Sally Bean

Travelling to @Ascot? 🏇 Check before you travel and remember that Oyster and contactless payments aren't valid. Please allow extra time to complete your journey, as services will be busy and queuing systems will be in place Please plan ahead 👇 southwesternrailway.com/plan…

Years ago, I was at a private TED event, and what I heard about presentations has stuck with me ever since… After slide:ology came out, Duarte was asked to help transform slides and speakers as they launched TED.com About 3 years later, I was at a curated table with several big deal TEDsters. And I asked this question: What do you miss most about the old way TED delivered presentations? Their answer surprised me… They said they missed the early days when they’d have a world-renowned scientist on stage who was so nervous they’d be shaking. Everyone in the audience would be cheering them on, and they would push through the fear to deliver incredible insights. There was something special about that level of authenticity. It was uniquely human. Unpolished. It helped the audience feel a real connection with the speaker. And it gave everyone an experience they’d never forget. Every high-stakes presentation needs to have some level of “polish”. The deck needs to be visually clear. Your message should follow a clear structure. You need to practice your delivery. But NONE of that will help you move your audience if you don’t develop an authentic connection with them. Your conviction about your topic, your vulnerability to be your true self, and your genuine belief in what you’re sharing are what your audience will remember.

Let me make my position clear. @realDonaldTrump is incompetent, corrupt, and depraved. And those who continue to support him enable and encourage that behavior.

Former Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May is the final Today guest editor. In her programme, Baroness May will talk about trust and respect in politics, and speaks to Her Majesty the Queen and the Hunt family about violence against women. Listen: bbc.in/49bqrv9

I don't tend to post much on X these days, but I thought I would let my UK followers know that I have a new TV offering: a 2-part Horizon special on BBC2 going out on 29th Sep and 6th October. It is called Secrets of the Brain. See bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002k78…

There’s a secret trap MANY people fall into when using AI to create their presentations. After years of studying what makes presentations succeed or fail, I'm noticing a concerning pattern as leaders rush to adopt AI for their high-stakes communications. In 1964, media theorist Marshall McLuhan said, "The medium is the message." His framework helps us understand what happens when a new technology enters our lives. When I applied his Tetrad of Media Effects to AI in presentations, the pattern became clear Here's what AI is doing to your presentation process: AI gives you a 24/7 thinking partner. Need headline variations for your product launch? Want to test different story angles for your board presentation? AI accelerates all of that exploration. You're no longer building in isolation. Like the ancient oral traditions, you can shape ideas through dialogue before they're polished. It's collaborative, iterative, and fast. This transforms your role from slide creator to story architect. Your job isn't to fill slides, but to shape the logical and emotional journey your audience experiences. But there's a dangerous trade-off emerging. I've watched brilliant leaders deliver AI-generated presentations that looked perfect on paper, yet completely failed to move their audiences to action. Their messages were efficient... but empty. Here's the trap: When your presentation arrives instantly through AI, you skip the mental friction that creates genuine breakthrough thinking. The quiet walk. The reflective pause. The deep consideration of your audience's specific needs. Without realizing it, you become reactive rather than purposeful. Your thinking is outsourced rather than enhanced. The most devastating consequence? Your audience feels it immediately. They detect the generic thinking. They sense the lack of true empathy for their situation. And they don't take action. The very tool that makes you faster can undermine what makes you persuasive. The solution isn't avoiding AI. It's using it while preserving four essential human capabilities: 1. Empathy: Deeply understanding your audience's context 2. Message: Testing for clarity and resonance 3. Visuals: Creating memorable images that guide understanding 4. Delivery: Bringing it to life through authentic presence Because every presentation that moves people to action still starts with human empathy, not algorithmic efficiency.

I heard a smart person say we should provide a steelman case for what Trump is doing on tariffs. It completely ignores the reality of how policy is being made. To get the 90-day pause, two of his advisers literally waited until another one left the room in order to get him to change his policies, and then rushed to announce it before the other guy found out.

I wrote a piece for the Guardian's "big ideas" series on how techbros' failure to understand sci-fi novels is causing immense harm. theguardian.com/books/2025/a…

What bad architecture teaches us about the world on.ft.com/41RRAQ8

The Psychology Behind Why Donald Trump Won the 2024 Presidential Election open.substack.com/pub/psyclo…

judging an engineer by age is BS - Linus Torvalds wrote Linux at 21 - Steve Wozniak built Apple I at 25 - Palmer Luckey created Oculus VR at 20 - Vitalik Buterin designed Ethereum at 19 - Mark Zuckerberg coded Facebook at 19 Looking back, I realize that 18-25 is the peak time. "The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible – and achieve it, generation after generation."