The Art of Manliness - The Fascinating Secrets of Your Voice

00:00:00.000 brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast

00:00:10.780 unless you're complete recluse you probably use your voice many times a day whether talking to

00:00:15.080 your spouse chatting with co-workers or singing along to music in the car yet you've probably

00:00:20.140 never thought all that much about something that's literally happening right under your nose

00:00:23.800 my guest day says that once you do start thinking about your voice it reveals fascinating secrets

00:00:28.060 to who you are name is john colapinto and he's the author of this is the voice john and i begin our

00:00:32.900 conversation with what exactly the voice is how the voice develops in babies why men and women speak

00:00:37.660 in lower and higher voices and what each sex finds attractive in the voice of the other we then

00:00:42.060 discuss why people develop accents and how these accents set boundaries as to who is in and who

00:00:46.080 is out of a group we then dig into the modern phenomena of vocal fry and uptalk and how when

00:00:50.720 you end everything in a question it can sound like your submissive supplicant we get into how singing

00:00:55.400 makes us feel super vulnerable and why modern pop music can sound soulless when its inherent

00:00:59.600 imperfections are stripped out we enter conversation with the way our voices degrade as we age and john's

00:01:04.300 call to own and use your voice after the show's over check out our show notes at aom.is slash this is the

00:01:09.900 voice john colapinto welcome to the show thank you so much so you are an author of a new book called

00:01:24.980 this is the voice where you explore the human voice the physiology of it the history of it the

00:01:30.820 culture of the human voice what caused you to take a deep dive into the science and anthropology of our

00:01:37.300 voice yeah it was in some ways a long time coming i think i really needed the initial spur of 20 years

00:01:44.280 ago injuring my voice in a permanent way i was actually at the time a staff writer at rolling stone

00:01:49.920 magazine yawn winner the owner and editor was putting together a rock band i was tapped to be

00:01:55.900 the singer because it got around the offices that i could at least hold a tune but i had never done

00:02:01.780 proper vocal warm-ups i didn't know how to rehearse i oversang horribly like way too loud at rehearsals

00:02:08.640 and the gig itself was scary 2 000 people lots of celebrities in the audience and i sort of overdid it there as

00:02:16.000 well and ended up with this rasp in my voice which was eventually diagnosed by a laryngologist as

00:02:22.420 they're called as a vocal polyp and it's effectively like a bleed in one of your vocal cords from overuse

00:02:28.880 that becomes like a bump of scar tissue on one of your vocal cords so that got me thinking you know

00:02:34.680 all of a sudden i couldn't take my voice for granted couldn't sing anymore but actually 10 years later

00:02:40.460 when i did a story on a vocal surgeon who had saved adele's career she had a polyp much like mine

00:02:47.620 he was the guy that said to me you know this is messing you up more than you're acknowledging like

00:02:52.780 you are limiting your emotional range because we do emotion in voice with pitch changes up and down

00:02:59.480 and he said you're speaking in kind of a one register in order to sound a little smoother you know you're

00:03:06.140 not projecting who you are because you're sort of coming across as this raspy voiced like bourbon

00:03:11.420 swilling cigarette smoker which i'm not anymore and haven't been for years so you know he put it in

00:03:17.580 my head that even something as tiny as a little bump on one vocal cord is changing how you behave

00:03:23.160 how people perceive you how you sound i mean i stopped speaking as much i'm an extrovert i stopped

00:03:29.260 talking as much because i would be extra raspy and this really was the beginning of thinking about

00:03:35.740 writing a book that really looked at the whole wide scope of what our voices are doing that we

00:03:41.060 don't really acknowledge all right so this is going to sound like a really basic question but i actually

00:03:45.180 it's this is really profound what exactly is our voice what is it no that's the that's the sixty

00:03:52.520 four thousand dollar question absolutely because we just assume oh yeah voice i mean it's right under

00:03:58.240 our noses literally but we don't think about the fact that it actually is a signaling and

00:04:04.400 communication system that is transmitting emotion but also of course language you know the linguistic

00:04:10.520 layer it's telling people something about where we come from from accent and so on it can even

00:04:15.800 communicate sexual orientation if someone has a very strongly gay voice as in the guys in whatever

00:04:22.320 it's called queer eye for the straight guy or something but you know it's not enough just to talk

00:04:26.680 about what the signal is doing when you think about how we're doing it you suddenly realize wait

00:04:31.920 there's no single vocal organ i mean the vocal cords just create a buzzing sound uh that we actually

00:04:40.180 then have to sculpt into speech by moving our articulators lips and tongue but we're actually

00:04:46.720 powering the vocal cords with air that we're pushing up from our lungs and you know we take that for

00:04:52.380 granted but chimpanzees can't do it like we do we have to draw out our exhalations we actually hold back

00:04:58.920 in order to breathe like out for a long time to string words together chimpanzees go because they

00:05:06.760 can just do little short bursts so we're we're actually it's like all these different body parts

00:05:12.520 are acting to create this signal that is so complex so i mean what is the voice who is it singing is it

00:05:19.660 just talking is it coughing laughing it's all of the above and it's not just physiology it's like it's a

00:05:25.500 it's a cognition it's a mental it's like in the mind as well oh yeah it's it's i mean that's exactly

00:05:31.420 it i mean it's all everything that i just described is of course controlled by our brain and you know

00:05:38.440 we don't think of it this way but speech talking is a physical gesture i mean you're literally moving

00:05:45.320 body parts with exquisite control and precision and hitting targets in your mouth with your tongue tip

00:05:52.200 either to say a t or with the back of your tongue to say a k i mean the stuff that we're doing that's

00:05:58.120 just you know motor control again is all controlled by the brain but then we've got that layer you know

00:06:04.120 that high executive cortical layer that's giving us language too so we're putting together words and

00:06:09.760 you know putting thoughts into words which we then get out through our vocal apparatus so there is so

00:06:15.780 much going on up in that brain of ours with voice so let's go back kind of hash out some more of the

00:06:21.560 physical aspects of voice you know humans are the only animals that can speak with a voice

00:06:26.200 why can't our you know primate relatives what what is about their physiology that's preventing them to

00:06:32.040 have a voice yeah you know it's it's fascinating it's a combination of exactly as you say their

00:06:38.360 physiology it's literally where their larynx which is the thing that holds our vocal cords it's like the

00:06:43.620 voice box and men can see theirs because it's where the adam's apple is that point is literally where

