I did an AI for PM's training today. And it's very good for brainstorming. It's very good for summarizing. It's very good for getting started. Like if you fear the blank page, it's a great way to get started. But if you think you can just go and... prompt it and then write a thing and then leave, then I think you're in trouble. I guess I'm in trouble. Really? Is that most of your work is just a really good prompt? I don't even review it anymore. I just have it spit it out.
You've just given up. I get so much more done. Do you really? Are you teasing? I can't tell. I'm teasing. For my AI research coding, I have AI generate 95% of the code. I just sit all the time going, nope, fix it. It's amazing. That is like a 10x productivity booster for me. Because it's like, basically what you're doing, if you think about it in comic book terms, it's like, I'll pencil it, you ink it and color it. I'll do the penciling. It's really astounding. I can hear you doing email.
I'm literally not doing email. You're slapping the keyboard. I can hear you slapping the keyboard. I glanced. Are you trying to yell at me? I feel like I glanced to the side and I get yelled at. You glanced and then the typing started. That wasn't me. That wasn't me. My keyboard is silent.
Hey friends, it's Mark and Scott, Learn2. Welcome back to the show. I am getting on a plane in two days to go and give a keynote in another country. And Mark, you have an internal talk tomorrow. That's right. So we are both actively steeped in... preparation for technical speaking. So it would be useful for us to learn how to give a technical talk. When was your first technical talk? Well, my first technical talk was probably on my PhD thesis.
But I did give lectures as a teaching assistant in grad school. So I kind of started there. That was very subtle, the way you let us know that you have a PhD with just one prompt. I just said grad school. I didn't say PhD. You literally said when I was prepping for my PhD. Oh, okay. I guess I did. It always, it just comes out all the time. It just comes out.
Yeah, and speaking of that, haven't I told you multiple times, I'm Dr. Rusinovich. Dr. Rusinovich. I apologize, doctor. I appreciate your service. That was your first... talk like when did you get up in front of people like I did high school musicals like literally I did that too I did like that was always the like the bit player yeah lobster number two person number three yeah A second lobster. I did a talk at the Software Association of Oregon somewhere in the mid-80s.
Like when XML was coming out on like this new, exciting technology that was going to, new markup language that was going to change everything. And that was like a room of 30. And that was cool. But I did a bunch of brown bags. Like if you can present to 10 people eating lunch. You can talk to a thousand people at a conference. Yeah. I kind of started doing technical teaching outside of school environments in the mid-90s.
I remember one of my early talks was giving a talk on Regmon to the local Windows user group in Nashville, New Hampshire. Oh, that's awesome. But then I started teaching Windows internals as part of a consulting company I joined called Open Systems Resources. And that's really what got me off the ground on teaching. And those were teach for a full day. And some of the courses were actually multi-day.
I worked at a company called Step Technology, and I worked in the education department, and they would fly us to like fly to Intel and stay in a Marriott for a week and go and do nine to five, teach classic ASP. teach http 1.0 like that kind of stuff and it was like with labs and you're your own proctor you write the labs you do the whole thing we sit in a room with desktops because there weren't any laptops at that point people weren't dragging laptops around
set up big CRTs and just like, all right, everyone, everyone gets a Dell. Let's all learn how to make a web page. And it takes 40 hours to do Hello World in Netscape Navigator. Those are fun. I mean, I liked the long form teaching because you could kind of...
vary the pace. And, you know, it wasn't like here you've got 45 minutes and you've got all this content to get through and you better nail it. Are you prepping for your talk tomorrow? Are you just going to just roll in and go like, what are we doing today? So I've... probably given at this point thousands of technical talks in my career. I mean, I counted like the number of conferences that I've been to. I've been to every single TechEd, Ignite.
tech-ready or internal conferences every year, and they used to be twice a year, builds slash PDCs, IT forums, third-party conferences, and then internal talks. So I've gotten to the point where... I don't prep much for them. But hang on, though. Yes, but when you and me and Jan are doing work, you prep. You know, you'll say...
