Okay.
All right.
All right, I think this is the audience we're going to get, so I want to just go ahead with
it.
I always record my own speeches in case they're of use later.
So it's a tip for you.
If you're ever doing a presentation and you're concerned because you have less people than
you'd hoped, you just record your own speech and it becomes a part of your portfolio or
a part of your own training tape.
So there's an actual advantage to it either way.
So for the 20 of you who decided to come here tonight, I appreciate that a lot.
My name is Jason Scott.
I am one of the organizers of Block Party.
I have a history fetish.
I'm very much into collecting history, historical artifacts, and computers.
And a side effect of that is that I found myself doing presentations for people.
I would go to places where they would say, could you come in and talk about your subject
of interest?
And I took to it like a fish to water, really enjoyed it.
And over the past decade and a half, I've probably done something on the order of 40
or 50 presentations, speeches, and that sort of thing.
And I come from a training background in performing arts.
I went to a school called Emerson College in Boston where I was a performer, I was a
radio person, I was a magazine editor, I was a bunch of things.
So I came from that background and there were things that we were taught as a matter of
course that are simply not taught in other locations, in other schools, in other places.
And people come up through different realms and find themselves on a stage talking to
people to various degrees of terror, misery, happiness, or whatever.
So I asked the organizers if perhaps the night before we went into another round of presentations
given at not a con, that I would have something that I could give just to give some people
some pointers.
So anybody who's a presenter here for this weekend, it's specifically for you, but anybody
else who's just kind of interested in some of the work that goes on behind the scenes
when you have a person up here, this speech will work for you as well.
So when I start this out, I thank you.
And the reason I thank you is because any presentation represents an investment of time
by people.
In fact, if you look at it even more mathematically, it's the investment of time by each person
in the room sitting for the period of time that you are talking times the number of people.
And that is a lot of time depending on your audience.
This is an investment that some people make lightly if they're young and less if they're
old.
We all know we're going to end up in the ground and to spend some of that time in a boring
or uninformative or unentertaining speech is a personal insult to me because you have
people who could be doing anything else and here they are with you.
So I initially always thank people for coming because of that.
So if that sounds a little weighty, I understand, but it's the weight I like to think about
these things.
The speech that you're going to get today is basically a technical presentation.
That is to say I'm giving you facts, but there's all sorts of presentations out there.
So when you say presentation, you could as well be saying writing or recording or anything
else.
It's a very, very general term.
And people will say, oh, I did a presentation without telling you more and it could be anything.
For instance, if you have a person who has an item and the whole purpose of why they're
up here is to show you the item, that's basically a demonstration.
They're basically going to show you this neat item that they've created and everything else
they say is primarily chowder.
It's primarily there just to make you feel like you're talking to somebody who knows
what they're talking about, but whatever one wants to see is the item.
This is especially the case if that has been promoted.
On the other hand, you might have somebody who has discovered something new or has a
knowledge of a certain subject and people are here because they want that person who
is an expert to give them a little bit of that expertise.
So they feel like they're part of that person's progress and they feel like they're going
to benefit from it.
Other times you have people who are here because of a requirement.
That is to say, for instance, they are paid by their company to go to a number of speeches.
At these speeches they have to take notes to take back to the company or the company
won't reimburse them for their expenses.
This audience is extremely tough because either they don't care or they really feel pressured
to write down what you're doing and if they don't find any meat there they feel like they're
just automatons who are really there because it's in a city that has something they want
to go to like a bar or an event or a party and they're just doing this to pass the time.
All of these are different audiences.
What we have here is a hacker con audience and hacker cons have an interesting history
because initially they were just large parties, parties put on by hackers in someone's backyard,
a bunch of people hanging out.
It was the newness of having people that you only knew online come spend time with you
in person.
That was the core reason to do it.
Now presentations as a medium, that is to say a person on stage giving you information
whether for their own needs or yours has been going on for many, many hundreds of years.
In this extreme formalized setting where there's a professional location that's designed that
today we're a hacker con, tomorrow we're a social media con, the day after, that's relatively
newer this more industrialized version.
You have to keep that in your mind when you're presenting that you're in a very artificial
space that isn't really designed for performing.
In a hacker con speech this starts to rise up really in the 1990s.
There's a few 1980s versions but what it came down to was instead of having these in people's
backyards we could have them in hotels because people could have good rooms then.
Then we could have a communion space where people give ideas.
A lot of times those could be very loose because it was the pure joy of being able to be in
front of people and talk to them about what you were doing.
That was more than enough for a presenter.
In other vocations that's not the case.
A presenter will expect to be paid or have their travel expenses reimbursed.
They will be given access to an unbelievably expensive location like say the TED speeches
which are thousands of dollars to attend.
Simply by being able to attend for free you've actually saved thousands of dollars.
