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#92 Garr Reynolds, Presentation Zen
Join Dr. Sciarretta for a conversation with Garr Reynolds, the author of Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery, for a compelling discussion about the fusion of Zen aesthetics with modern communication. Garr shares how his journey from Oregon to Japan has shaped his philosophy, emphasizing the power of simplicity and focus. Garr's insights extend beyond visuals, touching on the growing role of AI in both storytelling and education, while reminding us of the unyielding value of authenticity and creativity.
Garr's YouTube channel
Garr's website
Keynote by Jensen Huang
Welcome to the Hangout Podcast. I'm your host, david Shoretta. Come on in and hang out. In this episode, I was privileged to sit down remotely from Japan with Gar Reynolds. Gar is an internationally acclaimed communications consultant, teacher and the author of bestselling books, including the amazing bestseller Presentation Zen. This is a book that I stumbled upon probably more than 10 years ago and a book that I've gifted to many friends and colleagues, especially when the topic of how to create more compelling presentations comes up.
Speaker 1:Our conversation was wide ranging. We talked about Gar's more than four decades living in Japan, the Zen aesthetic and how that has influenced his work and his views of the world, the role of running, walking, being out in nature, and much, much more. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. Welcome, gar. Thank you so much for joining us. I guess it's morning on your end of this planet and afternoon here, so thank you so much. That's right. Thanks for having me. I thought we'd get started in a place that is a natural starting place for most people, which is, with an origin story where you come from, where you grew up, what about your past might point to where you are now in time and what you do for work and what you do for life.
Speaker 2:Right, right, okay. Well, I'm calling in from Japan. So I've been here well over half my life for sure, maybe two thirds of my life, basically, since I graduated. So I went to Oregon State for my undergrad, same as Jensen Wong, the NVIDIA CEO, and shortly after that I had some time in Peace Corps. But basically I've been in Japan, except for graduate school in Hawaii and then back to Japan.
Speaker 2:But why did I come to Japan? Maybe it's because I grew up on the Oregon coast. Our house was right on the beach. In those days you didn't have to be wealthy to have a huge house on the beach. I mean, everybody did. That was what you did back in those days, that's in the 60s and 70s, and I guess you know my mother always said the next country over is Japan. You know. So if you keep digging, you're going to end up in Japan. We dig in the beach. So I just always had this sort of, you know, romantic feeling about going someplace far away. And then, once I arrived in Japan and just started reading and studying about the culture, I just felt, yeah, I really fit here. I mean, I'm always a Gaiko Kuchin, I'm always a foreigner, I'm not Japanese, but it's just very, very different from the United States. So I fit really well here.
Speaker 2:But in terms of presentation, where did that start? When I was younger maybe you know this because you know high school students as well I think I was more confident as a 15, 16, 17-year-old certainly an 18-year-old and so I just loved presenting and public speaking. I did it in college and people said, oh, you're really good at this, even though I was really shy and introverted. I'm less confident now as a human being. It's funny, you get that hubris when you're younger and then as you grow older, you go well, there's so much I don't know, but when you're 18, you think, well, I kind of know everything. So anyway, I was just really interested in public speaking and communicating and performing, since I was a musician and still am. So I just like that idea of connecting with an audience.
Speaker 2:And then I combined that with my interest in graphic design and visual communication, which seemed to really lend itself for the visual aspect, not PowerPoint per se, but the big screen. Someone taught like a Steve Jobs kind of keynote kind of thing, but this was long before PowerPoint was invented. So my first presentation I was 17, in high school in a science class using 35 millimeter slides, but the screen and the projectors were really bright. So it's just like today, basically really huge screen, four by three screen in those days, 35 millimeter slides, you know. So I take the photos, photos, and then wait weeks for the slides to come back, so that I really liked that. It felt like being, you know, combined cinema, a little bit aspects of cinema and photography and kind of TV. I felt like a TV weatherman.
Speaker 2:So that's when I kind of got the bug, when I was 17 in high school and then went to college and studied philosophy and then I didn't really do we didn't do presentations in those days with visuals, of course, because computers just came out when I was in college. But, um, we would present, like at the chalkboard and things like that, and so anyway, I just always kind of did that. So that's kind of the origin story. But then how did the presentation zen become this thing? As you know, you've heard of death by powerpoint and you've probably seen a lot of boring.
Speaker 2:I've suffered it many times, yeah so I started, um, well, after well, I worked for apple. You know sorry, yeah, I was been asia forever, in japan forever, but then I did um leave to work for apple and um then, and I was before that, I was a president of an apple user group, um, and so I was, you know, very much interested in in presentation and then came back to Japan. But how did this presentation Zen stuff started? So when I was at Apple of course you can't do your own thing, you can't do your own presentations, you can't have a website and things like that.
Speaker 2:So I got a chance to become a college professor, so I left Silicon Valley to come back to Japan, to Kansai Gaida University, and then I started a website and Presentation Zen website as well, 20 years ago or so. And then I just put everything I know for free on the website. And then eventually I didn't know this would happen but Pearson you know Pearson's a big publisher and they asked me to would you like to write a book? So I, yeah, so I did that. And then I've written three editions of that and a few other books, and some books in Japanese too. So that's where we are, and then I just go all over the world, all over the world doing keynote presentations and seminars and things like that.
Speaker 1:Well, I have to say that what I discovered you and your work by accident now probably, god, probably more than 10 years ago hopefully it might be correct I remember being so frustrated by what I saw as this general addiction to PowerPoint that I was seeing all around me and as it became more accessible. And then that's online and you got Google Slides and there's just all these different varieties of the same, different flavors of the same ice cream, so to speak. People would cram a bunch of content into as few slides as possible because they somehow thought that there was this kind of stigma against having a long presentation slide-wise. So you'd get these just complete dumps of information. And I remember one night going online and there's got to be books on presenting.
Speaker 1:And that's how I found one of the editions of presentations and and I've since gifted it to I don't know how many colleagues, especially when, when they're especially towards the start of their careers, where they're, they go oh, oh, you want me to present at the board meeting, do you have any tips? And I go hey, yeah, yeah, here's this book and it's really heavy on images and it's light on text and you can go through and really pick up the aesthetic, and that's really what originally kind of turned me on to your ideas and I've just always been very grateful.
Speaker 2:So thank you. So how have you used it? So what's like the most interesting? Have you used it? So what? How is it? You know what's like the most interesting presentation you've done or you felt, you know?
Speaker 1:I, the most interesting work that I've been able to do and I think that others, colleagues of mine and just friends is when we try to do a presentation where there's you know, I always joke if you can, if you can do a presentation and do a slideshow with no words, I'm going to take you out to dinner.
Speaker 1:On the screen that's a little extreme, right but where really people think about the imagery, the high quality images, the planning it out in an analog format first.
