Transcript
Dave Bricker (00:05)
Want to expand your speaking and storytelling skills and grow your influence business? This is Speakipedia Media brought to you by speakepedia .com. I’m your host, Dave Bricker , bringing you straight talk, smart strategies, and amazing stories from visionary speakers and thought leaders. My guest comments daily on communication issues on his popular blog, Writing Boots.
He’s an award -winning journalist and the editor and publisher of Vital Speeches of the Day, one of the world’s longest continually published magazines. He’s the author of Raised by Mad Men, a memoir about his advertising parents, and he’s co –author of the New York Times bestseller, Tell My Sons, A Father’s Last Letters. His latest book is An Effort to Understand, Hearing One Another.
in half. Please welcome the founder of the Professional Speechwriters Association, David Murray.
David Murray (01:07)
Hey, great to be here, Dave. Thanks for having me.
Dave Bricker (01:09)
So glad you could join me, David. So many speakers focus on the performance side, on the stage craft, and we forget that we need to have something worthwhile to perform. Talk a bit about rhetoric, about the written element of speaking.
David Murray (01:28)
Well, I don’t know if I can talk a bit about it, but I can talk a lot about it. Yeah, so I come from the world of speech writing and that world, know, speech writers are often complaining, well, my speaker is wooden on the stage. My speaker is awkward, but my speaker‘s really good when she or he gets into personal conversations.
with people. Really natural, uses their hands right, knows exactly what to say and how to say it and knows all their stories cold. Well, why is that? That’s because in personal conversations, they’re talking about something they actually care about. To me, if you’re having to act your way through a speech, you’re really acting like you know what you’re talking about or you’re acting like you care about what you’re talking about. And if you’re having to learn how to act on stage,
passionate, sincere, intense, then you shouldn’t be talking about that thing, period. I’ve learned this over my life. There are a number of subjects. I get invited to speak on a number of subjects. I will only speak on the two or three subjects. I’m kind of an expert on some of them, but I don’t really care about those. If I’m going to be in front of a group of human beings, I’m going to speak about a subject that I really care about. So to me,
That’s the price of entry with, that’s the reason we give speeches. That’s the reason we go to speeches. I have a long riff. Well, it’s about 50 ,000 years long about why we give speeches. When we first started giving speeches 50 ,000 years ago, whenever that was, it was an efficiency device. was gather everybody together. There’s a masto
Don coming here and we got to sharpen our spears and I don’t have the time to talk to each one of you one by one. So gather everybody together. I’m going to give a speech. That’s why we gave speeches originally. And that’s why we gave speeches for millennia. Then the Gutenberg press came along. We could distribute our ideas. Then the radio came along. People could hear us speak from miles and miles away. Then there was TV. People could see and hear people speak. So all that was going on. Now we have social media.
do a YouTube video and you can see me speak. So why are we still doing this thing where we get together, get everybody flying across the country, inconveniencing their families, filling the atmosphere with junk, to sit still in a room and listen to one person talk? And my answer to that is, it’s an essentially emotional experience. And it’s an experience, people in an audience are saying, why am I doing this? I could be sitting.
seeing you on YouTube from the comfort of my house, why am I here? And if you don’t have a good answer for that, and emotionally, if you aren’t connecting with these human beings, speaking of something from your heart, then they’re, really are correctly wondering why they, why they inconvenienced themselves. So I feel like there’s a real need to speak, to speak about authentic things that we truly care about.
that we care about so much that it takes advantage of this wonderful in -person thing and makes people connect with me and it makes people connect with one another. So it’s a big mandate and to me, somebody who has to tell somebody else what to do with their hands, we’re way off course if that’s what’s going on here.
Dave Bricker (05:01)
And I like your answer. The other part of it, because I’ve always wondered, what is it about a live speech? Why does nobody ever watch the replay? And it’s the tightrope factor, because people are afraid to get up on stage and here’s somebody getting in front of an audience and the microphone might die, the projector might die, they might forget their lines, whatever it is, all of the things that speakers worry about happening do happen. And
David Murray (05:09)
Yeah. Yeah.
Yep.
Dave Bricker (05:29)
When you see somebody getting on that tightrope without a net, who wants to watch a movie of somebody on a tightrope?