That was a fun off-the-cuff talk. Let's do a prepared version of that at Build. And we'll spend 10 hours, 15 hours really tightening those demos up. Doing one with you. Am I raising your game? No, you're not raising my game. It just requires prep to do it with somebody else. Okay, so you're saying you're confident to just get off the plane and boot up your laptop and go, what are we doing? I mean, I could. So here's one of the things that I do is I look... So...
Sorry, I'm laughing with you. Like for tomorrow. And the other thing too is that, like you, a lot of the content that I present is derived from content that I've already presented. Right. It's incremental changes. It's the thing that's new. It's a different angle on it. And so I'm already deeply familiar with most of it. And it's just like, let me get familiar with the parts that are updated.
So like the talk I'm giving tomorrow, it's on confidential computing and where it's going and what we're doing inside of Microsoft to Microsoft Research. So it's kind of a, and they've got to invite outside talk series. And so I'm going there and...
giving this talk. It's going to be an hour. And you already know what you're doing because you're helping drive it. And it's a status report as much as anything. I'm just trying to give people a sense of what prep time looks like to come off as a professional and look good. I'm looking at my calendar here.
And I have six technical presentations this week. I did a workshop on Tuesday. I'm doing a career thing on tomorrow at 10. And then I'm doing a workshop with black men in tech on Thursday night. The workshop will have worksheets and things to fill out, so I'll prep for a couple of hours for that. The career speakers event, I'll prep for 10 minutes. But then this morning I presented on AI to our team and I prepped for a couple, two hours.
You know, it just kind of depends on how well you know your material and then whether I needed to go and prep or reset or get hard head reset my demos. But then next week, like Friday, I'm getting on a flight to Johannesburg and I'll be presenting at the AI tour. 45 minutes in front of 5,000 people. I want it to work. And I've got demos. I've got backup machines. I'm actually still using your OpenAI account at the CTO's office. All right. Yeah. I'm not letting anything run. It's just...
So, like, it matters more. Like, it's not like I want to say the other ones matter less. But, like, if a mistake happens on stage, I'm going to feel it. Yeah, I mean, that's another way to look at it. What are the stakes for the talk? Yeah. Because that kind of will influence. Like, if you're getting... Even like a 10-minute spot in a Satya keynote will take more prep time than, you know, because the stakes are high. Yeah. So it'll probably be announced before this thing comes out.
But they've asked me to do a TED Talk at TEDx Portland. And, you know, there's a certain gravitas to that. And it's only like a 15-minute talk or an 18-minute talk. But they're getting me all in my brain about it. Like I do 15-minute talks all the time, but this one you have a big Ted standing behind you, you know what I mean? Yeah, with the little X. Yeah, with the X. The little X to tell you that you're not the same. You're not in the big leagues.
in the medium leagues. How would I get someone to prep for that? How do I get a beginner up to skill on that? Like when I teach beginners how to talk, I always tell them to start from the end. What's the point of your thing? What do you want people to leave with?
and then build a narrative that leads them to, so what? What we're talking about is prepping to give a talk that you've already got, but I think it goes hand-in-hand with developing the talk. And here's the first thing you have to do. What is the person you're speaking to? What do they know? What are they interested in? What problems do they have? Because if you don't know who you're speaking to, you're not going to know. Dude, that's so true. That's why this TED thing's freaking me out.
Yeah, because you don't know who you're talking to. It's random people who like TED things. And they're like people who paid a ticket to a nonprofit to go to a local event. And they're all going to sit in a concert hall. And it's just a bunch of random people. But I think at that point you go, okay, so... Selection of public. Probably educated, because they're showing up there and they're interested in this. Probably somewhat aware of technology and what's going on with AI. That's the T and Ted.
experts you know like you assume that they don't know what a transformer model is but they know what prompt and response and chat bots do and so you kind of start to build out a here's what the typical audience member and maybe I'll drop some things for the people that know a little more than that. And I'll also try to carry along people that might know a little less than that with a few things. For those of you not familiar with X, here it is, to bring them up to the level of your target.
