>> Anoop Gupta: Okay, good morning. Let’s start. My name is Anoop Gupta, and welcome to today’s
session on the art of stage presence. It’s wonderful to see so many people here early in the morning—
not very usual for this building at Microsoft Research. [Laughs] So there has to be something in there.
For most of us who’ve attended a lot of technology conferences, we know there’s not a high correlation
between technical brilliance and the presentation skills and the art of public speaking. So—you know—
James has a fix for us; certainly, that is what I’m hoping for, and I guess that’s why we have so many
people here today. So until I master the art, I want to keep the introduction short and hand the stage
over to James. You know, so James Whittaker is a distinguished engineer and evangelist at Microsoft;
his background spans government, academia, successful start-up and top leadership positions at key
companies; he’s shot … shipped products at IBM, Google, and Microsoft; he’s authored five awardwinning, best-selling technical books; he’s won best of show awards for his speaking across conferences
across the globe. James is passionate about public speaking and teaching public speaking. I loved a
quote from one of the recent articles about him where he says, “If I have a super power for Microsoft—
that can take advantage of—it is my stage presence. What you produce with software and other skills:
you can change the way people work and play, but with the power of words, you can change the way
people think, and that’s wonderful.” So perhaps—you know—Jim is best known for his blog post; his
most famous one was the one he did when he left Google in 2012, which got one million hits on the very
first day it was posted. So please give a warm welcome to James Whittaker. [applause]
>> James Whittaker: Thank you, Anoop. So you have an idea; there’s some new feature that you need
to propose or you think would be great for your product; or maybe you even have an idea for a new
product that will change the world or help your company compete more fiercely with its competitors. I
don’t care how good you think your idea is, if you can’t explain it—if you can’t get that idea into
someone else’s head—it’s really not a good idea. If you can’t explain it, no one else is going to get
excited about it, and if no one else gets excited about it, the world’s not going to adopt it, so your worldchanging idea dies on the vine. How many times is this ha … played out over and over and over on this
planet? The best idea doesn’t always win; in fact, it’s often the idea that’s best presented that wins.
We’re going to talk about this today, and we’re going to figure this out.
Here’s a guy who presented some ideas—generally considered the best president of modern times—
John F Kennedy. Now, did he have the best legislative agenda? Did he pass the most just laws? Did he
understand the American people more than anybody else? Who knows? But he got us to think
differently about being an American; he got us to ask not what our country could do for us, but what we
could do for it. How many other presidents have had a lot of luck with that one? He made us believe in
moon shaws; [?] he inspired a generation of little boys and little girls—we’re all here now—to study
math, and science, and technology. He has a super power; his super power isn’t his ideas; his super
power is his stage presence.
Here’s another man with that same super power, Martin Luther King. How many civil rights leaders did
we have in the nineteen sixties giving fiery speeches on behalf of their race? How many of them were
standing up and inciting black people across the world to demand freedom? How many of ‘em actually
got that idea into white people’s head? How many ti … people got that idea into laws and into the way
society works today? Only one—only Martin Luther King—because he has a super power, and that
super power is stage presence.
Here’s another man with a super power who needed to counter a Adolf Hitler, who also possesses this
oratory super power. Adolf Hitler, with the power of his words—with the power of his stage presence—
incited a nation to a world war, and this man stood alone in stopping him. He was the one that stood up
and kept the British people—their minds and their souls—into the war; he said, “We shall never
surrender.” None of the other world leaders said that. He said, “We will fight them on the beaches; we
will fight them in the villages; we will fight them in the fields. We shall never surrender,” and the British
people, who were probably already beaten, didn’t surrender; they stayed in; the Americans joined
them; the Russians switched sides; and we live in a world today that’s different because of Winston
Churchill and his super power.
And finally—I know we’re at Microsoft; you might not like this one so much—[laughter] how many CEOs
attempted to usher in the mobile era with their ideas? Palm had it; BlackBerry had it; Microsoft had it;
we all had devices that would run apps, and play music, and send text, and make phone calls. How
many of us ushered in an entire era with those ideas? None of us; only Apple, because of the power of
Steve Jobs, the stories he told. He didn’t just tell us what that thing would do; he made us want it; he
changed the way we thought about these machines we carry around in our pocket, because he has a
super power—storytelling, stage presence: they’re super powers. They’re bigger, and oftentimes,
greater than the idea that they support—the idea that they present—because without them, the idea
would be meaningless; without them, the idea wouldn’t change anything. I don’t care if you want to
change the world or if you want to change your small corner of the world—both of them are very
admirable goals—you’re not going to do it with the power of your ideas alone; you’re going to do it with
the power of your storytelling and the power of your stage presence, and today, in this room for the
next three hours—yeah, we’ll take a break in between, I promise—for the next three hours, we are
going to take this storytelling—this stage presence concept—and we’re gonna hold it in our hands, and
we’re gonna pick it apart, and we’re going to understand how we—me and you—can adopt this super
power for our very own. Are you ready for this? Let’s begin.
Okay. You’ve just learned an important lesson about stage presence, and that important lessons is that
you have to start strong. When I had my hat on, I am in presentation mode, and I’m getting inside your
head, and I’m using oratory instruments, and I’m using storytelling techniques to try to make you
interested, keep you interested, keep you intrigued, and to make you want to learn this. When I have
my hat off, I’m teaching—I’m in teaching mode—if you want to ask a question, go ahead, ask a
question—this is being recorded; try to keep ‘em quick, maybe clarifying questions, and then we’ll go
really deep at the end. So I’m a storyteller; I’m a teacher—that’s how it’s gonna work. So let’s begin to
pick this thing apart. Here is the first thing you need to know about stage presence: start strong—if you
don’t, you may lose them before you even get to your main point. Now, let’s talk about this start strong
for a minute—in fact, we’re gonna talk about this for about a half an hour, because that’s how
important it is. First thing you need to understand about a presentation is I want that first line out of
your mouth to be impactful and memorable; I want you to work really hard on just the first line out of
your mouth, because here’s what’s happening: you’ve got somewhere between one or two minutes that
… the brain researchers will tell you that people are ready to listen to you for two minutes—they’re
ready to give you two minutes. That research was done in 2008; I think it’s old; people’s attention span
has gotten smaller; our distraction has gotten greater. Thirty seconds: I want that first line to be
impactful, and I want that first thirty seconds to make people want to stick around to hear your
message, because that’s when you have ‘em. They will grant you that; that will grant you your … their
undivided attention for about thirty seconds—it’s up to you to screw it up. Don’t screw it up. There’s
plenty of seats down here, front; I promise the spitting thing is almost under control [laughter]—by the
way, that was audience interaction; we’re gonna talk about that a little bit later. First thirty seconds,
you can’t squander that; they’re not gonna give it to you again, and if you lose it in the first thirty
seconds, it’s done; they’re gonna start reading their e-mail; they’re gonna start thinking about
something else; they’re gonna glance down at their phone—you’ve lost them; you’re not gonna get
them back. First line out of your mouth, make it memorable; first thirty seconds, make sure you’ve done
something to keep their attention—we’re gonna talk about that—and then finally, say it well. I’m gonna
teach you sixteen oratory instruments today—sixteen storytelling techniques—that will help you make
it interesting. I already used some—I used several just in my opening—and I used ‘em on purpose; I’m
already inside your head. Perhaps your conscious mind isn’t even aware of it, but your subconscious is,
‘cause I have done things that I know that work. Brain science says it works; storytelling research says it
works; and I’ve got thirty years of practice doing this—I know these things work, and I’m gonna talk
about those. I’m gonna plant some ideas in your head, and then I’m going to pull them out and let you
know they’re there so that you can embrace ‘em. So start strong.
Now, let’s keep on this same subject. A strong start happens on purpose. If you have some great idea—
“Oh, this is so good. Everybody’s gonna love my research, because I’m so freakin’ smart. They’re just
going to appreciate my magnificence.” No, they’re not; they’re going to appreciate your idea, and
they’re only going to appreciate your idea if it’s well presented, and if you don’t have a full grasp on
exactly what you want your audience to understand, they’re not gonna be able to grasp it either. So
many times, I see speakers step up, and they start their talk, and I realize: you didn’t really think through
this start; you have an idea, but you’re not even sure how to state it clearly; you’re just picking around;
you made a bunch of slides, and now, you’re just going through your slides. This is awful; this is death
by PowerPoint; please make it stop. You need to be really fully aware of your opening, and it has to be
on purpose. Everything you say in the first thirty seconds needs to be scripted; it needs to be
choreographed; after that, fine, you can wing it, because you’ve got the audience’s attention; they want
to listen to you they’re on your side; they’re rooting for you. That’s what you want, and once you get
that—once you get the audience like, “Ah, this is something I want”—you’re good. Then you can
stammer; then you can make mistakes; then you can say, “Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait, I forgot this one
thing; I want to go back to it.” Alright? Because they will give you that.
Alright, so let’s talk about the purposes. The first is inspire, and this is what I tried to do. This … my
opening—wait—attempted to be inspirational. There’s—by the way—there’s four goals, and I want you
to pick one; this is one of ‘em. Pick one of these goals, and come up with an opening that fulfills it. This
is exactly what I tried to do; I tried to inspire you to want to be better presenters; I tried to inspire you
that: “Hey, I can make my idea pop,” because I’m gonna bet—particularly, since this is an … a Microsoft
Research building—that many of you all have had great ideas that no one else has really grasped. I’m
counting on some people in this audience like, “They chose this way; I was promoting this way. Why
didn’t they choose my idea?” And we made a connection because of that. There’s more oratory
instruments I’m gonna talk about in a bit, but it … but this works, by the way.
For … let me present this instead of teaching it; here we go. For centuries—really, throughout the entire
history of mankind—this is the way we learn: sitting around the campfire, telling stories. It was a story
teller that was the center of culture, that was the center of tradition, that was the savior of our youth,
right? This is the way we taught our young. Ha … don’t … when the bushes are rustling like that, don’t
go there; you might get eaten, right? And the people who didn’t listen to the stories got eaten, couldn’t
procreate, died off. The people who listened to the stories grew to make sure that their DNA got passed
to the next generation. We have literally evolved as storytelling animals—this is what we want. Your
tee … your kids, soon as they grow up to talk, they ask for a story. We are storytelling people; we are
story listeners; and this is the way that we learn. And we still do that now; we don’t learn by a list of
features. How do you learn that Windows Phone is better than the iPhone? By the way, that’s called
branding; I just kind of slipped that in there—right—did you see how I did that? Alright? Probably the
people watching on video didn’t even notice it, and they’ll all running out and buying Windows phones.
I bet you that will happen. [laughter] We don’t learn from a feature list; we don’t learn from instruction;
we learn from the power of the story, and that’s what we’re going to do today. We’re going to learn to
be these great orators, to be these creators of tradition, to be these creators of culture—that’s what
we’re going to do today. So an inspiration is one of the ways that you can open up a talk to make it
really pop. The second is simply to say something interesting like this: [video] … he said, “I got thrown
out of a bar in New York City”—a … ten or eleven words, three or four seconds, that’s it. That’s
interesting isn’t it? Don’t you want to know why he got thrown out of the bar in New York City? There’s
got to be a story there. How many times do we say that to ourselves as human beings: “Oh, this is
gonna be a good story. Oh, there’s got to be a story behind this.” Well, there’s a story behind it. Make
them interested; say something in the first thirty seconds that makes them want to stay to hear more.
Now, related to interest is this next one that I call intrigue, and intrigue, what we want to is we want to
say something controversial; we want to say something counterintuitive; we want to say something
profound. Here’s an example of a intriguing opening; listen to this: [video] “I got to be honest—I’m
sorry—I’d much rather have AIDS than a baby. [laughter]” “I’d much rather have AIDS than a baby,” Don
Glover says. You’ve got to be kidding me. He took something that we generally congratulate people
for—having a baby—and something that you never talk about if you have it—right, having AIDS—and he
did … not only equated them, he said AIDS is better. It’s counterintuitive, right? It’s a little bit profound.
We want to know more. That’s an intriguing opening.
And finally, the last form of an opening is really the hardest one to do, and unfortunately, it’s one of the
ones that it—particularly, it’s Microsoft, and particularly, it’s cooperate workers and entrepreneurs—
we’re always trying to inform someone of our idea, inform someone what our product does, inform
someone why our product is better. We do this over and over: this is why Azure is better that AWS; this
is why it would be a big mistake to leave Google docs and … leave Office for Google docs, right? These
sorts of things. We give these a lot, so I’m gonna spend a little bit of time talking about informational
time of openings for inform talks. Now, there’s four ways to do informational openings, and the first is
basically: you give a summary of your entire talk. Now, whether you end up giving this opening or not, I
want you to do this: every time you have a talk, I want you to summarize the whole thing in thirty
seconds or less—it’s good for you to be able to do this, even if you don’t choose this type … style
opening, ‘cause if you can’t summarize your talk in thirty seconds or less, you’re probably saying too
much, or you really don’t understand the idea. You probably understand the idea from a detail point of
view, but you don’t understand it from a conceptual point of view, and it’s the conceptual story that’s
going to win your audience, not the detailed story. So summarize your entire talk in thirty seconds or
less, and here’s how I would do it if I was giving an informational summary opening for stage presence.
Stage presence has four parts. First, start strong; you have thirty seconds in order to get your audience
interested in enough to hear the rest—thirty seconds. We are going to spend a great deal of time on
that first thirty seconds. The second part of stage presence is having something to say, and I mean have
some thing to say, not a whole bunch of things, one related … one concept or a series of related
concepts that you can tie together. Have some thing to say. Third, saying it well—using oratory
instruments, using story techniques to make that some thing come alive, and then finally, the bookend
for a strong start is a strong ending—I call it sticking the landing. Stick the landing: take that one
concept that you want your audience to remember, jam it into their head, and then stop; the
presentation is over. So here we are; stage presence and the journey starts now.
So that would be how I did that opening—I didn’t time it; I don’t know if it was thirty seconds. Brain
scientists give me two minutes to deliver the whole thing, but the first thirty seconds have to be
interesting. So that’s a summary opening.
The second type of inform opening is: give them an example—give them a complete worked example. I
used to give computer security talks all the time; here is some code that’s insecure; we’re gonna show
you how to fix it. I gave software testing talks all the time; here is some with code with no tests; here’s
that same code with tests—I’m gonna show you how to do that. Right? Give them a completely worked
example, but at a very high level. So for stage presence, this is exactly what I did to you guys: I gave an
example—I started a talk on stage presence by demonstrating stage presence. I started a talk on how to
give a good talk by giving a little bit of a good talk, giving a very—what I think—was a very strong
opening. So give them a fully-worked example, leave out all the details—that’s what the talk is for—but
that example is gonna make them: “Hey, I want to know more about this. That was very interesting. I
would like to be able to do that,” and then they’re yours.
The third type of an informed opening is to give them a picture of the end game. Tell them, “When you
walk out of that door at the end of this talk, this is the stuff that you’re going to know”—just get right to
it. By the way, if you can’t say this—if you can’t come up with a good end game—you might not should
give your talk at all; maybe you should just shut up—right—they might have a better use of their time,
‘cause no one appreciates having their time wasted, and you can only waste someone’s time once,
unless of course, you’re their boss, and then you have a license to continue to waste it for the rest of
their lives, [laughter] but I would do something like this: by the end of this talk, you are going to be able
to conceive, create, and gi … deliver a powerful presentation, based on any idea. By the end of this talk,
you are going to be able to understand how to present that idea using storytelling techniques and
oratory instruments—I should have had my hat on for that; I told you I was gonna screw it up—and so …
and that’s it; that’s what you’re gonna learn. See, this becomes a contract with your audience: “I
promise I’m gonna teach you this stuff, and if you’re interested, hang out and learn it, and if you’re not,
there’s the door”—that’s the idea.
Now, there’s one more for inform-type openings, and this one, I think, is probably the strongest. I used
to do this a lot in computer security: “Here’s an example of a hack, and here’s example of a hack-proof
software,” or in my software testing lectures, I would show bugs—“Here’s a bug; here’s a bug; here’s a
bug; here’s a bug; y’all don’t want that world—right—you want a world where software actually works.
That’s what we’re gonna talk about today.” So for stage presence, I could do something like this—let
me go ahead and present this one, because I like a better-world opening. When was the last time—
think back—when was the last time you were bored? I mean really bored; I mean just-shoot-me-now
bored; “I want to be anywhere rather than where I am” bored. I’d be willing to bet—given the fact that
you all work for a corporation—that it was the last time you were sitting in a chair similar to the one
you’re sitting in now, staring at a screen where PowerPoint is playing. Am I right? Death-by-PowerPoint
we call it; we don’t call it discomfort by PowerPoint; we don’t call it mild irritation by PowerPoint; we
call it death—that’s very final—and guess what? This is happening twen … to twenty-five million people
today—that’s right—every single day on this planet, twenty-five million people do what you all are doing
right now: sit in a chair watching PowerPoint. How many of them do you think walk away saying, “Oh,
that was enjoyable. [laughter] What a great experience that was.” They don’t; they fall asleep; they
fight falling asleep; they think about something else; they catch up on their work; they’re not paying
attention. This is destroying productivity; what … our kids are experiencing this in their grade schools,
and their middle schools, and their high schools; we are experience it as grown-ups; this has to end. Our
ideas are dying because of death-by-PowerPoint, and we have to stop that. Now, you can look at this in
two ways; first of all, you could look at it as: “Hey, I have an advantage to gain here.” What … from what
I just said, most presenters probably suck really bad; if I don’t suck, that’s a huge career opt …
opportunity for me; I will be the one person in my company that people will actually sit through, walk
out the door, and say, “Hey, that really was valuable.” Secondly, imagine if all twenty-five million of
those people walked out of every single one of those PowerPoint presentations thinking, “I just learned
something new. I understand a concept much deeper than I did before that talk. I’m inspired in some
way that I wasn’t inspired.” Can you imagine that world? That’s not death-by-PowerPoint, that’s
inspiration by PowerPoint. If that was the world we all lived in, we would have built the starship
Enterprise by now. Well, that world is possible; it’s possible one presenter at a time, and you are going
to be that presenter after today, so let’s get started. So a better world is a great way to present an
idea—any idea—“Look at how our competitor is destroying the world, and look at how our product’s
going to make it better”—that’s the bottom line.
Okay, are you with me? Start strong; you must start strong; this is not optional. If you can’t come up
with a strong opening, don’t give the presentation; you’re probably gonna end up screwing it up and
ruining the audience for you in the future. Now, here’s some ideas to not begin presentations with.
Never say, “Before we begin,” because you just began, [laughter] and what did you invent a time
machine in the last two seconds? Don’t say that; you have wasted precious of those thirty seconds—
precious seconds—do not waste those. And here’s another one that’s related: “I want to begin by …”
you want begin by saying, “I want to begin,” that’s what you want to do, and you really don’t want to do
that. Just begin, please.
Here’s a one: “Hello, everyone. My name is James Whittaker.” How many of you all are thinking, “Don’t
care?” [laughter] Right, you don’t care; who cares who I am? Who cares that I’ve got all these
credentials and written books? You don’t care; you care about the idea. If I stand up with all my
credentials, and list all my credentials, first of all, I’ve wasted my entire thirty-six seconds to two
minutes—wasted it—on my ego; no one cares about your ego. That’s gone; that opportunity’s lost;
people are already tuned out, but even if they tune in, they’re gonna listen to all that, and they’re gonna
walk out the door saying, “You know that guy had all those credentials, and he still sucks.” [laughter]
Make them want to know who you are—I think it’s mysterious—don’t tell ‘em who you are; stand up
and slay your audience, and then have them go, “Who in the hell was that person? Where are they on
Twitter? Where are they on Instagram? I want a piece of this.” Alright? Make them want to know; slay
them with your stage presence, not with your résumé. Your résumé is the past; they’re not sitting
through your past; they’re sitting through your now.
How ‘bout this one: “Hey, everyone. How you guys doing?” How many of you all are gonna answer
that? None of you all are gonna answer that; you’re all gonna say, “Just speak; it’s eight thirty in the
morning. [laughter] Seriously, I’m trying to eat my eggs. Please entertain me.” You don’t even say that
when you’re passing someone in the hallway—“Hey, how you doing”… eh—you just keep going. Don’t
ask questions of the audience; they’re not going to answer them, and if they’re not going to answer
them, you wasted some of those precious seconds. How ‘bout this one: “A priest, a rabbi, and an imam
walk into a bar …”—look, I will say some stuff; in fact, let me just say it right now: I have been known to
say some shit on stage, but even I won’t touch religion. No way, no shape, no … if I say a … the F word,
I’m going to lose a few of you all; few of you all are going to say, “Ah, I … ooh, yuck, he said the F word,”
but if you talk about religion, you’re gonna lose most of your audience; don’t do it. Yes, ma’am.
>>: I’m finding it curious: you actually lost me in the opening sequence with the gender slide …
>> James Whittaker: Yeah, right?
>>: … and I’m wondering if there’s any—especially the other women in the room—if that … I was sort of
like, “Ah, I think using more male examples is gender bias, even if it’s because [indiscernible]
>> James Whittaker: You’re talking about my opening credits, where I admit to gender bias by using
mostly … so I have one female presenter, and I’m actually working on integrating another one, but that’s
a problem, and see, that’s a good lesson. I’ve … I—as a male presenter—I relate far more strongly with
other male presenters, and I think as a female, you’re going to relate more strongly to female
presenters, but I’m aware of that, and I’m aware that I risking losing my audience by doing that—so be
aware of it consciously.
