Why Listening Unlocks Deeper Human Connection with Haru Yamada

Guy Kawasaki:
Good morning everybody. It's Guy Kawasaki. This is the Remarkable People Podcast, and I keep telling you, we scour the world for remarkable people, and we found Dr. Haru Yamada in London. She's a social linguistics researcher, author, kind of a global citizen, multilingual, we'll get into it, but what a background she has.
She has a PhD from Georgetown, and she spent decades studying how people do something, which seemingly seems very simple. Seemingly seems, it's like redundant here, but something very simple, which is listen.
And I read her book. It’s called Kiku. And oh my God, I had no idea. Listening is so complex, and we'll get into that. So this concept of deeply engaged, empathetic form of listening is really a skill that's probably missing a lot these days, especially in the United States.
So without any further ado, here is Dr. Haru Yamada. Welcome to the Remarkable People show.

Haru Yamada:
Thank you for having me here, Guy.

Guy Kawasaki:
I have to start off because your book starts off this way that you lost your hearing, like you were on a scooter or something, you had suffered a head injury, right?

Haru Yamada:
Yes.

Guy Kawasaki:
And so you lost much of your hearing, and I don't know if you know this, but I am deaf. I have two cochlear implants.
Do you use hearing aids or implants or anything?

Haru Yamada:
So it was just one side. So I have a hearing aid on one side, and in addition to the hearing loss that I have, it's not complete loss, but I have some loss. And, I also have tinnitus, so I have a ringing that goes on constantly, so that was a result of that accident.

Guy Kawasaki:
Oh, believe me. Yeah. I have Meniere's disease, which I'm sure you know what it is, but people listening might not know. Meniere's disease is when you have three symptoms, which is hearing loss, tinnitus, and vertigo. I don't have vertigo anymore. Thank you, God. That's the worst part. But the tinnitus I still have and hearing loss, I'm basically totally deaf without any cochlear implant.
So this should be an interesting podcast where the host is deaf, and the guest is partially deaf.

Haru Yamada:
Hopefully we can still listen to each other in spite of that.

Guy Kawasaki:
Obviously we're pulling it off. Should you ever need a cochlear implant, Haru, it is a miracle. I do not understand. You go for this one hour operation, they put it in your head and then like a week later they activate it, and all of a sudden you can hear.

Haru Yamada:
Our hearing is truly a miracle, so being able to implant this in your ear is a further miracle.

Guy Kawasaki:
And I also think that we're going deep into hearing because there is a theory that an implant or hearing aids helps tinnitus because your brain is trying to find something to hear, and your hearing aid or implant is giving it something to hear, so it no longer creates that noise.

Haru Yamada:
Like a ghost sound, yes.

Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah. All right. So anyway, first of all, I take great pride in my podcast and one of my goals is that the guests should do 90 percent of the talking. Is that the goal? You haven't done 90 percent of talking yet, but you're about to zoom into that level.

Haru Yamada:
I think that's right. A podcaster must interview. So I think by definition you are a listener. A deep listener.

Guy Kawasaki:
Well, perhaps you could start off by just giving this concept of what is a good listener.

Haru Yamada:
Listening for me occurs on many different channels. That's how I see listening. So most of us listen to hear information. We extract information and we’re trained to do that. We go to school and they tell us we should listen for content and information, and that's what cognitive listening is.
But we aren't so well trained in relational listening because when we go to listen, we are listening to content, but we are also listening to what's happening in the relationship, whether we're conscious of it or not. We have this going on in the background and because we're not trained for it, that I think is where we have many of our misunderstandings.
So growing up, bumping around countries, I always thought misunderstandings happen because somebody isn't saying something, but I then over time realized that misunderstandings happen to eloquent speakers as well.
So what's going on here? And I discovered that misunderstandings often happen because we aren’t listening. And so, to be able to listen well, we need to be able to create a space for the other person to be in. And that's a good listener, very simple in a nutshell.

Guy Kawasaki:
And is this a cultural thing? Do Americans listen not as well as Japanese or whatever?

Haru Yamada:
I think, like our hearing, we all have these different listening channels. We listen for information and we listen for what's going on in the relationship.
Everybody does this, but some of us and some cultures emphasize more one than the other, and at different times, even throughout the day. For example, at work, we definitely emphasize listening for content, information extraction, much more than the other.
So the answer to that question is it isn't so much the case that one culture does it better than the other, but we emphasize different parts of listening and different channels in listening.

Guy Kawasaki:
So what do Americans emphasize?

