 Welcome to Looking to the East. I'm your host, Steve Zuercher, professor here at Kansai Gaidae University. Welcome to the show. It's wonderful to have you as part of our audience, whether you're watching us live right now or in a recorded format later on. We're very lucky this morning to have a colleague of mine at Kansai Gaidae University as our guest. Usually this show, I talk about politics, I've been interviewing some professors. Of course we could talk about that, Gar, a little bit today if you'd like. But Gar is very famous, Gar doesn't want to talk about, okay. Gar is very famous for Presentations End, which is a book that he wrote about how to improve the quality of presentations. And specifically what we're going to address in this show is the influence of Japan. So this does have a Looking to the East topic, but it's not necessarily politics or business this time. So welcome, Gar. Thank you so much for waking up early and being with us this morning. Yeah, it's not so early. Okay. I'm on Hawaii time. Oh, that's great. Yeah. So first of all, I have to say, I'm going to get into a brief introduction, but both of us are graduates of the University of Hawaii. So there is a connection definitely to Hawaii. And, you know, I continue to visit there quite often. Have you been to Hawaii recently, Gar? Boy, it's been a, no, it's been a while. So, of course, now it's complicated. You know, I grew up in Oregon. So a lot of people, well, when I grew up in Oregon, right on the, on the beats, but the only people that went to Hawaii were always, you know, the rich people. That's where I thought, oh, you have to be rich. So like maybe three families in our whole town, never went to Hawaii, even though it wasn't that far away. So I didn't go to Hawaii until I, after college, I joined Peace Corps. I was in the Peace Corps in Micronesia. And we had some, we stopped over and had some training in Honolulu. And I think we're at the East West Center and then went over. Oh, really? Wow. So you were on the campus at the university then? Yeah, I think that's why. And I just fell in love with it. And, of course, being in Micronesia, that wasn't just the climate, but just, you know, it's kind of in between Japan and, you know, the mainland. So it's, you know, there's a lot of Japanese influence in Japanese and Korean food, which I love. So it's awesome. I think there are many of us that feel that way about the island. In fact, the Kansai Guide, there's probably half a dozen different professors that studied at a graduate level at Hawaii. So it seems to be a jumping off point for people to get kind of, they don't grow up in an Asian culture in the mainland. They're influenced in Hawaii by that Asian culture. It makes them feel comfortable to go further East. Just a little bit more about your background before we start talking about the development of presentations then. So you mentioned you were in Oregon. You went to Oregon State University and you played football for the team? Well, for a year and I got injured twice. I broke my Achilles tendon, so I gave up on that. All right. But yeah, I'm still a beaver, so which is always hard. And then you worked in the corporate world for a while for Japanese companies and then also for Apple computer as well. So I mean, I did my first experience in Japan was with the JET program for three years. And then University of Hawaii and Manoa and then joint Sumitomo Electric and then Apple in Silicon Valley and then Kansai Guide, I gosh, 17 years ago or so. And now I'm not leaving. So since I was working for Apple, which is my dream job, dream company. But I didn't really, to tell you the truth, enjoy that much living in California or at least the Bay Area. I really love lifestyle in Japan and Japanese food. And the best Japanese food is in Japan. So even though I had the best job, I mean, I was happy working at Apple, but I wasn't happy somehow. I really missed Japan. It really called to me. So I realized now I know. It's sort of like, I don't know, sometimes people get divorced and then they realize, oh, that was a mistake. Right. And those couples get back together. It was something like that. Except I mean, I only left Japan because I mean, Apple, you know, that was a company I really, I was an evangelist for Apple anyway. Right. For free. So I might as well get paid for it. Yeah. But then Kansai, I had this chance to work for Kansai Guide as a professor. And that gives you a lot more freedom because when you're a corporate person, you know, you can't, especially at Apple, we weren't allowed to speak. I mean, basically, there was a handful of people that could speak publicly and do other things. Okay. So in your book, which I'd like to talk about now, one of the influences that you cite for the creation of it was your work at Apple and the fact that you were inspired by Steve Jobs. So if you could talk a little bit about that and then how you actually developed your book, which I have here. This is the latest version presentations then. So if any of you through the course of this show are inspired about what Gar talks about the book is available and any of you want to improve your presentation skills. This is a very, very important tool to do that. But anyway, Gar, how did you actually come up with this idea to publish a book and focus on presentations, which I can tell you as a business person is one of the most painful part. Of corporate life, listening to horrible presentations and still even today with your book and other influences, it's still rough out there in terms of what we see what people think are effective. I just the other day, this was on an academic conference, I think the guy was reading the slides to us. Holy crap. Don't you know that you just don't do that? I can read the slides. You don't need to read. I've been reading since I was five years old. Anyway, it's remarkable that. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's remarkable that this I mean, look, it's we all know. We all know what to do because we all we all see, for example, I'm making video. Everyone knows what a good video is or a good film or a good short documentary because we watch them and we know what it is. But how to do it because I also teach that at Kansai Gai Dai and young people, for the most part, don't know how to make a compelling short documentary or short film. But it doesn't take much to learn. I mean, a day and a half. Actually, Orson Welles has this great video. He's being interviewed. And, you know, Orson Welles, right? And he did his first movie, Citizen King, when he was 26. And they asked him, well, how did you know how to do that? And he goes, you know, a day and a half, you can learn this stuff. I mean, the storytelling and the creativity, that's what he said, you know, big Orson Welles, right? Yeah. Day and a half, day and a half, you can learn this. It's not hard, right? And then it's but but you need to have that day and a half. There are some and then practice, of course, lots and lots of practice. Okay, but let's get back to your original question, which was about presentation. Yeah. Tell us a story of how this all developed. Well, I always, I mean, the first, okay, well, I was born and no. No, no, not that long. We already covered that. We know about Oregon part. Okay, my first presentation, though, was with 35 millimeter slides when I was in high school. This is before PowerPoint had been invented. So two Kodak carousels, 35 millimeter slides, set to music. I mean, it was awesome. And my, I guess the template was, you know, the network news, the NBC news or whatever with Walter Cronkite. So you have a person talking, but you have, you know, the visuals were visual. They weren't lots of lines of text. It was, you know, bar charts and line charts, you know, of course, quantitative displays, but also lots of photos. So if you're talking about, I don't know, you're talking about plastic garbage on the beach, then you show a picture of the actual plastic garbage on the beach. So it just, it was a no brainer to me. I mean, we didn't know that you put a boring title and six lines of text that hadn't been invented yet. So in a way, it was sort of, you know, going back to the way we've been doing it a long time, newsreels before TV and then after TV, you know, that was, it's a visual medium. So I always thought that presentation was a visual medium. It should be you, the person connecting with the audience live. That's the most important thing. But the visuals should be there to support. And we grew up, you know, in the States, we all did show and tell if I want to talk about my new or my old, my old iPhone. This is the iPhone. This is it. You show it, right? Show and tell. That's compelling. Just show it and talk about it. Okay, so now I'm working for Sumitomo. We have a lot of really boring presentations. And then I started getting into Apple. Around late 80s or something. And then I discovered Steve Jobs presentation when he came back to Apple was 97. I was watching these. This is when videos would be really tiny on the internet, right? Probably, I don't know, 10 frames a second or less. And I just thought, well, hey, this is the way I'd been doing it. This is the, you know, this is not rocket science. It's a compelling conversational style, telling stories, showing things, using visuals to show. And it's really engaging. And Steve could talk for two hours. You go, I was two hours. That was, you know, just a presentation for two hours. Yeah. And of course, we were interested in the topic, but it's actually hard to keep people's interest for more than 10 minutes, let alone two hours. So, you know, I just thought this is the way it's done. But then, you know, PowerPoint had become this term, it's just software. You know, people say PowerPoint presentation and PowerPoint presentation equals lots of text, maybe people reading the text. But we know from the cognitive science research that that is not how people learn that is not engaging to the brain. And it's weird that we say PowerPoint presentation. We don't say like a, you know, a book. So we don't say a word book. You know, give me a Microsoft Word book or an InDesign book or I need an InDesign magazine or a Final Cut Pro movie. That's just a software that makes it. If your presentation is really good, people have no idea what software you use or they don't care. Yeah. So, you know, when I wrote the book, well, first I did the website presentations end.com and everything's still just free. I just did a blog and put different things and lots of videos and was putting that up for years. And then Pearson Publishing, or a lot of publishers asked me if I'd write a book and so I did and then that it exploded when it came out 12 years ago. And now that's the third edition that you held up. And there's some other books like Presentations and Design and The Naked Presenter and a couple others that are just in Japanese as well over here. So, but, you know, the struggle continues. I mean, it