L&D In Action: Winning Strategies from Learning Leaders - Teaching The Geek: How Experts Can Connect with Non-expert Audiences through Empathy

Episode Date: July 2, 2024

The curse of knowledge... So many experts succumb to this bias. Whether in minor conversations or high-stakes presentations, it is very difficult to distance oneself from one's expertise--the jargon, the concepts, and the logic that makes something simple to some yet complex to others. And yet, helping others understand what we know as experts is an invaluable skill. Neil Thompson, founder of Teach The Geek, joins the show this week to share some speaking and presentation principles that will help experts reach their non-expert audiences much more effectively.

You're listening to L&D in Action, winning strategies from learning leaders. This podcast, presented by Get Abstract, brings together the brightest minds in learning and development to discuss the best strategies for fostering employee engagement, maximizing potential and building a culture of learning in your organization. This week, I welcome to the show Neil Thompson. Neil is the founder of Teach the Geek, through which he trains technical experts how to present complex information to non-technical audiences. After earning his master's in biomedical engineering from Columbia, Neil enjoyed careers

as a product development engineer and patent agent. Having engaged both with high-complexity products and novel inventions, he decided to try his hand at sharing the knowledge he gained as a writer and speaker thereafter. Seven years ago, he embarked on his training journey with Teach the Geek and began helping folks in STEM pursue careers as speakers. Neil is also host of the Teach the Geek podcast and author of the children's book, Ask Uncle Neil, Why is My Hair Curly? Let's dive in.

Hello and welcome to L&D in action. I'm your host Tyler Lay and today on the show I have Neil Thompson. Neil I'm thrilled to have you here. Thanks for joining me today. Thanks for having me. We're gonna dive into teaching experts how to speak better to non-experts and lay people and how to present to folks who don't have the same knowledge base as them and as we were having our pre chat a little while ago, a few popular examples came to mind for me. So I'm sure everybody listening has seen this in the media. I'm sure you have too, Neil. But in my lifetime, it's been a series of major tech companies that have had to sort

of present to Congress and the government and also, you know, the public through the media what it is exactly that their tools are doing with us. sort of present to Congress and the government and also, you know, the public through the media What it is exactly that their tools are doing with us. It started with social media You know the the classic Mark Zuckerberg episodes it went to web 3.0 with crypto and NFTs And then I'm now seeing it with like open AI and AI technology where most people just really don't know what's going on behind the scenes of these tech products that we're using and Most people just really don't know what's going on behind the scenes of these tech products that we're using and Tech products just kind of one example of what we're talking about here within the realm of technical expertise but there really seems to be a major and growing divide between those who

practice these sort of cutting-edge tech things and create these products and just the rest of us and it really seems to be creating You know a sort of divide in society. I'm wondering if you see the same thing. Maybe you've seen more examples of this. Does this contribute to why you do what you do? And you know, what can we do about it? What do you think? It certainly contributes to this divide

between the more technically minded and the perhaps less technically minded. And it's unfortunate because once there's this divide, there are a whole lot of miscommunication happens. And I mean, I saw it within my own life. I worked as an engineer for a number of years in the medical device industry, and I had to give presentations on a monthly basis

in front of senior management, most of whom were not technical. So we're talking the CEO, CMO, COO, C. Phil Neblanco, all the Cs in a room room listening to me talk about project status updates and those first few presentations I gave were absolutely horrendous. And I think the biggest issue I had was not being able to bridge that gap between what I knew and what they knew and not even thinking about it at the time. And it was so, and I've mentioned it was so unfortunate. Luckily I got better at it over time, but I also saw a lot of the other engineers that had to give such presentations,

they weren't all that much better at it than I was. So it looks like a lot of us had this issue in bridging the gap. And you would think that at least for myself, I would have, I would have acknowledged that earlier on because there have been so many instances in which I've been in the audience of someone speaking and that presenter didn't do the best job. So I knew firsthand how it is to be an audience member not knowing what this person is talking about that's presenting and yet here I was giving a presentation and the people in the audience didn't know what I was talking about and I wasn't even thinking about that as as the presenter. In fact, one instance comes to mind. I was at a marketing event, and the person that obviously

was talking about marketing, all these various terms, upstream, downstream marketing, I still get mixed up. But this person was using all these terms, and I had no clue what any of them meant. And I'm looking around at other people in the audience, and they're taking notes. And people are looking at this person, nodding. And I'm just thinking, well, they know what's going on.

