Making People Talk

by Barry M Farber

  Remember Kipling: “Softly, softly catchee monkey!”

  Play with the conversational opportunity you’ve been offered like a grateful cat plays with tumbling balls of yam.

  As he ushers you to precisely the point on his turf where he wants you, he’s probably saying something. You figure he’s just filling the void of the moment with meaningless patter, so you put on mental earmuffs and let him drone on, the better to concentrate on shaping and sharpening the repartee you’re about to launch.

  It’s dangerous to tune out anything said by the one you’re in the act of talking up to.

  After the “What’s the weather like?” and “Did you have any trouble finding us?” he continues talking. Is he saying something about hostages, wheat crops, power failure on his commuter train, the tennis upset, women technicians, the Soviet spokesman who speaks better English than the American anchorman, the fare hike, the fare cut, Paul Revere, Marcel Proust? Whatever it is, it can’t compete in your estimation, you’re sure, with the marvelous lineup of icebreakers you’ve prepared for the occasion, as you’re certain you’ll demonstrate as soon as he finishes his little flourish about Danish pastries, MSG in Thai cuisine, weight lifting, newspapers with ink that comes off on your hands, or the interview last night with the homosexual senator who came out of the closet during his victory speech.

  Sure, you listen politely enough, but you inwardly can’t wait for him to shuffle offstage so you can do your tap dance.

  That’s a good moment to remind yourself that he’s not there in hopes of going to work for you or to sell you his wares. He is the world’s foremost authority on what he feels like talking about at the moment. You’re there to talk up. And what your Intimidator is giving you is the hook most likely to Get Him Talking at that moment.

  That’s the equivalent of your poker opponent showing you his cards, or the professor giving you the answer. It’s like the governor slipping you the winning lottery ticket.

  Who could ask for anything more?

  Accept it!

  If you happen to know that Danish pastry has nothing to do with Denmark—and in fact in Denmark they call it Wienerbrod, which means Vienna bread—you get a blue ribbon around your box of Cracker Jacks in the form of his merry, “Gee, is that a fact?”

  We now reach The Wall, and the ray gun that vaporizes that wall.

  Suppose he takes off on something like the big wheat crop scandal, and you couldn’t tell wheat from marijuana. Sure, he’s launched a probe into an especially weak sector of your front, but that’s nothing to lament; that’s something to rejoice over! That’s better than knowing all about Danish pastry. The instant something as alien to you as wheat gets nailed to the top of the small-talk agenda, you have the opportunity to ask questions.

  Your brightest remark, about Danish pastry or anything ~ else, finishes second after a flat, ordinary question from you to the one you’re talking up to.

  “I’m glad you mentioned wheat,” you can say. “I hate that feeling about being lost in any topic that makes page one. I’ve read that America is the breadbasket for the world. I’ve also read that America has become a net importer of foods. Can you take a minute and explain that wheat story to me?”

  Those who’ve flown the Concorde agree the most remarkable feature is the incredible feeling of lift power during takeoff. You’ll get that same feeling of lift power when you suggest to the Intimidator, “I don’t really understand much about that subject you seem so well schooled in,” and then flat out say, “Could you take a minute and explain it to me?”

  The room ripples with energy. Your bleakest moment in an important relationship improves vertically and rapidly. Survey your accomplishments.

  You’ve seen some people hunch like mother sparrows over their paycheck and deposit slip at the bank for fear someone will see the amount of their weekly wage. You’ve let the Intimidator know right away you’re not One of Those. Among all the things he’s going to learn about you within a short time, you’ve made sure he learns early that your inclination is not to conceal ignorance, but to eliminate it.

  The Intimidator also learns you’re sensitive enough to ask if he has time to contribute to your knowledge.

  Moreover, you’ve made the Intimidator talk to you about something he’s knowledgeable about.

  And, towering over all the above, you’ve got the Intimidator talking!

  That does to the awkwardness and insecurity of those early moments what noon does to dew.

  He is not merely talking. He’s in the act of doing something far better than merely talking.

  He is talking by request. Your request. That gives him a good feeling. Long range: He will remember for years that you gave him a good feeling upon contact. Short-range: That good feeling you’ve engendered in him gives you the best head start humanly possible toward accomplishment of your immediate mission.

  Every profession and occupation throws off a lot of things insiders know that others ought to learn. One of the richest lessons the broadcasting business teaches has to do with ‘ ’feelings’ ’ like the one that the Intimidator, no matter how formidable, will hold toward you once you break format and appoint him “professor” for your ad-hoc course in Wheat Surplus 101.

  As a beginning broadcast talk host, I had friends and strangers approach me with increasing frequency as my show took root in New York with the identical comment. “Hey, that was a great show you had last night!” At first I would thank them and ask, “Which part of last night?” trying to get a handle on precisely which guests and topics were making it with the listenership. To my amazement and chagrin, they seldom remembered. I would give them the name of each guest I’d interviewed the night before, tell them the topics discussed, recite the name of any books the guests might have written.

  And almost always to no avail. They didn’t remember. Despite my in-depth probing to determine precisely what it was they’d liked the night before, I’d usually get no more out of them than the sheriff gets from the guy in the serape dozing against a cactus who looks up and says, “They went that-away.”

