Sam Leith | De-Coding The Worlds Best Speeches & World’s Greatest Talkers... It’s Rhetoric All The Way Down…

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Sam Leith is the literary editor for the oldest surviving weekly magazine in the world, an organisation which started publication in 1828 which means… the magazine for which he is the literary editor of, The Spectator, are on the doorstep of a famous double century in just 4 years time!

While also contributing a monthly column on gaming, over the course of 30 years Sam has written 100’s of book reviews, authored multiple books himself, but as well, Sam hosts one of my favourite podcasts titled ‘Book Club’ where… in a similar fashion to this very show but with much better execution, Sam talks with interesting authors about their books.  

Sam’s also got a new book, scheduled for release later this year and available for per order – The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading – and although we don’t discuss it in this podcast, if you like the way Sam talks and thinks then you might be keen on checking this one out as well.

But in this podcast we non exclusively discussed Sam’s 5th book – You Talkin’ to Me? Which is a book on Rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama…

And so as you can imagine, I brought up Christopher Hitchens immediately as a reference for good rhetoric but in the podcast you can also expect a break down of Ethos Pathos Logos, what makes some of the great speakers great, and references to Obama, Churchill, Martin Luther King and more for what made specific things they said stick so deeply. 

• 00:00 – Who Is Sam Leith
• 01:43 – Who Are The Best Communicators Alive Right Now?
• 07:23 – Sam’s Great Theory on US Presidents (Rhetoric v Anti-Rhetoric) + Obama V Trump
• 20:04 – Good Speech… Writing or Delivery?
• 26:03 – Christopher Hitchens (+ a bit of Peter)
• 37:45 – How Media Is Consumed & How Media Changes (Introducing Socrates)
• 1:03:23 – Ethos Pathos Logos
• 1:20:23 – Story & Rhetoric (Martin Luther King)
• 1:26:58 – Best Of Churchill
• 1:28:53 – Speeches Lost To History
• 1:30:25 – Podcasting & Rhetoric
• 1:39:46 – Visit One Speech In History
• 1:44:24 – Serendipity & Country You’re Bullish On

Curious Things Mentioned During The Episode

• Matthew Dicks – Storyworthy
• Ben Burgis – Christopher Hitchens
• Ethos Pathos Logos

🍻☕: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/ryanhogg

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Sam Leith writes for the oldest surviving weekly magazine in the world, an organization which started publication in 1828, which means the magazine for which he is also the literary editor, The Spectator, are on the doorsteps of a famous double century in just four years' time. While also contributing a monthly column on gaming, over the course of 30 years, Sam has written hundreds of book reviews, well over, in fact. He's authored multiple books himself, but as well, Sam hosts one of my favourite podcasts titled Book Club, where, in a similar fashion to this very show, but with much better execution, Sam talks with interesting authors about their books. Sam's also got a new book scheduled for release later this year and available for pre-order, The Haunted Wood, a history of childhood reading. And although we don't discuss it directly in this podcast, if you like the way Sam talks and the way he thinks, then you might be keen on checking that one out as well. But in this podcast, we non-exclusively discussed Sam's fifth book, You Talkin' to Me, which is a book on rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama. And so, as you can imagine, I brought up Christopher Hitchens immediately as a reference for good rhetoric, but in the podcast you can also expect a breakdown of ethos, pathos, logos, what makes some of the great speakers great, and references to Obama, Churchill, Martin Luther King, and many, many more for what made specific things they said stick so deeply. Now pump your good juice with five stars as a review into this podcast. Sign up to the newsletter as the top link and enjoy the brilliant Sam Leith.

SPEAKER_01 1:35

Oh, God, that's very hard to say. I mean, the best talkers, I mean, in it's a cliche, maybe to say, or it's got a very obvious answer to say, you know, I still think Barack Obama is extraordinary. Um, though, as my old friend Philip Collins speechwriter said, he's not even the best sp speechmaker in his own family. Um, but um, I think Obama was what inspired me actually originally to write that book um about rhetoric because you know I I just saw, wow, this was about 2008, and I saw this guy who was using unashamedly and virtuosically all those kind of rhetorical tricks and tips um that I had long and long previously in my undergraduate career kind of taken a shine to. Um, and I was like, wow, here's somebody being intentionally using a rhetorical high style and being really good at it, and what's more at yielding, this being 2008, you know, some real results for him. Um and I think he's still extremely good in a weird way. Um, you know, his sort of nemesis and anti-pole Donald Trump has a sort of effectiveness as a communicator, though it's in a very different sort of style. He's a sort of anti-rhetorical style, he isn't you know, a purposely unpolished style, but one that's nevertheless itself very, very rhetorically effective. Um, as far as good writers, my god, I mean, you know, I do that for a living, and um there are too many to count. And I I think you always and this is one of the kind of points I've always tried to make when I'm talking about rhetoric itself and indeed language in general, in the book I wrote about about the written language, um, which is you know, you can't really say whether somebody's good in isolation, it's more you know, for a particular task. You know, you you you're not compare you're comparing apples and oranges sometimes because there are any numbers when you say good communicator, I mean there are lots of people who I think are terrific writers, but who may not be communicating to an end. That's the distinction I'm looking for.

