John Bowe is the award-winning author of I Have Something to Say (Random House, August, 2020). He is a speech and presentation consultant specializing in corporate and individual presentations. He has worked with students, business and charity leaders, entrepreneurs and executives from all over the world. He has given talks at the New York Public Library, the 92nd St. Y in New York City and many other companies and organizations. John contributes regularly to CNBC about public speaking. He has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, GQ, McSweeney’s, This American Life, and is the author of numerous books. His work has been featured in the Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, and he has appeared on CNN, The Daily Show, with Jon Stewart, the BBC, and many others. He lives in New York City.
Public speaking is difficult because you’ve never been taught the proper techniques.
Fascinated by the possibility that speech training could foster the kind of psychological well-being more commonly sought through psychiatric treatment, and intrigued by the notion that words can serve as medicine, Bowe set out to discover the origins of speech training—and to learn for himself how to speak better in public.
What would it mean for Americans to learn once again the simple art of talking to one another?
Bowe shows that learning to speak in public means more than giving a decent speech without nervousness. Learning to connect with others bestows upon us an enhanced sense of freedom, power, and belonging.
The result: an easy, humorous read that explains the subject considered by the Greeks and Romans to be the cornerstone of education: the art of connecting with others.
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Resources Mentioned in the Episode with John Bowe:
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Dustin Burleson:
What would it mean for Americans to learn once again, the simple art of talking to one another? Hey, it's Dustin and you're listening to The Burleson Box. Today on the show. I'm so excited to welcome John Bowe, author of I Have Something to Say: Mastering the Art of Public Speaking in an Age of Disconnection. John was fascinated by the possibility that speech training could foster the kind of psychological wellbeing more commonly sought through psychiatric treatment, and intrigued by the notion that words can serve as medicine, both set out to discover the origins of speech training and to learn for himself how to speak better in public.
From the birth of democracy and Ancient Greece, until two centuries ago, education meant in addition to reading and writing, years of learning, specific easily taught language techniques for how we interact with others. Nowadays, absent such education, the average American speaks 16,000 to 20,000 words every day, but 74% of us suffer from speech anxiety. On today's episode, you'll learn an ancient system of speech techniques for overcoming the fear of public speaking and how they can profoundly change our lives. Right here inside another episode of The Burleson Box. Welcome everyone. I'm so excited to welcome John Bowe to the podcast. John, thanks for being here.
John Bowe:
Well, thank you, Dustin.
Dustin Burleson:
Your new book is, I Have Something to Say: Mastering the Art of Public Speaking in an Age of Disconnection. I love the book. Thank you for writing it.
John Bowe:
Thanks for liking it.
Dustin Burleson:
You're an award-winning journalist, and you go through quite a journey in this book. I'm curious first why you wrote it, and then we'll talk about that journey you went through, because obviously you're really good at the written word. What was that journey like? Researching this book for the spoken word.
John Bowe:
In one word, the journey was miserable, every step of the way, it was miserable. But it was really cool also, it was a really long journey. It was a really long story, but the short version is I had always hated public speaking, and as a writer, whenever you publish something, you're cool and famous for exactly eight minutes, and so you have to go around and talk about it. And I always failed at that. I wasn't the worst, but I just never rose to the level that I thought I could or should. And I wondered what is the problem? Because in regular life, I definitely not shy. I'm pretty articulate and funny, and I don't care if I look stupid. So why am I not a cogent public speaker at all? So I would spend so much time writing things trying to be meaningful and create meaning for other people.
And when it was time to talk about it, I just felt like it was just a lot of chaff. I was like a chaff machine. So all my life I thought public speaking was dumb and uncool, and not for me, even though I was a bad public speaker and would have wanted to be a good public speaker, but just if you had told me, "Hey, you know that that they have lessons for this?" I would've said, "Yeah, those aren't for me." So I was working on a project in oral history about love, and I interviewed the step cousin of mine from rural Iowa who had been a recluse all of his life. And when he was 59 years old, after living in his parents' basement, pretty much playing around with a model train set his whole life, he got married. And everyone in my family in Minneapolis, we would make jokes like, "Wow, I wonder how that went down. How did that happen?"