00:06:49.060 your vocal cords join and then extend backwards towards your spine but anyway ours are about mid

00:06:54.940 neck if you actually look at a chimpanzee if you dissect one you discover that its larynx and vocal

00:07:00.300 cords are right up in the back of its mouth just under the soft palate at the back of the mouth

00:07:06.040 what that does is it eliminates the sort of throat resonating chamber that we have there's that vertical

00:07:13.460 part of our throat that actually is you know acts to amplify sound and to filter it and we actually do

00:07:20.980 that also with our mouth so that's how we do vowels is where i'm going with this and vowels are absolutely

00:07:27.960 critical to speech if like a chimpanzee you can basically only make the vowel sound uh which is about

00:07:34.700 what they can do with the mouth chamber you can't say a sentence like who hid the hat in the hut hud so

00:07:44.040 i mean you know i'm just using an h and d pair of consonants but i'm putting a different vowel inside

00:07:50.480 each one and saying who hid the hat in the hut now that's literally you know a major aspect of how language

00:07:58.240 is even possible so chimps don't have that but they also lack the sort of parts of the brain or at

00:08:05.900 least as far as we know actually this is actually i guess something that we can never know for certain

00:08:10.360 they seem to lack those parts of the brain that comprehend words as sound which they can then try

00:08:17.140 to put out through their vocal apparatus but you know again yes their bodies just aren't outfitted for

00:08:23.520 speech i thought it was interesting you highlight the point that having our larynx down lower actually

00:08:29.120 makes us more susceptible to choking yeah that's an amazing and actually darwin was the first to

00:08:34.620 notice that because our larynx is so low it actually brings the opening to our lungs right beside where

00:08:41.540 the opening to our esophagus or food pipe is so every time we swallow food has to pass across this very

00:08:48.360 dangerous opening to our lungs which is where our vocal cords open and close and so people have been

00:08:54.480 choking to death for centuries you know because of a mistimed swallow the heimlich maneuver has helped

00:09:00.360 with that but darwin said this is totally against everything i know about natural selection which is

00:09:07.140 supposed to increase our chances of living rather than increasing our chances of dying and he saw that

00:09:13.840 our larynx was lower he just didn't know why it was you know in the 1950s and 60s that people

00:09:19.920 discovered that throat resonance chamber that i mentioned and its importance to creating vowels

00:09:25.340 and a wonderful linguist and scientist at brown university named philip lieberman said hey man the

00:09:31.260 reason that larynx you know is so low is it actually yes it increased the chances of dying but it also

00:09:37.360 improved or created our ability to speak which just outweighed you know the dangers of choking you know

00:09:45.620 evolution being kind of a balance between things that are advantageous and you know disadvantageous being

00:09:52.000 able to speak as a primate that could not run as fast as a leopard or wasn't as strong as a bear or whatever

00:09:58.500 predator was there our ability to speak was critical not only to our surviving but to shooting to the top of the

00:10:06.240 food chain because by speaking to one another we were able to make plans and we could outsmart these

00:10:11.980 bigger faster more lethal predators so the descended larynx this larynx that literally moved down our

00:10:18.560 neck over the course of evolution was a surprisingly critical thing for our species and do we know about

00:10:26.820 when that happened like when did humans start using their voice and then i guess that would the question

00:10:30.700 be like how did the act of using a voice change our thinking yeah well you know the i guess it's

00:10:37.320 believed about 500 000 years ago what you know we first had to stand upright from being primates that

00:10:43.820 were knuckle dragging knuckle walkers and in standing upright it's theorized that you know that partly is

00:10:49.740 what started to literally pull the larynx down in the neck interestingly though it probably just continued

00:10:56.880 to descend even before we had language and that's because it gave an advantage in making us sound more

00:11:03.140 threatening when we make a a deep voice like growl or or grunt you because we have that throat resonance

00:11:11.120 chamber it actually sounds more threatening and it's a size bluff you sound bigger and more threatening

00:11:16.140 so it probably was offering an advantage to this rather weak and slow creature this primate but as we

00:11:22.920 crossed over about six million years ago when we departed companies from chimps and we started to become

00:11:28.900 these human species you know it was really a again about four to five hundred thousand years ago it's

00:11:35.100 theorized that the larynx was in a position that permitted vowels and that we had the motor control

00:11:42.000 and speed of tongue and lip movement that gave us the ability to actually say stuff how that affected our

00:11:48.960 our brains is fascinating i mean you know this guy lieberman who i mentioned departs company from

00:11:54.840 almost every other scientist on earth at the moment who follows noam chomsky's idea that language began

00:12:02.080 as thought which in many ways is a bizarre thing to claim thought not communication i mean as you pointed

00:12:08.880 out other animals have been communicating with their voices you know threats and mating calls and so on since

00:12:15.520 time immemorial we were obviously doing that in our primate past the idea that language didn't evolve

00:12:21.780 from from like vocal sounds is sheer insanity and lieberman thought so and he spent 50 years looking

00:12:28.980 at how that descending larynx and various other changes literally to our genetic makeup which they've

00:12:36.020 discovered was actually what created language in a sense language followed the voice in a feedback loop i mean

00:12:44.340 it sounds weird how would that work well we're constantly feeding back into our brains through

00:12:49.340 bodily movements like with our hands and digits that's when we started making fire and making tools

00:12:54.520 our brains got smarter with more sophisticated abilities to move our bodies that includes the vocal

00:13:01.600 cords tongue lips and in lieberman's beautiful conception which has been proved by a lot of genetic evidence

00:13:08.660 lately it's almost certain that language followed the voice i mean talk about not giving the voice enough

00:13:16.180 sort of importance in in the world of science these days it's critical that we change our thinking on

00:13:21.920 this it's interesting it makes thought a very physical act right yes yeah yes and you know and that too

00:13:29.940 lieberman was was kind of obsessed with because he actually discovered that you know he sort of traced

00:13:35.360 thought to the earliest movement of like mollusks and stuff with with particular motor pathways now on

00:13:41.840 the one hand that sounds totally bizarre on the other when you think about thinking there's so much

00:13:47.140 movement involved you feel your thoughts go from a to b to c to d you you navigate through a mental

00:13:54.600 space in order to assemble ideas a lot of it happens unconsciously but a certain amount in fact a lot of it is

00:14:00.800 something that we actually feel as movement in our brains i believe all right so our voice changed the

00:14:06.340 ways we think it gave gave rise to language and allowed us to be you know homo sapiens let's talk

