- In this video, I'm gonna show you
how Howard Stern, the
Sirius XM radio celebrity
and multimillionaire, king of all media,
completely transformed his life,
by letting go of the brutal honesty
that characterized him
in his early career,
and embracing a more
tactful and diplomatic way
of communicating with people.
If you can master these same techniques,
you can transform your own relationships
to one where you're calloused and brutal
and alienating the people around you,
and where you have trouble
connecting with people
to one where you can build strong,
intimate friendships and relationships.
Hi, everybody.
I'm Bruce Lambert, from
howcommunicationworks.com,
a channel where I teach
you communication skills
so you can improve your relationships,
succeed at work and build
your own confidence.
Let's get started.
Howard Stern, some of you
may not know who he is.
I was talking to a younger friend of mine,
and he didn't know who Howard Stern was.
People my age know that Howard Stern
is what you used to call
the king of all media.
He was the first radio shock jock.
He became famous by
saying shocking things.
His whole strategy for celebrity
was brutal honesty all the time,
and this worked tremendously well for him.
He became very popular and very wealthy,
but as we'll see in this video,
it wasn't a great long term strategy,
so those of you who may not
know who Howard Stern was,
I'm gonna show you a clip or two.
He just did an interview
with David Letterman,
on Letterman's new show on Netflix,
and he revealed some
really interesting things
about his personal life,
and that's what we're
gonna get into today.
So in this first clip,
I wanna illustrate for you
the sorts of things he
used to do on the radio,
so you know what I mean about his style
if you're not familiar with him.
So in this case, there was
a terrible plane crash,
back in the 1980s, where a
plane took off in Washington
and crashed into a bridge
over the Potomac River
and many people died.
It was tragic, and he
made a joke about it,
and so in this first clip,
we'll see him talk about the joke he made.
- You had called, an airline crashed
into a bridge in the Potomac.
- Right.
- And you called the airline and said,
I just wondered, how much is a ticket
from Dulles to the bridge?
- Yeah.
(audience laughing)
I said, is that a one way ticket?
- A one way ticket, yeah.
- Yeah.
- That joke gets a big laugh,
and even I have to say,
it's kind of funny,
but it's brutal and it's funny,
and if you've ever known anyone
who's died in a plane crash, as I have,
you realize, in some
ways, how heartless it is,
and he made this joke right
when the plane crash happened.
We're not talking about 40 years later,
or 35 years later to make
a joke, it can be funny,
but on the day that it happened,
you really have to have a lot of nerve
to make a joke like that, and he did,
and that's what he was like,
and he believed that this honesty
was the key to his success.
Let's watch a clip of him
talking about honesty.
Here it is.
- I think the reason I was successful
was that I was always
honest with the audience.
- Honesty, then, he thinks
is the key to his success,
and this comes back to
one of the main themes
we've been talking about on this channel
for a long time, and that is the tension
between being completely honest
or maybe being completely authentic,
saying exactly what's on our mind,
and the competing demand to care
about other people's feelings,
and to be considerate, to be tactful,
to be diplomatic, to be kind, et cetera,
and in the beginning,
Howard Stern just thought
it was really best
to have no filter, and in this next clip,
he talks about the decision
that he made to have no filter.
Let's watch it.
- Well, when I went to Washington, D.C.,
I decided I was not gonna lose anymore.
I had to do whatever it is,
and my epiphany, if you wanna call it that
was I had to loosen up a bit,
that whatever came into my
mind, I would talk about,
and it would be pure id, total honesty,
and I had a lot of rage, and
I was gonna let that rage out.
- That's what your quote is,
you were just gonna let
your head crack open.
- [Stern] Yeah.
- And your unadulterated
id would spill out.
- In that clip, Howard Stern says
he's gonna crack open his
head and just let pure id out.
So maybe you don't know
exactly what id is.
Id is a Freudian term.
It comes from Sigmund
Freud's theory of the mind,
and he said there were
three parts of the mind:
the id, the ego and the superego.
