Welcome to what happens next.
My name is Larry Bernstein.
What happens next is a podcast which covers economics,
political science, and culture.
Today's topic is the art of conversation.
Our first speaker today will be Paula Morance Cohen,
who is the Dean of the Honors College
at Drexel University.
Paula just released a new book entitled Talking Cure,
an essay on the Civilizing Power of Conversation.
I want to hear from Paula about what is critical
to a successful conversation in why we should care.
Our second speaker is Darren Schwartz,
who is our what happens next film critic.
I've asked Darren to review three of my favorite films
that deal directly with talk.
They are Woody Allen's Annie Hall,
David Mammett's Glen Gurry Glen Ross,
and Spike Jones's movie Her.
Darren is always super entertaining,
so look forward to hearing about
what makes these films so good.
Let's begin this podcast with Paula Cohen.
Good conversation has both personal and communal value.
It can enliven our lives,
and it can help us connect and better understand each other.
I derive the title of my book Talking Cure
from Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis
and pioneer of so-called talk therapy.
Freudian analysis is not a real conversation,
but it does provide some elements in common
with genuine conversation and its ability to uplift
and even heal.
Conversation is not about winning an argument.
It's not a debate.
To engage well is to be less devoted to one's point of view
than to the engagement itself.
I want to point to three factors
that can contribute to one's ability to converse well.
One is the right atmosphere and accoutrements.
Good food and drink in an inviting setting
relaxes the body in mind and opens it
to the pleasures of literal and metaphorical nourishment.
For Virginia Wolfe and her 1929 essay, A Room of One's Own,
describes the wonderful conversation
at an elite men's college.
She first describes the subchewest meal
served at the college and then continues, and I quote,
thus by degrees was lit halfway down the spine,
which is the seat of the soul, the profound subtle
and subterranean glow, which is the rich yellow flame
of rational intercourse.
No need to hurry, no need to sparkle,
no need to be anybody but oneself.
By contrast, the women's college where she goes
to dinner that night has fewer resources
and she has served a meager meal.
The result is accordingly different, she writes.
A good dinner is of great importance to good talk.
What cannot think well, love well, sleep well,
if one has not dined well.
I wholeheartedly agree with this,
though a good hamburger in a pleasant setting
will do as well as filet mignon in a luxurious one.
It's the atmosphere of leisure and well-being
that counts most along with the companion
willing to be open and engaged.
The second factor that can aid conversation
is having contact with the French,
who as a people and culture are adept at conversation.
I was fortunate in being able to spend a year in France
following college, the French had a history
of salon culture where men and women mixed together
informally.
The cafes that so generously spot French streets
have also created the cultural habit
of using leisurely observation as a food for talk.
The third point that I want to emphasize
as supportive of good conversation is the college seminar.
Nowadays we see an impoverishment
of free and joyful talk on the college campus.
This is a result of several things.
The fear of offending or being ostracized for one's views,
a career is focused that makes students and faculty feel
they shouldn't be wasting time just talking,
and a lack of practice in conversation.
Owing to the pervasiveness of social media
and the restraints that conditioned so many of us
during the COVID-19 lockdown.
Good conversation requires practice.
It also requires a tolerance for disagreement to propel it.
When everyone's afraid or unwilling to disagree,
this is certain to turn the conversation
into an exchange of platitudes,
which brings me to the college seminar
as a practice site for conversation
where students can learn to talk and listen well
before going out into the world.
Conversation would enter it into with goodwill
as one of the great pleasures of life.
A way of strengthening our sense of community
and our ability to empathize and tolerate difference.
We need to talk to each other to support personal
and societal mental health.
If we don't, we risk becoming an inarticulate,
incurious, and deeply fragmented society.
In your book, you mentioned that you discussed literature
with your French cab driver.
French students are exposed to their literary canon.
In preparation for a podcast recently on AP testing,
I reviewed the recent English literature AP test.
They asked students to write an essay on a topic
and students were encouraged to write from a list of novels.
I read only a few like great expectations,
catch 22 and 1984, but I hadn't even heard many of them.
Based on what I saw at my kids' private schools,
the American literary canon seems to be in flux.
Do you find that problematic
that my kid's generation can't make references
to the same canon when they converse?
It's something I feel strongly about.
My husband and I went to Yale
when the canon was still intact.
He and I have this education that we draw on constantly
and with our friends.
And I don't think our kids have that.
Now they do have television and movies and so forth
and they do read books,
but they don't have a coherent group of works to refer to.
But I do believe that an education should involve
a shared group of works.
I don't even care that much what they are.
I would like them to be excellent,
but of course I know that people's notions
of what is excellent may differ,
but the idea that there should be an idea of greatness
there which again has come under attack.
The French do have a very centralized educational system.
They still feel very proud
of their literary inheritance and their language.
And that gives them a certain kind of ability
to talk as I say in that book.
The cabis talk to me that's concierge.
Others, a respect for language
is what makes a civilization flourish
and what makes conversations so interesting
with people on the street.
But when you talk about solid conversation,
you want to dig deeply into ideas.
I think it is helpful to have these touchstones,
these rates to talk about who have thought deeply
about the human condition.
After reading your book,
I took your suggestion and read Virginia Wolf's
Room of One's Own.
And I read that section you quoted
that compared Oxbridge with a woman's college.
My interpretation was that Wolf was frustrated
that women were not included in the male world
more than the access to the high quality food.
I agree with you there.
And in fact, I had cut from my discussion.
You could have a good hamburger
and have a great conversation.
I think it's the relative impoverishment
of the women versus the men.
It's their subordinate status
that is reflected in the meal that she's talking about.
There is a need on the part of the women
to prove themselves, to be brilliant.
She makes the point that in the men's conversation,
there's no desire to be brilliant.
And conversation is communal and accepting
and tolerant and open.
Meals at faculty clubs are less frequent,
especially interactions with different departments.
