July 28, 2024 • 29 mins
"If you do the things that make you happier, you also make your community better." Richard Kyte
Richard "Rick" Kyte is Director of the D.B. Reinhard Institute for Ethics in Leadership and Endowed Professor of Ethics at Viterbo University in La Crosse, Wisconsin. He also teaches a variety of courses dealing with ethical issues in business, health care, law, politics, and the environment.
His most recent book is "Finding Your Third Place; building happier communities and making great friends along the way".
We discuss this book that helps us explore the places that nurture our souls, and make up the bedrock of our communities. I hope, after listening to our conversation, you will consider if you truly have a Third Place.
Eavesdrop on our chitty chat to discover more about: the correlation between the friends you'll have in your 60's compared to the friends you had in your 20's, your community and why you need to be part of it, how social media has taught us to laugh AT people instead of WITH people, the 13 year old who saved lives because he did not have a cell phone, and that humor is learned socially - meaning - there are younger generations who are humor deprived!
At a time when our nation is facing epic loneliness, are you ready to commit to your Third Place?
Richard "Rick" Kyte is Director of the D.B. Reinhard Institute for Ethics in Leadership and Endowed Professor of Ethics at Viterbo University in La Crosse, Wisconsin. He also teaches a variety of courses dealing with ethical issues in business, health care, law, politics, and the environment.
His most recent book is "Finding Your Third Place; building happier communities and making great friends along the way".
We discuss this book that helps us explore the places that nurture our souls, and make up the bedrock of our communities. I hope, after listening to our conversation, you will consider if you truly have a Third Place.
Eavesdrop on our chitty chat to discover more about: the correlation between the friends you'll have in your 60's compared to the friends you had in your 20's, your community and why you need to be part of it, how social media has taught us to laugh AT people instead of WITH people, the 13 year old who saved lives because he did not have a cell phone, and that humor is learned socially - meaning - there are younger generations who are humor deprived!
At a time when our nation is facing epic loneliness, are you ready to commit to your Third Place?
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Like when you share things like that on social media,
you're not talking about these problems in a way that
helps you. So we talk about this, well, it's good
to acknowledge it. Well, yeah, it's good to talk it over,
but just announcing it to the world, what ends up
is that we normalize a culture of complaint.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Stranger Connections is the embodiment of Lisa david Olsen's perspective
of we're all just friends who just simply haven't met yet.
It's an exploration of the weirdly wonderful side of life
and a look at the single commonality we have with
each other, our differences. Slip off your shoes, pour a
cup of your favorite and let's meet this week's barrel
of quirks.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
Welcome to Stranger Connections, where I celebrate wonderfully weird people
and quirky stories. I'm your curious beast and host, Lisa
david Olson, the practically world famous interactive speaker and improv ninja.
Invite me to your group. Let's get everybody energized, because
great leaders know a connected team is a productive team. Okay,
(01:03):
I have a fun guest today. This is an exciting
day for you and me because We're going to learn
a lot more about a book that I found in
my local area, but it's available anywhere books are sold.
This is called finding your third place, building happier communities
and making great friends along the way. And the part
(01:23):
that really grabbed me was thinking about we made it
through the big Pause, but we're still dealing with loneliness.
Communities are suffering from a loss of trust, low levels
of engagement, despair, and even political polarization. Well, I have
the author right here, and we're going to go through
what finding your third Place means. Please welcome Rick Kite,
(01:48):
the professor, the director, the doer of all things. Go
ahead and introduce yourself and what you do so I
get it right. Please.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
Well, I guess if I'm on this show, I must
be either a wonderfully weird person or have a quirky story.
And I'm kind of eager to find out which it is.
Speaker 3 (02:05):
Oh, I'll let you know. It could be in between.
You could be dabbling a toe in each pool. That's fine.
Speaker 1 (02:11):
Yeah, Yeah, that's what I hope. Yeah. Yeah. I've been
teaching ethics for over thirty years and also leadership, and
I helped start the Master's in servant leadership program for
Turbo about twenty years ago, and I've been teaching him
that ever since. And that is actually where I got
interested in the idea of third places, is how do
(02:33):
we help leaders make our community stronger? Because we know
all these things about how healthy communities function, how to
make them better, and we don't do hardly any of them.
Speaker 3 (02:45):
So I love that sentence because a lot of people
are going by the book and not in between the
lines of the book that really connects us as people,
as humans, as those that maybe someone has their dog
and someone is just beginning. We still need to connect.
So how do we do that asolutely?
Speaker 1 (03:05):
Yeah? Yeah, we I mean we are fundamentally social creatures.
We're not. It's not only that we aren't quite happy
enough if we're not integrated within the community, within a
network of people, and our relationships should be really meaningful
and robust. We're making a world in which it's much
(03:26):
more difficult to do that. And and when I started
looking at this, I realized that for the first time
in history, we've developed a society that the older people get,
the more disconnected they become in their communities. And it
used to be the other way. Around like that, Like
you got more settled and more rooted, and that was
the whole thing. Like you'd get kids interested in joining
(03:49):
clubs and you know, and and creating a big network,
and people would get more and more settled. So at
the time that they're like retired, for example, they've got
they know where they are, they know what their purpose
is in the community and everything else. And I talked
to so many people now who are in their sixties,
(04:09):
seventies and eighties and just feel lost, right, And that
would be one thing, But then we have people in
their twenties who are feeling the same thing, right, So
it's it's a really disturbing time. And it wasn't because
of the pandemic, right, pandemic highlighted what was going on.
(04:30):
But this change has been happening for a long time.
Speaker 3 (04:34):
And you note that, I mean you've been working on
like articles for the local paper, the Ethical Life. You
started this servant. How do you say that I always
messed that up with leadership servance leadership, thank you? And
you said you started that over twenty years ago at
Viturbo University in Lacrosse, Wisconsin. So the twenty somethings around
(04:57):
this area, it's been all about drinking and going out,
and now that it's cool to be sober, people are
going Now what do I do? You know that's something
for the younger generation for sure, and older there's less
and less places to go and things to do or
clubs to be in, or they just can't get around
as easy.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
Yeah. And you know, as a as a professor who
teaches young people, I've been seeing this shift take place
before my eyes. Where it used to be I would
notice changes generational changes over a period about ten years.