I'm not gonna go into all that in detail,
except to say that the id
refers to the part of our mind
that contains the basic,
instinctual drives,
especially for sex and aggression,
without any filter, without being governed
by the ego or the superego,
which would be a conscience
or logic or reason
or tact or anything like that,
so pure id means pure,
unfiltered expression
of sex and aggression,
and if you know about Howard Stern's show
in the 80s, especially,
that's what it was about,
sex and aggression,
and he thought that was a great idea,
but in this next clip,
he talks about though it made him famous
and successful as a radio host,
it had lots of other
negative consequences,
so let's hear him begin to talk
about the negative consequences
of this unfiltered,
pure id way of being.
- Which is great radio,
but really damaging to your personal life.
It can wreak havoc.
You don't have a life.
You become a madman.
- You don't have a life.
You become a madman.
It wreaks havoc with your personal life.
So this is Howard Stern,
who, make no mistake,
became rich and famous
by having this unfiltered
strategy on the radio,
but now upon reflection,
as an older, wiser man,
having paid the price
for that unfiltered way of communicating,
he now says, it made me a madman.
It was no way to live.
So here we begin to see the costs
of communicating in an unfiltered way.
Maybe in certain narrow
domains of our life,
it could make us successful,
but it ruins the rest of our life,
because it prevents us from
developing friendships,
intimate bonds and
relationships with other people
because we have no
regard for other people.
This unfiltered honesty is just a way
of having no regard or
consideration for other people,
for their feelings, their thoughts,
and for the consequences.
And here in this next clip,
he continues along that
same line of thought,
about what the consequences were
of communicating in this way.
Let's have a look at this next clip.
- You know, I didn't
really have this ability
to think about others.
I didn't have a way of
functioning in the real world.
I knew how to function on the radio.
That's what I was good at.
- He says he didn't have the
ability to think about others
or to function in the real world.
These are pretty dramatic consequences.
The inability to think about others,
what is he saying there?
He said he had no empathy.
This is what I've been
trying to get across.
There are these two poles.
On the one end, brutal honesty,
on the other end, empathy,
and I've been encouraging
people, move towards empathy,
move towards the light,
and this is what Howard Stern was saying.
When he was operating
in this mode of pure id,
unfiltered honesty, he
said, he had no ability
to understand the
perspective of other people.
He was without empathy, a madman,
and as he goes on, he talks
about what this ultimately did
to his relationships, and
about the need to apologize
to all the people that he hurt,
so let's watch this next clip,
where he talks about
the need to apologize.
- I've apologized to a lot of people.
And I'll tell you why.
I think I did a lot of growing up,
and I do attribute this to psychotherapy.
Again, I was just a
young man full of rage,
and I was angry.
I was angry with you, that
you were on television,
that you had an audience.
There was no rhyme or reason to it.
I could not love anyone,
I couldn't respect anyone,
I just thought this was who I was.
- I've never seen Howard
Stern be this vulnerable.
I really was taken aback
when I heard him say,
I could not love anyone, I
could not respect anyone.
I just thought this is how I was.
That's a really, really sad
state of affairs to be in,
and it's a very empty way of
existing as a human being,
and it is a direct result of
failing to take into account
the needs, beliefs,
preferences, attitudes,
feelings of other people,
and if you are like this,
you will not be able to
connect with other people,
and it's in those
connections with other people
that all of the greatest part
of life eventually emerge,
the friendships and love relationships
and family relationships
and work relationships
that give meaning and purpose to our life,
and he's reflecting
now, with great regret,
on having communicated in this other way,
which did so much damage.
And he finally begins to talk about,
and he talks about the
benefit of psychotherapies,
and I think for many of us,
psychotherapy can help us
get over these obstacles
and these flaws in our
ways of communicating.
We can work with people who can help us
learn to communicate in new ways
that we may have learned
from our families,
or early in life, very
destructive ways of communicating,
and in this next clip, Howard
talks about what he learned
from his mother about how to communicate
when he was a child.
Let's take a look.
- Words had no meaning to me.
Words didn't hurt.
