The Art of Manliness - April 07, 2021


The Secrets of Public Speaking From History's Greatest Orators

Topics
rhetoric public speaking humor humor effectiveness speech organization
Hosted by
Brett McKay
Mentioned
Patrick Henry Paul Will Rogers Josh Hawley John F. Kennedy Abraham Lincoln Darius Robert Frost King Xerxes King Philip Alexander Odyssey Greeks Sparta Saul
Social Psychology Won't Save Us The No-Nonsense Guide to Simplifying Every Aspect of Your Life

Episode Stats


Length

39 minutes

Words per minute

166.39

Word count

6,609

Sentence count

382

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

7

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Despite the fact that public speaking remains an important and relevant skill in our modern age, I mean, you never know when you ll need to give a toast at a wedding, pitch an idea at work, or champion a proposal at a city council meeting? Most of us get very little instruction these days in how to do it effectively. Fortunately, my guest says we can look to the great orators of the past to get the public speaking education we never received.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 I'm Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
00:00:10.920 Despite the fact that public speaking remains an important and relevant skill in our modern
00:00:14.340 age, I mean, you never know when you need to give a toast at a wedding, pitch an idea
00:00:17.960 at work, or champion a proposal at a city council meeting, most of us get very little
00:00:22.100 instruction these days in how to do it effectively.
00:00:24.460 Fortunately, my guest says we can look at the great orators of the past to get the public
00:00:28.220 speaking education we never received.
00:00:30.240 His name is John Hale, and he's a professor of archaeology, as well as the lecturer of
00:00:33.680 the Great Courses course, The Art of Public Speaking, Lessons from the Greatest Speeches
00:00:37.760 in History.
00:00:38.460 Today on the show, John shares what we can learn about the physicality of public speaking
00:00:41.780 from Demosthenes of Athens, the importance of empathetic body language from Patrick Henry,
00:00:46.020 the effective use of humor from Will Rogers, the power of three from the Apostle Paul,
00:00:50.180 and the potency of brevity and well-executed organization from Abraham Lincoln.
00:00:53.560 After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash public speak.
00:00:58.220 John Hale, welcome to the show.
00:01:12.440 Thank you.
00:01:13.380 I am very glad to be here with you.
00:01:15.460 So, you are a professor of archaeology, but you're also the lecturer of a Great Courses
00:01:19.840 course on the art of public speaking.
00:01:21.760 Where do you trace your interest in public speaking to?
00:01:24.140 My grandmother, she lived within walking distance of the house where I grew up with
00:01:28.840 my seven brothers and sisters, and my father was her son.
00:01:33.560 And to get to know us, her name was Lydia, and she established things called Liddy Nights.
00:01:40.480 Every Friday was a Liddy Night for one of the seven of us.
00:01:44.880 When we got to escape the herd, pack a little bag of our own, walk through the woods on the
00:01:49.480 path to grandmother's house, and spend the night with her at her house, with her brother
00:01:54.520 and sister, listening to her stories, working ancient jigsaw puzzles that our parents had
00:02:00.400 worked when they were kids, exploring the woods, getting into old books and things like that.
00:02:06.140 So, it was a magic time, and she would take us down to the woods, tell us stories, and
00:02:13.380 introduced me, I realize now, to the concept of an oral tradition, that although she'd read from
00:02:20.240 books, she mainly told the things, improvised the stories, and she wanted us to be able to
00:02:27.180 do that, so she would ask us to tell her stories.
00:02:30.420 And so, we began, none of us ever knew what went on on the other brother and sister's night
00:02:36.220 with her, but I imagine she did it for everyone.
00:02:38.840 We were encouraged to talk, to speak, to learn how to organize our thoughts, to tell her a
00:02:43.960 story.
00:02:44.320 Maybe she knew it was a familiar folk tale or fairy tale, and we would retell it.
00:02:48.840 But I think we all got over with her any fear of self-consciousness about speaking, and
00:02:54.980 that's one of the hardest things in American life today.
00:02:57.300 Lots of people are great at the word processor or writing things down, but there is this
00:03:03.840 very widespread block on confident public speaking, and she took us in hand starting when we were
00:03:10.640 about five, and I think it made a huge difference.
00:03:13.140 So, I just think I grew up in an oral tradition, a family, oriented toward telling stories, towards
00:03:19.080 holding forth, towards speaking up at a town hall meeting, have family members who went into
00:03:23.820 the church and became great orators in the pulpit.
00:03:26.540 So, I was lucky because I think public speaking is the single most neglected, valuable achievement,
00:03:34.720 attainment that we can have in a democracy.
