Olivia Fox Cabane

speaker

140 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 23 Jul

Olivia Fox Cabane’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Something You Should Know · The Science of Charisma & Why Midlife Is Better Than Everyone Thinks · 23 Jul 2026 podcast

Some studies say up to 80% of adult people experience it at some point or another and really detach from it as something that, you know what, it happens to everyone.

So that's another myth I'm so glad you brought up.

You're right that extroversion is an advantage for certain forms of charisma, but introversion is an advantage for other forms.

So if you look at presence, power, and warmth, you kind of think of them like in chemistry, you need a certain amount to reach the bare minimum to get charisma.

After that, what changes is the kind of charisma you get depending on which of these is highest.

So for focus charisma, for example, the kind that Bill Gates or when I met Elon Musk about 10, 15 years ago, he was a fairly different person, I'll admit.

But at that point, he was absolutely charismatic, but in a very introverted, focused way.

And what that is, is highest on presence, second on power, and third on warmth.

It turns out that lowering the intonation, the intonation of your voice at the end of sentences, and frankly, even at sentence breaks, that is what conveys competence and authority.

And the faster and deeper the drop, the more authority you convey, the more power you convey.

So one of the myths that was debunked for me, I was one of the people who thought that lower voices are more charismatic, right?

Wrong.

When they studied Steve Jobs' voice, who apparently had one of the most charismatic voices, his voice was so high it occasionally went into the female register.

But he did have that fluctuation, and he did have those sentence drops, which are speaking as if it is a judge delivering a sentence.

The other one, if you tend to not pause enough,

Interestingly, being able to pause before you speak, it doesn't have to be super long, it doesn't have to go the full Obama length, but being able to take just a moment before you speak will tend to make people pay more attention.

So those are some of the quick ways to convey power.

What's really interesting is if you look at high status and low status humans, the higher status ones tend to pause not just between sentences, but even in sentence breaks.

Essentially, they're communicating that I am so damn confident in either who I am or what I'm saying that I am sure you will not dare interrupt me.

First of all, when you're in a conversation, anytime you feel that only half your mind is present and the other half is busy doing something else, immediately focus on your toes.

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