Dr. David Gruber

In this week's COMversation, hosts Kevin and Dave sit down with Associate Professor, David Gruber. David joined the Department of Communication Studies faculty after working nearly a decade oversees at institutions in Copenhagen, Hong Kong and Auckland, New Zealand. David is a persuasive communications scholar who has published extensively on rhetoric and the brain. In this interview we hear about David's need to play the electric guitar as loud as possible, his love of rocks and geology, and how a humor writing course he took as undergrad at USC, taught by the legendary Shelley Berman, sparked an intellectual curiosity that eventually led him to pursue a PhD.

What is COMversations at UNLV?

In response to the Covid-19 Pandemic, the faculty and staff of the Department of Communication Studies began working from home and teaching online. Now that faculty and students are returning to campus and having more opportunities for face-to-face interactions, we almost feel like we need to re-introduce ourselves to our colleagues and students. The same is true for other schools and departments in the College of Urban Affairs and across the university. We believe that the best way to (re)introduce ourselves is by sharing the personal stories and backgrounds of our faculty and staff. The goal is to introduce each of our faculty and staff members to students, the public, and each other. Starting with these podcasts, we hope to build a podcasting network devoted to helping students and the public meet the people who teach the classes, conduct the research, and manage media operations. We also hope to get to know each other better and build a richer academic community. So lend an ear to the personal stories of the faculty and staff preparing students for a promising future.

Kevin Stoker 0:00

Well, welcome to Conversations. I mean calm for stations, stories from the faculty of the Department of Communication Studies at UNLV. I'm here Kevin Stoker. I'm the my co host, David Nourse and I are here with Dr. David Gruber. We're happy to have you with us. Dave, good to have you on board

Dave Nourse 0:21

A pleasure as always my friend.

Kevin Stoker 0:22

Good. Well, we've got David here. And we, you know, I've been excited to talk to David because not only does he do fascinating research, but he's had an interesting career. This is a guy who's been a globetrotter. At the same time, I know you went to North Carolina State University you got your PhD from, from North Carolina, North Carolina State. And so you were there. What made you then decide to embark on this international journey of reflection and analysis in serving as a professor in places like Hong Kong and Copenhagen?

David Gruber 0:59

Well I almost didn't, because I went to Hong Kong for the job interview, and I got deathly ill that day. And I was by myself and I came back and I told my wife, Lindsay, I said, I don't know, if I've moved on. I went there for one day, and I got deathly ill. She said, we're going I was like, you both think it's gonna be great. She was so excited about it. She teaches English as a second language. And so she already had good opportunities there. I had good opportunities there. What happened was the reason I was out there in the first place is because my advisor was Carolyn Miller, at North Carolina State and now a distinguished retired professor of rhetoric. And she knew my dissertation and knew my work. And she says, I think this job would be perfect for you. And I think it'd be a great place for you and your wife. And so I applied they called me out i When got deathly ill. The otherwise they were well, because they offered me the job, I guess. But I spent most of the time in my hotel room staring out at this gigantic city. I'd never lived in a city like that before. So it was a huge change. That just launched the journey. Really?

Kevin Stoker 1:55

Wow, what a great story. So you ended up going there? And had you been abroad before?

David Gruber 2:02

Yes, I've been abroad before, but I really hadn't traveled much. In fact, to go on that job interview, I had to get my rent my passport rushed because my prior passport had run out. That's how long it had been stepping out of the country. So this was a it was a huge change.

Kevin Stoker 2:14

Wow. Yeah. So yeah, to go from North Carolina to Hong Kong. Tell me what it was like, what was the the call? Was there a kind of a cultural shock when you got there?

David Gruber 2:25

Yeah, absolutely. But for me, it was mainly because there's so many people I mean, if you've been to Hong Kong, you know that it's like everywhere in Hong Kong is like the most crowded place in Manhattan, you know, your elbow to elbow, you're you're touching elbows with a 10,000 people just to get to work, you're getting shoved onto the train. So that's something that I had to get used to, you know, and the culture shock. And other than that, I mean, the foods and stuff I fell in love with, though, so it wasn't that hard. So as far as the culture shock goes, and the university system in Hong Kong is all English. So they they have an English only university because their legacy with the British rule. And so there wasn't much transition there. I worked with people from all around the world. I worked with Hong Kongers, and Chinese and Australians and lots of Brits and me. And we were just all there trying to make it all work. And it's worked well.