In some ways you can still be paid that way.
Hacker cons by their very nature don't make the money that other cons do.
They don't tend towards them.
As a result the people who presented hacker cons are primarily people who are going to
get in for free as their primary method of payment.
This is critical to understand.
This means that the person who's up here may or may not be up here because they want to
be but may be up here because they have to be.
I tell you that if you've ever been through a speech where the person up here wants to
be here less than you it is excruciating because there's no planning, there's no effort to
really get things out and they rely solely on their general knowledge froth to kind of
give things to you.
Obviously if a person is so famous or has shown themselves to be of such quality that
just being near them is kind of enjoyable that sometimes is a great time and there are
certainly people who give speeches that way.
But there's a lot of convention space that's taken up now by people who are presenting
things that they did at school or have kind of half remixed things they read online in
the past couple of months and that they're mostly motivated to finish the speech and
get on to being an attendee.
Motivation is one of the most important things that I want to get along to you.
The question that I always ask in any kind of an endeavor that I do is why?
Why are you here?
Why am I here?
Why would people want to come to this?
Why would I speak about this versus anything else?
Tomorrow I'm giving a presentation on Mario 64.
I had a number of subjects I could have gone through.
Part of it is because not a con does not pay me and part of it was because I was kind of
intrigued by this very unusual idea.
So I tend to use not a con as a place to do very experimental speeches.
I did one speech where I never left a chair.
I did one speech where the person who was presenting it was dead.
I presented a few other interesting experiments to simply try them out and see what would
go on.
I put effort into them but they were experimental.
Same thing with tomorrow.
I'm giving a speech where I think that Mario 64 is one of the most important events in
computing history and try to then take that thesis and demonstrate it both through the
game and citing history.
This may or may not be interesting but I think that it will be.
And so the people who come who are there to see a Super Mario speech and wonder about
this part of their history will get something out of it, will be informed, will also perhaps
learn something they didn't.
So that's where I work from.
When a person works on a speech say about a project that they're working on, the reason
they're doing it is because they either want more information from people or they're really
proud of it or they simply think that it can't hurt.
The audience may be here simply because there's another event happening in the room before
and they've stayed or there's a room event afterwards that's so popular that by staying
in the room and the convention has a policy of that, they don't clear the room.
Some conventions because of the mass of people will clear the room and so you don't have
this case but sometimes people are here simply because they've got nowhere else to go and
those people are only going to peripherally spend time with your speech.
In fact they're going to probably be your worst critics because they're going to concentrate
on the parts that a lot of people don't.
Why is Jason walking back and forth?
Why is he wearing that funny god damn hat?
What's up with the sideburns?
Why does he look formal?
Why isn't there any sort of a PowerPoint presentation?
Why are the lights up?
They're looking at the whole zeitgeist of your performance and that's fine with me who
might spend some time preparing for that but other people what they might not realize is
they're actually doing two presentations.
They're doing the presentation over here on this thing coming across this way and they're
putting it on a laptop and looking down at their laptop while this event goes on over
here on this projector and they may not have spent any time understanding the room and
so what people see out there is an extremely unhappy guy aimed down this way doing this
looking up a little bit and you can get away with that for a while because the person may
be doing something so brilliant everyone wants to see it but for a lot of people it ends
up becoming a rote reading of a series of hard to read slides to an indifferent audience
and while that's fine if your entire reason for being there is to get through the hour
I really do contend that a modicum of work and preparation will make your speech that
much better.
The audience location size feeds into it.
I always make a point when I can of walking in the room when I come into a speech so if
I know it's going to be here today the first thing I do when I get here is try to figure
out which room am I going to speak in and I walk into the room and I know immediately
if there's going to be problems.
Is there going to be sunlight coming through here?
Are there lights that are adequate to show me?
Will my connection work out?
Can I put my laptop on right now and make sure that it's working?
Can I spend that time, that 20 minutes beforehand, maybe a day beforehand and make sure everything
that I present here is what's going to work?
A lot of people don't.
They walk in cold and very few people can walk in cold.
You've got to have an unbelievably well prepared speech to walk in cold where you expect them
to walk up to that microphone and it's going to work and you slam in and you're going.
If you watch most of the professionals either they have someone before them who does it
or they themselves have done it hours beforehand.
When a person pulls a rabbit out of a hat people go wow but they don't understand.
You had to hide the bunny there hours beforehand.
So hiding the bunny is critical.
You want to work on all your hard stuff beforehand.
If you find out at the same time that the audience does that something doesn't work
it reflects poorly on you and the audience loses you.
I also try to find out how many people I'm speaking to.
I have a talent for speaking in front of groups of people.
I know that there's a statistic out there that most people are more afraid of public
speaking than death.