Speaker 1:So that's kind of an idea that I picked up from you, just even the post-it note approach. So I've tried to do we have a leadership retreat every year and I put together what's our journey been in the past year, and then what do we think it's our journey been in the past year, and then what? What do we think it's going to lead to in the future. So I'll it'll be images from the previous year and then leading into the future. So really trying to think, trying to channel that idea that you have mentioned, even of the slide projection, because I remember my dad was an amateur photographer, used to show us these slide shows back, like I'm talking about 1978 and stuff, and you, because of you, had to really choose your slides carefully back in those days, right, like it was expensive to get them made. Um, we didn't have this over abundanceundance of images, right, it was like you had to choose them carefully. Think about the sequence.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:And so really trying to run through that. I don't fashion myself to be some great presenter, but I really try to channel that from you. The other thing that I've coached people on is the empty space, whether black or white, between slides. Um, to not be afraid to have a blank screen so that the attention of the audience is on the, on the idea and on the presentation and what's just been said, rather than all eyes just looking at the next content yeah, that's a good point.
Speaker 2:You could do that in the old days, you know, you just put a I guess no slide in the right. Oh, it'd be white anyway. Yeah, kind of white and too bright I guess. But yeah, but with you know software today you can just, and you can always just hit the b key, you know, on your keyboard or your um, whatever, it's always on a remote control. But if you kind of plan that you have a black slide in there, otherwise even you know everyone's looking at you all the time, so it's looking at the screen all the time. So, yeah, it's a good, it's good to plan that in, right, it makes it more interesting that way.
Speaker 2:And also, the thing is, when people get off topic, and that's fine, right, you want the audience to be engaged. But let's say, you have a slide up I don't know about um, you know, it's something just not related now to it. There was a question and now you're kind of going off in a tangent, but it's relevant. Well, yeah, just hit the b key, you know, make that slide go blank, because otherwise it's wait. Are we talking about that data? No, we're not talking about that anymore, right?
Speaker 2:so yeah, that's a little little trick you can do how much?
Speaker 1:how much influence has? Has japan? You know and I've never been full disclosure, I've never been to japan, it's definitely on my list but kind of a, a zen aesthetic. Um, that may be somewhat of a stereotype but also, I'm sure, has some truth to it how much has that influenced your work, your book, book, et cetera.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, a lot of people, a lot of foreign people who come over who are really interested in Japan. Of course you get into the culture and Daisetsu Suzuki, who wrote over 100 books in English on Zen, and he had said that that's really at the heart of Japanese culture. Even people don't talk about it, they don't go. Hey, look at Zen, this Zen that People don't, and most people are either sort of a mix of Buddhism and Shintoism. They're not really very religious, but all Zen is, I mean the Zen aesthetic, zen arts, like tea ceremony and different kinds of calligraphy. And then you know no theater, Sumie, which is kind of a brush painting. You know no theater, sumie, which is kind of a brush painting. You know they have hundreds of different shades of black and gray on white. Yeah, so the idea is just simplicity. I mean it's not really just a Japanese idea, but you just start. You need something to kind of a framework. It doesn't really matter what the framework is. People have their philosophies. So Zen is, you know, well, I'm going to say thousands of years. I'm not sure exactly when it came from, when it originated in India, then came through China and Korea, but really hit Japan about a thousand years ago. Buddhism was before that, but Zen Buddhism about a thousand years ago, and the aesthetic just really fits with the idea of, you know, simplicity. So you can apply that to many things, such as diet and cooking, obviously. In terms of art, architecture, yeah, everything it's really. I think we need it more than ever. I know it can be cliche and people think, oh, it's not really about Zen, but you can't help but be inspired by it. So you study it, like Zazen, which is meditation. I was interested in that. I didn't really do judo or karate so much, but you can learn a lot from those arts, those martial arts as well.
Speaker 2:So actually, a buddy of mine who's a curator of old Japanese pottery in Kyoto and he showed me one day he goes, oh, let me show you this, and he pulls out. I went to his office, came back and he had a business card from Steve Jobs. Now, steve Jobs didn't give away many business cards. I didn't even know he ever had business cards. But there it is. It was similar to the ones I had when I was there, but he actually had a business card and he had him.
Speaker 2:So my friend would uh be sort of this private, um, you know, tour guide. So steve would come, sometimes with one of his children or just by himself, and he was really interested in japanese culture, you know the arts, and so my friend would take him around to different museums and he's just, it's just like the things you hear about steve, he's just tons of questions, really interested, and of course he would apply those kinds of things to products and so on. So that's the whole point. I mean you as an educator, you know, know all this. You never know where inspiration is going to come from. So as an educator myself, I just try to make a fertile ground and hopefully things will stick, stimulate students to really want to pursue something on their own, of course.
Speaker 1:I remember, you know, I think it's probably been, you know, told a million million times, but the story about steve jobs saying that the most important course he ever took in college was a calligraphy class, um. But I also remember, when they were designing his private jet, that he obsessed over one button, certain area of the you know the whether it was going to be a right, a toggle or some sort of other switch Cause he was that focused on detail, right, simplicity, functionality, relevance, and then just eliminate what's not necessary.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he was a big fan of of Japan, japanese culture and morita at sony and yeah, he would often take trips to japan and he was very popular. I mean he's a, I mean he's popular everywhere and but you know, the legend's kind of bigger than the actual person now. Um, but yeah, he was obsessed with that. I was listening to a podcast by one of the guys that worked for him not that long before he passed away. But he was showing him this advertising kind of thing. You know like how advertising can work on the iphone, and his examples that he showed were like sears and when I was looking so I showed sears and I showed I don't know like some outback steakhouse or something like that, and I go I'm thinking oh god, no.
Speaker 2:And of course at the end of the story is steve, it's just irate, like how dare you show me this crap? First, you don't choose those companies. If you're going to show examples, it's the Ritz-Carlton, the Four Seasons, whatever the top Nike it's going to. You don't do Sears or Outback Steakhouse. But this guy came from another company. You know his company was bought out but it's really funny. So once you work there and you get to know Steve's thinking we'd often have, like we'd say does Steve know about this, because I would see something stupid in a meeting. No, he doesn't know. Yeah, that's good, because you know what. He wouldn't approve this.
Speaker 1:These were lower level things that never got pushed up. Yeah, that's interesting. So you were there at a pretty critical. How long were you at Apple for?
Speaker 2:No, no, I was only there two years, just a couple of years after he came back. I mean, when he came back I was involved with Apple stuff, but from the outside, but I attended all the events there and I was president of a user group in Japan. But when he came back, apple was basically a couple of quarters from bankruptcy. I mean, that's how bad it was. It's hard to believe. And then a few years ago they were actually the most valuable company in the world, I mean bigger than Shell and ExxonMobil, whatever. It's crazy that they went. That's quite a success story.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I remember I think one of the first laptops I bought in the, I'm going to say, early 90s was a some version of a Mac and it was just. It was terrible and that must've must've been. I felt like I'd bought like a Ford Pinto or something. I was like this is just and I don't. It was probably when he wasn't there right, when he had just come back. I don't remember the dates, but it's really been quite a remarkable, a remarkable journey last 30 years.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's really good lessons there, for I mean for educators too, or certainly principals or superintendents who have to. You know, you know they're your leaders, right? You see the big picture. So what happened is that there was this product creep. So Apple was all about simplicity and they lost that. They made too many products, just too many products, or some were very similar, and that's not what you want to do. So he came back and just did a thing on a whiteboard and it was basically four product lines that we have. I mean, just simplifying means you have to throw away stuff that some people still like. You know it could be some curriculum or something like that. But you see the big picture, but you're always going to have people say no, no, no, no, don't cut that.
