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 host, you’ll realize their amplitude (how high and low the voice gets) and variety (the different patterns of rise, falls, high plateaux and low plateaux) is absurd. Aim for this!
The one tip I saw work best was for me to pretend to be a child asking the speaker to tell me a story in the most dramatic way possible, and otherwise I’d pretend I was losing attention. TV is less exaggerated than radio or podcast, but has a more stereotypical melody.
Another thing to remember is that public speaking is a very bodily thing. It means showing your body in public, holding it straight, chest open, resting your voice while you speak, doing specific hand gestures separating important points from minor ones. This can’t really be explained by text but is a whole thing in and of its own. Film yourself, compare yourself with a good TV host, choose one aspect (Facial expressions? Hand movements? Posture?) and compare it. Tricks that usually works: warm-ups, energizing yourself, physical exercice, training reactivity and "presence" with a partner.
4 - Give your message before answering the questions
Journalists are often misaligned with your message : you may want to tell them about AI risk, but their focus may be exclusively on whether AI is a bubble. If such is the case, make sure to point out the framing and say the truth on what you think is more important: “That’s a good question, but a much more pressing one is whether we’ll keep AIs safe enough to prevent a catastrophe” (you may then either come back to the bubble question to answer it straightforwardly, or explain the link between one and the other in your model, but do adress it).
5 - Be specific
“Many”, “a lot”, “often”, “during the summer” reeks with “I’m winging it” and an overall lack of seriousness. The archetype of a “competent adult” usually rests on social codes such as giving numbers, dates, citing references and authors. Of course, there is the real risk that your numbers may be off, so this means you should prepare yourself accordingly.
6 - If you’re not a talented actor, choose a persona
“Professor Logic”, “Savvy Diplomat”, “Passionate Rethor”, “Dignified Narrator”, pick the one you want (or the one others see in you) and hold it lightly to work on it. Working on your character will be a lot easier than trying to see yourself as a bundle of different habits and tendencies.
“Professor Logic” is my favorite one.Jean-Marc Jancovici is probably the most influent such archetype I know in France, succeeding in the Herculean task of turning a good chunk of the upper-middle class in favor of nuclear power, in a political climate that was hostile to it. His technique is simple : use a model that rests on math or physics, explain it, and explain why you can’t work around it.
7 - Have a high awareness of the social context
Media is low-decoupling, aka contextualizing - people focus on the connotations of what you say before hearing out the logical reasoning. It’s filled with commenters and TV watchers who don’t know who you are and are trying to work out your secret allegiances from subtle cues and possible dogwhistles. You don’t need to necessarily turn low-decoupling in turn, but at least acknowledge when what you said could be misinterpreted by a low-decoupling person. E.g. “I’m quoting Demis Hassabis here, independent experts came to the same conclusion.” (i.e I am not pledging allegiance to Demis).
If you’re bad at this, open a “walking in [city] camera ambience 1 hour” video on YouTube, click pause from time to time, and create stories around the faces of people you see. What are their emotions? What is their life like so far? This “social imagination” is the one I use to anticipate how someone (especially someone who distrusts me) may misinterpret what I’m saying.
8 - Practice the art of cutting people and asking questions
If you’re facing other people, it is sometimes expected that the initiative to talk rests on you, and that you ask some socially aware and intellectually motivating questions in return. The standards for this vary from country to country and according to the context, but it is expected that you make an effort: don’t stay silent, but don’t be discourteous. A lot of status games are implied within this, and be aware that e.g. claiming more status than someone who is structurally above you (minister, president) is possibly a very bad idea.
9 - Practice the art of nuance
In debate settings, making your point, steelmanning the point of your interlocutor, and then giving a counter-argument feels a lot more convincing than either just sticking exclusively with your point or acknowledging the criticism but not answering it.
E.g., instead of:
“But don’t you think this AI thing is all hype?”
“No, the risks are real. OpenAI has a model capable of bruteforcing the Navier-Stokes equation, and it's still in training. A HuggingFace attack with this sort of model would be devastating.”
You can say:
“But don’t you think this AI thing is all hype?”
“No, the risks are real. OpenAI has a model capable of bruteforcing the Navier-Stokes equation, and it's still in training. A HuggingFace attack with this sort of model would be devastating. Of course, they do get a lot of attention due to it in a way that’s unprecedented and paint them as important actors, but on net it’s costly attention: after the slowdown announcement NVIDIA stocks fell 9%, Anthropic and OpenAI's own staff regularly resign, which is something that worries investors. Short term, this isn’t good for business, more so with a now hostile Trump administration."
To me, the second one feels more courteous, relevant and confident. This requires practice, as it can be riddled with adjustments depending on the specific point and the context.