So later I interviewed him for this book and I said, "How did you go from being a recluse to talking to this woman for the first time who you would eventually marry?" And I assumed that it was psychiatry and therapy and meds or something like that. And he said, "I joined the Toastmasters Club." And so that very slowly but irresistibly set off this series of lights in my brain and it made me fall in love with public speaking and it set me off on this journey of researching what is public speaking and what does it mean and what does it do for people?
And so I realized, "Oh, the Greeks used to teach this stuff." Like five minutes after they invented democracy, they had to invent speech training because suddenly we lived in a world where you needed to speak well, and the Greeks just had this presumption, you can't be part of any big organization like the church or the military or politics, anything if you don't know how to talk because you're just going to get beaten up, you're just going to get killed.
And so they came up with these really cool ways to teach it, and the Romans came along and they improved on some of those methods and they taught this stuff for 2000 years, and then they stopped teaching it a couple hundred years ago because science became cool and public speaking seemed weird by comparison. And so I fell in love with the idea that, oh my God, we can all get this psychological benefit from learning how to speak once again. And we're all messed up right now because nobody knows how to connect with anyone. No one knows how to express themselves.
And if people don't understand you well, you hate them and you hate your life without even knowing it, and you just feel very excluded and alienated. So I thought, Well, this is a pretty cool thing. It was a pretty cool bunch of IP to revive. So that's what my book was all about and damn thing took me 10 years to write because a very hard subject to write about, and now I teach it for a living and work with people and work with companies. So the whole thing has gone full circle.
Dustin Burleson:
It's so well researched, and I love that you've made the connection between we stopped teaching this a few hundred years ago and now today, as you mentioned, we have an epidemic of loneliness. I think, I don't want to get the statistics wrong, but they're in the book, a significant super majority of millennials, they don't feel comfortable expressing their thoughts or opinions. They'd rather text or interact online.
The interesting connection, I'm curious because you talked to so many people in the book that we all would assume who are just naturally gifted speakers. So I'm thinking of CEO of Domino's Pizza, who gets in front of thousands of franchise owners. One of the most popular Ted speeches of all time, Susan Kane, one of our favorite authors, 35 million views or something. We just assume she's gifted at that. Debbie Fields, you got to interview one of owner of our favorite cookies. That assumption that these people are just good at it, and I'm not because anxious to get up in front of people. What did you learn in talking to them? Did anything surprise you in your interviews with those people?
John Bowe:
Everybody's story was a little bit different, but I think there's one big takeaway that they got that I got that anyone listening to this should get, which is, you can learn public speaking. We all think it's a matter of your character, it's a matter of your psychological makeup. I can't do this because I'm nervous, because I get nervous because I'm this type of person and oh, those loud people, those charismatic blowhards, they'll run away with the show and they're naturally good at this and I just can't do it.
And so that is a 100% false. It is a technical skill that anyone can learn, and it's like cooking. You don't hear anyone talking about, "Oh, I have cooking anxiety." But it makes perfect sense to say, "Oh yeah, I can't speak because I have speech anxiety." And like, no, you break it apart in the same simple dumb way that you break apart any recipe for cooking. And it sounds crazy to say it, but these people that you just mentioned, they all learned it step by step.
You add a little bit of this, you think a little bit about that before you put your words together, you prepare in this way, and suddenly you can get your thoughts out there, and then that makes you a little bit more confident. So you repeat those steps again and maybe do it a little bit better, a little bit more, attentively, and then it works out even better. And you keep learning, "Oh my gosh, I can actually do this."
Dustin Burleson:
It's one of my favorite classes in college. I was fortunate to take a public speaking class and a lot of the principles you cover in the book, I want to get to those on that. You can learn this, but I want to step back first and say, "Why are we so anxious? If we can learn it, why are we so anxious to do it?"
John Bowe:
I just think there's nothing that cuts to your core more than that. Some people care a lot about the way they look, and it just wounds them to the core. If they look bad, I don't care about that at all, but speech, if I say something dumb or I express myself in a way that makes you think I'm not special, it just bugs me. And I think most people share that. It's like having a bad hair day, but for your brain and your soul and your character, so like, "Oh, everyone is judging me on the basis of this false, bad, lame version of me. How do I correct that?" You're immediately pissed. Everyone's... No one wants to come off looking bad.