First of all I don't agree but we'll say it's probably third or fourth that they're
afraid of public speaking and somewhere up there is you die.
But when a person is public speaking they may or may not be able to look at this room
as a performance space.
They may look at it as an audition.
In other words they look at this audience and they say oh God all these people are evaluating
me and what am I going to do?
And it reflects in the body language.
Whereas I'm very comfortable with it.
I ran for the school presidency in high school knowing full well I wouldn't win simply for
the joy of the fact that the entire school had to listen to me for ten minutes for my
speech and I had an awesome time.
I just got up and just started making them do the wave and I proposed digital clocks
in the classrooms and I demanded an on campus McDonald's and I just did all these wonderful
things.
This was in 11th grade.
In 12th grade I had my ass kicked.
Absolutely kicked.
I went to run for it again because what the heck it was fun last time.
And there was a kid who presented before me.
His name was David Mechner.
David Mechner's brother is Jordan Mechner who created Prince of Persia and the Mechner
family was a part of my high school.
David also ran on a joke ticket.
David's platform was brilliant.
It was satirical.
It was subtle.
Here was his platform.
Hello students.
I know that most of you fear coming back to your school in the years hence when you're
older and feeling nostalgic and you find that it's all changed.
Everything's different.
Everything is not where you remember it and you no longer feel connected to our wonderful
Horace Greeley High School.
I promise you as school president that I will change nothing.
I will enact no actions.
I will commit no crimes against the memory of this place by doing anything.
By voting for me you vote for nothing.
It was brilliant.
I was on after him.
What could I do?
And the answer was I nosedived.
Totally nosedived.
Got up there.
Got nervous.
But the nervousness wasn't that I was facing 1200 people.
The nervousness was I was facing 1200 people with nothing.
That's the fear for me.
My fear is not speaking in front of people.
It's speaking in front of people and realizing I am absorbing all that wonderful time, all
that living from people for nothing.
And all they're going to remember was I was a douche for 10 minutes.
However, I have never forgotten that and that has been over 20 years ago.
And I never walked up on stage without at least having something in my back pocket to
make sure that I could present something cohesive to some extent as opposed to wing it.
A similar lesson happened to me just a few years ago where I presented at OSCON, the
open source convention in Portland, where it wasn't quite portrayed to me what I was
going to be presenting for.
I was only presenting a room of this size.
I kind of knew that.
But unfortunately I couldn't see the room.
But they did a very brilliant thing which we've just done a version of here.
They would have a remix keynote every morning.
So for one hour, five people would present 10 minute speeches from random points in the
day.
And you would show up at 9 o'clock and from 9 to 10 you would get to sit through essentially
five reduced speeches.
This would perhaps, in a place that had multiple tracks, five tracks, you might say, oh my
goodness that boringly titled person is actually fascinating.
I want to know more about that guy.
It was a wonderful idea for cross pollination because it's so easy to just browse these
summaries of a person's talk and make a judgment and to see the person anyway.
The thing was this remix was to the entire convening body of the entire convention.
I had assumed I was going to do a 40 person speech.
And when I walked into the back of the room I learned a little thing which was any room
that requires seven projectors to project to the audience is fucking huge.
And there were 3700 people there.
The largest speech I'd ever been at.
And I hadn't prepared for it.
Because I had been planning to give a reduced version of my current speech.
And wing it.
Because I was under the impression it was just kind of a short coffee clutch interview.
Now bear in mind this was something to the level that each speaker was assigned three
people for this.
We each had three people who would come up to us by the side, prepare us, wire us up,
get us ready.
This was the big leagues.
This was my chance to shine.
And I blew it.
Because I got up there and I did okay.
I can wing like anybody else.
I have a certain presence and that presence comes across to an audience and I can expand
it.
But a 3500 person audience is not the same entity.
I can hear you laugh.
I can figure out which one of you is responding this way.
I can look at your body language in this room right now and see which of you are here because
you want to and which ones you don't.
I study my audience.
It's part of why the lights are on.
But in a 3500 person audience any emotion you blow out to there will just be absorbed.
This is a problem musicians have.
You perform to a stadium.
There's nothing.
You do something incredible and they just take it.
They're this thriving mass of humanity that could not care less about you or it feels
like that.
And when they do get angry or they do get excited you're just affected by it.
So when I would make a joke my joke would literally ripple through the audience and
bring it back.
And I feel always that I blew it.
People who might watch it might go, well you seemed okay.
You seemed like you were together.
I'm like yeah but I wasn't on top of it.
Being on top of the game.
Being on top of things.
That's why I do it.
I want this to be better.
I want the audience to be better for when I speak and I want to be better at the end
of when I speak.
If I fail failure is fine.
Failure is a start.
Failure is your example to yourself of what not to do later.
If you treat everything as the end all be all then you will be in a constant state of
misery and that's in life in general.
