Aaron Kalin

Hi, I’m Mike. I’m here with Hugh Tastic at Chicago Web Conf again, and I’m sitting with Aaron Kalin. Aaron has been heavily involved with the Ruby community, doing a lot of speaking over the years. But also, he’s your trainer at Treehouse, and today he just did a panel discussion at Chicago Web Conf. Aaron, can you tell a little bit about, how is it different doing a presentation versus doing a panel? And how did you prepare for it? Did you prepare differently? Well, I’d never done a panel-style thing before. I’d been to conferences where there’s panels, so I kind of know what the format was, but I got this sort of last minute from J.C. and the organizers, I think just literally a couple days ago. He’d already been mentioning it to me. But it wasn’t really official yet. And then, literally about two days ago, I got an email saying, “Hey, I realize it’s last minute, but do you want to moderate the panel on the future of web?” I said, “Sure, why not?” And I had no idea what I was getting into. But I’m sort of like a Boy Scout, I want to be prepared. So I started researching online, just trying to get prepared for it, like getting the mindset and everything. Okay. So, I mean, how is that different from when you prepared to do web? Do you want a regular presentation? Is it vastly different, or is it a very different mindset? Because one, I think you would be more like, “What am I going to talk about? What are they going to talk about?” Well, so I guess the huge difference is that when it’s a presentation, it’s actually a bit more about you. People, especially if you’re one of the senior conferences where they announce the speakers really early before they close call for proposals. I’ve been one of those where they directly invite you, with the exception of, I think, the rails, but it’s not to where people are coming to see you directly. Right. So at that point, a presentation is really all about the speaker. Right. And of course, you want to include the audience and all that stuff in there, but it’s really more of like you’re self-focused, but it’s the exact opposite on a panel. You want to moderate and be sort of the guy with the whip, but you also don’t want to be the center of attention because it’s about the panelists and not the moderator specifically. So there’s this weird balancing act you have to play. At least everything I was reading about it, and it started to make sense about all the panels that I’ve seen that I thought were good, where the moderator doesn’t become the center of attention and more or less you try to ask some questions that aren’t necessarily directly polarizing, but enough to invoke some good conversation because you want to get everyone’s opinions, and especially if you have a panel of very differing backgrounds and opinions, you’re going to get some sometimes very similar or very different answers and just balancing that where it’s not about you. And that’s the hard part. I’m used to presenting where it’s like, “Yeah, hey, these are my stories. This is my subject I want to talk about,” all that stuff, but then switching that completely off and trying to keep that curbed and not try to start stealing attention is difficult. When you were doing the presentation, were all the panelists first-time panelists or they had ever sat on a panel before? I didn’t get enough time to really ask, so I’m going to go check after this interview. And sort of, “Hey, that was cool.” I think that I only got to say that to Jen because Tim was already kind of walking away. David was still there, but talking to someone else and saying like, “Great job, this did a good job,” and everything. So I don’t really… I’ll have to go collect their thoughts afterwards to make sure, “One, I did a good job.” And the other thing, too, when you’re a moderator is you don’t want to make the panelists look really smart, and you don’t want to belittle them at all, and you don’t want to railroad them in any way. And you also don’t want them to become the center of attention. So that’s the other part of it, too, of making sure that you keep control of anyone who starts to take the mic. I told them before we started, for me, there’s a hard two-minute limit or something close to it. If it’s a good conversation, I’ll let it go. But if you start rambling and getting on a pulpit, then I’m going to pull you down and get the audience to say something or something. Now, if somebody did go off, I’m going to presume that nobody went off the rails. That’s here. But did you learn any techniques, like, “Oh, if somebody is starting to kind of rant a bit or hog the mic,” was there any kind of tips or tricks that you learned, like, “Oh, say this kind of thing, or this is how you can diffuse it?” Yeah. So I read a couple of different techniques. One was to sort of find a spot when they’re grabbing their breath. So you have to start when…start noticing in your head that they’re going a little bit beyond. Like, I was also looking at my iPad occasionally to see the clock and all that stuff, and I started noticing they were getting a little bit off on a tangent. I think that only really happened, like, I was aware of it once or twice. And that’s when the trigger starts to go in my head of, “Okay, I need to start listening to what they’re saying, so at some point if I can find a graceful pause, then I’ll interject a joke somewhere.” Like, I’ll try to do that. So it’s sort of easy to do with the front end stuff, so it could be like, you know, Comic Sans or just something to get the audience to laugh and get the audience to break that pattern. And then I guess usually people sort of get the message like, “I just stopped you gracefully, so just let it go.” And then the other technique, too, is also interjecting with adding on to the conversation, so you sort of step in and you grab the mic for a minute, and then you can disperse it back out. Okay. So yeah. So one is kind of a… Let’s say like the magicians, look over here, there’s a word for it, I’m just drawing a blank on it, but… Yeah, just misdirection, distraction. Misdirection, yeah. Misdirection. And then the other one was helping them take that step and realizing, “Oh, okay, I…” Because one of the things I do with the interviews is if I feel like somebody’s starting to repeat themselves, that’s usually the time where if we’re starting to come back around on the topic, like if we started talking about one subject, we went off, and then all of a sudden, now it feels like, “Oh, we’re back on that topic.” It’s either a graceful stopping point or try to push them back to the original topic. You’ve also taught classes, and I’m sure you’ve had to deal with…