How to Captivate an Audience

The book Freakonomics came out 20 years ago. Before we even started to write the book, there was already something that gave me a sense of dread: the media tour that I’d have to do when the book was released. I was a professor, and I was quite comfortable giving a 90-minute lecture, but going on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart or Good Morning America, that was something completely different. I was terrified, and so were the folks at HarperCollins who were publishing our book. They rightly sensed that I had no idea how to talk to the media, and they knew if I did a terrible job, the book would flop. So they brought in their secret weapon, Bill McGowan.

MCGOWAN: Who doesn’t want to step off a podium and have people say, “Wow, that was incredible.”?

Welcome to People I (Mostly) Admire, with Steve Levitt.

*      *      *

 Bill McGowan is an Emmy-winning journalist and an expert on public speaking who’s worked with an incredible list of clients, including Kim Kardashian, Jeff Bezos, Alex Rodriguez, and Sheryl Sandberg. Still, I was resistant to meeting with him. I thought he’d bore me with clichéd advice, but, boy, was I wrong. In a few hours, he gave me a whole new way of understanding how I could much more effectively communicate. When I heard he had a new book out called Speak, Memorably: The Art of Captivating an Audience, I knew I had to get him on this show to share his insights with you, the listeners. I talked with Bill a day or two after I attended my son’s college graduation. And I started our conversation by telling him about my experience listening to many good speakers and many bad speakers at the graduation ceremony.

LEVITT: And the crazy thing was I actually enjoyed the bad speeches more than the good ones. And the reason was I had just finished your new book, which had me listening to the speakers through the lens of all the advice and insights you have in the book. I was mesmerized!

MCGOWAN: So did you find that a lot of the things they did that weren’t working for you were things that were identified in the book?

LEVITT: Oh, absolutely. I mean, If only he had told a story right there. And one of the most obvious ones, How could the speaker think it was a good idea to repeat his name and all of his academic credentials at the start of his speech right after the person introducing him did the exact same thing?

MCGOWAN: It’s the double intro.

LEVITT: Yeah, exactly. So I read your book in the hope that it would help me be a better speaker, and it was completely unexpected that it would also make it more fun to sit through bad speeches, and that might be an even bigger gift than the gift of learning how to speak better.

MCGOWAN: That may be one of the best compliments I’ve ever gotten. Sitting through other people’s presentations can be like the bane of our existence. But, when you’re in the audience, you can on a tablet or on an actual pad just make two columns on the page, the left column is old and tired and clichéd, and the right column is new, interesting, fresh. Everything that the speaker does that you’ve heard a million times, obviously you put in the left column, but there’s also an opportunity to see what other people are doing that you’ve never heard before, and jot that down. If it fits stylistically with how you go about speaking or presenting, see if you can borrow that technique and work it into the next one you do.

LEVITT: So I don’t even know if you remember that I was one of those (BM^Mm hmm) clients, with the dread, 20 years ago. Do you remember the time we sat down? 

MCGOWAN: Of course! With you and Stephen. 

LEVITT: This was right before Freakonomics was released. And you asked us a really simple question. You said, “So what’s Freakonomics about?” I think I bumbled around and I said some terrible thing. And then Dubner bumbled around and he said something as bad as mine. And you said, “Oh, it’s interesting ’cause I thought Freakonomics was this.” We both looked at each other and said, “Yeah, actually that is what Freakonomics is!” And so what you ended up doing was you showed us that we did not know what we were doing instead of telling us. I was not even told that we were going to go meet with you. I was just there in New York for a day with the publicist. And if they had told me, “Oh, there’s a speaking coach who’s going to tell you to speak,” I think I would’ve done everything to get out of it. ‘Cause I was both terrified of talking to the media, and I was pretty sure I was good at it ’cause I had done a lot of teaching. I’d been in front of a crowd. And it was only by being completely Shanghaied and dragged into this meeting. But literally you won me over with that first question. I said, “Okay. As much as I’m going to hate this. I think it’s good for me.”

MCGOWAN: The thing you just touched on right there is not the run-of-the-mill, paint-by-numbers coaching guidance, which is, Here’s how you use your voice, here’s how you hold your hands, here’s how you stand. What I place a lot more emphasis on is the content creation. And that’s what really is behind this book, or at least a good part of this book is, How do you create your content in a way that doesn’t sound like everybody else that’s a bit distinctive so people can remember what you say? And when people remember what you say, you have a greater chance to motivate them, inspire them, persuade them, all the things that we hope we accomplish in communication. 