And I have no clue. So, but it would have been so much easier, at least for me as an audience member that perhaps didn't have the same level of expertise as the presenter for them to use, at least explain terms as opposed to just assume that people know what they mean. But yeah, I totally understand

what you're talking about, Tyler. This idea of there being this gap between the technical and the non-technical, and there's a whole host of issues that happens when that gap persists. What was the specific instance for you as the expert that really made you realize, oh, people aren't quite getting what I'm speaking about? In our pre-chat, you mentioned a couple moments I think where there are some follow-up questions that you felt you had answered. Do you remember those instances specifically? Oh yeah, certainly. Those first few presentations that would happen, and you would thought I would learn my lesson after that first presentation, but I didn't. I

suppose I was either lazy, cocky, or maybe a mix of both. Basically for those presentations, I would slap some slides together, get up there, read them and try to get out of there as quickly as possible. I never got out there as quickly as possible because I would get these questions afterwards that I thought I'd answer during the presentation. It wasn't really until my project got canceled that I did I get that wake up call that maybe this is something I need to get better at. This happened all maybe 15 years ago now. But I still think that if I was just better at talking about the project,

the group that I worked in was a new group to the company. So it would have made more sense for especially for someone like myself to take more time in explaining terms and explaining the importance because as I said, it was new to everyone in the company outside of the group that I was a part of. But I didn't think about it. At the time, I was, as I mentioned, trying to get out there as quickly as possible

and then my project got canceled. That was definitely the wake-up call I needed to think, well, maybe this is something I need to improve at. Well, I'm sorry to hear the project got canceled, but at the end of the day, it seems like you've turned this into a career and are helping the world because of it. So I guess we're on a better path now. It's good to hear.

And I'm glad that you used marketing as a counter example there because I am a marketer. And I can remember when I was learning the terminology associated with marketing, God, the number of abbreviations and acronyms talk about AOV and LTV and PPC and all these. So there's so many of them. And it took me so long to learn them. And I'm starting to think now, like how many times have I had a conversation with somebody where I was using these abbreviations or acronyms or terms

that were just totally foreign to them. And they were just kind of nodding their head along because they didn't even want to bother diving into that topic. And I definitely feel like that's a barrier to this communication as well is, do our recipients, does our audience actually want to ask the question, what does that mean?

Or do they have the opportunity to ask, what does that mean? Because if you're presenting to a big room, people aren't gonna raise their hand and say, what's that word you just said there? So I would like to ask you, what, in addition to like jargon, you know, very simply the language that is inaccessible to most when you're an expert at something, what else is there that causes misunderstandings

or difficulty in the world of teaching as an expert? Of course, it can be just very complicated topics. Marketing at the very acute level is incredibly complicated as is anatomy and biology. And sometimes without at least a superficial understanding of that arena of knowledge, it can be really hard to access what an expert is explaining to you. So I'm sure that's a consistent problem that we face. But is it also, you know, on the part of experts, a failure to give only the pertinent information that will actually stick to the listeners and help

them understand something and a focus on maybe the more challenging parts of that field. What do you think it is in addition to the jargon that really makes it difficult for experts to speak to non-experts? A big issue I think is the idea of presenting everything that you know to people so that they know what you know. But that's not possible because they're not the technical expert that you know to people so that they know what you know. But that's not possible because they're not the technical expert that you are. And I think a big issue we have

is providing all this extraneous information that perhaps this non-technical audience needs to know to really get what your point, what point you're trying to make is. So I'm a big fan of figuring out what your call to action is when you speak to non-technical people. What do you want them to do?

What's the overlying message that you want to convey to these people? When I used to have to give presentations in front of senior management, typically the call to action was I need more time or I need more resources. So I really needed to make that clear in that presentation as opposed to talking about the minutia of the project that I was working on, which most likely the senior management that I was presenting to don't care a whole lot about. So when you figure out what that call to action is,

it makes it a lot easier to figure out what points you need to make that will naturally lead to that call to action. It makes it easier to figure out what type of introduction would I need that would lead to those points, which would lead to that call to action. It's basically starting from the end and working backwards.

