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Episode #62: Garr Reynolds
167 Plays8 years ago
Welcome back to the PolicyViz Podcast! With my book on presentations about to launch, I’m very excited to talk with one of the authors who inspired my work in this area, Garr Reynolds. If you’ve ever thought carefully about how...
The post Episode #62: Garr Reynolds appeared first on PolicyViz.
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Transcript
Introduction and Sponsorship
00:00:00
Speaker
This episode of the PolicyViz podcast is brought to you by JUMP's Statistical Discovery Software from SAS. JUMP's powerful, easy-to-use visualization capabilities allow you to both explore your data for hidden insights and create interactive graphics that tell a compelling story. Enhance your presentations with dynamic graphics powered by world-class analytics in JUMP.
00:00:23
Speaker
Visit www.jmp.com to download a 30-day free trial to see for yourself how with JUMP, data visualization and exploratory analysis go hand in hand.
Shift in Topics and Guest Introduction
00:00:46
Speaker
Welcome back to the Policy Vis podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabisch. I'm going to take a little change this week on the show. We're going to move away from data and data visualization as we've been talking about the last few weeks. And this week, we're going to talk about presentation skills and presentation design, because I'm very excited to be joined this week by author, speaker, blogger, professor,
00:01:06
Speaker
Gar Reynolds. If you don't know Gar, he has written several great books on Presentation Zen, Presentation Zen Design, The Naked Presenter, and many other books, many of which have been written in Japan. And Gar joins me today from his home in Nara, Japan. Gar, welcome to the show. Thanks for coming. Thanks for having me. Let's get started. The school year, at least here in the US, has just kicked off. What are you up to these days?
00:01:31
Speaker
Yeah, well, our school year is different. It starts in April. But what I'm doing right now, besides staying home and taking my kids to their preschool, I have a book that'll be coming out in November or December on storytelling, and it has a DVD with it. So we just did the DVD, and now we're still in the midst of writing the book. But it won't be for English, so that'll be just in Nihongo, just in Japanese.
Gar Reynolds' Background and Zen Influence
00:01:56
Speaker
Right. And you are teaching in Kyoto now?
00:02:00
Speaker
Yeah, so I'm going back full-time as a professor of management and also communication design at the Kyoto University of Foreign Studies in April. So that's when our system starts. So we're actually from April. So now the regular school starts up again in September, but that's mid-term actually in September. Gotcha. Okay.
00:02:21
Speaker
Well, let's give folks who may not be familiar with your writing and your work, maybe you can talk a little bit about Presentation Zen, the philosophy behind your Zen design process.
00:02:32
Speaker
The key aspect of it is simplicity. I've always been into presentations starting with 35 millimeter slides way back before PowerPoint. I kept doing that. That's one of the reasons why I went to work for Apple was my interest in Steve Jobs and the way they did presentations, but also because I could do a lot of presentations inside Apple when I was working there and then also with customers.
00:02:57
Speaker
Around 2005, I started a website called Presentation Zen, presentationzen.com, where I just gave everything away, focusing on things, lessons from the Zen arts, from tea ceremony and sado, which is painting, calligraphy, ink painting. Japanese culture is quite deep and quite wide, and there's a lot of rather old arts with many lessons that we can take today and apply to different things.
00:03:25
Speaker
It wasn't a gimmick. I wasn't trying to make money out of it or anything. It was just lessons that I've gleaned over the years from living in Japan. I've lived here half my life. And I thought, well, you could apply a lot of these simplicity lessons to other things, including data visualization. And I found that the world of presentations, which meant PowerPoint, I mean, that's not a synonymous term, but a lot of people used slides, of course, and most of them were quite dreadful and didn't really help communication.
00:03:54
Speaker
And yeah I mean really awful and it still is that things are getting better and and of course the way to convince people is not to say that you know most presentations are terrible because they'll just say oh okay well then mine are terrible too no big deal instead you have to approach you must say things are getting better and people are not presenting that way anymore if
Design Teaching and Visual Literacy
00:04:12
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you want to be.
00:04:13
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effective, whether you're talking about policy or whatever it is, you cannot present like that. You can't use this crappy old Excel file. And there's a whole new world out there. And then people say, well, I don't want to be left behind. That's a much better approach.
00:04:28
Speaker
Anyway, so then that turned into a book. So the website became really popular just through luck, I think. And just by working on it, I mean, three or four days a week, I had new material that took a long time to research. And that became big, and then publishers will ask you to write a book. This was back in the day. So end of 2007, presentations then came out. Luckily, that became a bit successful, so that led to other things. Right.
