you talkin to me

The Trojan War

the best communicators alive right now cliche or it’s a very obvious answer

• barack obama
• philip collins speechwriter said he’s not even the best speech maker in his own family
• intentionally uses rheotircal high style
• nemesis and anti-pole donald trump
• anti-rhetorical style
• journalists in general
• journalists generally are actually weirdly where you look for or where you’re most likely to find you know very good people in the business of direct communication because that’s their absolute bread and butter they need to get stuff across quickly and make it you know if they’re comment journalists they need to make it persuasive and entertaining in a very short space of time
• new yorker
• spectator

good journalistic writers

directly employing the lessons of rhetoric for iteration of message they’ve crafted it’s mostly unconscious rhetoric is something we do it’s a sort of aristotle said it’s a thing that you can teach we use language rhetorically from the moment we are able to use language we’re always on the make rhetoric really is just language plus power we instinctively group things into groups of three the tricolon we instinctively set phrase in the beginning of successive sentences

certain people will consciously as craftsmen go in and go right we need a tricolon here we need to you know a lot of the time i think we have imbibed them so much that they become nearly as natural as breathing a journalist will be familiar bringing a long piece of reportage somehow circle back to the opening line - those things that become instinctive

hegelian view of history: one articulate president , become disillusioned , then one who can’t string a sentence together everyone comes to mistrust a president after a couple of years.

really anywhere that language is involved with power um i persuasion and which is to say it’s almost all language all the time yes and you can appeal to people by seeming you know which is one of the aristotle came on this this idea of the ethos appeal how how you present yourself to your audience um and one way to present yourself to the audience is as the guy knows stuff you know you’re an expert you’re smarter than the audience you can lead them along you can you know they could trust you because you know you’re you’re you’re the person who who’s on in command um another way you can appeal to the audience is to seem like someone who’s just honest and completely trustworthy and completely transparent and you know the kind of one locus classicus of this is the great funeral oration off in shakespeare’s julius caesar where mark antony says you know i am no orator as brutus is but has he known me all a plain blunt man which is just you know fantastic piece of cheek he’s much much better orator than brutus but he’s already put his thumb on the scales by saying brutus you know he’s doing rhetoric he’s he’s fooling you he’s tricking you he’s he’s playing on your emotions using these techniques and i don’t use techniques i speak from the heart the moment someone tells you they’re speaking from the heart that is the most it’s like people claiming this isn’t political right you know um i mean in the same way that ideology you know suffuses as marxist critic will say all of literature you know you can’t say this this this literature isn’t political because literature is political depending on what it chooses to omit you know a literature that omits politics you know as people have complained about say jane austen they say well it’s all you know surely it’s just all about people having balls and worrying who’s going to marry who and so well of course in order to focus on that you have to pull focus from the you know gigantic slave funded international society which gives rise to all this wealth in the west kind of england so that’s the argument that marxists make about ideology in literature and i think the same argument can be made about rhetoricality which is when you’re trying to persuade somebody saying you’re not using rhetoric is itself a rhetorical sally and you know why george w bush much to the kind of frustrations of the coastal elites you know the fact that he said really stupid stuff when he opened his mouth and his sentences didn’t really make sense didn’t really harm him with the voters because there’s a sort of sense if if somebody yeah if somebody seems like they barely know what’s coming out of their mouth before it does you know there’s a kind of forrest gump quality to that that you think well okay he may not be the sharpest tool in the box but he’s honest and he’s decent and he’s certainly you know if you can’t can’t put a sentence together himself he’s certainly unlikely to be tricking me whereas people who are smooth um people who are completely in command you know who have sort of beautiful command of language and rhetoric you know like obama it can come to count against them because you’ve got this that guy’s too smooth that’s kind of used car salesman patter there’s a sort of sense that i don’t trust this guy because he’s flyer than me and and so both of those become rhetorical strategies and you know trump has that whole i am anti the smooth washington coastal elites thing um and he’s very very good at mustering you know in the great triad of rhetorical appeals um pathos which is to say emotion okay you know trump speeches are designed to make you feel rage um and pity and he plays on an audience’s rage and anger and you know um and that that i think itself is very powerful and particularly in the social media age where we know that you know again and i guess get on to this but you know it’s it’s always old wine in new bottles rhetoric and what rhetorical strategies work absolutely adapts itself to its audience generation by generation that means it also adapts itself to the means of transmission and in the digital age we know that the means of transmission is often social media and virality and so forth and we know that what goes viral what works is emotional rather than as it were logical appeals you know it’s something that’s short that makes you feel something fast and respond quickly yep the rhetoric of trump as you analyze the way he speaks do you think he’s consciously using pathos rhetorically or rather do you think it’s just unconscious this is how he communicates and it happens to be along these lines of uh traditional rhetoric i think it i think it’s probably pretty instinctive for him i mean i don’t want to get into a kind of you know it wasn’t too awful sort of thing but i think he’s obviously a person who has if you like quite poor impulse control um and who’s quite angry or self-pitying quite a lot of the time and you know come with the hour come the man you know he’s he’s sort of very well suited as it turns out to a particular form of you know media transmission and a particular kind of constituency that he was speaking to at a time when you know after 2008 you know a lot of working class americans felt that smooth washington elites represented by the likes of obama had you know sold them down the river everything everything had gone to shit the you know all the masters of the universe we were supposed to trust to keep the economy buoyant turned out to be lining their own pockets and it all went you know went to hell in 2008 um i mean that’s a sort of political point but the sort of background to that is that trump admittedly you know there is the absurdity of his ethos appeal he’s you know a supposed billionaire um presenting himself as this kind of perfectly ordinary man of the people but he’s sort of his ethos appeal is kind of clever because it’s simultaneously buys into that kind of compensatory fantasy of you know that has long been remarked that the american dream you know is is really a way of telling people haven’t got much money you know we have this wonderful free market in the american dream because everybody has the chance to get lots and lots of money and the fact that you have a vanishingly small chance if you start out poor in america from getting lots and lots of money nevertheless the american dream becomes this kind of totemic compensatory fantasy for very unequal society um again so i want me to drift massively into into politics so it does tie in with this yeah because trump persuaded presents himself as a sort of insider outsider he is the guy who’s just like you and at the same time he’s got lots of money and all these hot chicks and lives in a big golden hotel um and everyone goes yeah i’d like some of that um and and he’s clever at positioning himself and in that cleverness is it conscious or just instinctively that’s how the man has communicated i think he’s obviously cunning i don’t know whether i call him clever i don’t think he’s got much book learning i don’t think he’s you know probably um reads a book from one year to the next so the idea that he’s he’s been kind of scrutinizing gary wills’s study of lincoln’s oratory and applied it to himself as undoubtedly obama did right right um but the other thing that people have i mean there was a really interesting piece in i think it was vox that got linguists to analyze trump’s speech style because i mean you know you get kind of rhetoric rhetoric guys and speech writers and people like me to go well you know that’s a tricolon and look he’s using an afro here and you know he does do all that stuff again it’s sometimes instinctively sometimes when he’s actually reading what his speech writers have written for him though he seems to improvise a lot but the vox piece had people who said what he’s doing is very much what stand-up comics do his his way of delivery and they said it’s very characteristic kind of new yorkery queensy kind of thing is that he doesn’t finish sentences and he he very often he’ll say you know he’ll get halfway through a sentence and then as the audience sort of responds he’ll go yeah yeah you know what i mean you know you know and the audience comes to kind of complete his thoughts for him and that kind of it is and i think it’s it is that stand-up thing you know where someone will start telling a story about their washing machine they got halfway through and the audience will start to giggle in recognition because everyone’s had a washing machine that’s gone wrong like that and he’s like you know am i right am i right guys and that kind of am i right guys thing if you look at it in rhetorical terms is a very good way of kind of co-opting partly it gets him out of legal trouble because very often he’ll say you know the audience will say the bit that’s the incitement to violence rather than him um but also it co-ops the audience as part of the speech making process and that’s absolutely central to the way rhetoric’s always worked that you know all rhetoric in some sense is identity speech because it starts out with the speaker saying this is me and the speaker very quickly wants to try and make a connection with the audience and that connection is almost always you know i’m one of you this is us this is why you know endlessly endlessly endlessly you know politicians do that thing despite the fact that most most of them particularly in the states are you know very rich and very weird and very unlike most of their voters um they’ll nevertheless you know they’ll put on a baseball cap they’ll eat a hot dog they’ll you know go hunting with an ak-47 with a republican um they’ll you know in this country in the uk you know if you’re for years the gotcha question for a politician was how much is a pint of milk yeah yeah because you didn’t know what cost of a pint of milk was you don’t understand the people so the the progress of a speech is almost always from me plus you and you and you and you and you to we you’re binding the audience together into one and ultimately you’re trying to co-opt them their reactions that you know you’re riding the riding the tide of their reactions and you know good speech makers they don’t talk over the applause they they know when to pause to get a laugh they they start to play the audience and the audience’s response becomes part of the whole performance and of