Next Big Idea Transcripts: John Colapinto

Summer is a time for me of reflection for me. We have now done over 100 episodes of The Next Big Idea podcast, and though we try not to have favorites — we cherish each and every episode – we do have favorites (we are only human).?

On the short list of favorite episodes is this conversation with John Colapinto, author of This Is the Voice, a book about the power – and beauty – of the human voice …?

And of course the podcast, as a genre, is a celebration of the human voice. A podcast is so simple, so minimalist … just someone talking … more often, two people … in conversation.?

If a podcast is powerful, if it touches you, moves you, it is because the human voice moves us. It evolved, over millions of years, to do just that.

You may listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , or below. With no further ado, our podcast episode with John Colapinto …

?? Buy a copy of This Is the Voice

Rufus Griscom:

I'm Rufus Griscom and this is The Next Big Idea. Today, how speech made us human and why your voice makes you, you. One night back in the late '90s, John Colapinto took the stage at a dance club in downtown New York. He was working at Rolling Stone at the time and his boss, Jann Wenner, had asked him to sing a few covers at the magazine's holiday party. That may not sound like a big deal, but this is Rolling Stone we're talking about. The party had 2,000 guests. As John got ready to sing, he spotted Val Kilmer, Paul Schaffer, and there was Yoko Ono in the front row. Not bad for a bunch of journalists. They'd been practicing for weeks, but as the big night drew closer, John's voice got weaker. He started to rasp and he couldn't reliably hit the high notes. John got through the concert, but afterward, his rasp got worse.

John Colapinto:

I had total laryngitis, completely couldn't make sound for about three or four days. Came back as a whisper, eventually sort of was raspy, and then it was gravelly and it stayed that way.

Rufus:

A few months later, John was riding the elevator in his apartment building when a smiling new neighbor got on. "What floor?" He asked her. All it took was those two words for her to stop smiling, look at him and say, "You've got a serious vocal injury." John later found out she was a Broadway vocal coach and on her recommendation, he went to see a doctor.

John:

I had a polyp, which is a bump on the edge of my vocal cord.

Rufus:

It was no bigger than a pea, but that was big enough to turn John's once melodious voice into sludge. The doctor proposed surgery.

John:

I was told it would be six weeks of vocal silence. There was no way I could afford that. I was a new father, a new apartment owner. There was no way I was going to stop earning money for a whole long period of time.

Rufus:

So John never called the doctor back. Fast forward 10 years, John is now writing for The New Yorker and he's doing a story on Steven Zeitels, the celebrated vocal surgeon who just operated on Adele.

John:

And when he heard my voice, he said, "I want to take a look at your vocal chords. I need to see those." He said, "This is bigger than Adele's. It's one of the biggest I've seen. And there's no way in the world you can sing ever again until you have this thing removed."

Rufus:

John doesn't care so much about singing again, but something else the doctor says does resonate with him. Zeitels says you could hear that John had trained himself to speak around his injury, dropping his pitch below his natural register. It works to mask his rasp, but it drains his voice of emotion.

John:

He sort of said to me, knowingly, "I bet you don't go to as many loud restaurants because if you do, you can't speak for several days afterward." And I said, "You got that right." And I really was sort of withdrawing from the activities that I used to engage in.

Rufus:

John began to realize when he lost his voice, he lost part of himself. He started to think maybe surgery wasn't such a bad idea after all. But before he made up his mind, or maybe to help him make it up, John decided to write a book about the human voice, partly inspired by Zeitels' observation. If speech is what makes us human, then our voices are what make us, us. The result is This is the Voice, a fascinating survey of the science behind how our voices evolved, the cultural conditions that turned our voices into signals of our backgrounds, status, and sexual desirability, and the tremendous impact of the spoken word on art and politics.

At first, there was only the voice, the voice of our mother reverberating through her body through the amniotic fluid in which we floated. Though we didn't understand the words she spoke, we came to understand the music, the syntax, the grammar, the song of language. Storytelling, of course, also began with the voice. Before books, before movies and Snapchat and Instagram. And the voice conveyed not just language, but also emotion, mood, conviction. Homer, the epic poet who gave us the Odyssey and Iliad, was illiterate. Shakespeare had never bothered to have his plays printed. He didn't care about writing, he only cared about speaking.

And indeed, this podcast and our new Next Big Idea app reflect our belief that the human voice is the best way to deliver ideas. We began with the voice and to the voice we return. Oh, and if you're wondering what John decided to do, whether he's going to get the surgery or not, don't worry, the answer is coming. Welcome, John, to The Next big Idea podcast.

John:

Oh, thank you so much.

Rufus:

Well, thank you for this book. It was such a pleasure to read, so fascinating. You begin the book with the story of your own voice injury. You can't change pitch, you can't get loud, you can't do the normal things that a voice does to express how you feel.

John:

Yes.

Rufus:

So there's almost this revelation here that we are our voices, right? That our voices are our social presence to some degree. And if your voice is contracted to some degree, it's almost a contraction of self.

John:

Beautifully put. That's exactly it. And of course, I mean, who really gives much thought to that in their daily life really? We're doing it subconsciously all the time. I mean, you get a phone call from someone you don't know and you're immediately making all sorts of assumptions about that person, just according to the way they sound over the phone. Even if you don't fully articulate them to yourself, you are making judgments like, I wonder how educated this person is? Or I wonder where this person grew up? Or I think I can tell that this person is kind of aggressive. Or gee, there seems to be a little hidden hostility in this person's tone. I mean, the number of things that are coming across in this vocal channel, these many channels that are emerging from between our lips are truly stunning. But yes, we don't think of it consciously, but we are, interestingly, because of our evolutionary heritage, all of us are extraordinary experts in precisely this science because we're simply doing it all the time. I had not seen a book that really articulated this though, that broke it down.

Rufus:

And as you implied there, the power of the voice and the complexity of what's happening, what's transmitted through our voices is, some of it's conscious and some of it's unconscious. That there's a sophistication to our ability to read all these layers. And much of it, we're not even aware of. I mean, I have learned this from reading your book.

John:

I became obsessed with that idea of how much we are communicating without knowing it, without deliberately transmitting things with our voice. I mean, we're of course always aware of the linguistic layer, the language part, but we think we can hide things like anxiety in our voice or lust, any number of emotions. And then if we really cast our mind back over our lives, we can think of the times where people have kind of caught us out and said, "Gee, you sound kind of hostile."

Or the examples I give in my book of the betrayed wife who says to her husband, after he has said, "Hey, hand me the remote." She says to him, "Are you having an affair?" And then she later says to her friends, "I just heard something in his voice." We are communicating so much unconsciously, but then there's all those ways in which we are also manipulating our voices to sound this or that way for the social occasion, however successfully. But yeah, it's just so complex what we're doing.

Rufus:

That is a perfect segue to the first big idea in your book, which we'll share now.

John:

Big idea number one, voice is molecular lasagna. I say molecular, because voice is actually the movement that we impart with our vocal apparatus to the air molecules around us. In a single cubic inch of air, there are 400 billion billion air molecules. Like a high def TV screen with many pixels, this makes the air an extremely high resolution medium for carrying the voice, which holds an almost frightening amount of information about the speaker in its many layers of sound, which is why I call the voice lasagna. Take my voice right now. One very obvious layer is the words and sentences I'm speaking. I am beaming my thoughts into your head by making the air molecules vibrate in specific patterns with super fast movements of my tongue and lips.

But layered into the linguistic molecular vibrations, you're also getting other data. My pitch tells you I'm probably male. My way of pronouncing words like sorry and out and about tells you I'm Canadian. The crispness of my articulation and use of multi-syllabic words suggest that I probably have a fair amount of education. And I'm obviously striving to sound entertaining and winning in the hopes of making my book sound interesting so you'll buy a copy. But if I were speaking now in ordinary life, you might detect other things in the layers of sound. You could hear anger, sadness, envy, resentment, tiredness, whatever. Layers of the molecular lasagna that you would perceive and process simultaneously with the words. Amazingly, our voices have all these layers of lasagna baked into every syllable we utter.