David Murray (05:35)
or a pre -recorded thing saying that the guy made it across. Well, fine. I’m sure that’s boring to watch. Yeah. Yeah, that’s a big part of it. But I also think a part of it is there is a communal experience. You know, there’s a reason that people, go to church because they not just because they, know, the church is also on, you know, you can get church streaming, but people go to church and not just so that they can see this.
Dave Bricker (05:42)
Exactly.
David Murray (06:03)
priest or the minister speak and get the message. It’s because something happens in a church, not just between the speaker and the people, but the people and one another. There is something magic and human about sitting next to somebody and a speaker says something and you either look at that person next to you or you are conscious of being next to a person and sharing this atmosphere and sharing this moment and sharing kind of an emotional
an emotional experience. So to me, a speech that doesn’t take advantage of that stuff and doesn’t set that stuff in motion is really a waste of everybody’s time.
Dave Bricker (06:44)
And you’re right on there. I completely agree with you in the same way that when one person in the room yawns, everybody yawns. When one person laughs, everybody laughs, everybody cries. It’s not the same watching that on TV or hearing about it on a, you can’t even see those things on a radio or audio broadcast. So getting in the room together is really powerful.
David Murray (06:51)
Yeah.
Right.
It’s magic. Yeah.
Dave Bricker (07:09)
It is magic as you can’t really explain what’s going on in that super consciousness, but we know it because we see it and we experience.
David Murray (07:18)
Yeah, I honestly call it a spiritual thing and not in the church context, but just I think people’s unite when you get, you know, you’re experiencing all the same smells and sounds and you’re just experiencing a thing together. And that I think that’s even a rarer experience than it was 50 years ago. think we spend so much time by ourselves on our phones that when we have a moment like that, I think
I think speeches that are good are even more profound than they used to be for that reason.
Dave Bricker (07:52)
completely agree with you. So coming back to speech writing, we’ve been alluding to this a little bit, but let’s go deeper because even the most eloquent words delivered poorly will fail to engage. And this must be a conundrum for speech writers. Do speech writers have to be good speakers and good speaker coaches?
David Murray (08:14)
I think it really helps and speech writers give this advice to each other all the time. Do some public speaking yourself. It’s really important to know what it feels like to walk up there. It really is important to know that. It’s also important.
to know to be able to coach your speaker and say you keep doing this with your hand or you keep you realize you keep doing this or it’s it’s you know there are some basic things that a speechwriter needs to understand to coach their speaker and to to empathize with their speaker and to help their speaker get better. But I will go back to.
what we were just talking about, which is I think a speechwriter’s best, most important thing they can do is figure out how to get that person speaking from the truest part of themselves. And I’ll give you an example of how this can happen without a speechwriter even putting pen to paper. We had at our world conference, the Professional Speechwriters Association a few years ago, we had James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence.
and his speechwriter. And they were talking and about halfway through the talk, the speechwriter said, you know, something important happened in our relationship about two years into it. Clapper, they’d been working together for a couple of years. Clapper wasn’t the greatest speaker. He’s kind of comes off as this gruff guy and he wasn’t exactly killing it on the speaking trail.
Trey Brown said we were, his speechwriter said we were in a limousine once, leaving a speaking gig and going to another thing. And Clapper was just free associating and talking about his childhood. His childhood as an army brat or a military brat and his parents were moving him around all the time and they moved to Philadelphia when he was about 13 and he was lonely. He didn’t know anybody. He had nothing to do. So he started, he figured out.
that if you put in between two numbers on the dial of the TV set, if you got it in between the two numbers, and I have to explain to some audiences about the dial on the TV set, but you could hear the police radio in Philadelphia. between each different number, there was a different precinct you could hear. And after about two weeks, he had all the precincts down.
And he knew which precinct was saying what to whom and what was going on all over Philadelphia based on what he’d figured out about this TV. His speech writer is sitting there going, you’re just telling me this story now, dude. This is your origin story. This is the story that you’re going to tell in every speech from now on. This tells people who you are, how you became who you are. You were a spy at 13. You’re a natural born spy. It does the thing that
every speech can do, which is it shows you, it shows the audience what makes that person special. The audience wants to know two things about any speaker. Why are they up there and I’m down here? What makes them special? What’s so great about Jim Clapper? Well, he’s a natural born spy. But in the same breath, the audience also wants to know what makes him like me. Is he normal? Can he, does he understand normal human beings? He’s special, but does he understand normal human beings enough that he can be my leader?
and understand the needs of me and my community. That story does both things. It shows why he’s special and it also shows that he was just a lonely 13 year old boy just like you and me. And so that’s what a speechwriter can do. It’s much more profound than helping a person format their speech correctly and act better up there. It’s to give that speaker a story that they can tell from their heart.
