Do high-stakes interviews make you nervous? Do you want to communicate better across partisan, racial, or gender divides? Or do you want to make any interview you conduct more compelling? You couldn't ask for a better teacher than Celeste Headlee. A best-selling author and global speaker, this veteran NPR reporter and host has interviewed everyone from presidents to KKK members to authors like Toni Morrison and John Updike. She's also literally written THE books on the art of conversation. Her TED talk, "10 Ways to Have Better Conversations," has been viewed 38 million times. Today, she is the host of the Slate debate podcast, Hear Me Out. In this episode, you'll learn how to interview people who hold vastly different beliefs than you do; how to have illuminating conversations, not confrontations; a helpful mindset shift for when you're nervous about conducting a hostile or difficult interview; and the brain science that explains what makes a good conversation (prepare to have some myths busted), and more strategies that serious audio creators can put to good use in their own work immediately.
Celeste Headlee has anchored many programs, including Tell Me More, Talk of the Nation, Here and Now, All Things Considered, and Weekend Edition. She also served as co-host of the national morning news show, The Takeaway, and served as executive producer of Georgia Public Radio’s On Second Thought.
Her best-selling books include We Need to Talk: How to Have Conversations That Matter, Do Nothing: How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing and Underliving, and Speaking of Race: Why Everybody Needs to Talk about Racism — and How to Do It. She also wrote Heard Mentality, a book specifically for journalists and podcasters.
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The episode discussed on today’s Sound Judgment: "A National Divorce Would Be a Good Thing," from Hear Me Out
Hear Me Out is a podcast from Slate. The show is produced by Maura Currie. Ben Richmond is the Senior Director of Podcast Operations, and Alicia Montgomery is VP of Slate Audio. Celeste Headlee is the host.
Links mentioned in this episode:
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At the end of every episode, I give you a few of the many takeaways from these conversations. Here are today’s:
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Elaine Appleton Grant
Hi storytellers. Do you worry about your interviewing skills? Do you wish you knew how to do it really well? Well, I have a treat for you: a woman who has made it her life's work to learn everything science tells us about how to have better conversations. It's journalist Celeste Headlee, who is known as one of the greatest interviewers in public media. But she wasn't always.
A truly awful experience hosting her first conversation on a national radio show led Celeste Headlee to her calling as an expert in communicating well. It led to a TED talk, viewed by 38 million people, to writing bestsellers including We Need to Talk: How to Have Conversations that Matter, and Speaking of Race, and now to a new Slate discussion and debate podcast called Hear Me Out. In this time of our increasing inability to communicate across all kinds of divides, learning how—maybe one of the single most important things we can do as audio makers and as human beings.
One of the most useful things that I learned from this conversation is how we can have conversations, not confrontations, with people we disagree with. This skill doesn't just help us at the dinner table. It's crucial for us as storytellers. It's the only way we can represent the full range of human experience, and hopefully connect us a little closer with each other.
This is Sound Judgment, where we investigate just what it takes to become a beloved podcast host by pulling apart one episode at a time together. I'm Elaine Appleton Grant.
Ad Break (1:52-3:11)
Elaine Appleton Grant: Before we get started, I want to thank you for showing up and supporting this new venture. I started Sound Judgment at the tail end of September last year. And it's been such a joy to produce these conversations and these lessons for all of you serious and curious creators. It's also a ton of work and one of the things that helps us continue to produce this podcast is your reviews on Apple Podcasts, your ratings on Spotify and elsewhere. Like this one from Lauren Passell of Tink Media. She didn't stop at five stars in her Apple Podcasts review. No, she gave it 456,645 stars. Thanks, Lauren. She wrote, Elaine is specific and thorough, asking questions that everyone is wondering, but not too many people are addressing. Each episode is packed with real advice, multiple takeaways for people in audio. The takeaways at the end are hugely valuable. So if you are enjoying these episodes and finding them useful in your own work, please follow Lauren Passell's example and post a review on Apple Podcasts today. And now on to some practical evidence-based research and real-world advice from a master of the interviewing craft, Celeste Headlee.
Elaine Appleton Grant
I think something that you've been quoted as saying is that you were a reporter for a long time, and as a result, you assumed that you were a good interviewer, that you knew how to have a good conversation. And then you became a host, and you discovered you were wrong. Do you remember the moment. Did something go wrong?
Celeste Headlee
I had been avoiding being a host for a very long time. People kept pushing me to host shows. And I was really resisting because I was really invested in my identity as a reporter, right? And hosts sit at the desk all frickin’ day. And I did not want that. But I got my first job full time hosting at The Takeaway in New York. And I remember early on getting an interview that I was really, really looking forward to, and I can't for the life of me remember what it was.