>>: [indiscernible] way that you could presented it … this isn’t gender bias; I’d actually much rather hear
you say, like, this is gender bias: I relate more m—I mean, we’re in a room full of men—it’s just …
>> James Whittaker: I did say that, but I said it in my openings, ‘cause I didn’t want to that part of my
start.
>>: Okay. I guess all I was saying was: to me, it was presented in a way that lost me and actually set me
up adversarially to you [indiscernible]
>> James Whittaker: Alright, let’s see if I get you back. I probably won’t, [laughter] ‘cause as I said, if
you lose somebody in the first thirty seconds, you very well may have lost them for good.
>>: I’m putting this forward as a, like … as an attempt to engage and get back, so that’s a … I’m saying
this as your friend and ally.
>> James Whittaker: I’m completely with you. Let’s talk afterwards and see how I do. Now, the other
part of this is this is starting to sound like a joke, isn’t it? Right? A priest, a rabbi, an imam are float …
walk into a bar—don’t tell a joke. Whatever you do, don’t open with a joke. Let me tell a joke. What do
you say to a software developer with two black eyes? Nothin’, he’s already been told twice. [laughter]
See? He thought it was really funny; other people are like, “Oh, god,” and by the way, speaking of
gender bias, that joke has its roots in a sexist joke, right? There are so many reasons to not tell a joke:
you might offend someone; there might be some—even unintended—gender bias in it, but probably,
the most … most people just aren’t going to find it funny. You may find it absolutely hilarious; it’s
probably not funny. If you tell your joke to a hundred people, and a hundred and one people laugh,
then you can tell your joke to open it. Never open with a joke; it’s a really stupid thing to do; it’s a great
way to lose your audience.
Now, let’s talk about some openings that I’ve used in the past—in fact, I’ve used ‘em in the last few
years—that have really resonated, and I know this mostly because of Twitter—they get retweeted a lot.
So here’s one that has served me well—oops—“Data is the new oil,” and in fact, as soon as I say that—I
crafted … hand-crafted that line; it took me a long time. In fact, I worked on this line and on my opening
thirty seconds longer than I worked on my entire twenty-minute talk, and so here’s what happens in my
mind: I say, “Data is the new oil,” and then all of a sudden my talk floods into my head, and I can do this
… I haven’t given this talk for months, and I can still do it. Data is the new oil—big data, little data,
structured data, unstructured data—data is the new oil, and like oil, data will be responsible for the
largest transfer of wealth from one place to another since the industrial revolution. And then I go into
talking about the power of data, how you harness data, how you use machine learning, et cetera, et
cetera, et cetera. Right, but it is a very strong talk. It also has cultural, and particularly, pop culture
annotations, right? “Orange is the new black;” “Wednesday is the new Friday;” I’ve captured that—all
of that—in one really clever opening line. This is where you want to be clever: in your opening line.
Here’s another one I’ve used to good effect—this was a talk called “Test is Dead”—“The more software
testers you have on a project, the more you will need; you are a self-fulfilling prophecy.” That’s an
intriguing opening, isn’t it? Especially to a room full of two thousand software testers, who were
immediately like, “I do not like this guy,” [laughter] but they were listening; they were listening, and it
worked; it’s got a lot of views on YouTube. This is a talk about the future, because the present pisses me
off. Alright, this is funny just ‘cause they just introduced me, and here’s the guy from Microsoft, and I
said, “Yeah, the present pisses me off, so we’re gonna talk about the future.” This one got retweeted a
lot; it got worked really well. This is one I give; I give a talk on career success, and here’s how I start it
often: take a good look at the people above you in your org. Is there any reason to believe that any of
them deserve to be there more than you? What’s holding you back? How did they get ahead? That’s
what we’re gonna talk about. Alright, and this one’s worked really good; the reason this has worked
well is ‘cause the same reason this next one works well. This is how I open my computer security talks
back in the day: I’m going to explain software security in a way that even your boss will understand. So I
told you: don’t tell a joke; don’t talk about religion. There are two things you can talk about—open
season—bosses and lawyers; talk about them all you want. [laughter] Seriously, bosses don’t even like
their own bosses, and lawyers hate themselves; [laughter] they do. So just say whatever you want
about them; in fact, if you do tell a joke, make sure it’s aimed at a lawyer or a boss, and you’ll probably
be good.
This is an intervention: when I first came back from Google to Microsoft, I gave a talk called “Microsoft
2.0 or Bust,” and I started it by saying, “This is an intervention,” because I realized I’m saying a lot of
controversial things—I’m holding up a mirror to Microsoft that they might not want to look in—and I
might get into some trouble for this, and so I said, “This is an intervention.” And that word—by the way,
we’re gonna talk about power words later—intervention is one of those very powerful words, because
there are traditions and culture around intervention. When I say intervention, you know what to
expect, right? There’s some drug-addicted family member; they used to be wonderful; they used to be
great; all of a sudden, they’re addicted to drugs; you gather all the loved ones around; you have the
intervention; there’s a lot of: “You bastard, you ruined my life; you’ve stolen all my money,” but then,
there’s the uplifting part at the end, where you all hug, and you walk away to therapy together, right?
My talk had this exact same cadence; I said, “Microsoft, you used to be powerful,” and then I let ‘em
have it, and then I brought ‘em back up at the end, thinking that if—in case—I get complaints, I’m gonna
say, “Hey, man, I warned you it was gonna be an intervention, and I did get complaints, and we’re gonna
talk about those later as well. [laughter]
This is the way I talk … start my internet of things talk, when I’m on the road, giving at internet of things
conferences. I’m having a problem with my hot tub; I put it on the internet of things, and it is not happy.
Now, this is an intriguing opening—remember I told you, “Select inspire, interest, intrigue, inform;”
what are you trying to do in your first thirty seconds? This is an intriguing opening. It’s intriguing
because when you think of the internet of things, you think about light switches and thermostats; you
don’t about hot tubs. Well, I actually did put my hot tub on the internet of things, and I learned a lot
about what the internet of things is going to be capable of because of this. And yeah, my hot tub was
first; it was lonely; I get a chance to really tee up this whole conversation about the internet of things
based on my hot tub. So this one is … has served me well as well. This is my go-to one, just in case I
forget everything, ‘cause I do—I tell you I give talks all the time; I still get nervous; I got … I get the … it …
Manilla, the Phillipines, I’m standing up there; it’s in an arena; there’s twenty-eight thousand people in
the audience, and there I am, standing up there. Twenty-eight thousand people generally only gather
for rock concerts, where you can’t hear the audience, right? You cannot … twenty-eight thousand
people cannot be quiet; there was a murmur; there was a hum—people rustling in their seats, then
people whispering back and forth. It was … my bowels were like, “James! We’re here, dude! [laughter]
And we don’t know what to do!” And my stomach’s like, “You really, really shouldn’t have had bacon
this morning, James. [laughter] You really shouldn’t have.” And I started to sweat, and I got nervous,
and my entire talk was just gone; I mean it was gone; I didn’t know what to do. This is the thing that
came to me: “PowerPoint was harmed in the making of this presentation,” right? ‘Cause it connotates
“Animals weren’t harmed in this movie”—we’re gonna talk about associations of words and concepts a
little bit later. And as soon as I said that, enough people laughed that I thought, “Oh, okay;” I relaxed a
little bit; my bowels were like, “Dude, we’re good;” my stomach’s like, “We got your back, James. We’re
gonna take care of this bacon; we’re good, man.” And I went on and won best presentation at that
conference. So always have one in your back pocket—feel free to steal this one.
Okay, so now, the rest of this talk—we talked about starting strong, and I can’t emphasize it enough; if
you lose your audience in the first thirty seconds, the chances that you’re gonna get them back are very
slim. Here’s the rest of it: so after start strong, have something to say, and I mean, I want you to work
on this. I … how many people stand up—they’ve got a lot to say, but they can’t summarize it quickly;
they don’t understand the core concepts; and audiences notice that. And then, say it well—we’re gonna
talk about oratory instruments—and then finally, we’re gonna talk about the one or two things that you
have to do in sticking the landing and the four or five things that you can’t do when you’re trying to stick
the landing. Okay, let’s go in to have something to say now.
So what key point are you trying to make? That’s what you need to be able to state, and I love to ask
people that when I’m at presentations and at conferences—what’s your talk about? And it … and all of a
sudden, they go into telling their story in some long-winded fashion. What is your talk about? If you
don’t understand the point you’re trying to plant in people’s heads, you’re not going to plant it. You
have to be the first one that understands that core message, and if you don’t you’re not gonna be able
to teach it to anyone else. So here are the things that you need to be: you need to be clear—really,
really clear—your message must be very clear in your own mind so that—you know—you’re talking to
career coaches tell you to have an elevator pitch for yourself; you need to have an elevator pitch for
your talk, and if somebody asks you, “Hey, what are you talking about?” You nail it. Or, “I’m sorry I
missed your talk; I went to another one. What did you talk about?” It’s that same thirty-second thing;
you’ve got to be able to get your core message across. I want you to write it down, and I want you to
also make it as concise as possible—make it really small—whittle down that core message until it’s just
this big, and the smaller you can make it, the more powerful it will be. Your ability to tell it will become
greater. And then finally, make sure it’s impactful—I mean, if … state the value of your presentation;
what is your audience going to walk away with? If you struggle with that, you might not want to
present, because you don’t have anything to say, and your audiences are smart enough to figure that
out. Why … what is the impact? What is the key takeaway for the audience? If you can’t state that, and
you can’t state that simply, then you don’t have a key takeaway, and you really have no business
presenting in the first place.
So let’s take a look at a presentation, and let’s figure out what this is all about. Here’s the first
presentation—I’m not gonna go through this—these are slides I took from a presenter that preceded me
at a conference—this is only about a third of ‘em. I asked for his deck; he seemed to be really pleased
that I asked for his deck; I didn’t tell him I was going to use it as a counterexample in a class on stage
presence. [laughter] But this is about a quarter—a third or quarter—of his slides. Every single one of
them had a different story, and it was bouncing around everywhere. Oh, let’s talk about this thing down
here, and now that that’s off the screen, and this is on the screen, let’s talk about that thing there. How
many PowerPoint presentations have you seen that are like this? Talk to the slide; talk to the slide; talk
to the slide. That’s okay as long as the slides have the same subject, and the plot progresses through
them, and you can read that thread through those slides. But these are all disconnected points about
marketing, and it was terrible. I loved it that he was right before me—I mean, he set the bar like right
here [laughter]—I’m writing my best presentation acceptance speech, even at … I was that confident,
right? That I was gonna look really good after a guy like this. Don’t do this. What is your core concept?
He couldn’t answer that question; I know, because we talked about it after his talk. He couldn’t answer
that question because he didn’t have one, and if you don’t have a core concept, you don’t have a
presentation, and you don’t have the right to waste people’s time with your message.
Okay, have something to say. We’re gonna watch a presenter now; this is a TED talk with millions of
views. Come up with this guy’s core message, and then we’re gonna talk about it at the end. You ready
for this?
[video] “If you look deep into the night sky, you see stars, and if you look further, you see more stars,
and further, galaxies, and furthermore, galaxies. But if you keep looking further and further, eventually,
you see nothing for a long while, and then finally, you see a faint, fading afterglow, and it’s the afterglow
of the big bang. Now, the big bang was an era in the early universe when everything we see in the night
sky was condensed into an incredibly small, incredibly hot, incredibly roiling mass, and from it sprung
everything we see. Now, we’ve mapped that afterglow with great precision—and when I say we, I mean
people who aren’t me [laughter]—we’ve mapped the afterglow with spectacular precision, and one of
the shocks about it is that it’s almost completely uniform. Fourteen billion light years that way and
fourteen billion light years that way, it’s the same temperature. Now, it’s been thirteen billion years
since that big bang, and so it’s got faint and cold; it’s now two point seven degrees, but it’s not exactly
two point seven degrees. It’s only two point seven degrees to about ten parts in a million—over here,
it’s a little hotter, and over there, it’s a little cooler—and that’s incredibly important to everyone in this
room, because where it’s a little hotter, there was a little more stuff, and where there was a little more
stuff, we have galaxies, and clusters of galaxies, and superclusters, and all the structures you see in the
cosmos. And those small, little inhomogeneities—twenty parts in a million—those were formed by
quantum mechanical wiggles in that early universe that were stretched across the size of the entire
cosmos. That is spectacular, and that’s not what they found on Monday. What they found on Monday
is cooler.
“So here’s what they found on Monday: imagine you take some hot … if you take a bell, and you whack
the bell with a hammer, what happens? It rings, but if you wait, that ringing fades, and fades, and fades
until you don’t notice it anymore. Now, that early universe was incredibly dense—like a metal, but way
denser—and if you hit it, it would ring, but the thing ringing would be the structure of space-time itself,
and the hammer would be quantum mechanics. What they found on Monday was evidence of the
ringing of the space-time of the early universe—what we call gravitational waves from the fundamental
era—and here’s how they found it. Those waves have long since faded. If you go for a walk, you don’t
wiggle. Those gravitational waves in the structure of space are totally invisible for all practical purposes,
but early on, when the universe was making that last afterglow, the gravitational waves put little twists
in the structure of the light that we see. So by looking at the night sky deeper and deeper—in fact,
these guys spent three years on the South Pole looking straight up through the coldest, clearest,
cleanest air they possibly could find, looking deep into the night sky and studying that glow, and looking
for the faint twists which are the symbol—the signal—of gravitational waves, the ringing of the early
universe, and on Monday, they announced that they had found it. And the thing that’s so spectacular
about that to me is not just the ringing, though that is awesome, the thing that’s totally amazing—the
reason I’m on this stage—is because what that tells us is something deep about the early universe. It
tells us that we and everything we see around us are basically one large bubble—and this is the idea of
inflation—one large bubble surrounded by something else. This isn’t conclusive evidence for inflation,
but anything that isn’t inflation that explains this will look the same. This is a theory—an idea—that has
been around for a while, and we never thought we’d really see it—for good reasons—we thought we’d
really see killer evidence, and this is killer evidence.
“The really crazy idea is that our bubble is just one bubble in a much larger roiling pot of universal stuff.
We’re never gonna see this stuff outside, but by going to the South Pole and spending three years
looking at the detailed structure of the night sky, we can figure out that we’re probably in a universe
that looks kind of like that, and that amazes me. Thanks a lot.” [applause]
Okay, so how many of y’all stayed with him until the end? Now, if you look at this—so less than half,
about a third, I guess. Very strong start, no question about it. “When you look up in to the night sky,
you see stars; you look further, you see more stars.” There … wow, what else is out there, right? You
get this feeling—this intense interest in this subject—and then, it kind of wandered a little bit. What
was the bell? Did the bell metaphor help you? Did it take you further into understanding his concept?
One thing that disturbed me a little bit is he got to the ver … he was sixty seconds from the end when he
said, “The reason I’m up on this stage is to—actually—to talk about inflation,” and inflation hadn’t been
part … he hadn’t talked about the subject of inflation at all, and he introduces it all in the last sixty
seconds. He was kind of all over the place there. He’s got … there’s some signals, too, to me that he
walked onto stage very unprepared. First of all, he’s got a bottle of water; he didn’t pick it up from
anywhere; he never put it down; he carried it from offstage, and he never took a drink off of it. He was
nervous or something was going on; he backstage; he’s got a water bottle; he’s standing in his Walton’s
uniform—right—ready to come out … didn’t put a lot of thought into the uniform—that’s not … doesn’t
matter if you’re really good speaker—but maybe, you’re on the stage at TED, maybe let your teenage
daughter dress you that day—I don’t know. [laughter] Right? What was up … was it the nerves? Why
did he have that there? This guy … I love this guy; he’s so expressive; he’s so sweet; you want to just
cuddle him, don’t you? [laughter] But the message was kind of all over the place. What was his core
message? I’ve worked with astrophysicists, and they listened to it, and they didn’t quite understand it,
but then we … here’s what I got out of this. Variations in the background radiation bolsters the inflation
theory of gravitational waves caused by the big bang, and inflation predicts that other universes exist,
because they also had their own little big bangs, and they live in their bubbles, which we can never see
or we can never get to. This is his core message, and I think if he would have wrote the core message
down, he could have built a better story around it. Yes, sir?
>>: One observation I had is that he’s actually talking to a much broader audience, which doesn’t have,
like, an astrophysics or physics background.
>> James Whittaker: He’s talking to a TED audience, in fact. You’ve got to think lay people. I mean, I’m
talking to a Microsoft Research audience, and I’ve probably got mo … you know, the biggest audience of
people who at least understand astrophysics; he’s talking to lay people—they must have been blown
away by this—so it’s way too complicated, but it doesn’t have to be. People are smart; people are up …
capable of understanding these concepts. Now, I’m not gonna try to blast at his physics, because it
turns out that a few months after this, a lot of the power of the … this discovery was lessened in further
analysis of the data, and then a few months after that, the impact of this was lessened again. But I want
to talk about the talk itself, because the talk itself can be a whole lot better. Here’s the way I would
open this talk—or at least part of it. When you look up into the night sky, you see stars; if you look even
further, you see more stars, but you’re not seeing those stars as they exist today. You’re seeing light
emitted from those stars eons ago—light-years ago—millions of light-years ago. You’re looking at the
past. So what I’ve done there is I’ve connected this: what we see happened a long time ago; it’s like
looking back in time. That was a concept he never … see, it’s not just having a cool concept; it’s tying
them all together so that the audience can say, “Okay, that point goes to that point goes to that point. I
got it”—particularly a lay audience. So now, I’ve this whole looking back in time, right? And if you look
further, for a very long time, you see nothing at all—it’s completely dark—because everything that
happened earlier than that—all of that light that’s generated—is already past us; it’s gone; we’ll never
be able to see it. But there’s more than just light up in the night sky; there are things that we don’t see
that our instruments can; there’s things like temperature; there’s radiation; there’s gravitational
waves—our instruments can detect all of these things—and those gravitational waves are still there. So
now, what I’ve done is I’ve connected some of the deeper concepts to this: “Hey, I’m just seeing the
stars, and yeah, I get it; that light came from a long time ago.” Right? I’m connecting it to a lot more
subtle things; the people—the lay people—in the audience, they’ll get it. “Okay, yeah, you’re looking
back in time; you’re seeing all this other stuff.” I have no idea what a gravitational wave is, and I’ve
connected it to that, right? And so then I can be a lot stronger about: “Hey, this is another view on
history. There’s more ways that we can look back in time, and if we look back far enough, then you can
go into the … seeing evidence of the big bang.” Right? This big bang happened; we know it happened,
and it’s in a bubble, because we can look fourteen billion ye … light-years that way, fourteen billion lightyears that … and we see the exact same thing. And so now, we’ve got the bubble thing—right—and
then you could see how you could get into the inflationary part, right? What if … but the cool concept
is: what if ours wasn’t the only big bang? What if, beyond this bubble of ours, other big bangs have
occurred in the past, and perhaps, are even occurring now? What you get is our little world in a bubble,
and then you can put the x—that was xkcd guy that drew his graphics for him. I mean, he had
everything going for him: eminent scientist, cool discovery, xkcd artist, and … but the story was lacking
clearness; it was lacking conciseness; and its impact was lessened because of that. Where’s Carl Sagan
when you need him? Yes, sir?
>>: So when I was watching that talk, something that stood out to me is it seemed like he contradicted
himself. He’d say, “Well, the temperature over here and the temperature over there is really the same,
except it’s different in a very meaningful way. Or the gravitational folding …
>> James Whittaker: And then you never really understand why it would be meaningful.
>>: “… can no longer be discovered, except we can see it.”
>> James Whittaker: And you know what he was doing there: with being the smartest person in the
room—which he probably was—is a deterrent to telling a good story, because you’re noticing all these
subtleties, and you’re like … and maybe you know that one of your astrophysicist friends is there, and
they’re really smart, and you have a tendency to want to talk to them—that you want to talk to the
science. He’s on an … he’s on a stage at TED; you can’t talk to the science, and if there’s contradictory
stuff in there, either weave it out of your story or weave your story around it so that you don’t come up
with … you know, if you’re a scient ... and eminent scientist—Carl Sagan did this over and over again.
He was an eminent scientist smarter than anybody he ever talked to, and yet, he was able to get really
cool ideas in lay people’s head, because he left out those little twists, and those will mess with you. So
this could have been done a lot better; in fact, I’m planning on giving this entire talk sometime in the
new year from start. Right, I figure rock and roll bands can cover Led Zeppelin songs; why can’t—and
Beatles songs—why can’t I cover TED talks? And by the way, I’m working with a woman to cover Sheryl
Sandberg’s “Lean In” TED talk as well: amazingly powerful message delivered—I’m sorry, Sheryl—very
poorly. Oh, by the way, speaking of Sheryl Sandberg, she did the same thing that Alan Adams did. Did
you hear when they tried to laugh? When he said—you know—“People who are … by smart people, I
mean people who aren’t me,” and everybody started laughing, and he kept talking. Never, ever, ever,
ever, ever talk over either applause or laughter—never. Let the applause take its course; let the
laughter take its course, because when people are clapping, [clapping] here’s what’s going on in their
brain: “Man, that was great—really fun, really learned a lot, totally enjoyed that.” Never interrupt that
thought process. [laughter] Let them convince themselves that you’re wonderful.