SPEAKER_02 3:42

Good communicator, irrespective of how good their prose is. Exactly. Can they deliver a message?

SPEAKER_01 3:47

Yeah, I'm trying to think what's uh of good examples of written communicators who are very lucid and clear. I'll probably have to come back to you on that. I mean, there are you know, there are a number of journalists who are terrific. Um, and I think 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. They absolutely can't rely on a captive audience in the way that you know the people who are writing you know internal policy documents for corporations can, or you know, dictators can. Um, and obviously literary writers are in a different game. So I think probably, you know, look at probably the New Yorker, um, places like that, the spectator, you know, that's where you'll probably find some of the best communicators alive, I think. Um the really good journalistic writers.

SPEAKER_02 4:46

Are these journalists you're thinking of directly employing the lessons of rhetoric, or is it rather just through a long uh period of iteration of trying to communicate a message, they've somehow crafted it, or is it just a direct here are the employment of the lessons?

SPEAKER_01 5:04

Well, I think it's a it's mostly unconscious. I mean, my argument in the book about rhetoric is that rhetoric is a way of describing something we do. It's a sort of it's you can certainly learn it. Aristotle said, you know, it's a techna, it's a thing that you can teach and learn, and you can get better at it. But what you're doing is something, you know, we use language rhetorically from the moment we are able to able to use language at all. We're always on the make, you know. I mean, and rhetoric really is just language plus power. Um, and we've just discovered there are things that work, you know. We instinctively group things into groups of three, the tricolon, we instinctively, as I've just done there, we instinctively, we instinctively use an aphora where you use the same set phrase in the beginning of successive sentences. Um, a lot of those sort of stylistic ticks of rhetoric um are things that you know, speech writers use them consciously, and there are certainly people who who will very consciously, you know, as craftsmen go in and go, right, we need a tricolon here, we need to, you know, gussy this up. But a lot of the time, I think we have imbibed them so much that they become nearly as natural as breathing. We do, you know, we use those things in the spoken language as well as in the kind of written for speech language. And I think you know, almost anyone who's a journalist will be familiar with, you know, you're writing a comment piece. Okay, find a way of bringing it, or even a long piece of reportage, you find a way of of making your payoff somehow circle back to the opening line, or you know, tie it up with a bow and all of those things that become instinctive.

SPEAKER_02 6:52

You mentioned the direct swing from rhetoric Obama to then really the opposite anti-rhetoric Trump. Is it actually I should check myself there? Is that even the case? Is that what it was?

SPEAKER_01 7:05

Well, I've got a s it's they're probably too grand to call it a Hegelian view of the history of US presidents. Um but I tend to say they they find one who's a good speaker and they become disillusioned with him and hurt chuck him out and try and get one who can't string a sentence together, and then they get fed up with him and they go back to a good speaker. Um and I think you could see to an extent, I mean it's a kind of jokey point to take, but you know, George W. Bush was notoriously inarticulate, though that didn't make him rhetorically ineffective, but he wasn't someone who sounded like he was in command of a fabulous high style, he didn't sound like someone who really knew how to use language in a conscious way. And you know, uh W ended up coming to grief as they all do. Obama suddenly looked great, you know, he was clever, he could talk, he knew stuff, wonderful. Um, you know, all that Hope you changey stuff came along. Had Obama. Then obviously everyone came to mistrust Obama because people do come to mistrust presidents after a couple of years. And you know, we got Trump, who was, you know, very much the antithesis. But the point I would want to, I mean, you know, you said, and I think you were picking up on something I said kind of flippantly, that there's you know, Trump is anti-rhetorical. One of my real baseline arguments as I see it about rhetoric is that what seems like anti-rhetorical stuff is also rhetorical. I mean, I I've got a kind of Derrida and view of sort of wall-to-wall rhetoricality, um, that rhetoric, in my broad understanding of it, is really anywhere that language is involved with power, um, i.e., persuasion, and which is to say it's almost all language all the time. 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 who knows stuff. You know, you're an expert, you're smarter than the audience, you can lead them along, you can, you know, they can 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 the kind of one lockers 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 as he known me all, a plain blunt man, which is just you know a fantastic piece of cheek. He's a much, much better orator than Brutus is, 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. Yeah. 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 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 critics 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 emit. You know, a literature that admits 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 County. 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 ristorical 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 forest 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 he can't can't put a sentence together himself, he's certain 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 pattern. 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 mu uh mustering, you know, in the great triad of rhetorical appeals, um, pathos, which is to say emotion. Okay, you know, Trump's speeches are designed to make you feel rage and pity, and he plays on an audience's rage and anger, and you know, um, and that I that I think itself is very powerful, and particularly in the social media age where we know that you know, uh again, and I guess we'll get on to this, but you know, it's it's it's always old, wine, and 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.