I thought I was ready for that interview. And it just didn't go very well. It was boring, the person wasn't engaged, the guest whom I was so looking forward to talking to wasn't really enjoying themselves, and that's when I was like, uh-oh, doing an actual live interview is super different than doing a reported interview, where you don't have to worry about story arc, where you don't have to ask the questions in any particular order. Where the way that you craft the question itself doesn't matter, because we're not going to hear it. When you're reporting you don't hear the reporter's question. So that's when I really started to do research into conversation particularly.
Elaine Appleton Grant
What did you learn? That was like, oh, that's what I'm not doing! Or that's what I ought to do.
Celeste Headlee
First, it was a process of realizing that most of the advice out there was crap. I started out with books that were about journalistic interviewing. There's not a whole lot of them. But I was in an interview laboratory, like, literally, I could take every single individual suggestion and test it. And say, okay, they tell you to do this. Let me test this out and see if it makes the interview better. And it almost never did.
Elaine Appleton Grant
Really! Like what?
Celeste Headee
Well, if there were things like you making the person feel comfortable by offering up your own stories, or telling them about your personal connection to their work, or whatever it may be. That rarely works. And again, I was just testing this stuff out, I didn't have any stake in it. And then I moved on. I was like, Well, you know, an interview is basically a formal time limited conversation, let me just research what we know about conversations. And that advice was worse, you know, the whole thing of saying uh-huh, and giving those verbal affirmations, or nodding your head, or maintaining eye contact, or mirroring their body posture, or summarizing what you just heard.
Again, I was able to test all those things out, and almost universally, they made the conversations worse. Now, one big part of that is because all those things that we're told to do are basically teaching us how to performatively listen, if you're focusing on saying, uh huh, yeah, mmm, then what you're thinking about is how long is it since I last said, Uh huh. And okay, it's probably time, let me say uh huh again and nod my head again. We now know, because we've had access to the fMRI, the functional magnetic resonance imaging machine, for quite some time, we know that eye contact is not necessary at all. And in fact, most people can't even tell when you're making real eye contact. If I were to focus my eyes on your forehead, or just your nose, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference. Number one, great news for people who, for example, might be on the spectrum. And the other thing is that when you're focused on making eye contact, it tends to make people feel awkward and uncomfortable. And so then I was stuck in a quandary. Because,
Elaine Appleton Grant
Because now what do you do? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Celeste Headlee
Exactly. So essentially, what I did was I just started going back to the research studies, and I'm like, okay, so what do we know in general about human conversation and connection? What do we know about conversations that work? How do we know if a conversation is working or not? How do we know when a human connection has been made? And what does that look like? And that led me in a completely different direction. That's what led to my TED Talk in 2015. That's what led to my first book, We Need to Talk. Even before that I wrote a really slim volume that was basically designed just for broadcasters called Herd Mentality. And that's where that came from, tot.
Elaine Appleton Grant
And in fact, your TED Talk, 10 ways to have a better conversation, has now been viewed 38 million times. It's astonishing.
Celeste Headlee
It’s crazy. It’s totally insane. It is insane. I honestly did not think anyone would be interested by that topic.
Elaine Appleton Grant
It is a great talk. I learned a lot. But why do you think the subject is so incredibly popular?
Celeste Headlee
I will tell you idealistically what I hope it means. I hope it means that all over the world, people are realizing that something is going wrong with our communication, that something is missing. And they're looking for a solution. That's my hope.
Elaine Appleton Grant
I am curious. In your TED talk—and I had to laugh almost. You said our partisanship is at a fever pitch. It's higher than ever. You recorded that in 2015. And it almost seems laughable, doesn't it? It's so much worse now. So do you feel like if we learned better ways of having conversations, whether that's on an air or in a meeting room or a school yard, that we would be able to come together?
Celeste Headlee
I absolutely do. And I have the evidence to back it up. A couple things I will point out. The first is that belonging is the number one need that a human being has after food, shelter and water. In fact, there's some evidence saying that we may even pursue belonging before we have secured food, shelter and water. Which makes sense in light of our history as a species, right. Like a lot of people have thought for a long time that the reason Homo Sapiens was the human species that survived—you know, there were several human species, and the Neanderthal was way smarter and more powerful than we like to think. A lot of people still think that we did that because we were so smart, because of our sophisticated intelligence.
No, that is not true. Human beings are not particularly logical thinkers. We are the only species that is prone to confirmation bias, for example. We are emotional and social creatures, we're not logical. The way that we have survived is through our communities, right? If you're messing with one human being, you're almost always messing with more. And when we need to accomplish a task, we have the sophisticated communication that allows us to find out who has the best aim, find out who can think geometrically, who's the best with the drawing, etc, etc.
