Four Countries, 7,000 Students, and One Lesson About Communication

What Thirty Years Taught Me About Communication Between Humans and AI

The Interview

HOST: You’ve lived in four countries, taught more than 7,000 adults, and spent two years learning to work with AI. What do you bring to the table?

ATTILA: Thirty years of watching where understanding breaks down, and learning how to repair it. I taught adults who were starting over, and my job was always the same: find the missing piece and hand it over. It turns out that’s exactly what communication between humans and AI demands. I’ve put roughly a thousand hours into ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok, and I turned what I learned into a book, Round 3: The Next Level of Communication, under the pen name A.W. Wolf.

HOST: Why should anyone care about a teacher’s take on AI?

ATTILA: Because most people use AI like a glorified Google. I use it as a partner. I supply the ideas, the experience, and the judgment. The AI helps me explore, organize, and refine. I reject what doesn’t fit. Think of the nail gun. It didn’t build the house. The builder’s knowledge did. The nail gun just made the work faster.

HOST: You grew up in Hungary, then lived in Germany, the USA, and Canada. What did each place give you?

ATTILA: Hungary gave me a first-class education and an ear for what’s said and what’s left unsaid. Germany gave my family a temporary home for two and a half years. That’s where I learned German and English at the same time, and where I started writing. The USA gave me thirteen years and a classroom full of ambitious adults. Canada gave me a home and a platform. I carry all of it into everything I write and teach.

HOST: So what’s next?

ATTILA: I want to keep serving the countries that shaped me, in a new way. Communication is the common thread between neighbors, between countries, and now between humans and intelligent systems. I want to share what I’ve learned so each of those conversations goes better.

That’s the short version. Here’s the long one.

It Started on a Dojo Floor in Eger

When people hear I practiced Kyokushin karate, they imagine broken boards and action movies. The truth is less glamorous. Most of martial arts is repetition. The same block. The same punch. The same kick. Again and again.

I joined Zoltan Lakatos’s dojo in Eger at twenty. One session, we threw at least 300 roundhouse kicks. My legs were on fire and I wondered if my instructor had declared war on our muscles. Years later I understood he wasn’t teaching us to kick. He was teaching our nervous systems.

Proof came one evening in my university dormitory. A friend hid in a dark hallway to scare me, and before I even knew who it was, my leg snapped into a roundhouse kick. I pulled it at the last instant and only tapped him on the head. Neither of us got hurt. He never tried that again, and years later he became the police captain in Eger.

Decades later I heard the Greek word praus, which describes strength under control. Someone capable of anger but not ruled by it. I realized I’d been training for that philosophy my whole life without a name for it. And when I started teaching Excel, I found the dojo had simply become a computer classroom. Nobody masters a nested IF function after one demonstration. You imitate, you make mistakes, you get frustrated, something clicks, and then you repeat it a few hundred more times.

Germany: Two Languages, One Notebook

Germany was never meant to be permanent. It was a temporary home, two and a half years of waiting, while my relatives in the USA were where we planned to build our future.

So I did the practical thing. I learned two languages at once. German was all around me, and English was the one I was aiming for. Every day I lived inside one language while studying another, which taught me something no classroom ever did: communication is a bridge you build while you’re standing on it.

That’s also where I started writing. Stories first, then ideas for books, and sketches and illustrations to go with them. Most of it lived in notebooks. Some of it looked like daydreaming, but it wasn’t. Much of what I picture and write today started on those pages, years before I had the skills, the language, or the tools to make it real.

I think about that whenever a student tells me they’re “just” waiting, “just” practicing, or “just” a beginner. Waiting years are rarely wasted. They’re where you build the foundation. The same discipline from the dojo, one repetition at a time, was working quietly on two languages and one notebook.

The Flood and the Box of Tissues

In September 1924, the Neva River flooded Pavlov’s research compound in Petrograd. His dogs were trapped in their cages as the water rose. They survived, but afterward the carefully trained responses were gone. The terror had cleared the shelves.

Pavlov tried everything to restore them. What finally worked was almost too simple: when a researcher stayed in the room with a dog during testing, the animal recovered. The cure wasn’t medication or time. It was a person. Present, consistent, and trustworthy.

