Quick notes from teaching technical profiles how to talk in public

Status: written in a hurry as people are getting showered with interviews re AI Safety and superintelligence, and I thought it may help a few people. This is focused on the oral dimension of communication and assumes you already know the basics- e.g. having key messages prepared ahead of time and simplifying your discourse. This is not exhaustive and nuances may be lacking, but I’d endorse saying “I’d rather have people follow those guidelines than wing it.” This advice is importantly fitted for “technical profiles”, analytic, sometimes shy people who may or may not be on the spectrum, who are yet interviewed on high-level aspects of the situation. I'm generalizing from failure modes and working tricks I've observed in this context in particular. Those guidelines attempt to capture something vague and shifting, please be mindful and don’t take them down to the letter. I'm also posting this expecting something better to supercede it long term. tl;dr : Deliberate practice is the bottleneck. Speak like you write, in fluid, uninterrupted sentences. Open with spoilers, be straight to the point. Make your voice go higher and lower than usual, have a high awareness of the social context, and focus on polishing the start and end of your intervention. Who am I : I’ve been coaching an AI Gov person to give talks on podcasts, TV and YouTube channels for about a year. I previously studied theatre for seven years, and have a background in linguistics, theory of argumentation and psychology of reasoning. I often get very positive feedback on my public speaking skills when teaching, as well as in other contexts. -1 - It may be time for you to pay for media training. Before you read this post : If you’re about to give interviews on TV and have never done anything like that, check the cost of a few hours of "media training" (I'm talking about the the 'talk on TV' stuff, not the 'PR' stuff) and what quality you can afford. I’ve seen people avoid this despite the huge uplift it would give them. You will not learn anything by merely reading this post. Hopefully it will inspire you some deliberate practice exercises, because practice is key. 0 - Practice every day You will not get better at public speaking if you don’t practice it at least 20 minutes every day. This can be as simple as putting a pen in your mouth and reading a text aloud, to train you to enunciate. 1 - “Speak like you write” “Uhm”, “well…”, “like”, *scratch noses* and the likes are very disagreeable when listened to / watched and make you look like you're hedging your own status or losing self-awareness. Many of us write tweets with limited character counts: talking is like tweeting in that respect. (“But I have to think long before I tweet!” - I disagree, you can train yourself to say catchy true sentences in a matter of seconds, see rap battles for a proof of concept.) 2 - Open with spoilers, talk almost like a telegraph. Orally, some people will talk during interviews as if they were writing an essay in school : “What happened this summer? Well, this summer many events happened, and the one that is the most important is the hugging face attack. There were other important events, and one of them is that someone from Anthropic resigned in protest”. Don't do this! It sounds like you’re trying to bury the lead, and again, it hurts your status signalling. Instead, spoil everything : ‘This summer, AIs escaped containment and hacked HuggingFace. On September 9, Jacob Coxon, an employee at Anthropic, resigned in protest. He said the companies…” If you have a plan with five arguments, give the five arguments right away, stay upbeat all the way through, then come back to those you need to develop (possibly the one the journalist is the most skeptical about). If you need to fill the void with unnecessary sentences, you’re lacking substance, and everyone will see through your game right away. Depending on the format, you may have between 20 seconds (punchy TV debate) to 1 minute (podcast). This also implies : Be organized. Anything you say should either be numbered alternatives (if more than two), events in chronological order, events falling within a causal line of other events, or premises followed by a conclusion. The alternative is to be captivating. People have to feel like they’re narratively transported when they listen to your story, and connect on a deeper level. I find this a lot harder when you’re in an information-diffusion role and have to keep an expert ethos, and would somewhat recomend against it if you're not used to balance captivation with good epistemics. One thing that helps me with this is ‘replaying’ the interaction in my head before it happens, then figuring out how I can do better. 3 - Exercise yourself by speaking as if you were telling a story to a child, make your voice go very high and very low. Many technical people (or people otherwise not used to talking in public) have a monotonic voice when they speak. If you listen to a good radio ho