#76 - Dr. Allan Louden: How We Can Find Humanity in One Another

Welcome to the Talk to People Podcast.

This is your host, Chris Miller.

Listen, whenever you create a podcast, oftentimes you have episodes you dream about.

And this is one of them.

This is one of the first episodes where I hopped on a plane with microphone equipment and my checked luggage to capture a conversation.

This episode features Allan Louden.

Allan is a dear friend of mine.

He is one of the best professors I know, former Director of Debate for one of the best programs in college history.

He's worked with US presidential candidates.

He has one of my favorite dogs, Glacier, who inspired us to get a dog, which you know, Sunny.

This conversation features a lot of topics I'm very interested in.

I'll give you a quick sneak peek of some of the questions we cover, such as how to avoid pessimism, what makes a good question, what it's like to retire, how to find the humanity in one another, how to get people to talk to each other more and how technology is affecting young people's conversations.

Whether this is your first time listening to the podcast or your 55th time listening to the podcast, the main thesis with every episode is either an insight or a conversation that explores the question, why is life better when we talk to people?

What is it about social connection that allows us to live a fuller experience life?

And how can we get better at it?

I hope you enjoy the conversation.

If it adds you any value, I'd love for you to subscribe and leave a rating and review for the podcast.

And without further ado, Dr.

Allan Louden.

I'll say that I've officially started recording, so you are officially live.

We're on, we're on live.

I'll record a separate intro.

But we are in Winston-Salem, sitting on a beautiful deck, overlooking the luscious green pine trees and wildlife all around us.

And we get to sit down with one of Annie and I's favorite people, which is the man, the myth, the legend, Allan Louden himself, a former roommate slash professor.

And there's so much for us to talk about, but as you know, this podcast is a lot about communication and conversation.

And those are two things where I'd say you're fairly familiar with.

We're both kind of voracious conversationalists.

We kind of sustain ourselves on it, yes.

And why do you think you are that way?

I think you're born that way.

I don't know, you probably learn it across time because it smooths your transition across life.

And it also gives you sustenance because it gives you new ideas and a way of expanding your own thinking, surprisingly.

It's somewhat creative in terms of thought.

It's not just exchanging information.

You actually produce new information.

Would you say you're better at talking to people now than you've ever been before in your life?

No.

When do you think you're your best?

When they think you're accessible.

And when you're too old or too young or too whatever, then you're not accessible.

So you have to be careful about that kind of thing.

So if I'm talking to a farmer in the pasture back home in Montana, I do not usually bring up the fact that I work at Wake Forest.

But if I talk to somebody in town, I can't wait to bring it up.

So they know, so they go, oh, and then they eat it.

Two things happen.

They engage because they think that's okay.

Or they just go quiet because they're not sure what the hell to say.

And if you say you're from Montana, they hear Miami.

So that's not necessarily a good conversation starter.

A lot of people who listen to this podcast, I did a poll and I asked them a few different things.

And one of the most requested things people want to learn how to do is how to speak with confidence.

Wow, speak with confidence.

Confidence is such an elusive thing and it comes and goes.

And you can talk yourself into being nonconfident.

If you quit thinking about what you're doing, then you're suddenly confident.

So, you know, if you just roll, it kind of works.

Confidence comes from success.

So if you have a good conversation, the next one's easier and the next one's easier.

And you could have studied a whole bunch of different stuff.

You could have been a lawyer or you could have studied economics, but you chose communication.

Yeah, I felt like I got rescued in life.

Yeah, I felt viscerally relieved to realize I didn't have to do those kind of things for a living, even though I suspect they're quite interesting.

But a lot of people aren't that way and they choose to study business or finance, but you do communication.

Because they think they're supposed to, because they have to keep up with the Joneses and that takes a certain amount of cash.

And basically, the society and all societies do brainwash people what they need to be when they grow up so they can fill the jobs to get things done.

So the kid ends up being in finance and they really want to paint.

What prompted you to study communication?

I was going to law school, okay?

So that's an admission and it was my way of keeping people at base.

What are you going to do?

Go to law school?

And I did LSATs and did well and all that kind of thing.

So that was sort of in the plan until a professor who was at a competing institution said, if you consider graduate school, I didn't know you could do that kind of thing.

I don't know how that worked.

I wasn't schooled enough to really know.

But I do remember viscerally feeling this was wonderful and that was a done deal.

So grad school started five days after finishing the BA.

Not much in between time.

No, I moved.

We had that much time.

From where to where?

Oh, from Bozeman to Missoula.