A story that they can tell and that they’re going to use their body language is going to be fine. Their passion is going to be fine because it’s a personal story about them. And that wasn’t anything he even wrote. It was just something he said, you’re going to tell this story. And in the speech, he’d say, tell the TV story, the Philadelphia story. And Clapper laughed and said, yep, and that story keeps getting longer and longer every single time I tell it. So that’s what a speechwriter does in my mind.
Dave Bricker (12:30)
Yeah. And I like that very much. And it goes back to what you’re saying, talking about the things that you’re passionate about, because I see so many people, they’ll write a 4 ,000 word speech and sit down and try to memorize it. And you’re going to do how many hours of memorization so you can read that speech out of your head to the audience. my God. I’d rather be bitten to death by ducks than listen to a speech like that. And yet.
David Murray (12:49)
Right.
Yep.
Dave Bricker (12:56)
People pressure themselves to do this big memorization thing and they don’t get into the, speak about the things you know about the things you care.
David Murray (13:04)
And every single person has those things. so these speech writers are working for CEOs and they’re working for military people and they’re working for. So the CEO, what is the CEO, invited to talk about? Well, the CEO should be able to talk about the marketplace, should be able to talk about the economy, should be able to talk about corporate culture, should be able to talk about the product and it’s. But figuring out.
What, which aspect of the business, which aspect of, of life really animates that person? Everybody has things that, that animate them and things that they just have to put up with and do. You got to get that person or you got to get yourself talking about the things that you actually care about. I can get up and talk about, I could tell an audience how to organize an executive communication department in a big corporation. I know, I know that stuff.
I can write about that stuff. I don’t need to stand in front of an audience and talk about that. If I’m going to fly to, Britain and give a speech, I want to give those people a speech about something that I really care about and that I need to get my emotions across about. So that’s to me the essential purpose of a speech these days.
Dave Bricker (14:20)
Yes. And I always teach people, lecturers deliver information, speakers deliver transformation. And those people who are just sharing their expertise, that’s cost of entry. If you can’t get somebody to think, feel, or act different after they’ve heard it, then write a book. It’s a lot less painful for people. So, right, right, right. Exactly.
David Murray (14:41)
Yep. Send it. Send the PDF. Yeah.
Dave Bricker (14:49)
Write a blog, whatever, there’s definitely a place for that instead of speaking. So what are some of the common speech writing problems that you see? Boy, would I love to answer this question, but you’re on stage this time. I’m the facilitator.
David Murray (15:05)
I’ve already described the speeches that I think suck, which are speeches that do not emotionally engage the speaker with the subject and that do not emotionally engage the audience. To me, a speech that does that is a good speech and a speech that doesn’t do that is a bad speech. I think that an audience wants to feel,
and almost subconsciously demands to feel that this speaker is delivering a message only this speaker could be delivering to only this audience at only this moment of time in time. That’s what an audience wants because the think of the opposite. Think of sitting in an audience. You flew all the way to Texas for this and you’re sitting there and somebody’s giving a speech that you know they gave 100 different times to 100 different audiences.
you know, nonstop over the last 25 years. Now I realize a lot of people in your audience are professional speakers and they give the same basic talk wherever they go, but an audience needs to feel, and the audience might even intellectually know that, but an audience needs to feel that this is for them.
And that’s why audiences respond so well, even because they want to feel that way. They respond so well to what we in the speech writing business called, called a how to hell. And what a how to hell is, is, I’ll give you an example. The easiest example is Peggy Noonan is giving a, a commencement speech at Notre Dame. She gets up and the first thing she may, she may have given this basic same commencement speech for 15 years, but she gets up and says, well,
It’s so good to be here. Congratulations graduates. know, yesterday I was down at the Suds Bar on First Street. Everybody goes nuts. Why do they go nuts? Because they say, how the hell did Peggy Noonan know about the Suds Bar, our bar? It’s the easiest. So audiences want to feel that they’re special and that the speaker, even if they know that the speaker has a speech writer who came up with that.