LEVITT: I suspect most people fall into one of two groups. The first group are so terrified of public speaking that the idea of actually working constructively to get better at it is overwhelming. And then there’s this second group that thinks, Well, I’m already pretty good at public speaking. I don’t need your help. How do you overcome that hurdle as you begin to work with your clients? How do you convince them that time with you is well spent?

MCGOWAN: We do face the person who sits across from you, they’ve been dragged to this session probably by their head of comms. They think they’re the bee’s knees with public speaking, and they sit back in the chair, arms folded, and they give you that look like, Okay, bucko, dazzle me. And I usually start off by letting them know every professional has a coach. The top tennis players in the world never get rid of their coach. Tiger Woods, the majority of his career, had a swing coach. 

LEVITT: My graduate students often ask me for advice when they’re going out and looking for jobs. And I tell them there is one single thing that is more important than anything else. And every student is shocked when they hear what it is. And I mention it now, because I stole it from you!

MCGOWAN: Okay. Let me see if I can guess. Is it storytelling?

LEVITT: It is not, in part because storytelling is completely verboten in academic economics. So I don’t tell ’em to tell stories. Something else you told me to do.

MCGOWAN: Is it displaying an eagerness for the work?

LEVITT: It’s just to smile and be friendly.

MCGOWAN: It’s related to that, yeah.

LEVITT: It’s such a foreign concept to academics because everyone is just grim all the time, and there’s this view that it is the scholarship that matters and nothing else matters. And the students have been brainwashed into believing that. And my students are shocked that being liked is central to being hired.

MCGOWAN: It’s interesting because likability, and there’s a chapter in the book about it, it definitely makes people more receptive to listening to you. In fact, in those first seven seconds, they’re deciding, Are you friend or foe? And ultimately I tell people that we coach, you got to lead by example. You have to look as though you find this material that you’re presenting — that you think it’s fascinating, that you think it’s important, or you think that it’s urgent. If you don’t, your audience is not going to go along with you. How many times, Steve, have you seen a presentation or a speech where somebody has gotten up and they’ve said, “I’m so excited to be here. It’s such an exciting time for this company, and a lot of exciting things ahead.” Oh my God. That word has been used to the point where it’s now threadbare. And usually the person is saying this with an absolute stone-cold facial expression. So I try to get people to stay away from that as well.

LEVITT: This graduation I went to (BM^Mm hmm) was a fantastic example of that because the Dean of the Law School and the Dean of the Business School and the Dean of the Divinity School all have to get up and literally say the exact same speech. How the students in their college have fulfilled all of the requirements in order to get a doctor of philosophy or a master’s of arts or whatever. So in the course of 10 or 15 minutes, I think it was eight or nine speakers who got up and said the exact same thing. And because I just read your book, I was hypersensitive to the way they did it, and the difference — it was a controlled experiment in a way ’cause everybody had to say the same thing. And some of them said it with enthusiasm and a sort of smile in their voice and others, it was really, really awful. It was a great way to drive home the lesson that what you’re calling enthusiasm or engagement with the material makes a huge difference. And you could see it even in the few sentences these speakers were giving.

MCGOWAN: It really does, and I would wager a guess that some of those people who in the front of their mind realized, Oh my God, this audience just heard this two minutes ago. Probably undersold it, raced through it in almost an apologetic way. There’s nothing new here, and I just have to get through this. And that is a trap many people fall into in public speaking. This lack of confidence can make you just blow through whatever it is you have to say because there is this attitude like, They’re bored. Just be merciful and get this over fast. It is important to read a room. But I often think, Try not to overread the room. There are going to be lots of people in your audience who are giving you that incredibly bored resting bored face. And you can’t let it affect you because lots of people inside may be really engaged and hanging on your every word, but they’re not displaying it on their face. So I often tell people, try to find in any audience, four people in each quadrant of the room who are encouraging, smiling, nodding listeners, and just play to those four people. If a big crowd intimidates you, you’ve now shrunk the room to just you and four people, and those people are going to boost your confidence through whatever it is you have to present. I know that if I catch the eye of somebody in the audience and their head is buried in their phone, that throws me, that’s a confidence killer ’cause you do feed off the energy in the room. And inevitably there’s going to be somebody there who’s sending the wrong vibe to you, and you have to just make sure that you don’t get obsessed with that person not paying attention to you. I remember a presentation I had to give at a company not too long ago, and I was happy to see just about everybody was engaged, but there was one guy in the back of the room who really looked out of it. But he was the guy who came up at the end and said, “I found what you were saying really interesting, and I just had another question for you on that,” and it made me realize how dangerous it is to overread the room.

