Voices of Reason

Foreign.

Ladies and gentlemen, hello.

Hello.

Welcome to episode 102 of the Secular Foxhole podcast.

Martin,

we're going to have to mind our P's and Q's.

You know why?

We have a professional speaker on with us today.

Yes, we have.

And you started out nice.

Well, thank you.

Thank you.

Robert Begley is a keynote speaker, certified world class speaking coach,

author of Voices of Reason.

As founder of Speaking with Purpose llc,

he has helped executives enter entrepreneurs and other leaders find their voice and speak

with courage, clarity and conviction.

Robert has spoken to audience acclaim across the United States and internationally.

His mission is simple, to help people speak boldly and lead effectively.

Today we're going to talk to Robert about his speaking career and his new book.

Robert, how are you?

I am wonderful, absolutely wonderful.

Been on this show several times.

But as an author,

you know what it's like to have this looming over your head forever.

I've been threatening to write a book since the 80s.

Holy cow.

Anyway,

thank you gentlemen.

It is really important to me to be with the

two of you because when you are an author,

you can't be an authority,

okay.

Without having the word author in there and

subject of public speaking, presentation skills, whatever,

however you want to use the expression,

it changes lives.

And my book is about seven famous speeches throughout history.

I walk the audience through, I break down these famous speeches from the perspective of

Aristotle.

We've talked about Aristotle in the past, but

his rhetoric is his book of rhetoric,

the art of rhetoric.

He mentions persuasion, how do we persuade people?

And he has three pillars, Ethos, Logos, pathos.

And so what I do in my book is analyse Patrick Henry,

Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr.

Winston Church, Aline Rand, Maga Wade,

Frederick Douglass.

Seven magnificent.

I call them the magnificent seven.

I guess.

My notebook.

Seven speakers, it's not all,

you know, exhaust.

It's not an exhaustive list, but they're

speeches that have, have influenced me.

And using them through,

viewing them through the lens of Aristotle, Sithos, logos, pathos.

I want to show today's leaders,

hey, you can use these principles and you have a voice and you need to use that voice because

unlike the two of you gentlemen, a lot of people are afraid to speak out.

They silence themselves, they self censor.

And I want people to speak boldly so they can lead effectively.

I'm still guilty of that, sadly in some, some circumstance.

But you know,

not on here you're not.

No,

no, no.

I constantly strive to, you know,

erase that.

But yeah, there's still, there is a challenge

of that.

Now just for the audience.

When, when you say ethos, pathos and.

And logos.

What?

Yes.

What does that mean in English?

Yeah, you're right, you're right.

Also, if you want.

I'm sorry, you could say it in.

Greek also, if you want.

So ethos,

I'll give you the famous the public speaking example, and then the what Aristotle meant.

I've studied.

I've been a professional speaker for decades,

and I've studied the science of public speaking.

And by ethos,

most speakers mean the credibility of the speaker.

But guess what?

Credibility is important.

But Aristotle is more precise.

He. He says the moral character.

Like the word ethics.

Yes,

the eth. Ethos, ethics.

Same. Yeah, the same ballpark.

So credibility is an offshoot,

but the moral character of the speaker.

And I'll give you, after I finish the three,

I'll give you a little backstory, a little history on the sophist.

So that's ethos, which I think is the most important of the three logos.

That's what most speakers focus on.

That's the logical.

That's the argument.

Okay, this leads to.

This leads to this conclusion.

All right,

Most speakers, most presenters.

And let me just clarify the difference between public speaking.

Not that many people comparatively do public speaking.

A lot more people do what we call presentations.

So public speaking, it kind of.

You think of Tony Robbins on this big stage

with hundreds of, you know, thousands of people.

No,

not that many of us get that opportunity, but we're often much more.

Often we're in front of a small group,

whether it's a board meeting,

whether it is a local chapter of community event or something.

And my point in the book, one of the points in the book is use your voice for any audience,

any setting.

So the logos is what most people focus on.