00:04:53
Speaker
So let the presentations and design led to the naked presenter. I'm curious. I think presentations and design is one of my favorite design books for presentations. I'm curious when you work with people who may be in the business school or may not have a design background. How do you work with them to say you don't need to be a designer to create great design?
00:05:12
Speaker
Yeah, well the book was for non-designers, so my feeling is, and this is not a threat to people who actually are designers, but that we all need to up our game. I mean, learning how to write well. Everyone, every professional should know how to write well is not a threat to people who make a living as writers. Actual authors and actual journalists and writers.
00:05:32
Speaker
And the bar is pretty low. Well, it's for writing as well. But in terms of visual literacy, no one is winning if the general population kind of sucks at it. That's not a good thing. So we need it in our schools. So this is a whole other thing. But we didn't get it in school much, but we can learn to be better. And it's sort of like photography. You don't have to be a great photographer. You don't have to be a professional. But there are 10, 20 things you could learn, which are not about how to use the camera. That you could do in a workshop.
00:06:02
Speaker
But there are some things you can know that will really help you improve immediately. And then it's just a lifelong pursuit on thinking, well, this matters and I want to get better at it. But a lot of people waste time messing around with things like PowerPoint, rather than just taking the time to understand what is good visualization, what is good graphic design. And then what will happen is they'll learn that, well, actually, as a tool like PowerPoint, if I ignore 99% of the features, then that'll be good.
00:06:31
Speaker
People often ask me, what software did you use? It's not about the software and actually the tool that I use, which is I use Keynote for the final presentation, but I don't even Keynote. I probably use 2% of the tools.
Simplicity over Tools in Presentations
00:06:48
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It's not really about that. It's just a slide sorter.
00:06:50
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So most of good graphic design is just really thinking first, what do I need? What's important? How do I want to tell this story? And then how can I convey it in the simplest way without being dishonest, without hiding things, but putting it in a way that's simple and it's not easy to be simple. But it's not the software that makes something simple. It's your brain that figures things out first.
00:07:15
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I want to come back to the tools in a little bit. I want to see what sort of you're thinking about the new tools. But you mentioned a couple things that were really interesting. The first thing I want to ask you about is the process of creating. Are you the kind of person who starts by drawing and writing and hard copy and then moving into the computer? Are you designing in the computer and just starting there?
00:07:34
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No, so my whole thing has been, and you can have your own system, but my whole thing has been you should always turn off the computer, just get away from it. Of course, we use that for research and for getting some data or whatever, but the actual thinking about it is a very analog process. When I worked for Apple, I shouldn't have been surprised, but my office, for example, was all whiteboard, so whiteboard material for wallpaper, basically. That was true throughout the whole marketing communications department.
00:08:02
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and TV commercials and things like that or marketing plans or websites were all on whiteboard or all on paper that you could sort of stick as a magnetic whiteboard so you could stick a magnet. I mean, whole website, Apple.com would be on a big board or this section of Apple.com for a new product would be on the whiteboard or on pieces of paper up on the whiteboard. I mean, because a screen is small. Most, it's what?
00:08:26
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22-inch monitor or whatever. But if you can use the whole room or your whole desk for space, it just really opens things up. And also, of course, it allows for collaboration. You can more easily show people. I don't know. It could be my age because of where I grew up, but I just like... I'm on computer all the time, and as much as I can, I want to get away from it.
00:08:49
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Yeah. Being able to hold the piece of paper and the index cards or whatever it is that you use or post the notes or different pieces of paper, I think there's something about
Creative Process: Analog Methods
00:08:59
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that tactile feeling that, for me, helps the creative process. There's some research in this in Japan, too, why, for example, writing things, actually handwriting things, why is that a good thing? And it's something happening different in the brain than if you just learned Japanese, let's say, or English, and you never actually wrote things, but you just typed everything.
00:09:18
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And you could learn the ABCs and you could learn how to write doing that. Fine, of course. But there's something different going on. And there's a lot of people like Dan Rome and, ah, forget the woman's name, but doodling. So there's a lot of work now in books talking about doodling and how important that is. And that's a very analog thing. And maybe it's because, you know, I don't know how long Homo sapiens have been around, but let's say it's a minimum of 100,000. It's probably longer. But, you know, we're doodling. We're showing, you know, drawing pictures of things.