Speaker 1:It's interesting that I'm so glad our first conversation got postponed, because we're now right in the middle of budget reductions mid-year due to some um things we didn't predict, and part of that is is a leaning right, becoming lean strong. You don't want to become so, you don't want to reduce so much that you become weak, but it's really true. We have initiatives, we've got technology tools that we've barely used, we've got platforms that are redundant. We've got all these things. Eventually, when there's an imperative because you want to make sure that you stay in the black budget-wise, you go okay, let's lay all these things out and let's go through the process of what can we get rid of, what can we eliminate but still remain relevant and strong and effective, and and I actually think it's a really healthy process- yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:The thing is, you know someone's going to not be happy about it, so it's a lot, a lot of people are happy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we had with apple. It was, there was something kind of like an eye. It wasn't like an iphone, but it's called lot easier. Oh, a lot of people want to have it. Yeah, we had with Apple. It was that there was something kind of like an eye. It wasn't like an iPhone, but it was called the Newton, which anyway, it was the kind of a PDA personal digital assistant kind of thing. This is 25. I don't know how many you're 30.
Speaker 1:That's a long time ago that's like the era of it had a lot of fans. We got otaku.
Speaker 2:Otaku just means, like you know, nerds, but in a good way, like they love this stuff. And when they canceled that because like, well, you know, we're going to focus on, like notebooks, you know, laptop computers, computers I forget what the other thing was that's when iMac came out, you know the colorful ones and all that. And so they're like protesting one time in Cupertino. They're like, you know, bring back the Newton. So you just have to really be focused. And there's a book you've heard of Maria. What's her name? Kondo, is it Kondo, kondo, maria? The simplicity. She's all about like getting rid of stuff, you know, decluttering your life and your stuff. Um, but it actually can. You know, minimalism can actually make your life more powerful. So you know, if you have to cut something here, it actually can make other things stronger, you know.
Speaker 1:So you have to kind of think of it that way I think we certainly in the us we have many of us just have kind of this feeling like our space is unlimited, right, like our houses are big and you, you fill up your garage and then then you get a storage, you get a storage container and then you, you put those damn sheds in your backyard and you fill that up with stuff and you're like I don't even remember how many circular saws I have, right, I'm just going to go to home depot and buy another one.
Speaker 2:Instead, slowing down and simplifying, um, it's an interesting thing to think about yeah, I mean, if growth is always the metric, is always what you measure, you know more growth? Well, it can't. How can that go on forever? There's got to be other ways and other countries I don't get off topic of what we're talking about, but other countries measure things like different things, not not just GDP, but happiness and well-being. You know all these kinds of things Because that's never. It's very Zen in a way, or Buddhist. It's never enough. You know you're attached. If it's always more, I'll be happy. If I can only get this right and then you get that, you go. Well, I'm not happy. Now. Your emphasis is in the wrong place.
Speaker 1:I wanted to ask you you know what you think have been the positive and negative impacts of technology on storytelling? Right, like, obviously we're able to have this very natural conversation across time zones and thousands of miles, you can fly around the world and do keynotes and and they can book you on email via email and all those pieces, but do we lose something of the both the, the the kind of primal impact of storytelling? Obviously, for the vast majority of storytelling's life, we were around fires and we're sitting in a cave or whatever?
Speaker 1:Did we lose it? Because we can. It's too easy to bang out a PowerPoint and screen there.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, you have to imagine, well, how could I tell the story if the lights went out, if the electricity goes out? Right, I have to have a backup plan, and that you know. The essence of this is not just about you know the technology at all, so things like this. I mean of this is not just about you know the technology at all, so things like this. I mean this is a supplement and I, yeah, I do a lot of online, not a lot anymore, but during COVID, of course, that's what I did and it was okay, but yeah, something it's not nearly the same as being face-to-face, being live, but technology, you know, supplements, not supplements augments that. My English augments that my english augments that.
Speaker 2:I mean, I love concerts now, it's always the way I dreamed it would be. I saw queen, not with freddie, but with you know, with adam. Uh, you know 55, 60 000 people, but, and we were kind of far away, high up in these seats, but they have massive screens. These led screens are absolutely enormous. So we get to kind of the best of both worlds, this visualization, and then we get closer to the actual performers there, even though it's a huge stadium. So it's mostly good stuff.
Speaker 2:The thing I'm worried about not worried about, but right now we're in a weird place with AI, which isn't even new because I've been using you didn't call it AI, but we've been using it for a long, long time. I had a. Magisto was a is a app, a video app that automatically you just give it all your vacation photos and videos and it makes a great video. You don't have much control over it, but it's like all this technology or all these special effects, okay, but I stopped using it because I I want to control, I want to be, I like the process. So the thing is, right now there's all these apps that are saying you know, presentations in seconds, we'll make your PowerPoint in seconds, no need for research. I mean, these are actually things they say I've got all this, I wrote this down.
Speaker 2:You know, we're at the grifter stage, people trying to make money, but some things I don't think there are shortcuts to, and we, you know, like movie making, of course there are things that really shortcuts to, and we, you know, like movie making, of course there are things that really really help, but at the end of the day, I do, I don't know, um, the idea that ai is going to automatically write a script for you. It can help you with some things because you can bounce ideas off of you, but I I think that's been uh, it's overblown. I think ai mainly or will be used, not for those creative things where it is now, but things like like being able to detect cancer, for example, in an MRI that a human would miss. All these kinds of things. This is great, great use of AI, or safer airline flights, or whatever. But right now it's all talking about how this app will automatically obviously write your paper. I mean that it can do, but what's the point of the paper for anybody?
Speaker 1:It's interesting that you mentioned the paper thing.
Speaker 1:I was writing an article a couple of weeks ago and I thought I'm going to run that kind of bullet point concepts through AI and have it give me sources of each of the key points, right?
Speaker 1:So I ran it through and boom, immediately popped up and it seemed super official and it gave me a reference list and everything, and. And then, as I and this is like the paid version of chat, gbt, so I thought, whatever, it's costing 20 bucks a month, and I would say 80 of the sources were either dead links or were links to a similar website where you might find that information, and some of them gave me direct quotes that, even when I pasted them in due to google search, didn't exist. They were completely made up, you know, and which is an interesting, I mean they were. I mean this thing is language learning models are ostensibly learning from, from everything that's out there and this corpus of information that continues to grow. But but I just I left that experience feeling like I I'm just gonna scrap this right from scratch and then I'm going to make little notes and I'm going to go back in and do a Google search for these concepts, and it was actually much more accurate.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's funny. You mentioned quotations, and using quotes is really useful in a presentation, but usually the source should come from something you actually read, and it could be just an article or something in a book. So I found a website that promotes itself, as you know, I'll quote. So I just searched myself. So I'm like my book and it gave me 30 quotes and every single one of them I never said. I never said those things and it says and it's already a slide that you can use, and it will say blah, blah, blah. I mean one of them simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, which is in my book and it's attributed to Da Vinci. Leonardo Da Vinci said that, I mean, and so I put that. That's a quote, but it says my name underneath it. That was the close one. The other ones are completely made up and it's just paddling. I mean. It's like it says do your best always in every endeavor to persevere through presentation. Gar Reynolds, I never said such a weird, stupid thing. Where are they getting this from?
