Weekend Edition Trump, Lochte in the News, Your Questions

Thanks for listening to Speaking With TJ Walker, where the communication skills and practices of world class leaders are dissected.

Welcome to the WEEKEND edition of Speaking With TJ Walker.

This is a little bit of a.

Change of format and I apologize for.

Some of you thinking this seems like.

It'S sort of popped around in a few different directions recently. As many of you know, I switched formats and am now doing long form interviews with experts on communication. And I shifted my daily commentaries, answering questions about public speaking, analyzing newsmakers presentation skills to another channel. But others of you said, let's just keep it on one channel. But I didn't want to clutter things up by sending you 2, 3, 4, 5 separate short audios in a day because that becomes tedious for people.

So what I'm doing is on a.

Daily basis recording short form news analyses, answering questions and video that's on my YouTube channel. And then once a week I'm gathering them up and putting them all together for you here for the WEEKEND Edition. Some of you may say, I just want to hear the interviews. I don't necessarily want to listen to T.J. okay, now, you know, don't listen to the Weekend. Others of you say, okay, I wouldn't mind finding the other answers to questions and that stuff.

So it's all here for you, just.

Laid out one after another. So sit back, relax and enjoy. This is the first edition of the WEEKEND edition of the TJ Walker Show.

In breaking news, U.S. olympic swimmer Ryan Luck is in a heap of trouble. Now. It is Thursday afternoon, August 18th. The Olympics are still going on and there's controversy swirling around Ryan Lochte. He initially said that he was robbed at gunpoint a couple of days ago in Rio. Since then, his story has constantly changed. The story of three other swimmers who were with him has been changing. And now it certainly looks like the story was fabricated, that in fact, he had had way too much to drink. He and his buddies, they kicked down a door at a gas station, got in some trouble, had to make a payment and sort of covered up their mishap by claiming that they were robbed at gunpoint. Well, here's why this is a problem. You can say boys will be boys. No one was really hurt. It's not that simple. First is the issue of filing a false police report, which police everywhere, government authorities everywhere take very seriously. Next, it's the issue of just massive, massive amounts of negative publicity. I mean, the whole reason that Brazil spent billions of dollars creating all these venues and all they had to do to get ready for The Olympics was to get good publicity to make people want to come to their country. And then when someone who's won medals and what you would think be the toast of the town is robbed or allegedly robbed at gunpoint, kind of destroys all the goodwill and value spent on the Olympics. This, I think, is to me, the best sound, one of the best sound bites of the week that sums up the situation. This is from Brian Winter, who's the vice president for policy at the Americas Society and Council of the Americas. He said this incident has caused so much damage to Rio's brand abroad that I think Brazilians deserve a clear, consistent account of what happened. He continues, the entire episode has tapped into one of Brazilian's biggest pet peeves. Gringos who treat their country like a third rate spring break destination where you can lie to the cops and get away with it. A powerful sound bite, but that is really what sums up this entire issue. Can some gringo, the derogatory term for the white man up north, come down? Why get away with it? So that's why this issue is not going away. That simply. Here's what's at stake. Ryan Lochtech, as one of the most successful Olympic athletes of all times, is someone who has won. At this point, it has to be north of $10 million in sponsorship revenues. He's still a young man. He's in a position to make tens and tens, if not north of $100 million throughout his career as a spokesperson, as someone whose face can be seen in TV ads. So if his credibility is destroyed, if he becomes a punching bag, a punchline, and someone who is seen as just an automatic liar, well, guess what? All of those sponsorships completely evaporate overnight. Now this has happened to other celebrities in the past. Those of you who are talk show aficionados may well remember Morton Downey Jr. The now deceased, controversial shock jock talk show host who in the waning stages of his own talk show hosting career claimed that he was kidnapped in an airport bathroom, had his head shaved and a Nazi swastika was carved in his face. Now that was since debunked when you looked at it and you realized it was like someone drawing a swastika looking in a mirror, not what someone would have done if they'd actually pinned him down. Similar things have happened to talk show host and guardian angel Curtis Lewis, where he claimed that he was shot by mobsters and wasn't later admitted that he made it up to the point where people didn't even believe him when he actually was stabbed by criminals. Once your credibility is shut, it's very hard to get it back. So Ryan Lochtech has additional problems in that the Olympic code of ethics states, you cannot commit fraud. This is a fraud. So even though it certainly looks like he's retiring, it would be an ignominious ending to his career to be officially booted from the Olympics. My advice, if Ryan Lochte is not my client, but if you were to call me today, I would say, look, come clean, say exactly what happened, call yourself an idiot, beg for an apology, beg the people of Brazil for forgiveness and make some large, significant contribution, a million dollars north, something