If your first demo sucks it sucks.
If your first article you get published in a paper is boring and somebody points out
a central error in the thesis that's not the end of your writing career.
That's the beginning of your writing career.
Similarly when you give a speech it pays to look at the recordings of yourself.
To look at your presentation style.
To say to yourself do I even want to watch this?
If you can't watch yourself people might have a little bit of displeasure seeing their
body language from the external but if you can't even turn it to the audio and listen
to yourself then I don't know how you expected the audience to sit through it without a laptop
and a PBA for them to twitter how much you suck.
You're going to end up being a screen saver at the top of the stage.
You're the thing kind of running that's kind of amusing and an automaton that's not really
interesting and boy when do we get to three o'clock.
So in terms of audiences besides this one which I said was a hackathon audience you
have a whole division of them.
You have an academic audience.
An academic audience is there because they're ostensibly trying to learn things from each
other so their speeches tend to be very info dense.
They tend to have a lot of information in them and the people who are there are being
given it.
I happen to think that's terribly and utterly inefficient and a real waste and primarily
a way for people to drink and see each other which means I think that they should be really
short introduction speeches.
We're so lucky now in 2009 that your speech can be the front end the beautiful polished
front end to a complete idea set on a website.
You can create all of your ideas all of your examples all of your wonderful endless boring
ass stories and put them all on your website where people can browse them and read them
at their own leisure and that this 40 minute 50 minute presentation can be a really well
rehearsed really exciting idea set for what's going to come later.
It's just such an opportunity that we have now.
Previously you couldn't do that.
In the 1800s during the great exposition you basically had to show your wares and try to
convince people walking by that they should get this.
Not much more than a Broadway barker.
But now we have so much wonderful information going on and so much of a wonderful network
set up.
It's so much more of an opportunity.
So for me I think of this all as just this exciting ability and in an academic situation
you're trying to push into the audience as much of a lecture as possible and they're
like a class that you're never going to get again.
So your students have assembled you're going to teach them and they're never going to come
back and you're never going to be able to really test them.
And so it's OK but not great.
You have an indifferent audience.
Indifferent audiences and audience that's there because they have to be or because something's
coming afterwards or before.
They're not really there for you and you have to be there at least for yourself because
they'll pick up on that.
A person who's there because they are indifferent will translate even worse to an indifferent
audience.
You have chums and buddies.
People who are here where you're at a speech and there's 20 people and eight of them know
you personally.
I've given enough speeches that I have people come to the speeches on the strength of my
name and that's fine but I don't do it for them.
I do different kinds of speeches and so like a performance they go oh that Jason Scott
speech sucked.
Oh that one was pretty good.
Oh it was really much better before the band broke up.
And that's a different kind of audience too and the problem, the danger is that you can
end up playing to them.
You have people in the audience you know, they're your buddies and then you just start
using language, you use terms, you use all sorts of shortcuts because your buddies are
there and you don't want them to sit through the basics.
And so the rest of your audience feels like they've assembled to a family gathering that
they're not a part of.
Huge pitfall.
And then there's what I call an incestual audience.
An incestual audience will be where other people who are presenting before or after
you are in the audience.
In other words you have a round table set up where I'm up here speaking but all that
you're really here for is to speak.
It's got no real paradigm for people interacting with each other.
Each of you are here because it's going to be your turn and you're going to come up and
say okay and so on and some of you might take pointers.
At that point you're pretty much playing to this camera.
You're playing to do the presentation or to put an extra line on your resume to say you
gave a presentation at a convention.
Much more effective than saying convention than hacker convention.
And then there's a required speech and by that I mean a speech where you are a person
who has to give these speeches or they're an audience that has to attend your speech.
For instance Dan Kaminsky who is a hit on the hacker circuit gives talks that are essentially
requirements.
In other words their audience is going to be there because their employers have said
oh if you've got to go you've got to attend Dan Kaminsky's speech.
And you sit into Dan Kaminsky's speech and you get his ramblings which have all sorts
of information in them but are all kind of jumbled and then you've done it.
Check it off and you move on.
That's a whole different audience in its own.
You're going to see all sorts of those kind of speeches this weekend.
Like I said how many of you are presenting at this thing this year?
So that's one, two, three, four, five, six, seven out of the twenty.
So you are the people who I want.
I know one or two of you are first times for this.
I know that you didn't expect to walk into this room for my speech and make it sound
like you were being prepared for a skydive.
But I'm not trying to give that impression.
I'm not saying and if you fuck it up you are screwed.
Not a con does not appreciate an unforthright dishonorable presentation.
No actually we absorb them.
We love them.
But I want it that you don't just think of the way things are done here or whatever as
being the only way to do it.