Okay, now, once you have something to say—once you do have a concise, clear, impactful message—
now’s the time to say it well; now’s the time to take the elements of your message and turn them into
story, turn them into metaphors, turn them into things that will make them pop inside the audience’s
head. Now, this is gonna be the longest part of the course; there are fifteen or sixteen—I’m forget … I
may have taken one out for a three-hour course—that we’re gonna go through one at a time. And the
way we’re gonna do it is we’re gonna watch a presenter, and then we’re going to analyze the
presenters. I have two types of presenters that we’re gonna look at: we’re gonna look at TED talks—or
actually, three—we’re gonna look at TED talks; we’re gonna look at some classic, famous speeches; and
we’re also gonna look at comedians, ‘cause comedians can really teach you a lot, and if you want to
become a good presenter, you need to watch other presenters. If you want to become a good writer,
you read what better writers wrote; if you want to become a good presenter, you watch presenters who
are a lot better than you. And so let’s go through this now. Okay, listen to the storyteller.
[video] “I got thrown out of a bar in New York city. [cheers]”—this is not G-rated—“Now, when I say I
got thrown out of a bar, I don’t mean somebody asked me to leave, or we walked to the door together,
and I said, ‘Bye, everybody, I got to go.’ Six bouncers hurled me out of a night club like I was a frisbee.
[laughter] Those big ole bouncers that go home every night, watch Road House, and beat off—you
know what I’m talking about? [laughter] Patrick Swayze’s hitting another guy! He huh huh he huh
huh”—God, that’s just wrong—“for wearing a hat. I walk into a bar with a hat on; this guy—real pissy—
goes, ‘Take off the hat!’ [laughter] I’m like, ‘What’s the deal?’ He goes, ‘I’ll tell you what the deal is.
Faggots in this area wear hats. We’re trying to keep ‘em out of our club.’”—watch the way he deals with
bigotry; this is beautiful—“I’m like, ‘Oh, really? The only way we can tell down South is if they have their
hair cut like … yours.’ [laughter] And he got all pissed, but he walked away, and I took the hat off, and
like an hour later, I’d been drinking, and I forgot. You ever forget? Happened to me. I put the hat back
on, and the guy comes over to me. Now, I’m between six one and six six, depending on which
convenience store I’m leaving; [laughter] I weigh two hundred and thirty-five pounds; this guy comes
over to me, poking me in the shoulder with two fingers, saying, ‘You’re out of here.’ I’m like, ‘I don’t
think so, scooter.’ [laughter] And I was wrong. [laughter] They hurled my ass, and then they squared off
with me in the parking lot, and I backed down from the fight, ‘cause I didn’t know how many of ‘em it
would have taken to whip my ass, but I knew how many they were gonna use. [laughter] It’s a handy
little piece of information to have right there [laughter]—overkill—but they called the police, because
we broke a chair on the way out the door, and I refused to pay for it, and the cops showed up, and at
that point, I had the right to remain silent, but I didn’t have the ability. [laughter] The cop says, ‘Mister
White, you are being charged with drunk in public.’ I was like, ‘Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, I was
drunk in a bar. They threw me into public. [cheers] I don’t want to be drunk in public; I want to be drunk
in a goddamn bar, which was perfectly legal. Arrest them.’ [laughter]”
Okay, so that was chalk-full of storytelling instruments, and we’re gonna go through ‘em one at a time,
and as you watch presenters, I want you to train yourself to look for the instruments, to understand:
“Why did I laugh right there? And what was it about that particular statement or that particular way of
telling the story that really made it pop?” Because what comedians do is they really get inside your
head—they’re using brain science. Every joke basically has the same structure; every joke is basically
said at the same cadence, and if you begin to understand this, you begin to identify this from speakers,
and you relate to it. And the ones you relate to very strongly are the ones that you can use yourself; the
ones that turn you off are the things that you never want to say—right—but you do need to get to the
point where you can recognize these things. So let’s start going through them now. Now, there’s no
recipe here, this is only ingredients. You have to bake your own storytelling cake. I’m gonna line the
ingredients up, and you can pick and choose among these ingredients and form your stories the way you
want, but I’m not gonna give you the recipe. There is no recipe for storytelling; otherwise, all stories
would have the same structure, but there are a very thick set of ingredients.
So the first one is state, then clarify—ask a question and then answer it—and most jokes have this
structure, right? So you make a statement—now, the key part … there’s a key part of this—you make a
statement, and then you pause. That pause is crucial. If you don’t pause, you ruin the whole joke, or
you ruin the whole statement. That pause does one of two things: for people who are … if that
statement is very profound, or if that statement is unfamiliar, it gives people time to think, “Wait a
minute. What’s he talking about? What’s she talking about?” And catch up. The second thing it does
is: people who are with you—people who are already got it—it creates a little drama; it creates a little
suspense—“Oh, this is gonna be good,” right? “Now, I’m between six one and six six, depending on
which convenience store I’m walking out of,” and you’re like, “Oh, yeah, that was … that’s good”—
right—“now what? Now what? Come on, come on.” You get what that pause does is it gets your
audience’s brain anticipating what you’re gonna say next. This is very good for the storyteller. When
your audience is getting to the point where they’re anticipating what you’re gonna say, they’re alert;
they’re focused; they’re listening; they’re concentrating, and that’s exactly the state you want you
audience’s brain in. And then, you lay it onto ‘em: answer the question, clarify the statement that you
just made, and you’ve got yourself a great joke, and he did this over and over. Watch comedians; watch
how the deliver this; there’s a reason they do this—because it works. “I got thrown out of a bar …”
pause, tell the story. “I don’t know how many of them it would have taken to whip my ass”—pause—
“but I knew how many they were gonna use,” and you all laughed, right? You laughed on cue every
single time. The jokes that weren’t delivered this way—right—“thrown out by … hurled my ass like a
frisbee,” right? That … no one—very few people—laughed, because he said it too fast. “At that point, I
had the right to remain silent”—pause, oh, this is gonna be good; oh, this is gonna be good; oh, this is
gonna be good—“but I didn’t have the ability.” It’s this structure—state, pause, clarify—that makes
these things came a … come alive. So I want you to look at your presentation; I want you to look at your
material, and I want you to understand: these are the key statements I’m making; these are things that I
need to really make pop. See if you can rewrite them into this format. You rewrite them into this
format, and you give them life; you give them character, and you make them far more memorable than
if you had just said them out loud in some normal way. So that’s the first instrument.
The second instrument is logical consistency. Talks that aren’t logically consistent—internally
consistent—are very confusing. They’ll have some tangent: “Oh, wait, let me stop talking about this
thing and start talking about this other thing over here, because I did,” right? Like the Alan Adams. Who
cares that they were at the South Pole? Who cares that they were looking up? ‘Cause in my head, I was
just as happy them using the Hubble and looking—you want cold, clear night sky, you know … right? It
had nothing to do with the central point; it could have easily been left out; it was really kind of logically
inconsistent, ‘cause he had to pause with his message and say, “Oh yeah, there were these dudes
hanging out at the South Pole,” right? And I’m thinking, “Ooh, God, that’s cold. Man, I think I’d be
hungry if I got to the South Pole—right—and did they bring beer?” Right? [laughter] The … whenever
you go off on a tangent, you’re giving your audience an opportunity to go off on a tangent as well, and
that means you’ve lost them. So be very careful with that.
Now, his central theme is crime and punishment. The whole story is about him breaking a rule and
being punished for the rule, so every instrument, every joke, everything that he says has to deal with
this. If it’s not, it’s not logically consistent; it’s okay not to be logically consistent—you can find lots of
examples of great talks that aren’t logically consistent—it’s just dangerous. If you really want to get you
message across, be logically consistent, ‘cause everything was related to this: there was a bouncer—
they enforce laws—he was between six one and six six—when do you hear that? When someone has
robbed a convenience store, and they’re trying to describe the perpetrator, right? It’s beautiful. The
cops came at the end; there was a rule about hats that he broke; he had the right to remain silent.
Every single part of his story was logically consistent with the theme of crime and punishment. Maintain
that logical consistency, and the brain is a happy camper. Your audience’s brains are like, “Yep, got it;
yep, got it; yep, got it”—that’s what you want them to do. You don’t want them to say, “What?! Where
the hell did that come from?” As soon as your audience’s brain says that, you got to bring ‘em back, and
that’s harder to do. Don’t make it harder to do; don’t try to pull them back; just keep them there to
begin with.
Number three—and this is really a problem with Alan Adams; he really had this plot progression issue.
What was the relationship of looking up into the night sky and seeing stars with gravitational wave with
the temperature being a little hotter over here, a little colder over there, a hammer named quantum
mechanics, the ringing of the … there was … things were out of order; things could have been reordered
and it would have made a lot more sense. And look how this story went: he entered a bar, got a
warning about his hat; he was at the bar; he forgot about the hat; he was thrown out; the cops were
called; story’s over. So the human brain is used to chronology: once upon a time, this happened, and
this happened after it. The … if you obey a chronological timeframe, it’s the simplest one; the brains are
not gonna skip it, right? You’re not—look—you’re not James Cameron; you’re not filming Avatar, or The
Matrix, or something like that; you’re not making a movie; you’re not a screen writer; you are trying to
present an idea to an audience that you really want to get it. You’re not out … you’re not there to blow
their minds in some … oh my gosh, like did you see A Beautiful Mind—the movie A Beautiful Mind?
Wow, what a movie; they sucked us in thinking, “Oh, this guy’s a spy,” and then all of a sudden, “Oh,
he’s got a mental illness—this is all a … an imagination.” That is great in the movies; they’ve got two
hours in a movie to tie up all these loose ends and to bring you back from the start—it’s a good
storytelling instrument for movies. You’re not making a movie; you’re giving a presentation to people
you need to understand the concept that you’re trying to present. Make it simple, and chronology is the
most simple plot progression you can get. You ever need to go back in time, that’s a tangent; you ever
need to switch things around, that’s a tangent, and that tangent is an opportunity for people to tune
you out, and most human minds will tune you out if given the opportunity—don’t let ‘em. Okay, that’s
number three.
Number four: descriptive language. Did you notice he didn’t just get thrown out of the bar, he got
hurled out of the bar. The bouncers weren’t just big … well, let’s not talk about that. [laughter] Right, so
use a thesaurus for goodness’s sakes. Just go through your talk; every time that you have an adjective
or an adverb, thesaurus it—thesaurus it? Look it up on a thesaurus, and figure out a better, more
powerful word for it, and maybe there’s not a better, more powerful word, but don’t get too fancy here;
don’t show off too much of your vocabulary, and particularly, understand your audience. If your
audience is a TED audience—we talked about that—don’t go overboard on a TED audience. We’re
gonna see a Carl Sagan video in a minute; you see Carl Sagan actually does his backwards—he uses
really simple terms just so he can connect with his audience. So make sure you understand this; if you
have a multicultural—if you have a lot of people where English isn’t their first language—don’t go all
crazy on them; you want them to understand. And notice he used the word “hurl” twice; thrown was
his … was base word; I want to say something besides thrown, because—you know—he’s actually being
thrown out, and he used “hurled.” So he got hurled out of it in the beginning, and then, “They hurled
me out”—he used the same word again. You’re gonna … if you’re gonna use a fancier word for
“thrown,” and you need to say thrown three or four times, then use the same fancy word three or four
times. You’re not hurled one time, and chucked the next, and ejected the third time—that’s too …
that’s overboard; it’s too much—stick to the same one. But hurled is a very … see some of these words
have more meaning that just being thrown—they exert other sorts of imagery in our head; I’m gonna
talk about that in just a second.
So it’s not just about big words; the way he describes some of the concepts, you … so it’s not … so my
first advice: take all the adjectives and the adverbs; use a thesaurus, and see if you can come up with
something that’s a little more fun and a little more descriptive. Seconds is: what are your key concepts?
He was talking about the bouncer throwing him out, and he wanted to make the point: it’s not easy to
throw a guy like me out of a bar; I’m a big guy—that’s what he wanted to say—I’m a big guy. So how
can you say that with the theme of crime and punishment? When do we talk about people’s size? Not
like you got weighed in at the doctor’s office or a boxing match—that has nothing to do with crime;
that’s a sport or a physician—but when do you talk about weight associated with crime and
punishment? Well, this is perfect; it’s beautiful; it’s exactly when we talk about height and weight is
when somebody’s robbed something; we’re trying to describe them. So he uses colorful, descriptive
language that really gets his point across and that causes you to respect him. See, this is what’s going
on: an audience that respects the speaker and admires the speaker learns what the speaker has to say
much, much more readily, and that’s what he did, right? “At that point, I had the right to remain silent,
but I didn’t have the ability”—this is very nice language; it’s very descriptive, and we admire his
cleverness in saying it.
There’s more to descriptive language that this, too; it’s what we imply. Authors and oratory experts call
this implicature—we imply other things when we say something, right? Like I can say—if you shake my
hand—I can say, “He has rough hands,” right? And “rough” is one type of a word that says, “Oh, yeah,
the guy’s … manly man,” but then, if shook the guy’s hand and said, “He had leathery hands,” that is a
much more powerful word, because leather has texture—it implies texture. I’ve just said it; I’ve
described something, but it’s much more powerful because of its implicature. It implies leathery, right?
We can picture cowhide; we can picture maybe a fisherman might be described that way—someone
who works with their hands a lot. When I say, “He has a leathery hand,” all of you all are … you all can
feel the handshake yourself, because of the word leathery, and how descriptive, and what it implies, and
all of these words imply things. If I say the word “imagine,” who do you think of?
>>: Disney online [indiscernible]
>> James Whittaker: It’s easy, right? Disney and John Lennon—I like the John Lennon one; I’ve actually
never heard Disney; that’s interesting. You have kids?
>>: That’s right.
>> James Whittaker: Yeah, you do. [laughter] So you think of John Lennon; you think of Disney. One
word conjures all that, right? All the sudden, you’re thinking of—maybe “imagine” I would have thought
… or “magic,” I might have thought of Disney or Harry Potter, right? You say one word, and all of this
imagery comes flooding into people’s head. “Intervention” is one of these—“Wow, I get all of this—
right—because of my culture, because of my traditions, because of the images I already attaches. If I
say “dream”—besides Disney, Disney guy—who do think of when I say “dream?” Martin Luther King,
right? All of this, you can’t help it; in your mind, you already have these associations between these
words and these other images, and experiences ,and cultural and traditional phenomenon, so you’ve got
to be careful; if I’m giving a talk in the Phillipines, there are certain imagery that they might not have. I
used to have a metaphor I used to describe Microsoft, Google, and Apple using the Terminator movies,
right? Microsoft was the first Terminator; Google was the second; Apple was the third; and it was this
funny little story I told with it. I couldn’t tell that in places that—you know—with a really young
audience, who were too young to have seen the movies that were out in the nineties or in countries
where movie-going isn’t particularly something that everybody does. Right, so you’ve got to be careful
with these things too. So let’s look … I’m gonna take one of these words, and I’m gonna show you just
how powerful it can be with a little video that’s going to be very short. So watch this. Here we go.
[video] “It’s so exciting to be back with you—just time for a quick recap of what we’ve missed since we
were on break. In a word: Isis. In three words: holy fuck, Isis. [laughter]”
You all laughed too. You didn’t laugh when he just said “Isis,” but as soon as he throws in the F word,
you laugh. There’s a comedian that I’m gonna show a little bit later—Demetri Martin—when I get to a
part about props, and he started his career at high schools and middle schools and doing stand-up
comedy that was totally clean, and he used the same jokes, but when he got on Comedy Central, he
started throwing the F-bomb in there, and they just got funnier. I mean, Eddie Murphy isn’t even funny,
[laughter] and yet we laugh at him because of his foul mouth—right—so you … so this is an up …
because the F word has such power, we associate: “Ah, that’s …” I mean, we’ve done this. There’s
nothing wrong with that word; in fact a few hundred years ago, that word didn’t exist, and there were
other words that we couldn’t say, but the point here is clear: there are traditions associated with words
that we say. There are images and cultural annotations to words that we say, and when you use those,
you wield their power in the brains of your audience, but you also risk losing a few people. So be careful
with those.
Okay, so now, I want to talk a little about tone of voice and body language, because you notice—you
know—Ron White had his drink; he had his cigarette; other people have other sorts of props; they will
talk faster; they will talk slower; they will higher—there’s layers of what you say; there’s layers of feeling
that you can convey to your audience, depending on what you say. So I’m gonna take all of those away
for a second, and just using what you hear—you can even close your eyes if you’d like—and we’re gonna
ask me a question, and I’m going to answer it—twice. So here we go. “James, how was your beer?” “It
was decent.” “James, how was your beer?” “It was decent.” Which beer did I like more? The second
one, right? It’s pretty obvious, simple, but I wanted to take away every other stimulation, just show you
it’s the way you say something. The first layer is just what they hear, and that—you heard it differently
just because of the way I said it. I can slow down; I can stand up; I can say, “It was decent,” and you
know: “Yeah, he didn’t really like that.” “It was decent.” “Hey, he did like that.” Now, I can add what
you see to it as well. So tell you what: when I put my hat on, you ask me, “James, how was your beer?”
>>: James, how was your beer?
>> James Whittaker: It was decent. And then, when I put my hat on, you say, “James, how was your
beer?”
>>: James, how was your beer?
>> James Whittaker: I haven’t put my hat on. Give me … give me a second here. [laughter] Audience
interaction, I’ll talk about that later. Hat and …
>>: James, how was your beer?
>> James Whittaker: It was decent. Right? So see now, I can make that decent even better by kind of
giving a little rock. “Yeah, it was decent,” and in this case, I can say it was decent, and I can give a little
smirk, right? You emphasize your words with what people are seeing—your facial expressions, the way
you have your hands. Right, I could even say, “It was decent,” and then, “It was decent,” right? You can
… all of these things make what you say more powerful—think about them. Now, there’s gonna be
some natural things that you do with your tone of voice and your body language, and in fact, you got to
be careful of this. There’s a lot of vice presidents I’ve seen at a lot of different companies—particularly,
this one—who have a tendency to do this when they talk. Have you seen this? You all are smiling;
you’ve seen our VPs do … why do they do this? This is an awful gesture, right? [laughter] This is what
you did to your little brother when you go, “Noogie!” Right? When you’re speaking, open your hands.
This is a welcoming gesture, right? This is what Jesus did, right? [laughter] He was a nice guy, right? You
didn’t see Mohammed doing this stuff; come on, these were nice guys. This is an opening, welcoming
gesture; this is not; this is … why do they all do that? Who’d they get it from? Steve Ballmer—they got
it from Ballmer; Ballmer does it too, and they see: “Ah I ex … respect … I admire this person; I’m going to
act like them”—be careful. This is not—by the way—do you know where Ballmer got it? “I did not have
sexual relations with that woman.” [laughter] See the power of language? I didn’t even tell you who it
was, and you know, right? Bill Clinton did this too—you pick these things up; you got to be careful with
this; you pick up really bad habits from presenter … I picked up a habit one time; I was … saw a
presenter, and his zipper was down, and was like, “Ah, dude,” used … for two years, I’m doing this,
right? I’m just: “Ah ya heyo wa cha,” [laughter] and I finally saw—somebody filmed me one time, and
I’m watching; I’m like, “James! Stop playing with you junk! Please stop playing with your … delete!” Oh,
so glad it was before YouTube. Right? So you’ve got to be careful with what you pick up from other
people, because these sorts of things are … they’re either a positive or a negative. Open your hands;
don’t close your hands; emphasize the words you want to emphasize. I wouldn’t say “It was decent;” “It
was decent”—decent is the word you want to emphasize. So what they’re hearing and what they
saying, choreograph it so that it works well for you. By the way, we’re gonna take a break soon—I see
some of you all wiggling. We don’t have too much longer.
And then finally, what you feel, because you can—it’s not just saying words like leathery that have
obvious textures—you can get, actually, deeper with the thing that you make people feel based on what
you say as well. So if I said something like this: “My brain is a busy boy; it’s either working for me, or it’s
warring with my demons; I think I’ll buy it a beer.” I tweeted this one time—I don’t know why; I just
tweeted. Be … does anybody ever know why they tweet what they tweet? So I tweeted this, and a lot
of people like, “Oh, yeah, that was funny,” but there’s so much of me that I’m giving away here, right?
This is … I can make you feel differently about me, even if your conscious mind doesn’t pick this up, your
subconscious is saying, “Ah, he’s a busy boy; he’s probably got ADD, just like me. What? He’s admitting
to warring with his demons? Is he depressed? Is he ang … does he have anxiety?” Anybody in the
crowd who wars with demons; anybody in the crowd who thinks, “God, I fight with anxiety; I take
Prozac; it sucks having to do this. He does it too; we have something in common.” Right? I just gave a
little piece of myself to you, and “Buy it a beer,” right? Yeah, I like to party—you know—and I like to
party so much that it’s gotten famous that somebody bef … into my crowd—thank you, sir—bought me
a beer before the talk, right? So I’m giving a little bit—a piece of myself—I’m making you feel differently
about me based on what I say, and you can do this. Do it consciously; make sure you’re giving up the
stuff that you want them to take instead of the bad stuff, right? But you … so body language and tone of
voice is really important. Think hear, see, and feel; take your most important points that you want to
make and see if you can layer on some of this other language to it; it can be very powerful.
Okay, wait for this next storyteller’s tools. So what I want you to do is I want you to try to detect the
tools that you’ve already seen, and you’re also going to see a few new ones as well. So here we go.
[video] “I got to be honest—I’m sorry—I’d much rather have AIDS than a baby. [laughter] I got to be
honest—I’m sorry—I’d much rather have AIDS than a baby. [laughter]” Okay, you want to know why,
right? So you’re gonna find out—after the break. [crowd murmurs] [can opens]
>>: Alright, let’s do this thing.