00:03:37.460 And I certainly didn't find that any of my schooling at Green Valley Grade School, Scribner
00:03:43.800 Junior High, Louisville Country Day School, Yale University, Cambridge University, none of those
00:03:49.800 places focused on it.
00:03:51.380 And yet, we were continually hearing teachers that were either good or bad, based on whether
00:03:56.300 they were good or bad public speakers.
00:03:58.920 And why do you think there has not been that much of an emphasis on public speaking?
00:04:02.520 I mean, if you go back 200 years ago, like at Yale, you'd have to take a course on rhetoric.
00:04:07.720 Absolutely.
00:04:08.820 What happened?
00:04:09.480 I cannot explain this.
00:04:11.140 You've asked the $64,000 question.
00:04:14.000 How does a nation that prides itself on being a participatory democracy not think it matters
00:04:20.700 that every youngster learns to be a confident and effective public speaker?
00:04:27.360 And yet, it's interesting to me that the word rhetoric in American English, it's a little
00:04:33.600 game I play with myself.
00:04:34.820 What are words that have nothing but positive meanings?
00:04:37.780 What are words that have nothing but negative meanings?
00:04:40.360 And what are mixed words?
00:04:42.360 Rhetoric is basically a nothing but negative word.
00:04:46.580 Oh, that's just rhetoric. 0.92
00:04:47.840 In other words, empty word spitting, just being a blowhard.
00:04:51.460 It sounds like it's a big deal, but you're not saying anything here.
00:04:55.260 Cut to the chase.
00:04:56.920 Give us the meat of the matter.
00:04:58.360 That's not what rhetoric is.
00:04:59.780 Rhetoric, as was once said, is as noble an art as any cause that you can use to put rhetoric
00:05:09.740 in the service of selling that cause, advocating that cause.
00:05:13.280 Rhetoric itself is a noble thing.
00:05:16.280 And so what I did was, when I was asked by the teaching company to do a course on rhetoric,
00:05:21.260 was try to pick out a dozen great speeches in history that were spoken by people who I thought
00:05:27.140 were not just wonderful speakers, but were at a crisis in their lives.
00:05:31.840 And they were great leaders, great individuals, great discoverers, great examples for any of us
00:05:36.260 to follow of somebody who is making an effective speech when it really matters.
00:05:43.140 Well, what I like about your course on public speaking is that you go back into history to
00:05:48.140 look for, you call them guest lecturers.
00:05:50.260 Yes, I do.
00:05:51.100 I call them, I like to imagine they're in the room with us when we're talking about them.
00:05:54.580 To teach different aspects of public speaking.
00:05:57.620 And so you start off, the first guest lecturer was a fifth century Greek statesman named Demosthenes
00:06:04.080 of Athens.
00:06:05.300 For those who aren't familiar with him, who was he and what role did his public speaking
00:06:09.120 have on Greek history?
00:06:11.360 Athens and Sparta are the two great city-states of ancient Greece, which still are fairly familiar
00:06:17.340 in American popular culture.
00:06:18.860 And they were the yin and the yang of the Greek mind and Greek culture.
00:06:23.440 Athens being warlike, Spartan, laconic, which means you never say more than you have to.
00:06:30.240 And they had a pair of kings and they didn't do much orating.
00:06:34.000 The kings who served as generals for life would propose things.
00:06:37.520 There'd be a rattling of spears on shields to indicate yay or nay, and they'd be off to war.
00:06:44.000 Athens was totally different.
00:06:46.160 Athens was a democracy, and they ultimately became the world's first radical democracy
00:06:53.240 when they became a naval power.
00:06:56.740 And all the poor citizens who owned no land, they weren't farmers or landowners,
00:07:01.500 they were citizens who had not played a role in defending the polis.
00:07:07.340 Polis is the Greek word for a city-state.
00:07:09.700 You got a city, you got all the surrounding farmlands and forests.
00:07:12.640 That's a little country of its own.
00:07:15.740 And we got our word politics and politician and even polite from the polis of the ancient Greeks.
00:07:22.500 Athens was a polis. 0.63
00:07:23.740 Sparta was a polis. 0.97
00:07:25.700 Well, in Athens, every citizen who had full rights had a chance to stand up in the National Assembly,
00:07:32.680 the Assembly of the polis up on a high hill.
00:07:35.680 It was a place called the Pnyx, the crowded place, and you could speak your peace.
00:07:39.860 It was a participatory democracy in a way ours is not.
00:07:44.120 Every four years, we got to go to the polls and decide who's going to boss us around for the next four years.
00:07:49.100 And anywhere up to 49% of us will be disappointed in who it is that is doing that.
00:07:54.700 But they weren't that way.
00:07:57.060 And they all cycled through government positions.