00:09:45
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Even when we're grunting, I guess, and still using sticks to draw. And we've been doing that long before the typewriter. And long before we knew how to really write. Evolutionarily speaking, we haven't been writing very long at all. But I think we've been explaining things obviously through story and also through sketching things out.
00:10:08
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You also mentioned earlier this, this idea of, or sort of mentioned that we don't teach certain things about communication or about design in
Statistics Education Importance
00:10:16
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school and younger school. If you were the secretary of education or the czar of education, would you change the curriculum? Would you add things about data about communication? Like what would you, what would you change about data? Yes. I mean, I think what's useful, I don't know how useful some of the math that I had, but, um, I mean, I still, I still haven't used algebra. I mean, I would have.
00:10:38
Speaker
I mean, if I went on to study physics, my brother has a physics degree, so he went on and studied a lot more than algebra. But what is very useful and I wish I had, you know, deeper grounding and didn't struggle with so much in graduate school is statistics and understanding statistics. And you don't have to get too deep for the average high school student, but they should understand it so that now you have people who really don't know what they're talking about saying that, well, you can't trust statistics.
00:11:01
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or you can make statistics say anything, which actually is true, but they still don't know why that is. And I think it'd be very useful for a democracy to have people that could look at data and understand why it's bogus or why it's incomplete or why it could mean this, but it's not convincing. But we don't. We just say, nah, global warming is a hoax because it's snowed in Minnesota.
00:11:25
Speaker
Right. There's data for you. Yeah, there's data. There's data for that. Right. Yeah. Well, the original question was, so I think there needs to be more on visual literacy. I think George Lucas and Martin Scorsese have talked about this. Kids should learn. It's not just how to use a tool, how to make a movie. Everyone has a smartphone. So every even high school kid who has the means probably has a smartphone, certainly a college kid does.
00:11:49
Speaker
And so the excuse of, well, we don't have cameras. We don't have good video cameras. Every kid has a better video camera than that some big $3,000 Sony I had 15 years ago. So everyone's got the tools. And you could have kids, for example, do actual short movies and then learn storytelling techniques and also editing techniques, how to make good video, which would be very useful for them. I think making good video, mostly video isn't good, but making a good short movie
00:12:17
Speaker
is very valuable, just as valuable as knowing how to write a report. So let's talk about stories because you'd mentioned that writing is a learned skill, presenting is a learned skill, design is a learned skill. What about stories? Is telling stories a learned skill or is it sort of innate and then we sort of can develop that skill?
00:12:33
Speaker
I think it's a little bit like Ken Robinson says about creativity. We're all very creative and born creative, but we've been educated out of our creativity. So storytelling is funny that way because it is innate to all of us. I mean, that's how we have evolved through telling stories. Every kid, you have children,
Storytelling and Creativity in Education
00:12:53
Speaker
so you know they're good at telling stories. Well, at least it's narrative. It lacks sometimes some conflict and some obstacles and a clear goal. But anyway, it's narrative.
00:13:03
Speaker
But it is natural to us and we're natural inclined to it for good or for bad. So we're actually also naturally inclined to believe nonsense. I mean, we will take our nonsense explanation over no explanation, which probably explains, you know, a lot of thousands of years of our, of our evolution because, you know, when we're very superstitious because even, even a bad explanation is better than no explanation. So we come up with supernatural explanation.
00:13:29
Speaker
So storytelling is innate in us and we're receptive to it. But to learn how to tell a good story is, yeah, I think something that takes time and takes some education, just like writing. I mean, if we learn the ABCs and we learn some basic sentences, we can write. But learning how to write well, it just takes practice and it takes teachers and practice. A lot of questions that I get
00:13:54
Speaker
when it comes to presentation is what does it mean to tell a story? And I sort of try to walk people through that stories don't have to be some involved complex thing, that it can be the story of why the data is interesting or a story about why you got interested in the research or in the project. Do you get pushback, especially when you're working with people who are in the business or the marketing or advertising sectors, do they push back on what does a story mean when I'm standing in front of an audience?
00:14:23
Speaker
Yeah, it could be. I mean, years ago, it was more. But I think now people hear about storytelling, story this, story that, like, hmm, OK, I'm missing something. I want to be honest. And they're finding that it's a differentiator. Everyone's got the data. So how can I present it in a compelling way? So what is story? Well, there's scores of books written on what is story. But at its essence, I think a story is it makes the audience care, whatever that audience is. You've got to make them care that what you're saying is important for them.