And again, what that does is it eliminates a whole lot of extraneous information that you might've added into the presentation, but doesn't really add to the presentation. I see. I read a quick survey, I think, that you posted on LinkedIn. It asked experts, you know,

what is it that makes it difficult for you to communicate with non-experts? And there was a handful of categories that they could respond with, but I think the majority, it was like 56%, said that balancing technical depth with clarity was the biggest challenge in specifically in presentations. So for me, when you give somebody a call to action

in the marketing sense, it's, you know, calls to action are very specific. It's like click on this and learn more, you know, it ends up being a pretty simple thing because at the end of the day, marketing is dedicated to growing business. And that means, you know, achieving a sale ultimately. But when you are a scientific expert or an engineer,

something along those lines, I feel like the call to action might be something a little bit more complicated and it might be, knowledge-based, it might be didactic, or it could be behaving or performing in some way within an organization, but how do you take that sort of technical depth and give it enough clarity in that call to action, but also more broadly,

how do you balance those two things? Do you have any advice for that? Having empathy for the people that you're speaking to. You have realized that you weren't always the technical expert that you are. So you wouldn't have been able to really take in all that technical expertise that you have now. So even if you were to present that technical expertise,

you wouldn't have been able to understand. So what you need to do is prepare a presentation that will match what you were before you were that technical expert, because likely that's where the non-technical people are that you're presenting to. So you mentioned, we mentioned before the technical jargon, use more commonly used words, that could be helpful.

Instead of data dumping on people, this data that you readily understand, use stories to convey the importance of this data so that non-technical people can really grasp what you're trying to get at when you present this data. It's just realizing that the people that you're speaking to aren't where you're at and you need to meet them where they are so that you can really engage them and they know what to do after your presentation. Yeah, my wife is actually a former professor and she has an incredibly good rating on RateMyProfessor.com which was a much more popular resource I think a decade ago or so.

I'm not sure if it's still used widely but I think it she has a 4.9 out of 5. So whoever didn't give her that last, you know, point one curse you, but she was considered a very good professor. And it has me thinking, you know, she created syllabi, she created a syllabus for her class. And that is, to me, kind of like a degree of research about who you're teaching and how you're teaching it. It's mostly focused on sort of the content itself, but I compare that to a presentation, which tends to be, I think, you know, there's less preparation for that. I mean, because it's not, you know, several months of teaching. It's not a whole semester. But I'm thinking about this from the perspective of like making a syllabus, for instance, for the audience that you're teaching to, you know, structuring a presentation or however you do it, do you how do you advise someone actually

prepare beyond starting with that empathy, but actually creating systematically a structured presentation, perhaps or thinking about how you segment it, how you how you actually present it visually pacing all of those things. Do you have any specific tips in that direction? Sure, I mean, when it comes to the type of presentations that perhaps technical people have to make, you mentioned the empathy piece,

I mentioned the developing the call to action and working backwards. You also mentioned the idea of using storytelling to really convey what you want from the presentation as opposed to just doing a data dump. All of that's really helpful. But then, ultimately, when it comes to it, you want people to understand. And you mentioned you putting together a syllabus. And really, when you start with that call to action, that's where the syllabus can really start. Making sure of the sure of those, the points that you make.

You certainly don't want to have too many points because there's only so much that people can take in at one time. And so I would say maybe five points tops. I mean, especially if you're giving a less than one hour presentation and you got to make sure that those points count. So there's that.

So you basically use those points to then figure out what bullets would naturally go under each point. And you do that, and you can do that figuring that out by some research. You know, when I used to give presentations in front of management, one of the people that I had to speak to with the CEO, getting a meeting with the CEO to figure out what kind of presentations he liked and what what would be included in the syllabi or the syllabus

Wasn't not possible. This is a very busy person. There's a lot of demands in this time so I would go to his I would go to his administrative assistant and then you know that says that person's right hand man or woman and Asked that person questions like what type of information would I need to have in this presentation? To be of interest to your boss. Is he more of a bullet type person? Does he prefer more pictures on slides? I mean, basically figuring out what that person's preferences are. And once you do that, especially if you're talking to decision makers, you could do this for all the various decision makers that are going to be in your audience, getting getting that that person's administrative assistance feedback

on what kind of information needs to be in the presentation. And then making that happen. I think that can be a really great way to make sure that the people in the audience are more likely to listen. I love that. Yeah. Going straight to the person who is closest with the individual that is most important to you. But in our pre-chat,

where we just kind of got to know each other a little bit, you mentioned that you've done some work with ATD, you wrote an article recently for the magazine, and it sounds like you're gonna be doing some more presenting for them. I'm thinking about, so I've been to ATD for the last couple years now, San Diego and more recently in New Orleans.

