Episode 50 - An Interview with John Bowe on Mastering the Art of Public Speaking
Intro.:
People of earth, we have come to upgrade drug cosmic consciousness, DNA activation ready in, three, two, one.
Lou Quinto:
Hi, welcome to Q&A on Breakthrough Leadership. I'm Lou Quinto.
Craig P. Anderson:
And I'm Craig Anderson.
Lou Quinto:
Craig, we're celebrating. Today is our 50th episode of Q&A on Breakthrough Leadership. So I think we should give each other a virtual round of applause here for our hard work sticking with it, every week, 50 weeks. Coming out with an episode of this podcast. I'm enjoying it. I'm looking forward to the next 50 as well.
Craig P. Anderson:
Absolutely. I wish I had worn my silver shirt today, that's my only regret after 50 episodes, Lou, is I didn't get my silver shirt out. But it has been great.
Lou Quinto:
See, and I was going to get a bottle of champagne and pop it, and we could have virtually had a champagne toast.
Craig P. Anderson:
Who knew? Who knew?
Lou Quinto:
Who knew? Who knew? Anyway, today for our 50th podcast, we've got a very special guest with us. We're going to be speaking with author, John Bowe, John and Craig, I feel very special because John has a book out called, I Have Something to Say: Mastering the Art of Public Speaking in an Age of Disconnection. And it just came out August the 11th, so we're right in the beginning of all of his tour, virtual tours obviously, because I'm sure he's not doing a lot of bookstore book signings. But anyway, John is an investigative reporter. His articles have appeared in several magazines, the New Yorker magazine, New York Magazine, GQ. And he's come out with this book about public speaking. And to be honest with you, Craig, when I first got it, I'm thinking, okay, I'm a veteran of public speaking.
Lou Quinto:
I've been doing it personally for over 35 years. I teach public speaking. What can I learn? But I have to say that this book grabbed me from the very beginning. John has some tremendous wit, and he tells a story about how he learned public speaking by going through Toastmasters. And he literally takes us through the entire time while he was with Toastmasters. So I'm looking forward to the interview. So with that, let's bring on John Bowe.
Lou Quinto:
Well, John Bowe, thanks for joining us here on Q&A on Breakthrough Leadership. We're pleased to have you and to talk about your new book, I Have Something to Say: Mastering the Art of Public Speaking in an Age of Disconnection, which I want to ask you about in a little bit. But before we get into the book, I want to know, what gave you the idea for this book?
John Bowe:
First of all, hi Craig. Hi Lou. Thanks.
Lou Quinto:
You're welcome.
John Bowe:
The idea for the book came absolutely by accident. I had never written a book about speech or anything like a self-help book before, nor was I an expert by any means on this subject. In 2010, I was doing an oral history interviewing people from all over America talking about love. And I decided to interview my very, very reclusive step-cousin from Iowa, who had really lived in his parents' basement until he was 59 years old. And my family lived in Minneapolis, and we heard over the dinner table that cousin Bill had gotten married. And we all had a lot of questions about that. And when I grew up and became a big boy journalist, I had a reason to ask him. And I said, how did you break out of that isolation to ask this woman to... You know, to talk to her for the first time, much less to ask her to marry you?
John Bowe:
And I assumed that his answer involved something psychological, meds or therapy, or something. And he said, I joined the Toastmasters club. So he told me a bit about his story. And I realized that learning to speak had done for this guy what a lot of people hope psychiatry and meds will do for them. It had enacted this total psychological transformation and totally changed his life. So as a guy who had always written books hoping to change the world and make the world a better place through words, here was a much better example of that happening than anything I had ever worked on.
Craig P. Anderson:
That's wild. That's such an interesting story. To just come out of the basement for 59 years because of Toastmasters. You actually have me... I've never joined Toastmasters and I get invitations all the time, and now I'm thinking, I think maybe it's time at 53 before it's too late.