And then the third one, the pathos,

that is the emotion, the emotional connection between the speaker and the audience.

Now,

audiences, the speaker needs to be aware that audiences come with their own baggage to a

presentation,

and an effective speaker needs to recognise that.

So we should not be behind a wall saying, I have this content.

I'm going to rush through this content no matter what.

You gave me 45 minutes.

I'm going to use all 45 minutes.

I got to get through this.

I'm not even going to look up from my notes.

No, that's no path.

There's no pathos there.

Right?

Pathos.

Seeing them watching the head nod,

asking reflective questions, establishing a connection.

And there's a f. Famous quote which the two of you probably have heard.

To trust someone,

it's like we don't care how much you know until we know how much you care.

Okay. And that is where the pathos comes in.

And Aristotle.

So it's not just pure emotion,

it's seeing the direction that the audience is in, the state of mind they're in, and trying

to bring them towards your position, trying to persuade them to.

Through your position.

So jump in on that and then I'll get to this office if you have any responses.

So how could we do it as a podcaster, then?

Because you have the listener out there listening.

But now with new Podcasting 2.0 features,

we could even have in the future, live streaming and getting feedback and reactions

thanks to technology.

Live item tags.

Yes.

How could we think as podcasters?

Okay, so as podcasters, address the audience.

Yeah.

So guess what, Blair and Martin,

I think your audience can learn a lot about ethos, logos and pathos by listening to your.

Your podcast, particularly this programme.

Here's why it's important to them.

So the way Martin knows, the way I coach, it's very you focused.

You will benefit, you will discover if you listen to this programme on September 2nd,

that's what we're aiming for, right? Yes.

You will get these benefits.

So do you hear that? Instead of saying,

I have the answers,

listen to me.

End of discussion.

Making it for me, like, yeah, good.

Like a listener.

What's in it for me? Why should I listen?

That's right.

Zig Ziglar, one of the most famous speakers,

says,

most famous radio station wiffm.

What's in it for me?

And when you're sitting, when you're sitting in the audience or listening to a podcast,

my coach, Ed Tate, he has he.

This is what's going on in the mind of the

person sitting in the audience or maybe listening to the podcast,

the speakers droning, right?

All the, all the audience members thinking is,

so what?

Who cares?

What's in it for me?

It's all about me.

Okay?

We know on this programme that's an egoistic.

So we as listeners go there for the egoistic benefit.

It's not that we want to see a famous speaker.

We want to.

We want to see what we can get from that famous speaker.

So by integrating ethos, logos and pathos,

having a beautiful balance between the two,

that's the way a presenter, a speaker can set up the audience to be persuaded to take that

action after the speech is over, a day after, a week after, a month after.

Because the other issue that I'm.

That I'm battling in the book is most speeches are forgotten by the next day.

Okay.

Most and I have data on that and the reasons

why our brain isn't wired to sit down.

45 minutes sitting passively while someone is droning on.

And so we tune out quickly.

18 minutes.

That's why TED talks tend to be eight minutes maximum.

This day and age, it's even shorter because young people are desperately hooked to their

smartphones and looking for any reason to be distracted.

So speakers need to be aware of.

That and they need not be bored.

And thanks Robert, and you will continue here.

But you gave me argument for podcasting now.

So when you have listened, you could pause,

you could rewind and you could listen again.

Yes.

And then if you find this podcast episode value for you, then you could give

value back voluntarily in different ways.

You could spread it to a friend,

you could help us out in different ways.

And you could also stream satoshis or send a

booster gramme, real money, bits of bitcoin.

So. And we take silver also and other things like that.

So it's all good.

There's one other aspect if I want to get to.

And I want to hear from you.

Yep.

Carrie Ann, this is what she would do.

She's not going to sit down and listen to

this.

She'll print out the transcript.

Yes, it's included.

She's a reader.

Good.

She doesn't like.

She is a reader and so she doesn't do audiobooks.