like that, as a goodwill gesture to whether it's beach cleanup or something to help the people of Brazil to show you care about it. Because as it is right now, Lochte has gotten so much more good publicity until this incident. So many more sponsorship deals that would have come to him from, not the gold medals, but the various medals from these Olympics and others. It just doesn't strike people as fair that he can besmirch a country that puts so much into it while he gets richer. And there's going to be. I'm not always a believer in karma, but there is going to be some karmic justice here if he doesn't make amends, because as of right now, nothing he says is adding up at this point. I'm not going to repeat every bit of the allegations because who knows what's swirling around. But even if you take into account gossip and people who are just going after Lochte doesn't negate the fact that his story has changed numerous times and his credibility is shot. If he ever wants to regain his status as someone who's a viable spokesperson for major banks, which he has been in the past, and as someone who can be a reality TV star and a celebrity that isn't just at the D and C ranks, he's got to come clean quickly, beg forgiveness and make amends. Otherwise, he's going to spend the rest of his life as nothing but a laughingstock. Talk show host John McLaughlin is dead at age 89. Now, for a lot of you who have not followed public affairs until the last decade or so, you may be saying, who is John McLaughlin? I can tell you he's one of the most wildly influential talk show hosts and media communicators of the last quarter century. Certainly incredibly influential to me personally. For those of you who are not familiar with his career, he started the McLaughlin Group in 1982. This was back before all the food fights on TV, before you had Fox News before you had combative shows on cnn, certainly before MSNBC even existed, and talk shows were fairly sedate. You had Washington Week in Review, a show I grew up on in the 1970s where everyone was polite, demure media people didn't give their opinions. John McLaughlin completely broke the mold and some could say in a very negative way, but brought in the shouting, brought in highly opinionated pundits, extracted opinions from reporters, and created what some would describe as intellectual food fights. It was not in the first episode or two, but it pretty quickly became a huge hit. It was a favorite of Ronald Reagan, got a lot of attention. There were a lot of imitators out there. Now, True Confession I. I was so enamored with John McLaughlin's style, his theatrics and how he did things. I created a show modeled after his. This was a regionally syndicated TV talk show, and it was on 10 markets throughout Florida starting in the late 1980s. For a couple years now, I was in no way anywhere near as successful as he was, and my show was only on the air for a couple of years. Here's why else I think he. He is so influential, by the way. He's not influential in the intellectual sense. It's not that he leaves a large body of ideas or a political movement. Whether you love Rush Limbaugh or not, Few serious political observers would deny that he has been influential in politics, especially in certain campaign seasons like 1994. No one really contends that John McLaughlin has influence. In fact, his most widely known quote is from when he served as an aide to Richard Nixon and told the White House press corps that Richard Nixon will go down as the most moral leader of the last third of the 20th century in the world. Obviously, that didn't happen. But he had more than just bluster. Although he had a lot of bluster, he did bring a level of erudition. Now, part of it is just like, to use big words, but he structured his show in a way that was just entertaining, fast, interesting, did go deep occasionally and allowed for people to see the philosophical prism, the lens of how actual politicians and political figures looked at. Now, he had a lot of clever things going on. A part of his pitch to PBS was, hey, everybody thinks you're a bunch of liberals, and the Republicans in Congress don't like it. Give me a show and I'll stack it mostly full of conservatives, and that'll take some of the political heat off. That was part of his selling pitch that allowed him to stay on so long. Now, as a Media entrepreneur. I think he's a fascinating case. Before him, the old way of doing things was you work your way up a traditional media organization. You put in 20 years as a reporter, you get to be a columnist at the New York Times, and then you're occasionally asked to be a guest on Meet the Press and you give your opinions in very understated ways. McLaughlin had nothing to do with that. He, he had a new model. He created his own company, named after his dog, by the way, his own show. And that gave him power, that gave him independence. Different pundits could come and go. Some he famously got in a fight with, like the late Robert Novak, who was always one of my favorites on the show. And no matter what happened, sometimes he would be on NBC. For many, many years he was on NBC stations. General Electric was his prime sponsor for many, many years. In later years, in addition to pbs, which was his base, he was on CBS stations and he got different sponsors. So to me, he's a fascinating example of someone who created his own little media world, his own shows. He couldn't be fired. One station didn't like him, he'd get another. One sponsor didn't like him, he'd get another. There was no one saying, Mr. McLaughlin, you've hit the age limit of 65 or 75 or 85. The only thing that took him out of that chair was death. And approaching death. The previous Sunday is the last Sunday. It was the only Sunday in his 34 