is getting better. I told you this antidote. Yanai, who's the president of Uniglo, the famous clothes retailer. So he had an event in Tokyo. This was probably four or five years ago. He himself is kind of notoriously shy. He very rarely gives presentations because he himself feels very uncomfortable doing it. So, but anyway, he gave his presentation. It was, it was okay. It wasn't great. And he had too much information up on the slides. But then there were questions from the audience. And one question was from a Japanese person saying, can you tell us about your Japanese employees and, you know, what you think about them. He said, oh, they're hardworking. They're very loyal. They've helped my company to grow to where it is today. And then he stopped. He paused for about three seconds. And then he said, but they just don't know how to present. He said they're terrible at it. And he repeated that a couple of times. So this is from Yanai saying my employees are great people. But when I get into these meetings, it's just torture. Yeah. No, I hear this a lot. And so one thing is just knowing when to use something like a multimedia keynote style presentation. What I mean is there's a screen and there's a there's you and there's the audience, but often it's usually just better to use a whiteboard. So even with teaching university, I mostly use a whiteboard, mostly talking, mostly discussion or students are at the whiteboard and they're doing things. Right. Just like Harvard style, Harvard case study style. They don't use slides at all. That's all whiteboard. Yeah. No. So in the corporate set, and this was everyone knew this at Apple, you don't go into a meeting with Steve Jobs and without some slides. So that's just talking and just talking, just talking, sitting around a table. There are white in the walls, we're all whiteboard materials. So if something comes up, we have to explain something that's a much very important skill to have if someone says, well, explain it. You know, Steve, what are you talking about? And they go, let me just open this pen and just explain it. You don't have to be a great artist at all. Just basic shapes, but just explain it really helps. Especially when you're teaching to if you're teaching in English, for example, to non-native speakers, you got to have a visual that could be a whiteboard or it could be visuals through multimedia. But I saw the presentation, we had a guest speaker, I won't say who, but it's really good. But you know, it was one hour and he didn't want to use any kind of visual, not even the whiteboard, which was behind him. And so it would have been much better if he just used a whiteboard, just to write, even if it was just key words down, right? That really helps anyone, but it especially helps if you're, you know, if it's not your native language. Yeah, I think it may help you to organize your own presentation as well. It kind of gives you a structure. If you're just improvising, it's easy to go in different directions, which makes it obviously harder for the audience. And improvising is good, or I mean, you know, I always say good presentation or good teaching is a lot like jazz. I mean, we know that we're playing, you know, satin doll or whatever. It's great satin doll and it's got these key changes, but it's kind of go in a different direction, especially with the solos and so on. And that's kind of like teaching because it depends on the question that you're going to get. And so it's going to go in this direction. Actually, I just talked to a woman who's a rock ago, you know, storyteller, and she was saying her live her performances. Of course she has the story she's going to tell, but it depends on the audience. Everything is where that story goes exactly. I didn't realize that the audience was so important for that as well, because she says she can't do this on zoom. They want her to do it on zoom. Or just do it canned with no audience and we'll record it. I need the audience. The audience is so crucial. So getting back to the whiteboard. So this is why the whiteboard is so important. If you're doing more, well, it's kind of, there's a bit of improv in it. I mean, you know your subject and you know where you're going, but it's going to depend. So it's nice to have that record of where you went, right? I mean, that when I studied, took some philosophy courses at UH. And I remember we had this professor from Harvard, real smart guy. And at the end of the day, it was a chalkboard back then, but it was just filled with stuff that came out of his head. And he go back at the end and then look up and go, well, what is that? But it's still held because we went on this journey with him and we're writing things down. But it's not hard to copy the things down. He's not saying write all these things down. These are just key words and diagrams and things which were easy to follow. I think that's a very important skill is the whiteboard. Yeah. So we have a question actually from the audience here. I do want to talk about the main topic of this, this interview today, but that is the influence of Japan because you did call it called a presentation Zen. Oh, right. Japan is influenced, but let's let's jump into that after we take this question. So the question is, what are the signs of a good presentation? Do you think Ted talks to good presentation? Well, yeah. I mean, again, I've been, I was one of the first people to put when Ted went public with his presentations, put him live. Probably in those days, it