course the audience is not only then helping to perform but it’s it’s sort of watching you know if you make your audience laugh because crowds behave like crowds behave the more people are laughing the more people are going to laugh next time and so it gets a kind of momentum and trump’s co-optation of the audience so that they’re all shouting letter up letter up sorry lock her up lock her up lock her up or um oh what’s that let’s go brandon or any of these other kind of i haven’t seen that one tags yeah yeah and they absolutely um you know they become they’re part of a club they’re part of a club and that that that’s powerful rhetorically i think and it’s different case to case obviously and they need to go hand in hand but if you could put a uh percentage divide how much of a good speech is its delivery versus how much is its written form its construction i hard to put percentages i would say probably almost 70 30 to delivery to delivery yeah um i think it’s all about delivery in the same stand-up comedy maybe isn’t a bad analogy which is you know george carlin or i don’t know um bill hicks or eddie azod could write you and me a routine and we would die on our arses with their routine um and you know good material helps and bad material can hobble you you know if speech is laden with cliches if it’s you know if it’s self-contradictory in a very obvious way if it’s just clunks it’ll be harder to deliver but honestly you know it’s pure rhythm and music really and i mean this is a point i make actually about even the written language that so much of what sounds to us or seems to us like good writing is stuff that sounds good it’s just the cadences are right right and that’s that’s kind of below the conscious level normally and people who are good writers often just have an instinctively good ear for cadence um an example i use of this delivery thing and the the speech making and sound um i remember a secretary of state for scotland in this country some years ago who said he was giving a speech he was a tory um and therefore not a very popular secretary of state for scotland because it’s uh scotland’s you know generally sort of laborish and smp-ish but he said i am scottish by birth by choice and by aspiration got a huge round of applause you know one of us he’s scottish he’s not just scottish once he’s scottish twice he’s scottish three times he must be very scottish yeah he must be very scottish he’s one of us um and there’s a lovely rising tricolon birth choice aspiration dum dum da da dum you know just like the opening um chords of back in black by acdc it’s got that that lovely rhythm um but of course if you’re scottish by birth you have no choice about being scottish because you were born that way and you’re scottish by choice you can’t therefore be scottish by birth and you aspire to be something that you’re not but would like to be so you’re simultaneously saying i had no choice but to be scottish i chose to be scottish and i’m not scottish but i wish i was absolutely nobody paid any attention to this it was you know nobody laughed out of court they just applauded him because the rhythm was right and people aren’t really listening to the words they’re looking at how confidently you’re standing they’re looking at whether you seem to be enjoying yourself whether you seem nervous are you cringing is there blue on the stage what’s the you know um and you know the reason confidence tricksters you know succeed in their tricks is because they’re confident more than because they’re tricky um and i think that’s i mean i i don’t want to kind of you know reinforce this age-old association between rhetoric and confidence trickery but confidence is a lot of delivery and you know you could i mean george w bush is another good example he gave a speech in which he said and i think i’ll try and remember the quote exactly but he said hope is where our wings take dream um families is where our anyway it was it was complete gibberish and and yet the rhythm of it was okay it contained these emotive words hope families wings dream didn’t really matter there wasn’t a logical connection between them you know and so the sort of smart-ass people like me who are you know writing little instant reactions to political speeches and will say oh this sentence didn’t make much sense or i see these paragraphs contradict each other you know that basic that’s farting into a hurricane if the politician delivered it well it will probably have worked fine which is why routinely in any democracy we’re sort of selecting we’re optimizing for charisma more than substance a lot of the time i think 100 and i i that doesn’t mean to me that we need to you know sort of abolish democracy altogether and get a sort of platonic style um you know selection of philosopher kings um uh you know all of whom will be decided on by dominic cummings um that seems to me a bad idea i take the view that you know the athesians were on something that democracy as churchill put it is you know the worst of all systems of choosing government except for all the other ones that have been tried but absolutely you know the way we’ve set up democracy in most of the western world it does optimize for charisma um there is an idea at least in the in the uk that you get charismatic politicians and you have hopefully very uncharismatic but extremely attention to detaily civil servants who right you know work on policy and you know there’s a kind of little yin and yang going on there you know i mean we we fortunately don’t you know it’s not quite as stupidly constructed as all that you know we do have this idea that that you know you need a secretariat as well as an executive and you need people you know you need some counterbalances to the the flashy lunatics um but undeniably the flashy lunatics have the upper hand and in recent years in the uk the flashy lunatics have been given the you know solomon sober people the secretary had a really good showing in public yeah so it’s tricky but yeah we do optimize for charisma um emphasizing the delivery i brought up this guy with you before we were recording christopher hitchens um you watch his videos on youtube or at least i’ll speak personally watching his videos on youtube absolutely loved it thought this is the best speaker i’ve ever seen i admire it i emulate it i want to recreate it and then as i’ve grown older and revisited a lot of these debates he does you realize that it is actually charisma driving it and not necessarily substance particularly in some of his religious debates um there’s a great video online that looks at the sophistry of hitchens in a lot of his arguments against god which isn’t to say you know he’s not on the right side of the argument in my opinion but nonetheless it was pure charisma pure audience work that drove him through what was actually an empty point i think that’s true i think that’s a fair criticism of hitchens i think i think he was very clever um i think he he did does coast a long way on passion and audience work i think weirdly he’s had a sort of second round of super celebrity almost posthumously because he fits very well into that because he’s so he’s so aggressive he and and rivetingly so and articulate in the sense that he’s aggressive but he’s never inarticulately aggressive the the aggression comes through and absolutely i mean you know logically yeah it may jump from step one to step three but in terms of the sort of verbal torrent and the apparent precision you know he never misses a beat the sentences are all in place absolutely um and that means he is perfectly tooled for this you know can we now opening onto a wider question about the way that democracy and the world is is affected by the means of transmission and the media we’ve got you know that genre of social media video which is all like watch christopher hitchens destroy yeah and you get those kind of youtube videos it’s you know jordan peterson destroys owns you know hammers and it’s always in a 10 second clip um i mean college student this gets exactly some college student is eviscerated and you know it’s got sort of mortal combat finishing the roof you know crudely photoshopped onto it which you know some would say is not necessarily the ideal way to go about deciding on whether something’s true or not um or the comparative merits of a complex case but there is a lovely story that i think it’s in amos’s memoir that he introduces someone to i think maybe amos introduces his dad to it’s julian barnes and christopher hitchens and his kings he goes now are you the one who can talk but can’t write or the one who can write but can’t talk which and i think julian can now talk quite well and i think christopher hitchens his writing was never as elegant as amos’s or right barnes but you know he was the talker you know actually i think in a way i sort of i i re-read some of hitchens’s essays not very long ago and i was kind of like not as impressed with them as i was hoping to be okay you know i mean not i don’t know about logical aporia but you know he’s just not quite the stylist i think he’s he’s claimed to be and he might be remembered so just because of how forceful he’s uh speaking is yeah and his persona remember his persona i would say for someone of my generation is very typical our experience of hitchens is via youtube yeah and maybe written later and so you can be you can be uh you know drawn down a false lane of he’s brilliant on every measure possible it’s very yeah it’s very interesting you say that that generational thing because you know dismayingly to me or like 20 years younger than me and so you’re absolutely of the generation that caught his youtube yeah fame because i mean he did he certainly you know he was very celebrated for most of the you know last 15 or 20 years of his life i mean one of the things he did also which which is not to do with spoken or written he was very good at choosing his enemies you know he went i’m gonna pick a good enemy and yeah you know he loved to fight oh they were worthwhile enemies mother theresa yeah he went from okay who does everyone love right mother theresa we’ll have her yeah and then he went right the elgin marbles that’ll be that’ll be worth us you know six months of my time to kick up some shit and kissinger um you know he was on the same side but then he you know and when when it came to the right the you know the famous thing that obviously put him on the outs with the left yeah was the iraq war yeah but i think i don’t think that that was a cynical career move actually i i do think he was a believer oh yeah i don’t i think that people go oh he’s just i mean he wrote that book notes towards a young notes to a young contrarian which i think is a kind of way selling himself a bit short because i think his publisher probably said we want you to do a thing about contrarianism because i think he was interested in the idea that if you get too complacent in your position you know you should look at it from another one i be contrarian in the sense kick the tires of your own prejudices yeah but i don’t think he was someone who was contrarian in the sense that he simply picked up a you know one end of an argument because everyone else was on the other one in letters to a young contrarian he disowns the title of contrarian well there you go which in itself is very contrarian exactly but but but nonetheless yeah i think it would be incorrect to say that he simply chose the other side of that argument because it would be a good career move and it would get a lot of attention yeah um and there were there were a lot of honorable people on the left who i mean they ended up with egg all over their face and but but yeah he did take the view i mean again this kind of slightly ancient history for you but at the time of the eralte war i remember i was contacted a telegraph and oh there was a small but honorable minority lefties instead of said it simply going you know right we don’t like america because they’re the big bad and we’re against wars because you know we’re on the left and we we think wars are bad they will say but saddam hussein is like as big a