They want to feel that way, but you have to make them feel that way throughout the speech. You have to make them feel that they flew here for a reason and that they’re not just getting some canned thing that you gave or that anybody else could have given either. you know, I think that if it’s, again, if an audience feels that way, feels they’re getting something that only you could give them and only to them and only on this day or at this moment in time.
I think that’s a successful speech and anytime they don’t feel that way, it’s garbage.
Dave Bricker (17:50)
Right. And customizing it. I’ll tell you, anytime I give a speech at a conference or a corporate meeting or something, I always ask the meeting planner. And if I can, the CEO say, I’d love, is there a way I can drop a little joke? that, does the CEO drive a funny car or does he say something over and over that people make fun of him for? I want to get permission to do that, but you get that inside dirt that they don’t expect you to know. And you drop that at
David Murray (18:18)
Yeah.
Dave Bricker (18:19)
all of a sudden they know you care about them. It’s those little things that make all the difference. Yeah.
David Murray (18:23)
Yeah, that’s the how to hell. It’s every speech should have one, but it shouldn’t just be that shallow. it should. You should, know that that there should be references all through the speech acknowledges all through the speech as salespeople. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you like you have to. You have to let them know that you’ve been thinking about them, even if you’re delivering a message the likes of which you deliver all of all the time.
Dave Bricker (18:35)
Yes.
Yes. And I’ll actually interview employees and things ahead of the speech to get that. It’s because every speech has to be customized for the reasons that you’re talking about. And some of the, some of the things I was alluding to are, for example, if I can do it, you can do it stories. That’s kind of tired. You’re doing your therapy on the stage. Poor me stories. Don’t play the victim card on stage or in life. And there are a number of, and by
David Murray (19:13)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Dave Bricker (19:18)
all means if you start a story, finish it. Because if you leave a story unfinished, you’re going to cause story trauma in your audience because we have a natural desire to see things brought to a conclusion. So you were in jail. I mean, I see you’re here on the stage. Intellectually, I know you got out, but what happened? You can’t leave people hanging. So it’s that kind of thing.
David Murray (19:32)
Yep, tension and release, yeah.
Yeah, right.
Dave Bricker (19:46)
Most professional speakers should but don’t take acting lessons. And they should but don’t study speech writing. But having a good story to tell is cost of entry. Having a good speech to deliver is cost of entry. So how can people get the education and the resources they need to create better speeches?
David Murray (20:08)
I mean, to me the best advice is to read a lot of speeches and hear a lot of speeches and see what works. Ted Talks speeches, old speeches, new contemporary speeches, obviously. We do have, we offer a speech writing school, which is basically, we’ve conceived it to take writers and turn them into speech writers. It’s not necessarily designed for speakers.
but it would work beautifully with speakers. I think that it really goes through the whole process. I think you need to develop a writing process. think public speakers, professional speakers aren’t writing that many new speeches all the time, so they don’t get this groove about how to do it. But there really is. So we take them through, with this wonderful faculty, but we take them through a process where it’s like,
Before you write a speech, here are the three things you need to think about. Who’s your audience? What’s the purpose of this speech? What are you trying to achieve here and what’s the message? Basically, that’s before you even, and then there’s a structure. There’s a Monroe’s motivated sequence structure that we walk you through that works for pretty much every speech. Then there’s, okay, so you’ve got this concept, you’ve got the structure. Now, how do you figure out what to put in it?
Are you gonna put a bunch of statistics in it? Are you gonna put a bunch of stories in it? How are you gonna fill this speech with evidence? And then there’s editing. And so I think there’s a discipline to creating a speech that I think professional speakers could benefit from because I think there’s powerful, there may be powerful things, even if they’re not writing that many talks.
there are powerful things that they may be leaving on the table, rhetorical devices, rhetorical structures that we sort of walk people through. know, speech writing, before the speech writing school existed, it’s been around about 10 years, the Professional Speechwriters Association has only been around 11. Before that, speech writers just came from everywhere and they fell in with their feet in the air and they’re like, they were.
They came from every different discipline. There was no way to learn how to be a speechwriter. You just figured it out by the seat of your pants. And we’ve kind of systematized that speechwriting process. I hope not so much that it creates cookie cutter speeches. Every once in a while, I get a little nervous because I’m reading speeches and I’m like, boy, here comes the story. We don’t want speeches to be cookie cutter, but there is kind of a system for writing them.
