Talking the Talk
Ep. 380: Linguist Deborah Tannen on ‘cooperative overlap,’ Peoplehood founder Julie Rice on creating community through conversation, and Mitchell Silk on communicating across languages and cultures
This week on Unorthodox, we’re preparing for Yom Kippur by learning how to communicate better.
We interview linguist Deborah Tannen, who coined our favorite phrase, “cooperative overlap.” She explains the real reason why we’re always interrupting each other on this show, and shares some tips for talking to people with different conversational styles.
We talk to Julie Rice, co-founder of Soul Cycle, whose new project, Peoplehood, teaches people how to better listen and communicate with each other. She tells us why we should be working out our “empathy muscles,” and what we can learn when we finally shut up and listen.
We chat with Mitchell Silk, the former assistant secretary of the Treasury for international markets (and the first Hasidic Jew to be appointed to a Senate-confirmed position in the federal government). He recently published the first English translation of the Kedushas Levi, a classic Hasidic commentary on the Torah. He shares how communication, whether in Chinese, Hebrew, or English, is the key to revealing what we all have in common.
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