Kevin Stoker 3:06

Yeah. Wow. It sounds like a real melting pot.

David Gruber 3:09

Yeah, it was. And that was, I loved it. Yeah. So it was really great.

Dave Nourse 3:14

You have this really global perspective that you bring with you to Las Vegas, you've been here for a few months. Now talk to us about kind of how that international experiences kind of helped you as you've settled here.

David Gruber 3:27

Well, it has helped me because we've moved a lot. So we moved from our stuff has gone around the world, we went to Hong Kong and then to New Zealand, and then to Denmark and then to hear. So every time you move, you have to realize you have to be flexible. You have to take time to know how the place where you're going works. And even though we were moving back home, we were anticipating a reverse culture shock kind of thing going so we were still prepared to move here and sort of be ready to not expect everything to work seamlessly and go our way. But I'll tell you what the most exciting thing I'm excited about is coming back is being in Las Vegas in this in the sunshine I was I just craved the sun after living in Denmark. You know Denmark has this terrible winter that lasts for like nine months a year and it's terribly dark and I'm just soaking up the sun. So that's been the best thing about moving back.

Kevin Stoker 4:18

And so you know, the fall weather is probably Oh, this is one this is

David Gruber 4:21

not fall. Yeah, this is this is perfect. It's great. I'm going leaving my office to sit outside at lunchtime if I can just to get the sun. I feel like I'm vitamin D deficient after all the four years in Denmark. Let's just see it just want the sun.

Kevin Stoker 4:34

You know, it is quite a journey. Tell me about you know, as you went from New Zealand and then to Copenhagen, what you do kind of give us an idea what was what were some of the things you learned along the way.

David Gruber 4:49

You always learn something when you go overseas, you know if you've traveled, it's always a good learning experience. I think I've taken something away from each culture you know, freshest in my mind is To the Danish culture, and I think they do a lot of things that I really they're really family, family oriented place to be. There's small things that you observe that you want to take on and bring home. So we got invited over to our neighbor's house. All the in all the family comes in together. So they, they, they wait in their cars down the road until the other family members arrive. And they all come in at the same time. And then you shake everybody's hand when you enter, and all the kids greet you. So you sort of do this little ritual. And I think that's nice, you know, they they value this thing called Heuga, which I don't know if it became popular in the US, but there was books going around Europe about like, how we should value Danish hookah, which basically is the Danish word for coziness. It's about being together, it's about creating small spaces with candlelight, and it's the most Heuga if you're in together with your with your good friends, you're drinking wine. And it's a terrible snowstorm outside and you're in a cabin. I mean, that's who this is about this closeness. So they find ways to create this closeness with other people. And I think that's something that I've really cherished and valued there. And in New Zealand, I mean, the outdoors, I think in Denmark, they enjoyed doing outdoor walks too. But when you go to New Zealand and mean it's a place like no other you know, it's you're out in the middle of the South Pacific Ocean, and you are just get to enjoy just the all the beautiful sceneries and all that stuff. So yeah, I mean, you take something away from everywhere you go.

Kevin Stoker 6:28

So from New Zealand, and you took kind of the outdoors and being in the outdoors and everything else.

David Gruber 6:34

Yeah, yeah, definitely. And, you know, I think that New Zealand has also done a really good job with the, with the multiple languages at the university uses. So they've incorporated Maori, the traditional people of New Zealand. So they incorporate the language into the university system, and they encourage you to, you know, respect and learn the Maori traditions. And so that's not overlooked. And I think they've done a good job at that there. Obviously, there are still some tensions between Maori people and the settler communities that came in, you know, one to 200 years ago. But you know, you learn about different cultures, and you learn to respect them for what they bring.

Kevin Stoker 7:09

That's awesome. Okay, so how about Hong Kong?