Dustin Burleson:
You did this before we got on this podcast, and it's a neat tool that I want to talk about in learning about the audience. You and I had a call to learn, who am I talking to? A bunch of dentists and doctors. What is this weird podcast you have and how can I help your audience? That one takeaway has been powerful for me when I just get in front of a group of employees or even a patient. Can we talk about that?
John Bowe:
Yeah, I mean, here's an example of one of the steps that is so easy to take, and I always tell clients, this is so dumb. What I'm going to teach you is so obvious that you're going to feel like it's a fraud because there's nothing intellectual about it. This comes from Aristotle, comes directly from Aristotle. He said, "The audience is the beginning and the end of public speaking." So if I'm going to go talk to anyone, whether it's my partner or my kid or a group of Canadian pension fund, whoever, my first instinct is to think about how dumb I am and how dumb they'll know I am. It is to go to thoughts of anxiety, which are all about me, and then I'll think about my material, "Okay, I have this great Greek stuff I want to lay out there and explain to people, how do I teach it? Well, how do I do that well?"
And Aristotle's thing is just forget all that and think about who you're talking to first because the Canadian Pension Fund is going to be different than talking to you. Talking to a group of orthodontists might be different than talking to a group of dermatologists. They might be different than talking to a bunch of eighth graders here in Chinatown in New York, which was another group that I talked to and worked with. And so you start thinking about who you're talking to and you make a list. What's their deal? What time of day is it? What are their concerns? What do they love or hate? What do they need to use this stuff for? Did they eat lunch? If you're talking to a conference, is it the end of the conference or the beginning of the conference? Because all those things influence what they care about.
So you might be smart and have the best ideas in the world and want to tell your ideas, but they care more about themselves than you. And if they're in San Francisco and they just had a big earthquake that's on their mind first and foremost, more than you and whatever your great ideas are. And so you take that into consideration and it lightens your load a lot because you realize 90% of what I thought I had to know or talk about, they don't care about. I can drop that. And so it just focuses you in this huge way, and it gets your mind off how nervous you are or how dumb you might feel, and it's the first step out of a few steps that just makes it, suddenly your load is much lighter.
Dustin Burleson:
I just want to highlight that it works for me. Even though I get on stage and I speak for a living in lots of different venues, the tendency is always to think, appear, how can I come across this clever, like you said, how can I not be dumb up there? And the minute you flip it and go, what did they need from me? Suddenly the anxiety starts to instantly in my head will go away, and it's just really powerful.
John Bowe:
Also, I think a lot of those chestnuts, I mean, there's another part of this too, which is everyone thinks that anxiety and confidence are the biggest thing about public speaking. So if you could just get rid of your anxiety or somehow acquire a bunch of confidence, then you'll be great at speaking. And you could take a Xanax and then you would feel less anxious. Maybe you'd feel more confident too, but that wouldn't improve your ability to put words together and it wouldn't improve your ability to connect with this audience.
So I think all of those chestnuts, imagining your audience naked or there are 10 other things like that. Imagine your anxiety floating down a stream farther away from you, or that thing about body poses, power poses, how that stimulates these chemicals. And that was dismantled and called out a few years ago, but people really went for that. And when you think about the simplicity of just no, think about the people you're talking to and construct some thoughts. Take the parts of yourself that will be useful to that audience and tee those up so that those are front and center for that audience. You cannot get any more common sense or practical than that.
Dustin Burleson:
And you found this was an inspiring story. You can be yourself. It can't be all about you, but you can be authentic on stage. And I'm thinking back to one of the interviews where we had that common misconception. You've got to be like Tony Robbins up there just pumping up the crowd and shooting off fire cannons, and that's a good public speaker and it's so inauthentic. That's not who that person is in real life. I'm curious, what was that like? It seems like that was a hard journey for you in getting feedback from fellow Toast Masters. What takeaways do you have for the audience from going through that painful process?