Why has there been a social breakdown
in faculty conversations?
In the universities, there is far more of a competitiveness
and the publisher-perish idea
has taken on a more frenetic quality.
In the STEM fields, there is a sense
in which you're constantly having to get grants
and to build your laboratories and so forth.
In the humanities, the jobs are dwindling.
The Modern Language Association made a point of saying,
you can't use collegiality as a standard
for granting tenure.
If someone is uncollegial, you can't deny them tenure
because of it.
It was the recipe for the old boy network
where they would give someone tenure
because he'd fit in with the boys.
But the other side of this is that you get
very mis-entropic or difficult individuals
who have no interest in the conversation
that I associated with academic life.
I feel very lucky that conversation over lunch
that could last as long as two hours or more
was to me what made the university life so appealing.
But it has disappeared.
And the faculty clubs have either dwindled
as you say or closed entirely.
I mean, we used to have a little bar at Drexel
where the president would hang out.
This was 30 years ago.
But that closed in the early 90s
and the faculty club as well.
I know many places still have faculty clubs,
but they are not well attended.
Other things seem to academics to be far more important
than conversation, which seems like it's frivolous.
During my podcast in AP testing,
Patrick Owlet discussed the university academy's decision
to reduce the offerings of survey classes
in English and history.
I look to see if these survey courses were offered
at Penn or the University of Chicago and they were not.
But introductory survey courses were available
at Northern Illinois.
Why do you think survey courses
have been abandoned by the top tier universities?
It's nonsense.
This is one of my gripes.
We had some sort of peer review of our English department
that does have survey courses.
But peer reviewers from other schools
said, you need sexier courses.
So a survey course is not a sexy course.
I mean, really, I think it's also faculty research
interests that they need to publish
so they teach courses within their field of research, which
tend to be very esoteric, very narrow.
But the survey course is like the cannon.
Someone has to make a decision as to what constitutes proper
works for a survey course.
And that's a hard thing to do.
And it's politicized.
It should be the responsibility of the department
to sit down as a group and do it.
But they don't want to do it.
And they don't want to get into the whole fray.
When I was an undergraduate at Penn,
my management professor, Steve Salbu,
held his office hours after class at Fiesta Pizza.
And most of the class joined the festivities
for the conversation and food.
Does that happen anymore?
Well, I think it depends on the school.
We try and do that in the honors college where I am.
But it's hard because these students have such packed schedules.
I mean, we try, and some of them do come.
But often, their work takes precedence.
They feel so stressed by work.
And they feel such a fear of not getting a good job after graduation.
I mean, I'm in a school with a co-op program
where they do various six-month co-ops.
It's a five-year degree.
And they're working all the time, working or studying.
Next topic is boy versus girl talk.
When I go to a dinner party, the men and women
separate either immediately or at dessert.
I know exactly what you mean, but I can't stand it.
And I work against it.
And I stay with the men.
Six is the ideal for a dinner party,
because more than that, you splinter.
The splitting of the sexes, I mean, yes, it happens.
And maybe I shouldn't to cry as much as I do,
because there are gender differences.
There's no doubt.
But I'd rather go out with my women friends and have lunch
and talk with them.
Then if we're all together, then I want us all
to talk together, I do find that the men's conversation
tends to be more intellectual.
Maybe that's not really fair to say,
because I know so many intellectual women.
But sometimes we end up talking more about the children
and so forth.
I really don't want to do that.
I notice that female conversations
tend to be more of motive.
And the females often seek an emotional connection.
In my chats with men, the topics are less emotive.
And the discussions usually relate to sports, business,
politics, and ridiculous things that are hilarious.
Do you notice a difference in the topics of discussion
between the genders?
See, I'm a woman, and I agree with you,
in that I love talking about ideas
and being irreverent, making fun of things and people.
That's my favorite thing.
So men talking about sports is sometimes
a way of doing what women do with feelings
and gossip in the children.
So they can both be equally sort of mindless,
but also cathartic.
I do think there are women who like to talk about ideas
and be irreverent, and there are men who don't.
So I'm not sure if it's gendered, except that women
have more experience with the domestic side of life.
And they are more generally involved with the children.
So maybe they find the emotional connection
very helpful to them when they find somebody else
who's dealing with the same sorts of things.
What else do you notice that's different in the way
conversations evolve with mixed genders?
I'm very aware of things like eye contact
during a discussion, in a meeting,
and there'll be three other men, and they'll be talking.
And I feel that I don't get as much eye contact.
Now, is that because I'm wearing a dress and pearls
or that they feel a more emotional
or they feel I am too strident
or that they feel that they don't know how to talk to me.
They don't know where I'm coming from.
And so they want to be with their own kind.
They want to connect with their own kind.
I mean, I'm exaggerating a little bit,
but I do feel that something as subtle as that
is very important.
It might be because you're an alpha female.
Yes, I am. I guess I am.
You didn't get to be a dean at Drexel for nothing.
You were picked because you're a leader
and you speak effectively.
You're tough and not a pushover.
No, that I'm not.
Before you continue, can I ask you someone like me
if I were in finance, which was your world, right?
You'd crush it.
No, I think the opposite.
I think I would be crushed.
You'd do great because you're smart, clever,
opinionated, and have good leadership skills.
And finance the goal is to make money.
That means you need the best ideas and you want it now.
So it's a true meritocracy.
Pretty much.
Well, the university is somewhat different.
It seems no one even cares, but the best idea is.
No, but it's still a wonderful environment for ideas.
At least it was.
How does reading novels contribute to conversation?
I talk about literature as giving you
something rich and deep to talk about.
Within a seminar class, I find that particularly useful.
Novels have dialogue.
They model a sense of robust conversation.
People who read a lot tend to have a lot to say.
The key with dialogue in fiction is that it's musical.