David Gruber 7:13

Hong Kong? Oh, man, I don't know, I just learned so much about Hong Kong. And you learn about just the whole Chinese system. And I mean, everything i What, what did I take away in particular that I loved about Hong Kong? Other than the food? I think that? Yeah, I think that Hong Kongers are really good with their own international perspective, because they're interesting political situation with China. And they, they have a lot of so many international travelers coming in out of out of Hong Kong, I think something that's really impressed me about people who live in Hong Kong is how open they are to other cultures and how hospitable they are. And tolerant they are. So I think that I could see that there. Would I work there and you know, someone who is there as a foreigner working in their country, I always felt welcome. So I tried to take that too. That's great.

Dave Nourse 8:02

David, maybe you could tell us a little bit about your research. This podcast is geared towards people who may not be familiar with the faculty here. You're a new faculty member. And we'd love to hear about kind of what are you doing now that you're here? I mean, if there are new doors that are opening, but maybe what have you been doing? And what are you really curious about?

David Gruber 8:20

Oh, what I've been doing is the field of rhetoric, you know, which is traditionally understood as the field of studying of persuasion. And you know, a lot of people in fill the rhetoric, study speeches, or political speeches, and how politicians persuade us with the words they use, the way they frame the issues and all that stuff. But what interests me about rhetoric is the role of the body and being persuaded. So I've done a lot of work on the rhetoric of neuroscience and the neuroscience of rhetoric. So, the first one is like looking at why we adopt neuroscience, how the metaphors in neuroscience help us to communicate the findings, and how we understand neuroscientific work. And the other one is how neuroscientific findings can inform the long history of rhetoric going back to the ancient Greeks. Because I think there's, you know, the role of the body and understanding why we're moved to do this or that or why we, why we behave in the way we do, we can learn a lot from neuroscience, so I tried to play on that intersection. So that's really what I'm interested in.

Kevin Stoker 9:16

What if you look at that, more specifically, and say, what would be a good example of this that you've looked at in your research?

David Gruber 9:25

I've done a lot of articles on this finding called mirror neurons like MIM IRR or not M iari. The mirroring neurons, my dissertation started that work where basically my PhD dissertation was how this finding on mirroring mirroring other people. So if you're sitting like this, I sit like this you not I not? Yeah, there was a finding in the early 90s. I suggested that we have some neurons in our brain that simulate our lived environment so that even though we are not ourselves doing something, we simulate it in our body so we couldn't so that we're able To understand what's being done. So one example would be if you watch sports on TV and you see someone do a great catch it, you imagine what it's like to have that great catch in your body gets excited, you know, and those were the are the mirror neurons acting. But what I noticed when I started to look into this work is that people in different fields were interpreting this finding different ways and using it differently. So my dissertation was about how robotics used it how the phenomenology in the field of philosophy used it, and how rhetoricians were wanting to use it, to inform their own work, or to legitimize the theory they already had, or to make a new robot. So I was looking at how neuroscience is used creatively across the disciplines, irregardless of whether they got it sort of got it right or got it wrong, you know, it was just about how it became a creative, creative resource, a pool, that neuroscience was functioning in the disciplines to inspire people in their own fields to do something new. And that's what I was writing about and studying in the initial days. And that turned into a series of five different articles.

Kevin Stoker 10:56

How did you kind of get into this? I mean, obviously, starting rhetoric, persuasion, and looking at that. What got you in this particular area? What was it? What was the aha moment?

David Gruber 11:11

Well, the aha moment for mirror neurons were some pieces written in the field of rhetoric that was using the mirror neurons for theory. So I was saw that they became important to the field of rhetoric, you know, I said, I'm interested in how the body reacts in a non rational way, why we do things because of how we feel. And rhetoric has not prioritized tradition that prioritize the emotions coming out of the tradition of the Enlightenment, where arguments and reasons and logic, you know, you give three good reasons and that should convince people to do something that's been mainly prioritized. So when people who were Theorizing the role of the body in persuasion, were turning to mirror neurons that caught my attention. But my really my aha moment was before that, when I was I was, I mean, prior to my Ph. D. program, I was interested in writing, I took a master's degree in writing from University of California, so I was doing a lot of writing. And I was reading about writing, and I just was interested in how people are crap. We're crafting persuasive texts in the structures of text. And I fell into discussion about neuroscience and the relationship to writing and how different people read and it just got me interested in the brain. And I think that's probably not an accident, because, you know, I also have suffer from migraines. And so to a lot of people, my family, I've had several brain scans and other issues with my brain. And so I realized sort of how important neuroscience is I, I, myself had been affected by, you know, studies to the brain. So I think that it caught my attention for those my own personal reasons, but also for just how much the neurosciences are influential in helping us understand human behaviors.

