Tomer Sharon interviews Gary Vaynerchuk on empathy. Interview prepared by Daniel Szuc of Apogee Hong Kong (http://apogeehk.com) and Tomer Sharon of Google NYC.

Full transcript:

Q:	We’re here with Gary Vaynerchuck. Thank you very much for doing this with us today.
A:	Thrilled.
Q:	So let’s talk about empathy.
A:	Okay.
Q:	What is empathy?
A:	You know, I’m not a scholar so I don’t know if my – this is just one man’s point of view. First of all, when I think of empathy, I truly, truly believe that it is the single reason that I’m a good sales person; that I would tell you that – you know, it’s funny – if you asked me what is the singular reason – if you were interviewing me not about the subject that you’re interviewing me, if I was in the New York Times building right now, front page cover of all my business success, why are you successful, I would tell you that empathy and self-awareness are the reason I am successful. And that I’m not even sure how empathy and self-awareness – are they cousins, are they the same exact thing, are they the same thing in context of a conversation – but that’s – to me, it’s feeling the other person in the process, and then having the – whether it’s happiness, contentness, whatever other traits one has to then provide more value to that person, than yourself. My process is a) to feel out the situation and then to always be most comfortable in giving at least 51% to the other person. I think of salesmanship as a good thing. Most people think of it as a bad thing. I think my DNA of empathy is the reason that that happens.
Q:	Why is this such an important skill to have?
A:	Well, that’s a whole other debate. I’m not sure it’s a skill, so maybe you know this better than I do. But it’s been – if I knew how to develop empathy – first of all – it’s interesting – I don’t know if it’s a skill. So I think everybody has some level of it.
Q:	Okay.
A:	I can tell you that my mom has a hell of a lot more of it than my dad. Right? I can tell you that the leaders, the people that are helping me build this company here at VaynerMedia, I have watched the five or ten of them that I’ve been trying to grow – I would tell you that self-awareness and empathy are two major things I push and it does evolve. A skill – to answer your question before I debate it – it’s an important skill to have because it fundamentally allows the other person in the equation to like you more. And being liked has dramatically more value than I think our current society understands.
Q:	Okay. How is self-awareness connected to this?
A:	I think that for me they’re kind of like self-awareness is almost like empathy within yourself.
Q:	Okay.
A:	It’s not punishing yourself for the things that – you know – I understand myself or feel myself the way I feel you and then I try to treat myself the way I treat others. Most people treat themselves better or worse. I try to treat – I try – to treat myself the same.  Acknowledging my weaknesses. And so I think – I think self-awareness is a gateway drug to empathy. If you’re able to be self-aware and understand yourself, it puts you in a happier place to have the broad enough shoulders or the internal strength to then be able to accept what you are able to decode by using empathy.
Q:	Let’s say I’m a product manager, engineer, marketer, whatever. I read about empathy, I understand it’s an important thing to have, whatever we call it. How do I develop it?
A:	I think the best way to develop something is to surround yourself with people that have the same thing. So if I want to be a better tennis player, I could take lessons, I could play my contemporaries. But I truly believe that if I went and played great players over and over and took my losses, that I would be better. And so much like I’m trying to mentor young people that are entrepreneurs these days, and I tell them that it’s far better to go work with an entrepreneur that you admire that has actually executed something, than it is to actually go and learn about entrepreneurship by reading about it. I think the same thing about developing empathy. It’s kind of like pushups. If you want muscles, you got to put in the work. I think surrounding yourself with somebody who’s massively empathetic and has put into practical use, is something that people should really pay attention to. So I would surround myself forcefully, to create the serendipity of the osmosis, from the people that have it.
Q:	So you do that. You take your losses.
A:	Yup.
Q:	You have some wins.
A:	Yup.
Q:	How do you know if you’re successful in developing empathy?
A:	I think this is – this is why I brought up self-awareness so quickly. I believe and I’ve done a lot of managing, and have been around people; I’m very people-centric. I believe most people know the truth of every situation but pretty much lie to themselves.
Q:	Okay; tell me about that.
A:	I would tell you that your question is very easily answered by anybody who went through the process. They actually know the answer. They actually know if they become a better manager. You notice this towards leadership.