And I also sometimes run into people who again they think of the speech as a requirement
to get in free, very mercenary or they think of it as I have to get all this information
out in forty minutes but nobody will ever understand everything I'm trying to say here.
And then of course there's all the Alexander Technique performance issues which I'm of
course parodying here.
The Alexander Technique is a school of learning that breaks down how your body language performs.
I have gout, I have arthritis so I walk with a certain kind of gait and I've hunched my
shoulders a certain way over the years and I've got a tendency to lean down and I've
got a number of flaws in my presentation style which I sometimes fight and sometimes forget
in the heat of the moment.
All of these are messages to the audience whether a person wants to admit it or not.
If a person can't look at you while he's talking it gives the impression that they don't want
to deal with you or they can't deal with you.
If a person constantly looks around a lot it almost starts to give kind of a bizarre
vibe because it's like what are you doing?
Why are you trying to sell this?
But then you have people who will do kind of a half thing where they're here and they're
doing something and they're like okay wait wait wait and they're performing an awesome
show to these patterns.
And these patterns are getting an awesome show and if you were to lie down and be like
this you'd get a great show from the guy.
You would have all of the dynamism that you would expect from a show.
But all of these are things that places like Alexander Technique which if you now that
I've said that word to you you could look it up.
It's basically the person sits with you and says you've done this wrong, you've done this
wrong, you've done this wrong.
Now try to hold your arm this way, now try to do this and you learn the language that
your body gives and it's very effective for presentations and picking up the opposite
sex.
It's a case of looking at the full message, like I said that second message, that second
presentation that you're given.
I'm a big fan of something I call deeds not words.
If you have somebody who just tells you about stuff but doesn't show you anything, in other
words I'm giving a presentation about giving a presentation in which I'm showing you how
I give a presentation and knock it down.
I'm trying to show you something, I'm trying to give you something that I couldn't give
if I just wrote out a couple paragraphs on some page.
If I said oh yeah you should engage the audience with no impression of what that means for
me.
I'm a certain style and I think that's the other thing to pull away from.
I'm a certain style.
I'm a bombastic person.
I don't need amplification.
I don't need to have a microphone in my face.
I don't like PowerPoint.
I don't like podiums.
I like being here in front of you.
This is a certain kind of person who does that.
Usually they want you to give them all of your money and then die because they're trying
to emotionally pull you in to what's going on.
I happen to be a rather emotional person so I happen to use this.
If you're not an emotional person the whole point of the podium is to protect your body.
Your nads are completely protected from the audience.
They can't get it with their magic audience race.
Now you are a cyborg, a half machine, half person entity able to present a tron to the
audience.
That's fine.
If you're not comfortable being out there or you think it's kind of weird or you think
you're blocking the screen this is fine.
Your voice which is very quiet will be amplified so you'll say my god this BIOS is amazing
to watch.
People will go wow he's really into it.
This is all coded messages and part of the people.
Are you doing that on purpose?
No?
Awesome.
That's the point.
I'm just standing here and it's blocking in and out.
I don't have that problem.
Next person here will have that problem.
When something goes wrong with your presentation you can really tell the character of a presenter
how comfortable they are with the material because if that stops working what happens?
Have they lost their one and only crutch?
What if their projector goes out?
Can they still be engaging?
What happens if everything is stripped down?
What if the lights don't work?
What if we're not here?
At what point do you say okay we can't do this anymore?
There's no such level for me.
Good solid radon gas would do it I think.
If there's no gas in the audience that would probably stop me dead.
But other than that I can just keep going because the material doesn't require it.
Some material requires it and I understand that.
But if you are so dependent on your material that there's no you the audience will notice
that and the question they'll ask again internally subconsciously is why?
Why am I here?
Why is this guy talking?
Why aren't I getting drunk?
Because they're asking themselves fundamental questions you forgot to ask.
So at the end of the day the purpose of a presentation is to inform, entertain, or pass
time.
I happen to think the past time one is so great and I've spent a lot of time passing
time through conventions.
And when you work on your presentations you say to yourself am I doing this to inform?
Am I doing it to entertain?
Am I doing it to pass time?
Why am I doing it?
Am I just doing it because I need to get through?
As you progress through the various levels to get to the end level boss of presentations
which is basically president you end up having different motivations.
You end up having people who will pay you.
I've been flown to Europe to speak.
I've been paid in products or honorariums or I've been brought in to speak and I'm
sitting next to the guy who invented hypertext or a version of it or I'm having dinner with
this guy or I'm having dinner at one point I had dinner in a wonderful old club in England
that had been there for hundreds of years that they took me on a tour.
At that point I didn't care how well the speech went because I had already won on a personal
level.
I mean if you get there and you're like I just met five of my greatest idols just by
being here.