Haru Yamada:
I think we love to hear talking. We think of talking as very important in terms of clarity. And it is important because the United States has lots of different kinds of speakers, so clarity is an important thing. And, within the listening side, sometimes in the past we have tended to think of listening as a kind of passive activity.
Just sit there, we listen, more containers, we hear something, and we just kind of absorb it. Or more recently it has gotten to be a little bit of a, well, it's nice to have, we'll do this as a checkbox. It makes us look good to look like we're good listeners, but actually we're not really listening.
Listening for content, that's good at school. I've taught at schools where I've given 15 percent for class participation and nothing for listening. So we consider it really important to be a really good speaker, but do we really consider it important to be a listener? It's hard to measure.
And so I think that is one of the challenges in communicating in the United States or in English speaking environments where there are a lot of different kinds of speakers.

Guy Kawasaki:
And how about gender? Are men or women generally different in listening skills?

Haru Yamada:
I think in the seventies it was really popular to say, “Yes, there was a big difference,” and I think probably if we look at the two genders in terms of the traditional genders, there are differences. But again, I think it's just like cultures. In fact, I consider gender as a kind of culture.
And it is what one group has been educated and socialized to emphasize. So we think that content and knowing a lot of content, speaking about content that we know, clearly makes us look smart. And hearing, being able to hear that and comprehend that also makes us look intelligent. So if you have a culture or a gender that emphasizes that part, then that's going to happen more often.
And the other stuff you have to tune that down in the background.

Guy Kawasaki:
Is there a somewhat objective test for your listening skills? There's reading tests, there's math tests, there's language tests. Is there a listening test?

Haru Yamada:
I think you're talking about measurement. And so I think there are comprehension tests. You can measure how well somebody can spit back the contents of a lecture or information that was given to them. And you can test a kind of listening intelligence along those lines.
But listening for relationships is really something else, and it is something that we never had to measure, even though we had lots of it.
For example, as children, I think in many ways, children are more naturally and also, without thinking about it, without the cognitive part getting in the way, are more curious and have listened relationally better than adults who want to put forward the idea of listening for content.

Guy Kawasaki:
All right. You open your book with a very funny story about being a school kid in Japan, and you weren't listening well, and you missed your bus stop. So can you tell this story and how it formed your career really?

Haru Yamada:
I moved back and forth between several countries, but mostly between the United States and Japan. And every time I moved it was a catastrophe. I had to learn a whole new language, in the case of English and Japanese. I had to change school systems. So as a child, I was really thrown around, and it was a question of survival.
Language was survival for me. Culture was survival. I had to get all that, so my head was just crammed with all kinds of things about what do I need to know to get to school?
And, I think you know this, but in Japan, everybody goes to school on public transportation. I went to the U.S. first when I was four, and that's when I learned English which is what the British people always ask me, why do you sound like this?
Because I went to the United States when I was four and learned my English there and then went back to Japan when I was seven. I was going to a Japanese school, and I had to go on public transportation. But of course, I'm thinking about all kinds of other things.
And when the bus stop is announced, actually it was the changeover to the next bus stop, I missed that changeover because I was thinking about other things. So that is really already when I discovered that when language is important, but also listening is important because otherwise you'll miss your bus stop and get lost.

Guy Kawasaki:
When you told that story, you also mentioned that in America when you got the green light, it's the signal to go, but in Japan it's a blue light, but even though the light is blue, it's called green or I hope I got that right.

Haru Yamada:
Yes, that's right. Thank you for reading my book. That's exactly right. Those are the kinds I think about my nerd brain.

Guy Kawasaki:
When I read that, I said, “What the hell is she talking about?” So I actually did research and correct me if I'm wrong, way back when the Japanese word for blue is blue-green or green-blue or something like that. And it was never pure green or pure blue. So as it evolved, this blue light became known as green or something like that. Because there's a Japanese word, right?

Haru Yamada:
Yes, that's right. So we borrowed the Chinese characters, and we already had a spoken language. So that was part of the reason why we didn't have a green. It wasn't that we can't see green in Japan, but that the range of color until a certain point is called blue, and then it's called green.
So we even think things like that, that are so obvious to us, it's black and white, right? But I discovered really early on that they aren't. So our reality is really whatever we make up, socially and culturally, which is fascinating to me.

Guy Kawasaki:
You also point out, it's fascinating that in Japan, in a sense, blue is green intellectually, and so since people think that blue is green, the traffic lights were physically made more greenish than bluish to match the cultural expectation. I may have gotten that reversed, but what I'm trying to say is that in this case, the culture influenced the actual physical property of the traffic line, right?

Haru Yamada:
That's right. So it's actually more bluish, and if you go to Japan next time, check it out. It is a little bit more bluish than probably the ones in L.A. And, yes, language influences culture, but culture also comes back and influences language. So that's a fantastic and interesting process. Yeah.