Rufus:

Molecular lasagna. I love that. We think of our voices as a way to deliver words, right? We select our words very carefully, but there are all these other signals that we're delivering, some of them intentionally, some of them unintentionally. And one way in which my understanding of human speech has totally changed now that I've been enlightened by your book is that I now understand that it's really almost a form of singing. We sing when we speak almost as much as we sing when we sing. Do you see it that way?

John:

I absolutely do. It was also a revelation for me as well. It really is singing. I mean, if you imagine that I was talking like this, I mean, people would've tuned out immediately. They'd be like, there's got to be something else to listen to.

Rufus:

Yeah. Quick interjection. The failure of computerized voices, I remember when the Kindle offered me the option of listening to a kind of computerized version of the text and I thought, oh, well that's handy. I can just use that when I'm driving or whatever and then I can go back to my Kindle. But it just, it was you almost can't listen to it.

John:

Isn't it amazing? And you can't stay focused on it. It's irritating. But what's interesting is that that lack of singing makes the linguistic layer deteriorate. You cannot follow what someone is saying if they're not fitting the lyrics into the tune that we expect. We are doing all sorts of things all the time in the lowering and raising and the rhythmic changes and differences and the softness and loudness of our voice, all of which are singing things that are actually bolstering what we're saying. And not just bolstering it, making it possible even to listen to someone. And I mean, not to get ahead of ourselves, but Darwin did say that our capacity, our unique capacity as a species to speak language came out of singing. So, I mean, I just throw that out there now to sort of foreshadow just how important it is that we are singing at each other.

Rufus:

Well, and one indication of this is this great observation that we think... I mean, I've always thought that we actually leave a space between the words that we speak. But in fact, when you analyze speech, there are no spaces, that the words run together in an unbroken ribbon of sound.

John:

It's stunning.

Rufus:

You notice this when you hear somebody speaking in another language.

John:

Yes.

Rufus:

Right? And you're trying to decipher it and you realize, wait a second, these people don't stop. They don't pause. How can I possibly decipher the words? But when we speak ourselves, we don't notice this, that we're releasing a river of sound out of our mouths. But it's a real challenge, as you point out, John, for babies who are trying to figure out where words begin and end. How do they figure that out?

John:

Well, it's one of the extraordinary things and what they're doing is of course listening extremely closely to speech as it's happening. And they are running a statistical analysis on the sounds that they're hearing. And they are figuring out, for instance, that if the parents happen to be English, the sounds Z and B together, like as in Polish, Zibignew, the name, that does not happen in English within a single word. Just think of it. I mean, how many words can we think of? Zero.

Rufus:

Yeah.

John:

But Z and B do occur together in that ribbon of unbroken sound if someone says, "Leaves blow," where you've got that happening. Now, as the child listens, I mean, this is just freakish, but as they listen, they are noticing all sorts of statistical information about how often that sound happens from their parents' lips. And what they come to realize is that the within a word is illegal in English. It's just not allowed unless it's across word boundaries, leaves and blow. And that's how, as they lie back in their crib looking so cute and helpless, and frankly dumb, they're actually noticing this. And they're realizing, okay, I can break a word there. Now, that was interesting enough to learn. But when I found out how fast they're doing this, how little they have to hear, yeah, it's amazing.

Rufus:

Well, and it's not only extraordinary what the babies are doing, but it also as it happens is extraordinary what the mothers and fathers, in some cases, I think I'm sure you and I, John, did our best to speak with our young babies. But the motherey is the way that moms speak to babies is apparently consistent in almost all languages and this exaggerated sing songy way. Now, aren't you cute? Right?

John:

Yes, indeed.

Rufus:

Right?

John:

Indeed.

Rufus:

This is all very intangent or probably evolved, right? This isn't just sort of like a cultural behavior. This is consistent.

John:

It's consistent and it's extraordinary because people are doing it even when they don't know they're doing it. So they actually do experiments with men where they put the man behind some two-way glass with hidden microphones and they put a baby in the room with them. And then eventually he'll starts saying, "Well, aren't you cute? What are you doing?" Or whatever. "Oh, don't do that." And then 15 minutes later they say to him, "Now listen, do you think you lift your pitch when you speak to babies?" "Oh no, no, I don't do that. That's something women do." Well, of course they do it. Men do it.

Rufus:

Interesting.

John:

Small children do it when they talk to their dolls and we do it when we speak to our pets. And I do think it must be an evolved trait where we recognize that the way to inculcate language into a being that doesn't understand it, our doll, our pet, our baby, is to lift the pitch this way. And in that beautiful way that all of kind of science and biology is overdetermined, one of the reasons that we do raise our pitch that way is because babies hear better in that higher frequency range for a long period of their childhood. So we are, somehow we know to raise our voice where they are really hearing it. It foregrounds the voice against all the other sounds in the environment. What you're doing is guaranteeing that this child won't die. You're guaranteeing that this child will have the equipment, language and speech and prosody, to win and woo a mate, so that those genes then go on. So yeah, I mean, for all of the fun and cuteness of it all, it's an extremely urgent survival drama that's taking place under our noses when we talk to babies.

Rufus:

We're singing to the babies. The babies are singing to us. When we have a conversation, as you and I are having now, we're singing a duet. I love this detail. The fastest a human brain can respond to a statement is in 600 milliseconds, a little over half a second. And yet the average gap between statements in a conversation is 200 milliseconds. So we're all preparing to speak well before the other person finishes talking.

John:

It's a beautiful thing. And you know what I compare it to in my own mind? And I probably should have put this in the book, is if you play tennis at all, or if you're throwing a ball with a friend, a football.

Rufus:

Yeah.

John:

You start moving to where that ball is going sometimes before it's fully left your friend's hand. And it's because you are able to read through repetitive throwing and catching. You're picking up all these visual cues and clues as to what the trajectory of that ball will be. And as it leaves the hand, well, by then, you really are starting to know. You know what speed it's coming at, you know what its arc is going to be. And I mean, it's really why we're able to fluidly play catch. It's why we're able to fluidly play tennis. It's all about the anticipation.

And I now wish that I'd actually put that in the book because really the phrases that we speak to people in conversation have arcs and trajectories that are very, very similar to throwing a ball back and forth. You and I are both very, very good at knowing, as the ball is arcing down towards us, when it is we should start gearing up to speak. And it's really how we are able to drop in our reply within 200 milliseconds. It really should take 600 for us to get that all figured, but instead, we are ready before the other person has stopped speaking. And it's a remarkable aspect of our back and forth conversation. And in fact, really good conversation sounds like an unbroken ribbon of sound. It's almost as if it's one voice speaking.

Rufus:

Yeah. But meanwhile, you observed that pausing for more than a second is considered rude. And pausing for more than two seconds is considered unendurable in a conversation, which you exploit. As a journalist, you confess to exploiting this extreme, excruciating pain that people experience if more than two seconds passes between comments in a conversation.

John:

Absolutely. If you or I, in this conversation, if we pause for a second, it can actually add a kind of wonderful performative impact. It's as if we're giving extra consideration before we speak. One of us has said something so interesting that the other person's just mulling it for a full second.

Rufus:

Yeah. Yeah.

John:

Which in conversational terms is a long time. You might be able to even get away with two seconds. Professors do that. They love to sort of cogitate and they'll roll their mouth around as if they've got a candy in there as they silently get ready to disgorge this wisdom. But if you go to three seconds, I mean, it's just, everybody goes into a full panic. It's like, oh my God, is he ever going to speak? And it can be so awkward that the person that's asked the question and not received a reply just starts to babble. Or the person that has half answered a question in the journalistic context of when I'm interviewing someone that's trying to hold back secrets. If they get halfway to where I want them to be, I simply don't obey the social cue that says, geez, I better speak now or both of us are going to feel awkward. It's like, yeah, let's feel awkward and see if he keeps going. And they almost invariably do. And that's when they say, "Yes, I killed him," or whatever it is you're hoping for the person to say.

