Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Scott Kersner. I'm a journalist, author, conference organizer, and frequent moderator. And one of the things I do a lot is to conduct fireside chats, which some people call onstage interviews. It gives me a chance to have a conversation with someone really interesting, ask them just about any question, and help an audience get to know them better, as well as ask a couple questions that are on their minds. I've had the opportunity to get some amazing people into my fireside chat chair, like Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, inventors Dean Kamen and Ray Kurzweil, former Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick, Kim Janey, the first black and first female mayor of Boston, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, the late Clay Christensen, author Malcolm Gladwell, Vicki Dobbs-Beck of Lucasfilm, New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, and Boston Celtics president Rich Gotham. And I also just watched someone do a fireside chat that was a total train wreck. I'll tell you why in a minute, but first I wanna share with you the five keys to making a fireside chat successful. Fireside chats are different from panel discussions. In some ways, they're easier because you don't need to juggle four or five different speakers and give them all equal airtime. You can just focus on one person's story and perspective. But in some ways, I think they can be harder because you need to structure the time so that it feels fast moving and dynamic for the audience. And sometimes with fireside chats, your speaker is so used to public speaking and so busy that they don't have time for a prep call or a Zoom in advance. You might just get a few minutes to chat with them in the green room or in the hallway before you are thrown together on stage. First, let's talk about preparation. Yes, it's helpful if you've done your research about your guest. Read their books, listen to their music, watch videos of them giving speeches. But you wanna resist the urge to show all that research that you've done. You don't need to be the world expert on this person. And if you say things like, in the second paragraph of your research paper from 1972, you suggest that you're gonna lose the audience and they're gonna feel like you're getting way too far into the weeds. But in your research, you may discover fun stories that you wanna ask them to share or provocative quotes that you wanna bring up and ask why they believe that. If you do have a meeting or call with the guest beforehand, I always resist the urge to share all of my questions because you lose spontaneity if they've thought through every possible answer in advance. I usually share a couple opening questions just so the person knows what's coming. And I ask if there are topics or projects that they wanna be sure to cover. If there's an opportunity to show some photos or video related to their work, I always like to try to include some visual elements because it breaks up all the talking. You can also ask them about their ideas to engage the audience in the chat, which I'll talk more about in a minute. Second, if you've seen my other YouTube video on moderating panel discussions, you know that I love index cards. You can use one index card to write down a few things on the front and a few things on the back. Intro yourself, lay out your goals, do a brief intro of the speaker since the rest of the time will really serve as an extended intro. On the back, list the questions you most wanna ask. If you feel like you don't have enough material to fill the time, don't worry. That'll leave time to ask follow-up questions that occur to you in the moment and that you're curious about and to let the audience ask questions. Okay, third is the audience. They are there to learn about the guests and their work and you are there as a conduit for them to learn about that person. So poll the audience, make them part of the conversation. You might say, can you raise your hand if you've seen one of her movies, bought something from her website, been touched by her writing. One trick that I like to use is to say that I'm vastly underprepared for this fireside chat. I just have this one index card. So I'm gonna need your help in asking the really smart questions. If the speaker is a successful restaurateur and you have an audience of wannabe chefs and restaurant owners, see if you could get a few of them to pitch their concept and get your guests to give them feedback. You could do the same thing if you have a movie director on stage with you and an audience of aspiring student filmmakers. Think about ways that you can make the audience feel connected to your guests. Like they've gotten to see something different than just a rehashing of anecdotes that have been told many, many, many times before. It's a good idea to get your guests involved with your plan for engagement during the prep call or at least in the green room. And in my experience, most will be on board with doing something a little different. Fourth, a great structure for most fireside chats is past, present, future. Spend the first segment talking about the person's early career, how they got started, some of their best known projects. Spend the second segment talking about their recent work and what they're interested in right now, the present. And conclude by asking about what they expect to do next or for their predictions about the future. You might say, what will we be talking about at this conference 10 years from now? When you get started, you can explain to your audience that your plan is to talk about this person's past, present, and future. And that gives them a map to know what to expect. You'd be surprised at how many firesides just hopscotch all over the place with no logic. And it's confusing and frustrating for the audience and sometimes the guests too. You wanna ask stuff that you are actually curious about rather than only focusing on things the speaker has said they wanna talk about or things you think you're supposed to ask about. I once asked Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, about his propensity for playing pranks and goofing around. And here's what he said. The one thing in reading up about you that strikes me is like you've always loved pranks and practical jokes and wordplay. And you have this background of phone freaking, of hacking into the phone system to make calls for free and make prank calls and things like that. So I wonder if you think that breaking the rules is important in some way to being an innovator.

Speaker 2: That's odd. I've never been asked that question that way on stage. And yet I've thought about it many times and it's a personal hateful. I believe that a little bit of misbehavior, trying to go beyond the rules and the boundaries of a strict maze that you live within is really critical to creative thinking because the most creative thinkers that I meet, the ones who create the products that we love to this day and start the companies that became so big and important in technology, almost all of them go back to their days of playing little pranks and fooling people trying to get computers, get further into a computer than you should be. And I've never been a computer hacker, but I always try to figure out in my design how to design things differently than anyone else was ever taught. So I didn't follow any things that were in the books.