But I'm sure I had to get back up in the beautiful flathead in the interim to do something at home.

I don't know.

Who knows?

But it was a real quick turnaround and then you're in class.

So Montana to Montana State or?

Other way around.

Montana State to Montana.

Yeah.

And what's it like growing up in Montana?

Because a lot of people have never done that.

Well, most people haven't done it because there's nobody there.

It does have two congressmen now, so it's built some population.

And they're mostly refugees from real life because they want to get away.

It's sort of like the frontier still in a sense.

That's not the Montana I lived in, but that was probably the dominant Montana.

The thing I remember most, and it's not as true now, but it was really true then, was it was really kind of a city, a state of libertarians.

And so basically the mantra was, you know, don't tell me what to do and we'll be just fine.

So there was a rejection of government, as you know it, and a rejection of somebody organizing and telling you, because everybody was an independent actor, and that independence was defining almost for the state as well as the individuals.

Did you imagine yourself growing up and being there for life?

I don't know.

No, not really.

I think I knew I was getting out, but not in the sense I was escaping.

I was getting out in the sense, oh, the big world would be interesting.

So I kind of knew that that was going to happen.

But I don't think it was, you know, a lot of people leave because they're uncomfortable.

That was never the case.

We left because there was different kinds of opportunity.

And when I got to a small school and got this opportunity, I kept applying to other schools, mostly back east, probably just to see what the world would be like.

And then this one came through late at Wake Forest, and here we are.

What was it like when you heard about the opportunity at Wake Forest?

Was it a phone call back then or what?

It was a phone call and show up for an interview.

I flew out and walked onto the upper quad with these gigantic oak trees by the chapel, between the administration building and chapel, just spectacular.

And I had been on the plane for umpteen hours, because you can't get there from here or vice versa.

And the department chair walked me onto the quad, and I had not, sorry guys, but I hadn't smoked for hours.

And of course in Wyoming, that was sort of a mantra.

Everybody did.

And with their cowboy hat.

And so I asked him innocently if they allowed somebody to smoke on campus.

I was so naive.

I did not know that it was RJ.

Reynolds University.

And it was built on tobacco money.

And I did not know what a deacon was in the church at that point, which of course their mascot at Wake Forest is a demon deacon.

And all this comes about later as you become part of the culture.

You assimilate.

I remember whenever I was visiting from Oklahoma and seeing the big pine trees for the first time and driving in, and then getting into the university was this windy road through a forest.

And then all of a sudden you see one building and then another building.

You're like, what?

It's like coming down a major path with all the flowers on each side.

And it's like, when are we going to get to the school?

We're off road now, but where is this thing at?

And then you, especially one entrance is gorgeous and sufficiently dramatic, especially the first time because that road's pretty long the first time.

So what was your first impression?

You know, initially I didn't know much about Wake Forest.

What I knew about Wake Forest was they had a good soccer team and I love soccer.

I've heard that North Carolina was pretty.

Mountains, trees.

I knew it was coastal.

So you came with what it should be.

What was your actual impression?

Whenever I showed up, I was tired and I was overwhelmed.

So you kind of ducked for a few couple months just to see where you're at?

And I initially, I made, this is the only graduate school I applied to.

Which is crazy.

And the only way I was able to go here was because they said I could be a grad assistant and they'd pay the way through school.

Yeah, these are all things you did.

What was your impression?

What did you think you'd gotten yourself into?

I think I had gotten myself into something a bit over my head.

So you were a little overwhelmed in the sense of, oh my God, how's this going to work?

I was overwhelmed.

Did you have a little imposter moment?

Once I got to know the significance of the place.

Oh, okay.

Because I didn't realize.

That it really was a real place?

It was so expensive.

I didn't realize.

You know, then people started to say, like the most one percenters out of any university go to this university, or like stats like that.

And I was like, oh wow.

Then probably sitting in the first like seminar.

So you're actually being a TA, assisting in a class, and you're the teacher, and everybody in front of you is in the one percent, $800,000 ranger above of their families, right?

So how does that feel?

It felt a bit odd.

I think there definitely was insecurity.

There's some imposter syndrome?

You got over that pretty damn quick.

Well, what helped me...

You hung out in front of the building, you wore short shirts, and you were sort of hung out in the sunshine.

And I talked to people.

Yes.

And that was my ticket in was...

Or not like I didn't have a ticket in, but that was how I felt comfortable, was we were all talking.

You didn't say uncomfortable very long.

I didn't say uncomfortable very long.

I don't know that you're capable of that.

And something I recognized was that, despite maybe someone having more money, right?