SPEAKER_02 13:15

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?

SPEAKER_01 13:34

I think I th I think it's probably uh pretty instinctive for him. I mean, I don't want to get into a kind of you know, oh isn't too awful sort of thing, but I think he's obviously a person who has uh, 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, cometh 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 you know that's sort of a political point, but the the sort of background to that is that Trump, admittedly, you know, there is the absurdity of his ethos appeal, he's he's you know a 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 that has long been remarked that the American dream, you know, is is really uh a way of telling people who 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 a very unequal society. Um again, sorry, I'm not mean to kind of drift massively into politics, though it it does tie in with this because Trump persuade presents himself as a sort of insider-outsider. He is the guy who's just like you, and at the same time, he's he's a guy who'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 at positioning himself like that.

SPEAKER_02 15:45

And in that cleverness, is it conscious or just instinctively that's how the man has communicated?

SPEAKER_01 15:50

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 scrutinising 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 analyse Trump's speech style. Because I mean they you know you get kind of rhetoric guys and speechwriters and people like me to go, well, you know, that's a tricolon and look, he's using an Afro here. And he you know, he does do all that stuff again. So it's sometimes instinctively, sometimes when he's actually reading what his speechwriters 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 his way of delivery, and they said it's very characteristic, kind of New Yorker-y queensy kind of thing, is that he doesn't finish sentences, and he 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 you you know what I mean, you know, you know. And the audience comes to kind of complete his thoughts for him. Oh man. 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 and they've 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 it'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-opts 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 rhetoric in some sense is identity speech, because it starts out with a 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 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 cat, they'll eat a hot dog, they'll you know, go hunting with an AK-47 if 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?

SPEAKER_02 18:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:36

Yeah, because you didn't know what 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, their 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 gonna 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, let her up, let her 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 kinds of tags, yeah. Yeah, um, and they absolutely um you know they become they're they're part of a club, they're part of a club, and that that that's powerful rhetorically, I think.

SPEAKER_02 19:50

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?

SPEAKER_01 20:03

I hard to put percentages. I would say probably 7030 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 asses 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 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 cadence as a right.

SPEAKER_00 21:11

Right.

SPEAKER_01 21:11

And that's at 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 example I use of the 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 labourish and SNP ish. But he said, I am Scottish by birth, by choice, and by aspiration. Got a huge round of applause. You know, one of my Scott is 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 as 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. There was you know, nobody laughed at him 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 say 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 fucking gibberish. And and yet the rhythm of it was okay. It contained these emotive words, hope, families, wings, dream. It didn't really matter that there wasn't a logical connection between them, you know. And so the sort of smart ass people like me who are, you know, r 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 basically that's farting into a hurricane. If the politician delivered it well, it will probably have worked fine.

SPEAKER_02 24:05

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.

SPEAKER_01 24:18

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 pl 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, and I I take the view that you know the Athenians were on something that dem 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 optimise 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 you know work on policy and you know that 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 uh 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 solemn and sober people of the secretariat a really good shoeing in public. Yeah, so it's tricky, but yeah, we do optimize a charisma.

SPEAKER_02 25:46

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.

SPEAKER_01 26:35

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 uh rivetingly so, and articulate in the sense that he's aggressive, but he's never inarticulately aggressive. The the aggression comes through in an absolutely, I mean, you know, logically 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 he is perfectly tooled for this, you know. Again, we're 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 you know a ten-second clip. Yeah. Um college student just gets a college student is eviscerated, and you know that it's got a sort of Mortal Kombat finishing move, 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 is Julian Barnes and Christopher Hitchens, and his Kingsley 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' writing was never as elegant as Amos's or Barnes's, but you know, he was the talker, you know, actually I think in a way. I I sort of I I reread some of Hitchens' 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 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.

SPEAKER_02 29:06

And he might be remembered so just because of how forceful his uh speaking is, yeah, and his persona and his persona I 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.

SPEAKER_01 29:32

It's very yeah, it's very interesting you say that that generational thing, because you know, dismayingly to me, you're like 20 years younger than me. And so you're absolutely of the generation that caught his YouTube 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 and 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 a fight.

SPEAKER_02 30:00

Oh, they were worthwhile enemies, Mother Teresa. Yeah, he went from okay, who does everyone love? Right, Mother Teresa, we'll have her.

SPEAKER_01 30:07

And then he went, right, the Elgin marbles, that'll be that'll be worth as you know, six months of my time to kick up some shit. And Kissinger, um, you know, who's on the same side, but then he he you know, and when it 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.

SPEAKER_03 30:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 30:28

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 I think that people who go, Oh, he's just I mean he wrote that book, Notes Towards a Young Notes to a Young Contrarian, which I think is kind of in a 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.e., be contrarian in the sense of kick 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.

SPEAKER_02 31:12

In letters to a young contrarian, he disowns the title of contrarian. Well, there you go. Which in itself is very contrarian. Exactly. What it did. 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.