And it's funny how I start to think about like the institutional impact of presenting to an audience because at ATD they have a few different ways that you can present. You can be, you know, Matthew McConaughey or Venus Williams, and you can have the giant stage where, you know, thousands of people are sitting in the room, you know, with their eyeballs glued to you. That's just, you know, the nature of celebrities. So I think that's a very different topic there. But as an organization or as an individual, you can purchase speaking slots

in a couple different formats. So you can either do, on a stage that's in the main conference room, which is a massive open space, and people just come to see you speak if they want to. It's announced on a promotional, you know, packet, it's announced online, but it's really up to you to promote yourself and then people to, you know, see the topic and come

through. And there's, you know, 50 to 150 seats there. And also, if you want to stand behind those seats, you can do that. Or you can get a private room where you actually have an enclosed space that's more dedicated, so you're not interrupted by all the things that are going on, you know, in the conference space like the booths and other noises and giveaways with people shouting and whatnot. And it just really has me thinking about that sort of like institutional impact of presenting. And I guess the simplest question to ask here is when you have an audience that you don't really know who they are, you know broadly what they

represent in terms of what their professions are, what industry they're in, maybe even like what level professionally or what stage of their career they're in. You at least have some basic info and you know based on your own professional expertise who's likely to watch you speak or attend a lesson from you. Do you have any advice for researching that sort of audience where it's a bit more nebulous? It's definitely not just one sort of stakeholder. It could be many that are in the audience for instance, but you can't go to somebody's admin assistant.

If you had asked me this question last year, my answer likely wouldn't have been as good as it is now, because now we have generative AI. We have ChatGPT and all the various other platforms. Sure. I'm a big fan of using something like ChatGPT to try to figure that type of thing out. A useful prompt could be what type of attendees attend the various or the specific convention or the specific conference and what type of it and what type of information would they want to get from whatever your speaking topic is and it can spit out a really

interesting it feels some really great answers and once so once you see those and then you know it'll tell you each the various types of attendees that will come for ATD you could have you know CLOs and instructional designers and etc and based on that those, they can then tell you what type of information they've wanted to get from whatever your speaking topic is. So now, you know, at least you have a better basis without having spoken to a CLO

or to an instructional designer, the type of information you need to have in your presentation, and then, you know, you make your decision as to what you include. Yeah, I like that. Absolutely, great idea. What about just improving a presentation as is, regardless of the audience?

What are some like hard dos and hard don'ts that you would advise? Let's say you're an individual, you're presenting with a slideshow. What do you advise for on your slides, how to style format them, but also how to present, you know, physically in terms of gestures and anything else.

Do you have any specific tips and tricks for that sort of presentation? Sure. I would suggest using more visuals than written words on slides, because what ends up happening is the presenter will read the slides and won't look at the audience. And when you don't look at the audience,

you have no clue whether they're listening to you or not. And then the people in the audience, they'll just read the slides and won't look at the audience. And when you don't look at the audience, you have no clue whether they're listening to you or not. And then the people in the audience, they'll just read the slides and they likely won't listen. So when you minimize the amount of text on the slide, you're eliminating the ability for the people in the audience to read. And as the presenter, you're also eliminating the ability for yourself to read.

So now you got to look somewhere and look at the people as opposed to your shoes. So not only when you're looking at the people, you're seeing what are they doing when they're when you're speaking. Are they actually looking at you? Are they looking at their phones? Are they looking off at the space? Are they falling asleep? At least you get a better sense as to what's going on when you're speaking to these people. A few months ago I was listening to a webinar put on by the National Speakers Association, and the person was talking about the use of not even just visuals, but more like 3D holograms during

presentations. She built out this presentation. It was very impressive. But the concern I had with that is, are people going to remember what you actually spoke about or are they going to remember the fact that you used a whole bunch of cool holograms during your presentation? So it's really important to not just, certainly to have these, have visuals that are,

that can engage people that people would find interesting, but also still to work on the presentation, to have the appropriate call to action, to make sure you hit your points in the order in which you wanna hit them, make sure you have stories that go along with those points to keep people engaged. So definitely don't forget that.