You're still going to have to articulate your thought and interact with others.

Well, the difference between people with money and without money, there isn't one.

There's still people.

Yeah.

There's nice people, not nice people, and there's people full of themselves.

There's a little bit of privilege, but even that, the university sort of preaches that you should realize your own privilege.

What do you think interests you most about debate?

I think it's, well, the competition part is really important.

That's sort of undersold, but we are competitive and it's fun to play.

You get to a point where that's not how you define yourself.

When you're a young coach, you kind of define yourself by your success because you want your peers to approve of you.

But you get over that pretty quickly.

You can't sustain yourself in the activity as a coach.

You have to see it as an educational training kind of thing, and you watch people grow up in a way they don't as a normal student because they're under all kinds of pressure.

It's an interesting place to be because you're always talking to people who are smarter than you or are as smart, and they're not wallflowers.

They'll talk and they'll argue, and that produces a certain quality of mind that this isn't available in normal education.

How do you ultimately get involved in debate?

Oh, I was in an English class as a freshman in high school, and I was called upon to walk up in the front and speak.

Now, I had spoken 4-H and all these things, so I had not, wasn't exactly a novice.

And I did it, and I remember going back to my seat with my hands shaking, because I was so damn scared.

And the teacher was somebody from Wisconsin Whitewater, which had a big program in those days.

She had been a debater, and so she got us on the debate team, and just started like, well, this is more interesting in the alternatives.

And so we started traveling.

We went to tournaments, and the way we went, and we were so bad.

When we started, we didn't know it.

We were that bad.

And eventually, you catch on, and we found out we weren't stupid, and we won eventually.

Oftentimes, whenever people think about debate, they get nervous because it's conflict.

Yeah, yeah.

How do you deal with that?

Well, like all things, we just had a session at an old folks' home, a really nice one, a Salem town, which has a lot of very accomplished inmates and people who are really able to deal.

And so we've had several sessions with their starting debate team, believe it or not.

Everybody's a little scared of that because you don't want to embarrass yourself in front of others.

And so we're trying to convince them of that.

And so they asked me what my take on that was.

I said, well, it's the same thing I would tell a debater.

How do you learn that you can do that and that you don't need to be scared and that the conflict is stimulating?

The only way to do that is to do it.

So I said, you know, you sign up today at the end of this meeting, and you get in a debate.

You do it, and then it will all make sense to you.

It will come to you.

But I could talk about it till the cows come home, but until you do something, you don't own it.

Well, here's the thing about debate.

You're always dealing with somebody who's just as smart as you are, and you have to figure out why you're still right.

Well, that's kind of an interesting place to be, and you do.

You always do.

There's always another argument, another level, another way of seeing things.

Debate is creative in the sense that there's no rule of what you can and can't say or do and can't do.

So these old folks in the old folks' homes, if we can get them to actually have a debate, which I think will happen, they'll be fun to listen to because they have life experience.

They have stories.

They'll be just fun to listen to, and they will call each other out.

It'll be just fun.

Once you get them bought in and rolling, you just have to get them up there, and they don't have a way out.

And then at the end of it, they go, huh, that was cool.

Let's do it again.

Something I think you're really skillful at and that sets you apart is if you want, you can do really well in debate and make me feel like, oh man, I don't know how to answer that question or oh, that's a good point.

But you're also intellectually fairly hospitable.

Well, see, the thing about debate is you take both sides of things, which was controversial in the 1930s and before.

There were people that argued you shouldn't do that.

It's always been controversial.

It's very hard, one of the controversies within rhetoric of whether we are, before I forget what I'm going to say here, whether it's like a discussion versus debate.

So people opt for the discussion.

Let's all get together in a hot tub, do kumbaya, and we'll talk.

A roundtable discussion.

Yeah, well, everybody's protected.

And so there's no real opinion.

This is a safe place.

No real opinion gets really challenged there, gets reinforced.

Judgment-free zone.

And it's like the invention of argument as opposed to stylistic and the grand presentation.

Is it about building community?

How do you build community?

By acting like you're building community, or you build community through the conflict which builds community.

You're taking both sides.

So what happens in a debate?

Me talking to you, the reason that you just said in a way it's not threatening to you, you're surprised at that.

Well, that's because other people make sense too if you hear them.

And then debaters have to hear what the other side says or their toast because the judge is hearing both sides with some credibility.

So you start hearing the conversation as others third party or as a total conversation and not just your point of view.

And that creates a different argument set.

And it creates an acceptability of the person's opinion.

Would you say communication is common sense?

Communication works if you have the appearance of common sense with authenticity.

