S3E3: Kevin Groen

Episode Transcript



Evy: Did he tell you that you have to perform?

Kevin: No, no. He did not.

BLESZ: I did not. But you can, if you want to.

Evy: He did not.

Kevin: In the final five minutes, I'll give my commentary on the conversation.

Bill: It's now time for Kevin's podcast about our podcast.

BLESZ: It's the reaction.

Bill: It's the reaction podcast.

Announcer: This episode was produced and sound designed by Burgundy Sound Studio. Burgundy Sound Studio, sound better.

Evy: Hello and welcome to Word Up podcast, I'm Evy.

Bill: Hey, I'm Bill.

Evy: How are you, Bill?

Bill: I'm okay. Yeah, can't complain. We're in this no time no space atmosphere and we exist in here. I'm doing quite well.

Evy: Yeah. We're just hanging over oblivion.

Bill: You know, right. There's no gravity, it's airless, we're in oblivion.

Evy: It's awesome.

Bill: Yeah. Just suspended in midair, looking into the vast chasm. Yes, great.

Evy: Just eating from the tubes.

Bill: Right. The capsule food, packets of goo that we eat in space, so that's fantastic.

Evy: Absolutely. Yeah, great. Like washing your hair with, like, floating water.

Bill: Right. Little globules of water that are floating in the...yeah, right. Wearing socks all the time indoors. I love it.

Evy: I love socks.

Bill: Yes.

Evy: Fuzzy socks.

Bill: Well, it's cotton socks for me. That's all.

Evy: So shall we talk about our guest?

Bill: Yeah, I think so. He's been waiting for hours and we should let him in.

Evy: Yeah, I think so too. So hi, Kevin Groen. I cannot pronounce your surname.

Kevin: Thank you. Hi.

Evy: How are you today?

Kevin: I'm doing well. Yeah. I'm looking forward to the podcast so I'm pretty energized.

Evy: So can you tell our listeners who don't know about you who you are?

Kevin: Yeah, sure. Who am I? I am an adopted South Korean boy, grew up in the Netherlands, and I am incredibly, insanely passionate about behavioral change. And that is also how I make my living, self-employed behavioral change enthusiast. I get hired by organizations to usually run 6 to 12-month programs for them to help people internally sustain or change behaviors. And I think I've always had a fascination for words as a kid. I think the history of my fascination for words traces back all the way to when I was 6 years old. And that's my hobby, so spoken word, writing poetry, performing it on stages. Yeah, I guess that's what I do. And yeah, being adopted, growing up in Netherlands, identity has always been the constant, sort of, factor throughout my life, the question about what does identity mean?

Evy: Yeah. And how was it for you to grow up in...because you didn't grow up in Amsterdam, right?

Kevin: So I grew up in...my first part of my childhood, I grew up in a small village, like 2000 people. And then the second half of my childhood, I grew up in the countryside with farms and fields.

Bill: Wow. Okay.

Kevin: And so I think growing up in the countryside was great because as a kid, having all that sort of...for me, that was freedom and I enjoyed it. I think what people often think is that my life must be easier in Amsterdam than it was back in the countryside. I think this is probably one of the biggest misconceptions that people have. I worked on a farm...I started working on a farm when I was about 12 years old, so like on weekends, and the most, sort of, accepting people that I've met were farmers. And people often think, well, you grew up in a small village, you grew up in the countryside so people must be very narrow-minded. There must be very intolerance and Amsterdam must be super tolerant and accepting. And for me, it's been kind of the opposite. But I really love living in Amsterdam.

Bill: How long have you been in Amsterdam for?

Kevin: On and off, 10-and-a-half years.

Bill: Okay.

Kevin: Yeah, with some stints somewhere else.

Bill: I mean, I'm sure you've seen some change in the city over 10 years. That's enough time to have been here for sure.

Kevin: I think sure, but at the same time, because you live there, it's weird because you're part of the change. So sometimes, it's harder to pinpoint what has changed in Amsterdam because a lot of that change then happens gradually rather than if you leave the city for five years and then come back.

Bill: Yeah, there's myopia. If you're looking at it every single day, you just kind of get used to the smell, the BO, right? I'm fascinated. I love this term. When I was researching you, I saw the idea, behavioral change enthusiast, is that what you called yourself?

Kevin: Yeah.