John Bowe:
I think that the hardest thing about public speaking is when you're new at it is if you really start looking at it closely, you realize, "Okay, I have a hundred options at every second. For which self can I be? Should I be my more thoughtful self? Should I be this rowdy self?" I do have a part of me that's slightly Ton Robbinsy if I really push it. But that guy comes up only once in a while when I'm hanging out with my friends and I'm very relaxed. And the idea of me going on a stage and being all energetic like that, and Susan Cain in my book, she called it rah, rah, there's this rah, rah approach to public speaking, which I think most people hate. And I was one of those people who hated. I was like, "That's not me. I'm a writer. I'm pretty thoughtful. I'm from the Midwest. We don't do rah, rah.
Even if on a day if I won the lottery and you say, how's it going, John? I'm not going to be like. So just figuring out a way to be thoughtful, figuring out which one of those hundred selves to choose from and how to make that work and how to... The root of oratory back in Ancient Greece came from the same root as acting, and they both came from the root of two interpret. So I can use my voice this way, I can use my body, I can write the words this way, but what are the best way to arrange those things so that I can get my point across?
And so when you realize, oh, it's this artistic process, and you can choose whatever you want, you could make yourself be Tony Robbins if that works for you, or you could make yourself be, think of really, really thoughtful speakers. I mean, Susan Cain is a great example. So my journey, you asked how did I figure that out? It was one painful step at a time, but once I really landed on that thing of the audiences, the beginning and the end of public speaking, it took the focus off of me. And so I didn't have to feel like a phony anymore. That question about authenticity was put to rest, and it hasn't bothered me ever since.
Dustin Burleson:
A great step in the process that you share on page 69, knowing why you're speaking, someone calls and says, "Hey, I'd like you to come speak to this group," knowing why. And you say, give a general goal and a specific purpose. So you say, "After hearing my speech, my audience will know X and respond by doing Y." I really like that. That's really powerful. Well worth many multiples. The price of the book, when do you start that process? We'll start there. If someone calls and says, "Hey, can you come speak?" I'm thinking of people listening to this. "Can you come speak to our class about what it's like to be an orthodontist?" Where do you start that process of determining why you're even showing up to do the talk?
John Bowe:
It is so counterintuitive. Most people, when they are asked to do a talk or presentation, they immediately go to their slides. Maybe they'll start writing out their ideas. But most people these days seem to go to the slides first. And my method, which when I say that, I almost say it in quotes because there's nothing new under the sun. I just have my own version of old classic techniques for teaching this stuff. But no, don't write down a word. Don't choose any of your slides. Do that thing I said about. Think about your audience and make a list of attributes about who they're, and the second thing, second step is what you just said. Think about the purpose. Think about what you want them to know or do as a result of your talk. And for me, that was super weird. I reacted very negatively to that.
Because I just thought, "I'm not here to tell people what to do. That sounds manipulative and Machiavellian," and it took me a while, thinking about that to realize, no, think about when you hate when someone comes up to you and they're paddling and you don't know why they're speaking to you, that's what drives you crazy because it's so disrespectful of your time. So what you really want is someone to come up to you and just say, "Dustin, I want you to know blah, blah, blah, so that we can do blah, blah, blah." And then you're like, "Okay, cool. I know what to do. I know my marching orders. Thank you for being so clear."
And so when you're going to go talk to that group of dermatologists or orthodontists, you think about what do you want them to get out of it? And so then when you really think about that, you're thinking about them, you're thinking about their benefit, you become less selfish, we all need a little bit of help pulling our head out of our, you know what, and so what's in it for you? Let me tee that up. All of my thoughts, all of my brilliance, all of my experiences. Let me tee up the ones that are going to be useful to you so that you can do blah, blah, blah. That's why I'm here to speak to you. So I think when people zero in on that before they start writing and before they do their deck, then you really know your script and your trajectory, and it makes it 10 times easier to do and 10 times less nerve wracking.
Dustin Burleson:
You just touched a nerve because we've all been. In our association meetings, there'll be a thousand orthodontists in a room. Big, huge multi displays, and someone will be pulling up their laptop and he'll say something like, "Well, I've got about 500 slides here." I'm going, "Whoa he definitely started with his slides." He's like, "Which ones? I can't get through them all." I'm going, "Man." There's a question in this, and I'm rambling. When I see someone who has 500 slides, I think they haven't started with why they're here.
