Ideas - #5: What makes a great conversation?

Episode Date: August 22, 2025

You might think the subject makes a great conversation, but according to Massey lecturer Ian Williams, it's more than that. It's full of layers and you never really know where it’ll end up — how it will change you by the time it ends. Williams explores the art of good conversation in the final episode of his Massey Lectures. *The 2024 CBC Massey Lectures originally aired in November.  

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Certain conditions apply. This is a CBC podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. You don't always know which conversations will change you. You think a friendship is indestructible. Suddenly, it's crumbling with every word you speak. Or you think you know what you mean to someone else. then the conversation shifts

and you discover a whole other world swimming beneath your feet strange, tender and full of things you still don't know how to say but if you try it could change everything these conversations are rare they're sublime

they're terrifying but they're a beacon in our era which is full of bad conversations. Conversations that are stagnant, stiff, rehearsed, or at worst, hateful. In his fifth and final CBC Massey lecture, Ian Williams goes in search of truly good conversations, conversations that can coax us out of our little fortresses of solitude

and make us brave enough to try something new. Ian Williams is the author of seven books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. His first novel, Reproduction, won the Giller Prize in 2019, and he teaches creative writing at the University of Toronto. His Massey Lectures are called What I Mean to Say, Remaking Conversation in Our Time. They were recorded on a cross-Canada tour with stops in Sydney, Ecaluate, Saskatoon, Victoria, and Toronto. In a talk about conversations, there are, of course, examples of conversations. In each city, two other readers joined Ian on stage.

So throughout this lecture, you'll hear interjections and snippets of dialogue read by me, and by longtime CBC journalist and Carlton Journalism Professor Adrian Harewood. Today on Ideas from Kerner Hall in Toronto, here's the fifth and final lecture, Ian Williams, with good conversations. All right, good night, everyone. It's good to see you. So maybe a bit of a warning about tonight. I'm a poet, and I tend to speak elusively,

so there'll be gaps. I do this as a way of getting at things a little bit more deeply. And it's because I trust you as readers and as listeners to think alongside me, okay? So I'm really going to trust you to think alongside me as I sort of deliver this lecture. Are we good? All right.

Lecture 5. Good conversations. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, All conversation is a magnetic experiment. For most of my life, I've lived alone. This means that spontaneous conversations don't flare up the way they do when you're driving your kid to their friend's house and end up talking about septum rings.

Conversations for people who live alone, regardless of relationship status, must be actively initiated by some party, usually through technology. Armchair scientists that I am, I resolved to keep a log of my first conversation of the day, then I would scan the data to see what patterns emerged. My first conversation of the day with a human

was with a gym employee. It was early in the new year. I got to the university gym right when it opened at 7 a.m. So I could have my pick of the machines and not have to bench in someone else's sweat. Following my chiropractor's recommendation, I did three sets of squats,

three sets of bench, then I looked around, and I couldn't find the equipment for the last exercise. So I went up to the employee and asked, Hey, is there a lat machine somewhere? You mean for lap pull-downs or rows? Lat pull-downs. Yeah.

He pointed to the intimidating section of the gym where guys wore contraptions on their waist, wrists, and ankles. The lat machine was in use. I wasn't going to wait around for the guy using it to finish and then adjust the weight down while snickering internally. So I asked, What's in the room behind this one? Mostly free weights.

And upstairs, is there a lap machine in the upper gym? For lap pull-downs? I'm pretty sure, yeah. Yeah, by the rowing machines. Okay, thank you. That was it. I didn't talk to anyone else at the gym until my squash partner arrived,

and he told me about a project he was working on. It was a book about banned books, the history of the Catholic Church censoring books, more than books, every form of human expression, he said. This conversation had potential. I asked, When was this? Dark Ages? No, no.