  For a long time I just supposed they were insincere people who knew somehow I had a radio show and felt like handing out a spray-on compliment to make me feel good. I later learned that wasn’t the case at all.

  In most cases, they had listened the night before. And they had liked what they heard. They simply didn’t remember by dawn’s early light exactly what it was that grabbed their attention and pleased them so the night before.

  All they remembered was that whatever it was, it gave them a good feeling.

  Feelings, I learned, are more important than meaning.

  People may not remember the meaning of what they heard even as recently as last night. But they do remember the manner in which an interview was conducted and the mood it lodged on their brain disc.

  After this many years I can promise (almost straight-facedly) that, were I to have Winston Churchill on one microphone and Adolf Hider on another, and if Churchill were rude, inconsiderate, obnoxious, and interruptive, thousands of people—including Jewish people—would call the radio station shouting, “Who’s that nasty Englishman who won’t let that poor German speak’’!

  Life is not an issues poll. Life is an approval rating.

  Your Intimidator may not remember why he liked you. Or he may be ashamed to tell anyone it was because instead of muscling his small talk aside and moving on to your own, you stopped in the middle of your own opportunistic quest and deputized him as an expert in something about which he knew and cared.

  Your Intimidator will like that smart, sensitive person who came to the office and, rather than saying, “Look at me,” instead said, “Forgive me, I’d like to continue looking at you.”

  A good way to get things started is by opening with the highest honest compliment you can come up with delivered squarely between the eyes of the Intimidator.

  Every broadcaster knows that a compliment like “Hey, man, you’re the greatest!
” is nothing but the predictable wiggle of a contemptible worm. When someone makes good eye contact with you, though, and says, “I thought the way you handled the leftist revisionist historian the other night when he tried to contradict you about Tito’s wartime activities was masterful”—that, by contrast, is a compliment.

  It doesn’t matter whether your highest honest compliment deals with a firm’s recent acquisition of three competitors, a software house, and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg or with the extraordinary niceness of the uniformed attendant who helped you find a space in the visitors’ parking lot. It matters only that your compliment should obey the Law of the Compliment.

  A compliment should be brief, blunt, specific, and above all accurate and credible. It’s hard for some of us to deliver a compliment and maintain eye contact simultaneously. It’s tough—a little bit like a child delivering a forced apology to a playmate. Practice sending that compliment over the outfield fence while keeping the pressure of both your eyes on the bridge of his nose. Make him dissolve under the awesomeness of it all.

  (You’d be amazed how many people, when I am the Intimidator, actually begin the conversation by asking, “Are you still on the radio?” Surveying my own accomplishments, modest though they be, as objectively as I can, I cannot bring myself to believe that that is my highest honest compliment from someone whose whole purpose in meeting me is to try to get me to say yes!

  The pain of “Are you still on the radio?” might be bearable, by the way, if only they would learn to conceal their surprise when my answer is affirmative!)

  A book by a phony psychic who decided to go straight and tell all (The Psychic Underworld) revealed the existence of a national data base “psychics” could tap into for a fee. It was worth a big fee. That data base was the beginning and end of their “psychic powers.”

  Think back to the last time you heard a friend rave about a psychic she just met who sat her down and proceeded to “work miracles.” (The “she,” I fear, is advised in this case. Psychics know their best customers are older women who’ve lost their husbands!) How did she word her praise for that psychic?

  Wasn’t it something like, “… And then he started telling me a whole string of things about myself and about Harold he couldn’t possibly have known any other way!”

  The author of The Psychic Underworld peeled away the veil and gave us a glimpse at the operations of the Psychic Mafia. It’s a glimpse that customers who believe in psychics will find disconcerting. When a phony psychic works a client, he gingerly probes around through the lives of the client and her loved ones hoping to score with some good guesswork. The closer the psychic’s observations come to accuracy, the closer he comes to lots more visits and fees from that client.

  He may say, “Your late husband had an interesting attitude toward animals.”

  He’s hoping she’ll say, “Oh, you’re right. It was beautiful to watch Harold communicate with our pets. It was almost as though he could talk to them.”

  The psychic then gets credit for a bull’s-eye. He smiles knowingly and then proceeds to guess, gingerly and always hedging around so he can pile up a little more credit, to convince the client he has genuine powers.

  When he’s right, the client will tell him more. When he’s wrong, the client will tell him what’s right. In either case, another psychic who could secretly eavesdrop on the client’s session with that first psychic’s could easily convince the client that he possessed profound and exquisite powers.

  “No, I’m afraid you’re wrong about that,” the client will interrupt in the middle of the reading. “Harold didn’t really love animals all that much. I think it was because of his getting thrown off a horse when he was ten and a nasty dog bite that very same year.”

