Giving Banger Presentations

I know whereof I speak

Most presentations suck. Mine don’t, but most do.

I’m convinced that’s because most of them have, in their innermost beating heart, a core of solipsism. “My team made an inventory system that I presented on at the close of Q4” is something that one can put in a promotion doc, and therefore it’s the most natural thing in the world to go up on stage and present on your inventory system!

Then you talk about it while your audience zones out or thinks about lunch.

I don’t argue here that this is bad, exactly, or even that it’s always avoidable. I’m just arguing that any presentation where the speaker’s needs are the genesis of the presentation is probably doomed to be excruciatingly boring to the audience, because the speaker isn’t really addressing the audience. The audience is simply a necessary piece of apparatus that the speaker needs in order for the presentation to be considered a presentation and not “Gerald talked to a wall for an hour.” Because one of those can get you promoted to staff engineer; the other might, at best, get you a small amount of paid leave to get a handle on things.

Okay, but what if I have a captive audience?

Trick question! Actually, no audience has ever been captive. You fool. You dumbass. You utter buffoon.

Even in a work meeting where someone will be scolded if they reach for their phone, you are competing with them planning for their next meeting or thinking about the lunch menu or rehashing that fight they had with Gerald, all within the privacy of their own head. There is no circumstance wherein inflicting boredom is forgivable, because boredom will cause your audience to check out and if that has happened then you may as well not have given the presentation: you’ve just wasted everyone’s time for the duration of the presentation.

Your Audience Has A Problem

Or at least they’d better. They might or might not be aware of this problem!

That means your presentation, fundamentally, should come down to:

1. Telling the audience a problem that they have, or are likely to have. This might or might not require persuasion. Best-case scenario, you’ve titled your presentation around the problem the audience has so that they are now self-selecting for wanting a solution to that problem. Instant audience engagement, for free!

My Confidence Engineering talk at Slutcon is basically a how-to on “what does it actually mean to be confident, and how can you mechanically achieve this state in circumstances where you’re likely to be nervous?” It is addressed to an audience of men who are, often, deeply terrified of what Slutcon is asking of them. Perfect product-market fit.

2. Walking them through your thought process in how to conceptualize the problem, and then walking them through the solution space.

A good presentation is a lot like an essay, in that they are crystallized artifacts made of structured thinking. Running an essay this way is basically walking the audience through several problems or sub-problems, a whole nested web of them, and the space between “showing them the problem” and “describing the solution” is where the tension lives, and tension is where audience engagement lives. You want the audience to be trying to think ahead of your talk, to be figuring out where you are going with it, because otherwise they’re at most five seconds from reaching toward their phone.

And like a good essay, that means that there is a very specific sort of honesty is required, because if you are (even subconsciously) hiding true facts from your audience then this will show up as subtle non-sequiturs in your talk. Speaking of:

Defend Nothing

I think this failure mode is common in academic contexts, where there are enormous structural incentives to claim that a study you ran is both statistically and practically significant, but where both “the results of the study” and “the subject of the study” are both outside of the presenter’s control.

My contention here is that any form of bottom lining will cause a presentation to suck because in the ideal world, 100% of the energy of the presenter is put toward walking the audience through their chain of reasoning to the conclusions they actually reached. If you’re forced into dividing your attention between “walk my audience through the study” and “prevent them from noticing this flaw in my study” then that will cause you to become nervous; you’ve taken on a goal that’s deceptive, that’s antagonistic to your audience, and in critical ways you’ll be distracted from the job of informing and entertaining your audience by trying to talk around this hole in your reasoning.

It’s really hard to avoid this failure mode because it’s very natural to, if you’ve been saying a specific thing for a long time, start to identify yourself with the stuff you’ve been saying. This is a core reason that politics is the mind-killer: if you’ve constructed enormous chunks of your identity around being a member of a political party and all your friends know it, then now you have a conclusion to protect, and having a conclusion to protect is the death of good reasoning and that is the death of being a good presenter.

The desire to defend a conclusion is incredibly human; but doing so makes you defensive, and people can smell defensiveness in the parts-per-billion.

I think the mental motion involved in not defending a conclusion— the mental motion of surrender— shares a lot in common with the mental motion involved in “not trying to come off well.” It involves taking a huge bundle of deeply-entrenched but largely unconscious desires and setting them down as not-mission-relevant.

You’ll definitely have a conclusion that you’ve come to, but it needs to be a conclusion that you arrived at through a great deal of thought and consideration and effort. This fact is what makes the conclusion correct to have come to and if you’ve done this truly then you have nothing to fear from any argument a heckler might come with, because you are not wedded to your conclusion: your conclusion is merely the logical outgrowth of the evidence you have already looked through. Frankly, it’s pretty unlikely the heckler has actually thought of something you haven’t.

(I end up in a lot of interesting conversations during talk Q&As.)

Hecklers Considered Beneficial

I love hecklers. That is to say— people who will shout out challenges and hostile questions as I’m giving a talk. This really stresses some presenters out but here’s kinda how I look at it: the heckler feels strongly about your talk and that’s why they’re heckling. See, you’ve said a bunch of stuff, and that stuff was specific enough to be disagreed with, and the heckler feels like you’re full of shit.

However, unbeknownst to him, this is playing right into your hands. The worst attribute a talk can ever have is being boring, and by injecting an element of conflict the heckler makes it not boring. People fucking love conflict. It’s why Twitter exists!

The best presentation I ever gave was one where I had a heckler in the audience (“okay, what are some tells of nervousness?” “Giving a talk about confidence OOOH BURN”) and where, in the middle of the Q&A at the end, the room dissolved into a whole bunch of people bickering about my talk. I consider this the best possible outcome for a talk to have.

