Speaker Tales

Photo by Thor Alvis on Unsplash

Ah the glamorous speaker circuit. I’ve spoken at a lot of conferences over the past several decades, and some of these talks have gone great. Some not so great. I thought I’d share a few experiences from the latter group, mainly for the entertainment value.

Of course, these are not tales of a demo gone wrong, or not having a cable to plug your modern laptop into that coal-driven projector. Oh no.

Empty Rooms

I have unfortunately had this happen more than once. It is usually a combination of things. You submit a talk for a conference, and get a really bad slot on the schedule. The event sounded great on paper, when in reality it is ever-so-slightly horridly awful. Someone sold you or someone in Marketing on this great gig, and slightly exaggerated the expected crowd. You get the idea.

Just a few short years ago I was speaking at a seafood restaurant in one of their private dining rooms, for some event. There was supposed to be 40-50 attendees, there ended up being 11 people there, which includes me, the marketing person, a sales rep, and the waiter. The talk was way over the attendees’ heads even though I had watered it down. I was flown there at company expense, hotel stay and everything. Fortunately I had an aisle seat on the flight back, as the food from this restaurant led to several mid-flight lavatory visits.

Another one was a somewhat large event a few years ago in San Francisco (not RSA), but by (bad) luck of the draw I had the first slot on the last day of a week-long conference. That last conference day was a Friday, and it was a half day at that. The vendor parties with the open bars were all on Thursday night. There I was with a co-worker, the AV guy, and three people at 8am when I was scheduled to speak. In the vendor area, all the vendors had already packed up. The place was dead.

The largest crowd I’ve spoken for in my career was maybe 2000 people. That said, I wish I could remember which event this other event was, as there was this one time where it was me and the AV guy. I mean, that was it. He was like, “What do you want to do?” Seriously, the person that was supposed to introduce me didn’t even show up. I said something like, “The talk could stand for a live rehearsal, let’s do it.” The reason I wish I could remember this better is because it was recorded on video. I’d love to see that now. Maybe I mentally blocked it. If you know where this was, it would have been the mid 00’s, contact me and-…. oh wait, you weren’t there. No one was.

First Black Hat Talk

This was rather sad. I had spoken at a few conferences at this point, and so I was typically not nervous. However this was my first Black Hat talk in 1999, so I was very nervous. The talk was on Novell NetWare hacking, something I had some experience with back in the day, and this was more of a talk in front of my peers. Actually, this was really a talk in front of my heroes, as I saw some of the other speakers in the audience.

I had a simple demo planned, it was all going to be from my local machine so no Internet needed, and I had every connector I could bring with me so that there was no chance of me being unable to connect up to the projector. I got to the room early, sat everything up, and I was ready. I was so prepared.

A very nice guy I’d met at another conference came up to the front, he was telling me how he was looking forward to the talk, and he reached over to shake my hand. It was about one minute to showtime. As he reached for my hand, he hit a full bottle of water which promptly fell over directly onto my laptop, with a LOT of water soaking the keyboard.

I grabbed it but it was too late. I mopped it up as best as I could. The screen was still on, but the mouse was not responding. In fact the pointer would scurry across the screen every few seconds without me touching the mouse, so things were obviously bad.

The guy was so apologetic, but the damage was done, and it seemed right after that they came up and said “okay, time to get started.” So I started the talk.

Somehow I was able to advance through the slides with the keyboard, but I was afraid if I did too much the presentation would die, and that would be it. The demo was completely out of the question.

I struggled through that talk as I was completely distracted. All I remember from that talk is staring at that mouse pointer going crazy, during which I could not advance the slide until the scurrying temporarily stopped. No demo, and at the end during questions the slides finally froze up completely on the very last slide, and that was it for the laptop.

Phoenix Totally Not Rising

This was not a public conference, this was a very large telecommunications corporate event where all of their security people were brought together from all over the globe for a big internal security conference. I was asked to be the lunch speaker at this event, which took place in Phoenix. I honestly thought this might be several dozen people, in some simple conference room.

It turned out to be several hundred people in an auditorium. I was basically sequestered at the hotel until it was near my allotted time, and I was not allowed into the auditorium until right before I was to go on. Now this was a time after this company had been infiltrated by some of those filthy hackers, and we all pretty much had a really bad reputation. Yes, it was the mid to late 90s.

Time for my talk. I am introduced as a hacker and by my hacker handle, and so Simple Nomad began to walk up the steps and onto the stage. That was when the booing started. Yes, I said booing.

I was nervous before, because I was learned how big the crowd was, and it was mentioned how a few people were “somewhat hesitant” at the idea of an actual hacker being there. There was an odd physical security component - I was not allowed to be alone at any point, like even going to the toilet. And when you couple that with this being my second official speaking gig, I was rather on edge.

When I say there was booing, just realize this wasn’t one or two people, this was a LOT of booing. There was a smattering of polite applause which quickly stopped. And there was plenty of murmuring. I don’t know what was being said, but I was able to guess the gist of it as being judgmental and otherwise not positive in nature. I realized I could probably not make this worse, and somehow my nervousness left me. I actually started laughing out loud, because I thought this was the most ridiculous situation I had ever faced.

I cannot remember the first thing I said once I reached the microphone, but it was along the lines of “Okay well, this is going to be a very interesting session.” The plan was that I was going to speak for a bit, you know, pontificate and ruminate, and follow up with some Q & A. Instead, I massively shifted gears. I said, “Tell you what, let’s just move right into the Q and A.”

If I remember correctly, the first question was from the person who asked me there, as a kind of a warm-up, and it was probably some kind of a softball question. I don’t even remember what it was, but they started lining up at the microphone so I wouldn’t be asked any more softball questions. Most of the questions were kind of rough, but I focused on being honest and being a human being.

They were surprised my employer knew I was a hacker and that my day job was keeping hackers out. They were surprised that my answer to why I wasn’t in jail was along the lines of how I was a combination of careful and lucky. After I finished up, I stepped off the stage very relieved. I did get applause and no boos, and at that moment I thought I’d won them over. After reflection on the flight home, I realized I had probably just wore them down a bit as opposed to actually winning them over.

Random Incidents

At ShmooCon in 2008 I was doing a talk and touched on some details about crypto, which lead to being nailed in the chest with a ShmooBall by an NSA employee in complete disagreement with something I said. I had a number of people yell shit out during the talk. Oddly, for a long time this was one of my fave talks.

In 2004 did a keynote for the Institute of Internal Auditors, and had a whole series of jokes and an important point about being law abiding. This joke started with me asking the audience to raise their hands, “Who here has ever gotten a speeding ticket?” Not one person in this room raised their hand. “Are you telling me that no one here has ever gotten a speeding ticket?” After a pause, someone said “It is against the law, they post the speed limit on the street, it’s so easy to just see the sign and know what the limit is.” I responded with a laugh and said, “Well you just killed a bunch of jokes I was going to make!” Nothing. I mean, crickets. I don’t even remember the jokes now. I have never spoken in front of such a straight-laced audience as that one.

Before you ask on this next one, there is no video. Anyway, in 2006 I was greeted by a reporter right after I finished my talk while I was packing up the laptop. I thought she wanted to do an interview. I mean of course, I’m this cool hacker and all, there’s such a demand for my utter wisdom. Nope. Instead, she informed me my fly was open, and she recommended next time I wear black underwear to match my trousers, so if it happened again it wouldn’t be noticed. My underwear was bright red.

Bad speaking experience? Tell me your tale in the comments!