Of course they hurt me, if
somebody says something bad,
but as far as I was concerned,
oh, everything is joke.
- [Letterman] Yeah.
- Words don't mean anything.
In fact, my mother used to
say to me when I was young,
words don't mean anything,
and I took her at her word.
It was like, so when I would
talk about your ratings,
or talk about your relationship,
or anything like that,
I assumed he doesn't care.
- Mm-hmm.
- But it did hurt, and it did hurt you,
and you know, I was like,
why am I hurting this guy
I love so much, and admire?
- Words have no meaning.
So I think this is a common belief
for people who can be
brutally honest like this.
They might think, especially
if they're joking or teasing.
A lot of people really tease a lot,
and think, well, you shouldn't be hurt,
'cause I'm only teasing.
You should know that I'm teasing,
and because I'm teasing,
this shouldn't hurt you,
because my intentions aren't to hurt you.
You shouldn't be hurt.
And this is the way that
Howard Stern thought
for a long time, and he says
he learned from his mother,
words have no meaning,
and we learn, as children,
you know, sticks and
stones may break my bones,
but names will never hurt me.
But that's just wrong.
Anyone who's ever been
called names or mocked
or teased knows it actually does hurt us.
Now we can develop a thick skin,
so that they hurt us less,
but in fact, language can
hurt us very powerfully,
when people who we care about
say terrible things about us,
and this is a painful lesson,
and he talks, in the end, about,
he asks himself why was I doing this?
To Dave Letterman, in particular, he says,
I loved you, you were my friend.
Why did I do this?
And it's really painful.
Those of us who sometimes communicate
in this unfiltered way and sadly,
I have to count myself among them.
I have, at times in my
life, been impulsive,
and said things that really hurt people,
and have lived to regret it,
and have had to apologize.
You know, I may portray myself
as a communication expert
on this channel, but I
have made all the mistakes
that I'm talking about
other people correcting.
When we communicate in this
way, this brutally honest way
without regard to other people's feelings,
we hurt the people that we love,
and sometimes, in irreparable ways..
We sometimes damage relationships in ways
that we can't repair them.
Other times, we just cause tremendous harm
and suffering to people that
we care about, and that we love
and we have to spend an
enormous amount of time
and effort repairing those relationships,
if they can be fixed.
So in the end, I thought
it was just beautiful
to hear Howard Stern tell this story
of how he evolved from this pure id,
unfiltered, brutal honesty,
this approach which made him
famous and very, very wealthy
to after psychotherapy,
being able to have regard
for other people's feelings,
apologizing to all the
people that he hurt,
realizing that words do have meaning,
and words have the power
to hurt us very badly,
and then modifying his
behavior accordingly.
I think he does a very generous thing
by sharing this vulnerable
aspect of his life experience
with us so that we might
learn the same lesson
without having to pay as
high a price as he paid.
So that's all I have about Howard Stern.
I hope you enjoyed that clip.
You can go and find the show on Netflix,
and watch the entire interview.
It's really funny and
entertaining and touching.
I could only pick a few short clips here
to talk about these principles of honesty
and compassion and empathy.
If you like this kind of video,
I'd be really grateful if you'd consider
giving us a like over here,
and maybe even consider
subscribing to our channel,
if you find this to be
useful or entertaining
or edifying in any way,
and go on over to
howcommunicationworks.com,
which is our website and contains a blog,
often as written versions
of the material from these videos.
It has 30 or more articles
about various different
communication topics.
Also on howcommunicationworks.com,
on the front page, you
can find a coaching offer,
where I offer to give
you one on one coaching
about communication skills
issues in your life,
and there's a brief application form.
We can set up a phone call
to see whether one on one coaching
between you and me might be helpful
and mutually beneficial
for the both of us.
So if that's something that interests you,
go on over to the website.
I'd love to hear from you in the comments.
Tell me what you thought of Howard Stern,
whether you were a fan of Howard Stern's,
what you think of his transformation.
Go on down to the comments,
and leave me a note
to let me know that you're watching.
Thanks so much for watching.
We'll talk to you next time.