I think that when I've gotten flummoxed going to give talks it's because I don't really have a good mental model for who I'm talking to. That is very true. The nervousness that a beginner feels, there's the basics of like, well, what if I say the wrong thing? And what if the thing blue screens or dies or whatever? But then it's ultimately.
are you confident in your topic? And are you confident that they're interested in your topic? Because a lot of times, I have given a pep talk to a young person or an early in career speaker, and all I needed to say was, the people in that room want you to win.
for this TED thing I'm all in my head about, I don't know if these people want me to win or if they paid for the ticket to watch me fail. No, they won't. That's hilarious. I think it's just implicit that people don't like watching Crash and Burns, most people.
So if you assume that people went to build to go and see a cool education, then it's like, well, am I confident in exciting them or educating them or empowering them or doing whatever? And then it'll be okay. Yeah. I mean, what I do, and you probably do the same thing, is I'm like...
I've got information here that they don't have. Like, otherwise, why am I speaking to them? Some point of view or knowledge that I want to share with them. And by the time you get up and give the talk, that's not the right time to look at the person in the audience to go.
I bet that person knows way more about this than I do. Even though it's possible, you should not think that. You should think, I designed my talk for this person that knows less than this about and is interested in what I have to say about it. Yeah.
And when I look at that face, that's who that person is. Yeah, when you look at the audience, I always try to pick a happy, friendly face on one side of the audience and a happy, friendly face with it. And when you bounce back and forth between them, you do the same.
Same thing. So you know how when people do like crowd work, when they're like a comedian or whatever, and they'll tell a joke and they'll go, this guy gets it. Yeah. What they're doing is they're like, he nodded, so I feel validated by that. So if you have a thousand people in a room or 15.
A friend on each side that you can bounce back and forth is like, okay, keep doing what you're doing. I'm picking up what you're putting down. It's funny that you do that too after all these years. You're just like, yeah, I don't know who you are, but I like your face because you make me feel validated. Well, I realized actually a while ago that...
I was unconsciously doing that. And it's just kind of natural. Because when you're looking at the audience and somebody's nodding their head, you're like, oh. That person likes what I'm saying. Let me talk to them. This talk is now for you, person in the front row. I love it when people sit in the front row and are interested. And then, of course, there's always the one in the front row doing email. And then it's like...
And then what I do is I start trying to talk to them and get loud. Yeah. So building a story arc, knowing who your audience is, remembering that there's some thing, like what do I want people to feel? One of the things that I'm guessing that you and I both do that I've always added to my technical talks is at the end of this, I want you to be able to pick up your laptop and say, I'm going to implement that right now.
you know, or I'll do a talk. And this is the thing that's so great about like ZoomIt, because we're going to do a show on ZoomIt later, which is if you are not feeling good about your talk, just show a sysinternals tool. And then even if the talk topic didn't matter, they'll go, well.
At least he used Zoomit, or at least he used Regmon, or at least now I know about Process Explorer. And you know, well, everything that Hanselman talked about for an hour was garbage, but I like that one tool. I'm going to go and use that right now. Yeah, great tip.
It's a good tip. Just use one of your tools. But seriously though, sprinkling little things in there that like, okay, I knew some of that. Like people will say, I knew that it was a good refresher though, but I didn't know that tool or I didn't know that other thing. Yeah. Yeah. So we're talking about prepping as seasoned experts and having done this a million times. I think there's a different prep for people that are new to it. Because I think one, and actually even for me.
Like I look at the slides so that I have effectively memorized the order and what's on each one because I've been burned when I've not done that and not prepped enough. of I think the flow is a certain way. You know, it's like the next slide is going to be this. And so I start to lead into it and then I press click and it's like, oh, actually, I have something more to say about what I was just talking about. Or, oh, actually, we're going to talk about something.
different than what i just said we're going to come back to that thing later and that just looks really amateur yeah i always do a bullet point for every five minutes and I put them on a slide or a piece of paper. I used to put them on a piece of paper on the ground. So if I ever caught myself looking down at my feet, I'd have an eight and a half by 11 sheet of paper with like font that was like 25, 30 point font. That's like...
don't forget this, don't forget that. And six bullet points could give me a half an hour of material. Yeah, that's a great point. And I'll come back to some of the tips that I got on how I keep track of what I'm doing. I mean, we did together actually, but one of the... prep things that I actually do. I saw this talk by a woman that was really a promoter of the make it till you fake it. Fake it till you make it. Yeah. Yeah. Which is this power pose.
yeah oh like which is you know hands in like before the talk go back stage hands in the air spread out and then breathe deeply for a minute and that gets you open and you do that yeah It actually has an effect on the brain. Yeah. It's funny. I look at my blood sugar, of course, because I need to make sure I don't die on stage. But I also have started looking at my heart rate. Because when I'm about to come on stage, my heart rate will be like 105 or 110, like I'm working out.