We're looking at early 1600s until 1960-something. It sounds like something from 300 years before the Renaissance, at least. Well, it's really the printing press. That's what made all the censorship necessary. From a content level for a nerd like me, it was terrifically exciting. My squash partner would devote chapters to Ulysses and the Handmaid's Tale, another to Oscar Wilde and the perceived corrupting influences on sexual. He told me about book bands and a local school board's decision to purge all books published

before 2008. We panted through the conversation between games and gulps of water, suppressed pleasant emotions, and whacked the ball against the wall while thinking about what the other said. Despite its unusual spaced out rhythm, the squash conversation seemed important because the subject was important. We often transfer the subject matter to their conversation itself. Is it possible to have a silly conversation about something serious? Of course, but you'd notice the incongruity. I felt satisfied because we were both interested in the topic, even though it was his topic as much as a topic can be owned. I was curious about it for its own sake. The squash conversation was also satisfying because I could find

parallels between my partner's expressed thoughts and my suppressed thoughts. Every once in a while, I could punctuate or turn the conversation by saying, that reminds me of X, or I was working on something about Y. Together, we built ideas. At around 8.30 in the morning, we hit pause on the conversation to go sit in front of our screens in silence. We'd continue it in a week. Reality check. I was not my squash partner's first conversation. He had connected with his family through good morning and hurry up in the shower

and do you want oatmeal or cereal and it's too cold for that coat. While the substance of such conversations may not be memorable or interesting, oh, to wake up with voices around you asking about your dreams. Necessary allusions. What makes a good conversation?

My mother would say, Getting my point across. One of my grad students would say, Feeling listened to. My most touchy-feely friend would say, preserving or improving a relationship, a sense that we got closer. I can't say for sure.

I didn't ask any of them. But I reckon that no one would include being a good listener. At best, they might frame the role of listening as something more active. I feel satisfied when I'm helpful, when I can comfort someone well. Enough speculation. After a bit of warm-up, I asked someone in a hotel lounge. What makes you feel satisfied in a conversation? The man had removed his shoes and was wearing thick wool socks. He said, reciprocity, genuine interest in whatever the other is saying. After a good conversation, you come away with some energy.

And I almost asked, do you play squash? A good conversation is built on curiosity and attention. This means lending all of her senses to people. Here's a little plug. If you want to improve these two capacities, read poetry. Every detail matters. Every switchback at the end of a line resensitizes your attention. The language and world of poetry is strange enough to make you ask questions.

The question is the clearest sign of curiosity. It promotes spontaneity and originality. I bristle at superficial rote questions, although I long for people to be genuinely curious about me. We need the social forms of politeness. How are you? Fine. To get us through the ice.

To keep us together long enough for our defenses to break down. But a good conversation moves beyond wrote questions and responses. Ian, a good conversation is also a tennis match. You're challenging the other to bring their best game. Nothing worse than having the other agree with you. Agreed. Charles Duhigg, author of supercommunicators, suggests ways of reframing simple questions into deep ones,

thereby opening up a conversation for more than factual answers. and increasing the chances of connection. Are you married becomes, tell me about your family. Where did you go to high school? Becomes, what advice would you give a high schooler? And you can simply add, what's the best to ordinary questions

to juzze them up? Where do you live? What's the best thing about your neighborhood? Where did you go to college? What's the best part of college? And the problematic... Where are you from? What's the best thing

about where you grew up? Now that last one feels strategic and deceptive. Curiosity is necessary if you are to connect with others. Perhaps you've met the kind of man who speaks only in declarative sentences. No questions. He possesses a certainty that masquerades his confidence, but is really underdeveloped curiosity.

I wish it were fatigued curiosity, but it's not. This man's incurious nature is symptomatic of brutishness and brutality. So curiosity is the first point for a good conversation. Attention is the other. There's a limit to our attention, no? How long does it take for people to stop caring? If a politician or government engaged in a war, knew that the media news cycle for an acute event is on average four days,

and for a war, 90 days, then they could just wait us out. Attention is about more than how long we can concentrate, though. It is about the sensitivity of our receptors. Screenwriting coach Robert McKee in his book Dialogue asserts that conversations are made up of the said, the unsaid, and the unsayable. The said is obvious. words that come out of your mouth. It's the surface.

The unsaid is deliberately withheld by the speaker. Perhaps there's a consequence to speaking. Perhaps it's wiser, safer, or sexier to imply something rather than stating it. The contrast between the said and the unsaid gives us personal drama in each conversation. We actively monitor fluctuations of trust and predict our partner's reactions to determine whether our thoughts dare break the surface and be put into words.