>> James Whittaker: You ready? [thumping] [video] “I got to be honest—I’m sorry—I’d much rather
have AIDS than a baby. [laughter] Sorry, AIDS beats baby by this much. [laughter] Seriously. People get
all upset when they hear that, and I say, ‘Think about it. They’re not that different, you guys. They’re
not that different at all: they’re both expensive; you have them for the rest of your life; they’re constant
reminders of the mistakes you’ve made, and once you have them, you pretty much can only date other
people who have them. What’s the difference?’ [laughter] What’s the difference? [applause] The only
difference is you can’t go to jail by accidentally dropping AIDS. [laughter] So AIDS wins by this much.
[laughter] I’m serious. I mean, like people … at least, people—when you have AIDS—people are, like,
aware of it, and people want to help you; people feel sorry for you—like, people want to help you out,
and make other people aware of that, when you have AIDS. People don’t give a shit when you have
kids. [laughter] No one’s just like, ‘Yeah, man, I’m living with kids. [laughter] Been kids positive for about
five years now. [laughter] I lost a lot of my friends in the eighties to kids. [laughter] It’s just we’re doing a
kids walk tomorrow, and just [coughs]—I’m sorry, it’s just one of my kids coughed in my face; I have to
leave.’ Like no … [laughter]”
Okay, you saw all the instruments that we were talking about before. You saw the state-then-clarify
over and over and over again, and as you watch comedians, you’re gonna see this over and over and
over again, because it’s the proper way to emphasize a joke; it’s the proper way to deliver a punch line.
And it’s not just for things that are funny; it’s also the proper way to make your idea really pop—state it
and then clarify, happened over and over and over again. He introduced a new one that I want to talk
about—this happens in children’s books; this happens in movies all the time—where we take human
traits and place them on animals, right? Little Bear, and Franklin the Turtle, and all of these annoying
things I’m so glad my children have grown out of, and I don’t watch anymore. Right they have … they
can talk, and they can garden, and they can do all of these things. The way he did it was really clever,
and it’s a great way to compare two things. He’s comparing AIDS and having children, but he doesn’t
compare ‘em directly; he doesn’t list the features of AIDS, and list the features of having kids, and say
“this, therefore, it’s better.” He actually takes traits of AIDS and applies ‘em to kids and traits of kids and
applies them to AIDS—it’s devilishly clever and a very good storytelling technique. So you don’t drop
AIDS, but that’s what he did—you drop kids. You don’t accidentally … you don’t go to jail for
accidentally dropping AIDS. You have a AIDS walk, not a kids walk; you have a … you’re living with AIDS,
but he said living with kids; you test positive for AIDS, not test positive for kids. When you can do this—
whenever you’re trying to compare two things, take their properties and just transpose them, and
you’ve got a completely new and novel way to describe the differences between one thing and another.
Now, one more storyteller, and we’re gonna learn some new tricks here—how to relate to
[indiscernible] This one’s a little bit longer, but settle in, because this guy’s a great storyteller, and there
are some tricks that we’re going to learn that are difficult to find a better place to learn them.
[video] “In discussing the large-scale structure of the cosmos, astronomers sometimes say that space is
curved, or that the universe is finite, but unbounded. Whatever are they talking about? [music] Let’s
imagine that we are perfectly flat—I mean absolutely flat—and that we live, appropriately enough, in a
Flatland—a land designed and named by Edwin Abbot, a Shakespearian scholar who lived in Victorian
England. Everybody in Flatland is, of course, exceptionally flat. We have squares, circles, triangles, and
all scurry about, and we can go into our houses and do our flat business. Now, we have width and
length, but no height at all; these little cutouts have some little height, but let’s ignore that; let’s imagine
that these are absolutely flat. That being the case, we know, as Flatlanders, about left-right, and we
know about forward-back, but we have never heard of up-down.
“Let us imagine that into Flatland—hovering above it—comes a strange, three-dimensional creature
which, oddly enough, looks like an apple, and the three dimensional creatures sees an attractive,
congenial-looking square, watches it enter its house, and decides, in a gesture of interdimensional
amity, to say hello. ‘Hello,’ says the three-dimensional creature, ‘How are you? I am a visitor from the
third dimension.’ Well, the poor square looks around at his closed house, sees no one there, and what’s
more, has witnessed a greeting coming from his insides—a voice from within. He surely is getting a little
worried about his sanity. The three-dimensional creature is unhappy about being considered a
psychological aberration, and so he descends to actually enter Flatland. Now, a three-dimensional
creature exists in Flatland only partially; only a plane—a cross-section through him—can be seen. So
when the three-dimensional creature first reaches Flatland, it’s only the points of contact which can be
seen, and we’ll represent that by stamping the apple in this ink pad and placing that image in Flatland.
And as the apple were to descend through—slither by—Flatland, we would progressively see higher and
higher slices, which we can represent by cutting the apple. So the square—as time goes on—sees a set
of objects mysteriously appear from nowhere and—inside a closed room—and change their shape
dramatically. His only conclusion could be that he’s gone bonkers. Well, the apple might be a little
annoyed at this conclusion, and so—not such a friendly gesture from dimension to dimension—makes a
contact with the square from below, and sends our flat creature fluttering and spinning above Flatland.
“[music] At first, the square has no idea what’s happened; he’s terribly confused; this is utterly outside
his experience. After a while, he comes to realize that he is seeing inside closed rooms in Flatland; he is
looking inside his fellow flat creatures; he is seeing Flatland from a perspective no one has ever seen it
before—to his knowledge. Getting into another dimension provides, as an incidental benefit, a sort of xray vision. Now our flat creature slowly descends to the surface, and his friends rush up to see him.
From their point of view, he has mysteriously appeared from nowhere—he hasn’t walked from
somewhere else; he’s come from some other place. They say, ‘For heaven’s sake, what’s happened to
you?’ And the poor square has to say, ‘Well, I was in some other, mystic dimension called up.’ And they
will pat his on his side and comfort him, or else they’ll ask, ‘Well, show us. Where is that three-dimen …
third dimension? Point to it.’ And the poor square will be unable to comply.
“But maybe more interesting is the other dimension in dimensionality. What about the fourth
dimension? Now, to approach that, let’s consider a cube. We can imagine a cube in the following way:
you take a line segment and move it at right angles to itself in equal length—that makes a square. Move
that square in equal length at right angles to itself, and you have a cube. Now, this cube, we
understand, casts a shadow, and that shadow we recognize; it’s—you know—ordinarily drawn”—see
where he’s going with this?—“in [insicernible] third-grade classrooms”—he explained the third
dimension from the second dimension point of view—“as two squares with their vertices connected.
Now, if we look at the shadow”—now gonna blow your mind by explaining the fourth dimension from a
third dimension point of view—“of a three dimensional object in two dimensions, we see that, in this
case, not all the lines appear equal; not all the angles are right angles—the three dimensional object has
not been perfectly represented in its projection in two dimensions, but that’s part of the cost of losing a
dimension in the projection. Now, let’s take this three-dimensional cube and project it—carry it—
through a fourth physical dimension—not that way, not that way, not that way, but at right angles to
those three directions. I can’t show you which direction that is, but imagine there is a fourth physical
dimension. In that case, we would generate a four-dimension …”
Now, I stopped that on purpose. [laughter] I stopped it on purpose, because I know exactly the average
number of page views that that YouTube video gets on a daily basis, and as one of the metrics I can use
to see how many people are really interested in being better presenters and how many people are just
sitting through this and are gonna walk out that door and go back to their day jobs. And so I’m going to
watch over the next few days and see how many more it gets. [laughter] There’s a second metric I have
for this, and I’ll talk about it later, but it … this is mind-blowing. He’s going to describe the fourth
dimension in a way that you will actually understand. Do you have a question?
>>: Yeah, more importantly, people should go read Flatland.
>> James Whittaker: You can go read Flatland—right—by Edwin Abbot. Yep, a wonderful, wonderful
book. Okay, so let’s continue with what he taught us. He made a very strong connection with the
audience; here is Carl Sagan, an eminent scientist, a television personality in the seventies if you
watched the series Cosmos—if you’re old enough to be privileged enough to live in that era, where such
quality science television was possible. And here’s how he opens it: “Astronomers sometimes say that
space is curved, or the universe is finite, but unbounded. Whatever are they talking about?” Even in his
opening, what he’s doing is he’s elevating the audience to his level. “Oh, there’s these big-brained
scientists that say all these outlandish things, and me and you together, we’re gonna figure those out.”
He makes the audience feel good, because hey, we’ve got Carl Sagan on our side. When you can do
that—when you can get an audience thinking, “That speaker’s on my side. That speaker’s going to help
me. I’m going to get a benefit from this. That speaker thinks I’m smart”—then you’ve won. And that
connection with the audience, we’ve talked about several aspects of this; we’ve talked about—you
know—giving little nuggets about my beer-drinking or my anxiety or—you know—little nuggets to your
audience—this is a really great way of doing it.
Martin Luther King does this too: Martin Luther King’s talk, he starts by saying, “I am happy to join with
you today in what will go down in history as the largest demonstration for freedom”—that’s what he
says. And so instead of connecting me and you in the audience, he’s connecting us all together by
saying, “Hey, we’re making history here together. This is going to be amazing. Your children, your
grandchildren are gonna talk about this, and you’re going to be able to say you were there at the
greatest demonstration for freedom”—it’s awesome. So try to make that connection with your
audience; try to keep that connection with your audience going, and great things are going to happen,
because they’re going to pay more attention—they’re going to feel special. An audience that feels
special learns more from you than an audience that is alienated in some way or simply neutral.
Now, notice his pace and cadence; I mean, you can’t say that Carl Sagan has a compelling voice—in fact,
it’s downright monotone, and it’s downright boring. Now, he could try … he could go to some Toast
Masters course and learn how to talk like this and get an accent—any of that would be false. If you have
a monotone voice, own it—that’s you—be genuine with it. I have a Kentucky accent; I don’t apologize
for it; I’m from the South, or the Midwest—I don’t know; I’m from Kentucky; I’m confused! [laughter]
And I don’t shy away from that, and I always hate it when—you know—some person comes to me who’s
not from this country—English is their second language—saying, “I want to lose my accent.” Don’t lose
your accent; own your accent, and he owns his monotone. He’s boring; he really is; I mean, you could
just … if it wasn’t so interesting, and if he didn’t know how to use pace and cadence, it would be
wonderful cure for insomnia, but he does know how to use it, and it was subtle with him. With Martin
Luther King, he will get angrier—he will say something. It was … he starts out with, “I have a dream … I
have a dream,” and by the end of it, he’s like, “I have a dream!” He doesn’t do this; he never raises his
voice, and he never lowers his voice, but he speeds up and slows down—that’s the only change that he
makes. So figure out what change works for you. If you want to … if he wants to emphasize
something—like when he was talking about Flatland and Edwin Abbot, the Shakespearian … the
Victorian scholar, right—he quickened the pace so that he got through it faster, and then when he
wanted to make a point about something being really important, he would either quicken or slower his
pace, right? “Not that way, not that way, not that way, but all of those directions at the same time,”
right? He didn’t have the passion that I have for it … like I can’t say it monotone, but he would say, “All
of those directions at the”—I can’t do it. But he said it—just said it—faster. So don’t just … try to be …
be yourself; don’t try to change your voice; don’t try to change who you are; be genuine, and this is part
of being genuine is owning your monotone. All he can do … he can’t change the cadence so much, but
he can change the pace of the conversation. So figure out what works for you, and if you can take that
monotone—and you all were paying attention; when I clicked pause you all all went, “Ah,” and you did
that because you wanted to hear despite the monotone. Own it; be genuine.
Alright, now, props: we was an absolute master of props. Did you see how he would lean over the
props, and he would move ‘em back and forth, and when he took the apple, he just lovingly looked at it.
It was beautiful the way he handled everything, and he picked up the cube, and you’ll see the tesseract
at the end. Right, he handles them just so lovingly, and his voice and the use of the prop were
perfectly—you know—“He walks into … or goes into his little flat house and does his little flat
business”—he’s moving ‘em around. And so he’s matching how … what he was saying with the use of
the prop. We already talk about layering hearing, seeing, and feeling; your prop is another dimension of
that—it’s the fourth dimension of that. Your prop and timing—the movement of the prop and how you
do it—you’ll see later, when I tell stories, I’m going to move places, and I’m going to do it purposefully,
because I … it’s another layer of association—it’s not just what you’re hearing; it’s what you’re seeing
me do with the prop. And you got to be careful with props, because oftentimes, props can take over,
and if you read any of the books—like there’s a book out there called Presentation of Secrets of Steve
Jobs. By the way, don’t read it; Steve Jobs himself said, “If I had read … if I had done the stuff that’s in
that book, I would have been a worse presenter,” and the guy who wrote the book can’t present like
Steve Jobs. Why … there’s a guy who wrote a book How to Give a TED Talk, and he’s never given a TED
talk—alright, come on, really? Not just you … should you be able to give a TED talk, you should be able
to give a great TED talk in order to write a book like that, so don’t pay any attention to that, but one of
the pieces of advice they’ll tell you is to not use props. That talk that he gave would not have been as
good without the props; there’s no question about it. Flatland made it; it made it pop. What you need
to do is you need to understand the prop is part of the story; it can’t be the story; it has to be ancillary to
the story—it has to support the story. The story is still more important. Now, I want you to watch this
comedian, because he has this prop which is basically PowerPoint, and that’s what all those books tell
you, “Don’t use PowerPoint” like it’s some … it just makes you stupid by its very presence. Here’s a
prop; here’s PowerPoint. Watch how he uses it; watch how it becomes part of the story and not the
story. In fact, he will show something on the prop; there will be silence; and it’s not until he tells a story
about it that people laugh. So watch this; you’re watching someone who’s mastered his props.
[video] “[applause] So this is a large pad. [laughter] On this pad, I have data from the last year—these
are findings. [laughter] Start with a simple chart: okay, this is pretty simple; this is how short the person
is versus how drunk the person is, [laughter]”—see where the laughter came in?—“and the line is how
funny it is. [laughter] You see the shorter and more drunk the person is, the funnier it is. [laughter] This
up here would be like a midget or a small child who’s very drunk; [laughter] here, this guy’s like six foot,
and he’s just like buzzing—it’s like, ‘nah, not so much.’ [laughter] How funny I find farts by location:
[laughter]”—they’re laughing at him, not the prop—“school is pretty funny; church is funnier; my face
isn’t funny at all—that’s negative [laughter]—my brother’s face is off the charts, though; [laughter]
scuba, I’m not sure. [laughter] Flow chart of clowns: circus—annoying—birthday clown—sad—one
that’s just around is creepy, [laughter] but if any of them get hurt, it’s funny. [laughter] Okay, this is very
autobiographical. This is the cuteness of the girl versus how interested I am in hearing about how
intuitive her cat is. You see the cuter the girl is, the more I’m willing to hear about the cat—‘Oh, really,
yeah, he’s very intuitive’—but you’ll notice at a certain point, I don’t care how cute you are, I don’t want
to hear about your [beep]-ing cat anymore. [laughter] [applause] This is my ability to draw mountains
over time. [laughter]”—watch him stick the landing—“[applause]”—he doesn’t talk over the applause;
he doesn’t say thank you; he just closes his little pointer and walks offstage.
So that … he … you laughed at him; you laughed at the words; you laughed at the jokes; you didn’t laugh
at the prop. Props are in support. Okay, one more storyteller, and I hope that wait for it thing will go
away this time—it was earlier—and this is one of the most important lessons you’re going to learn.
[video] “And though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream
deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day, this nation will rise up; live out the
true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.’
[applause] I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Jordan, the sons of former slaves and the sons
of former slave owners would they be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a
dream that one day, even the state of Mississippi—a state sweltering with the heat injustice, sweltering
with the heat of oppression—will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream
[applause] that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the
color of their skin, but by the content of their character. I have a dream …”
Now, it turns out that if you do read those books that I recommended that you not read, he’s breaking a
whole bunch of their rules. He’s standing at a podium; they tell you, “Oh, never stand at the podium,
because that’s a barrier between you and the audience, and it’s a position of power that you have over
the audience.” Why is that necessarily a bad thing again? He’s reading from a script; “Oh, never read
from a script, because it makes you look ungenuine.” No, it doesn’t. That kind of … that’s poetry, what
he’s reading there—“Not … judge not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character?”
Holy shit! You can’t get that wrong, and if you’re up … if you’re nervous, and you’ve got this big crowd,
and you say, “Not to be judged by the content of their character, but by the color of their skin”—it might
happen, right? You might screw it up if … if you’ve got to get it right, it’s okay to read; it’s okay to glance
down at something, but you got to be careful; you can’t make it too obvious. It wasn’t obvious that he
was reading, but he was reading, and he practiced this over and over and over again, but he was
glancing down at his notes. Watch the whole thing; this is probably the greatest piece of oratory of all
time. By the way, the greatest modern piece of oratory is by Amanda Palmer. I don’t know if we’ll have
time, but we’re gonna watch her TED talk—the best TED talk of all time—she makes zero mistakes in it,
and it’s amazing. So if I don’t get a chance to play it during this, watch Amanda Palmer’s TED talk—it’s
the best piece of oratory since Martin Luther King, and that’s saying a lot.
He needs to deliver that line perfect, and it’s okay to read it, whether it’s a teleprompter, or whether—
you know—you have your notes on your phone, or you have paper notes, it’s okay to read it, but be
careful; teleprompters are hard, and particularly for speakers that aren’t used to ‘em, they’re a huge
distraction, because they literally are—they’re in the floor between you and the audience—and they
just … it draws you attention, because this stuff is moving on them, and you’re … you keep looking in
down. I was in New Zealand; I gave a talk at a Microsoft TechEd conference, and there was three
keynotes. The first was Michelle Dickinson—she goes by the handle Nanogirl—and she just slayed it,
man—she gave a great talk—and then the second person in between her and I read the teleprompter,
and would literally look down at the teleprompter, and then say what the teleprompter said. He
completely lost the cadence of his talk, and then, I got up and did my thing, and it was Michelle and I
that were vying for best presentation, not the poor chap that was in between us. And as soon as I saw
it, I kept thinking, “Stop looking at the teleprompter; stop looking at …” and he didn’t do it. He … it
sucks you in, man; it’s like drugs; it’s like sex; it’s like rock and roll, and it’s got to be avoided—it’s evil. If
you have to look at it—‘cause I didn’t look at the teleprompter at all; in fact, before I took stage, I went
back, and I said, “Turn the teleprompter off for mine.” I didn’t want to accidentally get sucked into what
that poor guy was sucked into.
If you have to look at a teleprompter—if you have to look at your notes—you want to distract the
audience in some way; so if you see yourself thinking, “Okay, I need to look at a teleprompter; I need to
get this line correctly,” move while you’re doing it, or make a gesture while you’re doing it. Do
something that makes the audience … and it’s really easy just to change directions is the easiest thing to
do; glance down at the teleprompter while you’re changing directions, and then look up and make eye
contact with the audience. Eye contact is important. Who am I making eye contact right wi … eye
contact with right now? A lot of the books will tell you, “If it make you nervous looking at your
audience, look over your audience.” Can you all tell I’m looking over you right now? Of course you can,
and it’s annoying; it’s weird; it’s like, “What is this guy, stoned?” [laughter] Yeah, man, stage presence …
[inhales] oh, wait, this is being filmed, right? [laughter] Oh, wait, it’s legal here; yeah, we’re good.
[laughter] Look them in the eye; give them eye contact, and make sure you sweep around, and even if
somebody’s being an—I’m gonna talk a little bit about audience management at the end, and I’m … I’ll
tell you who to look at and who not to, but I won’t … I’ll save that for then.
So what was his main power of this? The main power of Martin Luther Ki … we’ll actually the main
power of Martin Luther King is that he spoke to white people—I don’t know if people really appreciate
this so much. Do you remember what a great orator Barack Obama was when he was a candidate? The
reason he was a … such a great orator when he was a candidate is because he was really good at
speaking to liberals, and he would get an audience full of liberals, and everybody’d be like, “Holy shit,
this guy’s awesome! Where can I vote?” And he never, ever figured out how to speak to conservatives.
He didn’t—I’m sorry, Barack Obama supporters, right? I like the guy; I’m rooting for him. He couldn’t
figure it out. Same problem with the civil rights leader in the sixties had—Jesse Jackson, Malcom X—
they all talked to black people; the black people got it; they didn’t need to be reminded of bias; they
didn’t need to be reminded of oppression; they knew, right? And that’s why all of their rallies had a lot
of violence associated with ‘em. Martin Luther King figured out how to speak to white people; Martin
Luther King convinced the white people in charge that he was smarter than them, and that he’s a
greater orator than them, and that he could command more power than them, and his dream became
the white dream as well—stunning, absolutely stunning.
But here is what he’s known for: repetition, and he did it over and over. Listen to this talk; go to
YouTube, look for the I Have a Dream speech, listen to the whole thing. If you want to be a great orator,
this is the greatest piece of oratory ever, but Amanda Palmer is closing fast. [laughter] “One hundred
years later,” he starts out—right, he starts with the: “One hundred years ago, the …” or actually, he
doesn’t say a hundred ago; he says, “Five score years ago, the emancipation proclamation was signed,”
and then, one hundred years later, we’re still screwing it up. One hundred years later, we’re still
screwing it up, right? He says it three, four, five, six times—one hundred years later—and then he goes
into the now is the time, right? We’ve been screwing it up for a hundred … now is the time that we can
fix this part of it; now is the time that we can fix … now is the time that we can fix this part of it—
amazing, amazing. We’re talking about gender bias earlier; female gender needs its Martin Luther King.