Bill: Was that a term that you coined? I mean is that something...because I've never heard it before but I think it is the, sort of, perfect linguistic terminology, the perfect crystallization of a concept that we're all, sort of, right on the cusp of now. You know, and it's like, people...I mean, obviously, back where I'm from in the United States, we're fighting this battle and it's going one way or the other. But I mean it's a real great way to put that. The idea is like, well, you are trying to change people's behavior and I mean it's fascinating that you've dedicated your life to this but it seems that you have figured out a way to apply this to the world. I mean it's inside your professional life, it's inside your personal life, your public life also at the same time. It's really a part of a crusade almost.

Kevin: Yeah. So I find labels like expert sometimes difficult because in a lot of fields, expertise is developing, it's evolving. So if your expertise stems from like 20 years ago, it is very likely to be outdated today. And so behavioral science is also developing and so to call myself a behavioral change expert sounded wrong to me. And that is important because if I tell a client what I do and who I am, I wanna make sure that what I say comes with conviction and I own it a hundred percent. And so also the label trainer or coach was something I could never really relate to. And then I always said I'm passionate about behavioral change.

So I don't remember when but then at some point, it was oh, enthusiast, because that's what I am. I'm an enthusiast about behavioral change and I'm constantly trying to learn more about it, reading books, listening to podcasts, documentaries because also I don't want to get stuck in this idea that I'm already there. Like once you're an expert, and I've noticed that a lot with people in science, I already know this, or even in my work with like executives, they're like, "Yeah, I know what leadership is." Then show me. And then obviously, they fail to show it. So they got stuck in this idea that they already are an expert and they don't have to learn anything else anymore.

Bill: That's perfect, man. Yeah, the idea that you can evolve. I mean, clearly the world around you is grinding on but these people get stuck in entrenched positions and it becomes fixed in the dogma of whatever year that they got installed. Yeah.

Evy: So what's the most interesting thing about human behavior that fascinates you also?

Kevin: Oh, wow. There are so many things. Because there's too many things that I find fascinating about human behavior but I'll highlight a few in random order. One, people completely misunderstand how behavioral change works. So most people think that just good intentions and a goal is enough for behavior to change and that is fundamentally wrong. Like, it's not that intentions and goals don't matter but it is far less important than people think it is.

The other thing that people...and it's a lot of misconceptions and myths. Another thing that I've noticed a lot is that people think that they are in full control over their own behavior. And philosophically speaking, you can argue you are in control of your behavior but it does dismiss the impact and external influences. So our behavior in the supermarket is influenced by very smart marketeers. And as soon as there are more people involved, so in my case, when I work with organizations, it's people working together so there are multiple people involved, your behavior and your responses will influence mine and it would be naive to believe that my behavior exists in a vacuum. And so a lot of people completely do not take that into consideration. They think like, oh, that's easy because I can do that, and they don't take into consideration that, well, the moment you get together with other people, their behavior, their attitude, their mood, their energy will impact yours. And that's another misconception about behavioral science.

And then the third thing I'll highlight is...and this is something that keeps coming back in my work and this is probably also, sadly, why I have a job. There are four things that I've noticed, regardless of culture, regardless of country, fields, industry, hierarchy, age, gender, etc., that keeps coming back into work that I do from my observations. And that is as human beings, we are incredibly bad at listening when it matters. We're not bad at listening but we're bad at listening when it matters. Two, we are significantly more judgmental than we'd like to admit. Three, we are very bad at transforming conflicts. So most people are either good at running away from conflicts or they're good at just trying to manage the conflict to an extent that it doesn't escalate. But we're not very good because we haven't learned the skills throughout our lives consciously on how to transform conflicts.

And then the fourth thing that keeps popping up is, as human beings, we're wired for stories. So like our brain creates narratives in split seconds. We see something happening and we create a narrative about it. Somebody does something to us that we don't like and we create a narrative about that person. A person cuts us off in line and we create a narrative about that person. And we do that in split seconds and we don't realize how quickly we create those narratives and how much those narratives influence our energy, mood, behavior.

And so those four things keep coming back and it is interesting and there's an explanation for that as well is that in school, we get taught all these courses like maths, language, geography. We learn how to do those calculations like the tables, like one times five, two times five, three times five, and when we learn them by heart. So we consciously learn all these what we consider are often hard skills but at no point throughout our educational life do we learn very consciously and deliberately interpersonal skills. So if we do end up having fairly well-developed interpersonal skills, it's more sheer luck often than that it was a deliberate plan.

Evy: Right. Or by accident.

Kevin: Yeah, exactly.

Evy: Which is luck, I guess.