Dave Nourse 12:50

That's interesting. That's fascinating. Well, maybe we can back up a little bit. David, tell us a little bit about you. What led you to I mean, you talked about your love of writing, but maybe you could talk a little bit about, you know, who was David when you were, you know, pre University pre PhD. What inspires you as a rock star is what I was hoping.

David Gruber 13:12

Well, I my main hobby that I still try to do every day is play the electric rock guitar as loud as possible to drive my neighbor's crazy. So that's what I do now to relax too if I especially if I'm writing I have to take a break and play the guitar to sort of clear my mind out.

Kevin Stoker 13:28

Not just any guitar, not just any. I did not play

David Gruber 13:31

electric guitar. Yeah, the electric guitar. Yeah. So from my earliest days, in the my preteen eras, I always wanted to play the guitar be a rock star, I think when I was maybe 14, I sold my junior high school saxophone, which was too nerdy for me. I didn't like putting my mouth on the instruments, I want an instrument, right octave, like put my, you know, empty the spit out of the side. I wanted to play the guitar. And that was around the time Nirvana was really popular. I said, I'm just going to try to learn every Nirvana song I could. So I found a guitar teacher who just taught me by listening. So he said, find, find the songs you like, listen to him, try to figure them out. And I'll give you help. So I've actually I don't know how to read music. I just learned to play the guitar when I was 14 or 15 by listening to a song and trying to imitate it and I've been playing ever since. So that's what I was doing. I would was not a very good student as an undergraduate to be honest, because I was far more interested in playing the guitar sometime around. After I graduated with my undergraduate degree. I went and worked in the film industry for a while and somewhere in that time, I got more interested in intellectual ideas and philosophy and the guitar fell a little bit to the wayside. But I still play as a hobby. I still write songs. I wrote a lot of new songs over the pandemic, so I'm hoping to record those soon. Maybe you can help me out with that. You got this great studio we

Dave Nourse 14:47

have we have we note we may know guy.

Kevin Stoker 14:49

Yeah. We have a performance studio as well. So that would work. Yeah.

Dave Nourse 14:54

David, let's, let's tell tell me a little bit more about you mentioned that moment right that moment. And when kind of the guitar wasn't necessarily the priority, you started reading and you know, that intellectual side of your brain really kind of lit up. What was it? I mean, what what was that snap moment?

David Gruber 15:11

Well, I took a writing class at USC and the professor made us read some of the classic philosophical texts, even though it was a class about fiction writing. So made us read, you know, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, I don't know who else we read, we read the big stuff. And his idea was that you need to understand how humans function in order to write convincing characters. So we were reading philosophy about human behavior in order to write fiction stories. And I think I saw the connection there to writing as I was sort of saying earlier, and to rhetoric, human beat studies of human behavior, from all kinds of different perspectives can inform you. So that sent me down the trail, some macing. Yeah. And I had another great professor at USC, who was a, who was a comedian in Vegas. For years. He taught me how he taught us a comedy class, and he had us all write funny things and follow the thread and explain why they were funny and talk about humor. And I love that. So it's my only connection to Vegas early on, but that guy's name was Shelley Berman. He since passed away, but he was a great comic for many years and also played the father in in that, what's that show with Larry that Larry David created after Seinfeld, but he was in that show for a while

Kevin Stoker 16:22

arrested. That's a great experience. So obviously, you got a lot of good influence there. Till you know, I'm kind of curious. Tell us where you grew up. Kind of your you know, tell us a little bit about your, your background there. Your family.