And then he goes into the I have a dream—that’s the part we talked—I have a dream, and do you notice
how he said it; it wasn’t just some random I have a dream sort of sprinkled in. He would make a point, I
have a dream, make a point, l have a dream—it came when we were expecting, and what’s happening in
our minds … what brain scientists tell us is we get to … repet … see, repetition causes certain neural
con—I’m sorry—you make a point, and it causes neural connections to be made; you make that point
again, and it’s the same—you’re reinforcing those neural connections over and over and over again.
And in your mind, you’re like, “Oh, he’s gonna say it again; he’s gonna say, ‘I have a dream;’ he’s gonna
say it,” and then when he says it, you’re like, “I knew it!” And you feel good about yourself. This is …
there’s really no way to lose; the audience is like, “Oh, I knew he was gonna say that.” Right? It’s kind
of like one of those “I got the joke” things—that’s why you laugh; it’s not really ‘cause it’s funny; it’s that
you got it, and you feel proud of yourself for getting the joke—but even if you’re not expecting I have a
dream—even if you’re … you get it, and it’s a surprise—you’re like, “Oh, wow, he did it again. He got
me.” You can’t lose with repetition. The only way you can lose with repetition is saying it to many
times; Martin Luther King nails it—absolutely nails it. And then finally, “Let freedom ring”—he’s … not
only is he repeating something, he’s repeating something that has connotations, right? We’ll let
freedom ring—what a statement of American equality and justice can you make other than “Let
freedom ring?” Right? That’s part of one of those really important documents that … this is two
hundred some odd years old—I don’t remember which one—but “Let freedom ring:” somebody said it,
and he said it again, and all of those historical connotations come back. Yes, sir?
>>: Yeah, I know he … I noticed that he’d finish a point and then say, “I have a dream,” and then wait for
audience response.
>> James Whittaker: Yeah.
>>: What was the reasoning behind that? I mean …
>> James Whittaker: He’s letting it sink in—right—he said, “I have a …” he’d make a point, say, “I have a
dream,” then he’d make a point, then he’d wait for audience response.
>>: [indiscernible] he’d wait for audience response after he’d done the next I have a dream. So he’d go
point, I have a dream, and then wait for the audience response.
>> James Whittaker: I think—I mean, I’m putting words into Martin Luther King’s mouth here—but I
think he was … it was the biggest impact. I have a dream—that’s what he wanted to emphasize; he
wanted his audience to have that dream as well. So the points really don’t really matter, because
“sweltering with the heat of injustice”—what was happening in Mississippi, and this was only part of it,
too—he … all of those things were just a bunch of evidence. It was the dream he wanted you to have—
very powerful. Is there a question over here?
>>: I think you’re missing a point here that that was a call-and-response that you hear in a black church.
You’ve been in … I mean, anybody that’s grown up in the South has heard that, and you can listen to it,
and you hear it the speech and the recording, and if you watch the audience reaction, that’s what he’s
playing to.
>> James Whittaker: Yeah, yeah, so he … you’re saying this was a … this happens in black churches all
over the South, and this is how they speak, and they do that because it works. Right? But he also … and
it works for white people too, because this guy is responsible for—you know—the civil rights; he is the
guy. Yes?
>>: So my take here was when he was saying, “I have a dream,” there are certain points he would say
that would … sounded negative, when you could get negative connotations—“Oh, that won’t change”—
but then he would right away say, “I have a dream,” so you have a positive push that: yes, this can
happen.
>> James Whittaker: That’s right. The I have a dream’s were both positive and negative, and do you
notice that the negative ones, he almost seemed to be sighing when he said it—I have a dream—but
then the … when he got to the end, it was like I have a dream, and they became more fiery. His pace
and cadence—even in just the way he said, “I have a dream”—changed over time. Brilliant, brilliant
stuff. Alright, we’re gonna forge ahead here, because we could literally be talking about this for quite
some time. I’m gonna talk … we have a monthly film club I’m gonna talk about later, where we actually
watch, and discuss, and debate these sorts of things, so we’re gonna continue.
So the other part that he gets and that a lot of people get … use this—this is a great oratory
instrument—is reality versus aspiration. I talked about this at the beginning, where I said one of the
ways you can start your talk is by showing them a better world. Here’s reality—“This is the world of
these poor people who have to use Amazon web services. Oh, aren’t they suffering? And they can
switch to Azure, and all the sudden, it’s butterflies and puppy dogs.” [laughter] Right, so that’s the id …
and he was doing this, right? He tore that world down—“The reality’s … a hundred years later, the
reality is still bad. A hundred years later, but the dream that my four little children will be judged not for
the color of their skin,” right? He … the dream was there. That reality versus aspiration is really strong,
especially if you can paint this reality fairly; you can’t lie about a reality; you can’t say, “[indiscernible]
poor people using AWS;” it actually works pretty good, right? You have to find something about their
reality that everyone will agree: “That’s not good,” and then show them a different reality. When I did
my software testing talks, I always did this: “Here’s a bug; here’s the same software working properly.
Here’s the security vulnerability; here’s that software written properly”—it’s “This is not good; what I’m
going to show you is good.” And he got inside our head; we wanted that new … we want this new
reality; we want what he’s aspiring to; we agree with him—incredibly powerful.
Okay, now I’m gonna tell you all a story. This is a story I’ve been telling on the … last week was the Hour
of Code, and in schools all over the country—right—Obama kicked it off; Bill gates had a talk in it; and I
had a talk at it. I drove hundreds of miles, across King county—actually, further than King county—
giving talks at high schools, and so I gave this follow talk I’m going to give now, and we’re going to find a
few more oratory instruments in it as well. And my purpose was simply to inspire; these were computer
science classes, and I went to—you know—heavily minority schools; I went to wealthy schools—I went
from one to the other—and my message was simple: I want to inspire them into thinking differently
about computer science; I want them to see that this is a viable career option; I want them to see the
beauty of computers … computer science. And I came up with the idea of calling software … calling
computer science “magic”—look at the magic you can do with this; don’t you want to be part of this?
And the … in my telling, I used examples, I use quotes from magic authorities; magic is my theme, and
I’m gonna stick with that magic theme, and so the … I’m gonna quote magical people, right? Think
Gandalf the Grey or whoever that dude was in Harry potter. You know, I’m gonna use real examples of
software actually performing magic, and I’m gonna give you this reality versus aspiration click. So see
how many of the oratory instruments you can detect, and then we’ll see where we go from there.
Hat on, presentation mode engaged. I want you all all to hold your hand out right in front of your face,
and I want you to look at your thumb. Put your thumb right in front of your face and marvel at its
versatility. Move the thumb up and down. This is literally the human body part that the mo … hu …
movable human body part that is the most useful and the thing that really separates us from the higher
primates. This is an opposable thumb for our bodies. What would an opposable thumb for our minds
look like? What would that be? Well, it wouldn’t be physical like this; an opposable thumb for the mind
would be ethereal; it wouldn’t be something you could touch; it would be like thought. You can’t touch
thought, but you can think things that change the world around you. An opposable thumb for the
human mind would be magic would be the only way you can describe it—something ethereal,
something that you can’t touch, but that you can use to manipulate the world around you, and we know
that the only thing that can possibly be magic is the thing that satisfies Arthur Clarke’s condition of
magic: any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. What satisfies this? What,
in all of this world, satisfies this test for magic? Software—it’s the only thing that satisfies it. You take
any device; you take any toy; you take any game; the thing that makes it magical is software, and
software is that opposable thumb for our mind. It’s ethereal; we can’t really touch it, but we can use it
to manipulate the world around us in incredibly magical ways, and we’ve been doing this, right?
Software isn’t just about taking pictures of your junk and sharing ‘em with your social network; software
isn’t just about cute cat videos; and in fact, I could even say those are misuses of software—software is
capable of so much more. In fact, some problems are so big—too big for the human mind alone—that
its opposable thumb is necessary to solve them completely.
Take DNA for example; the double-helix structure of DNA was discovered in 1953 by Crick and Watson—
they won a Nobel prize for it—but that invention sat basically still for decades, because the only tool we
had to manipulate it was the human mind, and it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t until the 1990’s that the real
promise—the real magic—of DNA was unlocked. The human genome project in 1990, thirteen short
years later, we mapped the entire human genome because of software; you take software out of the
equation, and we’re still wondering, “Ooh, maybe we can solve crimes with DNA evidence; maybe we
can cure diseases with DNA; maybe we can understand how our species evolved because of our analysis
of DNA; maybe we can actually extend life because of DNA”—they were all maybes until the 1990’s,
when our minds’ opposable thumb of software was applied to this problem; in only thirteen years, we
mapped the human genome—not the genome of some inert organic substance; not the genome of
some laboratory rat, ours, that means yours, and yours, and yours. Any of us, for a few thousand
dollars, can get our genomes mapped—this is magic, and it’s going to cure more disease, and it’s gonna
solve more crime, and the magic is getting stronger.
Not only can the magic look into the tiniest recesses of the human bodies, we can also point this magic
at the stars. For centuries, we been—our ancestors—have been looking up at the stars, saying, “I
wonder if there’s life out there. I wonder what’s out there. Are there other planets? Are there other
species like ours? Would life be somehow different?” But it sat, because our mind lacked its opposable
thumb of software; we were only guess—that’s all you can do without the magic is guess. The human
mind could only take us so far; there are only certain problems the human mind can solve—it’s really
good at cat videos and taking pictures of your junk, but capable of so much more. Instead of guessing
now, when we look out, we know what’s there. There is a planet—the very first planet that was ever
discovered—a gas giant orbiting around the binary star of Gamma Cephei was found many years earlier,
but verified—validated—by software in the year 2003. No more guessing, no more maybes, no more
what ifs, we found one, and a few days later, we found another, and a few days later, we found another,
because of the magic of software. It’s getting more powerful; we’re grinding lenses with software;
we’re tracking stars with software; we’re … software is able to transfer the tracking of a star from the
North Pole to the South Pole—from Australia to England—automatically; software is able to record all
the data and see in all the light spectra—visible and invisible—software is capable of sharing the data
with that scientist, and that scientist, and that scientist over there, so you can all agree: “That’s a
planet.” No more guessing, the magic takes the guesswork out, and now, here we are in 2014, more
than a thousand extra-solar planets have been identified—more than a thousand of ‘em—couple dozen
of ‘em are rocks—warm-core rocks, just like the one your feet is planted on right now. And the magic is
getting more powerful; we’re detecting atmosphere; not only that, we’re figuring out what gasses make
up that atmosphere. How long? How long until we find one that has an atmosphere that we can
breathe? I’ll tell you what: take software out of the equation, we never find it. See, that’s the magic;
this is capability that we won’t have without software; we will always be guessing without software.
Now, your generation has this magic. Your generation has this magic—remember, I’m talking to high
schoolers, right? Your generation has this magic in much more powerful form than my generation had
it, and you have much bigger problems than my generation had. For example, instead of mapping DNA,
do you know what your generation is doing? You’re mapping the human brain—a bigger problem, a
much bigger problem. The human brain project started last year; hundreds of millions are being poured
into it, just like we did in DNA. Are we going to succeed? Yes, we’re going to succeed. We’ve given
ourselves ten years—I don’t think it’s gonna take that long; I been tracking the project; we are making
great progress. We are not only gonna be able to understand how neural connections are made, we’re
going to be able to make them. We’re not gonna just understand the autistic brain, say; we are going to
be able to modify it. We are going to be able to understand schizophrenia; we are going to be able to
understand anxiety and depression; we are going to be able to treat the brain as well or better then we
treat the human body right now. And this is going to happen in your all’s generation; you all are going
to do this with your power of your mind and its opposable thumb of software. And oh, there’s such
problems for you to solve with this—the Higgs bozon, the God particle—it’s yours. We discovered it;
you’re gonna turn it into magic. Power of creation: the ability to take matter, change it to energy and
back again—that’s called teleportation. You guys are going to build the starship enterprise, not my
generation, and you’re gonna do it with the power of software.
So you have your choice: do you want to work on the big problems—like global warming, the
acidification of our oceans, the disappearance of species, gazing at the stars, curing the human body—or
do you want to stick with your cat videos and the pictures of your junk? Please choose wisely. Thank
you. [applause]
Always wait out the applause. So you saw a lot of the oratory instruments, right? I kept repeating
things; all my key lines, like software, the opposable thumb for the human mind; when you come up
with something like that, you want to say it three or four times—right—it’s good; it’s really a good line.
And so let’s take a look at some of the new things that I’ve introduced, and the first were quotes, and I
use this very powerful quote, because what’s happening in your all’s mind—particularly, remember,
these … this was a technical audience; these were the people who were interested, or studying, or
thinking about being interested in computer science. If I mention Arthur C. Clarke, you either know who
he is, or you’re embarrassed that you don’t. [laughter] Right? And either way, I assume his power; see,
this is what happens when you quote someone: you assume their power; this isn’t … it’s not James
Whittaker saying software is magic; it’s James Whittaker pointing out that software passes Arthur C.
Clarke’s test for magic. Arthur C. Clarke is a giant in science fiction and in science—right—he did a lot—
amazing man—and now, he agrees with me, therefore, you agree with me too. You assume the power
of the person that you quote; you start quoting Einstein, they’re like, “Oh, shit! Einstein agrees with
James; he’s got to be right.” And this is the type of power that you get.
Now, remember when I talked about I gave that presentation “Microsoft 2.0 or Bust,” and I knew it was
gonna be contentious, and I was saying some really, really scathing—you know—analysis of Microsoft’s
current market position, and so … and it turns out, I did get some blowback. All the sudden, there’s an
e-mail thread, “Hey, James is talking some smack about some of our products. So—you know—who’s
gonna tell him shut up?” And so I responded, just saying, “Hey, I told you all it was an intervention; you
all know they start out … maybe you should the whole talk to the end and see the good part that comes
out of it.” And then right before my signature, I put that quote: “You have enemies? Good. That means
you’ve stood up for something sometime in your life”—Winston Churchill. And then, the e-mail thread
kept rolling—right—they’re like, “Yeah, but James, you said that, man, and you’ve just demotivated
everybody on”—I’m not gonna name the team out loud—“you just demotivated everybody on that
product team.” So I went back—I had my excuse—and I put this quote at the bottom of my signature:
[laughter] “Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds”—I didn’t
comment on it; I just put it there—and then, it got a little more conciliatory. They’re like, “Okay, yeah,
we kind of see where you’re coming from.” Of course you do; Winston Churchill and Albert Einstein are
arguing my points; who you got in your corner? And so it got a little more conciliatory, so I said—you
know—“Hey, man, it’s just me. Go to hell for the … got to heaven for the climate, hell for the company
… comp …” and then finally my very last one was after it was all okay—yeah, we’re all friends, hugs. I
put, “Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes”—Oscar Wilde—and so you see with my point
here is you put the power of the person you’re quoting in your corner if you’re trying to make a claim,
and somebody smarter than you has already made that claim—somebody more famous than you—then
put it down, right? Never quote somebody no one’s ever heard of; don’t quote people—you know, it
really annoys me when Microsoft people quote Satya or some CVP that I’ve never heard of, right? I
mean, you … it’s o … I mean, yes, you’re … within the halls of Microsoft, maybe a quote from Satya
makes sense in certain contexts, but be careful how you wield this power. Is there a question back
there?
>>: [indiscernible] question. Do you have a database of all great quotes for … [laughter]
>> James Whittaker: Dude, that’s what the web is for, right? Brainyquote.com, you just search for
Winston Churchill quotes, and they come up—Winston Churchill says some great shit, too, man.
[laughter] He is awesome, awesome, but—by the way—but you’ve got to be careful. Like Winston
Churchill, I quote Winston Churchill on a regular basis, and I’m glad that I’ve read and I know a lot about
Winston Churchill, because I had a Winston Churchill scholar in one of my audiences—he wanted to
come up and talk about Winston Churchill after one of my talks, because I had mentioned him a few
times. Thank goodness I knew something about Churchill, because I would have looked like an absolute
idiot. So at the very least, read the freaking Wikipedia page of the person that [laughter] … a person
that you’re quoting, or don’t bother. And be careful, too, because Oscar Wilde—as much power as you
get from people you quote, you take some baggage on, too—Oscar Wilde has a very colorful history;
there might be certain places—you know, I’m thinking churches [laughter] and … or you know, the US
South, right—the … where you wouldn’t get a lot out of quoting somebody like Oscar Wilde, so be
careful—be careful with that.
Proverbs, sayings, anecdotes—all this same thing—proverbs … the …I can get by with Kentucky
proverbs; I can get … man, I mean, China and India are two countries that just have some of the most
beautiful proverbs, particularly India—I’m sorry, Chinese—but particularly India. The whole Hindu and
Buddhist influence on … man, they say some stuff that’s just way out there—I am serious. The
legalization of marijuana and the proliferation of Hindu quotes should go hand-in-hand. [laughter] And
… but I can’t pull these off; I’m not Indian; if you’re Indian, you’re Chi … embrace that—right—embrace
your culture and all of the cool things that come out of it, because that’s another way of giving a little
gift, right? If I start quoting Daniel Boon or Stephen Foster—right—it’s a little—or talking about
bourbon—that’s a little Kentucky gift to you; keep that in mind when you start using these things. ‘Kay,
we have thirty minutes left.
Alright, next thing I want to talk about are metaphors. “Software is magic”—right—that’s a metaphor;
software is not magic; I’m explaining software by comparing it to magic. That’s what a metaphor is all
about. By the way, all the books on public speaking have a whole chapter on the differences between
analogies, metaphors, similes in talking about … blah, blah, blah, blah, blah—they’re all metaphors,
metaphorical concepts; metaphor is a root word. It doesn’t … no one cares whether it’s a simile or an
analogy—no one cares—you shouldn’t either. What you’re doing is you’re taking something that you
want to explain the audie … to the audience—perhaps they’re a bit unfamiliar with it—and you’re
comparing it to something that’s very familiar, like I did: Microsoft is Arnold Swarzenegger; Google is the
dude with the weird glasses who could walk through—alright, the … of course, Arnold won—Apple’s
that little cute one at the … in the third one, right? Always—you know—well-designed and always
perfect in … we beat that one too, right? So that’s the idea; so you get … there’s more to the story
because of the metaphor; so software’s magic—that’s a metaphor—you understand magic; you have
Harry Potter, and Lord of the Rings, and Merlin the wizard, and all of these things sort of come in, and
you’re like, “Hey, you know what? Software really does do magic.” And that’s my … part of my
credibility; you agree with me that software is magic; I’m credible; and you’re going to listen to my story
closer, Ron White got thrown out like he was a frisbee, right? That’s not pushed out; he didn’t stumble
out the door. Frisbees go airborne, so we can picture that; frisbees turn—right—we know this, ‘cause
we know what a frisbee is, and we can picture him being thrown out of that bar.
Some more: Martin Luther King said, “Sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of
oppression.” Injustice and pression don’t have a temperature, but he just gave ‘em one—this is
metaphorical—it makes them much more rich; it makes them much more tasty in the audience’s mind.
Having a baby is like contracting AIDS—a metaphor. This is one I wrote the other day that people seem
to like on Twitter: “My brain came to me the other day and said, ‘Will work for beer,’ so I hired him.”
Where’s the metaphor here? You can picture my brain standing out on a street corner—right—with a
sign that says—you know—“I’m hungry. Anything will help,” right? I … the metaphor here is I’ve
compared my brain to someone who’s homeless and—you know—asking for help. That’s the metaphor;
I didn’t qui … I didn’t come out and say, “My brain is like the dude on the street corner with the sign;” I
didn’t have to—it’s embedded in this. Metaphors, sometimes, the deeper the metaphor is buried, the
brain is more activated, and like, “Oh, wow, how clever is that? I get it; it works for me.”
Sometimes, metaphors are—you know—come … can be just spot-on. Here’s how I describe the first
page of a google search: So you had this great idea, and you built this awesome product, and you
popped up this great website, and you’re ready for the world to find you, but where are you when
someone googles—or bings … I always like to say, “or bings” in a slightly sla … smaller tone when I say it
out loud, because people not from Microsoft kind of like, “ha, ha, ha,” but anyhow—some googles—or
bings … do you notice I added a little … nevermind, I’ll just keep [laughter] … I’ll just go … I’ll go on
beyond that. If someone googles something related to you, you don’t show up; you’re not on page one;
you’re not on page two; you’re not on page three—is there a page four? Does anybody ever go there
except the people wondering, “I wonder what the hell’s on page four?” [laughter] Right? The web is like
high school: you want to be on that first page, you’re either one of the popular crowd, or you’re rich
enough to buy your way on there, or your product—just like you were in high school—becomes one of
the invisible people—one of the people that nobody notices, one of the people that can’t figure out how
to get ahead. Well, you moved beyond high school, and it’s time that we moved beyond the web; it’s
time to create an economy based on actual value, and not just your ability to buy popularity—that’s
what I’m going to talk about, a real-value economy. We’ve all moved beyond high school, and what is
our biggest value? Was it back in high school, when we were one of the invisible people, or is it now,
when our voices are heard? So the metaphor is buried in there; it was a much larger talk, and people
get it, right? They relate to the metaphor. I mean, come on, I’m talking to mostly computer science
audiences—we were the invisible people in high school, right? [laughter] None of us were particularly
popular, and we’re … we’ve made more money than our parents, right? So immediately like, “Ah, I can
relate to that,” and they get my concept. I don’t have to talk anymore about killing browsers; I can talk
about making a value statement.