Guy Kawasaki:
Would you explain what you mean by what's a speaker led versus a listener led communication?

Haru Yamada:
This goes back to, I studied a lot of American and Japanese business conversations, and I discovered that some business communities preferred to be led by speakers. That American one is an obvious one. We go into a meeting, we have an agenda, we talk about things in an agenda. We have a very formalized pattern.
We let people talk in rounds and something is resolved at the end of that meeting. And there were so many people who are going over to Japan and being so confused that Japanese businesses didn't come out that way. So they would go into a meeting, something would happen, but nothing would ever be resolved even at the end.
And they were saying, “What is happening?” So a lot of the times in Japan, because the context is so much more important, there's a lot of people building that goes on in the background. Relationship building that goes on in the background. And those conversations tend to be very listener led.
So instead of having speakers say what's on their mind, Japanese businesspeople come to the conversation already knowing what's going to be on the table. And so they discuss other things other than that, that feed into that. And so the conversation is led by the listeners rather than in rounds by, in turns, by a speaker, speaker A, speaker B, and in order like that.

Guy Kawasaki:
So if you are an American and you're about to go to Japan and you're trying to close a deal, it's contrary to everything in America. In America you're like Jerry Maguire and you, “Show me the money,” and you want to go out there and dazzle him, shock and awe. What are you supposed to do if you're an American then?

Haru Yamada:
I think the really hard thing to do is, you really need to take a step back and study the culture and do as the Romans do, and do it the Japanese way, which is that it's going to take a lot longer. There is trust at the bottom of the listening pile.
And for that to develop, we really need to have a relationship with the people before you can start talking about the deal or the money. That's pretty much what you have to do is build the relationship first and the content comes way at the end.

Guy Kawasaki:
So in a listener led situation, does that mean that there's lack of diversity, there's lack of feedback, there's lack of innovation because nobody's saying anything? Or is that just done in more subtle ways?

Haru Yamada:
I would say the latter. It's done in more subtle ways. So there's a lot of meeting that goes on outside of the formal business environment. So it's not in an actual meeting, but maybe, after work, outside of work.
And there is feedback, but it isn't the type of feedback that we're familiar with in English speaking countries where somebody comes into an office and we say, “This is your feedback,” or so the feedback also comes in those not very formal environments, so outside of the office and does take place.
It emerges rather than it is spoken. So it isn't that there's just nothing that's happening. There is something that's happening, but it isn't necessarily in words, but more in activities that are done together.
And as we go along, a lot of listeners demonstrate their listening in countries like Japan, as we're talking Japanese, do a lot of ‘aizuchi,’ which is back channel queuing, so the kind of, “mm-hmm,” we do in English, but a lot more, and a lot more substantive even than that.
It's the comparable, I guess, for giving somebody an employee of the month award or something, but in conversation. So it's just cued to say, “Look, I'm listening and I'm hearing what you have to say,” which is really important to the Japanese speaker or the Japanese community, and goes a long way in those business circles.

Guy Kawasaki:
Haru, I have to say that based on what you just said and my reading of your book, Silicon Valley is the most speaker led culture in the world. I mean, there's nobody listening in Silicon Valley.

Haru Yamada:
You're probably not wrong there.

Guy Kawasaki:
Well, as I was reading your book, I was trying to think, Would you ever have said Steve Jobs is a great listener? I said, “Nope.” Every executive, in Silicon Valley, if your lips are moving, you're pitching, right? Oh, so different here.

Haru Yamada:
Yes. And it goes back to, I think, the idea of also cultural values of the importance of the individual in English speaking environments versus the importance of the other person.
And it sounds altruistic to think of it in those terms, but it really isn't if you think about it in other seeking interactions in a kind of Asian context because what you do for the other person helps the relationship and that ultimately helps you.
So it isn't just completely altruistic for the other person. It's something that builds the community and helps you in this space. So I always think of listening as just a different way of approaching a space that a person has with another person when they're talking to the other person. Yeah.

Guy Kawasaki:
Dare I ask you your analysis of Donald Trump as a listener, or is that an oxymoron?

Haru Yamada:
I have opinions of course, but I think my studies are more towards interpersonal interactions and political situations are very difficult. That said, I always refer back to my mother who always used to say, “You can always connect with anyone.”
My mom was a person who, and you might relate to this because I think a lot of Japanese Americans have this kind of story in their background, but she left on a scholarship to go study in the United States when Japan was under U.S. occupation, and she left to go study in Kentucky.

Guy Kawasaki:
In Kentucky?