Rufus:

I thought I'd give it a couple seconds and see how it felt.

John:

I love it. I was wondering. You know what? Brilliant. I hope you leave it in the edit. That's fabulous.

Rufus:

Well, meanwhile, a cynic, John, might say that the fact that it takes 600 milliseconds to process their response and we in fact respond in 200 seconds may be an indication that none of us are listening to each other. Hopefully that's not the case. But hopefully in this exchange of ideas, we're actually listening, changing each other's minds. As you put it, an exchange of musically orchestrated ideas.

John:

Absolutely. I mean, I wish my memory was better, but there's been a couple of times literally in the conversation we are now having where you've actually spurred and you've triggered a new idea in me about this thing that I spent three and a half years thinking about, really just through ideas that you've tossed to me. And I've suddenly had a thought like, oh yeah, yeah, that would've been good in the book. And really we're creating something together in speaking this way. And it really does fire our ideas, and I'm not kidding when I say I've had a couple of insights just from what we're doing.

And I mean, my God, how critical is that? I mean, our species clearly use this to really great effect because no other animal species does it. We don't just trade back and forth the idea that we're wanting someone to get off our territory by barking at them. We have this astonishing way to create ideas. I mean, we are a remarkable species, but really what makes us so special is that we're able to say stuff to each other in this beautiful conversational back and forth.

Rufus:

Well, and this is something I'd love us to talk about a little later in greater length, but the idea that maybe the conversation, which was sort of the original literary genre, is a better format than the 400 page book for getting at truth, the sort of Socratic method. Because really when you think about it, a book is like a 10 to 15 hour monologue of one person.

John:

Well, you've given me a bit of a chill mentioning Socrates, because I just so happened to be reading about him right now.

Rufus:

Yeah.

John:

He never wrote anything down. He's the most famous philosopher I think in the world. He simply arrived at all of his ideas...

... in the world. He simply arrived at all of his ideas by speaking to people in the city streets of Athens. And it was really up to Plato, his student, to write this stuff down. So you're dead right. Socrates really thought that he would change and improve the society in Athens simply by going wide, speaking to everybody, close questioning them, literally what you say in conversation. It's beautiful, and again, I wish it was in the book. Think of it, he had this brilliant ability to question people and make them reveal their own truths, and he would then use in conversations with other people. So it's almost a contagion of increasingly smart and well honed ideas that goes out into the society. But as you point out, not in written form at all, and it was really up to Plato to jot this stuff down, and thank God he did. But yes, the roots of our civilization derive from Socratic, literally, conversation.

Rufus:

And I think there's an argument that we may be beginning to come back to that place because we see, in the power of the podcast, that for some writers like Malcolm Gladwell, one of our curators at the Next Big Idea Club, and Sam Harris and others, that the podcast is becoming their primary genre. And it's also changing how they write, when they write. So I think that's something we could maybe come back to at the end. Back to the molecular lasagna, among the things that we're communicating in all these different layers of our voices, often involuntarily, as you point out, is emotion. And maybe emotion is the ricotta cheese in the lasagna [inaudible 00:24:53] But you give this great example of your son coming home from school in the fall of 2008. You'd been listening to news of the subprime mortgage meltdown, and you're stressed out. And your son walks in the door and you don't want to communicate to him your anxiety. I'm sure you're trying hard not to communicate the anxiety. You say, "Hey, how was school?" And he says, "What's wrong?"

John:

Yes, yes.

Rufus:

So our voices portray this emotion whether we want them to or not. And part of this, I guess you point out, is that we have this incredible ability, even in a nine year old boy, to detect deception or detect emotional signals.

John:

Yes, yes. And we're hearing it in the finest grained aspects of how those molecules are vibrating. We're hearing it in just something slightly different about the pitch. We're hearing it in something different about the volume, maybe something different even in the way I'm shaping a vowel. As I say, "How is school?" Maybe I'm just not... And he's been hearing me speak since he was came out of the womb, and before. He would've heard me through the uterine wall a little bit, a rumble of my voice. And so this is an instrument, this is a mechanism my child, who is so ready for his own survival, needs. He depends on me. There better not be something wrong with me or in the world. And so he's developed the ability, of course, to hear that, to listen for it and to hear it. And clearly, I know it because why did I masquerade? Why did I try to put on a cheerful voice? Still stuns me to this day that he was able to hear the deception, but it is something we have evolved over time for precisely those reasons of having to survive.

Rufus:

He was like, "Dad's 401k is down 34% this morning."

John:

Exactly.

Rufus:

You have to charm some other Welltodo people to [inaudible 00:26:48] Let's take a short break so I can charm our Welltodo advertisers. When we come back, we'll be talking about another yummy layer of our vocal lasagna, accents. Where do they come from, and what do they say about us? And are they the secret to creating a more equitable society? I'm ever more amazed by Charles Darwin. You think, you figure out that we're descended for apes and you can really hang your hat on that. You can pick up your feet and you're done. That's not a small accomplishment.

But he went on to tease out all these nuances about human evolution and theorized that early humans sang without words to express emotions and gradually developed language on top of this musical prosody. And Darwin cited the example of gibbons, the species of singing ape, whose operatic mating calls, and I'm quote, Darwin said, "Are true musical cadences serving to express love, jealousy, triumph, and to challenge rivals." And so we early humans were basically singing to each other to express emotion, and then gradually started identifying maybe threats, objects, whatever it was. But how extraordinary? And so this really explains the molecular lasagna, all the richness of human voice.

John:

Yes. The layers being built one by one over time and accreting in the signal. Useful things in evolution do not get edited away, they're kept or they stay. So things that were useful to us in our ape incarnation, we keep into our human state. And Darwin was magnificent in that. And terribly moving, the fact, I always get a little chill when I... You've reminded me that he talked about jealousy in apes. It's not just a question of hostility and anger and territorial control, it's more nuanced stuff. And Darwin, I think, is remarkable because he had this awareness of how very, very feeling and emotion filled are animals. There's just nobody that ever had a better understanding of that. And the way he then extrapolates to that into an understanding of how we emerged from that and how the emotional underpinnings of our lives are so incredibly important. We've developed this linguistic layer that no other animal has, and it's super duper sophisticated, of course. But my God, as we've been talking about, it's all undergirded by the singing, emotional and [inaudible 00:29:31]

Rufus:

Yeah, it's amazing. Well, and meanwhile, all animals speak in a low pitch growl when expressing authority or dominance and communicated high pitch notes when they're being friendly. And in every language, we raise our voices when asking a question and the person responding lowers his or her pitch, taking on a voice of authority when responding. So it's extraordinary that effectively we are submitting ourselves, we're expressing a submissive impulse when we ask a question, and expressing our authority or dominance when we respond in a low pitch voice.

John:

Exactly. The feeling is, it was John Ohala, a linguist at Stanford, who pointed that out. He had this wonderful explanation of why we do raise our pitch with questions in virtually every... Not every language. There are obviously some cultural things that can shape language. But in most languages we do that. And he really sees it as a holdover of this emotional signaling that's encoded in us as animals. And it really is when you ask a question, you are saying, "You have authority over... You know something I don't, or I suspect you do. So please answer me." And when the person answers, of course, we don't answer with a raised pitch at the end. We lower our tone.

Rufus:

And when we discipline our kids, our pitch drops. And I've noticed this when my wife disciplines me, she tends to go lower. But although if any of my kids are listening to this podcast, I'd like to point out that when I'm disciplining you, it's not a size bluff. I am actually larger. This is a point of fact. The size bluff is not always a bluff when you take on the low voice of authority. The most interesting nuance in this section of your book to me was this observation by the zoologist Eugene Morton that animals, when communicating with each other, will alternate between growls and wines, mixing them to test whether they're interacting with a friend or foe. And I think we've all seen this when dogs encounter each other in a park, or what have you. It's this kind of conversation. They'll growl and then whimper a little bit, and growl, and they're kind of testing one another, aren't they, and trying to assess how this is going to play out?