So I think that would be helpful for people.
Dave Bricker (22:51)
And it’s really comes down to that relationship between flow and structure. And it’s one of the reasons I’m a jazz fan, right? You’re improvising, but you’ve got to know the chord changes and what scales to use on the chords. And that’s a whole other cul -de -sac. We won’t go down. Yes.
David Murray (23:07)
But speeches are music. Speeches are music. The sound of these words. People, you there’s a lot of speech. You can go to a lot of speeches and sometimes you don’t get anything out of it, but it was just nice to listen to. yes. Boy, he was fantastic. Well, what did he say? Well, I don’t really know, but it was good. You hear that a lot.
Dave Bricker (23:27)
yeah. I know content free speakers who are able to get the whole room on their feet. Now I just, I can’t do that. I don’t want to do it, but you have to admire that in some sort of perverse way, right? There are people who have just get up on stage and talk for an hour and say nothing and people are throwing money at them or standing on their feet cheering. And I’m thinking, I don’t get it, but
David Murray (23:33)
Exactly.
Yeah.
Yep.
Right, no, that’s definitely the truth. in the speech writing world, these people, can’t put, if you can do that, if you can get up and entertain an audience with words, to me, that’s like music, that’s fine. Like it gets the sales force excited and everybody’s happy that somebody said something. Like I’m not, like there’s nothing truly wrong with that. But in my world, a CEO, and sometimes in my, the version of that in my world,
of CEOs and university presidents and their speech writers. Sometimes you just want the leader to get up and say the expected things in a pleasing way. I mean, that sounds cynical and we’re supposed to be saying, well, you know, what are people going to do differently after this speech? And you and I want to change the world and we want all speeches to do that, but speeches are also ceremonial activities sometimes. And sometimes the sales force just wants to be sort of, you know,
made to stand on their feet and say, couldn’t you thank God for leadership like that? And sometimes it’s okay for a CEO to get up and just say what you expected them to say. It’s a comfort to people sometimes. So I try to think about all the social purposes of speeches and not all of them are to absolutely get that audience to march out and vote for your candidate.
Dave Bricker (25:13)
think that’s fair and accurate. So let’s talk a little bit about your book, An Effort to Understand, Hearing One Another and Ourselves, because we live in a bitterly divided country, and I love your focus on hearing rather than on speaking, because listening is the most important speaking skill, and it’s an essential part of the solution to every communication problem. Can you unpack that a little bit?
David Murray (25:40)
Yeah, first I’ll explain that the title, In Effort to Understand, comes from a Robert F. Kennedy speech that was delivered in an all -black neighborhood in Indianapolis an hour or two after Martin Luther King was shot. And he had to deliver that news to that audience that didn’t know it, and he was a vulnerable guy telling this audience that Martin Luther King had been shot and killed in Memphis, Tennessee that night.
And he gives this speech that you can go find on YouTube. It’s my favorite of all the, if you ask me what my favorite speech is, it’s that one because it does all the things.
It shares information. Martin Luther King’s been shot and killed. It reinforces values about what we’re doing here. He says we can go in this direction as a country toward more violence and more bloodshed. But I don’t think we really want to do that, do we? And by the end, he actually gives marching orders and says, say a prayer.
for our country and go basically go home peacefully. And Indianapolis, it’s a little bit of a complicated story, but Indianapolis was the only city that night in America that didn’t burn, not just because of that, but that was a moment. So in that speech, over and over and over again,
He says it like three or four times. He says, we have to make an effort in this country. We have to make an effort to understand. And it’s like such a bland phrase. And I’ve been playing this speech all around the world for audiences for years. And I thought, why does he keep saying that? Why does he keep saying that? And it’s the word effort. It’s like, this is a country. This isn’t a homogenous country. This is a country with all different kinds of people.