David Gruber 16:37

Oh, okay. Where did I grew up? Well, I've moved around a lot. Not surprising, right? So I kept that tradition. I grew up in some of the Carolinas. So we're going back to the Ph. D. program was sort of a return to the Carolinas. I also grew up in Florida, I consider sort of Vero Beach, Florida to be my hometown. That's on the east coast. It's the former home of the LA Dodgers. They since moved for the spring training camp was but that was a great place to be a kid with the Dodgers in town every spring and family on the beach. So we still go back to Vero Beach, Florida, a lot to see friends. And that's where we do our vacations. I also lived in Ohio, I lived in Southern California. And now I live in Las Vegas. There you go. So yeah, the family comes from the newspaper industry. My mom and dad were both my dad was a publisher or you know, managing newspapers. And my mom was a reporter at various levels in different newspapers. And even though she's retired, she's kind of lying that she's retired because she still writes a column for her local newspaper, a humorous column that unfortunately sometimes contains my stories. And I said, Mom, why you don't write about me? You actually she calls me like, I think she calls me handsome son. She doesn't use my name. She has my handsome sons moving to Las Vegas, and I get to go visit him. You know, she writes this whole column. People in the hometown think it's hilarious because she shares all of our family secrets. And she writes about her husband who's called hubby. And her granddaughter my sister's daughter's called delightful granddaughter. So she's uh, she was also a stand up comic for a while when we lived in the Carolinas, she used to go to downtown Charlotte to do sort of comedy about my crazy family back, you know, like the Roseanne Barr style comedy background days. I was too young to really hear her routines. But yeah, my mom's an outrageous sort of extroverted writer. And my dad is kind of like, sensible businessman with good advice, you know, kind of stuff.

Dave Nourse 18:27

The perfect kind of parents. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, there's a balance. Maybe you can share with us a little bit about if I were walking into your classroom for the first time, you know, for a semester long course, what can I expect about you? So teacher,

David Gruber 18:40

you, I would say, I'm going to stay on your tail. But I know you look like a troublemaker. No, I'm just kidding. I try to work through activities. I mean, mainly, you know, if I'm teaching my class, I think that having fun and laughing is probably one of the most important things, because you're way more likely to engage the material and remember the material I think, if we're just having fun, so I tried to lead a loose classroom, a fun classroom, I try not to talk and lecture too much. I mean, you know, you need a little bit of input. But basically, we tried to do things in the classroom. Today, we were looking at different works of art and draw, I was teaching visual rhetoric today in my rhetoric class for undergraduates, how to analyze images from rhetorical points of view. So we were like looking at different paintings and drawing lines on them to understand this method of analyzing images. And so I tried to do try to do active things. Next week, we're going to take a little field trip around campus to analyze the debt, some of the different buildings on campus with the same methods. So that's what you can expect. Hopefully, it's fine. I don't know they don't always have fun, but I can only do what I can do.

Kevin Stoker 19:41

Well, tell us about your family. Tell us about your wife. How'd you How'd you meet your wife?

David Gruber 19:45

She was sitting at my table at college I went to the cafeteria and for some weird reason I decide kind of like Why eat oatmeal every day. I only I was telling you earlier that before we started the podcast that I only eat oatmeal every morning and I'm obsessed with it but when I was in college It was sitting in the same place in the cafeteria every day. And I because it had this beautiful window in this view. So I said I would get my, whatever that terrible pizza they used to serve us or whatever they cooked up. And then I would go sit in this at this one table. And I went there that day. And for some, you know, I was there by myself, I don't know, my friends, we always sat at the same table, but no one was there. So I just took my tray and I went to the table, and there's a group of girls sitting there. And this one girl in the chair that was facing the window. So I was like, Oh, that's a pretty girl. I don't know, I can't I can't sit there though. Because she's with her whole group of friends, you know, you it's hard to break into that it's kind of weird if I just came over. So I said that the next table over and I kind of watched her as I was eating, and I thought you know what, I'm gonna try to talk to her afterwards. So I, I finished up quickly, and I went outside the cafeteria, which we called the calf. And I was waiting and the but she came trumping out with this huge group of girls. You know, they all stayed together, I didn't get to meet her. But back then the college was small enough, you know, this was Biola University in Southern California. This was a very small school, the school was small enough where they made this like your book style thing where you could, everyone's picture was in it. And we had this bulletin board system, or we could email it just, you know, intra University bulletin board system, like AOL chat or something like that. And so I found her picture in the book. And I was so lucky, because in the picture that she had taken for the, for the school's yearbook, she was wearing a shirt that said South Carolina on it. And there was nobody in southern in that school in Southern California from South Carolina, and I had grown up for a period of time in South Carolina. So I just sent her a little message on the bulletin board said, Hey, are you from South Carolina, I noticed your picture in the yearbook from South Carolina. I'm also from South Carolina, if you ever want to get together and talk, that would be great. And then at the end, or whatever, you know, because that was cool. She still asked about that, like the first message, or whatever. But she responded, hey, and so it all worked out.

