Vanessa Van Edwards: The Weird Trick That Makes People Like You

A connection crisis, and the first question that changes everything

The episode opens with a sting: 95% of people have worked with someone who talks too much, and the clue is often visible before you hear any complaint. Vanessa calls it the “open fish,” that moment when someone opens their mouth because they want a turn and you keep going anyway. That tiny image sets up the larger theme of the conversation: most of us are worse at talking with humans than we think, and the stakes are getting bigger.

Vanessa says she wrote the book now because conversation is turning into “career insurance.” In a world of technological change, people who can connect are more likely to get promoted, collaborate well, date successfully, and avoid loneliness. She frames conversation as the vehicle to get what you want, whether that is a promotion, a soulmate, or simply the feeling of being understood. Her deeper worry is cultural, not just personal. She thinks this may be the last generation that learns conversation primarily from humans, because the next generation may talk to technology more than to people.

That claim matters because she ties poor conversation to dread. The symptoms are not abstract. You open your calendar and feel social dread. You overthink every interaction. You leave feeling like you were the worst version of yourself. Vanessa, who describes herself as a “recovering awkward person,” says this is not a personality flaw. It is usually a mechanics problem. People try to impress instead of discover, which turns conversation into performance.

Then she introduces the experiment that changed her thinking. She ran three speed networking experiments with 500 people, recording conversations and rating how connected people felt afterward. The worst opener was “What do you do?” and near the bottom was “How are you?” Both trigger social autopilot. They are fact-based dead ends. The best opener was a surprise: “What was the highlight of your day?” It sounds casual, but it asks the other person’s brain to search for optimism and memory, not script. Her second and third strongest swaps were “Anything exciting you’re working on?” and “Do you have any fun plans coming up?”

Her key insight is memorable because it is simple: a fact is a stop sign, a story is a doorway. Good conversation does not begin by mining data. It begins by creating movement.

Level one: stop Googling people, start harvesting stories

Vanessa builds the first floor of her framework by borrowing from Dan McAdams: level one is “general traits.” This is the part of conversation where people usually try to fact-check each other. Where are you from? What do you do? Married? Kids? In Los Angeles? Those questions are natural because the brain wants to process social facts from least intimate to most intimate. But most people get stuck there, and that is why so much small talk feels lifeless.

Her twist is that level one should still include facts, just facts wrapped in emotion or story. She suggests questions like “What’s your personal passion project?” or “Working on anything exciting these days?” because they give the listener something alive to respond to. She says these better questions now have to “compete with the feed.” That is the unexpected angle in the interview. Conversation is no longer just competing with boredom. It is competing with a phone full of dopamine. If your question is weaker than Instagram, the other person’s attention drifts right back to the screen.

To explain what makes a question sticky, she turns to Howard Stern. After analyzing thousands of his transcripts, she noticed he constantly creates information gaps. He asks for “the weirdest,” “the biggest,” “the most embarrassing.” The brain hates unfinished loops, so those words act like conversational confetti. They make people lean in. This is why saying “the craziest thing happened to me yesterday” works so much better than “I was in traffic.”

Vanessa also pushes back against the common belief that this stuff is fluffy and anti-productive, especially in companies. She says the opposite is true. Communication friction costs money. Teams with weak level one conversation have more silos, less psychological safety, worse brainstorming, and less collaboration. Her practical fix is tiny: start meetings with “Tell me something good.” It takes less than five minutes, but it creates easy banter, positive emotion, and what she calls frictionless communication.

One subtle point here is that she is not preaching fake positivity. If someone answers honestly and says they are struggling, that is not failure. It is still connection, because now there is emotion and a real chance to respond with care. The goal at level one is not cheerfulness. It is to get off autopilot and into something human.

Level two: dreams, worries, and the danger of talking too much

Once the basics are in place, Vanessa says the real connection starts. Level two is “personal concerns,” the place where motivations, goals, side hustles, values, and worries live. If level one is a treasure hunt, level two is dream building. The test is simple: do you know what gets this person up in the morning, and do you know what keeps them up at night?

She gives practical entry points. “What have you always wanted to learn?” works because it activates growth mindset, the belief that you can still change and expand. “What is your biggest goal right now?” is another favorite, especially around birthdays, new quarters, or New Year. These questions matter because they invite someone to bring private motivation into public conversation. A lot of modern self-improvement happens alone, in journals, meditations, and to-do lists. Vanessa thinks we have forgotten how powerful it is when another person becomes an ally to the dream.

But then the episode pivots into something almost more useful: what happens when someone cannot stop talking. Vanessa explains the mechanics of turn-taking from the CANDOR corpus. A healthy turn in ordinary conversation is roughly 15 to 30 seconds. Forty-five seconds is possible, but starts to feel like a monologue. That benchmark becomes a mirror. If you regularly go beyond it, you may be creating conversational friction without realizing it.