And then the other question, and someone can fact check this, I think someone like Frank Sinatra, maybe it was Dean Martin, basically said, "Hey, anyone that needs more than a microphone and a spotlight is a putts, I don't need all this showy stuff in the background." What are your thoughts on visual aids? I think some of my favorite presentations I've ever seen, some of my favorite speakers, it's just them. There's no visual slides. What are your thoughts on slides and getting to the why?
John Bowe:
We could talk for an hour about this. Look, the whole purpose of having a meeting or a presentation or a live engagement, it comes down to the people. It comes down to you and your eyes looking at them and your heart and your soul and your brain, whatever, your presence, making a connection with them. So if it were just about the information, you could email that, you send a spreadsheet. So on this very animal level, you have to come to grips with that.
You're there, they invited you there because they want a piece of you, they want to feel you. They want a connection with you. So I'm not saying people shouldn't use slides, but people lean on their slides to a ridiculous degree. I mean, how many times have you seen a speaker turning their back to the audience reading from the slide as if the audience is illiterate and it's like it's really uncool. I kick people's asses for that. I yell at them and say, "It's public speaking, not public reading."
Dustin Burleson:
Reading. Yes. Oh my gosh. Okay, good. I had to let that cat out of the bag. I think we've all been to those where we're like, "Oh, there's a hundred words on each. It's not just 500 slides. There's a hundred words on each slide."
John Bowe:
I do entire workshops based on just slides and how to simplify them, and how to... If you really do the writing better, you can simplify your ideas. You can offload. A lot of the factual stuff that you think is really, really necessary to include, which isn't. You can distill your points and say, "Look, I'm here because I want us to figure out what are we going to do about this problem coming up in third quarter, dah, dah, dah, dah." You can send the slides, you can talk about those in a different format, but a live format is just terrible for getting through a lot of numbers and figures and graphs and all that stuff.
So getting rid of 80% of it is a good step one. Step two is put one idea per slide. I see it all the time with finance companies. They have four different charts explaining four different things on one slide, and there's no human who can sift through that and know what it means. So it's just this perfunctory performance that no one is getting and no one's getting the value from it, so they're just sleepwalking. And that is the opposite of connecting. But when you do get the slides right, it's magic and it's really fun and people are learning along with you, the speaker, and everyone's getting a ton of information from it. So I'm not saying don't use slides, but you just want to use them in the right way.
Dustin Burleson:
Tie in with the connection. Personally, how do you feel at the end of a presentation, even if it's just a small team meeting, how do you know you've connected with the audience?
John Bowe:
I think it's funny. I write about that in the book. It's very hard to say what connection is, but it's really easy to list the 20 ways when it's the opposite, when you're not connecting. So when people look at their phone, when they're looking at you in horror, what are you talking about, looking at you it's just dazed in comprehension. I think when people really respond when you're asking questions or answers or it's time for people to respond. If you get really lively response, preferably the response isn't like, "Kill him." But I think you want to have everyone on the same page, not necessarily agreeing with you because that's not realistic, but at least just understanding what you said and getting a thoughtful response.
Dustin Burleson:
I'm curious timeline for a lot of the clients you work with to help them with public speaking. How long does it take to learn these skills? Is this something you need years to learn? Is it faster than that?
John Bowe:
No, it's shocking. I mean, one of the problems I have as a guy who now has a business teaching this stuff as I run through clients too quickly, everyone learns it pretty quickly. And I always tell them, "The goal for most people is not to be Martin Luther King. You're not going to be Steve Jobs. The goal is just to not suck at this and to get over most of the anxiety, not all, but just most, and to be able to do a competent job for the rest of your life." So for most people, that is three to 10 hours. It's just not. Once you get these methods in place and you start using them, you don't need me anymore. And you use these methods repeatedly, and every time they get a bit better and you get a bit more adroit with using them, you get a bit more confident.
You realize, "Oh, this actually works." So yeah, it's pretty short. If someone is really writing something fancy, some big thought leadership thing, or I worked with a client for a TED talk. Suddenly, yeah, you could put in a hundred hours in a month to get ready for something like that because you have to practice it and write it and try out a bunch of things and rehearse them and try it again. And same with the deck. But for the average person doing a speech or presentation at a conference or just learning to prepare for a scary meeting breeze at the low end, but 10 is at the high end, number of hours that it takes.