00:08:00.860 Juries, they were very sensible.
00:08:03.320 Juries for big cases were 501 people.
00:08:06.560 And so everybody, every citizen will have been on a jury on a regular basis.
00:08:10.680 And what are we with 12 jurors?
00:08:12.920 There's always going to be hung juries.
00:08:14.520 They could never have a hung jury because there's 501.
00:08:17.500 So they thought things through in a way that I think somehow we didn't back in the 1770s and came up with a working thing that worked for centuries.
00:08:28.560 But it was all based on public participation and public speaking.
00:08:33.120 Standing up on that little rocky hilltop, which was kind of a sounding board.
00:08:37.540 It was a good place for you to speak loud and everybody could hear you.
00:08:41.540 And so that's, I think, at the threshold of our Western tradition of a participatory life in your community, in your democracy, in your city, whatever it may be, where you have a privilege and an opportunity, but also a responsibility to make your voice heard.
00:09:02.920 And that's why Athens, it just fascinates me to this day.
00:09:06.980 I'm an archaeologist.
00:09:08.280 I look to the past for insights and wisdom and interest, but I still think we have a lot to learn about getting our American population actively engaged in our democracy.
00:09:20.400 And they did it through that open forum of public speaking.
00:09:25.360 And what did Demosthenes do in that open forum of public speaking?
00:09:30.480 Well, he was a skinny little kid, and he was never going to be a great general.
00:09:35.120 So he, and also, let me just give you the background on his life, because it's such an interesting one.
00:09:41.800 He was born into a wealthy family.
00:09:43.740 His father died when he was tiny.
00:09:46.200 And after his father's death, everything was left to him.
00:09:49.820 But his father's male relatives embezzled all the money, took it all away, invested it elsewhere for themselves.
00:09:56.300 And he found himself, when he became of age, a man ready to launch his public life in Athens, his career as a citizen, a pauper.
00:10:07.360 And all of the older men in the family didn't want him to have a public voice, because he would call them to account and demand his own money.
00:10:16.380 So he'd been brought up without the kind of engagement with other people and so on.
00:10:22.180 So he thought, at last I could speak in the assembly.
00:10:24.700 I don't know anybody.
00:10:25.720 There's nobody to champion me.
00:10:27.900 I must be my own champion.
00:10:29.840 I must speak for myself.
00:10:32.340 He had a stutter.
00:10:34.580 And he'd never been taken to the gymnasium by his uncle.
00:10:37.900 So he was a kind of concave-chested, weak, and scrawny kid.
00:10:42.520 He had not worked out.
00:10:44.040 He'd not become the Greek ideal of the muscular youth, the Olympic hero.
00:10:49.420 So he started to do training.
00:10:52.180 And he would run up hills declaiming speeches that he'd memorized while he ran up the hill until he could run and still speak the speech without being breathless, without stumbling on the words.
00:11:06.700 He would go down by the seashore, and he would find smooth pebbles that the sea had worked over, put them in his mouth, and then while the waves were crashing on the beach, try to declaim passages from Homer's Odyssey or famous passages from the plays of Aeschylus or Sophocles at the top of his voice with pebbles in his mouth to get over his stutter,
00:11:30.720 to work his tongue around the pebbles until he was elocuting clearly, but also projecting his weak little concave chest.
00:11:40.520 He built himself up, and he could project then over the sound of the waves.
00:11:45.560 And I should say right now, as a technical point for all our friends who are listening who are interested in public speaking, yelling ain't projecting.
00:11:53.420 Projecting is finding a way to make your own head kind of a voice box that amplifies your voice as you send it out into the air, and that's what he did.
00:12:02.980 And that's what he had to do when he ultimately became first a lawyer and would stand in the great open public forums of the Athenian law courts.
00:12:11.260 Everything was open air in Athens so that everybody could come.
00:12:14.260 As I've said, juries are 501, and each one got to hear you if you're the lawyer defending somebody.
00:12:20.040 And in the first case, he defended himself.
00:12:22.960 He went, presented himself to the justices, and took his uncles, who'd embezzled all of his fortune, to court, and convinced the jury that he was in the right, they were in the wrong.
00:12:34.320 Well, he won the case, but they'd spent all the money.
00:12:37.600 There was nothing to win back.
00:12:39.480 So he realized, well, I've got a marketable skill.
00:12:42.640 I will hire myself out.
00:12:44.160 And he became a lawyer.
00:12:45.640 Did he have a career outside of law?
00:12:47.200 Did he become a statesman of any sort?
00:12:48.520 He ultimately became the head of state of Athens at the most dangerous time in the city's history.
