https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=2FTx7DV7sv8
You once said the most dangerous person is one who is articulate. What would you recommend to a one who wants to learn to speak in a more articulate manner? Well, articulate is an interesting word, eh, because if your joints are articulated, and that means you can do things with them because they’re articulated, right? They’re not one solid, vague mass. They’re differentiated. And someone who’s graceful is articulated. And compelling because they’re articulated. Speech is a form of articulation in that manner because the act of speech itself is extremely complicated. It’s a very complicated motor activity, right? It’s a very complicated action to dance with your tongue, let’s say. And it is definitely the case that there is no more exceptional form of the capacity to be dangerous than to be articulate. And one of the things that really shocks me, part of the reason that my son and I and our coworkers developed this essay app, is that young men in particular never taught this. It’s like, well, why learn to, why be literate? Well, do you want to be competent and dangerous or do you want to be vague and useless? Because those are your options and I don’t care what your job is, it doesn’t matter what you end up doing. You know, if you’re a plumber, great respect for plumbers, by the way, and you’re articulate, you can negotiate with your clients. You can introduce your coworkers. You can make a case for your employees. You can advertise your services. You can think through your problems. You’re firing on all cylinders. You know, our whole culture is based on the idea of the supremacy of the word. Our whole culture is based on the idea that it is the word itself that extracts habitable order from chaos and possibility. And the reason our culture is predicated on that is because it’s a deep truth. And to the degree that our culture actually embodies that, it works. So, it’s a great thing to be articulate. And it would be so lovely if our educators were wise enough to communicate this appropriately to young men who are striving forward and to let them know in no uncertain terms that if they want to make themselves into forces to be contended with, that there’s no surer route to that than an exceptional poetic literacy. Now, it’s not like young people don’t have an intuition of this. There are reasons they admire rap musicians, for example, who are often extraordinarily articulate in their performance and their capacity for spontaneous poetic utterance. And certainly, the greatest people I’ve met, including great warriors, you might say, are great in no small part because they’re articulate. I know a former Special Services Special Operations soldier, Jocko Willink, some of you might know about Jocko. He’s got a pretty decent online following. And he’s about four feet wide and about three feet thick, and he’s one tough son of a bitch, I’ll tell you. You don’t want to mess with him. And he knows perfectly well and is very capable of articulating the fact that his success as an eminent warrior is in no small part dependent on his ability to communicate. Because he could communicate well, he could listen to the men who were under his command. Because he was articulate, he could explain to his superiors the situation on the ground. Because he was articulate, he could make a case that the men under his command who were deserving would be promoted. Because he could think in an articulate manner, he could plan strategically and not lose battles. Okay, so that’s the case for being articulate. And what’s the alternative? You want to be inarticulate? You want to say ah and like and mmm and pause and stumble and be unable to formulate a strategy, be unable to elucidate a vision, be unable to compel and convince other people to entice them with your articulated vision of what you are. You want to say ah and like and mmm and pause and stumble and be unable to compel and convince other people to entice them with your articulated vision of what might be. You want the opposite of that? That’s, why would you want that? You would choose awkwardness over grace? That’s, it’s preposterous. And that’s why this case isn’t made in a compelling manner, particularly to young men. And I know it’s not being articulated to young men because they’re dropping out of the educational realm in droves. And it’s unbelievably sad. So how do you become articulate? Well, by paying attention to what you say. That’s a good start. And what do I mean by that? I mean pay attention to what you say. So you can think of this as an analogy. So imagine that you’re trying to walk across a swamp and the swamp is murky. But you know there’s a path. You know there’s a path of stone under the water, but it twists and moves. And if you stay on the path, you won’t drown. The crocodiles in the swamp won’t devour you. And as you walk forward, you can feel with your next step where the stone might be. And then you feel it solid. Then you take that step and then you do the same thing with your foot again. You search and you find out what’s solid and you step on it and you move forward in that manner. That’s what you do with your words. It’s the same thing. You feel and you feel, is this the right word? Is it, is the fact that I’m uttering it putting me together and making me intact and stronger? Or is it tearing me apart and making me dissolute and