246. Shared Wisdom: How Communication Defines Culture and Builds Community

Hi. Matt here. The start of the new year gives us a moment to rethink how we work. And I don't know about you, but I wanna work more efficiently. And that's why I'm going to double down on Grammarly. Grammarly has been super helpful to me. It brings everything I need to do when writing all together. So I can take my writing from draft to done in one place, emails, presentations, proposals. I don't lose momentum, and you won't either. Grammarly even helps you use AI more thoughtfully and thoroughly. You can get real time suggestions, refine your tone, or ask for help, all while keeping your own voice front and center. I found it saves time and makes writing feel more manageable and even enjoyable. In fact, 90% of professionals say Grammarly saves them time, writing, and editing. Sign up for Grammarly free and take your professional writing from draft to done. Visit grammarly.com. That's grammarly.com. Community and communication not only have the same root word, but they work together to make us more effective. My name is Matt Abrahams, and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. Today, I'm excited to have a conversation with Sandy Pentland. Sandy is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he helped create and direct the MIT Media Lab. He is also a Stanford Institute of Human Centered AI fellow. Sandy is recognized as a pioneer in computational social science and wearable computing. He has just released his newest book, Shared Wisdom, Cultural Evolution in the Age of AI. Well, welcome, Sandy. I have long admired your work, and I'm very excited for our conversation. Well, I'm really happy to be here. Shall we get started? Yes, please. Well, let's start with honest signals. That's where I first got to know you and your work. Can you define what honest signals are and how you studied them? And then can you share how mastery of these signals can actually be effective tools to help us build trust and foster relationships more than words might even be able to? A way to think about this is that if you look at our closest ancestors, big great apes, they actually communicate with hoots and pants and other sorts of sounds. Language seems to be built on top of that, but we didn't get rid of it. We kept it at its contrast to the words. So you can tell when someone's excited, of course, because they get all, like, oh, yeah. That's a signal. Right? And you can tell when they're not paying attention because there's these sort of awkward pauses sometimes. And those are the things that are the signals about what's going on in the person's head and about the relationship. And the ones that are most interesting, I think, to me and perhaps to your question, are the ones about the patterns of interaction. So it's …