00:12:56.600 There was a great power up to the north that we're all familiar with now, Macedon or Macedonia, still an important mountainous northern region of Greece.
00:13:06.160 But at that time, it was a kingdom.
00:13:08.320 The Athenians loathed kings.
00:13:11.300 They had gotten rid of their own kings centuries earlier.
00:13:14.960 They had gotten into that democracy where every citizen had an equal voice and an equal vote.
00:13:20.740 And their great enemies, the Persians, were always led by their great kings.
00:13:25.820 And the two that really tangled with the Athenians were King Darius of Persia, who sent the Persians to invade Athens.
00:13:33.880 And the Athenians repelled them at the Battle of Marathon.
00:13:37.140 And then Darius' son, King Xerxes of Persia, who sent a thousand Persian ships or Persian-owned ships to try to capture Athens by sea.
00:13:48.800 And that was when they fought the Battle of Salamis, and we still have, thanks to a Greek writer named Herodotus, some of the speeches that were given by the heroes of that time in Athens.
00:14:00.840 A great man named Themistocles, who, like Demosthenes, was on the outside.
00:14:06.420 Themistocles was the only Athenian who thought, we can beat these Persians. 1.00
00:14:10.760 We just need to not face them on land where they can overwhelm us like an avalanche.
00:14:16.760 We need to get in our ships.
00:14:18.440 They're a land power.
00:14:19.800 We need to make ourselves into a sea serpent, a great power on the waves.
00:14:24.800 Let's build ships. 0.98
00:14:25.940 We just struck some silver in our minds.
00:14:27.800 We'll build a great force of 200 of these ships with bronze rams, and we will beat them.
00:14:33.400 And they did.
00:14:33.980 It was called the Battle of Salamis.
00:14:35.220 It was all because of the speeches of this Themistocles, who believed in fight rather than surrender or flee. 0.93
00:14:43.680 And these were the kinds of old speeches, in this case recorded by the Herodotus narrative, that Demosthenes steeped himself in.
00:14:52.620 Not just law court, where he would make money initially and win back his own purloined and embezzled fortune from his wretched guardians, but ultimately rise to become the head of state of his own city and try to prevent Athens' conquest by the Macedonians, by King Philip and his son Alexander.
00:15:11.960 And I think the big takeaway from Demosthenes was this idea that public speaking is a physical act, and he had to get in shape physically to be an effective public speaker.
00:15:21.640 And oftentimes I think we typically think of public speaking as sort of intellectual, which it is, but you can't forget that this is also an embodied physical act, so you have to be in shape to do it.
00:15:30.880 I couldn't agree more, and every aspect of your body comes into play.
00:15:35.760 Your eyes, you've got to look at your audience, and you can't pick one person.
00:15:40.200 You've got to feel by the end of your speech, everybody in that hall has felt you looked at them once.
00:15:46.040 And I think if you've got to read the speech, many places have it set up now, if you talk to them about it, where your text that you need to read will be projected, and you can still be looking out into the group of people, the audience, the crowd, the folks who've assembled to hear you.
00:16:05.000 But there is the text of your speech on a little board or tablet or screen in front of you, and you can get through it.
00:16:13.940 Some of the people listening may be able to remember how moving it was at John F. Kennedy's sunny inauguration ceremony when Robert Frost was reading one of his last poems, that aged poet laureate of America.
00:16:26.960 And the sun was so bright on his pages that he couldn't read his own poem clearly, and he just stopped trying to and then began to recite it from memory.
00:16:38.520 But the fact that it was the spoken word, that it was a drama of communication from someone who was there trying to speak to you, trying to share things of great importance to him or to her, whoever would be speaking, that's what I think rivets the attention, and that's what builds memories that last in a way that a typical television broadcast just doesn't.
00:17:01.620 Public speaking is personal to everyone who's listening to you, and you've got to combine that broad oratorical roots to the crowd, to everybody, with moving your eyes around.
00:17:16.120 Try to make everybody who's there feel you looked at them once.
00:17:20.560 We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.
00:17:25.460 And now back to the show.
00:17:27.000 Well, in a guest lecture you bring in to help people understand the importance of delivery and eye contact and how you move your body when you public speak is Patrick Henry.
00:17:37.360 How was he a master of delivery in public speaking?
00:17:41.600 Patrick Henry, for those folks who've joined us, let me remind you, he is the one who helped launch the American Revolution with the famous rallying cry,
00:17:50.540 Give me liberty or give me death.
00:17:53.980 It was part of a longer phrase, I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death.
00:18:04.080 So he was allowing for that democratic principle, I may be in a minority, but I know what I'm going to do.
00:18:10.480 I will die in the trenches in this cause.
00:18:13.660 Well, that was one of the things that made the revolution happen.