John Bowe:
It's a pretty radical story. It is really just a total transformation. He wasn't even a very good Toastmaster, he didn't go for years or anything like that. I think he got through about six speeches. And when he talked about how it reoriented his way of approaching people, it just was a complete re-engineering of how he relates to people. We think of it as act confident or, I don't know what most people think of when they think of speech training, but it certainly isn't so profound or psychological as that.
Lou Quinto:
Right. Which then leads me into my next question. Tell me about the subtitle. I mean, Mastering the Art of Public Speaking in an Age of Disconnection. What is the age of disconnection, John?
John Bowe:
Okay, well pick up a newspaper, pretty much from the most individual level to the biggest macro societal and political levels, I think it's fair to say that America is completely divided and disconnected now in every way. So there's a book from the year 2000 by a Harvard political scientist named Robert Putnam called Bowling Alone. And he charts the demise or the decrease in civic engagement in this country, whether it's PTA meetings, or participation in political or religious affairs, clubs, using the example of a bowling club. We still bowl, but now we bowl alone.
John Bowe:
So since about the late 60s, early 70s, that stuff had really gone dramatically down. And then since 2001, Putnam wrote his book of course, that's when America has really gone online. So everybody's staring at a screen now. They have separated into these partisan camps. It's very hard for people to talk to each other or connect with each other, speak each other's language, all of these different terms you can use. And if you measure things like trust in government, trust in neighbors, trust in the medical establishment, people don't have anyone to talk to anymore. So you add that to all the statistics about how shy people are, how introverted they are, how many people have speech anxiety, which is supposedly 74% according to the National Institute of Health.
Lou Quinto:
What is it they say, that people would rather die than speak in public?
John Bowe:
That's, I think, a little bit of fake news. That is a true scientific finding, but the test that came up with that finding was so poorly concocted. It's kind of a factoid.
Lou Quinto:
Well don't take it away, it's a great line I use when I teach presentation skills.
John Bowe:
My test for that one is, okay, put a gun to your head. So which one would you really, really want? Which one do you prefer, to give that speech or that I pull the trigger?
Lou Quinto:
That's a good way to put it though. For me, I'd do the public speaking since it's my livelihood. But other people like Craig, he might take the gun.
Craig P. Anderson:
Now that's not even fair, Lou. I think I'd pause at that moment and give it a little bit of thought and live with my uhs when I public speak. I think I could probably pull through. So John, one thing you talk a lot about in the book is that communication is more than just words. And there was two things in there that Lou and I were thinking about with this. One is the importance of connecting with your audience, and two, the importance of visuals. Not just PowerPoint, but gestures, facial expressions, and posture. Can you tell us a bit more about those?
John Bowe:
If you go back to the ancient Greeks and how they taught rhetoric, it wasn't speech, it wasn't communication, and it wasn't even primarily about language. It was about this thing called rhetoric. And rhetoric meant the ability to observe persuasion in any form, in any circumstance. Whether it's your own attempts to persuade other people, or their attempts to persuade you. And Aristotle's theory was that's all we do when we talk to each other, whether it's our lover, our kids, our family, our workplace, and in politics. That is all the people do, we're just these persuasion machines.
John Bowe:
So it could be how I sit like this, or how I sit like this, or what I do with my face, or it could be the words I choose. It could be the tone of voice I use. It could be how I organize my speech, how I appeal to you, your religion, your sense of manhood or womanhood, your desire to get rich or live forever, or be sexy, whatever. All of these things are part of this greater effort to get you to either buy the thing I'm selling, or just to even get you to like me, or believe me enough to keep listening.
John Bowe:
It doesn't have to be something like a lie. It's just, we all want to be believed and heard. So that's what is meant by connecting. There are a lot of people who can talk really well, but they can't connect. They can use words really well, or they're really smart, or they have a lot of knowledge, but they can't connect.
Lou Quinto:
Yeah. In fact, John, if I can interrupt. One thing that you said that, because I work with a lot of technical people who aren't good at public speaking, and there was one line in your book that I loved. It said that prior to going through Toastmasters, you believe that you were like a disk drive and your job was to transfer all of the information on your disk drive to all of the disk drives in the audience. I just thought that was so fantastic. Because I've sat through so many technical presentations that it's just a data dump of information with no rhyme or reason. And it's just, they're throwing it out there.