In this country, we have to make an effort to understand one another. That’s not, that’s not, hey, and what do we hear all the time? I’ll never understand somebody who votes for so -and -so. Never will I understand that. Well, it doesn’t sound like you’re trying that hard. It sounds like you’re like actually trying not to. And so that’s what Kennedy was getting at. And I think that’s what we have to do with one another. And it gets difficult. You get mad at the other side. You get mad at.
at what’s happening and you lose your patience and you get tired of trying to understand. But it is an effort and the effort to me is not just listening to what
Dave says in figuring out what I can say back or even even listening to what you say and hearing your point of view and then telling you what my point of view is. I have to listen. I use this term in my book imaginative listening. I have to even if you’re saying something that I think is ridiculous, I have to use my imagination to figure out well, why is why did he come to that? Why did he say that?
Where did he come to that attitude? I have to assume that you came by your attitudes as honestly or dishonestly as I came to mine. You weren’t born and decided to be some sort of jerk and who’s an idiot who doesn’t know anything. No, you’re trying to be the best thinker person you can possibly be. And you came to a point of view very different from mine. So how did you come to that point of view? I have to make an effort to figure that out. And to me, that’s…
That is the price of doing business in a civic society, especially a diverse country like ours, especially a divided country like ours. And it gets, it’s hard and you get sick of it. And sometimes I use the Steven Wright joke when I’ll be talking about somebody will say, Mr. An effort to understand, cause I’m ranting and raving about somebody who I disagree with. And Steven Wright had this joke where he said he went to the 7 -Eleven and it said it was, they were open 24 hours and the guy was closing up.
And he says, why are you, you’re open 24 hours. And the guy goes, yeah, but not in a row. And so I make an effort to understand, not 24 hours, not 24 seven, but you know, that is, to me, that’s what we must do with one another if we’re gonna have a country at all and a society at all.
Dave Bricker (29:35)
Ha
Yes, and as speech writers, as people of the message, I think we have to work very hard to parse the messages that we see. There are a lot of speech writers out there who are intentionally dividing people and stoking fear and things like that. And we need to become aware of the mechanisms that they’re using because deep down, people all want the same things.
So I like that. You’re tuned into Speakipedia Media for aspiring and professional speakers and thought leaders who want to change hearts, minds and fortunes. My guest is David Murray, founder of the Professional Speech Writers Association. So David, let’s talk about Vital speeches of the day because that has been published since 1934 and you’ve either aged extremely well or there’s history to this publication.
What’s this magazine about and how can the speaking community benefit from it?
David Murray (30:47)
Vital Speeches of the Day is at once the most antiquated concept and the most modern concept that you’ve ever heard. So there was a family called the Dailies and Tom Daley, Sr. was the maker of this magazine and it was on newsstands back then. His idea was that the problem with the country in 1934 was that the media was all super biased.
And that if you, know, Franklin Roosevelt or the CEO of Standard Oil would get up and give a speech and depending on which newspaper you read or radio report, radio experts, excerpts they chose, you’d get a spin job. And he thought the best thing I could do for this society is to create a magazine where we publish speeches in full so that you can read the whole speech.
and make up your mind for yourself. So it the leading thinkers in America. It was weekly for a long time and it was fat. if you were reading this thing, it was a full -time job just to read that magazine, let alone edit it. It’s monthly now and it’s not as fat and it’s a smaller thing and it’s not in news stands, but it’s still really relevant. And I think it’s relevant not only
now because if you read Vital Speeches you can really get a sense of how smart leading people are handling our current issues of the day and how they’re trying to figure out how to talk about this stuff and how they’re referring to stuff. But it’s also an incredible, it’s become an incredible research tool. So if you go, you can go to your library and search for Vital, all libraries, a lot of libraries have the archives.
and you can go back and search, you hear a term, hear, okay, Donald Trump talked about something called America First. And you can type that in and realize, that’s what isolationists were saying in 1939. America First was a thing. And you can find speeches. So it’s a great time capsule. So when I’m putting the magazine together every month, I’m putting it together for you, because you’re gonna read it and I’m trying to find the most interesting speeches of the month.
But I’m also putting it together for somebody who’s looking back at this 50 years from now and trying to figure out what the hell those people were thinking and talking about in 20, in, you know, 2024. You know, I wish, I wish I could like retire and just look at Vital Speeches. There’s a job for somebody who, every time I dip into a back issue of Vital Speeches, I will just pull one out at random. I find out, I find things that are totally amazing. Like,
in 1945, the first, like the September 1st issue of 1945, three weeks after we dropped the atom bomb on Japan, there’s a speech in there basically saying that America did the most immoral thing in the world and we were killers and we killed all these millions, know, thousands, hundreds of thousands of people. Now, that shocked me. This is a fairly conservative magazine. The fact that they would publish that soon after
a speech saying that like that truly teaches you stuff about history. So I think the magazine has this great value and I think the value is mostly in the future, but I also think it’s a good magazine to read today. And it is good to read, to like let people talk for 20 minutes and read their whole idea rather than saying, you know, I heard what you said, I’m moving on from there.