00:14:53
Speaker
So there's a lot of empathy is involved for the storyteller to think about what is important to this audience. What is their pain? How might they resist? So if you show that you've anticipated that how they would resist like I, you know, there's again, there's a lot of research on this how and you probably know this already is that just arguing with people or showing them data that shows that they're wrong does not convince them.
00:15:14
Speaker
So how do you convince people that they're just not going to be convinced? And there is some success if you can show that you've done the research that you understand their pain, you understand where they're coming from. You know, the old one is, well, in fact, I used to think the way you do and I understand why you do. I mean, it does make sense.
00:15:31
Speaker
And so, I mean, we used to think that, you know, the sun evolved around the earth. I mean, Aristotle thought that. It makes sense. Look, the sun, look, it just goes over there. So I understand. Right. It's completely, I mean, not today's world, but let's say, I don't know, two, three, four or 500 years ago. I understand. Don't kill me. Don't put me on trial. It makes sense why you would think that. But I've got some new information. Yeah.
00:15:55
Speaker
So i think having empathy for everything to is one that you really thought about the audience and you really know the audience and then on the day that you're actually presenting that you show your empathetic to their point of view even if you think your point of view is completely nonsense.
00:16:09
Speaker
And right now, the political stuff is happening in the States. And it's sometimes hard to remember that even on the other extreme side, they are people. They are just people. And I know at the very extreme, there's some Looney Tunes. But most people are not really Looney Tunes. And you have to just have empathy for them. Even though I know it's hard, but we have a lot more income and then we have not in common.
00:16:34
Speaker
Yeah, that's a great point. I want to turn to tools in a second, but I did want to ask one other question
Handling Presentation Nerves
00:16:39
Speaker
about when you present. You've been doing this a long time. You've given a bunch of TED talks. You're a professor. When you're given a big keynote or even a small talk, do you still get nervous? Well, more nervous than sitting in my underwear watching cartoons. Well, I assume you're wearing pants when you're giving presentations. Rarely, which is why I'm usually comfortable.
00:17:04
Speaker
When I have been nervous in the past, it's because I wasn't prepared. If you're prepared, then you're just not nervous. The bigger the audience, the better. I've been in 5,000 or so at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas and didn't feel a bit nervous at all, except I prepared a lot for it. I thought I would be nervous. I think for the first time, and it wasn't that long ago, maybe 10 years ago, in Washington, in DC, at the Gaylord Hotel, something like that.
00:17:33
Speaker
Yeah, something like that. And I was the keynote. And I knew it was a big thing, but I still had never actually been and I presented a lot, but not that like 2000 people and it had the big stage with the confidence monitors and like spotlights. And I went the day before for the rehearsal. And I remember my first instance, I mean, I was nervous like, oh, crap.
00:17:52
Speaker
No, I didn't. I mean, I know I'm kind of a presentation Zen guy and I sold a lot of books and I coach people, but I actually had never been on a stage like that. I didn't even think that way. I wasn't interested in that. And so I was nervous at that point. But when I actually did it, I wasn't nervous at all. I was one of the best experiences I had because I had like top 10 things and I only could do seven because you never finish or you never go over time.
00:18:15
Speaker
And then I said, well, I've got three more, but I'm, you know, being a great audience, I got to leave. And they loved it. And they asked me back, said, no, they were like more and more and more. They're like encores. So because there's three more things. Yeah. Well, that's another thing about storytelling. That is a kind of storytelling, which is why you have, you know, top 40, the top 100, whatever the top 10 Countdown on Tuesday, because we want to know, even though you don't care, it's like, oh, damn it, what's going to be the number one song of 1980?
00:18:40
Speaker
Who cares? I've listened through this, now I'm to number five, and I've got to see if Duran Duran is there. I've got to get to the end. It's a weird thing. I forget the book. There's a book on storytelling and video. It's called The Millionaire, something millionaire, how to be a millionaire, millionaire iPhone, something. Anyway, it's a pretty good book in spite of the title, but he talked about that a little bit. That's a common technique because that kind of list of top whatever countdown
00:19:08
Speaker
It's compelling. David Letterman made a living off of that. Even though most of the jokes were disappointing and lame, it's like, well, maybe this one won't be. There's something about accounting. Anyway, so what was the question I forgot? Oh, have I been nervous? I think the thing is, everyone would be a little bit nervous. Not nervous, but amped up just a little bit.