And that's a high, high level of communication. So, we know that when you encourage people to form teams, you can get people to overcome all kinds of personal differences in order to be part of that team. It links into that deeply held evolutionary need to belong.
We really like puzzles, for example. If you put two people together who don't like each other at all, but say, here's this puzzle, can you get it done in less than 90 seconds? They will work together in almost every case. Yes, it is shocking how quickly people will form teams. The other thing we know is that the one way—which is the most reliable, the quickest and most effective way to establish an empathic connection between two human beings—is through perspective taking. So when you are hearing someone else tell you their personal story, when you yourself are sharing a personal story, and you're being heard, that's the fastest path to an empathic connection between two human beings. And in fact, there's research into a phenomenon called neural coupling—his research began at Princeton, but it's been researched at a lot of places—that shows that when one person begins to actually really listen to another in an engaged way, their brainwaves begin to move in exact sync.
Elaine Appleton Grant
I love that.
Celeste Headlee
In some cases, the sync is so exact that the listener’s brain anticipates changes in the speaker's brain by a fraction of a second. Yes, it is the closest to magic you will get in science, right? Because that's mind meld. That's the kind of empathic bond that we can create when a human voice is telling its story, and another person is really listening. And I'm leaving out the deaf community, because we don't have the same amount of research into that, although ALS is seen to be a very, very nuanced and empathic language. So do I have hope that if we actually would listen to one another, we could overcome these differences? Absolutely. Yes, we could. We just aren’t listening.
Elaine Appleton Grant
That is such good news. And it's news, I think, that we all have to hear, that we all need right now.
Celeste Headlee
I agree with you. I'm biased, but I agree with you. Yeah.
Elaine Appleton Grant
Okay. So recently you launched Hear Me Out on Slate. It's a deliberate attempt to have civil, curious conversations with people who you probably do not agree with?
Celeste Headlee
I think so. Yeah.
Elaine Appleton Grant
Topics range from the episode we're gonna pull apart, American Secession, to the notion that outdoor cats could actually be a good thing. In an ideal world, what outcome would you like to see from Hear Me Out?
Celeste Headlee
Actually, it's not even an ideal world. We've already started to see some of this. This episode that you're about to hear from, and others as well, we've gotten feedback from people going, Wow, okay, so, yeah, that's how you do it. Like I'm literally hearing step by step how to have the conversation—in one case, one person said, with my racist uncle.
The outcome is that we want people to feel so empowered to not only be able to hear that this is possible, but also see how simple it can be, and then give it a go.
Elaine Appleton Grant
Today we're gonna dissect the second episode of Hear Me Out, it's called A National Divorce Would Be A Good Thing. Your guest is Frank Buckley, a professor at George Mason University. He's a native of Canada who became an American nine years ago, and he wrote a book called American Secession. Let's listen to your intro.
Clip from Hear Me Out
Celeste Headlee: Welcome to Hear Me Out. I'm your host, Celeste Headlee. So what if secession wasn't the third rail of politics? It's safe to say the last time it was tried on US soil, it didn't go well. More soldiers died in the Civil War than in the Revolutionary War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War combined. And things have not been sunshine and daisies since then. So if the S word happened again, could it end up being a good thing? Our guest today argues, yes.
Frank Buckley: Bigness is badness and we're a big country. Smaller countries are happier, less corrupt. That argues for looking carefully at the possibility of becoming a smaller country.
Elaine Appleton Grant
Now, there are people like Marjorie Taylor Greene calling for secession. It's an idea you would hear on Fox News. Tell me first why you chose this episode of Hear Me Out to examine with me.
Celeste Headlee
I think it's because I so very much disagree with this man. He's a kind of an ideal Hear Me Out guest because he's an old school conservative, and he is perfectly well educated, well read, rational. He is measured, he's perfectly willing to let me speak without interrupting me. He's not trying to say provocative things just as clickbait. So, to that extent, he's a perfect Hear Me Out guest. But I disagree with him on almost every single level.
Elaine Appleton Grant
So Frank Buckley argues that secession is not as unlikely as it seems. He also argues that it would not be violent. So you bring up the elephant in the room, and here's a clip.
Clip from Hear Me Out
Celeste Headlee: But I want to bring it forward to today. Because you had said you feel like secession today would not be violent. How do you square that opinion with what happened on January 6?
Frank Buckley: Oh, January 6 was a scandal. I mean, and it—you know—it permanently tainted one wing of the Republican Party. Not the entire party, to be sure. Was that an attempt to overthrow the government? Well, you know, I don't think governments get overthrown by people who wear funny hats and paint their faces. There was nothing like Fort Sumter on January 6...
