Analyzing first-name usage in interviews

Call me by my name (but sparingly, and only if you're charismatic)

Hello {{ FIRSTNAME }}, valued reader.

I recently listened to this interview with Claire Hughes-Johnson, who was COO at Stripe and wrote an excellent book about how to scale human organizations effectively.

I noticed in the interview that Claire often addressed the interviewer, Tim Ferriss, by name:

Episode Transcript, The Tim Ferriss Show

She does it gracefully and comes across as genuine, so I did not find it jarring. But it made me reflect on a long-held pet peeve of mine. When someone I don’t know well uses my name a lot in conversation, I feel like I’m being “handled.” As if the person just listened to a Blinkist summary of How to Win Friends and Influence People and is eager to use their little mind trick on me.

I have found recruiters to be among the worst offenders in this regard — “and Joe, is there a salary range you’re expecting as you’re looking for a new role?”— but I’ve noticed it in VCs, salespeople, product managers, sportcasters. Any role where influence is an important function seems vulnerable to the overuse of this tactic.

Of course, I like it when someone I admire uses my name. And it’s possible that it works to influence me subconsciously even when I don’t like it. But I usually find it grating, and I tend to use people’s names only when I’m greeting them or saying goodbye (suboptimal, I am sure).

Anyway, I was curious to see what “normal” looked like here. The Tim Ferriss podcast is a good place to look because he does long-form interviews with lots of illustrious guests, many of whom are very influential and have managed to Win a lot of Friends.

How often do podcast guests address Tim Ferriss by his name?

Helpfully, Ferriss publishes transcripts to all of his episodes here. I extracted the speakers from each episode and counted how many times they said “Tim.” This is the distribution: it seems like most guests rarely use his name, but there are some who use it quite frequently.

As it turns out, Claire Hughes Johnson does use his first name more frequently than most guests, but is still far from saying it the most often. Interestingly, Margaret Atwood uses it more (by my count, 30 times in a 2 hour interview)! And The Handmaid’s Tale is not exactly a management handbook you’d find in airport bookstore.

Both LeBron James and his trainer, Mike Mancias, use Ferriss’s first name a lot (the episode with them seems interesting but I haven’t listened yet; will report back). I wonder if they both had the same media training, or if James coached Mancias about it before going on the show.

Riveting quote here. Source

On the other end of this spectrum is Balaji Srinivasan, who goes on extremely long soliloquys about the future of money, technology, and humanity and will go thousands of words without saying “Tim” — by my count, just 8 “Tims” across 108 thousand words!

One can imagine that when these are the topics there is not a lot of room for pleasantries

In summary

Upon reflection, I guess I probably just don’t like interacting with people who strike me as disingenuous, and the first-name usage thing is something that amplifies that. Maybe I’ll start working names in a little more in the New Year, see if I can get a little more powerful.

Hbu?

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Thanks for reading, and happy holidays. If you liked this article, you might enjoy this post about public speaking or this one about specifically complimenting people you’re managing.

P.S. This article reflects my views only and has nothing to do with my employer; all the data came from Ferriss’ website.