John Bowe:
I think of myself as a social guy, and a socially gifted guy. But when I had to write that description of what was really going on in my mind during public speaking, I realized, you're like a cyborg. You're like a robot. Because my conception of it was almost sociopathic. It was, the audience was the enemy. I didn't want to be there. I certainly didn't want them looking at me. And it never occurred to me to think of them as people. What was the most important thing was the information.
Lou Quinto:
Right. And you follow that up with a great story about recently going to Auburn University to talk to a bunch of students about your book, Nobodies. And in it you had mentioned that prior to it was just a, again, a data dump of, this is what I found. And at the end, I think you said people would ask questions like, well what should I do? And you didn't have an answer for them. Talk to us about the difference of prior engagements, where you spoke about Nobodies, and the Auburn engagement that just kicked it out, knocked it out of the park.
John Bowe:
It's embarrassing to answer this question because, like almost everything else about public speaking, it's so obvious and it's so simple that it's a miracle that we don't even accidentally think of it or discover it. But I certainly didn't. Before the speech that you mentioned, for me, again, public speaking was this, I'm giving this information that lives up here into your head. And it just didn't occur to me to think of the people as people. One audience was the same as the next. Why would I think of them? I have to think about my information, first of all. And secondly, I have to think of myself and how embarrassed I am. But in no part in the process did I sit down and ask myself a few questions about who I was talking to, what they might need or want, or what's the best way for them to hear this information and keep it easy for them?
Lou Quinto:
Right. Yeah. And Craig, you and I have been in situations where we've had subject matter experts address an audience of people from different disciplines, like accounting, and sales, marketing, call center, whatever it may be. And this person just does not, as John said, take into consideration, I'm going to give you information. But before I give you this, I thought about how you can use this information. And I think that's the story, John, that you tell about Auburn. Is that when you went there a second time, you did homework, and found out about the university, the students, et cetera. Tell me about that.
John Bowe:
And this was a result of Toastmasters. It was a result of thinking about Aristotle for several years. I realized that there's an Aristotle phrase that says, "Public speaking begins and ends with the audience."
Lou Quinto:
Right.
John Bowe:
And so I actually put that to work for the first time in my life before going to Auburn. I researched the university. How many students? What's going on in the student newspaper? What is their football team doing? What is their song for the football team? All of these things. What are the controversies going on, on campus? And in the end I threw a lot of that away and I began with a story that happened to me when I was hitchhiking through Montgomery, Alabama, 20 years earlier. But it was a funny story and it put me in their area. And it's a lot like when rock bands say to the audience, "[Acran 00:13:38], we love you." It's not even deep, but at least it's an acknowledgement saying we know who you are and we're happy to be here.
Lou Quinto:
And more importantly, they know where they are.
Craig P. Anderson:
It's interesting you say that, before doing this I was leading a business, and a call center mostly, 70 people in a call center, and the associated staff above it. And it was so fascinating to me how much better I got speaking to them when I actually talked to them one-on-one and heard what they cared about and what they were concerned about, and how that changed the way I would do a town hall. Just getting to know the people in the audience and what it is they're interested in is fascinating. It's too bad it was Auburn though. But beyond that.
Lou Quinto:
Yeah. Craig's a University of Florida Gator, so a little bit of a rivalry there. But John, tell me about, early in your book you talk about and admit that you had this disdain for public speaking. That you thought people stood up and act it. And you were just like, no way am I going to do that. But yet throughout the course of your Toastmaster experience, you warmed up for that. Talk me about that.
John Bowe:
I think anybody born during a certain time, when they think of public speaking they think of Dale Carnegie. And when I think of Dale Carnegie, the first thing I think of is act confident. And this whole idea of confidence plays such a major role in the idea of speech training. That, to me, that was like an anathema. The idea of acting like somebody who I am not was toxic. And I think it is for most people. Nobody wants to act in some way that isn't natural to them. So I thought speech training meant putting away John Bowe and acting like some bright, shiny person who I just was never going to be.