You have to have a sense not only of what's worth saying,
but how to put it into the rhythm of the discourse,
of the narrative.
My husband likes to say that watching films, good films,
you learn how to use dialogue better as a writer.
What do you think of the use of dialogue in contemporary fiction?
A lot of contemporary fiction that has been acclaimed.
I'm just thinking of Jonathan Francis' books.
Sometimes the dialogue goes on and on and on,
and it's not interesting.
A lot of secondary contemporary fiction
doesn't seem to add to the drive of the plot,
and it doesn't seem to reflect the character,
but it is there as filler.
And I find that very boring and tedious.
I think in the book, in talking cure,
I take a piece of dialogue from my first novel,
Jane Austen and Boca, which is a putting pride and prejudice
in a Jewish retirement community in Boca Ratan.
And I take some dialogue and explain how that is where I first
learned how to use dialogue in a way that I think was useful.
And it's not realistic.
It's not like a real dialogue.
When you try and copy real dialogue, it doesn't work.
And I think that's the problem with a lot of contemporary fiction.
Paula, have you enjoyed being the dean?
I have enjoyed it, believe it or not.
I never wanted to be an administrator.
I always was a faculty member who taught and wrote.
And then because of a series of happenstances,
this position opened and I decided to apply for it.
And I've liked it because it involved building something,
fundraising for the Honors College at Drexel.
And managing people is an art of sorts.
And then I love students.
And I like trying to get them excited about ideas.
We got a grant that I'm proud of from the TIGLE Foundation,
which tries to develop the humanities, particularly in STEM
schools.
And we have a program of three courses
for first-year students that I think is very useful to them.
So I'm proud of what I've done.
We have a building.
We're all in one place.
The first-year residence is attached.
And it's a community.
There's more to be done.
But I think I've done all that I can do,
so I'm stepping down after next year.
I went to college at Penn and Drexel is right next door.
It's literally contiguous.
As a student, I walked through the Drexel campus
on the way to 30th Street's train station.
But I did engage with the Drexel campus.
35 years ago when I was a student,
Drexel's campus was ugly with orange brick buildings.
Today, the campus seems much more alive,
and the facilities are really attractive.
What happened?
No, you're absolutely right.
It has changed radically.
I think in many ways, it is a model university
for the 21st century.
It was when I first got there, orange brick,
just a few buildings, no place to eat.
I think it was voted the ugliest campus in America,
in US News or something like that.
When it was close to bankruptcy in the 90s,
Constantine Papadakis, who had been the Dean of Engineering
at the University of Cincinnati, was recruited to lead,
and he was an extraordinary vital personality
with this kind of self-confidence, who's Greek.
A confidence and a larger than life persona
that was unbelievable.
He totally revamped Drexel.
He made decisions by Fiat,
but he really built the university back up.
He created morale, everything, then he died.
And John Frye, who's the current president, took over.
His thing is civic engagement and building real estate,
and he developed the infrastructure of the campus.
And it is really quite attractive now.
One of the roles of management is to change direction.
Yes.
And you only have a few tools available to you.
You have your words.
You've got the budget, and you can hire and fire.
It's very limited.
It's very hard to fire people.
How do you do it?
Well, there's budgetary issues.
We're not getting the money, and we need to downsize,
so you're going to be laid off.
I mean, otherwise, you have to do a performance review
that goes on HR and all of that.
There's a lot of stuff.
But I do think that I've learned a lot
about managing people over the course of the nine
and a half years that I've been due.
And I think I was much more critical and blunt
in the beginning than I am now.
And I am much more careful to choose my battles.
There also can be toxic employees,
people who just poison the atmosphere in it.
You have to figure out a way to get rid of them,
and then things will generally fall into place.
Does tenure make managing the school more difficult?
Well, I profited by tenure.
I love having tenure.
I feel I'm a dinosaur, though.
It's probably going to wither away.
It's already much less.
I do think it's one of those rewards
why people go into university teaching.
If they get tenure, they get a lifetime job,
and summer off, and holidays, and all of that.
So it's a lifestyle thing, and it should allow people
to talk freely what they think.
And that has not necessarily been the case in recent years.
I think the university is just going
to become a different kind of place.
It's already a much more commercialized place
with a lot of turnover and so forth.
The students are much more in control.
They're the customers.
And there aren't any jobs in the humanities.
In these STEM fields that can pay them high salaries,
but they can move in and out
between the corporate world and the academic world.
There's a lot more partnerships going on,
and they have their own companies,
and their entrepreneurial and so forth.
So it's a whole different landscape.
I don't know if it's good or bad.
Can tenure professors speak their minds?
I think a lot of the censorship is self-sensorship.
People could speak up more, but they don't want to be ostracized
or they don't want to be trolled on social media.
That's the real control factor.
It doesn't matter if they have tenure or not.
They're going to be careful not to offend.
I was on the high school debate team,
and the goal was to persuade a judge
that you had the better argument.
Do you think conversations should be about persuasion?
I think it's not a viable goal.
And I'm not interested in it.
I'm not interested in persuading you of anything.
Now, I would get it sensed about things
in too much so.
My daughter's always saying I get too upset,
but I'm not really trying to persuade the other person.
I'm just trying to air what I feel, what I think.
I have an example at the end of the book
from Warren Peace, of the character of Pierre.
He's trying to find the meaning of life for himself,
but at the end, he just listens to people
because he's not trying to change their minds.
Now, I think of my friend Dave, who died a few years ago,
we fought a lot.
I mean, sometimes we wouldn't speak.
We once didn't speak for a whole year.
But now that he's dead, I hear his voice in my head.
I hear what he would think about a movie
or a political idea.
And it tempers how I think of it.
And that to me is the way in which you influence somebody else
by becoming a voice in their head.
I end each episode with a note of optimism.
What are you optimistic about?
I'm optimistic about human beings.
I really love people and I feel that people respond.