Elaine Appleton Grant
Tell me what you felt when you heard him say that.
Celeste Headlee
I mean, it's so familiar to me, this dismissal of the so called bad apples. We hear the same thing when it comes to reform of law enforcement, for example. That's not who most people really are. It just felt really, really dismissive. Forget about the hats, what they were doing wasn't funny at all. And so it just made me, I guess, a little tired? And also, like—it always frustrates me when there's somebody that I respect who’s, to my mind, just not seeing a full picture.
Elaine Appleton Grant
I know, when I hear stuff like this—we have a hard time engaging in these conversations, you know, with the uncle at the Thanksgiving table. That's the classic because our blood pressure gets raised. We're worried about having a big argument. So we tend to just avoid having the discussions in the first place. So as you just said, you're tired of hearing it. It's very dismissive. It's disrespectful. But that's not the way you responded. You responded with curiosity, you responded very respectfully and civilly.
Celeste Headlee
I always try to respond with curiosity. I always try to ask myself, What if that's true? If that is true, then what? Or what are you hearing that I'm missing that led you to that discussion? I always try to give the other person the benefit of the doubt as a smart person. Because I expect other people to assume that I'm smart, that I hold opinions, because I have a different experience, or I have different conclusions that I've drawn from what I've learned. And so I try to do the same thing with them. Okay, so if they’ve drawn different conclusions from information, what information did they see? Right? It just helps to sort of calm all those things you're talking about. Your heart rate raises. That happens because you feel as though you have to defend your point of view. But if you can just breathe into that, and be like, Okay, I'm feeling defensive. But I don't need to defend my point of view. A better question is, why do they think that? What led them to that?
Elaine Appleton Grant
So you just turn off the need, by knowing that you're not going to talk them into your point of view to begin with. Then there's no point in defending your point of view.
Celeste Headlee
Exactly. They will not change their minds. I didn't change my mind. And most people don't. In fact, when I ask groups of people, tell me about the last time you changed your mind, I almost always hear things like, well, I thought I hated mushrooms. It's never on a core value. So understand that if you haven't changed your mind, they're not going to. So there's no need for attack, there's no need to defend.
Elaine Appleton Grant
So the ultimate aim then, is about connection, not persuasion.
Celeste Headlee
Yeah, exactly. You don't want to persuade them. What you want to do is learn more about their perspective taking and giving, right? So you're going to take their perspective and be like, Huh, what can I learn from that? And you're gonna give them your perspective—in a sense, not of beating them down, but I'm giving you my perspective as a gift, assuming it's going to help you in the way that your perspective is helping me. And by the way over the course of that, you will make a connection.
Elaine Appleton Grant
Got it. In fact, you said in your TED talk, and it's one of the most famous things I think you said in your TED talk, I always—well, as often as possible—try to maintain a sense of curiosity rather than judgment. A person is never our pre judgments, they will always surprise you.
Celeste Headlee
It’s true. And you know, it's the same thing in a kind of broadcast, right? There has to be an element of surprise. But we think we know everything there is to know about other people, even perfect strangers. We see a political t shirt they're wearing, or—we think we know everything we need to know about them. And we don't even entertain the possibility that they might surprise you. People surprise you. I mean, if there's one thing you learned in journalism it’s that people are freaking surprising. They are surprising.
Elaine Appleton Grant
And fascinating. So one thing that I hear in this show is just how much preparation you do in order to hold your own in these conversations. Here's an example. He argues that January 6 is meaningless, as we've said, as sort of the bad apple theory. And that a more useful precedent for a largely nonviolent secession was the movement for Quebec to secede. And here's your response.
Clip from Hear Me Out
Celeste Headlee: But Quebec didn't secede?
Frank Buckley: No, it didn't. It came within one percentage point of seceding, of voting to secede, I should say. Right. The vote—
Celeste Headlee: I mean, but that's an important distinction. You're talking—the precedent that happened in Quebec did not result in secession. And the violence of the Civil War didn't begin at Fort Sumter. There were skirmishes, possibly in some cases carried out by oddly dressed people, there was horrible violence. There were even massacres in some places. There were small militias carrying out violent attacks, especially in the border states that were still deciding whether they should make slavery legal or illegal, especially in the frontier states. There was—it was not organized, the Civil War, until it was organized. Before that it was chaotic, and spontaneous in some cases, and horribly violent.
Frank Buckley: Recall, but you're the person who says that history is not going to get us fairly far on this one. And I agree with you. So I've tried to bring things more up to date to imagine what secession would look like today…
Elaine Appleton Grant
Tell me how you prepared for this particular episode and how much time you spent.