Lou Quinto:
Sure.
John Bowe:
Only when I got into the whole Greek stuff and understood that it's really about putting your mind where your audience is, and starting to see things through their perspective. It has nothing to do with being authentic or not being authentic. Really, you can be authentic or you can be funny, it doesn't matter. That's not really the center of the task. The task is to communicate and connect and make it simple, and make it easy for people to understand. So for a modern person, and we all think so much about our feelings and how we feel, to just set that aside and be thinking about your audience and your message, and set aside how you feel. Who cares how I feel. That's not the most important thing going on when I talk to people.
John Bowe:
And interestingly enough, when I stopped thinking about that so much, I stopped caring. So later, after working on this for a while I realized, if I have something to say, whether it's to a loved one or to a company, or in politics, or whatever. If I can't say what I'm feeling or thinking, that's already totally inauthentic. How I feel when I'm saying or not saying it has nothing to do with it. So the real measure is, are you being true? Are you explaining yourself well? Are you standing up for what you believe in, or what you think? That's authentic.
Lou Quinto:
Okay. That's great. Yep. That's yeah. Greg, do you have a question?
Craig P. Anderson:
No. I just wanted to touch on, you talk in the book about interviewing Tom Monaghan, the founder Domino's Pizza, and Fields Rose, the founder of Mrs. Fields Cookies. And they talk a lot about how Toastmasters was crucial to their success. So how did they view improving their presentation skills being so important to their business? We really talk a lot to leaders through this video blog about this. So how did they really tie that all in together to make that important to their business?
John Bowe:
Well, Tom Monaghan, Debbi Fields-Rose were both very different kinds of speech anxiety suffers. Monaghan had a horrible childhood, he was raised in an orphanage, and he had a horrible time of it. So he grew up very insecure and had a hard time with social situations. And even as Domino's Pizza was becoming a big deal, he could not talk or even ask questions in meetings. And when I asked him, well how did you lead your company? How did you do it? And he just said, "I avoided it as much as possible." And even after Domino's started having a national convention and stuff, he would go up there and read from notes, and lose his place, and stammer, and look out at the crowd. And he told me that he would see other CEOs of big companies, and he would be jealous of them because they seemed to have fun in that role.
John Bowe:
And he viewed it as purgatory. When he learned how to speak at Toastmasters, which by his account, wasn't easy at the beginning, he began to finally inhabit that role and do what he was meant to do all along. So his story was that. Debbie Fields-Rose was, I think, capable of acting the part, but she felt like a fraud. And that's the word she used. And she said that her sisters used to tease her when she was younger and call her a name, they called her stupid. And they'd say, "Hey stupid, go over there and get that. Hey stupid, go over there and get that." And she said, she believed that there were kidding, but it still stuck somewhere. And even when she had to be leading her company, which you would get to the lectern and be facing a large audience, she would just think, uh, why in the world would anybody believe me being up here? And she would just be thinking, 90% of her energy would be devoted to all of these self-conscious thoughts instead of thinking about her message.
Craig P. Anderson:
Wow.
John Bowe:
When she learned some basic speaking techniques, how to organize the speech, and how to properly prepare for a speech and think about the audience, all of that went away. So she could be in the moment and really talk about what she wanted to talk about.
Craig P. Anderson:
Wow. That's fascinating.
Lou Quinto:
Yeah. Particularly when you would think, there's two people that are so successful. I mean, they built companies from the ground up to be worth billions of dollars. And speaking in public, there was an anxiety, it was different types of anxiety. But yet it was an anxiety that prevented them from... I think, John, you used the term, just a great way of saying, they weren't having fun. They weren't at home in front of a group of people. And as we all know when we stand up in front of a group of people, we either want to educate, inform, inspire, persuade. And they couldn't do that. Some people would find that hard to believe, because a lot of times we see successful people and we think right away, oh, well they're good communicators.