fascist bastard as you will find on the face of the earth and if as bad as i get you know and and sure maybe the case for you know his connection to 9-11 is a little bit tenuous but you know from an entirely leninist point of view you go right if w wants to stamp on this guy we’re in favor and all the gays and leftists and women and trades unionists and you know ordinary people in iraqi civil society will be very pleased to see the back of him and why shouldn’t we be in favor it now you know the answer was well didn’t work out quite how you’d did it but which is to revisit a very old old and sterile argument but you know i think he took that position from an honorable and basically you know from the left before we return to yeah sorry we’ve strayed but that’s the last thing about podcasts is you can is there anything uh worth mentioning from your interactions with hitchens i really i mean i i didn’t have many interactions with him i remember meeting him at a succession of parties where he was you know always kind of sweating sweating whiskey and um he was always very charming and delightful um i remember somebody a young nick lezard scurrying up to him at a party when i was talking to him and saying i’m writing a book about the simpsons do you you know do you watch the simpsons i’m trying to collect essays thing on the simpsons and hitch saying you know i think the simpsons is the only reason to own a television um and i’m kind of peeling across a field in hay pursued by another old friend of mine who was desperately trying to have a drink with him and he was like no no no i’m off um but actually the the abiding in person memory i have is of seeing him on a stage um which is a good i i think it’s good a corrective to the you know hitchens was you know always destroying and you know working the audience and hammering his opponents it was him doing a debate very stagey thing with his brother peter hitchens who as you probably know is you know a weird having started out as a i think as just as much of a trot as christopher yeah you know became intensely conservative um in fact he proudly calls himself a reactionary but the hitchens brothers were doing an on-stage debate and of course the audience was 95 and you went to watch it i went to watch it oh really just sat in the audience the the audience was obviously 95 christopher fanboys i mean i i use boys advisedly fan people but you know let’s face it most of them were boys um and you know peter hitchens the so-called hated peter hitchens i say so-called because he also calls himself the hated peter hitchens in capital letters passive aggressive move um and peter’s very articulate as as is christopher um and it was a really good debate but the audience started booing and jeering peter when he started to speak and christopher stood up i don’t think there’s you know there was not much love lost between the brothers i understand it he just stood up and said stop it you’re behaving like children you’re behaving like animals let the man speak you know this is not how we debate and i thought you know good on him telling his own fans off maybe contrarian move but yeah good on him for it uh it’s actually not a bad way to talk about rhetoric analyzing the two of them because in my summation peter although maybe he’s articulate and i’ve admittedly never really read anything he’s written he has no charisma like his brother did um and so from a purely delivery point of view yeah i think he’s actually he is actually very fluent and articulate um and he’s a very fiercely i mean i often think some of his logic seems to me to be a little bit cockeyed but he’s very you know he’s a therefore b therefore c you know his arguments are tend to be quite logical but he doesn’t have i mean i think he’s got a sort of prickliness which is slightly you know anti-charismatic you know i mean you like people who seem to be confident um we all respond to people who seem to be confident just institutively in our you know you know collective pits um and i think people who seem to be chippy or angry if they’re not angry like on our team you know i mean if you’re angry and you’re you’re marshalling the audience’s right it’s angry it’s great if you’re like fuck you guys it’s me against everybody that is a very isolating thing to project and i think pt hans who was sort of adopted i think quite cheerfully the idea me contra mundum you know um everybody’s mad uh the modern world needs dialing back to 1956 um you know leftists are all you know dangerous maniacs people who smoke weed or you know a disaster um you know the conservative government is of the uk isn’t nearly what i call right wing you know i mean he sort of basically thinks thinks he’s surrounded by you know communists and drug fiends and wasters and losers and that you know society is on a high road to doom um you know he’s he likes being the prophet jeremiah but it’s not you know being jeremiah isn’t a way to um i don’t know whether that’s the prophet i’m thinking of might be um i wouldn’t know uh anyway he you know he likes denouncing the evils of the modern world as if it’s him alone on his pillar no and i think he’s you know he’s quite cheerful about that and he’s quite effective as i say it’s it’s not generally a way to bring an audience with you all right let’s return to the book um you made the observation that trump is in the perfect age because these short little videos optimize for rage or violence and clicks jordan peterson destroys college student optimizes perfectly for the the the media consumption if you looked at a pie chart of where all the media is being consumed shorts is yeah maybe more than the written word um yeah for sure go on the tube it’s like people are tick tocking ten to one and we even know that um i mean you know as i repeat i’m a very old fart and i’m tied into kind of you know legacy media in which you know you write like a thousand words in a newspaper um which is you know absolutely gone um but you know even i understand that that if you’re using social media something like they found that on tweets if it’s got a picture it travels much much much much further than if it’s just text and people respond so much more now to pictures and videos and they’re all very short because short stuff travels fast um and you know like it does worry me a bit because it does mean that anything that’s complicated or that doesn’t easily kind of get subtended into a kind of us versus them frame or where there are complex trade-offs between risk and reward and various people’s interests which is to say most of the important politics worth doing it’s just incredibly hard to make cases for in you know in in an age when a very quick very shrill response is what and and you know ideally a visual one yeah that’s what travels and this quote from the book with that idea in mind i think it’s quite strong and i don’t know if it’s your observation or if it’s socrates but this is the quote socrates was worried the written word would cause the art of memory and thinking to fall into disrepair people would imagine that just because they’ve read something they would know it so with that idea furthermore um isn’t the same feeling relevant for the changing medium as we’ve just discussed in the shorts yeah i think in fact my what i’ve just said is in a way a kind of like gold-plated example of exactly what i i also you know attempt to treat with some caution which is that every change in medium or technology is generally greeted with panic and you know um a sense that a fear of loss a fear of loss and a sense that everything is going to make us stupider so you know when the the theater came along you know the puritans thought that was a really terrible idea novels you know novels were a terrible idea um you know they’re going to make make young women stupid um and you know obviously the television the goggle box nobody was ever going to read books anymore people were just going to become steeper because they watched television all day long um you know david foster wallace watched millions of hours of television as a young man and you know david foster wallace was quite clever um he’s so revered among uh authors yeah he’s that good i think he was great i mean i love him because he was funny um he had a lot of heart and and very good jokes and he was very clever he was a right shelf but he was hey check out his essays they’re great um sorry but go on no um and you know likewise in our own age you know i’m occasionally as a as a sort of geeky nerdy computer game person going like everyone says computer games and screens are going to destroy our children’s minds and this is you know it goes back to that you know essential you know socratic mistrust of the written word because it would destroy memory um you know each new technology has people saying it’s the end of the world and generally it’s not generally it changes the ecosystem but it does it does fit in so i no doubt the things that i’m panicking about you know nobody thinks joined up anymore the internet’s rewiring all our brains to be stupid is going to turn out to be it’ll shake out somehow um but i have to say at the moment i’m i’m definitely caught in that that particular moment of thinking christ is nobody ever going to be able to mount a proper argument anymore because someone simply wave a palestinian flag or the keys of being a turf and it’ll all be over yeah i mean can you give any still man argument what are the virtues for this changing medium where everything is short-term content um what are the virtues of a medium like can you say something positive about it well i think one of the virtues which which is why you know it was interesting to me revising my book is that social media when i wrote the first edition of this book has come 2011 ish hadn’t really taken off it was just starting its extent yeah and now of course it is the central fact in political and public which is to say rhetorical life now without question it seems to me the fact that now the potential to reach a vast audience is available to anyone with an isdn line yeah is a transformational and basically an extraordinarily good thing um i mean you know for most of the history of rhetoric it was formal speech making in certain very limited venues you know you didn’t have recorded you know you couldn’t record things you couldn’t transmit things so it basically you know if oratory was going to happen it was going to happen in the law courts or it was going to happen in the agora or in the descendants of those things over the years and it was going to be you know powerful white men of a very small minority in the west certainly um who had the right to speak and could be expected to be heard and in the you know 20th and 21st century that has changed and more and more people can speak and can find an audience and you know the very fact that like you and i are engaged in a podcast in which neither of us you know is like super famous you know we haven’t we haven’t had to kind of go to i don’t know the bbc to make it right and it can go up online and if you know people like it any number of people can download it and listen to it is kind of transformation you know that’s real that sort of people power you know the spread of rhetoric and the spread of democracy kind of go hand in hand so the democratization of rhetoric seems to me to be an unqualified good um you know the fact that the forms in which it’s currently transmitted tend to prioritize like shouty lunatics and you know but we are having those arguments aren’t we i mean it’s it’s interesting to me that that you know phase one was this sort of laissez-faire thing when everyone gets on twitter we’ve all got free speech we all get on you know the internet or you know substack or whatever in proliferation of these these platforms and over the years as we kind of slight pushing back and we’re now seeing it people are arguing about you know are we all leaving twitter because it’s full of nazis has substack got a problem with the content and the the kind of idea that i mean free speech has itself become a sort of shibboleth or a a kind of a