It's not always common sense, no.

I agree.

But that's an easy out to say, well, this person just spoke with common sense or I'm speaking as the common sense or the common man, the kind of thing which is a normal mantra in politics.

People like to hear that because they want to know that whoever's running is like they are.

It's an identity thing.

When Trump does I'm mad as hell, I'm not going to take it anymore, which is from a lovely film broadcast, One Academy Award, and that line in there, and that's kind of how he acts.

And there's a lot of people that feel that way.

So they identify with that.

They identify with somebody who will say go to hell.

And his inauguration was so unique because typically people really lean into optimism, especially at the beginning of your presidency.

But he talked all about the rusted out and the dark, and this is all for the forgotten ones.

Most effective political speech other than Hitler and people like that, and even he was sorted that way, is kind of an optimistic mold.

Almost always the optimism trumps the dark.

But in this instance, that hasn't been the case.

And it was optimistic for a certain group of people, the people who did feel like they were getting stunted on.

But I remember they were losing their identity to a changing culture that didn't value them.

Well, that will tick you off.

I had just made a video over Obama's farewell address.

And he says, he talks about, like he does his farewell like 11 days before the inauguration.

And he talks about before the inauguration or before Trump's.

Yeah.

And he talks about the forgotten ones.

And then Trump talked about the forgotten ones too.

And I was like, huh, I wonder if they intentionally put that in there because of that, or if they had already written it.

I don't know.

I don't know the turnaround for some of those things.

How is that possible?

Well, they are writing them right up to the time, making notes, side notes and things right up to the instance.

Because most of them have some stump speeches or some things that they hit on a lot.

Those are more corporate in the sense there are many authors for something like an inaugural speech.

But they try to write it in the voice of the candidate and what they want to say.

Having said that, it tends to be shared by many.

So they bring out a lot of things, many of which might be stump speech level in terms of content and stuff, because they want to reinforce that.

But the candidate pretty much controls that speech, unlike some.

You don't have the feeling that Trump controls anything in his State of the Union speeches.

They were like somebody else wrote them.

And they were better in a technical sense and in a linguistic sense and use of language and memorable lines and things.

But they weren't as visceral.

They weren't Trump and they had zero lasting effect.

Annie has a question.

Hi, Annie, long time listener, first time caller.

I think that you could do a whole separate series on his, I actually think a podcast on the history of debate would be really interesting, like an oral history provided by him.

Because he's currently writing all about the history of debate.

Yes, and has written.

Yes, yes, that could be a really cool episode or miniseries.

I think that Al, I'll call him Dr.

Louden on the pod.

Dr.

Louden has such an impressive, if you look at all the work that he's done in his career, I mean, we're not even scratching the surface.

Big body of work.

Yes, which is all very important.

I think, and you kind of touched on this in the beginning, Chris, when you were asking about how he came to study communication and all that.

But I can't think of someone else that does relationships like Al, because his house is like Grand Central Station.

People are always here visiting and talking.

And I think that says a lot about the way that he maintains his relationships and the way that he communicates day to day and how he takes time to invest in the people around him.

And so I think that people could learn a few...

Like one question I had in my mind that popped in was, what do you think, communication-wise, is something that you think people are struggling with the most right now that could maybe help just the way that we...

Improve life.

Improve life by relationships.

I'll pass the mic.

I want to go back to the notion of why communication versus other things, because I didn't really go that smart-ass answer about being asked by a professor and then being relieved.

Your question of what makes communication difficult now, well, the obvious answer is we don't talk to each other.

And we don't talk to each other because of technology.

We communicate technically more than we ever did, but we don't talk to each other.

When you talk to somebody, they become reasonable.

And you start seeing things from their point of view as well.

And almost everybody, including the awful people, when you talk to them, makes sense.

So I think one of the things that would work in communication is if we would not be as polarized, and that's overstated all the time, too.

It's not overstated, but it's kind of used as an excuse.

We're so polarized, we don't talk to each other.

Because we're all so mad as hell, we're not going to talk to the stupid people.

So when you do talk to the stupid people, they're not stupid.

If you realize that everybody is worthy of your conversation, then the whole world becomes available.

And in that sense, I think if we just talked more, there's a lot of initiatives, particularly on campuses now, to have people talk more, and they feel stilted to me and pre-organized by somebody, and they never feel authentic.

It's when you're at the fire pit on campus and you're talking to somebody, you get going on, oh, I've been to Greece, too, or whatever, and away you go, and you never know where that goes.

That's when you find their humanity, which you share.