Lou Quinto:
But I know personally, I've dealt with CEOs, or I'll say C level type executives, where they stand up in front of a room and their second grade teacher gave them a rule. If you're nervous, pick a spot in the back of the room and stare at that spot. And I used to go in and watch and see people actually turning around and looking over in the audience, looking over their head like, who is he looking at behind me? And it's because they didn't want to look, give everyone eye contact. Which you know, now that you've been through Toastmasters, is so important. But I mean that eye contact, it can be paralyzing to some people.
John Bowe:
There was a prisoner in Toastmasters who I interviewed, who had been in jail for 28 years in Baton Rouge. And every time he came up for a parole hearing he would stare at the ground and mumble because he suffered from speech anxiety so much. And a fellow prisoner who had joined the prison Toastmasters and gotten out of jail insisted, you have to join, you have to join. One of the tricks they taught him was to stare at people's foreheads. If it's unnerving you too much to stare at their eyes, stare at their foreheads and they'll never know the difference.
Lou Quinto:
Yeah.
John Bowe:
So he joined, and seven months later he was out of jail.
Craig P. Anderson:
Wow. That is amazing, that story. That is really amazing.
Lou Quinto:
Yeah, it was. Well, John, because of our audience being primarily entrepreneurs and business leaders and everything, one of the things that you detail in the book throughout, you keep going back to Aristotle. And you talked about rhetoric, teaching rhetoric throughout history. It used to be a very important skill that people believe they need to have, but that hasn't been a priority for a very long time. And now we've got a generation of people who are used to communicating by looking at their phones and everything. And so, why should companies and business owners invest in public speaking when it comes to their learning and development curriculum?
John Bowe:
Okay. Think about any Fortune 500 company. Okay? Their employees spend their entire day doing what? Are they mining? Are they doing tenant farming? They're talking.
Lou Quinto:
Yeah.
John Bowe:
So for any of these companies, if you could improve the general level of communication, and I mean, from phone calls to conference calls, to meetings, in-house, inward facing, branding stuff, outward facing, any kind of sales thing, any kind of sales report. If you could increase your employees' performance by 4%, how many millions and billions of dollars would that translate into? So I worked, for example, with one of the larger financial services companies in the world. And their people are professional speakers, that's what they do all day. And their job is to bring in hundreds of billions of dollars a year. So what's a 4% bump or an 8% bump in net worth? And I asked these people how much training they had received to do their job. They said none. When I asked them, how often do you feel horrible after you give a presentation? The answer was 50%.
Lou Quinto:
Wow. So they have 50% room for improvement. So that 4% number that you just mentioned may be underestimated. If-
John Bowe:
It's a very conservative estimate.
Lou Quinto:
Yeah. Very conservative. Because I know, and Craig you probably experienced this also, learning and development, one of the hardest things to do for a learning and development officer, or even a CEO of a company is to track the investment in the training and education to, how does that apply or what did it do to my bottom line? And that's one of the reasons why so many companies just can't make that direct connection to their bottom line by saying, we put 30 people through presentation skills, and we were able to increase our sales by X number of dollars. Or we brought in X percent more customers than we did last year. Because in their minds, I find when talking to them, they contributed to a lot of other different factors, and they don't go down to the basic communication relationship that public speaking does for their employees.
Craig P. Anderson:
[crosstalk 00:24:39] John, I beat... Go ahead, please.
John Bowe:
No, it's a very hard thing to measure. And yet it's night and day, easy to spot when somebody is good at it or bad at it.
Lou Quinto:
Right.
Craig P. Anderson:
Ever since I looked through all your material, and just this idea of teaching rhetoric. My son goes to a small private liberal arts college, and everything is liberal arts and they all minor in business. And they all go on to either law school or MBA school. But it's so interesting to me, when I worked in a big Fortune 500 company with an English degree, what the difference is the way you approach problems, the way you communicate, if you come from that background and then pile the technical skills on top of it. Do you think about that as you're going through the book?