And I will take that heart rate number and it'll take me a moment to remember like, okay, I am here. I am present. Why is my heart rate like this? Is it because I'm about to fail? No, it's because my body is setting me up for success. by sending as much blood as possible to my brain so I don't screw this up. So like the flutter feel, the butterflies and stuff, the nerves, it's fight or flight in order to be successful. It's not fight or flight.
setting you up for failure. And that presence, that moment of like, oh, okay, my body is not betraying me. My body is setting me up for success made a big difference in my talk. So do you do breathing? Yeah, I do the breathing. And what I do actually...
I do this, I do this actually when we were on stage once. I look at my heart rate and I consciously look at it and I do a biofeedback and try to get it under 100 before I get on stage. That way I don't come out breathless. And you do that by breathing? Yeah. I assume.
Well, I breathe and I look at it and I just kind of will it down. And in doing that, I assume breathing is causing that to go down. I didn't know this about you. This is such good information. I just thought you were a robot. I just thought you went out and just like killed it.
No, no, no. Now, one of the things that I always do, like similar to your, you know, write the points down, is I put the sections on a piece of paper. And I do this typically not long before the talk. Like even for tomorrow, I'll do this and I'll say... here's the sections that I got. Here's about, if I just take the sections and I just estimate their relative size, in many cases, they're about the same size of content. I've got 45 minutes. I've got five sections. That means...
With no adjustments, each section is 45 divided by five minutes long. And then I just put that in each section. I go, oh, wait a minute. I've got a lot more content in this one. So I'm going to take two from here and put them into there.
You know what that is? It's like making a paragraph and you're like, this paragraph has nine sentences and this paragraph has two sentences and you're setting up stanzas. It's actually a little different than what I'm talking about is that the content's already there. What I'm talking about is... In estimating how much time I'm going to spend in each one, I do this way of adjusting minute by minute to try to figure out how much time I have for that section. And what this...
results in sometimes is I'm like, wait a minute, I've got way too much content to fit in the kinds of times that I've got here. So I need to start throwing some stuff out. But what that does is at the end of it, I've got section one. That if I'm giving the talk and it's at one o'clock, I'll say section one, I've got from one to 105. And at 105, I should be moving on to section two. And section two, I've got from 105 to 112. Right. And that's just an approximation.
And then what I can do is glance at the clock every now and then and go, oh, I'm in the middle of this, but I should be wrapping it up soon, so I'm behind. I need to speed up a little to catch up. And that keeps me kind of adjusted. Oh, I don't have one of those. Yeah. I have a speaker clock app and I'm like, okay, I'm giving a talk. I need one of those. I'll send it to you. And the idea is, where am I when I'm in trouble? Like, okay, if I get to 10 minutes.
and I'm not halfway through, that's a problem. So there's the section thing, but then there's the also, if I've made it to the apex of this thing, and I haven't got ta-da, and I got 10 minutes left, that's a problem. So you don't do the section thing, you just do a halfway marker. Everything I do is three acts. Oh, I don't do that. Okay, so if you have 45 minutes, five minutes on the front, intro and BS, five minutes on the back, now I have 35 minutes, okay?
35 divided by seven is five minutes. So I got seven five-minute sections plus intro and outro bumpers. So you do the same. That's what I do. We are the same then. Okay. And then I have 10, 15-minute act, 10, 15-minute act, 10, 15-minute act. Yeah.
scene. We do about the same thing. And then I write it down in a piece of paper with the times on them. Yeah. I use a, I've just texted you that app. And I also put down on the piece of paper, I've got, you know, this section has this demo, this demo, and this demo. This next section has this demo and this demo. You know what I actually have? I don't know if you have this as well, but over here, I have all my notebooks from all my talks.