I’ve also compared browsers … well, this … I talk about advertising; I compare advertising to American
sports versus European sports. So I do something like this: you know, in browsers, ads make sense, just
like ads make sense in the National Football League, because in the National Football League, we play a
little and then we stop, right? “Ah, let’s all rest and hear about Pepsi,” and in the web, we enter a
search term, and we stop; we get a page. Oh, here’s a chance to advertise—“Ah, you … do you need
your mortgage refinanced? Do you have a small …”—nevermind—right? We get those opportunities;
so just like the NFL, the browser is full of opportunities to advertise, but what about apps? Because in
apps, you’re not searching around for something; in an app, you’re task-based; you’re busy; you’re
doing something; you launched the app so you could do something. How do you place an ad in that?
Well, apps are much more like European sports—right—soccer, those people never stop kicking the
damn ball—they just don’t—so where’re you gonna place the ad in that? You can’t get away; you can’t
say, “Hey, Pelé”—no, he doesn’t play anymore—“Messi! Messi, dude, take a break, time out, because
we got to talk about: you are spending way too much time on figuring out your car insurance or
whatever.” Right? You can’t do it, so the ads have to be placed—right—on the jersey, on the coach’s
bench—in places that the camera will go—we have to be much more subtle about it. So what are the
principles about advertising in apps that we need to get right, just like the Europeans figured it out for
soccer? So I could talk about it in those terms, and when you talk about … man, that really goes over
well in Europe, because they laugh at all of our commercials; they laugh at the fact that our games stop
all the time, and so I’m playing to that kind of cultural aspect of it, and they always love that analogy. So
there another one: now, whenever you get the same question over and over and over again, a
metaphor or a story are necessary, and I have both for privacy, because as a Microsoft evangelist, I’m
always out there giving a talk, and they always say, “James, what about privacy?” And I’m gonna show
you how I handle it with a metaphor. So when I put my hat on—let’s see, you in the green shirt—when I
put my hat on, say, “James, what about privacy?” Okay?
>>: [coughing] James, what about privacy?
>> James Whittaker: Privacy—you know—you asked the question as though it’s a concept, and I think a
lot of us think about privacy as a concept—“Ah, I’m private, or I’m not”—but it’s not that simple. In fact,
I view privacy as a spectrum, and it’s a spectrum that I think would be very helpful for most people to
think about where they fit—where the … your opinions about privacy are. At one end of the spectrum is
the NSA; right now, at the NSA end of the privacy spectrum, there’s not a lot of choice; you don’t really
know what they’re connecting … collecting; you never really gave them permission to know it; you’re
not really sure what they know; you not really sure what they’re going to do with it—maybe there’s
some nebulous view of: yeah, you’re probably gonna be safer, but that contract contains very little
input, very little control, and very little value. Now, at the other end of the privacy spectrum is Santa
Clause, and at the Santa Clause end of the spy … privacy spectrum, the rules are pretty straightforward:
he sees you when you’re sleeping; he knows when you’re awake; he knows if you’ve been bad or good,
so be good for goodness’s sake. We all understand that contract, and we’re happy to tell him; we’re
happy to give him information—“Oh, Santa, I did this; Santa, I want this,” so we understand the value
proposition coming back; in fact, we even understand it so well we know the worst case is a lump of
coal. [laughter] So this is privacy—this is the spectrum upon which we exist, as companies, as
governments, as individuals—where on this spectrum are we? Are we closer to the NSA, where, “Hey—
you know—we’re willing to do this, and we’re not really sure what we’re gonna get back, but I’m sure
it’ll be great.” Or are we closer to the Santa edge, where we want to have some input, and we want to
be able to understand the value proposition? But it’s a spectrum, because there’s a lot of places in
between. Now, the interesting thing about—once I started that … with that analogy—is I will explain
that; people will be thinking about it, and then I’ll go on to the next question without the audience ever
really realizing I didn’t answer the question. [laughter] See this is the power: people are start thinking
about the metaphor—“Wow, this is awesome.” I also have a story involving my son, which I don’t know
if I’ll have time to do, but we’ll see if that’s the case.
Okay, next … we’re on fourteen? Next is facts, data, and research. Data shows—I had a few facts
thrown into my presentation: DNA was … the double-helix structure of DNA was discovered by Crick and
Watson in 1953; look it up, right? There’s actually a third guy that nobody ever talks about. And you
know, it … and really, nothing really happened with DNA, right? He won a Nobel prize, I could have even
said, “He sold his Nobel prize later for four point one million dollars,” and then, if I wanted to really get
current, I could say, “and the guy who bought it gave it back to him,” right? So you could … there’s a lot
of … do your research; you’re talking about something, do your research on it, and research is so easy to
do these days—bing it! Did you notice the hesitation, right? Okay? See the more people think about
Bing, I think. So facts make you look like an expert—you did your homework, and when you do your
homework, people respect you for it—and so the first planet that was discovered with this new science,
Gamma Cephei—binary star, right? All of these sorts of things, what you’re doing is you’re underscoring
your credibility; you’re underscoring your willingness, not just to speak, but to speak authoritatively,
because you’ve done your homework. So you got … but you’ve got to be careful here; I could have
talked about Crick and Watson for a long time; I could have talked about—you know—I went through it
fairly quickly about software grinding the lenses, moving the thing, right? The … you can go overboard
here too; you can look like a complete data nerd, and you don’t want to do that—so got to find the
balance.
So every statement—every declarative statement that you want to make—go through your talk and say,
“Alright, when am I declaring something as true?” So if I want to say Americans don’t travel much,
that’s a decl … alright, I’m making that declaration: Americans don’t travel outside their own country
very often. I can say that, and it’s partially effective; it happens to be true. So if it’s true, find some
data, and it turns out, fewer Americans travel outside their country than the citizens of any other
industrialized nation. That says Americans don’t travel much; that actually says we really don’t care,
alright? [laughter] Our country’s big; there’s a lot of cool shit here to see, and I’m sure there’s cool stuff
out there, “but it’s so, so far away”—right—“and it’s looks bad on television.” Or I could say, “Less than
twenty percent of Americans even bother getting a passport”—also true, and it says Americans don’t
travel much. So you don’t have to say, “Americans don’t travel much” if you have the data that implies
it—make the implication; let your audience’s brain make the connection. “Ah, James just said
Americans don’t travel much, even though he said he said this”—very powerful oratory instrument.
Alright, we are getting down to the wire here. Now, the last part is personalizing it; I’ve been giving you
little nuggets; I bet you all could probably sort of figure out my political meaning … leanings at this point,
and probably religious associations, you could figure out—substance abuse, comments about … you
know, ideas about my personal life, whether I’m married or not, right, all of these little things you all can
… probably already started to figure out. Stories like that—little bits of individual nuggets about me to
you—about a speaker to an audience help personalize it. It helps make that connection that Carl Sagan
and that Martin Luther King were doing it, but here, we’re doing it with actual personal stuff, and stories
are the way to do this. Stories, I’ve already talked about the power of a storytelling; in fact, if you go
medium.com, search for my name—I wrote two stories about stories. I wrote a storytelling manifesto,
where I talk about the fiery talk about the power of the story and that the human brain is wired for
story, and then somebody challenged me, said, “Ah, that’s a weenie way out. If stories are so powerful,
tell a story about why stories are so powerful,” so I did, and it’s called The Parable of Yrots, and you can
read both of those and see if I succeeded, but it personalizes, so that you’re giving your little sel …
you’re giving the audience a little piece of yourself. And I also have to give other people’s talks, right?
Like Guggs’s talks, when he goes out on the developer circuit, I end up … I’ve taken some marketing VPs’
talks, and I’ve given those; one of these days, I’m thinking Satya will send me out on one of his talks, and
I can add my own little stories to personalize it, so even if they’ve heard Guggs tell the same talk, I can
tell it in a way that makes it more personal—makes it James’s talk. So I generally tell three stories; I
don’t think I’m gonna have time to tell them all. First is: what about privacy? I have a personal story
about that—let me just tell it to you real quick. So when I put my hat on, say, “James, what about
privacy?”
>>: James, what about privacy?
>> James Whittaker: So you all know I used to work for Google, right? And Google’s corporate e-mail
client is gmail—right—so I’m on gmail; I’m travelling to Europe, and I’m reading my mail—trying to work
in the middle of the night, because I can’t sleep—and I got an e-mail, and the e-mail was from my son.
He’s probably twelve or thirteen at the time, and I begin to read it—big mistake, because it’s a bad email. It’s a break up e-mail; his little girlfriend, who he’s been with for—ah—weeks, [laughter] dumped
him, and here I am, reading this in the middle of the night, and I begin to tear up. He’s like, “Oh, dad,
my heart is so broken. Will I ever heal from this? Oh, I feel …” and I’m beginning to tear up, and I look
over to the right-side panel of gmail, and there’s advertisements flashing by for divorce attorneys—
divorce attorneys, right? [laughter] And I mean, can we all just admit that this kind of stuff is creepy?
That Google, I do not need a divorce attorney for my twelve-year-old son’s breakup. I don’t need to sue
her; she’s fine. I know I’m American; I know we have this suing tendency; I’m totally good with that—
this is creepy. Now … then, what I generally do at that point is I’ll … then I’ll go into my spectrum, right?
Santa Clause and NSA, and I—just like a one-two privacy punch—and I leave them laughing about my
story, understanding, “Ah, he’s a father, and he loves his son, and when his son hurts, he hurts,” right?
All of these things go combined.
By the way, did you notice how I did the audience on all of the questions? I was talking about eye
contact earlier. When somebody asks a question, give them some eye contact, but eye contact can get
… you know, at some point you’re gonna become a little creeped out [laughter]—okay, see, we got to
that point. Too much eye contact is not a good thing; we all had those professors in college, remember
if, like, if you were the first person to ask a question, the professor was like the rest of the time—you
know—he’d write on the board, and he’d be looking at you, and then everything was directed towards
you—it was like, “I’ll never ask a question again.” In general, you want to make sure that you sweep all
the way and that you’re looking at their eyes and not above ‘em, and … but when someone asks a
question—like you asked a question earlier—my general rule of thumb is you get fifty percent of the eye
contact for the duration of the answer. You get fifty percent of the eye contact for the duration of the
answer, and if you find yourself that … that’s one rule of thumb; the second rule of thumb is emphasis
points—look at the person who asks the question, right? You know, so I could say—you know—
“Divorce attorney! A divorce attorney!” Right? So you—you know—when you want to make
something like that, the person that asks the question kind of gets that little special extra—extra stuff—
sort of as a reward for asking the question, or maybe in my case, it’s a punishment, but [laughter] there
you have it.
Alright, I’m not gonna be able to do this one—this one’s a little bit longer, but it’s a lot of fun—it
involves my daughter, just—you know—trying not to be gender-biased, I guess. [laughter] I’m gonna do
this one—the app discoverability problem. This is a tough problem to describe, and I always—every
time I want to talk about it—“Oh, I have to [indiscernible] and so many apps in the Apple App Store;” I
went to try to do the fact base; I tried metaphors; I tried all this stuff, and then a story happened. A
story happened to me while I happened to be going about my daily life, and boom, it was the app
discoverability problem. So I’m going to tell you a story, and you’re going to understand the app
discoverability problem just because of the story. So check this out—hat goes back on.
So have you seen this movie? This movie is called World War Z, but that doesn’t matter. This movie is
the most perfect movie ever made. It’s the most perfect movie ever made for two reasons: the first
reason is because it’s got zombies in it, [laughter] and zombies are coming—they are coming; they’re
real; we’re create … it’s not like that stupid vampire stuff they tried to shove down our throats there a
couple years ago. Remember those movies? Vampires are made up; zombies are real; we’ve created
this virus in the laboratory; we understand the conditions; it’s going to happen; you must watch all of
these movies and prepare. [laughter] And the second is because this is the first zombie movie that my
date wanted to go to, because it’s got Brad Pitt in it! [laughter] This is a perfect movie! Oh, and there
we were; we both couldn’t wait, because she heard about the shirtless scene, right? So there I am, I’m
like, “Ho, ho, ho, huh, zombies,” and there she is; she’s like, “Ah, huh, huh, ha, Brad Pitt,” and I was like,
“Oh, zombies,” and she’s like, “Oh, Brad Pitt.” Alright I did it twice; that’s repetition, I think—that’s one
of the cases, where if I kept saying, “Zombies, Brad Pitt, zombies, Brad Pitt,” it wouldn’t work, okay?
Repetition done, put it to sleep. But then, there I am, watching a movie, and something strange
happens: my date pull out her cell phone, and she begins to glance down at her cell phone during this
most perfect movie. To make it worse, I hear mumbling—she’s like, “Five, four, three, two, one.” She
touches me on the knee, and she leaves this most perfect movie; I am shocked—I mean shocked—I’m …
I am coming up with my breakup line so that when she gets back, I can just eject this person from my
life. And she does come back two, three minutes later; she sits back down; now, if you’re at the movies,
and you’re with somebody, and you come back from being gone, you generally turn to the person you’re
with, and you say, “What did I miss?” Right? “What did I miss? What happened?” And she didn’t say
it; so being proactive, I said, “Hey, you didn’t miss anything,” and do you know what she told me? She
said—and I quote—“I know,” because she has an app that tells her when to pee at the movies.
[laughter] There is literally an app for that. [laughter] Somebody has watched every single movie;
they’ve curated all the data—“Here’s an interesting part; oh, here’s a part, plot twist, don’t pee here.
Oh, new character introduced, don’t pee here, but here is a little four-minute section; go ahead and go;
nothing interesting happens.” [laughter] So now I ask you: raise your hand if you go to the movies—just
put your hand in the air—alright, I think it’s safe to say we all go to the movies, right? Now, raise your
hand if you have this app.
>>: My wife has.
>> James Whittaker: One person. [laughter] The smallest-bladder person in the room has this app. One
… you know what? It’s funny: there’s always one person that has it—always—I mean, I can have five
thousand people in my audience; I can have five in my audience; there’s always one person who has it.
[laughter] But back to the story: that, my friends, is the app discoverability problem: an app that, at
some point in our lives, all of us could find value from, but none of us know about. How do we solve
this? All software developers are wasting an awful amount of time writing an awful lot of functionality
that never sees the … there … it exists on anybody’s phone—this crazy. There has to be a better way,
and I’m gonna talk to you about how Azure solves this problem, and then I go into the more technical
description. And so that’s the story; you all laughed and you all got it—right—the app discoverability
problem was obvious; you all actually showed me what it was by all raising your hand and then no one
raising your hand.
Okay, so now we’re almost done—we have eleven minutes left—and the only thing left is to stick the
landing. So I’m gonna stick my hat back on, and I’m gonna stick the landing. Now, the first thing—I
need to tell you a couple of things about sticking the landing before I stick it. The first thing you need to
know is don’t introduce anything new—never, ever, ever introduce anything new. Alan Adams—you
saw him—he stuck inflation in there right at the end—way too late—if you haven’t made your point by
now, it’s not going to get made, and so therefore, you can’t put anything new in there, because you’re
not going to be able to land it—you’re not gonna be able to give it any justice. Secondly, no
summaries—I’m sorry—no summaries; somebody talked in the beginning; they said, “Hey, what about
an agenda? I go to so many talks where the first two minutes are always just taken up with: ‘Hey, here’s
the agenda; here’s what we’re gonna talk about.’” My advice is don’t do that; I gave you my agenda
after my opening. My agenda was that slide, and it was like twelve, fourteen slides in—“This is what I’m
going to talk about, now that I’m gotten you interested.” So don’t do that; don’t summarize. You know
what your summary is? Your summary is a reminder to your audience that you think so little of them,
you’re going to tell them again what you already told them. “Look, I’m sorry you aren’t as smart as me; I
spent a lot of time explaining this, but I’m gonna explain it one more time”—you don’t want that
message to get to your audience, not a good message. If you—it’s your fault—if you feel the need to
summarize, go redo your talk—it’s your fault for not getting the point landed. And then finally, this is
what I wanted you to frame it around: what is the one thing that you want—when everybody walks out
of that door—what is the one thing that you want them to remember? That’s what you want your
summary to be. So I’m going to stick this landing, but I’m not gonna stop—but I … you should stop.
Stick the landing, let people clap, and then stop, but however, I’m gonna take my hat off, and then it’s
gonna go back to course mode, and I am gonna wrap up. I got some closing advice, and then I’ve got
some pointers; I’ve got some pointers about how to get course note; I’ve got some pointers to
distribution lists, where we discuss stage presence on a regular basis; how to get involved in our film
club; and how to continue to work with the stage presence community within Microsoft. So first, I’m
gonna stick the landing, though.
So you have an idea. I don’t care how good your idea is; I don’t care how bad your idea is; it’s not your
idea that matters the most. If you want your idea in other people’s heads—if you want to change the
way people think about you and your idea—stage presence is the tool that you must master. Here are
four gentlemen who mastered it—four gentlemen who changed the world with the power of their
message. They didn’t have better ideas, and they didn’t necessarily have better plans or better
products; they had stage presence, and stage presence is quite literally a super power; it can take a
great idea and get it inside a large number of people’s heads; it can take a good idea and make it sound
better, because this is a super power. So I don’t care if you want to change the world, like these men
have changed the world, or if you just want to change your little corner of the world; you’re not going to
do it without powerful stage presence. I’ve given you the basis of it now—I’ve given you the ingredients
list. I want you all to walk out that door and go bake yourself some stage presence cake that’s just yours
and no one else’s, that makes you unique—more so than everybody else—and that makes sure that
every time an audience listens to you, they get your message. Thank you all very much. [applause]
I always stick the landing—it’s always my worst part, because I’m tired. This is really a difficult course to
give, and I got the sweat rings to prove it, but a few final thoughts before we stop: so practice, practice,
practice, and mental practice counts—it really does. Science has shown that mental practice—even if
you’re not standing up on a stage giving a talk—just going through your talk over and over and over
again—the same neurons are firing; the same neural pathways are being created; think about your talk;
go through your opening; recite it over and over and over again. Now, if you suffer from stage fright,
you’ve got to put a little more—oh, by the way, this is true. That’s not me, but I just got that off the
web. I never told my kids stories until they were old enough to ask for ‘em. I used to explain buffer
overflows to my kid while I was changing his diaper—right—he didn’t care; he just wanted to hear the
sound of my voice. I’m like, “Ooh, there’s a big bad stack out there, and then there’s this guy that wants
to move the stack pointer. I’m gonna show you how you move it.” Right, in two E, and I started talking
about all this cool stuff about of overflows; I get into just talking, talking, talking—stalking to … talk out
loud, talk to yourself. I would—in fact, I still do this to this day—but I had stage fright fairly, fairly bad
when I was graduate student, and I was teaching, and I had to do my dissertation defense and all, and I
would go—in order to just create some pressure to my mental practice—I would drive—and this was …
I’m old enough that this was before we talked to our cars and our phones and things like that in the
car—I would drive, and I would drive, and I would look over and make eye contact with the person next
to me at a stop light, and I’d just stare ‘em down, and I’d move, you know? Roll my window up and
down, get their attention, then they’d look at me, and I’d say, “Data is the new oil—big data, little data,
[laughter] structured data, unstructured data. Data is literally the new oil, and like da … like oil, it …”
you know, just stare … ‘cause it would make me nervous, ‘cause they’d be like, “What the fuck, this guy?
Laughter] Who the hell is this dude?” And it would make me a little bit nervous, but it would give me a
chance to practice under duress, [laughter] which you want to try to do, and it worked. See? It made
him nervous, too. [laughter] So practice, practice everywhere.
Act like me; act like Carl Sagan; act like Steve Jobs—go ahead and do it, because there’s no way that
you’re going to be able to act like any of us, because you’re not us. And these are my three biggest
influences—sorry we didn’t get to Amanda—Winston Churchill, Carl Sagan, and Amanda Palmer. The
reason they’re my three biggest influences is because, first of all, they’re better than me—all three of
‘em are much better than me, and I can learn from them—and secondly, I just get the things that they
do: his use of props, his poetry—I can’t pull off King’s, but I can pull off Churchill’s—his poetry, and her
choreography—ah, wow, watch this TED talk. She starts out here life as basically a street performer—
the eight-foot bride—and she stands up on her box, and she starts to give her talk, and then at some
point, she’s a mus … her musician … music career takes off—she’s no longer a street performer; she
steps off the box, and it’s just beautiful. Her choreography—the way she matches what she says, what
you hear, what you see, how she says it, and her motion—is beautiful, and it’s something I try to aspire
to. So find yours; watch a lot of comedians; watch TED talks; get inspired, but while you’re doing it,
think, “Why is this so strongly resonating with me? What is about him? What is it about her that
resonates with me so strongly?” And that’s the stuff you want to mimic, but you’ll become yourself,
because I’m a little piece of all of these presenters.
And then finally, where is your creative center? The day before a talk, I like to just go take a walk in the
woods and just run through my talk. I don’t have music playing in my ears; I’m listening to the birds; I’m
becoming centered; I’m thinking through all the points that I want to make—I never make ‘em perfectly.
If I did this again next month, I would tell different stories; I would land my … some points better some
points worse. It’s hard to do; you’re never going to be perfect when you give a talk, but this is the sort
of mental preparation I have. For some reason, me and hot tubs just get along really—that’s why I put it
on the internet of things: I appreciate it so much. And then my other one is live music; I built a music
studio in my house, just so I could get musicians to come in and play, because I love watching people
play guitar, and I love listening to really loud live music, and so that’s my son—I think he’s sixteen at the
time there—playing with, evidently, a lazy bass player and some other people. So surround yourselves
with the things that make you creative and go through your talk at the same time.
