I get a groovers. It's Harps and Bobby and Tiffany and Cook. It's the U Project. We're sliding in towards Christmas, as we do at the end of every year. Surprisingly, Christmas comes at the end of the year. Every year. It's a pattern. I don't know if anyone else has picked it up. I've noticed it. Look, this may not be groundbreaking for you, but and often often followed by New Year, so you're welcome. Call it science Hi, tiv high Harps.
I find it very weird because it's like, oh, it's December the first, It's Christmas next week.
Yeah, It's like it is it is avalanching down on top of our little heads. And that's okay. But this is the time of the year when everyone goes, I don't know where the time's gone. Oh my god, where did the year go? Everyone says that every year everyone is surprised by how quickly the year went. But in the middle of the year sometimes it's like, oh my god, this is a fucking saga. It's like, and then at the end of the year, I can't even just just like a blink, it just went Hi, Robert, how are you.
I'm doing well? Doing well. Yeah, I'm surprised that how consistent we have been with the whole Christmas New Year's thing right at the end of the year. Every year we've been great with it. We haven't believed where the time's gone.
Yeah, we haven't missed one. And I don't know too millennia. I actually wonder when that's not that's that's not actually true. When did When did Christmas as a kind of a social I'm going to say social experiment, that a social thing. Tip. Can you figure that out? When did we start celebrating Christmas in Western culture?
Bobby?
What's your what's your guess? When did we start doing Christmas and presents? And I know it's become very commercialized over the last one hundred years, but when do you think that we started doing, Hey, merry Christmas. When do we got doing that?
Well, I don't know when we started doing Merry Christmas, but I think we started celebrating Christmas maybe sometime around I would guess the Medieval age, right around there. I know we had a we had a whole sermon in our church many many years ago against Christmas trees. Apparently Christmas trees were originally this pagan ritual that was adapted in and you know, the pastor was kind of like, yeah, just well, very keen on Christmas trees. I love a Christmas tree.
And do you also know that Santa is an anagram of Sitan? Have you ever thought about that? What do you now? What are you going on about? Now you've taken it too far? Well, Santa? So you know what an anagram is, right?
Well, yeah, I know what an anagram is.
Yes, so Santa is the same letters as Syitan and the same number of letters.
I ever thought about it be purely coincidental?
Well it could, or it could be God telling us something Robert.
Like sounds to clause isn't real?
Yeah, he knows, Ti, what have you got for us?
We know that Chatters likes to carry on a bit to me.
Come on, Chatters, keep it brief. Just go hey, chatty, Kathy, keep it fucking brief.
In Western Christian culture, Christmas as a formal celebration shows up in the fourth century. Three point thirty six CE is the earliest clear record of Christmas on December twenty fifth, appearing in Rome.
Wow.
By the late three hundreds, the dates spread across Western Roman Empire like a hymn with legs.
Is that what it says? Yes, Oh my god, Oh my god, that's hilarious. That's hilarious. Oh well, there you have it, everybody, the history of Christmas that you didn't need. You're welcome.
I could have been more wrong. I missed it by like a millennia. But yeah, so sad to clause it's ideolatry. Don't do it, boys and girls.
Yeah, that's the that's to take home message. Listen to
us fucking raining on Christmas, you know. But it is, like you think about from a sociological and psychological point of view, Christmas is a really interesting time because so many people fucking hate it, and not for any religious reason necessarily, but because so many like it represents to some people like times that aren't great, or it reminds them that their family is not here anymore, or they're not with their family, or that they're alone, or that
nobody cares about them or what it fill in the blank. It's like it's such a dichotomy of experiences ranging from complete jubilation and joy and present opening and kids riding new bikes and all the fucking Walt Disney stuff through to the other end of the scale where people just it's almost like the worst day of the year because it just you know, reminds them of what they don't have or where they where they're not But.
Well, I blame those Hallmark films. Yes, those are very hard to watch. Other than that, I love Christmas.
A little bit ambivalent. I don't. I definitely don't hate it, of course, but to me it's like, oh, it's a Thursday or whatever it is. What day is it this year? By the way, Thursday Thursday? Yeah, yeah, I always get I always send out a thing on Christmas to people, gone, Happy Christmas. Hope you have a great day. If you're not a fan of Christmas, you know, have a great fucking Thursday. And I'll see it tomorrow on Friday. You know, it is the psychology of it is interesting.