00:18:17.720 We have to remember what a near-run thing that was.
00:18:20.620 It was only about 50-50 among the English-speaking colonists of the British colonies in America, whether they wanted to really fight Mother Britain,
00:18:30.860 the greatest sea power in the world and far outnumbering them.
00:18:34.600 But it was those early speeches that did it.
00:18:37.380 And Patrick Henry's was one of the moments when somebody held a match to the little fuse on the cannon and blew that shot right out that was heard around the world and certainly all around America, give me liberty, give me death.
00:18:54.360 So I talk about him in my course as how famous he was for his body language, shaking his fist at the heavens and an anger at the tyranny of the British.
00:19:05.440 And when he cried, give me liberty or give me death, I think we would consider this overdoing it these days, although we are not trying to liberate our country from a foreign oppressor. 0.98
00:19:15.400 But he was standing astray of the stage in front of his little seat there in the house of, I guess it's the equivalent of the colony of Virginia legislature.
00:19:27.980 But he's standing there.
00:19:28.960 He's given his speech.
00:19:29.900 And as he cried out that final phrase, he struck his heart with his fist, raised the other hand in the air, and then cried out, give me liberty or give me death, and then collapsed back into his seat as if he'd been struck with a blow rather than just, oh, thank you, Mr. Chairman.
00:19:52.900 I'll sit down now.
00:19:53.660 So anything you can do with body language, and you've got to match it to the occasion.
00:19:59.300 We're not all trying to start a revolution as Patrick Henry was, but let your body also speak.
00:20:05.520 So, okay, think about your delivery.
00:20:06.840 Think about your body language.
00:20:08.140 But another, I think, something you attack that you see people do when they give a speech is they try to start off their speech with some sort of joke or self-deprecating comment about how they're terrible at public speaking.
00:20:20.920 So they're trying to use humor as a way to get in.
00:20:23.260 If they're nervous and maybe they feel that they can laugh it off, then things will kind of be a little more smoother.
00:20:30.280 But often those jokes fall flat in public speaking.
00:20:34.100 Why does humor often fall flat in public speaking?
00:20:37.000 Well, I want to say, first of all, I think there are different approaches.
00:20:40.400 And if it calms you down to tell a joke, tell the joke.
00:20:47.320 If it helps you launch, and above all, if the joke relates to the message of the speech, which not all opening jokes do, then don't rule out the possibility of using one.
00:20:59.620 But I think in some ways, jokes are always somewhat trivializing.
00:21:04.780 And I think most public speaking, it's an occasion that matters or you wouldn't be doing it.
00:21:10.780 And what I want to convey is not humor and aw shucks, we're all in this together, we're just plain folks.
00:21:18.020 And I want to suggest respect.
00:21:21.640 Respect for them.
00:21:23.640 Respect for the subject we're talking about.
00:21:25.980 Respect for the outcome.
00:21:27.740 Respect for the occasion.
00:21:29.120 Self-respect.
00:21:30.520 And I think that is done by standing up straight, looking people in the eye, being frank, being open.
00:21:36.360 If there's going to be humor and so on, save it.
00:21:39.760 Until you've established that this is something that matters to you, you know it matters to them, it's meaningful.
00:21:47.760 One can add humor to anything.
00:21:49.580 Humor can be a great spark that lightens things up.
00:21:52.360 Actually can be a spur to thought and make people think twice.
00:21:55.360 A joke can sometimes shake people out of the straight intellectual pondering on something and see a thing in a new way.
00:22:02.660 But I would just use it really sparingly and really, to borrow our old term, intentionally, with intentionality.
00:22:11.520 You know that's the right joke to launch a new topic or a new aspect or a new thought or to sum something up.
00:22:20.300 A little exclamation point at the end of a section, give everybody a break, and then go on.
00:22:25.460 Well, the guest lecture you bring in to show how to effectively use humor is Oklahoma's own Will Rogers.
00:22:33.960 The supreme humorist in American history, in my opinion.
00:22:39.000 Why do you think his humor was effective?
00:22:41.780 I believe it was because more than anybody else I know of in human history, not human, American history, American history of our times,
00:22:51.000 is Will Rogers struck people as being that term we sometimes use, an everyman.
00:22:58.140 Everybody could identify with him.
00:23:00.500 He was that person we are when we're not praying in church or standing up at a town meeting or being chewed out by the boss or whoever.
00:23:08.500 He just seemed to embody a plainness, a simplicity, a straightforwardness, and that we all wanted to identify with.
00:23:19.720 It seemed like a basic good to be open to all people, tolerant, welcoming of all people.
00:23:26.100 That was the kind of image that Will Rogers projected.