In terms of the gestures, I'm a big fan of hand gestures. Do it in more of a natural way so it doesn't seem so rehearsed and forced. Certainly there are people that use more hand gestures than others and that's more of a personal preference. But for the people who might be distracted, perhaps, by a whole lot of gestures, if you use less of them, they'll appease those people.

And the people who like a whole lot of hand gestures, they're likely not going to stop listening because you're not using a whole lot of hand gestures. Ultimately, it comes down to figuring out what you think would be best for the audience, giving presentations as often as you can, seeking feedback from people and running that feedback through your own filter

to see what makes sense and what doesn't. For a number of years, I was a member of Toastmasters. And as part of Toastmasters, you get feedback when you give a prepared speech. But oftentimes, at least for me, you could get conflicting feedback. One person could say, I really enjoyed your eye contact. Another person said, improve your eye contact.

So now what are you going to do? You got to just run it through your own filter to see what type of feedback you take in and what you don't. I did Toastmasters for a little while out of San Francisco. Did you have like a home base where you did it? Yeah. So I've been a member, I was a member when I was in Orange County

and then I was a member of a group when I was living here in San Diego. Oh, very cool, yeah. It was a really fascinating experience, I have to say. I definitely saw that conflicting feedback multiple times. And what I really enjoyed about that was the way that people would actually treat the feedback and the conversations treat the feedback and the

conversations around the feedback almost more deliberately as a part of the learning experience. Like the conversations themselves were a part of the presentation almost because when you enter into that space of Toastmasters, like everything you do is now like for the purpose of becoming better at speaking. And it really felt as if you cross that threshold of the door and now like you're on watch, you know, not in a bad way, but like you just have to present yourself effectively now.

So even those conversations about feedback felt more deliberate and more effective because it felt like even they were being scrutinized, you know, and that, that to me was just like a really fascinating outcome of being at Toastmasters. So I think that's a really nice piece of advice is, you know, check that out. I think there's pretty cool videos of Toastmasters and everything. Nice little organization. I wanted to actually roll back a second and pick at one point that you made about the woman who was presenting about, I think it was holograms you said, you mentioned that you wondered if people

might be focusing on sort of the visuals and how cool all that was and not so much maybe what she was actually teaching or presenting. And you know, unfortunately, this is sort of a, I would say like a marketing tactic is, you know, video and images are much more effective than just text on a screen. Which isn't to say that's what this was, obviously, but, you know, social media is kind of a cesspool of like attention grabbing things and getting you to take an action through just breaking your patterns and whatever is going to get you to click that thing and buy that. And I don't love that direction that we're going in as a society, this sort of hyper consumerized,

really focused on just like attention grabbing things. But when it comes to teaching something as complicated as or presenting something as complicated as holograms for instance, do you think it's still valuable to get people to remember what was seen even if they don't take away perfectly kind of what was actually being taught in that moment because it might make them more likely to search that later and do their own research on that topic. And because you made it extra sticky for them through the visuals, they might be more interested in it than if they were just kind of listening to you

the whole time. Do you think there's some value there in actually emphasizing and focusing on the visuals for certain topics? I guess that's my question. Well, I would hope so. Well, that's with the assumption that by them remembering the visuals that they will go back and think about what

the actual message is. I know from my own experience, those presentations that were really visually profound, those are the ones where I would have to think really hard about what they were about, as opposed to the ones where the content was first and foremost was front stage, and likely it was based on stories. Let me tell you a story. And then someone starts telling a story. Oh yeah, I'm gonna remember that, as opposed to, well, they use a whole lot of cool holograms. But perhaps

that's just a personal preference. You know, Tyler, one thing that I've learned early this year was about disc. You know the disc personality styles? Yes. Yeah, I'm familiar. Yeah. So I learned about that early this late last year, early this year. It just made me think about just how people take in things and just based on their personalities. So, you know, perhaps if you're a D or based on whether you're a D or an I or S or a C, how you even take in these types of presentations might differ. So I would think maybe for an I,

a whole lot of visuals, a whole lot of holograms, they like that type of thing. But maybe for a C, oh, they're there for the content. They're there for what can I learn from this? What can I take away that I can use later on? And to be able to satisfy all those personality types, I'm not sure if that's ever possible, which is why it's really beneficial

to even do some research to figure out what types of personalities are gonna even be in the audience and maybe chat GBT could be used for that too. Oh, I like that. That's some really good advice. Yeah, you don't advise trying to really hit all those personalities though Do you think that's just kind of too lofty of a goal is to make a presentation for the D's eyes S's and C's Is that too much or do you think it's maybe good to just get an idea of who they are and then try to focus on?

