
She did that, got a new CEO, built a new strategy with [inaudible 00:57:57] new CEO built strategy and suddenly was an organization that she believed in, but she had committed. She had committed by getting rid of the thing that was the biggest obstacle to her commitment. Yeah.
Daniel Stillman:
It's just interesting that accepting that you can leave can make commitment easier.
Fred Dust:
Right. Isn't that fascinating?
Daniel Stillman:
Yes.
Fred Dust:
It's like just knowing that she wasn't showing up well because of her lack of commitment and then realizing that commitment looked like something different, had this huge impact on her ability to think about the way she was going to be instrumental to the organization.
Daniel Stillman:
Yeah. We have choice. I think often we think we don't have a choice, which goes back to where we started here which is we can design the kind of conversation we want to have if only by leaving.
Fred Dust:
No, exactly. That's it's like for instance I had somebody hunting on my property the other day and I went down and his truck was covered with Trump stickers so I was kind of nervous about it. But I was like, “If I can tell a prime minister that they can either get on a call or not…” It's like… Or I mean literally, I had to be like, “Yeah, you're going to get on Zoom.” “Then I shouldn't be afraid to go and talk to my hunter who's a Trump voter [inaudible 00:59:14],” and we had a great conversation. I had a great conversation with him and his son.
Fred Dust:
It's like, and I was like, “You can keep hunting until six, but you just have to like in the future let us know if you're on the property so that we know, ” and he was super polite about it and we had a really lovely conversation. Then I know his name and now he knows my name. I just thought that was a little bit about like, “Yeah, why not?” Again, granted, I'm in a place where hunting, no one's got AK47s when they're hunting-
Daniel Stillman:
Right.
Fred Dust:
It’s like they’re hunting with rifles or bows. I might feel a little different if I were in a place where we're AK47s were the common way to hunt.
Daniel Stillman:
I just presume you went down and said you started with hi, not what the hell are you doing here?
Fred Dust:
I said, “Hi,” and “What's your name?” Like, “My name is Fred. I own the property and just wanted to talk to you because…” I said hi to his son and I was just like, “You can see, I've got like four adolescents just running around. These kind of four dirty kids. I'm not just like please watch them,” and he was like, “We're really good and we've hunted this property for decades.” I'm like, “I totally trust you.” Then we just kind of chatted. By the way, I have no construct of how he really will vote. I don't really care, but at the same time it's like, there's no, just because he's got Trump stickers doesn't mean that that's where he's voting but I, it doesn't matter anyway.
Daniel Stillman:
Well, so I feel like we've highlighted good ways to connect as humans during a conversation. We're just talking about how to connect as humans is a great way of starting a conversation. Since we're here at the end, what's the best way to end this conversation in the most human way possible? What are some ending principles?
Fred Dust:
Yeah. My ending principles are-
Daniel Stillman:
Because there's nobody to give us a check Fred.
Fred Dust:
Yeah. I know. My ending principles are kind of awesome. They're there which is like, “Just stop,” which is [inaudible 01:01:17]. Basically, I also have like it's like anyone who ends like two minutes early which I think we didn't do it, but that's fine because we knew it would kind of happen, is like a genius. Anyone who ends five minutes early, like an angel gets their wings. But I would just say for you and I, we can just sort of say, you know the conversation is not over and you know what? You and I have been in some form of spiritual conversation in some way or another all through so this will continue even if we're not talking so.
Daniel Stillman:
I really appreciate you saying that. It is such an important idea that we are talking about because as you say, conversation is so precious and so human and to do it on purpose as opposed to by accident is a gift and so I'm really grateful for the work that you're doing Fred,
Fred Dust:
Likewise, your work and thank you so much for… Thanks, by the way for reading the book, that's kind of you.
Daniel Stillman:
Well, thanks for writing it. I appreciate it and I like… We can talk about what that, the pattern language of conversations Bible should look like. I think that's amazing.
Fred Dust:
Yeah, and I need your book actually. I'm going to send you my address if I haven't already-
Daniel Stillman:
Well, Fred, thank you for your time. We'll call scene.
Fred Dust:
Scene.
