Hi, Matt here. We're excited to celebrate a milestone. Think Fast Talksmart is approaching our 300th episode. To mark the occasion, I'll be hosting two free Ask Matt Anything events on June 3rd at 8am or 8pm Pacific. We'll run these on LinkedIn and YouTube. Open to everyone around the globe. Before taking your questions, I'll share one of my favorite new communication structures for advancing ideas and arguments. Anyone joining can submit questions online during the event. In a few of our learning community members, we'll have the opportunity to ask me their questions live on video. Don't miss this opportunity to be part of this live AMA on June 3rd. Be sure to sign up on LinkedIn, YouTube, or fastersmarter.io slash live. Now a word from one of our sponsors. Their support covers the cost of production, allowing us to bring you quality content free of charge. Language isn't just about words. It's about connection, opportunity, and credibility. That's one reason I like Babbel. It focuses on real-world communication, not just vocabulary drills, but practical conversations you can actually use, whether that's collaborating internationally, traveling for work, or building relationships across cultures. The lessons are short, about 10 minutes, so they fit into busy schedules, and they're designed by more than 200 language experts with tools for listening, speaking, reading, and writing. It adapts to how you learn and helps you track real progress over time. For many of our listeners, whether you're strengthening English skills, adding another language for professional growth, or staying connected globally, it's a practical way to keep moving forward. Babbel has over 25 million subscriptions sold worldwide, offers 14 languages, and every course comes with a 14-day money-back guarantee. If you've ever thought about learning another language, this is a perfect opportunity to start. Right now, Babbel is offering up to 60% off your subscription at babbel.com slash tfts. That's babbel, b-a-b-b-e-l dot com slash tfts for up to 60% off. Rules and restrictions apply. Creative and conscious communication can not only help us resolve our conflicts, but can help us live a better, more connected life. My name is Matt Abrahams, and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. Today I'm excited to speak with Deepak Chopra. Dr. Chopra is a physician and a leading authority on integrative well-being in spiritual intelligence. He is a clinical professor of family medicine and public health at the University of California, San Diego, and he serves as a senior scientist for Gallup Organization. He is the author of over 97 books, many of which are New York Times bestsellers. He is the co-founder of Cyberhuman.ai and Deepak Chopra.ai, a new AI tool available to all. Well, welcome, Dr. Chopra. I look forward to our conversation. I have been a big follower of your work for many years. Thank you. Shall we get started? Yes, of course. Excellent. Your work emphasizes the importance of presence and mindfulness. What practices do you recommend to cultivate presence in our communication and our interaction with others? To make any communication meaningful, we need presence. Presence is fundamental, but it is overshadowed by the ego mind. Most of us do not bring presence in our conversations. You bring presence in conversations when you have deep listening without judgment. We call it attention. You bring presence when you bring the element of empathy and compassion and joy and equanimity. That's called affection. So attention, affection. Another thing you bring presence is when you have appreciation for what you're doing, because every conversation is unique, every conversation, and every encounter is unique. And finally, you bring presence when you have radical acceptance, which you're not trying to change another person's point of view. You're expressing your point of view, but you're not attached to it. Then that's presence. Of course, mindfulness practices, being aware of your breath, being aware of your bodily sensations, once in a while asking yourself, am I present? Okay, all those things will bring you to the present indirectly. Just asking yourself, right now, is there presence in this conversation? It will bring you to it. I appreciate how you delineated all the aspects of presence, and anybody listening knows that I love things that are memorable, and all of yours begin with the letter A, attention, affection, appreciation, acceptance without attachment. And then the test you just shared with us, which is just asking, is there presence here? You've mentioned that conflicts present a unique opportunity for growth and understanding. Can you elaborate on how we can reframe our conflicts or leverage our conflicts to bring us to a better place? Whoever your adversary is, treat them with respect, because if you don't, you lose them in the first few minutes. I can rob you of your money, and you might forgive me. But if I insult you, and if I humiliate you, you'll never forgive me. So you start with respect. You understand emotional intelligence, which means you understand what the other person feels. You understand what you feel. You have compassion for them and for yourself, because without compassion, there is no healing or communication. And you have the intention that you will resolve the conflict. And therefore, if you use emotional intelligence, you refrain from belligerence. You understand the dynamics of conscious communication. What is my perception right now? What's happening? What am I perceiving? What am I feeling? Okay, obviously in conflicts, everyone feels insecure and fearful. How do I maximize the outcome so I feel better? So what am I observing? What am I feeling? What is the need here? And how do we fulfill the need for both parties? This conscious communication I have refined in my work, and again, I give credit to an author, Marshall Rosenberg, who wrote a book many years ago on conflict resolution. It was called Nonviolent Communication. So you use all the principles of nonviolent communication. You use game theory, which says, let's make it a game where everybody wins. We use conscious communication, and we refrain from dogma and being right and all that. All we want is the best outcome for everyone, which means