  The client instantly forgets the business about her husband and animals ever came up, because it wasn’t a “score.” The psychic, however, then submits that bit of information to the data bank. When that same client makes an appointment with another psychic, even halfway across the country, days, weeks, or years later, she’ll be staggered when that psychic—who comes to the session fully briefed about Harold and the horse and the dog, and everything else that client ever told any other psychic hooked into the data network—will smoothly and with an all-in-a-day’s-work manner, tell her not only how Harold felt about animals, but even why! (The psychic phony, by the way, wouldn’t come straight out and tell her he “gets the impression Harold was thrown off a horse at the age of ten and suffered a nasty dog bite that very same year.” That would be too obvious. Instead, he’ll say he feels Harold had an unpleasant encounter with a dog that went beyond the normal dog bite along around his early teens, or even preteens, and he believes, though he can’t be 100 percent sure, that Harold also had some sort of unpleasantness with another animal, a larger animal!)

  The phony psychics’ trade secret, of course, is that most of their best customers keep going from one psychic to another. They’re what the old carnival hustlers used to call marks. When a new psychic sits down with a mark and says he’s not quite sure whether the rapport will be forthcoming and fortuitous but he’s willing to try, and then closes his eyes, heaves a deep breath, and proceeds to disclose chillingly accurate details about Harold’s experience with horses and dogs, that poor mark will impute supernatural powers to that psychic forevermore, sing his praises, and recommend him to her friends.

  Point out to such a mark that unscrupulous manipulators collect, collate, and sell information about people like her in neat little dossiers that “psychics” pay good money for, and she’ll swear you’re nothing but a cynical sorehead jealous of sensitive people with the “higher gift” of being able to tune into and interpret human vibrations.

  Smart psychics pay a lot for those little scraps of information. And rightly so. They’re buying the password.

  The instant a person hears a detail about his life that “the psychic had absolutely no way of knowing,” his resistance melts and he becomes silly putty in the hands of the psychic.

  Psychics pay for the password. Spies kill for the password.

  You, on the other hand, are free to pluck all the “passwords” you want en route to your encounter with the Intimidator with no expense and no killing.

  Had you visited President Nixon in the White House in, say, the twelfth month pf Watergate and somehow alluded to the Watergate investigations, you would not have gotten credit for a searching eye and a retentive memory. Quite literally, 100 percent of everybody knew about Watergate! Remember Henny Youngman: “You remember World War Two—it was in all the papers.”

  Now it’s our turn to use a “trade secret” that does just as much for ambitious good people as secretly compiled purchased dossiers do for phony psychics.

  Once we get to knowledge below the World War Two and Watergate level of total public pervasiveness, you’ll be considered psychic if you show knowledge about die Intimidator. or his firm’s activities no matter how well publicized that knowledge may have been!

  Abandon the notion that says, “Gee, it’s been printed, so everybody must already know it.” Substitute for it the notion that says, “Nobody notices, nobody reads, nobody pays attention to, and nobody remembers a damned thing.” That latter notion, though flawed, is lot more valid than the former.

  Let’s say the Intimidator is personnel director of a high-tech outfit in the energy field, and you’re just about to begin the Waltz of Pain, trying to warm the atmosphere in his office between his “Why don’t you take this chair here?” and “Let me ask you a bit about your work experience.”

  Let’s further say you can read Indonesian and you spotted a tiny item in an Indonesian technical journal that very week indicating that the Intimidator’s company had just signed a deal to recondition four giant turbines for the Indonesian government in the Moluccas, beating out an Australian, a Malaysian, a Hong Kong, a Taiwanese, and two Japanese companies for the job. That item in the Indonesian language is the only public word released on the matte
r so far.

  We can all understand how your knowledge of that and your deft dropping of that ‘ ‘password’ ’ into that moment should warm things up.

  Now, then, suppose that same item in English had appeared in the English-language newsletter published by the Indonesian Embassy in Washington and been sent to thousands of businessmen, technicians, students, and friends of Indonesia all over the United States.

  “Shucks,” you fear, “that password has now fallen into the possession of every Tom, Dick, and Harry who’d like the job I’m angling for.”

  Cut it out! The unexpectedness of your knowing that tidbit from an Indonesian Embassy newsletter will be every bit as explosive in the Intimidator’s estimation as if it had appeared only in that technical journal in Indonesia in Indonesian! The Erosion of Value as that information spreads outward from the esoteric journal read by a handful of Indonesians to the well-circulated Indonesian Embassy newsletter is imperceptible.

  Let’s keep going. The Erosion of Value speeds up, of course, as the item is picked up by The Times of London and then carried by the Associated Press to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and every newspaper and news and financial magazine across the English-speaking world.

  Never mind how much press attention that item got, though; so long as it falls below the World War Two-Watergate level of coverage, you get credit for knowing it. You get full credit for knowing it. You get much more credit than you deserve just by knowing it! And by knowing how to use it as an ice-melter.

  “By the way,” you say boldly and without fear of being thought a favor currier, “that was a sensational coup, breaking through all those international players to get that turbine deal with the Indonesian government. That must make you awfully proud.”

  Something magic happens (not every time, but often enough to make this doctrine unassailable) when you get things started by belting out a bold, honest, accurate, and well-deserved compliment, especially one that takes a little “knowing” on your part. Effete little Billy Batson in the comic books used to turn into Captain Marvel, accompanied by lightning and thunder, just by uttering the word “Shazam!”