00:23:29.460 And his humor never had that edge on it where he took somebody down with a joke.
00:23:35.400 It was never aimed at somebody.
00:23:38.000 His humor always made a kind of a feeling of bond.
00:23:41.740 We're all smiling at this together.
00:23:43.640 We're all seeing the humor in this together.
00:23:46.540 And I think humor can be a tremendous rhetorical device, a joke, that makes jokes.
00:23:54.140 Remember, you laugh because you were surprised.
00:23:56.340 You didn't see it coming.
00:23:57.620 So you want to pick an element of the situation you're talking about.
00:24:00.900 And it may be a very serious situation.
00:24:03.160 Obviously, there are certain things you never want to use humor about, deaths,
00:24:07.260 unless you're telling a funny story that will make people remember the beloved person who died at the age of 90.
00:24:12.900 Maybe that's okay, but you've got to use this carefully.
00:24:17.080 But in a less high-tension, high-stakes moment, humor can help draw the audience together.
00:24:25.940 There's nothing like a laugh going around the whole crowd that makes everybody feel, A, relaxed, but B, together, united.
00:24:34.560 They've laughed at the same thing.
00:24:35.900 That's a real powerful moment for any group.
00:24:38.800 I've even seen moments at memorial services where the most memorable thing was an enormous roar of laughter from the whole group
00:24:47.900 at jointly remembering a remarkably humorous moment in the life of the deceased person that that person was proud of
00:24:56.540 and liked to brag about or liked to recite or remind people of.
00:25:01.140 So humor may have a place in almost any speech, but it should always be like a spice, a dash, a little element that you add as a thing to emphasize, spark, refocus attention, or release tension itself.
00:25:19.520 So I'm seeing a theme here with the Patrick Henry delivery and the Will Rogers humor.
00:25:24.740 It's like these things are used to create a connection between you and the audience.
00:25:28.540 That's what public speaking is all about.
00:25:31.420 That's why it differs from sitting down at your lonely word processor, typewriter, pad of paper with your pen in hand,
00:25:37.180 and just writing in the silence words that you will know will be read ultimately by others.
00:25:42.400 In that case, you've just got to craft the words that carry your tone, your message, your sort of focus and where you all want this to go.
00:25:53.820 You're steering the thoughts and attitudes of the reader purely through words.
00:25:58.540 Public speaking allows you to do it much more person to person.
00:26:01.740 And we all know body language can overrule anything you say.
00:26:07.320 I was, I once read a really interesting book on body language, I was still a teenager, and it told me things that I've never gotten over.
00:26:17.520 One was that people who touch their face while speaking at a moment of tension or something, obviously if you've got a little itch or something to brush off, you're going to touch your face.
00:26:28.180 But touching your face is a defensive thing.
00:26:32.640 You're bringing the hand up, and it means whatever they just said, it's something that's a slightly problematic statement for that person who's saying it.
00:26:41.440 To touch your eye can sometimes mean, I can't really see this myself, but I sure hope you can.
00:26:45.740 To pull your ear is, I hope you're hearing this because there's a problem here.
00:26:52.460 Any touching of the face is a sign of insecurity, of a double meaning, of a sense that the speaker is not 100% with or behind or convinced by the statement they're making themselves.
00:27:03.880 So, always keep your hands away from your face, away from your ears, your face, mouth, nose, neck, anything.
00:27:12.000 You can use them, you know, raise a hand, fist out, make a point, whatever, with the index finger, but do not touch your face.
00:27:20.120 Now, when it comes to the more macro question of how to organize your speech, you're a big believer in organizing things into threes.
00:27:25.960 Why is there power in talking about things and organizing things in groups of threes, and who is an example of an orator who employed this tactic?
00:27:34.700 I believe the human mind is satisfied by three.
00:27:41.540 One of anything, one example, one statement, one fact, is an isolation.
00:27:49.300 It doesn't prove anything.
00:27:50.920 It's just, yeah, there's that, but what about everything else?
00:27:53.260 Two, we are taught to see the opposition.
00:27:58.060 Two is always a dyad, a yes, no, a yin, yang, a black, white, a male, female, a human versus the rest of the world. 0.99
00:28:07.500 That's two.
00:28:08.820 Feuds are made between two.
00:28:10.700 Three is a completion.
00:28:13.220 And so, if you think of your own presentation, you want a beginning, you want a middle, which is the substance of the speech, and you want an end.
00:28:20.760 Those three parts, the tri-part element.
00:28:22.900 I used Paul, the apostle Paul, who's probably more responsible than any other single person for making Christianity the, obviously, after Jesus, for taking up the words of Jesus, who he never knew.
