Summon the zombies and robots! It’s time to give a speech.
When is the last time you gave a speech that people wanted to pay attention to? Was your audience awake and alive, or resembling something more like zombies (or maybe robots)?
Think back to the advice you were given in your college communications class (which, admit it, we know for some of you was many, many years ago). Are you still following that advice today? Is it helping you perform like the mastermind you know you are, or is it causing your audience to morph into soulless, empty vessels tied to their chairs out of obligation?
In The Zombie Guide to Public Speaking by Dr. Steve Vrooman (2015), we are encouraged to unlearn much of the conventional wisdom that we are taught in communications class. You know the ones: stand still while you’re speaking, read from a script, use a slide deck and a script, and so many others. These are the bits of advice that Vrooman has deemed “MOPSBOTS (My Old Public Speaking Books On The Shelf)” (p. 12).
Instead of relying on these outdated methods, Vrooman challenges us to rethink our speaking methods and relearn some critical elements that elevate a speech to a level even the undead might be willing to re-animate for and engage with.
Often in business, government, and education, no matter what we were taught in that communications class, we tend to develop a heavily scripted slide deck presentation with numerous bullet points, some photos, and then during the presentation we are supposed to speak to the slides and stick to the script.
Dr. Vrooman’s advice in The Zombie Guide (2015) essentially says phooey to all that. In fact, he suggests that unless you can use visual aids to complement your speech, he wants you to ditch them altogether. Especially if it means you can gain a deeper connection with your audience.
Developing a good speech requires a balance between simplification and complexity. It’s hard work, but it is what makes the difference between you wasting other people’s time and potentially persuading them to make a change for the better. He suggests simplifying information for people so that they are willing to think about what you are telling them, enough to the point that you may be able to persuade them to think differently, and then make it complex enough to challenge them and keep them engaged in the speech for the duration of the time you are speaking (Vrooman, 2015).
You are competing with countless other priorities in people’s lives, and the reality is, they may not even want to be listening to your speech. I mean, heck, due to all those other priorities in your life, you might not even want to keep reading this whitepaper! How many times have you glanced at your phone hoping that something, anything, will pop up as a notification so that you can have an excuse to look at something else? It’s ok, you can admit it. We get it.
Just like this whitepaper is hopefully keeping your attention, your speech must grab your audience’s attention during the introduction and maintain it in a way that keeps them engaged until the very end.
Visual aids, if you are planning to use them, should be carefully considered and planned in a way so that they do not distract, confuse, or bore your audience. They must complement your speech enough to engage them without confusing them or causing them to have to read all your mussy bullet points.
More advice from Vrooman (2015):
· NEVER read from a script that you wrote to go along with those slides. If you do, you have probably lost your audience. Practice (maybe a LOT) and deliver your speech extemporaneously, without notes, and make eye contact! Your audience will feel like you are having a conversation with them. All this practice will help you come across as natural and approachable, and people will respect you more for it.
· Don’t feed us information you haven’t properly researched. Who has time for that? Someone in your audience will immediately open their device and fact-check you, as they should, to counter your argument. You must put in the time and be able to back up your claims with evidence. Your argument must be strong, and if you are making claims, they must be warranted and grounded in credible theory or evidence. Avoid common thinking fallacies (pp. 282-287).
· Anything you include in the speech, whether it be data, charts, graphs, or citing research must be credible, and you must cite your sources during the speech to maintain credibility with your audience.
· Your use of language matters tremendously. Practice to the point of being able to not be tempted by filler words such as um, uh, like, and any others. Remember, this is a conversation, featuring you as the subject matter expert.
· The organization of your speech must make sense and be delivered in an order that takes your audience from not knowing anything, to gaining an understanding, then being convinced to believe the way you want them to believe or take the action you want them to take. The use of connectives is important, and the way you summarize information matters.
· When you conclude your speech you must summarize it for the audience, reaching a logical conclusion that provides psychological closure. Adding in a clincher is the thing that will persuade the audience members to change their thinking and behavior and take action. If you’re doing it right, these people should be wanting to get up out of their seat and walk out the door ready to implement whatever you say due to the way you present yourself, your content, its credibility, the way you got the message across, and your persuasiveness.
Sounds like a lot, right? It is but it is doable.
YOU. CAN. DO. THIS.
Sometimes it helps to look at examples from other successful speakers, and we found a great one for you to observe and consider.
Take a few minutes and watch the TED video, Meet NEO, Your Robot Butler in Training (2025), and consider the points we’ve discussed above, and then we’ll discuss the strengths and weaknesses in this video.
Meet NEO, Your Robot Butler in Training
https://www.ted.com/talks/bernt_bornich_meet_neo_your_robot_butler_in_training?language=en
Isn’t that fascinating? The content plus the concept of robots doing our chores was enough to win us over.