What do you love about it?
What do you love about it?
Well, over here in the Northern Hemisphere it's bitterly cold, it's all snowy and gray and just drinking hot beverages, and you know, it's a time to take a break and pause and reflect and spend time with people you love and really watch films that you don't need to watch. You've seen them like ten times. You know how it's going to end, but you've got them playing in the background. You know you could another year to cry in front
of love. Actually again, that's why I died love scene that people are ashamed of me when I watch that film, and I feel a lot of internal shame as well, and right for so. But I just I love, I just love. I just love the holidays. I love the lead up to the holidays.
Well, good for you, dude, and you should. You should love it, you should enjoy it. It will not say everybody should probably stop saying should Craig? Okay, well done, not to self. I just reprimanded thing. So I've been doing this whole thing.
I've tried it twice now with Scrooge, where looking at Scrooge from a perspective of well being and someone who lacked well being rather than being this mean, cromogeneous guy. I will say right now, nobody likes that story. I have tried it in front of a small group at a retreat and a large audience. They both looked at me like did this guy forget to pay his brain
bill this month? Like some things like it's just I'm just looking at the bewildered faces, going wow, I've never had a story just like fourth this flat in my life.
So I was like, I'm gonna try that again. So that's a lesson. That's a lesson, dude, that's that's that's read the room. That's your audience telling you something. That's an opportunity. Yes, it crashed and burned your story, but it's also a learning moment. So you learn this eating character. Eb No, don't start. Don't fucking try and wheel it out again. Fuck Scrooge, look at you. He's so desperately
trying to tell the story that's failed multiple times. We don't want to fucking hear it, and we don't want to hear your positive being on a negative coun So you just put that shit back in the metaphoric box. If you want to talk about good things and happy people. Cool.
You know, it's really interesting. Everything you just said is true. I have this obsession with wheeling out the same field story, over doing it.
Stop doing it. It's like you're you're almost a stand up comic.
Now.
You need to constantly pay attention to the audience. What's working, what's not working? You know, what's landing what's getting the laugh, what's getting eyeballs, what's getting attention, what's drawing people in read the room? Bro, don't keep telling the same fucked up joke. You've got to tweet either new joke or tweak the old joke. I love listening to comedians talk about the way that they design and refine and constantly
re refine material. And it might be a clunky, kind of lopsided, like awkward ninety second joke that becomes a thirty second absolute banger, but it takes in two years and they know exactly when to pause and exactly the energy and exactly the words. But after like all this tweaking and refining and paying attention, they just come up with this bit that's just thirty seconds of fucking gold, and it kills in every room.
I mean, that's that's the goal for you, right, yeah. I mean the writing and the refining is constant, and it's like, to come up with even five minutes of material, you're gonna have to write and edit quite a lot. At the end of the day. What really lands, it's not so much the joke, but it's the timing. It's
completely the delivery. Oh my goodness, because like every week we get together in school and we practice things, and sometimes you'll deliver a joke in a certain way and there's you know, there's nobody that's harsher than your peers. If something's not funny, nobody's gonna laugh. Or if you're doing an open mic night we got one down here just for that's attended mostly by stand up comics, so they're just trying out their material on one another. And
what's really great about that is the brutal honesty. If something's that funny, they'll tell you. But you'll see something and you'll just tweak a tone or a pause and the room explodes with laughter. Next week you're going over it again and you do it differently, seam jerk like flatline. Yeah, it lies in the air. So it's really interesting. I'm learning a lot.
I just it's something that something that you should listen to because it's well, listen to me something Bobby. You might enjoy listening to Craig stop telling people what the fucking do, Bobby. Hey, here's an idea. Feel free to not do it. My suggestion for you is listen to the most recent Louis Throw. I'm sure you like Louis because he's British and you love Britain. Louis throw with Jimmy Carr and probably two people you like, and Jimmy talks about his process. Oh both of you have gone
to your phones. That's good, Jimmy, come down. No, no, you'll love it because for you it's it's probably very very relevant and very timely where he talks about the process, like the creative process, the delivering, the content process, the reading the room, the you know, the written kind of choreographed, scripted stuff versus the freestyle stuff, and like basically he
said for something like for the last year. I'm speaking as him now, he said, for the last year, I have done five days a week to two hour shows for the last year. That's twenty hours on stage a week. Imagine that TIF as twenty hours live. And it's not like he's talking to fucking seven people, Like he's doing rooms with between two and twenty thousand, depending on where
he's at. And yeah, five days a week, two times a day, two hours each time, and he you know, there's no like you know where people it's like, oh, it's just a sense of duty. It's just what he fucking loves it, and he talks about his first twenty minutes is essentially just pre choreographed, scripted. Here's a joke. Laugh, here's a joke. He's a laugh, and he just does all these stuff and it's it's similar, but like these are just jokes that he's written that he's just wheeling at.