00:19:33
Speaker
But no, the only time, and I was thinking, I can't say the name of clients, but it was a huge one. So I flew over to New York to do the head office in downtown New York, and it was probably like the most, like what would be the worst kind of company you would want to present for? And I did that. And it was great. It was 300 analysts, and it wasn't at all what I thought it would be like. So I thought, well, if I can do that, if I can live through that. And it wasn't bad. I've never had a bad experience. Sometimes you get pushback.
00:20:02
Speaker
But it's never personal, so I don't really care. I disagree with your ideas, but everyone can disagree and that's okay. Yeah, I had a friend, I probably shouldn't say his name, he was a very famous guy and he was presenting for a big company in Paris. So they flew him over there, he's written a bunch of New York Times bestsellers. So he did his thing, blah, blah, blah, title of the book. And then the CEO comes up and says, you know, I disagree with everything you said.
00:20:30
Speaker
And I asked him, what did you do? And he goes, nothing. They paid me. So what do I care? I mean, that's what you're going to do.
00:20:39
Speaker
So, I never had anything that bad. All right. So, we talked a little bit about tools. I know you're a keynote guy. Well, I'm not a keynote guy because if you've read my books, you know, I don't care.
Agnostic View on Presentation Software
00:20:50
Speaker
I'm agnostic or an atheist. Do you have any thoughts? So, there's kind of a whole new slate of tools out there. There's Prezi and there's Zoho and there's all these sorts of tools and then
00:21:03
Speaker
the new powerpoint the subscription service now has powerpoint zoom and there's microsoft sway have you. You know you have thoughts on all these different tools or do you just are you still agnostic about all of them say. Yeah i'm pretty agnostic so i just still use keynote because that does everything i needed to do i don't you know i need.
00:21:23
Speaker
Okay, so I don't talk about prezi because I a whatever you can make work fine I think something like a prezi and there's some other softwares that copy what what that does actually I could fake you out almost using keynote and make it seem like it was present
00:21:36
Speaker
But unless you're talking about architecture or like some mapping, maybe if you're talking about the cholera outbreak in London, we zoom in and out to different neighborhoods that might work. But usually I just find that a superfluous technique and technique is not what we're about.
00:21:54
Speaker
Why don't movies use that I mean cinema hasn't the basics of cinema in spite of the great technology we have hasn't really changed. I mean you could use and there are thousands of transitions between scenes that you could use and yet not almost none of them are ever used it's always no transition you know just a cut.
00:22:14
Speaker
Fade the black and crossfade. That's it. And you notice when something's different, like Star Wars, of course, he is famous for the wipe. The wipe. And you know that's different. That's a kind of Akita Kudasawa thing, I think.
00:22:29
Speaker
So, I mean, look, we could have millions of transitions, but no one uses them because it doesn't really, doesn't help the story. It doesn't help the narrative. So if you can use Prezi because you think that really helps the story or it helps the audience understand. If so, then God bless you and go for it. But I just find that it just usually doesn't.
00:22:47
Speaker
I mean, my students, college students will use it. It's free. That's a good thing. Okay, it's free. You can use a free version fine. But it doesn't really, it's never helped the actual presentation that I've seen. I know that online you can see a good examples where they're using spatial areas, usually done by professional designers. And it's really good. But you know, like when I show a video, I don't want it to start as a little video that pops up and
00:23:10
Speaker
I don't want them to wear it. If you're watching the BBC or you're watching something that's well done, even on television, it's not a little video that pops up into a slightly larger video. The video would just play. It would just begin to play. I don't know. It just seems the slide word that we have is even PowerPoint. As I said, if you ignore most of it, it's pretty solid. I guess if you could make a movie, making movies, making short film,
00:23:38
Speaker
that you could embed in different places, different media. I think that's important. Yeah, being able to sort of seamlessly go between a slide and a video, I think is one thing I've seen that mostly PowerPoint user were PowerPoint and Keynote as well. They've gotten more powerful over time so that now they're not as clunky. They move seamlessly. They don't crash at least across my fingers. They don't crash as much.
00:24:01
Speaker
Yeah, well the advantage of something like Prezi is that, you know, you say it's non-linear. And storytelling can be non-linear too. But what they mean is you can go back and forth. So if someone has a question about something that happened, he can go back and do that. But in a teaching situation, at least in university, I don't, when I'm, you call it teaching, I guess, I try to have students do most of the talking. But we're using whiteboards and we're talking. And we're, you know, we're looking at data somewhat, but I don't really need to
00:24:28
Speaker
I'm not really focused on the screen anyway. So presentations that students do are quite short, 10, 15 minutes. Then after, during Q&A, maybe, could I see that video again? That's not a big deal. You don't really need Prezi to do that.