Speaker 1:Well, and then the next layer of that is the deepfake videos where they'll actually, if you're a known personality, they'll actually. You know, there are all these videos now of Elon Musk telling people to send him one Bitcoin and he'll return two Bitcoins to them. And here's this code. And you watch it and you go. I don't know Elon Musk other than what I've seen in videos, but I look at it and I go it's like a 98% real looking thing and for a while there's a gesture and you go. That doesn't seem totally human. But in another, another five years, we might not be able to tell the difference sure you you won't.
Speaker 2:You won't be able to tell the difference between people. You actually know someone famous like that, but then there I came across one the other day that I thought was real. It was not a famous person, so I don't know the person, it's just a talking head, a person but it felt very um, uh, uncanny valley. You're familiar with that term, uncanny valley, which came from japan. It just means when something's very, very fake, you know like a cartoon or a robot, then we're okay with that because we understand what it is. But when it's like it's 99 percent there, or even 99.9 percent, and then you think something's uncomfortable, something's a bit weird. There are actually people like that, people. People, for example, who may lack empathy but seem very nice but eventually, wait, something's off here with what this person said. It's kind of like that. It's a weird feeling, anyway. So I'm watching this and she's talking, but the lips are matching perfectly, but there's something. It's just like a dead. It's a weird feeling. I go, okay. So this is the problem.
Speaker 2:The whole website came up, or YouTube channel came up, about a month ago. A video every day. You can do this with AI. That's all it's doing. Ai writes the script does the narration, the visuals now using some. It's amazing what it does, but it's all fake. It's just some guy wherever creating this stuff and it's all fake. It's just some guy wherever creating this stuff and it's all regurgitated from wikipedia and a million. I mean it doesn't contribute anything. The idea of education and creativity is we're creating something that didn't exist. You know.
Speaker 1:We're adding something what's not even adding anything yeah, that's a interesting place we're at right now, especially in regards to our, our, our children. Right, like what are they gonna grow up believing or knowing to be true and be able to filter, filter that out? I mean, I'm my. My when I was in college was when let's see the end of college, I think my senior year of college, I got an email address and it was like you could only email people at other universities.
Speaker 2:And.
Speaker 1:I was like this technology sucks. It doesn't even scroll. You got to hit return to go down to the next line. I go. This is why I'm not a multimillionaire. I'm like, oh, this technology will never take off but whatever. And so that was how you know that was. I was 20. And so now I'm in my fifties and obviously I've kind of got that balance between the two realities. But someone who's being born now, by the time they're 15, like what does that look like?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, I heard someone else talk about this. Is that the? I mean you people like einstein, you know, not to, you know name drop, but people like einstein or, uh, richard feinman or anyway, all the brilliant scientists who were, you know, probably on the spectrum, I mean they're brilliant guys, right, but they still. They also grew up reading ethics, you know, reading philosophers, and they had some morals were something they thought about. Right, try to do good, you know your fellow man and all this and that might be seem to be missing now.
Speaker 2:If it's only just about you know tech and how much can you do, and that's a really important part, humanity is a huge part of it and we shouldn't lose that, and that's what I worry about school or things that are cut, and if it's just always focused on tech. I mean, if I do have kids they're now 14 and 12 and I wish like they don't ban with my son's school it's a private school, international school, but they don't ban phones and I wish they did because they're distracting, and I would love if I could afford it if a school existed that had no tech at all, if I could afford it if a school existed that had no tech at all. That's what I want. I want my kids to develop resilience and to be able to read and write and resilient and creative and problem solvers. That to me, that's going to get you far in the world.
Speaker 1:It's interesting that you bring that up. You know, schools. There's this recent push, certainly in California, but also across the? U, the US and I know in Europe as well, of controlling, banning, limiting cell phones on school campuses. I don't know if you've read, uh, the anxious generation. Jonathan hate height um, I pronounce his name uh, really compelling book and makes this whole argument about how's the? You know, after 2010, 11, when the iphone became ubiquitous. It's really this.
Speaker 2:It's exactly like you know, in 1966, you know the father complaining about that rock and roll, the long hair, the rock and roll, you kids, and of course they were wrong. Rock and roll is awesome, but on this I'm not wrong. No one knows the future. But we have wisdom, the elders do have some wisdom sometimes, and what we need are more young people and they do exist out there. Young people saying this is ridiculous. This is addiction. It's not even reading, as you know. You read the article. I'm sure I think it was Harvard, but kids won't read. These are Harvard kids who cannot read a book. I totally believe that because I'm the same way. I used to read books, nonfiction, I mean. Look at the shelves, they're full of books and I buy books, but I don't read them. I read them, I read all the time. So kids are reading constantly. They're one sentence at a time, one sentence here, maybe a paragraph, but the idea to sit down and think about things and annotate it's got to be so hard for them.
Speaker 1:I can't remember the author's name, but I think it's called the Shallows or Shallows or something. I think the guy was a technology writer for the New York Times. I remember reading this book and I read it and it was hard for me to get through the book. And he's talking about how hard it is for him to get through that. You, you remember in college or in high school. You're like, oh, I'm going to read whatever. They assigned this. It was like Dostoevsky or whatever. And you and like, I'm thinking about it now and I go, I can't. I know it's at least I feel I don't have any science to back this up, but I feel like it's changed the way I view absorbing information. Now I'm doing more and more audio books because I feel like it fits into my workouts or my runs or whatever. And then I go and I'm like you, I have bookshelves full of books that I get a chapter in and I jumped to something else.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we need a movement. There is a slow I call, call it slow reading, but then people think I'm talking about idiots or something. But you know that's. But we need, I need to promote. Actually it was an article. I think it's a school in sweden that got rid of books mostly to switch to, you know, ipads and things, all digital ebooks and, um, it costs a ton of money to do that and now they've reversed it and they're going back to books. So, yeah, I'm the same way I. We need a movement to promote books. Even you know people like and kids tell me they if they have to read, they do prefer paper books. If they're going to read a book and there's many advantages to paper books, it just feels better, we're less anxious, you get away from tech, yeah get away from alerts and notifications, and yeah, and you can kind of flip back and forth.
Speaker 2:I mean some things are great, of course, with ebooks, because you can just search, find me everything about this word. I mean it's great. But on the other hand, it's just something about holding. Uh, you know the difference of, you know, holding a I don't know a baby and imagining holding a baby, you know, or a dog or what a cat you know, it's something interesting here.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love, I love books, I love, I love old books. You know I used to um present, for I'd go to the oxford to the side business school. Anyway, I went into the library a few times and like they have books that are hundreds and hundreds of years old, that you have to like wear gloves and everything but gosh, it's just so. It's amazing what?