And then from there, once he's created whatever he needs to create, the energy, the connection, the trust, the whatever, then he just starts to freestyle and interact. And yeah, so if any well else wants to listen to that, I think also, like, obviously I'm not a comedian, but I just as somebody from a point of view of building rapport with people or trying to understand people, or
how do I communicate effectively? Like so much because I think think if you can do comedy, you can almost do any kind of communication.
It's a different world. The expectation of the audience is really high, so you really have to be on. It's quite difficult. I mean, Jimmy Carr is an absolute master. What I like about Jimmy Call lately is he seems to be incorporating some of his ideology and some of himself into his comedy more than just jokes. There's like a message there, and that's something that you didn't really hear from Jimmy Call many years ago. But I like it. I like this evolution because I think he's quite switched on.
I was listening to walso on Diary of the CEO, where he was talking about that and so many things that he was saying resonated with me from being on the road. Where he's talking about, you know, it's not glamorous, like a lot of times your plane's delayed. It's like you're not getting out and then you're sleep deprived and you're in a cab somewhere in a city you've never been to. And he was talking about how much he
loved all of it. I was like, yeah, you know, you know what, Like I didn't like when my planes were delayed. I didn't like when things were rearranged and there were set backs, or you know, occasionally you're not in a four or five star hotel, you're in a shitty one star hotel where the heater doesn't work. I didn't like that, But I loved all of it, do you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, So in love with the lifestyle and the work, and there was nothing that felt like, oh fuck, I got to
sit down and prepare this shit. It was like, oh, okay, what's my environment? How do I remove interference? That was the biggest thing, is removing interference and zone in Do.
You remember it would have been? I think it was When were you and I? When did you and I got London together? Was it ninety eight ninety nine? Kevin Laferrier and Richard Boyd? And do you and I? Anyway? I think it was just before two thousand and I remember you and I stayed in a hotel room. If you know how big my office is, this hotel room was the side of my size of Now I'm in the whole room and it was like it wouldn't have been one star? Do you remember that? It was disgusting, Bobby?
It was so fucking low brow, It was so dirty. I slept in my clothes because I didn't want my skin to touch the fucking sheets.
It was. I've stayed I've stayed in a few hotels like that in London, in Kingston, the Antwinette, Oh my goodness, that was. Yeah. I used to have like clothing that I would bring just to like wear to bed. And just like a hat from my head and then I would bag that shit. It had For a shower, there was a hose coming out of a wall and he had to squat down and shower and rooms smelt like must and mold. It was so absolute and cleaning products. It was so disgusting. And before the smoking ban, this
is you would walk through the lobby. They had the actual keys. The keys were gigantic. That was cool, but the lobby had this thick haze of cigarette smoke just hanging there. Oh. I used to feel like shit after getting out of there with just one night.
Good times, Yeah, great time. Speaking of comedy, how's your comedy career going?
What do you so?
For those who don't know, Bobby is a presenter and a coach and a mentor and a workshop facilitator and all that, but not a comic, but kind of becoming a comic. So just putting his toe in the comedy world. Warders, what do you have to report?
My second show that I've done since I started going to school. I have another show that'll come up, and Jane, it went better than the first. It went well. First one didn't go bad either. You know, I've got to credit the other students that are in the room. You got everyone who is a novice and just wants to try this out, either because they want to be a comedian or they just want to be better at communicating
from a stage. And then you got like working comedians that are constantly working on their craft and like they'll give you notes. They're fantastic. My teacher, Tony, it's a really cool guy. He's he's very subtle, very direct, but very subtle, and he'll just like throw things out, give you feedback, and then it'll hit you when when you're doing your writing and editing that week, it's like, okay, let me cut this back. So I love I love Tony. It's one of the best decisions I've made in a while.