SPEAKER_01 31:27

Yeah. Um and there were there were a lot of honourable people on the left who I mean they ended up with egg all over their face, and but but yeah, who did take the view? I mean, again, this kind of slightly ancient history for you, but at the time of the Iraq war, I remember I was content at Telegraph, and oh there was a small but honourable minority of leftists, instead of instead of 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 all said that 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 Dubia wants to stamp on this guy, we're in favour. 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 favour of it? No, you know, the answer was well, didn't work out quite how you'd hoped 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 honourable and basically you know from the left.

SPEAKER_02 32:40

Before we return to Yeah, sorry, we've got we've strayed, but that's the nice thing about podcasts is you can. Is there anything uh worth mentioning from your interactions with Hitchens?

SPEAKER_01 32:50

I really I mean I've 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 Lazard 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 of the 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's desperately trying to have a drink with him, and he was like, No, no, no, I'm off. Um, but actually the th the abiding in-person memory I have is of seeing him on a stage, um, which is a good I I think it's a good 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 stagy thing, with his brother Peter Hitchens, who, as you probably know, is you know having started out as a I think as just as much of a trot as Christopher, you know, became intensely conservative. Um in fact he proudly calls himself a reactionary. But the Hitchens brothers were doing an on-the-stage debate, and of course the audience was 95% and you went to watch it. I went to watch it. Oh, brilliant. Just sat in the audience. 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 are 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 cabal 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, and 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 a contrarian move, but yeah, good on him for it.

SPEAKER_02 35:11

Uh it's actually not a bad way to talk about rhetoric analysing the two of them, because in my estimation, Peter, although maybe he's articulate and I've admittedly never really written read anything he's written, he has no charisma like his brother did. Um so from a purely delivery point of view.

SPEAKER_01 35:33

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 cock-eyed, but he's very you know, he's A, therefore, B, level C. You know, his 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 intuitively in our in our 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 if you're angry and you're you're marshaling the audiences right, you're saying that'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 Peter Hitchens, who has sort of adopted, I think quite cheerfully, the idea me contramundum, 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 are you know a disaster. Um you know, the Conservative government is uh of the UK isn't nearly what I call right wing. You know, he's it sort of basically thinks thinks he's surrounded by you know communists and drug fiends and wasters and losers and that you know society's 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.

SPEAKER_02 37:16

Um, wouldn't know.

SPEAKER_01 37:17

Uh anyway, he you know he likes denouncing the evils of the modern world as if it's him alone on his pillar. Yep. And I think he's you know, he's quite cheerful about that and he's quite effective, but it's not generally a way to bring an audience with you.

SPEAKER_02 37:30

Alright, let's return to the book. Um you made the observation that Trump is in a the perfect age because these short little videos optimise for rage or violence and clicks. Jordan Peterson destroys college student optimizes perfectly for the the media consumption. If you looked at a pie chart of where all the media is being consumed, shorts is maybe more than the written word. Um you go on the tube, it's like people are tick tocking tender one.

SPEAKER_01 38:02

And we even know that um I mean I you know, as as I repeat, I'm a very old fart and um 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, is 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 as what travels.

SPEAKER_02 39:19

And this quote from the book, with that idea in mind, I think is 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.

SPEAKER_01 39:50

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 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's gonna make us stupider. So, you know, when the the the theatre 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 were gonna make make young women stupid. Um, and you know, obviously the television, the goggle box, nobody was ever gonna read books anymore. People are just gonna become stupid because they watch 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.

SPEAKER_02 40:48

Um he's so revered among uh authors. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 40:52

Was he 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 show, but he was hey, check out his essays, they're great. Um sorry, but go on. No 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 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 will simply wave a Palestinian flag or the accuse of being a turf and it'll all be over.

SPEAKER_02 42:06

Yeah. I mean, can you give any still man argument what are the virtues for this changing medium where everything is short-term content?

SPEAKER_01 42:16

Um, what are the virtues of a medium where can you say something positive about it? Well, I think one of the virtues, which which is why you know I it it was interesting to me revising my book, is that social media, when I wrote the first edition of this book, it was going to come 2011-ish, hadn't really taken off. It was just starting its accent.

SPEAKER_00 42:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 42:40

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 p a vast audience is available to anyone with an ISDN line 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 uh 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 centuries 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 democratisation 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 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, and proliferation of these platforms. And over the years there's been 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 a kind of a very live political term. What's a Shibeleth a Shibboleth, sorry, it's uh it it's become um Shibeleth is a biblical story where they sorted the who were they, the two different tribes. One of them pronounced the S in Shibeleth more like sss. Okay. And so when they were all pretending to be each other as refugees, I think I'm getting this quite wrong, but they were crossing a border. Okay. And they discovered that using Shibboleth, you 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. But it but it it's it's it's a way to say a way to test whether you're legit or not. Well, free speech has become such a kind of political football, really. It's it's become a term in which, like, for the right, you know, free speech, it's all about free speech. Um arguments about free speech and censorship are about which are fundamentally in some ways arguments of how we control these spaces, whether the idea is you have completely lay-sa-fair attitude where literally everyone goes in the internet and 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 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 you know, most jurisdictions around the world tend to draw the line of 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 we're seeing that happening. I think that what's you know, as we sort of recognise 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, uh you know, 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 in a you know, I don't even 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 behaviour 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 I strayed a little away from your original question, which was about the formal question of this like small stuff travelling 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, and people will 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. It's 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 are like bitty bitesy sites like um like Twitter. I mean, using Twitter as the paradigm because it's it's the biggest one and it's the one that I most do. It'd be 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 I mean I think it's a popular idea that our attention spans are all completely shot to pieces by the internet.