Speaker 1:who do you think? I mean, you've talked about steve jobs. I know I've seen you in video that we spoke a little bit about him here too, but who do you think are some of the most effective presenters you've you've either worked with, or coached or seen? Perhaps we can find them on YouTube, perhaps not, but could you give us some examples of that and what makes them so effective?
Speaker 2:Well, yeah. So for me I'm not interested in, like, people who are really polished, I mean people on the network news, cable news. I mean these are people who've been doing it a long time and that's not the rest of it, we're just regular people. But how can we be much better? So I love to point to people and I just did. I just made a YouTube. It's on my YouTube channel, I just put it up yesterday from a former student.
Speaker 2:I mean he's a former seminar student of mine in Paris. He's a Swedish medical doctor and he's leading a movement in nutrition to help people maintain their healthy lifestyle. Anyway, there, a healthy lifestyle. Anyway, it's a keynote style of presentation. He did last year and he did one just a few days ago, but in a his home, in his office studios, and he's it's just, he makes a really good use of visuals and you know structuring a problem solve. You know a problem solution structure. And yeah, I mean he's not a, he's not going to be on the tv news, he's not a dynamic. I mean he's a very soft-spoken, he's a regular guy, he's a very to be on the TV news. He's not a dynamic. I mean he's a very soft-spoken, he's a regular guy. He's a very smart guy and that's to me, that's most of us, right, we're just regular people, but he's very engaging and he just does a really good job. He understands the importance of visuals and the little things, kind of how Steve Jobs was. Little details are really important and so we spend extra money to get to really amazing screens because that, you know, that matters. So there's that one. I mean I can give you the link later. It's on my youtube channel. Great, yeah, we'll put it in the show notes. That's that would be great.
Speaker 2:And then, in terms of famous and, like you know, the big keynote and not just keynote but also in interviews um, jensen wong, who I mentioned before, is the ceo, founder of nvidia and he's not a household name like a Bill Gates, but he should be. He's the 20th richest person in the world. I mean, he's worth right Today. I think he lost 8 billion a few weeks ago because he said something, but you know, on paper I don't know what it is it's near 100. I think it's 100 billion, which is insane, right? Anyway, but I love he's just a regular guy. He's from Oregon. I mean, his parents are from Taiwan. I think he moved to the States when he was three, went to Oregon State and then Stanford, started his own company and he does his keynotes, which are, yeah, very visual, really great. But he's just a regular guy, right, so it's not perfect. I like that.
Speaker 2:I don't like the new Apple recorded keynotes. The new Apple recorded keynotes so-called keynotes they're not keynotes, they're like keynotes, they're videos and they're kind of they're too polished, too slick, even though they're by the regular people, including Tim Cook. But anyway, jensen, I love his keynotes because there are little tiny mistakes in there, but I love that. And in his interviews, for example, there's this one interview where I thought the guy interviewing him was disrespectful. A younger guy with Bloomberg talked over him and all this is the kind of thing where a lot of CEOs would have walked out or got really angry. He's just a really nice guy you wouldn't think and I don't know what he's like. I have never heard anything bad about him, but I do know some CEOs with like Fortune 1000 companies that are nice people and they say you can be a nice. Of course you have to be firm and you have to be a leader, but you don't have to be. I don't want to say the word. You don't have to be a D-head.
Speaker 1:You don't have to be.
Speaker 2:And, of course, steve Jobs was. He was not a pleasant person often and you probably don't want to cross paths with him, but on stage he was great and very you know, very, very approachable. So there's a good lesson there. And with jensen he's just yeah, it just seems like a really nice guy, but that comes across in his interviews and in on stage as well. So that's another one I would look for. In terms of famous people. Um, in terms, I used to really recommend a lot of ted talks years ago, my first edition of the book. I had a lot of cooperation from Ted with that and I've been to Ted when it was in Long Beach.
Speaker 2:I don't watch them anymore because they're just a little bit too slick. And I know they have their presenters memorized. They literally memorize what they're going to say rather than just having more. You know, a good idea. Of course you're strict, but I like the imperfections, I like the realness. I don't like memorized, unless you're an actor. I mean if you're an actor, right, and of course that's different. I mean if you're Tom Hanks, then fine, we're not going to know you memorize. You know it doesn't seem memorized, but most of us aren't like that. So if it's memorized, it's not, it's going to feel a little bit off. So I'm sorry.
Speaker 1:I don't have a list of names, but no, that's a, those are, those are, those are great. And you know I was, I, you, I was going to ask you the follow-up about ted talks. So I'm glad that you you brought that up because I started to kind of feel that sort of a shift in my perception of ted. Eventually, right, it is like there's ted and there's ted x, and then there's local, whatever, and they're all. They all kind of have structure. And I had the privilege of interviewing or having a conversation with a guy who he did an early Ted talk, like 10 years ago or more, on this experiment that he did in India with the hole in the wall school, where he oh, yeah, yeah, I know that one and I remember seeing this thing on an airplane and I was like it blew my mind and it's a very he's a down to earth dude who who even his presentation was very, very down to earth and and amazing story.
Speaker 1:And I, when I interviewed, when I we did a zoom like this and he's in London and I just I love listening to the guy who's so down to earth. And we started out and he said I have one question for you Are you going to publish the video of this? And I said no, it's audio only. And he said okay, good, because I'm wearing my favorite sweater and I just spilled some pea soup right here and I hope this doesn't show up. And then the whole conversation kind of had that human touch where you felt like your professorial uncle was having a conversation with you across the dinner table and I'm like that's I think the beauty of it's really hard to coach someone in that right. It's like is it a real human experience or not?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you can help. Even a really ineffective presenter can be. You can help even the really, you know, ineffective presenter can be. Everyone can learn to be better. But yeah, I mean, of course there's, you know, the superstars, but I think everyone can learn to be really, you know, really really good, really passable. But another person who died, of course, many years ago, but Richard Feynman, a prize-winning physicist, but he has a lot of his videos. I don't know if it was not Berkeley, but where was he Down in California, Anyway, Cal.
Speaker 2:Tech or something Cal Tech, I think, right, yeah, anyway, he did all these lectures that were recorded. This is the 60s, so he's at a chalkboard but on a stage, so it's very much like a presentation, but he's teaching and he uses humor and he's not boring and the students are engaged. There are no iPhones then, of course, but he would use humor. A very bright guy, obviously. So that's someone I always recommend. I mean to me that's like my hero. He's a great communicator, whether it's in an interview or on stage. He would say things like you know what is science? How do we do it? We have a hypothesis. So what do we do? Well, first we just guess, and then the whole audience laughs what do you mean? You guess no, no, don't laugh, that's what we do. You guess, right? I think this is my hypothesis and then we check it. Anyway, he's really engaging. I've seen keynotes where he's gone over two hours. I mean, think about a two-hour keynote but he did things to break it up. He'd bring different people. Of course, some of the announcements were very exciting, but it's just never. It's not boring and he had a really great way on stage, but when he was younger he was not good In the early 80s.