My first show, I was intense. My energy level on stage was particularly high, if you know what I mean. Second show, No, I still had my personality, unfortunately, but I was a little bit toned down and my pauses and you know, and delivery it was a little bit sharper. I think it went better. I liked it.
Yeah, yeah, I would imagine that doing comedy and even doing you know, open mic nights and getting up for ninety seconds, two minutes, five minutes, whatever the allocation is. Even if you don't end up being a comic, although you well could, but even if you don't, it's still going to help you as a facilitator in front of an audience anyway. It's gonna bring another dimension to how you do what you do.
I would imagine, no doubt whatsoever. I think comedy is sharpening my skills. It's teaching me a lot of lessons. There's one thing that comedy requires, though, that I was trying to get away from. But I think it's I
think it's really good. Actually, where I've mentioned that I've over prepared a lot, I've been extremely intentional on things, and like I would get on stage and try to memorize everything else, going to say not word for word, but pretty much bullet point by bullet point, which really
is the worst possible thing you could ever do. But in comedy, if you've got ten minutes, that's tight, or if you're doing an open mic night and you've got five minutes or three minutes, you better have things memorized because you could go you go go short. Like if you they give you five minutes and you do four, nobody really cares. If they give you five minutes, you do six, You're probably not going to do an open mic night.
There.
I'm not saying that an open mic night is. I mean there are advantages of it. I think you learn a lot more when you do actual shows. That's been my limited experience. But you really have to have it tight. You get it so tight that when you get up on stage, forget, forget everything you remember, just go. It should be second nature.
Just perform and are you okay with the iterative process of getting up being not great, getting up being a bit better, getting a bit right tonight, getting it wrong tomorrow night. And one hundred shows later, you're starting to understand. You're starting to because I feel like this is not something that you get good at in five attempts, you know, no matter what your starting point is or your natural
talent is. I think like for comedy, for me, comedy is like I think anyone can get up and not anyone, but a lot of people can get up and just talk and do like I think what I do is not I was going to say it's not that hard.
I guess it is for a lot of people. But I think what I do is infinitely easier than doing comedy, because your whole job in comedy is to change people's emotional state, is to get a visible response, Like you want to see them laughing, You want to see their head moving, you want to see their facial expression change. You want to see a psychological, emotional, and physical outcome.
You want to like, I would be so fucking terrified to wheel out my first Joe Core story or two or three, and I've just got fucking dead pan faces. I mean, like so whed craiggo I actually moved to the country. We've never heard from him again, and that was ten years ago. Yeah, yeah, apparently he's living in a subterranean bunker eating fucking weedies. He won't talk to anyone, you know, Like I think, hey, that's actually funny. I
should put that in. But you know, it's like, yeah, I think being I love amusing people and being spontaneously funny if that's what works in the situation. But walking out for the ex express reason of being funny, Okay, you're gonna walk on in sixty seconds, and in sixty one seconds you're going to start to be funny. Fucking hell, that terrifies me. Are you scared of that, I hope.
So I look, this is what I tell anyone who I've ever coached as a speaker. If you are not scared to step out on a stage, you don't belong on one, because you're either delusional about what you're stepping into and what it's really going to take to get good, or you're not taking seriously the fact that you have an opportunity to impact people. This is some serious shit.
You could be the person that says that thing in a way that has never been said to that one person in an audience of three hundred before, and five years from now they look back and like that was the day. That was the day things changed for me.
If that doesn't scare you, do something else. And I know that there are a lot of A listers out there that they lived that lifestyle of bombing constantly because they due to a degree, write their own stuff still and they go to small comedy clubs and they'll get on stage and just try shit out. So my first show, what happened was we had a professional not like not like a name, not anyone who you would have heard of, but they said that this person was constantly working in
La San Diego, you're a working comic. You're really good, and you've worked very hard to get there. He got on stage and it was so uncomfortable, and most of what he threw out bombed. It was Oh, it was cringe. Yeah, And you can tell up the look on his face he was enjoying the whole thing. Wow, because as a working comedian, he just got on stage that night, and you know, they weren't paying him to be there for that evening. He was just you know, getting up to
do a set. Ninety percent of what he threw out he learned, Yeah, that doesn't work. That ten percent. I'm gonna refine that. And he does that all the time, and I think that's life. Ninety percent of the stuff you do is probably gonna suck, and then the ten percent's not, and then you keep refining that the ten percent of the ten percent is going to be amazing,
and you just keep doing that. You're gonna have a large enough body of work where you could just get up in whatever your stage is, wherever you play, and perform really well because you've worked on craft long enough to be able to do that.