Kevin Stoker 21:49

That's pretty cool.

David Gruber 21:50

Yeah. It played out to a hole that unfortunately, the summer hit right then. So it was a long summer of emailing each other over this bulletin board system until the next year when she came back to school. Because I didn't live in South Carolina anymore at the time. So then we met back up the next year, school started, like the first week of school went on our first date, and we've been together ever since.

Dave Nourse 22:13

That's a beautiful story. Yeah, it's

Kevin Stoker 22:14

a great story.

David Gruber 22:15

So you know, keep an eye out for who's sitting in your seat. You never know.

Kevin Stoker 22:19

That's right. That's right,

Dave Nourse 22:19

or whatever,

David Gruber 22:21

or whatever. Yeah.

Dave Nourse 22:24

David, is there anything that we haven't asked you that you think would kind of give us a little bit of light into you? Or your classes or your research or just, you know, kind of what one can expect if they were looking for a mentor or just an advisor to somebody who is coming to UNLV?

David Gruber 22:40

Oh, well, I don't know, I think that I am. Well, I guess maybe one thing if you're talking about advisors, and UNLV, and students and stuff like that, I'm really interested in students who are willing to take risks at putting together putting strange things together. I think a lot of people felt that it was it was a bit strange to use the traditions and concepts of the field of rhetoric and try to put it together with contemporary neuroscience. But I like I like taking the disciplines and mashing them up so that we don't get all in these silos that you know, the arts are so separate from the sciences and we can't talk to each other learn from each other. So you know, I would love it if we had some science students are from biology students are someone who wanted to cross over and learn about communication and come into the MA program and communication or someone who just comes from a wildly different background but can see the connections to a field like the studies of persuasion. That's what really gets me excited so that's maybe one thing I would say you know, our our stuff got lost. It was like three months late arriving here and customs decide to pull it for because of course that's the way it works. But I think I concluded they probably pulled our stuff out because I'm I'm also an obsessive rock collector and I probably had rocks in bags under our clothes and boxes and that probably didn't look good on the customs X rays. So I'm guessing I shot myself in the foot there on accident.

Kevin Stoker 24:04

Well, rocks No wait, what you got to know about the more about this. What is this about rocks? What?

David Gruber 24:12

Rock looks lucky? Yeah, I don't know. I like to I like to have a rock in the car. I have a rock, you know, a rock here. I like to have rocks around. So I'll bring the rocks and you can see rock. There's nothing special about rock. They're just special to me. It's like, that's a rock from a trail I was on, you know, 10 years ago in Hong Kong. You know, that's just a rock. But I guess customs doesn't like it when you take rocks from around the world and carry them they're not supposed to bring dirt in something and so I'm guessing that's why my stuff got specially pulled but all my rocks are very clean, very safe. And they're well packaged in there now here in Las Vegas.

Dave Nourse 24:44

From Rockstar to rock enthusiast, yes. Roi. Impressive.

Kevin Stoker 24:48

I think we've got a title of this podcast.

David Gruber 24:52

I could have been a geologist. Yeah, that would be exciting. But you know, you end up where you end up.

Dave Nourse 24:57

David, thank you very much for taking the time to chat.

David Gruber 25:00

Oh thank you for the interesting podcasts and I look forward to listening to all the other ones as well

Kevin Stoker 25:05

That's great well thank you for joining us