Haru Yamada:
Yep. Nazareth, Kentucky at a nun's college. And her father was, of course, besides himself that she insisted she would go because she won the scholarship. And he said, “You have to come back.” And she honored that wish. And she came back and she came back with, of course, she had challenges.
She didn't speak a word of English. She was nineteen when she went, and she didn't speak a word of English, but she came back with many, many fond memories and many connections and friends. So she always said to us that “You can become friends with your enemies,” because the U.S. was, at the time, a big enemy of Japan.
So that's kind of how I grew up, thinking that you can actually talk to people who are very different from yourself and who have very different things to say, but to arrive at that table, I think you have to have the premise that you are willing to talk and willing to listen to each other.
But as long as you have that, you can be very different people and still listen to each other. So I think that's probably where we stumble because we tend to shy away from differences. We tend to not like them to think, Oh, if we're different then we can't understand each other.
But I think differences are really interesting, and children love finding these little differences about each other on all these quirky things about them. And they love to tease each other about those kinds of things, but somehow they have become really stuck.
And I think in our political conversation today, and we are so invested in our own thinking that it's very hard now to say, “Okay, I want to listen to you, so that we can have a conversation, and I can talk and I can listen as well.”
That's all I can say about the political aspect.

Guy Kawasaki:
I'm a slow listener, Haru, but man, that was a very smooth answer to a very pointed question.

Haru Yamada:
Oh, thank you. Thank you.

Guy Kawasaki:
At a kind of a metaphysical level, does the listener receive meaning or does the listener create the meaning?

Haru Yamada:
I think we always co-create meaning, and that's what makes it so difficult, because how can I ever know what you're saying or thinking? I really don't, but I can still try. So I think when somebody starts talking to you, they basically invite you into their space. So that's one of my favorite words, it means human in Japanese, and you write it as person and then space.
The space is the same word for ‘ma,’ which we use a lot today to mean space. So we are each someone with a space, and when we start talking, we invite someone to join with us in that space. So if you're a listener, you can say, “Okay, I'll try joining you in that space.” Or you can turn away and say, “I'm not going to listen to you. I'm going to walk away.”
So if you decide to listen to someone and stay in that listening, that's really what's happening is that you are entering a space and you're creating that space with the other person, and that's how you get meaning.
If you're just talking about content, then you don't get that as much because what's interesting about that space that you're creating and the listening that you're doing is that you're trying to listen to and understand what's important to the other person.
I think that's what we don't do in our political language today is that we aren't really interested in hearing what the other person is about. We just are against each other's content, and we just want to show that we know that we're against, “I'm against your content,” and you say, “I'm against yours,” and that's it.
But if you really listen to the person, it's probably frightening in the beginning to find that we're really more similar as humans than we are about our content differences.

Guy Kawasaki:
Just for clarity, are you saying that the listener invites the speaker into the listener space or the listener is entering the speaker space?

Haru Yamada:
It's a space between them. It's a space between, speaker can initiate or a listener can ask a question and initiate as well, but it's a space in between. Yeah, the threshold, I guess, is where all the action happens, so it is an active process of meaning making that you enter into and invest into with this with a speaker.
And I think that's why most of the not listening, which is still part of the listening continuum, happens because we're afraid of what could happen in that space. Perhaps we'll discover when we're talking to somebody with very different political views that, Wow, maybe we're not that different after all.
And I've been saying, banging on about this for a really long time, and now I realize that. So not listening is what I think of as a kind of protective device for ourselves. I think that's the really interesting part of not listening.

Guy Kawasaki:
But the irony is that if you're using not listening as a protective device, you are probably doing yourself more harm. You are defeating protecting yourself, right? The best protection is no protection, maybe.

Haru Yamada:
That is very true. But we have amazing ways to convince ourselves that that's true. It is just an investment that we made for so long that going back on it seems like a cost.

Guy Kawasaki:
I will tell you that in Silicon Valley, if we were to use this concept of space, I think the attitude would be that if you're the speaker, you're going to take over the other person's space. You're not inviting people into a neutral space. And that would change the conversation in Silicon Valley.
If people could wrap their heads around that concept, that is a space that we're going to share together. That's not at all the perspective right now.

Haru Yamada:
I think talking a lot of kind of posturing and that kind of thing that goes on is actually, yes, I don't really want to be in your space. My space is the important one and I'm going to tell you about it, but when you're talking, you already talking about something you already know.
So it's a very different thing than listening because listening is really just discovery. Even with people that you know really well, you're always discovering little things about them that you didn't know yesterday.
Yes, you're right in saying that actually closing yourself off to that, that's the definition of being closed is that you only want to hear what you already know and you don't want to hear anything new that somebody has to say.
Again, I think because that's potentially risky, it's scary in terms of what you could learn from that, that you didn't know. Not knowing is a big fear for many people, I think.