Tell me about like you said something like, if you're not scared something's wrong or and I kind of I understand that, and I would be fucking terrified by the way, which is why I'll never do it, because I'm a big baby. But at the same time, we know that if we're scared, our you know, our critical thinking and our timing and our skill and our judgment. Like if ow amigdala is fucking lit up like a Christmas tree because we're fucking terrified, we know that all the other
kind of cognitive skills drop. So how do you be simultaneously scared and get up there and do a great job when you probably can't think the way that you need to think to be excellent.
I think that's a great question. The answer is, like anything else, you practice strategies that help you mitigate as well as direct, the emotional intensity you're feeling in the moment. Like one thing is movement, right, burn off that epit ephroent, Like, just burn it off. Move I'm not saying pace the stage like a cage tiger because you'll freak everyone out.
But if you can help it before you go into your next meeting, before you know you go on your next date, or get up on your next stage instead of just sitting there the audience, Like you know, twenty minutes before you're gonna go on if you can, or even ten minutes, go for a walk, put on a headset, listen to some music that inspires you, instrumental and that movement. That movement will help with your stress hormone levels. Then when you get on stage, be deliberate within your movements,
your expressions. Also, like you said, Jimmy call what he was talking about. I never heard him say that, but that's interesting because I found that worked for me. Let's say you have thirty minutes in front of an audience. The first five minutes, YE script that. Practice it, because once you deliver that, you're already moving into the quote
unquote zone. It's really hard. Like if you have to manage two streams of consciousness, what you're trying to remember and what you're trying to communicate, that's way too much cognitive load. But if you have an opening signature story or a point that you want to make to draw your audience in, if that's rehearsed, you could just get into that. By the time you get out of that, you'll be flowing a lot more. So, there's steps that you can do. So there's a movement, there's deliberate action
is another one. There is getting your first five to ten minutes of delivery so tight that that emotionally, biochemically, psychologically guides you into the presentation I think you know. And also find somebody in the room, unless you're presenting to an auditorium where you just look out into thousands of people and it's blackness, find someone, look at that person for a few seconds. Deliver to that one person, because here's the thing, that one person will be like,
oh wow, this person's talking to me. What seems like an eternity for you, because sometimes like I don't want to stare at one person that's creepy, that's like they're going to report me to HR. If you lock eyes with them for three seconds, what feels like an eternity for you is a moment for them, and the rest of the room will feel more as if you're speaking to them looking at that one person than if you were just staring off into space or the back of
the room. Then find another person, Yeah, particularly the friendly face, not the person who's frowning, not the person whose boss made them go, who's hoping like you have a stroke in the middle of this thing, so they can go home. They don't want to be here, not that person, but the next friendly face lock eyes with them, and just keep doing that. Within fifteen minutes, you'll be in a completely different state. So it's not a matter of having butterflies.
Butterflies are great. Can you train those butterflies to fly in formation?
That's the question, Oh, beautiful metaphor. I remember I've told this once before, but I've done a bunch of gigs where there was somebody in the audience who, in my mind, as I was on stage, they're looking at me, and clearly they fucking hight me me. I'm crashing and burning, and I'm telling you the first time I so you speak, yeah, thank you, probably the first hundred times I spoke. But I remember, you know, like I'd be in a room
with a one hundred people or whatever. It was a whole lot of people, and most people are somewhere between seemingly interested and really enjoying it, somewhere in that space, and I'll always find the one that looks like he hates me. It's usually a hymn, and all I do, like the other ninety nine who were digging it. They don't even come into my attention. But this one dude who fucking hates me, he has all of my energy. And anyway, I had this one guy. It was actually
at a gig that I don't normally do. It was in a gym, so it was members of a gym, and I remember I'm looking at him. I'm thinking as I'm talking, I'm thinking, this stuff is relevant. This is an area that I'm really comfortable in. I'm talking, you know, if I have any area of expertise, it's the shit
that I'm talking about right now. Because I was talking as an exercise scientist and a jim Anna, you know, a trainer of people over a very long period of time, and I just like it was bothering me at the same time as I was like completely my fault. I ended up doing I would say a seven or a seven and a half out of ten. It wasn't brilliant, it wasn't terrible, it was okay. Anyway, the dude who'd just been like cold, staring me, not smiling, looking at
me like he just had contempt. At the end, he comes up to talk to me, and he's with his wife and he walks up and he's holding her sleeve and he's legally blind, so he couldn't even fucking see me. And he's like that was amazing. I'm like, oh my god.