Now, right before I start my talks, I go through my notes, and you came in here quite early—didn’t you—
this morning, and I was sitting in that chair, and I was going through my notes, just to—you know—
remind myself of everything, make sure that I’ve got the important points down; I put on music—and I
put on the same music every talk—I put on a … it’s a local band called Ben Union; you probably heard it
if you came in early. There’s just something about that guy; I love his … I’ve got a complete and total
man-crush on him—love his voice, love his music, love the message. There’s one song called Trance; it’s
a very long song, and it’s mellow. I put that on about forty-five minutes before I go on stage, and then I
get heavier and heavier and heavier stuff, and the song that was playing right as we started—that I
stopped when we started—it’s called The Right Way, and it’s got an awesome guitar solo in it, and I just
love it; it makes me comfortable; it makes me relaxed. What … create your own little ritual around your
talk, and it’ll just make you feel better. The other thing is: I snuck in the other room, and I did fifty
pushups in a dark room, just to get my blood flowing, and then I walked out to the stairs, went up,
down, up, down and—up and down twice—and then came back, breathing a little bit heavy—I got my
blood flowing; wake my body up. “Hey, I need you; I need you. Wake up; come on, you can do it. I
need you.” And I was ready for my talk. I actually got in trouble for this; I was in Europe—I think it was
in Germany—and I was back in a speaker room, and I just dropped and did twenty pushups right before I
was going—I mean, I … Marissa Mayer was just on stage, and this is heavy, serious competition; Mark
Zuckerberg’s in the room; he’s going on stage later, like “Holy shit.” Right? So I drop, and I just do … I
bang out twenty, thirty pushups, and as soon as they say, “James Whittaker,” I hop up, and I run out on
stage, and I slayed it—I mean, I slayed this talk. And I won best presentation—they announced it that
night; they were so sure that the rest of the conference, no was going to hit … match my score that they
gave it to me mid-way through. I mean, it was one of the best talks I’ve ever given in my life—I was
on—and so the next day, I’m in there, and the lady ran the conference—Stephie—she was mad at me;
she was like, “James, come in the speaker room. Look what you did,” and we walk in, and there’s some
dude doing pushups, [laughter] and she’s like, “James, this has been happening; they just keep doing it.
[laughter] You … why did you do this to me, James?” So find what works for you, and—you know—what
will get you loose.
And the audience: I’ve talked a little about audience management. Don’t look at that guy—he’s
yawning; he’s bored. People … don’t … they will take your energy from you if you give them too much
eye contact, ‘cause it’s human nature to: “Ah, she’s bored; I can see it. Ah, she’s fallen asleep. She’s …
ah, man.” And you want to think like, “Is she paying attention to me now?”—I’m using you, my dear—
“Is she paying attention to me now? Is she paying attention to me now?” Don’t do that; she’s not
paying attention to you; [laughter] she’s bored; let her go. You all … you will lose some of your
audience; it’s okay to lose some of your audience. I’ve written some books, and I don’t mind the onestar reviews I get on Amazon—love the fives, respect the ones; three? Make up your damn mind, man.
[laughter] I mean, seriously, get off the fence. I don’t mind the ones; I’m totally happy with it, because
I’ve still made a connection with you; it’s a negative connection, but I’ve made a connection with you;
I’m proud of my ones. Look at that guy. If you need some energy back from your audience, and you’ve
got that guy in your audience, give him a little love, alright? Look at that guy; he’s laughing at all of my
jokes—this is wonderful—and several of you all have done that for me in this. You’ve probably noticed:
maybe I just stray to you just a little bit longer than others, and then I’m not gonna talk about hecklers,
because we’re a little bit over time.
And then finally, remember to have fun. I hope you all see me … I’m volunteering to do this; this is not
part of my job; no one’s ever asked me, “Okay, James, you need a commitment—or we don’t call ‘em
that anymore, but whatever we call ‘em—right, you need a commitment to go out and I …” this … I’m
doing this for fun, and I hope it shows. This is way earlier than I really like to be around people,
[laughter] and … but I’ve done it anyhow, because … and so if … enjoy your subject; be genui … and if
you enjoy it, be genuine in that joy—show it to ‘em; give it to your audience They’re going to pick up on
that—“Hey, he’s having fun; this is fun”—and then you’ve got ‘em, right? So smile and have a good time
with this. So now, remember [laughter] only you can present … prevent shitty presentations; [laughter]
it’s up to you that every presentation you give, raise the bar a little bit from the last one—I want to be a
little more provocative; I want to be a little bit more interesting; I want to get my idea over just a little
more clearly than I did before—every single one gets better and better and better. And you know who
they are: there’s people at this company that can’t present—shhhh … actually, no, tell them, but be nice
about it; say, “You know, James has this course. Quite enjoyed it; it was … you would enjoy it. [laughter]
I highly recommend that you go there, mister GM”—because our GMs … it’s like: what do we do to our
GMs; as soon as we make ‘em GMs, we send ‘em into some offsite and suck the personality right out
‘em. [laughter] So help me help them to put it back in. So recommend people for this, please.
Alright, so here we go. Follow me on Twitter if you’d like—@docjamesw—there’s a mailing list—
internal—aosp—art of stage presence—underscore grads. Sign up for that—that DL—and when new
courses—I also teach another course called “Career Super Powers”—all the course notifications are sent
to that DL, and we do film clubs ever month or two months. They’re … you all organize them, not me;
we watch three talks: one comedian and one TED talk that I approve, because I want things to have
lessons in them, and third is whatever you want to choose. Book a room, invite the list, see who shows
up, and we sit around and we discuss things. Read my blog on Medium if you’d like—@docjamesw
again—so there’s an e-book for this; just go to amazon.com Kindle Store for it; there’s a good Kindle app
for the … for Windows that you’ll like. Now, be warned, I charge for this, and I charge for this for two
reasons: number one, it’s another way for me to collect metrics about: how is my message really
landing? Are people just sitting here, enjoying it, and then leaving, not doing a thing about it? Or are
they continuing their study? So I created a financial barrier—six dollars and ninety-nine cents—and it
turns out, it’s quite a barrier. [laughter] And so … but it is giving me data about who’s really interested in
this, and who’s really wanting to improve—or at least what percentage. And secondly, if you do buy it, I
will send you a link to the slides, so don’t ask me for the slides unless you buy the book, and third, I also,
actually, to do it to make money, and so every quarter, I pick a new charity to donate the money to. So
the way it works is: seven bucks—right—about two goes to Amazon; I get about five; I match it with five
of my own money; I go through the Microsoft matching programs so that they match it, so twenty—
about twenty—bucks goes to charity. This quarter, it’s Ignite Worldwide; it’s an organization that
teaches girls ages eight to fourteen all over the world the joys of science and technologies and … to try
to get more women into the discipline, so they’re getting all the money; they’ve already gotten one
payment halfway through the quarter, and they’re gonna get all the rest of it up to December thirtyfirst, and if you have a charity you’d like to recommend—this is not insubstantial money that ends up
going to the charities—if you’d like one to recommend, I’m going to be picking a new one for the first
quarter of next year. So anyhow, my name is James Whittaker; you’ve been so patient and so kind.
Than you all very much. [applause]
And I’ve got nothing better to do, so I’m gonna take questions. My boss is already texting me, saying,
“Where the hell are you?” He can wait another twenty minutes, so if you all have questions, let’s talk; if
you don’t have questions, file out as quietly as you can so that we can have a discussion. Yes, sir?
>>: [indiscernible]
>> James Whittaker: Very good. So the question is: he said, “You were mainly focusing on presentation
skills—when you’re talking to a crowd—but what about one-on-ones and what about—you know—your
interactions with people on a daily basis?” This applies to those big time. I don’t go into a one-on-one
unless I have my opening line set up. Too many of our one-on-ones do nothing but waste time, and
people do not respect that. If you’re having a one-on-one with somebody higher than you in the org,
the last thing you want to do is be unprepared and be boring, because that will be the last one-on-one
you’ll ever get with them. So the same thing: okay, I’ve got thirty minutes with Satya—actually, I last … I
got forty-five minutes with Satya on my last one-on-one; that was awesome—right, what am I gonna
talk about? What is my point? What is my … what do I want to walk away with either having him
understand or having me get at the end of this? Be very clear with this; these operate on any level of
presentation. Question from … there you go.
>>: So when your message that you’re trying to deliver equally is about changing the culture of the
people that are in that org, is there any sort of special [indiscernible] you take when you go into that?
>> James Whittaker: No, it’s a … every presenter—he’s asking about what about presentations about
culture change—all these rules apply. Like, for culture change, my “Microsoft 2.0” was basically a
culture change and strategy change talk, and I took the aspiration versus reality. “Here is the culture we
have now; here is the price we’re paying for that culture; here’s how it … look at the bright side of this
reality that we should all aspire to. So just … what … this is a cookbook; I … this is the ingredients; you
got to mix it all up, but this applies very strongly to any kind of presentation that you would want to
make. Yes?
>>: I understa … right at the beginning, warning us not to start with a joke, but throughout the talk, you
used quite a lot of jokes, and then …
>> James Whittaker: I said things that were funny. [laughter] They were never actually jokes. So
someone told a … she shared the most—is she still here? She’s gone; she shared a joke that she heard
that a man told in front of fifteen hundred people that had to do with incest, and it was … she’s like.
“That was … so I’m really happy to hear your advice never to tell a joke, because that was awful,” and he
did it out of nervousness. He just … that was the only joke he knew, and someone told him to tell a joke.
And you heard that advice: “Oh, yeah, tell a joke. That’ll break the ice”—no, it doesn’t. Right, do you
want … your first date—right—are you seriously going to tell a joke? Or do you want to hear a joke from
the person you have a date with? I tell you what: if people spent as much time thinking about their
presentation as they think about getting laid … I talk about that in my career super powers course, right?
You’re … you spend more time thinking about getting laid than you think about progressing in your
career, you’ve got the formula wrong, right? Now, was that a joke? I don’t know if that’s a joke or not,
but it’s funny, [laughs] but I never try to be funny right away—never. Yes?
>>: So throughout your presentation, you talked a lot about different stories and metaphors, and I’m
just curious: how do you actually come up with those and how long does it take you to come up with
those?
>> James Whittaker: How long does it take to come up with stories and metaphors?
>>: Right, or …
>> James Whittaker: Stories you have to collect. You put yourself—so in my career super powers
course, I actually talk about how to collect stories and how to go about it—I put myself in situation
where stories might happen. I travel a lot, so—you know—I will go to places that most tourists won’t go
to; I like to go into the back streets and the bars where all the locals hang out, and try to get involved,
and—you know—and watch for stories. Like that story actually happened; it happened a little bit
differently than that; I told it a … much more dramatically—the zombie and RunPee story—I told it much
more dramatically; it didn’t … so I embel … everything in there is true—everything in there happened
exactly—but I told it in a much more fun, embellishing fashion. But you got to look for ‘em, and in fact,
my daughter … one of the stories that I didn’t tell was the one on the domestication of information. We
were doing this thing with Bing where we were … if you sent an e-mail, and you were talking about—you
know—some event, instead of making you go to the web, we would just take that event from the web
and pop it in your e-mail, and so that was it, and we used an example of my daughter sending me an email: “Hey, dad, do you want to go see this band at the Paramount theater? Please, please can we go?”
And that was the example, and it was—you know—so here’s how the band information appears, and
here’s how the Paramount theater information appears, and the funny thing is that when I sent my slide
to legal to get them approved, legal changed her picture, and they changed her name, and I thought,
“That’s weird,” so I called them, and they’re … they said, “Yeah, no, it’s a privacy issue, James, you don’t
want to use your daughter’s na … picture, or you don’t want to use her real name.” And so I turned that
into a story, but … and so I had a lot of things, like I called legal and said, “What did you do to my
daughter?!”—right—“She started out as a blond Bailey; you turned her into a brun … I want my
daughter back!” Right, so I add things like that in a story anyhow, and … but I wanted to get something
kind of personal, and so I literally chased my daughter around with that screenshot of her e-mail with
Jennifer Whittaker—right—on it, and I’d chase her around, like she’d be eating, and I’d put it in front of
her, hoping she’d see it; I’d put it on her … on the coffee table in front of the TV so that she would have
to see it; I even put it in her bedroom one time, and she came out; she gave me my laptop; she said,
“Dad, stay out of my bedroom,” and just gave me … [laughs] oh, that didn’t work, right? And so finally, I
coaxed her into—you know—seeing the thing, and she said something really funny. I mean, and it was
great; it’s part of my story now; she looked at it, and she said, “Dad, who’s Jennifer Whittaker, and why
is she calling you ‘dad’?” And then she got that little pose that only a teenage girl can get—right—and
said, “Do you have something you need to tell us?” And it was just great, and so I got this awesome
story, and it’s all completely true, and—you know—shows a father-daughter relationship. So I actually
sought it out; I tried to get her to say something about it. Stories happen all the time; you just have to
remember them and apply them to your subject matter. And metaphors: look at those metaphors; find
‘em, you know? Metaphor happen on a regular basis: in conversation; you see ‘em in TV shows; you see
‘em in movies; you hear ‘em in the music that you’re listening to. Recognize that the metaphors are
happening, and over time, you’re gonna get better at coming up with ‘em. Yes, sir?
>>: In a few months, I’m going to be giving a presentation at a conference, and …
>> James Whittaker: Go get ‘em.
>> James Whittaker: … it’s my first time. What are your thoughts on, as I go up, just letting the crowd
know that it is my first speech and I may be a little nervous. Go to ted.com and search for stage fright.
>>: Uhuh.
>> James Whittaker: That guy did it right; he gave a TED talk on stage fright, and he started his talk by
saying, “I am scared to death”—right—“I am having a physical reaction because of my stage fright right
now.” And watch it—search for stage fright, and you’ll find it—and you … the audience’s reaction was
stunning; the audience was just … you could almost feel them willing him on, and even when he was
only slightly funny, they would laugh harder, because they’re … it was beautiful moment. Yeah, you can
say … but don’t … remember, you got thirty seconds; you take the whole thirty seconds, and you’ve lost
‘em—they don’t care that you’re nervous; they care about your message. So if I were you, I would
deliver my opening and then say, “Okay, glad I got that out of the way; I’m really nervous right now.
Bear with me; let’s continue.” Do your opening first. Yes?
>>: Online question: he’s wondering if you have any advice about demoing products as part of a
presentation.
>> James Whittaker: Yeah, you know, I’m actually coming up with tips on how to demo; I’m not quite
there yet; I been … but I’ve been studying this for a couple of months and been watching a bunch of
people do product demos, and most of the time, when people do things and product demos, the demo
takes over—over from the story—and that’s the part I want to break. So make sure that the demo is
ancillary; you’ve got to have the message; you’re not giving a list of features; you’re telling a story.
Here’s the situation I’m trying to solve; here’s how my product helps me solve it. Never get to the
situation of: “Let me show you this does. I does feature A, and it does feature B, and it does feature C,”
right? We do to that too much as Microsoft anyhow; we’re like, “Oh, Cortana will do this, and Siri won’t.
Cortana will do this, and Siri won’t. Surface will do this; iPad won’t. Surface will do this; iPad won’t.”
People don’t want to hear that; people want to hear: “I have a problem, and here’s the solution,” and so
make it as real as you can—the demo—but I am … I actually do have more advice on demos; I just … I’m
gonna make it part of the course for 2015. Yes, ma’am?
>>: I don’t know if this is covered in the TED talk, but …
>> James Whittaker: You know what? If I hadn’t seen you with your hand up, with that hair, you
deserve to be first questioner. [laughter] That’s awesome.
>>: I thought that’s why you picked me! [laughter]
>> James Whittaker: Yeah, your beard; I like your beard—beard’s going.
>>: I don’t know if this is covered in the TED talk about stage fright, but it’s something I’ve been working
on for quite a while, and I’ve gotten a lot better. So it used to be I just heard sound—like white noise—
whenever I talked, but now, I can have a cadence, but I never seem to catch my breath. I’m always
nervous, and I always hate that feeling, like suddenly I have to take a big breath in the middle, [inhales]
and I was wondering … maybe I just need to learn how to enjoy it?
>> James Whittaker: You do need to enjoy it.
>>: Do you have suggestions for that?
>> James Whittaker: You need to enjoy it. So here’s what I … here’s my suggestion … so she suffers
from stage fright—those … for those of you who didn’t hear the question—she tends to talk herself out
of breath, not slow down enough. I mean, the state-then-clarify, you want to try that first; take a look at
your talk, and then figure out all the parts you really don’t want to talk about—the parts that bore you
the most—just throw ‘em away, and then you’re left with the most interesting parts, so your chances of
having fun with it and them seeing you having fun just got higher. And then take some of your key
points and do that state, pause, clarify—state, pause, clarify—because that will force you to stop and do
it. ‘Cause you’ve got a nice voice; you got a cool … you got cool hair; you should be somebody people
want to listen to, and so work on it, and record yourself, you know? Do a—instead of a selfie picture—
do a selfie video of you talking, and then critique—what do you like? What don’t you like? And—you
know—work on it, and practice; get an audience together and practice. There have been several cases
on the aosp_grads e-mail alias, where people just said, “Hey, I want to practice this.” In fact, we have
one—a girl on the list—she’s covering Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In” TED talk, and she’s given it, at least,
to me and a couple others in a conference room once; we tore her a part, and she hasn’t come back
since, but she is … she’s gonna do it for all of us next year. So find an audience and go for it. Did you
have a question? Just a cool beard? Okay. [laughter]
>>: Yes, I have a question about speaking to kids. Any advice for us—we might be invited to speak to
our kids’ classes, things like that—it’s a tough audience.
>> James Whittaker: It’s a tough audience, man.
>>: Any advice there, and in terms of preparing for that audience, are there lessons there that apply to
other audiences as well?
>> James Whittaker: Okay, so how to … his question is about speaking to kids, and are there—you
know—what makes it uniquely hard? You have any advice? And is there anything that you can learn
from that audience that applies to others and other audiences that apply to that? You really do need to
think carefully about your audience and what will resonate—I wouldn’t say the F word in high school,
but I would say junk, right? When I said, “Take a picture of your junk and upload it to your social
network,” the whole auditorium at that school died laughing; the teachers laughed—everybody—it
related to them. But it was … it related to them; it wasn’t … the worst thing that you can do with a
bunch of kids is try to act cool like a kid. I was a dad chiding them for taking pictures of their junk and
doing this stupid stuff, right? Remain a dad; don’t … I … actually, I think the same advice applies to your
own kids: don’t try to be your kids’ friends; be your pig … kids’ parents; they don’t want you as a friend;
they can pick their own friends; they’re not gonna pick you, dude. [laughter] So don’t try to be their
friends; be … it’s okay to be that authority figure, but if you can take some words, like there’s certain
things I couldn’t say—you know—I wouldn’t put like, like, like, like, like; they say “like” a lot; I don’t … I
hope I don’t say like a lot; sometimes, it rubs off. Don’t try to be too much lick a kid, but if you can pick
something out—one word, like “junk,” you know—that’s very popular, that they understand, but you
say it in a way that’s derogatory. Here’s your dad talking to you—I think it’s very … it’s worked for me;
I’ve spent a whole week travelling around high schools doing this, and it’s … it worked. I was the only
week of … day—what—hour of code lecture that was put on Seattle and Lake Washington’s home page
for a week, so that’s pretty cool. Yes?
>>: I have two questions. First one: so I feel like af …
>> James Whittaker: Oh, wait, there was one piece of this, too.
>>: Oh.
>> James Whittaker: You asked about what you can learn about the audiences. You learn something
from every audience—every single audience—and I do something wrong every single time I talk, and I
learn from it and try to correct it for next time. Watch for your own mistakes. Yes, ma’am?
>>: So two questions. First one is: sometimes I feel like when I’m trying to imitate others or trying to
work on preparing myself for presentation, I almost feel like I’m doing things that’s too extreme, and I
don’t know how people will react, and I feel like—for example—like thinking about the stance or how
you move around the room—things like that—you always feel self-conscious. How do you feel more
comfortable about it, and then at what … like, to what degree? Like, eve sometimes when you slow
down, and telling the story, and that using some emotions—for example, just to … for a room of my
colleagues—I may think that’s, oh, that’s using too much emotions for just a presentation for them. And
then, my second question would be that for me, a problem I have is that I add a lot of ums when I talk,
especially when I’m nervous. How do I get rid of that?
>> James Whittaker: Is English your f … your second language?
>>: Yeah.
>> James Whittaker: Okay, yeah. The people whose Eng … English is their second language say a lot of
ums and aas, and you can even see, like the French people, and Israeli people, and Chinese people, and
Indian people, they all … there’re actually cultural things that they add—some are ums, and some are
aas, and some are uhs—and it’s really quite interesting to listen to speakers who English is their second
or third language. And taking those out is just practice. First of all, it’s recognizing that you’re doing it
while you’re … it’s better to recognize it while you’re doing it, so you can stop, ‘cause that whole—you
know—I was talking about my zipper thing—checking my zipper, checking my zipper—I didn’t recognize
that until I watched myself on film; I thought, “Oh, my God, I cannot believe I’m doing that; it’s awful.”