When you show respect and good will toward them
will respond in surprising ways.
And we'll give you back something that's precious.
I love these little connections
that I can make with people, the man on the street,
so to speak, someone on the supermarket,
somebody in the Verizon store, the security guard,
that I just find that having a little conversation
with somebody lifts them, lifts me,
makes me feel that the human condition is shared.
And I really appreciate that at this time of turmoil
and difficulty in our world history.
Thanks, Paula.
It's now time to switch to our second speaker,
Darren Schwartz, who is the what happens next film critic.
Darren is a leader in sales and sales management
and the ideal speaker to discuss interpersonal communications
in film.
Darren, welcome back to the show.
Thanks, Larry.
Glad to be here.
I thought we would start out first
by reflecting on some of Paula's ideas.
And then I'd like to go over three films.
I'd like to do any home.
Yeah.
Glenn Gary Gunross.
Yep.
In her.
Yep.
OK.
Paula suggested that the French were particularly good
at conversation.
Have you had any very good conversations with French people?
The most I've interacted with a French person,
I'd probably had a French restaurant.
Was that full French or was that actually real French?
Well, it was in Miramar in Hollywood.
I don't think there has been, probably.
Well, even the owner is Italian or something.
He's Italian.
Yeah.
He's out of town.
I think you're confusing steak free with French people.
You're probably right.
Yeah, I don't think I've talked a lot about it.
This is about French food.
This is about French people having good conversations.
Or it's not about conversation.
You are an excellent conversationalist.
People like to talk to you.
Yeah.
What do you think you do so well?
My strength is being able to connect with someone
based on who they are, what they're saying,
and what I think they're thinking of feeling
versus being overly wrapped into am I saying the right thing
or doing the right thing?
How do you think about conversation
as a theatrical performance?
100% echoes, like theatrical performance,
especially in business, in in sales, in presentation,
where you're not just communicating and conveying information,
communication to a large extent is theatrical.
I think there's multiple purposes of talk.
One is to convey information.
But second is to make some sort of connection
other intellectual, emotional, or otherwise.
Right.
How do you think about talk in that framework?
Words are a vehicle to connection.
And the elements of the impact of a message communication
is vital language, tone, and content.
And they've done lots of studies on this.
And the highest percent is vital language, which is 55%.
Tone is 38%.
And 7% is the content of the words, which seems kind
of like hard to believe, it's been tested multiple times,
meaning if you're delivering a message,
good vital language and good tone
will make the content much more appealing than otherwise.
Let's talk about Annie Hall.
Yes.
So Annie Hall, I think, was released like in 1977.
And I love Woody Allen movies, and that's
where we're starting out with this movie in particular.
It is a talk, talk, talk movie, right?
How is Woody Allen effectively using talk
to express his ideas?
Well, he's constantly talking.
And his mode of communication is wrapped around his emotions.
He's a nebushy, neurotic guy.
And he's constantly telling you how he feels, constantly,
in his fourth wall breaking to the audience as well,
so that people he's talking to on the screen.
So in both the first scene and last scene of the movie,
he starts with a joke.
And then he applies that joke to his relationships.
How do you think about the use of humor or even joke-telling
to make a point?
I think that if you air too far being a landership ridiculous
or even being sarcastic at someone else's expense,
it can be very damaging.
Otherwise, if it makes people feel comfortable and aligns
you with them, I think it can be wonderful.
But I think it takes skill to do that.
One of my favorite scenes is a scene with subtitles
where they're talking in a very faux intellectual way.
But the subtitles are completely different,
have nothing to do with conversation.
What did you make of that is an indication
that sometimes a conversation seems to be out one thing,
but it's really about something else?
So I thought it was well done.
And a lot of things that he did in his films,
you really had it seen a lot in other types of films.
That was one of them.
Breaking the fourth wall, also.
I don't think it was done many times before him.
The content you're saying to people is,
said, out loud on what other person is hearing.
But again, what are they feeling
and what's the person really trying to convey?
So I think it was extremely relevant.
And I think it happens way more often than we probably know.
There's a famous scene where Woody Allen and Diane
Keaton and the kitchen and lobsters are loose.
And they need to get those lobsters
in the boiling hot water.
And they're subscribing and yelling, but there's banter
between the two of them to kind of get the confidence
to pick up that lobster and throw them in the boiling water.
Later, after they break up, Alvi, the Woody Allen character,
is in a similar situation with another young attractive woman
where the lobsters are loose.
And Woody Allen breaks into that same sort of banter,
but meets a woman who's just baffled by it.
It just doesn't work.
And in that moment, Woody Allen realizes
this relationship can't work.
And what am I doing?
I need to get anyhow back.
How do you think about communication as an example
of which relationships will work or won't?
I think it depends on if it's important to you.
For me, I think communication with friends
or people in my life, it's critical you have that banter.
I just need that on a core level.
I think you do too.
Some people just don't need it.
Some people are not capable of it.
What's actually probably frustrating is some people,
and I know if you like this, who really want that,
but they're not good at it.
But first, let's do that kind of the lobsters for a second.
I don't know, anywhere you can go right now and buy a lobster.
You just go to Kroger, you just be lobster's for sale.
I don't know.
Do you know one place you can buy a live lobster
and come back and cook it?
I think that this is something you can do.
And you can also, you can order it online
from someone who made it or caught it.
You can't go pick up.
I used to go to the store, you'd pick say,
I want that one.
I don't know, any of you can go to a restaurant
and see a cage of lobsters like used in the old days.
All right, let's move to Glen Gary Glen Ross.
Yes.
Yes.
First, I want to talk about David Mammatt
and how conversation in a David Mammatt play
isn't reflective of the way people actually talk.
It's something else.
How do you think about dialogue in a Mammatt play
versus actual human talk?
I think about dialogue in general
in how it makes you feel.