Nearly a century later, a student named Chelsea walked into my bookkeeping class with a full box of tissues. She had taken bookkeeping before, and she’d packed for the ordeal she expected. I told her she wouldn’t need it. She didn’t. Later she wrote that I helped her not only overcome her fear of bookkeeping but excel at it.

Over the years, dozens of students arrived carrying invisible versions of that same box. Their brains had filed school under threat, not under learning. A frightened person can’t learn, and it has nothing to do with ability. It’s like trying to read a book during a fire drill. Until someone trustworthy stays in the room, nothing new sticks. That is a communication problem before it is a teaching problem.

The $40,000 File Extension

In 1998, four people chartered a private jet from Wayne, New Jersey to Texas. The bill was $40,000. In their briefcase was an Excel file holding millions of dollars of real estate transactions. One of those four people was my wife.

The night before, a colleague named John renamed the file from Texas.xls to Texas.John. The icon went blank, and the file seemed to vanish. For thirty minutes, four educated professionals searched in a rising panic while the jet waited. At 9:30 that morning, my wife called me. I had her search for Texas.* and the file appeared instantly. The asterisk tells Windows to find anything starting with Texas, whatever comes after the dot. She renamed it, typed .xls back in, saved it to a floppy disk, and they boarded the plane. Under ten minutes.

John wasn’t careless. He was never taught what a file extension is. A file extension is not decoration. It’s an instruction. That gap isn’t personal. It’s institutional, because somewhere along the way schools stopped teaching the foundation and started teaching only the tools. It’s one more way communication breaks: someone knew the answer, and nobody asked them in time.

The Competence Paradox

For thirty years I’ve watched the same pattern. People who do excellent work, who fix problems before anyone notices, become almost invisible. Nobody promotes the person who made everything look easy. Nobody writes about the fire that never started. I call it the Competence Paradox.

This past term, I told my Business Communications students I was building a network of professionals who communicate together and benefit their community. Then I asked them to prove it with their own lives. One built a presentation on self-sabotage. Another designed a communication plan so a law firm’s clients would all be heard. Someone tackled forest fire prevention in Canada. Another used art as therapy to show how to talk about mental health without flinching.

Then they turned it back on me. A student named Sarah wrote a public thank-you letter on LinkedIn and Substack, and other former students joined in. Thirty years and more than seven thousand students, and it took a handful of them speaking up, unprompted, for anyone outside the classroom to notice. That’s the other option. You don’t have to chase the spotlight and you don’t have to hide from it. You build something real enough that people put the light on you because they want to.

What Thirty Years Taught Me About Talking to Machines

When AI arrived, I wasn’t starting from zero. I’d spent decades learning how two parties misunderstand each other, and the skills transfer almost perfectly. Include the audience, the format, and what to avoid. When something goes wrong, treat it as information about what was missing. Verify confident claims, whether they say “done” or “error,” against something outside the conversation. Spend the hours.

That last one matters most. I started with ChatGPT by asking for a joke about three famous men walking into a bar. Then came recipes, then Excel formulas, then translating my own novel. At one point I seriously considered divorcing every AI program. What changed was learning to communicate. I documented dozens of real exchanges where the AI and I corrected each other, and after each one I wrote a prevention prompt so readers could skip the pain. That became Round 3.

I also believe we need a third category for creative work. Not human-made, not AI-generated, but human-AI collaborative, where a person with decades of experience supplies the ideas, directs the work, rejects what fails, and takes final responsibility. Anything worth value requires long-term effort, and that doesn’t change when a tool gets better.

Where This Goes Next

I’ve served four countries. Now I’d like to keep serving them in a new way, by sharing what I’ve learned to improve communication between communities, countries, and intelligent systems.

If a teacher, coach, or mentor changed your life, tell their story in the comments and tag them. I’m collecting thirty stories from thirty years, and I’d like yours to be part of it. If you run a school, a community group, a media outlet, or a team that wants practical, tested communication skills, my door is open.

Read my relevant blog posts

Attila Farkas has taught for more than 30 years across Hungary, the United States, and Canada, has trained over 7,000 students, and was recognized in the top 2% of computer instructors in North America. He is the author of Round 3: The Next Level of Communication as A.W. Wolf.