So you got to get to the point where either you’re self-aware enough to recognize it—and you probably
won’t get that way during the talk; I can have a conversation with myself while I’m doing this, because I
do it all the time, and that’s … I’ve noticed that’s only occurred over the last three or four years. Before
that, I had to be focused completely on my audience and completely on my message, and I can find
myself solving problem in my head while I’m giving a talk—it’s weird—but it’s been … so I can … I know
my mistakes—right—the gender thing at the beginning, and I was like, “Okay, I gonna try to fix that
here, and fix that …” so I can actually try to make it … make adjustments, but self-awareness is the main
thing, and if you can’t figure out how to do it immediately, film yourself, or ask colleagues if there’s
people in this room that you trust; you say, “Alright, I blew that, didn’t I? Help me; I want to get better.”
And people want to help—right—because they probably have the same … stage presence is something
that very few people naturally have; I didn’t naturally have it; this is developed; I was frightened to
death—I was terrible—when I first started doing it, but I started at a very young age, and I taken a lot—
I’ll tell you what, the best training in the world for stage presence is improve theater. It’s not
toastmasters; it’s not even my course; it’s improv theater, where you’re around a bunch of other smart
people; you have a subject; you have no time to prepare; and you have to have a conversation—right—
like you say one thing, and then I reply to it, and then you reply to it, and then you reply, and then
somebody fucks up, and we all laugh. Right, and then, “Okay, let’s start that over,” because improve, it’s
just … it’s not about how good you are; it’s about how long you can keep it up, and it’s a blast—it’s an
absolute blast. So I think you need a lot more practice, but you got to figure out what works for you, so
first of all, watch a lot of female presenters, ‘cause if you start trying to get … take on … and here’s a
problem, and it’s … and one of the problems that I don’t have a lot of videos in this is—you know—
there’s not a lot of great footage out there of female speakers, because men have been dominating this
field for decades, and yes, we have gender bias in this—there’s no question about it. Amanda Palmer’s
really freaking good; Michelle Dickinson is really good—Nanogirl—really freaking good. Watch her; she
gives a talk—you’ll enjoy it anyhow—it’s about the Microsoft Surface, and she drops it and shows it in
slow motion—the magnesium casing taking the drop—it’s bad ass, man, and she’s really good. And so I
tweeted the other day, “Hey, I’m … we’re looking for great female presenters. I nominate Amanda
Palmer and Michelle Dickinson,” and there was a nice little … a whole bunch of … a list of a whole bunch
of ‘em that are quite good, so look in back in my Twitter feed, and you’ll see I retweeted ‘em all, but still,
there’s only a dozen or so. So go to TED; start looking through; find some great female presenters,
and—you know—I’d love to include one in this, but my purpose in this is to teach, so I’ve got to have
teachable stuff. That’s the reason I chose the … ‘cause people will say, “Oh, James, here’s a great
comedian; she’s really funny”—like Wanda Sykes. Holy shit, is she funny, but I can’t find enough
teachable lessons in there to … for her to make my list, but I’d love to. Yes, sir?
>>: Find … you work in some other good—or maybe bad—[indiscernible] in tech?
>> James Whittaker: Straining? Speakers in tech?
>>: Yeah.
>> James Whittaker: Other good speakers in tech? Well, we lost one: Blaise Aguero just quit and went
to Google. He was a great speaker, and you can still find him on RESNET. Let’s see, within Microsoft,
Dave Coplin’s really good … umm … eesh, this is embarrassing; we’re gonna have to cut this part out of
the video. [laughter] Microsoft really doesn’t have a plethora of great speakers, and tech really doesn’t
have a plethora of great speakers. Steve Jobs really was … he was good, but he wasn’t fabulous; he was
just a lot better than anyone else named Steve. [laughter] See? Do you see how I delivered that? Pause,
punch line … yes, ma’am?
>>: So you mentioned that you started this very … when you were very little—sorry, I …
>> James Whittaker: No, no, no, no. I didn’t start stalk … talking about stage presence for that. I
struggled; I was a … I was not good; I did this on purpose, because I had teachers in high school that just
turned me on to subjects. I signed up … I took a year of Russian—I didn’t want to take Russian, and I
knew I was gonna forget it; I lived in Kentucky; where the hell am I gonna find a Russian to talk to? But
there was this guy… this teacher was just so good; I would have learned … I would have taken basket
weaving from him; he was just that good. And I did, at an early age, say, “I want to be able to do that; I
want to be able to stand up and get my idea across; I want to be able …” and so I … what you see now—
and it’s still … I’m still a work-in-progress—it was very purposeful.
>>: I’m wondering if you have any recommendation on getting—I have a nine-year-old girl who likes to,
you know, to do this …
>> James Whittaker: Ignite. She’s the age of ignine; Ignite’s fabulou, and by the way, they’re opening,
or trying to open, or just opened a chapter in Nigeria—right—you talk about little girls that need a leg
up, that’s a country that needs a leg up.
>>: Yeah, yeah, I wondering—you know—those resources, you know? You’re talking about leg up …
>>: Are you talking about getting a leg up in public speaking or in science?
>> James Whittaker: No, he’s talking about his … her daughter now.
>>: Yeah.
>>: But public speaking, not science.
>>: Public speaking, yeah. [indiscernible]
>>: How can girls get into public speaking? I’d be happy to … you know what? I should take that as a
challenge. I should take that as a challenge. So I have two classes: I have career super powers, and I
have the art of stage presence, and I had a similar interaction with a woman in my crowd when I gave
the career super powers. Hers was: “Wait a minute. This is different for women,” and I said, “I … okay,
I’ll trust you on that, because I’m not a woman, and I don’t know what it would be like,” and so she … I
gave her the course, and she’s been teaching it now, and she teaches it to female-only audiences, and
she’s slaying it, right? But that’s the career super powers, not the ...
>>: Name?
>> James Whittaker: Her name is Allison Wade—you’ll find her on Twitter somewhere. Fact, she was
tweeting about it just the other day. So I would love to create a course just for girls, but I’d have to find
… it’s gonna take some work, right? I’ve got to … ‘cause it’s the same point—it’s not like it’s a different
recipe for girls as there is for boys—but there may be some differences in body language; there may be
some differences in—you know—the way you interact with the crowd—maybe, I don’t know; I’m not a
girl—but I would love to have a course where it was all female presenters and a totally female audience,
‘cause—so alright, I’m just gonna say it; I don’t want to offend anybody here—but I do teach this course
to a female-only audience twice a year, and I’ve noticed some strange things that … Bing does this, that
women in Bing … there’s a big e-mail alias; if you’re female and you’re within … you’re in Bing, you’re on
this alias. Hundreds of people on the alias, and they cycle through my courses twice a year, and it’s a
room this size full of nothing but women, and the question-and-answers never stop—I mean, and they
will stop you, and they will challenge you—it’s a completely different speaker-audience dynamic, and so
I should probably start paying attention to that, and …
>>: Fifty percent of the people who are in the room right now are women, whereas this is probably a
hundred percent of the women who were … from the start.
>> James Whittaker: Yeah.
>>: We were ten percent, initially.
>> James Whittaker: Yeah, and I’ve … it happens all the time. Women stay and ask questions; they
want that … I … help me figure this out! [laughter] Hang on a sec; I got to cycle; somebody—oh, you’ve
been here a long time—you ask your question next.
>>: I’m wondering if you have advice for that moment where you’re in a presentation, and you
completely blank, or you drop your notecards, and they get all out of order, and you have no idea what
to do.
>> James Whittaker: The only time it ever happened to me was in the Phillipines when I told you about,
and I was like, “PowerPoint was harmed in the making of this presentation;” they laughed, and I got
over it. You’ve got to know your key point; your first line out of your mouth—you’ve got to memorize
that, because a lot of the other things are gonna flow in your key point. So if that happens, remind
yourself of your key point: “Alright, I’m just talking about this, and I’m gonna get right back to it,” and so
you start; you restart by saying, “We were”—something happened, and you distracted—“okay, we were
talking about X”—you just name your key point, and then fight your way back into it.” You’ll find most
audiences are pretty cool about things; if you mess up, they all kind of look at you and think, “Okay”—
first of all, their expectations of you are quite low, because most presenta … presenters and most
presentations are really that bad, and so if you elevate it a little bit, they’re gonna be like, “Oh, wow;”
they’re gonna start rooting for you; they’ll give you … they’ll cut you some slack. But just go back to
your key point; remind them of your key point, and then just pick a place to continue.
>>: You did that well at the beginning—you know—at the beginning, with the first video, that you didn’t
have … the volume wasn’t up.
>> James Whittaker: Yeah.
>>: And you didn’t replay it; you didn’t blame the … it’s kind of …
>> James Whittaker: Yeah, and then that “Wait for it” was up there over those.
>>: You just quoted it and moved on, just …
>> James Whittaker: Yeah, I didn’t mess with it, ‘cause I could have stopped my presentation, deleted
that “Wait for it,” but I swear, that is in the background—that … when I ran through this earlier, that
“Wait for it” was not over … superimposed over the videos, but I let it go. So what you want to get out
of the habit of doing is apologizing—just let it go; it happened—and so get back into it as quickly as you
can. Don’t mess up the flow of your presentation too much. But yeah, you’re right.
>>: [indiscernible] also, you just blame the software.
>> James Whittaker: Yeah, you could just blame the software, too—we all work for Microsoft.
>>: Valid … it actually works, because you work … and it makes a good throwaway line.
>> James Whittaker: I even say sometimes, “You know, I’d complain … I’d blame this on PowerPoint,
except I’d be blaming it on me”—right, ‘cause they know I’m from Microsoft. So you can kind of say …
pick a few things like that that you can say, but yeah, I just power through it. Thanks for pointing that
out. Question in the back.
>>: So I’ve always struggled with telling stories, and from watching you in this presentation, it seems
like most stories are like one nugget an observation nestled in a lot of story crafts.
>> James Whittaker: Exactly.
>>: So I wonder there’s any more scaffolding can help us with … get from that observation t the story.
>> James Whittaker: Practice, practice, practice. How often do you tell stories?
>>: I try all the time.
>> James Whittaker: And what happens? People tune you out?
>>: I feel like I lose people somewhere mid-way.
>> James Whittaker: Okay, your stories are either too long, or your start wasn’t strong enough.
>>: Okay.
>> James Whittaker: So the start has to be strong, because then they want to listen to your story. And
the story can’t be too long, and you can notice—you know—you’re telling somebody a story, and all of a
sudden, they pull their phone out—you’ve probably lost ‘em. But get used to telling stories; I mean, I
make my kids do this. You were talking about your daughter—I didn’t even think about this—I make my
kids tell stories. They come home from school, I’m say, “What happened at school today?” And—you
know—at first, it was like, “Oh, nothing.” “No, no, no, no, what happened at school today? What
happened at school today?” My daughter’s away to college now, and she just came back, and I told her;
I said, “I’m expecting three good stories—three good stories.” And my kids are used to this now, so they
get home, and she’s like, “Alright, I got a story. You are not gonna believe what happened in my psych
class,” and she goes through, and—you know—I help her with it; you know, help coax it out her, and:
“So what really happened is this.” You know, and you can just kind of massage them and make them
more interesting, but your kids, encourage their stories. Just telling me that nothing happened at school
today isn’t enough—“Oh, you mean nothing happened? It was like you were in a room, and it was blank
walls, and you just sat there, and you just stood there, and nothing happened? You … there was no
people involved in this?” And no, they’re, “Oh, no, there was more people in …” “What is the most
interesting that happened today? Even if it was boring, there’s some one thing that was the most
interesting. Tell me that.” And then, help explore it with ‘em, right? So you just practice over and over
and over again; if you have a friend—you know, pen pal or somebody you’ve only talked to on skype—
just challenge each other: “Tells us a … come on, tell us a story.” And—you know—you meet people; I
had a … this student—when I was a professor—student, Hugh Thompson; he still one of the best
storytellers I know. He would just come to me and say, “Ah, I had a great story; I got a … let me tell
about …” he took a picture of the red light district—he had never been to Amsterdam before—and
there’s a row of red lights, and the—you know—the people who stand under them, and he took a
picture of it. You don’t do that in Amsterdam, and the people came running, and he tells this story, and
it’s hilarious. He’s running from these thugs that are trying to take his phone to throw it into the canal—
you know—‘cause that’s what they do if you try to take pictures, and it’s brilliant, right? So as soon as …
every time I see—you know—I’m like, “Hugh, tell me a story,” and he usually has one. So create a
culture of people around you that are storytellers and that tell stories, pull ‘em out of ‘em, and you’ll get
better by association. Yes?
>>: I just want to … for the girl who … for her daughter, that your suggestion about improve for adults—
that kind of theater … for where it’s not just script where you have … I mean, that has value too,
standing up in front of people—but I think theater can have a—in my experience—have a lot of value for
kids.
>> James Whittaker: Yeah, I think theater get you over the nerves, and you get used to the audience
being out there, but you have a script so it’s not the same as just being a storyteller, unless it’s
improve—improv’s brilliant.
>>: Yes, and—you know—there’s things like that for kids as well.
>>: Oh, you mean like the youth theater or something?
>>: Right, yeah.
>>: Okay, yeah.
>> But specifically, improvisational theater—improv. Improv is: you throw a subject out, and then you
interact with is, and generally, what it … the improv that I’ve done is it starts with everybody just stands
in a circle, and either you have a bunch of subjects that … and you pick one out off a piece, or somebody
just throws something out, and then you start talking about it, and if you’re not one of the first four
people that talks, you got to step back. And then, it’s those … it’s—or like I said—maybe it’s the first six,
or whatever, but then they make the crowd get smaller, and then there’s only a few people left, and the
one at the end—there’s two and the end, and as soon as it’s two, people say, “Alright, she won,” right?
Everybody else gets to vote on who wins, and then everybody, “Aaahhh,” and then you get back into a
circle and start all over, and so the people that have to step back, they’re ready for the next one—you
know—they’re in … you know, you just interact that way, so it’s really cool. So even if you don’t want it
… the nice thing about improve is: even is you don’t want to participate, you really don’t have to; you
could just shut up and step back, and there’s no pressure—you can just experience it a few times before
you do it. Ah, improve is great; maybe we should start an improve group. Yeah?
>>: So I really love this presentation. I had to give a talk like two weeks ago; I wish I had known all this
stuff. [laughter]
>> James Whitaker: Bad timing.
>>: That talk was for Microsoft internal audience, and my question is: do you ever find, like, when giving
talks to very specialized audiences that, like, this blows back, ‘cause they know you’re doing this, and
they start … do you ever see somebody ‘cause they see you as less authentic, ‘cause they can tell you’re
doing this to them?
>> James Whittaker: You know, that’s a … there’s … but it’s a small community, but yes, there is a … it’s
called the presentation summit, and it’s held in San Diego every year, and I spoke at it, and—you
know—everybody knew the tricks, but they didn’t know all the tricks. [laughter] And so to me, that’s a
challenge; I’ve got to teach those people something that they’ve never seen before, and so … and then
we also did—I was part of a corporate training—where there was a bunch of us—like eave … every
single one of us—basically giving our stage presence talk, and mine was better.
>>: Thank you.
>> James Whittaker: Yes?
>>: How do you feel about embellishing stories or changing details? Is that a slippery slope, or is that
something you do?
>> James Whittaker: I do, and it is a slippery slope. I never make the story up, but the story didn’t quite
happen that way with the RunPee app. It was mostly like, “Hey, check out this cool app.” Alright, let …
so let me just be honest with you; this is the way it worked: I was with my friend Nancy, and she’s like,
“Check out this cool app”—she wasn’t my date, so that I … is just kind of a … personalize it a little bit—
“check out this cool app; it tells you when to pee.” I’m like, “No way,” and then there’s … so we’re like
messing with it in the beginning, but then the rest of it did happen, right? She’s like, “Wait for it; wait
for it; five, four, three, two, one, gonna go pee,” and she runs off, right? So that’s … so I’ve added the
other details just to make it more interesting, and I’ve actually told it a little bit di … this, you got to be
careful, ‘cause now, YouTube follows you everywhere—right—there’s no presentation I’ve ever given
that doesn’t end up on YouTube, and somebody noticed I told it different twice, but it was a small,
subtle change, but yeah, so you got to be careful with it. Yes?
>>: Yeah, one more question …
>> James Whittaker: Okay, be … so I got to ba … prob … I’m gonna leave at twelve fifteen; so we’ll keep
going until that clock says twelve fifteen.
>>: So when you have a presentation, do you need … you have … do you need to have an idea
[indiscernible]
>> James Whittaker: Yes.
>>: … or just when you have idea …
>> James Whittaker: You have to have an idea that’s clearly and concisely stated and that will be
impactful to your audience; otherwise, you don’t need to give a presentation. [laughs]
>>: That’s a good answer.
>> James Whittaker: Yes?
>>: When you have to give the same talk multiple times, like with your high school tour …
>> James Whittaker: It’d better bloody get better every single time you take it.
>>: Yeah, how do you … so how do you stay passionate? How do you keep it fresh? Is it that?
>> James Whittaker: I will swap stories in and out when I have to give … like the … remember I had the
three on the slide: it was “James, what about privacy,” the domestication of information, and the app
discovery problem—I’ll just pick a different one each time. I have … I actually have the whole slides are
greyed out or hidden in PowerPoint, and I just unhide ‘em before the talk. And everything … it’s actually
a great way to work out some of your stories, like the first time I told the zombie RunPee story, I’m like,
“Ah, could have made that better,” right? And the next time I told it, I did make it better, and in fact,
the story about my daughter and—you know—saying, “Do you have something you need to tell us?”
I’ve told that one different, too, because I was telling it before that happened, and I realized: this is not
as impactful as I want it to be; I need it to be more impactful: I bet my daughter would say something
funny. I was thinking, “Oh, she’ll say, ‘Oh, I’d never wear my hair that way’ or something like that,” and
what she said was just gold, but I had to go search for it; I mean, I put that thing in front of her
everywhere she went—I even had it in a toilet at one point; it was like, “Oh, yeah, I left it there,” you
know? She’s like, “Dad!” So anyhow, I got what I wanted. Yes, ma’am?
>>: A part of every presentation—as is the case now—is Q and A, and so I’m wondering is there an art
to Q and A, or how do you kind of manage that? ‘Cause I find that that’s very difficult as well.
>> James Whittaker: Q and A is difficult, because it’s the one part that you can’t really prepare for.
What question are you gonna ask? I have no idea. I mean, I prepare for it the same way I prepare for an
exam in college, and I teach my kids to do this too—you know, because my son was struggling with … he
was acing everything, except he couldn’t take the exam, and I always tell him, “Guess the questions; go
through the material and guess the questions.” He came home—this is his first semester in college—he
came home; he was like, “Dad, I nailed it. I got an A on my music theory final, because I guessed the
questions,” and so go through your talk and say, “What would they ask? What would they ask? What
would they complain about?” Try to figure it out in advance, and other than that, it’s … you get used to
it; you think on your feet, and—you know—if you … I bet if you look at how well Satya handles questions
now compared to how well he handled ‘em ten years ago, you’ll see an improvement—you get better
over time. Satya’s actually one of our better corporate presenters, or executive presenters, and he’s
really good at Q and A—except at Grace Hopper. [laughter] I actually think that was a lost opportunity—
lost opportunity for him and a lost opportunity for women. He said … well, anyway, we won’t talk about
that. I would have advised him to have handled that differently; apologizing eight times was probably
not the way to go. Yes, sir?
>>: So I was reading—you know—viewing TED talks. I personally found that it’s just as much a visual
presentation that they got—you know—as much as the way they talk about. So how do you balance the
two?
>> James Whittaker: Well, that’s the props thing, right? I mean, the story always has to take priority—
the story is most important. Come up with the story first, and then integrate the props into the story to
make your … where you want you points to be made, but the story has got to be first, and all the really
good TED talks are story, story, story, not the props. Telling you, watch Amanda Palmer’s—hers is the
best ever—I mean that she makes zero mistakes in that entire talk—she’s perfect.
>>: Can you recommend some other TED talk … talkers, like [indiscernible]
>> James Whittaker: Some other TED talks? Well, stay on the … join the alias, and come to the fil …
what we call film club. There’s a bunch of ‘em; search for top ten TED talks—it’s was a Guardian,
Guardian Magazi … Guardian … is it a magazine or a newspaper in England? Guardian newspaper just
recommended the top ten TED talks, and by the way, Amanda Palmer’s on that.
>>: Okay.
>> James Whittaker: So she should be number one if she’s not. Okay, one more, and then we’re done.
>>: Oh, can you just elaborate a little bit more about your different lessons or classes? Like you
mentioned you have the career, like [indiscernible]
>> James Whittaker: Yeah, career super powers is the only other one; I mean, I tea … I give talks all the
time, but the two courses are the art of stage presence and career super powers—this is one of ‘em.
You just took one of ‘em; the other one will be offered monthly, and I’ll send it out to the alias. It’s a …
basically, it follows on the super powers—storytelling is one of the super powers; there are seven more,
and the other seven I teach in the career super powers course.
>>: Okay. So … and then you announce it to the list?
>> James Whittaker: Yeah, I’ll announce it through the list.
>>: So James, one thing that I want to let everyone know is that somewhere, someone said that you
automatically get added to this alias.
>> James Whittaker: You do not.
>>: We—you do not—we actually are not tracking your presence here at all, so if you want to get
James’s info, you have to add yourself.
>> James Whittaker: Yep, yeah, you have to join the alias, and then we’ll go from there. Thank you all
very much [indiscernible] [applause] Now it’s nap time.