Speaker 1: Fifth, you don't need to overthink the ending, but you do need to keep an eye on time so that you don't aggravate the events organizer by going over. Here are three options for endings. The simplest one is that you can let an audience member ask a final question, say thanks to everyone and ask the audience for one more round of applause. You might wanna save the future portion of your past, present, future structure for the last few minutes and ask your guests for predictions about the future of their field or maybe their hopes and concerns for the year ahead. Or if you've worked this out before, maybe there's a piece of advice or a great quote or a joke or a passage from their latest book that you wanna ask your guests to end on. You're welcome to steal my very last line, which involves expressing gratitude to three groups of people. I usually say it like this. I'd like to thank the organizers of this event for all their hard work and for inviting me to moderate. I'd like to thank you for all your great questions and please help me thank our guest for being with us today. Please help me thank is code for applaud now and it always works. See which one of the three things I missed in this fireside chat at South by Southwest with the documentary filmmaker, Gary Hustwit. I wanna thank you for being here. Thank you for all the great questions and please help me thank Gary Hustwit. Thanks everybody. Okay, let's get to why the fireside chat I just watched as an audience member was a complete disaster. The subject was a famous artist who I didn't know much about and the interviewer did a couple of things wrong. She started off by explaining all of the ways that she'd interacted with him. I think to establish that they were really good friends but it just made those of us in the audience feel like we were outsiders watching two great friends reminiscing. She let him ramble and go on way too long. You can always tap your guest on the shoulder, tap your guest on the knee and move on to the next question, kind of interject and redirect. And there was definitely no structure to the talk, at least anything that was explained at the start. Finally, when I left at the one hour mark, there hadn't yet been any kind of audience interaction or Q&A, not even asking for a show of hands. The audience is spending time with you for a reason. They wanna get to know your guest and they wanna feel part of the conversation. If you wanna get some inspiration from a master, watch any of the Inside the Actor Studios interviews by James Lipton or interviews by Oprah or Barbara Walters. I hope that this video has been worth your time. I hope that it's helpful if you have a fireside chat coming up or you're planning an event that involves fireside chats. And I'd love it if you post any questions or comments that you have below. Thanks for watching. So John mentioned that you grew up in the Catskills, 16 miles from the grocery store. I'm guessing you walked uphill both ways in the snow to go grocery shopping, but what did you think you were gonna be when you were growing up?

Speaker 3: Well, we actually had snowmobiles who would take the groceries up the driveway when there was too much snow, so we didn't have to walk it. Nice. So growing up in a rural area, you tend to become pretty self-sufficient. You can't just call someone up to show up and solve a problem. And sometimes they're mildly existential problems. You know, the power is out, there's no heat and there's all snow and there's no water, no this. And so you spend a lot of time in the garage working around machinery and you build things. And so I thought I was gonna be a machinist and have a really big machine shop with lathes and milling machines and fancy welding machines. And that's kind of what I was excited to do.

Speaker 1: I often use Disney, as I was telling you earlier, as an example of a company that had this visionary founder, has a visionary CEO today who, in Bob Iger, really understands everything in that presentation and has had the Magic Leap glasses on and really gets it. So to me, Disney is a prototype of a company that has really built up and maintained its innovation muscles over time. My one question is just, what's still hard in a company like that that has so many creative people and so many different innovation capabilities? What's still hard?

Speaker 4: I think you're absolutely right about Bob Iger being a very visionary CEO. And I think that that's been incredibly important both to what we're doing and to the company at large. But because the company is still organized in different business units, and when I talked about this idea that we really want to take a holistic view to storytelling and immersive storytelling in particular, that can still be challenging when we're sort of trying to look this way and the organization is structured in business units. The good news is that we have some really strong collaborations. I would say one in particular is with Walt Disney Imagineering. They apply their talents to the theme parks, hotels, and cruise ships. And we're, of course, looking at some location-based experiences that, as they would call it at Disney, Beyond the Berm. So it's outside of the parks. And so that's an example of a really good collaboration. But you're not always that fortunate in terms of finding the right collaborators in an organization as large as Disney.

Speaker 1: What would you be focusing on learning right now as kind of a new technology and emerging area if you were a designer?

Speaker 5: I would learn how to code. Yeah. There's two sides to it. On the mechanics side, so the functional tool set that I think is gonna be the most valuable is understanding code. And just as a way of thinking, algorithmic thinking. On the social side, to think the most broadly about human interaction. I mean, there's the manipulative, sort of the dynamic side of manipulating social interactions. And then there's also the part which is what does it mean to be alive? You know, the wonderful kind of like, the big questions of what makes life worth living. And that, you know, I'm sure that's like such a disappointing answer. Because, sorry.

Speaker 1: I think the audience wants to know like Python or Ruby.

Speaker 5: Dreamweaver is the future, obviously.

Speaker 1: I guess the first question I should ask that was on everyone's minds this morning as we were gulping down our coffee is the news of the week is the big gulp policy in New York has been struck down. As I was listening to that on the radio this morning, I was thinking like, how much government time in New York City is being spent on the size of soda that you're allowed to sell? And then I heard this week that it doesn't even apply to coffee. You know, Starbucks can still sell the tanker truck size latte.

Speaker 5: You do know what state I'm governor of, right? Are we gonna spend time on New York or are we gonna talk about Mississippi?

Speaker 1: I was just teeing it up for you. I thought that maybe that was a softball question about what they're doing down in New York.