The key ones perhaps is that what you're getting at? Yeah, that is what I'm getting at But but for sure, I mean if it is if it is at all possible to appease everybody I mean, I would like to see it. Although I will say that it can be a tall order I have a podcast and I had a guest on once my mother Contacted me after the presentation after the podcast episode and she said she had to stop listening After five minutes because the guests use so many filler words, ums, a lot of uhs and ums. But I suspect that there are other people out there like my mother who are bothered

by these filler words. But how are you supposed to appease everyone, the people who like the filler words and the people who don't like the filler words? Well, I suggest probably minimizing the filler words because the people who are bothered by them, they'll be happy. And the people who aren't too bothered by them, they'll be happy anyway. Yes. I like that you give that sort of advice.

Think about which audience is going to be more impacted. So my policy with filler words is that because I edit these shows, I take out most of them. So I, I say a handful of ums y'all, if you haven't noticed on the show, but I try to cut them all out. I have a lot of you knows too. I want to keep the actionable pieces of advice going here because we were on quite a roll before I try to cut them all out. I have a lot of you knows too. I want to keep the actionable pieces of advice going here because we were on quite a roll before I sidetracked

us a little bit. Asynchronous teaching. I'm not sure you do much of this yourself. I know that you're presenting directly to a lot of folks as you've already described, but I'm curious if you have any advice for asynchronous teaching where you can't directly get feedback or directly engage your audience and you are teaching in that way. So you're creating a module or a video or something for an audience that will view the content at a different time in a different place and at best you can follow up with them after they've consumed the content. So do you have any advice as a technical expert for presenting to non-experts asynchronously? When I first started Teach the Geek,

it started with an online course and it was called Teach the Geek to Speak. So this was a four module course that people did whenever they wanted to. It wasn't based by myself, it was based by them. So essentially it was asynchronous. Well, I said in the in the in the course at the end of it based on all the based on what you have taken

away from this course is now upon you to find opportunities to use what you learned in this course. I mean, there's only so much you can take away from a course. I mean you can watch all the videos and listen to all the various aspects, read all the various aspects of the course. But if you don't actually go and apply that somewhere, well then it's all for nothing. I mean, I say that also on my podcast as well. You can listen to all the podcasts, read all the books. But if you actually don't go out there and apply what you learned in those books or in those podcasts, then it's really for nothing.

And that applies for technical people too. I mean certainly you could spend a whole, a lot of time taking in all this information but then you know I mentioned the idea of creating the call to action and working backwards to figure out the points in the introduction. You could just write all that down and have it on a piece of paper and think I'm done. I'm going to be good at speaking now, now that I have this on a piece of paper, it's in front of me. But now you gotta go and find opportunities to actually do it. Perhaps it's lunch and learns at your organization.

Perhaps it's Toastmasters getting up and doing prepared speeches there. You gotta get the reps to actually get better. So that's what I would have to say about asynchronous. Certainly you take in the information when you take it in, but then you gotta go apply it at some point. So as a teacher doing something asynchronous, again, calls to action,

did you give hard CTAs in Teach the Geek to Speak? Was it that sort of thing? Were you telling them, get out and do this? Did you give them specific avenues for doing that? Like say, hey, go check out Toastmasters. Was that one of the CTAs perhaps? Yeah, so that was one of them. One of them was, especially for technical people,

perhaps start a lunch and learn series at your company so you can talk to the people who wanna know more about what you do based on your job. So yeah, those are the type of examples or suggestions I would give to people to figure out, the better you actually use the information that they took from the course. Cool, I like that.