John:

Absolutely. And they're signaling how they feel in the situation themselves. And Morton used sophisticated acoustic instruments to see that even in a single bark, in a single sound, there is a little bit of the upward trajectory of submission, and then the downward trajectory of dominance in every vocal, even the chirp of a bird. But the proportion of submission to dominance can change within that single sound. So those signals are being put across with every sound that an animal is making to another animal. And yes, you will literally watch a dog do these kind of exploratory questioning wines of another dog. And if things are going badly between the dogs, their voices mutually descend towards growls, and really what this is is a diplomatic exchange. They're trying to figure out, "Am I going to scare you off or not? How do you feel about me doing this with my voice?" And of course, if things go from bad to worse, they'll end up having a bloody fight.

Rufus:

Yeah. So you talk about the most resonant form of singing, the vibrato, which is the flutter and pitch when a violinist wiggles her finger or a singer oscillates her voice, you have this vibrato, which you say produces a plangent yearning sound. And executed properly, people don't even consciously hear the oscillation in the vibrato, but it consistently creates this powerful, emotional response, which is kind of amazing. And you hypothesize, a John Colapinto original insight, that the rapid up and down frequency changes may be a vocalization of this kind of hopeful, plaintive, exploratory communication of animals when they're shifting between the growl and the whimper.

John:

Absolutely. I mentioned that the animals will mix these up and down pitches low and high when they're indecisive, they're not sure how they feel about a situation, they're unstable. There's something happening emotionally that is putting them off kilter. And yes, it was my insight. I thought, "Well gee, the way the vibrato works in a singer's voice, it calls up in us this kind of emotional upwelling that we can't strictly name." We can't say it's sadness exactly. Sometimes it's a thrilling feeling of triumph or whatever, whatever else is going on in the music. But there's certainly a very, very strong, unstable, emotional feeling we get from that. My feeling was this goes right to what Morton saw, and Darwin, in this idea of dominance and submission in the signal because of vibrato as a rapid flutter between the pitches going up and down. And I really do think that's why we're hearing something that gives us this emotional response because we're animals. We're responding like animals.

Rufus:

Yeah, right. Yeah. Well, it's the hopefulness that the dog has in this kind of oscillating bark that he or she will be met with a friendly party. It's this yearning hope, that's kind of amazing. Well, let's talk about what our speech says about our backgrounds. And so another layer of this molecular lasagna of our voices, you point out, is accents, which again, portray information about us, without our being able to control it, or at least not easily. I think of it almost like we're walking around with these cell phones that are sharing all these intimate details of our lives with Facebook or Google or what have you about where we are and what we're searching for. And our voices sort of do that too. We're radiating all this information about where we've been and where we grew up, without intending it. And George Bernard Shaw said, "It's impossible for an English man to open his mouth without making some other English man despise or hate him." This, of course, is from your book. It's ironic, isn't it, that our voices both connect us and they also divide us?

John:

Oh yeah, it's kind of a revelation that my book built to. It was an insight that I kind of came to. The accents are, of course, learned in earliest childhood, right back to when we're segmenting the speech stream and doing all of those complicated statistical analyses and so on. And we're mimicking our parents. Through the babbling stage of speech, we are figuring out how to make the sounds that mom and dad make. And if mom and dad happen to be wealthy people in London, then mom and dad are talking about going to a dance. They're talking about this or that and the vowels have a certain shape. Whereas if we're in New York, it's different. We speak differently. And the babies pick that up and shape their own speech accordingly with these incredibly subtle things, just the height of the tongue as you say a vowel. People probably don't think about this, but vowels, of course, our tongue isn't touching any target within the mouth.

It does when you say a T or a D or a C. But with a vowel, vowels are just swimming out there in the cosmos. Your tongue is just unanchored, and it's doing curvatures and lifts and pullbacks and stuff. But it's making these vowels that are absolutely critical to language. You cannot speak without differentiated vowels. And our vowels assume their flavor and shape from what we hear from our parents. And what that ends up doing, of course, is giving out a lot of information about where we were born, but also how we were educated, if we were well educated, because that sort of process of shaping vowels extends into pretty early childhood when we first go to school. So yes, a bunch is baked into those vowels and also how we do our consonants.

And as Shaw pointed out, and I love that quote of Shaw's because he doesn't say, "An Englishman can't open his mouth without making another Englishman vaguely suspect that he might not be top drawer." He says, "Makes us hate or despise him." He goes hard on that hate or despise. So he's really talking about social fracture, and it's really why he wrote Pygmalion. His point was that if we take a cockney person who's on the lowest possible rung of the socioeconomic ladder in Britain and simply get her to do her vowels differently, to change where her tongue is curving in the mouth, she will then be able to hang out at fancy aristocratic parties and marry some aristocrat. And Shaw really believed this was critical because there was no other way Britain was going to get around its class distinctions. It's heavy, heavy stratification.

Rufus:

Right. And it's extraordinary. And so by the way, Shaw's play Pygmalion, for listeners, was adapted into the musical and movie My Fair Lady, about how a speech scientist transforms a penniless cockney girl into a duchess by altering how she talks. And Shaw, who was a socialist, believed that speech therapists could be important social reformers in helping to level the playing field. He really felt like we have these class divides that are extremely dangerous for our society and our world, and modifying how people speak is a possible solution. It's kind of remarkable.

John:

Yes. And it sounds like one of those British eccentricities of that period that Shaw would be saying that the most important social reformers are phoneticians. It sounds ludicrous, but the more closely you examine it, the more truth you realize is in there. It's quite remarkable. And we are doing it as Americans all the time, or Canadians as I am. We really are making judgements about people's socioeconomic status according to how they speak. It's why we say that voice and accent are the last acceptable form of prejudice.

Rufus:

Yeah. I will confess shamefacedly that my father grew up in a blue blood old American family and it was not your Aunt Christie, it was your aunt Christie. And there was a number of pronunciations that were almost a little bit British. And we were always raised to say, "John is the person with whom I am speaking." You never end a sense in a preposition. Well, I decided somewhere along the line that that makes me sound like a pompous asshole, and John is actually the guy I'm speaking with. So I found myself at some point in my teens or twenties, undoing some of these slightly pompous habits that I'd formed. And I think that's kind of nice because it does seem peculiarly American.

John:

I think so, and I think it can be quite brutal living in Britain, living in England, and really realizing that your voice is giving you away in a manner that can be holding you back, literally in your job prospects, in your romantic ambitions. It's sort of like wearing the wrong shoes or something, you're just a little bit not on.

Rufus:

Yeah. Well, and what's fascinating in the book is this realization that accents are living and breathing, and they are contagious, and they're constantly forming and emerging and spreading. And in many cases, they're expressions of solidarity or identity. One of the great examples is the spread of the Yeager draw, which I think came from Chuck Yeager, the air force pilot who became famous for breaking the sound barrier in 1947. He was born in a coal mining town in West Virginia and he spoke with this slow Southern draw, that probably you could do better than I could, that communicated imperturbability in the cockpit that he was a calm, cool cucumber. And this was just gradually imitated by people in the military, and then airline pilots. And I think we've all heard it. Are you capable of doing the Yeager draw, John?

John:

I don't know if I'm good at that. You sort of get the well, howdy folks, we're cruising now 35,000 feet, or however they do it. They all do it. They all speak in some version of the Yeager draw. And it turns out they do it, even if they're from Minnesota or they're from California. It doesn't matter where they come from. This literally became the contagion throughout the pilot world, precisely because it did communicate something very, very soothing to the people sitting there in the cabin that didn't want to die. You just have that voice roll out from the cockpit. Interestingly though, they're really not super accurate Southern accents if they're adopted later in life. Unless the person's a very good mimic. It's interesting to know that British people think that Meryl Streep does a so-so British accent. We think it's impeccable. But if you're a real Brit, it's not quite there. So for accents to be fully there, you pretty much have to learn them in childhood during this critical period of learning. But yes, the basic outlines, the basic melody and shape of speech, is highly contagious. It's remarkable.