00:14:11.720 about how on an individual level like a baby goes from basically sounding like a chimp they just can

00:14:18.040 wail wah wah wah that's it exactly to the point where like by year two year three like they're saying

00:14:24.180 full sentences what goes on yeah well stunningly one of the things that goes on maybe i'll start

00:14:30.640 with them actually still in the womb babies are actually learning language from the minute they're

00:14:36.380 hearing is in place and that happens at about 28 weeks gestation as a fetus they can hear their mom

00:14:43.520 through their through her abdominal wall but they also pick up a lot of her voice signal through what's

00:14:49.300 called bone conduction as she speaks her whole skeleton and her musculature vibrates and it carries it down

00:14:56.480 into that amniotic fluid that surrounds the baby so that that fetus is actually getting its first

00:15:03.700 stimulus from a human voice that is vibrating against its the soles of its feet its legs its its neck its

00:15:11.360 face so if you really think about it we are absorbing language in this like as this captive audience and what

00:15:18.800 babies are picking up at that stage they've learned is um the stress patterns of particular languages we stress

00:15:25.000 either a first or second syllable more often in english than in french and so on so they're born

00:15:31.220 with a basic very basic understanding of how their language sort of sounds it's not great just because

00:15:37.260 it's kind of muffled in there once they're born into the world they're suddenly in a bath of people

00:15:42.940 speaking all around them and they are we've discovered through these incredible scientific experiments

00:15:48.360 actually starting to distinguish what the particular sounds of our native language are

00:15:54.580 we're born science has discovered able to hear every single sound in the world's 6 000 languages

00:16:01.500 that includes the pops and clicks of certain african tongues and they and babies can distinguish between

00:16:07.720 them they can distinguish between r and l sounds which are quite close

00:16:11.580 in certain languages and so they're doing all of this kind of constructing of the of the sounds

00:16:18.440 but then when they move to the part where they have to speak at around one year old when they start to

00:16:25.980 sort of well they start babbling before that the astonishing thing is they're born with a larynx

00:16:31.780 that's in the same position as a chimps as we talked about it's literally up at the back of the mouth

00:16:37.420 because they breastfeed and they have to be able to breathe through their nose without coming up for

00:16:41.780 air and the milk flows around that raised larynx and into the stomach but literally over the first

00:16:47.380 like three to six months of life that larynx inches down the neck they get onto solid food soon they're

00:16:54.500 swallowing over the opening to their you know lungs as well and their larynx moves basically where an

00:17:00.540 adult's is it still has a way to go but they start to be able to make vowels well enough that we can

00:17:06.880 understand them one other thing i can't resist mentioning that they have to do we think we speak

00:17:12.700 with like a little space between each word almost like words on a page we don't it's a constant ribbon

00:17:17.900 of sound babies just hear that ribbon how do they know where words begin and end one way they know is by

00:17:24.760 running a statistical analysis on the sounds that they're hearing so if you're a polish baby you hear

00:17:31.900 a z and b sound together like zabignu the name zabignu but if you're an english baby you never

00:17:37.880 hear that combination within a word but you do hear it across a word boundary if someone said

00:17:43.540 leaves blow you've got that but it's going across a break in the words babies listen for the statistical

00:17:52.220 kind of preponderance of those sound and sound combinations and they literally realize oh that i

00:17:58.920 should split this because i'm an english baby i'll split the words there that's probably a word

00:18:04.160 and there's other techniques they use science is amazing and having discovered this where they are

00:18:10.040 figuring out what separate words are and then they figure out what those words mean and then they move

00:18:15.380 into learning grammar and eventually they're speaking we're gonna take a quick break for your words

00:18:20.420 from our sponsors and now back to the show and to hit back on this point of how our voice shapes our

00:18:28.460 cognition you highlight there's we have instances where if there's like a certain period of time

00:18:33.260 where a child needs to learn language and if they don't kind of messes them up for the rest of life and

00:18:38.080 there's that movie uh that jodie foster movie nelly right where that happens what happens to

00:18:43.860 children who don't learn how to speak yeah you know what happens is there's what they call a critical

00:18:50.500 period or a window in in earliest childhood where certain behaviors are learned then or they're never

00:18:56.980 learned so what's literally happening is the baby is building a brain that is capable of language by

00:19:04.520 hearing language i mentioned you know that they were that we're hearing the speech sounds of our

00:19:10.240 particular language buh kuh ah a e i o u and so on with repeated hearing the baby actually builds

00:19:18.840 neural pathways i.e links together neurons in the brain that represent those sounds and so they if they

00:19:26.040 keep hearing a puh puh puh sound they literally it's and it's interesting how this works the electrical

00:19:31.840 impulses that flash along the neurons actually build like a layer sort of like on a copper wire the

00:19:38.300 insulation it's called myelin it's like a protein that's built along the nerve which speeds up the

00:19:44.680 way the neurons flash across each other and represent that puh sound but if they don't hear puh that

00:19:52.260 connection dies away they literally don't happen so within that period that critical period you build a

00:20:00.340 language capable brain that both hears the sounds and also builds the neural motor pathways for saying them

00:20:08.020 and also sort of the musical movement of language that links things in grammatical structures

00:20:14.840 and you sort of have this period where if you don't learn that stuff you're not going to and we actually

00:20:21.280 know this in a way because bilingual babies that are raised in bilingual environments they effortlessly

00:20:27.280 know french and english but a baby raised just in english if he like when he goes to high school he's got to

00:20:34.360 sit there and go je suis tu es il est nous sommes he's like learning by rote french and not learning

00:20:41.820 it because it's so damn hard to learn a foreign language when your brain has been sculpted for your

00:20:47.040 native tongue so that's literally what's happening but i think it's interesting too it kind of raises the

00:20:51.300 point the question like what is the voice because like the children who are born deaf they are still

00:20:55.920 able to get that language thing going if they learn sign language but i imagine like it's the same

00:21:00.420 it follows the same pattern except you're just using your hands well that's it because people do

00:21:04.920 ask that they say hey wait a second if the voice is so important but we have to remember that our

00:21:09.040 species obviously is endowed with a talent a special skill for language if those those sort of standard

00:21:17.140 ways of communicating have been shut down by because of some malfunction in the in the hearing

00:21:22.860 yes then you know you use another i mentioned before that speech is a gesture well hands gesture

00:21:30.260 of course and it's astonishing and wonderful how human beings start to gesture with their hands