Finally, the unsayable resides at a deeper, more private place than the unsaid. The conscious self may not even have access to this secret self that nevertheless creates inconsistencies between what one believes about oneself. I'm not sexist. And how one behaves.

Well. Deep attention. within a conversation is being able to understand the said and also sending out sonar signals to pick up the unsaid and the unsayable. On the second morning of the magnetic conversation experiment, my phone rang. I almost didn't answer. I didn't want to begin my day of glorious conversations with this one, a logistical checklist for event planning. According to my notifications, it should have been my second conversation that day. I had missed a call from a pre-construction salesman. I had the conversation. I was not satisfied. The phone calls felt like substitutions for

conversations rather than conversations themselves. A young writer told me that when she's away and calls home, and someone places the phone close to the dog's face. The dog looks confused and goes to the door to wait for her to come home. When you call someone, you expect them to come. Of course, after the average phone call, there's no guarantee that someone will join you. But if the conversation is really good, you feel like you've left your house and are with your friend in some alternate dimension. But most phone calls feel like a diminished form of contact, a peach with the skin peeled. New twist on the experiment. My understanding of conversation was too narrow. I had to get with the times, open up, and observe the first interaction of the day. My previous first conversations

felt more like transactions rather than interactions. Now I resolved to take note of the first exchanges I had with another human. That day, the first interaction was a a text I sent. 9.52 a.m. I was thinking about how many fish you have killed in your lifetime. You're like a fish terrorist. No reply.

Until later that day. And that's the problem with asynchronicity. Too much time can elapse between one utterance and another. You're left hanging. I couldn't count that as a conversation. Rather, I was engaged in a peculiarly modern way of being, waiting for my phone to manifest a human, snacking on human interactions throughout the day. I was not satisfied. A day later, the first interaction was a

phone call to give someone good news. I was happy for them, but I was not satisfied. The following day, I went almost the entire day working from home, not talking to anyone else until I got to the chiropractor at 5 p.m. Ian, I like the recurring chiropractor. Really, these conversation experiments are about adjustments. Also, they point to the modern experience with all our scheduled appointments. Also, his reappearance suggests to me

that you don't feel quite right. And I didn't. My chiropractor told me that his partner had surprised him for their anniversary. She took him to a two-star Michelin restaurant in Toronto to get sushi. When he arrived, he found only two couples in the restaurant. I asked, Did she buy out the restaurant? Are you dating a Saudi princess? Trust me. I was shocked, too. It was one of those restaurants that only led in six people

at a time. Exclusive. I know, eh? Maybe she loves you. My internal conversation, though, was wondering whether he and his partner were aligned in love languages, whether a grand gesture from her was landing as a significant signal of affection to him. Then he described the food. There were unusual body parts involved. I felt us diverging here. I'm not a foodie. But I liked his excitement.

He was working on my wrist, holding my hand to do so. I asked about his partner. Did you guys meet at the gym? Yeah, I was checking her out and finally talked to her when she was racking weights. How long have you been together? A year, but you've got to help me. on this. I planned this whole elaborate

thing for our first Valentine's Day. Then she planned her anniversary, the Michelin restaurant. Now, her birthday's coming up, and I don't know what to do. I'm sorry, man. She's won this. Then I gave him really bad bro advice. Your best bet

is to lower her expectations from here on in. I got home and said to the big palm tree in the kitchen, your leaves are wilting. I said it without using my voice. I thought it at the plant.

And it thought back at me. I want water. And for you to raise my soil level. But don't worry about it. I know you're busy. To summarize the data from that day, I had four types of conversations. Chat, phone, face-to-face,

and one with myself as projected onto a plant. It struck me that this was not saying, simply the effect of modernity on the structure of my life. But maybe this was a foretaste of what the last years of one's life feels like. I discovered that my first conversations came late in the day, or should be forgotten altogether. My first interactions were typically through a device. In a real experiment, this might be the point where the ethics board pulled the plug on the experiment, because the emerging result would hollow out the participant.