Q:	Yup.
A:	I truly believe that the biggest – you know, self-confidence, self-awareness, empathy – there’s three or four things that I really look for in a leader. It’s what I have. I think people know the answer to your question. I just don’t think they want to tell you the truth to that answer. How do you know if you have any results? You actually are fundamentally, visually watching people respond to you better. I mean, empathy is a very attractive trait. I just got done with two meetings this morning where I used something that’s pretty much empathetic – which is being the bigger person in every relationship is always the right thing. Being the bigger woman – this is what I say – being the bigger man is kind of a – being a bigger woman will help you win this. They were both right. And that’s where people struggle. Most people think the world is black and white. The world is grey. Very grey. Empathy falls into the top of the Bill of Rights of greyness.
To answer your question, I think they would fundamentally see that people around them were more attracted to them. People would ask them to go to more places together. People would listen to their direction without friction more often. People would aspire to spend time with them in the workplace. People that were managers above them would come down and ask for their opinions below them. I think their lives would look substantially differently even with a subtle change towards empathy.
Q:	You start with this but I’ll ask again. Why are you so passionate about it – about empathy?
A:	Because I think it fundamentally is THE trait that has led to the success of my life.  When I say the success of my life, I don’t only mean financially. I mean the person I decided to marry, the relationship I have with all my family. I’m a very popular person in my life and an outrageous percentage of that is I naturally gravitate towards doing better for others than myself. Over indexing empathy which is something I kind of do – becomes a very lonely thing. It happened this morning. I’ll tell you a funny story. I played basketball this morning with all my employees. I look forward to it so much. There was ten of us, five on five. Halfway through our first game, a gentleman walked in; an 11th person. A stranger. Was playing basketball. We ended our game and we wanted to play another one before we all left.
It was so unnatural for me to not invite him to play and let one of my guys sit, including myself, because I was on the losing team which means I would have had a shoot. I fought it. I fought it because in my late 30s, I‘m starting to try to develop some level of selfishness because empathy becomes a very lonely place. So it was funny. It was interesting. I literally thought about it this morning; that I was happy that I allowed it to happen. The guy was fine. He was shooting himself. He was fine. It wasn’t like he was devastated. But God, it never gets out of your body.
Q:	How can products, and I’m phrasing it on-purpose like this –
A:	Yes.
Q:	How can products empathize with humans?
A:	It can be responsive.
Q:	In what way?
A:	When I think of product – that goes in a lot of different direction – I think of product in my world, a lot of times, from a digital website kind of standpoint. I would tell you that responsive design. Mobile friendly. It blows my mind that we’re in 2013-14 and we have mobile sites that don’t convert to either m dot or are driving you towards the download of the app.
To me, this is what reminds me that most businesses are not empathetic. They love to say that the customer’s always right and it’s customer first. But their actions rarely reciprocate that statement. So that’s the singular first thing that comes to mind. I think modern technology is leading us towards empathy product,  meaning with responsive design, with customization. That’s what it is; right? I would tell you that my empathy leads me to – I mean, listen; I almost wrote a book probably very similar to where you’re going. I have a feeling it may be slightly different – but Thank You Economy was almost called one on one marketing. It’s what I believe in. I do not manage a single one of these 260 people the same; not one. That’s empathy. That’s making it for them. I think product is starting to look at that way. Very honestly, a very unpopular product in some ways, which is a birth child from Facebook beacon but is now Facebook Connect, I’m a big fan of – I’m an enormous fan of Facebook Connect because I think it innuendos to that world. And I believe big data formulated properly to bring more value to the individual, has enormous upside.
Q:	Alright. We’ve been talking with a few people about empathy. We’re hearing, that they say at least, I don’t know if it’s right – that empathy is practiced less and less in society. Do you feel the same way or not so much?
A:	I think in theory it’s a popular thing to say. I think that big media – I think empathy’s not sexy. So I think empathy is less and less sexy. I’m not so sold that it’s practiced less. I don’t think it’s heralded as much.
Q:	Alright.
A:	Now, can I tell you something interesting?
Q:	Of course.