Rufus:

Well, so if the voice is the most important way we communicate emotion, it's interesting that as computers start to try to interface with humans, it turns out that the voice is the most important medium through which this human computer communication can occur. I'm old enough, as you are, John, to remember with great reverence the television show Knight Rider. Came out in 1982. David Hasselhoff played Michael Knight. But the real protagonist was the talking car Kit, a black Trans-Am, if memory serves that, by the way, would back out of an 18 wheeler while it was driving down the highway for reasons I don't understand at all. Why did it need to be driving? And the tires would squeak. That was great. An odd detail. But the show was ahead of its time in identifying the importance of voice communication between AI intelligence and humans. Let's play a clip from Knight Rider.

Speaker 1:

I'm going to listen to some good music, and don't offer any suggestions. I'll choose my own.

Speaker 2:

As you wish, Mr. Knight. But since you are still recovering from your ordeal and I detect we're in a slightly irritable mode caused by fatigue, may I suggest you put the car in the auto cruise mode for safety's sake?

Speaker 1:

No, you may not.

John:

Fantastic. Fantastic.

Rufus:

And that's not unrealistic. One can detect in the human voice fatigue, irritability.

John:

Yes. Absolutely. Within about the last 10 years, Silicon Valley figured out, "Wow. we're getting awfully good at transcribing speech into print from just the sound of someone talking into a microphone, and we can sort of simulate speech." But, of course, they realized it was not sounding like a human being because it was not the nice up and down of emotional coloring and linguistic prosody. And so they suddenly realize, "This is the game changer for computers now. This is like the next frontier where they become more and more human and they sound like human beings." Well, to sound like a human being, it took us 400 million years of evolution. So you got to somehow pack that into your software. And for the longest time, they didn't bother. And it was really very, very recently, 6, 7, 8 years ago, they really started to go in earnest. And part of what gave them the ability to do this was machine learning, the ability to write algorithms that actually let the computer learn the emotional tenor of speech by simply playing vast amounts of speech at it.

... by simply playing vast amounts of speech at it and labeling what the emotions are in the particular speech samples, so that the computer starts to make this connection between a sad voice and it sounding sad, and a happy voice and sounding happy, and all of the... And the thing that's vaguely terrifying is how quickly they started to learn this, like just how fast it was. They're really recognizing the emotions in a real human voice, and they're thus able to simulate it in fake computer speech as well. So we're in a brave new world, no question, of AI voices.

Rufus:

We can imagine then, that not too long from now, Siri saying, "Yes, John, I can put through a call to your boss, but you sound a bit cranky, so it may be better to call after lunch."

John:

That's what I'm told, yes, that we are rapidly moving toward that exciting future, where our computer tells us that we're lying, or can tell that we're fibbing. So that's fun.

Rufus:

And this sounds spooky, and horrible, and Orwellian, but it can also detect early signs of autism, depression, suicide risk.

John:

Yes.

Rufus:

There certainly could be some nice benefits to-

John:

Absolutely.

Rufus:

... having more attentive and more emotionally attuned computers.

John:

Correct. You know, I had a highly apocalyptic ending to that chapter, and my very wise editor, Eamon Dolan, said, "John, John, John, let's think about this a little bit." We sort of talked about the ins and outs of what could be positive, and we worked that in, and I... Well, in effect, I became more like Steven Pinker, just a little more optimistic.

Rufus:

And you didn't have to rub up against him physically, just it happened.

John:

That's right.

Rufus:

Well, I think it may be time for big idea number two. What do you think?

John:

Sure. Yes.

Rufus:

Let's do it.

John:

Men and women are different, when it comes to voice anyway. All other mammals are vocally monomorphic. That is, they display no difference along gender lines. Their roars, barks, meows, and baas sound the same whether made by a male or a female. However, human males speak, on average, a full octave below women, a big difference. We start out in childhood as monomorphic, but at puberty, the male voice deepens dramatically through the blast of testosterone that makes the vocal cords explode in size, which is a pretty big clue that the sexual dimorphism of the human voice has something to do with mating and reproduction.

Darwin said that wooing and winning reproductive partners involves two quite separate mechanisms, attracting mates through seductive ornaments, like the male peacock's tail or a symmetrical, well-proportioned body, but also by driving off or vanquishing same-sex rivals. Darwin called this contest competition. This almost always involves males battling other males for access to the female. Many male species dually evolved what Darwin called special weapons to maim or kill sexual competitors, like the antlers on stags, lethal leg spurs on roosters, and fangs on male chimps.

The deepened male voice in humans is one of these special weapons. While the voice can't maim or kill, it can be weaponized by a dropped pitch and a growl, which creates the illusion of greater body size, dominance, lethality. Early human males with naturally deeper voices had an inborn advantage, scaring off squeakier rivals and winning the contest for mates. Thus, the genes for deep-voiced males were sexually selected in our species.

Meanwhile though, women also developed a taste for a deep male voice. In lab tests today, women rate men with lower voices as more sexually attractive than guys with higher voices. Experts think that this is because deeper voices suggest that the male has more testosterone, which made the vocal cords thicker and longer, and testosterone boosts immune response. Greater disease resistance is something you'd like to pass to your children, so the theory goes, over long spans of evolutionary time, women became hardwired with a taste for deep-voiced mating partners, although just how deep depends, amazingly, on where the women are in their menstrual cycle.

When ovulating, and at the greatest risk for getting pregnant, and at their most libidinous, women lust for the lower voiced guys, the lowest actually, but during the least fertile part of their cycle, that is right after their period, when they're less erotically minded, the same women prefer men with voices a few semitones higher. Apparently, women have also evolved an understanding that deeper voices, through greater testosterone exposure, come with some less desirable traits, like violence and searching out lovers on the side. Higher voiced guys, who are less amped on testosterone, are more settled, more monogamous, more likely to stick around to help raise their offspring.

Rufus:

Okay, so Darwin said that if we want to woo mates successfully, and if you're listening to this and you're a single male, you may want to pay attention, two things are required, attracting the mate and vanquishing foes. And as it turns out, the voice is critical to both of these things, right? There's this incredible study by David Putz at Penn State, which showed that when men are speaking with guys who they consider to be socially and physically inferior, they adopt a lower pitch, a more dominant pitch. When men are speaking with other males who they identify as more dominant than them socially, they raise their pitch in deference. And again, all of this is involuntary. We don't even realize we're doing it.

John:

Yes.

Rufus:

So we're a bunch of singing apes vanquishing foes with our voices.

John:

Absolutely. You know, it's a contest competition, as Darwin said, for mates. And usually, it's men that do the fighting over the female. Big surprise, it's all that testosterone. And you know, I mean, a rooster, a male rooster, grows leg spurs that it slashes a fellow male rooster to death in order to get the female. Stags run at each other with their big, huge horns and smash together. Now, humans don't kill each other with our voices, but as we talked about earlier with the lowering of pitch, we size bluff. We suggest that we're bigger, and we drive off the male competition with that.

The male that happens to have been born with thicker vocal cords, just a genetic accident, has an inborn advantage over the one that has a slightly higher pitched voice through smaller vocal cords, and those get sexually selected in our species. So I mean, evolution of course is always about random accidents, so you've got that genetic accident of a lower voice. Well, who prevails in getting the mates? Those guys.

And that's really Putz's theory for this extraordinary thing about our species, which is that our voices are massively different between men and women. Think about dogs. You can't tell a dog, or a cat, or a moose, or a mouse apart sexually according to voice. Their pitch is the same, their timbre is the same. Human beings have this huge octave difference between men and women, and Putz was really getting at why that is, and he was, I think, very smart in suggesting, "Well, we may not have antlers, we may not have leg spurs, but we've got this amazing voice," and men's voices were deeper.

They didn't descend to the level of gorillas, who have truly terrifying, low, bassy voices, and he theorized that's because females, using the other mechanism of sexual selection that Darwin talked about, he said there was this contest, competition between the males, but there was also mate selection. There was what did females find alluring and sexy? You know, what did they like? What were they attracted to? Well, they were attracted to lower voices for reasons that suggest the bigger body, sort of a dominance thing, but also more testosterone, which deepens the voice, also gives you more immunity. So over incredible, vast spans of evolutionary time, women developed this understanding that the guy with the deeper voice was going to give her children more like immunity to diseases, amazingly enough.