Dave Bricker (34:41)
Right, judging by the sound bite, which is so easy to do and the media helps us do that as well.
David Murray (34:48)
Yeah, I mean, I’ll give you an example, a destructive example of that recently, but not that recently, but 10 years ago, this business with Hillary Clinton and the deplorables. So she said, there’s a basket of deplorables and then everybody said we’re deplorables and that became a thing. Like she was just insulting it. If you read the speech, if you read the whole speech, she was saying Trump voters,
are not all the same thing. They have reasons to feel the way they feel. Yes, there’s a basket of deplorables who are jerks, but the whole point of the speech was we can’t dismiss these people. They have reasons for the way they feel and the way they’re voting, etc. So you excerpt that speech and you pull that out of it.
You’ve actually gone the other way and made the opposite point of the speech. Now, however you feel about that, fine, but you owe it to read the whole speech. And that’s what the Vital Speeches people thought and that’s why, that’s what I still think.
Dave Bricker (35:54)
I’m glad you’re carrying that torch forward. That sounds like a worthwhile effort. Also, tell us a bit about the Cicero Speech Writing Awards.
David Murray (36:05)
Yeah, so this is the only speechwriting awards in the world and it’s been around I think about 15 or 16 years now. It basically judges the best speeches that were submitted to us every year by speechwriters usually. Some of the speeches are submitted by people who have delivered the speeches.
many of them are delivered by the speech writers. And we basically judge these speeches on style, on substance, on whether they’re their coherence and on the humanity that the speaker brings to them. Speeches are not speeches until there’s a human, that we can tell there’s an actual human being behind this thing. So it’s wonderful. It’s a wonderful, what I love about it is that it always,
sort of surfaces a bunch of speeches I hadn’t seen, I hadn’t heard of that are truly fantastic. So it’s rich. I know how much fun it is to judge because we’ve had the same set of judges for about 13 years now. They just love judging these awards. They love reading these speeches because they’re good.
Dave Bricker (37:17)
And is there a length requirement or is it doesn’t matter? Make the point in a speech.
David Murray (37:23)
Doesn’t matter. mean, you know, a paragraph, you know, we have different, so many categories. like often, you know, we have like a category of toasts. So a toast might be a hundred words or a hundred, you know, 150 words. Usually the speeches are, speeches are getting shorter in general. 20 minutes used to be kind of the standard corporate speech. I think that’s now down to about 10 or 12. So speeches are getting shorter, but now there’s no, there’s no, there’s no.
length limit.
Dave Bricker (37:54)
Interesting. So another thing that has the David Murray stamp on it is the Executive Communications Council. So tell us a little bit about what that’s about.
David Murray (38:06)
Well, so executive communications is a term that was just that 15 or 20 years ago was was all that was was a euphemism for CEO speechwriter. That’s what that was. If you if you were executive communications director, you wrote speeches for the CEO. Since then.
And gradually over the years and in an accelerated way since CEOs started becoming more than just speech givers, they became social media creatures, they became video people, they’re sort of mobilized and animated in many different ways. A speechwriter now has to be much more than a speechwriter and an executive communication director has to be much more than a speechwriter. Your job is to…
And not just for the CEO, you’re taking, you know, in most of these companies, you’re taking all of the top management, all of the C -suite and senior VPs, and so figuring out what they should be talking about to what audiences, when and how. And that’s a much more complex thing than writing a speech for the National Manufacturing Association meeting for your CEO. So we’ve created a group, it’s about five years old now, of organizations.
corporations mostly, AARPs in there as well, that either, that really care about this, that really believe in it. There’s kind of two kinds of CEOs. Some CEOs think that executive communication is a duty. You know, I got invited to the meeting again this year. I gotta go. I gotta say something that sounds smart. Other CEOs and leaders think this is a strategic thing. I can move, I can make or break my company to one extent or another through my.
communications. Those are the companies that belong to this association, this little council. And it’s small. It’s only about 24 companies, 25 companies. And we want to keep it small because we want it to be intimate. We want these people to really be able to tell each other.