Which is to say, could I bear to be disabused of the image of myself as leading a full, rich life with deep connections and stimulating conversations? No, we would continue to the wintry conclusion. The next day, I changed the experiment when I realized that my first conversation wouldn't be until 2 p.m. Instead of noting my first conversation or first interaction, I would note the first voice. voice I heard that was not mine. I was living inside the silence of a John Cage composition. I heard many things that day. I heard the wheeze of the garbage truck as it made its way down the street, pausing in front of each house to overturn the bins. I heard myself moving around. The toothbrush on my teeth, my feet on the floorboards, a lot of gurgling in my gut, the sound of the toaster

lever, of apples being sliced, the fridge opening and closing, oat milk in the bowl. I heard notifications come in on my phone, but I did not hear a voice until the guys downstairs woke up and addressed each other in Turkish. This brings us to the end of our scientific process, rigorously applied in grade five purpose hypothesis, materials, method, observation, conclusion kind of way. Nevertheless, I did not like what the experiment was revealing about my life. No, no, the problem could not be with me. The design of the experiment was flawed. I should observe the last conversation of the day.

Maybe that's when I was at my most scintillating. Or forget the first and last, I should seek out the best conversation of my day, or this or that. Conclusion, I was isolated. I do not mean lonely. I had many types of relationships, from lifelong relationships to exclusively textual relationships

that could be called on to deliver a dollop of dopamine, but I was nevertheless sequestered from the people in those relationships. We all meant each other well, yet my friends had become contacts. One of the overlooked downsides to living alone is that one literally has no one to talk to. As an introvert, I took a long time to identify that as a source of my malaise, though I spotted it easily in a relative, who seems to need someone. to talk to, who like her relative is afraid of becoming someone who talks to herself. I didn't perceive a need in myself for conversation, but once it became apparent how

underused my voice was by noon, I couldn't stop noticing. Did this conversational infrequency set me at a social disadvantage? You remember how after lockdown, we were all awful at making small talk with each other at our initial gatherings. Maybe some people are always living in a conversational pandemic, perpetually emerging from a drought of loving voices. On Ideas, you're listening to the 2024 CBC Massey Lectures, What I Mean to Say, Remaking Conversation in Our Time, by novelist and poet Ian Williams.

You can hear ideas on CBC Radio One, in Canada, on U.S. Public Radio, across North America, on SiriusXM, on World Radio Paris, in Australia, on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca.ca. slash ideas. You can also find us on the CBC News app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayyed. We are gathered here today to celebrate life's big milestones. Do you promise to stand together through home purchases, auto upgrades, and surprise dents and dings? We do.

To embrace life's big moments for any adorable co-drivers down the road. We do. Then with the caring support of Desjardin insurance, I pronounce you covered for home, auto, and flexible life insurance. For life's big milestones, get insurance that's really big on care at Dejardin.com slash care. So, we finally found a podcast that speaks to you. You. Pure bliss. It's so good that when you finish the final episode, it leaves a hole in your heart and your schedule. What now? Personally is here for you. It's a collection of true stories that explore what it means to be, well, human. The best part, there are six incredible seasons to dive into with more on the way. Personally, get lost in someone else's life. Available now, wherever you personally get your podcasts. In the fifth and final 2024 CBC Massey lecture, Ian Williams explores how our age has left many of us in a drought of loving voices

and searches for conversations that feel transcendent, not transactional. Good conversation is an art, he argues, and you don't know how it will change you by the end. From Kerner Hall in Toronto, here is Good Conversations. Levels of conversation. A conversation can occur on multiple levels. A science conversation in the penthouse unfolds beautifully through a fusion of passion, discovery, and significance.

Even scientists use the word elegant for those moments. And this type of conversation has the uncanny ability to be both erudite and accessible. A few levels below the penthouse in large, suites owned by academics, a scientific conversation is pitched at the level of statistical significance, studies, journals. A conversation in the lobby where there's the most traffic tends to be general, muddled, with various degrees of commitment. Much public conversation occurs in the lobby, and increasingly in the basement, which is pretty much a fight club. I would say that most conversation pitched to folks in the lobby feature embarrassingly reductive discourse.