Now on the other hand maybe that inspires you to be a really good speaker because now
you know these people are going to be there and you want to show them that you're worth
their time because you're taking time from them especially if you convince them to sit
in the room with you.
And so I think that we're going to have some pretty entertaining speeches here and I think
we're going to have some informative speeches and I also think we're going to have some
passing time speeches and if you're trying to improve yourself I say the best thing to
do is to stand back a little bit if you find quote unquote bored or disengaged and say
what are they doing wrong?
Why don't I like this speech?
What's wrong here?
Why?
What are they doing?
Are they doing anything wrong?
Sometimes they're not doing anything wrong.
The presenter Seth Hardy has a technique he uses which is he puts up a bottle of alcohol
and explains that he's going to drink from it for the entire con speech until he is drunk.
And what that does on one level is entertain but what it also does is it sets up a plot
line and it sets up a contest and I'm sure he doesn't think of it that way but it's
essentially a contest can he finish the speech before he falls over and he will provide drinks
to the audience members for answering good questions.
Instant engagement.
In other words even the most silly clowning around on a speech has its own purpose and
its own effects and so tomorrow it starts.
At noon we have the first of all presentations the welcome here and then we have a series
of speeches including my own tomorrow and then again on Saturday ending up with the
final presentation of prizes and goodbyes on Sundays and you will have an opportunity
to see this in action and you will have an opportunity to do it yourself in the case
of seven or eight of you assuming you don't run out of the building now.
And I look forward to seeing your approaches and I look forward to seeing some of what
I've said have an effect and I look forward to hearing what you have to say with me in
the position that you're in now and hopefully feeling that I too was given value, worth
and time.
Thank you very much.
Does anyone have any questions about this?
It comes to mind just to give a little bit of the back story.
I wrote this speech 20 minutes ago but 20 minutes before the start of it but that's
very misleading because I don't start thinking about it 20 minutes ago.
I compose pieces in my mind for months beforehand and then I quietly assemble the pieces and
say maybe this audience doesn't need this.
Maybe this audience needs to hear this.
In other words, I sit there and come up with it.
So after I do that, I create a small page.
Usually I didn't have a chance to do a revision.
This would normally be one 8.5 by 11 sheet of paper which has a series of words on them.
So it will simply say introverted, self-awareness, performance and all of them are touchstones
for me.
A lot of people don't like that approach.
You got to really know your subject to be comfortable with a series of nine words to
carry your lame ass through 45 minutes.
And that's fine.
A lot of people write outlines for themselves or, and this bothers me a lot, they use the
PowerPoint as their presentation.
I hate that.
I fucking hate that.
I hate it more than like watching my pets being killed because you're watching a person
who is sitting with you reading his own notes and it's an instant buzzkill, an instant disengagement.
Anyway, that's how I do it.
I don't suggest that for everyone.
That just happens to work for me.
It works for a few other people.
Other ways that people do it besides doing that is to have a series of notes for themselves
on their computer and not have a presentation.
Or they just friggin' wing it.
And some people can really get along with just winging it.
Not many.
I mean, you know, at that point they're a clown.
Anyway, any questions?
Yes?
Well, when you show people code, they're not going to be like, oh, I'm going to show you
this program.
Have you seen that and what do you think of that and what are your feelings about that?
Well, when you show people code, all you're doing is prove to them that you wrote code.
That's the entire point of information that's going to come from that.
In other words, I gave a presentation where I showed code on my twittering account, Saffington
the Cat, where I showed the script that generates Saffington.
And its purpose was just to go, I made a script and the script does this.
But every time you put something up on the screen, it's a message to the audience to
say, and you should read this.
But they can't read code.
Like, not if it's going to be, you know, 40 lines.
But if what you're really saying is, is like, we did this and with one small effect, we
got this great effect.
And you show like, you know, two lines.
And you're like, we were able to like just do this.
Then you've passed along to them, this is a small piece of information, it uses this
and it did this thing afterwards.
In other words, it's being used as a talisman.
A lot of people, we had some presentation here, one of you did it, I think, where somebody
put up something.
They put up a slide here that I counted, right?
It had 55 lines, and it was small as shit.
I mean, each thing was here, which was awesome on your laptop.
But as soon as you broadcast it, it just looks like big fuzzy crap.
And it's information, I mean, it's actual information of like, oh, here's this, this,
this, this, this.
And it looks good here, but it looks terrible on the screen because the audience just gets
hit with this cinder block.
And they just go, all right, you know, it's like showing somebody, you know, all the architecture
plans going, get it.
And they're like, yeah, you made architecture plans.
So code, if there's something that's unique about your code that you want to get across
to people, I would focus on the formulas or the very specific pieces.
But just to go, I wrote a big thing of code, unless there is an exception to this, to go,
I made all this code.
And then you immediately show the result of the code.
Then you could see that, right?