John Bowe:
The ancient approach to education was exactly like what you just said. They had this thing called the Trivium, the place where three roads meet. And it was logic, grammar, and rhetoric. And rhetoric was the biggest of these, and that's what you studied for years. And then they added on the other subject. So if you were going to be an architect or a lawyer, or be in the army, be in the religious institutions, those skills came afterwards. And those were considered the apps that sat on top of your operating system. But language skills and the ability to interact with other people and not be crazy, and not be weird, and not just be some impossible to work with person, that was the main skill. As it is today. Nothing has changed.
Craig P. Anderson:
Yeah. And we talked earlier about how much we've lost by not having that. It's really amazing. You just wonder how different things could be if we got back to that a bit.
John Bowe:
Well that's the third point of the book, and it's also the point of what makes it a valuable business skill. If I try to win every argument by insisting that I'm right because I have the facts, that doesn't help anybody. I'm going to lose the argument, but I'm also going to intimidate you or bore you. And we're never going to resolve anything, or connect and understand each other's point.
Lou Quinto:
Or do business together.
John Bowe:
Or do business together.
Lou Quinto:
Yeah. Wow. Well one thing in the book, and I'm going to break a Toastmaster rule here, John, but I'm going to read it because it comes toward the end of your book. And I thought it was so good, particularly since the new generation of leaders are so... They communicate through text messages, tweets, Facebook statuses. Well, I'd say emails, but hell, they don't even use emails anymore. I've got two daughters that are in their 20s and I send them an email and I don't get a response back from them for a week. And I'll say, "I shot you an email. How come you didn't respond?" And I remember my older daughter telling me one time and said, "Dad, you sent me an email. Why don't you just write a letter and put a stamp on it? I probably would have looked at it a lot quicker."
Lou Quinto:
So they're not even using that anymore. But something you wrote at the end that I thought was so good. It said, "Toastmasters has changed the way I think about speech, but it's also changed the way I think about people, time, and even the meaning of life. I had a bit of a vision. What do people typically grab onto in the final moments before death? Every account I've heard mentions flashbacks of people, places, real life moments that meant the most to that person in the moment of dying. And then you ask the question, will any of us, during those final seconds, seize upon the great emails and text messages that we sent?" I thought that was so good because it does go back to the experiences and the connections. And going back to the reason for your book, your cousin Bill, who had no relationships whatsoever and lived a reclusive life. And through the art of learning how to feel comfortable talking to other people. I mean, in the late years of his life he turned his life around.
John Bowe:
He did. He absolutely did. And I think that's the point of the book is, we all think that our ability to speak to each other or speak to a crowd is this baked in feature of our personality. I can't do that because I'm a such-and-such person. I'm a socially anxious person. I had a horrible childhood, or whatever. And what the Greeks had and the Romans had, and 2000 years of education says, is that, no, this is a skillset that you learn. And it's like cooking. It's like, would you expect yourself to be a great cook if you never cracked open a recipe?
Lou Quinto:
Right.
John Bowe:
Maybe. Some people are. But 95% of the rest of us are not.
Lou Quinto:
Yeah.
John Bowe:
And there's this little recipe for learning it that is not esoteric or weird or hard. You just have to do it.
Lou Quinto:
Sure. Well, just like in Toastmasters, we wrap everything up with key takeaways. So before I get to you, John, Craig, after this conversation with John, when it comes to public speaking, what were your key takeaways and applying it to business?
Craig P. Anderson:
It was really a lot tied back to that last question I had. It's just the importance of getting the training of how to communicate and how to be much more effective in the way we do it. Because so much of what I see in business is what you mentioned, John. Is, I try and convince you of facts, or I just try and convince you with my personality. And I never really do the last piece. So I think that was really my key takeaway is, I'm no longer ashamed of my English degree during my Fortune 500 career.
Lou Quinto:
And my key takeaway is, John, this came through loud and clear in the book and it's what I tell people all the time. It's that connection with the audience. You've got to find out, what's in it for them? And that's the question that you need to ask yourself when you're preparing your presentation. Because you can have a wealth of knowledge, but unfortunately what happens is, if you don't make that connection, all of your words just fall on deaf ears. And so answering that question right at the beginning, this is what is in it for you. And to make that connection, do the homework, understand who's sitting there. Do they like you? Do they like the topic you're talking about? Do they not like you, and maybe they do like the topic they're talking about. Those are all traps that we fall into if we're not aware of those. And so that is always my key takeaway, is making that connection with the audience. So John, what's your key takeaway? Since you wrote the book.