SPEAKER_00 50:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 50:32

I think is it's like a massive oversimplification and probably neurologically a bit chonky. 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 books. And he said, you know, the internet is physically changing the structure of your brain. Nice. And I think it took one it took one critic to say, 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 interactions with the world does. Sure, sure. So I think each additional experience. Exactly. Every every experience, every memory, every ha habit, every you know, everything you every affordance or ability you acquire rewires your brain. And likewise, um Stephen 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 tele is making us stupid, or that computer games are making us stupid, or that you know, and he actually went structurally, he said, Well, look, television of the 1970s, you know, there was a completely linear plot line. Television of 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 The Sopranos, there's like five or six different timelines, they'll, you know, the cutting's much more frequent. The amount of cognitive work that a viewer is doing is getting greater and greater and greater 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 you. It's not destroying your brains. See, it might be he 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 whether 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 the spread of information, not just disinformation, but you know, people we we seem to have an appetite for binge watching television ten hours at a time.

SPEAKER_02 53:27

Yeah, I 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.

SPEAKER_01 53:57

Well, also, I think the idea, again, I mean, it's just maybe a slight psss detour, but this anxiety, I mean, books, you know, books are my thing, books are my professional life. Evidently. Um, but the idea that people the only way to take in text or language is through a book within a 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, sixties, seventies, eighties, people were worried about telly. Because to younger people, you know, telly is is attractive and it's probably more attractive than the work you put at a book. Though actually, um 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 can 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. True. Texting and emojis and you know text messages, you know. I mean, I very, very few millennials and Gen Z 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, that 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 or 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 uh well, 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, then you speak to the judge, you know. Um we've 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, the moment they entered the workplace, covered their CVs in smiley faces and emojis and you know abbreviated U 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 group read and writing arithmetic at school, I think they will know how and when to use it as adults.

SPEAKER_02 56:52

Yeah. That's uh that's um actually a really optimistic look of things, which I haven't heard elsewhere or consume that opinion.

SPEAKER_00 57:03

Yeah, well, it's a kind of optimistic.

SPEAKER_02 57:04

But it all it all completely makes sense as you say it. I think it's easier to have a knee-joke reaction that's everyone's all bad.

SPEAKER_01 57:13

Yeah, it's not I mean I I I'm I'm not totally complacent about it because I think it is the case that And you've got two young children, so you see. Yeah, I've got yeah, I've got three young children. Um and yeah, you met you 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 optimised for you know dopamine feedback loops and thing, you know, someone's supposed they're a slot machine in a pocket. I think we can't ignore the actual elements of the stickiness. I mean, 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 was. Right. Um so I d you know, having airily dismissed the last moral paddock, I don't completely dis dismiss this one. I do 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 twelve hours a day. Right. But I I 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 doesn't mean you're engaging with language. If you're consuming no text on the screen whatsoever and you're literally paying Crowny Crush twelve hours a day, that's you know, that's maybe another thing.

SPEAKER_02 58:40

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 Ford 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.

SPEAKER_01 59:45

Oh, that's very interesting. I mean, I I funnily enough, you know, we mentioned David Foster Wallace. That's sort of the joke of his great novel Infinite Just, is which everyone thinks of as an internet novel, it was a pre-internet novel, it was a television era novel, yeah. 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 the moment 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, you know. Maybe it's what uh Aristotle said. Yeah, it's back to the back to when the written word came about. Exactly. But it's back to the idea that you know everything's always making us stupid, but it's always making us it's it's often making us clever in different ways that we might find.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:51

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. I don't remember that, but again, yeah It was one of the ancient Greeks basically said that, which is hilarious because of course, but of course they didn't know they were the ancient Greeks, right?

SPEAKER_01 1:01:09

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, look at all the stuff guards, there's people around for ages, you know. Um I mean, you know, it 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 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 the book that I followed up the rhetoric book with, which was more kind of a style guide, how you know, tips for how you might use persuasion in 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, 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 English, and and I think part of that, you know, we were talking about nostalgia earlier, part of that is just you know, we 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'll 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 TechSpeak, um, or all of the other variants of language, which are fantastically useful to the young generation, 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?

SPEAKER_02 1:03:05

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 the world?