years run on the show where he didn't appear. Pat Buchanan guest hosted, but other than that, he was there every single week for 34 years. That tells you something right there about his commitment to the show, his passion and dedication for the show. Now, a lot of things you can complain about him and there have been lawsuits from women who've worked for him and many other things which are certainly worthy of discussion. But to me, the main thing is, to me, he's sort of the precursor to so many modern day mini media moguls such as Glenn Beck, such as so many podcasters who love the fact that they own their own thing, they own their own media company. They can't be fired, they can't be bought out, they can't be downsized, they can't be given retirement package and shuffled off the stage. He left on his own terms. I do have to give him credit for that. Is part of the political dialogue in America coarsened because of it. You can make that case. Although I would say in recent years, his show is one of the few Shows where you didn't have everybody 100% on one side debating an issue or agreeing with each other. So a lot of things in the mainstream media went to his level and then kept on going in a more extreme level in recent years, let's not kid ourselves. His show became almost irrelevant because of all the 24 hour political debate shows, talk shows on the news networks and talk radio for that matter. I had not seen the show in years, but someone who injected himself into pop culture, whether it was guest appearances on TV shows, being made fun of on Saturday Night Live, appearing as himself on Mission Impossible, he seemed to have just a fabulous, fabulous time, long, long career, a career before that in politics as an unsuccessful Senate candidate, presidential aid, but seemed to really enjoy the second half of his life as a media superstar. I can't say he'll be missed tremendously now by people not seeing the show, but he will remain an inspiration to me and others. I'm TJ Walker. It's the question I get from friends, family, clients, people online and social media. And here it is. Can Donald Trump be coached? Is he coachable as a media communicator? Folks, I'll leave it to others to debate his political ideals and the values there. That's not what this show is about. And I do in general think that anybody can be coached, anyone can be improved. There is one big caveat and it's why have to take the position that no, Donald Trump can't be coached. If you want to be coached, you have to actually want to improve. You have to want to be trained. You have to buy into the idea that you're not great. Yet I have trained clients all over the world, every industry, a lot of different ideologies, different values, but the one thing that is 100% consistent with every single person I've ever helped is they wanted to improve. They came into a media training session with me with some level of humility that they're not perfect, they're not great, they can learn from others. And Donald Trump certainly gives every indication that he cannot fathom the idea of himself not being great. Everything he does. And if he ever ends up with media criticism or media stories, coverage that is negative, his first reaction, his only reaction, is to blame the reporter. Folks, reporters aren't perfect. Reporters might get things wrong from time to time, but if your only reaction to less than flattering media coverage is that reporters are idiots for fools, morons or have a problem, then you're not really a candidate for media training. You're not a candidate for improving. You're stuck exactly where you are. For better or for worse, folks are about to head into the fall campaign. It's really the final leg of a many year process for presidential candidates. Donald Trump is with way back in the polls. It was announced yesterday that he has shaken up his campaign team, essentially demoting Paul Manafort, the campaign chairman, and bringing in a guy whose current job is running Breitbart News, a far right website. Now, I think it goes beyond debate and beyond controversy, regardless of your politics, to notice that Donald Trump has received more negative news coverage than any presidential candidate of a mainstream party ever. Certainly in the last month it has been unrelentingly negative. He's been criticized by conservatives, by Republicans, conservative media, mainstream media, and obviously liberal and left leaning media. The criticism has been absolutely non stop stop. How do you stop that? How do you change it? Well, Donald Trump is suggesting that he would like to change. He is bringing in a new campaign manager, Kellyanne Fitzpatrick, and the well known pollster, and he is bringing in other people. But what sort of a message does it say to bring in now as his top advisor, the guy from Breitbart News, someone who's never run a political campaign, and his business model consists of saying things that are considered beyond the pale to anyone who is not a part of the far right? Now, Steve Bannon apparently is a successful business person. Breitbart News is getting bigger audience than ever before, making more money from clicks and advertising. But at some point, people have to step back and look at the fundamental difference between a media company and a political candidate. So for example, if you're rush Limbaugh and 95% of the country doesn't like you or doesn't believe in you or share your values, but you can get 5% of the country to listen to you every single week or in any given day, he has about 20 million million people listening to him in a week, then you're the most wildly successful talk show host ever. Even if 95% or 93% of people never, ever listen to you. Politics isn't like that. You have to get 50% of the vote plus one. You have