We’ll be right back with more of my conversation with public speaking coach Bill McGowan after this short break.

*      *      *

LEVITT: I want to tell you a story about an experience I just had at a conference. I was on a panel about the future of education. And the two other panelists were Walter Parkes — so he was the producer of the Men in Black movies and Gladiator and many other movies. So, obviously an amazing storyteller. And then John Williams, who produced Shrek. So here I was with these two Hollywood guys and the second question that was asked to me, I could either do the straight academic data-driven thing or I could tell a story. And so I decided to tell a story, and much to my amazement, the audience, which had been completely reserved up to this point, they started clapping at the end of the story. And then what was even more amazing is that Walter Parkes, when he next spoke, instead of answering the question directed to him, he said, “I just want to pause for a second because I’ve got this amazing data analyst sitting next to me. But did you see how he just chose to answer the question with a story? And his story was the most concise and memorable way that he possibly could have made his point. This is the power of storytelling, and it’s why we need more and better storytelling in education.” I kept a straight face, but I was thinking, My God, that is roughly the best moment I’ve ever had on stage in my entire life.

MCGOWAN: Everybody in that audience is going to remember that story long after they would have retained whatever data, analytically driven answer you could have given. That’s the absolute goal of communication, to have what you say really stick with people. Every single day in companies all over the world, there are golden opportunities for people to have what they say be remembered. And those opportunities are being squandered because people speak in a very bland, predictable, empty-calorie kind of way. And it just seems to me that if those opportunities were seized upon, collaborative teams would do much better. Effective communication increases team productivity by about 25 percent. So, the point I’m really trying to stress in this book is, it’s not just a nice quality to have to be a good communicator. It’s a business imperative because you get better outcomes when people communicate in a clear and memorable way.

LEVITT: Is it fair to say that you think public speakers as a whole don’t rely enough on stories?

MCGOWAN: For all that’s been written on the importance of storytelling, it shocks me that more people almost think of it as a foreign concept. It’s one of the most important things when giving a speech or giving a presentation. I often feel that we’re very visual creatures. I think there’s a movie reel spinning in the heads of your audience, and it’s constantly looking for images that you are providing them that can fill that reel. And if you don’t supply imagery that can help that projector in the brain, your audience is going to fill it with something and that’s daydreaming. They’re now going to provide their own imagery that will spool through that reel. And that’s usually a surefire way of losing people. There are two ways of speaking: there’s abstract and theoretical, and then there’s visual-specific and anecdotal. And I think that the best speakers have a really nice combination of those two things. There’s a chapter in the book called “The Coppola Storytelling Formula.” It’s based on this interview I saw with Francis Ford Coppola where somebody asked him, “Do you have a formula for making a movie?” And he said, “Well, I learned from the masters in Hollywood years ago that you should identify your three best things and you should take your best thing and finish the movie with it. You should take your second best thing and lead with it in the first scene, and then find some logical thematic place in the middle for the third.” And I thought, Okay, that’s about movie making. But movie making’s storytelling. Giving a presentation is storytelling.

LEVITT: Again, sitting in this graduation, I could not believe how terrible the first 30 seconds were of every single speech. In part because they’re at a graduation, they had to thank a million people and whatnot. 

MCGOWAN: A lot of people throw away those first 40 seconds. The absolute enemy of engagement is the dreaded agenda slide where people do all this talking about what we’re going to talk about, and that is not a great way to hook an audience. That’s the place where a story can really work, as long as the story metaphorically is connected to the theme of what you’re talking about. 

LEVITT: You give an example in the book of a TED talk that Geoffrey Canada of the Harlem Children’s Zone gave, could you talk through that? Because I thought it was such a fantastic example of how one takes a little bit of risk at the beginning of a talk, but in a way that you feel like it’s really going to pay off for him. And I think for him it really did.

MCGOWAN: It’s one of my favorite clips. Geoffrey Canada is an education advocate and his whole life has been dedicated to making sure that underrepresented kids have the same educational opportunities that other kids have. And so here he is as an African American man, he is standing up at a TED Talk, and you can see in the background the majority of the audience is white. And he starts off with a little self-deprecation. That is a device you have to wield in moderation. I’ve seen people go too far and undermine themselves, but a little bit goes a long way. So he starts out by saying, “I’m a little nervous because my wife, Yvonne, said to me, ‘Geoff, you watch the TED Talks, right?'” And he says, “Yes, honey, I love the TED Talks.” And she goes, “They’re like really smart, talented—” He goes, “I know.” And he pauses and he says that his wife told him, “Cause they don’t want, like, the angry Black man.” And so of course the audience erupts in laughter. And he says, “No, honey, I’m going to be good. I’m going to be good, but I am angry.” And of course they erupt in laughter again. And he says, “And the last time I looked—” and he looks down at his arm. So they’re clapping and now comes the turn. And he says, “This year, millions of our children we’re going to needlessly lose.” And it’s textbook good because he gets a little laugh in the beginning, not from some random joke. In fact, don’t listen to anybody who tells you to start off with a joke. That’s about as bad as telling somebody to picture the audience in their underwear. But you’re seeing something through a funny lens, a humorous lens. And here he’s giving the audience a little opportunity to be a fly on the wall with the conversation between him and his wife. And he’s intimating in the story that his wife is a little bit smarter than he is, and she’s warning him to behave. But the thread is this idea of him being angry. It’s the punchline of the joke of the humorous open, but then it becomes his theme. He’s incredulous over the fact that all of these children are going to be left by the wayside and what he does in the transition from humorous to gravitas is he slows his voice down tremendously. He completely disrupts the pacing of his voice, which further signals we got a mood change happening here. This is the lens through which I want you to see what I’m about to tell you.

LEVITT: Everything we know from psychology tells you that the first 30 seconds matter a lot. And yet, invariably, somehow we live in a world in which the speaking conventions are such that everybody clears their throat for the first 30 seconds. They thank a bunch of people or they talk about the weather or they put up their agenda slide. Why do you think that kind of nonsense has turned out to be so sticky?

MCGOWAN: Probably because people’s anxiety and nerves are at their height in those first 40 seconds. This is what I call in the book, “the presentation chasm.” And there’s this big gaping hole that exists in those first 40 seconds between the pleasantries: Hi, everybody. Great to be here today. It’s wonderful to see so many of you. And the presentation. There’s about a 30-second gap there that has to be filled, and most people mistakenly leave that to just winging it, saying whatever the first thing that pops into their head is. And inevitably that makes it necessary for them at some point to say, “Alright, so, um, I guess let’s get started.” Those words should never come out of anybody’s mouth. And in fact, when I do a presentation to a group of people, what I often spend the most time on is stitching together and figuring out what the rungs of the ladder are between saying good morning to people and the contents of slide one. Because that’s when the audience is making the keenest value judgements about you and you don’t want to mess that up.

LEVITT: One thing in your book that was interesting is you should take advantage of every strategic opportunity you have to figure out how to make a speech a success. There are obvious things, like, you go to the room, you understand the space. When I gave a TED Talk, I had never been under stage lights before. And so when I walked on the stage for the live thing, I couldn’t see anything. I was completely blinded. I was literally like the figurative deer in the headlights, and it was because of bad preparation. But one little thing you said that I kicked myself and said, “My God, I can’t believe I’ve never done that.” You said if it’s a big enough event to have someone who’s managing the soundboard, you should just learn the name of the guy or the woman ahead of time. So if something goes wrong, you can call and say, “Hey, Benjamin, this is going wrong. I need your help.” Instead of staggering around. A lot of times people don’t realize that there’s room for strategy not just in the words they’re going to say, but in the circumstances surrounding the words they’re going to say.

MCGOWAN: A lot of times I hear people observing other speakers and say, “Wow, she’s so smooth,” and, “It doesn’t seem like anything rattles her.” And it’s very gratifying to me to be able to say, “There are techniques and insights she has that allows her to be calm, cool, and collected. And it may be that ability to not sound panicked as you just said, and instead call out the name of the A.V. person and say, “Hey, I think the clicker may need to do some new batteries. Can you throw me up a new one?” Instead of, “I got a problem here.”

LEVITT: In your book you talk about that and you use the tagline, “familiarity breeds comfort,” which I thought was awesome. ‘Cause it’s very sticky, right? It’s a play on, Familiarity breeds contempt. And then you say comfort. All of a sudden it makes me pause and stop and say, “Oh yeah, that’s good. I got to remember that one. I’m going to steal that one from Bill in 20 years like I stole the other stuff from him before.”

MCGOWAN: If you think about it, Steve, it’s very much the principles of comedy where you get in a joke or a story, brought down this road and you are fully expecting a certain payoff, and the payoff is completely different. And in the book, that device I call a “twisted cliche,” and it’s one of the “magnificent seven.” There’s a chapter on the seven devices that can help you create more memorable content.

LEVITT: Okay, let me tell you a story about one of the most impressive speeches that I’ve ever witnessed. This was back when I was a graduate student at M.I.T. There was a young professor named John Gruber. He had been there just a few years. And so this was a very high-stakes presentation for him. It was to a big group of faculty and students, and this was before PowerPoint when we would use overhead projectors. So you’d walk into the room with a stack of acetates or transparencies that you’d then put on the slide projector and that would be projected onto a screen. So it’s quite chaotic in this big lecture room before the talk starts because a professor’s just finishing teaching a class and so all the students are filing out, and all the faculty are going to listen to John Gruber are coming in. And I can see John is visibly nervous and agitated, and so eventually dashes off to the restroom. So when he returns, I see him go from nervousness to complete panic because he’s looking around and he says, “My slides are gone. They’ve disappeared.” So while he was in the bathroom, that professor who had been teaching the class before him had scooped up all of the slides that were on the table and taken all of John’s slides with him, and now he was gone. Okay. So there was some discussion about canceling the seminar because literally every academic economics presentation relies heavily on slides, and he must have had 30 or 40 slides he was going to go through. But John said he wanted to give it a shot. So the audience is waiting to see what kind of disaster follows.

MCGOWAN: Does he preface the seminar by saying, “I don’t have my slides.”?

LEVITT: Everyone watched it happen. Everyone was in the room and John’s like, “Oh my God, I don’t have my slides. I don’t have my slides.” Everyone knew he didn’t, and so then he just starts to talk. And it’s perfect. And it’s brilliant. And then he gets to the point where he normally would rely really heavily on slides for tables, these academic tables that have hundreds of numbers. John doesn’t have anything in front of him, but we all have a copy of his paper in front of us. He says, “So, if you turn to table five. I think it’s going to be the third column just look at that first row and I think you’re going to see a number, maybe it’s going to be 0.041 with the standard error of 0.004.” And so you turn to that page and it’s literally exactly the number in table five. He knows the number. And he ended up giving an absolutely stunning presentation. And the reason I bring this up is it’s obvious that he had prepared in such a way that he didn’t need any of his supporting documents. What I left that seminar with was the view that you should always prepare that way. And once you’ve prepared so well that you don’t need the crutches of the visuals behind you, look, you can have them if you want or not have them, but you don’t need them. And I think almost nobody takes that approach, but probably everybody should.

MCGOWAN: I recommend a ratio of eight to one. And what I mean by that is if you’ve got a 15-minute presentation to give, you should be practicing out loud after the content’s already been set for two hours. That’s how long it typically takes for you to really own the content. And people who are often considered among the greatest presenters and communicators of all time, they’re not born with some great orator gene. They work it.

LEVITT: I think the highest level of speaking is when you know things so well that you can make it completely credible that something that is absolutely rehearsed, appears to be totally spontaneous.

MCGOWAN: Yeah, we call it “feigned spontaneity.” This is essential when you have your content either memorized or you’re reading off a teleprompter or you’re reading off a speech in front of you on a podium. Nobody wants to hear perfection. Perfection in delivery is boring. You should never define success as the absence of mistakes. That is the error so many people commit. I couldn’t care less whether you had a little hiccup here or a little stumble there. Because when you make the absence of mistakes your definition of success, you will flatten out. And that usually winds up being a monotonous drone of you just trying to get through it technically clean. And that doesn’t make for a very interesting speech or presentation. I’d much rather you take a few chances, really put yourself out there, really show to the audience what I find interesting about this. The word passion is a little overused, but that’s what has to be on display.          

LEVITT: Which speakers or speeches would you recommend someone watching if they want to see examples of great public speaking they could learn from?

MCGOWAN: Two executives that I really like a lot, one is Brian Chesky at Airbnb. I think Brian has gotten to a place that’s really impressive and he’s a really good storyteller. And also Indra Nooyi, who used to be the C.E.O. of Pepsi. She’s a great example of an executive who just does a great job of demonstrating gravitas and warmth in such a beautiful, harmonious blend. Look at techniques really accomplished and effective communicators use, and ask yourself, Could I blend those devices into my personal style of presenting? If the answer is yes, road test it. See if it works for you.

LEVITT: For many years I’ve told people that one of the single best speeches that I’ve ever seen was Sheryl Sandberg’s Berkeley commencement speech. It’s just a stunning combination of funny and smart, inspirational, beautifully spoken. And then reading your book, I discovered that you actually had a hand in its creation, right?

MCGOWAN: I did not work with Sheryl on the Berkeley commencement, but I did have the pleasure of working with Sheryl a fair amount on her speeches. And in fact, there’s a story in the book that I tell about us being at Annapolis and her giving the Forrestal speaker series speech to all the midshipmen. And she was the first woman to ever be asked to do this. And she was a little on the fence about whether to tell this joke or not.

LEVITT: What was the joke?

MCGOWAN: The joke was the honesty of children and how unfiltered they are and authentic they are. They say what’s on their mind. And the joke was that this kid went up to his mom and wanted to know about the baby growing in her stomach. He said, “Where is its arms? Are they inside, your arms?” And she said, “No, everything’s in my tummy.” “Are the baby’s legs inside of your legs?” “No, the baby’s in my tummy.” “Oh, well, Mommy, if the baby’s growing in your tummy, what’s growing in your butt?” So we’re sitting around this conference table and four or five people said, “Absolutely not. You should not tell that joke.” And myself and Nell Scovell, who wrote a lot of Sheryl’s stuff, said, “Are you kidding? You absolutely have to tell that joke. It may be the only laugh you get the entire night because midshipmen sitting in front of you are going to be real stiff lipped.” And so she followed the advice, she told the joke brilliantly, ’cause Sheryl really does have great comedic timing and skill, and the whole place erupted. So, it was a good call.

You’re listening to People I (Mostly) Admire. I’m Steve Levitt. After this short break, Bill McGowan and I will return to talk about how he prepares for a public lecture.

 *      *      *

 Bill wrote the defining tome on public speaking. I’m curious whether he feels intense pressure to nail it every time he speaks in front of an audience

MCGOWAN: I try really hard not to put that pressure on myself, but clients, or even friends or anybody, if I tell them, “Oh yeah, I’m going to talk in front of so-and-so next week,” and they say, “Oh, You must never get nervous.” I usually say to them, “Are you kidding? Do you know how high the bar is here? I can’t afford to have a major slip up. That would just be the biggest knock to my branding possible.” So, yeah, I hold myself to a really high standard on all the things I teach people. But I also have the benefit of having them reinforced every day because I talk to all clients about what’s important in these techniques. So it’s getting cemented in my brain deeper and deeper every day.

LEVITT: Knowing and executing though are two very different skills.

MCGOWAN: They are. And I was in front of a group of about 40 young interns at this investment firm last Friday. And I was really trying to stress to them the importance of preparation. And I said to them, “For instance, this presentation I’m giving to you this morning, I’ve done it dozens and dozens of times. You better believe I said it start to finish out loud in my hotel room this morning, twice.” And they all had this look of shock on their face. I would never dream of going out there thinking, Ah, I’ve got this. I can wing this. I know what I’m talking about. Or the trap a lot of people fall into in any kind of Q and A is, There isn’t any question they could ask me that I don’t know the answer to. That shouldn’t be comforting. All that means is you could go on and on with just way too much of everything you need to take the time to really be selective and discerning about what you say.

LEVITT: Have you ever worked with clients who are just incapable of becoming decent public speakers? I just suspect many of my listeners who aren’t in front of audiences very much and who have all this fear, they’re thinking, Oh, sure. It’s easy to turn Kim Kardashian from an A-minus speaker to an A-plus speaker. But I’m an F-speaker. I have no talent. I’ve flopped every time I’ve been on stage. What do you say to people like that?

MCGOWAN: I say to them, “If you were to step on a tennis court and you think you’re a terrible player, you just need somebody to show you the right way to bring the racket back, the right way to move your feet, the right angle to bring the racket forward. And, yeah, in the beginning it may feel a little awkward and you may be thinking in the middle of your backswing, but if you do it a bit over and over again, it starts to become this new muscle memory about how you get up and you speak to people.” I have always been surprised at who I thought was going to be great, who wasn’t. I like a certain amount of client confidentiality — all I’ll say is one of the real housewives came in, she had written a memoir, and the very first role-play interview where I videotaped them and I play the role of the interviewer and I play it back for them. The first take was about as disastrous as it could possibly be and I stopped recording. I thought, Oh my God, how am I going to get this woman to where she needs to get to? And then we looked it over. We made some observations. Second take? Perfect. I mean beyond perfect. I could not believe it. I was absolutely astonished. It is really rare that somebody makes a leap that far. So you never know.

LEVITT: Nobody was more afraid of public speaking than I was. I did not speak in class in college because I was so allergic to having my voice heard. And then I joined a consulting firm and it was just really clear I needed to be able to present. And I was so nervous about speaking that I wouldn’t practice in front of other people, but I went in there at 6:30 every morning when no one else was there and I got the video camera on and I would day after day record myself and watch myself speak. And it’s hard not to improve a lot if you’re doing that.

MCGOWAN: Oh, absolutely. The other thing about preparation, Steve, that clients do all the time is they mistakenly sit down at a laptop and try to write their content for a speech or a presentation. And unless you’ve worked in television or radio, stylistically, you’re likely writing for the eye. You’re not writing for the ear. And they’re very different styles. Writing for the eye tends to be long and prosy with introductory phrases and parenthetical clauses, and it’s not easy to deliver that. Writing for the ear tends to be short, choppy, simple sentences, fragments of thoughts. So for those people who don’t have the skill of writing for the ear, I tell them, Just make yourself an outline of what it is you want to say and then roll on the video record on your phone and get up and just say it as it would naturally come to you. Don’t worry if it’s full of starts and stops and mistakes, that doesn’t matter. Just keep plowing through. And then take the transcription of that recording and clean it up, but stylistically don’t change it. And I think what you’re going to find is what you come away with is something much more casual, much more conversational; the tone of it will be better, it’ll be easier to deliver, but more importantly, it will represent instinctively how you want to communicate these thoughts. 

LEVITT: Do you ever think of running for public office? You’re obviously an incredible speaker, but you’ve got much more than that. You’ve got a knack for surveying a complex situation, being able to recognize the simple truths like you did with Stephen Dubner and I, and Freakonomics; you’re photogenic; you’re successful. You seem really electable.

MCGOWAN: I appreciate that. I know you mean it as a compliment, but it’s such a cesspool today. When you see what passes as memorable in a political arena, I would never want to subject myself to that. I don’t do a lot of politics in my work. I did help Dan Lurie with his race for San Francisco mayor, and that was very rewarding because I had worked with Dan for 10 years when he was the C.E.O. of a nonprofit. And I believe in him and I think he’s a wonderful person, and I think he’ll make a very good mayor of San Francisco. And I coached Wes Moore, the governor of Maryland years ago when he was in charge of the Robin Hood Foundation. But ultimately, I don’t get mixed up in politics simply because my edict with people when I coach them is: The truth is non-negotiable. Everything that comes out of your mouth has got to be truthful. Let’s just start from there and that can be a deal breaker in the world of politics.

We barely scratched the surface of Bill McGowan’s new book, Speak, Memorably: The Art of Captivating an Audience. If you want to improve your public speaking, I’d highly recommend it. It’s not a magic bullet that will transform you overnight, but it will give you the tools that, along with a lot of hard work, will help you get better.

LEVITT: This is a point in the show where I bring on my producer Morgan to help with a listener question.

LEVEY: Hi, Steve. So a listener named Richard has a problem. He lives in the U.K. and he works for the city government in London. Richard’s issue is fly tipping. Do you know what fly tipping is?

LEVITT: No, I’ve never heard of fly tipping. Sounds fun though.

LEVEY: It’s not really fun. In the U.K. fly tipping is illegal dumping. So Richard says, in the city of London, this can take on the form of old construction waste, or extra trash bags — often it’s old mattresses and unwanted couches that get left on the street corner. It’s an easy and free way for people to dispose of items they don’t want. The problem is, is that it’s really expensive for the city to then dispose of these items. So Richard wants to know if there’s an idea from economics or behavioral economics that can help discourage people from fly tipping. Richard says the issue feels like a catch 22 — if the city is too good, too efficient at disposing of illegal trash, then residents have no incentive to stop fly tipping. And it’s really costly to the government to put all these resources towards quickly disposing of items. However, if the city government is too slow then it’s the broken windows theory, where residents see it as an acceptable practice. My neighbor left their mattress on the street, why can’t I? So, can you come up with an idea to disincentivize fly tipping? 

LEVITT: So economists have thought a lot about garbage, more than you might expect. There’s a classic paper from the 1990s by Fullerton and Kinnaman. And they were looking in Charlottesville, Virginia, where the city had put a per-bag price on garbage. And it is a great example of how people respond to incentives. Superficially, it looked like it worked great because the volume of trash that got turned in in the city went down by 37 percent. It turned out the actual weight, so not the volume, but the actual weight of garbage only went down by 14 percent. So what did people do? They stuffed each individual garbage bag more full than they did before when they started charging, which makes sense. The horrible part of incentives is that people often respond too strongly to them. And when they did the calculations, it turned out that about a quarter of all of the reduction in trash they had seen ended up being thrown somewhere that was much worse than in the garbage. And then those results were also in a Korean natural experiment. The same thing happened. When Korea started charging for bags, they found that sure enough, the amount of garbage that was produced went down, but for every 1-percent increase in the price of garbage, there was a 3-percent increase in the amount of illegal dumping that happened. Okay. So what do you do about it? That’s the question that we’re trying to face today. And there’s one experiment done by an old friend of mine, Robert Dur, and it’s set in the Netherlands. I spent a fair amount of time in Rotterdam, and the trash system in the Netherlands is really strange. You take your trash and you carry it to some central place, which is just a huge hole in the ground. And sometimes you go to that hole and it’s totally full. And so what you’re supposed to do is take your trash to the next place in the city that’s a few more blocks away. And so there’s a real incentive to leave your trash just by the side of this hole, which is illegal. So my friend Robert Dur, who’s an economist and a co-author named Ben Vollaard, they did an experiment with the city — and it wasn’t in Rotterdam, it was another city in the Netherlands — where they would put really bright orange signs, labels, on the illegally dumped garbage. And for 5 percent of these bags, they would actually open up the garbage and go through it and look for snippets of addresses and things, and then fine people 90 euros for having done it. And that was really effective. They didn’t take them away, they just put a bright label on it saying, “Hey, if you leave this trash here, it’ll be a 90 euro fine.” People were very responsive to that visible deterrent. So, I think you don’t want to leave the garbage there unless you leave it there with a sign that says, “Hey, whoever left it here is being punished for it.” I mean, the best punishment, honestly, in a community is you should figure out who left it there and put a really big sign with a picture of the person and their name saying, “Hey, if you know this person, go tell them you’re not friends with them anymore ’cause they left their garbage on the side of the road.” That’s the kind of really powerful message you could do if you really wanted to stop this.

LEVEY: So basically shame and fine people is your solution. And it wouldn’t have to be all the bags of trash that they leave on the side of the road. They could just leave some with these big signs. And, it could be a short-term thing because it’s going to be probably really effective pretty quickly. 

LEVITT: Yeah, no, I think shame works great on people who are members of a community. If the people who are dumping it are not long-time residents, maybe people coming from other towns, who knows who’s dumping it, then it won’t work nearly as well.

LEVEY: What about for something like a couch, the city could put up a sign that said, “If you know or saw or have any information about who put this here, we will give you a small monetary reward.”?

LEVITT: Yeah, that could work too. Couches are tricky ’cause one man’s garbage is another man’s treasure when it comes to couches.

LEVEY: I think that’s more the thought of the person who’s leaving the couch. I think in reality most people don’t want a couch found on a street corner, unless you’re a college student looking for a cheap way to furnish your apartment. 

LEVITT: You might say that’s true, but in the alley behind my house in Chicago, a college student left a stained orange chair and for some reason, my wife took this incredible liking to it. And it is now front and center in the middle of our new house in Boulder.

LEVEY: Oh! Okay.

LEVITT: Can’t really account for taste.

LEVEY: Touché. Richard, thanks so much for writing. I hope that this helps you think through the problem. Listeners, if you have a problem or issue that could use an economic solution, send us an email. The email is pima@freakonomics.com. That’s P-I-M-A@Freakonomics.com. We read every email that’s sent and we look forward to reading yours.

In two weeks, we’re back with a brand new episode featuring climate scientist, Kate Marvel. As always, thanks for listening, and we’ll see you back soon.

*      *      *

People I (Mostly) Admire is part of the Freakonomics Radio Network, which also includes Freakonomics Radio and The Economics of Everyday Things. All our shows are produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. This episode was produced by Morgan Levey, and mixed by Jasmin Klinger. We had research assistance from Daniel Moritz-Rabson. Our theme music was composed by Luis Guerra. We can be reached at PIMA@Freakonomics.com, that’s P-I-M-A@Freakonomics.com. Thanks for listening.

LEVITT: I didn’t expect you so early.

MCGOWAN: Well, you know, if you’re early, you’re on time. If you’re on time, you’re late. And if you’re late, you’re out of luck.