You'd see some changes in students, but they're but they
were really slight, and you would never notice changes from
(05:35):
one year to another. You'd only notice it after a
long period of time. Now I'm seeing changes every years.
It's really yeah. Yeah, And like the issues with anxiety
anxiety disorders that like exploded among young people, and so
we have all this documentation that this has happened in schools.
(05:56):
But I started noticing it really a little bit the
year before the pandemic twenty nineteen, and then after we
came back twenty twenty one, twenty twenty two, really significant,
and a lot of people said, well, that's because these
are the kids who were in school when we had
that year of disruption, and that affected them. But it's
(06:18):
not if we look at the data, what's going on.
We've got this real sharp progression that started about twenty twelve,
which tells us this is due to smartphones and social media.
Speaker 3 (06:31):
Right of course, Why am I leaving my house when
I can see what you're doing by the scroll of
my screen.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
Yeah, And it's had these two effects. One is the
opportunity costs, so like the more time you spend on
electronic devices, the less time you spend face to face.
And because we haven't, we haven't really appreciated how much
work it is, and work like the kind of work
where it takes practice for the developing brain to read
(07:01):
facial expressions, to learn how to interact, to learn like
social manners, for example, and to get a comfort level
with talking to people and talking through disagreements, especially right,
those sorts of things. So that all takes a lot
of practice. And our young people now are getting less practice.
And every generation has less practice than the one before,
(07:23):
every year has less practice. So that's one of the things.
And then the other is just like the the like
all the ways in which social interaction promotes these these
feelings of connectedness, and so we can measure, you know,
with the with you know, the release of dopamine and
serotonin and things like that we can measure and then
(07:47):
so we can see the effect on developing brains. But
we also see the loss of practice. So these two
things are happening to our young people. And the answer
is it's the same thing that older people need. Need
to spend more time in social interaction, right, because you
need practice that learning how to do it, and then
(08:07):
you need to get comfortable with it and you realize that,
oh yeah, I'm I'm a much fuller person when I
talk to other people and I interact with them, and like,
you learn humor, for example, humor has learned socially, right. Yeah,
So like, and if you don't have that interaction, I
(08:28):
find many of my young people are really humor deprived
in a way that I didn't see.
Speaker 3 (08:35):
I can't stand that thought.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
Yeah, well, well, because they know how to laugh at people,
because that's what you do on electronics, right, But laughing
with people is a is a learned skill that just
hurts me.
Speaker 3 (08:53):
You're right, you know, we've got smart phones, but they're
making us dumb.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
Yeah, we shouldn't be making our phone smarter, we should
be making our children smarter. So I read a calm
about a year ago about the child. It's the kid
who's I think he was thirteen riding on the school
bus and noticed that the driver was slumped over the
wheel and the bus was veering off the road, and
he jumped up, grabbed the steering wheel, stepped on the brake,
(09:18):
and brought the bus under control. None of the other
kids noticed what was going on because he was the
only one in the bus without a cell phone.
Speaker 3 (09:27):
Oh wow, Oh my gosh.
Speaker 1 (09:30):
So he saves there, He saves the lives of all
these kids. But he's regarded at school as the weird
kid because his parents don't let him have the phone.
But he knows how to act in the real world,
and so like, it takes things like that to kind
of shock us into an awareness of what's going on.
Speaker 3 (09:51):
Right, we have to feel things to understand them. We
can't just be told. But that and that takes me
to your saying he was where he was looking around,
and he reacted instead of looking at TikTok or whatever.
And that takes us to your newest book which is
finding your third place. So what's your way of saying,
(10:13):
Because the rest of the title is building happier communities
and making great friends along the way. So I have
an idea and I got to see part of the book.
So what is finding your third place?
Speaker 1 (10:24):
So first place is your home, second places work. Third
place is where you make friends, where you go for
social connection. And what we find is that there are
fewer third places in the world than than there's ever been,
partly because we've been designing them out of our cities.
(10:46):
Because third place is these social gathering places. They're in
a real healthy community. There's a lot of them, and
they're very easily accessible, and they're the places you don't
you don't dress up to go to third places. You
feel right at home there, and and you go there
on a regular basis, so you walk in and everybody
knows your name, so it's like cheers, right, yes. And
(11:09):
there are regulars at a third place, like Cliff and
norm like You're like that are always there and they
give the place its character and all this and this
idea was introduced by a sociologist named Ray Oldenberg in
nineteen eighty nine, and what happens is the concept kind
of remains underground for a long time, and then it
(11:29):
rises in public consciousness during the pandemic because everybody's looking
for a name for what we've lost, right, And we
had a lot of you know, like taverns and coffee
shops and things like that closing, some temporarily, some permanently.
But then if you if you go in and you
(11:50):
look at what's actually been happening. A lot of these
have been closing for a long time because it used
to be that say you're say you've moved out of
your hometown and your you're coming back Thanksgiving or Christmas
or something like that. How do you know what's going on?
How do you meet with your old friends? Well, it
used to be, yeah, you'd go to the local bar
(12:10):
or the bowling alley or something like that and you'd
find out who's there. And now you get on Facebook
or Instagram or something and you connect with people, so
you don't have to go somewhere right to interact exactly. Yeah,
So that's that's happened. And then people have become so
(12:32):
satisfied with home entertainment.
Speaker 3 (12:34):
Right, you have to go to the movie theater now, right.
Speaker 1 (12:38):
So I mean like I really like Netflix, but it's
been terrible for a community. And like I won't get
into this, I've just mentioned it. Like we find that
all these terrible things happen when people start being coming
engaged in their community, Like the quality of schools goes down,
healthcare goes down, child abuse goes up, domestic violence goes up,
(13:00):
politics gets more polarized and more negative. So all these
things that we're seeing that we complain about, and they
happen more, and we have all kinds of evidence of this.