very live political term what’s a shibboleth a shibboleth sorry it’s a it’s become um shibboleth is a biblical story where they sorted the who were they two different tribes one of them pronounced the s in shibboleth more like s okay and so when they were all pretending to be each other as refugees i think i’m getting quite wrong but they were crossing a border okay and they discovered that using shibboleth they’d make them say the word shibboleth and the ones who pronounced it in whichever was the the midianite way or whatever they let them through and the rest of them they put them to death sorry it’s a way to say it’s a way to test whether you’re legit or not well free speech has become such a kind of political football really it’s become a term in which like for the right you know free speech it’s all about free speech um so arguments about free speech and censorship by about which are fundamentally in some ways arguments of how we control these spaces whether the idea is you have completely they say fair attitude where literally everyone goes in the internet says what they like and corporations can lie and you know false advertising and you know all those sort of abridgements of free speech that we have traditionally had you know various forms of censorship not all of which are malign you know because we have restrictions on false advertising on libel on the you know and we tend to say hate speech in various forms i mean some some some people define hate speech as if you like you know you might say holocaust denial or or racist language in some territories will be regarded as prohibited speech in others it might just be bad taste um but most places in most jurisdictions around the world tend to draw the line in incitement to violence so there are these kind of questions over how we police these spaces you know we’ve got these spaces we know that things travel in a certain way we know that the lies halfway around the world before the truth’s got its boots on and i think we’re now sort of starting in the way that laws and regulations and institutions tend to play catch up with technology and they play catch up through a process of sort of human human reaction and conversation sort of say oh this technology’s got it over here okay that’s not an entirely good place how do we make it safer and better and i think we’re seeing that happening i think that what’s you know as we sort of recognize that you know amidst all the kind of cornucopia of goods that the essentially unpoliced and unpoliceable free spaces of the internet have supplied us with in rhetorical terms you know there there may be some some bad things that have come along as well which is you know the disinformation the signal to noise ratio the presence of you know bad actors and you know i mean i’m not you know singling out nazis but you know we talk about nazis as a sort of paradigmatic instance of you know people whose voices maybe we don’t want to hear in the same way um but equally you know they’re the kind of cancel culture mobs which the right tends to object to um so the way in which we start to kind of shape and i think mostly shaping not de jure not through kind of state legislation and kind of heavy-handed stuff even when that works but shaping through a kind of common discussion about how we use these spaces which spaces we choose to inhabit how people’s consumer behavior can bring pressure to bear on platforms to keep their houses in order you know um and i i think the sorry the other thing which i i strayed a little away from your original question which was about the formal question of this like small stuff traveling fast yeah i think weirdly it’s not quite as straightforward as just everything’s in bits and bobs because one thing we’ve discovered you know podcasts have become a big thing you know podcasts are all over the internet people listen to two or three hours of people talking about often quite complicated stuff um and indeed long reads you know people will substack thousands of words of articles which is such an interesting paradox well i think what it is is that the way that people are using the internet is quite clever so these like bitty bitesy sites like um like twitter i’m using twitter as the paradigm because it’s it’s the biggest one and it’s the one that i most do it but tiktok maybe or instagram i don’t know how much tiktok links to text um but i do know that for it’s you know like a tweet you embed a link to something bigger and so people are using some of these small bitty things to transmit a kind of a little hook a little link you know a little look here to something that often will be very big and people have you know the idea and i think it’s a popular idea that our attention spans are all completely shot to pieces by the internet yeah i think is it’s like a massive oversimplification and probably neurologically a bit shonky um i remember when nicholas carr wrote his book the shallows yeah which which was sort of superficially quite impressive and it was basically one of the first of those woo woo the internet’s making us all stupid because our brains are shrinking um books and he said the internet is physically changing the structure of your brain nice and i think it took one it took one critic to say yeah well yeah except when you learn the piano it physically changes the structure of your brain that’s what neuroplasticity is you know if you if you interact with anything in the world it’s rewiring your brain because rewiring the brain is what our interaction with the world does so i think additional experience exactly every every experience every memory every habit every you know everything you every affordance or ability you acquire rewires your brain yeah and likewise um steven johnson’s lovely book everything bad is good for you which came out now many years ago but in which he said look we all think that modern telly is making us stupid or that computer games are making us stupid or you know and he actually went structurally he said what television of the 1970s you know there was a completely linear plot line television in the 80s you’d have two or three plot lines at most in a soap opera if you look at something like the wire or breaking bad or sopranos there’s like five or six different timelines they’ll you know the cuttings much more frequent the the amount of cognitive work that a viewer is doing is getting greater and greater and greater interesting as as television develops and becomes more sophisticated grammatically and he said the same you know makes a similar argument about computer games he says computer games they actually require you to infer the rules of the game from within it they telescope larger tasks within you know a whole set of tasks will telescope inside each other so you know you you find your way into the room and then you have to find the key to open the box which allows you to find the other key to open the other box which allows you to you know that and that these games actually do exact i mean they may be a total waste of time but they cause a lot of cognitive work yeah it’s not destroying it’s not destroying your brains it might be he argues that all this stuff actually is accounts might account for the flynn effect which is the um observable but nobody quite understands i think at this stage why that over the last 50 years or so iqs in the west have gone up oh interesting steadily but surely um and he says it’s just because our media is getting more sophisticated i mean i don’t know if that’s right or wrong so i don’t think it’s as simple as to say that you know we’re all on social media and that’s making us dumb um i think it makes us more connected um it allows spread of information not just disinformation but you know people we seem to have an appetite for binge watching television 10 hours at a time yeah yeah i think i’ve i’ve always never taken too seriously the idea that like tv’s bad for you or reading a book is the only way you could responsibly consume some type of media it’s a very highbrow way to look at things like you say the wire i learned so much about american culture i learned so much about crime it gave me sympathy empathy and entertained me the entire way yeah it’s like it’s much better than a book well also i think the idea again i mean this is maybe a slight detour but this anxiety i mean books you know books are my thing books are my professional life evidently every um but the idea that people the only way to take in text or language is through a book the only proper way seems to me to be just just kind of philistine i mean and the i i mean i can sort of see why in the you know 60s 70s 80s people worried about telly because to younger people you know telly is is attractive and it’s probably more attractive than the way you put it to book though actually you know i’m writing a book about children’s literature and i looked into one of the reports they did at the time and they said in fact they discovered that television didn’t displace reading from children’s lives um but you could sort of see why there was the anxiety but it struck me that certainly um in the you know of the millennial generation like kids are really really immersed in text they might not be reading dead tree books that much but social the social media rage was one that was saturated with text sure texting and emojis and you know text messages you know i mean very very few millennials and gen z’s like to pick up a phone they text they whatsapp and obviously you know the the sort of boomer anxiety was yeah but it’s full of emojis and they’ll you know they’ll basically be incapable of you know writing a proper sentence when they’re required to do so for an essay or a job application whatever but i don’t think that’s true either because i think what we’ve got is a generation of children who are incredibly children young adults now even older adults now who grew up absolutely immersed in text and in text in the written language and who were very very adept at what linguists call code switching you know they they knew and have always known the way that we all instinctively know you speak to your parents differently than you speak to your peer group than you speak to your teacher than you speak to the judge you know um we all we all are masters of a whole set of different languages and registers and rhetorical effectiveness is all about matching your language and register to your audience um and we’re all very good at that and i would be very surprised and i’m sure we’d have heard about it by now if the generation that grew up texting each other you know at the moment they entered the workplace covered their cvs in smiley faces and emojis and you know abbreviated you to the letter u totally um you know i think it’s bollocks i think they i mean if they’re taught you know proper reading writing arithmetic at school i think they will know how and when to use it as adults yeah that’s a that’s um actually really optimistic look of things which i haven’t heard elsewhere or consume that opinion yeah well that’s optimistic but it all it all completely makes sense as you say it i think it’s easier to have a knee-jerk reaction that yeah i mean everyone’s always all bad yeah it’s not what i mean i i’m not totally complacent about it because i think it is the case that and you’ve got two young children so yeah i got yeah i got three young children and yeah you met you met two of them you’ve been spared the third so far um i have you know i’m sort of very aware that the interactivity of you know our little pocket friends and the way that they are so ruthlessly optimized for you know dopamine feedback loops and that you know as someone’s because they’re a slot machine in your pocket i think we can’t ignore that actually elements of the stickiness and i think you know i know a bit about addiction and i think there is definitely an addictive quality to them that is probably greater than say sitting in front of the telly right was right um so i you know having airily dismissed the last moral panic i don’t completely dismiss this one i do think there are issues with phone use