So I could go into one of these notebooks. Like here's the Windows. This was like Windows XP or whatever. Like find a talk. So here's your Birmingham user group. I don't keep mine. You don't do that. Azure Keynote. And literally, it's like, this is my talk. Storage, VMs, PaaS, secrets of PaaS, logging tests, Docker. Did you say secrets of PaaS? What are secrets of PaaS? I don't know, man.
Here we go. This is Ignite 2016. Ignite 2016. And it says Android emulator and then warm is underlined multiple times. which probably means run the thing before the talk so it doesn't launch cold. Yeah, this is crazy, man. 2017 Visual Studio launch. So I've got all those talks in Molluskin notebooks. Wow. Is that the way you pronounce it? Molluskin?
I don't know. It's Moleskina, I think. But people say Moleskina, but Moleskina. But yeah, I've got all these things. And then I put my phone number on them in case I lose them, and multiple times I'll leave it. on the dais or on the podium, and then they'll call me and they'll say, you left your Mario notebook. Now it's all in Remarkable. It's all in PDFs. Same approach, except I just put mine on a...
I tear out a piece of paper from a notebook that size and just put it on the desk in front of me. So if you're a beginner, I usually recommend that a beginner have two to three talks that they can do at a moment's notice. be ready to go. So whenever an opportunity presents itself, you might be at a conference and someone drops out and you go, hey, I can do a talk.
I would say probably one or two out of 10 conferences I go to, somebody sleeps in or doesn't show up. And I always let the speaker manager know, the organizer know, hey, let you know, I've got three talks I can do at a moment's notice. If you need anything, let me know.
Oh, so-and-so got COVID. When was the last time you had to do that? Oh, what was I? I was at one of the NDC conferences. I don't know if it was Porto or something, but it was like, oh, shoot, so-and-so missed their plane. Now the three o'clock slot is open. Boom. It's an opportunity, like more experience.
Yeah. Just be ready to go. So how many talks could you do with a half an hour warning? A dozen, right? Three. Three? Oh, well, like modern. So do you have any squishy talks? Do you have any soft talks? Any soft skills? Do you have any soft skills? Thanks. I gave a talk on giving technical talks. Did you? Yeah, me and Mark Manassi. I don't know if you remember him. Yeah. We gave a few times, at least once, gave a talk on giving technical talks together. We did together. He was a great speaker.
We should do that. What about blocking and tackling? Do you ever think about stagecraft and where you physically are on the stage and how you move your body? I do. And I actually move around the stage. I go from one side to the other. Really? You just oscillate? No, I don't mean that. I mean, I walk.
The back and forth. And then I try to be conscious about standing in the same spot for a while because if you're just always moving, people are like, ah. So do you know Billy Hollis? Yeah. So Billy Hollis. Years ago, when I was just getting started, gave me this amazing tip that I really loved about physicality. And he would, Billy's from Arkansas or something, and he has this fantastic, and he said, let me finish. Can I talk for a second? And he would be talking, and then he'd say.
Let me step out of the box. And he'd physically like mime getting out of a box. And then he'd leave whatever concept he had over here. And then he'd talk about his other concept. And then he'd step back in the box. So when I do talks on like Azure networking or anything where it's like a client server, I'll declare this is the client side of the stage and this is the server side of the stage and I will be in that space. Oh, that's pretty cool. Yeah.
And making motions like, hey, now we're talking to the server. Oh, I'm receiving your data. Like those kind of things. It seems small, but it's stagecraft and it works. And Billy Hollis taught me that 25 years ago. Shout out to Billy Hollis.
Are there any talks I can find about you talking about talks? Do you think that Mark Manassi talk is online? Because I think people would love to see that. It might be. Well, I'll see if we can dig it out and put a link in the notes. And then if anyone has a Pluralsite subscription.
I did a thing with Rob Connery called The Art of Speaking that you can find. And then also if you search for... Wait, are you wrapping up? Because I have more tips. I am wrapping up. Do you have more? I was told to wrap up in the chat. Are you reading the chat? No, I'm not.