They happen more in communities in which people aren't participating
in the community and don't know one another. If you
do the things that make you happier, like going to
bars or coffee shops or wherever people gather, you also
(13:21):
make your community better.
Speaker 3 (13:23):
And if we go there, we shouldn't just go there
to sit in our laptops or our.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
Phones, right, yeah, because actually that's not a third place.
And some people think, well, third place is wherever you go,
like every coffee shop, Well every coffee shop isn't. Like
that's right, you can tell you You walk into some and
people are talking and happy and interacting, and other ones
everybody's silent. Right, they're all plugged in. Well, that's just
a place for coffee.
Speaker 3 (13:49):
Yes. And the thing is is that during the pandemic,
if you saw someone running down the street jogging, you
actually waved back then because it's like, wow, there's another
human and now we're almost back to the regular way.
We missed so much. Then we became so ah, I
guess I'll stay home. These these pants are comfier than
my dress pants, and so it goes, and so we
(14:12):
all became that way. But something you said earlier was
just the openness people share about having more anxiety and
issues like that, and people are open about saying it.
Is that kind of a crutch It sometimes just to
because it's okay to say I have anxiety or I
have add or the things that people share. I kind
of don't know what to think about that. Sometimes sometimes
(14:33):
I don't want to know. Can't someone just say, right,
not feeling today? Do I have to know about your
all the things? I don't know? Maybe my age is showing,
but you know what's causing that?
Speaker 1 (14:47):
Well? Yeah, in part because I mean one of the
things you do with friends is you as you talk
through the things that are bothering you, right, so you
you would do that with friends. What we find out is,
but like when you share things like that on social media,
you're not you're not talking about it, about these problems
(15:10):
in a way that helps you. So that's and so
we talk about this, well, it's good to acknowledge it. Well, yeah,
it's good to talk it over, but just announcing it
to the world, that's what what ends up is that
we normalize a culture of complaint. And we don't like
(15:31):
to spend time with people who are complaining all the time.
Speaker 3 (15:34):
No, right, not at all. That's really smart. Now, yeh,
don't be the complainers. That's not fun. If you spend
time with somebody you don't leave feeling lighter, that's not joyful.
That's not where we want to go back to.
Speaker 1 (15:54):
But you know, it's one of the obligations of friendship, right.
Sometimes you know you need to be there for a
friend when they're going through something difficult, and you know
that's reciprocal. But you don't want to be with somebody
who they're always having difficulty rights that's the only thing
they have to contribute to the relationship. And when you
(16:15):
normalize a culture complaint, sometimes this is where people find
their need for attention being gratified. And that's really too
bad because it develops into a habit that's not good
for developing your network, your series of relationships. By the way,
(16:36):
could I mention something I found absolutely fascinating.
Speaker 3 (16:39):
I'd be mad if you didn't.
Speaker 4 (16:41):
You don't want to add the number the number of
close friends you have when you are sixty is very
closely correlated with the number of acquaintances you have when
you're twenty. Really yeah, because you know the good friends
that you develop, really good friends to develop over a
period of time, and you only choose to spend like
(17:04):
a lot of time and become fairly intimate sure details
about your life with a few people that you have
a really strong connection to. But it's hard to find
who are those people, So you have to meet a
lot of people when you're young for both of you
to find one another. And so those who have a like, no,
(17:24):
three or four hundred people on a first name basis
when they're in their twenties, they will usually end up
having quite a few, say ten or more close friends
when they're in their sixties. But right now we have
only twelve percent of the population say that they have
ten or more close friends.
Speaker 3 (17:45):
Do Facebook friends count because I got a couple thousand, No, no.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
That.
Speaker 3 (17:51):
Would I don't even know it they are.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
I don't even know if they count as acquaintances. I've
got people with Facebook friends. I don't even know who
they are, right.
Speaker 3 (17:58):
I know, I know we could see them in the
store and not even know that we're connected on social media.
I love that thinking, and that makes me realize when
you wrote Finding Your Third Place, When one writes a book,
one learns about themselves. You can't have one without the other.
What did writing Finding Your Third Place make you know,
(18:18):
teach you or open an awareness?
Speaker 1 (18:21):
You know? I started out writing about my parents and
why they weren't depressed about the world that they were
living in when I was born in the nineteen sixties.
That is that that's a generation that you know, they
developed the EPA, the Environmental Protectionary Protection Agency, in response
to Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring. You know, they have
(18:42):
all these really terrible things. You have nuclear all the
costs that's imminet because of Khrushchev. You have this really
devastating environmental pollution from DT and pesticides. There was this
really deep racial inequality because this is before the passing
of the Civil Rights Act. But what do they do?
They passed the Civil Rights Act, right, and they come
(19:06):
up with the EPA, and so they do all these
positive things, and I was trying to figure out, like, so,
why why did they do that? Well, I think it's
because they felt really empowered locally. That's kind of the conclusion.
I came like, they had these really robust social networks
which they could talk things over, and it gave them
(19:29):
a sense of power because they were doing things on
a local basis. That makes them think, yeah, well, we
just need to do it on a bigger basis too,
And so they they did. And that's a very different
environment than young people are in right now. And so
one of the things I wanted to dismiss the idea
when young people and I'm talking about people in their
twenties and thirties, complain about how bad things are the
(19:52):
point to things in the outside world. But it's not that,
because other generations have been through like even bigger crisis
than we have been, and they they didn't point to
the outside world. They just got together and fixed them.
I started looking at that and then and it caused
me to think more about what happened with my father,
(20:12):
because at the end of his life he was completely
isolated and and and one of my interests in really
looking into this was thinking, I share a lot of personality,
and so how do I avoid that? Well, one is
by making sure that I have a lot of social connection,
that I have friend groups, and that I participate in
(20:35):
things even when I don't really feel like it.
Speaker 3 (20:38):
That's the tough part because usually once we get somewhere,
we're okay. It's just the act of getting our shoes on,
you're going.
