BSidesAugusta 2017 - Track3: How to Persuade Humans... by Jason Blanchard

No yes the title of this is humans

getting your message across the people my name is Jason Blanchard I'm a professional social engineer means I work in marketing my entire sole purpose in life is get people to click links just like any Nigerian prince and so that's what I do on a daily basis so I come from a marketing background from college books and filmmaking and so I don't necessarily know how you do what you do but you may also not know how to do what I do so I have some I'm gonna try to explain here in the next 30 minutes as my Twitter handle if you want to follow me on Twitter I don't really tweet that much except when I'm going to

give a talk cool there's like a lot of you right now if you didn't notice I raised my hand - so - before we really really begin I want to let you know that I I am a nervous shy person in real life I'm just generally a side person when I'm on stage and it's a little different when I'm working in booths I'm shaking hands as my job but in real life I'm a pretty shy person I love and hate presenting like before this happened I was outside in the heat just let the Sun cook on me I took ten deep breaths before I came back in here and I walked in house I can't students but I

love doing this because I get to teach people something but I also hate doing this because you're all looking at me and so there's that love-hate relationship that goes hand-in-hand I am prone to anxiety attacks and panic attacks I've had these before where I've been presenting and all of a sudden I realize you're all looking at me and then I become incredibly self-aware and I get like a thousand-yard stare the worst time was I was presenting to the CEO and vice president's and self of the company I was in and out of saying something they all had this look on their face of like we don't believe you

and I feel like it took 20 minutes for me to reach for the pose I'm sure it was like 30 seconds no one even notice but it was fine so it's internal you may not even notice that I have like an anxiety attack or you know anything here today but the reason why I'm telling you why all this happens is because I suffer from self-doubt I'm the imposter syndrome and all those things like you may one day suffer if you're giving presentations but I because I still get up here and do this so I never want your shyness for your is ID attacked or anything that you think you may have keep you from ever giving a presentation

and teaching somebody's son and especially when it comes to work and you have something to offer in other people please don't hold back because you think you have these things it's a thing that you just have to overcome and I've been doing this for like 14 years and I was telling these guys before we even started I am nervous right now but 15 minutes from now I'll kind of feed into it and then also don't be over into all right that's fine okay I was born a storyteller seven and my brother took me to go see the movie Top Gun in the theater age seven and I don't know if you've ever seen the movie Top Gun maybe

you haven't maybe you have but I was seven years old in the theater he's more like stadium seats and everything like you have now against it in the theater it was seven years old and also like some birds and then he played some long-ago do that and he was just watching this movie so awesome you remember the volleyball scene yeah and then he's killing McGillis and all of a sudden like he you know something bad happen and then like if you spoil something happens and I'm sitting there in theater like and then he goes he could be consoled by Kelly McGillis and my brother realized that Lovins was happening he's a government absolutely it's just like I kept watching Top Gun

and then at the end like he finally found the strength to get back in a plane because he had lost it because of a bet and he gets back in a plane he chooses off the bad guys and when he gets back home to the aircraft carrier and he lands and all of a sudden everybody runs over and they throw him up on his shoulders and I don't know if you remember the end but he's got the thing in his hand probably seven years old good awesome I remember I went out and bought the my own f-14s and all that Tomcats and I bought the soundtrack my money and I put in my fisher-price plate-like

tape that I played that song all the time and I loved movies from that point on I decided I want to make moves and so I went to the army eventually I went to the army and I became a combat cameraman so I was a twenty five picture all along time ago 96 of 2002 and so I was a combat cameraman they taught me how to be a video editor and I made a lot of I don't want to call propaganda but we had this rule that if if it was 1% true is true and the fact that we filmed it means it happens

from the Army I went to Full Sail University which is a Film School in Orlando Florida from from there I began began being a teacher at the school because I had six years of experience and so I came to teach now is a nonlinear editing teacher and so I got to teach people how anything affects how human beings perceive information and so by doing this over the years I started to learn about storytelling and how humans like yourselves like to watch things and so what I'm gonna talk to you about now is how humans like to watch things and learn things so that way you can apply that to the way that you also have a manage so all stories break down