to at least get a majority of the electoral college. Yes, there could be third and fourth party candidates in there. So you won't technically have to get 50%, but for the most part, you have to get a majority of the votes among the two major party candidates or you're just not going to win. So to reach out to someone whose sole business model is figuring out how do you excite and exercise a 5% extremist group here and write off 95%, I think is quite telling that essentially the candidate is almost given up or just doesn't even buy into the premise of wanting to win more votes than his main opponent, in this case Hillary Clinton. Now, you see this in many situations in different industries, not politics. When someone has succeeded doing one thing or some organizations succeeded doing one thing, very hard to switch to do something else. Microsoft, really, really good at creating operating systems, never very good at creating MP3 players and other devices, not really good at mastering the whole Internet thing or creating search engines. Google, as innovative as they are, they're really good at selling ads for keyword search. But whether it's RSS feeders or a gazillion other things, they fail. Donald Trump is really, really good at saying wildly inflammatory things that gets a tremendous amount of media attention. The fact that traditionally half the people might, or more than half might think he's a complete idiot for saying it. This never bothered him because in a primary environment running for the Republican nomination, that didn't hurt. That helped. But now times are different, times are new, and the strategy that helped him succeed in one area isn't helping him in another. You see this time and time again with industries the best buggy makers were not the ones that made the best horses. Barnes and Noble, which did such a great job of selling books, was not as good as Amazon once things changed, once the environment changed. Donald Trump is certainly giving the indication that he's not understanding how the environment has changed. Therefore, he's not going to change his messages, his messaging process, his whole communication process. I'm TJ Walker. What do you think? Post your comments here or send me an email or communicate on Twitter JWalker media training tip of the day. Be as accurate as possible when you are pitching the news media. Now, I have recently started taking guests for my talk show on itunes, which is replayed here in audio format on YouTube as well. So I'm starting to get all kinds of pitches from people. Now, I've had various shows over the years and have been pitched many times and some people just make the mistake of sending you a generic form letters. Obviously they haven't listened to your show. That's a standard problem everyone knows. But here's another problem I've recently encountered, and that is people who are puffing themselves up to look like a much bigger deal than they are in ways that are easily uncovered. So here's what I received just the other day. An email from A publicist saying, you've got to interview my client. He's this, he's this, he's this. And he has 100 million subscribers to his podcast and he does this. And whoa, timeout. I saw that, I said, wow, that must be nice. 100 million subscribers to a podcast. Apparently the most successful podcaster of all time is someone I don't know. And he's willing to come on my show. This is great. So I went into itunes, looked at his podcast and he did have some shows. Now, my show hasn't been on that long and I'm a small little show. I've got 23 or so reviews. I know that some podcasts like that, the history one in serial, they've got seven, 8,000 reviews. So I'm figuring if this guy has a hundred million views or subscribers, he's going to have tens of thousands of reviews. Guess how many Reviews he had? 0. Absolute. Which tells me his audience has to be miniscule because even if you don't ask for reviews, a certain percentage of people are going to leave them. Then I thought, well, let me give him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe his show is more of a video show. And I was sent some of his videos from his YouTube channel. I went to his YouTube channel. Sure enough, he had a lot of great looking videos, slickly produced. And the thing with YouTube, unless you hide it, you can see how many views the channel has, how many views each video has. And his average number of views per video was like nine. I mean, this audience was minuscule, absolutely minuscule. And hey, I've got some videos that don't have huge numbers, but I don't tell people I have a show with 100 million subscribers. His entire channel had 93,000 views total, which is better than nothing. And he had less than a thousand subscribers. So I wrote back to the publicist and said, I'm a little confused. You're saying you have 100 million subscribers. I'm trying to figure out where because I don't really see it. She's like, oh, I'm so sorry, it was a typo. We have 100,000 subscribers to our newsletters and all the people who enjoy our shows. I said, oh, okay, maybe it's on some other form. Perhaps his video is on Vimeo, or maybe the audio is someplace else. Let me do a little more digging. So I went to Twitter and sure enough, he had tens of thousands, I think about 20,000 Twitter followers, which is a lot more than I have. That's about 10 times more so I'm thinking, okay, maybe he's putting his show on Facebook through Twitter. He's got tens of thousands of people reposting everything. So I look at his Twitter feed and the average posting he had received zero retweets. Zero. He had a few that had one, maybe two. But what this tells me is he has no engagement with his Twitter followers. For all I know, he just auto subscribe to anyone who said they