Speaker 1 (20:48):
Part of it is this arc, this personal journey of
learning that yeah, I'm a lot like my father. I
don't want to end up where he did. How do
I avoid that mistake? But then I came at the
end of this realization I write about it, but it
came as I was writing the book that his community
changed so much during the course of his lifetime. He
(21:10):
lost all the places where he found social connection. They
were all gone by the time he died in the
small town. And I tell kind of a in some ways,
kind of a tragic story. I had a conversation with
the editor of my little hometown newspaper, the Frasey Form,
and they asked that they could run one of my
columns because I had written about the town. And I
(21:31):
said sure, And then I asked, by the way, do
you know my dad who lived a block and a
half from the newspaper offices. They'd never heard of him,
and he'd had a business two doors down from the
Phrasey Forum offices for twenty years, you know he had.
And that's how isolated he had become. He'd like the
(21:53):
little coffee shop, the bakery that had a coffee shop
in the bakery that had closed, real sure, like all
the family had moved away, and he'd grown up in
an age where extended family stayed around. By the end
of his life, like all his kids had moved away,
one of them, you know, living three hundred miles away.
Like all these things, a change in is in his society.
(22:16):
And he didn't have the kind of personality that was
able to form social connection without there being easy ways
to do it. That's where we are today, where you know,
we have plenty of people who find it easy, Like
they just go somewhere, they show up, they join. You know,
it's not a big, not not problem. We have a
lot of people for whom it's not that easy, and
(22:36):
the loss of places then is really significant for them.
Speaker 3 (22:40):
That's one of the things. When we were writing for
Heart of Lacrosse, we were doing sketch comedy, and you
know what's funny now is we'll do improv shows using
audience ideas and people are like, what are you going
to do your next sketch show? And my husband Todd,
and I say, what's funny anymore? What do we really
to anymore? Who's going to get hurt if you make
(23:03):
a joke on this side or that side and it's
a joke, but then if you have to explain it,
it's not funny. It's exhausting. So all that has changed.
But back when we could freely write, we were at
a small breakfast place and the guys were at the
counter and it was called we called them the old guys,
and that's where the news was happening. We would eat
(23:23):
near there to listen. So I think about your dad
back in the day, that would have been what your
dad was doing. Yes, that's where the news was. You
had to pick up a newspaper, actually leave the house,
whether it was just on the front door. So all
of that is just amazing. And unfortunately the pandemic didn't
(23:43):
didn't give us more of that gratefulness as when things
were opening back up. You know, now we're still demanding
fast service even though we're we lost a generation of
workers somehow, and you know, I think grace needs to
be found again where we can just kind of go
it's it's a okay, I could just eat at home
then if I'm going to be a miner.
Speaker 1 (24:06):
Yeah, but don't need at home. Don't eat at home
every day.
Speaker 3 (24:09):
Not every day. But if you're going to be grouchy
spreading that around, yeah, but that's But the.
Speaker 1 (24:18):
Argument of the book is like, we have to do
something intentionally that our ancestors did out of necessity. They
had to interact with their neighbors in order to survive
because they were really in all kinds of ways in
daily interdependence on one another. And gradually, as technology is
(24:39):
progress in our societies become our prosperous, we don't have
to interact in the same ways with people in order
to survive, but we still need it for our happiness
and for the health of our community. So we have
to we have to now try to do something that
we don't have to do anymore.
Speaker 3 (24:56):
Wow, And you say it so easily, but it should
be screen from every speaker, every rooftop. I think that's
what we all need to know more about doing doing
things intentionally that our ancestors did out of necessity. Well said, Well,
it's Rick Kite and the book is finding your third place,
(25:16):
building happier communities. We all need to do that and
try harder. And if you forget, then give me a call.
I'll remind you. I need to ask you before I
let you go if there is a dare or a
prank story, or one of those legendary tales that you
would let me know.
Speaker 1 (25:34):
Yeah, I was you told me this coming up, and
I was trying to think of like which one, because
I could tell the story of the time I showed
up at this honorary event to you know, to give
this really big honor with a whole bunch of donors
to the university, and I had to give this talk
(25:55):
introducing this faculty member who's getting the honor, and I
showed up in a banana suit.
Speaker 3 (26:00):
And you make it sound like that accident.
Speaker 1 (26:03):
It did not meet. Yeah, I don't know how, I
just you know, I slipped up so anyway, that was
not everybody found it appealing, let's put it that way.
But I'm not but I'm not going to tell that
story because that's, yeah, that's not really a point. My
(26:27):
grandfather is a great fan of April Fool's Day, but
but he he he could never get the presentation right
and so his pranks never worked out. But he gave
me this love of April Fool's Day that I used to,
you know, enjoy tormenting my kids. And but but a
(26:47):
couple of years ago, I had a class that was
taking place on the evening of April first, and it
was just this great opportunity. So I made I made
these oatmeal cookies and I also had a recipe for
dog biscuits that were oatmeal, and I made them so
they looked just the same, and I mixed them all
(27:07):
up in the tray and then passed them out. And
it was amazing because you were having some kids were
just you know, like digging in. You know, like you're
like it's you know, seven o'clock in the evening and
you have twenty year old kids and they can really
dig the cookie. So some are just devouring them and
other ones are like taking a bite, and they're just
(27:27):
their facial facial expressions price and they'd put it out
and they would look to the person next them, like,
how are you possibly eating this? And so I thought,
I thought it was hilarious, and I started laughing, and
I got all these confused looks, and then somebody realized
it was April first. Nice, and then about half the
(27:51):
class got it. But I think there were some that
never forgave me, Like it was another like a month,
like how could I possibly be so mean as to
feed them dog biscuits?
Speaker 3 (28:04):
And if you're making homemade dog biscuits, they can't be
that bad. It's not like you're adding anything horrible horrible,
So I'm just not human consumption sugar happy fun.
Speaker 1 (28:20):
Yeah, they're pretty much male cookies without sugar exactly. They
just don't taste that good.
Speaker 3 (28:25):
It's not like you gave them laxative cookies or something
fun like that.
Speaker 1 (28:30):
Right, And I didn't put special dog ingredients, but.
Speaker 3 (28:33):
Right, see, there's a lot of ways you could have gone.
Right light kids, light not.