10 - Polish the start and the end
Start and end are what stay in mind. If you have some overview of the structure of the interview or podcast, focus on those parts first, fill the middle later on. Spend more time getting (human) feedback on those.
Conclusion
Again, you will not get better at public speaking by reading this document. Deliberate practice is key, and there is no “conceptual” knowledge to handle for public speaking -it’s all procedural.
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 host, you’ll realize their amplitude (how high and low the voice gets) and variety (the different patterns of rise, falls, high plateaux and low plateaux) is absurd. Aim for this!
The one tip I saw work best was for me to pretend to be a child asking the speaker to tell me a story in the most dramatic way possible, and otherwise I’d pretend I was losing attention. TV is less exaggerated than radio or podcast, but has a more stereotypical melody.
Another thing to remember is that public speaking is a very bodily thing. It means showing your body in public, holding it straight, chest open, resting your voice while you speak, doing specific hand gestures separating important points from minor ones. This can’t really be explained by text but is a whole thing in and of its own. Film yourself, compare yourself with a good TV host, choose one aspect (Facial expressions? Hand movements? Posture?) and compare it. Tricks that usually works: warm-ups, energizing yourself, physical exercice, training reactivity and "presence" with a partner.
4 - Give your message before answering the questions
Journalists are often misaligned with your message : you may want to tell them about AI risk, but their focus may be exclusively on whether AI is a bubble. If such is the case, make sure to point out the framing and say the truth on what you think is more important: “That’s a good question, but a much more pressing one is whether we’ll keep AIs safe enough to prevent a catastrophe” (you may then either come back to the bubble question to answer it straightforwardly, or explain the link between one and the other in your model, but do adress it).
5 - Be specific
“Many”, “a lot”, “often”, “during the summer” reeks with “I’m winging it” and an overall lack of seriousness. The archetype of a “competent adult” usually rests on social codes such as giving numbers, dates, citing references and authors. Of course, there is the real risk that your numbers may be off, so this means you should prepare yourself accordingly.
6 - If you’re not a talented actor, choose a persona
“Professor Logic”, “Savvy Diplomat”, “Passionate Rethor”, “Dignified Narrator”, pick the one you want (or the one others see in you) and hold it lightly to work on it. Working on your character will be a lot easier than trying to see yourself as a bundle of different habits and tendencies.
“Professor Logic” is my favorite one. Jean-Marc Jancovici is probably the most influent such archetype I know in France, succeeding in the Herculean task of turning a good chunk of the upper-middle class in favor of nuclear power, in a political climate that was hostile to it. His technique is simple : use a model that rests on math or physics, explain it, and explain why you can’t work around it.
7 - Have a high awareness of the social context
Media is low-decoupling, aka contextualizing - people focus on the connotations of what you say before hearing out the logical reasoning. It’s filled with commenters and TV watchers who don’t know who you are and are trying to work out your secret allegiances from subtle cues and possible dogwhistles. You don’t need to necessarily turn low-decoupling in turn, but at least acknowledge when what you said could be misinterpreted by a low-decoupling person. E.g. “I’m quoting Demis Hassabis here, independent experts came to the same conclusion.” (i.e I am not pledging allegiance to Demis).
If you’re bad at this, open a “walking in [city] camera ambience 1 hour” video on YouTube, click pause from time to time, and create stories around the faces of people you see. What are their emotions? What is their life like so far? This “social imagination” is the one I use to anticipate how someone (especially someone who distrusts me) may misinterpret what I’m saying.
8 - Practice the art of cutting people and asking questions
If you’re facing other people, it is sometimes expected that the initiative to talk rests on you, and that you ask some socially aware and intellectually motivating questions in return. The standards for this vary from country to country and according to the context, but it is expected that you make an effort: don’t stay silent, but don’t be discourteous. A lot of status games are implied within this, and be aware that e.g. claiming more status than someone who is structurally above you (minister, president) is possibly a very bad idea.
9 - Practice the art of nuance
In debate settings, making your point, steelmanning the point of your interlocutor, and then giving a counter-argument feels a lot more convincing than either just sticking exclusively with your point or acknowledging the criticism but not answering it.
E.g., instead of:
You can say:
To me, the second one feels more courteous, relevant and confident. This requires practice, as it can be riddled with adjustments depending on the specific point and the context.
10 - Polish the start and the end
Start and end are what stay in mind. If you have some overview of the structure of the interview or podcast, focus on those parts first, fill the middle later on. Spend more time getting (human) feedback on those.
Conclusion
Again, you will not get better at public speaking by reading this document. Deliberate practice is key, and there is no “conceptual” knowledge to handle for public speaking -it’s all procedural.