weak? And you can learn to do that. I learned this in part from reading Carl Rogers, who’s a great clinician. And Rogers believed that the integration of language and action was a necessary precondition for operation as an effective clinician. That you had to align what you said with who you were. And that one of the things that your clients would be evaluating you for was that capability. And you might say that someone with that capability manifests themselves as genuine and trustworthy. And more than that, I would say also as compelling and interesting. Although that can be gamed, but the entire combination that emerges out of the domain of articulate communication can’t be gamed. It’s not easily. You feel your way. I noticed 40 years ago when I started thinking these things through that much of what I said actually made me feel weak. I didn’t know why exactly, but sometimes some of the things I said didn’t have that effect. They weren’t accompanied by a sense of shame, let’s say. They weren’t accompanied with a sense of vulnerability. They were solid. And at the beginning that was probably only about 5% of what I said. The rest of it was instrumental. It was language I was using to get my way in the manner that Tammy described when she introduced me tonight. There was an arrogance in my use of language that had to do with the desire to attain proximal victories, right? To appear smart, let’s say, to win an argument, something like that. A very different idea than merely feeling my way along to see what word was appropriate for what moment. But you can learn to do that. And you can listen to yourself. And you can stop humming and hawing and using like and you know and fillers. And you can take the time necessary to craft your words carefully. And you can practice merely saying what you believe to be true. And you can read. And you can read great writers. And you can write. And you can write about what you think about the problems that obsess you. And you can become articulate as a consequence. And there’ll be nothing about that that isn’t the adventure of your life. And so it’s a moral endeavor in some real sense. To become articulate is to become the master of your own tongue. And to become properly articulate is to make the word divine. And to treat it in that manner. And to decide whether or not you believe that it is the case that the divine word creates the order that’s habitable and good. And if you do believe that, well if you don’t believe that, then what do you believe? And if you do believe that, well go all in. See what happens. See what happens if you become articulate. I’ll give you one more small example. Tammy touched on this in the introduction too. She said she’d learned to pause. You can pause. It’s a prayerful pause in some sense. When you’re in a discussion with someone, you can ask yourself. They might present you with a question or a conundrum or a proposition. And instead of responding with what you know to be right, so to speak, you could just ask yourself, What do I actually think about that? But it has to be a real question. It has to be the kind of question that you pose to someone you didn’t know. It has to be a question predicated on the idea that you might not know who you are. And that you could ask. And so someone will present you with a question and you think, okay, what do I think about that? But you have to want to know the answer. And then the answer will make itself known because that’s how thought works. And then you can just communicate that answer. And if you do that, you’ll be interesting right away. You’ll be interesting to the person that you’re talking to. And if they do that to you, they’ll be interesting too. And then if you both do that, you’ll have an interesting conversation. And if you have an interesting conversation, you’ll both grow as a consequence. And that’s actually the pathway to growth. And you just wait. You can wait. You can open yourself up to the possibility that what needs to be said will make itself manifest. If that’s what you are striving for. If that’s what you’re asking for. And then you can merely communicate that. You have to abandon instrumentality to do that. So one of the reasons Jill Rogan is so successful, by the way, is that that’s what Joe does. He just asks questions. He doesn’t, he isn’t trying to get something from his guests. He’s not trying to become more famous. He doesn’t need any more money. There’s no instrumental utilization of language in his discourse. He’s just a humble, lunkhead, you know, in the most profound sense, who would like to know more than he knows. And he’s just a humble, lunkhead, you know, in the most profound sense, and who asks all the stupid questions he can think up. And it turns out that he’s actually very, very smart and very well educated now, after talking to hundreds and hundreds of people and listening. And so the stupid questions he asks aren’t stupid. And they’re questions that are shared by virtually everyone who’s listening. And he takes his listeners along on this process of exploratory endeavor. And it’s the pathway to success. And the same thing can be true of your life. The pathway to success is, is much, it’s a, if you’re guided by the spirit of honest inquiry and every word you say is reflective of what you believe to be the truth, then the pathway that you walk on is a golden pathway to success. And I know that, I know that to be true.