so my name is Peter Wang I'm going to be talking to you today about how doing open mic stand-up comedy helped me with public speaking I know super meta but before I get into that I like to you know kind of introduce myself a little bit as you can see I'm really tall my name is Peter winged sucks going to high school but my nickname is big Wang which is really ironic because I actually have a really short last name so when I was growing up believe it or not I was actually really really shy like super shy could you know Asians shy but five years ago I decided that enough was enough and I wanted to break out of my shell partly because I was working in sales and my job was on the line but that was like a whole different topic another part of me was like these four people right here I didn't like structure yes they're hipsters we're in San Francisco you know come on keep up so I didn't like the structure I didn't want to do something that required a rubric and just like this email of llama right here I really value expression so I wanted to find something that really I guess spoke to me and because I lost a bet I had to do stand-up and I wasn't actually that bad so I kind of kept going with it and these are kind of the three things I learned on how it relates to public speaking and even overcoming social anxiety so the first thing I gained from all this was confidence yeah I mean you can't really learn confidence but the second steps kind of like leads to the first episode uh bear with me here one of the biggest things with confidence is the pauses now when I first started doing stand-up it was really really scary there was a video of me like this leg was constantly shaking like this and then there it was horrible but one of the feedback I got was that I should learn to pause in between jokes mainly because one it makes me seem really confident and you know fake it till you make it if we learn anything from Trump but the second thing was the ability to deal with silence is really important because whatever feeling you're feeling in that moment is learning in either case right if you're telling a bad joke know the feeling of telling a bad joke and if you're telling a good joke then revel in the laughter that the audience is giving you just like you guys just gave me thank you but how do you get there by storytelling oh my god so last week I had this really amazing experience I went out to dinner and I had this amazing opportunity to meet this gorgeous delicious double-double patty and it was so good I just hated I went to sleep a really loud why are some storytellers so good at keeping us on the edge of our seat while some of the most interesting people can't even hold an audience the there is an art with storytelling and with storytelling it's all about how you play with the words how I just played with the pauses right there and how I use my voice to enunciate and lead you guys in suspense just like this guy so the last thing I learned and this is something I still kind of been working on is it's called riffing now before I get into that I'm going to need someone from the audience you sir hi real question who are you voting for in the election all right Jill put down your picture she Ally's not voting for Trump so what I just did there was something called riffing riffing is where comedians actually go and interact with the audience and a lot of my favorite comedians kind of pull techniques from that with this picture that's about to pop up because I totally just didn't time that joke cool enough there we go look at that Lucy Kay one of the reasons why I love riffing so much is one I'm super lazy so I don't like to write out my whole entire joke list if I just write down topics then I have enough know-how to just yeah kind of go through and talk about each topic as if they were my own second second thing I like about riffing is one you can make all your jokes seem like you did them yourself even though it's something that said over and over and over again you know your jokes are original so those are those three things I've learned and I'm really glad that you guys took the time to allow me to be kind of vulnerable with you guys so thank you so much [Applause]