Jeff Krasno
speaker
350 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Jeff Krasno’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Like, that's the best band ever. They got the best songs. They sell more tickets than anybody. And then there would be this long pregnant silence afterwards. And I was so uncomfortable that I always felt like I needed to fill that void. And then I'd start in pitching again. And this recurred over and over. Finally, I asked our interpreter, I was like, what's up with this?
Every time I go in and pitch my bands, I get this silence. She's like, oh, no, no, no. That's a sign of respect. that they actually listened to everything that you had to say. Then they synthesized it. Then they formed their response. So I started to actually really use that. And even when people on these Zoom calls would stop talking, finally, they'd exhaust themselves.
I'd always leave a little bit of space before I then started. And that really helped them feel heard. Like I had really heard them, you know? Another really good technique to having stressful conversations is seek connection, not solution. Okay. So this was another thing that I learned kind of in the process of doing these calls is
as people were talking, I started to notate areas of their life that also converged with my own life. Like I have three daughters, you know, maybe they had daughters. Oh, they were born in Chicago. I was born in Chicago too. Oh, they used to drive cross country. I drove cross country for nine summers in a row, you know, all these things, whatever they happened to be.
And then when it was my turn to speak, I wouldn't start in among, you know, the best points of my argument, I would be like, oh, that's so cool. You know, I've got daughters too. I know what that's like.
And really focusing on these areas of connection created this sense of really deep human connection beyond whatever frivolous, petty argument that we were having around, you know, one issue or another. So that was another one. Seek connection, not solution. And then I think the last one that I would share with you, and there are plenty of others, is this technique called steel manning.
Are you familiar with steel manning? Yeah. Yeah. So it came about because it's the opposite of straw manning. So a straw man argument is when you basically take someone's point and you basically discard it through an ad hominem, like insulting them, or you kind of distort their argument. Like if you might say to like, hey, Jeff,
You know, we should really invest more money in renewable energy, you know? And I said, oh, Drew, you just want to put everyone in oil and gas out of business. Something like that. You know, I basically just, I didn't really address what you were saying. I just kind of like distorted it. Because it's very easy to knock down a straw man, a man made of straw.
So very difficult to knock down a man made of steel. And that's why it's called steel manning. So with a steel manning technique, you listen to someone's point of view. And then instead of rebutting it, you actually reiterate the best portions of their argument back to them. And this has a number of impacts. A, it makes them feel seen and heard again.
And there's more likelihood of compromise there because they're like, oh, that person really did register the best parts of my arguments. But what it also does, it fortifies your own position because you have to actually consider the best parts of an opposing position. And I found that to be just incredibly helpful and yield amazing results.
And, you know, the, the output of these 26 hour long zoom calls that I had wasn't necessarily agreement, but I made this kind of Rolodex of what I call frenemies, you know, of people that still text me today. And they're like, I hate you. Yeah. They sometimes they do with a smiley face though. I'm kidding. I'm kidding.
No, but you know, but, but there is the playfulness now to our, our rapport, our repartee. And some of them like our hardcore Trumpers and some of them are super BLMers and they're all over the place, but, and they're sending me videos and they're trying to like nudge me a little bit. And it's just, but we've come to a new place because we've found some degree of common humanity in each other.
For sure. And the world needs that.
Yeah. Well, we also, it also provides a possibility of, of progress through common ground and compromise. I mean, essentially every success in humanity has been predicated on our unique special ability to cooperate flexibly at scale. Like everything big that we've built as a species has required some degree of a large scale cooperation.
And I mean, I was running these seminars in the fall, this past fall, on how to have stressful conversations. And at the end, I would get Trump supporters and Harris supporters on stage, and they would essentially look each other in the eye and say, here's my greatest hope. Here's my greatest loss. you know, here's the most important relationships in my life.
They would actually say that to each other. And then I'd flip them and say, Hey, tell your quote unquote adversaries narrative. And then they would. And then they say, Oh, what are the, then I'd ask them like, why are you, you know, supporting this candidate, that candidate. And then they do the steel manning thing of like, Oh yeah, this is why this person's supporting that candidate.
And at the end they would hug These people, like in the most incendiary time in an era of just intense political vitriol, where the invective is so deep that we barely can have a conversation. I mean, we can't even have a conversation, you know, that I would see this before my eyes, people then hugging each other and seeing and recognizing each other's common humanity.
I was like, there is something to this. And here's the last bit of this is that if you can have a hard, stressful conversation, with someone you don't even really know, could it be possible to have that conversation with the people that are most dear and important to you? And we tend to avoid those, you know, like your kids, your best friends, your parents, like my parents are in their 80s.
You know, this really propelled me to have some of the more difficult conversations with my parents before I can't have them with them anymore. And so I really do think that it is these conversations that separate us from a better world.
Yeah, because they have developed an ability to emotionally regulate, probably, to move back to center. And again, I would say that all of the protocols... that I embrace in my life, that's the one thing that they share. It's like, does this help me move back to center? Does this meditation practice help me move back to some degree of equipoise or emotional equilibrium?
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