Did I lose control of the room? Oh, absolutely, but that’s great because the reason I lost control over it was because the room felt so passionately about the subject of the talk that they couldn’t stop themselves from arguing about it.

Audience Energy Levels

If the audience is just nodding along, I think that’s roughly 4 out of 10 in energy levels: that can be easily gotten if you’ve kept them engaged but not really lit them aflame. It’s better than them checking their phones, at least.

Now, if the audience is arguing with each other then you have demonstrably (1) said things that were specific and nontrivial enough to be refutable, but also (2) that there are people in the audience who thought you were right anyway, and who are moving to argue with the objectors. That’s something you *only* get if audience energy is greater than like eight out of ten. Which is also why I personally prefer to have people calling out questions during presentations: it keeps a back-and-forth going with the room and injects a tiny amount of drama that I can feed off of for the rest of the talk.

If you note that audience energy levels are dropping (commonly signposted by audience members checking their phones), this is a good opportunity to move swiftly to your next slide asap: dropped energy is commonly due to just taking too long on a particular topic, and moving to the next section can yank back their attention. Being a presenter is largely about showmanship and audience connection and mostly this manifests as energy level management. (Jokes are also amazing for energy levels and so I suggest peppering your presentation with them.)

Memes

God I love memes. Use as many as possible; they are reliable crowd-pleasers. They don’t really even need to be that funny: their main function is to signpost ideas in a memorable way, and to give the audience’s eyes something to do while you’re talking about whatever. These buy a huge amount of goodwill with the audience and I cannot recommend it enough.

(“Wait, isn’t that just pandering?” Absolutely yes. The people crave pandering.)

Also, if any member of the audience laughs this is a signal to the others— especially those who are scrolling Twitter on their phone— that something important or useful is being said, which makes this similar to the function of a heckler. These moments are where you recover attention. Any meme works: vintage 2000s memes, modern memes, whatever. I hear you: “oh what if they think I’m out of touch, what if my memes are old?” Actually, this is a good outcome! Because they are now having emotions about your talk instead of thinking about their date tonight.

The opposite of love, as the saying goes, isn’t hate: it’s indifference. The worst talks I’ve had to sit through aren’t ones where I’ve hated the speaker or the message, it’s ones where I’ve been glancing constantly at the clock while waiting dutifully for the speaker to finish and subsequently retained nothing of what was said.

The greatest sin is to be boring.

The Problem With Text On Slides

The problem isn’t chiefly that text-heavy slides are tempting for the speaker to read off of, dead-eyed, though this is indeed a fearsome outcome. The deeper problem is that text eliminates tension.

Think about it: if the audience is reading the text off your slides silently while you speak the words, their silent reading will be faster than you: people are slower to speak than process. They’ll reach the end of the text on your slides, and you’ll be midway through with several seconds to go, and that is when your audience will start reaching for their phones.

This isn’t because your audience is rude; it’s because you have been rude to your audience by boring them. Don’t be boring. You are allowed to have little bits of signposting text: the limiting question is “can an audience member predict the words I am about to say by reading my slides?” If the answer is yes, you have a problem.

Also, if you have more than two or three bullet points on a slide you are wasting perfectly good screen real estate. You can have any number of slides in a presentation! I like to cycle through maybe one slide every minute or so, and give each one at least an interesting or evocative picture unless i desperately need the real estate for something else. I like pictures that serve as silly metaphors for whatever it is I’m currently discussing: AI is great for generating pictures of this kind. (I use an abstract, painterly style for these, since this avoids the Classical AI Look that is off-putting from overuse.) Sometimes diagrams are helpful; I often have multiple slides for a given diagram where I fill in the boxes or whatever piece-by-piece as they’re discussed. Tension!

Visual memes are better than straight AI images for filler, so if the opportunity presents itself I go for a meme.

Make The Audience Work For It

I like to try and get the audience to explicitly predict where I’m going during audience interaction segments. Talks become boring and unengaging if the audience isn’t being made to perform any intellectual labor whatsoever; give them a challenge or invite them to chime in in various ways. Ask them about times they’ve encountered the kind of thing you’re discussing; make them speculate the attributes of a solution before you’ve provided it.

This also goes a long way toward making the talk feel like an interactive experience, which itself makes audience members more likely to chime in, which provides back-and-forth and drama. (Also it gives good opportunities for our heckler friend to chime in with something “helpful”.)

GK Chesterton On Giving Presentations

I delegate this conclusion to my good friend and confidant, GK Chesterton.

We have been speaking, in various ways, of the same sin. The man who presents because his boss requires it, the academic who speaks around his study’s flaw, the speaker who silences the heckler as one silences an inconvenient alarm clock— these are not three men but one man the size of three, a formidable body-guard diligently protecting none other than himself. He has walked into the room carrying himself very carefully, as one carries a bowl of soup filled dangerously to the brim, and the whole of his attention is given over to fending off those who might make him spill.

The modern advice, naturally, is to carry yourself more steadily and with more authority, that none of your soup may escape. And this advice is wrong in the precise way that modern advice is always wrong: it has correctly identified a problem and then, industriously, made it worse. The man who takes such advice will guard his soup-bowl more efficiently and bore more efficiently than ever before, a sort of da Vinci of boredom, a vast and intelligent innovator in the field of causing one’s audience to check their watches.

He is to be pitied. For his situation is older than he knows: it is Adam's situation, who reached for the fruit that would make him as God and discovered, in reaching, that it had made him rather less than a man. The lectern is a smaller garden and the soup a saltier fruit, but the arrangement is identical; and the man who walks into that room determined to spill nothing will, with the dreary inevitability of the Fall, spill everything.

See Also