Writer Dan Lyons on how bigmouths are ruining the world: ‘Social media encourages us to have an opinion on everything’

They are everywhere, always ready to explain things. They stretch out the meetings with useless chitchat. They interrupt. They ask about your weekend just so they can talk about theirs. They don’t have a question; they have a reflection. They write long threads on X (formerly Twitter). They always have an opinion, a theory, an anecdote. Science calls them compulsive talkers. You might know them as bigmouths, or perhaps mansplainers, a term that in itself reveals how this is an essentially male phenomenon. Verbal diarrhea is a disease, and it is taking on pandemic overtones.

Dan Lyons knows them perfectly well, as he was one of them. This American journalist and essayist spent years talking like there was no tomorrow. He lost a job because he didn’t know when to shut up. He lost $8 million. He almost lost his wife. During the Covid-19 pandemic, when half the world was confined in silence, he began to wonder what was the matter with him. He asked anthropologists and psychologists. He consulted scientific studies and books. He spent several months trying to understand why he couldn’t keep his mouth shut, and then he realized that it was not an individual question. “The problem is not just me. It’s not just you. The whole world needs to shut the fuck up.”

With this forceful idea Lyons begins his new book STFU: The Power of Keeping Your Mouth Shut in an Endlessly Noisy World. In it, he states that we are living in the noisiest age in history. Social networks promised to become a Greek agora, a place that encouraged dialogue; in practice, however, they are more like London’s Speakers’ Corner, a space where thousands of people spew hysterical rants that no one listens to. And the worst part is that this behavior, which was born in the digital world, has made the leap to real life.

Resorting to science, Lyons explains how the constant noise around us destroys critical thinking and erodes dialogue. He also gives advice on how to stop talking too much, starting with quitting social media, to which he himself rigorously adhered (although he had to return, to promote his book). The second was placing a Post-it note next to his computer with a concise order to follow during meetings: “Quiet, listen, wrap it up.” He talks via video call with EL PAÍS from his living room and, although the note is not there, he still shows restraint. His answers are concise; the interview lasts less than 25 minutes.

Question. How did you realize you were talking too much?

Answer. I kind of knew it for a long time, I would say things, blurt things out, and mess up my life. Over and over again. And I finally figured out that I should try to do something about it, because it caused problems with my marriage and with friendships, relationships and work.

One time I said something on Facebook that ended up costing me a job. Then, [in late 2020] I went and looked at the stock and, if I had stayed, my stock would be worth like $8 million. A mouthing off on Facebook ended up costing me $8 million bucks. And I was like, “What did I get out of that Facebook post?”

Q. You published a book about it... [Disrupted, where he denounces the ageism of his former company and of all of Silicon Valley].

A. I would rather have the $8 million.

Q. At least you know you’re not alone in being a bigmouth. You say that there has never been a noisiest age in the entire history of humanity. To what do you attribute this?

A. Social media has a big role in that. You now have the opportunity to have an opinion on everything, every time anything happens. And we’re sort of encouraged to go out and have an opinion. And I think that has pulled back into the rest of our lives so that we have too many meetings. We had just too much noise, like information overload. We have eight million channels of TV. There’s just too much stuff coming at us, and I don’t think our brains are wired to handle it.

Q. But is social media a cause or a consequence? Have we always had that need to state our opinion, or did Facebook, Instagram and Twitter create it?

A. Sort of both. We always had this urgency, but not a way to express it to a large audience. You could write a letter to the editor of a newspaper, say. But they only ran a couple. I think social media created a platform so that it made it very easy; it’s free to just start telling everybody anything you want to tell them. But the platforms themselves are programmed to program you to talk too much. They induce you to keep talking, to get worked up, to get agitated, so that you’re engaged and you start getting into arguments with people and debates. That’s oversharing online. But then you’re pulling that back into your regular life, too. That sort of agitation comes back with you.

Q. Not everyone needs to shut up equally.

A. I think [men] are guiltier than women. Aside from mansplaining, in my book I talk about two more terms. One is “manterrupting.” There is research that shows that men interrupt way more than women do.