John Bowe:
My key takeaway, two things. One, you guys are very nice, and thanks for having [inaudible 00:30:56]. And the other one is, think about how stupid this is. The average American speaks 16,000 to 20,000 words a day. And almost none of us have gotten any education on how to do it. So think about our school trajectory. We began at four or five, we go at least through high school, if not into college and grad school, and 99.9% of that time is spent reading and passing around paper, or information on screens. And it's never about this. And as you live your life as a grown up, which one's more important?
Craig P. Anderson:
The latter. Yeah.
John Bowe:
It's ridiculous that there's no part of our formal education that's about that anymore. Because it used to be the main thing for several years.
Lou Quinto:
Sure. Yeah. I mean, kids are just given book reports and told, stand up in front of the room and give a book report. And the kid says, but I'm scared. And the teacher says, you have to do it. And [crosstalk 00:31:50]. Yes. Stare at the point, that second grade teacher stare at dot [crosstalk 00:31:55]-
John Bowe:
The only thing you learn from that is that face to face communication is horrible and terrible, and you can't do it, you don't want it. So let's avoid it for the rest of our lives by staring at a phone.
Lou Quinto:
Yeah. Yeah. And unfortunately we perpetuate that by giving our children iPads and cell phones at a very early age. Even to the point, I mean, I've got a two year old grandson, and when he gets bored his father just literally finds an Elmo video and puts it on his phone. And my grandson Rocco just watches it and behaves. He shuts up and he behaves. And so we're training them from a very early age that that device. And I think you even said in the book, those devices are going to be the end of us. That technology. And it's a shame.
Lou Quinto:
So John, let me just wrap everything up by saying, everybody should go out. You'll see that I've got lots of sticky notes where there were some important things. John's book on, I Have Something to Say: Mastering the Art of Public Speaking in the Age of Disconnection. John, where can we buy this?
John Bowe:
There's this store called Amazon, it's [crosstalk 00:33:03]. But they have a few copies of it. But no, also from Random House, the publisher, and from any bookstore. And if you go to a bookstore and it's not there, you should demand that they order 100 copies.
Lou Quinto:
Yeah, exactly. And I'll give you another plug, John, this is from 2008. And I saw you on Jon Stewart being interviewed on The Daily Show. And this was the book you wrote called Nobodies. And it's about agriculture and a level of employment that really is slavery. And if you want to find out a little bit about that while you're at that... What's the name of that store again?
John Bowe:
[inaudible 00:33:40].
Lou Quinto:
It starts with an A. Amazon. You can pick one of these up also. John, thanks for joining Craig and I today. We really appreciate you taking your time to be with us. Lots of luck on the sale of the book, we hope it goes through the roof. And we'll continue to push it through this video blog and our podcast. And hopefully people will buy it and they'll start feeling comfortable standing up in front of a group of people and making that connection. So, John, thank you so much.
John Bowe:
Thank you guys for having me. [crosstalk 00:34:12]-
Craig P. Anderson:
Thank you, John. Lou, that was a great interview with John Bowe. Thanks for reaching out to him. He was a great guest for our 50th episode. And I really enjoyed what he had to say about his book, I Have Something to Say. So if you'd like to catch some of our previous 50 episodes, you can find all of them on QAleadership.com. We're also on YouTube, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Please like, subscribe. And if you know somebody who thinks they're a great public speaker, but are a terrible public speaker, share this episode with them so they can go out and get the book as well. You can also find [crosstalk 00:34:44]-
Lou Quinto:
Does that mean you're going to get the book?
Craig P. Anderson:
Yes. Based on how well I'm doing today, absolutely. You can also find all of our episodes on your favorite podcasting platform. So until next time, I'm Craig Anderson.
Lou Quinto:
And keep your hands washed, and keep your distance. I'm Lou Quinto.