Speaker 2:By the time the Mac came out he really learned. He's like anything, he goes well. I'm not really great at this, so he got great at it. But by the time the Mac came out he was very charismatic in front of an audience but also very approachable. And so people might misunderstand because he seems so approachable In real life not so much, and I don't think you can fake it. So I'm not trying to suggest that he's faking it, because I don't think you can fake it. He's a very unusual. He was a very unusual person in that regard because he could really turn on a charm. And I don't mean that. I don't mean that he was a snake oil salesman, because I don't. I think he actually believed everything that he said and he would change his mind. He often would change his mind when he got better information. So he wasn't a con artist, but he was optimistic about things he believed in.
Speaker 1:Of course, do you recommend? Maybe you do this for yourself, but do you recommend that speakers, presenters, uh, film themselves practicing? Um, you know, I've, I've, I record a video to our staff every week and it's it. You know, I usually do it in one take because I want to make it natural and I don't have a lot of time in my day and I just literally my phone and I send it out. But as I, I always watch it before I send it out to make sure I didn't say something that's confusing. And I feel that even from that process, over four or five years of doing that, I'm getting a little bit better yeah, do you yeah sure I mean, yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:Well, the more you do, the better you're going to get, and if you can watch yourself, I mean that's the best. Coaching, a good you know football coach or whatever, is they have film right and then they the sensei you know yoda right, so you have to see it.
Speaker 2:Oh, I, you can explain it. This is the power of the visual. You, I can show you, I can kind of do it myself, but when you see yourself doing it, of course. Yeah, this brings up another point that's related to that Presenting, like I mentioned with Dr Enfield. I'll send the links to you later.
Speaker 2:But one is on stage and then one is just in front of a camera. Maybe there's someone else there, maybe there's not. I find that really hard. I find it extremely hard. It's much easier to do a presentation live. I'm all prepared, I got the slides, everything's working, I'm not worried about it. It's one take. There's no possibility of another take, it's just go. But when there's no audience and there's just that camera and you can't do other takes, I mean, if you saw my outtake reel, which is 90% of it, you know you it's, I swear, like a drunken sailor. I mean, it's so frustrating, and so that is another art that teachers need to can work on too. There's teaching in front of a class, but if they want to make videos as well, supplementary videos for their students, which I know a lot of professors do, you just have to keep doing it and you'll get better at it. You have to, kind of I just I don't know why just the camera is so difficult. We're a live audience, isn't?
Speaker 1:I wonder how much of that goes back to the kind of primal roots of of story, right like it was meant to be, something shared in in in community and family, in a circle, and with people there and watching their expressions, and I don't know. I think the camera is really artificial, because I've had that same experience. I had to record an onboarding video for new staff and with our HR team and they said, well, there's the studio, you can go to the studio and they're going to record this video. And I thought, okay, great, here are my topics. And I get to the studio and and they're going to record this video, and I thought, okay, great, here are my topics.
Speaker 1:And I get to the studio and I'm I'm used to filming one take on my camera off to staff, but those are our employees. But now I'm trying to project out and think, what are new staff or prospective staff wanting to see? And the very nice producers at the studio are saying can you, can you do another take, can you talk a little bit more? And I'm thinking, oh my God, and then I start to clam up because it just doesn't feel like a normal conversation.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, no. I think what you said earlier is absolutely. The reason is that it's very natural to us I don't know how many tens of thousands of the DNA developing that we're just used to telling stories or talking in front of other people at least one other person and it's only been a few. What? A little over a hundred years. The idea that we'd put a camera and I would pretend that's really hard to do it doesn't come natural to a lot of us. But interestingly, my shyest students, the most introverted students, they would prefer to record themselves by themselves with a camera where my more extroverted students, it's easier. Like me, even though I'm an introvert, I find it easier to be in front of people. I think most people probably do.
Speaker 2:Once you get over that fear of I mean, both are scary for people Because we don't want to stick out, because you know that's why leaders are often you know, sometimes they're sociopaths, because it's not. It's very normal to want to be in the middle of the herd because you're, you know you're not going to be attacked. So it takes a special person that really wants to put themselves out there. So it's not. I mean no one, I mean no well-adjusted person is not nervous, especially when they're starting out. They might eventually get used to it.
Speaker 2:I mean, you're younger than I am, but people like Johnny Carson, who was a very famous talk show host but he never watched himself. He was very shy, he never really got over the nerves, but he was a professional so he didn't know he was nervous, which is what I always tell my students. I had one recently. She was just so nervous, the whole idea of it. But I told her no one knows, you're nervous, you don't look nervous and no one will know that you're nervous and it's very natural and no one knows. So just slow down and it will be fine.
Speaker 1:And she did great, and that's yeah, and she did great. Now you teach university students to present and or in the context of some other content, that's what they're presenting.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I have a lot of just presentation classes, but you know, I have a marketing class and a senior thesis class, but the presentation is a big part of that and they always say when they review the class, that's their favorite part, where they didn't know they were going to get that, because they're used to what are going to be lectures and it'll be a test. And my philosophy is look everything's online. Youtube is amazing If you want to learn something. There was a kid that learned coding. He's like 20 and he's making a bunch of money and he never went to college. Oh, I know, it's free. Harvard puts all their coding stuff for free. If you're motivated, you could learn it. Everything's on youtube also if you're so.
Speaker 2:But we still have classes. So I think class should be very we got to do stuff. It's got to be interactive and I mean, otherwise, why are we here? I mean, you can learn this anywhere. So let's be here and I'll be more like a yoda figure and we're going to do stuff in class. That's my feeling of it. So it's not. But in terms of subjects, yeah, it's the students doing presentation is a big part of it, but sometimes it's at the whiteboard so they might explain. They have time to prepare and then they just write stuff on a whiteboard and talk about that. You know group work but not group work. That's really forced, but they really. Anyway, they, they like it, they like the group work I wanted to ask you.
Speaker 1:So oregon is known for for a lot of things rainy weather, and I think I think where they, I think where they filmed the goonies, is on the oregon coast, oh, sure, yeah, and uh, also the home of nike, um, and you, if I, if I'm not mistaken, are a runner or you've run, and yeah I still, I still run.
Speaker 1:I started running, yeah, yeah, what? So what's the? Do you see a parallel? Maybe I'm stretching, but I'm just always intrigued because I I've run my whole life and now I'm starting to slow down because my hips don't hips don't lie, as they say. But I've always just really enjoyed that simplicity, really Right, like there's no cheat, there's no faking at running. You're either doing it or not. You're either faster, you're slow, you're out there. Do you see parallels between that and your, your presentation, work, and then a follow on to that is what is your? Do you? Do you find that that helps with your ideas and your work when you're out there running?