Guy Kawasaki:
So when a misunderstanding occurs, is it usually the fault, if you can assess fault, is it the fault of the speaker or the listener?

Haru Yamada:
I think in the English speaking language, we've always made it the fault of the speaker. The speaker is responsible. They control the meaning, they're the like meaning central, but in the end, a lot of the meaning is co-created. So it happens in the ears of, or in our case, in assisted listening in our case, but in our ears.
And it's in the listeners' ears that it happens, but I think meaning is, again, co-created. Not the responsibility solely of the speaker or the listener, but we have tended, in English speaking history, to say it's pretty much all the speaker.
They have control over what they're saying and if there's a misunderstanding, it's because they haven't said something clearly or they haven't articulated well what they were thinking.
And the speaker's just there to absorb whatever it is that they're saying.

Guy Kawasaki:
Is there an unintended consequence that in a listening led environment, it punishes or penalizes people with less power because they're not speaking up. All they're doing is listening. Can the listening orientation reduce the power of other people? Because all they're doing is listening.

Haru Yamada:
In a speaker led society, yes because we think, Come on, speak up. Are you empty? Do you have anything to say? People who don't speak up are seen as not having anything to say, but in other cultures, in Japan, it's the other way around.
People who are talking about things all the time are kind of thought, Oh, they're so arrogant. They're only thinking about themselves, and they think they're really something. And so those are cultural values that decide whether a whole group of people want to be listener led or speaker led.
But it is a disadvantage to be quiet in a speaker led community, I think. But I would like to raise the awareness that listening is really important. So it's not that anybody's just sitting there just drawing a blank and not thinking about anything when somebody's speaking all the time.
But, in fact that they're really taking in something probably more thoughtfully, and that thought process and the reflective process is what's taking them a long time to come back. Or maybe they're not going to come back with it at all and keep it to themselves. But that doesn't mean they're not really listening.

Guy Kawasaki:
In Japan, is there ever a case where you advise people that you are in fact listening too much? Is there too much listening? Is that a problem too?

Haru Yamada:
I think there is a movement to tell junior office workers that they need to speak up more and that they should have a voice, so I guess the answer globally is that there needs to be a balance. You can't have this kind of very top down speaker led leadership, but at the same time, you need some direction, and you need to have some direction from middle management and below as well.
So you want both things, and I think you can have both things. It's just the question of tuning your listening channels.

Guy Kawasaki:
Theoretically, if I were in Japan and I was able to, first of all, speak Japanese so I understood what they're saying, but if I was in Japan and I got the ability to access a meeting, let's say it's a meeting of the management team of Toyota or the management team of Sony or the management team of Mitsubishi, a very large company.
If I were to sit in that meeting, would I hear the CEO take control of the agenda and set all the things, or was the CEO sitting there and just listening? How do meetings work in Japan at that highest level where it's a listening kind of culture?

Haru Yamada:
I think it really depends on whether the CEO is formally articulating something from his perspective. And then he would probably read something that is being announced in the company, but also, at another level, if a CEO is present, they probably wouldn't have to speak, is kind of the listening perspective on it.
They wouldn't have to say anything because all the other senior members probably, but also middle managers are doing the work, and they should be the ones who are broadcasting it. They wouldn't necessarily have to be the broadcaster.

Guy Kawasaki:
If you are an American and you are interacting with a Japanese counterpart, right? So it's peers. And you're an American and you're interacting with a Japanese counterpart, and the counterpart is talking and the American interrupts the Japanese colleague, what is going through the brain of the Japanese person who just got interrupted?
Is that like, you know, This dumbass ‘hakujin’ just interrupted me. Does he not understand anything? What goes through the brain when that happens?

Haru Yamada:
I think most Japanese employees learn a lot about doing business with the English speaking country, so they're familiar with this and they know that relative to themselves, they'll be speaking a lot more. They'll feel like they're being interrupted. I don't think they think, Oh, stupid Guy.
Although they will, invariably, feel cornered, that it was a lot compared to what they do, but I think there is a training to have employees speak up in these kind of contexts. And also, demonstrations of what typical English speaker led meeting looks like.
They may have been in some and over time, I think, they become used to it as well and vice versa as well. I know many Americans who go over to Japan and become very used to the Japanese style of doing business. And although in the beginning they were thinking, What is going on?
Nothing is happening. Everything is so slow here. Eventually they find their feet and get the rhythm of the Japanese business, and they can adapt.