So I agree that for the most part,
David Mammatt dialogue is not something
you would actually experience in the world,
but he's doing it.
It's written in a way to make you feel a certain way.
There are so many scenes in Kroger and Ross
that are like classics.
And I think my favorite scene is when Alec Baldwin
is explaining the rules of a sales competition.
First place wins a Cadillac.
Second place, steak knives.
Third place, if you're fired.
You see this watch?
This watch costs $95,000.
It's more expensive than your car.
What's this break it down?
Do people speak like that in sales conferences?
Less so now.
Do they ever?
I've been part of a lot of those.
You couldn't have the coffee because coffee's from Kroger's.
I've been part of the delivering.
Not quite that extreme,
because again, that was tore over the top.
But yeah, those things happen.
Are they effective?
This is taught to motivate them action.
All right, get them to sign an align that is done.
Let's go.
And if you don't, get out.
Yeah, when we've not leave, I don't care.
Right, I don't care.
And for there was a lot of F-bombs in all that.
But my answer is, I don't think it has ever worked.
I think it will work short-term
because people get motivated by fear.
But I don't think it really works.
And it doesn't work in the people
that you really want to motivate anyways
who are your good communicators,
in that case, your good salespeople.
It's certainly not effective or healthy.
You implied that there were a number of F-bombs
in that presentation.
And David Mehmet is known as using a lot of profanity
in his work, particularly the F-bombs.
How do you feel about the use of profanity in talk
as emphasis to people, both as both of motivation vehicle
or any other purpose?
Right.
Colorful language can be effective
when you get other people emotionally involved.
Too much is not effective.
And I think part of communicating
is, I'm observing the person I'm talking to
and my actor in terms of what they want to hear
and how they want to hear it.
I could say the same sentence 10 different ways.
I could say it loud, soft, different tone
with bottle language, without bottle language,
with swear words without swear words.
So that's really the responsibility
of the person delivering the message to figure that out.
In a work setting, you probably don't want
to throw the swear words out there.
And certainly in this day and age,
you probably are going to wind up in the HR office.
I mean, the backstory here is that Mehmet worked
a summer job in a real estate sales office
as a young person.
And he wanted to articulate his play,
how these men spoke to each other
and what motivated them.
And they used swear words.
And he wanted to lace his dialogue with swear words
so that people knew this is how men behave
in this sort of environment.
Do you think that's what's going on here
or is it more of a shock value?
Do you think that the audience would be dazzled
by excessive profanity?
I think it was a shock value.
It wasn't new to me that people talked like that.
So it wasn't, I didn't need to be shown that.
It's an audience pepper.
But a quick story on my background,
when I was 15, I worked in a telemarketing office
who was called Lakes of the North real estate property,
just like Glen Gerry Glen Ross.
Love it.
And just dialing, dialing, dialing five to 9 p.m.
Calling out of the phone books.
And all you really want to do is get out of there.
Maybe you can make a couple sales.
The job is to get someone to agree to go on a trip
to go to the land, make an appointment to go.
And I was the end of the night, a kid answered.
I said, is your mom there?
He said, mom, someone's at the telephone.
Who is it?
It's Deerin from Lakes of the North.
Who, Dan, the kid's saying, who are you?
And I hear him yelling to his mom.
His mom's saying, who is?
And eventually, he goes, tell him I'm not here.
So he goes, I'm sorry, my mom's not here.
And I'm like, so mad, I'll hang up.
And not to the kid, but out loud, I say the F.B. OK.
So, you know, about 20 minutes later, my boss calls me in.
And this guy wore cowboy hat, cowboy boots.
You know, it was back in the old days
so you can smoke.
And everyone's smoking, they're smoke everywhere.
I walk and I said, Derek, come back here for a second.
I say, yeah, go sit down.
I mean, this job, like, almost nobody
was able to convince people to say, yeah, show up on Saturday
and get on a bus and go three hours north
in northern Michigan, look at empty lands
so you can sell me on it.
No one was saying yes.
So, I mean, I was happy to click my $3.35
and I was proud to be able to watch it.
He said, did you talk to by the chance Danny Goldstein?
I go, I don't know.
It was specifically Mrs. Goldstein's eight-year-old son.
I go, I don't know.
Because did you tell him to, I said, and I was just mortified.
I was going to get fired.
And I was like, stomach goes, oh, sorry.
She called back, I talked to her, and she's on the bus, it's after.
So, sometimes you can fail, but succeed.
Fail forward.
People literally can talk differently
to the same person and have a completely different outcome.
This guy was a master.
And I was just a neophyte, I was nothing.
Can you teach sales?
I do, yeah, it's part of what I do, I think.
And what kind of lessons do you impart?
You're really focusing on the other person
to figure out, wait a second, do I have something
that works for them?
And to me, that's the big thing about sales.
If you don't have this idea, like you're like
the Glenn Green Ross people, like you're just selling
someone so they don't need.
Ultimately, if you're in sales,
you're delivering something to somebody that fits their needs.
And you have to communicate, you have to get on the same page
because walls are going to be up when you start that process.
People try to sell me stuff all the time.
Yeah.
And I don't wear sports coats.
Right.
I don't need a sports coat.
I walk into a place and I say, I'm looking for a golf shirt.
And they say, have you seen our new sports coat?
Yeah.
I'm not interested in a sports coat.
I want a golf shirt.
Why does the salesman try to sell me sports coats?
That's one where sales gets kind of a bad knock
is people selling someone, talking to them,
so that they have no interest in it.
They got to read the situation.
They got to read you.
And I think before you start selling someone something,
you have to find out what they want, what they need.
And that's when the art is in terms of conversations.
Let's make a connection so I get it.
Because you really were not going to be turned around
on the sport coat thing in that scenario.
Then don't lose the sale in the shirt.
Give the guy what he wants.
Deal Carnegie.
Yeah.
It's been a big influence on Darren Schwartz in what way?