Speaker 2:oh, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:So recently it's more like walking and sometimes jogging, because as you get older you know, I read this thing where, like people who lift weights, like older men, they never die lifting weights. It's always when they're out on an hour run they really push themselves. So I think at this age, I mean, walking is so beneficial. And if we had a scale and running maybe a tiny bit, maybe a tiny bit more, but it's really probably has diminishing returns if you run too much, right as hips go and things like that. Walking is so good for you. And if you're walking in the forest, which we call forest bathing this japanese idea and there's some science behind it that you're actually getting health benefits from the trees and being in nature, and if you're also walking, wow, that's just amazing. But oh, it's absolutely. It's amazing for creativity, for inspiration. So I always have the phone with me because it's just the way life is now and if I ever get an idea, it often happens and so I just record myself, I just talk it and just put it away. I don't listen to anything because it's safer and I like to hear the birds and my footsteps and everything. But yeah, it's absolutely critical. I think any creative person you'll find that they have something that they're doing. But so I never stopped. I never stopped running.
Speaker 2:I'm from the most beautiful place in the world was Cannon Beach. It's a beautiful beach. Yeah, goonies, parts of Goonies was there and so, yeah, it's just, the forest is right there, it becomes, it's all forest, huge. You know Douglas fir forest, and then boom beach, beautiful beach, and you get the sound of the ocean. It's the beach, it's the air, and then the forest is also there. It's like this is the most inspirational place. If you can't come up with ideas here. I don't live there anymore. I miss it a lot. How often do you get back? No, not very often at all. So it had been nine years since I'd been in the States with my family and I went back and I drove them to the Goonies house and all the places where Goonies was filmed and, it's funny, where they're like in August and I found the house and it was. We're walking back to all these people, all these you know middle America people and their rental cars. Is the Goonies house up there? Yeah, it's amazing movies.
Speaker 1:That's how I found it. That's that's how I, you know, I can remember it was a family vacation and we went to the Goonies' house.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, yeah, astoria is a really cool town. Now A lot of movies have been filmed there and it's kind of like Wellington in New Zealand. Wellington is kind of like Hollywood of New Zealand. So Astoria should do more of that, because for cinematography it's often cloudy, not raining, but with cloudy and cloudy the skin looks so good. It's this great atmosphere when you have clouds sometimes fog, so it gives it a really nice look. Sunshine can be problematic, even watching a sporting event. Right, my son asked me we're watching some game NFL playoff game and it was sunny though. So you know how the ISO doesn't know what to do, so it's overexposed in the sunny area and it's too dark, but cloudy days are great for that. So, anyway, that's my plug for Astoria Please make all your films there.
Speaker 1:Support the local economy. So I wanted to. I ask you, you know you've had a really interesting life because, as you say, you've spent more than half your life in Japan and you've had this interesting journey with Apple and also you know kind of an unconventional path now, traveling around the world doing keynotes and in a day and age of more and more bells and whistles and more sexy AI and everything, really the simplicity piece.
Speaker 2:What advice would your 60-something-year-old self give your 18-year-old self that you wish you knew time? Yeah, yeah, well to, oh not. Look, if I was 18 today. You mean, yeah, like what have you learned, um?
Speaker 1:you know? In other words, if you could go back and talk to that 18 year old, what would you tell him?
Speaker 2:yeah, well, I mean things that would help me now. So that's, that's a different question than what? What if I were 18? You know, today, like nobody knows the future. So I, you know, I have no regrets.
Speaker 2:I wasn't going to be in stem anyway, although I do like science pretty much, but math was not a strong point of mine, so I just went with what was my strong point, which was reading and writing. So i's why I studied philosophy. But I think for a student there is no panacea and people say, well, it's STEM, or it's STEM plus this. You got to know how to read and write and be curious. The worst thing is to be an incurious. Some people just are incurious, I guess, but that's just a very depressing thought. So, you know, and I think I am curious, so I don't, I was stimulated, but I'm not particularly, you know, and I think I am curious, so I don't, I was stimulated by I'm not particularly, you know, intelligent, but I think I had the right. I liked my teachers and I think they, I was inspired by them to be curious about the world and I, I think the arts are so important I actually I wish I would have done more arts when I think about junior high especially.
Speaker 2:That was a completely waste of time for me and mostly my fault. I was a good kid but a C student. It wouldn't have mattered though it would have been better served if you sent me to music camp for two years and I did nothing but music. I wouldn't be any different, except I'd be a great piano player or a cello player, because academically I got nothing out of that, and even early high school, the freshman year. But my last three years of high school was great because I was way into music and drama and all these things, but I didn't do painting or I didn't do fine art because I thought, well, I'm not a fine artist, I can't draw, and I regret I should have done more fine art because no one knows what the jobs are going to be. You're going to learn, you'll learn that anyway. So we used to think it's programmers, programming yeah, get a degree in cs. And now there's these kids graduating from berkeley and they can't find a job with their cs degree. So nobody knows.
Speaker 2:I I don't know what you should study. Don't go into debt, whatever it is. Do not go into debt. Go to a community college if you have to, for two years. I mean, the idea is, just do not do the debt. I did debt, but but it was so little compared to today. But study what you want. If you study whatever you study psychology, and people say you're never going to get a job doing that, well, you still keep your interests. You're still doing other things. You can intern, have a YouTube channel, do whatever, follow your passions, but just don't go into debt. And if it's a STEM thing that you're really interested in engineering and you can handle it, then absolutely.
Speaker 2:There's no guarantee, though, that the ai won't replace that job, but isn't ai is not going to replace us. There's a lot of hype right now. There'll be different jobs and you know, but I I think the human people who are compassionate, who have empathy, who can be great communicators, who can still be kind to people and thoughtful people they're going to be in more demand. And smart people, people who have good BS detectors, who aren't swayed by social media or whatever cable news says, but really thoughtful, well-read I think that's also really important to be well-read, to just understand the world. Not in bytes, but yeah, I've read books, it doesn't matter, you just read understand the world, because we don't know the text is going to change anyway, but if you can understand oh, this is like what Socrates said about whatever these are not superfluous things I think they're going to still be relevant, it's not really what you know?
Speaker 2:Can you think? I mean, anyone can have an idea or repeat something, but how do you know what you know? Can you think?
Speaker 1:It's really great advice. I know we used to, just even a few years ago, trying to predict what careers were going to look like. Even five years down the road is really hard, right Like who would have thought that was a that, a data scientist or a you know big data thing? But now that's gonna that's probably going to go the way of AI analysis of amazing amounts of information that a human can't do. So what else are we going to do? But my daughter's getting ready to graduate from college and I've said similar things to her that you just brought up, which is reading, writing, thinking, being a good person, just the emotional intelligence of interacting with other people, trying to read a room, figuring out you know, the end of the day, no one's no sensitive, sensible person's going to want to go to a therapy session with an ai bot. Compared to right, compared to a thoughtful social worker, right like, who could sit in the room with you and talk yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Now nobody knows, I'm not worried, so I'm not. You know it's famous last words. You know, like Bill Gates saying was it?
Speaker 2:no, who could ever need more than one megabyte? You know, or something like that. So you can't. No one knows the future. But that's the thing is, no one knows. But there are people saying that they do know and you get all these cliches like, yeah, ai won't replace your job, but the person who knows ai will replace your job. Ai is just going to be like the air we breathe. Everyone's going to. We use it, we've been using it all the time. And yeah, there are tools. The kids know it. The kids know. Oh, actually, my son.