Her cultural diagnosis is sharp. Podcasts are not normal conversation. They are interviews. Voice notes are not conversation either, they are “the most selfish form of conversation,” because one person talks as long as they want without interruption. Add the fact that only three in 10 Americans socialize daily, and one in six people worldwide are affected by loneliness, and you get her argument: our conversational muscle is atrophying.

To catch yourself overtalking, she offers concrete signs. Time your turns on old Zoom calls. Watch for the “open fish,” when someone’s mouth opens because they want in. Notice if people nod politely but do not really respond. She also gives a modern self-test, the “yap challenge”: record yourself answering a prompt with no notes. If your natural answer spills into a minute or two, you may be talking longer than conversation can comfortably hold.

The cure is not silence. It is curiosity. Not vague curiosity either, but assertive curiosity. What, how, why, when. Questions that actually invite the other person to show up.

Entertainers, appreciators, and the weird truth about being liked

A useful shift happens when Steven describes someone who talks as if nobody else exists, almost with their eyes closed, as if they will stop only when they personally run out of fuel. Vanessa answers with a distinction that clarifies a lot of social confusion: there are entertainers and there are appreciators.

She discovered this in a green room with a massively famous guest. Person after person approached him with the same playbook, either a compliment or a question. “I love your work.” “Any advice for me?” He barely engaged. Then an AV guy walked up and said, “Can I tell you the funniest story?” Suddenly the famous man lit up. He did not want to entertain. He wanted to be entertained. That became Vanessa’s template. Some people want to perform, tell stories, give advice, and make you laugh. Others would much rather appreciate, listen, and be delighted by someone else’s story.

This is especially useful around bosses, celebrities, or intimidating people. The mistake is assuming everyone wants your compliment or your question. Some want your story. Others want your curiosity. Read the type, then respond accordingly.

The conversation then deepens into why some people overtalk in the first place. Vanessa thinks a lot of it is insecurity and fear of awkward silence. In her survey of a few thousand people, the greatest conversational fear was not rejection or judgment. It was awkward silences and not knowing what to say. That is revealing. Many people are not talking too much because they are arrogant. They are talking too much because silence feels like danger.

Vanessa returns to a principle Steven had heard from her before, borrowed from Dale Carnegie: be interested, not interesting. She cites a finding that the most popular kids were the ones with the longest lists of people they liked. That reverses the normal strategy. We usually walk into a room wondering, “Will they like me?” Her advice is to walk in asking, “How could I like you?”

This is the episode’s surprising moral center. Likability is not earned by broadcasting your value. It is often earned by aggressively liking other people. The person who makes you feel chosen, understood, and worth knowing becomes magnetic almost by accident.

Level three: the story you tell yourself about yourself

The deepest part of the framework comes with a warning. Level three is self-narrative, and Vanessa says it should be reserved for your most important people. Go too deep too fast and you trigger what she calls vulnerability regret, that painful feeling of having revealed too much in a place that was not safe enough to hold it.

Self-narrative is the story you tell yourself about yourself, the lens through which you interpret your life. Vanessa says there are two broad versions. A redemption narrative says hardship happened, but I can overcome it with grit, resilience, and effort. A contamination narrative says hardship happened to me, and it keeps poisoning what comes next. The facts may be similar, but the frame is completely different.

She argues that redemption narratives are linked to better health, longevity, stronger immune systems, better relationships, and greater happiness. Why? Because they create an internal locus of control, the feeling that while you cannot control every event, you can control how you respond. Steven offers a vivid analogy: some people think they are a bird, free to move, while others think they are on a roller coaster, stuck on a track.

To detect someone’s narrative, Vanessa listens for “narrative hints,” little leaks in language. People with contamination narratives often speak in absolutes like always and never. They frame bad events as permanent. One of her favorite questions to uncover this is disarmingly simple: “Do you feel lucky?” She says there are three responses. A fast yes often signals gratitude, optimism, and agency. A clear no can reveal pain, pessimism, or a deeply external locus of control. A hesitant “kind of” may mean the person has never thought about it, or that they do not yet feel safe enough with you to answer honestly.

What makes this memorable is how ordinary the doorway sounds. “Do you feel lucky?” sounds like bar talk. Vanessa treats it like an x-ray. It can tell you about someone’s relationship to fate, agency, suffering, and hope. The point is not to diagnose people on the spot. It is to understand the frame they are living inside, because conversation, at its best, can help them rewrite it.

The five archetypes, and why some people energize you while others drain you

Once Vanessa is talking about self-narrative, she pushes the idea further into five archetypes. She is careful to say these are more art than rigid science, but they explain a lot about attraction, conflict, and work style.

The first is the ambitious hero, which both she and Steven seem to recognize in themselves. This person believes effort can overcome obstacles, dreams big, chases growth, and often struggles with never feeling satisfied. At work, this can look like shiny object syndrome, the founder who keeps throwing out new initiatives before the old ones are finished. In conversation, ambitious heroes love progress, metrics, momentum, and goals. Ask them how the business is doing and they light up.