She doesn't listen to podcasts.

She doesn't even want how good looking I am.

You know,

so. But the point is there's that segment of the audience that they just want to read the

transcript.

And that's a good, good point, Varen.

And now it's a feature with that you can get

transcripts.

And we included that in the work to put up

transcripts.

Right.

So that's, it's accessibility thing.

But it's also for your matter of, you know,

how you take in or how do you say, how do you process things?

So that was very interesting note there.

And you know something,

Martin? I'll say I, I'll mention that because one of

the things I cover in the book is the fact that people absorbed in absorb information by

different.

There is not a one size fits all.

And speakers need to be aware of that.

Some are visual, some, some actually visuals.

Having visuals leads to much greater retention

afterwards than someone standing at a lectern gripping it with, you know, gripping the

edges.

And so.

But we need to be aware of that.

How does our audience absorb information?

Now a couple of things popped in my head, while you were talking.

And Aristotle,

difficult to read.

And so. And you.

You. You picked up a book about his rhetoric.

Is that a. Is that an interpreter that you would recommend, you know, or if you know,

John.

John Lewis?

Yes,

this was his copy.

This was actually.

This was his copy with some of his notes in it.

Carrion and I, we spent more than a year going through.

Aristotle's Rhetoric by Joseph Sacks is a different translation,

so I'm looking at different ones.

Sacks is the one that.

Carrie Ann, who is an interpreter,

she translates herself, can read it in the Greek.

And so in my book, I actually have a hundred.

100 in the index, 100 citations.

This is like a.

You know, it's a thin book, but it's scholarly.

And there is.

So I'll just go on a slight tangent.

There's so much junk out there.

There's so much garbage.

And Carrie Ann, as the editor, she's like, holds my feet to the fire.

How do you know this number of people are afraid of speaking?

Well, the citation here.

No, someone just threw that number out there.

And if I can't find an actual source,

I had to take out.

I had to rewrite.

How much time did you spend on that when.

On your book?

On the book itself,

more than a year.

It was late July last year that I carved out

roughly 90 minutes to two hours a day on the book, despite running a business, despite

giving presentations and coaching and all that.

So it was from August through,

I think, April.

I think I finished it in April.

And then back and forth with the.

With the publisher.

Okay, so.

But a lot of it hearkens to my past.

A lot of it are stories from.

From my past.

And so.

But, Blair, I just.

Coming back to Aristotle, he is tough to read.

He is tough to read, especially on your own.

I'm fortunate in having.

Carrie Ann,

we have a small group who's going through his entire corpus slowly, very slowly.

Now we're on his metaphysics,

which is a.

His.

His metaphysics is a night to say that.

Anyway, so just coming.

Coming back to his impact with the.

With his rhetoric, I'll just say this.

Why did he write his rhetoric? Because back then, there was a group called

the Sophists,

and they were all about using tricks.

Yes.

They wanted to win an argument.

They wanted to grab the loot, grab the.

They were like snake oil salesmen, but they

were good at getting people emotionally stoked.

And Aristotle.

So the term rhetoric had, like, a negative

connotation.

Still does today, right? Yes.

Yeah.

In that interim, Aristotle said No, there's a science to persuasion here.

And I'm going to methodically go through these principles.

Ethos, logos, pathos.

So my, one of my goals, I have billion goals with the book, but one of them is to restore

the value of the term rhetoric.

Okay, now this.

Thank you, thank you.

Rhetoric tips that I'm.

Once a week I'm putting out a different tip

using rhetoric, but go ahead.

Yeah.

I can't tell you how, how sick I am if every once in a while I'll hear,

you know, read.

Trick your mind into this, this, you know,

this or this is how you trick your mind.

How to do, you know, to psych yourself up or

whatever.

It's not a trick,

it's.

There's a certain method.

Yes, you know,

but I'm. And I, I'm just everyone,

whenever I see that I just, I get, I start to boil.

But my other question, when I. Again,

sorry, Martin, let me.