Dustin Burleson:
It's pretty inspiring for those of us who might think it takes a lot longer than that. I want to touch on a really profound thing, a concept you bring up in the book that I had never considered before. And you say "Speech anxiety is really a form of selfishness," and I want dig into that a little bit and then relate it to how we often as doctors presenting to patients are actually being very selfish. There's old data. I went and actually, I want to make sure I actually did fact check this. So in 1984, there was an article in New England Journal of Medicine said that the doctor interrupts the patient after 18 seconds. So doctor asks you a question, you start talking, 18 seconds, then we interrupt. 2018, University of Florida and Mayo Clinic, it's down to 11 seconds. So maybe some supporting data there that the doctor just jumps in, "Yeah, I know what you got going on. Let me tell you more about what I think," often I used to think that was just oversharing or just nervousness, but it seems like maybe it's being selfish.
John Bowe:
Dustin, that's amazing. That is really cool, useful stuff. I think that's just a great example of people failing to understand your purpose of communication. If you think about a doctor, patient communication, is it to pass along information or is it to create a connection? I have seen the statistic that says that patients who spend more time with their doctors, there are less, fewer lawsuits and sue.
And so if you think about that for 10 seconds, you realize, Okay, patients want that connection even if doctors probably don't care as much." So that's a great example of being selfish, the doctor being ignorant in that situation about what the patient needs and what is ultimately for the wellbeing of both of them. But since they stopped teaching public speaking, we all stopped learning the importance of it. And so we just discount it, we discount it, and we think knowledge is the thing.
Facts are the thing. So whether you call it selfishness or just our attention is trained in the wrong direction, we just think, "Dustin, I got to show you how smart I am. I got to get you my information," even if you're miserable, even if you hate me. And obviously that's really unwise and immature and just obviously wrong. Once you look at it, take a couple steps back and look at it again. But I feel uncomfortable sometimes using the word selfish, but I don't know of a better word, I guess. So I'm thinking of my... I'm just bursting with this encyclopedic knowledge of everything I know, and I've got to bombard you with it instead of just shutting up for 60 seconds and listening, "Well, what do you actually need?" And I think that's hard, not just for doctors, but everyone at every level of society, everywhere.
Dustin Burleson:
Yeah. You actually, I think that was one of your speeches, if I remember correctly in the book with Toastmasters, was bringing up the topic that maybe we should speak less. I thought that was brilliant. Amongst a lot of fellow professionals who like to speak, suggesting that we all talk a little less was a cool idea.
John Bowe:
There's a lot of... The Greeks get credit for inventing this comprehensive system of teaching speech, but most cultures that were worth their salt also had pretty interesting thoughts about speech. And one of the big Chinese things like from Confucius more than anyone, was just shut up and saying superior people don't have to prove themselves all the time. And usually people who are clever talkers are liars or they're being manipulative. So if you're really cool, you'll just shut up. But then other commentators said, yeah, and Confucius talked a lot, and that's how we all know how smart he was. So somewhere in there, the truth lies.
Dustin Burleson:
Yeah. It goes back to saying maybe the right thing that the audience needs to hear at that time, which is really powerful. Can we talk about takeaways? What are your goals with takeaways and what are maybe some examples? I'm thinking now as a doctor who's going to listen more to the patient and make sure that they've got what they need out of that interaction. How important is the takeaway and what are some tips when you're designing those for any presentation?
John Bowe:
I think again, just running through my step one and step two, and there's a step three, which we won't get into, but just think about who your audience is and think about why you're talking to them. So part of that presupposes a takeaway. I want Dustin to know that if he's anxious about speech, he can do these steps one and two or look up my website or look up any other websites and be able to get what he wants or be able to overcome that next challenge.
So I think for doctors and patients, it's just taking that 32nd pause or two minute pause, whatever before the communication to think about what you just asked me. What do I want them? I don't know what the takeaway is, but you have to think beforehand and remember that there is a takeaway and remember to articulate the takeaway rather than just assuming that you're going to get there in the conversation or that the patient is going to get it.