into spide simple parts there's the hook the beginning the middle climax and end the hook beginning middle climax and end the hook beginning middle those are the five simple things a hook beginning and ending and what I want you all to start thinking about is that every time you tell the story you do this there's a look at the beginning there's the middle there's a climax of Japan in every single story you've ever told it's just you may not have noticed it or you weren't being intentional about it but now that I'm explaining it to you when you start hearing stories from now on you'll start to hear the hook the beginning the middle the climax an end

and when you started tell stories you'll start to think in the hook beginning middle of a climax event and if you don't believe that you're a storyteller and my next slide I have a belief that most people drink and do drugs so that way they have stories to share the next time they drink of your drunks there's so many great stories that start off with hold my beer I mean just think about how many awesome things have happened after someone said them but going from place to place and talking to person to person I remember back in the army that there is people in the unit that were phenomenal storytellers and it almost always started with so back home right

and you knew a storm is coming and it's gonna be great but there's this one time did I ever tell you these are all books oh I've got a story you remember last time these are all books as soon as you say these things the person you're talking to like tell me more and we're used to doing this we may just not have known that we were doing this I'm gonna right now ruin every 93.4% of movies for you the reason why I had this exam sayers did I made it up because I work in marketing yes you put a point after a percentage to you with this automatically think it's real in any way

the hook on all movies and so we're taught in screenwriting we're taught moviemaking that by page 3 page 3 in the script that you're writing page 3 is the hook you introduced the main turn I page 3 and if you think back to any movie I've ever seen the main here in the first three minutes of any movie that's why if you miss the perfect it kind of lost a little bit because there was that cook there trying to get your attention - then tell you the rest of the story so it's in the first three minutes by minute 10 minute 10 something bad happens a small bad thing now it's not a big bad

thing happens but a small bad thing happens in the movie Top Gun it was essentially you're going to Top Gun like that was the wasn't a bad thing but it was a next by minute 30 the hero goes on a journey to fix something bad they're going on if it's Frodo he's going to return the brain if you think back to the movies on the quest to do something by minute 45 page 45 essentially meta 45 and also once I've talked to this you go back and watch movies and you hit the pause button as you're watching he was right I was watching the movie and it was literally like a minute 3 when I

film school the one thing is all people who went to film school love making movies by the 9th month in film school they all hated moves because they knew how they were made so 9 minute 45 the hero's winning everything's going well but by minute 60 falls levels something bad happens the character lost the you know something terribly happened to the character and if you think back to all the movies you you can think about right now you know that this is true the hero's winning then also the heroes losing but then by minute 75 they either a mentor where they've found the will within themselves they found a magical item worth of whatever they need to kill

the bag and by minute 75 you had the climax of the movie and then that last 15 minutes or so if you were and then we have a thing that finished the movie as fast as possible don't linger don't sit around don't talk about you finish the movie soon to climax it over your life and and if you think back to your movies that you really enjoyed it will be like whoa and it's done die hard is a great example of this guy hearted like non-stop action

and so now I have just ruined all movies for you and I'm sorry because the thing is when you go to watch a movie next time it follows this formula if you've ever sat there and go oh I hope he wins really Wow so another editing so if that's the story breakdown of movies here's what happens to you and here's what editors do to you on purpose and once I've learned how this works it was really fascinating and a powerful tool for editors to use is three seconds flow whenever you watch a movie a TV show or anything the average edit is three seconds long or there's gonna be camera movement or something happens but it's one one

thousand two and done three windows and the reason why is because your brain which is this amazing tool but your brain still takes three seconds to go what do I see I know what I see and it relates it to something else and what this looks like in your brain is you see on the screen a yellow house and it takes a second for your brain to go see it it's yellow it's a house so that's what happens in two seconds but in the third second your brain goes there is a yellow house like that my neighborhood it relates it to something that's why when we watch movies we cry every lap or we get anxious because it's not about

what's happening to the on the screen it's about what's happened to us before and as we're watching it we're leading it to something that happened to us like the notebook like when you're watching the note so you were lead it into yourself but it takes your brain 3 seconds do so at 4 seconds here's what happens your brain so 4 second edit your brain says I see something it's a yellow house there's a yellow house like that my neighborhood and then it makes one more leap and then another second there was a pretty girl that lived in that house - it starts relating so that's I see a house it's a yellow house there was like that my