00:28:38.300 And as a man named Saul, who was not Christian at all, a persecutor of early Christians, had a vision on the road to Damascus, according to the tradition.
00:28:49.620 And then became, I think, because of his eloquence and because of his great gift at turning thoughts and beliefs into memorable words, that he's one of the builders of the whole success.
00:29:03.640 That Jesus' message became something that millions of people through history have turned to, adopted, followed, or argued against and fought.
00:29:14.780 Paul was a genius at that.
00:29:16.420 And I think the three that I always remember is, now there are by these three, faith, hope, charity, or love, but the greatest of these is charity.
00:29:27.380 That word charity that I also said could be love, it's a Greek word we can't say in one English word, agape.
00:29:33.500 If you spell it out in English, agape, well, that is what it means in Greek.
00:29:37.520 Open, like an agape mouth or an open window, but it means open, tolerant, welcoming.
00:29:44.000 So that's what he's trying to say.
00:29:46.000 And he is wanting you to see that your faith and your hope, that's in you.
00:29:52.980 But you need, Jesus felt, he felt this was something that made Jesus, a teacher he wanted to follow the teachings of.
00:30:00.500 Jesus wanted an outward thing where you are sharing that.
00:30:03.540 You are opening yourself up to others.
00:30:05.480 You are connecting with others in the most kind of humble, but open and willing to learn and willing to share kind of way.
00:30:14.040 So I'm not getting into the theological or the life lessons that Paul is trying to say.
00:30:18.840 I'm just saying faith, hope, agape, faith, hope, charity, faith, hope, love.
00:30:25.360 And then the greatest of these is the third.
00:30:27.720 But his whole sermon, and it probably is a sermon.
00:30:31.020 Someone probably wrote it down while Paul was speaking.
00:30:33.940 He was a proselytizer.
00:30:35.020 He went around and talked to lots of different early Christian congregations around the Mediterranean world.
00:30:40.880 And this, I'm sure, was a frequently used speech because agape is Jesus's.
00:30:46.540 That's the word he used that it gets translated as love or charity.
00:30:50.700 So Paul, this is his signature speech.
00:30:53.500 I imagine faith, hope, charity was something he was known for.
00:30:56.680 But everything, think in threes, a beginning, middle, end of a story, a beginning, middle, end of a sentence.
00:31:04.260 Everything you do, examples, always in threes.
00:31:07.700 And your audience will get the picture, be with you, feel you have made a case that's easy to follow and carries conviction.
00:31:18.300 Okay, so another guest lecturer you bring, and I want to end with this, is Abraham Lincoln.
00:31:23.640 And he gave one of the most famous speeches in world history.
00:31:27.640 Like, it's always listed up there as some of the greatest speeches.
00:31:30.080 And that's the Gettysburg Address.
00:31:32.160 Absolutely.
00:31:32.880 But what a lot of people forget or don't know about the Gettysburg Address is that there was another renowned speaker.
00:31:38.240 He was like a country famous in America that gave a speech that spoke right before Lincoln, but it lasted hours.
00:31:46.820 But we don't remember that guy.
00:31:48.180 I don't even know the guy's name.
00:31:49.740 But we do remember Lincoln's speech, the Gettysburg Address, and it was just like a 10-year-old can memorize it.
00:31:55.920 It's that short.
00:31:57.100 Why don't we remember the really famous speaker guy, but we remember Lincoln's short speech?
00:32:02.680 His name was Horton, and he was the main speaker.
00:32:05.420 He was a person who was respected by all, and he had been asked to do the memorial tribute, the speech that would be a tribute to all of those who fell at Gettysburg.
00:32:17.960 And Lincoln was insistent that it be a non-political, non-ra-ra union speech because Gettysburg was, as far as I can remember, that may be the battle that led to the most American deaths of any single battle.
00:32:31.840 At any rate, there they are on the field at Gettysburg, and because it's near where some of my family live, Gettysburg, Virginia, from an early age, I was taken to the battlefield, and we would just walk that field.
00:32:45.500 And we would go to the place where Lincoln and the others gathered for those addresses at the end.
00:32:51.200 And I was fascinated to read because I sure didn't know when I was a kid.
00:32:54.120 The Gettysburg Address was not the big deal.
00:32:55.940 He was a little afterpiece, and so the big two-hour oration went on.
00:33:03.160 In those pre-media days, our ancestors had a stronger stomach than we do for direct public speaking, listening to a person with attention for a couple of hours.
00:33:13.340 We don't have any trouble watching a movie for two hours.
00:33:15.920 They brought that same kind of attention to a public speaker.
00:33:19.040 Even a preacher or an inspired prophetess or whoever, they were willing to listen at great length.