Complex situations and ideas are reduced to slogans, headlines, sound bites of an entire press conference. Pro-life, pro-choice, survival of the fittest. We are in an age of conversation as slogan, as a series of talking points regurgitations. We rarely have sustained. complex public conversations outside of our work or areas of knowledge. When the press, say,

engages with the public, it's as if with a child who has strong emotional tendencies and an undisciplined will and can only ingest a brightly colored, heavily processed, easily digestible snack. Consequently, we are raised

on a diet of snacks without desire or ability to process complex carbohydrates. Without a doubt, simple conversations are necessary sometimes. Entry into a field needs a ramp, and new people are always entering these conversations. But just as we, the public, were able to process with increasing sophistication

how MRNA vaccines worked in relation to traditional vaccines, that is, we rose to meet the challenge of the pandemic. so too we can rise to increase our literacy, learn to ask better questions, to seek clarification until we get to the point of reasonable complexity.

Knowing how much and which details to provide is the trickiest part of having a conversation on multiple levels. Too many details and you lose a non-specialized audience. Too few and you insult them by dumbing down the conversation. When speaking of, of the multiple levels in a conversation,

I mean more than appropriately pitching our contributions to the level of our partner. I also mean that we can occupy multiple levels simultaneously. We take the stairs between text and subtext, surface and underground, stated and implied meanings. That is, the said, the unsaid, and the unsayable. Let's switch metaphors from conversation as building to conversation as music.

Sorry to speak so metaphorically, but a metaphor itself where two disparate things overlap on a point of similarity is the perfect example of how conversations are superimposed on each other. A conversation is like a fugue, where multiple lines are active and overlapping at the same time. But rarely will a fugue begin with its most iterative moment. Rather, it begins with a simple melody. Then over time, other lines are added. It develops beyond its original statement. Residences occur even while independent lines are maintained. And eventually, if we think of ourselves as one of these parts,

we contribute to making music that is both complex and moving, appealing to our intellects and to our emotions. The simple melody is always present and accessible. One can eliminate the other strands if one comes to the fugue late and still catch the gist of it. Simplicity and complexity exist simultaneously.

And eventually, ideally, we are able to appreciate complex motifs. It takes time to build up that density of conversation, which in plain terms involves many perspectives, sometimes competing lines, sometimes buried lines that we have to listen to carefully to uncover. With patience and practice, though, our conversations can become an art.

Overcommunication. I've spent a lot of time talking about the paucity of communication when it would appear that the opposite is true. We are oversaturated with words and attempts to communicate with us. Hence, all the ads, friendly packets of information claiming to know what we want, to promise us pleasure, ask your doctor if this is right for you. These are not conversations in any true sense. Our data is mined stealthily, and then we're spoken to in terms of what we buy or search for, out of the abundance of one's heart, right? Or in terms of a powerful cultural understanding of status, beauty, uniqueness, in the picture.

or whatever. Yet these attempts fail so often because they neglect an elusive and resistant part of ourselves, the part of the human that is not for sale, something like the will. And they fail because they cannot time our desires with their fulfillment. They miss us at the right moments, and they fail because they do not interact with us.

The only responses they ask of us are, consumption, agreement, and amusement. And there's so much of it, so much messaging, so many words all the time launched at us. The endless scroll, the news digest, the warm voices in the YouTube ads telling us to take vacations, the influencers, our friends talking at their screen as we look at their 2D incarnation.

The 10 hottest new restaurants in Toronto right now. election 2024 everything you need to know in maps and charts climate change world way off target to limit warning says UN and with all of this noise it is easy to delude ourselves into thinking that we are participating in culture that we are socializing that we are up to date with the zeitgeist it's no longer enough to know what the number one pop song is we have to keep up with the latest words

and the shifting categories of being, the increased permissiveness, the renamed streets. We are being told things and we're swallowing as fast as we can without chewing or digesting. The people we admire say, This was acceptable. It is no longer acceptable.

Accept it. There's a lot of pressure on us to be the best version of ourselves. We are to tend our bodies into perfect specimens down to our eyebrows. We are to tend our inner lives, becoming more woke and more mindful, setting boundaries, avoiding toxic people.