Speaker 1 (28:39):
If that wasn't ground up pre anda flower exactly.
Speaker 3 (28:45):
This has been fantastic. I am so honored that you
gave some time for me and all the things that
you share, because your book and your ideas are fantastic
and we only touched on a tiny crumb of all
that you share in this community. So please share your right.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
I like that, I like working in the word chrome.
That was really good. Thank you.
Speaker 3 (29:06):
I'm accidentally pony oh. So share your website with everyone, please.
Speaker 1 (29:12):
Richard Kite dot net. Hey y t E, Richard y
t E.
Speaker 3 (29:17):
We will find your books and your articles and all
that you do, and maybe a photo of you in
your banana suit eating dog biscuits. Who knows.
Speaker 1 (29:26):
You never know what you're gonna find there. Yeah, yeah,
this is well.
Speaker 3 (29:30):
Remember that we can only be strangers once, and I
invite you to stay weird.
Speaker 1 (29:35):
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (29:37):
This has been Stranger Connections with Lisa David Olson
Like when you share things like that on social media,
you're not talking about these problems in a way that
helps you. So we talk about this, well, it's good
to acknowledge it. Well, yeah, it's good to talk it over,
but just announcing it to the world, what ends up
is that we normalize a culture of complaint.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Stranger Connections is the embodiment of Lisa david Olsen's perspective
of we're all just friends who just simply haven't met yet.
It's an exploration of the weirdly wonderful side of life
and a look at the single commonality we have with
each other, our differences. Slip off your shoes, pour a
cup of your favorite and let's meet this week's barrel
of quirks.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
Welcome to Stranger Connections, where I celebrate wonderfully weird people
and quirky stories. I'm your curious beast and host, Lisa
david Olson, the practically world famous interactive speaker and improv ninja.
Invite me to your group. Let's get everybody energized, because
great leaders know a connected team is a productive team. Okay,
(01:03):
I have a fun guest today. This is an exciting
day for you and me because We're going to learn
a lot more about a book that I found in
my local area, but it's available anywhere books are sold.
This is called finding your third place, building happier communities
and making great friends along the way. And the part
(01:23):
that really grabbed me was thinking about we made it
through the big Pause, but we're still dealing with loneliness.
Communities are suffering from a loss of trust, low levels
of engagement, despair, and even political polarization. Well, I have
the author right here, and we're going to go through
what finding your third Place means. Please welcome Rick Kite,
(01:48):
the professor, the director, the doer of all things. Go
ahead and introduce yourself and what you do so I
get it right. Please.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
Well, I guess if I'm on this show, I must
be either a wonderfully weird person or have a quirky story.
And I'm kind of eager to find out which it is.
Speaker 3 (02:05):
Oh, I'll let you know. It could be in between.
You could be dabbling a toe in each pool. That's fine.
Speaker 1 (02:11):
Yeah, Yeah, that's what I hope. Yeah. Yeah. I've been
teaching ethics for over thirty years and also leadership, and
I helped start the Master's in servant leadership program for
Turbo about twenty years ago, and I've been teaching him
that ever since. And that is actually where I got
interested in the idea of third places, is how do
(02:33):
we help leaders make our community stronger? Because we know
all these things about how healthy communities function, how to
make them better, and we don't do hardly any of them.
Speaker 3 (02:45):
So I love that sentence because a lot of people
are going by the book and not in between the
lines of the book that really connects us as people,
as humans, as those that maybe someone has their dog
and someone is just beginning. We still need to connect.
So how do we do that asolutely?
Speaker 1 (03:05):
Yeah? Yeah, we I mean we are fundamentally social creatures.
We're not. It's not only that we aren't quite happy
enough if we're not integrated within the community, within a
network of people, and our relationships should be really meaningful
and robust. We're making a world in which it's much
(03:26):
more difficult to do that. And and when I started
looking at this, I realized that for the first time
in history, we've developed a society that the older people get,
the more disconnected they become in their communities. And it
used to be the other way. Around like that, Like
you got more settled and more rooted, and that was
the whole thing. Like you'd get kids interested in joining
(03:49):
clubs and you know, and and creating a big network,
and people would get more and more settled. So at
the time that they're like retired, for example, they've got
they know where they are, they know what their purpose
is in the community and everything else. And I talked
to so many people now who are in their sixties,
(04:09):
seventies and eighties and just feel lost, right, And that
would be one thing, But then we have people in
their twenties who are feeling the same thing, right, So
it's it's a really disturbing time. And it wasn't because
of the pandemic, right, pandemic highlighted what was going on.
(04:30):
But this change has been happening for a long time.
Speaker 3 (04:34):
And you note that, I mean you've been working on
like articles for the local paper, the Ethical Life. You
started this servant. How do you say that I always
messed that up with leadership servance leadership, thank you? And
you said you started that over twenty years ago at
Viturbo University in Lacrosse, Wisconsin. So the twenty somethings around
(04:57):
this area, it's been all about drinking and going out,
and now that it's cool to be sober, people are
going Now what do I do? You know that's something
for the younger generation for sure, and older there's less
and less places to go and things to do or
clubs to be in, or they just can't get around
as easy.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
Yeah. And you know, as a as a professor who
teaches young people, I've been seeing this shift take place
before my eyes. Where it used to be I would
notice changes generational changes over a period about ten years.
You'd see some changes in students, but they're but they
were really slight, and you would never notice changes from
(05:35):
one year to another. You'd only notice it after a
long period of time. Now I'm seeing changes every years.
It's really yeah. Yeah, And like the issues with anxiety
anxiety disorders that like exploded among young people, and so
we have all this documentation that this has happened in schools.
(05:56):
But I started noticing it really a little bit the
year before the pandemic twenty nineteen, and then after we
came back twenty twenty one, twenty twenty two, really significant,
and a lot of people said, well, that's because these
are the kids who were in school when we had
that year of disruption, and that affected them. But it's
(06:18):
not if we look at the data, what's going on.
We've got this real sharp progression that started about twenty twelve,
which tells us this is due to smartphones and social media.