Can I give one more tip? You may. It's your show. Because I think this one is a key one for everybody of any levels. Have you ever been in the middle of a talk and then you suddenly get in your head and you're like... Only with you. Only with me? I'm intimidating. That's why. It's so true. Yeah, you get stuck. You're halfway through the talk and you're like, I don't know how I'm getting out of this. Yeah, and you're like, what's the next word? So it's happened to me a few times, obviously.
given enough talks. It's going to happen a few times. I think one of the things that I do now when I start a talk is I'm like, I'm going to speak. I just try to program myself. I'm going to speak slowly, clearly. I'm not going to second guess words. I'm going to just go with the words that I pick. Even if they're not the best words, they're the words. I'm not going to stumble over my words. I'm going to speak confidently. I know this better than anybody in the room.
And so this is just programming, and I find it very effective. Because what that stops me from doing is going, blah, blah, blah, and then a word and going, crap, that's not the right word. Or what's the best word to say next and getting stuck there.
It's just like, whatever. This is a good enough word. Just go. It doesn't matter. The analogy that I always talk about is when you're a kid and you're running downhill, you're just running for the joy of running. But then if you start looking down and thinking about your feet...
that's when you slip and you fall. So just try to keep your momentum and try to keep your forward motion and don't think about your feet. Yeah, don't think about, oh, I should have said something different. Oh, I just stumbled. Oh, that was bad. I said a bunch of, like, no, just move forward.
On the ah thing, I recently, well, maybe the last 10 years, started removing ums. They still exist, but they're replaced with silence. Oh, yeah. Silence is right. So there was like three ums in that sentence just now to you.
I use silence instead. And no one notices. No. You don't need to fill the silence because people are not going to notice. They're digesting the information. Yes. So it's different than a conversation where you're trying to hold, especially because the attention's on you. It's not like... they're waiting to respond and so you need to say um to signal that hey i've got more to say i just am figuring out the right words
Exactly. And then when you and I are speaking, if you ever do talks with two people, the improv style of yes and, rather than disagreeing completely with the person, you say, well, yes, I agree. That's completely wrong. Yeah, exactly. And it sucks the energy out of the room.
I'm shutting you down because we need to wrap it up. Yeah, we're wrapping it up because you've ruined everything. But if you search for The Art of Speaking, I have a thing on YouTube about that. And then public speaking, we've got one on the .NET website with Donovan Brown.
and myself doing a thing on public speaking with Maria Nagaga and Casey Ellenhuth. So there's lots and lots of great art of speaking things. And then have you ever done Toastmasters or anything like that? Are you familiar? No, never done that. So for folks that are watching and you're interested in public speaking,
Toastmasters is literally like a local club. There's one in every city in the world that you can get together and give a talk and learn how to speak extemporaneously. And they'll give you a topic. And then by the end of the hour, you'll be giving a presentation. And then you go to Toastmasters.
and you get better. This is not a thing that you're born knowing how to do. These are tools, there are techniques to get better at public speaking. So it's nice to know that you do power poses and you think about your breathing and you do fumble when you're giving a presentation, like you're not superhuman. folks that are watching or maybe assume that we just are born knowing how to do this. It is practice to get at this level. Cool. That's fun. Well, this one was...
learning how to speak publicly, we can actually talk about our favorite thing, ZoomIt, which will be our next episode when Scott and Mark learn how to use ZoomIt, which is a very valuable public speaking tool. My favorite. It is your favorite, yes. You've made a whole category of tool.
All right. We'll see you again next week. Be sure to like and subscribe. And Mark is really concerned about the views on the thing. So just even just set the thing to repeat overnight. Anything to do with pump the views up. Share this with your friends. Write a bot. I'm sure ChatTBD could do one for you.
Yep. Just write a bot in PowerShell or Python or Perl that watches this episode as much as possible because I want to make sure that we keep doing the show and we can't do the show if you don't watch it. Send it to your friends and family. Right. My dad watches these shows. We'll give them a discount. Yes. Less than free.
Yeah. We hope you're getting your money's worth watching Scott and Mark. Be sure to subscribe where you get your podcasts. Or if you're in YouTube, smash that bell, kids, so that you can get notifications when the show is going live. And we'll see you again next week.