And then you can jump in.

Jeffrey Sachs is S, A C K S. Joseph Joseph.

S A C H, S. Okay, Jeff.

Joseph Sachs.

All right, thank you.

I'll look for his books.

Or has he got more than one?

Or just one?

Yeah, so we,

so for instance, we're doing his meta.

He's the translator of metaphysics.

He has the rhetoric.

We, we did Nicomachean ethics is his best, is

a good one.

His politics.

So we've done several of his translations.

A few like the categories he didn't do and I think physics he didn't do but most of them

were going through Joseph Stacks, his translations.

All right, thank you, thank you for that because I'll be looking those up.

What.

Since you've been a speaking for a professional speaker for quite a while, who

were your teachers, your heroes, your mentors?

My heroes? Yeah, my all time favourite.

His name is Les Brown.

Oh my.

Yeah, sure.

His laughter, he cracks jokes and his laughter is like infectious.

And he says one of my favourite, my favourite quotations.

He's the first.

When you open the book, it's actually.

Let's go to the videotape as they say.

Right, right.

Okay.

Chapter one, the joy of speaking and why it matters.

Okay.

Okay,

first quote.

One of my greatest joys in life is speaking.

Can you identify with that?

And then I go into why people have the joy of it and then I flip the.

Flip it of why people are afraid of it.

Okay.

And the value of overcoming that.

I have several different ways to overcome

different types of fear of speaking.

So Les Brown,

I quote him so often when I'm speaking one of my favourites.

He says if information,

when we go to a presentation or listen to a podcast, we get information.

And he says if information was enough,

everybody would be skinny, rich and happy.

Look around.

Is everybody skinny, rich and happy?

No, normally I don't have the camera.

It's only for audio part there, so you're safe.

So the point here is that if from the stage or from the front of the room, if

presenters simply divulged information and audiences grasped it and acted on it,

then that, and that was enough.

Then we'd have a different culture.

So the point is we need to connect with the audience.

We need to pull them from where they are here to where we want them to be.

Now, is that manipulation?

The sophists thought it was, but Aristotle is a man of reason and he's like, let.

How do we persuade them? Well, we combine these three ethos, logos,

pathos.

So that's one example of Les Brown, like his

geniusness for me is that my goal is to not just give information.

It is.

And another coach of mine,

Mark Brown, who I have regular sessions with,

met many times.

He says,

don't deliver a lecture,

bring an experience.

Now, a week from today, a month from today, what do you, you go to an event,

see the speaker.

What are you more likely to remember in a week or a month or a year?

A lecture or an experience?

Hopefully the experience.

Yeah.

Well, yeah, you don't want to get stabbed at it.

And that's an experience.

And that's.

There are, there is that kind of thing.

But no,

an experience means you're engaging all the senses.

You're getting them to raise their hand, you're getting them to involved.

And it's not, you're, it's not the audience just sitting there passively,

somewhat absorb, somehow absorbing this information and retaining it sometime after.

So that's why I say I'm not a lecturer, I'm a presenter who gives it, who delivers an

experience instead of giving a lecture.

Okay, now, there are contexts.

I will,

I will say this.

Carrie Ann, who comes from the academic world

and she's gone to these conferences, these academic conferences,

and they do give lectures and the professors take notes and I understand.

So my method is not optimal there.

And it took me, it took me a while to get her

to even change her thinking on this.

But there's even, even in the lecture format, there's a more effective way and a less

effective way.

The more effective way is asking reflective questions, prompting the audience,

getting that buy in telling stories,

things like that, that, that turn what we can consider like a dry academic paper into

something more alive and more retainable.

More sticky is the term that I like to use.

So a speech, a presentation, that's sticky.

And this is where one of, one of the books I refer to, it's called Made to Stick Chip Heat.

And Danny and I know Martin's heard about it.

Who.

And their point is presenters.

One reason most speakers have forgotten.

Presenters have what is called the curse of

knowledge.