00:33:25.960 So Lincoln came without knowing what he was going to say, and this is the tradition, and that he scribbled notes on what he was going to say while listening to the main speech.
00:33:39.920 And that when he was over, he got up and read the immortal words of the Gettysburg Address a few minutes.
00:33:51.800 I don't know that anyone has ever recorded the crowd's response.
00:33:56.480 It may have been so somber that the effect he had was just silence and then everyone dispersing from this field of sorrow.
00:34:05.040 So, but Horton, the main speaker, walked over to Lincoln and was heard to say, Mr. President, I wish I could feel I said as much in two hours as you said in two minutes.
00:34:19.800 And hats off to the speaker for his insight, his awareness, his humbleness, and his admiration for Lincoln.
00:34:27.080 But for putting his finger on something, you can encapsulate something big in a small space if you give it the right form.
00:34:36.280 Everything needs a beginning, a middle, and an end.
00:34:39.100 Read through the Gettysburg Address for yourself.
00:34:42.140 You see how Lincoln's evocation of the situation, what brings us all together on this field of battle, the middle part about the stress.
00:34:50.900 We are caught in the, we find ourselves here on this field of the battle in the midst of a great civil war.
00:34:55.560 And then that final ending, which is dedicating ourselves to the cause for which they died, taking them as examples to follow, making them live not just in a sort of, oh, I remember way, but as examples, as these sort of figures written in fire in our imaginations of we can be that too.
00:35:18.680 We can do that too, and if we do give that last full measure of devotion as they did, any cause can prevail.
00:35:27.560 So it's a mechanical thing I'm talking about with Lincoln, but his words have the power because of the structure, that tripartite, three-part structure that he used, a powerful call to attention, an equally powerful, but now somewhat more cerebral, thought-provoking middle,
00:35:50.440 and then a finally power in a summing up, turning back to the subject, the fallen, all of these soldiers who gave their lives, and focus then on the subject, not on the speaker, beginning, middle, end.
00:36:08.780 And it's not a long speech, two minutes, but I think his audience felt, and certainly Horton, who gave the main speech, felt he had created the sense of something vast in those two minutes because they'd been on a journey with him through those three parts of opening the door, taking the view, and then reflecting on the message.
00:36:30.080 That's what I would recommend, and anything you're doing, even if it's just a financial report, have a beginning, have the middle that's the substance, and draw it to a conclusion that reminds your listeners of what mattered.
00:36:43.800 And also keep in mind, more isn't often better. In fact, less is often better.
00:36:48.080 Well, and that is what the honored main speaker that day was pointing out to Lincoln. I wish I could say as much. He felt he'd said less.
00:36:54.860 He felt that Lincoln, by boiling down to the heart of the matter, had left the people feeling the greater message in the way that the main speaker, who had to talk for two hours, everybody expected it.
00:37:09.340 I mean, he had the harder row to hoe, but he was such an insightful person. 1.00
00:37:14.440 I think that's a beautiful thing that he said to Lincoln, that the president had said more, that the brief could be more powerful, and it was partly because of its gravity, its memorability.
00:37:24.860 Well, John, this has been a great conversation. We've talked about some of the guest lectures you bring on in your lecture on the art of public speaking.
00:37:32.020 Where can people go to learn more about your course, The Art of Public Speaking?
00:37:35.360 Well, it's available to you from the Great Courses Company. They have a mail order and online presence. I think now you can download them all, which was a technology that didn't exist all those decades ago when I would truck out to Chantilly, Virginia for session after session from my home base in New Albany, Indiana, and Louisville, Kentucky, and spent some very happy times working with them.
00:38:00.660 I'm a guy who likes team efforts, and I'll say one other thing about public speaking. Think of it always as a team effort. Don't be isolated and lonely about it. Try things out on other people. Learn from other people and make the audience feel like you're all in this together.
00:38:15.380 It's not you haranguing or lecturing them or teaching them that it's a conversation. Even if they don't ever get a Q&A at the end, even if they never raise their hand, try to make it a conversation, and you will relax yourself.
00:38:31.140 You will find the right way to put across your points, and they will not only enjoy it, they will remember it.
00:38:38.380 Well, John Hale, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.
00:38:41.360 Thank you.
00:38:42.800 My guest today was John Hale. He is the lecturer of the Great Courses course, The Art of Public Speaking, Lessons from the Greatest Speeches in History. Check that out at The Great Courses. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is slash public speak, where you can find links to resources, where you can delve deeper into this topic.
00:38:56.060 Thank you.
00:39:26.060 And if you haven't done so already, I'd appreciate if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. It helps out a lot. And if you've done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out of it.
00:39:36.560 As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay. Remind you not only on the list of the AOM Podcast, but put what you've heard into action.