peace, prosperity, abundance for everyone. And in the end, a more peaceful, just, sustainable, healthier, and joyful world, we can resolve any conflict and we can come up with a creative solution for anything that you consider adversity. So there are now social scientists who say, if you have shared vision number one in a leadership, shared vision, maximum diversity of opinion and talent and storytelling is spiritual and emotional bond. And when we strengthen and complement each other's strengths as in a good soccer team, everybody is something else, but they're all good at what they're doing. Or in India, in a cricket team, you know, everybody has a role. So you maximize everybody's strengths, that shared vision, maximum diversity, complementing each other's strengths, and having a platform even online or offline doesn't matter, where we share our strengths and complement our strengths and root for each other. There's a creative solution to everything that exists. I learned this as a physician. When we had difficult patients, we had something called grand rounds. So let's say I had a difficult cancer patient. Of course, I want the cancer specialist to be part of the solution. They know more about cancer than anyone else. But if I bring in a psychiatrist, a generalist, a dermatologist, a gastroenterologist, a cardiologist, you say, what has that to do with cancer? And what that has to do with cancer or any disease is people who don't know too much think outside the box. And so when you compliment everybody's opinions, suddenly a creative solution emerges, and I call it a spiritual solution because creativity and spirituality go together. That is a very robust answer to the value that conflict conveying to our own personal growth and understanding. What I heard from you is that it's all about conscious communication that's inclusive, that's compassionate, and that's creative. And by leveraging that, as you said, we can find the win-win and solve any decision. The ultimate win-win. Peace, prosperity, justice, and good health. Because ultimately all these effects are health, right? The conflict causes information in the body. What I hear is that in this approach to resolving conflict, it's not about my position and me being right and you being wrong. It's about us truly collaborating, connecting, and communicating to achieve the ultimate win-win. And many of us, I believe, entrench ourselves in our position, which work exactly against what you're advocating for. The next number comes if you entrench yourself. Then with some algorithm, you're a biological robot, and I can press the button and get the right response and manipulate you to my advantage, which the world does with people who tend to be narcissistic or self-important or bully. You highlight the power of intention in your work. How does one set a clear intention? And how does that impact how we interact with others and communicate? What's the role of intention in all of that? Intention, by the way, is part of the conversation and the hard problem of consciousness. So when you say tension, your brain actually records that somewhere as a neural correlate. However, at its source, intention is not orchestrated by the brain. It's orchestrated by consciousness. And if it is done with integrity, with authenticity, with responsibility, so these are very important words. Integrity means you're not pretending to be who you're not, and authenticity goes with it. And if you make an intention, you promise to live up to it authentically, integrity, authenticity. But the intention has to have a higher purpose. It's not because I can win the conversation. But if it has a higher purpose, if it has integrity and authenticity, integrity means I live up to my word, authenticity, I'm not pretending to be who I'm not. Once you introduce the intention, then consciousness takes over and organizes its fulfillment without any effort on your part. And how it does that is through synchronicity, through meaningful coincidences, through good luck, through what is called being at the right place at the right time, what the spiritual traditions call grace. So forming that intention from the right place opens up the possibility of the very things that you are hoping to achieve. 100% without much effort. It's called do less and accomplish more and ultimately do nothing, accomplish everything. I love the idea of accomplishing more with doing less and just taking the time to have a genuine intention to help. I want to share something I'm very excited about in the work that you're doing beyond the writings and the posts that you do. You've created a new AI tool, Deepak Chopra AI. Can you share a little bit about this tool and what its purpose is? Yeah, so Deepak Chopra.ai, which you can access just on your browser. And it's not a large language model. So large language models give you a lot of information and then you have to sort it out because some of it is useless. You might occasionally think a lot of it is useless. It's too much information. Large language models tend to hallucinate, which I like by the way, because hallucination is a way to tap into creativity. Every time the large language model hallucinates, I get a creative idea. That's not a bad thing. But my Deepak Chopra.ai is a small language model, which is 97 of my books, all the books are written. It will ultimately access this conversation too. So when you ask it a question, it uses my material. Furthermore, the answers are very personal. The more personal you ask the questions, the more personal the answers will be. To help you. And now we've trained the model to speak in my accent, in my voice, in Arabic, in Spanish, in Hindi, soon in Portuguese and Chinese. So you could ask the question in any language globally and you would get a personal answer and you could engage with it, even engage it with the meditation. What a wonderful tool to help people around the world. I personally am benefiting from speaking with you directly, but can see many uses when I don't have access to you. We'll be right back to finish our conversation. But first, a quick word from one of our sponsors. Their support allows us to bring you this show free of charge. When things get busy and they always do, the real challenge is focus. Knowing where to spend your time so