and you know i think it’s probably not a great idea to let your kids you know just be on the phone 12 hours a day right but i i don’t think that everything that they do you know i don’t think just because you’re consuming text on a screen right right that’s the doesn’t mean you’re engaging with language if you’re consuming no text on the screen whatsoever and you’re literally paying cranny crush 12 hours a day that’s you know it’s maybe another thing uh when you initially wrote the book and also revised for the updated edition did you come across neil postman’s amusing ourselves to death oh i know of it i don’t think i’ve read it okay i would highly recommend it um it kind of does fly in the face of everything you just said but this was written in 1987 and it’s incredible how prophetic it was because he was just writing about how tv sort of rots political discourse and rots people’s ability to make an argument um and you’d love it particularly so for the for forward or the epilogue whatever the opening to the book it is so good he basically says we were all worried about 1984 when in fact it was a brave new world um that sort of won out in the end where you will be happy by just dumbing zoning out to whatever the crap is in front of you um anyway but it’s yeah i think 1987 when it was written and it’s phenomenal and i think an updated version of that now would be a phenomenal bestseller oh that’s very interesting i mean i i funny enough you know we mentioned david foster wallace that’s sort of the joke of his great novel infinite jest okay which everyone thinks of as an internet novel it was a pre-internet novel it was a television era novel um in which there is this thing called the entertainment which is a film so ridiculously entertaining it kills you because people start watching this videotape and they um are transfixed by it and then they stop they just have to go back and watch it all over again and of course they forget to eat and they just you know die in a puddle of their own shit um and you know that’s as you say you know he had no idea what was coming down the pipe you know right um so i think that that yeah the the stickiness of entertainment i mean in a way you could read the amusing ourselves to death thing as a as a reason for optimism because okay if we were having the same panic about tv totally maybe what aristotle said yeah it’s back to the back when the written word came about exactly but it’s back back to the idea that you know everything’s always making us stupid but it’s always making us it’s often making us clever in different ways that we might find was it also aristotle who was complaining about his grandchildren and how their generation doesn’t respect their elders doesn’t clean up after themselves oh i don’t remember that but again yeah it was one of the ancient greeks basically said that which is hilarious because of course well of course they didn’t know they were the ancient greeks right that’s the thing that always does my head in thinking about aristotle at the time he didn’t think here i am at the beginning of western philosophy he was just like oh this stuff god there’s people around for ages you know um i mean you know it is it’s very hard to avoid falling into that idea that these people they kind of knew that they were doing something completely different and new um you know i mean to us they’re like oh he was he was aristotle but he didn’t know he was aristotle when he was aristotle he was just a guy kind of wandering around being interested in stuff um and i did in a book that i followed up the rhetoric book with which was more kind of a style guide how you know tips how you might use persuasion and you know basic english prose i did have at the beginning a kind of list of all the people who complained the language is going to hell in a handcart and like the first one in modern times is caxton you know it’s sort of 15th century you know english is utterly degraded and we’ll soon you know we’ll be barring like sheep and grunting like pigs and this all um and every single generation says you know and and i think part of that you know we were talking about nostalgia earlier part of that is just you know i don’t like new stuff you know language changes we like the way we were taught in school we like to feel superior to people so if somebody’s saying you know less when they mean fewer there are people of a certain generation and cast of mind who will go oh you know that’s just wrong and you know young people today can’t speak the queen’s english um but at the same time you know this person would struggle to get on with text speak um or all of the other variants of language which are fantastically useful to you know standard written english and formal english you know it does change also it just changes a bit more slowly do you find that actually i forget that question let’s return to definitional work almost you’ve mentioned ethos you’ve mentioned pathos could you just give us the rundown what is ethos pathos logos and why it’s really the building blocks of okay absolutely yeah sorry i should probably have set out this still much much earlier but this goes back to aristotle um who we’re not complaining about his grandkids um formulated the original sort of i mean he’s the first person who formally thought how does persuasion work and he said basically there were three ways three three appeals three ways you persuade someone and they always mingle in almost any piece of rhetoric at all um but they are analytically distinct ethos is the way that the speaker presents him or herself to the audience it’s them it’s the sort of what your bona fide is do you know what you’re talking about um you know do you project expertise and confidence and above all i mean what’s really important with ethos is not not just it’s the extent to which your interests coincide with those your audience i mean fun which is why the basic ethos appeal particularly in politics is you know he or she or one of us right um but fundamentally it’s i choose to be a scott yeah exactly you’re talking to your tribe and you know what you don’t want you know if you’re an audience listening someone trying to persuade you to take a course of action or not take a course of action you want to be fairly confident that whatever the benefits of the course of action to you they’re going to be the same as the benefits of the speaker you know you don’t want the person who’s going to who wants to sell you this car because you know it gets the car off their hands but you’re you’re going to crash the car because the car doesn’t work you know it’s it’s like we’ve got the same to take a taller notion the same skin in the game you want to feel that the speaker isn’t pursuing a hidden agenda so ethos is all about reassuring your audience you have their their good on your on your you know their interests at close to your heart that you know what the hell you’re talking about and that you’re trustworthy and um pathos is the appeals with motion um i mean we use pathos now very often to mean you know the sad bit in films but actually pathos is any sort of emotion and um positive emotions you know hope excited anticipation um you know exaltation and triumph all of these are very powerful emotions but equally the negative emotions work very well you know you if you make your audience scared of the consequences of not doing what you want them to do um or you make them angry or you arouse pity in them or laughter and laughter i think it’s a hugely underrated pathos appeal because in the first place anybody laughs implies confidence um if you laugh at your opponent in debate you’ve always got one over on them whereas if you go white and clench your fists and look like they’ve got to you you’re rattled um and if you laugh or can persuade an audience to laugh laughter is kind of involuntary you know you can’t laugh deliberately yeah and so or if you do we can sense you’re not exactly and so laughter um as i think i think of it is involuntary ascent if you laugh with a speaker instantly that ethos work of you know we’re all to get we’re all as one is is done and that’s that’s why i think you you see on a kind of paradigmatic level um come back to stand-up comedy the dynamics of a stand-up comic facing a heckler are absolutely about ethos right if a heckler gets a bigger laugh than the comedian the comedian stone dead because the audience is with the heckler not with him and that’s why they get so bloody good at putting down hecklers yeah you know true true and because also stakes are highest oh yeah and also everybody you know one of the things we you know i’ve said rhetoric is identity speech identity is you know every identity theorist in the history of the world will tell you is all about you know not so much who you are as who you’re not define yourself against another you know the classic rhetorical sally is find a common enemy and you know in lots and lots of speeches through history and lots of most consequential speeches through history finding a common enemy is you know let’s go and bash those bastards you know the persians are coming whatever it is um but in a you know comedy theater it’s it’s the heckler who’s the enemy them give us a classic example of uh pathos pathos um of pathos is emotion right pathos is emotion yeah i’m trying to think of a classic example where you’d find one in the um i uh yeah well i mean there’s obama’s speech at the um at the mass shooting do you remember where he started to sing amazing grace um he was giving speech after school shooting and he started singing and he started singing amazing grace in this oration right in the middle and that’s a sort of almost a cheat pathos because right the moment you know song conveys an emotional current yeah that’s to sing unexpectedly to sing unexpectedly partly you know having the brass bollocks to do that is you know um you know very high risk strategy but also did it work for him yeah i did work for him but um but song song obviously is i mean not everyone breaks up with song but pathos but um i mean when lincoln’s gettysburg address is drenched with pathos i mean he’s he’s talking i mean it’s got those elevated that language about you know four i’m now going to remember three score and seven however many years it was um but he says you know we cannot consecrate we cannot sorry i’m gonna have to to um maybe i should just just it’s right there actually i mean pathos is not as i say you know it’s it’s very often conveyed not you know because you don’t say i am cross pathos or i am sad i mean you might do but that’s not often what carries it across to the audience so it’s not you wouldn’t say this quote is pathos very much it’s more to do with sort of bearing of a speech the type of language we use the type of connection you’ll make with your audience but um the delivery a lot of that’s to do with delivery but let’s find the i’ll just find the gettysburg address in here oh yes so in the gettysburg address you know it’s lincoln obviously consecrating of a war cemetery and he says in it we cannot dedicate we cannot consecrate we cannot hallow this ground the brave men living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract the world will little note nor long remember what we say here but it can never forget what they did here and that you know it’s absolutely kind of i mean partly this ethos is bringing the audience together and saying but it’s it’s turning the art of mourning to political purpose and it’s saying in this humble way you know what can we do in the face of the sacrifice that these people have made and that’s undoubtedly i think a pathos appeal that that sacrifice is not an abstract sacrifice it’s one that the audience is meant to feel as an emotional loss um but almost whenever a speaker is trying to bring an audience to some sort of um emotional pitch that’s that’s going to be pathos i mean i actually i think i should remember in the book i do use examples of very cheap pathos appeals like the way a charity will never in its leaflets send a you know a sort of detailed breakdown of the effectiveness of its