SPEAKER_01 1:03:21

Okay, absolutely, yeah. Sorry, I should probably have said uh set out this still much, much earlier. But this goes back to Aristotle, um, who we're not complaining about as grandkids, um, formulated the original sort of I mean he was 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. An ethos is the way that the speaker presents him or herself to the audience, it's the 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 it's the extent to which your interests coincide with those of 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.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:22

Um I was I choose to be a Scott. Yeah. I aspire to be a Scott.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:26

Exactly. You're talking to your tribe, and you know, what you don't want, you know, if you're an audience listening to 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 gonna be the same as the benefits to the speaker. You know, you don't want the person who's gonna who wants to sell you this car because you know it gets the car off their hands, but you're gonna you're gonna crash the car because the car doesn't work. You know, it's it's like we've got the same, to take a taleb 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 you have they're they're good on your on your you know their interests are close to your heart, that you know what the hell you're talking about, and that you're trustworthy. Um pathos is the appeal to emotion. 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, exultation 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, is a hugely underrated pathos appeal. Because in the first place, i anybody who 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.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:25

And so laughter Or if you do, we can sense you're not.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:27

Exactly. And so laughter, um, as I think I think of it as is involuntary assent. If you laugh with a speaker, instantly that ethos work of you know, we're all to g 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.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:54

Right.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:55

If a heckler gets a bigger laugh than the comedian, the comedian's 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. 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 theatre, it's it's the heckler. Who's the enemy? Them. Give us a classic example of uh pathos. Pathos. Um pathos is emotion, right? Pathos is emotion. I'm trying to think of a classic example where you'd find one in the um 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 a speech after a school shooting.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:13

And he started singing.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:14

And he started singing Amazing Grace in this oration right in the middle. And that's a sort of almost a cheat pathos because the moment, you know, song conveys an emotional current 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 you? Yeah, it did work for them. But um, but song song obviously is I mean, not 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 gonna 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 I'm I'm maybe I should just just It's right there, actually. I mean, pathos is not as I say it, you know, it's it's very often conveyed, not you know, because you don't say I am cross 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. Right. It's more to do with sort of bearing of a speech, the type of language we'll use, the type of connection you'll make with your audience. But um The delivery. Uh but 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 a war cemetery. And he says, you know, 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 nittle 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 it's ethos is bringing the audience together and saying, but it 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 an a 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 I think I seem to remember in the book I do use examples of very cheap pathos appeals, like the way in that 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 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's shares a root 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, who 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, we look 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 m is mortal. Right. And those things are absolutely you know, a 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 if you're trying to persuade people something about the future 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 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 enthemes. An enthememe is basically a kind of half-arse 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.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:14

Right.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:15

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?

SPEAKER_01 1:13:29

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 forth. Um but generally you know that ethos tends to come near the beginning. That's the s 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. You know, 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 it's George W. Bush, he wasn't always exactly that he was a hereditary president. His his whole thing, and he had a kind of quite charming thing, you know, he always wear a Texan hat, and he was actually born in Connecticut, but he always said, you know, it was just an accident of birth. I was really a Texan, but my mother just happened to give birth to me in Connecticut, but very 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 pres 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 you 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 washes over you and it can be sound effects, and you won't be able to see its structure. So you know, getting at the logos is harder work normally, because quite often the logos is occluded.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:14

So it's credentials, and then this is what I want to do, why it makes sense I want to do this, and then and generally the pathos um is very often what comes in the peroration at the end.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:31

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 on 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. 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 gonna say this, but I 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 as as in the example I mentioned earlier, you can bundle things that actually have no logical connection together at all into a speech 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 an aphora, you know, I believe X, I believe Y, I believe Z, I believe you know, 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 then 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 the bit which you know you you you end up punching the air going 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 or it might be a bad vibe, it might be locker up, you know, if we do it might be locker up, but it or it might even be, you know, an 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.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:14

Um is that direct quote?

SPEAKER_01 1:19:16

Uh no, that's a kind of mishmash of various churchill quotes, but I mean he did say stirring light. 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. Silent, mournful, broken. Yeah, that's amazing. And so, yeah, sometimes it'll be like, you know, we really have to send up Bruce Willis to stop the meteorite or all we're 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 get 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.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:13

Matthew Dix, are you familiar with him?

unknown 1:20:15

I think so, sorry. Matthew Dix.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:19

So I'm just constantly losing my vape and wriggling around for it. Matthew Dix?

SPEAKER_02 1:20:23

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 that's a very good thing.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:18

No, I think that's I mean, stories are very powerful in rhetoric, certainly. Um I think partly that's because we think, and you know, here you you head off into deep waters of kind of you know speculative colleges psychology, but you know, we do think in patterns, um, as Aristotle kind of recognises and we have sort of set set forms of set forms of argument and ideas, and we have, as any number of structural narratologists have observed, kind of set patterns to stories. You know, and 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 f we're we're kind of uh like pre-programmed to respond to them and to receive them. And so sort of archetypal shapes of argument and archetypal uh forms of story uh 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 go to what rhetoric has, which is often a call to action, but it does uh depend to some extent on uh 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 thing's 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.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:03

I loved that line from the Churchill speech you just drew up. Do you have uh a short list of favourite lines from speeches um ready to go?