Well, I've taken two deal Carnegie seminars.
The regular one of the advanced one.
When I was in my early 20s, trying to figure out
how to communicate to people.
You know, wanting to get good in business and better at sales
and have a career.
Being in that setting where other people
are expressing themselves and seeing
how other people communicate and you're kind
of in the safe environment is extremely beneficial.
One of the best things I learned in deal Carnegie
is got his eight golden rules, I think.
And one of the golden rules is that people would like you
more than more they talk.
It's a little counter-intuitive.
What was your favorite scene in Blankery?
Well, some of my favorite scenes
were involving Jacqueline.
Shelly, the machine, Levine.
It's fantastic.
Let me give a little background.
This is the scene where Kevin Spacey's character
who plays the sales manager has just received the latest leads
and Jacqueline is offering him a bribe to get him
and then things get heated.
Yeah, so it was like a microcosm
of his whole essentially failed sales career
when he was trying to sell Williamson,
Kevin Spacey, right?
I give him the leads.
He was probably bringing Spacey to the edge
where he was like insulting him and deriding him.
They didn't bring him back.
He said, hey, what are we talking about?
He was like trying to punch him and then like hug him
at the same time.
And it was almost masterful, you know,
even though he ultimately failed.
I also liked.
Did he use ever clothes?
I think that's the whole point.
He was close in everything, but he never got it.
I did a book club with Stuart Diamond
and the topic was getting more.
It was negotiation.
And fundamentally to negotiation, it's based on talk.
But it's trying to understand the desires and needs
of your counterpart.
Right.
And what was unusual about the scene
you describe between Shelley Veein and Williamson
was everyone in that scene was clear what they wanted.
It was a price.
In any negotiation to get to closing,
both sides have to agree.
And it's really not one person's failure.
Why did Williamson demand the $100 plus 20%?
Once he knew he didn't have a cash,
did he just think, you know, what Shelley can't perform?
What came out later in the movie
is how much Williamson dislike Shelley.
I think it's because Williamson,
himself, was a weak character, clearly.
He didn't like Shelley because he was weaker than him
and there was some level discussed.
So I think he was willing to make the deal with him.
If he had the cash right there and then,
but if he did add the cash, he was like,
I'm, you know what, I can't trust you have it or not.
What do you have?
He bucks on him with $30.
And I'm going to give you the needle
just to screw you as well.
So do you think he was playing along?
I don't think he was playing along.
I took it as he would have made the deal from loser to loser.
But if you don't have enough money to give me the money now,
I'm not going to get better back and break the rule
and get fired potentially.
So I'm also not only going to say no,
I'm going to make it feel bad what I'll do it.
What I think was surprising about
Bungering and Ross is that no one
was looking at for the company.
Nobody.
These salespeople were ruthless, right?
They were ruthless with their customers, right?
Lying.
They were ruthless with their sales manager.
They were ruthless with the firm.
They were ruthless with each other.
The knives were always out.
Why is sales fundamentally a war against everyone?
You did that thing.
I got to figure the term when you do that.
You asked a question that is such an outrageous assumption.
First of all, it is not a war.
It's a war that is not a good product
or there's not good people.
You just said it yourself.
Well, the guy who wrote the book getting more true.
Yeah, you're either on the same page or everyone's happy
or no one's happy.
Why are the knives out?
Yeah, for everyone.
The knives are up because they're selling land.
It's an impossible product to sell.
At the end of the day, it may well be that you buy the land
and you build a house.
This links the north thing that I was selling for.
I looked it up.
It's a community.
They built these houses.
They probably raised their families there as vacation homes.
It totally worked.
But you can't just advertise.
They say, hey, calls who want to buy empty land.
Bigotland.
It's like the butt of all sales jokes.
So it's a tough, tough job.
And because they're not making money on the land right now,
you probably hire salespeople with no salary.
And it's just a killer to be killed business.
And even the top sales guy, Ricky Roma,
and he was top on the board with 90,000, right?
He was about to get the El Dorado.
They showed him making the sale to Jonathan Price.
And that was art.
Wasn't that?
Yeah, that was.
It was magic.
It was magic.
It was not a soft sell.
Nope.
It was, you know, I don't know.
I don't care.
He's right now.
He's right down now.
So tell us about that essence of sales, the soft sell,
the connection, the motive, giving him his masculinity,
giving him his strength.
Yeah.
So he's not only affirming this purchase,
but he's affirming himself in his place in society,
a staff.
Yeah.
It was amazing to watch Fichino do that.
Because when you're listening to it,
you realize, what is he talking about?
I mean, he's not talking about land.
He's talking about a man thinks this,
and a man thinks that, and does he take risks?
From Paris, there's no matter you get things,
you get the who cares?
He's building the case.
Seems like hours, right?
Probably three, four doers.
There's a lot of scotch involved.
Oh, he's doers, wasn't it?
I have a feeling.
Yeah.
It was doers.
So he's cubes, too.
Ice cubes and doers.
And you could see Jonathan Price's eyes were just lighting up.
You learn later on really how much weakness he has,
and he knows he has.
You know, if you put yourself in Jonathan Price's,
see he's looking at Ricky Roma at Fichino in amazement.
That this guy is so like in charge of his world,
and he's like talking to him.
And when it comes down to the,
okay, I'm selling you land and he pulls out that brochure.
There's an eightfold, and he smooths it all over.
And he goes, look at that.
Look at that.
And it was, it was a picture of a flamingo.
It was a flamingo on a lake.
There's no holy houses.
There's no, there's no flamingo on a lake.
And it was this big reveal, and you can see like,
it took him all that time and all that mastery,
and all that Michigas to then reveal,
and I'm here to sell you something.
And there's a moment where the guy who's being sold knows
this as a salesman.
Because you can see that.
Yeah.
I'm on a sales car.
Right.