It's like, oh, look at all this code.
And then we finished our project.
And this is what the project looks like.
So a person goes, oh, look at that.
It's essentially like showing somebody a photograph of all these people assembling wood.
And then the next shot is a house.
You go like, oh, of course, you don't have to sit there and go like, God, what kind of
load bearing are they using?
What are they doing all this stuff over here?
Has anybody thought about the OSHA requirements?
All they go, oh, people made a house.
And it's much more effective.
If you want people to read the code, you make it on a website and make a big, fat link while
you're answering questions.
And when people go there, you go, I did this, I did this, and here's all the code.
Or if you don't want people to know about the code, you're essentially showing it to
them just for a moment to go like, yes, and we worked really hard on it, and we did this.
And that way, they get like, oh, I get it.
There was a lot of stuff.
That's my personal opinion.
I think that a lot of presentations think that they both underestimate and overestimate
their audience.
They underestimate that the audience will understand basic concepts.
Like, I'm on a computer.
A computer is a device that provides information.
And then a little bit later, they'll be like, here is a 80 by 25 block of text that I'm
going to show you for 20 seconds, and you will memorize it.
So you'll get my point three slides down.
So it can go either way.
So that's my take.
Did we just clap for you?
I'm answering questions, bitch.
See, he is what we call a heckler.
Now, various people have different ways of doing it.
A heckler.
Heckling is an integral part of not a heckler.
He is a staff member, right?
And that depends on the definition of staff.
If you're just having a seat.
Give me a moment, and I'll show you a staff member.
All right, there we go.
Anyway, so.
This is how they do it with hecklers.
I, yeah, I had anonymous heckle me at Raffle Thing, and my solution was to pull one of
them up on stage and kiss him.
And that was a much more effective way to knock them down.
It sure didn't work with me.
No, it never works with you.
Did somebody else have a question?
Yes.
How do you know if you're out too informed?
How do you know you have too much material, or how do you know you have too little?
How do you know you have too much or too little?
Besides running over or running short, which really doesn't help.
Well, it sort of does.
Okay, so.
It's a guideline.
In other words, people who walk into a speech.
We've had people here who have been on stage for a long time, and they've had people here
who have been on stage for a long time, and they've had people here who have been on stage
for a long time, and they've had people here who have been on stage for a long time, and
they've had people in the audience who have had the story and the example.
I think one of the most interesting things there is hard work, because it can
All right? And they'll say something which pulls the curtain up immediately that they're fully aware of this.
They'll say, yeah, that's kind of all I had to say about this thing, so if anyone wants to give me...
And their voices are always low.
When I have to do this, so if anyone wants to ask any questions, I can type it out.
Okay, no one does.
And they leave. That to me is just, you know, a huge insult.
I think it's a case of, like, you have some places that have a cultural expectation.
You know, things that were wild and willy here.
Very enjoyable, right?
You'll get somebody who's a drunk asshole in the back who's just screaming at you.
And it's kind of funny. And you've got to deal with it.
And you've got other places where the audience is just not paying attention to you.
They're not looking at you. They're twittering. They're doing laptop stuff.
And that's fine. You're all kind of sharing and experiencing.
They don't care how much you talk.
But if you find that your goal is to transfer some body of knowledge to people,
I honestly think that most speeches work better as pointers to bodies of knowledge.
If I go off on a 15-minute rant on the Alexander Technique,
I feel like I could go off on this whole thing and, you know,
three or four people are like, oh, it's kind of interesting.
And then the rest of the people are like, wow, this is not what I signed up for.
And so I listen to the audience, too.
This is also a weird thing that comes from my improv days
where I can feel an audience so that I can tell when they're starting to kind of lose it.
And sometimes I might be intentionally going further.
So I'm like, oh, what's going to happen now if I really push this one?
What are they going to do? Are they going to start to really slump?
Are they going to do this? You watch for people slumping.
But again, this comes after dozens of speeches.
You start to notice when people – like if you worked in radio,
after a while you don't have to look at the clock to do a 15-second presentation.
You start to feel uncomfortable.
You're like, oh, I think I'm buttoned up on 50 seconds. Oh, there we go. OK.
And you feel it. And similarly, you can say, oh, God, the audience is starting to feel like they're –
we're wrapping up here. Let's go. Fuck. When can I go? Right?
We're here. We're here. We're there about now.
I mean, it's about six or seven of you that need to go.
But you're wanting to see what the fuckhead is going to do at the top of the screen.
And that's fine. I can – you know, I'm not bothered by people leaving.
People do that all the time. And that's the thing. You can't let that kind of stuff –
you can't embarrass people for leaving. They've got to go to the bathroom.
They told their girlfriend they're going to go to 930. But they like you so much,
they want to at least hear 20 minutes of you.
And you're criticizing them for leaving early.