SPEAKER_01 1:23:13

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 the 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 he to has a whole thing about the um Molehills Mulhills and Mansion. 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'd used a bit, he he had a bit about the dream, and he was originally delivering a different speech called Council Check, and I think at least folk memories and folk singer Mahalia Jackson said, Come on, tell him, do the dream bit. And so he was alright. Um I mean he was very improvisational because you know who'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 a kind of riff on Isaiah, the book of Isaiah, where he says the hill and mountain made low. And there's a sort of Blakean thing of the mountain of despair. And he establishes these kind of in the speech architect, 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 molehill of Mississippi. And I I think molehill there is kind of brilliant because it's 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 you see every hill and molehill. Um, I don't know, I 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 or at least having the 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 with 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 it gave hope because it was was so sort of you know confident. Right, right. You know, it was re shall overcome. You know, he believed he had the arc of providence on his side, which helps.

SPEAKER_02 1:26:44

And in the book there is some of the great Churchill lines. Yeah, there's lots of good Churchill in there.

SPEAKER_01 1:26:50

Well, there is a light 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 no 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 all you say 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 of n you know neuroscientists when I was coming up saying. We know why we group like group thing like grouping things in groups of three.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:03

Or it's just survivorship bias? Yeah. That's the way we've always heard it, therefore that's what we respond to.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:07

Well maybe, maybe. Um but certainly triads seem to be the thing. But anyway, so it 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.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:30

Um, we are running up on time. You've been very generous giving me so much. Not at all. Well, thank you for oh no, I'm not wrapping it up yet. Okay, get it anyway. Can you do maybe three or four quick uh more questions? Yeah, yeah. Sure. Okay, absolutely. Were there any speeches in doing your 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.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:58

I'm sorry, it's such a long time since I've done this. Um I can't immediately think of a of a great speech. 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 are there are dodgily written speeches that are well delivered. I mean, you know, the the uh Philip Collins, who I mentioned earlier, always liked 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. He said it's an 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 have any logical connection to the rest of the speech, which is all all about you know the the Cold War.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:10

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?

SPEAKER_01 1:30:21

I wish I was more conscious of that. I think I instinctively find myself using an affora a lot because when you can't think of what to say next, you often think, well, start the sentence, what have you said previously previously? I mean it's more that I catch myself in ticks rather than anything else. Um, I uh uh 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 the sort of podcast I host is 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.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:05

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 uh a book about speeches, great speeches.

SPEAKER_01 1:31:17

I listened to one that might have been Philip Collins. Um, or either Phil Collins, I wrote one of I spoke to him about great speeches.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:27

Speeches that shape the world.

SPEAKER_01 1:31:29

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.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:41

Then perhaps um some advice for me. How can I uh uh uh use the lessons of good rhetoric to better convince my audience to share with people, to leave reviews, etc.

SPEAKER_01 1:32:00

Well, I think you you do very well in coming 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 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 interviewee will open up and feel appreciated and loved if you have clearly you know read the book and asking questions, you know, you say on page 395, you say this. And they're instantly like, oh, oh, oh, they've actually oh they've read the book. Because it means you know, I think and I think that works in an ethos appeal in the same way, in ways you, 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, you found out about our baseball. He likes our baseball, oh, we liked our tiny, 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 and audience. Well, 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.

SPEAKER_02 1:33:54

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 lit 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.

SPEAKER_01 1:34:25

No, I think I think people are always pleasantly surprised if if a radio interviewer has read read the book. I mean, I won't generally be quite as unsubtle as saying these magnificent books. 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 uh I 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 at themselves just to prove I've read it.

SPEAKER_02 1:34:55

But it's more thinking in the beginning, I want to somehow signal to him that I've read it.

SPEAKER_01 1:34:59

No, not not really. I mean I'm 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's 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. I've just noticed that that you know it really helps in terms of opening up and that that's you know, that's a that's a sort of pleasant side effect of you know bothering to do your homework properly.

SPEAKER_02 1:35:30

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 uh he's not a host of a show that other people are are curating for him.

SPEAKER_01 1:36:11

No, I think that that's absolutely 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 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, it's which new books am I think thinking our readers are gonna be interested in or whatever. Um, but you've 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 has more than five or ten minutes for an author interview. Absolute tops. I mean, it's you know, Kazu Ishiguro, after he's won his Nobel Prize, might get a half-hour special if he's bloody lucky. True, true, true.

SPEAKER_02 1:37:07

Um with three ad breaks.

SPEAKER_01 1:37:08

With three adbreaks, but on you know, podcasting allows you to go on for hours and hours and hours, which I mean it 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, um 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, um 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, or sport.

SPEAKER_02 1:38:03

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.

SPEAKER_01 1:38:13

Yeah, so it's much less it's much less structured, and I am kind of in some ways a bit surprised because I you know I f 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 bit 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 that these people are friends, and if you listen to um you know my old friends Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook doing their the rest is history podcast hugely 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 and 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 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 odite 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 sort of podcast format that works.