The more we talk about presentations, the more I think about just TED Talks. I have a book somewhere behind me up in the, your right-hand corner, it's called Talk Like Ted, it's by Carmine Gallo. I worked with him several years ago now, I made a little course with him actually. And storytelling is one of the major principles

in that book for sure. But I'm just thinking more broadly about TED talks. I another author actually comes to mind Laszlo Barabasi. He advised when it comes to applying to a job, his best advice for maximizing your success rate when applying to a job is to delay the interview as much as you can so that you are effectively last in the process because according to the data the person who gets hired most frequently is whoever interviews last because of recency bias is what he explained and

This was several years ago. I'm not sure how much that still applies, but it has me thinking in the frame of presentations I'm sure there's a sweet spot for somebody to consume a presentation with maximum attention and You know minimal Sort of fading into disinterest if you will and I think that's why TED talks are about 18 minutes Because once you get past the 15 minute mark you start to go into the realm of more people are kind of losing attention And I think when you go up to an hour, when you have a broad audience, you're really starting to lose people

if it's not a specific audience. So do you have any recommendations in terms of timing for how long a presentation really should be in an ideal world? Does it really depend on the topic and who the audience is, or should we really try to structure our presentations with a specific time limit in mind? I think if you're a technical person

speaking to a non-technical audience, I really do like that 18 minute threshold like that TEDx uses. I suspect that if the audience is different, for instance, if you're a technical person perhaps speaking to technical people on a subject that you all have that interest in, you could go longer because you all have that interest in that particular topic.

But yeah, I think TEDx or TED has it right. At some point, you're gonna start thinking about other things. Maybe the stories aren't hitting as well as they were when you first started the presentation and other things that are going on with their lives. So I really do like the idea of 18 minutes, but I do think it is, I guess, audience specific.

Yeah. I do wanna bring it back around to storytelling actually, because this is obviously critical. Anytime I read about presenting or speaking or teaching, storytelling is just always one of, if not the first pieces of advice and do you have any recommendations for what kinds of stories to tell I've seen people tell stories about their own lives I've seen people tell stories about big business business successes and innovations and that sort of thing. Entrepreneurship is very effective.

I've seen people tell stories about history, about science, about everything. But do you have any sense if personal stories perhaps are more effective than abstract stories or stories about business and other people in the world? Do you have any ideas around that? I think personal stories are helpful because people relate to people. I actually wrote a piece about that in regards to pitch competitions and how

you can put your best foot forward as a technical founder if you're giving a pitch to potential investors or at a pitch competition. And a lot of times those technical founders want to focus more on the features of their particular innovation, but if you really want to grab the attention of the pitch judges, you want to put them in the middle of the story of why this invention or what you're working on even matters. So if you come up with a story

which really puts them at the center of it, why they should care about this particular innovation, how it could benefit them or those that they know. It really makes it more personal to the people you're speaking to as opposed to personal to you. And when people like to think about themselves, so if you were to do that, I think that's even better when it comes to telling stories, making the people that you're speaking to the center of the story or the center of attention.

Yeah, of course. So I wanna ask you a couple more questions before we wrap up here. I'm having my first experience with a massive relational database. I've never experienced this much data before, at least not that I just had immediate access to. I'm teaching myself how to use SQL and everything

just to access this database. And it's making very, very apparent to me the difference in understanding that exists between most people at any given company and the IT folks, the programmers and the coders and what actually happens behind the scenes of a tech product or even just a website with any amount of data.

It really does feel like, you know, I started off as a salesperson in my career and I had a Salesforce database with all the accounts that I had visited and everything like that. But the volume of data when you have a tech product that's accessed online, the things that come through with that is just, hundreds of millions of pieces of data

in a very short amount of time, it feels like. So it seems like there's a big divide between those at a company that are kind of on the front line or really anywhere else, and those that are on the back end of the tech experience. And I'm wondering if you, as just a technical expert yourself who works with both kinds of people, you're an engineer, you've probably dealt with this in many different ways. Do you think that we do need to just bridge that gap that exists between tech people and non-tech people, specifically when it comes to big data, what kind of data there is, how it's accessed, how it's used, you know, like

more broad privacy concerns kind of naturally come to mind, but just in general, do you think more people at any given organization should understand what goes on behind the scenes, kind of like I'm discovering right now? Well, I mean, if you want your company to be successful and productive, then bridge the gap. If you don't, then don't. Ultimately, you certainly do want to bridge that gap because you want everyone to know what's going on.