You never know what people's motivations are. You can't treat them like that.
They're not your toys. They're fun to play with, but they're not your toys.
In terms of information, when you have people who are trying to get across a lot,
I had Jerry Ellsworth last year speak about the creation of field-programmable gate arrays,
which is an unbelievably dense subject. She spent years learning it.
She's a professional. And she said, so should I give people basics?
I said no. Fuck them. Do a talk on stuff you've discovered.
Because it's too direct a subject. It's too much.
In other words, field-programmable gate arrays assumes all this stuff.
And for her to try to fit that in in four minutes beforehand will not benefit the people who know what gate arrays are.
And it won't benefit the people who don't know. They'll be like, oh, cool.
Once there was a rock and now we're going to learn about Zor. It's just too much.
And so I said, you know what? Do it so that you really push the people,
the cool stuff you learned way up where you are and do it. That's for her, right?
Now, the fat man gave a rambling poetic music-filled speech last year.
This is a man who has 25 years in the industry.
He's giving a keynote tomorrow to Games Development Convention and told them,
I had so much fun at Natacon that I want to just give the keynote and leave.
And so he's flying up tomorrow on my dime to get to this place so that he can give a speech with Jerry on Saturday.
His speech was a rambling music-filled piece. It was kind of went in all these different directions.
But this was a man who had such a pedigree. He did the music for Seventh Guest.
He's the first time there's somebody who had Red Book Audio on a video game.
This is a guy who's got the history. So you're there to hear him.
Doesn't matter what he says. Let's listen to him go.
And he had all sorts of cool kind of insights and things, but it was all jumbled up.
It was all very unusual. But it was a joy. It was a performance more than an information piece.
I'm trying to think of my other presenters and the other people who I dealt with.
I've had a few presenters who I've paid for. I've had them come here and they suck.
Full of knowledge. Terrible presentation.
But you take that risk. And they may or may not know that. I don't know if they do know that.
You know who I'm talking to. Who just, you know, because it's not their strong suit.
But their information was good. Whatever came out of their mealy-mouthed, poor presentation was accurate.
But it was not going to win over their audience because it was a very dull piece.
So I don't know. I think maybe, you know, audience is good for five, five to ten pieces of information.
If they're a good human audience. If there are crazy ass academic Google code bots, they're probably good for 15 to 20.
Some of them are going to sit there and write notes on everything. So yeah, they can do infinite stuff.
But now you are the world's worst fax machine.
That's what you are. You're putting out information and they're like...
You know, you're getting like 300 BPI there. I don't know, something around that.
Real sucking. No high speed. So, you know, back and forth. There's a whole bunch.
The reason I didn't just say five to seven is because it's all different.
It could be one really good piece of information, right?
Like the classic presentation is the script show where the one piece of information is I'm nude.
That's a one bit presentation, but awesome. Awesome. Look, I'll pay you now.
And other ones are like I am about to give you something. A good example is Andrew Wiles' speech where he was able to prove Fermat's theorem.
And it was a very long speech and he didn't complete it, which was, you know, Fermat's theorem had stood unproven for decades and decades.
I think a couple hundred years where he had just written something in a margin and written this little basic math thing.
And nobody had been able to prove it.
And a man named Andrew Wiles spent seven years doing nothing else but working mathematically out to figure out how to prove the theorem. And he ultimately did it.
There was a period when it looked like it wasn't quite accurate, but then he did it again.
You know, it looks like it might have a problem. No, it doesn't have a problem.
But for his presentation, he didn't tell people what he was going to do.
And everyone showed up and all the word was like, wow, Wiles is up to something.
Wiles has big news. Wiles is going to talk about it.
And the way he presented it was he started out with the basics and just moved out over, I think it was an hour and a half.
Moving up, moving up. And you're like, wait a second, I think he's going in the realm of Fermats and he's doing this.
And he hits up to the point where he's basically laid out both these pieces and they're just got it.
All you got to do is do one more equation and they click right in. And he got up to that point.
Guess what? I think it'll stop there for now.
That was a showman. He really took his seven years.
And it was a big friggin' deal. Songs were written about him.
He got in everything and that was how he presented his info. He didn't feel he had to complete it.
He just, you know, total, total pimp.
Any other questions?
Okay. Thank you very much for your time. I'm going to be around for the entire convention.
If you have any questions or anything like that.
And I'm running BlockParty so that's going to take a lot of my time. I hope some of you enter it.
Feel free to look at demoparty.us.
We also have a coders lounge. We actually have, due to something really weird, some free laptops to use.
We were given a pile of laptops so if you want to hack something out there and you don't have access, we can get it for you.
And the winner of the demo competition gets a $1,000 machine.
So it's worth it to you to take a shot at it. People have won more with less.
Thanks again for your time.