00:21:36.820 deaf babies they've discovered babble with their hands they literally in that stage before speech

00:21:43.820 in a hearing baby is in place but they're practicing by saying ga ga ga ba ba ba ba you know deaf babies

00:21:50.580 are doing something similar with their hands it's it's wonderful right so yeah we there's all there's

00:21:55.300 a voice there even if you can't you don't use your larynx to make a voice you still have a voice i guess

00:21:59.360 that's a good way of putting it absolutely uh so another thing you explore in the book about our voice

00:22:04.560 is the uh the difference between male and female voices and you point out in that in humans are the

00:22:10.440 only pretty much the only species where there's like dysmorphia where there's a big difference between

00:22:14.440 genders and how they they speak in their voice can you tell us a little bit about that yes absolutely we

00:22:20.100 yeah men i should say speak on average about a full octave below women which is actually quite

00:22:26.860 stunning because think of your dog or your cat or a bear any mammal you care to name they don't you

00:22:34.760 cannot tell them apart sexually the dimorphism is they're they're called monomorphic voices and

00:22:41.540 species we are a dimorphic species and strongly so with our voice and so that raises the question why

00:22:48.480 why on earth would that be why did the male voice go low and the female high and i mean the best that

00:22:56.440 science can tell us at this point it seems highly likely to me is to look at stuff that darwin said

00:23:01.740 actually about mating behaviors and he pointed out brilliantly that i mean we're kind of used to this

00:23:08.360 idea that mating is around this idea of attraction to the way the other the mate looks and sounds and

00:23:15.400 moves and so on so we think of a peacock with its feathers that seduce and we think of a bird with

00:23:20.420 its beautiful bird song now with human beings you know a female might be looking at a male and listening

00:23:28.120 and realizing oh there's sort of a deep voice there now voices are deep because of testosterone it

00:23:33.400 literally makes our vocal cords bigger and thicker and slower vibrating to give a lower voice so over

00:23:40.160 evolutionary time women females kind of figured out oh if he's got a deep voice it means he's got a

00:23:46.280 good steady shot of testosterone he's probably strong and capable and as aggressive as he might

00:23:52.060 have to be in order to win food for me and the baby and furthermore i'd like to pass that along to

00:23:57.340 my baby all good but it's not the only way that our voices or how mating works because there's also this

00:24:05.820 thing called contest competition that darwin talked about whereby men or the male of the species usually

00:24:12.620 have to fight each other for the favors of the female and that also drove male voices down down

00:24:19.860 down because as i mentioned earlier a deep voice is a threatening sound it can be just a bluff or it can

00:24:26.820 be you know it can really mean business like you know when the voice goes down there people know

00:24:31.680 okay it's serious so one of the things that's super interesting is the it's theorized that

00:24:38.620 you know females like a deep voice in men but not too deep because it means the man is over

00:24:46.620 androgenized or over testosterone and that might mean that he's kind of let's say you know like kind of

00:24:53.640 rapey maybe he's kind of like trying to find mates on the side maybe he's not going to stick around to

00:24:59.920 raise the baby so it's theorized that human male voices sort of ended up where they are which is

00:25:07.900 low and lots lower than a female but not as low as a gorilla because females did not choose the super

00:25:16.280 deep voices and so a slightly more mid-range male voice was propagated in our species through reproduction

00:25:24.420 and that's how we have ended up where we are as males with these voices yeah and and you also men

00:25:32.500 you know there's also an attraction like men are listening to the female voices for attraction and

00:25:36.100 i guess the two things are it's breathiness and like a higher pitch yes and i don't want to leave

00:25:40.740 this out i got in trouble on another podcast or possibly interview where i think people said yeah

00:25:45.320 you didn't talk about women's voices and they were right i didn't get that opportunity so i'm glad

00:25:49.280 you've asked yes i mean it's again theorized we can never know for sure but men through testing

00:25:56.260 like college aged men find the higher voice in a woman more attractive as a mate they statistically

00:26:04.200 say that's more attractive and they also like a slightly whispery edge to the voice or a it's almost

00:26:10.680 hard to describe what this sound is like now the reasons why we believe is that the higher voice

00:26:17.680 suggests that the person is fertile because when women have menopause their voices deepen so a higher

00:26:24.420 voice is in a woman is suggestive of reproductive health what's that whispery edge well fascinatingly

00:26:31.540 at puberty women's voices change in a particular way whereby the vocal cords don't quite meet fully at the

00:26:39.920 back of the vocal cord our vocal cords make sound by vibrating against each other now they have a little

00:26:46.440 gap where some of the air from the lungs sort of whispers through in a slightly breathy kind of whispery sound

00:26:53.380 now if you think of marilyn monroe she exaggerated both of those qualities so she spoke in a cupidol high

00:27:00.220 voice with a lot of whispery edge to it so the feeling is that men are sort of you know subconsciously

00:27:07.980 unconsciously hearing these things in a female voice and being attracted to it but i just hasten to add

00:27:14.440 that all of this is very very slippery because of course there are women with deep voices that sound

00:27:21.220 particularly sexy i mean um lauren bacall the actress from the 1940s was sort of famed for her deep

00:27:28.740 voice so you know you always have to kind of weigh these theories against certain things that contradict

00:27:35.500 them but anyway it's it's her voice actually had some breathiness so who knows so another aspect

00:27:42.080 sort of a cultural influence on our voice and i'm gonna bring this because i've been hearing it

00:27:46.260 a boot the canadian lovely let's talk about yes and so like why do why do we have accents with our

00:27:52.080 voices do we know why that happens yeah you know you know it really is an astonishing thing accents are

00:27:58.820 really like territorial sounds they're almost like ways for groups of people to indicate their

00:28:06.360 membership with each other and their exclusion of like an interloping other and we know that from

00:28:14.680 extraordinary studies by a guy named william labove and he started in the early 1960s studying the

00:28:21.000 fishing people on martha's vineyard a tiny island off of massachusetts and there he discovered that these

00:28:28.180 fishing families were oddly enough starting to speak with an accent that was many generations old it sort

00:28:35.140 of lingered in the oldest people but all of a sudden the youngest people were doing it he didn't know

00:28:40.600 why he interviewed him he did a sociological deep dive and discovered that really what they were doing

00:28:46.780 was trying to differentiate themselves from the mainlanders from new york and boston the rich summer

00:28:52.820 folk who would pull into town and it so happened in this time in the 60s the fishing families were going