Celeste Headlee
I don't actually remember how much time it took me. One of the first things I do is to read what they've written on the topic as much as I possibly can. I didn't read his book. But I read articles that he'd written. I clicked all the links, you know. When people cite things, you have to look up those references. That's especially true if they're citing any type of science or research, because that—whomever did the original research, that may have been a completely flawed and ridiculous study.
So I always have to go back to their own argument first. And in this particular case, that's about as far as I needed to go, the things that he had written reference so many things in current politics, and in history, especially, that I just had to follow that rabbit trail down and research all of these historical events that he kept talking about till I had my notes, and I was ready to go.
But there's other things. For example, we did one on whether or not it's okay for cats to be outdoor cats. And so I had to go and look up all the current research on what actual scientists and biologists and wildlife biologists say about that. So that I'm ready to say, Oh, you're kind of—have an opposing opinion from, you know, the bulk of scientific opinion. So—you know, it's interesting, for my book, Speaking of Race, I spoke with David Black, who was a neo Nazi. He's actually the son of the man who founded Stormfront, which is a neo Nazi publication…
Elaine Appleton Grant
David Black’s godfather was David Duke. He was a Grand Wizard of the KKK and he was a member of the Louisiana House of Representatives from 1989 to 1992. In 2013, the Anti Defamation League described Duke as perhaps America's best known racist and anti Semite. But when Celeste spoke with his godson, David Black, Black had renounced his bigotry and was instead serving as a voice of equity, Celeste told me.
Celeste Headlee
I asked him for tips on how to talk to somebody who is absolutely in the other camp. And he said, You need to know their argument as well as you know your own. If you don't understand what they're saying, any objection you have is going to be put down to, well you don't understand. You need to come from them from a place of having the respect for their opinion that you get what they're saying to you. Otherwise, they don't hear you. They just count you out. And that's sort of where I'm coming from on the podcast.
Elaine Appleton Grant
And perhaps you don't give yourself enough credit. So I used to work with Laura Cannoy who hosted The Exchange on New Hampshire Public Radio for 25 years. And I remember the day she got an honorary pHD. And it's because you learn so much over the course of 25 years, I think, of being a journalist. And if you're curious about something in particular, you know. You're extraordinarily well informed about the history of the Civil War. And you were able to say, without missing a beat, yeah, but no, there were skirmishes. That's not true. There were militias, there were massacres. Is that something that you picked up along the way that you research for this episode,
Celeste Headlee
My great grandmother was born on a slave plantation in Georgia. The Civil War is very important to the history of my family. But it's also, frankly, at the core of so many political things that occur in the nation that as a journalist, it's something that you return to again and again and again. But you know, the point is, is that you learn from what you've seen and read and heard, and then you bring that to bear.
The danger here is that our memories are so unreliable that when you go into these conversations, you have to be careful that you're not relying on gut instinct, or what you think you recall about something. If you're going to state something as a fact, you need to be pretty damn sure that that's what the facts were.
Elaine Appleton Grant
Sure. But you know, the research, obviously, it's one of the things that I'm always sort of harping on, is—you can't just go into an interview without doing some serious research. And, you know, again, with the widespread ability to get on a mic and talk, I think there are a lot of people who don't really realize that.
Celeste Headlee
You know, I'll tell you a story. When I was reporting, I was the Midwest correspondent out of Detroit, and I covered the premiere of the opera Margaret Garner, which was Toni Morrison's first opera. It was based on her novel, Beloved, based on the same story. And I had an interview with Toni Morrison.
Elaine Appleton Grant
In 1856, Margaret Garner was an enslaved woman who attempted to escape along with her husband and four children. When they were caught, she killed her two year old with a butcher knife, rather than have her grow up in slavery.
Archival Clip
Host: Morrisson says Garner’s act was unforgivable. But her motivation was understandable.
Toni Morrison: Slaves had no rights over their children. They could never be parents. They could reproduce, but they could never be parents. She insisted that she parent, and that for her was freedom.
Celeste Headlee
Now, I did not know that she is notoriously a prickly interviewee. That people—obviously she's passed, but—dread having to interview her because she's so difficult. I had no idea. And so I went in and did this interview. And we had a fantastic conversation. The engineer had to come out and say, I'm sorry, Ms. Morrison, we need to use the studio. She didn't want the interview to end. And I did a Getty fellowship a little later in journalism. And the leader of the fellowships is like, Celeste, I know you're here as a fellow. But do you think you would talk to the group and I was like, about what? She's like, we want to know how you got Toni Morrison to talk. And I said, I read her stuff.
I read her writing, beginning and end of the research that I did, and I can't tell you how often— it's become a specialty of mine. I'm particularly good with people that everyone calls really difficult interviewees. John Updike, other people. There's no secret to it, I really read what they've written.