What's the source of knowledge? Speaker knows what's in his or her head.

What they want to say doesn't mean the audience does.

So they use these acronyms, they use these terms that are way over.

So you right on the dime, Blair, you called me out.

What is ethos, logos, pathos? Guess what I'm talking about so much.

But I need to define it and clarify it so it's.

Everybody knows early on.

If I'm going to use this term 20 times, let's

get it straight from the get go.

And I have a lot, a few pages explaining what

those three pillars are in the book before you advance.

All right, excellent.

Now tell us about some of your speaking

engagements.

You don't have to reveal unless you want to.

I mean, who you've spoken to.

I mean, corporations or associations or.

Yes,

go ahead.

Yeah. So last year,

Last year I was invited to Nairobi, Kenya.

Last year was a big year for speaking.

I spoke in Tbilisi, Georgia, while there were

riots going on.

And then in Kenya there was.

They had shot protesters like two weeks before.

They were.

They were having these scheduled planned

protests and the authorities were just shooting them.

So Carrie Ann and I went.

We went to give a presentation and then also to grade.

The culmination was 100 students from all over the world.

And there was a debate contest on the relationship between political principles and

moral morality and political principles,

objective morality.

And we were the judges of that.

So first we presented and then a few days later we coached the students.

And for me as a coach, it was like a dream come true.

And a lot of the testimonials, a lot of the book itself came out of that because my

presentation was on.

It was called Voices of Reason and it was

analysing, it was showing excerpts from famous speeches.

And then I would have the audience.

In fact, I even went over time because the audience was so engaged.

I was like, okay, what is that? Ethos, logos or pathos?

And just everyone's raising their hands.

And so.

So that was the most important speech I gave last year.

This year I'm running events for businesses.

One of them is for engineers,

communication for engineers.

Because guess what?

Engineers speak engineer ease and they need to know anyone who's seen office space.

You know, I'm a people person.

You know, like what do you do?

You need someone between the engineers and the actual people, the vendors.

All right, well, I'm that guy.

I get them.

I've never been smart enough to be an engineer.

And yesterday I coached a guy who's naval officer engineer.

And I was like, no, I, I was a technician.

I wasn't smart enough, but I know what they

were aiming for and I'm a communicator, I'm a communication, communication coach.

So I've been helping this one.

I have a 12 session series.

Part of what Martin attended because one of

my,

one of my friends is he's a partner in a firm and he knows the value of what I'm doing.

So he's got his whole team signed up and so we're doing a 12 session over 24 weeks

programme on communication.

And so that's actually via Zoom.

And I anticipate getting more of those kinds

of gigs because I really like the business atmosphere.

One of the things that troubles me,

including in business, particularly in business, you have a good product, you have a

good service,

but it's poorly delivered,

it's boring.

You don't, you're, you yourself are not even excited about it.

How can you excite your audience?

Your.

And so that's where the spoken word ramping up the impact.

So my goal is to be like doing businesses.

You know, down here in Orlando, there's a

couple of businesses that, that I'm in touch with, a couple of chambers of commerce.

But in New York,

I have a gig in New York, a speaking gig to business people about, guess what, the value

of capitalism.

Okay?

The relationship between capitalism and prosperity and having them speak out about

that value as opposed to feeling ashamed of it.

No, that's word that, you know, that's a word I don't want to use.

So I have that coming up in September in New York and I'm really excited about that.

And the thing is that like I'm going to be using examples from my book.

Good.

And then the last I'll say before I open it back to you is on two, two days ago,

one of the Africans who I quote in the book, Edgar McKenzie from Burundi, he has an

organisation out there in Africa and I coach more than 50 of his,

his network,

50 people via.

It wasn't even Zoom, it was Google Meets.

And they have power outages going on and there's shady thing.

But all 50 of them were riveted to the content.

And this is going to model going forward for the book because not only it's not just, it's

not just content.

There are a lot of exercises on how good

improve your speaking.