A:	I actually think it has a chance of coming back because I think what the internet is doing, is it’s maturing into people. And as we go back to the psychology of small town rules where everybody knows everything, I actually think empathy is going to be on the rise. Because the reason empathy worked or all these nice things worked, was you lived in a town of 60 people. And like your reputation was – your social equity really mattered. It went away as we became dramatically fragmented. I think the social networks, specifically, which is just a majority of the internet, are actually bringing us closer together. I think that change the dynamic. I think in the next 20 or 30 years you’ll see an upswing in people valuing attractive human traits, empathy being one of the biggest ones.
Q:	Alright; let me finish with a question that might be unrelated but to me in my mind, it’s somehow related.
A:	Okay.
Q:	How does one become a master at what they do?
A:	How does one become a master at what they do. I think first and foremost – I think at some level, and I think he’s a master at selling books – I think Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 Hours probably has a lot of truth in it. I haven’t read that book so I don’t want to talk about it in a negative or positive way. But I will tell you this; I’m a master at the only things that I just have done my whole life, right? I’ve always been selling: lemonade stands, baseball cards. I get a lot of credit for building my family wine business very quickly. Boy; I was a professional. When I walked in at 22 years old, I was a professional. So I think rinse and repeat practice, is – you know, I actually think that the world needs to spend more time – I’ve been debating whether the reason we have so much admiration for athletes and celebrities is because they are truly people who went all in on their craft. There are very few, if any, professional athletes that come out of three or four years and then into the profession, right? You’ve had to pretty much do it your whole life. 
I truly believe that at least in entrepreneurship, that that is going to become the norm; that – as a matter of fact – I have a lot of heart for carrying that torch when I’m a little less on fire for building myself up. That you have to put in the hours. To be the master, you have to put in the hours. And so I’ve been empathetic since I was a kid. It’s always been there. It’s why the people that are best at it – it was funny – did you see I struggled with skill? Because I don’t know if the definition is skill or a trait but when I was a little kid I was sharing my toys with my sister. On my 9th birthday, I bought my sister – my grandma took me to ToysRUs and I bought my sister a Cabbage Patch Kid with my money because my empathy made me realize that you couldn’t find Cabbage Patch Kids and in that moment, there was dramatically more upside of that emotion for my sister than whatever I would have done as a commodity. There was a lack of selfishness that allowed me to understand the overall picture.	I basically mapped that 9th grade trip into everything I’ve done.
Q:	Awesome. Perfect. Thank you very much.
A:	Awesome. Thanks.  How’s it going?
Q:	Good; very good.

Gary Vaynerchuk on Empathy

Tomer Sharon interviews Brad Feld on empathy. Interview prepared by Daniel Szuc of Apogee Hong Kong (apogeehk.com) and Tomer Sharon of Google NYC.

Full transcript:

Q: 	So my first question to you is this; can you please describe the scene from  White Man Can’t Jump that frames empathy versus problem solving.
A:	It’s one of my favorite movie scenes ever. So Woody Harrelson – a young Woody Harrelson and Rosie Perez are in bed together. She’s studying for Jeopardy and he’s, I don’t know, just laying around. 
	She turns to him and says in this sort of very sexy, throaty voice, ‘Honey, I’m thirsty.’ And he gets up and pads across the bedroom to the kitchen sink. It’s a very gratuitous shot of Woody Harrelson in his underwear. Fills up a glass of water, comes back into the bed, lays down in the bed and hands her the glass of water.
	And she takes the glass of water, looks at it, and tosses it in his face.
And he, ‘What the hell; what did I do wrong?’ and she said, ‘Honey, I wanted – I didn’t want a glass of water.’ Or she said, ‘Honey, I said I was thirsty. I didn’t want a glass of water. I wanted empathy. I wanted you to say I know what it’s like to be thirsty.’
	 And that’s the essence of the difference; where Woody Harrelson or Woody Harrelson character went to solve her problem, and all she really wanted was some empathy.
Q:	So let me ask you this; what is empathy?
A:	Empathy is a complicated thing. A lot of people actually don’t really understand what empathy is becau8se they think it’s sympathy. There is a fairly significant difference between the two.
	Essentially, it’s the capacity to recognize the emotion. It’s not that you have to experience sympathy but understand what the other person is feeling, and understand what the person is going through, and being able to be detached from the actual solving of their situation.	