Bill: You know, I found that at the age I'm at now and the circles that I run, people who let's say look like me and have my own cultural background, I think everything you're saying...again, it's a perfect way of thinking about it and it's a great way to term this. And it occurs to me that one of the threats that people think, there's this fear of rebuke. There's this fear of punishment that comes from any of this examination that the minute that you begin to track behavior, the minute that you engage in any discussion, it's merely for the purpose of being squashed or being told you're wrong. And this is the problem I can see, even just having rational discussions with people is that they can't wrap their head around it being almost like a neutral or benign conversation. It's punitive. And I mean I haven't seen anybody, other than your, sort of, technique that you're describing, I haven't heard anybody talk about it in a way that seems constructive or at least, you know, you mute that punishment aspect of it.

Kevin: And I guess that comes back also to some of the myths around behavior and misunderstandings is, myself included, as human beings, we are often biased to think that behavior equals identity. So my behavior is my identity. But behavior can be changed. Riding a bike, learning to ride a bike does not mean anything really about your identity per se. You can turn it into an identity statement but it's not necessarily identity. So riding a bike has no bearing on your gender identity, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, nothing.

But as soon as somebody says something about our identity, so for example, feedback, like at work, somebody gets feedback or somebody calls out something that might be gender-biased or racially-biased, and if somebody says something about what we do or what we say, very quickly, we usually immediately jump to the conclusion, oh, are you saying that I'm a bad person? So one is addressing behavior and then on the receiving end, we kind of usually perceive that as an identity attack and we need to learn to separate identity from behavior.

Evy: That's super interesting.

Bill: It's almost like another...it's another consequence of tribalism to some degree. I mean, again, you know, I'm coming from a very tribal atmosphere right now back in my home country and trying to pick through this is, you know, quite literally, the mission of our day and age, our times is to guide the human race through some sort of transformation to a better way of relating to itself and so people can just be more harmonious.

Kevin: Yeah.

Evy: So now, I would like to speak about, well, what I'm very proud of is that I've witnessed your debut as a poet back in, I don't know, what was it, two, three years ago?

Kevin: Three years ago. Yeah.

Evy: Yeah. Wow. Time flies.

Kevin: Probably three years ago, December.

Evy: Wow, okay. So you call yourself word magician, is that...?

Kevin: True.

Evy: How was your journey to poetry?

Kevin: So my journey into poetry started eight years ago when I discovered spoken word poetry through the internet. YouTube is great for discovering. And probably, I was on a website like, I don't know, BuzzFeed or something like that and I came across a spoken word video of a North American, of a Canadian poet, and it got me hooked. I was mesmerized. And apart from the poetry exposure that you get in school, but that was my first real introduction to spoken word poetry and that was probably about eight years ago. And I think six years ago, I started writing. I think that was more of a need, a personal need, rather than a drive, in that moment, to perform but it was a personal need to write to process my emotions, my feelings, my experiences.

And I think because my initial introduction to the world of spoken word was seeing another poet perform spoken word on the internet, I think in the back of my mind, there was always this idea like at some point, it has to get on stage. So initially, the writing was for myself but then eventually, about three years after I started writing, I started looking into spoken word communities and that's when I discovered Word Up.

Evy: Yay.

Bill: Did you ever balk at being, sort of, onstage, you know, the idea that you are part of the show and you were creating the charisma that you were projecting? You know, a lot of people just want the work to lead and they don't wanna have to be the person who's reciting it or creating a performance but obviously, you don't strike me as a person who has much timidity, maybe you do inside, but I see a public persona that's very confident. Did you ever struggle with that or was it a natural fit?

Kevin: Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I remember the first time performing at Word Up, it was in December, it was like mid-December, and a couple of friends wanted to be there as well but it's mid-December so it was also the time where people had Christmas dinners and stuff. And so some of my friends had texted me that they would probably be running late. So I had asked Ennio if I could perform in the second half so that my friends would be there and he said, "Well, I already put you on in the first but here's the deal, like before you're up, I'll give you a sign and then you can tell me if you can go or if you wanna wait for the second half and I'll put somebody else on."

So I already got a text from my friends that they wouldn't be able to make it so I could have gone any time. But the moment Enio gave me a sign that I was gonna be next, I was so nervous that I couldn't even speak and I kind of lost my voice. And so I just gave him a sign that I would have to go in the second half. And so he put somebody else on and during the break, I went to the toilet and just tried to get my composure back. That was the first time performing, incredibly nervous, and I'm still nervous sometimes performing nowadays but I think the difference is I'm better capable of managing the nerves.