00:28:59.140 through a terrible economic crisis and they were losing their homes they were having to sell them at fire

00:29:04.320 sale prices to the city folk and they were moving out of these ancestral homes built by their fishing

00:29:09.800 ancestors and having to move into shacks on the inland what this made them do was a despise those folk

00:29:17.340 and revert to an accent that not only said hey we're part of the storied fishing past of america that's

00:29:25.660 in moby dick for heaven's sake this is this was the economy of america we belong to that special group

00:29:31.960 furthermore this is our island now this indicates that accents are kind of about pushing people apart

00:29:39.580 from each other and the guy that wrote pygmalion or my fair lady george bernard shaw knew this he

00:29:46.680 actually said an englishman cannot open his mouth without making another englishman hate or despise him

00:29:52.660 here in america i think we pride ourselves on being a democratic society that doesn't have a class

00:29:58.780 structure as much i'm afraid we do you know you have northerners looking down on southern accented

00:30:06.220 people you've got flakes out in california speaking in valley girl sounds you've got midwesterners with

00:30:12.900 their marge gunderson from that coen brothers movie way of talking i mean all of these differentiations

00:30:19.820 are about saying i belong to this crowd or i don't belong to that one no it's true i like so i lived in

00:30:26.680 mexico for a few years and even within mexico there's differences there's like regional accents

00:30:31.680 so you could tell if someone was from mexico city or they're from sinaloa or they're from veracruz

00:30:36.220 and then even within the spanish speaking world there was like there was a lot of like i don't know

00:30:41.520 like sort of you know like in spain they speak with like a lisp oh yes i've heard of that right

00:30:46.420 so instead of saying like uh sabado be a sabado and like mexicans like does it make they make fun of

00:30:51.680 that and then like the spanish like they make fun of the mexicans they're like you're not speaking true

00:30:55.060 spanish yes well and the amazing thing is that these things do become essentially hardwired in

00:31:01.140 childhood during that window that i talked about that sort of critical period and it's why i say

00:31:06.100 out and a boot or however i do it i can't even imitate it you know because i'm unconscious of doing

00:31:11.900 it but people hear it so yeah these things are get really cemented in very early and you've got to work

00:31:18.240 hard to get rid of an accent and it's weird how like things can develop you talk about the development

00:31:23.660 of that sort of chicago accent right you know what oh incredible yeah the bears the the bulls and like

00:31:29.680 you think that's how they've always spoken chicago but this one guy dug into it was like no it actually

00:31:34.400 wasn't like the 1960s that people started talking like that it's absolutely stunning it was actually

00:31:39.220 that same guy that did the martha's vineyard study he actually then he looked at why people in that

00:31:45.060 entire great lakes region spread out across the sort of northern middle part of the country they've been

00:31:52.100 increasingly saying not fat and the name and fat and they're saying fiat in you know and and like

00:31:59.660 they're speaking in this really distorted way with their vowels so he he looked at why and he literally

00:32:06.780 traced it to the migration of people in the mid to late 1800s from upstate new york area when the erie

00:32:14.080 canal of all things was built they were suddenly able to people that that part of the great lakes

00:32:20.060 region now when they moved in there they encountered another group of people who were upland southerners

00:32:27.580 from places like kentucky now it so happened that these groups had totally different approaches and

00:32:33.180 values to life in almost every respects from drinking to whether or not stores should be open on sunday

00:32:40.120 to whether or not women should have special rights the northerners were kind of like pc millennials

00:32:45.580 of today they were very sort of liberal now the southerners were kind of they were into capital

00:32:50.880 punishment they were you know they were they were just more loosey-goosey about a lot of stuff so you

00:32:55.560 had this incredible culture clash now how did it manifest as they became more acutely sort of

00:33:04.400 aggressive towards each other the the northerners thought hey i don't want to sound like them at all and

00:33:10.680 they actually began to exaggerate that a sound in the word fat let's say and they started to push it

00:33:16.840 forward in the mouth the tongue went higher fat to fit fiat to fiat and over time literally and into the

00:33:24.720 60s this was still evolving because of course the political divide has gotten no no no less in fact

00:33:31.600 it's gotten probably stronger and you literally had the northerners pushing the vowel forward while the

00:33:37.940 southerners i really believe in response they dropped the tongue back they started to give it

00:33:43.120 a nice drawl you know fiat like you know why i'm not going to say fiat so you have these these literally

00:33:49.860 these americans pushing themselves apart with their voice but also politically socially and in terms of

00:33:56.620 value i mean this is how deep voice goes as an indicator of like mass sort of movements in in american

00:34:05.720 society or in the world it's just fascinating i think well you mentioned one sort of accent that's

00:34:11.260 that's it's new in america and it's the valley girl type thing it's called uptalk most people talk

00:34:16.460 about uptalk and the other one they typically when you hear people talk about uptalk they are also

00:34:21.220 talking about vocal fry for those who aren't familiar with these concepts can you describe what

00:34:26.280 vocal fry and uptalk is and has anyone studied like why why are younger people in the united states

00:34:31.780 speaking with vocal fry and uptalk yeah well it's interesting now uh you know uptalk is when people

00:34:37.520 and they're even statements with a set with a question as if they're i'm always asking a question

00:34:42.200 and so they uh you know they they say that they're going to go to the store because we're and right now

00:34:47.600 we're talking on a podcast so that's uptalk the vocal fry is this growly sound that you'll notice

00:34:55.580 young women largely you tend to notice it in young women but older and older women are doing it

00:35:01.100 where it's almost a crackly sound of the voice and it's kind of like down down there i wish i could

00:35:06.100 do it better yeah like this yeah exactly it's like kim kardashian talks with a vocal fry totally and

00:35:13.360 you were asking has anyone looked at where it came from why it's become sort of this epidemic

00:35:18.280 amongst american and canadian women and the belief literally is that it can be traced to the popularity

00:35:25.800 of the kardashians tv show which started in 2007 but peaked in its popularity in 2010 which is exactly

00:35:34.380 when linguists became fascinated they were like why is every young woman talking this way now i wrote

00:35:41.400 about this in the book and i theorized it first that women were doing it particularly at that period

00:35:47.240 2010 shortly after the big sort of economic crash of the subprime mortgage meltdown where all of a

00:35:53.640 sudden millennials lives didn't look too easy it was a fearful time kim however was a pampered beverly