Guy Kawasaki:
I think I remember in your book that you explained that you've lived in about seven countries. Is that the right count at this?

Haru Yamada:
Yes, that's about right. Yes, that's not advisable, but it's the upbringing I had.

Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, so from someone who's lived in seven countries, and who's also a social linguist, I want to know, who are the best listeners in the world?

Haru Yamada:
Who are the best listeners in the world? I think we all know who they are, and they are probably not famous people, but people who are really right around you. And I think people can really remember well those who have listened to them, so they are our mothers and our siblings and our friends. Those are the really great listeners of the world, I think.
And I don't think that one culture or one gender is necessarily a better listener than the next. We have all these hearing and listening tools within us, but sometimes we're not aware of them and we don't make use of them.

Guy Kawasaki:
So you cannot do anything as blasphemous as saying that “Yeah, Americans are the worst listeners in the world. Australians are the best listeners in the world.” It's not that simple?

Haru Yamada:
I don't think it is because I think we all know good listeners. We know our own good listeners, but I would say that the English language speaking world prioritizes speaking and has always prioritized speaking. It's a value and perhaps listening is undervalued and therefore underused.
But in spite of that, I think every person knows that they have been listened to at some point in their lives, but they have also listened to somebody in their lives too. And that's because I think either way we need listening. We need being listened to.
I love to steal from Lao Tzu's comment about, I think being listened to gives us strength, and listening gives us courage. So I think it goes both ways. He said that about love, but I stole it, say that about listening. It works for listening as well. Yes, I'll resist your invitation to say some country is better or not.
I think it is true that we have reached a turning point where we have so much speaking and so much content with AI and everything that it's come to a head and we need to remember cultural listening, but I think we can remember that.
I think we all had it, we were listening before we were seeing things, so visually as well, our culture has become increasingly towards speaking and visualized as well.
But we were listening in the womb before we were seeing things. When we were infants, we had to listen because it was directly linked to our survival. So we have maybe forgotten about that a little bit, but we all have it.

Guy Kawasaki:
I think you just touched on this, but I would like you to truly define it and explain it because it is a concept that I have never heard before. It is the concept of credibility listening. What is credibility listening?

Haru Yamada:
As we were saying before, not listening is part of the listening spectrum. So we can't listen to everything and absorb everything and say, “That is really good.” So when we are listening, at the same time, we want to understand someone. We also want to make ourselves feel safe in that space.
And so credibility listening does that with content. Often in credibility listening, we're listening to what someone is saying and listening for whether what they're saying, is it credible or not? Are they believable or not? Should we believe them or not?
Those are the questions we ask when we are listening for credibility, and we do it all the time subconsciously, in meetings and at work especially, but also when we listen to all these political debates. We're listening to see if we should believe other people.

Guy Kawasaki:
Now, if people are listening to this and they're saying, “Absolutely. Haru is so right. I want to become a better listener. Okay, what do I do?”

Haru Yamada:
That's a really tough question, but I would say everyone has everything they need to become a better listener.
So tomorrow morning, this is an exercise everyone can do is as you're waking up, stay in bed one minute longer and remember how you were listening when your best friend was cracking that stupid joke and you were just listening to him talk about it or listening to your favorite bedtime story. And remember how you were listening really intently to that when you were a child.
I call it, it's part of my soft listening channel, but if you remember that and how important it was for you to discover the other person in what they were saying in that joke or in that bedtime story, then everything else that you hear about, Oh, okay, you need to pause when somebody says something, take a breath.
All those things, I think, will come naturally because you're just really interested in discovering this other person. So you won't be thinking about it, and you will have engaged your relational listening channel, so when it's full on, you'll be able to listen better, and you'll have tuned into the conversation.
So if you do that tomorrow morning, come back to Guy, tell him if it worked, and say if your conversations were more resilient, I think, and meaningful because of that. I think if we can listen in with both channels on for content as well as a relationship, then we can have more interesting and more discovery, which I think we need.

Guy Kawasaki:
Now what if I'm a speaker and it could be a public speech or it could be a meeting or something, and I have perceived that people are not listening? Now, I think based on this conversation, it could probably be my fault, not the listener's fault, but then at that point in real time, what do I do when I realize people are not listening?

Haru Yamada:
See, that's a speaker question, right? What you're asking is you're saying, you've noticed somebody isn't listening. We're really good at noticing people aren't listening. We pick up on it all the time. And we know when somebody's zoned out.
I think there are many answers for speakers to answer the question about what to do to get listeners more involved, but I feel like that's more your domain. I don't know because it's not a listening question really. Speakers have to be more entertaining or include the listener more. That's the answer to that question is it's a speaker question rather.

Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah, but you're the social linguist. I really want to know. Not that I've ever had this problem, I have a friend who has this problem.

Haru Yamada:
Oh, you have a friend that has a problem. Okay. They always say, “Tell a good story,” so you can tell a good story, engage the listener.
There are many ways to engage a listener and bring them in to invest in the story, and listeners today have gotten really good at also showing that they are engaged in a story even though they aren't, I think, and that's part of a kind of maybe even bigger obstacle, I guess, in our communication is that we are increasingly wanting to show that we're doing well, so we're speaking and we are listening well.
But I think ultimately listening well and probably speaking well isn't about showing that as much as just experiencing it and just enjoying the process of communication.

Guy Kawasaki:
Now, the pandemic changed a lot of things, and I guess I want to know from you, if you're doing all these Zoom calls and these virtual conferences as a speaker, what do you do as a listener? How do you get the most out of these virtual meetings as a speaker and as a listener?

Haru Yamada:
In virtual conferences, we have a whole other person that appears, which is yourself that you could see speaking. So this is almost like a third person that we don't have in in-person conversations. We don't ever see ourselves, even though we can go back later and reflect upon ourselves.
So we lose a lot of the nonverbal interaction in a virtual meeting that we would be able to pick up on. And that is really important for a listener, is to have a lot of the fidgets that we do, things that we're doing, not just with our face, because that's usually the only part we can see, but also with our body and what we're doing.
Again, the virtual world pulls us towards the speaker world, I think, because it is the speaker that's important and has to articulate clearly the things that would be otherwise available in an in-person interaction. So technology, in a sense, leads us more into this speaker led world, I think.

Guy Kawasaki:
And is one of the logical conclusions that you should ban people from turning off their camera then because if the listener's cameras is off, you really have no cues at all about how you're being received or whether you're communicating effectively?

Haru Yamada:
I think it's true to an extent, I think, many of the cameras go off in rather large meetings when there isn't much listener participation anyway. And then I think that begs a different question about how we want to structure those kinds of meetings and even whether they're necessary at all.
And can there be communication in another different way? I think banning things is always difficult. It never seems to work. There are people who, for privacy issues, don't want to be seen. And I think once that is there, it's very difficult to take that away and institute something.

Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah. Haru, I have literally given thousands of speeches, like thousands of speeches and the pandemic with virtual speeches, the hardest thing for me is that I have no idea how I am being received, right? None at all.
And then when I became deaf, speaking virtually or speaking in person became much harder because even when I speak in person, because of my deafness, I have to really try to figure out, are they laughing or not?
There's like a lot of cues you miss even with an implant. One of the ironies of my life, Haru, is that when I became deaf, I truly learned how noisy the world is because with the implant, the implant magnifies everything, not just voices. I'm just going on a little diatribe here.
It's very difficult to give a virtual talk or an in-person talk if you're a deaf person, and I think it's actually forced me to become a better speaker because of the challenges here.

Haru Yamada:
That is probably true. I've given lectures, and you just feel like you're just going on and on about something. Is anybody there? Does anybody care? So yeah, I can see that. That would be a challenge.

Guy Kawasaki:
In a sense, it is a challenge, but it is a challenge that could make you into a better speaker because you have to overcome this factor.

Haru Yamada:
I think, all these challenges, as another Japanese thing that people will say is, if you go to Japan, they have retail stores. They say, “In preparation or in operation.” So I think that's kind of a very Japanese way of thinking about things is you're always in preparation or in operation, so if things are a challenge, it is just a training phase, right?
I think the pandemic was a huge training phase for many of us. None of us knew what was going on or what we had to do, and we just had to learn on the fly. And it was an interesting moment in history.

Guy Kawasaki:
Until that moment, I have never looked upon being deaf as training, but okay, so now I have a whole new way of looking at my deafness. I read a story in your book that I just want to clarify because it was so counterintuitive to me.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but you basically said that text messages can be extremely effective because of the interaction. It's back and forth, not like email. Email is expected that, Oh, they'll answer in one or two days.
But text messages is immediate. But text messages also enhance slow listening because you get the text message and you can take a moment or two or three or four or five before you answer.
Whereas in conversation, there is no silence where you're thinking before you answer, did I get that right that text messages can be a better form of communication?

Haru Yamada:
Yeah. I think our new generation really likes texting, and listeners really tend to like texting because exactly for that reason is that when you receive a text, okay, there's some protocol that you have to answer more quickly than you do an email. Yet still it puts the advantage, the privilege almost, in the listener's camp.
Okay, you received the message, we have this whole culture about blue ticks and no blue ticks. Have they seen it? Have they not seen it? And it really becomes a kind of listener led communication where a listener can then say, “Yeah, I've seen the message and this is my reply.” I think texting is a whole other world of communication where listeners have a say, have some presence.