And now on the other end of the mic, when I'm getting interviewed about my own books, it is so clear to me immediately when someone hasn't read. Within the first two minutes of an interview, I know whether they have read the book or not.
Elaine Appleton Grant
And how do you react?
Celeste Headlee
I mean, I try to be as polite as possible. There's only been one time where I was a jerk about it, it was because it was this dude who kept trying to be edgy by pushing back on everything that he thought—I mean, I guess he must have read the book jacket or something. And I said, that's in chapter two, that's in chapter six. I address that specifically. I said, obviously, you didn't have time to read the book, and that's totally fine. But I don't want to repeat what I've written. That's all discussed in the book. And he ended the interview pretty quickly after that.
Elaine Appleton Grant
I guess I should have asked, how do you feel when that becomes apparent?
Celeste Headlee
I kind of disinvest. You know? How good is that conversation is going to be? Like, this clearly isn't important to you.
Elaine Appleton Grant
I think that's really important. I think it's important for people to hear, from both sides of the mic here. I did mention, and I mentioned it for a reason, that there is a point in that clip that we just played where you actually jump in and interrupt him politely.
Clip from Hear Me Out
Celeste Headlee: But Quebec didn't secede.
Frank Buckley: No, it didn't. It came within one percentage point of seceding, of voting to secede, I should say. Right, the vote—
Celeste Headlee: I mean, but that's an important distinction. You're talking—the precedent that happened in Quebec did not result in secession. And the violence of the Civil War didn't begin at Fort Sumter.
Elaine Appleton Grant
And you did an interview last year about the art of conversation with Sanjay Gupta and his show Chasing Life.
Clip from Chasing Life
Celeste Headlee: When I give a speech on conversation, I will always get some version of how do I get people to stop interrupting me? How do I get people to stop going on and on and on.
Sanjay Gupta: But before Celeste became an expert in conversation, she had a self realization.
Celeste Headlee: I’d always thought I was good at conversation. And it turned out, nope. I'm good at engaging with people and connecting with people. But in terms of actually stopping talking, and asking people really good questions to get the meat of what they know, and they think, and they feel—I wasn't great at that.
Elaine Appleton Grant
So this is the opposite, I guess. How do I get people to stop running on and on at the mouth, which, of course, pundits have a tendency to do.
Celeste Headlee
So this is one of the cases in which there's a distinction between an interview and a conversation, right? Because as an interviewer, I am there as a guide to guide the conversation, I need to keep it on target. And I also need to keep that guest intellectually honest.
My listeners don't have time to do all the research that I've done. So I need to jump in and say when something isn't true, it's off base, or somebody's changing the subject. So in that particular case, I feel like it would have been a waste of time for him to go off and draw a lot of conclusions about the fact that they had this secession, because he kept not mentioning the fact that they didn't secede. He was using it as an example of secession. And I'm like, we need to address the elephant in the room, which was that there was no secession. And so at that point, he had mentioned it so many times, it was time for me to jump in.
The thing I was talking about with Sanjay Gupta is related in that we really notice when other people interrupt us, we almost never noticed when we interrupt others. We really notice when other people are going on and on and on and on and on. And we don't notice when we're occupying that floor for a really long time. So to everybody, I will say number one, doctor, heal thyself. Just a couple quick statistics here, more than four out of five people say that bad communication has wrecked a previous relationship. Fewer than one in five say it was their fault.
Elaine Appleton Grant
Seriously, more than four in five people say bad communication has wrecked a relationship?
Elaine Appleton Grant
Yeah, has really destabilized and and and weakened a previous relationship of some kind. And fewer than one in five say, it was on me. I was the one that was doing poor communication. It was the other person, right, that math doesn't work.
Elaine Appleton Grant
I'm only laughing because I've been divorced. I've done that.
Celeste Headlee
Yes. But I will say that's number one. Is that you cannot change other people's conversational habits. The only thing you can do is work on your own. And by the way, they probably could use some work. And the other thing I would say is that people's attention spans are very short.
Elaine Appleton Grant
I'm just going to generalize, I'm gonna say most of us have been trained to be extremely polite. And if we're not journalists, we're not professional interviewers, we're unlikely to interrupt, which allows people to go on and on. And then you either have a terrible problem in post production, or you leave it in in post production, and you don't have any listeners left because it gets really boring. So how do you help people get over their natural inclination to say, Well, my mother taught me not to interrupt.