Speaker 3 (06:31):
Right of course, Why am I leaving my house when
I can see what you're doing by the scroll of
my screen.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
Yeah, And it's had these two effects. One is the
opportunity costs, so like the more time you spend on
electronic devices, the less time you spend face to face.
And because we haven't, we haven't really appreciated how much
work it is, and work like the kind of work
where it takes practice for the developing brain to read
(07:01):
facial expressions, to learn how to interact, to learn like
social manners, for example, and to get a comfort level
with talking to people and talking through disagreements, especially right,
those sorts of things. So that all takes a lot
of practice. And our young people now are getting less practice.
And every generation has less practice than the one before,
(07:23):
every year has less practice. So that's one of the things.
And then the other is just like the the like
all the ways in which social interaction promotes these these
feelings of connectedness, and so we can measure, you know,
with the with you know, the release of dopamine and
serotonin and things like that we can measure and then
(07:47):
so we can see the effect on developing brains. But
we also see the loss of practice. So these two
things are happening to our young people. And the answer
is it's the same thing that older people need. Need
to spend more time in social interaction, right, because you
need practice that learning how to do it, and then
(08:07):
you need to get comfortable with it and you realize that,
oh yeah, I'm I'm a much fuller person when I
talk to other people and I interact with them, and like,
you learn humor, for example, humor has learned socially, right. Yeah,
So like, and if you don't have that interaction, I
(08:28):
find many of my young people are really humor deprived
in a way that I didn't see.
Speaker 3 (08:35):
I can't stand that thought.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
Yeah, well, well, because they know how to laugh at people,
because that's what you do on electronics, right, But laughing
with people is a is a learned skill that just
hurts me.
Speaker 3 (08:53):
You're right, you know, we've got smart phones, but they're
making us dumb.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
Yeah, we shouldn't be making our phone smarter, we should
be making our children smarter. So I read a calm
about a year ago about the child. It's the kid
who's I think he was thirteen riding on the school
bus and noticed that the driver was slumped over the
wheel and the bus was veering off the road, and
he jumped up, grabbed the steering wheel, stepped on the brake,
(09:18):
and brought the bus under control. None of the other
kids noticed what was going on because he was the
only one in the bus without a cell phone.
Speaker 3 (09:27):
Oh wow, Oh my gosh.
Speaker 1 (09:30):
So he saves there, He saves the lives of all
these kids. But he's regarded at school as the weird
kid because his parents don't let him have the phone.
But he knows how to act in the real world,
and so like, it takes things like that to kind
of shock us into an awareness of what's going on.
Speaker 3 (09:51):
Right, we have to feel things to understand them. We
can't just be told. But that and that takes me
to your saying he was where he was looking around,
and he reacted instead of looking at TikTok or whatever.
And that takes us to your newest book which is
finding your third place. So what's your way of saying,
(10:13):
Because the rest of the title is building happier communities
and making great friends along the way. So I have
an idea and I got to see part of the book.
So what is finding your third place?
Speaker 1 (10:24):
So first place is your home, second places work. Third
place is where you make friends, where you go for
social connection. And what we find is that there are
fewer third places in the world than than there's ever been,
partly because we've been designing them out of our cities.
(10:46):
Because third place is these social gathering places. They're in
a real healthy community. There's a lot of them, and
they're very easily accessible, and they're the places you don't
you don't dress up to go to third places. You
feel right at home there, and and you go there
on a regular basis, so you walk in and everybody
knows your name, so it's like cheers, right, yes. And
(11:09):
there are regulars at a third place, like Cliff and
norm like You're like that are always there and they
give the place its character and all this and this
idea was introduced by a sociologist named Ray Oldenberg in
nineteen eighty nine, and what happens is the concept kind
of remains underground for a long time, and then it
(11:29):
rises in public consciousness during the pandemic because everybody's looking
for a name for what we've lost, right, And we
had a lot of you know, like taverns and coffee
shops and things like that closing, some temporarily, some permanently.
But then if you if you go in and you
(11:50):
look at what's actually been happening. A lot of these
have been closing for a long time because it used
to be that say you're say you've moved out of
your hometown and your you're coming back Thanksgiving or Christmas
or something like that. How do you know what's going on?
How do you meet with your old friends? Well, it
used to be, yeah, you'd go to the local bar
(12:10):
or the bowling alley or something like that and you'd
find out who's there. And now you get on Facebook
or Instagram or something and you connect with people, so
you don't have to go somewhere right to interact exactly. Yeah,
So that's that's happened. And then people have become so
(12:32):
satisfied with home entertainment.
Speaker 3 (12:34):
Right, you have to go to the movie theater now, right.
Speaker 1 (12:38):
So I mean like I really like Netflix, but it's
been terrible for a community. And like I won't get
into this, I've just mentioned it. Like we find that
all these terrible things happen when people start being coming
engaged in their community, Like the quality of schools goes down,
healthcare goes down, child abuse goes up, domestic violence goes up,
(13:00):
politics gets more polarized and more negative. So all these
things that we're seeing that we complain about, and they
happen more, and we have all kinds of evidence of this.
They happen more in communities in which people aren't participating
in the community and don't know one another. If you
do the things that make you happier, like going to
bars or coffee shops or wherever people gather, you also
(13:21):
make your community better.
Speaker 3 (13:23):
And if we go there, we shouldn't just go there
to sit in our laptops or our.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
Phones, right, yeah, because actually that's not a third place.
And some people think, well, third place is wherever you go,
like every coffee shop, Well every coffee shop isn't. Like
that's right, you can tell you You walk into some and
people are talking and happy and interacting, and other ones
everybody's silent. Right, they're all plugged in. Well, that's just
a place for coffee.
Speaker 3 (13:49):
Yes. And the thing is is that during the pandemic,
if you saw someone running down the street jogging, you
actually waved back then because it's like, wow, there's another
human and now we're almost back to the regular way.
We missed so much. Then we became so ah, I
guess I'll stay home. These these pants are comfier than
my dress pants, and so it goes, and so we
(14:12):
all became that way. But something you said earlier was
just the openness people share about having more anxiety and
issues like that, and people are open about saying it.
