Jason Pfeiffer

But when my eight-year-old son, Fen...

picks up his ipad in the middle of a conversation i know we have fully lost him to roblox and therefore we got to pull him back but when i go and i give a talk uh like a keynote somewhere oftentimes i'll see people on their phones and then they will come up to me afterwards and they will show me the notes and they'll be like i i'm sorry if it looked rude that i was on the phone i was taking notes like they want they want to show that and i think that that's a good instinct

Yeah, exactly. Right. I hope not. We are really hoping that the other people that Fenn is interacting with on Roblox are also eight, but it's possible that they're 50 and at a convention listening to me give a keynote talk.

Just really awkwardly. Just glare at each other.

Oh man, I'm sorry about that.

Because you had to do all the small talk, Morgan. What was your question?

Do anything good this weekend?

All right, I'm going to give it to you. Here's the solution. This is the solution. The solution is this. Tell a story. So this is what I always do is if I'm on a call, I share whatever the latest amusing or random thing is. I just start telling that to people.

And the reason I do it is because I know that everyone on this call hates Zoom small talk, but also will feel obliged to do it unless somebody just fills the void. Somebody needs to fill the void. And I, you know, I know that I, for better or for worse, a thing I can do is fill a void. And so I'll just start talking. I'll just start, I'll just tell some random story until everyone's there.

And then I will exit the story and we'll get on. And it's like, look, as long as you know that you're not, you didn't just launch something.

your own private version of the moth and like people aren't there for your stories so they don't want it any longer than necessary but like you know if you tell a story and then as soon as the last person shows up and the meeting is supposed to begin like wrap your story up and move into the thing everyone will love you for it

Yeah. You know, I mean, another way you could solve this for people is put interesting things in your background, and then people will ask about them.

Like a money roll, yes. Nicole's got a giant money roll behind her, like a physical statue of money. But then you need something amusing to say about it. And I found this to be the case often when I go and call somebody and I was like, oh, I like your wall of hats. And then they'll be like, oh, thank you. And then they'll start telling me about the hats and it fills whatever time is necessary.

I usually have, depending on the angle that I'm in my room, I either have a large old timey typewriter behind me, which was my grandma's. And so I have a whole couple of things to say about that. Or there are some guitars hanging on the wall that people ask me about. And then I say some things about that. So Have something that starts a conversation. People will ask about it.

But now it is your duty to have some at least mildly engaging thing to say about it that can last 60 to 120 seconds.

What percentage of time when you are on a Zoom call, for example, you listening at home, what you don't see is that we are recording. We're all in a Zoom together right now, me.

Nicole's looking at herself and has checked her phone a couple of times. But we're also recording locally, which is why the audio quality is better. Anyway, point is, on this call or on regular calls, what percentage of the time have you spent looking at yourself? Morgan, how much time have you spent looking at yourself instead of me and Nicole on this call?

I was going to go a little higher for myself, like maybe a third.

Oh, yeah, that's this is at the end. Right. So there's a there is a just for context. There is a we're going to take another episode after this one. There is a guest for that episode. That person is in the waiting room waiting for us. But also Morgan had created a list of questions for this episode. And the shrimping was at the end. What the hell is shrimping?

Explain. Yeah, describe that.