Speaker 2:He had to do a fill in the blank for a science. You know like 20 questions and fill in the blank. And so I go well, you do that. I came back like 90 seconds later he's done. He filled it in, but he didn't know it. He took a picture of it with his iphone, put it into some ai I don't know if it was chat or whatever it was and it gave him the answers. That's a picture. Then he had to copy it, of course, because it didn't is a paper. That's it, that's it.
Speaker 2:Well, obviously, giving fill in the blank is not something you do as homework, right, because and you can't blame the kid you can say, well, don't use ai, but I mean what they're going to use, of course, and I use ai all the time. I mean jensen. The jensen wong was mentioned, so it's a constant. It's like an assistant. It's there, you have questions about things. I'm not. It's still my creative work. It's not writing my paper or making my video, but I have questions and it's. It gives me sources. It answers the question. I used it for what time at it? What time is it now in San Diego? That better be correct.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Yeah, no, I, I, we just had a staff meeting and we were doing like a brainstorming, put a bunch of post-it notes up and different one idea per post-it note. It was on a theme. And I remember we finished the meeting and one person said okay, I'm gonna take down, I'm gonna start jotting down all the. They sit there with their laptop and I just thought you know what? I took a photo of the wall and put it in a chat gpt and I said make a list of all these and organized by common themes, and it's instantaneous. You know, is it cheating? I don't think it's cheating, any more than me wearing these glasses now. After that, we can get to. Okay, what does it mean that there are these themes, that this is. This theme came up more frequently than the other. What does that mean? Chat gpt can't tell you what that means.
Speaker 2:That's the human side sure, sure, and there are a lot of job and friends who are in hotel business and they have to write a menu for things. I mean this is kind of grunt work no one really likes. You know you have to come up with this paragraph to explain this steak or something. Have ai do it and then you go through and then you know you put. That's so helpful. I've used it where people say they've asked me give, give me the top 10 things of presentation Zen. So I did that with AI and then it and I said give me like 30. And then I used 10 of them. They were not incorrect. It's just like having an assistant. That is saves me a lot of time, so that I'm totally embracing, you know, the LLMs. That's very useful, but it's not going to make your presentation for you. It can already, but who cares? I don't want that, just like I don't want an AI wife. I have a real partner. I have a real human.
Speaker 1:Well, you've been very generous with your time and I know I wanted to honor our commitment to the hour time, but I wanted to. Before I come to the last question, is there anything that I've not touched on related to your work, something that you think, um, uh, our listeners should know and, and perhaps you know, if not, and at least where folks can find you?
Speaker 2:um, yeah, well, sure, there's gar reynoldscom if you just search my name, gar Reynolds G-A-R-R. Reynolds, as in the aluminum and you can contact me from the website and the YouTube channel. It's Presentation Zen on YouTube. But the only thing is I kind of said it before but in terms of teachers education, I think presentation is more important than ever because you can't fake it. Even if you got used ai to help you a lot, but you still have to stand there and deliver and you have to do the q? A. So let's say it's five minute presentation and we're gonna have five minutes of discussion, or I mean you can't fake that. But the paper you could fake and it's very, and then it gets time consuming with people taking it through. And did you fake, you know? So I'll probably writing. I don't do writing in my class but if I did I would do in-class stuff right, I mean because you can write it in class, but I don't do that kind of class. But I would think for just about any subject having students do presentation where they have to actually do the research you can use ai to help you with that.
Speaker 2:But what I show in my videos is ai at the beginning. Yes, to help you to get an overview, just like we use Wikipedia, students could use that to kind of, you know, refine their questions. It could be about anything, for example, I don't know, maybe like, is fat, is animal fat really unhealthy? That could be a question, right, and then research that. But at some point you need to identify some actual books or papers, some PDFs that you could actually get away from digital and sit down and read. I still think reading is so important. Yes, you can still watch videos.
Speaker 2:At some point you really need to really know your topic, know the subject. I mean, you know your subject because you've been doing it for decades right. But when you're a 15-year-old student and you're going to present on, I don't know the health benefits of fat in a diet or something, well, you need to study this and then you're going to present it and then you're out. You're going to teach us, too, right, and when you teach, you're learning, right. You know? The book Make it Stick talks about that how learning should be difficult. If you don't have a struggle, you're not going to know it and you're not going to remember it. So it's kind of like that. So I think presentation is here to stay and you can do it with technology or without, but that's something even if you're an introvert. Make it a safe place for students, even students who are not real comfortable doing that. It still can be a good learning experience for them. Presentation is learning.
Speaker 1:It's not just sharing, it's also learning Well we'll definitely link to your website and your YouTube in the show notes and really appreciated your thoughts and your ideas today and your generosity of your time. The last question is a hypothetical so and it'll be interesting because of your design background as well, if you're given the opportunity to design a billboard for the side of the freeway. Those are dangerous, yeah, dangerous. I've had, I've asked people this and they say I don't believe in billboards because it's that's visual pollution, but we're going to assume we're going to pass that. What does boards? Because it's that's visual pollution, but we're going to assume we're going to pass that. Um, what does, what does uh gar reynolds billboard say about what you feel is important about life, about you?
Speaker 2:oh no, that's a. That's an interesting question, as you ask everyone that right I do it's kind of a synthesizing distillation question.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I wish I had more time.
Speaker 1:The whole point is you're not supposed to have time, it's supposed to be immediate.
Speaker 2:I mean, if it's a billboard, what would get attention? I guess it would be Apple-esque, right with lots of white space and Helvetica in the center. But it's not my quote. But be here now, be somewhere else later. I think that's just a really important thing. We're so distracted and I'd been reading about, you know, zen since high school, but it just seems more relevant now because it always talked about you know how to stop distraction, how to be here 100%. You know this is the moment. There is no other moment. You know, know the past doesn't exist and we need to understand the past and the future, but they don't really exist. This moment exists, something like that. I don't know, let me think about it. But yeah, just white with a black helvetica, that would get attention because there's so much noise, that actually would get attention it would in in its simplicity right.
Speaker 2:Anyway, it's hard not to answer without a cliche. I missed a cliche. I tried to avoid it.
Speaker 1:Well, I really thank you, Gar, for your time and I've really looked forward to this conversation and I've admired your work for a long time and, as I said at the start, your books are frequent gifts of mine staff members and others.
Speaker 2:Well, that's very kind of you. Well, if I'm ever in the San Diego area, I'd love to visit your school.
Speaker 1:Yeah, please stay in contact and we'll connect.
Speaker 2:All right. Thank you very much, all right.
Speaker 1:Thank you, good luck, bye-bye.
Speaker 2:Bye-bye, okay, all right.
Speaker 1:Thank you very much. All right, thank you Bye-bye. Thanks for joining us on the Hangout Podcast. You can send us an email at podcastinfo at protonme. Many thanks to my daughter, maya, for editing this episode. I'd also like to underline that this podcast is entirely separate from my day job and, as such, all opinions expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thanks for coming on in and hanging out.