spending dollar by dollar what it’ll go is it’ll give you a picture of a child you know starving or in fact you know it connects a human puts a human face on something and we do respond to pathos more than anything else logos is the one that comes in in third position um and what’s interesting about logos i mean because it shares a route with logic and you’d think that means it’s all about you know the logic of an argument it’s really it is about the structure of argument but it was aristotle way back when he noticed that logos and logic are slightly different things and his argument was that logic proceeds by kind of mathematical you know by iron chains of inference so you go you know as um plato would have you know looking at syllogisms um you know you get your premise a your premise b and you draw a conclusion c so you know socrates is a man all men are mortal therefore socrates is mortal right and those things are absolutely you know syllogism there’s no wriggle room in it and aristotle said no it doesn’t work like that in rhetoric because you’re trying to persuade people and you’ve tried to persuade people something about the future right in um deliberative oratory you know we don’t know what’s going to happen in the future you could say you’re fairly sure that if you you know march into the next town carrying your axes you’ll carry the day and win the win the castle but it might not go that way for you and if you’re arguing about the past in a court of law um again you know the phrase we use now is beyond reasonable doubt because the past is is in its way as unknowable as the future and so he said the way we persuade people isn’t with absolute logic it’s with not syllogisms but enthymemes and enthymemes basic kind of half-assed syllogism it’s either a syllogism with a kind of hidden premise or a syllogism that relies on probability rather than certainty um so logos basically is logic with a whole lot of wriggle room and that’s why rhetorical logic is is bendy logic right so to surmise ethos pathos logos how can we think about trying to identify that next time we’re listening to not only a politician speak but you know maybe just someone who’s trying to convince us of something well you can notice that generally the ethos appeal will be that because rhetoric gives you a whole set of you know um analytical tools for the structure of a speech the you know the structure of sentences and words within it and so um but generally you know the ethos tends to come near the beginning that’s the the speech you know like when a speaker introduces themselves and that you know you think what’s your credentials your credentials so you say what’s first of all what story is this speaker trying to tell me about him or herself by the way they dress by the way they comport themselves and what are they you know how are they describing themselves how are they presenting themselves and very often particularly in political speeches a speaker will tell a story you know they’ll you know god i’m weary of the you know um american presidential candidates you know speeches which always have some personal thing about how their own story is essentially the story of the united states itself yeah they’re always like my mommy and daddy worked worked hard and you know my if they’re immigrants they are the you know immigrant or they had immigrant parents they are the you know the american dream that way they almost never say you know i was you know i i was born to parents who are fantastically rich and i’ve went straight to harvard and i’ve never had to do it i mean george w bush it wasn’t almost exactly he was a hereditary president his his whole thing and he had a kind of quite charming thing you always wear a texan hat and he was actually born in connecticut but he always said you know it’s just an accident of birth i was really a texan but my my mother just happened to give birth to me in connecticut but really spiritually i’m from texas um so how you know you can just see what they what they’re doing in lots of ways not all of which will be actually directly verbal to give you a picture of themselves and what they try and occlude and what they try and push forward um logos you’re looking at how does the chain of propositions in their speech and the you know if the best way of checking that one is you know if you can be bothered and you really care download a copy of the speech’s text and just read it a bit carefully because then you’ll be able to notice you know where the um where the figures don’t seem to add up or where there’s a leap of logic or where one paragraph seems to contradict another because in the course of listening to it it all watches over you and it’ll be sound effects and you won’t be able to see its structure so you know getting at the logos is hard at work normally because quite often the logos is occluded so it’s credentials and then this is what i want to do why it makes sense i want to do this yeah and then and generally the pathos um is very often what comes in the peroration at the end um it’s not always the case sometimes people start out with screaming pathos sometimes um you know i mean very often if it’s a very emotional event there will be a you know i mean again it depends what sort of speech you’re giving um but typically you want to leave the audience with a feeling because they’ll remember a feeling much better than they’ll remember a fact yeah and that’s why very often you’ll see a speech might be quite logical and careful in the middle it might say look there are three reasons we need to do this and these are the reasons why and you know my opponent’s going to say this but i need to rebut that in advance that’s where the logos comes in quite often in the body of the speech you advance an argument i mean not all speeches advance an argument but in most deliberative speeches the sort of speeches i guess we’re talking about an argument at some level is advanced yeah most consequential speeches advance some sort of an argument and they will pretty it up to make it memorable and to make it persuasive and to make it feel like it’s coherent i mean that those tricks like anaphora an epistrophe where you’re repeating things or tricolons where you’re clumping things into groups of three all of those rhetorical tricks have the effect of making something feel solid you you know as in the example i mentioned earlier you can bundle things that actually have no logical connection together at all into a speech um and make them sound like they’re you know an iron chain simply by the patterning of words you know you put it in a tricolon or you have a whole series of things introduced by anaphora you know i believe x i believe y i believe z i believe and and those things suddenly feel achieved and solid and structurally coherent um but they may not be logically speaking and there’s there’s your fuzzy logic so you’ll get the logical bit in the middle and generally the peroration of most speeches is where you try and just leave the audience with a tune that they can whistle and so you think what and often it’ll be you know it’ll be the bit which you end up punching the air go usa usa usa usa usa or um you know that’s why it’s coming home it’s coming home it’s it’s the it’s the good vibe or the you know or it might be a bad vibe it might be you know if we do it might be locked up but it might even be you know and a sort of churchilian moment where it’s sort of unless we act now you know one by one the lights across the european continent are going to wink out and the earth will enter an unfathomable phase of darkness from which it may never ever recover um is that the right quote uh no that’s a kind of mishmash of various charitable quotes but i mean he did say he’s stirring he did say the lights are going out all over europe um and he had another lovely line about mournful broken mournful something mournful about silent mournful abandoned broken czechoslovakia retreats into the darkness yeah and so yeah sometimes it’ll be like you know we really have to send up bruce willis to stop the meteorite or all are fucked and you know you’ll you’ll be wanting to emphasize the fuckness rather than the success of the meteorite in your peroration because you’re trying to scare people into action right so it’s not always a happy or triumphant or excited thought but but the peroration tends to be where you know you put down the moon music and often it’s where you use your most flowery phrases and you you know the high style comes in sorry i’m swearing a lot i hope that’s not oh absolutely fine yeah right good matthew dicks are you familiar with him so i’m just constantly losing my vaping no you’re right wriggling around for matthew dicks yes uh he wrote a book called story worthy he won the moth storytelling competition many times and um he was actually like we were saying before when playing ping pong like he was a surprise out of nowhere standout guest there is a very very devoted um fans of him he’s a school teacher in america but he is this phenomenal storyteller anyway uh not one word of ethos pathos logos uh or traditional rhetoric speech in his book um but then speaking to him about it and thinking about it now although storytelling is a big part of uh good speeches a story on its own right doesn’t necessarily require the other elements of a good speech because you’re not necessarily trying to draw someone in a certain direction you’re just trying to captivate him and entertain him for a short amount of time it’s just an observation no i think i think i mean stories are very powerful in rhetoric certainly um i think partly that’s because we think and you know here you head off into deep waters of kind of you know speculative cognitive psychology but you know we do think in patterns um as aristotle kind of recognizes and we have sort of set set forms of set forms of arguments and ideas and we have as any number of structural narratologists have observed kind of set patterns to stories you know and people who are who improvise stories or storytellers you know they will you know there’ll be a hero’s journey or there’ll be you know there are ways of holding a story together whereby you reintroduce certain elements just like the way jokes are structured and so these kind of archetypal shapes you know they’ve we’re kind of like pre-programmed to respond to them and to receive them and so sort of archetypal shapes of argument and archetypal forms of story are engaging i mean your purpose in telling a story is is when you’re just telling a story as a storyteller is not necessarily to to what rhetoric has which is often a call to action but it does depend to some extent on identification you know you want an audience to invest in it and to go along with you and to give a shit about the characters and you know in rhetoric exactly the same things going on you are you you want an audience to invest in the character the character might be you the character might be the person you’re trying to get thrown in jail whatever it is you know um but yeah heroes villains all those things work work very well in storytelling as in rhetoric i think there’s a huge amount of overlap i loved that line from the churchill speech you just drew up do you have a short list of favorite lines from speeches um ready to go oh god top of my head no um i love i i love and often quote the one i quoted earlier from um julius caesar the i am no orator as brutus is but as you know me all a plain blunt man because it’s so outrageous um plain blunt man i i think um there are some of those bits in that there are some of the lesser known parts of i have a dream the martin luther king speech which i think are terrific um when he for instance he has a whole thing about the um um molehills molehills there are bits when he’s obviously actually being funny which you think of that as a very solemn speech but there are sort of jokes um well he was very improvisational he used a bit he he had a bit about the dream and he was originally delivering a different speechful council check and i think at least folk memories and focusing on mahalia jackson said