And once you see them as human and not as the enemy, but as worthy adversaries even, but as worthy, then they become talkable.

You talk to those people you think you have access to, and you think who will accept you.

So part of the equation is how do you get people to realize you're safe, or how do you acknowledge...

When I talk to somebody, I'm in an agreement a lot, and that usually encourages them.

I've met a few which are intractable, and so that's a difficult one, but there are not very many people like that.

And most people, conversations, people absolutely love to talk about themselves.

So the way to make a conversation work always is to ask them about themselves and let them go, and they will think you're the best conversationalist in the world, even if you're quiet the entire time.

So I'm going too long here, but the notion of why communication versus being a lawyer, because lawyers view the world as this kind of contractual.

So they're concerned with the rule, rule following, and what the rules are and how you keep everybody in line, and the rule of law is to keep things organized, and that's their job.

Well, when that's your lens, then people can become the enemy, because they're breaking the rules or they're doing something, or you're claiming they're not when they do, you know, as a side draw in the law.

But that's crazy.

So you got the psychologists, and people do what they do because of their brain and how it's organized and that kind of thing.

And you got the sociologists, and they say people do what they do because of who they hang with.

And you got the economists, say that people total things up on a win-loss ledger, and then they go with that, which wins for them the most.

And it's really an economic balancing, accounting kind of worldview of how the world works.

And how you think the world works has something to do with your discipline or your occupation.

And that tells you what's correct behavior.

Now, having said all that, why communication?

Well, first of all, all the others are communication.

Secondly, communication, for me, is the construction of meaning.

It is the symbolic construction in which we live.

And how could anything be more important than that, of studying how we understand our lives?

That's how I think communication.

That's why it was always attractive.

I think a lot of people, I was talking to somebody about this today, how communication as a major, communication studies, research, I get so bothered when people talk about communication collectively, as a soft skill, because it is the foundation of everything that you're doing, no matter if you're a lawyer or a doctor or somebody working at a grocery store, you have to know how to communicate effectively.

You use the term soft skill, which means it's kind of secondary.

So all these other professions study important things that do matter.

It's not like it doesn't matter who you hang with or where your brain is organized or any of that, it all matters.

If you exercise like health and sports science, therefore you can think, you know, all of it matters.

But it's a secondary thing when you call it a soft skill.

And they look at all the consequences and the process without communication being part of the equation.

It's something that happens on the side.

It's something natural that goes on because you have to talk.

And it's not the focus of what's making things happen.

So they don't look at how the symbolic containers control our thinking and that kind of thing.

They look at the containers.

And in that sense, that's kind of when you say it gets sidestepped or pushed away as less important because what we're doing is more important there.

But we don't see it as central.

We see it as periphery that's really not examined.

Now that's changed a lot in academia.

There's all kinds of communication specialists now in almost every field who talk about what their stuff means in terms of creating meaning, if you will.

But that's taken a while.

And I think that's happening in academia.

I don't think that's happening in society.

And you mentioned how those programs that are trying to foster connection or conversation seem pre-stilted or pre-planned or forced.

Oh, I hate those things.

Yes, we are.

We have like four or five going on at Wake Forest.

Called a conversation, right?

Yes.

And they're mostly out of the president's provost's office, so we're going to all get together.

I can't help but think we're all in the 1970s, stoked up in a hot tub somewhere in Northern California because we're all happy and are communal friends.

I don't know that that's the world in which most of us live.

So I just find it inauthentic.

And what do you do to go like...

It's like speed dating.

You go talk to them for a while, but that's not a marriage.

It's like you have to have real friends who you really talk to, and you need variety there because variety adds so much meaning to life.

I want to know from Al, what makes a good friend?

I'm very curious about this because I think there are commonalities, but at the same time, the nuances, to you, what makes a good friend?

Well, I don't want to step in that one because you've actually studied friendship with one of the leading people now at Harvard doing it.

And I don't know there, but I guess my first response is, it depends on what stage of life you're in and what makes a good friend changes.

You have to be able to acquire friends, but you have to be able to let them go too because you can't hold the entire world as it was.

So what makes a good friend is that there is a non-judgmental, the loyalty, the fact they're there.

We sort of do it in a commerce sense, like, oh, if I need some help, who's going to actually be there?

I can tell who my real friends are.

And I don't buy that entirely because some people have more time than others and they have more ability or they have all kinds of reasons they can act on your behalf.

But a friend is the person that you are happy to see when they walk up and you know that they are, they're forgiving about you as you are with them.

That's what makes a good friend.

How do you think we get people to talk to each other more?