00:24:43
Speaker
I'm not against Prezi, so I'm not dissing it. I understand if the tool does what you need it to do. If it helps, that's what it's always about. But people talk about Prezi. I think if it's a good presentation, they have no idea what tool you used. You don't go to a great film. When I saw Star Wars Episode 7, I was like, oh, man, look at that final cut. You know what? That's an Adobe After Effects. Cool. You don't care. And if you knew, then something's wrong.
00:25:10
Speaker
And I've just never been able to see Prezi that I didn't know. That's Prezi. And I don't want to know. Or I don't want to know it's PowerPoint. I shouldn't be thinking about that. I should just be looking at the presenter. And then there's some visuals there, fine. Right. OK, I want to close up. But you've mentioned Star Wars a couple of times. I know you're a big Star Wars fan. So we've got a lot of Star Wars ground to cover. So Force Awakens, number seven, big fan.
00:25:38
Speaker
Well, yeah, it was pretty much like episode four, which is what everyone thought. That's what I thought when I was watching. But I don't care because that's what I wanted. So it was a kind of a, you know, the prequels were a disaster. I know, I mean, there's been many documentaries on this. And but it more as time goes by, I mean, I actually like the stories are okay. And I have to we have to watch them. But it's just amazing how the visuals just I mean, how badly, how bad they got within like,
00:26:05
Speaker
You know, six months after the release, like that looks lame because it looked lame right from the beginning. On the other hand, my son and I, he's only four, but we have Jurassic Park on Hulu. The first one, which is 20 years now. And that is so believable. It's like, it's not, it's yeah. I don't know how they made those dinosaurs do that, but I guess it wasn't a lot of too much CG because it's, wow, it just, it just works.
00:26:28
Speaker
Yeah. Now your son still a little young for, for Star Wars. So, uh, so let's say he's ready by the time episode nine is out. So are you, how are you, how are you going to handle that? So I'll tell you my son, uh, you know, he's, he's now seven. He's, he's old enough. He's seen all seven, but we started with episode four. We did four, five, six, then we did one, two, three, and then we did seven. So now if you have all nine, where are you going to, how are you going to start?
00:26:54
Speaker
The order, I don't know, but I think you could start at the beginning, but there's a continuity problem just in terms of, wow, why does the newer one... I guess that makes sense because you go, well, that's episode one. That's why it looks kind of lame. And then episode four, they had better technology.
00:27:10
Speaker
So yeah, I mean, I just like was I love four or five and six. I think a lot of its nostalgia to maybe for the I remember in the theater, I remember episode five. And those were the days before long before anyone even had the interwebs. So I mean, we were shocked.
00:27:27
Speaker
when you know no i am your father i mean i was friggin shocking if you want to see it again you had to go back the next day yeah and just look it up on youtube yeah right right there no spoiler alerts that because it's like yeah you know yeah so are you on board with a sort of new split two so we have the we have the sequence and we have these rogue one coming out the end of the year and a few more after that i guess.
00:27:52
Speaker
Yeah, it's fine. You know, I'm just very thankful for that. So it's all good. Yeah, it's all right. I'm just thankful for what you have. So we have four or five and six and seven is okay. And I'm looking for better ones in the future. But yeah, I don't, you know, it's fine.
Concluding Thoughts on Simplicity
00:28:09
Speaker
Yeah. Gar, this has been great. Thanks so much for coming on the show. It's been a pleasure talking with you.
00:28:14
Speaker
Well, I apologize if there's nothing here for your listeners to glean, take away with them, but just keep it simple. It's hard to be simple. People are afraid to be simple, but if there's anything that the Japanese arts have taught me is that to be simple is really hard and takes years and years of training, but it takes some courage too because
00:28:38
Speaker
You know, anyone can be complicated and it's quite easy to confuse people, but the problem is if you're simple, you've done the hard work, people might actually understand what you're talking about. And if they understand it, then they'll have questions for you. So if you're okay with that.
00:28:52
Speaker
Then simplicity is the way to go. I think that's a great place sentiment to stop for this week. So again, thanks for coming on the show. It's been great. All right. Thanks very much. And thanks everyone out there for listening. I appreciate you tuning into this week's episode. So until next week, this has been the Policy Viz Podcast.
00:29:23
Speaker
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00:29:40
Speaker
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