And so now, ultimately, with the Jonathan Price character,
he came back the next day.
Offs had been robbed.
And that's when Roma and Levine,
they did the quick like, hey, listen,
we got to put on a little act here.
Right.
And Roma is only gold at that moment.
Where's the lay?
Where's the lay?
Because there's a 3D writer recision
on real estate transactions.
And he figured, okay, if I can wait till Monday,
then this guy's going to come back in.
I'm going to say, we don't honor your recision.
So that tells you that that moment that Ricky Roma
also was a bad guy, right?
He was the top sales guy, but it was a bad guy.
And then you also see Jonathan Price's revealed,
how much he wanted to do.
He wanted to be the buyer,
because he wanted to prove to himself and to his wife.
But also, his wife said, go down and cancel this.
This is not a thing that you should do as a man.
So in the 1990s, I was working in a project,
and we had gotten a Salmon Brothers entity-rated trip away.
And I get a phone call from Rep,
who I worked with on this transaction.
He's literally, we're going to have to downgrade as Andy.
I go, what?
He's, yeah.
I said, all right, tell you what,
I'm going to be over with the CEO of Salmon Brothers
in an hour.
Can you get the CEO to meet with us as well?
Yeah, I think I can do that.
So I go up to the CEO's office,
and I don't really know the guy.
Okay.
And I go to a secretary, and I say, I have an emergency,
I need to see the CEO, and it's Derek Maud.
And Derek comes out, and he goes,
all right, this better be important.
I had to hang up on Warren Buffett to talk to you.
What is it?
I explained the situation, and he goes,
what do you want from me?
And I said, I organized a meeting in 15 minutes from now.
We're going together.
He goes, what do you want me to do?
I said, I need time.
I need you to send in the wheels.
Okay, that's the objective, okay?
He puts down a sports coat, we walk out.
When you get in the cab, he goes,
all right, give him as much shit as you can.
So on the cab ride over, I tell him as much as I can,
we walk in.
And I remember I asked for the meeting.
It's the CEO, it's my friend in his boss,
and Derek goes, you're meeting.
Now, I asked for me, it wasn't a meeting, right?
So the CEO, this is not his first rodeo.
This guy knows that animal self.
So the CEO gets up, and he says, you know,
wow, you know, he goes, man.
And Derek get an observant, this is a drug sentence,
and he goes, this is bullshit, okay?
We're going to destroy you.
This kind of behavior is ridiculous.
Is that what you want?
You want to war with some brothers?
Is that what you want?
He goes, well, of course not.
He goes, all right, here's what we're going to do.
And Derek offered a compromise for delay.
And CEO goes, I'll take it.
Okay?
We walk out.
He says, how did I do backstage?
I go, you were fantastic.
He goes, mischievous, now figure it out, I'm out of here.
So, later, calls me on the out, and says, what happened?
He goes, oh my god, the CEO was so mad,
he turned to my boss, basically said,
this can never happen again.
Okay, do I make myself clear?
Don't go fix it.
So, as usual, you don't get to see in business.
Yes, oftentimes, the whole scale of organizations
in a clash, where everyone has similar objectives,
where negotiations can be made to figure something out
that comes over the reasonable solution.
And we got there because we got delay.
Now, sometimes the backstage becomes the front stage.
Oh, for sure.
I caused a break in a scenario like that.
I was a group on, and one of the sales reps
had had a communication with the merchant
about a deal we were gonna run on the platform,
and there was a miscommunication,
and they wanted to talk to someone higher up,
so I got involved, and they wanted a certain percent.
We weren't willing to give it to them.
They thought we'd done something wrong, back and forth.
So, I then replied to my boss, Andrew Mason,
the sign was a founder of Groupon,
and I said, some of the effect of these guys
are being ridiculous.
This is outrageous.
I feel like they're trying to take advantage of us.
We shouldn't do this.
I got an immediate little chat box pause out
from Andrew that said, no, like N and like 17 O's,
and I'd reply to everybody on the email.
So, now, I wanna talk about your heartbeat, what happened?
200 beats per minute, or maybe zero.
I don't know, it was so horrible.
It's like, oh my.
But then, what do you do?
I think I made me communicate with Andrew real quickly,
but at that point, the only thing you do is it's honesty,
because I didn't insult the guys.
I didn't say, you know, they're awful people
and you swear words, but I got the guy on the phone,
and I said, okay, I'm sorry about that.
However, it is kind of how we feel.
I was being honest with my guy,
we're trying to work us out, mistakes,
and you're missing her in, but let's just work us out.
I'm sorry, you saw that,
but it actually led to an honest dialogue,
and we figured it out, it was no big deal.
But for those three minutes, I was about to die.
All right, I'd start about her.
Yeah, did you love it?
So I had in the theater, I liked it,
and I thought it's kind of seemed outrageous,
like, come on, are you really gonna fall in love
with your operating system like that?
I can't have it.
The opera season talked to you.
We watched it the other night.
I have to babysathe.
I should have fall asleep the truth.
Shake him, shake him, shake him a little stick, forgive me.
And I liked it much more this time.
I did too.
And I think also, it's realistic to say that this,
this is real.
It could, it's real.
This is happening.
Shad G.B.T.
Now, right?
Now.
It literally could happen.
Her is about a man,
Joaquin Phoenix, but is clearly in the future.
In LA.
In LA, who falls in love with his operating system,
with an Alexa or Siri type voice that's on his phone.
She becomes his virtual assistant,
opens his mail.
He can ask her questions.
There's clearly artificial intelligence in there.
And at some point, it kind of transitions to them
having more intimate conversations
and it's like become a relationship.
And he falls in love with his operating system.
As a little background,
he's just coming out of a divorce.
Right.
And he's vulnerable.
And he's looking for a connection.
And I think fundamentally,
why we chose this film for this discussion
is it's not about body language.
None.
And it's not really about content, I don't think.