Celeste Headlee
You have to stop thinking of an interruption as something rude. Because oftentimes, especially as an interviewer, your interruption is helpful. You as an interviewer are trained in how to hear the way this conversation will hit a listener’s ears. And so you'll interrupt to help them be more clear, you'll interrupt in order to help them dig into maybe a subject they skipped right over. That's actually going to be really, really interesting to the audience. And oftentimes, I will phrase interruption as curiosity, right? I will be like, you know, that's so interesting. We could spend a ton of time on that. Sadly, let me pull you back to what we're here to talk about today, which is, blah. And so a) I am pulling the curtain back so that everybody knows exactly what I'm doing and why I'm interrupting. But I'm always phrasing it like, Absolutely, this is fascinating. But let's get to this particular point.
Elaine Appleton Grant
Those are very concrete. Really, really helpful. I have often said, Well, your first loyalty is to the listener. And so you're helping the listener, but to be able to frame it that you're actually helping the guest is very helpful.
Curation is one of the most difficult parts of doing a good conversation or interview show, especially one like Hear Me Out where you want to talk to people you disagree with who have hot takes. But you are also, as you said, looking for someone who, you know, is well informed, reasonable, wants to talk. This day and age that can be pretty hard to come by.
You've got some great producers, how are you curating this show? And what does it take to find the right guest—and convince them to talk to you?
Celeste Headlee
So we talk a lot about guests. And obviously, that's the core of what we do. And so we will a) rely on people's past experience with that particular person. We will rely on each other's knowledge of having heard someone be interviewed. And then of course, to be a great podcaster, you have to have a freaking fantastic producer. That producer not only has to be smart enough to understand what it is that everybody wants, that producer is listening in to that editorial meeting and taking away all the important points about what you want and what you don't want. And then they're gonna go and make that happen.
So our producer, Maura Currie, has a long, impressive resume doing this. And she's super good at really doing the research that she needs, listening to their interviews, and making sure that they are articulate in that they can be understood. When you can get the most astute, brilliant scientist in the world, and if all they do is talk about things that most people can't understand, it's a waste of time.
So they need to be articulate in that way. And they need to be reasonable, and they need to be willing to engage in an honest argument. You know, there's also ethical issues in curation, where you really have to make sure that you have a diversity of guests. All kinds of diversity, socioeconomic, educational diversity, where they were born, what kind of—their immigration status—as the widest possible representation of people as you can. Otherwise, who are you representing? And you also have to make sure that in terms of curating your guests that you're not relying on stereotypes of subject matter. You don't want to always book a Hispanic or Latino guest if you're talking about immigration, right? You don't want to always book a woman if you're talking about abortion, right? That's not to say that the conversation or abortion should happen without women present, as it does.
Curation is one of the most difficult and completely underrated part of podcasting. We don't invest enough in—we don't pay our producers enough for what they deserve in terms of how important this is and how crucial it is to the success of a podcast.
Elaine Appleton Grant
And it's time consuming to do well. It is very time consuming to do well. Absolutely. I could not agree with you more that is underrated and overlooked.
Let's talk about the problem of an alternative set of facts. And I know, you said your ideal guest, you're coming from the same set of facts. But even with as good and articulate and eloquent as Frank Buckley was, it appears that there was a certain point at which it seemed like he was operating from a different set of facts, certainly than you were. And that was when he argued that secession would not be as horrible now as it would have been in 1861, or 1964, because of the success of the civil rights revolution.
Clip from Hear Me Out
Frank Buckley: We're not going back to slavery. We're not going back to the kind of injustice as we saw in 1964, even.
Celeste Headlee: I got to disagree with you, Frank. I mean, to say that we haven't—we've come far. Yeah, we should have come far since slavery, but to say that they are not individual states in which the rates of discrimination, the rates of discriminatory sentencing, and prosecution, the rates of redlining and insurance, where it costs more to be a Black or brown person in in particular state. I mean, that's just not looking at the data. There are absolutely states…
Elaine Appleton Grant
So, it appeared to me that the basis of this argument starts from two entirely different understandings of the status quo, of truth. So talk to me about that exchange and what it illuminates about the work we as interviewers are doing in the first place.
Celeste Headlee
So when I come up to these particular things where there's a real disagreement, my goal is to introduce a seed of doubt. I'm not going to convince them. Like that question, do you think that's because I'm a black Jewish female and you're not? That is not me phrasing it as, do you think that's because you're a white male and you enjoy privilege? It's like, can you imagine that coming from my point of view, I have a different perspective on this. And honestly, that's all I have to do. Either that seed will grow or it won't.
So there's two important goals for me here. Number one, so that the audience hears that pushback, so that we don't allow those statements to stand as though they're accepted as real. Like if somebody has an alternative set of facts we need to lay out, that's very different than 98% of climatologists, for example. Where did you do your PhD in climate science? Right?
I will ask those things all the time. If somebody's going about vaccines, I'll say, so the entire bulk of scientific opinion, is 100% in disagreement with that, and we have thousands of pages of research, saying that that what you've just said is not true. So what is your source? What are you basing this on?