And I think the first time performing, I wasn't capable of controlling my breathing and my heartbeats and my body basically. So in that moment, I couldn't perform. But nowadays, I'm not as often nervous anymore but depending on the audience, depending on what I'm gonna perform, depending on the context, I still am nervous and personally, I have this belief that if I don't experience nerves at times, then I'm too much in my comfort zone.

Bill: I understand that.

Evy: So I was wondering if you have something prepared for us today?

Kevin: I can perform something, yeah.

Evy: Okay.

Kevin:

𝐀𝐃𝐎𝐏𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍 𝐈𝐍 𝐅𝐎𝐔𝐑 𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐏𝐓𝐄𝐑𝐒

Chapter 1.
When I was born I was given up for adoption,
and with it love temporarily gave up on me.
Maybe that is why I love the way I do;
intense without compromising.
Maybe that is why I hug a little tighter
every time we say goodbye.
Maybe that is why I jump head over heels
every time love pushed me to the edge,
because I know what it feels like
when love leaves without explanation.
Chapter 2.
When I was adopted
my name changed from
Ahn Kwang Soo to Kevin Groen.
My name; a game of scrabble,
my name; an update, an improvement,
my name; a winning combination.
Ahn Kwang Soo, 22 points, no premiums.
Kevin Groen, 18 points but triple word value.
But society continues to question my identity,
Ahn Kwang Soo, too difficult to pronounce,
Kevin Groen, that’s not who you really are.
Society confused.
Society not listening.
Society still searching for better letters
to describe who I am.
Society,
fuck you!
Chapter 3.
I have learned that hamster mothers can kill
their own young because of scent confusion.
Maybe that is why I keep being refused
acceptance by my home country.
Born in the womb of my motherland,
raised in the resigned embrace of another,
and the distinctive scent of both never
quite rubbing off.
As a kid I used to believe that
if I simply scrub long and hard enough,
the scent would disappear.
But all it ever really did was leave behind
an open wound that just won't heal.
They say that the great white shark
can smell blood from well over
half a kilometre away...
Chapter 4.
They gave you up for
adoption with the promise
of finding a better home.
They never knew that
finding home could feel
so so lonely…

Bill: Wow.

Evy: Wow. I'm, like, gasping a little bit. It's so heavy, I find, and it's something that's so engraved in your identity I suppose. And you and your sister, I suppose, it's the same because you were adopted together.

Kevin: Yeah.

Evy: I wonder how much of that carries into your work and to what you're looking for in other people maybe also.

Kevin: It's definitely central to my work. Identity has always been that constant factor and I think I've only been figuring out what identity for me means probably in the past 10 years. And so writing is, for me, a way to explore that and to give words to it. And so being adopted...for me, being adopted has several elements and that is, one, for me, there's a question, what does it mean to be South Korean in the Netherlands? Two, what does it mean to be a South Korean man in the Netherlands? And then three, for example, what does being a South Korean man mean for the relationships that I have with people and the way I navigate society? And that definitely comes back in my writing.

Evy: Yeah. And I also wonder, like you talk about being adopted, but I don't know if you talked a lot about your adopted parents.

Kevin: No. I don't write a lot about them per se, no.

Evy: Yeah. Is there a reason?

Kevin: I think it's not my story to tell. And I think my adoptive parents, their experience of what it is to raise two kids of color, being white people themselves, I think is something that I need to be careful if I wanna write about it because...and I think this comes back to certain respect and privilege. Like, I think I can talk about why they adopted us because we've openly talked about it but what it is for them to adopt us and to go through that experience, I think is their story and they need to in a way also then give me permission to write about that story.

Evy: Yeah, of course. That's beautiful.

Bill: Well, I mean, I feel like your spoken word is like a rocket ride for me to a different planet and I mean it's one I'm very grateful to take and very grateful that you're able to, again, crystallize this stuff in language that's so clear to show me something about the human experience that I know clearly nothing about. You know, I grew up in a Caucasian family in a middle-American suburb, you know, no identity issues whatsoever. And I went through a lot of my life really being unaware of that and without an empathy for that sort of thing and not because I was mean spirited about it, just because it wasn't really access to those stories.

So it means a lot to hear about this from inside. And again, there's so many intersections that's just so amazing, especially me now being a resident, a visitor, a guest in a foreign country. You know, it's another angle of the culture. There are just so many different things going on in terms of how many stories we're able to tell simultaneously at the same time. I mean, I wonder if, you know, when your...this is coming, this is from you, it's coming out of your heart. But I mean, you must know at the same time, it's gonna hit me in a very different way. And I mean, you're not trying to be instructive but you know that it's gonna...you know, it is a message for me. It winds up being something I could use. I mean, how much does that factor in to the way you create this stuff?