would subscribe back or it's robots or it's bought. But it certainly wasn't in any way a meaningful following. So, folks, it's not hard for me to do that these days. Not just little bitty podcasters like me, but media producers everywhere are looking to see what is the following of this person who wants to be a guest. How can they promote the interview if they're going to be on? And you don't have to say you have a million followers, but the biggest thing just don't. I won't say lie, I don't know if there's any intentional lying here, but don't wildly puff up things to try to make yourself a lot bigger because it completely destroys your credibility. And these days, people, they don't mind if you have an interesting idea, an interesting message, if you don't have a huge, huge audience. But if they don't know anything about you and you're telling, if I walk up to you and say, I'm TJ Walker, I have the thickest head of hair, for those of you listening on audio only, I don't have a thick head of hair. It's probably going to undercut everything else I say because you're going to instantly spot that what I'm saying just isn't truthful. So nothing wrong with putting out your social media platform, number of people you hit in a week or a month or a year, but don't do it in a way that is obviously easily refuted, I'm TJ Walker. And now it's time for viewer and listener mail. As always, any questions you have about public speaking, media training, I answer them right here. And this is also the place to criticize me, give dissenting views. We encourage that. There's very little, I won't say no censorship, but there's very little censorship here. Certainly you're not censored just because you don't agree with me. I do want to share with you a rather lengthy yet substantive and thoughtful critique sent in by a viewer on YouTube. Josh writes in this is in response to my video really telling people they should not use beta blockers for fear of public speaking to help them with their fear of public speaking, here's what Josh writes. What about the people who are perfectly prepared to give a presentation over any given topic but still get so nervous that it hinders their ability to actually present their information effectively? What if their nervousness isn't rooted in lack of preparation, but a much more deeper and complex issue resonating within the person? What if you've recorded yourself and are completely satisfied with the results and believe that if you presented the way you did in the video to your actual audience, you'd receive a gold medal, which is what I advocate. But when you actually speak in front of the audience, you are nervous. Serious people don't take beta blockers to make their presentation better. They do it because no matter how many presentations they give, no matter how many times they give an excellent presentation, no matter how many times they've recorded themselves, they still get nervous. They get nervous about being nervous. Real fear of public speaking isn't cured by repetition self analysis. It is either embraced and endured or it is alleviated in some fashion. Beta blockers alleviate the nervousness. Beta blockers allow me to not worry so much about my physical symptoms of being nervous because they limit them. It just sounds like you are ignorant of the psychological complexity that is nervousness. No, there is not a direct causation between beta blockers and a good presentation. However, if someone is inevitably going to get nervous to speak and has prepared immensely to present, and has recorded themselves to the furthest extent and has been inhibited by their fear of public speaking in the past, then beta blockers are the best answer. You're so confident in your claim that people shouldn't use beta blockers, but most psychiatrists and people who use them dismiss your argument. More often than not, you lack perspective on the people to whom you're referring, which makes your argument against beta blockers very weak. An 18 year old that can't stand when people, especially an adult like yourself, dismiss the complexity of the brain. If I placed you in an Ocean with 20 great white sharks within 75 meters of your body, would you remain calm and unaffected? No, I wouldn't. Do you know that's what it feels like for some people to feel or to speak in front of others and you're telling them to just prepare to just record. I'm happy that you can give great presentations. It is a beautiful gift. But please spare your ignorance on beta blockers and why people should use them. Thank you. So Josh, I do appreciate Your perspective. And while you were critical of me, I don't think you said anything that was below the belt or inflammatory. And that's why I wanted to give it the full airing you deserve. So let me state right off the bat, you're absolutely right that I'm not intimately aware of every single person who has a wide range of issues and psychological issues and issues that psychiatrists deal with. You're absolutely right about that. Here's where I take issue with a couple of things. You're saying is I do live in a. We're all shaped by our perspectives. You have a perspective as an 18 year old. I have a perspective of having trained more than 10,000 people for 32 years. And I've just never seen someone who claims to have a fear of speaking do the one thing I ask them to do, which is practice on video, look at it and figure out one thing at a time that they like, redo it and keep doing it, even if it takes 80 takes. And to get to the point where they love that video. I haven't seen people do that. I've worked with people who claim to be really, really nervous. And what happened is they tried two or three times and they just gave up. I'm not a good speaker. They took a beta blocker and they were