So it's a workbook and a book where if you read the material and you do the exercises,

you will be better.

It's just that simple.

And to have a willing group in Africa,

which I loved my trip there, I got to see elephants, real life elephants.

Even though the hotel was saying, don't leave the hotel, there's armed guards were

everywhere.

And I was like, hey man, this is my chance.

I, I, I gotta see elephants.

And we're here.

It's like,

and, and so a lot of exciting things,

guys.

Again,

I've never been to Africa, but I, you see movies and you see documentaries.

Some of it is just staggeringly gorgeous land and everything.

It's just,

and it's a shame.

They, I would, I'm hoping that, yeah, they'll get their act.

A lot of those nations there will get their act together.

Yeah.

And ideas change the culture.

We know that, right?

Yes, yes, that's right.

And it's usually a minority, it's a small segment who are committed.

That's what we have right now.

That's one reason Magatt Wade, who is the

seventh speaker, the only one who's alive, who I cover in, in my book,

she has a great TED talk and I analyse her TED Talk.

And she's born in Senegal and she's an entrepreneur over there.

And now she's in, I think Austin,

Texas.

And her thing is open it up to entrepreneurs.

Don't give us aid, don't give Africa aid.

That's a waste of time.

It just goes to the pockets.

Pockets of the crooks.

Yeah,

she's like, open it up to entrepreneurs, take out the regulations, and you will see Africa

flourish.

And my goal, that's one of my purposes with my

book, is to have those ideas as well, setting them up for some kind of,

you know, success in the future.

But,

you know, you reminded me, I used to brag that I'd been to six continents and I had been to

Africa to, yeah, to the African continent, the north.

I went more than 10 years ago.

I wasn't with Carrie Ann.

A town called Ceuta, which is in Morocco.

14, 15. This was a pivotal moment in Western civilization.

Prince Henry the Navigator, Portuguese from nobility in Portugal, he went to this town,

Ceuta.

They conquered it because the Muslims, the

Moors controlled the Mediterranean at the time.

And he opened it up and that's where the Portuguese started be shipbuilding.

The whole age of discovery.

I wrote a long article on that.

So when I went there, I went to Ceuta just to see where Prince Henry was from.

You know, as I'm walking down, it's now Spanish.

It's part of Spain, so everyone speaks Spanish, which I can fake my Spanish, you

know.

And I'm walking down and in Greek mythology, that was one of the towns that Hercules.

They were.

There's Gibraltar on one side of the

Mediterranean and Ceutis on the other.

And according to Greek mythology, there was a slingshot that he would shoot, you know,

into the Mediterranean. So I see these Greek columns and Greek figures, and I'm like, I

didn't expect this.

Then I see one of Aristotle.

I'm like, what is Aristotle doing in Africa right now?

It's Northern Africa.

Never.

Nevertheless.

And it wrote about him at Estoteles in

Spanish.

It had like a little plaque.

And I remember Alan Gotthelf was like the.

The aristotle authority, like 15, 20 years ago.

And I asked him, I was like, alan, is that.

Do you know of a statue in.

Of Aristotle on the African continent? And he's left.

Maybe Alexandria might, but I don't.

I'd never been there.

But last year I went to the sub, you know, the

subcontinent, where.

So the northern part doesn't just like kind of South Africa.

Does it really count as Africa? Or as you said, the image of Africa is like

Lion King and it's, you know,

something in our minds and.

But give them freedom and you will see things,

you know, like any other culture.

Just take the chains off and they will flourish.

So what.

What is your ultimate vision or your ultimate

goal, your ultimate dream about why you wrote that book?

What do you want to see happen?

What I want to see happen, why I wrote the book is, guess what?

You would not know this, but I used to be afraid of speaking.

No, I don't believe that.

So I know how it feels,

okay? I was a singer in a rock band,

all right? And I saw this movie, Gimme Shelter, where

Mick Jagger controlled the crowd that was on the verge of a riot.

And in Altamont, California, 10 years old.