00:36:01.020 hills billionaires or whatever she was millionaires who had not a care in the world and she spoke in this

00:36:07.760 way that kind of erased all emotion from her voice because because vocal fry you can't go up and down

00:36:14.060 you always sound like you're kind of bland and blase and in control so my initial theory was that women

00:36:22.460 were quite understandably kind of disguising any anxieties they felt about the future and about life

00:36:29.880 in this imitation of kim but the thing is it's gone on way too long it's still accelerating in the world

00:36:36.720 my new belief is that that initial use my sort of morphed into something else after the 2016 election

00:36:45.240 where you had the rise of the me too movement and you had women now with a sort of new newly energized

00:36:52.200 feminism that really derived from a feeling that the the government was being run by people that were

00:36:58.600 inimical to women and their rights so suddenly the vocal fry became really an assertion a growl a

00:37:06.700 way of women to say to men i really mean business and in the book i point out that in the 70s we had

00:37:12.960 you know i am woman hear me roar but but that roars are kind of theatrical but a growl a growl is

00:37:21.000 actually something that's kind of it's across the animal kingdom and it's produced exactly like the

00:37:25.900 vocal fry it's the same set of laryngeal muscles you you actually tighten and stiffen the vocal cords

00:37:32.000 so the air moves through them in these crackling sort of bubbles and so when a woman my theory is

00:37:39.420 is doing that i think she's sending a signal that i i demand to be taken not just seriously but as a

00:37:46.460 legitimate threat to you if you abuse me and i think that's might be why we're hearing the fry as

00:37:53.000 much as we do in women men also do it though which is not often pointed out yeah dudes do it and i've

00:37:58.820 talked to a vocal coach and about this and he said when you see guys doing vocal fry they're usually

00:38:04.920 trying to make their voice deeper because they don't have yeah but he says like it's not great for

00:38:10.140 your voice it's not the best thing to do because actually can it just yeah they say it's hard on the

00:38:14.280 vocal cords i think right yeah yeah but then the uptalk i mean why do you think these like drive

00:38:19.200 people's nuts like so like oh wow i mean just i mean to me it just bugs the crap out of me because

00:38:23.960 like i don't know are you like making a statement are you making a question like what's going on oh i can't

00:38:28.240 believe that brett why does it bother you brett no it's so annoying i mean it's it's well you know

00:38:32.900 what it is it sounds defensive because interestingly you know i mentioned before that we deepen our

00:38:38.560 voice in order to sound threatening but we raise our voice in order to sound submissive and loving and

00:38:43.560 and so and we speak this way to babies and to pets just very naturally we just do that it's a reverse

00:38:49.480 size bluff we're trying to sound small now a wonderful linguist named john ohala from stanford

00:38:55.200 years ago said that's literally why almost every language has a raised pitch at the end for a

00:39:02.320 question because when you ask a question you are literally becoming submissive to you're giving up

00:39:08.980 control and authority to the person you're asking the question of so your voice goes up is it nice out

00:39:15.100 so you're you don't know so you're becoming submissive the person says yes it's really nice and they

00:39:20.100 deliberately answer in a voice that does not go up but down so when someone is doing up talk you

00:39:27.960 really get the feeling that they're constantly asserting sort of a non-threatening submissive

00:39:34.000 oh i'm just like you know i don't know anything i'm just totally at your mercy and you know everything

00:39:39.040 and that starts to grate no you might you might sort of think oh gee i guess i would kind of like

00:39:45.000 someone that sort of makes me feel dominant and no i think we prefer to try to work with people as

00:39:51.700 equals if we're sane and normal so someone that's constantly putting themselves in a position of

00:39:57.820 sort of supplicating questioning submissiveness you know you want to slap them one of the places it

00:40:03.960 might have become so popular and labov said this as well incredibly enough was the song by moon unit

00:40:11.280 zappa back in the very early 80s whose name is going to elude me that song oh i can't believe it

00:40:17.580 it's in my book where she raps in it too oh well she also does a little bit of vocal fry but it goes

00:40:23.300 way way back to then possibly and then the movie clueless picked it up and that was a very popular movie

00:40:29.680 the girls there did it now and that suggests too that like things in our culture are highly

00:40:36.460 sort of contagious the things about voice are very easily picked up as kind of fads kind of short-lived

00:40:45.200 fads but then they can become like almost permanent aspects of of accent as they get passed down to

00:40:52.520 children when they're in the you know crib so that might also be why we're hearing so much up speak and

00:40:59.020 vocal fry so we talked about too when you speak you're not just conveying information with words and

00:41:03.980 language your voice itself can carry information about your emotional state and it can be very

00:41:09.660 subtle it's not just like i think everyone knows what a happy voice sounds like a sad voice but

00:41:14.580 there's like these like really subtle ones like annoyed you know disdain contempt that you can pick

00:41:20.120 up on in a voice so how do we know like have scientists kind of like figured out like put an

00:41:25.980 algorithm like they know if they hear this voice this is contempt like do we know about that yeah

00:41:30.200 great question i mean for for years decades one particular scientist in the sort of i don't know

00:41:36.920 how many years 40 years he devoted to it trying to you know study emotion in voice and think of how

00:41:43.940 hard that is to do because you know science you want someone to be able to repeat a particular behavior

00:41:50.580 so that you can be sure you weren't getting a one-off sound so how do you make someone make a jealous

00:41:56.740 statement that sounds jealous or envious or hostile or happy or sad or some weird blend

00:42:02.980 of those emotions so he figured out ways of doing that he started using method actors and actually

00:42:09.640 that worked pretty well and he you know scrupulously dissected the acoustic signal using instruments

00:42:16.900 called a spectrograph and oscilloscopes and this guy drew up these huge charts with like decimal

00:42:23.740 pointed measurements of volume versus pitch versus the speed now you can imagine how incredibly

00:42:31.360 complex that was because it's literally those tiny adjustments now the thing is that his work ended up

00:42:39.180 being essentially worthless because it was just like who could do anything with this but you mentioned

00:42:44.440 a really interesting thing when you say is there an algorithm because what the big tech companies are

00:42:50.540 doing now is trying to imbue computer voices with convincing sounding human emotion and the way

00:42:57.500 they're actually doing it is not by using all those little micro measurements like this guy did because

00:43:03.900 you could never input all of that into a computer they're using machine learning they write an algorithm

00:43:09.920 where the computer can teach itself and then they play emotional speech into the computer with the emotions