But females also realized something else, and that is the deepest voiced males are the guys that have the biggest blast of testosterone, both prenatally and at puberty. Now, a deep voice, that can be good, but a lot of testosterone exposure also goes along with things like restlessly searching for other females to sleep with, a lot of fighting, maybe some dominance and some wife-beating, to take this to its furthest extreme. In other words, testosterone is a pretty dangerous molecule, and it really leads to some less-than-wonderful behaviors in men sometimes, and females seem to have been aware of it.

So they liked men with deep voices, but not gorilla deep, not like Earth-rumblingly deep. So in fact, the mates that they chose were ones with slightly higher than the lowest of the voices, so they kind of over time, they gradually dialed up the frequency of the male voice, still keeping it low, but not super low.

Rufus:

Yeah, yeah. Well, and meanwhile, there's this odd detail that when women are ovulating, they're most attracted to the deep-voiced guys, and I read in other studies, to square-jawed faces and so on, other signs of testosterone exposure, and when they're not ovulating, they prefer slightly higher voiced guys as long-term mates, who are less likely, as you say, to be violent or philanderers. And this makes me a little bit worried that higher pitched guys are unwittingly raising the kids of deep-voiced guys, right? Because you wonder, "Well, why would you have this change in preference when you're ovulating?"

Of course, our female listeners may want to consider the evidence that you present, that higher pitched guys are not always marriage material. You give the example of Robert Plant, of Led Zeppelin fame, who said, while touring, that, "Whatever road I took, the car was heading for one of the greatest sexual encounters I've ever had."

John:

Yes. Yes.

Rufus:

Yet, Plant had an extremely high voice. You write in the book, "Ironically, Plant's sexual success might have been derived from the message his singing voice, like Justin Bieber's and McCartney's, sent to female fans of a lack of sexual threat, or at the very least, the promise of monogamous devotion, a dishonest signal if there ever was one."

John:

Yes, indeed. Indeed.

Rufus:

I laughed out loud at that line.

John:

Nice. Yes.

Rufus:

And it is extraordinary, right? The way that rock stars and famous singers attract amorous interest at scale, right?

John:

Yes.

Rufus:

I mean, to my knowledge, novelists and other famous people don't get quite the same degree of amorous passion, right? So there's something primal there.

John:

Correct. I mean, and it's really, it's an ornament. It's a sexual ornament, that's attractive to females. And my feeling was, and again, this was me sort of daring to go out on a limb in theorizing, but it's really the elasticity of the male voice. The fact that it can go from sort of a low grumble, like I mean, Robert Plant, in his speaking voice, sounds like an ordinary male, but he's got an elasticity. He can show that, "I can go from battling other men, and fending off threats for you, my dear, but I can also just be up there in this stratospheric, angelic range, that turns your crank because it sounds like I'm going to be sticking around for the babies, and it also just suggests that I'm artistic, and creative, and supple, and flexible." So I think it really is about that range.

Rufus:

Coming up after the break, guest appearances from Lauren Bacall, Marilyn Monroe, and Kim Kardashian. John says that when it comes to our voices, especially women's voices, biology isn't everything.

You document this extraordinary shift in women's voices. There's evidence that since the 1920s, women's voices have dropped more than half an octave, which is, I think, a huge drop, right? Very significant. And you say that this drop in female pitch parallels, and was almost certainly driven by, seismic changes in women's social status over the last century. This is a kind of extraordinary claim. How and why do you think this happened?

John:

You know, it's really something that one can only draw inferences about. We can't know for sure, but it's so beautifully synchronized to changes in women's status. 100 years ago, that's when women got the vote, and it's really that's sort of the starting point that researchers looked at, in studying what was the pitch of the female voice. And they noticed that from about that point, it starts to inch down in pitch, and that you can watch it happen through to the Second World War, where all the men went off to war and the women were left in positions of authority, and they suddenly found themselves in charge of ordering other women around, telling people what to do, being bosses, holding down the fort. They were no longer doing motheries to their babies exclusively. They were suddenly in charge.

And they really have documented. They're able to tell from recordings, that women's voices did descend at that point, and you do see it reflected in the movies at the time, in particular Lauren Bacall, really because the director, Howard Hawks, was just fascinated by the sound of deep-voiced, authoritative women, which he would have been noticing around him in the society. We're talking now about the Second World War time. And he would have also, although he hasn't said this, although it's implied in everything he did say about it, that he found it erotic. This was sexy, and we know that it is.

So he actually, it was actually his idea, this is not so feminist perhaps, it was his idea to say to Lauren Bacall, "I want you to be speaking in this special, low voice," and he actually got her to read out loud for hours at a time, and train her voice lower, which just blew people out of the water. They had never heard anything like it.

Lauren Bacall:

You know, Steve, you're not very hard to figure, only at times. Sometimes, I know exactly what you're going to say, most of the time. The other times... The other times, you're just a stinker.

John:

Oh, man.

Rufus:

That's also an effective use of a two-second pause, right?

John:

Yeah, totally. I had the same thought. Absolutely, pregnant pause or what?

Rufus:

Oh.

John:

Wow.

Rufus:

It's extraordinary, and apparently, you also write that during the war, during World War II, women were recruited as radio announcers, that had previously been a man's job, men were all fighting, and they had to learn to speak in lower registers, because the audio equipment was designed for men.

John:

Yes, that's what I read.

Rufus:

And it distorted at higher pitches, right? So you had this combination of female radio personalities that became quite popular. Then you had this series of movies, and this resulted in a large-scale, arguably, drop in the pitch of women's voices. And then we get a curveball, which is the war ends, and women are kind of pushed back into these housewife roles, and we have a swing back, in popular culture, to the hyper-feminine, with starring ladies like Joan Collins and Marilyn Monroe. What were they like?

John:

Marilyn's voice is a parody of the sexually attractive voice in Darwinian terms. It has the high pitch that men find alluring, because it suggests fertility. It's got the breathiness, the whisper to it. It's as exaggeratedly feminine and sexy as the big, thrusting brassieres they wore, and the cinched-in waists that really accentuated, like in this artificial way, the female form. This was exactly coincident with the baby boom that happened after the war. All of a sudden, women's roles had strongly changed, and lo and behold, we see this reflected in the movie star that just quasars as the most alluring and successful of them all, Marilyn.

Marilyn Monroe:

Didn't you just love the picture? I did, but I just felt so sorry for the creature at the end.

Speaker 3:

Sorry for the creature? What'd, you want him to marry the girl?

Marilyn Monroe:

He was kind of scary looking, but he wasn't really all bad.

Rufus:

Good lord. That's extraordinary. It's almost a self-parody, as you say.

John:

Yes.

Rufus:

Well meanwhile, so fast-forwarding to 2021 here, we have this more recent phenomenon of Kim Kardashian's vocal fry. What's happening here?

John:

Well, people were mystified, linguists were particularly fascinated, because you don't get a vocal change so abrupt as that was. All of a sudden in 2010, women were speaking this way, young women. That happens to have been when the ratings for The Kardashians show, which had started three years before, were at their highest, and it was just the phenomenon. And you know, I sort of addressed this by thinking, "What's going on with this?" What happens when you do a vocal fry is you're pressing your vocal cords together, and the air is not being chopped smoothly. It's actually sort of popping through in these discrete little grumbly pops, and you're sort of getting a sound a little bit like this. So my theory, initially, was, okay, Kim Kardashian, she speaks in this way that really accentuates this idea that she's this blasé, rich, Beverly Hills, pampered, privileged person. So she speaks in this monotone that's just like, "I've got it all. It's all taken care of."

Rufus:

Sure. Sure.

