I deliver about 3-5 talks a month and usually prepare for them.

Thanks to AI (but even otherwise), I have a steady stream of new content. So, I just to assemble the story.

For example, in my TEDx Whitefield talk “Prisoners of Birth”, I shared the impact of name, gender, lineage, place, and time of birth. I didn’t execute any new analysis. I just cherry-picked disparate analyses into a theme. (Took me three days to plan, though.)

But repetition bores me. I’ve known this since 2002 when I tried coaching CAT students. Conventional teaching isn’t for me. And talks get boring too.

So, often, I ad-lib. Impromptu. Deliberately under-prepared. (Panels are good practice for this. I must try improv next.)

This has a surprising benefit. In the pressure of the moment, inspiration can strike.

Like it strikes Calvin

For example, yesterday, at an internal Straive fireside chat, I went completely off-script and answered a question on the chat about the benefits of Gemini.

The sort of things that you can do with Gemini is amazing. And what I do … is to poke … what can I do here? What’s in here? What’s in here? Recently, I saw that it can create music. And some of this music is stunning!

Now, I had to think of something interesting to do with the music. Despite weeks of exploring Lyria, I never found a use for it, let alone “stunning”. Now I had 3 seconds.

Then, inspiration struck!

Now, we had music at the beginning of this Zoom call. Why does that need to be something that is unpersonalized?

I went to ChatGPT and asked it to create a personalized jingle for the talk I was delivering, providing it my name, title, talk topic, etc. - something the L&D team could replace their stock jingle with. And it was pretty good, actually.

That’s a novel and a useful idea - something many people can use!

It’s times like this that I really enjoy delivering talks. This is why I live-code. This is why I pause for questions. This is why I’m thrilled when I have no clue of the answer. Pretending to be know is fun and all that, but the kick of discovery on stage – that’s something else!