00:43:16.840 labeled and the computer literally learns them itself it's an astounding thing and actually not a little bit

00:43:25.520 scary i have to say because we've suddenly got computers kind of learning the way babies do you know i talked

00:43:32.580 about how we sort of inculcate babies with speech by them hearing speech well that's how our computers are getting

00:43:39.560 so good at doing language but now they're getting good at the secret ingredient of language that really

00:43:46.000 makes us sound human which is that emotional what they call it prosody it's the song-like part of our voice

00:43:53.240 and if you don't use prosody you become unlistenable that was horrible what i just did and if i kept it up

00:44:01.880 you'd have ended the podcast so you've got to have the music and and yeah i mean you know really we don't

00:44:08.800 know to now here's the short answer we don't really know what all those variables are but computers are

00:44:15.000 learning them anyway it's amazing yeah next time you ask your alexa what the weather is it's gonna

00:44:20.080 ask john you sound kind of annoyed did i correct right yeah that's exactly what they say or are you

00:44:25.380 lying you know they could they might call you out on a line this is free this is where the nightmare

00:44:29.520 could go that's creepy yeah that's why i don't have an alexa god no don't do that well and those alexas

00:44:34.900 are going to start learning from your voice i mentioned that because they're going to start putting

00:44:38.300 that learning software into these devices that we use series and alexas and so on and so every time

00:44:44.820 we speak when we you know when we call it up to say hey when's justin bieber's birthday something we all

00:44:49.600 are curious about you know it's literally going to be learning some of the prosody of our language

00:44:54.360 and speech from that well another aspect of voice that you hit is singing right this kind of that's

00:44:59.880 kind of kick-started the whole project you were a singer you're gonna pop on your voice on your

00:45:04.220 your vocal cords what is it about singing that makes people feel really vulnerable like why don't

00:45:10.000 we like to sing it's so weird it strips us naked you know it's it's this way in which i you know i

00:45:17.100 mentioned in the book that if you you could say to someone in a work environment hey you know could

00:45:22.160 you get up and like deliver this report and they even if they don't like public speaking they could

00:45:26.640 fumble their way through it try asking them to sing a solo song to all their co-workers the minute

00:45:32.820 you lift your voice out of normal speech and launch it into melody and rhythm it strips you

00:45:41.360 us to our our human core in a way that science doesn't really understand we just know it when

00:45:48.760 it happens and it touches on emotions deep in us that are maybe it goes back to our moms singing to

00:45:55.920 us when we were babies but i think it goes further back than that darwin thought that our language itself

00:46:01.780 emerged out of the singing cadences of early primates so it's almost as if funnily enough

00:46:10.260 even though we exalt our linguistic capability which i believe brought us to the top of the food chain

00:46:16.020 in a funny way it's finally though that music where we find our most human kind of universal emotional

00:46:24.700 salience and and to sing is to just totally bear ourselves bear ourselves kind of nakedly and

00:46:32.740 you know and that works in certain ways that can be so beautiful and i do point this out in the book

00:46:38.440 that when president obama was addressing the charleston church where there'd been a horrible shooting many

00:46:44.280 people killed he he started to speak and then he fell silent for 12 seconds which is an infinitely long

00:46:51.420 period of time to be silent and when he next made a vocal noise it was to start singing amazing grace

00:46:58.700 and he actually someone just recently told me that i was correct because he recently said that

00:47:04.260 he had run out of words there was no words for how horrible this was and the only recourse was to this

00:47:11.780 to singing now in the world's one of the world's greatest orators

00:47:15.820 obama that's quite an admission so i can't really answer what that mysterious sort of soulfulness is

00:47:25.700 except to just say it's real it's true and it's it's a beautiful mystery well and going on to that

00:47:32.700 you talk about pop music today one of the complaints like it's some of it's like really complex and

00:47:37.760 sophisticated but one of the complaints that people have and music critics have is that

00:47:41.180 it's too perfect because they have we have this technology that allows us to take a singer's voice

00:47:46.580 and auto-tune it make it sound differently put them back in pitch and like put things on beat

00:47:50.940 and when you hear it you're like that doesn't sound right doesn't doesn't stir me like what is it about

00:47:56.060 the imperfection that started we have you figured that out yeah you know it's fascinating a guy actually

00:48:01.260 back in the 20s in the 1920s studied singing voices and was actually amazed to discover that all singers

00:48:07.900 even highly trained classical singers are singing off pitch very often or starting off the pitch

00:48:14.300 and then moving into the correct pitch and then moving out again they're jumping on beats a little bit

00:48:19.840 in advance or lagging behind in order to create like emotional effects there's something called vibrato

00:48:26.540 where you're literally going between two notes but it sounds like you're sort of on the pitch of one note

00:48:32.860 but if you think about it you're not you're wobbling and and these create emotion

00:48:37.240 now why on earth is that is you know it's sort of like if you look at a painting like a beautiful impressionist

00:48:44.660 painting by monet you're going to see his brush strokes and if you get close to the canvas you'll suddenly realize

00:48:51.080 wow that's kind of messy and that kind of looks wrong you step back from it and it all assembles

00:48:56.680 into something beautiful and alive japanese calligraphers with ink and brush pen they love the little mistakes

00:49:04.920 they actually they would put in mistakes into things that they made because that's where we find our

00:49:10.180 humanness now the sort of quote-unquote mistakes in the human voice are absolutely real in singing we

00:49:17.340 almost can't we can't really control them these these emerge as part of the emotional expression of a

00:49:24.840 singing voice the voice trying to find a note it's got a yearning quality of seeking the note of seeking

00:49:31.300 the thing that's going to unlock our emotion and it's beautiful to hear the voice get there

00:49:35.920 now when you use pro tools to just center the the person right on pitch and right on the beat

00:49:44.720 you're in you're necessarily draining off a whole bunch of the humanity and it's just you know it's

00:49:52.600 just for real and you can hear that you know listen to bob dylan who's not auto-tuned and he's not even a

00:49:58.040 great like singer in terms of pitch and stuff but he'll break your heart with certain songs

00:50:03.440 taylor swift who was you know i think when she first broke you know i remember with the album

00:50:07.920 fearless i saw her on letterman and she was very touching and i remember thinking it was because

00:50:14.080 she was kind of a lousy singer she was a little off pitch but she was singing about her first you know

00:50:20.240 emotional affair as a young woman and my god like her being sort of not quite on the beat and a little

00:50:26.380 uncertain in her pitches it absolutely contributed to this entire beautiful emotional effect of