There’s secrets because there are secrets in this. Like if you’re in CEO communication, there’s stuff that you don’t that you go through and deal with that you don’t want the whole world to know about. So these people really trust each other and it’s a it’s a wonderful group and a lot of good, really good thinking comes out of it. And then we hold us. We take the ideas that come out of this and we hold a summit every year that that everybody in executive communication attends. It’s a virtual summit. So we share the wisdom of this group with the world, too.
Dave Bricker (40:32)
That’s fantastic. So it’s almost an executive mastermind in certain respects.
David Murray (40:37)
Yep. Yep. Yep.
Dave Bricker (40:40)
So we have Toastmasters, which focuses on presentation skills, and we have organizations like the National Speakers Association and CAPS, which focus more on the business of speaking and a bit on presentation skills. So where does the Professional Speechwriters Association fit into the Speaking Association ecosystem? Who should join and how do we connect all of these people who are interested in the art of oratory?
David Murray (41:09)
You know, it’s funny. I think you and I agree about this, that these two worlds, the speech writing world and the professional speakers world, they’re like England and the US. They’re two countries divided by a common language. what’s that? Yeah, and an ocean. But yeah, but it’s like, it is an ocean between us. And it shouldn’t be. We’re kind of trying to do the same stuff.
Dave Bricker (41:23)
and an ocean. Yes.
David Murray (41:34)
but it’s just sort of different cultures. I think professional speakers think of speech writers as sort of bookworms and eggheads maybe. And I did hear a bookworm eggheaded speech writer once say about a professional speaker, he’s written more books than he’s read. So there’s kind of a cultural gap, I think, between these two organizations.
There are some people who have crossed over, one or two people from the NSA world have crossed over and become big important people in our organization. One of them is a legendary speaking coach named Patricia Fripp, who some of your people might know. She’s a big personality in our group too. But not enough. I should be going to the NSA conference every few years and the head of the NSA should be coming to the PSA World Conference.
We’ve had conversations about that, we do occupy different, we have different purposes to some extent. Speech writers are serving these captains of industry and public speakers, professional speakers are doing their own thing. But I think we can really learn a lot from each other and I think we should.
Dave Bricker (42:46)
And I would imagine only because based on my own experience, I haven’t written a lot of speeches for other people, but I’ve helped a lot of other people write their speeches. And someone with that background might work with somebody who’s an aspiring professional speaker or even an active one to get into that narrative and help them flesh out some of the problems that like any other editor.
We need, I don’t care how good a writer you are, you need a good editor to get you out of your own way. And I think I see lots of potential for crossover between PSA and NSA and Toastmasters. A lot of speeches being written and delivered.
David Murray (43:29)
Agreed, agreed. as I was, you know, as we talked about with the example earlier with Jim Clapper, you know, it’s not really all about writing a text for somebody. It’s about helping that person find what their story is. And that’s a speech writing thing. And that’s what, and I think professional speakers are good at that, for doing that for themselves. And I bet they could provide a lot of wisdom to speech writers who are trying to do that for their bosses.
Dave Bricker (43:56)
Absolutely. So David, if one of our listeners wants to learn more about you, your books, the Professional Speechwriters Association, and these many other resources that you offer, how can they get in touch with you?
David Murray (44:10)
Well, most of the resources are at prorhetoric .com, prorhetoric one word .com. Maybe you can throw that in the show notes as well. And my personal site is writing-boots .com and that’s writing -boots .com. So if I’m writing about it or if I offer it, it’s on one of those two websites.
Dave Bricker (44:33)
Well, David Murray, thank you so much for being my guest on the Speakypedia Podcast.
David Murray (44:39)
It was great to be here. This was a fantastic conversation and we proved that we can really, that these two worlds can talk to each other and agree on things.
Dave Bricker (44:49)
I agree completely. So I’m Dave Bricker inviting you to explore the world’s most comprehensive resource for speakers and storytellers at www .speakipedia .com. If you’re watching this on social media video, please love, subscribe and share your comments. And if you’re listening to the podcast, keep your hands on the wheel, stay safe and I’ll see you on the next episode of Speakipedia Media.