Is that kind of a crutch It sometimes just to
because it's okay to say I have anxiety or I
have add or the things that people share. I kind
of don't know what to think about that. Sometimes sometimes
(14:33):
I don't want to know. Can't someone just say, right,
not feeling today? Do I have to know about your
all the things? I don't know? Maybe my age is showing,
but you know what's causing that?
Speaker 1 (14:47):
Well? Yeah, in part because I mean one of the
things you do with friends is you as you talk
through the things that are bothering you, right, so you
you would do that with friends. What we find out is,
but like when you share things like that on social media,
you're not you're not talking about it, about these problems
(15:10):
in a way that helps you. So that's and so
we talk about this, well, it's good to acknowledge it. Well, yeah,
it's good to talk it over, but just announcing it
to the world, that's what what ends up is that
we normalize a culture of complaint. And we don't like
(15:31):
to spend time with people who are complaining all the time.
Speaker 3 (15:34):
No, right, not at all. That's really smart. Now, yeh,
don't be the complainers. That's not fun. If you spend
time with somebody you don't leave feeling lighter, that's not joyful.
That's not where we want to go back to.
Speaker 1 (15:54):
But you know, it's one of the obligations of friendship, right.
Sometimes you know you need to be there for a
friend when they're going through something difficult, and you know
that's reciprocal. But you don't want to be with somebody
who they're always having difficulty rights that's the only thing
they have to contribute to the relationship. And when you
(16:15):
normalize a culture complaint, sometimes this is where people find
their need for attention being gratified. And that's really too
bad because it develops into a habit that's not good
for developing your network, your series of relationships. By the way,
(16:36):
could I mention something I found absolutely fascinating.
Speaker 3 (16:39):
I'd be mad if you didn't.
Speaker 4 (16:41):
You don't want to add the number the number of
close friends you have when you are sixty is very
closely correlated with the number of acquaintances you have when
you're twenty. Really yeah, because you know the good friends
that you develop, really good friends to develop over a
period of time, and you only choose to spend like
(17:04):
a lot of time and become fairly intimate sure details
about your life with a few people that you have
a really strong connection to. But it's hard to find
who are those people, So you have to meet a
lot of people when you're young for both of you
to find one another. And so those who have a like, no,
(17:24):
three or four hundred people on a first name basis
when they're in their twenties, they will usually end up
having quite a few, say ten or more close friends
when they're in their sixties. But right now we have
only twelve percent of the population say that they have
ten or more close friends.
Speaker 3 (17:45):
Do Facebook friends count because I got a couple thousand, No, no.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
That.
Speaker 3 (17:51):
Would I don't even know it they are.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
I don't even know if they count as acquaintances. I've
got people with Facebook friends. I don't even know who
they are, right.
Speaker 3 (17:58):
I know, I know we could see them in the
store and not even know that we're connected on social media.
I love that thinking, and that makes me realize when
you wrote Finding Your Third Place, When one writes a book,
one learns about themselves. You can't have one without the other.
What did writing Finding Your Third Place make you know,
(18:18):
teach you or open an awareness?
Speaker 1 (18:21):
You know? I started out writing about my parents and
why they weren't depressed about the world that they were
living in when I was born in the nineteen sixties.
That is that that's a generation that you know, they
developed the EPA, the Environmental Protectionary Protection Agency, in response
to Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring. You know, they have
(18:42):
all these really terrible things. You have nuclear all the
costs that's imminet because of Khrushchev. You have this really
devastating environmental pollution from DT and pesticides. There was this
really deep racial inequality because this is before the passing
of the Civil Rights Act. But what do they do?
They passed the Civil Rights Act, right, and they come
(19:06):
up with the EPA, and so they do all these
positive things, and I was trying to figure out, like, so,
why why did they do that? Well, I think it's
because they felt really empowered locally. That's kind of the conclusion.
I came like, they had these really robust social networks
which they could talk things over, and it gave them
(19:29):
a sense of power because they were doing things on
a local basis. That makes them think, yeah, well, we
just need to do it on a bigger basis too,
And so they they did. And that's a very different
environment than young people are in right now. And so
one of the things I wanted to dismiss the idea
when young people and I'm talking about people in their
twenties and thirties, complain about how bad things are the
(19:52):
point to things in the outside world. But it's not that,
because other generations have been through like even bigger crisis
than we have been, and they they didn't point to
the outside world. They just got together and fixed them.
I started looking at that and then and it caused
me to think more about what happened with my father,
(20:12):
because at the end of his life he was completely
isolated and and and one of my interests in really
looking into this was thinking, I share a lot of personality,
and so how do I avoid that? Well, one is
by making sure that I have a lot of social connection,
that I have friend groups, and that I participate in
(20:35):
things even when I don't really feel like it.
Speaker 3 (20:38):
That's the tough part because usually once we get somewhere,
we're okay. It's just the act of getting our shoes on,
you're going.
Speaker 1 (20:48):
Part of it is this arc, this personal journey of
learning that yeah, I'm a lot like my father. I
don't want to end up where he did. How do
I avoid that mistake? But then I came at the
end of this realization I write about it, but it
came as I was writing the book that his community
changed so much during the course of his lifetime. He
(21:10):
lost all the places where he found social connection. They
were all gone by the time he died in the
small town. And I tell kind of a in some ways,
kind of a tragic story. I had a conversation with
the editor of my little hometown newspaper, the Frasey Form,
and they asked that they could run one of my
columns because I had written about the town. And I
(21:31):
said sure, And then I asked, by the way, do
you know my dad who lived a block and a
half from the newspaper offices. They'd never heard of him,
and he'd had a business two doors down from the
Phrasey Forum offices for twenty years, you know he had.
And that's how isolated he had become. He'd like the
(21:53):
little coffee shop, the bakery that had a coffee shop
in the bakery that had closed, real sure, like all
the family had moved away, and he'd grown up in
an age where extended family stayed around. By the end
of his life, like all his kids had moved away,
one of them, you know, living three hundred miles away.
Like all these things, a change in is in his society.