The second is the contented pragmatist, the person who likes life as it is. They are grounded, ritual-loving, practical, and not especially driven by more. Vanessa’s funny example is how she will tell a friend who makes great granola that they should bottle it and sell it at farmers markets, and the friend replies, “But why?” In relationships, contented pragmatists can soothe ambitious heroes by reminding them to enjoy the view.

The third is the selfless helper, one of the most emotionally generous but also most vulnerable archetypes. Their worth is tied to helping. They often choose service careers and can become beautiful managers because they naturally bring out the best in others. But they struggle with boundaries, attract takers, and can burn out on compassion. The challenge in conversation is that they may feel talking about themselves is selfish.

The fourth is the creative disruptor. These are the people who dislike rules, enjoy challenging assumptions, and often come off as contrarian. They can be exciting and visionary, especially in entrepreneurship or law, but they can also become accidental dream killers if they constantly attack ideas before they are ready.

The fifth is the unlucky struggler, someone with a strong contamination narrative who feels overlooked, misunderstood, and fundamentally unlucky. Vanessa compares them to George Costanza. They can be funny and self-aware, even entertaining, but they are often internally tortured.

The practical point is not to box people in. It is to know how to meet them. Goals energize the ambitious hero. Ritual comforts the contented pragmatist. Permission and care help the selfless helper. Challenge stimulates the creative disruptor. Empathy is essential with the unlucky struggler. A single question does not fit all humans equally well.

How to leave well, build aura, and stop trying so hard to impress

Near the end, the episode shifts from depth back to mechanics, and that makes the advice especially usable. Steven asks how to get out of a bad conversation without offending someone. Vanessa says most people obsess over first impressions and ignore the ending, even though the “peak-end effect” means we remember the emotional high point and the ending disproportionately. Her fix is a clean formula: future cue plus compliment or action.

The future cue nudges the brain from here to later. “Do you have any fun plans this weekend?” Once they answer, you can wish them well, compliment the interaction, and pair it with an action. “It was so lovely talking to you. I’m going to grab another coffee.” She emphasizes the importance of exit voice and nonverbals too. Step back slightly. Angle your body toward the door. Lingering awkwardness is, in her words, “kryptonite for charisma.”

That leads naturally into aura and riz, the language Steven uses for presence. Vanessa’s definition is childlike and useful because she got it by explaining charisma to her eight-year-old daughter: it is the person you want to be around, sit next to, listen to, work with, or play with. Her daughter immediately identified the same two charismatic kids in class that Vanessa had already noticed. Charisma, then, is not mysterious. It is socially visible.

So how do you build it? First, be easy to talk to. Clearly signal liking. She says we all suffer from “signal amplification bias,” thinking our warmth is obvious when it usually is not. People underestimate how much others like them, so saying “I always love talking to you” or “you always have the best stories” matters more than we think. Second, signal both warmth and competence. She cites a line from the research that competence without warmth makes people suspicious. Third, claim space physically and vocally. She talks about “maximum resonance point,” the lowest relaxed part of your natural voice. A nervous “Hello” tightens the cords and weakens presence. A relaxed “hello” on the out-breath lands differently.

Her closing story ties everything together. At a VIP party full of people introducing themselves by sounding impossibly impressive, Vanessa simply said she was a “recovering awkward person” who helps smart, awkward people. The room laughed, exhaled, and afterward more people came to talk to her than to the billionaire or the person who seemed to have “cured cancer.” The lesson is blunt: trying too hard to impress creates distance. Being the easiest person to talk to creates gravity.

Who this is for, and the personal cost of chasing success

The final stretch of the conversation becomes unexpectedly personal. Vanessa adds one last practical recommendation: write down the boring questions you get asked most often and prepare better answers. Not rehearsed, robotic answers, but answers that contain a story, an anecdote, or a hook that gives the other person something to respond to. Her example is a friend who cannot smell or taste. When people ask what he is ordering at dinner, he says he has no sense of taste or smell and asks what they would choose if they could taste one thing. Instantly the boring question becomes a doorway.

When Steven asks who the book is for, Vanessa answers in a way that circles back to the beginning. It is for people who dread small talk, dread networking events, dread the first five minutes of a team meeting, dread first dates. She wants to remove dread because if conversation keeps feeling costly, people will avoid it, and avoidance deepens loneliness. Her hope is that a plan can make conversation not just tolerable but joyful.

Then comes the closing tradition: the previous guest’s question. Vanessa is asked whether she sacrificed things in her personal life to build success that she regrets and wishes she could get back. Her answer cuts through the frameworks. Yes. She says she sacrificed friendship and family closeness in the hustle, especially after moving to Austin for work. What she regrets most is being away from family when her children were very little. She says she felt very alone as a new mom and wishes she could get back the communal feeling of raising babies with her mother and sister nearby.

That ending quietly validates the whole episode. Conversation is not just a skill for promotions or better networking. It is part of what keeps life from becoming efficient, successful, and lonely at the same time. Vanessa says she is back now, with her sister at her house and her kids nearby. It is a small human ending to a long conversation about human connection, and it lands because it is not theory anymore. It is the cost of losing it, and the relief of rebuilding it.