awful. So let's keep in mind we're working from perhaps two different assumptions. My assumption is that if you're going to speak, your goal should actually be to speak in a way that's effective for your audience. You told me embedded in the letter is you realize it might not make the presentation any better. Well, if it's not making the presentation any better, why do it? The goal of a speech is not for you, the speaker, to get through it without throwing up or breaking out with flopped sweat or shaking and collapsing. That's not the goal of the speech. The goal of a speech is to actually communicate ideas to your audience in the way that they can understand them and remember them. And what I've seen some of my own clients on beta blockers. They spoke in a calm way, but it was kind of flat and the same speed. And they just seemed a little out of it. Guess what? It didn't work for their audience. Ultimately, I'll be honest with you. I care about your audience more than I do for you, the speaker. Now, I'm being a little bit facetious there. I do care about you as a speaker, but I'm not really helping you unless I help you with your audience. A psychiatrist doesn't have to worry about your audience. I also do think, and many psychiatrists are excellent and do good work. I'm not anti psychiatry, but if you go to a psychiatrist and ask them for help with a fear of public speaking, they can't spend eight hours with you practicing on video. They can spend two minutes writing a prescription. That's their business model. It's not their business model to actually make you so good at speaking to the point where you don't have fear. It's certainly possible to rehearse again and again and again on video. Love it and still do bad. But I've never seen it. Now I have a self selected audience that comes to me. And I'm also a little suspicious that people are actually doing this because I can tell you, other than my own books, I don't see in the 10,000 public speaking books out there people actually giving this recommendation. Oh yeah, you'll see the recommendation. Oh, practice on video. You'll feel comfortable. That's not my advice for getting over fear of public speaking. My advice is very, very specific. Practice your speech on video. Analyze everything you like, everything you don't like. Focus on just one thing you don't like and do the video again. Try to eliminate that one thing and keep doing. I don't care if it takes a hundred takes. I have clients who have fear of public speaking and guess What? They do 107 video practice practices with me or before they even show up with me. And at that point, it's very, very difficult to be fearful of something that you've done 107 times if you've never done it. Yeah, it's fearful. If you did it once and you kind of halfway looked at it for two seconds and said, oh, I'm not good at this. Well, sure, it's easy to be nervous. You gave your example of the sharks. Then I would be fearful of being out in the water surrounded by sharks because sharks can actually eat me and kill me. Okay. And it's somehow logical for me. Watching me swim away from sharks isn't particularly relevant because any given day those sharks can swim faster. Here's another example for you. If I come to you and say, oh my gosh, I'm nervous. I am going to have a major fashion show in New York City. All the major fashion critics are going to be there. And you know what? I didn't really prepare anything. So I'm just going to put old bags and tape old bags to my body and walk down the Runway. And I'm nervous that they're going to say horrible things about me, give me bad reviews. I'm just curious as to your advice. Would you say, well, tj take this beta blocker and you won't feel nervous when you're walking down the Runway in your old bags? Or would you say, well, tj, before you have this fashion show, why don't we actually create some fashions that we know people like? So if your demographic is, for example, young women, let's create a bunch of designs, test them on a bunch of young women, see which ones they like most. And that way, when we do the fashion show, you'll show stuff that you know has already been liked and viewed favorably by your target audience. That's all I'm suggesting you do with speaking as well. But you know what? One of my main themes with all of this is do what works. If you can give a great speech using a beta blocker, then do it. But my challenge to you is, remember, it's not about you, it's about your audience. Just because you didn't shake or your voice didn't crack, if the audience doesn't remember your messages, you have failed. Miserable. You have failed, failed. Perhaps not in as memorable way as if you broke out in flopped sweat, shook and ran out the door without saying anything that would be more memorable. But at some level, it's the same degree of failure. You communicated nothing. So a lot of my beef with the whole beta blocker issue is that I think people aren't actually focusing on the goal. Your goal is to communicate. Your goal is to get your audience to understand messages and remember them so they can take the actions you want. And if you're focused on a beta blocker and okay, now I can go through this boring data dump of a speech and just get through it and no one will say I fell apart, to me, that's already the biggest failure you could be. So whether you use beta blockers, whether you do shout out to key at some level, I don't care. As long as after your speech you have evidence that your audience understood your messages and remembered them. Do that and you can use any legal drug or substance you want, I'll still be happy. More important, I want your audience to be happy.

Speaking with TJ Walker, dissecting the communication skills and practices of world class leaders.