Oh, Lord.

You know, it was done with organizations and churches before bowling alone, right?

I don't know.

I'm kind of scared of it.

I think people are growing up in a world in which that is really, the really lovely parts of conversation and stuff have been lost.

I mean, people make the observation that the young people don't know how to talk anymore.

And that's not, it's unfair, obviously, because they talk all the time and they talk to each other like crazy like they always have.

They're just not talking about the same things.

They never were.

So in that sense, it's not different.

But I do think our estrangement technologically and our availability constantly and our lack of privacy and sort of the uniqueness of each friendship has been eroded by the tech.

And I think that's a done deal.

I don't know, I don't see that turning around.

So we may in fact create different kinds of humans in that regard.

Will that be less human?

I think so, since being human is communal and being human is talking and having relationships and a support group and the family and all the various things that matter.

We don't give it up entirely, but I think those pools have shrunk with the churches that go away and all kinds of different organizational sets in which we, the bowling league, in which we talk to other people and we have to encounter people who aren't our norm.

That's lessened.

There's less of that, I think.

Me too.

I do think people compensate.

Part of what's going on with these social movements right now is building a sense of community because there's an identity there which they get to define and they're hanging out with people and talking with them for three or four days before the police show up.

I think of the Four Square Church and the support of those organizations which are kind of family-like by definition, right?

But they also tell people how to think because everything's alike.

So I think people find ways, compensatory ways of having a social fulfillment and identity.

But because of how the world's not organized, they're less integrated.

They're more independent.

I've thought that too.

I ask about communication being common sense because historically, whenever I'd tell people I'd study communication, they'd be like, well, we communicate all the time already.

We all are experts.

Yeah, I'm already doing that.

In my work, I'm already doing that.

People all think that they're experts in communication and in one sense, they're right.

They get by.

Because they've done it for so long.

They've done it for so long, and that's how they think it works, so they don't ever question anything.

And that's not a bad thing.

You can't go through life questioning every damn thing.

But yeah, it's a really tough one to have people become reflective on because they already know how it works.

And everything in their experience says, it works, and so I do know it's validated by self-experience.

And then when you start thinking about it being common sense, one big reason why is because like you said, we do it so much and we talk all the time.

But I do think we are being a bit more distracted because there's more distractions.

And I think we're spending less time actually talking to one another.

And if it is supposed to be intuitive and it is supposed to be common sense, but it's not as because it's not as common.

Yeah, it's like everything else.

You practice it, you get better.

And you find out the tricks that work, and you find out what keeps people talking, and you find out what makes an interesting conversation.

You learn those things again by doing.

You could talk about what those things are.

My last interpersonal class is, the last class I taught at the university, I was supposed to think on rotation teach about presidential rhetoric.

And I went to the people that make those decisions and says, I'm not teaching anything on the books.

I'm going to teach a, we gave it a fancy name for like a seminar of some sort.

So I had about 45 kids in a room, in an auditorium, and I sat there.

You got to mold their minds however you'd like.

I sat there on the stage, and we talked about the ideas.

And only lectured like one or two days, and those were a disaster because they felt like lectures.

And this thing just popped.

And the athletes and all the groups who are kind of silenced or silenced or self-silenced or all the things that go on there got into it.

So you got the famous quarterback everybody in the country knows who went to Notre Dame, I don't know how to name him.

He was in there among others.

This thing rolled, and it was so much fun.

And they made comments at the end of it.

I mean, every day was just interesting.

And I would kind of do the thing we're doing now, right?

Challenge people a little bit, and they kind of get a kick out of that if you don't embarrass them too bad.

And then your friends get a real kick out of it if you do.

So it was really, really fun.

One kid at the end of that, they wrote little comments on their own.

They decided to write comments and hand them to me on the way out.

Did a little standing ovation.

It was quite moving.

And one kid walked up and he says, This is my tenth communication class.

And this is the first one when I understood what that meant.

And I was, I still remember that comment.

And that really stuck with me.

You've been a teacher for 45 years, right?

45, awake.

And then I did a whole stint before this, but yeah.

So let's say 50 years.

Yeah, 50 years.

So more than 52 or something like that.

How did you change how you spoke to students?

Well, you get better.

Initially, you kind of think you're one of them.

And so you want approval.

And so you kind of do things to make yourself make so they'll like you and you act like you like them, which you kind of do.

And that works at a certain age group.

And then you become kind of an administrator of knowledge and stuff and facts and theories.

And you give them all the kind of things that you learned in graduate school because that's what matters.

And you finally get integrative later.

You start integrating more, the more you know.