(22:16):
And he didn't have the kind of personality that was
able to form social connection without there being easy ways
to do it. That's where we are today, where you know,
we have plenty of people who find it easy, Like
they just go somewhere, they show up, they join. You know,
it's not a big, not not problem. We have a
lot of people for whom it's not that easy, and
(22:36):
the loss of places then is really significant for them.
Speaker 3 (22:40):
That's one of the things. When we were writing for
Heart of Lacrosse, we were doing sketch comedy, and you
know what's funny now is we'll do improv shows using
audience ideas and people are like, what are you going
to do your next sketch show? And my husband Todd,
and I say, what's funny anymore? What do we really
to anymore? Who's going to get hurt if you make
(23:03):
a joke on this side or that side and it's
a joke, but then if you have to explain it,
it's not funny. It's exhausting. So all that has changed.
But back when we could freely write, we were at
a small breakfast place and the guys were at the
counter and it was called we called them the old guys,
and that's where the news was happening. We would eat
(23:23):
near there to listen. So I think about your dad
back in the day, that would have been what your
dad was doing. Yes, that's where the news was. You
had to pick up a newspaper, actually leave the house,
whether it was just on the front door. So all
of that is just amazing. And unfortunately the pandemic didn't
(23:43):
didn't give us more of that gratefulness as when things
were opening back up. You know, now we're still demanding
fast service even though we're we lost a generation of
workers somehow, and you know, I think grace needs to
be found again where we can just kind of go
it's it's a okay, I could just eat at home
then if I'm going to be a miner.
Speaker 1 (24:06):
Yeah, but don't need at home. Don't eat at home
every day.
Speaker 3 (24:09):
Not every day. But if you're going to be grouchy
spreading that around, yeah, but that's But the.
Speaker 1 (24:18):
Argument of the book is like, we have to do
something intentionally that our ancestors did out of necessity. They
had to interact with their neighbors in order to survive
because they were really in all kinds of ways in
daily interdependence on one another. And gradually, as technology is
(24:39):
progress in our societies become our prosperous, we don't have
to interact in the same ways with people in order
to survive, but we still need it for our happiness
and for the health of our community. So we have
to we have to now try to do something that
we don't have to do anymore.
Speaker 3 (24:56):
Wow, And you say it so easily, but it should
be screen from every speaker, every rooftop. I think that's
what we all need to know more about doing doing
things intentionally that our ancestors did out of necessity. Well said, Well,
it's Rick Kite and the book is finding your third place,
(25:16):
building happier communities. We all need to do that and
try harder. And if you forget, then give me a call.
I'll remind you. I need to ask you before I
let you go if there is a dare or a
prank story, or one of those legendary tales that you
would let me know.
Speaker 1 (25:34):
Yeah, I was you told me this coming up, and
I was trying to think of like which one, because
I could tell the story of the time I showed
up at this honorary event to you know, to give
this really big honor with a whole bunch of donors
to the university, and I had to give this talk
(25:55):
introducing this faculty member who's getting the honor, and I
showed up in a banana suit.
Speaker 3 (26:00):
And you make it sound like that accident.
Speaker 1 (26:03):
It did not meet. Yeah, I don't know how, I
just you know, I slipped up so anyway, that was
not everybody found it appealing, let's put it that way.
But I'm not but I'm not going to tell that
story because that's, yeah, that's not really a point. My
(26:27):
grandfather is a great fan of April Fool's Day, but
but he he he could never get the presentation right
and so his pranks never worked out. But he gave
me this love of April Fool's Day that I used to,
you know, enjoy tormenting my kids. And but but a
(26:47):
couple of years ago, I had a class that was
taking place on the evening of April first, and it
was just this great opportunity. So I made I made
these oatmeal cookies and I also had a recipe for
dog biscuits that were oatmeal, and I made them so
they looked just the same, and I mixed them all
(27:07):
up in the tray and then passed them out. And
it was amazing because you were having some kids were
just you know, like digging in. You know, like you're
like it's you know, seven o'clock in the evening and
you have twenty year old kids and they can really
dig the cookie. So some are just devouring them and
other ones are like taking a bite, and they're just
(27:27):
their facial facial expressions price and they'd put it out
and they would look to the person next them, like,
how are you possibly eating this? And so I thought,
I thought it was hilarious, and I started laughing, and
I got all these confused looks, and then somebody realized
it was April first. Nice, and then about half the
(27:51):
class got it. But I think there were some that
never forgave me, Like it was another like a month,
like how could I possibly be so mean as to
feed them dog biscuits?
Speaker 3 (28:04):
And if you're making homemade dog biscuits, they can't be
that bad. It's not like you're adding anything horrible horrible,
So I'm just not human consumption sugar happy fun.
Speaker 1 (28:20):
Yeah, they're pretty much male cookies without sugar exactly. They
just don't taste that good.
Speaker 3 (28:25):
It's not like you gave them laxative cookies or something
fun like that.
Speaker 1 (28:30):
Right, And I didn't put special dog ingredients, but.
Speaker 3 (28:33):
Right, see, there's a lot of ways you could have gone.
Right light kids, light not.
Speaker 1 (28:39):
If that wasn't ground up pre anda flower exactly.
Speaker 3 (28:45):
This has been fantastic. I am so honored that you
gave some time for me and all the things that
you share, because your book and your ideas are fantastic
and we only touched on a tiny crumb of all
that you share in this community. So please share your right.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
I like that, I like working in the word chrome.
That was really good. Thank you.
Speaker 3 (29:06):
I'm accidentally pony oh. So share your website with everyone, please.
Speaker 1 (29:12):
Richard Kite dot net. Hey y t E, Richard y
t E.
Speaker 3 (29:17):
We will find your books and your articles and all
that you do, and maybe a photo of you in
your banana suit eating dog biscuits. Who knows.
Speaker 1 (29:26):
You never know what you're gonna find there. Yeah, yeah,
this is well.
Speaker 3 (29:30):
Remember that we can only be strangers once, and I
invite you to stay weird.
Speaker 1 (29:35):
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (29:37):
This has been Stranger Connections with Lisa David Olson
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