Kevin: A lot. So I'm on a personal mission and my mission is to make people feel more alive. And I do that through my work with behavioral change because when people own their own behaviors and they become more aware of how behavioral change works and how that impacts their lives, they will feel more alive. But also, spoken word poetry is a way to make people feel more alive. Because when people sit in the audience and it hits them, in whatever way, it can be incredibly confronting, it can be painful, it can be relatable, it makes them feel more alive, and in that moment, they don't shy away from allowing themselves to feel something that they would otherwise not feel.

So you can write a piece about, you know, depression and someone in the audience feels that and they don't push it away. In that moment, they feel more alive because they're not numbing themselves. And I think, for me, actually there's a spoken word artist and also a host in Berlin, his name is Naniso Tswai. And years ago, I had a conversation with him at the end of a poetry slam and we had a conversation about the winner and he said something that stuck with me. And he said he believes that as an artist, when you take to the stage and you take that time from the audience, you have a responsibility to use your words responsibly. And that stuck with me because I thought that that was spot on.

Like, whether you're a comedian, whether you're a storyteller, whether you're a poet, whether you write prose, you have a responsibility to use your words responsibly. And I think too few artists do that consciously. And for me, one of the ways to use my words responsibly is to make sure that it comes from a place of purpose and that purpose is to make the audience feel more alive. You know, and my worlds of my professional world and my hobby world of like spoken word, so behavioral change, spoken word, they're not separate worlds. They very much mix. So one of the things that we tend to do is we tend to classify certain emotions as bad and certain emotions as good. Like, happiness is good, joy is good, love is good, but anger is bad, rage is bad, depression is bad, frustration is bad.

Like, we tell children, don't be angry, but we never tell someone, don't be happy. But feelings and emotions are part of the human experience so there's no good or bad. The way I look at it is our relationship to each emotion defines whether the impact of it will be good or bad, will be negative or positive. So you can have a healthy relationship to anger and you can have an unhealthy relationship to anger. The same way you can have a healthy relationship to happiness and an unhealthy relationship to happiness. And when we try to push our feelings and emotions away, that's an unhealthy relationship.

And so spoken word poetry for me is a way to draw it out of people and to let them sit there. And I think we need to give the audience more credit because sometimes, we feel the need to...after a very dark, deep piece, we feel the need to lift the audience up. There's no need to lift the audience up after. We need to give the audience credit that they can deal with that. And the beauty of a spoken word evening is that it can take you on this rollercoaster from total bliss to like,"Holy shit, like, I'm feeling down right now," or, "That hit me and I wanna go home and cry," to suddenly, you know, 10 minutes later, like, "Oh my God, that is so warm and loving and caring," to then 10 minutes later, again, like, "I'm angry about the world." And when we allow the audience to experience that, it makes them feel more alive and we start normalizing that it's part of the human experience.

Evy: Yeah. It's kind of like you feel like you need to balance because you're taught to balance and like we feel, don't be sad, be happy so it's okay. But I really agree with that and, for me, it's really hard to stop myself of doing that because I'm like, "Oh, let's talk about something jolly now."

Bill: Do you engage with younger audiences? I mean, you mostly do...because I could see there being a ton of value in what you have to say the younger someone could hear it. These are the lessons that get concretized so quickly when we approach young adulthood. Adolescence is exactly the time when you tune stuff out because you just think it's beneath you because you're a jerk when you were a kid but it's precisely when you need to hear these things when you're starting to build that identity.

Kevin: Yeah. I predominantly work with adults. And sometimes, I get an opportunity to work with younger people. And when I say younger people, it typically then is in the range of I'd say 18 to mid-20. But then two years ago, I had an opportunity...no, actually last year, I had an opportunity to spend a week in a school, like this was 12, 15-year-olds. And it was a school, we're like in the middle of nowhere in Germany and they had asked me if I...it was just before the summer holiday. They had a learning week and their learning week was people, like the kids, they could just pick subjects that were offered by external people, so no teacher.

So there was a hip hop workshop and they asked me if I could do two workshops throughout the whole week. So it was every day, like one-and-a-half hours on each of those subjects with a group that I would be working with for four days. And one was performance skills so more like presentation skills and the other one was life skills, which was the far more fun one. Because always, like, life skills, what the hell is that? So I had to narrow it down. But one of the things that we covered during that week in life skills was empathy. And another topic that we addressed that week in life skills workshop was purpose, like life purpose, like big, big questions.