come on tell him do the dream bit so he was all right um i mean he was very improvisational casino he’s a pulpit yeah he would just stand in a folk pulpit and pure charisma yeah pure charisma but also a very very serious kind of no shit improvisational skill um in i have a dream he has a whole bit that’s kind of riff on isaiah the book of isaiah where he says the hill and mountain made low and there’s a sort of blakey and thing of the mountain of despair and he establishes these these kind of in the speech and then he has this anaphron let freedom ring and he says let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of new hampshire the mighty mountains of new york let freedom ring from the heightening alleghenies of pennsylvania the snow-capped rockies of colorado the curvaceous slopes of california stone mountain of georgia lookout mountain of tennessee and every hill and mole hill of mississippi and i think mole hill there is kind of brilliant because it’s it can’t not be a funny word right you know in this context he’s these biblical rhetoric he’s all these mountains and he’s he’s enjoying himself with ever more kind of baroque descriptions of the these various mountains all over the country um and then he’s you know every hill and mole hill um i don’t know i maybe mississippi is much flatter than these other states but but it just seems to me that that has not only the effect of being you know being funny um or at least having confidence to treat something which is of the utmost importance in this speech you know i mean this is a speech about something that is fundamental to the lives and dignity of millions and millions of black americans and you know for whom many including martin luther king have themselves suffered and been jailed and been squirted water hoses and attacked with dogs and all sorts of you know really really horrible shit has gone on and what’s amazing about that speech is that it is uplifting and it’s optimistic and it has the confidence to even laugh at some of its own oratory you know he’s having fun in a weird way he’s really having fun there um you know i think what was effective about that speech was that it it gave hope because it was was so sort of you know confident right right you know it was we shall overcome you know he believed he had the ark of providence on his side which helps and in the book there is some of the great churchill lines yeah there’s lots of good churchill in there well there is a line that we should fight them on the beaches um you know that very famous bit fight them on the beaches fight them on the landing places so so forth um i think the story goes that the radio just cut off briefly before his next line which doesn’t go down into history is we’ll throw broken bottles at the bastards if we have to really um and there’s the churchill thing that i always think um which is a famous churchill line which is indicative of the extent to which like rhetoric is is made by the audience and you know it’s what you hear so not so much as what they say his most famous line about blood sweat and tears he never said blood sweat and tears he said blood sweat toil and tears but it was basically smoothed by memory into a better phrase because blood sweat and tears is metaphorically coherent because it’s a cliche now yeah it is but but a it’s a tricolon it’s a group of three we somehow for reasons that i have never got to the bottom of um i did even write to a couple you know neuroscientists coming out saying yeah do we know why we group like group thing like grouping things in groups or it’s just survivorship bias yeah that’s the way we’ve always heard it therefore that’s what we were well maybe maybe um but certainly triads seem to be the thing but anyway so it’s a group of three and it’s you know toil is the only one that isn’t a bodily fluid so you know we’ve basically the grand you know um march of historical amnesia has just pebble like kind of smoothed that into a better phrase nice um we are running up on time you’ve been very generous giving me so much not at all well thank you oh no i’m not wrapping it up yeah okay can you do maybe three or four quick uh more questions yeah yeah sure okay absolutely were there any speeches in doing a research um that you know of which were extremely significant and had huge potential but were butchered in their delivery and therefore the significance of them lost oh god off the top of my head i’m sorry it’s such a long time since i’ve done this um i can’t immediately think of a great i mean i think there’s a survivorship issue in that one as well which is we don’t generally remember the great speeches that were badly delivered um there are good you know there there are dodgily written speeches that are well delivered i mean okay you know the philip collins who i mentioned earlier always like to point out and i you know have to give him credit where it’s due for the observation he said that the famous line in lincoln’s lincoln’s in kennedy’s first inaugural where he says ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country so it’s absolutely brilliant line but the whole of that speech up until that point had been about foreign policy um and obviously there’s absolutely nothing that you can do for your country he said a complete logical disconnect it worked beautifully because it sounded great and it you know draws the audience in it says you know we’re all we’re all in this together um but you know honestly um you know it didn’t didn’t have any logical connection to the rest of speech which is all about you know the cold war you’re a podcast host do you ever consciously think about any tips of rhetoric that could help you when either interviewing a person or just communicating to people through a microphone i wish i was more conscious of that i think i instinctively find myself using an afro a lot because when you can’t think of what to say next you often think well start the sentence whatever you said previously previously i mean it’s more that i catch myself in ticks rather than anything else um no i my podcast tends to be a sort of rambling conversation i’m generally focusing in as much as i’ve got a plan on the content of the book under discussion um and also the sort of podcast i host is is one where i’m essentially trying to get authors to talk rather than talk myself so i i’m generally just asking you know i’m not trying to show off on my podcast book club by the spectator that’s the one yeah no it’s really good thank you really good i was listening on the way over to i actually don’t know the guy’s name but he’d written a um a book about speeches great speeches listen to one that might have been philip collins um or either phil collins i wrote one of i spoke to him about great speeches speeches that shape the world i think that’s i think that’s phil’s book um i also spoke to a guy called joe heinrichs who who did a book called how to argue with your cat he’s another another of my colleagues in the in the groves of rhetoric then perhaps um some advice to me how can i use the lessons of good rhetoric to better convince my audience to share with people to leave reviews etc well i think you you do very well and come across as as trustworthy and likable which obviously is is number one um i think you know how do you persuade your audience to leave leave likes and reviews unfortunately if i had an instant answer to that i’d have more listeners to my podcast than i do um i guess actually the only rhetorical thing that i have noticed um that has helped me on my podcast which i suppose is a sort of ethos thing is i make a point of always reading my guests books and because a lot of those guests are used to being interviewed by you know radio hosts who are very harried and haven’t bothered to read their books or have had it briefed for them it’s amazing how much uh an interview will open up and feel appreciated and loved if you have clearly you know read the book and are asking you know you say on page 395 you say this and they’re instantly like oh oh oh they’ve actually interesting because it means you know i think and i think that works in ethos appeal in the same way in ways you know you’re in a small town and you you know you’re a presidential candidate and you’re in a tiny town you compliment their local baseball team because you’re they’re all like oh he’s found out about our baseball he likes our basically oh he likes our time he takes an interest in us um and so i think that that an ethos appeal to that extent can be a personal connection between two people just as much as it might be between one person audience where you know we’re accustomed to thinking of rhetoric as a big thing to a large audience um but actually that’s just the sort of tradition of formal speech making you know rhetoric is as i you know hope i argue in the book and i hope i’ve at least hinted here is present everywhere there is persuasion and you know there’s a lot of persuasion is one-on-one you know there’s probably a whole other book to be written on the rhetoric of getting someone to come on a tinder date with you true absolutely um so you’re so brazen as to say when you do sit across from someone like on page 234 you had this magnificent quote as like a wink to them or surely because your job is a literary critic and editor they sort of know sam’s sam’s got an extremely erudite understanding not only of my book but you know the books that surrounds it no i think i think people are always pleasantly surprised if a radio interviewer has read the book i mean i won’t generally be quite as unsubtle as saying it’s magnificent i mean i think it’s generally polite to say say if you’ve enjoyed the book and if you haven’t to say you’ve found it interesting um but um you know it’s i i don’t generally consciously you know use a page reference or something but um it’s it’s not like i think okay in the first five minutes of this i’m going to quote them directly back of themselves just to prove i’ve read it but it’s more just thinking in the beginning i want to somehow signal to him that i’ve read it no not not really i mean i’m i’m describing results really rather than a deliberate project yeah i mean the reason i i bother to read the books is because i don’t think the conversation is generally nearly as worth having if you haven’t absolutely um but an accidental byproduct of that is that the um you’re doing dj you know i’ve just i’ve just noticed that that you know it really helps in terms of opening up and that that’s you know that’s that’s a sort of pleasant side effect of you know bothering to do your homework properly do you think that rather than let me ask you i’ll just say my opinion i think the podcasting is terrific in terms of adding legitimate in terms of raising the standards for radio right because where else would you actually get such intimate interviews with authors from a host who actually is interested in them and the reason you know he’s interested in them is because he’s the curator of the entire show he’s not a he’s not he’s not a host of a show that other people are curating for no i think that that’s actually and that’s a change i mean it’s i think it’s changed the grammar of radio a bit in two ways one of them is absolutely as you say that particularly those ones which like yours and like mine are kind of basically one-man bands um you know you’re a you know you’re getting one person’s sensibility and interests um i mean in my my case it’s not purely my sensibility and it’s which new books am i think thinking our readers are gonna be interested in or whatever um but you got one person but the other one is because and it’s a you know follows up what we were saying about the internet not being entirely composed of tiny things you know almost no like broadcast radio show right it’s true has more than five or ten minutes for an author interview absolute tops i mean it’s you know kazuo shiguro after he’s won his nobel prize might get a half hour special if he’s bloody lucky true true um with three ad breaks with three ad breaks but on you know podcasting allows you to go on for hours and hours and