And so you just form your whole conversation around this idea of, "Okay, I want them to know this. I want to leave them time to maybe ask any questions they might have about it, because I might want to give them the takeaway in the form that I think they should have it, but they might not know how to use it, or they might have questions about it or objections or who knows what, but people never do what you think they're going to do." So anticipate that in advance instead of just try to ram it all through, which is what we all do.
Dustin Burleson:
You and I may have spoken about this in our pre-call, but we send in secret shoppers to our top clients to actual patients who go in with a lapel camera or a purse camera, and then we transcribe every word the doctor says, and they do these in high-end restaurants and hotels and retail shops, and it's unbelievable. You can just look at the transcript and see if the doctor is saying eight paragraphs and the patient says three words. We know that conversation is upside down and trying to get it flipped is largely doing this like what do they need from this? How will we leave this interaction where I know her story versus her knowing everything about our practice? So it's interesting.
John Bowe:
What's weird about it, how easy it is to teach that. I mean, again, that seems like some ingrained psychological trait. You could say, "Oh, doctors are arrogant, or doctors are this," or you could talk about modern medical practice. It's really hard because of this and this and this reason, but to correct for this, it's just weirdly easy. It doesn't require some big psychological makeover or some big industry-wide makeover to flip that around. And it's just shockingly easy once you get it into people's head that it's possible and that it's easy. If you organize your thoughts well and tee them up well, instead of just barging into situations and hoping that it works out well, it's amazing how much better it works out.
Dustin Burleson:
Yep. I'm curious your thoughts continuing moving forward on Toastmasters. Is that something you encourage employees of yours to do, or employees of your clients to do as well?
John Bowe:
I get accused now all the time of being a page fill for Toastmasters. That's how much I encourage everyone to join them and make use of them. I do, especially-
Dustin Burleson:
Brought to you by Toastmasters.
John Bowe:
Brought to you by. Yeah, they're entirely nonprofit. And I used to work as an investigative journalist, and I never had the experience where I showed up somewhere and people said, "Oh yeah, we're opening our doors to you. Come on in and look around and do whatever you want." And they were so quick to do that, and it's just because as an organization, they've always been Sterling since they were founded a hundred plus years ago. They don't charge a dime more than they have to. There's just never been a big controversy about Toastmasters. They just really have... They walk the walk, they talk the talk, so to speak, no pun intended.
And they've spread all over the world so anybody can join and you can mold the Toastmasters group to your organization's needs. They have public-private Toastmasters, and even private ones. I think Bank of America has something like 60 different inside, in-House Toastmasters chapters. So you could have one for dentists and a separate one for orthodontists, a separate one for different types of doctoring surgeons and where people would really get practice doing the thing they do.
Dustin Burleson:
I'm curious, what's the time commitment like? I know you were deeply involved investigating and researching for the book, but moving forward, do you use that a quarterly thing? Is that a monthly thing? What's the time like?
John Bowe:
I mean, anybody can dip in and out of Toastmasters. I was in a rush to go through them because I was writing a book and I needed to be the Guinea pig who subjected himself to going through Toastmasters. They've changed it around since I did that. So they have a different introductory cycle. I had a book that had 10 different speeches, and each one of them worked on a rudiment of public speaking.
And it was crazy. It's so weird because it's very meta. It's very fourth wally. You break down the performance of being a human and using your body and using your voice and using words in a way that at first is awkward and shocking, but then you take apart your personality and put it back together over the course of these 10 introductory speeches. So I don't know.
I think a lot of Toastmasters join and have a pretty intensive year or two with it, and then they back off and they get busy doing other things. My cousin, who I wrote about in the book, the recluse, I think he just went for a few months and it changed his whole life. There was a prisoner I wrote about too, who was stuck in jail in Louisiana, who couldn't... He would come up for parole hearings every couple of years, and he would get tongue-tied and blow his chance at freedom. And then a fellow prisoner suggested that he joined Toastmasters, and six months later, the guy's walking out of jail a free man. So that's for me in a way, the most powerful story of just, wow, you can get that big of an effect with that. Just going to this club once a week for an hour.
Dustin Burleson:
It's amazing. You overheard someone in one of the classes, and I don't want to misquote her, but it was essentially, she said, "I feel like I'm becoming more human. I'm becoming more of myself." Is that a common binding after going through Toastmasters?