And these things are related to each other.

They're not independent little subjects.

And then you start talking to the world that way.

And they can identify with that because that makes sense to real people.

So when I was chair and things, I watched professors.

And my standard statement then was that the longer people teach, the better they get.

And I think there's a lot to that.

Now, there are a lot of...

The example we always use is a person who gets tenure and disappears and they're worthless, right?

They're doing their old yellow notes kind of thing.

And those people do exist, but they are really a tiny minority.

And even they get better.

And they don't have to get better alike.

They don't have to all become integrative or be able to give the class experiential learning or the kind of things that actually stick with people.

They could just be lecturers.

There are many models that work.

And different models work with different kids.

So in that sense, I think kids tend to end up shopping for certain styles of professors.

And I don't think that's a bad thing.

They say you take the...

You don't take the course, you take the professor.

Totally take the professor.

You go to a course and you get exposed to a different point of view of how the world works.

Exactly.

And the content is relatively unimportant.

What do you think future of academia with college getting more expensive?

Oh, we're basically resegregating on means.

And we're making it more available to higher end clientele, even as we work to not have that happen.

It's still on balance moving that direction.

But it always does in society for everything, really.

And then you get a corrective.

Or you find some other alternative where these people can excel.

So they go to Central Oklahoma, for example, and then they move up and they're perfectly happy.

Many people communicate.

Yes.

But not many connect.

Everybody connects somewhere somehow, even if it's with somebody you can't imagine why they want to talk to them because they need them.

We need a certain amount.

We just have to.

So you see the two street people hanging on each other, going down the street, taking care of each other.

Almost everybody connects somewhere.

We don't connect in the broad and the quantitative sense that we probably did before.

In conversation, how can people get better at connecting?

Value with whom you're talking with and talk.

And then come to understand what makes a conversation work.

And that's real simple stuff like asking the other person about themselves and then shutting up.

Like knowing when to be silent in a conversation is also a skill.

I would, in the interpersonal class we got, they wanted us to evaluate, did anybody learn anything?

Because everything is about evaluation, right?

And if you got a number that exists.

So I would do the humans of New York thing on a humans of Wake Forest.

And I would send them out to get a picture and ask a quote and write a one page thing of their response or what the person said and what an idea about it.

And everybody came back on the first one.

They were quite happy with their assignment because Wake kids will do good assignments.

But they all went and interviewed themselves.

You could look at the pictures.

They were like themselves.

They all went and talked to people who were them.

And of course, they were delighted because how wonderful the person was.

Well, I'll be damned.

So we did it at the end of class without prompt and said go out and basically, I guess a prompt because of the class was go out and find somebody who's not you, who's different and find out why they're interesting.

And the second set comes back at the end of class and it's an entirely different set of who people talk to.

And it has to do with who you think is available or worthy.

And that worked.

I mean, I got good numbers for my little evaluation of crap.

You got a good score.

Humans of Wake Forest is awesome.

That was my one thought of how to do this, because I don't know how you evaluate most things.

Most things that matter can't be evaluated in that obvious way.

What do you think is a key to a good question?

Like, how do you ask better questions?

You actually, oh, that's a really good question.

You ask things that you shouldn't.

If you ask something about their lives, I remember one time flying somewhere to the Middle East, I think, for a thing we did.

And my seatmate was an arms dealer, the merchant of death.

So his job was to sell arms around the world.

And so we sat there and we started the conversation.

My first question to him was, well, how is it to be characterized as the merchant of death?

And he did it up like a flag, like a Christmas tree.

People like talking about what's interesting in their lives and the pressures they're under and stuff.

They love talking about that.

So don't avoid it because you're thinking you're offending them.

Ask them and let them just shut up.

They'll go.

So you ask what you shouldn't talk about to some degree, not every question.

That would be ridiculous.

The rest of time is built on showing commonality, right?

And showing that you're the same person as they are kind of nonsense.

And that's good too.

But basically you ask the question that's actually interesting, that's in your head that you think you shouldn't ask.

How's that?

That's awesome.

I wonder about that a lot because I think questions are so good.

Well, you're good at it.

And you tend to do that a little bit.

And I think I want to get better, so I'm always...

Well, I would think in interviews that's exactly what you would do because as soon as you sort of attack the assumption or the underlying, then they have to think about the stuff that actually matters in their lives about what they do.

And they'll light up.

They almost always will rise to the occasion.

And then it gets interesting.

That's the kind of thing they talk to their spouse and their coworkers and the people they're bitching about what they do with because it's their daily matter.

It matters to them.