you actually make meaningful progress. But that's hard when you're trying to do everything yourself. That's where Upwork can help. Upwork is a one-stop platform to find, hire and pay expert freelancers across areas like marketing, development, data and analytics and more. It gives you fast access to specialized talent so you can move quickly, fill key gaps and keep your work moving forward without getting stuck. You can browse profiles, review password and get help scoping your project. So you can hire with confidence and get started faster. And if speed really matters, you can connect with top tier talent and get matched in under six hours. It's a simple way to maintain momentum and focus on what matters most. Visit Upwork.com right now and post your job for free. That's Upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's U-P-W-O-R-K.com. If you think about it, a lot of our communication challenges at work aren't about what we say. They're about what never gets clearly shared in the first place, especially as teams grow and change. Processes live in people's heads. Explanations vary and over time that leads to confusion and inconsistency. This is exactly the problem today's sponsor, Scribe, was built to solve. Trusted by over 80,000 enterprises, including nearly half of the Fortune 500, Scribe is a workflow AI platform that captures what you're doing in real time and automatically turns it into clear, step-by-step guides, no recording, no manual write-ups. So instead of adding one more task to your to-do list, you can just do your work knowing it's being documented for others. As our team has grown, we've spent a lot of time walking people through onboarding, dual transitions, and cross-team workflows. The reality is, we're often just too busy to stop and properly document all of it. With Scribe, you just turn on the extension, go through the process, and it builds the guide as you go. Something that might take hours or get pushed aside entirely now takes seconds. It also automatically redacts sensitive information so you can share confidently across teams, contractors, and new hires. When anyone following along gets real-time on-screen guidance so the message isn't just sent, it's actually understood and applied. And what I really appreciate is that Scribe doesn't just document your processes, it helps you improve them by showing you where things could be more consistent, more efficient, and easier to hand off. To book a personalized enterprise demo, visit scribe.how.hs.hth. That's S-C-R-I-B-E.H-O-W-S-L-H. Think fast. And now, back to our conversation. Well, Dr. Chopra, before we end, I'd like to ask you three questions. One I create just for you and one I've been asking people across this podcast for all the many years we've been doing this. Are you up for that? Yeah. So my first question is, you are a very articulate communicator yourself. You use several tools to help. You use analogies. You position things that start with the same letter or things that have some rhyming to them to help. Can you reflect for us for just a little bit about what you do to make sure that your messages are clearly understood? Because you certainly are an expert at it. What do you think about when you think about how can I clearly communicate this? I sell words for a living. So my profession is selling language and words. So I have very carefully over the years cultivated my communication to be articulate and clear and helpful. If it's not helpful, I don't bother with that. I want it to be helpful. I want it to be correct. So I don't mistake any facts and that it's easy to check up now on facts. And number two is clear, articulate. And number three, it's helpful. Otherwise, why bother? Okay. So with those things in mind and bringing presence to my communication. Thank you for that helpful answer. Question number two, who is a communicator that you admire and why? I have admired communicators like Obama, admired communicators in the past, like Nelson Mandela, Bishop Tutu, the Dalai Lama, Martin Luther King Jr., Abraham Lincoln, you know, the Gettysburg Address. If you want to be inspired in the time of a crisis, then listen to the Gettysburg Address, right? These are amazing communicators and I've studied them and I try to model them and even improve on them. Wonderful. All very good, effective communicators who have had very challenging topics to communicate. My final question for you, what are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe? Number one, is it necessary? Whatever I'm going to communicate. Is it necessary? Half the time we just shoot the breeze and it might be entertaining, but it's not necessary. So number one, is it necessary? Number two, is it true? And number three, is it helpful? Purposeful, truthful and helpful. You have been all three of those in our conversation today. Thank you very much, Dr. Chopra. The understanding of presence and conscious communication is profound and can really change not just our own lives, but the lives of those around us. Thank you for giving us some insight and helping us understand the value that communication truly can have. Thank you. Thank you for joining us for another episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. To learn more about self-actualization and communication, please listen to episode 138 with Graham Weaver. This episode was produced by Catherine Reed, Ryan Campos and me, Matt Ibrahims. Our music is from Floyd Wonder with special thanks to Podium Podcast Company. Please find us on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to subscribe and rate us. Also follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram and check out fastersmarter.io for deep dive videos, English language learning content and our newsletter. Please consider our premium offerings for extended DeepThinks episodes, Ask Matt Anythings and much more at fastersmarter.io slash premium. Before we wrap up, I just want to say thank you for listening. It really means a lot to hear how people all over the world are using these ideas in their own lives. It inspires me and the whole team that brings you this show. If you want more episodes and resources, feel free to follow, subscribe and explore past conversations. We're grateful for your support of Think Fast, Talk Smart.