I go really, I go, do you know what?
Can I tell you something funny? He's like what, I go, I thought you hated me. He goes why and I go, cause you're kind of looking at me like with that I hate you face and he goes, I can't see you. I'm legally blind, or he goes, I can see you kind of now, but I couldn't see you there. He goes, No, you're funny.
It's great.
It's like, ah yeah, like I literally invented a problem, like I plucked the problem out of thin air, and I actually made my own experience bad like no one else did. So it happens. Hey, tif, I wanted to ask you, similar to Bobby's kind of thinking around getting on stage. You did a gig very recently, quite a decent, big gig, well paid, grown up like look at tiff, I'm a pro speaker gig, and how that was one. I mean, you've done quite a bit, but this was
like stepping up a bit for you. It was good Money, good group quite a long time on stage. How did you feel going into that? Because I may or may not have got a call from a friend of mine who was a little bit panic strict, and as she was driving.
In, you're talking about that the recent workshop.
Correct, Yes, yeah, yeah, that one.
Yeah, yeah, well it was I didn't love it, Harps.
I didn't love it.
This time because I've got all these new ideas and concepts and strategies and stuff in my mind. So I felt like I was in the middle of tif pre twenty twenty five learnings and TIFF post twenty twenty five learnings and then doing something completely new in a completely different environment. So it's interesting because there's so much stimulus.
To Can I just interrupt it? Can I just interrupt? Tell our audience that might not know what you're talking about is you've just been immersed in this speaking program for six months or so, and so you were looking through that lens and that was and then you stepped into this environment where that wasn't really that appropriate, right.
Well, yeah, look it could have been, but there's you have to make a choice of how how would I like to deliver this workshop? And this is how I normally deliver workshops, but this is this new framework and there's some new ideas and strategies and how would I like to choose to operate this time? And so for me, it felt like there was a lot of spinning plates in my mind in the middle of doing the process, which is funny. And what was very funny is I rang you afterwards and I was like, I hated it.
Not good the feedback. The feedback was surprisingly really good, but I didn't love it. But the last concept I'll remember speaking to these people about was how our perception of our performance is never never accurate. You know, I'm not ironic, right, because then you going, oh, my performance was terrible.
YEA, so funny.
Yeah.
What I would ask you guys before when you were talking about the comedy, and this would apply to perhaps speaking as well, but how much do you think the success of a working comic comes back to the curating of your audience over time? Because you talk about speaking in warm rooms as opposed to cold rooms, so that
makes a huge impact on delivery. But also you think about if someone I was reflecting on going to see Hannah Gadsby when she was in Melbourne and there was a great comic that came on before her that no one knew who was ended up being quite funny. But there's no warmth. There's no warmth when they walk on stage.
They have to earn that with hard reps. And then I remember Hannah Gadsby, a song comes on and everyone laughed and applauded, and she hadn't even and then she might have said some one word or something over the mic as she and everyone was clapping and laughing, and like she has that rapport over time, and everyone knows what and you know what style of humor you're there for, you know, the intellect of the person that's delivering that content.
M That's the terror and horror and vulnerability of being a corporate speaker. Where you go to rooms. Where I did a gig at Crown, there was one thousand people there and the guy said, who knows Craig's work, and like, fuck nobody, And I'm like, oh, awesome. So I'm like, hey, mate, shut the fuck up, get off the stage, you know. And so there were really the best part of a thousand people who didn't know who the fuck I was.
You know, I may be a few people, but the vast majority didn't know who I was, so there was no expectation. There was no you know, there was and they weren't. Well, they were cold in that they didn't. I had to work.
I had to.