If you can let people talk about what matters to them, then you learn stuff because your life isn't theirs.

How do you avoid pessimism?

Oh, man.

How do you avoid pessimism?

You have to be around people who are not pessimistic, so you're always off a sink.

But that's hard to do because it doesn't take too many pessimists to bring a group down.

So you put yourself in a situation in which your pessimism is out of step.

Then you eventually learn.

But I think it's possible.

I'm kind of a geneticist in a sense.

It's possible that pessimism and optimism and things may be born.

You're born with some of that.

It's not learned.

It's honed.

It's refined.

It's stomped out.

But it's not learned, per se, I think.

Some people just are optimistic, and some people just enjoy being pessimistic.

Once you realize that some people enjoy being unhappy, that they're really happy when they're unhappy, there are people like that.

We know them.

And that's okay, because that fulfills them.

Then that makes them all accessible and okay, too.

And then when somebody is okay and acceptable, you talk to them different, and that opens things up.

So that's part of the conversational secret, is just accepting them as they are and not trying to change them, and then the change happens.

You recently retired.

Yeah.

How's life different?

I thought it would be markedly different.

It's not particularly.

The thing I enjoy the most about it is not grading papers, because I don't know what that means.

Never did.

When people will say grading papers was the worst?

Oh, everybody hates it, because you're evaluating without, you can impose standards, but they become arbitrary and nonsensical.

And they change.

And the people do that with, you know, they say, this paper has to have these ten things.

If it does, you get an A.

Well, that creates ten lame papers, if that's how many kids you got, because they can all do the ten things.

They just don't, there's no creativity or something where you go, wow, you see the world differently, you know, or introduces.

So grading is tricky.

I don't miss that.

I thought, and I still think this is true, that in retirement you got to redefine and then you got to, how do you maintain a social outlet that's not just going out and seeking people who are like you?

Now, most of the time, that is what happens, but you got to maintain a social outlet of some sort.

And I thought people coming by and friends and all that stuff would dry up, and it hasn't, and it's been two years.

Well, that's pretty good, pretty good.

And it probably will hold for a while, but it ain't going to hold forever because people have lives and they move on, and they should.

So, but at that point, you get old enough, you're kind of okay if they don't show up maybe.

The fact that since it hasn't happened in your head, you're like, well, I'm pretty sure it will happen.

Well, that's what I expected, but it hasn't happened at all.

It's been stayed terribly busy and lots of people coming by.

How have you grown to understand like the human experience and the human condition?

Well, of course, that's such a tiny question.

What are humans like and what does it mean?

Other than that, I can probably answer in two words or something.

I think that most people are human and most people are similar in the fundamental ways, and most people, almost all people are good, and that's enough to sustain it.

And if you were to win $100 million tomorrow, what do you think you'd do with it?

Oh, I would probably add this room right where we're sitting now, first of all, and I would probably add a little more space so I'd have some walls to hang things on, and I probably wouldn't change a damn thing.

I don't mean that in a, why would I change anything that's all good?

Because that isn't what I really mean.

I do think we settle into patterns that are of comfort, and they fulfill us enough in the ways we need fulfilled.

So if you start messing with that, it depends what age you would be.

You would obviously go get your villa in Spain or something if you were your age, if you had $100 million, plus your place here in Colorado or whatever, but you wouldn't, and that would make sense.

I'd buy that house right there behind you.

Yeah, and fix it, get some water in it.

But that would, well, you could come here and you could build a house, a nice one that I could visit when invited.

So, I don't know, I think most people think they're going to change their lives a lot, and they don't.

And they don't for good reason because they've organized it in a way that works for them.

That's what I really think.

So no, I wouldn't try, I would try, I wouldn't do this, so I'm not going to change anything.

I'm still going to go to work and that kind of thing like people do.

I would take some advantage, I would, mind you, but I become even greater.

You know, I'd be in bed with Amazon constantly, but you know what I mean.

So anyway, I think that we think we want to change things, and we really don't.

That's what I think.

What's a parting message you'd like to?

Oh, that's almost as bad as what's the future and what's life meaning mean.

And it's the kind of question that is typical for this kind of thing, right?

Especially at the end.

My parting thought is that people have to learn to trust their own judgment, as opposed to what everybody tells them they should do.

Everybody will tell you what to do.

That's really easy.

And at some point, you got to decide what you think you should do, and that's what you should do.

This has been fun.

Annie and I are obviously big fans and grateful for you.

We've had many talks on this deck, and it's awesome to capture one of them.

All right.

Well, folks, as always, we will see you next time.