[A George Washington University study found that men interrupted women 33% more than men. Another study, from Stanford University, compared the conversations between two men, two women and a man and a woman. There were seven interruptions in the same-sex conversations; in the conversations between men and women there were 48, 46 of them made by the man.]

The other term is “manalogues,” you know, like the guy who holds forth at some dinner or at a party and wants to tell everybody everything and goes on and on and on. Even if, historically, women have been the ones with a reputation for being talkative, which is amazing. It goes way back, to the Middle Ages or even to St. Paul. And I think that is just another way for men to control women, like, “You talk too much,” and they were, like, “We talk less than you.” “That’s still too much.” I think that’s where that stereotype comes from.

[Researchers at the University of Texas found that both women and men speak 16,000 words a day on average. The three most talkative subjects in the sample were men.]

Q. This difference is especially evident in the work environment.

A. Right, that’s where you see men interrupting the most, in meetings, and I think it’s an interesting exercise: the next time you go to a meeting, take a notebook and just take notice of every time someone interrupts, and at the end it’ll probably be that it was men doing it. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

Q. Speaking of meetings, you state in your book that the average worker attends 62 a month, and people claim that half of them are a complete waste of time.

A. I think people feel compelled in meetings to say something, otherwise they feel like they’re not carrying their weight. But I think the smartest thing to do is to sit back and listen, more than talk. Hear what everybody’s saying and then maybe say something succinct or, you know, something that adds to the conversation, not just talking for the sake of talking. There are really smart CEOs, like Tim Cook at Apple, who do that.

Q. Or Jack Dorsey, the former CEO of Twitter. In your book you use him as an example of a person who knows how to shut up and listen. Now Elon Musk — a renowned bigmouth — is at the helm of the platform. What is the lesson here?

A. Yeah, Elon Musk kind of destroys the thesis [laughs]. When I was writing the book Dorsey was in charge, and I noticed, “Dorsey doesn’t tweet that much.” The same with [Meta’s CEO Mark] Zuckerberg, you don’t see him going on about everything on Facebook, but he’s got supercomputers that force all the rest of us to do it. The people who build this stuff are often the ones who don’t get carried away with it. Musk is a unique case. So is [Donald] Trump. Musk and Trump kind of destroy my thesis that powerful people don’t talk too much, but I still believe that both of them have, and will in the future, talk their way into trouble. I think eventually they will talk too much and it will hurt them.

Q. Let’s talk about love. Talking too much not only affects us at work; it can also be dangerous in the emotional context.

A. Well, there is a balance. You don’t want to be completely silent, at least at first when you’re meeting somebody. There is a rule, the 60-40 rule, where you should talk no more than 60%, but no less than 40%. And so each person is having a conversation. But there’s also research that found that in speed dating, people who ask questions and listen are more likely to have the other person want to have a second date with them. And it’s sort of obvious, right? If you’re interested in the other person and you really listen to them, of course they’re going to want to talk to you more. And then in the case of a marriage or a long-term relationship — in my marriage, spending time together in silence, if I forced myself just to shut up, just to not have something to say about everything, it helped our relationship. There’s a great line by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Supreme Court Justice, that says that sometimes it helps to be a little deaf.

Q. But if no one speaks, what dialogue are we going to promote? Is it just a matter of quantity, or is it quality, as well?

A. I interviewed this German scientist who is at the University of Arizona [Matthias Mehl, PhD] who did this research and found that people who have meaningful conversations are happier and even healthier than other people. And I said to him, “Wait a minute, that kills my book, because you’re saying: ‘you should have more conversations.’ And he replied, ‘No, meaningful conversations, authentic conversations where you listen a lot. You don’t just talk, talk, talk.’”

Q. So it can be learned. Did you change a lot while writing this book?

A. Yes. I think I’m better now than I was before. Although I’ll tell you, I said something on a podcast when somebody was interviewing me about the book, I think I said something that made someone else pissed off at me.

Q. So what did you say?

A. I don’t want to get into it.

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