But in that particular case, we're talking not about a fact, we're talking about an interpretation of facts. And so in that case, I have to introduce the idea that your interpretation may be based on your identity. It's really common. When we talk about culture wars, we're always talking about underrepresented minorities, or when we're talking about racial identity, we're talking about Black people and Hispanic people. But racial identity also means white people. And that racial identity means something to you. You don't have to defend it or proclaim it all the time, because that's the norm.
Elaine Appleton Grant
Right? It's the water we all swim in…
Celeste Headlee
Exactly. And so therefore, it's important for me at those points, especially—not just for the listeners’ point of view, but it's also for his, to say, you're interpreting that possibly because you're not me. Yeah. And here's why I see this really differently.
Elaine Appleton Grant
Can we talk about NPR for a minute? Leaders of color fled NPR over the last couple of years. And obviously, NPR is having problems now. And as a person who thinks broadly about the media's role in solving today's biggest problems, partisanship, lack of true representation, racism, inability to talk to each other, what advice do you have for NPR—for public media?
Celeste Headlee
You know, just for listeners who don't realize, it's important to point out that NPR is not synonymous with public media. NPR is just a network, the way CBS is a network, right? But public media in general has invested a lot of time and money into trying to fix their diversity problem. And there's two things there. Number one, diversity is about numbers. It's not about inclusion. And so if what you're really focused on is numbers, then you're probably going to have a retention problem. Because retention is all about inclusion and belonging. If you're framing it as a diversity problem, then you're already behind the eight ball because it's not a problem. The problem is the monotonous homogenous character of all the people at your workplace. Diversity is the solution, not the problem.
And so when it comes to NPR, or any of the networks—PBS, anything else—they have the same issues that most of corporate America has, which is that they've been relying on diversity training that was designed originally by lawyers to reduce liability, and by HR professionals for the same reason. And traditional DEIB training, it doesn't work. And we've known it for a really long time.
And so as long as they are clinging to traditional values of journalism, things like objectivity, which is a white supremacist value, they will continue to operate within a white supremacist system. If they're going to really be serious about this, they have to get rid of all those values, which from the very beginning were designed to be exclusive and protect the white, mostly male viewpoint of American journalism. And honestly, there's not a lack of will. John Lansing, I absolutely believe, is firmly committed to this and wants to solve this. But we have to do things that work. Not things that feel good.
Elaine Appleton Grant
And I'll just jump in and say John Lansing is the CEO of NPR. Yes. Okay, to wrap up. A couple quick Lightning Round questions. How has hosting this show changed you in a way that you didn't expect?
Celeste Headlee
I didn't expect to be sympathetic with so much of what people are saying, and maybe a surprise considering my whole entire life's work. Knowing what I know about the human brain, I expect it to be pretty stubborn. And it turns out when I really focused on not being stubborn, it actually works. Surprise, surprise.
I also have been surprised at how many people are willing to do this. I thought it would be more difficult to get guests to come on. But it turns out, there's actually a lot of smart people who are willing to come on and have to really present their argument and get pushback.
Elaine Appleton Grant
And finally, who is your dream guest for Sound Judgment?
Celeste Headlee
I would want to get somebody like Carline Watson, who is the executive producer now of Here and Now, but she was the executive producer of Tell Me More. Before that she produced Talk of the Nation. And she has been a transformative figure in public radio very quietly. She has such an eye for hosts, she can identify hostiness in somebody. And I myself would want to ask her questions about what it is she's hearing that tells her this one is going to work, and this one isn't.
Elaine Appleton Grant
That's phenomenal. Celeste, thank you for being so incredibly generous with your time and being so fascinating to listen to. Postproduction is going to be a bear.
Celeste Headlee
Good luck.
Elaine Appleton Grant
At the end of every episode, I give you a few of the many takeaways from these conversations. Here are today's.
That's all for today. Thanks for being with me. If you'd liked this episode, you'll love Episode 10: Snap Judgment’s Glynn Washington: Lessons from a Master Storyteller. That link is in our show notes.
If you're a Sound Judgment newsletter reader, thank you for being there. And thank you to those of you who email me. If you're not yet a subscriber, sign up for takeaways like the ones I just shared and more. That link is also in our show notes.
Coming up in the next episode, a real treat. Julia Barton, who is the executive editor at Pushkin Industries, on a new audiobook anthology of 2022's best audio stories.
Sound Judgment is produced by me, Elaine Appleton Grant. Sound designed by Andrew Parella. Our gorgeous cover art is by Sarah Edgell. Podcast management by Tina Bassir. Our production intern is Audrey Nelson. See you soon.