Work hard for the first fifteen minutes to not fucking sink. And you know, it's like, it doesn't matter what your content is. The first five to ten minutes is do we like him? Do we trust him? Is he a fuck with? Does he know anything? Do I want to listen to him for an hour? Is my Instagram feed going to be more interesting in the next five minutes
than this fucking idiot? And why should it? You know, It's like and as you're up there, there's this myriad of you know, emotions and thoughts and ideas and feelings, but at the same time, you don't want any of that to transfer to the room. So yeah, I mean me talking at a Craig Harper Live event like you've been to multiple times, like Bobby, you've spoken at you
know where we're at. Where at Angle c doing a or Man Lives are doing a camp, or where at Deacon University where seven hundred people in a room Like I literally can walk out in that room with seven one hundred people and just look at people and smile and just be cheeky and people laugh because it's they want they want to be there, and they chose to come to see me, whereas a lot of events nobody chose me. I just happened to be the bloke that they're wheeling out at ten o'clock. You know. So it
is a completely different challenge and a completely different dynamic. Bobby, you would have had the same thing, I'm sure.
Oh yeah, completely different dynamic. When an audience knows you and they're there, I mean they want to listen to your content, but they're there because they want to listen to you. They like your style. There's there's a resonance, there's a familiarity. It's a completely different animal than walking into a cold room. I think the longer you have to present, the easier it is to overcome that yeah
you said, you said something really important. When you step out on stage, the first thing is an audience is thinking, as with any rea it could be a metaphorical stage, is so what and why should I listen to you? So people tell you, Well, when you come out, just like start delivering takeaways. That's like telling somebody the first you know, four weeks of working out, like you just want to get as strong as possible, Like you're an early stage motor learner, Like what are you even doing?
So you got to win over that room before they even trust you and give you permission to influence them in any way, because you're always there by permission. So it makes that emotional connection even more important. If you got twenty minutes hard to do, if you got an hour easier.
Yeah, that's so true. It's like the longer you have, as long as you're not dying for twenty minutes.
At the stop.
Yeah, but yeah, I like it when I have two or three hours because I don't have to rush. I can make it much more interactive. I know that I can talk for three hours without any prepper, and I know it gives me a lot of space to be able to go wherever I want to go, you know, in terms of content and activities and connection and energy. Yeah, some of the hardest gigs are twenty I've only done maybe one or two, but I've done like literally where I've been paid a stupid amount of money to go
to a conference to talk for twenty minutes. I'm like, do you want me to talk for forty five minutes? I won't charge you anymore. They're like, no, we just want twenty minutes. And it was basically a roster of pretty good speakers that just got up for twenty minutes.
I'm like, fuck, I do not. This is so much harder than two hours because I don't know what I've got to leave out ninety eight percent of what I might you know, it's like, all right, so I'm maybe going to get through four things in these twenty minutes. So what are those four things? Tif If you had to do that workshop that you did recently, you had to do it next week, same workshop, but to a different group of humans, what would you change?
Just a just a tighter plan. I think I had a I had a I had a plan, but then I kept it loose and interactive, and I just think I would probably have a tighter plan with around wrapped around that same you know, the same all of the same concepts and topics we talked about, but just yeah, because it was two hours, so it was it was longer, and you never know, like you never know how many people are going to interact and how how how much the conversation will take place, and that I really like
to have workshops to be very interactive and conversational, which had got in the end, it was very much like that. But I, Yeah, the time frame for me was I felt like I was very aware of how long is this taking? What have I gotten through? Where have we been? Where are we going? You know, just a lot of but you can't you can't learn. I can't learn without putting myself into that situation. So come out of that and went oh and sometimes, but that audience was very different.
I there were some things I mentioned and people hadn't heard of the people, and I remember thinking, who, oh, you don't know about that? So used to people knowing about maybe the people I refer to or talk about or some of the concepts, so that you know, just that sort of stuff. What am I talking about? That I might not be taking that into account?
Yeah, that exactly what level is this group out in terms of what they know or what their you know, their language or their Yeah, if I'm talking to an academic group, it's totally different to if I'm talking to a bunch of blokes on a construction site. Nobody's smarter or dumber they're just different. Yes, they're interested in different things and different language. And you know, like I've spoken a few times in prison, and I figured out first
time I was in there. I figured out what they are interested in from me, the excise scientist is they're interested in learning how to get as strong as possible with no equipment or limited equipment. So I taught them about manual training. So I would every time I went in, I would get one of them to go get a towel, and I would train the strongest guy I could find with a towel doing manual resistance training, push pull training, and we'd have no dumbells, no bar bells, no gym equipment.