And I said, I want to be like that.

I want to have that kind of control over the crowd.

So a couple of years later, I'm singing in a band,

and after every song,

I almost had my back to the.

I could.

I could sing the words of someone else.

But when there was silence in between songs, I was just scared to death.

I'm actually saying something.

Okay. And then in class, you know, okay, give a speech.

I was nervous and then I walk away from.

In fact,

you guys know, I'm a bit of a ham.

I like the spotlight.

So I'm thinking, well, how can I perform without having to speak?

Oh, I know what I'll do.

I'll become a ballet dancer.

Because that's what they do.

They dance, but they don't have to speak.

And then sure enough,

that for several years.

But then I got hired by Merrill lynch and I became a manager.

And I had to present.

I had to.

I was.

I had to get up in front of people and do a

turnover shift and report to upper management, things like that.

I needed to speak with authority.

You know, this Blair Wright, data centre.

I was a data centre manager.

If there's an outage,

you can't get on the phone weekly.

And.

And traders cannot trade.

You need to be authoritative on the phone.

And so I went to Dale Carnegie courses and I

went to Toastmasters, and I learned the science of speaking as a result.

So my point here, this is 30 something years ago, is let me take this knowledge,

boil it down and show people who are afraid to speak.

Now there's.

There's a few ways.

There are people who are afraid to speak and then there are others who are simply blabber

mouths and don't know when to shut up.

Okay. They also coaching because being succinct, a professional speaker knows how to

be succinct.

You get to the point and then you shut up and

you let person absorb the material.

So my goal, ultimately, my goal is letting people own their own voice.

Because I've seen this and Martin, I've seen this over and over again.

Someone is slumped over and they're timid and they're nervous and after a few sessions,

they stand.

There's this confidence that comes out of them and they're a different person.

And the best dramatisation, if we look at film history,

this movie, I always recommend it.

The King's Speech with.

It's one of those colons.

Yeah.

First.

Yeah,

yeah.

Anyway,

what happens in the king? The king himself has a stuttering problem.

Yeah.

So he goes to a coach, a speech coach,

and you see the evolution.

You see his confidence the entire movie.

He slumped over.

He's a tall man, but he slumped over.

Only at the end, he nails that speech and he walks out like a king.

Yes.

Yeah,

yeah.

That's what I do.

Okay. That's. That's what I enjoy doing, seeing that evolution in the So I want CEOs to

have that.

I want entrepreneurs to have that confidence

when they're in front of their staffs because they have so much power that they're not

necessarily aware of.

Their words carry a lot of weight.

But if they're, if they're caving in to the

pressure of what someone is telling them or the wrong word, you can't use these words.

So they self censor.

And my point here is no, speak up,

speak up.

Defend your company, defend your profits that

you're making the value that you're creating so that everyone can be better off.

We can move towards a fl, you know, a flourishing society.

Ultimately it's for, for the purpose of a freedom and flourishing society is what my and

I think my book is a path toward that end.

Yeah. For the defenders of liberty, as you wrote in the foreword there.

Yes. Yes.

And liberty.

Thank you for saying that.

Yes.

Lessons for liberty's leaders.

And liberty here is not simply political, it's the freedom.

Frederick Douglass was a slave.

I go into his story.

But he taught himself how to read.

In fact, he would have gotten punished.

He would have gotten, he did get whipped.

Yeah.

Because he was caught reading.

Imagine somebody getting whipped today because

they're caught reading.

So he.

But his point was I have a mind and I'm going

to use it.

And then when he escaped slavery, he had a

voice and he put that voice to use.

And so Self Made Men is the speech that his, that I analyse in his book and he talks about

become.

The chapter title is Becoming Self Made.

How do we become self made?

We use our voice.

You know, we tell you just,

just yesterday the CEO of Bed Bath and Beyond told California to shove it nice.

He's not put, he's not putting any more stores in California.

And I think he said he's closing the ones that are there because they're just not taking that

**** anymore.

This is.