hours which i mean has disadvantages because some podcasts go on for hours and hours and hours and it’s it’s also invented a sort of kind of hybrid between a traditional radio and those kind of drive time you know old-fashioned radio shows where you just had a couple of slightly wacky guys like burbling on at each other and playing records for four hours you know on a thursday afternoon um but it does allow that thing which people obviously really dig of quite often podcasts that are just a couple of people or three people who just you get to just listen to them shooting the shit and they’ll maybe have a vague subject that they like to talk about you know politics or history or whatever sport and they just that’s the entirety of all the whole sports genre yeah you just get these guys chatting you’re there because of cricket but you might go two hours without mentioning cricket yeah so it’s much less it’s much less structured and i’m kind of in some ways a bit surprised because i you know i find i i get bored just having my own conversation for two hours i don’t want to listen to somebody else just talking shit for two hours you know um but but people do and i think it’s because there’s an ethos thing there because you feel there’s a sort of quality of intimacy to it you get to feel these people are friends and if you listen to um you know my old friends tom holland and dominic sandbrook doing the the rest is history podcast usually successful and they it’s because they are two incredibly knowledgeable guys i mean my god if i had the recall for facts and dates and themes that either tom or tom have i would you know retire happy yeah they both know everything and if they don’t know it they can read a book and they remember it instantly um you know for me i’m like i read a book and i know all about that book for about three or four days tops and then it’s gone um even my own books um but you know you’ve got like these two very erudite and amusing and slightly weird guys just chatting to each other about history and you learn something and you you’re kind of invited into the tom and dom living room and i think you know that’s kind of classic sort of podcast format that works yeah that is an amazing one that’s amazing one um okay if you could go back and be present at one speech in history oh one speech yeah that’s good i think i probably i mean i’m not not gonna go very far off the beaten track here because you know the old is the goodies i i it wouldn’t be the gettysburg address because by all accounts almost nobody was there could even hear him and it only went on for two and a half minutes so i think it’d be a bit of a letdown stand at the back and just it’d be like that monty python sketch where they’re like bless the cheese makers yes um so you um so i think the gettysburg address would be deeply underwhelming i think being somewhere near the front for i have a dream would be pretty cool um and actually i i wouldn’t half mind having been in grant park for obama’s obama’s victory speech okay because that that it was a good one oh it was amazing go look it up and i mean it was slightly kind of chilling because he delivered it in grant park chicago between two enormous they were like the goals for american football fields you know those those big kind of y-shaped things and they were bulletproof glass um because at this stage they were like first black president uh some lunatics gonna have a pop at him with a high velocity rifle aren’t they so it was kind of had that slight frisson of it um but it was it was tremendously moving um and he told he tells a story he tells the story of ann ann nixon cooper i think she was called who was a black woman who had i think been born i don’t think she was would have been old enough to be born into slavery but had you know first generation after slavery and had been through all of the civil you know civil rights stuff in the south and had you know had lived through she was 92 or something and had lived through all of america’s terrible racial history and it described how she was voting and she had voted i don’t think she’s voted for the first time but it was incredible it was an amazing story that kind of personalized and he was like that’s who we do it wow you know and you get that’s i mean i think being at one of those speeches where you kind of know this is history and and the speaker nails it that’s got to be a thrill why doesn’t barack use his gift of oratory post-presidential career more that’s a good question i think he does um i think he’s not it’s not reported as much because he’s not i mean i think he gives where’s he doing he gives your speech he does his charitable foundations and things he’s not intervening in politics partly because i think he doesn’t want to be what you know retired cops sometimes get called uncles you know they always turn up at the cop shop you know hoping to get i think you know you know he he doesn’t want to overshadow his success you know he likes biden he i i think you know you don’t want to generally ex-prime ministers and ex-presidents i think good manners says you don’t be a spare wheel you know you don’t want to start you know being a you know if obama was making political speeches all the time for a start he’d get all the attention there’d be a whole lot of oh why is he doing so much better than biden why can’t biden do it this well you know there’d be a whole i think you know with very good reason he doesn’t he doesn’t generally get involved in politics anymore um but i mean obviously we’re not inside the political apparatus but what biden lacks in most is charisma and public speaking yeah imagine if his old buddy barack who is exceptional at it could you know do some of the heavy lifting here well no he couldn’t precisely because you can only do your own heavy lifting you know if barack were doing the heavy lifting for biden what you’d see is is a ten stone weakling having his suitcase carried by right you know by the big muscly guy yeah which would make him look even weaker um i don’t yeah i mean biden’s biden isn’t a great orator he’s he’s he’s shocking no he’s he’s he’s not good um you end up uh kind of chuckling at him or feeling pity for him yeah every time no i think he’s i think he’s not good but there is no way um unfortunately that obama would do anything other than make his situation worse if he popped up and started being the prince across the water and of course you can’t you know there’s a term limit and you know maybe what happens is trump gets in again abolishes all term limits abolishes the you know rules you can only be a two-turn president attempt to install himself as a dictator for life and barack is then able to come back wow and save us i want that timeline that’d be that’d be something else all right i’m not sure sam two more ask this to every single guest and so it’s completely non-rhetoric related okay great the first being what is the role that serendipity has played in your life um serendipity well i think the pure serendipity that i met my wife so that obviously has been the decisive um pure serendipity do you care so well we happen to be at the same party together and i nearly didn’t go to the party and she nearly didn’t go to the party um and you know like we were both really really drunk which was also serendipitous um so that that you know that certainly played i mean i think serendipity plays part throughout my life i mean to be honest my career was quite dramatically changed i was a gossip columnist and i ended up going to be a new york correspondent because of 9-11 um and my i mean this book about rhetoric i wrote by chance because an article i’d written about barack obama because serendipitously i got interested in rhetoric at university serendipitously i got interested in obama at just the time when i was fired from a newspaper and had newly become freelance so i was able to write a piece for the ft about obama’s rhetoric in 2008 by serendipity that piece happened to fall into the hands of book publisher who said i think there’s a book in this okay so i was very lucky in that um now i’ve been i’ve been lucky all through my life um yeah serendipity has mostly mostly been been good for me i think so far i love it and um that is the most common response particularly with a life partner yeah that is it’s always chance that you mean almost always chance yeah absolutely although less so now yeah these i imagine in 50 years if i’m asking the same question to a bunch of people oh they’d all have met through an algorithm well it’s an algorithm yeah because it matches you because you swipe right on some and left on others yeah yeah yeah no but it was literally it was literally like i’d been out the night before and i was absolutely a horrible night and i so nearly didn’t go to this birthday party um and she likewise um and so that was and here you are and here we are yeah three kids exactly all right mate last question uh-huh again super non-rhetoric elated but what is a country you’re particularly bullish on bullish you mean what country do i think is about to bright future has a bright future oh boy you do ask the difficult questions don’t you i mean you know speaking as like somebody who is incredibly ignorant about global economics and politics um i mean i would have to say i think it’s china’s looking pretty good um everyone says that don’t they um i know i’m not very bullish on russia i’m less bullish on ukraine than i was a year ago as unfortunately all of us are no i think everywhere looks pretty terrible i think i think of countries i know or like i’m like you know it’s okay uh lebanon no south africa no um israel triple no um you know russia triple no the uk screwed america’s looking terrible no i think we’re all doomed really yeah yeah it’s uncanny sam how everyone says the same thing everyone says the same thing so i’ve done four interviews in two days uh-huh not one person could just pick out a country and say you know what i think they’ve got a good future whereas two years ago everyone had a few countries top of mind and so just as a you know non-data-driven signal of what people’s general sentiment is it is not sunny um which is you know rather depressing well the trouble is i mean obviously because regional regional disturbances just translate don’t they i mean i mean i’m sure there are a handful of african countries that are beginning to prosper because they’re starting from a low bar and you know climate change hasn’t really started to bite yet but you know i mean okay the far the middle east is screwed america’s you know it looks like losing its republic and everywhere else is you know dependent on america um eastern europe’s in all sorts of trouble europe you know america catches the cold europe sneezes i mean yeah maybe maybe south america maybe it’s fucking great in uruguay australia australia well australia is kind of okay isn’t it we’re kind of not immune obviously you’re not immune but much further downstream from a lot of these problems yeah you got a bit of the you got a bit of the fash down there but with a bit of the fash all over everywhere aren’t there and a bit of the fash fascism yeah okay um but yeah australia seems like a nice place i thought i thought there was there was a bit of a hard right hard right thing going on in the states a lot of kind of anti-immigration sentiment and the sort of we’ve always chip shop stuff but unfortunately actually hey what’s up yeah no i’m sorry i’m not optimistic but there again i don’t you know i’m not one of those people who also i spent a lot of time reading the news you’re not talking to the mic anymore oh sorry i’ve just spent a lot of time reading the news um so because of all the biases we know about in the news no cat don’t knock that over um i will tend to have a less than rosy view of the world because you know if it bleeds it leads sam loved the book there’s an updated version there’ll be a link to your podcast the book as well and um i just can’t thank you enough for being so generous with your time thank you i’m very honored to be on your podcast in such distinguished company thank you t