I would put that guy through twenty or thirty minutes of hell, and because I understand how to make him work hard, and you know, and they're like great, But that's because oh I'm in prison. I want to be safe, i want to be strong, I want muscle. So I'm not going to go in there and talk to them about fucking the meaning of life, you know, or how to you know, be a better communicator on stage, you know, or whatever. It's like horses for courses, Hey, Bobby going
to wind up. But so with your first two gigs, what's one thing that you wouldn't do again or one thing that you thought was a mistake or didn't fly, and what's one thing that perhaps went great.
H that's a hard that is a hard question.
Because let me ask let me ask an easier one. What did you learn something that because I feel like you're doing comedy schools so to speak, but there's no learning environment like the actual job itself. Like, so when you're doing the job in front of the room, what was the maybe the key takeaway for you.
That would be it? I think you just said it. And it's like, if you're going to get good at anything, it's wraps. I mean I could go to swim school and I could, you know, study the biomechanics of swimming. You're going to get in the pool and do some laps if you're ever going to be a decent swimmer.
And you know, I think the lessons are a lot of people talk about imposter syndrome, where I think that could be either crippling or it could be an advantage because to some degree, like there's an element honesty there. But yes, just like our attitude shape, our behaviors. Our behaviors conversely shape our attitudes and beliefs. And that's one of the lessons I've learned from my teacher is the
power of belief. I feel uncomfortable saying that because it's a language I've kind of moved away from the past few years, mistakenly. Having that belief in yourself and that confidence, it not only inoculates you from a lot of the hurt and disappointment that you're going to have to face in order to get better at just about anything that's important to you, but it also allows you to excel in self expression. And that belief comes from execute on
a series of behaviors. So getting up on stage that was like the best and the worst of it, and I know that. In class Tony was like, you know what your problem is? He thought my second set was fantastic. He's like, but it's your delivery because you have not completely committed to delivering this. You do not believe yet. And I was like, yes, okay, and he's one hundred right.
So it's that belief and whatever you want to get good at, what are the behaviors that someone who is really good at that has done or still does start doing those behaviors.
It's really hard to try real hard but simultaneously look like you're not trying at all.
Well, I think that's where trying hard comes in, because when you're on stage, you should be trying hard at all. You should just be in the flow and performing. That's why your practice is so damn brutal. That's why you need so many reps. And I think one of the things that benefits you is it is there an arena where the stakes are different, because I can understand something like going, oh, I don't want to do trial and error at board presentations because I'll get sacked if I
screw up with those. But one of the things, like if you have a domain like comedy, nobody's gonna sack me. They might not invite me back. But if I bomb on stage, and I don't want to because if people are paying like whatever, they're paying like sixteen bucks to come see me, like, I respect that. I want them to have a really good time. But if I did bomb on stage, I personally would enjoy it because I know, maybe not that night, but next week, next month, there's
a lesson there. And I just think the irony of someone who stands up to do comedy and just dies in front of the room is hilarious. Maybe not for the audience, but for me. I wouldn't feel the same way if I was at work. So if you can have a compartmentalized arena where you can go through the pain and the struggle of gruth, but the steaks are not. Oh jeez, I just lost I just lost a major account for my company. I think that's something that people should consider. Get looking into.
Oh, doing scary shit, Folks doing scary shit to learn and grow and evolve a bobby. Where can people find you? How can they connect with you online? I don't mean personally, physically, geographically.
Hi unfriendly? I want him, I'm looking for you.
See him about give him a cuddle, just maybe stand back a little bit, just offer him some food, don't get too close to his mouth. Where can they find you online?
LinkedIn? Okay, all right, that's and well I have websites too, but LinkedIn? Yeah, all right.
All right. He does have a podcast called yo.
Yeah.
Yeah, you're fucking terrible at promoting yourself. Uh, TIF, thank you any words of wisdom as we wind up?
TIF, that's it from me, mate, you're the you're the guru. I'm just.
I'm just the ship kicker. I'm just up the front steering the ship. You're the captain. Thanks everyone,