00:50:32.600 vulnerability now she's a big stadium dance you know edm singer you know with like propulsive beats

00:50:39.520 and robotic sounds and they're centering her voice on pitch you know with pro tool and it's all gone

00:50:45.380 the emotion's gone so she's a different singer now a successful one but she's not going to break your

00:50:51.200 heart as readily do you know are there musicians who are kind of rebelling against the pro the pro tools

00:50:56.040 i believe there i believe they are yes there are there are but you know i say that because they

00:51:01.940 say it i wish a name would come to mind but you know they kind of like to boast you know that they

00:51:07.260 didn't but to be honest you know people do slide off pitch on like take 35 of the song that they're

00:51:13.420 singing and sometimes the engineer just nudges them you know onto the pitch i mean it's sort of

00:51:19.260 irresistible i guess the point is that it's irresistible you know with all of our computers now you just

00:51:24.380 know you can hit that button and get rid of the zit before you put the photograph of yourself up or

00:51:29.360 whatever i mean do you really lay off that you know zit remover click um so i don't know it's it's

00:51:36.840 a really actually i should have asked some engineers this i mean whether or not anybody sings in their

00:51:42.460 naked i would imagine dylan but i don't know who else no that's weird yeah that's funny how we have

00:51:46.420 that propensity to like want to remove our humanity but then yeah and but like once you do that with

00:51:51.000 like photoshop or like the audio tools like you enter that uncanny valley you're like this doesn't

00:51:55.460 correct this is not right but like you still have the compulsion i need to do it i know i know exactly

00:52:00.880 i know i want to be perfect right so you in the book i thought it was interesting about how what

00:52:06.080 happens to our voice when we get old and i never really thought about that like oh i thought about

00:52:09.780 going gray i thought about getting wrinkly but i never thought my voice would age as well but it does

00:52:14.020 yes yes it does i mean our you know sort of every component of voice that we talked about earlier

00:52:19.940 like everything from your lungs to your vocal cords to the articulators lips and tongue all of

00:52:25.940 them basically degrade they get weaker they get less powerful they get less precise so you sort of

00:52:32.140 hit the wrong tongue targets you know so your speech starts to sound a little blurry but one of the

00:52:36.600 biggest things that happen is that your vocal cords it's sort of like your knee ligaments or something

00:52:41.920 they tighten up they stiffen they get arthritic and so a young voice has a ripple a beautiful

00:52:48.360 almost liquid ripple to the way the vocal cords vibrate and move that goes away they really

00:52:54.020 become stiff and kind of crystalline and kind of hard and you start to hear that in a croaky old

00:52:59.700 person's voice you know the voices get more quiet because you don't have as much lung power as an old

00:53:04.440 person all of a sudden the muscles are weakening and you're we sound loud by pushing that diaphragm it's a

00:53:09.840 big muscle so all sorts of stuff happens i mean fat collects around the neck and literally makes the

00:53:16.700 resonance chamber of the throat kind of smaller women's voices lower with age because their vocal

00:53:23.660 cords gets kind of thicker and and stuff and men's kind of raise so they men and women we talked about

00:53:30.480 the dimorphism of male and female voices for mating well when mating is no longer an option

00:53:35.960 you know the voices actually move together they start to sound more and more the same men and women

00:53:41.560 so you're sort of de-sexed your you know your power goes away i mean it's not pretty and you know

00:53:47.700 you really hear that in aged voices so what do you hope people walk away after reading your books

00:53:54.440 it's like you said in the very beginning like this isn't a this is not a how-to book how to how to sound

00:53:59.080 like james earl jones or frank sinatra or whatever yeah what do you what do you hope people walk away

00:54:03.960 with yeah you know i hope they end up with an impression of i guess maybe two things just how important

00:54:09.080 our voice was to us as a species i really do think it drove us to the top of the food chain

00:54:13.540 but i also do by by talking about all the different things that control and make our voice i hope that

00:54:20.520 people will glory in their own voices weirdly enough a little bit because you know it is an instrument

00:54:26.620 you know you watch a wonderful clarinet player or saxophone player and you're impressed with what

00:54:31.540 they're doing when you just say pass the salt you're doing something more remarkable in terms of

00:54:36.600 of speed of movement and precision of movement and so on and even tune and pitches so i would love to

00:54:43.860 see people kind of you know push their voice out there project it you know use your articulate

00:54:49.020 animate your voice you know get excited sound enthusiastic you know possess the air around

00:54:55.300 you with these vibrations because we're not here that long so i guess my feeling is i do sort of end

00:55:01.440 with the with a little bit of uplift because our voices are one of the main ways that we kind of

00:55:07.960 imprint ourselves on the world that we occupy it's it's part of the web that we extend in order to

00:55:14.660 connect to everybody else and you might as well give it some you know give it some power give it some

00:55:21.020 style you know speak up don't don't be shy so i guess that's where i would go with that well john this

00:55:26.660 has been a great conversation where can people go to learn more about the book in your work

00:55:29.700 yeah well you know you can you can definitely look at my twitter because i'm always tweeting

00:55:35.140 jay colopinto i'm always tweeting about it but i mean just read the book i mean it's on amazon you

00:55:40.820 can get it at bookstores if you can go in them at this point with a mask on and i actually do think i

00:55:45.880 have to sort of rather hubristically say that my book actually pulls together all of these different

00:55:53.040 strands and and sort of disciplines to look at the voice in kind of this global way

00:55:58.600 that frankly no other book really does or has done that was actually one of the great challenges

00:56:05.000 of doing it you got books on linguistics phonetics singing oratory accents but they're all separate

00:56:12.920 books and separate fields of study so for a book that i mean i really am selling it here but for a book

00:56:18.940 that kind of pulls it all together in a narrative way you might just go to my book this is the voice i

00:56:24.900 don't know where else to point you well john it's been a great conversation thanks for your time it's

00:56:28.340 been a pleasure brett likewise my guest today was john colopinto he's the author of the book this is

00:56:34.440 the voice it's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere make sure to check out our show notes

00:56:38.200 at awm.is slash this is the voice where you can find links to resources where you delve deeper into this

00:56:42.560 topic well that wraps up another edition of the aom podcast check out our website at art of manliness.com

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00:57:24.320 brett mckay remind you on the list they win podcast but put what you've heard into action

The Art of Manliness - July 31, 2025

The Fascinating Secrets of Your Voice

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