was 720p. Who knows, it's 10, 11, 12 years ago, I think. No, maybe more next 2006 or so. So then I was linking and talking about Ted because that's how I'd been doing it. That's how, say, Steve Jobs and others had been doing it. Visuals and storytelling influence from the way Kami Shibai storytellers would do it. Visuals plus the presenter plus the engagement with the audience and simplifying the topic. So you might have a literal rocket science there, but he's only got 10 minutes or 18 minutes max. So you've got to simplify. Simplify without dumbing down. So in the old days, a lot of reason Ted talks were really good. And some of them still are really good. But like anything else, it can become cliche after a while. So even a lot of Ted talks probably shouldn't really feed. Are you giving? Well, the motivation is because I have something that people really feel is important. And I think sometimes, and even Chris Anderson talked about this in his book, and I've talked about this with him before too, is that a lot of people want to make a Ted talk. I want to make a Ted talk. I want to be famous. I want to say that I have given a Ted talk. And that isn't really the motivation. The motivation should be I have, I got this in me. I want to share this with people, whatever it is. I'm just trying to think of something. I mean, it could be my work with primates or, I don't know, something about nutrition. How say fat isn't fat is misunderstood or something that I think this is important. And I'm a doctor and I'm an expert in this and I want to get it out there. That Ted format is good for that. It can teach you something in 10 minutes. Of course, then you have to go deeper with that. It's only 10 minutes. So I do think there's a lot to learn. But I also think, yeah, actually, I don't watch a lot of Ted talks anymore. I'm sure there's some good ones out there, but it's just, you know, because of the TEDx movement, it can just become kind of too much. But I do use them for teaching because it's great. Here's 10 minutes of this thing. That's a great example. Now we can go deeper with it. So for example, in a marketing class in business, you know, a lot of good Seth Godin does a lot of great talks. His interviews are great. You can just show that for 10 minutes or even show a 30 minute interview with Seth and then go deeper with that in class. So let's transition into the Zen part of your presentation Zen book. And here it is for those of you that are interested. So, you know, I know that Jobs himself was interested in Japan. Maybe you already had a love of Japan when you were working at Apple, as you explained earlier. Well, before that, no, back, yeah, back to high school. I mean, I grew up on New York. Well, our house was on the beach in Seaside, Oregon. And Japanese floats, these glass balls would sometimes wash up. I remember seeing them in San Francisco too, Gar. Yeah. But I mean, it's very rare. I mean, I think it happened twice in my whole life, but I always hoped that I would get a glass ball. Yeah. I mean, so anyway, I knew Japan was over there. It's the next country over. And so there was sort of a romantic, you know, mysterious, you know, how people are about Asia and the West. And so I always kind of had an interest in it. And we had a Coca-Cola bottle too. For some reason from the 60s, I said Coca-Cola in Katakana. And we had one in Kanji. I don't know what it said in Kanji. So I just, anyway, I was just sort of always interested. And then in high school, I studied Zen for the first time, or Buddhism in world religions. And now I was reading all the world religions. And I thought, well, this is, oh, Buddhism seems very practical. And it seems very, almost goes along with science. It's just very concrete and easy to understand. And it just resonated with me. And then in college, my undergraduate degree was in philosophy. And so I took more, you know, Eastern religion classes. Or Taoism and Hinduism and all that kind of stuff. So it just appealed to me. And then when I didn't get a chance to come to Japan until the JEP program in my 20s. I just fell in love with it and everything. I mean, no place is perfect, but I like it because it's completely different from where I came from. I mean, if I went to New Zealand and I love New Zealand and we may move there someday. I love New Zealand, but it's New Zealand is a lot like Oregon. I mean, it's beautiful and laid back and right. People speak English. So Japan looks in some ways, looks so much like the United States. I mean, you know, baseball is big and, you know, there's McDonald's everywhere and Starbucks everywhere. But, you know, it's not, and it's very difficult. The language is difficult. Communications can, you know, it seems easy on the surface, but it's actually more complicated than that. Business is complicated. Everything is more difficult. And so that's a challenge. You know, I could live here a million years and never understand it completely. And, you know, when I went to Apple, that's the other thing that I was sort of disappointed is that it was just too easy for me. Because I know how to do everything from, you know, using the bank to shopping. So everything here in Japan still is a challenge and you get used to that. And there's probably something in the literature about, you know, life for expats or people who wander and live in different countries. You get kind of, you get used to being an outsider and not fitting in and struggling with everything. Yeah, that's