SPEAKER_02 1:39:30

Yeah, that is an amazing one. That is an amazing one. Um, okay. If you could go back and be present at one speech in history.

SPEAKER_01 1:39:40

Oh, one speech, yeah. That's good one. I think I probably I mean I'm afraid 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 who 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 to stand at the back and just it'd be like that Monty Python sketch where they're like, bless them the cheesemakers. 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 it they were like the gulls from 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 could have a poppet with a high velocity rifle, aren't they? So it was kind of had that slight free son of it. Um but it was it was tremendously moving. Um and he tell he tells a story. He tells the story of Ann Anne Nixwood 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 at 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 how she had voted and I don't think she voted for the first time, but it was it was an amazing story that kind of personalized, and he he was like, That's who we do it for. Wow, you know, and you get that 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 gotta be a thrill.

SPEAKER_02 1:41:43

Why doesn't Barack use his gift of oratory post-presidential career more?

SPEAKER_01 1:41:53

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 the Where's he doing it? 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, ho hop hoping to get the cost. He's like, you know. You know, he he doesn't want to overshadow his successor, 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 uh you know, if 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 way? You know, there'd be a whole I th I think you know, with very good reason he doesn't he doesn't generally get get involved in politics anymore.

SPEAKER_02 1:42:50

Um I mean obviously we're not inside the the political apparatus, but what Biden lacks in most is charisma in public speaking. Yeah. Imagine if his old buddy Barack, who is exceptional at it, could you know do some of the heavy lifting here?

SPEAKER_01 1:43:07

Well, yeah, 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 his suitcase carried by you know by the big musley guy. Yeah, which would make him look even weaker. Um I 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.

SPEAKER_02 1:43:34

Um you you end up uh kind of chuckling at him or feeling pity for him every time.

SPEAKER_01 1:43:40

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 a situation worse if he popped up and started uh being the prince across the water. And of course he 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 root you know, rules you can only be a two-term president, attempts to install himself as a dictator for life and then and Barack is then able to come back and save us.

SPEAKER_02 1:44:04

I want that timeline, that'd be something else. 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?

SPEAKER_01 1:44:18

Um serendipity. Well, I think with pure serendipity, that I met my wife, so that obviously has been the decisive um pure serendipity? Do you pure serendipity? Well, we happened 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 pledged 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 f I mean uh th this book about rhetoric I wrote by chance because an article I'd written about Barack Obama because serendipitously I got interested at rhetoric at university, serendipitously I got interested in Obama at just the time when I was fired from a newspaper and had newly become freelancers. 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 a book publisher who said, Oh, I think there's a book in this. Okay. So I was very lucky in that. Um no, 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.

SPEAKER_02 1:45:51

I love it. Uh and um that is the most common response, particularly with the life partner.

SPEAKER_01 1:45:56

Yeah, that is it's always chance that you mean almost always chance.

SPEAKER_02 1:46:00

Absolutely, although less so now. Yeah, these uh I imagine in 50 years, if I'm asking the same question to a bunch of people, it will be. Oh, they'll have met through an algorithm. Well, it's an algorithm because it matches you, because you s swipe right on some and left on others. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:46:15

It's actually now, but it was literally it was literally like I'd I'd been out the night before and I'd have absolutely horrible night, and I so nearly didn't go to this birthday party. Um and she like was. Um and so that was And here you are. And here we are, yeah. Three kids. Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 1:46:31

All right, mate. Last question. Uh-huh. Again, super non-retoric related. But what is a country you're particularly bullish on?

SPEAKER_01 1:46:39

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 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 mean think of countries I know or like. I mean, 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.

SPEAKER_02 1:47:38

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.

SPEAKER_01 1:48:07

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 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 uh you know dependent on America. Um Eastern Europe's in all sorts of trouble. America catches a cold, Europe sneezes. I mean, it yeah. Maybe, maybe it's South America, maybe it's fucking great in Uruguay. Australia. Australia. Well Australia's kind of okay, isn't it?

SPEAKER_02 1:48:57

We're kind of not immune, obviously. You're not immune. But much further downstream from a lot of these problems.

SPEAKER_01 1:49:02

Yeah, you've got a bit of the you've got a bit of the fashion there, but with a bit of the fashion all over everywhere, aren't there?

SPEAKER_02 1:49:07

Um a bit of the fashion, uh fascism.

SPEAKER_01 1:49:10

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-integration sentiment and the sort of chip shop stuff, but we've always had that. Unfortunately, actually, you know. 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, so um, obviously, because of all the cognitive biases.

SPEAKER_02 1:49:40

You're not talking in the mic anymore. Oh, sorry.

SPEAKER_01 1:49:42

Obviously, I spent a lot of time reading the news. Um, so because of all the biases we know about in the news, and oh cat, don't knock that over. Um I will tend to have a a less than rosy view of the world, because you know, if it bleeds, it leads.

SPEAKER_02 1:49:56

Sam loved the book. There's an updated version. There'll be