And what I still remember, there's many things I remember, I'll highlight two things that I'll remember. One, the kids, so they're aged 12 to 15, right, they found it so much easier to connect to purpose and having, like, a life purpose. They quickly connected it to things like environment, things like just the local communities, empathy, anti-discrimination work, no biggie. So I think it shows that kids are incredibly receptive to it and they have far more capacity to understand these topics than we give them credit for.

The second thing that I remember from that week is on the first day in the life skills workshop, a girl came up to me at the end of the class and she asked me if I do work around addiction. I'm not a specialist on addiction. I know just a little bit about addiction and it sometimes comes up in my work but not in the classic way of addictions like alcohol addiction or drugs addiction. Well, we talk about addiction at work in terms of work can be an addiction as well so I understand some of the basics, basic concepts there. And so I asked her, "Hey, why do you ask? What's your interest in addiction?" And she told me that her father is an alcohol addict and she wanted to know if I had some tips for her on how to deal with her father and how to help her father.

We're talking about a 12-year-old. We're talking about a 12-year-old girl who has the awareness and the mental emotional maturity to go up to a stranger who she just met two hours earlier and her intent was to get more advice and tips and understanding on how to help her father. And she had never talked about this to any other teacher. And so that experience, I remember that because it highlights another couple of things. And that's one, schools need to spend significantly more time on the emotional development and support for kids. And if we only focus on the subjects but we don't focus on the kids that we're actually educating in schools and their stories and what's going on outside of schools, we're never going to be able to fully, like, properly educate them. And it only takes empathy, care, genuine attention that these kids will open up. And I would love to work more with kids.

And one of the things that I do every year is I have a couple of principles that I try to implement in my life because having values is one thing but that just sounds good on paper, so you have to operationalize values, you have to turn them into, sort of, everyday principles. So one of my principles is spend one month of my time working for free. And that's my way of giving back. So giving back is the value but how do you operationalize that? The rule is spend one month every year working for free. And this project with that school happened because of me always looking for projects to, kind of, like, volunteer my time and my skills. I would absolutely love to work more with schools. So if any of the listeners today have some opportunities, reach out to me. I think the problem is...I think the challenge is to find projects that are more sustainable. And I am more interested in projects that I believe have some sustainability in it.

Bill: Do you feel like you have held on to some essential part of being a child like in terms of relating? Do you remember what it was like to be there? Do you have a childlike portion of yourself that you still hold on to today in this wonderful adulthood you're giving us?

Kevin: So being adopted, one of the things, and I'll be eternally grateful for, is that that our parents, they didn't have to adopt. They adopted because they wanted to. So they said, "Hey, there's a lot of kids in the world that that have no real future, no proper future for them if it's not for adoption." And so they decide, okay, let's give...rather than adding more children to the world, let's give children who need it right now, give them a future. And I'll always be grateful for that, that they gave my sister...my sister is a doctor, and so they gave us an opportunity for having a future life that we own and I'll always remember that.

So yes, for sure, I want every...not just every adult, but I want every child to have a future. And if it's not through adoption, it can be through access to opportunities, attention and care, the kind of development that is far more important than learning equations in school. So yeah, so maybe that's the childlike part of me that I'll always tap into.

Evy: And also, I will always think your life sounds very busy because your work and your hobby, as you said, like it's all intertwined. So I'm just wondering, to bring it to the lighter note, what do you do for fun? What's Kevin when he is chilling and color-coding books?

Kevin: So I will say spoken word for me is a lot of fun. So I genuinely enjoy going to spoken word shows without performing. And it's also a way to meet fellow artists. And that, for me, is an enormous source of energy and social connection. So I would say spoken word is definitely a major part in my life. A couple of other things that I really enjoy is cooking and baking and making coffee, like quality artisanal coffees at home. So I have six brewing methods at home...

Bill: I wanna visit your house, man. You look like the kind of friend I wanna have.

Kevin: Surprisingly, this will surprise a lot of people probably, but I am incredibly lazy. And so on the outside, it looks that I'm super busy but when I'm at home, I can easily just binge watch series and movies and spend time watching documentaries, listening to podcasts, exploring spoken word and before I know it, I've spent like eight hours online. So that's the other side. One of the other things that I enjoy a lot is...two more things that I really enjoy a lot, I enjoy creating shared experiences. So it can be anything, right? It can be taking friends on a trip or it can be organizing a dinner party or something, creating shared experiences. And the other thing is I enjoy travelling but in a way, I love to just spend a lot of time in one place or one country rather than kind of like just...