And we've seen, we're starting to see this more and more but two, three years ago it was

really dangerous to speak out.

There were punished, there were repercussions.

And I talk in the book about Edward Snowden

and James Damore from Google.

I mentioned them by and they're not, they're

not trying to cause havoc.

They just, they're just giving evidence of what they observed and speaking out and they

get vilified.

And so but the more the pendulum has swung a little bit in the direction of people speaking

out and not being punished for that.

So My goal is giving people a voice, giving them a platform, giving them the confidence,

the courage and the,

and the confidence to say what's on their mind.

That's what I like with podcasting, because that is freedom of expression.

And we, it's.

We could run our own show, you.

Know, Martin, I'm assuming.

Martin, we're still.

We have an audience in over 90 countries.

Yes. So.

So invite Robert to come and speak in your country.

Let's go.

That's right.

Yeah.

So if they reach out to us, we could, could arrange that.

Robert, if you have anything to add, please do.

Yes, I have.

We can wrap it up.

We have an important thing.

If everything goes smoothly, it will be published on September 2nd or on, around or

before that.

It's. It's a symbolic date.

Right.

This.

So I, I'm looking at something.

Do you know what I'm looking at right now

behind my computer?

I do, yes.

Do you know, Robert?

No, I don't.

It's an artwork, you could say, or a poster or.

How do you say it? It's a, It's a piece of.

Yeah, a poster.

A poster, yeah, by Bosch Foston, with 9-2-sign.

Oh, that's right.

The dark.

Yes, yes, yes.

In original there.

So I'm always looking at that, but.

I'm, that's a. I'm actually looking at the Brian Larson called First First Heat, I

think you know that one where it's kind of like Hank Reardon pouring that.

Yeah. Reed and Steve.

Yeah. It's pretty much based on the Hank Reardon.

So for the, for the listener out there that don't know the importance.

September 2nd, do you want to say why you want to have the book published there?

And if you know Atlas shrugged, it is September 2nd.

It's called Atlas Shrugged Day because the novel starts September 2nd, and there's a four

year timeline in real time going forth in the novel.

There's a backstory,

but four year.

And every September 2nd there's an incident,

there's some kind of shakeup that happens on that day because Ayn Rand herself started

writing it.

September 2, 1947, I believe.

So that's the referent there.

And I'm hoping you don't air it before then because for the week of September 2nd to the

9th,

the book will be available on Kindle for 99 cents.

Yeah. So that's why we want.

So you, you name, you name it when you want it

published and we will.

I will get it done.

So, yeah.

Yes. September 2nd.

And I even have a book launch party.

And yeah, so I'm grateful for that because this is,

this is the kind of book people need,

I will say.

And there's no book like this that gives you

philosophy, history,

presentation skills, heroism and self development all packed up into 180 something

pages with tonnes,

tonnes of stories, tonnes of citations and a lot of,

lot of fun.

Great.

All right.

A lot of references maybe too.

Yeah.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, we've been talking to Robert Begley, author, speaker,

entrepreneur.

Robert, tell people where they can find you on

the web.

So my name,

Robert at Begley, is my email, but Speaking With Purpose is llc, is my company.

So. And the website is Speaking With Purpose llc.

You'll find all my info up there.

And there's even a pull down for the book, Voices of Reason.

You can even pull down from that website if you want a free chapter of the book,

the opening chapter I have right now available and the table of contents, things like that.

So I want to say thank you gentlemen for having me again.

Did we,

did we escape the foxhole? Did we, did we,

yet again, like three for three with this foxhole thing.

I was just about to say thank you for manning the foxhole with it.

Okay.

Manning it, yeah.

Thanks, Robert.

That's my signature line.

I. Yeah, I think.

Anyway, Robert, been a great.

It's been a great pleasure.

Yep.

And we will hopefully see you again.

Yes, you will.

Very good.

That's a wrap.

Yep. Thanks.

Sam.