Sometimes I feel that what we really need is not self-actualization, but escape. Conversation allows us to escape the pressures and burdens of being on, of moving toward decisions and plans of action. It asks us to pay sustained attention and attend to new, perspectives until we forget ourselves. It offers us a kind of transcendence that exposes materialism, the paying for products that are quickly compacted in the landfill of our hearts to make room for more. Out of the Sun. Selin, 20s, pretty, is on a European train, trying to read, but there's a couple across the aisle arguing in German. The wife slaps the

newspaper out of the hands of the husband. Cilin gets up, takes her belongings, and finds a seat at the back of the train, across the aisle from Jesse, an American, also young, attractive, and reading. Jesse can't concentrate because of the fight, but also because of Céline. Cilin and Jesse watch as the German couple storms down the aisle. Their eyes linger on each other once the couple passes. Jesse leans over and asks Cilin if she knows what they're arguing about. She doesn't immediately reply to this stranger, and he checks to see whether she speaks English.

She tells him that her German isn't good enough to understand the couple's argument. Jesse turns back to the window. Cilin lingers and randomly shares. Apparently, as couples age, they lose their ability to hear each other. Older men have trouble hearing high pitches, while older women have trouble hearing low pitches. So they cancel each other out. Jesse chokes, that's how nature allows. couples to stay together.

The joke lands. So begins before sunrise. Two strangers meet. It's perhaps not the most original meat cute in the movies, but its ordinariness makes it among the most seductive. The script records the next beat as, quote,

a slightly awkward moment where they don't know if they should continue talking or not. They do, though, and they talk for several hours. Selin gets off the train early in Vienna to continue the conversation with Jesse. They wander through the streets as the sun goes down, talking about whatever comes to mind. They talk about traveling, about work, school, buildings, boyfriends, girlfriends, death, God, music, palm reading, and honestly, a lot of forgettable things.

The movie is nothing but a conversation between two young strangers. played by Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawk, and yet it is captivating, more interesting than a car chase, a naked body, or the usual Hollywood tropes. It's a dream of a conversation. I found it hard to believe that the conversation was scripted. Ethan Hawk and Julie Delpy have writing credits,

so they must have thrown out the script at some point. I tried to determine if I could pick out the moments that were scripted that were scripted and those that were spontaneous. It would be like identifying the difference in texture between AI-generated text and human-generated text. When we let go of our scripts, we falter a bit. We speak before we think, but we're able to access a surprising place, the unconscious place that motivates our behavior

and governs us without our knowing. It's important, I think, to speak off script to not say the regurgitated thing and thereby to discover ourselves I don't recommend that you watch before sunrise with a notepad in hand yet there's so much one can learn

about a good conversation from the film a good conversation is spontaneous there's no fixed agenda of topics it meanders ebbs and flows goes wherever is interesting topics emerge one from the other like shoots from a branch surprisingly, a good conversation is not painstakingly balanced.

Ceylain talks more than Jesse. 90 minutes is about the length of a satisfying, meaty conversation. Can you recall the longest conversation you've ever had? Have you spoken all night to someone? Who was it? And what became of that relationship? Cilin and Jesse don't discuss heavy historical problems, but the conversation does move between the mundane and the

profound. They disagree, but it hardly matters. The conversation moves through all time zones, the past, disclosure, the present, what they're experiencing on the walk, and the future, their short-term plans, their long-range goals. There's a sense of eternity in their conversation. When watching and listening to Selen and Jesse talk, I felt both outside and inside of their conversation. And then it struck me that the conversation between Cilin and Jesse was sparkling, sure, but what I was really after was the relationship, the sense that a stranger could so quickly turn into a loved one. A good conversation opens a widening gyre of attraction, where we connect

not just to our partner, stranger or lover, but symphonically to everything in the world around us. Ian, you should end the lecture now on this point. The conversations are primal. We've all had them. We recognize what's going on is all beneath the surface, like trees talking to each other. They're finding each other,

and without a direct word being said, they are connecting. Perhaps that's the moral. That's what all real conversations lean to. But what about Selen and Jesse's future? Would they still enjoy talking to each other when they're old and gray and full of sleep? Nine years later, in the sequel, before sunset, they meet again in Paris. Same thing happens. Nine years after that and before midnight, we meet them in Greece, where they have their most difficult conversation yet. The answer, though, is yes. Thank God, it's yes.

The Age of Insecurity. I confess that I have countless worries about the future of conversation. Here are a handful. First, we will become so polarized that conversations with strangers will be thought of as antagonistic encounters of worldviews all the time.