neighborhood there is a pretty girl and so your brain is making those connections in five-second edits and so that's one one thousand two one thousand three one thousand four one thousand five thousand your brain is so fast and so efficient it goes I see something it's a yellow house there's yellow house like that in my neighborhood there was a girl that lived there and now you're thinking about her and now what's on the stream you like and didn't know one time and then you're like I wonder if she's on Facebook like that your brain just keeps making leaves that's why if someone's ever boring within a few seconds you're thinking about your checkbook or this or that or it's a you

know something like oh I forgot that at home like it takes five seconds - loser on it it only takes five seconds to lose your organs if you're not entertaining if you're not giving new information if you're not going to something else it takes five seconds - loser audience I remember being a teacher that if my system ever went down or something ever did not work I would continue talking while I fixed it well it's amazing that I have to fix this right now all of a sudden as soon as I get this hook back up and it back up thanks guys because if I stopped talking to fix that I knew that during that time and tried to maintain

their audience their attention in the entire time so that's five seconds you see how fast it is to lose your honor and that's why I add it to only sticking that three-second range in two seconds let's go to the other two seconds your brain goes I see it's a yellow house but you don't really have time to relate it to anything else you just your brain is making a connection at one second your brain goes I think I see something I figured of yello-ha like it's just trying to search for what that is and so if you do faster and what's that what's that what's that what's that what's that what's that what's that what's that

and so your brain is constantly trying to make connections at half second it is your brains like and your brain is constantly trying to make a connection after connection and here's what's cool that happens to your brain all that on tricity all that stuff happening up there your brain starts to get a little overwhelmed so it releases happy chemicals like prepare for something and so it releases chemicals into your brain and you get happy and excited that's why movie trailers are cut in this range because [Music]

and that's why they do the breakdowns afterwards and then in this shot because you didn't see it but you get excited that's why after you see a trailer Oh Dale I can't wait to see that movie yeah they know so they're doing this here's what I'm telling you about because I just did this to you and I'm doing it to you right now I'm speaking at a certain cadence of birth I was talking fast I am now talking slow because I want you almost pain on each world I can do this long but I won't because I'll do is your attention but when you're giving presentations think about this when you want people to be

excited about something you speed up your cadence when you want them to really sit in and listen and lean forward when you slow down your words and that's how humans like to receive information there's a is if I walk through here one of the things about being a presenter sometimes is that you get to watch your audience and what I love is that as I'm saying these words to you right now you're taking it all in and you're listening to it and I can see on your faces it's getting meta cuz you're like oh damn he's doing that thing I wonder what he's doing to me now well let's talk about me see the thing

is I talked about a yellow house and when I talked about the yellow house I can only imagine that none of you saw that yellow helps because in your in your mind you got the picture of your own yellow house but if I talked about and I showed you that yellow house then you would have been seeing this the whole time I left it up to your own imaginations when you're giving presentations at times you can do this you can leave it up to the imaginations of your audience to fill in the gaps and that works for certain presentations because you want people to go and just make up their own story and you'll always make up a better story than I can

because that's the way you bring toward it it's related to you and it's more important to you so it's cool but then there's the flip side of that and so I used to project would work with first-time directors and you know students and things like this and there was a thing that this is this is what a film script looks like if you've never seen one this would look like the big interior and baited my day a bear ball shines from a reflector atop a slender stand a bubble I comment rising into frame and flipping the light and extra not like figure and a hazmat suit reaches down to is what a script looks like and this is what screenwriters

write and when I would work with first-time filmmakers and people like that and now I'd ask them what does the abandoned mine look like and this ah it's this really cool thing it looks like a skull it's like this cool cave and you see the entrance of it and I'm thinking that's not in the script but that's what the filmmakers saw in their minds that's what they wanted to see on the screen it was a bare bulb look like I think this old school bulb and you can see the filaments on the inside like that's also not in the script but that's and so what happens is you when you're telling your audience something you're like we need to buy

this we need to buy a server okay they're figuring out in their heads what that is they're filling in the planes when you're not explicit they're gonna fill in the blanks with whatever they want to fill it in with because that's how they perceive information if you want people to know exactly what you're trying to say you include attachments the light bulb looks like that in the helmet looks like this at that point you've just killed all ability of anyone to fill in the gaps themselves and I would just think about maybe presentations you give it in the past or emails you sent or something where you were vague but you didn't think you were

bad because it will all up here for you but the person who got it they just still know the gaps with whatever they wanted to fill it in with and so when you need to be specific be specific but when you want to leave it to someone else's imagination no one to do that as well so how do you apply how do you find the words I have to write emails that's a part of my job and sometimes I don't know where to start I hate the blank page