certainly an element of expat life. And some people hate that and they leave and others like you and I are long term people living abroad. But let's bring this back to the book though. I mean, your knowledge, your interest in Japan. How did you build that into the presentation Zen book and what principles did you think that you learned about in Japan that would apply to improving presentations? Well, you do make that a big part of your book. Oh, because Japan is such a visual country. And so the Zen arts such as Sado or tea ceremony or Ikebana or Sumie, a brush painting. It's a great analogy because those are arts that are, we think of as simple simplicity, but simple doesn't mean easy. It's actually very hard. And just like jazz music is looks, well, it's very accessible. I love that you might not be a musician at all, but you can appreciate that and you can understand its beauty. And it seems simple and accessible, but for that jazz musician, it took years and years or a lifetime of study. So it's actually difficult. So likewise, good presentation is like that just like good filmmaking or documentary filmmaking. It looks easy, but it's because that creative person put a lot of effort into it, a lot of thinking, a lot of intention and then has the skills and the experience to do it. And so I just studying different aspects of Zen arts, things like asymmetry. You can have balance through symmetrical balance or asymmetrical balance. And Japanese art is generally favors asymmetrical balance, something like Ikebana. Balance is still key, but you will find it just like you do in nature. It's more not symmetrical. So things like that and, you know, the console, the idea of simplicity and simplicity is achieved through the elimination of the unnecessary, right? So you're refusing to include what we don't need. So the use of space you talk about. Yeah, yeah, so you don't have to fill your presentation with images flashing and lots of text. You know, I remember the best example I can think of that is when maybe you remember this too when Google started and they still have it. Their main website is mostly 90%. And I looked at that and I went, holy crap, this company is completely different because at that time, especially you remember the early days of the web, right? The screens were like, they were offensive. They were everything was blinking. The idea was the more things you put on the screen, the more interesting it would be. And then Google came out and it was like the Zen response to all of this crap that was on so many screens. My company back then, Hewlett-Packett, you went to their websites. It was like, whoa, what's going on here? It gave you headache. Yeah, so just, you know, distraction is one of our biggest obstacles in life in general and it certainly was presentations. So I just say, always simplify, simplify, simplify. I'll always be asking yourself, what can I remove from this? And still be honest. Again, everything is in tension. I'm not removing things or omitting things to deceive, but I'm just trying to simplify in this moment. Right. Hey Gar, believe it or not, we're running up against it here. I'm getting the warning sign from Melissa, but I do want to ask you just very briefly. We're now living in the Zoom world. We're on Zoom right now. And people are giving presentations over Zoom, doing interviews over Zoom. What are your reflections or your thoughts about this world that we're in right now in terms of how to effectively present? Because probably the same issues are surfacing. Too much information or poorly designed presentations when you're talking. I would think my guess would be, and see if you agree that under Zoom, to make it simpler is even more important. Yeah. I mean, people are burnt out and this has really taught us a lot, the importance of being live in person. And of course, you know, learning when you want, of course, the internet is great and we've all used it. But there's nothing like being live. But anyway, so when we can't be live, yeah. So learning the skill how to make videos of yourself. For example, if I put myself kind of like the TV news over in one third and then leave two thirds empty where you can put in visuals. So not just doing things live, but also the ability to make good videos and then put them up for people to watch whenever. So there's all sorts of skills that, you know, that we're lacking in video, video shooting, you know, preparing videos, shooting the videos and editing the videos. It takes a long time. But it's worth it. These are important skills to have just like writing. You know, we take that for granted, even though a lot of people are not good at particularly good at writing either. It's something that takes a lot of work to become good at writing. And it's the same with speaking and presenting visually. So yeah, I'm really looking forward to going back live in class whenever that's going to be. All right, Garhey, thanks so much where we're out of time. Again, everyone here is a book presentation Zen, if you're interested in following up on some of the things we talked about this. Thanks so much, Gar, and maybe in the future six months from now or so we can talk about this video creation process and what you've discovered and so forth. So really appreciate it. Thank you all for tuning in to our guests and to the viewers. Thank you for the question that came in. We'll see you actually in the new year. We'll be the next looking to the East Show. Bye everyone. Thank you. All right.