We find ourselves braced, locked into a defensive mode, unwilling to budge from the things we believe in, holding flags and banners, distributing buttons. The lines of this polarization will be political and religious. Politics organizes a lot of the details of practical life, aligns us with a tradition of thought, and gives us group membership, which can pass as community. As with politics, from religion we get pre-packaged core beliefs, deference to past ideas, imbued authority from those ideas, the same kind of allegiances to groups. Religion is like the pure mathematics of politics, which itself would be like applied math.

Ideologies dominate our ability to dissent from institutions because they simply don't value anything but totally. I fear we won't respect the rights of others to dissent from our religious or political systems. But it's too late to talk about that. That's a book in itself. My second worry about the future of conversations concerns the place of technology in determining how we relate to each other. Will innovation progress to a point where people 25 years from now speak 50% less than people today? well that would make a great speculative novel you could have characters who are evolutionarily different with throats that were once for speaking but are now just for eating

we're getting silly but tech changes how we interact it obfuscates the humanity of the person we're talking to the body introduces various considerations and tensions within our communication such as that guy could pummel me but the online self evades all of that. Tech disembodies us for now. My third concern is again about technology, but less of a worry and more of a point to monitor.

Technology is making changes at the atomic level of language. We communicate visually with emojis, we condense phrases to acronyms, blah, blah, you've heard this. I'm not too worried. English is shifting in really exciting ways with new words and arrangements. The energy comes from waves of young people who have a linguistic renaissance in their teen years. The Internet makes these changes rapid, powerful, ubiquitous. Fourth fear.

I worry that increasing isolation means that we will have fewer trusted companions to talk to. Our conversations with AI will evolve conversations into stilted, one-sided, transactional intercourse. We may come to expect of our human partners the same level of efficiency and service, yes, service during a conversation. And because AI is disembodied, we will have a permanent severance of conversation

from social context. To engage with AI is not a social act. Not yet, at least. Eventually, it may merge with social media to give us the illusion of participation in social life. I worry that we'll have fewer deep conversations over a lifetime. That means that our chances to have mirrors of ourselves, to take on the perspectives of others, to ask good questions, to be taken seriously, to make others laugh, to be recognized as multifaceted, beyond functional conversations.

All of these things are threatened. Ian, you really should have ended before this doom and gloom on the inter-connectivity of all things. Human conversation reminds us that the universe is in conversation with itself, and a great conversation puts us in tune with the universe. Too late, Edna. Fifth fear. About the more immediate future,

I'm afraid of returning to silence once we part. Belonging. We weren't wandering around Vienna at sunset. We were in my kitchen. One of my friendships was breaking down, I thought, because this friend never seemed to take a reciprocal interest in me. I ran my little experiments. I observed the amount of time he spoke

versus the amount of time I got to speak, I paid attention to the number of questions he asked me versus questions I asked him. There was empirical evidence to support what I was feeling, as if I were a service agent within the friendship. So I decided to withdraw. The friend kept up one side for a while, not really noticing my absence.

Then when he finally noticed that the volume of my communication, had reduced dramatically, he issued pleasantries now and again, which I returned now and again until the words petered out. Eventually, my withdrawal became obvious and painful to the friend, and I confessed that I felt something like grief myself. I had withdrawn in disappointment and in protest. There was a principle about mutuality that had been so often violated, that the roles of speaker and listener in the relationship had become calcified and normalized.

It all came to a head when the friend was over at my house. I said, it's obvious that you don't care about me. You don't ask anything about the details of my life. Why do I have to ask? We're grown men. Nobody asks. I ask you.

If something's going on, just tell me. I told him about, feeling like I was audience to the drama of his life, and that he never came to my play. And it wasn't because he was busy, but because he didn't care. I care. I don't go around saying it. I don't either. That's not what I want.

I paused. What had been so clear in my head was turning opaque. I said, I feel like all you want me to be is your little customer service rep. Don't you dare. Don't you dare call it that. He was teary.

At this point, I thought that I might be wrong, despite all my tabulations. I would never have raised the conversation if I knew tears would be involved. Perhaps if I said nothing, the conversation would end itself. Just go away. But my friend asked,

What do you mean by care? Nothing. I'm making a big deal out of nothing. No, tell me what you mean. It's not so hard to figure out. It's basic. You take an interest in people. And then with his charming hyperbole, my friend said...