This is about talk being the basis for relationship.
And it's effective and it's believable.
What is it about talk that is fundamental
to his successful relationship?
Well, one of the big things was tone.
And then he said a couple times,
well, why'd you say it like that?
So I think the tone and the content were huge
because they got to the point in the middle of the movie
where she was saying things in a way
that they were very loving and they were very caring.
And it's like, oh, my God,
this is literally like it could be like a real person
who's giving him emotional nourishment
in the way that she's talking.
So I think that's the key.
Fun fact.
Yeah.
Rachel Hanson was not the original voice.
Right.
They fired someone and she came in and did a voice over
after the film had already been done.
How'd she do?
She did amazing.
And what was different about this experience
is I did not know it was Scarlett Johansson
when I watched movie for the first time.
Oh, really?
I knew.
And I wish I wouldn't have known as I was watching it now
because I was trying to really keep that out of my head.
Well, you think it's unfair
because Scarlett Johansson has a body.
Scarlett Johansson definitely has a body.
So I was able to visualize, okay, she's an actual person.
I remember watching it the first time
and I could not connect it to a person.
So, you know, she giggles, she uses pauses.
She can use silence and her voice can crack if necessary.
It seemed natural, it seemed human.
Right.
But what was amazing was watching Theodore
grow with just a voice.
He had no sense of loneliness.
He was totally fine, okay?
And Theodore was friendless.
And then boom, he's got an operating system.
He's fine.
Right.
He's really made huge progress over this period of time.
Tell me about conversation of personal growth.
It gave him confidence in a sense of self
and I think that that's a relationship sorry
so you're able to see yourself through someone's eyes
and hopefully it's a good thing.
Without that mirror, without that voice,
sometimes you're just left to yourself doubt.
Compared to 2013 to now,
here is no question in my mind
that people can have a relation with their AI.
Have you used CHEP GPT yet?
I mean, not enough to me.
I used it once and I wanted to write a funny thing
about my friend, it plugged in like five lines about it.
It wrote two pages that was for the most part accurate.
It was terrifying.
Without question, it is much more realistic
and the fact that it's realistic
made the movie more enjoyable.
I agree, yeah.
A hundred years ago, maybe 150 years ago,
people said the difference between man and animals
is they'll be able to talk and communicate.
Yeah.
And with this automatic operating system,
they do talk and it's gonna speak more coherently
than some of the people who we know in this room.
Yeah.
So are we able to redefine what we mean by being human?
You could certainly argue that AI could be categorized
as an Earthling.
My dog's an Earthling.
He's an Earthling.
Yeah.
So it's a microphone.
There are so many amazing applications,
but that's not always how it goes.
You know, like 2001 Space Odyssey,
the monkey at the bone, what's the first thing you do with it?
Smash the skull, you know, then they're off and running.
So my grandfather was both a physician and a psychiatrist.
And he believed that to cure somebody,
he had to learn about their personal problems
and let them talk.
Yeah.
And then he could try to understand their medical problems.
If they come in and say, I can't sleep
and I can't eat, is it a medical problem
or is it something that's a psychiatric problem?
And Paul's book is called Talking Care.
The essence of it is, it's probably designed
to something about talk to deal with problems.
How do you think about talking with the animals,
talking with a friend to deal with your real life problems?
I totally agree with it.
And I think that talking to someone
who can give you a feedback and you're in a safe space,
is this a safe space?
There's tens of thousands of people
who will likely listen to this.
You have to be honest with the person you're talking to.
You can go see a therapist for years
and they can be working with what you're telling them
and you may not be telling them the most important stuff.
You have to be honest with yourself
and honest with the person you're talking to.
And I think the real breakthroughs come,
not with the words that you're hearing from the therapist
with what you say to yourself.
Because once you acknowledge or admit
or identify something to yourself,
and you truly buy in, then I think that, you know,
that's where world growth comes from.
David Mammoth in his book, How to Direct Film,
he says in the first chapter, Show Don't Tell.
And the irony here is that, is I'll tell.
It's all time.
I mean, oh my God.
But maybe that goes back to the dialogue,
the way that they speak is so not consistent with reality.
So maybe what he's doing is he's showing that style
instead of overtly telling you something.
Do you love banter?
Love banter.
Yeah.
You live for banter?
Absolutely.
I love banter, Larry.
And what I'm optimistic about is the ability
to interact and communicate with people that are in my life
or new people that I know.
And I think as I've gotten older,
I've become much more comfortable doing so.
And finding people like you who also love banter.
Not a lot of people do.
It's kind of a subgroup of humanity
that likes to kind of interchange.
David Mammoth, fast-talking kind of style.
So I've always loved that.
And I'm optimistic about continuing to be able to do that.
Thanks to Paul and Darren for joining us today.
If you missed last week's show, check it out.
The podcast was embracing autocracy in the Middle East.
Our speaker was Robert Kaplan,
who just released a new book entitled The Loom of Time
between Empire and Anarchy from the Mediterranean to China.
I love Robert Kaplan's work.
And I've read a dozen of his books
that delve into the politics of the developing world
in places like the Balkans, the Middle East in Asia.
Kaplan made the case for realism
as a foreign policy approach in the Greater Middle East.
And with our ongoing power struggle with the Chinese,
he doesn't expect these societies
to be liberal democracies like ours.
Instead, his hope is that these countries
can have some order without descending into Anarchy.
And I want to plug for next week's podcast
with Michael D. Smith, who is Professor of Information
Technology and Marketing at Carnegie Mellon,
and has just published a new book entitled The Abundant
University Remaking Higher Education for a Digital World.
You can find our previous episodes and transcripts
on our website, what happens next in six minutes.com.
Please subscribe to our weekly emails
and follow us on our podcast or Spotify.
If you have any comments or suggestions,
please email me, and I want to thank everyone
for joining us today.
Goodbye.