But not just what's going on. But not just what's going on, but how it benefits what their part of the puzzle is. You mentioned that you worked in sales and you started off working in sales. It certainly would have been, I suspect you might have been an even better salesman if you did know what was going on in the back end because you very well might get questions from your potential customers and just other stakeholders that if you knew that information, at least a cursory knowledge of it, you could offer an insightful answer to the questions that you're given, that you get as opposed to I don't know. Although I don't know if it's fine if the

true answer is I don't know, but I know who to speak to to get that answer but certainly bridging that gap is It should be in the it's in the best interest of everyone certainly it for the people in the back end It helps for the others to know what what they're what they're doing so that they can be a better spokesperson for those people in the back end in the event that they're not the people being spoken to, but then also for the people that are in the front and it benefits them for the people that are that they're that they that they are speaking to themselves. So just bridging that gap, I don't see any downside to it. It's just the only the only as well as the hesitancy is it is just convincing the people of the importance of it. Yeah, I'm trying to find the downside myself.

And I honestly fear sometimes that it could be that certain companies, the higher ups, don't want everybody to know what kind of data they have. I mean, this is an issue that I first saw in that Mark Zuckerberg case to kind of bring it all back around. It's like, you know, we signed those agreements, we signed these consent forms online that are 100 pages long that nobody could ever reasonably read. It feels as if when it comes to big data, some folks don't

actually want us to know what the big data is. And we've seen lawmakers change what actually has to happen before you give your data and how you sign things away. Now, every time you open a new app, you can click a button on an iPhone that says, ask not to track instead of what used to happen, which was it's just tracking you by default now, GDPR, all those things are changing. It really does feel to me like really advanced tech people

in some cases wouldn't be upset if everybody else didn't quite understand the level of big data. At the individual organizational level, I would hope that we want to spread that for general awareness, for sales effectiveness, like you said. You're absolutely right that had I known some of that data when I was a salesperson, usage rates for our tech products or something like that, I probably would have been able to have more fulfilling conversations at the very least. But I do see a bit of like an erosion of trust

going on here between the really high level tech innovators, sometimes just regular old coders and programmers who are just kind of enacting orders related to these things and just lay people, those who aren't really experts at all. Do you see this sort of erosion of trust that I see as well? Is this just me making this up? I feel like it's been sort of in the air for a while now but I'm curious from your perspective what you see here. Yeah it's an interesting point you make you know when it comes to the perhaps the people in the in the back end perhaps they might be now I about it, they may be more hesitant to these others knowing what they're doing because they're worried about those other people not

communicating it in the way that they see fit. So they're going to leave out something that's really important and then say something that perhaps the people in the back end think, well, that's not true. You shouldn't have said that. So there's certainly that. And then for the people in the front end, they might be hesitant because they could always have plausible deniability. So hey, this is something I didn't know. So I didn't have to, I don't have to communicate it to anybody. So I'd rather not know. So when you were asking the question, Tyler, you really got me thinking, well, maybe there is some downsides, but even though there are those downsides, I still think that the upsides

will supersede the downsides. Yeah, yeah, I see that now. That's actually a really good point because as soon as I first started accessing this large relational database, like I mentioned, you know, I hear here's some data, but remember this, and this isn't exactly what you think it is because x, y, and z. And it's like the things that you have

to take into account the context around the numbers themselves. It's never simple. It's things that I could deduce based on my existing knowledge, but unfortunately, you really do have to have a pretty strong tech background to understand and just to sort of like naturally know a lot of this stuff. And I guess that's a really good point is not wanting the data to get obscured by how it's communicated. And also plausible deniability ain't bad to have sometimes when it's that much data.

So I appreciate that point of view as well. Neil, before I let you go, can you just let our audience know where they can learn more about you and anything that you are up to or would like to let our people know about? Sure. You can go to teachthegeek.com to learn more about me. I believe I mentioned that I also have a podcast. It's called Teach the Geek in which I interview people with technical backgrounds about their public speaking journeys, and not only their public speaking journeys, but their career

journeys. It's been really interesting to learn what some people have, where they started and then where they ended up. One woman that I interviewed about a year back now, maybe two, she started off as a civil engineer, at least she got a degree in civil engineering, but didn't work as one. She decided to go to law school instead,

or at least after getting her degree in civil engineering. She worked as a lawyer for about five years, and then she decided to be a stay at home mom for about a decade, and now she works as a personal stylist helping women with their wardrobes. I mean, you couldn't, I couldn't script this. I certainly couldn't think of somebody doing something like that. So having those conversations with such people has been so fascinating. And you can learn more about the podcast or check out the podcast at podcast.teachthegeek.com. Cool. All right, Neil, thanks again for joining us. For everybody listening, we will catch you on the next episode. Cheers.

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