Guy Kawasaki:
Haru, to put it mildly, you are the only person that I have ever heard say that texting is an effective form of communication. And as I read that part of the book, I said, “She's right. It's better than email because of the more immediacy, but it's also not so immediate as a conversation.”
So there is that space in the middle, right?

Haru Yamada:
I think we generally have to fight new things when they come along. We resist them, but new things all obviously have to be regulated together with our society as we move along.
But there are many advantages to new technology and new things, and I think texting, although it came on as a kind of silly thing that young people did kind of thing, I think we all use it now and we all need it now, and we all recognize the advantages.
It brings perhaps some disadvantages as well, but it's part of our human living language in the sense that it takes on a life of its own and we don't really have that much control over it. But as we use it, it grows up and changes together with us.

Guy Kawasaki:
All right. I would like you to close this interview with the story that you closed your book with, and it is a fascinating story about the power of listening. So let me set the stage.
The stage is that you are in Arizona, you're at some kind of, I don't know, university or library, and there's a visiting scholar from Russia who taught himself to read and speak a language, and he's a Buddhist scholar and you take it from there. Tell us the story.

Haru Yamada:
It was a very funny time because Russia was just opening up from the Soviet Union and we had a visiting scholar. There were a few scholars who were visiting various universities, and we got a very serious Buddhist scholar, and he was just fascinated by the archives that were in our university.
And he spent, I think, the first week just completely cloistered in there and just never came out. And our Dean said, “He's in Arizona, he's never left the country.
He has to do a formal visit to the Grand Canyon, and he isn't coming out, so you have to go read with him,” and I said, “I beg your pardon? I'm sorry. I don't read any Pail or Sanskrit. I don't know how to do Sutras.” I was terrified, and as I was trying to get out of it, I bumped into him and he invited me into the archives and I'm sweating and everything.
I don't know how to do this. And, as it turned out, all he wanted to do was read the Sutras to me, and he read a Buddhist script, which I didn't understand.
And he said to me at the end, “No one's ever listened to me read a Buddhist script before, so you're the very first person.” And I felt the weight of the moment on me.
And I don't know if this was the trigger factor that led him to go up to the Grand Canyons, but he did go up and visit the Grand Canyon after that and socializes a little bit more with the department. I think being listened to does give you strength to open up and makes the rest of the communication a lot less terrifying.

Guy Kawasaki:
I love that story. Haru, thank you very much for spending this hour with us. I hope we are fostering better listeners. It's kind of ironic, podcasters trying to evangelize listening. It makes sense at some level, right? Thank you very much. I also want to thank my team, which is Madisun Nuismer co-producer with Jeff Sieh.
He has a great sound design engineer named Shannon Hernandez. And we also have a great researcher named Tessa Nuismer. So that's our team on our side.

Haru Yamada:
Thank you everyone.

Guy Kawasaki:
Thank you very much. And I'm giving a speech in a few hours and I'm going to try even though this is a speaker led event, I'm going to try to foster better listening, both in myself and my audience.
So thank you very much for all your advice and all your insights.

Haru Yamada:
Oh, thank you for having me. I really enjoyed that conversation. Thank you.

Guy Kawasaki:
I got to say one more thing, Haru.

Haru Yamada:
Yes.

Guy Kawasaki:
As I was reading your book, do you know who Stephen Wolfram is?

Haru Yamada:
Wolfram. Yes.

Guy Kawasaki:
The mathematician and physicist?

Haru Yamada:
Yes. I don't know how I know him, but I do.

Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah. Anyway, I would say that Stephen Wolfram is one of the most difficult people to interview because his brain is just operating so much faster than your brain, at least my brain.
And when you read his books, it's like so many concepts coming at you at once. And as I was reading your book, and you're talking about like the fourteen forms of listening, and this Japanese character has these fourteen little things in it.
And then the word has a space to signify, and like I'm reading all this, I said, “Oh my God, this is like if Stephen Wolfram were a linguist, this is the book he would write.” I was like, “Oh, your book was an intellectual playground.”

Haru Yamada:
I needed all those crayons from Fiona. I always say that it was really directly linked to my survival. I didn't get to talk to the next kid or borrow her crayons and so that's my language.

Guy Kawasaki:
So if you're listening and you want to learn about listening, the book is Kiku, but I'm telling you right now, you are going to have to think when you read this book. This is not some pop psychology bullshit book. This is the real deal. This is Stephen Wolfram talking about linguistics, so that's it.