Last month I stood in front of 3,000 people on a Sunday night in Las Vegas, while at WPPI 2012, and delivered a 5-minute talk about The Fascinating Truth About Lying. After giving a number of much longer presentations to even larger groups, you wouldn’t think this would have been that difficult. It’s just five minutes, right? But it’s 5 minutes completely out of your control – the slides move forward every 15 minutes, no matter where you are, and the entire presentation has to be memorized and all the slides are turned in weeks in advance. And IT WAS QUITE DIFFICULT (and I was quite nervous). When Kevin Kubota introduces me here, he jokes about how scared I was when I did a very different presentation last year. It’s funny, but he wasn’t making that up – I was quite terrified that time, too. The most bizarre thing about watching this back as a recording is not being able to really hear the audience. This was an evening event, and the sound of the audience sounded deafening to me when I was up on the stage, complete with a mic echo. But when you watch this, it all sounds so smooth and so controlled. Fascinating, really.