John:

However, I then came to think, after the 2016 election, that the vocal fry, which didn't go away incidentally... It was not a short-lived fad, so already you're starting to think, "Wait, this is something more." I mean, six years on, and they're still doing it, and in fact more. You're hearing it more. I began to realize this has got to be about leveling the playing field with men. To make a vocal fry, we're literally doing one of those things that was encoded in us in our animal incarnation, as when lions growl, or when dogs growl, they are literally doing a vocal fry. And what I truly believe is that women started to use it in their speech, as a way to growl, to make a low, threatening growl. And I couldn't help but think of the 1970s expression, "I am woman, hear me roar." But I did-

Rufus:

Interesting.

John:

... think that roars are a little bit of a bluff. They're kind of theatrical and performative. Growls, however, are somewhat more frightening. They're kind of threatening. They do communicate that someone means business. So I think that this was a manifestation of women saying, "Wait, now we've really had it, you know? Like, we've got to be listened to." Yeah.

Rufus:

Well, this makes me really want to hear Kim Kardashian's vocal fry.

Kim Kardashian:

When people do say that having a brand like this is we've gotten lucky and stuff like that, I mean, I think that this doesn't come easy, you know? We work really hard, and if it was easy, then three sisters-

Speaker 4:

Then everyone could do it.

Kim Kardashian:

... from Beverly Hills, everyone can do it.

John:

"Do it." Wow, I have to congratulate you guys on finding just the most spectacular clips. What a great example.

Rufus:

Yeah.

John:

Yeah. Yes.

Rufus:

It is interesting that it's literally a growl, that it's a... That's remarkable.

John:

Yes.

Rufus:

Well, this brings us to idea number three.

John:

Ancient Greeks had it right about political voices. The Ancient Greeks said that the greatest political orators and rhetoricians are those who use their own voices, raised in public speech, as a way to bridge the natural divides in people. In his 2004 address to the DNC, nominating John Kerry, Barack Obama said that there was not blue states or red states, but the United States. This was classic oratory of the type that Cicero approved of, an emotionally stirring voice, but a voice that acted in the service of articulating complicated ideas about unity of purpose and cooperation, in this case, the idea, enshrined in the US Constitution, that all men are created equal.

Dangerous demagogues, charismatic self-dealing charlatans who seek power to advance their own ends rather than that of the country, do the precise opposite in their public speeches. They divide the populace along lines of religion, sex, politics, color, geography, whatever, and voice, as the Ancient Greeks warned, is one of their chief weapons for doing so. They use a furious, anger-driven oratory, designed to whip up pure emotion, to subvert reason and get people acting on their animal instincts of fear, and rage, and distrust of the other.

Hitler was the most destructive demagogue in history, and you can hear that appeal to pure, rageful, divisive emotion in his speeches, where he is literally foaming at the mouth as he screams about the supremacy of the Aryan race over all others. Propaganda Minister Goebbels actually praised Hitler's use of the voice, saying that Hitler could move people who didn't even understand what he was saying. It was all in how he said it. Talk about negating language and reason.

Demagogues are as much of a danger today as they were in Ancient Greece or Weimar Germany, so in this final big idea, I would urge you, when listening to a candidate on the stump, to listen for the balance between emotional vocal signaling in a speech and rational, sophisticated ideas. The best political orators must be emotionally rousing, yes, but not at the expense of reason, and human cooperation, and tolerance.

Expensive reason and human cooperation and tolerance. I would say, be suspicious of candidates whose oratory and rhetoric moves audiences to violence against other audience members. Such that the candidate is heard shouting from the podium, "Punch him in the mouth." "I'll pay the legal bills, believe me." Or, "They used to take people like that out on a stretcher." When it comes to the people who lead us, let's listen most closely to that layer of the molecular lasagna that speaks to our higher reasoning, the better angels of our nature.

Rufus:

Let's talk about the voice of leadership and persuasion as you put it. It's such an interesting time to be discussing the ancient Greeks who came up with the idea of democracy around 500 BC, as well as their view of power and the danger potentially of oratory.

John:

Yes.

Rufus:

And you write that the Greeks were aware of the risk of charismatic, self-dealing, narcissistic charlatans who attract voters through not an appeal to reason, but rather by whipping up pure emotion. I can't imagine you might have been thinking of anyone in particular when you wrote those words.

John:

Oh, not at all. Not at all.

Rufus:

The Greeks. Yeah, go ahead.

John:

Well, this was a great... Well, it was an interesting time to be writing the book. I actually signed the book deal I think two days after Donald Trump's election.

Rufus:

Interesting.

John:

It was inevitable that Trump colored my thinking... as I think we've all noticed he was in the air for those four years, you really couldn't escape him. And it really gave a target for me to aim at in my story of the human voice. Trying to make our voices into a narrative is not an easy thing. But because I had this end point that I kept thinking about, which is that leaders... of course we all have our individual voices that we use as we've talked about to converse in conversations and so on, to sing together. But ultimately our societies and civilizations and their fates come down... if we happen to be democracies or even not... actually to leaders, to one voice speaking. That's how the whole mishegoss is steered.

And I had the example of Trump before me so I was very much aiming the book towards that. Because that's sort of the end of our evolution. As we are in civilizations and societies that are led by political leaders. And Trump's voice was very clearly highly emotion filled. It was clearly very, very angry. It was loud, it was belligerent, it was forceful. It was all of these things. But meanwhile, the linguistic channel was not particularly sophisticated. I wouldn't say there was no ideas, but the ideas were simplistic. "Build a wall." "Lock her up." Simple platitudinous slogans for a complex society that is facing very difficult problems and those wonderful darned ancient Greeks were so good at understanding all of this.

We talked about Socrates earlier. He was also fascinated by this idea of the demagogic voice, the voice that is privileging the emotional channel of the voice in these kind of Darwinian scientific terms we talked about earlier. And I mean, I really think it's not overly simplistic to suggest that in all acts of speech and speechifying, the speaker is mixing those two levels. Just like moving faders on a mixing board. Let's bring up the linguistic and take down...

No successful political leader has no emotion in his voice, that would never work. It's very, very wrong to suggest that demagoguery is only emotion. But it's really the mix. It's what you privilege one over the other. And Trump was masterful in really pushing up that anger fader, because he knew it was going to connect. He saw a lane... I don't know if it's political smarts or if it's just a feral instinct, but he knew there was a lot of angry people in the country. And the way voices work is the human voice is a two way transmitter. There's a transmitter and a receiver, and neither of them really can exist in isolation. Trump understood that his transmitter was going to land. And boy did it ever. It landed amongst a populace ready to hear the cathartic sound of real anger.

Rufus:

Yeah. And I would add that so many politicians sound dishonest, even when they're actually saying something that's true.

John:

Oh yes.

Rufus:

Because they're so prepared and stiff.

John:

Yes. Yes.

Rufus:

And so when somebody comes in, is just shooting from the cuff and just very relaxed and having fun up there and doesn't really care. That's highly attractive.

John:

Totally correct. And you're actually making me realize just what a... And I hate to give him much credit for this, but he really was an amazing vocal artist. Because you've reminded me that when he was brow beaten by his aids into doing one of those hostage videos where he, let's say apologized for the "Grab them by the pussy," comment. Where he's speaking someone else's script and he signals it with his voice. His voice does a different thing. I really believe his MAGA followers can read it easy as pie. They know it's not sincere. To your point, which is exactly right. He's an amazing artist of the voice, he really is in his own way.

Rufus:

Yes. Yes. He certainly is. Well, I was so compelled by your section on Cicero's writing on oratory and persuasion that I went and bought a collection of his writing on the subject.

John:

Oh great.

Rufus:

He said that a skillful orator does three things, proves her thesis, delights her audience and moves the audience emotionally. And I guess sometimes only one of those is necessary as you point out.

John:

Yes.

Rufus:

But the great orators do all three. One of the most affecting speeches, maybe the most affecting speech that I've ever heard live and not just through the television set was Obama's speech, A More Perfect Union on March 18th, 2008. He was in a perilous tense moment in his campaign. And he gave this just stunningly elegant and heartfelt speech. I remember being so affected. Do you remember that one?