I am more interested in you than anyone in this world. What do you want me to do? I should have been appeased by that. But I flared a little because he was putting pressure on me to solve the problem. There was no racial subtext between us, but I recognized that feeling

from being in situations where I would be called on to manage the feelings of the white person after a racial encounter. I said, you're proving my point by asking that. I don't have to ask you what I should do to make things feel better.

Silence. I went on. It's a sign of emotional maturity to recognize the needs of someone you care about, then to meet those needs, then eventually to anticipate those needs. I do it all the time for you, man. I've never had this kind of conversation with a guy friend.

I avoid them too. I tend to cut folks off and move on. Then he rephrased his question as a statement. Just tell me what you want me to do, and I'll do it. And this time, it broke my heart. He was so earnest. I was, by comparison, monstrous. You can ask, I said.

It's not a secret. It's the simplest thing in the world. I guess I just don't get why someone like you, who's so good with people, can't see this. You're saying I'm self-centered. You have a good heart. Because I could call you selfish. You're calling me selfish?

My friend retreated. He said, I understand when you need time for yourself. I leave me alone. I don't want you to leave me alone. I want other people to leave me alone. I give you space. I give you space to deal with your personal stuff. Listen, it's just three simple words. Are you okay? Are you okay? Obviously not. But I mean, that's the question. And my friend began to ask me this question.

on repeat, especially when he sensed that I was orbiting away. Are you okay? Are you okay? Are you okay? Are you okay? He asked it incessantly until it became a joke between us. It was funny. Then it made me angry because when I was not okay, it seemed as if he was mocking me. And it's if I was impossible to please. But wasn't I? To have to script my own care like some kind of loser? But back to that conversation in my house, the most important one of the last year. When my friends saw himself as I saw him,

self-absorbed, avoidant, uninterested, and I saw myself as he saw me, ruthless, clinical, distant, unapproachable, we stood in silence. the rug a great ocean between us, both of us, teary. How many decades of friendship was I going to throw away at this crucial middle-aged time in both of our lives? I knew him before marriage,

and he knew me before a single book. I knew him unemployed and scrambling and scrans. He knew me jumping through the hoops of a PhD. A deck of memories shuffled between us. He had a phase where he wore Hawaiian shirts. I had a phase when I wore Velcro shoes. He revealed me to myself as a man willing to walk away from all of this shared life. I showed him how for decades my own small triumphs had been glossed over and his triumphs magnified.

It could all come to an end. This could be our last conversation. We had a good run. I gave him a tiny nod and walked away. Everything in the open, catharsis complete. But a few moments later, he followed me into the hallway and embraced me, and all the words rolled down my face. And he held me while I resisted him, tried to push him off until I surrendered. He had discovered the best way.

The surprising thing I didn't know, I didn't know. needed to end the conversation we were fine for a while possibly forever forgive me I've said too much On Ideas, you've been listening to Good Conversations. It's the fifth and final of the 2024 CBC Massey Lectures, What I Mean to Say, by novelist and poet Ian Williams. This lecture was recorded at Kerner Hall in Toronto. Special thanks to Adrian Harewood for joining me.

on stage. You can get the entire 24 CBC Massey Lectures series at cBC.ca.ca slash massies. You can also stream episodes through the CBC News app or download the lectures from your favorite podcast app. Your local bookseller will have the book version of the lectures. What I mean to say remaking conversation in our time, published by House

of a Nancy Press. And now that you've been listening to the lectures, we're inviting you to send us questions you may have for Ian Williams. We'll be creating a special program to run with the series when it airs again in the spring. So send your questions to Massey Questions at cBC.ca. That's Massey Questions at cbc.ca.

Our partners in the Massey Lecture Series are Massey College at the University of Toronto and House of Anncy Press. The Massey Lecture Series is produced by Pauline Holdsworth and Philip Coulter. Online production by Althea Manassan, Ben Shannon, and Sinisha Yolich. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso.

Our technical producer is Danielle Duval. Our senior producer is Nicola Luxchich. The executive producer of the Massey Lectures and Ideas is Greg Kelly, and I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBS, podcasts go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts