Garr Reynolds

It doesn’t matter how advanced technology gets, presentation skills are about connecting with an audience and making a memorable, valuable contribution in that moment. amazon.com/gp/product/013…

Found an AI perspective I’d never heard before from a teacher of teens. It’s a bit meandering but your three minutes will be well used.

Best video on the internet right now

See "A Long Time Ago, Before Bad Presentation Slides" presentationzen.com/blog/a-long-ti…

A New Hope for clear communication. Let’s embrace the spirit of the Rebel Alliance and push back against the Imperial AI slopocalypse, template propaganda, and the scourge of habit and conventional wisdom.

I just started building out my LinkedIn page. If you’re interested in presentations, design, storytelling, creativity, data visualization, education, and Japanese culture, I’d love to connect with you on LinkedIn. Hope to see you over there!

The godmother of AI just delivered the reality check Silicon Valley refuses to hear. She has the standing to say it. Li: “Silicon Valley as a whole tends to mistake clear vision with short distance.” Seeing the destination clearly has nothing to do with how hard it is to reach. Self-driving cars were first demonstrated in 2006. Twenty years later Waymo is barely on the road. The vision was never the problem. The distance was. Clarity of destination gets mistaken for proximity to arrival. That’s the mistake the industry keeps making. And keeps making. Li: “I consider myself a scientist in my heart and I actually really don’t like hyping.” In an industry running at maximum temperature, Fei-Fei Li is one of the few people at the top willing to say that publicly. Not because the technology isn’t real. Because the gap between what’s visible and what’s required is being systematically underestimated. Large Language Models dominate the conversation. Text to text. Comparatively contained. The harder problem is spatial intelligence. AI that reasons about and acts within the physical three-dimensional world. Hardware. Physics. Data that doesn’t exist yet. Real-time adaptation to chaos. A robot that can clean a bathroom requires understanding every surface, every object, every force, every exception. That’s not a software update. That’s a civilizational research problem. Li: “I don’t call it hype. I call it a misleading sentiment. We don’t want to replace human creators.” The second place the industry gets it wrong is creativity. The narrative has hardened around replacement. AI takes the jobs. AI tells the stories. AI makes the art. Li considers that not just wrong but destructive. Wrong because AI doesn’t replicate creativity. Destructive because believing it can devalues the humans creating culture. Human creativity isn’t a process to be automated. It’s fundamental to what we are as a species. The goal is augmentation. Tools that make human creators faster and more capable. Not systems that generate output in the style of human work and call it creation. That distinction matters more than most people in the industry are willing to sit with. Precision of imagination is not proximity to reality. Li has spent her career in the gap between those two things. The map isn’t the territory. The journey is long. The hurdles are deep. And the scientist who built the foundation this era stands on is telling you the timeline everyone is selling is wrong. We’ve been almost there with self-driving for twenty years. The pattern doesn’t change just because the destination looks different.

No contrast, no attention.

New blog post with a PDF download to the related section from Presentation Zen 3rd edition: presentationzen.com/blog/design-fu…

I snapped this may years ago during a Midosuji street event in Osaka. The worker's type (Helvetica or Arial?) on his t-shirt caught my eye & is a good reminder: If you want to avoid creating bad visuals, remember C-R-A-P. (Link to new post in comments)

“I don’t think being good at things is the point of doing them.” KURT VONNEGUT - one of my favourite humans.

@ValaAfshar Wise people read like it is cardio for the brain, you do it daily and suddenly bad ideas get tired first.

It is increasingly clear that the careless mass introduction of 1:1 devices (on each kid's desk) in the 2010s was, at best, a waste of billions that could have been spent on teachers. At worst: a major cause of declining ed outcomes.

Want your next presentation to be the best you’ve ever given? Remember these 3 things (they’re just 59 words): 1. Your audience is the hero. They’re the central figure. Your role is to guide them toward success 2. Infuse your talk with story. Data informs. Story moves. It gives structure, emotion, and meaning to your message. 3. Ask yourself: “Can they see what I’m saying?” Each idea should have a clear visual moment; something your audience can grasp instantly. Giving great presentations takes work, you’ve got this!

Present with Simple Visuals, Not Dense Text presentationzen.com/blog/steve-job…

“It’s effective to speak to a diagram, because it presents information in a different form. But it is not effective to speak the same words that are written, because it...decreases your ability to understand what is being presented.” —   John Sweller

"Leave me alone you AI grifters" - I need this printed on a T-shirt! :-)

Read the post here: hegemon.substack.com/p/the-age-of-a…

Good, short read by Seva Gunitsky.

Near Kifune shrine in mountains near Kyoto.