so what I do with a blank page to help myself is I write in the works hook beginning middle climax end I just write those and then I fill in the blanks because at least my putting hook beginning no finite commands I start thinking in that framework at ago well the hook is the hook is the whole thing crashed the whole thing went down that's a good hook don't you think that's a good like you're sending a plane crash I would want to keep breathing the beginning I went on I went on a quest I went on a quest and in my quest I gotta work it is that it crashed worse and the whole thing fell apart remember the the

story arc of that something bad happened to heroes fixes everything looks like it's going well and then it gets even worse and then there's a climactic part and then you end it so the climax is to fix it I have three solutions and you can put the attachments in the emails you can put specific solutions so that way they don't have to fill in the blanks themselves they can look at in government got it those are my three specific solutions and then they need to end it very quickly so you have all this and this is why you can't have nice things but when you're sitting there thinking about how do I get my message across

I like I've talked to people who write pen test reports and they're just really mean but in your pen test report think about it as a hook beginning middle the flam accent end and that climactic part we'll talk about that next when you're giving a presentation so I'm giving a presentation right now in this classroom when it was time for me to write this presentation I sat down and I had a blank sheet of paper and I wrote the words hook beginning middle climax and end when you give a presentation I want you to always do this when you give a presentation started off by asking the question so every presentation all if you ever give your life by asking a

question of the audience a hypothetical question not so they can answer it's necessarily not significant throughout these but I always like the race the hand kind of question and the reason why I like to raise the hand question is because all of you walked in here at 11:15 with your own thoughts and agenda and everything else going on and and you are like not sure what I was going to talk about but you're sitting there you're talking you were thinking about the last talk that you're in and I need you to stop all that and pay attention to what I was about to say and so I started also the question and then stopped anything else you were thinking

about and you started thinking about the thing I want to do think about are you shot to start off your presentation given context history make a personal people want to know why did you even care enough to put this presentation together give me the context make it personal why did you think this would be important for the audience in the middle give it a deep dive the conclusions the observations that you come to you've liked and I've learned this and I learned that and I thought this was cool as you gone through your presentation you're giving that deep dive what you learned what you experienced in the climax how this applies to the audience I've said through presentations before

where I got done another what I just heard someone talk about what they found for like 30 minutes great thank you but how do them flags in the audience how can they use the thing that you've learned so that they can apply in their letters in conclusion I love I am a huge fan of when you're giving a presentation that you end it with the words in conclusion or you you get ready to end it with in conclusion and the reason why is because no one's been paying attention at all they will at this point because if you're like oh thank god and they will hear the next minute or so what you're about to say

and so that's your opportunity for the too long didn't read part we sum up everything maybe you give it like a little inspiration towards the end so that way they leave with that good feeling because most people will never remember what you say but how you made them feel those kind of things and so that very important in conclusion and then if you're giving a presentation that's something like this always say thank you and tell people where they can ask you questions afterwards because a lot of times you won't come and Russia at the end of the like hey I had this or this or how can I apply this like that so I always let people know where the to

meet me and that's where questions are you know perfect and we'll talk there and stuff like that so in conclusion talk about storytelling is just about the hook beginning middle climax and end I want you guys to become more intentional about the way you tell stories I want you to think about how the hook is presented the middle the climax the end I want you to think about that when you're writing your emails or giving a presentation we're just expressing a message to anyone and I want you to know that you know like life like here like at work you know we're all artists or you know we're always telling stories something that happened we're in the

midst of a new story but stories are awesome I love stories I I love sharing stories with people because the stories always remind me of that I'm alive and stories remind me that I'm live because I'm in someone else's story or they're in my story and I think that's cool and I think that's why humans have been telling stories ever since humans could talk I'm available for questions at the sans booth that's where I went day job is put on the other t-shirt and go back to work then I will be giving away t-shirts after lunch I hope that you play cyber City which is on the third floor upstairs I am you this one last

takeaway if you are interested in anything that I've said today about editing or about how humans perceive information read in the blink of an eye by Walter Murch this is guy who's been editing films since they actually had to cut the film and splice it together and those are some of the films that have gone on to win Academy Awards because he's phenomenal what he does and you know that's how you like to hear what you hear and see what you see and with that I'm done [Applause]