Let’s look at it through the lens of The Zombie Guide to Public Speaking (Vrooman, 2015), and see what our speaker, Bernt Børnich (TED, 2025), got right in his speech, and maybe even a couple of things to look out for that you may want to consider doing differently in your own speech.
First of all, the robot opening the speech grabs our attention well. Then Børnich gets the audience out of its mental rut by taking a complex situation and breaking it down very simplistically through surprising and unexpected (Vrooman, 2015): a robot that does your chores for you (TED, 2025).
Vrooman (2015) says “We have a hard time stopping the processing of our own ideas long enough to get to yours” (p. 32), but this video (TED, 2025) gets around that by entertaining us with the robot doing demonstrations of things we don’t necessarily enjoy, such as household chores. There is so much glee in watching someone (anyone!) else doing our chores for us.
Børnich’s (TED, 2025) delivery and speaking style was personable and while it was apparently rehearsed and scripted, it was more like a conversation between himself and the audience. There were very few filler words used, and in fact, we only counted one, which was part of an unscripted robot response to a situation. In that case, even a filler word felt natural, and the audience connected to the moment and made it seem ok.
Børnich (TED, 2025) helps the audience early on to create their own mental model (Vrooman, 2015) for support of his claim, that robots in the home are a good thing for everyone, then he goes on to discuss why he believes that to be true. Regardless of whether you agree philosophically with his claim, his grounds for discussion, and what warrants the discussion is probably based on fairly sound logic.
Throughout the TED (2025) video there are numerous visual aids, all of which seemed to help propel the story forward. To what we assume would be to Vrooman’s (2015) delight, every visual served a purpose, whether it was a simplistic slide that helped Børnich prove the point he was making, to the photographs of humans interacting with robots, and young families that could potentially benefit from robots doing their chores for them. He included charts, graphs, icons, photographs, and symbolism, all of which helped us ‘catch’ the vision being shared. We don’t know about you, but we were NOT expecting to see a humanoid robot dressed as a pirate in a long, dark wig serving cupcakes to the kiddies at a birthday party (TED, 2025, 9:35).
The other, much more obvious, and quite convincing visual aid used is NEO the robot itself, which Børnich (TED, 2025) uses masterfully to help convince the audience. This would be a tough act to follow, so let’s have a moment of silence for whichever speaker followed this act.
We would like to point out though, that it was not clearly spelled out whether the robot was functioning as a result of its own learning, or whether someone backstage was controlling it. Working under the assumption that it was the latter seems more reasonable, especially to our non-robot-having selves, and that surely someone was at the controls. However, the speech was leading us to believe that the robot had ‘learned’ to function on its own on that stage. We might never know, but it is something to consider whether Børnich’s (TED, 2025) credibility is intact, given our skepticism.
Børnich’s (TED, 2025) makes a few claims in his video that may or may not be warranted as grounds for conclusion (Vrooman, 2015) as to their correctness:
· AI-powered robots must learn complex sets of data in order to become effective at performing labor
· Training robots in our home are more effective than training robots in a warehouse or factory setting, where new and more diverse learning is limited.
· Training robots in our homes provides robots a much richer learning experience
· This generation of robots is safe, docile, and helpful
Each of these claims would need to be discussed at greater length to determine their validity, and that’s not something this speech was designed to cover.
At the end of the speech, Børnich and NEO (TED, 2025) ended it together on stage, with the robot ‘looking’ at its own hands (are we being gullible here?) when Børnich suggests that perhaps someday robots may learn to build other robots and solve other heady problems. Gullibility aside, there is still some skepticism as to whether a robot would react this way on its own and lends itself to being more scripted or programmed entertainment than reality, but the audience seemed to stay engaged (how could they not?) and riveted until the very end.
The clincher at the end, “…we can start trying to answer some of the remaining big unanswered questions about the universe and our role here. And I think if we can do that, that will to some extent redefine what it means to be human” (TED, 2025) combined with the visual featuring the robot’s face with a reflection of planet Earth in its face-lens was a powerful way to end the speech and resulted in raucous applause.
The speech is a good example, particularly in its use of visual aids and the speaker’s delivery. The way he combined complexity of subject with simplicity in delivering the message was something to model our own speeches after. It was entertaining, and we should take heed to the fact that entertainment can be overdone (which probably should be avoided, lest we discredit ourselves) (Vrooman, 2015), but all in all, there are many good takeaways here.
Ok, who’s ready to write and deliver a speech? Go forth and speak well.
You can do it.
References
TED. (2025, April). Bernt Børnich: Meet NEO, Your Robot Butler in Training [Video]. TED Conferences. https://www.ted.com/talks/bernt_bornich_meet_neo_your_robot_butler_in_training?language=en
Vrooman, S. (2015). The zombie guide to public speaking, 2nd “Dead”ition, re-animated. A MoreBrainz Project.