	Often when you feel sympathy for somebody or compassion for somebody, it tends to suck you in to actually try and solve their problem in some way or engage with the problem whereas empathy is just this recognition, understanding of what the person is going through.
Q:	Do you think this is an important skill to have; empathy?
A:	I personally think it’s an incredibly important skill to have. My wife and I have an ongoing joke which is whenever one of us brings up something and it’s unclear whether we want empathy or problem solving, the person says do you want me to solve your problem or do you want a glass of water. That’s code for do you want me to solve the problem or do you want some empathy.
Q:	How does one develop empathy?
A:	I don’t know how you develop empathy, in sort of an algorithmic way. I think a big part of it for a lot of people is recognizing that it’s not often that the person you are interacting with is goal seeking; is trying to get to an outcome; that a lot of times the person might be complaining, they might be venting, they might be thinking out loud, they might b expressing a struggle that they’re having but they don’t actually want it fixed yet.
	That could be for a variety of reasons, the most constructive being that the person wants to solve their own problem. So they’re looking for some empathy which essentially provides them support on the path to them solving their own problem.
Q:	Let’s say I’m thinking, I’m developing empathy toward somebody else. How do I know if I’m successful or not?
A:	I don’t think it’s a black or white success, and by the way, I don’t know that you develop empathy so much as have it in a moment in time.
Q:	Okay.
A:	So – or express it in a moment of time. I have tended to always view empathy as a reaction to a situation rather than an overall behavioral pattern. I guess the qualitative measure of success is that the person that you’re engaged with when you’re expressing empathy, feels better, is able to let go of some of the stress, is able to work toward solving their own problem, connects with you, the empathy expresser in a constructive way rather than a reactive way – it’s almost certainly the case that you’re not being successful when that person shuts down or turns away or gets angrier.
	So I guess I’ve always viewed empathy as something that is a calming influence, a calming force in the context of conflict.
Q:	Alright. You seem to be passionate about empathy. Tell me about that.
A:	Say it again?
Q:	You seem to be passionate about empathy. Can you tell me about that?
A:	I think it’s a skill that a lot of entrepreneurs could learn to do better. I think it’s also – you know, it’s not a strictly gender boundary but I think men generally struggle with empathy. Both giving and receiving. I think it’s something that in a lot of situations, when you actually can step back from the particular situation, have a little bit of detachment from it, and engage in a sort of a softer interaction with the person. In a lot of ways, it could be very, very powerful.
Q:	Okay. 
	How can products empathize with humans?
A:	Well, when they become Cylons they’ll be tested. 
	I think that – I’m actually not willing to give a product in its current instantiation the ability to empathize ‘cause I think it’s a natural trap we fall into as humans, which is that we anthropomorphize things that aren’t ready to be anthropomorphized. Products often – one dimension of them, at least, or one of them – although it’s very interesting. If you think about your iPhone or your android phone, in a lot of ways that has become as close to an organ as any device. 
	You carry it around with you close to your body all day long. Often times it’s probably the first thing you touch in the morning and the last thing you touch before you go to bed. Other than your physical self, it’s probably the thing you touch the most during the course of a typical day.
	But I think we’re probably loathe to anthropomorphize our iPhones. So I think the same extends to products in general. The flip side of that is I think over the next 20 years, I’m going to refer to things as machines instead of products.
	I think the machines will become increasingly anthropomorphized even if they don’t instantiate as human-like things. And our relationships with them will continue to increase in a very constructive and human way, especially on some interesting dimensions like biological computing, all the human instrumentation stuff, etcetera. 
	As a result, I think the design of the products will start to matter a lot in the context of empathy, both directions. In other words, products will be able to relate to us better whatever our moods are, whatever we’re feeling, whatever we’re struggling with.
	There will be times where the machines help us solve our problems, and there will be times that the machines are just there, and they interact with us but they aren’t necessarily solving our problems.
Q:	Alright; perfect. These are all the questions I had for you. Anything you want to add about empathy?
A:	No; I think it’s a really fun thread. I’m glad you’re asking the questions and probing on it.
Q:	Alright, Brad; thank you so much.
A:	Okay.