John Bowe:
I mean, to express it so profoundly and simply. I didn't hear that all the time, but yeah, I think that is the result. I think if you go through the world thinking, "I'm too uptight, I'm too anxious to speak. Well, I can't connect with anyone." And the flip side of that is, "Urgh, everyone's so dumb. No one understands me." And I think if you could really do an honest reckoning with people and see how much of that we all feel like, "Urgh, people never slow down and listen to me," or, "People don't care about me." And if you really dig deeper, it's like, well, are you making yourself easy to understand? So if you suddenly insert this insight, this IP, this Greek IP, this how to do public speaking thing, and you realize, "Oh my gosh, I can solve this problem relatively easy." Yeah. The result from that is you become more human.
You like people better, you like yourself better because you just don't feel so frustrated. And I think to go back to that purpose thing, not to bang the drum again and again, but if you're just thinking, "I'm a zip drive or a disc drive, and I've got to relay my data into your brain so that you have my data," that's not very human. But if I think, "Oh, Dustin's having a really busy day day, I want to give them this information. How do I give it to them in the most useful way?" So I'm thinking about you as a human suddenly, not just a disc drive.
Dustin Burleson:
It's really powerful. It's really, really powerful. We could talk all day. I know your time is very valuable. I want to make sure listeners have a chance to not only go get the book, but learn more about you and what you're writing and teaching and what you're up to next. Where can people learn more about you?
John Bowe:
Well, I publish stuff pretty regularly. I do little how-to articles for CNBC very often. I just did an op-ed for the New York Times about how we need to start teaching this stuff to kids again, because you look at the mental health statistics for kids before and after Covid. It was bad before Covid, it's twice as bad now. The Surgeon General just came out with this amazing study a few months ago about our epidemic of loneliness. So the purpose of the piece was just to say, "Hey, we can fix a lot of this for very little money and time. Let's start teaching this stuff again." I don't know. I publish stuff pretty regularly. I have a website where anyone can come find me. It's john fbo.com. LinkedIn is pretty big for my people. I'm not a huge TikTok guy.
Dustin Burleson:
No, not yet.
John Bowe:
Starting to do that because you were talking about this earlier, video is everything. So if you can explain how public speaking works and geekfy it, that's my mission in life is just to make it be accessible to people and realize what a big deal it is and what an easy thing it is. So I'm out there in the world on social media now more and more.
Dustin Burleson:
Cool. Yeah, I think honestly, there'd be some people that I've seen. I'm like, how did you... I'll see an assistant who's a Gen Z, and they'll do something neat and like "Where'd you learn that?" She's like, "I watched the TikTok video." So there's TikTok videos on little dental techniques. There's certain on resume writing, and now we'll tee up for public speaking classes on TikTok.
John Bowe:
I mean, I really hope, the thing that attracted me to it was the fact that you could get all of the psychiatric help without paying a ton of money or taking drugs in hours, days, whatever. And it's this shocking thing that no one knows about. So yeah, I want to get the word out. I'll bow down to TikTok and social media and start making little videos if it helps people.
Dustin Burleson:
You heard it here first, he's going to have millions of TikTok followers. We'll post a link to the New York Times, which is how I found you. It's an ancient solution to our current crisis disconnection. I sent that to probably 10 people at my kid's school and said, "Hey, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this." And we-
John Bowe:
Oh, thank you so much. I mean, I'm starting. I don't know what I'm doing, but I'm starting a nonprofit and want to turn this into a big thing because it's really cheap and it's pretty easy to get it out there, but I just cannot imagine anything that would get more bang per buck than this.
Dustin Burleson:
Yeah, I agree a 100%. So thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks for writing the book. It's brilliant. It was such an honor to speak with you.
John Bowe:
Oh, thank you, Dustin. You too, it was really fun conversation.
Dustin Burleson:
Thanks for joining me on another episode of The Burleson Box and a special thank you to John Bowe for coming on the show. If you liked what you heard, be sure to subscribe and leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform, that helps us spread the word and share the message with other like-minded professionals. And until next time, I'm looking forward to seeing you right here inside another episode of The Burleson Box.