John:

It blew me out of the water so heavily at the time. I am a Canadian so anytime a politician of that amazing oratorical and rhetorical skill and knowledge, of course, and historical knowledge and not to mention sensitivity and awareness gives a speech that actually ranges across the entire history of the country and what it's ideals are, what it's founded upon... when someone takes it upon himself to do that at a moment of unbelievable drama... here was the first African American person that looked like he was going to seal the nomination with the Democrats beating Hillary out. And then at the very last second, he seems to be being upended by his reverends in politic speeches and people are using them this against him. In other words, here's the angry black man. It finally surfaces the charge, the ridiculous racist charge.

Then he's got a speech to give and the whole of his presidency hangs... a potential pre he hangs in the balance. There's just no other way to look at it. What does he do? Well, instead of just saying, "Hey, I'm not a racist," and so on. He patiently takes us through the whole history of this country's, troubled, to put it mildly, relations with race and slavery. And he does this in this elegant, remarkable and moving way that puts the whole of American history into perspective and his particular run for the presidency. And yet none of it is done in an egomaniacal way.

And I defy anyone to listen to that and think, "Wow, there's a politician trying to save his skin." Man, by that point, he's like, "Hey, I'm just going to do this speech and we'll just let the cards fall where they may." He's assuming intelligence, he's assuming knowledge on the part of his listeners. He's assuming stamina. It's not a short speech. He's assuming that the people will feel the arc of the ideas because it's beautifully wrought. There are phrases at the beginning that resound with phrases near the end. It's a work of art and it is delivered with an oratorical beauty that's almost unsurpassed, I think.

Lauren Bacall:

For we have a choice in this country. We can accept the politics that breeds division and conflict and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle, as we did in the OJ trial. Or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina. Or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright's sermons on every channel every day and talk about them from now until the election and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can do that. But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we'll be talking about some other distraction and then another one and then another one and nothing will change. That is one option. Or at this moment in this election, we can come together and say, "Not this time."

John:

Actually when I signed on to do this book, I remember thinking, "Oh my God, I'll be able to write about that speech." Because it's just obsessed me from the first day I ever heard it. I remember saying to my wife, this is a high wire act that is almost unendurable to listen to. If he had like said a particular phrase, a little too loudly or a little too angrily, he would be the angry black man that we can't elect. It is just extraordinary what he did there.

Rufus:

Well and a high wire act is such a great description of what Obama was doing because he did this vocal code switching. This shifting between different vocal styles. The ability to speak in both Black English and easygoing Midwestern English. And he could play the law professor in a way that was not so much insincere I don't think as it was him just using his instrument as it were, his vocal instrument, to reflect his rich and varied background and try to connect and suture together the country. And obviously here we're both sliding into just this sort of hagiography here to Barack Obama. We're clearly both huge fans. I think it's out at this point that we're Obama fans. But he really was an embodiment of what Cicero hoped for in an orator. And I think that speech will be remembered and studied with the kind of attention that you've given it.

Well, let's speak for a moment, John, about the future of the voice and the future of human communication. Because as we touched on earlier, I'm really interested in this idea that Socrates had no interest in writing anything down. He thought that the spoken word was the way that one communicates. I love this detail in your book that Shakespeare had no interest in written version of his plays. He felt that his plays were meant to be spoken, to be acted and writing them down was just something to be done for the actors. But since the printing press gained steam, we've had this view that the book and the written word, what you might think of as a 10 to 15 hour monologue, is the primary genre of communication or of how we get at truth. But I think it's interesting to consider that the conversation that what you and I are doing now may be coming back as a genre that is more effective at moving us towards truth and understanding than the 10 to 15 hour monologue that is the book. What do you think about that?

John:

Well, I think that's absolutely fascinating. I do make an argument in my book that audio books, for instance, which is that monologue, that they are incredibly pleasurable to listen to and that we can actually find that we retain the information better, weirdly enough, through the auditory channel as opposed to reading it. But you are actually making the point that maybe conversation itself is even better. I can't argue against that. That dynamic and the excitement and fun and creativity, the sparking spontaneity of these voices that I listen to now in conversation on the internet is just wonderful. Wonderful. And I wasn't lying earlier when I said I have actually had ideas coming to my mind from talking to you in this way, that... it's sort of creativity in action. It's like an action painting that people can see taking shape right before their eyes, except in this case, it's their ears. It's magnificent. Yeah. It could be game changing.

Rufus:

Well, and of course there's no reason for an either or. The book is an important genre. We're all big fans of the book. This is a podcast about books. And you have a wonderful book that people should buy and read. But I think as you say, first, the audio experience that we are actually seeing this in the numbers that the growth in the book publishing industry is happening in audio right now.

We've made a decision to create an audio first product in our Next Big Idea app and this podcast because out of a conviction that the lasagna, the molecular lasagna that is the human voice offers four or five different levels of engagement. It's a higher bandwidth, more compelling way to receive ideas fundamentally. And so I think that you get that in an audio book. And I think that in the rise of the podcast, as a genre... which now Sam Harris's most recent book, it was a collection of his podcasts. And Malcolm Gladwell has indicated at times that the podcast has almost become his primary genre and it's changed the way that he writes books maybe with more attention to this emotional component to some of these other layers which can get lost in the book.

John:

That's very interesting that he actually feels it's actually changing the way he writes. He's peculiarly good as a podcaster. And I don't know that everybody has necessarily the talent. I don't know what... He's just endowed with kind of a great... an unusual voice, but a great lively voice for putting across ideas. I'm not going to name any names, but there are some brilliant writers that I've been quite surprised to discover come across less well in a podcast format to my surprise. And maybe they just aren't as practiced yet, but, yeah, some people are unusually good at it. Malcolm clearly is.

Rufus:

Well, John, you told us at the opening about your personal journey, your personal voice injury. And you shared about how you had spoken with maybe the most preeminent surgeon for addressing voice injuries. And clearly anyone listening to this has heard that you really do have a beautiful range and fluency with your voice. And I'm sure it's probably taken years to develop that, but how have you come to think about the journey of your own voice and where it's headed?

John:

For my own voice, the injury... I can definitely feel it's hobbled me. Even though I can inject a lot of melody and emotion and so on into it, it's actually quite tiring for me. I have to drive air passed a lump on my vocal cord, and I actually have to work harder with my diaphragm and muscles in my abdomen and back and shoulders, which we all use to speak. I will be very tired after this podcast. And so I really did think about having the operation and I suddenly thought, "Oh, I got to do this for the book, because it'll be amazing to describe my vocal injury in the beginning to talk about the importance of voice for our species, but also as individuals." And then to wind it up by saying, "And I had my vocal surgery and I've emerged Lazarus like with a smooth voice and I'm singing again."

Alas no. I decided... Crazily perhaps, but I decided, no, I wasn't going to do that. I'm 62 now I believe. And I realized I'd made peace with my voice. Even as a singer, I joined a new rock band. The other one was Jann Wenner's Rolling Stone. This was the New Yorker in house band. David Remnick our editor eventually joined us. We did some high profile gigs like at The White House Correspondents' Dinner jam back when Obama was president. And I dared to sing. And it was not easy for me to do. Some of the singing was better than others, but it damaged my voice I'm sure further. But I guess my feeling was that our voices are so much an expression of ourself. They're so pleasurable really to use. We should take pleasure in our voice. And I realized I'm not going to deny myself the fun and excitement of singing. I want to keep telling stories.

I'm going to keep blathering too much at dinner parties. And my voice is scarred and it's nicked and it carries my history in it. And I decided, I kind of like that at the end of the day. And I sort of seized on Coco Chanel's point about the face. "We end up with the face we deserve by the time we're 50."

Rufus:

Yes.

John:

And I do wind up the book with this conclusion where I say, "I kind of have got the voice I deserve." "I just have to make peace with it."

Rufus:

Yeah. Yeah.

John:

Yeah.

Rufus:

Well, it's been wonderful to listen to and speak with your disembodied voice.

John:

Oh, likewise. It's just been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much.