Evy: Jumping.

Kevin: Yeah, rushing through. And then really slowing down and sometimes, just observing life somewhere else.

Evy: Wow. Nice, beautiful. And another thing I'm wondering is because you're so immersed into your work...and I always feel also a little bit self-conscious with you, is he analyzing me? Is my behavior...Do you get that from like, people, like, friends?

Kevin: Yeah, yeah. Actually, people do wonder whether I'm constantly analyzing. And so the truth is it doesn't work that way. Maybe for some people, maybe for some professionals, but not for me. So it is true that I can't disconnect my work from who I am. Like, that's part of who I am and I'll always probably have this fascination for human behavior but when I meet people like in a bar or at spoken word events or for dinner, I'm just me and I'm not actually paying attention in terms of analyzing. That part of like really very consciously analyzing people happens when I'm in that work mode.

So when I get, for example, a team together in a room and I'm in the same room and then I spend one or two days with them, and then that's where that mode goes on and that's when I am looking at everything that people do and then also, what they don't do. On a serious note, right, like so sometimes, I've had people that after they find out what I do, they're like, "Okay, tell me who I am." Like, it doesn't work that way. It doesn't. But if you would join a workshop in a setting that I have created...

Bill: For a paid scenario. You get compensated for what you do.

Kevin: Yeah. I will say like if you come into a space that I own, that I create where I set the rules and you interact within that space, give me half a day and I'll know stuff about you that your best friends don't know about you.

Evy: Ooh, challenge accepted.

Bill: That sounds like a threat to me. I don't know. Joke's on you, I don't have friends. So obviously, you are at least trilingual if not more linguals. Like, where do you find the best way to express yourself? It's like which of those tongues, which of your moedertaal, which do you...you know?

Kevin: So in terms of poetry and also emotionally, I feel most comfortable expressing myself in English. And even though Dutch is my...Dutch is the language that I grew up with. Depending on how you argue, South Korean would be my...Korean would be my official, like, mother tongue. Dutch is my first language but English is the language that I feel most comfortable expressing myself and I don't really know how that happened. But also, I guess also because when I went to university, the study program was entirely in English. So basically as of the age of 17, the default language in my life became English. And so now, I think in English, the funny thing is when I do work in Dutch or if I sit into a business meeting that's in Dutch, my notes tend to be in English, which is super weird but it's because I find it easier to translate what I'm hearing in Dutch to English in my notes than to write it in Dutch.

Evy: I can relate to that. I mean I also speak a few languages and for me, English is something that I think in, I dream in. Sometimes I dream in Spanish but I don't even speak Spanish so that's something.

Bill: I mean but is that something like Rosetta Stone thing? Like, because we all live in, sort of, the English speaking world, that's become the lingua franca of everything?

Kevin: For me, definitely it's true that it became the default ever since I studied and ever since it became a default language because also my work is in English and most of the educational content that I take in tends to be in English. Yeah, so and English is still, I guess, one of the most dominant languages in the world as well.

Bill: Yeah, my friends...every time I meet somebody here and their English is not just functional but it's idiomatically robust, I'm always surprised by that because of all the countries that I have been to, you don't get that kind of English in France I've seen, you don't get that kind of English in Germany, Portugal, etc., etc. But here, you know, people do that so excellently. And it has to do with the fact that the culture everybody is eating has been American culture for so long or Anglophone culture and that's kind of where people, like, grow up, the movies, the music, the books, that's where it, like, gets into you.

Kevin: I remember as a kid, I watched cartoons from Cartoon Network that were original version, so mostly American, and they just had Dutch subtitles.

Evy: Lucky you.

Kevin: Yeah. I think it is really useful. Yeah. But yeah, that's indeed how even as a kid, without being conscious about it, how much English language and American pop culture plays a role. Also, I think languages are incredibly fascinating not just from a perspective of learning language and being able to express yourself in different languages but I think we underestimate the significance of language in terms of language shapes our reality. So we use language to give meaning to what we experience. So we see something and we use language to describe what we're seeing. And people don't realize often the significance of that because of certain languages have certain words to describe some things that other languages don't have.

And research has already shown that when people speak different languages, their voice changes sometimes, different parts of the brain are used. So it even affects the way we express ourselves and how we express ourselves. I think it's great that...I remember in school, we had access to four languages. Well, so Dutch was, of course, a language that you had to learn and English was another language that was obligatory. Then electives were German and French and then depending on what level of school you did, you also had access to Greek and Latin.

Nowadays, even schools already offer many more languages that you can learn. And so from a perspective of learning languages and being able to express yourself in different languages, that's great. What I don't know for sure is if people, if schools and education pays enough attention to not just learning the language grammatically but the significance of language in the way that it shapes our reality.

Bill: I'll tell you for damn sure, they didn't do that when I was in school. We just learned the frickin' language and that was good enough. That seemed like a miracle in the American public school system anyway if you even got that far with it.

Evy: I'm wondering, do you have a favorite word in English or in any other languages that you speak?

Kevin: No, no. No, nothing comes to mind right now.

Evy: Do you have your favorite word?

Bill: I do.

Evy: What is it?

Bill: I don't know if you want me say it on the air.

Evy: Rhubarb?

Kevin: Rhubarb is a good one.

Bill: Rhubarb is...I hope that's like a natively English word but I do like rhubarb. Have you ever had rhubarb?

Kevin: Yes.

Bill: It's weird, right? It's like celery except it's like weird, it's in a pie, it's like a celery pie.

Kevin: I like it.

Bill: Not until...I lived in North Carolina for a couple of years and all of a sudden, someone came up with a rhubarb pie and I'm like, shit, I am in the South. Like, this is what they do. You would never see a rhubarb anywhere north of Virginia. And I was like, all right, I gotta try the celery pie, it's like shit, this is good. How is there a celery pie that's somehow good. This is not bullshit at all. So yeah, I have a very positive association with rhubarb but it's an adult association with rhubarb. I'm glad you brought that up.

Evy: Thank you. I'm here to bring things up.

Bill: To bring rhubarb up.

Evy: Yeah. That's why I'm here.

Bill: Any durian memories you have, dragon fruit, jackfruit, anything like that?

Evy: I was born in Soviet Union. I met banana when I was 13.

Bill: I guess the only vegetables you had was steak.

Evy: Potato.

Bill: Potato vegetables.

Evy: All the way. I think it's in my DNA floating.

Bill: Everything, right? You're the George Washington Carver of potatoes.

Evy: Okay, so with this beautiful rhubarb note, I think it's time to thank you for being here.

Kevin: It's a pleasure. Thank you very much.

Evy: And maybe just a quick note about where can people find you online or come to your house?

Kevin: For coffee and cake.

Bill: That's an invitation. You can't take that back.

Evy: I mean I think I know where you live.

Kevin: Oh boy. Oh boy. How many people listen to...?

Evy: We'll put that in the notes.

Bill: You've been geotagged.

Kevin: If people wanna follow, so on Instagram, they can find just like Instagram poetry short snippets and you can find me on Instagram, word.magician. If people wanna follow and read more on the stories that I post and articles that I write and the longer performance pieces, then they need to go to Facebook and that's where Kevin Groen, G-R-O-E-N, and otherwise...

Bill: You keep looking at me when he said that like I wouldn't get it.

Kevin: And LinkedIn, the same thing, Kevin Groen.

Evy: Great. So thank you so much, Kevin, for taking your time to be with us.

Bill: Thank you very much.

Evy: And we're still looking forward to the coffee.

Kevin: Hey, just come on over. Come on over.

Evy: And for listeners at home, you can find the transcript of this podcast and all the notes on our website, www.worduppodcast.com, and of course on social media. So don't hesitate to say hello.

Bill: So if you wanna have a conversation about this episode, get in touch with me and Evy on Twitter. It's probably the easiest way to do it. We're on Twitter, worduppodcast, @worduppodcast. I run the Twitter. You'll be talking to me. You have firsthand interaction with somebody, one of the voices on the show. I will probably get back to you, probably say something very nice, but we wanna hear what you have to say about it because we're very excited about our guest and we're very excited about the show. So come and talk to us, everybody.

Evy: Absolutely. And thank you so much again and thank you, Bill, for being a great co-host

Bill: Thank you, Evy. And I appreciate your co-hostingness as well.

Evy: Thank you. We are all very appreciative.

Bill: Yes. We're appreciative people.

Evy: Thank you so much and doei!

Bill: Doei!

Bill: By the way, boobs, that's my favorite word, boobs, in English.

Evy: You can say that.

Bill: No, I could. I just want to make I wasn't...you know.

Evy: Like, specific boobs or just general boobs?

Bill: All of them. I'm just a fan. Well, I like the word boobs because it makes me think of all the boobs.




Transcript by Janice Erlbaum